Nginx 1.6.0 stable released - <AUTHOR> http://nginx.org/#1.6-stable <comment><USER3> Slightly OT: Does anyone know if packages for Ubuntu 14.04 are coming soon? We're using the official (mainline) repository[1] on Ubuntu 12.04, but Trusty doesn't seem to be supported yet.

I've always preferred the official repository because I didn't want to start compiling nginx just for stuff like SPDY support.

[1]: [http://nginx.org/en/linux_packages.html](http://nginx.org/en/linux_packages.html)

<comment><USER4> It's a good idea to be comfortable compiling/packaging your infra from source (including interpreters, libraries, etc), if only for the ability to quickly apply and deploy emergency patches. To demonstrate the importance of that capability, look no farther than Heartbleed.

While distros are usually pretty good about updating critical software, they shouldn't be your only line of defense, except perhaps if you have a SLA or something.

<comment><USER5> > It's a good idea to be comfortable compiling/packaging your infra from > source

Would highly recommend becoming comfortable making your _own_ packages (with any security updates, misc changes, etc.) over compiling and installing your own stack from source - distro packaging really is mostly your friend.

<comment><USER6> nginx still has a critical bug with SPDY and proxy_cache which causes connections to be aborted on cache hit. SPDY with proxypass+cache is fairly unusable without this patch.

[http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/428](http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/ticket/428)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I figure this is as good of place as any to ask my question: Where can I find someone to hire that is able to write Nginx cofigs well. I have spent literally 40ish hours trying to create a Nginx conf that holds up to my OCD. I have been told numerous times on IRC that I am too picky and clean urls are a challenge to write. I am college student and System Administration isn't even my job! Help!

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure the best way to accomplish this is to jump into IRC and declare that it is impossible to be done.

You will have 6 answers in 3 minutes.

<comment><USER9> Or say, "Well, this is the only way to do it... nothing else works for nginx." and then present an inefficient solution. You will get ripped but solutions will arrive.

<comment><USER10> Cunningham's Law to the rescue!

[https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is anybody here using nginx as a REPLACEMENT for varnish ? I'm not an expert in devops, but will be deploying a webapp pretty soon - I was wondering if anyone is replacing varnish with nginx cache (memcached backed?)

nginx seems to be increasingly irreplaceable (with ssl caching,etc.) - so was looking to not having to deal with varnish.

I did some google searches, but was not able to find anything - <USER2> nginx configs, etc. Nginx Plus claims to be an accelerator, but again there isnt a lot of info around that.

<comment><USER12> I've been using nginx+memcached for about 2 years on a high traffic site in production. It's been pretty great and runs without a hiccup. However bear in mind that Varnish is far more capable as nginx's memcached integration is fairly simplistic. You'll have to manage all your keys in the application layer as all nginx can do is send a certain request to a certain key and failover if it's not found. Varnish ACLs allow much finer control.

Also, I've come across benchmarks that say Varnish is faster. I just don't want to deal with a complex setup for something that gets the job done. (Job = lower the load on the app server)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's also a survey from Nginx Team: [http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2014-April/043282.h...](http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2014-April/043282.html)

Your opinion is needed for a great future of nginx!

</comment><comment><USER14> The big feature, imo, is it finally implements a new version of SPDY (as Chrome and Firefox are discontinuing the version 1.4.x implements).

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm currently running apache 2.2.22 on my Ubuntu 12.04 servers. It works fine. I'll be moving them to 14.04 and thus getting apache 2.4.7. I mostly use it for mod_passenger webapps and static sites.

14.04 includes nginx 1.4.6 but I'm sure the phusion guys will package 1.6 soon so I can easily upgrade to that. Is there any killer feature in nginx that I'm missing, staying with apache 2.4?

<comment><USER8> Generally speaking, nginx is lighter/faster/less flexible (though no less powerful). It really shines on low-RAM VPSes where the RAM eaten up by a big list of httpd processes really adds up.

For example, here are numbers from Apache+mod_passenger on my dev box:

    	                         VSW    RSS
    	root     20050  0.0  0.1 416524 21020 ?        Ss   Apr18   0:13 /usr/sbin/httpd
    	root     13370  0.0  0.0 217068  1984 ?        Ssl  Apr21   0:00  \_ PassengerWatchdog
    	root     13373  0.0  0.0 503104  2324 ?        Sl   Apr21   0:04  |   \_ PassengerHelperAgent
    	nobody   13381  0.0  0.0 218208  3508 ?        Sl   Apr21   0:00  |   \_ PassengerLoggingAgent
    	apache   13388  0.0  0.2 500060 33888 ?        S    Apr21   0:00  \_ /usr/sbin/httpd
    	apache   13389  0.0  0.2 500060 33888 ?        S    Apr21   0:00  \_ /usr/sbin/httpd
    	apache   13390  0.0  0.2 500060 33888 ?        S    Apr21   0:00  \_ /usr/sbin/httpd
    	apache   13391  0.0  0.2 500060 34140 ?        S    Apr21   0:00  \_ /usr/sbin/httpd
    	apache   13392  0.0  0.2 500132 33924 ?        S    Apr21   0:00  \_ /usr/sbin/httpd

And those same numbers on one of my production Linode instances, running nginx + passenger:

    	                           VSW   RSS
    	root     17824  0.0  0.0   7988   328 ?        Ss   Apr10   0:00 nginx: master process
    	nobody   31676  0.0  0.5   8732  3248 ?        S    Apr23   0:08  \_ nginx: worker process
    	nobody    9103  0.0  0.5   8684  3288 ?        S    Apr23   0:03  \_ nginx: worker process
    	nobody    9106  0.0  0.5   8876  3416 ?        S    Apr23   0:04  \_ nginx: worker process
    	nobody   22077  0.0  0.4   8400  3004 ?        S    01:23   0:02  \_ nginx: worker process

(yes, I know that ps auxf isn't the best measure of memory usage, but it ballparks to make the point)

<comment><USER16> Nginx is also non-blocking which is the main difference from Apache. I don't agree Nginx is less flexible, from my own experience it's quite the other way around - try configuring Apache as a reverse proxy, you'll see how "flexible" it really is.

<comment><USER17> Having managed a fairly complex apache based web site (lots of rewriting to maintain various legacy url schemes, a few cgi bin apps -- lots of cruft) -- I do think Apache is more _flexible_ than nginx. Traffic server is probably more flexible still. On the other hand, you could say if you take a routing problem, and you attempt to fix it via mod_rewrite -- you now have (at least) two problems! ;-)

There was a fairly recent comparison between nginx and apache2.2/2.4 (and uwsgi and gunicorn, I believe) driven by jmeter for testing that showed apache was a little lower on throughput -- but more consistent on latency (unfortunately I can't seem to find the link again). So while I think it is generally good advice to "just use nginx", I wouldn't write off apache based on how 1.3 used to behave compared to old versions of nginx.

I would normally advice an architecture where you have a reverse proxy in front of application servers (even if that means php with fastcgi) if you can, and when it makes sense. Possibly with ssl termination and/or caching (varnish) in front of that. I'm not sure that using nginx is actually any better than, say, HAproxy -- unless you need a static webserver _in addition_ to your appserver. As always YMMV -- choose the stack that fits your needs.

<comment><USER18> > I would normally advice an architecture where you have a reverse proxy in > front of application servers

My understanding too is that as we containerize more applications (whether this be Jails, Zones or Docker) then for shared-IP addresses (e.g. VirtualHosts) we need a reverse proxy to do the mapping to the correct container.

Do you know anything about this, as my research hasn't found anything?

<comment><USER17> Well, if you're not using ipv6 it can be a bit tricky to map a (public) ip to each application server/container/whatnot. For web services you need a front- end router/proxy that understands http host headers and/or SNI (for ssl). If you have that, you can map stuff in DNS, and still use just port 80/443 on the "user facing" side:

client sends "host: some.service.example.com" -> proxy (alias for some.service.example.com) routes -> internal-ip:port

If you have enough public ips (be that ipv4 or ipv6) the "proxy" can just be a firewall rule that maps/NATs public-ip:80 to service:80 (or whatever). Not that that is necessarily a good idea.

Virtualhosting and proxying are related to containerizing (containing?) services -- but you could for example set up your reverse proxy in one container, map all traffic there, and then after deciphering host-headers and/or SNI route traffic to different back-ends.

It depends on what your needs are. For low traffic services, simply having the container answer on an external ip might be fine.

If you want to do more sophisticated load-balancing _some_ system needs to take care of that, typically between the client and the back-end server (DNS only allows for round-robin distribution, barring tricks like giving different replies depending on who (from where) is asking).

Personally I'm leaning towards moving my "internal" ip-related stuff to ipv6 and only multihoming my outward facing points to ipv4 -- for simplicity. It does mean I actually have to set up firewall rules again, as most "internal" systems are now technically exposed. I guess it depends on how one draws the line -- does the container manage its own SSL/TLS termination (if applicable)?

