Organic Lawn Care For the Cheap and Lazy - <AUTHOR> http://www.richsoil.com/lawn-care.jsp <comment><USER2> Instead of worrying so much about a lawn, why not look into natural landscaping? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_landscaping](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_landscaping)

The rough idea is to use local, endemic plants. They'll have a much higher tolerance range for your area's pests and climate conditions. I understand the appeal of grass, and certainly love lying down to read on a slightly sloping lawn, but there are certain areas where the combination of soil and climate should make it inordinately expensive to grow and maintain one. We just collectively happen to provide huge subsidies (in the form of extremely cheap water and minimal restrictions on use) for households that want to have a lawn in those areas. That's also ignoring all of the other negative environmental and infrastructural externalities around everyone having a lawn.

<comment><USER3> _Instead of worrying so much about a lawn, why not look into natural landscaping?_

It's a cultural thing, afaik. Somehow (during the previous century I assume) it became important, or a sign of wealth, or maybe even a display of 'I'm living the dream' to have a nice green lawn. Without any impurities of course. And as flat as possible. So it turns into something that is considered aesthetically pleasing as well. I noticed that whan asking people with such a lawn why exactly they want it like that, they mostly remain pretty vague and cannot give much reason to it - which for me is a reason to support my belief it's purely cultural, as it doesn't have much, if any, benefits. Not for the people having to keep it like that, nor for nature.

That last thing bothers me most: for most animal life not bound to soil, a lawn without any weeds wahtsoever is essentially worthless. If you're lucky you'll get some birds able to get the earthworms out but that's it. Bees and butterflies and the likes don't benefit from it. Which is why natural landscaping (or basically, just let nature have it's go at it without much human intervention) is imo always better. We have a couple of acres of land like that: it is mainly left as-is (apart from getting rid of occasional non- local plants and making some pathways through the grass with a mower) and it's a home to a wealth of local plants and animals. The neighbour's land however is dead in comparision, no matter how green his lawn is shining.

<comment><USER4> Except if you have children, then it is easier to play on a lawn than between the plants and rocks.

<comment><USER3> that depends on what games you play.. soccer will be hard :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mowing height should be based on the type of grass, not a global 1 height fits all. Here in Texas, where lots of lawns are Bermuda, mowing high will leave you with a weak lawn. Of course, if you have St. Augustine or fescue, sure mow as high as you can.

Watering deeply and infrequently is very good advice though. If you have a sprinkler system with zones, it's good practice to run 10-15 minutes per zone depending on the type of sprinkler head in each zone. Do that for all zones then repeat. This will result in a much deeper soaking and lower runoff amounts.

Check your sprinkler heads yearly and replace ones that are broken or misdirected.

Fertilization should again be according to the type of grass you have. You would never fertilize corn the same way you fertilize beans (trick question, you shouldn't fertilize legumes) so you shouldn't expect to fertilize different grasses the same amount or time.

Lawn care in Boston is going to be drastically different from lawn care in Dallas. Do a little bit of research for your area and your grass type and then you can develop your own guide for the cheap and lazy.

<comment><USER6> +1 for height based on type of grass. [http://publications.tamu.edu/TURF_LANDSCAPE/PUB_turf_Maintai...](http://publications.tamu.edu/TURF_LANDSCAPE/PUB_turf_Maintaining%20Bermudagrass%20Lawns.pdf) [http://publications.tamu.edu/TURF_LANDSCAPE/PUB_turf_Maintai...](http://publications.tamu.edu/TURF_LANDSCAPE/PUB_turf_Maintaining%20St.%20Augustine%20Grass%20Lawns.pdf) I've been following their height recommendations this year and can tell a difference in density and weed occurrence. Gig 'Em beanholio class of '96

<comment><USER7> I just love the existence of Turf Grass Management as a college major. My school also had a great program and I've always been amazed that people are so crazy about grass that it demands science and study on a large scale but it's a damn good profession to be in. It's a crazy art but who am I to judge when it pays so well?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also look into xeriscaping (frequently pronounced "zero-scaping"): [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping)

It's "landscaping and gardening that reduces or eliminates the need for supplemental water from irrigation," frequently with native species.

We xeriscaped much of our yard in Austin, Texas, and if it can work in Texas, then it can work anywhere. My wife took great care to make sure many of the plants were attractive to wildlife (bees, butterflies, hummingbirds) which was an added bonus. (Did you know that hummingbirds are crazy aggressive and territorial? They are!)

"Native plants" doesn't just mean ugly scrub brush either: plenty of beautiful plants grow natively where you are - but you'll probably have to look further than Home Depot to find them.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, hummingbirds are super aggressive. It is kind of cute and kind of scary at the same time. A territorial hummingbird will think nothing of dive-bombing you out of nowhere, or buzzing your head a few times until you get the message and back off. They can come at you so quickly that you won't know what they are until they zoom past you. You just hear this loud buzzing sound and see a large object dart just past your face. At first it seems like a monstrously proportioned bumblebee, until you look back and realize it's a hummingbird.

In re native plants, it _is_ possible to grow a quasi-traditional grass lawn using native grasses, like Buffalograss. It will look like prairie grass, and not necessarily like the archetypal, deep-green fescue patch. But if you're living in a drought-prone area, you really shouldn't be growing thirsty, exotic grass lawns in the first place. It's bordering on socially irresponsible in certain parts of the country (Southern California, I'm looking at you).

<comment><USER8> My poor dog got dive-bombed by hummingbirds, poor girl didn't know what happened.

And you're right on about Buffalo grass - it was pretty popular in the Austin, TX area.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This was a really good article.

I have one of the manual reel mowers listed. I love it. Not only does it give a better cut, it uses no gas and doesn't have all the associated hassles (pull start etc) of a gas mower. It's only slightly more effort to use than a gas mower too. And it cost like $100 as opposed to 3-$400. I predict it lasts much longer as well.

<comment><USER11> That's great that you use a manual mower, we've always had a gas mower because we have a fairly large lawn. I wonder how a manual or electric mower would do on a large lawn, especially going uphill?

<comment><USER12> I recently replaced my dead Toro with a Fiskars reel mower. It really does a great job, but if your lawn hasn't been mowed in a while, you may need to make some extra passes for your first cut.

<comment><USER10> That's true.

You have to stay on top of the length with a reel mower which means regularity. You can't plow through really long grass like you would with a gas rotary mower.

Fortunately I really enjoy it and look forward to mowing. It's a break from sitting in front of a screen and is kind of like a long walk with a little arm activity too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm looking for a guide to caring for my lawn while we're conserving for the drought. Right now we're watering 5-10 minutes _per week_. I hope that's enough to keep the roots alive but assume that fertilizer would be a terrible idea until the grass starts to recover.

<comment><USER14> A bit OT from your question, but I've had an organic lawn the last 3-4 years (in Illinois), and while it's certainly debatable if tall organic grass 'crowds out dandelions' or not, I've been quite happy with the natural spread of white clover, particularly along parts of the lawn like the edge of the driveway that have been hit hard/first by drought. I'm pretty sure the clover is more drought tolerant than the grass will ever be. The last few years before this one we had some bad droughts, but this year our fortunes are reversed.

So when I see clover getting dispersed through my grass, I get quite happy. Much better than bindweed, which took me a few years to get out :-)

<comment><USER15> The strength of dandelions is in their tap roots. One theory is that dandelions do best in poor, hard soil that other plants have a hard time taking root in. Let the dandelions grow and they will breakup compacted soil and you will eventually have thick grass and no dandelions, assuming you do the high mowing, infrequent deep watering, and organic fertilizer only in the fall. It will probably take more than a few years, but I've been doing this for twenty years and I'm quite happy with the results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a great article. I found it recently and have been experimenting with the process this summer.

</comment><comment><USER11> Great article, thanks for sharing this. My dad and I were on opposite sides on whether to mow low or high. Now I have proof that I'm right!

<comment><USER5> Mowing height is almost entirely dependent on the type of grass you have. Mow St Augustine low and you'll have major problems. But let bermuda grow to 4 inches and you'll have a different set of problems. Find out what kind of grass you have and mow according to that.

[http://publications.tamu.edu/TURF_LANDSCAPE/PUB_turf_Maintai...](http://publications.tamu.edu/TURF_LANDSCAPE/PUB_turf_Maintaining%20Bermudagrass%20Lawns.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think their Hugel Kultur [1] link was posted here on HN before. Great stuff!

[1] [http://www.richsoil.com/hugelkultur/](http://www.richsoil.com/hugelkultur/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682846](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7682846)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Now I'm curious what the cheapest and laziest lawn care solution would be for someone only interested in avoiding municipal fines and rocks through the windows from neighbors.

It's got to be cleverer than mowing less frequently. Surely there's some way to hack lawns so they require almost no care at all right?

(Short of buying a townhome?)

<comment><USER18> Plant something other than grass. Seriously. I'm experimenting with yarrow in some problem areas on our property: a hot dry and sandy septic bed and some embankments with crappy soil. Yarrow can be mowed much less frequently, looks amazing (better than grass), grows on any soil, chokes out weeds, and doesn't need watering. For shady areas I'm having good results with periwinkle.

<comment><USER19> A quick search turns up warnings of periwinkle being an invasive species: [http://www.canadiangardening.com/how-to/pests-and- diseases/t...](http://www.canadiangardening.com/how-to/pests-and-diseases/the- top-10-unwanted-garden-plants/a/32921/5)

Seems like something that you might not necessarily want to introduce.

