Ask HN: Can Cryptocurrency Beat Credit Card in Consumer Micro Payment Market? - <AUTHOR> Amid all the hype on cryptocurrency, I think in consumer (espcially in micro payment), credit card is better than cryptocurrency because:
1) it has cash back; 2) it has no fee in most cases (still some website/service will charge you though, but even for cryptocurrency if you buy on coinbase, say, you still have to pay some fee), but nowadays it is very hard to let the payment to go through without adding some transaction fee; 3) the payment is instant for the user, meanwhile bitcoin is much slower. Many altcoins are fast but still the credit card payment is just fast.
I am not saying cryptocurrency cannot be backing the credit card company to do the transactions transparent to users. That is possible. Because for that use case, all my argument above for credit card can still hold for cryptocurrency.
I wonder what you guys think if consumer using cryptocurrency directly for micro payments can be a reality, and why? <comment><USER2> There are two points you did not mention which make credit cards a more suitable medium:

1\. Credit cards use a stable currency. Cryptocurrencies are not yet stable in price and are heavily impacted by speculation. If someone pays you in Bitcoin, you'll probably want to quickly convert that a conventional currency so you have a reliable store of value. You'll be doing a lot of de facto forex transactions as a result.

2\. Credit card networks have far more transaction bandwidth capability than blockchains. Presently, there is no implemented cryptocurrency which can scale in the same way VISA and MasterCard have. This could change in the future, but I have doubts about it changing without trading off all or most of the "decentralized" component (at which point, why are we bothering?).

I think it's debatable that cryptocurrencies beat out credit cards in fees because they're fundamentally incomparable right now. Bitcoin is the most mature cryptocurrency, but it doesn't have anything resembling a mature ecosystem. It is not widely accepted, and you cannot directly use Bitcoin as credit. It doesn't have consumer protections like credit/debit systems do. There's really no telling if it would remain competitive with credit cards after it scaled up to real usability. You can abstract away transfer processing fees to a distributed consensus network, but you dramatically slow down the entire system in the process.

</comment><comment><USER3> > 1) it has cash back;

That's only a benefit for a small percentage of people. If you're a middle- manager or salesperson, cash back on purchases reimbursed by the company can be considered part of your compensation.

I suppose the bank can negotiate with certain popular companies for a higher cash-back rate, which is harder to do as a bunch of individuals.

Outside of these, it's not really a benefit since it's included in the interchange fee. You might not notice it because your bank hides it with clever marketing, but it's there.

> 2) it has no fee in most cases

One common credit card fee is 2.9% + $0.30.

> 3) the payment is instant for the user, meanwhile bitcoin is much slower.

Payment is 6 months if you want to be sure. Anything less can be charged back. Bitcoin payments are instant if you're willing to immediately confirm, which isn't a bad idea on payments smaller than $50 or where it's a repeat customer.

The one area that you truly benefit from a credit card is in the consumer protection laws: You can chargeback very easily and it's tough for the merchant to dispute it. Bitcoin transactions can't be reversed, so if you get scammed you're out of luck.

The items you've mentioned are just banks out-marketing you. They aren't fundamental benefits. You pay for them with a markup that the merchant adds, and you also end up paying for a bunch of banks and Visa/MasterCard to exist.

Checks or ACH are better than both credit cards and cryptocurrencies, when applicable. Terrible security and a bit clunky, but very efficient for moving money around. And you can even get a card with a lower fee: I think the debit cards from major banks are 0.05% + $0.21, though you might have to convince the merchant to charge you less.

My ruling? For casual use, then - mostly because of the better security:

Credit cards > Cryptocurrency > Check/ACH

For anything serious, then - mostly due to cheaper transfer costs and assuming you can trust the counterparty:

Check/ACH > Cryptocurrency > Credit Cards

For guns, drugs & porn, then - mostly because you don't want self-righteous politicians or outraged soccer moms pressuring your financial processor:

Cryptocurrency > Check/ACH > Credit Cards</comment>


Ask HN: Replacing large legacy CRUD software with new frameworks – challenges? - <AUTHOR> Came across a proposal to replace a software which is atleast 10 years and 'not-so-good-looking' for 2017.
Current stack : ASP.NET, Ajax, JQuery and no automated tests. Users : 30-50.
Most of backend design is in what they term as - 'flow' documents. Front end is basic as in presenting information - mostly text and document uploads.
I am planning to use node and angular if we move ahead.
What are the challenges that I should be wary of ? <comment><USER2> The first question is: why? What do you hope to gain?

Edit: are you looking to transition off of a stack in which which you have less expertise to a stack you have more expertise in, or embark on a rewrite in an effort to reduce technical debt?

Why Node and Angular in particular? Which version of Angular? Given how you describe your application, do you intend to use server-side rendering?

For a CRUD app with limited user interactions that seems to be a good fit for server-side rendering, Node and Angular don't particularly confer any unique strengths that would benefit an app of this nature.

<comment><AUTHOR> They have new features to be added. They are expanding in coming year and willing to invest freshly on tech. People who developed old stack have moved on.</comment></comment>


Notifications are highly reliable, except when device manufacturers interfere - <AUTHOR> https://onesignal.com/blog/manufacturers-interfere-with-reliable-notifications/ <comment><USER2> Manufacturers, please keep interfering with notifications.

Better yet, let's get google in on the business and do it by default in a standardized fashion on every android device. Spam is bad enough sitting idly in my message center. I don't want my phone to fill up with battery-guzzling nagware unless I very explicitly enable it. An acceptable compromise would be to enable notifications by default but put a permanent disable option on each and every message so that users could punish apps on the first abuse.

<comment><USER3> > _I don 't want my phone to fill up with battery-guzzling nagware_

...Then don't? You control what you install.

<comment><USER4> You should be able to install an app at without allowing it to do anything in the background whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So it seems like most Android manufacturers are independently adding their own aggressive power savings mode which kills apps - and prevents any background tasks or notifications - just about as soon as they're out of the foreground. And users have no idea this is the case when they buy the phone.

Seems like Google should just create a better power management system - or one that selectively lets through notifications without firing up the whole app - rather than have the manufacturers bungle this up.

<comment><USER6> If phone apps followed a proper runtime lifecycle -- start, use, terminate -- and phones had proper task management this would be visible front-and-center and wouldn't be an issue.

And I don't share this author's view on notifications... most of the messaging delivered to me via notifications is neither urgent nor time-sensitive. Notifications are a nuisance

<comment><USER7> I disable most notifications. Basically everything besides sms and e-mail (and only for some accounts that tend to get 2-3 messages a day). The ones that remain activated tend to be reasonably urgent, and the apps that receive them are the ones that I'd like to start as soon as the phone boots and keep permanently in memory. Or at least, I'd like my remaining notifications to be able to wake up the apps they belong to.

<comment><USER6> Me too, yet theres always more to block. Especially on Android.

And if you do block notifications? Some apps needle you about it relentlessly!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Background beacon services or location services also suffer from this although I'm not always sure whether it is the OS author or the manufacturer.

The trick here is that these manufacturers know that people will try a different phone if they believe that one brand or another's battery won't last very long. (Ironically they probably all buy batteries from Samsung)

It drives me mad since our company provides software and hardware that does beacon and geofencing related tasks but the flip side is that I also know that when my Samsung battery is half that of my Wife's phone even though its 2 years newer, I'm definitely starting to think to myself 'maybe I should switch to an iPhone'. I think the real issue here is probably people wanting to do more than batteries really permit at the moment and its a frustrating tug of war.

The obvious answer in my mind is to give users the power to choose what they want. Its fine for manufacturers to choose defaults that will work for non power users.

</comment><comment><USER9> Funny. The first thing I do (if it's an option) is disable notifications. I don't like my phone constantly interrupting me. I check for messages and email at my convenience, not the phone's.

<comment><USER10> And i have my notification going to my watch so I always know what's going on.

People have different uses for their technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just got a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 a while back, a lot of phone for not a lot of money. Anyway, it comes with MIUI, a stupid version of Android, and notifications was very rare with the default settings. You have to enable notifications per app, and then there was some sort of aggressive killing of background apps, so you wouldn't get any notification from many apps anyway since they weren't alive to send them.

</comment><comment><USER12> All of these battery saving options are great, when they are painless. Running apps that _need_ to stay in the background like Tasker is a much more painful experience now than it was a few years ago.

</comment><comment><USER13> > It's now only a matter of time before app-to-user SMS goes away entirely.

Was this ever a thing? The only SMS messages from "apps" I ever get are for 2FA codes.

Maybe it's regional? I know sending SMS to US numbers is a lot cheaper than, for example, Dutch numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> The high cost of SMS in some countries is a big factor, but there are other reasons that many publishers have largely moved off of SMS to push whenever possible:

1\. SMS Aggregator+Carrier integrations can be buggy, especially when optimizing for low cost aggregators.

2\. Carriers often have filters in place that can block content without the publisher being notified. Unsurprisingly, SMSs that contain URLs frequently get blocked by these filters.

3\. Carriers have inconsistent standards when it comes to content, encoding, and even length of SMS messages.