<comment><USER18> Thanks, it's interesting to hear about the different options. I've not even thought about IPv6 yet and the options I'd have using that internally. I'm never going to have enough public IPv4 addresses for the number of containers so something has to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Supplement: [http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES-1.6](http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES-1.6)

</comment><comment><USER20> I wish there were better authentication options with Nginx. The ngx_http_auth_request_module is limited: First, it assumes that the authentication agent doesn't need to talk to the user. Second, it doesn't cache the authentication.

Perhaps nginx might instead check all requests for a particular signed cookie, verify the signature, if the signature matches, verify that the cookie isn't too old, and then unpack variables from the cookie that the application server might want, such as REMOTE_USER. It seems nginx would then want to freshen-up the cookie.

If the cookie doesn't exist, signature doesn't match, or the cookie has expired, then, nginx should proxy the request to a delegate... but, it should return the results of that delegation directly to the user agent. It'd be the job of the delegate to set/sign the cookie with the information needed when authentication succeeds.

In this way, the authentication agent has full control over the process (so it doesn't have to be in nginx), and, heavyweight authentication is cached.

EDIT: Thanks mixedbit -- you're correct that nginx will forward 3xx onto the client. However, I recall patches are needed to support headers; and, without 200 going to the client, how do you support LDAP form authentication? Even so, an extra sub-request to authenticate each request is still heavyweight.

<comment><USER21> >Perhaps nginx might instead check all requests for a particular signed cookie...

That's called session handling, which is something you want to implement in your web application, not your web server.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP#HTTP_session_state](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP#HTTP_session_state)

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

<comment><USER22> Unless you want to use Nginx as an SSL-offloading proxy for a bunch of internal apps that you want to protect from the public but your apps themselves don't use the session in any way? Yes, we can use Lua and effectively write our own, but one of the reasons I've considered Apache again is that there's now a plugin for OAuth 2 + OpenID Connect ;-) [https://github.com/pingidentity/mod_auth_openidc](https://github.com/pingidentity/mod_auth_openidc)

That said, even before this, Apache supported a million different mod_auth_* at [http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/](http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/) including authentication caching [http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_authn_socache.html](http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_authn_socache.html) for modules that don't supply their own cache.

<comment><USER23> Put Nginx in front of Apache then? Or set up an authentication service and use it from your internal apps?

<comment><USER22> You'll lose some of the benefits of Nginx at that point, since part of why people like Nginx is how it handles connections, proxying and caching. And the internal apps aren't always mine to maintain, e.g. Apple's Xcode server.

But yeah, there are options in Apache-land, my post was more that nginx could eventually gain those options too :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nice to see we once again have a stable nginx release that supports a version of spdy that browsers currently support!

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, finally auth_request is an official module. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder what is the policy regarding their Debian repositories now that 1.6 is stable (currently we have 1.4.x installed from that same repo).

They broke some stuff in the past moving to 1.4 from an older release, it would be nice to have a "release notes" so we can check what can possibly go wrong (if anything).

The changelog is huge, congratulations to the nginx team!

EDIT: nginx twitter account confirmed that there's no expected disruption upgrading from 1.4 to 1.6. Excellent!

<comment><USER27> I just upgraded one smaller site to 1.6 to test the waters before doing it elsewhere.

So far everything works as expected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> All good, but Nginx is really playing a nasty game now. Basic features such as proxy_cache_purge are available in the commercial version only.

</comment><comment><USER29> Fyi to those oh-so-lucky to be stuck on Windows systems, while nginx.org offers a 32 bit build, you can get yourself 64 bit build (no extra modules compiled) of the current releases, including 1.7, from [http://kevinworthington.com/nginx-for- windows/](http://kevinworthington.com/nginx-for-windows/).

</comment><comment><USER30> but "In general, you should deploy the NGINX mainline branch at all times." @ [http://nginx.com/blog/nginx-1-6-1-7-released/](http://nginx.com/blog/nginx-1-6-1-7-released/)

</comment><comment><USER31> _Waiting for package for Ubuntu 12.04 and crossing my fingers that it comes with SPDY enabled so I don 't have to compile it. I know, I am lazy :P._

<comment><USER32> Nginx has an Ubuntu PPA.

[http://wiki.nginx.org/Install#Ubuntu_PPA](http://wiki.nginx.org/Install#Ubuntu_PPA)

<comment><USER30> It hasn't. "This PPA is maintained by volunteers and is not distributed by nginx.org."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Most of the best features are in the paid version. I am leaning towards replacing Nginx with Haproxy for the reverse proxying part, unless they move at least the advanced load-balancing features to the free version.

<comment><USER23> Have you considered Hipache? ( [https://github.com/dotcloud/hipache](https://github.com/dotcloud/hipache) )</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite Apple iOS HealthKit apps and devices? - <AUTHOR> As the years go by and I am starting to think that maybe, just maybe I will not live forever, I am starting to get more and more interested in the Apple iOS Health app and I am looking for ideas how best to use it and how to get the most of all possibilities and data that can be collected and analyzed, so what are your favorite applications (and devices) and how do you recommend to integrate them and use them...<p>Thanks a lot for taking the time! <comment><USER2> I really like Gyroscope [https://gyrosco.pe](https://gyrosco.pe)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot, looks really cool, will give it a try</comment></comment>


Paris in the Twentieth Century - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century <comment><USER2> I've read it and I strongly suspect it is a scam, not "discovered" but written by the inheritors of his estate wanting to make a quick buck (since the works of Verne would be in public domain now).</comment>


Show HN: HTML5 canvas site turns your face into Legos - <AUTHOR> http://brickapic.com

<comment><USER2> I didn't get it until I watched the kickstarter video, and even then not until the scene of actually building the mosaic out of logos.

At first I thought it was just a cheesy low quality image filter. I also didn't notice the image was 3d movable.

A simple way to convey the idea might be to show the count of each logo color used in the image on the side. Or maybe animate the building of the mosaic?

Neat idea though, I think kids would have a lot of fun with this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Shouldn't HTML5 also fetch my image from the webcam via getUserMedia() rather than ye-ould file upload?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a good idea. Thanks</comment></comment>


Google bid pi billion dollars for Nortel patents (and lost) - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/02/us-dealtalk-nortel-google-idUSTRE76104L20110702

<comment><USER2> As much as this phrase is a cliché on the internet, I believe it is entirely justified in this case: well played.

More seriously, I think the fact that the person high up enough to lay three billion dollars on the table was also the kind of person who knows about Meissel–Mertens constant says a lot about google's structure. Either that or the whole thing was a whimsical piece of obtuse preplanned PR, which still says a lot.

<comment><USER3> If anything, it's good for the brand (at least with the people that matter).

<comment><USER4> Who do you feel are "the people that matter" in Google's case?

<comment><USER5> I assume he means the smart hacker types, because they're about the only people who would appreciate that sort of thing.

<comment><USER6> Google generates a lot of good will in the developer community: lots of open source projects, Google Summer of Code, free hardware at developer conferences, Google tech talks, hacker "jokes"...

I don't know if this is a deliberate strategy, or if it simply stems from the company's culture and values, but it sure helps them. I personally love them. Winning the hackers and early adopters is a key to winning a market. I'd bet the majority of Google+ early adopters belong to the tech crowd. Similarly, many Android early adopters (from the tech crowd) convinced their friends and family to switch.

It's also good for recruiting :)

<comment><USER4> I get the feeling that investors might not get the joke when dealing with billions of dollars. If the patents come back to haunt Google, I bet the shareholder meeting will be fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The real interesting thing in the article isn't that the nerd number bids, it's how the alliances formed. They weren't set going in, people hit their limit then looked to buy into an alliance. Intel chose to partner with Google instead of Microsoft and Apple. Android vendor Sony-Ericsson went with Apple instead of Google.

<comment><USER8> I had always thought Apple was very close to Intel, as they work closely together. Peculiar.

<comment><USER9> Apple's Intel-based products are quickly becoming a hobby compared to ARM- based iOS devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Google should now spend Pi billion dollars lobbying the US government to abolish software patents. ;-)

<comment><USER11> heh, that would make me gulp if I had spent 4.5bn on some paper 0_0

<comment><USER12> It wouldn't make me, because you can't just buy changes of the law, not even in the US. Three billion dollars is a lot, but will never match what other big companies stand to lose from software patents becoming less important. This is the worst possible outcome for Google and the open source community. Apple, MS, Sony and others will be able to sue everyone - but not each other. And after laying that amount of cash on the table, they will. Google is right to be pissed off, but they can't do much about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> $750,000 per patent--$4.5B divided by 6000 patents--is clearly absurd.

Or is it? I'm thinking that it does make economic sense, but only if you buy in bulk.

The vast majority of patents (not even limited to software patents) make no money, are never enforced, and are completely unused in every sense of the word. Even a patent lawyer has admitted this to me.

But in very rare, unpredictable, and seemingly capricious cases, it's worth a fortune. The best example is the patent purportedly for inventing wireless email that allowed NTP to extort $600 million from Research In Motion a couple years ago.

