The Problem With Photorealism - <AUTHOR> http://blackhole12.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-problem-with-photorealism.html <comment><USER2> It's often been said that the difference between Steven Spielberg and Ed Wood is merely thousands of subtleties. Tiny things add up to either make or break created worlds.

Clipping is one of my biggest pet-peeves with current video game engines. It really destroys the illusion when stuff that looks realistic and solid starts magically clipping through something else that looks realistic and solid. How about when the camera passes too close to something and you see the hollow insides? This is especially jarring when it happens to be a character's head and you see the backside of his/her eyeballs and teeth! Pick any AAA title randomly, make a character, and then look at that character closely while standing in his/her default start-of-the-game gear. The odds are good that you'll see dozens of little bits of his/her gear clipping into itself while that character is engaged in the default standing animation. It's telling that even excellent artists can't solve this problem for the one combination of gear and poses they know the player will see with 100% certainty.

The next big step for computer game realism is going to be material physics. Simulated materials instead of textured polygons and bounding boxes. This is going to be computationally intensive, but the boost to realism is probably going to be far greater than we'll gain from ray-tracing.

<comment><USER3> "Simulated materials instead of textured polygons and bounding boxes."

What does this mean? Like, what do you envision this changing?

<comment><USER2> Think about how a game treats a block of stone right now. It's a hollow cube with textures pasted on it. It's bounding box is pretty easy to calculate, but a complex object that doesn't match it's own bounding box closely will still clip right through it.

Now, imagine if we replaced that single block of stone with a matrix of tiny blocks. Also, imagine that we've made the bounding box of the complex object fit its geometry much more closely. If the same motion that caused clipping before is carried out, we'll detect it. It's going to take a _lot_ more computation, but we will detect it.

Not only will we detect collisions that we wouldn't have before, we'll be able to handle them in a variety of gameplay enhancing ways. If the stone is meant to be strong stuff, we make it's mass high and the bonds between sub-blocks strong so that the complex object will come to a jarring halt when it makes contact instead of passing into the stone. If the stone is meant to be softer, we dial down the bond strength between the sub-blocks a bit so that they can be broken. The object might dig in a bit and leave a noticeable gouge as some of the sub-blocks are separated from the main block. If the stone is meant to be more like dirt, we make the bond strength very low so that a blow will cause a chain-reaction that will cause the whole block to tumble apart. We can change the probability of blocks sticking together to simulate either wet, clumpy earth or dust that's ready to fly off in all directions when it's touched. Deforming the complex object is also an option. It could be similarly be composed of sub-blocks, but with tweakable levels of stickiness/stretchiness holding them together that would allow us to capture things like flexing or bending.

In short, we really oversimplify the physical nature of objects in video games at present. This greatly reduces computation, but it makes the world seem unrealistic in how objects interact. By splitting things into smaller chunks that more closely resemble real matter we can start to simulate real materials, but at the cost of greater computation that isn't devoted directly towards making things pretty. Prying resources away from the graphics engine has long been something developers just don't want to do.

<comment><USER3> So, that's cool and all, but we aren't making simulations-- _we 're making games_.

Nobody gives a hoot in hell how realistic the drapes on a window are if the game isn't fun.

Many games have gone for very good realism, and it hasn't really worked out so well.

Doom 3 had per-poly hit detection, and all it did was make many weapons feel less accurate and multiplayer more annoying.

ArmA2, one of the most detailed military sims out there, did very accurate character-world collision detection and as a side-effect actually moving around inside buildings became quite hard. A community mod was created to address that and restore the funner, less realistic behavior.

Red Faction Guerilla tried to make more realistic destructible physics, but it mostly just made more trouble for level designers, because things they built tended to fall apart.

Again, simulations aren't games.

<comment> loup-vaillant Jarring details _do_ spoil the fun a little. I'm fine with lack of realism. I am _not_ fine with noticeable _differences_ in realism.

My last example comes from _Rembember Me_ , which I have played on the PS3. An excellent game, with very good graphics… except for self shadows: they emphasise the underlying vertices. I'd rather have no shadow and a smooth face, than a "realistic" shadow and a blocky face. Other titles who feature self shadow display a horrible dithering (I have seen this in Mass Effect).

To date, the best consistency I have ever seen comes from Dragon Quest on the PS2. It's not realist at all (its style is Japanese motion picture), but there's next to no mistakes such as clipping. Even more recent titles such as Ni no Kuni aren't as consistent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This guy isn't thinking outside the box. He's trying to solve the problem using techniques from the past.

Obviously the solution isn't to manually make levels, it would be to automate them. Where are EA on flying scanning drones around football stadia in order to save artists thousands of man hours?

They already use these techniques to scan actors faces, I can imagine someone from 10 years ago predicting it would be impossible to script all the movements of lips and eyelids to produce realistic characters.

Disclaimer: I have no idea what I am talking about, but thought my off the cuff theory would have more weight if I wrote like I did.

<comment><USER5> Scanning and other forms of automatic content generation do not replace manual 3D modeling and texturing; just as cameras did not replace painting and sculpting.

Personally, I'm more excited about procedural generation than any of these other ideas. Programming seems to be the most powerful tool humans have ever devised. Why not apply it to create art?

<comment><USER6> If you could use automated scanning (or other means of observing the real world) combined with procedural content generation, that could be huge.

Buildings that look and feel like buildings because they were procedurally generated with a deep understanding of how buildings actually exist? Yes, please!

<comment><USER7> Usually you want to deliberately distort the real world significantly, to reduce the distances by an order of magnitude while keeping the 'feel'.

You don't a GTA-style game to take 40 minutes to commute from one place to another; so you want to keep the noticeable landmarks but cut out huge parts in the middle. You want wild alley chases to be possible, so you make many places connected and cross-navigable in patterns that don't occur in real life. You want to drastically increase density of 'interesting' places, not mirror their density in real life; and leave out endlessly repeating miles of similar suburbs or apartment blocks.

<comment><USER4> So this is where you spend the man hours, tweaking a generated or autonomously created world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just simulate the entire universe. It requires a computer the size of the universe.

There is one freely available, however, you will have to share it with a few other people. It's barely noticeable though because it's highly parallelizable.

<comment><USER9> It's rather poorly documented, though.

<comment><USER10> And extremely buggy.

<comment><USER11> It's pretty bad. The other day _an entire plane_ just disappeared. And I have yet to see someone respawn properly.

<comment><USER10> I saw the greatest fake release notes entry the other day: "Fixed bug where matter would sometimes spontaneously become self aware."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Minecraft is an interesting case study here, in that it deliberately throws away realistic graphics in favor of a comprehensively mutable environment. It's interesting how that seemed like such a totally unprecedented idea at the time.