4\. It's easy for publishers to track the deliverability and CTR of notifications.</comment></comment>


How to Write Telegrams Properly (1928) - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph-office.com/pages/telegram.html <comment><USER2> "Fortunes might be saved by discounting the manufacture of musical instruments and by closing the art galleries, but no one thinks of suggesting such a procedure."

My city's public art gallery (UK) has stopped putting on exhibitions, the council plan to close the last of the libraries and the gallery with it ...

</comment><comment><USER3> For anyone who doesn't know, telegrams are still around. Email is a lot cheaper and does basically the same thing, but if you want to spend $30 on having an email hand-delivered, you can.

I sent one back in 1997ish, basically to impress a girl who liked quirky things. Of course, it had to be written in the correct style. It seemed to work - we dated for 3 years after that.

</comment><comment><USER4> It was interesting to learn that charges were per word and not per character. And that "2nd" counts as two words while "second" is one, dispite being twice the number of characters.

Weren't all telegrams sent by morse code on the wire? Or was there another protocol?

<comment><USER5> There were entire dictionaries compiled so that words in a telegram could be kept to a minimum.

[https://archive.org/stream/adamscablecodex00cogoog#page/n22/...](https://archive.org/stream/adamscablecodex00cogoog#page/n22/mode/2up)

A couple of extracts from the preface:

      The value of this code will be seen at a glance. We will suppose
      that the friend abroad is in Paris and is about to leave for London and
      wishes to apprise his friend at home of that fact. He turns to the Index
      and finds sentences beginning with "Am going to," "Am leaving for,"
      etc., are to be found on pages 80 to 82, and then makes up the following
      message:— "INGRATE, LONDON, TUESDAY," which, when trans-
      lated by the receiver, means, "Am going to London and expect to reach
      there Tuesday morning. Telegrams sent to me there shall reach me
      promptly." In this message twenty words are sent at the cost of but
      three.

And,

      Furthermore, in sending and receiving messages, do not fail to take
      time to read the telegram carefully, and re-check it to and from the code.
      Too much care cannot he taken in the translation of cable messages, as an
      error may cost both the sender and the receiver a deal of trouble, worry,
      and expense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm interested in the coexistence of telegram and telephone; it sounds like they used telephones for local delivery or acceptance of telegram for a while. Was long distance calling unsuited for cost reasons, or unavailable, or otherwise not desired?

Sort of similar to SMS vs. voice, SMS vs. email (esp on mobile mua), email vs. IM.

<comment><USER7> Long-distance phone calls used to be extraordinarily expensive. As late as 1950, a 5-minute phone call from New York to LA cost $3.70, or around $35 in today's money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a new literacies researcher, this fascinates me - especially the 'forced informality' through artificial constraints.

"so accustomed is the public to telegraphic brevity, that their use often produces amusement rather than the expression of formality which the sender desired."

In this case the brevity was due to cost, but in this age of abundance we _choose_ such constraints (and complain when they're removed - c.f. Twitter).

</comment><comment><USER9> Although telegrams are not restricted to 140 characters, this guide translates well to writing tweets. It will not take long before an article "How to Write Tweets Properly" (2016) (twitter.com)" is posted to HN.

<comment><USER10> >this guide translates well to writing tweets

I thought it would, so I read this guide (for the first time) after doing find-replace in the source code of Telegram, Telegraph, telegram, and telegraph with Tweet, Tweet, tweet, and tweet respectively. The guide does NOT translate well to writing tweets! At all. It's fine grammatically, but the whole guide becomes nonsense. The specific advice on writing, e.g. "20th" as "twentieth" (because the former was counted as two words and the latter as one) does not translate at all. What it says about billing is nonsense. What it says about delivery is nonsense. What it says about customs and how tweets are used is nonsense. The whole guide becomes nonsense.

you would think it would still have excellent parts - but not really.

<comment><USER10> Apparently two downvoters disagreed with me, so can you point out any sentences at all that you find useful or relevant?

I didn't read it all the way through but guide seemed completely irrelevant to tweeting. Obviously reducing tweet length is important for everyone, and a hard skill to master: this guide doesn't include anything that can be used.

In particular the abbreviations don't seem current. Then there are whole sections of advice like this:

>' for feet

>"for inches

>% for percent

>@ for at

>should be written "feet," "inches," "percent," "at," etc.

Which is obviously literally the opposite advice of that which you would use for tweeting.

Or look at:

>For example, a press correspondent might ,first write this dispatch:

>"The enemy has not yet been met or even seen on account of the entanglements thrown up during the night," etc.

>Revised for the cable, this dispatch might read:

>"Enemy unmet unseen account entanglements upthrown night."

They say "upthrown" instead of "thrown up" because upthrown is 1 word but "thrown up" is 2. The words they omit are ones that editors might put back in. But it's not something you can tweet! (Account instead of "on account of".) If you tweeted "Enemy unmet unseen account entanglements upthrown night" absolutely nobody would understand what you mean.

The whole guide does not really translate in any way to tweeting. I think perhaps my downvoters thought that I was being too literal, that I shouldn't expect it to -- but why not? Brevity is the underlying style focus in each, so you would think that a lot of the guide would translate! It simply doesn't.

Being extremely brief and using specific techniques to be briefer is an important skill used in both telegrams and tweeting, and the advice I read here doesn't in any way translate into tweeting. You can't use any of it.

<comment><USER9> (Upvoted your reply because it is relevant and adds to the discussion; thanks.)

Obviously, a lot of the advise is targeted to the telegraph domain, for example in reducing words (instead of characters), not using punctuation marks (because they are words), and how addresses should be written (and we have mentions). So, in a very literal sense of this "HOWTO", I agree that it does not translate well to tweeting.

On second reading, I guess I was (and still am) impressed by the relevance of the table of contents (section headers) for tweeting, and that it _could_ be used in a guide on "how to write tweets". So, the actual advice does perhaps not translate well, but the structure is relevant. Perhaps I got carried away by reading the TOC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Lots of interesting things here.

One of them:

> If the telegram is packed full of unnecessary words, ... the sender has been > guilty of economic waste. ... He added to the volume of traffic ....

And yet:

> But when you think of telegraphing someone to "reply at once," you may very > well save the cost of an unnecessary word and write it, "reply immediately," > ....

So, in order to reduce traffic volume, we are counseled to replace 6 letters and a very brief pause with 11 letters.

I think the writer had trouble distinguishing between trying not to overburden the telegraph system vs. hacking its cost structure.

Also, here is the first sentence I quoted above, in full (emphasis is mine):

> If the telegram is packed full of unnecessary words, _words which might be > omitted without impairing the sense of the message,_ the sender has been > guilty of economic waste.

The phrase that I have italicized is completely unnecessary. Of course, the writer was not composing a telegram. Still, I think this is just a bit ironic.

</comment><comment><USER12> Commercial telegram's thing of the past, but if you want to experiment with it, there's the National Traffic System if you are in the US, other country may have similar system in place, ran by radio amateurs. You can pretty much send non-commercial message to anyone (as long as third-party message is legal in the country for domestic message, and originating/destination country have third-party agreements.)

Although, it can be bit challenging to get hold of someone who can actually place a message to the system. (If you have a license, you can actually originate message yourself through your local NTS net.)

[0]: [http://www.arrl.org/nts](http://www.arrl.org/nts)

</comment><comment><USER13> Hemingway was taught how to write telegrams properly during his time at the Kansas City Star calling proper ones "without fat, nothing but blood and bones and muscle. It's a new language." It's almost certain this training as a teenager greatly influenced his prose style later.</comment>


ImportYeti – Find which factories and suppliers a company uses - <AUTHOR> https://www.importyeti.com/ <comment><USER2> Super useful. Allowing new entrepreneurs to compete with well established brands is a game changer. It's HUGE.

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't even know that this information existed. Good job.</comment>


Russian Cyber Attack Targets Pentagon Email Systems: Officials - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/cyberattack-pentagons-joint-staff-emails-take-system-offline-n405321

<comment><AUTHOR> _" The officials said the suspected Russian hackers coordinated the cyber attack via social media accounts."_

The Email system described here is not linked to the secure network?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you enagage users in your mobile app? - <AUTHOR>

Some say great products don't need marketing, but I think these great products have in built propagation mechanisms will help it spread. That is a form of in built marketing : word of mouth etc.<p>Apart from word of mouth/invites/shares, how else do you engage your users based on their behavior? <comment><USER2> There's a good blog post from Nate at Picturelife on how he asks for app reviews: [https://medium.com/@innonate/7-ways-to-ask-for-app-store- rev...](https://medium.com/@innonate/7-ways-to-ask-for-app-store- reviews-d4e4a74211cb)

Outside of that, I recommend starting with a solid core story and brand experience. Arm your users with the story you want them to share with their world. Plant the seed across your product and marketing so they pick up the language you use and will share that from top of the minds.</comment>


Ask HN: Did anyone else get an invitation for a Chromebook? - <AUTHOR>

Just received an email.  Did anyone else get an invitation?
I didn't find it exciting to have applied for a chrome cr-48 and now just received an invitation to buy a chromebook.
What are your thoughts?
-m <comment><USER2> I got an invite to purchase a Chromebook for $499 through gilt.

