Recipe for a Better Oven - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/nathan-myhrvolds-recipe-for-a-better-oven <comment><USER2> Whoah, this is a really good article. It's not a pitch for a specific better kind of oven Myhrvold came up with (which is what I expected it to be, and the reason I didn't read it until just now), but a survey of all the problems with current oven technologies and what modern tech can do to solve them. If you haven't read the whole thing, do check it out.

What's interesting to me is that everybody and their cousins have done DIY water baths, and there are even people doing DIY rotary evaporators, but nobody does a DIY CVap. Is it that hard?

<comment><USER3> I'd like to say DIY ovens are hard; don't even attempt it :) but if you are interested in really good pizza, pita, bagels, and ciabatta all you need is a conventional oven modded basically like this[0]. Also a baking stone is required. SV takes too long, is it worth it?

[0] [http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-a-Toaster-Oven-for- Refl...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-a-Toaster-Oven-for-Reflow- Soldering/)

<comment><USER4> Try 1/2 inch sheet steel instead of a baking stone. More thermal mass, better conduction and more wear-resistant (won't crack from thermal stress). Cast iron is a cheaper alternative.

<comment><USER3> Hey that probably has less asbestos than my fibrament baking stone, and maybe it doesn't smell as bad when you heat it up the first time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The oven design is of course patent pending:)

On a serious note, Like him or not his books/treatise on cooking is excellent. [1]

I got it for my wife for Christmas about 3 or 4 years ago, can't remember, and all 5 books have been well used.

You'll need a big kitchen for all the specialized gear he recommends but it made cooking fun for me and helped my wife go from an amateur enthusiast to someone who can hold their own with professional chefs. I'm very lucky:)

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Home-Nathan- Myhrvold...](http://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Home-Nathan- Myhrvold/dp/0982761015/)

<comment><USER2> I have both MC and the much cheaper Modernist At Home and recommend the latter (the smaller cheaper one) over the former.

<comment><USER6> Ditto on the latter, get the at home version. Its only like $100 (the big set is like $575 or so)

I was kind of surprised to start reading the article and immediately start guessing he's aiming at either more sous vide in the home or a combi oven in the home and I had to read about 3/4 of the way thru to find yup its a combi oven story.

One little problem with combi ovens is they work really well when sterile-ish but I can see some opportunity for nastyness and corrosion. People letting water sit for weeks all dusty and moldy and then wonder why the kitchen and food smell. Dirty oven walls now with extra moisture for special mold growth what could possibly go wrong. Maybe a vaporizer that uses distilled water would be more realistic. A traditional combi just isn't going to work in a residential setting.

Also a meta observation is he's not talking about getting to a destination, but several alternate paths of getting to a destination. So your oven cooks 5% too fast or slow, a "nest" level of intelligence bolted onto the oven should take care of that. Or most of the fooling around with a combi precision thermostat discussion is to get a sous vide like effect... well most of the time just use a sous vide and be done with it? (edited to add what I'm getting at is its possible thru application of extreme engineering to do something difficult... then again there are simpler methods... for example controlling the humidity inside a working oven is no joke to compensate for massive humidity variations in the ambient kitchen air... wouldn't it be a heck of a lot simpler to very tightly control humidity in the kitchen which is COTS and use a conventional oven which is COTS rather than making a very complicated oven?)

I have looked into the market and small excellent sous vide rigs are available, and cheap, but this article is correct, you are not putting a combi into a residential home without totally freaking out the interior decorator, the electrician, the plumber, probably the carpenter... its like dreaming of one of those 25 horsepower 5 minute steam dishwashers the commercial kitchens use instead of home dishwashers... well, you can wish for free, but its about as likely as mass adoption of a turbine car...

<comment><USER7> On a podcast of Cooking Issues with Dave Arnold, he mentioned his dream is to modify his oven with copper tubing and inject water into his oven (he uses bricks for thermal mass). Of course, this was largely in relation to baking and injecting a massive amount of steam quickly, but I think a spray system over thermal mass (metal is the modernist suggestion, but I think possibly some sort of ceramic would be best).

Of course, I read this article and thought exactly one thing:

There's no way an oven like this will be affordable and reliable over a 3+ year. There's way too many things to break.

<comment><USER8> I know of a few professional ovens that add humidity by spraying water directly on the heating elements. The trick is to use a very small amount at short intervals. You can't quench the calrod or it will crack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The issue as much as anything is about reliability and the lifetime of an oven. The less moving parts the more reliable and longer life the oven has.

If you look at some of his suggestions and when they have been implemented, the costs are quite astronomical. Also you begin to quickly realise that specialised ovens that cook in a certain way don't cook in multiple ways.

It's the versatility of your oven that a home needs. Mine can fan heat, convection heat and grill.

The only specialised extra 'oven' in most people's houses is the microwave. It's cost effective at what it does.

<comment><USER10> We're all reading these articles because we're excited about the future. In that context, the issues you've raised don't seem to be that big. Cost for the bill of materials will drop with mass production, and many of the major parts are already cheap.

After seeing personal computing and mobile computing revolutions unfold during my lifetime, I'm pretty sure the technical obstacles to making a reliable and cheap oven that Myhrvold describes are surmountable. Electric cars, jet planes and search engines deal with much harder engineering challenges.

<comment><USER6> There are financial system problems. If we don't value engineer our products to rapidly fail, the mfgrs will go out of business and we won't have any ovens.

So imagine a "super oven" that is rust proof and thermal shock proof to tolerate high humidity cooking. Someone is going to figure out that running that dude dry means it'll operate theoretically for 500 years, and 90% of the home cooks will be too lazy to ever fill the distilled water tank anyway, so 50 years in or so, that mfgr will go out of business, and no new ovens.

There are some examples in the automotive world, where in the old days when farm trucks were really farm trucks and not marketed as a macho station wagon for starbucks runs, some people bought them for 100% asphalt use anyway, because they'd last 25 years if treated better than farm trucks. That value engineering epic fail has been fixed for decades now, but in the old days this was a serious problem. Ford had no problem selling commuter cars that would rust out and require replacement in 3 years but they couldn't figure out how to keep farm trucks on the farm and off the roads for 20 years, back in the 70s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> James Dyson's twin-drum contrarotating washing machine was a huge improvement over normal washing machines but failed to take off because it was much more expensive.

The Privilege of Incumbency is tough to beat. To convince the public to adopt a new technology you must have something that's cheap, reliable and yet performs _overwhelmingly better_ than the existing design.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice article but I don't think it's greatly relevant to most of us. I use the oven a lot, cook most days, and don't cook above 220C. I don't think our oven goes above 250C.

If you're into molecular gastronomy I can imagine you'd want to play around with the stuff mentioned in the article, but outside of that ... m'eh.

<comment><USER10> I beg to differ. A better oven means tastier food at home, which pays dividends every single day of your life.

<comment><USER13> Every single day of your life that you use the oven, as opposed to eating something fresh or cooked stove-top. And strictly, just for those things cooked in the oven that the oven-improvement improves.

<comment><USER2> The oven improvements being discussed here will have the effect of making more things best done in the oven.

<comment><USER13> Yes, certainly that metric should be "the amount you use your _new_ oven", not "the amount you use your _current_ oven".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The opening lines immediately reminded me of this wonderful article about old technology behind energy efficient brick ovens:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140327025219/http://www.lowtec...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140327025219/http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/10/hoffmann- kilns-brick-and-tile-production.html)

(waybackmachine because the official website is down).

There's surprisingly many old and forgotten technologies that are still relevant in terms of energy efficiency. Of course, this particular one is only relevent at industrial scales, but the website has more articles to offer.

</comment><comment><USER15> There's some meta-point here to make. I don't understand it well enough to articulate it, but I'm going to try.

Start with the acquisition of dev bootcamp schools and the emergence of these schools in general. They are very SV-esque. The funding. The founders. The aesthetic. There's obviously a link via teaching programming and preparing people to work in startups but fundamentally these are more like schools than tech companies. Why are they seem like tech companies?

Tesla is a car company. Also SV-esque.

So here's the poorly articulated meta-point. Technology has changed a lot in the last decade or two in ways that are relevant to many industries and many products. Schools. Banks. Hotels. Ovens.

Even just the information people have available about products is very different. The slightly above average consumer has information available about fishing rods or ovens is very different. A motivated buyer of an tablet has access to a lot of objective information and the ability to make a far more rational choice. Compare that to buying toasters or fishing rods. The average person walks into the store. The sales person might seem knowledgeable. But ultimately, brand matters more than anything and that is a very long feedback loop.

These days, it's a lot easier for a new product with a genuine improvement to win.

Between all these effects, I think there's room for radical changes to a lot of products.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can't your get far more bang for your buck by using convection and a pizza stone or a brick or something else to hold in the heat?

Certainly the steam/humidity thing won't be helped by the pizza stone. But keeping the air moving and providing something solid to act as a more uniform beat source gets you pretty far. It's like switching from crappy pots and pans to a nice set. A big difference is the thickness and materials in the base to create even and steady temperature.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how a continuously on stove/oven like [http://www.agasales.com/index.htm](http://www.agasales.com/index.htm) compares. These always remain at temperature. Obviously not a solution for most people.

