Ask HN: I am a deaf founder who never give up. How can I network and get funded? - <AUTHOR> I am shy with social anxiety and I almost always fail at networking during events due to both my medical condition and fear. On the top of this in the current world, everyone has a short attention span, everyone is busy, obsessed with being quick — while anything in life worth doing takes time.<p>https://github.com/sievehq/Manual/blob/master/manual.md <comment><USER2> First question: there's deaf and deaf -- how severe is your loss and how good is your speech? That information will help us help you.

Second - which country do you come from? Many now have some form of assistance dog specifically aimed at deaf ("Hearing dogs" or similar). These serve a very useful purpose in sign posting the fact that you have a disability which is otherwise not visible. They also act as awesome icebreakers. The dogs are bred and trained specifically to deal with situations such as crowded and noisy rooms, and will not be the least bit anxious or feel the least bit threatened in such a situation.

Lastly, there's various strategies for dealing with the phone side of things - in the UK there's NGTT, an app which puts a stenographer on the call too, so it can be subtitled in real time. You can obviously do something similar with a co-worker if necessary.

I'm profoundly deaf. I've run my own software company for ten years, a large chunk of which I was also remote working on a small island (off grid). I don't think being deaf has made an iota of difference to my career, you just have to identify the issues and route round them, as you would any other obstacle in day to day life.

<comment><USER3> > I've run my own software company for ten years, a large > chunk of which I > was also remote working on a small island > (off grid).

I'd like to know more about this. The island and how you setup your off-grid existence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 1\. I think you should stop telling people you have social anxiety. Let them decide. For many people you meet it might not be something they notice or care about. Perhaps they have something too.

2\. For #1 remove "I am shy with social anxiety and I almost always fail at networking during events due to both my medical condition and fear. On the top of this in the current world, everyone have short attention span, everyone is busy, obsessed with being quick — while anything in life worth doing takes time." from your GitHub.

Also, I'm not sure you should tell people you worked for $120/month or that you rejected offers from Google and Facebook. It sort of sounds like you want people to feel sorry for you, then bragging. At least my opinion, no offense intended.

3\. Practice writing good e-mails. This may be the first impressions you give people and investors.

4\. I have deaf friends. They are all successful. I can ask them why they think they are. I think they are because they observe what's around them and are methodical when interacting with others.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Removed the initial intro, my intention was more to showcase the startup, progress and then how to go about next steps given my problem. Thanks for the feedback :)

I've tried cold emails, while they work many times, a lot of times good investors value intro over cold emails.

Would love to get in touch with your friends!

<comment><USER2> Now the intro has changed, I'm unsure what you are asking for. If you need funding, either bootstrap or find a co-founder who has the social capabilities you need to raise funds. Bootstrapping is lot easier IMO, and carries less risk.

If you are funded and want to market/sell your product, get a sales person (part time, perhaps). Cold calling (whether by email or phone) requires a specific set of skills and very thick skin. If that's not you, delegate.

If you have no choice but to cold-email, use Linked In so that they are targeted and get a marketing person's advice on how to phrase those initial contacts so you have a good hook. (NB all the above is generic business startup advice, the same advice applies to anyone: identify the critical weaknesses; backfill from elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fellow hard of hearing individual. I am 1 step below needing to use sign language. I also have some social anxiety.

For me? I try to arrive early before the event starts. This ensures there are fewer people around. For larger events and or talks, I bring my own assistive devices to assist with hearing at a distance and a noisy environment.

</comment><comment><USER5> Network events will probably not make or break your startup. So relax on that front.

Focus on the product and clients. This means speaking to clients either over email or in-person (or on the phone? not sure if there's an voice app).

It sounds like your nervous and worried about how everyone else is so busy. I could infer that you might not value what you have to say which could come across in conversation. People then won't listen which creates a negative feedback loop. Try to figure out how to break that perception.

</comment><comment><USER6> What are your skills? Can you code a MVP and get traction? You can always be email only for quite a while with a product, so no one would even know you are deaf.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is more, we've launched and we have traction. [https://github.com/sievehq/Manual/blob/master/manual.md](https://github.com/sievehq/Manual/blob/master/manual.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> just start putting off the shyness and put on the courage to approach others.... It all starts with one steps..</comment>


Improving Robustness of Deep-Learning-Based Image Reconstruction - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11821 <comment> aaron-santos > Consider the standard MSE loss in x-space with the popular l2-regularization > on the weights (aka weight decay)...

Am I missing something? I thought weight decay and l2 regularization _could_ be equivalent when using SGD[1], but are not in adaptive gradient scenarios(the paper mentions using Adam later on).

[1] - [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.05101.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.05101.pdf)</comment>


"Practical" modern Perl for Ruby/Python people - <AUTHOR> http://bulknews.typepad.com/blog/2010/03/practical-modern-perl-for-rubypython-people.html <comment><USER2> Interesting, Perl's come a long way since I picked it up in 2001 (and dropped it for Ruby in 2007), but it just doesn't feel organic to the language.

Sadly, things like Perl 5i <http://github.com/schwern/perl5i>, while awesome in the service they provide the Perl community, just make me wonder why one would even use a language that makes you go there.

Stumbling across a Perl script these days feels like finding an Awk script; it's nostalgic and interesting, but I generally just want to stay away.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, perl5i is a little much all at once. It feels like, "lets apply as many hacks to the language as possible all at once, for maximum blogability". Adding methods to every class? Random autoboxing? It's like I'm looking at Ruby ;)

But the real point of the article is about how flexible Perl is, and how it has all the stuff from your favorite of Python / Ruby, and _also_ the CPAN. No other language seems to want to steal from Perl, because "it's Perl", but fortunately, we don't have that problem -- we already got over using Perl, and can enjoy the features for what they are, regardless of which religion invented them.

Now is a great time to be a Perl programmer, and it's sad that people dismiss it as "cool like an Awk script" instead of embrace it as "a tool that can save me time when I'm building complex applications". Sigh.

<comment><USER4> As a Perl defender, I don't feel any less clever doing things the Ruby way.

I don't mean to be dismissive, either, but Perl over the years has distilled, and what we got out of it in the end wasn't Perl.

<comment><USER3> Care to elaborate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, perl's bad reputation is undeserved in some ways. My definition of a bad language is one that _forces_ you to code in "bad" ways. There's very little that perl forces you to do. Insofar as it's bad, it's bad in a very different way to, say, VBScript.

<comment><USER6> unfortunately that logic still only makes perl a neutral language, not a good one.

