Sand scarcity is about more than "running out" of sand - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/science/2018/9/4/17797394/sand-microscope-grains-scarcity-construction-industry-concrete <comment><USER2> Making sand by grinding down rocks is routine in the developed and semi- developed world. The trick was developing a method of rock crushing that mostly crushes rock against rock, rather than rock against steel. That's the vertical shaft impact crusher. Wear is much less, the product quality is better, and power requirements are lower. Lots of videos of this available, if you like rock crusher videos.

<comment><USER3> That's something that will probably become more and more commonplace. It's a few times more expensive (I can imagine) than just digging up existing good quality sand though.

<comment><USER4> But it's a more-or-less constant cost (energy costs, maintenance, rock supply), vs rising costs of sand (diminishing sand reserves, increasing shipment costs).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Things I learned: River sand is the best type of sand to use in Concrete. There a companies that manufacture sand. Desert sand is too fine to work well in concrete. There are "sand mafias" in India stealing entire riverbeds of sand.

<comment><USER6> _> >Things I learned: River sand is the best type of sand to use in Concrete._

If it's washed and clean of dirt...maybe. But crushed stone IMO is even better, it's not round and thus performs better in earthquakes.

<comment><USER7> >But crushed stone IMO is even better, it's not round and thus performs better in earthquakes.

Maybe if you manage to pump the concrete with a reasonable wear to the equipment, you mean.

Normally with crushed sand you need to increase cement quantities (because more water is needed) and need finer fillers like "flying ashes" and since you dont' want to have excessive resistance and thus excessive shrinkage, you need also other chemical additives.

And - just for the record - rounded aggregates tend to make stronger concrete, not the other way round, not because of the "surface", but because of the "shape", a concrete made of only spherical (in theory) aggregates has the less voids, and the more the actual shape of each aggregate tend to be similar to a sphere the less voids you find in the mix (that need to be filled by smaller fillers).

Of course this is "generally speaking", concrete is a product not much different from cooking, you need good ingredients, a good recipe, good equipment and a good cook to have a valid result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How to read this headline:

"scarcity" -> "cost"

"is about more than" -> "is about"

"running out" -> "local availability"

<comment><USER9> Thank you. That saves me the bother of reading the article.

<comment><USER10> The article is functionally a wordier version of "watch the video" anyway.

<comment><USER11> Yes, there is no article there. I hate that. There's no audio in my VM, for various reasons, and CC (if even there) is an utter waste of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's a video. How is that a reason not to submit it? How is your misconfiguration a reason to complain?

<comment><USER12> Probably should have a [video]-tag if so. There are also plenty of other situations where one is unable or where it is cumbersome to be able to listen to audio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't get the reasoning. Unweathered sharp sand has more surface area than stuff that has been tumbling in water for a long time, no? In my experience the received wisdom is, that glacial esker sand, sieved, is good for concrete. Somewhat like the manufactured sand.

But I might very well have misunderstood, or the old folks advice might not be right. Or it does not scale to industrial uses.

</comment><comment><USER14> And this is why I don't watch videos. 7+ minutes for the same amount of information I could have skim-read in under a minute.

<comment><USER15> get a video speed plug-in for your browser and watch HTML5 videos at 1.5x or 2x. It's changed my life.

<comment><USER14> Tried it. Weird and still slower than reading.

Plus I don't want to pander to the internet's decline into a glorified tv channel. If they can't write a blog post then to hell with them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is it beyond our capabilities to come up with a new composition of concrete that involves finer grains of sand?

Maybe it is not as strong, but it seems like necessity should involve some compromises.

<comment><USER17> I think that's basically plaster of paris? Practical Engineering did a good demonstration of different concrete ingredients: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOHURuAf5iY&vl=en](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOHURuAf5iY&vl=en)

<comment><USER18> Plaster of Paris is a different cement than the Portland Cement mostly used in concrete.

A big difference is that it isn't waterproof.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The information content of the video might be not too big - it boils down that river sands, which are the best for concrete are somewhat scarce. But it is worth while watching it, as towards the end they show microscope takes of the different kinds of sand being talked about. Those takes clearly show nicely how different the artificial, river and sea sand are with some faszinating imaginery. So this is a case, where the video adds to the textual information. Though it takes a while till it gets to the really interesting part.

</comment><comment><USER20> I feel like I'm missing out on something here: [https://snag.gy/hDjiEF.jpg](https://snag.gy/hDjiEF.jpg)

Disabling the ad blocker doesn't work. Anyone else having this?

<comment><USER21> No, in fact for me the text seems to load first and then other elements of the page load around it. And I'm running HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, and Decentraleyes in addition to uBlock Origin (with mostly-stock blocklists), so if there's going to be an issue I usually hit it :p

Edit: if you click the Readability Mode icon you should at least be able to read the text. Here is the video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2349cn0-T0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2349cn0-T0)

<comment><USER20> Readability doesn't work for me either, same short piece of text. Checking the error console, only a warning for some script of LinkedIn that didn't load, and all the network requests succeeded. Odd. You'd think if it's supposed to load dynamically (why'd you want to do such a thing anyway? It's not as if the text is as big as a JS library and they don't mind including those), it would at least throw an error if something failed.

<comment><USER11> That's all there is. It's just the lead for the video.

<comment><USER20> Oh! Now I get it, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I learned in school that silicon is literally the second most common element on Earth.

So this story sounds like fake news to me.</comment>


The 15-Minute Guide to Becoming an SEO Ninja - <AUTHOR> http://www.ecommercefuel.com/ecommerce-seo-guide/

<comment><USER2> This is a very thorough and useful guide. I've always been pretty turned off by the SEO "community" as guides like this mostly come across as guesswork and quackery.

On a personal note I read Andrew's ebook a while ago (which is very good) and had a brief email conversation with him. He struck me as very genuine and knowledgeable guy - even if he was an investment banker! :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks boothead! Spent a lot of time trying to distill SEO down to the need- to-know concepts without skipping over anything major. Glad you enjoyed the eBook, and thanks for not writing me off based on my past career! ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting how the nofollow tag has evolved over the years. Originally, people used it not only to control blog SPAM but also to shape the way PageRank flowed throughout a site - a method called PageRank Sculpting. The idea was you'd nofollow links to unimportant pages on your own site so that more PageRank would flow to the important pages you wanted to rank for.

I'm pretty sure Google has confirmed this doesn't work anymore. Now a nofollow link still takes a portion of a page's PageRank just without passing it along. Hence, no more sculpting power.

</comment><comment><USER3> Agree with the others -- solid piece. I get asked about SEO all the time, and I think this is the best explanation while remaining concise I've seen of late. Will definitely recommend this to people before I attempt to explain things.

</comment><comment><USER4> Good info without quackery but why do you call the title element "meta title"?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's technical name is 'Meta Title', which helps disguising it from an article's on-page title, which is actually an H1 or H2 tag. Often, please think the meta title is what appears in big letters at the top of an article. While they are often the same, they're set in ways and just wanted to make the distinction.

<comment><USER4> The HTML 5 spec refers to it simply as "the title element" (as opposed to a title attribute)

[http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/single-page.html#the-title- elem...](http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/single-page.html#the-title-element)

There is no such thing as "on page title". There may be a top level heading in the DOM outline.

Throwing "meta" in there is just going to confuse people.</comment></comment></comment>


Saving obsolete jobs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@meshedsociety/saving-obsolete-jobs-5e5dd4bff9b8#.acuoyelc4 <comment><USER2> > Considering that in aggregate, seen globally, the world in the 21st century > is in a better shape than ever before,

This is the worldview that enabled the Brexit to happen and fueled the rise of many populist politicians in the world.

Most people don't care about the aggregate. And globalization does hurt parts of the economy as it benefits other parts of the economy. The parts of the economy that it hurts are the ones that aren't doing so well, and it benefits the already rich.

That being said, how is any part of this article going to appeal to somebody's who's out-of-work because their job went abroad? Tell them to celebrate because their tshirt is 10% cheaper?

<comment><USER3> It seems like the upside of the '10% cheaper t-shirt' extends far beyond that. Our modern definition of poor is considerably more civilized than it was less than a hundred years ago.

The harsh answer to this question is that there is no reason to sugarcoat the truth and try to appeal to someone who is out-of-work because their job got automated out of existence (and let's be honest, that's a _lot_ more likely to be what happened than outsourcing to some third world country). It doesn't help them to lie about 'bringing jobs back' or some such nonsense. Tell them their job is gone, it isn't coming back, and they should take advantage of training opportunities to move into a field where employment is available. Uncomfortable, yes, but anyone who promised (or is promising now) that life would be easy or fair is lying.

<comment><USER4> Compared to 50 years ago, Americans (middle- and lower-classes) are working longer hours and making less and less.

[http://www.lambertonlaw.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/08/Graph...](http://www.lambertonlaw.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/08/Graph.png) (chart also seen in Robert Reich's "Inequality for All")

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/20/middle-class- charts...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/20/middle-class- charts_n_6507506.html)

[http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/middle-class- cant-g...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/middle-class-cant-get- ahead/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For every coal worker who shops at Walmart, I say where were you when the book shop down the street closed down because Walmart sold the book for %50 what they could sell it for.

There's definitely a problem, where people want to keep their obsolete job, but wants to screw anyone else who also has an obsolete job.

</comment><comment><USER6> Obsolescence is inevitably from a given philosphical point of view.