If you buy patents in bulk, you might even be able to achieve a return despite the randomness in value.

I'm going to make the analogy to owning a gun and deciding how many bullets (patents) to buy:

\- A dozen bullets and you can (maybe) protect yourself. This is your defensive patent portfolio; if sued, you can maybe find some way to countersue.

\- Thousands of bullets and you can wage war. This is your attack patent portfolio.

\- But a single bullet is good only for suicide. Start-ups that spend their time and energy filing one patent application probably kill themselves. I saw one case where it happened.

I think I'm going to call this principle the Patent Portfolio Price Power Law. In a ruthless business sense, a LOT of software patents makes sense.

<comment><USER14> Tech companies like Google have nearly unlimited pools of money, so they can spend ridiculously large amounts of money for things that make sense to them.

People do the same thing. How many rich guys buy a $500k Ferrari that is never driven?

<comment><USER15> >How many rich guys buy a $500k Ferrari that is never driven?

None. No Ferrari costs $500k outside of an auction house, and even then that's a very rare price. The classic collectable ferraris go for far more, and the "average" ferraris go for far less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google has a history of doing things like this. In their IPO filing, they intended to raise $2,718,281,828 [see [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/E_- _base_of_n...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/E_- _base_of_natural_logarithm#In_computer_culture)].

<comment><USER17> Ah, so _that's_ why they didn't use e as one of their bids! I had been wondering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> See. Another case of 2π being more suitable.

<comment><USER19> The bid was on Thu 6/28 as well (Tau day)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> You've got to hand it to Google. It's a brilliant strategy if the Nortel patents were being auctioned off in radians.

Unfortunately for Google, the patents were auctioned off in reality.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think Google's plan was to get the other parties to pay more for the group of patents than what the original price was (~$1.5B).

They probably decided that they may as well have some fun with it in the meantime

(although google has a history of using mathematical significant figures in financial dealings, such as in their S1 filing)

<comment><USER22> Does that happen often in business?

<comment><USER19> There was a multi-million dollar contract in Japan a few years ago decided by a single hand of Rock Paper Scissors.

<comment><USER23> That's classic. Any references will be appreciated.

<comment><USER24> Here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_paper_scissors#Auction_hou...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_paper_scissors#Auction_house_rock- paper-scissors_match)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't understand why the article refers to this as "shenanigans that didn't work". The problem wasn't that they bid pi billion dollars. The problem was that they didn't have enough money to buy the patents.

<comment><USER26> They certainly had the money, they just didn't bid enough money.

<comment><USER25> Was that the problem? My understanding was that they could see the other bids, but chose not to bid higher.

<comment><USER26> Google has 36 billion dollars of cash on hand, so they had the money, they apparently weren't willing to bid more than pi billion though.

<comment><USER27> A minor point, but they certainly do not have $36B cash on hand, they have it in assets that can be liquidated reasonably quickly, but companies do not keep $36B lying around, or in the bank. It is stashed in short term investments.

<comment><USER21> what investors refer to as 'cash on hand' doesn't literally mean a room full of bills or a bank account. a 'cash asset' is anything that can be theoretically converted back into cash quickly and with little trouble (tbills, term deposits, bank accounts, any AAA+ funds, etc.)

for eg. if the Greek government owed me $1B, I wouldn't call that cash on hand, but if the US government owed me $1B, it is

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Should have gone with Tau

<comment><USER29> Why bid over 6 billion when the current bid is at least below 3.1 billion right ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Stand by for a new raft of belligerent offensive patent suits...

</comment><comment><USER31> In my mind (despite the precedent with Google), Google's irreverent bidding suggests that they were simply running up the bid. In which case perhaps the partnership with Intel suggests similar strategies from companies that never intended to win the portfolio. It would be interesting to me to know if Google later secures licensing on some or all of these patents for less than Pi billion, as licensing seems more likely than litigation.

</comment><comment><USER32> Looks like they ran out of well known constants. I'm sad google lost this round.

</comment><comment><USER33> They should've gathered the whole OHA alliance around and get them to make a pool. Just getting Apple alone in the bid would've meant a very high chance they lost the bid, because Apple could've outbid them if they really wanted the patents. But of course it got even worse, with all the others joining up with Apple to take them.

They really didn't expect this to happen? I'm a bit disappointed in Google for not thinking this through, if they really wanted to get them to protect the whole Android ecosystem.

EDIT: I also think Microsoft is focusing too much on making money on patents, rather than from their own product. Are they going to buy as many patents as possible that later they can use to act as a leech on Android ecosystem? That's a pretty perverse business model, and it doesn't make them look any better than Righthaven.

<comment><USER9> _I'm a bit disappointed in Google for not thinking this through_

Presumably they ran the numbers and figured that the expected costs of defending against lawsuits based on these patents was around $4 billion, in which case they're better off not bidding higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Google thinks this is real funny until Samsung android phones are banned from the us

</comment><comment><USER35> Am I the only one who thinks Google didn't really plan on winning anything? I think they were just making a statement about the ridiculousness of patenting an algorithm. But, I'm probably wrong.

You can't patent innovation, although you can attempt to stifle it with patents. If you're going to sue me on the grounds of patent infringement, I can go work on something else, but you're just going to be left holding your bag of patents. Like a bully on the playground, sure you've got the ball now, but nobody wants to play with you.

</comment><comment><USER36> See how this is great for people in finance and law - they get big firms into bidding wars, end up paying a large number and eventually end up filing infringement suits to get back the $$$$ spent.

</comment><comment><USER37> When bidding with imperfect information (that is, each party does not know the other bids, only if his is the highest,) it makes sense to bid in non-even numbers.

I think the bidding here wasn't such, so it probably not the reason here.

</comment><comment><USER38> How irrational.

</comment><comment><USER31> I would also be interested to know exactly the order of bids, because if Google and Intel never bid directly after one another, it might suggest they had an allied strategy going in.

</comment><comment><USER39> Things like this make it hard to ever really abolish patents, either a lot of companies would be out a lot of money or the government would have to reimburse they a lot of money.

<comment><USER40> They are a granted monopoly, you pay the filing fee whether it is accepted or not hence the gov't has no liability. Look at making gold illegal for examples of how the gov't can drastically devalue your assets with no recourse.

<comment><USER41> The government can indeed devalue or even confiscate your assets if it wants to. The problem is that legislators have no interest in pissing off well- heeled companies that can contribute billions to their opponents when the only people opposed to software patents are a few programmers and policy wonks with a whole lot less money than the companies that own the patents.

Also, keep in mind that lawyers tend to be much more politically connected than programmers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Am I the only one who wants to know what the _numbers that were not even numbers_ were? What does that mean?

</comment><comment><USER43> That's an awful lot of money to spend on patents unless they plan on aggressively pursuing violators of it.

<comment><USER44> It will be really interesting to see what Google's next move will be. Since the competitors had to stretch themselves for this one, will this continue as a game of attrition (through various legal and acquisition costs)?

And I suspect that this was a really bad move in this context on the side of Google's competitors. Oh and I am well aware that these companies got loads of cash on hand. But it can't last forever.

<comment><USER45>
      > Since the competitors had to stretch themselves for
      > this one

What do you have in mind? Apple has about $66 billion in cash.

      > Oh and I am well aware that these companies got loads of cash
      > on hand. But it can't last forever.

They are still making money as crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> They should have bid Planck's constant and would have won?

<comment><USER47> I think you have Planck's constant (about 6 * 10^-34) confused with something else. It would be about $0, which is still less than $4.5 billion.

<comment><USER48> pi is also less than $4.5billion. It's the multiplier that matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Looks like their strategy was to just push the bids up, so as to force their competitors (who are competitors to each other) to bond together in a giant bid: divide and conquer.

Either that, or they didn't like the Feigenbaum constant.

<comment><USER30> It might turn out to be closer to unite and submit than divide and conquer if they find themselves on the business of a buch of new IP lawsuits. I doubt the winners plan to sit on these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> should have bid 2.71828 and 0.42331 bil.

</comment><comment><USER51> Would be funny if in the future Google's ordered to pay $3.14159 Billion for violating the same Nortel patents in Android.

</comment><comment><USER51> Google was Trying hard to be cute it backfired.

Typical childish behavior from Larry Page.

<comment><USER52> I like it.</comment></comment>


Napoleon Was the Best General Ever, and the Math Proves It - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/napoleon-was-the-best-general-ever-and-the-math-proves-it-86efed303eeb <comment><USER2> Relevant (Russian winter campaign) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard#/media/F...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard#/media/File:Minard.png)

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


Is Bloomberg Offline? - <AUTHOR> I test with Ping. OK. But Firefox, Online Proxy and Mobile can't find the https://www.bloomberg.com/ page. No problems with another pages. <comment><USER2> Working fine for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really weird. I was just looking to see if it might be due to my DNS settings, but I just can't locate the problem.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Oppression Check - atom-morgan http://oppressioncheck.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Reminds me of "Come be PC."

