Sukey - A tool for non-violent demonstrations - <AUTHOR> http://sukey.org/ <comment><USER2> Briefly, this is a map overlay which pools reports on police activity surrounding demonstrations, designed to counter the "kettling" confinement tactics used by the London police in recent student protests. Best link for those who want to see how it works: their tutorial at <http://sukey.org/tutorial>

Some of the press coverage, like the Economist piece here, is also oddly more informative than the web site itself:

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/01/demonstration...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/01/demonstrations)

Unfortunately, their attitude towards security, at least as expressed in the FAQ, seems slightly worrisome. For groups without funding or world-class expertise "we'll release the code when we think it's OK" is a slower, less sure path to trustworthiness than "here it is now; please tell us what's wrong with it." But they claim to have (unnamed) experts on the project; I guess we'll see how soon they do a source release, and what shows up when they do...

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I an idiot for not have a clue what this actually does after both watching the video and reading the FAQ?

As far as I can tell it's hyper-local news app tailored to specific protests. People send them messages and they send updates out? Which I guess is useful?

<comment><USER4> The tutorial ( <http://sukey.org/tutorial> ) does a better job of explaining things.

It's a tool to aggregate location/safety statuses submitted by many people in the same protest.

I'm interested in how the site verifies reports. The purpose of this app is very similar to Ushahidi, which has some basic vetting tools for editors/organizers.

In the tutorial, it just says something like "sukey will check your report and broadcast it" -- how will this look if thousands of people submit reports at once?

<comment><USER5> _> how will this look if thousands of people submit reports at once?_

This app will be used during specific events, not all the time. If there's a protest with many thousands of people involved, and this app becomes well used enough to attract thousands of reports at once, it is not unreasonable to imagine a good few hundred trusted, trained volunteers to crosscheck reports.

If you have thousands of reporters, you will be able to get hundreds of volunteer moderators. These are student activists remember :)

<comment><USER6> Who watches the watchers?

<comment><USER5> Just let them flag reports so they are hidden by default, rather than deleting them. Then everyone can watch everyone else, UK activists are used to that now: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jan/22/undercover- police-c...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jan/22/undercover-police- cleared-sex-activists)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"Sukey is brought to you by the students and supporters who formed the technical team at the UCL Occupation"_

Brilliant! For those unaware these were the students who occupied some of the buildings at the University College London for about a month over christmas in protest at the education funding cuts. Good to see they managed to fit some hacking in there between fighting the university management trying to evict them and giving webcasted interviews to tv reporters.

<http://blog.ucloccupation.com/demands/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting. I built something like this: <http://crowsne.st/>

These kinds of tools are really valuable. The New York Times called it "One of the best all-purpose sites with updates from the streets."</comment>


Diamonds on Demand - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/diamonds-on-demand.html <comment><USER2> My father headed a mineralogy lab that specialized in diamonds back in Russia. Naturally, when all these stories about synthetic diamonds started coming out, I got very excited. My father on the other hand was, and still is, quite sceptical.

I am not going to repeat his "lectures" here, but check out for your self the Appolo Diamond website. Their online store clearly shows lower quality diamonds with significant inclusions. Not one colorless, high-quality diamond.

Wouldn't it be nice if the journalist took five minutes to browse the company website before posting the hype piece - I am talking the most basic level of professionalism...</comment>


How a NYC datacenter avoided downtime by carrying buckets of fuel up 17 stories - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/01/squarespace-fog-creek-peer1-kept-ny-data-center-alive-by-carrying-fuel-buckets-to-the-17th-floor-in-the-dark/

<comment><USER2> I'm impressed. I definitely thought it was hyperbole when Joel said they would carry the fuel if they have to.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4718124></comment>


Coursera: 33 Universities, 200 Courses, 1.3 Million Students - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/09/19/coursera-doubles-university-count-33-now-hosts-200-courses-reaches-1-3-million-students-worldwide/ <comment><USER3> Any one being cynical about Coursera is definitely having a perspective of the traditional college/school structure, i.e assignments, exams and grades equals knowledge. That need not be true, because any one would be enrolling in the courses just to get their curiosity fueled and gain some knowledge which or else they would have absolutely no access to. I have been enrolling in at least two courses a month and i make a point to finish all the lectures and understand them before enrolling for more, but i have had no time to actually do the assignments and take the quizzes. Ill not get a certificate of completion i.e iam a drop out, but i have access to knowledge and i free to choose what i want to learn.

<comment><USER4> Some of the cynicism around Coursera (and Udacity) isn't around the _way_ the education is delivered, but the business model.

Both Coursera and Udacity are for-profit businesses, and both have yet to reveal (or decide) how they want to make that profit. Many current for-profit providers of education are not particularly well respected (University of Phoenix, Kaplan, etc). Some non-profit universities are understandable a little hesitant to work with Coursera and Udacity without a better understanding of how exactly they propose to make money (both have many suggestions, but nothing concrete as of yet).

This cynicism is one reason why some universities have decided to "go it alone" (MIT/Harvard/Berkeley being the most notable with edX).

To be clear, I'm not saying this is my viewpoint: I think very highly of both Coursera and Udacity. I just wanted to point out that some of the cynicism stems not from the idea of open access to teaching and knowledge, but from the worries over working with for-profit companies to achieve that aim.

<comment><USER5> My guess is that they're running it free as a sort of massive beta test, once they've got the format sorted they'll start including paying courses - <USER2> possibly as follow up to free ones (for example Scala I is free, Scala II costs you money).

And, personally, I'm very grateful to them for hosting such excellent free courses at the moment - the quality has generally been pretty high on the ones I've done, and the format is excellent. If they start making money off it, good for them.

<comment><USER6> I'd more likely expect all the content to be free, but course completion certifications to cost money.

Edit: This would be particularly useful if the certifications were convertible into course credit at participating universities.

<comment><USER5> How would that work online? Cheating is already a problem - there's nothing to stop you googling for the answer to a given assignment, or getting your clever best friend to help you out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Atlantic recently had an interesting POV that puts a positive spin on the high dropout rates of MOOC courses[1]. Essentially claiming that it is a by- product of the great fact that these courses are free and therefore have a low barrier to entry - in contrast to traditional higher education.

[1] [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/overbl...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/overblown- claims-of-failure-watch-how-not-to-gauge-the-success-of-online- courses/260159/)

<comment><USER8> That and you need to sign up if you just want to have a (short) peek at the content. One also picks up more than one book in the bookstore before buying, if any.

Also, the real value in these courses is that they are the real deal. They should be hard, and thus not for everybody.

<comment><USER9> Yea, my dropout rate is around 80%. I'll sign up for 4-6 courses that sound interesting, watch the first few lectures all of them, perhaps do the first homework, and then decide which ones (if any) I feel I have the time and interest to complete.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There seems to be a fair amount cynicism around the business model (rather, the lack thereof) for these MOOC services. I personally believe that an interesting monetization model lies in examinations. EdX seems to be exploring proctored examinations with Pearson, but if someone can come up with a credible, non-game-able, non-proctored alternative, there's a lot of value to be created/captured.

Completing one of these courses along with the accompanying assignments only takes you so far. Grades in a rigorous examination, however, represent a credential, which in turn sets up much needed (by the candidates taking the course) signaling. Eventually, a lot of employers might end up becoming sensitive to this signaling. A crude example of this can be found here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3353543>

If (and when) someone does crack this puzze and if employers in turn, react to this change, I see a lot of universities more than breaking a sweat. This latent potential is what, IMHO, most analysts / investors are really upbeat about.

