What Elon Musk Doesn't Get About Urban Transit - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/12/what-elon-musk-doesnt-get-about-urban-transit/548843/ <comment><USER2> > "Musk doesn't want to share a vehicle with "a bunch of random strangers." > But the presence of random strangers is what a city is"

Yes. This is the essential fundamental pro & con of living in the city: "There's a lot of other people nearby". If the benefits of this situation don't outweigh the downsides, then maybe the city isn't right for you.

This is not to say that maybe by appealing to the rich people who don't like associating with the rabble, he might have a successful business. But for the vast majority of commuters, the downside of public transport is _not_ having to be close to strangers but rather the inconvenience (in america cities) of limited coverage and schedules.

I personally don't like noisy trains, but a simple fix could designate some train cars to be no-talking, so I can more easily get work done.

<comment><USER3> If you're imagining getting work done, I don't think you understand what transit crowding is like. In cities with busy transit systems, getting a seat is out of the question - the variable is how tightly you'll be squished against your fellow standees, and whether it will even be possible to squeeze onto the train.

The problem is absolutely being too close to strangers. Still, going to individual cabins is an over-reaction, what we need is longer and more frequent trains so that people can at least have seats and/or room to breathe.

<comment><USER4> Nobody uses transit anymore, it's too crowded.

<comment><USER3> When your choices are "put up with transit" or "live somewhere else," plenty of people choose transit, grudgingly, for a while. But we can and should do better.

<comment><USER4> I was recently in Vancouver for a month and used transit daily. It's a well oiled machine and not unpleasant to use.

This is in stark contrast to my home city, a more typically north American city: sprawling, car-centric and any transport mode that isn't a motor vehicle is compromised, and transit system exists to punish people for being poor. Even using a car is compromised because of all the other cars, there's a geometry problem there. Nobody is actually saving time, they're just spending lots of money, running people over and generally making a mess. But you do have a nice, protective shell to segregate you from strangers.

My primary experience living in different cities is 'put up with cars or live somewhere else', and I don't even know where this mythical land unsullied by the tyranny of the automobile might be, but I fantasize about it regularly.

<comment><USER5> The Netherlands, Danmark and, to a lesser extent, Sweden are seriously rethinking the automobile tyranny. I live in Sweden, and have no real need to own a car, since public transportation and a bicycle solve pretty much all my transportation needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not trying to troll, but one just needs to take a minute to get through a few pages on [https://www.bartcrimes.com/](https://www.bartcrimes.com/) to see why public transportation in America, at least in the bay area, is not pleasant. I have first hand experience of taking Bart daily for a year or so, and even been through being the victim of an assault while walking out of a Bart station.

Perhaps public transportation works somewhere else, in other countries. There's something about America that makes it not work. Someone pointed out Japan to which Elon rebutted that it's too crowded. Trust me, trains in Japan are more pleasant than here in the SF Bay area even considering how they cram people in in Japan. I grew up in Hong Kong where cramming is also the norm. It is not nearly as unpleasant as Bart.

For someone who lives in California, I see why Elon Musk considers existing public transportation a failure right now.

<comment><USER7> What's so terrible about Bay Area transit? I mean this genuinely since I've never been to San Francisco so I've never used it, and I'm wondering why it makes you think all American public transit is bad. I've used public transit in two North American cities, Chicago and Montreal, and they seemed to work fairly well, enough that I could kind of enjoy them if I wasn't in a rush (which typically I wasn't since these were vacations). Maybe they weren't as pretty as what I saw in Tokyo or Beijing, but they functioned fine and didn't seem terrible in the least.

<comment><USER6> I could be wrong about generalizing it to America in general, since I don't have much experience outside of SF Bay and a little bit in NY (where I also didn't have a pleasant experience, even as a tourist).

Trains in Hong Kong and Tokyo are at the very least clean, on time, for the most part crime-less, and no matter what time you arrive, even if you miss a train, there will be another one to your destination within 5 minutes (likely 2 minutes).

Bart is rarely on time, extremely unclean (encountering human feces is almost a regular basis), crime-ridden (as shown in that link above), and if you live anywhere outside of SF, missing a train usually means you have to wait 15-20 minutes for the next one (even during peak hours).

I consciously choose to drive in to SF downtown instead, even considering the premium I have to pay for parking (easily $20 a day), and enduring through bay bridge traffic. I know I'm also doing harm by carbon emission and adding to traffic on the freeways and bridge, but it poses a personal risk (both physical danger and health) to take Bart for myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Elon Musk's livelihood depends on people wanting to live in separated housing (so they can each have powerwalls and solar-paneled roofs) and wanting to move through their regions in separated vehicles. It doesn't take Upton Sinclair to understand why he would use every propaganda outlet he can find to push that agenda.

<comment><USER9> > Elon Musk's livelihood depends on people wanting to live in separated > housing (so they can each have powerwalls and solar-paneled roofs) and > wanting to move through their regions in separated vehicles. It doesn't take > Upton Sinclair to understand why he would use every propaganda outlet he can > find to push that agenda.

Somehow I don't get the feeling he's this selfish. If that's an agenda he's pushing (which I don't know one way or another), I would expect it's because he genuinely thinks it's better for society, not because he wants to make himself feel good or rake in more profit. (To re-emphasize: it's not clear to me he _is_ pushing this agenda.)

<comment><USER10> I don't think he can credibly argue it's better for society, he's probably just a realist. The hunger for detached houses and independent cars has had a long opportunity to subside, but hasn't. So might as well make greener independent cars and detached houses.

Your carbon footprint commuting on high-occupancy diesel trains while living in a 50 year old highrise is usually going to be significantly lower than commuting in a Tesla and living in green detached house.

<comment><USER11> > Your carbon footprint commuting on high-occupancy diesel trains while living > in a 50 year old highrise is usually going to be significantly lower than > commuting in a Tesla and living in green detached house.

I think it could be a tossup, depending on how green the house really is. But making a truly low carbon footprint detached suburban house is still prohibitively expensive in some climates, due to space and water heating needs.

If you take the same green tech and apply it in a multidwelling context, then it becomes more economically feasible.

You see something similar today with Internet services like iPass that provide gigabit Ethernet service only in buildings with more than a certain number of units.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not impressed with either side in this argument.

Jarrett Walker is confusing capacity with crowding. It's ridiculous that he can't admit having someone's underarm shoved into your face during peak hours does in fact suck.

Meanwhile Musk is an idiot if he actually thinks single occupancy self driving cars will reduce traffic (I don't think he does). If sitting in traffic becomes more pleasant because you'll be watching tv, more people will choose to sit in traffic. Adding tunnels won't help if you're still wasting a car- sized space on a tiny human.

Just running more buses and actually policing harassment on them would make transit both more convenient and pleasant without giving up the capacity that's essential to move an entire city worth of people around. It doesn't have to be rocket science.

<comment><USER13> Agree. I suspect Musk doesn't get how efficient good public transport can be (NYC when the system is working well), and the author doesn't get how substandard most public transit systems _are_.

I have strong doubts that single- or low-occupancy vehicles could outcompete trains or buses on efficiency. I also think public transit could be way better than it is. I'm not sure I buy Musk's vision (which does seem out-of-touch), and I definitely don't buy the author's position that "nothing is wrong".

<comment><USER14> It's probably one of those cases where less efficient node in the system makes entire system more efficient overall. Perhaps we need to reduce car use by 20% to make transport 300% more comfortable, practical, attractive.

I remember seeing pics of a concept bus Tesla was rumoured to manufacture, where every seat has it's own doors and personal area. So maybe it's capacity is half normal bus, but 20x a car. Even if it works like Uber Pool, overall it's a net win.

Finally, I don't think he's trying to disrupt public transport entirely, rather to introduce better options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like people too but not random train passengers. They smell bad, are unattractive and grouchy. I don't want to strike up conversations with randos. They make the train dirty.

I don't think this makes me "elitist." The reason rich people don't take public transit is because no one likes it, but the rich are more able to afford alternatives. A trend of history is extending luxuries of the few to the many.

This looks to me like CityLab is emotionally attached to the current transit system, with all its flaws, and is a bit annoyed that someone is working on a better alternative.

<comment><USER16> It sounds like you may be overgeneralizing your experiences in a particular city. At least here in London, the people you see on trains are a broad crossection of the general public, and are no smellier or less attractive (not sure why this matters?) than anyone you're likely to run into on the street.

So, no, it is not the case that "no-one" likes public transport. I like it fine, and experience none of the issues with it that you seem to. I would generally prefer to get the tube as compared to e.g. an Uber, even if there were no price difference.

<comment><USER17> I'm sure there are, on average, demographic differences between who takes the subway, who takes a taxi/Uber, and who has a reserved black car. That said, I don't disagree with you in general. In cities with good public transit systems where transit is a genuinely easier way to get around much of the time, many people take the subway even if they could afford something else. I know that's true for me in Boston, New York, and London to name 3 cities. I do take BART in SF but pretty much only to get in from the airport.

<comment><USER16> If some options are more expensive than others then there are bound to be demographic differences, _even if the more expensive options aren 't better_. But so what? What's so terrible about traveling with people outside your demographic?

<comment><USER17> Absolutely nothing. Not sure what I said to imply that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can't help but get the sense that this is just a closed-minded way to think about things. Yes, if you've been studying transportation for decades you have probably got drilled into your head that "this is how public transit is supposed to work".

I'm sure there were plenty of people who made similar arguments about taxis when Uber started up. Or about horses when cars were invented. Or about planes, electricity, etc. Any fairly revolutionary technology started with most people saying "you're insane". I mean you don't even have to look far -- many of Musk's other accomplishments were scorned, too. Reusable rockets? Electric cars people actually _want_? That's ridiculous! Until it isn't...

