Enforcing Strict ModelView Separation in Template Engines - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~parrt/papers/mvc.templates.pdf

<comment><USER2> Totally enforcing separation is an almost impossible ideal. You just shifting logic from the controller to the template engine.

For example the paper describes how a designer would handle submenus as follows:

To handle submenus, have the template iterate (tail-recursively) over the list of submenu items if that menu is active.

$attr.title$ $if(attr.active)$ $attr.submenu:menuItem()$ $endif$

I prefer to send either an array to the View with the menu items and handle the logic in the template or the controller sending the list in a list with classes and id's embedded. I do not like either of them. Has anyone found a solution? I have also tried transclusion a.l.a. wikipedia to ease some of the pain of separation the designer only having to include this {{menu:top}}.

Another pet peeve of mine is that Views are more and more becoming programs (i.e ajax, Javascript?), they do not fit in neatly into a model view controller paradigm.

Whatever my comments the paper cited above by tmikew is a MUST read.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree it is tough. Coming from java land it always seems like one is either mixing java in the html or html in java. I have also never been totally convinced about the separate people argument. Not that it won't work, but that company's that I am familiar with don't hire both people very often the developers build both the UI and the business logic, which of course further complicates the issue, because the developers are always taking shortcuts. Everything I have ever worked on is mixed up to some extent, and it works, and we manage to maintain it. Still the arguments in the paper are compelling.

It is possible to use ajax and Javascript without getting things to mixed up, but again the discipline by the developers I am involved with is sadly lacking. There is another article I will try and find to post. Humble Dialog that fits with this paradigm.

<comment><USER2> With webpages becoming more and more UI's rather than documents, I was thinking one needs something like an evolved morph.

ftp://ftp.squeak.org/docs/Self-4.0-UI-Framework.pdf</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Payola, the Rails Stripe engine, now has Subscriptions - <AUTHOR> http://www.petekeen.net/payola-subscriptions?hn=1

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks,

I launched Payola[1] a few weeks ago and I thought you all would appreciate an update. Since launch Payola has gained a bunch of features, most importantly including subscriptions.

If you have any questions please ask away!

Thanks, Pete

[1]: [https://www.payola.io](https://www.payola.io)

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8482500](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8482500)</comment>


Does scoping make every tech project better? - <AUTHOR> https://tryblueprint.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> So we launched this today and the core thesis is that the issue most non-tech founders have is not knowing what to build or how tech generally gets built (outside of scrappily testing ideas, of which tech is sometimes, not always, a part).

Does that gel with your personal experience?</comment>


Hygen – The simple, fast, and scalable code generator that lives in your project - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jondot/hygen <comment><USER2> Ohhh I like this. The idea of having sub-project level boilerplate is great. i.e. being able to generate components or whatever rather than a whole project like you'd see with Yeoman. There's probably a ton of stuff like this out there that I'm unaware of, but I like the simplicity of this project.

The Redux case mentioned in the docs is what sold me. [http://www.hygen.io/redux](http://www.hygen.io/redux)</comment>


Cancer Vaccine Works 'Startlingly Well' in Mouse Model - <AUTHOR> https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/892447?src=soc_fb_180214_mscpedt_news_onc_cancervax&faf=1 <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16279856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16279856)

</comment><comment><USER3> Original publicity materials: [https://med.stanford.edu/news/all- news/2018/01/cancer-vaccin...](https://med.stanford.edu/news/all- news/2018/01/cancer-vaccine-eliminates-tumors-in-mice.html)

Paper: [https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.aan4488](https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.aan4488)

<comment><USER4> First sentence shows something is wrong:

>"It has recently become apparent that the immune system can cure cancer." [https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.aan4488](https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.aan4488)

Recently? This has been thought for quite awhile... [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=immune+surveillanc...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=immune+surveillance+cancer)

And really it is obvious that there are trade offs between immune surveillance of cancer and auto-immune disease. Next they will be surprised at the tradeoff between aging/organ failure and cancer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So many vaccines work beautifully in mice.

Must be comforting to be a mouse facing health issues.

<comment><USER6> As I understand it, many diseases that wild mice almost all carry have been eliminated in lab mice, using some fairly crazy measures. They also have very little genetic variation due to the way they have been bred.

I think there is a very interesting scifi novel in reading about how that stuff was achieved and what human society would be like after it was applied...

<comment><USER7> > They also have very little genetic variation due to the way they have been > bred.

Specifically, the mechanism is inbreeding. Each generation has less and less genetic diversity, until individuals are essentially clones.</comment></comment></comment>


Optimization tips - <AUTHOR> http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/Home/optimization-tips

<comment><USER2> Excellent find and share Clawrence.

Worrying too much on the front end about optimization not only inhibits productivity, but results in wasteful optimizing since the majority of our bottlenecks reside in a few key areas. And we may not know or have coded those areas until the project is well under way.

<comment><USER3> Find? Look at his other submissions--I think he's the author. A lot of the other articles are excellent too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the section titled "LINQ? Return expressions, not results", the query returns an 'Iterator'/'Query' and not an 'Expression Tree'. They are completely different things. The underlying point is valid that it makes sense to return the query so that the caller can do perform additional filtering/grouping, if needed.

Also, it's great idea to convert query results to List instead of an array. See Eric Lippert's blog on 'Arrays Considered Harmful.' [http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/22/arrays-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/22/arrays- considered-somewhat-harmful.aspx)

Section: Immutable strings? Use String.Format() and StringBuilder

For the given example, practically, there is no difference in performance for two code samples. I hate micro optimizations. Use the version which makes the code easier to read.

I take serious objection to the tip - 'Minimize the number of variables'. Code readability/maintainability is much more important so use as many variables as you need. Only after you have profiled the code and found that using 3 variables instead of 5 variables gives you performance boost (which I doubt will ever happen), remove those extra variables.

<comment><USER3> _For the section titled "LINQ? Return expressions, not results", the query returns an 'Iterator'/'Query' and not an 'Expression Tree'. They are completely different things. The underlying point is valid that it makes sense to return the query so that the caller can do perform additional filtering/grouping, if needed._

It reads to me as if he's saying that query comprehensions like that essentially parse the code and store the structure of the query in a completely unevaluated manner, like the expression trees that a compiler operates on, including things like decomposing more complicated expressions into simpler lambdas, and that the whole thing is lazy-evaluated and hidden behind the enumerator interface.

So, if the queries are optimized before running, tacking additional clauses onto an unevaluated query would allow it to rearrange the execution plan in arbitrary ways, including moving clauses into different parts of what would (I assume) be some sort of a tree-structured representation of the query.

But I'm not an expert on LINQ, so maybe it is a misuse of terminology. I know I've heard expression trees mentioned in a LINQ-related context, but I don't recall the details.

 _For the given example, practically, there is no difference in performance for two code samples. I hate micro optimizations. Use the version which makes the code easier to read._

If you're doing string concatenation in a loop, this isn't really a micro optimization, it's a serious change in the algorithmic time complexity of the loop. His example was a trivial illustration, but the point is valid.

<comment><USER4> LINQ is made possible using Expression Trees but the query itself is not expression tree. Read this article, it will give you a good head start. [http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/archive/2008/01/31/expression-...](http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/archive/2008/01/31/expression- tree-basics.aspx)

Also, your understanding of his point is valid and I agree with it, I did mention that in my original comment. I was acting pedantic about terminology.

And I did not question the advice of using StringBuilder when concatenating strings in a loop, I questioned the advice to use string.Format instead of using '+' operator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is why I keep reading Hacker News. Excellent practical advice!</comment>


Life Below 600px - <AUTHOR> http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/

<comment><USER2> In my own experience, when I moved the buy button and price info to the very end of the page, my conversions went up a considerable amount. The reasoning behind it was that people needed to be engaged (and sold on features/benefits) before realizing that this is not a free product and bouncing automatically.

<http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper>

This is not the general rule, but an exception to it.

Always test, and don't assume that the general rules apply to your type of business, product/service/content, customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> The goal of the 37signals fold is to grab attention and try to lock in interest. They are fully embracing the concept and importance of the fold.

People aren't arguing that ALL of you content needs to be above the fold. The argument is that the fold gets the most attention from your audience. When you're optimizing, you should optimize the things that will have the biggest impact first. Many times that is the content above the fold.

And let's not forget that a general web page is going to attract different audience. This article seems to be saying that since you went below the fold on their article, that you will go below the fold on everything. That's false. I went below the fold on this article because I went to the page specifically to read the article.

<comment><USER4> I agree, the 37 Signals page doesn't disprove the value of the top fold. The argument for content above the fold was never entirely about people not reading below it (even for newspapers). It's about above the first impression you give to a user and enticing her to stay engaged. There's definitely benefit to getting certain information across in that first impression when they land on your page.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. Above "the fold" should be what is needed to draw the user into looking further down. A squashed up mess of many details and buttons/links, which is what often follows from following the "everything above the fold" rule, is not going to do that.

