If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can't We Put a Man on the Moon? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-we-can-put-a-man-on-the-moon-why-cant-we-put-a-man-on-the-moon-1514833480 <comment> Al-Khwarizmi This seems to happen to a lot of things.

In my city (random Spanish mid-sized city, around 250K population) there is often debate about building a light rail or tram public transport line. But it is always dismissed by the administration for being too expensive, pharaonic, disproportionate for a city of this size, etc.

Doing some research on the history of the city, I discovered that not only there were several tram lines in the early 20th century, but there was even a tram line that went all the way to a nearby town of population around 15K, 22 km away. If anyone proposed a tram line like that today, I think they would be dismissed as being kidding for proposing such extravagant spending.

This, in a context where Spain is a much richer country than it was back then. I often wonder what went wrong.

<comment><USER2> I lived in a Swedish city of a similar size. They had a tram network that was dismantled bit by bit until it was completely shut down in 1973 because it was seen as unmodern. And now 40 years later they're all talking about building trams again since they're so modern...

<comment><USER3> Even in the US you see this. There was a light rail line[1] that ran west from Washington DC connecting several small farming communities in the early 1900s. It was dismantled and turned into a bike trail and now we are spending billions of dollars[2] to build a Metro expansion parallel to the old rail line.

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

[2] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr- gridlock/wp/2016/02/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr- gridlock/wp/2016/02/17/costs-mounting-for-phase-2-of-the-silver-line/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe we realize now going to the moon from a financial standpoint is purely political. If there was a efficient way and industrial need for plenty of resources from the moon maybe they'd make it possible. But right now grandiose measures of showing off your countries genitals kind of creates a narrative of wasted resources to me right now.

I've heard the argument that spending on stuff like this creates jobs and economy and I'm sure it does. But work a soup kitchen for a day and you'd realize we have economies of wealth built on the back of despair and hopelessness.

Our society needs to change to be a space faring one. Maybe I'm stupid and a traveling to space would initiate the change we need. I just can't see how.

<comment><USER5> > But right now grandiose measures of showing off your countries genitals kind > of creates a narrative of wasted resources to me right now

Countries spend all kinds of money showing off their genitals in much worse ways. Think North Korea's nuclear weapons, or any of the Western nations' colonization follies.

How much has been spent on Olympic games in the last couple of decades? Would that be enough to get us to the moon?

<comment><USER6> > _How much has been spent on Olympic games in the last couple of decades? > Would that be enough to get us to the moon?_

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

Given the double-digit billions in operating budgets per game, we could probably get a Mars program going for the cost of two or three of those games.

<comment><USER7> If only we could attract as many spectators, and command the ad budgets ti match.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Economy. If Moon was made of gold it wouldn't be worth going there for it [1]. Perhaps reusable spacecraft can change that.

For strategic / military reasons (money no objective) we can achieve much more than if profit is the only motivation.

[1. need a better source?] [https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/22059/if-the- moon-...](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/22059/if-the-moon-were- solid-gold-how-far-away-would-it-have-to-be-to-not-be-economic)

Edit:

Elon Musk: With New SpaceX Tech, Rocket Costs Will Drop By A Factor of 100

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/908254079092002816?ref_s...](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/908254079092002816?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ffuturism.com%2Felon- musk-with-new-spacex-tech-rocket-costs-will-drop-by-a-factor-of-100%2F)

Also analysis / spaculatoin for BFR. Keep in mind we're only talking about sending stuff to Mars, not retrieving it. [http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3343/1](http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3343/1)

Edit 2 federal court set the value of the moon rocks at $50,800 per gram based on how much it cost the U.S. government to retrieve the samples between 1969 and 1972.

[https://www.space.com/11804-nasa-moon-rock-sting- apollo17.ht...](https://www.space.com/11804-nasa-moon-rock-sting- apollo17.html)

<comment><USER9> But we ARE talking about retrieving stuff from Mars: the BFS must be returned to Earth to be reused. It's also capable of bringing people back from Mars, and that's supposed to be included in the $200k/person ticket price. Assuming at least 200kg of human plus consumables per person for the trip back, that implies that anything worth at least $1000/kg would be worth sending back.

So I think Musk is actually wrong when he says that he can BOTH send people to Mars super cheap with return tickets AND that there could not possibly be something of enough value on Mars to return to Earth even if you had cocaine ($100,000/kg?) prepackaged on the surface (gold is $35,000/kg or something).

...not that I expect a vibrant Mars export economy or anything. Musk's basic point about not expecting Mars to fully and profitably pay for itself with physical exports is correct.

<comment><USER10> >even if you had cocaine ($100,000/kg?)

it's $100k+ retail value, but wholesale value is much below that, more in line with gold.

<comment><USER9> Sure, but he was trying to pick something super expensive, even more than gold.

<comment><USER11> Saffron, platinum, human organs...

<comment><USER12> Prepackaged human organs on the Moon? That would be weird.

<comment><USER11> I can totally imagine a Chinese Prison facility that houses any nation's bad guys for a fee and churns out prepackaged organs. The tiny Albert Speer in my head can even see the benefit of such a system. And to be honest, China already does it to their prison populations. Putting the Organ Dispenser on the moon would just be a stylized recreation of the original concept of "international waters".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> T-A Edit: nope, looks like it's this one: "Stepping Stones: Economic Analysis of Space Transportation Supplied From NEO Resources"

[https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/eso_fin...](https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/eso_final_report.pdf)

\---

I think the report in question is "NASA's In Space Manufacturing Initiatives: Conquering the Challenges of In-Space Manufacturing":

[https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011108](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011108)

These may also be interesting:

"NASA's In Space Manufacturing Initiatives: Overview and Update", [https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011109](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011109)

"Additive Manufacturing for Human Space Exploration", [https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011644](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?print=yes&R=20170011644)

<comment><USER13> I really want to see asteroid mining prioritized, as well as a space station capable of permanent human habitation (either partial or full gravity). A space station is also preferable to another planet for our next big space endeavor IMO because it is easier to get materials to and from it (no extra gravity well to deal with). Also, I feel like a lot of people think "ah, everything has to be done differently because space is a zero-G environment", but I bet it would be easier to adapt a lot of traditional technologies, engineering processes, and biological elements in a rotating station. Once we have the ability to do fabrication and construction in space, everything becomes much cheaper. Lastly, if researchers need to experiment in zero-G, we could construct zero-G modules adjacent to the center of the ring for experimentation.

The primary blocker for a rotating station as far as I know has been the mass requirement. If you have a structure above a certain rotational speed with a radius that is too small, the occupants are likely to become nauseous. From the research I've seen, the minimum size for a viable rotating station would be about 600 tons[1]. Moving that amount of mass into orbit would have been extremely expensive, but Falcon Heavy could launch it for under $1.5B, and the BFR for even less.

[1]: [http://www.nss.org/settlement/space/GlobusRotationPaper.pdf](http://www.nss.org/settlement/space/GlobusRotationPaper.pdf) (page 22)

<comment> GCU-Empiricist It'll happen when there's a business model that reduces the operating margin for a company. My best guess is this will be when the price for lithium or trans-uranics goes up significantly, or some engineering process requires microgravity conditions.

<comment><USER14> Lithium will never be that expensive/rare. Its somewhat common, just we haven't needed as much as we do now.

Some rare earths are getting close to being worth it. That why a few companies are looking at nearby asteroids to see if they have enough of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are a lot of answers here about how expensive Apollo was, and about how those expenses haven't really gone away. Those answers are basically right: putting humans on the moon was, and would still be, enormously expensive.

But there's another factor at play which I haven't seen any mention of, which is that our risk tolerance as a culture has dropped considerably since then. We went from Mercury, to Gemini, to Apollo, in an INSANELY short period of time. We went from having never launched anybody into space, to Apollo 11, in ten years; we went from never having launched a Saturn V to putting three humans on top of one in thirteen months. We lost three astronauts due to multiple design flaws in the Command Capsule, then redesigned the capsule and launched it with astronauts in it in eighteen months.

None of that could happen now. And the reason can only partly be blamed on NASA losing its mojo. In truth, the entire spaceflight community has developed far a more comprehensive, reliable safety culture. But that culture is by necessity much slower than it was then. Nobody in the industry could move as quickly as NASA did in the mid 1960s. NASA of today can't - but neither can SpaceX, or Blue Origin, or Sierra Nevada, or anyone else I know of.

Even if we wanted to, we would have to re-educate our engineers. Engineers are taught how to do program management starting as undergraduates. We have an entire generation of aerospace engineers who have been taught to move at deliberate, conservative speed, to make sure nobody gets killed. The human inertia inherent in our current engineering culture just wouldn't allow us to go back to the speed of the 1960's.

A slower, more comprehensive safety culture costs even more money, but more importantly it requires financial support from Congress and the White House over a much longer period of time in order for a mission to make it from proposal to launch - support which is extremely hard to sustain across administrations.

And (personal opinion here) society _as a whole_ is supportive of - indeed, has demanded and driven - these changes. We would not tolerate the US government spending 2% to 3% of the entire federal budget on a manned spaceflight program, and then losing an entire crew in a pre-launch accident, and then returning to launch in 18 months.