Personally, I find the price a bit too high for an iPad-with-a-keyboard.

Based on what I've read/seen online, the Chromebook isn't "there" enough yet to justify a $500 investment. Maybe soonish though.

<comment><USER3> It's not an iPad-with-a-keyboard. The iPad is much more powerful; it can actually run client-side apps so you can do things either offline, or without the slow, bloated feel you get from web apps. You can SSH from it with reasonable speed (unlike ajax terminals). You can take a picture and save it locally. The list goes on. It's a polished system that's been around for a while, and it's supported by a company with a history of actually supporting and caring about their products.

The chromebook is more of a cut-down web browser with a keyboard that you can't use without having a google account and forfeiting your privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a little confused (got one too). Did Google sell my contact info to Gilt?

<comment><AUTHOR> you were contract by Google, not Gilt.

they simply gave you the option to register with Gilt if you are interested in purchasing the chromebook.

<comment><USER4> No, they simply gave Gilt a whitelist of email addresses of people wanting a Chromebook.

The email I got says right there: _Remember, you must use this email (...) to access the sale_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a CR-48, I did get the invite. I'm not getting it because they only have the white, I'd prefer the black. I'll wait and get it in Best Buy.

</comment><comment><USER6> I got an invite but $499 is a little steep :\

</comment><comment><USER7> I did, but I also received a CR-48

<comment><AUTHOR> so as an owner of a CR-48 would you buy the Chromebook?

If no, is it because you already have the CR-48 and therefore don't have the need, or because you didn't like the CR-48 and don't think the Chromebook would be useful?

<comment><USER8> My wife's netbook is starting to get a bit flaky (power cord issues) and if we decide to retire it permanently to a desk for the kids to watch movies with and buy her a new one I would definitely consider a Chromebook, but only if they get the Netflix plugin I've been hearing about working. My wife does three things with her current Win7 netbook, she reads her email, browses the web, and watches Netflix.

I received the invitations you speak of, and I was also one of the pilot CR-48 users. Pretty cool tech overall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes, but still deciding.

</comment><comment><USER10> chromebook for $500 is crazy. you can get a decent used thinkpad off ebay for that much that can run a real os.</comment>


Ask HN: More interesting side work? - <AUTHOR>

I probably do 20 or so hours of side work in addition to my typical 9-5. The extra money is nice, and in the past, I was getting to do some pretty neat things. Now, although I'm still making good money, most of my side work has turned into installing/theming/configuring various CMSs for clients, and, well, its not interesting. I've got several years experience as a PHP & Front-End developer, and I'm really looking to work with a "cool" startup and better utilize my talents, and help grow as a developer, but am not ready to leave my 9-5 for it. Anyone out there looking for someone to work on the side for them? Suggestions on how to find something more interesting without leaving my day job? <comment><USER2> Can't you write a CMS installer/themer/configurator tool? You already have the domain knowledge and potential clients.

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose. Particularly the config/install part. Just not so exciting to me anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can try making a product to sell, like the Bingo Card guy. It may not be a "cool" startup, but it's a step above CMS stuff.

</comment><comment><USER4> What was the more interesting work that you did in the past? Can you describe it more and how you got that?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've always been pretty involved in the automotive industry (hobby of mine), so got to write a bunch of neat web apps to do with it. Inventory/parts interchange stuff that connected a bunch of different online retailers together so they'd save time calling between each other to see who had what in stock, and kept track of pricing models to use. The total scope of the projects is really off-topic for the thread :). Got a lot of the people interested in that through a big trade show a few years ago when I was going through a lull in freelancing jobs.

Honestly, money is the least of my concerns. I don't have any interest in working for free, but I'm billing out around $100 to do CMS work. All of which is mindless for me. I'd rather take half as much and do something I enjoy.

<comment><USER5> If you're game, I'd like to talk -- your experience sounds like a great match for my business. Contact info is in my profile. (Also, if you'd like people to get in touch with you, add some contact info to your profile. The email field isn't visible to the rest of us.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sent you an email. Looking forward to talking with you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So what is it that you enjoy?</comment>


New cameras to watch cameras that watch you - <AUTHOR> http://wtop.com/41/3034979/New-cameras-to-watch-cameras-that-watch-you <comment><USER2> _Liberati says the cameras aren't a case of Big Brother nor a cash grab, police are simply trying to keep the public safe from reckless drivers._

Ha ha, very funny! If that were the case, for red light cameras at least, then they would just increase the length of the yellow light. That's cheaper than a camera, for sure, and has been proven empirically.

As far as speeding cameras, I might buy it except that in Denver they only show up in swanky neighborhoods that have a high-traffic street through them. Like on 1st Ave in front of the Denver Country Club. Or University by the gated "Polo Club" neighborhood. Never seen one on S. Federal, or Santa Fe Boulevard.

on the whole, I don't believe that an honest citizen can treat pronouncements about traffic cams with anything other than utter suspicion.

<comment><USER3> But what happens once people get used to the new duration of the yellow light? Do they approach it based on what they're used to from all the other yellow lights they've ever seen? Then the longest yellow light in the country is the safest one, until all the other lights are lengthened to match it.

<comment><USER4> This is actually a problem in the area this article is from. In maryland the yellow light is much shorter then in virginia, therefore maryland drivers tend to stop at yellow lights in virginia which causes lots of close stopping of drivers behind . If safety was really a concern then there would be a more narrower range of allowed yellow light duration between counties and states. As far as the speed cameras are concerned they only reduce speed for a very short distance once everyone knows where they are, its a pure profit motive.

<comment><USER5> Seems like VA drivers should stop racing yellow lights, and should maintain safe following distance. Even if the driver ahead chooses to roll into a stop at a green light, drivers behind should be able to stop safely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The really insidious thing about these cameras in many if not most cities is that they are owned and operated by a private corporation and then the government splits the profits. In some cases the private company is paid per ticket issued which doesn't take much thought to realize how to maximize profit. [http://washingtonexaminer.com/court-md.-drivers-cant-get- spe...](http://washingtonexaminer.com/court-md.-drivers-cant-get-speed-camera- fines-back/article/2505967#.UFOLvUJvQqY)

I've gotten tickets from these things before simply because my car was the only license plate visible in the frame even though the little yellow triangle designating the vehicle speeding marked a car on the opposite side of the road traveling in the other direction. The highway guard rail was obscuring the speeders plate though so they just sent it to me instead.

Speed cameras are akin to a lottery tax system where by motorists are randomly chosen to pay an extra tax and it's justified by the fact that some of them may have been speeding.

<comment><USER7> _> The highway guard rail was obscuring the speeders plate though so they just sent it to me instead.

Speed cameras are akin to a lottery tax system where by motorists are randomly chosen to pay an extra tax and it's justified by the fact that some of them may have been speeding._

Sounds more like an implementation problem than a problem with enforcement cameras as a concept. A software patch would correct this.

<comment><USER8> You are assuming the system isn't functioning as performed.

They send out a ticket, act like a bureaucracy when questioned about it, and eventually get paid. ("They" being both the government entity and the private camera operator.)

Why would they bother changing it? Traffic courts are a laugh, since it's recognized that driving is a privilege and not a right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Old process:

1\. Destroy speed camera

2\. Profit

New process:

1\. Shoot out surveillance camera

2\. Destroy speed camera

3\. Profit

<comment><USER10> 4\. Response from the cops:

Install cameras that watch the cameras that watch the cameras that watch you.

<comment><USER11> Real response from the cops: install a chip in everyone's brain. When a citizen happens to be within 10 ft of a "forbidden" object without authorization, his/her body experiences violent seizures.

Should be possible within 10 years, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 'The cameras work to slow people down' is the most annoying, nonsensical BS. If the cameras were supposed to slow people down they would not be cameras that capture information that leads to a citation; nor would the money go into local government coffers. I f-ing hate pathetic liars.

</comment><comment><USER13> Only a $40 fine... that's a bargain! It does make it seem silly that people would respond by recking the cameras. I wonder if it's more a case that some people will vandalise anything they can.

(Here in Australia we pay at least $200 for a speeding fine).

<comment><USER4> The price point is carefully thought out. Its high enough to make a profit but low enough that most people won't go out of their way to fight the ticket in court etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How do these cameras work? If it is wireless, i'm sure someone could discretely hide a jammer near them?

<comment><USER15> Let's assume it is using the cell network.....isn't jamming the cell network a much bigger felony than just destroying the camera?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> On a seperate note, would anyone actually visit a website that had a private non fine generating camera over the freeway you take to work, and would pop up the speed and time you passed when u enter a license plate

just thought it might be a fun thing to learn opencv on - thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh great, now our spycams have spycams, rather Inception-esque.

</comment><comment><USER18> Google cars will make this all obsolete anyway. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER16>
      It costs us $30,000 to $100,000 to replace a camera.

