To Figure Out Google's Priorities, Just Look At Team Larry - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/08/google-team-larry/

<comment><USER2> "If people shift from search to sharing as the primary means to find information, then Google needs to figure out how to tap into social, and fast."

Ah, but how are people going to _find_ this information in the first place? Links don't just grow out of a vacuum. Someone searched for it _then_ curated it.

And, really, if Google wants to own the _future_ of consumer "information sharing" in this era, they don't have to become a lumbering Facebook me-too clone. Just buy Twitter (be ready to pay a soul-crushingly high premium for them, though). Boom, they'll now have 4 of the top 10 global Alexa ranked sites (after Google, Youtube, and Blogger). Integrate them all with some non- trivial alchemy, and you'll rule the Internet.

<comment><USER3> > _Ah, but how are people going to _find_ this information in the first place? > Links don't just grow out of a vacuum. Someone searched for it _then_ > curated it._

No. In the first place someone _created_ that content, then shared the link.

<comment><USER4> It's not necessarily true that the person who created the content will share the link. Even if they do, if they are far removed from my social network then the only way I will find that content is still by searching for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it's strange that Google is going after social.

Search isn't going away. It's here to stay. Will search become social? I tend to think it won't. But if it does, I think it'll only be a small component and it'll occur in niches. For instance, searching for a movie on Netflix based on what your friends like/recommend may become more common. Though, searching for a pair of new shoes online won't be a social activity. I like what I like.

But Google should worry most about search. Google.com. Searching on Google has gotten worse and worse for me over the past 2 - 3 years. To find what I want (if I find it at all), I have to try several queries and comb through several pages. This is time-consuming and my solution has been to just search less.

Google needs to stop worrying about what others are doing and focus on Google.

Make search better. Once you've done that, keep making it better.

I know Google wants to build new things, etc., but it shouldn't be social.

Edit: (1) I could be totally wrong about this. (2) I think of Google going after social meaning it wants to build something that replaces Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc. Perhaps its social strategy is different than that.

<comment><USER6> > _"I think it's strange that Google is going after social."_

As a company whose revenue is based on data-mining internet traffic, it makes perfect sense because of the potential value of pushing ads to an individual based on knowledge of their social network, e.g. pushing Mercedes ads to a person whose friends all drive Porsches. And for Google, that's what better search means - it doesn't mean putting useful long tail information on the front page when such information is not easily monetized.

<comment><USER5> >e.g. pushing Mercedes ads to a person whose friends all drive Porsches

That's a small demographic, in my opinion.

The bigger pie are the people who are actively seeking out information about Mercedes via search.

But if I'm searching less because it sucks, then that's a big problem.

Google is a search company. I hope it doesn't lose sight of that.

<comment><USER6> The ability to consistently identify the consumption habits of a small demographic with large purchasing power and target advertising directly at those individuals is immensely more valuable to advertisers than Adwords. It's the reason Apple does so much print advertising.

Improved browser speed and increased bandwidth means that you can perform more searches in a given time. Degraded search results mean that you will do so, and thereby generate more advertising impressions and hence more potential for revenue. Or to put it another way, anyone ever becomes so frustrated with the Google Search's results that they clicked on a sponsored link or other ad to see if that's what they wanted?

<comment><USER7> Have to disagree strongly with your first paragraph. What is valuable to advertisers is intent. It's why Facebook ads have such low CTR compared to Adwords. A person searching for "auto loans" is more valuable to the advertiser than someone whose buddies all drive Porsches.

<comment><USER8> Yet the bulk of advertising dollars goes to demand generation (i.e. Drink Pepsi!) and not fulfillment (i.e. searching for Pepsi on Google & seeing a targeted ad for Pepsi).

Companies pay a lot to get people that don't know about their products to be aware and interested in them. The other side is actually the smaller market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For anyone interested, I just put together a link round up of some of the most interesting posts/articles of the CEO change starting from January till now.

[http://www.jasonshen.com/2011/how-larry-page-returning-to- ce...](http://www.jasonshen.com/2011/how-larry-page-returning-to-ceo-changes- the-game-for-google-link-roundup/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm rooting for Google-- would love to see them kicking ass on more fronts.

The SVP of Social seems like a strange choice... Should be someone like Ev Williams. Instead, it's a guy who was an open source evangelist who also helped lead Windows Vista when he was at Microsoft. I'm sure he's a really effective guy, but does he GET social?

<comment><USER11> Honestly, is social that hard to GET? I think what Vic has shown at MS and Google (and I think its important that he showed this at both places) is that he can execute.

If Vic's mission is to make Google social big, period then he'll do well. If his mission is to make social big, and figure out how to monetize it too, then there will be problems. But I think Vic is bright enough to know that monetization is a second-tier priority right now.

<comment><USER10> If it's not hard to get, why hasn't Google gotten it yet? Certainly not for lack of trying or technical execution. It's a whole different beast. The first order problems (IMO) are around empathy, design, positioning, marketing, and community (things that Google is historically not good at).

<comment><USER11> _If it's not hard to get, why hasn't Google gotten it yet?_

The problem isn't that they don't get it at an individual level. It's that they struggle to see how to make money from it and have tried to get it complement search. That's my take on it.

To put it in perspective, Facebook did $2B in revenue last year. Google did $29B. In otherwords, if Google owned Facebook outright, Facebook would be about 6.5% of Google's revenue.

But that's why I said as long as Vic focuses purely on social, they'll do OK. But if they get sidetracked by a 3-year plan to get to $1B in revenue... which will be like a mere 3%, that's when things will begin to fall apart.

And that's why these sorts of things are easier outside of Google/MS. For a startup company $500M in revenue is pop the champagne. For Google and MS that's when you start thinking that there _might_ be a business here, but make sure it doesn't canabilize the business that brings in $20B a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Again, aren't these just the people promoted? This isn't all of the org heads. There's still Location (Marissa Mayer), Google Apps, and others. I find it hard to believe that Page has no interest in Apps succeeding.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm glad to see Sundar will have the ear of the king, ChromeOS hardware may be the single most promising near term development in computer security for the common man. I expect to be buying several for my family once they become commercially available.

<comment><USER13> What do you mean with "most promising near term development in computer security for the common man"? Can you expand on that?

<comment><USER7> Chrome has a very robust security model that includes, among other things, auto-updating and a verified boot (version numbers cannot go backwards). For example, if a device is detected as being hacked, an update will be initialized and then a reboot. And if a device is stolen, it's basically useless since ALL user data stored on the device is encrypted (and can be remote-wiped anyways). Here's everything:

[http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design- docs/s...](http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design- docs/security-overview)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's the difference between Google +1 and Facebook Like? How are they differentiating their service? Just because the +1 is integrated somehow into search results doesn't really make it better. A community cannot successfully determine the reputation of it's members if their only option is to give it a +1 or a like. If +1 also came with -1 or it morphed to thumbs up/thumbs down, it could become more of a reputation generator for any person or web based entity which I think could be much more useful.

<comment><USER8> The difference is context within my social network. None of my friends have Google Profiles and are unlikely to reconstruct their graph on Google Profiles. Clicking +1 doesn't have as much social distribution as the Like button because of this fundamental problem. Facebook already has all my friends on it, so clicking a Like button actually has weight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how much Google worries about the popularity of niche sites like stackoverflow. I go there for all my programming queries now instead of searching on google. If more and more sites take up niches like this the over all search volume should decrease for Google. Though I would think its not a lot as a percentage.

<comment><USER7> I use Google to search stackoverflow. "site:stackoverflow.com query", they do a better job at search than SO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm kind of rooting for him.</comment>


Building Cocoa apps with Common Lisp becomes a tad easier - <AUTHOR> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.openmcl.devel/6817

<comment><USER2> If you're interested in developing OS X applications with a lisp, you should check out Nu — <http://programming.nu> — It's a Cocoa-native language built on the Objective-C runtime, that's flavored somewhat like Common Lisp.

Additional info:

● A talk by the gentleman who created Nu, Tim Burks, talking about why he did so: <http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/13>

● The Google Group for Nu: <http://groups.google.com/group/programming-nu>

● The source (Apache License) on Github: <https://github.com/timburks/nu>

<comment><USER3> I've developed stuff on Nu before, it's magically easy compared to other language binding frameworks for Cocoa. I still use nutest as a testing infrastructure for projects that use exclusive objective-c.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is an interresting development (but haven't checked it lately) for using Cocotron (Cocoa clone) for Windows for ClozureCL.

What's really cool, is that while Objective-C Win32 applications written with Cocotron must be compiled under OSX (using gcc-mingw tools), this allows you to write them under Win32, because it uses the produced DLLS (AppKit.dll, Foundation.dll) and you communicate with lisp with them.

There is one thing to note - ClozureCL has 32-bit and 64-bit executables, but for some reason the 32-bit produced ones do not work on 64-bit.

That might be fixed already, I have to check again.

</comment><comment><USER5> My first option for developing Mac apps with lisp would be Lispworks <http://www.lispworks.com></comment>


NoSQL – Explained in Layman's Terms - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@animeshgaitonde/no-sql-databases-an-introduction-eb9706fbe3 <comment><USER2> I have this feeling that the article focuses on the positives, and also doesn't help with the question "which one you should choose". It would be very helpful if someone could point to a good source (or just share their experience) how to make a good decision between the two.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your inputs. The intention of the article is to explain NoSQL in lucid terms and hence is more inclined to the positives. As the article only revolves around NoSQL databases, it doesn't throw much light on "which database a developer should choose ?"