</comment><comment> mark-r To find out why transit isn't transporting 100% of the commuters, you can't look to the people who are using it - you need to ask the people who aren't. I think Musk's comments get to some important reasons why transit utilization isn't higher. If you simply sweep it under the rug and claim that transit's goal isn't to be appropriate for 100% of the people, you're throwing away an opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER19> Cities just don't work if everyone drives their own personal car. And keeps it parked 90% of the time. Perhaps when autonomous cars arrive we'll be driven around more but right now public transport is faster, more convenient, cheaper. [top gear race across London] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_POxZSkaU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_POxZSkaU)

"Transit requires sharing space with strangers, which is icky." Is this an American thing?? What about a sport stadium, music event, lots of strangers to share space with?

<comment><USER20> It's not only the car being parked, but the traffic during peak travel times that make cars bad. Roads filled with Autonomous cars might be 10x more efficient then roads filled with cars with drivers, but autonomous buses are 100x more efficient and trains can be 1000x more efficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the author is misrepresenting Musk's views and statements. Musk isn't condemning public transit, he knows it plays a valuable role in large cities. Musk is simply saying that there are ways to make it better. Also the statement below is sort of troubling:

> This means that if you decide not to ride transit because it's too crowded, > somebody else will be happy to take your place there, delivering the same > level of efficiency.

That statement is fallacious. Overcrowded public transits can be a serious danger in the case of an accident and they should not be overlooked simply because someone else is willing to take your place. For example, on my morning commute in san diego the doors on the light rails can barely close due to being overcrowded and people jamming in to not miss the light rail. Sure its efficient in that a lot of people are riding, but if an accident happens we have no room to maneuver.

<comment><USER22> And the US Rail system has a terrible safety record there have been no fatal accidents (excluding person on the line) on the UK rail system in the last decade.

The USA has mad many and the number of passengers caried is orders of magnitude less

<comment><USER23> > The USA has mad many and the number of passengers caried is orders of > magnitude less

The only way I can see to arrive at that statement is to count all train accidents but only Amtrak ridership (total US rail ridership is about 570MM rides, but Amtrak is only about 30MM of that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Author is very focused on "vs the elites" topic. However, the strangers comment is about safety. Even the quote used from Musk states that one of those strangers could be a serial killer.

That's not an elite-only concern. Staying alive and safe is a pretty basic need that has little to do with socio-economic status.

The question is whether the fear is more widespread in those more fortunate is debateable, but mass transit does have that weakness. From pickpockets to mass robberies (recent BART events for example) to acts of terrorism, when you have a concentration of people, they are vulnerable to being targeted.

There are also questions of hygiene - I once had to sit next to a person covered head to toe, including face, in some sort of orangish dust, minus the outline of the goggles he must have been wearing, probably from some sort of construction. I wasn't sure I wanted risk breathing that in, but it's a public space. Still, health is not an exclusively elite concern. We have asbestos laws for a reason, for example.

I would love to use mass transit that went close to where I want to start/stop (5-10 min walk), went in reasonable intervals (5-15 mins), was safe, reliable, clean-ish and cheaper than a car (with parking, maintenance, ins and all other expenses included).

The only really good point the article makes that is often missed is the distinction of crowded vs overcrowded. Not everyone should get a seat, but those who need it, should.

</comment><comment><USER25> >> And there's like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great

>> Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people

These two points of what Musk says are the core point, I believe. With a tight enough, and especially, well timed, mesh of rail, light-rail (tram) and buses you can solve the "doesn't take me where I want" problem, and for example in Munich it is solved well.

What is not solved is the "strangers" issue: cities all over the world have a yuge homeless persons "problem" \- and this is what I dislike about public transport. Cities must tackle the (growing!) problem of homelessness first, if they want to increase acceptance of public transport. Give drunks, junkies and hobos safe places to stay, both during night and day, and lots of problems associated with public transport will go away. Often enough, public transport and its stations are the only thing that's both open 24/7 and warm...

</comment><comment><USER11> I often hear from well-off suburban Americans who have traveled in Europe how much they enjoy using the well-maintained transit systems in those countries, but not here in the US. Part of this no doubt is due to the fact that those European systems are more comprehensive and convenient.

But there is also the reality that those transit systems don't have to serve as temporary shelter for the homeless, since those countries deal with homelessness directly.

Americans' views on mass transit are tainted by the unfortunate (and incorrect) conflation of mass transit with our unaddressed social ills.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure this is as pervasive as you suggest. I personally found the tube pretty terrible around heathrow and friends who studied abroad in various parts of europe complained about trains being late (Eurorail pass).

The fact is nothing will beat the appeal of point to point travel for the individual. In my experience it seems Europeans are, on average, more willing than Americans to sacrifice personal comforts for efficiency. I saw this in everything from elevator size to hotel room configuration, and even road layout.

<comment><USER11> > I personally found the tube pretty terrible around heathrow and friends who > studied abroad in various parts of europe complained about trains being late > (Eurorail pass).

Really, both of our arguments on this point are anecdotal, but there is a pretty solid body of evidence that European mass transit systems are far more efficient at moving large numbers of people efficiently between important destinations.

> In my experience it seems Europeans are, on average, more willing than > Americans to sacrifice personal comforts for efficiency. I saw this in > everything from elevator size to hotel room configuration, and even road > layout.

This isn't because of something essential about Europeans. It's a consequence of their urban infrastructure developing under space constraints, and doing so prior to the mass adoption of the automobile. Today, many American cities are approaching the levels of density of European cities without transit systems built out over time to handle the congestion that the density brings, largely because of the single-occupancy commute vehicle.

<comment><USER27> I had similar thoughts in Tokyo - Japan has even higher population density than any large European country. Tokyo is amazingly quiet and clean (and therefore relaxing, if you don't have to work 12 hours a day...) for such a dense city. The cleanliness I had heard about before, but the lack of avoidable noise struck me only when I was there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Maybe it's not a fair reading, but all I can see in commentary like Musk's is "I want to live in a city, except I don't, you know, actually want to _live in a city_. I want the part of living in a city that I find convenient, but not the rest of it. And that should totally be a thing that it's possible to do. I don't care if it works for anyone else. I care if it works for _me_."

Which, I mean, if that's your perspective on the matter, then sure, you do you. Reality, and other people, may choose to differ.

</comment><comment><USER29> He is a forward thinking individual. Those types of people are always open to criticism for ideas that can change and revolutionize the norm. You don't need to look any farther than Tesla and SpaceX. As a resident of Los Angeles I support his innovation and ideas behind alleviating traffic congestion. His work with The Boring Company and Hyperloop are simple examples of that.

[https://latechnews.org/elon-musk-bores-152-meters-closer- dis...](https://latechnews.org/elon-musk-bores-152-meters-closer-disruption/) [https://latechnews.org/hyperloop-one- reaches-192-mph/](https://latechnews.org/hyperloop-one-reaches-192-mph/) [https://latechnews.org/hyperloop-one-high-speed-project- test...](https://latechnews.org/hyperloop-one-high-speed-project-test/)

</comment><comment><USER30> > Effective transit doesn't go to your door

I don't know if this is true. If someone finds an efficient way to do this there is nothing wrong with it. Current transit is limited by resources and technology given sufficient increases in either going to you door is not a problem.

</comment><comment><USER31> It is one thing to claim transit is succeeding by cramming people into cars and another to wonder if all those people would choose private cars if the costs and time were equivalent.

It seems most city planners have assumed transit is the only answer and invested accordingly. Musk is appealing to individual preference for space and privacy and investing accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER32> Another false dichotomy. We need both public transport and cars. I like public transport because it brings total strangers together - a much-needed thing in this day and age.

By the way Musk, psychos drive cars too: witness the new terrorist tool, the car, mounting the sidewalk and mowing people down.

And think of the trust you place in total strangers every time you drive down the highway.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think people don't want all the cars for one person on the road. For moving one person to and from the city current cars are too big, weight too much, ...

My preferred robo-taxi that may pick me up every morning is the C-1 from Lit Motors.

[http://litmotors.com/c1/](http://litmotors.com/c1/)

</comment><comment><USER34> this whole situation reminds me of all the naysayers Musk proved wrong twice already. Electric cars will never happen. A private space company, Musk is insane. Better public transportation, who does he think he is... Who else can't wait to have Musk prove them wrong? ... I can't wait

<comment><USER35> 1) No one ever said "electric cars will never happen". There were electric and hybrid vehicles before Tesla even existed.

2) SpaceX is no more a "private space company" than the United Space Alliance/United Launch Alliance that builds rockets for NASA and others. Or both are. Both SpaceX and USA/ULA operate under similar models: clients both government and private pay them to build rockets.

I do not understand why people think NASA builds rockets. They don't.

Rob

<comment><USER36> In 2017, ULA launched 8 government payloads and 0 commercial.

In 2017, SpaceX launched 6 government payloads and 11 (or 12) commercial payloads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The other thing is, almost any problem you can pick out with transit is basically _not enough_ transit, not too much transit. Most of the money gets funneled away elsewhere -- to cars and freight. Spend some real money on it and see what happens.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm a Tesla fan but in Elon's worldview would public transit be ok if it was barely used and all passengers were college educated and polite?

</comment><comment><USER39> It seems to me that Musk's goal isn't transport on Earth. It's transit on the moon or Mars. View his suggestions in that context and they make sense.

<comment><USER40> I for one fully support Musk's efforts to hurl himself into space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I for one fully support Musk's efforts to hurl himself into space.

