Next-generation of GPS satellites are headed to space - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-12-next-generation-gps-satellites-space.html <comment><USER2> Also of note is Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System[0], which finished placing its 4 satellites in October 2017. These provide GPS coverage from near-vertical angles over Japan at all times, giving accurate location fixes despite Tokyo's deep urban canyons. The geosync orbits designed for this are pretty cool.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi- Zenith_Satellite_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi- Zenith_Satellite_System)

<comment><USER3> Interesting to see they're using molniya orbits but for a very different purpose than the Russian telecom, military comms and broadcast satellites which most commonly use them.

<comment><USER4> It's not really that different of a purpose. You want at least one satellite visible in the sky, not on the horizon, nearly overhead. A highly elliptical geo tundra orbit gives you that overhead pass that a normal geostationary orbit can't give you. US Satellite radio (like Sirius) uses a tundra orbit with multiple satellites to cover the US and some parts of Canada and Mexico. You get max overhead time over the US with at least one satellite at all times so the connection is always good unless things on the ground interfere. Japan is doing the exact same thing as everyone else here.

<comment><USER5> Sirius XM is now geo only.

<comment><USER4> Makes sense, those satellites are well past their scheduled lifespan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a Tokyo dweller, I'm also quite excited about the QZSS system which has a constellation of 4 satellites one of which is always in a near zenith position and provides a GPS signal even amidst the highest skyscrapers.

<comment><USER7> The thing is... One satellite isn't enough to get a position fix... You need at least 4 (or 3 if you want a very rough position fix and are happy to assume your altitude = ground level)

So effectively, this QZSS system provides 1 extra satellite over what GPS would normally have visible - which is helpful, but really just an incremental improvement.

<comment><USER4> QZSS adds one geosynchronous and three tundra orbit satellites so depending on where you are in the city, you could be seeing two or more QZSS satellites. It's not going to replace GPS but its going to help with getting a quicker location solution than not having it.

Something where you have beacons on every major intersection would be a better step for a city to introduce. The beacons would just be sending compatible messages so there is no need for additional hardware. If the roads are straight enough, you could see multiple beacons plus whatever satellite is overhead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In a few years many GNSS (Galileo, BeiDou, GLONASS) will update (or complete) their fleet and software, according to the respective schedules. So consumer electronics that can work with all of them will increase location precision and accuracy drastically.

<comment><USER9> My work involves software testing consumer electronics with GPS and I always find it amusing when the requirement comes up that the devices should not be capable of accurately tracking position when traveling at 1200 mph.

I'm curious if Galileo will still have this limitation as I assume the purpose is not to be able to jerry rig long range missiles.

<comment><USER10> You are correct that the original intention of this (called the CoCom limit [1]) was to prevent use in ICBMs. The specific regulation was originally implemented to prevent GPS receivers with that capability to end up in communist countries during the cold war.

However, with the proliferation of small satellites and cubesats the CoCom rules are no longer really enforced. Many commercial GPS receivers still have them, but the regulations are different now.

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

<comment><USER11> I would not say the cocom limits aren't enforced, any exportable GPS receiver is required to have the cocom limits and needs a special license to unlock under EAR regulations. This means that anyone building a cubesat and using a commercial receiver has had to specifically get that exception.

<comment><USER10> You are correct, I did not mean to say that there are no more regulations on export of GPS receivers. Yes you still have to obtain an EAR license for a GPS receiver capable of tracking at > 600 m/s. But the specific CoCom limits are at least relaxed since they specified that the GPS receiver will stop functioning if velocity is > 1000 knots or the altitude is computed to be above 18,000 meters. The latter part was restricting operation of high altitude balloons which is why I believe there is only a restriction on the velocity and not altitude now.

Sorry for the mixed units, but that is the actual wording from original CoCom, for reference: 600 m/s = 1342 mph 1000 knots = 1150 mph

<comment><USER12> >The latter part was restricting operation of high altitude balloons which is why I believe there is only a restriction on the velocity and not altitude now.

A group of friends and I did a ~90,000' balloon launch on the "cheap". We used a consumer handheld GPS unit that reported it's location every 10 minutes to a server we could keep an eye on. We suffered through the issue of altitude limitations as well, but it was still better than nothing. Learned a lot of stuff from that project. A big take away was using a mobile version of Google Maps when using Lat/Long coordinates is not very accurate, as it seemed to always want to put the location close to a road. When using the same coords in the desktop version of Google Maps satellite view, the Maps' pin dropped to within 3 feet of where the payload had landed. Using the mobile version, we wandered around in the wilderness for an embarrassingly long amount of time before I got fed up with it and though there must be a better way. Using the desktop location, we were able too pretty much walk up directly to the payload.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Slightly off topic, but is there any research going on regarding how to manage all the satellites being pushed into orbit? What happens when these things start to collide with other satellites or other trash accumulating in orbit? Is there a practical limit to what we can throw up into orbit before we start to see some adverse consequences?

<comment><USER14> It's more regulation than research. The idea of a Kessler cascade (where debris collides with a satellite, causing more debris, causing more collisions) is well known, and there is a lot of work to avoid it.

This means everything from eliminating things that might be jettisoned from rockets (like the despin weights on the upper stage of the Delta II), to deorbiting rocket boosters, to designing stages and satellites to fail safely without causing debris.

One of the more interesting things is the design for SpaceX's new Starlink satellites, which will be in a low enough orbit that they will deorbit within a few years if one fails. (If not, they can boost themselves into higher orbits.)

The other thing that helps is that there are only 43,864 objects large enough to track ever launched, and Only about 18,000 of them are still up there. While that seems like alot, that's the number of people at a baseball game, spread out over an area larger than the surface of the earth. (And even larger in volume.)

[https://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/master.php](https://celestrak.com/NORAD/elements/master.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> So, I worked for six months as a subcontractor on the Raytheon GPS OCX project, but only the unclassified stuff.

We helped them take their datacenter deployments from a matter of months to a matter of hours -- using Chef. Once it's all powered and racked and stacked, we got the base OS plus the core apps and their configurations deployed very quickly. Towards the very end of the time I was there, we did a demo on a virtual datacenter that literally took just about three hours to execute from start to finish.

Definitely one of the projects that I am proudest of working on.

One of the things I heard many times while I was in Colorado was that the Lockheed guys got the easy job -- all they had to do was design and launch new birds.

The Raytheon guys said that they had gotten the hard job, because they had to handle all ground control operations for the current fleet of satellites, plus all the ground control operations for the new fleet of satellites.

And the Raytheon guys were pretty proud of that fact.

</comment><comment><USER16> > But some of their most highly touted features will not be fully available > until 2022 or later because of problems in a companion program to develop a > new ground control system for the satellites, government auditors said.

Hey, maybe they need AWS GroundStation! =)

</comment><comment><USER17> Can anyone shed some light on how this new setup will be more difficult to jam?

<comment><USER18> 1\. Adds a new directional 'spot beam' that can provide a 20dB signal boost (100x power boost) in a target region several hundred kilometres in diameter.

2\. A new(-ish) military signal, the 'M Code', which is present on some but not all satellites from Block II. It has a number of features including [1]:

* Secretive design.

* Much wider bandwidth than civilian C/A code, meaning wideband jamming needs more energy.

* Power distribution different to the civilian C/A code, and unlike the older P(Y) code doesn't need the receiver to acquire the C/A code first, so less impacted if someone jams the civilian C/A code.

* A more modern spread-spectrum design (from 2000 rather than 1973) that provides better noise immunity and forward error correction, and hence better jamming immunity.

* The parts of the spread-spectrum design that rely on the transmitter and receiver having a common source of pseudorandom data use more modern cryptography.

[1] [https://www.mitre.org/sites/default/files/pdf/betz_overview....](https://www.mitre.org/sites/default/files/pdf/betz_overview.pdf)

<comment><USER19> Interesting that the spot beam is not phased array, but a parabolic dish on the satellite body.

<comment><USER20> GPS signals are sufficiently low frequency that a phased array would need to be fairly large. Each antenna in the array would need to be around 5cm and you'd need quite a few of them on each axis. Totally doable but someone probably decided a dish was easier/cheaper than a big board of antennas or waveguides and associated circuitry. Phased array would be nice to have though, since if the array was large enough you could have multiple beams produced by different parts of the array and cover more/multiple areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How many satellites will be needed to be operational? What's chips are comparable with the new bands? I know that there is currently only one phone with the Motorola chip, the Huawei P20 Pro.