(i haven't used perl for years, but this isn't intended as a snark against the language, just a comment on the fact that saying something "is not bad" does not necessarily mean that it is "good")

<comment><USER7> >>unfortunately that logic still only makes perl a neutral language, not a good one.

Well.. If you believe that flexibility isn't a good thing.

Edit: Flexibility do imply a need for coding standards and buying copies of "Perl best practices".</comment></comment></comment>


Your brain on molly - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/161283/this-is-your-brain-on-ecstasy/

<comment><USER2> While I'm always interested to read about effects of MDMA on the brain, I can't help but take issue with the negative, tsk-tsk tone of this article. They make MDMA out to sound like this drug which makes you lose all inhibitions and any real sense of control, yet I've known far more people who have made bad choices (driven recklessly, had unprotected sex, gotten into fistfights, etc) while under the influence of practically every other kind of intoxicant - usually alcohol.

On that note, I think that it's interesting how our societies demonize MDMA (largely, I think because it's not sold legally, like alcohol is.) I see tons of articles published discussing the good and bad sides of MDMA use, but rarely see articles circulating around which discuss why we should or shouldn't drink on the weekends, or the long-term effects of binge drinking. It seems like alcohol is the accepted form of abusing our bodies because we've been doing it for so long, and because it's a larger, more public part of our culture.

<comment><USER3> > I see tons of articles published discussing the good and bad sides of MDMA > use, but rarely see articles circulating around which discuss why we should > or shouldn't drink on the weekends, or the long-term effects of binge > drinking.

Strange, I see a _vastly_ more articles getting popular media attention relating the health effects (good or ill) of various usage patterns of alcohol than the same for MDMA. Like, several orders of magnitude more.</comment></comment>


Clever piece of code exposes hidden changes to Supreme Court opinions - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2014/06/12/clever-piece-of-code-exposes-hidden-changes-to-supreme-court-opinions/ <comment><USER3> I think this is such a great example of a small bit of tech that completely changes the dynamic of how we understand the Court's work.

The NYT spent a whole high-profile article highlighting the issue of a silently shifting court record. This completely removes the "silently".

<comment><USER4>
      The Supreme Court has been quietly revising its decisions
      years after they were issued, altering the law of the land
      without public notice. The revisions include "truly
      substantive changes in factual statements and legal
      reasoning," said Richard J. Lazarus, a law professor at
      Harvard and the author of a new study examining the
      phenomenon.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law- is...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/us/final-word-on-us-law-isnt-supreme- court-keeps-editing.html)

[http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/rlazarus/docs/articles/La...](http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/rlazarus/docs/articles/LazarusRichardTheNonFinalityOfSupremeCourtOpinionsFullVersion21May14.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be a good idea to put the legal documents in a version control system. Then all the revisions can be tracked.

It's time to adopt the ideas we've learned in CS to other professions.

<comment><USER6> In the future I imagine this will be the case, and official versions will be indicated by a published MD5 hash, etc. As for why it hasn't happened already . . . why does the web still run on JavaScript, a language that was obsolete the day it was designed two decades ago? Even within the tech industry, tooling moves at a glacial pace.

We'll get court opinions stored in version control when we get a generation of judges that grew up with word processors with integrated version control. As it stands, version control isn't even well-implemented in mainstream word processors.

<comment><USER7> > official versions will be indicated by a published MD5 hash

That would be proof positive to me that they have no intention of leaving the documents unchanged. MD5 has been unusable as tamper-proof signature for a long time now.

[http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue- ca/](http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/)

<comment><USER8> Although MD5 has known collision issues, using an MD5 collision to alter the text of the document in a specific manner is highly unlikely. This is not as trivial as simply generating some random bits of data that result in the same signature when hashed.

In the use case where you want to change the document for your own purposes without leaving evidence that you've tampered with it, you would not be searching for just a single other file which generates the same hash value. You would be looking for another file which results in the same value when hashed, has the same format (text is easy, I suppose, but it's conceivable they could switch to a binary format at some point), makes grammatical and syntactical sense, and also contains the desired content that you are looking for (or some approximate.. the 'exact' desired content would result in a different hash in most scenarios).

That said, I agree that there are better hashing algorithms out there. Multiple signatures from several common hash functions could be provided for quick confirmation purposes while still making it relatively easy to validate quickly.

(Edit: Also, since you are concerned: I am not the downvoter)

<comment><USER7> I know it is not trivial but to start off with a known broken hash would be a big mistake in my opinion. There have been some pretty impressive demos regarding this.

[http://cryptography.hyperlink.cz/MD5_collisions.html](http://cryptography.hyperlink.cz/MD5_collisions.html)

A collision in under a minute would seem to me to qualify as 'broken' for all practical purposes of this particular has function for the purpose of proving a document was not modified after it was signed.

That that minute is still a substantial number of cycles is not too relevant given the importance of the documents that are being modified, it counts as a 'non-expense'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminded me of an idea somebody else had of publishing everybody's votes in a federal or state election to the web. Everybody would get a unique, secret key right after voting with your voting choices. The machine would publish that key and the vote, but not your identity. You would then be able to, in the privacy of your own home, confirm that your vote has not been altered, while keeping your vote secret unless you choose to make your secret key public. Assuming enough people found discrepancies, a major revolt could be created in the event of the elections officials altering results in closely contested elections.

If only we could get a transcript of legislators' or government officials' conversations with influence groups...

<comment><USER10> _This reminded me of an idea somebody else had of publishing everybody 's votes in a federal or state election to the web. Everybody would get a unique, secret key right after voting with your voting choices. The machine would publish that key and the vote, but not your identity. You would then be able to, in the privacy of your own home, confirm that your vote has not been altered, while keeping your vote secret unless you choose to make your secret key public._

If you _can_ prove you voted a certain way, that's a big problem in itself.

<comment><USER11> For those that wonder why: Imagine organized crime saying things like, "You will prove to us that you voted this way, or we will burn down your house".

<comment><USER12> Or, perhaps more plausibly: confirmable voting makes it much more tractable for corrupt candidates to buy votes.

<comment><USER13> Actually, when talking about possibilities for election fraud in contested places, threats seem much more common and plausible than simple votes-for-cash trade. It's more widespread in places with less democratic traditions, but USA history has also a fair share of examples.

The most common current method worldwide for "vote buying" seems to be done by large regional employers organizing voting as such for their employees (time schedules, transportation, lunch/party after voting), sometimes that can be very effective as strategic voting (i.e., bussing large numbers of voters to a different district). If the votes would be actually verifiable, then even without any illegal violence it'd simply mean near-permanent unemployment in that town for "wrong-party" people.