</comment><comment><USER18> Am I the only person here that has seen the ad for the Wolfgang Puck pressure Oven? I am curious how it really performs because everything looks good on an infomercial.

[http://puckoven.com](http://puckoven.com)

</comment><comment><USER19> > And you're not going to be able to stop a cook from opening the oven door on > occasion—peeking through a grease-splattered window just doesn't cut it. But > designers could prevent that blast of cold air by building a blower into the > door frame that generates a "curtain" of air whenever the door is opened, > retaining more of the preheated air in the oven. Larger versions of air > doors are already in wide commercial use for refrigerated warehouses.

Whoa, isn't this also used in supermarkets when you enter them?

<comment><USER20> Yes, and I've seen it used at other businesses. Positive pressure systems are also used for clean rooms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Better ovens already exist, such as combi-ovens, but they are all designed for commercial use or extremely high end personal use, and so have 5 figure price tags. It would definitely be cool to see that come down to 3 or 4 figures for reasonable consumer versions (e.g. combi-ovens are designed for cooking multiple sheet pans full of food, that's overkill for home use, so there's an opportunity for cost savings). Definitely an opportunity for crowd funding to get development rolling.

<comment><USER10> His article takes aim at these high-end ovens as well, and makes several proposals to make them even better.

<comment><USER21> It's rather more of a grab-bag of ideas on the future of oven technology. Which is very cool, but far from a simple linear trajectory toward a better oven. It's the promise of perhaps a better oven, which maybe if we're lucky might be affordable and practical, or perhaps not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are two key innovations missing from this oven that would make it revolutionary. I won't say them out loud because Nathan might run and patent them...

<comment><USER23> If you say them here they will form part of the prior art and a suitably date- verified version of your post would negate such an attempt at patenting those parts.

Of course a patent on a refinement or a specific implementation would still be possible.

<comment><USER24> Of course, the patent examiner would almost definitely not see the post in their shallow searches for prior art. The patent would get issued, and then it would cost near to the tune of $1million to invalidate it using the court system. Yay patents.

<comment><USER23> In the UK it's free to submit prior art (S21 of the CDPA I think) to the patent office and IIRC also free to request the office re-examine a patent.

There are better places than HN to submit a defensive publication but HN posts aren't outside the locus of prior art searches unless they get delisted from Google.

Of course it doesn't matter for a competitor what the granted patent says, if they have date verified disclosure prior to the priority date of the granted patent then they can submit that to the court and win a case by invalidating the granted patent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Things like this could be a big deal.

Part of an unhealthy food culture is some people find it hard to cook, both the difficulty and the time involved.

A well price oven that's easier and quicker might have a lot of run on health benefits.

<comment><USER26> There's also the fact that healthy food kinda sucks: It rots fast and is usually not premade. I'm surprised the market for healthy fast food is too small for Nestle/Kraft etc to bother with.

<comment><USER27> It generally rots quickly (and is thus not premade) specifically _because_ it's healthy. Rotting indicates the presence of thriving yeast/mold/bacteria, which can't live without nutrients to feed on.

There are plenty of decently-nutritious pre-made meals in the freezer section of your grocery store. If "take the wrapping off and put it in the oven for an hour" is too much work, though, there's always Soylent.

<comment><USER28> We're aiming for a middle ground with MealSquares. Even easier than Soylent (no prep) but also made of whole foods. Caveat: same as OP complaint, they last something like a month compared to 6+ months for most of our competitors.

We ran into the exact problems talked about in the article when trying to bake our prototypes in a home oven. Even heating is next to impossible. Working with a convection oven now is much better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It lost me when it started talking about cooking above 200C - almost all oven cooking is at temperatures below this, and the more interesting stuff happens _much_ lower than this.

<comment><USER30> How about bread? Many people feel that bread is interesting stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anyone else sees this?

        ")},load:function(e){var t,n,r=!1,s;s=Date.now(),i.load();if(!e)return;for(n=0;n

</comment><comment><USER32> Looks like you could make one out of a PC case :)

<comment><USER33> Provided it has temperature tolerances in excess of 1000° F.

<comment><USER34> So that's a metal case and a pair of nVidia cards (or a single pentium 4).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> In case you missed it, Nathan Myhrvold is also the founder of Intellectual Ventures[0], arguably the worst and most pernicious patent troll in the country[1][2].

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

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures#Controve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures#Controversy)

[2] [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/441/t...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/441/transcript)

<comment><USER36> Yup. And as such I do not feel we ought to be promoting any work of his on Hacker News.

<comment><USER37> HN users are hopefully mature enough to make a distinction like that.

We did take his name out of the title, though, mainly because we usually do, but also because it's baity in this case, at least for this site.

<comment><USER36> Hacker News is a community of technologists, many working in the start-up space.

This man, his company, and the industry he represents are a bane for many start-ups (and other companies, small and large).

Such a bane, in fact, that many people, including many on this site, are working hard and expending large amounts of resources to change laws to prevent this man, his company, and their ilk from continuing to be an economic drag on our entire industry.

But never mind all that. He's got some great ideas about ovens.

<comment><USER2> Yes. That exact sentence is exactly correct.

This little subthread is a microcosm of one way the whole site regularly goes off the rails. "Wet bulb temperature shmet bulb temperature, let's all yell about patent trolling!"

<comment><USER36> Fair enough. I'm not sure how else to communicate my distaste for giving Myhrvold additional attention on this site. But I'm getting down-voted, so my opinions are not shared by other people participating in this thread.

Thanks for engaging instead of simply down-voting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> We share our planet with a lot of people that are retarded. There are simpler things that can be done to make ovens better:

The majority of ovens have wire slots to hold the racks. Retarded people do not place the racks in the slots, they place them on the slots. Therefore when it comes to pulling a rack out the back tips up and the dish dangerously slips off the wire rack. Simply by passing some standard where it is not possible to have wire side slots that accept racks in non-design-for positions a sizeable battle in the war on health'n'safety can be won.

People that do not know how an oven works put the temperature up to max on the assumption the oven will heat up quicker. It won't but some people cannot be told. A simple 'preheat oven' button that takes the oven to 200C would help the retards out. A beep when the 'preheat' temperature is reached could help too.

The whole notion of pre-heating the oven is often a waste of time, particularly with vegetarian dishes. A jacket potato really does not care if the oven is heating up or is already pre-heated. Same for plenty of other dishes. Even pizza doesn't actually care. Souffles and other advanced dishes are exceptions, however the default is to waste a small eternity pre-heating an oven. This is wrong. It is worse than leaving the tap running whilst brushing one's teeth as far as the environments and polar bears are concerned.

Some people like to clean. If you clean the oven exterior and hob whilst you cook then the heat makes it an easy task, no chemicals needed. Retarded people that spend longer cleaning than researching recipes will get the abrasive solvents out and put in a lot of time and effort removing those symbols next to the dials. Therefore they actually have no idea what dial does what and it can be quite dangerous to have the wrong ring turn on the hob.

Some people like to store every baking tray in the oven, so, rather than heat up that jacket potato they heat up several kilos of metal. Instructions on food should have 'remove unnecessary trays from oven' as part of the instructions. This would be good for the polar bears.

Timers on ovens are not used by the overwhelming vast majority of people. Retarded people put the timer on max to speed up the oven, forgetting to put the temperature on either max or something more sensible (see earlier point). Timers need to go. If someone wants a timer then they should get an app for that, the dial/buttons on the oven need to go. Nobody would miss them, they are pure 'feature-itis'.

Regarding the door, it must be possible to have ovens with something more akin to a chest-of-drawers arrangement, where you can pull out one of three drawers, with the wire rack coming out too. The drawers could be interchangeable with the option to flip them upside down so that no matter what you cook there is room for everything. This would help keep the heat in and be more convenient for retarded people that cannot put normal wire racks in safely (see earlier point).

<comment><USER39> I bet if you reworded your post to remove the offensive analogies to the mentally disabled, then framed it as a list of common myths and their polite rebuttals, you'd be upvoted instead of downvoted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I have very little experience in cooking, but after seeing the complex solutions needed for proper food preparation, I think it would be better to produce more practical foods and simplify the whole nutritive process.

<comment><USER41> It's not proper food preparation, it's fancy food preparation.

You can cook tasty, nutritious food over an open fire in a field. For generations, that's how it was done. In fact, the best gumbo I've ever eaten was cooked over an untreated scrap lumber fire in a spillway behind a construction site.

To make it fancy, you need all this nonsense.</comment></comment>


The Apple Watch wants to alter your behavior - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/24/16926350/apple-watch-series-2-fitness-tracker-healthy-notification-behavior <comment><USER2> This sums up a lot of my problems with fitness trackers in general. I know some people who have started to be more active since getting one, to beneficial health effect but I'm very skeptical of their use for most people. The false sense of knowledge that it grants with things like Calories burned can easily lead to unhealthy behavior as well.</comment>


Will virtual reality compete with museums or help them? - <AUTHOR> http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/museums/virtual-reality-compete-museums-2016.html <comment><USER2> It'll do both.

