Windows 10: Designed for All Your Devices - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/05/26/your-windows-10-pc-will-love-all-the-devices-you-own/

<comment><USER2> I just installed the latest Windows 10 build in a VM, and I'm remarkably impressed. Cortana is working much better than expected, and I'm loving the new start menu. I'm planning on switching to Win10 full time for at least 6 months or so after release; been on OS X for many years, but I much prefer the direction MS is going, these days. It looks like they're going to be the first folks to really get a universal ecosystem across desktops, tablets, and phones; frankly, I'm surprised it wasn't Google.

<comment><USER3> >I just installed the latest Windows 10 build in a VM, and I'm remarkably impressed

wat.

> Cortana is working much better than expected,

wat.

>and I'm loving the new start menu.

waaaaaaat.

> been on OS X for many years

oh. now it makes sense.

<comment><USER4> Actually, I'd like to second how impressed I am with Cortana. I got a windows phone a little while ago (really cheap, no contract, no love for the Android interface, etc) and was a bit skeptical of how useful it'd be at first.

After trying to ask it more and more natural-language questions, and having it speak useful answers back to me, it feels more and more like I'm in Star Trek.

I'm not usually that impressed by technology anymore (i.e. I still think lots of things are cool, but seldom do they surprise me), after being in the field for 30 years, but Cortana impresses the heck out of me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm really looking forward to Windows 10, but how come every single marketing page they put out instantly lands on the front page around the top results?

<comment><USER6> Internal MS voting circle.

Edit: Not to say they're necessarily doing it on purpose or for marketing: Microsofties would receive these urls internally, and if only 20 or so of them immediately submitted them to HN, it would go to the top of the frontage.

Although personally and knowing the extremes Microsoft goes to with marketing, I'd also not doubt if said Microsofties were 'informally encouraged' to share such links on social media as much as possible.

<comment><USER7> Yep, and the admins should be able to see that. They should get one warning to stop or all accounts involved should be banned.

<comment><USER8> It's slightly tricky because people usually upvote what they are interested in. Therefore if a big bunch of people are interested in Win10, then it is just completely normal if they upvote these topics. Similarly, basically every new Apple hardware ends up on the top of HN. Same applies to many other things -- secure messaging, depression/burnout related articles, all Tesla news, etc.

It's very hard to run a news site and keep stuff out that actually interest people.

I very much doubt that these articles are upvoted by employees, etc.

<comment><USER7> The web developer community is well known to have a massive Apple bias. I'm not surprised by Apple stuff going to the top quickly, usually.

But this post in particular is suspect because it is totally devoid of content. Look at the comments so far, the most discussion has been prompted by the lack of content resulting in wondering how on earth this got to the top so quickly.

I'd bet dollars to donuts there was coordinated voting by Microsoft employees. Lots of companies do it on reddit, it's much less common here at HN (I think), but it still does happen.

<comment><USER9> Accusations of shilling without evidence are typically boring. This post is not an exception.

<comment><USER7> You know what's even more boring? Someone replying with "This is boring." without contributing anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been using the preview full-time for quite a while now, and my favorites are by far the multi-monitor window management features.

Essentially, you can now snap windows to any one of the 4 corners or 2 sides of any monitor and it just works (corners and sides are "sticky" when you're dragging windows). It also offers you the option to snap another window to the adjacent space with a single additional click.

It's by far the most user-friendly and elegant way of managing windows on multiple monitors I've seen on any OS so far.

</comment><comment><USER11> My primary devices are an Ubuntu laptop + an Android phone. Both are very flexible for my needs. I'm scratching my head to figure out why should I be excited about all that integration, perhaps I'm not their customer. Don't get me wrong, I love & own Windows laptop too, but my Android phone does almost everything that Cortana is supposed to do, Dropbox gets me the files I need, I've moved away from MS Office...

It's just that the stuff mentioned in the blog isn't as magical as they are trying to project.

<comment><USER12> So, I have a couple of machines running the preview. I basically feel like I am not their targeted market most of the time. I don't use cortana, windows phone, or own an xbox. The use case it play a game or browse the web. So, the integration feature set doesn't really do anything for me. Overall, the preview generally feels pretty good, with the occasional massive issues that tend to happen in software previews, nightly builds, and beta software the world over. Generally, think windows 8.1 but with slightly more desktop feel.

The gripes I have are mostly things that will likely get better by release, or are simply things that I disagree with design choices. To pick one example, let's talk about wifi.

The wifi selection recently moved from the windows 8 style UI to a newer UI. In the process it lost several features, the only things I can change on the properties screen for a wifi network are if it metered and if device discovery is on.

It might just been that I have spent too much time in linuxland recently, but that seems a bit like going too far the way of being idiot proof.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Outside of some stability/compatibility issues that I hope are ironed out before release, I've been pretty impressed with Windows 10 preview so far. I only use Windows for games these days, so I can't really speak to it from a productivity standpoint, but the interface is much more intuitive than Windows 8's while still keeping the handful of things I liked.

Ironically, there were a couple of Windows 8 behaviors I had to unlearn (for example, there's no longer the super strange "hot corners" that were the only way to access the shutdown menu). Definitely didn't take as long as initially learning how to navigate Windows 8, though :)

<comment><USER14> > there's no longer the super strange "hot corners" that were the only way to > access the shutdown menu

I'm not a fan of the hot corners. If you use a keyboard, you can use the following shortcut to shutdown your PC

WIN KEY + X, U, U

<comment><USER15> > WIN KEY + X, U, U

Windows Key + X is pretty much the one thing that makes Windows 8 tolerable on the desktop and the one thing I would recommend everyone having trouble with Windows 8 learn even if they aren't generally keyboard shortcut users and navigate the resulting menu (the WinKey+X menu) via mouse. I've been using Windows 8 since release and never use the hot corners stuff at all thanks to this menu.

<comment><USER14> Agreed 100%

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like a lot of what I'm seeing and hearing, but unless I can find a good replacement for Media Center on the desktop I might still be using Windows 7 for a few more years.

<comment><USER2> I really recommend Kodi (previously XBMC). It's open source, the ecosystem is vibrant, and pretty much everything plugs into it. [http://kodi.tv/](http://kodi.tv/)

<comment><USER17> But Media Centre has the ability to record DRM-ed cable. XBMC will never have that.

<comment><USER18> There's your first problem: you bought more cable than you needed for your internet connection.

Second problem: you tried to use DRM. See XKCD 488 as to why it's a problem.

<comment><USER17> _you bought more cable than you needed for your internet connection._

What?

 _Second problem: you tried to use DRM._

I didn't. The cable company did. And plenty of the TV I am able to record is not available to stream on the same day, if at all.

<comment><USER18> you bought more cable than you needed for your internet connection.

> What?

Cable Internet in the US requires some sort of service to be bought alongside internet. That's usually Basic Cable. My comment was saying that if you bought more than basic cable, you bought more cable than you needed.

Second problem: you tried to use DRM.

> I didn't. The cable company did. And plenty of the TV I am able to record is > not available to stream on the same day, if at all.

You can easily get your new via other avenues online. The only exception would be local.

<comment><USER17> _Cable Internet in the US requires some sort of service to be bought alongside internet. That 's usually Basic Cable._

No it doesn't. In NYC at least you can buy internet through Time Warner without buying a TV service.

 _My comment was saying that if you bought more than basic cable, you bought more cable than you needed._

Incorrect. I bought the amount of cable service I required in order to watch the things I want to watch when I want to watch them.

 _You can easily get your new via other avenues online._

Not legally. Live sports in particular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I recently installed Win 10 on bare metal to have a go with the Win 10 IoT version for the Raspberry Pi 2. Works well on an old MacBook Pro with a bit of disk swapping even if bootcamp says it won't.

Seems OK but it definitely wasn't intuitive (and I'm already running Win 8). The only thing I can think of is they are making it an easier learning curve from Win 7 than from Win 8. It's a step backwards in some respects but I guess that's the idea.

I'll probably upgrade once the first round of patches are out for the stable version. More than I can say for the Raspberry Pi version which I won't be touching again unless it gets a lot better. Sticking with Linux on that for now. At least the mouse is usable.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nailed it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4074053)

(especially the parenthetical)

</comment><comment><USER21> So, rather than a way to sync with your phone or setup stuff like calendar, contacts, photos or music sharing, they have just made a thing telling you to install Microsoft's cloud apps?

Disappointing.

Apple has a great iOS/OS X experience because the integration is deeper than just "install Apple's apps on your iPhone".

<comment><USER22> I don't use it because I don't like Metro UI apps but a large part of the list you give is already supported in Windows 8: calendar, contacts, photos (thru OneDrive). Some are available in a cross-platform fashion (calendar, contacts via MS account) others require a Windows Phone (IE opened tabs sharing, some systems settings). So I don't see them being removed from Windows 10 and don't really understand what you are exactly disappointed about.

<comment><USER21> > I don't use it because I don't like Metro UI apps but a large part of the > list you give is already supported in Windows 8: calendar, contacts, photos > (thru OneDrive)

So the only way to sync them is via the cloud?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> is this legit? its hilarious [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt5iLwNChyo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt5iLwNChyo)

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't trust Windows even though my laptop has windows 8.1 installed. I'm planning on building a custom desktop so I can install a Linux OS and not have to worry about MSFT tracking my every click/keystroke.

<comment><USER25> It doesn't matter since your ISP/Browser/Mobile is tracking you anyway.

<comment><USER26> This makes me doubly sad to think that IPv6 backed away from requiring IPsec at all times. Very Sad.

<comment><USER18> Why? If who you're talking to is blabbing over a side channel, encryption doesn't matter. Encryption only stops Eve from seeing the content. And this says nothing regarding authentication. And there is no internet-wide RADIUS server.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to check where are your Facebook friends from. - <AUTHOR>

I have now clue how they are doing that:
http://www.sterntv-experimente.de/FacebookLikeCheck/
But tests with some very small fanpages i own, are producing very accurate and amazingly fast results. There is no API for such results. How are they doing that? <comment><USER2> Didn't work with my username.

