Why the sun is a poor dumping ground for nuclear waste (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/shooting_for_the_sun/ <comment><USER2> > To reach the Sun you need to subtract 100 percent of Earth's orbital > velocity; to reach solar escape velocity you need only add 41 percent to it.

You could send the waste with near solar escape velocity to travel on a really long ellipsis trajectory, at the furthest point you can get rid of the remaining kinetic energy with minimal fuel and let the waste fall back straight into the Sun. Subtracting Earth's orbital velocity is by far not the optimal method to reach the Sun.

<comment><USER3> A straight Hohmann transfer requires ~0.5-1% more dV than a bi-elliptic transfer. Calling this "by far" not optimal is by far not correct. So instead of 32 km/s you need 31.68 km/s. This changes nothing.

<comment><USER4> Where did you get the "0.5-1%" figure from? That may be true in some cases, but not in this extreme case, here it's closer to half the delta-v (which, due to the rocket equation is enormously less difficult to achieve).

Solar escape velocity is about 16.5km/s* , and since ~99% of this manoeuvre's delta-v budget is used at launch the entire delta-v cost is asymptotically this value.

*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Launch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Launch) (see paragraph 4)

<comment><USER5> _> Solar escape velocity is about 16.5km/s_

No, it's about 42 km/s, i.e., sqrt(2) times the Earth's orbital velocity around the Sun, which is 30 km/s. New Horizons was launched to take as much advantage of the Earth's orbital velocity as it could, so that the rocket didn't need to provide all of the 42 km/s of delta-v needed for solar escape.

(You could use the same trick for your scheme, of course. The main issue I see with your scheme is that it greatly lengthens the time that the waste is out in space.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always thought the biggest reason was that if a rocket carrying nuclear waste exploded in our atmosphere, it would be catastrophic. It's a lot less risky to just bury it underground and pray it never leaks.

<comment><USER7> Or bury the nuclear waste in oceanic trenches. It is out of the way and future generations won't stumble upon it when humans forget where they buried all this stuff.

<comment><USER8> Do we know enough about our oceans to know that there would be no harm from this?

<comment><USER9> No

<comment><USER10> Really? Water is just about the best radiation shield in existence. It would only affect the ~10 feet of ocean immediately around it.

<comment><USER11> It's not about the actual radiation, that's easy to deal with. It's about the containers cracking or leaking and having that stuff floating around in the ocean, contaminating our food and the environment. Even the strongest container we can make is still susceptible to the corrosive effects of the ocean.

If you're going to bury it in the ocean, your best bet would be to bury it near a subduction zone. But then you have the earth itself possibly being the cause of the container cracks and leaks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Every time the question of nuclear waste disposal comes up, someone is sure to say, "Why not shoot it into the Sun?" It seems so obvious._

Or we could get over our stupid fear of recycling. The stuff's only hazardous because we haven't taken all the energy out of it yet.

 _Nuclear fuel reprocessing is performed routinely in Europe, Russia and Japan._ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing)

<comment><USER13> One of the downsides of reprocessing is that it makes plutonium easy to separate out in a form that is good for making nuclear bombs. Therefore it represents a nuclear proliferation risk.

<comment><USER14> None of the countries that have developed nuclear weapons have gotten their plutonium from nuclear waste because there are much easier ways to get weapons grade plutonium.

Form the wikipedia page: "Ordinarily (in spent nuclear fuel), plutonium is reactor-grade plutonium. In addition to plutonium-239, which is highly suitable for building nuclear weapons, it contains large amounts of undesirable contaminants: plutonium-240, plutonium-241, and plutonium-238. These isotopes are extremely difficult to separate, and more cost-effective ways of obtaining fissile material exist (e.g. uranium enrichment or dedicated plutonium production reactors)" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste)

As the wikipedia article points out a very good approach to deal with nuclear waste would be burn the waste in pyrometallurgical fast reactors like the proposed Integral Fast Reactor. (For background on the Integral Fast Reactor: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor))

Trying to throw the waste in the sun would be one of the worst possible imaginable ways of dealing with nuclear waste.

<comment><USER11> > None of the countries that have developed nuclear weapons have gotten their > plutonium from nuclear waste

Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean someone won't in the future.

You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not _want_ to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not.

<comment><USER12> _You 're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not._

So which is worse for that, having a fuck-ton of seriously nasty stuff sitting around _forever_ , or concentrating the nasty stuff to a much more manageable volume and then fairly quickly shipping it off to be _destroyed_ (in a way that just happens to provide useful energy out of the deal).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Use the Jules Verne solution: a cannon.

A solar powered mass-driver could sling a steady stream of pellets from Earth orbit into Solar non-orbit using existing technology.

That being said, burying it deep near the the start of a plate subduction zone makes at least as much sense.

<comment><USER16> What does "Solar non-orbit" mean?

What would happen, if you managed to make sure all this stuff got escape velocity, is you would wind-up with a bunch of junk (literally) in an orbit around the sun that would inherently pass through Earth's orbit - as long as it doesn't have solar escape velocity, once a thing is moving on pure momentum, it is in orbit and since the orbit fairly closely an ellipse so the object will return. As the article mentions, probably not when the earth return to the point. But if you keep throwing stuff "out there", the chances of a return are naturally going to increase.

<comment><USER17> i think he just means any old trajectory that doesn't come back...

its not a completely rubbish idea.

if you shoot the right way you could end up cancelling enough orbital velocity to intersect the sun before any return to earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Even if it were actually difficult to get to the sun, there are other options that are nearly as effective.

Jupiter would be just as good of a dump or we could just launch on an extra solar trajectory. Hell, we could just put it on a large, non-equatorial orbit around the Earth and it would be effectively gone with the added benefit of being able to recover it should we find a reason to. Space is a big enough place to dump an Earth's worth of trash.

The only problems are cost and the risk of explosion during launch.

<comment><USER19> Ehhh, orbit's not a great idea, especially lower-earth orbit. There's already enough space junk in our orbit right now that we're running the risk of an orbital chain-reaction. The chain reaction could take out most of our satellites. I'm sure radioactive waste in our upper atmosphere wouldn't be a good thing, either.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome)

<comment><USER20> You are vastly underestimating the space of possible orbits and vastly overestimating the size of debris and satellites.

<comment><USER21> Or possibly you are overestimating the probability of impact beyond which this should be considered too risky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It could be much lower than that if you take roundabout trajectories with gravity assists from Earth, Venus and Mercury. Not having to establish orbit is definitely a plus.

Besides, nuclear waste is still mostly unburned fuel which could be reprocessed and burned for power in special reactors.

<comment><USER23> >Besides, nuclear waste is still mostly unburned fuel which could be reprocessed and burned for power in special reactors.

That was my reaction. Future generations will want to use that stuff for fuel. There's no reason to launch it into space.

<comment><USER24> Well yes, it could be fuel in the future.

But at current in the US it is stored in holding pools all over the country. None of those are getting any larger, although they are frequently reworked to allow better use of the volume available.

Very little of it is 'weapons grade' and not many people have access to the equipment to weaponize it into a nuclear weapon. But turning any of it into a dirty bomb is trivial if you can steal it.

There is also the problem of accidents, why by definition are unavoidable.

So, you really do want to get rid of the fuel. Launching it into space is impractical. But it should be stored in a difficult to access facility where the chance of it escaping is minimal. The US federal government collected billions for the construction of such a facility, but it was never completed. So as a result, we have fuel scattered all over the US.

<comment><USER23> Oh, we definitely should open Yucca Mountain. Maybe with Reid out of the Senate it will happen. But we definitely don't want to "get rid" of it.

<comment><USER24> Yes, but unfortunately logic and reason don't factor into the decision making around nuclear energy policy.

People love to point scream and shout about the dangers of nuclear energy. In conversation I've noticed that people think of nuclear energy as interchangeable with nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are incredibly difficult to build compared to a nuclear fission reactor. The experimental data you need to build one either requires numerous tests or stealing it from a government. Nuclear reactors on the other hand, can be very simple. The simplest reactors are just lumps of radioactive material carefully bonded to thermoelectric devices! The biggest risk from a conventional nuclear reactor is a steam explosion and the dispersal of radioactive material. I reckon the second biggest risk is having tons (quite literally) of spent fuel laying around the country for no good reason. The storage ponds aren't 100%, accidents will happen. For most of the ponds if the cooling systems went offline the water would boil away and then the fuel would self-heat till it started to oxidize. At that point you've basically got hundreds of miniature fallout generators going. You better hope the structure above the pond is airtight because no one is going to be entering it again in this century.

The same group of people that scream and shout about nuclear energy being unsafe seem to actively ignore the dangers of conventional energy generation. For example, steam explosions are still a risk to the employees operating the plant. But I guess their lives don't matter? The pollution from coal isn't exactly helping the environment. Then there is this matter of what to do with all of the coal dust after it is burnt. You know, the same coal ash that over 1 billion gallons recently flooded an area of Tennessee. This contaminated a river, people's land, and destroyed their homes.

Even if we ceased 100% of nuclear energy generation today, we still need Yucca Mountain to deal with the spent fuel we already have. It seems that some groups in the US believe that if they scream loudly enough, the problems of the world will simply go away.

Also there is this issue of the fact that the energy consumers and the taxpayers already paid for the fucking thing but aren't getting any of the benefits. At this point it is basically just a boondoggle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anybody who's tried doing that in KSP knows how hard it is.

</comment><comment><USER26> Back in high school I wrote a program that would let you pilot your ship in orbit around the earth and try to dock with things. I discovered just how annoying the physics of spaceflight can be!