On the one hand, there'll certainly be some people who like the convenience VR brings. The possibility of visiting a virtual museum without leaving the home or (in many places) having to pay any entrance fees or what not. Some uses of VR (as the article referenced in the link says) will act as alternative ways to learn about the past. Like by experiencing historical artifacts and structures as they were thousands of years ago.

But at the same time, a lot of people go to museums because they want to see the 'real thing'. They don't want to see a 3D picture or hologram of a vase from a few thousand years ago, but the actual vase from said time. Or the actual sarcophagus/mummy of a long dead Egyptian pharaoh.

And at the end of the day, to these people, VR is 'fake'. Like TV, movies, literature or video games are. In fact, it's best not to compare VR and museums with the internet and libraries, but with museums and recreations of historical sites.

Because the latter exists. There are lots of places where you can say, experience life in a small village from Biblical times. Yet these don't replace museums, because they're closer to a theatrical performance than a history lesson.

It won't replace museums, it'll act as another way for people to learn, and (as people say) might be integrated into the museums and even original historical sites as a way to experience things from a news perspective.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm really excited about the prospect of learning new skills through VR.

someone is working on a sailing trainer in vr. Think about it. It can put you on a realistic boat and you can actually learn how to sail. Imagine stepping on a sailboat for the first time in your life and already knowing what to do from vr.

I know it wouldn't teach you everything but learning the concepts from actually doing it in vr seems so amazing to me.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure that search and rescue teams are thrilled about this concept.

Only teasing, this does seem like a really cool usecase. If it takes off, I'm sure there will be an uptick of idiot people doing idiot things, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I worked for a company that specialized in design/build of interactive science exhibits globally and while I wasn't directly involved with creative being in proximity to the day-to-day process gave the opportunity to think deeply about where the museum experience's relevance is moving in society (especially in the context of "digital native" generations). I think there is a huge opportunity for a software platform to offer "relevance as a service" to museums. Not at all to imply that "relevance can simply be purchased, plug-n- play" but that a well-designed software platform could present the opportunity for museums to build relevance into the lives of its eventual visitors by connecting with them and providing meaningful experience's in various digital realms far before their actual brick-and-mortar visit. In my mind the company that builds this platform looks less like a communications company and more like Disney/Pixar. It would build, as some of its primary assets, characters (not unlike a Disney character) that have their own personalities. These personalities would have child-friendly conversational AI. This company would work with educators in the communities to craft supplementary education experience's using these characters. These experiences would be accessible free to the students via any mobile device or VR/AR. Eventually the company will have created narratives and personalities that are contextualizing topics which are usually somewhat abstract, like history or science. Then this company would work with museums to integrate this ongoing narrative into the museums exhibits. Perhaps the virtual characters would extend their presence into the museum with ready-made, indivualized tours for each student based on their shown interests. Ultimately the company will have built a platform which could offer up freemium and premium services and content to both museums and parents wanting to supplement their child's education (think Leapfrog).

I know there is resistance to the idea of "edutainment" sometimes but I think the idea isn't "to stay relevant we must entertain" but instead "to stay relevant we must verse ourselves in today's prevailing medium". With digital natives, it is more true than ever, that the medium is the message. If the museums message is so antiquated as to ask the visitor to bend to its form in order to derive relevance it will loose out to more accommodative formats.

</comment><comment><USER6> Haven't explored this subject before, but I'd guess there's likely some sort of social, psychological and biological basis for why museums exist and are popular in the first place. Likely the activity involved in "discovering" objects and then inspecting them as if you found them for the first time, simulates "seeking" behavior and solidifies the memory in the context of finding the information on your own instead of being shown it.

If the reason for why museums assist in learning, and are driven by the rewards of "discovering" something and experiential aspect of inspecting something in a 3D environment, then there are certainly some fascinating opportunities to create not only augmented museum experiences or virtual museums, but take the behavior to new places. There are maybe new types of museums that wouldn't be possible in the physical world. Pretty exciting

</comment><comment><USER7> I think they'll get along just fine. "Would you like to see an invisible sculpture?" [http://elevr.com/would-you-like-to-see-an-invisible- sculptur...](http://elevr.com/would-you-like-to-see-an-invisible-sculpture/) How to Bootleg [http://elevr.com/all-about-the-context/](http://elevr.com/all- about-the-context/) I'll warn you up front, the videos on the page are not... exciting. But the ideas in the article, about how we can experience physical spaces augmented by AR/VR, are really cool.

</comment><comment><USER8> What an absurd question? Popular magazines didn't kill museums. Documentaries didn't kill museums. If anything they increase interest, and allow you to "visit" the museum more.

People who want to see the actual artifacts will still go to museums, I presume in the same volume. Some small number may even become excited to go because they'd like to see something they learned about in VR (that they hadn't already become excited by via a documentary).

If there's someone who can't be bothered going to a museum they are unlikely to be affected either way by VR.

</comment><comment><USER9> VR museums are my personal killer app.

<comment><USER10> In The Stanley Parable <Spoilers>I spent soooo much time wandering around the virtual museum in one of the endings. It was so cool, and I wanted more things like that. I'm totally down for VR museums. </Spoilers>

I realized awhile back that a lot of the best 'sculptures' nowadays are being made in 3D programs, and not in real life, nowadays. I'd love if someone could create a virtual museum software that includes exhibits of some of the great 3D models that have been included in various games, movies, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> An idea: Make a VR museum that is constantly growing as HD 3D scans of artifacts are added regularly. Charge a small subscription to fund ongoing updates and scanning etc.

<comment><USER12> I like what these guys do: [https://www.myminifactory.com/scantheworld/](https://www.myminifactory.com/scantheworld/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Will virtual reality compete with museums or help them?

I'm going to go with "neither."</comment>


Ask HN: How do you start a project? - <AUTHOR> When you have an idea for something and you decide to make it, how do you get started?  What tools do you use to plan it, how quickly do you jump into implementation, and what advice do you have for others in starting new medium-scale projects? <comment><USER2> Ideas go to paper (most often), or Markdown in my random projects, way before I decide to 'decide to make them'. Mostly so I don't have to keep things in my head and worry about them. Then maybe I'll flesh it out, both big picture and any details that come to mind immediately.

If I find it interesting enough, and I decide to do it, I focus my idea- generation finding the minimum core of the idea, as a milestone with steps or pieces required to get there. Basic rule is that it must take less than 1 day to get there (or know that you can't get there). Then I code/fabricate it, then iterate along same lines, each time allowing more time for next milestone, until I'm done with it. The process explicitly focuses on keeping problems small, so they are fun to execute - and not worrying about 'final' outcomes.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use the Merise method : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merise)

I always start by drawing the "MCD" (I'd translate it as "conceptual data model"). It looks like one of the UML diagram : there are entities and relationships between these entities (zero to one, one to many etc). With this model you can design your relational database schema with ease.

It's my experience that if your data model is right you're building on strong foundations.

<comment><USER4> Interesting! Are there any online resources that describe the Merise method?

<comment><USER3> Yes, but only in French I'm afraid.

I don't understand why it never took of (elsewhere than in France) for relational data modeling. It's a really vast and complex method if you want to apply everything, but most devs here use only the part that make database modeling easy.

I should stress that it's purely for relational data, NoSQL didn't exist when they invented Merise and it would have probably been frown upon ;-) So I guess it's not really interesting in most startups environment were NoSQL seems the norm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Find 1 person you think has this problem who is not yourself.

Get this person to talk to you.

Have a conversation asking them about their daily life and their pain points.

See if the problem you are trying to solve comes up in conversation without you bringing it up.

Take notes about their daily work and their problems.

Repeat this process with 10 other people.

Ask yourself if you want to solve this problem or if something else came up in conversations that would be a better problem to solve.

</comment><comment><USER6> If it's a random idea, I let it simmer in my head for a few weeks. If the enthusiasm fades I trust my gut and abandon it. Perhaps this explains why I've never pursued random ideas that aren't related to the work I do day in day out.

On the other hand, when I come up with an idea that's in my line of work, I'm immediately convinced of its viability. I always start out with drawings (tables, schematics, pro/con, etc). Then I move on to building the DB schema but I don't get too deep in the normalization. Otherwise it gets too tangled up. I then pick a framework and begin . As soon as I have a working proof of concept (not prototype), I pick a good name and website. Then I work toward an MVP.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER7> If it has a gui, I would draw it out on paper first. Next, I would make wireframes or html mockups of each state. From there I would mockup a backend to serve static test data and convert the gui to use the real data.

</comment><comment><USER8> When I come up with a new idea, I write it down and jot down whatever is in my mind about the idea. Nothing formal.

Then I spend a lot of time thinking about the idea. I think of it from it's beginning to where it could grow. The different paths it might go down. I think about how users will react to it and how it helps them. I think about scaling it. I think about it technically. I think about how it makes money. I think about writing a PR about the idea announcing it. I think of the simpliest way to start the project (no feature creep) and then I try to start from there.