<comment><USER20> Periwinkle may be invasive but it's also easy to control, similar to English Ivy. It does great in shade and is an attractive option to plant (or allow to self-propagate) under large evergreens ... as an alternative to doing nothing and just having dead grass there like most people do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was hoping that the answer would be "get a flock of sheep and turn 'em loose!"

<comment><USER22> Goats! That's what the City of LA uses in certain hilly spots on city property. I used to take the subway to Pershing Square in downtown and was rather amused to find a goat staring at me from across a temporary fence erected to coral them around an overgrown hillside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have given up on lawn.

It is a great resource for public spaces like parks and sports fields but maintaining it domestically seems to belong to a distant past. Domestic water has to be potable. Parks can use lower quality waste water and they can manage it better. Some people have huge rainwater storage but even then lawn has to be scaled back in a dry climate.

When I was a kid just about everyone had a quarter acre block with a house and shedding (garage, garden, tools etc) a veggie garden and a big front and back lawn.

I learnt to ride my bike on our big lawn. Played backyard cricket on it. Got stung by bees on the clover. And summer meant playing under the sprinklers running during the daytime with no thought to waste or expense. Golden age.

Drought water restrictions killed most lawns where I lived and when they were lifted most people didn't bother to reestablish them. Most of the green yards of my youth are now bark and natives, glyphosated bare earth or weeds. It sucks for kids. Kicking a ball around without lawn isn't the same. It is another of those childhood freedoms people used to take for granted that seems to have disappeared.

</comment><comment><USER24> Missing from this great guide was any mention of moss, an issue I never thought about until moving to the Pacific Northwest. Now my lawn is mostly moss with some grass sticking through. I have resigned to just let it grow, since it is soft underfoot and nice and green. Any tips for a mossy lawn?

<comment><USER9> Moss is often a sign of poor drainage and/or inadequate sunlight. It's often seen overtaking lawns on heavy, compacted, waterlogged, clay soils. If you don't believe that to be the problem, you might have a soil that's overly acidic.

Clay soil is a bear, especially when it's been compacted. I had to deal with it for many years when I lived in LA. There are no fantastic solutions that don't risk making the problem worse than it already is. The best you can do is compost generously, and hope for a slow improvement over time. Do not attempt to till the soil or mix in sand. This can actually make the problem 10x worse, creating a sort of concrete-like substance as the clay and sand particles interlock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I really don't understand the obsession people have with lawns. Obviously it depends a great deal where you live, but we only mow once or twice a month, and never use fertilizer or irrigation. It's not a perfect monoculture, but so what. There are also lots of flowers; large patches of clovers, dandelions, wild carrots. It benefits the bees.

I'm surprised that many years of people mowing their lawns hasn't evolved plants which don't waste resources growing above the mow height. Perhaps the trait could be selectively bred into them manually.

<comment><USER26> My understanding is it came from the UK. Sign of wealth. A bit like buying your own set of queen's china.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Get an earthworm or bokashi composter use that for nutrients. Declorinate your water by letting it stand outside for a day or 2. if you have a water feature somewhere which recycles water pee into it, after a couple of weeks bacteria which turn the amonia into no2 and then no3 will come to live in there (you will also supply a fair bit of nutrient this way), use that to water your lawn.

*bacteria in certain temp ranges obviously, a boston winter won't be any good for this.

<comment><USER28> " Get an earthworm or bokashi composter use that for nutrients. Declorinate your water by letting it stand outside for a day or"

THis only works if your waters has been chlorinated. chloramine is much more stable and is also commonly used - it does not break down in the water over short periods of time, so letting it sit for a couple of days won't remove it.

<comment><USER27> yeah good point. check what your council uses obviously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Missing from this great guide was any mention of moss, an issue I never thought about until moving to the Pacific Northwest. Now my lawn is mostly moss with some grass sticking through. I have resigned to just let it grow, since it is soft underfoot and nice and green. Any tips for a mossy lawn?

</comment><comment><USER29> Any advice on aeration? Doesn't seem to be covered...

<comment><USER16> Make your lawn earth-worm friendly, by not putting chemicals in the soil (I think the article alludes to this).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The recommended brand of fertilizer seems to be hard to find. Can someone explain what to look for that isn't a specific brand?

<comment><USER31> I believe it is made by SaferBrand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> >Add lime if it is below 6.0 and gardener's sulfur if it is above 7.0

I believe that should be the other way around.

<comment><USER33> I don't think so. Lime should raise pH and sulfur lower it. Lower pH is more acidic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Yeah, but why add the cartoon of the girl in a suggestive pose at the top of the article? Was it really necessary?</comment>


The EU might ban facial recognition in public for five years - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/f/615068/facial-recognition-european-union-temporary-ban-privacy-ethics-regulation/ <comment><USER2> Big discussion yesterday (574 points, 201 comments):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22072466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22072466)</comment>


Drupal 8.0-rc1 was out - <AUTHOR> https://www.drupal.org/drupal-8.0 <comment><USER2> Looks like they finally solved the configuration management problem--how to version and deploy different configurations in different environments. That was my major sticking point last time I used them (that was 6 years ago though).

That and I felt less like a programmer and more like an assembler.

<comment><USER3> On your last statement: I think that is the point, the end user gets some of the power that the programmer was providing.</comment></comment>


How to get started with Ubuntu and Bash on Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/ubuntu-and-bash-arrive-on-windows-10/ <comment><USER2> The Microsoft article about this is on Hacker News at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11445301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11445301) .</comment>


Air Fares 101 – Why do fares change all the time? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cheapair.com/blog/travel-tips/air-fares-101-why-do-fares-change-all-the-time/ <comment><USER3> There is a big problem with trying to game the system with the airlines: The pricing is done using control theory. In fact, they have the most mature application of control theory to pricing out there, probably by virtue of being to first to apply it in that way.

Practically, that means that you can only game the system if nobody else knows how. If you are the only one that knows how, the algorithms probably can't detect and compensate for the error. As soon as news breaks out, the algorithm starts compensating. We saw this about 10 years ago when there were a few companies that started promoting the ability to search for Y-class fares...it was all but a year or so before the pricing stabilized. The same problem is currently happening for the hidden-city ticketing trick [1](the algorithms are compensating, although the airlines put in some manual systems when it first broke news).

The same goes for these ideas of "the best time to buy". Not only is historical data not good enough, but the more well known the data becomes, the worse the predictions become. This has already happened to some degree with the "buy as early as possible" crowd. Now it is _more_ expensive to buy early than it is to buy late...something that wasn't previously true.

The lesson? If you figure out a way to game the system, don't tell anyone else.

[1] [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873235398045782597...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323539804578259740155116054)

<comment><USER4> Or, create a system where the airline benefits from you gaming the system.

For example, imagine you 'game' the system in such a way that you will definitely be in an otherwise-empty seat, and you would only buy a ticket if you successfully got your intended discount. Then, airlines wouldn't be incentivized to 'adjust' and you could keep getting discounts.

We are playing with a few prototypes to do exactly this at [http://www.projectcaspini.com](http://www.projectcaspini.com). Sign up for the mailing list if you are interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the states, the more I deal with cellular companies and airlines, the more I hate them.

It's not just me: it's a common opinion. One prominent business magazine had a cover a few years back titled something like "The companies we all hate"

Consumers like to purchase things in atomic units and simple terms. If I go to the grocery store, there's a bushel of apples. The sign says "Granny Smith apples: $1"

I can confidently pick up an apple, walk to the register, and expect to pay a dollar. The grocery store can advertise their wares and prices in the paper or online and I can plan on going to the store and making the same exchange. People like being able to predict how much of one thing they have to trade for an amount of something else. When lots of competitors do this in a market that anybody can participate in, it's good for everybody.

But when I buy an airline ticket? The rules are many times so byzantine that entire cottage industries have sprung up in an effort to capitalize on them. How much does it cost to fly coast-to-coast? Beats the heck out of me. There is no answer. Could I pick up a job where I had to fly ten times from point A to point B with a few day's notice and be able to include travel costs in the price? No, not unless I were to charge up to 17 times the cheapest rate.

Complex pricing systems may be great for the airline, but they're damaging to the free and open market. Instead of using rapidly-changing yield management systems, we'd all be better off if they just used an cross-carrier auction with transferable tickets. Let downstream providers handle liquidity.

I doubt this will happen, and instead there will be more penny-pinching, crazy rates, and unhappy customers.

<comment><USER6> This doesn't take away from your point at all, but I just wanted to point out that:

> I can confidently pick up an apple, walk to the register, and expect to pay > a dollar.

This is true in most of the world, but not in the US, where you don't know what you're paying until you reach the checkout counter.

<comment><USER7> Well, you can weigh the apple yourself on the scales that occur all throughout the produce section... but yeah, I'd be surprised to see a flat rate for fruit by species no matter the size.

Fruit is sold by weight, not count, in China too.

<comment><USER8> That wasn't their point.

In most of the world if a product's price tag says X then you pay exactly X at the register (e.g. £2 sandwich costs exactly £2 in cash, you hand then exactly £2 and leave).

In the US that is not the case. Almost everything has a "hidden fee." You go buy a $2 sandwich but pay $2 + 6% ($2.12), if you get food in a restaurant you pay $price + 15-20%, an advertised $30/month cell phone plan is actually $45 after "taxes and fees," and so on...