I'll write a separate post on choosing between NoSQL and SQL database.

<comment><USER2> Much appreciated, thank you!</comment></comment></comment>


I built a Product, but I don't know how to monetize it - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/@mubaris/i-built-a-product-but-i-dont-know-how-to-monetize-it-35e54ad8dc <comment><USER2> Some products just aren't worth paying for.

I _might_ use a webpage that displays me the current year as a progress bar? Would I pay for it? No.

Your best bet is to just move on and market your new product (with actual value worth paying for) to the users of this one.</comment>


Richard Matheson dies, aged 87 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23043116

<comment><USER2> That's a shame.

For those that only know I Am Legend via the film, I definitely recommend reading the book. They don't have much in common apart from zombies and the title.

<comment><USER3> _> They don't have much in common apart from zombies and the title._

According to the BBC, the book doesn't even have zombies: _" Richard Matheson, who wrote the 1954 vampire novel I Am Legend"_

I haven't read the book, so I might be making an unfair judgment here, but I was fairly sure it was about zombies as well.

<comment><USER4> That's pretty much a question of what the divide between zombies and vampires really is. They are, in essence, very similar, especially compiling variants of the myths. They are undead in some way feeding off of humans in a manner that, some percentage of the time or by some means, turns the human into one of them. Pre-Dracula vampires are generally hideous in manners that could be confused with some versions of zombies.

The book is pretty explicit about them being vampires including distinctly vampiric traits (nocturnal, traditional vampire weaknesses, killing them with stakes through the heart.

The film of the same title, however, rides the line pretty close, coming closer to vampires with the original ending. Their weakness to sunlight and their intelligence are clearly more vampiric, but it doesn't really do much more than that.

Either way, though, Matheson's influence on zombie fiction certainly makes the vampires look more zombie-ish from a modern perspective and can probably be uncontroversially explained at least as a stepping stone from between vampires and zombies.

<comment><USER2> Let's just go with Zombires. Or maybe Vampies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Richard Matheson was the Donald Knuth of horror and SF TV tropes. A giant has fallen.

As for _I am Legend_, _The Last Man on Earth_ was debatably the closest adaptation.

</comment><comment><USER6> ...a legend indeed ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> He lived a long, great life and left a wonderful legacy behind and for that I thank him. Goodbye Richard, you will be appreciated more than you will be missed, a rare feat.</comment>


Lossless and Transparency Encoding in WebP - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chromium.org/2011/11/lossless-and-transparency-encoding-in.html

<comment><USER2> This is incredible! If the claimed benefits are true (and the WebX team seems to be pretty honest about their numbers) this is now a better format than PNG, JPEG, and GIF, all at once, as well as covering some other options (lossy + transparent) that could be interesting. WebP, with recent metadata and ICC support, and these new additions, is starting to look like a serious image format that we might have good reason. If Google can encourage Firefox to start supporting it, it might even see significant usage. Just think --- one image format covering all the use cases you care about, one optimization tool, one backend to thumbnail user images, you name it.

Man, PNG was such a nice binary format, though. _sniff_

<comment><USER3> 1) Quoting source page: "The bit stream specification has not been finalized". This is something other implementers want to stay clear from for now, let alone it gets deployed in the wild and you have massive compatibility issues, or need to bloat all supporting software to support now-long outdated bitstreams (hi Vorbis!).

2) "If Google can encourage Firefox to start supporting it". Yeah, like they did with WebM, and then completely backstabbing Firefox by never actually removing H.264 support from Chrome, despite claiming to going to do it for many months. If the Firefox developers don't have total amnesia, I think they're going to need a lot of encouragement.

<comment><USER4> point 2 is just a little overdramatic considering all the other support that Google offers for WebM e.g. buying it for $130 million in the first place, supporting it in Chrome and Android, converting the entire Youtube back catalog, producing reference hardware encoders and decoders and giving the designs away for free, etc. etc.

Chrome and Firefox in desktop and Opera and Android in mobile have enough combined share to shift the market on this if they want to. I'd hope and assume that Mozilla's decision making would be a bit more related to their mission to support an open web than to petty recriminations for percieved slights.

<comment><USER3> _Chrome and Firefox in desktop and Opera and Android in mobile have enough combined share to shift the market on this if they want to._

Yes, meaning dropping support for H.264. Firefox did this, Chrome did not (I'm not sure what Opera does?). What's the conclusion? Google doesn't particularly care to shift the market in favor of their own format, or thinks it will burn its other fingers too much in doing so. Meanwhile, H.264 is used everywhere, including for Firefox users, who get to enjoy it over the now-deprecated Flash.

Do you see a problem looming here for "supporting the open web"?

 _I'd hope and assume that Mozilla's decision making would be a bit more related to their mission to support an open web than to petty recriminations for percieved slights._

Does WebP advance an open web? Let's see, is there some actual standard describing it, or do you have to blindly lump in a big chunk of Google code to support it? (That's a real question)

<comment><USER4> I actually meant WebP when I said they could move the market on their own. I think that WebM has a slightly harder hill to climb and would require Microsoft, Apple or Adobe to get fully on board, but that WebP adoption would also help ever so slightly in that regard too.

(Opera, who originally proposed the video tag, with a suggestion to use Theora as the only viable video format at the time with licensing compatible with the web, didn't drop H.264 because they never supported it. I mentioned them in this context because they already support and use WebP in their bandwidth- saving page-transcoding features which are particularly useful in mobile devices on 3G networks. This solves the chicken and egg problem and gives browsers, like e.g. Amazon's Silk, a reason to support WebP even if no-one uses it yet.)

edit: and to answer your last question, WebP was up until recently a subset of WebM, which can be decoded by at least two other independent implementations I know of (FFMPEG and one in Java). Standards settings bodies have been corrupted by politics and are no match for multiple, independently produced, open source codebases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Finally! A lossy transparent format, supported by a browser that a large % of people use!

Does anyone know a good way to provide webp with a fallback, short of sniffing the UA? I've tried using mod_negotiation (<http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_negotiation.html>), but Chrome doesn't sent the webp mime type, so I can't get it to work...

Anyone know of a solution?

<comment><USER6> This is what the Accept-header is for, but unfortunately browsers do not really give helpful values in this header.

I've also heard from people working with web browsers that the Accept-header wouldn't work well for the real web anyway. Sigh. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Chicken and egg. Designers will not use a format not supported by the majority of browsers and browsers see no need to implement new formats unless people are asking for them.

It goes against the web design principle of making your site usable to all users regardless of what they are browsing with to use an image format that is not widely supported. This principle is backed by users who will simply leave your site in disgust if they are asked to jump through hoops to use it. Very few designers will be willing to maintain two versions of all their images just because one of the formats is a bit smaller.

Microsoft has it's own range of newish web image formats that never caught on. History suggests IE is unlikely to support anything "not made here" unless it is forced to. The competition to Microsoft's image formats, JPEG2000, never caught on either. Firefox has an infamous open bug about adding it in dating back to 2000: <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36351> \- over 11 years! Despite what it looks like in the last comment, my Firefox 8 still does not have support.

The last image format that managed to make it was PNG, and that was almost over a decade ago, although alpha support in PNG was added comparatively recently to IE. Last time I checked MNG (PNG's answer to animated GIFs) still wasn't widely supported.

Sorry to be such a downer, lack of support for JPEG2000 was a let down for me. As I see it Firefox, Opera and Safari will all need to support this first, before web designers in general will even consider using it. Only once a significant number of web designers are clamouring for it will IE slowly add support for it. Only then will it see wide use.

Tool support is vital too, most importantly Adobe PhotoShop. No web designer I know of is going to muck about in the commandline with imagemagick.

<comment><USER8> Those formats aren't really dead. Just that the web browsers don't support them doesn't mean they're not used.

mng is currently used for simple animations in UIs (for example, Qt has built- in support for it). On the web, I guess there just isn't that much of a need for an animated format (other than fully-fledged movies).

jpeg2000 is used by some 3d tools and games as texture/asset format.

WEBP already has the advantage that it has been implemented by one of the larger browsers, and that it supports _everything_. Lossy, lossless, transparency, animation. And smaller files as a bonus. It could be the image format to end all image formats :-) I can see a lot of uses outside the browser as well, even if it fails as browser format. I also think google is going to push it as the defacto image format for Android.

Support in design tools isn't that important. One can always convert image formats as part of deployment. In many cases this is needed anyway (for example for CSS spriting / inlining).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> When reading about this I came up with the idea of rendering a JPEG on a canvas element with a PNG (or grayscale JPEG) as a transparency map. This would give you alpha-channel JPEG on most browsers _right now_. Sweet huh?

... and of course, it's been done: <http://jim.studt.net/jpeg-alpha/> :) It's even been on Hacker News, though not to much attention: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1772760>

</comment><comment><USER10> WebP's compression is good, but there's an often forgotten PNG8+alpha format that is a form of lossy compression as well.

Although PNG8+a compression isn't as good as lossy WebP, it is availble _now_ , and it is compatible with all browsers.

Comparison: <http://pngmini.com/vs-webp/>

Source code: <https://github.com/pornel/improved-pngquant>

</comment><comment><USER11>
      * flashes the DarkShikari signal *

:)

I wonder if just adding LZMA or PPMd compression to PNG (instead of deflate) would have the same size improvements, with the benefit of keeping PNG's very nice binary format.</comment>


Broken Cable Damages Arecibo Observatory - <AUTHOR> https://www.ucf.edu/news/broken-cable-damages-arecibo-observatory/ <comment><USER2> Really unfortunate, with the budget cuts it may not be repaired for a while. Is it possible for them to accept donations like from a go fund me page?

