Ask YC: Will there really always be room for more successful web startups? - <AUTHOR>

I've heard the argument (also made by PG) that there will always be room for more successful web startups. Do you think it's true?
Sometimes I get the feeling that the internet has gotten too crowded. Every idea I think of, someone else has done.
But it's more than that. I also sometimes think that mainstream users have a finite number of needs that web applications can satisfy. I think of web applications are like kitchen appliances. Once you have the essentials -- a microwave, a fridge, an oven, a toaster, a coffee maker, and a blender -- new appliances you get have decreasing marginal utility. Sure, you can always get new ones for increasingly esoteric needs, but they are just not as useful as the important ones that almost everyone has.
I read about all the new startups on TechCrunch and YC news, and although I think many of them are cool, I don't use 99% of them. Why? Because although they may solve some problem I may or may not have, incorporating them into my life introduces mental overhead. It's like PG's essay about stuff. Having less stuff keeps your head clear. So does using fewer webapps. I'd rather use 5-10 really useful apps than 40-50 marginally useful ones. Although the total utility I can get from the marginally useful apps is greater than zero, this utility doesn't outweigh the disadvantage of having to think about them. They solve some problem, but they also add (virtual) clutter to my life. As a user (which is different from an entrepreneur in the same field) I'd rather not think about them.
Will there really be the next big search engine or the next big social networking site? (By big I mean bigger than the entrenched players.) I'm not convinced. Some industries mature and their barriers to entry become too high. (How many new car companies have been started in the last couple of decades? Not many.) Furthermore, after every adoption of a new product, users have a smaller reason to switch. I don't care if ask.com is sometimes better than Google or if some social networking site is slighly less creepy than Facebook. I still use Facebook and Google. They are wired too deep in my cortex. Trying out a competing product just isn't worth the work.
I'm sure there will always be technology startups. And there will always be new marginally successful webapps that cater to small niches (I just thought of one: a hot-or-not for pets app that runs on the iPhone! Maybe that's my ticket to riches!) But will there always be the next world-changing web startup?
What do you think? <comment><USER2> People's wants seem unlimited, at least in the near term. If you accept that, the only limitation on the number of web startups is how many needs can be satisfied by software. (The web is just the current default software platform.) And since everything is turning into software nowadays, it seems likely that the infinite demand for new stuff translates into an infinite demand for new software.

<comment><USER3> What do you mean by "everything is turning into software"?

Also, while I agree that there's effectively infinite demand for new _software_ (I can't imagine a day where all software companies and open source projects stop writing code), it doesn't mean that there's infinite room for new software _businessnes_ \-- especially the ones that start with a few hackers in an apartment cranking out a webapp in 2-4 months.

<comment><USER4> _What do you mean by "everything is turning into software"?_

Can't answer directly for pg but I know my whole field (electrical engineering) has pretty much been converted to software. Musical instruments, medical diagnostics, anything that deals with information processing, which in this day and age, seems to be migrating to a software function.

But like I said, can't speak for pg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Every idea I think of, someone else has done._

Maybe your ideas aren't specific enough.

Take my own not-yet-launched project (<http://www.tarsnap.com>), for example: Online backups. Lots of people have done those, right? Mozy, Carbonite, iDrive... google can easily find dozens of them.

But that's just the "30 thousand feet" view of what I'm doing. I'm not just doing online backups -- I'm doing _secure_ online backups. Secure in the sense that I can't steal your data. Secure in the sense that the NSA can't steal your data.

Have other companies done online backup? Absolutely. Can anyone else reasonably describe what they're doing as "backups for the truly paranoid"? No -- that's something which nobody else has done.

<comment><USER6> That sounds a lot like <http://www.idrive.com/> or www.evault.com/ and or several other systems out there. Building a secure system is a hard problem and even if you build the best system few people can judge how well your doing. You could market it as "The only 4096 bit system" but you end up with a tiny market segment.

I would suggest starting with a secure chat system with good logging options. That way you can reasonably target teenagers, bankers and the truly paranoid. And you don't need a huge backup infrastructure or a 50$ / year price tag to compete.

<comment><USER5> _That sounds a lot like<http://www.idrive.com/> or www.evault.com/ and or several other systems out there._

As I said, lots of people are doing online backups. Nobody else is doing secure online backups.

 _Building a secure system is a hard problem_

Exactly -- that's why it's something which I can do but nobody else has done yet.

 _and [...] few people can judge how well your (sic) doing_

Fortunately, with a doctorate in Computer Science, as the FreeBSD Security Officer, and as "that guy who found a security flaw in Intel processors a few years ago", I'm ideally positioned to show people what I'm doing right -- and what everyone else is doing wrong.

Is secure online backups a smaller market? Absolutely -- most people don't care about security. That's the price you pay for entering an arena where there are many established companies: The best strategy is to carve off a smaller part of the arena rather than trying to fight for the complete arena.

<comment><USER6> I am not talking about the size of the market, just pointing out there are already several companies that _seem_ to do this. To be more clear: looking at idrives's home page's table iDrive, Mozy, and Carbonite all do "Security: Encryption on transfer, Encryption on storage" now I don't think these systems are going to be NSA level security but you now have to convince people you do security better than the existing players which tends to be hard.

In the end security is more about trust than the algorithm. I need to trust you not to log the password somewhere etc. Established players gain some trust because they have other things on their mind than your data and presumably they want to protect their reputation, so IMO the new guy is bester off focusing on something more tangible so you get a chance to build your reputation.

Which is why I suggest a free App that demonstrates you do security. You could build that relationship of trust and drum up some somewhat _free_ press around how subversive your application was and turn that into a strong market.

PS: Good luck with your startup. I think you can make it work, but after considering the same idea and talking to people about what they trust I moved on to other areas .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Each individual mainstream user might have a finite number of needs, but the number of needs of users in aggregate is effectively infinite. I agree that I'd rather use 5-10 great apps than 40-50 marginally useful apps, but why do you think the 5-10 apps you find most useful would be the same 5-10 apps someone else does? No one webapp has to appeal to the entire market to be successful, it just has to appeal to enough users to provide an income to cover its costs.

This reminds me of Joel Spolsky's take on the 80/20 bloatware myth. The idea being that bloated programs like Word are bad because 80% of the users only use 20% of the features. But they don't all use the same 20% is the problem, so you can't just remove 80% of the features without pissing off a sizable group of people. I think the same applies to web apps. Nobody needs every one of them, but the right set of web apps for any given person probably isn't identical to anyone else's.

<comment><USER8> Also - the cost of servicing that marginal niche is now so low that it's economically feasible to build a solution just for them. To use the kitchen example, most people want gas & electric ranges, but a few might want eco- friendly solar-powered cookware. This product doesn't exist (to my knowledge), but it's because the cost of designing, tooling up, and manufacturing it is above what people are willing to pay. In software, a niche solution could probably be coded up by just a couple programmers. It'd have more economic value than the code they wouldn't produce at their day jobs, so it becomes economically feasible.

<comment><USER9> Actually, it's probably because no one knows how big that market was. If you produced market evidence that there were 1 million people that would buy a solar powered stove in the next year, there would be product rolling off assembly lines in less than 6 months.

Read Seth Godin's book Permission Marketing if you want to learn about market creation and demand-driven design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Viewing the web as a kitchen is quite limiting. There are thousands of products in your house...many are for entertainment (TV, DVDs, CDs, ipod, etc.), some are for news and education (TV, radio, magazines, newspaper), some are for communication (phone, mailbox), and on and on...Software and web applications can be involved in all of those things in one way or another.

I don't think I'm going out on a limb if I say that I think changes will come much more rapidly in the future than they have in the past. So, while the telephone has been around for over 100 years, I don't think Skype will last out the next seven years. Facebook will be lucky if it gets five years at the top (if it ever bests MySpace and makes it to the top). I don't think a better "social network" will dethrone Facebook...I think a whole other class of product will take its place (actually a dozen or more classes of products, probably, since people do so many different things with Facebook). Your job, as a technology innovator is to spot those trends and build the products that enable them.