</comment><comment><USER41> I can see why Citylab would favor a system like BART...making everyone equally miserable (aka "levelling") is a primary motivation of the left

Citylabs fantasy community is an endless stream of apartment buildings virtually fenced in by taxation (so you can't even dream of escape) and regulation (so you could only ever get as far as public transportation would take you). all ruled by people who post on HN. no thanks!

</comment><comment><USER42> Oh look more anti-car propaganda from citylab posted to HN, must be a day with y in it.

<comment> chroem- Honestly it's beginning to become a parody of itself how people in the bay area can't imagine life outside of a hypercrowded cityscape that has temperate weather year round.

<comment><USER43> Most of the Bay Area is not even close to being hypercrowded. In fact, that's exactly the problem with the Bay: no town wants to get denser and build enough housing to meet the demand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> _" So Musk can imply that there's something wrong with transit because it's too crowded—an example of the Yogi Berra fallacy—but cities and transit agencies shouldn't care. If they're crowded, they're succeeding."_

That seems like an enormous leap in logic. Saying agencies shouldn't care about overcrowding seems flippant. They most definitely should care about rider experience. Soviet bread lines were massively long, but that didn't mean they were hugely successful.

I love the usefulness of the subway when it actually runs on time. I hate the experience most of the time. Next time I hear "Showtime!" I want to punch somebody.

</comment><comment><USER45> The article is holding up an ideal premise that is never going to happen (subways everywhere), as a counter to a viable plan that will be a real improvement over a mediocre existing system (the one we have now).

If the US was ever going to do mass traditional subways, it would have been in the prior 50 years when it could have maybe afforded to. It's _never_ going to happen now, not under any scenario imaginable. Combined with the disastrous cost, time it takes, zoning issues etc. to build above ground in most US locations (eg the California debacle). That's what Musk realized and it's why he is doing a partial patch on the mess with the boring company approach.

There is no plausible alternative. Musk's approach can give us a significant improvement over what we have. Wishing for fantasy subway lines everywhere, that would cost trillions of dollars the US is never going to have to spend on such things ( _particularly_ in the next 20-30 years, as entitlement obligations alone are already set to bankrupt the US Government), is pointless.

<comment><USER46> Why do you think the boring company plan is so much more viable than improving public transit?

Note that I am not using your strawman here (subways everywhere) as that's not the point--the point is better public transit, which includes subways, busses, etc. That seems like a much richer target than building an entirely unproven tech.</comment></comment>


Earthquake Shakes Swath of Midwest from Nebraska to Texas - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/earthquake-shakes-swath-of-midwest-from-missouri-to-oklahoma-1472906357 <comment><USER2> I live in Iowa. I had just gotten up and was blearily checking HN and email - and I was swaying in my chair. I thought "Boy am I groggy; I can hardly sit upright" and some passing thoughts of incipient Parkinsons flitted through my head.

Then I read this an hour later. I guess it was an earthquake I was experiencing! A mixed blessing to be sure, but nice to know I'm not as decrepit as I thought.

</comment><comment><USER3> Same article on AP without the signin crap: [http://bigstory.ap.org/article/34f0e22aa7f94ca187d02886167f1...](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/34f0e22aa7f94ca187d02886167f1903/earthquake- shakes-swath-midwest-missouri-oklahoma)

<comment><USER4> Thank you. My back-button reflex to those ads and teaser text pages has never allowed me to subscribe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This morning at 7:05 am CST DFW. Felt the tremor and the house let out a small creak. My wife thought someone was shaking the bed but noticed no one was there. She starts to think it was some kind of supernatural event...LOL. I told her it was the Earthquake Ghost....

It's hard to imagine what people must of thought of such an event 100's of years ago before modern day science.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm on a high floor of a highrise in Uptown, Dallas. The building was shaking and swaying hard enough to wake me from sleep.

</comment><comment><USER7> All of my friends from Arkansas said they'd never move to California, like I did, because of earthquakes. Now they have tornados AND earthquakes. Looks like I made a good choice!

</comment><comment><USER8> It will be interesting to hear to what extent fracking is to blame for this.

<comment><USER9> There are a bunch of rigs just south of the epicenter operating at a well depth of around 5-10 km deep which is how deep this quake/aftershocks were

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We're just about 20 miles north east of Dallas, but didn't notice it at all. Interesting that others have. I'll be curious to hear more reports about it and talk to some neighbors.</comment>


I loved C. But it always fell short for me. Objective-C fixed that. - <AUTHOR> http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/2256/objective-c-is-the-language <comment><USER2> Meh. I do not program in Objective-C but I think I can provide more reasons for liking the language than the linked article contains :)

Reason 1: When you need what C provides, it is right there for you (being a superset of C)

Reason 2: When you need what C does not provide (basic reflection, generics, polymorphism, whatever) it is in the "bracket" part of Objective-C.

Reason 3: The two above do work quite well together - the impedance mismatch is minimal, compared to e.g. Python with extensions written in C.

<comment><USER3> Or you could pick a well thought out OO language like Java or C#, maybe even Python. Unfortunately you're trapped using the abomination for iPhone development unless you pick Monotouch.

<comment><USER4> "well thought out OO language like Java"

Not even Java's fans would defend it as a "well thought out OO" language.

Since this is _Hacker_ News, it maybe appropriate to point out that nothing prevents you from building whatever specific flavour of OO you want on top of the Objective C runtime, if you want it badly enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would anyone care to comment on the state of Obj-C outside the Mac/iOS platforms? The impression I get from previous posts on this is that the utility of Obj-C is closely tied to the functionality provided by the (proprietary) Cocoa platform.

Since there are so many developers from outside the Apple ecosystem learning Obj-C in order to develop for iOS, is there any signs of a movement in the other direction? Are developers who don't think of themselves as purely Mac/iOS developers trying to take Obj-C back with them to other platforms?

Posts about how great or poor Obj-C is as a language are kind of irrelevant really as long as it's (effectively) the mandatory language for development on Apple platforms, and isn't much used beyond that. In that situation there are no choices to be made based on opinions about the language's merits or flaws, so they are largely moot.

<comment><USER6> I get the impression most developers use Objective-C because they _have_ to, rather than because they want to. Take a look at the Tiobe graph for Objective-C:

[http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Objective-C.ht...](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Objective-C.html)

I have a feeling it would see a distinct dropoff in usage if Apple were to change their focus to, say, Java or C++.

<comment><USER7> It's my favorite C variant (including C itself).

<comment><USER8> I agree. It is exactly what the name implies: a somewhat minimal object orientation layer on top of C.

I wouldn't say the same thing about Cocoa though. Cocoa is good, but not _great_.

<comment><USER7> And I'm not without my criticisms of ObjC. I can't stand the lack of namespaces, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Objective-C is a nice UI glue language but I wouldn't want to write anything of any algorithmic complexity in it. The data structures are just way too awkward and manual boxing/unboxing of primitives puts it way over the top.

I write my iOS app UIs in Obj-C but the brains are in a C++ core. The new C++11 support in LLVM 3.0 has tipped the balance that much further.

<comment><USER10> If you think Obj-C is nice, try Qt's QML - it's a declarative language with JSON-like syntax that also allows you to embed JS and interact with C++.

Probably one of the easiest and more powerful ways to create an UI, but not as mature as other consacrated frameworks and not available on iOS anyway.

By the way, how do you handle unicode in the C++ core?

<comment><USER9> I'm kind of stuck with Obj-C on iOS but I can totally believe you could build an abstraction layer like the one you describe over vanilla C++ that would give you most of the benefits of Obj-C. Clang's Obj-C++ support makes it pretty painless to mix Obj-C and C++ as long as you clearly delineate responsibilities.

So far I haven't had to do any serious string handling in my C++ engines (mostly audio apps). The new unicode stuff in C++11 ought to make this manageable but I haven't actually tried it yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is anyone using Objective-C as a systems language? That is, without Cocoa and other Apple libraries and APIs? Otherwise, why is it worth comparing it to C? Is anyone suggesting that Linus could write the Linux kernel or git in Objective-C? Objective-C is more fairly comparable to Java, C#, Qt or GTK rather than plain C.

Most people who say they like Objective-C actually mean they like programming for Macs and iPhones.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I am. And it is fine, either using ObjFW, GNUstep (which is essentially Cocoa) or just writing it raw with my own framework. It is a nice language, and the C apis to the runtimes are pretty nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Objective-C was Apple's response to object-oriented programming

Apple's response? At its inception it had nothing to do with Apple and for a long time was the language of NeXT. It's only since OSX that Apple has adopted Objective-C.

<comment><USER13> NeXT bought Apple for minus US$400 million and renamed itself Apple ;-)

Apple's CEO came from NeXT, as did their lead software architect. OSX is NeXT (ever wonder why so many things extend NSObject?).

<comment><USER14> FYI, NeXTs' CEO was Apple's CEO first. The parents point is correct.

<comment><USER15> Actually...no. Jobs was never CEO until after the NeXT merger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Am I the only one who thinks Objective-C is complete crap compared to Scala, Haskell and the likes? Hell, even C++ is way faster to code in and provides a better experience. Obj C is just immensely verbose. I'd love to be able to use Qt + C++ to program iOS instead..

<comment><USER17> You 're not the only one. I too think speed of development and maintenance is key. It's just that lots of people live in (and on) the Apple bubble. I think Obj-c was one of Jobs' obsessions or else i can't explain why anyone would want to force people to write code like that in 2011. I have a feeling that Apple may open up their APIs now that he;s gone.

<comment><USER18> Does submitting to the App Store require you to provide source? If so, it seems like a compelling reason to enforce a single language to avoid the explosion in skills required for the app reviewers.

Otherwise, I have no idea.

