Ask HN: Do you contribute to open source? Why? Why not? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
We think that a lot of developers want to contribute to open source, but don't do it for various reasons. We want to gather more insights about it and try to improve it.
We made a small survey with questions about open source. Would mean a lot to us if you take part. It should take only a couple of minutes.
Link: https://fdier.co/mm23y7 <comment><USER2> At my company, engineers dedicate 10% of their work time to open source contributions outside of our core products. They are quite free to pick any project they want, as long as it benefits our particular community.

Why do we do this?

* It's a great perk for engineers. They contribute under their "personal" profiles, improving their own karma.

* Growth of the community we come from lifts everyone, including the company as a whole.

* We are grateful for what we get for free, and want to contribute back.

* It's a nice argument when hiring.

* It's a great way to skill up in the underlying technology.

* It teaches about collaboration and the softer skills needed to get PRs merged.

* It gives people to touch technologies they wouldn't learn on the job itself.

<comment><USER3> Time to reveal the mystery and tell us how this magical workplace is called!

<comment><USER4> <insert trendy silicon valley upstart here>

<comment><USER2> Swiss :-) . Cryptosphere Systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Do you contribute to open source? Why? Why..._

Yes, I do.

I have been contributing to the open-source community for ±10 years.

Many of my personal projects pass years unnoticed, but once in a while I receive an email from a stranger on the Internet saying "Thank you" for building a tool they found useful one way or another. Some times students, some times people without programming skills, some times IT professionals.

To answer your second question: _"Why?"_ I make contributions to the open- source community as a way to pay back the solutions they have provided in the past. Nowadays I spend much less time building my own tools and more time searching online for open-source solutions, and fortunately I often find good ones, then I say "thank you" by reporting issues, giving feedback, implementing features, fixing bugs, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not contributing to any free / open source projects.

I think that that FOSS is fueling the technology monopolies, despite originally aiming at the exact opposite. I think it has driven many software markets in the ground like for example tooling. I cannot believe that we use absolutely horrible software like GDB in 2020.

I think there is a lot of left learning ideology behind hte FOSS development and also these types of products have a limited way in which they can be monetized.

P.S. I know I'm gonna get a lot of hate, but I think that as a developer you can spend your time better elsewhere :)

<comment><USER7> Can you elaborate on how foss fuels tech monopolies? I've never understood that argument and would like to hear more.

<comment><USER6> As a manager of a big tech company you are incentivized to increase profit and minimize cost. Might be slightly more painful to use a FOSS toolchain in your team, but your costs are zero. In comparison look at how much does a commercial IDE license like CLion costs per user.

It is a zero resistance environment. It gives the opportunity of the small to grow without any costs, but it also doesn't limit how big the big ones can get.

<comment><USER7> So if I understand correctly, the argument is that it drives down costs as opposed to proprietary alternatives. But how does this lead to monopolies?

Is it something like was suggested below by tsukurimashou, that companies takeover foss software so that it is essentially theirs? But I don't see how that is functional ly different from them just developing that software themselves (apart from higher costs for them). In this model at least everyone can see the source and has the freedom to use and modify as they see fit. I feel like there is still a step here that I'm missing.

<comment><USER6> It is a zero resistance environment. It gives the opportunity of the small to grow without any costs, but it also doesn't limit how big the big ones can get.

<comment><USER7> I see. To me that is then not something that would specifically lead to monopolies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Define "contribute".

If you mean "write code for", then honestly I make very few code contributions. In the 00s, my employer was suspicious of developers contributing to open source, to the point of banning it contractually. I've since changed employer, but I have a legacy of that early experience.

On the other hand, I contribute to open source projects in many ways - I give money to many projects I use, attend meetups, give presentations at conferences, coach people, write answers on StackOverflow.

<comment><AUTHOR> For me all of that counts. Even a bug report is a contribution.

<comment><USER9> Especially a well written and researched bug report. Many typical users lack the skill to do that, and a software developer would have an ample amount of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't. Have donated though.

I rarely program outside of work. And if I do, I just want toy with some ideas, not to actually build something. Most of my learning is done on work time.

It certainly feels nice to take regular breaks from screens, bugs, things not working because the stars aren't aligned just the right way and solving abstract problems. Enjoying the simple tings.

</comment><comment><USER11> I do, as much as I can.

The main reason is that it's important for me to contribute to the common good regardless of monetary reasons, if I can afford to do so. This is true both at a moral/political level, and at a personal level (feeling useful).

It's also a way to give back to projects I use, as I can't donate money to all of them as much as they are worth.

I also like to program just for fun (ie. not useful stuff), and today it's as easy to make my useless stuff open source rather than keeping it private; so I might as well make it open source, because sometimes other people actually find it useful.

</comment><comment><USER12> Do I contribute to open source?

Seldom (<10 PRs merged)

Why?

\- When I discover issues in an otherwise active library or starter, I fix them and submit a PR

\- When I need a minor feature in a library and the codebase is readable

\- When I study online courses, I submit PRs with notes and solutions to help others (and myself with motivation)

Why not?

\- Because it's a thankless job (not getting paid for contributions)

\- Because of lack of expertise

</comment><comment><USER13> Yes. I use a lot of open source software. Often it doesn't do something I'd like it to, or it misbehaves, and I'm fortunate enough to be able to spare time to contribute. Plus it's a great way to learn new things or get a better understanding of how things you use work, and you often get to meet people doing interesting work!

</comment><comment><USER14> I would like to contribute more. But the first reason I don't do it is the amount of time it requires. Investigating the issue, opening a ticket, digging in someone else's code, coding the fix, testing it, opening a PR, updating following review's comments, etc, can take hours.

I created an open source developer tool ([https://mockoon.com](https://mockoon.com)). And I can see the amount of time it takes for other people to contribute. On my side, reviewing or correcting other people contribution is already a lot of work. I think open source is fantastic but can really become a full time job. :) I really believe companies using open source libraries and software should start contributing financially or by dedicating employee's time to contribute. We are in 2019 and this must be seen as an investment.

</comment><comment><USER15> I contribute to open source at work and on my free time. At work I contribute because I want to improve something I spent my time on figuring out (eg. documentation, bug fixes, features) so I don't have to do it again later and hopefully someone else can enjoy it too. On my free time I contribute for the same reason I play music, skateboard or play video games: it's fun.

I have gained tons of things from contributing (experience and knowledge, connections) even if I don't expect to get anything from it. I have also faced the darker side of OSS: the angry users who haven't spent a dime, the "go kill yourself" messages, the dislikes, the time spent wasting time on things that wouldn't happen. At times like that I just remind myself: I am doing this for fun and I can stop when it's not fun anymore.

</comment><comment><USER16> I do.

Reasons for me:

* I like building things

* I feel like we are relying on OSS a lot, this only works if we contribute back, too

* It's a great way to improve (workflow, coding, communication)

* So far it was mostly a nice experience - I've got the pleasure to get to know some awesome folks

</comment><comment><USER17> I contribute as much as I can, but I don't usually have much time that I can use at work so 99% of it is done in my own time. Right now I'm maintaining a small project for converting markdown into pdf's[0], and I've picked up maintaining the StatsD project[1].

I do it for two reasons, first the enjoyment. I really like working on problems of a smaller scope, without a full business around it. I love being able to think of something and knock out some code for it and share it, rather than the code coming last.

The second reason I try and contribute is because I generally believe it contributes positively to the world. I'm sure those who've read my code might disagree, but on the whole I think offering free tools to tackle common problems helps everyone. Even if it's not "exactly" how you want it to work, it's at least prior art to inspire new solutions.

[0] [https://github.com/bluehatbrit/mdpdf](https://github.com/bluehatbrit/mdpdf)

[1] [https://github.com/statsd/statsd](https://github.com/statsd/statsd)

</comment><comment><USER18> Personally I don't, but I know people who do and whilst meeting and chatting with them, they are very encouraging to newcomers who want to attract new contributors. Without them, most of all the software used by everyone would be non-existent.

Why?

Some of them tell me that this helps them improve their skills and allows transparency in the project which helps their project in being trustworthy than the alternatives. Promoting more FLOSS-based software.

Why not?

While for many years, it has been a voluntary endeavour for devs and they take donations or sponsorship to fund their development. On Github, unless you are lucky enough to be a celebrity programmer of a famous project, this is difficult for many to build such a reputation and release a useful project for free to get paid for it. Thus, GitHub has accelerated this entitlement and only the famous programmers with a solid fanbase will reap its benefits.

I think it would be better to donate to an OSS org for more devs to get paid rather than to a specific individual/developer, unless they are the sole owner of the project.

</comment><comment><USER19> Does Wikipedia count? Not too much. Mostly due to amount of work required and twice the amount to defend against the politicking about it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I use my own time to work on tooling I miss on my workstations/own servers [0]. I also have a knack for finding weird bugs in otherwise widely popular and stable software [1,2]. I spend some time on select subreddits (WireGuard for instance) and on IRC to help out when I can.

I do it mostly because it's fun, and I learn some new stuff. Not much is applicable on my day-to-day job though.