</comment><comment><USER9> Justin Jackson just released a book around this very topic "Marketing for Developers" -> [http://justinjackson.ca/marketingfordevelopers/](http://justinjackson.ca/marketingfordevelopers/)

It's full of great advice...but I think one of the key take aways is to "find a market" before you really "have an idea"...and he walks you through some really good ways to do that (using real world case studies of people that are doing it)

</comment><comment><USER10> Really depends on what the project is. Assuming you are referring to an app or website.

I always start with an Evernote page with my general thoughts, then grab a pen and paper and start drawing what could be a barebones UIm then do more research.

I go through the cycle again and again until I am ready to graduate to Balsamiq for a clearer UI and have a clearer story to tell about the project.

I try to balance between doing and researching. I find that excessive research in the beginning is just another form of procrastination of just starting.

</comment><comment><USER11> This question is as vague as it gets, and so wil be the answers.

I say first decide is it an experiment, or for profit? Depending on that you'll need different research methods, planning, and tools.

Especially if you envision some ultimate goals, quickly forget those and formulate the first milestone reachable with minimal effort. At most a proof of concept to take hurdles (function, technical, or other), not a prototype.

</comment><comment><USER12> I jot any notes I may have in a notebook that's always with me, then when I have access to my laptop I just start prototyping.

</comment><comment><USER13> Ask people will they buy it. If they want it, you have something. From there, it's fairly easy to setup a CMS or Ecommerce store - either hosted/self-hosted - and you can get immediate feedback in the form of orders or messages of interest.

</comment><comment><USER14> Planning? paper sketching screens listing fields, notes on features you want etc.

Started... most of mine are data oriented so I usually start with entry screens, maybe a little bit of creating some inital DB tables first.

</comment><comment><USER15> If a GUI, for me the key aspect is drawing each state on paper first.. this is key. Others have commented on the plethora of options vis-a-vis where to go next..

</comment><comment><USER16> Put it inside Colornote (within differnt catergorised notes like HW, SW, WorkASAP etc... you get the drift)</comment>


Fragmenta – A Golang CMS - <AUTHOR> http://fragmenta.eu/ <comment><USER2> A picture is worth a thousand words. No single screenshot.

<comment> grey-area Hi,

author here, I agree the site content definitely needs some work - it is built with fragmenta itself, but I need some videos of editing, a demo site, things like that, I wasn't quite ready for publicity yet, but it looks like it made it to the golang newsletter...

It is more at the stage where tinkerers and those building sites in golang will be interested, rather than end users. If you have any other comments or criticisms I'd be happy to field them here, I'm genuinely interested, though I know it is hard to judge without a demo of the backend (unless you download the code).

It's intended to be a CMS which eventually rivals something like Wordpress for ease of use/themability etc, but to be significantly easier to extend (more like rails in that sense). I got tired of building the same building blocks again and again in go for clients.

Another site built with this is [http://golangnews.com](http://golangnews.com) (source available), so it's not just for simple websites, it's also intended for building things which are a little more complex quickly.</comment></comment>


Once thought safe, DDR4 memory shown to be vulnerable to "Rowhammer" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/once-thought-safe-ddr4-memory-shown-to-be-vulnerable-to-rowhammer/ <comment><USER2> Do any tools like say Memtest86 use test patterns that will detect row hammer vulnerability and for that matter, is it something that can be fixed on any given system by changing the RAS/CAS frequency or the voltage?

Many years ago, I ran a couple of PC shops. When EDO RAM first came out we had a lot of problems with random crashes being reported by customers, usually when they were running Word. We would typically run memory tests for a few hours in QAFE, which was then the best at detecting errors, but it would consistently fail to find anything wrong with these systems.

It turned out that the most reliable way to reproduce the problem was to run the shareware version of Duke Nukem. So we had a copy of it on all our diagnostic disks. If a system could get through the first level without any on-screen corruption, you knew it wasn't going to come back to the shop, so that became a standard test on all new PCs.

<comment><USER3> You made me remember a extremely interesting article about Guild Wars team... they were annoyed with the amount of weird bug reports, and one of their programmers found out how to make the game self-analyze its data, and find if it was RAM hardware issue, he found out that about 1% of all their players had computers with faulty RAM, and a good amount of bug reports came from these computers, and that this program saved them a lot of money (since now they didn't needed to make devs chase "ghost" bugs, only actually real bugs).

<comment><USER4> I had bad RAM on my primary Linux desktop some ~six years ago and it caused an endless series of problems, data corruption, and hard reboots every few months. It happened so infrequently that I never quite tracked it down, but I'd copied hundreds of gigabytes of data between computers over my LAN and lots of random files still have some corrupted bits in them to this day from that.

I finally got serious about tracking down the issue, ran memtest, and sure enough, it discovered a faulty DIMM pretty quickly. I yanked it out and the problems immediately went away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I submitted the original paper this is based on (notice most of it comes from Micron DDR4 chips): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11308525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11308525)

</comment><comment><USER6> As a hardware engineer, I find the idea of security vulnerabilities based on how closely components on a chip are to one another. Most of the hardware implementations we still use aren't really designed to prevent these exploits. Aside from rowhammer, there's also "sidechannel" attacks on shared CPUs, and measuring the electromagnetic fields generated by a PC to reverse-engineer sensitive data.

I'm certain that in the future these concerns will play a greater role in how we design computer components and systems. Previously these attacks were infeasible due to the lack of computing power available to sort through what is seemingly just noise.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can this be exploited by VPSs, docker containers, and the like? As throwaway2048 mentioned, this can be executed from regular JS, so it's not a difficult thing to exploit, and it seems that ECC RAM doesn't help, so any server with vulnerable RAM could be exploited. Is there anything, from the software side of things, that can/will be done to mitigate this?

</comment><comment><USER8> Link to actual paper - [http://www.thirdio.com/rowhammer.pdf](http://www.thirdio.com/rowhammer.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> So. Time to move to ECC by default?

<comment><USER10> from TFA

The researchers were also able to flip the bits inside DDR3 DIMMs installed on an enterprise-grade server. The tests succeeded even though all of the DDR3 modules included a protection known as ECC, the servers completely locked up or spontaneously rebooted, usually within three minutes of the tests commencing.

<comment><USER9> Yes; Locking up or rebooting seems like a reasonable thing to do if the memory has multiple unrecoverable errors. It certainly beats silent corruption.

<comment><USER11> But the failure mode for ECC is silent corruption, followed (maybe) by a crash, right? ECC can detect and correct one or two (or a few more?) bit-flips at a time, but if there's too many it won't notice that something's gone wrong.

The system then goes merrily along and either crashes (because you've flipped some bits at random) or recovers (because those bits weren't important) or hands the attacker root (because you've managed to flip some particular target bits).

So if the computer crashes or locks up, you can probably conclude that you've defeated the ECC and flipped some bits, and the system is vulnerable to Rowhammer. It's (maybe) just a matter of time before someone engineers a way to flip the specific bits needed to hand the attacker root.

<comment><USER12> The memory can recover one, detect two, and will throw up loud warning bells to any competent admin as long as it is doing so. If you see a sudden spike of ECC errors from a server, the memory is probably bad, and you replace it. If you see a sudden spike of ECC errors from a large number of servers, something is seriously wrong, and you investigate - I'd be more likely to blame it on bad power myself, or a EM Field/radiation source.

Even when trying to trigger rowhammer, the graph of bit flips is going to look like a logarithmic curve - Single-bit flips will be common, two-bits will be rare, and undetected flips will be real but ultimately not much to talk about compared to the discovered flips. You know they're there by the unrecoverable rate, and you replace the ram, discard any replicated data on that machine, and move on.

<comment><USER13> _The memory can recover one, detect two, and will throw up loud warning bells to any competent admin as long as it is doing so._

I don't have personal experience here, but one of the important claims in the paper is that this warning is not given on all servers:

      Unfortunately, server vendors routinely use a technique
      called ECC threshold or the 'leaky bucket' algorithm where
      they count ECC errors for a period of time and report them
      only if they reach certain levels of failure. From what we
      understand, this threshold is commonly above 100 per hour,
      but this remains a trade secret and varies based on the
      server vendor. So, to see ECC errors (MCE in Linux or
      WHEA in Windows), there generally needs to be 100 bit flips
      per hour or greater. This makes "seeing" Rowhammer on
      server error logs more difficult.

      In addition, we have observed some server vendors will
      NEVER report ECC events back to the OS,although they might
      get logged into IPMI. Typically, users expect to see
      correctable ECC errors logged directly to the OS or that
      halt the system when they cannot be corrected. During our
      investigation into this phenomenon, we even encountered one
      server that neither reported ECC events to the OS nor
      halted when bit flips were not correctable. The end result
      was data corruption at the application level.
      This is something, in our opinion, that should never happen
      on an ECC protected server system.

[http://www.thirdio.com/rowhammer.pdf](http://www.thirdio.com/rowhammer.pdf)

<comment><USER14> I really wish they'd have expanded on that somewhere and actually stated what manufacturers/models of server they tested and which ones don't report ECC errors.