<comment><USER19> You aren't forced to use Objective-C, at least not any more than you're forced to use Java on Android. It's just the native language of the system frameworks, which you _are_ required to use. You can literally just have a glue layer to talk to the Objective-C underpinnings and write your whole app in another language (as long as that language can compile for iPhone, obviously). The reason people don't do this is because for most people it turns out to be less productive, not more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> People who like C should definitely take a look at Go. I think it can be a good alternative for higher-level projects.

<comment><USER21> I was personally a little off-put by Go. Some things just _felt_ a little odd to me, after an admittedly small amount of time with the language (implemented a trivial app with it to play around).

That said, I did quite like some aspects of it: goroutines, channels, functions can be added to structs.

I am hoping that rust makes it out of the lab at some point.

<comment><USER22> My biggest annoyance with Go is that Google, a search company, gave their language a completely un-Google-able name. I'm pretty sure the term "Go" invokes special handling.

<comment><USER23> If that really bothers you, you can either search for 'golang' or you can use this custom search engine: <http://go-lang.cat-v.org/go-search>

But really if that is your biggest issue with the language, I think they are doing a pretty damned good job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe I'm weird, but I actually really like Objective-C. My mind likes how the language works. I just wish there was more of a community around it so that it could more easily be used for things other than iOS/Mac development.

</comment><comment><USER13> Having learned object orientation with Smalltalk/V, I never quite liked C++ (to the point of procrastinating for 8 years before really touching it). It felt just wrong.

Objective-C was always attractive (I like C), but its close association with NeXT and Apple (and corresponding little support from other platforms) always puts me off.

</comment><comment><USER25> I like C. I really like Smalltalk. But Objective-C really doesn't do OO well enough for me to enjoy dealing with it.

<comment><USER26> Doesn't do OO well enough? That's not a complaint I've heard before. What makes you say that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> When I first started coding in Objective-C, I hated it because it just felt "wrong". The more I learned the language, the more I enjoyed programming in it. I still think some things are a bit awkward, but like anything new, it just takes time to learn to love it.

</comment><comment><USER28> These are just tools. Each has its place.

Example: I wrote a GA-based solver in Objective-C. It worked but it was painfully slow. I re-coded in nice-clean C. The plain C version was incredibly fast and efficient in every way. Best of all, it is highly portable too.

</comment><comment><USER8> The only thing I really don't like about Objective C is that message passing is considerably slower than function calling. You just can not manipulate an image using the `setPixelX:Y:` method in anything close to real time. Using functions in C, this is no problem.

So, there you go: Write your algorithms in C, write your program logic in Objective C. Oh, and I love how the OpenGL C API interacts so nicely with Objective C and Cocoa!

That said, I have a fair bit of experience with PyQt. I would ditch Objective C for something like MacRuby any day, but then I would (sorta) lose the ability to drop down to C if need be. (Still, does anyone have any solid experience in MacRuby? I would love to hear some!)

<comment><USER29> I think the nature of OpenGL's API (internal state, very simple C-style functions - contrast with DX) means it is very portable. Java also interacts nicely with it, as does C++, and I've not worked with WebGL but the very fact it exists says something about it.

OpenGL is great. Really well designed :)

<comment><USER30> OpenGL is a good API, but it's design is fairly terrible, and its implementations range from quirky to terrible (cosnider Intel's support for anything above 1.4).

The notion of internal state is fine and well for only the most trivial of programs--once you start doing something requiring multithreading nothing but sadness awaits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wanted to play with Objective-C for some numeric computing, but until Intel's c++ compiler supports it there really was no point in even getting started with it for me (sorry gcc)

</comment><comment><USER32> Objective-C is a natural language to learn for developers coming from Java too.

And you don't have to give up the power of C (memory pointers etc...) either.

<comment><USER25> Objective-C is the choice if you are developing for Apple products. But coming from Java, C# and Mono were a much easier switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've only coded a (really) simple app in Obj-c, but disliked the syntax.

<comment><USER34> Now, I've coded a lot of stuff in Objective C for iOS, and it works just fine, and I actually think it's a pretty good language. I'm glad that Apple has helped bring it more into the spotlight.

But ramitos is right; it really is a Frankensteinian bolt-on addition of Smalltalk, syntax-wise. The message passing code simply does not look like C.

That said, I'd encourage everyone to give it a chance. I, too, had a negative reaction to it when I first encountered it ("It's so ugly!") but you get used to it, and then it's fine.

<comment><USER35> > The message passing code simply does not look like C.

Arguably that's a very _good_ thing, because passing a message has very different semantics from calling a function. Making the syntaxes of these operations identical would encourage a lot of confusion between two very different operations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So, where in this article did the author actually state _why_ Objective-C fixed C for them? Where was a listing of C's failings or Objective-C's strengths for their projects?

This is not really a good submission--it's got the rhetorical content of a tweet.</comment>


The Sometimes Catastrophic, Mostly Embarrassing Consequences of Screen Sharing - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/style/screen-share-disasters.html <comment><USER2> One thing that makes this difficult is there's no one button you can press to give yourself what looks like a fresh-installed browser window or OS.</comment>


Gnome developer creates new animated image format - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mecheye.net/2014/10/xng-gifs-but-better-and-also-magical/ <comment><USER3> _SVG with base64 embedded JPEGs for each frame._

This is not a "new animated image format", it's just using the capabilities of something that existed before.

In other words, it's basically MJPEG in an inefficient text-based container. Many browsers can already play back MJPEG streams (common with IP cameras), so I do not see the point of this other than as an "it can be done" exercise.

Also worth noting that animated SVG (vector format) is usually bigger than the equivalent SWF file - despite all the hate Flash gets (after the Adobe acquisition was when it seemed to get worse), I think it's a great compact vector animation format. You can also put MJPEG inside a SWF, so they're on equal footing with respect to that.

<comment><USER4> And it works in fewer places than h264 video tags.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> webm is a better format for animated images.

So is webp.

The author talks about lacking support for apng, but ironically apng has better support than his hack and is a superior format in every respects.

Any animation form that a) just uses a still image form (jpg) and b) base64 encodes the data is destined to be terrible. SVG support is also not significantly better than apng... in fact, taking arbitrary photo viewing applications I'd bet that animated svg would fall far below apng in support.

Calling this a new format is also very charitable since je did no work on improving the actual image compression algorithms. Google's WEBP/WEBM are examples of a new format that truly is pushing the boundaries. This, not so much.

<comment><USER6> Agreed - use WebM.

You're seeing support for it already in the "imageboards" like 4chan. It's _much_ better compressed than any dirty hack like this.

I always appreciate seeing the odd dirty hack, though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is completely terrible.

This completely disregards anything motion estimation. Every single frame is encoded from scratch and that means a huge amount of space is wasted. And because of how JPEG works if even a single pixel is different in a macroblock you're throwing away most of the compressibility. Even GIF, __GIF __has the option of overlaying the previous GIF, which is how it 's possible to get more than 256 colours in a GIF, among other net little tricks. GIF with even a small measure of dithering makes more sense than this, in all honesty. "GIFs, but better"? That's only because you're a) not using GIFs right and b) GIFs are terrible, but there's worse for the majority of use cases. This is one example.

It also means that the browser has to load every single frame of this. If you've got a minute long video with 15 frames per second, that's 900 JPEG images in base64 hopping around in memory. Which do you think a tablet would be better at? Playing a minute of H.264, hardware accelerated and all, or shuffling through 900 JPEG images, 15 a second for at least a minute? How about 60 fps and 15 seconds? MPEG has been invented for a reason. Motion estimation is a good thing and has been built into everything since the 90s. Including virtually all mobile browsers, through whatever codec. Sorry, but this at best solves only a UI problem. Something like gifv is a much, much better solution. Also, unless you have the JPEG quantiser set to a wasteful 100, you're going to see the maroblock boundaries sitting around there and cutting lines into the picture, each frame differently depending on the quantiser level. I wouldn't even call it a neat little hack - just check out the memory usage. And don't even get me started on the name - XNG.

Using canvas with JavaScript to render something akin to simple MPEG - <USER2> would be cool, amazing, brilliant. Finding a way to optimise dithering patterns within a GIF to minimise frame sizes would be absolutely fascinating. This is terrible.

This is not a format problem. Hell, storing a movie in three different actual formats next to each other to get browser support for everything would waste less space than a single file of this. This is a UI problem at worst.

If you want to use SVG for animations, go nuts. By all means. But never use it for anything like what I'm seeing here - actual videos instead of animations.

The only use I can see for XNG that leaves it at least an order of magnitude as good as something else is if each frame shares almost nothing in common with the previous frame and is a full actual picture. But even then MPEG-1 with every frame a keyframe would do about just as well. gfycat and gifv are perfectly fine and superior on almost every level (apart from maybe the UI on esoteric devices x y or z that also somehow have a fast processor and a lot of RAM) than this.

tl;dr: 60% CPU usage and a memory leak pushing my Chrome past a GB and that's just the start of it.

<comment><USER8> "Terrible" is taking it a bit far. This is basically a prototype and certainly has potential.

> This completely disregards anything motion estimation

A good xng encoder could work around this by doing the motion estimation and encoding transparent regions where things don't change on subsequent frames which could reduce file size dramatically.

There's no question that for longer video clips, a native format like mpeg4 will outperform, especially on mobile. This XNG thing does play smoothly on my iPhone 5s with iOS 8 however.