<comment><AUTHOR> doesnt work with usernames only with pages like cocacolazero</comment></comment>


Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/new-study-politics-makes-you-innumerate

<comment><USER2> I was underwhelmed at the end of the article when it becomes clear that another interpretation of the results is "People presented with shocking results tend to scrutinize them."

A lot of Kahan's research can be read as "polarization dooms us all, careful discussion and thought are useless." I think you could find the opposite conclusion here, that communities with strong adherents of competing views are more likely to have some members discover errors in hard problems that might otherwise go unnoticed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interestingly, communities like HN and LessWrong have banned political discussion, or tried to, for its particularly deleterious effect on conversation.

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/)

<comment><USER4> Still a shame that people are flagging this particular article, though. This is factual and not partisan.

<comment><USER5> It is a good article. But putting out shit stirring garbage on a daily basis makes it so everyone immediately skips over it when their eyes grace _motherjones_ next to the link.</comment></comment></comment>


Need help concatenating two strings in C / C++? Ive written an example. - <AUTHOR> http://www.xanthu.com/string-concatenation-with-strcat

<comment><USER2> That's a pretty well written example. You mention your article on character arrays several times, but it would be much more convenient if those mentions were hyperlinked with permanent links to the other article. While the "Previous" link on the navigation takes you there, it's not as obvious, and interrupts the reading flow to look for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it would have been worth using strncat. The example wouldn't have been much more complicated, and it's good to start people off with best practices.</comment>


Ask HN: How to transition to mainframe development - <AUTHOR> I am a sr software developer with 6 years of C# experience and am itching to get into mainframe development with COBOL or even assembly. I have a few months professional experience with COBOL but don't know how to make the transition to a full time COBOL gig. It isn't as easy to pick up COBOL like C# is since the ecosystem is very limited. I have a MS in CS but didn't touch any mainframe type content so I have no formal education in this either. Is the only option to really apply for entry level jobs and take a pay cut? <comment><USER2> I'd look into GnuCOBOL ([https://open-cobol.sourceforge.io](https://open- cobol.sourceforge.io)) or try a free download of MicroFocus ([https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual- cobol/](https://www.microfocus.com/products/visual-cobol/)). I work at a shop with legacy Cobol applications and more and more of those folks are preparing for retirement. Thing is, those applications are the bedrock for running the business. As such they are so starving for new blood so I don't think they'd immediately dismiss the idea of paying for Sr talent and getting someone who's still coming up to speed in Cobol.

But there's one question you'd better be prepared to answer and answer it spot-on, and frankly it's a question I have out of simple curiosity: why? Why do you want to do Cobol development? Why do you want to change tracks to one that appears to have a dead end in the not-too-distant future? How do I know that after incurring the effort and cost to bring you up to speed that you're not going to leave? How are you going to deal with experienced people who are very comfortable with the tools and processes they have in place and have little interest in changing how they do things?

I'm curious, but your interviewer is going to be serious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your response, I'll take a look at GnuCOBOL.

As to why I want to do COBOL development, I think there are interesting problems. I enjoy working on an existing product and all that comes along with it (bug fixes, enhancements, etc). I want to change domains because I want to be at the heart of a business's process. When I worked at a clearing company I volunteered for take over the COBOL development when the contractor suddenly left. It's hard to describe the rush that I got from learning the code base and working on it. Knowing that what I'm doing is vital to the company (it was the clearing engine that was written in COBOL) is a source of pride to me. Thinking about it now, learning COBOL and dealing with that code base was my favorite part of my previous job (and I liked the previous job too). How many people can point to their work and say they are critical to the operation of their organization? How many dev jobs really affect as many people as one can as a mainframe dev (of course, the number can depend on the organization. Chase is going to affect more than some small bank but it is still going to affect a large amount of people).

Sure, COBOL may be dying but the business knowledge gained while doing the COBOL development won't go away and that is an advantage. I have learned programming languages in the past and I will continue to learn more in the future. It is something I enjoy doing, so I would have no worries that if COBOL were to die out while I was working as a COBOL developer that I wouldn't be able to find work doing some other sort of development. As for dealing with experienced people who are comfortable with their tools and processes, that is no different than any other job. Some people are willing to learn other things and some people aren't. It is a matter of finding a happy medium and in the beginning I wouldn't have a leg to stand on when it came to tools and processes because I would be just learning.

Sorry, I think I started rambling but I it gives some insight as to why I want to make the switch.</comment></comment>


Lessons from a Year of TDD - <AUTHOR> https://channikhabra.com/talks/lessons-from-a-year-of-tdd <comment><USER2> "Dynamically typed languages cause more trouble than they are worth".

Here we have the classical fight. Those unreflected statements don't help anyone as there are plenty of use cases and benefits for dynamically typed languages.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Thank you for giving it a read.

In my experience, I've find myself wanting dynamic typing when I want to prototype stuff, or when I used to work with Java. Modern statically typed languages (e.g Typescript) take care of most of my "rapid prototyping" needs, while making a decent effort at keeping me from shooting myself in the foot. I might of course be suffering from the "Javascript fatigue", but I feel the same way when I am working with Python. Playing around with Haskell completely changed the way I used to look at types. And the tooling that comes with a statically typed language means much less cognitive overhead.

If you'd have some time on your hand, would you state the use cases and benefits of dynamically typed languages that you have experienced here? I am sure I am experiencing some tunnel vision.

<comment><USER2> Exactly - I find dynamic programming languages very helpful to quickly iterate over an idea and to make it MVP-ready. I have no experience yet with Haskell, however I feel multitudes faster building applications in Python compared to Java, Kotlin or Swift which I have all used extensively. Any of them has their good advantages, though I never felt faster with Python+TDD – and I don't write any type checking tests. Hopefully one day I can jump on the Haskell train and feel what it's like. Probably then I understand your sentiments a bit better.</comment></comment></comment>


Nokia to demonstrate a technique for terabit-speed data over optical-fiber - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/think-google-fibers-fast-nokia-to-show-off-tech-thats-1000-times-faster/ <comment><USER2> "Researchers will this week demonstrate a newly-refined data-transmission technique that can deliver one terabit per second (Tbps) over optical fiber"

We already had 10 Tbps per fiber pair: [http://www.extremetech.com/internet/231074-googles-faster- un...](http://www.extremetech.com/internet/231074-googles-faster-undersea- cable-goes-online-with-60-tbps-of-bandwidth)

<comment><USER3> the main difference is, this demonstration uses cables within Telekoms Network - so it's no laboratory but a real-world-test. (german source: [http://www.golem.de/news/saser-muenchner-forscher- uebertrage...](http://www.golem.de/news/saser-muenchner-forscher-uebertragen- ein-terabit-im-telekom-netz-1609-123339.html))

<comment><USER2> According to the article, FASTER has already entered service. It's the name of a deployed submarine cable, not a lab demo of new fiber technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am barely able to get a 20mb ADSL2 connection here in Australia, let alone 100mb. I know I won't live to see even a 1gb connection speed becoming available in Australia in my lifetime. Lab conditions and real world conditions are two different things. You can have a fast connection, but if the bandwidth isn't there to meet the demand, then you just end up with a fast link to the exchange and then from there, it's plain old slow internet.

<comment><USER5> This is all about core networks, the comparison to residential surface is just bad journalism.

It seems, reading between the lines, that they were able to make 10x bandwidth improvements over existing fiber with fancy new physical layer encoding (QAM with some statistical magic)

And it's not in a lab, they're experiments between major German cities.

<comment><USER6> If it means replacing much of the current fiber optic equipment it's not going to be popular soon.

<comment><USER7> Why not? Replacing cables is cheap if you built the infrastructure properly.

Switching my entire district from ADSL to fiber-to-the-building took a team of a dozen workers only 2 weeks, because all cabling between buildings and all street cabling is in cable tunnels where the cabling can be easily replaced with RC vehicles.

That means replacing those cables again in a few decades will be basically free, too.

For backbones, the same applies, except there the reward is even higher: They're all in cable tunnels, where they can easily be replaced.

<comment><USER8> > That means replacing those cables again in a few decades will be basically > free, too.

I think you and me have a different definition of free. There are still substantial costs in both labor and materials to replace the outside plant, even if there is existing ducting in place with free space.

<comment><USER7> Almost all of the costs of replacing the cabling in the US today is digging a trench, or getting access to privately owned telephone poles.

As evidenced by Google Fiber's struggles.

If that cost is eliminated, replacing fiber outside is as cheap as replacing it inside a datacenter.

<comment><USER8> > Almost all of the costs of replacing the cabling in the US today is digging > a trench, or getting access to privately owned telephone poles.

Firstly, if you have existing ducts there is no need for trenching. Secondly, a lot of trencing is replaced by directional boring and, where possible, by microtrenching or plowing. Thirdly, gaining access to poles isn't usually the problem. What takes time and money is to get them into such a state that new cable can be installed. Fourthly, your largest cost is always going to be labor, regardless of what you do. Lastly, even ignoring all the other costs there is still equipment and materials, which will account for at least a fifth of the project costs.

So in summary, no almost all the cost is not in the line items you specify. A lot of money is going to get spent no matter what when you replace your outside plant.

> As evidenced by Google Fiber's struggles.

Google is also being actively hampered by competitors that own the poles they need access to.

> If that cost is eliminated, replacing fiber outside is as cheap as replacing > it inside a datacenter.

That's a bit optimistic, as the outside plant is far larger than any datacenter, not administered by a signle party nor a controlled environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Too bad, Deutsche Telekom is blocking fiber built-up for customers in Germany by pushing VDSL vectoring.

