New U.S. FAA rule requires drone owners to register by Feb 19 - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-drones-registration-idUSKBN0TX1RP20151214 <comment><USER3> The comments here really surprise me. My dad's a pilot, and I've heard from him firsthand how drones are a very serious problem for airplanes. Comments like "this is just one more example of tracking" or "I can't believe I have to do this even if it's only for my house" seem to be said out of anger rather than from serious consideration of the issues with drones. Your $30 drone can very easily cause someone else's $1,000,000 airplane serious damage, and as drones get more sophisticated and more capable the danger will only increase.

I want to say "Just because you can make it doesn't mean you can use it irresponsibly", but people will take issue with my use of the words "can't" and "irresponsibly". It's probably easier to say as follows: when you're playing in the sandbox, you play nice with other kids. Here, when you're playing in the air, you have to play nice with other things in the air. The fact your toy is tiny and easy to use doesn't change the fact that you're still playing in the same sandbox as everyone else.

<comment><USER4> If the drone pilot is flying outside of controlled airspace (e.g. airport, major event, etc) and below 1,000 feet, and somehow an aircraft and drone collide then it is the aircraft pilot's fault. It is illegal to fly below 1,000 feet except in an emergency or in controlled airspace.

If your "dad" is routinely flying low enough over urban areas so that drones are a legitimate concern then they're likely also routinely breaking FAA rules and I hope they get fined.

Also, this is why most aircraft have insurance...

<comment><USER5> "It is illegal to fly below 1,000 feet"

Where on earth did you read that? Yes, the rule is 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a radius of 2,000 feet when over a congested area, but when not flying over a city, minimum altitude is 500 feet.

<comment><USER4> > Where on earth did you read that?

Why did you ask me and then quote the exact regs back verbatim? Why ask a rhetorical question with the implication that I am wrong if your very next sentence is going to confirm that I am indeed correct?

As you yourself said, 1000 feet is the minimum allowed in most normal situations. You can go fly over the desert at 500 feet if you wish, but drones won't be an issue out there.

<comment><USER6> You can fly over the desert at 1 inch if you want. FAR 91.119.c (subject to the catch-all exception in 91.13)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Failure to register can result in a hefty penalty, including civil fines of > up to $27,500 and criminal penalties of up to $250,000 and three years in > prison.

> "The goal is not to be punitive but to get people into compliance," FAA > Deputy Administrator Michael Whitaker said.

These two sentences don't seem to mesh for me. Even if they don't plan to actually prosecute any violators (yet), just the threat of that is ridiculous. I guess it's just another tool in the arsenal of prosecutors if they decide they don't like you.

Edit: The second quote was removed from the article.

<comment><USER8> I think the idea is that you can achieve compliance through fear of punitive action without ever actually having to punish anyone (in an ideal world).

Before law: "I'll just fly my drone around this airport, it's not like I'll get caught or anything."

After law: "Crap, now if anything happens this is gonna get traced right back to me and my life is gonna be ruined, maybe I shouldn't fly around this airport like a moron."

<comment><USER9> After law: "Crap, now if anything happens this is gonna get traced right back to me and my life is gonna be ruined, maybe I shouldn't <register my drone> like a moron."

People willing to break one aspect of the law are generally willing to break other parts as well.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but this means you now can't fly in a park or any public space without the risk of a police officer coming by and asking to see your registration. I'm assuming police would be empowered to do that?

<comment><USER10> I must have missed the bit in the article where they explained how all local cops are going to receive training in "drone inspection" and access to an up- to-date database of registration numbers.

<comment><USER8> > drone owners will receive an FAA identification number that they must > display on aircraft

How many hours of training do you think it'll take for them to look for and read a sticker?

> access to an up-to-date database of registration numbers.

Cops probably have smartphones, right? [http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Serial_Inquiry.aspx](http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/Serial_Inquiry.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What surprises me is is the minimum weight requirement: 250 grams. That's well below a weight that could reasonably be considered a danger to aircraft or people.

Just for comparison purposes, a McDonald's Big Mac weighs 215-240 grams without wrapper, so with a wrapper if you turned a Big Mac into a drone, it would likely require registration.

The real question is, what is their endgame here? Just send out notifications? It isn't like drones have transponders yet(?).

I like the FAA but this seems misguided and unworkable. Plus $5 is significant when some drones this impacts only costs $30.

Hopefully the FAA has birds 250+ grams register too, just for consistency. In particular as birds kill an order of magnitude more pilots than drones have (have drones ever taken down a plane?).

<comment><USER8> I was under the impression that pretty much anything getting sucked into a jet turbine is a major problem, can anyone speak to whether that's true? Birds don't weigh a lot either, but run into one and you could have a major problem on your hands.

<comment><USER4> > I was under the impression that pretty much anything getting sucked into a > jet turbine is a major problem, can anyone speak to whether that's true?

Definitely untrue. Air, water, and particulates get sucked in all of the time, it doesn't cause a "major problem."

It really boils down to mass and in some cases chemical makeup. Smaller birds get sucked in all the time, and often don't even damage the fan blades. Whereas a couple of Canadian Geese could clog up an engine causing it to stop.

While the news likes to drum beat about large commercial aircraft, it is "unlikely" that a drone could be a real threat. It is more smaller single engine aircraft and helicopters that are at risk from drones flying into them (in particular during take-off/landing).

Larger drones definitely need some kind of moderation. But as I said above 250g is too small, a pigeon weighs over 350g by comparison. How are you going to regulate them?!

PS - I actually fully support regulating pigeons, those things need to be taken down a peg or two.

<comment><USER11> >While the news likes to drum beat about large commercial aircraft, it is "unlikely" that a drone could be a real threat.

You have to keep in mind that many of these drones are made of things like carbon fiber and are almost certainly carrying lithium-polymer battery packs with a smattering of metal parts thrown in, though. I'd think the potential for damage to a turbine is quite a bit greater than that of a small bird of similar weight.

>PS - I actually fully support regulating pigeons, those things need to be taken down a peg or two.

Little known tangential fact about Captain Sullenberger landing on the Hudson - one of the things to happen as a result was a mass culling of Canadian Geese in New York:

>To prevent similar incidents, workers from the United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services and the city's Parks and Recreation Department and Environmental Protection Departments descended on 17 locations across New York capturing and gassing 1,235 Canada geese in June and July 2009.[118] The Agriculture Department undertook another goose control measure by coating 1,739 eggs with corn oil, which kills developing goslings by depriving them of air.[118]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549#Long- te...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Airways_Flight_1549#Long-term_effects)

<comment><USER10> So there's just under 3000 fewer Canadian Geese than there would have been otherwise?

I wonder what that is as a percentage of the total Canadian Goose population, and the population of large birds generally?

We've recently here had hysterical calls to "cull the sharks!!!" after a few shark attacks. It stinks to me of politically and more likely profit motivations - local politicians wanting to be seen to be "doing something" (never mind the pointlessness or futility of their chosen "something"), and politicians friends who can be rewarded with fat government contracts to buy themselves new boats and guns and go playing with them on the public purse, while making a completely insignificant change to the total shark population or the risk of swimming in the ocean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems like a LOT of people here didn't read the actual report. I'm skimming through it, but the most interesting thing in here is that the limits are based on only one line of reasoning: " _what would cause death or serious injury due to a UAS (drone) and a person on the ground._ " They said that there wasn't enough data to support a rule based on anything else.

      "The Task Force ultimately agreed to use a mass-based
      approach to determine an appropriate category of sUAS to
      recommend for exclusion from the registration requirement.
      This was based upon the probability of a catastrophic event
      occurring (i.e., death or serious injury) due to a
      collision between an sUAS and a person on the ground.
      Because of the lack of data on UAS-aircraft collisions,
      engine ingestion, propeller, and rotor impacts by UAS, the
      probability of a catastrophic event occurring due to those
      events was not part of the consideration.  This approach
      best satisfied the Task Force's concerns about safety and
      provided a minimum weight threshold for registration that
      is easy to understand and apply and would therefore
      encourage compliance.  The formula considered was
      identified to the group as a standard aviation risk
      assessment formula used in consideration of manned aircraft
      safety."

</comment><comment><USER13> The article does not link to the FAA's website.

Here's the link to the actual FAA page: [https://www.faa.gov/uas/registration/](https://www.faa.gov/uas/registration/)

It appears that registration opens on 21 Dec, 2015. Further, if registration is done before January 20, 2016 the $5 registration fee will be refunded.

<comment><USER14> So now, model airplane hobbyists who've been doing the same thing for decades can be penalized with "fines of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment for up to three years," if they don't realize they have to register their balsa wood RC airplanes.

<comment><USER10> Not just register, but register every single one of them.

I've got 4 or 5 rc gliders in my garage and half a dozen or more kits or collections of parts to build more, as well as 5 quad copters that'd all fall under these rules.

At the height of my slope combat phase, I was probably averaging building 2 or 3 new slope soaring gliders every weekend. And I had friends who were _way_ more prolific than I was.

I wonder just how scalable their new "drone registry" is? It's easy enough to keep track of 747s and A380s, but whatever system they use for that was unlikely to be designed/specced for "webscale" type growth (and given their "$5 is the same price as we charge airliners!" comment, I wouldn't bet against this being exactly the same system/database)

<comment><USER15> It's worth noting that you register once and then mark each aircraft with your registration number[0]. You don't need to register each aircraft.