How long until the satellite launches will it be operational after the tests? I couldn't seem to find any of this information anywhere. Just basic press releases.

<comment><USER22> The only new signal (which I think isn't actually on a new band, it uses the same frequency as an existing signal) won't be online until 2020something when the new ground station software is ready. It may be a while before cell phones ship with chips that actually use the new signal. The L5 signal has been broadcast since 2010 and I think it took until this year for the first phones to ship with support for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hopefully the week field is longer than 10 bits. That was a headache.

<comment><USER24> Erm, they aren't going to change the nav data.

<comment><USER25> Untrue. There's a newer format for NAV data -- CNAV. It's currently broadcast on the L2 and L5 bands, and does indeed include a larger week number field -- 13 bits to be exact.

<comment><USER24> Well, yes, that's true. But my point was that they aren't going to change the legacy nav data structure.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bing considers paying sites to delist themselves from Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/microsoft-news-corp-reportedly-consider-web-pact-over-google-2009-11-22 <comment><USER2> It looks to me like a PUBLISHER was quoted as saying "puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them."

This means publishers appear to be using some leverage with search engines, forcing them into the position of possibly having to purchase the right to index their content.

This is kind-of what Twitter is doing with bing, right? Imagine if WebMD started doing this, followed by others.

We'd have to go to Bing for some content, Google for other content, and there would be a PirateSearchBay that just indexed everything that people would be forced to use.

<comment><USER3> [This means publishers appear to be using some leverage with search engines, forcing them into the position of possibly having to purchase the right to index their content.]

Yes, that's correct, I think. They (or at least Murdoch) wants to do that. Most of the folks here seems to defend Google, and some of their points are valid, but let's try to look at the issue from the publishers point of view. As it is now, Google just index their content, make a good money out of it, and then give back only a link to that content. And when publisher wants money for the indexing right, Google just says to them: "Shut up, be happy that you've got a free link from us." But... why should the publisher agree with that? They have a full right to ask money for indexing their content.

Now, I think this will be interesting. So far, Internet users have a perception that "there is everything in Google", and it's also Google's core mission, to index all of the worlds information. But it seems everyone just supposed Google should have a right to index everything for free, so now everyone seems surprised that it's not so.

But, it is not Murdoch who drilled a hole to Google's strategy, it was Twitter. Google admitted they are willing to pay for indexing rights, so Murdoch demands the same. I am really curious to see what Google will do about it.

<comment><USER4> _They have a full right to ask money for indexing their content._

Seriously?

A Dewey Decimal catalogue system should pay money for listing a book?

The White Pages should pay me for including my phone number?

People _pay to get entries in the Yellow Pages_ , not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "I'll pay you not to use the competitor that possibly brings you more than half of your discoveries, new customers, and revenue."

Sounds like a sound business model to me. </sarcasm>

On a more serious note, I'm actually afraid of the collective ignorance of most computer users today that Microsoft _could_ win out with manipulative business practices like this - most internet users are layman and don't understand the integrity issues of whats going on here.

It starts with the developers - we are the ones that create the software that start the market that feed the companies that buy into Microsoft's bull. Vote by code. Stand by it.

Seriously, stories like this make me sick to my stomach. I don't post such bold statements here usually because of the holes that could be punched in my statements by downvoters but there's absolutely no integrity in their business model.

Blech.

<comment><USER6> I think you're being a bit dramatic here. Whats the difference between this and Playstation paying for Grand Theft Auto's exclusivity, or Bing and Google paying for access to Twitter's content while small engines like DuckDuckGo go without? Or the NFL network only allowing coverage of most football games on DirecTV/Dish?

I'm not judging the business model's merits, but selling exclusive access to content is nothing new.

 _"It starts with the developers - we are the ones that create the software that start the market that feed the companies that buy into Microsoft's bull. Vote by code. Stand by it."_

You're confusing Microsoft the software company with Microsoft the advertising company. This has absolutely nothing to do with developers.

<comment><USER7> _I think you're being a bit dramatic here. Whats the difference between this and Playstation paying for Grand Theft Auto's exclusivity, or Bing and Google paying for access to Twitter's content while small engines like DuckDuckGo go without? Or the NFL network only allowing coverage of most football games on DirecTV/Dish?

I'm not judging the business model's merits, but selling exclusive access to content is nothing new._

I'm coming at this from a completely different angle, which is entirely unfair (:P), but the big difference is that moving a closed-source, inherently- system-dependent piece of software onto another system against the will of the original developers is notably non-trivial, while ignoring a robots.txt file is a fairly straightforward exercise.

If this would-be "exclusivity" comes to pass, it won't last for very long. Even if above-board companies like Microsoft and Google continue to play by the nominal rules, something vaguely similar to the Pirate Bay is bound to pop up eventually, especially when such a massive, glaring hole in the market is present. I mean, what good is a search engine that doesn't even search properly?

<comment><USER8> A site could start blocking certain IPs and user agents as well if need be to prevent being indexed, I'm sure there's was for crawlers to get around it but a site could certainly make it hard to index there content.

<comment><USER9> Then you could start sending requests via proxies ... and sooner or later the site would start blocking legitimate users.

Either way, the majority of all new traffic comes from Google right now, and if a website has exclusivity for Bing, it would surely lose a lot visits. And it's definitely not worth it unless Microsoft pays really well for this privilege ... and I'm not sure they can do that, even if they are Microsoft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What would stop the de-listed sites from appearing in Google search results via syndication/aggregation on blogs and other sites? Seems like they would be putting themselves in a weaker position by letting other sites capture the click-trhough traffic and apply their own spin to the content. In how many cases would the searcher be satisfied with the syndicated/aggregated summary and never click-through? They would have to insist Google de-list sites that link to the content for this to make any sense.

<comment><USER3> As I understand it, Fox's ultimate goal is not to de-list themselves from the Google, but to force Google to pay them for indexing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if this strategy is really intended to gain a foothold against Google in search, or if they're trying to do something a bit more clever.

Google is the number one search engine, but grew into that position while the web was growing, during a period when people went "on the internet" to find information, rather than to any specific site, and a substantial proportion of users were new to the internet altogether.

Now that the web has reached a higher level of maturity and become a tool of mainstream, day-to-day life, people have begun to view many sites as destinations in themselves.

Look at sites like Wikipedia, eBay, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc. They are very collaborative, and function like platforms, but unlike Google's core business, people visit these sites specifically because of the content they host, rather than as a means to explore the wider internet. Add to that the increasing presence of traditional media content, e.g. Hulu, that have been able to leverage conventional marketing to drive users to their sites.

Most of these sites are likely no longer heavily dependent on search to attract users. These sites may be willing to delist from Google in exchange for a direct revenue stream. If they do, it will diminish the value of not just Google, but of web search in general.

This may be a strategy to fragment search as a primary driver of web traffic, and create an incumbent advantage for content providers and web services with high traditional brand awareness, such as its own, at the expense of startups which continue to rely on search to build their user base.

</comment><comment><USER12> Let's say News Corp and Microsoft did this. Let's also assume that News Corp did other things to monetize their data, such as putting it behind a paywall, preventing bloggers from quoting large sections of articles, if the Tories win the British election getting them to shut down the BBC's news website, etc.

I think this could be an enormous opportunity for Google. They could create their own news service (or maybe buy one). They could integrate it with Google Ads, Reader, allow commenting social bookmarking, etc done in an open way to get as much external take-up of the information as possible, and maybe integrate it with Google Maps so that people could have a personalised local news service.

The cost of this? BBC News has an annual budget of £350 million, so something in that area.

If a lot of Google's competitors are voluntarily de-listing themseves from the open internet, everyone would flock to Google's option.

<comment><USER13> Google doesn't even have to build a news research organization. there are enough people who see the opportunity and offer copies of news, and rephrased news, given the ad revenue that would become availble. it just has to make few changes to it's search engines, expose data from their toolbars/queries on popular news articles/subjects , and let the newspapers fight with tons of sites offering their content, or very similar contents for free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This isn't going to be good for the end user at all. Right now for the most part search engines can focus on improving results. This will just degrade results by fragmenting them, and detract from efforts to improve results.