Capitalist economics with 3-month lead times is just one.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some of the best tech ads you've seen? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> This was a favourite back in the day. 90s ad for Nintendo 64.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzcsORSS4NQ></comment>


Why Nikola Tesla Was The Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/a/tpcDu?gallery

<comment><USER2> It's probably best to link to the original source for this: [http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla)</comment>


Show HN: Salaried to Consultant Daily Rate Calculator - <AUTHOR> https://codegeek1001.github.io/salary2consultantcalc/ <comment><AUTHOR> A lot of my friends/co-workers have asked me about switching from Salaried to Daily Rate consultant as I did it a while back. I built this simple calculator to get an approx. idea. United States only for now as it assumes things like Social Security, Medicare etc. If this post gets any traction, happy to discuss.

</comment><comment><USER2> Back in the day, the rule of thumb I was given was to divide by 100. Probably better than this calculator.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, what this tool doesn't account for is all the non-billable time you'll have to spend trying to find the work that you will be billing for.

If you figure 50% non-billable (which could be wildly optimistic), the ~200 work days per year would turn into ~100 billable work days, and there is your factor of 100.</comment></comment>


Open Wireless and the Illusion of Security - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001141.html

<comment><USER2> Bruce Schneier has a valid argument that if someone does something bad through your network and you have security on: how do you prove it was hacked?

While I should just buy a 50-foot CAT5 cable and plug in, Wi-fi is just more convenient. I like to think of using WPA2 + MAC filtering as the wireless network equivalent of The Club for automobiles (a deterrent; too much trouble to hack mine in the local air of (mostly-WEP) wi-fi networks)

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to leave my network wide open. Then, a couple of months back, I found my download speeds plummeting.

I flipped on WPA and suddenly things were brisk again.

</comment><comment><USER4> An open wireless + a home VPN + QoS works for me. I don't have ay problem letting other people on my network as long as my connection speeds are unaffected (thus the QoS) and my server has plenty of log information about who tried to access my home network. Also, the VPN provides real software security.</comment>


The New Era of Bookmarks is about to begin? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19336397/the-new-era-of-bookmarks-is-about-to-begin

<comment><AUTHOR> if anybody with enough rep point on SO can edit my post to put my mockup image inline? that would be great :)

[http://i.stack.imgur.com/HXb4K.jpg](http://i.stack.imgur.com/HXb4K.jpg)

<comment><USER2> this looks interesting, but it appears to have been removed from stack overflow (for obvious reasons - SO is not an article publishing platform). do you have it written up anywhere else?</comment></comment>


Naked mole rats defy the biological law of aging - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/naked-mole-rats-defy-biological-law-aging <comment><USER2> Study: Naked mole-rat mortality rates defy Gompertzian laws by not increasing with age

Citation: J Graham Ruby; Megan Smith; Rochelle Buffenstein; eLife 2018.

Link: [https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.31157](https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.31157)

DOI: 10.7554/eLife.31157

Abstract: The longest-lived rodent, the naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber), has a reported maximum lifespan of >30 years and exhibits delayed and/or attenuated age-associated physiological declines. We questioned whether these mouse-sized, eusocial rodents conform to Gompertzian mortality laws by experiencing an exponentially increasing risk of death as they get older. We compiled and analyzed a large compendium of historical naked mole-rat lifespan data with >3000 data points. Kaplan-Meier analyses revealed a substantial portion of the population to have survived at 30 years of age. Moreover, unlike all other mammals studied to date, and regardless of sex or breeding- status, the age-specific hazard of mortality did not increase with age, even at ages 25-fold past their time to reproductive maturity. This absence of hazard increase with age, in defiance of Gompertz's law, uniquely identifies the naked mole-rat as a non-aging mammal, confirming its status as an exceptional model for biogerontology.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are a wide variety of life courses exhibited in the natural world, when plotting mortality risk over time. The human early start on an exponential increase is just one of them. Flies that reach a mortality risk plateau in late life is another - they just stop aging, they don't get any more damaged in ways that cause mortality than they already are. More complex organisms don't seem to exhibit this phenomenon, but the data for humans is pretty sparse at the ages of interest.

Naked mole rats and humans age for the same underlying reasons, the same types of accumulated damage. The difference in outcomes in terms of the shape of the mortality curve no doubt has to do with quality of repair mechanisms and resilience to particular forms of damage. Naked mole rats have less error- prone DNA replication, repair, and protein manufacture processes, a lack of lingering senescent cells pumping out inflammatory and destructive signals, a mitochondrial composition that is more resilient to oxidative stress (and they have plenty of oxidative damage, judging from the usual markers, they just seem to shrug it off; it doesn't cause further problems). The net result of this is that they do pretty well then fall off a cliff at the end.

It is interesting to speculate on what the cliff might be, a high threshold of damage needed to break an important repair mechanism, or a slowly accumulating form of damage that only really hurts the mole-rat at high levels, for example, but this is probably not very relevant to human medicine.

We know why humans age. We know what the damage is. We don't need to poke around in other species for further illumination in order to make progress towards rejuvenation - we won't learn anywhere near as much as we will from selective repair of the damage in humans or in mammals that are similar to humans. We don't need to improve human damage repair systems (comparatively hard) when we can repair damage (comparatively easy). It clearly takes a few decades for pathological levels of damage to arise, which gives plenty of time to deal with it through periodic applications of therapy, given a working repair biotechnology.

The comparative biology of aging is pure science, unlikely to produce meaningful applications of medicine when compared with other courses of action.

<comment><USER4> IANAGB and your meta-explanation makes total sense _but_ I'm given to believe that improving human damage repair systems would require gene therapy and this is becoming an easier and easier technique over time–isn't this what powers a lot of medical breakthroughs now? Am I wrong in believing this? Are you definitively asserting that repairing damage is going to be comparatively simpler than improving damage repair systems for the foreseeable future?

<comment><USER3> Only some of the damage repair methods require gene therapy, and in the case of allotopic expression to work around mitochondrial damage that is already demonstrated in human trials by Gensight.

You should look over the linked sub-pages here for an overview of the types of damage and approaches to repair.

[http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens- research](http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research)

I'd be more concerned about stem cell replacement therapies and lipofuscin removal as categories than anything requiring gene therapy, since in both cases there are a lot of targets and a lot of work to do.

For things like senescent cells and glucosepane cross-links, small molecule therapies will work (and already exist in the former case). In fact all targeted cell killing and specific molecule breakdown needs can probably be addressed sufficiently well via pharmaceuticals for a first generation effort.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the pointers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've read that humans are the same, they quit "aging" after age 110 or so. At that point the probability of dying in the next year is roughly 50%, and doesn't increase beyond that age.

<comment><USER6> The statistics and probability are improperly applied to this situation, and fail to accurately model reality.

The numbers are taken as abstractions and untethered from the complex subsystems that generate the results. This decoupling eliminates any understanding of the underlying principles at work.

Human tissues are organized into organs that eventually fail. When you put the tables and figures away, and look at the actual centenarians themselves, there's no expectation that those people's organs will continue on an endless plateau of static operation without further incident, in an endless streak of winning coin flips.

The reality is that life at that age isn't abstract coin flips, there's definite decline lurking in the background. Externalities like microbial illness could be modeled as coin flips (does the individual catch the flu this year?), but internal deterioration is still a systemic function with a graded slope that varies from person to person.

That declining slope could be altered with transplants, but eventually the brain gets involved, and we lack the metaphysical and philosophical tools to argue about when a zombie robot brain transplant might mean animate brain death or the living exchange and passing of one distinct individual for wholly another living mind.

<comment><USER5> Good point. So the cause is more likely that the distribution of _the underlying genetic code that determines max life span for an individual_ is what follows the Poisson distribution at the tail end, rather than any individual's own aging process (or apparent statistical lack thereof). That makes more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The number of data points is a bit misleading. Unless I am interpreting it wrongly, it looks like less than 100 rats were actually used to look at the hazard rate? Most of the ~3000 rats were censored because they moved/euthanized for experiments?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not arguing with their methods but I think there is an alternative explanation to their data: naked mole rats might still have gompertzian aging but with an exponent that is low enough to not show up at the age of 30 or so. Humans also don't display any signs of biological aging up to the age of 30, but around 70 everything starts to fall apart. My point is, until we have a decent sample size of 70+-year-old naked mole rats, we won't know.

</comment><comment><USER9> Only about 10% (469/3848) of their data had actual birth dates and death dates.[1] That looks like this: [https://image.ibb.co/bJLq4G/lspan.png](https://image.ibb.co/bJLq4G/lspan.png)

[1] [https://elifesciences.org/articles/31157/figures#supp1](https://elifesciences.org/articles/31157/figures#supp1)

EDIT:

I'm not sure what to conclude from that but think the clean data only should have been in the paper...

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there any good sequence of moocs to let an engineer go from mostly- forgotten high school biology and chemistry to understanding the cutting edge of aging research?

</comment><comment><USER11> Because there is no biological law of aging. There is only a collection of biological accidents.</comment>


Android's full-disk encryption just got much weaker–here's why - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/07/androids-full-disk-encryption-just-got-much-weaker-heres-why/ <comment><USER2> And again here's why Google needs to force manufacturer's (and carriers) to agree to required updates to the latest Android OS on a regular and ongoing basis, insofar as their hardware is not end-of-life.</comment>


Sky parental control system blocks code.jquery.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/6261-sky-parental-controls-break-jquery-website.html <comment><USER2> ISP interference makes for a interesting question regarding liability. Their interference are now potentially causing massive amount of economic damages to companies which relies on jquery library. Webshops, economic infrastructure, hospitals, transportation systems are just a few that relies on having fully functional websites up and running.