<comment><USER13> It wasn't unprecedented, just look at Dwarf Fortress. Tarn threw out all graphics in exchange for focusing on an incredibly complex and deeply layered game -- with an environment that is fully constructable and has both a geological and cultural history.

Once the 3D accelerator become an item all gamers had, (perceptually) it appeared all major game develop shifted to producing "photorealistic" graphics. We ended up with an endless trail of games that basically produced the same thing.

I wonder, what would happen if the budget of something like Call of Duty was spent on a game with Minecraft or even Ascii graphics? Perhaps a total disaster, but what could be produced if it was done really well?

<comment><USER14> The current state of Dwarf Fortress probably is within an order of magnitude of the number man hours in it as an early Call of Duty. The difference is that the work on Call of Duty is mostly art which is trivially parallelizable, whereas the work on Dwarf Fortress is the engine which is not parallelizable to anywhere near the same degree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Having worked on a FPS MMO, I can't agree with this enough. People always complained it didn't look real enough. I always wanted to ask them if would mind buying 1,000 video cards up front and then wait 10 years buying 1000 new ones every year until I got it right. I figured by then I could retire and duck the problem. Reality is ridiculously hard to do right. Now try doing it over the internet with a half second ping time and you realize that not only reality bites, but physics bites harder.

<comment><USER16> While WoW looks the way it does partly because of it's 10 year old origins, it's artwork also communicates to the player: "It's just a game". And once you're far enough away from an imitation of reality, the brain stops trying to fit it into it's model of the world and complaining when it can't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't know if you guys know how fast path-tracing is becoming reality. It just needs a few more years (of GPU advancement) to get rid of the noise, watch: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKqxonOrl4Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKqxonOrl4Q)

For art, next-generation photorealistic graphics will be 3D scanned and/or procedurally generated. Lots of work still (you can't scan cars or anything mechanical), but graphics could also be reused more often.

<comment><USER18> Yeah this is exactly what I was going to say and I was even about to post a Brigade engine video. LOL.

McClure kind of dismisses "ray tracing" offhand (and by implication/context, similar techniques like path tracing) with the premise that every texture would need to be manual developed by an artist.

The answer to that is as you mention 3d scanning and procedural generation.

There are quite a few path-tracing software (and even one or maybe a few hardware) efforts out there, and many 3d scanning companies.

I believe that the main thing that is holding these technologies back now is just people not knowing that they are realistic technologies, which keeps them from being mainstream. But once things enter the mainstream consciousness of engineers, you get an order of magnitude increase in the number of people working on them, starting with some of the existing working ideas and you start getting much more practical and inexpensive solutions.

I believe that within say 7 years Nvidia and ATI will either acquihire or build hardware themselves that makes real-time path-tracing, procedural generation, and real-time physics, convenient and efficient.

<comment><USER17> By the way, if you are interested in (realtime) ray tracing technologies, check out this forum: [http://ompf2.com/](http://ompf2.com/)

By procedural/scanned I meant mainly procedural that is based on 3D scanning (scans used for learning set), such as FaceGen [http://www.facegen.com/](http://www.facegen.com/) Lots of other stuff could be made this way, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And that's a big part of why video games suck these days. Creating a photorealistic or cinematic experience is extremely difficult and requires a huge amount of artistic assets, and even then the illusion only holds up under certain tight constraints. So game developers do as much as possible to enforce these constraints _all throughout the game_.

<comment><USER20> Or it's because the games just suck and no amount of photorealism is going to cover the cracks.

<comment><USER21> 100 times this. If you want to know how important photorealism is to getting your subject involved with the medium, go read a paperback copy of Lord of The Rings. It's pretty lo-fi.

<comment><USER22> And this is why I point to Dwarf Fortress as the state of the art in games.

<comment><USER23> I would love to play a DF with a decent UI, and preferably with simple 2D graphics. And I'm an ASCII DCSS player.

Are there any hacks out there that make the UI less memorization-focused? I know there are graphics hacks, but I was never able to get them to work...

<comment><USER22> There's tilesets, but honestly I think they detract. My extended ASCII are like 8x12 pixels and scan really easily. Even at 32x32 I can't reliably tell the difference between a dog a cat or a rat in most tilesets, especially on first glance, so a lot of memorization is still required with tiles, they allow for less information to be displayed at once, and they are more complicated to recognize.

I don't even see the extended ASCII anymore ( [http://i.imgur.com/7ci106g.png](http://i.imgur.com/7ci106g.png))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I noticed the most recent crop of engines (thinking of Frostbite 3 here mostly) do a lot of cheating to run well. This is most apparent on the awful draw distance of terrain decoration. Draw-in is very apparent at even the highest graphics setting.

Worse, despite games like Battlefield having beautiful art assets, it takes very little for the illusion of photorealism to be destroyed; it could be as simple as getting too close to a piece of tall grass and realizing it's actually just a sprite. Or noticing that a flag is always flapping one way, and smoke is drifting the opposite way.

It's unfortunate, but the brain is really good at picking these inconsistencies out. More stylized games seem to age much better; TF2 still looks great.

</comment><comment><USER25> Takeaway: the problem isn't photorealism in games, although that's hard enough. The problem is actually having somebody create the zillions of points of detail required to have something to photorealistically render.

So, seems like the technical challenge is to take a small portal, say 64x64 pixels, and then create a procedurally-based photorealistic (including damage, real-world illumination, and a damage model) engine to power it, right?

<comment><USER26> > So, seems like the technical challenge is to take a small portal, say 64x64 > pixels, and then create a procedurally-based photorealistic (including > damage, real-world illumination, and a damage model) engine to power it, > right?

You may be interested in .kkrieger as a proof of concept for this type of engine. The most incredible part is the whole game is less than 100 KiB in size, but then we're talking about coders who are used to working with in 4KiB limits: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger)

Talking of the demo scene, you may be interested in this 4K demo, another great demonstration of what procedurally generated content can do: [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wasn't there something about people actually prefering non-photorealistic renderings more, at least in Google Earth?

</comment><comment><USER28> One of the things missing from 'realistic' games is specular reflection and friends. Little subtleties like that help. One of my favourite moments in the realism wars was that phase where everyone had to have 'realistic' water, and I remember logging into Morrowind for the first time. "The water does look nice, shimmery and shiny"... but it drew attention to the problem that nothing else in the game shined at all, it was all dead flat.

</comment><comment><USER29> It should be "the problem OF photorealism" not "WITH". We all enjoy photorealism, but it is hard to make. We have a problem OF 3 times 6. Not a problem with 3 times 16.