<comment><USER10> Is that the reason for the slow fiber roll-out in Germany? I just looked at Berlin and there's a small neighborhood in Mitte that has it, otherwise there's nothing. Can't any other company than Telekom lay out fiber?

<comment><USER11> Telekom are toying with (super) vectoring and g.fast to avoid having to roll out fiber to every household. I guess it makes financial sense because the are still moving the Network Access points closer to homes and these are usually connected with fibre. However this will work until 500-1000Mbps at best and probably only for a few people, so at some point they have to do FTTH especially because cable providers are already pushing 400Mbps in many places in Germany.

DNS.NET and Versatel (now 1&1) have their own fibre network in some areas of Berlin and they actually do FTTH if you are one of the lucky few. I live in a pretty dense and central area of Berlin and all i get is 50Mbps VDSL, because i want to avoid the cable providers that have an inferior network. For private usage it's still okay and i have access to 1Gbps at work, but i still can't wait for Vectoring to arrive.

<comment><USER12> Can you explain:

"I want to avoid the cable providers that have an inferior network"

I live in Köln, and because of the distance to the nearest loop, I don't get the 100mbit offer from Telekom… only 18mbit vdsl at best. I went to UnityMedia cable and get 200mbit. Unity is an Evil Media Company, but I haven't noticed anything wrong with their network. So what am I missing?

<comment><USER11> Kind of a Berlin problem i guess. In the places i lived before i had UnityMedia and was generally pretty happy with it. In west Berlin you have Kabel-Deutschland which is also okay (but offers only Fair Use Flats yuck), but in the east where i live there is only Telecolumbus if you choose cable. While they offer 400Mbps there are a lot of dense places where people complain about <10Mbps in the evening or the weekends.

In general using Cable, more people have to share the same bandwidth, especially if the provider cheaped out and only does whats necessary. You don't even get your own IPv4, you are basically sharing public IPs with other people through NAT, which makes accessing anything at your home more complicated as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If memory serves there have being commercial multiplexers that could do that for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just a thought - maybe Google will buy the new Nokia this time to expand Fiber...

<comment><USER8> Google's problems in rolling out fiber is not with the equipment, it's in putting the actual cable on poles and in ducts. Buying Nokia would not help one bit with this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ok this is interesting tech and I like the light being shined on the remnants of Nokia occasionally, but the headline is misleading clickbait. They compare the new speed against today's fast _consumer_ fiber, even though they say in the article that this is a new tech for backbones. It feels like the headline just tries to work "Google" into it as an adversary to get the clicks :(

Go go Nokia Bell, go away zdnet ;)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm excited to hear the new BS excuses for data caps existing once common infrastructure can handle this bandwidth.</comment>


Fast base64 encoding and decoding - <AUTHOR> https://lemire.me/blog/2018/01/17/ridiculously-fast-base64-encoding-and-decoding/ <comment><USER2> Last fall I tried to figure out why Rust is slower than D in a base64 benchmark ([https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks](https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks)). It turned out that decoding in Rust is really fast but encoding is a bit slow. I looked at the assembly output of both programs and I could more or less follow the steps in the Rust version, but the D version was only about 5 SIMD instructions (without a single bit shift). I also checked the source code, the Rust version is fairly long, because a part of the hot loop is manually unrolled, but the D version looked like the simple, naive implementation in C. It might be a result of newer LLVM version (LDC was already using LLVM 5 and rustc is still on LLVM 4) or rustc still might have issues with optimizer settings (both binaries were compiled for Intel Haswell).

<comment><USER3> Do you have LLVM IR output? There are definitely places where rust's hinting isn't optimal, and that might not be too difficult to fix.

<comment><USER2> I didn't look at the LLVM IR (since I'm not really familiar with it), but I might investigate it a bit further in the near future.

<comment><USER3> I would encourage it. LLVM IR is fairly easy to understand. One of my first forays into rustc was looking at the IR for iterators to see why one version was show (turned out to be that the bounds on the index variable couldn't proven tight enough to eliminate the bounds check, iirc).

Try writing the same simple code as D and compare the two IR representations.

And no matter how much I slag on rust being difficult, the community is really good about helping and teaching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I made Go bindings for that library [https://github.com/myfreeweb/go- base64-simd](https://github.com/myfreeweb/go-base64-simd) …

…to use in a mail indexer project…

…only to discover that half of my mail was not being decoded, because that decoder does not skip whitespace.

<comment><USER5> Did you find any bugs in the library when implementing your binding?

Daniel Lemire has done brilliant work. His [https://github.com/lemire/despacer](https://github.com/lemire/despacer) looks great.

I wonder though if their Base64 SIMD algorithms could be tweaked to do the decode in a single pass?

Like you, also email related, I have written a native Base64 addon for Node in C optimized for decoding MIME wrapped Base64 in a single pass ([https://github.com/ronomon/base64](https://github.com/ronomon/base64)). It's not yet using SIMD instructions but it's 1.5-2x as fast as Node's routines with top speeds of 1398.18 MB/s decoding and 1048.58 MB/s encoding on a single core (Intel Xeon E5-1620 v3 @ 3.50GHz). Here is an explanation of the difference: [https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/12114](https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/12114)

The Ronomon Base64 addon also ships with a fuzz test ([https://github.com/ronomon/base64/blob/master/test.js](https://github.com/ronomon/base64/blob/master/test.js)) which you are welcome to try out on your Go binding. It picked up an interesting bug in Node's decode routine where some white space was actually decoded as data ([https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/11987](https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/11987)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Base64 is commonly used in cryptography to exchange keys._

Note that if you're encoding or decoding secret data, such as keys, you most likely want a _constant-time_ encoder (example: [https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/+/master/crypto...](https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/+/master/crypto/base64/base64.c)), not the fastest one.

<comment><USER7> You seem to be confusing encoding (base64 for example), and encryption (AES for example).

Where a side channel attack studying the decryption speed/power use can reveal information, the encoding of said encrypted data can not as far as I ever heard about. (It will still be encrypted after base64 decoding has taken place).

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

EDIT: I see you updated your original message with different wording, please ignore this rant.

<comment><USER8> Side-channel attacks against base64 encoding have yet to be proven, but constant-time implementations are available _just in case_.

My contribution is here: [https://github.com/paragonie/constant_time_encoding](https://github.com/paragonie/constant_time_encoding)

<comment><USER9> I'll add a high-assurance implementation from Galois to that which is probably not constant time. Their blog and Github has quite a few useful tools.

[https://galois.com/blog/2013/09/high-assurance- base64/](https://galois.com/blog/2013/09/high-assurance-base64/)

Also, anyone wanting constant time implementation might just run a verified implementation through something like FaCT or Jasmin:

[https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~dstefan/pubs/cauligi:2017:fact.pdf](https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~dstefan/pubs/cauligi:2017:fact.pdf)

[https://acmccs.github.io/papers/p1807-almeidaA.pdf](https://acmccs.github.io/papers/p1807-almeidaA.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00605](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00605)

In short, they spend roughly (EDIT: Herp-derp) 1/5th a cycle per byte of base64 through the use of AVX2 instructions to encode / decode base64. So one- cycle every 5 bytes.

This includes robust error checking (allegedly)

\</comment><comment>---

Because SIMD-based execution was so successful in this example, I do wonder if a GPGPU implementation would be worthwhile. If some very big data were Base64-encoded / decoded (like MBs worth), then would it be worthwhile to spend a costly PCIe Transaction to transfer the data to the GPU and back? Something like an email-attachment is Base64 encoded for example.

I'd expect most web programs to be only a few kilobytes (at most) of base64 data however. A few hundred bytes for Cookies and the like. So the typical web case of base64 doesn't seem "big" enough to warrant the use of a GPU, so the AVX2 methodology would be ideal.

<comment><USER11> I suspect you would bottleneck on the PCIe bus before you saw improvement. GPUs usually aren't great at problems where you have a huge stream of data to work with and not a huge amount of processing needed per byte.

If your data is already in GPU memory for some reason then yeah, it's going to blast through the data at an insane rate, but getting it there in the first place is the problem.

<comment><USER10> > I suspect you would bottleneck on the PCIe bus before you saw improvement.

Heh, you're right. Its not even close. PCIe x16 is slightly less than 16GB/s. And that's a 1-way transfer, the 2nd transfer back effectively halves the speed.

At 4GHz, this Base64 encoding / decoding scheme is doing 20GB/s of encoding (round numbers for simplicity). So literally, it is slower to transfer the data to the GPU than to use those AVX2 instructions.

Heck, its slower on the one-way trip to the GPU, before it even comes back (and before the GPU even touches the data!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a shame nobody is really using yEnc instead of base64. yEnc only has a overhead cost of about 2%, compared to 33% for base64, and would be perfect for use on webpages.

<comment><USER13> yEnc has a fair share of problems related to reliable encoding and decoding for some character sets (UTF-8 for example). Normally this is solved with the MIME types, but yEnc is not officially registered. Nor does it have an official RFC standard. base64 on the other hand "just works".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Note that this is considerably faster than the amount of memory bandwidth available per core.

<comment><USER10> No its not, at least if we're talking L2 cache or faster.

Intel processors support two loads + one write per core. That can be 2x256-bit reads + 1x256-bit write. Each clock, every clock. At least to L1 and L2 (the only levels of cache which have that level of bandwidth).

AMD Ryzen supports 2x128-bit reads OR 1x128-bit write (1-read+1write is fine).

\</comment></comment><comment>----

The kicker is that you must use AVX2 registers to achieve this bandwidth. If you're loading / storing 64-bit registers like RAX, you can't get there.

A raw "copy" between locations (assuming they're entirely in L2 memory or faster) can be done by Skylake at 32b per cycle. The speed of this Base64 encoder however is "just" at 5bytes per cycle.