[0] [https://git.sr.ht/~moviuro](https://git.sr.ht/~moviuro)

[1] [https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/ticket/580](https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/ticket/580)

[2] [https://marc.info/?l=postfix- users&m=157324715117972&w=2](https://marc.info/?l=postfix- users&m=157324715117972&w=2)

</comment><comment><USER21> I try sometimes but not that interested tbh. It boils down to my experience with PRs. they ignore it forever without a comment sometimes, other times it takes a lot of back and forth discussion which takes up valuable time. I wanted to contribute in other ways too but I alwayd run into roadblocks such as how bigger projects want you to have or build reputation first and they "frown upon" not using your real name and email. I am not saying any if that is bad or unreasonable, just incompatible with my requirements. Ymmv, I greatly appreciate all contributors. I wish more foss projects that are full blown apps offered commercial support though, it makes it easier to find people that can commit more time and resources.

</comment><comment><USER22> I donate to the fsf. At one point I realized how much free software my company was using. Thanks to it I was getting paid. I thought it was only fair to give back. Of course it should have been my company that should have done that, but they were greedy morons at the time.

</comment><comment> nils-m-holm I rarely (pretty much never) contribute, but I write a lot of software and put it in the public domain. Why? What I write has no commercial value (I think), but in case it is useful to someone, I do not want to put any legal stuff in their way.

</comment><comment><USER23> I maintain my own open source project. I do this because I am a manager now, therefore I no longer writing code during my day job. However I still love to code, so an open source project is a perfect hobby for me.

</comment><comment><USER24> Yes I do. Because I genuinely want others to benefit from problems I've solved so that they can focus on other things.

As a developer I struggled writing functional tests. So my company sponsors a team to build and maintain two OSS projects [https://gauge.org](https://gauge.org) and [https://taiko.dev](https://taiko.dev) that makes testing reliable and simple.

We are trying our best to listen to users and help them out. It's been the most rewarding part of my career.

</comment><comment><USER25> I contribute to open source packages when I am allowed to do it during work time. I do not do it from home, and this is mainly because getting pull requests approved (especially in the larger packages) is a huge pain in the ass (weird contributor license agreements, people bikeshedding for absolutely no reason, questions about my contribution that make no sense, etc).

There is already more than enough social posturing and chest-thumping involved in getting through a work day and I'm not interested in having that be a part of my private life.

</comment><comment><USER26> For the most part, no I don't. Not entirely sure why, I guess it's just a lack of interest in the projects I've seen so far. Or perhaps the feeling there are people with skills better suited to it, or enough of a community there that my efforts wouldn't be necessary.

Still, I guess there is one project (a video game level editor/modding tool) which I indirectly contribute to, in the sense of coding the website and working to get the web APIs working. Just haven't found many others in that situation.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm not a dev and product management work might be valuable to OSS, but I'd feel like I'd be imposing things on devs and in a way it's hard to get a foot in the door (because everyone always knows better what should be done and why).

I have the feeling it's similar for UX people.

This way I stick to good bug reports and some small suggestions.

</comment><comment><USER28> I run a small software company, and I occasionally contribute to open source, mostly when a library is missing _something_ that I want.

To be sure that my work won't go unnoticed, I file the issue first and ask maintainers if they'd be open for the pull request. If they respond within a reasonable time frame, I start working on it.

</comment><comment><USER29> I do not, mostly because I work with proprietary software at work. On my free time I submit bugs on GitHub for the projects I use (mostly small projects), with the technical solution inside, but not with PR (as i feel like the owner may have a broader view, and fix it in a better way).

</comment><comment><USER30> The most successful open source contributions I've made have always been when my employer required some bug fix or feature in a third party library and I was able to spend time submitting upstream patches.

</comment><comment><USER31> I do. It's like torrenting, at least some people in the swarm have to seed to a certain ratio to keep the swarm going. It's my way of paying back the benefits I've received from other people's work on FOSS.

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't because almost all the projects I'd like to contribute to feel like they're far beyond my abilities as a developer. I hope that's just imposter syndrome but it might not be.

</comment><comment><USER33> The main thing is that you have to deal with people who have a strong personality but don't know what the fuck they are talking about. It's all that stuff that wears you down.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've contributed to a number of things during my time working with computers , unfortunately it has always been commits that fix things that stop me moving forward. nothing major.

</comment><comment><USER35> I do, as part of my work.

But even if it wasn't part of my job, I'd want to be part of it. It's the best model for software development. (Lots of brains contributing.)

</comment><comment><USER36> I do a minute amount of greenfield open source, but I can't see myself doing PRs etc. seems too much like the 9-5 work! I might do if my main job wasn't as a dev.

</comment><comment><USER37> I do, at any possible occasion, for fixing/reporting bugs, proposing/discussing features, documenting, or simply curiosity and learning

</comment><comment><USER38> I used to but now I don't, for the same reasons I restrain posting on internet forums like these

<comment><USER36> What are these reasons?

<comment><USER38> Because I only have one life to live. Writing comments on internet forums and contributing to open source is roughly equivalent to pissing into a sea of piss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> No - not enough free time.

</comment><comment><USER40> if anything my terrible merges usually detract from it

</comment><comment><USER41> Yup, I did contribute to some small OSS projects</comment>


Ask HN: best cloud for a early stage startup? - <AUTHOR>

Use your own criteria, for example: price, facilities, easy to config, easy to scale, support X technology (like mongo or ruby). <comment><USER2> I'm going to assume by cloud, you mean a cloud VPS hosting provider. If you want some cheap, bare bone VPS's, DigitalOcean has worked for us.

\+ After shopping around, $5/month for a 512MB ram server is about as cheap as you can get.

\+ Simple to spin up a VPS (as opposed to Azure, which requires you to jump through hoops if you just want a Linux server).

\+ Great API for managing VPS's- simple, solid and intuitive (although AWS/EC2, while more complex due to additional features, is also very intuitive).

\+ Great customer support - you can browse to creating a new VPS or opening a new ticket from the same page. Easy support and quick responses.

(+/-)? VERY basic VPS hosting. They provide the minimum amount of distance between yourself and your server. You need to be command line friendly. A good example of the difference between DigitalOcean and AWS/EC2 is that you will need to manage your own firewall (with EC2 they do it for you via security groups). For me the reduced distance is a plus, but if you are inquiring about technology supported this may be a minus for you.

(+/-)? Lack of PaaS features: this is IaaS, you will be given a VPS somewhere on the interwebs, and you will need to be able to manage it. If you need support for MongoDB, Rails or the like this may not be for you. You will need to install/configure the entire stack.

\- Downtime! We migrated our entire infrastructure from EC2 to DigitalOcean around October(ish?) 2013. In that time period there have been 3 significant data centre outages (one lasting an hour or two). OTOH they are very transparent about issues that have occurred and have given detailed post- mortems.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are using rails or Sinatra I am a fan of cloud66. It manages deployment and you can back it with a half dozen different cloud providers. If you have load balancing enabled you can hook up to multiple servers from multiple providers.</comment>


Oxford university students told to use 'ze' instead or 'he' or 'she' - <AUTHOR> http://metro.co.uk/2016/12/11/oxford-university-students-told-to-use-ze-instead-or-he-or-she-6315794/ <comment><USER2> Misleading headline. Somebody handed out a pamphlet in the student union, and it doesn't say that person was an administrator. Additionally, the pamphlet did not instruct the students to refer to everyone by the gender neutral pronoun ze. The pamphlet said to respect other people's pronoun preferences. Therefore, most people on campus would still be referred to by "he" or "she"</comment>


Ask HN: How did Firefox (Mozilla) land a deal with Google? - <AUTHOR>

I'm assuming that Firefox gets money through searches performed from its default start page and through the search box on the upper right of the browser.
Two part question:
1) How did this deal come about?  Is there a program for this type of affiliate search?  (What I've found requires you use the Google watermark and traffic must come from your domain).
2) How did Firefox secure this deal?  It seams like Google could just decline to pay any money, and Firefox would still be reluctant to use a different search.  If users prefer Google anyway, what incentive does Google have to pay Firefox? <comment><USER2> Google wanted Firefox to succeed as much as Mozilla needed the money basically, they backed them as a standard-compliant, opensource alternative to IE, they even advertised them on the homepage back then.

<comment><USER3> Why would Google continue to pay them for search referrals?

<comment><USER4> Coz 1. It's traffic, which is good for Google (they pay others for traffic too)

2\. It's supporting a browser that's non-IE, which is also good for them, strategically.</comment></comment></comment>


What is the best religion for an entrepreneur? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-religion-for-an-entrepreneur

<comment><USER2> Buddhism. Most likely to cure him of his ignorance of impermanence, delusions of self-importance, and greed of material things.

Also, Steve Jobs, one of the greatest entrepreneurs ever, has been a Buddhist since he was 21. Zen Buddhism has a lot to do with Apple's simple design philosophy.