If there's any sign that Bing is inferior to Google it's that Bing has to artificially decrease the value of Google.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is there any reason Google can't just index it anyway?

<comment><USER16> A copyright lawsuit? Remember that a search engine ultimately functions at the sufferance of copyright owners. If push comes to shove, the engine is obligated to stop storing and serving data they do not own.

When Google was ascendant, the threat of a delist was enough to cow copyright owners into submission (see: news orgs vs Google News, Belgium vs Google, etc). Now, well, who knows?

That said I think this is a greedy and dangerous move on Microsoft's part, and I'm sure this is what Murdoch was alluding to a couple of weeks ago. This could kill the spirit of 'net neutrality for good if they simply move the battle to different layer of the stack.

On the other hand, I like writing metasearchers, so it might be a net win for me. :)

<comment><USER15> Are you sure that indexing is a copyright violation? You aren't reproducing the text in full and it seems like excerpts would be part of fair use. Do you have a source?

<comment><USER16> I depends on the country but yes, and yes.

<http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2005/09/68928>

[http://cci.edu.au/publications/search-engine-liability- copyr...](http://cci.edu.au/publications/search-engine-liability-copyright- infringement)

Parker v Yahoo takes the view that putting content online is implicitly allowing indexing. By the same logic, explicitly blocking an engine would mean the opposite.

[http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2008/10/search_engine_c...](http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2008/10/search_engine_c.htm)

<comment><USER15> The first link is about scanning, storing, and making available entire books. The last is about the caching ability.

The second one includes some great information, but if you read about the specific cases (starting on page 6) you can see it is still very much up for debate. Actually it seems that the courts have ruled in Google's favor almost every time, and most of these are for caching and not indexing.

<comment><USER16> You are right that search engines have made some advances in the courts in recent years, but the bases for their wins are thin and not the same in all countries. Barring legal action a site can block Google's known IPs entirely, forcing a search engine to either give up or use subterfuges that are probably not practical for a large public company to use.

If a site really really wants to block a particular engine run by a for-profit company, or make it impractical (either legally or technically) they can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You can all thank twitter for that. They only give access to their feed to a few selected buddy companies. It was just a matter of time until other sites follow and try to cash out on this!

</comment><comment><USER18> So it seems like Bing gotten the idea from Jason Calacanis's How To Kill Google

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTe15DEWp30>

Interesting development indeed.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is like paying a candidate for _not_ contesting in elections aka pagerank.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is Microsoft going to drink their own Kool-aid and delist Bing?

</comment><comment><USER21> If Microsoft needs to pay user to delete them from google in order to gain new users, how can I think of any quality from them? This sounds more like manipulation to me.

<comment><USER22> sounds more like desperation to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> [http://www.theonion.com/content/video/in_the_know_should_the...](http://www.theonion.com/content/video/in_the_know_should_the_government)

</comment><comment><USER24> Intresting development. I would have never imagined this happening. In the long run this will impact the profitability of search engines.

</comment><comment><USER25> How much money are we even talking about? And I don't mean the offering to Fox, I mean how much money is Google making for searches for Fox news? My guess is that it would be very little money. What searches (besides porn) are the bulk of internet searches?

I don't think I have ever hit on a Fox web site in a web search, but then I am not living in the US.

</comment><comment><USER26> There is no way this could draw another antitrust lawsuit. No way.

</comment><comment><USER27> Google should preemptively stop indexing all News Corp sites.</comment>


The basics of reality distortion - <AUTHOR> http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/june/theBasicsOfRealityDistortion

<comment><USER2> I figure the CMU guys went backstage and vomited.

It's important to remember:

Steve wasn't that awesome a presenter, he was merely much better than the alternatives.

The Wall Street and blogosphere reaction to Keynotes was frequently negative. (iPad jokes...)

There was always a crap ton of annoying shit in WWDC keynotes including boring marketing pablum and sales stats, and the self-indulgent videos and awful Johnny Ive videos.

Johnny Ive designed Aqua too. Remember pinstripes?

Apple hasn't lost it. Or if it has, there's no evidence of it yet. Implying otherwise puts Winer on par with the rest of the "what earthshaking sector destroying products has Apple released lately" morons.

<comment><USER3> I actually thought the keynote was pretty compelling evidence that they definitely still have it. I don't remember another keynote where they announced so much new stuff at once. A lot of interesting stuff actually got completely lost in the shuffle--like iWork on iCloud.

<comment><USER4> "they announced so much new stuff at once"

There was only one thing you could buy, though: a slightly better MacBook air.

"Available today" is the genius of Apple keynotes. They get the wave of interest combined with instant gratification drive. People are watching at home waving their credit cards.

<comment><USER2> It's WWDC, and from that point of view we got a new iOS, a new Mac OS X, and new Macbook Airs. That's not bad by WWDC standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I watched the whole keynote video and I have to say, those kids from CMU were absolutely the worst part of it. Steve-o would have castrated them behind the stage after that. I'd be surprised if Tim ever invites college students on stage with him again.

I found the rest of the keynote was actually really impressive. Craig has great charisma. It's not the same as Job's charisma but it is good, much better than Tim who seems to lack it utterly.

Also, Dave, the active, transitive form of "effect" you want is "affect." As in, "...will not in any way _affect_ their ability..."

</comment><comment><USER5> Rather than "real reality versus distorted", probably a better way to think about it is to realize that everyone distorts reality differently. True, you can't lie to a compiler, but as far as I recall Jobs never suggested such a thing.

Plus, consider whether Jobs believed what was saying at any given point. Maybe the rant about browser features was said for effect for those within earshot, who knows. After Jobs came back, he talked about how the Apple community needed to let go of the idea that winning meant MS had to lose. Make your choices as to which one he meant (if any).

The racing cars thing sure was strange, though. No disagreement there. Pretty much everyone remarked on it.

<comment><USER6> You can't lie to a compiler, but you can present it with some demented truths to persuade it to do what you want.</comment></comment>


Life-Saving Device Could Transform the Medical Market in 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://wolfstreet.com/2017/01/17/life-saving-device-could-transform-the-medical-market-in-2017/ <comment><USER2> Pump-and-dump? Looking at their web site, I don't see a _single_ mention of any status on any clinical trials... in any country. Very odd for something that claims to ship this year.</comment>


Ask HN: How to build Android when you don't have 16GB of RAM/swap? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> A 16 GB Linode instance with 8 cores is $.25/hr.

You can install whatever OS you want, and use it to build whatever you need. A full 24 hr usage would cost you just $6.

If you do sign up, here is my affiliate link: [http://www.linode.com/?r=a17c3e6ca0d2c34f8db9cb4d59a0733e888...](http://www.linode.com/?r=a17c3e6ca0d2c34f8db9cb4d59a0733e888986a7)

See also:

Running a Custom Linux Distribution on a Linode: [https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom- kernels-d...](https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom-kernels- distros/running-a-custom-linux-distro-on-a-linode-vps)

and

[https://blog.linode.com/2015/06/16/linode-turns-12-heres- som...](https://blog.linode.com/2015/06/16/linode-turns-12-heres-some-kvm/)

KVM Linodes are, by default, paravirtualized, supporting the Virtio disk and network drivers. However, we also now support fully virtualized guests – which means you can run alternative operating systems like FreeBSD, BSD, Plan 9, or even Windows – using emulated hardware (PIIX IDE and e1000).

<comment><AUTHOR> This is cool! Now, doesn't transporting the built images through network cost you anything extra? I guess this is the case with AWS instances.

<comment><USER2> Are you referring to OS images? Sure, but only if you want to use something Linode do not provide.

See

[https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom- kernels-d...](https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom-kernels- distros/custom-distro-on-kvm-linode)

You can also take advantage of Linode's image storage: [https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/linode- images](https://www.linode.com/docs/platform/linode-images)

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I was asking about transferring the final Android images out of the VPS to my home machine.