0: [https://www.faa.gov/uas/registration/faqs/#use](https://www.faa.gov/uas/registration/faqs/#use)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I guess I'm glad they're taking some kind of action. As a pilot of both single engine airplanes and "drones", I definitely see the argument from both sides.

Let's see how that website holds up at lunchtime on Dec 25th!

</comment><comment><USER17> Model airplanes have been around for ages and are generally used by very responsible operators. Local airports and the FAA often have a good working relationship with the local model aircraft club.

The issue with "drones" (which are really just a type of model aircraft) is a wave of irresponsible operators.

The regulators aren't looking to regulate the space because they were bored and looking for something to do. They are looking to regulate the space because there are too many idiots out there causing problems at the moment. If people are going to get upset at someone they should be upset at the people breaking all sorts of existing regulations and causing the FAA to step in to try and get things under control.

<comment><USER18> I see very little wrong with this simple registration step. As a drone owner, it costs me a minimal charge, doesn't impair my drone's operation with onerous rules. (Some were considering things like geofencing being MANDATORY!) It merely asks me to tag my drone with a number, which isn't a big deal at all.

I'd argue this has been actually a fantastic example of the government working in moderation. They involved drone manufacturers, commercial operators, and hobbyist groups directly in the discussion process, you can see it throughout their documentation. The community was well-invested in this entire process.

They've avoided any sort of crazy burden that would kill the drone industry, but they've offered a clear step to say that they're watching, and put in a basic framework that, while imperfect, gives them a starting point in an investigation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there any verification of the registration? Here's a hypothetical situation: a guy with a drone has a pesky neighbor he doesn't get along with. So he "registers" his drone in the neighbor's name; takes it to a nearby airport and lets it fly around over there and crash. Now the neighbor's in trouble, and has to defend himself from these hefty fines.

<comment><USER18> Well, you have to pay the registration fee with a credit card. My guess is, they keep enough of that information on file to prove whose card made the payment.

<comment><USER20> Just buy a prepaid with cash and register it to your neighbor. It's really hard.

<comment><USER18> Can't a credit card processor determine if a card is a prepaid or not? If they're using it as a verification step, they'd probably want to disallow those.

<comment><USER20> If they disallow them how's a 13 year old going to register their drone as required?

<comment><USER18> Adult's credit card, probably? I assume the FAA would like to tie drones owned by minors to responsible adults somehow. We haven't seen the form yet though, mind you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Damn, I thought the model clubs won this debate 50 years ago. What's the excuse this time? Terrorists making remote controlled bombs? Creeps taking aerial photographs? Kids having fun outside instead of doing their homework? Bloggers keep bringing up interference with air traffic, but that's completely irrelevant. Models are required by law to stay under 500 feet, and civil aviation is required to stay above. Even if there was a collision, it would do no more damage than a bird strike. And birds don't know they're supposed to stay away from airports. Kites, model rockets, and _laser pointers_ are all more dangerous to commercial aircraft than model aircraft.

<comment><USER22> I gather many drone operators have flagrantly violated the 500 foot flight ceiling.

Perhaps it's more of an issue now because in the days of RC planes operated line-of-sight, you inherently had a tougher time flying high & far than today with live video feed and long range controls.

<comment><USER23> It also used to be a requirement that you knew how to fly the aircraft, which wasn't much easier than flying a real airplane, and in the case of R/C helicopters was actual harder than flying a full-sized manned helicopter. With the latest multicopters and even some of the electric fixed-wing craft, any moron can keep the thing in the air. Hence the current wave of trouble.

<comment><USER21> Fixed-wing models have been idiot-proof for a long time. You can buy a beginner's kit at any hobby store, and they're much easier to fly than a multirotor. I don't think accessibility is responsible for the recent popularity of multirotors, I think they're just more interesting because they're unlike anything full-sized.

<comment><USER23> Guess I'm just old then. When I was learning, most models would barely fly, and then only if you flew them perfectly.

<comment><USER24> Models these days are generally built of durable and reparable foam, and the thrust/weight ratio is often over 1:1. Stalls are easy to avoid, and most beginning-level planes can be safely glided down without power (that is, just enough to power the servos without running the prop). If you're lucky, you should be able to repair your way through a few crashes.

That being said, my wife has flown a quadcopter with zero experience (but careful supervision of the owner). My impression is that a high quality multirotor will be easier to fly than a fixed-wing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One thing I haven't seen discussed is that the registration process is only open to US citizens. Am I misunderstanding something, or did the FAA just make citizenship a requirement for flying a $20 quadcopter in your backyard?

<comment><USER26> No, it seems like anyone can do it, without any relevance to your citizenship. I think the fancy new website is the only part that currently limits to US citizens, but that seems only temporary until they fix it.

> Q. Who is required to register on the new online UAS registration website?

> A. Only individual recreational or hobby users who meet U.S. citizenship > requirements are able to register their unmanned aircraft using this new > streamlined web-based process. __This new, faster and easier system will be > available for other UAS owners soon. __

[https://www.faa.gov/uas/registration/faqs/](https://www.faa.gov/uas/registration/faqs/)

<comment><USER25> Later on they say that for foreign nationals it's only a certificate of "ownership" , not a certificate of "recognition of registration". I'm not sure what the difference is. However it looks like permanent residents are lumped with citizens when it comes to being allowed to register.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does this apply to RC planes and helicopters too? Or is this only for the oh- so-scary "drones"?

<comment><USER28> What's the difference? [serious]

<comment><USER13> Quadcopters ("drones", ugh) are unable to maintain their altitude if there is a power failure. If one or more of the motors fail, it falls like a brick.

Airplanes, however, are much different in that they could softly and easily glide back to earth after a motor fails.

<comment><USER29> > _Airplanes, however, are much different in that they could softly and easily > glide back to earth after a motor fails._

Yes, the whole way to the scene of the crash.

I'm with you that these two things should be classified and treated very differently, but let's not pretend that if the power dies on a model airplane there's no danger.

<comment><USER13> You're correct.

Having no power in a model airplane is definitely an issue.

My main point being, however, it's arguably far easier to manuver an airplane after motor failure than a drone/quadcopter.

<comment><USER30> Is motor failure that frequent of a failure mode? I feel like complete electric failure (out of range) is much more likely in which case it will still fall like a rock?

<comment><USER31> Models (non-FPV) are typically flown until they deplete their power supply, which happens rapidly. For small electric models this is usually 6-8 minutes. Larger electric models and gas (usually nitromethane) models can sometimes stay up for 15 minutes or more, depending on how hard you're hitting the power.

Gas models use a separate battery pack for running the receiver and servos. Electric models usually use the same pack (via "battery eliminator circuit"), but there's a low-voltage cutoff that cuts the motor power off while there's still enough power to run the electronics. There's typically a "soft-cutoff" feature that allows you to restart the motors if you need power to land - <USER2> get maybe a 10 second burst of low power or 5 seconds at medium power before the cutoff trips again. It can help to stretch out an approach if you're downwind and not going to make the field.

Either way there is no technical problem with making a power-off landing. Such "deadstick" landings are very standard in the RC world, and most fields will want to see trainee pilots make several of them on a "buddy box" system under the control of an instructor before they will approve you to fly alone. They're no big deal _as long as_ you're being responsible with where you're flying.

Radio range is essentially "as far as you have a line-of-sight". Typical radios will have a range of 1.5-3 miles but you'll lose visual on the aircraft at a fraction of that distance. Some micro-sized parkflyer aircraft have less sensitive receivers, but since they're smaller you'll lose visual at shorter ranges too. Some radios have longer range, particularly amateur radio operators who can operate with greater transmitter power. These are popular with the FPV crowd, but to operate on these bands you must have your callsign and address on the plane.

The long range can actually be a bit of a problem because the signals really will go quite far, and can result in intermittent loss of control if someone else is operating on that frequency. AMA-licensed fields have a pinboard (if you don't have the clothespin with your frequency on it, you can't turn your radio on), and the fields are spaced out far enough to avoid this (typically a minimum of 5 miles). You're supposed to check before you just go fly somewhere, but some people don't. 2.4 GHz spread-spectrum radios are getting very popular nowadays because they're largely immune to these radio hits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> this registration requirement is absurd on many levels, but the pinnacle is that it holds even if you fly only above your own property

<comment><USER13> A good number of idiots do fly 'only above [their] own property'. The issue is that they fly much higher than 400' above their property.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Somehow this really angers me.

<comment><USER33> So now people have to register toys they own....

The anger you are feeling is the screws being tightened a little tighter. Everything nowadays is regulated, controlled and monitored, we in the west are not free, especially in "the land of the free"

And some beuracrat(s) at FAA just guaranteed themselves job security for long time

<comment><USER34> Except that they aren't toys. They are flying blades and we've already seen situations in which they have interfered with lives/property being saved.

And if you are so angry at regulation then go and live in China. I would highly recommend Beijing this time of year.

Just remember to breath in deep and taste the freedom.

<comment><USER33> How many people in US have died from gun and car related deaths last year? As compared to "drone strikes"

<comment><USER10> Around 100 people a year die in the US falling off ladders, with another ~35,000 requiring Emergency Department treatment.

(from the table about halfway thru [http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6316a2.htm](http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6316a2.htm) )

Drones are no doubt an emerging area of possible concern, but this heavy handed regulation is pure and simple control via hysteria.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> As someone who enjoys flying drones, I don't mind registration- I just want clarity.

