In field tests, device harvests water from desert air - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2018/field-tests-device-harvests-water-desert-air-0322 <comment><USER2> Ok, I have a dumb question about this sort of technology. Aren't these devices essentially just borrowing from tomorrow by capturing moisture that would have eventually collected as clouds? Are there any long-term ramifications to using these?

<comment><USER3> Clouds are quite cheap. Most of them drop most of their water over areas that would not significantly suffer from a marginal reduction of rainfall (the oceans, the arctics, mountain ranges).

And a dryer average atmosphere should be partially compensated by increased evaporation from the oceans. Overall, this technology should be applicable on a continental scale before it shows any measurable effect on other areas.

<comment><USER4> > areas that would not significantly suffer from a marginal reduction of > rainfall (the oceans, the arctics, mountain ranges)

Agreed as to the ocean and the arctic, but precipitation over mountain ranges is generally recovered by lower-altitude communities when the water eventually flows down to them.

Snowmelt has been a major source of water historically.

<comment><USER5> Also the artics are essentially cold deserts, they don't get much precipitation and there is likely very little that could trace its origin to the hot deserts of the world.

<comment><USER6> That's not really true.

 _Parts_ of the arctics are definitely deserts, but that is not true for _all_ of the arctic regions.

Looking at the relevant parts of wikipedia [0] and [1], "annual precipitation averaged over the whole planet is about 1000 mm" while "parts of southeast Greenland [recieve] over 1200 mm". Antarctica has a lot less precipitation in general, but there are still large parts of it that are not classified as desert.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_the_Arctic#Precipit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_the_Arctic#Precipitation)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Antarctica#Precipit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Antarctica#Precipitation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could this be used on Mars?

The humidity at the surface is 30 to 75 ppm [1]. Clouds have been known to form.

If Elon Musk gets interested, I think the MIT researchers could get the investment they need to scale this up.

I'm just grateful to read some good news about scientific progress for a change. Useful inventions like this give me more hope for humanity.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4508910/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4508910/)

<comment><USER8> Very cool idea.

Few potential issues come to mind:

\- I bet dust would muck up the MOF

\- Dust would need to be swept off to allow sunlight energy to reach the solar chamber.

\- Ambient temperature on mars in below the freezing point of water. May not get enough sun to warm the MOF enough to drive off the moisture. EDIT: Found a source saying that water vaporizes during the day because of the reduced pressure - interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty neat. From previous papers it is using temperature swing adsorption[1] pull the water out of the air. Basically their MOF material collects on its surface (adsorbtion) water at one temperature and releases it (desorption) at the other. In this way, just by putting their material out in the Sun light the day/night cycle will collect and then dispense the collected water all passively.

The 'catch' is how expensive is it to produce the MOF and how long does it work before it needs to be replaced. In an ideal world, with a cheap catalyst and infinite lifetime, you could build a large tower full of this stuff and it would pour water out during the desorption process.

[1] [https://www.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special- interest/mavt/p...](https://www.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special- interest/mavt/process-engineering/separation-processes-laboratory- dam/documents/education/rcs%20notes/ArvindRajendran_AdsorptionBasics.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes, you can extract water from air. You have just re-invented distillation, in a painfully mind blowing way.

In Chile we have the driest desert on earth, the Atacama desert, this projects have "tried" to address the challenge of getting fresh water in remote communities located in such places. State funds have been directed toward similar "science" projects. TV has dedicated time and resources to explore this "idea".

This has to stop, the amount of water that you can extract from air is related to the amount of humidity in that place's air. You don't need much to understand that the amount of water in the air isn't much in places such as deserts. And if you have lots of humidity in the air, you can probably get water from other sources, such as rain.

<comment><USER11> You said it yourself, the Atacama is the driest desert on earth. I imagine that environment would be the _most_ difficult to extract water from.

Develop the tech in easier locales then, once the major details are worked out, target the outliers.

<comment><USER10> Air already has X amount of water, you cannot get more than X. It doesn't matter if X is very tiny like in deserts or very large like in the middle of the pacific ocean.

<comment><USER11> Per cubic meter, sure, but there is a lot more of it than that to work with

We build our space equipment the same way... arrange for/synthesize/simulate a close analogue of an environment for initial development and then move on to the real thing once the initial quirks are solved. I certainly don't know the science behind water extraction but I imagine an extremely dry locale would not be the best place to be performing all your validation tests. Maybe start with a kind-of-dry desert, or some other biome. Like Joshua Tree instead of Death Valley...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> could this idea work? tie these devices to balloons, so they can reach the high humidities of the clouds, then when waters collect the balloons will drop to the ground, dumping the water into a collector. as the water is dumped the device rises again to continue humidity collection.

<comment><USER13> Leave it to Silicon Valley to reinvent rain.

<comment><USER14> s/reinvent/disrupt

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's the difference between MIT's prototype and Zero Mass Water?

[https://www.zeromasswater.com/](https://www.zeromasswater.com/)

Is it the minimum humidity rating?

</comment><comment><USER16> Gah, their own university press office doesn't even link to the latest paper.

Here is it after a quick search, open access too:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03162-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03162-7)

Seems interesting, for small, possibly off the grid, desert communities. Not sure how the overall lifecycle energy demands would compare to say desalination for most of the coastal population centers.

</comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me of Dune...

<comment><USER18> More like Tatooine.

<comment><USER19> Was looking for the comments about getting a droid that understands the binary language of their moisture vaporator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't see a link to the actual paper, or the title... Is the press office concerned about scaring the general public with links to actual science?!

<comment><USER21> No link, but at least they give enough information to search for it. I think it must be this one: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03162-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03162-7)

<comment><USER22> "Here, we demonstrate an air-cooled sorbent-based atmospheric water harvesting device using the metal−organic framework (MOF)-801 [Zr6O4(OH)4(fumarate)6] operating in an exceptionally arid climate (10–40% RH) and sub-zero dew points (Tempe, Arizona, USA) with a thermal efficiency (solar input to water conversion) of ~14%. We predict that this device delivered over 0.25 L of water per kg of MOF for a single daily cycle."

So what does a kilogram of the MOF cost, compared to the ordinary costs of acquiring water in dry places?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Couple this with algae growing and you could have a sustainable source of both food and water almost anywhere.

Yes, algae cakes are nasty but beggars cant be choosers.

<comment><USER24> A quarter liter per day could easily water a tree. Reforestation seems possible with this device.

<comment><USER25> >One large tree can lift up to 100 gallons of water out of the ground and discharge it into the air in a day.

This won't forest the desert. It may supplement a couple areas which could _almost_ sustain trees, but trees are some of the most water-thirsty plants around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> MOFs are generally notoriously unstable in water. Would a scaled-up system be able to perform while maintaining functionality over many cycles?

<comment><USER27> right right right -- you have an extremely high surface area of metal and you expose it to air and moisture. Why would it not oxidize in like minutes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Condensing water requires 2.265 MJ/kg, go figure how viable this is.