</comment><comment><USER2> Is this supposed to be a joke?

<comment> atom-morgan My story leading up to this launch is here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cORcTBp6rgA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cORcTBp6rgA)</comment></comment>


The World's Biggest Diamond Heist (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://archive.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/17-04/ff_diamonds?currentPage=all

<comment><USER2> And a few months after the release of that article, the guy gets caught with large amounts of rough diamonds in his possession.

[http://www.wired.com/2009/07/organizer-of-worlds-biggest- dia...](http://www.wired.com/2009/07/organizer-of-worlds-biggest-diamond- heist-found-with-rough-diamonds/)

Sadly I was unable to find out what happened after that.

<comment><USER3> I bet they were probably purchased legitimately to mess with the authorities. He sounds like he was testing them, to see what would happen. Reminds me so much of penetration testing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Fantastic reading. Felt like a screenplay for a movie though.

A lesson here is if you smell women's hair spray in your vault, there's a chance someone is going to break in. Seriously though:

> It was a simple but effective hack: The oily film would temporarily insulate > the sensor from fluctuations in the room's temperature, and the alarm went > off only if it sensed both heat and motion.

That is a real hack?! I love it. Does anyone know of a place where one can read about things like this? Genuinely interested. Don't worry, I'm not thinking of stealing any diamonds anytime soon!

</comment><comment><USER4> No wonder they got robbed with the vault security of something you could assemble with items from your local hardware store over a weekend. Removable magnetic plates, key in the closet, primitive sensors, no live guards -- sounds like a bad movie plot. If such security practices are the norm, I'm actually shocked that so few vault robberies happen.</comment>


Ask HN: How many lines of code is your build script? - <AUTHOR> I've started seeing more and more people have really complicated build scripts, sometimes thousand of lines long.
I prefer my build/deploy scripts to call command lines and maybe have a few small scripts for harder things.
What do you do? <comment><USER2> Our build scripts are small, biggest one is < 80 lines including comments and half of that could probably be chopped.

Our primary deployment script is fairly long, probably 800 lines or so. A couple of smaller update scripts are around 300 lines or so, these patch specific components that are frequently done.

This is how I think it should be in general. If I see a super complex build script for a single platform I usually think the product is trying to do too much in one place because usually that means there are tons of special conditions. One exception is if you have a build script that does cross platform compiling & packaging, then having a large script makes sense to me and isn't a sign of issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same, I really don't like it when i see massive build/deployment scritps</comment></comment>


James Lovelock at 100: the Gaia saga continues - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01969-y <comment><USER2> His views on nuclear power are interesting. He thinks that nuclear is the only real solution to climate change.

[http://www.jameslovelock.org/nuclear-power-is-the-only- green...](http://www.jameslovelock.org/nuclear-power-is-the-only-green- solution/)

<comment><USER3> that makes me doubt him as he obviously doesn't factor in the enormous difficulty of nuclear waste. nuclear energy is not green at all. EDIT: Also that was in 2004 and things have moved on massively since then

<comment><USER4> Nuclear engineer here. What specifically do you consider the enormous difficulty of nuclear waste to actually be? Technical issues? Political? Both?

I see it as a well-understood technical problem with well-reasoned technical solutions. But the politics of "what so we do with the waste?" are basically self-sustaining now.

<comment><USER3> nuclear waste is tougher to deal with as opposed to green energy where there is no toxic byproducts

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I dislike being the pessimist but it seems overly optimist to imagine this singularity coming and undoing all of mankind's harm... and I can imagine how someome at his age would embrace this view that surely, soon, automagically everything will be in order.

How long till we attain singularity? I believe another of his liftime and we'll still be far away from true self-replicating GAI. I also believe climate change will transform our way of living long before that.

What will be it's primary purpose? I don't know, it's definitely not going to be built to enrich mankind.

I like his view and I hope he is right but I believe the 'singularity' will solve how to further enrich its makes long before it solves the planet's ailments.

<comment><USER6> Singularity is becoming a religion, like the say The Rapture for nerds.

Technology is seldom the bottleneck, that seemingly is down to social acceptance.

Things used to progress by people dying out, however enhanced lifespan makes this even more of a problem.

Emigration to new societies helped, but there's no where left to go with a clean sheet.

Whilst a fan of space colonies, that looks to be even more complex than when life moved from the sea to land.

So herding rabid cats seems to be the core skill.

<comment><USER6> The rabid cats herding was a bit glib in my part, consensus is hard to come by, but valuable. With so many different points of contention though it's almost to get agreement across the board; a statespace explosion.

Several hundred years ago the main question was which crop to grow.

<comment><USER7> Several hundred years ago the main question was who would make the best king to lead us into the next war, which would probably be next year.

Sorry if I'm being glib, that's incidental to your main points.

<comment><USER6> They didn't get to chose the king did they, otherwise it would have been a democracy.

<comment><USER8> There were lots of ways to chose a king. Heredity was just one of them -- which is why not all kings (or roman emperors etc) are from the same family.

In lots of cases, popular support (or lack thereof) played a big role (in some cases, even more directly than in current democracies).

<comment><USER9> Often popular support of the elements of the landed gentry with largest armed hirds or retinues to call upon.

Not quite the modern sense of popular support.

<comment><USER8> Replace landed gentry with corporatist class, and "largest armed hireds" with mass media, and you're not very far off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Intersting how far his position has changed since the romantic Gaia ideas

[https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/james-lovelock-on- voting...](https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/james-lovelock-on-voting- brexit-wicked-renewables-and-why-he-changed-his-mind-on-climate-change/)</comment>


How satellite 'megaconstellations' will photobomb astronomy images - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02480-5 <comment><USER2> The article covers the mitigations already in place and how they only partially resolve the issue. These satellites are low, bright (at dawn/dusk) and very soon to be incredibly numerous.

Yes, it is possible for data workflows to post-process these streaks away, but not all configurations allow this, and whereas previous intrusions were somewhat rare and could be ignored that simply won't be the case due to three companies from one country.

This is cost turned into an "externality" and foisted upon astronomers--at every scale of investment--all over the world. Stock holders in these companies won't pay for it, but tax payers everywhere will pay for the mitigations. Not cool. This is a hill I'll die on.

<comment><USER3> I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these satellites.

However, this conversation has basically been skipped over. Maybe you're right and I'm wrong.

The constellations are being launched, and there's zero chance of shutting them down once they're serving a commercial role. Considering the abundant red tape in the modern world, it does seem like it was a little thin on the ground here.

<comment><USER4> > I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote > locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these > satellites.

I've had faster Internet than the average Starlink speedtest says, in rural Romania, at the foot of a mountain, wild bears and all: [https://twitter.com/q3k/status/1172621386977861632](https://twitter.com/q3k/status/1172621386977861632) . Internet access in rural areas is pretty much a solved problem, it just now hinges on enough of a societal push to apply this solution where needed.

Starlink is yet another SV-style attempt to solve (US) societal problems by blindly applying technology. Except this time, this also affects other countries, and we're furious.

<comment><USER3> I've been there, it's beautiful. Although under ten kilometers from a town of tens of thousands wasn't exactly what I had in mind; I was picturing some of the places I've been in Africa that don't have mobile reception and may well never get it if it means laying fiber. A solar powered base station that relayed mobile internet, even if slow, would make a meaningful difference.

The point of my comment isn't to defend the satellite launches, quite the opposite.

It's saying that _even as somebody that would be in favor_ , not carefully considering the trade offs before giving permission to permanently alter the night sky is not acceptable. This is exactly the kind of thing that bureaucracy should make painfully slow.

<comment><USER5> > _I was picturing some of the places I 've been in Africa that don't have > mobile reception and may well never get it if it means laying fiber._

When was the last time that you were in Africa? And in which country, because it's an entire continent.

EDIT: So I guess HN doesn't like being called out on [https://africasacountry.com/](https://africasacountry.com/) issues? Well sorry not sorry, but as someone born in Ghana I'm more a little tired of the sentiment on display in the cited part of comment I'm reacting to, which is the implication that Africa as an entire continent is inherently and forever will be a place too poor to have proper infrastructure.

<comment><USER3> This isn't about being able to afford infrastructure. It's about population density in rural areas.

North America and Australia (where I'm from) have the exact same issue. No country is going to spend a million bucks to lay fiber to ten person towns in the middle of nowhere.

<comment><USER6> Funny, Canada, even less dense, is doing exactly that. Maybe not 10, but at multiple levels of government there have been up to half the capital without many strings attached to get broadband out to rural areas. My understanding though, it's not work the time even with the fibre there for the larger companies in many cases. This is the latest program [https://www.canada.ca/en/radio-television- telecommunications...](https://www.canada.ca/en/radio-television- telecommunications/news/2020/08/crtc-broadband-fund-selected-projects.html)

<comment><USER7> Sure, and the US had a similar program. Just because the government promised something doesn't count until the thing is actually delivered.