And that's about ordinary elections. For a different example, the recent referendum for Crimea joining Russia, according to their official results, had ~32000 people voting against. I'm not informed about what's happening in Crimea now, but I'm very sure that if I was one of them, I wouldn't want that vote to be verifiable - the hypothetical risks far outweigh any possible benefits.

<comment><USER14> Even "ordinary" elections have a similar risk to Crimea in some parts of the world - if I lived in the Basque Country in Spain, and voted for the (mainstream, right wing) Partido Popular I wouldn't necessarily want that to be published.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice piece of work. It would be cool if you could OCR the text out of the pdfs (perhaps using ocrad.js) and push the text in as a GitHub commit. In that way, you would have a full history of all changes to a document.

<comment><USER16> The text is already embedded in the PDF files so there's no need for OCR - <USER2> won't see high-quality results with Ocrad either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is so much potential in applying version control to legal and legislative documents. Imagine being able to _git blame_ a bill in Congress.

<comment><USER18> Well, opencongress.org goes a long way already.

<comment><USER19> David w/ the Participatory Politics Foundation here, we created & ran OpenCongress from 2007-2013, and now it lives with the Sunlight Foundation. I wrote about version control for legislation here on OC Blog in May 2012: [http://goo.gl/Ll2rDs](http://goo.gl/Ll2rDs). I still think it's possible on a site like OpenCongress or GovTrack, it's possible on GitHub, and this non- profit is working on it directly w/ their MADISON platform for text annotation: [http://opengovfoundation.org](http://opengovfoundation.org).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting acronym, SCOTUS, in Greek[0] means darkness, blindness, obscurity.

[0]: [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%84%CE%B...](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%84%CE%BF%CF%82)

</comment><comment><USER21> Holy shit. How is this not highly illegal? That's like if Congress started changing laws without telling anyone...

And you can't really sue the guys...

<comment><USER6> It's because the slip opinion (the one posted on the court's website) is not canonical. The canonical version is what's published in the U.S. Reports.

The Supreme Court has a whole protocol for this: [http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinions.aspx](http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinions.aspx) ("Caution: These electronic opinions may contain computer-generated errors or other deviations from the official printed slip opinion pamphlets. Moreover, a slip opinion is replaced within a few months by a paginated version of the case in the preliminary print, and--one year after the issuance of that print --by the final version of the case in a U. S. Reports bound volume. In case of discrepancies between the print and electronic versions of a slip opinion, the print version controls. In case of discrepancies between the slip opinion and any later official version of the opinion, the later version controls.")

The GigaOm article is garbage: "Supreme Court opinions are the law of the land, and so it's a problem when the Justices change the words of the decisions without telling anyone." They're trying to generate page-views by making it sound like the Justices are going back and changing the official record, and are being thwarted by a coder who swoops in to save the day.

In reality, what you have is a tool to see what changes between the "release candidate" and the "Gold Master." Still interesting, even without the manufactured drama.

<comment><USER21> Well that's a lot more reasonable - but it seems like they should just hold off on publishing the thing till they finish editing it. The system seems a bit sloppy

<comment><USER6> A Supreme Court opinion has several functions: 1) it resolves a real live dispute between two parties; 2) it gives guidance to the other federal courts; 3) it serves as a statement of the law to the public.

For (1), you want to publish immediately, because the parties have already waited a long time to get the dispute resolved. For (2), you want to publish quickly, because the federal Courts of Appeal need to implement the new guidance in other cases, and may be holding cases that pose the same question pending the Supreme Court's resolution. For (3), you want to have enough time to polish something, because it will be referenced for decades to come.

The system of publishing a bench opinion, a slip opinion, and a final published opinion reflects these conflicting needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In my case against Ben Mezrich, Judge Collings cited WikiAnswers (wiki.answers.com) to define the term non-fiction. Except that he cited a page on WikiAnswers that was off by one character from the page he intended to cite. I didn't know this, and assumed he'd just made everything up, since nothing matched what he quoted. It took me over a year--after appealing based in part on his error--to accidentally realize that the link was bad.

He still refuses to admit that he made any sort of mistake.

I filed a Motion for Reconsideration, which you can find here:

[http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=34312001&z...](http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/download.html?id=34312001&z=c27f9aca)

Other judges refuse to cite wiki citations at all. When I brought the issue to the attention of the First Circuit as misconduct, they dismissed it, carefully refusing to use the word "wiki" in their public Orders because that might admit that judges cite wikis whenever they feel like it. I appealed; they refused to use "wiki" in the Order once again. Instead, they refer to an "on- line source."

[http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/sites/ca1/files/01-13-90016.O.pd...](http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/sites/ca1/files/01-13-90016.O.pdf) [http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/sites/ca1/files/01-13-90016.J.pd...](http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/sites/ca1/files/01-13-90016.J.pdf)

Wiki citations can be edited by anyone, including adverse parties, during or after proceedings, presenting the exact same problem as silent edits in opinions after they have already been issued. Whenever there is a better source they should never be cited. The behavior of Judge Collings, the First Circuit, and the Supreme Court does not inspire much confidence in the Courts.

<comment><USER23> I'd have to agree that randomly finding something on the Internet proves little. However, for a definition of a term like "non-fiction," you're not necessarily looking for an authority, but rather just something that makes sense. (Even if you found a definition in Webster's, it carries no legal weight at all. Nor does WikiAnswers.)

Your concern about changes seems valid. Maybe this could be solved by actually copying the original cited material so the original could be viewed later by interested parties? I'd hate to make the entire Internet off-limits to legal authorities just because of the potential for change.

<comment><USER22> The OED is pretty widely regarded as an authority when it comes to defining terms. It doesn't tend to change very much over time for any given term, which is important, in contrast to a wiki.

In my particular case, the wiki had three different definitions for "non- fiction" all written by different anonymous authors, all of which change frequently. perma.cc is a project to image hyperlink citations, but it doesn't stop judges from just screwing up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you're interested in this, you may also want to check out [https://www.courtlistener.com/](https://www.courtlistener.com/), a service that regularly crawls court websites for opinions. Not sure if they show multiple versions though.

<comment><USER22> CourtListener sometimes has multiple versions depending on the particular court and the case. Many courts will post opinions, correct typos (and who knows what else), and then re-post them later, as new opinions or just edits.

