The Future of Programming - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/01/the-future-of-programming.html <comment><USER2> > "For the programmer, that means we must grapple with problems such as > concurrency, locking, asynchronicity,.."

From my perspective, this is the problem of this decade in HW and SW engineering. Around 2007, Intel hit the wall with single threaded CPU scaling. It has gone from doubling every 2 years to a few % increase per year. We at the beginning of this paradigm shift to massively multi-core CPUs. Both the tools and the theory are still in their infancy. In HW there are many promising advances being explored, such as GPUs, Intel Phi, new FPGA, and projects like Parallella.

The software side also requires new tools to drive these new technologies. I think traditional threading will be viewed as a stopgap hack and will be replaced by some form of functional, flow-Based, and/or reactive programming models.

A few years ago, I had to help our EEs write some testing software in LabVIEW. I was blow away by how elegantly it solves concurrency and fault tolerance to bad input data. It took no extra design to utilize multiprocessing and multithreading hardware. The synchronous model in our program eliminated the issue of deadlock and race conditions problems that come up when using asynchronous threads.

Another project with great potential is NoFlo. What SW solutions have others run into in this field?

<comment><USER3> I've been using multi-media 'coordination languages' like Max/MSP/Jitter, Pure Data, SuperCollider, Touch Designer, and vvvv for years after I got hooked on the model from my first synthesizer (the Nord Micro Modular). When I had to learn traditional programming in school (Java at first), it felt hopelessly barbaric to me. Imperative text-based languages are incredibly time consuming, error-prone, and difficult to use in comparison.

Don't get me wrong, dataflow programming has its own gotchas– explicitly guaranteeing proper order can be tricky – and it's very hard for people from a traditional background to switch over (they're always reaching for the for- loop that isn't there), but it's quite clear to me that I can throw together a complex multimedia system with, say, camera input, some computer vision, effects, video playback, etc. in, say, 3 hours whereas it would take somebody starting from scratch in any other language at least twice that time if not 10 times[1]. Moreover, after they've finished, they enter a much longer period of intensive debugging, whereas dataflow systems I've built have been much closer to bug-free on the first draft.

Whenever I introduce this stuff to engineers, it blows their minds. I'm beginning to feel like it's a matter of serious importance to spread the word far and wide about alternative programming paradigms that make many of the problems of this decade magically disappear and make programming more efficient and easier to learn.

Shoot me an email if you're interested in more thoughts / pointers on this topic – skiptracer at gmail.

[1] Somebody might be able to argue that they could be just as fast with Processing or openFrameworks, but anecdotally developing in those environments is still 2x slower and bug fixing goes on forever.

<comment><USER3> There's something I've ignored here, which is that most of these systems are at a higher level of abstraction than text-based languages. Modules (called "objects") in Max, for instance, are written in C. Max is more analogous to Unix than an actual programming language (by admission of its author).

A question for me is why we write things like web servers in a programming language at all. After using dataflow systems, I believe there are much better abstractions possible than Rails-style web frameworks.

<comment><USER4> These ideas are not new. And _general_ click and drag programming has been "just around the corner" since GUIs became popular.

Now in specific domain, industrial & control system, signal processing, even designing GUIs themselves, click and drag has worked. It lets non-programmers but subject matter experts get stuff done.

But for generic stuff it hasn't worked too well. UML was one such push. Managers were just going to draw a diagram on the screen, click, "Generate Code" and bam, no need for silly code monkeys anymore. Well it hasn't quite worked that way. Now the "Generate Code" button just does an SMTP send to a .ch or .in domain some place.

There is another such system. Quite exotic called DRAKON.

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

It comes the Soviet space shuttle program. Yes they had a successful space shuttle once that few unmanned and even landed itself (before US space shuttles could even do that). Some of the people working on that wanted to bring programming down to non-programming engineers. And created that system. There was some interested in it lately as well. But can't say it exactly took over the world.

<comment><USER3> In my casual experience with such systems, they are extremely limited compared to something like Max, which is in turn extremely limited and badly designed.

Max is not just 'click and drag' – you can do quite complex configuration, cross-modulation of signals and parameters, etc. plus general purpose programming. You can also script things with JavaScript or Lua and write new routines ("objects") in C, Java, languages that compile to Java, and JavaScript.

They key is that the dataflow environment specifies a strict interface between "objects" and an overall execution pattern, but you can dig in to the stuff you're clicking on and change/optimize the underlying code.

Recently Cycling '74 (who make Max) added a new lower-level dataflow language that maps to C code or alternately GLSL shaders, which makes it super easy for people who don't know how to program to write efficient, auto-optimized audio and graphics routines. Another system along those lines is Faust: [http://faust.grame.fr/](http://faust.grame.fr/).

For a more open-ended system that combines dataflow ideas with traditional programming concepts, a time-line editor, and in-text GUI controls, check out Field: [http://www.openendedgroup.com/field/](http://www.openendedgroup.com/field/).

DRAKON looks like a naive low-level attempt at sticking imperative routines into flowcharts. Diagrammed UML systems sound awful – you probably lose all the power of object oriented programming by transposing it into a GUI. Signal chain diagram languages like MATLAB's SIMULINK[1], Analog Devices' Signal Chain Designer[2], or Cypress' PSoC Designer are usually very basic and nothing like what a proper dataflow system could be.

[1] [http://www.mathworks.com/products/simulink/](http://www.mathworks.com/products/simulink/) [2] [http://www.analog.com/en/content/Signal_Chain_Designer/fca.h...](http://www.analog.com/en/content/Signal_Chain_Designer/fca.html) [3] [http://www.cypress.com/?id=2492&source=productshome](http://www.cypress.com/?id=2492&source=productshome)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is based on a flawed promise: "The goal is to be able to describe the essential skills that programmers need for the coming decade.".

Good luck with that. You might as well attempt to predict the weather for the next decade.

As for the content, it's equally flawed. It's not just one device anymore, and probably not going to be a PC. Well - obviously. And frameworks are apparently a house of cards and things might break down horribly - a bizarre statement if there ever was one as frameworks empower individual programmers and small upstart teams to do amazing things which would simply be impossible without them.

Here's my prediction: Everything is changing, and everything will continue to change. If you're a programmer, you have to change and keep on top of things. It doesn't matter if you're just starting out or if you're like my genius ex- boss and are currently fixing up a software product at the spry age of 80.

<comment><USER6> >You might as well attempt to predict the weather for the next decade.

I can do that, with just as much accuracy as the author is striving for. It will be hot in the summer, and it will be cold in the winter. There will be storms in between. Some people may experience snow, while others will get rain instead, depending on your location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > On frameworks: "Why should we use computers like this, simultaneously > building a house of cards and confining computing power to that which the > programmer can fit in their head? Is there a way to hit reset on this view > of software?"

I'm not entirely with him on the evils of frameworks. Software is built on software the way knowledge is built on knowledge. I'm happy to stand on the shoulders of giants. It means I don't have to rewrite what's already been well written (and well tested). There are tradeoffs, sure, and it's really important to understand the hows and whys of the frameworks you select (this is where open source really matters). Still, I think narrowing the problem scope so you can "execute the program you're writing inside your head"—and inside the ambitious timeline of your startup—is the great gift of modern computing, not its curse.

<comment><USER5> You're too kind.

Frameworks are the reason I can go and build a top class product in 6 months all on my own. If we didn't have them, each new product would require an army of programmers re-inventing wheels, and only big corporations with lots of money could afford to even attempt it.

Frameworks rock. Abstraction also rocks. Whenever I need something more than once, I make it abstract. I automate it, abstract it, make it re-usable. And 99% of the time - I am not kidding, it's really that high - I will re-use that piece of software, re-run that script, etc.

A senseless article, all in all.

<comment><USER8> Frameworks have a lot of issues. First of all, they tend to exclude each other, hence preventing you from reusing code that might be a better fit for a particular problem.

Second, they provide a perverse incentive to force every new application feature into the structure of the framework you decided to use at the beginning of the project.

Frameworks are like debt. They give us a head start at the cost of paying more down the road. Sometimes that head start is worth the higher overall cost and sometimes it's not.

I think libraries are a lot less problematic and still provide most of the benefits of frameworks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Though many see it as science fiction, quantum "programming" shouldn't be excluded from the list. I realize he aimed to generate a practical discussion around where we are now and what we need to do in the immediate (5 years) future, but just as nanotech really needed to get off the ground in people's heads before it could get a foothold in popular culture as an actual technology, quantum computing is in need of more public analysis and simulation. He might have added a last section there titled "And Beyond..." for topics like this :)

<comment><USER9> Are there technologies aimed at quantum programming available and accessible today, even in a completely experimental status?

<comment><USER10> Check out Quipper:

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.5485v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.5485v1.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm most looking forward to typing my program requirements into the STACK- OVERFLOW-PARSING-INTERPRETING-COMPILING-MACHINE, and it gobbling up all the nuggets of information together into a fully-formed program.

That's part of the future.