<comment><USER8> Alberta already has one of the largest fiber networks on earth and has for more than a decade.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is so much unwarranted alarmism about this. This is not the end of astronomy, nor is it even super serious. The "unavoidable impact" they're talking about is that astronomers will have to care about when and where satellites will appear, rather than not bothering and just throwing away the rare image with a satellite in it. A small percentage of their pixels will be affected by satellite trails and they will need to implement better algorithms to avoid them, remove them, or use different sensor technologies that can reject them better.

Sure, if you're an astronomer this is annoying, and will cost you some effort and money and time. But you'll still be able to do astronomy. Meanwhile, if you're not an astronomer, the satellites will not be visible to the naked eye in their final orbits. The entire surface of the Earth will gain low latency broadband internet access for the first time, and new launch systems will drastically reduce the cost of access to space, enabling more space-based astronomy.

<comment><USER10> > will cost you some effort and money and time.

This externality needs to be captured for it to be fair.

<comment><USER9> Sure. Governments regulate space pretty closely and they have the ability to account for that. I'm sure the commercial potential of global broadband internet is high enough that some funding for astronomers wouldn't be a huge obstacle to the constellation operators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Living in a city, I didn't understand how big a deal this was until I got a view of the clear night sky in a less populated area recently. The satellites are already visible by eye everywhere, and there are only 655 Starlink satellites. There's approval for 12000, and SpaceX is seeking approval for 30000!

If they're all going to be this reflective, satellites will be the main thing we see in the night sky a few years from now. Forget about astronomy; 10 years from now you'd be telling your kids "when I was your age we used to be able to see constellations of stars in the sky". By eye, only about ~5000 stars are visible in the night sky.

<comment><USER9> It's not as big a deal as you think. The satellites are only visible to the naked eye for a few weeks after launch as they travel to their final orbits; after that they are too dim to see. The sky will not appear different than it does now to the naked eye; you will never see thousands of satellites. Most of the bright satellites you see now have been there for many years already; Starlink will not be visible like those.

<comment><USER12> Maybe, but with tens of thousands of satellites, each with a life expectancy of about 3-5 years then Space X will have to re-fill the constellation constantly.

<comment><USER9> Sure, you'll be able to see the most recent launch, just as you can now. But you won't see 30,000 in the sky, which is what everyone assumes. Also note that you can't see them at all in the middle of the night; only for an hour or so around sunset and sunrise.

<comment><USER13> Isn't sunrise and sunset the prime time for people looking at the sky for aesthetic reasons?

<comment><USER14> People yes, who will enjoy seeing satellites.

Prime astronomy hours are when Starlink is in the earths shadow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is bad. This is really really bad. The EU has invested billions in telescopes and that's now going to go to waste. Instead advancing human knowledge it's just going to fill rich guy pockets even more.

<comment><USER14> No, it's not.

Starlink satellites are only visible at dusk and dawn, they are in the earths shadow during prime viewing hours.

And SoaceX has already added visors to make new Starlink satellites nearly invisible.

<comment><USER16> > nearly invisible

In what wavelengths?

<comment><USER14> In all the best wavelengths first dawn/dusk observations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I recently moved out of the city after many years and looked up at night for the first time in a while and was surprised to see so much stuff moving around. The first time I saw something I thought I was really lucky to catch the ISS but after seeing the "ISS" many more times in the following minutes I quickly realised it was SpaceX and friends' satellites.

I also recall last year looking up and seeing a string of about 20 bright lights moving quickly across the sky and wondering if it was the start of WW3. Turns out it was a SpaceX launch.

</comment><comment><USER10> > A negative externality is any difference between the private cost of an > action or decision to an economic agent and the social cost.

Like pollution, I think this is another perfect example of a negative externality. A few companies stand to benefit quite a lot by incurring costs and risks onto others. Maybe these its possible for astronomy and other endeavours to work around this but it doesn't seem fair that they should have to be the ones to pay for it. If it isn't possible to work around then I think we have a bigger problem here.

Personally, I'd like to see these orbits like realestate which are commomly owned and democratically managed by all of humanity. Then companies could, if people are willing, temporarily rent them with proceeds equally distributed. Like in pollution, I don't think market demand for wireless Internet really suffices as a vote here and we need to make it more explicit to really gather consent.

Wouldn't it be neat if the net result is that capturing the negative externality actually funded the launching of better space based telescopes?

</comment><comment><USER18> I feel like this could be solved with a simple requirement that anyone launching anything shiny into LEO has to help fund space based telescopes. They're better anyway and we can have the best of all worlds that way...

<comment><USER19> Classic capitalism management. If a market change creates negative effects on society, create a tax to mitigate negative effects

<comment><USER18> Pretty much. Getting the best outcome for the most people etc etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> it's hard to make the claim that the private development of space doesn't inspire people in the same way as the old national projects did. my heart swells watching a livestream of a satellite being delivered into orbit. but "memelord space magnate delivers global internet access" doesn't give the endeavor the gravity it deserves.

space is the last realm of mystery. to me, a glance toward the sky and the stars has always been the fastest way to feel the presence of God. it won't lose that for me, even if the daytime sky fills up with blinkenlights. but it might not provide that for anyone else, anymore, if it stays—forgive me—on this trajectory.

> _The planets are all long gone. The inkblot finally closes overhead and the > last star winks out. The gibbous Moon remains shining balefully down on the > world for a tense and hopeful minute, but then, in an eyeblink, is swallowed > up by one final event horizon, and spirited away._

> _Left in utter darkness, the former astronomer tries and fails to deal > rationally with his loss, and his isolation from the human race who, as the > voice rightly tried to tell him, has really lost nothing._

[https://qntm.org/astronomer](https://qntm.org/astronomer)

</comment><comment><USER21> What I'm concerned about is how much the launching of tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of satellites will affect our ability to launch things out of orbit. Launch windows are already very precisely calculated, and the more junk we put in orbit the harder that will become.

<comment><USER22> that's actually a fascinating idea. think about how humanity solves the environment problems and fusion works out, bringing global peace and prosperity for once. Now a smallish rock comes from space. We don't see it, because of "we go to mars, bro"-elon making ground based astronomoy infeasible and debris from crashes from his great internet satellites making 9/10 new launches fail. so, even if we saw it, we couldn't launch a nuke to deflect it. BOOM. There was the USA and Elons android son is just reduced to dust by his daddies hybris.

<comment><USER23> Space based observation of objects on potential collision course with Earth is far superior to earth observatio. For example you can't really observe anything coming from the direction of the sun. Look up NEOCam project that aims to have a near Earth asteroid telescope in solar orbit.

<comment><USER22> how many space-based telescopes are there? And how many will where be, once 9/10 launches fail?

<comment><USER24> > And how many will where be, once 9/10 launches fail?

This is not a real thing that will happen.

<comment><USER22> This was never meant to be a real thing, but I fantasized. Some people then told me that our some dozen space telescopes are sooo much better.

How do you know by the way that this will never happen?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> We paid operators huge sums of money to build fiber internet across the US, but they kept the money instead. Now we're trying with satellites.

The whole astronomy problem could be solved if FCC had teeth and forced us to get the fiber connections we already paid for

<comment><USER26> Fiber never solves the problem of internet on a ship, or plane, or tank. It never economically solves the problem of internet in the _middle_ of nowhere.

If the FCC had teeth the US would have internet going up to the "edge" of nowhere (for some definitions of the boundary), but there are always limits. Satellites nicely complement that by working best in non-dense areas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Lots of people don't think Starlink is important enough to be barely visible over the whole earth. Lots of people think it is. I don't care one way or the other, but I'm glad that the precedent is being set. Someday humanity will have a reason to put something big into orbit, and at that time those who favor progress won't want to have to fight the NotInMySky fanatics. As we can see ITT, they're worse than the New England wind farm opponents.

</comment><comment><USER28> In unrelated news the cost of launching a space telescope (that doesn't suffer from atmospheric perturbations or cloud cover) has decreased by several orders of magnitude.

<comment><AUTHOR> > It is this author's opinion that any correlation between mass and space > telescope cost is a coincidence.

From "Survey of cost models for space telescopes"

[https://doi.org/10.1117/1.3430603](https://doi.org/10.1117/1.3430603)

<comment><USER14> A decade old study, using only NASA telescopes, using only super expensive launch systems.

Now the Falcon Heavy can lift over double the payload mass of the Space Shuttle to orbit, for less than 1/40th the cost per pound.

<comment><USER29> Launch costs are only a fraction of the cost. The cost of a space telescope itself is massive, regardless of launch cost. The James Webb telescope is massively over budget but even it's original $1 billion cost and 10 year build time is much more than many ground based observatories would have costed at the time. Currently it's cost is about x10 it's original estimate and 14 years late, partially because it'll be on its own once it's launched.

On the ground, $1 billion or less buys you an extraordinarily large telescope such as a 40 metre mirror or a distributed array. These are needed to study very distant objects in detail and impossible to build in space.

<comment><USER14> True, but if James Webb launched in a fairing as big as Starship, the unfolding mechanism that's driven most of it's delays and cost overruns would have been far simpler.