Within Europe/EU in particular these types of hidden fees are actively combatted. Just within the last few years a few airlines (e.g. Easyjet) got into trouble for charging both a credit card or debit card fee (approx. £3-5) which wasn't reasonably avoidable and wasn't mentioned in their adverts.

The US in general is rather consumer hostile on the grounds of "business freedom."

<comment><USER9> It's far from "a hidden fee." You simply have to know the rules.

In some states, there is sales tax. In others, none. Sales tax may or may not be applied to clothing depending on state. Sales tax may or may not be applied to food, or only some kinds of food (e.g., alcohol always taxed), or only to food above a certain threshold.

All in all there's nothing hidden about sales tax. It shouldn't be a surprise that people are expected to know how the sales tax system in their state works when they are interacting with it every day.

<comment><USER10> > _It 's far from "a hidden fee." You simply have to know the rules_

But that's the same thing! If people don't know or understand the rules, the fee is hidden to them. You could say that people have should educate themselves, and my reply would be that there's _infinite_ amount of complexity that could be added to the pricing if needed: _" Oh, on cloudy Wednesdays, when Jupiter shines and the Yen is down.. it's 2$ extra"_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Southwest, as far as I can tell, doesn't change rates once they've published. Three rate tiers, optional early check-in to get a better boarding order position, and free baggage.

The most striking difference is that, in general, the flight attendants are _happy_. They smile. They joke around. Sometimes they sing songs. I was on a flight a few months ago where the entire plane played a game because it was someone's birthday.

If Southwest flies anywhere close to where I'm going, I make a point to fly with them. Even if they're slightly more expensive, the drastically less toxic experience makes up for it.

<comment><USER12> As a parent, I fly Southwest so that I can take advantage of the two free checked-in bags you get per ticket. Not having to wrestle several overfull bags of clothes on and off of the plane makes Southwest a great bargain for my piece of mind.

<comment><USER13> If each kid has a ticket, you can check a bag under their name. Why do you need 2 bags?

<comment><USER14> As in, if they had to pay to check bags, they would bring them all as carry on, where with southwest they can check them for free and not deal with. I'm not paying to check bags either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One additional note: While airfares do get progressively more expensive (on average) as you get closer to your flight, if you book too far out you will actually pay MORE. A lot of discount fares don't open until around six months before a flight (approximately), sometimes less. So if you book too far in advanced you'll pay close to a "full fare" (or at least miss out on some of the better discount classes). This, I suspect, is because the airline hasn't yet calculated how many discount classes they'll be opening up, so they just give you a "default"/safe price that they likely won't regret.

Just something to keep in mind from someone who often plans travel 6+ months in advanced. Booking flights 3-4 months in advance is fairly safe, longer or shorter and you might suffer for it.

</comment><comment><USER15> So has anyone built a site that lets you put limit orders on airline seats yet? I'd love to, say, have something automatically book a $250 flight across the country if the price happens to cross that threshold in the next week.

<comment><USER16> I think that's a pretty good idea -

two quick thoughts:

1.as a consumer its hard to do more than "technical analysis" on a chart of the ticket price to figure out where to set your limit order

2\. What are the odds that the company doing this doesn't share their order book with the airlines?

still like the idea

<comment><USER17> > 1.as a consumer its hard to do more than "technical analysis" on a chart of > the ticket price to figure out where to set your limit order

You don't do any analysis on the price. You just introspect, and figure out what is cheap enough to make you get up and fly, and that's the price you set.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good overview. Having worked at a GDS subsidiary and written about this topic, another thing to add is it depends on how many caches there are between you and the root database. Airfares are heavily cached so the data that is shown in search results is often stale; only the final booking (when you actually pay) is the real number. The more contention for seats as you get to the last few the more likely the final price can jump. For example, Google's flight data is very stale since they don't do any booking, they don't really have to update all that frequently, which means they can return results from their own cache fast.

<comment><USER19> Great explanation, however why do I never see "Your fare has increased $55" on sites like Expedia but sites like CheapAir.com have it all the time. I expect Expedia and CheapAir.com have the same source of data therefore it does seem like a bait and switch situation.

<comment><USER18> Expedia may decide to eat the difference (it can go up and down) and other folks may not be able to afford this (remember that airlines only give like $10 per ticket, not much margin).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What no one is telling you is that the actual published fare tariffs don't change that often. What does change and is dynamically managed by the airlines revenue management departments is the availability of different fare classes that the tariffs book into. It's the combination of fares and fare class availability that determine the current fares available for a flight (and not just the lowest fare).

On ExpertFlyer, we show all of this hidden raw information that normally only travel agents have been able to see as we buy the data from the airline reservation systems. The first few pages of our education guide give a simple overview of how this works: [http://www.expertflyer.com/edu- guide.pdf](http://www.expertflyer.com/edu-guide.pdf)

<comment><USER21> In case it helps:

I've been a subscriber for several years, and this is the first I've seen the Education Guide. It might just be because I'm oblivious, but perhaps you might want to make it more prominent on the "New to ExpertFlyer" page?

I've learned everything in there by osmosis at this point, but the strategies would have been a cool thing to know when I was getting started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was hoping for something that explained the part where they get you to pay a higher fare by tracking you on the Web. But maybe an insider site like this wouldn't be willing to talk about that.

There are many sites that describe this happening, such as [1]. And I've seen it happen to me: a fare would go up by $50 while I was searching, and opening a private browsing window would make it go back down.

[1] [http://www.halfwayanywhere.com/budget-travel/your-guide- to-c...](http://www.halfwayanywhere.com/budget-travel/your-guide-to-cheaper- flights/)

<comment><USER23> I don't mean to sound standoffish, but as far as I know this isn't true.

I have yet to see real proof that airline companies get you to pay a higher fare by tracking your searches/browsing. While I'm sure you saw a $50 difference, it was likely a slightly different search, which is almost always what happens when people claim they've noticed this.

About a year ago, someone on reddit went out and offered a year of reddit gold for anyone that could, there was nobody: [https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/1ekv6e/lpt_bou...](https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/1ekv6e/lpt_bounty_1_year_of_reddit_gold_to_the_first)

As recently as last week, someone claimed they had reproduced, but they used slightly different search params and ended up with something totally different: [http://www.reddit.com/r/travel/comments/2okml5/for_anyone_pl...](http://www.reddit.com/r/travel/comments/2okml5/for_anyone_planning_travel_who_doesnt_use/)

This myth is rife with anecdotal proof, but I've yet to see anything concrete.

<comment><USER24> I experienced this just the other day. My father was looking at a price in his computer that I couldn't get (I was getting one that was $500 extra). I erased the cookies of the AA site, refreshed (exactly the same flights, the same days, everything the same) and bam! $500 dollars cheaper.

<comment><USER25> I bet you can't reproduce that result ... As someone else here stated, nobody can prove this happens

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Maybe to point out that the number of seats in a fare bucket doesn't need to change at any second for the displayed fare to change. For most airlines, the fare buckets are not independent and bookings in one bucket may decrease availability from other buckets. These formulas make it unnecessary to change the number of seats allocated to each bucket all the time. Most changes you see during the day are just the result of new bookings and cancellations that are coming in live.

The volume of pre departure cancellations can be crazy for some routes to a point people wouldn't even believe.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've always thought it was ridiculous that people would go to a site like Expedia or Kayak, type in a date and destination, and just hope that they get the cheapest fare. As this article explains so well, prices are fluctuating constantly and the chances that you'll be lucky enough to be searching for the flight at the optimal time are close to nil.

Most flight search engines now let you set up alerts to track prices, but I also think those aren't ideal because if you're flexible about where or when you might travel you'd have to set up thousands of alerts. (example: I'd like to go somewhere warm for a weekend in January from New York. There are 113 warm weather destinations within 4 hours of New York; I can leave on Friday or Saturday and return on Sunday or Monday; there are four weekends in January = 1808 alerts to set!).

This is exactly why we built Hitlist (hitlistapp.com, available for iOS and Android), an app which monitors airfares across swathes of destinations and dates and sends you notifications when there are ridiculous fares. Some of you might find it useful!

<comment><USER28> Installed it - it crashes each and every time I search for a destination, find the destination, then tap on the selected destination name.

<comment><USER27> Are you on iOS or Android?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Corollary: this implies that booking flights which are the cheapest/most inconvenient will likely end you up in a less populated plane. Double win!

This is another reason to be wary of ubiquitous tracking for marketing purposes. Say I want to fly from Kent to New York via London. I book my expensive transatlantic flight and once that is secured, book my domestic flight.

But if Big Data is watching my actions, what is to stop the airline hiking the price of the domestic flight as soon as they see me booking the transatlantic flight? At that point I am committed and will be forced to pay much more than I had planned for the domestic flight.

<comment><USER30> > But if Big Data is watching my actions...

Switch the order in which you book the flights. Since we assume separate bookings and sequential booking order this puts lower risk into your first purchase, and also Big Data then has all transatlantic flights from London to choose from to hike your price.

<comment><USER31> or use 2 browsers to load the 2 prices at the same time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here's the theory behind the price changes:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_management](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_management)

</comment><comment><USER33> I think the absolute dynamic pricing is what annoys me - it's like an inverse Lake Woebegone effect - simply everyone who gets on a plane assumes that they overpaid.

I suspect there is somewhere in the behavioural economics literature a pricing mechanism that has many benefits of dynamic pricing but allows the buyer to feel I control - they know the complete range of fares and the complete range of prices and so feel able to buy without the fear if missin out.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is a great piece, definitely, but the question I have, do you - <USER2> - consider $500 a fair/reasonable amount of money to pay for a plane ticket? (I even had to lookup the average salary in the USA)

I'm from Europe myself, and it usually costs us anywhere from $40 to $150 to travel anywhere in Europe, though the prices do go up if you want to go to a place such as China, Thailand, or even India. But then again, that's Asia!

