Olympics 2012: A Bruce Schneier Moment - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/04/olympics-2012-a-bruce-schneier.html <comment><USER2> I'm as big a critic of the "Security Theatre" as the next guy, but trying to fight bollocks with even higher-grade bollocks isn't really very helpful. And Charlie's "white-hot supersonic shrapnel" is bollocks of the purest sort. A surface-to-air missile -- after its fuel is burnt out and its payload is detonated -- is basically nothing more than a thin tube. The "shrapnel" would consist of lightweight scraps of carbon fibre and sheet metal, fluttering downward like ordinary carbon fibre and sheet metal. Definitely annoying to have it land on your roof -- but fairly inconsequential.

Disappointed in Mr. Stross for this one.

<comment><USER3> What's most unfortunate is that he's drawing attention away from the real issue by whipping up this largely unfounded public safety concern.

There aren't a lot of places on earth that put SAMs in residential areas apart from North Korea.

<comment><USER4> The Olympics is all about sponsorship. One could see this as a sponsorship deal: British designed technology (Starstreak) built by a British company (British Aerospace) being promoted to the world via the Olympics. They've already got their money's worth in publicity. (Were you aware of Starstreak before reading it here?) If the Olympics can be used to sell a soft drink, why not a missile system?

<comment><USER5> Where can I place my order? I can't wait to have a Starstreak in my home for three easy payments of $49.99 (plus shipping and handling).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I live in Leytonstone, a little under 2 miles from the stadium. My thoughts on this when I heard it where (i) The communication with the block residents might have been better (ii) That seems like reasonable thing to, given the balance between shrapnel potentially hitting my house and an aircraft hitting the stadium.

Moreover, if I were the authorities I would make sure that there was a big public kerfuffle about anti-aircraft missiles being stationed in London - whether they were actually going to be stationed or not. It may be security theatre, but not in the way that the blog author thinks.

And it may be deeply unfashionable, but the family and I are pretty excited by the prospect of the Olympics.

<comment><USER7> Do you think it's a reasonable thing to do, in that it's a case of good risk analysis?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've sadly decided to unsubscribe from Charlies rss feed today, I used to quite look forward to his posts but it seems like his blog has descended into an echo chamber filled full of dull and pretty predictable diatribes. If that's what he wants to do with his blog then that's his business, but I'm not interested any more.

</comment><comment><USER9> > "the best solution would be to designate a permanent Olympic venue somewhere > isolated — Diego Garcia would be a prime candidate"

A better idea would be letting the Chagossians return to their homeland (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians>).

</comment><comment><USER10> Flagged for linkbait title. Bruce Schneier isn't even involved.

<comment><USER11> But it's about what Bruce Schneier talks all the time.

<comment><USER12> Then use "Olympics 2012 Security Theatre" and leave the connection to those reading?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I live in the complex where these missiles are supposed to be deployed.

The part of this situation that upsets me the most is not the missiles, but what comes along with them - the heavily armed soldiers billeted for up to 2 months.

We have no choice in this, and were informed by a leaflet through the door.

This isn't war time and the Olympics only last for a few weeks. We shouldn't have to have soldiers and weapons in a residential complex!

<comment><USER14> Unarmed according to The Guardian, may be supported by armed police.

<comment><USER15> Hang on, so the people guarding the incredibly dangerous surface to air missile aren't going to be armed?

Wonder how long it'll be before you see a SAM in the local Cash Converters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh, look, it's a tabloid article. Not packaged that way and with more words, also more eloquent, but still a tabloid article.

Why can't this sort of advocacy (which is important) not take the high ground for once? Fighting FUD with FUD is disgusting.

<comment><USER17> This text field is your soapbox. Where is the FUD?

He points out the ridiculousness of anti air missiles being installed in random flats: it is far more cost effective to be a shit head by triggering those missiles than it is to actually hijack a plane. To my mind, that is therefore a uselessly expensive security countermeasure that puts more lives in danger.

To paraphrase Schneier, security is a trade off, and complete security is impossible at best and mandatory identification and cavity searches at every bus stop at worst. Given the casualties at previous terrorism incidents (Munich, Atlanta are the only ones that come to mind) we're lavishly wasting money. Where do you want it to stop?

<comment><USER18> _> anti air missiles being installed in random flats_

The reference to a "High Velocity Missile system" implies that the weapon in question is the Starstreak HVM system (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starstreak_%28missile%29>). Starstreak is a man-portable weapon, so nothing would need to be "installed" anywhere; it'd be a couple of guys standing on the roof with a Starstreak tube.

 _> triggering those missiles_

As far as I can tell, the only way to "trigger" a Starstreak launch is by physically pressing a button on the launcher, so the risk of remotely triggered launch is pretty low. And even if a terrorist or group of terrorists managed to somehow neutralize the Starstreak operators, seize control of the weapon and launch it, the missile itself is so small it wouldn't really matter; the backblast from the launch is negligible (it has to be, for the missile to be safe to launch from the operator's shoulder), and the warhead is just three darts with around 16 ounces of explosive in each. The terrorists would do more damage if they stole bowling balls and dropped them on people from the roof.

 _> uselessly expensive_

Presumably the Starstreak missiles in question have already been bought by the British army, so the only expense would be the cost of having the guys stand around on the roof all day. And since those guys are soldiers the British government is going to be paying them that day regardless of where they happen to be standing.

<comment><USER19> I am not a terrorist, but if I was and I would get hold of an _anti-air_ missile I probably wouldn't use to shoot people on the _ground_. There's plenty of airliners over London at any time. The missile seems to have a service ceiling only 5km but it's still fairly big risk. Couple of guys with guns can't shoot down an airliner unless you give them a Starstreak

<comment><USER18> Yeah, but

(1) presumably the airspace over London is going to be pretty thoroughly controlled during the Olympics, reducing the risk; and

(2) if terrorists want to shoot down an airliner with a man-portable air defense system (MANPADS) like Starstreak, there's easier ways for them to get their hands on one than by infiltrating one of the most heavily secured areas in the world and wresting one out of the hands of professional soldiers -- MANPADS have proliferated widely, and can be acquired on the black arms market for a few thousand bucks (see <http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/asmp/MANPADS.html>).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is not security theatre. Think of a few helicopters trucked in and loaded with ANFO and white phosphorus. Novelists just have to be plausible, but security analysts have to cover the whole threat surface.

And anyway the British military does not want to be caught with its trousers around its ankles like the USAF on 9-11.

</comment><comment><USER21> The problem is that a lot of people think it's a good idea because they are ignorant fucktards and believe any spiel that comes out of the media terror promoters.

this may sound horrible, but I genuinely hope someone innocent gets injured or killed by the security forces and everyone jumps on it. it's about time it all came to a head.

<comment><USER22> Firstly, that's a ridiculous thing to say.

But when it happens (and it does - see Jean Charles de Menezes) it will be put down to insufficient budgets, manpower, equipment and training. So far from coming to a head, it is perpetuated - bigger budgets, more people and more kit.</comment></comment>


William Shatner questions Reddit's permissive culture - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/10/3973634/william-shatner-versus-reddit

<comment><USER2> Ah, Verge comments; always so insightful.. Everyone brings up Digg as a counter-example, but completely forget SomethingAwful as a strong and diverse community with radical degrees of separation between each sub while still being able to kick the dirt to the curb; doing so in a public manner that makes people think before they submit.

Reddit will continue to go downhill if they don't take moderation more seriously and allow it to be a safe-haven for discrimination; awareness that it's happening and that 'something' needs to be done doesn't do anything but make people feel like they're contributing to the greater good, but when no one runs the risk of taking responsibility, nothing will change. It's at the point now where admins need to do a better job policing the subreddit moderators themselves. Some of the most needlessly-prolific users (those with histories of online _and_ offline abuse, those who intentionally game the system) moderate/make decisions for some of the largest communities and make decisions that affect thousands of users. That should never even be an option, as it just alienates the rest of the userbase and will make it hard for companies to justify spending marketing dollars advertising to audiences they don't want to be associated with.

I commend Shatner on making these points because they need to be made by someone with listeners inside and out of the community, rather than the minority who get downvoted and told to go somewhere else if they can't stand the heat. Even more that he told SRS to screw off for doing whatever they were trying to do with his likeness.

</comment><comment><USER3> Was Shatner's face added to SRS sarcastically? Or were they promoting him?</comment>


Debt Ceiling: China Calls for World to Be 'De-Americanised' - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/513431/20131013/china-debt-ceiling-shutdown-xinhua-de-emericanised.htm

<comment><USER2> This is funny coming from a nation that regularly violates the freedoms and basic human rights of its citizens.</comment>


Data Sketching:  the approximate approach is often faster and more efficient - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3104030 <comment><USER2> This is gaining popularity in bioinformatics too.

When you sequence a genome with a sequencing machine in tiny pieces you get the same piece several times, it's not even coverage, some pieces show up a lot, some pieces show up rarely so that you have to sequence the genome several times, so to speak (30 to 80 times is the norm).

A lot of that data is redundant to get to those rare pieces, so 'data sketching' is getting more popular.

Examples:

\- The Abyss genome assembler has (experimentally) a Bloom filter to decrease memory requirements and run time at the expense of accuracy and having to fiddle with the Bloom filter parameters. The paper assembles a genome using 35GB o RAM instead of a few hundred GB.