</comment><comment><USER16> They need driverless, conductorless subways/trams in enclosed tubular right of way with passengers entering from one side and exiting from the other, via offset doors. Think of the days when you had elevators with operators who were paid for pushing the floor number for you - (a carry-over from the cable-pull hole in the wall days when operators were needed.) These trams were killed by the wages of the operators, in much the same way that modern subways are ruined costwise by the wages of the drivers and conductors who each have hourly wage costs of $50 or more = large ticket costs and avoidance to car use. In effect opportunists grabbed all the $$

In the moon race, NASA is so burdened by legacy wages and other costs AND the fact that Congressional opportunists grab the money that NASA was prevented from that course.

</comment><comment><USER17> The author answers the question in the first sentence. It is not that we can't, the problem is that it is not cost effective to do so. Or, as the cliche goes, "It's all about the Benjamins".

The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T and a federal bureaucracy with a reputation of being unable to bring projects to completion on budget. Think of this in a more personal context: you need to plan to support yourself in your old age (retirement). Your lifestyle depends on a successful return on investment. What percentage of your savings would you invest in this? Where does this fit on your hierarchy of "needs" vs "wants"?

<comment><USER18> Your analogy makes no sense. America isn't a person, doesn't have a limited working life, and isn't going to "retire".

The solution to an inefficient federal bureaucracy and a large national debt isn't to cut economically irrelevant spending in those areas where the US enjoys an actual advantage over other countries. It's to improve the bureaucracy and balance spending in meaningful ways.

Unfortunately, any sane attempt at improvement is blocked by "small government" Republicans, who deliberately impede evolutionary improvements in government functioning in the hope that, by forestalling them, they can hasten some future libertarian revolution, wherein it becomes politically possible to eliminate all social programmes altogether.

In order to maintain their false image as being in favor of fiscal constraint, these same Republicans attack easy targets like NASA. At the same time, they protect insanely profligate projects like the F-35 fighter, which provide essentially socialist redistribution to defence contractors in their own districts. In your flawed comparison, it'd be like someone complaining about his children's spend on candy, while buying a dozen broken Ferraris every day.

<comment><USER19> Calling this a republican problem is being willfully ignorant of the problems in our government structure. We didn't get $21B in debt cause of republicans, or democrats, but because of congress.

Congress directed NASA to spend $20B to build the SLS, a super heavy launch system built by congresses favorite contractors. It won't be reusable at all, ever launch rocket will be burned up in the atmosphere. Each launch will cost about $2B, and the first version will only put in orbit about the same amount of cargo a Falcon Heavy will for $90M.

The SLS won't ever be canceled despite its awful economics because it's diverting billions to favorite contractors like Boeing. That's the problem. NASA could buy launch capacity for a fraction of the cost using commercial providers, but key congressional districts get no windfall from that.

<comment><USER20> The problems being discussed here happen at least 2 orders of magnitude larger than you are talking about. The little NASA journey to SLS has effectively no impact on the grander US government debt or the issues causing it.

The issues causing the debt are much much bigger problems that last _centuries_ and are largely Republican-driven. They are things like overspending on War, keeping the poor population poor (war on drugs, cutting education spending, etc), that keep the population of the US unable to earn money and pay taxes, etc.

The problems are large and structural and they are not with NASA or their decision making. They are with Republicans.

<comment><USER19> Again, there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. They both are responsible for the war on drugs because it's politicalky popular. The few Opponents are either very liberal democrats or libertarian republicans.

Secondly, we are spending more on education than virtually any time on our history.

Thirdly, Obama was a democrat, at times had political majorities in congress, yet he never pulled us out of Iraq or Afghanistan, because it would be politically unpopular, and cost significant democratic party funders billions on contracting revenues.

Trump says he would cancel the F-35, but dame thing, same reasons.

Imperial congress has a turnover rate akin to the members of the communist party in the glory days of the USSR. They are all professional politicians who get re-elected by voting for what their financial backers want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [http://archive.is/g1NEH](http://archive.is/g1NEH)

<comment><USER22> [https://archive.is/PO1WZ/image](https://archive.is/PO1WZ/image)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The question is why would we put a man on the moon?

I grew up with Moonbase Alpha (although I am not expecting to be thrown into space by a major explosion) and want this as much as anyone else but is there any reason (mining, strategic, know benefits to research) which justifies the price?

<comment><USER24> That really explains why it happened the first time. Price was not a concern. We were on almost a war footing to get it done.

The whole reason that NASA stopped innovating after about 1972 was that the costs were unsustainable.

<comment><USER6> I'd say the costs were _projected_ to be unsustainable. There apparently was this whole episode with the Congress realizing that Wernher von Braun & crew are aiming for Mars, and deciding to cut the party short before it gets out of control[0].

\--

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA#Loss_of_political_suppor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA#Loss_of_political_support_and_cancellation)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article answers itself: _" NASA's traditional manned programs for deep space exploration, costing well over $3 billion annually, continue to enjoy solid bipartisan backing among lawmakers and major agency contractors."_ That quote is speaking largely of the SLS. It's supposed to essentially be the Space Shuttle 2.0, but it's often just referred to as the Senate Launch System for good reason. We've spending billions of dollars on that program and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. This [1] is the Wiki entry from 2011 detailing the program's promises, which have been constantly 'reimagined.' In reality it's mostly a giant pork project.

Ultimately it's being driven by congressmen who only care about getting their kickbacks and it's being developed by ULA, an anticompetitive merger of Boeing and Lockheed, who only care about profit. And the companies themselves are also falling apart. This [2] is Lockheed Martin's CEO. One of the largest aerospace companies in the world is headed by a person who has absolutely no background whatsoever in aerospace or related technologies. Until 2015, this [3] was the head of Boeing - same story. Perhaps not coincidentally, since Boeing put an aerospace engineer in charge - they have sharply changed their direction and competitive outlook.

We have an increasingly corrupt government contracting work to companies who are driven only by money. Musk's success and the government's success in the 60s have something very simple in common. They were not driven by greed or short term self interest, but big picture ideology and aspirations. And it seems the whole notion of aspirations, beyond earning lots of money, is something that is somehow fading in society.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Space_Launch_Syst...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Space_Launch_System&oldid=457761065)

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

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

</comment><comment><USER26> Looks like commenters here did not read the subtitle: _Outside study blames NASA's bureaucracy and contracting practices for delaying lunar missions_

<comment><USER27> Well, the article does also say:

> NASA has routinely faced similar criticism from some lawmakers and advocates > of commercial space ventures, but seldom in a report released by the agency > itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not a WSJ subscriber, so I can only see the first two paragraphs...

" _NASA's current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren't affordable and likely won't produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency._ "

As an ex-NASA contractor (at the NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center, and yes, I think that name illustrates some of the problems of NASA), I completely agree. Management is extremely broken. Fifedoms are the major organizational component. Personalities are the driving principles. No one solves problems; they work around them. Going through the motions of the established procedures without understanding is expected to produce the optimal result.

On the other hand, all of this is a direct result of the funding model. Legislative and administrative priorities change every few years. Much of the priorities involve spreading contracts across important Congressional districts. It's not a surprise that the plans they come up with are PowerPoint schemes that sound good but have no real chance of success.

An example: the Constellation program was supposed to re-use the shuttle solid rocket boosters to save money. Sounds good, right? Until an aerospace engineer and solid rocket dude pointed out that they needed more thrust than the SSRBs provide. Proposed solution? Add another segment (of solid rocket motor) to the SRB. Unfortunately, that actually requires a complete redesign of the solid rocket motor. It would probably be more effective and cheaper to start from scratch. BTW, as far as I could determine, the current SLS program is the Constellation program with the names filled off.

(Said AE friend works for NASA building web apps because "they fly and that [pointing at the 1/5 scale model of Aries-1] doesn't.")

" _Released last month without publicity, the report advocates using asteroids to produce fuel..._ "

But here we have an example of the same problem. Have one hard problem you apparently can't solve? Replace it with 10 harder problems that sound better. Pure public relations.

<comment><USER29> ProTip™: Copy and paste the headline of the article into Google to get the full article. I really need to write a Chrome extension for this but haven't had the time. :(

<comment><USER28> Didn't that stop working recently? Or was that the NYT?

<comment><USER29> It worked for me to read the rest of the article so it might be NYT that you're thinking of.

PS. You may have to do the search in incognito mode as it might log a cookie that you've visited the page already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If you can read a wsj article, why can't you read it?

</comment><comment><USER31> I think the real question is why we want to put a man on the moon. Imagine you climbed mount Everest with no climbing equipment and then 30 years later someone asked you why you haven't done it again.

</comment><comment><USER32> WaitWaitWait... Nasa had its peak funding during those Moon landing years. We've let that equipment dryrot, switched to new versions, run those into the ground, slashed the budget repeatedly (and again over NASA's climate change research), privatized everything possible, let the best engineers retire, underpaid _and_ underutilized their replacements until they left...

And somehow we have the gaul to wonder "why is going to the moon not working?"

Its almost like we're asking for something for nothing. Scientists and Engineers need to eat too. We need to _buy_ new hardware. Train new people. If we wait too long, Musk will buy Cape Canaveral. We've already let Houston get turned into a museum rather than a launch pad.

I dont care how much you're gonna blame _bureaucracy_ for this - this is poor leadership at the helm of our nation to gaslight folks this way.

</comment><comment><USER33> In order to efficiently place people into space we would need a robotics based economy. Robots would need to build the rockets and fly the rockets. Humans would design the rockets and tell them where to go. Mission control would be replaced with one flight director observing an AI which monitors everything.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is the one hope I have, with huge amounts of wealth concentrating in a few people's hands we may see pie in the sky stuff like Moon colonies and space tourism start up.