I figured it - Transfer: 16 TB at [https://www.linode.com/pricing](https://www.linode.com/pricing)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Get more RAM and swap.</comment>


10 ways to screw up a web form and piss me off - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/09/01/10-ways-to-screw-up-a-web-form-and-piss-me-off

<comment><USER2> it's amazing, how many web forms still suck, as if the web was just invented yesterday.</comment>


Ask HN: Is anyone willing to defend the manifesto for data practices? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for people involved in the creation of the "manifesto for data practices"  (datapractices.org). I have major ethical concerns about the document as written, which I've outlined here:
https://towardsdatascience.com/an-ethical-code-cant-be-about-ethics-66acaea6f16f
At its core, the document's authors have committed the same kind of ethical breach that the document itself was designed to prevent: they've turned out a minimum viable product without fully considering the downstream harm the product could cause. The code rewards virtue-signaling - and nothing else - which allows individual data science practitioners to benefit from something other than actually doing their jobs well. That hurts the profession, and by extension, those who turn to the profession for solutions.
I've reached out to individuals in the Data for Democracy Slack channel where the document was drafted, and on Twitter when I see the document mentioned, but have not been able to find anyone willing to engage. Considering the bold claims with which the product is marketed ("the most effective, ethical, and modern approach to data teamwork"), and the values enshrined in the document itself ("invite fair criticism while promoting...open discussion of errors, risks, and unintended consequences of our work"), I find this frustrating and concerning.
I'm not trying to be a jerk here. I have an honest concern about the ethical soundness of the document. If the people who wrote it actually believe they've created a viable and meaningful ethical code, they should be willing and able to defend it.
So, again, if you know anyone involved, please share this with them. If you were involved in the document, please address my criticism. We can have that conversation right here in this thread, or if you're not willing to talk publicly, reach out on Twitter (@SchaunW) and I can get you my contact info.
EDIT: Here's something you can retweet to point people to this page: https://twitter.com/SchaunW/status/966768206114361344 . Or better yet, use your own words. <comment><AUTHOR> I've tried to flesh out some of the discussion of systemic risk here:

[https://hackernoon.com/can-we-be-honest-about-ethics- ecf5840...](https://hackernoon.com/can-we-be-honest-about-ethics-ecf5840b6e07)

I'm not questioning the documents' merits, or the intentions of those who wrote them. I'm concerned about the downside potential they introduce through systemic risk.

</comment><comment><USER2> Schaun you are welcome to stop by [https://slack.data.world](https://slack.data.world) and engage (and we definitely welcome engagement). This effort has been open for community review for several months (not just an MVP whipped together by a couple of "freds in a shed"). Please be warned however, simply linking to

[https://email@example.com/internet-argument-form- le...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/internet-argument-form- letter-7ff462e9ed69)

when someone disagrees with you will not be welcomed by anyone, any more than it was in the D4D slack. I look forward to having a productive conversation with you and sharing our broader view for this being a living document (and much more than _just_ a document). Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> A few things:

1\. I never claimed the MVP was just whipped together. I claimed it was an MVP. I'm aware that this has been worked on for months - I joined the Slack channel and tried to participate. You made a straw-man argument.

2\. The piece of my mine you linked to was never posted in the D4D slack. Or in any other community discussion. At least not by me. You resorted to an ad hominem attack on me personally instead of a principled attack on my position.

3\. You stress the fact of this being a living document as if that had something to do with my concerns. Living or not, it went into production without fully considering the downstream harm the product could cause. You avoided my actual argument with a red herring instead of engaging it.

Given all of the above, why should I accept that your invitation to participate in the data.world slack was extended in good faith?

If anything in my original post seemed to warrant the hostility of your response, then I beg your pardon for poor wording. But my argument still stands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> @shaunwheeler I posted this to HN earlier today, it might be of your interest, too: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16440425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16440425)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I filled out the survey.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Professional Hacker's Web Presence? - <AUTHOR> What sites are key for the professional hacker? What is your public face?<p>How do you evaluate a candidate professional for employ/contract/partner/supplier online? <comment><USER2> Edit: Ok, that's a little bit of a loaded question. Key to the professional hacker / public face: blog, github / google code, twitter and activity in forums (like HN).

How to evaluate a potential employee / contract.. the above, plus LinkedIn, CV / references, portfolio and social networks (if they aren't careful with permissions).

Supplier.. google, twitter (#good / #bad tweets) and credibility of web site.

Partner.. lot's of face-to-face time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Loaded? As in the answer is obvious because of how it was asked? I don't mean it that way.

I am curious if there is a combination of online attributes that will generally form a proxy for professionalism.

<comment><USER2> Sorry... I meant because the two sentences weren't entirely related.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not at all. I meant for it to ask a specific question. Your response hit all the notes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> depends on what kind of hacker. for a unix greybeard, it's all about the mailing lists. I'd be very suspicious of any applicant for a high level open- source *NIX job who doesn't show up on mailing lists.

<comment><USER4> Why, exactly?

<comment><USER5> I think because that's where the bulk of the community is for "greybeard unix open source" technology.

The generalised answer, I would think, is "be visible or at least present in the online community that exists around your chosen technologies".

(I didn't post the parent reply, but I did upvote it!)

<comment><USER4> I just disagree with the current mantra that you have to be so out there and in the public to be a worthwhile programmer. Many great programmers really aren't interested in tweeting every time they figure out what a hashtable is or whatever.I think it would be suspect if one was not aware of mailing lists and didn't at least lurk through them as a resources but as far as being an active participant, I think it's a bit over-hyped.

<comment><USER3> For many kinds of programming, you are right.

But if you hit a bug in the kernel, you are probably going to communicate with others (probably on a mailing list) in the process of fixing that bug. Same goes for hitting bugs in any other open-source part of UNIX.

I mean, sure, if you are writing an application, this only applies on the shared library bits. But I was specifically talking about advanced *NIX people... people who would be expected to deal with bugs in open-source products.

<comment><USER6> I'm a customer of yours. Out of curiosity, what mailing lists do you participate in?

<comment><USER3> xen-users, xen-devel, NANOG (oh man, I'm about 8K messages behind on that one) freeside-devel opensc-user dns-operations svlug lopsa-tech wear-hard centos- virt freebsd-xen netbsd-xen and a few others. If I'm working on an open source project, even in a minor way I usually subscribe to the list so I can lurk and ask questions in a more intelligent manner... For a while I was on the qemu mailing list (I think I even posted a stupid patch.) I'm leaving off the -announce lists I'm on to listen for security vulns because I don't post there, but they are _essential_ for any computer janitor. I'd recommend a search on "Luke S. Crawford" as most of these lists have public archives that are indexed by google and other popular search engines.

Actually, I'm sure you'll notice that I'm more active here than on any of those lists... this is probably a bad thing for my technical career development. (perhaps a good thing for my career development as a business person, though.)

Edit: just to be clear, I'm not saying you should ask an applicant what lists s/he is active on... by itself that won't give you that much information (well, except maybe that if a SysAdmin is not on a bunch of security announce lists, something is _very wrong_ but expecting them to remember this data without going through their mailbox is pretty unreasonable.) you should figure that out. maybe ask them what usernames they use on technical forms that they'd like to share? (note, as an employer, you have to be careful not to be creepy when you do this. Most of us have a 'professional identity' we don't mind sharing... but you don't want to look like the kind of employer who goes through employee's myspace profiles looking for drunken party pictures.)

<comment><USER7> Wear-hard! I didn't think that one would still be alive and kicking. It's not exactly what most employers would be looking for, I guess. I lost interest in wear-hard when I realized that smartphones pretty much did everything I needed a wearable to do and also got out of my way when I needed them to.

But all these mailing lists, they take serious _time_ . For me, they're really the first thing to go.

<comment><USER3> I was wondering if anyone was going to catch that one. Wear-hard, certainly, won't take up much of your time. It's just about dead these days, but every now and then someone talks about their rig which usually triggers a bunch of responses like yours. I don't think smartphones are quite there yet. Most of the way, though. A bluetooth twiddler would about do it.

Lists I can ignore (e.g. everything but the security -announce lists) go in their own folders to be ignored, most of the time. but they are a good substitute for HN, if you want a more technically oriented and less business oriented discussion, and they are essential if you really want to figure out a tough bug or add a new feature, so having a presence on the mailing lists (even if you don't read them every day) is really useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> github (or something similar, but only if used heavily) is the most paramount, I'd say.