\- The khmer package contains many functions to downsample sequencing runs using, again, Bloom filters. It also has a HyperLogLog implementation to quickly count k-mers (similar to n-grams, but with ATGC instead of words)

\- MinHash sketching is a popular first step in aligning messy PacBio reads (implemented for example in the Canu assembler). People also use this to map population structure using sequencing reads directly, and to quickly assign a taxon to the data of an unknown species.

\- There are some approaches with the Oxford Nanopore sequencer (that tiny thing you can hook up to your laptop) where you stream the incoming data directly into the assembler or other program and tell the sequencer to stop sequencing once you found what you're looking for, or your coverage is high enough

Etc. pp. It's a goldmine for fast algorithms, I haven't seen people use a Cuckoo filter, for example

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In response to this challenge, the model of streaming data processing has grown in popularity. The aim is no longer to capture, store, and index every minute event, but rather to process each observation quickly in order to create a summary of the current state. Following its processing, an event is dropped and is no longer accessible. The summary that is retained is often referred to as a sketch of the data.

This article introduces the ideas behind sketching, with a focus on algorithmic innovations. It describes some algorithmic developments in the abstract, followed by the steps needed to put them into practice, with examples. The article also looks at four novel algorithmic ideas and discusses some emerging areas.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is interesting to see that this topic which is around the academic world since 2004 is gaining popularity only now.

An interesting thing is that you can find some of these concepts implemented in apache spark (count approx) and into BlinkDB. While, from a theoretical point of view many result are relate d to statistical bound like Chernoff bound and Chebyshev inequality. During my phd I found this topic interesting and promising to answer to mine data with a verified error bound for precision/recall and elapsed time.

To go deeply into this topic I suggest the book Knowledge Discovery from Data Streams [http://www.liaad.up.pt/area/jgama/DataStreamsCRC.pdf](http://www.liaad.up.pt/area/jgama/DataStreamsCRC.pdf) and other books written by Joao Gama.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, streaming algorithms and sketches are a fascinating topic. The article's author, Graham Cormode, has been conducting research in that area for a long time and is one of the co-authors of the _Count-Min Sketch_ paper.

Basically a _Count-Min Sketch_ is the same thing as an undersized counting Bloom filter, but it's used quite differently. This allows for loads of interesting operations. First, there's the estimated number of occurrences of an element (how often has it been added?), but it can do more complex things as well, such as quantiles and heavy hitters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here are implementations of some of the sketching algorithms mentioned in the article for those interested:

[https://github.com/ct-clmsn/CHIUW2017](https://github.com/ct-clmsn/CHIUW2017)

</comment><comment><USER6> We (set.gl) have been working on a few really exciting ways to do this on- device with primarily location data. Here's the talk this fall at Strava [https://conferences.oreilly.com/strata/strata- ny/public/sche...](https://conferences.oreilly.com/strata/strata- ny/public/schedule/detail/61068)

</comment><comment><USER7> Sorting a dataset in order to draw k samples is completely nuts. Pick k random integers between 1 and N, rerolling any duplicates.

Is your data a stream? Use reservoir sampling for O(n) vs O(n log n).

Sorting a collection of values in order to sample from it doesn't make any sense.

<comment><USER4> The sampling algorithm you describe becomes pretty slow as _k_ grows. There are much faster algorithms. We wrote a paper on fast sampling: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.05141.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.05141.pdf) (page 11, what you described is labelled "H" (for _hash table_ ) in the plot. Sorry about the single-letter names, it's a weird convention for sampling algorithms). You can see that as soon as _k_ is more than a few thousand, "R" ( _" recursive"_) is much faster. What it does is recursively split the range (initially 1...N) in half, and deciding how many samples come from the left and how many from the right side. It does this by using hypergeometrically distributed numbers, which is the distribution for sampling without replacement. Its base case is the algorithm you describe (H) when there are less than ~1000 elements left. Algorithm R is also very easy to do in parallel. ("B_MKL" and "B_GPU" are vectorised, non-portable implementations of a _B_ ernoulli sampling based algorithm using Intel MKL and Nvidia CUDA, respectively).

Reservoir sampling can be done much faster than O(n). It's possible in Θ(k log(N/k)). This is a tight bound, so things like O(k) are impossible, because every position in the reservoir will be replaced approximately log(N/k) times. See [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jeffrey_Vitter/publicat...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jeffrey_Vitter/publication/234739284_Random_Sampling_with_a_Reservoir/links/0deec51ac0ca20f508000000.pdf) for a proof.

But you're right in that sorting in order to draw a sample is not particularly efficient most of the time. Not to mention that a selection algorithm would be sufficient as well, and requires expected time O(N): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickselect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickselect)</comment></comment>


Self-driving golf carts - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2015/autonomous-self-driving-golf-carts-0901

<comment><USER2> I wasn't able to find the specific IROS paper by Daniela Rus mentioned in the article, but it's most likely because IROS 2015 hasn't happened yet.

Eventually, a copy will probably show up here:

[https://groups.csail.mit.edu/drl/wiki/index.php?title=Public...](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/drl/wiki/index.php?title=Publications)

</comment><comment><USER3> No one on the golf cart wants them to be self driving :) I think that's half the fun!</comment>


Want to Get Involved in a Cool Project? - <AUTHOR> WANT TO GET INVOLVED IN A COOL PROJECT?
If you're interested in working on a great new project, you may want to here about the non profit open source tech studio that we are building. We are building multiple bots this month with MySQL and Javascript. We are looking for developers designers and anyone that can help us with writing and marketing to join our new project.
Drop a comment, or tweet at me http://twitter.com/davecraige if you would like more information. Thank you <comment><USER2> You wont get too much traction with this format, specially with the allcaps :(.

Try writing an interesting blog post about a problem that can be solved with you cool project or an interesting blog post about a problem you solved to make your software, and drop "we need more collaborators" at the bottom of the log post.</comment>


Tr.im Cuts Off Bit.ly's 301works Idea, Wants to Sell - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/trim-cuts-off-bitlys-301works-idea-wants-to-sell/ <comment><USER2> OK, this is dumb. If you want to sell, why announce to the world (!) that you're _failing_? Either your product is dead or it's not. This sounds like a refusal out of spite, not logic.

The bit.ly offer was clean, and clearly in the public interest. Spitting on it now only makes the tr.im folks look small and petty.

<comment><USER3> Not to mention that they didn't just say "we're closing", they said "There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening", and all but said there was only room for one shortener to make money.

If I were a prospective buyer, "we failed" wouldn't be a turn-off, but "we don't think it can be monetized" sure would be. You want to sell something you don't think can be monetized? Good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tr.im just wants to hold the public hostage with shortened URLs. Too bad nobody cares.

<comment><USER3> For all the mention of link rot, it seems like the primary use of third-party url-shorteners is Twitter. What percent of tweets are still useful a month later? "Oh no, my 3-month old tweet will be slightly more useless!" isn't really all that scary of a thought.

<comment><USER4> Yup, exactly. URL shorteners are disposable. That's why nobody will buy Tr.im. Unlike StackOverflow, this really _is_ something that you can build in five hours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, what does someone buying Tr.im get? A tiny uptick in their market share of shortened links? There's certainly no technology involved, and there are no locked-in customers involved.

Further, it seems like most url-shortened links are real-time, and probably useless after a few months. I wonder how many shortened links are still visited months later. And given that shortening-service use is accelerating, what slice of the pie is the 2009 links from a smaller player in the market going to be worth in 2010?

Can someone explain to me how it's worth more than pocket money?

<comment><USER5> I'm sure the typo domain squatters could probably come up with a way to squeeze money out of the residual incoming traffic from links -- since tr.im links will continue to get some volume of traffic for a long while yet -- so the question is how much traffic, for how long, and how much of a CPM can you get? Do the math & you have a minimum valuation...

But I hope to hell they're not evil enough to sell off to those scum. :)

<comment><USER3> True. I was basing this on their previous statement that they're not going to sell to typo-squatters or someone equally nefarious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't get the 301 idea: isn't it equivalent to proposing "let's all just use bit.ly"? In theory it sounds nice, but in practice it seems quite ridiculous.

<comment><USER7> I don't think so. If a company controls their domain, they control the links. If the company goes out of business, the domain can be transferred and the 301 service takes over processing the links. That's my take on it, anyway.

<comment><USER8> The country of Libya ultimately controls bit.ly's domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can't someone just scrape all of tr.im's ids and archive everything on their own?</comment>


Ask HN: What tech that's right around the corner are you most excited about? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> New, exciting tech making its way in to boring, old industries. And I mean _boring_ , _old_ industries.

There's an unbelievable amount of backwards business process that's still out there. Unless you've experienced it first hand, I really don't think you can fully appreciate how manual the "business world" still is.

For the past year I've been working with an intermodal trucking company building an app for owner-operator truck drivers so they can accept/reject deliveries, turn in paperwork, and update delivery statuses via a mobile app. If that sounds dead simple, it's because it is. But the change it brings is amazing.

While deploying the app I'd often ask when so-and-so truck driver came in to the office. The answer was usually something like "every day at 5:00pm to drop off his paperwork". A week after they start using the app, the answer suddenly turns in to "Oh, he _never_ comes in to the office. You'll have to call his cell."

Dispatchers that were tearing their hair out trying to get updates from their drivers so they can in turn update their customers now feel like they can manage double the trucks. They're asking if they can get a similar app on their phone so they can manage their drivers on the go. Managers are asking when they'll be able to ditch the office space they're renting and let everyone work from home.

When I tell people "It's like Uber for intermodal trucking", nobody cares. If they pretend to care, I have to explain what intermodal trucking is in the first place -- then they stop pretending. It doesn't sound "sexy". It's a boring industry.