<comment><USER28> Let me elaborate because this received a couple of downvotes. They only use the metal-organic framework to adsorb water vapor from the atmosphere during the night and then use sunlight to desorb it during the day which leaves them with water vapor again. Now they still have to condense that into water and their 2017 paper [1] shows that they use a Peltier element paired with a big heat sink to do this. But this is the process that actually requires the most energy, disiapating 2.265 MJ/kg of water which is enough energy to heat the same amount of water by 541 K. Maybe I am missing something but to me it seems like that metal-organic framework at best provides a marginal benefit over simply condensing water on a Peltier element directly, which will, with an efficiency of 15 % [2], still require about 4.2 kWh/kg.

[1] [https://globalscience.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/water...](https://globalscience.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/waterharvesting.pdf)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling#Perform...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling#Performance)

<comment><USER21> I downvoted the original comment because I thought it was factually accurate but misleading. The implication was that the amount of energy required made it obviously nonviable, but you didn't actually show the work to make that case. Without strong evidence, "go figure how viable this is" is an unhelpful thing to say when someone claims to have a working prototype.

Your explanation here is much better (and I upvoted it), but I think it still misses the major point that the authors claim that the new device _does not use a Peltier cooler_. Instead, it's heated by the sun, and uses a passive heatsink. I think it's the same mentioned in the earlier paper as "We also report a device based on this MOF that can harvest and deliver water (2.8 L kg–1 day–1 at 20% RH) under a non-concentrated solar flux below 1 sun (1 kW m–2), requiring no additional power input for producing water at ambient temperature outdoors.".

So I think the answer to your question is "Yes, it can be viable if you have a convenient source of heat that can produce the necessary energy". 1 MJ is about 270 Watt Hours, sunlight at noon is about 1000 W/m^2, and solar thermal collection can be more than 50% efficient. This doesn't mean it's viable, but as the new paper shows, if you have a square meter of sunlight available the energy necessary for condensation is probably less of a limiting factor than the collection of the moisture into the (currently exotic) sorbent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if these could be used for irrigation without having to run water lines.

How much does the MOF cost to produce?

What is flow rate?

How would wide-scale use of these in an area effect the regional climate?

<comment><USER29> MOF's are not mass produced, and while a method has been proposed to scale up production, as far as I know it's never been tested. It's also a solvent-heavy process, and often uses a lot of benzene.

MIT the university is an amazing thing, but MIT the press release machine is pathetic.

<comment> gene-h MOFs aren't mass produced, but it is possible to produce large quantities of them. BASF has been able to make double-digit tonnage quantities of MOFs per a single production run[0]. It much simpler to make MOFs than other nanomaterials like carbon nanotubes and graphene. The MOF used in the paper is somewhat expensive as it uses zirconium, but it is possible that MOFs based on other metal ions could be used.

[0][https://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i51/Materials-Chemistry- Meta...](https://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i51/Materials-Chemistry-Metal- Organic-Frameworks.html)

<comment><USER30> Zircon (zirconium raw material) isn't very expensive. Removing hafnium from zirconium compounds to reach nuclear-application purity is expensive. Reducing zirconium compounds to metal is expensive. The authors start with zirconyl chloride, which doesn't have either of those expensive requirements.

For anyone else wanting to read the full paper, it's open access in Nature Communications: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03162-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03162-7)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This won't work. Purely because of thermodynamics. We already have devices that suck water out of the air - dehumidifiers. They don't collect enough water to drink.

Similar concepts were tried before:

\- [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/fontus-the-self- filling-w...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/fontus-the-self-filling- water-bottles-sport-camping)

\- [https://www.waterseer.org/](https://www.waterseer.org/)

They're all bust because it can't work.

</comment><comment><USER32> How much can it reduce indoor humidity in San Francisco...I'd love to have that be a more energy efficient process, too.

</comment><comment><USER11> Didn't some kid in Africa come up with a similar device with spare parts? How come the MIT one needs all this exotic tech?

</comment><comment><USER33> Now, can they make one that harvests drinkable water from the ocean?

</comment><comment><USER34> >The system [...] was positioned on a Arizona State University roof. It's still early stages, and the water only measured in the millimeters

Millimeters is not a useful unit of collected water! Granted millilitres wouldn't be much better without time as well.

<comment><USER35> That seems like exactly the unit. Just like when measuring rainfall, the amount collected scales with the area of the equipment. What would you prefer, mm/(mm)^2?

I would assume time is on the scale of per day; that seems, at least to me, the only time unit they wouldn't have specified here. Of course, in an article this bloggy it's not a given that the reasonable interpretation of such vague units is the interpretation intended--but I think that there is a reasonable interpretation.

<comment><USER36> Volume per unit of collection area per unit time at a given absolute humidity.

It might be a bit too technical, but anything less really can't give you a sense of scale.

<comment><USER21> The actual paper ([https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03162-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03162-7)) actually gives something very close to numbers you want, although they express it as liters/day/kilogram @ humidity. Here's the abstract:

 _Water scarcity is a particularly severe challenge in arid and desert climates. While a substantial amount of water is present in the form of vapour in the atmosphere, harvesting this water by state-of-the-art dewing technology can be extremely energy intensive and impractical, particularly when the relative humidity (RH) is low (i.e., below ~40% RH). In contrast, atmospheric water generators that utilise sorbents enable capture of vapour at low RH conditions and can be driven by the abundant source of solar-thermal energy with higher efficiency. Here, we demonstrate an air-cooled sorbent-based atmospheric water harvesting device using the metal−organic framework (MOF)-801 [Zr6O4(OH)4(fumarate)6] operating in an exceptionally arid climate (10–40% RH) and sub-zero dew points (Tempe, Arizona, USA) with a thermal efficiency (solar input to water conversion) of ~14%. We predict that this device delivered over 0.25 L of water per kg of MOF for a single daily cycle._

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03162-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03162-7)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> House Harkonnen will be pissed.

</comment><comment><USER38> Looks like a peltier dehumidifier powered by a solar panel any one has any idea what the breakthrough is exactly?

<comment><USER39> No, this device is explicitly not one of those:

> The system, based on relatively new high-surface-area materials called > metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), can extract potable water from even the > driest of desert air, the researchers say, with relative humidities as low > as 10 percent. Current methods for extracting water from air require much > higher levels ... above 50 percent for dew-harvesting refrigeration-based > systems

<comment><USER38> Thanks for trying to explain instead of simply cluelessly down voting but this still does not answer my question.

This is a Peltier device you can see the power wires and the heat sink on the hot side.

Are MOFs used in the construction of the Peltier for example are Cu3-BTC MOFs used to increase the surface area of the cold plate which improves condensation or are MOFs used as a membrane to increase the humidity in the condensation chamber to above ambient?

I really don't understand why people get triggered by honest questions and decide to burry them.