I'm curious how their code would perform on AMD's Ryzen platform, because of the lower-bandwidth of Ryzen. Ryzen's AVX is also split into 2x128-bit ports, instead of Intel's 2x256-bit ports. I'd expect AMD's Ryzen to do worse, but maybe there are other bottlenecks in the code????

<comment><USER15> > Intel processors support two loads + one write per core. That can be > 2x256-bit reads + 1x256-bit write. Each clock, every clock. At least to L1 > and L2...

You can approach 2 reads + 1 write in L1, but you won't get close for data in L2, especially when writes are involved. Writes dirty lines in the L1, which later need to be evicted, which eat up both L1 read-port and L2 write-port bandwidth.

You'll find that with pure writes to a data set that fits in L2 but not L1, you get only 1 cache line every 3 cycles, so nowhere close to 1 per cycle. If you add reads, things will slow down a bit more.

Even Intel documents their L2 bandwidth at only 32 bytes/cycle max, and 25 bytes per cycle sustained (on Broadwell - slightly better for Skylake client), and that's "one way" i.e., read-only loads. When you have writes and have to share with evictions it gets worse. So again nowhere close to the 96 bytes/cycle if you could do 2 32-byte reads and 1 32-byte store a cycle.

Some details are discussed here (although it's for Haswell, it mostly applies to everything up to but not including Skylake-X):

[https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/software-tuning- perf...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/software-tuning-performance- optimization-platform-monitoring/topic/532346)

<comment><USER10> I appreciate your thoughts on this.

I agree with your argument. But... I feel like I should defend my thoughts a bit. My statements were based on this Intel Article: [https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/why-efficient- use-...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/why-efficient-use-of-the- memory-subsystem-is-critical-to-performance)

Which suggests L1 and L2 cache bandwidth was the same. But when I look at the sources you point out, it seems like your statements are correct. I think I'll trust your sources more, since they're benchmark-based... than a single graph (probably doing theoretical analysis). Thanks for the info.

<comment><USER15> To be fair, unless I missed it, that article is mostly just saying "The L1 and L2 are much faster than L3 and beyond". That's correct - but it doesn't imply that the L2 is somehow as fast as the L1 (if that were true, why have the distinction between L1 and L2 at all?).

Once you go to the L3, you suffer a large jump in latency (something like 12 cycles for L2 to ~40 cycles for L3 - and on some multi-socket configurations this gets worse) and you are now sharing the cache with all the other cores on the chip, so the advice to "Keep in L1 and L2" make a lot of sense.

Intel used to claim their L2 had 64 bytes per cycle bandwidth - and indeed there is probably a bus between the L1 and L2 capable of transferring 64 bytes per cycle in some direction: but you could never achieve that since unlike the core to L1 interface, which has a "simple" performance model, the L1<->L2 interface is complicated by the fact that you need to (a) accept evictions from L1, and (b) that the L1 itself doesn't have an unlimited number of ports to simultaneously accept incoming 64-byte lines from L2 and (c) everything is cache-line based.

The upshot is that even ignoring (c) you never get more than 32 bytes per cycle from L2 and usually less. Intel recently changed all the mentions of "64 bytes per cycle for L2" into "32 bytes max, ~2x bytes sustained" in their optimization manual in recognition of this.

Once you consider (c) you might get even way less bandwidth from L2: in L1, on modern Intel, your requests can be scattered around more or less randomly and you'll get the expected performance (there is some small penalty for splitting a cache line: it counts "double" against your read/write limits), but with L2 you will get worse performance with scattered reads and writes since every access is essentially amplified to a full cache line.

It turns out that L2 writes are especially bad:

[https://stackoverflow.com/q/47851120/149138](https://stackoverflow.com/q/47851120/149138)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The benchmarks shows the 'generic' aka SWAR version w or w/o openmp is the best for almost all purposes. The only thing I would change is the func sig to size_t base64_enc(const char * src, char * dst, size_t len) to ret written size.

</comment><comment><USER17> Another fast implementation (plain C99, without using SIMD), supporting buffer aliasing (i.e. allowing in-place encoding/decoding, check senc_b64() and sdec_b64() functions): [https://github.com/faragon/libsrt/blob/master/src/saux/senc....](https://github.com/faragon/libsrt/blob/master/src/saux/senc.c)

</comment><comment><USER18> In my benchmarks only the AVX2 is faster than the portable scalar "turbobase64" [https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBase64](https://github.com/powturbo/TurboBase64)

SIMD does not always mean faster.

</comment><comment><USER19> I hate base64. If you have to embed binary data within human-readable text, then you're either

A: doing something horribly wrong

B: or forced to use a monkey-patched legacy standard

Otherwise just use hexadecimal digits. At least it will be _somewhat_ readable.

I know, I know... Base64 encodes 3 bytes on 4 characters, while hex encodes 2 bytes on 4. Big fucking deal. It will almost surely be gzipped down the line, and if you're storing amounts of data where this would count, then see point "A" above.

I hope one day we will laugh at the mere idea of base64 encoding like how we do with EBCDIC or Windows-12XX codepages.

<comment><USER20> Base64 has been around forever, and hex has significantly lower information density than it - consistently more than 30% smaller.

As for doing something horribly wrong, I dunno, ensuring literally billions of moms and pops can exchange baby pictures by e-mail, for the first time in human history, and doing so since the time when we were using 33.6kbit modems, that seems like a resounding success.†

† Yes, if e-mail had not paid such close attention to compatibility, and just ripped up every old standard on every chance it got (i.e. pretty much like any technology invented since the commoditization of the web), interoperability would never have happened. Legacy crap is fundamentally a part of that success, and Base64 is fundamentally a part of making those hacks practical for the technology we had at the time††

†† To head off an obvious counterargument: yes, there are contemporary examples of why this strategy is still important (it's, so far, the only one that has ever worked in the decentralized environment of the Internet), and is very likely to come in useful in future, time and time again

<comment><USER21> Hex has lower information density, however it is more compressible, particularly if your data is byte aligned. For example the string "aaaaaa" is b64 encoded as "YWFhYWFh" but in hex is "616161616161". On a project I'm on, we switched from base64 to hex for some binary data embedded in JSON, and saw ~20% size reduction, since its always compressed by the web server.

<comment><USER20> Today I learned!

        >>> import random,zlib,codecs
        >>> sample = random.getrandbits(1024).to_bytes(1024, 'big') * 1024
        >>> len(zlib.compress(codecs.encode(sample, 'base64')))
        22083
        >>> len(zlib.compress(codecs.encode(sample, 'hex')))
        4326
        >>>

edit: (25 minutes of digging around the Internet, and I find this):

        >>> sample = os.urandom(1024) * 1024

        >>> len(sample.encode('base64'))
        1416501
        >>> len(sample.encode('hex'))
        2097152
        >>> len(sample.encode('ascii85'))
        1310720

        >>> len(zlib.compress(sample.encode('base64')))
        82169
        >>> len(zlib.compress(sample.encode('hex')))
        12537
        >>> len(zlib.compress(sample.encode('ascii85')))
        8212

Had to use Python 2.x to make use of the 'hackercodecs' package that implements ascii85, but looks like it's the best of both worlds, assuming its character set suits whatever medium you are transferring over, and decoding it on the other end doesn't require some slow code.

final edit: I'm guessing it was an accidental trick of the repetitive input data lining up well. On real data hex still wins out (which should have been obvious in hindsight):

        >>> sample = ''.join(sorted(open('/usr/share/dict/words').readlines()))

        >>> len(zlib.compress(sample.encode('ascii85')))
        1320809
        >>> len(zlib.compress(sample.encode('base64')))
        1116678
        >>> len(zlib.compress(sample.encode('hex')))
        880651

<comment><USER22> Huh, my results are drastically different:

        $ dd if=/dev/urandom bs=512 count=2048 | base64 | gzip | wc
        ...
        4088   31928 1059085

        $ dd if=/dev/urandom bs=512 count=2048 | xxd -p | gzip | wc    ...
        5019   33798 1231268

1 megabyte of random data consistently results in ~1 megabyte of compressed base64 text, ~1.2 megabytes of compressed hex.

<comment><USER23> Repeating the exercise using a photograph ([https://imgur.com/B4tqkrZ](https://imgur.com/B4tqkrZ)):

        $ pv lock-your-screen.png | base64 | gzip | wc
         2.1MiB 0:00:00 [  13MiB/s] [</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==>] 100%
           8641   48904 2264151

        $ pv lock-your-screen.png | xxd -p | gzip | wc
         2.1MiB 0:00:00 [4.41MiB/s] [</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==>] 100%
          10109   49956 2573293

See the same against the jpg version (I've no idea why I have kept both a jpg and png of the same image around, especially given jpg is much better suited format):

        $ pv lock-your-screen.jpg | base64 | gzip | wc
         377KiB 0:00:00 [19.2MiB/s] [</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==>] 100%
           1420    8373  392796

        $ pv lock-your-screen.jpg | xxd -p | gzip | wc
         377KiB 0:00:00 [9.36MiB/s] [</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==>] 100%
           1487    8935  441077

In both cases base64 is both faster and compresses smaller.

<comment><USER15> This test isn't very informative because both .png and .jpg are already compressed formats, with "better than gzip" strength so gzip/deflate isn't going to be able to compress the underlying data.

You only see some compression because gzip is just backing out some of the redundancy added by the hex or base64 encoding, and the way the huffman coding works favors base64 slightly.

Try with uncompressed data and you'll get a different result.

Your speed comparison seems disingenuous: you are benchmarking "xxd", a generalized hex dump tool, against base64, a dedicated base-64 library. I wouldn't expect their speeds to have any interesting relationship with best possible speed of a tuned algorithm.

There is little doubt that base-16 encoding is going to be very fast, and trivially vectorizable (in a much simpler way than base-64).