> Using canvas with JavaScript to render something akin to simple MPEG

This has been done and jsmpeg is one such implementation - [https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg](https://github.com/phoboslab/jsmpeg)

Live demo here: [http://stream.imdeity.com](http://stream.imdeity.com) [ The macro blocks/visual glitches in that demo are a result of the live capture/encoding via ffmpeg and not a jsmpeg problem ]

The downside with the jsmpeg approach is that it requires accompanying Javascript to work and won't animate as a standalone file unlike this XNG method.

> 60% CPU usage and a memory leak pushing my Chrome past a GB and that's just > the start of it.

Seeing high memory use on my Chrome as well but only 8% CPU usage with the multiple XNGs on that page playing at the same time (which is about the same as a single Flash-based Youtube video playing in another tab).

Again, definitely not production ready but has high potential when paired with a good encoder.

<comment><USER7> This is just MJPEG in disguise and then worse again. And MJPEG is already near the bottom of the list of things I would ever send over the web. Better or 'good' XNG encoder is an oxymoron. Also, it's JPEG so there's no transparency so you'd be using clipping masks in SVG. And that wouldn't give you motion estimation. For that you might want to subdivide the JPEG and...

But then you're already trying to put lipstick on a horse that's been beaten to death.

It doesn't have potential. Unless you have a slideshow of a low integer number of photographs and no access to JavaScript or a scroll wheel.

Good encoder? It's just JPEG, any good encoding is already figured out and this is the wrong tool for the job. gifv or even just silent webm for the win.

Also, nice that video played smoothly on your few month old device. Does it still have a battery left now?

It's neat to see this as a can be done exercise. But now it's time to set fire to it. As it probably has done to quite a few devices already.

<comment><USER8> iPhone 5s came out over a year ago. And yes it had plenty of battery left.

Also, transparency is possible because it's not limited to jpeg. PNG frames could just as easily be used where needed.

The point is the technique can be improved. Whether it can be shaped into anything useful is yet to be seen. In the meantime, cool down and take a deep breath.

<comment><USER9> meh, it boils down to whatever image format you use, you take a 33% increase in file size cause it's base64 encoded, and then a huge hit cause you can't do frame to frame encoding, like true motion estimation. It's trying (poorly) to solve an already solved problem with bad tech. Different platforms support it horribly differently, it burns cpu power on some (on Firefox, cpu hits 100% when normal web browsing, including youtube, is 10%). The true way to do it is to use modern html5 video tags, which are gonna work anywhere that svg would. Video tags are supported back to IE9, and SVG is only marginally supported in IE9. So the only thing you could gain is not having to use 3 video formats to hit all the browsers, and that's a pitiful excuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is exactly one reason animated gif still lives, and that's the simplicity and universality of the img tag. If this can run in all modern browsers in an img tag, it's useful. If it can't, it's not.

How do I load an h.264 video in markdown? bbcode? Filtered html? I can't. But anything that lives in an img tag? That just works.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cool :) SVG that contains frames and instructions to transition between the frames after given durations. This could be even animations embedded into the main HTML page.

</comment><comment><USER12> B64 images animated with SVG.

JPEG, PNG, 24bits, 8bits, you pick what works best for you. This is brilliant.

Not rendering on Safari 8 though.

<comment><USER13> Commenters reported not working well on Firefox either.

<comment><USER14> My bleeding edge 33.0 display them but has some issues.

For example if you scroll, they may freeze, if you scroll again sometimes work again sometimes not.

Sometimes they freeze at the end.

But it's exciting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can't we just agree on:

1\. APNG for low-color/lossless content.

2\. MP4/WebM for video-like content.

3\. ???

4\. No more GIFs = Profit.

</comment><comment><USER16> mpeg4 as used by twitter, imgur giphy and many others are using is way better... I really don't see the point besides being a cool hack.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's interesting and shows how extensible web platforms are. However, it's also a horrific misuse of SVG that slowed my web browser to a halt. The concept is fascinating but it's far from useful at this point.

</comment><comment><USER18> For once chrome android didn't hang loading animations.

</comment><comment><USER19> None of the examples renders. Mobile Safari.

<comment><USER20> No go on Dolphin Browser on Android as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wow, what a hack! I love it.

Despite all its shortcomings, it's hard to ignore the fact it works, right out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER22> Horrible title for this article.

</comment><comment><USER23> Isn't this like imgurs gifv?

<comment><USER8> "gifv" is just an mpeg4 file that imgur serves a fallback gif for based on browser headers (mediacrush, gfycat have been doing the same thing for a while).

The "xng" here is a series of images animated/wrapped in SVG.</comment></comment>


The Worst Thing That Could Happen to Facebook Is Already Happening - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/facebook-sharing-crisis.html <comment><USER2> 21% feels precipitous. The question is if that is just going to different platforms or if people are just more aware of privacy implications and thus sharing less on the internet as a whole.

Or is the novelty factor of sharing itself dying down and people discover they mostly have nothing original to say.

</comment><comment> T-A Time to trot this out again: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4208](http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4208)</comment>


How to Make More Published Research True - <AUTHOR> http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001747 <comment><USER2> I did research at a lab at Harvard Medical School. I can verify that the "publish-or-perish" mindset of academia drives researchers to do anything to get that significant p-value – even at some of the most highly regarded and established institutions.

Science today is full of bureaucratic nightmares - the publishing of a large amount of trivial results and the transformation of the most experienced scientists to uninvolved managers.

<comment><USER3> I have the same experience.

Until university positions and research grants stop being given out based on prior research results we won't be able to trust the research performed there.

There are millions of dollars on the line for researchers involved. It is the difference between a well paid career or a life of destitution while being a slave to huge student debt. It's no wonder they are blind to the flaws in their research.

I believe strongly that teaching positions and research grants should be given out based on criterions that are only incidental to research results.

Evaluate profs and grants based on:

1\. domain knowledge (test the applicants) 2\. math skills (test the applicants) 3\. motivation and leadership 4\. prior and current research proposals (but ignore results, especially the fact that they were published or not). 5\. other skills such as written and oral communication

Universities should not rely on journals to evaluate their professors. This corrupts the whole system. Journals have different goals. They want to publish well done research with interesting results. Universities should hire researchers that do well done research with interesting _questions_ regardless of the results.

If universities keep giving out jobs based on having generated interesting results in the past, they are going to keep getting researchers that ignore biases and publish whatever results are interesting whether they are true or not.

<comment><USER4> I don't know that the criteria you're proposing are all that different from the current situation. Domain knowledge and math skills are tested by your eduction. Motivation and leadership by committee work. Other skills by teaching. The only difference is your focus on proposals rather than results, and this is already the case in some fields.

I come for a "search for physics beyond the standard model" background, where other than the neutrino mass (from the SNO collaboration, which I was part of) there hasn't been a positive result in decades. So there is already a good deal of focus on proposals rather than results, and yet almost all the issues I see in the biosciences (I jumped ship to genomics in the mid-00's) are also present in that area of physics.

Ergo, empirically, I'm doubtful that focusing on proposals rather than results will make much difference.

The difficulty is that science never makes economic sense for an individual. I spent a decade of my life measuring zero to higher and higher precision, and I know people who have spent entire careers doing so: putting new limits on branching ratios to exotic (which sounds so much better than "nonexistent") decays and so on. It was fun, although I took a year off in the middle to do some medical physics and imaging, which was even more fun because I actually got to measure phenomena that exist.

So when I read things about the paucity of "breakthrough discoveries" I think that mostly the low-hanging fruit have been picked and genomics turns out to be a whole lot harder and more of a slog than people expected, with a vast amount of uninteresting material to be waded through for the sake of a slow accumulation of knowledge that we are still a century away from putting to any very good use.

I don't know what an economically rational model for reward in such an environment is, and it's good that the article raises the issue and explores some alternative approaches, but I don't think there is any easy fix for the problem because I don't think science makes any economic sense. Just moral sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article presents several provocative ideas. Changing the "culture" of research to encourage replication of findings, increase applicability of outcomes and reduce the corrosive effects of publication as competitive currency has been discussed quite a bit, though little seems to have come of it.

Especially interesting are the authors' ideas about the "reward system" in the current research world. If "value positions" like academic rank become irrelevant or even reduce reward, benefits would flow to research with greater scientific merit.

Effective science is much more a shared or collaborative effort than about proving who got there first. Too often authors stretch to make findings amount to an overarching explanation of the phenomena. Scientific quality would probably be improved just by scaling back conclusions and letting the data speak for itself.

</comment><comment><USER6> One exciting thing is happening in my field: [http://proceedings.dtu.dk/fedora/repository/dtu:233/OBJ/DOIu...](http://proceedings.dtu.dk/fedora/repository/dtu:233/OBJ/DOIusage- adataproducercase.pdf)

The TL;DR is that one international user facility is creating a universal locator for data that you can cite in your publications to point people to the raw data, which is curated by the facility and openly accessible. This is extremely cool! It may be of limited use without metadata about how the experiment was performed, but has the potential to be rather useful.

The DOE in the US is moving to put more of the research published with its grant money into the public domain--either with preprints, or if the publishers can be encouraged, the final articles (this seems to be under development).

For some of my friends in statistics, there seems to be a move towards reproducible research where you try to preserve the toolchain that was used to reduce the data--this is considerably harder.

So, I think that there's progress being made, but it takes time for change. Also, unless there are requirements from funding institutions, it's hard for individuals to justify the time requirements involved. While most of my raw data is on the web and a I put out a number of my reduction tools, maintaining the whole tool chain would be rather difficult.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been at Harvard and MIT for the last 10 years doing biomedical research and have published in Nature, Science, and Cell (top journals) numerous times. I can tell you academic publishing is completely f*cked with no hope.