<comment><USER30> The full paper is open access. Those wires are going to thermocouples, not Peltier devices: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03162-7/figures/2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03162-7/figures/2)

There _is_ a heat sink, but it's not dissipating electrically produced heat. From the paper:

 _During day-time water production, the enclosure is closed and the solar absorber side is covered with an optically transparent thermal insulator (OTTI aerogel). The MOF layer is heated by exposure to solar irradiance, causing water release (desorption). The desorbed water vapour diffuses from the MOF layer to the condenser due to a concentration gradient. Accumulation of vapour in the enclosure leads to saturation conditions and consequently, the condensation process occurs at ambient temperature. The heat of condensation is dissipated to the ambient by a heat sink._

<comment><USER38> Brilliant! Thank you for taking the time linking the paper looks very interesting.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


MS open-sources Reactive Extensions - <AUTHOR> https://rx.codeplex.com/

<comment><USER2> Released under the Apache license 2.0 [1]. I checked because sometimes MS releases code that can only be run on Windows/Azure and calls it Open Source but doesn't meet the OSI definition.

[1] [https://rx.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/ae16c4e...](https://rx.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/ae16c4ef7c9e#Ix.JS%2flicense.txt)</comment>


Unscatter.com trying constantly updating social search results. - <AUTHOR> http://www.unscatter.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the first cut, and I'm not sure how well the little cloud server it runs on will handle a lot of load. The platform should be pretty fast under high load, it uses the python Tornado application server talking to a mongodb backend.</comment>


Garbage collection with Automatic Resource Management in Java 7 - <AUTHOR> http://javawithswaranga.blogspot.com/2011/06/garbage-collection-with-automatic.html

<comment><USER2> There's a problem with box 2. If the IOException is thrown in the stream's constructor (FileNotFoundException) then there will be a NullPointerException if we try to call close!

      InputStream in = null;
      try
      {
          in = new FileInputStream(new File("test.txt"));
          //do stuff with in
      }
      catch(IOException ie)
      {
          //SOPs
      }
      finally
      {
          try
          {
              if(in != null)
              {
                  in.close();
              }
          }
          catch(IOException ioe)
          {
              //can't do anything about it
          }
      }

This merely proves your point! :-)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I didn't realize it's this bad. My only touch base with Java has been through Clojure.

This is just horrible. What braindead system forces you to check exceptions on _closing_ a file handle? If everything failed silently and just produced 'null', the code would look like:

      InputStream in = new FileInputStream(new File("test.txt"));
      if (in) {
        ...dostuff...
        in.close();
      }

Now, that you can grasp with one _glance_. I'll trade the ability to write something like that with having to use malloc()/free() any day.

<comment><USER4> Silent failure doesn't carry information about how the thing failed: did the file not exist, was it not accessible because of security, was there a failure on the underlying device or file system?

How is the user supposed to figure out what went wrong with the program if the program can't even convey to the user what went wrong?

Complex problems have lots of simple wrong answers.

(Your "solution" also suggests nothing about how "in.close()" is going to get called if "...dostuff..." itself throws an exception.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a much needed cleanup of something that's always resulted in clutter in my code. C# has had this feature for over a decade. Nice to see Java adding this since I have a lot of Java code to maintain. Like a lot of Java devs we're switching over to Scala for new projects and using vanilla Java for legacy code. Automatic resource management can be implemented trivially in Scala without the need for a new language feature to support it. Structural subtyping is awesome!

<comment><USER6> How does structural subtyping help you implement automatic resource management?

<comment><USER5> I can define a resource management method which accepts any object which belongs to a class that provides a close method irrespective of whether that class implements close as part of an an interface or not.

<comment><USER7> (I had another comment here but I figured out the answer.)

lombok's @Cleanup will close anything, interface or not.

<comment><USER8> I took a look at lombok and it's pretty obvious from the way cleanup method names can be passed as strings that's it's using reflection. It's a bit of a nasty hack, but it works.

<comment><USER7> It fiddles with the AST during compilation. No reflection.

<comment><USER9> Sounds like it's trying to add structural subtyping via the back door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Offtopic: In the past ~week Blogger blogs have started opening on the comments section rather than the top of the page. Anyone else?

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a welcome addition to java but I wish they had chosen a slightly different syntax. My main gripe is that its not clear what the lexical scoping rules are. Most likely the variable declared in the try is only available in the body of the try, not in the catch but its an extra thing to know. As opposed to

       InputStream in;
       try(in = new FileInputStream()){
          ...
       } catch (...){
          ...
       }

Now there are no new lexical scoping rules to understand. A lesser point is that I find the try(x = e) syntax ugly. It reminds me of the C-ism where a variable is set and tested in an if statement.

       if (x = getline()){
         ...
       }

Control flow and side effects should not be mixed, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER3> If Java had stack allocated objects there would be no need for new interfaces nor new syntax.

<comment><USER4> It's not that simple. It doesn't just apply to stack allocated objects; resource ownership (in the sense of being responsible for "closing" the resource when you are yourself "closed") may and often does logically form a tree throughout the heap, and doesn't easily flatten to stack allocated objects without going further into allocating objects inline in other objects.

And when you introduce that, you have a problem of dealing with the difference between references to these inline objects: possibly on the stack or the heap, free-standing or embedded. If a reference escapes and outlives the lifetime of the object, you've created a potential dangling pointer, whereas in the normal Java or C# implementation you have at worst a semantic problem of having leaked a reference to a "closed" or disposed object. The GC won't collect it, but any operations on it will and should fail.

If you try and deal with this in the C++ way, you'll end up with far more confusion over objects passed around by reference, and objects passed around by value. Instead of the mechanism of passing being encoded by the type, it would be part of the control flow, and it would be easy to get into situations where you're working with a reference to a copy that was passed by value, and think you have a reference to the original; this is already a problem in C# to the degree that it is not recommended to create mutable value types.

TL;DR: what you suggest would create far more problems than it solves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great, now it just needs a way to prevent you from forgetting to use that...

</comment><comment><USER13> its nice but the issue for me is that it will be backwards compatible so the preJRE7 way of managing IO resources is also included , this means an even more bloated java api :-(

<comment><USER8> I think the only thing that was added to the API was a single interface called Closeable. Adding 1 interface to a library is hardly bloat. The change is essentially language support for a common syntax for resource management, not a new API.</comment></comment>


LHC spots no black holes, eliminates some versions of string theory - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/12/lhc-spots-no-black-holes-eliminates-some-versions-of-string-theory.ars

<comment><USER2> I actually submitted a version of this yesterday, but then deleted it, because it didn't seem relevant to Hacker News. Problem is, there are so many models in String Theory, I don't think this negative result will be a significant detriment for stringy researchers. From what I know, string theory is more of a framework than a concrete theory.

From TFA:

 _Contrary to some reports, this result doesn't mean the death of string theory, only the particular flavor that predicted black holes at these energies..._

<comment><USER3> Is it my understanding that, in such high level physics, getting something proven wrong is never a detriment.

<comment><USER4> As it stands, string theory is _not even wrong_.

There is no scientific proof of it, even though there are many careers based on it. It can make a good living, like religion to priests.

This is just the usual HEP PR mill.

<comment><USER5> As far as I understand (not being a mathematician/physicist), it's a unification framework rather than one theory. As a framework, it's not right or wrong, but can be fertile or infertile (akin to what philosophy is to logic, string theory would be to physics). If a (the?) TOE is found among string theories, the approach would have been fertile.