Given the magnetic field of the Sun, one wonders if you could use a terminator tether [1] to get the remaining delta-v.

[1] [http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/2.3565](http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/2.3565)

</comment><comment><USER27> We can make it to Mercury. In fact, putting a spacecraft in orbit around Mercury is made more difficult because of the need to decelerate against the Sun's gravity.

If you look at the Wikipedia page for the MESSENGER mission, you'll see they tackled that problem by using gravity assists from Earth, Venus, and Mercury to reduce MESSENGER's relative velocity with Mercury and allow it to go into orbit. These gravity assists greatly reduced the propulsion requirements.

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure how much I like the idea of using the Earth for a gravity assist on a _nuclear waste_ payload. Getting that one wrong (anyone remember the meters vs. feet debacle with a Mars probe?) wouldn't end well...

<comment><USER29> Well, we have done at least one Earth gravity assist with a nuclear payload in the past. There also was some criticism about it back then: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens#Plutoni...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens#Plutonium_power_source)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is why you'd use gravity braking to do the work for you...

You just have to change direction, not slow yourself down, as long as your path intersects the sun you're done... we have sent spacecraft to the sun... it's not beyond our technical capabilities.

Basically, it's like flying into a banked curve... as long as you're pointed at the Sun when you exit the curve you're going to hit the sun with out needing to bleed 30km/s.

The fundamental reason why it doesn't work is because it's really expensive get stuff into space...

If it was difficult to hit things with large gravitational forces we wouldn't see very many comets in the night sky...

<comment><USER31> > _" If it was difficult to hit things with large gravitational forces we > wouldn't see very many comets in the night sky..."_

The difficulty does not come from the mass of the Sun. It comes from Earth's velocity around it. The waste starts out with that velocity as well. Basically the waste is already in a stable orbit around the sun, and getting it out of that is difficult.

<comment><USER30> It's not in a stable orbit around the sun...

If it has velocity to escape earth's gravity then it does not match earth and will eventually go somewhere else.

If it does not it will fall back.

Only at a Lagrange point will it not deviate from earth.

Given that it is not heading to earth we simply point it at an appropriate trajectory to intercept the moon and/or another planet using that planet to perform aforementioned "banked curve" which directs it to the sun at increased or decreased velocity.

The primary cost of shipping stuff to the sun is escaping earth, once you do that the additional fuel required to reach the sun is nowhere near the amount of fuel required to slow from 30 km/sec to zero.

Basically all we need to do is reach the moon... from there gravity does the work for us with the correct trajectory and a small amount of fuel to correct the trajectory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is there any way to use drag to decay the orbit? We don't have to reach the sun _quickly_.

The solar wind is blowing past, is it possible to "sail" against that at an angle and - over time - dump orbital velocity and so end up in the sun?

<comment><USER33> From my understanding, solar wind can only push the payload further away from the sun and there is no noticeable drag in space or the earth wouldn't orbit for very long.

You are probably thinking that you can sail upwind on a sail boat but it isn't the same in space. The boat's keel [1] and general shape keep it going straight which is necessary to sail upwind. That doesn't work in space.

Another factor is that a sail works much like an airplane's wing and isn't really 'pushed' by the wind. This allows the force to be perpendicular to the sail in some cases. To my knowledge (take this part with a grain of salt), solar sails works by receiving momentum as the photons hit. This could only push it away from the sun.

[http://www.real-world-physics- problems.com/images/physics_sa...](http://www.real-world-physics- problems.com/images/physics_sailing_2.png)

<comment><USER13> The force will be perpendicular to the surface light reflects from, not perpendicular to the light arriving at the surface. Therefore if the sail was mounted at a 45 degree angle to the Sun, there would be a force that reduces angular momentum and puts the object in a spiral towards the Sun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm not rocket scientist, but it seems like the author is calculating a decreasing spiral into the sun rather than an impact. Why not slingshot around a planet and barrel into the sun with all of the orbital velocity still intact.

<comment><USER3> Because if the orbital velocity is intact you will perputally miss hitting the sun. The only way you can hit a thing you are orbiting is to remove all the orbital velocity (well, remove enough of the orbital velocity such that your orbit drops low enough to scrape the surface anyway).

<comment><USER35> The sun's pretty big... And if you're worried about overshooting, you could probably lose a lot of velocity just braking against the solar wind.

<comment><USER36> While the solar wind gets stronger closer to the sun, it's an r-square law that balances the r-squared force of gravity. Fun fact: If a solar sail could be in a fixed position at Mercury orbit then it could also be in fixed position a Neptune orbit.

Quoting from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail), the "total force exerted on an 800 by 800 meter solar sail, for example, is about 5 newtons (1.1 lbf) at Earth's distance from the Sun".

The Orion space capsule is ~25 sq meters. I'll round that up to 100 sq meters (I'm being generous), giving a breaking force of 5/64 N on the waste barge.

The capsule mass is 20 tons. Assuming the waste barge were the same mass (I'm being generous) gives a solar gravitational force in Earth orbit of 120 newtons. This far exceeds the push from solar wind, even with wildly optimistic numbers. (Note: there's some 50,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste in the US.)

So no, you couldn't lose a lot of velocity just braking against the solar wind. Not unless you've also developed effective solar sail technology.

<comment><USER37> Your calculations seem sensible, but you're only talking about _radial_ forces, ie. countering the "downward" force of gravity with "upward" thrust of a solar sail.

But space flight maneuvers typically use _tangential_ or almost tangential thrust. Slowing down or accelerating the orbital motion will cause the altitude to vary, preserving the orbital energy and angular momentum. Placing a solar sail in a 45 degree angle from the sun will change the orbit slowly but surely, as there will be a little tangential and radial thrust.

I still don't think it's viable for throwing anything into the sun, though.

<comment><USER38> I think it's viable. There are no other forces acting on you. Set up the solar sail at 45 degrees "against" your orbit. You will slowly but inevitably spiral into the sun without burning any fuel.

<comment><USER36> If you have effective solar sail technology then all my calculations are thrown out the window.

If you don't, then the time to spiral into the sun is large. Figuring 5/64 N on 20 tons and an orbital velocity of 30km/s gives

      t = v / a = 30 km/s / ((5/64) N / 20000 kg)
        = 245 years to cut the orbital velocity

This assumes all of the force could be used to slow the waste hauler. As [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail) points out, the force is cos^2(theta) so the actual time at 45 degrees is

      t = 245 * (sqrt(2)/2)^2 = 490 years.

The actual time will be smaller because you only need to hit the sun, and solar wind will get stronger. So, 350 years? As a wild-ass guess.

That same page points out that sails don't work much inside of 0.25 AU, because the temperature can exceed the material properties of the sail. Though I think if the apogee is inside of 0.20 AU it's good enough.

To make it worse, the solar wind fluctuates, so unless there's active control on the rocket, its orbit will be unpredictable over the centuries. When it's still near Earth orbit, or when it approaches Venus orbit, what are the chances of a gravitational assist leading to an Earth-return?

With 50,000 tons of high-level waste, and 15 tons per rocket => 3,333 rockets in uncertain orbits, the chances become much higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is all assuming that we don't have a space elevator.

tldr; it costs a lot of money to launch mass into space.

Sending 1 pound of water into space costs $50,000. This is more than the price of gold on earth. A space elevator changes the economics dramatically.

<comment><USER40> No, this is about the speed of the earth relative to the sun. E.g. even if we wanted to shoot, say, the ISS into the sun, it'd be hard. As soon as you point it towards the sun it will go into an elliptical orbit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I wonder.. would the spent rocket fuel generate more power in (an appropriate) power station than the original nuclear material?

(Assuming gravity assist is used)

</comment><comment><USER42> I've been curious about his last paragraph for a while - send trash out into nowhere - and unless I'm being an idiot, it looks like we'd still be paying (at the author's implied Saturn-V costs) ~48 million USD per short ton of waste.

Compare this to Yucca Mountain's current cost of $9b for ~77k short tons of storage (~$117k/sh tn) and it's still pretty awful.

We do get the ongoing benefit of no upkeep and happy NIMBYs for spacebound waste, but there are always the downsides of making a mess in our space- backyard (what will the aliens think when they come to visit? How embarrassing. Almost as bad, what if it comes back a la Futurama or gets in the way of future endeavors) and losing access to that waste if we figure out a means of making use of waste in the future.

<comment><USER31> I don't think he is seriously suggesting that we blast nuclear waste out into space, only pointing out that it would be easier to do than throwing it into the sun. This emphasizes why "throw it into the sun" isn't a very good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's not that I don't believe the author is correct, but I'm having a hard time picturing why it is true. Imagine a rocket pointed in the exact opposite direction the earth is orbiting. So the rocket starts to orbit the sun slightly slower than the Earth, and so the Sun's gravity would pull it closer and closer every year.

<comment><USER2> That's not how it works. It would just place the waste on an elliptical orbit around the Sun.

<comment><USER43> But aren't the vast majority of possible orbits unstable? If the Earth were travelling just a bit slower wouldn't it slowly spiral into the sun?

<comment><USER38> No, just the opposite. Given any position and velocity relative to the Sun (or the Earth), an object in that position at that velocity is in an "orbit" that will be a conic section of some sort. Most of them are ellipses i.e. stable. The only way to _not_ be in a stable orbit is to go fast enough that it becomes a parabola or hyperbola - a flyby - or slow enough that the ellipse becomes so narrow that it's just a straight line (or rather, narrow enough that it hits the thing you're orbiting).