<comment><USER12> Looking forward to the day I'll put my mind-reading headband and go for a ride while I program in thought.

<comment><USER13> Not sure why this was downvoted... I've wondered often what it would take to develop a programming language that one could create in while being physically mobile. I do some of my best programming/thinking while walking around since it's conducive to inspiration, but then I have to wait until I get home behind my keyboard to try and implement something.

<comment><USER12> Yup, I was serious in my idea. Maybe downvoters thought I was sarcastic.

I'd love to be able to experiment both the physical and digital world at the same time, discontinuing my hand/eyes as an interface with the computer.

I believe it will eventually happen. I'm not exactly sure of the current state of the art, but I've seen research replacing lost limbs with robotic arms that are solely controlled by thoughts. Seen also images induced into one's vision by stimulation of the brain.

Our brain evolved with I/O devices meant to match our physical environment. As far as I know[1], we don't have any I/O device meant to convey ideas in themselves. We need to serialize our thoughts into words, images and movements to get them deserialized into other's minds. All this process is lossy and has a limited bandwidth.

 _Anyway, I 'm not talking about things I really know, so I won't elaborate further into this. I try to limit my opinions on HN to stuff that I actually know. You can't fool anyone around here; next thing I know, a brain researcher will come and break all my ideas apart in the comments._

[1]That's meant to exclude telepathy stuff

<comment><USER14> I also would like to see stuff like this. I hope it only evolves to stuff more like when I can see the whole algorithm (not in code, but in process I guess) in my head versus thinking "okay brain, for loop starting at x == 0, while x is less than this array's count."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The future of computing is design by contract and intentional programming. You define your goal, and that's about it. Most technicalities will be delegated to machines.

Most programmers will develop smart agents that will manipulate a decentralized and unique semantic data source. All of this is quite obvious.

<comment><USER16> Curious to know, other than SQL, are there any other examples of successful technologies that achieve this intentional, goal-driven programming?

<comment><USER17> This sounds like genetic algorithm programming (see my other comment below [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6080492](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6080492)). Writing a program consists of defining the end state. The GA then runs through thousands of epochs, getting closer and closer to the end state (determined by a fitness score for each program), until the solution is found.

I was able to achieve automated programs for printing text, simple math operations, string manipulation, and conditionals. After that, programming the fitness methods started getting complicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _The prevailing form of programming today, object orientation, is generally > hostile to data. Its focus on behavior wraps up data in access methods, and > wraps up collections of data even more tightly. In the mathematical world, > data just is, it has no behavior, yet the rigors of C++ or Java require > developers to worry about how it is accessed._

Er...I thought one of the underlying parts of OOP was creating a domain for data, such that derivable attributes and relationships were encapsulated in the data model? The way that R treats data as a first-class citizen is nice for some statistical modeling, but doesn't seem robust enough for all the other ways that we need to organize and munge data.

</comment><comment><USER19> Looking at all the languages near the top of language popularity chart, I don't think OO is going away. Last I checked Python was still an OO language. If you look at all the jobs on the job boards OO is still the dominant flavor as it has been for 20 years or so (only plain C is the oddball). Will that still be the case 20 years from now?

<comment><USER20> I think we're starting to see a shift away from the areas that OOP is traditionally comfortable with.

Increasingly, modern system design tends to place an emphasis on bare, immutable data, whereas OO tends to work with encapsulated, mutable state. If the only thing you're using objects for is namespacing and polymorphism, then there's not much point to designing software within the OO paradigm.

<comment><USER21> I have noticed this too; all the "functional" languages I've seen (i.e. those with immutable data) encourage working with bare data. Is encapsulation only necessary for mutable data?

<comment><USER20> I think immutability removes one of the reasons for encapsulation: controlling state change. With that gone, the disadvantages of encapsulation might outweigh its advantages in a lot of cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Well the article touches some good points, since it made me think...

The problem is the language and paradigms used not the framework or how many levels you abstracted the problem at hand.

The way as i see it, writing programs by manipulating data excessively, will lead us nowhere but complexity, which unfortunately is introduced by the program itself. Mainstream languages such as C++, Java, C# etc., should not be taught in schools as if they are the ultimate solution, and fp is sth not practical, it is a twofaced claim while stealing ideas from fp and patching these languages, nowadays.

Another one, saying how fast the IT changes at every chance and sticking with ancient programming languages. When someone points out the dilemma, then claiming not to having enough developers for say Haskell, Clojure, Go etc.. May be you should fix the education system morons, instead of building more complex frameworks, platforms.

Of course there are particular areas, such as simulations, modelling time dependent large data sets, embedded development etc.. where some languages will be the best suited while others will be overkill or not just fast/ viable etc.. Of course, I am not blindly saying, "Death to imperative languages" :P However, they shouldn't dominate.

As a final comment, The future of programming is already here, The question is are we ready for the future...

<comment><USER23> Whether you like it or not, your world runs on C, C++ and assembly. These languages form the ninety-percent-plus core of modern computing's foundation. Lift the hood of nearly any embedded system, BIOS or OS and you'll find these in heavy use. You'll find C code in the networking layers that let you talk to the world, and in the very light switches that let you go to the bathroom at night. C runs your dishwasher, your car, your elevators, and probably your toothbrush.

Then a lot of stuff gets layered on top of this. And sure, languages /do/ jit, but these are generally hothouse flowers, surrounded by an infrastructure provided by C, C++ and assembly. Few systems are native boot without involving a bunch of C.

I'm happy if people are satisfied to work in the layers above all this stuff. Frankly, not many folks (as a percentage of the programming population) can do good kernel level work. But don't pretend that it doesn't exist, or that it is somehow morally inferior to hacking away in Haskell.

Maybe this will change in thirty years; I think that's the time scale required to make a fundamental change in the way we program modern systems.

I'd /love/ to see a native Erlang system, soup to nuts. But there's little economic incentive to make one, given that the lower layers are actually doing a pretty decent job.

<comment><USER24> _Whether you like it or not, your world runs on C, C++ and assembly. These languages form the ninety-percent-plus core of modern computing 's foundation._

Isn't that part of the problem? There is no technical reason we couldn't have a language that offered the same fine control and hardware integration as C, compiled to native executable code in a similar way, but was both safer and more expressive. There is no advantage in having an awkward syntax for specifying types or in making all pointers nullable.

Mainstream industrial languages today are a triumph of good enough, and they continue to dominate primarily because of momentum and the size of the surrounding ecosystem rather than technical merit in the language itself. Unfortunately, this creates a vicious circle that reinforces the status quo, and the few organisations with sufficient resources to break that cycle have limited economic incentive to do so.

<comment><USER23> There have been many contenders, notably Eiffel, Oberon and D. There are many others that I don't immediately remember the names of.

These languages have /great/ technical merit. They offer safety (in various forms) and other interesting technologies that C definitely lacks. They were lauded by academics and industry pundits. So why didn't they take the industry by storm?

Perceived technical merit is a terrible way to choose a language.

Pascal was widely regarded as a great language, a wonderful model, and it was widely used in the 80s by various large companies. Today it is mostly dead. I believe this is because Pascal only did an adequate job of expressing stuff at the hardware and kernel level, and that C was better. Certainly nearly everyone at Apple that I worked with breathed a sigh of relief when it became obvious that it was okay to write C instead of Pascal for new projects. For the most part we'd been writing C for years anyway, just in Pascal. About the only thing that people missed were nested procedures (whereupon, C++).

Your new "adult" language is going to need a set of very compelling offerings over and above "well, it's safer" in order to succeed.

Take a look at things people are doing /to/ C in order to be better:

\- "analyze" builds that do control graph analysis and find bugs (not just ones endemic to C, but actual logic bugs, too)

\- declarative sugar that helps tools to reason about what things like drivers are trying to do

\- control extensions (commonly seen as macros providing 'foreach' like support)

\- ways for tools to enforce local conventions (without spending tons of manpower on parsers and so forth)

Come up with a language as good as C at low-level programming, that has great debugger support, offers easy tool plugins, and that has interoperability with the gazillions of libraries already available [take a page from C#'s great interop story here], and you might have something. Go "academic" and just say "this is good for you, use it instead," and the working programmers will see nothing in it for them and ignore you, just as they've ignored or abandoned dozens of other offerings in the last 30 years.

<comment><USER24> _There have been many contenders, notably Eiffel, Oberon and D. [...] So why didn 't they take the industry by storm?_

Some possible reasons, based on my limited knowledge of those languages:

Eiffel — Emphasis on simplicity over performance optimisation; emphasis on OO programming style; legal issues around various parts of the ecosystem in the early days

Oberon — Limitations of basic type system, such as a lack of enumeration types and the way coercion of numerical types worked until recent versions

D — Many of the same major strengths and weaknesses as the more established C++; two rival "standard" libraries for a long time

 _Your new "adult" language is going to need a set of very compelling offerings over and above "well, it's safer" in order to succeed._

Of course. You can throw in "it's easier to write" and "it's more powerful" and you still only have a small part of the big picture, because in reality so much depends on the surrounding ecosystem: development tools, libraries, and so on. However, there is no reason we couldn't have a language that was superior to C in both safety and expressive power, remained compatible with calling to/from C functions at ABI level for library compatibility and ease of porting, and used a clean grammar to help tool developers.