Recently I was going out with some friends to the Boston Harbor Islands. I wanted to take a small Parrot AR drone out there, to fly around 25 feet in the air, to capture some group photos and check out some neat angles of military ruins. Yet, I find things like this ([https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=1...](https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=14153)) on the FAA site that indicates I can't fly anything Class B airspace.

There's stuff about applying for a Certificate of Waiver or Authorization, which seems needlessly heavy. I find things that say things like, "Community- based guidelines require recreational operators to give notice for flights within 5 statute miles of an airport."

I attempt to contact Logan's tower, and get bounced around between literally 10 different people... all equally confused. It feels _really_ odd to call an airport about this, and I have a sinking feeling that this is a good way to get on some watch list, so I'm quite careful with my words.

Eventually, I get in touch with the Assistant Director Airport Operations Airside who responds that 'Massport does not have jurisdiction of that area and cannot give approval for the use of the drone. That approval must come from the FAA local ATC since the area you are looking to operate the drone in falls within their Airspace.'. I spoke with him on the phone as well, and he was super nice and indicated that he was hoping they'd figure all of this out soon as well, because he owns a drone too.

Sites like this ([http://fromwhereidrone.com/can-you-fly-your-drone- within-5-m...](http://fromwhereidrone.com/can-you-fly-your-drone- within-5-miles-of-an-airport/)) make it sound super easy and casual to get permission... but I found the opposite.

Class B airspace covers basically _every_ major city in the US. Additionally, I couldn't fly because all national parks have had a ban since mid-2014... so even if the FAA allowed it, the Boston Harbor Islands (which are technically a national park, through a joint venture with Massachusetts) I couldn't have legally flown.

I am 100% about safety for these things. I think there should be height limitations, but also reasonable allowances. I wouldn't mind if the GPS lock on the drone kept it below 50 feet (treetop level) in places like this.

Anyway, I had to spend a few hours realizing not only that I couldn't fly on the islands, but legally I couldn't fly almost anywhere around here... including my own back yard which is 4.5 miles from Logan.

<comment><USER20> The 5 mile limit for airports is absurd.

<comment><USER13> I wouldn't say 'absurd', I'd consider it very conservative, however.

I think 2.5 miles is plenty, but there could be legitimate reasons that full- size aircraft would be flying near 400 feet near an airport.

<comment><USER36> That it's a total restriction in those areas is absurd. There's no reason for the space below 40-50 feet to be restricted anywhere.

<comment><USER37> It's not a total restriction. You can fly _at_ the airport if you tell ATC and they clear you. Though that specific scenario is unlikely, I've seen emails from hobbyists to ATCs asking permission to fly within the limits and they approved it with certain hight restrictions (below the trees in one case).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I can literally manufacture an unregistered firearm in my garage, but now anyone with a flying toy heavier than eight ounces must register with the federal government?

The over-regulation here is _insane_.

</comment><comment><USER39> I've read a few pages on this, and everything still seems pretty unclear. Does this mean anything airborne, no matter how small and low-power? Exactly what counts as a "drone"? A paper airplane? How about a balsa-wood glider? The little quad-copter toy drones - they're powered, but don't seem like they'd be able to go over 100ft or so.

It seems pretty reasonable to register the ones that can fly reliably over a few hundred feet, out of easy eyesight of the operator, maybe faster than 10-20mph or so, that sort of thing. But I'm a little disturbed by the apparent lack of a lower limit. It may sound absurd to be fined for not registering a paper airplane, but exactly what part of this says explicitly that it's not required? I'd hope we know better than to trust Government agents not to over- reach in ways that go against all common sense.

<comment><USER40> So, first, read this sub-thread [0] for a bit of history.

Second, here [1] is a summary of the guidelines from the AMA.

Third, the full FAA rule can be viewed here [2] (PDF warning).

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10733635](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10733635)

[1] [http://amablog.modelaircraft.org/amagov/2015/12/14/ama- and-t...](http://amablog.modelaircraft.org/amagov/2015/12/14/ama-and-the-faa- registration-process/)

[2] [http://www.faa.gov/news/updates/media/20151213_IFR.pdf](http://www.faa.gov/news/updates/media/20151213_IFR.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Will this apply retroactively to RC model aircraft, or only products that are marketed as "drones"?

</comment><comment><USER42> Every argument FOR this is made moot by the fact that you dont have to register ultralights...</comment>


Unpatched KDE Vulnerability Disclosed on Twitter - ga-vu https://www.zdnet.com/article/unpatched-kde-vulnerability-disclosed-on-twitter/ <comment><AUTHOR> I posted this too, I'm surprised it has no traction.</comment>


Azul's Pauseless Garbage Collector - <AUTHOR> http://www.artima.com/lejava/articles/azul_pauseless_gc.html <comment><USER2> > Self healing is a unique capability that, as far as we know, the Azul > collector is the only one to do, and it can only be done with a read > barrier.

The Metronome GC from IBM Research ([http://www.research.ibm.com/people/d/dfb/papers/Bacon05High....](http://www.research.ibm.com/people/d/dfb/papers/Bacon05High.pdf)) also uses a read-barrier to fix up pointers to objects which have moved.

Although, I don't think it does marking in the read barrier.

</comment><comment><USER3> Always taking on the most difficult thing instead of waiting until you have no choice but to clean house sounds like the best strategy for java garbage collection, running your life, running a country, you name it.

<comment><USER4> That doesn't really map to computers, which spend an _enormous_ amount of time waiting and doing nothing. Putting it off lets you collect when nothing is happening, which would otherwise be "wasted" time.

More in general, putting things off frequently means being able to handle them without interruption when the time is right; it's only a problem if the right time doesn't come up frequently enough (too busy). And context switching is pretty much guaranteed to be expensive in every circumstance, be it computers, your life, or a country.

Back to computers again, this would mean that the problem is being too busy, not that you put it off - they'll likely take about the same amount of time no matter when they're handled; if anything, they're more likely to be _faster_ if done all at once rather than bit by bit, due to cache behaviors. At that point you know you have other, larger problems.

<comment><USER3> ok, when all urgent and important things have been attended to, do the most important, non-urgent thing regardless of how hard it is, until its done or something urgent and important needs doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like fascinating work. I would have expected big unpredictable performance problems from using a read barrier to lazily fixup references to moved objects, given how expensive each page fault is in a superscalar pipeline.

But it's hard to recommend a vendor who's opaque about pricing. If we have to ask, we probably can't afford it.

<comment><USER6> Page faults are usually expensive because the bits you need must be read in from disk. In this case the bits you need are still in RAM, and could even conceivably be in cache. It's probably not tremendously more expensive than a cache miss (which is still quite expensive, but hopefully the collector is fixing up pointers fast enough that actual page faults are relatively rare).

<comment><USER7> They'd be about as expensive as throwing an exception. And the live objects would, I assume, quickly pull all the other live objects into the active pages. I love this hack.

<comment><USER8> Furthermore they're using 2mb pages instead of the usual 4kb (on x86). That cuts the overhead by a factor of 512 alone.

The remaining problem I see is cache-trashing because on every minor page- fault you have to run a part of your mark&sweep algo, surely kicking out all the application data&code from caches. That's inevitable less efficient than a stop-the-world approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could anyone explain the "self-healing" algorithm in simplistic terms?

From what I gathered, when they compact a page of memory, moving all the objects within it to different locations, they will set a marker on all pointers to be "unset". Then, while program execution is still going on, the GC thread will be busily going through the pointers and correcting them to their new locations as necessary, then setting the marker flag. If, during this period, the executing code tries to use an unmarked pointer, a "read barrier" is hit in the VM, and the GC code corrects that pointer ("self- heals"), sets the marker, then allows execution to continue.

Do I have this right? What about the initial unsetting of all these markers? It would seem to require going through all pointers before you want to compact a page, and I would suspect they're being more clever than that.

<comment><USER6> You don't mark pointers, you unmap a page of virtual memory. This instantly invalidates all pointers to that page without touching them, and allows you to immediately reuse that physical memory by mapping it to a new virtual address. When you eventually dereference a pointer to an unmapped page the processor's MMU throws a page fault. The VM catches the fault and fixes up the pointer on the spot.

What I'd like to know is how you can guarantee that all garbage is eventually collected in a system like this, and how you can guarantee that you've fixed up all pointers to an unmapped virtual page so you can reuse it.

<comment><USER10> > how you can guarantee that you've fixed up all pointers to an unmapped > virtual page so you can reuse it.

Maybe they don't.

amd64 effectively has a 48-bit addressing limit. You can unmap 1,000 4K pages each second for over two years before you need to reuse a page address.

<comment><USER6> An interesting idea, but I'd imagine the tables you need to maintain to fixup pointers would become prohibitively large before you ran out of address space.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps the VM doesn't use tables but a pointer remapping algorithm, something along the lines of (page_address * large_prime_number) mod 2^48.

<comment><USER6> The problem is you're not just moving whole pages, you're moving and compacting the objects within that page. Each object in the page has a new offset in the new page (or pages).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> <quote> Can you explain how Azul's pauseless garbage collector works?

Gil Tene: At Azul, we've been building high performance Java virtual machines (JVM)s for the past eight years now. We started the company in 2002, and we aimed to solve several scalability and infrastructure problems for Java back then.... </quote>

Anyone else really hate then people don't actually answer the question? They should have edited that useless part out.

<comment><USER12> The whole rest of the article is him explaining how it works!