I think there's a lot of boring industry out there that hasn't fully embraced technology, and I think when it finally does we'll see a cultural change in the way we view work.

<comment><USER3> I'm interning at a law firm, two days ago I spent 4+ hours searching through public announcements on a government website. Me and a my colleague searched through the announcements of 500+ companies in the last 3 years. We ctrl+f'ed certain words, if they were present we noted the decision date, it was that simple. But the government website had a flashy UI with Ajax that required multiple clicks to get a list of announcements for a single year.

If the government had provided an API, the same task could be accomplished in a matter of minutes.

Likewise, most law offices have FileStore's or DMS's (Document Management System). These technologies are old and slow. If they used something like Algolia or Apache Lucene on a beefy server, the productivity would increase multiple-folds.

Another thing I want to mention is automated translation software. Most contracts we write are in dual languages. People usually slightly modify terms from earlier contracts. If there were a software that could identify identical/similar blocks and find their translation, the productivity increase would be substantial.

I wonder why these firms do not invest in IT. Being a corporate lawyer in 21st century is not that far away from being a coder. You primarily work with your computer, only instead of writing computer code, you write rules in natural languages. Programmers have IDEs, Lawyers still use MS Office products with lots of add-ons.

<comment><USER4> I remember someone posted a comment regarding why Lawyer doesnt want to improve productivity before in HN. It's because lawyer usually charge client per hour, the more hour the lawyer spend on work the more he/she get paid, there's a negative incentive on reducing work hours this way.

<comment><USER3> Lawyers bill by the hour, that's right. However there is almost always a race against time. You can always do the work slower/write more hours. But you can't speed up the work, if you don't have the tools.

In large offices, IMHO people get billed with their capacity to pay. It has not much to do with the hours lawyers put in. If the client has the money, lawyers put in more hours. Every piece of paper lawyers print gets billed to you. Every cab fare, every x and y, you imagine. On top of all this lawyers need to bill hours so they don't get fired. But I'd rather bill hours doing serious research than manual labor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ARKit.

Apple has solved few real world AR problems, which were usually hard for an average app developer to get started with. But with ARKit, apple, is "trying" to do the heavy lifting in terms of plane and object recognition etc.

Another thing is the platform of distribution. People will use AR apps, which will hit the app store after September like crazy. And these same people, will be primary audience for Apple headset.

It's like, before releasing headset, Apple is proving people that you really need a headset to overcome the pain of "continuously" moving your phone in the space.

Also, other OS and vendors will follow the trend and release AR compatible phones/hardware early. The only potential pitfall, I see is, battery usage. If it's properly optimised, I think a large AR wave on smartphones is about to hit.

Just my 2 cents!

<comment><USER6> Why do you think AR will become a "thing"?

Do people really want to run around wearing glasses/headsets all the time?

If you'd ask me, this idea could just as well end the same way as 3D TV.

<comment><USER7> > Do people really want to run around wearing glasses/headsets all the time?

Absolutely! If I could wear some regular looking glasses that could identify objects, give me directions, etc, I would totally wear them.

I'm really good with faces, in that I can see someone after a long time and know that I know them, but I'm really bad with names, so I can never remember their name. If I could have glasses that looked in my contacts or Facebook or whatever and told me the name of the person I'm looking at, that would help me be less awkward at social gatherings.

<comment><USER8> If the glasses can name people from your contacts, it's only one more step to name and recognize everyone it can including strangers, including showing any related info like reddit aliases (known and suspected), reputation in some reputation tracker or even criminal history, favorite alcoholic beverages and other interests to help with dating... enough people don't want that so they'll ban AR devices and punch out people they catch wearing them. This stuff is already going on to varying degrees, but mostly businesses watching people. Getting people watching people and really kicking off AR needs, besides the tech, more assurances that no one can tell you're watching. I agree there wouldn't be much adoption barrier for having to wear hardware, so many people wear glasses and sunglasses and hats all the time anyway, the barrier is just being inconspicuous.

<comment><USER7> At one point there was an Android app that could identify strangers. They nerfed it so that it couldn't do that anymore. I'm sure they could do the same for the glasses.

But yeah, that's why it would have to be real subtle.

<comment><USER9> Wasn't it an app by a Russian guy that looked on the social network for people's name? I think it served as a brilliant demonstration of the current state of privacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Textblade: [https://waytools.com/](https://waytools.com/)

Single row keyboard that has minimal finger movement. It was to be delivered March 2015 or so, but it has yet to be released. They have testers who rave about it and it looks incredible, but it is perpetually around the corner.

Originally designed as an ultra-portable phone keyboard, those who have used it tend to use it for all their machines. It has jump slots to quickly switch from device to device.

<comment><USER11> Not available? I didn't go through the full check-out process; but what happens when you go to buy it? I don't see any reference that it's unavailable.

<comment><USER12> I just tested it; eventually you get to the end of the shopping cart that asks for credit card details. The submit button says "Pre-order Now".

<comment><USER10> Yes, you can pre-order it. I have. They will charge you right away and then you will probably wait months, maybe years, until they are ready to release it.

Given how amazing it seems, it was worth it to me to take this gamble for $100.

Unlike a kickstarter, they do offer a full refund if you ever get tired of waiting. I went through that process once when I bought an iPad Pro with the keyboard case; this was before people were testing the Textblade. They did promptly refund my money. I then decided I really did not like the Apple keyboard case, returned it to Apple, and re-pre-ordered the Textblade. That was over a year ago.

The really annoying thing is that they do not do any push notifications, such as emailing status updates. To get their randomly timed updates, one has to be on their forums.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Gene editing, particularly on living people. I'm looking forward to cancer treatments being no more involved than an antibiotics regimen.

I don't know if its around the corner, but considering the human genome was completed circa 2003, I'm pretty enthusiastic that it isn't too far away.

<comment><USER14> It's a way's off, but I'm looking forward to the day genetic engineering lets people see colors they aren't able to see today. Those and other sensory enhancements could revolutionize art, culture, and society.

<comment><USER15> You may be excited about a technology from the sixties called "acid" that allows you to do just this. (Somebody had to say it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Much of what people have mentioned here will be really great. I think self- driving cars have the most potential to impact people lives day to day, followed by AR. I guess infinite, cheap, clean energy could also spark another industrial revolution.

But all these things aren't likely to impact the happiness and life satisfaction of those living in the developed world. The internet has been huge, but it really hasn't made us happier as a whole.

I would like to see someone create something that will make people's lives happier. That probably means doing something that will foster good human relationships and real world experiences.

I guess there's a lot of potential for driverless cars to help with that, but they could do the opposite as well. I think we need better tools for connecting with each other, understanding each other, forming social organizations and communities, and maybe changing the geography of cities to bring us closer together, rather than making it possible for us to be further apart. It's likely that new technology isn't needed, we just need to use what we already have in a new way.

<comment><USER17> >but it really hasn't made us happier as a whole.

Serious question. Has any technology done this?

We don't appear to be happier than any other animal. Even in the developed world plenty of people are downright miserable.

Unless primitive humans were just far sadder than the average animal, I can't see how technological advancement has made us happier as a whole, because we're not all that happy.

If antibiotics, electicity, and the steam engine didn't noticeably move the needle, it seems absurd to expect phone tech to do the deed. Whatever technology is solving "for the whole", it's not happiness.

<comment><USER18> Yes. Alcohol and various drugs, for example.

I jest, but only a little bit. The thing is, happiness is not really a good goal for technology. Humans are good about noticing what is not OK to them and focusing on that - while also growing resistant to persistent problems. So they keep the baseline.

Things have changed a lot, however - we've been moving up on the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Thanks to technology, most Westerners no longer really worry about food, shelter, personal security and forming relationships. We've moved upwards - that's why we have time and will to bitch about abstract topics on the Internet. The very controversies our society has is the evidence just how far our technology has lifted us. Starving people don't fret about identity politics and gender imbalances in hot industries.

This is a realistic goal for technology - lifting us up and solving the problems we identify. Feeling happy is something we either need to learn individually, or brainwash (or engineer) ourselves into.

<comment><USER19> >> The thing is, happiness is not really a good goal for technology.

>> Thanks to technology, most Westerners no longer really worry about food, shelter, personal security and forming relationships.

In the buddhist tradition, one dedicated to happiness, one barrier to happiness(or happiness training), was the need to take care of all those things. So happiness seems like a decent goal for technology, but maybe not the best ideology to win in the tech dev market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am excited about both WebGL & Web assembly.

Although both of these have been around for a few years, we are yet to see a general adaptation of these. (might be due to inconsistent browser support).

Now with the rise of VR, 3d Printing, powerful GPUs these two technologies are bound to open new avenues of an immersive browsing experience. I imagine that in next few years we would have 1- Webs stores, that show a virtual 3d shopping mall, 2- 3-d virtual try out of garments, 3- VR coaching of physical activities like a- Playing Tennis, b- Judo, c-Taecondo, d- Dance

<comment><USER21> We were excited about VRML in the 90s...

<comment><USER22> Two things have changed since the 90s:

\- hardware acceleration is everywhere, we all have an SGI Onyx in our pocket

\- good positional tracking give us a natural 3D input technique

Without those, the tech doesn't work.

<comment><USER23> Don't forget:

\- always connected

\- population increase

\- boredom increase

\- social networking (ie. highly targeted ads)

\- mobile payment

\- global map / elevation / city map / traffic data free online

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fully & Quickly Reusable Rockets (refuel & refly, like jets)

Obviously both SpaceX and Blue Origin are the leaders here, but once they do it the other majors will either have to build the same thing or drop out of the industry.