When you throw a ball it flies in a parabola, right? But actually that parabola is just one end of a very long, narrow ellipse, with the Earth's centre as one of the foci. If you could "turn on noclip"[1] and allow the ball to fall through the Earth, it would already be in a stable orbit.

(If you want to get a better intuition for this kind of thing, play Kerbal Space Program)

[1] And if the Earth were a point mass located at its centre, which it isn't. And ignoring air resistance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Simple: Just invent a rocket that runs on nuclear waste. Then you have all the fuel you need to get the rocket there. (joking)

<comment><USER45> If you were to not-quite-spend all the fuel, you could use [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket), which coincidentally would be your best chance at getting to the Sun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Ok, continuing the argument from the article and not discussing practical methods of waste disposal...

Instead of using chemical rockets for the entire dV how about using a rocket to get into orbit and then using an ion engine driven by solar energy to lose the additional 20km/s? It seems the "fuel" weight required would be significantly less.

</comment><comment><USER47> You could swing by Jupiter and use the pull from that to bend the trajectory back to the Sun. That's what they did in practice for the Ulysses probe:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(spacecraft)#Jupiter_sw...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_\(spacecraft\)#Jupiter_swing- by)

</comment><comment><USER48> Offshoot topic but noting how things we launch from earth already have all the energy they need to orbit the sun, why isn't it really easy to get to earth sun Lagrange points? It seems like we could kind of just float over there since we don't need any additional speed to orbit the sun.

<comment><USER49> You can't just "float over" to another point along your orbit; to move the forward Legrange point you would have to slow down, causing you to drop into a lower orbit which moves around the sun quicker, then speed up to a larger orbit that intersects with the desired Lagrange point and then finally speed up again when you reach that point to stabilize the orbit.

To try this in Kerbal space Program: place two craft into the same equatorial orbit, but with one 1/6th of an orbit ahead of the other. Now make them dock.

It's both counter intuitive and easy once you know how.

<comment><USER48> Ok, that kind of makes sense. But as an extreme example let's say you moved out to earth sun L4 leaving from earth and moving at 1MPH*.

Once you got there, you're there besides station keeping. So in theory there's no deltaV required? That's what confused me.

Of course moving at 1MPH you'd be expending energy fighting earth's gravity until you got there. But I think that's a separate issue.

<comment><USER49> If you accelerate by 1MPH you're not in the same orbit anymore. It's not like driving on earth, where you can go faster along the same path by pushing the accelerator down; the speed you're moving at is a component of your orbit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Could anyone here please explain why every time the rocket will return to Earth's orbit and,the Earth won't be there.

Does our solar system is constantly moving? Isn't it stationary with sun at center bending space and time and making planets to revolve around it?

</comment><comment><USER51> This article just ruined every Star Trek episode for me where they fly a ship into a star.

<comment><USER40> To be fair, the problem here is that the waste is already in orbit (by virtue of being part of earth). His point is that if you want to hit the sun: don't orbit it. To stop an orbit around the sun is a hell of a job.

But if you're not orbiting in the first place: no problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Why does it have to be the sun? Why not just perpendicular to the sun/earth plane?

<comment><USER53> You'd still be in orbit, and would still cross the plane at regular intervals, so you wouldn't "get rid of it", as with flying out of the solar system or into the sun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Just leave earth SOI, and the vessel will be orbiting the sun. the orbit will naturally decay in years/centuries/+

just try not to hit mercury too much. but even if this happens, not that big of a problem

</comment><comment><USER55> Creating all that force ourselves isn't the only option. We could use gravity assists from Venus and/or Mercury to alter velocity directly towards the sun, too.

</comment><comment><USER17> the article claims that the sun is super inaccessible compared to escape velocity, but they are extremely closely related. as an orbit gets more and more ellipitcal, the delta-v required to get the orbit to cut through the sun drops (for a well timed burn at aphelion), in the limit of escape velocity this delta-v vanishes to zero... the implication is that they are comparable in cost, if you were to use such a method to drop something into the sun.

</comment><comment><USER56> And I thought the 11km/sec escaped velocity was intended to shoot rocket without any further fuel supply nor any air-resistant? No?

</comment><comment><USER57> Just set it down at the south pole.

</comment><comment><USER58> It draws some doubt that the author lists accelerations in units of km/sec, not km/sec^2.

<comment><USER59> If you read "delta-v" for "acceleration" throughout the article, the whole thing makes more sense.

<comment><USER60> The author always says "an acceleration", which is the same thing as delta-v.

I have no idea how particular it is to phrase it that way, but it isn't confused.

<comment><USER58> The author says multiple times: "an acceleration of [X] km/s is required", maybe they meant to imply that the magnitude of the change of the velocity?

<comment><USER60> Accelerating at some rate km/ss for a period of s results in km/s. So the net result of "an acceleration" can be expressed as a velocity.

(what it comes down to is that "an" is an indefinite article and always modifies a noun and km/ss is described by the verb acceleration. Yay English.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Superman can do it.

<comment><USER62> So can Jebediah Kerman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> "Technology solves all problems!" \- every YC commenter

<comment><USER64> This is a crappy comment. It would have been funnier, though, if you had posted something like, "I could solve this with a Perl one-liner."

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Why not just send it into deep space?

</comment><comment><USER66> Sometimes rockets fail. I mean like they blow up on launch.

When the Shuttle was first commissioned, my concern at the time was that America's most reliable rocket was the delta, which failed every thirty launches.

When it's nuclear waste, it's not good enough just to have launch insurance.

<comment><USER67> > When the Shuttle was first commissioned, my concern at the time was that > America's most reliable rocket was the delta, which failed every thirty > launches.

You were right to be concerned. The shuttle had "a 40% vehicular failure rate and a flight failure rate of 1.5%", killing more people than any other space vehicle. [1]

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2012/04/18/5-hor...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2012/04/18/5-horrifying- facts-you-didnt-know-about-the-space-shuttle/)

<comment><USER68> And the space shuttles carried many more people than other space vehicles except for the current generation of Soyuz.

You don't measure failure rate by number built divided by number crashed. You measure by how much it's used. The more often something is used the more likely it it that it will fail one of those times.

<comment><USER69> The problem with nuclear waste is that you need a 0% failure rate or you might detonate a dirty bomb in the atmosphere. It doesn't matter how often it worked if it fails once.

Also it's a great target for sabotage for radicals.

<comment><USER38> > you might detonate a dirty bomb in the atmosphere

Which would put less radioactive material up there than coal power plants already do as a matter of course.

<comment><USER70> But it's a bit hard to say at which altitude the failure would occur. Plenty of rockets have exploded on the launch pad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> omg....when I was 10 I wrote a story about how humanity takes nuclear waste to the sun. tl;dr results in nuclear apocalypse destroying the entire solar system.

</comment><comment><USER72> Its generally not worth it to give smart answers to dumb questions. I guess its a pet peeve of the author though.

<comment><USER73> I would argue it's a waste not because it's stupid, but because it's just extraordinarily trite:

[http://www.reddit.com/search?q=nuclear+waste+sun&restrict_sr...](http://www.reddit.com/search?q=nuclear+waste+sun&restrict_sr=off&sort=relevance&t=all)

...variations include "why can't we put garbage in the sun", "why can we put nuclear waste in volcanoes", etc. It's a great question coming from a 6-year- old, but if an adult asks it, he's simply not the kind of person who will spend one second in critical thought, or in researching anything himself. So, yeah, not worth it.

<comment><USER74> You're right of course, we're free to determine how to spend our time. And you thought it worth yours to search for reddit discussions to post here to illustrate why you felt this topic not worth your time, perhaps as a lone beacon to guide future generations who might be tempted towards the folly of exploring questions which have answers you already know.

Discussing good explanations for a topic, no matter how common, is not a waste for anyone who is interested, especially any curious people who might currently be lacking the tools to solve it themselves. I don't believe any of us comes fully equipped.</comment></comment></comment>


Zoom still claims ability to "secure a meeting with end-to-end encryption" - <AUTHOR> https://zoom.us/security <comment><USER2> The website does not just say "end-to-end" and leave it open to interpretation. It goes into some detail of how it works:

> End-to-End Chat Encryption allows for a secured communication where only the > intended recipient can read the secured message. Zoom uses both asymmetric > and symmetric algorithms to encrypt the chat session. Session keys are > generated with a device-unique hardware ID to avoid data being read from > other devices.

This contradicts their previous statement[1] that end-to-end encryption means from the client to the browser. Surely the "recipient" of the communication is not zoom, but the other person you are talking to, right?

[1] [https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting- encryption/](https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting-encryption/)

<comment><USER3> Your comment above mentions chat encryption- not video..

<comment><USER2> You are right, then my case is weaker since they do not define _video_ end-to- end encryption explicitly. But still this shows that they do know what end-to- end encryption means as opposed to what was claimed previously.

<comment><USER3> Correct - but it also shows that they continue to actively mislead people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It appears that the stuff about there only being TLS as far as the servers is wrong. There is encryption and it goes all the way to the ends. That's all you need these days to claim e2ee it seems. It doesn't matter that the company making the claim can easily decrypt the data.

It's all a black box all the way down to the closed source clients. This whole discussion seems kind of pointless. Crap is crap.

</comment><comment><USER5> Entirely shoot from the hip comment, but at this point I feel it's warranted..

What is with all the Zoom hate? The company have been around for a decade, enjoyed relatively mediocre success until the outbreak of Covid, and suddenly apparently since they're experiencing huge demand and press coverage, every man and his dog is finding reasons to write a blog post complaining about them.