There's basically no consistency whatsoever. Courts don't even write their case numbers the same way from district to district, let alone format their opinions the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This smells of mitigation and not patch. Simply require the supreme court to publish all their opinions, rulings and changes so that they are available to the public.

We can review them... We have the technology.

</comment><comment><USER26> Amazing. An effective and simple way of increasing transparency and maybe even accountability. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER27> Another victory for opendata! Great project.

</comment><comment><USER28> Back to paper.

</comment><comment><USER29> That strikes me as eerily similar once again to 1984. The government retro- actively changes recorded history when it suits.

We've always been at war with Eurasia.

</comment><comment><USER30> "Node, an application written in JavaScript"</comment>


What Makes a Great Developer? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/development/what-makes-a-great-developer/ <comment><USER2> I think he is probably onto somthing with the lazy programmer idea. It's something that I have thought about a lot too. Although I thought his examples of what a lazy programmer might be doing sucked.

In my experience, lazy programmers write tools to automate stuff. It's the guy that wrote YACC that automates parser generation. It's the person that reads the yacc file and uses it to generate c/h files for each symbol, filled out with all of the initialisers specified in the yacc file. It's the person that generates test scripts from an xml file, etc etc etc.

Actually, the longer I work as a programmer, the more I'm bemused by people that talk about how they never do any interesting programming at work. If you are only doing boring stuff, then you are not doing it right. Build a system to automate that boring stuff, that'll get your creative juices flowing!

In my case, I work for a company that does embedded software . As we often work on devices for which there is only a C compiler, we have to use C as the language of implementation for our product. But personally I haven't written any C code for over 18 months - I'm using ruby to put together a whole series of tools that generate c code from, for example, UML diagrams. There's still a bit of tweaking to be done to the C code at the end, but it is just tweaking, which improves productivity for the whole team. Leaves us time to go and get an espresso from the cafe down the street instead of slaving away on boring projects.

<comment><USER3> Is there a problem with the C code that is automatically generated being too slow or inefficient for the embedded system?

<comment><USER2> Um, no? Should there be? Oh, you're talking about the 'tweaking'? Sorry, I was talking about some specialised edge cases where it just isn't worth trying to make the work automated. Basically all of the boiler plate code is automated, and all of the unique code for each class is coded by hand. But generally it is about 60% boilerplate and 40% unique code. The result is that programmers do 60% less coding, and only need to muck around with the unique/interesting code.

It's not perfect, but it takes a lot of the drudge out of the working day, which was kind of the point I was trying to make in the original post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree with most of the points but it seems some of these attributes can be conflicting. For example

\- A lazy programmer may not be that meticulous

\- A curious programmer may not be that meticulous

<comment><USER5> On your first point, I think he's suggesting something like "a lazy programmer will right great, detailed unit tests because he's too lazy do all the work by hand and not excited about fixing obscure bugs down the road." Seems a bit odd to call that lazy, but I get the gist.

On your second point, I guess I would say that "curious" might be an odd word. Some people who are intellectually curious dive into things very thoroughly, so they are likely to be meticulous but also likely to quickly find something else to obsess over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't believe there is any correlation, much less causation, between the attributes cited and "greatness".

So, instead of looking at possible cofactors, why not just look at actual results?

Did it get done?

Is it fairly accurate?

Is it high quality? (I know, lots of room for judgment here.)

Did it take reasonable resources (time, money, help)?

I'd settle for these over possibly unrelated character traits.

</comment><comment><USER7> Work ethic probably outweighs everything else over time. Getting something done that is sub-optimal still beats a great design that's never implemented.</comment>


Decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes - <AUTHOR> https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotcloud17/program/presentation/shahrad <comment><USER2> Interesting idea, but I suspect if you tried it you'd quickly run into practical limitations. I know people who've tried running build farms with "development board" hardware have found that the stress of 24x7 100% compute hits kernel bugs or overheating issues that 'normal use' doesn't, and I suspect mobile phones would be similar. The pace of phone evolution means you'd have an ongoing effort to get new kinds of devices into your 'cluster' (figuring out how to root them, identifying how to network them, rigging up some kind of custom rack-mounting hardware, etc). And there'd be a bigger turnover of 'replace expired device' than with fewer newer designed-for-server nodes.

The paper also suggests running a hypervisor on these, but I suspect you'd find that firmware/boot rom locks you out of EL2 (hypervisor mode) on most hardware.

<comment><USER3> I suspect certain games, like Ingress, or GPU-intensive games, routinely max out phones' computing hardware. Chances are that badly overheating models are reasonably few and already known by gamers.

<comment><USER4> My experience with Ingress back in the day bears this out. That game would cause certain phones to reboot due to overheating, and others to throttle down so low they were worthless for playing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My company is working on pocket-sized routers/firewalls/DNS servers.

These sit between the "smartphone" and the untrusted, e.g., public, wifi router, acting as a user-controlled gateway.

The user makes a one-time change to the settings on their smartphone to use the user-controlled gateway. This enables blocking ads and other unwanted outgoing connections without having to be physically at home or work, i.e. in a location where the user can "trust" the network.

The pocket-sized router runs open source software chosen and installed by the user. Users have a generous choice of operating systems, from Plan9 to BSD to Linux, as they do for the RPi. Baseband is either absent or physically disabled.

The main advantage I see to leveraging old "phones" for this is the power supply.

While I have seen small form factor routers made for travel, they are generally not rechargeable.

<comment><USER6> Why wouldn't someone just do that through the software on their phone?

<comment><USER7> Hard to do without root/jailbreak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems like you'd encounter so many challenges in taking this path, although I think it's awesome that people are seriously looking into this.

One point that they article doesn't mention is that mobile devices don't have ECC RAM. I'm not very familiarized with the server space, but I thought that was pretty much a standard requirement? e.g. If you're providing IaaS, isn't the risk of falling prey to rowhammer attacks a serious concern?

What I'd love to see is something similar but for home users. Instead of continuing to push stuff into third-party services, you can hook up a mix of devices to run services and applications from home. Bring back the distributed internet dream! Most home services don't need tons of power or high availability. The biggest risk is probably with handling data backups, which you can easily solve by encrypting assets and pushing em up to some cloud provider.

<comment><USER9> > If you're providing IaaS, isn't the risk of falling prey to rowhammer > attacks a serious concern?

Just don't share devices. They probably don't have worthwhile virtualization anyways.

A bigger problem is that the hardware is shit. Both from a reliability perspective, and from a performance perspective. I just don't think there's a market for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem with these devices are that they are often locked down, and even unlocked/hacked open getting them to run anything like mainline Linux is hard- ish.