<comment><USER35> What's "a plane ticket"?

I live near Washington, DC. If I fly to, say, New York, then $500 would be outrageous. I'd expect to pay $100-200 roundtrip for that, depending. It's about an hour's flight.

If I fly to Miami, I'd expect to pay $200-300. That's about two hours.

If I fly to San Francisco, then $500 becomes a reasonable price. That's a six hour flight.

It makes no sense to talk about "a plane ticket" in isolation. From where to where? How far?

<comment><USER34> You're right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> An article like this needs to at least mention that the relatively unsophisticated pricing approach by Southwest has led it to generally outperform the rest of its competition for decades (I know, staying out of bankruptcy is not a very high bar).

<comment><USER18> Since their fares are not comparable since they don't let anyone show theirs in the same list as other airlines, you really cannot know if they are cheaper or not. In reality this means they are able to set their prices on average higher than those who have to compete in a list. Better control vs. more exposure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> cheapair.com could keep the various fares for a flight and show you their progression

</comment><comment><USER38> "We did that Uber shit before it was cool." \-- The airlines.

Another thing that surprises most people is how expensive business and first class are, relative to coach. After all, if you're only getting 1.5-2x as much space, it doesn't seem fair that you'd have to pay 10x prices. The truth is that many of those seats are filled via upgrades to frequent fliers and more fairly priced in that view. But someone who asks for an _assured_ first-class seat (which is where the 5-10x premium is charged) is identifying himself as a captive buyer. About half of the first-class seats are upgrades (especially to make room, because airlines often overbook) given that day, and those are cheap or free, but the other half are a mix of business travelers under time pressure, invited conference speakers whose flights are booked by a third- party, and people with disabilities. While people complain about the "assholes" in first class getting marginally better treatment, a surprising percentage of the people up there aren't rich at all, but have disabilities (e.g. back and knee problems) and _can 't_ fly coach, and those people fly once a year (!!) at most, because they can barely afford it. Perversely, the disabled guy of modest means is going to see a higher fare for a first-class seat than a business traveler on a corporate rate.

Oddly enough, air travel is getting to the point where airlines are intentionally making coach travel worse to make up for a decline of first- and business-class passengers since 2008. While one might think that the purpose of the checked bag fees is to make a little extra money (and that's part of it) there's a much larger gain in filling up the overhead bins (thanks to those horrid checked-bag fees, overhead bins always fill up early) and then selling early boarding for $50 per ticket. Waiting spaces at many terminals have been deliberately neglected for acoustics and outlets, to push people into buying first-class tickets just to have access to the lounges. Natural demand for first class seats hasn't recovered since 2007 and, even with the economy back, it won't, so air travel is now an experience where unpleasantness is deliberately induced.

<comment><USER39> People buy first class tickets just for the lounges? Usually, you can just pay $30 or so for a day pass to a lounge.

<comment><USER40> $30 for a day pass to a first class lounge? I can't believe that at all. Can you show me which airports and lounges offer that because I'm going to take them up on it.

<comment><USER41> Um... All airports with United or American lounges? It's $50 a day, though. With American, they actively try to sell you a day pass on their in-airport check-in terminals.

Edit: please don't correct actual life experience with a quote from Wikipedia.

United Club is the name of their "first class" lounge, as people incorrectly refer to them. Those United Club Lounges have complimentary booze [1]. And no airline is going to allow a passenger to board who had obviously consumed the amount of alcohol you're referring to. I know: I practically lived at the T3 United Club lounge at O'Hare for many years, I was traveling so much. Not as much any more, but when I've been delayed significantly and I'm super-stressed because I'm speaking at a conference or something, I still occasionally get a day pass.

The United lounges you're referring to are considerably more elite, and most travelers don't even know they exist. Again, taken from actual experience and not a quick perusal of a Wikipedia article.

American's "Admiral's Club" [2] no longer offers complimentary liquor.

[1] [http://www.united.com/web/en- US/content/travel/airport/loung...](http://www.united.com/web/en- US/content/travel/airport/lounge/amenities.aspx)

[2] [https://www.aa.com/i18n/travelInformation/airportAmenities/A...](https://www.aa.com/i18n/travelInformation/airportAmenities/AdmiralsLocations.jsp?anchorLocation=DirectURL&title=admiralsclublocations)

<comment><USER40> That's United Club - that's not the first class lounge at all.

If you read the wikipedia page [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Club](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Club) it says you can buy access to United Club, but doesn't say that about the first class lounge. In fact it says:

"the access rules are significantly more restrictive than for United Club. Access to Global First Lounges is generally restricted to United Global First passengers, Star Alliance First Class customers, and Global Services passengers confirmed in Business Class."

In the first class lounge you get free food and drink including alcohol. If you could really get in for $50 a day, you could easily eat and drink that much worth.

<comment><USER13> That's because they're a huge international airline and they have to keep things kosher.

GS is a special invite status reserved for celebrities and high ranking politicians. My assumption is that they need that space so that they can load the person from the tarmac or have them check out of the airport. Thats speculation, but those individuals do have different needs from an airline. [Also onboarding needs as well as that they don't enter from the jetway]

<comment><USER42> Global Services is just a set of people who spend a ton of money on United. It's not only people who have interesting personal security requirements.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Esterel Language Primer: A Language for Reactive Systems (1999) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://home.ku.edu.tr/~stasiran/ecoe560/Papers/EsterelPrimerBerry.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> I posted this as an example of a language designed for verifiable correctness, predictable performance and a reactive design, and yet is completely imperative and full of side-effects. It is simply a demonstration that the pure-FP style is required (or even directly related) neither to verifiable correctness nor to reactive programming.

The debate on the relative merits of various programming styles will continue, of course, but Esterel is an example that may contradict some notions that are a result of some fashions.

Also, this categorization from Chapter 1 is interesting:

 _Computerized systems can be divided into three broad categories:_

* _Transformational systems compute output values from inputs values, and then stop. Most numerical computation programs, payroll programs, and compilers are transformational._

* _Interactive systems constantly interact with their environment in such a way that the computers can be viewed as the masters of the interaction. A user calls for services, the system listens to him when it can, and it delivers the services when they are available. Operating systems, centralized or distributed databases, and the Internet are interactive._

* _Reactive systems, also called reflex systems, continuously react to stimuli coming from their environment by sending back other stimuli. Contrarily to interactive systems, reactive systems are purely input-driven and they must react at a pace that is dictated by the environment. Process controllers or signal processors are typical reactive systems._

<comment><USER2> My own research [1] goes in this direction: there is a lot to be said for control flow and spooky actions at a distance (I could never get the expressiveness I needed out of FRP). There is no one true paradigm.

Esterel targets a low-level embedded domain where FSMs are sufficient and hard determinism is necessary. You might want to check out Francisco Sant'Anna's research [2], which is in a similar direction to Esterel but with Lua influences (same group in Brazil that does Lua, I think).

[1] [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/people/smcdirm/managedti...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/people/smcdirm/managedtime.aspx)

[2] [http://ceu-lang.org/](http://ceu-lang.org/)

<comment><USER3> I was about to post Ceu, had a lot of fun messing around with it. It's quite surprising how easily the paradigm "clicked", actually.

<comment><USER2> I found their REBLS workshop paper:

[http://www.ceu-lang.org/chico/ceu_rebls14_pre.pdf](http://www.ceu- lang.org/chico/ceu_rebls14_pre.pdf)

Here is the connection to Esterel:

> In contrast, the imperative style of Esterel is confined to the domain of > real-time embedded control systems. As a matter of fact, imperative > reactivity is now often associated to the observer pattern, typical in > object-oriented systems, because it heavily relies on side effects [20, 25]. > However, short-lived callbacks (i.e., the observers) eliminate any vestige > of structured programming, such as support for long-lasting loops and > automatic variables [3], which are elementary capabilities of imperative > languages. In this sense, callbacks actually disrupt imperative reactivity, > becoming "our generation's goto" [13, 15].

> We believe that the full range of reactive applications can benefit from the > imperative style of Esterel, which we now refer to as Structured Reactive > Programming (SRP). SRP extends the classical hierarchical control constructs > of Structured Programming (SP) (i.e., concatenation, selection, and > repetition [14]) to support continuous interaction with the environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's so refreshing to read something like that after we've been hit over the head with "pure-FP is the only _right_ way to program" for some time.

The way I see it, I think there are two approaches to solving problems. The first tries to see what tools we have available, tries to figure out what we can build, and then hopes the result is useful. The second looks at what we actually _need_ , and sees if we can use anything at our disposal to get us closer to our goal. In many respects, PFP is the result of the first approach. We _know_ how to verify PFP, right? Well, at least within the confines of first-order logic. So let's hope that's useful enough. Not that this kind of research isn't important, but I see it as searching under the (academic) lamppost, rather than research directed at providing the industry with what it actually needs.

<comment><USER2> I agree somewhat but maybe you are being a bit harsh on the PFP crowd: it was only 10 years ago where FP research was considered quite niche! Now the tables are reversed in that object people are now rebels and FP people are now the establishment, crazy. I think we are all searching for what are right answers, just that we are looking under different lampposts.