I've read some article splitting hairs over the nuances of "end to end encryption" and how Zoom is so horrible, evil and wrong because they, like almost every telecommunication provider under the sun, can intercept your calls. What makes Zoom so special?

What's driving all this hate? Because it's a far more interesting question than what technical flaws Zoom, or any other product in this category, almost certainly suffer from.

Has someone done any security analysis of Houseparty? It's experienced surge growth in the same period. But in the time I've seen maybe 20 Zoom-hate articles on HN I haven't seen a single mention of Houseparty. What about Google Hangouts: is it "end"-to-"end" "encrypted"? What about its recording feature? Where are the articles? Where is all the hate?

Why?

<comment><USER6> It's quite simple: Zoom are lying. They've doubled down on their lies.

End to end encryption means something. Zoom isn't that. Zoom is claiming to be that.

There's not much to it.

They set the stage for it previously, too: they've done all sorts of shady things with computers onto which their client is installed. Zoom singled themselves out of the pack by being some of the only name-and-address provided software to use these techniques; everything else that does so is criminal malware.

Apple even pushed an OS malware detection update to remove Zoom's backdoor.

They stand alone because of their own choices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fake it 'till you make it!

<comment><USER8> And when you make it there is no reason fix anything

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> They are behind with their responses, what about the ECB usage?

[https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own- crypto...](https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto-a- quick-look-at-the-confidentiality-of-zoom-meetings/)

That by itself might render encryption claims from Zoom as meaningless.</comment>


Should the sole founder of a startup bother issuing stock? - <AUTHOR>

I am going it alone and plan on setting up probably a Delaware S-Corp (unless someone can give me good reasons to skip the S-Corp and go straight to the C-Corp), as I don't plan on seeking any outside investment for a while (and if/when I need to, I've heard it's trivial to convert an S-Corp to a C-Corp), but I am sort of betting on selling the company as an exit strategy.<p>With that in mind, does it make sense for me, all by myself, to issue stock to myself (possibly even on some sort of vesting schedule) and make an 83(b) election? <comment><USER2> <http://grellas.com/faq_business_startup_005.html>.

If you set up the entity, issue the stock (usually for nominal cash plus IP assignment if you have IP already developed). It starts your tax holding period and prevents tax complications later when you raise money. Vesting should not be necessary (it can always be added later if your investors insist on it and there are no tax complications arising from a later reconfiguration of your stock).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.</comment></comment>


Major U.S. cancer center ousts 'Asian' researchers after NIH flags foreign ties - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/exclusive-major-us-cancer-center-ousts-asian-researchers-after-nih-flags-their-foreign <comment><USER2> I remember when I was young (+40 years ago), many Swiss private banks would only hire Swiss people. That rule was due to the French IRS equivalent having their own employees sent to Switzerland and hired by Swiss bank. They were mole transmitting confidential information about French clients. So these private banks had to restore trust and security.

Honestly still today, for some critial jobs, I do not understand companies _not_ hiring local people (whatever nationality) with their friends and whole family (parents, cousins, etc) in the country. The cost of treason is higher (if they need to escape the country). It is not bullet proof, but it mitigates the risk.

But it looks like banks have a short memory (This guy was a sysadmin): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herv%C3%A9_Falciani](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herv%C3%A9_Falciani)

<comment><USER3> It is racist to assume that someone's place of birth determines their allegiances.

<comment><USER4> By your logic, people from all nations should be able to get top secret government security clearances. Let me know how that works out.

<comment><USER5> No. By his logic "birth place" shouldn't be the determining factor. FYI, birth place does not determine nationality.

<comment><USER6> While that's true, personally I'm ok with birth place being a restriction for some things e.g. in order to run for President in the US, one needs to be born in the US, not merely a citizen. Not sure how it is in other Western countries.

<comment><USER7> I don't think that's true - John McCain was born in Panama. The rule is they have to be a citizen at birth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >The new developments are linked to a sweeping effort launched last year by NIH to address growing U.S. government fears that foreign nations, particularly China, are taking unfair advantage of federally funded research.

Instead we let big pharma do it and charge a massive markup to fund their yachts eh?

</comment><comment><USER9> Well considering this is the same country who interned 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent all due to hysteria.

<comment><USER10> Stop acting like something that happened nearly 80 years ago is relevant today. Did we go crazy and lock up every Muslim after 9-11? That was a different time, a great deal of progress has been made since then. Sometimes I think too much progress as we are unwilling to be tough against those who seek to do us harm.

<comment><USER11> The problem is that the same people who sold the 9/11 surveillance state were (and still are) making the argument that Japanese-American interment was justified, and would be justified again in the same circumstances. For example:

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

There was also some rhetoric explicitly referencing interment (in a positive way) during the 2016 presidential campaign.

And to remind, the Korematsu decision - which, essentially, made it all legal - wasn't overturned until last year, either.

So it's not exactly ancient history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder why the headline says 'Asian' instead of saying Chinese, since all three researchers were Chinese with ties to China.

As an ethic Indian, I'm kinda offended when all Asians are just lumped together as I believe it promotes general racism and bias against anyone from that _continent_.

<comment><USER13> Funny you say that because in the US, Indians are not considered Asians in practice even though of course South Asia is, well in Asia. I have seen many people argue that Asians only mean East Asians and does not include South Asians. However, the official census lumps all Asians together.

<comment><USER14> How are Indians not considered "Asians in practice" when they are considered as such by the Census, the authoritative organization that sets the categorization standard?

<comment><USER15> Colloquially, in America, Asians are identified as having slanty eyes and white skin. Indians have brown skin and are therefore not colloquially referred to as Asians. Instead, they are referred to simply as "Indian".

<comment><USER16> This is an oversimplification, most Americans will also be quick to categorize darker skinned Southeast Asians as Asian.

Historically most Asians in the US were from East Asia and later SEA so the label tends to evoke those groups. Lacking familiarity, it may also be harder for many Americans to easily discriminate (lol?) between East Indians and other non-white/non-Asian groups.

Still there are plenty of people that do include Indians as "Asian" in the US, it's hardly a universal standard to exclude them as a lot of comments here seem to think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why not look into other ethinic's ties with foreign nations that taking advantage of US funded research? Probably because they are not considered to be threats, and sharing common good research results is not necessarily a bad thing. (Military tech is different story.) The fact is US is considering China as a threat under Trump's throne, so researchers with Chinese heritage is under much higher scrutiny than other races is the racism happening right now. It is a much more subtle and dangerous form of Racism, reminded me War World II Japanese-Americans. What's happening in this article is just a symptom.

<comment><USER18> Specifically, white people have been stealing research and claiming it as theirs for decades. We give them Nobel prizes when they do it really well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> >Four of the five NIH letters to MD Anderson contain very specific allegations of what NIH terms "serious" rule violations. One letter, for instance, asserts that a researcher had violated peer-review confidentiality by emailing to a scientist in China an NIH grant application marked as containing "proprietary/privileged information." A different letter alleges that a researcher had shared "detailed information on as many as 8 NIH applications" with a daughter. NIH asserts several researchers had "active and well- supported research programs in China," or financial ties to foreign firms, that they did not disclose. Three of the letters specifically mention a researcher's potential involvement in China's Thousand Talents Program, an effort started in 2008 to establish ties with Chinese or Chinese American scientists working outside of China by offering funding, salary, and other research support.

This sounds like really boring stuff that the scientists may not even have known that they weren't allowed to do.

<comment><USER20> If you are a funding peer reviewer you _know_ you are not allowed to send grant applications to anyone unauthorized. It's not boring; a big deal is made out of this repeatedly and it is a serious lapse.

Of course this is something that is rarely punished because in most cases there's no way for the authorities to know. Too bad for these folks that they seemed to be under investigation.</comment></comment>


Rails 4.0 around the corner - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/806d023b4563f907f1b93278f19fe00e77c434c6

<comment><USER2> formatted:

[https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/guides/source/4_0...](https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/guides/source/4_0_release_notes.textile)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can someone please clarify what justifies the 3.2 -> 4.0? I don't see a big change, isn't this more like a 3.2 -> 3.3?

<comment><USER4> Rails 4.0 drops support for Ruby 1.8.x which necessitates the major version bump.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you think Rails is still fun and are you enjoying coding in Rails?

<comment><USER6> yes, yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have they announced a release date target?

</comment><comment><USER8> Rails 4.0 might be out by the end of the year, but that's outside of my definition of "around the corner".

</comment><comment><USER9> Upgrading our rails-2.3/ruby-1.8 website any day now.

</comment><comment><USER10> Any word on performance?

<comment><USER11> Aaron Patterson (tenderlove) gave a presentation where he said he wanted to refactor rack to make it more simple. He said Rails 3 had a lot more depth in the stack and it was making it slower. (when i start up an old rails 2 app i can't believe how fast it is). I don't think that is in Rails 4 though. I guess that is a separate project.

Also deprecating vendor/plugins means Heroku will have to change the way they deploy. You can notice that by the deprecation messages when you start a heroku console.</comment></comment>


How to build your own Slack integration - <AUTHOR> https://sprint.ly/blog/5-steps-to-a-slack-integration/

<comment><USER2> Also:

      curl -s -o /dev/null --data ' ...the message you were sending... ' https://??? the team subdomain ???.slack.com/services/hooks/slackbot?token=**** the slackbot api token for the channel ****&channel=%23channel???

...have to debug your API token, before you can integrate with it, right?