String theories are not quite like religion in that they are falsifiable, just usually not falsifiable within current technical possibilities. This experiment in the OP falsified one of the lower energy possibilities.

With this in mind, though, it may be more useful to support research closer to applied fields. That is, if public money is supporting the string theory industry, a cut in that direction would be appropriate.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Floyd Martin retires after nearly 35 years as a mailman tomorrow - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Jennifer__Brett/status/1131298044010483712 <comment><USER2> I worked as a postman for a bit. I'd wake up at 0430, make a short commute, then sort letters into street/house number order for something like 3 hours. After the first few days this became mindnumbingly dull. It was obvious 90% of what I was about to deliver would go straight in the bin so all this drudgery wad largely pointless. For a while I worked in a pretty rough area (by UK standards, admittedly nowhere in the UK is really that dangerous compared to much of the world), and on several occasions I was harassed by members of the public. Though later I worked in a much nicer area and people were nice to me.

I suspect the main thing about the story isn't how great it is to be a mailman, but how great it is to be good at people. I work from home and live in quite a nice community, but I only know a handful of people. This is basically because unless I have a common interest with someone I don't really have anything to say for myself. Clearly not something that afflicts Floyd!

<comment><USER3> "I don't really have anything to say for myself"

Kids.

It's amazing how many times people will stop to say hello when a small child says hello to them. We got invited into someone's garden last weekend to feed their chickens.

Admittedly we live in a more rural area. Might not work so well on the mean streets of London.

<comment><USER2> There's no doubt lots of people are closely connected to their local community through kids friends, their kids schools, their kids sports teams, etc. But having kids only as a means to talk to people would be a bit drastic!

<comment><USER4> Kids are definitely the ultimate cure for loneliness. A couple years in and you're likely to beg for some loneliness ;)

<comment><USER5> At least once a day

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unlike other commentators, this doesn't make me feel bad about my cubicle job working on abstract problems.

It does make me sad about living in a sterile mega city with no form of community with my neighbors. It makes me miss the days I used to live in a much smaller town, in my home land, where everyone knew each other, and we had shared festivals, feasts and fasts together.

Thanks for sharing the twitter thread.

<comment><USER7> This story takes place in Atlanta. The metro area has something like 6 million people in it. Not a 'mega city' but also not a small town.

Perhaps it's not the city that is causing the lack of community with neighbors?

<comment><USER8> This happens in Marietta which is a sizeable city but not Atlanta. It's outside of Atlanta like how Irvine is outside of LA.

My family lives in Acworth an hour a way and there are chickens wandering people's yards. GA is a bit different in that regard.

<comment><USER9> As a former Atlantan (I lived in EAV or near it for 12 years) now living on the west coast I think the trend follows here as well: twenty minutes outside of Portland and you're in the "sticks." That said, the folks who live in the further flung suburbs, exurbs, and "sticks" outside Portland tend to be a good bit nicer than their Atlanta area counterparts in my experience

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stories like this make you question whether it's worth being paid all this money to spend your life staring at a screen in a climate-controlled cube solving abstract problems that provide approximately zero benefit to your family, friends, and neighbors.

<comment><USER11> You need to separate your work from your purpose. Think of work as merely collecting resources to maintain life. Get a hobby or volunteer at a charity and find purpose there. I've been much happier with putting my "self" into designing and testing board games. I forget about the dumpster fire after I leave and focus my energy on something I enjoy creating.

<comment><USER12> I'll go ya one better and say _maybe forget your purpose entirely_. Not in a negative, nihilistic way, but in kind of a Zenny way. You think Floyd here thinks about his purpose? Well actually it seems like he has decided "my purpose is to care for these people on my route," so maybe that's a bad example for my point. Although it's worth noticing, HE decided that. Which proves, it's totally arbitrary. Meaning is wherever you ascribe it (and probably nowhere else).

Mainly the idea is not to let "purpose" be a logjam that stops you. Life will happen to you regardless. Lately I've been trying to free myself from the endless quest for (please use whiny voice, knit brow earnestly, hold upturned fists close in front of you, and wiggle them slightly while saying) _meeeaning_. It stymied me for a long time. But it has to be seen for the ego trip it is. It's a "get over yourself" moment. Rein in that fanciful and conceited ego that's always wondering what great and high purpose your magnificent and important soul was cut out for. All that pressure! Letting go of it is a bit of a death (ego death). But jeez what a relief. It frees you to do whatever you want, which ironically is the only way you might actually end up going on to do something worthwhile. (Worthwhile according to you.)

<comment><USER13> How is being anxious at discovering an objective value for oneself ("meaning") egotistical? If anything, it is an external reach out of the ego and _away_ from doing whatever you want.

<comment><USER12> My thought process is a bit circular and paradoxical, I admit it. I also tried to be brief, which led to a long list at one point being truncated to the phrase "whatever you want" which might be misleading. My intent was more like "anything at all." In other words, meaning is everywhere. Even the post office. (Or it's nowhere, and that's ok too.)

Wanting your life to be meaningful is still you, caring about your life, that's the ego part. You can skip the whole meaning thing if you want, and just start doing things. I dunno, it helped me unblock myself.

<comment><USER13> I understand the anxiety and the relief from abandoning a possibly unending and self-destructive task for "purpose", but it is exactly that energy which propels humans to do great things. But I agree, meaning can be everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You don't have to be a mailman to transform your neighborhood closer to something as heartwarming as this.

A good friend of mine worked as a programmer, then CEO, now Consultant... but in his spare time he'd spend all his energy on community projects, organizing everything, from Kids Halloween Tours in a small german city when that was very uncommon, to Developer Usergroups, to Startup Events to Barcamps, to TEDxs and so much more small and large.

Without him my area simply wouldn't be the same and many people know.

All it takes is just someone willing things like this into existence, over and over again.

<comment><USER15> Does the community have a recognition program? Key to the city?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is fucking beautiful. At the same time it makes me a little sad to work at a desk, hidden from all the people my work impacts. In a city and time where neighbors keep their heads down when they pass each other and all the mailpersons wear headphones.

<comment><USER17> The people our work impacts (at least directly) are often "disrupted" (made redundant) by the new tech. It's a good thing they don't know us by name.

<comment><USER18> English being my second language, I picked up vocabulary from random places. The word "disrupt" will forever be associated for me with "disruptor", a weapon for "disrupting" the matter of ships and people, used by murderous Klingons and backstabbing Romulans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Responses to stories like this make me uncomfortable.

I grew up on a small family farm in Iowa. Along with farming my father also took a substitute job as a rural mail carrier mostly for health insurance.

I can't find a better word than fetishizing to describe how – what I would call city people – think and talk about the world I grew up in.

Talking about where I came from and reading how people respond to this makes me uncomfortable at times, and moreso it is incredibly difficult to actually communicate to people without context how life was because of their pre- existing impressions.

<comment><USER20> I didn't read the whole thing, but I read enough to get the sense that it is a story about a place in America that still has a real sense of community. Many people today don't really have that anymore and desperately long for it.

My father grew up on a farm and was part Cherokee. My mother is an immigrant. I grew up some kind of sense of community and spent most of my adult life not really finding that again.