<comment><USER11> I was involved in distance education at our local university for a number of years and we vetted remote proctors. In the rare case where getting a proctor to watch the student didn't pan out, I've seen webcam + screensharing used as an accepted alternative. Seems like this approach could be improved upon and scaled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What are the other alternatives ? I know 1\. Udacity [<http://www.udacity.com/>] 2\. Venture Lab [<http://venturelab.stanford.edu/>] 3\. Class2go [<http://class2go.stanford.edu/>] 4\. MITx [<http://mitx.mit.edu/>]

<comment><USER13> EdX (<https://www.edx.org/>) - MIT, Harvard and Berkeley.

Also, Class Central (<http://www.class-central.com/>) lists courses on order of starting date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Andrew Ng, who founded Coursera, is a professor of machine learning at Stanford - I am taking his course right now. I wonder whether, once Coursera has been around for a while, he might use his machine learning knowledge to predict such things as how likely a person is to drop out of a course or to do well in a course, or to compare people based on the university they attended or other factors. Could be really interesting.

<comment><USER15> Maybe, now that they have almost 200 courses they would build also the interconnecting web of notions so there are no holes.

Also, if possible, some kind of assistance to get over the difficult moments and choose wisely the education path would be great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As much as I love Coursera, their statistics so far have shown that most of the students actually benefiting from their courses already have degrees and many even have graduate degrees.

It's still great that people are pursuing more knowledge; however, I'd much rather see MOOCs find a way to penetrate the percentage of the population that has less access to education.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm taking Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (ModPoPenn) and I'm thoroughly impressed by the fact that the professor, Al Filreis and his staff of TAs maintain a strong presence in the forums. The discussion format videos are excellent and the team is doing a super job of making this voluntary learning experience an extremely valuable one. The coursera.org platform is easy enough for my Mom to use. Now, as far as I can see, the only barriers to entry are background skills and commitment.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, the ModPo class is impressive thus far. They are producing a ton of content in the video roundtables, and the prof seems to have endless enthusiasm for the online forums. It's a tough subject to teach remotely, but they're really pulling it off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Impressive! Coursera keeps growing at a rapid pace. As always, the limit will be the time you have to put into it - there are already interesting courses there to keep me busy for a year (if I had the time ;-))

I also noticed that they have a profile page for students now. This may not be brand new (although I hadn't seen it before), but it's useful and looks good.

</comment><comment><USER19> Great to see Coursera growing with more universities, especially internationally. I'm really enjoying the courses that I'm studying - it is without a doubt a force for good.

</comment><comment><USER20> my wife signed up and followed a few so i got to watch some of the lectures - i was amazed by the quality of information they are giving out for free!</comment>


Ask HN: Do you use / have a smartwatch? Why do you use it? - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering why people would use a smartwatch? It seems like constant interruption for me and "useless" functionality. I could be wrong off course, that's why i'm asking.<p>Do you have a smartwatch? Which one and do you use it? What's the most important functionality for you? <comment><USER2> I have a Moto 360 and I used it everyday. Mainly using it for notification peek to see if I needed to respond immediately on them when the phone is in my pocket - I only turned on the notification for the apps that I cared about. Also often I used it to make call, send message, add quick reminder/note using voice when I am driving.

Though I must say it is not a must-have, just an extension to the smartphone, which is doing just fine without any other accessories.

The only one main issue with current gen smart watch is the battery life (except the Pebble of course), which can be frustrating because you need to charge it everyday, especially some of them need special charging docks (like Moto 360), but so far I am already used to it, so it was an OK for me, still, if you run out of battery, you can't even tell the time which is slightly not- so-funny sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wear a moto 360 since October.

Almost all key functionality are completely useless, and Android wear is so poorly designed, that it gets in the way when you actually want to use the small set of useful functions.

The only thing that's relevant, to me, is the notifications. I don't mind the interruptions and usually I discard them pretty quickly on the watch when it's not relevant. In this case, vibrations are way more clever than sound or light, it's a shame that it's the only component that has been left over during the design of the watch :/ (yes, it sounds and feels like an old nokia 3310 on a wooden table)

In a perfect future, you would have a multitude of vibration patterns, sensors and strength instead of a not-working-heart-rate-sensor.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a pebble. I use it on my work office and when I drive in order to see who's calling, who's texting and what while keeping my phone silent mode.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think smartwatches are fancy watches. It's a gadget, the key feature is still the clock and fast notifications i think.</comment>


What is wrong with "A successful Git branching model"? - <AUTHOR> https://barro.github.io/2016/02/a-succesful-git-branching-model-considered-harmful/ <comment><USER2> I don't know why people over complicate this stuff. [https://guides.github.com/introduction/flow/](https://guides.github.com/introduction/flow/) is a simple and pragmatic workflow that the vast majority of teams can use. I am sure there are reasons to deviate from this, but people should start with this and then make changes as necessary.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11190310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11190310)</comment>


DNS Pre-fetch Exposure on Thunderbird and Webmail - mike-cardwell https://secure.grepular.com/DNS_Prefetch_Exposure_on_Thunderbird_and_Webmail

<comment><AUTHOR> Mozilla really has to stop this pre-fetch obsession. It was a bad idea when they started it and, given how much malware there is and how many malsites there are, prefetch has become indefensible. I wrote an article a while ago pointing out a Google search plus Firefox prefetch interaction: [http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/07/should-your-mom- use-g...](http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/07/should-your-mom-use-google- search/) .

<comment><USER2> Fully agree. I was disgusted when I learned of the pre-fetching defaults. This reminds me to check whether my custom settings to disable pre-fetch have "stuck" through the most recent updates (Firefox).</comment></comment>


Show HN: Relevé Heels – Rent designer heels at a fraction of retail - <AUTHOR> http://www.releveheels.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Co-founder of Relevé Heels here. We recently launched and are grateful for any feedback!</comment>


VLC for iOS Now Available (itunes link) - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/app/id650377962 <comment><USER2> Doesn't work for me in the USA (Chicago/Comcast). [http://cl.ly/image/1a3e2L2x0M19](http://cl.ly/image/1a3e2L2x0M19)

      "The item you've requested is not currently available in the U.S. store."

EDIT: stock_toaster's link works for me! Much thanks. [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vlc-for- ios/id650377962?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vlc-for- ios/id650377962?mt=8)

<comment><USER3> This one works for me. [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vlc-for- ios/id650377962?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vlc-for- ios/id650377962?mt=8)

<comment><USER4> No luck with that link for my US location. Oddly enough, "VLC for iOS" shows up in App Store search results... but then gives the "item you've requested is not currently available in the U.S. store" error when clicked.

<comment><USER5> I've had the same issue, but after trying a few times it finally downloaded the app

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just linked it with my Dropbox account. That is the best implementation of authorisation I've seen in any mobile app, period. Compared to the Facebook method (overlay a dialog that for all I know could just be made by the app itself), it's fantastic.

<comment><USER7> Facebook iOS auth can be done with SSO as well.

<comment><USER6> I didn't realise they had cross-app authentication (I haven't really seen anyone use it), but that's awesome if so.

<comment> k-mcgrady SSO has been the main auth method for apps integrating Facebook for a couple of years now. I haven't seen the dialog in use in a long time. I'm surprised there's people still using that method.

<comment><USER8> It's a user-configurable setting on the device. So if you have it disabled, you will get a fallback to the old dialogue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I succesfully installed on iPad, Dropbox link worked, local wifi server worked, but VLC does not recognize mp3 audio files - am I doing smth wrong?

Also the description in AppStore is rather limited, I would suggest to expand it - indicate all available features and goodies.

I used this link

[https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/vlc-for- ios/id650377962?mt=8...](https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/vlc-for- ios/id650377962?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D2)

<comment><USER10> Same problem - VLC can't see .mp3 files uploaed to it's "app" folder. That's oddly strange and disappointing. I am certain it can play(decode) mp3 from the video file, why it doesn't open standalone audio .mp3?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I already have it installed from the first time it was available.

Then it got pulled... why/how is it back?

<comment><USER12> It was pulled because the GPL license made Apple sad. Now it's MPL (Mozilla Public License) which Apple doesn't have a problem with.