While Roberto's team in Brazil is more pragmatic, FP people like SPJ also care about producing useful artifacts. I would be worried if all PL research was oriented around FP, but it isn't :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember being greatly confused Esterel it in college. Teachers didn't use 'Reactive' so I never thought about it that way, nor if it already had explored what the mainstream is rediscovering nowadays (Rx).

<comment><USER2> Rx is not very comparable to Esterel, which is more about event-oriented programming than the classical meaning of "reactive" (today reactive somehow is taken to mean data flow but...that wasn't the case in the 80s).</comment></comment>


Show HN: Send.Design – visual email template builder - <AUTHOR> https://send.design <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

Today I would like to share with you my project Send.Design, which is a web app that provides a visual editor for creating original email templates.

By using colours, images, and typography inside nested layers you can create fully branded HTML emails with ease. When you export your email files the markup will also include VML code so that it displays well in Outlook.

Send.Design will make your email templating pains go away, so try it today!</comment>


Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hunt-for-the-death-valley-germans/ <comment><USER2> As part of my job, related to activities at China Lake Naval Weapon Station, I've worked on a test range in Coso, about 45 miles northwest of the area mentioned in the article. I've also been down to Trona and Searle Lake. I _can 't imagine_ going off pavement in that area without experience and training.

As a further illustration of how remote this area is, the safety briefing for the range mentions two important points: 1) if you are injured and it's not life threatening, it will take 3-4 hours to get you to a hospital. Someone has to drive you off the range to meet the ambulance just east of Coso Junction since there's no way an ambulance can get into the range. The terrain is to rugged. Coso Junction is also about an hour north of Ridgrecrest/China Lake. 2) if you are seriously injured, the only way out is on a helicopter. It takes about 25 minutes to get a helicopter up to the range.

This area is starkly beautiful and there's a lot of interesting things to see and do, but it is _absolutely deadly_. You can't go in unprepared.

<comment><USER3> I find this sort of story super scary because I come from a similarly big country with vast expanses of nothing. I know of an elderly couple who a couple of years ago died of a heat stroke after they got lost on their way and took a different route, which led them to a dirt road in the middle of a desert (Salinas Grandes in Córdoba, Argentina). [https://www.lacapital.com.ar/informacion-gral/un- matrimonio-...](https://www.lacapital.com.ar/informacion-gral/un-matrimonio- jubilados-murio-deshidratado-al-perderse-cordoba-n1323140.html)

And they had cellphones. They asked for directions. They simply were confused, took the wrong route, their signal disappeared and they ran out of gas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "That sort of treatment is typical of the level of professionalism I've experienced from the Inyo County Sheriff's Office. And I have taken away a very valuable lesson from it all. If I ever find myself in a dire situation in the backcountry of Inyo County and require rescue, I would crawl on bloody hands and knees over miles of jagged rock until I reached either the Kern or San Bernardino County lines. Then, and only then, would I set off my Personal Locator Beacon or SPOT device. A person needs to do everything possible to maximize survival…."

</comment><comment><USER5> I live in the town where they came from. There are definitely mountains here, even more frightening ones than in the Death Valley. The Saxon Switzerland mountain climbers even defined the rules of modern rock climbing. Their problem was the desert, they were more afraid of the rocks than the desert. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxon_Switzerland_climbing_reg...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxon_Switzerland_climbing_region)

</comment><comment><USER6> There was a period of several years when this sort of thing (weird content people put up because it was stuff they were personally very passionate and knowledgeable about) was more or less most of the what the internet was. I think about that sometimes.

<comment><USER7> There are very similar sites like the one posted still going on about missing people in hard to search areas. I will try to get my friend who's into it to provide a link.

<comment><USER8> The author is actively participating in the search for a hiker who got lost in the Joshua Tree National Park in 2010:

[http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and- rescue/searchi...](http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and- rescue/searching-for-bill-ewasko/)

<comment><USER9> That one had the coverage in the NYT Magazine as well. I wonder in that case did the guy get abducted or some similar victim of crime. Turns out that wandering off alone in the uninhabited desert actually can be dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Past discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12019567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12019567).

<comment><USER11> It's still worth your time to read it. I read the article when it was originally posted and I am still struck how, in the wrong environment, you can be two small decisions away from disaster.

<comment><USER12> On reading the article I had the same thought... I've driven (as a tourist in a hire car) up the road that they were ultimately trying to get to if they had made it over the pass, heading round to the north of death valley and then down Badwater road on the eastern side of Death Valley.

It didn't seem to be a stupid thing to do, we had lots of water in the car, we stuck to paved roads and although we probably only met one other car on the way north, once in death valley there was occasional traffic.

There have been several times when I've set off down dirt tracks in unsuitable vehicles for a bit of an adventure, and so far haven't come unstuck, but it's always been in western europe and not somewhere like this.

So maybe I'm just like the germans in this situation...

But then I looked at the map and started scouting around at where they had decided to go...

It may have been a couple of small decisions that led to disaster once they were up there, but the larger decision to head off up a 40 mile sandy/rocky dirt track to get over the very imposing mountains in the desert in July was the one that it was obvious (from my point of view) not to take.

<comment><USER13> > It didn't seem to be a stupid thing...we stuck to paved roads

It doesn't sound like you did anything stupid. You didn't go even remotely close to where the German's went in this case. They went into areas on roads that nobody would normally tackle without a serious 4x4 and a backup plan. They went down the westside unpaved road up to Warm Springs Camp and the Geologists Stone Cabin. The thing reading it that surprised me is that they tried this in a station wagon, not a 4x4, and never got the sense to turn around, and then from the Stone Cabin they went waaaay into serious offroad territory trying to drive down the wash.

[https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FdGZI6DDRPe3Y9-dtpLGGtDr2p...](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FdGZI6DDRPe3Y9-dtpLGGtDr2pQ&usp=sharing)

<comment><USER14> That's pretty normal for Europeans. 4x4 are rare and roads are often in worse conditions in mountainous areas that even some Fiat Punto can climb without any major issues. Most US folks would freak out without a proper Explorer or similar. It's like when in Germany you regularly see females driving 130MPH on the highway on their way back from shopping; it would freak you out but it's totally fine over there. So my guess is that those Germans just took it as a typical overcautious American thing and did it the same way they would do it in Austrian Alps or Canary Islands. Their main mistake was not to turn back, but again, moving forward and extreme resilience to pain is one of their national attributes anyway.

<comment><USER15> This is not at all my experience. I'm an American living in Germany who pretty regularly goes to the Alps, the roads are nothing remarkable. The amount of infrastructure built in the Alps is remarkable, but Americans are not going to bat an eye at the road conditions in the mountains of Europe, nor are they comparable to what people are talking about here.

<comment><USER14> That's true if you are a tourist in Alps, but as a native you'd know some really dodgy mountain roads that your clunker could climb without much trouble, but no American would ever attempt them without a proper 4x4 and life insurance. There is also a factor of underestimating distances due to latitude differences, i.e. Europe is drawn much larger and US much smaller than it should be in comparison, so looking at a map is very deceiving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks like a very long read. Given that I'm at work now, I won't be able to read this until tonight or this weekend.

Could someone be so kind as to give a 2-3 sentence summary? Looks like some German tourists got lost in the desert, and the author tried to track them down or retrace their steps?

<comment><USER17> Some visiting tourists got stuck in Death Valley without enough water or food, and they tried to walk out but it's a vast, hot, dry place. No one could find their bodies for a long time. It's a great story, I remember reading it before.

<comment><USER18> > and they tried to walk out

From reading the story, the crucial mistake might have been made when their van got stuck: instead of trying to walk back to a shelter with spring water supply they knew about because they had been there on their way out, they walked deeper into the desert trying to reach a military area where they hoped to find soldiers. They walked way beyond the point of no return and didn't find soldiers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> One of my favorite youtube channels just retraced the steps of the Germans based on the blog article [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-KUF- xiV5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-KUF-xiV5o)

</comment><comment><USER20> Read this some years ago but it's still a fascinating story. Having visited DVNP several times, I can certainly attest to the desolation of the landscape but I was there in winter and early spring and I certainly wasn't in areas like these. The pictures actually do the area justice. But to take two small children into such an area during summer with absolutely no preparation is simply criminal. What were these people thinking? It's good the families of the victims received some closure but it goes to show how making simple mistakes can easily lead to disastrous results.

</comment><comment><USER21> > But we were impressed with one amazing fact: To reach this spot required > them to have hiked 8 or 9 miles over rough terrain, in street shoes, in > July. In my mind they had earned a lot of respect for this accomplishment. > This was a tough group.

People will do extraordinary things fighting for their lives and for their children's lives.

</comment><comment><USER22> As an avid Death Valley fan I have been to the place several dozen times in last 4 years. I have only driven (on road and off road) and never dared to hike for more than 1 hour.

Deserts are a very deceptive places where the danger is never apparent.I have met many people who have underestimate the desert and what it can do to you.

</comment><comment><USER23> Last time this site was posted I spent a saturday reading it. Very interesting and gripping stuff on there.

</comment><comment><USER24> This was an incredible read. Thank you for sharing (again).

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it just me or is has otherhand.org suddenly started looking for a login? Read most of it yesterday, went to read the rest today and now can't :(

<comment><USER3> Same, it was working for me yesterday and now it's asking for a login. Just look up the page on the wayback machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I just ran into this nice article with some companion maps linked from the Wikipedia page: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com/the-hunt-for-the-death- valley...](https://email@example.com/the-hunt-for-the-death-valley- germans-companion-reading-79a7836d7c55)

</comment><comment><USER27> It seems he password-walled his site in the last 12 hours, probably because it got "viral"?