But for liability, a few questions pops up. Who is the offended party, and how much negligence is required for software bugs. Does it need to be a civil suit with each customer, or can the website owners sue? If a truck crash right outside a store and disrupt business, the store owner can sue even if they have no formal relation with the truck company.

<comment><USER3> Alternatively, does code.jquery.com offer any kind of uptime guarantee? Big companies would rather rely on their own hosting / CDN than that of jquery, I'm sure.

<comment><USER4> code.jquery.com has in fact gone down in the past, and this did in fact bite my workplace in the backside.

We went to locally-hosted copies of jquery stuff. We kept using Google for JS they hosted, since their uptime way beats ours.

<comment><USER5> > since their uptime way beats ours

You link to Google's JS so your users can still get it when your own site is down?

If you hosted it yourself your users would see a working site whenever you were up. Now they will see a working site whenever both you _and_ Google are up. This has not improved effective uptime for anyone. (On the other hand, Google might serve the JS faster, especially if your users cache it. They may also keep their copies more up to date.)

<comment><USER6> GP's point is that it also hasn't noticeably decreased uptime. So especially if there's a speed benefit, why switch?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sky user here[1].

Turn it off then!

This is entirely optional. It asks you when you first install and connect the router via the WiFi landing page if you want to use any blocking. If you don't answer the question or select no, there is no blocking at all apart form the IWF firewall stuff. Every kind of blocking comes with problems of some description. You either live with it or trust your users.

[1] £7.50/month for ADSL2 for 12 months with line rental and calls included was too good a deal to throw away. I'd go for Andrews & Arnold if I could afford idealism at the moment.

<comment><USER8> Interested Australian user here. That's about half of the cost of our cheaper monthly ADSL2 plans - what's the catch? How far away from the exchange are you?

<comment><USER7> Well I was an O2 customer. Sky bought O2 last year and in the effort to maintain their customer-base they will give you silly offers if you argue with them for long enough. It's usually £20.50/month including line rental but I argued it down to £7.50/month on the basis I stayed with them for 12 months.

No catch. Confirmed no traffic management, no download limit, free router, free migration. This is purely for customer retention.

I'm 800m away from the exchange and get 12.2Mbits down and 1.1Mbits up.

I pull an average of 120Gb/month over the line with no problems.

Edit: just to add I was paying £35.50/month with O2 before which is crazy amounts.

<comment><USER9> I wish I was having as good a time as you are.

I was on o2 for 3-4 years before being transferred over to Sky last month. Since transferring, I've had nothing but problems. Online gaming pings have gone from 20 -> 50, download speeds have fallen 20-30%, my connection frequently hangs (Youtube is near unusable), and I now have issues loading websites from time to time (I had to refresh Google 3 times before it loaded earlier). To make things worse, Sky is charging me £15.50 a month while o2 was only charging £7.50.

Thankfully, BT is installing fibre in my area so I should be able to jump over to plus.net sometime soon. I can't wait.

<comment><USER7> If it's unusable, tell them and say you will stop paying for it as it doesn't live up to their advertising. Your rights are protected outside the contract. Threaten to complain to Ofcom if they resist. They'll let you leave and give you the MAC code.

I'm in London and my exchange has Sky LLU support. Coincidentally I live in the same postcode as Sky HQ so any problems, I'll talk face to face with them as I have some contacts.

<comment><USER9> I did ring technical support to get the issues fixed last Thursday -- apparently a higher level technician will call me back within '10 working days'. Hmm.

I'm not trapped by a 12 month contract, which is why I'm not too annoyed about the situation. My cabinet will get fibre fitted early next month, so I should only have to endure Sky for another month or two thankfully, which is ok by me.

<comment><USER7> Cool good news then :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10>
        <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
        <script>window.jQuery || document.write('<script src="path/to/your/jquery"><\/script>')</script>

Source: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1014203/best-way-to- use-g...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1014203/best-way-to-use-googles- hosted-jquery-but-fall-back-to-my-hosted-library-on-go)

<comment><USER11> I'd question whether this is a worthwhile fallback as depending on what the error is then the browser may still wait 30 (ish) seconds for the original request to time out.

<comment><USER10> I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That is really not very reassuring in terms of the level of technical understanding/oversight in managing their block list.

Mind you, I'm not surprised that someone updating the list is on a Sunday night is not qualified.

<comment><USER13> I'd be interested to see if the initial blocking was part of an automatic system - block everything in this malicious page - and was fixed when the competent people got in to work to see all the complaints and reports?

That can't be true because it would make reputation attacks really easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sucks for the people affected by this, but if the result is that more people use google for this, I'd be a happy bunny.

Why would anyone use code.jquery.com, really? They obviously don't mind a third party hosting their js, so why not use the most popular service (google) to increase the chances that users arrive at their website with jquery already cached?

<comment><USER15> > Why would anyone use code.jquery.com, really?

Because webmasters would rather compromise the security and integrity of their site, and the privacy of their users, than pay for the initial burst of bandwidth and latency for first time visitors. jQuery 2.1.0 production, minified and gzipped is still over 30KiB, compared to this thinkbroadband page which is only 6 KiB (and yes this page uses about half a dozen external js resources, including jQuery)

Perhaps it's about time we had a way to specify the hash of <script> source inline so browsers can serve files from cache even if they are from different origins

<comment><USER16> Sure, that sounds brilliant: allow anybody who can compute a hash collision to poison _other sites '_ JS libraries. _facepalm_

<comment><USER17> A slightly more sensible approach may be to allow script tags (or any external linking mechanism) to list multiple (trusted) sources, and fallback appropriately.

That certainly feels more inline with how the internet in general was designed.

        <script src="googleapi/jquery,code.jquery.com/jquery,/my/own/version/jquery">

<comment><USER18> The point they were making is that googleapi and code.jquery.com don't count as trusted (at least not until you verify the hash)

<comment><USER15> The domains are obviously trusted to a degree. The objective of the hash is just to allow a content addressed[0] clientside web cache, and avoid talking to them most of the time. Good for privacy, security and load times.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content- addressable_storage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> FWIW my company (MaxCDN) provides the CDN service for code.jquery.com. We are currently investigating this issue with Sky.

Edit: Just saw this: "It appears that the jquery CDN is unblocked once more on Sky connections where the phishing filter that is part of the parental controls system was enabled."

We will continue to work with Sky to prevent this from happening in the future.

</comment><comment><USER20> to be fair, teaching direct dom manipulation is far more harmful to children than any amount of porn or violence.

</comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me of some article I read about having some fallback mechanism for when whatever CDN is serving up your JS fails. "Who controls downtime? You do."

<comment><USER4> Make sure your CDN has better uptime than you do. e.g. Google.</comment></comment>


Inspire HN: Solve the Internet Bystander Problem - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/9m/collective_apathy_and_the_internet/

<comment><USER2> Seems to me that there is plenty of online cooperation going on, between sites like Wikipedia, communities like HN, Reddit, forums, etc, open source projects, and all that jazz.

Perhaps I didn't understand the problem very well..

</comment><comment><USER3> For example, online political fundraising has become increasingly more effective in past decade. By separating the development of the motivation to action from the mechanics of the action itself -- the political rallying from the card swiping -- effective politicians play to the strengths of both the online and offline mediums.

</comment><comment><USER4> >Put up names and photos [...] of the first people who helped [...]

I like this idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some things are still best done face to face.</comment>


Japanese Farmer Builds High-Tech Indoor Veggie Factory - <AUTHOR> http://www.gereports.com/post/91250246340/lettuce-see-the-future-japanese-farmer-builds

<comment><USER2> Is this, or could, LED gardens be more efficient per sqft than leaving crops directly in the sunlight? Since a lot of spectrum is unused for photosythesis [1][2], the conversion of {full spectrum -> electricity -> required spectrum} seems potentially more efficient.

Another interesting idea would be to create solar panels that only convert the lost spectrum into {electricty -> required spectrum} [3]

[1] [http://bernardkatz.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/spectrum-o...](http://bernardkatz.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/spectrum-of-sun.jpg) [2] [http://www2.estrellamountain.edu/faculty/farabee/biobk/pigme...](http://www2.estrellamountain.edu/faculty/farabee/biobk/pigment.gif) [3] [http://mitei.mit.edu/news/transparent-solar- cells](http://mitei.mit.edu/news/transparent-solar-cells)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if they can use this tech in the space station or maybe a mission to Mars? Doesn't seem to need much water and we can probably use solar power to power the lights?

</comment><comment><USER4> Another lettuce farm. Does anyone have a part number for the LED growing lamps that GE makes, do they have a 'standard' version available? There wasn't anything relevant on their products page at gelighting.com ([http://www.gelighting.com/LightingWeb/na/solutions/led- lamps...](http://www.gelighting.com/LightingWeb/na/solutions/led-lamps-and- modules/index.jsp))

</comment><comment><USER5> Hand wavy arguments as to why this is a bad idea are ... well, just hand wavy.

<<

Solar is ~20% efficient LED's are less than ~40% efficient so you would need more land area for solar farms than you save by growing indoors. On top of that you need to pay for all your capital costs. There are other issues, but if this was close to cost effective you would be seeing this in Iceland which gets little sunlight in the winter and has cheap energy costs. Instead they use suplimental lighting inside green houses to boost production.

