Mediocrity is underrated (or better is the enemy of good enough) - <AUTHOR> http://nayna.org/blog/?p=11 <comment><USER2> Is this supposed to be tongue-almost-penetrating-cheek, or is this author for real?

Let's assume the author is serious for a second; the company he/she is describing is just _asking_ to get fed to the lions by a company that does not embrace mediocrity-as-policy mantra, and shows they actually give a damn about their product and their customers. Those customers they are pissing off, but aren't seeing leave, are staying because there isn't another option; as soon as there is, the exodus will begin. As it does, this company is screwed, because the mediocrity they worked into their codebase assures they will be able to react about as swiftly as rock can to someone threatening to kick it.

This is not the first appeal to mediocrity I've heard, but the authors or orators I've heard make this same appeal in the past are really offering an apology for their own apathy. They _want_ this to be true, regardless of veracity, because then it will justify their own desire to not give a shit. They hope that their self-fulfilling prophecy becomes the same to everyone else, so no one is forcing them out of mediocrity. No one is making them actually work for their monthly lifestyle installment, and instead join them resting on past achievements, hoping this grants all of us a perpetual annuity.

On the other hand, if this _is_ satire, it's really bad satire.

Oh, and to reflect on his clever quip about spelling: yes, I did catch the spelling mistakes, and they did piss me off. And I did finish the essay, in hopes that I would find a paragraph loosely reading "jk lolz" at the end. Since I didn't, this blogger now has the bozo-bit set. So much for mediocrity being good enough.

<comment><USER3> This is either bad advice or bad satire. I'm fairly sure it's the latter.

<comment><USER4> I'd say this is _mediocre_ satire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This actually made some sense for me. Yes it did start to read like sarcasm, but no-one (and no company) can ever be brilliant at _everything_.

Trying to do everything perfectly will lead to burn out, but leaving some things badly done will leave you exposed.

What I took from the article was to be mediocre in almost everything you do is a sustainable approach - want to take payments, use paypal, sales and marketing? Adwords, some PR puffs and a voip number. Mediocre still means a job is done and to an acceptable standard. If it is quick and dirty, it is a lot better than not done at all.

As long as you do one thing better than mediocre, and everything else is covered, you stand a chance.

But yes, there is a lot of judgement between 'this quick and dirty is an acceptable mediocre' and 'this quick and dirty is worse than nothing'.

</comment><comment><USER6> I actually thought the OP made some good points..!

The superstar coders are much harder to work with.

I think a lot of readers took this article the wrong way or were somehow offended by it. Why..?

This almost sounds a little like Eric Sink on software and is somewhat opposed to Paul Graham's philo, which is basically: the more super stars you have on your team the better. The OP sounds more in favor of building a cohesive team.

</comment><comment><USER7> "As far as I know, there is no company that says - We are ok. We could be better, but thats not our priority."

This author needs to get out more. Many corporate IT shops have this attitude. You can argue whether it is good or bad all you want, but it definitely exists.

Note: Technology companies should not have this attitude. But how many companies out there truly are about technology.

Is a grocery store a technology company? Your lawn service? Your local pizza shop? Being startups geeks, we all tend to get tunnel vision. Most companies are not about technology.

Even mine, a large energy company -- Our customers don't give a crap about our technology. They care about what we pull out of the ground and how we pipe it across the country. Our IT work has nothing to do with our actual business. IT work measures it, does accounting, handles "office work", etc. It affects our internal costs and efficiencies. But that isn't our actual business, and our customers don't know and don't care about our IT shop.

<comment><USER8> It's an excellent point that many businesses are not really technology businesses at all. However, one could make the argument that it is still in the company's best interest to promote IT quality because that is the best way to keep the IT department from bloating into something that consumes far more resources than necessary. Good technology should be reliable, cheap, and invisible, but those things take a certain amount of quality.

I would argue that most non-technology companies would be best served by employing a single very good software engineer, maybe two or three if the company is very large. If the company is small then the one engineer doesn't even have to be all that brilliant. You can't do this if you have to administrate a typical IT ecosystem, but if your company is not a technology company, why do you need a typical IT ecosystem in the first place? (Because no one knows how to do anything outside of one, and even if you can find someone you can't find a replacement. Therefore every company must support a relatively large and complex ecosystem whether they want to or not.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Although there should always be room to compromise, I've always thought that our reach should always exceed our grasp; otherwise we'll never produce anything of quality. The article sounds to me like a simple attempt to justify apathy.

</comment><comment><USER10> That reminds me of that silly game Mediocrity by I think Dougas Hofstadter: Three persons write down an arbitrary number. The one with the middle number scores a point. After an agreed upon number of rounds (5 or 7 or so), the one with the middle number of points scores a set. After a number of sets, the one with the middle number of sets scores the match.

</comment><comment><USER11> Waste of time. This is some kind of satirical article (I hope - if not, it's just so far off the quality curve that you can't even see the curve anymore), and not a very good satirical article at that. Somewhat bad writing ("towing" the line? Mistakes like this abound), not very imaginative.

Skip.

<comment><USER12> Whether it was satirical or not, I'm not reading. Why? Because mediocrity is orthogonal to success. It's all about what works for a particular business. I personally wish to always be passionate about what I do and work with similarly passionate people, and that correlates pretty highly with striving for excellence, and that will influence the type of business I participate in. However that is no better a recipe for success than just being really driven to sell tchotchkes to a billion people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Better aim for perfection and only achieve good-enough that aim for mediocrity and "achieve" it... To get better you have to play at least a bit above your skill level, out of your "comfort zone". If you constantly play below your skill-level you _will_ get worse.

</comment><comment><USER14> > My mediocrity undoubtedly teed you off a little, but did it prevent you from > finishing the essay ?

Indeed, the author is correct, I finished the article (which, to be fair, had some interesting points) -- but will I return in the future or subscribe. To that, the answer is 'no'.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't know if it's satire or not, but if it wasn't meant to be, I didn't pick up on it.

Also, I read this graph, mouth agape, and quit. No, I didn't finish your article.

"Process. It is important not to use Agile methods, as it actually improves quality. While a reader has pointed out that 'It is perfectly possible to use Agile methods and be a very mediocre organization', why take the chance? Using a CMM or waterfall approach will ensure that there is sufficient rigidity in process to disallow attempts to achieve a high quality."

If he's serious, that just makes no sense, and would be a miserable, miserable place to work. If it's satire, well, I still wouldn't want to work wherever this guy does.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've seriously been thinking about such issues; there is a definitely a point of diminishing returns. Deciding when to cut your losses on maintaining code that is on the limits of your ability to follow is difficult.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's about priorities.

pg talks about the priorities for HN in this thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=830035>

</comment><comment><USER8> This is basically a worse variation on the better Worse is Better article by Richard Gabriel, focused on software design as business strategy instead of as a pure popularity strategy.

The core observation of Worse is Better is that the 50%-80% solution, designed to be easy to replicate, is more popular than a 90% solution that is more difficult to replicate, because the worse solution will spread faster, gain a larger community, and can then evolve to an 85% solution and will not need to evolve further because users will have been conditioned to expect less.

These arguments appeal because they are basically correct descriptions of a common phenomena, but if you simplify the message to "mediocrity is good" then you miss the point. Mediocrity of product is good, but only if it allows for a 50-80% solution to an existing problem and only if that is the problem that you want to solve. Mediocrity of skill is also good, but only if your goal is to look good to managers of mediocre software products and if you have no desire to move beyond your current domain of expertise at anything beyond a snail's pace. Note how Gabriel says that C is not good enough for AI: it is a great example of this, and also of what causes people to start believing in mediocrity; namely becoming overly discouraged after working on a problem that is far too difficult to solve with current tools and levels of understanding.

I think there is a correct observation in this article as well, and that is that putting a lot of effort into designing the right thing without getting any feedback from users up front or during the process is a terrible form of premature optimization. I agree with this observation and wish it were obvious to everyone, but clearly it is not. But the real question is who are your users and what do they demand? Here the writer goes off the rails by attempting to argue that users want mediocre software, when he really means that users want software that does something very similar to the software that they already have.