</comment><comment><USER35> Because putting a man on the moon would be putting a man on the moon!

</comment><comment><USER36> An additional reason is that expertise died out with the end of funding. We had exactly one generation that tackled this problem - there has been no opportunity for them to hand down their experience. We're not starting from scratch, but we're certainly worse-off than we were at the _end_ of the space race - scientists and engineers will have to learn from books and papers, rather than having an expert around to guide them.

</comment><comment><USER37> Because the Apollo Program happened during Bretton Woods, a period of time where America had virtually infinite money.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege#Oppositio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege#Opposition_in_France)

<comment><USER38> > _Because the Apollo Program happened during Bretton Woods_

We are still under the Bretton Woods system, more or less. Almost 2/3rds of foreign currency reserves held by central banks are held in U.S. dollars [1]. If anything, real interest rates are _lower_ today than they were in the 1960s.

[1] [http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2017/03/31/pr17108-IMF-R...](http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2017/03/31/pr17108-IMF- Releases-Data-on-the-Currency-Composition-of-Foreign-Exchange-Reserves)

<comment><USER37> Yes but the US does not allow audits on their gold reserves.

They could print as many dollar bills they wanted until the Nixon shock.

That ended, and as a consequence the economy is not doing as well right now.

If not but because of exclusive deals (e.g: oil) it would be very hard to justify the dollar current value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Slight tangent but related: Andy Weir's new book _Artemis_ has some good scientific details about _living_ on the moon.

Some future cost estimates on getting there: [https://www.marketplace.org/2017/11/27/world/blog-what- econo...](https://www.marketplace.org/2017/11/27/world/blog-what-economy- artemis-can-tell-us-about-life-earth)

</comment><comment><USER40> You can't put a man on the moon but your grandparents could.

<comment><USER6> "Back when I was your age, I had to go to work 400 000 km. In near 0K cold for 3 days. Upwell! Both ways!"

<comment><USER41> If you were in direct sunlight for those 3 days to the moon I'd be more concerned about being hot than cold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Simply put, we need a lander. If we had a lander, we could use existing rockets to get to Mars via Earth orbit rendezvous (see Gemini, also ISS is regularly refueled and boosted by visiting vehicles). But we spent all of our exploration money on an expensive rocket (and a capsule that is much heavier than it needs to be...).

</comment><comment><USER42> Have been wondering the same for quite sometime. None of the mentioned reasons seems convincing enough.

</comment><comment><USER43> THere is little POINT in putting a man on the moon after you've done it.

We have plenty of moon rock to run experiments on.

Any micro/low gravity experiment can be run cheaper in LEO.

There aren't any valuable resources there to exploit.

It's a bit like asking why we don't build a habitat on the bottom of the Marians Trench - we COULD, but why WOUDL we?

<comment><USER44> Because it's awesome. :)

I mean, we burn piles of money just for fun. May as well burn a pile of money to put someone on the moon again. Doing it just because we can is a fine reason.

"Still got it!"

One tweak, though. Rather than forcing them to find a reason to go, i.e. gathering moon rocks, they should just let the astronauts play around. That's the goal. Go there, then turn on a webcam and romp around for a few days.

That would get the world thinking. And that'd be pretty cool.

<comment><USER45> I wish more people were inspired by Gene Roddenberry's vision of an ideal human society. I know it's a science fiction pipe dream because we're always held back by the lowest common denominator, but if mankind moved past the need for acquisition and power all that would be left is working together to achieve goals that make everyone's life more meaningful. We have to wait for meaningful goals to intersect with acquisition and power.

<comment><USER6> I for one am in full cognitive dissonance about that. On the one hand, I understand how much of a pipe dream Star Trek is, and on the other hand, I strongly believe it sets a standard worth aiming for.

<comment><USER45> I guess that's how I feel too. I would never preach this gospel, but I find it inspirational.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Because, half a century later, it's not any cheaper to do it than it was then.

<comment><USER13> It's recently gotten way cheaper.

Cost per kilogram delivered to LEO:

Saturn V (used for the Moon landing mission): $8,250

Falcon 9: $2,700 (price for an expendable launch)

BFR (hypothetical, in development rocket): $500

<comment><USER47> In inflation adjusted dollars? I would have still thought its 10X cheaper now because of all the learnings plus much lower cost computing and other engineering enhancements.

 _Back in 1973, the total cost of the Apollo program reported to Congress was $25.4 billion. By far the most expensive parts of the mission were the Apollo spacecraft (the Command Modules, the Lunar Modules) and the monstrous Saturn V launch vehicles. A single Saturn V launch cost up to $375 million in 1969 — or, in today's money, a few billion dollars.

In 2009, NASA looked back at the cost of the Apollo program in its entirety, and arrived at a figure of $170 billion in 2005 dollars (or around $200 billion in today's money). Compare these costs to modern day space travel, where companies like SpaceX charge just $133 million to launch a spacecraft to the International Space Station. The Falcon Heavy, which will be comparable to the Saturn IV, will be in the same price region._

[https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186600-apollo-11-moon- la...](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186600-apollo-11-moon- landing-45-years-looking-back-at-mankinds-giant-leap)

<comment><USER48> Safety. Back then it was basically part of the Cold War. Today, what are you asking the people to risk their lives for? Making things civilian-safe is expensive.

<comment><USER49> People risk their lives all the time for sillier reasons than going to space, sometimes without even getting paid for it.

<comment><USER48> Sure, so we might not stop an eccentric rich adventurer from self-funding an effort like this. But that doesn't necessarily mean the government would sponsor it, or allow people to be employed to do it.

<comment><USER49> Well if your justification for that is because people might die, I'm afraid you'll find that the government is more than happy to sponsor and employ people for projects with rather high fatality rates.

<comment><USER48> Aside from the military? Federal projects are very safety conscious. That was the whole point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Maybe because doin anything else that is slightly more complicated than a few experiments is gonna cost exponentially more and the budgets won't get approved.

</comment><comment><USER51> I thought helium-3 was a viable and necessary resource to put people on the moon. Is it not?

</comment><comment><USER52> So how much would it cost to send someone to the moon again?

</comment><comment><USER53> We can't because the USA prefers to create more bombs and other war machines rather than invest in science.

<comment><USER54> We would never have done it the first time if not for military competition with the USSR.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't mean we have to keep competing militarily if we could go to space instead.

(Though there is potential for another military race there too - the first country to put a deorbiting system on a near-Earth rock wins.)

<comment><USER55> Military competition is always necessary. You need to be able to defend yourself, and for that, you cannot fall too far behind.

I agree with you when we get to the offensive use of weapons. Though the US is only one of a number of players in that field.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I have no illusion that military one-upping is going away any time soon. My point was only that while it's true it was military competition that opened access to space, we don't have to forever justify space exploration by military applications. Private industry around space, and NewSpace in particular, is a good step towards that.

Military competitions is what gave us microwave tech. Doesn't mean that if world peace suddenly happened, we would stop producing microwave ovens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Are most of the comments here based on the headline alone? This is a paywall and I am not seeing many comments discussing the article itself, just the headline (question).

</comment><comment><USER57> Because capitalism, as religion while in its optimization frenzy- cripples the ability's of mankind? Reaching the moon already was only done to compete with a faction outside the reference system. Without commies to race and lean against, the western system decayed to just another nice decorated, well managed cotton plantation.

There is no price on the far future events, such as bollide strikes. If there where, suddenly the moon would have holiday resorts.

<comment><USER6> Nicely put.

Though this is not caused by the religious aspects of modern capitalism, but by its core mechanism of work - people are forced to work on what earns them and protects their short-term profit (poor people to eat, rich people to not become poor people).

There seem to be only few people on the planet with simultaneously enough wealth _and_ focused will to tell the market where to go, as opposed to being directed by the market - I'm thinking about people like Gates and Musk. Fortunately, one of them is hell-bent on getting to Mars; without that forcing function, we'd probably be talking about scrapping ISS by now.

(I don't feel like you can blame situation in NASA purely on capitalism though, at least not directly. They don't play the capitalism game. But they are controlled by politicians, and politicians play the capitalism game.)

<comment><USER58> Politicians play the politics game.

This game involves people acting with self interest, and relates in some ways to access to/control of resources. This is the case regardless of economic system.

"Capitalism is moloch, yes, but government is also moloch. Anarchy is also moloch."

<comment><USER6> That's why I wrote "indirectly". Politicians play the politics game, but the particulars of that game is in big way determined by the economic system of a country. In the US, politicians try to game the election process, and that involves allocating resources in a way that ensures their electability. The end result is things like turning NASA's space efforts into a giant jobs program. Politicians under a (hypothetical) different economic system would face different pressures, maybe even aligned with pursuing longer-term projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> NASA can't put a man on the moon, but Elon soon will make putting two lambos into lunar transfer orbit with the falcon heavy

<comment><USER60> You sure it's not Tesla Roadsters?

<comment><USER55> The (single) Tesla Roadster is going on a transfer orbit to Mars.

(Actually, the Tesla is 'just' going into a heliocentric orbit with it's apogee around the Mars orbit. That is sufficient to prove that it can get to Mars because it's just a matter of timing, which is _relatively_ trivial, but it doesn't crash into another Planet and upsets planetary protection officers - yes, that's a job)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Why don't more people realize that _infecting as much of the cosmos with ourselves_ should be one of the MAIN GOALS of Humanity?!