There are so many things about space that we just assume are true, but are actually only true because access to orbit has always been so expensive. If we can get the cost to reach orbit down to a multiple of the fuel cost, then so many more things are possible.

We finally get large satellite constellations for low-latency Internet all over Earth. We get space stations and O'Neil cylinders. Moon bases and fuel depots on Titan.

At the same time, firms like Made In Space are working on in-space construction so you can build radio telescopes in space with arbitrarily large dishes (10 km, maybe?). Eventually we build mirrors that size too.

Basically just those two things are the only barriers between us and a solar- system-wide civilization like in The Expanse.

<comment><USER24> Arguably the third thing is ISRU (In-Space Resource Utilization), aka, mining asteroids for fuel and materials. But that's not immediately necessary and doesn't count as "around the corner".

<comment><USER25> My understanding is that "ISRU" normally stands for "In Situ Resource Utilization", which can include mining asteroids (if your locale is 'asteroid belt'), but also includes using fuel that can be generated from resources found on a planet or moon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> RISC-V We should see the first hardware running a real Linux distro in 2018 and it should proliferate from there. RV32 should also start showing up in micro controllers as well.

Still need an open GPU, but I think a bunch of risc-v cores with vector extensions running LLVMpipe would be reasonable for running a Wayland desktop.

</comment><comment><USER27> Mass adoption of electric vehicles. Battery prices are plummeting and the advantages of EV are so great that the moment they break that $20k barrier with zero subsidies (which should be within the next five years) the switch will be rapid. I suspect at least 1 in 3 personal vehicles in use in major metro areas will be an EV by 2025.

<comment><USER28> I'd rather have adoption of high density urban areas, public transit and walkable/cycle-able neighborhoods.

Traffic jammed highways will still be traffic jammed highways with EVs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ethereum's Casper

[https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/casper4/pap...](https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/casper4/papers/casper_economics_basic.pdf)

It aims for more economically secure public blockchains with shorter confirmation times and less cost (electricity/hardware/inflation). I haven't delved deep enough into it to be fully convinced, but what I've gotten through so far is promising. AFAIK its the only proof of stake algorithm thats been formally documented.

<comment><USER30> For me it is Raiden, I believe Ethereum should be able to beat Bitcoin in their lightening network implementation, and for the cryptocurrency of future, Raiden is very important for Ethereum.

PS: So you don't support Ethereum Classic anymore?

<comment><USER31> Also more excited about Raiden. Sad there isn't much more information about it.

From my understanding, the thing I like about payment channels is that the capacity of the payment channel depends on how much of the cryptocurrency is deposited/locked away under it.

So with everyone competing for a payment channel toll, they have taken large amounts of crypto off the market, constricting the supply, while distributing the marketing out for their own use case, some of which will be successful at increasing the demand. Any limited supply commodity performs the same under these circumstances, up, and that is exciting because the capacity can also scale for the new attention, while the "centralized" payment channels stay optional ways to transact on the network at all.

<comment><USER32> FYI you can go use working state channels right now at [https://showcase.funfair.io/](https://showcase.funfair.io/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> ARkit finally pushing AR to the masses. From a developer perspective, having an SDK that simplifies "environment detection/reasoning" is huge. Previously required pretty deep hardware requirements and now is turning into an AI/ML/software problem.

[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/building_a_b...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/building_a_basic_ar_experience)

<comment><USER34> A usable AR SDK has been available from Qualcomm/Vuforia for years on more devices than ARKit supports. The only thing that came out of it was marketing gimmicks.

<comment><USER35> I thought vuforia was mostly just a marker based AR, which never really took off in the US market. ARKit is markerless and their VIO system is actually pretty good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Crystal & Julia 1.0. Crystal because it's a blazing fast, compiled and statically typed version of Ruby (or 80% anyway), and it's web server is awesome. Now it just needs full concurrency.

Julia because it offers a nice, performant alternative to Python & R in data science, while avoiding Java & C++. It has some really nice features like multiple dispatch and the ability to run R, Python, Fortran and C code inside of it, so you can use libraries like Numpy in Julia.

<comment><USER37> I was choosing between Crystal and elixir for my personal edification and I picked elixir.

<comment><USER36> Elixir looks really interesting as well. I just hope it leaves some Rubyists behind for Crystal. The reason I prefer Crystal is that I really like Ruby, and Elixir is a much different language.

And then there is Ruby 3.0, which will have concurrency and (optional) static types according to Matz. But that's slated for 2020.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If by "tech" you mean mostly computers and software, then WebAssembly is exciting. We've had 5 or more years now of companies inventing languages that compile back to Javascript, even though Javascript is a terrible target for compilation. WebAssembly was designed to be a true compilation target, and will allow an endless number of languages to be used on the browser.

WebAssembly helps create more space between the kind of languages that developers want to use, and any particular GUI output, such as HTML. In a different thread, I just wrote about what is wrong with HTML:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14926845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14926845)

If by "tech" you don't mean computers/software, then CRSPR is clearly going to be a huge thing going forward.

</comment><comment><USER39> AR. Being able to superimpose software on top of real objects is amazing. It has so much economic potential that it hurts not being in the space already (working on that though). I feel AR will be the app craze 2.0.

<comment><USER40> > It has so much economic potential that it hurts not being in the space > already (working on that though)

As someone not familiar with the area, could you elaborate on some examples of what you think the economic potential is? To an outsider like me, being able to overlay virtual objects on a scene seems like a nice curiosity, not particularly an engine for commerce.

Edit: specifically, I was curious about areas where AR offers a (financially) meaningful advantage over traditional HUDs (for example).

<comment><USER41> To me the benefit of AR is not just overlaying virtual objects on the physical world but specifically highlighting real objects in your field of view. Granted, this does just come down to placing a virtual object on the physical world. I can give a specific example that is perhaps of not so great financial advantage, but I think this kind of thing will be useful - using AR to give you directions to build IKEA furniture. You are sitting in front of a pile of materials and the AR will tell you to put _this_ bolt (highlighted) in _this_ hole in _this_ piece of wood. You would not have directions on a piece of paper but rather using the actual objects.

<comment><USER42> I feel the key AR advantage will be that we don't have to spend half our time glancing down on tiny rectangles anymore.

The Oculus is already less than an order of magnitude away from competing with regular LCD panels. Google glass and maybe that magic leap thing give us hints that it will eventually happen for mobile.

No more displays, now that's something I would pay for.

<comment><USER36> Problem is that not everyone will want to wear something over their eyes on a regular basis if they don't need to.

<comment><USER43> It'll be glasses then contacts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Still waiting for the day when I can buy a computer wth a full color e-paper display and sit out in the sunlight to work.

<comment><USER45> So, fast refresh e-paper displays?

<comment><USER46> I'd like a very large, performant-enough display for solely for editing in vi. Even that is still just a dream, as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER47> Have you taken a look at the Dasung Paperlike yet? [http://www.dasung.com/english/](http://www.dasung.com/english/)

<comment><USER48> This reminds me of reMarkable ([https://remarkable.com/](https://remarkable.com/)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN)

GAN is a type of Deep Learning Network which can generate data after training.

Applications

\- Text to image synthesis (Scripts to Movie ?) ([https://github.com/reedscot/icml2016](https://github.com/reedscot/icml2016))

\- Generation of Game Environments

\- Image to Image conversion ([https://github.com/junyanz/CycleGAN](https://github.com/junyanz/CycleGAN))

\- 2d to 3d conversion

I think in future we will have highly creative deep learning systems, which will make ar/vr/movie/game creation faster and cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER50> Without doubt, GraphQL is the next technologo I will learn. The idea is so brillant compared to REST. If you are convinced by SQL and in general by Domain Specific Languages, I think you should give GraphQL a try.

<comment><USER51> I'm intrigued ... can you elaborate on the wow factor beyond REST that you see in GraphQL? When I looked at it in the past, it seems to make sense for things that could be represented by graph (e.g. FB's social graph), and graphql allowed you to run complex operations in the backend without fetching each individual node on the client. I clearly missed something?

<comment><USER52> And if you can also elaborate on why SPARQL and RDF were a major failure, and how GraphQL is different/better?

<comment><USER50> > it seems to make sense for things that could be represented by graph

False, even if there is graph in its name it's not restricted to graph, and that what is great about it compared to things like RDF and SPARQL. Backend data can be stored in key/value store, document, files, RDBMS or whatever. And you will still be able to make it work. AFAIK you write a "translation" layer that interprets a pseudo-JSON file into your data.

AFAIK GraphQL is not good at querying recursive datastructure, it's better at "neighborhood" kind of query, so you can traverse Foreign Keys, but not "indefinitely".

> graphql allowed you to run complex operations in the backend without > fetching each individual node on the client.

Yes.

> I clearly missed something?

IDK. For me, GraphQL basically it's an RPC interface particularly suited at "reading" data.

> And if you can also elaborate on why SPARQL and RDF were a major failure, > and how GraphQL is different/better?

GraphQL is not tied to particular data layout. I don't know much of SPARQL and RDF actually and don't know why they failed. I am just guessing.

That said, GraphQL it "just" another query language, it's "just" another DSL targeted at querying datastructures. As something that was thought a long time, focused to solve a particular issue.

<comment><USER53> > AFAIK GraphQL is not good at querying recursive datastructure, it's better > at "neighborhood" kind of query, so you can traverse Foreign Keys, but not > "indefinitely".