Here is a great intro to a beginner: <http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/>

Personal Story: In high school, I used to be motivated by money and status. I wondered about God and morality from time to time but, never changed my behavior. By college, that all changed as a few lucky encounters with the right books, songs, and people changed me to believe the complete opposite. I am now motivated by trying to do the highest good for the highest number of people. That has led to me be a Buddhist while exploring scientific revolutions, creative masterpieces, technical innovation, and social change on a daily basis.</comment>


GoInstant acquired by Salesforce for $70 million - <AUTHOR> http://www.goinstant.com/goinstant-to-be-acquired-by-saleforce-com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Found through Techvibes: [http://www.techvibes.com/blog/confirmed-salesforce- just-boug...](http://www.techvibes.com/blog/confirmed-salesforce-just-bought- goinstant-for-70-million-2012-07-09)

And here's the TechCrunch article: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/salesforce-com-reported- to-...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/salesforce-com-reported-to-buy- goinstant-for-70-million/)</comment>


Demo of Short-Range Wireless Power Transfer - <AUTHOR> https://www.disneyresearch.com/publication/quasistatic-cavity-resonance-for-ubiquitous-wireless-power-transfer/ <comment><USER2> If you're having trouble loading the page, here is the direct link to the PDF: [https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/disneyresearch/wp- content...](https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/disneyresearch/wp- content/uploads/20170215220933/Quasistatic-Cavity-Resonance-for-Ubiquitous- Wireless-Power-Transfer-Paper.pdf)

Here are the YouTube videos:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn7T599QaN8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn7T599QaN8)

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

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> TLDR: Demo shows that in a 54 m3 specially designed room that it is possible deliver power to small coil receivers in nearly any position with 40% to 95% efficiency — and 1900 watts can be transmitted to a coil receiver enabling safe and ubiquitous wireless power.

<comment><USER3> from what I observe after work in high power radio wave industry, there is a possibility that long time exposure to high power radio wave can have effect on people's chromosomes, not quite sure what will happen if someone expose too long to this type of device

<comment><USER4> In this device, power is not transmitted via electromagnetic radiation, but via oscillating magnetic fields. It's completely safe for humans and any electronics not connected to an antenna tuned to the resonant frequency.

EDIT: Obvious in retrospect, but alternating current like this is exactly how you make EM/radio waves, so my comment above is misleading.

However, that's the cool part about this research. They are generating quasistatic magnetic fields, and decoupling the magnetic field from the electric field—similar to how near-field charging pads work, but at room scale. So they are producing very little in the way of EM radiation. From the paper:

> For example, radiative transfer methods have tightly coupled electric and > magnetic fields that propagate over long distances and are typically used > for radio communication. These far-field wireless power techniques have not > found wide spread use, since they are limited to delivering only a few > milliwatts of power due to health and safety concerns. In contrast, non- > radiative transfer systems such as inductive charging cradles and resonant > charging pads can safely deliver 10s-100s of watts of power by loosely > decoupling the magnetic fields–which are used to transfer power–from the > potentially harmful electric fields. However, near-field coupling is a > highly localized phenomenon and transfer efficiency drops off rapidly as the > source and receiver are separated by more than a coil diameter. Likewise, it > is not possible to strongly couple coils of drastically different sizes.

> Drawing upon recent work using far-field standing electromagnetic waves to > generate uniform field patterns in a metallic chamber, we introduce > quasistatic cavity resonance (QSCR); which can be used to create near-field > standing waves that fill the interior of the resonant structure with uniform > magnetic fields, allowing for strong coupling to small receivers contained > within.

<comment><USER5> > power is not transmitted via electromagnetic radiation, but via oscillating > magnetic fields

I don't think you can have one without the other, can you?

<comment><USER4> That's probably true. I admittedly am pretty bad with basic EM physics. Would love someone to explain this to me like I'm five.

<comment><USER6> A varying magnetic field produces an electrical field.

A varying electrical field produces a magnetic field.

Therefore if you produce either a varying electrical field or a varying magnetic field, you will generate the other, which will then propagate out; this is EM radiation.

I only did a quick read of the paper, but this looks like they are generating a standing wave (think like a guitar string, where the amplitude of motion is fixed at any point along the string) with a wavelength much larger than the size of the room; this lets them capture the electrical field in capacitors in the center of the room while still having a moving magnetic field throughout the room, thus effectively separating the two, which allows for a moving magnetic field (which the receivers can convert to an electric field) without having a high-magnitude electrical field in the free space of the room.

<comment><USER7> Seems to me more like they used the big copper tube in the center of the room and the aluminum walls of the room itself to guide the current flow. It's as if the copper tube and the room are a big conductor through which electricity flows (actually oscillates) - this changing electric field in the conductor creates a magnetic field in the space around it, i.e., the room. So the electric field is contained and guided through the conducting walls of the room, while the magnetic field permeates the space in the room itself.

<comment><USER6> Yes, the walls and ceiling conducting are important to this (otherwise there would be a large induced electric field outside the room).

There are capacitive elements in the pole which is important for allowing it to be resonant at a wavelength much larger than the room (the wavelength used is over 200 meters).

The very long wavelength means that, in theory, one cuold design a room with less of the perimeter conductive (a wire mesh would certainly work; they suggest that doors and windows, or even conductive panels that are connected could work).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Avg whole body SAR limit they use is .08W/kg. For reference, IEC 60601 governs the SAR limit for MRIs at 2-10W/kg [1]. Also, FCC limits cell phones to 1.6W/kg [2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_absorption_rate#MRI_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_absorption_rate#MRI_scanner_SAR_testing)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_absorption_rate#Mobil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_absorption_rate#Mobile_phone_SAR_testing)

<comment><USER9> You could also heat humans, much more energy efficient than heating the whole apartment or house.

Though it would heat any water or fat lying around.

<comment><USER10> It's an old idea: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15220615-500-not- cook...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15220615-500-not-cooking-but- warming-serious-researchers-are-turning-themselves-into-living-radiators-by- walking-into-giant-microwave-ovens-pete-moore-wonders-why/)

very far infrared == very short microwave

<comment> rm_-rf_slash It was also a joke on the first season finale of Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER11> I remember seeing that and thinking it was actually a solid idea

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the article: _" While QSCR enabled spaces do require purpose-built structures, as the walls must be conductive, it offers a substantial improvement in the tradeoff between range and the magnitude of power that can be safely delivered."_

Think theme park and sound stage, not home and office.

<comment><USER13> Until we start offering conductive walls as an option in new homes :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Neat stuff!

Notes:

\- pacemaker warning sign on the edge of the doorframe

\- Frequency smack in the middle of the AM band (1.32 MHz)

\- demo'ing very low power consumers

\- very directionally sensitive (just like any other radio transmitter)

\- room is set up like a Faraday cage

<comment><USER15> If you watch the video, they have a 3-coil power receiver that is not directionally sensitive!

<comment><USER16> It's 3 coils, each at a different orientation. For something like a smartphone, constrained in thickness, it might be difficult to do more than 2 orientations (L x W).

<comment><USER17> You should still be able to do all three. Consider a block around the height of the device and around half the width. You could have one set of coils going around the small edge, one around the middle width-wise, and one around the middle length-wise.

Unless I'm mistaken, that should give you 3 orthogonal coils.

<comment><USER18> You are both correct and mistaken.

That does give you 3 orthogonal coils, technically, but the other 2 orthogonal planes will get very little power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Core issue with the solution appears to be that the faraday cage used by the room would require any wireless wifi/cell access points be inside the room, otherwise they would be blocked.

<comment> m-j-fox That and the lack of windows might not be to everyone's taste.

<comment><USER19> FTA:

> Finally, the high Q-factor and sub-wavelength operation of the QSCR room > permits the inclusion of windows and doors, without significantly altering > system performance.

But there may be limits on how much area can be covered by windows...

<comment><USER14> Thin enough silver layer on glass is transparent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What could you do with this? A small drone that hangs in the air indefinitely?

<comment> david-given A huge swarm of flying drone manipulators in a manufacturing facility.

There are already demos of this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnkMyfQ5YfY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnkMyfQ5YfY)

...but drones use so much power that it's unsustainable beyond demos. Beaming power to them suddenly makes this useful because you can keep them flying indefinitely.

I'll predict that if Disney actually have this working beyond a prototype, we'll see demos of drone swarms building complex objects out of children's bricks within a year, and prototypes of tool-wielding drones actually doing assembly within another.

<comment><USER21> It also increases the weight of the payload they can move around since they wouldn't have batteries (unless the weight of the receiving coils overwhelms that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just what the world needs, less power efficiency.

</comment><comment><USER23> Man that is awesome. Wouldn't mind that. I guess although you'd only use a quarter of it, that pole wouldn't look bad in a corner of a room. But they did say they could shrink it. Maybe you'd just tape some wires on your walls that blend in to the color of your walls for that pole part.

I wish them well.

<comment><USER24> Im sure they could mask the pole by using a dividing wall or something.

<comment><USER23> Couldn't they setup wires in the corners of walls though or just in the walls too. Is that pole's diameter a contributing factor?

I don't mean literally in the wall like behind sheetrock, I mean if you scored a line in the sheetrock and placed the thick 12 gauge wire in there or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 40% efficient, so let's just generate 2.5x as much electricity! (Oh, and remove all of that extra heat with more air conditioning, too!)

Even at 95%, I wouldn't want a 1900W cool near my body for fear of burns. (Compare 100W light bulb)

Finally, what do other electronics do within this field? It's not like there aren't already lots of coils (inductors) that would now have to worry about significant RF back power!