Any how....

I worked on Flight sims in the mid 90's. We had a problem of Physics back then. So we didn't do real physics, we precalculated the physics based on a number of factors and loaded them in to tables, and if you were between point A and Point B in a table we took the weighted average of the two. It worked well enough.

Animations today do the same thing.

Anti-aliasing is now done based on point of contrast rather than the whole image. This works well enough, you notice the jaggies on white and black borders more than 45% grey next to 65% grey.

This doesn't strike me as a well informed post. Others have pointed out that it is directed at those new to the space, fine, but if that's the audience then explain "uncanny valley" in there somewhere. Where you can't be "right" be far enough off people accept it as fake because it is. We see this all the time in Pixar. We also see it in racing games with "arcade physics".

</comment><comment><USER30> I prefer comics and cartoons to live-action movies. It's ironic, but somehow, a primitive smile or frown on a cartoon character's face feels more genuine and "real" to me than a professional actor pretending to be happy or sad. I can take a drawing as the unfiltered expression of the artist, but when I watch a live-action film and see real people carrying out the trappings of fiction, I have a hard time taking it seriously. It feels silly, kinda like how the so called "uncanny valley" effect makes bad CG creepy and not just unconvincing.

I don't think that's a common opinion, given the lasting appeal of television and Hollywood, and the lack of respect comics receive in comparison, but in my mind, if a drawing feels more "real" than an actual human acting in front of a camera, then photorealistic CG doesn't stand a chance.

<comment><USER31> On the other hand it might just be a matter of getting used to it.

Japanese live-action movies are a textbook definition of overplayed, and few years ago I couldn't stand watching them. It was making me physically uncomfortable. Fast forward a few years and I enjoy watching them...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> About the last point about generating content, I think it's extremely likely that this leads us down the path of Voxels and Procedural Generation. Both those techniques together would help us at least get a starting point for an environment that's generated from certain chosen parameters, and then the "least effort" becomes modifying that environment for your game needs.

I mean, if you can have a procedurally generated jungle with a huge mountain in the middle and a river cutting through the jungle, all you need to do really is to cut through the mountain for your secret underground base, create a couple of roads, camps and checkpoints and you've got a better remake of FarCry 1 (yeah I'm extrapolating of course but you get the idea).

</comment><comment><USER33> I look at the loading scenes in GTAV and I wish the game looked like that, rather than the 'uncanny valley' that it is.

Borderlands II is a great example of not trying to do something you cant, instead it has great art that you can lose yourself in.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've always wondered, given all the issues presented in this article and the expertise required to solve them does $50-$60 dollars properly pay the teams working on these games? Not even just engineers, there are artists and even actors capturing motion of characters and authors writing up scripts it doesn't seem like $60 would cover everyone involved in creating a video game.

<comment><USER35> You can buy LOTR on Blu-Ray for about $20.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can someone list the possible technical advancements in gamedev yet to happen?

-> AI programmers are negative towards AI, saying gamers want 'fun' not Intelligence.

-> Graphics programmers say, the graphics will be photorealastic soon. What will graphics programmers do after that?

-> Gameplay, they are focusing more on creating the same style?

</comment><comment><USER37> Reminded me this "What Is Real" trailer ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dnw9dWISvw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dnw9dWISvw)), I welcome any trick that can help the player's immersion.

</comment><comment><USER38> I am a long-time 3D graphicist, and have written numerous software and accelerated renderers. I am really struggling to see the point of this article (it seems trivial and tautological to me), although I'll be glad if it generates some discussion.

This is an area where I feel very strongly that perception is reality, or at least so close to it as to make no difference. The game world is virtual, so the fact that say a rock is not made of zillions of atoms computing quantum chromodynamics doesn't come as a surprise to anybody. Well, that's a shortcut right there. Immediately, the game world is not arbitrarily "realistic".

But I don't think that's what the word "photorealism" usually means. I know I've never used it that way. I use it to mean "feels subjectively real". By that definition, as the OP alludes to, today's most advanced game engines come very close. In my opinion, they come so close, that the rest is gravy.

That's what will be coming in the next decade. More gravy, more cake, more icing. In the next year or so, somebody (Sony? Everquest Landmark?) will start the inevitable development toward Minecraft-style procedural/cellular automata based worlds, combined with increasingly photorealistic rendering.

<comment><USER39> _> so the fact that say a rock is not made of zillions of atoms _

But that's the problem. When the player misses the target with a rocket and hits the rock, it gets a strange looking explosion and then the rock is either still there, or simply 'removed'. Sense of realism? Lost.

In an open world game, the player might want to pick up the rock. If you took a shortcut and just made the rock an object that sits on top of the ground plane, when you pick up the rock there is normal grass underneath. If you throw the rock at a building, it bounces off and rolls around stupidly. Sense of realism? Lost.

 _> That's what will be coming in the next decade._

That's what the article is saying - you're deluded into thinking we're close to solving this stuff. There is no way it's coming in the next decade, it is a long way off with a huge number of very difficult problems to solve. This is like the AI debate. AI is always 'just around the corner'. No it isn't, we are nowhere close to even beginning to understand what we actually need to accomplish once the tricks are taken away.

<comment><USER40> Which is why tons of people play "Minecraft", because the voxel technology and ability to deform the environment is much more real than many other games. There are some advancements in this field, but really... at the end of the day... the best "deformable field" is Minecraft still. And it hardly even tries to be realistic.

Fortunately, most gamers don't care about realism to this degree. Many FPS gamers want a tight engine, fun mechanics. Bunny Hopping was left in the Halo series for this reason. Ditto with super-cancels in Fighting Games (tell me if MMA-fighters cancels their jabs into super-attacks).

Realism for the sake of realism is hopeless. Game programmers need to focus upon entertaining the gamer. Some gamers require a degree of realism... but it should never be the primary point of a game.

<comment><USER41> I was wondering when someone was going to mention Minecraft because that's a great way of illustrating to people _something_ of just how vast the gulf to be crossed is.

There are graphical mods for Minecraft, but none that bridge the gap from "cube world" to "our world."

And even Minecraft has artifacts like floating islands and limitless water -- the voxels are meant to represent fairly unchanging substances like dirt and stone, and even the trunk and leafy volume of a tree, and they support a limited amount of state being attached to them, but they are not being computed constantly in a way that would make it possible to implement something like erosion or a landslide, or realistic water motion, etc. And when you try to imagine going much beyond minecraft, you realize that, crap, you'd have to be computing the entire (essentially unlimited) voxel world maybe several times a second ...

I think it will be done, but there's a good case for it NEEDING to be done in a massively multiplayer way, because the work of simulating the world becomes too large to be done by any individual user's machine.