The distinction is blurred by the fact that the software that users already have was probably created by someone who sacrificed quality for time to market. The problem with not making this distinction is that you fail to recognize just how much quality remained after those sacrifices had been made.

Microsoft is a good example of this. Many people like to point out their lucky breaks, their rapacious acquisition strategy, and their monopoly preservation techniques, but it is also important to remember that Microsoft, for all its bloated bureaucracy, began with a strong technical culture and has managed to retain much of that culture as it has grown. It has an excellent research division, one of the few remaining in industry (not that Microsoft is much better at leveraging it than, say, Xerox was). If Microsoft is mediocre, and it is, its level of mediocrity is higher than most people's best effort. If you think you can beat Microsoft at anything remotely large scale with a strategy of mediocrity, well, you deserve what you get.

Linux is another good example here. It is a prime case of worse is better culture; initially based on a clone of a conservative OS design, never having ambitions beyond POSIX compliance as a way to spread everywhere, and repeatedly trying and failing to get a foothold on the desktop by slavishly copying Microsoft. Apple may not beat Microsoft, but it is thrashing Linux on the desktop with a strategy of tight control and emphasis on quality. Linux is mediocre all right - too mediocre to succeed outside of the server market, and even there it is probably not as good as whatever BSD best fits your needs. The real success of Linux is when it leverages its large porting culture to spread to platforms with no alternatives. And you probably aren't even as good as the core Linux developers. Hope you're not as ambitious.

Take a look at Google, perhaps the biggest challenge Microsoft has faced yet. Did they get where they are today by being more mediocre than their competition? Quite the opposite, I think.

The secret of mediocrity is that it is more helpful as a way of capturing a mass market than you might think. The secret of quality is that it allows you to create a market that doesn't even exist yet. Do you think every mass market lasts forever? How do you think they die? How do you think their successors began?

So yeah, be mediocre, but you will be at the bottom of a long chain of increasing mediocrity, and your ambitions of being big and successful some day will never be more than delusional fever dreams. Have fun with that.

The message here is not that really that mediocrity is bad or that quality is good. The real message is that you should think carefully about what exactly mediocrity and quality mean in your situation. These are meaningless terms in the abstract. Ignore the details at your peril. Don't let "premature optimization is the root of all evil" turn into "mediocrity is better than quality" turn into "I can be lazy and get away with it" turn into "I have no job, there is no market for my skills, and I have lost the ability to learn new ones." Don't live your life by platitudes at all. Think a little bit.

</comment><comment><USER18> Mediocrity is the swan song of a dieing company.

</comment><comment><USER19> This fart of a blog entry should be restated as ::

..:: Concentate on stability first ,and then excel in thoughtful and considered directions ::..

This mediocre rubbish is just that</comment>


Ask HN: How does the economy of bandwidth work in the era of Web 2.0 - <AUTHOR>

I should say in advance that while I am pretty savvy on low level software, I haven't been paying much attention to the Internet for many years (like over 8) and I am trying to understand the way things work today.
I am having a hard time understanding how it's economically feasible to run a high volume Web 2.0 site. What I mean is, take for instance a cloud based provider like Rackspace, which offers bandwidth for 20 cents per GB. Now say you have a default home page that is roughly half a meg in size, which when you account for all of the doohikies in the Web 2.0 era, is not totally out of the question. With those 2 variables in place, you're spending 20 cents for every ~2050 visitors.
Do the current online advertising rates cover the costs or would this be losing money in terms of bandwidth costs? Put aside all other costs for the moment. Perhaps the better question is, what kind of advertising scenario would be needed to even break even in such a scenario? <comment><USER2> _say you have a default home page that is roughly half a meg in size, which when you account for all of the doohikies in the Web 2.0 era, is not totally out of the question_

Don't forget about caching. The first time someone comes to your multimedia- bloated website he might need to download 500 kB, but as long as you don't screw up too badly future visits will require far less traffic.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a good point. I was wondering about it, things have changed since I did web development back in the late 90's. Has caching changed much? When you say "screw up", is there any thing I should look to avoid doing? Maybe this is also a good time to ask, what is a reasonable size for a main page, and pages beneath it? I see some really big page sizes almost everywhere I look. Small pages seem to be the exception, not the norm these days. Isn't that the whole point of Web 2.0? To deliver near desktop like experiences, or better?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Advertising rates vary a ton, so it's hard to answer in general. But in many areas you can get much more than the $0.10 per thousand impressions you cite as a breakeven point on bandwidth. It's not unheard-of to get $10-30 per thousand impressions, at which point your bandwidth costs are <= 1% of advertising revenues. I get $20 myself on one site, though it's admittedly low-volume, so it's quite possible it'd go down a lot if the visitors increased beyond the current niche of very relevant users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this answer. Is there a resource that covers in general what advertising rates are expected to be in different situations and with which ad networks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I suspect that a combination of advertising and freemium can cover those costs. Also consider that most hosting providers have huge markup on bandwidth, which costs $2-5/Mbps/month wholesale — that's more like one cent per GB. If you're big enough to buy wholesale you can afford to have a much richer site.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK, so if I understand you, the 20c/GB is not what you'd expect to pay for a site that does good volume and buys the bandwidth by the bulk, so to speak? Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but who provides cloud services with better bandwidth rates? Or is it something that Rackspace might negotiate over?

<comment><USER4> Amazon has volume discounts so the price automatically decreases from 15c/GB to 8c/GB as you transfer more. I don't know of any clouds that let you bring your own transit; you'd probably have to move up to a rack or cage (which may also make CPU time cheaper).</comment></comment></comment>


Lockpickers 3-D Print TSA Master Luggage Keys from Leaked Photos - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/09/lockpickers-3-d-print-tsa-luggage-keys-leaked-photos/ <comment><USER3> The only surprising thing here is that the master keys didn't leak sooner. This is a close physical analogue to why it's a very bad idea to mandate backdoors in encryption software. Hopefully the UK[1] and other governments will learn something from this, though I won't hold my breath.

[1] [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150702/00134231524/david...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150702/00134231524/david- cameron-promises-to-do-away-with-safe-spaces-internet.shtml)

<comment><USER4> Even more surprising thing is that you'd need some leak to pick this tiny lock. What protection mechanisms does it have that you can't reverse engineer within a day or so?

Probably Wired is more inclined to create some FUD around the fact that now this is freely accessible 'for anyone with 3D printer'.

<comment><USER5> Well AFAIK, each lock is unique, and while it's easy to pick each individual lock, it's harder to guess or derive from a few of those locks the master key that'll actually open them all.

<comment><USER6> That's generally not true. For example: you could buy a few copies of the same lock and take them apart. Unless there's something Really Funky going on, you can use the master oracle method as well (start with your working key, and change one pin at a time to derive the master key, as most locks with a master can be opened with all the pins set to the normal key and any one pin set to the master keying.

I'd say what this "leak" really did was (a) show the world that real security is hard to think about, and (b) make it easier for normal folks who don't know about how locks work to impress their friends with their ninja secret agent tools.

Really, this is all just a parable for the big fight over encryption. Do you really want to trust a government agency with any kind of control over how we lock down our stuff? Newp, nope, and noooope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is anecdotal but it gets me thinking. Sometimes in the late 90s I stopped putting locks on my luggage. Locks were once or twice removed previously - <USER2> once the customs put a note saying they had done it. I was travelling to Europe, the east of Africa and various Caribbean countries. Nothing was stolen - but the key thing was me not storing anything too expensive in there. Generally all my expensive objects are delicate and will be transferred in my hand luggage.

Perhaps it's safety in numbers. Perhaps it's a kind of camouflage and not signalling anything of worth. Perhaps it's because the level of risk of theft is incredibly low.

<comment><USER8> I don't put locks on my luggage either.

Instead I put an easily breakable cable tie on the zips as a tamper evident seal. The one time I've had a bag come back with it missing has been the time the TSA decided to inspect my bags.

vs a lock, which somebody can open and re-lock and I'd be none the wiser.

<comment><USER9> You can easly unlock and re-lock a cable tie. Not really tamper-evident material.