<comment><USER3> Hey, not quite sure what the question is, can you rephrase it?

Requests to slack require the slack token to be included in the request params ``` qs: { "token": integration.get('slack_token'), "channel": integration.get('channel_id'), "username": 'Partyline', "attachments": JSON.stringify(attachment), "icon_url": SLACK_BOT_ICON, }, } ```

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey there, this post came from our experience building Partyline, a Slack integration to manage project management tools.

If anyone has any questions about how we approached building it let us know, we've learned some things along the way, adopting a pattern to make future integrations with GitHub, Trello etc. follow a similar interface. Building for Slack is awesome.

Is anyone else currently building Slack integrations? For local development have you used a secure tunnel service?(ngrok or other) It would be interesting to hear about other peoples dev workflows with Slack.

Partyline is all JS with Hapi.js, using ngrok to help in local dev.

We <3 Slack :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Didn't know about the _reply_ function in Slack's API.

This would allow you to send a private message to the user in the #general channel, correct? I can see that being super helpful with a few integrations I'm thinking about.

<comment><USER3> Its actually the reply handler provided within Hapi, which lets you reply to the request.

For error handling, instructive messages and private messages we use the reply handler to push messages back to the user in the slack channel, visible only to them. Its super handy to cut down on "noise" in the channel but you do lose the rich formatting options in messages.

If the request is coming from the #general channel then that would work, alternatively you would have to build up a separate request using superagent or something</comment></comment>


Show HN: A (new?) very simply PK cryptosystem using CRT - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dosaygo-coder-0/dosycrtpkpq <comment><AUTHOR> This probably has a big hole in it that I missed. But I just feel there must be some way to make a PK cryptosystem using Chinese Remainder Theorem. And I've found it in this one way at least.

I'm somewhat concerned this is simply the (already broken) Knapsack PK cryptosystem, but I don't know enough about that to say if it's different or not, essentially. Anyway, I know this community is not totally deep into reviewing crypto from random people, but I'm putting it out here as a record and in case anyone sees a hole the care to point out. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, it has a big hole.</comment></comment>


Scale Your Website Like YouTube - A Look at YouTube's Architecture - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture

<comment><USER2> Very interesting article, it's good for entrepreneurs who are wondering what will happen when (of course ;-)) their websites start getting hammered with traffic.

</comment><comment><USER3> YouTube probably requires more bandwidth per user than all the YCombinator funded sites combined. Maybe Justin.tv is the exception.

<comment><USER4> Another huge bandwidth consumer is <http://www.ytmnd.com>

It's a site that lets you upload a gif image, a sound, and some text. You pick a subdomain (for example, "something"). Then it puts all those on <http://something.ytmnd.com>. Each day, around 100,000 of these are viewed, so it chews up a huge amount of bandwidth.

Max is the owner of that site, and he's been living off of the advertising revenue at about the same living status as someone working full time at McDonald's. Last I heard, the advertising pulls in about $20k per month, and the bandwidth takes about $18k per month. He works all day and night on it.. it's amazing. I don't know why he hasn't sought investors or anything like that, but it's a huge community (even though it consists largely of teenagers).

Any investors who like investing in that sort of thing might want to contact him.

<comment><USER5> always wondered how that was working out for the owners.

<comment><USER4> The whole story's at <http://ytmnd.com/news/?news_id=69> .. it's pretty interesting.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to develop the creative side of brain? - <AUTHOR>

Entrepreneurship is as much as problem solving as coming up with creative solution. How to bring that side of brain to use, and to further grow it <comment><USER2> I can recommend a great book: Serious Creativity by Edward De Bono.

I am very interested in this topic and this is the best book I've ever read about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Just think about it deeply, then forget it…then an idea will jump up in your face." \- Mad Men.

</comment><comment><USER4> Play with Lego bricks, doodle, fly a kite, stare at clouds, let your inner child out.</comment>


American business schools are reinventing the MBA - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/business/2019/11/02/american-business-schools-are-reinventing-the-mba <comment><USER2> This is something I wrote for a previous post on Hackernews re MBAs:

I went to one of the top-tier (top 3) MBA programs in the US. The way I've described that value of the top MBA programs is in 3 (roughly equally- weighted) categories:

1) The Education: Getting to discuss business concepts with a group of smart, successful folks for 6-9 hours a day is very helpful. Most of the content, I could get from books/ online articles at a fraction of the price, but spending the time in a focused way is actually helpful.

2) The Network: In terms of network, this isn't some vague amorphous thing at Stanford GSB, HBS, or Penn- it's knowing several hundred other folks who are going to be very successful in their careers. This can be useful in sales, fundraising, finding a next job, etc. and DOES have a tangible dollar value.

3) The Rubber Stamp: Having your resume say "Stanford GSB" or "Harvard Business School" does have value to future employers or customers- it de-risks you as you've been validated by a famous institution, and helps THEM to associate with these famous brands.

For the top 3 programs, even though they're VERY expensive (approx $250k in tuition + living expenses, plus at least another $250k in foregone income for most incoming students, for $500k in actual cost+opportunity cost), they're almost certainly worth it.

For middle-/ lower-tier MBA programs, 2) and 3) above aren't NEARLY as valuable, or perhaps don't even exist- is your "network" from Local State School MBA actually valuable? For these, the only real value is the actual education, and most students would be better served with an online program or just actually picking up some books/ case studies/ reading online articles. There are a few exceptions to the this- for instance, often schools that aren't in the top 3 nationwide can punch above their weight in regional networks. For instance, if you want to live and work in LA (or work in the entertainment industry) I've heard that it can be really useful to go to UCLA or USC for an MBA.

<comment><USER3> Mcmoose, do you think the University of Michigan has regional appeal that justifies the tuition?

<comment><USER4> Not Mcmoose; but I would say definitely yes. Top 3 is too high a cutoff in my opinion; I would expand the above sentiments to "top 20"; which would include Ross - especially if you are considering regional appeal and are an industry switcher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised education is even mentioned. Every MBA I know has always stated the real value of the degree was for the network is provided[1]. A general management degree would naturally be useless in a world that increasingly values specialization.

From this perspective, MBA programs are just expensive signaling, or even a luxury good. As usual for elite education, these who meet the strict and competitive entry requirements are highly talented individuals, so the programs real value to employers is the sorting they provide by filtering from a large set of candidates.

[1] I have a PhD, but I work and know many MBAs. My father, wife, and several former bosses have been MBAs. Very capable, but none mentioned much value in the degree program.

<comment><USER6> Why is there no value in the general knowledge and coursework itself?

There are people getting MBAs that started from literally zero business knowledge. Let's say a Computer Science major, who has now worked in the industry writing code for 10 years, wants to move into management. Where would that person get any business knowledge if not for that course work?

How will that person relate to the aspects of the business that management needs to be aware of without the kind of basic accounting, finance, and legal coursework that is part of a typical MBA program?

Sure, someone who is already on the business side with a lot of experience in that area may not get any value out of an MBA.

<comment><USER7> There is value in the education, but it's the exact same education you can get anywhere. Go to a community college and take statistics, economics, accounting, finance, and maybe a couple interest classes and you'll have roughly the same academic exposure for a tenth of the cost. You don't need an MBA program to learn business fundamentals.

<comment><USER6> Compare the curriculum for yourself. An MBA program at a reputable business school has more elective and specialization options, along with a higher level of difficulty. It's not accurate to declare that Community Colleges have _no difference_ in curriculum to a respected graduate business school (and they do not cost 10x more, that is an exaggeration).

Cleveland State University MBA:

[https://www.csuohio.edu/business/sites/csuohio.edu.business/...](https://www.csuohio.edu/business/sites/csuohio.edu.business/files/MBA_One_Sheet_2019_May2.pdf)

Cuyahoga Community College Business Administration Degree:

[http://catalog.tri-c.edu/course- descriptions/badm/?_ga=2.241...](http://catalog.tri-c.edu/course- descriptions/badm/?_ga=2.24156730.1457488063.1572963438-1937443682.1572963438)

At Cuyahoga Community College, do you see any electives like Lean Six Sigma, Supply Chain Analytics, or Medical Care Organization?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People seem to forget that the MBA (originally Master of Science in Commerce) was meant for technical undergraduate majors (like _Engineers_ ) to learn business concepts (and not meant for individuals who have a business undergrad degree). That's also why the graduate degree was called a Master of _Science_.

When you hear people claim that an "MBA is useless", it's typically spoken by people who took business as an undergraduate degree. And hence - yes, it is useless if you already have a degree in business ... and that was not the original intended audience to be attaining such a degree.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, perhaps the better claim would be that undergraduate in business degress are the ones that are fairly useless.

<comment><USER10> I have an undergrad bachelor of arts with a double major in business and accounting. It has served me well in tech and I'm a data engineer now. The tech learnig was all on the job and self-paced.

I did take two quarters of MBA classes but they were mostly redundant with my undergrad. I was bored and dropped out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It never made sense to me that one could specialize in business. Every business is radically different from one another, even from competitors.

Seems like it would be better to combine a few basic business courses with an advanced degree in a technical subject. Going deep into "business" seems to divorce a person from the reality of any particular company. It gets to the point where they're in danger of disrupting a company's successful strategy because it contradicts their business class theory. And then the elves leave middle earth [1].

[1] [https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle- ear...](https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle- earth-%e2%80%93-soda%e2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/)

<comment><USER12> The people I see with MBAs obtained them because they were more or less told to. If you want to advance you need to do this. When I was mentoring an intern we had an event with the CIO. All his top VPs were there and he had them state their masters degrees. The executives value the commitment to get a masters as much as they value the degree itself. Some times they don't even care much about the education, we gave you a challenge and you completed it.