By looking at a well-used github (/gitorius/bitbucket...) account you can evaluate someone's: \- communication skills \- code quality \- areas of expertise \- creativity \- ability to see things through to the end

<comment><USER9> Do you refrain from hiring anybody without a github account?

<comment><USER2> If it were an _employer's market_ you could probably get away with that.

<comment><USER9> Why would an employer want to do that?

A github account just makes it slightly more likely that the candidate's experience involves more open source, and less proprietary code.

Personally, I'd rather filter candidates based on factors that relate to their performance. After all, bad hires are _very_ expensive... as such, most of these shortcuts strike me as incredibly misguided nonsense.

<comment><USER2> Because they can see first hand the quality of the code (plus all the other meta information that comes along with commit logs). How do you evaluate proprietary code at anywhere near that same level?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think that the answer to the first part of your question ("public face") depends on a lot on the choice offered in the second part "employ/contract/partner/supplier".

Also, to a lesser extent, on the kind of work you're talking about (startup hacker, co-founder, web programmer, systems programmer, open source hacker, IT dogsbody?).

Can you be more specific? Assuming the question is for your benefit, what are you looking to be? If the question is for your own analysis, who are you looking to hire/partner/contract to?

<comment><AUTHOR> Lets say your boss gives you a list of ten name/email address pairs every morning at 10:00, and you have to give him a list of the three most professional candidates, in order, by 11 because your competition will hire them or something.

What script/Google search query/yahoo pipe/metrics could you use to automate this task?

<comment><USER5> I'd say that this is still meaningless without context. Who is your boss? Who are you? Who are the potential hires for? Where did the names come from in the first place?

If I'm reading your reply correctly, you're actually looking to write an algorithm for an automated "find-a-hacker" engine?

In which case, I'd say the first bar to surpass is from another comment here - the guy who said his website is pretty crummy but it comes up first when you google "PHP programmer edinburgh"

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not know your name, but for example, projectgus gives me 3400 Google results: blog, twitter, github, and then the rest of the top ten are "something something Project - Gus Winters, something, ..."

So 3400 is a poor rating metric. But what metrics from the list of HN, StackOverflow, /., reddit/prog, yahoo answers, MIT Media Lab, web site PR, Citseer mentions, etc. could constitute a good ranking? Sure, a Nobel Prize is a shortcut. I am talking about a proxy or data model for finding and sorting.

If it can be automated, it will be.

<comment><USER5> It would still seem to me like it would be context sensitive, in the sense that you want different information to hire different types of professionals and also that people put different aspects of their life online.

To follow on from your example of me - googling projectgus gives you my both my personal blog and my twitter account as the first two results. My twitter account title gives you my real name, and if you google that then you immediately find my current employer, and some details from an old employer, and then a long tail of quasi-related noise.

Whether or not you'll find anything relevant to what you want depends on what you're looking for. I don't have a resume posted online, which means that although I'm a professional programmer most of my programming experience doesn't immediately show up anywhere on the internet.

However, it's possible you could infer a lot of it from my posts on various little mailing lists and forums (for example, a handful of posts on Erlang- Questions because I spent about a year writing Erlang and a few posts on the Hibernate forums because I've done a little bit of Java middleware development.) Maybe.

Of course, nobody just says "let's see if Angus is a hacker we can hire". Someone might say "oh, you need more Erlang programmers? I know a local programmer called Angus who has programmed in Erlang" (for contrived example). In which case, you google my name + Erlang and you can see that I've programmed in Erlang. Although my online Erlang presence is, in my opinion, underwhelming and you would not decide to approach me on that basis. Which, in my opinion, would be a mistake. ;)

However, even though you wouldn't get specific information about me, you would be able to read my blog and find out I like Linux & open source, I own an Arduino, I like taking apart cheap chinese gadgets, and I like writing. Which is possibly all useful information, again depending on exactly what you were after me for in the first place.

Although I didn't put that information online to get jobs (if I did want to do that, I'd have a resume section online or a LinkedIn profile or something, and maybe the above paragraphs of rant would be redundant.)

I hope this discussion helps you in whatever process you decide to automate. I understand that you're talking about something a bit different, but at the same time I think it would be hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all approach that was entirely based on scraping other data. Finding something more specific, in the same vein as Haskellers.com except without the user- submitted data, might be plausible.

Stack Overflow Careers, for instance, uses Stack Overflow as its data source but OTOH it still relies on the user to submit other details, in order to make the information relevant to employers.

<comment><USER5> Also worth noting that this process of "Google stalking" me only works because I have a relatively unique name.

Doing it by email address might work, although most people make an effort to keep their email addresses away from automated harvesting. :).

<comment><AUTHOR> I just googled the name of your website. I hope you don't actually think that is stalking.

<comment><USER5> Of course not.

I put it in air quotes because I couldn't think of a better word for "using google repeatedly to find out everything you can about someone" (referring to the process that I described, ie more involved than simply googling me.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I publish a lot on my personal blog ( <http://www.puremango.co.uk> ). Other than that it's twitter, reddit and HN. I do have linkedin but I don't really use it at all.

I invite employers to read over my blog posts and my CV which I put online ( <http://www.puremango.co.uk/2009/08/php-cv/> ).

That's about it really. If I don't want something associated with me, I try not to do it really...

<comment><AUTHOR> The Eric Schmidt Solution to web archives?

[http://gawker.com/5419271/google-ceo-secrets-are-for- filthy-...](http://gawker.com/5419271/google-ceo-secrets-are-for-filthy- people)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a web dev so obviously i've got a website. Its very neglected but it still ranks in google for "Edinburgh PHP Developer" which is exactly the people i'm after so its fine for now.</comment>


Uber's Flying Taxi - <AUTHOR> https://noviceanalysis.wordpress.com/2018/05/08/ubers-flying-taxi/ <comment><USER2> > Use that expertise to build a tilt-rotor commercial plane.

They have, it's called the AW609. And like its predecessor V-22, it has crashed and killed the occupants early on and is nowhere near commercial readiness.

Uber's estimates of commercial VTOL flight on an untested airframe by 2023 is total garbage, and they have to know it. The US military has sunk $50 _Billion_ dollars into this problem over the last 30 years and still aren't there.

My guess is that Uber simply wants to maintain some hope of future growth, particularly with their autonomous car program in shambles.

PS I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

<comment><USER3> > My guess is that Uber simply wants to maintain some hope of future growth, > particularly with their autonomous car program in shambles.

They also benefit from future free advertising. Everytime you'll see a bit of news talking about autonomous drones, flying taxis, or the like, you can bet that the writer will mention Uber, thus giving them free Brand recognition. The same happened with Amazon's delivery drones, or Uber self driving cabs.

<comment><USER4> I missread that as "self driving crabs" and now I want to see that. :-)

<comment><USER5> You jest, but cybernetic implants to remote control cockroaches and flying beetles is a thing, and even normal people can buy the former (RoboRoach Bundle is about US$160), so I wouldn't be very surprised if someone makes a crab-based delivery cyborg.

<comment><USER6> Wow. That's actually mind blowing... I never would have thought that neural interfacing could be so cheap and affordable

<comment><USER7> Neural interfacing is not that complicated. It's just a microcontroller with two of the GPIO pins connected to antenna nerves, at most $5 worth of hardware.

<comment><USER8> In similar fashion, you can "mind control" a cat with a laser pointer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The V-22 also known as the "elevator of death" [1]

[1] [https://medium.com/war-is-boring/your-periodic-reminder- that...](https://medium.com/war-is-boring/your-periodic-reminder-that- the-v-22-is-a-piece-of-junk-db72a8a23ccf)

<comment><USER10> Worth noting that after the initial problems the V-22 turned into the safest rotorcraft that the marines have to offer.

[1] [http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/v-22-is-the-safest-most- su...](http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/v-22-is-the-safest-most-survivable- rotorcraft-the-marines-have/)

<comment><USER11> Also worth noting is that a bit of searching found this connection between Boeing and Lexington Institute:

[https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/lexington- institutes-w...](https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/lexington-institutes- weak-defense-boeings-bank-veronique-de-rugy/)

"The Lexington Institute, in fact, is the one receiving money from a narrow corporate interest — Boeing."