<comment><USER13> Additionally, "we started a company to make Java faster and garbage collection was around #3 on our list" _is_ informative. There's only one sentence that could really be cut ("founded in 2005" or somesuch.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wwwwow. The Boehm-Demers-Weiser GC can't move objects because, you know, C is gnarly and you can't really trust anything to update pointers in-place. But what if you could? This work seems to indicate that you could have a compacting collector with arbitrary C programs, given the extra hooks they added to Linux (<http://lwn.net/Articles/392307/>).

Azul continues to impress.

</comment><comment><USER15> The guy says his company solved some difficult engineering problems, but this is not language of an engineer. "On Zing they generally tend to be below a millisecond." - what on earth does it mean? He tested it? How? What are the results? What is the confidence interval?

</comment><comment><USER16> What happens with objects that can't fit on a single page, such as a large array?

<comment><USER17> The obvious answer is to use more than one page. Why wouldn't that work with a special case for "large allocations", like most heap implementations?

<comment><USER16> Good idea. Now that I think about it, a large object is trivial in this sysyem. You dedicate some group of contiguous pages solely to the object. This results in some potential waste of the last page, which is probably acceptable. You would not ever need to perform compaction in those pages, just pointer remapping. When the object eventually dies, you release all the pages at once.</comment></comment></comment>


Autism link to air pollution raised - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/health-30521255 <comment><USER2> Are the rates of autism occurrences falling in the US and Europe? With the huge reduction in the number of people smoking, the end of leaded petrol, requirements for catalytic converters in cars, and most of the manufacturing industry being exported to the far east, presumably particulate pollution is _far_ lower than was during the post-WWII years. If this research is correct there should be a corresponding drop in the numbers of autistic children.

<comment><USER3> The keywords is "presumably". There should only be a drop if your hypothesis is correct which given population growth, car ownership trends and overall economic growth is doubtful.

<comment><USER4> _The keywords is "presumably". There should only be a drop if your hypothesis is correct which given population growth, car ownership trends and overall economic growth is doubtful._

I think it's safe to say, that, in the West, air pollution has dropped dramatically: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.epa.gov/air/airpolldata.html](http://www.epa.gov/air/airpolldata.html)

There are probably more APIs out there. Autism numbers by location should be known. Simple correlation could go a long way to check the consistency of the hypothesis.

EDIT: The autism data needed would be age of diagnosis, to map it to the proper air quality metric.

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks like nothing more than spurious correlation. Even if rates of autism and levels of air pollution are found to be correlated, we cannot infer that they are causally related. Another factor correlated with air pollution could actually be causally linked with autism.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yet another example of meme-science. Only idiots would try to explain a complex, subtle phenomena to a single environmental factor.

<comment><USER8> "There is a large inherited component to autism, but lead researcher Dr Marc Weisskopf said there was mounting evidence that air pollution may play a role too."

<comment><USER7> The way of thinking about Autism should be like the way we think about human language. Yes, the ability to speak, or rather our abilities to acquire and learn a language are, of course, inherited, but when there is no one to speak to a child, or a child refused or unable to participate, or there are other obstacles in the environment, after passing a certain age he will never speak at all.

It seems that autism has the same pattern. It has genetic aspect and environmental aspect and one of personal experience and amount of practice, so no one could identify all the factors, leave alone find a "single cause". Of course, it is genes, for, say 80% (which is rather a flawed mental construct), like it is in everything else - height or IQ, for example (why should it be different?), but the rest 20% are, of course, not mere "air pollution".

It is the same meme-nonsense (with which we're bombarded daily by mainstream media) as to say, "look, children in a toxic environments have worse grades and misbehave more". OK, perhaps they are, but this is an "empty message", a "meme" based on a naive common-sense. Correlation does not imply causation, and even if this factor is a "valid" one, its actual implication is infinitesimally small - it, perhaps, contributes to "stress" or states related to "depression" (which is another meme). Most of these meme-studies are just misuse of statistical tools together with a confirmation and self-serving biases. People construct statistical "evidences" for their own flawed constructs, instead of methodically removing everything "mental" and see what remains.</comment></comment></comment>


Learn JavaScript and artificial intelligence in a fun, interactive way - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/olistic/warriorjs <comment><USER2> I really wish technical people would explain what they mean when they say AI, and quickly name which algorithms they're using. If they don't, it's just clickbait.

<comment><USER3> Well in this case it would be game AI which might or not use any traditional AI technique (pathfinding most of the time).

There are very few cases when games have used interesting AI/Machine learning techniques but most of the time you are safe assuming that they are not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there really a need to install, by my count, 208 node modules globally?

Would the longer second line in the instructions

      $ npm install warriorjs
      ./node_modules/warriorjs/bin/warriorjs

really have scared off that many people?

<comment><USER5> Just wondering... Is left-pad one of them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like this is a port/clone of Ruby Warrior: [https://github.com/ryanb/ruby-warrior](https://github.com/ryanb/ruby-warrior)

<comment><USER7> That project is mentioned in the credits section of the github page

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of CodeCombat [https://codecombat.com/play/level/codewarrior](https://codecombat.com/play/level/codewarrior) (which also allows multiple languages)

<comment><USER9> Screeps seems similar too. [https://screeps.com](https://screeps.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there are "tutorial" for this game? This is a really complex topic and if you're trying to teach path finding and other ideas to new programmers it would be really helpful if there was a step by step guide to show the basics of what you're trying to help them accomplish. Something that can get them to the top of the tower, but can also be improved upon. Even if it's just a code sample for each level that won't beat the next level.

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks pretty cool!

I've gotta take the opportunity to plug the interactive version of Ruby Warrior here: [https://www.bloc.io/ruby-warrior](https://www.bloc.io/ruby- warrior)

It's interesting that this style of learning programming fundamentals has taken off such -- Ruby Warrior, The new swift playground announced by apple, and now this Javascript port.

</comment><comment><USER12> Not particularly the type of AI I would teach people (neural networks, and some symbolic AI) but this looks good for working with kids to learn some programming. My grandkids are visiting and I might see if they are patient enough to try this.

<comment><USER13> do you have any high level thoughts about how those could be used to dynamically solve these puzzles?

I was thinking about how to do this using QLearning to solve the optimal solution given any level, though I am not sure how long it would take to converge since their are so many different actions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> you can also try this out: [https://screeps.com/](https://screeps.com/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Hey, he stole my ASCII sword idea! [http://vorpal.js.org](http://vorpal.js.org)

Although I would argue he found a better use for it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks fun but it has little to do with AI, I expected rather something like [https://top-tactic.com](https://top-tactic.com) where you can train NN how to play football just by creating sample situations on the pitch.

</comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of [https://www.battlecode.org/](https://www.battlecode.org/) by MIT.

Both are AI games where you code your own player class, but MIT competition is PVP(player-versus-player) whereas in this one you play alone.

</comment><comment><USER18> Whether it's good "AI" or not, it looks like fun, and that's good enough for me.

</comment><comment><USER19> a Roguelike dungeon crawler is cool, but i'm not-so-secretly hankering for a procedurally generated text adventure in the style of.. well.. text adventures, requiring programming-orientated input.

</comment><comment><USER20> How does this game teach artificial intelligence? I can't see that.

<comment><USER21> It's very limited in nature but it's a great introduction. We have a character and we have to give him the knowledge to handle his environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> also, don't forget to mention the great [http://play.elevatorsaga.com/](http://play.elevatorsaga.com/) in this context.

</comment><comment><USER23> What, and somehow create Skynet that kills my computer because I didn't program a purpose into it? I don't think so.

</comment><comment><USER24> Another way to learn Javascript: letzcode.com, using text chat.

</comment><comment><USER25> Not real AI, but just is a simple finite state machine.

<comment><USER26> Isn't all implementations of AI a combination of "a simple xyz"?

The perception of Artificial Intelligence being some kind of magic is common. However, as with all magic, when you know how it is done it is "just" a combination of techniques skillfully performed. And with AI it is a combination of algorithms, data structures and computational power with an output that make sense for whatever the application is.

<comment><USER27> As with other areas of cutting edge research, most non-experts often have little choice but to resort to woefully inadequate simplification. 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', and all that.

The best way I've come up with to explain the current state of AI is, "we can do tricks by hiding multiple immense databases behind the scenes and having supercomputers run complex searches among them, but we probably won't be able to fully model even a mouse brain for at least 10 years... and at that point we'll likely have learned enough new things about brain function to push it another 10 years out."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> warrior.explode()</comment>


LLVM Adds Support for Nvidia GPUs - <AUTHOR> http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-05-09/open_source_compiler_adds_support_for_nvidia_gpus.html <comment><USER2> There's also been an LLVM backend for AMD's GPUs for a while (though it doesn't support the newest Radeon HD 7000 series architecture): [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAyN...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAyNTg)

<comment><USER3> Slightly more up to date article on an OpenCL back end for LLVM: [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA2N...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA2NzM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the article: "NVIDIA awakened the world to computer graphics when it invented the GPU in 1999."

Umm....

<comment><USER5> 3dfx: ookay _sadface_

<comment><USER6> I'm guessing they're not counting 3D chips without hardware transform & lighting support (where the 1999 GeForce 256 was the first) as "GPUs". Also, 3Dfx got taken over by nVidia soon after, so I guess it's not completely wrong. Also... press releases aren't exactly the best place to look for unbiased information.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I was a Gamer back then and the Voodoo series were called "3D Accelerators". NVidia coined the term "GPU" for the first GeForce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was already discussed at length on HN on previous posts such as <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3949899> (77 points at the time of writing, posted 4 days ago).