>>

I thought the vertical stacking makes more efficient use of the light than the single layer you find in a farm or green house. It means that even though the light is produced inefficiently the vertical stacking is intended to cancel out that inefficiency by using the light more efficiently. Moreover, the optimization of the plant's exposure to light through automated means adds to increased efficiency in the plant's use of the light.

If every grower did this, it would (or could) destroy Monsanto's business model. I love it.

<comment><USER6> well normally farms cannot grow up, skyscraper style. Also, situating the building properly should allow for some of it to also be used for power generation. Then lets go further, make it tall enough that the warm air rising from the bottom could be used to generate power.

<comment><USER5> right, that's the point of stacking and other structure-wise efficiency enhancement... I didn't go as far as the warm air rising =)

<comment><USER5> see this other structural pattern for maximizing use of available light (be it LED light or sun light)

[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405297020355030...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203550304577138511287470508)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The LED grow lights seem to be a real game-changer; the most modest estimates put the power savings at ~%50 (over HPS).

<comment><USER8> However in the article's example there is only negative power savings as the plants used to get fed for free from the sun, now they're consuming electricity from the grid.

Now that might be recoverable via reductions in waste and lower water consumption (see article) but it isn't automatically a net win, it might be a net loss overall. Need data.

<comment><USER9> 'The LED lights are a key part of the farm's magic. They allow Shimamura to control the night-and-day cycle and accelerate growth. "What we need to do is not just setting up more days and nights," he says. "We want to achieve the best combination of photosynthesis during the day and breathing at night by controlling the lighting and the environment."'

Also: 'He is also able to cut discarded produce from 50 percent to just 10 percent of the harvest, compared to a conventional farm. As a result, the farms productivity per square foot is up 100-fold, he says.

By controlling temperature, humidity and irrigation, the farm can also cut its water usage to just 1 percent of the amount needed by outdoor fields.'

These are serious productivity gains, but, as you say, they have to be balanced against electricity use.

<comment><USER10> Additional productivity gains might be made by operating the "indoor farm" within dense urban areas and thus closer to the consumer, thereby removing transportation costs associated with a typical farm.

<comment><USER11> Those are overblown. Modern mega-scale logistics are stunningly efficient. Food shipped by freight-ship and truck are supposedly more efficient with less polution than a local farmer driving hir* produce to market in a car.

* I hate that term. So clumsy-sounding.

<comment><USER12> Sure, anything at industrial scale is going to me more efficient than a mom and pop operation. But with a system like this you've got scale and proximity. Instead of having a network of trucks delivering lettuce from California thousands of miles cross country, you can have a small fleet of trucks delivering lettuce within a 2 hour radius. Less spoilage, far less gas, and far less planning and logistics.

This could be huge in cities with abandoned/run down industrial districts that have been hard hit by globalization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is good news for farmers around Fukushima - no-one buys food from there for obvious reasons, which is why they started to grow indoor hydroponic farms, but not on a large scale yet [1]. This way the plants don't get into contact with irradiated soil, but I doubt that people will buy them.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-10/fukushima-seeks- rev...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-10/fukushima-seeks-revival-in- radiation-free-farms-with-no-soil.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> In countries/areas where land prices are very expensive, this might help.

In the US I don't see this helping with common food stock (wheat/corn/cotton/soybean/tobacco/...). I could see this used for presentation foods (foods we judge more from looks) since you can control everything so much more you will likely get more products that can demand a premium price.

<comment><USER15> or when aquifers run out of freshwater used to irrigate fields

<comment><USER16> It would be very interesting to see what the price of water would be if it was subject to a market. A tragedy of the commons which isn't immediately visible until gone. Paradoxically some cities in the future will be bone dry ( Las Vegas) which others will be under water (Miami.) Freshwater available in neither.

Another good point is reduction or elimination of e coli & other pathogens caused by livestock runoff & workers shitting in the fields.

<comment><USER17> _workers shitting in the fields._

Outside of eating meat, B12 comes only from growing vegetables in proximity to mammal manure... it's not necessarily such a bad thing as you make out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me of Garden Fresh Farms indoor farms: [http://gardenfreshfarms.com/](http://gardenfreshfarms.com/)

</comment><comment><USER19> In average, one acre of any crop brings about a thousand dollars per year in revenue. With this method it would increase by 100-fold.

That's a real agricultural industrialization.

<comment><USER20> Electricity is not free. This is a stupid waste of resources that might "work" through a vary large government subsidy.

<comment><USER5> Solar is not free above sunk cost? We've ran a whole house in AZ exclusively on solar the last 7 years, with a ~$40K investment. Would this consume so much electricity that the initial cost will not be recouped before the solar system degrades beyond use? What's the math you're inferring from?

<comment><USER20> Solar is ~20% efficient LED's are less than ~40% efficient so you would need more land area for solar farms than you save by growing indoors. On top of that you need to pay for all your capital costs.

There are other issues, but if this was close to cost effective you would be seeing this in Iceland which gets little sunlight in the winter and has cheap energy costs. Instead they use suplimental lighting inside green houses to boost production.

<comment><USER5> I thought the vertical stacking makes more efficient use of the light than the single layer you find in a farm or green house. I thought that means even though the light is produced inefficiently the vertical stacking cancels out that inefficiency. Moreover, the optimization of the plant's exposure to light through automated means adds to increased efficiency in the plant's use of the light.

<comment><USER20> Numbers matter.

45% of the light is in the photosynthetic active wavelength range in a normal farm vs ~20% solar panels w/ transmission conversion losses etc + 40% LED = ~8% of the incoming light is now useful for photosynthesis.

So, you need a huge increase in efficiency ~400+% just to break even.

PS: Not that their using solar power, but it's still worth considering.

<comment><USER5> What does the 45% of light that is in the photosynthetic range have to do with the with the efficiency of solar cells and LEDs? It would be more direct to compare % of natural light that is in photosynthetic range with % of LED light that is in that range. If you have a formula on which you're basing your assumptions then write it down so I can understand and examine your logic without any misunderstanding. Else, you're making hand wavy assumptions, with statements like "numbers matters" without clearly stated relationship between said numbers.

<comment><USER20> Ideally 100% of LED light is in the photosynthetic rage. It looks like there using white LED's which are less efficient AND not optimal for plants. Sill, assuming the 'best case' using current mass market tech.

      Sunlight > photosynthisis (45%)   = 45%.
      Sunlight > solar cell (22%) > conversion, storage, transmission (90%)
      > LED (40%) > photosynthisis(100%) = 8%

reality is LED efficecy drops over time and LED light is not quite 100% ect but this is the optomistic best case numbers.

<comment><USER5> but what stops a structural technique for maximizing light usage by plants (like stacking or some more optimal structural pattern, such as the natural tree pattern [1] optimized by nature) from achieving 4X or more increase in efficiency of light usage?

1\. [http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405297020355030...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203550304577138511287470508)

<comment><USER20> You can do the same sort of 3D arrangements with plants and sunlight. However, building a 3d structure costs money so you need to compare it with all the other ways of boosting yeild to find out the best option.

Generally, a mix of irrigation, fertilizer, better breeds, and greenhouses are the best option for boosting yield. Mix in more marginal land as needed (Note: ~68.4% of Japan is covered in forests.)

Greenhouses for example let you have a longer growing season and pack plants more closely together when their young. Which can let you have an early harvest and then use that same land for another plant or a plant with a longer growing season. Closer to the tropics you can often get 2 or 3 harvests a year. However, they have significant capital and labor costs.

PS: Now, we can try and figure out how a Dystopian future can feed say X billion people but we are a _long_ way from needing indoor hydroponics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If every grower did this, it would destroy Monsanto's business model.</comment>


Why do web portals want me to use "their app" - <AUTHOR> I write mobile apps for our company using Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android. I do so because that's what I figured out how to do, and we do quite a bit with BLE and 2+ years ago, the BLE shims for Cordova/PhoneGap weren't very robust.
Everyday, I see more and more push to write progressive apps, or somehow write my apps using web stack technologies. I'm fine with that. I perceive that more and more, the consensus is that you need to have a pretty good reason to write a native app instead of a mobile web app of sorts. I'm fine with that and am not opposed to succumbing.
The one thing I don't understand though is why many large portal sites want me to download and use their native app, when I go to their mobile web site. CNN for example. BBC. LinkedIn. Facebook. On and on. All of these sites and many other "large public facing" companies always have a banner up top suggesting I download their mobile app. If progressive is the way to go, why do these companies persist in wanting to offer me a native app? Have they just not "caught up with the times" yet? Are they able to better monetize me when I use their native app? What is their incentive? <comment><USER2> Many people use adblocking software while visiting web portals. But when we use mobile apps it is becomes difficult for naive users to block ads and hence the app owners can get more money.

</comment><comment><USER3> Funny fact: Netflix sends me to the web in order to do account changes (real stuff). Why can't I do that on their app? Even desktop app.</comment>


Best Django Blogs and Talks - <AUTHOR> suggest best django blogs and talks <comment><USER2> Check out [https://wsvincent.com](https://wsvincent.com)

He has a pretty good site on Django a couple books published with a third on the way.