EDIT: The only reason I looked for this connection was beacause the GP article was nicely written, long, and detailed, while the Lexington Institute seemed fluffy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _" [Uber's] electrically powered [concept aircraft] with two rotors for vertical flight and one for horizontal flight [...] is reminiscent of the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor, where the propellers transition from vertical flight to horizontal – the difference being Uber's rotors are fixed."_

 _Whut_ the _funk_??!? How is this in any way similar??? Uh, correct me if I don't see something, but to me this is like saying something like: _" Tesla Model 3 is similar to the Caterpillar CS-533E drum roller [1] — the difference being Tesla has 4 wheels"..._

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterpillar_CS-533E](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterpillar_CS-533E)

I'm in no way an aircraft person, but if I were to try to look for similarities to something, the following are more like what I'd think of:

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

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

<comment><USER13> I think the main difference here is that in the Autogyro and Gyrodyne the rotor is basically acting as a wing (either through autorotation for the Autogyro or the application of limited power for the Gyrodyne) while everything I have seen of the Uber fantasy and similar drone scale-ups uses powered rotors for most of the vertical lift.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Will this thing try to navigate as well as Uber's car-based navigation that occasionally tells its drivers in Las Vegas that the best route from the airport to The Bellagio is through the lobby of the MGM?

</comment><comment><USER15> > A private pilot's license takes a minimum of 40 hours of flying time

Wow, you can get a pilot's license that quick? In Germany you need 30h of driving just to get a regular car license. No large trailer or truck.

<comment><USER16> You still need to spend a lot of time in theory, and especially in Germany you need your radio certificates in English and German (which themselves take a long time).

After that, you can only fly a very limited subset of aircraft during the day under a certain altitude (and possibly certain weather conditions?). If you want to fly at night you need to get a certification for instrument flying.

<comment><USER17> In the U.S., a private pilot may fly at night with no additional training or rating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why not a full-size multi-rotor automated drone that can carry 4 people and luggage?

<comment><USER19> The answer to questions like these is almost always "power density and safety".

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> oh hell no.

What's the glideslope of a multirotor vehicle?

<comment><USER21> That's a running joke in the aviation industry - Zero.

<comment><USER13> They do not fly so much as... plummet...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The article reads like machine- or cocaine-generated slop. There doesn't seem to be a single credible assertion in it. It has literally no point, as the author openly admits near the end of the article ("just my thoughts"), just before he closes by asking us to read his profound insights into why flying things shouldn't be heavy. This prose would receive a failing grade in a _high school_ composition class.

I'm trying to resist the "Why is this on HN?" question, but can't. This is appalling dreck and doesn't belong here.

</comment><comment><USER23> My guess is that there would be no pilots. Given they are attempting to get rid of drivers, getting rid of pilots in VTOL seems like an easier proposition with a large added weight advantage.

<comment><USER21> I think fully autonomous flight is a solution, but I also think it's further away than people imagine. For airplanes at least, the trickiest segments of flight are takeoffs and landings and even with today's advanced avionics suites, pilots are still in control for those portions of flight.

The other big factor is the passengers. Even if technology for fully autonomous passenger flight is available in the next 10 years, I don't think people will trust planes flying themselves.

<comment><USER24> DJI drones have been able to navigate back to their takeoff point and land automatically for a while now. Landing's much easier for a multicopter than for a fixed wing aircraft.

<comment><USER25> Ours went haywire and crashed into a pond onetime when we used the Return to Home feature. YMMV

<comment><USER24> I didn't say I'd ride on one personally. :P Just that the basics are solved, and reliability is a Simple Matter Of Engineering.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Concourse Font by Matthew Butterick - <AUTHOR> http://concoursefont.com/

<comment><USER2> Please, if you'd be interested in a math font by MB (and be willing to pay for it, of course), tell him!

Maybe we can be a niche market. :-)</comment>


React is badly designed - <AUTHOR> https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150311-react-bad-idea

<comment><USER2> Good clickbait, but almost nonsensical article. The idea of supporting web components is great, but it's also a standards process in committee. React and Web Components can play together ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TD0efcwVg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0TD0efcwVg)), so why draw some sort of false dichotomy between the technologies.

The thought that went into the virtual dom diffing strategy is an algorithmic nicety that software in general can and has already benefitted from. React itself is an implementation of that which provides real workflow improvements for web and now native platforms. That's pretty awesome and usable right now. I don't see this as a zero sum game, or as an all in investment strategy unless you are going into some arcane questions of licensing, the code and the ideas are out in the open. Ember, mythril, Om have all taken the ideas into new regions.

Even look at the atom editor, they switched to react for their editor component, then realized the general purpose dom diffing strategy which is _very fast_ could still be optimized for their edit window. That's awesome. That idea is decoupled from react. Learning to read react code takes about 1 day to 1 week. It's pretty awesome.

Also, the canard about reactive programming... uhh... I just don't get what you're advertising here? That you're willing to use products like docker and node.js as advertised on your front page, but not react.js because... it's "bad"? Why so inflexible, why not try all the things and use what works as time permits?

<comment><USER3> On React in Atom: [https://discuss.atom.io/t/whats-the-status-of-react-in- atom/...](https://discuss.atom.io/t/whats-the-status-of-react-in-atom/11456/4)

Do you have an update beyond this?

<comment><USER2> I use atom as an editor for markdown. But I don't know about if they're using React in it or not. I don't follow the dev that closely. I am still rather sure you can develop plugins in react, which is fine.

My point being that require('react'); wasn't the best fit for their editor window (which doesn't need events to be intercepted, etc), but the idea behind virtual dom diffing and how they updated their window left an impact. The concepts behind react got them thinking in a new way, which is ultimately much more important than their dependency on a 0.x.y release library.

If anything, the design of react was a stepping stone to where they've ended up now. It wasn't "bad", so much as unoptimized for their specific task. For me I'm glad it can intercept events (usually), since it simplifies cross browser compatibility. Atom is essentially one browser version, so it doesn't need that overhead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > But what has [virtual DOM] got to do with reactive programming? Or embedding > markup in JavaScript?

It makes it possible to implement React's componentisation model in a performant manner.

It allows React to not only work in all major browsers _today_ , but to use its SyntheticEvent implementation to patch up and normalise aspects of their behaviour which are important when writing webapps.

While React's ideas about data flow might not be new, the componentisation model it uses to implement them makes it incredibly easy to compose and reuse UI components, with a well-defined method of passing data between them and controlling re-rendering.

It allows React components to be easily pre-rendered on the server and rehydrated to be interactive on the client from the initial markup using the same codebase, making progressive enhancement easier to implement, therefore more likely to be implemented.

That's why the virtual DOM isn't the most interesting thing about React, rather what it enables.

It would be nice if native Web Components just _worked_ everywhere right now, but they don't. Maybe some day React will just another way to implement the innards of a native Web Component, but at the moment it's just _better_ then them.

</comment><comment><USER5> I understand the motivation for wanting to avoid frameworks when it looks like a native solution is right around the corner, but that's just it – it's not here yet. There isn't even _experimental_ support for Web Components in either the most popular desktop browser or the most popular mobile browser, and the polyfills are simply nowhere near as mature or well-supported as React and Angular are for the same purposes.

So yes, you could develop for Web Components today, and it would "work" everywhere and it would be the platonic ideal of future-proof web development. It just wouldn't be very pragmatic.

<comment><USER6> Chrome's the most popular desktop browser [1], and Chrome for Android is the most popular mobile browser [2].

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

[2] [http://caniuse.com/#search=shadow%20dom](http://caniuse.com/#search=shadow%20dom)

It passed IE for desktop in mid-2012, and iOS Safari for mobile in late 2012 or early 2013.

I agree with your general point since the all Webcomponents-supporting browsers are barely a majority. But the web looks very different from it did even a couple months ago.

</comment></comment><comment> 97-109-107 Why can't I zoom the text on this website in and out?</comment>


How Much Should Expectation Drive Science? - <AUTHOR> http://cosmos.nautil.us/short/161/how-much-should-expectation-drive-science <comment><USER2> Expectations of the unknown are various shades of irrational. When the irrationality becomes recursive and spreads is when we have a problem. That is true of both too much rigor in science (limiting hypothesis of the far unknown) and too much opposition to the truths revealed by scientific study (denying climate change).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a well understood phenomenon in the history of science. Nothing new here.</comment>


Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? (1977) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~lpara/LETTURE/backus.pdf <comment><USER2> A better question would be: Should programming be liberated from the von Neumann style?