</comment><comment><USER3> Already covered here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128877](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128877)

<comment><USER4> Yes, but this source has photos. BI's website appears to try, but requires JS to load the photos, and the JS crashes unless it can access cookies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's really unfortunate. It appears to have been substantial damage. I hope it can be repaired within the often rather tight budget constraints of the Arecibo observatory. This radio telescope deserves more funding!

</comment><comment><USER6> Is Arecibo doing 1st rate astronomy still? Is it likely that there will be a huge call (or justification) for funding to repair this quickly? Versus spending the $ on other students/research programs? I wonder how much the $ bill is -- maybe on the order of <$5M?

<comment><USER7> It absolutely is still relevant and important. This is a huge blow to ongoing radio astronomy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know what the purpose of the irregular height columns are under the dish? They appear to be uniform spacing, but not height.

<comment><USER9> Other comment is correct on their purpose [https://youtu.be/JjDJLNubKKw?t=259](https://youtu.be/JjDJLNubKKw?t=259)

I don't think any are intentionally different heights. Part of it could be the thing was built nearly 60 years ago but also it doesn't need to be perfectly accurate to securely be tensioned.

<comment><USER8> I would bet they had a standard construction form (2 meter tall Sonotube, etc) and they simply dug down until they reached the rock and poured the concrete. Like you say, they height doesn't matter since it will be referenced from some other datum.</comment></comment></comment>


Yet another tutorial on PyTorch - <AUTHOR> https://nikhilweee.me/posts/2018/first-rnn-pytorch-1/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've written this tutorial for people having read enough and wanting to start out writing code. Would love to get some constructive criticism.

<comment><USER2> Given a ton of PyTorch tutorials already available [1], why should we read yours?

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=pytorch+tutorial](https://www.google.com/search?q=pytorch+tutorial)

<comment><AUTHOR> Because I myself went through many of them while I was starting out, but I still faced a ton of questions that I didn't understand. I've tried to address most of them in this post. Apart from the how's, I've tried my best to answer the why's.

<comment><USER2> Good enough, thanks for posting!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I have debt and owe back taxes — can they take my startup? - <AUTHOR>

Throwaway account.
I have credit card debt and owe back taxes, all totaling around $50k. My small startup has paying customers but does not yet have enough left over to actually pay me enough even to cover payments.
First, can companies or the IRS sue to take my company away from me?
Second, is my personal situation a liability for attracting a round of funding? <comment><USER2> 1\. The IRS won't seize your startup. It doesn't have any value -- could they sell it to get cash? Doubtful.

2\. The IRS can make your life personally miserable. Or not. In my experience the best way to keep them off your back is to communicate, not hide, and start sending money. Even if you are only sending in $50 per month that shows your intent.

3\. Creditors will not seize your startup. They can't sell it to raise cash.

4\. Creditors will make your life hell.

5\. All of this assumes you formed a company of some kind for your startup. If it is just you -- as a sole proprietor -- you may be f'd.

6\. This debt problem will consume an incredible number of brain CPU cycles. You will be distracted until you install a payment plan and have it in progress. It will -- in my personal first-hand :-) experience talk to you constantly. This is so important to get handled.

And yes. Tell your funding people. If you hide it and they find out you are screwed -- not because you are in debt but because you don't tell the truth.

</comment><comment><USER3> The IRS will accept _any_ amount per month if you get on a plan. Like $30/mo if that's all you can do.

They will also SOMETIMES agree to accept a lower amount of money. Usually nothing less than the principal you owe (e.g. they'll remove some penalty and interest fees). They may only do this after a year or two of you making tiny payments. They must believe you will never be able to pay it all back.

They absolutely will garnish your wages and/or seize any bank accounts you have. Call them immediately.

</comment><comment><USER4> Companies can sue you for anything. The question is whether they have a case that involves taking your ownership of your startup. Have you been making minimum payments (at least) on your credit card? If so, they won't do anything about it. Otherwise they will probably, at some point, throw you to the collections agency.

The IRS is tougher, since not paying your taxes is a felony. I suggest you do everything you can to pay your backtaxes as soon as possible.

And yes, of course your personal situation is a liability. Investors, should they become aware of your situation, will know that the first $50,000 or so will sink directly into your bank account, NOT the company. Therefore, your startup will have to be very compelling or the terms very good (to them) in order to make up for it. This is in addition to the signal you send, since managing scarce resources (money) is a critical skill for running a startup.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Investors, should they become aware of your situation

Morality aside just for the moment, as I'm not saying I would, but: is it illegal to withhold from investors information about my personal finances?

<comment><USER3> IANAL. You have no obligation to disclose your personal finances. If they asked and you lied it might open you up to liability though.

I don't think you have any moral obligation to tell a potential investor either. You do have a moral obligation not to let it interfere with your company though. Don't ignore it and hope it goes away. Face it and turn it into a predictably annoying problem instead of a scary unknown one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A question, usually when you have some debt and back taxes the usual choice is to start a small business of one that is solely designed to make money fast via contracts, etc to pay off that debt and taxes.

Can you tell us why you choose not to do that?

No, not being harsh just curious of the thought process.

</comment><comment><USER6> You should be able to take a few contracts to make up this debt in a year.

Work hard.

Don't get into debt again.</comment>


Show HN: Search Google, GitHub, Stack Overflow, other sites from the terminal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zquestz/s <comment><USER2> I didn't install and run the code, but this appears to be a wrapper for performing a search across these sites via browser...i.e. you specify a provider and the query, and the browser pops open with the properly formatted URL, rather than it doing the query, scraping the results and streaming into stdout.

Because I was thinking, there's no way it could be this easy to programmatically search Google:

[https://github.com/zquestz/s/blob/master/providers/google/go...](https://github.com/zquestz/s/blob/master/providers/google/google.go)

           func (p *GoogleProvider) BuildURI(q string) string {
    	return fmt.Sprintf("https://www.google.com/search?q=%s", url.QueryEscape(q))
           }

<comment><USER3> Actually, it _is_ that easy to programmatically search Google. Here's the endpoint: [https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&r...](https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&rsz=small&safe=active&q=cats&max- results=10&v=2&alt=json)

<comment><USER2> It appears to be officially deprecated as of November 2010, though it is perhaps one of those heavily used APIs (such as static charts API) that Google is in no rush to disable [https://developers.google.com/web- search/docs/?hl=en](https://developers.google.com/web-search/docs/?hl=en)

<comment><USER3> Ah, I didn't realize it was deprecated. Just about every IRC bot out there uses it ;)

<comment><USER4> Except mine, because I started looking for it post-2010 and got stuck on Google's new whatever-it-is that has complexity beyond imagination and a seriously buggy dev panel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Alternative: surfraw - written by a famous person: [https://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/](https://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/)

<comment><USER6> Julian Assange

</comment></comment><comment><USER7>
      function gs() { open http://www.google.com/search?q="$*" ;}

</comment><comment><USER8> The results should also appear in the terminal, then it will be a real tool, not just a browser-opener.

<comment><USER9> Ok, so that's exactly what I thought this program did (display results in the terminal), so I downloaded it and installed it. When I found that it opened a web search I was quite surprised and came to look at the comment thread.

However, should the results appear in the terminal (i.e. do I agree with you)? I am not at all sure that this browser view is a bad thing. The idea of searching from the command line and focus moving to the browser is just not something I was picturing at all, and I kind of like it.

But I definitely do agree 100% that I was and am interested in something that runs these webapps from the command line and makes the terminal a first class interface to say, Google, StackOverflow, etc. I think I may try to tinker with such a thing, and when I thought this project had it, I was really curious to see what method of scraping they used and how they turned web data into meaningful result objects of some sort.

Thinking about it, I feel like noting two things:

1 - I don't see why a single application, like s, can't support both interfaces. Give it an alias, say, r, and r renders search results at the command line instead of the browser. No reason the list of providers has to be the same for both interfaces.

2 - now we're on web like 2.9999999, right? Googlebot indexes JS/dynamic webpages properly, and webapps use a lot of JS to perform their basic functions, it seems. i believe it's time to start taking command line browsers seriously again. we have a few production ready off-the-shelf JS engines to choose from today and browsing from terminal seems like a simple and why-the- hell-not idea. Terminal/shell interfaces, imo, provide a really great way to move around, focusing on text and with the super quick functional input response that only keyboard navigation can provide.

i am positive that if we started aiming for a web development standard supporting JS and HTML5 or whatever well supported but capable standard is out there today and full accessibility from a text-only/terminal web browser (Lynx for 2015's HTTP realities) then we would be helping out people using non- standard input devices (screen readers, etc.). of course im talking out of my ass here, but someone knowledgeable back me up on this point please.

i guess it just didn't completely click until i saw this app, someone else who had the same idea as me (you/your post), and the fact that repo this is useful, but not what i was looking for, that i have decided i feel extremely strongly that now is the time for a fully functional javascript capable cross platform browser that does not render graphics at all and runs happily in the terminal.

On another note: the project README has very simple and well highlighted Installation instructions, if you happen to have Golang installed, which I do. but not sure how easy that would be if you didn't. A suggestion to the author: post Windows/Mac/Linux binaries on [https://github.com/zquestz/s/releases](https://github.com/zquestz/s/releases) .