 _Take a look at things people are doing /to/ C in order to be better:_

While I don't disagree with any of your examples, I'm not sure they really tell us anything useful. The absence of other things that people might do could be because they aren't particularly valuable or it could be because they are valuable but also prohibitively difficult or expensive to achieve starting from C as the foundation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In the future, programming will not be done through coding but through composition. I'm a bit biased on this prediction.

<comment><USER26> Kind of like how OO was going to give us massive libraries of OTS software components with which we could just 'wire-up' programs?

<comment><USER27> You generally can, though. All the web servers, all the frameworks, all the packages. If I wanted to make a graphing calaculator in Python I wouldn't write a reverse polish calculator or do more complex string parsing on user input, I'd use numpy and sympy, with a qt gui, probably written in qml.

I see very few domain problems where the boatload majority of the work hasn't been done for you, and you just glue legos together. Network stack? Most languages have an httplib or you could get libftp or some such from a foss repository.

The only real problem is figuring out which api is easier to use, since there usually are competing choices on a lot of these drop in solutions. qt or boost? django or bottle? backbone or angular?

<comment><USER26> Yes I agree, but software reuse isn't exactly new. The commenter was obviously referring to functional programming techniques, and I was trying to point out that other silver bullets have been spruiked in the past, only to fall short.

And besides, someone still has to program these libraries - it isn't turtles all the way down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm still hoping for computer programs to be written without humans [http://www.primaryobjects.com/CMS/Article149.aspx](http://www.primaryobjects.com/CMS/Article149.aspx)

That was my initial experiment with self-programming AI, although ultimately, the fitness methods were starting to grow in complexity themselves.

<comment><USER28> Defining the spec would be the "programming".

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Increasing the problem space (as opposed to constantly shrinking it which the author suggests as a trend) can actually make things easier to solve.

You can see the small version of that in a language like Prolog where a common pattern is to generalize the problem because more generalized problems tend to be easier to solve/reason about (often because they already come with easy to discover base cases and steps for a recursive approach)

</comment><comment><USER30> Sounds like a recipe for Strange Loop [http://thestrangeloop.com/sesssions](http://thestrangeloop.com/sesssions) !

</comment><comment><USER31> > In the mathematical world, data just is, it has no behavior, yet the rigors > of C++ or Java require developers to worry about how it is accessed.

This may be true, but in the _real_ world, data and behavior are still intimately tied together. Data-oriented (i.e. functional) programming is going to enhance OO programming, not replace it entirely.

<comment><USER32> I've moved recently from building data manipulation and machine learning systems in Python to a stack that's primarily C++, and it's striking how much less nimble I now feel transforming that data or in building machine learning pipelines.

I suppose building basic tools as Apache Thrift services would allow one the ease of prototyping ideas in Python before building a performant system in something like Java or C++.

<comment><USER31> I suspect that's probably due to C++ being a lower-level language than Python, not due to any inherent problems with OO programming.

BTW, Python describes itself as object oriented, so it illustrates my point that OO and functional are not at odds.

<comment><USER33> Many developers tend to think OO == Java/C#/C++ as they never learned other OO paradigms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > there's a bias to languages such as Python or Clojure, which make data > easier to manipulate

I assume its the libraries available for Python (Pandas, NumPy, Blaze) that are the basis for this quote. Is it also the case for Clojure (as compared to other FP languages)?

</comment><comment><USER35> > We're making faster and more powerful CPUs, but getting the same kind of > subjective application performance that we did a decade ago.

My modern computer with an SSD feels subjectively faster/snappier to me than any computer I've owned in the past.

</comment><comment><USER36> > Look around your home. There are processors and programming in most every > electronic device you have

And those devices are packing more punch for their size -- just look at the Raspberry Pi and it's competitors.

</comment><comment><USER37> Nothing about massively parallel programming. Bummer.

</comment><comment><USER38> This feels like an odd angle to take in concern around the next decade of programming.

It starts a level below what problems might be the next thing to tackle and focuses on what shiny objects have already got enough traction to be considered concern of the past 3-5 years.

Short-sighted. Boring. Couldn't dance to it.

1-3 years are feasibly predictable 3-7 are 50/50 hunches 20%CI 8-9 you might as well be talking jet packs 10+ You aren't talking about saving or controlling the world? Refactor!

10 years from now, we blow IP up. we napster algorithmic experiences because you can't patent wiping your ass 10 years from now, we make devices cheaper than water from scrap plastic 10 years from now, any human can talk to any other human anytime, anywhere 10 years from now, my meta-data is meaningless and we defund NSA because they are deaf dumb and useless 10 years from now, we eat the rich and feed the poor

Why bother looking 10 years ahead without setting some real goals or at least looking at things that might actually drive the innovation in the next 10 years vs what is already well-planned?

We're all going to be 10 years closer to death and you are believing we'll have "smart dust"? A Roomba in every house!

Do you know how long it's been since I first heard that there would be fucking smart dust? You mean we need to lay a powder of infrastructure down to detect what distributed, distant sensors could tell you? Looks like a whale just barfed in the ocean and we got a ton of our dust back online... water's still wet AND salty there! Dial back the Antarctica dust belcher for a minute to balance out the South Pacific by next year... stupid whales, when will you learn?

He should have stopped at sensors. We'll have 1984. Smart dust? We'll be crotch-deep in gray goo.

Whales are like, "IIIIIIII WIIIIIIILLLLLLL DEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSTRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!"

<comment><USER39> You lost me somewhere between eating the rich, and whales...

<comment><USER40> Yes, but it was fun</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to pay developers in Europe? - <AUTHOR>

I just paid out the first quarter's profit shares for my startup, x264 LLC (commercial licensing arm of the x264 open source project).  However, the majority of the major developers for the project are in Europe, so the best way to pay them seems a bit less obvious.
This time I did:
1.  US developers: Mail a check.
2.  UK developers: Mail a check (their banks are apparently fine with this).
3.  Sweden/Germany/Austria/France: Wire transfer in native currency.
4.  Russia: Wire transfer in US dollars to a special account set up by the developer.
The problem with this is that the wire transfer prices charged by the bank (Bank of America) are exorbitant: not only is it $35 per transfer, but they slash off another 5% in the form of exchange rate gouging.  This latter will probably become a significant cost (~1-2% of total income) as income rises.
Is there any better option for international payments in the ~$500-$25000 range? <comment><USER2> Western union is definitely less than what you're quoting there from BoA.

A general tip in this area is to find out what immigrants use to send money home. You can be pretty confident that they're getting a good deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems so!

Bank of America: 1 EUR = 1.5017 USD

Western Union: 1 EUR = 1.4590 USD

Google Finance: 1 EUR = 1.4429 USD

I'll try them for the next quarter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> One way or another, you're probably going to want to set up an account of your own in Europe and figure out the cheapest way to transfer large lumps of cash into it.

At least in Germany, there's absolutely no charge to wire money to another account in Europe, including the UK.

<comment><USER4> Remember, if you set up an account outside of the US, and its value equals or exceeds $10,000 for even a moment during any year, you have to report it. Not saying you shouldn't do it. But a word to the wise . . .

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Use Citibank Global Transfers. I think this option requires opening a Citibank account by both parties, but once done you can transfer to most countries in the World, Mexico and India for Free and other places for $10 (less than a third of BoA)… [https://online.citibank.com/US/JRS/pands/detail.do?ID=InterC...](https://online.citibank.com/US/JRS/pands/detail.do?ID=InterCiti)

</comment><comment><USER6> The 35$ per transfer is normal, the 5% is not. It'll probably be cheaper to send the money directly in USD without currency exchange, the european bank will then deal with it and their rates are usually cheaper (at least for french banks).

You can also maybe suggest to the people you work with to setup a USD account with their bank. That's what I did with my bank in France, it was quite easy and allows me to exchange all the payments from USD to Euros in one go.

Another services I've heard some good things of but haven't tested is Xe.com Transfers [1] and Xoom [2]

[1] <http://www.xe.com/fx/> [2] <https://www.xoom.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> B of A is gouging you. Are you big enough to shop for another bank? You may want to sit down with a VP of some competing banks, and take proposals, along with checking out some of these other options here.

One issue you face is Patriot Act, anti-terrorism laws. These laws have made it difficult for small / local banks to send international wires out to random people all the time; they need to have a "Know your wiree" type policy in place for everyone they're wiring. In your use case, since you sound like you'll have common developers, this would be an upfront, but not permanent problem. At any rate, I'd start by calling some Branch managers of large regional - national banks, and see who wants your business.

</comment><comment><USER8> What about Paypal? It should allow you to move around money quite easily and people can withdraw it to their accounts also relatively problem free. Although I am not sure about the state of Paypal in all the countries you mention.