And keep in mind that little web applications aren't the only problem worth solving. There's a lot of software that runs inside the firewall at businesses --and a lot of it is moving to web-based variants. There are many worlds to change, not just the world Facebook is addressing.

That said, there aren't many opportunities to make something as big and world- altering as Google. There's only so many problems on the web that touch every single human being that uses the web (that's a big customer-base). Search is actually the only one I can think of. Email, perhaps.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't think there is demand for another search engine that is 10% better than Google. Whatever comes along that can challenge Google, isn't going to be a "search engine" in a traditional sense of the word. Because Google mostly works and works pretty well. To displace Google from it's position in the search engine market, one needs to redefine the problem. Or be 10 times better than the leader.

I can think of many ways to make things 10% better, but that's just the next set of features these guys need to implement. I'm not convinced that is a business.

When Google started to work, it was definitely 10 times better than the competition, or had redefined it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes there will always be room for new applications (web or not) or kitchen appliances for that matter.

Don't make me think about my kitchen! it's awful! I can't seem to keep it clean and the traditional solution to this problem, marriage, has apparently run its course. My girlfriend is a software geek as well and hates to clean the kitchen (and vacuuming) even more than I do. So where is that long promised robot revolution? Bring it on!

And where is that website that lets me auction my food orders, to be delivered by the best bidder? And knowing about the food I eat, the site could also tell me which nutrients I'm supposed to consume more of and which ready meals contain them, excluding the ones I hate.

There are so many old unsolved problems. Anonymous hassle free micropayments for instance...

<comment><USER13> > Anonymous hassle free micropayments for instance...

Someone please make this, much lighterweight than PayPal, and saturate the market with it. Add a prepaid micropayment card anyone can buy at a store with cash.

This is one of the things that I have great interest in using (both as a user and as a client), but not so interested in building and running it myself! :-/

<comment><USER12> The prepaid card is a good idea. And I wonder whether it is always necessary to authorise individual payments. For something like newspaper articles, payments could be pooled and transferred en bloc via some kind clearing mechanism that doesn't require me to have an account with every magazine or website I read. The seller wouldn't even know who was paying and the clearing institution wouldn't know what exactly is being paid for.

The reason why nobody does it that way is probably that it's difficult to garantee settlement and the credit risk involved. But do we really need such a garantee in cases where no physical goods are delivered? Maybe it's enough if it works in 90 % of all cases. That's more than the rate of legally acquired software licenses today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the Web may be less like the kitchen, and more like television. Shows come and go every year, so there will always be a need for new ones.

In an attention economy you're fighting for eyeballs. And there's a smaller group that's always looking for what's new and different. If you want to pursue this demographic, and the larger, lagging crowd behind them, then you have a chance at capturing attention.

I share many of your concerns, and personally use very few Web applications-- basically maps and mail. I often ask the same question: what can I build?

Perhaps it's better to choose a pre-existing category/market and try to win through better execution. I also think success is more likely when building software as a product instead of a free service.

</comment><comment><USER15> "Every idea I think of, someone else has done."

Make a list of 10 absolutely fabulous web products that you love. Now draw a line through all of them that came to market as the first mover. I'll bet you don't draw a single line.

As long as businesses want more money and want to save more time, there is always room for b2b products that can demonstrate good ROI.

On the consumer side, there's certainly plenty of room. I just read that Meebo is reaching 30 million people per month. Twitter is functionally brand new and kicking ass.

The good news is that most consumer sites transition from a "providing value" stance (in the early days) to an "extracting value" stance (in the later days). Later stage consumer sites add more advertising, do more biz dev deals, and overall muddy up their value prop. Meanwhile, the next round of consumer startups leap into the fray with a nimble team, the next rev of web technologies, and a desire to provide value and build something that's better than the big guys. Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook... They are/were all on the same road.

</comment><comment><USER16> Whenever I think this way I remember the story of Newton's students complaining that he'd already discovered everything.

</comment><comment><USER17> Well it is not easy to penetrate established markets. Even Google will have trouble drawing away traffic from Naver in South Korea. One thing that I am experimenting with is porting popular web-apps in the developed world to the developing world and that has been working well for me so far.

<comment><USER9> Me too, that sounds awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Always is too big a word. Perhaps in 50 years we will all have plugs into our brains, and we will just KNOW things - we don't have to read stuff anymore, we are just connected to the information. No more need for web applications, so no, I would not say that there will always be web applications, although there might be.

Will there always be new opportunities? Of course. At the moment, there are also still lots of opportunities for web applications.

<comment><USER19> The brain plug invention would only increase the need for automated information processing.

<comment><USER18> Of course, but I would not call it "Web application" anymore. Perhaps brain application?

<comment><USER13> "Aw, man... BrainBook is down again..."

<comment><USER20> As long as Wikipedia is still working. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also, don't just limit your thinking to consumers. Consumers might need the next huge improvement to consider switching. Something to replace Google would probably need to give you a well researched and balanced report on your query, as opposed to just a fairly accurate link to something someone said somewhere. That's a HUGE leap.

Businesses on the other hand (rational ones anyway) will buy anything that exceeds a certain ROI, provided it meets certain requirements. There are so many ways to do this, but they aren't technologically sexy in the way consumer startups are. For instance, find a way to improve measuring their ROI! Then they're not guessing, you can point to exactly how much money they'll make/save. Improve something by 15%, then multiply that savings times the thousands of corporate users for one buyer. Viola, an upgrade license. Joel Spolsky is a master of this: see <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html> There will always be more of a market for things like this.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think that yo have replied yourself, 20 years ago there were not microwave ovens!

On the XIX century people believed that everything has been invented.

Why the net should be different? It is still on a very early stage, we have only seen what it can provide. I think that there is plenty of room for new web startups!

<comment><USER13> > I think that yo have replied yourself, 20 years ago there were not microwave > ovens!

They didn't have microwave ovens in 1987 ?!

"20 years ago" is not a fixed date ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> One of the basic problems with this whole discussion, is that most are thinking like Americans: that everywhere in the world is like where we are now.

If you go to any lesser-developed countries they are not entrenched in "google" or "facebook" or anything for that matter because they don't have computers --but they do have mobile phones.

Everybody's talking about China & India, great. But what about the many nations on the African Continent? In five to ten years, countries like Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, etc. will be the new technological and economical hotbeds.

</comment><comment><USER23> Your measures in comparison are totally wrong.

Retail products are totally different than software as service which is free. Thus the barrier for the user to try new stuff on the internet is zero comparing to buying something.

Also, the barrier to create automobile technology it's obvious very high and discouraging. However, enough costly innovation is occuring from the existing companies. Hubrid cars are becoming reality. A model car from sketch to manufacturing to get in the roads is at least a 5 year effort. Compare that to developing an app in 2 months!

<comment><USER20> He argued that the mental cost constitute a barrier. A barrier of non-zero costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Get the kitchen analogy out of your brain. Kitchen needs are different from information needs. What information do people want to get? What information do people want to spread? That universe is a lot bigger than your kitchen.

Any time you encounter pain or desire (yours or somebody else's) that's information-related, you've stumbled upon the opportunity for a web and/or mobile startup. When you meet that need, people's demand for time online will grow to encompass what you've given them.

<comment><USER24> The Universe IS my kitchen.

<comment><USER13> > The Universe IS my kitchen.

As long as the kitchen isn't your Universe... :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "I'd rather use 5-10 really useful apps than 40-50 marginally useful ones."

You answered your own question. What this means is that if you are serious about your start-up, you should shoot for nothing less than being in the 5-10 "really useful" list.

It is not easy by any means and pg has said before that as more and more start-ups launch, the difference between great ones and average ones would become more apparent.