<comment><USER9> The front page is constantly changing, I didn't see it 4 days ago, and apparently a lot of other people didn't either. If you don't like it, just ignore it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is awesome, but I don't quite understand how it works. What kind of code will you write to invoke massively parallel behavior in LLVM? Will every language have `kernel<<<...>>>`?

</comment><comment><USER10> Nice, but I've always though it would be nice to have a slightly higher level virtual machine that had more explicit mechanisms for expressing parrallelism.</comment>


Please, Evernote, wake up. I wanted you to win. - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattie.net/blog/2010/2/13/please-evernote-wake-up-i-wanted-you-to-win.html

<comment><USER2> The thing that has disappointed me about Evernote forever is their complete and total lack of Linux support. This is a product that has Palm Pre and Windows Mobile clients but for whatever reason has decided that developing a Linux client isn't worthwhile.

A recent Hacker News poll of OS used day-to-day, Linux finished second in frequency behind Mac OS: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=687267> . People who do dev/database/IT work frequently need snippets of text like IP addresses and passwords and API keys and this sort of tool would come in handy for us. But a lot of us run Linux as well. Even ignoring the nerd market, Linux is increasingly run by regular people on their netbooks.

I guess the reason I don't get this is that tech savvy folks seem like a great market to go after with your software, as they tend to be very influential in their social networks' decisions as well.

Apples and Oranges, I know, but I use and love Dropbox in large part because it works with 2 of my 3 computers. On the other hand, Evernote runs poorly on my mac and can only be accessed via the web on the others. I actually use dropbox now as I would evernote, by keeping .txt files in my dropbox.

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, does anybody here know of a concrete example where a Linux user actually paid money for Linux software?

I think that might be part of the explanation.

<comment><USER4> I just bought Galcon Fusion (<http://www.galcon.com/fusion/>) today. I wouldn't have had it not run on Linux.

<comment><USER5> I second that. Bought Galcon Fusion a few hours after it was released.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Evernote is even worse on Mac. I've been using Journler (<http://journler.com/>) because it's too much of a hassle to keep my stuff in OneNote on a separate partition, or run VMware.

I wish there was a OSX port for OneNote, which I think is the most usable not taking software I've ever tried.

<comment><USER7> Does journler have better formatting than Evernote?

<comment><USER8> A first-year CS undergrad student can write an editor with better formatting than Evernote on OS X. I don't mean to be snarky but it's terrible to see EN have so much potential only to be excruciating to use.

<comment><USER9> Believe me, it's frustrating to see how much press they get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was pretty impressed with the app when I tried it a while ago, but was _immediately_ turned off by the lack of secure uploads for the free version. That, and the $45/year cost and the _complete_ inability to import / export _anything_ means it's a lock-in tool designed to get them more money, not to improve my workflow. This is all in spite of several postings I've seen of the owner claiming to strongly support open standards. Put your money where your mouth is, and just _maybe_ I'll believe you, instead of your application doing everything possible to show the opposite.

A lot of applications could learn a thing or two from the design, and the OCR is impressive. But it's an expensive lock-in, and I'm not touching it any more.

</comment><comment><USER9> My startup, <https://snaptic.com> , is trying to help them wake up by building a better note taking app.

We are on Android, iPhone, and web.

Come hack with us in SF and scratch your own itch. firstname.lastname@example.com

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1089905> </shameless plug>

<comment><USER11> If you're hiring more than one person with investment money, then I give your company 1 year before you have to reorganise the company. You have 3 people already, add one more engineer and optimise your resources. Hiring more is going to be money wastage.

<comment><USER9> Our founders don't get a salary, we use the money to hire engineers.

We are very fortunate to have passionate users (#1 note app on Android) and need more folk to help us make something people want.

We are especially looking for data hackers, UX, and vis design people.

<comment><USER8> From someone knee-deep in the iPhone world but with zero experience in the Android world, could you perhaps let me/us know how many downloads and/or unique users a "#1 note app on Android" equates to? I'm genuinely quite curious if it is worth my time to get into Android and well, the more data points on usage numbers the better! Thanks.

<comment><USER9> The metrics Google gives you are a bit coarse, you only get total downloads and active installs. Not sure if this translates to unique users, iTunes Connect is so much nicer in this regard.

Google Market publicly give out your download numbers in brackets, 50-100 downloads, 100-1k downloads, 1k-5k, etc.

We have two apps in the 250k+ bracket.

We've been on Android for over a year and the last few months have been insane. The day of the Droid launch we saw our traffic triple, and things seem to be picking up steam since then.

Feel free to email me at [username]@snaptic.com or hit me up on GTalk [username]@gmail.com

We love the Android platform and it would be great to have more folks building on it.

<comment><USER11> Is the 250k+ bracket for a paid app or a free app? I have a free app that is top 10 in its category, and we have 1700 downloads a day on iphone - so it would take me 150 days to reach 250k, or 5 months. How does Android compare?

<comment><USER9> All our apps are free.

We haven't publicly announced our numbers, but we have a "nice" multiple of the daily download numbers you posted.

Sorry for being vague, I need to check with my co-founder before talking publicly about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The strange thing is, my typical evernote usage rarely involves me actually writing notes myself. I always find myself spinning up a dropbox'ed tiddlywiki for fleshing out ideas and in general using a pen and scrap paper for temporary notes.

Instead I use it as a place to clip anything I read online and find useful/interesting. It is like using a bookmarking site that keeps a copy of the article in case the original vanishes and is searchable beyond the titles. For being sort of a permanent searchable extension of my brain's memory it works really well.

I also use it to clip pages I want to read in the future into a 'ReadItLater' notebook; a replacement for readitlaterlist that won't lose my articles if the source vanishes and allows me to search things easily. Due to my hn/reddit/rss addiction the 'ReadItLater' notebook is tremendously valuable for me. I tend to encounter far more things I want to read then I have time to so my backlog is perpetually increasing. However if I am searching I still will get results from this list.. Honestly, sometimes it feels like I am sending myself messages from the future saying "Hey this article is relevant to something your doing. Now is the time to finally get around to reading it".

I don't have a premium account yet, but with GDC looming ahead I think I might spring for it so that I can take advantage of the searchable PDF feature. I would love to just dump all the pdf whitepapers I run across directly in rather than my current practice of extracting the contents.

As others have pointed out though, Evernote does have some major concerns that need addressed. The native clients are poor (luckily the web client is pretty good), they feel very 'walled garden' (open up, open up, an app ecosystem awaits you!), no linux client, and clipping web pages means settling for an uglified unformatted version.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think it's astonishing how nearly everyone posting here seems to have some complaining to do about Evernote for some reason or another. Please try to put yourself in Evernote's shoes - provide a Linux version? For which userbase? Will they get 50-100k+ Linux users with at least 1k+ premium users to make it worth their time (compared to other platforms)? Also, there are lots of unspecific complaints. It's great everyone can vent his anger and opinions, snark just doesn't really help. Does it help to just say "it sucks on platform x"?

</comment><comment><USER14> How do you guys do your note taking? I'm surprised there's so many people. I'll probably be getting an ipad so I'm curious if there's any iphone experiences.

<comment><USER15> Textfiles in a dropbox folder so they are available on other machines and the iphone if needed.

<comment><USER8> I use Notational Velocity and store the notes as markdown-formatted text files in a Dropbox folder. I can render them to HTML as needed for "pretty" viewing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Note-taking software has continued to fail me by not including LaTeX support. I will not be taking notes without being able to format math. This affects Evernote and OneNote equally.

<comment><USER17> actually, onenote 2010 support formulas. And the support is quite good, on par with word.

It makes me sad, because I live on linux and notetaking apps there are mediocre. The best I could find is keepnote.

Onenote is years ahead of everything else, but I don't want the vendor lock-in and the binary files that it produces.

Evernote moved to .NET 3.5 so no wine support. Bah!

<comment><USER18> Yes, but the problem with this is that you can't just enter a stream of text. If I'm in a math class, attempting to take notes, I have to point and click on those apps.

With apps that support LaTeX, I can just type $, start typing math, and type another $ to go back to regular text. Sure, I'll have to type things like \int, but that's still faster than trying to find the integral button in OneNote.

Edit: fix typo.

<comment><USER19> If OneNote is anything like Word you can use LaTeX notation once you are inside an equation environment (Alt + =).

For example in Word typing Alt + = \int^1_2 \sum^x_(x+1) \ge \sqrt(25)

Would produce exactly what you would get in LaTeX.

You can even copy/paste between applications that support MathML.

<comment><USER18> Sweet; I haven't yet had an opportunity to use the new equation editor. That's exactly what I want; though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The funny thing is latest client is worse than the last client for Windows. Previous client was quite good actually, new one doesn't even look like a native Windows app.

I think they fall into "Let's rewrite this and make it better!" FAIL. You need to be pretty stupid to rewrite something that's actually working unless you got a great confident, team and time, and final client of them proves that they sucked, and now it's going to take them another 6 months to come up with something as good as their previous client.

When startups are going to learn to not to do obviously stupid like "OMG, our client is not good enough, instead of improving it, let's rewrite it, yay!" ?

</comment><comment><USER20> BTW open sourcing their app wouldn't make a difference at all, actually it doesn't even make sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why do you say that? In theory much of their value is actually in the sharing/networking aspects. Since they control the backend service and the API, I'd say it could reasonably be a win for them to open source all of their client variants.