</comment><comment><USER9> I run a small startup in the UK (www.mycurrencytransfer.com) that helps people compare currency transfers from different providers.

We've found specialist currency brokers such as Moneycorp, The FX Firm, IFX, and World First, amongst others, offer more competitive rates than the banks.

They are what businesses tend to use when paying overseas suppliers, and people purchasing properties overseas.

(Sorry for the "shameful plug", I just thought I'd chime in seeing as it seemed appropriate)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm a UK developer and this is one of the reasons I very rarely accept work from people not in the UK. I usually accept paypal for overseas payments because even though the fees are ridiculous and I hate paypal, it actually takes about the same time and fees to accept international payments this way compared to a bank transfer. This however has the added benefit of being better for my client that is making the payment as it costs them nothing extra.

</comment><comment><USER11> Check out <http://www.xe.com/>

I'm living in Australia at the moment and lots of people recommended them for sending money abroad.

Not sure what the ramifications are for commercial purposes, but for changing large amounts of currency for personal use they give a damned good rate. I'm a BofA customer in the States and as you found, their rates are a joke.

</comment><comment><USER12> A US check being cashed in the UK or most places, can take a few weeks. We had an office in West London, and the best way we found to pay our European team was by bank wire. You may want to look into Ruesch International (now known as Travelex Business). Might also be able to use them for other Sweden/Germany/France and Russia as well.

<comment><USER13> Also checks (or cheques) are being completely phased out in the UK. Hardly anyone uses them. Direct bank transfer is cheaper, safer and clears much faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Take a look at an exchange service such as xe.com. Basically the way it works is that you would do an ACH transfer to them and then they would do the conversion and then transfer out to the requested bank account. These services are supposed to give you the best conversion rates.

</comment><comment><USER15> You can try Everbank www.everbank.com , which has World Currency accounts. It is a US-based bank, but you can have a Euro account, from which you can do wire transfers to Europe. Their conversion rates are good.

</comment><comment><USER4> For smaller amounts, how about setting up an account in the US and getting a debit card for the payee? Pay into the local account. They use the debit card.

</comment><comment><USER16> I believe _checks_ are safe and better for sender/receiver/govt

<comment><USER17> ...for sending money to countries that still use them, yes.

Where I am, noone's been using checks for that past 20-30 years. In the rare case you get one and wants to cash it in, there are exorbitant fees for doing so, since it's so unusual.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is something very big on its way for the crypto community? - <AUTHOR> It could be so many things that in hindsight were gamechangers, which one do you know about that you believe is truly monumental, groundbreaking, next level technology? <comment><USER2> Hopefully the federal government will jail pretty much everyone involved with Coinbase.com at the executive level. That would be my personal wish for something "very big".

<comment><AUTHOR> because of what happened with BCH?

<comment><USER3> and general technical failures since then</comment></comment></comment>


Bruce Lee's 5 Rules for Personal Productivity - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.bnet.com/teamwork/?p=226 <comment><USER2> should have included 'wear a yellow tracksuit' - worked wonders for him in Enter the Dragon and was successfully ported by Uma Thurman thus allowing her to Kill Bill. Whenever i've got a big business deal that just absolutely has to go down - i wear my yellow tracksuit.</comment>


Anyone want in an infant startup idea - <AUTHOR>

I'm in Seattle. Looking for someone technical to partner with in a web startup project. Anyone with time, hunger, and skills. I'll give you the pitch and you can see if you want in, <comment><USER2> Pitch already?</comment>


FAA bans the use of drones to deliver packages - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/24/faa-bans-the-use-of-drones-to-deliver-packages/?utm_campaign=fb&ncid=fb <comment><USER2> FAA has never allowed the use of drones to deliver packages. The right headline would be "The FAA does still not allow use of drones to deliver packages."

<comment><USER3> The FAA has no physical ability, and currently no legal authority, to allow or disallow the use of drones to deliver packages. This document is a set of rules that the FAA would like to carry legal weight, but which currently do not.

<comment><USER4> I'm assuming you're referring to FAA v. Pirker.

Isn't the case still undecided?

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoglia/2014/04/12/faa- files-...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoglia/2014/04/12/faa-files-appeal- brief-in-closely-watched-drone-pilot-case/)

<comment><USER3> The case is being appealed, but isn't the most recent decision the one with legal power, until another decision is made upon appeal?

But even more generally, I should have said the FAA has no _clear_ legal authority to regulate small unmanned aircraft. The FAA obviously _claims_ that it does have certain legal abilities, and points to certain laws to argue their case [0].

[0] [http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/2014-06-23/faa- claims...](http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/2014-06-23/faa-claims- authority-over-unsafe-model-aircraft-flights)

<comment><USER4> In this case the appeal stays the decision:

[http://www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/news_story.cfm?newsId...](http://www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/news_story.cfm?newsId=15894&cid=TW209)

Definitely agree with your second point - according to most observers, the FAA's authority to regulate small (model-sized) UAVs is tenuous at best. They're generally not expected to win their appeal.

<comment><USER5> Even if they lose, won't the laws change to give them these powers ? I don't see something as potentially risky as drones running around unregulated.

<comment><USER4> The laws already changed to give them these powers - the 2012 FAA Modernization Act authorizes the FAA to make rules about UAS.

However, the FAA's rulemaking abilities are limited by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and they haven't made any yet.

So, even if the FAA's appeal fails, there will be a very short window (probably a year or less) before drones are explicitly regulated on less shaky footing.

<comment><USER3> > The laws already changed to give them these powers - the 2012 FAA > Modernization Act authorizes the FAA to make rules about UAS.

So claims the FAA. I can't make my way through the text of the law, nor can I find any legal summary or analysis other than the FAA's own claim that it gives them the authority to regulate UAS.

<comment><USER6> Everybody is arguing if they have the authority or not the more important question is why do they want to?

I find the FAA's attempt at banning anything commercial relating to drones a bit curious.

Step 1. Ban/regulate all commercial Drones.

Step 2. Require a license for commercial use.

Step 3. Profit?

<comment><USER7> The FAA's goal in life is to ensure safety in the air. Drones are obviously within their field of interest. When commercial drones take off, there will obviously be a lot more drones in the air than the recreational drones and toy aircraft now, since there is a lot of money to be made, while comparatively few people fly things for a hobby.

<comment><USER6> If that was the intent they would be putting rules in place to prevent people from getting hurt not outright banning them which is what their doing now.

This looks more like a move to kill an industry before it takes off if you pardon my pun.

Not to mention there's nothing to regulate at the moment no people have been hurt by drones and there's very few companies actually looking into them.

So the next logical question is who would loose money if commercial drone delivery services become the norm?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the only sensible (but temporary) decision that the FAA could have done. The next step is to research reliable methods of navigation and air traffic rules for unmanned and autonomous aerial vehicles, and when that can be made demonstrably safe, this regulation can be revisited.

If FAA would have allowed commercial drone operations without further regulation, and the technology would have had widespread adoption, there would be great risks involved.

Before there are the equivalents of traffic lights, air traffic control and airways and regulations to how much and what you can carry, there are risks involved. ("hello Amazon, I'd like to have 5 kilograms worth of lithium batteries, drone delivery to this busy urban address." what could possibly go wrong?)

Of course, things can be relatively safe if common sense is applied, but you can't expect commercial operators to apply common sense when there are potential profits available.

And common sense is not always correct either, back in the 1930s when the state of the art in aviation was relatively comparable to the state of the art in drones today, most people thought that pilots should fly by the seat of their pants and flight instruments are only supplemental (which is _deadly_ wrong, and today all planes have doubly redundant gyroscopic instruments).

The reality is that the technology to fly unmanned and autonomous drones exists but it's not mature enough to work in large scale commercial operations safely and effectively.

<comment><USER9> I think the ban should stay regardless of safety. One big issue here is noise and visual pollution.

<comment><USER8> I appreciate your opinion and recognize that there are many people who share your opinion but I can't agree. Compared to road and air traffic, it would take a serious amount of drones to match the noise and visual pollution.

The pizza delivery man with his car or scooter makes more noise and takes more space than a drone would.

And you have to remember that the early jet aircraft were very noisy and inefficient compared to modern jets. NACA, NASA and the FAA did some serious research and development programs in the fifties and sixties to reduce the amount of noise.

Compared to "big" aviation, I think that the current drones are somewhere in between the Wright brothers and the Spirit of St. Louis - I guess there will be significant development in the near future.

<comment><USER10> If machines are flying over your head, would you feel safe going out without a helmet on your head?

Despite all safety measures, you know it'll happen at some point. One of those will fail, its safety will fail and it'll drop on the head of some kid and put it in the hospital.

I can predict immediately that birds and drones colliding will be one of the biggest problems (and it's not something you can fix with frequent tech checkups, as it's not a technical failure, just a fact of life).