Unlike a newspaper that needs to attract you as you glance towards a rack containing it and other similar publications, a website already has your attention to an extent and as you've probably just followed a link (rather than the site having opened in a pop-up/under window) you _chosen_ to be there and have at least a vague idea about what to expect - the first half-screen does not need to compete with other half-screens to grab the user's attention, it just needs to not put them off (in the case mentioned in powertower's post, by mentioning cost too early).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't see the 37 signals site as a great counter example. Their main products are on a 2x2 grid above the fold, with an intro paragraph beside them. And the 'call to action' elements at the bottom of the page are a reiteration of the products at the top.

It's a nicely designed site, but I wouldn't say it puts essential material only below the fold.

<comment><USER7> Not stressing too much the above-the-fold concept does not mean there is no difference between up and down the conceptual line of the average screen height resolution of your visitors.

You can use the content that has no need to scroll to capture the attention, but there is no need to stuff everything there. I think that 37 signals is an example about that as they don't try to put too many "information" above the fold, but only a few important stuff, and many other info is distributed across all the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems like the backlash against "the fold" has been taken a bit too far. Yes, we know that people scroll. But it's still essential to have the important parts of your site visible in the three seconds a user takes to make a decision on whether to stay on your site or not.

Plus, Matt Cutts recently said at Pubcon that Google now analyzes the content which it decides is above the fold, and places a higher value on that content in terms of determining SEO results.

I completely agree that we shouldn't stuff the top of the page with every important pieces of content and navigation option to the point where it makes the page a mess. But at the same time you can't treat a really long page as if the content in the middle or bottom gets the same attention as the content at the top.

<comment><USER9> If this is true about the Google fold that has got to be one of the most stupid things I've heard them do.

So Google decides where the fold is and not the designer or visitor? That seems stupid to me. How are they to determine such a thing? How are we as website creators supposed to know what Google's idea of the fold is to make sure we get that high value? Seems another way for people to game Google by stuffing all the content within this "fold" making for crappy websites.

Am I crazy that I think we shouldn't be designing websites for search engines but for people?

<comment><USER10> This is probably just an iteration on earlier methods of prioritizing a page's content.

Previously, Google would place a higher priority on content that came towards the beginning of a page. As users became aware of this, they then began organizing their code so that the most SEOable content was at the beginning of the HTML file, but used CSS to make sure that the what users _saw_ as the beginning of the page was still optimized for people.

Presumably, now Google is checking to see which parts are actually styled to appear at the beginning, regardless of order in the source files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Straw man. No reasonable person has ever said that you can't have content below the fold. The point that good copywriters make is that you have to grab the visitor's attention, and the best way to do that is to have the attention grabbing material where the visitor can immediately see it. It's not complicated, controversial, or even worthy of discussion.

<comment><USER12> That's actually what he's arguing for. Instead of what he has been seeing that many people are misunderstanding the concept to be "cram everything above the fold, no matter the cost".

<comment><USER11> > "cram everything above the fold, no matter the cost"

The reason I said it's a straw man is because I've never seen anyone actually champion that point of view. I've seen minimalist landing pages, but I haven't come across any I can think of that try to cram everything above the fold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This _seems_ to make sense, except whenever i've seen analytics for time-on- site, it seems like the vast majority of people spend less than 30 seconds on pages. People's attention spans aren't automatically better while using the web despite the lack of a physical fold, i'd guess that they're probably worse if anything.

And anyway, isn't the person's monitor a physical fold? Like, you still want to attract their attention with content. Having good content in the first 1000 vertical pixels doesn't mean you can't have good content everywhere else.

Very nice article though.

<comment><USER14> The subtle bit here is that he "hook" needs to be above the fold. The content, not so much.

It's not that people won't scroll. It's that they won't stick around without a reason. And if they stick around, they _will_ scroll - so use the top of the page to get them to stick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> One catchy infographic, a few opinionated articles and suddenly everyone agrees the fold disappeared.

The state of the industry in a nutshell.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's too much flawed logic in this guy's arguments. The most convincing argument could be made by showing, either via heat map software or eye tracking analysis, that a vast majority of people who arrive at 37 Signals' landing page make it to the bottom of the page. I think if he did this, he would actually make the opposite conclusion as I've seen almost every time in the dozens of tests I've run in the industry. This does not mean that long landing pages aren't effective (they can be very effective), just that he's wrong in that most people read beyond the top fold; there's can definitely be a significant and often precipitous drop-off.

<comment><USER16> The "people don't scroll" / above the fold thing has been discredited for a while: <http://uxmyths.com/post/654047943/myth-people-dont-scroll>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fantastic design, good article(s). But my god, how long does that take (how much does it cost) to produce?

And although not as artful, the "sameness" is unfortunately an area where usability kicks design in the ass.

</comment><comment><USER17> This article is flawed in so many ways.

First of all, the author has an incorrect interpretation of the guidelines. It's not 'Never, ever, ever use tables', it's 'Never use tables for layout'. And it's not stick ZOMG-EVERYTHING above the fold, it's make sure your most important stuff is above fold.

The main piece of "evidence", the 37-signals site, is bunk. Their site doesn't "give the fold the finger". I embraces it. What does 37-signals sell? They sell their SaaS products. When you visit their site, what do you see above the fold? Their major Saas products. Oh, you can click on them and get more information. This is precisely following the above-the-fold guideline.

The other piece of "evidence" the author submits - that "even if it goes even further down the page, way below the fold. You're still reading." is also bunk. I read the article because I clicked through from HN. I was already invested in reading the article. People that intend to read your content WILL read your content.

You can put content anywhere, and your mother will read it. But that's because she's your mother. You don't design a site for your mother, you design your site for potential customers/consumers. The above-the-fold guideline is to make a design appropriate for people unfamiliar with what's to come, to give them direction.

<comment><USER18> Yeah you make some excellent points but I'd say forget that for a moment and think of the countless books and articles and blog posts out there that are spewing the same information over and over. I see a ton of professional, established web design firms still designing sites like its 1997.

My takeaway from this was to really just remember that the rules have their place but it's a mistake to follow them just because they've become accepted. The web has changed so much in the past 3 years alone that we need to reevaluate the rules and each time we design a site ask ourselves if we're doing this because it's the rule or because it makes sense in terms of design and usability.

I'm still seeing a ton of people preach about using the keyword meta tag and preaching about divitis and semantic markup. Those ideas are all well and good but things are different now. I know those aren't exactly design related issues but the point is that some people are being fed outdated info.

There are a lot more opportunities to break the rules And actually be rewarded these days. So you're content is more like a section than an article. Okay, well that's debatable. Too many divs? Well it could be or maybe there's no other way and it's not hurting future modifications or rendering or load times. So be it.

The point is that we can't be blindly following these rules. Obviously we really need to know and understand the rules first. But once you know the rules you can then break them when it makes sense. I read the post such that the author was basically saying "think about if the rule you're about to implement makes sense. If you found another way that works do it. We're all pros and we can handle it". Amateurs should stick to the rules until they get their bearings but the rest of us should remember that it's not 1997 anymore and sometimes those rules don't apply to the situation.

I'm not disagreeing with you, just had a different take on the message in the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think the idea of the fold might means different things to different designers. "Above the fold" is really "Your first Impression". If you have a good first impression, chances are you'll stick around, if not you might leave.

Regardless of what a user does afterwords (such as scrolling or clicking) we can all agree that the first experience is "Above the fold". Just another way of thinking about it. I agree that if you have good content users can and will easily scroll to see the rest.

</comment><comment><USER20> What happened to me - You lost me at "Pretty crazy, huh?". I scrolled down a bit more, but didn't read or pay attention. Pretty crazy, huh ;)

</comment><comment><USER21> (from Jakob Nielsen)

"Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold."

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html>

The article includes the results of an eyetracking study, and a few examples of viewing patterns where people did spend a lot of time below the fold.

</comment><comment><USER22> Did it say anything interesting, I couldn't be bothered to scroll.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm more worried about the width. This nice-looking page doesn't fit my ~1000px in width while it should. All the content is within my view but I still do have a vertical scrollbar. That's quite a distraction. But what is even worse is that the text is snapped directly to the left edge of the page. Not even a single pixel of a space. Try resizing the tab to see for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER24> I agree with this to an extent. When I visit a website, I often skim the top of the page and scroll down immediately to get to the meat of the content. The fold is not meaningless, but worrying about a good design is significantly more important than worrying about "the fold".

</comment><comment><USER25> I agree completely with the article, however I wouldn't hold up 37signals of an example of it "well done", I think their page is way to long and heavy and putting their calls to action at the bottom, dumb.

<comment><USER4> This means nothing without quantitative evidence. If you've watched the page evolve, you would have noticed that they've varied their length greatly as they've tested for conversions. Not saying they have the greatest page, but many times what you may think is "too long" or "dumb" - when tested quantitatively - often proves otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> _This will make visitors stick around for a while and use that magic scroll button._

But please also bear in mind those of us who use trackballs :)

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder what metrics for bounces would look like before the advent of scroll wheels. Using a scrollbar was always a little bit of a pain.

</comment><comment><USER28> Survivor bias...

</comment><comment><USER29> while this debate seems to continually rear its head.... can we stop posting year old stuff to HN?

</comment><comment><USER30> If there was some content at the top, I may not have read the line at the bottom.