What?! At those sort of prices, Big Brother will be Bankrupt Brother before 2012 becomes 1984.

<comment><USER13> They have to measure vehicle speed accurately and in such a way that will stand up to scrutiny in court. So not just your run of the mill consumer type camera. I like your joke nonetheless. :)

<comment><USER19> <http://www.thehighspeedcamerastore.com/high-speed-products>

<comment><USER16> 250fps seems pretty high for this use case a car doing 100kmh is about 30m per sec.

Measured over 10m capture zone 24fps is more than adequate

focal length, durability, weather proofing etc all seem more likely to be the cost - but really that's just housing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Airbnb's new font holds the secret to design's future - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcodesign.com/90172242/exclusive-airbnbs-new-font-holds-the-secret-to-designs-future <comment><USER2> Wow, this article is full of some amazing nonsense.

It's a font. It's fine. Nice even! It's like a slightly more rounded and modern Helvetica. But designers so often go completely off of the deep end…

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks nice for bread+butter, but not very expressive. (is there any download for it?, might be nice for e-reading)

edit: regular, medium and bold are used on the website, no italic as far as I can tell.</comment>


[deleted] - <AUTHOR> [deleted] <comment><AUTHOR> I built this list whilst researching ideas for my new project, then thought it'd be cool to share it.

I'd love to hear any other favourite articles you have on best practices in this area - you can submit via a pull request or just me know.</comment>


About Linkrot: Proportion of Working Links on Pinboard.in, 1997-2011 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/05/remembrance_of_links_past/

<comment><USER2> There is an easy way to increase your detection of redirects and parked pages: make two requests, one to the real URL and one to a URL which is intentionally broken. (example.com/i-am-a-link and example.com/fklsdfasdifo for example) Run a heuristic for difference on the resulting content. This won't catch all of them, particularly if you use a really naive heuristic that can't deal with e.g. ads changing, but it's a heck of a lot quicker than comparing manually.

<comment><USER3> I suspect that's what Google does too. I see lots of example.com/fklsdfasdifo type requests from Big G in my logs.

<comment><USER4> if you see a lot of them go to webmaster tools, if you see them there too its not some kind of test but some other reasone, mostly their shitty js parsinf, which treats anything with an / as a relative url...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Links appear to die at a steady rate (they don't have a half life), and you can expect to lose about a quarter of them every seven years."

Is this self-contradictory, or is just poor wording of his findings?

<comment><USER6> What's not clear about it? They die at a steady rate of 25% per 7 years.

<comment><USER5> As reemrevnivek explains, the answer to "25% of what?" is the issue here. An exponential decay can be described with the same words.

<comment><USER7> There's a freaking graph. Are we really being this pedantic that we can't understand what he's saying?

<comment><USER5> I discovered when I got home that the graph was blocked by my office's web filter. Definitely makes more sense with it there. Thanks for your understanding!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it's about time that some government or billionaire throws a few millions at an internet archive project. The Internet Archive is nice but more regular snapshots with a wider coverage would be something I'm certain future historians would love to get their hands on (and they will hate us if we don't do it).

<comment><USER9> _I think it's about time that some government or billionaire throws a few millions at an internet archive project._

It may be that one or two governments have already done that. You are, of course, referring to a publicly accessible Internet archive.

As for what a benevolent millionaire (it wouldn't have to be a full billionaire for this to start up) could fund, pg has suggested, "There is room to do to Wikipedia what Wikipedia did to Britannica."

<http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html>

It's interesting that pg thought then that Wikipedia's problem is excessive deletionism, while I (after being a registered Wikipedian and working on various articles) think that Wikipedia's problem is lack of thorough research to prepare article content.

[http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strate...](http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary/Improve_Quality)

Whatever one's opinion of what's wrong with Wikipedia, the best way to prompt improvement in Wikipedia (or replace it, if you prefer that) is to build another site that does some of what Wikipedia does but does it better somehow. That's not easy, not easy at all, but it's not terribly expensive. I have looked at the Wikimedia Foundation financial reports, and building a strong competitor to Wikipedia is a project that is well within the grasp of several individual millionaires, and within the grasp of quite a few nonprofit charitable organizations. A business corporation that can find out a way to monetize a Wikipedia competitor might have a great business opportunity.

<comment><USER10> > It's interesting that pg thought then that Wikipedia's problem is excessive > deletionism, while I (after being a registered Wikipedian and working on > various articles) think that Wikipedia's problem is lack of thorough > research to prepare article content.

Yep, that's the usual distinction. Non-Wikipedians believe that Wikipedia should be a compendium of any information that could be useful, however unverifiable or incomplete. Wikipedians want there to be higher standards, but pg makes the common mistake of thinking this is because they are all OCD.[1] The Wikipedia system relies on group verifiability. Low quality info imposes long-term costs on the administrators. The article will be flagged more frequently than others. So pruning low quality info is a matter of administrator self-defence, even if you ignore the ideals of achieving a trustworthy encyclopedia.

A Wikipedia successor would have to abandon trustworthiness (or figure out some way to indicate that certain pages were untrustworthy). Or figure out how not to impose the costs of maintaining unverifiable information on administrators. One way might be to connect the info with the community that cares about it in a more direct and intimate way. Wikipedia fails REALLY badly at the latter, to the point where the wiki-insiders sometimes have more control than the audience for a topic.

> That's not easy, not easy at all, but it's not terribly expensive.

In terms of software and services, it would be no problem at all. But you are overlooking the cost of creating a new Wikipedia in a world where Wikipedia already exists.

Wikipedia content is also famously intractable to reuse in any system other than MediaWiki. We hope to begin alleviating that this year with the big parser redesign. A side effect should be to enable competitors to try different things with our content.

[1] They are, but this is not the primary reason. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sadly I think technological advances has only accelerated this phenomenon. We've gone from an era of static pages that would require considerable effort to change the overall layout of to CMSes that we can twiddle and upgrade with nary a concern for backward link compatibility.

Personally I think it should be a principle of every professional web developer that you just don't break links, period.

</comment><comment><USER12> Users may prune their own bookmarks when they discover the links broken – especially when considering some of the pre-Pinboard systems (like in-browser bookmarking) from which the earliest data in this analysis comes. So I suspect this underestimates link-rot.

<comment><USER13> Just like it says in the article!

<comment><USER12> D'oh! Overlooked that in my quick-read (or seeing as how I chose the same 'prune' word, only noticed it subconsciously).

Still an important enough point to pull out for highlight here; I should have used a direct quote.</comment></comment></comment>


Air Force Reveals Tests of Supposed Record-Setting Scramjet from N. Grumman - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/29307/air-force-reveals-tests-of-supposed-record-setting-scramjet-engine-from-northrop-grumman <comment><USER2> Johnny Armstrong, the Hypersonics Combined Test Force Chief Engineer for Air Force, until his retirement in 2012, passed away just last week. He worked in hypersonics from the X-15 to the X-51 Waverider.

[https://www.edwards.af.mil/News/Article/1922993/team- edwards...](https://www.edwards.af.mil/News/Article/1922993/team-edwards- loses-one-of-its-own-as-hypersonics-pioneer-johnny-g-armstrong-dies/)

[https://vimeo.com/37453969](https://vimeo.com/37453969)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a pretty neat technical achievement. One of the things that has made it possible has been the ability to much better CFD simulations of the whole system. Rather than test/tail iterate cycle, they can get to a working system that can be refined in a shorter period of time.

That said, its hard to beat the SABER engine's use of liquid hydrogen to cool the air coming into the engine and just achieving better thrust. I still find that concept mind blowing.

<comment><USER4> You probably know that using liquid hydrogen to cool engine bells is common in rocketry as well. I found this video fascinating. On one side, the engine is so cold icicles are forming. Centimeters away, the other side is so hot that it would melt pretty much any metal except the most exotic of alloys. The engine is so efficient that all that energy is pointed straight down. None escapes to melt the icicles.

[https://youtu.be/4eM1mNNdguA?t=89](https://youtu.be/4eM1mNNdguA?t=89)

Scott Manley has a good explanation but I can't find the video right now where he mentions it.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it keeps the bell of the nozzle from melting off the back of the rocket. And that is a really cool trick, extremely tough to pull off in the original F1 engines of the Saturn V (lots of welds) but easier to do now that you can 3D print the engine.

However, the SABRE has a different challenge. Rather than cool metal (Inconel) which is a very good conductor of heat, the SABRE heat exchanger is cooling the air which has gained temperature for becoming compressed by the moving aircraft. Air, for all of its wonderful properties, is not a particularly good heat conductor[1]. Further, since heat transfer by conduction is a function of time in which the two dissimilar temperature materials are in contact, and hyper sonic craft are going very fast, it has to achieve this heat transfer in a literal "blink of an eye." It has been compared to shooting an acetylene torch through it and having a cool breeze come out the other side. Really amazing stuff.

[1] This is fortunate as it makes down coats warm rather than cold.

<comment><USER5> Not only that, but it has to not ice up in the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > The Air Force recently broke the record for the highest thrust producing > air-breathing hypersonic engine the service has ever tested in its history, > at least that we know about.