Luckily I managed to read his hunt for the crashed A-12 before he did.</comment>


I've Read Obama's Secret Trade Deal. Elizabeth Warren Is Right to Be Concerned - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/tpp-elizabeth-warren-labor-118068.html#.VVs7zeuFs20

<comment><USER2> "I can tell you that Elizabeth Warren is right about her criticism of the trade deal. We should be very concerned about what's hidden in this trade deal"

Why when someone like Warren criticizes it does everyone listen?

There were many saying that the Net Neutrality law also was worry-some because it was hidden, and they were called 'crazy'.</comment>


Show HN: PhotosCovered – Turn Facebook Photos into Composite Cover Photo - <AUTHOR> http://www.photoscovered.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll start off by saying I realize hackernews isn't a great target market for a facebook application. This was a weekend project idea I wanted to play around with for awhile now, so I'm mostly just showing hn for general commentary.

So I wanted to build a facebook application that took all your friends profile pictures and built a composite image out of them the size of the facebook cover photo...so a montage of all your friends for your cover photo. Turns out, facebook removed the friends list endpoint from their api a couple months ago.

So I opted instead to allow users to select their photo albums and then build a composite image out of the photos in those albums. The user can also overlay custom text onto the their new cover photo.

A few random notes:

\- The interesting part of this was getting the image sizes, rows and columns laid out correctly for any possible number of images. I'm sure there are elegant ways to do this that I didn't think of, but I was pretty happy with my solution and how it turned out.

\- The php GD image processing library was very useful, but appears pretty slow when processing a lot of images. Again, I'm sure there are more efficient ways to do this (like, not using PHP perhaps), but this does the job and made overlaying text very simple. I'm not sure how well the server will hold up to multiple or many users using it at the same time, however.

All in all, a fun exercise. I'll likely be tossing the source up on github soon.</comment>


From Memory to Myth: The Adventures of Patrick Leigh Fermor - <AUTHOR> https://www.weeklystandard.com/dominic-green/from-memory-to-myth-the-adventures-of-patrick-leigh-fermor <comment><USER2> _A Time Of Gifts_ is one of the most extraordinary books I've read.

It's a slow read, because Paddy is an extraordinarily erudite narrator who loves purple prose. If it were just a description of what he saw while travelling in the early 1930s, it would be interesting enough; but it's far more than that. He's looking through educated and extremely romantic eyes at the _old_ Europe, from Roman times to the Austro-Hungarian and Bohemian empires. At the slightest trigger he will go on a literary/historical flight of fancy.

And like all good travel writing, he meets people along the way who get him into and out of scrapes. A surprising swathe of mitteleuropean aristocracy and peasants. At the end of this journey somewhere (in a later book) he ends up as the boyfriend of a Romanian princess.

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't know he was a part of the SOE in WW2 and took part in the kidnapping of Kreipe on Crete. If anyone can get to the British Museum in London before July 15th, there's a free exhibition called "Charmed lives in Greece - Ghika, Craxton,Leigh Fermor" [1]. I hope to visit tomorrow.

[1] [http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/charmed_li...](http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/charmed_lives_in_greece.aspx)</comment>


Will a voluntary liquidation harm my chances of future investment? (UK) - <AUTHOR> In a nutshell, I have a business idea that I would love to work on, that may require investment (I've had positive initial feedback).
But I have a large outstanding debt to HMRC, which I am struggling to pay (I made mistakes when I started contracting, and didn't put enough money aside. I've since learned my lesson.) A voluntary liquidation looks like a sensible option at this point.
But I am worried that winding up my company in this will this appear as a stain on my character, and put off potential investors?
Is this a legitimate concern? Any help deeply appreciated! <comment><USER2> Does voluntary liquidation mean personal bankruptcy? Or is this at the corporate level (i.e. your Ltd company)? Who owes the debt - you or the company? HMRC debt might also be harder to get out of.

In general, corporate bankruptcy tends not to be a big problem. Personal bankruptcy, well, you become toxic to banks. It usually doesn't matter much to angel investors, but it can be a problem when trying to secure debt financing through traditional channels. It can however become a problem trying to secure personal stuff like credit cards or mortgages.

It's a good idea to talk to a lawyer about this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. It's just the company that would be affected, I don't have any debts personally. Cheers!

<comment><USER2> Also, and it depends on if there's a chance you might be personally liable, but if you intend to let the company go bankrupt, you might as well try and use that to negotiate the debt down (if that's at all possible).

For example, let's say your debt is £50,000. If you declare bankruptcy, they get £0. Offer to pay them £15-25,000 - if they don't agree, declare bankruptcy, and they get nothing.

Not sure if this will work with the tax authority, but I've heard this being used with private debt (bank loans) and it can work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not an accountant/tax adviser, and I would take advice from yours.

Many entrepreneurs fail often. Debts however are another thing. Especially with HMRC, I'd have a chat with a professional about your HMRC debt.

That aside, investors would want assurances their money go into the business and not the paying off your other businesses or any personal debt :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure Her Majesty won't simply release you - or your company for that matter - from tax debt just because you declare bankruptcy, personal or otherwise. Tax debts are notoriously difficult to get rid off in any other way than paying them. Maybe, payment by instalments is a possibility but otherwise you might not have too many options.

Besides, this also depends on what kind of company you founded. If I remember correctly, both the director and the secretary of a private limited company for instance are personally liable for the company's tax debts as well (at least to a certain extent).</comment>


Microsoft debuts Windows 10 version for Chinese government - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-23/microsoft-unveils-new-surface-pro-device-to-reverse-sales-drop <comment><USER2> Windows 10: Chinese Backdoor Edition™</comment>


Show HN: Browse "Who's Hiring" remote jobs by eligible country/timezone - <AUTHOR> https://www.teamremote.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks!

A lot of the REMOTE posts in "Who's Hiring" have specific location requirements (e.g. 'US only', 'within +- 2hrs of GMT' etc).

This is a quick tool for browsing/filtering those.

Feedback appreciated!</comment>


Gawker told me to disable NoScript - <AUTHOR>

I told Gawker I am a NoScript user having trouble telling which of around a dozen third-party JavaScript domains will let me view comments.  I included some links to tips on Gawker blogs to enhance one's security using NoScript.  Here is their response:<p>'Unfortunately, the only advice I can give from my end is to just disable NoScript in general (it just doesn't play well with our sites).'<p>'And unfortunately, I don't have a list of third party domains to give you ( and if I ask the tech team, they're just going to tell me to have you disable Noscript, since its a known problem causer/ is just a pain in the butt from their end), so your best bet is to either play around from your end or just disable the plug-in. Let me know if you have any other questions/concerns.' <comment><USER2> I'm going to strongly side with them.

You are essentially breaking the internet. Then you're asking them to help you work around all the stuff you broke and posting a public complaint here when they tell you "no." Sorry but too bad.

I might have some sympathy if you even explained why you need to "NoScript" their site in particular. If you had accessibility issues (e.g. handicaps) I would definitely feel sympathy for your position.

NoScript rolls the web back to pre-1997 levels.

<comment><USER3> I agree, accessibility issues aside, the web is a language, and like every other language it evolves in order to be able to express more and more complicated ideas. Design is a language which changes too. Gawker and you may not be on the same page, but asking them to deviate from the state of the art, asking people to do things like support older versions of IE, in the end just stifles progress. Going forward is one of the main principles of technological development, and sometimes we just have to leave things behind. That said, everyone is entitled to be any kind of user they want to be - and I totally respect your position, just don't think Gawker should be compelled to comply.

<comment><USER4> But what about accessibility issues?

<comment><USER5> What accessibility issues are you specifically referring to?

All modern screen readers (such as JAWS, WindowEyes etc) work well with Javascript-enabled sites _as long_ as appropriate standards such as ARIA are adhered to and keyboard focus is managed correctly.

<comment><USER6> Yes, the old JavaScript can't be used for accessibility argument is pretty dead to me. 98.6% reported to use JavaScript <http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey4/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> NoScript was meant to use on sites like gawker's and other primarily US based sites that include an awful lot of 3rd party scripts.

I think websites that include 3rd party scripts should be liable when one of these script run amock.

But I am not going to wait for that, so sites like that are removed from my attention field when I am not able to make them function from enabeling scripts of their own domain.

</comment><comment><USER8> The solution is simple... install Ghostery so you can easily identify which sites are hostile to their visitors, then use sites that aren't.

<comment><AUTHOR> I quit reading all the Gakwer blogs except Lifehacker after they recently butchered their comments system. But I just can't give up Lifehacker. And I thought it might be nice to read the comments without disabling the most important piece of security software on my system. In any event, will check out Ghostery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why not use Internet Explorer?

.

.

.

.

.

haha - couldn't help myself :D

On a more serious note, I sort of agree with UnoriginalGuy's POV. He's right in the sense that you are "breaking the internet" and then asking them to help you fix it (great analogy, I thought). I don't agree with his idea that NoScript "rolls the web back to pre-1997 levels" though. I think NoScript makes things so much safer that anyone who doesn't run it by default is taking a huge security risk when they visit unknown/new sites. That said, it seems silly/over-reacting to create a tattle-tale post here.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes i appreciate the POV, in that JavaScript is widely accepted now and it's curmudgeonly to assume otherwise. NoScript's design takes this into account, for those who are willing to white list domains.