Henry Kissinger said the only thing you need to know about academia,

"Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

<comment><USER8> I was at a top 10 grad school till 2 months ago. An assistant professor here wrote a paper which was a minimalist increment over her PhD work. Something you would expect to see in PlOs One but got published in Cell. I know of people in lesser ranked and less prestigious schools who have trouble getting more impacting papers accepted.

<comment><USER7> What are you doing now?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As the author points out in the abstract, "Optimal interventions need to understand and harness the motives of various stakeholders who operate in scientific research and who differ on the extent to which they are interested in promoting publishable, fundable, translatable, or profitable results." Yes. This is fundamentally a human behavior problem, and economics, "the dismal science," reminds us that people respond to incentives. If the incentives are not aligned to produce better research, all the ideas in the world about best research practices and best publication practices will not help. The author suggests testing interventions experimentally whenever possible, and that is what will best suggest what helps most to change human behavior in the direction of producing more true research findings.

<comment><USER10> The economics of research are worthy of more investigation.

The goal would be to reward those who produce the most research with the highest impact. However, it often takes years or decades to determine which of the fashionable ideas circulating at any one time are the foundations upon which further knowledge will be built, and which will fade away.

A similar problem exists when discussing the mechanisms of rewarding Wall Street traders, bankers and politicians.

Since the impacts of the work performed today are so distant from realistic mechanisms of evaluation, proxies are instead used. In academia, this amounts to counting the number of papers a person publishes and the journals in which they are published.

So, are there alternative mechanisms that could be used? In what way could we harness the mechanisms of industry and capitalism to further "true science"?

A possibility, alluded to in the article linked, might be for researchers to makes "bets" on the outcome of their work. For example, they would lodge their predictions at some central place (perhaps using the mechanisms currently used for grant proposals), and if their predictions are correct, they get a reward. So, one would submit a grant application, some funding would be given, and if the results are correct, an extra tranche of money is delivered to the scientist (not their institute).

It would be necessary to ensure that they are not betting on results they already have (~insider trading).

<comment><USER11> [http://hanson.gmu.edu/gamble.html](http://hanson.gmu.edu/gamble.html) for the latter proposal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Best article I have seen on how to improve science. The author describes a whole spectrum of possible improvements - not just one, such as more replication, and not just the problems, such as misaligned incentives. Gives some hope - but as author admits progress will be difficult. Lots a good references too - although often behind paywalls.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've spent a considerable time in and associated with academia. It is certainly a system that "works" at all in spite of the process because of the talented and passionate folks involved and would benefit from some large structural changes.

I think that academia could make large steps forward by adopting some of the wonderful collaboration tools created by open source projects. Basic things like wikis, version control, accountability through open peer review, and open standards for data if required could really change the quality and the pace of innovation.

The current model was set up for an incredibly smaller community where everybody literally knew each other and the economics were different. What is needed now is more like a github for results/collaboration and python notebooks for analysis so others can reproduce and test.

</comment><comment><USER8> These are all great but not realistic given the current competition and the academic mindset I have seen here. Many of my fellow graduate students consider robotics to be the future of how science will be done as most, if not all, of the work done in the lab can be done by robots. We need cheap and open-source liquid handling robots with a well documented platform. The labs of the future will not require man labor except but to think and that means scientists will be ask to publish a standardized protocol file with any plugins they used and all other labs will have to do is run that file and provide the materials. That will make replication incredibly easy and cheap.

<comment><USER14> This is applicable only to a limited subset of a handful of fields. There's more kinds of research than -omics and organic synthesis/combichem.

<comment><USER8> I agree it would be a lot easier and plausible for the biomedical sciences and for material/organic/inorganic synthesis. Certainly the theory work will be done by scientists and the design of experiments. Hmmm I wonder for people developing equipment if we could write a whole bunch of plugins that allow a robot to construct different modules of equipment from raw materials and a built-in 3D printer. Again theory and design by the scientist but won't have to spend hours building and testing each component. There are very few scientists I have met or heard speak, and I am at a top 10 grad school, that are doing any method/technology development that are a huge leap from pre- existing science and technology.</comment></comment></comment>


Scarcity Is A Shitty Business Model - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/01/scarcity-is-a-shitty-business-model.html <comment><USER2> Wonderful point. There's a Doctorow article I read somewhere that essentially put forth the following logic for digital distribution:

There will be a group of people who would not acquire the content unless it was digital. They may buy or pirate it. This is the group of interest. If more people who weren't going to get the content (b/c of lack of exposure, lack of interest, etc.) pay for it than don't pay for it, the digital venture is worthwhile (This ignores that some people who would have bought it non- digitally may pirate it, though that group is small; if you wish to support to movie by paying for it, you'll most likely do it regardless of medium)

For example: 100 people would have bought the movie if it was only physical.

100 other people will have never heard of the movie unless it is released digitally. Of these 100, 75 people buy the movie, 25 pirate it.

By listing it digitally, the publisher gets 175 people's worth of profit, and 25 people's worth of "loss". Therefore, it is worth listing digitally.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's only one way to stop the studios and labels from making bills that restrict the Internet, and that is to convince them to adopt a modern digital strategy and embrace the qualities of the Internet, rather than keep fighting them.

I would also like to see more articles that debunk their claims of hundreds of billions of dollars lost every year due to piracy, because too many politicians believe them - even those that are against SOPA/PIPA. If politicians find out the real truth, and MPAA/RIAA lose credibility on piracy losses, they might actually have to start thinking about modernizing their digital strategy.

<comment><USER4> Indeed they THEMSELVES should work to create an global Internet license that allows any web admin the right to sell/stream/distribute their content. If site admins don't pay up based on such licensing terms then a legislative bill should be drafted up for those who don't pay up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > We would have paid good money to watch Sherlock Holmes or Tinker Tailor > Soldier Spy. But it simply was not an option. So we went with a TV show that > was free and then went to bed.

Free? Surely Fred has paid for his cable subscription. And paid dearly if he has any HD channels. And then there are the loud, terrible, annoying commercials.

It costs at least $50/month to get anything half decent on cable TV here in BC. More if you want HD stuff. Many folks I know spend about $100/month on cable.

<comment><USER6> "Free" is the perception though. Nobody is arguing the merits of a cable subscription. The content is already piped into his house per a contract he signed, so it's there and it's "free".

There is, however, no sum of money - no matter how large - that he can give to the film industry to watch an already released movie in the comfort of his own home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tinker Tailor came out on Bluray a few days ago on Pirate Bay.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd pay top-dollar to rent a movie while it's still in theaters (especially in lieu of a low-quality, pirated option). If the rental price decreases as the film leaves theaters, they could still maintain a strong sense of the value of their product. It looks like it's working perfectly well in an ecosystem like Steam, where a new release sells a truckload at $60, then again at $30, then again at during a firesale at $5.

<comment><USER8> _I'd pay top-dollar to rent a movie while it's still in theaters (especially in lieu of a low-quality, pirated option)_

A thousand times yes.

I have an AppleTV and would love to use it more. Sadly most movies arrive on the torrents _months_ before apple adds them to their store. I just don't want to wait that long.

To add insult to injury most downloads on AppleTV are _more_ expensive than the BlueRay and are plagued with infuriating restrictions; no HD on the download-version, or no download version at all. Sometimes there's even no HD version at all...

<comment><USER6> _months before apple adds them to their store_

Months before Apple is allowed to add them to their store, you mean. The same goes for Netflix and Amazon Prime.

<comment><USER8> That's irrelevant to me as a customer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


OpenSSH v7.6 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.openssh.com/txt/release-7.6 <comment><USER2> The release drops support for some old protocol versions and outdated/broken ciphers. No more sshv1, RC4, rsa512, ...

Is there anyone inconvenienced by this?

<comment><USER3> Blowfish gone will impact a good deal of orgs that were using it for performance reasons

<comment><USER4> Due to hardware acceleration, AES based ciphers on a modern computer can blow arcfour and blowfish out of the water.

[https://blog.famzah.net/2015/06/26/openssh-ciphers- performan...](https://blog.famzah.net/2015/06/26/openssh-ciphers-performance- benchmark-update-2015/)

<comment><USER3> Yes, but that isn't really the point. Legacy and embedded computers without AES instructions don't get those gains, so they use blowfish. And those with blowfish configured will either A) fail to connect entirely due to "Ciphers: blowfish-cbc" excluding all others, or B) fall back to another cipher that's slow on that system. Things are going to break, is my point.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chipotle Debuts Debt-Free Degrees for All Employees - <AUTHOR> https://ir.chipotle.com/2019-10-15-Chipotle-Debuts-Debt-Free-Degrees-For-All-Employees <comment><AUTHOR> Implemented through [https://www.guildeducation.com/why-guild/how-it- works/](https://www.guildeducation.com/why-guild/how-it-works/)</comment>


5 things Apple needs to do to make the next iPhone a hit in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/apple-iphone-7-big-hit-in-china <comment><USER2> people went nuts about that recently there didn't they huh</comment>


Ask HN: How do you organize your notes? - <AUTHOR> I work as a Senior Developer at a large tech comapny across many different projects. I have also recent started the transition to an SDM role. One thing I'm finding is that I have reached my capacity for remembering all the different items I need to follow up on, tasks that need to get done, notes from 1:1s, and long running project ideas/growth ideas.
I've started taking more notes, but without a good system for organization I am not getting much value out of them.
I'd be curious to hear what works for the rest of you. Specifically: - What tools have you found useful for note taking (I bounce between vimwiki and OneNote)? - How do you organize? By project? Tasks?
- How do you structure the notes? Do you have a template? - How do you deal with "scratchpad" style notes? Do you ever come back to them?
- How often do you revisit your notes?
Any other general good note taking practices or methodologies that you have found success with would be helpful. <comment><USER2> I used to use OneNote. When I found out that I could only export from the OneNote web site, I quit.