<comment><USER26> It depends heavily on what you're doing though, as to what the tradeoffs are. A simple example: remote controls use very little energy and the extra energy required at 40% efficiency would probably easily pay for the energy cost of creating / replacing the batteries. Phones, similarly, use very little actual energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Pretty neat demo, sitting inside a loaded cavity resonator. Probably not very practical, but still cool.

</comment><comment><USER28> Tesla would be proud.

</comment><comment><USER29> From the uBeam discussions, I thought this was impossible

<comment><USER30> uBeam's USP was charging via ultrasound, rather than wireless charging per-se.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This don't have any harm to health?

</comment><comment><USER32> this is all cool, but those fields created all around the room could affect (charge?!:) us as well; we are after all electrical beings before we are biological beings; so how is the presence of such fields all around us for extended number of hours daily for a lifetime (or half of lifetime) is affecting human health?

<comment><USER13> The electric field is contained by using capacitors in the pole in the middle of the room. The magnetic field is what propagates around the room to power devices.

But I suppose you'll say we are magnetic beings or something?</comment></comment>


Sorting 2 Metric Tons of Lego - <AUTHOR> https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/ <comment><USER2> Needs a 2017 in the title.</comment>


Cryonics Myths - <AUTHOR> http://www.alcor.org/cryomyths.html <comment><USER3> Reversible vitrification of organs is a field starting to show some promise. It will revolutionize the transplant industry, and will bring more attention to cryonics.

[https://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/216900...](https://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/21690025-after-decades-piecemeal-progress-science-cryogenically- storing-human)

There is also some interesting work spurred by the Brain Preservation Prize:

[http://www.brainpreservation.org/small-mammal- announcement/](http://www.brainpreservation.org/small-mammal-announcement/)

[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cryobiol.2015.09.003](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cryobiol.2015.09.003)

"We describe here a new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), which demonstrates the relevance and utility of advanced cryopreservation science for the neurobiological research community. ASC is a new brain-banking technique designed to facilitate neuroanatomic research such as connectomics research, and has the unique ability to combine stable long term ice-free sample storage with excellent anatomical resolution."

</comment><comment><USER4> As the procedure has not been proved to be reversible, it suggests to me that finding a future cure for the original ailment is the easiest assumption to make in this field. I'm more interested to get better answers to the myth that " _Cryonics is not a belief that the dead can be revived_ " than those presented in the article. I'd be hard pressed to say that there are things I think are impossible, but there are a great many things I think are very improbable. In the movie A.I., there's a part where advanced aliens temporarily restore the life of the hero's "mother" using a lock of her hair and some pseudoscientific stuff about information they managed to retrieve from the space-time continuum. All this without even having access to her brain! Impossible? I don't know - perhaps having the theoretical ability to retrieve a specific configuration which maybe exists at some dimension, somehow holographically stored in the fabric of universe combined with an unimaginably advanced intelligence and technological ability might make it doable. Do I believe there's a non zero probability if it being possible? Yes. Do I believe it will ever happen? No. Although cryonics is far less presumptuous than reviving back a personality from a lock of hair and information extracted from the "spacetime continuum", the complete lack of evidence for any sort of reversibility of the process makes me extremely skeptical in the wisdom in paying for such a procedure, regardless of how well intentioned it might be.

<comment><USER3> [http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/rej.2014.1636](http://dx.doi.org/10.1089/rej.2014.1636)

"Can memory be retained after cryopreservation? Our research has attempted to answer this long-standing question by using the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a well-known model organism for biological research that has generated revolutionary findings but has not been tested for memory retention after cryopreservation. Our study's goal was to test C. elegans' memory recall after vitrification and reviving. Using a method of sensory imprinting in the young C. elegans, we establish that learning acquired through olfactory cues shapes the animal's behavior and the learning is retained at the adult stage after vitrification. Our research method included olfactory imprinting with the chemical benzaldehyde (C6H5CHO) for phase-sense olfactory imprinting at the L1 stage, the fast-cooling SafeSpeed method for vitrification at the L2 stage, reviving, and a chemotaxis assay for testing memory retention of learning at the adult stage. Our results in testing memory retention after cryopreservation show that the mechanisms that regulate the odorant imprinting (a form of long-term memory) in C. elegans have not been modified by the process of vitrification or by slow freezing."

<comment><USER4> Thank you, that's news to me. While I still remain skeptical due to the orders of magnitude of complexity in the gap between C. elegans and humans, it definitely calls for a reassessment of the probability I have previously attached to it.

This is why I like HN...

<comment><USER5> Even if the probability is astronomical, isn't a non-zero probability better than null? Sure there is a cost, but is it that high that you couldn't justify taking the chance, and instead just blowing it on a couple other fancy things or whatever?

<comment><USER6> A lot of people don't like playing along with Pascal's wager type arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Being an avid cryonicist, I have attempted to express these myths to a wide variety of people. The very few and open-minded folks that will move past utter dismissal usually have a deep and visceral illogical fear of death - <USER2> a deep and visceral religious belief in the afterlife. These "Cryonics Myths Debunked" tend to only further convince those who are likely to choose Cryonics anyways.

There must be a better way to convince the masses, but so far no billionaire or government has stepped forward with a serious effort here, and I doubt such a thing will occur in our lifetimes.

My point is, other avid cryonicists should study serious and effective approaches, and abandon the "rational" one. But hey, making it up high on the hacker-news top-10 is a good start.

<comment><USER8> Funny, I find that the cryonics advocates are the ones with the deep and visceral illogical fear of death. That's why one signs up for cryonics, right? Being at peace with one's mortality removes the selfish "rational" incentive for cryonics.

Individual people are replaceable, and don't belong outside of their own time. If you want to advocate cryonics for the masses, think about what you would do if you had to live in a world with the reanimated masses of the 18th century. Because that's the kind of mess you propose to inflict on our future descendants.

<comment><USER9> One might as well say that being at peace with one's hunger removes the selfish "rational" incentive for food.

<comment><USER8> Yup, hoping to have one's frozen corpse reanimated in a few centuries is completely the same thing as eating food. You got me there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cryonics Myth #1: "Trustees 200 years in future at a time when your disease [X] is completely curable will care to bring you back."

There's no corporate or legal or NGO structure in the business that will last long enough that anyone will care, and even if they do the cooling system failover will not work in the particularly hot summer of 2074.

<comment><AUTHOR> While there is a real risk that cryonics organizations will fail, there's no reason to think it's a foregone conclusion. Tons of organizations have been around for over two hundred years. The oldest non-profits in continuous existence are well over a thousand years old. There's no legal barrier to a non-profit corporation or trust continuing to exist indefinitely, as many indeed have. (Heck, the Nobel Prizes are an after-death trust that has only gotten larger and more famous in the 122 years since Nobel's death.)

See also Alcor's reply to "Who will revive patients?": [http://alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#whowillrevive](http://alcor.org/FAQs/faq01.html#whowillrevive)

There is no active cooling system; cryonics patients are passively cooled with liquid nitrogen. The only regular maintenance needed is adding more liquid nitrogen, and the storage dewars can last for many months before replenishment is needed.

<comment><USER11> There is no shortage of people in the world and no reason to add additional people who are old or diseased, and have no particular skills that are necessary in the future.

It's much cheaper (not to mention more fun) to make more babies.

<comment><USER12> There's always a shortage of people who contribute to society with generosity and wisdom. But not many such heads end up in liquid nitrogen tanks, methinks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those of you who don't know much about cryonics (myself included), Wait But Why [1] has has fantastic primer.

[1] [https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> I started casually researching cryonics after reading the WaitButWhy article on it [https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html) and I'm recently leaning towards more towards a "why not?" mindset but I'm not yet fully convinced.

The purely logical, rational side of me wants to say "why should I make an assumption that 21st century norms about the inevitability of death will hold true or are even valid at all?" so I should just do the least presumptuous thing and get frozen.

But on the other hand, what does the quality of life look like for a 21st century human reanimated in 2300 or 2500 or whatever? If history (or Black Mirror) tells us anything, at best, I'll live out my immortal life as some sick museum exhibit/circus curiosity, with no possibility of the kind embrace of death unless some rebellious young person happens to take pity on me.

But that's also assuming humans keep on being Sapiens and don't transcend their present biology/mindset.

But then, of course, how lonely is it to live in a world where I'm one of the last humans tethered to my un-enhanced, primitive biology?

And so on...

</comment><comment><USER15> I did a podcast with a friend covering a lot of these points here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ffQEoSJW4w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ffQEoSJW4w)

I think a big myth people need dispelled is that cryonics is really expensive. It's not a very expensive gamble to take, and it's pretty easy to see that it's worthwhile for many people.

</comment><comment><USER16> They mention they don't preserve "heads" in specific but rather brains, and go into detail about how they can't separate a brain from a skull so they preserve the entire head. Wouldn't separating the head from the body cause similar problems of destroying information in the brain? Do they keep the entire body?

<comment><USER17> Whole-body preservation has been a more expensive option (and I assume still is, but I haven't been keeping up to date).

Not that I've tried, but I guess detaching a head at the base has less potential to damage than would opening and removing the whole skull.

<comment><USER16> I know nothing of this field, is there any idea of how long "information" stays in the brain or any metric like that once blood/oxygen flow to the brain has been inhibited?