That said, the idea that just because x% of people are happy to run arbitrary code from an arbitrary number of 3rd and 4th party domains, and that this is an acceptable or sustainable situation, I question.

It is ridiculous for a mainstream publisher like Gawker to run code from a laundry list of 3rd party domains, which are probably dynamically loading even more (that's what's usually going on when fiddling with individual domains still doesn't work). If all this code is trustworthy, they really can't download it and serve it to us directly? Of course, they have no ability to verify that it is safe when pointing to so many code bases.

It is also ridiculous that they cannot answer the question of which third party domains are needed to support comments on their system. This is how you take your more security conscious users and say "we don't care about you." With all the things that people will seemingly do to bump usage of their site a few percent, a sane JavaScript policy seemingly isn't always one of them.

Gawker can do what ever they want of course. And I can do what ever I want, which includes pointing out how silly it is!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Serious question--are you reliably able to use the Internet with JS effectively disabled?

<comment><AUTHOR> Heck no, but NoScript allows you to permanently white list domains and there is a pareto like distribution of domain usage.... white list for a few days and most of the internet works. By then you've gotten in the habit of twiddling with the NoScript menu wen it doesn't. And you start noticing how many domains that are just designed to serve you ads, spy on you, and God knows what (like unregistered IP addresses) you are avoiding granting access to.

There are only a few situations where it's a challenge. First, when there are just so many third party domains that is is pragmatically difficult to quickly weed out the ones that are making your experience better vs. worse. Second, when the third party domains dynamically load 4th party domains NoScript seems to puke, although it's getting better. If you visit some of the 3rd party domains though, you can sometimes figure out what the 4th party domains are and enable them.

Once in a blue moon, I do just have to view a site in Internet Explorer lol.

A surprising amount of stuff does still work with JS "effectively disabled" though. And even if you don't whitelist domains, NoScript will still turn of flash and let you "click through" to enable individual videos and stuff. It's a refreshing (and speedy) experience not to have to much "flashing" at one.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What search engines do you use? - <AUTHOR> Other than Google, DDG, and Bing. <comment><USER2> My own search engine. If I'm not happy with results I'll move to Google/Bing/DDG</comment>


Implementing a Neural Network from Scratch – An Introduction - <AUTHOR> http://www.wildml.com/2015/09/implementing-a-neural-network-from-scratch/ <comment><USER2> Stopped by his assumption that I know something about machine learning. Does anyone have any recommended resources to get on that level?

<comment><USER3> The author probably shouldn't have listed those as requirements - it's not really needed to understand the article.

Classification (in context of the tutorial) is determining whether the data corresponds to a 'male' or 'female' (where 'male' and 'female' are the 'class labels')

The purpose of 'Regularization' is to coax the network away from simply fitting an exact match to the training data (this wouldn't be useful because it would do poorly at any new data). In the context of the tutorial, they add the L1 norm to the 'penalty function', so the network penalizes larger weights.

The pictures do a pretty good job of explaining everything else.</comment></comment>


Thunderstrike – Apple EFI firmware vulnerability - <AUTHOR> https://trmm.net/Thunderstrike_31c3 <comment><USER4> Extremely impressive this, the tenacity of the author is incredible.

Basically the upshot of this article is (for me) that if you own some piece of hardware you can only really trust it if it has never been out of your sight after you bought it (and hopefully it wasn't compromised _before_ you bought it).

Shipping your laptop as checked in luggage, leave it on your desk overnight or go to lunch and when you see it the next time around it might not be your computer any longer.

Another very impressive bit to me was the fact that a financial institution took its security serious enough that they commissioned this work.

The whole thing is reminiscent of the inception hack:

[http://www.breaknenter.org/projects/inception/](http://www.breaknenter.org/projects/inception/)

I'm imagining this guy working for the Apple center on Wall Street or near it plugging a little dongle into _every_ macbook before it gets sold.

<comment><USER5> You'd probably be interested in Trammell's other projects (trmm.net has a list), including Magic Lantern, which arguably makes Canon cameras significantly more useful, and his older UAV work.

<comment><USER6> Definitely more than 'arguably' more useful. The intervalometer alone fills in for a $129 piece of hardware [0] and the HDR recording, although far from the standard of a Blackmagic camera, allows a $500 consumer SLR to produce HDR video where a $2000 camera would normally be required.

And those are just the features I could easily equate to money. There's also the zebra striping and so many other features I can't think of right now.

Magic Lantern is beautiful.

[0] [http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/164271-REG/Canon_2477A...](http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/164271-REG/Canon_2477A002_Timer_Remote_Controller_TC_80N3.html)

<comment><USER7> Interestingly the developers of Magic Lantern have explicitly stated that they will never develop it for the pro 1D and C ranges of cameras.

Apparently this is a result of some informal or undisclosed agreement with Canon, as the pro cameras are where Canon's recurring revenue lies.

<comment><USER8> It's probably a threat. Enable ML for the pro series cameras, and we encrypt boot loaders etc. Or even sue. But don't touch them and we'll have a gentlemen's agreement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I often come to the comment section looking for a summary of a dense article like this. Didn't find it, so here is my best shot at one:

Through the thunderbolt port, an attacker can put code that controls the firmware updates onto a mac. This cannot be removed by software, and could do all sorts of nasty stuff.

Anyone with physical access to the computer and a weaponized version of this exploit could do this. This includes intercepting hardware en-route to its recipients, spending a few minutes with a laptop while its owners are away, or while crossing international borders.

According to the author, this exploit works with every Mac with a thunderbolt port that they tested. Apple has a partial fix coming as a firmware update soon, but the author expresses concern that the proposed fix could still be bypassed.

<comment><USER10> I seem to recall that FireWire ports were disabled in some way when the system was locked (tip: show Keychain Access icon in menubar to have a manual lock at a click's distance) and that such attacks therefore required the computer to be unlocked.

Did I dream about that feature, and is that applicable to Thunderbolt?

<comment><USER11> Described exploit requires a reboot, so it doesn't matter if the computer is locked or not.

<comment><USER12> The article claims he can trigger the reboot from the device, although that wasn't implemented in the proof of concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As I mentioned in a previous discussion here ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8779696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8779696) ), Thunderbolt is basically "external PCIe" so you wouldn't want to plug in anything that you wouldn't plug into a PCIe slot on the motherboard of a desktop... it's not like USB where communication has to go through a special controller that requires drivers, this is the raw system bus itself.

Note that what Apple refers to as the SMC (it's usually known as the EC/embedded controller/keyboard controller in other laptops) is _another_ programmable controller, one that runs as long as the system has power - <USER2> from the battery - and is responsible for actually powering up the main CPU, so an exploit could hide itself there too and be even more difficult to detect. The main difference is the SMC/EC has much less memory so what can be hidden there is relatively limited.

Now I wonder if anyone has made a port-80 diagnostic card (dongle?) for Thunderbolt... [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POST_card](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POST_card)

<comment><USER14> _Thunderbolt is basically "external PCIe" so you wouldn't want to plug in anything that you wouldn't plug into a PCIe slot on the motherboard of a desktop... it's not like USB where communication has to go through a special controller that requires drivers, this is the raw system bus itself._

As cool as the raw power you get from Thunderbolt is, I wonder if externalizing an internal bus was a fundamental design flaw. PCIe descends from PCI, which descends from ISA, bringing along all sorts of backward compatible cruft, including the Option ROM support used by this exploit.

<comment><USER15> It's s huge problem, and another curse Apple has gotten the rest of the laptop industry to adopt. Newer ThinkPads ship with Thunderbolt instead of DisplayPort. So if I want external monitors, I'm screwed. I can't just epoxy the port, like I did with FireWire.

<comment><USER16> AFAIK, it's not Thunderbolt on Lenovos, just Mini DisplayPort+Audio, which has similar connectors and cables but excludes the PCI-alike interface for high- speed general purpose IO which this exploits.

<comment><USER15> The W540 has Thunderbolt, but also miniDP. I guess that's OK. But seeing as how they try to ape Apple, who knows what the next gen will bring.

<comment><USER16> Ah, okay. I looked at a few models and only saw MiniDP, I guess some of them actually are Thunderbolt, Interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very nice read.

Basically, when a MacBook is booted it allows random code to be executed from an attached Thunderbolt device (in a form of a legacy mechanism of Option ROM). The Option ROM is loaded unconditionally, including the case when the host system is rebooted to update its firmware. During such upgrade its primary on-board ROM is writable, so the exploit can write itself in it, replace RSA key used to verify firmware upgrades and thus prevent re-flashing the host with any official updates. Additionally, all this is possible because ROM includes only rudimentary self-integrity checks (in a form of CRC32) and proper crypto-signature checks are only applied during the update and not on every boot.

This particular exploit is pluggable by making firmware not use Option ROM during upgrades, which is a fix being deployed by Apple. Meanwhile you may want to superglue your TB port.

<comment><USER17> Maybe I'm missing something, but if an attacker can update the firmware without Apple's RSA key, then Apple (or you self) should be able to flash it in the same way the attacker did (even though the official update procedure is blocked) and "fix it", or?

<comment><USER18> This attack "closes the door behind it" so that you can't use the same vector to undo it. Specifically it completely disables loading option ROMs.

<comment><USER17> I see, thanks for the explanation! Hopefully we'll see an EFI upgrade fixing it soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The attack as described is plausible on non-Apple hardware, _provided_ that the system doesn't have UEFI Secure Boot enabled. If it does then you'd need a separate attack to circumvent the requirement for signed drivers.