That isn't true. You can request data in any shape you want and could theoretically traverse through child nodes indefinitely.

We have many queries which go 5-6 levels deep.

<comment><USER52> How do you deal with IDs misalignment between data sources?

<comment><USER53> Could you clarify what you mean? Got an example?

<comment><USER52> Let's say you want to query Wikipedia for village descriptions, and get a map of matched villages from openstreetmap. Would it be a use case where GraphQL could help? Then it would need a "translation" layer for both systems. And joins between datasets would be based (for example) on the couple "country+postalCode". Is it a possible use case of GraphQL?

<comment><USER53> Could you show me a quick example of what a request and response would look like with REST? I'm still not quite sure what you mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Lenovo ThinkPad Retro! That's certainly right around the corner: two months and one day until pre-order opens.

<comment><USER55> Hadn't heard of this until now! Thanks!

<comment><USER54> [https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)

I am glad you have heard it now! I am typing this on a T420s because I refuse to use anything but the old seven row keyboard and hope I can move to the Retro in October :)

<comment><USER55> I'm on an x220. Didn't really know what I was going to do for my next computer, but there might be hope yet...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Self-driving cars that really work and are safe. Google/Waymo is just about there.

Automatic language translation everywhere.

Big Brother everywhere. (Excited about, yes; happy about, no.)

Batteries + solar as the predominant energy source.

Electric cars getting some real market share.

<comment><USER57> I'm curious as to what exactly excites you about Big Brother being everywhere?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> better search, always

Find me:

\- an aggregation of everything I have to know to run a porcelain store in my country (taxes, suppliers, how to find staff or better yet: showing candidates directly, best location in my town, etc.)

\- Fuzzy stuff like: the pic of that tree I took when I was on hollidays in XY a few years ago; or the note I took a few days ago about that band with some greek name

\- a ready to paste, non-ancient js-script for XY

\- a cafe where nobody cares about how long I sit with my laptop with a not too modern ambiente

\- the lesser known types optical illusions

<comment><USER59> Honestly, it may not be at the level you are describing here now, but I have been overwhelmed by the ability I've had to find small figments of memories with Google search. For example, I had a faint memory of a movie I watched as 4 year old, and could only remember a few generic nouns describing it, and after a few minutes of searching I was able to pinpoint. This wasn't possible years ago, either because the search engine itself wasn't ready, or that the information simply wasn't on the web. Now both of those are true, and only becoming more so, so they are improving in tandem.

I'm pretty confident I can find something on the web by only knowing a few keys words.

<comment><USER58> Indeed already amazing.

"Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. […] I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them"

from 1995 [http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be- nirva...](http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be- nirvana-185306)

today google shows it right away: [https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=date%20of%20the%...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=date%20of%20the%20Battle%20of%20Trafalgar) (powered by the now slightly more semantic wikipedia I think)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Excited may be too strong a word, but I'm interested in seeing how the world of decentralised apps evolve. I like the idea of decentralising the web using plug and play home servers. There are a few projects in this space already (such as Sandstorm) and there are some existing projects that aren't strictly limited to dapps but could play a key role in the future (a few unikernel and meshnet projects spring to mind).

<comment><USER29> IMHO the real bottle neck here is NAT, so I'd throw universal static ipv6 consumer adoption in with this.

<comment><USER6> Another bottleneck is the asymmetric up/download speed of most ISPs. Often upload is more than 10x slower than download.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I'm looking for a company to successfully implement what I call on-behalf AI. AI legally allowed to take actions on behalf of someone, in a large number of ways in relation to daily life. This may be 5, 10, or 20 years out yet, hard to say. It'll be very hard to pull off, and whichever company does it first at a high function + comprehensive level will be another Airbnb or Uber, as the legal/regulatory hurdles will be similarly challenging, and exactly as with those cases it'll be ideal to move first and apologize later (which will cause the typical uproar among people that find that approach appalling). This type of AI is where you get deep into real time savings for consumers, by significantly reducing dozens of mundane & routine tasks (most of which repeat from person to person and can be modeled very accurately accordingly).

<comment><USER62> Why do you think it's "ideal to move first and apologize later" when rolling out a socially transformative technology in a democratic society?

<comment><USER61> Because I occasionally don't respect the restraints that tend to exist in democratic societies when it comes to entrenched regulation & interests vs innovation (or really anything new or different), which frequently dramatically slow down progress (see: zoning law abuse, or the FDA's countless abuses or otherwise slow & meandering approach (what I call backwards), or the present US healthcare system (vast entrenched interests, fear of change, etc)). That is, it's my opinion that that restraint is what always must be pushed back against to generate any positive change in any culture or society at any point in history. Failure to push in this regard, guarantees stagnation.

The vast majority - in my opinion - overwhelmingly tend toward being either aggressively anti-change, or they're at best very cautious about it. That has been demonstrated non-stop throughout history with practically every step forward in technology for example. It may even be a beneficial evolutionary attribute for the survival of humanity. I don't belong to the dislikes change group, my personality type is to push. That's the honest answer.

Am I biased because of my own world-view or personality type? No doubt to one extent or another. I'm not advocating for chaos or anarchy though; rather, I'm advocating for constantly testing assumed or entrenched notions/boundaries, as a means to find out if there is new progress to be found there. My opinion is that there's almost always progress to be found in challenging such, with some areas blatantly worth focusing on more than others (due to favorable upside vs downside risk ratio). If you ask permission first every time you attempt to find progress at the edge of what a society presently finds comfortable, you're not likely to get very far.

<comment><USER63> Maybe, just maybe, a reference to Chesterton's Fence is needed:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> For me personally, currently my absolute top reason I'm dying of excitement is [http://www.luna-lang.org/](http://www.luna-lang.org/) Only I'm not sure if they're gonna manage to get a release out of the door; I have an impression that they understand that it's their top priority and main focus now, but I'm not sure if they really realize how far they they need to go with sacrificing features and cutting it down to absolute bare essentials, to avoid faltering into endless development hell.

That said, I have some tiny glimmer of hope that even if they go vaporware, maybe someone e.g. from around the _Lambda the Ultimate_ community might possibly try to revive their ideas and ignite some F/OSS clone.

</comment><comment><USER65> The second coming of WebTV. I am sick of small devices, I want a huge 100" display managed by a touch remote where I can play and work, watch videos, movies, track my cryptos, even code my own apps from it, all from the comfort of a fat-ass recliner.

</comment><comment><USER66> Fusion, of course. It actually is right around the corner now, this time.

<comment><USER67> Yeah. Fusion will happen in the year of the linux desktop.

<comment><USER68> I wish I had a fusion reactor that worked as well as my desktop Linux computer. Far from perfect, but it's still a net positive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> That inflection point in a couple years where SSD is just cheaper than spinning HDDs. A whole class of problems kind of goes away, low end consumer performance goes way up, and archival platforms get faster "for free."

I'm also excited about NVMe and on-the-horizon, faster-than-flash solid state technologies like 3d xpoint, etc.

</comment><comment><USER70> Edge computing.

Basically shifting off of cloud onto separate peer-to-peer connections. Faster, more secure, more distributed, and no middleman. Think 1990s/mid 2000s but no servers, just client to client.

Soon everyone will want a home server.

<comment><USER6> How would we implement a search-engine using P2P?

<comment><USER71> MY_PC: "Who is hosting a webpage with the following information?" My 1000 connected peers: "Here are 500 more peers who say they do"

Proceed to witness extreme bandwidth usage every query.

<comment><USER6> That only works if the computer you're connecting to has an index of the entire web.

It will probably be more like this:

\- So you're looking for "kitten videos"? Well, you can ask computer X for words starting with "k", then ask computer Y for words starting with "v", and then I'll perform a logical AND operation to get your final results.

But how we make this as fast as Google is beyond me.

And also don't forget that we have to factor in the problem of security (some nodes may be sending in wrong results, e.g. spam).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I am suprised applications of blockchain outside cryptocurrency is not higher on this list. For example:

* Election fraud and recounts can become a thing of the past * Everything that requires a contract could become completely electronic (the mortgage industry alone is probably a multi-billion dollar opportunity)

<comment><USER73> I think it's a crypto-utopian view that election fraud can be fixed with a better record. Election fraud is a fairly small problem in countries like the US and the problems are around voters not voting in the right place, having a new address, losing their proof of identity, etc.

The security community thinks a paper trail is essential - less computers, not more - not a public database. I'm not an expert, but I tend to trust them.

<comment><USER31> > I'm not an expert, but I tend to trust them.

and blockchain proponents want an infallible system audit-able by the public, instead of having to trust anyone. they haven't figured it out completely, they push towards it.

in any case blockchain networks can function without computers. very cumbersome though.

<comment><USER74> Voting systems are hard because most democracies expect ballots to be confidential. Is there a blockchain-based voting system that allows a voter to have high confidence that their vote was counted, but doesn't allow someone else to be able to know how that voter voted?

<comment><USER75> Aparrently, someone has it figured out: [https://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fra...](https://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_fraud)

<comment><USER76> His solution doesn't seem to solve the hard problem of "stuffing the ballot box." Any voter can verify their own vote is correct, but they can't verify that each vote is cast by a real citizen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> VR Gaming. We're a few years away from some incredible experiences in the space.

<comment><USER78> Amazing VR gaming experiences have already arrived.