<comment><USER17> I found a recent review of cases of people resuscitated from combined hypothermia and cardiac arrest: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030095721...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0300957214005243)

E.g. people found drowned in icy water with no pulse. "Six of nine survivors (66.7%) had minor neurological sequelae with Glasgow outcome scale (GOS) 5 (low disability)" (the rest worse). It's not clear to me from the table what the longest time with no breathing or pulse was among those six best-off survivors. But here's a popular account of another case: [http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/child- survived...](http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/child-survived- almost-2-hours-cpr-after-falling-icy-stream-how/)

Those were the top two google hits that came up. It's not my field, but it doesn't seem plausible to me that much of our identity is encoded in evanescent patterns of electrical activity or such. (As opposed to your short term working memory.) If you can nail down the molecules, the information is bound to be there in their arrangement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Brain vitrification, from their FAQ:

This procedure is not yet reversible because of other damage (not caused by ice) including biochemical effects of the vitrification solution — but it eliminates ice damage and the preservation of fine structure is excellent.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Ask a Mortician" just did a video on Cyronics! [https://youtu.be/FOZSU0SLNME](https://youtu.be/FOZSU0SLNME)

</comment><comment><USER20> If Steve Jobs hasn't done it, then who am I to waste money on this.

<comment><USER5> I don't know, who are you? Perhaps you may be someone that enjoys walks, beautiful views, or maybe the perfume of a loved one? Maybe you're the type of person that would want to never stop experiencing these things. Or maybe you're the type of person that only does things approved and recommended by [rich person from pop culture]. Yeah, why even take any chances if they're not thoroughly sold to you by some CEO. It's just your existence we're talking about after all. Who are you to exist if [rich person from pop culture] stopped a while ago anyway?

<comment><USER8> Do you have stock in Alcor?</comment></comment></comment>


UX Is a Canary in a Coal Mine - <AUTHOR> https://blog.growth.supply/ux-is-a-canary-in-a-coal-mine-b7764b77f371 <comment><USER2> I don't get it, design is important but not nearly as important as engineering to any organization. All of these hipsters today in our industry doing design seem to think they are the most important, but the truth is they aren't.

I got news for you, Google has one bar and one button and was built by engineers and is the most successful company in the world of software. Facebook had a shit design and UI and became the leading social network. Microsoft never gave a shit about design and did great.

In the end engineers build great high tech organizations and it's especially true and even more important than ever today.

Fuck design, its like icing on the cake. Without a good cake the icing won't make you eat shit. It's not that important what's important is to get a product out, you should learn code it up and see if it's any good worry about hiring the hipsters when you're rolling in the dough.

EDIT: In the end I'm saying I disagree that having designers is a sign of anything in a good software company as the article seems to stipulate.

<comment><USER3> Proper design is about melding form and function. You're just talking about 'form' designers, who would be better termed as artists.

You're also just grabbing Microsoft and Google as being designer-free in their successful years, which is patent nonsense.

> _In the end engineers build great high tech organizations_

Again, nonsense. Engineers alone did not make Apple the behemoth it is today. The designers made their unusual products _desirable_. And the Apple marketing cohort never get their props for the incredible job they did in making a computer company _funky_. Then there are props to the Apple staff who did magic with their supply chain. You think engineers are the most essential part of a great company? Try to run a company when your business folk can't close a deal to save themselves. History is littered with superior engineering designs that failed in the marketplace. Doesn't matter how good your engineers are if their stuff doesn't sell.

Frankly, fuck this "my job is more important than yours" dick-swinging competition. In today's economic-rationalising environment, few jobs aren't essential.

<comment><USER2> My point is today, more than ever, engineers are essential.

Design is not and the article misses that point and is using design as a gauge for a companies health. That's not accurate, anyway that's my opinion.

Also it's not just google and Microsoft. It's every other high tech company being Bourne today. Engineering lead organizations are much more likely to succeed.

<comment><USER3> Part of what you're missing is that designers are closer to the user than engineers usually are, and the article relies on that link. I did support for many years, and I am _very_ aware of the disconnect between what non-customer- contact engineers think users want, and what users actually want. Your customer-contact staff are an excellent barometer to the mood of your users, because they're actually looking at what's going on. And in the case of support and sales staff, they're at the pointy end.

And of course engineers are essential to a high-tech company. It's like saying lawyers are essential to a legal firm. But in a lot of tech companies, the engineers are insulated from users, or are even dismissive or abusive of them.

Also, the biggest tech company in the world was led from near-bankruptcy to "more cash than the USA" by not an engineer, not a designer, but a _business_ guy. To make a great company - google, microsoft, whatever, you need hardcore business folks that can play the game hard at the highest level. Having a clean engineering setup is nowhere near enough.

<comment><USER4> Oh you get get it. Closing that loop between what the customer thinks they want, what they actually need, what the engineers can provide and at what cost, so so so important. I'd agree with the article, having the UX guys (or any keep team) dispirited is a bad sign. For companies with some sort of monopoly this stuff can continue indefinitely. Companies that don't have some sort of market power usually are a few years or quarters from death when you see this stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a UXer, here's my 2 cents:

"Design team morale is a leading indicator for a company's design health. Are the designers in the company positive and happy, or do they complain about feeling disempowered or disenfranchised?"

It's a bad sign when ANY entire team in the organization has low morale and is feeling disenfranchised, whether they are the design team, engineering team, or business team.

"If designers are not happy, it likely reflects larger issues with the company that impact current and future products under development. Moreover, if designers are not happy, it's really hard for them to create a joyful experience."

No so. Designers are never happy. We are always striving to do better and to improve the customer experience. The fact that the experience is not the best that it could be drives us to do more.

"It's incumbent upon the design leader and CEO to rally the team to see the opportunity ahead and be excited about delivering it."

The leaders need to be respected by the team in order to have the ability to rally them. In my experience, it's best to have the respected leaders talk to their teams rather than having a lead designer try to motivate a team of engineers, for example.

Overall, I think this article is a lot of complaining about designers not having enough respect in a company. From my experience, if you want respect, you have to earn it by showing that you can deliver value, not by whining that the environment is not optimal. Good UX designers are able to see inefficiencies and design a better way, both for the customers and for their own work processes.

</comment><comment><USER6> Its also the leading indicator of your companies financial heath. Typicaly "designers" get cut before engineers. IF they fire the designers and the UX people, odds are your next.

</comment><comment><USER7> You look at the top classified ad site(craigslist), and it's pretty clear how important design really is.

<comment><USER8> One might argue that the look and feel of craigslist matches its use. It also had a great first-mover advantage and vacuumed up all the mindshare for classifieds very early on. It's hard to compete with that, even with a shiny well tested design.

A lot of the comments here are pointing out outliers that succeeded due to reasons such as first mover advantage combined with network effects. In more competitive spaces, design still matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "I do UX at startup.io"

translated

"I read design articles and tell developers what they already know."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Design team morale is a leading indicator for a company's design health.

<comment><USER10> Yes, and in fact the title contradicts the main thesis of the article -- UX is a "trailing indicator", UX Team morale is a leading indicator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious to know how many people who've interviewed have received honest feedback about the current situation at the company.

Most people don't know how bad it is, until they're in the job, unless you know someone who works there outside the interview.

Morale can be a leading indicator but the honesty/transparency required to actually capture the indicator is somewhat difficult</comment>


Building a software-defined radio from scratch - <AUTHOR> http://electronics.kitchen/misc/freesrp/ <comment><USER2> Hey! I'm Lukas, the guy who made this. Just discovered someone posted it on Hacker News, pretty exciting for me. If you want to ask me any questions or make comments, I'm here and on reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/4uic5r/sdr_pla...](https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/4uic5r/sdr_platform_ive_been_working_on/)

<comment><USER3> Just a technical writing tip, when you are using any sort of acronym that's the subject of the piece it's helpful to do something like SDR (Software Defined Radio), then use SDR through the rest of the text. Either that or do the blog-style hyperlink the first acronym to the wikipedia page or give a footnote.

<comment><USER2> Thanks -- you're right. I've added a link and spelled it out completely in the first sentence now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a really impressive project, and I am all the more in awe that this guy is only 18 years old.

The project is on Github: [https://github.com/FreeSRP](https://github.com/FreeSRP) Reddit discussion: [https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/4uic5r/sdr_pla...](https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/4uic5r/sdr_platform_ive_been_working_on/)

He's selling a small batch of these for $350 apiece - calling it now, he's going to be very successful in his career.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for the kind comment. Not selling them yet, though, and the small batch might end up being a little more expensive than that (but I'm really trying to keep it under $400).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _I also had done more revisions of the board and spent way more money than I initially planned for... even though in hindsight, having only three revisions for a fully functioning, moderately complex design, with no previous experience working on something like this, probably is not that bad._

Are you kidding? That falls into the realm of superhuman. I've seen 20 year veterans blow a 100 grand and get half that far. I think even Woz would do a double-take.

<comment><USER6> > Are you kidding? That falls into the realm of superhuman. I've seen 20 year > veterans blow a 100 grand and get half that far. I think even Woz would do a > double-take.

A high density BGA through an OSH Park board with a homebrew reflow oven and only 3 revs and a stainless stencil on only the last pass? Yeah, that's really quite good.