<comment><USER31> That's actually part of his point. He's proposing that you use the space to "build up" to the good part. I agree with him that, properly executed, this would make better use of space, which would probably improve readability, (not to mention a more compelling package)

If he tried to pack all of his "content at the top", readability and usability would suffer.</comment></comment>


People should embrace comments. They're free content that drive traffic. - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/SteveReynolds/status/15276820264 <comment><AUTHOR> Interested in people's opinions and experiences with this. As a blogger, I naturally fear opinion and comments in response to my blog entries, but they are good for debate and ultimately in creating content on sites for free....</comment>


Important News About the Kermit Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/

<comment><USER2> "Cancelled" is a harsh word for such a distinguished project. I think I would say rather that Kermit has been "completed".</comment>


How Realistic Is Arrival? We Asked a Linguist - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/11/22/a_linguist_on_arrival_s_alien_language.html <comment><USER2> The topic of extraterrestial communication always reminds me of His Master's Voice, a Stanisław Lem novel [0]. While it does not focus strictly on the contact/communication - it's equal parts a harsh criticism of a certain kind of scientific approach and a philosophical discourse - it's still very enlightening.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master's_Voice_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master's_Voice_\(novel\))</comment>


Show HN: Reworn.co, a website which makes browsing second hand clothing easier - <AUTHOR> https://reworn.co <comment><USER2> The site looks great, I love the design and functionality. Is the code available on github?</comment>


A list of all known ResearchKit applications - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shazino.com/articles/science/researchkit-list-apps/ <comment><USER2> I helped build mTECH if anyone has any questions.

</comment><comment><USER3> All based only in the US App Store. Is this a coincidence or is ResearchKit not available abroad?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not exactly. One from Japan, one from China, one from Germany, and one from France.

Medical studies are often limited to a particular country, for regulatory reasons. So most ResearchKit apps choose to restrict their App Store availably (and ask for a confirmation during the setup process)</comment></comment>


The Future of OmniOS - <AUTHOR> https://lists.omniti.com/pipermail/omnios-discuss/2017-April/008699.html <comment><USER2> Sad but not surprising. When we created illumos in 2010, the latest version of Linux was 2.6.35, and it did not have an answer to ZFS, DTrace, or Zones. I thought these features were important enough to compete with Linux, and convince people to switch.

Times have changed, and Linux (now at 4.10) now does have an answer to each of these, particularly:

\- ZFS: ZFS on Linux, now part of Ubuntu. btrfs has been coming along as well, and I included a couple of btrfs performance analysis screenshots in my DockerCon talk last week, since we're testing it.

\- DTrace: enhanced BPF now provides the raw features (as of Linux 4.9), and is merged in the Linux kernel (unlike SystemTap etc).

If illumos were proposed today, I would not get behind it as I no longer think it makes sense when you're comparing it to Linux 4.10. It's no longer 2010.

Good luck to everyone moving on. I've published a lot on debugging and tracing on Linux, which should be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER3> My understanding of what happened to OpenSolaris after Sun/Oracle abandoned/closed the project is: Illumos develops the base/core for open source OpenSolaris based derivative distributions of which OmniOS is one of about 11 or so.

It seems to me, unfortunately, that since there are so many OpenSolaris descendant distros, and that Linux can only barely sustain 3 large commercially supported general purpose distros (Redhat, Ubuntu & Suse, but please correct if I am wrong), that there has to be some amount of consolidation that needs to/will take place if OpenSolaris/Illumon is to survive.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos#Current_distributions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illumos#Current_distributions)

<comment><USER4> I'm just an outsider to the Illumos community so take this with a grain of salt, but based on what I gather from checking it time to time I don't think this is the main reason.

11 is just the number of currently active distributions and is not meaningful for getting an idea of where the most stuff happens (By the same logic Distrowatch lists 288 active Linux distributions). There is only few main distributions with most mindshare (SmartOS, OpenIndiana and OmniOS. Nexenta is also a big one but I heard they don't get along well with the upstream).

Illumos is the upstream base and AFAIK Illumos community and distribution communities are indeed in tight relationship where the contributions to individual distributions find their way into the base not a long time later. And as a project it has a larger scope compared say, just the Linux kernel. It is the kernel, drivers, base libraries, core utilities etc. so developers on these different areas still belong to same tight community.

<comment><USER3> I think you nailed my point. Linux (according to Distrowatch) has 288 distros, and there are only 3 large scale commercially supported distros (for linux), so my question is in the world can illumos support more than one? What open source lets competing organisations do is collaborate on shared projects.

<comment><USER5> Linux distributions are very similar to each other. Having package management as the main thing that sets them apart.

In illumos land these different distributions exist because they have very different design goals and visions.

But I agree that the illumos community is also a lot smaller and maybe (sadly) too small for each distribution to be commercially successfull. I'm extremly sad about this announcement as OmniOS is a great operating system and the team behind it did a fantastic job. As a user I like the minimal setup and clear stable releaes.

From what I've read the community is now thinking of possibly consolidating with OpenIndiana for that usecase. So while having less commercial supporters is a pity the community is determined to keep pushing forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sad but understandable. I certainly recognise the divergance he mentions between the goal of it being a high-scale web computing platform, versus the ZFS storage server that many people (myself included) actually use it for. I suspect most people using an Illumos distro to do the former are running Joyent's SmartOS instead, and this leaves the OmniTI folks in a difficult position - how much time and resource ought they devote to (for example) integrating Joyent's work on running Linux containers, and to what end?

<comment><USER7> OmniOS currently does support lxzones

[https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/LXZones](https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/LXZones)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds like tough times for OmniTI. They recently announced they were canceling their Surge conference as well.

[https://omniti.com/remembers/2017/every-good-surge-must- come...](https://omniti.com/remembers/2017/every-good-surge-must-come-to-an- end)

</comment><comment><USER9> > OmniTI will be suspending active development of OmniOS

...

> We still run quite a bit of infrastructure on OmniOS and expect to continue > contributing

I'm not sure how to interpret this. They will simultaneously suspend development and continue contributions? That seems contradictory.

<comment><USER10> That means it will probably be limited to bugfix/maintenance efforts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those (like me) who have never heard of OmniOS, it's an extension of Illumos (which is a fork of Open Solaris):

[https://omnios.omniti.com](https://omnios.omniti.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is sad who knows what Samsung will do with SmartOS, OmniOS was very solid option.

<comment><USER13> I'm hoping that Samsung will open more of it up to open-source the interesting bits that they don't plan to sell themselves... Not sure where this will go, or if Samsung plans to expand/create their own Joyent based cloud. It does seem to be a great OS combination for Docker containers though.

<comment><USER14> All of the bits with the exception of the customer-facing portal are already open-source:

SmartOS: [https://github.com/joyent/illumos- joyent](https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent) and [https://github.com/joyent/smartos-live](https://github.com/joyent/smartos- live)

Triton (the orchestration around it): [https://github.com/joyent/triton](https://github.com/joyent/triton) \- this is the root repository of the project, there are many services which are linked to here: [https://github.com/joyent/triton/blob/master/docs/developer-...](https://github.com/joyent/triton/blob/master/docs/developer- guide/repos.md)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is the dupe story detector not working? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14171295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14171295)

</comment><comment><USER16> An unfortunate name. Omnius was one of the thinking machines that grew in strength and size to the point that it nearly wiped out humanity.

[http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Omnius](http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Omnius)</comment>


Google Phone Gallery - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/phone/#

<comment><USER2> Gsmarena.com, click android on the left. Way more information.</comment>


I Launched 3 Products and Didn't Become the Next Jeff Bezos - <AUTHOR> https://eddieabbondanz.io/post/side-hustles/how-i-launched-3-products-and-didnt-become-the-next-jeff-bezos/ <comment><USER2> I think your being too hard on yourself.

Keep in mind Amazon was founded in 1994, it is not an overnight success story.

I think you shouldn't give up on developing, the fact you took even one idea to product probably puts you in the top 10% of people working on projects right now.

I would also humbly suggest that on your next project you look into a paid ad service such as Google or Facebook.

I would also suggest you think about a project that would be useful in your detailing service and combine you past experience with your current expertise.

Thanks for posting the story, it was an enjoyable read that I could relate to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the honest feedback. I mostly came up with the title as a funny way to open the post, but I do agree I've been too hard on myself.

My decision to leave the field may have been brash, but living in an area with little tech jobs it made it quite difficult to find a new one. I still love to develop my own projects.

I am trying to incorporate my detailing experience with the next idea I'm toying with. It's something I'd use daily to run my shop, but it's still at the scoping it out stage.

Thanks for reading too.</comment></comment>


DebConf20: My phone runs Debian – and it does phone calls [video] - <AUTHOR> https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2020/DebConf20/13-my-phone-runs-debian-and-it-does-phone-calls.webm <comment><USER2> Great but does it have WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok tho.

If not then the category it belongs under is in the eternal hobbyist and early adopter category with no hope of mainstream adoption.

<comment><AUTHOR> Although I'm personally not interested in any of those you listed, people are already playing with running Android applications on such phones via Anbox (and it's even mentioned in the Q&A section of the talk).</comment></comment>


Show HN: GreenPiThumb – A Raspberry Pi Gardening Bot - <AUTHOR> https://mtlynch.io/greenpithumb/ <comment><USER2> I love these projects. They are always destined to fail from experience but are great fun anyway. I've tried a few times to do similar things. I'll catalog my disasters quickly:

1\. Seedlings need blowing around a bit when they pop out or they get all spindly. Cue wiring up two 80mm PC case fans to a chain of a single astable then two monostable 555's to generate an oscillating wind field that goes on for 5 seconds each direction after a delay of 10 minutes. Dried the compost out, blew most of it it away and then killed the plants dead. No tomatoes for me!