<comment><USER24> > both .png and .jpg are already compressed formats, with "better than gzip" > strength

FWIW, PNG and gzip both use the DEFLATE algorithm, so I wouldn't call PNG's compression "better than gzip".

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

> This has led to its widespread use, for example in gzip compressed files, > PNG image files and the ZIP file format for which Katz originally designed > it.

<comment><USER15> Like any domain-specific algorithms PNG uses deflate as a _final step_ after using image-specific filters which take advantage of typical 2D features. So in general png will do much better than gzip on image data, but it will generally always do _at least_ as well (perhaps I should have said that originally). In particular, the worse case .png compression (e.g., if you pass it random data, or text or something) is to use the "no op" filter followed by the usual deflate compression, which will end up right around plain gzip.

Now _at least as good_ is enough for my point: by compressing a .png file with gzip you aren't going to see additional compression in general. When compressing a base-64 or hex encoding .png file, the additional compression you see is largely only a result of removing the redundancy of the encoding, not any compression of the underlying image.

<comment><USER15> Ooops, that should read "Like _many_ domain-specific algorithms" not "Like _any_ ..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> [https://github.com/monobeard/libasmb64](https://github.com/monobeard/libasmb64)

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure what your point is here?

I mean, we could all go and dig up links to base64 encoders and decoders, but the article you're commenting on is specifically about how fast they've been able to get using vector instructions on modern processors.

<comment><USER17> They provide an optimized non-SIMD generic implementation. The version I posted is similar, speed-wise, and it supports in-place base64 encoding/decoding (i.e. allowing aliasing, supporting the case of using one buffer for both input and output).</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter Needs to Change – Ted Talk with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey - <AUTHOR> https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_dorsey_how_twitter_needs_to_change <comment><AUTHOR> Can Twitter be saved? In a wide-ranging conversation with TED's Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey discusses the future of the platform -- acknowledging problems with harassment and moderation and proposing some fundamental changes that he hopes will encourage healthy, respectful conversations. "Are we actually delivering something that people value every single day?" Dorsey asks.</comment>


Ask HN: Learning movie CGI - <AUTHOR>

After watching movies such as Harry Potter and Avatar, I became interested in the CGI effects used in movies. I realize that these are done by huge teams, but I want to learn about how the effects are created and how to create simple ones myself. I'm a fairly experienced programmer, but I don't know much about graphics programming and absolutely nothing about 3D modeling. Can anyone suggest some resources to learn about this? I don't even know where to begin. <comment><USER2> It's a long time since I had a play with 3d tools but you could do worse than start by grabbing a copy of Blender: <http://www.blender.org/>

</comment><comment><USER3> www.fxphd.com

www.videocopilot.net

www.digitaltutors.com

www.thegnomonworkshop.com

Many More...

For the tools:

www.autodesk.com ( Maya, 3DSMAX, Softimage, Mudbox )

www.pixologic.com (Zbrush)

renderman.pixar.com (renderman)

www.mentalimages.com (mental-ray) Nvidia company

Many more....

Dev:

<http://developer.nvidia.com> (lots of resources)

Lots of stuff all over the net</comment>


Send Me to Heaven rejected from app store - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/smartphone-game-may-destroy-your-smartphone-6C10853059 <comment><USER2> Rugged sporting balls that include such sensors (including cameras) seem likely in the next few years. "Here's the winning goal/basket/run/touchdown... _from the perspective of the ball_."

They'll use wifi or Bluetooth LE to report stats and imagery to your phone.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ofcourse this app is very funny, but also very inspirational. Using your phone for sports. Who would have thought :)

</comment><comment><USER3> This was done back in 2009, based on an idea on a barcamp/hackday at my old company: [https://itunes.apple.com/app/accelerated- browser/id322848585...](https://itunes.apple.com/app/accelerated- browser/id322848585?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER4> A similar app that made it to the app store in 2009: [http://iphonehangtime.com/](http://iphonehangtime.com/)</comment>


Sleeping with My Cofounder & Crashing Weddings - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/1840f90e95e1

<comment><USER2> I enjoyed reading this very much. No hint of the arrogance that so well characterizes some of the younger entrepreneurs and also a real success story not choke-full of buzzwords. (about a simple app that generated $500k in revenue in the first 12 months after launch).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I was one of the editors. English is neither of our first languages.

One of the guys who helped edit wrote a book with Clayton Christensen.</comment></comment>


Galaxy Nexus Power Analysis: Why chargers can't keep up with navigation - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/nystt/galaxy_nexus_power_analysis_why_chargers_cant/ <comment><USER2> Dear phone manufacturers,

Please stop selling us features or bigger screens or faster CPU's until you've made a phone that isn't rendered unusable by virtue of a flat battery whenever you use any of its glorious features.

Dear consumers,

Stop buying hardware that has exactly the same flaws time and time again because it has a few new gimmicks.

<comment> mike-cardwell You can buy extended life batteries for most phones, which double the life of the battery. They come with a replacement cover; the normal battery cover can't be used, because the batteries are about twice as thick and stick out of the phone.

It makes the phone thicker, but that's a price worth paying. I have one in my HTC Desire Z, and I had one in my G1 before that. They're surprisingly cheap. On the scale of about $15. I had three of them for my G1, so I had no problems going camping for a week, and not having access to a charger.

<comment><USER3> I think you missed his point. He wants a device off the shelf to do what it's capable off without dying.

<comment> mike-cardwell I did not miss the point. Most people don't seem to realise that extended life batteries exist, so thought there would be some value in mentioning them. If anyone is interested, there is a picture of my HTC Desire Z with an extended battery fitted in a blog post I just wrote here:

<https://grepular.com/Extended_Life_Phone_Batteries>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> i don't think there is going to be a single solution.

* the early usb portable hard disks i got often had a triple ended usb cable; one end for hard disk, one end for data connection and an extra end to draw extra power for the hard disk. could this be done for charging phones?

* offline maps would reduce the power required for navigation as sucking down data on 3g is power intensive. you can always turn off 3g and use slower 2g for lower power consumtion. perhaps even an option that if they are using voice to turn off the screen completely.

* somehow convince the manufacturers that many don't want a superslim phone. if it's twice as thick with twice or more the battery life then i am really interested! even if it's only as an extra option then a certain amount of people will pay.

* removable batteries. designing for removable batteries makes models bigger and bulkier but they are more useful when you can get and carry spare batteries.

* some form of standard batteries that persisted between makes and models so that people could invest in extra batteries and know that they will work with the next generation?

in 94 i could get a week from a psion pda with 2 aa batteries with no effort getting 40 hours of use.

in 04 i could get 2-3 days from a symbian device pushing it to it's limits.

in 09 i could drain an iphone 3g to zero in about 2 hours.

it just seems we are going in the wrong direction.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article seems to refer to the CDMA version of the Galaxy Nexus, which uses lots more power than the international version due to the power-hungry 4G chipset. So it might be possible that those issues don't apply to the international version of the Galaxy Nexus.

<comment><USER6> The international version has HSPA+ which is similar. I get 8.9Mb downloads on mine which presumably eats power.

<comment><USER5> Power consumption of HSPA chips isn't that bad in comparison to LTE. That's also the reason why the international Galaxy Nexus version has a smaller battery than the US version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of an old comic: A gas station attendant is filling up a 70s-era gas-guzzler; he yells to the driver: "Better shut off the engine! She's gaining on us!"

(I've spent the last 10 minutes searching google images and the New Yorker cartoon bank for this, but can't find it anywhere – does it ring a bell with anyone?)

</comment><comment><USER8> I must have a magic GNex, or the internal battery meter is wrong. Mine gains power while using navigation, with 4G, on my no-brand 1A car charger. Not much, and certainly much slower than when NOT doing all that.

<comment><USER9> I have the same experience; something doesn't add up about this article. My Verizon Galaxy Nexus will charge (albeit slowly) as long as I'm using a charger that supports the USB dedicated charging specification (One example is the Palm Vehicle Charger you can grab from sellers at Amazon).

I can run the screen at full brightness, 4G and all other radios firing, using Navigation while playing music streamed over 4G onto Bluetooth, and it still charges. I guess the CPU probably isn't pegged at 100% in my scenario but how often does that happen realistically?

<comment><USER8> I don't know how it is on the GNex, but I did a quick unscientific test with the original Droid and it _rarely_ used more than half of the CPU while using Google's Nav app. I was actually quite shocked at how little CPU it used.

<comment><USER9> Well, all the pathfinding and at least some of the map rendering is being done server-side, and the 3D drawing is mostly offloaded to the GPU. So I would actually be surprised if the CPU was working hard for Nav.

My guess is that a lot of the power suck during navigation comes from: \- Keeping the screen on \- Constantly reading the GPS \- Loading new map tiles, traffic data, etc over the radio \- GPU rendering at 30fps or so

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ouch. With tablets and phones being so ludicrously powered these days, I wish there was a dedicated charging standard (as opposed to hijacking a primarily data-transmission standard) that supported higher power draws.

It's pretty awful carrying around power bricks for portable hard drives, even though your laptop can easily supply the load if needed. Ditto phones and tablets.

And maybe we can all stop using cigarette lighters as DC sources and move to something a little more sophisticated.

<comment><USER11> Why do we need a "more sophisticated" source of DC power? What would that even look like? 12VDC is 12VDC. Are current 120VAC (or whatever your mains voltage) similarly unsophisticated?

Besides, with an install base that numbers in the hundreds of millions and most of which have well over a decade of useful life.

<comment><USER12> As far as I know, cigarette lighter connections in cars are quite "low-level"; i.e. they're not a source of clean, well-behaved 12 volt DC that you can treat like e.g. the 12 V rail of a computer's PSU.