I've seen similar situations where managers were told to teach an EE, SE, or even business classes at a local college at night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The MBA has lost its once held stature in most industries. It's almost become an acronym for dumb business decisions in many circles: "This must be something the MBAs came up with."

If schools want to stay relevant they need to create programs that produce leadership candidates for today's modern business environment. For too long it's just been a cash cow for schools and people went because it was the thing to do. With market attitudes changing and applications way down schools need to rethink.

Dare I say an MBA case study is needed on making the MBA relevant again ;-)

Yes the networking element is there but seriously you don't need to pay 50+k a year to do networking!

<comment><USER14> There is a case study, on CEO with or w/o an MBA, and there was no correlation into the company performance, there was a positive correlation with better compensation.

We'll post the link when I find it.

Edit: just use google scholar, there are a load of studies. Scanning through the titles quickly shows that a many people are wondering what is the value of the MBA. It does make the schools a lot of money.

<comment><USER6> Well, isn't that just like evaluating the difference between whether or not you're a self-taught programmer?

If you already have business skills, either from an undergraduate business degree, experience, or self-teaching, you don't need a non-specialized MBA.

If you look at the actual MBA curriculum it has courses that seem to be quite obviously useful if you ask me.

The only problem here is that there are some places that won't let you take a management role without a masters degree or MBA, instead of evaluating your actual level of skill, creating a surplus of MBA demand.

(And there are bad engineering schools just like there are bad MBA schools).

<comment><USER15> >Well, isn't that just like evaluating the difference between whether or not you're a self-taught programmer?

Not quite. Self-taught programmers can get high salaries too. Notice what the OP said about how having a MBA did not correlate with company performance, however it DID correlate with increased compensation. Basically, if you want to get paid extremely well, you need the MBA, even if it has nothing to do with how the company performs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> MBA is functionally a useless degree. (My opinion is based on interactions with MBAs over 25 years).

Look at the companies that you admire and that show the ability to innovate... chances are they are run by people with technical backgrounds.

Example: AMD is run by Lisa Su, whose background is in EE. HP was run by MBA holder, Carly Fiorina.

<comment><USER6> If you're basing that opinion on interactions with other people that you potentially don't like in the first place, who you're already judging to be inferior to engineers, it's not surprising that you find business knowledge to be useless.

You're judging them on their compatibility with your personality, not on the actual knowledge that an MBA or other sort of business degree provides. It's really easy for engineers to completely dismiss the kind of knowledge (including _emotional_ knowledge) that people in sales, business, and marketing possess. They aren't just some dummies who don't know how to code.

It also shouldn't be surprising that pure engineering companies like AMD are run by engineers, and while HP is an engineering company in some form, it's also more of a business services company. They do things like contract out desktop support services to large corporations or the government - that is much less about engineering and technical ability and more about providing continuing services, providing a business relationship.

It's actually not a lot different than hiring a custodial firm. Why _wouldn 't_ someone with a business background run HP? HP's commodity hardware business doesn't actually make a whole lot of money from what I remember.

<comment><USER17> Maybe you should read up on the history of HP. It is largely considered to be the case study in how a company can be ruined when technical management is replaced by "MBA" management.

<comment><USER6> Interestingly, now that I've looked into it, both of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc's current CEOs have computing and engineering degrees. At around a combined $80 billion in revenue in 2019, they must be one of the most lucrative ruined companies I've ever heard of.

Remember, many people who are candidates for an MBA already have a non- business degree, and they're looking to get a fundamental business education.

So a wonderful example of that might be Tim Cook, who has a bachelor's in Industrial Engineering as well as an MBA, and runs the most valuable tech company in the world.

Many people say he's not as good as Steve Jobs (due to the lack of personality cult), but then again, Apple is now making more than double the revenue that it did under Steve Jobs with a revenue mix that is much less dependent on the iPhone. The fastest growing segment is services, which is far more profitable and less risky than hardware (ask Pebble, BlackBerry, or Fitbit about that).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A lot of my friends are in, or have completed an MBA program. Has anyone ever noticed the whole "we go on 10 trips a year as a cohort. If you're missing out on those, you lose out on the experience" nonsense?

I'll admit I wanted to get an MBA, but when I did my due diligence, time and time again, people talked about the unexpected costs (read: trips) associated with getting value. That irked me to the core.

</comment><comment><USER19> I finished an MBA at UNC in 2005, right as they aggressively partnered and launched an online MBA using the same branding.

I got what I wanted from the degree, but it felt like the new product damaged the brand of the full time program.

</comment><comment><USER20> Don't rule out the large number of MBAs from mediocre schools polluting the waters with what you get from any fool that parties more than studies. Many, many MBA programs are grade inflated baby-sitters for those that that learned nothing during their undergrad and are now getting an MBA at night.

</comment><comment><USER21> A big factor is where we are in the economic cycle. It looks like we are heading in a recession, and if it is the case, I am happy to predict that applications will go back up.

</comment><comment><USER22> Are computer systems management classes and knowledge now at par with accounting and finance in MBA?

The fact that there is still the occasional CEO that brags about not even reading his email (granted its been 10 years since I heard something like that publicly) is ridiculous.

The entirety of the smooth management of modern systems is IT systems.

It would be nice if they taught morality, but I can hear the eyerolls from the students from a thousand miles away.

<comment><USER15> >The fact that there is still the occasional CEO that brags about not even reading his email (granted its been 10 years since I heard something like that publicly) is ridiculous.

Actually, these days, that might not be such a ridiculous thing. One of my engineer coworkers brags about how he never reads his (work) email either. And he has good reason for it: it's just full of spam and junk, even from the company. If there's something truly important he needs to know about or do, his manager or a coworker will tell him. Of course, part of that is because the rest of us who do read our email are basically acting as his filter, and informing him of the important things he's missing. But serious, email is such a cesspool now that I can see why someone would avoid using it, especially at work where they typically use Microsoft Outlook instead of GMail. At least GMail does a pretty decent job of filtering things, showing you the important stuff, putting spam in the spam folder, etc. Outlook is pretty useless by comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> [http://archive.is/YVNrJ](http://archive.is/YVNrJ)</comment>


App Store: I'm out - <AUTHOR> http://speirs.org/2008/09/12/app-store-im-out/ <comment><USER2> Well, Apple has already gotten some of our money. We purchased some Macs solely to develop an iPhone application for one of our endeavors. Now, though-- given the lag with even getting approval (so we can get to the stage of _installing_ a test app on test phones), we're rapidly losing excitement about investing in the project.

And then there's this kicker-- once our team spends time developing it, there's a chance it won't even be allowed. Great!

He doesn't really mention in his post the fun fact that you've got to pay a fee so Apple can review/reject your app. Definitely not feeling warm and fuzzy about the investment so far.

<comment><USER3> "He doesn't really mention in his post the fun fact that you've got to pay a fee so Apple can review/reject your app. Definitely not feeling warm and fuzzy about the investment so far."

You'd rather they get flooded with an absolute ton of crap? The fee isn't _that_ much and it separates the boys from the men, so to speak.

<comment><USER2> Nah, I'm not opposed to that, really. Ideally they'd have enough reviewers to handle that, though. A somewhat-non-profit like Mozilla handles it for Firefox extensions.

For us, the annoyance is just that we have to wait on them for multiple steps in the process when there's no guarantee they'll even post a produced app to the store.

We'll hedge our bets, though, and make a slightly useful app to see how annoying the process is, and wait for our larger app afterwards.

So far, we've been waiting over a week just to get into the program far enough to be able to legitimately put the app on our test iPhones. The app we're working on is worthless in the simulator, so to even debug it we need to get it on the phone itself. Waiting a few weeks to even debug your app is a bit demotivating. I whine here partly as a word of caution to anyone on a tight schedule.

<comment><USER4> Wow, that's really dissapointing to hear, that you have to get approval for an app before you can even test it on your own phone.

Do you get the impression that this is actually a stage for them to keep out what they consider bad products or is it just a bandwith problem with their approval process?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Their tune will change in a couple months when android comes out.

<comment><USER6> No one outside the tech world knows or cares what Android is. Unless it's on a damn sexy phone it won't make a dent.

<comment><USER7> Son! Son!! I don't understand this android thingie you're talking about: _where is the hard drive_?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Apple WILL change their tune, and the more users and developers complain and pressure them, the faster they will change their tune.

We know Apple's excuses ("we can't let you have open access, because someone might bad apps and we need to protect our users from themselves") are bullshit. Their competitors have had more open SDKs for _years_ and none of Apple's doomsday scenarios have come to pass.

I'm personally hoping that when Adroid comes out with its own app store and open platform, it will finally convince people to stop excusing Apple's behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of Apple's early days, when they didn't have an easy way for third parties to license their apps, their OS ended up without quality applications, and then Windows 3.1 ate their lunch... Anyone remember AmiPro?

<comment><USER10> Bloody context. I just read 'AmiPro' as 'Am I Pro?' and thought for half a moment it was another shitty iPhone app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As for me, I hope somebody builds a spectacular killer app for jailbroken iPhones so that part of the economy gets opened up. I love my iPhone and programming for it way too much.

Also, this dude seems to belong to the typical "elitist" Mac people group. "crapware written by hobbyist students" -- WTF! A student won the official Apple competition for best Mac / iPhone app or something like it.