<comment><USER10> There is this project : [http://weboob.org](http://weboob.org) (Web Outside Of Browsers). It allows the use of certain web apps in the terminal. It's a french project, so it's mostly french apps that have been integrated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This tool might be helpful if you are regularly searching for the same phrases and make aliases to, for example, `s "what is the weather"`.

For regular interactive usage this would actually hamper your productivity because you type "s", a space, eventually a starting quote, the phrase _without_ autocompletion, and an eventual ending quote, versus switching to a browser window and focusing over its location bar with two key shortcuts.

</comment><comment><USER12> Since results are displayed in browser window, There should be a "Search on google" in context menu displayed on right click after text selection in terminal. It will save some clicks like in Google Chrome. There was one similar package available for earlier versions of ubuntu([http://ubuntuguide.net/ubuntu-13-0412-10-terminal-with- searc...](http://ubuntuguide.net/ubuntu-13-0412-10-terminal-with-search-in- google-support))

</comment><comment><USER13> Why is this written in Go and not Shell? Why isn't this just one file?

Here is how such tools should really be done: [https://github.com/rupa/z](https://github.com/rupa/z)

<comment><USER14> When it's compiled, isn't the user just interacting with a nice binary? Among languages that compile to binary and have a nice standard library for http requests, I'm not surprised that somebody choose Go.

And if you want to talk about portable, I think people would rather work with Go than shell.

<comment><USER15> I started using Go for exactly this reason. It was something that felt slightly too advanced to write in shell, and figured I'd try Go (command line tool). I can't say I'm too much of a fan of the language, but the things it does well (fast compile times, simple portable binaries) it does very well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The license information is broken too. README says All Rights Reserved.

License file says MIT.

<comment><AUTHOR> This has been fixed. It is MIT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Name conflicts with s [1], which I use a ton of in my terminal every day.

[1]: [https://github.com/haosdent/s](https://github.com/haosdent/s)

<comment><USER18> Reminiscent of autojump, [https://github.com/wting/autojump](https://github.com/wting/autojump)</comment></comment>


Distrusting New WoSign and StartCom Certificates - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2016/10/24/distrusting-new-wosign-and-startcom-certificates/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad that post explicitly called them out on the deception:

> The representatives of WoSign and StartCom denied and continued to deny both > of these allegations until sufficient data was collected to demonstrate that > both allegations were correct. The levels of deception demonstrated by > representatives of the combined company have led to Mozilla's decision to > distrust future certificates chaining up to the currently-included WoSign > and StartCom root certificates.

Contrast this to WoSign's announcement:

> WoSign also made a careful investigation of these issues and issued a report > on these issues, some problems have been clarified, and all problems are > found in the first time and fixed. WoSign actively cooperate with the > investigation and communication to guarantee the issued SSL certificate will > not be affected in any way.

([https://www.wosign.com/english/News/announcement_about_Mozil...](https://www.wosign.com/english/News/announcement_about_Mozilla_Action_20161024.htm))</comment>


Why should hard be secure enough? Information and non-invertibility - <AUTHOR> https://diogomonica.com/2017/02/03/why-should-hard-be-secure-enough-information-and-non-invertibility-2/ <comment><USER2> The concepts are a bit sloppy here. "Zero information" is a bit of hand waving which relies on the idea of having a uniform distribution on a set with infinite measure, which is not mathematically sound nor is it useful as an approximation.

All messages that you choose to transmit follow some probability distribution with each message having finite, nonzero probability. This is what the author gets wrong, on a very fundamental level. If this were not true, your messages would require an infinite number of bits to transmit.

Studies of the usefulness of hash functions are based on comparisons to an "ideal" hash function called a random oracle. The idea behind a random oracle is that you can't reverse it, but you can try to remember what outputs it gives for known inputs.

This "perfect hash function" has been extensively studied and still suffers from all of the flaws that the author mentions in this article. And yet people prove rather strong properties of cryptography systems under the random oracle assumption. So the author's criticisms, fortunately, have no bearing or relationship to real cryptography, because the good systems are already designed to be immune to such attacks.

I'm on mobile so I can't really give a play by play but the article is really based on nothing more than bad math.

<comment><USER3> I think the article mixes up two things, namely the hash function business and uninformative priors.

Hash functions. In case of a good hash function the information about the actual distribution of the inputs is erased. That the hashes are uniformly distributed does not imply that the inputs are uniformly distributed which in turn renders any conclusion about the distribution of the inputs after applying a transformation invalid.

Uninformative priors. This seems to be more of a philosophical problem I don't really know much about. But as far as I can tell if one tries to quantify a lack of information in a naive way using probability distributions, then one gains information, for example that the value is uniformly distributed over some range, and this information has consequences like specific distributions of derived values.

So the attempt to quantify a lack of information turns into a self-defeating endeavor, not necessarily because of any inherent information but because of the information injected during the modeling process.

<comment><USER2> That is not a very precise way of describing the uniformity of hash functions, and it's not actually true. For example, if my input has some element with 50% probability, then the hashed output is going to have some element with at least 50% probability.

But this is well-known, and because it's well-known, no sane cryptographic system cares that hash outputs leak information that way. For example, look at PBKDF2, HMAC, or various asymmetric key authentication schemes.

<comment><USER3> You are right, I did not correctly word what I wanted to say. I was not thinking about repeated messages, I was only thinking about subsets of all possible messages. Say you are hashing HTML documents, then all your inputs will be in the subspace having <!DOCTYPE html><html as first characters but that information will be erased by the hash function.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the title, I thought that this was going to be about the lack of lower bounds in cryptography. Factoring is generally thought to be hard, because many smart people have spent many years trying to make it easier. But there's no proof of that. Maybe somebody will make a breakthrough. In the early days of asymmetric crypto, the knapsack function was believed to be hard. Then a fast way to invert it was found.

As far as I know, there's no publicly known one-way cryptographic function for which there's a provable minimum level of effort to invert.

On the hash function front, where the author seems concerned about something, perhaps the lesson is that filling up hash tables to the 90% level before expansion is pushing too hard.[1] At 70% fill, the hash function doesn't have to be near-perfect, just not awful.

[1] [http://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/post/153545455987/ru...](http://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/post/153545455987/rust- hash-iteration-reinsertion)

</comment><comment><USER5> If we have _any_ probability distribution, that tells us something about x. If someone tells us that license plates numbers are uniformly distributed, we can pretend to be a license plate maker by sampling from a uniform distribution, and nobody else could tell the difference by looking at the license plate numbers we make.

Zero information is more like not knowing what probability distribution a variable comes from. Rather than hiding "what value does x take", we can hide "what probability distribution does x come from". That's one level up. (Then you could ask what the likelihood of x having a given probability distribution is, and so on -- zero information is having _none_ of this information, all the way up.)

<comment><USER2> Uniform distribution gives minimum information, assuming the range is known. Any other distribution will give more information. Talking about information capacity of coded messages, here.

I think what you are saying when you use the phrase "zero information" is really "zero knowledge".

<comment><USER5> "Minimum information" is much more accurate than "zero information". A necessary condition for a good cryptographic hash function F is that F(X) is a uniform distribution if X is a uniform distribution. This is a property of F, not of X, which is where the article is a bit muddy.

The article seems to want to say that "zero information" ought to be a probability distribution such that for all functions f, f(X) is the same zero- information distribution, i.e. from nothing we get nothing. The point is that no such X exists, because every probability distribution encodes _some_ amount of information. What we _want_ is some function F such that for every X in a large class of probability distributions, F(X) is uniform. Which is exactly why x^2 is a terrible hash function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article takes a very long time to make an elementary point: if x is a uniformly distributed random variable, f(x) is not a uniformly distributed random variable if f is non-linear.

<comment><USER7> Which is visualized nicely in these 20 second videos.

Non-linear transform of a random variable:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQjk4ClpuUk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQjk4ClpuUk)

Linear transform of a random variable:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKo6-DnIxCg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKo6-DnIxCg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A good hash function doesn't, and cannot, ensure that you have no information about the input. It can't take information away from you.

A good hash function ensures that, _whatever_ information you have about the input, you have _no more_ information upon seeing the hash. If you believe x is equiprobable over some range, seeing H(x) should cause you to continue to believe it's equiprobable over that range. If you believe x is the square of some random variable y which is equiprobable in some range, seeing H(x) won't convince you that x is equiprobable!

If your prior for x is equiprobable over the space of Microsoft Word documents confessing to high treason and 0 probability elsewhere, seeing H(x) won't tell you _which_ Word document it is, but it certainly won't cause you to believe that it might be an MP3, either.

</comment><comment><USER9> The author considers speed of light being the absolute, irrevocable certainty, but how does he know that?

Does he know _why_ c is constant? Had he mastered general relativity enough to be 100% sure that it can't vary in time or space? Or that our current understanding of physics is total and there absolutely can't be something that we don't know about speed of light?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time- variation_of_fundamenta...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time- variation_of_fundamental_constants) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_speed_of_light](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_speed_of_light)

<comment><USER10> They know it because it's the best theory we currently have. Things aren't 100% sure in physics, there are no laws. Just the best available theory which you should treat as fact while knowing it may not be.

<comment><USER9> ...which works exactly as well for hash functions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "...if we have zero information concerning the value of x, than we are also clueless in what concerns the value of, say, x^2"

But that is not true, we have -some- information concerning the value of x, namely that the value of x is equiprobable.