[http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/07/18/vlc-for-ios-will- retur...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2013/07/18/vlc-for-ios-will-return-to- the-app-store-on-july-19-full-re-write-open-source-licensed-under-mplv2-and- gplv2/)

<comment><USER13> Not correct. Apple got a takedown request from a single (non-core) developer of VLC last time and had to comply due to the GPL.

The GPL itself is not a problem for them in general and they don't just go around removing apps that are licensed under it.

<comment><USER14> > single (non-core) developer of VLC

That's not true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Source (git repo) is available here: [http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc- ports/ios.git;a=summary](http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc- ports/ios.git;a=summary)

It's missing external dependencies which seems to be the goal of the included buildAspenProject.sh, but I can't get it to run 100%. I'll report back here when I can successfully build it.

EDIT: The git repo is missing the necessary patches to vendored code. i.e.:

      git am ../../patches/*.patch

<comment><USER16> There is also [http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc- ports/ios2.git;a=summary](http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc- ports/ios2.git;a=summary) that seems to be ahead of ios.git by a few commits. Do you know what's the point of having two repos?

<comment><USER17> Those are now symlinks :)

<comment><USER16> Hi. I don't a README in vlc-ios repo, I'm assuming it requires the main vlc repo to be built. Have you got a guide for building it on OS X? I can't get it past the configure stage due to some missing deps.

<comment><USER17> No, just run the buildAspenProject scripts as documented here: [https://wiki.videolan.org/iOSCompile](https://wiki.videolan.org/iOSCompile)

<comment><USER16> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems like the subtitles option is unable to display Chinese glyphs? All Chinese characters are replaced with the .notdef glyph of a rectangle with an X in the middle. Does this happen with other non-Latin languages?

</comment><comment><USER19> Is there a way to access from a NAS or other network share? I see options for network stream but its rather cryptic.

<comment><USER17> So far, we support ftp, http, rtp, rtsp, mms, sdp, tcp, webdav and udp.

We are notably missing Samba (our module for samba is not LGPLv2), afp (we don't have an afp module) and Upnp (the library is not ported to iOS). Help is welcome though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It just redirects me to the US store, which then insists I can't make US "purchases" on my account.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am on the US AppStore and searched for it on my iPhone and found it. But none of the links worked for me.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's a pity it doesn't support external SRT files, otherwise it'd be simply perfect.

<comment><USER17> Please do a feature request on our trac

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The item you've requested is not currently available in the Colombian store.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is this a US only release?

<comment><USER25> No, I just installed it from Germany.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Seems to work for 1080p AC3 MKVs, something GoodPlayer took away.

</comment><comment><USER27> Anybody know what formats have hardware accelerated playback?

<comment><USER17> As in decoders, none.

As in renderers and converters, all of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Apparently it's not available I'm the UK store yet.

<comment><USER29> It is now, I downloaded it about 90 minutes ago.

<comment><USER28> Great, thanks for the update. Not sure why someone felt the need to downvote my original post though, was true at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Has the source code been released yet?

</comment><comment><USER30> Not available in the German store yet.

<comment><USER17> We provided the app internationally, with no restrictions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Not yet available in the US.

<comment><USER32> Clicking that link from a PC turns on itunes and downloads the app. I'm in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Thank you for providing a _clean_ itunes link.

</comment><comment><USER34> Unfortunately it's a pretty average app by todays standards. There are a number of great video players that have been in solid development since VLC was pulled.

<comment><USER17> None of them are open source, though. And VLC is probably faster.

<comment><USER34> I'd imagine speed would mostly be dictated by ffmpeg as that's what everyone is using.

I haven't checked with this version of VLC, but can it do hardware h264 inside an MKV container ? That's where some players have put in a lot of work to hardware decode MKV (when it's h264) as iOS requires some crazy workarounds in that area. So if VLC is doing MKV in software, it's still going to appear slower to the user.

Also, I'd say Open Source isn't really a relevant feature on the app store.

<comment><USER17> > I'd imagine speed would mostly be dictated by ffmpeg as that's what everyone > is using.

No. A significant issue of speed is in the video output.

> Also, I'd say Open Source isn't really a relevant feature on the app store.

I'd disagree...

<comment><USER35> > I'd disagree...

Why ? You're running on a "closed" device with a closed OS where software can only be installed from one place. How can OSS be important here ?

I would think free is important for the end users...but OSS ? Neah..

<comment><USER36> Quite a few of us are running jailbroken devices, and can run just about anything we please.

Additionally, it costs a one time $100 charge to become an Apple developer (assuming you already have a mac), and then you can deploy everything even without a jailbreak. Given that a new device costs upward of $650 (let's ignore "subsidies" here), another $100 to get locally "open" the device is, for some of us, a reasonable expense.

<comment><USER37> > it costs a one time $100 charge to become an Apple developer

Just a nitpick, $100 per year last I checked, hardly a 'one time charge.'</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The programming languages behind "the mother of all demos" - <AUTHOR> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3122

<comment><USER2> Okay that's an awesome acronym. "Language for Systems Development" = LSD

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of "There are two major products that came from Berkeley: LSD and BSD. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." Jeremy S. Anderson

EDIT: Seems there's some confusion about the source and accuracy of the quote [0]. Still funny, though.

[0] [http://www.lemoda.net/people/jeremy-s- anderson/](http://www.lemoda.net/people/jeremy-s-anderson/)</comment></comment>


'Two-faced' membrane can create electricity from salty and fresh water - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/10/two-faced-membrane-can-create-electricity-nothing-salty-water <comment><USER2> There are a couple more things you need for this to make electricity:

•Wire. Whatever goop makes up this membrane is not going to be able to send all that energy back to the desired destination. I'd expect you to have to come with some kind of metallization and tabbing not unlike what you find on solar cells.

•Electrical insulation. At least with solar cells the plus and minus sides are pretty well insulated from each other. Wet goop on the other hand, not so much, and with water occasionally flowing around the edges to shunt the power produced.

•MPPT. I'd imagine this produces a highly variable low DC voltage, which is guaranteed to not be even close to the highly stable high AC voltage you want to provide, so you need these boppers. Luckily, PV has made them cheap. Unluckily, they're not waterproof.

•Lots of pressurized freshwater, and lots of pressurized saline water. Eventually, it'll all be saline, unless you have streams or rivers or other naturally charged sources. When it's all saline, power output goes to zero. When it's the dry season and the river dries up, power output goes to zero. When sea levels go up a foot, well, you know.

In the end, the amount of available surface area, if we spent trillions on R&D to make the perfect design of these, and resigned ourselves to killing all the species at this halocline and making river mouths nonnavigable, would probably be rated less than a couple conventional hydro plants. Efficiency is a red herring, and many devices (thermoelectric generators in particular) become more useful the less efficient they get.

<comment><USER3> "Efficiency is a red herring, and many devices (thermoelectric generators in particular) become more useful the less efficient they get."

I don't understand this part. How does a thermoelectric generator become more useful with less efficiency?

<comment><USER2> When getting down to the nuts and bolts of a Seebeck (thermoelectric) junction, the efficiency is highest when the heat flow is minimized and the temperature difference is minimized.

You get no power when those things are minimized, and in fact you want them both as high as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> *nothing but salty water... and fresh water. Pretty important distinction

<comment><USER5> Yes, it's the fresh water that's rare, and becomes salty in the process so it's sort of like stored solar energy from rain (mostly from the oceans)... osmotic power.

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

The power density even at 40% efficiency is pretty high (300Wh/m3) so major rivers (Mississippi 20,000m3/sec or 72Mm3/hr) would generate 20GW fully exploited.

The problem has always been the growth of biofilms on the surfaces of the membrane, which break them down and/or lower their efficiency.