<comment><USER15> Really, without details like that it's just unverifiable FUD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can you execute Rowhammer attacks from WebAssembly?

<comment><USER17> You can execute it from regular JS [https://github.com/IAIK/rowhammerjs](https://github.com/IAIK/rowhammerjs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Memory manufacturers all use heavy testing to both test designs and to weed out bad chips. This seems to be a weakness in these tests and should have been caught. Row-hammering is no different than applying test vectors. I'm sure those tests now include row-hammering but it will take a while for the new designs to come out.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is a pragmatic solution more virtualized memory, other software solutions, hardware shielding, lower data density, or some combination of these?

<comment><USER20> A pragmatic solution is probably "go for the DIMMs that are identified as not apparently vulnerable", if you're in a position where you have to care about this faster than t(vendors release software updates to mitigate this class of attack on your platforms).</comment></comment>


SpaceX CEO claims he can send you on a round-trip to Mars for $500K  - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122923-spacex-ceo-claims-he-can-send-you-on-a-round-trip-to-mars-for-500k <comment><USER2> What is it about this guy that allows him to make such claims and not be laughed out of the room? It's an amazing an useful talent that, oddly, I first witnessed as a young engineer on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope project.

The head of the servicing missions was a boisterous, outrageous, personality (some told me it was what held him from higher positions within NASA). He was the kind of guy who brought in a sales guy for a rapid prototyping machine (a 3D printer starting at $1 million), walked in half way through the presentation, and then promptly kicked the salesman out for not having a $200k offering.

He was also the kind of guy who demanded composite structures yielding 10X the mechanical properties of the current state of the art materials. But with no research projects, development, or anything even close to it. Just "get it done".

Of course, we didn't get it done (because it was impossible), but what we did get done was a major leap forward. We used materials without, _gasp_ , flight heritage. We used the absolute state of the art in some cases. We got _it_ done, it's just that _it_ wasn't what was asked for, at least not directly.

This smells of the same thing. But don't underestimate the shear force of personality it takes to make such outrageous claims, _and still have people follow you_ to something remarkable, yet more realistic.

<comment><USER3> There a couple of things that allow him to make these claims without being "laughed out of the room," as you say, but they don't have to do with his personality in the sense in which I take your meaning.

First, there is the rocket equation. That little gem tells us the amount of fuel it takes to achieve a given change in velocity for a given energy density of fuel. Then there are some results from orbital mechanics and aerodynamics that tell us what that change in velocity is. For the curious, escape velocity is just sqrt(2) times the circular speed at any given altitude.

I've laid this out before, but here it goes again. To put a pound of anything into orbit has a fuel cost of a little over $20. "Incredible!," you say, "It costs $10k/lb on the Space Shuttle! How can that be?!" Like so. Typical mass fractions are on the order of 2%. That is, 2% of the stuff on the pad, fuel, structure, payload, everything, actually ends up in orbit. About 12% of that mass is structure, things like tanks and engines and the like. That leaves 86% of the thing as fuel. 86:2 is 43:1. 43 lbs of fuel for every pound of payload. Assuming that propellant is roughly as dense as water and roughly the price of milk, both easily verified, that's under 6 gallons of propellant for every pound of payload, which will run you $21 at $3.50/gallon.

Multiply sqrt(2) by $21/lb and you have something like $30/lb. If you and your capsule weigh 2,000 lbs, That's $60,000 for a one way ticket. A little over 8 times that price may be a reasonable number. So, what makes up the difference in cost for current launch systems, or even for antiquated and clunky systems like the Shuttle? Low safety margins and their concomitant need for enormous administrative costs for each part, disposable launch systems where that administration cost burns up in the atmosphere or splashes down in the Pacific, and enormous system complexity driven by a lowest-flight-weight- results-in-the-cheapest-vehicle mentality.

We can begin to address, based on SpaceX's design philosophy and planned vehicle, how they may be able to make these claims without deserving to be "laughed out of the room."

First, SpaceX has reduced engineering and integration costs by reusing common components and simplifying designs at every step. they were (and I think, still are) using a pintle injector which is much less susceptible to catastrophic combustion oscillations than the more typical injector-face solution, at a cost of some performance. The tanks for all of their stages are the same diameter, allowing them to engineer and build one capital-intensive jig rather than two or three, and they get more experience with that hardware since all their work is done on it. They're using a pneumatic stage sep mechanism rather than a pyrotechnic one to eliminate material-handling, static, and other safery concerns related to pyrotechnics. Rather than relying on one or a few very large engines to power the first stage, they've chosen to use 9 smaller engines on the first stage and isolate each one in its own cato- proof container, again allowing them to gain more experience with a single system, prove its reliability, and leverage that experience and track record to perform a larger job.

Second, they have plans for full reusability of the launch system based on incremental changes to their existing systems. Yes, there is a fuel and performance penalty for going this route, but the savvy armchair aerospace critic will note that those penalties are expressed in tens of dollars per pound, whereas 100% disposal is measured in thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per pound. That is to say, even if reusability results in a 10-fold increase in fuel cost but allows vehicle cost to be amortized to negligibility, we're still approaching Musk's $500k/flight number. As to his actual plan, the fuel cost to land a booster segment is tiny compared to the cost of launching a vehicle. The first stage will simply reenter without having to retro-burn, and the second stage will need to retro-burn just enough to enter the atmosphere to achieve the rest of the braking. After that, the delta-v required is on the order of 100m/s, hardkly the 10km/s needed for orbit. You seem to know what you're doing, so I leave the derivation of that penalty, using the rocket equation, to you.

tl;dr: You're absolutely wrong in the most irrelevant way, and had you addressed SpaceX's achievements and plans in anything like a rigorous way, you could easily have answered your own question.

EDIT: The fuel cost for escape will not be sqrt(2) times the cost for circular speed. The real factor will be something more like 2 or 3, not 1.414... Still, we're in the range of $60/lb, not $6,000/lb.

<comment><USER4> _which will run you $21 at $3.50/gallon_

So I was going to call bullshit on your price for rocket fuel given that regular gasoline is more expensive than this, but I looked up the price [<http://www.desc.dla.mil/DCM/DCMPage.asp?PageID=722>] and it turns out that's pretty close to the current price for JP-5. The most expensive fuel the DOD uses, JTS, is only $6/gallon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Robert Zubrin published a detailed plan for generating rocket fuel on Mars several years ago. His book "The Case for Mars" is a good read.

Such a technology really is a game changer for the economics of the mission. And you can send your robotic fuel factory and make sure it's working before you commit to launching people.

<comment><USER6> I've actually got that book in my collection and you're right, it is a good read.

The idea of producing rocket fuel on Mars is not only a good one, but quite likely the only way such a mission would even be viable. The idea of hauling all that extra rocket fuel for the return trip to Mars and back simply doesn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While I'm sure it's a technical hurdle in itself, I didn't think that fuel or weight were the big problems with a manned mission to Mars. I'm curious as to what Mr. Musk's plan is for shielding passengers from intersteller radiation that one would experience outside of our magnetosphere.

The Apollo astronauts were exposed to approximately 1140 millirem over a 9 day mission, while the average here on earth is 350 millirem per year. Nuclear workers are limited to about 2000 millirem per year... so the approximately 52,000 millirem per year the astronauts would receive on a Mars mission is a problem.

<comment><USER8> Obligatory XKCD link: <http://xkcd.com/radiation/>

(100 rem = 1 sievert)

<comment><USER9> Following that math, the 9 day Apollo trip got 0.0114 sieverts. We'll round that to 11 mSv.

So in 9 days, they got 11x more than the EPA's yearly limit to the public, or 1/5th of the EPA's yearly limit to radiation workers.

The 520mSv warpspeed listed as a trip's radiation exposure comes out to 5x the lowest yearly radiation exposure 'clearly linked' to increased cancer risk.

So yeah. A problem, barring adequate shielding, if that number is correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The full-length interview this story is based on is on this page:

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17439490>

Just skip the stories and listen to the audio, it's much more informative.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is great and I fully applaud him for this. But when I go, I won't be coming back <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_to_Stay>

</comment><comment><USER12> How is he going to do the landing? Human manned craft are going to be too big for bags, and the atmosphere is too thin for parachutes to work. Landing on thrusters is somewhat fuel heavy (so to speak).

<comment><USER7> Like this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BudlaGh1A0o>

edit- Parachutes are probably more practical. They work if you make them big enough.

<comment><USER13> Your mass scales with the cube of linear dimension. Parachute drag scales as a square of linear dimension.

What this means is that the chute gets bigger much more quickly than the payload as you increase lander mass, to the point that you quickly get outlandishly large and impractical chutes for manned landers. Hence the research into alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> He's relying on generating fuel on Mars, which considering that we've barely scraped the Martian surface with robots is highly speculative. Mars travel is still beyond business planning and into the realm of futures studies. I love SpaceX, but they haven't yet demonstrated they can reliably deliver payloads to Earth orbit on a regular basis. They're a long, long way from Mars.