<comment><USER42> I think that the difficulties you would face in trying to make minecraft more realistic are far greater than the difficulties you would face if you were starting from scratch. Trying to make minecraft realistic is like trying to paint over _A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte_ to make it realistic. It just wasn't created with that sort of realism in mind, so you are working from a disadvantaged position.

<comment><USER41> Yeah, I don't mean a literal mod of minecraft. I just mean that it's a great illustration of what'd be entailed.

If you start from scratch, you still need something like voxels, ie keeping track of many points in 3d space representing different kinds of materials, which is what minecraft has now.

But then, graphical or behavioral perspective, Minecraft gives you an idea of what problems you'll run up against.

Graphically ... holy cow. I don't know of anyone that's doing that, ie taking voxel data and making it look amazing. I did see a demo that looked a bit less blocky than minecraft, it wasn't cube-based, but rather used the 3d hexagonal mesh I think. It looked less blocky of course, but it worked with only grass and stone material.

Behaviorally .. also, holy cow. I'm not sure if there's anyone doing that in a 3d game engine. Ie, voxel or volume world data representing materials, in a way similar to minecraft, but if you undercut a bank of dirt, it collapses ... to do that, you need to be constantly simulating the entire world with CA rules meant to emulate various physical properties of earth, water etc (not just the currently loaded world chunks, and not just a few kinds of very limited material types, like Minecraft's water and lava) probably at least several ticks per second.

I suppose there might be ways to cheat or to legitimately exclude 'all-quiet' areas from needing to be updated, in some cases -- like the dirt example, I can see approaches that would propagate simulation outwards from an area centered on user-generated changes at the maximum speed that the evolution rules transmit information, and that might be able to leave large portions of the world relatively static ... although that wouldn't work so well for things like fluid simulation ... but the point is that, holy cow, we're a long way off!

<comment><USER40> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y)

Voxel technology is improving, and certainly exists at realistic levels. The question is... what game _cares_ about such details?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: That's Fine for Merlin - <AUTHOR> http://www.thatsfineformerlin.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a Merlin Mann fan and decided to build this so there'd be some sort of record of his fantastic quotes.</comment>


About the future of Thunderbird - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/beyond-the-code/2012/07/09/about-the-future-of-thunderbird/ <comment><USER2> I find this fascinating because it speaks to the challenge of software that is 'done'.

Most people are familiar with software that is 'good enough to ship, could do more' where the software goes through release cycles and gets features added Etc. But sometimes, and this more common with embedded programmers, the programming is 'done.' All the features you could reasonably want are implemented, bugs as they come up are swatted, but basically the software itself is as it is and will be forever. Its done.

I expect to see more of this over the coming decade. While it is certainly true you can reimagine and reimagine, and of course you might want to port from form factor or OS to another, but the kinds of things that non- developer's do with computers is like a monte carlo plot getting more and more samples.

Personally I think its a Good Thing, as it might stem some of the gratuitous changes we see on things. It also has the chance of making the world a bit more stable.

<comment><USER3> _software that is 'done'._

Kind of interesting that this doesn't appear to have explicititely happened very often before with email software -- but intuition might imply that it _should_ have.

<comment><USER4> It should have happened with Thunderbird some time ago. Thunderbird is one of those programs where my heart would sink as soon as I learned there was a new update queued up. They _always_ break something.

<comment><USER5> Oh come on, you _love_ the multi-tab whatever that was forced on everybody. Thunderbird has definitely had some Gnome3-caliber failures.

<comment><USER4> The problem with their tabs is that they put different things on the same sized window. I like my overall Tbird to be almost full screened. But I like messages relatively narrow, because I (and people) generally read less efficiently if the lines are really long; it's harder to track back to the beginning of the next line accurately.

I like tabs in urxvt, vim, Firefox, etc. But they don't work well for me in Tbird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm pretty happy with this actually, but still a bit worried.

Happy, because for once a company didn't see a perfectly good--but decade-old --piece of software and think, "Gee, this has been around for a decade and it hasn't changed, let's _RE-INVENT EVERYTHING!!!_ " (See: Gnome 3, Windows 8). Thunderbird is stable, works, and does its job excellently; no need to turn a wheel into a square just because it's old.

On the other hand, there is still some room for improvement in Thunderbird: Gmail integration is kind of hacky and gross-looking (A "[Gmail]" folder? Really?), it could use better Linux desktop integration (notification icons, OSD bubbles, etc.--all of these kind of work, but in half-assed way, I've found). And of course, the ever-important security updates. Even stable software needs security updates on occasion, and someone has to provide that.

So with that said: kudos to Mozilla for not undertaking change just for the sake of change like so many other big software projects have of late; but I hope Thunderbird gets just a little more polish before it's placed atop its permanent pedestal, and I hope someone sticks around to keep it secure for its second decade of life.

<comment><USER7> The gmail folder is not thunderbird's fault. Its google's imap implementation. If you configure it correctly you should not see it.

<comment><USER8> How do you configure Thunderbird to remove the [Gmail] folder. I can select which subfolders I subscribe to - but still the root [Gmail] folder is always there.

<comment><USER9> You can configure Gmail to not display certain folders in IMAP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "To be more specific, Mozilla will no longer focus on developing innovations for Thunderbird but will keep it safe and stable."

I am quite content with Thunderbird as it is and welcome this news.

<comment><USER7> I think the chat integration is the last remaining puzzle piece. If thunderbird had builtin chat and _builtin gpg support_ I'd be content. I have never understood why smime was baked in but gpg was not. Enigmail should not need to exist and unlike any other ff/tb plugins it used to be a pain with amd64...

<comment><USER11> Enigmail works great here. I don't really see a need to bring it mainline, perhaps other than encouraging adoption. I use 64-bit and have used Enigmail for 3+ years without issue now -- I think it's probably safe at this point, especially if you can install from your package manager (as I can with an AUR helper on Arch).

<comment><USER7> _"Enigmail works great here"_ that's good to know I never said it did not. We can agree to disagree about it being in mainline and receiving the same attention and support as the rest of thunderbird. I don't think your _"+3 years"_ have really exposed you to all the growing pains enigmail has had.

<comment><USER11> I agree, Enigmail has been around longer than I've actively used it (for the record, I had installed it occasionally before, but hardly used it). The point I was making is that it seems to be stable and mature software _now_ , and that maturity has existed for a reasonably long time. Surely there's not much point in holding a grudge against software with a buggy past; that'd severely limit the pool of available software...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, in other words, they don't care about it. However, enough people need it, so they can't kill it yet. For now, they have it on life support.