I have a history of fostering phenomenal growth for online communities of a certain size which then often seem to collapse and become a shadow of their former selves after I leave. I think it has to do with me being able to foster a real sense of community and no one else seems able to sustain that in my absence.

I typically leave because of being treated abusively, basically. I'm never seem to be given credit for what I am doing for the community. People seem unable to recognize what I do and seem to have no idea how to relate to me in a positive, constructive manner when I am actively fostering a sense of community, which is something I seem to just have a knack for, having grown up with certain things.

So I think people just long for a sense of community and it very often comes out in weird ways.

That doesn't mean your discomfort is unjustified. It's completely justified.

I'm just making an observation about a phenomenon and hopefully that will be somehow useful or meaningful information for someone reading the comments here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can't articulate exactly why, but this is beautiful. I see it as an example of what social media should have been and hopefully what it still might become some day.

<comment><USER22> It is beautiful and it I don't think social media can ever be like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a beautiful side of the US.

<comment><USER24> *humanity

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Happy story, but I'm also supremely jealous. The thought of retiring after only _35 years_ of work! That's the outstanding accomplishment here. Either he has a great pension (remember those?) or has been a terrific, disciplined saver over those years. My Boomer parents all had generous pensions and they also retired pretty early. Us younger folks are stuck with crappy 401(k)s that place our futures in the hands of Wall Street and the stock market and other "figure it out yourself" investment vehicles. I feel like this is another ladder that's been pulled up after that generation reached the top.

<comment><USER26> The number of work years needed before you can retire can entirely be determined by the % of your take-home pay you save. For example, to retire in 35 years (assuming a 0 net-worth), you need to save 21.5% of your money. If you're on HackerNews, you _probably_ have a high enough salary where that's absolutely doable. Bump it up to 35%, and you can knock another decade off of your working career.

You can play around with the numbers here: [https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement](https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement)

<comment><USER17> This page, like all FIRE stuff, is making rather positive assumptions about the ROI on savings (they're assuming 5% over inflation). I, for my calculations, am personally assuming 0% growth - I just don't want to end on a street when I'm 65 or 75.

<comment><USER26> Even if that's true, what's the best strategy? I posit that learning to live on less is a pretty good one.

<comment><USER17> I agree. My point is that all the FIRE crowd is quitting work way too early, due to optimistic assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Just think, for at least 25 of those years he's been driving the same truck.

<comment><USER28> Indeed, the Grumman LLV is very well designed for longevity!

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

<comment><USER27> It's a Chevy S10 that was spec'd with the reliable low power engine and a different body. It's not really anything special in terms of reliability. The post office simply committed to keeping them for 30yr then followed through. It helps that they were working with a purpose built commercial body and not an "engineered to a price point" stock truck body. Any other similar truck platform of the era would have fared similarly. The late 80s/early 90s were a time when the electronics of the 90s were coming to maturity but hadn't yet snowballed in sheer volume like they did in late 90s and early 2000s.

In any other context the internet would be all "hurr durr, GM builds junk, muh indestructible Hilux because top gear". Goes to show you how much reputation and framing matters.

In hindsight the best available platform of the late 90s/early 90s for sheer reliability (in postal use) would have been a 1st gen Explorer only because the front suspension is better suited to handling potholes and driving over curbs all day and the 31spl 8.8 rear axle is complete overkill for the application (all other differences are minor/negligible IMO).

<comment><USER29> > The late 80s/early 90s were a time when the electronics of the 90s were > coming to maturity but hadn't yet snowballed in sheer volume like they did > in late 90s and early 2000s.

A very valid point, the ECU's etc around 1990 got a lot of the benefit of having a modern ECU with a fraction of the complexity and a lot of them where bulletproof in design.

Fascinating read on the history of computers in cars.

[http://www.chipsetc.com/computer-chips-inside-the- car.html](http://www.chipsetc.com/computer-chips-inside-the-car.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's something to be said with our Government personally reaching out to every resident and citizen, even if to just deliver a letter (yes, I know the USPS isn't quite the "Government" any more, but it's close). It makes us feel connected and part of something.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm curious what sort of magic made her know it was his last day, and move her to document the day like that. Things like this are beautiful but I don't know how to create them in my life. It it down to an inherent personality type?

<comment><AUTHOR> As a former newspaper reporter who occasionally was assigned to do these kinds of community features (though nothing this well-done), I remember that editors and reporters would frequently get pitches (by email or call) from random folks – because newspapers routinely publish these kinds of stories, and this was well before social media was a viable place for sharing stories.

The irony here is that the author _is_ a newspaper reporter/editor at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and one of the most surprising things about this to me is how the AJC's website apparently didn't have this story in traditional article format. The only thing I see is a followup -- a recap of the original Twitter thread, with the update that Mr. Martin's GoFundMe went viral:

[https://www.ajc.com/news/think-and-smile-hundreds- celebrate-...](https://www.ajc.com/news/think-and-smile-hundreds-celebrate- mailman-retirement/N6cdUdsNhn1Lq09wAF9sPL/)

But when I think about it, I wonder if a traditional article (full of images) would have worked as well as the Twitter thread? I'm probably more tolerant of Twitter threads as a format than most people are, but this was one time in which the Twitter format – this includes the way we interact by scrolling through Twitter threads – really seemed to strengthen the material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This article makes me happy, oddly enough someone started cutting onions in my office. I hate when they do that!

I'm going to continue to strive to be a good person, much like Floyd.

</comment><comment><USER33> I love it. Goes to show that you can have a lasting impact no matter what job title you have.

</comment><comment><USER34> Good to see some wholesome content

</comment><comment><USER35> This is just awesome! Thanks for sharing @danso!

</comment><comment><USER36> Wow this is awesome!</comment>


Opting Out of Coastal Madness to Live a Low-Overhead Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/05/low-overhead-life/480612/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Apart from housing, can someone tell me what is so overwhelmingly cheaper away from the urban metrocentres that this writer is smugly fleeing?

It's not food (not a consequential part of most reader's here's budget). It's not transportation (public transport is cheaper and more available in high density areas). So, apart from housing, what is it?</comment>


The Government Is Using a No Fly Zone to Suppress Journalism at Standing Rock - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-government-is-using-a-no-fly-zone-to-suppress-journalism-at-standing-rock <comment><USER2> The war to continue building New Large-Scale Fossil Fuel Infrastructure continues...we're supposed to spinning this down for the planet to remain habitable...Instead we have tax-payer subsidized security to bring new stuff online. We are insane.

<comment><USER3> The profits were promised. The money has been borrowed. You don't just stop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Makes one wonder what exactly they fear.

<comment><USER5> Could be a chainsaw: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Viwwetf0gU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Viwwetf0gU)

Could be a flamethrower: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwmh7ddPsk4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwmh7ddPsk4)

Could be a submachinegun: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU)</comment></comment>


When the Boardroom is Bits - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/when-the-boardroom-is-bits-052111 <comment><USER2> I see somebody was at #sllconf, or watching the simulcast...