</comment><comment><USER26> The way I see it, there will always be something that takes us (the users) to the next level. Maybe you have all the racks and detergents, then you discover the dishwasher. Maybe some day we'll get an oven+fridge all in one. It might be hard to think about it but there is definitely room for growth. It might not be growing upwards, it might be sideways, or even abstract it to a different dimension.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wouldn't worry about doing things that have been done. I would worry about doing it better than what's already been done.

</comment><comment><USER28> For the last 100 hundred years there has been a constant introduction of new paper based magazines and newspapers. After the introduction of the web, that has changed and now the web is where most new media is introduced and will continue to be introduced.

</comment><comment><USER29> You've identified a very worthy area to explore that no one to my mind has solved in any definitive way. The problem of letting users get the value of having many apps with the overhead equivalent of using very few. It's a damn hard problem and there's a ton of value in solving it. Have at it!

</comment><comment><USER30> I tend to agree that while people want a lot of things in the world, we're just not wired to handle, say, interacting with 50 web applications for our needs. I think if you really studied it, people probably have 5-15 web apps they use on a regular basis, with maybe another 5-15 they use now-and-then. That's it.

I don't think this number is due to a lack of web applications to fit people's needs, but limitations of the wetware itself. This implies that there is a biological driver for web application consolidation. It also implies that whatever your app, you're already competing for "web app" time in the user's mind with some other site, even if it is completely unrelated. Futhermore, it implies that great non-consolidated apps actually cause some harm, assuming they take people away from other sites that are providing value to them.

Pure speculation on my part, of course. I just know that while I've seen a boatload of crazy-cool web applications, the number I use is fairly static -- I just shuffle some in and out every now and then.

Great question!

</comment><comment><USER31> "Always", no. For the foreseeable future, yes.

</comment><comment><USER32> Web applications, including both code and English sentences, have unlimited capability to express knowledge. They have universality.

There is no limit to our use for knowledge. No point at which things could never be improved again. No end to progress.</comment>


Bethesda installs a kernel mode driver for Doom Eternal Anti-cheat - <AUTHOR> https://blog.irdeto.com/2020/05/14/denuvo-anti-cheat-goes-live-a-message-to-doom-eternal-fans-and-gamers/ <comment><AUTHOR> Denuvo Anticheat is a new service separate from their anti-tamper obfuscation service that games have historically used to prevent piracy.

This comes on the tail of Riot's Valorant [0] and League of Legends both implementing kernel-level anticheat.

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/fzxdl7/anticheat_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/VALORANT/comments/fzxdl7/anticheat_starts_upon_computer_boot/fn6yqbe/)

[1] [https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-null- anti-...](https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-null-anti-cheat- kernel-driver/)</comment>


AI is going to kill seat-based SaaS models - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/18/ai-is-going-to-kill-seat-based-saas-models/ <comment><USER2> No. Just because per seat pricing might create the incentive to limit offering productivity enhancements, doesn't mean that incentive won't be dwarfed by competitive pressures.

And it doesn't matter what you want, customers want to pay in ways that are easy, predictable and make sense to them. Devs can do the math to predict compute costs with Amazon. But hitting a typical SaaS customer with a surprise large AI Calc bill will be a huge problem.

Per seat pricing tracks to value for most customers, is predictable and will likely continue to be the preference for a very long while.

<comment><USER3> Agreed on all points.

There are already plenty of per-seat licensing models that explicitly acknowledge bots - e.g. Perforce's "service users" (used for e.g. the heavy hitting CI build accounts that have more activity than dozens of engineers combined) which don't even count against seat limits. Per seat is just a way to charge roughly by organization size, which has some semi-linear correlation to SaaS usage, even if automation / "AI" adds a potentially large productivity or load multiplier.

Even if "AI" somehow breaks that assumption at some point, where one engineer can reasonably use 'infinite' resources, it's pretty easy to couch usage based pricing in the veneer of seat based pricing. Just apply rate limits per user - say, high enough to handle your 95th percentile customers - and offer "virtual seats" for the power users who want to increase their API rates, or require a higher tier "enterprise" accounts - just as existing SaaSes already do, complete with public documentation of some of their API limits right on the pricing page no less.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Passpwn – check passwords in pass against haveibeenpwned - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/antonlindstrom/passpwn <comment><USER2> This is cool, but doesn't seem to work properly.

I tried it with the passwords "password", "test", "123", "12345" and it didn't report any of them as compromised, which they _surely_ are.

EDIT: It's because it's including a trailing endline before hashing every password. This is a serious bug.

EDIT2: Latest version in the repo does work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh wow. Can't believe I missed that. Thank you so much! Will fix right away.

<comment><USER2> I've sent a pull request.

EDIT: Which you've now merged :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Quick note that gopass (which is 98% drop-in API compatible with pass) does this out of the box:

[https://github.com/justwatchcom/gopass/blob/master/docs/feat...](https://github.com/justwatchcom/gopass/blob/master/docs/features.md#check- passwords-against-leaked-passwords)

<comment><USER4> And it supports checking passwords against the offline dumps as well as the online API. So you can choose convenience or security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So I should check my passwords against some remote API I have no idea who controls to see if they've been compromised? Does this API always return true?

<comment><USER6> It sends the first 5 characters of the SHA-1 hash to the API, which seems reasonable. To be safe, you could check after rotating all your passwords, or I suppose you could download the raw data yourself to check directly.

And the API is controlled by Troy Hunt, not some rando.

<comment><USER7> Troy Hunt and people who work at Cloudflare. But yeah it depends on your threat model. If it's just a random website password than it's probably fine to check. If you're trying to keep secrets from the state then maybe not.

<comment><USER2> Regardless of your threat model, you can read the code and see how it works. It's short and easy to understand. It doesn't send anything more than the first 5 characters of the SHA1 hash.

<comment><USER7> Sure but that leaks some information about your password. SHA-1 hashes are significantly quicker to compute than a password hash (and rainbow tables exist making it even faster). So the first five characters can be used to narrow the search space.

This is however not likely a real problem unless your threat model includes targeted attacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was also inspired to write one of these:

[https://github.com/kevlar1818/is_my_password_pwned](https://github.com/kevlar1818/is_my_password_pwned)

I tried to incorporate Troy Hunt's advice based on the frequency of occurrences in the database.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're already using a password manager, shouldn't you be using different (random) passwords for every service anyway? What's the point then?

I guess it makes sense to use this if you've begun using a password manager without changing your old passwords. But if possible you should really be doing that instead.

Also, I still don't understand why Troy doesn't use a cryptographically secure hash function instead of SHA1. Say I send the (truncated) hash of one of my passwords to his service and it returns no match in his database. I then consider it secure because it's supposedly not leaked. But shouldn't I really _do_ consider it leaked because I've revealed an insecure hash of it to a third party? What's there to lose with using a secure hash function over SHA1? Surely the one-time cost of hashing the database of passwords is negligible?

<comment><USER10> Thanks to k-anonimity, you never send the full hash, only the first 20 bits.

<comment><USER9> Yes, I know. It's certainly better to leak only the first eigth of your password than all of it, but it's still not something you should do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've done a livestream recently showing the implementation of a similar program in Nim. It's a pretty good first-time project for anyone to try in a programming language they are learning.

Here is the video: [https://youtu.be/Di2O_lIPxb4](https://youtu.be/Di2O_lIPxb4)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's cool! Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's also an implementation as a pass extension: [https://github.com/benburwell/pass-audit](https://github.com/benburwell/pass- audit) (I'm not the author)

</comment><comment><USER13> Thanks for this!

In case anyone else likes ruby, someone posted a link to a ruby script that does similar checks the other day on HN.