<comment><USER6> 20GW is basically nothing next to the environmental damage it would cause by destroying the Mississippi delta in order to build this plant. 20GW gives you 480,000 MWh/d. The US as a whole is currently using over 13,000,000 MWh/d [1]. There is only one Mississippi! Not worth it, if you ask me.

Besides, it's not just biofilms that are the problem. With a river you're going to have huge amounts of silt and very fine clay clogging up your membrane. The maintenance costs for an installation like this would be overwhelming.

[1] [https://www.eia.gov/realtime_grid/#/summary/demand?end=20160...](https://www.eia.gov/realtime_grid/#/summary/demand?end=20160802&start=20160702)

<comment><USER7> There is far more than just one US river. Hudson for example is: 21,400 ft³/s, Potomac is 10,810 ft³/s etc.

And the output is just mild salinity water, so you could probably extract form 1/2 the flow without causing that much environmental harm as long as you pipe the output to an area with similar salinity.

<comment><USER6> It's not the salinity I'm worried about, it's the installation.

<comment><USER5> Don't worry, it won't be installed and it's not practical. Also, the delta will be submerged by rising oceans soon enough so that won't be a worry either. :^(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _If the membrane performs as well in "the wild," the new membranes could be used to power remote communities with no other sources of renewable energy in just a few years, the researchers say._

I wonder what communities they have in mind where neither wind turbines nor solar power are viable options but fresh and salt water are abundant.

<comment><USER9> Northern Canada? Lacks the transportatjon for the massive weight of the concrete needed for wind, lacks the sunlight for solar. Has fresh water... But question is how much of that water is flowing in winter. I assume this thing fails at sub zero temperatures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Our try in Norway on a large osmosis plant: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statkraft_osmotic_power_prot...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statkraft_osmotic_power_prototype_in_Hurum)

Crossing fingers that this could reignite the view on osmosis.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if this can be reversed to use electricity to make fresh water. Then you can have a giant battery in the ocean that also produces fresh water as needed!

<comment><USER12> The reverse process is called desalination, and there are a few approaches to desalination that use membranes: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination)

Typically, you don't use electricity directly, but pump in salt water with high pressure, and some of the water is pushed through, while the salt remains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Useful any where near a coast where fresh water costs less than electricity.

</comment><comment><USER14> The idea isn't new. It's been tried before in Norway, unfortunately not very successful:

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

</comment><comment><USER15> I am no expert, but I think I have seen such a thing about 10 years ago and this article doesn't explain how it would be any different.

Also, here's why this thing, even with the technology completely perfected (100% efficiency), would be absolutely terrible: You're turning valuable fresh water into mostly unusable salt water.

</comment><comment><USER16> What,if any, are the side effects of generating electricity this way, other than lowering the speed of the water going through the membrane?

Also, the article didn't mention the power density of the membrane, which matters for making this work without covering river mouths.

</comment><comment><USER17> any differential can generate power - what am I missing here?</comment>


The Golden Grid(CSS Framework) .PSD Template - <AUTHOR> http://www.vcarrer.com/2010/02/golden-grid-psd-template.html <comment><USER2> These render very nice, and under the hood doesn't look too complex.</comment>


Conferize is a TED-like platform for professional events - <AUTHOR> http://www.conferize.com

<comment><USER2> Looks good! Can you help me with this dilemma? We don't have enough space for all the people we'd like to see for our upcoming launch party. Still, we want to include as many as possible in spirit.

</comment><comment><USER3> Conferize just came out of beta, please let me know if you have questions about our product.

<comment><USER4> Congrats! What's the main attraction compared to your competitors?

<comment><USER3> Thanks! We focus heavily on networking and rich media for individual events, it just works out of the box which is unique in the market.

And then we connect all the events communities and media across categories so you can keep up with topics and influencers you care about.</comment></comment></comment>


JavaScript Equality Table - <AUTHOR> http://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/

<comment><USER2> It's funy that "true==[[]]" is false but "false==[[]]" is true. Maybe someone could explain why "[[]]" is considered false?

<comment><USER3> If you write ([[]] == false) you compare _values_ of this object. Internally a [[]].toString() is called which gives an empty string (cause the first element is also an empty array) which in turn is considered false in javascript.

Otherwise [[],[]] is true cause cause [[],[]].toString() gives you this string: ",".</comment></comment>


DPD to pilot 'world first' electric delivery truck in London - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4018435/dpd-pilot-world-electric-delivery-truck-london <comment><USER2> A large proportion of the UK had milk delivered by electric vehicles 'milk floats' when I was a child in the 1980s... [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float)

<comment><USER3> They're still around, though not as common. I got a slight childlike excitement last time I saw one drive up my street.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> DPD have plenty of Nissan NV200 electric vans doing the rounds. They make a lot of sense and not a lot of noise. These are the right vehicles for dropping off Amazon orders and other online purchases, even in hilly areas.

London has a lot of businesses sending stuff out and getting stuff in. Some are close to the M25 where pallets are the order of the day. Normally this needs something bigger than a Nissan van - a big lorry. Seems that DPD have the right tool for the job. I don't blame them for grumbling, routes near to their depots on the M25 need vehicles where you can pick up several pallets of small parcels from many warehouses. This far they have not been able to do that the EV way.

<comment><USER5> We often get deliveries from a DPD electric van out here in the sticks of Gloucestershire hadn't realised it was a Nissan though

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > the world's first purpose-built full-electric large commercial vehicle

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

Probably not technically a Large Commercial Vehicle, but a couple other ones do come to mind.

</comment><comment><USER7> >> Volta Zero was specifically designed to deliver parcels and freight in inner city locations

Really? Setting aside the switch to electric motors, the thing is huge. The cab looks like the first 1/4 of a bus and it is 10-feet wide. Good luck with that on in the back alleys of London. How exactly is this designed for urban "parcel" delivery? It looks like any other flatbed meant only for work only at loading docks.

<comment><USER8> _> How exactly is this designed for urban "parcel" delivery?_

It doesn't look that much bigger than a UPS truck - and plenty of shops in urban areas receive deliveries on 7.5 tonne trucks.

The real thing that makes this designed for _urban_ delivery is the 100-mile range and 56 mph maximum speed which mean it ain't designed for much else :)

<comment><USER9> Streetscooter seems a more practical design, since they are narrow enough that most cars can pass them even in narrow streets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 'World first'... Perhaps for the size.

Certainly not world's first electric delivery truck.

<comment><USER11> Electric milk delivery trucks ("milk floats" [1]) were a common sight in the UK from the 1950s until the 1980s, when doorstep delivery of milk started to decline.

There are still a few around.

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

<comment><USER10> Yeah we still have a milk float doing its round (England) and it is electric (and quite beat-up, looks old). When we hear that "wizz" sound in the morning we know it's the guy.

Edit: Our local one looks like a "Dairy Crest Smith's Elizabethan milk float" in the Wikipedia page's pictures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What exactly are they claiming is 'world first'? There are already examples of previous electric delivery trucks in this thread. I will add one that I don't see listed - the Navistar International eStar - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navistar_International#eStar_e...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navistar_International#eStar_electric_van)

</comment><comment> the-dude "early next year" : or maybe another year later, or never.

Or someone beats them to it, making it not 'world first'.

Great PR ( submarine ) though.

<comment><USER13> Yeah these things can take forever to produce especially when it's a small company with no prior manufacturing experience and they have to build up a whole supply chain. A small defect in the manufacturing of a single component can push the build back months. I would reckon on around two years from rolling prototype to introduction to fleet. And I don't think they have a rolling prototype yet, I see a lot of nice renders instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> also [https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/29/waitrose-john-lewis- introduce...](https://metro.co.uk/2020/07/29/waitrose-john-lewis-introduce- electric-home-delivery-vans-13052452/)</comment>


Designer News + Hacker News = The News - <AUTHOR> http://thenews.im/ <comment><USER2> A lot of these redesigns share the common look of spacing everything out, which looks good. But I've gotten used to the compact layout of HN that lets me browse through stories really quickly.