</comment><comment><USER13> That's some serious newspeak, Mozilla...

"Thunderbird is not dead. We have announced a change in the way we develop new features for Thunderbird."

... in the sense of "not doing that anymore".

</comment><comment><USER14> "We have a solid plan to support Thunderbird until the second half of 2013 and are discussing how we support it beyond that date"

Kindof glossing over the issue, no?

<comment><USER15> Exactly. If the answer is "Thunderbird is alive for about another year" then we may as well start looking for replacements now.

<comment><USER16> Because, you know, the day they stop committing, is the day that thunderbird stops working and takes all your mail store with it.

Oh, actually, that's not true! I'm still using TB3 installed with my Ubuntu 10.10, and there's nothing missing there. I'm sure that the latest 2013 TB is going to be usable through 2015 at least. No need to look for replacement now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The original post announcing the change in Thunderbird's status, written by the Chair of the Mozilla Foundation:

[http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird- stabil...](http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stability- and-community-innovation/)

<comment><USER18> And the most relevant:

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Proposal:_New_Release_a...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird/Proposal:_New_Release_and_Governance_Model)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I know their strategy is "everything online", but if 20+ million people are using it (from the article) then that market doesn't look like such a waste of time, does it?

<comment><USER16> I suspect that unlike Firefox, which actually brings in money (mostly from search engine referrals, specifically from Google), Thunderbird doesn't bring in any significant money, if at all.

Mozilla is a non-profit (or is it a not-for-profit?), but I guess they're trying to make each project self-sustaining, and if thunderbird doesn't provide any bacon (pure speculation on my part here), then -- yes, that market might look like a waste of time.

<comment><USER20> Money is not why Mozilla made this decision.

For anyone working on software at the scale Mozilla is, this truth will be recognizable: focus can be a lot more important than financing.

Mozilla has and will continue to invest heavily in projects which have no or minimal revenue associated with them. Sustainability matters, of course, but there is no rule that every project or product must be individually sustainable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm cross-posting here the comment I added to the mozilla blog:

[quote] Firefox went to live because of the IE dominance in the corporate and private world. In the same idea, Thunderbird went to live to offer an alternative to the Exchange/Outlook pair domination (and is still widely used in the corporate world).

We have a few very good alternative to Exchange outside (Kerio and Zimbra for instance) but Thunderbird lacks good Card/CalDav support which is a feature request that Mozilla has completely fail to deliver. And that's were the real innovation was (think about it twice, please). Instead, we are seeing Thunderbird chat coming in. "Great". Are you kidding?

Furthermore, I don't get Mozilla communication ATM. When I hear "What Thunderbird users have in common is the need for a very stable and secure email product – first and foremost.", I just think the guy saying that is making fun of the users.

Finally, as I said yesterday on Baker's blog (comments), Mozilla should remove the Donate link on its website, as long as the long term goals are as unclear as they are now.

[/quote]

I also think that the decision to stop Thunderbird is based on a falacy: WebMail does not make e-mail clients obsolete, or even less important.

</comment><comment><USER22> What are the good alternatives for a lightweight IMAP email client? Outlook is pudgy and wants Exchange too badly.

<comment><USER23> There is Evolution that is worth taking a look at. But it was buggy and had problems with large mailboxes last time I used it (2 years ago?).

<comment><USER11> Even Ubuntu, which replaced Pidgin with the very inferior Empathy so they could be more "Gnomey", gave up on Evolution. I don't know that there's too much hope left for that one.

<comment><USER23> It was very promising at first. A simple no-nonsense IMAP client. But the buggyness is what killed it for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems like the spin is just making the situation worse.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ok, Thunderbird is dead :(

sooooo please can someone at Mozilla fixes this YEARS old bug <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=531002> before TB's funeral ?

Also, thread conversations sucks and don't properly show new mails.

</comment><comment><USER26> Are there any stats around on how many people are using Thunderbird ? There really arn't that many usable email clients around - yet, perhaps next to the phone, email is really a primary way of doing business. It seems Outlook got most of the business users..

<comment><USER27> Outlook has a captive audience. I suspect email in non-business contexts will fade from common use before a decent email client comes along. Or maybe it will be for "fmail" instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> At the very least it confirms that their email client is not going to be part of their Social Browser:

[http://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2012/07/06/bringing-s...](http://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2012/07/06/bringing- social-to-firefox/)

</comment><comment><USER29> If Mozilla is looking to reallocate R&D resources, I would suggest retiring SeaMonkey.

<comment><USER30> Given that SeaMonkey was initially (and still is, as far as I know) a community-driven effort to keep alive Mozilla-the-browser after the foundation had decided to stop supporting it, I suspect there is very little to be gained on that front.

<comment><USER29> I didn't know that. Thanks. <:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Seem's like they're trying to back peddle because they realize how many people like Thunderbird.

<comment><USER32> Back-pedal on what? Both the original leaked email and the official blog post said that Mozilla would "adapt the Thunderbird release and governance model in a way that allows both ongoing security and stability maintenance..."

It was TechCrunch who somehow translated that into "So, that's it for Thunderbird." :/

<comment><USER31> You're right "back-pedal" was not the correct wording. More like address how it was received.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Thunderbird has been dead to me ever since they completely botched search in Thunderbird 3.

</comment><comment><USER34> The real question should be: Where the hell is the open source alternative of Gmail?

<comment><USER23> The most advanced open source IMAP based webmail was RoundCube last time I checked. Not really gmail, but works well enough at least for small to normal sized mailboxes.

<http://www.roundcube.net/>

<comment><USER20> How does roundcube compare with Zimbra?

<comment><USER35> it does not. rc is a light web client. its fast, its reliable and doesnt 6ave so many features. zimbra does a million thing. calendaring for starters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> interesting article. it does not really convince me though. very nice to get an official but informal statement.</comment>


Elon Musk Challenges Porsche with Tesla Model S at Nürburgring - <AUTHOR> https://thedriven.io/2019/09/06/elon-musk-challenges-porsche-with-tesla-model-s-at-nurburgring <comment><USER2> Probably not:

[https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a28942079/tesla- mod...](https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a28942079/tesla-model-s- nurburgring-lap-attempt-porsche-taycan/)

They might be there to do some testing but not to attempt a timed lap.</comment>


Why are so many IT recruiters technically completely incompetent? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.uplink.tech/why-are-many-it-recruiters-technically-completely-incompetent-e924f559ed0e <comment><USER2> "But somehow you would assume that an IT recruiter must be interested in the technologies they work with every day, no?"

