Lake Michigan Is So Clear Right Now Its Shipwrecks Are Visible from the Air - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sunken-ships-lake-michigan-are-visible-ghostly-blue-180955108/ <comment><USER2> The US Coast Guard Station out of Traverse City initially took/posted these photos to their Facebook page... then MLive picked it up and now Smithsonian Magazine.

Here is their Facebook page if anyone is interested, they post some pretty interesting stuff: [https://www.facebook.com/AIRSTATVC](https://www.facebook.com/AIRSTATVC)

</comment><comment><USER3> I went kayaking in Little Traverse Bay (an inlet of Lake Michigan) a few years back, and it is usually always that clear. It was pretty amazing to be swimming and boating in water as clear as the Caribbean in Michigan. Someone told me it is so clear because of all the springs that empty into the Bay.

<comment><USER4> I don't know how true this is, but my mom used to live on Lake Michigan when she was ~7 and used to tell me how gross the lakes were before the Clean Water Act, and how amazing the turn-around. If so, it's a nice example for the jaded that government can do some things right.

<comment><USER5> Lake Michigan was fine in the 1980s (when I grew up swimming in it). Even during weather that would really churn things up the water was still fine.

Another comment mentions Zebra mussels, which have made the lakes quite a bit clearer in recent years (but not necessarily to good effect).

<comment><USER6> With the size of the Great Lakes, it wouldn't be that surprising that some bays or inlets would be clean while others were disgusting.

I don't know about Lake Michigan, but I wouldn't really have advocated swimming in the parts of Lake Ontario I was around in the '80s.

<comment><USER7> I was living in Toronto in the 1990's and I wouldn't swim in Lake Ontario if you paid me.

And anyway this is a seasonal effect brought on by a larger than usual ice content this past winter. If I read the article correctly this won't last long and run off from surrounding farms and industry will have the lake algae ridden and opaque before too long...

<comment> semi-extrinsic I wouldn't be so quick to blaim run off without evidence that this is the main cause. Diving in the ocean in northern Europe you experience the same thing: you have a choice between 4 degrees C and clear water or 15 degrees C and murky green. Runoff isn't a significant cause of plankton blooming in the North Atlantic. Temperature is.

<comment><USER8> Still, it requires nitrogen to get an algae bloom, right? Has to come from somewhere.

<comment><USER9> Phosphorus is the limiting nutrient, not nitrogen. But yes, it's nearly all from ag and wastewater.

<comment> semi-extrinsic In the ocean, iron plays the role of phosphorus.

And it looks like the evidence for run off causing algal blooms in the Great Lakes is pretty convincing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The descriptions of the shipwrecks pictured on that site all seem to be in water shallower than 15 feet. To make their point about how clear the water is, it might have been useful to show some shipwrecks that are deeper than a swimming pool.

<comment><USER11> It really boggles my mind that a 130-foot ship can "sink" in only 6-12 feet of water. (I know that 130' is the length, not the depth, but...) A tall guy could stand on the keel of that wreck and still keep his head above the surface on a calm day.

On the other hand, shallow water might be even more dangerous because every wave smashes your ship against the bottom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is incredible!

I've done some diving in Lake Huron just north of Port Huron, MI (just past where the 'thumb' connects to Canada for those unfamiliar with the area) and was pretty amazed with the number of wrecks + the clarity at depth (granted we didn't go much deeper than 90ft if I recall correctly). If anyone does any diving I would highly recommend them coming to great lakes (including the Canadian side as well - Tobermory was awesome).

<comment><USER13> The fresh water of the great lakes is great to preserve wrecks.

<comment><USER14> And the weather is great for causing them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> -1 for disabling zoom. I'd love to see it closeup on my iPad, but the web authors have decided that this isn't permitted. Why do websites go out of their way to remove useful functionality?

<comment><USER16> Meanwhile I'm geeking out over the number of things Ghostery blocked on the site. 38 - that'd have to be a record.

<comment><USER17> That site has the most insufferable mobile css and ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As someone who grew up near Lake Michigan, it is truly bizarre to see the lake this clear. These pictures look like they came out of the Gulf of Mexico!

<comment><USER19> Many smaller, connected lakes are clear too due to invasive zebra mussels.

<comment><USER20> Booo zebra mussels... Cutting my feet and killing off fish.

Fun fact, single colonies of zebra mussels may contain over 70,000 mussels per square meter!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd be worried if I owned the house in the last photo. It appears the land is eroding and the house is REALLY close to the edge.

</comment><comment><USER22> Anyone who has dumped a body in there will be pretty worried right now.

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe they can finally find the wreckage of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 2501

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Orient_Airlines_Fligh...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Orient_Airlines_Flight_2501)

</comment><comment><USER24> Wouldn't that make it Pond Michigan?