</comment><comment><USER12> There are some technical issues with the article, but the point the author makes (hashes are imperfect since they carry some information, but it is really hard or even impossible to do something better) still stands.

</comment><comment><USER12> While I like the style of writing very much, I don't like the pseudo- scientific take on the 'problem'.

In any probability class, you will learn that you can't have an uniform distribution on an infinite set.

<comment><USER13> Nitpicking, but you can have a uniform distribution on the unit interval, which is infinite :). What you cannot have is a uniform distribution on an unbounded set.

Edit: As pointed out, the correct assumption is not unboundedness, but having infinite measure (since then no normalization constant exists). I thought they were equivalent, but a simple counterexample is [0,1] \cup Z.

<comment><USER2> Mathematician here. You can't have a uniform distribution on a set with infinite measure. Unbounded sets are fine as long as they have finite measure.

<comment><USER14> What is an unbounded set with finite measure?

<comment><USER2> Other answers failed to give examples of a set with positive finite measure, which is what you really need. What we want is a set that has no upper bound, but isn't really weird or tricky—if it's too tricky, then the uniform continuous distribution doesn't make any sense—and an easy way to do this is take a union of a countable set of intervals.

For example, consider a set that contains (0,1/2), (1,1+1/2), (2,2+1/4), ... etc, so interval i has measure 2^-i. It should be obvious that there is no largest element, and if you sum the measures of all the sets you will find that the measure is 1. A big chunk of "doing mathematics" is having a library of techniques on tap to come up with weird objects like this to attack assumptions.

<comment><USER14> Thanks. That seems obvious now that you point it out. Just like Zeno's paradoxes, which are also about stretching a finite measure over a countable infinity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand why the x^2 thing is interesting at all.

If I multiply x by 0, the distribution is now just 0.

If I take abs(x) now it is positive.

Are these confusing to anyone?

<comment><USER16> It's confusing to me why the author is confused by these. As you say, he's literally saying "if I know nothing about x, then I should also know nothing about 0x". Wtf? No.

<comment><USER8> I think the confusion is between the idea that a hash function conveys zero information about the input, and the idea that you will have zero information about the input once seeing the output of the hash.

But if we move it out of math, it's easier to understand: if you have some guesses about x, and I tell you nothing, you have the same guesses about x. You don't _stop_ having guesses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One random (heh) thing that occurs to me reading this article is that if you are using hashing for security (e.g. password hashing, key derivation, ...) then what the author is calling "invertibility", i.e. there are few values in the input space that map to some value in the output space, is actually a good thing. All other things being equal, the more such input values there are, the more feasible collision/preimage attacks become. It seems clear that for these purposes, the information content of the output should be at least equal to that of the input.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think information can not be defined based on the source material alone. Why don't we define information like this?

An observer X has a prior estimate of the distribution d1 of variable x.

The source material yields a distribution d2 of variable x.

Then for that observer, the information gained from the source is something like |d1-d2|.

<comment><USER5> Yes, you can think of it like an information game where your function is a black box that you can feed values and get back values. If you take lots of samples from a uniform distribution and feed it to the black box, you can estimate how the function maps one distribution to the other, even though you might not know where all the individual values in the domain go. A good hash function produces a uniform distribution of some variety no matter what distribution you feed it. Bad hash functions deviate from uniform in some way correlating with the input distribution, i.e. they leak information.

The ideal hash function leaks no information. In practice, we can only make one leak very little over a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> diogomonicapt writes "Light does not travel at the speed of light (no pun intended) because it is hard for it to do otherwise. No. It travels (and does so at that particular speed), because it is impossible for light to do otherwise."

Actually,the speed of light in a vacuum is an upper bound. The actual speed of light can be substantially slower. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_light)

Some cosmological theories do not require the speed of light to be constant and fixed, and replace that axiom with requirements on the relationship of the speed of light with other physical parameters.

<comment><USER20> He didn't say "the speed of light in a vacuum", he just said "the speed of light". And in the next sentence he said

> _… it is simply not possible for light to be still, or even propagate at a > different speed in the same medium._

So he's already acknowledged the fact that the speed of light depends on the medium. His point, though, is that light must still travel at this speed (even though the speed itself depends on the medium).

<comment><USER3> The speed of light in a medium is still the speed of light in vacuum if you look carefully enough. The apparent slowdown is just an emergent effect due to the interaction of photons and the particles making up the medium.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What API Is Siri Using to Pull Cricket Scores - <AUTHOR> The macOS Sierra 10.12.4 update<p>• Siri support for checking Cricket scores, schedules, and player rosters from the Indian Premier League and International Cricket Council <comment><USER2> Not sure, but it looks like the ICC has an api here.

[https://cricketapi- icc.pulselive.com/fixtures?matchTypes=T20...](https://cricketapi- icc.pulselive.com/fixtures?matchTypes=T20I%2CT20%2CTEST%2CODI%2CFIRST_CLASS%2CLIST_A&tournamentTypes=I%2CWI&teamTypes=m&matchStates=C&page=0&pageSize=10&sort=desc)

Not sure if it is documented, but looks like you can kind of reverse it based on the query string parameters.

<comment><USER2> And it appears that the Indian Premier league has a jsonp based api.

This gets you the matches: [http://datacdn.iplt20.com/dynamic/data/core/cricket/2012/ipl...](http://datacdn.iplt20.com/dynamic/data/core/cricket/2012/ipl2016/matchSchedule2.js)

Then with the match id you can get the score. [http://datacdn.iplt20.com/dynamic/data/core/cricket/2012/ipl...](http://datacdn.iplt20.com/dynamic/data/core/cricket/2012/ipl2016/ipl2016-01/scoring.js) where ipl2016-01 is the match id.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Mobile app that works offline and syncs data periodically - <AUTHOR>

At our startup, our target market is increasingly conducting their business, on-the-go. Therefore, we have to augment our browser-based desktop app with a mobile app.
Therefore, I'm now evaluating what it would take to develop a mobile app that could work completely offline and sync transaction data periodically with the central server.
I've read briefly about Firebase, Parse, Usergrid, BaasBox, master-master replication, and the CAP theorem. As expected, I'm royally confused now!
We've already built out or backend using Postgres and RoR. Ideally I'd like to stick to it, especially Postgres, as we're dealing with financial transactions. We already have HTTP/JSON APIs to read/write data. We can also develop fine-grained APIs using Thrift, if required.
Now, my question is, is there a project/service/SDK out there which has already solved this data sync problem? What about conflict resolution when it comes to transaction data? I understand that this is like resolving merge conflicts in git, which basically requires human intervention, but is there an SDK that will reduce dev time for such scenarios? Can said SDK work with a custom backend API? <comment><USER2> I have been looking for tools to solve the same problem for a while now.

Based on documentation, the most promising approach seems to be to use Couchbase Mobile/Lite in the app, Couchbase Server on the server, and link them up with their sync gateway: [http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile/develop/guides/sync- ga...](http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile/develop/guides/sync- gateway/index.html)

It seems that this should make it possible to save data both on the client and server side, and leave sync and replication to the databases themselves.

Now, I haven't actually adopted it yet for two reasons:

* My server stack is built on top of Postgresql and Django, so I would need to either rip out Postgres and go all-in with Couchbase, or somehow sync between Postgres and Couchbase on the server, and

* Authentication, authorization and data access filtering has to be implemented as custom Javascript plugins in the sync gateway, so I would have to rewrite most of my server-side app logic. By default the clients have full write access to the server database...

But if you do give this a try, I would really like to hear about your experience.</comment>


The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee – Balzac - <AUTHOR> http://blissbat.net/balzac.html <comment><USER2> Previous discussions,

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13647098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13647098)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2880196](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2880196)</comment>


Erlang - Not just fault tolerant, but highly fault tolerant - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/201001928;jsessionid=DPXLN5AC1WZ2DQE1GHPCKH4ATMY32JVN

<comment><USER2> The posted link is dead because it has a session id in it. Here's the article: <http://drdobbs.com/201001928>

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the "problem" is that most people just don't need that kind of thing until they get really big.

When you're small, a language like Ruby or Python that's faster to develop in is more of an advantage.

<comment><USER4> Erlang is real fast to develop in. We write a lot of Erlang (switched to Erlang from being a Ruby shop in 2004) and it is lovely, fast-to- build/debug/change.

It is dynamically-typed (but you can do static analysis with Dialyzer to check that it is well behaved - sort of semi-typed, best-of-both-worlds).

Although Erlang is not (usually) interpreted, you can hot load Erlang binaries into a running system in the VM which is super-cool and makes development an unalloyed pleasure.

<comment><USER3> Erlang is a nice language in many ways, but my own experience is that Ruby is consistently faster for getting things done: it packs more power per line of code for most things.

Erlang's runtime is nicer, but like I said, that comes into play more once you've got popular, not when you're struggling to get traction and may need to change course quickly.

<comment><USER5> It depends on what you're doing, really. If you write something in Ruby that then performs like a dog and you have to rewrite in Erlang to get to anything remotely "web scale", I hope you learned a lot about your problem domain in Ruby because otherwise that's a pretty big waste of time.

I personally tend to use Erlang in the core of the product as the internal router and basic message bus, with the ability to "drop to" Erlang if I need to, but leave a lot of the business logic in higher-level languages in processes connected to the core. I don't necessarily want business logic in my Erlang, but I wouldn't even try to prototype a router-like program in anything but Erlang, because nothing is better at it than Erlang.

<comment><USER3> That sounds like a sensible way of doing things.