<comment><USER10> What about if burn the head a bit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The chain always breaks by the weakest link. Considering that you can very easily open the zipper with a ballpoint pen ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpIJVWXsBBI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpIJVWXsBBI)), and close it again as if it was never open, that the secret of the lock was revealed is irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER12> I just find it unbelievable that people were naive enough to believe that they can forever protect a master key that is distributed to thousands of people. You only need 1 rouge TSA employee, with a photographic memory and this whole system falls apart.

<comment><USER13> The locks aren't designed to be flawless. Even a shitty bolt cutter could take them down in 1 second. They are placed on canvas or plastic bags that can be cut open with a pocket knife. Or you could spend 20 minutes trying all 1000 combinations.

It's really just to prevent impulse theft from baggage handlers, bell hops, cab drivers, etc. Even after the leak, these are essentially just as effective as they've always been.

<comment><USER14> not really. if you casually walk up with a key, you can safely steal property without a second glance.

if you walk up with a bolt cutter or a knife, you're going to be much more suspicious.

<comment><USER15> Perhaps. Here's an old video about stealing bikes in NYC: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbklkFuFk-4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbklkFuFk-4)

Note that the guy is hacking away at the lock and the police show up. To tell him to not sit in an active traffic lane.

<comment><USER16> Ah, that's simple to explain. He's white.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7i60GuNRg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7i60GuNRg)

<comment><USER17> This kind of remind me of Israel. I traveled and worked with folks there a few times.

When go to/from/thru the airport, if I was with Hebrew speaking Jewish co- workers, everything would get thru in a few seconds.

There was one time I (Asian) was with Indian co-workers without the company issue security letter, we were search for 3 hours at the airport. Both of our laptop were completely disassembled and Xray multiple times. We were questioned for a long time separately by multiple people.

They must have our previous trip history base on passport record, etc. But ...

Anyway, later I asked a Jewish co-worker about is there any law in Israel about anti-discrimination base on race, color of skin, language spoken, etc. He said we always / must discriminated base on those info!

A different way for thinking compare the "official PC" view of US.

<comment><USER18> AFAIK Israel actually attempts airport security instead of security theatre, which is understandable considering what happens there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They have been out for much longer than this...

[http://world.taobao.com/item/40576438073.htm?spm=a312a.77007...](http://world.taobao.com/item/40576438073.htm?spm=a312a.77007126.96.36.199RSh2R#detail)

<comment><USER20> Nice find, I'm not surprised. These "security researchers" on twitter are just playing into the whole security theater. A TSA lock offers no meaningful security. It's not physically secure, tamper evident nor prevent loss. It's not even a requirement for flying, it's a convenience feature so your bag doesn't open in transit and the TSA doesn't have to cut so many locks open.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Good thing no one in the govt is proposing the same thing for crypto.

As a side note, and plz don't flamen as this is a system hack, the only realy way to keep the TSA out of your bags and stealing stuff is to put a firearm in there. Even a starter pistol works. TSA can't handle fire ars so it's checked by local cops and then locked up with whatever locks you want. Tho you may not want to do this going to NYC.

<comment><USER22> Does this work with realistic airsoft guns? I could imagine this being an interesting hack without having to purchase and own an actual firearm for those of us who would rather avoid that.

Also, what is the screening process like with the cops? Does it take significantly longer? Is it shorter? Do they question why you are bringing it? Would it be a valid response to say "to make sure people with real security training are checking my luggage vs. the TSA?"

<comment><USER21> No, it's gotta be a real gun.

The process is "it's just business and it's your right". I felt self conscious the first time I did it as an adult, moving some guns from my mom's house to Washington. However no one gave a damn, I was expecting a "oh sh*t" from the checking agent but she didn't even blink.

It's about the same as checking skiis, you go over to the oversized bags area and you have to wait for a cop to walk over, takes maybe 3-10 minutes extra over a normal checkin. However you can I think go to the special lane by asking the person who is filtering around telling folks which lanes to use when checking in.

The valid reason to have a gun is "Murican". I feel weird saying this but 'it's a constitutional right'. I get more shit for bringing water into TSA than checking a gun onto a plane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> None of this matters:

[https://twitter.com/mattblaze/status/641330920251891712](https://twitter.com/mattblaze/status/641330920251891712)

They're terrible, insecure locks.

<comment><USER24> That really only applies if the user has some degree of skill with picking simple locks. Experieced locksport enthusiasts could probably pick it quickly, but for the vast majority of people a key would be easier.

<comment><USER25> I promise you that for the most commonly used TSA approved locks, this is not true. Many models consist of 2-3 pins and can be open in 1 second by jamming anything that fits into the the channel and wiggling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm a fan of Schneier's take on it:

> The whole thing neatly illustrates one of the main problems with backdoors, > whether in cryptographic systems or physical systems: they're fragile. [0]

[0] [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/09/tsa_master_ke...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/09/tsa_master_keys.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> Luggage locks were never really meant to secure your baggage. They were mostly just to keep the luggage from opening accidentally.

If you want genuine security on your luggage, get a starter gun and go through the checked firearms procedures.

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/expensive_cam...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/09/expensive_camer.html)

[http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/08/matt-in-fl/more- on-...](http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2013/08/matt-in-fl/more-on-flying- with-guns/)

<comment><USER28> The gun trick doesn't really work well for international flights though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The principle of the classical mechanical key is falling in pieces as well. Take some pictures of any key and one can make a double of it.

The idea of such a master key is incredibly stupid. It could also have been reversed engineered with an autopsy of a lock. The people who come up with such idea don't merit the trust and responsibility given to then.

<comment><USER30> Most RFID systems are similarly vulnerable. All HID iClass systems (supposedly smart-card based) use the same cryptographic key, which you can dump out of the memory of any reader if you are so inclined. The ID numbers of badges are printed on them, and this is usually enough to program a new badge as a clone or do some SDR trickery to imitate it.

But let's not forget that tailgating will get you past pretty much anything that isn't a turnstile. Turnstiles are really only in elevator lobbies, so if you can find a legitimate reason to be in some other part of the building you can just follow a legitimate user through any door, no matter how secure its locking mechanism. And failing that, almost no one properly authenticates cleaning staff or contractors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> it's really hard to believe the statistics about ever growing IQs, when you see what imbeciles lead the world. someone actually thought it would be a good idea if one key could open all luggage, and then gave that key to thousands of low paid TSA workers. did the US outsource most of its government work to a pack of baboons? this 3D printing, Washington Post's "carelessness", it's all irrelevant. this looks like 2+2=4, and i'm betting many experts would agree.

</comment><comment><USER32> Couldn't you reverse-engineer the master key from a lock anyway? Or is there some clever design preventing that?

<comment><USER33> Yes. There was a recent thread where this process is explained. I'll try to find it, but basically:

You have one lock, and one key (not the master) for that lock, and a bunch of blanks.

You take the first blank. You cut a key that is identical to your key, except you vary the depth of a single cut. You repeat this until this new key works in your lock. That gives you the master key cut depth of one part of the key. You repeat this process forthe rest of the positions. You end up with a master key.

Edit: MrJones' comment here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10186309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10186309)

<comment><USER34> Slightly different process. The TSA keys aren't "master keys" in the normal locksmithing sense; they typically go into a separate lock that's only used for that key. For instance, the lock pictured in the article is normally used as a combination lock, not a key lock.

<comment><USER33> You buy one lock and take it apart?

<comment><USER35> Yep. The "security" is that compromised; leaked photographs or no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The 3d-printable files are on Github here: [https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA- Travel-Sentry-master-keys](https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master- keys)

</comment><comment><USER37> Can someone give me a rough estimate of how much it costs to 3D print them?

[https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master- keys](https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry-master-keys)

If it's cheap enough I'd love to hand them out at airports to travelers as a demonstration of how terrible the TSA is.

<comment><USER38> Seeing as how you're concerned about costs...

The cost of producing the keys will effectively be $0 in relation to your legal fees if you were to actually pursue doing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> There's an app for that.[1] Send them a picture of a key, get a key back. But they recently stopped offering the service to individuals.

[1] [https://keysduplicated.com/](https://keysduplicated.com/)

<comment><USER40> You don't even really need to send off for it. You can cut a temporary key from an empty 2L bottle and a paper printout, and once you get it just right, you can duplicate that plastic key onto a metal blank at the hardware store.