My current answer is not for everybody, but I write notes in ReStructuredText on GitHub and write my own scripts for analyzing them. An important thing is that I put notes in the same collection for search along with other kinds of documents.

<comment><USER3> What are you looking to export?

<comment><USER2> the whole book as a ZIP.

I like the ZIP export format, I don't like not being able to get it without logging into the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> \- OneNote hands down beats everything else for me.

Foe scratchpad I use the unfiled notes section. This is where all the shares go by default. I do wish they would bring some kind of hash-tagging.

</comment><comment><USER4> I too recently switched to Microsoft OneNote. I use it on Windows 10, my Macintosh, and my iPhone ... all work really nicely together.</comment>


Show HN: A project to keep myself up-to-date in my field passively - <AUTHOR> http://headsup.news <comment><USER2> Look quite nice. I'm a bit sad I cannot create my own channel with programming without login.

Also, if I just saw a item that I'm interested in, but too slow to click on, I have to wait until it comes back...

Otherwise it seems like a nice little side project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! Let me try to add a forward and backward button so you can navigate through the slide instead of waiting it to come back.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Like other reader in HN. I would like to keep myself update on latest tech news. However, I don't like keep reading feedly, flipboard periodically. And I would like to have something like that can run in background like a TV News Channel but showing what I am interested. So I made this and run it in a second screen so that i can take a look of latest headlines in office anytime. See whether it is useful to you (you can add in your news source) or free feel to let me know if you think of other use cases or suggestions :)</comment>


Show HN: Meetabit, a Meetup.com for Tech Communities - <AUTHOR> https://meetabit.com <comment><AUTHOR> I thought this would be of interest given that Meetup.com changed its business model and will be charging meetup attendees.

I organize a number of technical meetups, such as HelsinkiJS which is the biggest developer meetup in Finland, and have found Meetup.com lacking. To scratch our own itch, we built Meetabit which includes some additional features such as the ability to accept talk proposals and sponsorship offers, have speaker profiles, archive of talks and related materials, export data etc.

It does what we need and we haven't been actively developing or promoting it recently, but it has still grown organically to around 10K users and multiple meetups organized each month. We are likely to put more resources into it given the recent changes at Meetup.com. Worth adding that the service is free both to organizers and attendees; our long term plan is to have the same business model as Stack Overflow by promoting relevant jobs to members.

I'll draft a blog post explaining things in more detail, but in the meantime feel free to ask questions in the comments below. Also, if you'd like to take the service for a spin and your city isn't listed, shoot me an email at email@example.com and I'll add it.

</comment><comment><USER2> My question with this, or any potential replacement to meetup, is whether the people running the site are prepared to run it at the same scale as meetup. I'd hate to see it start to scale up, but end up in the same place, that they need to start charging a couple bucks to keep the service running.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes and we have the resources to do so, since we have a profitable business where we help companies find developers.

<comment><USER3> Won't your company be incentivized to let loose tech recruiters on the meetups?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because as tech meetup organizers ourselves we know that this would kill the meetups & by extension the service and our reputation. We plan to have the same model as Stack Overflow, i.e. show relevant job ads to members and put them in touch with a recruiter only once they've applied and given consent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does it have to be tech related ? What if I want to make a small group to meet people for boardgames or something ?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I agree we need some general purpose meeting websites that aren't strictly tech. oriented. That would make it harder to develop on the business model of showing tech. job advertisements, but the advertisement business model for community and informational websites is questionable to begin with.</comment></comment>


My Weekend Project: See everybody on Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://upvot.es/hackernews

<comment><USER2> Pretty sweet! What about a "sort by karma" slider? ;)

How did you get the photos for each user?

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting, a crowd not as geeky as one would expect.</comment>


Show HN: Interactive Google Doodle [HTML5] - <AUTHOR> http://vincentwoo.com/2011/02/14/interactive-google-doodle/

<comment><USER2> This is really cool. I hope to see it on Google's homepage soon!</comment>


Creating a QR Code step by step - <AUTHOR> https://www.nayuki.io/page/creating-a-qr-code-step-by-step <comment><USER2> A while ago I found a generator that took an image and a text and tried to use a genetic algorithm to evolve a QR code that looked like (a 2-bit dither of) the image. Unfortunately I've since lost the link, but I was quite impressed that it managed to generate a QR code for my then-employer's URL that looked like their logo. Impressive what's possible with a lot of error correction.

<comment><USER3> Here is a paper and demo describing creation of such codes: [http://vecg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/Projects/SmartGeometry/halftone_QR/...](http://vecg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/Projects/SmartGeometry/halftone_QR/halftoneQR_sigga13.html)

Sadly, original online demo doesn't work anymore, but by looking for "halftone qr code" you'll find plenty of alternative implementations like this: [http://jsfiddle.net/lachlan/r8qWV/](http://jsfiddle.net/lachlan/r8qWV/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is fantastic.

From this, I learned that making your URLs uppercase makes for a more compact code! The links at the bottom are great reads as well, especially:

[https://research.swtch.com/qart](https://research.swtch.com/qart)

I hope that QR codes become more widely used, now that iOS and Android both include QR capabilities directly in the native camera apps.

<comment><USER5> Visit China to see a cornucopia of QR codes. Everything there is QR codes. Almost all payment is done through scanning a QR code (even tiny stands by the side of the road). Public transportation is accessed through QR codes. Adding people on social networks is done through QR codes. Some restaurants don't even have menus and you access their menu via a QR code (and of course pay again through the same). QR codes everywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ironically in China the popular name for QR Codes is 二維碼 (literally "2D code"). This is disappointing because there are other types of 2D barcodes (Data Matrix, Aztec, PDF417, etc.) and because it fails to acknowledge the QR brand.

<comment><USER6> Isn't it more like it's calling a square a rectangle? All these codes are 2D codes - the general public doesn't care if it's a QR Code or DataMatrix or Aztec etc. Anyway, the Baidu Wiki [0] says QR Code is a kind of 二維碼.

[0]: [https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%BA%8C%E7%BB%B4%E7%A0%81/238...](https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%BA%8C%E7%BB%B4%E7%A0%81/2385673)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A guy I know ran IT for a London borough's libraries. Part of his job was to generate QR codes to go on various posters, stands and literature. He generated hundreds of them.

Recently, he checked how many times they'd been scanned by a member of the public.

It was zero.

<comment><USER8> It's weird how in China QR codes are basically ubiquitous and yet the rest of the world basically ignores them. The difference as far as I can tell is WeChat, which basically everyone has, has great QR code support built in

iOS has great integration built in now to the camera app which should help, but android is still spotty.

<comment><USER9> Android is terrible. The best thing to do is piggy back zebra crossing's open source app and integrate it directly into the app. But as for a general use scanner, Android still depends on the user to download a external app. Motorola has it built into their camera app but I feel users don't know and don't reach out for it on reflex.

Google has their own solution but it is the stupidest, roundabout way of using it where the host app has to dynamically download the library that has the necessary barcode scanning.

<comment><USER10> Hmm, interesting, Moto Camera automatically detects and provides the QR code text/info. I guess I took it for granted and thought it was stock Google photo app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I often use QR codes to quickly transfer long URLs etc from my PC to my phone.

In the commandline you can run "qrencode --type UTF8 -o - <text>" and get a pure text-only QR code.

</comment><comment><USER12> That is really a brilliant web page, and the interaction of the data and the text is also very fascinating .. seems to have a brettvictor-like effect, I no longer felt like I was viewing a web page but rather an interactive document that was teaching me something technical while allowing me to explore the subjects edge cases .. Nice!

</comment><comment><USER13> Actually, I kind of hoped he _would_ show the computation of the Reed-Solomon codes, or at least had a popout for it if it would have made the page too long.

<comment><USER14> You might be interested in [https://www.akalin.com/intro-erasure- codes](https://www.akalin.com/intro-erasure-codes)

<comment><USER13> Ah, excellent. Thank you both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thanks amazing. Thanks! I always wondered how companies create their own type of QR-code. Anyone has any idea how something like this can be built? [https://i.imgur.com/wtxZDdh.png](https://i.imgur.com/wtxZDdh.png)

<comment><USER16> Messenger codes: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scan-code-editor-for- messeng...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scan-code-editor-for-messenger- codes/id1148316864?mt=12)

<comment><USER15> I'm wondering how can I build a custom qr code like those for my own project, but thanks for the link

<comment><USER17> [https://research.swtch.com/qr/draw](https://research.swtch.com/qr/draw)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Thanks! That was really interesting. This is the first time I have found the processes broken down in a way I can easily follow

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome!

Now, how do I _read_ a QR code?

<comment><AUTHOR> See: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9th8a7/creatin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9th8a7/creating_a_qr_code_step_by_step/e8x20ck/) ; [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA8hDldvfv0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA8hDldvfv0)

<comment><USER19> Yeah, that's not quite what I meant. Once I have the QR-code's pixel map, decoding that is easy. What I don't know how to do is to recover the pixel map from an image without knowing the scale, orientation, and viewing angle.

<comment><USER20> I think that's the purpose of the finder patterns.

From a Source image I imagine you would locate the finders, find the edges, unskew the source image, and use the finders to correct the rotational orientation, and then crop the image. Maybe binarize the new image to make the next step easier.

At that point, it's a matter of working out the size of each cell to generate a grid to drop on top of the image. Then you can sample each cell of the grid. If it's light, 1. If it's dark 0. Now you have the pixel map.

I am sure it's more complex, but I think a lot of this sounds like stuff you could do with openCV

<comment><USER19> Yes. Obviously. If you know where the finders are everything else is easy. But how do you locate the finders?