Indeed no. The author is failing to see it from the recruiter's point of view. Recruiting is a sales job. Just like selling real estate, cars or double glazing. It's a numbers game and it involves a lot of cold calling, and a lot of rejection, which means recruiters have to be thick skinned and resilient. Candidates should remember they are not the customer; the hiring manager or company is the customer as they pay the recruiter fee. As a candidate, you are the product. Other non IT skills that are essential to recruiting are mapping organizations and networking. The author, and many devs who criticize recruiters, are overlooking all that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, author here. Indeed I try really hard to see it from the recruiter's point of view, which is what the article is about. And I don't think other devs have any problems to see it from the recruiter's point of view either.

Of course it's a sales job. Of course it involves calling/mailing a lot of people and getting a lot of "no"s. Of course the developers are not the customers in this relationship.

What does that have to do with the IT competency of the recruiter though?

I don't buy the "it's a sales job so it's ok if they do it quick and dirty and don't take the time to educate themselves". In my opinion, the opposite is true - recruiters would be much better salespeople with a higher success rate if they showed more competency in the field they work in, both to their customers/clients and to the candidates.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: If any of you have started email newsletters, I'd love your advice - <AUTHOR>

I am starting an email newsletter to target a particular demographic (residents of my city outside the US), I am imagining something like  something like thrillist or dailycandy on a scaled downlevel.
I have set up a signup page, with good design that is essentially collecting email addresses. It has around 57 sign ups so far by sending out emails to my friends and family, and asking them to forward it to friends/ some other methods. In the next month I will be advertising on two forums that residents of the city frequent, and I am thinking of actually launching the newsletter in late June or early July. Till then I am collecting emails, and creating content that would give me a buffer of sorts.
I am just wondering whether anyone has done something similar, and if so could you share some anecdotes regarding increasing membership, advertising, and whether how long a runway should I give this to figure out whether this may be sustainable in the longrun? I am planning on emailing content M-F with the weekends off. <comment><USER2> I started Blurb.FM last august. Got some early traction and press, link: [http://venturebeatprofiles.com/news/view/blurb?article=28735...](http://venturebeatprofiles.com/news/view/blurb?article=287352) (behind a paywall now.) Here is an archive of the emails: <http://twitter.com/blurbfm>

I had to close it down because the workload became unsustainable pretty quickly (i was running another startup at the time).

My advice would be that you know your content generation strategy very well and make it work in such a way that you don't get burnt out.

I would also suggest that you offer an incentive on signing up. People don't normally like to sign up to newsletters that are just newsletters. I offered to plant a tree for every person that signed up (cost was only $1, i would earn double that from ad revenue in a year and that's when the trees would be planted.). It worked really well, i had an almost 30% conversion rate.

Also do as many things as you can to get people through the door and establish momentum. No other business needs more momentum to build than email newsletters. Word of mouth is king.

Hope that helps.</comment>


Mobile Safari won't allow usable bottom navigation for web applications - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194235 <comment><USER2> Ouch :( Unfortunately, mobile Safari's viewport is full of those issues.

I reported a similar one to the WebKit team a couple of months ago:

* [https://gist.github.com/Reinmar/91c70d2882523f47da7c49805042...](https://gist.github.com/Reinmar/91c70d2882523f47da7c498050421204)

* [https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=191204](https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=191204)

This is an issue with the viewport mechanics making it impossible to position anything in the viewport when the software keyboard is visible. This is something that every rich-text editor developer deals with and that's why none of them work really nice on iOS.

Chrome (Blink) behaves much better here – just like one would expect it to. This means that there's a pattern which Safari developers could implement in it too. Also, I talked about this with Safari's developer who worked on the current mechanism and I got the impression they weren't aware of how problematic the current implementation is for developers. So, big +1.</comment>


Too early to tell if Affordable Care Act(aka ObamaCare) is good for consumers - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/06/more-competition-is-supposed-to-help-consumers-that-might-not-be-true-with-health-insurance/ <comment><USER2> Without Obamacare I would have no coverage other than the legal requirement that emergency rooms treat me. Thats not an efficient allocation of money, that is its a lot cheaper for everyone if I can use my insurance.

Its not that I have a problem with the monthly payments but that I have so many preexisting conditions.

The insurance companies would get really petty when they denied me coverage, for example because I had an ear infection when I was two years old that damaged my hearing. That way they didn't have to come right out and say I was rated because I am mentally ill.

While I can get coverage at most coding jobs some of the best jobs I have had did not provide medical. Also I am commonly self employed. Given that most new jobs are created by small businesses its likely that job growth is putting money into the economy more than obamacare is taking money out of it.</comment>


Ask HN: How to Find Purpose? - <AUTHOR> While analyzing my life I realized that the main reason for not making any significant progress is the lack of purpose (both in my private and professional life).<p>What did you do to find your purpose? <comment><USER2> Looked inside. Mindfully.

I encourage you to read following books: 1\. Mindfulness in plain English 2\. As a man thinketh 3\. Self reliance (essay by RWE) 4\. Wherever you go, there you are 5\. The monk who sold his Ferrari 6\. The alchemist 7\. Wind, sand and stars 8\. The heart and the fist 9\. The little prince 10\. The phantom tollbooth

If you think you don't have the time for all, just only read the first one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comment @tug0fwar, I just bought Mindfulness in plain English by Henepola Gunaratana.

Are there any exercises that helped you?

<comment><USER2> Mediation, obviously. Also being physically active; jogging, swimming, or running, at least a few minutes everyday.

<comment><AUTHOR> The thing is that I already meditate and do yoga every morning. I also either run 10k or fitness every morning and play team sports. Even when being mindful, that does not give me a clear purpose.

<comment><USER2> Hey @leadership101 how things are going for you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I spent a week into the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola.</comment>


LimeWire is Quietly Resurrected: It's Baaack - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/210092/limewire_is_quietly_resurrected_its_baaack.html

<comment><USER2> I think this is the 12th article I've seen about this resurrection. I may be alone in feeling this way, but I think buzz and quiet are near opposites.</comment>


Factor: Comparing Factor's performance against V8, LuaJIT and SBCL - <AUTHOR> http://factor-language.blogspot.com/2010/05/comparing-factors-performance-against.html <comment><USER2> It seems strange to benchmark SBCL on the mac port when the main (and very fast) version is written for Linux.

<comment><USER3> It hardly seems strange if Slava's main computer happens to be a mac.