An app certainly adds a bit of convenience, but it also takes out most of the fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Physical key locks gives people the feeling of security but its not so false it´s security! People think locks keep their things safe but they don´t except from amateurs.

Also see 3D printed bump keys [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2739879/WATCH...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2739879/WATCH- The-3D-printed-bump-keys-open-ANY-lock-seconds.html)

<comment><USER42> Lock effectiveness is specified in time - how long your lock will prevent penetration. Just like a firedoor. Every door will burn, just some doors take longer than others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I honestly feel like the risk of non-TSA people breaking into my luggage and stealing stuff is lower than the TSA stealing stuff while they go through my luggage (as has been proven many times that they do this).

So it seems the real threat I need to protect my luggage and belongings against is the TSA, yet the law is mandating that if I travel with luggage, they need to be able to open it.

Would love to see more done to combat that.

</comment><comment><USER43> Politicians are going to "solve" this by declaring it illegal and setting mandatory prison terms.

Are people forgetting TSA is entirely for security theater only and serves no real purpose?

What happened to all the protests at airports only a few years ago, amazing how everyone just caved in and the media moved on to the next squirrel. Then again we did the same for the NSA which is a far bigger problem.

<comment><USER44> Honestly I doubt it will become a big deal outside of the tech community. Most people realize luggage locks aren't really there to protect against a determined adversary, or a person with a ballpoint pen [https://youtu.be/wpIJVWXsBBI?t=1m10s](https://youtu.be/wpIJVWXsBBI?t=1m10s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> What I've always found surprising is the arrogance that America (and maybe some Americans too, to an extent) displays in this context. In this day and age how is it right that a single country can mandate a requirement on every piece of luggage that passes through their airports? It might be a security concern, but there definitely are better ways to deal with this - all other 'first world' countries in the world do.

I'm pretty sure if India, China or any non-Western country did this, everyone would be up in arms about misuse, infringement of rights, etc. And yet when the TSA acts so stupidly (a photo shown to the public) and with multiple incidents of abuse of power from the TSA's side, the public opinion is still that the TSA is competent and well-intentioned.

I would call it hubris if they show capability, but this is downright arrogance.

I'm surprised no one is suing the government over this. Or is it like a EULA when you enter the United States that you agree not to press charges on such incompetence?

<comment><USER46> Individual countries have had travel requirements for a century now. Everybody is used to it. This is not a new thing, not by a very long shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> So what happens now? I have Samsonite luggage with what looks like more advanced TSA lock, 007.

The keys are not equal, some keys will be more difficult to print, like 006 for example. Or is it the same?

What can I do to disable the lock easily without compromising function of my luggage and without voiding the warranty?

What about legal aspect of you purchasing the luggage expecting certain lock security. And later you find out that anybody can produce a key to open your luggage? can I contact manufacturer of my luggage and ask them to replace the lock because it is compromised now?

<comment><USER48> The luggage was compromised when you purchased it. Heck, they even advertise it as a "feature." Here's a quote from Samsonite's website:

> TSA Lock - provides additional peace of mind when checking belongings, but > can still be easily accessed by TSA agents in the event the case needs to be > searched.

So compromised by design. So nothing has really changed, it was compromised then, it is compromised now. In either case most luggage can be opened with a ballpoint pen, by just force separating the zipper.

I myself won't waste money on a TSA lock. I want to discourage casual criminals, and I want to know if my bag was accessed, so I just purchase inexpensive zip-ties[0] in unusual colors (i.e. not white, typically orange, black, or green) and just zip tie up the bag, the TSA can cut it, but at least I'd know if they had. It is not "secure" but at least I cannot pretend it is. TSA locks can be opened without leaving any traces.

PS - Although even with a zip tie someone can open the zipper. I just assume that laziness will win out, and they'll just cut the zip tie instead.

[0] $5 on Amazon: [http://www.amazon.com/TEKTON-6235-Assorted- Cable-200-Piece/d...](http://www.amazon.com/TEKTON-6235-Assorted- Cable-200-Piece/dp/B000NQ16NG/)

<comment><USER49> Having a ziptie on your luggage will probably get you singled out for terrorism eventually...

<comment><USER48> I've done it on tens of flights, nothing bad happened yet. I've had my bag searched twice in all that time, and one of those two times I knew exactly WHY (there was a piece of camera equipment that may have looked odd under x ray, a "Giottos Rocket Blaster," they did unzip the inner-camera case, and leave a leaflet in the bag).

I do recommend if people zip tie they cut off the excess/tail so it cannot get caught in any machinery.

I've seen a lot of international frequent fliers who zip tie when they have to check bags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Come on, it was very easy to reverse this before. 3D printing has nothing to do with this.

You could also just as easily carve this by hand.

P.S: What is this, the '80s? why is "3-D" hyphenated?

</comment><comment><USER51> I've never feared other passengers getting into my luggage. I have always feared the baggage handlers doing the robbing and they have the keys so no worries.

</comment><comment><USER52> In the paper _Reconsidering Physical Key Secrecy: Teleduplication via Optical Decoding_ ([http://vision.ucsd.edu/~blaxton/pagePapers/laxton_wang_savag...](http://vision.ucsd.edu/~blaxton/pagePapers/laxton_wang_savage_ccs2008.pdf)) they manage to decode a key from 200 feet away. Pretty cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER53> Someone uploaded these high res scans of the keys too: [https://imgur.com/gallery/JQD7l](https://imgur.com/gallery/JQD7l)

It seems likely that the uploader had the master keys in his private possession for a long time, but only decided to upload the pictures due to the keys being leaked anyway.

</comment><comment><USER54> I expect that this will change nothing and that these locks will continue to provide the same illusion of privacy and security that they did before.

The other option is to buy s $3 padlock at your hardware store and risk TSA breaking out the bolt cutters. Cheaper than a beer in coach.

</comment><comment><USER55> You don't need any lock-picking skill. Physically bruteforcing through 1000 combinations really doesn't take that long. I did it once for my aunt (who forgot her combo) in a matter of minutes.

</comment><comment><USER49> Good. Burn the drapes of the security theater. Maybe when people realize that actual safety isn't the same as bending over for the TSA we'll be in a better spot.

<comment><USER56> Better how? We don't need the TSA to provide actual safety. We are already plenty safe. What we need is security theater, and we get it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I wonder if I'm entitled for a compensation. Perhaps starting a class action lawsuit against TSA would be the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER58> The amount of money the TSA has cost the US since it's foundation is staggering 0_o

</comment><comment><USER59> Now just get a job as a baggage handler and you'll be set.

</comment><comment><USER60> Wow, that really is a well-understand screwup.

</comment><comment><USER61> The photos weren't really leaked. They were purposefully, proudly, and affirmatively held up by a senior TSA official so a news reporter could photograph them.

While these locks are so easily defeated that this really doesn't make anyone significantly less safe, it does demonstrate that the TSA knows absolutely nothing about security.

<comment><USER62> I'm not sure if it tells us anything about what the TSA knows about security. It was already pretty apparent they didn't know much there. Even just looking at the locks, the master keys would have been pretty easy to reverse engineer from the locks themselves, which of course are sold all over the place.

What's interesting to me is that this shows they don't even know about _pretend_ security. Releasing these pictures doesn't impact real security much, but it does impact the _impression_ of security they try to give to the average idiot.

<comment><USER63> Have you read the leaked TSA SOP document?

They don't know much.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Distributed transactions from mobile app to web server - <AUTHOR>

This is bugging me...

    1. A mobile app places a booking on the server over a HTTP POST
    2. Server completes transaction, sends 200 response back to app.
    3. Network blip. App didn't receive the response.
       Server thinks everything went peachy.
    4. So app shows network error.
    5. Big fail because customer thinks booking failed.
       Server thinks it went great.
       Death and destruction ensues... :)
 How do you protect against this? <comment><AUTHOR> P.S - my current favourite solution would be a 2 phase commit when the mobile client does 2nd API call to commit the booking. Server rolls back the booking if no commit received within N seconds/minutes.

</comment><comment><USER2> Not sure if this is a recommended approach, but I did something similar recently.

I create a guid on the client, and send this with the request. If I get a connection error or no response, I re-query with my client side id to see if the transaction succeeded.