<comment><USER3> Simple is better than complex explains a lot of Django stuff even for beginners [https://simpleisbetterthancomplex.com/](https://simpleisbetterthancomplex.com/)</comment></comment>


Memory Deduplication: The Curse That Keeps on Giving - <AUTHOR> http://download.mette.org/videos/33c3/h264-hd/33c3-8022-eng-deu-Memory_Deduplication_The_Curse_that_Keeps_on_Giving_hd.mp4 <comment><AUTHOR> tlds: they used the side-channel leakage together with rowhammer to flip bits in ssh public keys in memory from authorized_keys to convert them so they could factor them, generate a new private key and eventually log in. also, sources.list and the system gpg-keychain to point the system to a malicious repo and install a backdoored /bin/ls</comment>


God be with you till we meet again (1918) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lettersofnote.com/2020/03/god-be-with-you-till-we-meet-again.html <comment><USER2> Question, about this part of the letter: "I have four day nurses and five night nurses (female) a ward-master, and four orderlies".

Does anyone know why it was important to point out they were female? Were army nurses typically male?

Anyways, I'm reading about the 1918 flu a lot lately and came upon parts of this text multiple times. I'm still not sure if it's making me more or less paranoid about Covid-19, but it's definitely fascinating.

<comment><USER3> This gives me a cert warning, but it quotes something in a way that implies that may have been sort of the formal designation: Nurses Corps (female)

[https://history.amedd.army.mil/ANCWebsite/articles/malenurse...](https://history.amedd.army.mil/ANCWebsite/articles/malenurses.html)

I've googled around a bit and when Florence Nightingale did her thing, it was mostly male nurses in the military. By early 1900s, this had changed, at least in the US, and most nurses were female.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I suppose that might have been why indeed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > It is salutary to remember that we do not really understand why the > devastating pandemic of 1918-19 was so severe, and that we cannot therefore > be confident that our modern medical measures would succeed against a > similar future challenge.

From the introduction to the letter in the British Medical Journal published 1979. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1599810/pdf/brm...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1599810/pdf/brmedj00105-0026.pdf)

This still seems to be the case for Covid-19.

<comment><USER5> Could it be that very dangerous viruses emerge more often, but only when they fall on "(very) fertile ground", that they then spread? The WW1-circumstances (a lot of men together on small space and harsh conditions) have contributed a lot, that the "spanish flu" spread, while others did not spread and so never became known to us ?

<comment><USER6> Here's a study that exactly goes into your question:

[https://www.faculty.umb.edu/peter_taylor/epi/oxford05.pdf](https://www.faculty.umb.edu/peter_taylor/epi/oxford05.pdf)

The conclusion of that article is that the basic lessons we learn today, were - in part - learned in 1918...

Back then, researchers had already traced the emergence of outbreaks to an encampment in France where men and animals were living in close quarters and unsanitary conditions.

As to the first part of your question, the answer is that more people encroaching on the animal and wildlife territory while not adhering to basic sanitary practices will increase the chance of new strains appearing and making the jump to humans.

Vox did an excellent video on how this works for Corona: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54)

Such events do not only happen in China in particular but they can happen virtually anywhere in the world.

Another ongoing pandemic is HIV/AIDS. Well, it is generally accepted that the jump to humans occurred in West-Africa in the 1920's. But it took time and globalization - increasing mobility - before HIV finally spread across the world:

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

<comment> SCM-Enthusiast May be a complete digression but it's much easier for me to believe the virus escaped from Wuhan Virology Institute than made the jump from a fish market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I found a newspaper message from the 19th century that described a flu that gave pneumonia and undertakers hadn't seen anything like it since the Cholera epidemics, this article was from Spain around 1840's.

<comment><USER8> do you have a copy?

<comment><USER7> I have, but it is old Dutch. Don't know if that is of help... I am still going through the archives for older mentions.

<comment><USER9> Facinating. There's a lot of Dutch people here. Some might want to translate

<comment><USER10> Old Dutch is actually a lot like Old English, they're both sister languages. Supposedly speakers of those languages were able to (mostly) understand each other, similarly to a dialect.

<comment><USER11> Old English is not similar enough to English for English speakers to understand, so this isn't particularly helpful.

[https://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/hel/orosius.html](https://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/hel/orosius.html)

[https://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/hel/chron.html](https://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/hel/chron.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know what happened to the doctor? Did he make it out ok?

<comment><USER13> This would be quite hard to discover bar someone having access to army records of that time or having a family connection, I think. Not only has more than a century passed, there's also the issue of the letter simply being signed "(Sgd) Roy". Roy isn't that uncommon of a first or last name.

One fact that could help the search is in this comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703434](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703434)

If, indeed, the Burt that the letter is addressed to has the surname Bouell or worked with someone named Bouell, that could help narrow things down substantially. If Burt is found, the Roy in question could be found as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just a usage note for grammar/spelling obsessed. Is the usage of _till_ correct? Yes it is.

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%27til](https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/%27til)

<comment><USER15> Thanks for sharing. I'm a complete etymology nerd and myself had no idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What does "Keep the Bouells open" mean?

<comment><USER17> KYBO is a common acronym in Scouting.

"Keep Your Bowels Open"

Whether Bouells is a typo or pun I don't know.

<comment><USER18> But what does it mean/come from?

<comment><USER19> It literally means to make sure you avoid getting constipated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So, going beyond the depressing, I think one good thing that will come out of all this since this situation isn't experienced in any of our lifetimes (including our elders) we have to reach back to history to find comparisons. Maybe this will spark a curiosity in history!

There's a number of really great history channels on YouTube; I particularly like "The Armchair Historian".

<comment><USER21> An historian on Twitter suggested people should keep journals of how COVID-19 affects their everyday lives.

I've been doing it as a method of self-reflection, and found it really valuable. I end up not just enumerating the changes to my life, but exploring how I am responding to them, trying to describe how they're affecting me emotionally, etc.

It's just for me, so I don't worry about missing days or being dramatic, or writing in an organized manner. But it's been really interesting, and not at all the chore I expected.

<comment><USER20> I'm doing something similar too! Morning / afternoon / evening pages on my personal blog: [https://blog.yingw787.com](https://blog.yingw787.com)

I don't think I've ever shared my personal blog before, it's my personal scratchpad as opposed to my professional content on Bytes by Ying, but if it helps people understand how one rando on the Internet processes emotions during this time, maybe I can do some good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Of similar historical interest is "A journal of the plague year" about the great plague in London. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Journal_of_the_Plague_Year](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Journal_of_the_Plague_Year)

The book is free to read on project Gutenberg.

[https://www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376-h/376-h.htm](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/376/376-h/376-h.htm)

</comment><comment><USER23> I find the language very beautiful. How come we don't write like this anymore? Where does one learn to speak like that? We don't see beautiful language on emails.

</comment><comment><USER24> Strange how nature works sometimes. An arrangement of proteins sheathed by a layer of lipids can kill billions of people.

<comment><USER25> That's what we all are.

<comment><USER26> Proteins killing proteins at the macro and micro level

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> damn... staff of 7-8 and 168 beds. that's a biblical scene.

</comment><comment><USER28> The Spanish flu from Kansas.

<comment><USER29> I wonder if, like with the 1918 pandemic, we'll find later that the first cases were somewhere other than China, but that place was better at keeping it under wraps.

<comment><USER30> A shrimp vendor at the Wuhan seafood market reported symptoms starting Dec. 10, so unless someone finds earlier cases elsewhere, I think that's as good a place as any to call the starting point.

[https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health- problems/cor...](https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health- problems/coronavirus-patient-zero-at-wuhan-seafood-market-identified/news- story/2d6706018d09b7daa4567521f8cae3e3)

<comment><USER31> [https://www.foxnews.com/world/coronavirus-investigators- one-...](https://www.foxnews.com/world/coronavirus-investigators-one-step- closer-to-solving-mystery-of-patient-zero) Reports of a 70+ year old that had the disease on Nov. 17th. Patient zero probably originated in October or thereabouts, and was probably never tested for it.

<comment><USER32> Better article: [https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coronavirus- chinas-first-confirmed-covid-19-case-traced-back)

But website has a touch of ad cancer.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Discord Class Action Waiver - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/c93697c9d59ec2f0d8071b7d0e907632 <comment><USER2> Well, aren't they selling everything you write and say to advertisers?

I wonder how it ever disrupted IRC.

<comment><USER3> What gives you that impression? There are no ads in any of the Discord clients.

<comment><USER2> Well, it's in their TOS

 _"We collect information from you when you voluntarily provide such information, such as when you register for access to the Services or use certain Services. Information we collect may include but not be limited to username, email address, and any messages, images, transient VOIP data (to enable communication delivery only) or other content you send via the chat feature."_

 _"If you do not wish to receive personalized advertising that is delivered by third parties outside of the Discord Service, you may be able to exercise that choice through opt-out programs that are administered by third parties, including the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). Our Services currently do not respond to "Do Not Track" (DNT) signals and operate as described in this Privacy Policy whether or not a DNT signal is received, as there is no consistent industry standard for compliance."_

 _"The Company and its affiliates may use this information to contact you in the future to tell you about services we believe will be of interest to you. If we do so, each marketing communication we send you will contain instructions permitting you to "opt-out" of receiving future marketing communications. In addition, if at any time you wish not to receive any future marketing communications or you wish to have your name deleted from our mailing lists, please contact us as indicated below."_

[https://discordapp.com/privacy](https://discordapp.com/privacy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's supposedly only enforceable in the US, and not in the EU, but it's a shady move that leaves a bad taste, especially since you can opt out only within 30 days from Oct 16th and only by writing an email to a specified address (deleting your account, for instance, _is not_ treated as opt-out).</comment>


AWS Console is down - <AUTHOR> As of right now (17:15 UTC) the AWS Console is unavailable.<p>https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=aws%20down <comment><USER2> Oregon Console is down and so are network connections to VMs......