[https://gist.github.com/schmich/aeaffac922271a11b70e9a79a5fe...](https://gist.github.com/schmich/aeaffac922271a11b70e9a79a5fee19c)

</comment><comment><USER14> Good work on this, finally a simple way to check if some of my passwords have been compromised ! :) Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER15> So i guess this does not work with any salted hashes

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, it doesn't work with salted hashes.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Alpha release of Write Daily, an app for "daily pages" and drafting - <AUTHOR>

The research on skill development says it's practice, not talent. Creativity experts agree that you have to put the work in to get results. You have to write a million words before you find your voice. Focusing on quantity produces better results than focusing on quality.
To manage that process for writers, I'm creating Write Daily:  http://www.writedailyapp.com
It's in alpha currently, just freshly released. It's only been tested in Chrome on OS X, so I'm sure it will break in other browsers -- but if you have Chrome I'd love for you to give it a whirl.
It's built with Rails, jQuery, Underscore.js, and Backbone.js. It's my first more-Javascript-than-back-end-code project, so the JS is quite disorganized at the moment -- that aside, Backbone+Rails is a great combination.
I'd love any feedback on the idea or the execution to date, and would be happy to answer any questions. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.writedailyapp.com></comment>


Show HN: Discurse – A discussion forum based on Reddit and 4chan - <AUTHOR> https://discurse.xyz/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN!

This is the first time I am showing my work here. I mostly built it to learn Laravel/PHP.

You can infer what discurse is probably from the title. Some features/peculiarities of discurse:

* Threads and comments can be posted anonymously.

* Posts can be categorized based on tags. Click on the tags to view posts under that tag.

* Posts and comments can be upvoted, using a registered account. The registered account only serves to track the posts/comments you have upvoted. The posts/comments posted while logged-in are not tied to your account, they are still anonymous.

* Post/Comment score is never visible to the end user.

* Only the last 7 days of posts are indexed on the frontpage. Posts older than 7 days can still be commented on, but they aren't accessible from the frontpage. (Might be disabled in the future.)

<comment><USER2> I like the ideas and the framework, but I can't stand the font. Still, no huge deal. If it had a threaded layout and auto-deleting threads it would be perfect.</comment></comment>


Handling the Nastiest Pathogens as a Day Job - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/12/04/502132637/what-its-like-to-handle-the-nastiest-pathogens-as-your-day-job <comment><AUTHOR> My wife and I moved to Hamilton, MT where that lab is located after searching around for the best mountain town to work remotely from.

It's a unique little town with amazing local mountains and rivers, some good restaurants and breweries and not too many tourists. The lab brings in educated young people including many climbers and skiers.

People joke that they government will let you live somewhere this awesome if you're willing to work on ebola.

In reality the lab was founded originally to study a tick born illness first observed in the area in the early 1900's and was eventually chosen as a BSL-4 site do in part to its isolated location and the fact that all access to the valley can be cut off by blocking a relatively few number of roads.

<comment><USER2> What are your days like? Sounds like an amazing job, and Montana is beautiful. Would you stay there, or do you plan to move back to somewhere busier later in life?

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly not much changed work wise except that instead of commuting i can go for a trail run or quick ski tour or head to the local bouldering area. I was already on a distributed team with most meetings done via video call and heavy use of issue trackers and chat for communication.

I lived in a big city for 10+ years and can't see going back. I've actually changed jobs once since we moved here and we plan to stay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've worked in a BSL-3 lab, not BSL-4. It's pretty similar. Almost identical danger to the individuals in the lab, but different level of danger to the surrounding community...

So if I screw up, I might die, but you'll be safe. In BSL-4, everyone might die. (At least that's roughly the reasoning behind the categorization of pathogens.)

> You can't do anything else other than what you're doing at that moment. It's > kind of a nice mode to be in while you're working. And it's very quiet. > Because you're on that air hose that blows air into your suit continuously, > you can't talk to anyone unless you're wearing a radio. So, you're in your > own little bubble doing your own thing.

This really is one of the best parts of the work. At certain times of the day / week, you literally had no way to contact anyone, and no one could contact you.

</comment><comment><USER4> "...working at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. The 450-person facility, which is part of the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is nestled in a town of 4,000. It's surrounded by mountains and national forests. Only one road passes through."

And suddenly Resident Evil comes in mind....

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx6GxmNqJ4I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx6GxmNqJ4I) 3:39 A man in the video removed the pressure hose from his hazmat suit before leaving his chair. Is that allowed ?

<comment><USER6> Yes, how do you think they would leave otherwise? You can see earlier in the video they walk into the facility without a hose attached.

FTA

"As you move through the lab to a different spot, you unhook, move to where you want to be and grab another air hose."

<comment><USER7> Is the assumption that there are no pathogens in the air, so the air hose is not contaminated?

What if there was a release, would it still be OK to switch air hoses, or would they only use internal air at that point?

<comment><USER8> There's a small HEPA filter on the suit itself, downstream of the air hose connection, that filters out whatever may be on the hose connection.

You can go without a connection for several minutes easily.

The article also unusually describes "thinking about keeping the suit under positive pressure." The vents in the suit have one-way valves, so it really isn't something you need to think about.

(-occasional researcher in a BSL4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds unimaginably scary. Yet folks work in foundaries; climb telephone poles all day; cut down trees; fight forest fires; wash windows on the 100th floor. Dead is dead I guess, and you can get used to anything.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how many pathogens may be climbing the scale of threat level now that many antibiotics do not work on them.</comment>


Intel to Release Discrete Graphics Card in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-discrete-gpu-2020-raja,37289.html <comment><USER2> I remember the first time Intel tried this, in 1998, when they introduced the i740 AGP card. [1][2] The data sheet is still out there if you know where to look. [3] It made everyone in the industry from S3, Matrox, ATI, Nvidia and 3dfx all tremble. In the end, it flopped.

[1] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/202/3](https://www.anandtech.com/show/202/3)

[2] [https://assets.hardwarezone.com/2009/reviews/video/v2740tv/v...](https://assets.hardwarezone.com/2009/reviews/video/v2740tv/v2740tv.htm)

[3] [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&ved=0ahUKEwj-4IXHyc_bAhXmNJoKHc92DUkQFghLMAU&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vgamuseum.info%2Findex.php%2Fcpu%2Fitem%2Fdownload%2F924_eea0c29729fc2e16b2514e590d74bb72&usg=AOvVaw3jMEj2kfchzWH4YV0sR8Vo)

<comment><USER3> I had an i740 and it was OK. It ran games from the era without complaint: [https://youtu.be/x8sZ3kazUaU](https://youtu.be/x8sZ3kazUaU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was one of their previous attempts: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740)

I hope these GPUs will be far better documented and have very good open-source drivers --- Intel has historically been much more open than ATI/AMD or nVidia at releasing public developer information.

<comment><USER5> Wow, I was an intern at Intel when they were making the i740. I would run the WHQL tests on sample boards / drivers and document which tests they failed. Part of the job was testing them with preview builds of the upcoming NT5.0. Tests involved playing a whole bunch of different games in 30 second stretches, changing screen resolution, and repeating. The full-timers also thought it was very important to stress test the hardware, which meant playing Action Quake 2 over lunch every day. They were quite good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There was an article written by a guy from the Larrabee team, where he explained how the projet wasn't a failure, in the sense that management wanted a processing beast and that's what they got, not a GPGPU.

But what's interesting is that in the article, he said that the Intel GFX dep. were "begging to let them build a GPGPU", and he might have been exagerating but he made it seem like all they needed was to slap some ROPs and texture units on that thing.

That makes me question wether we'll be seeing a brand new architecture, or an Intel HD unleashed edition with some GDDR5.

<comment><USER7> _There was an article written by a guy from the Larrabee team, where he explained how the projet wasn 't a failure, in the sense that management wanted a processing beast and that's what they got, not a GPGPU._

Great. Except the kind of parallel processing Larrabee was supposed to provide isn't something anyone wanted.

It's a half-pregnant architecture. Not parallel enough to compete with GPUs, not enough single thread performance to compete with Intel's own CPUs.