<comment><USER20> They already have an API and which is good. Because in products like this (without millions of admirer) open sourcing the application won't help.

They can open source the application but not add any new developers outside of the company (which wouldn't mean anything, other than good faith).

They can open source it and bunch of people might send stuff in an un- organized way, it never ends good. There are thousands of open source projects some serious usability issues because no one cares and it's hard organise people in open source projects and consistency is the key for usability. So open sourcing projects in this scale, %95 of the time won't be better than what it's.

I can't even recall one successful product that area.

Although publishing more document, samples etc. about API definitely helps.</comment></comment></comment>


Wall of Shame – Hosters edition - <AUTHOR> http://blog.patrolserver.com/2015/07/28/the-infamy-list-hosters-edition/

<comment><USER2> It looks like the author obtained the results using the banners obtained by using a scanning tool. For distributions like Ubuntu LTS or RedHat/CentOS, security fixes are backported to older versions of applications like Apache or PHP. For example RHEL 6 bundles PHP 5.3, but backports relevant security fixes.

<comment><AUTHOR> The tool used was our own scanner and it differentiates between package versions and 'upstream' versions. So when saying an older PHP version, it is about the upstream version, not the package version. There were many hosters that hadn't installed the latest security releases of e.g. RedHat, but I only included when they were on an unsupported release.</comment></comment>


Air Force Blocks Media Sites That Posted Leaked Cables - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704694004576019944121568506.html <comment><USER3> Dup:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007332> \- wsj.com - no comments

Additionally, same story, different sources:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007015> \- nytimes.com - 2 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007650> \- theregister.co.uk - <USER2> comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2008075> \- reuters.com - no comments</comment>


Show HN: Ship – A fast, native issue tracker for software projects - <AUTHOR> https://www.realartists.com/blog/ship-it.html <comment><USER2> I kind of wish that software issue trackers/ALM/SCM/whatever-the-fuck-its- called-today would be a bit more opinionated and enforce some set of practices. I think some people are looking to these tools for help building an effective software workflow and are left with a configurable product that _can_ work great -- if you've run projects effectively before. But if you haven't it turns into a nightmare.

I know that workflow, work item types, how to transition between states is kind of a deeply personal thing -- but often I wish I could just eliminate the mental overhead of trying to figure out how this project, manager, and team are using Jira/Rally/TFS/Trello/Pivotal and what state I need to put something at what time and which fields need to filled out and if we are using tags and why adding this critical bug to the current sprint is giving me a big scary warning and are we calling this a feature or a story or an epic or an enhancement or a task or a subtask and if I want to be looking at what this tool is calling a burndown chart or if its really the milestone progress chart in this project and what was that filter you used to see bugs that were open and also defined because I'm not seeing the bug that my customer is asking about and are we supposed to put new information as a comment or in the description or is it a new linked issue or a new child task or a new child bug or a link to the integrated wiki page...

(maybe I'm just the only one with these scars...)

<comment><USER3> I find that Pivotal is pretty opinionated with the workflow you use. Specifically, it is meant for an agile process that is exactly that Pivotal (the consulting group) uses to develop their client products.

<comment><USER4> Some nitpicks:

* Pivotal _Tracker_ is the SaaS software you're thinking of.

* Pivotal _Labs_ is the agile and lean engineering/design/product/data science consultancy, from which Pivotal Tracker first emerged as a product.

* _Pivotal_ is the parent company formed from Pivotal Labs and other products (notably Cloud Foundry, Spring, Greenplum, Gemfire) several years ago.

Disclaimer: I'm work at Pivotal Labs.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, Googled and ended up on the main site. Thought they were doing a _really_ bad job of explaining their software for a bit.

<comment><USER4> Calling Tracker "Pivotal" is pretty common.

My first thought is we should add a "did you mean Tracker?" link somewhere, but that's got problems too. We work on a _lot_ of software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone!

James and I made Ship because we were frustrated with other tools we've had to use. It's focused on developer productivity and meant to be used frequently without wasting your time.

But seriously, we'd love feedback, both good and bad.

<comment><USER6> Have you considered using a source code repo as the store for issues? So that "git pull" syncs issues too, issues can exist on (to describe) branches, etc?

<comment><USER7> (james here)

There are a few tools that do this already. I think it's an interesting approach, and probably makes sense for some people.

However, I feel like tying issues to closely to the code can be problematic. For example, for the product Ship itself there are multiple repositories, there's the server, the client, the web site, and a few libraries that we built along the way and open sourced.

We want to be able to file issues on our product without having to first determine in which repo the problem actually resides. We also want to be able to file umbrella issues or features that require us to make cross cutting code changes across multiple repositories.

<comment><USER8> I imagine that sort of issues would (mostly) be solved by a monorepo approach. Of course that is also drastically different in many other ways too.

<comment><USER9> That was my thought too. It sounds like having an issue tracker tightly coupled with the code/repo structure would be extremely useful in monorepo's.

The problem might not be that it's hard to figure out which issue a repo would belong too, but rather, having multiple (separate) repositories that have things in common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the great features of a web-based bug tracker is that I can paste ticket links in various places, which people can view with a single click.

On top of that, it's yet another app to be installed and kept up to date, which everyone on your team has to independently do. If it auto-updates, presumably one person updating will update the database and then require everyone else to upgrade to continue use? I can't tell you how annoyed I'd be if it did that right after I finished entering info for a new ticket..

I appreciate the feature set and motivations from that perspective, but I have trouble with the native app part. I'm a very heavy app user though; Aside from my actual IDE, git, and the executable code I am actually writing (generally web apps or background daemons), everything I do is web-based: Email, chat, docs, bug tracker, wiki, build server, repository management, notes, news, music...

<comment><AUTHOR> It's possible you've not experienced the problems that we have with web based issue trackers. That's ok. Ship may not be the right tool for you.

As for all-at-once upgrades, so far it's not been an issue. The client ignores things it doesn't understand and we've kept the server backwards compatible for the last 7 months. We expect to be able to continue to do so.

<comment><USER11> I actually love the native part, fwiw. I've often thought that a native JIRA client could be way easier to use than their web interface. Of course they could also just invest in making their web interface much better, but native expectations are naturally very high, and a lot of the horrible UX practices we accept on the web wouldn't fly in a native environment. Essentially it would have no choice but to be better.

<comment><USER12> > a lot of the horrible UX practices we accept on the web wouldn't fly in a > native environment.

I'm interested by this statement. I like to think I just web and native apps by the same standards. I've seen horrible UX in both - and great UX in both. I currently lean towards favouring web apps based purely on my feeling that I tend to get a better UI on average.

<comment><USER11> Together we obviously represent a pretty small sample, but I'm curious what OS you use? One of the reasons I like MacOS is because the apps are typically better designed than what I got when I used Windows or Linux as my desktop (don't get me started on Linux UIs).

Don't get me wrong, I've seen some bad app UIs on the Mac -- even from Apple. The old skeuomorphic days are coming back to me as I type this and I'm still sad for them. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> iOS/OSX only? Meh. The real need is on every platform you haven't yet developed for. At my work right now we use TFS built in tracking tools. I can't even begin to described how annoying it is to work with that system. There are no tools right now that have a built-in workflow and are minimal for windows/linux. There's tons of bug/tracking systems but they tend to take the approach of giving you tons of features and allowing you to make your own workflow which ends up creating a big mess if people get lazy with filing issues/tickets.

I'm sorry I know its a good first step, but those who need minimal issue tracking and such are probably on a windows/linux platform where current solutions are bloated and maybe even too feature filled.

Then again this is only my 2¢

</comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me a bit of Bee[1] which puts a native Mac interface on top of existing issue trackers (GitHub, JIRA, FogBugz). On the one hand, Bee's approach seems like a win in the short term because people don't have to switch where there data lives or buy in to an off-premise service if that's not what they want. Longer-term, though, the data model of the existing systems could prove to be limiting if you've got good ideas for how to change the approach here.

Issue tracking "at scale" is hard for the same reason that a lot of software becomes complicated: when applied to the real world, new workflow needs and such pop up frequently. As an example: security issues that may need to have a restricted audience for a time. The release model for web-based software is different from that of desktop or mobile software.

There's plenty of room to make this better! Good luck in finding a winning path forward!

[1]: [http://www.neat.io/bee/](http://www.neat.io/bee/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks neat. It's a bummer that it's Mac-only

<comment><AUTHOR> We're planning to support the web and other native platforms. I use Windows.

Which platform do you prefer?

<comment><USER16> Linux please. If you're going to target the web, you might as well build a desktop app with electron[1].

[1] [http://electron.atom.io/](http://electron.atom.io/)

<comment><USER17> Looks like electron could work with FreeBSD as well, so I'd probably give a +1 to that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks like the Mac client is written in ObjC, judging by the small size of the binary and the lack of any recognizable language runtime libraries. Is that correct? If so, I guess you'll have to write a new client from scratch for other platforms.

</comment><comment><USER19> Looks nice. Also looks utterly unusable unless you can guarantee that everyone you work with runs a Mac, which is not an option.

</comment><comment><USER20> I like native part, I like offline support (sometimes have to work without Internet).

I don't like cloud nature (if I understood it correctly, I can't host my own server) and it's probably not open-source which I don't like too (would be too hard to make non-Windows server).

Overall it's a very interesting approach and I'll consider using it. Thanks for making it.

</comment><comment><USER21> It looks great - and extremely tempting since I am currently going through QA hell with a project, but I cannot tell from your website whether or not this will stay a free product.