</comment><comment><USER3> Discussion from around 6 months ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13210988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13210988)

</comment><comment><USER4> It is probably the first paper where FP ideas are introduced. I remember this title so well even after almost 40 years because my junior year CS thesis was based on this paper!</comment>


Tweeter:TWTRQ Stock Went Up +1,000% Because People Thought It Was Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/electronics-stores-stock-went-over-204900245.html;_ylt=A2KJ3CcTKlBSb1YAM6WTmYlQ

<comment><USER2> WOW.</comment>


Cuil CEO Rips Users, Asks Them To Please Shut Up - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/14/cuil-ceo-rips-users-asks-them-to-please-shut-up/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><USER2> I must say those are two biased posts in one link. Maybe not the best PR for Cuil, but definitely some negative bias from Arrington's side as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Head of cpedia gives self-inflicted wound.</comment>


In five years all browsers will block Internet advertisements by default. - <AUTHOR> http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/102600/in-five-years-all-browsers-will-block-internet-advertisements-by-default.html <comment><USER2> When you say "all browsers", did you mean to include these three?

1) The one run by an advertising company which happens to employ a lot of engineers

2) The one paid for entirely by a deal for search engine services with the advertising company from #1

3) The one run by a software company which owns an advertising platform and under absolutely no circumstances will exit any market entered by the advertising company from #1

?

</comment><comment><USER3> The article assumes that advertisements will remain discrete objects that are readily separable from content. Deeper integration of ads with content (e.g. from ad servers also serving content images, or ads placed within video content) may break that assumption.

</comment><comment><USER4> The article fails to mention the biggest players in the ad market have a vested interest in browsers and what eventually becomes 'default behavior'. I doubt they will shoot themselves in the foot or won't lobby to avoid this becoming a default.

Microsoft controls IE, Google now has Chrome and I have to think Google still has some type of partnership with Firefox.

<comment><USER2> Google pays the Mozilla Foundation $50 million or so a year to be the default search provider for most versions of Firefox. This provides about 90% or so of the revenue the Mozilla foundation earns.

But I'm sure they could totally give that up if the users wanted it. _smiles wanly_

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The fact that ad blocking even works today shows that advertising is highly profitable.

An industry wide ad-resistant browser initiative doesn't make sense. What's now just a shrug of the shoulders would quickly turn into a powerful lobby.

</comment><comment><USER6> If that's true, then in five years __nothing __on the Internet will be free.

<comment><USER7> Sites like Hacker News will still be around.

Not all free content relies on advertising.

<comment><USER8> C2 Wiki will still be up. I guess I wouldn't mind losing out on some of the stuff that relies on advertising, but some of the other stuff will make me sad to see go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What would be more interesting is if browsers _visited_ internet advertisements by default, but sent the return pages to /dev/null...

<comment><USER10> So the browser clicks on every ad but never displays the results to the user, so it's like it never happened? Basically throwing online advertising into chaos?? I like it!

<comment><USER10> Downvoted? Really?? Ughh

I work 9-6 every day at a digital advertising agency, so it's a love hate thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think if web-based advertising ever got close to being unprofitable, people would find a way around Ad Blocker really fast.

<comment><USER12> I've already had a site (forget which one) refuse to serve up its content until I turned off ad blocking. Of course this could get into an arms race involving Flash etc. which would be horrible.

<comment><USER13> Then just install a non-caching proxy like Privoxy. Works for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Browsers don't need to block all advertisements, just the annoying ones. Users will just ignore the rest.

How much money do you think consumers spend as a result of internet advertising? The amount of money that can be sustainably made in the industry is significantly less than that.

The ad industry markets to clients, not consumers. On the internet, unlike every major medium before it, clients have stats to show them that their ads don't work.

When TV dies, so will advertising as we know it.

</comment><comment><USER15> There are some adverts that viewers send each other, a nice analysis of that trend is the spreadable media series of articles by Henry Jenkins ([http://henryjenkins.org/2009/04/how_sarah_spread_and_what_it...](http://henryjenkins.org/2009/04/how_sarah_spread_and_what_it_m.html) \- this is a kind of summary).

</comment><comment><USER16> Microsoft shipping IE with easy-to-enable advertisement blockers, might be the biggest blow they could deal to Google at the moment.

Of course, they are unlikely to do so now that they have invested so heavily in emulating Google's business model.

</comment><comment><USER17> ReplayTV had the ability to automatically skip commercials on TV 6-7 years ago and I'm sure the same articles were all over the news. It didn't really happen, now did it?

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't block ads. Well, I guess running Chrome on Ubuntu means I block Flash ads, but it also means I block all Flash (and Java and any other plugin).

</comment><comment><USER18> I think Murdoch probably paid this guy. :P That might explain the continual repetition of "People do not like Advertisement". I got scared at some point that he is rewiring my brain or something.

Umm, I have some problem with my teeth. There was this advertisement which mentioned a tooth paste which helps tackle it, I was kinda glad that I saw that advert. Then there are these advertisements with cool songs, hey it might just lift my spirit for a bit. Sometimes, I kind of want variety in my food and wonder how I may try something new, what is out there to try, guess tv advertisements may inform me at some point. The idea that people do not like advertisements is rubish, people do not like seeing the same advert over and over and over again, but they do like to be informed about what is out there.</comment>


The Dutch Pension Plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/business/no-smoke-no-mirrors-the-dutch-pension-plan.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A11%22%7D&_r=1 <comment><USER2> What a puff piece.

I am the proud owner of both a Dutch pension and an American 401k. I much prefer the American 401k. If only because I don't have to pay 15% front loaded commissions everytime money gets put into a fund. I had to claw and fight with my Dutch pension company to even understand how much of my contribution they were taking on their front loaded mutual funds. And the sad part was that most of my Dutch colleagues didn't even understand why I was so upset about it.

Another thing that sucks about the Dutch pension system is that once I hit 65 I'm forced to buy an annuity with it. Most likely my pension company will trick most people into buying an annuity directly from them, but I do have the option of shopping around. Work for multiple companies, get multiple pensions and multiple annuities. There are options for rolling over one pension into another. But nothing as straight forward as a TIRA, and nothing where you can choose what funds are actually held.

 _I was told by an independent Dutch pension expert that my Dutch pension is standard, so my case isn 't an outlier._

<comment><USER3> As a Dutch freelancer, I will avoid collective pension funds like the plague. I'm quite certain that once I reach the age of my retirement (70?), there will be very little money, if any, left in the collective funds.

The biggest issue with the Dutch pension system is that one doesn't safe for himself / herself, but instead pays for the current elderly people. With more and more elderly people and less and less workers, eventually this system won't be sustainable anymore.

Dutch people should watch this informative movie: [http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/6576741/e81f2c3e/beste_pensi...](http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/6576741/e81f2c3e/beste_pensioenstelsel_ter_wereld_uitgelegd.html)

<comment><USER4> I'm also a NL resident freelancer. I've just started putting money into index trackers as I have very little to speak of with respect to normal pensions.

Any advice? I'm mid-thirties.

<comment><USER3> I've only started freelancing since the start of 2014, so I'm still trying to figure things out. Some of my plans are:

\- Buying an expensive house at a nice location, which hopefully will sell for a nice price when I'm older and also will reduce the income tax I have to pay.

\- There are certain savings options that are only taxed once you make use of said savings. I.e.: these kinds of savings may be reduced from your income, which will reduce income taxes you have to pay.

\- I will probably buy some stock.

The house is highest priority for me at the moment though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hip hip hooray for reality based accounting. The Dutch system may not be perfect, but they are doing as best as can be done within the bounds of financial uncertainty. They definitely get points for choosing pain now vs pain later and aligning incentives more precisely.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, Netherlands has a better minimum wage compared to the US even after adjusting for PPP. [1]

Private insurance companies are regulated by the government and MUST offer a core universal package including the cost of all prescription medicines. They must do this at a fixed price for all. [2]

Taking into account these two facts, the article makes sense and provides good reasons why the system works. Looks like progressive policies with healthy government regulation always works better than the free market.