</comment><comment><USER12> > Loudly and conspicuously hire an App Store Evangelist

I agree, but I'd be surprised if we see it happen. Evangelists are needed all over the place and yet so few companies bother to hire any or attempt any serious relationships on social media and the like. Apple are also not known for their openness in situations like this. A lack of information gives them some sort of advantage, I guess.

<comment><USER13> Apple has other evangelists on the payroll already. Some examples: User Interface, Graphics and Media, Developer Tools, Frameworks.

These evangelists have often helped developers shed more light on bugs against Mac OS X which are blocking the shipping of apps. Also, they're often a great first-line contact at Apple for getting help from Apple's engineers outside of WWDC.

To get an additional App Store contact that could field developers' questions about apps that have been rejected with little or no explanation would be nice.

The small group of evangelists Apple already has on the payroll is spread quite thinly between their Mac OS X, and now iPhone, responsibilities as it is.

I suspect developers are already talking their ears off about App Store issues, and I bet Fraser's wish could likely come true eventually. Whether it's in the form of a separate App Store evangelist, or a new iPhone-specific team of evangelists that can also help with shedding light on the App Store process, it'd be a huge improvement.

<comment><USER14> I know of applications that have been rejected not because they sucked, but because they were similar to ones that already existed.

It's bad for long-term innovation, but maybe it's good for the platform by not confusing users. I personally feel it's legitimate for open platforms to arbitrarily restrict default visibility, but not for them to restrict distribution.

<comment><USER15> Wow, I wasn't aware that they were denying apps that are "similar" to other apps already approved. That eliminates the evolution that comes with capitalism. Very bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Anytime your work needs approval to be live, you are in big trouble.

The problem is not Apple. The issue is the mobile industry. Everyone screams the Iphone is an open platform, but if you truly look at it, it is not significantly different.

You still have to go to an approval process and your application cannot compete with any Apple applications or future applications.

<comment><USER8> You're wrong, it _is_ Apple. And not only are you wrong, you are provably wrong.

Go ahead and write a pull-my-finger app for one of Apple's competitors (Blackberry or WinMo) and no one will stop you from releasing it on your target devices.

<comment><USER16> _The problem is not apple. The problem is the entire mobile industry_

About 5 years ago I set out to do my first mobile startup. Using RSS to SMS to provide near real time traffic updates. In the beginning the problem was to get a shortcode and SMS gateway provider. No possible way for a startup with little money to directly hook to the carrier gateway.

Then I said forget it, let's morphe it a bit and distribute games for small time developers. Cool. I already knew about 6 or 7 games developers who committed to let the startup distribute their games, but we quickly found the pain because some carriers did not allow downloads unless you went thorugh their certification program.

I also built a mobile marketing tool to help merchants geo-target their offerings. Cool. But qucikly enough you find that you have to continuously pay for each SMS, hence there was no sealing (at least not at the stage I was in) and you had to depend on a third party that can shut you down at any given time. Heck even Twitter had its service turned down by T-mobile for a short amount of time.

Anyway you go in the mobile industry, save one, you are dealing with restrictions. That is why I am saying the problem is not JUST Apple. It is the industry in general. If you create apps you will sooner or later hit a barrier. In one case the barrier will be Apple, in an other it will be your SMS gateway provider, in an other it will be T-Mobile, in another it will be BlackBerry certificates.

That is not to say there is no way around. There are applications that are truly independent of carrier rules or mobile platforms. Applications that you write once and they work on every cell phones, every carrier. It is just that developers want to bet on their apps being approved all the way to the top, or they think that if they hit a tiny 1% of the market they will make it big.

<comment><USER8> This is a critical point that too many people here miss. If Apple wants its phone to be a "smartphone" and compete against another smartphones, then it will be compared to its current peers, NOT against cheapo feature phones and _definitely_ not feature phones from 5 years ago.

When you do start comparing the iPhone to its current competitors, none of what you said makes sense. To go over it quickly.

-You can use SMS gateways that charge about 4cents a text.

-You don't have to use SMS at all. You can make an app that either polls a server or listens for pushed data.

\- "Blackberry certificates" are an $20 ID, which you only need to use internal APIs. At no point will RIM place any restrictions on what you can do with its powerful SDK.

If you set out to develop a BB app, and no point will you have to worry about your app making through some byzantine bureaucracy and whether or not it can be brought to market. It'll be a good day when you can say the same of the iPhone.

<comment><USER16> In simple words. There is no standard in the mobile industry for application developers. You have to tackle iphone and bb differetnly. You have to tackle ATT and Verizon differently.

My point is not that Apple is more open than others. That still does not make it standard.

Yes you can build apps that polls a server etc..., but again when building apps, there is no standard. Iphone apps do not work on Symbian phones. What kind of open is that?

BB is not truly open either. Maybe this has changed by now, but we could not get to collect SMS. How open is that?

The point I am trying to make is that developers should not be suprised where there apps are shut down by the SMS gateway provider, or the carrier, or Apple, or BB, or ......

Developers should focus on applications that they can write once and can deploy everywhere.

<comment><USER8> That's kinda like complaining that there is no standard in the desktop software industry, because you know.. UNIX developers and Windows developers don't have the same API. That's rather silly.

Quite simply, there are two tiers in the mobile industry now: smartphones and feature phones. On the feature phone tier, having to jump through bullshit hoops was and still is standard - getting certificates from the carrier, worrying about SMS, etc. On the smartphone, there are far, far fewer limitations - companies like Palm and RIM don't shutdown apps, and the carrier's control does not extend beyond perhaps discriminating types of data traffic (ie, email vs 3rd party data).

Apple's SDK policies make the iPhone far closer to the restrictions feature phones have than to smartphones the iPhone is actually sold against (ie BB Bold).

oh, and: [http://myhowto.org/java/j2me/22-sending-and-receiving-gsm- sm...](http://myhowto.org/java/j2me/22-sending-and-receiving-gsm-sms-on- blackberry-using-rim-apis/)

Pretty simple, no?

<comment><USER16> You cannot compare developing for desktop with developing for mobile.

Saying it is simple shows me that you do not have much experience creating mobile applications.

If you develop for windows I assume it will work in every country, for every machine that runs windows, regardless of the machine manufacturer and the insternet service provider. Write once deploy nearly everywhere. Try that with mobile apps.

If you develop for Symbian phones, although one app may work on T-mobile UK networks, it may not work for T-mobile in the US.

It is anything and everything but simple.

EDIT: I am saying this after tools we had built using Twitter SMS API, NMS SMS API, Kannel, 41411 SMS API,as well as working on Mobile IM for Symbian, Call Interceptor for Brew, CallBack for all platforms including an Iphone web app, Backup application, Mobile Device Management Servers for Symbian and Brew, Infinite number of mobile games etc....All products being deployed in every continent save Australia. In every single case clients find it to be a pain. I wish writing and deploying mobile apps were as easy as it is for desktop apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that..."

The 5 real reasons to avoid iPhone 3G:

        * iPhone completely blocks free software. Developers must pay a tax to Apple, who becomes the sole authority over what can and can't be on everyone's phones.
        * iPhone endorses and supports Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology.
        * iPhone exposes your whereabouts and provides ways for others to track you without your knowledge.
        * iPhone won't play patent- and DRM-free formats like Ogg Vorbis and Theora.
        * iPhone is not the only option. There are better alternatives on the horizon that respect your freedom, don't spy on you, play free media formats, and let you use free software -- like the FreeRunner.

[http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/why-free-software-and- app...](http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/why-free-software-and-apples- iphone-dont-mix)

<comment><USER18> Can you quit spamming this comment to every thread that mentions the iPhone?

(See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=303708> for example.)

It is especially annoying because your use of code formatting for text stretches the page and makes the other comments unreadable.

<comment><USER19> Workaround: Install Stylish (<https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/2108>) and add "pre { white-space: pre-wrap; }" for this domain.

<comment><USER18> Amusing. I saw the word "Stylish" and wondered how someone got it working in Firefox:

<http://git.jrock.us/?p=Server-Stylish.git;a=summary>

I had the name first! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow - I hope Android fares better but I'm not holding my breath.

<comment><USER21> Android (as far as I can tell) faces different hurdles, mainly operator and consumer uptake. Oh, and getting the damn thing out the door.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Personally I dont care about apps! There are a flood of them now and it seems reminiscent of all the Facebook apps that flooded that network - not for the better.

I just want an Internet mobile device that provides the full net experience in the palm of my hands; FLASH & VoiP access!

<comment><USER18> Get a Windows Mobile phone then. I routinely use Skype from mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Apple is evil and in severe need of competition in this space. May Android provide it.

</comment><comment><USER24> I too refuse to write for the App Store until an evangelist is hired!

</comment><comment><USER25> Android FTW?

<comment><USER26> Has anyone here played with an OpenMoko ? I have examined one, but have so far avoided putting out the cash to buy one.

I have always disliked the cultist and elitist aspects of Job's company. I see Apple as no better, and possibly worse, than Gate's company.

I think, that if you are trying to make money to live the next 3 years comfortably, writing iPhone apps may be the way to go; but if you want there to be a world where your great-grand kids live comfortably writing apps for an open tri-corder from their apartments in a Stanford torus at one of the Earth- Moon Lagrangian points, then you write apps for the OpenMoko and feed yourself with a day job.

<comment><USER25> Android is like OpenMoko but with a chance that anyone will ever own a compatible handset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is getting a little boring. Obviously Apple are going to reject apps that are a little too close to their existing apps, or might cause offense, or dumb down their product.