Having casualties is the case with cars too, of course, but it's a whole new kind of terror to expect not just cars hitting you coming from the street, but also machines dropping from the sky (where you usually aren't even looking).

I'd take one of those risks, but not both at the same time. I can't look for both at the same time. And I'm not saying "ban them" is the only solution, but this has to be solved somehow.

<comment><USER8> > If machines are flying over your head, would you feel safe going out without > a helmet on your head?

No, not with the current state of technology. That's why I think that this ban is in the right thing to do for the time being.

> I can predict immediately that birds and drones colliding will be one of the > biggest problems

You're definitely right, bird strikes are a hazard for drones, model aircraft and big aviation alike.

Unlike big aircraft (which can dodge big flocks at best), a drone is more maneuverable and could be able to dodge birds to some degree using some kind of camera technology. Of course, a bird may also intentionally attack a drone (they certainly attack my kites occasionally), which is a harder problem to solve.

These are challenges that have to be overcome with navigation, camera and drone-to-drone communication techniques as well as redundancy.

Before we can put a number estimating the statistical risks of drone traffic, it is premature to think about large scale commercial operations. I think that it's inevitable that we'll have such a number (ie. number of incidents per hours of drone flight), and we can utilize technologies that will bring that number down to acceptable levels (ie. near or below existing road and air traffic risks). When that happens, re-thinking this restriction (not necessarily lifting it) is due.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Huge win for Amazon, which never actually intended to use drones to deliver packages. The whole thing was a PR stunt designed to gain traffic on cyber Monday. Now they conviently can blame the government when they never actually invest the money to build the drones.

<comment><USER12> I think you are wrong. I will abbreviate the article wrote on this very subject found here: [http://fritzw.com/2013/12/03/theres-little-doubt-about- amazo...](http://fritzw.com/2013/12/03/theres-little-doubt-about-amazon-prime- air-heres-why/)

Amazon's devices will be used for a single purpose they will be optimized in ways we have never seen in the multicopter industry. Their delivery scheme will be completely computer controlled, and will account for weather, airspeed, air density, and flight path, because they will have to.

Octocopters have demonstrated their amazing flight stability and capability in the hands of tinkerers and hobbyist, and there is some question of whether a billion dollar corporation can achieve this? As soon as Amazon mentioned this, FedEx, UPS, and USPS started forming their R&D for the exact same programs.

This is one of the largest, most high-tech, most optimized and automated companies in the world, and some of us are doubtful? Amazon will do this because humans are the problem. With robots, you eliminate the most irrational, chaotic, unreliable and expensive element from the equation.

<comment><USER13> Hasn't amazon been the one to only slowly adopt warehouse automation because it is cheaper to hire humans at $10 an hour?

They did buy this company that makes little robots to move shelves around but it is nothing compared to a real system like this one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DeT- Hj2DXk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DeT-Hj2DXk)

<comment><USER14> warehouses are different. It's very costly to send a guy to people's houses. They're simply limited by the walking/running rate of the human body, and traffic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Meanwhile, in Russia a pizzeria recently launched unmanned delivery: [http://rt.com/news/167936-russia-drones-pizza- delivery/](http://rt.com/news/167936-russia-drones-pizza-delivery/)

<comment><USER16> I misread 'unmanned' in that sentence as the 'emasculated' meaning of the word, and had a mental question as to why you would make a service out of having your pizza delivered by broken, subservient men... :)

<comment><USER17> In Soviet Russia, pizza delivers YOU!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The part I've been thinking about and don't have a good answer to is, where would the drones fly? The best answer I've come up with is directly overhead non-highway surface streets. Or put another way, where is it OK for drones to crash?

I do think the FAA is too risk adverse, and they ought to allow less-limited market trials in large metropolitan areas. The current UAS plan is good but too conservative.

<comment><USER19> But you should also consider where it is OK for delivery trucks to crash, and whether a drone crash or truck crash is more likely to cause damage or injury.

<comment><USER18> Hence overhead non-highway surface streets. Drones are typically fairly small, smaller than delivery trucks. And hopefully the drone operators can figure out how to avoid power lines, overhead trains, etc. Wind could blow a non- functioning (or even worse, incorrectly vectored) drone off the street as it falls towards the ground. A market test could start off by declaring streets OK for overhead drone activity.

I bet if the FAA opened it up to cities to decide whether it's OK for a drone to operate commercially above their streets, you'd get dozens or hundreds of cities move to allow it. Starting with Seattle.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure why you think it would be okay to fly over non-highway streets, where presumably there will be pedestrians. Already there has been an injury caused by a drone falling on top of someone ([http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26921504](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26921504)).

Regarding avoiding power lines: is that actually feasible? Either you have to program a GPS route from the warehouse to the delivery address avoiding all obstructions, or you have to use some kind of radar so that you can detect obstructions even in fog (or maybe just not operate in low visibiliity). It's not a trivial problem, and I'm not sure if the proponents have really thought it out.

PS, if you're going to downvote my comment, at least explain why.

<comment><USER21> Don't worry, there's a whole lot of posts in this thread that terrified would- be censorers have tried to hide! You're not alone!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> From reading all these legal nuances I feel like next step would be to rent away for free drones to customers which they will use in turn to pickup their packages at amazon warehouses :)

<comment><USER23> That was my first thought: a Prime membership could include fractional ownership in a drone, so any delivery would be my personal fraction of a drone delivering my package for recreational purposes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't see what problem delivering packages with drones would be solving, package delivery seems already quite efficient to me. Also I suppose drones would often be able to deliver just one package at a time because of weight restrictions.

I pick up most of my packages at the local post office because I live in an apartment, it's a 5 minute walk away, not really an inconvenience.

<comment><USER25> It's like saying "why use phone when telegraph is good enough". If you can order things and receive them very fast in any place, there are things that you can start ordering that otherwise you wouldn't do.

It's raining and you need an umbrella, with nomsalesperson near? Order a drone. Forgot to buy mayo back in the store? Order throug drone and get it in an hour.

But there once you're able to order stuff and get it within minutes, not hours or days, there are other effects that start happening. For one, you don't need to stockpile supplies anymore, or you can do things more spontaneusly. Will 40 or 100'people come to a party. Who cares, if there are not enough forks or plates, you can order them fast. Or, if you want to play in garage, you don't have to make sure that you've got all the supplies well in advance, or go to the store and back 20'times.

Think how many businesses were spawned, and how much more efficient are people now that there are mobile phones, not just stationary. But ic an imagine people saying "who needs mobile, I can call when i get back home, and i've got an answering machine if someone calls when i'm away.

<comment><USER24> I'm sorry but that sounds just silly to me, planning ahead is a basic life skill if you ask me, but I get that people would pay for it, ignorance is bliss.

I know I'm sounding condescending, but that's not why I'm replying to this topic, this is just one of those things that right now to me seem like the wrong direction to look at when solving peoples problems, a dead end so to speak.

The whole smartphone/tablet thing is a sore point for me as well, I love the hardware but I don't like the mobile OS movement at all, I hate that there is no real push to go in the direction of something like Ubuntu for Android[1] as the devices are getting more capable.

[1][http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/ubuntu-for- android](http://www.ubuntu.com/phone/ubuntu-for-android)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> One of the interesting pieces I picked up from the related reading to this article is that any use of FPV equipment on a model aircraft puts it square out of the exemptions as far as the FAA is concerned. If the operator does not have un-aided eyes on object at all times, they lose the protection of the exemptions afforded to model aircraft.

Bleh.

<comment><USER27> There are similar restrictions for flying visually or by instruments. Even flying visually you wouldn't pass your flight test if you restricted your field of view to anything like a normal camera.

It's amazing how prescriptive the aviation industry is, often with demonstrable reason, so it doesn't surprise me that drones/models are also evaluated in an equally stern light. Though I think there's a good argument for exemptions the lower hazards involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I really can't see the need for premature bans. Has there been a significant amount of accidents involving the use of delivery drones? I don't think so, so why potentially limit your competitiveness? :(

<comment><USER29> 418 U.S. military drones have crashed so far. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/06/22/cr...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/06/22/crashes- mount-as-military-flies-more-drones-in-u-s/) Do you think commercial drones will be better-maintained or have more experienced pilots? I don't.

<comment><USER30> These are very very different types of aircraft. Sort of like saying a few submarines have sunk therefore we are outlawing all boats.

<comment><USER31> Beyond carrying weapons or higher-that-prosumer-quality video equipment, they are not all that different. UAS go from the sized aircraft one would typically think of as "military drone" to the small hand-launched aircraft used by people on the ground [0]. Using a submarine<->boat analog I'd argue with as the overall physics and operating principles of the two are hugely different.

[0] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/12/us-military- min...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/12/us-military-mini-drones- battlefield)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > > If an individual offers free shipping in association with a purchase or > other offer, FAA would construe the shipping to be in furtherance of a > business purpose, and thus, the operation would not fall within the > statutory requirement of recreation or hobby purpose.