<comment><USER21> [http://dsynflo.blogspot.com/2014/10/opencv-qr-code- detection...](http://dsynflo.blogspot.com/2014/10/opencv-qr-code-detection- and-extraction.html)

<comment><USER19> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The mind sees what it wants to see - <AUTHOR> http://www.pprune.org/rotorheads/407864-intreresting-reading-about-human-factors.html Found this link on a skydiving website I frequent.  It was given up as an example on how things can go horribly wrong when we become complacent in things like gear checks.
I've always tried to draw parallels between what I learn in my hobbies and what I do in my professional life.  Granted, the stakes are a bit higher in skydiving and they were certainly high in this story (the person involved died), but the lessons are still valid.  Ignore them at your own peril.
When I read this post one of the things it reminded me of was a time when a coworker chased a crash bug for about two days.  He scoured his code.  He became convinced that he had exposed a bug in the compiler....he started to doubt the stability of glibc even!  After many lost hours he asked me to look at his code and I saw the error in five minutes; two lines after calling free on a variable he called free on it again.
Before you jump to your keyboard and start typing about how this would not happen to you, realize that people in situations with higher stakes than the mere survival of an insignificant startup have made similar mistakes.  The mind sees what it wants to see, and when the mind is reading code that it wrote it wants to see that code as being perfect. <comment><USER2> It's hard to find a routine check-list that doesn't have this sort of problem. We've investigated the idea of inserting deliberate errors in the diagnostics systems used by our engineers for exactly this reason. Sometimes even though a reading is OK we could show red. The system logs would show that this has been done, and if the engineer report doesn't, we know the check-list hasn't been followed properly.

But it's hard. We have intelligent, clever people, and mundane checks don't come easy. In some cases the more clever and capable someone might be, the worse the problem becomes.</comment>


Startup failed, giving away free Qwerty Arm7 mobile devices for cost of postage - <AUTHOR> http://www.peek.ly/blog/news/old-peeks-testbeds/ <comment><USER2> For what it's worth, these are based on the TI Locosto chipset which also integrates GSM/GPRS. We'll see if the released development platform includes enough TI blobs to actually use the radio (I suspect it won't, but I can always be pleasantly surprised).

Locosto has a 104Mhz ARM7, no MMU, and I think in the configuration on the Peek has 4MB of RAM and 16MB of flash. In the Peek email/Twitter client configuration, it runs TI's embedded RTOS (Nucleus) with Peek-internal code (called, fittingly, PeekUX) on top.

<http://elinux.org/Peek> is the best source for data on the hardware, and <http://www.geekypeek.com/> is the blog of one of the engineers on the project - if you go back a year or two there are a few interesting tidbits about the device.

(edited: 8MB of flash -> 16MB of flash per the eLinux Wiki)

</comment><comment><USER3> For anyone interested in a similar, slightly higher specced, hackable ex- consumer device for next to nothing: ZipIt Wireless have been clearing their old "ZipIt Z2" messenger range for some time now. <http://linux.zipitwireless.com/>

ARM9 ~300Mhz, 32MB RAM, wifi, QVGA display, keypad, mainline linux kernel support, etc.

Decent sized hacking community: #zipit on freenode & sites like <http://mozzwald.com/>

Believe prices are as low as $18 for a single one, or $10/unit if you buy 16. We bought around 20 in a group buy at our local Hackerspace. Not quite cost of postage, but still pretty cheap.

<comment><USER4> Did you ever do anything interesting with one?

<comment><USER3> To be honest, not as much as I'd initially hoped.

\- Fitting a USB interface is possible, but it's a bit fiddly, so not many got added.

\- I ported OpenWRT, as a good Linux distribution, but I haven't used it for anything after! :/

\- There have been some cool projects made by others though, like the zipitbot: <http://justinbox.aresgate.net/html/make_page.php?n=zipitbot>

<comment><USER4> Yeah. I have a terrible urge to get all these low-end machines and they inevitably are not terribly useful.

I did just buy a TP-Link 703n which seems pretty useful for a low-end box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm like three blocks away from that address.. Can I just come by and pick one up? I'll bring you coffee :)

<comment><USER6> You are invited to drop by for a beer on Friday a 5 and you can take a Peek with you when you go

:) 33w17fl9

<comment><USER6> This is a legit invitation: come by, bring a few beers, we'll give you a Peek and show you some tricks...

5pm 33 w 17th st, 9th floor Peek NYC HQ

RSVP here [http://www.peek.ly/blog/news/hacker-meetup-get-a-peek-to- try...](http://www.peek.ly/blog/news/hacker-meetup-get-a-peek-to-try-hacking/)

<comment><USER7> how long will it run, i'm unlikely to get out of work before 6

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish those things had some kind of signed bootloader and smartcard; they'd be awesome for a secure password management device.

When I first saw the Peek, I was wondering what it would take to turn it into the ultimate drug dealer/activist/etc 2-way text device; everything proxied through a secure multi-stage relay (like Tor), anonymous flood-fill messaging (like posting an encrypted message to a usenet group; the key is the address), etc. Something with a hacked baseband to let you change the IMEI periodically would be better, though (or wifi with MAC rolling).

</comment><comment><USER9> How much should the shipping label be for?

EDIT: From posterous:

\- a mailing label for a 0.5lbs envelope from Peek at 33 w 17th st, NY NY 10011 to you

\- maybe mention some of your mobile dev qualifications out of interest

\- maybe mention what you want to make

</comment><comment><USER10> I walked out of my math class to go upstairs to the computer lab and buy a postage label to email them. I'm really hoping to get one. It will be fun to play around with.

</comment><comment><USER11> hey - we didn't fail! We are "pivoting".

<comment><USER6> Fail, pivot... what's the difference? Our failed technology just won the most prestigious nomination in the mobile industry

<http://www.peek.ly/blog/buzz/gsma-best-technology-award/>

Amol from Peek

<comment><USER12> Failing is falling on your face; Pivoting is turning right before you walk into a wall. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Really cool, but unfortunately USPS won't let me create a shipping label from outside the US.

<comment><USER14> also, they specifically tell you not to include batteries...

<comment><USER15> Lithium batteries installed in devices are OK.

<http://pe.usps.gov/text/pub52/pub52apxc_040.htm>

<comment><USER14> thanks. TIL.

they don't mention this on the huge banners they have at the post office that teaches you about not sending batteries and TNT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think it's great they want to open the system and let developers play around with these.

But I'm just wondering - I don't believe there is a wifi chip in them and it isn't clear whether its possible for the customer to get the device onto the GSM network (is there a real sim card that is accessible, etc).

With that in mind, I'm wondering if the functionality and possibility of these devices is rather limited?

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if they'll let me just stop by and pick one up, since I work about three subway stops away.

</comment><comment><USER18> ... I threw away two still-new-in-box Peeks a couple weekends ago when I ran across them while cleaning out a closet. Used the service for a few months in 2009, it was pretty neat but finally moved to a real smartphone when I started bumping up against limitations.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's a cool looking device, and nice for them to offer them for free. We'll see if the community can invent some interesting uses for it. I couldn't begin to guess what you could do with such hardware

</comment><comment><USER20> Have you written a post on why you guys failed? I'd be interested...

</comment><comment><USER21> I have an old peek and a charger. Do I already have what I need to start hacking away when the dev environment tools are available?

<comment><USER2> You'll need the "flash cable," which looks like a standard MicroUSB cable but actually provides 1.8V TTL serial to the Peek (the Peek doesn't support USB but rather exports its serial RX/TX ports over a MicroUSB connector).

Peek themselves sold one for a while and you might be able to get an official one - otherwise they're not hard to build.

See [http://elinux.org/Peek#External_MicroUSB_Charge.2FUpgrade_po...](http://elinux.org/Peek#External_MicroUSB_Charge.2FUpgrade_port) for more information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I requested one. Should be interesting. What is everyone going to do with theirs?

<comment><USER23> I still have my original Peek and I'm going to try and get a version of Linux to run on it.

<comment><USER6> Very doable. You just need to put something interesting on top of that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone got recommendations on shipping to the UK?

</comment><comment><USER12> So does this thing only have a mail application?

<comment><USER2> It's got nothing. The mail application was a (relatively) thin client to a service that ran on AWS, and that service was shut down in January. The idea is that you'd write your own embedded code to make the device cool.

I posted <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3544436> with a bit more info on the hardware.

<comment><USER6> We still run the cloud-based mail service; these devices stopped working because of plumbing stuff mostly. There are tons of devices with thin clients hitting the cloud -- that's actually what we spend all our time on these days...

But you are right about what someone would try to do with it

<comment><USER2> Ah - sorry! I thought your more recent cloud offering was something totally new. Thanks for the clarification!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> OK, how hard would it be to get enyo running on one of these? Doesn't that sound like a nice hack to do? ;)

</comment><comment><USER26> are these still available?

<comment><USER27> I hope so, just bought a label and sent it to them.

<comment><USER28> I'm waiting for confirmation if there are any left, I'd love to get my hands on one

<comment><USER29> As am I.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's really a disservice to yourself when there is no way to see a picture of your product or get to a proper landing page from your blog without having to Google or manually manipulate the URL.

<comment><USER31> When trying to follow the link here:

> Use this site to coordinate your discussion – > <http://peekhack.posterous.com>

It gives a 404 Page Not Found error.

Edit: Okay, the link from the site is actually:

[http://www.peek.ly/blog/news/old-peeks- testbeds/%20http://pe...](http://www.peek.ly/blog/news/old-peeks- testbeds/%20http://peekhack.posterous.com)</comment></comment>