From [http://status.aws.amazon.com/](http://status.aws.amazon.com/): We are investigating an issue with an external provider outside of our network, which may be impacting Internet connectivity between some customer networks and the US-GOV-WEST-1 and US-WEST-2 Regions. Connectivity to instances and services within the regions are not impacted by the event.

</comment><comment><USER3> We are seeing packet loss from various locations.

</comment><comment><USER4> ¡ya esta reestablecido! i's restored!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It seems the entire Oregon region is down.

<comment><USER3> Oregon region is not down. I'm logged in to several servers there. But there is definitely some networking issues going on connecting to that region.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Service is operating normally"</comment>


Shit I Learned Burning through My Family's Life Savings on a Failed Startup - <AUTHOR> http://kevinjmireles.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/business-lessons-from-the-land-of-hard-knocks/

<comment><USER2> An interesting article, but the title left me with a question that the article completely failed to answer: what about the lesson "don't spend your family's life savings on your startup"?

<comment><USER3> Whether or not "don't spend your families life savings on your startup" is good advice or not really depends on the amount of the savings, the age of the individual/family, and the family's earning potential, etc.

Losing all of your $20k savings at age 25, DINK family: hurts, but not life- changing in any way (as long as your spouse is OK with it, and you'd better be damn sure they aren't lying to you when if they say it's OK)

Losing all of you $200k savings at age 35, two small children and stay-at-home spouse: extraordinarily painful and will impact every decision you make for a long time.

<comment><USER4> In both cases, it's possible that it will advance your career to the next level, which can make up for the loss in the long run. Work hard, save money, take calculated risks, don't be doctrinaire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author had an invaluable experience, but I think the blog post doesn't do it justice. None of the section headings is actually that surprising; it's unlikely he started a business without being aware of _all_ those lessons in the broad strokes. Be ruthless, yes, but why was he unable to be ruthless even when he knew he should be? "Fail fast"? What did he do that violated that? What was he thinking, failing slowly?

I wish he could come up with a way to give us more concrete details that add nuance to the broad lessons. Memories will fade, and if all he's saved of them is this blog post, the lessons will follow the life savings. And _that_ would be tragic.

<comment><USER6> Check out my posting Product Adoption: Lessons on how to maximize product adoption and avoid common pitfalls: [http://kevinjmireles.wordpress.com/2006/08/03/product- adopti...](http://kevinjmireles.wordpress.com/2006/08/03/product-adoption/)

I appreciate the encouragement and challenge to write some more. I'll see what I can do to live up to your request but no guarantees as I'm trying to put some of the lessons to use=).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7>
      Know when 80% is good enough

I consider this an important strategy when executing most tasks. It is an on field guideline in the Marine Corps to aim for a 70% solution to problems in some cases. It is sometimes a better strategy to implement an imperfect plan than to roll out _the_ perfect plan by the time it's too late.

<comment><USER8> Voltaire summed it up by saying: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

<comment><USER9> "Just do it." -- some shoe company

<comment><USER10> Nike

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just read Rework. There is a chapter called "learning from mistakes is overrated." It cites a Harvard business study that showed that startup founders who launched a startup and failed had about the same odds of success in their second startup as someone who was launching their first.

While I've learned valuable lessons from my (many) failures it's a nice reminder that there is also a lot to be learned from our successes.

</comment><comment><USER12> Now I'm curious as to what the startup did.

<comment><USER6> Software for collision repair shops....

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "The issues that bother you at the beginning will be what kills you later."

This section describes a people problem, and I think the headline should be narrowed to that realm. Otherwise, a good, honest list that I believe will ring true to many HN readers.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is great stuff, kudos to Kevin.

The "looks like/is a goose" one reminds me of looking for a "market alternative" (from the book "Crossing the Chasm"). The market alternative is how potential customers _presently_ deal with the problem the new product solves, and it has a name and an existing budget. This helps to communicate what the product is to the customer.

If it's hard to find such a market alternative, it's a sign that the product isn't ready to 'cross the chasm' into the mainstream - that is, it won't be attractive to _pragmatists_ (who just want a percentage improvement on existing methods, with minimal change). It's still in the non-mainstream pre- chasm realm populated by _techies_ and _visionaries_ (who think the tech is cool in itself, or who can see a new way to use it to make money, respectively).

It might also be that the target market selected isn't suitable, i.e. there might be another application of the technology and for another group of customers, for which there is an existing "market alternative".

</comment><comment><USER15> So many of these things resonate for me, I'm troubled by a good third of the problems, or the seeds of the problems outlined here. Some sterling advice that I'm going to heed well.

I think the nature of the failed startup is irrelevant as much of the advice is raw, yet vague enough to apply to many areas. Almost all startups are based on a good idea, their success or failure rests almost entirely on the back of the choices you make along the way. Thanks for sharing this.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like the goose metaphor and I see it in education all the time. We constantly tell undergraduates that learning math is not just about crunching numbers but about learning how to abstract and reason more efficiently and yet the tests and homework assignments tell a different story so the undergrads just learn how to crunch numbers.

</comment><comment><USER17> Never spend more than $1000 in a startup unless you start getting revenues, say $100 or $200 and growing.

Then invest proportionally to the revenue.

With cheap VPS in the $20 and say $500 in average design, I fail to see how you should over spend in chasing a dream highly probable bound to fail.

<comment><USER18> If you're only willing to spend $1000 on a startup, and you count your own time (which you should), then you're going to have a rough time as an entrepreneur. Startups require risk and sacrifice. Maybe not bankrupt-your- family sacrifice, but sacrifice nonetheless.

<comment><USER19> No offence, but your comment is incredibly silly. There are plenty of successful businesses that started on kitchen tables with miniscule budgets and grew organically as the founders learned as they went along.

The cliche of the macho startup entreprenuer working 100 hours weeks and burning through cash for five years is not how many people become successful. Plenty of people start quietly in their spare time and build as they go along.

Startups require risk and sacrifice - yes, this is true. But not all businesses demand your internal organs and your wallet.

<comment><USER18> I hate the macho startup cliche as much as you. 100 hour weeks don't help a startup - they hurt - and it's never a good idea to dig a hole deeper than you can get out of.

But if you count your own time, which is worth AT LEAST $20/hour (if not $100), then you aren't going to get very far if you're only willing to commit $1000. Even if you don't count your own time, many opportunities require significantly more than $1K.

Success in a startup comes from tenacity more than anything else. If you aren't willing to make a real commitment (as the GP was suggesting), you're setting yourself up to fail.

<comment><USER19> Ah, yes I agree with you. Success comes from tenacity. But the original comment made me think all start ups should be sprinters. Some of us are marathon runners, or even long distance walkers! We get there, slower. But the persistence is just the same, even more, perhaps, due to the longer time frame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Fail quickly" always annoyed me. The part that annoys me the most is that institutionalized tend to view "I failed to the tune of several million dollars" as validation of somebody's investment worthiness. Sure there are lessons to be learned in failure. More often than not, the lesson seems to be "I learned how to convince VCs to give me money for a bad idea and an incompetent team!"

<comment><USER6> Fail quickly doesn't mean let your company fail. The goal is to figure out what doesn't work.Too many people try to develop a perfect product, etc... instead of investing the minimum amount required to get feedback and test the concepts with customers, stakeholders etc... It's better to discover that your great idea won't work with a paper sketch than to discover the issues after you've invested 6 months in development.

So fail quickly is about taking risks, making mistakes and learning as rapidly and as cheaply as possible - so ultimately you can be successful in the long run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> if it really added 10% to the bottom line, why not take payment on commission?

<comment><USER6> Getting people to change their habits is hard. After all shouldn't you be going to gym instead of watching mindless videos on Youtube? But are you? Read my post for some key product lessons [http://kevinjmireles.wordpress.com/2006/08/03/product- adopti...](http://kevinjmireles.wordpress.com/2006/08/03/product-adoption/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> All I can think when reading this blog post is: Owned.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> @Kevin Proud of you dude! Your first time on HN and you made it into the Twitter stream. Glad to have u here in blog land!</comment>


Will we still be alive in 2150? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bestlifeonline.com/cms/publish/health-fitness/Could_He_Live_to_2150.shtml

<comment><USER2> Everything past page 1 appears to be 404.

</comment><comment><USER3> Everytime I see stuff like this there is inevitably a want-to-be-29-forever boomer behind it somewhere.

Perhaps, just perhaps, our children may be able to extend their lives, and theirs may live longer still, but to suggest it will happen to the current generation is woefully optimistic.

Give it up boomers, you're going to die.

<comment><USER4> Trying (successfully) to decrease mortality goes back to the 18th century.

<comment><USER3> Point Taken,

However, while there is room for growth in the area, I don't see any dramatic advancement for those of us living our lives today... perhaps 10 or 15 years or so.

<comment><USER5> Are you a biologist? There are respected biologists today who do see "dramatic advancement". It must be discouraging to them to have their work dismissed by people who aren't even familiar with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's hard to extend your life span as they are tons of factors, out of your control, that affect it. However, you can try to simply live. Most likely, anything you engage in (including too much sport) that is supposed to help you live longer will ultimately shrink your lifetime. Just live. We are programmed to live as long as we want to (unless a car runs us over). The trick here is to not fight nature, not follow society, and definitely master the differences between "need" and "want".</comment>


Facts Do Not Persuade - <AUTHOR> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/09/03/wittgensteins-revenge/ <comment><USER2> I've read dozens of articles like this and my complaint is always the same: "Just because we can't know everything, doesn't mean we can't know anything."