I'm sure there are downsides to this, however for now it's simple and seems to be working well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers, I think this might be what we settle on (or similar).

One slight tweak would be to do a "retry" using the guid, but the server knows to send result of last success if the guid matches a completed transaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can't protect against this. Any confirmation messages are subject to the same problem. Look up the FLP paper for proof.

This is really a user interface problem; your user needs to think of a transaction during a network outage as being in an "unknown" state rather than a "succeeded" or "failed" state.

<comment><AUTHOR> Big thanks for that. I'll give it a read.

We've hit problems with ack in the past. So I thought we could add more acks to increase confidence. But it's never 100% certainty. I'm sure this paper will help understand the issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could you theoretically wait to commit database transactions until after the client has sent acknowledgement of the response?

<comment><AUTHOR> Kind of, yup.

That said, one detail I left out is that this transaction is distributed across 4 separate systems, so it's not quite as simple as a database lock. And I wouldn't do a long db lock unless it was some kind of pessimistic offline lock :)

But we're mostly worrying about the mobile app acknowledging the response so the same principle stands - we need the mobile app to ACK :)</comment></comment>


Airline pilots landing at LAX report "a guy in jetpack" flying alongside them - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36096/airline-pilots-landing-at-lax-report-a-guy-in-jetpack-flying-alongside-them-on <comment><USER3> Took me a while to find on LiveATC as this wasn't actually on the Tower frequency, but here is the full feed: [http://archive- server.liveatc.net/klax/KLAX-Final-Aug-31-202...](http://archive- server.liveatc.net/klax/KLAX-Final-Aug-31-2020-0130Z.mp3). At 5:23.

Unfortunately their web player is not linkable, but this is the KLAX North/South Final Approach feed ([https://www.liveatc.net/archive.php?m=klax6](https://www.liveatc.net/archive.php?m=klax6)) from Aug 31, 0130-0200 UTC.

<comment><USER4> That is a friend of mine's site. If you live near an airport and have a good internet connection volunteer to provide a live feed.

<comment><USER5> I live close to LAX. I'll send them a message.

<comment><USER6> I bet there is plenty of coverage there for LAX already. In my impression, services like this (and even Flightradar24) at this day and age are mostly interested in coverage in spotty areas in rural areas and far away from civilization.

Don't get me wrong! I'm not trying to demotivate you. Just letting you know that maybe they'll turn you down. However, even if they do so, you can always learn a lot by doing so... and it's quite cheap, and redundancy is always welcome, right? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >> They are also very high-profile in nature and require a mothership to launch from, such as a helicopter, or at least a very high point to leap from.

No. Yves "Jetman" Rossi's design can now launch from a standing position on the ground. It is able to launch, hover, transition to forward flight and zoom-climb to several thousand feet. Other than the landing, which is currently still via parachute ... ironman.

<comment><USER8> Even if it's not Rossi, whose design has been years in the making, I think a copycat is most likely here. Rossi's wing operates at 4000+ feet and 189mph, which is comparable to jets slowing down on long final. Those hobby jet engines are very expensive but off the shelf, and anyone can build a wing in their garage. The FAA would classify it as an aircraft (already has), and would like to talk to this operator.

I think you can rule out the multirotor bathtubs for now.

<comment><USER7> It is also odd that they said "in a jetpack" rather than wearing or riding on/under a jetpack. Might this also be a very small but conventional aircraft? Might it be a mannequin mounted _inside_ a smaller drone? Size gets distorted in these situations.

(FYI those hobby jets are one option, but there are considerably more capable small jets available, mostly used for cruise missiles and heavy drones.)

<comment><USER9> Airline pilots typically earn their 1500-hour minimum for their license in "small but conventional aircraft" so the odds of them mistaking one for a jetpack is approximately zero.

<comment><USER7> And I probably have 5000+ hours driving cars. That doesn't mean I don't occasionally confuse one type of road vehicle for another, especially when dealing with odd/rare types.

<comment><USER10> You often confuse motorcycles for cars?

<comment><USER11> At night, sure. Many times I've met a car with a broken headlight, only realizing it's not a motorcycle as we're passing. I don't know if this happened at night, but visibility can be reduced for other reasons as well.

<comment><USER12> This one is scary to me, as a motorcycle rider. The other one that's not fun: some motorcycles have two separate headlights on the front (low and high beams) and can be wired so that both can be on at once. What are you looking at? A car that's really far away or a motorcycle that's really close?

Please watch out for motorcyclists. The blindness people have for us is astonishing. And terrifying.

<comment><USER13> I've had that on a bicycle. The bike had two small side by side halogens on the handlebars, I was on a main road when a car pulled straight out of a side turning and into the side of me. I released afterwards he'd glanced down the road, seen two small lights and assumed it was a car far enough away for him to pull out.

On motorbikes I've had drivers in side roads look me in the eye and then pull out. On occasion I've ended up having words, and it's always "Sorry mate I didn't see you".

<comment><USER14> >it's always "Sorry mate I didn't see you".

Ah, the SMIDSY: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqQBubilSXU&t=387s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqQBubilSXU&t=387s)

That video covers the optical illusion that leads to it and what motorcycles can do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As amusing as this is, it highlights how fragile air travel is -- someone managed to fly a 200 lb payload within a couple hundred feet of an airliner on final approach. And apparently did so anonymously since there was no mention of who or exactly what it was.

It wouldn't be hard to maneuver it right in front of the airliner and cause a collision. While the aircraft would likely survive an engine strike, at only a few thousand feet of altitude it doesn't give much time to recover.

<comment><USER16> All sorts of transportation are very fragile. Everyone with a driver's license is trusted with operating tons of steel that can move at enormous speeds.

Society's based on some amount of mutual trust. We can't lock everything down and treat every person as a potential criminal. That leads to an inefficient and dystopian country.

<comment><USER17> Well at the risk of sounding pedantic, things on rails - railways, metro/subway etc. are not in same category.

<comment><USER18> Wasn't there a guy who crashed the train he was driving because he'd been radicalised by Q nonsense?

<comment><USER19> Yes, a train engineer at the Port of Los Angeles intentionlly crashed his train in April because he was suspicious of the nearby Navy hospital ship _Mercy_.

'"You only get this chance once. The whole world is watching. I had to," Moreno told investigators, according to the complaint. "People don't know what's going on here. Now they will."'

(Nothing about this story makes sense to me.)

[https://www.navytimes.com/news/your- military/2020/04/02/trai...](https://www.navytimes.com/news/your- military/2020/04/02/train-engineer-intentionally-derails-locomotive-near- hospital-ship-says-usns-mercy-was-suspicious/)

<comment><USER20> He must've been hoping the earth was flat enough that he could drive the train across water or something. Simultaneously amazing and terrifying that he could be put in charge of something so deadly despite what I'm sure is obvious mental instability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> ATCs have a reputation for never losing their cool and that really shines through here:

"Tower, there's a guy in a jetpack flying outside."

"Copy. To your left or your right?"

<comment><USER22> Incidentally, do pilots say left and right? They don't have a special word (port / starboard) like naval vessels?

<comment><USER23> They say left and right as others have noted, but the main boarding doors on planes are supposedly on the left for the same reason the left is called the "port". It appears to be a relic of the flying boat era of aviation.

<comment><USER24> There are a lot of such relics in aviation, for example distance is measured in nautical miles, speed in knots and the uniforms and ranks are also very much like their naval counter parts.

<comment><USER25> Nautical miles are used in navigation because one nautical mile equals one minute of latitude when you're traveling North/South, making it a very useful unit of measurement on oceans. Planes use it for the same reason. A knot is simply a speed of one nautical mile per hour, so it's a useful unit for speed when you're using nautical miles for distance.

So I wouldn't call these two specific examples relics, but I agree with you on uniforms & ranks.

<comment><USER26> Specifically, the nautical mile thing means that any chart with coordinates on it also has a scale in miles built-in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't think there's any question the pilots would describe it as "a guy in a jetpack" if they weren't sure that's what they were looking at. Spotting traffic around the plane is part of pilot training.

With that being said, if it zipped by the plane very quickly, there's the possibility it was maybe a very large RC plane shaped like a guy in a jetpack, which I think could be a bit more plausible.