2\. Watering robot version 1. Similar to above but with a 74hc390 dividing down the clock so it only ran once every day. Used an unprotected MOSFET to control a small water pump from ebay. Back EMF blew the MOSFET up and jammed it as a short. Emptied the entire water reservoir into the pot, down the wall and into the carpet.

3\. Watering robot version 2. Same as above with problems fixed. Apart from I ran out of bipolar 555's so I used CMOS ones which are a little more tetchy about noise. Cue last 555 getting jammed in an on state and the same thing happening. This time, the tupperware box with the electronics ended up getting wet and the wall wart exploded.

Edit: meant to say to the OP - nice work. This is the spirit of all things interesting :)

<comment><USER3> Fun story: we're doing a project at work to do with agriculture.

We bought some pot plants to keep alive and some cheap soil sensors; they're just two electrodes and you pass a current through the soil, measure the resistance and get a proxy for soil moisture. We left the sensor continuously logging on Friday, came back on Monday to find the plant very unhappy and the probe contacts almost completely corroded. Within a day or two it was a stump, never recovered.

Turns out you're not supposed to leave these things powered on 24/7 and capacitative sensors are a much better solution. TIL you can electrocute plants.

<comment><USER4> Put a metal stick in the soil and check the travel time of the reflected signal:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time- domain_reflectometer#TDR_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time- domain_reflectometer#TDR_in_geotechnical_usage)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measuring_moisture_content_usi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measuring_moisture_content_using_time- domain_reflectometry)

<comment><USER2> This is a really cool idea actually. However you're likely talking sub nanosecond rise times which makes things a little difficult in the signal processing space. For example my scope (knackered old 1971 Tek 475) can barely manage 1.8ns on a properly terminated transmission line which this will likely not be.

<comment><USER5> I don't remember the name of the peripheral off the top of my head, but there are some PICs that have a very fast time measurement unit in them. I don't know if they're fast enough for soil measurement, but there's app notes around for doing TDR-based liquid level sensing with them.

<comment><USER2> [http://www.edn.com/Pdf/ViewPdf?contentItemId=4433411](http://www.edn.com/Pdf/ViewPdf?contentItemId=4433411)

Details above. Looks like you can get 3.5ps resolution with an off the shelf PIC after calibration which is pretty impressive!

<comment><USER4> Wow!

So the price is..

3$ for the microcontroller, 3$ for the 4 ns comparator, and a few cents for the resistors, capacitors, and 7 GHz transistors (I couldn't find the exact model), and probably some dollars for the rest of the materials such as steel rods and tubes. All in all it looks doable for <50$ easily. That's pretty amazing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _But I'm a programmer, not a gardener. If I had a plant, I'd have to water it and check the plant's health a few times per week. I decided it would be much easier if I just spent several hundred hours building a robot to do that for me. If the plant lives to be 80 years old, I come out slightly ahead._

The mark of the start of any good hobby project is a sense of humor about the time it really takes to accomplish something simple with technology on the first go-round.

<comment><USER7> Reminds me of this: [https://xkcd.com/974/](https://xkcd.com/974/)

<comment><USER8> expected that one [https://xkcd.com/1205/](https://xkcd.com/1205/)

<comment><USER9> expected this one [https://xkcd.com/1319/](https://xkcd.com/1319/)

<comment><USER10> expected this one [http://i.imgur.com/3PBpIQm.gif](http://i.imgur.com/3PBpIQm.gif)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So the reason your moisture sensor project failed is because those types of moisture sensors are really designed for "stick it in, test it, and pull it out" testing. If left powered on in a moist environment, the conductive material on the sensor will quickly corrode (quickly as in the span of a few hours, as is seen on the graph).

However, Vegetronix makes an ultrasonic soil moisture sensor that does not have electrodes, and thus does not corrode. It is far more complex and expensive ($40) but it's designed as a moisture sensor for sprinkler systems and as such is engineered to be left in the ground.

Edit: Link to Vegetronix sensor: [http://www.vegetronix.com/Products/VH400/](http://www.vegetronix.com/Products/VH400/) . I have used it and it works well, but as it turns out, even this is not sufficient to really automate a garden. You need fertilizer. Hydroponics make dealing with that complication _much_ easier -- until you realize that the fertilizers are caustic / acidic enough that you have to flush the lines with water as well...

In other words, there's a pretty good reason you can't buy a kit off the shelf that will grow plants :)

<comment><USER12> The sensors corrode due to oxidation caused by the DC current. It's a pretty simple design change to alternate the current flow through the sensor and prevent that oxidation by toggling the pins.

<comment><USER13> Exactly this. I created a soil moisture setup with cheap sensors that worked consistently for several months. The key was to send the current flow one direction for a few seconds, then reverse high/low on the pins for the exact same time. This prevented excessive oxidation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really like the addition of the web camera - it's a nice bonus on top of the more traditional temperature/humidity/light/moisture readings that most people incorporate into these DIY systems. Much better than what I made the first time I built one of these things.[0]

The one thing that made my scratch my head was your approach to measuring moisture. There are several very reliable methods for measuring soil moisture directly (changes in resistance, capacitance, time domain reflectometry, etc) that will give you exactly what you are looking for here.

"Therefore, we felt it was fair to assume that watering based on moisture level is impossible and that GreenPiThumb is doing the best it possibly can, given certain inexorable limits of the physical world."

This just isn't true. The sensor you picked up from Sparkfun should give you decent measurements for a while before degrading gradually depending on your soil chemistry.

[0] I ran a consumer soil moisture IOT company for a few years that was sold to Scotts Miracle Gro in 2016.

<comment><USER15> > time domain reflectometry

Can you point us in the right direction on this? The wiki doesn't make it clear how it would be used for measuring soil moisture.

<comment><USER14> Sure - this paper (PDF warning) is a decent place to start learning about how the process works. [http://quebec.hwr.arizona.edu/classes/hwr432/2014/jones02-TD...](http://quebec.hwr.arizona.edu/classes/hwr432/2014/jones02-TDR- principle-applications.pdf)

I haven't looked at the industry in a couple of years, but I think that many of the high-end commercial sensors use some variation of this technique.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Did the pot you use have holes in the bottom? It looks like you have it just sat on a desk so I'm assuming it's basically just a bucket?

Your moisture problem could just be that you were relying too much on the water evaporating/being absorbed rather than needing to drain out. Gravel at the bottom of a pot with holes in helps water drain really well. Alternatively, without the gravel you could place the pot on a dish, fill the dish and let the water be absorbed from the bottom up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it drains into a little tray underneath. I'm trying to figure out a better solution for that because we can't see how much water is in the tray, so if too much has drained out, it starts overflowing onto the table with no warning.

Also I get the sense that I shouldn't just be leaving standing water in the tray forever, but it's also pretty difficult to remove the tray and empty it.

<comment><USER17> Put some pebbles on top of the tray to raise the pot off of it, so it's not sitting in the standing water.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh that's a good idea. Thanks!

<comment><USER18> I usually throw a base of pebbles / marbles into the bottom of any pot before I put the dirt in, which also aids in draining.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I bought this moisture sensor for a gardening project

[https://www.tindie.com/products/miceuz/i2c-soil-moisture- sen...](https://www.tindie.com/products/miceuz/i2c-soil-moisture-sensor/)

Haven't had the chance to try it out in soil yet, but reading the comments it looks promising. It uses capacitance instead of resistance and connects directly to the I2C pins of the Pi. So, easier to setup and should be more reliable.

On the software side I use Grafana [https://grafana.com/](https://grafana.com/)

Not really made for gardening projects but its monitoring and alerting capabilities are pretty much perfect for this kind of application. Not to mention how easy it was to set it up on the Pi and get all (temperature, moisture, light) the sensor data in.

<comment><USER20> Or.. you can use a $2 Arduino Nano clone, a 1¢ 10MΩ resistor and some aluminum foil strips to build one yourself.

[http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/CapacitiveSensor](http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/CapacitiveSensor)

<comment><USER21> ...nope. This'll give you a nice little touch sensor but not much more than that. Try turning this into any sort of usable measurement of soil moisture as opposed to "there's wet soil on this strip of foil" and you'll run into a wall.

<comment><USER22> Reminds me of Cheesoid.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_m17HK97M8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_m17HK97M8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In the water distribution section the author mentions the other gardening software doesn't mention how they distribute water. There's a longer history of irrigation than there is of embedded software development, so maybe he should have talked to someone that actually does agriculture or googled 'irrigation system parts' and bought one of the thousands of existing drippers for a buck.

Of course the later heading "the gardening wasn't supposed to be hard" seems to imply that he assumes non-coding skills are easy to figure out or obvious, which is a sadly too-common trend in the tech world.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't mean to imply that gardening in general is easy, just that gardening basic houseplants seems like it's not supposed to be very hard.