Do you or your partner have a plan to commercialize the software? Add premium features? Or is this a side-project whose future is still being decided?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pricing will be comparable with similar tools - probably on a per-seat basis, but we'll do something special for early adopters.

It will always be possible to export all your data. We have that now, it's just not exposed yet. Here's an example of the demo database: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/ujix7vch7ramlmx/data.json?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ujix7vch7ramlmx/data.json?dl=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> We in the Prosody project were using Google Code and the project leader really liked their issue tracker. When the shutdown was announced, we looked around but found nothing that met our needs, so we ended up writing our own. I'm personally quite pleased with the result: [https://prosody.im/issues](https://prosody.im/issues)

[https://prosody.im/issues/static/readme.html](https://prosody.im/issues/static/readme.html) [https://hg.prosody.im/issue-tracker/](https://hg.prosody.im/issue-tracker/)

Also see [https://prosody.im/issues/issue/2](https://prosody.im/issues/issue/2) ;)

<comment><USER23> That actually looks very nice, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just downloaded the Mac OS X version to try it out and upon clicking 'Demo Mode' I am presenting with the next screen which is mostly blank (Screenshot: [http://i.imgur.com/evyyF5v.png](http://i.imgur.com/evyyF5v.png)).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for letting us know!

That's a bummer. Sadly, I don't have any guesses as to why. I'm happy to help debug if you want: email@example.com, but understand if you don't want to spend any more time on it.

<comment><USER25> No no no.... No need to apologize! Just chase the bug. This looks awesome for a V1! Kudos to you guys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This makes me reminisce, we had lots of bug trackers that were close to having these kinds of features when git was first hitting in the mid-ish 2000's.

My favorite was Simple Defects: [http://syncwith.us/sd/](http://syncwith.us/sd/)

</comment><comment><USER27> General question about issue trackers in general:

How do people usually integrate these with other project management tools, like Jira or Trello? Some of the issues shown on the site seem like what I would call features as opposed to bugs. Is it a different use case? Does it work to have software "features" in Jira or Trello or similar and then use an issue tracker like Ship for just the bugs?

I used to use a system of filing bugs as GitHub issues and then moving them into Trello when they've been scoped and prioritized and are ready to work on - but lately I've just been putting them straight into Trello. Any insight on workflows for combining software like this with Trello or Jira would be appreciated!

<comment><USER28> > Some of the issues shown on the site seem like what I would call features as > opposed to bugs. Is it a different use case? Does it work to have software > "features" in Jira or Trello or similar and then use an issue tracker like > Ship for just the bugs?

"Features" and "bugs" are essentially the same thing: differences between the current and desired state of a piece of software.

Tracking them in separate tools seems to be a bad idea.

<comment><USER27> That makes sense. My next question then would be: Can you use Ship or some other issue tracker to manage the software lifecycle reasonably? Planning for a sprint or release, development, code review, QA, etc. I'm used to having these as columns in Trello or Jira - is the alternative to do them as labels or similar? Or would you use some other tool for them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> After looking through the documentation it doesn't seem like the following features exist. Would love to know if I'm missing something, or if not the thought process behind excluding these features:

1) Ability to prioritize problems on a more granular level than the priority type. This would help people prioritize which problems they want to work on next in a kanban type format

2) Story points or the ability to estimate the approximate size of the task

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't personally like agile.

We would like to add the ability to order problems - both a personal work order queue, like "I'm doing this, then that, etc." and globally within a milestone, which I think is what you had in mind.

Arbitrary attributes are supported, so you could track point estimates that way, but you're right, nothing like that is surfaced at the top level. Perhaps we can think of a good way to surface things like this without reaching Jira- custom-fields level of pain.

<comment><USER29> Thanks for the response! That's exactly what I had in mind re: ability to order problems at a more granular level. Didn't realize that arbitrary attributes are supported, that's great

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> regarding the architecture: basically is (or is very much like) event sourcing, right? I mean, kind of like an append-only log, that will grow forever.

<comment><USER7> (author here)

Yes, that's right, at least at the source of truth on the server. Clients automatically rewrite or squash their local history a little bit prior to pushing it to the server to minimize log length and to avoid showing intermediate editing states that were never communicated to anyone else (just like you might squash git commits), but every important state is preserved in the log.

<comment><USER30> ok tnx! as a dev myself, i'm still not convinced about this whole append- only/time-machine approach (i'm talking more about event sourcing in general, not your specific architecture). it smells too much architecture astronaut (see [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html) and [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html)). it feels like this incredibly heavy monster system that _theoretically_ may let you do anything, but in practice, at the end of the day, is not able to do it because it is impractical to use. again, not necessarily yours.

<comment><USER31> Git itself is exactly such an append-only system, and it's one of the most reliable and useful tools ever. What's the problem?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's strange to me that although distributed version control systems are very popular, we all use centralised issue trackers for them.

<comment><USER33> But it really isn't strange. Maybe because there is a lot of value in seeing a real-time, shared, up-to-date view of the issues including status information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interesting angle approaching this problem, from a continuous log cacheable on the client. Just downloaded and used demo briefly so take this for whatever it's worth: \- What about a sidebar for the issue detail, instead of a floating window? \- A send button when posting comment, not just CMD-S \- The issues list could use some bigger font size and spacing

</comment><comment><USER35> Kudos for doing conflicts the right way!

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd actually be interested in trying this, since I have a lot of issues and I'm getting frustrated with Github issues. But I'd need my users to be able to file and comment on issues online - it looks like this is not possible right now. Is that planned?

<comment><AUTHOR> Consensus seems to be that we need to build out the web client next.

We always planned to make a web version, but don't expect we'll be able to do too much better than existing solutions.

<comment><USER23> Well, I think the "better than existing solutions" part is the offline client - mostly I just need a web front end for users to get the issues into the system. I'm happy for all the searching etc to be only in the desktop client.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This looks awfully similar to a tool called as radar when I worked at a fruit company in cupertino.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, it looks more like Mail.app. It really will if we offer a single window mode.

My co-founder, James, most recently worked at Apple. Pretending he wasn't influenced at all by (the good parts) of Radar would be disingenuous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What will the pricing be like?

</comment><comment><USER38> I like this. A lot. What's the pricing? SaaS vs one time fee?

</comment><comment><USER39> Startups would love to use this if you building Jira compatibility.

</comment><comment><USER40> You should mention in the article it's mac only

</comment><comment><USER41> What does 'native' mean in this context?

<comment><USER9> In this context it means that the software was built specifically for Macs. Ie, not a web/mobile app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks great!

</comment><comment><USER42> s/native/OSX/

</comment><comment><USER43> Why OSX 10.10 or later?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't have older machines to test on, and we built it for ourselves first.

I use Windows, but a web client is probably next.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> great domain! :)

<comment><USER45> my thoughts too

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Why would you make it require Yosemite 10.10? This is absurd developer laziness. Spend an hour making it compatible with OS versions from the last couple of years.

There's no excuse for this.

<comment><USER46> Out of curiosity, why wouldn't you upgrade? I know Yosemite had its issues, but El Capitan seems better. I agree that having something available for previous versions is probably a good thing. But just curious why you specifically wouldn't upgrade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> We have built an alternative to Jira and we're always looking to improve our product. Check out tool out - [https://jixee.me](https://jixee.me)

We're working with developers daily to make it a better experience.</comment>


Suspend for the X1 Carbon 2018 on Linux - fiji-flo https://github.com/fiji-flo/x1carbon2018s3 <comment><AUTHOR> This is short on details. So here are some more: since S0 ( active suspend) became more popular with windows 10, most manufacturers have decided to REMOVE THE CODE from the bios that allows S3 (suspend to ram).

Worst case is they left the stubs pretending S3 is supported, so the computer goes to sleep - but never wakes up! Dell, I'm looking at you!!

Workarounds come from redoing the S3 code, mostly in ACPI tables with triggers - for all peripherals.

It is a shame, as in S3 most laptops eat less that 1% of the battery per hour, while in S0 such good results require heavy configuration to prevent the "active" part of active sleep, and make sure the laptop never wakes up until you actually press on the power button. But I guess it is the road to progress, as S0 is more flexible.

<comment><USER2> It's worrying how obscure and poor standards compliance modern hardware is starting to display. And we're talking about PCs. Let's not even discuss mobiles.

In 2012 I bought a MacBook Air to run Linux. It's a great silent machine with all Intel hardware, except the pretty poor quality Broadcom wireless card. It boots with any vanilla kernel, and everything just works. Except for poor wireless range. What machine can I buy these days that?

i) Just works on Linux (which in practice means everything has to be Intel, including the wireless card)

ii) Is reasonably silent

The only machine I've found worth considering is a Xiaomi Air 12 with a m3 (fanless) CPU. Some Thinkpads are OK, but they tend to be on the noisy side of things due to excessively small fans and too much power I don't need. This, despite aggressively tweaking powertop settings.

I'm also looking for external USB high-gain wireless antennas. But even classic Alfa ones with Atheros 9271 chipsets are a hit and miss.

It's a bit hopeless. If someone has good suggestions, I'd be glad to consider them.

<comment><USER3> Thinkpads might not be as bad as you think. I have an X230 at home, which runs many flavors of linux extremely well and is dead silent, and a T440s at work which is also an excellent choice albeit slightly more expensive. You can pick up refurbished t440s'es for around 500-700 euros in the Netherlands, where X230's go for 200 at the very lowest price point (still with an ssd!).