Nuclear scramjets achieved 3 times this thrust "record" under similar test conditions more than half a century ago.

<comment><USER7> Do nuclear scramjets count as air breathing? They don't use atmospheric oxygen for combustion, iirc, which is what I think of when I hear air breathing.

<comment><USER8> They're air breathing in the same sense that electric planes are, I suppose? They use air for propulsion, but not for chemical reactions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a picture of the test apparatus. This barely resembles a typical wind tunnel. Anyone who know these things care to provide a illustrated guide to thing?

[https://media.defense.gov/2019/Aug/05/2002166487/-1/-1/0/190...](https://media.defense.gov/2019/Aug/05/2002166487/-1/-1/0/190220-F-IL571-080.JPG)

<comment><USER10> Not sure about the details of this picture, but hypersonic wind tunnels look very different than subsonic wind tunnels. The cross section of a hypersonic tunnel is usually small and there are not many moving parts. The high Mach number is achieved by discharging compressed air into the tunnel. You can find more info about this specific tunnel on wikipedia [1].

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

<comment><USER11> I can't add much to this, besides the point that in my experience with expansion tunnels [1][2] from my time at uni, they are very short-term test facilities, lasting for fractions of a second. They work by compressing a big vessel of air with a piston, rupturing a diaphragm, and then blowing that highly compressed air through a expansion nozzle (which, unlike subsonic flow, _accelerates_ the flow velocity through the nozzle) before passing it over the test piece.

I'm not familiar with the APTU, but it would not surprise me if this is a similar concept, wherein it delivers a short-term high-velocity flow across a test object. I think the main difference is it heats with a combustion air heater, rather than pressurising with a big slug. In any case, because it's quick and requires a small cross-sectional area, much of the surrounds of the machine are all sensors to measure everything, since you don't want to have to do it over and over again. I think that is much of what can be seen in the photo of the APTU.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_tunnel) [2] [http://hypersonics.mechmining.uq.edu.au/facilities](http://hypersonics.mechmining.uq.edu.au/facilities) (specifically X2 and X3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember scramjets in Popular Mechanics 30 years ago, but nothing seemed to materialize.

Off-topic to scramjets but potentially military-related: Making a _big_ stretch by assuming the "white Tic-Tac" isn't an elaborate hoax to get adversaries to overspend on propulsion technologies and/or troll the public, what type of propulsion could allow it to accelerate so quickly? Casimir effect thruster?

<comment><USER13> Gamma ray to the visual cortex.

<comment><USER14> or bits into the video camera and hud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is the SR-71 constrained by its engine or airframe? I know I've read that if the plane went any faster _something_ would start melting and the plane would be lost but I don't recall if it was the airframe or the engine.

<comment><USER16> Presumably both, to a large degree, since it's probably a pretty optimized aircraft. The engine & inlet are designed to compress the air using the shock patterns that develop at certain Mach numbers. Beyond that Mach range, it won't work. Likewise they probably didn't bother designing the airframe to work at speeds in which the engine couldn't.

<comment><USER17> The SR-71 is also high altitude, so if there is less air (pressure), that can change things like: how much lift you need or can generate, the outside temperature, how much air can be used by the engine, heating due to air friction, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Close a Sales Call - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/how_to_close_a_sales_call.html <comment><USER2> IME the key to closing a sale is to open it in a way that makes the buyer comfortable saying no. If you get them to commit up front to the idea that no is acceptable, even desirable, and that "maybe" is a waste of time (and really just a polite way of saying "no"), the "yes" will be obvious.

Example:

[At beginning of sales meeting]

"I'm going to show you my product and I hope it's a good fit for you. But our product isn't a fit for everyone. So, if you decide that we are not a good fit, are you comfortable telling me no?"

[At end of meeting]

"Now that you've seen my product, on a scale of 1-10 how good a fit do you think we are?"

If it's less than a 7, you can either explore their problem more deeply and see if there's something you missed, or just say:

"So it sounds like that's a no. Am I right? I know we're not a fit for everyone, so it's okay if the answer is no."

I learned this (and a lot of other stuff) via Sandler Sales Institute several years ago and have found it's very effective in all kinds of situations, not just sales.

It's easy to hate on sales as being full of manipulative, pushy people. But there are good, authentic techniques that work better than just showing up and giving a demo.

<comment><USER3> I agree that giving people a "get-out" clause allows for more honest answers. It pays off because you don't waste your time chasing the 'maybe' that turn out to be a 'no'.

I think that builds up more trust and pushes more towards a yes than any other technique.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ugh. Please don't read this and think you know anything about "closing" a sale. Closing techniques work well for small, unimportant, everyday purchases.

They do not work at all on sophisticated buyers. They might in fact cost you the sale.

The rule of thumb is: If there is any chance that the prospective customer might have heard of such a thing as a closing technique - DON'T USE THEM.

<comment><USER5> I actually don't think this article falls in the same category as someone doing "A benjamin franklin close" or a forced close or whatever other closing technique involves manipulation.

The article states very simply that there are three different ways you can close a call, hard, medium and soft. It's not a technique, he paints with a broad brush and leaves the article very open to interpetation and adaptation to your sales style.

<comment><USER4> Exactly my point. All fluff, no informational content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's wrong with "Thanks for your time and allowing me to discuss product x with you. Is there any reason why you think this wouldn't be a good fit for your problem y? I want your business, and I look forward to working with you further."

<comment><USER7> Nothing. But without having coded languages and competing to manipulate each other, sales and business folks wouldn't have much left to do. They call it "people skills". And while being direct and honest might be a good way to communicate, it's not nearly as challenging, so it's not a "people skill" and the Harvard Business Review would have nothing left to write about.

<comment><USER6> So frustrating that you have to virtually manipulate people to accomplish a goal that ultimately both of you want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "With experienced buyers, consider a softer close because how many times do you think they have heard "this is our best and final offer" and every other type of hard close before?"

I have yet to find a professionally trained salesman that has called on me that doesn't immediately telegraph that he has read some book, took some course, or is following some technique he learned somewhere. After a while it sounds to any experienced ear phony. In the same way a politician sounds phony.

Sales is all nuance and it's really difficult to master without spending considerable time actually doing it and building knowledge about what works for you in a given situation (which may not work for someone else in the same situation because of delivery of message among many other variables).

</comment><comment><USER9> My own favorite sales technique to find out the upper range of a buyer is to casually ask 'up to' when they reveal their budget

<comment><USER10> Which is why as a buyer, I never even get close to giving a real answer to this question =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some people, (edit) men/women do this so much that I punish the behavior. Instead of then saying "I would rather you not do X" they come up with some cryptic encoded message that leaves you wondering why they said it and what they want. The one issuing cryptic messages often gets angry when things do not change the way they expected. When people do this to me, I go out of my way to not read their mind and not give them what they want. If you are going to communicate like a 6 year old then expect that you wont always get your way.

<comment><USER12> And people wonder why women feel excluded from technical forums. Yikes.

(The edit makes it better, but the fact that this was written about "some women" in the abstract who need to be "punished" for doing it remains really disturbing. This was a complete tangent to the linked article, not a point that really needed to be made. How would you react if you pulled up a forum comment where the top post talked about how "Some geeks are so socially awkward that I can't understand them. So I punish them for it". See the point? What you did was deliberately exclusionary: it's just plain mean. Stop it.)

<comment><USER7> If I did find a comment like that, complaining about a predominantly male behavior on a forum for some female-dominated hobby/profession/interest, I wouldn't be surprised or outraged. Some patterns of behavior are more common among one sex than the other; some of those patterns of behavior bother the opposite sex; sometimes people complain about things that bother them.

<comment><USER12> Which is what I'd expect you to say to your peers on the predominately male- dominated forums you frequent. :) I suspect (based on my own personality) that your personality isn't nearly so confident when you're out of your comfort zone. Now picture a world where that zone outside your comfort is an important part of the career path.

To tickle the startup thing: picture a site where a bunch of VCs sit around talking about money stuff. You want to get into that world and you know you need to be part of this site to do it. Yet half the time you start posting you find the people you want to interact with complaining about how infuriating "tech people" are to deal with. Think hard about what you'd do: jump into the conversation anyway or just stay silent until you have something "serious" to say? I know what I'd do.

<comment><USER7> > just stay silent until you have something "serious" to say

That's my MO on any new forum. I only stopped following that rule on HN as HN itself got increasingly sillier.

And really, your VC example, in reverse, is in full display on HN. There are always articles complaining about unfair shit that VC's pull, and VC's probably talk about unfair shit founders pull. The proper response, assuming you're a VC that doesn't pull unfair shit, is to say "yeah, I hate that shit and I never do that." Look at how Peroni (a recruiter) contributes to the perennial complaining-about-recruiters threads.

The OP is about using indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques to close sales. I think it's fair game to complain about indirect, passive- aggressive communication techniques and the people who use them, and if someone observes that it tends to be women more often than men, so be it. If you're a woman who doesn't use indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques, you come into this thread in the same position that Peroni comes into the multitude of threads about how useless recruiters are.