And space telescopes don't suffer from atmospheric distortion, can focus on the same spots for days straight to collect more light, etc. those are huge advantages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Seems like the perfect use case for Vantablack. Of course the satellites will still block ER as they pass across the sky, but at least if they aren't reflecting so much light it would surely be of some help?

<comment><USER31> Painting was already tried and doesn't work.

> But the black paint made the satellite thermally 'hot', harming its internet > operations, said Patricia Cooper, SpaceX's vice-president of satellite > government affairs, at a recent webinar.

<comment><USER32> maybe something like this? [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2241717-infrared- reflec...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2241717-infrared-reflecting- paint-can-cool-buildings-even-when-it-is-black/)

Would still be bad for astronomy but at least the impact for naked eye would be less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This was posted in a deep link but I'm reposting it: SpaceX mitigations in progress: [https://www.spacex.com/updates/starlink- update-04-28-2020/](https://www.spacex.com/updates/starlink- update-04-28-2020/)

The OIR report, if you bother to actually read it, also details that a) astronomers agree that providing world-wide broadband is a worthy cause, and b) that there is close cooperation between astronomers and at least SpaceX to work out mitigations.

</comment><comment><USER32> ok, so 30k satellites from SpaceX, 60k from OneWeb. I anticipate this is just the beginning, other US companies and other countries will want to launch similar amounts.

What will the impact be when there are 500k+ satellites in LEO, who decides who can launch more?

<comment><USER34> I hope not many other countries would want to do so, because many have solved internet problem already.

<comment><USER35> You shouldn't judge other countries by western standards. There are a lot of places with poor or non-existent internet. But I fear that the reason other countries will do the same is because of their current infrastructure. Capable countries would be weary of ceding the control of their internet to American companies. We already have a splintered internet with countries and companies addicted to monitoring and controlling information (which would have been impossible in the first place if it was designed following the original principles of creating a mesh, rather than a hierarchy). Why would anyone give up now?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm not expressing a pro or con opinion here, but I'm curious. Did this same conversation happen when we started light polluting the city? Was this why observatories adapted by moving to darker locations?

On the surface this seems a wee bit absurd, but I wonder if a case could be made that it's time for more space-based telescopes.

<comment><USER35> That is exactly what happened. It's clear even to the naked eye - people still freak out when power grids get knocked out at night. They see far more stars and think that's what caused the failure. To be more technical, the EM radiation signals that astronomers are interested in is very faint and barely above the background noise level. This is why they have to use large aperture and long exposure to essentially amplify the difference between signal and noise. They can resolve fainter signals (images) if the noise floor (light pollution) is less.

Compared to space telescopes, ground telescopes were limited by atmospheric interference. This has improved much lately with adaptive optics. Space telescopes are better, but it's too costly. You will never see a mega telescope constellation, because there is no money to be made. Ground telescopes still generate considerable valuable data (in scientific terms. corporates wouldn't care any less). Even individuals have ground telescopes that do this. Some projects like Sloan Digital Sky Survey ([https://www.sdss.org/](https://www.sdss.org/)) puts massive amounts of data in the public domain. SDSS also does observations that are impossible with space telescopes.

Space telescopes are good, but are complementary to ground telescopes - not a replacement. When (some) people say that we should simply forget ground telescopes in favor of space telescopes, they are actually asking to throw away cheap, accessible, democratic, inclusive and sometimes unique way of astronomical observations in favour of an incredibly costly, elitist and closed methods which is viable only to big corps who have little interest in it because of lack of short term profits.

An aside, there are some people in this thread asking astronomers to stop complaining and just remove the streaks from the image. I would say that's incredibly philistine stance - science has long term benefits that is underrated compared to commercially motivated projects with perceived short- term social benefits. An approach suggested is to statistically remove the streaks from image. That's against the whole purpose of these observations - astronomers are interested in the details that cannot yet be statistically predicted. Another approach is to use multiple exposures and combine them. Again - the signals they are interested in often takes night long exposure before signal is sufficiently amplified above and noise. This can't be solved with multiple exposure. The third approach is to close the sensor (usually CCD) with a shutter when a satellite is in the vicinity. This is more viable. However, this is going to be hard and is going to waste a lot of exposure time.

<comment><USER33> Did you actually read the article? The impacts on research astronomy range from insignificant to significant depending on the application, and some things are harder to mitigate for than others. "Removing the streaks from the image" is exactly one method of mitigation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > "There's no place to hide in the middle of the night from such a satellite > constellation," says Tony Tyson, a physicist at the University of > California, Davis.

Fortunately this has never been true for Starlink, which are at such low orbits they are always in the earths shadow at night, excepting dusk and dawn.

</comment><comment><USER37> Has anyone talked about the possibility of putting our astronomy tools in orbit? Seems like as it becomes feasible to put megaconstellations in orbit, it also becomes feasible to put more telescopes in orbit. Wouldn't that solve the problem?

</comment><comment><USER38> There was a big discussion a month ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23926699](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23926699)

In a comment by vilhelm_s in the previous thread has a link to a site that explain that the usual software can select correct the parts of the images and create a nice image [https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-blogs/imaging- foundati...](https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-blogs/imaging-foundations- richard-wright/satellites-begone-how-to-remove-satellite-trails-from-your- astrophotography/)

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm pretty pissed billionaires and their stupid toy internet projects have ruined my chances of taking a clear picture of the asteroid in my name (won at an Intel ISEF science & engineering olympiad in high school) for the foreseeable future :( .

It only transits the earth into a position where the sun lights it up every three years - I'm still working on finding a university to aim a spectrometer / laser at it so I can identify it's mineral composition and decide how much to charge asteroid miners for it ;)

</comment><comment><USER40> Since their internet service will generate a lot of money, maybe spacex should just provide very low cost launches of future telescopes. Or maybe spacex should launch their own telescopes in partnership with researchers and sell the service for a low fee.

I also hope we tax companies that launch and own satellites to fund a clean up service that de-orbits all the junk before they cause the Kessler syndrome.

<comment><USER26> Part of getting a FCC license for space radios is having a plan to avoid Kessler syndrome. For things like Starlink that plan is "stick them in low orbits so they naturally deorbit within a few years in the absolute worst case".

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Could a country (or a continent) in theory remove satellites hanging above their area? What if countries decide to extend the airspace to the aerospace?

<comment><USER24> There is absolutely no way to do this.

These are low-orbit satellites and they will eventually "fly over" every point on the Earth up to their maximum inclination. Only geo-stationary satellites are "hanging above an area" and suffer from high latency because of the speed of light.

Legally speaking "airspace" does not extend beyond the atmosphere. There are treaties for this, otherwise almost all satellites would need approvals from almost all governments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> So the next logical step is to move astronomy into space. I mean all the astronomy, including an amateur astronomy. Elon Musk should launch 100k telescopes into orbit (somewhat higher than constellations of satellites), so I could pay $100/year to rent one, to write a program controlling telescope taking pictures and sending them to me.

</comment><comment><USER43> Just star watching in general's become somewhat disappointing. I remember satellites were nearly as rare as meteors to see and almost as exciting when you spotted one. Now though, it's hard to even look at the stars without something moving in sky. Every couple minutes there's satellites.

</comment><comment><USER44> Serious question: how is this any different from airplanes and birds "photobombing" astronomy images?

Ground-based telescopes deal with objects in the sky _all the time_.

What makes a higher number of satellites any more problematic than those?

The sky is a noisy place. And we've had satellites up for decades. How are "megaconstellations" any different?

</comment><comment><USER30> I can periodically see with the naked eye what appear to be "moving stars" (about the same approximate brightness as an average star), and appearing to orbit the earth (moving in a "straight" line across the sky).

Can I assume that these are satellites?

<comment><USER45> Yes, especially if they are just after dusk or before dawn. Spotting satellites is a common thing.

<comment><USER30> Yes, an hour or so after dusk. Guess that's what they are then!

<comment><USER46> You can even see shape(solar panels) of ISS with naked eye, pretty mind blowing...

<comment><USER47> No you can't. That's beyond the biological capabilities of the human eye, even if you have absolutely perfect vision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I appreciate the arguments on both sides of this, but it's hard for me to get past the point that the satellites are temporary infrastructure, whereas Earth-based fixed wireless or fiber/wire lines are fairly permanent. It's hard for me to understand why the solution here is the temporary one.

A decade ago I think my opinion would have been different, because technology didn't make offering gigabit bandwidth via wire/fiber and fixed wireless pretty straightforward. So, back then you could have argued everything was temporary. Nowadays, I suspect gigabit fiber/fixed wireless will last a very, very long time before being outmoded (if it ever is).

So, I'm asking myself whether it isn't just more sensible to put up the fixed investment to connect remote areas using existing technologies rather than blasting off satellites again and again to do it.

<comment><USER33> If you think you can competitively install fiber to all the areas that will be served by Starlink, then it seems you should be able to outcompete them. No one's preventing you from giving it a try.