This was an incredible presentation by @sgblank... if other VCs start to buy into this, it could totally transform the startup scene. Like somebody said... "@sgblank should have just dropped the mike and walked off stage, because he killed it." :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Just following Eric Ries and watching the streaming. Too much work on the current startup to actually have the time to join one of the three simulcasts where I live.

And trying to help other HNers with getting the signal out of all the stuff the conf is generating.

<comment><USER2> I know the feeling... ultimately I decided it was worth it to spend the day watching, and - in retrospect - I think it was worth it just for Steve's presentation. Not that there was't a lot of other great content as well.</comment></comment></comment>


How to block annoying Facebook political posts - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-block-annoying-facebook-political-posts/ <comment><USER2> Should probably start with Social Fixer, so that you don't unfollow friends who you care about. The goal should be to just filter out all of their political posts. I think this Lifehacker post has a slightly better approach: [http://lifehacker.com/5940319/how-to-block-annoying- politica...](http://lifehacker.com/5940319/how-to-block-annoying-political- posts-on-facebook)

<comment><USER3> Social Fixer doesn't currently work. Its developer is hard at work getting it functional again, but then he's been at it for over a year now so I'm giving up hope. In any case, Social Fiser is still mentioned in the story.</comment></comment>


Building your own 6502 computer  - <AUTHOR> http://wilsonminesco.com/6502primer/index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Saw this over @ hackaday.com, and thought some of you might find it interesting.

I just find homebrew computing fascinating.</comment>


Today I solved a twelve-year-old Outlook mystery - <AUTHOR> https://emails.hteumeuleu.com/today-i-learned-about-mso-generic-font-family-85b0e4703079 <comment><USER3> I cannot believe that Microsoft Outlook, in 2019, is still using the broken word-based HTML rendering which is an insult to the whole industry and a pain for anybody in email business.

Is there a strategy behind this? Is Outlook on maintenance mode with no developers? Or is it on their best interest to keep it broken?

<comment><USER4> I dunno about Microsoft's intentions, but it's in _our_ (worldwide internet users) best interest for Outlook to keep the 'broken' renderer.

HTML email has some use-cases as long as the HTML used is very limited, and that's exactly what Outlook provides. There's however no justification to turn email into a full on web page like Google wants. The longer Outlook's renderer is 'broken', the less likely we are to get abominations like Google's AMP email.

Ultimately, email really is a document and should remain that way. This is compatible with HTML, but completely incompatible with Javascript.

<comment><USER5> Oh come on, don't you wish you could send a game using WebGL via E-Mail? Think about the possibilities! (To some degree I'm unsure if I'm really joking - <USER2> can image practical use, but I love plain text mail, which I can easily search, filter and render as I need it)

<comment><USER4> Ah, wonderful. We'll have animated, autoplaying 419 scams. We'll need Turing- complete spam filters, which will be exploited themselves. Just what we needed.

Edit: Wait a minute. Wouldn't these WebGL games need microtransaction ability? That's a must for any game company. Obviously we must be allowed to use the payment API in emails! So now the scams would be able to bill the user directly.

<comment><USER5> As long as they can mine Bitcoin there's no need for micro transactions. Just make sure that there is no save button and warn the user that closing the mail will lose their game state.

A more serious use case might be the architect sending models of the new building or the doctor sending MRIs. While those cases have practical issues like the recepient not being able to respond to it easily (move that wall!) and privacy, they also have interesting benefits like no need to login to some cloud and retention period controlled by the recepient. Sending as attachment of course works, but needs container formats to collect assets together and sandboxing in browsers for local files. As well as this being a media break, where I have to switch to a different tool to look at it then where the context is.

<comment><USER4> Your suggestion is pure genius. We'll just call it a roguelike and that would explain the 'no save button'. I'll be sure to recommend you at the next 'dark pattern' meeting! /j

As for the latter, if we're going in that direction, we might as well go all the way and implement some COM-like thingy for the web, so users can attach multiple whatevers and work on them in the email. This seems more efficient than turning each email to a unique embedded app which can embed only one type + maybe attachments.

Despite all this being possible in Outlook-land, everyone I'm familiar with prefers opening the attachment and working in a separate window, but I guess some people would rather work inline?

<comment><USER5> Maybe they like it since there is no alternative!? If there were a working way things might be different.

<comment><USER4> I meant that in Windows there is an alternative to attachments to an extent. COM allows an application to embed in another application. i.e. I can paste some Excel into Outlook and it will keep the table formatting and I can manipulate it in Outlook as if it were Excel. It's not the best implementation though (pretty bad on the other side), and there probably is a much nicer way to do it.

You could be right, with a better implementation there would be more that choose to work that way. I still think the risk outweighs the possible limited benefit though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I clicked the link I thought it would be about something that confused me for a while: What do people mean when they write a capital J in their emails? I eventually figured out that it's because Outlook automatically converts a smiley emoticon into a WingDings (an old Microsoft icon font from before that term became popularized on the web) version, which happens to have J as the character for a smiling face. View that on a machine that doesn't have the WingDings font installed, and you just get a capital J. Raymond Chen blogged about it too: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31103)

<comment><USER7> Yup, Microsoft jumped at just the wrong moment on this stuff.

Today you just go "Eh, text is Unicode" and any weird corner cases go in the Private Use Area bucket never to be seen again.

And in the 1980s you'd go "Eh, text is ASCII" and just tell office workers that too bad they can't have an emoticon in their email, try writing :) instead.

But just at that moment where Windows exploded and everybody was getting a PC with a graphical user interface there was that awkward moment where it seemed reasonable to act as though text was arbitrary indexes into a font and doesn't actually _mean_ anything except that a lot of the fonts map to ASCII. So now you can write [HN removes actually Emoji] but it doesn't mean [HN removed the same emoji here] it just looks that way on PCs with the exact same font.

And that mistake infected Microsoft Office and all of Windows. I wrote a presentation on a work PC in about 1995 and then my boss printed it from her work Mac, and on every single sheet of the presentation the trademark symbol was replaced by some other symbol Macs had because of this useless ambiguity.

<comment><USER8> There are so many things Microsoft was ahead of the times. For example, they had what are now 'Electron apps' in the 1990's (hta files). And how I wheep when I look back at the power of COM, how I complained about it back when I didn't understand it, and what could have if we'd had proper object technology today.

<comment><USER9> Windows also had some chat application, hidden within the Windows folder, that allowed you to draw comic book style panels and converse using those over a network. I have never actually seen it used live, but it seemed like an interesting concept.

<comment><USER10> Honestly Comic Chat is one of the best things to ever come out of Microsoft. I miss it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm always annoyed by Outlook's HTML, I remember when it set Calibri as font and the fall back was "sans-serif" which would not really work.

It really made me wish that HTML in emails would vanish, just vanish and never come back again. Sadly this won't happening.

<comment><USER12> I'd be down with them either vanishing, or at the very least being compliant with a standard html5 spec. The in between state they're in now is the worst of both worlds.

<comment><USER13> Which HTML 5 spec is that exactly?

HTML 5 is a "living standard", which is a horrible idea for documents that might be archived for 10 years, like email.