The last two months have seen a flood of incredible VR gaming experiences for the Oculus Rift. I highly suggest you give the current generation of consumer VR another try:

* Lone Echo - Amazing space story line, one of the highest ranked PC games on Metacritic right now: [http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/lone-echo](http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/lone-echo)

* Echo Arena - Basically the Enders Game zero-g arena in space, multiplayer. Really addictive: [http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/echo-arena](http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/echo-arena)

* The Unspoken - You're a wizard, with magic, and you use your hands in different combinations with the Oculus Touch controllers to battle other mages, including real people via multiplayer gaming: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVD1O853aSw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVD1O853aSw)

* Robo Recall - Battle robots, grab them with your hands, tear them apart, grab bullets from the air. Epic: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIK4D0kVlIs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIK4D0kVlIs)

* Star Trek Bridge Command - You are literally on the bridge of a Star Trek spaceship.

* Mages Tale - VR RPG from the creator of the classic Bards Tale, makes me feel like I'm embedded into a classic AD&D dungeon crawl.

Anyway, that's just a small selection! I picked up an Oculus Rift + Touch Controllers the last two months and have been blown away at the developments lately.

<comment><USER79> Agreed. Owned a Vive since last October and still have a "wow!" moment at least once a week.

And that's even without the continual joy of demoing to people who've never tried proper VR. It's genuinely rewarding every time you pop a headset on someone new.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> For me, I'd like online IDEs to be standard (and therefore equally good) and graph wikipedias for arguments (like Argumans but mainstream).

I can see the advantages of both of these and imagine (and have seen people) build them so I assume someone will fully crack this in the next few years and we'll all be using this.

What might be around the corner that I'd love: someone makes a mainstream general purpose visual programming language (or tools in IDEs using languages that are indistinguishable - revenge of smalltalk)

<comment><USER81> I wonder if Apple will go to online iPhone development sometime soon. Write code, test in emulators, push to Apple App Store, all through web browser. No XCode, no Macbook required.

Would open up iPhone dev to a whole new class of people who can't afford the pricey Apple desktop/laptop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> USB-C being so common that it's cheep.

</comment><comment><USER83> WebGPU. Granted, "right around the corner" is a bit of a stretch.

[https://webkit.org/blog/7380/next-generation-3d-graphics- on-...](https://webkit.org/blog/7380/next-generation-3d-graphics-on-the-web/)

<comment><USER84> Do you have a 15 seconds explanation on how that's going to be much better than WebGL?

<comment><USER85> ELI7: WebGL crunches numbers fast to end up as pixels, WebGPU crunches numbers fast to end up as numbers again.

<comment><USER84> Got it, thanks for the clear explanation.

So this means that we'll soon have web ads mining bitcoins using our GPUs, right? :)

<comment><USER85> Well, that's one thing. Google "Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks" for another.

<comment><USER86> Already happening! This came up a few days ago: Tensorflow implemented with webgl: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14894653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14894653)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> IRV voting in Maine, automatic districting to prevent gerrymandering, and reliable voting schemes like Scratch and Vote.

<comment><USER88> Last I heard, ranked choice voting had been ruled unconstitutional in Maine: [http://www.pressherald.com/2017/05/23/maine-high-court- says-...](http://www.pressherald.com/2017/05/23/maine-high-court-says-ranked- choice-voting-is-unconstitutional/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Writing React apps in OCaml using Reason: [https://reasonml.github.io/](https://reasonml.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER90> Allam cycle power plants. I love the idea of turbines that continue to burn in the middle of a giant fire extinguisher.

</comment><comment><USER74> Major applications and/or operating systems written in Rust, or languages that offer a similar degree of type safety. We need to be ruthlessly eliminating undefined behavior from our software stacks, especially the lower layers, so that there are fewer places for security bugs to hide.

Electric car adoption.

Solar isn't new or particularly exciting, but it's become a good alternative to burning fossil fuels and it isn't used widely yet.

I've been looking forward to real-time global illumination via ray tracing with photon mapping or path tracing or some other good algorithm to become mainstream. It doesn't seem like there's much enthusiasm for the idea from the game industry, though.

Genome editing has already been mentioned, along with reusable rockets.

</comment><comment><USER91> Renewables in general. Many problems can be solved if you throw enough juice at it.

e.g. Desal plants.

</comment><comment><USER92> Affordable triple digit core desktop computers. The cloud is fine but until I'm getting Google fiber in every city, this'll need to suffice. The application is HTC applications in industry design

<comment><USER93> A core for every browser tab!

<comment><USER94> With how bad most webpages are these days its almost not even hyperbolic. No script really woke me up to how much bullshit most pages try to load.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Large-scale low-cost metal 3D printing. We're _very_ close and it could be a game changer for a number of industries since the price for one unit is very close to the mass-production per-unit cost. It could allow custom-fit application or modification of a design on a per-customer level for things that would in the past require significant outlay.

If I need a new part for something that's no longer supported, no problem. If I want to test an idea, fine. etc.

<comment><USER96> Will be interesting for the manufacturing space when multiplied by torrents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> WebRTC for all real time communications/broadcast.

</comment><comment><USER98> Self-driving cars, it will majorly change how we transport.

People in 100 years will look back to manually driven cars as we look back to horse-drawn carriages

<comment><USER99> And after say 200 yrs, what's your prediction?

<comment><USER43> Teleporters

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> The advent of AI-based search. I'm not sold on the siri/cortana et al conversational agent approach. AFAIK it's mostly UI/UX layered atop the "keyword->10 links" paradigm. Search is missing the key concept of iteration and exploration and (hopefully) someone somewhere is working on it.

<comment><USER101> I'm working on it.

I believe the future of UI will be like Tinder or Akinator, where your browse through results and apply constraints to the search space by answering simple yes/no questions.

<comment><USER100> Nice! can you share some details on your work? do you have a write up somewhere? also is this academic research? or a commercial enterprise?

<comment><USER101> I'm trying to reduce suffering (the delta between the real and the ideal). For that, we need to communicate better.

Today, we generally communicate through natural language ("Hi, can I get a taxi at XYZ?") or software (Uber's "REQUEST UBERX" button).

I'm taking the best of natural language (ubiquity, flexibility, generality) and software (unambiguity, conciseness, guidance, automation) to create a better communication paradigm.

First, I'm getting rid of action verbs. Everything is the description of a state. Instead of "I want to go to the park", think "I am at the park" or better "me.location = park".

Second, I'm reversing the flow. Instead of manually requesting things, you get things suggested to you. Most of communication is done by accepting or rejecting suggestions, like with Akinator or Tinder.

Third, I'm making the real world interactive by allowing physical things to act triggers for suggestions. With the press of a button, you can capture you current location, a QR code, an RFID tag, a picture of a book, some Chinese text, the song currently playing, etc. The captured entity will be processed, meaning will be extracted, yes/no questions will be asked, and you'll be offered ways to interact with it.

Basically, I want to be able to point at something, get information about it, and act upon it.

This is neither academic research or commercial enterprise. I'm currently doing this on my own, but anyone is free to join.

Next week, I will publish a blog post explaining the relationship between GTD (Getting Things Done methodology) and the future of UI. This should cover some of the ideas I have mentioned here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> volumetric displays are pretty fun. e.g.:

[https://voxon.co/](https://voxon.co/) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKTfP56rpDA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKTfP56rpDA)

</comment><comment><USER103> A replacement for Javascript in the browser, I'm sure it can't be far off.

</comment><comment><USER104> FDA-approved closed loop artificial pancreas.

</comment><comment><USER32> The decentralized web built on top of Ethereum/Swarm/Whisper

</comment><comment><USER23> Truly and honestly, the automated food preparation and retail systems we're building at [http://infinite-food.com/](http://infinite-food.com/) ... constantly available, broader choice of higher quality food for more people with less supply chain waste and at a lower cost in time and money.

<comment><USER105> this looks amazing, how many different meals can it provide? how many different ingredients can it process and cook? will the ingredients need to be bought from you or can we supply anything we have?

thanks for working on this, i have been dreaming this for a long while.

<comment><USER23> Initially we are focused on a broad subset of popular foods in Asia. The intended model is a wholly owned and operated network including the logistics system for restock and servicing, in order to keep costs down. Ingredients will be relatively numerous, with variety significantly upwards of the average restaurant kitchen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> Millisecond instance boot and teardown times on the major clouds - AWS, Google, Microsoft and Digital Ocean.

Along with suitable pricing.

</comment><comment><USER107> Hopefully WebUSB will arrive sometime and be useful. I thought it would be really cool to write a basic SDR web app/browser extension, but unfortunately it's not really possible right now.

There was a project called Radio Receiver which used an RTL SDR, but it is a chrome app and chrome apps are pretty much dead.

</comment><comment><USER108> Eye tracking - mouse and keyboard control using eyes. Microsoft has already started working on this.

I read a novel published in 1999 which predicted how VR headsets would be followed by eye tracking eye boards,etc. which would then be followed by control directly via the brain using electrodes,etc.

</comment><comment><USER109> I think voice controlled apps (google home, Siri, Alexa, etc will be the next big thing)

<comment><USER110> Why?

I can imagine using voice when driving perhaps; but it's not really usable when other people are around, since voice commands would disturb them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER109> I think voice controlled apps (on Alexa, Cortana, Siri, google home) will be pretty big.

<comment><USER111> Certainly the voice recognition is impressive.

All the regular things I asked Google Assistant were recognised almost perfectly. Andrew Ng talked about the difference between 95% accuracy and 97% accuracy being the massive difference. Google Assistant is at 95% [2], but feels very impressive already.