<comment><USER8> As someone who was doing enormous amounts of CPU-bound raytracing at the time, I wanted it. But quite honestly the product sounds absolutely incredible even without workloads like that - to read the article, it worked perfectly well as a graphics card, with the added bonus that 1) the graphics code was in software, meaning you could arbitrarily upgrade the graphics model to support later software, and 2) the system _also_ ran general purpose loads, simultaneously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am wondering if GPU design are basically approaching the end and limited by smaller node and bandwidth. We don't see better performance per die / transistors any more . And hasn't been so for many years. The gain seems to be small.

Given Intel has had the lead in transistor density for years, and will continue to do so for at least a few more years, I wonder why Intel hasn't jump into this earlier.

The largest obstacle in GPU is actually the software and driver support. Especially in gaming. Middleware Engines has made this 10x easier. but it is still a fairly hard problem.

I wish they would call their new silicon as AGP; Advanced Graphics Processor. :P

</comment><comment><USER10> This will be great for everyone. About time theres some more competition.

</comment><comment><USER11> Call me a conspiracist but Intel strategically are roadmapping an exit of the IGP market? Perhaps a new focus on high performance OpenCL computing, if the returns on low-power IGP are diminished, viz:

(1) The Vega partnership with AMD (2) thunderbolt eGPUs (3) Apple PowerVR-less in A1x chips (4) Adreno on budget Win 10 devices.

Headless desktop motherboards, with Intel Inside laptops and NUCs utilizing Vega graphics would be my prediction.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really hope they don't do weird market segmentation stuff with their virtual gpu support. They've got the best support for doing that with qemu/kvm currently. Amds sr-iov support exists but the hardware support isn't very widespread still. No idea about the Nvidia side of things.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hedging bets against the rise of ARM processors?

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm surprised they don't make lossy GPUs that have a few defects among the obscene amount of transistors. Consumer graphics you wouldn't know the difference.

<comment><USER15> Interesting idea.

I assume you mean that each GPU gets a variable number of execution units, as opposed to code randomly failing depending on the core it gets run on.

You've just helped me realize that AMD and Nvidia overproduce every GPU and kill off the execution cores that don't work to reach the final fixed number (and that all GPUs probably have a few tens to hundreds of working cores that will never ever be used).

Unfortunately I don't think such variation would work, from a market standpoint: actually exposing the lossiness rating would devalue you as a manufacturer, solely because of the fact that the media would pounce on it like crazy, and even though said media would simply report what's there without putting malice in anyone's mouth, the fuss would mean naive users would go "wat", collectively conclude "well the number is smaller", interpret that to mean "vague less-iness", and bam, people don't think your product is as good.

Despite the fact that, for all intents and purposes (read: not mining), you are 100% right.

<comment><USER16> > You've just helped me realize that AMD and Nvidia overproduce every GPU and > kill off the execution cores that don't work to reach the final fixed number > (and that all GPUs probably have a few tens to hundreds of working cores > that will never ever be used).

That's basically the idea, but it's usually scaled down. A single GPU generation is essentially one chip design. If a single die has a defect in a particular unit, its turned/soldered off at the factory and sold as a lower end chip. Repeat until you have a chip that works. If you have a die where everything works, clock it up as much as you can, and ask a king's ransom for it.

The best exception is the PS3 "Cell" CPU.[0] It had an extra 'sacrificial' processing core.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)#Commerci...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_\(microprocessor\)#Commercialization)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They must want some of the bitcoin market.

<comment><USER18> Graphics cards aren't used to mine bitcoin any more. Only chips that are made specifically for mining bitcoin (ASICs) are used in mining rigs.

<comment><USER17> When did that change? I still see it mentioned.

[https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/11/nvidia-ceo- cryptocurrency...](https://venturebeat.com/2018/02/11/nvidia-ceo- cryptocurrency-mining-drove-a-spike-in-graphics-chip-sales/)

[https://www.techradar.com/news/best-mining- gpu](https://www.techradar.com/news/best-mining-gpu)

<comment><USER7> According to [1] if you have 15c/kWh electricity you can make about $1/day with a 1080ti on _Bitcoin_. This of course doesn't cover the cost of the card for over a year.

Other coins are slightly more profitable though.

[1] [https://crypt0.zone/calculator/s/most-profitable-coin-to- min...](https://crypt0.zone/calculator/s/most-profitable-coin-to-mine-1080-ti- at-this-moment)

<comment><USER19> What these calculators never seem to account for is difficulty factor. That dollar-a-day today rapidly approaches zero as more and more people bring more equipment online. No way you're making a dollar a day 600 days from now.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I agree.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Airbus wants to test autonomous airborne cars by the end of 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/r-airbus-ceo-sees-flying-car-prototype-ready-by-end-of-year-2017-1/?r=AU&IR=T <comment><USER2> About time! [http://marklee.typepad.com/this_guy_falls_down/2003/10/where...](http://marklee.typepad.com/this_guy_falls_down/2003/10/wheres_my_flyin.html)</comment>


Brunch 0.7.0 (stitch, underscorejs 1.1.6, coffeescript 1.0.1, …) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brunch/brunch/issues/58

<comment><USER2> Can someone tell me how this is different from 37signals' cinco?

<comment><USER3> Don't know yet, but I'm looking forward to cinco's release.

From what we know, Cinco uses the following components:

Coffeescript Stitch Backbone Eco Zepto

see comment on <http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2761-launch-basecamp-mobile>

I believe Cinco has custom models, controllers, collections, views and other helpful tools. see <https://gist.github.com/854250>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> check out stitch by @sstephenson and @joshpeek <https://github.com/sstephenson/stitch>

</comment><comment><USER4> Anybody knows when the backbone version will be out?

<comment><USER3> If i remember correctly Jeremy Ashkenas wants to release a new version before jsconf.</comment></comment>


Delight.io (YC W10) shutting down Jan 31st - <AUTHOR> http://www.delight.io/blog

<comment><USER2> I know nothing about this space, but assumed there have to have been competitors. I'm sure UXRecord aren't the only ones. [http://www.uxrecorder.com/](http://www.uxrecorder.com/)

I am very surprised to see a YC W10 company with this lo-fi website, and poor marketing.

I appreciate that not everybody who goes through YC raises funds, but the video doesn't even have a voice-over describing what the viewer is seeing.

They may have had the best technology (as bartman says), but I wouldn't exactly call this 'A game' marketing material, and they had to have realised how important that is.

I hope we hear a post-mortem from the Delight.io crew.

On a side-note, I find it interesting that UXRecorder is a video capture company that doesn't have a video demo of their product.

<comment><USER3> There are actually more competitors [1] but none of them was the reason of our failure. As PG once said, startups don't die until founders quit.

And yes post-mortem is coming.

[1] Apps: [http://blog.hipmob.com/post/72458567103/6-mobile-sdks-for- in...](http://blog.hipmob.com/post/72458567103/6-mobile-sdks-for-in-app- screensharing-and) Games: [http://kamcord.com](http://kamcord.com) and [http://everyplay.com](http://everyplay.com)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> From all iOS screen recording startups delight.io still has some of the most impressive technology. This is especially true for OpenGL-based apps. Where other companies [1] require numerous code changes, Delight took the extra effort to hide all this from the user and only require one additional line of code.

I'm currently working on a usability testing startup myself in which we developed similar technology, and were constantly impressed by how easy Delight kept it for their users.

Good luck with your next project, Thomas, Chris and Bill.

[1] [https://developers.everyplay.com/doc/iOS-Everyplay- Tutorial](https://developers.everyplay.com/doc/iOS-Everyplay-Tutorial)

<comment><USER3> Thx for your kind words. Ease of integration was crucial to us and the team worked hard to deliver that. But as pedalpete noted, we lagged in other areas and eventually failed to succeed.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it was easy to integrate and use, was glad to have used it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm kind of surprised how unprofessional the blog's discourse is. Not something I would expect from a startup funding by pg. I suppose that's why it's terminated; great code is great but unless you can appeal to professionals, your product is going to sit in a quagmire.