Do you have some reason to expect that the results would be substantially different on some other platform? As noted in the article these are mostly srather narrow pure computation benchmarks, so the OS shouldn't matter a lot. Sure, the OS X kernel is crap when it comes to supporting exotic features, so SBCL has to do a little bit of extra work around bugs in things like signal handling. And I could believe using mprotect() for a hardware write barrier have a worse relative performance compared to a software barrier on OS X than on Linux. But at least in the context of pure computation these kinds of effects shouldn't distort things all that much.</comment></comment>


If a Soyuz capsule lands in front of you, follow these instructions [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.spaceref.com/iss/soyuz/SCLSaB.edit.pdf <comment><USER2> Reminds me of a charming story from Yuri Gagarin's flight:

"Both he and the spacecraft landed via parachute 26 km (16 mi) south west of Engels, in the Saratov region at 51.270682°N 45.99727°E. It was 280 km to the west of the planned landing site (near Baikonur).

A farmer and her daughter observed the strange scene of a figure in a bright orange suit with a large white helmet landing near them by parachute. Gagarin later recalled, "When they saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don't be afraid, I am a Soviet citizen like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_1#Reentry_and_landing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_1#Reentry_and_landing)

<comment><USER3> Check out this strange pic:

[https://vintagespace.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/ivan- ivanov...](https://vintagespace.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/ivan- ivanovich.jpg)

"MAKET" means dummy or doll. This is the dummy pilot used in a test flight. The word is there so that any well-meaning farmer who finds the craft won't start cutting anything open in a rescue attempt, possibly destroying test data.

I've also seen, but cannot find online, pictographs on soviet spacecraft meant to inform possibly illiterate rescuers that real people are inside and probably need help. Similarly, look at any plane with ejector seats. There are usually signs or diagrams explaining how to pop the canopy and even trigger the ejection seat of a crashed plane (usually by means of a rope).

<comment><USER4> Why would it be a good idea to trigger the ejection seat of a crashed plane?

<comment><USER3> Everything is on fire, or about to be. The unconscious pilot is strapped into the seat. Better out now than in for even a few more seconds.

Also, I guess, one could use the procedure to render safe and unoccupied seat rather than leave it in the wreckage for some kid to play with. The seat alone doesn't have a proper chute. So it wouldn't be the safest thing for a SAR team to do if their helicopter was parked nearby.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Reminds me of a first responder briefing I heard at an air show. The first job if a fighter was on the ground with a pilot aboard, after opening the canopy, the first two guys on the scene were to hold the pilots arms down. Nothing else mattered. Should he wake up and reach for those ejection handles ... bad things.

<comment><USER5> I suppose that it would be theoretically easy to disable the ejection handles when the plane had the canopy open, was not moving, and/or was on the ground. But if the plane was damaged and the sensors or circuits that managed that decision were destroyed, the pilot couldn't eject.

They decided to err on the side of allowing the pilot to eject, possibily in a state of panic or confusion, under conditions that could be fatal. They did this instead of preventing this death caused by human error but opening the remote possibility that the best redundant system they could devise would fail and leave the pilot unable to eject. That says something interesting about their safety philosophy.

<comment><USER3> There are times when a pilot may want to eject from a stationary plane on the ground, fire being the big one. Of course this is only true of modern "zero- zero" ejection powerful enough to get the pilot under parachute without any altitude/speed. But if the plane has already crashed, the pilot probably has a damaged neck/spine already and ejecting might be lethal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was in the Soviet Union for a couple of weeks at the end of the 60's. Our Intourist guide took us to see an exhibition having to do with the Soviet space effort. One of the exhibits was a spherical module which, given the date, I imagine was part of a Soyuz-A. The thing that struck me, and that I would be interested in having confirmed (or not) by someone knowledgeable, was that part of the thing (a porthole surround?) was made of/trimmed with wood. Could this be the case or is my memory playing tricks on me?

<comment><USER7> A Google search turned up that the Chinese have used a heat shield made of impregnated oak, and perhaps the Russians used a cork one.

Some speculation:

[http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=11075.25;wa...](http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=11075.25;wap2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I enjoyed the knocking code:

One knock or silence (.) = "We are bad."

I'm not sure you need a translation to know that no knocks = we might not be doing so great in this capsule here.

<comment> V-2 Well, clearly it should be split:

One knock (.) = "We are bad."

Silence ( ) = "We are unconscious or dead."

<comment><USER9> Don't forget aware, but paralyzed.

<comment> V-2 Yeah, let's not leave these poor folks in confusion about the protocol

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Those deploying antennas sound absolutely terrifying and deadly.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, what's up with that?

<comment><USER12> Things that need to stay _very_ secure, but also quickly detach when needed, are usually attached with explosive bolts. Much simpler and far more reliable than other means.

<comment><USER13> But why do they need to detach at all?

<comment><USER12> They protect the antennae during re-entry, otherwise they'd probably melt in the heat. If you read carefully you'll see that it's the antenna covers that explode, not necessarily the antennae themselves.

<comment><USER14> Yes, but why? Why not just leave them attached there?

<comment><USER15> A basic quarter wave VHF antenna is about a foot and a half long (assuming this is the type of antenna used). A foot and a half long piece of wire can't be hanging off of a capsule coming through the atmosphere without burning off, as others have stated. It would need to be protected for re-entry.

When it comes time to use it after the capsule lands, it can't be enclosed within a metal capsule which would undoubtedly act as a Faraday shield preventing the RF from getting outside. So the protection has to come off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is a "150_____ mile radius"? What goes in the blank? "Nautical" vs. "imperial roman"?

<comment><USER17> Note also the strange spacing and boxing of "side", apparently for no reason.

Also: "there is no hazard-if both risers are still attached". What's a "hazard-if"? Or do they mean to use a dash here instead of a hyphen?

This document looks like it was typeset by an incompetent temp in 1995. Really goes to show that the cutting edge of space research is in many aspects at the mercy of the lowest bidder (literally and figuratively).

<comment><USER14> Heck, what's a riser? I mean, I am familiar with the term, but I have no way to identify what a Soyuz capsule's risers are, so ho do I know if they're attached or not?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting.

> There is a low level radiation hazard area clearly marked on the bottom of > the capsule

Whats this?

<comment><USER19> Cobalt-60. Here is some more information on the Kaktus gamma-ray altimeter in Soyuz landers: [http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/spaceflight/reentry- desce...](http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/spaceflight/reentry-descent- landing/soft-landing-on-kaktus/)

<comment><USER20> Wow, a radar that uses ionizing radiation is a crazy idea.

<comment><USER21> Seems ingenious - it's an active system that uses entirely passive components. No power draw, and will always work.

<comment><USER22> I'm pretty sure the receiver can't be passive. If the receiver doesn't work due to power failure or malfunction, what good is a functioning transmitter?