Instead, the voltage can vary depending on the state of the car's engine, the car's battery, whether or not you're currently hooking up a _second_ battery in order to jump-start your car, and so on.

It's not very sophisticated when considered as a source of 12 V DC, since it has these other parameters that are not something you'd generally expect a clean and simple power source to have.

<comment><USER13> This is why car chargers have a 5V regulator in them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have the european Galaxy Nexus and the battery consumption is disastrous. We are lucky that Ice Cream Sandwich provides somewhat detailed battery usage logging. Thanks to it, the native Facebook app was the first thing I deleted, because it was running battery-expensive background services even with all notifications turned off. Also what's up with the horribly jittery scrolling in some Android apps, one of them being the native Google Reader? I'm coming from iPhone 3GS and I never had issues with battery nor scrolling. That said, Galaxy Nexus is still better.

</comment><comment><USER15> He never tested the power draw when using the three golden contacts on the side of the phone - the contacts designed for this kind of situation when the phone is docked in a car mount. He says:

"I'd love to test the side charging pins but I don't know the pinout or if it needs to communicate to draw full power."

</comment><comment><USER16> I have a nexus one that while charging in the car and using navigation it would overheat and would not keep up either. Turned out to be a faulty battery and was just fine with any other battery.

I have not had much chance to test this on my GSM galaxy nexus but I have not noticed this problem so far.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll probably get down voted for saying this but that's one of the reasons I'm jumping off the Android ship this year, and, no, I'm no aApple fanboy.

I've had the original Nexus, Nexus One, Nexus S and wanted to buy the G Nexus but if google/samsung are willing to put a device that can't function under normal operating environment, then they shouldn't have done at it all.

See, with the iPhone (4S), I know Apple would never put out a device like this. It might not have things like a notification LED that blinks when u have a message, but the thing is bullet proof -- it just works.

The mentality is certainly different. I want a finished product, and not be a beta tester for a company.

It's no accident Apple sticks to their time-proven design: small 3.5" screen, no LTE, etc.

And as I get more busy with my life (business, etc), I could careless about the "openness" of the Android platform--it's not like I'll be compiling ROMs all day.

I just want something that works and won't let me down in the 11th hour and with Apple I know that won't happen.

<comment><USER17> You are aware that the 4S has been bedeviled by issues of poor battery life due to iOS5, no?

<comment><USER18> Can you elaborate on the 4S battery life issue?

I've only had my iPhone 4S for a week, but I haven't noticed anything drastically worse than my iPhone 4.

It certainly hasn't ran out of power during the course of a day yet.

<comment><USER19> I just got a 4S, and it seems noticeably worse than my 4 (which I only had for a few months after its initial release). It might just be that I've been playing with it more in the first week of owning it (coming off a year and a half with no smartphone), but the battery has consistently been down to 5% after 12 hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've drained my Evo using Maps while plugged in to the car adapter, as well. Frustrating.

<comment><USER21> Did you have it positioned in the sun/on the dash?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would be interested in knowing whether the iPhone has this issue when it is navigating.

<comment><USER23> No.

<comment><USER24> That being said, navigation is a lot less complex (fewer features)--no turn- by-turn, no voice, no "3D" map.

<comment><USER25> Anyone with any legitimate navigation need gets a third party app with offline maps, like the above mentioned Navigon, which supports all your mentioned features and more, such as live traffic based re-routing (which works extremely well) and the full Zagat guide for finding nearest decent food.

While running a full blown GPS app, talking on a conference call with Bluetooth, and using live traffic so the data connection is running as well, the iPhone 4 gains about 1% charge per minute with a 2 AMP charger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As others are noting both here and there, I do not experience this problem. My GN charges slightly or at least stays at the same battery level.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is this Chinese company spending millions on an App? - <AUTHOR>

I am talking about this application [WeChat][1]. It is a free messaging app and somewhat similar on the lines of WhatsApp. I really don't understand why would they spend million for TV marketing (yes it is being shown on TV (at least in India)) for a Free app.<p>How much revenue will they be able to generate if they try to charge fee? I think very less because users already have an option to WhatApp which is already dominant in the market. Banner ads is'nt too an option because the users will simply quit if it is provides poor UX.<p>[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat <comment><USER2> They sell games through the app.</comment>


Italy Orders Jail Terms for 7 Who Didn't Warn of Deadly Earthquake - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/world/europe/italy-convicts-7-for-failure-to-warn-of-quake.html <comment><USER2> (Mostly an edited repost of a comment I made in yesterday's discussion on the same topic.)

A blog post on Nature.com about a month ago explains better why they were on trial, which is _not_ the misprediction that an earthquake was imminent:

      The prosecution's closing arguments [...] made it clear that
      the scientists are not accused of failing to predict the
      earthquake. "Even six-year old kids know that earthquakes can not be
      predicted," he said. "The goal of the meeting was very different:
      the scientists were supposed to evaluate whether the seismic
      sequence could be considered a precursor event, to assess what
      damages had already happened at that point, to discuss how to
      mitigate risks." Picuti said the panel members did not fulfill these
      commitments, and that their risk analysis was "flawed, inadequate,
      negligent and deceptive", resulting in wrong information being given
      to citizens.

Source: [http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/09/porsecution-asks-for- fo...](http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/09/porsecution-asks-for-four-year- sentence-in-italian-seismology-trial.html)

If you can read Italian, there are a few online newspapers have comprehensive explanations about the trial matter:

[1]: [http://www.giornalettismo.com/archives/548491/terremoto- laqu...](http://www.giornalettismo.com/archives/548491/terremoto-laquila-la- sentenza-la-commissione-grandi-rischi-e-colpevole/)

[2]: [http://newrassegna.camera.it/chiosco_new/pagweb/getPDFartico...](http://newrassegna.camera.it/chiosco_new/pagweb/getPDFarticolo.asp?currentArticle=1M75AD)

[3]: [http://www.cattivamaestra.it/2012/10/sentenza-processo- aquil...](http://www.cattivamaestra.it/2012/10/sentenza-processo-aquila- grandi-rischi.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Discussion at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4683657> (84 comments)

</comment><comment><USER4> This story actually seems to be more complex than most western media is reporting it, apparently the scientists issued false "everything is ok" messages possibly for political reasons, against what their data actually showed. At least that's what I picked up from the Reddit discussion.

<comment><USER5> You're right, they held a big conference to reassure people that everything is OK and they should remain in their houses. One week later the big one came and some of those who listened to the scientists died.

Not as outrageous as what the media is reporting, but probably more interesting from the point of view of a scientist's responsibility.

<comment><USER6> In fairness to the scientists, you know as well as I do that they could have stated the risk of a big earthquake and nobody would have listened. It happens in high-risk disaster areas all the time. Sure, they should be held accountable for making false statements for political or economic gain, but saying "those who listened to the scientists died" isn't fair.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So now every scientist is just going to sound the alarm every time. How does that help anything?

<comment><USER8> Or more likely every scientist is going to be extremely cautious and cover their ass when making public statements. That's a lot different than sounding the alarm every time. I get the feeling that if these scientists had not been so absolute in their vision of safety they would not have been convicted.

<comment><USER9> If covering ass means saying something like "I predict <5% change of X happening" instead of saying it's not going to happen... why not. Maybe publishing more raw data for others instead of just a 2-word summary would be a good solution in general.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recall hearing of Italy having a poor legal/justice system. Can anyone comment on this verdict as it relates to Italy? Would these scientists be found guilty in Germany, Spain, Greece, etc.?

<comment><USER11> Well, the sentence is not really about "earthquake prediction", but about the fact that some hours before the big earthquake alarms from the INGV (the italian institute for earthquake monitoring, one of the best in the world) were ignored.

Of course nobody can predict earthquakes, but in L'Aquila's quake there were strong evidence of "something happening", and they were ignored: that's why they were found guilty.

P.s. I'm from Italy

<comment><USER12> There were no "big earthquake alarms from the INGV", that's the whole point. If you have sources that say the contrary, I would be interested in reading them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> <5 years later> Italy wonders why there are no leading seismic researchers in the country.

</comment><comment><USER14> So when do we start slapping lawsuits on failing to predict floods and hurricanes?

<comment><USER15> Why stop there? We just have to look around and find someone knowledgeable about something that just happened and is bad. Then you can sue them for not reporting that it was going to happen.

I think I'm going to promptly forget everything I know about computers before I get sued by a local store for not warning them that a virus is in the wild.</comment></comment>


Nginx SPDY heap buffer overflow (affects 1.3.15 – 1.5.11) - <AUTHOR> http://nginx.org/en/security_advisories.html?1.5.12 <comment><USER2> Before you panic: "The problem affects nginx 1.3.15 - 1.5.11, compiled with the ngx_http_spdy_module module (which is not compiled by default) and without --with-debug configure option, if the "spdy" option of the "listen" directive is used in a configuration file."

<comment> nevi-me Well, SPDY is enabled by default on 1.5.11 from what I understand, so they better push out 1.5.12 out (at least not seeing it yet)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Patch is pretty interesting. Why was buffer overflow protection behind a debug flag?

[http://nginx.org/download/patch.2014.spdy2.txt](http://nginx.org/download/patch.2014.spdy2.txt)

<comment><USER4> Without context (I'm not familiar with nginx' code) the blatant subtraction of pointers was scary, too.

As everyone is of course no doubt aware, subtraction of pointers is only valid in C if you can guarantee that the pointers point to the same "object" (or at most 1 character past the end of an object).

I would prefer an interface using a size_t count of available space, rather than passing an end-pointer around.

Again, this is based solely on reading the patch, so it might be perfectly fine. Considering nginx' reputation, I guess it's academic.

<comment><USER5> It's kind of implied by the parameters that they point to the same object; they're named "pos" and "end" after all. But I agree, a count variable is nicer.