[1] [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/how- amer...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/how-americas- minimum-wage-em-really-em-stacks-up-globally/279258/) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands)

<comment><USER7> In fact the free market always works better than government regulation in every scenario. Which is why all the countries following the modern welfare state model are in disastrous economic condition and sinking by the day. From Japan to Denmark to the Netherlands (the people of Denmark and the Netherlands are two of the most indebted peoples on earth per capita) to France to Italy to Greece to Spain to Portugal, to even the US (the world's largest welfare state). _Nearly_ every welfare state in the world, to the degree that it is a welfare state, is collapsing. It's also why Europe is still stuck in a depression, with its GDP below 2006 levels, and set to stay that way for another decade.

It was a free market for healthcare in the US that produced the greatest healthcare system in the world, with the best doctors and hospitals, prior to the government's first major moves to nationalize parts of the system nearly 50 years ago. It also produced by far the greatest innovation, across all aspect of the health / medicine field.

<comment><USER8> If you want to argue that, at least get your facts straight first. In Europe, the stronger welfare states of Northern Europe and Scandinavia has had much stronger economies during the financial crisis. They have also had much better success retraining their work force when industrial jobs has been lost to the cheaper Asian countries.

There are many reasons why (most of) Europe is in a depression right now. One of the important ones is the financial crisis that started in the US and spread across the world, where European banks were invested up to their ears. Another is the former tiger states of Ireland and Portual, where low company taxes attracted money which was invested in a real estate bubble which popped when the economy tanked. A third is the Euro experiment which didn't really pan out the way politicians had hoped (to put things mildly).

So there is a whole complex of reasons for the current situation and no one can really point out any single one as more important with any confidence. But one of the few things we do know is that welfare states have generally fared better in the crisis, not worse.

<comment><USER9> Just FYI, the Nordic countries had been in a process of scaling back their welfare states considerably leading up to the financial crises and are still struggling to achieve sustainability (except Norway which has a mountain of oil).

It is the southern european states that have spent lavishly on behemoth welfare states that are struggling the hardest, forced into harsh austerity as a condition of bailout by wealthier states.

<comment><USER8> Well, it's all relative here. The welfare state has been getting slimmer over the past 20 years. But to understand what has changed, one needs to look at the details. It is mainly the work loss insurances that pays out over a shorter period out time.

Defense spending is also continously down in all the mentioned countries. But investments in health care and education has paid off well during the same time period, and there is no democratic mandate to lessen it.

Compared to the US it would still look like a socialist model. The southern countries (not states) have spent a lot of money, but not necessarily on classic social insurance systems, so I don't really think it compares. Their main problem is that their underlying economy was much too weak for what they've been spending.

<comment><USER9> Slimmer, but also just more efficient in some respects. The Nordic countries aren't afraid to experiment and innovate, which is perhaps the real Nordic model.

Interesting that you take exception to my use of the word state. I generally regard the word interchangeable with any sovereign territory outside of a US context, as does much of the international relations field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Article is just b*t. There is zero criticism, zero data, just naive adoration. It is sad to see something like that on NY Times.

My friend worked in Netherlands for 6 years. He lost 20% of his salary, he will get ZERO, because he is not local resident.

<comment><USER11> He should also have paid a very low tax rate - a 30% discount on taxable income, which results in a rate closer to 20% than the 50% I pay.

See: [http://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-page/official- issues/taxation/3...](http://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-page/official- issues/taxation/30-ruling/what-it-is)

<comment><USER4> You're either earning EUR100k+, or your accountant sucks if you're paying close to 50% :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pensions are (your)savings, done by some large profitmaking organizations. Now all the money is in there they are starting to steal it(of course), with the excuse that the economy is in heavy weather. It is normal nowadays to see them scraping off 10% a year. Those billions are just magically disappearing. And all those hardworking people can say bye bye to their savings. It's more a proof that you can never trust a large profitmaking organization taking care of your money.

</comment><comment><USER13> A lot of pension funds in Europe are trying to convert people to market rate products, where the size of the future payouts are entirely dependent on the market. Most usually claim it is because they can give the retirees more, when the funds doesn't have to be so conservative with investments. In some cases, though, it is also similar to what's seen in the US - there might not be enough money in the coffer to honor the guaranteed interests.

<comment><USER14> The challenge for pensions in practice is that they are fundamentally either very expensive or very risky, but almost everyone involved pretends like this tradeoff does not exist. People hate uncertainty but few people can afford to eliminate it to the extent they wish to. People want a pension to be "guaranteed" but they do not want or cannot afford to pay for that guarantee either directly or indirectly. This incentivizes both the sellers and buyers of these pensions to engage in willful denial of the financial fundamentals of pensions; they convince themselves the much cheaper product to be almost as good as the real thing because they can't actually afford the real thing. The layer of indirection between the recipient and the underlying securities makes it that much easier to bury dodgy assumptions.

To the extent moving to defined contribution and market products eliminates the popular fiction enabled by pensions, it is an improvement. The actual risk is more transparent to the recipient even if they would prefer to not deal with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _The Economist_ looked at pensions systems back in April 2011 and praised the way Netherlands run theirs. It's not just putting lots of money in, it's also keeping a lid on promises: if there is significant inflation, the retirees will have to share the pain.

</comment><comment><USER16> For a more detailed description (from the viewpoint of the pension fund association, so possibly somewhat overly favorable) see:

[http://www.pensioenfederatie.nl/Document/Publicaties/English...](http://www.pensioenfederatie.nl/Document/Publicaties/English%20publications/Nederlandse_pensioensysteem_Engelstalige_versie.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER17> So well thought out :)</comment>


Linux Container Internals - <AUTHOR> http://rabbitstack.github.io/operating%20systems/linux-containers-internals-part-i/ <comment><USER2> Writing the basics of a container runtime is easier than it sounds. Last summer I was curious how they work and wrote something simple in python that can run docker images:

[https://github.com/kragniz/omochabako/blob/master/omochabako](https://github.com/kragniz/omochabako/blob/master/omochabako)

[https://asciinema.org/a/77296?speed=2&autoplay=true](https://asciinema.org/a/77296?speed=2&autoplay=true)

I learned a lot doing this, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested about containers.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing!

When you set out to do this, had you studied docker's source code at all? Or did you just have a basic understanding of containers? Other than the link from OP, are there any resources you'd recommend to get one to the point where you have enough understanding of the concepts without having to "cheat" and look at the docker implementation?

I want to do this too, but it's not as much fun if you need to go to the source due to not understanding the fundamentals.

<comment><USER2> I started with a basic understanding about the parts involved, but not so much how they fit together. Most of the necessary information came from the lwn series of articles posted in another comment: [https://lwn.net/Articles/531114/](https://lwn.net/Articles/531114/)

The actual namespace stuff was easy, the harder part was pivoting the root fs and figuring out all the things to mount. At some point I looked at the source for systemd-nspawn, but I forget exactly what for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A great resource to understand how Linux containers work is "Linux containers in 500 lines of code": [https://blog.lizzie.io/linux-containers- in-500-loc.html](https://blog.lizzie.io/linux-containers-in-500-loc.html)

Or, if you just want to skip to the code: [https://blog.lizzie.io/linux- containers-in-500-loc/contained...](https://blog.lizzie.io/linux-containers- in-500-loc/contained.c)

<comment><USER5> bocker([https://github.com/p8952/bocker](https://github.com/p8952/bocker)) is also very good for understanding containers

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you want more information on how Linux namespaces work, there's an extensive series of articles on LWN at [https://lwn.net/Articles/531114/](https://lwn.net/Articles/531114/)

</comment><comment><USER7> For a very high level overview, I really like this essay:

You Could Have Invented Container Runtimes: An Explanatory Fantasy

[https://medium.com/@gtrevorjay/you-could-have-invented- conta...](https://medium.com/@gtrevorjay/you-could-have-invented-container- runtimes-an-explanatory-fantasy-764c5b389bd3#.npqdu2abx)

</comment><comment><USER8> Which language is the sample code written in? Looks.... awful.

<comment><USER9> Rust?

<comment><USER10> Looking at the blog's source, yes rust (and the code looks like rust also).

[https://github.com/rabbitstack/rabbitstack.github.io/blob/ma...](https://github.com/rabbitstack/rabbitstack.github.io/blob/master/operating%20systems/linux- containers-internals-part-i/index.html#L177)</comment></comment></comment>