Yes, maybe a buffalo stepped on the thermometer. But the temperature was SOMETHING and just because you don't trust your thermometer doesn't mean the temperature is unknowable.

And I found the glorification of free speech at the end troubling. Is free speech good? Yes. Is it the greatest good? Not at all. To say we shouldn't strive to know anything concretely because we might suppress free speech seems like sheer folly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ribbonfarm being weird as usual.

There's centuries of deliberation about what knowledge is, how we can obtain such knowledge and what its value is. Of course, the author ignores all of that and tries to "reinvent the wheel", badly.

Apart from the (true, but not very original) observations that a) you can easily mislead with decontextualised facts, b) trust is necessary in a world where you can't verify everything yourself and c) people are not necessarily persuaded by facts, the article doesn't seem to have much content. He also completely lost me when it seems he's trying to make a case for the existence of UFOs. In an article that describes the importance of trust, I find it a bit ironic that he's basically coming off as a crank.

But more importantly, this article has a decidedly anti-science vibe. And while it is important to be careful with science and understand its flaws and limitations, historically it has again and again shown to be the best tool for advancing our understanding of the world.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Objects traveling 5,000 miles per hour and making 90-degree turns without > slowing down have been recorded by radar that can only detect physical > objects.

Really? Got links to more info? It amuses me that the blogger voices concerns over pop scientists omitting context from their claims, and then fails to include context for his own.

<comment><USER5> I was a bit confused by that tangent. By the title of the article I was hoping for a bit of psychological insight on how people react to facts in certain conversations and then suddenly I'm asking "is the author trying to convince me aliens are flying space craft now?"

The rest was a bit of a ramble as well. The main tenets of the fact trust, context, and the third one seemed interesting though.

<comment><USER4> Yeah the philosophy is a bit cray. Trust and curation are the key words. Those were smart to point out. Curation is great. Folks only let those they respect most do curation for them. It's about the most esteemed role there is. It makes collective information processing scalable. Omitting details when filtering information through layers of humans is the point. Transparency enables good curators to address any concerns relating to that. For example, programming and mathematics have pretty much already invented the blockchain of facts the author is describing, with things like GNU Make or Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms. The latter is a great way to have more depth if you think normal arithmetic alone isn't factual enough. Some people even use math for theology with theorem provers like coq, but the conclusions they come to only really apply afaik if you believe in certain assumptions like the ability to divide good from non-good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this author is in fact correct that science isn't typically concerned with absolute, eternal truths but rather circumstantial truths or whatever hypothesis best maps onto available evidence.

One of the hallmarks of critical thinking is being able to move past black- and-white reasoning. Critical thinking entails comprehension of the ambiguity and gray area present within most debates. Any individual who feels as though there exist ideas which are irrefutable even in the face of many other similarly viable explanations is clearly not thinking rationally.

I'm sure radar has indeed recorded objects in the air going very fast and turning rapidly, but as mentioned in the article, there is likely additional context which has been omitted. Thus, I don't feel any need to fact check this individual, as there is no need to verify such a vague claim which lacks almost any context whatsoever. Hopefully both author and reader understand that claims made without context or citations are not meant to be interpreted as authoritative, definitive examples.

</comment><comment><USER7> I LOLed at the attempt to prove that facts do not persuade by linking to a bunch of psychology studies. And not one reference to Aristotle? However, the author's general thrust is correct, as anybody could tell you.</comment>


Man Spends 40 Years Building Giant Kinetic Carnival for Restaurant in Italy - <AUTHOR> http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/10/ai-pioppi-kinetic-carnival/

<comment><USER2> Must be fulfilling to build such things.</comment>


Stealth, Countermeasures, and ELINT, 1960-1975 - <AUTHOR> http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/DOC_0006122549.pdf <comment><USER2> The way to defeat stealth is instead of looking for the size of the object look at speed and trajectory. The B2 famously has the radar cross section of a honeybee. No problem. I would just build filtering software for my radar that said show me all the objects of any size (even Bee size) heading my way at over 300mph. I'm sure this has been done, and it's alluded to in book Skunkworks (good book btw).

<comment><USER3> Actually a better approach is to use longer wave radar, getting a reflection from the whole metal airframe as a conductive object rather than just bouncing waves off the surface. Apparently this technique has difficulties with clouds but was successful in shooting down an F117 in the Balkans.

<comment><USER4> Another way is bi-static radars. Stealth is generally designed to prevent returns from going back to the sender, with the downside that they get scattered in all other directions. Just setup a (silent and difficult to locate) receiving station(s) and give it a communication channel to the sender (to synchronized), then it will receive the emissions from the sender that bounce off stuff.

<comment><USER5> Another way of using bistatic radar is to look for holes. Pick a frequency band that has significant background noise and search for places where the background is consistently lower than average. Essentially, invert the detection algorithm. Nice thing about this approach is it can be done non- cooperatively; that is, the EM sources do not need to be controlled by whomever is running the receiver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This story is 'revised'. The original idea of the OXCART was to fly so fast that it would not be in one place long enough to rise above background noise on the radar screen. Think of those CRT radar screens and the 'mark' corresponding to the plane not being a big green dot, but more something that just would not excite the phosphor and therefore not show.

The OXCART contract was won by Lockheed because Convair had little experience of black projects plus Lockheed delivered the U2 under time and under budget. The OXCART A12 was the 12th revision, sure it might have evolved to have stealth as we know it, however, the original idea really was just to be too quick to register on the phosphor.

The big problem as far as radar was concerned was the gigantic plume of exhaust out the back. They tried putting stuff in that to hide it from the radar, however there were problems with that too.

Anyway, my point, this is revised history.

<comment><USER7> > This story is 'revised'. >> Anyway, my point, this is revised history.

This person was a radar / signal intelligence geek who's only work on the OXCART project seems to be related to electronic jamming and determining the radar capabilities of the then USSR.

So this entire set of anecdotes are from their perspective. They never claimed to be in the initial OXCART development group nor did they make claims as to what OXCART was design to or not to do. All they said was that based on their data the OXCART would have been trackable on the USSR's radar defence systems.

That isn't revising history in any meaningful way. However you should take into account that the scope of the anecdote is just a single person's perspective working in a single field. They also allude to the recently launched satellites in addition to the U2's shootdown being contributors to use the Blackbird was never really used over the USSR.

Frankly your concept that the whole basis for the OXCART project was that CRT' refresh rate was too low to literally draw the aircraft bizarre. First time I've heard that and Google has no clue about it either ("OXCART CRT" "blackbird crt" no relevant results). Plus CRT displays have very high refresh rates (around 89 Hz), so there's that too...

<comment><USER6> Look at it another way: imagine a camera with a certain shutter speed taking a picture of a cat. If the cat is asleep in the same place, centre frame, then the picture will almost certainly be of the cat.

Should the cat wish to not be photographed then the cat could go into one of those poses used when hunting prey - ears flattened, tail down etc. The cat will present a smaller cross-sectional area and not be seen as easily. Who knows, could be mistaken for 'a bumblebee'. This is 'cat stealth' \- see 'ninja cat'.

Alternatively, the cat could just leap past the camera at phenomenal speed. Most of the exposure will be of the background however there could be some light blurring where the cat has leapt across the frame of the picture. On initial inspection a cat would not be seen, just some shadowy/tabby artefacts.

If the camera was one of those early CMOS sensor things and the light levels were low then the shadowy/tabby artefacts might not make it past the background noise that came with those sensors.

In this way a sufficiently fast cat could hide in plain sight from a camera that had an early CMOS sensor. To make extra sure that the cat was 'invisible' the cat could be instructed to flatten its ears as it rushed through the frame.

Clearly I wasn't around in the late 1950's, however, I think my analogy describes how 'early stealth' worked by just being very quick. You should get the concept now.

In the military/intel or even normal companies knowledge and information isn't globally shared so maybe the author didn't know some aspects of the project or those details were not pertinent to what they were doing. I should have cited sources but cat analogies are more fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> don't forget that even if stealth is worthless when considering radars, it can still greatly reduce the distance that radars can detect stealthier aircrafts.

<comment><USER5> The second clause of your statement contradicts the first.

There is a common misconception that stealth is about making things "invisible" to radar. It is really about reducing the radar signature of a vehicle as much as possible when viewed from a conventional, colocated transmitter/receiver type radar. That includes reducing the detection range or making it harder for fire control radars to get and maintain a lock. One end of this spectrum is making the aircraft undetectable by some or all radars, but stealth goes well beyond that.</comment></comment>


Germany's unheralded computer inventor - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sites.post-gazette.com/index.php/news/techman/33515-techmangermanys-unheralded-computer <comment><USER3> I'm not sure I'd call him "unheralded". When I saw that description, I thought, "huh, there's someone other than Zuse I should know about?", but then the article _was_ about Zuse.

I mean sure, he's not Turing- or Von-Neumann-level famous, but in both those cases their fame largely stems from their involvement in a number of other things as well (Turing's early AI writing and theoretical models of computing, and Von Neumann's role in the Manhattan Project and game theory). Zuse is pretty famous in comparison to the other computer-builders of the era, e.g. John Mauchly or John Vincent Atanasoff.

<comment><USER4> He is also pretty well known in Germany. That (I guess you could call it local fame) seems about appropriate for what he did. He is no Turing, after all.