<comment><USER11> Just use GNURoot to install any linux onto any android device - it just runs alongside Android:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=champion.gnuro...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=champion.gnuroot&hl=en_GB)

<comment><USER12> What is the real downside of that vs replacing android with linux? I could see there being more pro's than cons except for specific use cases.

<comment><USER13> Android kills stuff when it feels like it wants more room to cache apps in ram. The background stuff like the media indexer takes CPU time and generates heat (these are pretty easy to overheat when used like this.) I think some of the older android userspace even has flaws exploitable over the network. etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well, the cost of a raspberry Pi for a home server is actually quite high when compared to using the busted or obsolete phone gathering dust in your drawer.

Since there are probably _millions_ of these, why not recycle into cheap servers given the benefits of their low power use (and the possible ability to draw power to charge during cheap periods and run off battery during expensive ones).

<comment><USER15> At least with a Pi you can install the latest security patches. Of those millions of phones, many are simply locked, and even the others very often don't have drivers compatible with the newer kernels.

Becoming a node on a botnet to save $5 is not very attractive.

<comment><USER16> _Which_ security patches?

The slides are light on details, but if I were doing this, the phones would _not_ be running Android in any case, so while security is an important consideration, you can't just say "but security!" and toss out the baby and the bath water.

<comment><USER15> What would they be running? Which other OS supports all thousands of models of SoCs, with the necessary drivers to do everything described?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In practice so far new CPUs were much more power efficient than older ones - so much that this approach makes little sense but .... it is worth noting that one of the reasons this _might_ remotely work is on slide 7: Diminishing growth CPU performance / end of Moore's Law. I'm fairly optimistic about the 10nm node still providing a power saving boost but in the long run this sort of thinking could interesting.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have at least 4 Android phones that have either a broken screen (but still usable) or are just too old to run a recent version of Android. Anybody knows how can I use them as computers or even servers? how to connect them to the network without using wifi? they obviously don't come with a network port.

<comment><USER14> A USB to ethernet adapter will probably work for a wired connection.[1]

Gambiting mentioned elsewhere in the comments that you can install GNURoot from the Play store and run Linux along side Android.

I imagine there is, or soon will be, specific projects to pare down AOSP to the minimum required to run a server without all the extra stuff (that is, the Android part on top of Linux).

1: [http://plugable.com/2015/01/22/new-plugable-usb-fast- etherne...](http://plugable.com/2015/01/22/new-plugable-usb-fast-ethernet- adapter-brings-wired-ethernet-directly-to-your-tablets-microusb-port/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Imagine those on the attic, connected to a internet connection, forming a mesh-net with all houses nearby- and activated if distributed computation power is needed.

Converting abundant power into computation.

<comment><USER20> Imagine a mobile web server. For events, geocaching, emergency services, and other on-demand situations. It could serve local wifi to serve its pages.

<comment><USER21> There a bunch of LAMP apps on Android. You just need a phone that open enough to let you 'share' a connections. Otherwise you would just be better off with RPi setup as an access point.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.esminis.se...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.esminis.server.php&hl=en_GB)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Would love to see a community like Rasberry Pi for linux on old phones! Maybe that already exists?

<comment><USER23> yes: [https://www.postmarketos.org/](https://www.postmarketos.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Isn't this the storyline to HBO's Silicon Valley ? Someone took it seriously?

<comment><USER16> The original paper for _FAWN: Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes_ came out of CMU back in _2009_ ; HBO's Silicon Valley has no monopoly over the level of idea which would fit in a tweet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> At a previous company we had a 'farm' of test phones that we used for testing new versions of software. A large number of those test were 'stress testing' which would probably be analogous to the sort of load you would have it they were to be treated as a 'datacenter'.

Based on that I'm pretty sure that the biggest issue with managing the cluster would be the extremely high failure rate.

That's not to say that this won't work because I haven't done the maths, but it kid a unique challenge.

</comment><comment><USER26> Skimming through the article, I think it does not include cost of labor. In a developed country, my guess is that the cost to have a human worker collect, clean, setup, connect, etc. all the 84 phones would be actually higher than buying a new server.

In third world countries, this could be a different story. I would be happy to send my old phones to Africa to be used at schools.

<comment><USER27> It would more likely end up in a place like this, though.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Add a factor of two to the material costs, because without ECC, on a large scale you will have errors, so you need to double check every result. Now add some more to their TCO because they don't take MTBF into account. Suddenly the numbers do not look good anymore.

</comment><comment><USER29> How does "FLOP per Joule" compare between such devices and an average desktop PC?

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm not sure they really did a good comparison here. Cost comparing an 8-socket system with 2 cpus installed buying new vs buying broken phones on ebay isn't really fair. If I were going to for cheap compute, I'd look for used (or otherwise discounted) chromeboxes. No distributed UPS, but small and gigabit ethernet, reasonably current intel processors for good IPC, not terribly large.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, the table is missing at least a few more columns. Whats the breakeven point for a $200 server off eBay? 15000 savings in capex pays for a lot of opex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I saw a talk at my university by a prolific robotics engineer who explained that for small drones designed to work by swarming & collaborating, it is much more cost effective to use old Samsung Galaxy phones as the "brain" of a drone platform rather than integrating standalone CPU's. As far as I know they still use this as their primary design strategy.

<comment><USER33> They probably meant using the Odroid XU4 which is a nice platform built around the Samsung Exynos-5422, not an actual phone

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I used to make a joke that phones will be the future in datacenters because nobody is designing ARM SoCs for servers and those that do made them perform worse than phones.

The paper completely ignores the lack of ECC, hardware reliability and lack of software support. Especially if you consider that the majority of mobile gpus don't stupport opencl or don't even have drivers available for modern kernels. You will need to support your software for each device type or rewrite your software as an android app. But since developer and sysadmin time is far more valuable you're better of just buying an x86 server.

</comment><comment><USER35> This was a establishing plot point in Rudy Rucker's short story Hormiga Canyon, published in Asimov's August 2007 issue. He also included the benefit of voice recognition on any node :)

You can read it here: [http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestories/#_T...](http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestories/#_Toc53)

(warning: Rudy's stories are... zany)

<comment><USER36> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_and_the_Ants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_and_the_Ants)

Is a good one too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Energy efficiency relative to the same compute power for newer devices has been a major factor for not using old computers to perform computations. Maybe this principle carries over to low powered mobile devices, certainly some basic economic principles between computations per power consumption prevail at different orders of magnitude.