<comment><USER48> Well I mentioned Fixed Wireless as well. Also, there's room for government in this. That's like suggesting highways, high-speed rail and airports should all be privately funded. In most cases, societies have chosen to make those projects the purview of the government.

<comment><USER33> I agree, but that doesn't affect the question of competitiveness between satellite and ground options.

A few thousand satellites sounds like a lot, but the amount of ground installations that would have to be done to give the same area of access is staggering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> If only there were some existing available technology designed to make satellites hard to see or otherwise detect.

Oh well. Too bad nobody's ever researched that.

[https://youtu.be/ZV6A74qLiec](https://youtu.be/ZV6A74qLiec)

<comment><USER49> Best thing to do midnight is watching youtube conspiracy videos.

<comment><USER45> I don't think it's a conspiracy to imply that several nations likely have a significant body of research on stealth satellite technology that could likely solve the problem at hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Related: SpaceX tests black satellite to reduce 'megaconstellation' threat to astronomy

[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00041-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00041-4)

</comment><comment> wing-_-nuts Hopefully they can come up with some sort of 'vanta black' coating for the sats that reduces this issue. I agree with there needing to be a tax on bright, private sats in orbit. Space is getting more democratized, but not nearly so much so that an international body wouldn't be able to slap fines on companies putting 'disco balls' in orbit.

Another thing is that our skies will probably get brighter overall when we resort to stratospheric sulfide injection to try to reduce the effects of global warming. Anyone that doubts this will happen needs to come to grips with the fact that this is our cheapest most readily available means of reducing temps until we can get our emissions under control. We're going to need to fund _a lot_ more space based telescopes to preserve our ability to do science.

<comment><USER14> Vanta Black would make the satellites too hot. SpaceX is using visors to solve the problem .

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Perhaps putting a camera at the outer side of each satelite and a screen at the facing-to-earth side transmitting what the camera sees could help. Plus google advertising benefits, of course.

<comment><USER38> The amount of light blocked by the satellite is too small. The problem is that the satellite reflects a lot of light from the sun.

<comment><USER50> Maybe they could use a broken/plicated/spiky surface that does not reflect so much light. That definitely would reduce the amount of light reflected.

Maybe could be designed to act as a heat exchanger also or be used as a system to mitigate the improbable impact of a small debris

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Maybe it is time to think about moving astronomy to space or possibly the moon. Issues for years about street light polution. Even ducks show up sometimes on astronomy photos.

</comment><comment><USER52> How many sats in Leo would you need for it to potentially impact launch windows and access to space? Does anyone have any data or speculation on this?

</comment><comment><USER53> I feel this is like internet disrupting a lot of things, maybe space photography needs to also evolve with the new landscape

</comment><comment><USER54> How long are digital exposures? It seems like most of the interference could be removed with a bit of signal processing.

<comment><USER55> If you take long exposure of dim object, bright satellite passing in front of it will saturate signal and there will be nothing to recover. To avoid that you need to track all the satellites and split one long exposure into multiple shorter ones - but that multiplies read noise accordingly.

<comment><USER49> This is why I take 500+ images and process them. I don't think the moving satellites would cause any harm to long exposure deep space photography. I agree if you take 30 pictures, it could be a problem.

<comment><USER55> _> This is why I take 500+ images and process them._

If you do 500 exposures you get 500x read noise of the sensor mixed with signal. Modern CCD and CMOS sensor have low read noise (compared to thermal and shot noise) but not zero.

For scientific observations of faint objects long exposure times on order of hours are necessary, for amateur astrophotography you can just go with multiple exposures.

<comment><USER54> Thanks for the explanation, I didn't realise there was a per-exposure noise component.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Maybe they can now launch more space telescopes.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Weirdly, HN itself removed the "how" when I just copy pasted in the title and I had to edit it back in...

<comment><USER56> That's intentional and I think it's because most articles on the form "how x something something y" don't actually explain how at all. Even when they do explain how, the title is often just as good without the word how.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Considering the end result, 'Dyson Sphere' would have been a more interesting name choice than Starlink.

<comment><USER4> Presenting SpaceX "Dyson Sphere but wait fuck that's the wrong celestial body isn't it oh well let's just roll with it"

</comment></comment><comment> tom-khagai I believe it would be difficult to further prevent this from happening since there is so much more demand for global, low-latency wireless internet than for astronomical observations.

<comment><USER58> > there is so much more demand for global, low-latency wireless internet than > for astronomical observations.

This is very much not true and a remarkably narrow utilitarian view.

I understand US folks are poorly served in terms of ISP infrastructure and competition but please don't try to project those issues as a 'global' problem.

Internet service is a solved problem, you have transoceanic cables and distribution networks which garantee reliable, high bandwith, _wired_ internet service.

Wireless service is a solved problem in densely populated areas, again the issue in the US is the ludicrious pricing of mobile data plans.

The only use-cases that this serves are high-income people that want to go off-grid but are unwilling to sacrifice high-bandwith, and military deployments (Which SpaceX does not hide as an objective). To me these are very poor gains for all the negative impact it brings to science and the 'global' public.

<comment> tom-khagai The demand is not limited to americans, most third-world countries will benefit from having high speed internet unconstrained by local infrastructure and lack of investment. Having stayed in South East Asia I know the locals would very much appreciate having more than one option: pay-as-you-go mobile data bundles.

Even in rural parts of Scandinavia where I spent my vacation, 4G signal was too weak and ISP's refuse to lay fiber unless the whole neighborhood commits to subscribe.

This may concern millions of people who need basic or better internet access, meanwhile there are only a few thousand astronomers in the world.

<comment><USER58> The demand that exists is tackled by an increase and expansion of the existing ISP and public infrastructure.

A satellite based internet provider is inneficiently duplicating the existing fiber/copper/cellular infrastructure but more importantly cannot scale to serve the billions of people you mention in your comment.

Do the maths you cannot keep up this alleged 50Mbps link if you add more than a few million users, there is a finite amount of satellites they can add in contiguous trajectories.

The capacity issue means this will never be affordable but to a few select few or state/defense actors.

I agree with your problem statement but this unfortunately is just not the solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> "SpaceX, an aerospace company in Hawthorne, California, has already launched more than 650 of a planned 12,000 Starlink satellites. Other operators include the London-based OneWeb, which has launched 74 of what it hopes will be a gigantic fleet of 48,000 satellites, and Amazon, which last month received US government approval to launch 3,236 satellites for its planned Kuiper service."

We need to do something about millionaires. Urgently. But also global governance: space is not US's backyard.

<comment><USER60> > We need to do something about millionaires. Urgently.

Can you elaborate what premise this conclusion follows from? And what do you want to do about them?

And going out on a limb, I would assume you have a problem with the satellites, but Amazon, SpaceX and OneWeb are companies, not a Millionaires. So maybe you meant to say we should do something about companies?

<comment><USER61> > I would assume you have a problem with the satellites, but Amazon, SpaceX > and OneWeb are companies, not a Millionaires.

Elon Musk is CEO of SpaceX and owns > 50% of the shares. As for Blue Origin (aka Bezos / Amazon); Bezos is the owner of the company. That means these people can make decisions on their own without consulting anyone else. They appoint the board, they appoint the CEO, etc.

And sure, there are outside investors. However these investors can only marginally influence anything because they can not get a majority of share holder votes (since Bezos, Musk have > 50% shares). Maybe they got a seat on the board if their investment is large enough. But then what? They still can't get a majority in the board. Besides the only reason these investors want to participate is because the whole thing is controlled (and partially bankrolled) by Musk and Bezos.

<comment><USER60> So are you positing that it would be impossible for a company to make such decisions if no individual shareholder owned >50% of the shares? If so the problem is still not with millionaires.

And I'm not sure by what mechanism this will function. What will prevent a company where no individual shareholder owns >50% of shares from making a similar choice?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Use Blockchain to Build a Scalable Database? - <AUTHOR> https://www.devteam.space/blog/how-to-use-blockchain-to-build-a-scalable-database/ <comment><USER2> i admit to knowing very little about blockchains and some about distributed databases.

from previous readings each verified statement needs to be folded into > 50% of the entire population so that there effectively a global quorum. so..that makes it somewhat paxos-like, except with a strong desire not to partition quorums for scalability (as suggested in one of the later sections). which would make performance/node point entirely in the wrong direction.

the article acknowledges this problem, but really doesn't address technical solutions except to link to two company's main pages.

can anyone shed more light?</comment>


MochiMedia: From game developers to building a scalable business - <AUTHOR> http://behindtheweb.com/2011/10/20/jameson-hsu-mochi-media-interview/

<comment><USER2> It's a long interview but it's worth watching. Jameson's an awesome guy and super smart.

It's kind of funny that I ended up crossing paths with him - in my early 20s WWDG was one of a handful of companies every aspiring Flash dev/artist/whatever with a cracked copy of Flash 4 or 5 wanted to be like, in my late 20s I became a Mochi user when I shifted into game development, and then in my (very) early 30s he became an angel in my own startup.