Ergo, space exploration technology should be a priority, even at massive costs, and even when those cost are measured in human lives and human pain and suffering. This, plus "defeating aging", plus "achieving superhuman general- purpose intelligence" (either by augmenting/improving human I or by developing AIs). _Almost nothing else matters besides these._ What fucked up global leadership did we end up with that they seem to have completely forgot this?

<comment><USER62> You might wanna justify those claims? Having a bunch of oppressed miserable humans rules by tyrannical AIs or whatever seems quite a bit worse then living happily on our single planet.

<comment><USER63> Better to have the seeds of humanity spread across many baskets, rather than in a single one that is perpetually endangered by an unlucky intersection with a rock.

Who knows if we'll ever be able to actually get outside our local system, but we're never going to figure out how to do it if we can't even setup shop in the cosmic equivalent of our front yard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> What evidence leads you to believe that nasa is currently run as efficiently or as innovative as during say the first half of Apollo. Everything I've heard from people who worked there is that it's generally become more and more of nightmare

<comment><USER64> You ask for evidence, then follow up with "I heard from people..."?

<comment><USER65> People telling you things is evidence.

<comment><USER59> Actually,that's a good point! People telling me things isn't exactly evidence. I wonder what pure evidence would look like?

<comment><USER65> No, it _is exactly_ evidence. But, as you seem to be aware, each kind or instance of evidence should be weighed differently, i.e. stronger evidence should sway your beliefs more strongly.

People telling you things may not be particularly _strong_ evidence, but you should still probably update your beliefs at least a little.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> This will go on until one day a large enough government admits that moon landings back in the 60s/70s were filmed, instead of real.

The large majority of people here are based in facts instead of religion and dogmas. As a fact-based society, we should be able to look from a distance and re-evaluate the facts with a colder perspective.

From what I observe, every year we are either 5 year away from settling on the moon (or Mars), every year there are nn reasons why it didn't happen (loop and repeat since the last 50 years).

Very few doubt the fact that selfies of astronauts smiling directly at the sun are possible (without injury).

Very few wonder why the first landing was a success, right on the first try even as other agencies (SpaceX) iteratively fail on the first runs.

Very few ask why the the original recordings don't exist any longer, only botched TV recordings.

The effect of radiation outside the earth shield is simply too strong. We have always sent animals during any space milestone before humans. Look up what happened to them, if you can find the records.

I'm an engineer. If possible, would like to see humans on the moon during my lifetime. Instead, we are taught that the sun orbits around the earth and burn apostates on the public square. We can do better.

Happy 2018! :-)

<comment><USER67> You forgot the /s</comment></comment>


Google-styleguide  - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/google-styleguide/ <comment><USER2> Hm, while the python style guide is interesting and contains good advices, I am missing a reference to PEP8.

<comment><USER3> Speaking of PEP8, I find it strange that the guide mentions "Indent your code blocks with 4 spaces.". AFAIK Google used 2 spaces for indentation.

<comment><USER4> They use 2 spaces for C++ and ObjC, 4 spaces for Python.

<comment><USER3> I was talking about the previous standard. Here's a proof: [http://code.google.com/p/soc/wiki/PythonStyleGuide#Indentati...](http://code.google.com/p/soc/wiki/PythonStyleGuide#Indentation). It says:

 _Note that this differs from PEP8 and instead follows the original Google Python Style guide from which this style guide originated._

 _Indent your code blocks with 2 spaces._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And the java style guide?!?! Google has invested a lot in java projects, I don't think they don't care about the style there. Strange...

<comment><USER6> Perhaps there's no reason for a Google specific Java style guide because the Java style guide from Sun is pretty good.

<comment><USER7> There is a Google-specific guide. Its mostly of the form "go read the Sun style guide", with some specific clarifications of things the Sun style guide is quiet on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The C++ guide interestingly recommends not using a number of language features (exceptions for instance) and advises a more standard-like approach on Windows. I wonder what seasoned windows programmers make of it [http://google- styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.x...](http://google- styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml#Windows_Code)

<comment><USER9> I was reading that the worst problem of C++ is to decide what 10% of the language to use in your project. Google is trying to do this to avoid such conflicts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Too bad there's no .vimrc :-)

<comment><USER10> they have one; I might have it around somewhere but it's probably missing a lot</comment></comment>


Stream you terminal in real-time with anyone – without installing anything - <AUTHOR> https://streamhut.io/ <comment><USER2> Author of tmate here. This is really cool. Bravo

</comment><comment><USER3> Could this solution be extended with a openssl pipe to offer encryption?

</comment><comment><USER4> How do you shut it down or delete the session after you are done?

<comment><USER5> With exit..

<comment><USER4> does it delete the session video from server? It seems like not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks like a security breach for most companies.

</comment><comment><USER7> I was recently looking into ytalk/talkd which is the old-school way to do such things...

Very cool, now I must decide between tmate and streamhut!

</comment><comment><USER8> Very cool! I'll have to stick with tmate because I do need encryption. Keep up the work though!

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, such an elegant solution!

Very impressive!</comment>


PolyHook – x86/x64 Hooking Library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/stevemk14ebr/PolyHook <comment><USER2> A cool addition would be to augment the IAT hook with an option to hook LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress, so that functions imported from delay-loaded DLLs are also hooked correctly, and so that the IATs of delay-loaded or otherwise dynamically-loaded DLLs would also be hooked.

<comment><USER3> Or patch the export table of the exporting DLL in addition to the import table of every current importing DLL (as future importing DLLs will look in the export table).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also I wrote an article on how it all works on codeproject: [http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1100579/PolyHook-The- Cpl...](http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1100579/PolyHook-The-Cplusplus-x- x-Hooking-Library)

</comment><comment><USER5> Quite unusual to see so low level code in C++11 - what about some Ruby ;) ?

[https://github.com/jjyg/metasm/blob/master/samples/pe- hook.r...](https://github.com/jjyg/metasm/blob/master/samples/pe-hook.rb)

</comment><comment><USER4> hey guys i'm the creator thanks for the views! I plan on adding Export address table stuff soon, making it cross platform, and i will look into improving IAT hooks! Anything else i should look into?

</comment><comment><USER6> This is awesome, was looking at something like this some time ago for graphics API hooking. All other options I found were commercial, non OSS or just a random article on CodeProject.

</comment><comment><USER7> FYI: Windows only</comment>


US Government Begins Rollout Of Its 'Driver's License For The Internet' - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140503/04264427106/us-government-begins-rollout-its-drivers-license-internet.shtml

<comment><USER2> I can verify my own identity, thanks</comment>


GizmoSneak: Rent gadgets for as low as $10 a month - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmosneak.com/

<comment><USER2> Like the idea but I wouldn't touch this until I knew the price of the gadget _I_ wanted. Signing up to find the Rift or 3D printer were actually $200/month would really annoy me.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks good!</comment>


Show HN: Self-signed certs as a service - <AUTHOR> http://lolroot.ca/

<comment><USER2> Just in case anyone doesn't realize that this is a terrible idea, this is a terrible idea.

It's certainly a reasonable position that self signed certs should not have such a scary warning, but if you install the lolroot root certificate as a trusted certificate, you will now be completely vulnerable to MITM attacks.

Anyone can pretend to be, for example, your bank, by generating a lolroot self signed certificate for your banks domain name. You've said you trust them, your browser won't put up any warning.

I'm sure most people realize this but in case you didn't, don't install it.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://pastebin.com/fQ5ftcri](http://pastebin.com/fQ5ftcri)

"Need Support for your self-signed cert? 5k/year - 1 (800) 555 - 5549"

Indeed.

</comment><comment><USER4> Pretty good idea.

<comment><USER5> Really, really good idea. Now browser makers (looking @ you Google and Mozilla) need make self-signed certs feasible by removing the scary warnings.</comment></comment>


Why is Google so slow? - <AUTHOR> Is it just for , or does it seem like Google has slowed down a lot recently ? I am using a MacLaptop and when I search for stuff recently, 60% of the time, the website doesn't load at all. It just freezes at a certain point and doesn't proceed and I need to exit the site and reenter. Doesn't help if I switch to a different browser too ... Or is it because I am using a Mac laptop ? <comment><USER2> Wat, "the website doesn't load at all." Do you mean google or the websites you're trying to browse..?

<comment><AUTHOR> The websites I am trying to browse --- very often they don't load at all when I type in the site in Google's search field.

For example, when I type soccernet in Google's search box, in the past , the results were returned almost instantaneously with no delay.

Recently, however perhaps 50-60% of the time, it just freezes up and doesn't proceed ...

<comment><USER3> I've noticed some sloth over the past few days. I'm using google.co.uk.

Search results can take a while to appear at times. More common is that when I click on one of the links (which of course are always of the form www.google.co.uk?blahblahblahblah...) it spends a while waiting for google before following the link.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it possible to build a search engine that is faster, more efficient compared to current Google search engine and has almost zero lag time ? It's been a huge problem for me recently, as you mentioned, when i click on links, very often the screen just freezes up for a few seconds or the search result doesn't appear at all ... I don't recall this happening in the past ...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Study Satirises Measures of Social Media Addiction - <AUTHOR> https://digest.bps.org.uk/2020/04/15/are-you-addicted-to-spending-time-with-your-friends-study-satirises-measures-of-social-media-addiction/ <comment><USER2> I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint that social media has some negative consequences, but I still think this is a really valuable satirical measure.