It would be interesting to know why they decided to go this way instead of a more conventional radar. Soyuz is already full of RF equipment for communications and docking procedures. Adding a landing radar probably wouldn't add that much to overall complexity. It might be that gamma backscatter is more consistent over expected landing surfaces than microwave reflectivity.

Also, I wonder how they shield their detector from direct gamma rays from source so that they don't overwhelm the weak backscatter signal. They can't have much in the way of heavy shielding.

<comment><USER23> It could theoretically land anywhere on the planet in an accident situation, some freaked out country could fire up the radar jammers, would be terrible bad luck to land next to a weather radar, even if nothing bad happens it'll have Russian military aircraft loitering around the LZ and now you have the technical problem of proving every Russian aircraft radar ever made won't interfere with the landing system. I would guess if the rockets fire early the astronauts will be severely hurt (killed?) on landing so not firing early would be a priority. They didn't make it triple redundant for fun...

Also without any information its very hard to tell if this is just good old fashioned ALARA at work, or if its a real threat. On one hand a powerful source would require a smaller detector and size and mass are expensive in spacecraft. Then again the crew needs shielding from the source and they're using gammas so source intensity is also not cheap. My guess is its a combination of ALARA principle at work combined with some first responders might have radiological monitoring and that will detect it, causing a freak out unless previously warned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For non-rescue personnel (the rest of us), it looks like the best thing you can do is simply make sure that nobody gets closer than 150 feet. If you're certain that aerials are deployed, you can approach (from the FRONT/pointy- end) and knock five or more times. One or no knocks means that you need to phone the authorities after retreating to a safe distance - there is nothing that _you_ can do for them (special tools are needed to crack it open).

<comment><USER25> Though,

> There are three tools safety-wired to the outside edge of the bottom of the > capsule. They can be easily removed in both upright and side landing > scenarios

<comment><USER24> Ah, I missed that.

They seem very clear about how dangerous the thing is, so unless you're absolutely and utterly certain that it's completely safe, keep away. Don't add more casualties.

<comment><USER26> I suppose some people just want to be ready for any event.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Information that would have been more useful YESTERDAY!!

</comment><comment><USER28> If any capsule lands in front of me, and I survive the impact zone, I'm looking to see if Sandra Bullock needs any help.

<comment><USER29> She'll need it. Recovering micro-g is rough stuff.

<comment><USER30> For any context look at the video of the astronaut (almost said spaceman ;a;) that landed the other day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Has any of the Soyuz capsules ever landed outside of Russian/Soviet controlled territory? Does anyone know?

<comment><USER32> None, ever. Unless you count the Chinese capsules that are heavily influenced by the Soyuz design and of course land in China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > NOT FOR RELEASE TO MEDIA

Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER34> Do not _taunt_ Happy Fun Ball.</comment>


The App Design Handbook + Time-lapse Design Video - <AUTHOR> http://nathanbarry.com/book-app-design-handbook/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is the direct link to the landing page: <http://nathanbarry.com/app- design-handbook/>

</comment><comment><USER2> I love the idea, the video, and the design.. but I wish it wasn't geared strictly to iOS, since the title doesn't mention that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many of the concepts could apply to Android, but it is iOS focused. I didn't want to make the title too wordy.

<comment><USER2> But I'm assuming none of the Android Design Principles will be regarded?

<https://developer.android.com/design/index.html>

Design decisions on Android generally play by different rules and conventions.

[https://developer.android.com/design/patterns/pure- android.h...](https://developer.android.com/design/patterns/pure-android.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right that it isn't focused on Android, and so another book may be a better fit.

<comment><USER2> Then, to avoid confusion, a clearer title for your book might be a better fit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can't wait to see the finished book!

</comment><comment><USER4> Any idea when it will be released? I love the time-lapse video. Well done!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I have the book mostly written, but editing and layout will probably take another month. Mid August or early September...

<comment><USER5> Please post on HN again when it's done. It looks great.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely will. I appreciate the compliments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That bubble texture at 2:48 is sweeeeeet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't you just love Photoshop defaults?</comment></comment>


Musician makes 26.3% of his net income from just 40 hard- core fans - <AUTHOR> http://www.musicthinktank.com/blog/in-defense-of-1000-true-fans-part-ii-matthew-ebel.html

<comment><USER2> _Imagine what it will be like for him when he gets to 1,000?_

And imagine what happens if he loses just ten. That sword cuts both ways.

<comment><USER3> As a musician, it's much harder to lose fans than it is to gain.

<comment><USER4> Really?

I would assume that's true for the best ones (survivorship bias), but on average, there are probably more musicians who just fizzle out and disappear after a few years...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In related news, Botticelli made ~100% of his net income from the Medicis.

Which is to say, what role does/can patronage play in the modern world?

<comment><USER6> That is a great point & one that has been floating around in my head. What is the qualitative difference between a fan & a patron? It doesn't seem like you would expect the same kinds of people in these categories.

<comment><USER7> Patrons get to directly tell you what to create, where a fan is get's to tell you if they liked what you created.

<comment><USER8> Yes, this was a big deal in the evolution from music from the Renaissance to post-Renaissance. Normally musicians were employed by the wealthy, often church and royalty. This rather limited the variety of music coming out. The French Revolution, and related social change rather downgraded the importance and wealth of royalty. Some of this related social change was the Industrial Revolution, which helped create more of a middle class and spread the wealth around, also consolidating people more in cities.

So then, you had sorta the same problems any entrepreneur has. You go from having a boss...to having thousands. So they could and did compose different stuff, but the composers who ate well were the ones who could write popular stuff. Obviously they could push the envelope a bit as there's always those who appreciate novelty. So they went after the folks who now had disposable income, in the places where they were conveniently lumped together (as the geographic distribution wasn't quite as favorable before then, and the working classes didn't really have the spare money anyway).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a lot to dissect from this interview for small businesses and entrepreneurs. The goal is not to get big fast (although that is so sweet), but to engage with your "brand" advocates to help make your living and expand your reach.

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally don't like it when everything that is extended to entrepreneurs.

I posted it for independant musicians (and there seems to be a lot among us) that want to make a living from music. I don't think it really applies for entrepreneurs in general.

<comment><USER10> Independent musicians trying to make a living from their music _are_ entrepreneurs, and most of what I saw in the article definitely applies to someone bootstrapping a startup.</comment></comment></comment>


Licensing Board Admits It Can't Silence Red Light Camera Critic - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/blog/2017/12/07/licensing-board-admits-they-cant-silence <comment><USER2> Engineering licensing boards are a good idea, as long as they have zero legal powers. Let customers decide which is a reasonable engineering standard. Don't give officious twits the ability to control anyones ability to earn a living as an engineer.</comment>