We did look for gardening supplies that would spread the water out, but everything we found was designed for large fields or at least small gardens, not single planters. I'm seeing the same thing now when I Google "irrigation system parts." Looking at drippers, I'm not seeing how it would solve the problem. Doesn't it just drip onto a single spot?

<comment><USER23> Sorry to come across so harsh, I was in a poor mood yesterday :) There are a bunch that friction fit onto tubing that have e.g. 10 holes and spray out to the sides

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Instead of measuring soil moisture try:

        - measuring air moisture of small upside down cup on top of the soil
        - measuring weight of the whole pot

Or don't measure at all and instead use precise amount of water on precise times (RTC module, medical grade piezo-electric pump). My similar project is on hold at 20 or so sketches of various types of water pumps.

<comment><USER25> Wouldn't the weight of the pot increase as the plant grows (because it's absorbing carbon from the air in fact).

<comment><USER26> This could be accounted for - for example, if the weight of everything drops by 100 grams, then _at least_ 100 grams of water has been used or evaporated. Eventually any increase in weight from the plant could probably be calculated, but for many plants, (like bush beans), it's a relatively small amount, probably less than a pound.

OTOH indeterminate tomato plant, for example, weighs a _lot_ , and the weight would also be affected by picking the fruit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am so excited to see this! I've been working on a very similar project to monitor my outdoor vegetable garden using a raspberry pi and some ESP8266's. Like you, I'm using this as a project to better learn javascript, angular and django. It's in the very early stages, but I'm really loving the experience so far.

Here's a picture of my setup. [http://imgur.com/a/BV188](http://imgur.com/a/BV188)

I have a enclosure (that I recently made waterproof) that sits out in my garden that has the ESP8266 wireless chip in there, which works very similar to an Arduino with built in WiFi. I have it reading data in from a soil humidity / temp sensor, an air humidity sensor, a light sensor, and a air temperature sensor.

That data gets sent back to a simple django webserver that I have running (indoors) off of a raspberry pi. It records all the sensor readings every 10 minutes and registers them to various plots in my garden. And then, if there are any big issues (no light for 2 days, lower than average soil humidity or soil temperature, etc), it texts me.

Eventually I'll connect it to my irrigation system, but I don't trust it enough yet!

I have the exact same problem with soil humidity sensors that you mentioned. I even sprung for some fancy ones ([http://bit.ly/2sMNRnD](http://bit.ly/2sMNRnD)) that claim to be waterproof. I cannot make them read useful information and, once it rains or I water outdoors, the sensors read 99% for the next few days. It's very frustrating and the missing piece to make all of this work.

Like you, this started as a quick, month-long project and now it's become something a lot bigger :)

I think eventually I'd like to build this out to be a vegetable garden planner, so I can plan my vegetable garden at the start of the season, monitor what's happening with them, and automatically trigger my irrigation system if needed.

Anyway - it was great to read this! I'd love to hear how this project evolves and would be happy to share any of my experiences as I've put this together.

P.S. And, it's a long shot, but if you (or anyone is reading this) figures how to accurately measure soil humidity temperature in a waterproof environment, I would be forever grateful!

<comment><USER28> Soil moisture measurements can be scientific if you have enough money. Look up Time Domain Reflectometry and Soil Moisture Tension.

I don't understand TDR well enough to explain it, so I will let you search for your own info. The cheapest usable TDR sensor is about $350.

Tension has a simple analogy; a Slurpee (is that trademarked?) is easy to drink through a straw in the beginning, but it gets harder to pull the liquid up the straw as you drink more of it. That's tension and plants also struggle to pull the water from the soil depending on lots of factors including the composition of the soil, the amount of water present, drainage, etc.

There are several sensors that can be used to measure tension but none are accurate in all conditions, so people who want to measure tension tend to use multiple sensors of different types and triangulate on a useful number.

Large scale farming (in dirt across thousands of acres) is where the complex sensors are needed because the soil attributes are not uniform.

When you're gardening in a pot indoors or in a greenhouse with the same soil everywhere (because you bought bags of it), you can use those $0.43 resistance probes and just calibrate your watering amounts and intervals over time. Pump on for X units of time, ignore for Y units to let the water move through the soil, then sample every Z units until it needs more.

<comment><USER4> It should be possible to hack together a basic TDR device, especially if you can calibrate it.

Then one needs a/two metal piece of defined length, and a high-frequency oscilloscope, that can also give a pulsed signal (ideally of high frequency).

The biggest issue I see is that you'd need something like at least 0.5 GHz resolution in the oscilloscope with a metal piece of 25cm (quick mental math and some guesses, don't hold me to it). Probably better to have at least 2 GHz. I don't think computers and software alone is up to it after a quick search. Maybe one can increase the travel time in the probe (metal stick) somehow to lower the needed resolution, but not by orders of magnitude.

[https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/268333/ghz-c...](https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/268333/ghz- class-sampling-oscilloscopes-on-the-cheap?rq=1)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Love this. I went down a similar path last year, using a Raspberry Pi to water an outdoor vegetable patch. In the end I used a package [1] to control a remote controlled plug socket. I also hit similar problems with soil moisture, so went down the route of pulling a weather feed - pump water if it isn't going rain. Easy if you are watering outside!

[1] [https://github.com/dmcg/raspberry- strogonanoff](https://github.com/dmcg/raspberry-strogonanoff)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, that's awesome! Doing it outside is interesting because there are a whole different set of challenges. I like your project name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A raspberry pi is the wrong choice for this project from my perspective, complexity is far too high for a simple project. I looked at building the same thing (minus watering) because it seemed commercial products were way too expensive (Parrot Flower Power is $60!).

The cheapest DIY solution I could think of was ESP8266 ($2), Vreg ($.5), moisture sensor ($.5) and LiPo battery (i have many of these..) but I decided I didn't have time or inclination to write the software.

I continued looking for commercial products, and ordered one of these: [https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Chinese-Version-Original- Xia...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Chinese-Version-Original-Xiaomi-Flora- Monitor-Smart-Tester-Soil-Light-Water-Digital-Grass-Garden- Plant/32807893133.html)

Pros- Cheap ($15). Has temperature, light and 'fertility' (capacitance?) sensor. Cons- Logs to phone app (in chinese) via BTLE instead of WiFi.

After a few weeks it seems to be working satisfactorily and I will probably order a few more units.

<comment><USER31> Come on. Maybe unless you live in India or Africa (and even then, still), $60 is nowhere near as expensive as designing and building your own device.

Not that there's anything wrong with building your own device. Just don't lie about it.

<comment><USER30> True, I had discounted my time spent on DIY as 'hobby time', which I do for fun and learning. Had I included this then of course it would have been far greater.

I have a few plants I wanted to monitor, so price is more relevant- $300 is more than I'm willing to pay. I think you underestimate how much of the world thinks $60 is unreasonable for such a device, but i don't suppose there's a way to know which of us is right :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Hmm. A MOSFET for a motor switch might be overkill. Also, there's no flyback diode. So your Pi pretty much will let its blue smoke out when you get a flyback voltage, or at least the MOSFET.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds... undesirable. Electronics is definitely not my area of expertise, so I'm very open to feedback. What do you recommend?

<comment><USER33> Wouldn't a relay be easier to integrate? and also keep the pump power circuit isolated from the pi power circuit?

<comment><USER32> Anything involving collapsing magnetic fields, eg solenoids, relays, motors, absolutely simply has to have a flyback diode.

So your suggestion is actually introducing a second magnetic field, so now you've doubled the chances of blowing up your Pi and or the MOSFET.

Whether you're using a transistor/MOSFET directly with a motor or instead with relay + motor you need the flyback diode.

<comment><USER34> > So your suggestion is actually introducing a second magnetic field, so now > you've doubled the chances of blowing up your Pi and or the MOSFET.

No. You haven't fixed the original problem, but your motor is now isolated from the rest of the circuit.

You've just now have a relay with an inductive element instead of a motor. Ultimately, you haven't solved anything (unless you are using an AC motor, and you don't have a triac or something else solid state to control the motor). You still need the flyback diode.

But you haven't doubled your problem by introducing a relay, merely moved the issue to another part.

Now - in regards to the mosfet - many mosfets (not all!) have a built in protection diode between the source and drain. Check your datasheet for details (including what kind of back-feed voltage/current can be handled by them - some may need an added diode with better ratings in detail).

EDIT: Also - some relays have built-in protection diodes (or can be ordered as such) as well (again, check the datasheet). You see this more on relays for automotive applications (ie - standard BOSCH style relays) than ordinary bare PCB relays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> As for the faulty soil moisture, check out tropf blumat. It's made in Germany (you know the Germans make good stuff). It uses osmosis and gravity to keep the soil moisture consistent, no electricity. I've had great success with roots even growing up out of the soil towards the drippers [https://youtu.be/UWPLr0Selh8](https://youtu.be/UWPLr0Selh8)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> So great to read. This is exactly the kind of project the Raspberry Pi was designed to enable - doing something a bit odd (and arguably pointless!) but having fun and learning loads along the way.

</comment><comment><USER37> The plants look waterlogged; the roots need air to breathe.

Drain the water back into the reservoir (use a simple filter to prevent damage to the pump) and just use a schedule for watering.