> I hope you learned a lot about your problem domain in Ruby because otherwise > that's a pretty big waste of time.

The biggest problem most startups have is no market, not being "web scale". You'll figure that out faster with Rails or Django as your web code. Clearly there are some areas where Erlang is really, really unbeatable, but... my whole point was that I see other people muscling into them, like node.js and Scala. Are they there yet? No. But give them some time and momentum and they'll get most of the way there; far enough for most people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow - 1.7M lines of Erlang, the largest functional program ever written, with 9 nines (99.9999999%) reliability.

</comment><comment><USER6> " Basically there are two models of concurrency:

        Shared state concurrency
        Message passing concurrency

"

Wouldn't the node.js style callbacks be a third type of concurrency? It's similar to message passing, but quite different from the user's perspective.

<comment><USER7> He did qualify that statement with "basically" and if you think about it, a "callback" function really is just sending a message.

<comment><USER6> Yes, however at the implementation level, message based concurrency is shared memory concurrency (as I understand anyway.) Callbacks seem to me an entirely a different abstraction.</comment></comment></comment>


How Hyperloop One Went Off the Rails - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-15/how-hyperloop-one-went-off-the-rails <comment><USER3> There's one thing that keeps bothering me about all the Hyperloop competitions and startups: everyone seems to be using maglev. This does not match up with the original Hyperloop proposal, which used an air compressor to suck up oncoming air and blow it out the bottom, creating a fluid bearing.

Maglev trains have been proposed before; there's nothing particular new or novel about the idea. One of the bigger problems with maglev is that the tracks are very expensive. One of the exciting things about the Hyperloop concept was that the tracks should be much cheaper, since all you need is a steel tube.

Is it really right to call it a Hyperloop if it eschews the original concept in favor of building a maglev train in an evacuated tube? Feels like they're taking a totally different idea and just using the Hyperloop name to generate hype.

<comment><USER4> I'm on one of the hyperloop teams (UCSB) that's using maglev.

We aren't using the type of maglev that's used in maglev trains where the track is magnetized and super expensive. We're using ArxPax hover engines[1]. They just spin a Halbach array[2] super fast and generate a hovering force off of an aluminum track.

The winning team of Design Weekend last January, MIT, is also using magnetic levitation but they are doing a passive version. The track still isn't magnetized, but their magnets generate their eddy currents just by the movement of the pod. It sort of "takes off."

The first reason we -- and others in the competition, though not the majority I believe -- went with maglev is that the we (well, the Mechanical Engineering students, I'm CS) couldn't find air-skis that worked at high speeds. Elon mentioned at Code Conference that they'd been tested up to Mach 1.1 but when I told the ME's of that they said they hadn't found anything they could use nor any research showing that the air being pushed out of the ski "keeps up" with the pod at high speeds.

In addition to the speed problem with air skis, they also hover much lower off the ground than the maglev and require much higher tolerances on the track (more expensive).

Part of the reason to have the competition is to try a bunch of different ideas at once and see what works best. I do believe there are plenty of teams that will be testing air-skis on the track at competition weekend. We'll see how it goes.

[1] [http://arxpax.com/product/hover-engine/](http://arxpax.com/product/hover- engine/)

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

<comment><USER5> In your opinion, how complex are the civil engineering challenges, e.g. keeping the tube straight?

<comment><USER4> I'm honestly not properly educated to answer that. My responsibly on the team has been controls & networking. I don't think the tube necessarily has to be perfectly straight as the pod could bank on the turns like a racecar or roller coaster.

I think the tube itself could be made reasonably cheaply compared to the CA high speed rail system. We transfer oil in huge pipelines with high pressure differences so I think it should be pretty feasible to keep it properly sealed. I'm more worried about the cost of the safety mechanisms and them being able to secure the land rights.

Elon mentioned at design weekend that initial versions could even use wheels if they aren't going over ~250MPH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To me all the Hyperloop startups have just been a scam to take big chunks of money from investors who believe in any Musk hype. None of them can still really explain how to overcome the big technical hurdles and I don't believe the cost estimates for a minute.

<comment><USER7> The technical hurdles are enormous but they are nothing compared to the economic hurdles.

Just look at the planned LA-SF high speed rails. It suffered delays and cost overruns over and over again. The latest figure of $68B most likely will not be enough[1].

And that is a garden-variety high speed rail that has been proven all over the world for decades. Hyperloop is completely unproven and requires construction of end-to-end airtight tubes.

If a few hundred miles of vanilla high speed rail costs $70B and counting, how much would hyperloop cost? $500B? $1T? It'll never work economically.

[1] [http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet- train-c...](http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-cost- final-20151025-story.html)

<comment><USER8> Hyperloop boosters also seem to ignore that it will require the same sorts of right-of-way acquisition as high speed rail, which is an enormous component of both the cost and political difficulty of building HSR.

<comment><USER9> The original Hyperloop paper addresses this issue; HSR can't run down the middle of I5 for most of its length. I have no idea what the costs will be, but if you're going to attack Hyperloop for getting this wrong, it'd be a good idea to attack what they actually proposed instead of something different.

<comment><USER10> The reason HSR rail wasn't routed down I5 is because the I5 corridor is unpopulated vs the HWY99 corridor which has several major cities.

<comment><USER9> HSR can't fit in the _median_ of I5; if you're going to have to buy a huge chunk of land, sure, you'll run it where there are more people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I dunno, after watching thunderf00t's video on hyperloops, I'm pretty convinced that there are fundamental engineering barriers that would have doomed the company anyway.

If not internal squabbles and lawsuits, the practical laws of nature would eventually have to be reckoned with (just like with Solar Freakin Roadways)

<comment><USER12> Maybe it's just me but I'm more tempted to trust engineers who's day-to-day job is engineering rather then a Youtuber who replaces vowels with letters.

But strawman/direct attacks aside.

In my experience when one engineer is disagreeing with a team of engineers, they're wrong or the team a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem they're working to solve.

<comment><USER13> Thunderf00t isn't just some average Joe on the street. The guy has a PhD in chemistry and has dedicated a decade to educate the world at large about matters of science and intellectualism. The world would be a better place if we had more Thunderf00ts on YouTube.

His videos on the hyperloop are pretty comprehensive and succinct about their reasoning. Why not watch them instead of mindlessly repeating the same strawman argument that every other Elon Musk fanboy/fangirl left on his videos?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDwe2M-LDZQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDwe2M-LDZQ) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk)

<comment><USER14> How does a PhD in chemistry make you an expert in mechanical engineering and fluid dynamics?

<comment><USER15> "Expert" is a vague term, but the parent didn't claim that it did. Do you think that one needs to be an 'expert' (whatever that means) in mechanical engineering and fluid dynamics to make meaningful criticism of a project like this?

<comment><USER16> Yes. (for technical criticism)

<comment><USER15> I hope you don't take that to such an extreme as to think that every line item of criticism in which Thunderf00t applied general science principles to the hyperloop paper under discussion is invalid due to a lack of sufficient technical expertise.

Right? Surely Thunderf00t is qualified to make some of the criticism he made?

I would agree that there are likely a few areas in which his criticism exceeded his understanding, though I have yet to read a criticism of his criticism that doesn't mis-represent his claims.

I still don't see the _specific_ relevance of mdorazio's comment to computerex's.

<comment><USER17> At this depth of the thread we're not discussing whether Thunderf00t is correct in his analysis. Computerex claimed that Thunderf00t wasn't "just some average Joe on the street." His background in chemistry was brought up to show that he has special standing. Mdorazio countered that from the perspective of mechanical engineering and fluid dynamics, he is in fact an average Joe on the street.

Doesn't mean he's wrong, just means he doesn't have special standing.

<comment><USER15> In my opinion, valarauca's comment is the correct place to start looking at the context, here. V. started the conversation in a way that could easily be construed as an effort to discredit Thunderf00t.

To me, Computerex seems to simply be saying "Thunderf00t has sufficient general knowledge of science to make his debunking videos worthy of watching".

You mention 'special standing', which suggests an 'all or nothing' approach to categorizing people's status and knowledge, rather than a more reality- accommodating recognition that expertise and knowledge are a matters of degree.

Mdorazio did not state what you say they did, they instead asked a leading question in which words were placed in another person's mouth. Further, Mdorazio would be incorrect to state that "from the perspective of mechanical engineering and fluid dynamics, he is in fact an average Joe on the street." because the average Joe on the street, _relatively speaking_ , is not as equipped as Thunderf00t to understand issues of mechanical engineering and fluid dynamics. I'm not saying that Thunderf00t is or is not properly equipped to make each criticism, just pointing out the problem with 'all or nothing' style thinking here.

You would be right to question whether Thunderf00t has sufficiently advanced and detailed knowledge to make each and every one of the criticisms that he makes, but this would depend on the specific criticism and the specifics of Thunderf00ts knowledge.

As it happens, not even having a PhD in fluid mechanics would guarantee that the critic has the relevant knowledge, nor is thinking through the problem correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's no way that dude's name is actually "Brogan BamBrogan"...

<comment><USER19> [http://www.techinsider.io/how-hyperloop-founder-brogan- bambr...](http://www.techinsider.io/how-hyperloop-founder-brogan-bambrogan- got-the-greatest-name-ever-2016-5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> i still have not been able to understand why a hyperloop is needed instead of just using pre existing high speed rail technology like shinkansen

<comment><USER21> That's especially the case when you consider that the proposed track across CA is really a fairly short track on which the Hyperloop would not save a great deal of time in aggregate: the Hyperloop has a passenger capacity of about 10% of high-speed rail. It's obvious that given the economic/technical costs the Hyperloop imposes, it's way more marginally efficient to build a Shinkansen or TGV-like system.