What I've seen is that journalists often seem to think that if social scientists can measure something, it proves that it is real. A typical headline will be something like "Studies show that 29% of us are addicted to social media." What they miss is that these studies starts with researchers making value judgements, and those judgements aren't more legitimate because a researcher made them.

This kind of research doesn't answer the question "Is social media an addiction?" It tries to answer the question, "If you think social media is an addiction, how serious is the problem?" That's why you can create a satirical measure that answers the question "How serious is the problem of friend addiction?"

The addiction classification is especially difficult. Often we call something an addiction if someone routinely engages in behavior where the negatives outweigh the positives. But when there's no common standard of measurement between the pros and cons, another value judgement has to be made about how to weight the various consequences.

<comment><USER3> > What they miss is that these studies starts with researchers making value > judgements, and those judgements aren't more legitimate because a researcher > made them.

I disagree. That a researcher (aka expert with significant theoretical and methodological knowledge and experience) makes a judgement on something makes it likely a better judgement than that of a random person.

But more importantly I doubt the problem is (usually) the researchers. Most good social science will give confidence intervals, careful language, etc. But how it is then spun and interpreted by university communication departments, news, science bloggers etc is often far from the actual findings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any addiction is a disease. I have just read an interesting article on this issue here - [https://addictionresource.com/drugs/fiorinal/](https://addictionresource.com/drugs/fiorinal/) . Pretty informative

</comment><comment><USER5> I think I understand the point of the satire ... partially?In most cases we speak about engagement on social media with an assumption that more is worse.

But it seems like a weird thing to satirize in this way because aren't there already many real-world studies that demonstrate that spending less time with people IRL can be detrimental to people emotionally and even physically, and that sometimes this trade-off comes from increased time spent on social media?

Also, nobody is profiting from my gatherings with my friends or has any financial incentive to increase the amount of time I spend doing it.

I don't really get it.

<comment><USER6> The satire is of the shallow sensationalism and panic mongering if reapplied shows how specious the claims are. If it can be straight transferred it shows the focus for criticism is misplaced. Working a job or reading a book may also result in less time spent with friends.

As for profiting from gatherings it depends upon where they spend time together. Resturants, bars, karoke clubs, (mini)-golf, etc. may say hi. Even hiking in the woods does so indirectly shoe wear and any exercise means any food sellers have an incentive.</comment></comment>


Apple TV+ wil launch in November for $4.99/month - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-tv-plus-price-172202270.html <comment><USER3> The other remaining question I have is if they are going to release the shows using the Netflix model (dump all at once) or follow Amazon/Hulu and do weekly releases. My guess is the latter. The $4.99 price point is great but it also signals to me that they know they don't have a huge library as a draw. So releasing shows week by week will also be a better strategy than just dumping all episodes at once. Otherwise people could watch everything using the free trial and then cancel the subscription.

<comment><USER4> > Otherwise people could watch everything using the free trial and then cancel > the subscription.

i'd guess you can still do this, just not at launch. Just wait a few weeks/months

<comment><USER3> That's true! I know I've done that with a few HBO series in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Plus, a full year of it is given away with new hardware.

</comment><comment><USER6> have to say I was pretty skeptical about yet another streaming service - <USER2> for that price point its going to be hard to not sign up

<comment><USER7> The first hit is always free. The real question is how quickly they ratchet up the price. I suspect Disney will do so very aggressively - to keep the shareholders happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very little initial content explains the low price. Good idea for the free trial will boost initial launch numbers.</comment>


Duck Duck Go tells you your IP when you ask for it - <AUTHOR> http://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+my+ip%3F

<comment><USER2> Searching Duck Duck Go for "show hn" shows that you can search HNsearch with their !bang syntax: <http://duckduckgo.com/?q=show+hn>

<comment><USER3> www.unscatter.com also has slashtags for HNSsearch. /hn, /hnstories and /hncomments all work

<http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=duckduckgo+%2Fhn> [http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=duckduckgo+%2Fhnstories&#...](http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=duckduckgo+%2Fhnstories&cs=duckduckgo) [http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=duckduckgo+%2Fhncomments&...](http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=duckduckgo+%2Fhncomments&cs=duckduckgo)

I didn't win, but I added it as an entry for that contest a while back.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For some reason this keeps getting flagged: it's disappointing that HN is evidently not willing to allow a counterpoint to a multi-billion dollar search company on the front page; on the one hand there's a submission with 70-some points that shows Google offers this functionality on the other we apparently can't also point out Duck Duck Go is equally capable. Personally I think that Duck Duck Go deserves more attention than it gets.

<comment><USER4> By all means, upvote and contribute to the discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3128997>.

 _Personally I think that Duck Duck Go deserves more attention than it gets._

Perhaps this is getting flagged b/c folks see it as promotion/spam?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> DDG has a lot of short commands like this. There's a list of regular ones here: <http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html> (stuff like "is it raining?").

More technical commands are here: <http://duckduckgo.com/tech.html> (like IP address lookups, whois commands and password generation).

</comment><comment><USER3> Just checked, the duckduckgo instant answer integration on www.unscatter.com got this by default it appears

<http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=what+is+my+ip%3F>

</comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know of a site which returns nothing but your IP address in text/plain when hit with a GET request?

Such a thing would be useful for scripting purposes.

<comment><USER7> A competent programmer could build it in the time it took you to read this.

<comment><USER6> Yes indeed. However this competent programmer has paid work to be doing, and possesses the certain knowledge that such a thing exists already.

Anyway, I'll bite:

        lambda { |env| [200, {'Content-Type'=>'text/plain'}, [Rack::Request.new(env).ip]] }

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While Google gives my public IP, Duck Duck Go gives the IP address of my local network, that is behind my office's firewall.

How useful is this IP address?

<comment><USER9> It definitely only gets the external IP for my work PC here - perhaps your firewall isn't using NAT and you have a public IP address range on your internal network?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So does Google?

</comment><comment><USER11> shorter version: <http://duckduckgo.com/?q=ip></comment>


Ask HN: Defer College? - <AUTHOR>

Hello Hacker News,<p>I'm here to ask for advice. I've gotten into college, but I would like to defer and work at a start-up in the bay area for a year. I've done a little bit of c++, java, javascript + html + css, and a lot of lsl (from the virtual world Second Life). I don't know if I would be very useful as a coder (right now), but I learn very fast, and I will learn if given the opportunity. Because I go to a boarding school on the east coast, I haven't had a lot of time (they don't give us any free time here) to code and search for jobs, but I want to know if you all think I should start contacting start-ups in the bay area for a job. I know it's a little late in the game for job hunting, but do you all think it's worth it? Or should I go to college? In case it's relevant, I would double major in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in college. Please ask me questions if you have any! <comment><USER2> Go to college. I had the same thoughts as you in high school. Here's why:

1\. You're most likely incompetent. Don't take this personally. In HS, I thought I was amazing and a genius too. It took college to make me realize that there were a lot of smart people out there. I was the top 1% of the top 1% of my HS. And I'm definitely not even in the top 1% of my university.

2\. You think you're a quick learner and a hard worker. Most people think they're quick learners and nobody likes to think they're lazy. Guess what, most people are actually average. I thought I was a quick learner in HS. I got to college and I realized that I'm pretty average. And in terms of hard work, I don't sleep in the library and take the 8 hardest courses the university has to offer in the same semester. So no, I don't even compare in "hard work ethic" to some of my friends.

2\. You have a lot of theory to learn that will make you a better programmer and school is the right place to learn it. Yes you can learn it on your own. The majority of people think they can and some claim they do. 99% of them are kidding themselves and actually don't.

3\. If you're at a university that pushes you (my experience is with CMU) you'll work harder than you ever thought possible. This just isn't something you'd do on your own because normally you couldn't fathom that this much work was possible.

4\. You'll meet friends and professors who are much smarter than you and will be valuable friends along the way. You'll learn from them and improve yourself.

I don't mean to be mean, and take this with a grain of salt because maybe you are accomplished enough to not need college. Just take this as a warning to do a reality check, and then make sure your frame of reference is realistic. ;)

<comment><USER3> Well said.

College is hard for a reason. It'll make you better.

<comment><USER4> But is it harder than working with/under somebody that's way better than you - in "the real world"?

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what you mean but in my experience college tests your ability to master a wide variety of skills and topics while work requires you to become really good at only a few. However, it's that mastery of the wide variety of skills that will help you be the person everyone else works for someday.

Some people don't need college, but there is a reason most people do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would never hire a highschooler to do a real demanding coding job, and I would imagine that it's all a startup would have to offer. "A little bit of programming" is what a lot of your peers entering college have, and they're not jumping on the startup bandwagon or being recruited by tech companies. College is a necessary hurdle to weed out the people who suck. If at the end of the day the startup fails (and most do), then at least you still have your degree. I doubt admissions officers are really going to understand why you took a year off; after all, they're not going to be engineers.

Also, college is a terrific formative experience. I can't think of a better way to spend my time between 18 and 22. As an engineer you can pay for it by doing coops, which are usually $15-25/hr and you do it for six months (and get overtime pay). I have some friends that did two and were able to make payments on their cars and handily pay their tuition and housing.

</comment><comment><USER6> I got straight A's in high school. One of the most important things I learned in college was how to fail (and if you don't, you aren't working hard enough). College holds some important life lessons, if nothing else.

Some people think colleges churn out incompetent zombies, but whether or not you get good at your craft is up to you -- get involved in projects, research, and seek internships. This could even lead to a start-up of your own.