> Surprising? No, but it is almost fun to see the government be so particular > in its language

Well couldn't amazon get around this by using _negative_ shipping, whereas they pay you to ship items to you? Like pay you a penny. To me being "so particular in [..] language" just leads to loop holes.

<comment><USER33> Why would amazon pay you? In furtherance of a business purpose.

It turns out that judges aren't stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'd like the US to be the innovators on drone deliveries but it looks like we'll pass that opportunity up. Maybe we can outlaw any form of driverless car as well. Just as both are getting to be new markets that could increase economic growth.

Drones, if they are more efficient than truck deliveries from a cost and energy use perspective, for most things they will be the solution used. It is just does the US want that to happen here or elsewhere.

Drone energy use and possible accidents will be less than truck/delivery energy use and accidents in the future.

<comment><USER35> Silicon Valley and the tech sector is full of adult babies. Watching the twitter reaction to this news (and others) is pretty fascinating. You're all so doom-and-gloom the first second the government tries to regulate something. Let's not discuss the histrionics that come out on other topics. Further, you act like there could be no possible logical reason why these things should be regulated. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of onerous regulation or regulatory capture, but you guys are just a bunch of babies.

I think there should be rules about drones, because I can easily think of several _really fucking bad_ things that could happen if everyone who wants to tinker can just fly their drones around because they've got the money and know how. What happens if Amazon tries to deliver a package, but the software fucks up and the drone flies over the airport (assuming the engineers even thought of that problem in advance)? What happens when multiple business start flying drones around and they start crashing into one another, falling on people, highways, or whatever? I've seen a video where a guy decapitated himself with his gas powered toy helicopter. Are these drones going to be safe if they crash into me, or should I walk around with a shotgun?

We need rules. We don't need onerous rules, but we need rules.

<comment><USER36> You're absolutely right that there should be regulations. The reaction you are seeing is because the FAA is so behind the times that it hurts. This topic is just now coming into mainstream news, but it's been going on for a long long time.

In 2012, _Congress_ told the FAA to hurry up. Do you know how far behind the FAA had to be for _Congress_ to notice that the FAA wasn't doing their job? Yeah, it's that bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> First comment, couldn't have put it better myself:

N Lawrence Pfeifer "FAA Bans The Use Of Drones To Deliver Packages" "As such, the FAA wants to ban it."

TechCrunch, please.

</comment><comment><USER38> UPDATE:

 _" This is about hobbyists and model aircraft, not Amazon," said Mary Osako, a spokeswoman for the Seattle-based company. The rule, she said, doesn't apply to commercial entities such as Amazon and "has no effect on our plans."_

 _The rule applies only to hobbyists and was meant to clarify what services are considered legal and what are not within that category, FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown told CNET. For hobbyists, "using a model aircraft to move a box from point to point without any kind of compensation," is OK, according to the guidelines, while accepting a fee for delivery services is not._

Source: [http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-dont-worry-our-drones-are- st...](http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-dont-worry-our-drones-are-still- preparing-for-takeoff/)

<comment><USER36> Not sure if Mary Osako is clueless or trying some PR angle that I don't get.

Yes, the FAA statement was to clarify what is okay for hobbyists. The FAA clearly states that accepting payment takes you out of the hobbyist category and puts you into the commercial category. And there is a blanket ban if you fall into the commercial category.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Advice to attempt to find a loophole or skirt the law in some way probably won't turn out good for Amazon. A better approach would be to cooperate and participate in discussions with the FAA and for Amazon to perhaps help pioneer new regulation regarding drones for commercial purposes like package delivery.

Also I don't think the negative shipping part would work because isn't it still free shipping since the customer isn't paying for it? It isn't free to Amazon and that's not what the free part is for. So negative shipping is still free shipping.

</comment><comment><USER40> I think this is a sensible decision until safety concerns have been adequately addressed. Innovation is great, shorter delivery time is awesome, but not at the expense of safety of general public.

</comment><comment><USER41> So theoretically, I could start using a drone to deliver gifts to my friends. Non-commercial, not "free shipping in association with a purchase or other offer" right?

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm curious, do the people who think that they should be allowed to fly their unmanned aircraft without restrictions also think that they should be allowed to fly their _manned_ aircraft without restrictions, or should the rules be different because the pilot is on the ground rather than in the vehicle itself?

<comment><USER43> Last time I checked, commercial manned aircraft were regulated but not banned outright. In this case, FAA is banning commercial unmanned aircraft altogether, so unless you consider banning altogether to be a regulation, I don't think your comparison stands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Another example of the government becoming overly involved in private enterprise. There are times when the government should become involved, but it must be done in a responsible manner. Government needs to catch up with technological innovation rather than continuing to stifle it.

</comment><comment><USER45> I envision drones as being personally owned and then sent out to do tasks like pick up things from stores anyway. Businesses just need to create places for them to land. It seems that would be fully within the scope of the rules.

</comment><comment><USER46> There's a fatal flaw.

Even _if_ commercial delivery drones could be engineered to not crash into people or houses, not tangle with power lines, not cause accidents on highways, and not collide with each other once they are common, there's one thing that will instantly get them banned.

That will be the time someone uses a UAV to deliver 10 Oz of Semtex and a proximity sensor to someone they don't like. Exactly how are you going to stop that becoming common, if there are lots of UAVs in the air everywhere?

Actually this factor is probably why they will definitely be banned _before_ there is any commercial take-up. Because there are some powerful people who very many people don't much like. And this application will be very unpopular with the powerful.

<comment><USER47> You can use a car packed with explosives triggered by mobile phone to target someone you don't like. It's much easier and more reliable than the short- distance drone. Should we ban cars and mobile phones?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> It would be interesting to see Amazon revamp their warehouses to use these drones.

</comment><comment><USER49> They shouldn't have asked.

</comment><comment><USER50> Clach of clans

</comment><comment><USER51> Good. What a terrible, terrible idea. Imagine these things falling from the sky a few times a day in major metro areas.

<comment><USER52> 1900s: Imagine these bulky cars hitting people. ;)

<comment><USER53> related (With cool banners from 1933): [http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/murder- machines/](http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/murder-machines/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Drones are really annoyingly loud. This isn't a bad thing at all.

<comment><USER55> How quickly do you think they will get quieter?

<comment><USER56> Depends, how fast can you run from our future robot overlords. Point being, noise should be the the least of concerns [http://rt.com/news/167168-riot- control-pepper-spray-drone/](http://rt.com/news/167168-riot-control-pepper- spray-drone/)

<comment><USER55> Well, if they are quieter, we won't hear them coming to riot control us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Establishment resists potentially disruptive technology. News at 11.

While agencies of government have never hesitated to step in and order people about, I am somewhat concerned that they are saying "Stop that at once!" far less often, in favor of "Don't even think about it."

Rather than allowing people to test the limits of their ingenuity, and intervene only when there is a demonstrable externality to be addressed, they are now issuing orders based upon an unrealized potential for harm. I think the latter demands a higher standard. You would have to be worrying about buildings burning down and people dying before I would want anyone to ban _something that hasn 't even been done yet_. Let's ban people from building nuclear reactors in their toolsheds, yes. Maybe don't allow people to set off high-powered fireworks in the middle of a bunch of flammable homes. And let's not drive cars at high speed through suburban avenues where children, joggers, and pets may be present.

How, exactly, would software-piloted package-delivery aircraft present such a severe threat to life and property that we have to conclude that they cannot possibly be operated safely?

The public wants to use its airspace in a manner that benefits them. That includes noncommercial hobbyists, people such as journalists and surveyors profiting incidental to their usual work, and people earning money directly. The FAA does not get to pick the winners and losers here. That job, unfortunately, belongs to the legislature, not the executive (unfortunate in the sense that they have opted not to do their jobs, of course).

FAA is either exceeding its authority, or its authority is ambiguous at a result of legal refactoring proceeding more slowly than societal development. Either way, it stops Amazon from even trying, while black marketeers will blithely use drones to make drops of contraband, and cops and soldiers will use them for illegal surveillance and ethically dubious methods of crowd control.

As with so many other things, the real barrier here is how much it costs for Average Joe to buy and operate his own software-piloted drone. If you can get one cheaply enough, drones will eventually be resupplying beers from the camper to the bass boat, and the FAA will be stuck trying to enforce an extremely unpopular decision that is routinely ignored by people who have never even heard of it.</comment>


Google Sees The Future. - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/31/google-launches-future-search/

<comment><USER2> :|

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't tell if this is a joke or not, given it's by April Fools and all. And when I looked on Google Au, it wasn't there.

<comment><USER4> Google traditionally runs a prank every April 1st.

<comment><USER3> I didn't think they put it out on March 31st at the time. But in retrospect, it was april fools in Australia while I was reading it on march 31st in the US. I deserved my down votes.</comment></comment></comment>


A recent paper proposes to bring zeppelins back - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/zeppelins-stopped-flying-after-hindenburg-disaster-now-scientists-want-bring-ncna1043911 <comment><USER2> CargoLifter [1] tried to bring Zeppelins back in the late nineties. They started building a gigantic manufacturing building but ran out of money before they even started to build a Zeppelin. The hangar was later turned into an aqua park but ran into troubles because the heating expenses were too high. Not surprising given the hangar was designed to be open at both ends.