<comment><USER3> Particularly the big annoyance in the latest version of UI/UX wave is the small fonts. I always zoom to about 150% and in instances where the pages are spaced out very little content is visible in one screenview. I just hope this phase passes soon and never comes back.

And to be clear, I have 20-20 vision.

<comment><USER4> Don't forget small light grey fonts on a white background. I have terrible vision and have firefox set in a way that absolutely destroys websites in proportion to their trendiness (in order to make them readable). I'm still waiting for accessibility to become trendy.

To be fair, even places that should know better, like Mozilla Thunderbird and Valve's Steam client, are impossible to increase fonts in or are destroyed when you force them to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the large, bold story numbers draw too much attention that would otherwise be focused on the headlines. What a story is about is more important, and contains more information, than its ranking on the front page.

Hacker News may not be all that pretty, but it's designed to bring out the important parts and communicate them quickly. Less relevant, less commonly accessed bits or information like numbers and usernames are available but don't stand out.

</comment><comment><USER6> What is the reasoning behind making the story number so big?

We now that it is an ordered list so we don't really care much about the story number.

The most important thing on the page should be Story title > Story source / Submitter / Comments

I like the idea of having the top 20 of both websites side by side though.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the concept, but the site optimizes "beautiful" over functional. It is very hard to scan titles versus the standard news.ycombinator.com

1\. make the text bigger and bolder

2\. cut out colors

3\. less padding on everything

4\. the "numbering of the post" matters very little to me. it doesn't need to be so prominent

</comment><comment><USER8> me likes.

if you added inbound.org it would be a trifecta of hacker,hustler,designer news

</comment><comment><USER9> As a designer, I don't get a lot of value for DN that HN doesn't already provide. With the membership being closed down its too cliquey - -

It feels like these design sites are offering design for design sake instead of designing something usable on a daily basis. This is one area where HN has done quite well in my books. Once our arrows are unicode we're set. :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Would be good if it had a "more" button

</comment><comment><USER11> Why are you using quickfit if you're not changing font sizes? use jquery- ellipsis-interactive if you just want reversible truncation.

You could also consider having some way to load more stories, there's more to hackerne.ws than just the first twenty.

</comment><comment><USER12> I love this. I immediately started tweaking the CSS for a larger font size and less padding, though. HN users are accustomed to density, I think.

</comment><comment><USER13> It says that all of the posts were submitted 12 hours ago. Probably a bug?

</comment><comment><USER14> The HN side goes from 19 to 21.

<comment><USER15> It goes from 18 to 20 for me.

<comment><USER16> For now it skips the ASK HN news,

I didn't mean to release the project yet, just told one of my friends now it's on hn :) It's the second day on project, I will fix ASAP :)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What happened to the TechCrunch Web Tablet - <AUTHOR>

With a lot of noise they told the world that they were going to build a $200 Web Tablet. But nothing seems to have happened since those postings? They promised a project web site but it is nowhere to be found.
Hoax? What do you think? Anyone with inside info?
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/21/the-techcrunch-web-tablet-project/ http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/21/techcrunch-web-tablet-part-2/ <comment><USER2> Don't like to put down an Aussie, but it was written up on TechCrunch by Nik Cubrilovic - the same guy who was behind Omnidrive (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnidrive>)

Nik's past doesn't feature too many home runs - and with that in mind I decided not to hold my breath for the release of the tablet!

I'd dearly like to be proven wrong, though.

<comment><USER3> Seconded. [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/omnidrive_heading_for_d...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/omnidrive_heading_for_deadpool.php#comment-28206)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> About two days after I saw that article I saw that Dell had added touch to their tablets. Doesn't meet the $200 goal, but it's a start. [http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/pressoff...](http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/pressoffice/en/2007/2007_12_11_rr_000?c=us&l=en&s=corp)

</comment><comment><USER5> Despite the quick momentum the idea picked up, it never quite left its pie-in- the-sky state. It will probably take even more community push before they do anything tangible with it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ostensibly,

<http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/>

this happened.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm from the future. I bring you this piece of archival footage showing the week prior to Skynet becoming self-aware:

<http://qik.com/video/156187></comment>


Show HN: Compare Lift.do habits and look for simple trends - <AUTHOR>

Hey all,
Last weekend I spent some time building a little web-app to place my Lift.do habit check-ins on a chart to look for any simple correlations.
This was useful for my partner and I as she tracks her back pain and other activities in Lift.do so we could see some correlation between them.
Thought I would post it on HN in case anyone else finds it useful. Feel free to give any feedback or comments as well.
Source is on GitHub: https://github.com/lukemurray/lift-trends
Check it out live here: http://lift-trends.herokuapp.com
For the devs, it is a real simple app using AngularJS and a tiny Node.js backend (using express).
Note: you have to upload your exported habits because Lift.do does not have an API currently. And to be honest I didn't want to invest too much time in this. Check the source I'm not doing anything with the uploads, they get deleted. Also you can run it yourself instead if you wish.
Cheers, Luke <comment><AUTHOR> Clickies:

[https://github.com/lukemurray/lift- trends](https://github.com/lukemurray/lift-trends)

[http://lift-trends.herokuapp.com](http://lift-trends.herokuapp.com)</comment>


Samsung's biggest challenge now is Google software, not Apple hardware - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/30/15118744/samsung-galaxy-s8-google-software-apple-hardware-competition <comment><USER3> Can anyone speak to success or usefulness of any of this Samsung software? In my experience, these are usually terrible and are in any case always worse than the Google equivalent. The first hour I own a Samsung phone is spent stripping these back as much as allowed.

Do people really use these? Does Samsung really make money from them? Naively it seems like they must if they exist, but I wonder if it's just a continuing bet Samsung is making that has never paid off.

EDIT: To be clear, if experts consider the apps to be worse but consumers still use them, this would explain why Samsung builds them. My question is whether they are actually used and, if not, why Samsung does this.

<comment><USER4> Based on the users that use our dating web app - about 10% of our revenue comes from the Samsung browser. Which says to me that lay people can't be bothered to use anything but the default "productivity" apps that come pre- installed on the phone. It has "Internet" so installing Chrome doesn't matter to them.

Samsung's browser is complete garbage too. It's the IE of Android and I hate supporting it.

<comment><USER5> > Samsung's browser is complete garbage too

It's certainly a pain to support ... I get quite a few compatibility / layout issues with web sites. However I use it anyway because it has a bunch simple incredibly obvious features that for my use make it infinitely better than Chrome for simple browsing.

<comment><USER6> Could you elaborate on what these features are? Personally I'm a fan of FF mobile.

<comment><USER7> I actually liked when chrome tabs showed up in the app switcher... I don't like FF much at all, but I at least get ublock on it. So FF is my default (so launches from twitter/fb go there), but the sites I go to directly, usually done in Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I met the Samsung team by accident several years ago at TC Disrupt. We were having lunch at the same table.

Being in the mobile health space, I instantly went into my pitching mode and started selling them on the virtues of mobile health and why it would help provide some platform stickiness (if I have a chronic disease and have lots of health data there, I wouldn't want to switch platform and lose my valuable data). This was before Apple Health was launched or was ever mentioned.

Quickly it became clear to me, Samsung was ahead of me and they fully understood the value of health data. And it was very clear how strategic they were about the future of mobile and ways the would be able to keep people on their platform.

It's obvious Samsung understands the value of software. Especially as more Chinese or Taiwanese companies are making competing hardware, it's become very difficult to differentiate or be able to differentiate in the long-run.

It's natural Samsung would want to find ways of differentiating against their competitors. However, they have not been successful yet. I think part of the problem is corporate structure/culture. Will Samsung be able to build an entire consumer software division that is free to operate fast, test things and break things? Or will the team be slowed down having to coordinating with Seoul?