I used a mechanical timer switch for 15 mins every hour for my hyrdo setup. For soil, such tiny plants, and no lights you would need far less frequency. A general rule of thumb is to give it enough time between waterings to let it get a bit dry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, thanks for the feedback. There are holes at the bottom of the planter. Is there something different we need to be doing to get it to drain properly?

How much time do you think it should go between waterings? The first batch, we kept waiting for the soil to get _really_ dry, but weren't sure if it should just be not very damp to the touch or like as dry as before we put water in at all.

<comment><USER38> I would think a purely technical approach to this is flooding the plant every hour, and then measuring the differential of how much water had flooded the roots vs. how much water was pumped out.

If the differential is tending to 0 then it means that not only the soil is saturated, but the plant is as well. This is _quite_ a basic concept, since you do not want a fully saturated soil all of the time.

A proper biological approach is to estimate how much water exactly the plant needs per unit of time, and then make sure the differential is always exactly that amount. This is not an exact science, especially when you're only working with a single plant and your conditions are probably far from ideal.

This approach would easily take into account other hidden variables, such as the rate of evaporation of water from the soil that depends on the ambient temperature. It also scales to hydroponics.

<comment><USER11> This is basically hydroponics. And by "basically" I mean "exactly". Replace the soil with an inert, porous medium like hardened clay. And if you aerate the water with say, an aquarium pump/stone, you don't even need to drain it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >GreenPiThumb: a gardening bot that automatically waters houseplants, but also sometimes kills them.

Quite an advanced bot: as close to a human as you can get!

</comment><comment><USER39> I also thought about doing a project like that, thanks for the write-up. I somehow can't really believe that it's that hard to measure soil moistures.

Are there any industrial plant moisturing robots? What approaches do these use?

Edit: I met this guy a few months ago at a faire: [https://lambdanodes.wordpress.com/](https://lambdanodes.wordpress.com/) The project doesn't seem to have advanced since then, but maybe he'll get better results with his epsilon node.

<comment><USER40> >Are there any industrial plant moisturing robots? What approaches do these use?

Sure there are. They look like this: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/PivotWit...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/PivotWithDrops.JPG)

I assume you mean the second/third definition of "robot," since GreenPiThumb doesn't look like a human. [https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/robot](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/robot)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm not much of a gardener but the idea of measuring the moisture level seems ill-conceived... Namely because you are measuring at only a single point in your 3D region of soil, and you don't know what range of moisture should be maintained without experimentation.

Using our guy's own sawtooth model of watering/drainage, it would make more sense to just water at fixed intervals and experiment with the frequency to see if the plant grows.

Still a fun project!

<comment><USER42> As the plant grows the rate of water being removed from the soil increases, so the amount of water supplied will need to increase. Varience in illumination, temp, and humidity will also change transpiration rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I have a pretty similar project. But the problem with the mainstream moisture sensors is that they break after some time (or I did not find a good one). For myself I found the expensive solution a flower power from parrot [http://global.parrot.com/au/products/flower- power/](http://global.parrot.com/au/products/flower-power/) a handy solution. It workes with bluetooth and they have some documentation. I did some working for python: [https://github.com/Dlotan/flower-master- fab/blob/master/app/...](https://github.com/Dlotan/flower-master- fab/blob/master/app/hardware/flower_power.py) and get good results over a long perioud without too many outliers

</comment><comment><USER44> As a city dweller who has grown a lot of plants on balconies and in apartments I have also been down that road but I found a much easier solution to the watering. Autopots[1].

With those you can have 6 plants on a single 47l tank and only re-fill it every month. (depends on how thirsty they are)

It's a gods send when I want to go away for a few weeks vacation.

For other house plants that are not connected to a huge water tank I tend to just turn over a 2l plastic bottle into the soil after thoroughly saturating it first with water.

So with this the only real requirement I had for my grow op was monitoring. Because I have hard wood floors and I don't want them to swell up due to a leaking tank.

1\. [https://autopot.co.uk/products/](https://autopot.co.uk/products/)

<comment><USER40> Nice product, and nice KISS approach.

For those who don't want to / can't pay for it (eg the developing world), burying unglazed pots will also work. It's probably the most water-efficient method in arid land. The technique is at least 4000 years old.

[https://www.treehugger.com/green-food/unglazed-clay-pots- cre...](https://www.treehugger.com/green-food/unglazed-clay-pots-create- efficient-drip-irrigation-video.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Some kickstarter projects doing the same (some in non-obvious ways):

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studiolorier/ultimate-s...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studiolorier/ultimate- self-watering-flowerpot-the-natural-balan)

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1267027760/rigavit- the-...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1267027760/rigavit-the-easiest- way-to-water-your-flowers)

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/849992274/giy-stick- let...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/849992274/giy-stick-let-nature- self-water-your-pots)

</comment><comment><USER46> As someone who has done a lot of gardening, and automated that gardening, I personally find soil moisture to be a complete boondoggle of something to measure. It doesn't tell you if the plant is taking up the moisture, or if the pH is correct (or you have some kind of nutrient salt lockout). The author says they are having trouble because the water isn't evenly distributed.

While it sounds scary, hydroponics is much easier to automate. Use a substrate like grodan blocks that can't be overwatered, and have it drain back into the reservoir you are pumping from. Then it's just a matter of setting your cycle time appropriately, and watering for x seconds every y hours, and changing the water after a set number of days, and adding new nutrients. By using more water than you need without risk, you can ensure an even level of watering over the entire medium.

It's also much easier if you have a nutrient problem as you can easily flush with a large amount of properly pH'd water to 'reset' your substrate, which is very hard to do with soil.

This doesn't even get into things like potting mix typically has eggs for all sorts of pests, if not pests themselves. If you are lucky and get a clean batch, you are still providing a great environment for pests to live.

While it does cost a bit more to do hydro, it's honestly not that much. If you want to be super cheap you can use pH papers or by a $20 pH pen. A starter nutrient kit from general hydroponics should be under $30.

PS - here's a link to my raspberry pi automated hydro system on hackaday ([https://hackaday.io/project/12418-garden- squid](https://hackaday.io/project/12418-garden-squid))

</comment><comment><USER47> You may also hack this product by Xiaomi.

[https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Xiaomi-Mi-Flora-Monitor- Smar...](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Xiaomi-Mi-Flora-Monitor-Smart-Tester- Flower-Care-Soil-Water-Digital-Grass-Light-Sensor-for-Garden/32804584205.html)

There are many wifi enabled switches to enable the water pump. Try out the ESP8266 and/or ESP32 in your next project.

Your mind will blown with the possibilities :D

Also, you may loose the soil and go for hydroponics, that would make this really from the future.

<comment><USER48> "loose the soil and go for hydroponics"

What a great idea! (Especially since his "dirt is broken"). :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I recently build something similar for my balcony. But instead of a $30 raspberry I used a $9 NodeMCU: [https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2017-06/10-automated_plant_w...](https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2017-06/10-automated_plant_watering)

Also just took me a few evenings instead of months.

<comment><USER50> Great work! This is inspiring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is awesome. I did something similar at reddit.com/r/takecareofmyplant

I was running through moisture sensors on a weekly basis until I hooked it up to the GPIO on only flipped the power on when I was taking a reading. Now I get readings every 10seconds and haven't had to replace the sensor in over 6 months.

<comment><USER27> Interesting -- was this indoors or outdoors?

<comment><USER51> indoors, and it's still going. over a year!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The traditional answer to automated irrigation for indoor plants (and outdoor plants when you need better water efficiency than with a sprinkler system) is typically a drip system (background info: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_irrigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_irrigation)). Interesting that this project didn't seem to go that direction, seeing as how water distribution is kind of a solved problem in agriculture/horticulture (at least in terms of the mechanical aspects; efficiency can still use improvements, and little projects like GreenPiThumb are definitely steps in the right direction).

</comment><comment><USER53> I had good results with using a simple timer board that switched the pump on and off at fixed intervals. The total setup (for 5 potted plants) costed around $25 including the timer board. The results were great especially with tomato and okra where we had a hard time collecting the produce :)

Edit: Was using something similar to this board: [http://www.ebay.com/itm/Automation-DC-12V-LED-Display- Digita...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Automation-DC-12V-LED-Display-Digital- Delay-Timer-Control-Switch- Relay-A7Y6-/272702855151?_trksid=p2349526.m2548.l4275)

I think RPi is a overkill for this project.

<comment><USER54> > I think RPi is a overkill for this project.

Not when you consider the goals of their particular project and the experience of the author(s), as he does explain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I dig the writing style! I find that putting in a joke or two every now and then makes it far easier for me keep up my attention.

Also, this makes me think. I have two Raspberry Pis lying around. One is a glorified video player, the other one is just catching dust right now. I have wanted to do some kind of hardware project with it for a while, but I am kind of lazy and have pretty much no knowledge of electronics.

I have wanted to build a weather station, though, that keeps a long term record of its measurement in some kind of database. A Pi would be well suited for that, so I might get around to it one day after all.

</comment><comment><USER56> One of the better laid out Pi project summaries I've seen. Good work, I say.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading!

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I wonder, for a container plant, if you can reliably use weight as a measure of soil saturation. Of course plant growth would add to the weight, but I suspect that could be accounted for.