</comment><comment><USER38> Amazing little blackthrows too. Or so I've heard.

You can usually find a rootable phone in Walmart for about $15.

<comment><USER39> But why buy it over a comparatively cheap single board computer?

<comment><USER38> It's pretty difficult to anonymously buy an SBC with cash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> The question is can you trust these devices?</comment>


ITER is one of the most ambitious energy projects - <AUTHOR> https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines <comment><USER2> I can say upfront that I'm extremely skeptical about nuclear fusion in general. I don't think that it will ever play any major role in energy production.

The ITER project is only fueling that skepticism. They started with projected building costs of around 6 billion euro and before they really started these costs have already more than doubled. It seems very likely that if this project ever gets finished the costs will rise a lot more. If you're advocating for nuclear fusion and projects like ITER then my first advice would be to be honest: It won't be a bargain.

That said I want to mention why I'm so skeptical about fusion: It is often quoted as some kind of magical energy source without problems. Although it's hard to make predictions about a technology that isn't working yet, most likely it will mean expensive, huge power plants that generate large amounts of energy at one place. That means even if you are able to build these plants technically, you face a number of additional challenges: Getting it to work so that it makes any economic sense (competing probably mostly against much cheaper wind and solar which will likely be much cheaper than today when fusion is ready) and getting energy transmission working at a huge scale. Right now for many energy projects transmission lines are a major cost and acceptance factor already.

<comment><USER3> Is 6 billion euro a large sum to invest on such a potentially game-changing project? How much does the US spend on coal, or solar, or wind each year?

<comment><USER2> The 6 billion is the original number. The real number is 15 billion + X with X largely unknown. That was my whole point: I find a project that is so dishonest about its real cost not trustworthy.

Whether you consider that worth the price will largely depend on whether you believe it's game-changing. I don't.

<comment><USER4> It will be game-changing at any price, the first problem is to find a solution that works sustainable at the scales we are looking for, then we can look at the economics. I agree that that is the harder problem but I'd be more than happy if ITER or any other fusion project would get to > 1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excellent longform piece on ITER in the New Yorker from March 2014:

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a- bot...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bottle)

<comment><USER6> With a couple of major HN discussions: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=star%20bottle%20points%3E20&so...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=star%20bottle%20points%3E20&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Um, you know that ITER is also one of the most delayed and in-jeopardy major science mega-projects out there?

[http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-to-fix- iter](http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-to-fix-iter)

Classic case of scientists being allowed to become project managers with no training...

<comment><USER8> They just announced it's going to be delayed by another 6 years, probably why the reason for this article:

[http://news.sciencemag.org/europe/2015/11/breaking-iter- fusi...](http://news.sciencemag.org/europe/2015/11/breaking-iter-fusion- project-take-least-6-years-longer-planned)

ITER is going to be the F-35 of science projects.

<comment><USER4> At least the F35 flies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "ITER will be the first fusion device to produce net energy. ITER will be > the first fusion device to maintain fusion for long periods of time. And > ITER will be the first fusion device to test the integrated technologies, > materials, and physics regimes necessary for the commercial production of > fusion-based electricity."

Lord, let us pray that is not true, as ITER is notorious for pushing their time tables back. Right now they are pushing 2027.

<comment><USER10> > "ITER will be the first fusion device to produce net energy.

Is that proven or just hopeful?

<comment><USER11> AFAIK, proven in the sense that extrapolating known results shows that a device this size should be net positive, and that material scientists state that the necessary parts can be made, size- and tolerance-wise.

Hopeful in the sense that the pudding hasn't been eaten and in that it may take only one of these material scientists to be wrong or too optimistic to turn a 'can' into a 'cannot' (In many cases, we have never built parts at the necessary scale and tolerances, so scientists assessing whether we can build them have to extrapolate, too)

And of course, it helps for many of the scientists involved to be on the optimistic side. That possibly is a good thing, as we will never know whether we can build this if we do not try doing it.

Finally, there always is a chance that we overlook some important problem, or (less likely) that new science rears its head.

<comment><USER10> So it is expected. Because it was stated as "settled and done" in the article. Which was a surprise to me, since my opinion on the matter is close to yours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't it seem more likely that one of the stellerators will win the fusion race due to the plasma containment issues that make controlling a tokamak difficult?

For anyone not familiar, these are eye-poppingly impressive machines:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X)

</comment><comment><USER13> Anyone got a good summary of how the alternative fusion projects are working out? eg. The company that was trying to use hydraulic rams to compress the target (I think it was [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Fusion)) Are they hoaxes or wishful thinking or likely to succeed?

Edit: This is a good summary from 4 years ago: [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/skeptical- look-3-w...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/skeptical-look-3-wild- fusion-energy-schemes/) I'm looking for something more up to date.

<comment><USER14> Tri Alpha, General Fusion, and Helion just got major coverage in the NYTimes and Time Magazine. Here's a summary: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/10/pictures-of-tri-alpha- energ...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/10/pictures-of-tri-alpha-energys- nuclear.html)

Tri Alpha has achieved stable plasma, next step is to ramp up the temperature, which is relatively easy. According to their model the plasma should get _more_ stable, in which case they'll move straight to an attempt at net power from aneutronic boron fusion.

Helion and General Fusion haven't released any major results but they seem to be doing well, and have good funding. Helion is attempting a mostly-aneutronic hybrid D-D/D-He3 reaction, which I think is news since four years ago.

EMC2 released a paper about a year ago: [http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/low-cost- fusion-...](http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/low-cost-fusion- project-steps-out-shadows-looks-money-n130661)

They're looking for funding, and need about $100 million for the next step: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/01/emc2-chief-scientist- presen...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/01/emc2-chief-scientist-presents- path-to.html)

LPP is doing a lot better with funding since their indiegogo campaign, and is working on getting the last residue of contamination out of their reactor chamber: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/10/lpp-fusion-will-line- vacuum...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/10/lpp-fusion-will-line-vacuum- chamber.html)

Some recent work suggest that petawatt picosecond lasers could ignite boron fusion: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/11/picosecond-pulsed-laser- des...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/11/picosecond-pulsed-laser-design- for.html)

The most advanced lasers have been increasing by a factor of 1000 every ten years: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/11/generating-kilotesla- magnet...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/11/generating-kilotesla-magnetic- fields.html)

Sandia's MagLIF got good results in 2014 and is making upgrades: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetized_Liner_Inertial_Fusi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetized_Liner_Inertial_Fusion)

Germany's about to turn on their stellarator. UW's Dynomak and MIT's ARC are looking for funding.