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

<comment><USER3> The aqua park is actually doing quite well nowadays [https://www.tropical- islands.de/en/](https://www.tropical-islands.de/en/)

<comment><USER2> Good to know, I always wanted to visit it. Maybe I'll do...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Allied forces went to great lengths in creating specialized bullets to ignite hydrogen from zeppelins. The common conception of zeppelins being wildly flammable seems misplaced in this context.

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

In my eyes zeppelin travel would be a welcome alternative to current air accommodations. In the same way I prefer taking a room on a train to air travel, I would prefer a cabin on an airship to either. If cargo can be transported, then I would expect a similar arrangement to the existing container ship passages.

<comment><USER5> In the article they talk about how the airships would be unmanned due to the risk of fire.

<comment><USER6> Which is a very shortsighted view from them IMO. An unmanned hydrogen filled airship may spare passengers and crew in case of an accident because there is none of either, but if catches fire over a stadium or a highway while carrying 5 grand pianos that wouldn't make it less deadly than the Hindenburg.

<comment><USER7> In fact, two thirds of people aboard the Hindenburg survived. Since the we had a lot more aircraft landing accidents where all passengers died in the jet fuel fire.

<comment><USER8> But on the other hand, the whole class made less than 100 flights, which makes it more than a thousand times more deadly than the 737 MAX even with two thirds surviving. So the bad reputation is not just the outcome of exceptional media coverage (I do wonder how the failure rate compares to it's fixed wing contemporaries though, they surely were quite terrible by today's standards as well)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A wild dream of mine is to build a 1/4 scale replica of an Imperial Star Destroyer that would actually be a zeppelin in disguise.

Just imagine that thing floating mightily in the sky like the actual starship from Star Wars.

You could even jump with a parachute or a wingsuit from the starfighter hangar bay.

If any zillionaire out there wants to tackle this...

<comment><USER10> Let's try maths on that! An Imperial Star Destroyer is ~1600m long, and has a volume of ~9.3e7m³ [1]. At 1/4 scale, it would be 400m long and have a volume of 9.3e7/4³ ≈ 1.45e6m³. The largest zeppelin ever made was the Hindenburg, which was 245m long and had a volume of ~2e5m³ [2].

I think your dream is unlikely to come to fruition, but zillionaire is in the right ballpark!

[1] [http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=117422](http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?t=117422)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg- class_airship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindenburg-class_airship)

<comment><USER11> Bring on the 1/8 scale model!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been hearing about the return of Zeppelins since the 1980s. Still hasn't happened.

> But for all their high-tech advances, Hunt said, the new airships would > still get their buoyancy from hydrogen, a highly flammable gas that is 14 > times lighter than air. It's the same gas the Hindenburg and the other big > zeppelins used in the 1930s.

As a reminder, the Hindenburg was originally designed for helium. They were unable to get the US to lift its ban on the export of helium under the Helium Control Act of 1927.

> As an additional bonus, Hunt said, the fuel cell would generate as a > byproduct water that could be released as the craft passed over regions hit > by drought.

That's isn't much amount of water, and certainly not enough to affect a drought.

Figuring 2km long x 200m x 200m that's about 3E9 mol of gas. You need some lifting gas for the vehicle weight - call it 1E9 mol or 5E8 mol of water, which is 30K tons. That's 27 acre feet, which appears to be enough for about 15 acres of potatoes for a growing season, using numbers from [https://www.ardentmills.com/media/1725/colorado-quinoa- susta...](https://www.ardentmills.com/media/1725/colorado-quinoa- sustainability-story.pdf) .

And I think I'm highly over-estimating.

<comment><USER13> Well at least for now we are not running out of Helium: www.ox.ac.uk/news/2016-06-28-huge-helium-discovery-life-saving-find

<comment><USER14> But... we are. We're using it at a rate that's faster than the rate it is produced in.

Just because we find a pocket or two that we haven't found before doesn't mean that the problem is gone. The new pockets are usually more difficult to extract helium from, and storing it and transporting it is a painful process to say the least. The problem won't be truly gone until we find a way to gather it from outer space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Weather is the enemy of airships: three of the four large helium-filled US airships were brought down by structural damage from bad weather. Forecasting is now good enough that bad weather can probably be avoided, but airships are not fast enough to be routed around developing or fast-moving storms, so regions of unsettled weather might be off-limits for days at at time.

<comment><USER16> would it be possible for them to rise above the storm systems and thus avoid them? Or is that where the jet streams are?

I have wondered about a similar thing in the context of solar panels floating on the oceans: if the weather and the waves get too rough, just go drive to -5 meters or so to avoid damage from the waves and surface after the storm is over. But of course, salt water corrosion and growth of marine life on the panels is going to be a big problem with that

<comment><USER17> I think you miss the scale of strong storms. Updrafts and their corresponding downdrafts can commonly reach 40,000 feet with severe storms far higher than that. Many storms, especially in the central US can exceed 65MPH in forward ground motion.

<comment><USER18> I think you miss how high balloons can go. Strong storms top out at roughly 60,000 feet. Weather balloons can easily reach 100,000 feet and are often only altitude-limited by the fact that their skin is designed to burst after they reach a certain point. There's really no reason you couldn't design an airship for flight above storm conditions as long as its weight to lift ratio is kept low enough.

<comment><USER8> A balloon can be designed with excessive slack for accommodating the dramatic pressure differential between ground level and typical weather balloon altitudes, but neither airships (rigid or semi-rigid) nor blimps could ever hope to come close. Airships would fail to enclose enough volume power structural weight and blimps tailored for high altitude would fail to keep shape at lower altitudes.

Even if the problem was somehow solved for blimps, (perhaps with an internal "diving bladder" filled by compressing some of the carrying gas), their cross section at lower altitudes would be prohibitively big, making them effectively unmaneuverable. A very high altitude blimp would effectively be a one-way vehicle, it could raise as an uncontrolled balloon (then it might even be acceptable to not solve the slack issue at all), then operate as a dirigible at target altitude.

<comment><USER18> I fail to see why a blimp could not be designed in the same way as a weather balloon with a highly expandable skin. They already utilize bladders extensively. You would have to suspend your payload / drive unit below the balloon the same way a weather balloon does, but that's not a deal breaker. This seems like a materials engineering problem more than a design engineering one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Who are the people always cited as being concerned by using hydrogen, every single time there is an article on airships? Do they exist? If so, are they just contrarians we can ignore? The technology is doomed if every time someone suggests it they start by explaining why it won't explode like that incident that happened 80 years ago that your parents might remember from a Led Zeppelin album cover.

"Unlike blimps built in the last 50 years, the the suggestion is to revert to an even older technology and using hydrogen for lift, cheaper, safer and more environmentally friendly than the alternatives."

<comment><USER20> Airliners take off full of fuel. Many airliners have ended in fiery crashes. Yet we still fly in them, all the time. Myself included. We drive around in cars full of fuel, that burn, too. People even drive around in hydrogen fueled cars.

Why should Zeppelins be held to a far higher standard than airliners?

<comment><USER2> Makes me thinking: What is the total energy of a full airplane vs a Zeppelin for roughly same cargo or passenger number.

<comment><USER21> Just stubby pencil work here because I'm up at entirely the wrong hour and this might help me go back to sleep.

Envelope volume of the Goodyear blimp is ~8.5e6 liters.

Density of hydrogen at STP is ~0.09g/L. If we filled the Goodyear blimp with that we'd have ~765kg of hydrogen gas. Let's round up to cover the slight operating pressure and say we have 800kg of hydrogen.

Energy density of hydrogen is very high, 141MJ/kg. Energy density of Jet A is ~45MJ/kg.

So our hypothetical blimp has the equivalent of 2600kg of Jet A on board.

The Goodyear blimp only holds 8 passengers plus two pilots. A similarly sized jet would be the Learjet 60. It holds 3500kg of fuel.

So, most jets probably have more on takeoff and less on landing.

<comment><USER22> The Hindenburg carried around 200k m³ of hydrogen, or 18,000kg, storing 2.54 PJ of energy, or equivalent to 56,400 kg of jet fuel. A 747 can carry more than four times that (240k-ish); an A320 or 737 carries slightly more than half (25k-ish). The Hindenburg only carried some 70 passengers, though.

<comment><USER21> Whoa the Hindenburg was huge: [http://thesaratogasake.blogspot.com/2010/06/big-things- again...](http://thesaratogasake.blogspot.com/2010/06/big-things- again.html?m=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> yoz-y A completely naïve question: Is there any chance we could get buoyancy from void if the materials are strong enough?