The Hyperloop might be worth pursuing it it were 10% of the price of HSR, but that's just not anywhere near the case, as other commenters have duly pointed out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think this project will amount to much; it almost certainly will not become part of a widely used mass transit system. It was always a tech geek vanity project at best, even before the serious trouble started.

</comment><comment><USER23> We already have a safer and less expensive mode of transportation: air travel.

Same speed, cheaper, exists today, no need to build tracks :)

<comment><USER24> Air travel is a huge pollutant and is literally destroying ecosystems and life all across the planet Earth. Either airplanes need to get to 0 greenhouse gas emissions, or we need new types of long-distance and fast transportation. The hyperloop is a great concept because it can significantly reduce the demand for high-polluting air travel. There are other ways too, of course - <USER2> isn't some single savior for everything. But you cannot pitch airplanes as an alternative. They are not.

<comment><USER25> Huge yes, but still only about 1-4% of total emissions. It's good to make inroads there, but I'm more worried about cars, power plants, etc. I think the biggest argument to make in favor of the hyperloop is ease of use, speed, and price.

After all, maybe we'll have battery powered airplanes some day or maybe we'll just use gliders for shorter distances though maybe that wouldn't be as great for a reliable transport.

<comment><USER26> 1-4% sounds low. The figure I'm more familiar with is about 6% of global petroleum use.

IndexMundi gives ~5 million barrels/day of jet fuel consumption, 2012.

[http://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?product=jet- fuel](http://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?product=jet-fuel)

That compares with 90 mbpd global petroleum consumption in 2012 (BP Annual Statistical Review, 2016)

That's 5.5% of _petroleum_ consumption, which is about 1/3 of total energy (BP, 2016). Carbon allocation is to petro, gas, and coal, so 2-4% of total CO2 emissions actually is about right.

OK, you pass ;-)

<comment><USER25> I did some googling beforehand, but I like your math better. ;)

<comment><USER26> I was going to disagree with you but talked myself out of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Title should be changed to 'Hyperloop One', there are actually multiple Hyperloop startups.

</comment><comment><USER28> Throwaway account.

I'm really disappointed to see Hyperloop One come crashing down, but I'm not surprised by it. Those who have worked closely with him have learned that Shervin Pishevar is absolutely toxic. There's not much else I can say without violating HN's civility rules, but this seems to be an open secret in SV. Some people love him, some just tolerate him, but many say they will never work with him again.</comment>


S. Korean babies born Dec. 31 become 2-year-olds next day - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/082ab3d8f16d4360bf9ade45c41925f8 <comment><USER2> You think this is weird. Then realize kids get put on their school group based on the birth year in the west anyway.

I wonder how a biological age based school grouping system would work out.

<comment><USER3> Biological age on which date?

<comment><USER4> Date of conception.

<comment><USER3> I meant what date do you compare ages on, but since you need to put students in classes (you can't exactly have a class for each date of birth).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I live in Seoul for more than a year. It is also a thing to get into Nightclub, they sometimes check your 'Korean' age</comment>


Minipresso – Hand-powered portable espresso machine - <AUTHOR> http://www.wacaco.com/

<comment><USER2> A friend brought a portable espresso machine camping and it made very nice coffee. I'm pretty sure it was the [http://www.handpresso.com/](http://www.handpresso.com/) . You boil water to the specified temperature (he had a hot water bottle with a temperature gauge) and pour it in the right compartment. You hand pump it up to pressure (there's a gauge). You put the grounds in the filter. Press a button and away you go.

<comment><USER3> why all the hastle? get an espresso cooker / cafetierra [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moka_pot](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moka_pot)

low tech and not a perfect espresso, but cheap, durable, no moving parts, no lubricant

<comment><USER4> This. It is a neat product, but nothing beats a mocka boiler. Lightweight, tested, well never break. I see not reason to buy this product other than me being a nerd and loving tech, but when i go on a hike i will bring a mocka boilder

<comment><USER5> Oh, they do break… I've had one explode in a newly renovated kitchen. Bent the metal vent hood above it to a frightening degree, missed my head by a foot or two and sprayed mocha onto the white walls and into every nook and cranny.

Not fun.

<comment><USER6> My moka pot is currently brewing. I'm now situated around the corner from it, shielded by a large cabinet. I've never heard of an exploding moka pot, but with all that pressure, I can understand. I'll be checking the valve after it's done!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the FAQ: "we spent three months to look for an alternative of the use of lubrificant for the semi-automatic piston as such substances appear to not be tasteless."

Glad to hear we'll only be drinking tasteless lubricant with our coffees!

<comment><USER8> That reads like they were looking for an alternative to using lubricant at all i.e. in their design choices.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps. It'd be interesting to see if coffee oil worked though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've got (an earlier model of) [http://espressounplugged.com/rok](http://espressounplugged.com/rok) Less portable, but much less fiddly than this minipresso seems to be.

<comment><USER10> How's the rok holding up? I always wanted to get one. But I read reviews that it had issues with balance and it would topple easily etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cute, but I'd wait to see reviews on the espresso it makes. I have a myPressi Twist which makes outstanding espresso but it requires me to preboil the parts to bring them up to temp , the whole process is finicky if you really care about coffee. Not sure how this falls onthe curve

<comment><USER10> Also it needs compressed air capsules right? Those need to be refilled. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not enabling my auto-rotate screen and turning my phone sideways for this.

<comment><USER13> I'm on a _desktop_ and they're telling me to rotate my screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recall Phil Hendrie did an Art Bell spoof that featured a hand-crank espresso machine (for the post y2k apocalypse) that still makes me chuckle when I think about it so many years later.

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks promising! I have been looking into the MyPressi ([http://mypressi.com/](http://mypressi.com/)), as it has a reputation of punching far above its weight as far as a good cup of espresso goes, but in the end I decided against it because it needs compressed gas cartridges to operate.

The Minipresso appears to rely solely on hand pumping, so I wonder if it still gives as good a result.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't know... They've applied a lot of technology to end up with something that's more complicated, slower more expensive and objectively worse (mmm lubricant) than an Aerobie AeroPress.

An AeroPress is also _really_ simple to clean which this really doesn't seem to be.

</comment><comment><USER17> Neat idea, but honestly I've given up on brewing my own coffee. I now buy cold-brewed coffee (TJ's, but other brands are good also) and the acid content is much lower than hot brewed, and there is no mess or grinding involved.

</comment><comment><USER18> e molto erotico !!

Let the home page load fully, then scroll to the bottom.

<comment><USER19> Hot pumping action!

<comment><USER20> Literally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Where is the heat coming from?

<comment><USER22> I think you put hot water in.

Creating really nice steamed milk is more difficult than creating an intense coffee liquid that will I enjoy.

<comment><USER23> Have you tried a manual stovetop frother? It's made of metal, and it has a plunger with a frothing head (looks like a coil-type whisk) on the end.

You fill it with milk, put it on a gas burner or electric hot plate, warm it until the milk is hot enough (around 60-65C). Then you take it off the heat and push the frother up and down until the milk is sufficiently aerated. Here's the one I have:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000X7GF40](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000X7GF40)

It produces microfoam that is at least good as those electric frothers from Nespresso etc. Not as good as a steamer wand, but close.

<comment><USER24> The manual frothers usually say that they work best with non-fat milk. Yuck.

<comment><USER23> Mine works great with whole milk, actually. I don't use anything else; lower- fat milk just isn't capable of foaming, in my experience.

(The HIC one doesn't come with any instructions and I'm pretty sure they don't say anything about the type of milk to use.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does it taste like good Portuguese and Italian espresso, though?

</comment><comment><USER26> Hmm, I wonder if I can make tea in it. (sip)

<comment><USER24> I have never seen a tea-maker that required or used high pressure, while espresso machines always use high pressure.

<comment><USER26> That doesn't mean that tea can't be made in that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Forcing mobile users to rotate their devices to landscape mode to see the site seems like a very lazy design decision.

<comment><USER28> Even after rotating, the text was too small to read (on an iPhone 5).

<comment><USER29> On an Nexus 5, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It seems to want me to rotate my monitor to view the site. Very poor design.</comment>


Gray code at the pediatrician's office - <AUTHOR> http://blog.plover.com/math/gray-codes.html <comment><USER2> Hmm. As a geek I like Gray code and think it has many useful applications, but this is not one of them: _Iris stood against the post and the nurse adjusted the bracket to exactly the top of her head. Then she read off Iris's height from an attached display._

How is this an advance on looking at a conventionally numbered ruler (with a similar bracket to touch the top of the head) and writing down the number? It's technological and presumably expensive, but it isn't delivering any discernible benefit that I can see. Measuring height via computer vision + Gray code would be very useful in security applications where you want to log biometric information for a large number of people efficiently (camera + abstract-looking wall design in an access corridor or at a security checkpoint), but if you're paying a human to take the measurement you might as well use a scale that's easily human-readable ( _ie_ at a glance). I hope the doctor's scale was at least using bluetooth or similar to automatically update the patient's digital record...but I wouldn't bet on it.

<comment><USER3> Presumably it's considered useful because there's a measurable error rate in the nurse a) reading -and/or- b) recording the observed data. Assuming this thing works properly more often, you've not only guaranteed you get the data entered properly, but it's more likely to be right.