The best part is, worst case scenario, you have a degree to show employers you are competent. You need to get money from somewhere (even if you are working on a start-up)!

There are so many more perks to graduating college. I really encourage you to go! So many great experiences await you. But as Mark Twain said, "Never let school interfere with you education."

And to re-iterate the sound advice of those who commented before me...there's always someone better.

</comment><comment><USER7> What do you want to do with your programming career, or what do you think you'd like to do?

Going to college with your major choices will teach you computer science, and you'll pick up some programming along the way. Conversely, going to work for a startup will teach you programming, and you may pick up some computer science along the way.

It depends upon what kind of programmer you want to be, and what you enjoy doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> My ambitions really aren't a programming career. I'd live to be able to program whatever ideas pop into my head. I'm able to do that only with lsl.

What I want to do (eventually) is start my own company that creates technology to aid education. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a stack of ideas already lined up; however, I don't have the knowledge necessary or the capital. My end goal is to help people, and I feel as if it is time to decide the first real step.

<comment><USER7> I agree with what jchonphoenix said.

If you want to be a developer of note without school, you're going to have to work your ass off, and then once all your ass is gone you're going to have to work up some ass debt and keep learning, except that you're not sure what to learn next, you don't even know what you don't know, you don't have friends in class going through the same thing or guidance from a professor. You'll be on your own. It will be stressful, and there won't be any pretty girls to kiss.

If you want to be a developer of note with school, then you'll have an incredibly solid foundation to build off of. And if you work on your ideas on the side (as you should) there's nothing better than learning something in a lecture and being able to go home and directly apply it that evening to your own work.

You've already said that you want to make technology to aid education, so immerse yourself in it. Get the best education you can, study the education you're getting, not just the material you're learning. Ask yourself, "How could this be better, how could I make some manner of technology to improve this experience, or bring this to other people?" By furthering your education, you'll not only be getting the tools you need to create your idea, you'll be doing the research too. It's always better to kill two birds with one stone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Depends on your situation. It sounds to me like you would like to work more for the experience than for the money (otherwise I'm guessing you wouldn't have much of a choice.) Just start school and code in your free time. In fact, why not do your own star-tup(s)? People have this image of a start-up but really any business which could bring in many on the side is great. Build something small that could bring in $100 / month. Then keep building so that you can hit $500 / month. Keep working your way up. Maybe that's one site, maybe it's a bunch of things.

I would rather have 10 different income sources which collectively pay me as much as my day job than put insane hours into one start-up which I'm hoping will be a home run (or working for one and hoping for the same.)

You might be better off picking one major and getting out as fast as you can. I'm not sure how much extra school would be required for the double major, but it would certainly cost you in time and money. That's time you could be working or coding.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely value the experience more than the money, and I would love to start my own start-up(s). The problem with that; however, is that I don't have the knowledge to physically build my ideas. That's what the E.E. major is for.

Maybe I should stick with the E.E. major and work on CompSi&Coding in my free time.

<comment><USER8> Right, I would stick with the E.E. major if that's what you are more interested in. You don't need the CS degree to be a programmer and the E.E. degree would be enough to show that you got the brains.

As for start-up building, all the more reason to give it a go. As with anything, you learn by doing. You know nothing about building your ideas, but once you take a shot you learn a lot more about it. You don't need to shoot for the stars. Try something small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Life is not about a start up. A start up is just going become a part of life, and how big you make it is up to you. You might get involved in a start up now, but i have a feeling you do not know what it is to be an entrepreneur; and to know that, you need to go to college. Being an entrepreneur is a process of self discovery- like enlightenment and it has to happen itself, don't force it upon yourself. Go to college. And when you 'feel' you no longer need to be in college, quit. If you never feel that way while you are there, get that degree!

</comment><comment><USER10> If you are interested in a startup, see if you can do small tasks for them while you are in school. Realistically, you probably are slightly inexperienced compared to CS grads, but perhaps you can do the odd jobs like minor testing or bug checking.

A lot of college students get jobs anyway while in school, so there's no reason to think you couldn't do some part time work for the startup.

The big advantage of this is you get some real-life experience and, come graduation time, you might have a job waiting or will get kick-ass referrals.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ask yourself what your priorities are with going to college. Let's say you do get a job for a start-up, will you set yourself a time limit of say a year before you go to college. You will find it harder and harder to give up a job and go to college the longer you continue to work. As others have mentioned you can always apply for internships while you are at college. You might find better opportunities and more doors open if you do go to college. You can always leave collage if along the line you find a start-up that suits you.

</comment><comment><USER12> Have you contacted any startups about jobs? If nobody shows any interests in your level of experience, then you don't have a dilemma, just go to school

[Edit]

This isn't to say that if you don't have an offer firmly in hand, go to school, but if nobody has even said 'gosh, we wish we had the money to hire you', then you might be much better off going to school and working on some impressive side projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't contacted any startups. I really only seriously started considering it when I got into college, which was the beginning of April. However, now that I've thought about it, I really would like to do it.

<comment><USER12> Getting into college doesn't limit you. Apply to some places you'd like to work anyway. There's no cost associated with seeing if startups you'd like to work for show any interest in you. That college admission will still be there if they show no interest.

Send some emails. There's no point in us telling you to go and try for a startup if nobody is willing to hire you.

I don't say this to be harsh.

When I was going into first year University, I was working for a startup doing tech support and I was pretty sure that I was amazing.

I wouldn't hire the kid I was when I started in University. He was smart, ambitious, and knew a few things, but he didn't understand business and he didn't understand that there's a whole lot of programming that goes beyond SQL statements.

During University I started my own business and learned a lot both in and out of classes. I'm graduating in a couple of weeks, and I've got a good business ready for me to focus on it.

The time I spent at school has helped me enormously, but only because I've been working as hard as I can to make the time worthwhile.

Startups are hard, you have to be a good to great programmer to participate, and sometimes the ambition isn't enough without experience to back it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree with what you said. I will send out some emails, and see what they say.

As for startups being hard, I'm looking for experience now, so that when I start my own, I won't be lost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you don't already have a job offer, this is kind of moot. It would probably be easier just to go to school and then do some internships.

<comment><AUTHOR> At the same time, I haven't really reached out, so I feel that I should spend time contacting startups before I declare the search moot.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Sick of running random cron jobs, I built a small Keepalive for my FaaS - <AUTHOR> https://stayingalive.vessels.tech/ <comment><USER2> If you need to keep your function "warm," why are you using FaaS in the first place? This almost seems like serverless satire!

<comment><USER3> I don't understand this either. What's the point of going serverless with something like Lambda if you're treating it like a regular old EC2 instance with more overhead? Is it cheaper or something?

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure the "point" is "I drank the koolaid. Turns out I have diabetes and can't have that much sugar but fuck it insulin injections work so pass the koolaid bro"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm afraid I don't understand the purpose of this. Are there servers that die if you don't hit their URLs periodically? I use uptimerobot for my servers but it serves a different purpose.

<comment><USER6> For FaaS (like Lambda), if a function hasn't been hit in a while, it'll be cold started when it is needed next. (Even though it's "serverless" behind the scenes they're likely containers that stay up for a little while to handle subsequent requests; a cold start means there's overhead of starting up the container)

A hack to keep your function warm is to call it via cron or a service like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 404 and invalid cert :-/

</comment><comment><USER8> I get it. Well done!

I had the same problem when I first launched [https://dndemail.com](https://dndemail.com). Traffic was low and if no one uses the service for an hour or so, the first load in the app was slow.

I built a once a minute Cron to keep the app warm and initial requests quick.

Now I have enough traffic that I don't worry about the problem.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why once a minute?</comment>


Unmasking The Biggest Troll on Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/10/man-behind-troll-who-got-gawker-banned-reddit/57916/

<comment><USER2> This action against violentacrez seems nasty and vitriolic.

His only "crime" in the article is moderating/posting non-nude pictures of teenage girls -- while removing actual nude pictures of the same.

This is not an actual crime and while society discourages non-nude pictures of teenage girls -- as it forms part of an unofficial no-go zone between adult pornography and pedophilia -- there are whole industries (modelling, beauty pageants, pop singers) that thrive doing exactly this to 16 year old girls.

So Adrian Chen is creeped out by a legal behavior and decides to defame someone who is -- on all other apparent metrics -- a positive, diligent member of a number of communities. Additionally, Chen has heaped shame and entirely fictional guilt (since there's no crime) on this person to the point where he feels he needs to withdraw.

Chen seems like the troll here.

<comment><USER3> > So Adrian Chen is creeped out by a legal behavior

This is a conflation of "illegal behavior" with "creepy behavior", but they are distinct categories.

> there are whole industries [...] that thrive doing exactly this to 16 year > old girls.

It is not relevant that other people engage in similar behavior.

> So Adrian Chen is creeped out by a legal behavior and decides to defame > someone

Defamation need not be false. (If it were false you could call it "slander" or "libel".) Again, this is conflation of illegal behavior with creepy behavior; there are lots of legal creepy things and lots of illegal things that aren't creepy.

> entirely fictional guilt (since there's no crime)

Conflation of meanings of the word guilt, which has a legal definition as well as a common definition. I could be "guilty" of standing a girl up on a date even though it's perfectly legal to do so.

<comment><USER2> I accept your criticism that I've conflated legality with Chen's personal morality.