<comment><USER23> Don't know about the material science behind it. But from a purely physical point of view, the problem there is that void (= vacuum) does not have any pressure. So the frame would have to support itself against the atmospheric pressure instead of the gas doing it from the inside – that is a big technical challenge. The catastrophic failure scenario (hull breach) would be an implosive compression of the entire hull, which kinda sounds worse than a hydrogen-fuelled fire.

<comment><USER24> I read about this a lot a while ago, the main solution I came across was that in the _diamond age_ when we get to that point in societal development. We'll be able to make tiny diamond bubbles with a vacuum inside, and they can be used to create airships and floating platforms. The airship doesn't have to be a single large vacuum diamond hull, but could also be made from many smaller diamonds which would help prevent a catastrophic failure. The diamond bubbles would be strong and light enough to hold the vacuum.

<comment><USER25> The wikipedia entry on "vacuum airships, as they're called," is nicely detailed. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_airship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_airship)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There alternatives to zeppelins [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_airship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_airship)

<comment><USER27> I wonder if it is feasible as a miniature version for cargo drones. Probably would add quite a bit of range for the cost of speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> According to the article, these new zeppelins would be 1) huge, 2) hydrogen- filled, and 3) uncrewed and automatically piloted.

If there are any Hollywood producers reading this, I suddenly have a great idea for an action film involving maleovelent hackers and a slow moving fleet of explosive destruction.

<comment><USER16> I'm picturing extremely slow moving cinematography like in DBZ in the battle against Cell (which was stretched over weeks' worth of episodes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here is a BBC dramatization of Lady Grace Drummond's 1929 sensationalized first-person account (sponsored by Hearst) of an around the world trip on the Graf Zeppelin:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4jq7oRxw-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4jq7oRxw-g)

<comment><USER30> NB, Hearst, William Randolph. Grandfather of Patty. Creater of the eponymous Castle (and a northern cousin). And inspiration of _Citizen Kane_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Related: Blimp Boom or Bust? Assessing Airship Business Opportunities for Helicopter Operators > [https://www.rotorandwing.com/2018/11/02/assessing- airship-bu...](https://www.rotorandwing.com/2018/11/02/assessing-airship- business-opportunities-helicopter-operators/)

</comment><comment><USER32> "The idea would be that the whole process would be automated so that in case you have an accident, no one will be injured — only the equipment and the cargo,"

"And in other news, tragedy struck earlier today, as hundreds were killed when a cargo blimp exploded, dropping its 250 tonnes of cargo 40,000 feet into an apartment block in Chicago..."

<comment><USER33> Just don't fly over highly populated areas?

<comment><USER34> I'm sure they'll make that rule right after!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> They've been coming back for 30 years, I think I'll be excited when I see one

<comment><USER36> It is really cool I saw Airlander flying before its crash and I can almost see the Cardington Sheds from my office window.

And years ago ago I remember seeing Airship industry flying around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Quite apart from the dangers of hydrogen, zeppelins handle bad weather only so well. The US Navy had a couple of large zeppelins in the 1920s. They used helium, but both, as I recall, were damaged and lost in storms.

</comment><comment><USER38> The only reason to bring them back is the fancy steampunky look. From the practical side, they would be a step back.

<comment><USER39> Step back from what? A middle sized autonomous airship carrying one container, would be a huge step up from semi trucks, as it would be 2-3 times faster would not cause damage to roads, could be used in places where there are no good roads, and if thin film perovskite solar cells become reality would generate the energy needed for its flight by itself.

<comment><USER40> A standard 6m shipping container has a maximum gross weight of 30,480kg. The current Zepplin NT craft have a payload of 1,900kg and are 75m long. So it seems that quite a substantial airship might be required, e.g. a modern version of the 240m long "Hindenburg" would be able to deliver a shipping container, given that [1] quotes it as having about 20,000kg of payload capacity (including crew, passengers, food) but allowing for further weight savings with modern aero engines, etc.

[1] [https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/calculating-lifting- capacity-o...](https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/calculating-lifting-capacity-of- airships-48df5cd7d147)

<comment><USER41> They state the dimensions in the OP: a mile and a half long at altitude, 10 times larger than the Hindenburg, payload of 20,000 tons. No, not 20,000 pounds - tons.

<comment><USER40> That's the "replace a freighter" model - I was commenting on the parent's "replace a road truck", which seems like a poorer return: since any Zeppelin is going to be inconveniently large may as well go for broke.

<comment><USER41> Yep, it only makes sense economically (and physically) if it is big enough to carry a few dozen shipping containers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> An electric Airbus Beluga will be a lot more efficient.

</comment><comment><USER43> The thing about zeppelins is, that (party) balloons give the completely wrong intuition about things that float in air. A balloon does float quite freely and without much air resistance, but by contrast a zeppelin is a substantial piece of machinery with a lot of area to generate air resistance. Actually to the point, where it is less energy consuming to use a plane, instead of fighting against the wind.

<comment><USER44> Eh, I wouldn't say that a balloon floats without much air resistance. Trying to throw one to someone else is difficult, for example.

The cheap footballs that are thin skinned - we used to call them 'flyaway' balls when I was younger. Because even those, substantially heavier than a balloon, would go off in random directions due to their susceptibility to wind from the low weight.

But actually, I've never thought of a zeppelin this way before. It gives a good intuition - but for the opposite reason you've stated, that they _do_ act kind of like balloons, and that's not what you want from a directed vehicle!

<comment><USER45> > Because even those, substantially heavier than a balloon, would go off in > random directions due to their susceptibility to wind from the low weight.

Just be sure to keep in mind that while zepperlins, dirigibles and aerostats are subjected to non-negligible amounts of buoyant force due to low density, that does not make them light, nor easy to push around.

If you carry 20kt of cargo, plus the weight of the vehicle (including the weight of the lifting gas), I don't think a wind gust would blow you away, regardless of how strong it is.

Try to push around a big buoy, that gives an idea of the challenge.

Moreover, spheres are one of the aerodynamically poorest shapes (if not the most), actually worse than a flat sail. That's probably the biggest reason for Zeppelin's shape (or the rugby ball, for that matter).</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to expand in China? - <AUTHOR>

We've just launched our iOS app (an iPad travel magazine) and I've started to think about how to expand in china and other east Asian countries, like Japan and South Korea (the biggest App Store markets in the region). Does anyone have experience doing this? I would love to hear ideas from people for a bootstrapped PR strategy or from people who actually have iOS apps and how well its been working for them.
Right now I'm running into two problems. One, I'm having trouble finding places to send pitches to. Is there a Techcrunch of China? A app review site of Japan? I'm a little lost because of the language barrier. I don't even know how to find blogs that will cover us. If anyone here has names, please throw them out.
The second problem I'm running into is related to the first. I don't speak the language, so its hard to communicate or understand Chinese, Japanese or Korean language blogs and websites. We also can't really localize our app. Its a long-form travel magazine, so translating thousands upon thousands of words and making sure they matches the emotion of the story is beyond our budget. It seems silly to translate a menu item in our app just to leave the content unreadable, so we haven't considered it.
So not only do I need to find places, I need to find places with English language audiences. Any suggestions? Has anyone had any success with their apps in Asia? I'd be interested in hearing from both people with localized apps and without, and from people whose strategies have failed. <comment><USER2> Try to get in touch with <http://chinesepod.com>. They seem very friendly and understand the local culture. You could also target ex-pats.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean to ask them who I should contact over there, or to learn the language?

<comment><USER2> Neither. I did not mean to be sarcastic. Perhaps they can feature your website in their blog or they can refer you to a site visited by ex-pats. They could even provide you with Chinese marketing knowledge in exchange for a equity or a fee or for free. I'm just brainstorming all of this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, got it. Well, its the only suggestion so far. I guess not a lot of people think about it.

<comment><USER2> Good luck!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pwn2Own 2016 Won't Attack Firefox (Because It's Too Easy) - <AUTHOR> http://www.eweek.com/security/pwn2own-hacking-contest-returns-as-joint-hpe-trend-micro-effort.html <comment><USER2> Some other possible reasons:

1) Mozilla as an organization has previously expressed the opinion that contests like this have bad side-effects (like causing delays in vulnerabilities being reported by researchers who find them, hence leaving users exposed when the vulnerability could have been fixed). Keep in mind that the browser vendors are involved in funding the contest, so said opinion could be read as "we don't want to pay you money for something we think is harmful".

2) Mozilla has had the best response times of the browser vendors on Pwn2Own bugs, which means the other vendors have incentive to keep them out of the contest if they can spin it as a problem with Firefox, not with the contest.

Notably, Firefox has made security improvements in the last year. "Serious", is of course a subjective judgement.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One change in the 2016 event is that the Mozilla Firefox Web browser is no longer part of the contest.

"We wanted to focus on the browsers that have made serious security improvements in the last year," Gorenc said.

I took the liberty of using slashdot's headline, here: [http://it.slashdot.org/story/16/02/12/034206/pwn2own-2016-wo...](http://it.slashdot.org/story/16/02/12/034206/pwn2own-2016-wont- attack-firefox-because-its-too-easy)</comment>