<comment><USER58> Interesting thought, probably could. USB scales are cheap, but your plant with water (draining through) would be sitting on top of said scales electronics. Could get messy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I used a fish tank pump with surgical tubing and a moisture sensor with an arduino to switch the pump on when it got dry but as you say, its never that easy, the whole thing is lying in a drawer somewhere, it didn't make anything easier. Another project involved load cells and LPG gas bottles. That was a bit more useful but it needed to be constantly powered and the wires kept falling out, so that's also in a drawer somewhere. I still haven't made a useful project yet

</comment><comment><USER60> This was exactly the route I wanted to go down until I found out about hydroponics, especially the Kratky's method. It's super easy, does not need any electronics or pumps, and I've successfully grown lettuces and herbs.

[http://www.instructables.com/id/Kratkys-non-circulating- hydr...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Kratkys-non-circulating-hydroponics/)

</comment><comment><USER61> This project reminds me of an installation at MOMA NY, the same concept but they used an Arduino. Now there are even kits to do it for whole garden [https://www.cooking- hacks.com/documentation/tutorials/open-g...](https://www.cooking- hacks.com/documentation/tutorials/open-garden-hydroponics-irrigation-system- sensors-plant-monitoring)

</comment><comment> un-devmox > The first time we pumped water into our planter, the tube directed a small > stream into one spot, completely soaking that area but leaving the rest of > the soil dry.

I use irrigation tubing with drip line emitters in my garden. That might be a solution for you. The cool think about the emitters is that they control the flow of water and are easily positioned. I think they start at .5ga/hour on up to 10ga/hour.

<comment><USER62> One could hook the RPi up to a solenoid valve and then standard Orbit drip tubing or variable drop line emitters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I'm building a space bucket atm using Arduino instead of Pi. It's a lot of fun. There are some amazing projects on spacebuckets.com. [https://www.spacebuckets.com/u/POstoned](https://www.spacebuckets.com/u/POstoned) has a good Pi setup with schematics etc. I think his reddit post is very detailed with sourcecode.

</comment><comment><USER64> I vaguely remember that when I read about soil moisture sensors, they all needed to be cleaned and dried after every use. Basically, you couldn't leave them in the soil. Seemed odd to me, but I never dug further into it.

Is that true? If so, that would explain why the sensor doesn't work here, but leaves me wondering why I've seen so many projects try to use the sensors that way.

<comment><USER58> Many soil sensors use electrical conductivity between two contacts, using the resistance to gauge the moisture. The more water, the lower the resistance. Unfortunately those contacts will start to corrode after being left in a damp (and electrified) environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Questions to everyone who's tried similar things:

1\. why use a water pump, instead of a gravity-fed system with a valve you could control with a servo?

2\. Would a scale be able to measure soil moisture? Dump in X grams of water, wait until scale registers X/2 before adding more. (Some fiddling would be required to see how much of the water is retained by the plan as building material.)

<comment><USER11> 1\. Because solenoid valves that can work with a very low pressure differential (a few feet worth of gravity often isn't enough to "force open" the valve) are expensive and require higher power draw than an Arduino / RPi. If you already need an external power source, might as well go with a pump. A pump is going to be a more consistent flow rate, and thus easier to control.

2\. Generally not; a plant's water consumption is not steady over its lifetime.

I eventually moved on to hydroponics. Soil is just too "analog" for most of this stuff to work. Hydroponic kits are available on Amazon for cheap, though the main measurement you end up doing with hydroponics is pH measurement -- and I am not aware of any "hands off" sensors capable of accurate pH measurement that are remotely affordable.

<comment><USER66> Aren't the kinds of plants you can grow in hydroponics limited, though? I like having flowers on my balcony, and I'm not sure I could get the same stuff with a hydroponic setup.

<comment><USER11> Not sure, but pretty much any plant with a root system will grow in hydroponics (which includes most flowers). The fertilizer mix may be different for different plants, but the concept is the same.

The biggest pain with hydroponics is that you do have to totally change out the water periodically. That gets difficult, because you have to add nutrients, and those nutrients are pretty caustic, cannot be pre-mixed and actually need to be mixed into the solution in a certain order...

After a while, these "automated garden projects" end up becoming basically industrial control/automation projects with complex rulesets, programming schedules, etc. It was fun and I learned a lot, but it ends up being a _much_ bigger project than you assume when you start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I did almost same to feed the Rat! :D [http://www.feedmyflash.in/](http://www.feedmyflash.in/) and also open sourced the code at [https://github.com/neelkadia/FeedMyFlash](https://github.com/neelkadia/FeedMyFlash)

</comment><comment><USER68> I'm sorta thrown off by the use of "we" and "our" in the middle of this article. From the top of the article (which doesn't use we/our), I understand that this is just one guy doing this. Is there someone else in the process that I'm missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the royal "we". I should have mentioned in the post that I reign over a small kingdom.

Kidding, it's a project I worked on with my friend. I maybe should have made that more visible at the top of the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> This is inspiring. I've been thinking about hand rolling a rain water reserve style irrigation system that essentially just pulls/scrapes a weather forecast and waters my garden. Not nearly as precise as this but hopefully useful.

</comment><comment><USER70> This was a hilarious read (as well as informative). Fantastic work, fantastic writing!

</comment><comment><USER71> I dislike the use of the "robot" for anything that doesn't have autonomous movement (those were "RC Wars", not "Robot Wars"\---although I, for one, would have delighted, at a safe distance, in someone strapping a circular saw to something autonomous). Nor is watering a single indoor potted plant the same thing as "gardening." An actual Gardening Robot would have been very interesting (I envisioned something trundling around with a spade and actuators for pulling weeds when I saw the title).

I actually love the Pi---one is now my primary computer---but it seems to have created a niche for "let's add a website and database to my really trivial control systems project" that I'm not sure really advances much of anything.

<comment><USER72> I understand your argument but I disagree.

According to the Merriam-Webster, this arguably fits two of the three definitions of "robot".

I guess you could say that measuring soil moisture and adding water isn't "complicated" but I would also disagree with that assessment.

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/robot](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/robot)

2: a device that automatically performs complicated often repetitive tasks

3: a mechanism guided by automatic controls

<comment><USER71> I see your point, but I think that complexity is key (and I think that definition 3 is far too over-broad, unless you require minimal complexity of the mechanism or pay close attention to the plurality of "controls"). The problem with categorizing anything with a sensor and actuator as the proper study of robotics means that very little is excluded. We wouldn't be impressed if a car salesman claimed that the automated dash-light dimmer is a "robot" (even if he had a well-researched semantic argument), and I don't think the term is applicable in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I have been thinking about making a homebrew Phototron using an arduino, grow lights, temp+moisture sensors and a water reservoir.

The addition of the camera makes me think that a Pi might be a better solution.

</comment><comment><USER73> I am excited to see projects like this. I believe that it will be important to be able to deploy fully autonomous food production facilities to Mars ahead of any colonization effort.

</comment><comment><USER74> I once setup something similar but with solar panels in Mojave desert to water a peach tree. Needless to say that didn't work oht as planned.

</comment><comment><USER75> On this subject, does anyone know what the state of the art is in using machine learning to identify (and preferably eliminate) weeds?

<comment> semi-extrinsic Do we really want to start down the road of teaching computers to identify beings that are slightly different from the rest and then killing them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> the codebase is really elegant. thanks for open sourcing everything!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We put a lot of effort into making the code readable, so I'm glad you found it pleasant to read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Why computer vision of plant stress is better than fancy sensors.

<comment><USER62> I've run into trouble with human vision in this case: I can see that a plant is stressed, but it's often much harder to figure out what is stressing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> it would be interesting to see if its possible to make a closed system. a black box that gives tomatos ...

</comment><comment><USER79> The Color Computer from Tandy started because of a project called "Green Thumb". Hurray for gardeners and farmers! :)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer#Origin_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Color_Computer#Origin_and_history)</comment>


100 Oldest .COM domain names - <AUTHOR> http://www.whoisd.com/oldestcom.php <comment><USER2> an interesting little factoid: domains were free to register until 1995

<comment><USER3> ...approximately October 5th 1995. spy.net was requested before it was announced that they were charging, but they grandfathered us in anyway. :)

Of course, like an old fogey, I'll state that it was all downhill from there. The ``one organization, one domain'' rules, etc... all died when people realized they could make more money by making it chaos.

Some good probably came out of that, though I'd say domain squatters did enough harm to make that severely unbalanced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My first domain was guetech.org, running over a UUCP link to eskimo.com, I remember having to fill out and email a text template to request it. I think this was sometime around 1995. I still have the domain :)

I think the absence of microsoft.com is telling. They really didn't see where the internet was heading.

</comment><comment><USER5> the time span is interesting. a full ~2.5yrs for 100 domains to be registered.

<comment><USER6> I'm assuming that these weren't the first 100 but the oldest 100 domains that have been registered even until now.

<comment><USER7> "mcc.com" has been snapped up by a domains squatter, so I assume that the list is of the first 100 registered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> No 'microsoft.com', but Apple registered their domain 'apple.com' in 1987.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm now intensely curious about what the oldest "popular" hostnames were before there was the DNS.

Also, what were FMC, Alcoa, and DuPoint doing with domain names?