Note, I'm not condoning the status quo, but let's think about what we actually want here.

<comment><USER14> A proper browser can display all HTML documents crated like, ever, if you can live with some imperfections that are there to deal with improper browsers in the first place.

I mean, I get your point, and it makes sense, and for a similar reason we didn't get WebSQL. But I think HTML is special in this regard. Everyone just accepted the complexity of dealing with all sorts of documents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Outlook does support @font-face declarations (but doesn't load distant > fonts). Because Outlook can't display that font, it falls back to its > expected mso-generic-font-family value. And because it's not defined, it > falls back to its auto value, matching the roman font family, thus falling > back to Times New Roman.

It also seems that mso-font-alt can be used in a similar way:

[https://litmus.com/community/discussions/36-outlook-and- fall...](https://litmus.com/community/discussions/36-outlook-and-fallback- fonts#comment-2459)

And there are many more mso-prefixed options available, though documentation is scarce: [https://litmus.com/community/learning/8-outlook- overview](https://litmus.com/community/learning/8-outlook-overview)

Generally it seems like this isn't very well known. Hopefully this gets a signal boost and best-practices articles get updated with the advice.

</comment><comment><USER16> > I hope you enjoyed this read as much as I enjoyed doing this research.

Redmond's quirkery has been a pleasure these decades, for "yelling obscenities" values of "pleasure".

</comment><comment> duncan-donuts Maybe I'm dense and I couldn't draw this conclusion — were those properties always available but we're never documented? If that's true it seems crazy to me that Microsoft couldn't just say, "Hey I know everyone is mad about font- face not being respected. Here's this property you can set and all is well."

<comment><USER17> If you had passed a supported font to the font-family tag it would have rendered it (it will not download a webfont). Since people really don't like seeing square boxes instead of characters windows tries very hard to find a font that will draw the character. Based on historic precedent Times New Roman is normally chosen.

You'll note the fallback-families he lists are exactly those supported by the GDI LOGFONT structure which dates to windows 3.0. This is old creaky stuff we're dealing with.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/win32/api/wingdi/ns...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/win32/api/wingdi/ns-wingdi-taglogfonta)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is yet another gem hidden in that post:

        src: local('Pacifico Regular'), local('Pacifico-Regular'), url(https://www.caniemail.com/tests/assets/fonts/pacifico-regular.woff2) format('woff2');

Basically... isn't this a way to bypass the default external resource loading block for mail clients other than Outlook, meaning that this could be (ab)used for stealth "read receipts"?

</comment><comment><USER19> Outlook can't even display raw TEXT consistently. We have a confirmation email that goes out when somehow submits to our contact us form.

In all email clients except outlook, the footer is on two lines (because there is a CR there).

line1<CR>

line2

In outlook (and only outlook)?

line1line2

The rest of the email is fine, just these two lines of the footer are smooshed together.

<comment><USER20> Window's line separator is actually two charaters, CR LF ( 0x0d 0x0a).

This is a fundamental difference between Windows and other operating systems. There's unix tools available to convert between the two formats (dos2unix & unix2dos).

<comment><USER21> That's an SMTP requirement too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >The following line especially picked my interest

FYI, it's "piqued my interest."

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, it's not a bad thing that it doesn't load remote resources...

</comment><comment><USER24> I could be missing the plot here, but I always got the impression that Outlook limits (sets) the fonts and colours in order to make the emails look like they "were sent by MS/Outlook". But again, this may be my idiosyncratic MS experience.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder, does Outlook 2019 have the "system" font glitch from Win 3.xx? I think I'll be sending out all my HTML emails in either System or Courier from now on; just to pull peoples' legs.

<comment><USER26> What's the glitch? Microsoft has a font named System and if you ask for it you get it?

<comment><USER27> I guess they're talking about this.

[https://medium.design/system- shock-6b1dc6d6596f#.v0lk6vj4x](https://medium.design/system- shock-6b1dc6d6596f#.v0lk6vj4x)

<comment><USER26> Right, so not really a "glitch"

 _> Dormant, that is, unless someone asked for it with CSS. Which we, inadvertently, did._

It boggles my mind that not once did someone load up the "Medium 2.0" redesign on a Windows computer before launching it. Or even render it out from browsershots. Is cross platform browser behavior consistent enough that people don't do this anymore? And IE/Edge testing was just not on the list?

For reference if anyone wants to use the OS's font like this, "-apple-system" now has an unprefixed implementation as "system-ui" avoid the Windows font collision. Chrome/Safari support it, Edge will once they're running the Chrome engine, but Firefox doesn't yet.

<comment><USER27> "It boggles my mind that not once did someone load up the "Medium 2.0" redesign on a Windows computer"

It says in the article that it was only certain OS, browser combinations. Don't know how unusual the combination was though.

<comment><USER26> Ah you're right, I'd missed that. I wonder what versions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _This morning I was doing some tests in Outlook on supported styles for HTML > lists._

"Today I was doing unpaid QA on a widely reviled proprietary Microsoft office app ..."</comment>


The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame - <AUTHOR> https://protected.personal.psu.edu/j/e/jea17/PDFS/CMLIT013/Newman.pdf

<comment><USER2> Wants a login to the PSU system.</comment>


Firefox plans making DNS over HTTPS default - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/09/08/firefox-announces-major-new-encryption-default-to-protect-millions-of-users/ <comment><USER2> So ISPs can provide "a deliberately blocked site to lists that will alert Firefox, telling the browser that a protection is in place and to block DoH."

I sure hope Firefox allows us to opt-out of ISP override. I know they're trying to deal with the criticism of "but how will censorship work?", but if your ISP can simply override it, I fail to see the point of DoH.

<comment><USER3> In the Firefox blog post, they do mention that if ISPs (and other organizations, I suppose) abuse the canary URL, they will re-evaluate their position. So it's definitely something they've thought of.

[https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/09/06/whats- nex...](https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/09/06/whats-next-in- making-dns-over-https-the-default/)</comment></comment>


Wikipedia to the Moon - <AUTHOR> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_to_the_Moon <comment><USER2> The FAQ is much more illuminatng then the main page: [https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_to_the_Moon/FAQ](https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_to_the_Moon/FAQ)

<comment><USER3> Non-mobile link: [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_to_the_Moon/FAQ](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_to_the_Moon/FAQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If an alien makes it all the way to the moon with the tech to read the disc why wouldn't they hop on over to Earth where there would be much more data? When Carl Sagan did it it was much more evocative because Voyager will be traveling for thousands of years into deep space.

<comment><USER5> Well hypothetically if the Earth was destroyed by grey-goo or something, the disc would still be there.

But the other answer is that it's much easier to find. Where would you put a ceramic copy of wikipedia on Earth to maximize it's probability of being found? Anywhere you put it could get destroyed, buried, or stolen. Who knows what will happen to it over the Eons.

This disc will be on the surface of the moon forever. Anyone surveying the surface of the moon for unnatural objects will find it. Although that might take some advanced technology, it would be easier than surveying the Earth.

And while they might find many artifacts on Earth, locating that single copy of wikipedia out of all the other junk we've left behind is a bit improbable. We haven't covered the moon with much junk.