The features page reeks of narrow technical view. Just because the users are devs, doesn't mean they immediately want to see all these API references, they want marketing material just like anyone else. [1] [http://www.delight.io/features](http://www.delight.io/features)

</comment><comment><USER6> Unskinned bootstrap, no wonder they didn't take off. Nothing reaks of amateur hour more than unskinned bootstrap.</comment>


Pragmatic, practical font sizing in CSS - <AUTHOR> http://csswizardry.com/2012/02/pragmatic-practical-font-sizing-in-css/

<comment><USER2> I wonder why people don't discuss posts on CSS but I am surely going to.

I am totally in for the alpha notations as I feel more comfortable with it. Plus its semantic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Classes are neither semantic or insemantic, merely sensible or insensible.

Realising that classes aren't subject to the same semantics as elements is a massive breakthrough for a front-end developer to make IMO.

These classes aren't 'semantic' because no classes are; semantics in the front-end development sense is when something (i.e. a machine) can glean meaning from something. No machines (browsers, search bots, assistive technologies etc) actually interpret classes, they merely match them. The only thing that gleans meaning from a class is a human, so you should write classes for people.

Thus, in a roundabout way, no classes are semantic, so we need to stop worrying about that.

Cheers for the comment!

<comment><USER2> You are very correct when you say that but I have been opposed a lot of times for trying to use classes like .small, .medium and .big for font sizes.

I understand that they take the meaning away from standard elements but I feel that classes give more meaning to an element.

p.small and p.big are all the way more logical than styling them according to the container that encloses them.

<comment><AUTHOR> > but I feel that classes give more meaning to an element

But they don't. Classes (and IDs) have nothing at all to do with semantics or meaning.

You can use whichever notation you wish (.big, .small, .alpha, .giga etc), I state as much at the end of the article, just remember that classes do not add meaning to (or subtract meaning from) an element :)

H

<comment><USER2> So classes mean only one thing to us. They are used "just for styling". We use them only for our convenience and that's it.

Pretty cool then :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


China slammed over programme that 'appoints' men to sleep with Uighur women - <AUTHOR> https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12295956 <comment><USER2> This is insane. Just this week I finished a novel called How We Disappeared, about the mass internment and rape of "comfort women" by the Japanese in WWII. So to read this news on the eve of 2020 is horrifying. And sadly, I don't think the Western powers have the spine or appetite to penalize China for these abuses. What the living fuck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Immediately reminds me of the Sliders S2E2 episode 'Love Gods' where the male main characters are effectively forced into basically being breeding stock because they just happen to be male. Note the article's "to 're-education' camps" and the episodes description "Bureau of Re-Population"

>Story: The Sliders arrive on a world where nearly all men have recently disappeared leaving a global population of 99% women. Quinn, Rembrandt, and Arturo are rare commodities, much sought-after by the romantically-starved female public, and Wade soon needs to rescue them from the "Bureau of Re- Population".

Also the episode Mother and Child:

> The Sliders discover a young woman and her eight-month-old infant trying to > escape across the countryside from a Kromagg breeder camp. Will they be able > to find a way to return her to her home? How far will she and her half- > Kromagg baby get amongst other war-torn and suspicious survivors? And what > dark, dangerous secrets do the other survivors harbour?

Looking back on Sliders I find that it really did take a good look at society of the time and often gave pretty plausible potential situations in the near future. Tackling things like ageism (The Young & the Relentless), racism (California Reich), sexual slavery (see above), population control (Luck of the Draw), climate change (Desert Storm), company store/debt slavery (Season's Greedings), forced organ donation/organ harvesting (The Breeder), mass media right-wing zealots (Prophets and Loss), tech addiction (Virtual Slide), mass drug addiction/epidemic (Just Say Yes), etc.

It's crazy that a lot of this stuff existed to some degree in the 1990's (always has really) but fast forward to now and some of the stuff is just... way too close to reality now for much larger numbers of people.</comment>


Ask HN: Open source web app html/css templates? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of any good open source web app html/css templates?
I've got a web app I want to put on GitHub but the template I'm currently using is free-as-in-beer, but not GPL/Creative-Commons licensed.
When I search Google, all I get is templates for business websites or blogs.
Something like http://www.gooeytemplates.com/templates/ would be great.
Thanks! <comment><USER3> There certainly is a lack of good free templates available. If you want to get in contact with me, I'll make a template to your specifications and release it GPL via github for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://pilu.github.com/web-app-theme/>

<comment><USER5> What's the licensing for this theme? Can one just use the source/theme?

Regards

<comment><USER6> It's under MIT License <https://github.com/pilu/web-app- theme/blob/master/LICENSE>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://github.com/tylerhall/yui-app-theme>

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://opensourcetemplates.org/>

</comment><comment><USER9> <http://www.lessframework.com>

Grid based css with inline queries for mobile/ipad/desktop.

</comment><comment><USER10> Open Source Web Design: <http://www.oswd.org/> But you have to look for yourself how good they are.

<comment><USER11> i have used templates from this site back in 2005. just checked - <USER2> templates. probably, this site is outdated.

<comment><USER12> Yup, the site hasn't been updated for at least 2 years now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm building a UI html/css framework-template thingy, but I'm not sure if it is "good" yet.

<http://www.longbeardstudios.com/>

</comment><comment><USER14> Thoughtbot has a project that might help a bit: <https://github.com/thoughtbot/flutie>

</comment><comment><USER15> <http://www.freecsstemplates.org/>

501 excellent templates on this website.</comment>


Apple's 16GB iPhone 6S is a serious strategic mistake - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2015/9/11/9311203/apple-16gb-iphone6s <comment><USER4> The author forgets to mention iCloud, which is apple's answer to needing more storage. This incetivises them to keep storage low and advocate for everything in the cloud - their cloud.

Their phones aren't expandable, and to the best of my knowledge the only computer they offer now that can be user-upgraded is the mac pro - <USER2> else requires configuration at purchase.

Battery life and storage are the two biggest problems I have with my iphone, and it looks like they made no effort to address this low-hanging fruit in their latest iteration. As if to say what it's at now is good enough - <USER3> it clearly is not. This is especially painful, because these are two areas that an android phone has more to offer.

I wouldn't call it a serious strategic mistake. I would call it disappointing and self serving; something apple has always been, but the shtick is getting old, especially considering their position in the industry.

</comment><comment><USER5> Earlier discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10204884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10204884) (5 comments)</comment>


The physics of making an iPad into an accurate aviation instrument - <AUTHOR> http://www.x-plane.com/adventures/60_so_thats_how_its_done.html <comment><AUTHOR> Yes, Austin Meyer (creator of X-Plane) is a bit of a loon, but if you can see past the ALL CAPS he does give some pretty good explanations of interesting aviation-related stuff.

More Austin Meyer goodness: <http://www.x-plane.com/x-world/austins_adventures/>

Building his own airplane (in incredible detail): <http://www.x-plane.com/hardware/evo/evo.html>

Incredible in-flight engine failure autoland device: <http://www.x-plane.com/hardware/evo/9_seeker/Seeker.html>

A rather convincing explanation of why very small jets just don't make sense: <http://www.x-plane.com/hardware/evo/0_nojet.html>

</comment><comment><USER2> OK. I'm no expert on this myself, but for someone who claims to have just figured out how an attitude indicator works, the author certainly doesn't explain it very well. I was left with the impression that the author is uncertain of the distinction between an accelerometer and a gyroscope. An accelerometer, like he says, can be likened to a hanging weight or pendulum. Accelerometers can measure the direction of gravity of a stationary object because the only force acting on the pendulum is acceleration due to gravity. However, as soon as the object is moved, other acceleration vectors are added to the already-present gravity vector.

(Imagine an accelerometer hanging from a rope. If you swing that rope in a circle around your head, the accelerometer will report that the force vector points to its bottom, away from your head, and not down to your feet as gravity alone would indicate.)