Also worth mentioning that this isn't specific to Thunderbolt - <USER3> also breaks out PCIe to an externally-accessible port.

<comment><USER20> I assume it was you that asked the question about Secure Boot at the end of this talk at 31C3?

<comment><USER19> Yeah - after the previous day's discussion on how pretty much every existing Secure Boot implementation was vulnerable to kernel-level attack, it was nice to hear about something that _was_ fully prevented by Secure Boot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> An amazing write-up. Although I am using my EE training a lot more at work these days, and I've designed my fair share of MCU (and USB, FPGA, analog...) projects I've never found the time to dip into learning even a fraction of the detail presented here on low-level modern x86 architecture.

For me, reading this really hammers home just how feasible evil maid type attacks really are (considering attacks aimed at defeating Eg. Full disk encryption). But at the same time, if I am still typing the passphrase for my encrypted disks at each boot, simply filming me use my laptop would seem easier... So using that logic, I have been working on passwordless unlock before fiddling with the very tedious task of maintaining a SecureBoot Linux installation.

Can anyone say how strong the x86/TPM-equipped machines out there are against malicious firmware updates, assuming one has their BIOS admin password set?

<comment><USER22> _> Can anyone say how strong the x86/TPM-equipped machines out there are against malicious firmware updates, assuming one has their BIOS admin password set? _

A machine with VT-d (IOMMU), TPM and TXT is needed.

[http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/09/anti-evil- mai...](http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/09/anti-evil-maid.html)

<comment><USER23> Heh, but be careful of (intentional?) bugs. I have seen some versions of UEFI which do not measure option ROMs for example.

Look for changes to pcr-2 and pcr-3 when you plug or unplug cards with option ROMs:

      cat /sys/devices/* /* /pcrs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The 31c3 video for this exploit is here: [http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6128_-_en_-_...](http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6128_-_en_- _saal_1_-_201412291830_-_thunderstrike_efi_bootkits_for_apple_macbooks_- _trammell_hudson.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone noticed that the File Vault password also seems to leak? [https://www.flickr.com/photos/osr/16139512701/lightbox](https://www.flickr.com/photos/osr/16139512701/lightbox)

So basically a File Vault disk encryption is useless? Any clarification would be welcome :)

<comment><USER25> From the FAQ: Can it actually decrypt FileVault? Thunderstrike can not directly decrypt FileVault keys, but it does record the password the user types in to decrypt an encrypted boot volume and could use other data exfiltration techniques to send the key to the attacker's system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I can't wait for the same demo next year, but wireless. I wish I were joking:

      The WiGig Bus Extension (WBE), which can enable a wireless
      version of the PCI Express (PCIe) slots used to connect
      everything from video cards to hard drives. WBE is now a
      published specification available to members of the
      consortium.

WiGig Bus Extension (WBE) aka PCIe over Wi-Fi, coming to a laptop near you.

<comment><USER27> There is already a wireless USB.

WBE would essentially replace the cable. It is invisible to upper stacks. There is encryption/scrambling. I'm sure there are vectors for snooping attacks but I don't see viable "imitation" attacks where you could issue commands on behalf of the other device.

<comment><USER26> No need to issue commands, just provide an Option ROM over Wi-Fi like this attack. It's the same PCI protocol after all, just over Wi-Fi...

<comment><USER27> PCIe is a bus. It is the drivers that would choose to read and execute option ROM. It isn't part of the protocol actually.

If your peripheral device is compromised by a third party (say NSA) then it doesn't matter if it is over wireless or cable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> There is an interesting opportunity here for a Thunderbolt "condom". You would permanently attach it to your Mac's TB port -- and plug everything through that. It would block Snare attacks by detecting/preventing PCIe reads in a certain address range.

During boot time, it would read your BootROM and compare it against a known good and visually let you know if your ROM is compromised or not.

<comment><USER28> It is my understanding that verifying the BootROM is not possible once infected with sufficiently malicious code. I talked with Trammell about this briefly and my takeaway was that once you have code on the BootROM, you can control how code is read from the BootROM, making it possible to present the appearance of a non-compromised ROM image.

To the best of my knowledge, the only solution is something sitting on top of the BootROM chip, monitoring for writes. It may also be possible to alter the write-protect/write-enable pin (forget which it has) on the ROM to prevent all writes.

<comment><USER29> I'll have to find the data sheet, but it should be very possible to pull a pin high or low to disable writing to the chip itself. I doubt they do any checks for being able to write to the chip in software, that would just wear out the flash unnecessarily.

<comment><USER27> SPI flash has a write disable pin but that would also prevent Apple updates.

<comment><USER29> Could bodge in a physical switch for write protect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Great read to start 2015, it's been a while since I read something of that quality.

</comment><comment><USER31> Excellent article. I haven't watched the presentation yet, but I believe only the article is enough.

Also I liked it was somewhat step-by-step without jumping too far and losing the reader. This must be related to his class experience and is really awesome to broaden the access.

I would like to see way more of this kind of presentation/article had this step-by-step guiding through the discovery process.

Well done! That makes me wish to return to the field after some time _sleeping_.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm reminded of a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin:

        "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."

Maybe our new world version is:

        "Your computer can keep your secrets as long as it's dead".

Or maybe better:

        "Computers will keep secret anything you don't share with them."

</comment><comment><USER33> Someone needs to make a physical Thunderbolt port lock, like there are for Ethernet, USB, etc...

</comment><comment><USER23> I did not realize that macs did not include a TPM... So there can be no equivalent to bitlocker for them. This seems like a big competitive disadvantage for them.

I suppose you could make a dongle with a tpm for macs.. Perhaps there would be a market for it.

<comment><USER34> For the low, low price of $2000 you can buy one of my new, patent-pending Thunderbolt TPM dongles. Simply plug it in, reboot your machine, and you're protected from future EFI firmware changes _! One use and you 're protected, so pass it on to family and friends!

_Includes other Thunderstrike implementations and official Apple updates.

</s>

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> _Why Apple uses little-endian, while everything else uses big-endian, is another mystery._

The Apple-I and Apple-II family were 6502 based machines and the 6502 was little-endian, would be my guess. Any takers?

<comment><USER4> More likely a holdover from the power architecture days. I highly doubt a single bit made it from the 6502 days to the power pc days but I would not be at all surprised if some bits made it from the power days to the present.

<comment><USER36> I think the author is talking about something else (or is confused), the Motorola 68K processors were big-endian and the PowerPC had a big-endian mode (which was used by both PowerMacs and other POWER architecture systems).

Intel x86 processors are little-endian.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Endianness_and_hardw...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Endianness_and_hardware)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I wonder...how did the author gain such a wide variety of knowledge to figure this out.

<comment><USER4> The key to that in a way is embedded in the article. He doesn't give up, just keeps plugging away at it. That most likely goes for other things he does as well, including learning.

If you want to understand anything at all you'll end up branching out into tons of other fields besides the one you started out in. Want to understand something about biology? Off you go to Chemistry, Physics and even Math...

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is every security bug now going to get a fancy name? We'll run out pretty fast.

<comment><USER39> Go read the article, then decide if you snark is appropriate and substantiated.

<comment><USER38> I did read the article and found it extremely interesting. My comment is not detracting of the work itself.

<comment><USER40> Same reason that hurricanes (and now powerful tornados) are named.

Naming something makes it more real as a thing and easy to speak about.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is this a good way to run a software company?  [13 min vid] - <AUTHOR> http://youtube.com/watch?v=gG3HPX0D2mU

<comment><USER2> Ha, I think this is great. People actually being expected to produce instead of just warming the chair from 9-5. I find the part of this video amusing where they are talking about how they encourage everyone to use a different desk everyday so that managers have a hard time monitoring them. I suspect this makes the manager focus on the important thing. That being the quality of the employee's actual work. Unfortunately so often people default to using a persons work schedule to determine performance because it is easier to look up from your game of solitaire every morning at 9 and check a desk than it is to actually understand what each individual does and it's value (or lack there of) to the organization.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it must get harder to run a company that way when you get a lot more employees. Once you become just another face in the crowd, there's not as much social pressure on you. The system might break down there.

I mean, I'd love to work in a place like that. And I'm sure lots of others would. After all, many of us are altruistic and hard-working people, which would work great in a culture like that.

<comment><USER4> Semco have over a thousand employees. I think in such a large organisation, it's a great system, because everyone is accountable. I think that the opposite of becoming another face in the crowd happens under Semler's system. You answer to those around you, rather then those ten floors up.

<comment><USER5> According to the video in the link rguzman below, Semco has 5,000 employees.

According to the title on this, page, however, they might be looking for sysadmins:

<http://semco.locaweb.com.br/en/content.asp?content=1>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seems to me that if a company which manufactures a "solid product" can be run that way it must be possible to run a software company this way.

An interview with Semler: <http://youtube.com/watch?v=gJkOPxJCN1w>

</comment><comment> meat-eater It really depends on the quality of people you have. This is a really nice way to run a company. But for it to work, you need to get employees that care and are willing to do their fair share for the company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously. But in a software company, specially a startup, if you don't have good people you were doomed before you started.

On the other hand, the whole democracy thing and the employees having stake on the company may even take care of or at least counter balance having bad people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I highly recommend his book Maverick.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I've been meaning to read _something_ by him but haven't put any thought into which book I should start with. I care mostly that it goes into detail about implementing what he preaches and keeps the pontificating to a minimum.</comment></comment>