<comment><USER3> Jameson is a pimp, and Bob is a genius. MochiWeb is an amazing server.</comment></comment>


Yeah right Sarcasm poses problem for computer algorithms in U.S. election - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/17/us-usa-election-sarcasm-idUSKCN0PR0C820150717

<comment><USER2> > A voter whose online posts indicate unwavering and exclusive support for > Republican White House contender Jeb Bush, for example, shouldn't get online > advertising for his rival Marco Rubio.

Wait, why shouldn't he? If he only hears about one candidate, he doesn't have a chance to learn other views.

Isn't this exactly what people are complaining about with personalized Google searches?</comment>


Dropbox is giving up on Mailbox and Carousel - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofandroid.com/77588/dropbox-is-giving-up-on-mailbox-and-carousel/ <comment><USER2> On the front page [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10690754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10690754)</comment>


Dear HN: Please help me save my life - <AUTHOR>

Long time user here, using a dummy account. I need your help, please. This is what happened to me and it's ruined my life.
A few weeks ago I went with my family to a forest for a walk. We were walking back through the forest to go home, but the rest of my family was walking very slowly, so I was a bit ahead and alone in the forest. What happened is I saw a person walk by me, an older guy. A few minuts later my family finally joined me and we walked a few more minutes to our car. What happened then is I got a thought "what if I killed the guy". This thought really started playing over and over in my head and I spent two weeks getting rid of it. I went to see a psychologist and she said this is OCD and I should start a therapy. I had OCD symptoms before - mostly "what if I hit someone with my car".
Two weeks after this I had an idea of going back to the forest and checking to see if I can remember anything or find a body - I know, it sounds crazy. So I went back there, went the route we took before and found nothing. I left the forest, drove home (apprx. 40 miles) and suddenly got the idea "what if I didn't look carefully. So I went back 40 miles, checked it out again and drove back towards home. Then, again, after apprx. 6 miles on my way home from the forest (I somehow remember when I turned the car around (6 miles) I got the thought to "check again" and went back again. So I checked and then went home for good. For the rest of the day I felt very nervous and kept thinking "what if something was there". The next day I had the urge to check it out again but didn't drive there. Then, another day passed and I kept thinking "what if I saw something red there - the old man I saw there was wearing red something" - but I don't remember seeing anything red there. So, then, another day passed and then this HORRIBLE thought came - what if I killed someone there when I went there for the second time and not the first time? I don't remember seeing anyone there. I went a few days ago to check the forest with my friend (since I don't trust myself alone anymore) and we couldn't find anything. My friend is sure it never happened. I felt ok then. But the next day I had this thought "what if I killed someone there and put their body in the trunk of the car and dropped it off somewhere so it wouldn't be in the forest?"- when I was there for the 2nd time I don't remember the place where I turned the car around after the 6 miles. And this thought has been killing me. I don't remember seeing anybody, killing anybody and putting a body in the trunk or putting someone out of the trunk. I am trying to find logical reason why this couldn't happen.
I am starting a therapy but I know the only thing that will help is finding some logical proof or reason why this couldn't happen. That's why I'm turning to technical HN users - is there any kind of technical aspect that would help me somehow reason with this? For instance: If I killed someone, there would be bruises on my body etc. or If I put someone in the trunk there would be something left etc...
Please help - I am lost and this seems like the end of the world to me..
I appreciate all your help - I really do. <comment><USER2> Hey, I'm there with you man. Before I say anything, I agree with Michael, continue to see your psychologist. Don't give up hope or think that your are crazy. What you are experiencing can happen to anyone -- it happened to me and one of my friends had lighter, but similar symptoms too. You can get through this!

I don't know your situation, but something very similar happened to me when I was under a lot of stress, away from my family and after several relationships failures. My confidence level was so low and I think that was triggering the whole situation. I didn't trust myself anymore. I didn't trust I was doing simple things correctly. It's an extension to the problem "Did I really lock the door?", but with much deeper and frightening questions such as "Did I really avoid that cyclist or did I hit him without noticing?". Damn, I should really go back to the "crime scene" and make sure everything is fine! Yes, I did that and when I rationalized it I knew it was ridiculous, but the feeling of doubt and stress was so strong I somehow had to go back and check it out. I would look at my car for "proofs" of innocence like you. It could help a little bit, but there was always a new scratch somewhere that could trigger the doubts again. Back to square one. The thing is, you do not want to train your mind to continue with this line of thoughts. Finding "proof" or going back to the "scene" only adds confirmation that there is potentially a real situation when we both know there isn't. It stimulates the brain, triggers other questions, etc. You want to break the pattern _as soon as possible_. The more you encourage your mind, the more questions, the more stress, the more doubts you will feel. I will give you some tricks that helped me tremendously.

As soon as the symptoms appear, recognize them. Know what they are. Not feelings of something real, but something your mind is creating.

As soon as doubts appear in your mind, try to dismiss them (I know this is hard). Fight them. Never encourage them by looking for proof or going back. What helped me: running a 5k asap or calling a friend, but more importantly stop caring. I said to myself: You know what, you did your best. You drove the best you could and if this "accident" really happened so be it. I didn't mean to and I'll pay for the consequences. I know it didn't happen, but if it really did so be it. I'll deal with whatever punishment. etc. You have to train your brain not to worry. Not to care, because it's not real anyways (you know it rationally, you have to use that to your advantage and train your brain).

Also, always remember that if what you think happened _really_ happened you would know. Yes, in addition to feeling guilt and stress, you would know exactly how it happened. There would be memories. Sounds. Images. Odors. Understand that it's totally impossible to kill someone without realizing it. Impossible.

The sooner you stop encouraging your brain, the sooner the symptoms will disappear. For me, at first it took a few days. Then a few hours. And know not even a second. It's not instantaneous, but once you know the symptoms and act on them they will disappear eventually. And at some point they will disappear instantly.

Don't give up!

<comment><USER3> "Know what they are. Not feelings of something real, but something your mind is creating. ...You have to train your brain not to worry."

May I also add meditation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please: continue to see your psychologist.

Take whatever meds she tells you to.

Ask her if there are any exercises (Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, meditation, etc.) that might help.

There is a difference between fantasies and memories. If you're having trouble telling the difference, you're not likely to accept external verification in the form of any logical/technical "proofs" we could propose.

I sincerely wish you the best of luck in your recovery.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. OP, please follow your psychologist's advice and be honest with them about your obsessions. Mental health isn't about finding a secret key that will "make you better" - it involves working through a treatment plan with a trained professional.

Also, I recently watched this series on VH1 about OCD treatment that was quite interesting, and may give you some insight into the experiences of people in similar situations: <http://www.vh1.com/shows/the_ocd_project/series.jhtml>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, that's quite a story.

I remember once driving home 10 miles just to make sure I really did turn off the stove but this is on a different scale altogether.

What could HN do for you other than to tell you to continue that therapy and to take it serious ? This is already quite something and it could end up interfering with your ability to lead a normal life.

Why the fascination with killing someone?

</comment><comment><USER7> There's no way you could kill a physically capable person, dispose of the body and dispose of the evidence in a few minutes without the very nearby people noticing anything funny. A trained professional would find that challenging.

But my saying this won't help, because the problem was never that there was a logical reason to believe you killed somebody. The problem is that your brain is slightly broken when it comes to this subject, which can only be helped by therapy. Trying to disprove it logically won't work, because that train of thought goes through the currently-broken part of your mind. The sooner you accept this fact and stop feeding the sickness, the better for you.

</comment><comment><USER8> You already know the answer. Get professional help (psychologist.) This is a board where people can post anonymously. Assume that nobody here is qualified to help you.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all for responding - I really appreciate it.

</comment><comment><USER9> > I know the only thing that will help is finding some logical proof or reason > why this couldn't happen

No, it won't - You thought the only thing that would put your mind at rest was going back to check. It didn't work, and you then thought the only thing would be to check again, and that didn't work either.

You are not in a position to judge what will work, and not realising that is allowing you to keep looking for a quick fix. See this through with your therapist - trust him/her completely. Whether you like it or not, the cold facts state clearly that you cannot just make yourself 'see sense' - you need the help the therapist offers.

Godd luck!

</comment><comment><USER10> No offense if this is real, but I have a hard time believing this is not a troll. It reads like one of Philip K. Dick's rejected short stories. Even if it is real, I don't believe that HN is an appropriate forum. You should see a therapist but maybe also send your story to Malcolm Gladwell or one of those other essayists who write New Yorker articles about people with interesting neuroses.

<comment><USER4> That's a remarkably uncharitable response.

I agree that asking HNers for psychological advice is not a great idea, and that's why my advice was basically "Stick with your psychologist."

However: the symptoms described were not at all like a rejected PKD story, but rather, were quite exemplary for OCD. The OP is obviously troubled; treating him glibly ("send yourr story to Malcolm Gladwell...") when he is crying out for help, even in the wrong place, just seems cruel.</comment></comment>