<comment><USER10> I'm assuming their researchers wanted email, to chat with their university buddies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish I was old enough and had a good understanding of domains during the 90's so that I could have bought myself a good domain.

</comment><comment><USER12> My oldest is 1999. I read somewhere that google also uses that in there complex page rank and results page.</comment>


How I gained access to TMobile's national network for free - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jacobajit/how-i-gained-access-to-tmobiles-national-network-for-free-f9aaf9273dea#.j24m9o2uv <comment><USER2> I love hacks like this. I know of a number of other hacks that have been used (but don't currently work) for other mobile numbers (outside the US) Where there's a will, there's a way. ICMP Tunnels is a great one, for example. That's saved my bum a few times.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mmm, love the good ole'style hack. Find a hole in the system and peek through, good-natured of course. Reminds me of how I discovered that some hosting company's FTP server supported the somewhat obscure `cdup` command (which should work identical to `cd ..`), but didn't check if the connecting user actually had access rights to poke around that parent directory (it did for `cd ..`).

Much mischievous grinning ensued as I showed to my colleagues how i could "escape" from our allotted home directory and look at directories of some of the other clients, before I reported it to the hosting company. I don't know if they ever fixed that loophole...

</comment><comment><USER4> TL;DR: t-mobile's captive portal doesn't block access to URLs containing "/speedtest", so you can proxy all your Web traffic appropriately and get free access.</comment>


Berlin Profits from US Spying Program and Is Planning Its Own - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/berlin-profits-from-us-spying-program-and-is-planning-its-own-a-906129.html <comment><USER2> I wonder if Germany was the most spied upon EU country because they have a similar deal with US that UK has: "you spy on ours, we spy on yours, so it can be 'legal' for both of our countries, and then we hand each other the data".

This continuous skirting of the constitutions, laws (or at least the spirit of the laws) to get whatever they want makes me sick. If they would've thought this sort of stuff would be "okay" with the public, they wouldn't try to keep everything so secret and how they even interpret their own laws.

I don't care what laws exist to protect this sort of stuff. People should have privacy and they should be _free from suspicion_ by their governments, unless the government has probably cause for _specific_ crimes. If the laws aren't protecting us like that, then the laws need to be changed.</comment>


Israeli scientists claim to have found cure for cancer - <AUTHOR> https://www.wfla.com/news/israeli-scientists-claim-to-have-found-cure-for-cancer/1737416516 <comment><USER3> This is obviously quackery.

They made some experiments in mice. Now they claim they have a cure within a year.

(This is not my opinion, this is the opinion of people who know better than I do: [https://twitter.com/MDankner/status/1090295041115983872](https://twitter.com/MDankner/status/1090295041115983872) [https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH/status/1090283969378054144](https://twitter.com/VPrasadMDMPH/status/1090283969378054144) )

<comment><USER4> > _This is not my opinion, this is the opinion of people who know better than > I do_

Knee-jerk reactions of Ph.D. students aren't really more convincing than the original article.

I'll wait for more information before making such strong claims as "obvious quackery".

<comment><USER5> > I'll wait for more information before making such strong claims as "obvious > quackery".

IMHO science works the other way round.

<comment><USER4> Skepticism is essential in science. Gut-feelings based on newspaper articles have no place there.

<comment><USER6> gut feelings have a huge place in discovery science (what these scientists are doing). It can lead you in directions that rational cannot. For example, Kekule's dream of ouroborus: " He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros).[14]"

I've been privileged to know a lot of world-class scientists, and many of them have told me their careers and their best ideas came from gut feelings. Of course, they had to apply skepticism to the experimental results of their gut feeling experiments.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. Gut feeling is another word for intuition. Such background cognition is a great tool in science and has been found in use by a lot of top scientists and thinkers. Training it by broadening your knowledge and then using skepticism and other science tools to focus your thinking is a great way for finding stuff out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the actual article ( [https://m.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for- cancer-Israeli...](https://m.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for-cancer- Israeli-scientists-say-they-think-they-found-one-578939) ):

"Morad said that so far, the company has concluded its first exploratory mice experiment, which inhibited human cancer cell growth and had no effect at all on healthy mice cells, in addition to several in-vitro trials. AEBi is on the cusp of beginning a round of clinical trials which could be completed within a few years and would make the treatment available in specific cases."

vs.

"We believe we will offer in a year's time a complete cure for cancer."

Don't those two statements contradict each other?

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure that the researcher didn't come up with the headline, its journalism in the Trump age

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cancer isn't just one thing; it's the general term for a whole bunch of different problems. Saying you have a cure is like saying you have a cure for "virus". Science just doesn't work like that.

<comment><USER11> Mostly agreed, though from the handwaving in the article it seems that they claim that they can identify and exploit suitable receptors for any of the many cancers.

<comment><USER12> So, they might be able to tailor a potentially unsafe or deadly hormone (read: poison) to get at cancer. Sounds like chemo v2 to me, not a cure, won't work in all cancers especially later stage which no longer depend on the receptor stimulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Original article:

[https://m.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for-cancer- Israeli...](https://m.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for-cancer-Israeli- scientists-say-they-think-they-found-one-578939)

<comment><USER14> I was about to post the same link. Linked article by OP has close to no information, meanwhile original article is easily accessible anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Linked article from the OP: [https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for- cancer-Israe...](https://www.jpost.com/HEALTH-SCIENCE/A-cure-for-cancer- Israeli-scientists-say-they-think-they-found-one-578939)

More detail in that, but still nothing more than an interview with the the scientists who claim to have developed the "cure".

</comment><comment><USER16> Read this a few days ago through reddit. It sounded outlandish - <USER2> cryptocurrency ponzi promotion article.

That's why I didn't post it.

<comment><USER17> It would be ironic if an incredible invention like a cure to cancer went unoticed because everyone thought it was fake

<comment><USER18> If it works, it won't go unnoticed.

<comment><USER17> Ideally.

According to fast.ai there's this (very simple) technique to automate optimizing the learning rate parameter for deep neural networks, that went unnoticed for a couple years, because it was discovered by a no-name researcher, while all the big wig researchers were spending tons of manual hours finding the optimal learning rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I thought Reddit was finding cures for cancer on a periodic basis, is it going to be Hacker News after all?

</comment><comment><USER20> Submitted _12 times_ previously.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cancer%20cure&sort=byDate&pref...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cancer%20cure&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER21> Just a PR stunt... nothing to be concerned about. Cancer is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER22> There were some attempts to reprogram virus to cure cancer but ethical concerns have stopped progress in this path.

Human made viruses can have significantly more impact than planned. If this cure works, I believe that people should be kept in quarentine until clear of the virus.

</comment><comment><USER23> reddit used to have at least one very confident claim of a full cure for cancer make it to the front page per week, which we would then never hear from again if course. I fear the same will be the case here

</comment><comment><USER24> Of course it sounds too good to be true, however I read the linked original article, which provides much more detail and - everything they say sounds plausible and coherent and most important is novel, they admit several years away, let's hope they have discovered a genuine breakthrough. Medicine is very short on discoveries that actually make much difference to human health ie hygiene, vaccines, anti-biotics, anti-virals(more limited) - there has not been one for quite a long time, so the optimist in me says, maybe this is another - stem cell and telomerase based therapies also seem to me to be on the cusp of providing real benefits in dealing with the worst disease of all - aging.</comment>


Tesla/spacex – financials and raising - <AUTHOR> I'm a huge tesla and spacex fan. going on 10+ years now.
I've recently gotten back on Twitter and in an effort to be more exposed to opinions outside of just the tech world have seen a lot of criticism about Tesla/SpaceX running out of money and about to die.
Understand everyone here worships Elon and loves the products. Without spending 25 hours researching what is real about this, the good and bad vs the supposed media/twitter craze.
I chalk it up to finance not understanding how to build innovative and very lasting companies. But also don't want to be ignorant.
Some of the things I saw, cited by influential finance people
-SpaceX tried to raise 500m and only raised 273m (might be explained by holiday season)
-SpaceX laying off 10%
-Tesla breaking ground on factory without designs (feel like this is so wrong but I just don't know)
-Tesla not being able to raise more money (because of a wells notice, of which I just learned what that means)
-SpaceX resources being used for Boring Co tunnels
-Tesla not sending permanent license plate tags for some super complicated finance scam to delay paying down their a/p until they sell another car (ponzi scheme)
-Elon vs Azalelia banks drug cocaine twitter beef
there's a ton more. And I realize everyone tweeting could have a short position and be doing so to try to instill doubt but this seems like a lot.
what is the tl;dr other than Elon does some insane stuff and is equally an asset as he is a liability?
What should someone who wants both of these companies to succeed but doesn't want to be optimistically ignorant need to know? <comment><USER2> That Elon Musk has leveraged 40% of his Tesla stock to fund his other businesses.

SpaceX is private company so we don't know how much his SpaceX ownership is pledged as collateral.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is that something I should care about? I don't really care how much he leveraged stock. Maybe people in finance would care because maybe that might mean he's stressed about the different ventures but that's just par for the course in the tech world.

<comment><USER2> If Musk gets a margin call, forced liquidation will create downward price pressure. He has to do SEC filings and announce it to the world. It could create huge panic sell and open a door for a takeover.</comment></comment></comment>