The subtraction also has a (very theoretical) problem that its result must fit in ptrdiff_t (signed), and it would produce undefined behavior when you have a huge object whose size doesn't fit in ptrdiff_t (but does in size_t, by definition).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      -        if (ngx_list_init(&r->headers_in.headers, r->pool, sc->entries + 3,
      +        if (ngx_list_init(&r->headers_in.headers, r->pool, 20,

Personally, both the old code and the new code use magic numbers, and both send up a red flag to me. What does 20 mean? (I don't personally need an answer here: my point is it's not obvious and therefore it's easier for bugs to get through.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if this discovery is a result of OpenBSD switching its focus from Apache to Nginx ?

<comment><USER8> It wasn't.

> Thanks to Lucas Molas, researcher at Programa STIC, Fundación Dr. Manuel > Sadosky, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I assume this only affects configurations with ngx_http_spdy_module enabled. Can anyone confirm whether or not that's the case?

<comment><USER10> Yup, it's in the announcement: [http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx- announce/2014/00013...](http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx- announce/2014/000135.html)

 _The problem affects nginx 1.3.15 - 1.5.11, compiled with the ngx_http_spdy_module module (which is not compiled by default) and without --with-debug configure option, if the "spdy" option of the "listen" directive is used in a configuration file._

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It said it affected 1.3.15 to 1.5.11 but the fix is available _in nginx 1.5.12, 1.4.7_.

So for those who are using legacy version are they going to rely on distro vendor to push the patch? Just curious, even though I guess the number of users who have activated this experimental SPDY is low and people who actually have it enabled probably know how to fix it themselves.

<comment><USER12> 1.5.12 is the latest devel branch and 1.4.7 is the latest release branch (released in response to this CVE and excepted from the vuln range). The patch works for any of the intervening versions.

As far as I'm aware, all the major distros backport nginx stable release

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why was it replaced with "#if 1" instead of just deleting the entire "if/end" delimiters? Won't that always evaluate to true?

<comment><USER14> Maybe they wanted a patch that could be easily applied to older versions. It might have an elif later too, although I'm guessing that's not too common after debug blocks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It appears my Ubuntu server only updates nginx mainline to 1.5.11. I've disabled spdy support in my listen directive for now as an easier work around.

<comment><USER16> It's not affected on Debian/Ubuntu, check --with-debug flag.

<comment><USER15> Thank you.

<comment><USER16> btw, I use packages from nginx.org, they're updated in time with every release: [http://nginx.org/en/linux_packages.html](http://nginx.org/en/linux_packages.html)

<comment><USER17> Do the upstream packages still use a different configuration path from the Debian/Ubuntu packages?

<comment><USER18> Yes. There's no sites-available or sites-enabled, and some configuration is split off into different files in the conf.d directory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Got to love C.

<comment><USER20> Almost as much as I love Java</comment></comment>


Django API Boilerplate - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bisratyalew/Django-Api-Boilerplate
Guys, you can use this api boilerplate for your django project! It's awesome and cool! You can register, login, post, reset_password, change_password... have fun with it!!!
Go to: https://github.com/bisratyalew/Django-Api-Boilerplate <comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/bisratyalew/Django-Api- Boilerplate](https://github.com/bisratyalew/Django-Api-Boilerplate)

Awesome</comment>


Show HN: I Made a Web API for Textual Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.skr.io/

<comment><USER2> Quite honestly, I don't get it. Why would anyone want their product to depend on a third party (= point of failure) for something as trivial as storing a string in a database and calling a markdown processor?

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably wouldn't for that, but there's quite a bit more going on there, not the least of which is XPath and JSONPath querying.

I'll be posting more on this later, but this is just a part of another project as well. But since it has some uses as is, I thought I'd post it now.

<comment><USER2> Hmm, still, with Postgres supporting XPath queries natively, I feel that your added value is rather slim, I must admit.. It doesn't have JSONPath, but it does have something else that comes very close ([http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/functions- json.htm...](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/functions-json.html))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Unencrypted basic auth as a means to authenticate REST API access is a bad idea. Acquire an SSL certificate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that is in progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> After subscribing, I get redirected to [http://www.healthtracr.com/](http://www.healthtracr.com/). Another project of yours?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that! Yeah, that's something a few people use to track & graph things (either y/n questions, 0-n question, or numeric questions) via scheduled emails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I actually rather like it. I had a similar idea a year or two ago which became something more like a text snippet site, but I originally had ambitions along these lines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Mind sharing your email (or pinging me)? I'd love to hear about what you found.

<comment><USER5> Whoops, forgot to check back on my HN comments! I've signed up with email@example.com.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I actually am searching for a service like this. But I'm very concerned about privacy, IP logging and stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ping me at isaachodes at gmail.com if you have specific questions (and I've love to hear about your use-case as well). Encrypted data at rest and transit are upcoming (SSL is very soon, encrypted by the secret key (as an optional measure) is coming later, if there's demand for it).

<comment><USER7> Offer a full text search instead of encryption at rest.</comment></comment></comment>


Japan maglev train breaks world speed record again - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-32391020?OCID=fbasia <comment><USER2> I wonder if we'll ever get back to "High Speed Air" in my lifetime.

Back in the 70s, you could rock up at the airport twenty minutes before your flight left, jump on with minimal hassle, and cruise along at 600mph to your destination. Now, you need to endure two hours of having your fingernail clippers confiscated so that you can fly at 500mph to save on fuel costs.

That seems to be the true advantage of rail travel. As it said on the loudspeaker in Berlin HBF last time I was there: "Please try to arrive on the platform at least five minutes before your train is scheduled to depart."

Sadly, I bet the way we'll end up equalizing this will be that somebody will eventually bomb a TGV and we'll have to start doing the two hour confiscate- your-kids'-apple-juice routine at the train station too.

<comment><USER3> In the US we really don't have any rail alternative to flying. I'd love to know how European travellers thinks and weigh up rail (which seems relatively fast and efficient) vs flying. Do you think the two are interchangeable services? Is there a magical breaking point (more than 500km's distance etc) ?

<comment><USER4> The budget airlines provide such a customer hostile experience that many people prefer trains. These are (England) sometimes awful, but mostly okay and can be nice.

Commuting tends to be worse than the occaisional train journey. The baffling fare structure drastically needs reform -- the same journey can either cost £27 or £72 -- these will be the same class on the same day, just different times. It's frustrating. I like the Virgin trains - I've only ever had an unfun experience on one when the aircon broke. I really hate GWS and I will try to avoid using them where possible, even using a coach would be better. (Virgin trains have power sockets; GWS don't; even a National Express coach has power sockets and free wifi)

<comment><USER5> > the same journey can either cost £27 or £72 -- these will be the same class > on the same day, just different times.

Or just bought at different times. I recently saw a return train ticket for £50, the next day it was £90, the next back to £50. I bought it then so not sure what happened after that. Admittedly that example was travelling over easter but it's a consistent annoyance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Amazing. Writing this from Berlin, which doesn't have maglev trains, but has phenomenal public transit. It's sad to be going back to the US soon where the infrastructure is so primitive.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. The current incarnation of the US transportation system is also downright unsustainable from a fuel and carbon standpoint, and will lead to various downfalls if something isn't done about it.

As much as I'm a public transportation advocate (I don't own a car, and refuse car rides if a public transportation option is available for the place I need to get to), it's becoming increasingly more difficult to promote this kind of lifestyle with the advent of Uber and other things that have made private gas- guzzling cars even more convenient than ever before. People also just don't like being told what to do and what not to do, even if what they are doing is going to kill their children.

Given the short-sighted nature of people, in general, the only way this is going to change is if we make public transportation _more_ convenient than an Uber. What we need, very seriously, is to make self-driving cars/minibuses running on renewable energy happen as soon as possible. They can then be rigged up to become a "Public Transportation 2.0" system that gets anyone from A to B while dynamically routing and picking up others in-between and avoiding traffic jams from happening in the first place. It would also put the US back on the world map with a brand new, innovative system that's both environmentally efficient, cheaper to ride, and ultra-convenient at the same time.

<comment><USER8> Huh. I have pretty much the opposite feelings about Uber as you, as a fellow non-driver and public transit advocate. I think Uber (and also car-sharing services like Zipcar) are great for transit advocates, because they make it much easier for city dwellers to justify not owning a car, to the extent that I suspect that they actually increase transit usage.

Many people in my city (Washington, DC) that own cars don't actually need them most days, but they do have occasional needs that aren't easily doable by transit (Costco trips, driving out to see friends in the less-transit-friendly suburbs, hiking in Shenandoah, etc.) so they keep a car for that purpose. But the problem there is the incentives; the fixed costs of car ownership (a car payment, insurance, scheduled maintenance, etc.) are high, and once you've paid them, the incremental cost per mile of travel is really low (certainly way lower than the per-mile cost of transit), so if you have a car, you have a strong incentive to use it more than you need to. Uber and Zipcar are alternatives that make cars available in the circumstances where you need them and thus could allow these people to ditch their personal cars, and they also flip the cost incentives around: low-to-no fixed costs, and comparatively higher per-mile costs, which means you only use it if you really need it, and use transit most of the time.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that's also true. It's very rare that I need to travel to a place that requires a car to get to, so I can spend on Uber in those cases, and that allows me to not own a car.

However, this isn't the way a lot of people use Uber; at least where I live a lot of people use Uber because it's faster and more comfortable than public transportation, not because public transportation doesn't get them where they need to. I've seen business school students (i.e. students who have cash to burn) frequently take Uber between MIT and Harvard for god's sake. There's direct bus and subway service, but it involves a 5 minute walk on both ends, they're too lazy to look it up, and don't want to wait outside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's interesting, the speed record for conventional bullet trains is 574.8 km/h, about 30km/h less! This was a TGV train, largely unmodified (although they did increase the tension in the caternary). The wiki article about the speed record is interesting: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_world_speed_record](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_world_speed_record)

Makes you wonder whether the overhead of maglev is really worth it.