<comment><USER15> I've heard some experts in the field say that the hardest parts about space travel are the launching and the landing. The middle parts, like the long boring flight and keeping the crew alive and not crazy, are massively easier and less risky in comparison, engineering-wise. They've shown they can put something into orbit. Landing on Mars with humans will be tricky, but the technology seems to exist to allow it, and that general kind of thing has been done before. Parachutes and thrusters, etc.

<comment><USER14> I don't doubt that SpaceX can get to Mars eventually, maybe even within 10 years. I really hope they do, I'm rooting for them. But I seriously doubt they will be ferrying space tourists out there for $500K apiece in any timeframe that would fit in a business plan, even a very long-term one. We're decades away from that kind of capability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Of course, there are many skeptical experts out there that have pointed out > the fact that SpaceX has only attempted a rocket launch seven times. Of > those seven, three were total failures.

Ouch. I hope that $500,000 is refundable in case of death or accident.

> Any human that makes the trip will be stuck inside the vehicle for the 214 > days it would take to actually travel to the Red Planet.

I once made a road trip from Seattle to Tennessee in 3 days. In the middle of a frigid winter. During blizzard conditions. Of course we took breaks to get out of the car, stretch our legs, have a piss and get some fresh air. At the end of the trip I was ready to hang myself. The boredom and rigor of endless driving became unbearable. The prospect of taking a similar trip, over a much longer timespan, in much more hostile conditions and paying for the privilege is not appealing, at all.

<comment><USER17> To be more specific about their flight record: the _first_ three test flights were failures, back when they were still working out the kinks on the Falcon 1. The flights since then -- including both Falcon 9 launches -- have been successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd rather go to the moon. The view is better.

<comment><USER17> If you're interested in spectacular views, it's hard to compete with a mountain three times the height of Mount Everest:

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

Mars also has an atmosphere suitable for flying around in with helium or hydrogen balloons. You could mount a camera on a bunch of balloons and get some _amazing_ pictures.

If you don't mind my saying so, "The view is better" doesn't sound like your real reason for preferring the moon.

<comment><USER19> He means the view of Earth from the moon vs from Mars.

<comment><USER20> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthrise>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So you can drop a half million dollars and spend 2 years of your life in a tiny compartment millions of miles from home to visit a dead, cold, rusty rock without a breathable atmosphere?

Does that sound unappealing to anyone else?

<comment><USER22> I expect there are many people who would find that very unappealing. I also expect that there are people who would put down the money right now if you would let them.

<comment><USER23> There are people who would put down the money for a one-way trip.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe fly to the moon first before you tackle mars?

<comment><USER17> If anybody feels like going to the moon, I'm sure SpaceX would love to handle the launches.

<comment><USER25> To me going to moon looks like a more interesting prospect than going to mars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can't get that much time off of work. What can you do for me over a couple weeks?

</comment><comment><USER27> In other news, a one-way trip to Mars only costs $50k. If you don't make it, you can sue for a refund, but you have to sue in Martian courts, which won't be set up for a few more decades.

<comment><USER28> Is mars established as a credible planet/nation zone, or does it count as space (international)? Its an interesting perspective that the "zone" of mars could be a place of legal jurisdiction. But it seems that space is a free for all "zone", so maybe your lawsuit would be void?

<comment><USER7> According to the 1967 U.N. Outer Space Treaty, "outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means. However, the State that launches a space object retains jurisdiction and control over that object. The State is also liable for damages caused by their space object and must avoid contaminating space and celestial bodies." (from Wikipedia)

So any crimes on Mars would probably fall under the jurisdiction of the country who launched the mission. Enforcement on the other hand might be tricky.

<comment><USER15> Laws and treaties are just words on paper. They can be changed. They can be ignored. They have in the past and it's reasonable to assume they will continue to be in the future. So, I wouldn't rule out having some existing nation declare sovereignty over some part of Mars or an asteroid. They will give whatever excuse they need to justify it. Businesses would have powerful private profit incentive to be able to claim rights to things, and to have the protection of a patron national government's military to back it up, like the US, China, etc. We can also expect silly unnecessary wars to be ginned up by propagandists working for those same private profit interests. History is littered with examples, and no reason to expect it won't happen again in the future.

<comment><USER29> > So, I wouldn't rule out having some existing nation declare sovereignty over > some part of Mars or an asteroid.

Perhaps it will end up in a situation akin to Antarctica.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wav2letter: Automatic Speech Recognition Toolkit from Facebook AI Research - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/facebookresearch/wav2letter <comment><USER2> Suggestion for anyone interested in this.

I recommend not copying and pasting the blocks of code into your terminal. Look at the install commands first and make sure you are running them from the preferred root directory.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone suggest some good resources for a beginner to get to speed on Speech Recognition and synthesis?

<comment><USER4> I guess it depends on what exactly you want to do. If you want to get familiar with the components of a speech recognition system at the level of fiddling with a bunch of shell scripts until you have an end-to-end pipeline from recording speech samples to recognizing new speech, I can recommend the "Kaldi for Dummies" tutorial. [1] It helped me a lot to get an appreciation for the steps that go into making such a system work.

[1] [http://kaldi-asr.org/doc/kaldi_for_dummies.html](http://kaldi- asr.org/doc/kaldi_for_dummies.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> the link for torch is borkened

<comment><USER6> Submit a pull request - the URL just needs those colons</comment></comment>


Google is reportedly shutting down its in-house VR film studio - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/13/google-is-reportedly-shutting-down-its-in-house-vr-film-studio/ <comment><USER2> I bootstrapped a VR company (1) after leaving a high paying CMO job. I put in around $100k, we released three games, one got some funding from HTC, we were shown at GDC, SIGGRAPH, VRLA, etc. We hit around 2,700 MAU before my co- founder tapped out after no salary for two years.

I took six months off from VR to go back to a normal job that paid well. That got acquired (in a very non-meaningful way, at least for me) in December and I've been drawn back to VR. Immersive computing is the inevitable next platform. Recent data(2) shows the kind of growth you'd expect and hope for at this stage.

As others have said, the Quest will be a game changer. I think an NDA says I can't confirm or deny that I have one, but I certainly agree it is a game changer. During my six month break from VR, I didn't have any of my half dozen headsets setup. We had turned my living room into our office prior to dismantling, so it was nice to just have my living room back to normal. Setting up my Vive again after six months reminded me of what a pain in the ass that process is. The Quest fixes all of it.

VR is not 3D TV. Anyone who has experienced both knows that to be true. AR will have a much higher install base, but VR will have an addressable market of tens/hundreds of millions.

I've been working on a postmortem about my VR company for a while, but can't seem to finish it. Partially because I'm not sure if that company is over yet.

I've got plenty to say about VR, VR startups and VR venture, so any questions, ask away.

(1) [http://www.RLTYCHK.co](http://www.RLTYCHK.co)

(2) [https://www.roadtovr.com/monthly-connected-vr-headsets-on- st...](https://www.roadtovr.com/monthly-connected-vr-headsets-on-steam-have- grown-exponentially-analysis)

<comment><USER3> Like you I think the Quest will change everything. I feel that it has to, at this point, for VR momentum to break through. Do you think Oculus will dominate the space in the coming decade? I can't help but be reminded of Sense/Net from Neuromancer as a potential VR-only business with massive upside and potential (userbase in the hundreds of millions if not billions) that can be done _today_ if VR headset proliferation went beyond gamers. I am thinking if Carmack and Abrash can't get it done, chances that anyone else will are slim, at least in this generation.

<comment><USER2> I have conflicting thoughts about Oculus' domination. Last night was an interesting example, Facebook went down and took Oculus with it. But beyond that, if this is going to be the platform of the future, we're going to need more than one company behind it. History tells me that there is a better solution being built in a garage right now. If Lucky Palmer could do it in the 2010's, someone else can be doing it again now. I'd certainly vote for that company to be stand alone.

Have you read The History of the Future ([https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062455966](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062455966)) yet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How's the market for VR doing in general? Is it growing or shrinking?

Around the time the first Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and Microsoft's HoloLens were released some years back seemed to be high water mark of media stories about VR. Since then it seems to be pretty quiet.

Is VR dying on the vine?

<comment><USER5> I have spent quite sometime with Vive, Rift and PSVR. (rift, psvr at home, vive at my office)

PSVR is unironically the hope for VR right now, even though it has by far the lowest quality.

It has some very good games (Astrobot, Wipeout, RE7, Ace Combat 7, Moss, Beat Saber). It's cheap, easy to set up (aimed towards couch VR instead of room scale), cool helmet design, and the fact that the headset works as a regular monitor for non-vr games and one person can be watching TV while the other person gaming, is genius.

Compared to let's say Oculus where you need, 4 usb ports (3x usb 3.0), cables everywhere, space, a ~$1200 pc/headset combo...

I do believe in VR though and am excited for what the future holds.

<comment><USER6> > PSVR is unironically the hope for VR right now, even though it has by far > the lowest quality.

For me it's the upcoming Oculus Quest. I've been refreshing /r/oculusquest daily, hoping to get a release date or a way to reserve it.

<comment><USER7> My big hope for the Quest is that they'll say "Surprise! The USB-C port isn't just charging, it also supports VirtualLink alternate mode!"