Either way, Samsung will alway be one step behind Google, not having full visibility in Googles updates. And there is a chance that Google may want to put a distance between itself and the other handset makers just to reap more profits from their hardware division.

If I was samsung, I would try to focus on killer apps within the asian market. For example, Yandex (of Russia) until recently (and maybe still) had far better map over google maps in their region. Even for places like Turkey, Yandex had a better map. Can Samsung become the brand for providing far better mapping technology in the region? Can they build much better search technology for asian languages?

<comment><USER9> "I met the Samsung team" Weirdly worded since the Samsung mobile team is fucking huge and fits in multiple buildings in multiple countries

<comment><USER10> Less weird when you take into consideration the rest of the sentence: "I met the Samsung team ... at TC Disrupt". So "team" in that context would be the folks that Samsung were sending to TC, not the whole company-wide team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Samsung had always been scared of google. They developed and are still developing androids replacement OS called TIZEN. It's a total crap OS and never able to catch up with android. Most tizen phones are unsold and are given to its employees as annual gift.Samsung RnD in India is the worst place to work for.My friend worked here It has worst culture in SW industry. They think spending 12-15 hrs bring good software. It's Highly unethical company. They want to transform to a SW company by conducting SW exams to engineers. But they miss the point that it has to change its DNA first from its Factory and copycat mindset to innovation/skill based mindset that lot of western companies like google/Facebook/apple exhibit.

</comment><comment><USER12> The title could be _how Samsung wants to lock you in and call it brand loyalty_.

I don't want to use Samsung apps. Neither LG, Sony or HTC apps if they are restricted to certain handsets. I want to be able to switch smartphones without a cognitive overhead. Sure, zoom out a bit and buying into Google ecosystem looks the same, but still, the range of choice is match better.

Want to win me over? Make your samsung app available for my lg phone and next time I am in the market for a new one, I will look more favorably upon you.

Maybe there is something wrong with me as a consumer though, who knows.

<comment><USER13> This is exactly right. Android is open source and more or less free for vendors who want to use it. If you want to deal with that then make your stuff open source and free, but then you lose competitive advantage and brand loyalty through lock-in and that's the point. You have to compete on other things like features and quality.

<comment><USER14> > You have to compete on other things like features and quality.

Quality is obvious. People like well made things and are willing to pay for them.

But features? What kind of feature won't require software or software support? Waterproofing? Curved screen?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My biggest challenge with Samsung was the software customizations they put on their phones.

A lot of it is just bonafide bloat -- there's even a Samsung Printing Service on my phone, and some of it is just completely unwanted UI modifications like "TouchWiz". Samsung even acts as an intermediate layer of bureaucracy that further delays receiving OS updates (i.e. first the update has to come from Google, then Samsung takes Google's update and has to take time to make their customizations to it adding in their Printing Service and their completely redundant Samsung Messages app, then the carriers take Samsung's update and apply their own modifications like restricting tethering and adding Verizon Messages, NFL, and VZ Maps Navigation, all with restricted uninstallations). My perfectly-capable Galaxy S6 will likely never see the day when it can run Android N.

I have since switched to the Google Nexus 6P, which has a vanilla Google version of Android, and I am much happier with a cleaner, much more streamlined personal device.

On the other hand, given that Android is open source, I'm curious why Samsung can't just put something like Cyanogenmod on the S8 (or their own forked "custom ROM") and call it a day?

<comment><USER16> Believe it or not, but, there are people who don't like stock android. They want to be able differentiate themselves. Why do you think companies like Xiaomi, vivo, oppo, etc are a huge success.

<comment><USER17> In part because you can't use google services in China so you don't get all those parts of Android...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am glad Samsung is trying instead of just saying "we can't do better than google anyways." Maybe most of this might fail and maybe some even wont teach/contribute in any constructive way. But even with small percent of success they add a healthy competition and an alternative.

That being said, I had no idea Samsung had all this going on before I read this article. So take my opinion with a grain of salt.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'll agree that shifting consumer preferences related to software is a major threat to Samsung. I have for several years taken the position that there are only two smartphone options - the latest iPhone or the latest Google Nexus/Pixel.

<comment><USER20> That's a ridiculously narrow assumption. There are millions of smartphone users who cannot afford either of these flagships, and people like me who could but refuse to spend the money on what I consider unnecessary features.

<comment><USER19> I was just stating my position. Certainly others are free to take a different position. I still also have and use a Sanyo Mil-spec flip-phone - <USER2> sometimes the only necessary feature is to be able to reliably make and receive phone calls.

Regarding smartphone features - the really don't differ very much. I buy Google phones because a) I want them unlocked, and b) I don't want malware and bloatware, and c) I want regular updates to OS.

<comment><USER6> I used to take a purist Android view like this. But AOSP 4+ with its mandatory lock-in to Google services and its "always watching you" policy is the definition of lock-in malware. Do you trust the incentive for Google (for whom you are no customer but a product) more than that for your phone manufacturer (with whom you have a regular customer relationship)?

<comment><USER21> Call me naive, but even as an outspoken critic of many things Google, I trust their phones far more than any other Android phone.

That said, I disagree I would trust even Google branded phones re: malware. Android will likely never have my trust there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Samsung is also flirting with Microsoft, "The Microsoft Edition Android phone appears to be exactly the same as the regular version of the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus from a hardware perspective, but it will apparently have some features that make it easier to install and use Microsoft apps that don't already come preinstalled on the device, such as Outlook and Cortana, when users first connect to Wi-Fi. The Galaxy S8 will ship with Office basics such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as OneDrive and Skype"

[1] [http://www.windowscentral.com/samsung-galaxy-s8-microsoft- ed...](http://www.windowscentral.com/samsung-galaxy-s8-microsoft-edition)

<comment><USER23> They've been "flirting" since Windows Phone 8 days.

Also, the "new Microsoft" is using its patent extortion scheme to get "deals" out of manufacturers, where they say they won't extort them anymore with patent royalties if the phone makers accept to put the Microsoft apps on their phones.

[http://www.androidauthority.com/microsoft-cuts-patent- fees-f...](http://www.androidauthority.com/microsoft-cuts-patent-fees-for- apps-600824/)

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/23/12599132/lenovo- microsoft-...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/23/12599132/lenovo-microsoft- office-skype-onedrive-android-devices)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Samsung's problems with software are a legacy of how Android was launched: Android had to be launched with the help of hardware OEMs. Hardware OEMs (with the exception of vertically integrated Apple) were, in turn, under the thumb of carriers. Both carriers are hardware OEMs are utter crapulent crap at software AND at product management, and at the time could be quite arrogant about it despite being hopeless.

Now that Android is mature, OEM and carrier modifications should be limited and strictly user uninstallable. Even in the short history of modern smartphones, this has been evident for several years now. But that legacy of carrier dominance of phone specs and crap product management persist.

Google has been unable to get a handle on this problem. If you are in the know, choose a Nexus or Pixel device. But Android Silver, Android One, Google Play Edition, etc. have all gone by the boards as OEMs drift back into "but we need differentiation."

The upshot is that Samsung's biggest challenge is to simply refrain from adding bloat and confusion. Their product management should be asking "Is this SO much better than what Google has that it would dominate the category if we put it on Google Play for everyone to use?" If not, it needs gone.

</comment><comment><USER25> I kind of almost get why Samsung is doing this, as they have identified that they will be looking at decreased margins as a hardware-only player but...

Is it really viable? What do Samsung offer that Google doesn't already do. Is it possible to compete right now, in a head to head fight?

Do the users care enough to chose Samsung? Those that care at all, are they not inclined to pick Google as the lesser evil of two megacorp? I have no idea if it's the case. I'm worried about Googles panopticon and market dominance, but Samsung's headquarters might be in a volcano, filled with CEOs, swivel chairs and white cats, for all I know. Or they might be run by angels that only wants to give us nice stuff... No idea.