<comment><USER7> I wonder about this. If he was off the wing, could the pilots actually see him with their own eyes? Off the wing tip is actually rather far back on a modern airliner. Pilots wouldn't leave the cockpit to look during approach. I have to assume these were reports passed on by people in the cabin. If so, where are the pictures?

<comment><USER27> No, I believe what happened is that the "jetpack" was either hovering or flying at low speed, and the airplane flew by it. So the pilots could see it approaching and get a visual on the jetpack before it zipped by the side.

<comment><USER7> So a relatively fixed object that they passed at speed? There is even more room there for size distortion. A doll hanging from a drone? A partially- inflated balloon of some sort? Once one person radios "jetman" then subsequent spotters will tend towards that description too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't imagine it was these guys but another "Ironman" type flight suit I've been following is the tech from [https://gravity.co/](https://gravity.co/) \- it looks like so much fun although I'm sure it's much harder to use that the videos suggest.

<comment><USER29> I think those look really exhausting and unnatural since you have to carry your whole bodyweight on your arms.

Seriously, try suspending yourself with your hands on two chair backs. Now imagine doing that for many minutes at a time, while also withstanding heavy vibration and precisely controlling your flight.

<comment><USER30> It looks like the arms are just here for controlling the direction, the jets look supported by a belt attachment: [https://youtu.be/aFQSFke0wFc?t=35](https://youtu.be/aFQSFke0wFc?t=35)

That video was one link down in the article, several other interesting concepts are shown, that generally seem to be platforms with thrusters.

I feel like a more practical design could be something a bit like "falcon" in the avengers: back-mounted thruster that gives a lot of forward thrust, with deployable delta wings à la jetman. Since the thrust is forward, you'd need something to right up for landing. Either with a physical movement, or aerobraking above the center of gravity (could be using the wing?).

For now, designs that only rely on thrust, and not lift, are probably doomed by their fuel efficiency and noise.

<comment><USER31> I remember watching an YouTube interview with the founder, and he explicitly said that he could suspend his entire body weight on his arms alone, on pilates or something, and that was the base idea for the design he went with.

He is a former marine and I think one would need considerable strength to use his jetpack.

One very, very interesting project is Frank Zapata's Flyboard Air ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kB- BGMXxZc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kB-BGMXxZc) and [https://www.zapata.com/](https://www.zapata.com/)). You basically stand on a hoverboard.

I wonder what these guys could accomplish if they partnered with, say, DJI or something. Their flight controllers are very small and have years of development in automatic flight stabilization. Anyone that has flown a DJI drone knows what I'm talking about. It would take balancing out of the equation and make these much more feasible for a general audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Reminds me of lawn chair Larry.

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

<comment><USER33> One would think that there would be higher fines for this sort of misbehavior.

<comment><USER34> As it turns out, you can't just make up laws just because someone did something unsafe for the purpose of punishing said person

<comment><USER35> You can absolutely pass laws to punish the _next_ person who tries it, though.

<comment><USER36> or the same person who tries it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm surprised that there's not a single picture of this from any of the passengers on the landing flight and that ATC didn't seem to confirm it via radar, either.

<comment><USER38> ATC primary radar can't resolve objects that small, and the jetpack-person was unlikely to have the requisite transponder to make it visible to secondary.

<comment><USER39> And you'd need a very long lens to get a worthwhile shot of a human-sized object a fifth of a mile (~300 yards, so ~900 feet, ~0.3km) away. No phone camera can come anywhere close.

I do actually own a lens that could do it. Extended to full 500mm focal length and mounted on a camera body, the whole package is about three feet (0.9m) long. That's a lot to wrestle in economy class, especially if you're not in the window seat! Given advance knowledge of the opportunity, with time enough to prepare, it wouldn't be too hard a shot to get, I think. But taken totally by surprise? Even if you spot me the camera being out and ready to shoot - which is no triviality given that this happened on final - and the jetpack guy being perfectly visible out the passenger windows, I'd still need a very large helping of good fortune, not to mention a good deal of tolerance on the part of whoever _is_ in the window seat.

<comment><USER40> In theory, a sharp enough crop body and a 300mm lens could do it. But yes, you really do need a good lens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> How is it 2020 and no one got a video of this. Hopefully some airport security camera got it, and they will release the video at some point.

<comment><USER42> Surprised there are not cameras recording what the pilots can see outside? Even if it's overwriting itself every few hours or something.. just to keep a record in case of something weird like this.

<comment><USER43> There aren't even cameras recording what's happening inside most airplanes.

<comment><USER44> This is fascinating to me, so many municipal buses are loaded with cameras (thinking particularly of Washington, DC), but they also are dealing with everyone who wanders in the bus off the street.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This sort of cowboying is how cool technologies end up getting banned and set back years.

<comment><USER46> It's better when problems with technology are recognised during its development than when that technology is already widespread.

What good can bring one of the most wasteful ways of travel imaginable to be worthwhile? It is not cool to emit an anual carbon footprint equivalent of small city in the poor part of the world to take off. Hence it will be better to ban jetpacks for personal travel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> A hoverboard with fuel container on back looks like a jetpack. One guy crossed the English Channel on one in two hops. He had to refuel midway. Thats more distance in a flying device than I had heard before.

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/4/20753648/jet-powered- hover...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/4/20753648/jet-powered-hoverboard- english-channel-crossing-franky-zapata-success)

</comment><comment><USER48> Maybe an RC plane like this? [https://youtu.be/P5xPtOAbt70?t=35](https://youtu.be/P5xPtOAbt70?t=35)

At least mostly foam board.

</comment><comment><USER49> I recognize those 'jetcat' engines.

[https://www.jetcat.de](https://www.jetcat.de)

<comment><USER50> Those are a lot cheaper than I expected them to be

<comment><USER40> Swiwin makes even cheaper, more powerful ones. 6000$ retail for a 400N jet. Though, it is a Chinese company, so I would test the engines pretty carefully and a carry a parachute just in case.

<comment><USER51> The trouble with jetpacks is that there is a large dead zone in the flight envelope. Too high to survive a crash but too low for a parachute to be effective.

<comment><USER40> Very true, but to be fair with four engines and a wing you'd need 3 engines to fail out of four to be in a catastrophic situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> If we have come to the place where individuals can violate controlled airspace either in a flying suit or a drone and our reaction is to shut down transport, we've come to a very strange place. I say this because some responses here are exploring the catastrophic consequences. Catastrophic consequence in flights are a fact of life.

We've had these consequences for some time, in other ways which really aren't that different. You can buy materiel on the open market and devices like drones without gps lockouts, or I guess flying suits.

El-Al has been flying at a higher risk profile than others for some time. So has cargo in the "stans" and the middle east and Africa. I'm not saying "shoot him down" is the best choice but there surely exist a range of choices here up to and including defensive action?

Commercial ships can request rights to armed force on deck in the pirate zones. Lethal force. We lock the guns up otherwise but the reasons the Gatling guns are fitted (if that's what they are) are understood. Aircraft can have anti missile systems. We've had that for years.

I think the ways we will deal with this will be broadly similar - <USER2> defences, on aircraft detection systems, IFF and boots on the ground.

We probably don't have a systemic risk profile change here beyond the breakdown in the social contract: its funny to play but things work better when grown-ups don't do some things. Maybe 2nd amendment rights to a flying suit as a weapon is a thing?

WINGMAN FUNNY NOT FUNNY

</comment><comment><USER53> Glad to see Spirit Airlines is back in business.

</comment><comment><USER54> There are toy drones shaped like a guy in a jetpack.

Not sure they go high enough though.

</comment><comment><USER55> I guess Elon finally finished the Mark II.

<comment><USER56> Im pretty sure Elon is not an inventor of any of the tech he promotes/owns or invents. He is no Tony Stark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Until a humanoid balloon inflated with helium is definitely ruled out, that's my default assumption.

</comment><comment><USER58> Why didn't the FAA get the cops or military to scramble some jets to apprehend this individual? How is this not a national security threat?? Who knows if they were strapped with IED type device.

<comment><USER59> If you want to get a flying IED, you can use a commercially available RC plane. Nobody with the means to build a working jetpack would use it to do something so pedestrian as a suicide bombing.