Would be great to have one device that can operate as _both_ a standalone device and be connected to a computer for more graphically intense experiences than the Quest's snapdragon hardware can provide.

IIRC it's running at a lower framerate than a Rift does, but it'd still be cool to have that option because I have no plans to buy a dedicated PC- connected headset.

Odds of this actually happening are probably not good, but fingers crossed anyway.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure they've already said to the public that the Quest hardware isn't capable of of video input over USB-C, so I wouldn't hold out any hope for that. They did say they were investigating streaming from a PC over wireless though which might be even better if they can get it working decently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is Google saying VR _as a medium for passive consumption_ is dead, or at least the market isn't ready yet. There's could still be plenty of potential for interactive media like games though.

<comment><USER10> > This is Google saying VR as a medium for passive consumption is dead

Not quite. The OP is about 3DOF content where the stereo is baked. You can't move your head around and can't tilt your head.

You can have passive content like a static or living scene that isn't interactive but where you can move your head a bit or explore, and it can be photorealistic (6DOF video, light fields, which Google is also working on).

VR has this property of being the best hardware to consume some kind of contents that don't fully take advantage of it. Like monoscopic 360° videos, stereoscopic 180° video or stereo panoramas. Not quite VR but there is no better way to consume them. I wonder if it sometimes confuse people assessment of VR potential.

<comment><USER11> > The OP is about 3DOF content where the stereo is baked

The OP is about Google Spotlight Stories, which mostly produced non- interactive 6DoF experiences. Obviously on Daydream headsets or YouTube videos which don't support 6DoF you'd only get 3DoF, but if you download the videos on Steam 6DoF works just fine: [https://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=Google%20Spotlig...](https://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=Google%20Spotlight%20Stories&vrsupport=401)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> when is google _not_ shutting something down, tbh

<comment><USER13> When they are raising prices on it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> VR is in its infancy for over 30 years now. It is just not really good.

<comment><USER15> > It is just not really good.

I suspect you having been shown the right content. I could reel of a long list of amazing work being done in VR. Google Earth in VR is one of the most astonishing things I've tried in the last decade. Narrative works like Dispatch and Manifest 99 show the potential of VR as a storytelling medium. Tilt Brush, Gravity Sketch are already genuinely useful creative tools...

Oh - and Beat Saber. :-)

<comment><USER16> I have a Mixed Reality headset and Google Earth is amazing with room-scale VR. It's not something I would have thought would work as well as it does.

Beat Saber is the only VR game I keep coming back to - the controls are spot on. So simple and intuitive. You really need to work to get used to all the buttons and sticks to control most other VR games.

<comment><USER15> > You really need to work to get used to all the buttons and sticks to control > most other VR games.

This is a controversial opinion but I prefer the Vive wands to the Oculus touch for this very reason. It pushed developers towards simpler control schemes on the whole.

Trying to remember which button does what is not immersive.

Picking the controller up with the wrong hand every single time is not immersive.

Being reminded you're using a game controller is not immersive.

The best controls in VR are your hands but failing that - the Vive wands are often used as a lump with a single trigger - which I find ideal.

This is one of the reasons why public demos are always smoother with the Vive. You just pass people the controller and show them where the trigger is (and maybe the big trackpad button if necessary)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It could just be that VR at Gooogle scale is not ready. There may still be a huge part for VR to play in "niche" markets like games, training simulators, data visualization etc.

<comment><USER18> Yeah perhaps there's just not that much room for large companies who want to throw gobs of money and resources at it.

Smaller players, even capable hobbyists, who iterate and find what works and what doesn't and keep rolling on / don't shutdown if they don't hit a goal in X time, might just be the folks who find what works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was a co-founder of a VR lab at SAIC in the 1990s. We shut down because we lacked a clear path to monetization even though everyone who tried our system loved it.

It seems like a `chicken and the egg` problem: if enough people had VR gear then studios would have a chance of profitability.

<comment><USER20> Daydream hardware didn't support most phones for no reason, I don't know what they thought was going to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > aggressively hocking

Possibly they mean "hawking"?

<comment><USER22> I think they mean "hock" in the pawn off sense of the word and not intense falconry.

<comment><USER23> "Hawking" can also refer to the sale of goods, usually in a kind of bazaar- like fashion

<comment><USER24> No, that's "hocking".

<comment><USER25> Actually, it's "hawking"!

To _hock_ something is to pawn it, i.e. sell it because you need the money (and possibly plan to buy it back later):

[https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/hock- hawk/](https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/hock-hawk/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reality is almost nobody wants to wear VR headsets, and that's going to take a while for VCs to admit that.

</comment><comment><USER27> Billions of people never knew it existed. Nobody knows what they even did or produced.

Flagged as who gives a heck.

<comment><USER28> billions of dollars were also invested, at the expense of other technologies</comment></comment>


Walmart.com - <AUTHOR> http://Walmart.com <comment><AUTHOR> Context—

Walmart just went live with a massive redesign. The person driving the effort is Dan Makoski of Moto X and Project Ara fame.

I have a bit of an inside track on it considering I've known Dan from his Microsoft days. The design is intended to be much more needs-focused and less cluttered, though I've yet to actually give the site a try.

(I'm not affiliated with Walmart by any means)

<comment><USER2> I'd have recommended putting that in the title. ;)

"Walmart launched a whole redesign of their site"

I signed in really quick, and my main original peeve with Walmart's site, the frustration of getting to my personal lists, is gone. It's very easy to find now, right where I expected it to be. So big +1 there.

On the other hand, I removed something from a list, and it slid away. And then I realized later it was still on the list. In actually, it had slid away to a confirm removal option, that I wasn't expecting (Amazon removes on one click but allows you to undo it), but since I navigated away instead of clicking Remove a second time, it didn't remove it. I found this unintuitive.

<comment><AUTHOR> dang — regarding the title, thoughts on renaming the submission? I just went with the raw page title.

I'll bring Dan M over to monitor the feedback.

<comment><USER3> I like the title. It seems meta. It's a simplified title for a simplified site...

I predict the title will be changed, though. Here's the original title for context: Walmart.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some quick notes:

\- Feels a little _too_ mobile. Menu on left requires a click and should ideally be a hover. I had to check to make sure I wasn't on some mobile site as it looks like the mobile version just enlarged.

\- Search bar touches the top of the page. Needs some gap above it.

\- Navigation even on top right requires far too many clicks for basic functionality (sign-in, etc). Desktop should take advantage of hover.

\- Was clicking around products and the experience feels a bit jarring. The page loads and menu color changes are sudden and feel like a full page refresh. I'm sure it'll get better over time but just mentioning.

Nice redesign overall! Looks more like Amazon's latest refreshes.

</comment><comment><USER5> on a desktop walmart.com is a long series of annoyances:

\- hamburger menu on desktop, why?

\- not 100% recognizable icons in the upper right (requiring a hover)

\- Large product images for categories with tiny text

On the plus side, search and search results are well done.

Why does nearly every ecommerce site put product reviews at bottom of the product page? I'll never understand it.

<comment><AUTHOR> > hamburger menu on desktop, why?

I'm seeing this everywhere, probably because the hamburger is now the universal symbol for a menu.

<comment><USER5> It's recognizable, but why require a click to see subcategories? It's an unnecessary interaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It loads 'second-party' JavaScript (from domains which are pretty obviously also owned by Walmart), which means that it doesn't work with uMatrix. It'd have been easy enough to load all assets from something .walmart.com …

<comment><USER7> > _It loads 'second-party' JavaScript_

Most big sites that use CDNs do that.

> _which means that it doesn 't work with uMatrix_

It only takes a few seconds to permanently whitelist those domains (wal.co and walmartimages.com) in uMatrix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We're having technical difficulties and are looking into the problem now.</comment>


Body by Victoria (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/322-Body-By-Victoria.html <comment><USER2> Error Level Analysis ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_level_analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_level_analysis)) is controversial, and some people would argue that its usual application is pseudoscientific.

If you're interested in ELA, I'd encourage you to try it on some control photographs you've taken yourself, and know are unmodified, particularly photographs that have objects with considerably different textures, like textured fabrics.

Trying it on lossless screenshots can also be amusing.

<comment><USER3> > and know are unmodified

Cameras these days do all sorts of digital processing themselves, especially on phones, which might make this a little hard

<comment><USER4> If it finds problems in images directly out of the camera that makes its use for identifying image manipulation suspect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1017726](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1017726)

</comment><comment><USER6> The apparently shoddy job (handbag, tiles, etc) suggests to me that whitening dark skin tones, enlarging busts and thinning arms and legs is so banal it's not even worth paying a skilled artist for.

To me, this example serves as a stark reminder that women's bodies are _still_ expected to conform to absurd norms in the media. FFS, can we get past this already!?