However, I think Chen has taken this action because he thinks violentacrez was objectively and unambiguous immoral -- which I think is not a univerally agreed point. I think alternative moral perspectives are indicated by the legal boundaries and the behaviors of other exploititative industries. I think this indicates that different moral standards on this issue are tolerated, even if they're still actively campaigned against.

I do now feel weird for defending ephebophiles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You cannot say both of these things together and be a decent human being:

 _I asked if he regretted anything he had posted, now that he'd be found out. No, he said. "I would stand by exactly what I've done."_

 _"My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment," he said. "I do my job, go home watch TV, and go on the internet. I just like riling people up in my spare time."_

So the real answer is yes, he does regret it, will probably have real percussions that affect him and his family and saying things online should be filtered with the same level as if you were talking to someone in person.

Free speech does not mean speech without responsibility.

<comment><USER4> Not that I'm defending violentacrez, but to say that he fears reprisal does not mean he did anything wrong.

It's really hard to get a clear picture, because I'm not familiar with violentacrez's ouvre, but being painted as a child pornographer would probably hurt most people's career.

I've seen r/jailbait. It was creepy, but as another commenter points out, not more creepy than most child/teen beauty pageants. I think because it's on a strange + ungoverned corner of the internet, it was easily painted as illegal when it was only very creepy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those saying hes a normal guy who just likes trolling, the article mentions "Michael Brutsch had sex with his step daughter"

He was also the creator of subreddits that dealt with glorifying beating women and children. He has 100% of the right to live on the line and be a griefer and/or troll. He also has 100% of the right to feel the wrath of people he pisses off.

As a internet free speech advocate, I am sad that things are in this situation. As a parent and decent human being, I am not. He is surely on many FBI lists now.

<comment><USER6> > For those saying hes a normal guy who just likes trolling, the article > mentions "Michael Brutsch had sex with his step daughter"

According to him, while trolling. Yeah, real solid source. Definitely grounds to ruin someone's life.

Also, since when is that a crime? Or even immoral? It _could_ be a massive breach of trust and immoral, depending on the situation. However depending on the relationship between wife, daughter and the guy, it could be just regular cheating. Or not even that.

He didn't rape his stepdaughter, or coerce his daughter, or have consensual sex with his underage stepdaughter. What he did was have consensual sex with a grown woman he has no blood relation to and for all you know has no parental relationship with either.

Hardly the "case closed" indictment you want it to be, even if it allows you to string together the words "sex" and "daughter" in the same sentence to elicit a knee-jerk negative response.

<comment><USER4> Woody Allen did the same. He took a lot of flack for it, but people still watch his movies.</comment></comment></comment>


GNU: A Heuristic for Bad Cryptography - <AUTHOR> https://soatok.blog/2020/07/08/gnu-a-heuristic-for-bad-cryptography#resubmit <comment><USER2> This is trying to show the GNU project in a bad light.

The GNS which most of the article focuses on has nothing to do with the GNU project. Because pgp is from the 90's, gpg is an easy target mostly . The only other halfway good data point in the line they're trying to draw is gnutls, which is surely got its holes, but also wasn't afflicted with openssl's heartbleed

<comment><USER3> > The GNS which most of the article focuses on has nothing to do with the GNU > project.

Doesn't it stand for _GNU Name System_?

<comment><USER4> Tech is particularly famous for having similar names for very different things.

The authors of the GNS IETF draft appear to be associated with GNUnet[0], which _is_ an official GNU project. However, in defense of the OP, there may be a level of indirection here - there's no clear link between the GNU leadership and GNS: just GNU - GNUnet - GNS. It could be a purely GNUnet initiative.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like mostly the technical nitpicking that goes on with any crypto protocol. There aren't any holes here, and as a competent non-expert I'm having trouble deciding on whether any of these criticisms even rise to the level of a theoretical vulnerability. It's all best practices and hygine stuff. Which is fine, but hardly justfication for "Bad Cryptography".

I mean, these are the mistakes that everyone seems to make (including the blog author, who seems to have retracted one of the bigger claims). Stuff happens in engineering.

And the "GNU" angle is just bile, or a cynical attempt to get clicks by leveraging hacker political sentiment. Yawn.

<comment><USER6> > It's all best practices and hygine stuff. Which is fine, but hardly > justfication for "Bad Cryptography".

Cryptographers have spent years trying to clean up the GNU cryptography ecosystem [1] [2].

[1] [https://twitter.com/FiloSottile/status/1281055144659030016](https://twitter.com/FiloSottile/status/1281055144659030016)

[2] [https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gcrypt- devel/2015-November...](https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gcrypt- devel/2015-November/003618.html)

<comment><USER5> Isn't that true of almost every crypto protocol, though? As I mention, this kind of stuff is absolutely routine. Free software protocols, open source protocols, standardized protocols, proprietary protocols.

I get that crypto is hard (again, the messup in the central criticism in the linked article is a great existence proof). I don't get why you feel like taking potshots at GNU in particular is justified except to flog your personal political agenda.

<comment><USER6> I don't have a personal political agenda here.

I'd love for GNU cryptography to be better, but the first step in fixing problems is to acknowledge they exist in the first place.

GNUnet, GnuPG, etc. need to actually learn from modern cryptography projects like age and Signal, instead of doubling down in the name of ideology.

<comment><USER7> I have no clue on what "ideology" they (who are they? The GNUnet developers? The gnupg developers? all developers associated with GNU projects?) are "doubling down" on in your opinion, despite reading the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the linked articles references Magic Wormhole, which appears to be just the file transfer tool I have been missing all the recent years.

[https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole](https://github.com/warner/magic- wormhole)

summary and example -> [https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/magic-wormhole-is-a- clever...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/magic-wormhole-is-a-clever-way- to-send-files-easily-and-securely/)

<comment><USER6> It's so good.

I've been meaning to write a GUI frontend (probably in Electron, but still) so that desktop users can experience its magic, but I keep putting it off.

Maybe this weekend? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > If you see the letters GNU in a systems design, and that system intersects > with cryptography, I can almost guarantee that it will be badly designed to > an alarming degree.

Battle of heuristics: furries vs GNU

</comment><comment><USER10> With this logic Signal is a "heuristic for bad cryptography" because it uses CBC. Although I admit that GNU does not have a great track record.

<comment><AUTHOR> Signal uses AES-CBC + HMAC-SHA2 in encrypt-then-MAC.

If Signal used unauthenticated CBC mode, it would be bad cryptography.

Reference: [https://soatok.blog/2020/07/12/comparison-of-symmetric- encry...](https://soatok.blog/2020/07/12/comparison-of-symmetric-encryption- methods/#aes-gcm-vs-aes-cbc)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you give feedback in rejection letters to job applicants? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Not usually. For a few reasons: 1. If you aren't careful, specific feedback could be used against you. 2. It's not my job to help people get good at interviewing. The one exception I can recall is when a candidate had exactly the wrong set of skills for the opening we were hiring for, so I did provide some feedback on the types of skills they could look to develop or roles that they might be better suited for.</comment>


Pied Piper - <AUTHOR> http://www.piedpiper.com/ <comment><USER2> At first I kind of rolled my eyes when I heard this show was coming out -- I was pretty certain I could fully predict most of the jokes that would be used for a cheap laugh.

But I like the characters, and the plot is pretty fun - it's a show that's easy to watch and enjoy for those of us that don't take much too seriously.

<comment><USER3> And it's making the world a better place.

<comment><USER4> ...by constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility!

<comment><USER2> they made something someone wants!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Context: this is the official in-universe website for the central startup in HBO's "Silicon Valley."

<comment><USER6> It was funnier until I realized that it was created by HBO

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> does anyone actually watch this show? I've tried several times to get into it, but I just don't find it funny at all. Sure hearing startup names being thrown around (like Github) and knowing who they are is present day nostalgia, but not enough to make me committed to the show. I compare the likeness of Silicon Valley to "the Big Bang Theory"; those who are into those fields find them more annoying then funny.

<comment><USER8> I love this show. Not only does it accurately portray the SV startup scene, but it has a well-written story line. You can't really compare this to Big Bang Theory. I've seen nearly every episode of Big Bang and that is way, way more sitcom-style than Silicon Valley. Big Bang has a lot of nickle jokes related to science fields, with situational comedy surrounding the characters thrown in. Silicon Valley is not a sitcom, and the episodes follow a well- researched story line.

<comment><USER9> Does Silicon Valley have a laugh track? I don't remember one from the first episode, but I watched that a couple of weeks ago.

Often (not always, though) shows with laugh tracks are an entirely different level of "not funny". It's bad when the show creators have to rely on cheap psychological gags to trick you into enjoying yourself. Silicon Valley operated at a higher level than that, although I still found a lot of its humor just referential and not too humorous or too easy. Honestly, just reading hacker news every day provides you with way more satire than the show does... I didn't watch anything past the first episode, so I can't speak to the story which you seem to like - I was just looking for a comedy show.

But tastes do differ. Especially when it comes to comedy. I'm glad you liked the show. I wouldn't compare it to Big Bang Theory, but I wasn't a fan.

<comment><USER10> It shouldn't be compared to Big Bang Theory. That show is a typical paint-by- numbers sitcom, the kind that CBS has been cashing big checks on for the past decade. They aren't particularly funny. I think Chuck Klosterman wrote something that these shows are "in the form of funny", which means that they follow a common comedic timing and use the laugh track as a cue. Once you start looking for it, you always see it.

The three camera and laugh track are usually indicators that the show probably isn't "smart funny", but it's not always true. I can watch Seinfeld reruns and pick out the camera cuts, laugh tracks and joke timings, but the show is still pretty clever.