They built it, they own the ecosystem, so they get to decide.

Don't like it? Write a webapp instead.

<comment><USER27> That's stupid. If someone makes a better podcatcher than Apple for the iPhone, the iPhone does podcasting better than before which sells more iPhones, which makes Apple richer. I don't see why it's such a threat.

Any time you implement a feature for a product you have to do it in a way that can't possibly please everyone. If you let your developers implement alternative versions, it's conceivable you could get close to pleasing everyone, which makes your product better because it then covers obscure use cases that you can't afford to deal with. It becomes as if third parties are developing the product for you for free.

<comment><USER28> That might be the logical conclusion, but I don't think Apple sees it that way. They've never been very big on this "third-party" stuff...

<comment><USER29> They've changed their tune ever since the iPod (hmm unintentional pun). A huge industry exists to make iPod compatible products. Apple is never going to make an iDJ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> After the first paragraph of reading this, all I could think of was "holy crap, this person has really just written every excuse in the book NOT to write iPhone apps."

There are a million excuses to not diet and exercise, to not do a startup, and to not do anything in life. Your job as an entrepreneur is to work around the obstacles. Give Apple an app that they can't afford to reject. Don't do anything stupid that would cause your app to get rejected.

Yes, better rules can always be written, but your job is to deliver kick ass apps to the public. GET 'R DONE!

<comment><USER31> You have a great go-get-'em attitude, but the issue isn't remotely similar to the question of whether or not to diet and exercise. It's more like, "Should I spend huge amounts of time and effort on diet and exercise in order to enter this bodybuilding competition, only to be disqualified at the last minute because I look too much like the competition judge's nephew?"

<comment><USER32> There is a bit of truth in it. Not necessarily the comparison to a diet, but still.

Becoming indignant & saying 'I'm out' is not useful. There's a potential snag here. It is a man made snag that's _unfair_ , unreasonable or whatever. But that doesn't mean the opportunity isn't there. It's not really more of a reason not to develop then any other reason that isn't unfair: too hard, too much competition, etc. The only difference is emotional.

<comment><USER31> The difference is that it's unpredictable, based on Apple's whims. If they said "Hey, here is a list of apps we won't accept from third party developers because we consider them to be competitive," that would be one thing. But as it stands, we don't even know where the line in the sand is, because the line is based on Apple's best interests, not those of the developers. Dozens of developers have released apps that duplicate (and improve upon) the functionality of the built-in Notes app, but when someone writes an app for podcast streaming (which the iPhone does _not_ already offer, but which I'm sure they're planning on adding eventually), Apple nixes it. It's not just difficult, it's demoralizing.

<comment><USER33> You hit it on the head. Players leave rigged markets once they get burned once or twice, and pretty soon the market freezes up altogether.

Withdrawing from iPhone app development is the rational choice. There are other things developers like the author can work on with similar payoffs, but more predictable risks.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Set Up a Raspberry Pi as a Personal Web Server - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/raspberry-pi/ <comment><USER2> I'm really beginning to dislike all these "Set up the Raspberry Pi as a X" tutorials. I think they contribute to the idea that there's something weird and peculiar about the Pi, and give the impression that if you want a tutorial to do something on the Pi you need a "For the Pi" tutorial.

Couldn't we instead have a "Install Raspbian" (or whatever) tutorial and then try to push the idea that at the end of that you have basically a low-powered Debian machine and can follow any "Do X on Debian" tutorial? It seems that one of the wonderful benefits of Debian as a "universal OS" is that it doesn't matter whether it's on a Pi or a ten-year-old 386 laptop, it's another computer and almost everything is just an apt-get away.

<comment><USER3> But it _does_ matter if you're using a Pi or an old laptop. I mean, those two are just radically different, but even for fairly comparable platforms you often end up having to do adjust procedures, you can't just blindly follow a how-to.

For a newbie, those subtle adjustments are often the difference between wifi working and not working. An experienced user will figure it out, but it can take forever.

The RPi isn't the cheapest or the fastest or the smallest or the most featurific board in its niche. But it's got great value as a standard platform, which means if you've got a problem, chances are someone else had it before and maybe wrote up a solution.

Of course it all breaks down once you start using external hardware, which I found out when I tried to get my USB wifi stick running (unsuccessfully). But at least you can google "raspberry pi <manufacturer> <model>" and get advice specific to you.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure it matters more that you're using a Pi than it would matter which old laptop you're using.

And, when it's as low-level as simply making something work, rather than particularly optimising it (when the fact that it's a Pi or a 2003 T61 or a whatever _do_ matter), I think that treating it as a slow Debian machine and finding a generic howto (or, better, a few generic howtos) is much more appropriate than insisting that you find a "How to install postfix and courier on as raspberry pi".

Obviously for troubleshooting problems the hardware's much more important, too, but so far I've just treated my Pi as just another Debian box and everything's just working.

<comment><USER3> You didn't really add any arguments -- why doesn't it matter, why is it not imortant? I think specific how-tos are useful, regardless of whether it's about making things work or making them fast, because there are often countless things that could conceivably go wrong, and a specific how-to can be as succinct as possible for a given set of circumstances.

If I just want to mess around with a platform, I might not care about that, and I might prefer to read a dozen more abstract how-tos and guides to get in- depth knowledge about a topic. But usually, I don't want to be troubleshooting (or optimising) Wifi USB hardware, and it absolutely does matter whether you're using a RPi or an old laptop, in fact it matters whether you're using a Rev. A or a Rev B RPi. A generic guide to installing node.js on the RPi would have been much less straightforward than the specific one I had available.

And the difference is way more pronounced when you're trying to get intrepid newbies interested in your platform.

<comment><USER4> The newbies are the reason. They need to know what the word is they need to search for, or they may not realize the full power they have for them, which is putatively the point of the RPis.

Personally I am also perturbed in that it contributes to the growing culture of seeing devices as something other than general-purpose computing machines, and I really fear the political implications of a growing misconception about the nature of these _computers_. What bothers me even more than these RPi tutorials are "Pedestrian Computer Application X Run On A Mobile Phone! Wowzers!" stories, some of which even make it onto HN (though not so much lately). Yes, you got your general purpose computer to run a program. This shouldn't be surprising, this should be the _expected_ outcome, the news should be that you find yourself unable to run whatever program you like on these general-purpose computing devices.

RPis are computers. Cell phones are computers. The cheapest, crappiest feature phone currently being sold has specs that blow every computer I owned before 1990 out of the water. This is important for as many people as possible to understand, lest we blunder into walled gardens for no good reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This isn't even a link to an article. It's a link to a category on Lifehacker, which then links through to an article, which then links through to _another_ article at: [http://www.jeremymorgan.com/tutorials/raspberry-pi/how-to- ra...](http://www.jeremymorgan.com/tutorials/raspberry-pi/how-to-raspberry-pi- web-server/)

</comment><comment><USER6> You would be better off with Nginx rather than Apache with such limited hardware.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. Also GWan and Monkey[1] claim that their webserver perform faster while remain lightweight. Anyone interested to put RPi on actual datacenter can do so with EDIS for free[2]

[1]<http://gwan.ch/benchmark> [http://monkey- project.com/benchmarks/raspberry_pi_monkey_ngi...](http://monkey- project.com/benchmarks/raspberry_pi_monkey_nginx)

[2]<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4636374>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I live in the US. Is there any way to get my hands on one (or more) of these in a reasonable amount of time. The site seems to indicate that after you place your order you will have to wait months before you actually get it :(

<comment><USER9> I finally got mine in the mail yesterday. I ordered it 9 months ago from RS Electronics. I've heard from other hackers here that they ordered theirs from other companies and had much faster turnaround time.

By the time I got mine, my interest had significantly waned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What I think would be nice was to setup RPi as a open Wireless network with a captive portal that you could carry with you.

</comment><comment><USER11> Has anyone experimented with using it as a media server ?

<comment><USER12> Xbmc is reported to work tolerably well & you can pay a £1 or so to get mpeg2 hardware decoding in the GPU along with the mpeg4 that you get by default. (I know, I know: software should be free. Sometimes you get to deal the cards you've got & if you want mpeg2 decoding on the pi GPU, you have to pay for the key to unlock it to cover the licensing costs for the codec.)

I'll have to try it out myself.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: A tool for job posting notifications? - <AUTHOR> Hi - Everytime I find a cool company, I check out their jobs page and look if a specific job is available. If its not available, I am looking for something that can notify me via an email at least as soon as the job gets available. Anything that does that? <comment><USER2> I've used Versionista in the past. And I believe you could also use Pingdom for that. Use code ATP for 20% off.</comment>


Y Combinator application deadline ambiguity: is it end of day April 1 or end of day April 2? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Consider figuring this out part of the application process.

</comment><comment><USER3> End of April 2nd: ___"... by midnight PST on Monday, April 2, 2007"_ __

<comment><AUTHOR> It's ambiguous:

<http://tf.nist.gov/general/misc.htm>

<comment><USER3> I think it's safe to assume that YC is not trying to trick applicants by playing with abbreviation semantics.

By midnight means before midnight on April 2nd. If this is really turning your world upside down, make your personal deadline April 1st.

<comment><USER4> It would seem that - technically - this is due the first minute of April 2nd, PST, since April 2nd begins at 12:00AM(midnight) and ends at 11:59PM.

Honestly, I think anyone worrying about this has too much time on their hands.

<comment><USER5> well said. I took danielha's advice and made my personal deadline 11:59 on april 1

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah and which calender? Gregorian I assume? Hard to know for sure!</comment>