<comment><USER7> People respond to incentives. They must've figured out at some point that using attractive models for advertising sells better to normal, average people. Not all models you have on hand will be attractive enough for the magazine, so they can supplement with Photoshop. Even if you regulate away Photoshop usage in the marketing/advertising industry, they'd just have to start only hiring super attractive models right? Maybe we could force companies to use average looking models? I don't know, but there's a lot of ways you could approach it. The simplest but most difficult solution is to change people. I know the first reaction is to think that "Wow, it's all those pervert men's fault for these absurd norms and expectations of women!" but then I remember these are advertisements targeted to women. What to do?

<comment><USER8> French solution: [https://www.france24.com/en/20170930-france-fashion- photosho...](https://www.france24.com/en/20170930-france-fashion-photoshop- law-models-skinny) / [https://www.france24.com/en/20170506-france-health- skinny-ai...](https://www.france24.com/en/20170506-france-health-skinny- airbrushed-models-fashion-anorexia)

(France is still in many ways a more conformist culture than the Anglo- American one, but this is a good gesture)

<comment><USER9> Also [https://www.france24.com/en/20170906-french-fashion- giants-b...](https://www.france24.com/en/20170906-french-fashion-giants-ban- super-skinny-models-anorexia)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's worth re-mentioning that the model in this article had her skin tone whitened significantly as part of the photoshopping, as well as nipple removal/bust enhancement/handbag "removal" etc.

Basically, they made her look less black.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's a bit grim that no one is using her name; talk about depersonalisation.

</comment><comment><USER12> What exactly is he performing the PCA on? I assume the image is concatenated into a 1D vector, so what makes up the matrix that's used to generate the eigenvectors? RGB values?

<comment><USER13> See, for example, slide 17 ff. of [http://people.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hlavac/TeachPresEn/11ImageProc/...](http://people.ciirc.cvut.cz/~hlavac/TeachPresEn/11ImageProc/15PCA.pdf) .

<comment><USER12> I may be getting this wrong, but doesn't that slide show the PCA being done on multiple images? Each image is 321 x 261, which concats to a 83781 vector. Then they're repeating that for 32 images producing a 83781 x 32 matrix, which they then apply the PCA on to get 32 principle components.

When you have only one image, what's making up the columns of the matrix (assuming rows = 1D image vector)?

<comment><USER13> > I may be getting this wrong, but doesn't that slide show the PCA being done > on multiple images? Each image is 321 x 261, which concats to a 83781 > vector. Then they're repeating that for 32 images producing a 83781 x 32 > matrix, which they then apply the PCA on to get 32 principle components.

Yes, you are right (except that it's 'principal'), and I didn't read my link carefully. I am a mathematician whose specialty is not a million miles away from these kind of signal-reconstruction techniques, but far enough away that I can't give any better answer from personal knowledge. Sorry!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is an excellent "how to catch a photoshop" guide.

</comment><comment><USER15> Not on topic, but the changes to the pics bring out the horror masks. Check the black skull leering out of the gloom in 2nd pic, the joker's red/green skull-face of the 4th, the black cheshire cat grin of the last.

</comment><comment> globular-toast This is interesting when it comes to being able to spot a Photoshop. But this seems to be about more than that. It seems to be about casting shame on to Victoria's Secret for using Photoshop. Why is that? They are selling a dress and want to show it in the best light. Is the author claiming false advertising? The model is being compensated (probably handsomely) for the use of her image. She should consider herself lucky that Photoshop exists because she's clearly not exactly what they want, but close enough.

<comment><USER16> They answered in this FAQ: [http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/346-Bod...](http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/346-Body- of-Answers.html)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Pro's and con's of Joomla with quantifiable data/information? - <AUTHOR> I'm doing a bit of research about Joomla, partially because a client asked me to though also because I'm having trouble finding qualitative data for or against it. Instead what I mostly find are useless posts simply ranting about how they hate it because of XYZ but never back up their claims; in other words, to me they seem to talk trash about Joomla without any evidence to back it up. The other side of the coin: I see articles saying how great it is, but all they tell me are the feature set in layman's and sales like terms; all I can think of when I read those are: well, there is nothing here that tells me how it is different, better or unique when compared to other platforms on the interwebz (yes, with Z!).
One popular article mentions the difficultly of upgrading from Joomla 1.0 to 1.7(?? or some version like that). Though it seems rather silly to assume a completely re-written CORE would be 100% compatible with old stuff. Stuff from Apple OS 8/9 does not and will not work with OS X. It's just too different of a system.
That said, my current bias is to just say "I don't see any reason to use Joomla over what we use now," though the technology does interest me. So, can someone please shed some light for me on how or why Joomla may (or may not) be a great system with proper data to backup their claims. Simply saying "it sucks" or "it's great" will not help this conversation since it's just favourtism at that point.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> It's a pain in the ass to use. The plugins are often not backwards compatible. It's amateur quality. The database is mySQL which is not ACID compliant, among other problems. Joomla also is terrible for SEO as the URL handling is badly implemented.. (the whole thing runs off of Index.php? for example.)

Joomla is for people that don't know anything about web development and want something they can throw together. If your client "must" use something like Joomla, you'd be better off with WordPress -- there are far more plugins, the documentation is better and it's not a pain in the ass to deploy. Or better yet, just build a Rails CMS. It isn't that hard.

Joomla also has a bad reputation for security. While it can be secure, it often isn't because of the way 'developers' build the sites.

Joomla is based on Mambo (from the PHP 4 days) and is badly engineered. It isn't even object oriented. It's also not MVC, so you can't separate business logic from presentation, among other things. It's just a mess.

The documentation is terrible compared to WordPress -- a pretty big deal if you want to create custom extensions.

I'll go out on a limb here and add that the types of clients that love Joomla are the types of clients I can do without. I did some Joomla work for a client and it was the worst experience I've ever had working with anyone, because the types of people that value Joomla, rarely value craftsmanship, good design (both front-end and back-end) and are generally ignorant (or hardheaded) about good software practices. Never again.

Oh, and it's in PHP.

</comment><comment><USER3> Definitely avoid Joomla if you can. I've been maintaining a Joomla site since 2009, and I can't update any of the core components because it would break too many plugins for which there are no newer, compatible versions.

I'm building a replacement for that site right now using Rails. If that's not an option, go with Wordpress.

</comment><comment><USER4> Joomla is _so_ slow.

It looks like _nothing_ about it has significantly changed over the last four years.

I'd recommend Wordpress (very simple) or even Drupal (which is complicated, but more CMS-like as Joomla is).</comment>


Researchers found stolen military secrets for sale on the dark web - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/researchers-found-stolen-military-secrets-for-sale-on-the-dark-web/ <comment><USER2> You can also buy human remains and pound after pound of any drug you could want. Doesn't surprise me in the least.</comment>


Australian dentist granted court order forcing Google to unmask anonymous critic - <AUTHOR> https://www.sbs.com.au/news/melbourne-dentist-granted-court-order-forcing-google-to-unmask-anonymous-critic <comment><AUTHOR> Also, from the _Guardian 's_ coverage:

> Google has argued that defamation threats can be used to suppress > information that might help customers steer clear of bad businesses, and > that it should only remove reviews with a court order.

> It followed a judgment in the South Australian supreme court last week > awarding $750,000 in damages to Adelaide barrister Gordon Cheng for an > October 2018 review left in English and Chinese on Google, claiming Cheng > gave "false and misleading advices".

> Cheng told the court he had lost around 80% of his business, and was > subsequently diagnosed with depression. Google took down the review around > two months after Cheng was first alerted to it, and six months after it was > posted.

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/14/court- say...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/14/court-says- melbourne-dentist-can-serve-google-for-user-details-over-bad-review)</comment>


Zerodium to stop paying bounties for iOS due to sheer amount of vulnerabilities - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Zerodium/status/1260541578747064326 <comment><USER2> This makes a pretty good argument for open-sourcing OS software.

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" \- Linus Torvalds

<comment><USER3> You assume that because many people _could_ look for bugs, many people _do_.

I added an easter egg to a widely used piece of software many year ago. Noone discovered it until another maintainer published it, maybe a decade later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related posts are the real winners, this one was two down from the one linked:

[https://twitter.com/aionescu/status/1260466215299973121?s=20](https://twitter.com/aionescu/status/1260466215299973121?s=20)

</comment><comment><USER5> Apple with it's large war chest and claim of being security and privacy first should prevent most of these bugs.

I don't expect the same from Google's Android as their business model is on harvesting data and NOT selling you a secure and privacy-first device.

<comment><USER6> Google would still like their devices secure. Can't have someone else rooting it and redirecting the sweet sweet data feed...</comment></comment>


Are there any good mmobile live streaming solution? - <AUTHOR> http://jatspeak.com/blog/?p=33 I was looking for some live solutions that allow me to transfer a live feed from my mobile to a friends mobile. I could not find any good solution. If anyon e knows abt it, then please do inform.
Also, given such a platform, i came up with some interesting use cases, which you might agree as well. I posted it on my blog.
Given that you have a framework which can deliver real time video feeds from your phone to anywhere? How would you use it? I'm sure justin's job would be much easier in case it allows him to stream his video on web. <comment><USER2> AT&T Video Share does this, but it is limited to select 3G phones and I dont think it has yet been rolled out to all regions.

And its damn expensive.</comment>