<comment><USER15> Samsung is basically the Korean government.

Moreover, I rode in Samsung cars, used Samsung refrigerators, and I even saw advertisements for Samsung Life Insurance when I was visiting Seoul. They do everything.

<comment><USER26> Japan is the same, and so is China. Those countries like conglomerates for coporate structures.

I'd say the Western equivalent would be a holding company.

<comment><USER27> China is? My impression was that successful buisinesses there were blessed by the government, as more of a top-down thing. I thought in Korea it was more like if Goldman Sachs was also Apple and GE- enormous influence, and politicians succeeded who were blessed by samsung.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I agree with the premise of the article, that software becomes more important than hardware at some point in the future. The only two phones I have owned are a Galaxy S3 and a Note 4: Samsung makes great hardware, but disabling bloat and waiting for Android updates is not good.

I am almost two years past my trade up date, but the Note 4 keeps satisfying. I had intended to try an iPhone next, since I like my iPad and MacBook, but the S8 definitely has me tempted to stay with Samsung.

The screen, with almost no bezel, is the selling point for me.

</comment><comment><USER29> Samsung should ship their phones with Tizen instead of Android. In the long term you are dead if you don't control your own software.

They could build a "Android bridge" (an Android runtime for Tizen) and partner with the main app developers (in particular, Facebook) to upload their Android apps on Samsung's own store.

It would be extremely risky but also it would pay off. Otherwise, they will be crushed in the Android phones commoditization race to bottom.

<comment><USER30> Samsung is terrible with their OS, if they switched phones to a software similar to their TVs, that would instantly kill their mobile division.

Maybe they should look into bringing an AOSP phone without any cloud services (not only without Google, but without any; or at least easily uninstallable, unlike their current offering) and capitalize on recent anti-Google and anti- spying sentiment. That would require renegotiating their contract with Google through.

<comment><USER31> As far as I understand it, having the right to sell a phone with Google Play Services is an all-or-nothing situation.

> The OHA is a group of companies committed to Android—Google's Android—and > members are contractually prohibited from building non-Google approved > devices. That's right, joining the OHA requires a company to sign its life > away and promise to not build a device that runs a competing Android fork.

(cit. [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip- on...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android- controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/3/))

<comment><USER32> Samsung probably has the position of strength to push for a phone without play services.

However that's a lot of stuff that suddenly needs to be replaced and I don't see Samsung able to pull of correctly half of Play Services.

<comment><USER33> > Samsung probably has the position of strength to push for a phone without > play services.

No they aren't. The first Galaxy Gear ran a non-certified version of Android and Google got _really_ upset about it. Launching a phone would be suicide.

As for the alternative services they already have a lot of stuff for the Chinese market and Tizen phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I try using a Samsung phone and always run back to something with a more stock Android package, I don't think Google has anything to worry about on this front.

<comment><USER35> Give this a read. [http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4120208/why-andy-rubin- and...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4120208/why-andy-rubin-android- called-it-quits)

Andy Rubin, creator of Android, left Google after a decade because Samsung became more closely identified with Android phone than Google, or something to that effect.

"While Samsung got rich off shipping phones built on Android, Google's brand faded into the background and its influence was chipped away."

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Samsung also downplaying Android the OS, that's why they have TouchWiz (like most software, first iterations are crappy, but constantly improving), so when they switch to different OS (say Tizen), people would still feel home.

In Indonesia, there's a competition platform (like Kaggle, but for devs to make apps), and Samsung is one of the regular sponsors, holding competitions to build apps for Tizen, with interesting prizes.

<comment><USER37> Samsung exit strategy is Tizen. But they forgot to use the exit strategy back when Samsung produced 80-90% of all Android phones about 3 years ago. Now many cheap but equal as good Chinese phones got released. But Samsung might still try it, and partly migrated their users as their SmartTVs and watches run now on Tizen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Broadly spoken surpassing should be a consequence not the aim. Having a rich feature set, at least as rich as your competitors, is required to offer the same playground. Before you can evaluate two features there have to be two features. In this sense Samsung is already on the right way. If their software will ever surpass Googles, well everything is possible.

</comment><comment><USER39> This. It's not about the hardware anymore, it's the software, services, and security that matter now. On these fronts Google is light years beyond Samsung or Apple, and the expanse is only going to get greater over the next 10 years, esp with its data resources combined with its advances in AI. Skate to where the puck is going.

<comment><USER40> Neither Google nor Microsoft (I wouldn't even count Samsung among the top players here) come close to the out-of-the-box experience and integration of services like you get in the Apple orchard.

Read a book on my iPad and have my place, bookmark, notes, automatically show up my Mac. Same with movies and podcasts; they pick up from where I left even when I switch devices. AirPods work with all my devices without cumbersome unpair/re-pairing. Copy/paste across devices. The cloud-synced documents without even having to manually save them.

All of that and more, all so seamless, with no configuration required on my part beyond signing with my Apple ID once on each device. This makes a huge difference to me as a user and Apple aren't under threat from anyone on that side.

<comment><USER41> On the other hand, Apples lack of support for standards is hurting their users. Metal instead of Vulkan, USB Micro/C vs. Lightning. No Miracast support. Most TV software has built in support for Android (simply show videos and photos on your TV). Better integration into the system. My router supports landline calls via smartphone, but iOS doesn't allow integration into the dialer. Copying non-iTunes music to your iPhone is still a PITA. If you don't live in an exclusively Apple environment, your experience will suck. Honestly, Google and the bad update support is the only reason I won't switch to Android. Definitely not the day-to-day user experience.

<comment><USER42> Airplay was created because Miracast had sucked for years and still does. Apple always creates proprietary enhancements to make technologies work well in real use for real customers, like they did with Airplay/FaceTime, etc.

And iOS 10 supports custom VOIP in the dialer.

<comment><USER41> It's not so much about the individual points anyway, but about the mentality in general. I came up with these examples off the top of my head.

First of all, that Apple is the only one providing usable real-world solutions is simply not true. Secondly, it still doesn't invalidate my point. Even if Android works badly with third party products, Apple is often absolutely incompatible.

Disclaimer: I'm an iPhone user, mainly for security/privacy reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Well, yeah. That's why they bought Joyent.

<comment><USER44> Pretty UI is not Samsung's problem.

<comment><USER45> On the contrary. TouchWiz is the antithesis of "pretty UI".

<comment><USER46> Samsung can be bad at pretty UI (no judgement here on whether or not they are) without that being their problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> My dad used to have trouble with Enternet Explorer. Mainly, his sister in law would come visit, play a bunch of Flash games, and then his computer wouldn't work right anymore. So, I explained what Chrome was ("what's a browser?), installed an adblocker, removed the shortcut for Enternet Explorer, and replaced it with Chrome. He would say he understood he needed to click the Chrome logo and the internet would still be available like he was used to. When I would return days or weeks later, I would notice that Chrome was still there but IE had crept back somehow and he was using it. I think a similar pattern happens with phones. Whatever is baked in, gets used by the average user, regardless of how bad it sucks to someone in the know.

</comment><comment><USER48> Samsung could easily fork Android and set up their own app store (just like Amazon). They account for over 50%(!) of the Android market. Hell, I'd like them to become the new Apple: Apple is ditching most of their peripheral hardware suite, they don't sell routers or displays anymore. If Samsung put in some effort they could create the same level of integration with their displays, phones, laptops, TVs etc. that Apple used to have.

<comment><USER42> What talented engineers would every work for Samsung?

<comment><USER35> You probably wouldn't say that in front of the Samsung engineers that keep the production lines of their RAM, CPU, displays humming.