<comment><USER4> I imagine this is compounded by the subject matter being measured. A simple "click and lock the measurement" button would be invaluable when trying to measure the height of a squirming child.

Simple, easy to read numbers that eliminate guesswork would seem to make a nurse's job much simpler (or allow them to utilize people who are not registered nurses to collect this data). There have been similar advances in scales, blood pressure cuffs, heart rate monitors, etc. All are readable using analog gauges, yet they progressed to digital devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previous discussions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=667689>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=899913>

<comment><USER6> OK, it may be an old question but why doesn't HN search for old URLs before allowing you to post? I missed this the first time around and am really glad that it got posted (and glad you found the dupes) but most reposts are bad. I think something like a URL check would be valuable.

<comment><USER5> There is a URL check, but it only finds exact matches, and only if the URL tested against is in memory. If it's old enough and hasn't been accessed recently, it's not found.

I thought this was in jacquesm's FAQ, but it appears not to be:

<http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ>

You might suggest it to him, although he's very busy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's another visualization of the Gray code: <http://billmill.org/static/perm4.png>

(it's from a few visualizations of permutations I did a while ago: <http://billmill.org/permvis.html> )

</comment><comment><USER8> A partially related topic(maybe many of you already know): I was learning about minimizing logic expressions the other day, and I learned about the Karnaugh Map, which uses Gray code for its axes. You can read more about it here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map>

</comment><comment><USER9> When I looked at that pattern I though "Looks like one of Wolframs FSAs". And after reading the encoding algorithm, seems like it is. See [http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ElementaryCellularAutomato...](http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ElementaryCellularAutomatonRulesByGrayCode/)

</comment><comment> T-hawk Gray code was used as long ago as the Atari 2600 game system, designed in 1977. The system's clock for drawing out sprite graphics pixels counts in Gray code internally. Why? Because a binary adder could have too long a propagation delay. To increment 01111111 to 10000000 requires seven carry operations which would not always complete within a single clock cycle. (A modern ALU has tons of transistors to compute all those bits in parallel, but the Atari 2600 mass market game console did not have the budget for that many transistors.) Gray code was the solution. It always changes only one bit to increment a counter so the operation was guaranteed to complete quickly.

<comment><USER10> No, they didn't use Grey code for that, they used a "linear feedback shift register". A LFSR has lower propagation delay than a normal binary counter.

The driving controllers did use Grey code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> extremely fascinating, but what problem does this solve that a standard analog equivalent ruler/markings didn't?

<comment><USER12> The optical machine doesn't have to count lines, it can read it's place on the bar from a small (2cm wide) part, rather than keeping an incrementer from the bottom or top.

<comment><USER11> I understand that. but whenever I'm at the doctor's they still have a graduated wall against which they put patients to get their height.

I'm all for digitizing things, but is there any reason to replace this?

<comment><USER13> In regard to digital measuring devices, they are much easier to recalibrate than say a strip of metal with graduated marks. This can lengthen it's lifetime of use, as well as speed installation and manufacturing time as neither has to be as precise as the analog versions.

Another perceived benefit is that the indicator dial/display can be offset from the scale. I know I've seen some height gauges that partially cover the numbers that indicate their position. Digital solutions allow the measuring marks to be independent of how one takes the measurement.

<comment><USER14> Why would a ruler marked in binary not need to be as precise as a ruler marked in decimal? Changing the base of the numbers does little to affect how one attaches it to the wall.

<comment><USER13> After it was manufactured, it could be calibrated and the counter could then tell itself that 100cm is actually only 98cm due to manufacturing tolerance errors, for example. Then, after it was installed on the wall one centimeter too high, it could then be re-calibrated to reflect that error as well.

Abstracting the way the device counts (incremented binary marks on the wall) away from the measurement (inches or centimeters, etc) with a re-programmable digital device has many benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is incredibly interesting. Thank you!</comment>


The Three Amigos - <AUTHOR> http://jonkruger.com/blog/2012/01/04/the-three-amigos/ <comment><AUTHOR> We followed a similar process when I worked at Intelliware.

Before commencing work on a feature, the team would gather around the whiteboard and discuss the intent of feature, and list out the tasks required to implement it.

An estimate was added to each task, and summed up to provide an overall estimate for the feature.

Involving the entire team (BAs, devs, QAs, PMs) meant that everyone knew what was going on, and often surfaced ways to leverage existing components. It also helped to avoid conflicts between features impacting the same parts of the codebase.</comment>


Land Rover's new Discovery search and rescue SUV has a roof-mounted drone - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/07/land-rovers-new-discovery-search-and-rescue-suv-has-a-roof-mounted-drone/ <comment><USER2> Surprisingly the Daily Mail has a much more extensive write up of the vehicle and drone [0], along with plenty of photos. Normally I'd avoid linking to the Mail!

Jag's SVO group does some remarkable vehicles from the gorgeous F-Type Project 7, to bullet proof Range Rovers.

[0] [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4288250/Red-Cross- he...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4288250/Red-Cross-heroes-Land- Rover-rescue-drone.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sure there's a point in on the adoption graph of any technology which should be labeled as "Used to generate PR buzz". Second Life, 3D printers, etc. My gut feeling is that it comes just before the mass realization that something isn't ever going to be mainstream.

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe I"m missing something, but what's the purpose of launching from a roof box? It just seems like a gimmick. I can launch a multi-rotor from the roof of my car, but that's hardly news-worthy.

Second, why a quad-copter? Anyone that knows anything about multirotors knows that a quad-coptor has multiple single points of failure, where a hex or octo can be controlled with single or multiple failures respectively.

Seems like they just slapped a hobby drone on the roof of a car "because marketing". It doesn't deserve to be on HN.

<comment><USER5> I think the idea is you can be driving around and launch and recover it without leaving the vehicle. While one person is driving, another navigating, another operating a radio, a fourth person can operate a drone without interfering with any of them.

That seems useful to me. I guess it must be useful to the Red Cross as well since they're using it. Do you have more experience in search and rescue than they do?

> "because marketing"

Who are you quoting with these quotation marks? That's not why they say they've done it. If it's your opinion don't make it look like you're quoting someone else.

<comment><USER4> Your argument is weak, and clearly you recognise that, as the to appeals to authority, and mistaken [1 8a] questioning of something as trivial as the use of quotation marks are a poor attempt to distract from the question.

[1] [http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/quotes.asp](http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/quotes.asp)

<comment><USER5> No I didn't appeal to authority, I appealed to the fact that they had used the tool and nobody in these comments had. That's concrete relevant experience in the topic at hand, not just authority.

<comment><USER4> > I appealed to the fact that they had used the tool and nobody in these > comments had.

So demonstrating that you didn't even read the article.

It's not due until June 2017 (how long does it take to fit a roofbox to a car?!) and then then only for pretend use in a training facility.

It's also clear from the video that the GUI is an artists impression.

Like I said "because marketing".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another cool thing about Land Rovers and Jaguars is that the body panels are built from ~50% recycled aluminium.

<comment><USER7> Why is that cool? Many cars are made from wholly or partially recycled raw materials. The only thing that is hard to recycle is certain plastics but future recycling is already part of the design phase of almost all vehicles.

This article:

[https://www.thebalance.com/auto-recycling-facts-and- figures-...](https://www.thebalance.com/auto-recycling-facts-and- figures-2877933)

has the percentage of recycled material in a car pegged at ~80%.

<comment><USER8> Not OP, but my understanding is that aluminum paneling is uncommon enough and supposedly superior due to lighter weight than conventional steel paneling. Perhaps the major draw is aluminum paneling, with the 50% recycled material a nice extra?

<comment><USER7> That's reflected in the vehicle price, aluminum vehicles are substantially more expensive (and more expensive to work on after an accident) than steel.

Aluminum is extremely well recyclable, pretty much everything you buy that is made of aluminum will have a substantial portion of recycled material in it.

It's pure marketing to make it seem as though that's special somehow. The whole idea of something like an SUV being somehow green is a nice example of how 'green marketing' can be ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Magnets lock the drone in place while the Discovery is login, ...", "... extending the Red Cross staff's ability o cover terrain beyond ...", "... partnership Land Rover has had with the Red Cross across the glob, ..."

I was going to go and post a link to Paul Graham's "Submarine" article[0], but instead, I have to ask: What ever happened to editing? I know it's fashionable to be first with the news these days whether you know the full story or not, but this is just terrible. I'd be ashamed if it were my name on the article.

(Any typos in the above are a clever use of irony ;-) )

[0] [http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER10> Couldn't agree more. Did the author not even bother to run this through a basic spell check? Even my browser will highlight words in a text-entry field that are misspelled.

<comment><USER11> I don't think any of those examples would be caught by spellcheck. "login", "o" and "glob" are all considered words by mine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe the car-periscope from "Curb Your Enthusiasm" was a billion dollar idea after all.

</comment><comment><USER13> cars should have drones instead of dashcams in future

<comment><USER14> Drones are nice and all, but using a drone as a dash-cam, that's going to be expensive as hell since the drone would have to have a top speed equal to the top speed of the vehicle. Weather conditions, powering the device, obstacle detection.

<comment><USER15> A drone with a camera that could be deployed when required rather than permanently could be useful for parking manoeuvres, extra visibility when overtaking, checking out why traffic has stopped, and so on.

<comment><USER16> Would be better to have a stick with a camera. Or many sticks with cameras.</comment></comment></comment></comment>