<comment><USER12> (late reply to late reply, but I couldn't let this one go)

' _I think it's fair game to complain about indirect, passive-aggressive communication techniques and the people who use them_ "

Good grief. No. Just no. Not when the "people who use them" are generalized (maeon3 didn't even hedge with "tend to" like you did) to half the species.

Sorry, that's not objective argumentation, it's plain bigotry.

Would you have stepped up in the same way if he had jumped into to say the darkies are lazy and dumb? That the muslim faith is evil?

I'll just repeat my original "yikes" and leave it at that. People like you make me sad for humanity.

<comment><USER7> I don't think he implied anywhere that all or even most women (mis-) communicate that way, but rather that most people who mis-communicate that way are women. That _is_ a fair observation, and similar comments about men largely pass without comment.

<comment><USER12> The original post has been edited, but the phrasing was "some women [do this], so I punish them for it". And he went on to use the female pronouns throughout. It was a rant, not an argument. And there wasn't even a tiny nod to the idea that anyone other than a woman would be so afflicted.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Will cPanel be the next IDE? - <AUTHOR> http://mattlock.blogspot.com/2007/04/will-cpanel-be-next-ide.html <comment><USER2> I'm not a huge fan of it, but my immediate thought was 'emacs'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check this out <http://robrohan.com/projects/9ne/></comment></comment>


5 questions to ask before buying enterprise software - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2012/06/five-questions-to-ask-before-buying.html

<comment><USER2> I hate software that expects to be extended in its own editor; they're invariably inferior to what I'm used to. IDEs are a hard problem; far better to buy something that integrates into eclipse than something that includes its own inferior version therof.</comment>


Graph algorithms via SuiteSparse:GraphBLAS: triangle counting and K-truss (2018) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://faculty.cse.tamu.edu/davis/GraphBLAS/HPEC18/Davis_HPEC18.pdf <comment><USER2> Has anyone compared GraphBLAS to nvgraph, custinger, gunrock, etc.?

<comment><AUTHOR> Re: nvgraph, NVIDIA is one of Tim Davis's research sponsors and uses his code, as is (and does) Google. Among other things, he also wrote the open-source NVIDIA CULA sparse matrix library. See the list of libraries at the bottom of this page (scroll down) [http://faculty.cse.tamu.edu/davis/research.html](http://faculty.cse.tamu.edu/davis/research.html)

Re: cuStinger, it's no longer...it's now Hornet, which uses CUB by NVIDIA Research [https://github.com/hornet-gt/hornet](https://github.com/hornet- gt/hornet)

Re: gunrock, they have plans on adding GraphBLAS as part of their backend: [https://github.com/gunrock/gunrock/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=i...](https://github.com/gunrock/gunrock/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+graphblas)

Re: GraphBLAS, see my comment from yesterday...

Log(Graph): A Near-Optimal High-Performance Graph Representation (2018)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099520)

For an overview of GraphBLAS in the context of Heterogeneous High-Performance Computing (HHPC) systems such as NVIDIA GPUs or Intel Xeon Phis, see the 2015 talk Scott McMillan ([https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/author/scott- mcmillan/](https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/author/scott-mcmillan/)) gave at the CMU Software Engineering Institute:

Graph Algorithms on Future Architectures [video] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sIdS4cz7-4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sIdS4cz7-4)

And a few years back, Jeremy Kepner did a mini-course on D4M (the precursor to GraphBLAS). The videos and material are on MIT OCW...

MIT D4M: Mathematics of Big Data and Machine Learning [video] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCAZLl6nq4c&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCAZLl6nq4c&list=PLUl4u3cNGP62DPmPLrVyYfk3-Try_ftJJ&index=1)

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105931](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18105931)

<comment><USER2> ... That makes it sound like the implementations are not meant for direct long-term use, as folks assume them uncompetitive with tuned GPU versions that show up in hornet et al, and in practice they will be used when no GPU equiv is available / out of convenience? Likewise, even when used directly, it will be by framework / lib devs, so some sort of hornet-blas?

To be clear, the work has been interesting to me for years, so this is purely a practitioner's question as we are not in a position to ship-all-the-things.</comment></comment></comment>


Solar panels are starting to die, leaving behind toxic trash - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die-leaving-behind-toxic-trash/ <comment><USER2> PV: By 2050, 6 million metric tons of pre-vitrified, almost perfectly inert and easily recycled "waste" material that had a 50-year service life.

Coal: 140 million metric tons of toxic glop, at least 100 parts per million of mercury and 10 ppm of uranium, every year, right now.

<comment><USER3> Came here to say the same thing. I don't understand why (semi-)reputable outlets are hocking this anti-renewable propaganda. Reminds me of an article[1] earlier this year about the coming "wind turbine waste", which sounds big when you give a number with tons after it but in reality amounts to a small fraction of waste from disposable toothbrushes.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind- turb...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine- blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills)

<comment><USER4> I've been seeing an uptick of anti-renewable sentiment, either coal or nuclear is probably doing a media buy at the moment.

So much of what we see in news outlets are driven by dedicated PR drives, and these dying industries are trying to hold on, or trying to unload stranded assets on the next biggest fool. (For example BHP announced their exit from coal: [https://companysavingexpert.co.uk/2020/08/19/bhp-to-exit- the...](https://companysavingexpert.co.uk/2020/08/19/bhp-to-exit-thermal-coal- mining-within-two-years/) )

<comment><USER5> Nuclear is low-carbon energy being killed in the US by cheap fracked natural gas. It's a low-carbon partner with wind and solar. Wouldn't make sense for the nuclear industry to attack renewables.

Attacking fracked gas would make more sense.

<comment><USER6> No the natural alliance right now is between gas and "renewables" because they're synergistic in that gas is the only technology that can paper wind/solar intermittency/variability today.

<comment><USER7> We have a very good synergy between nuclear and renewables in France, see:

\- [https://electricitymap.org](https://electricitymap.org)

\- [https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production- delectricit...](https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricite- par-filiere)

\- Illustrated example with real data: [https://twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1102620969808658432?...](https://twitter.com/tristankamin/status/1102620969808658432?s=21)

<comment><USER8> While it works I am not sure what the point of (wind/solar) renewables is when the grid is already low-carbon. My understanding is that it increases the cost of nuclear plants by reducing their load factor (since they have to reduce their output power to give way to renewables), but I don't see what we gain for it.

Maybe some additional usable capacity when coupled with reversible hydro?

<comment><USER4> France, like most other countries, has not been able to successfully build new nuclear, so there is no other option as their current fleet ages out. Renewables will be far cheaper than trying to have a second construction miracle.

<comment><USER6> There are no miracles in engineering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't know what they are writing about. PV wafer reclaim has been around for at least a decade, at least in China.

Reclaiming a cell is as easy as polishing off its surface layer, which contains most of defects, and resurfacing it.

A much more crude method just heats up the cell to the temperature where most defects from solar radiation disappear, but not hot enough for dopants to start diffusing more than they should, and then reselling it as a lower spec cell.

<comment><USER10> Your comment made me wonder something: how delicate are solar panels? Like, if a hailstorm hits a town with solar panels, will they be completely destroyed?

<comment><USER11> From a solar installer in Colorado: [https://blog.namastesolar.com/hail-solar- panels-how-much-hai...](https://blog.namastesolar.com/hail-solar-panels-how- much-hail-can-solar-panels-handle).

seems they're likely damaged by hail roughly the size of a golf ball, but in the link above they point to an example where 2.75in diameter hail did little damage to panels at NREL.

<comment><USER12> It's "size of golfball" hail that makes me wonder if shielding the solar panel with 40mm wire mesh (often called chicken wire) is worth the solar efficiency loss.

One thing about Climate Change is: more energy in the system means worse extreme events, and the less extreme events more often. But when is the cut over point?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While this issue is worth exploring and talking about from a policy and science perspective it's disappointing that the article doesn't mention that solar e-waste is still considerably less harmful, and much smaller in scale than fossil fuel waste.

I sent this to a friend of mine who is an energy expert who reminded me about how terrible coal ash is: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Dan_River_coal_ash_spil...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Dan_River_coal_ash_spill)

<comment><USER5> A more interesting comparison, moving forward, in my mind, is with nuclear waste. Solar and nuclear both make low carbon electricity and prevent air pollution heath impacts of combustion. Yet most people oppose nuclear because of the waste products.

Here we have to compare solar making large amounts of moderately toxic waste from solar that remains toxic forever vs. nuclear making very small amounts of extremely toxic waste that becomes less toxic over time. Clearly more people dislike nuclear waste, but the E=MC² thing makes it so small that it can be completely internalized.

At the very least, it is valuable to talk about the negative externalities of decarbonizing at scale with solar as we debate the details of the clean energy transition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was under the impression that - baring physical damage - solar panels won't just stop working one day as the article implies, but they merely decrease in efficiency over time. Most solar panels today come with a manufacturer's guarantee that after 25 years, they will still be 80-something percent efficient.