They are engineers too, and with the scale they deal with, I'd say they are talented engineers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Now that google are making their own phones in earnest I think they will start trying to hobble Android on Samsung phones.

<comment><USER50> They don't really need to. Samsung already happily modifies as much AOSP code as they can get away with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I have a question does S8 run Tizen? I am guessing it doesn't since it has no mention in the article?

</comment><comment><USER52> Samsung Pay has not disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER52> Samsung pay has not disappointed.</comment>


Linux Foundation launches killer development tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux.com/feature/144170

<comment> mark-t "Ask any independent software vendor what he hates most about developing for Linux and he'll tell you that it's having to develop for SUSE and for Red Hat and for Ubuntu and ... you get the idea."

Nope. He lost me right off the bat. Maybe I just don't use strange libraries, but getting things working across the Linuxes has never been a major problem for me, apart from debian/ubuntu's broken menu system, and this app sure won't fix that. And it's certainly not the available libraries that cause problems. The things that bite me are the wider unixes: Sparcs have numlock as mod3 instead of mod2, BSDs don't use GNU make by default, Apples have one mouse button, cygwin can't store much on the stack, etc. And honestly, compatibility issues are maybe 1% of the bugs I fix. This is no silver bullet.

But if I had to say something about the disparity of Linuxes, it would be all the different compiler versions and flags that people use.

</comment><comment><USER2> I am not sure I see the point of this. Either a distro is LSB or it isn't. This won't tell you anything you don't already know. And it exists to address a problem that only exists on Linux in the first place; none of the other major Unixes (OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, OSX etc) even have a need for something like this.

<comment><USER3> _none of the other major Unixes (OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, OSX etc) even have a need for something like this_

Those systems are less compatible with all of the Linux distributions. If you're building applications for a customer base that is almost entirely Linux, then those other possibilities are even more difficult to support (and justify supporting) than yet another Linux distro.

And, of course, you're also wrong: To compare apples to apples, OSX, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are about as different as Red Hat, Debian, and SuSE from one another. All come from the same core codebase, if you go back far enough in history (OSX being the odd man out, being willfully stupid on some counts for legacy reasons, I guess...maybe comparable to SlackWare, since OSX has even less useful package management tools than FreeBSD) and yet you can't generally run software compiled for one on the other unmodified. Rebuilding is usually trivial, but it pretty much always has to be done.

The thing you don't seem to get is that each Linux distribution is a different operating system, built by different teams for different purposes. Just like OSX and FreeBSD are different operating systems. Incompatibility goes without saying...it's just that Linux folks have looked at the fragmented market, and decided that it'd probably be better if software makers could build a "Linux" package and expect it to work on all "Linux" systems. That's pretty cool, though it's a rather formidable task and takes more cooperation than operating system vendors (UNIX or otherwise) have ever really been able to pull off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Linux.com launches killer exaggeration article.

<comment><USER5> Yeah. That's something that I hate about Linux and Firefox: their news teams are wholly unprofessional. When I see a news story that's 9/10ths propaganda, I don't have much faith in the product, even when it looks nifty.

EDIT: Weird, swombat. I was just reading your whole discussion with Paul Graham in another thread. Fancy seeing you here.

EDIT 2: The opposite side of this coin is something that I love about Apple's advertising. It has a lot of glib phrases on their web pages, but after that, the entire advertising is just explaining how their stuff works.

<comment><USER4> _EDIT: Weird, swombat. I was just reading your whole discussion with Paul Graham in another thread. Fancy seeing you here._

I'm everywhere!

BOOOOO!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems to me this will generate a few false positives, though it will be fairly good at avoiding false negatives.

</comment><comment><USER7> Apparently, "Linux Foundation releases a compatibility tool" was too subtle.</comment>


Why is my post not published? - <AUTHOR> It isn't spam... <comment><USER2> New accounts which post within seconds sometimes require an upvote (vouch) to be seen. I've click that now. That's my observation, I'm not a moderator and have no deep knowledge about anti-spam logic.</comment>


Professor's 'Amazing' Trick Makes Quadratic Equations Easier - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/science/quadratic-equations-algebra.html <comment><USER2> Deep link from the article to a page that the professor made to explain this [https://www.poshenloh.com/quadraticdetail/](https://www.poshenloh.com/quadraticdetail/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Back in 6th grade, my geometry teacher played the "Quadratic Formula Song" for us, which was apparently written by a math teacher who wanted to help his students remember the formula. 14 years later, I haven't factored a polynomial since maybe six or seven years ago, and I certainly don't remember how to "complete the square", but I've been utterly unable to forget that formula no matter how hard I've tried. The song is an earworm, and I think it will be stuck in my head for the rest of my life.

Listen at your own risk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvXgFLV2gOk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvXgFLV2gOk)

</comment><comment><USER4> NYT article: "To find u, we want the product of r and s to be equal to c,"

Why should it be that the product of the y-values of the roots should equal the constant of the quadratic equation?</comment>


Ask HN: Keyboard layout while changing countries - <AUTHOR>

I'll be probably changing countries soon. Different countries, with different languages, have different keyboard layouts. It may be a bit of a silly question, but it has popped up in my head: should you keep your original country's keyboard layout or should you adapt?
Adapting means losing quite some speed for some time and if you change countries each few years may be a bit frustrating.
Not adapting means you keep your typing speed, but you'll have difficulties with other peoples computers and maybe problems to write some symbols (eg. writing ß in an american keyboard).
What other issues are there to consider? <comment><USER3> I would continue to use whatever layout I was using before up until the point where my speed or convenience starts to suffer.

Once I find myself trying to type stuff that'd be easier with a native layout, I'd change. Not a moment before.

In my case, chances are I'd be still writing code mostly, for which my layout is perfectly adequate. The odd native-language text is no big deal, not worth switching to a different layout just because of that. Only when those become the majority.

Granted, when trying to use someone else's keyboard, it becomes a bit of a problem. But that's why you tell people to make it easy to switch between their layout, and yours (and in turn, you set up your computer to be able to switch to their layout aswell).

At work, I have three layouts: the plain old boring US qwerty, hungarian qwertz (for those collegues who prefer that), and programmer dvorak. Takes a single key combo to switch to any of them, and everyone's happy.

</comment><comment><USER4> When I moved from the US to Norway, I started buying Norwegian keyboards. This way I have easy access to the special Norwegian characters, and the loss of typing speed while I re-trained the keyboard layout was minimal and temporary. Of course, one of the factors was that it was a one-way move; I'm not planning on moving elsewhere anytime soon.

If you're planning on staying in the new country a while, I'd suggest taking the one-time hit, and switching.

<comment><USER5> I'm not so sure... I think it depends some on what you're doing. I absolutely loathe using Italian keyboards for programming, and indeed, I tell anyone that needs me to do programming work with a computer not my own that I need a US keyboard. If you do a lot of writing in the new language, then, yeah, access to whatever funky characters might be a time saver.

However, on the other hand, on Italian keyboards, { and }, if I recall correctly, require some alt key sequence, so you either remap them to something of your own via your editor, or go mad in short order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Azerty format (used widely in France) is horrible for coding - <USER2> braces are a 3 key combo, so I'm typing on an azerty keyboard with qwerty bindings!

Most of my co-workers also prefer qwerty for coding, but azerty has better access to é and ç etc... I'm not typing much prose, so I'm sticking with qwerty for now.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you are native user of US layout, you probably will have hard time adapting non-US layouts which don't have separate keys for typical programming punctuation keys (such as <[{}]>).</comment>


Markdeep - <AUTHOR> http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/ <comment><USER2> The diagramming features are nice, although I suspect an editor for those would be helpful.

Have to look into applying it offline somehow, it would be nice to be able to export finished HTML files

<comment><USER3> It looks like all you need to do is save it from the web browser. At least when I did it to the example file I got a page that has no scripts in it and an svg diagram.</comment></comment>