Edit: also see this IEEE Spectrum article on ARC, LPP, and fast lasers: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/three-alternative- fu...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/three-alternative-fusion- projects-that-are-making-progress)

And Scientific American has a new article covering at least one fusion company I hadn't heard of, but I don't have a full text link: [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-fusion- researc...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-fusion-researchers- are-going-small/)

Also of course Lockheed Martin's made a splash in the press, but they haven't released much detail and fusion researchers have been fairly skeptical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Has anyone any knowledge of machine learning being combined with nuclear fusion data? I ask because I may be pursuing this intersection.

(Anecdotes from HNers can be more insightful than research papers).

<comment><USER16> I don't know anything about this area, sorry about that.

Quick search found this: Fuzzy logic and support vector machine approaches to regime identification in Joint European Torus (JET), Plasma Science. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TPS.2006.875825](http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TPS.2006.875825).

<comment><USER15> very interesting article!

It seems that machine learning could be used to stabilise a nuclear fusion reactor through a real-time control strategy, e.g. optimising the reactor's environment/conditions via micro-adjustments.

<comment><USER17> The article previously posted concerns design of a reactor for inherent stability. What you are thinking about is called active control. Here is a paper investigating such control of a fusion torus: [http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/pop/21/8/10.106...](http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/pop/21/8/10.1063/1.4893418)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Fusion is only 10 years away.

<comment><USER10> For the last 50 years

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Also, Germany's "Mobius Strip" Tokamak Reactor is going live.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/germany-is-turning-on-its- mon...](http://www.businessinsider.com/germany-is-turning-on-its-monster- stellarator-2015-10/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I suspect ITER was setup to act as a honeypot for fusion research money, to slow the technology's development.</comment>


Bill Gates funds creation of graphene condoms - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/171417-bill-gates-funds-creation-of-thin-light-impenetrable-graphene-condoms <comment><USER3> I must admit I didn't see that one coming. It suggests a fascinating application, which is to wear a graphene condom, on top of a rubber condom, on top of a graphene condom. Thus creating a condom 'super capacitor' [1] that you would charge up by rubbing it, which could then power a piezo electric vibrator. I'm so waiting to see who patents that!

[1] [http://www.extremetech.com/computing/163071-graphene- superca...](http://www.extremetech.com/computing/163071-graphene- supercapacitors-created-with-traditional-paper-making-process-rivals-lead- acid-battery-capacity)

<comment><AUTHOR> Or, alternatively, recharge your smartphone during sex.

<comment><USER4> Not sure how much of a charge you would generate in 2 minutes.

Couldn't this be used in trousers? The friction generated between the legs could wirelessly charge whatever is in your pocket?

<comment><USER5> ...2 minutes?

<comment><USER6> and that includes the time it takes to eat the pizza.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The possibilities of graphene are vast and many and exciting but this is kind of scary. For all intents and purposes, graphene is nanotechnology and in certain forms can act like asbestos and has a lot of other unknown behaviors in the body [1]. Unfortunately the field of nanotoxicology hasn't really organized itself and caught up to the widespread use of nanocoating and other material science in industry[2]. I hope they find ways to make it extremely inert in the human body but there's much work to be done.

[1] [http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v3/n7/full/nnano.2008.11...](http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v3/n7/full/nnano.2008.111.html) (CNTs are rolled up graphene and are formed in many graphene production methods as a byproduct)

[2] Nature has a whole series on this: [http://www.nature.com/nnano/focus/nanotoxicology/index.html](http://www.nature.com/nnano/focus/nanotoxicology/index.html)

<comment><USER8> Graphene flakes and carbon nanotubes are already relatively common in the environment as they are naturally occurring. You get carbon nanotubes in ordinary soot, for instance.

<comment><USER9> Yes, and ordinary soot is not something you want to have regular contact with.

<comment><USER8> I thought it was lucky. Besides, it has been used in cosmetics for millennia.

<comment><USER10> Breathing ordinary soot is sub-optimal.

<comment><USER8> The set of things that are sub optimal to breathe is pretty wide ranging though. I agree that breathing soot is not great, but I don't think this is particularly because it contains CNTs, as much as because it is a fine particulate that can get into and block up alveoli. I can't think of any fine particulates off the top of my head that are particularly good to breathe in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fun graphene fact: As the article mentions, graphene was first isolated at the University of Manchester using sticky tape. For this discovery, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics... making Andre Geim the first person to be awarded both the Nobel Prize and the _Ig_ Nobel Prize. He was previously awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for magnetically levitating a live frog.

<comment><USER12> So which accomplishment do you find more rewarding? While I see graphene becoming an extremely popular 21st century material, levitating a frog is the first step to levitating anything larger.

<comment><USER13> The frog was levitated using diamagnetic levitation which is pretty much useless for anything in the real-world (hence the ig Nobel, not Nobel).

The magnetic field used was stronger than the confinement field in ITER - <USER2> stronger magnets than you need for nuclear fusion.

We can already levitate much larger things, such as trains.

<comment><USER12> Thanks. Good point on the trains, completely missed that.

I guess levitating a live frog seems more interesting to me however. To be able to use magnetics to simulate gravity for humans safely, is IMO, a huge barrier (of many) to space travel/living one day.

<comment><USER11> My understanding is that they do use such magnets for microgravity experiments. Here is a cool video on diamagnetic levitation from the University of Nottingham: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nod54HFkH0o](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nod54HFkH0o)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a good idea which won't solve the underlying problems with poor condom usage in places which really need it (Africa).

That's being powered by deliberate misinformation campaigns and cultural leftovers, not the specific properties of condoms (though improving them is always a good idea).

<comment><USER15> In some cases "underlying" problems (eg misinformation campaigns and cultural leftovers) are really just used as excuses by men who don't like how condoms feel. Fix that, and many will be happy to ignore those thing.

As an aside: don't forget the largest major anti-condom propagandists is not African at all (ie, the Catholic church).

<comment><USER16> >As an aside: don't forget the largest major anti-condom propagandists is not African at all (ie, the Catholic church).

That would be the curch that also goes on about abstinence before marriage and monogamy afterwards? Never understood why the church gets beaten up for that (not a fan of the stance on condom use but this implies people "religously" follow one of their rules while blatantly ignoring others).

<comment><USER17> The difference is that you can't really convince people to practice abstinence and monogamy. You can quite easily convince people to not use condoms. Failing to take this into account when you are in a position of authority is unethical at best. Spreading misinformation such as HIV being able to get through condoms is plain old evil.