You practically can't avoid making a mistake on a PCB of that complexity. There are simply too many details buried on too many datasheets and one of them is going to drop.

If you have the time, the best thing I have found for catching mistakes is to have a design review. Even if the person doesn't understand electronics, the fact that you have to walk through every part and _explain it_ to somebody means that you will catch some really stupid things.

However, if you're good and the board isn't too expensive, it's often cheaper just to fab the board. You're time is worth something, and you can be designing something else while the PCB is being fabbed.

<comment><USER2> That's actually sort of what I did. I didn't explain it to someone else, but went through it in my head, talking to myself explaining the design. Explaining it to someone else must be even better!

<comment><USER5> Or just a rubber duck.

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

Personally I use a cat. Its Steve-Jobs-like attitude seems ideally suited for the task.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome project man. I do EE HW design for a living and this I can attest is a hard project. I have a bladeRF and use it regularly. One thing I try to instill in the people that work on my team is that the best attribute you can have and try to foster in your career is not giving up on hard things. So it's great that that is something you have.. To stick with this project for a long time and putting in the time to make it happen. MIT will be a challenge but I'm sure if you stick with it you will end up doing great. Go for something tough and glad you are coming to the US. I have to apologize for politicians that say we don't like foreigners. We do like foreigners and we need them. You will be a great addition to the many awesome people coming here to find there path to great success!

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the USRP1 motherboard, when I originally used one in 2008, used to be $700 complete/$550 for the motherboard. The price now is $719, but that includes the enclosure, cables, power supply, etc...

I actually cut my teeth on Python learning GNURadio.

<comment><USER2> That's true, I'll update the USRP price on the website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am curious; what would one actually do with this device once it is working?

This is a really neat sounding project.

<comment><USER10> With 56MHz bandwidth, a lot. You could record and analyze most 802.11 connections (typically 20MHz to 40MHz, except for newer AC hardware that can go to 160MHz).

You could also record the entire FM band in your area at once, all of it. Same with AM and a lot of other bands. It'd also probably work really well for recording things like fire and police bands, with trunking and being able to determine an entire conversation at a time that normally need 2 or more cheaper SDRs to record the trunk and then the channels. That would normally mean you'd probably miss some channels that are at the other end of what you're listening to. It'd also mean you can monitor the entire bandwidth of many of the ISM bands to determine what some misbehaving device is doing.

So many things that I'd love to do with it! I really want one now.

<comment><USER11> _You could also record the entire FM band in your area at once, all of it._

I'm not very familiar with RF beyond the basics, but could you explain simply how does that work? Don't you need to tune into a specific frequency to receive a signal?

<comment><USER12> Basically a traditional radio would multiply a signal with the frequency you want to tune to and give you the resulting signal which is an audio signal. With an SDR, you can record the actual RF signal and then store/multiply whatever you want to. So you can store everything and later tune to any frequency using software later!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Amazing project!

1\. What are your plans for it? Aside from high altitude balloons.

2\. Do you plan to turn this into a sort of "shield" add on?

3\. What will you work on after this project is done?

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

Well, I'm currently working on a new version that I'm hoping to sell. I also still need to work on the software.

This won't be an addon, but the next revision will include an expansion header so you can add addons. Should be pretty neat to make an LCD+battery pack "shield" so you can use the SDR as a stand-alone spectrum analyzer.

What I'll actually use it for: I built it because I wanted to learn more about signal processing and the different protocols that common devices use, so I'll be tinkering with all those protocols.

No idea what I'll do after this, maybe that LCD addon I was talking about?

<comment><USER14> Really an amazing job. Keep feeding your curiosity, it is really worth it and try to travel a bit while explaining your project. Array processing is something that deserves a better look. Many SDR solutions still lack a bit under this point of view. Yet that will be quite useful to have. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lukas, your schematic link seems to be broken on the project site. I have been thinking about doing a similar project with this chipset actually. I really want to put down about or 8 of these ADI parts and actually make lower cost phased array development environment. One day....

<comment><USER2> That'd be a cool project... The link is working for me, the schematics should be here: [https://s3.amazonaws.com/freesrp/prototype-r2/freesrp- sch.pd...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/freesrp/prototype-r2/freesrp-sch.pdf) Are you sure it's broken?

<comment><USER16> Your link here, and the link in the article, both work for me.

This is a really nice write up of an impressive project!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Could this project, in theory, be done with a 2-layer (front and back) board? I'm thinking of building a small SoC board... but I don't want to shell out hundreds of bucks (and days of shipping time) for prototype PCBs, but hand- etch them instead.

<comment><USER18> Its been done, but AFAIK not with hand etching: [http://hforsten.com/making- embedded-linux-computer.html](http://hforsten.com/making-embedded-linux- computer.html)

I don't think you can do high frequency RAM lines with hand etched boards or BGA escape routing without vias, but two layer prototype boards are pretty cheap these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is it the truth, or just pure genius? I choose second! What an amazing job, well done!

</comment><comment><USER20> SDR: Software-defined radio</comment>


Cosmos Will Get a Sequel - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/08/cosmos-to-get-a-sequel-hosted-by-neil-degrasse-tyson/

<comment><USER2> Yes. Incredible. With Cosmos, Carl Sagan opened my mind up to the incredible wonders of space and what's out there a few years ago. It's up there with _Planet Earth_ on the scale of seriously remarkable television series. Seeing this continue with none other than Ann Druyan and Steven Soter themselves gets a resounding _hell yeah_ from me.

If you haven't watched Cosmos already, I highly, highly suggest it. Start with Episode 1: [http://www.hulu.com/watch/63317/cosmos-the-shores-of-the- cos...](http://www.hulu.com/watch/63317/cosmos-the-shores-of-the-cosmic- ocean#s-p3-so-i0)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but Neil de Grasse Tyson, fine chap that he is, doesn't have anything like Carl Sagan's charisma.

<comment><USER4> I'm a huge Sagan fan, and while I agree that Tyson doesn't have quite the same charisma, he does have a charisma of his own.

The big question I have is, being on a major network owned by a well-known conservative mogul, will the show be able to take the same stance on religion as its original incarnation. Will Tyson be allowed to refer to religion as, "a reassuring fable?"

For the sake of the integrity of a successor to Cosmos, I certainly hope so.

<comment><USER5> Tyson tweeted out yesterday: "Simple Logic: Worried that FOX viewers don't know, think, or care about science? That's why COSMOS belongs on FOX."

It's being written by the same writers (aside from Carl) as the first one, and produced by Seth MacFarlane, someone who doesn't take shit from FOX. Tyson also doesn't seem like a guy who would corrupt his morals, he knows the value of scientific passion.

FOX isn't Fox News, so don't worry too much. I'm not, at least.

<comment><USER6> _FOX isn't Fox News, so don't worry too much. I'm not, at least._

What people don't realize is that Fox News serves a commercial rather than an ideological agenda. The rest of the news media (especially when Fox News started) has a slightly liberal bias, which means the big business opportunity for Fox was right-wing news. It's not that they have a political agenda, they're just giving people what they want--news coverage that aligns to their political bias. As the TV viewing population has skewed older, Fox News has pushed even further to the right to match their target market. Likewise, the business opportunity for the Fox network was young adults. (And for The Sun in 1970, the target market was presumably working class British males who wanted to see topless girls in their tabloids.)

<comment> mkr-hn Ailes is an advocate for his political views, and business is just the latest way he advances them. Even if he's somehow uninvolved in content direction, Fox News doesn't get a free pass with "it's just business." A lot of destructive things have been done in the name of profit, and poisoning the national discourse is no different.

<comment><USER6> Ailes is a means to an end. If right wing news is the business opportunity you want to pursue, you hire Ailes. I'm speaking from the perspective of Murdoch here.

I never intend to justify Fox News, only explain it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Unless they get one big, honkin' corporate sponsor, any commercial-television follow-on to Cosmos will be broken up by commercials. Cosmos was done on PBS, which meant they could write for longer-duration episodes. 12-15 minute morsels will be more difficult to follow.

And if they assume that people's attention span are about that of house plants (which sums up Fox sports and the rapid-cut crap), it's going to be rather lightweight. If this is coupled with the "show rather than talk about" trend I've seen in Nova, it's going to fail as it'll take too much time to get the points across.

</comment><comment><USER8> Carl Sagan tried to recruit Tyson to Cornell for undergraduate studies after he read his application essay. (He decided to go to Harvard though.)

So if he is good enough for Sagan, he is good enough for me.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think I'm most blown away by Seth MacFarlane's involvement in putting this together. I didn't know the guy had such a deep respect for science and a desire to impact our understanding of it.

<comment><USER10> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p5jnqEyUs4>

<comment><USER11> That clip shows that he hates Christians, not that he loves science.

It's not even accurate (to the extent that any counterfactual can be considered accurate). If Christianity had never existed, would that have prevented the fall of the Roman Empire? Unlikely. Even if it had, were the Romans in the 3rd Century AD making huge strides in science before Christianity came along? Nope. And you'll note that when modern science _did_ eventually arrive, it showed up in the Christian part of the world rather than the other 90%, which suggests Christianity can't be retarding scientific or technological progress _that_ much.