It felt like going back a decade when trying out the Firefox Voice Fill [0], where trying repeatedly to say the word you want doesn't work (I was trying to search for 'React Router Redirect', which it kept interpreting 'React' as 'Really').

However I think the personality of the assistants are lacking. It doesn't feel like there is any real interaction. Google assistant feels like little more than a better version of Voice Fill.

I'm waiting for things much along the lines of Ironman's JARVIS (or KITT). But what I really really want is a full blown version of Jeeves voiced by Stephen Fry. I'll have to settle for the TomTom Stephen Fry voice for now [1].

Is there a turing test for Butlers?

[0]: [https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/voice- fill](https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/voice-fill)

[1]: [https://www.tomtom.com/en_us/drive/maps- services/shop/naviga...](https://www.tomtom.com/en_us/drive/maps- services/shop/navigation-voices/stephen-fry/)

[2]: [https://www.recode.net/2017/5/31/15720118/google- understand-...](https://www.recode.net/2017/5/31/15720118/google-understand- language-speech-equivalent-humans-code-conference-mary-meeker)

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> Global warming and this coming mass extinction thing are gonna be awesome. And IPv6.

</comment><comment><USER112> Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone

[https://spiffe.io/](https://spiffe.io/)

</comment><comment><USER113> GPGPU in the browser. Some would say it's already here but not all browsers have a standardized API that facilitates it.

</comment><comment><USER114> So I guess the responses on this thread begs another question - VR or AR? Which is going to take off much better?

<comment><USER66> AR, but with high enough quality to offer a superset of VR's features.

<comment><USER115> I think AR will get usable and mainstream much sooner, because it can work good on current smartphones.

VR will be cool later, when Oculus and others get more perf and fix more current problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Smartdust. (And the opening of geospatial database tech that can support all the data...)

<comment><USER116> What is smartdust?

</comment></comment><comment><USER117> WebAssembly.

</comment><comment><USER118> Teslas travel network involving Autonomous driving, Boring and hyperloop network.

</comment><comment><USER106> Entangled pair quantum routers. Oh wait, that's 50 years away.

<comment><USER94> Its how we break the increasingly centralized nature of the internet given almost all countries are BBB becoming more authoritarian.

</comment></comment><comment><USER119> Racetrack Memory.

</comment><comment><USER120> unikernels; single purpose operating systems for anything you want.

</comment><comment><USER121> Hydrogen fusion power.

</comment><comment><USER122> GraalVM.

</comment><comment><USER123> There are rumors of phones with batteries lasting longer than 5hrs. I'm still not sure if true or not but when it happens it will revolutionize what you use your phone for. It may even replace the watch completely some day.

Obviously I insist they still need to be as thin as they are now. That is much much more important than batteries.

<comment><USER124> ? I get at least 10 hours out of my Pixel on a daily basis, what rumor are you talking about?

<comment><USER125> can't tell if you're being serious or not...

<comment><USER66> Are you guys for real? This is ridiculous! I've been on the old Nexus 5 for ages. I think, if we aren't going to get Android 7, then maybe it will be time for me to switch to one of the fringe mobile operating systems.

I get about 20 - 40 hours between charges, depending on whether or not I need to use Google Maps that day, and I often stay in airplane mode when I am working.

<comment><USER126> Airplane mode is cheating. My Nokia 920 lasted for a literal week during my honeymoon. It sat in the room in airplane mode and zero usage other than an alarm clock and a few dozen pictures. No one cares how long a smartphone lasts when you're not doing smartphone things with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER127> Another javascript framework, of course.

<comment><USER106> This may be facetious but in fact it's true.

JavaScript needs a fresh wave of tools and improvements in the JavaScript language.

This time the priority has to be zero configuration and simplicity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER128> My own!

Should I ask HN to help with the beta test?

<comment><USER129> Probably!</comment></comment>


UCF researchers develop new rocket-propulsion system - <AUTHOR> https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/UCF_researchers_develop_groundbreaking_new_rocket_propulsion_system_999.html <comment><USER2> We covered the rotating detonation engine on Orbital Index a few months back. The main conclusion was that, while more fuel efficient, the RDE is currently way too unpredictable for real use. Here's a cool video of the circular detonations though: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEYFy3qRNdo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEYFy3qRNdo)

And the actual paper: [https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.101.0...](https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.101.013106)

(If you're into this kind of nerdery, you might enjoy subscribing to our weekly newsletter. [https://orbitalindex.com](https://orbitalindex.com))

<comment><USER3> I was thinking that a solid state hydrogen/oxygen gas generator might be a safe way to store propellant, as it could exist in the inert, uncompressed form.

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/transportation/alternat...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/transportation/alternative- transportation/hydrogen-on-tap-device-trucks-fuel-efficient-vehicles)

I think using this for vehicles is the least creative application of this tech.

<comment><USER4> It looks like AlGalCo makes an aluminum-gallium alloy that produces hydrogen + aluminum oxide when mixed with water. This seems like it would be useless in space, because the oxygen is locked away until you run the waste through an aluminum smelter.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, I wasn't thinking of re-usability for the aluminum. Just that it would keep the propellants in a safe state. water+alloy might be better than nasty toxic fluid + pressurized oxidizer. I am also not a rocket scientist.

<comment><USER5> It isn't a question of reusable type - you need to have fuel and oxidizer to burn things. A truck can use atmospheric oxygen for the oxidizer; a rocket can't.

I also imagine that the extra weight of the aluminum pucks would tank your Isp (though I suppose you might be able to make back some tank weight).

<comment><USER3> I willfully? missed that the O in the water binds to the Al so is unavailable for combustion (it has to, otherwise what gets consumed?).

Oh, another take, it is a molecular pump that removes oxygen from the environment and turns it into water, via burning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is the maximum increase in fuel efficiency (e.g., ISP) with such a design? I was under the impression that modern chemical rocket engines operated near their thermodynamic limits. If that's the wrong question, what's the right one?

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure what's the news here are (H_2 + O_2 instead of H_2 + air?) but if you want to see experimental _continuous detonation thrusters_ in action, just search for videos on Youtube.

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=continuous+deto...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=continuous+detonation+thruster)

I posted this elsewhere in the comments already but to save your time looking for it, here it is again: a video of ignition and transition to continuous, circular moving detonation in such a thruster: [https://youtu.be/ERTei7D8LJs?t=28](https://youtu.be/ERTei7D8LJs?t=28)

<comment><USER8> This presentation really helped me understand what was going on:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws4kbgfpKCw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws4kbgfpKCw)

<comment><USER9> Paul Rudd's smart brother.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thought: this was done in a laboratory setting where they were able to statically fine-tune the flow rates. In an actual rocket, it seems plausible that external forces such as the acceleration of the rocket, changing force from gravity, etc. could significantly affect the propagation of the detonation waves, so the flow rates would need to be dynamically adjusted in real-time (a non-trivial problem). Still, this is definitely progress!

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting. As I understand it, deflagration is usually used in rocket engines because detonation is hard to control, but they've managed to control it using very precise engineering.

<comment><USER12> I guess one question is, can they maintain that precise control over a long enough period of time, without the explosions degrading the injection apertures, to really use the technology.

<comment><USER13> At the fuel flows they are using, the explosions aren't that much of an issue. These look like wisps of hydrogen and oxygen in a vacuum chamber, not a big jet of fire steaming out of a nozzle. The detonation wave doesn't look like it is contacting much of anything.

They have a sustained rotating ring, a detonation chasing itself around a circle. That's great, its more efficient, but it is a long way from a working engine. They need a properly shaped chamber, a nozzle, and a few other things before they can test for the expected increase in ISP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think article could have more mentions of previous developments of rotation detonation engines.

Navy experimented with it (for efficiency, not rockets) since 2012.

E.g here's overview with images: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S100093611...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1000936115002356)

</comment><comment><USER15> SciHub mirror of the paper:

[https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...](https://sci- hub.tw/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010218019305838)

It's a 'brief communication' of three pages, so not many details. Most interesting thing is the citations, one of which is to the _much_ more enlightening 'Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine' tech readiness report from the Air Force in 2018:

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/William_Hargus/publicat...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/William_Hargus/publication/326263199_Air_Force_Research_Laboratory_Rotating_Detonation_Rocket_Engine_Development/links/5d9e0f0c299bf13f40d0cbbb/Air- Force-Research-Laboratory-Rotating-Detonation-Rocket-Engine-Development.pdf)

</comment><comment> ur-whale Little did I know: there is a "Combustion and Flame journal".

Exciting.

But then ... instant sadness ... another compendium of taxpayer-funded research walled off and milked by elsevier.

[https://www.journals.elsevier.com/combustion-and- flame/](https://www.journals.elsevier.com/combustion-and-flame/)

</comment><comment><USER16> The question I have after reading this press release is, "Why was it previously thought to be impossible?" as stated in the beginning of the article.

Further down, the release seems to indicate lots of people thought it was possible and have been studying it, "The technology has been studied since the 1960s but had not been successful due to the chemical propellants used or the ways they were mixed."

So just an engineering problem, which are seldom impossible.

<comment><USER17> Would love someone clever's opinion on this too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _rocket-propulsion system once thought to be impossible_

I can't be the only one who read those words and for a split second thought, "They got the EmDrive working?!?!" But this is completely different.

</comment><comment><USER19> [https://youtu.be/WvBpuJ0fa98](https://youtu.be/WvBpuJ0fa98) Here is some low res footage of one in action

</comment><comment><USER20> Is there an ELI5 breakdown of this anywhere?