At this point they would have paid for themselves over many times, and would now be generating free electricity, so for most installations there is little point in replacing them.

<comment><USER15> The last time I had an estimate for solar, the break-even was 18 years, so it made no sense whatsoever, financially speaking.

When you mention after 25 years they would have paid for themselves many times over, based on what criteria? I'd love to revisit this topic -- power costs in Florida are very high.

Edit: Just curious on why the downvotes? Not enough context? Negative sentiment? (not intended, genuinely curious about revisiting solar)

<comment><USER16> > I'd love to revisit this topic -- power costs in Florida are very high.

Power /bills/ may be very high (due to hot/humid climate necessitating extensive air conditioning). But a quick google shows me power /rates/ in FL are around $0.11 per kWh - which is very low on a global scale (and on the low end of average for the US[1]). Solar costs are coming down on a per-kW basis, so the per-kWh electricity cost is the one you need to compare to find when it breaks even.

[1] [https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by- state/](https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/)

<comment><USER17> This is my problem; my power is ~7.5¢/kWh; my walls are 12" thick (6x2 studs + drywall + facade), so my electric bill only runs about 120$/month, averaged. I have a 68$/month fixed flat hookup fee. That means I've got to get solar to "pay out" at ~52$/month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > A solar panel is essentially an electronic sandwich. The filling is a thin > layer of crystalline silicon cells, which are insulated and protected from > the elements on both sides by sheets of polymers and glass. It's all held > together in an aluminum frame. On the back of the panel, a junction box > contains copper wiring that channels electricity away as it's being > generated.

None of this sounds like much of a problem in a landfill. I guess some panels might use lead-based solder, but I would be shocked if it's more than a handful.

If it's not economical to recycle them, why _shouldn't_ they go in a landfill?

<comment><USER5> One reason is that you end up using a lot of raw materials if you aren't recycling when you build out solar electricity at a scale that matters for deeply decarbonizing the world.

<comment><USER18> In that case, recycling them should be a money saver, and people should do it for economic reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just remember that the greenest kilowatt hour is the kilowatt hour never produced.

<comment><USER20> Of those produced, statistically, nuclear is both cleanest and safest [1]

[1] [https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of- energy](https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy)

<comment><USER21> Yeah, but go tell the people in Fukushima.

And keep in mind that Japanese people are usually religiously meticulous about work, procedures and safety.

And still remains the problem of radioactive toxic waste.

Edit: I don't want to underplay your comment, but it's important to understand that when dealing with nuclear power all it takes is one major fuck-up to completely screw a whole region.

<comment><USER22> They meticulously put the standby generators in the basement, where they got flooded out.

<comment><USER5> The plant was designed for Kansas, where they'd be safe in the basement from tornados. But in Japan they should have been moved to higher ground.

<comment><USER23> Whole new application of _" Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> " Voluntary, industry-led recycling efforts are limited in scope."

Did anyone else chuckle when they saw this?

Also, what will happen to the poor people who cannot detach from the grid? As the amount of people using solar increases, I am sure the costs for those who can't afford solar will increase, right? Also, as solar increases, if it does, the already horrible grid infrastructure will suffer even more so as the utility providers face even less financial incentive to provide upkeep.

<comment><USER25> I am taking a hunch here, but I imagine that it is cheaper for you to provide energy to the grid (once the grid is already established) than for the power companies to provide energy to the grid. IIRC, your unused power you generate goes back into the grid correct?

<comment><USER26> The argument they are making is one that you will see a lot in these types of discussions. As renewable energy becomes cheaper and easier to add to individual houses, the supply of cheap energy combined with the decrease in energy demand from wealthy households will drive down energy prices and cut into the operating margins of power companies.

If too many people start producing power and not buying it themselves, power companies would not be able to afford maintaining the power grid as effectively or would have to increase prices for people who can't supply their own power.

Basically the argument is that a movement for those who can afford to be self- sufficient to do so ends up being a tax on those who can't afford to.

There is some level of merit to this argument and if we transition to a heavily renewables based energy system, we will likely see this occur to some extent during the transitional period.

There are a handful of solutions to this problem but the easiest is to move maintenance of power infrastructure from the public utility to the government and implement a local tax to pay for the power grid. Power Utilities would still exist however instead of also maintaining the grid, they would just be responsible for producing power and supplying sufficient redundancy to minimise/eliminate brown- and black-outs.

With this solution, everybody shares the burden of maintaining the grid rather than just those who can't afford to be self-sufficient. Those who are able to be self-sufficient can feed back into the grid to help recuperate their expenses on their energy equipment as well as some of the tax they paid in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> You can properly dispose or recycle anything non-radioactive with enough energy, heat and oxygen. Soon this process will be powered by excess renewable energy.

Still less toxic than coal.

<comment><USER28> Anything organic.

Apply as much energy, heat and oxygen you want to mercury and it's still mercury.

<comment><USER29> You can bombard it with neutrons to produce (radioactive) gold, though.

[https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.60.473](https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.60.473) (1941)

<comment><USER27> Haha, was going to post this as well, but thought it was too snarky :)

So few people know that the alchemists ended up being correct. (they just didn't have enough energy at their disposal!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Cananyone explain the mechanism through which a solar panel dies or even loses efficiency ? I understand physical damage to the panel but how does a solar panel degrade ? Are stored solar panels losing efficiency or is it a result of an interaction with the solar/ultraviolet or some other radiation ? Is anyone working on solar panels that degrade less and last longer. One issue with solar panels right now I'd imagine is that even 25 years and the ROI are quite long periods of time for many Americans who don't plan on staying in their houses for that long and solar isn't mainstream enough that people appreciate the value it adds.

<comment><USER31> Solar cells themselves do loose efficiency very slowly (less than 1% per year for most modern monocrystaline silicon cells) due to defects collecting in the semiconductor material. It is the same reason that LEDs slowly loose power over time. Due to the extreme conditions in the semiconductor material (high electric fields, often moderate to high temperatures) the dopants can diffuse into places they do not belong, or cluster together both of which hurt the performance.

That said, most panels die before the cells themselves go bad due to mechanical failure of the cells (cracking, etc) or failures in the electrical wiring in the panel due to corrosion.

It is the same problem as with LED lighting. I have not seen a single LED bulb which lasted long enough for the actual semiconductor devices to age noticeably, but I have seen dozens of bulbs where thermal cycling caused the electrical contacts to the chip fail or the power supply capacitors have gone bad.

Also, due to the rapidly increasing efficiency and decreasing costs of solar cells, it can often be economically viable to replace your array with fresh cells just for the added power output you get. If you took cells form 20 years ago and replace them with current cells you can quadruple your output power for the same area!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is there a way to mass-disassemble panels and replace the cells? Panel sizes could have been long standardized. I used to buy slightly damaged 6x6 cells on eBay from the factory, so could this be the size template for the automated tooling and robotic maneuvering required to switch out the active material?

</comment><comment><USER33> The Stirling engine's time has finally come! :)

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

Not really, but it's a neat alternative for turning solar energy into mechanical power. Achievable (at grossly inefficient power outputs) by the hobbyist without expensive tools or nasty chemicals. Much easier to recycle at the end of a system's useful life.

</comment><comment><USER34> Uh aren't solar panels mostly glass and silicon? The article says silicon is "valuable" for recycling. It's not. It's sand, it's worthless.

Glass and silicon are both rocks. Putting them back into the ground isn't going to hurt anything

<comment><USER35> The problem is the toxic chemicals in between the glass. Are we going to bury the panes as deep as we dug them up? Or will they be near the surface, creating a layer of toxicity for future generations?

<comment><USER36> Which chemicals are those?

<comment><USER35> TBH I'm just taking this and various article'a word that they exist.

<comment><USER36> Don't be a conduit for misinformation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Solar panels still use leaded solder?

<comment><USER38> Not the ones manufactured today, but the ones on the article are 30 or 40 years old, so many of those might have had leaded solder.

<comment><USER39> Which is good news, because thanks to the exponential growth of solar, panels manufactured in the bad old days may as well not exist.

The vast majority of solar panels were manufactured in the last ten years: they are largely free of toxic atoms, and built to a higher standard of power delivery and reliability.

In short, the article is clickbait.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wonder how many solar panels + storage you need versus your average nuclear plant

</comment><comment><USER41> The word _toxic_ has become a great indicator for bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER42> I bring this up every time solar panels are talked about as some god's gift to energy production. Nobody wants to talk about the insane amounts of e-waste it brings. Not to mention they're constantly improving so people throw out perfectly panels for new ones.

I'm pro solar but it does have a few downsides that we shouldn't ignore.

</comment><comment><USER43> That's not the only "clean" energy that's hard to keep for long with low costs:

Wind Turbine Blades Can't Be Recycled, So They're Piling Up in Landfills

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind- turb...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine- blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills)

<comment><USER44> So non-toxic waste is somehow a catastrophe compared to all of the other nonrecycalbe garbage already being produced? That is a blatantly stricter standard than literally anything else is held to.