<comment><USER6> _This disc will be on the surface of the moon forever._

Or until a meteorite hits it.

<comment><USER7> It's true. The surface of the Moon is a lot less peaceful than it seems. If you process the image, you can tell the affected area from a single meteorite strike is much bigger than the crater itself:

[http://www.astrobin.com/full/220884/0/](http://www.astrobin.com/full/220884/0/)

<comment><USER8> Has anyone compared the surface of the moon over time? We can count how many meteorites have hit the surface since we've been taking pictures of it, and we can also probably assess the actual damage they've caused.

<comment><USER9> NASA's Lunar Impact page is at [http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/lunar/#.VxmMxvl942...](http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/lunar/#.VxmMxvl942w)

<comment><USER10> How do "Earth-based observations of the _dark_ portion of the moon" work?

Is that the dark part of the light _side_ , where the sun won't overexpose the video?

<comment><USER7> It's as easy as night versus day.

Flashes from bolide strikes are actually easier to see on that part of the Moon where it's night. Where the Sun is above horizon on the Moon, the ambient light is drowning out any light-producing events.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They should team up with the Time Capsule to Mars project ([http://www.timecapsuletomars.com/](http://www.timecapsuletomars.com/)) which ostensibly will use quartz storage technology to send millions of photos to Mars. If the quartz memory is for real, it should be able to store Wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER12> The deadline for the Lunar X Prize is next year, and according to wikipedia one of the teams has a launch contract with SpaceX. Does SpaceX have a rocket capable of making it to the moon?

<comment><USER13> Please note that the ability to "making to to <somewhere>" is all about Delta-V. Which varies wildly with payload size.

<comment><USER14> To be precise, it varies according to the equation:

Delta-V = Exhaust velocity x natural log(mass full / mass empty).

As the "mass empty" is very dependent on the payload size, it will indeed change a lot!

<comment><USER15> See for example, New Horizons:

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

<comment><USER16> For those too lazy to go read: biggest rocket available + very light probe = very fast travel

Another interesting read in this aspect is the Dawn Spacecraft, which had a big delta-v because of its ionic thrusters: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_%28spacecraft%29#Propulsi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_%28spacecraft%29#Propulsion_system)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 20GB? What kind of disc are they using? Why not use a 200GB MicroSD? That would be way more efficient.

2 200GB MicroSDs would give you 400GB of storage weighing in at only 1 gram.

<comment><USER18> [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_to_the_Moon/FAQ#Ca...](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_to_the_Moon/FAQ#Can.E2.80.99t_we_use_some_other_medium_with_more_space.3F)

> _Can't we use some other medium with more space?_

> _The conditions in space prove hostile to many data mediums. Traditional CDs > or DVDs would be destroyed in space, because they are composed of layers and > would come undone. It's different with a medium made of ceramics. Also, you > have to consider the dimensions and weight of your medium. The ceramic disc > is light enough and resilient._

I'm guessing microSD cards are not radiation hardened.

<comment><USER19> Wonder how much lead you'd have to wrap an sd card & reader in for it to be "safe" for space travel.

<comment><USER20> If you want as much protection as Earth's atmosphere provides, 25 inches. At least that gives as much mass in between the card and space as the atmosphere does. (1 atm is about 30in of mercury, lead is 11/13 as dense as mercury...)

<comment><USER19> But it isn't just about mass, there's density to consider... we aren't sending up computing devices into space wrapped in 25 inches of lead... so I'm guessing that far less is actually needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder what the estimated cost per GB will be for this data transfer?

<comment><USER22> I bet they can get the data there faster than it'd take for me to upload it anywhere using Time Warner Cable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How long would it survive there? The surface of the moon is a pretty hostile environment, I would think.

<comment><USER24> It's a ceramic disc. Since there is no wind erosion, if it doesn't get direct hit, it should last quite some time. Footprints from first landing are still there - and are expected to be for at least next 10 million years - so you can expect finely-engraved piece of rock to last much longer.

<comment><USER25> There is still radiation erosion. It may corrupt the data if it is packed too tightly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sending an archive of YouTube would be much more useful for any aliens that happen to drop by. YT comes far closer to _The Sum of All Human Knowledge_ than Wikipedia.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure that's correct. Wikipedia contains detailed articles on many very obscure subjects. Searching for such topics on YouTube usually gives disappointing results.

Wikipedia is missing some material though. A better choice might be the google book project or libgen, which contains a ton of obscure books and scientific papers. But compressing it all to 20 GB would be difficult or impossible. Much easier than compressing Youtube though.

<comment><USER26> That's my point: They're assuming the aliens want to know about detailed, encyclopedic subjects. But what if they just want to know about Kim Kardashian?

<comment><USER27> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Kardashian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Kardashian)

That's more than anyone ever needs to know about Kim Kardashian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They have 20 GB? I downloaded the entire English wiki 4 years ago (just the text of articles, not photos) and it was 12 GB.

<comment><USER28> Now it's ~55 GB uncompressed and as you said that's without images, audio, and more.

<comment><USER5> I meant compressed. Text compresses really well.

<comment><USER29> It does indeed. However compression may cause problems for future beings discovering or understanding the data.

<comment><USER30> Keep in mind they have to understand the text and image encodings. The concept of glyphs themselves, even. Words. Language. Bytes (why 8 bits). Bits. Knowledge expressed as sentences. How to read the media. Compression would be just another thing.

There's a pretty big hurdle to comprehension even without compression because we are thinking in human terms. Imagine all of the prerequisite human knowledge you overlook to even approach the concept of an encyclopedic article describing something. Aliens might share knowledge by hitting each other with telepathic darts for all we know, having a completely different understanding and implementation of information, and words might require years of study on their part to comprehend. Even the golden record carries a lot of assumptions. What we know about the universe is not necessarily final, even with rudimentary things like information theory.

In the end it's a bunch of bytes, numbers really, on a disc. What are numbers, even? What if they have a totally different non-numeric system to quantify and explain their existence?

Think about finding an extraterrestrial storage device like this from _our_ perspective. I'd safely predict 20 years before we even extract one byte of data, and a lot of that time would be arguing over it, probably. Although thinking about an alien Nobel ceremony for cracking the "extraterrestrial ceramic Wikipedia" is a pretty amusing thought.

<comment><USER5> One of my favorite short stories is _That Alien Message_ : [http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/)

Its about humanity trying to reverse engineer a message from space that has very few bits. One of the morals is that humans would be able to decode crazy encodings provided enough time. And more data helps a lot. With 20 GB, even compressed, common patterns could quickly be found.

I don't believe for a moment a race advanced enough to recover the disc wouldn't understand it.

<comment><USER30> Me neither, to be clear. Just saying that compression is but one drop in the bucket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sneakernet on steriods.

<comment><USER32> On asteroids.

</comment></comment><comment> Ruud-v-A Now I understand why they were begging for donations all the time

<comment><USER33> How to downwote comment on the HN? I only see "upvote" button.

<comment><USER34> You need to be at a certain karma level to downvote.</comment></comment></comment>