<comment><USER12> Does it show that he hates Christians? I would say it indicates he is strongly critical of the role _Christianity_ has had on the world. The strongest that you could say is that it shows that he hates Christianity.

Hating Christians though? That is an unfounded allegation. For example, I hate all religions, including but obviously not limited to Judaism. However, if you said that I hate Jews, that would be slander. It is incredibly untrue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I only got around to seeing Cosmos when I was in graduate school, but I could see why it would inspire people to get into science. (For myself, I blame Isaac Asimov.)

One problem I have with a lot of science programs today is how they don't make it clear how we know what we know, or _who_ figured it out. Science is presented as a bunch of facts rather than as something that was developed by people (who always have interesting stories). Carl Sagan didn't make that mistake, nor did Asimov, and I hope this new Cosmos sequel also takes the historical and human perspective.

<comment><USER14> Have you seen James Burke's Connections? Sounds like it'd be right up your alley. <http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/james-burke-connections/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "weaving rigorous science with the emotional and spiritual into a transcendent experience" .. the level of hyperbole .. i worry .. i worry ...</comment>


Liquid-Cooled Supercomputers, to Trim the Power Bill - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/12/business/international/improving-energy-efficiency-in-supercomputers.html?ref=science

<comment> josh-wrale In my experience, RAM needs to be replaced VERY OFTEN in HPCs. I seem to remember reading somewhere that motherboards that go into a mineral oil bath are basically impossible to clean afterwards. This point seems important, since mineral oil is used here for its electrically insulating properties. There are many contact pads in the marrying of RAM DIMM to slot. Ergo, replacing sticks of RAM in such a supercomputer would probably be a nightmare. And this nightmare would likely be frequent in its occurrence.

I also take issue with the first sentence of the article. Submerging a home computer in mineral oil is a common practice. Their "technology" editor needs some more technology chops, it would seem.

Another note: Let's hope they aren't secretly using polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in place of mineral oil to give themselves a boost. (see Wikipedia)

<comment><USER2> I've read a similar article sometime last year, about Intel testing immersion- cooled blades. That solution would make more sense IMO - blades are already designed to be a single FRU, so if any component were to die, you'd just pull the blade from its chassis. I imagine the process of safely disconnecting the fluid hookups could be integrated into the blade chassis packaging system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not just "one" model of Cray-at least the Cray-1, XMP, C90, T916/932, T3E…were cooled by liquid HFCs.

At five million+ $$ per system, the cost of using Fluorinert as opposed to mineral oil in the coolant cycle isn't even a rounding error.

If you spill mineral oil while swapping internal components, it's a trip & fire hazard. HFCs evaporate quickly, and aren't flammable.

<comment><USER4> You might be surprised at flourinert cost, when that was contemporary rather than ancient history I was looking into FC-40 and the like for some ham radio gear cooling (hey, why not?). Believe it or not, FC-40 retails today for about a kilobuck per 2-liter bottle. No I'm not kidding. So a couple thousand liter tank is about a megabuck. So its not a rounding error.

<comment><USER5> You could have picked a Cray T94 full of it when it was for sale on Ebay.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4560173](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4560173)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Coming from a EE background, sounds like total bogosity relying on the customers not knowing anything about electronics. Magically dripping oil on a piece of electronics makes it use half the power, yeah get back to me on that.

I never knew that adding massive capacitance to high speed signalling lines made their drivers draw less current (super sarcastic here, its the other way around)

I've dunked my share of power resistors, precision resistors, and the occasional semiconductor in oils of various sorts and nothing too exciting happens. Some electrolytic caps are not very well sealed and leak oil in and (conductive) electrolyte out. Some component marking inks are oil soluble and some inks are semi-conductive, which can be a problem.

<comment><USER6> It's not that the components themselves draw half the power, it's that you don't need to provide as much power to cool them. There's a typical rule of thumb in datacenter planning that for every 1W of compute power, you need 1W to cool it. If you can cut the cooling power, you can cut almost 50% of your datacenter cost.

Obviously you won't eliminate cooling cost entirely, and it's quite possible the overhead of replacing oil and extended maintenance times could offset these power savings.

<comment><USER7> Why not go for warm water cooling then (like SuperMUC[1] for example)?

Should get you the same benefits as submerging it in oil without most of the drawbacks.

[1] [http://www.lrz.de/services/compute/supermuc/systemdescriptio...](http://www.lrz.de/services/compute/supermuc/systemdescription/)</comment></comment></comment>


Development Journal for Price of Persia - <AUTHOR> http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/

<comment><USER2> Fantastic read. I love the way he charts the ups and downs in his personal motivation. It's a great reminder to be persistent.

<comment><USER3> This inspires me to keep closer logs of my progress on personal projects -- particularly the "soft" stuff (how I'm feeling about it, etc). It's terrific motivation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just spent the last 2 hours reading through most of the 46 pages and skimming through the ones that didn't appear to have much "meat" on them regarding Prince of Persia.

I found the journal to be an incredibly revealing look into what game programmers, and arguably many other programmers, go through. Really makes me wish I had documented some of my earlier forays into programming just so that I could go back, read, and remember.

It's also sparked a bit of intrigue in me that I haven't felt in a while to revisit game development. I toyed around with Dark Basic and Blitz Basic back in 2001 and really haven't touched anything since.

As others have said, great find and I would love to read more from other programmers like this and like ones from Carmack recently posted on HN.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a great find. Thanks! BTW, I love the reference videos that were shot for the animation.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, even just seeing the still frames brought flashbacks of those animations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> October 23, 1986

Everyone in the office has been playing a lot of Tetris – a Russian submission for the IBM PC. It's a classic, like Breakout. But I don't think Broderbund is going to publish it. The knaves.

October 31, 1986

I beat out Ed and Steve for the #1 spot on the Tetris high-score list.

</comment><comment></comment><comment>

Thanks for this link, great reading! my best friend had a pc and prince of persia (and karateka) when we were young, great memories...

</comment><comment><USER8> 1985: "And the games business is drying up."

Classic.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was fascinated to learn that Jordan was working in the same office as Robert Cook, the guy who was making D/Generation, a game I remember fondly. Like Prince of Persia, it also has an enemy who is a dark version of the player.

(The lineage of the concept is more complicated than one game borrowing from the other, however: The journal entries show that another coworker, Tomi, suggested the dark version of the player, while Robert suggested creating the dark version by jumping through a mirror.)

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a great read, but you kind of cringe knowing in hindsight that the Apple ][ market was drying up and there was Mechner, working on screen plays and taking months at a time away from development of the game.

It _does_ have a happy ending that the PC market started to kick in, but man.

</comment><comment><USER11> it's "prince" of persia.

<comment><AUTHOR> yep, first fpp, typo, duh

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> you can download the original prince of persia here :

[http://www.bestoldgames.net/eng/old-games/prince-of- persia.p...](http://www.bestoldgames.net/eng/old-games/prince-of-persia.php)

use dosbox (<http://dosbox.com>) to run the exe. This brings back childhood memories. Learning how to use the command line to play prince on a 386.

The journal really motivates me to start writing my own. I would help me to clarify my thoughts and keeping my goals in mind..

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow, this is brilliant - always interesting to read about development in the old days! Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER6> Amazing story of a very exciting and chaotic time in computing and computer games.</comment>


Ask HN: Sales Resources - <AUTHOR> I'm working on a webapp that is targeted at will be directly sold to a pretty specific niche, like a 37signals app. I don't have much experience in direct sales, and was wondering if any of you had any good resources (books/sites/etc) for a beginner trying to get into the sales game. Your advice, tips, etc, you may have as far as marketing and selling an online service are all welcomed, of course. Thanks.<p>EDIT: It's targeted at the religious market. <comment><USER2> Hey Kyro - Bring someone on. It takes about 1 year to really learn sales, 6 months if you have a bit of a marketing background. If you really can't bring someone on, then here are some pointers based off of the sales guys I work with.

First, treat everything like a funnel. First time visitors to repeat visitors to trial accounts to paid accounts to referring accounts. Test around about a bit to determine where you are best able to impact the conversion from one part of the funnel to the next. Make sure your tests are not biased. Randomly assign yourself to a certain number of leads vs a control group. In some companies, the best way to spread the word and impact final sales is through contacting your already paying accounts and getting them to spread the word to their contacts. This works especially well if they have a ingrained interest in seeing you do this (ie, they get value by bringing people on). But usually your best performance is reached by calling, emailing, sending real life snail mail to people that have created free accounts. Also, always CARE about your users, especially your first ones. Care, care, care, care, care. Your first users are typically cutting edge folk that others look to for advice. Even if it looks like a negative ROI to service these users it's not, because they spread the word. You should be emailing these guys back within the hour.

Once you reach enough visitor volume, split test EVERYTHING. Pricing pages, home pages, sales tactics, etc. Send me an email if you want some tips on how to do this successfully, it is part of what I do for a living :) firstname.lastname@example.com

All the best going forward!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm having a little trouble parsing your first sentence, but ... if you have a truly specialized/niche product, my best advice is to find high-profile people inside the industry, partner with them in one way or another, and let them sell for you. We did this initially and it was instrumental in our growth.