The FAA should still have a stern talking to the guy, of course, if he flew in the path of airplanes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Every inch of that airport and all runways are covered by video cameras, many of them. There should be no ambiguity here. Let's hope they release the footage.

<comment><USER61> Of what? Something 6' long at 3000' up? That's a 1/10th of a degree across.

Even if you want to do the 6' long at 900' (300 yards), that's only about 4/10ths of a degree across.

Those aren't things that are captured on camera well. These are angles that are similar to a 110' long airplane cruising at 38000' (that spec in the sky leaving a contrail).

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Wow are they supposed to be this emotionless when talking to pilots? Its amazing how calm they were even after hearing a person in jetpack.

</comment><comment><USER63> My money's on this guy: [https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCkHr2Z0JWH8KGmQNDp4QXLw](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCkHr2Z0JWH8KGmQNDp4QXLw)

<comment><USER48> mine on this one [https://youtu.be/P5xPtOAbt70?t=35](https://youtu.be/P5xPtOAbt70?t=35)

it also happened in the evening if I'm not mistaken

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Do we think this is going to get elevated to a major plot line in this season of "2020: The longest year" or just fizzle out unexpectedly like the Murder Hornets episode?

</comment><comment><USER65> There is also Richard Browning in the UK: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAJM5L9hhBs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAJM5L9hhBs)

</comment><comment><USER66> Does the government have the legal and executive resources it needs to investigate these claims of rocketeering in the airline industry?

Serious allegations if true!

</comment><comment><USER67> I've always been of the belief that a jetpack could never exist until flame- proof pants/trousers were made first.

<comment><USER68> Jetpacks have been around for years, tons of youtube videos of people flying them. You can even buy one.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj- Iwv5NJKg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj-Iwv5NJKg)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBe9bucYPcY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBe9bucYPcY)

<comment><USER69> Is there a reason why the flights are all over water? LAX doesn't have a body of water surrounding it other then the Pacific Ocean. Is that a requirement for the jet pack?

<comment><USER70> I'm pretty sure its because falling hundreds of feet into water is more survivable than hundreds of feet into earth or concrete.

There are flights, however, over land, but they usually involve a lot of practice and permitting.

<comment><USER71> >> falling hundreds of feet into water is more survivable than hundreds of feet into earth or concrete.

No, not really - hitting watter as damaging as hitting concrete once you get above 100 feet high. But at least you're not going to kill an unlucky pederastian by falling on them.

<comment><USER72> The world record for cliff diving is 192', so I'm sure there is some special way you can enter the water, if not safely, at least more safely than entering land.

<comment><USER73> Just up to a point. Go fast enough and water won't be able to get out of the way in time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I would imagine there are passengers who caught this guy on camera. Would love to see some footage.

</comment><comment><USER75> I am glad they saw me because I took a power nap around 3000ft alt. Cool beans.

</comment><comment><USER76> So, which one of you was this?

</comment><comment><USER77> If someone wanted to fake this as a prank, could it be something attached to a drone?

</comment><comment><USER78> It's 2020 guys. Haven't you seen that documentary Iron Man yet?

</comment><comment><USER79> The two video trailers at the end of the article are pretty fun to watch.

</comment><comment><USER80> Inflatable display got loose?

<comment><USER81> That would cause the illusion.

Even if it was a donkey. It certainly won't be an inflatable 'guy in a jet pack'. I assume the other pilot heard the jet pack sighting which is why they said it.

But is it the most probable cause of the illusion?

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> C'mon, Elon.

</comment><comment><USER83> It's like the Liar Liar scene but with a jet pack.

</comment><comment><USER84> Is Disney doing another reboot of the Rocketeer?

</comment><comment><USER85> Elon?

</comment><comment><USER86> How are there no passenger videos?

</comment><comment><USER87> People are Awesome...

</comment><comment><USER88> The Rocketeer.

</comment><comment><USER12> You know it's true because it's 2020. Remember that whole alien thing back in April? Me neither because about 10 years worth of events has happened in the past four and a half months.

<comment><USER89> On this, a Youtube creator Julie Nolke had a fairly popular couple of videos on "Explaining the Pandemic to my past self"[1] in April and a part 2 in June[2].

The first one was hilarious, and I struggle to believe that was only in April.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms7capx4Cb8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms7capx4Cb8)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdyDpP2s-og](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdyDpP2s-og)

<comment><USER90> "You're gonna wanna pull all your investments..."

Markets are rockin'

<comment><USER91> Not between Jan and April

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER92> I've seen speculation that it's one of those person shaped disney balloons they sell at grocery stores.

</comment><comment><USER93> The Rocketeer is a great movie :)

</comment><comment><USER94> Sacha Baron Cohen.

<comment><USER95> Very nice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> 2020 gonna 2020.

</comment><comment><USER97> Tony Stark ?

</comment><comment><USER98> Maybe it was Elon Musk, bored with the Pig already ?

<comment><USER95> "God damnit Elon, this is not an appropriate way to celebrate jumping to #1 on the Richest People list."

Seriously though, pissing off the FAA would be, I think, the last thing a board member of SpaceX would want to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> And nobody on the plane recorded it?

<comment><USER100> The passengers probably couldn't see it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Its LA some rich kids are having some risky fun

</comment><comment><USER102> Which brings up a question of why multi-million dollar airlines don't have "dash cams"

<comment><USER103> Plausible deniability.

<comment><USER72> They want to deny seeing a man in a jetpack, despite transmitting the fact on the radio?

<comment><USER103> I was thinking more broadly than just this single incident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> Bicycle Repair Man comes to mind.

"Look! Is it a stockbroker? Is it a quantity surveyor? Is it a church warden? NO! It's Bicycle Repair Man!"

[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2howud](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2howud)

</comment><comment><USER105> Nobody is going to mention how this is an overly-hyped PR stunt?

edit: Nevermind, I thought the embedded youtube videos in the article was footage of the event described in the article. I didn't realize the video footage was a separate flight from 2015.

<comment><USER106> The jetpackers in the video at the bottom of the article aren't the same jetpackers the article is about. The people in the video clearly have permission as you pointed out, but I don't think we can say for sure as to whether the person at LAX did.

<comment><USER107> I think it's a near-certainty that this person didn't have permission.

It's extremely unlikely that he'd be given permission to fly his jetpack in the approach to LAX, and even if he were, you can bet that air traffic control would be fully aware of it ahead of time.</comment></comment></comment>


Take Over The Galaxy with GitHub (DCPU16 support) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1098-take-over-the-galaxy-with-github

<comment><USER2> I'm having a hard time articulating why I think this is so fantastic. It's great to see people attack a not-so-serious problem with such gusto. I love the passion behind taking things apart just to see how things work.

Thanks, github. You made my day.

<comment><USER3> The value of just playing around is underestimated. A lot of discoveries have been made by people just playing around.

<comment><USER4> As someone with not a lot of experience in low level languages and I can't wait to play around with this. I think it will be fun way to learn and maybe even try building hardware implementation using a FPGA.

<comment><USER5> Hackaday.com will be running a competition for hardware implementations: [http://hackaday.com/2012/04/08/getting-12-year-olds-to- learn...](http://hackaday.com/2012/04/08/getting-12-year-olds-to-learn- assembly-programming/)

<comment><USER6> The comments link to information about the Apollo Guidance Computer.

(<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer>)

(<http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/>)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ok after seeing the assemblers/VM's last week I wasn't expecting to see much new this week.. then I saw this:

<https://github.com/krasin/llvm-dcpu16/>

C compiler support for dcpu16!

In a way this almost saddens me as by the time the game comes out it looks like the community will have javascript ported to the CPU and no one will actually have to program in assembler as per the original idea... ;)

<comment><USER8> It _could_ run JavaScript, but this is a 16-bit processor we're talking about here, with minimal RAM. It's more likely we'll be using C and BASIC ;)

<comment><USER9> Yeah this seems like the exact scenario where hand-rolled assembly and perhaps some hand-optimized C will really shine. You don't see a lot of embedded processors running javascript, for example. If your ship can process data and respond 5% faster than an opponent's, all other things being equal, you will come out ahead.