<comment><USER18> If you abstain you have no chance of getting pregnant. It depends: [http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/3167/do- condoms-...](http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/3167/do-condoms-have- large-enough-holes-for-hiv-to-pass-through) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm very glad to live in this era. I can imagine a few years from now young people will be talking about how back then they used very thick condoms that suppressed all pleasure and people still fucked using them.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have always wanted to know.

What does Bill Gates want for the world?

He's in India helping Polio efforts [1] and helping distribute mosquito nets in Africa. [2]

What does his philanthropic soul want, in the end and in the larger scheme of things?

Has he ever expressed this or laid out?

There wasn't much in his AMA on Reddit a while ago. [3]

[1] [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230330950...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303309504579181753580988412)

[2] [http://www.kplu.org/post/bill-gates-vs-mosquitoes-whos- winni...](http://www.kplu.org/post/bill-gates-vs-mosquitoes-whos-winning)

[3] [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_c...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/)

<comment><USER21> "Here's My Plan to Improve Our World — And How You Can Help" from 10 days ago: [http://www.wired.com/business/2013/11/bill-gates-wired- essay...](http://www.wired.com/business/2013/11/bill-gates-wired-essay/all/)

"We take a double-pronged approach: (1) Narrow the gap so that advances for the rich world reach the poor world faster, and (2) turn more of the world's IQ toward devising solutions to problems that only people in the poor world face."

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A material as strong as graphene may have curious abrasive properties.

<comment><USER23> Doesn't graphite (a close relative of graphene) have lubricative properties?

<comment><USER24> Yep. We had graphite gel and spray for our pinewood derby axles in Boy Scouts.

<comment><USER25> Same here -- graphite lubricant was the standard stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hopefully the packaging is slightly different than what is pictured. :)

<comment><USER27> Or not. The depicted condom would provide quite effective contraception for more reasons than just the material strength.

<comment><USER28> The whole point of the article is that encouraging condom use is better then discouraging it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maybe fund a small chip in your boxers that emits the loud cry of a baby when you take them off.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's not the material that's the problem in many places, but the cost. There are reports of people using post-exposure prophylaxis drugs over condoms because they're cheaper!

More info: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24942903](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24942903)

<comment><USER31> Only in places that allow use of cheap generic post-exposure drugs produced in India. Unfortunately the very same drugs in Europe are hell expensive. They should be probably subsidized by the country like Germany which is famous for its sex industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So, back in the day we would have said "bring your rubbers." I suppose once this condom hits the market we will say something like "make sure to bring the lead for your pencil." Actually, do people ever refer to the graphite in pencils as lead anymore? We did when I was a kid.

The condom is something in bad need of a radical overhaul and it would have a huge effect. At least, if this could deal with the sensation component of the problem, then it would get more people to use them.

Still problems would be distribution (religious blocking and availability for the poor are issues here), education (family planning so people know the full financial effects of having lots of kids) and "killing the moment" when you stop to put the thing on.

At 100K per competing group, it seems like the foundation could be getting lots of "bang" for its buck here.

</comment><comment><USER33> Considering that most people don't wear condoms because they they think its coming in their way its a good idea to fund something that will encourage people to use condoms in developing nations such as africa and asia. Gates doing good job KUDOS. Now i only expect him to interviene into ms's anti- google missions and put a hold on that shitty business. Those are some cheap publicity stunts from ms while google is busy making cool products and amaze people[[http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/11/21/google-building- chro...](http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/11/21/google-building-chrome-app- based-development-environment-using-dart-polymer)].

</comment><comment><USER34> The donation was 100 grand to 11 different teams. That's about 1 engineer per company for 1 year (if that?), is that really enough to do this? There's first the invention of this thing, then there's manufacturing process, etc.

<comment><USER35> Plus PR, and global debate. The mass debate has to be worth 10x that much to the cause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I preferred the Guardian[1] piece on this, for it's lack of real content (who's heard of graphene?) and very entertaining comments.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/21/graphen...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/21/graphene- condom-safe-sex-bill-gates)

</comment><comment><USER37> I can imagine the tech support calls. "Have you tied taking it off and on again?"

</comment><comment><USER38> so, just to be clear, is this still vaporware, a prototype condom has not been made yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> The grant has just been made. I think it will be a couple of years before this becomes real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Finally, science has the answer to "man of steel, woman of kleenex"[1].

[1][http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html](http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> Am I the only one that finds "impenetrable" a funny selling point? It makes perfect sense but still sounds funny. I'm surprised they didn't go for "unbreakable".

</comment><comment><USER41> I posted the same idea 244 days ago but was downvoted.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5432569](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5432569)

</comment><comment><USER42> just by association with inpenetrable, armor-piercing bullets, etc...

[http://media.uow.edu.au/news/UOW118285.html](http://media.uow.edu.au/news/UOW118285.html)

"UOW researchers have used graphene to develop a new composite material which can produce the toughest fibres to date- even tougher than spider silk and Kevlar!"

<comment><AUTHOR> there's an advertisement in there somewhere...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Let's hope they will also be 100x stronger than current ones, so they never break.

<comment><USER43> Just wait until somebody staples them to a sex-ed pamphlets and hands them out on a college campus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Can we consider using "impenetrable condoms" as an intended pun?

</comment><comment><USER45> I swear. He better call it Steel Gates

</comment><comment><USER46> that'll make some money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Every propellerhead on the planet will buy some just because.

<comment><USER47> Weird comment. I, like most people, will likely buy hundreds with which to fuck people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Micro... hard?

</comment><comment><USER49> But...don't you want penetration? wah wah wah

</comment><comment><USER50> Gives the expression "Billware" a whole new meaning!

</comment><comment><USER51> At the end of the article: "Now read: Do humans dream of android prostitutes?"

Is that Google's answer to Microsoft's condoms? ;-)</comment>


AWQL.me – A web AWQL console to easily run requests on your Adwords accounts - <AUTHOR> https://www.awql.me <comment><AUTHOR> AWQL.me is a web console to query easily your Google Adwords accounts with AdWords Query Language. It is born when we developed sunnyreports, a Google Adwords reporting tool. At that time, we needed an easy way to check the AWQL queries we were using.

We developed a simple web console for that. Later, we released it as a free web service for everybody.

The primary use is to query manually the accounts but we added scheduled queries by users request.

Although it hasn't had much traction, we have some dozens of users using it hasn't had much traction, we have some dozens of users using.</comment>