But most people capable of making shows of Seinfeld-quality aren't going to go do a CBS sitcom. Seinfeld's set up was mostly a relic of its era. Today, you can get a single-camera comedy greenlit thanks to the cable channels. Even networks took some chances. I don't watch too many network shows anymore, but I know Scrubs and Arrested Development were single camera shows without laugh tracks and they were on NBC/ABC and Fox, respectively.

As for Silicon Valley, I was expecting more from it. It's a Mike Judge show and the reviews were very positive. I've only seen the first two episodes, but they were at least good enough to make me want to watch more. It sometimes takes these shows a while to build the characters and build enough background for more jokes to connect, but at this point, I'm more worried about the story lines being thin than the comedy. That's what ultimately lost my interest in Entourage. That show started out as being a fun 30 minutes, but it was very superficial and once you realized that the plots were ridiculous and the characters didn't make that much sense, it became tedious to watch. Since both Entourage and Silicon Valley are both based on specific, unique cultures, I think they're fairly comparable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How can I watch _Silicon Valley_ on the internet (legally)?

I already checked [http://www.canistream.it/search/tv/silicon%20valley](http://www.canistream.it/search/tv/silicon%20valley) but I don't have access HBO GO.

<comment><USER12> You can't. To watch legally you have to have cable TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like this is actually code for sending completion pixels in a video ad.

[http://static.squarespace.com/static/531f2c4ee4b002f5b011bf0...](http://static.squarespace.com/static/531f2c4ee4b002f5b011bf00/t/5335d873e4b037066057e0e2/1396037777561/section_technology_bg.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER14> User 01 : document.getElementById

</comment><comment><USER15> I almost wrote it off after the first episode but said I'd give it another chance - pilots are hard.

Then some of the technical rants from the 'staff' in ep 2 won me over. There is a striking balance/hover around real and humor/farce in the show I'm starting to really like.

</comment><comment><USER16> Love the show.

Pretty sure I saw one guy using the Windows Phone emulator, which made me do a silent fist pump.

But hey, it's TV :-)

</comment><comment><USER17> I like it. The idea to make "the product" something simple like MP3 compression works and all the lead characters are some of my favorites.

</comment><comment><USER18> What editor is on that screen with the code?

<comment><USER19> No idea, probably just a mock-up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interested to know the technology behind Nipple Alert. They should create that site.

</comment><comment><USER18> Aviato.com is available.

</comment><comment><USER21> Clever move from HBO to create that page...

<comment><USER22> I've seen other networks do it for shows in the past. Most notably [http://www.bettercallsaul.com/](http://www.bettercallsaul.com/) was created a while ago in reference to Breaking Bad.

Edit: and [http://www.savewalterwhite.com/](http://www.savewalterwhite.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So what year does this take place? 1999?

<comment><USER24> Now...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Where's the Github repo?

<comment><USER26> The show has mostly made sense technically. The only thing they got wrong is the code is clearly proprietary but Richard tells the assistant that it's up on github in the first episode.

<comment><USER27> Haven't seen the show, but could they mean a private github repo?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Amazon's beta had a better show and also a better idea as a startup.

They create real world meetings by setting up places for people to congregate to.

<comment><USER29> I actually watched the first season of Betas after someone recommended it in a Silicon Valley thread, and thought it was pretty good. Beta's seems to use the silicon valley theme as more of a backdrop for character development whereas Silicon Valley does seem to poke more fun of the SV culture. I like them both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> That algorithm sounds like total B.S. As if someone could stumble onto a lossless compression algorithm with file sizes 50% of an mp3. Even a comparable size would be a huge compression breakthrough.

And there are theoretical limits to what you can do with lossless compression and I suspect that the algorithm in the show breaks those.

<comment><USER5> If you think the feasibility of the algorithm is the most unrealistic thing here, I'd say Mike Judge is doing his job well. :P

<comment><USER31> Well, everything else can be waived as marketing-speak. From a cursory glance it looked like the landing page for a small team that came up with some cool compression technology and then got some marketing wiz-kid to throw up a webpage. Everything except the technological claims I could just disregard.

<comment><USER32> I was confused for a second and thought this was the most ego-centric startup I've ever come across. What team stares at you from 80% of the landing page instead of revealing the product?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inefficiency Yields Opportunity - <AUTHOR> http://codingvc.com/inefficiency-yields-opportunity

<comment><USER2> I dislike this line of reasoning. If you add up the effects over many people then obviously you get a large number of minutes that were wasted, but those people collectively had many minutes to waste. You cannot claim that those minutes could be added together, and therefore you shouldn't invite comparisons to what you could do with 3 extra years. Brooks argued about the mythical man month in the same way.

It's an annoying, emotional statistic, used in the same way that my cereal box tells me they've saved 30 lorry-loads of cardboard from being produced. In the context of the millions lorry-loads of rubbish generated, it's not important.

I also dislike the 0.05% statistic (which is essentially saying Americans spend 0.05% of their time queueing at the DMV) as it's uselessly emphasized with "a significant amount considering the size of the GDP".

 _If everyone does a little, we'll achieve only a little._ David MacKay [http://www.withouthotair.com/c19/page_114.shtml](http://www.withouthotair.com/c19/page_114.shtml)

<comment><AUTHOR> (I'm the author.) Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the statistics are emotional and not completely translatable to productive time, though I do think the numbers are still significant. Specifically, I think these types of savings compound, so that if you can save one minute of time on each of a 20 daily tasks, then at the end of the day you could have an extra 20-minute continuous block, which is much more valuable than 20 1-minute blocks.

Re: .05% -- I personally think mentioning GPD is useful because .05% sounds fairly trivial, but .05% of the GPD is still something like eight billion dollars, which is a very non-trivial amount.

Finally, I really like the philosophy of the blog post you linked to, but I think it's talking about a slightly different point. The examples I gave are about a single organization doing something that saves an aggregate of millions of hours or millions of dollars; they are not about trying to convince millions of individuals make a conscious choice to each save one dollar or a few minutes. In the language of the linked post, I would consider the latter to be a million minnows while the former is a single shark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This quest for eliminating inefficiencies often creates a cycle in terms of products designed to eliminate them.

In the first stage, every individual efficiency (or a related group) will lend itself to a new application that significantly changes the equation.

However, as the number of these applications increase substantial efficiency benefits can be reaped by aggregating /replicating these functionalities in one place - sometimes even at the cost of a little inefficiency. But once these inefficiencies start paining a user segment, we start with step #1 all over again

</comment><comment><USER4> In a lot of examples he gives it's not just a matter of time, but it's a matter of people's limited cognitive capacity.

In the example of the Target data breach you just learn to click on the UAC dialog every time, click on the EULA and not read it, delete emails that have URGENT in the subject line, not look at anything on a web page that is designed to catch your eye, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't really accept the idea that 3 years of time was wasted because of a 30 second recording. I just activated a new card, I wasn't working, I was waiting for the costco lady to make a new batch of samples. Those 30 seconds were sunk no matter what.

I think its kind of a fallacy to suggest that human time can be summed in much the same way computer resources can be.

<comment><USER6> I was thinking the same thing about google search results. The .1s difference can aggregate to a lot of hours, but in reality, I cannot effectively utilize my .1s - It literally is too small of a unit of time to be useful.

When looking to optimize human time - the low hanging fruit is always the most impactful. Shaving 2 minutes off a 10 minute task means nothing to me if the task is a rare one - I will still schedule 20 minutes for it in my planning. On the other hand, if someone turns what used to be a day-long task into something that takes an hour, my planning will be significantly altered and I'll be able to add more productivity into my time.</comment></comment>


Source Code Obfuscation Patterns - <AUTHOR> http://joe-bergeron.com/posts/Java%20Obfuscation:%20A%20Pattern%20Language/# <comment><USER2> Check out Procyon's[1] java decompiler. Another great tool would be CFR[2]. Never know when these might come in handy.

edit* mind if i ask what game it is? :)

[1] [https://bitbucket.org/mstrobel/procyon/wiki/Java%20Decompile...](https://bitbucket.org/mstrobel/procyon/wiki/Java%20Decompiler)

[2] [http://www.benf.org/other/cfr/](http://www.benf.org/other/cfr/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really awesome, the sort of thing I love to see on HN! Thanks for writing & posting it.</comment>


The rise of the 'digilantes' - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/209356/online-vigilantes/ <comment><USER2> > But digilantes are not operating in small communities, where they might have > accountability to their neighbors. They are usually policing strangers, > sometimes a world away, and because they are acting on a global scale, their > punishments can go viral, moving far beyond the borders of the community in > which the wrongdoing occurred.

> "If I out the wrong person, I destroy his life."

Humans haven't evolved in an environment where the things they say and do are remembered forever, and are visible to every other human. However unworkable the "right to be forgotten" may be, it points to a very real problem.</comment>


Specter social (senate) graph - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2217204/

<comment><USER2> This is poignant. On Firefox/32bit/Linux/Flash10 I see only the word "Specter" wandering aimlessly on a barren white background. Poor guy.

</comment><comment><USER3> Politics is poison. Let's leave it off HN please.

<comment><USER4> And yet, it's depressingly relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not a fan of politics here, but I like seeing the graph there of associations. I'd love to see a full semantic relationship graph with fundraisers, lobbyists, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice simple visualization (in flash).

Don't you just wish you could tweak a few parameters and explore the data more? :-)</comment>