If the current level of interest persists, by the time the game launches, I imagine that the vast majority of people will be downloading and running programs written by others. These will have been pored over and optimized to an extent that most of us would be unable to achieve by ourselves, and it will not pay to roll your own trivial implementation. I'd be curious to see what Notch can do to still encourage people to learn how the CPU works themselves. If the environment and game dynamics are rich enough, perhaps this will not really be a problem?

<comment><USER10> I think we're going to see some clever optimizing DSLs (a la FFTW) -- restricted languages for the kinds of embedded programs you write on such an architecture will be easier to optimize than general purpose languages. Particularly if they have a clear cost model.

The Haskell embedding is very likely to head in that direction.

(See e.g. in this style : <http://www.fftw.org/faq/section4.html#whyfast> or this style : <http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/polymer.pdf> \-- code generation + DSL + constraint solver for instruction level timings).

At least, that's what I'd do.

<comment><USER11> Low-level lisps à la GOOL/GOAL[0] will probably gain some traction as well, or so I hope.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp>

<comment><USER12> Did they ever get released to the public?

<comment><USER13> No, but the design docs are still out there if you contact the former engineers. I would distribute them if I had permission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I want to see a networking protocol between ships so that fleets form in order to take advantage of multiple "cores."

So for example, you'd have the difference between a single-celled organism (standalone ship) versus a multi-celled organism (a fleet), with a fleet of ships delegating work to specific ships. So 10 ships run the "scout" programming in a perimeter, 5 act as resource gatherers, and a few others as transports within the protected space. Perhaps some act as brain cells which tell ships when to change roles.

All of this is happening even when no members of the fleet are actually playing.

This just boggles the mind with possibilities and I can't wait to start playing this game.

Furthermore, you have people trying to break into space protected by fleets by attacking _networking protocols_ \-- _in a game!_

</comment><comment><USER15> I had a dream the other night wherein there was a start-up that took custom code requests for 0x10c players on commission. Requests ranged from optimizing the ship's defense to autopilot and hyperspace jump controls.

Viable?

<comment><USER16> Due diligence is called for. Has this business model been successful in other games? Do you have some advantage over the throngs who will gladly do it for free / recognition?

<comment><USER15> While I can't think of a specific example, there are related precedents: consider the advent of the Mann Co. Store in TF2 where players purchase game items with real cash. There is definitely a model to be made off players with disposable income who want to be the top dog.

Your second question is a reservation that I have as well. We have already witnessed a huge influx of people coding up DCPU-16 software for free, but such programs are only related to the software engineering side of the spec rather than the actual gameplay. Obviously we know less about the latter since few details have been released, but in the competitive game I imagine it could be different. For example, to build a really awesome weapons system and then share it with other people seems a bit counter-intuitive. So there may be room yet for a business built on custom, clandestine code for a player's ship.

Gamers are already a demographic with money to spend. This could be seen as a worthwhile investment to some. If you are interested, email me and we can talk there.

<comment><USER16> I phrased it as a question because I don't know the answer either. I've heard that second life had a thriving economy of user-generated content and that some players "make a living" from the game; I've never seen hard numbers though.

I doubt the returns reach the proportions necessary to support a startup, especially with the low barriers for entry, competition from free alternatives, and piracy. Maybe it could support a single developer, though; more of a "lifestyle business."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> HN is funny. Last week as each new dcpu emulator implementation popped up, they got fewer and fewer votes and more comments like "oh great, yet another dcpu post. let's call this Dcpu News for crying out loud!" Then github adds syntax highlighting and gets 150+ points. I'm very curious why that is...

<comment><USER18> The emulators got less votes because it was more of the same exact thing ("someone implemented DCPU-16"). This is news because a big name has _taken notice_ of DCPU-16, going so far as to officially support it. It's a different flavor.

<comment><USER17> Ah, so dcpu is cool now because somebody cool says its cool. Just seems like bandwagon/fanboyism to me. Call me a dcpu hipster :)

btw, awesome work w/ mappum on the js emulator stuff. you guys update w/ impressive speed.

<comment><USER18> It's not fanboyism, most like "stop showing me emulators it's not interesting anymore". The subject of the DPCU iself is still pretty interesting.

Also, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looking at all the amazing work done regarding the DCPU and the article yesterday on Instagram's technology stack made me realize just how far we've advanced. With the tools that we have available now, it is possible to do things in a few days that it took people years if not decades to achieve.

<comment><USER20> "it is now possible to do things in a few days that took people ... decades to achieve".

Let's not get too excited here. Name one thing that can be done in days that used to take decades.

<comment><USER21> The first Fortran compiler's creation took 18 person-years. Now there are C compilers which were written from scratch in _person-weeks_ , like TCC.

<comment><USER22> But the first C compilers were written four decades ago by a couple of people in a matter of months. And they were not just writing the compilers but also designing the language at the same time.

 _"When Steve Johnson visited the University of Waterloo on sabbatical in 1972, he brought B with him. It became popular on the Honeywell machines there, and later spawned Eh and Zed (the Canadian answers to `what follows B?'). When Johnson returned to Bell Labs in 1973, he was disconcerted to find that the language whose seeds he brought to Canada had evolved back home; even his own yacc program had been rewritten in C, by Alan Snyder."_

\-- Dennis Ritchie, who wrote the first C compiler. <http://plan9.bell- labs.com/who/dmr/chist.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Weird that they didn't include the language link[1] that shows all the repo statistics for the language, like most watched, most forked, newly created, etc.

[1]: <https://github.com/languages/DCPU-16%20ASM>

</comment><comment><USER24> Notch tweeted the other day that he was thinking about DCPUs coming with some fan-made open source OS... as soon as someone writes one. This should be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if Notch is regretting releasing these details so soon. Now he's already going to be a slave to backwards compatibility and the game is about 0.1% complete.

<comment><USER2> Seeing that everyone is doing this just for fun, I doubt it. He could change everything tomorrow and I bet people would be excited to do it all over again.

<comment><USER25> I don't think _everyone's_ doing it for fun, I'm sure there are savvy dudes out there that know that there's a lot of money to be had by being a first mover in the Notch ecosystem.

But even those that are doing it for fun -- you might be underestimating the amount of nerd rage that people are capable of when stuff they don't want to have happen happens. Just sayin'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> now let's just wait for the first O'reilly book on DCPU16 programming

<comment><USER27> no starch press most likely :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> While its great the GitHub added support for this how about x86-64?

[https://github.com/ReturnInfinity/BareMetal- OS/blob/master/o...](https://github.com/ReturnInfinity/BareMetal- OS/blob/master/os/kernel64.asm)

The 64-bit register names are still not handled correctly. It does properly color the 8, 16, and 32-bit register names.

<comment><USER29> GitHub uses the open-source Pygments (<http://pygments.org/>) to highlight source code. If you can find the code for whatever ASM highlighter Pygments uses, you could probably fix it yourself. Though I tried searching for it and didn't find it after a while, so it would take some tracking down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Now all we need is a DCPU16 to x86 translator and we have a whole new stack of dev tools ;-)

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm a beginner programmer with a little of bit of programming experience, and this idea of programming a game through assembly interests me, but I'm not familiar with assembly. How should I go about learning DCPU16?

</comment><comment><USER32> So, who's going to be first with a hardware implementation of the DCPU16? :)

<comment><USER33> I'm working on a multicycle implementation that I will be able to push to a FPGA. There's no way I'll be able to get the same cycle timing as the specs indicate however. 3 cycles for a divide is very, very generous for such a simple CPU, I'll probably either end up implementing a shift and subtract algorithm (will take more than 3 cycles), or using huge look up tables (probably too big fit in a single blockRAM as well...) to try and achieve it. On the other hand, SHR and SHL are trivial to do in hardware via a barrel shifter, but he assigned 2 cycles for them.

The [next word + register] instruction is also a bit annoying to deal with in the given time tables and a simple register file design, though I haven't thought about the design of that too much.

<comment><USER34> Would it be a good idea to run the instructions as fast as you can, adding some cycle accounting and using it to generate some external interrupt to help implement quotas? Though when it gets IO support you might have to run things entirely in lockstep again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What does the D in DCPU stand for? Notch's DCPU16 spec does not say.

<comment><USER36> Digital?</comment></comment>