Which gets me to the OP. Because the article does not make a single mention of angular momentum (among other reasons), I would guess that the author doesn't understand how gyroscopes work. A gyroscope is essentially a spinning disc- shaped mass that resists change to its axis of rotation. If you built a housing that allowed it freedom of motion in three dimensions (called a gimbal (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal)>), it would remain on its original axis no matter how you tilted its enclosure (barring the inevitable energy loss due to friction, etc.)

So, in the case of an airplane, you would set the disc spinning on level ground. Then, while you're flying, any changes to your pitch or roll would be _around_ the gyroscope (which, remember, is allowed to move freely relative to the cabin). The gyroscope wants to preserve its angular momentum, so it will still be spinning on the same axis relative to level ground. Any difference between the gyro and the cabin therefore indicates the orientation of the plane relative to the ground.

You'd probably get a more concise explanation from the Wikipedia page on Gyroscopes (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyroscope>). The Wikipedia page on attitude indicators (the visual display for a cockpit gyro) is also quite coherent and less prone to rambling (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attitude_indicator>).

[EDIT: Toned down some grumpiness. I must be tired.]

<comment><USER3> Private pilot here. Mechanical attitude indicators don't need to be reset on level ground, when they first start spinning they're almost always tilted but once they spin up they level out on their own. Because they're driven by vacuum from the engine, sometimes they don't fully spin up and level out until the engine's being run up or takeoff.

I've always wondered how the attitude indicator self levels, and the OP's explanation sounds plausible. Next time I go flying I'll have to spend a few minutes in a constant rate turn to see if I can make the attitude indicator drift like he says it should.

Edit to add, here's a link to a youtube video showing the inner working of an AI, including the pendulous vanes, neat:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUSklh3MKtA>

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I kind of glossed over the vacuum aspect of the attitude indicator because I don't understand all its intricacies. The video pretty much confirms my understanding of how the gyro is kept spinning. The original author's description of air puffs sounds a lot like how the filtered air is ducted in to the housing and vented off in quadrants. I suspect that has more to do with maintaining the gyroscopes precession (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession>) than leveling the gyro in mid- flight.

I've heard that during prolonged banks or pitches, the AI can eventually find a different "level" than the true horizon. I'm trying to find more info into that phenomenon though.

In the mean time, I've found this article that seems to be talking about the same accuracy and drift issues as the original post, but explains the issues with more clarity and also includes sensor graphs and code samples: [http://myahrs.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/turning-errors- contin...](http://myahrs.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/turning-errors-continued/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Though this is the internet....

Far too many hyperbole. Much of this is straightforward when dealing with GPS data. And all the shortcomings of relying on gyro data can be found by searching for dead reckoning systems.

Don't get me wrong, I am very impressed with the x-plane application, but the writing style assumes a complete idiot.

<comment><USER5> I agree. Some paragraphs in I was thinking that the solution is to just calibrate it when it's on the ground, but was curious what solution he came up with...

> While on the ground, use the ACCELEROMETERS to see which way is up.

Oh. Yeah, I guess I should have seen that coming.

Still, the more people write this enthusiastically about a topic considered as "mundane" as this by an average "complete idiot", then I'm all for it.

Because despite the writing style, I could feel the excitement in this, and it was worth it for that alone.

And it has made me more excited about this topic.

<comment><USER6> He continues on, saying that [ground calibration] doesn't work for very long due to errors in the reported rates of change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Put another way, holy crap that was nearly impossible to read.

<comment><USER8> Man, that's exactly how I felt. I think we need a tl;dr for this -- it was incredibly frustrating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I couldn't read due to the much caps locks. After reading the comments, I thought I might add a few things.

As others have pointed out, outdoors you would use mostly GPS, and maybe a camera pointing to the ground to estimate the position. Accelerometer are more or less worthless when you want to estimate a translational position of a free flying rigid body. However, orientation can bes estimated very well with the sensors you find in a smartphone. At least outdoors.

The acceleration gives you the orientation of the earth gravity vector, assuming that translational acceleration can be neglected. This information corresponds to pitch and roll in an airplane. The iPad, and most smartphones, also have a magnetometer (digital compass) which gives you the direction of the earth magnetic field and which works reasonably well outdoors. You can combine these two 3D vectors with an iterative algorithm, e.g. QUEST [3] or Madgwicks AHRS [4] to obtain an estimation of your orientation in quaternions. No gyroscope required so far. Usually, the gyroscope is only used to give a more accurate angular velocity and acceleration signal, speed up the orientation estimation and serve as a short term replacement in case of a larger disturbance in acceleration or the magnetic field. A Kalman filter is the most common way to do this.

If you want to play around with these values on your phone I recommend the Sensor Kinetics [5] app for Android, or if you have an iOS device, I believe XSens has an app, too. There is usually need to implement the above method yourself. Most IMU's you can buy of the shelf provide these higher level estimations already.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MEMS_gyroscope#MEMS_gyroscope> [2] <http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/> [3] e.g. EXTENDED QUEST ATTITUDE DETERMINATION FILTERING Mark L. Psiaki 1999 [http://www.google.ch/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s...](http://www.google.ch/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCkQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.151.7265%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&ei=XDVoUJTPI- P_4QSkqoGwAg&usg=AFQjCNGouU0km_Q- BeIthUrTnqmaES2ckQ&sig2=LJC_j6hylww0fp3y_pAT-g) [4] Includes working (tested it myself) Matlab, C and C# code <http://www.x-io.co.uk/node/8> [5] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.innoventio...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.innoventions.sensorkinetics&hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER10> "If anyone thinks that they are revealing new information to me by telling me the difference between centrifugal force and acceleration, I will fed-ex a crazed baboon that is high on crack to their house."

I can think of a few people I'd like to see receive a package from fedex containing a crazed baboon high on crack.

</comment><comment><USER11> He is being sued by Uniloc, I think this is the same suit against Mojang (Minecraft)

<http://www.x-plane.com/x-world/lawsuit/>

<comment><AUTHOR> previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4523380>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> XCSoar is a very nice free and open source flight computer that includes an artificial horizon. It runs on your Android phone, old PDA, and many other devices.

<http://xcsoar.org/> <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.xcsoar>

It's designed for sailplane, hang glider and paraglider pilots, and is slowly disrupting the incumbents in this space. Source code is C++.

</comment><comment><USER13> It seems that the author developed the underlying kinematics needed to implement an inertial measurement unit (src: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_measurement_unit> ), though with his introduction of GPS, he could probably convert it to an inertial navigation system (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system>). I wonder if the author is aware of the Extended Kalman Filter (src: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Kalman_filter> ) -- he could fuse the noisy sensor data with the aircraft's kinematic model to cancel out some of the error he was mentioning getting. The best resource I've found online about how to use Kalman filters and EKFs is course notes from a simultaneous localization and mapping workshop taught at Drexel University in 2006 (src: <http://prism2.mem.drexel.edu/~billgreen/slam/slam.html> ).

</comment><comment><USER14> There are external GPS receivers specifically to improve iPad GPS performance in aviation.

For example: <http://www.mygoflight.com/external-gps/>

</comment><comment><USER15> The writer would benefit greatly from the Ardiuno community. Most of this stuff is open-source code. Quite possibly, some of the authors solutions were learned from it. However, no credit was issued for where the author learned most of their lessons.

I do appreciate the layperson's explanation of an attitude system applied to a smartphone/tablet. Many do not realize just how powerful these mobile devices actually are.

<comment><USER16> The Arduino community did not invent the Kalman filter or sensor fusion.

<comment><USER17> No, but they have aggressively applied them to self balancing robots which have many of the same issues as the author is dealing with (isolating actual up vector from acceleration vectors etc)

<comment><USER10> And they're not the only ones to have done so. Adruinos aren't the be-all and end-all of embedded systems, and most projects do not need to give them any credit whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I couldn't make it to the end of the article; the writing style is too frustrating.</comment>


"My favorite feature is the Obituary department" (1961) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/04/my-favorite-feature-is-obituary.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> Never give up WHEN you fail on first try!</comment>


Ancient Quasars Provide Evidence for Quantum Entanglement - <AUTHOR> https://www.livescience.com/63398-ancient-quasars-evidence-quantum-entanglement.html <comment><USER2> Description in that article is very bad. How can you get correlated photons from some classical light source? Like, you get two random photons and they happen to be correlated?