For most niches, there are trade organizations, annual conventions, and "connectors" (as Gladwell would call them) who have been around for years, teach workshops, run regional groups, etc. This is where I'd start looking. Hit an annual convention or two–you don't have to exhibit just yet (but it would help), but at least walk the floor and introduce yourself. Look at the speakers and get in touch with them. Many trade organizations allow you to advertise directly to their members.

Hope that helps.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just for fun, you might want to drop Olark (<http://olark.com>) on your website, so when you do get useful traffic you'll have an opportunity to help sell to them -- it's worked out pretty well for us. (shameless plug)

</comment><comment><USER5> This was posted a while ago on HN and I found it really useful: [http://saleseverything.ning.com/profiles/blogs/8-sales- quest...](http://saleseverything.ning.com/profiles/blogs/8-sales-questions- you-cant)

</comment><comment><USER6> If it's B2B software shoot me a product description and screenshots, and let's discuss the terms. It would be easier if you have a CJ account.

Affiliate marketing is what you want, offer a top commission and give more freedom to publishers.

</comment><comment><USER7> Books by Brian Tracy</comment>


Chats are not dead yet - <AUTHOR> http://amiadogroup.github.com/candy/ <comment><USER2>
      Awesome Features!

        Beautiful default theme
        Join multiple rooms and start private conversations
        Get notified when new messages arrive
        Ignore spammers and people you don't like
        Moderation: Kick and ban users, change the subject of the room

Um. So basically, they just reinvented IRC, based it on an XMPP backend and spiced it up with a load of funky buzzwords?

<comment><USER3> I don't get it. XMPP already has everything IRC has.

\- Federation

\- Multiple (persistent) rooms (Look up XMPP Groupchat)

\- Permissions (think chanserv, /mode +ov etc.)

\- Private messages

What am I missing? I'm hanging out on IRC every day, on multiple networks. No, I don't use XMPP groupchat so far - just to counter that argument.

The reason for that is, that

\- XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion. So the protocol would be fine for me and I'd like to see IM tied in with groupchat/channels, but really.. Look at the clients and it's like really, really crappy IRC clients (to get back to your point: Yes, those UIs are usually following IRC designs, just with look like from a decade in the past)

\- Adoption. For company internal stuff XMPP is great. If someone with high profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product based on this protocol, it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other hand, as I stated a couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long as Google or Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really supporting the core feature of XMPP in my book.

Did they reinvent IRC? No, XMPP did. Years ago, it's an XMPP standard. This is just an IRC client look-alike that doesn't suck completely.

<comment><USER4> _\- XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion._

what do you use for irc? at least irssi and adium do irc and xmpp, i'm sure others do too.

 _If someone with high profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product based on this protocol, it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other hand, as I stated a couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long as Google or Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really supporting the core feature of XMPP in my book._

huh? google chat does have xmpp federation. i run my own jabber server and talk to a bunch of people that use google chat through the web interface or a jabber client.

<comment><USER3> IRC:

Well - irssi actually. But when I say that I think that the XMPP clients suck I'm talking about nice and clean GUI things. That I can force upon my non- technical peers.

My 'presence' in this discussion should show that I'm a strong xmpp proponent, crappy clients (in the 'Not for my SO' sense) or not.

pyre said the very same thing in this thread. Sorry for that - I'm clearly mistaken and need to figure out what the reason for this assessment was.. You (and pyre) are correct, federation was announced int 2006(!) here:

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/open-federation- for-g...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/open-federation-for-google- talk.html)

Thanks a lot for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome. I just wish it was a hosted service. Somewhat regularly I want to do an online group chat with some people, and there's no good way to do it. Yeah, you could spend hours trying to get Skype installed on everyone's machine, or teach people how to use IRC (yeah right). But with a nice hosted chat service, I could just click a button, and send everyone a URL and be done with it.

I'm surprised no one has gone after this use case. I would even potentially pay a couple bucks for a "day pass" or whatever. Convore could've gone in this direction, but their signup process is too onerous. I don't want to have to walk five people in my family through signing up for their service just to get a chat going.

<comment><USER6> A large number of New York City startups use something called PartyChat (hosted on AppEngine). It is maintained by some current/former NYC Googlers, and basically creates an IRC style chat interface over XMPP, allowing you to create fairly full featured chatrooms using your various Gtalk or XMPP accounts. It's easily extensible with commands and "hooks", so you can pipe code commits, deploy messages, alerts, and the like into the chatroom.

<http://partychapp.appspot.com/>

Also check out partychat-hooks for simple HTTP API integration. It was written by one of our engineers at bitly to ease some of the aforementioned integrations. <http://partychat-hooks.appspot.com/>

<comment><USER7> Wow, this is an excellent tool. Can't believe I haven't heard about it before now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Suprised no one has yet brought up the obvious comparison to campfirenow.com and hipchat.com. While being free and self host-able is nice, the Candy UI seems light years behind its for pay competitors.

But I'm glad to see more options available. I've been advocating web-based chat in my offices for quite a while now, and am happy that a few decent choices have finally started to pop up in the past couple years.

<comment><USER9> I agree it would be better if they just focused on this being used for building chat into apps, rather than being ready out of the box as a chat widget.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What I really miss is character-at-a-time chat, a la unix 'talk/ntalk/ytalk' or VMS 'PHONE'. It created an intimacy you can't get with line-at-a-time solution, and there is, as far as I know, NO modern replacement for it - literally no way at all to do this any more other than actually setting up and using talk and talkd.

It's sort of possible to emulate it using something like etherpad, but it's really not at all the same.

<comment><USER11> Wave was like that. :-)

<comment><USER10> It wasn't, though - updates were 'chunky' - you'd type a few words, and the other person would see them all appear at once. Even that little bit of loss of real-time destroys the illusion of a shared space.

<comment><USER12> Google Docs used to be like that, but Wave was capable of character-by- character updates. You would see updates in larger chunks if latency was high enough, but I've participated in several waves where I could see characters appearing one to three at a time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> See also: <http://www.irccloud.com/>

</comment><comment><USER14> Having demo run in the "screenshot" is a really cool idea.

</comment><comment><USER15> Could this easily be adapted for chats between the webpage visitor and a single other, predetermined user rather than many-user chatrooms? I've been looking for a web-embeddable open source chat client that could be used to power a support feature of a website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, you can try to do that. But it's focused on multi-user chatting. Maybe another software would be a better fit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Look, it's hipchat!

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like a chat client for geeks(i.e. we HN frequenters). Well, just looking at there setup section!! But as already said in other comments, there's nothing new.

The title could have been "chats are not dead yet, but innovative new chat tool are"

</comment><comment><USER18> <http://jaconda.im> is #1 for developer team chat. We use its integration with git and issue tracker. Has XMPP, persistent and basically the shit.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if they plan to support Nginx in the future?

> To run the example you'll also need Apache HTTP server with the following > modules enabled: mod_rewrite, mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can also use nginx. I don't know about nginx supporting url rewritings, but basicly you just need that for rewriting http-bind/ to your jabber server's http-bind

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can i please get the same UI/feeling, but with an IRC backend, no need to reinvent that. Aalso the irc protcol is kinda weird and bloated with extensions.

<comment><USER21> If the IRC protocol is bloated, then why use it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Am I the only one here wishing for some persistence?

</comment><comment><USER23> This seems great for a persisent group chat! The chat client is in the browser and I automatically seem to get persistence. Seems nice.

</comment><comment><USER24> It looks lovely and pretty, but does seem like they're trying to re-invent the wheel.

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer: I have no ties to the project, no idea if I can find a use for it myself. But I somehow feel the need to defend them against this 'reinvent the wheel' thing.

No, they don't. If that project makes any sense at all (the 'Under the hood' page only defines what they used to build the frontend, not what the backend is) they are using <http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html> on the server.

Quoting:

"This specification defines an XMPP protocol extension for multi-user text chat, whereby multiple XMPP users can exchange messages in the context of a room or channel, similar to Internet Relay Chat (IRC). In addition to standard chatroom features such as room topics and invitations, the protocol defines a strong room control model, including the ability to kick and ban users, to name room moderators and administrators, to require membership or passwords in order to join the room, etc."

So - yeah. XMPP 'reinvented' this. First version is from 2002..

So these guys try to build a good and extensible UI for a feature that is available for a long time. Let's judge them by that, not by our 'get off my lawn, IRC is good enough' attitude.

Now, if we look at node.js chat examples.. Those are usually reinventing IRC (but again, those are trying to demo technology or build a good web client. Criticizing the protocol wouldn't make that much sense for these projects either, imo).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> They should take a look at <http://qwebirc.org/>

</comment><comment><USER26> Only non-coders think chat is dead. We still live on IRC.

</comment><comment><USER27> Thanks, but I'll stay with IRC and irssi.

</comment><comment><USER28> CTRL+F -> IRC -> no results -> ctrl+w</comment>


Punch Club's Guide to Pixel Art - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AlexNichiporchik/20161205/286829/Punch_Clubs_guide_to_Pixel_Art.php <comment><AUTHOR> If you haven't tried Punch Club, it's worth the $10 on Steam. I think it's some beautiful pixel art, and it's kind of addicting. I started playing one evening and looked up to see the sun poking in the windows the next morning...</comment>