Unless I'm playing Counter Strike on the X230, which runs great all things considered, I never ever hear the fan. Wireless and thankfully wired connections are spotless too, though the X230 doesn't have 802.11ac as far as I know.

<comment><USER4> X1 Carbon 5th gen had some kinks at first but has been serving me well w/ Ubuntu for a year now. Managing the HiDPI display has been the only real headache -- if I could go back in time I'd have gotten the 1080p screen instead of the high res one.

Besides that when I say it works, I mean it really works. Even the 4g card I added worked out of box on Ubuntu!

<comment><USER5> Yeah, that's why I got the 1080p screen :) Learned my lesson with the 2nd gen - that was a piece of crap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Didn't Lenovo used to get Thinkpads certified by Ubuntu and RH ? Did they give up on it ? That only leaves Dell as the other main vendor (not counting smaller niche players) that still gives a shit.

Edit: Looks like they still do, just that certification doesn't mean shit. This is more RH and Canonical's fault than Lenovo's. What's the point of certifying something if you can add a note (as Canonical did) that suspend/resume doesn't work.

[https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/hardware/3398131](https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/hardware/3398131)

[https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201712-26045/](https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201712-26045/)

<comment><USER7> > Slow Resume from Suspend

> This system does not not meet our performance criteria for resuming from > suspend, but suspend/resume is functional and other functionality is not > affected.

Ah, so it does meet their performance criteria after all. The elusive double negative.

<comment><USER6> Upon further reading, there are further issues with this laptop with thermal throttling (only on linux, not windows). And no support for wwan or fingerprint reader. The certification is beyond useless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's probably because Lenovo's suspend feature relies on an unsigned binary blob from China sideloaded during system boot over an unsecure HTTP connection.

Why anyone still trusts Lenovo enough for this sort of thing to come up as an issue is beyond me.

<comment><USER9> Citation on that? Never heard that before, and I own two ThinkPads (including a four-month-old T480).

<comment><USER8> [https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/security-failings- demonstrate-...](https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/security-failings-demonstrate- avoid-lenovo/)

Or who could forget Lenovo's surveillance malware that performed man-in-the- middle attacks on SSL traffic? Seriously, these machines should be banned for sale in the U.S. on national security grounds.

<comment><USER10> that link says nothing about

> Lenovo's suspend feature relies on an unsigned binary blob from China > sideloaded during system boot over an unsecure HTTP connection

it talks about Lenovo Service Engine, Superfish, Lenovo Solution Center, and Lenovo Customer Feedback.

if you blow away the default install of windows, including the UEFI partition, and install (windows or linux or whatever) from scratch, how could any of those things affect you?

<comment><USER8> Lenovo Service Engine was BIOS-level bloatware loading garbage into clean installs of Windows over HTTP. Lenovo's drivers were so bad that they couldn't get Microsoft WHQL certification, so their BIOS was sideloading them in a very unsecure manner.

<comment><USER11> Note that this is an official Windows feature and it is the OS that executes the firmware-provided crapware in the first place. It should provide an option to turn it off.

Of course, malicious firmware doesn't really depend on the OS's cooperation. It would just be harder to implement and the result a lot more flaky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The fact that the script is open source is great, but I'd be extremely hesitant to download something that patches my laptop's boot sequence without a little more info and/or some comments in the code about exactly what it's doing. Yes, I can see the sed commands, but I have zero idea what it's actually replacing or with what.

<comment><USER13> You're editing your ACPI tables, compiling the result, and telling the kernel to use it instead of what it gets from the hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I planned to buy this laptop some time this year. Has lenovo stopped supporting linux as well as they used to? I've owned two lenovo laptops and loved them and planned to buy another. I'm also looking at dell laptops since their linux support is reportedly excellent.

<comment><USER15> I just switched from an MBP 2013 to a ThinkPad T480 running Ubuntu 18.04. I'm loving it. Linux support has been really great and I didn't have to install a lot of special drivers. (e.g. trackpad support with multi-touch scrolling worked from the start) A lot of Dell's have that terrible bottom placement of the webcam.

Things to love about the T480:

\- Fairly portable at around 3.5 lbs with a 14inch screen. It avoids the dedicated numeric keypad that some larger 15inch models have, while still having good screen real estate.

\- Great keyboard as all Thinkpads have. (media keys are working great under linux)

\- Very durable having undergone mil-spec testing.

\- Camera placement at top with a mechanical shutter if you get the FHD screen.

\- 32 GB of ram if you want/need it

\- Hot-swappable batteries. No need to turn off the laptop. just flip it over and replace. (You can buy the extended 72Wh battery for extra battery time)

Bonus if you find one on eBay slightly used. You could save over a $1000 for a comparably specced machine.

<comment><USER16> I have to second how awesome Hot-swap batteries are. While I do need to find a socket for this, having 'just' a T540p (can recommend, nice device), being able to swap the battery in seconds instead of charging >30 min (depending on how large your charger is) is awesome. So if you can hot swap, get another non-protuding battery instead of one that sticks out from the laptop, as that makes it hard to hold it on your palm (works like a charm, and the robustness makes you worry less). In that sense it is easier to use on-the-go than a tablet, due to the ease of holding (just wrap your fingers around the battery, and it will take a couple weeks to get the strength in your arm to do it comfortably if you are not used to such loads).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Trackpad also doesn't work under Linux with the NFC model. Hardware wise the webcam and sound are beyond horrible. The fan curves are obnoxious and it still gets uncomfortably hot. It's such a shame, I had high hopes for this laptop but it's collecting dust in a drawer. Between the sleep states, track pad, thermal issues and throttling, poor audio visuals and battery life … the thing really should never have had that price point.

<comment><USER18> I've got that laptop and it's fine in Windows. Maybe the problem is Linux, not the laptop?

<comment><USER19> I run linux, have the latest BIOS, but it is _not_ the NFC model, with the "HDR" screen and i7-8650U. I idle around 43C and my fan is completely off under 50ish, at which point it (very silently) ramps up. I get 8-10 hours of battery life, and the screen is fantastic (and very very bright). However the speakers are worst than a 200$ smartphones. No issue with the trackpad as it is a non-NFC model.

I suggest OP revises his configuration...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting that this is now necessary on PC laptops to get basic things like suspend/sleep to work. I remember having to apply DSDT patches to make suspend, as well as other basic functionality, work on Hackintosh machines (PCs running macOS.)

</comment><comment><USER21> Missing S3 standby support is also causing problems with Windows. Leading to battery draining during standby: [https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X- Series-Laptops/X1-Ca...](https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series- Laptops/X1-Carbon-6th-Gen-Battery-drain-in-sleep/m-p/4075415)

</comment><comment><USER22> I bought the X1 6th gen, but ended up returning it for a refund due to poor Linux support.

There is no excuse for breaking S3 suspend.

<comment><USER23> Did you find anything besides S3 that didn't work? I have the 6th gen X1 and once I patched in ACPI my ubuntu install has worked perfectly.

<comment><USER24> Can you please tell me what the battery life is on Ubuntu (with ACPI patch) vs Windows (with or without ACPI patch)?

<comment><USER23> I didn't have windows on long enough to get solid battery numbers, but on ubuntu I get 8 hours of work use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have a X270 that's modernish and I'm wondering if this could suffer from the same issue... I can't get it to suspend at all. I'm hoping the sensor is gone, but I'm not sure how to verify that... Thinksupport have changed the mainboard but that didn't fix it.

How to check?

</comment><comment><USER26> This looks like serious witchcraft. Is it safe?

I have some suspend working on X1 2018, not sure which one! Switching from Mac is... hard. My true-wireless bluetooth earbuds don't work too well either. I guess it's gonna take few weeks of tweaking configs to get to a decent situation.

</comment><comment><USER27> I have a 2018 X1 Carbon with Ubuntu that has perfectly supported suspend. It's never been a problem

<comment> fiji-flo Ubuntu only supports S0i3 (modern standby) not the normal S3 sleep. S0i3 has some problems like peripheral not working after resume and higher battery drain during "sleep".

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Can it detect the state of the lid and automatically enter suspend & wake up based on it?

<comment><USER23> Once you have patched it it will. I have the X1 running ubuntu with the patched initrd and the lid works perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Unnecessary headline editorializing. Could we have it changed to the original?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you know why S3 does not work on some brands, the editorializing is not unwarranted.

There was an active decision to remove working parts of the code. That is shameful.

<comment><USER18> There is nothing wrong with throwing away obsolete code.

<comment><USER30> It's not "obsolete"... S3 sleep mode uses _much_ less power.

<comment><USER18> On a properly designed system, the S0iX sleep modes should totally subsume S3.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Climate Change – The Facts: BBC Documentary with David Attenborough [video] - cirrus-clouds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ypaUH57MO4 <comment> cirrus-clouds If you're in the UK, you can watch on iPlayer: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00049b1/climate- chang...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00049b1/climate-change-the- facts)

I hope the BBC won't remove the YouTube link, this is one of those documentaries that everyone would benefit from seeing.</comment>


Why I promote conda - <AUTHOR> http://technicaldiscovery.blogspot.ca/2013/12/why-i-promote-conda.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This one will mostly be of interest to Python developers but not only to them. Conda is an excellent example of "screw it, let's fix that" attitude that I like so much. Personally I migrated all my internal Python workflows from pip and virtualenv to conda and Anaconda (Python distribution from the authors of conda) is now my go-to Python distribution.</comment>