<comment><USER3> It's not bad, it's wrong, since they make reference to the "entangled photons in the light coming from the quasars," which is entirely not how the experiment worked. The light from the quasars (which weren't measurably entangled with squat!) were essentially used as random number generators, in order to perform standard Bell test experiment [0] using a standard laboratory entangled-photon source.

I recommend reading the paper instead, if you're interested [1].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_experiments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_experiments) [1] [https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...](https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.080403)</comment></comment>


Python: Bitwise NOT and List  - <AUTHOR> I realized that instead of using negative numbers to access elements of a list from the end, we can just use bitwise NOT. That looks more symmetrical (and hence beautiful).
For a list x:
First element is x[0]
Last element is x[~0] (instead of x[-1])
You can use x[~0], x[~1], x[~2]... (coz ~0==-1, ~1==-2 etc)
Did you guys know this already or is this my fresh insight? If it is the latter, YAY! :-) <comment><USER2> I didn't know that, but I don't know that it really is that helpful. I prefer the Pythonic way of sticking to one method and having anyone be able to understand it.

Good little hack though, if it works for you go nuts! (but document it somewhere and be consistent)

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe this'll only work on machines that use 2s-complement arithmetic, which is basically all of them. Just saying...it's theoretically possible to have number representations where ~0 != -1.

<comment><USER4> That wouldn't matter since we are talking about python, not assembly or C.

<comment><USER5> I would hazard a guess that CPython (the reference implementation) hooks directly into C for bitwise NOT, and therefore, it _would_ matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> silly me, all this time i've been using x[~-1] to get the first element, x[~-2] to get the second element, and so forth!

</comment><comment><USER7> If you used this in source code that I had to maintain, I would curse you every time I saw it.

Just saying.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have to maintain my code, I'm sure you'll curse me anyway.

<comment><USER8> Always write your code as if the person who will maintain it is a deranged ax murderer who knows where you live

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Clever, but as others pointed out likely to anger anyone who has to read your code.

NB: python bitwise operations are not super fast like in C. They don't get optimized down to single CPU instructions but instead are looked up like regular type methods (e.g. __str__ and __add__). An "ob[~0]" won't kill you even in a loop but don't bother translating simple math into bit-twiddling because it won't help (and might hurt if it inflates the number of operations).

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried profiling these two functions:

      import cProfile

      def flipbits():
          c=0
          for i in range(1,400000):
              b=~i
              c=c+b
          print c

      def negnums():
          c=0
          for i in range(1,400000):
              b=-i
              c=c+b
          print c

      cProfile.run("flipbits()")

140 function calls in 0.175 CPU seconds

      cProfile.run("negnums()")

140 function calls in 0.176 CPU seconds

\---

Summary:

Flipping bits is tiny bit _faster_ actually.To make negnums function produce the same result as flipbits, we need to change b=-i to b=-i-1 and this is even slower. Poke holes in my experiment please.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> what a hack! I LIKE this idea! It's neat!

Look at this code I wrote for Project Euler. it checks if a sequence is "palindromic". A "palindromic" sequence reads the same both from left and from right. So the simple idea is to check from the left of the sequence to the middle, and compare each element during the process with ones read from the right. Note here I use Python 2.5 integer division (//) to ensure the index is integer.

Using official Python index syntax, I have to write "s[i] == s[-i-1]" to compare elements on symmetric positions in the sequence.

      def ispalindromic(s):
          return all(s[i] == s[-i-1] for i in range(len(s)//2))

However, using the "bitwise or" trick proposed above, I just write "s[i] == [s~i]", really neat!

      def ispalindromic(s):
          return all(s[i] == s[~i] for i in range(len(s)//2))

<comment><AUTHOR> _> what a hack! I LIKE this idea! It's neat!_

Thanks, it means a lot...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Oh you mean the old

x[::~0][~-1]

trick to get the last item. Thought that's what everyone uses.

<comment><USER12> You can just use x[-1] to do the exact same thing. ~0 = -1 though, hence the reason x[~0] has kind of a nice feel to it.

<comment><USER4> your humor detection may be broken.

<comment><USER5> I don't get it, either. I mean, I realize that the OP's method would be obscure to someone who's never seen it, but at least on some level, it's more intuitive. Your example is simply obfuscated code for no other reason (other than humor, apparently, which like I said, I missed).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I didn't know this and I do like it. Especially if it caught on and became more standard.

I'll see if I can get my crew to try it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow that would be awesome. BTW, I like your startup (bug.gd)... Thanks for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> x | y bitwise or of x and y

x ^ y bitwise exclusive or of x and y

x & y bitwise and of x and y

x << n x shifted left by n bits

x >> n x shifted right by n bits

~x the bits of x inverted

<comment><USER5> I'm not going to vote you down, but honestly, what was this for?</comment></comment>


Cameron V Corbyn – Presenting V Protesting - <AUTHOR> http://mindfulpresenter.com/mindful-blog/cameron-v-corbyn-presenting-v-protesting <comment><USER2> "he raised the bar substantially by using passion and personal conviction to inspire his audience."

I think the last 15 years of politicians using 'passion and personal conviction to inspire' war in the Middle East have gotten me a bit burned out on that technique, to the point where speeches in that style make me distrust the speaker.

"For me it lacked structure and focus and was delivered in such a monotone way that you wouldn't be blamed for reaching for your phone. "

Maybe speeches are better read than heard, as otherwise irrelevant details of presentation style seem to become important.</comment>


Conspiracy Theories Are Shaping the 2020 Election - <AUTHOR> https://time.com/5887437/conspiracy-theories-2020-election/ <comment><USER2> The term "conspiracy theory" originated as an attempt to discredit people who had correctly recognized a very real conspiracy. Always remember that.</comment>


Antimatter might repel matter and be the cause of dark energy.. - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-antimatter-gravity-universe-expansion.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I had idea that antimatter might repel normal matter many years ago but I thought it was already conclusively experimentally tested because such test should be easy enough. Just cool down some antiprotons with lasers and see if they fall towards earth or in the opposite direcion.

Haven't anyone done this so far?

</comment><comment><USER2> Woohoo, you mean all I need to do is carry around a 175lb antimatter backpack and I can float free! ;)</comment>


Wi-Fi Body Scale with Arduino - <AUTHOR> http://www.open-electronics.org/wi-fi-body-scale-with-arduino

<comment><USER3> It's like a hacker version of this: [http://www.amazon.com/Withings-WiFi-Body- Scale-Black/dp/B002...](http://www.amazon.com/Withings-WiFi-Body-Scale- Black/dp/B002JE2PSA)

</comment><comment><USER4> Now this is actually a thing I could use Arduino for! Most of the projects I see on Arduino-related sites are cute toys, but not too many useful things.

I, personally, would like to see more of DIY projects describing how to do Wi- Fi or Bluetooth enabled:

\- Blood Pressure monitor

\- Heart rate monitor

\- Weather station with hygrometer and barometer

\- Security camera with motion detection

\- Mood lamp (or lighting system) with voice recognition

<comment><USER5> There's a nice sensor for heart rate for Arduino: <http://pulsesensor.com/>

I've set up security cameras with motion detection using Raspberry Pi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very good - I am working with several wifi enabled arduino packages - <USER2> to link back to a Raspberry Pi using this Kickstarter project [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ciseco/eve-alpha- raspber...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ciseco/eve-alpha-raspberry-pi- wireless-development-hardwa) which looks likely to get funded.

</comment><comment><USER7> Very nice write-up. Side-note: It's really interesting to see code written in Italian.

<comment><USER8> Which makes it quite annoying to read. I'm not a native english speaker but that does not mean that I would write code written in german idioms - not even in the comments...</comment></comment>