<comment><USER16> IANA Rocket Scientist, but I'll try.

Rather than have one big continuous burn, the rocket engine rotates to create many small burns, by mixing and igniting small amounts of two gases at just the right frequency and amounts. This apparently leads to a more efficient conversion of chemical to kinetic energy.

This sounds similar to how a car engine uses a fuel injector to inject then burn small amounts of fuel to make the pistons go.

<comment><USER21> What I understood from the article: it's not the engine that rotates.

Instead, the fuel mixture ignites in one spot, and the explosion spreads at Mach 5 around the engine but once it reaches the end of the combustible fuel, more is injected behind it so the explosion can just keep traveling around in circles.

Judging by the article they managed to get that working, and also came up with a better way to take videos of this happening (high speed camera, tracer chemicals in the hydrogen, better signal strength).

<comment><USER22> There used to be one, does anyone remember Rotary Rocket? They had a small vehicle they claimed could SSTO.

<comment><USER23> That was very different: conventional rockets for ground-to-orbit, but landing with folding helicopter-like rotors. I think the original concept was to use the helicopter rotors to get to high altitude before throttling up, which was supposed to save a lot of fuel, but that was dropped pretty early.

<comment><USER24> I think they actually wanted to use some rotating set of engines and fuel tanks early on with the rotation taking care of propelant flow.

IIRC they dropped that early on as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What is the theoretical Isp for such a system? Or is that relevant only once this is paired with a nozzle?

</comment><comment><USER26> I read the paper, there are no data on actual performance. There may well be no significant advantage

</comment><comment><USER27> The title is a nice pun.

</comment><comment><USER28> > 4,500 to 5,600 miles per hour

That's about 2-2.5 km/s. Compare this with the exhaust velocity of the main engines of the Space Shuttle, 4.4 km/s. It's not clear why this is considered to be groundbreaking.

<comment><USER29> > the exhaust velocity of the main engines of the Space Shuttle, 4.4 km/s. > It's not clear why this is considered to be groundbreaking.

And ion thrusters have an exhaust velocity in the 20-50 km/s range. Things can be groundbreaking for different reasons.

But in the case of this article, I dont think the velocity mentioned is the exhaust velocity. It says the "rotating detonations are continuous, Mach 5 explosions". This is likely the flame front speed inside the combustion chamber (a traditional rocket engine has subsonic flame front, ie conflagration not detonation). The exhaust velocity is a different measurement, after the nozzle/bell (converts thermal to kinetic energy). Here [1] for more details.

I'm interested to hear more about the possibilities this combustion chamber design brings up.

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

<comment><USER28> > And ion thrusters have an exhaust velocity in the 20-50 km/s range

I compared with the Space Shuttle main engine because they are both hydrogen- oxygen engines.

As for the speed they mention, it's not clear why they focus on that one. At the end of the day, there are only 3 things that matter for a rocket engine: exhaust velocity, how fast it can burn the fuel, and the mass of the engine. You want the highest exhaust velocity, and the lowest mass of the engine. For the upper stages, you don't need to be able to burn fuel that fast, but you wouldn't mind that either.

All other things are implementation details. Now, the Space Shuttle main engine achieved 86% of the maximum theoretical exhaust velocity [1]. If this innovation here managed to increase this to 90% or more, that would be quite interesting, but hardly groundbreaking if it adds substantial mass to the engine.

> I'm interested to hear more about the possibilities this combustion chamber > design brings up.

I would be interested too. This article was quite unilluminating unfortunately.

[1] [https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/17129/is-there- a-m...](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/17129/is-there-a-maximum- isp-for-exothermic-chemical-reaction-rockets)

<comment><USER29> > At the end of the day, there are only 3 things that matter for a rocket > engine: exhaust velocity, how fast it can burn the fuel, and the mass of the > engine.

While those are primary factors, and a rocket won't go up if they aren't good enough, they aren't the only ones (or else every rocket engine would be hydrolox staged combustion, like the SSMEs). Other key factors are engine cost (SSME does terrible here), fuel type (hydrolox needs way larger diameter boosters, isn't worth it for first stage), combustion stability (allows engines to throttle, key for max-Q and reducing max g as stage empties, especially on upper stage), reusability (important for some systems), controllability (how quickly it can throttle)... While their importance gradually diminishes, there is a list hundreds long of different trade-offs made in engine development. The reason I said I'd like to know more is indeed because that article wasn't informative. I certainly am not writing it off because it can't be plopped in a rocket right now

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The advertising on this page is particularly aggressive.

</comment><comment><USER31> I want to hear the sound of this think

</comment><comment><USER32> Tangentially, RIP UCF's IDS.

I'd be curious to see some stats on this. I.e. what is the uptick of attacks (esp from curious nation states) after something like this is announced.

</comment><comment><USER33> well, I was testing something on s a clone version of a game and end up publishing that version to the app store. When I uploaded the game on my phone, my progress ware gone, all my saves. the colone version created a new database (thank God without deleting the old one). my game only had like 1k installations, and I found out my mess quick enough. just published a new update with the original database name and was lost.

<comment><USER33> well, I wrote my comment on the wrong thread. I don't know what happened. I meant to comment that on a thread about failures. Sorry.</comment></comment>


New Facebook security hole allows people to see friend requests of others - <AUTHOR> http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=141535641

<comment><AUTHOR> This hole is apparently being patched by Facebook right now. It has already been exploited. This forum thread might be deleted (previous thread about the photo security hole I publicized by posting here from the same forum was eventually deleted <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3318652>). As with the December's photo security hole, I don't believe this bug has been publicized anywhere else besides that forum and now here. It also has been noticed accidentally, without any purposeful hacking.</comment>


Pocket Guide to Email Marketing - <AUTHOR> http://asmallnation.com/sarah-j-brays-pocket-guide-to-email-marketing/ <comment><USER2> Points 1-20 are either aphoristic, or sound true but don't work out in practice. A lot of the points after that are more interesting.

e.g. > Earn the right to address people by their first name. First names are powerful and should be used carefully; build rapport before auto-programming them into a mass email.

And yet most data show that including 'Dear Firstname' at the top of a newsletter increases open rates and clickthrough rates. Continuously.

> #4. Predictability kills.

Typically, the benefit of email marketing comes from predictability. Sending an email every Thursday at 4pm builds confidence in your ability to deliver. It strengthens branding, and when somebody is ready to convert, your name will be top of mind.</comment>


The Mindful Brain: Cortical Organization, Theory of Higher Brain Function (1978) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://homes.mpimf-heidelberg.mpg.de/~mhelmsta/pdf/1978%20Mountcastle%20book.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> Jeff Hawkins in his book On Intelligence describes Mountcastle's 1978 article An organizing principle.. as "the rosetta stone of neuroscience".

<comment><USER2> For anybody who hasn't, I strongly suggest reading On Intelligence, even if you don't agree with all his views. Hawkins does a fantastic job presenting his framework in an understandable way, and once you finish reading it, you definitely feel like you could code up some simations yourself.

If you have read the book, and are interested in tracking his progress, check out Numenta. They released a product based on his hierarchical temporal memory. There's a spinoff company named Vicarious with Dileep George, one of the minds behind the HTM implementation, but they've been pretty hush-hush about their progress.

<comment><USER3> They've actually tried to make themselves much more visible recently. Search for NuPIC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On the first page of the book there is a cross above the M in the coauthor's name. What is that? I've seen similar markings in library books in college. Is it something librarians used before everything went digital?

Sorry for the off topic question.

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks, insightful.</comment>


Something to think about: developing world and science - <AUTHOR> http://www.badscience.net/2009/05/what-would-you-say-to-people-from-the-developing-world-who-use-science-to-make-decisions-but-dont-necessarily-always-have-a-lot-of-time-or-know-a-lot-about-it/

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried reformatting the original title so it was <85 characters but couldn't.

Interesting thing to think about - good comments in the article.</comment>


Interview w/ Lenny Rachitsky, founder of Localmind - <AUTHOR> http://interviews.betali.st/interviews/lenny-rachitsky

<comment><USER2> I can't wait for this to go live. It's a great idea and I'll be using it as soon as I get that invite code. When do we get it Lenny? Come on!

</comment><comment><USER3> Really looking forward to this... and love the Andes story.

<comment><USER4> It's probably not a good idea to trust the wisdom of a small bird anyway.</comment></comment>


No accept or reject email...? - <AUTHOR>

Anyone simply not get anything back? <comment><USER2> You filed a late application. We don't read those till later.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, pg. Hope to hear (at least something) "soon" : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing yet.</comment>


The Story of the Gömböc (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://plus.maths.org/content/os/issue52/features/gomboc/index?nl=0 <comment><USER2> There is a Gömböc statue in Budapest: [http://www.gomboc.eu/en/site.php?inc=&menuId=12&hirId=79](http://www.gomboc.eu/en/site.php?inc=&menuId=12&hirId=79)

</comment><comment><USER3> Discussed in 2011: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2671084](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2671084).

</comment><comment><USER4> My wife got me a gomboc for Christmas a few years ago. It's actually surprising how simple the shape is.

<comment><USER5> Do you know where she got it? I could only find them for sale for over 100 euros

<comment><USER4> Indeed she got it for that price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of plum dumplings - and they are called gomboc in Hungarian. My late grandmother used to make those, and they were fantastic! Its not served as sweets, more as a main dish. Not that this has anything to do with mathematical objects and points of equilibrium :)</comment>