The new computer science and automation building of my university in Germany (now the second largest building on the campus) was named after Zuse. I would say that's quite the honor and recognition, especially considering the other buildings are named after Humboldt, Newton (mechanical engineering), Kirchhoff (electrical engineering), Helmholtz, Leibniz (library), Röntgen, Curie and Faraday.

<comment><USER5> A nice permanent exhibit in the engineering and technology museum in Berlin testifies to him being well known in Germany.

<comment><USER6> This was just a small part of that exhibit that I photographed in the Deutsches Technikmuseum: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/87883903@N00/4279979012/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra There's also a Soviet unheralded hero: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Alexeyevich_Lebedev>

He acted a bit later, but the same pattern: making his first computer in an estate using commodity hardware, then producing a quite few interesting machines some of which were the best in continental Europe at the time.

Sadly, it seems that all european computers are essentially evolutionary dead ends - so nobody remembers them and their creators.

</comment><comment><USER7> The article is kind of incomplete and concentrating more on the circumstances (nazis, war, ..) then his actual inventions.

\- He invented the first turing complete computer the Z3 which was finished in 1941, the Z4 (which was based on the Z3 was the first commercial computer)

\- He is also responsible for the first high level computing language - Planalkül

The wikipedia article on him has some better information: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse>

<comment><USER8> One of the more fascinating things about the history of computing is vacuum tubes where first commercially available in 1920 and several computing devices where so quickly built from them. When you look at how unstable early vacuum tubes actually where the gap where a computer was possible and when the first one was built was fairly small.

<comment><USER9> they are quite reliable if you don't turn them off which is what colossus did

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Absolutely the best material on Konrad Zuse's inventions can be found in archive.org captures. It's written by his son Prof. Horst Zuse:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20040213064006/http://www.epemag....](http://web.archive.org/web/20040213064006/http://www.epemag.com/zuse/)

<comment><USER11> Hi,

thanks so much for linking this. I have always been a fan of the history of computing (e.g., Moshe Vardi mentioned Charles Peirce in a talk once <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce>, and I have seen a reconstruction of one of Leibniz' calculators [[http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Leibnitzrech...](http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Leibnitzrechenmaschine.jpg&filetimestamp=20060706122903\])), but I did _not_ know that Konrad Zuse got a patent on the concept of pipelining in 1949. (AFAIR Hennesy and Pattern's "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" cites Tomasulo's algorithm from 1967)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When Merkel gave a speech at Stanford mentioning Zuse invented the computer, she got laughed at.

[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/reporters-notebook- merkel-o...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/reporters-notebook-merkel-on- german-engineering-2010-04-16)

</comment><comment><USER13> When I was in undergrad my university offered an unusual course: "The History of Computing". The prof wrote the text for the course, but it was actually a pretty good book, unlike many prof written texts.

[http://www.amazon.com/History-Computing-Technology-2nd- Editi...](http://www.amazon.com/History-Computing-Technology-2nd- Edition/dp/0818677392/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332105922&sr=1-10)

Zuse was given his due in this book (and the course).

A recommended read if you're interested in the foundations of computing. It's oriented much more towards early computation devices than the PC era. If you want the story of Jobs, look elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER14> See also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl> and [http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/Plankalkuel/Plankalk...](http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/Plankalkuel/Plankalkuel- Report/Plankalkuel-Report.htm) for information on Plankalkül, an imperative programming language by Zuse, which, however, never was implemented on his computers.

</comment><comment><USER15> Konrad really is an unsung hero. Had he been able to publish his work and interact with others in the field I don't doubt we would all know his name.

<comment> excuse-me Although paradoxically, if circumstances had been such that he could - <USER2> wouldn't have been as much demand to invent computers !

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> He is also sometimes credited with writing the first chess programm, in his own language, Plankalkül. cf [http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/Plankalkuel/Chess/ch...](http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/Plankalkuel/Chess/chess.htm)

</comment><comment><USER17> If you plan to write a blog post about other German computer/electronics pioneers, why not pick Heinz Nixdorf:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Nixdorf>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixdorf_Computer_AG>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqGZBUs7wP4>

</comment><comment><USER18> I once made pictures in the Computer museum in Berlin of the Zuse first computers. [http://thenextcorner.com/2008/01/zuse-computer- tentoonstelli...](http://thenextcorner.com/2008/01/zuse-computer- tentoonstelling/) Sorry, site is in Dutch!

</comment><comment><USER12> The Computer History Museum (Shoreline exit on Hwy 101) has one of his boards. It used electro-mechanical relays instead of vacuum tubes.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've always wanted to build a replica of the Z1

[http://www.pcgameshardware.com/screenshots/original/2008/12/...](http://www.pcgameshardware.com/screenshots/original/2008/12/zusez1.jpg)

It was a mechanical, binary computer. It ran at 1 Hz, had 1400 bits of memory, and it could add, subtract, multiply and divide. It even had a control unit which means it could run real computer programs. A 22 bit floating point multiply took 10 clock cycles.

And all of that in a completely mechanical system!</comment>


Dismantled Tesla Model S found in truck - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2017/05/31/tesla-model-s-stolen-parts/ <comment><USER2> > always-on advanced GPS tracking feature

No thank you - oh my god, no thank you _very much_.

It's a real shame that Tesla has wedded their beautiful drivetrain engineering to such a creepy, cell-phone-esque system of automatic software updates and GPS tracking and giant touchscreens; I'd like to like their cars, but I want absolutely none of that.

<comment><USER3> Do you carry your smartphone with you in your car?

<comment><USER4> Is having a smartphone mandatory now?

<comment><USER3> Well put; I suppose I should have referred to "a" smartphone rather than implied ownership of a smartphone. On the other hand, the smartphone installed base is on the order of 3.4B devices, so I'd ask that you give me the benefit of the doubt for assuming that an HN reader owns a smartphone.

<comment><USER4> I don't, and for precisely those reasons. Actually I do own them for testing and dev purposes but never ever carry them with me, my regular phone is an oldie from just before the smartphone hit. I fear the day that it will die.

<comment><USER3> Honestly, I'm jealous. While I find them convenient, I also find them troubling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > it's not clear how the vehicle was stolen in the first place.

> For owners, it's important to make sure that your Tesla account is secured > with a strong password and to keep your key fobs in a secure location at a > safe distance from the vehicle when parked.

The insinuation here is that owners had weak passwords and/or kept their keys in an insecure location at an unsafe distance from the vehicle. Another explanation could be that hacker-thieves found a way to access Tesla's without keys and/or passwords.

<comment><USER6> What is the range of the key fob, and does Tesla warn customers to keep keys far away from the car (not in rooms adjacent to the garage, for example)?

I have a friend who bought a late-model BMW and accidentally discovered that her keyless ignition is also fobless — if unlocked, her car will start even if the key fob is miles away. Not an easily discoverable bug, since she typically has her key with her when she approaches her car.

<comment><USER7> All keyless gobs have the same problem, a thief with a repeater can extend the signal range and steal your car while you are at dinner, even if blocks away.

<comment><USER8> Could you build a portable faraday cage of sorts to carry in your pocket that effectively reduces the range to zero when the fob resides inside it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would imagine the easiest way to steal a Tesla is to create a make-shift faraday cage in a truck bed and then disconnect the power.

<comment><USER10> I was about to say that is a lot of effort.. but for a 100k car it would be worth it.

What do they do about software updates though? They would probably have to break the firmware to if they still want any updates.

<comment><USER11> I wonder how long until someone "jailbreaks" Teslas.

<comment><USER12> If Tesla remains as controlling over the Model 3 as they are over the Model S, you'll see a HECK of a lot more "jailbreaking", reverse engineering, and third party knock-off parts. A big reason Tesla has likely been successful so far controlling so much of the market around the Tesla is the high price: People who have them can afford Tesla's services and will be averse to risking the car with unsupported work, and there aren't all that many of them out there (comparatively) to begin with.

With the Model 3 hitting a much wider consumer market, you'll see a lot more interest in ways to get around Tesla.

I am actually expecting you may also see more lawsuits regarding things like software activation requirements vs. holding the title to the car and such. Tesla treats these cars like they're still Tesla's property, and if anything I'm shocked it hasn't been tested in court more already.

<comment><USER13> There's been a big legal battle between John Deere tractors and farmers who want to fix them. I haven't been paying close attention to that case, but it seems like a very similar situation.

<comment><USER4> Big difference between business operators and private individuals consuming goods.

Besides there being many more of the latter they also have special legal aspects in the form of all kinds of consumer protections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I know someone who had their Tesla stolen in Belgium, never to be recovered. The car just vanished from the system, no connection to the network and the last known location was in front of their house.

I always wondered what thieves do with these vehicles though.

<comment><USER15> Probably a chop shop. Tesla parts are hard to get, they probably have decent resale value.

<comment><USER16> Can you get a Tesla serviced anywhere other than a Tesla dealership? Does anyone do this? Seems like it's going to be difficult to consistently sell $100k of Tesla parts for even 10% of their value.

<comment><USER12> Tesla forbids any unauthorized party from even seeing a repair manual for the car, except where they're legally forced to by "right to repair" laws. (In those jurisdictions, they charge a high price for time-limited access.)

But, bear in mind, the difficulty in getting access to Tesla service or parts outside of the official methods is what makes the parts so valuable: There's almost none on the market to begin with. Those who need them (for whatever reason) will have to pay big to get them, since competition isn't driving down the prices. And most Tesla owners can obviously afford it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> GPS and GSM signals can be easily jammed, and such devices don't cost much in China.</comment>