<comment><USER36> I"m pretty sure one could cut those expired turbine blades into short pieces if they were too large.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Wind turbines also suffer from a similar problem. After some number of years, they just get landfilled. See [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind- turb...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine- blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills) or [https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-06/wind- turbi...](https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-06/wind-turbine- blades) for more on that.

Similar concerns were raised around solar panels by Michael Moore in a recent documentary, which claimed that the total lifetime cost of a solar-powered society makes these alternative green technologies not really green. See [https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore- right-8603f...](https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore- right-8603f982d049) and [https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore- right-part-...](https://medium.com/@tejasgole67/is-michael-moore-right-part- ii-84f75e5d9343) for a discussion around that.

Ultimately there may be no getting around the fact that we simply need to reduce demand. And reducing demand, if we want to preserve our quality of life, likely means population control.

<comment><USER5> The Moore Documentary got lots of flack but does raise some pretty good points, particularly about combustion of biofuel.

You can see the whole thing here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE)

I disagree with the movie's conclusion, which seems identical to yours. We can use tech to keep quality of life high by using responsible and sustainable energy systems like nuclear/wind/solar/hydro.

PoTH hardly even mentioned nuclear, which tears their whole "we must depopulate" narrative apart easily.</comment></comment>


The Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://www.hulu.com/watch/85122/the-entrepreneur This is a documentary about serial entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin, who introduced the Subaru and the Yugo the US. <comment><USER2> This was actually a good watch. It teaches entrepreneurs a few important lessons:

1- Don't waste time trying to raise capital unless the money is crucial to your survival.

2- Persistence is almost the single most important quality of successful entrepreneurs.

3- A deal is never truly a deal even if it is on paper. Sometimes the guys across the table will make it so difficult you wish you never signed a deal with them.

4- If a partner cannot make his mind in x days, move forward and when they come back, respectfully turned them down.

5- (Repeating 2) Never ever quit. "Be water" and adapt to the market.

<comment><USER3> While I agreed it was a good watch, instead I found it taught me what not to do and what to watchout for.

What struck me was how he often talks about the future as the obvious, when in fact, he doesn't know. "Everyone knows that Chinese cars are going to flood the US market". I guess that's what some call entrepreneurial optimism or being a visionary, but to not admit that your vision won't pan out doesn't win me over.

There were a couple scenes of him saying, it's his way, or the highway. Table pounding, everyone's-an-asshole, I make the final decision. In fact, they start off arguing about the logo. That doesn't inspire any sense of leadership, and doesn't make me want to help him achieve his vision.

It struck me also that his company didn't make anything. So when a single deal fell through, they went under as well.

He does have good qualities, like persistence and making arguments for how a deal might benefit the other side, but in the end, it seemed like he'd be a person really hard to work for and with. Life's too short to deal with that, and there are plenty of other entrepreneurs.

<comment><USER2> I agree. They do not necessarily talk about the making of a company, essentially because there was no company. Only people trying to raise money for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any links for those outside of the US?

<comment><USER5> I'm using a US proxy - in China - and somehow Hulu is still blocking me: 'Sorry, we are unable to stream this video. Please check your internet connection and try again.' How does Hulu know?

<comment><USER6> Flash connects to the RTMP server directly unless you firewall it correctly and thus can do the geolocation there.

<comment><USER5> Ah, so I need to re-route another port. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> " _We're sorry. Currently our video library can only be streamed in the United States._ "

I hate Hulu.

<comment><USER8> Spotify is the same way... but US users cant use it. :-(

"Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions we are not yet available in your country. We understand that you are currently in United States"

<comment><USER9> I'd rather have Hulu then Spotify!

I have YouTube and million other sites for music.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm in the middle of this still, but it's a pretty interesting look at Malcolm Bricklin, who brought the Subaru and the Yugo to the USA. He's at retirement age, working on his latest venture.

</comment><comment><USER10> Great movie. It is so sad to watch the old man bumble with the Chinese, though. He is incredibly clueless about how they do business. The Chinese take their time, and even a successful deal with the Chinese rarely results in a signed contract.

I haven't finished it yet, but the only thing that could possibly save him with the Chinese is his age.

<comment><USER10> Real quickly I just want to say I hope this comment didn't sound ageist. I didn't mean that he is less talented because he is old, only that I really wondered if he understood a post-WWII China instead of modern China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those that are interested, I found the Wall Street series on hulu to be absolutely captivating.

<http://www.hulu.com/wall-street-warriors>

</comment><comment><USER12> Superbly inspiring movie. Seeing Malcolm in action against impossible odds time and time again has only raised my already high opinion of him.

</comment><comment><USER13> Outside of the USA you can watch it using this tool: <http://hotspotshield.com/>

<comment><USER14> I've just tried via this and it didn't work. The message is that "based on the IP address we notice you are trying to access Hulu via an anonymous proxy...". Any other ideas? Anyone seen this film anywhere else?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This guy seems to have a knack for crappy little cars:

1965 - Started selling the Subaru 360, which was named most unsafe car in America. Then was selling Subaru franchises(back then Subaru was worse than Daewoo)

1970s - Started his own sports car company, that had horrible sales and was forced to close.

1980s- Started selling Fiats(crap in the 80s).

1980s- Started selling Yugos. And we all know how great they were.

</comment><comment><USER16> Exciting, and real life stuff... thanks, great view.</comment>


The BBC asked us to look into a range of IoT products - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/cybergibbons/status/1176419262325501953 <comment><USER2> That didn't take all that long.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21303108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21303108)</comment>


New Best Encryption? - <AUTHOR> http://mansioncontrol.co.uk/DyNAcrypt.html

<comment><USER2> Oh, please... It's a secret algorithm that's going to be patented, and they're courting investment money. It was apparently designed by programmers. (But not to worry, it has "extremely special mathematical properties, that have surprisingly remained non-invented until recently, and therefore undocumented anywhere")

Can someone please spike this?

<comment><AUTHOR> ahazred8ta-what is wrong with it?</comment></comment>


10 things the iPhone Siri will help you get instead of an abortion - <AUTHOR> http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/11/29/10-things-the-iphone-siri-will-help-you-get-instead-of-an-abortion/

<comment><USER2> I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that Steve Jobs was adopted as opposed to aborted...</comment>


Ask HN: Issue bounties for GitHub projects? - <AUTHOR> One of the largest motivations for users to donate to open-source projects is for their funds to be used directly for features that benefit them. Is there a service that allows users to "pledge" an amount of money for particular GitHub issues that are cashed out upon marking them solved? <comment><USER2> There is a project I have contributed to that uses Open Collective for that: [https://opencollective.com](https://opencollective.com)

You can see how the bounties are labeled here: [https://github.com/evhub/coconut/issues](https://github.com/evhub/coconut/issues)

When you complete the PR for the issue, you then fill out a form with Open Collective and they transfer you the money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, looks pretty relevant to what I'm looking for. I'll take a look.</comment></comment>


Render Hell 1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://simonschreibt.de/gat/renderhell/
<comment><USER2> None of the videos work, and most of the images are broken.

Both of those things are kinda important in an article about _graphics programming_

<comment><USER3> The source webm and mp4 files are all returning with status 403. I sent an email to the author to let him know about the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Odd. They were working for me right up to when I posted this.

<comment><USER4> And the robots.txt blocks everything, so the Internet Archive refuses to archive it.

      User-agent: *
      Disallow: /

<comment><USER5> That's the weirdest thing I've seen. I can understand it if you're sharing private things, but why would you do that with your public website?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A collection of books, talks, and papers on security engineering - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/veeral-patel/learn-security-engineering <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I'm very interested in two things: thinking about new types of security tools and studying how different systems, especially those that are not computer related, are secured.

This repo is for people who also fall into the second camp and are curious about how prisons are secured, how museums are secured, etc. And the techniques used to do this systematically -- kill chains, failure analysis, and so on.

Happy to hear your feedback, and sorry if it's a bit disorganized!

<comment><USER2> Created an issue about a ToC, as it would be helpful when looking for things in that list.

But looks really good, thanks for creating and sharing it.

I like reading post mortem posts about security incidents too. There's a repo in GitHub that I follow: [https://github.com/danluu/post- mortems](https://github.com/danluu/post-mortems)

A great source for what to do, what to avoid, etc. Not only for security.

<comment><USER3> So many config failures!

As an aside -- do you know of any good forensics / incident response books/resources for learning the fundamentals?

Seen some books/courses but they're often the "download this open source library and run these commands" ilk.

Spotted this, but no reviews:

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/183864900X/](https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/183864900X/)

<comment><AUTHOR> check out Kevin Mandia's book!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a new security engineer, thank you! I also believe security engineering is not just abiutbweb apps but applies to everything. So far the things I've learned have opened my eyes to a lot of things, such as seeing someone share a Google doc with history enabled (could possibly leak information from a previous revision) to sharing the least amount of information as necessary in my interactions.

All I need is to get a yubi key now!

</comment><comment><USER3> That Adam Shostack Threat Modelling book is top knotch.

Nice collection. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER5> for small values of "largest"</comment>