<comment><USER10> Actually, the TGV record was set by a specially-rebuilt train set that was _heavily_ customized -- and the test crew reportedly couldn't stand/walk around the instrument car at speeds over 500km/h due to vibration. (The track they ran the test on was newly-laid and not yet open to regular traffic: they had to replace most of the overhead cables from the stretch where the train hit maximum speed due to arcing and shock waves.)

The big difference is that the TGV record set pretty much an upper limit on steel-wheel speed -- horrible vibration, and the wheel rims were close to supersonic, which would have led to more shock waves if they'd pushed it faster. Similarly, Formula One cars go a lot faster than regular road vehicles, but you wouldn't want to commute to the office in one! Whereas this maglev test demonstrated a technology that would be comfortably usable at this speed.

<comment><USER11> Interestingly, the TGV record was broken by an unmodified Velaro-D train recently. Standard rolling stock, used the week before for normal transport, used a week after for normal transport.

<comment><USER12> Are you sure? I'm not finding anything about this.

The TGV record is about half the speed of sound, which means the wheel rims are bordering on supersonic, so it's not a simple thing to talk about exceeding it.

<comment><USER13> Why would the wheel rims rotate at twice the speed of the train? If the train advanced along the track 1m, surely the part of the wheel in contact with the track must also have moved 1m?

<comment><USER14> The bottom of a wheel is stationary relative to the ground. (X - X)

The middle a the wheel moves at the same speed as the vehicle relative to the ground. (X + 0)

The top of the wheel moves at twice the speed of the vechile relative to the ground. (X + X)

Put another way, the top of the wheel must go faster than the vehicle or it does not rotate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just to reframe this a little:

Commercial aircraft travel in ground-speed terms, around 350-500 MpH on average [0] (sometimes faster with wind behind them). This travels on a "normal" day up to 313 MpH which is nothing to sniff at.

You should also take into account how long you'll spend at the airport (e.g. security, checking/unchecking bags, etc) and taxiing/queuing on/off of the runway, and how long it takes it get up to altitude (aircraft travel slower while ascending).

Even still an aircraft likely is faster than this. But this could theoretically be cheaper than an aircraft, in particular as fuel costs continue to rise (and after the high building costs have been repaid).

These might be wider deployed if land wasn't already "owned" and using Eminent domain to seize it wasn't so politically unpopular. Plus every road you cross either requires a bridge (expensive), tunnel (more expensive), or crossing (dangerous).

[0] [http://www.flightradar24.com/BER7382/60eb62e](http://www.flightradar24.com/BER7382/60eb62e)

<comment><USER16> > . . . in particular as fuel costs continue to rise.

The long term trend is for a megaWatt (in any form) to get cheaper (in real terms) and less carbon intensive. There is every reason to believe that energy will be cheaper 5, 10, 50, 100 years from now.

[http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/realprices/](http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/realprices/)

(check out residential electricity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article by Kiyotaka Matsuda in Bloomberg Business[1] makes the important point that "Whether any of this makes a shred of economic sense is another matter." Japan has a declining population, and the level of investment required to build a maglev train line is enormous. Countries with growing populations have decided against building high-speed rail lines, and Japan does not appear to have any export market for this technology. Even the first phase of Japan's proposed maglev train line project, running from Tokyo to Nagoya if built, would not be completed until 2027.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-21/world-s- fa...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-21/world-s-fastest- train-records-speed-of-603-kilometers-per-hour)

</comment><comment><USER18> Imagine NYC to Boston in 40 minutes and the kind of boost it can bring to the innovative power in the region. It will be truly a silicon alley. And imagine two innovative centers in the country competing with each other.

Unfortunately this kind of decisions are not made by innovative people.

</comment><comment><USER19> How about low-speed maglev? China will open its first line later this year: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR)

I imagine it's much cheaper to build and operate?

<comment><USER20> The reason for this is to cut down travel time.

Japan already has a high-speed connection between almost all major cities, so this is just to speed up the link even more.

What would a low-speed maglev accomplish?

<comment><USER21> It's less noisy than wheeled trains, and the maintenance cost for the track is lower.

[http://www.ebeijing.gov.cn/Culture/EnjoyBJ/t1192828.htm](http://www.ebeijing.gov.cn/Culture/EnjoyBJ/t1192828.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> They are certainly cool pieces of technology but also expensive ones. The development of the German Transrapid began in 1969, it was declared ready for use in 1991 and then no planned route turned out to be cost efficient. Wouldn't China have bought one there would probably still be none in use. Even the test track in Germany is no longer open to the public since an accident a couple of years ago.

</comment><comment><USER23> Often people are disappointed when they visit Japan to find that it isn't as technologically advanced as they had dreamed, and I do agree partially, but whenever I discuss it with friends who also live here we always agree: the trains are amazing. Even local trains (in Tokyo) come very often, are fast, and are extremely quiet. But I always look forward to riding the Shinkansen. If you're lucky you can even get a great view of Mount Fuji.

</comment><comment><USER24> What's truely impressive is not the record but the fact that they will operate at 505 km/h.

Current high speed trains can go over 570km/h but are only operating an 320km/h.

</comment><comment><USER25> Contrast this with the Caltrain that chugs diesel and barely goes at 80 mph taking over 1 hour and 40 minutes to get from San Francisco to San Jose (the hubs of modern day technology). At this point the only advantage that Caltrain brings to the bay area is that you don't have to worry about parking in San Francisco.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's sad that in the US, train connections between major living centers isn't even a federal priority. Granted, the US is VERY large and we're talking about much larger investments than in Japan, but our economy is a crapton bigger as well.

</comment><comment><USER27> I used to be all about public transportation and trains, but I cannot reconcile that anymore with advancement in technology. It simply does not make sense to me anymore to try and build high speed rail on the ground, on fixed "rails" in order to not even get close to even slow airplane speeds.

With the roll-out of more sophisticated air traffic control systems that will allow denser traffic, higher frequency landing / take-offs, I don't see the sense in fixed systems like rail.

It obviously makes a lot more sense in places like Japan or even parts of Europe, but in the USA, where you need to traverse huge swaths of uninhabitable and even inhospitable and unpredictable land, it simply makes no sense.

Take Texas for example. All the idiots that have been moving to Texas from self-absorbed and myopic cesspools of self-importance keep crying about public transportation and high speed rail to connect the San Antonio, Dallas, Houston triangle; but no one wants to address the question as to why. You could and already can travel those paths by air and it will only get faster and cheaper with the improved air traffic control system when fully rolled out.

Do we think that high speed rail will enjoy the freedom that current AMTRAK does where you just drive up, hop on the train and off you go? No! You will have to also go through the TSA security bullshit and you will still have to go to specific locations to get on. It just makes no sense.

I would much rather see some sort of automated flight between regular airports on regional hops like the Texas triangle.

Edit: ... If at all. Something somewhat related that has baffled me for years now. Is why do people, especially in the tech industry need to travel so much? Of all people, why has the tech industry not solved the remote working issue? It's like we are using steam power to make electricity. Again, it makes no sense.

<comment><USER28> > It simply does not make sense to me anymore to try and build high speed rail > on the ground, on fixed "rails" in order to not even get close to even slow > airplane speeds.

Planes have higher max speeds, but they're subject to weather delays and other issues that bring their average speeds down well into maglev territory.

> With the roll-out of more sophisticated air traffic control systems that > will allow denser traffic, higher frequency landing / take-offs, I don't see > the sense in fixed systems like rail.

Significant limits remain - planes simply can't takeoff/land too close together due to things like wake turbulence, unloading a plane through a couple doors and jetways takes much longer than a train, etc. The weather issue is a big factor here, as well - a thunderstorm in Chicago can disrupt the entire nation due to connecting flights.

> Do we think that high speed rail will enjoy the freedom that current AMTRAK > does where you just drive up, hop on the train and off you go?

It does in Europe and Japan.

<comment><USER27> You are not thinking objectively, it's quite obvious. Not only will weather impact the operation and speed of a maglev just as much if not more considering that high winds and / or blistering heat can significantly impact the train and track.

And if you think that a few storms disrupting the air transportation network is a problem because some idiots thought it was a good idea to make Chicago a hub then you are not thinking about the problem correctly. What you are describing is a process and business problem. Maybe north and north east airports should not be hub airports like any even half witted person would realize, and no matter what, I don't think you could even pay for all the rail lines that would need to be built in order to serve the same number of passengers between the same number of destinations as you can flexibly adapt to with air travel.

For example, Southwest started direct flights from DC to Austin two years ago because the demand was so large. You couldn't even get the plans together in the same amount of time it took to plan, permit, coordinate, and implement DC- AUS flights, which are also a connection from some other airport on top of it.

<comment><USER28> > Not only will weather impact the operation and speed of a maglev just as > much if not more considering that high winds and / or blistering heat can > significantly impact the train and track.

Planes are frequently grounded/delayed by weather systems trains would have no trouble transiting, particularly thunderstorms.

> I don't think you could even pay for all the rail lines that would need to > be built in order to serve the same number of passengers between the same > number of destinations as you can flexibly adapt to with air travel.

Once again, you pretend like this doesn't already exist throughout Europe and Japan already.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AP Twitter account hacked, makes false claim of explosions at White House - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/23/4257392/ap-twitter-hacked-claims-explosions-white-house-president-injured

<comment><USER2> NSFW video!!!

to crackers: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i6OrOZwtmA>

edit:

Apologies. I feel strongly one should never advocate for political assassination.</comment>


Top 50 SEO Posts of 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://www.evancarmichael.com/blog/2010/12/31/top-50-seo-posts-of-2010/

<comment><USER2> Nice to have all in one spot.</comment>