</comment><comment><USER25> I hope SkyBox / Planet Labs / etc are getting some great aerial imagery!</comment>


Dear Rotten Tomatoes: I want Leonardo DiCaprio not these other Leonardo's - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@DearTechnology/dear-rotten-tomatoes-i-want-leonardo-dicaprio-not-these-other-leonardos-ac61b41e4a9e <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, this is my first blog post! Its about my saga of searching for Leonardo DiCaprio on the Rotten Tomatoes website. Search on that site is about the worst I've ever seen.

It's a comedic spin on a series I hope start about venting on various things in the tech space. Let me know your thoughts!</comment>


Show HN: Bootstrap.io - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/tech/bootstrap-io#comment-357503 <comment><USER2> Direct link [http://bootstrap.io/](http://bootstrap.io/)

"An all-in-one platform to host and launch your website without the hassle of building one."

</comment><comment><USER2> Found a typo on the top right of the homepage: 'No create card required'

<comment><USER3> Hey @mtmail!

Thanks for the find. Slipped our hands on this one. Just updated the copy.

Definitely would like your thoughts on this product.

Just a snippet from PH that we wrote their: Bootstrap IO hosts and automatically creates your website and landing pages for all your apps in under 3 minutes.

When you're coding for weeks, days, and hours on pushing your app live, it's a pain to switch gears into a different language to create a website to showcase your apps. Bootstrap.io takes care of all of that for you - saving you weeks in development.

All of that extra (and we do really mean a lot of extra) time can now be allocated back into improving and iterating on your apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shouldn't we rather post direct link and add related links in comments?

<comment><USER3> Hey @jakozaur!

A direct link to the site is here: [http://bootstrap.io/](http://bootstrap.io/)

As a quick snippet of why we've developed Bootstrap.io as a value proposition: Developing apps is hours on hours of coding weeks, days, and hours. On top of that - you have to switch gears to create your website. This process can also take weeks to complete. Now what if, your site can be hosted, created, and the content auto-generated for you in under 3 minutes? That is what we offer, with a great design to display your app site.

Attached below is a sample site created. Bootstrap IO automatically creates the home page as well as all the landing pages for your apps.

Website: [http://284417353.bootstrap.io/](http://284417353.bootstrap.io/)

App List page: [http://284417353.bootstrap.io/apps/](http://284417353.bootstrap.io/apps/)

iOS app landing page example: [http://284417353.bootstrap.io/itunes-movie- trailers/](http://284417353.bootstrap.io/itunes-movie-trailers/)

OSX app landing page example: [http://284417353.bootstrap.io/imovie-2/](http://284417353.bootstrap.io/imovie-2/)

And customizable page layout via the dashboard: [http://284417353.bootstrap.io/pages/](http://284417353.bootstrap.io/pages/)</comment></comment>


Creator Mansions, Shitposts and Chief Meme Officers - <AUTHOR> https://socialstudies.substack.com/p/creator-mansions-shitposts-and-chief <comment><USER2> What's with all the emojis?

I tried reading the article, but I gave up after twenty or so emojis. They're attention-grabbing for no reason.

There's something seriously off-putting about so many emojis in an article written by an adult. It's like the author doesn't even care about his own writing.

<comment><USER3> If that's a lot of emoji to you, you're going to be in for some pain as more zoomers age into the workplace. This wouldn't be out of place in professional communication at several places I've worked.</comment></comment>


Disconnect, The Anti-Ad Tracking Startup, Now Has A Privacy App For Children - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/12/disconnect-the-anti-ad-tracking-startup-now-has-a-privacy-app-specifically-for-children-built-by-an-ex-nsa-engineer/

<comment><USER2> It seems from the video/screenshot [1] that they are just adding VPN settings (still cool).

[1] [https://mediacru.sh/QGOXHRWC9fpZ](https://mediacru.sh/QGOXHRWC9fpZ)

<comment><USER3> Sort of. :-) We're using iOS's VPN capabilities but not actually running a VPN. As the Wireshark session in the video shows (but please verify yourself!), blocked tracking requests never leave your iPhone or iPad (are never sent) with Disconnect Kids installed.

(I'm one of the devs.)

<comment><USER4> Hi, Can you explain how it works in some more detail?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's all in the video!

[http://youtu.be/HverdXMmuEE](http://youtu.be/HverdXMmuEE)

<comment><USER4> I saw the video. I was asking how is the app able to block the tracking on the whole iOS device? What does the configuration profile this app installs exactly do?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Electricity From WiFi Signals - <AUTHOR> http://www.ohgizmo.com/2010/01/09/ces2010-rca-airnergy-charger-harvests-electricity-from-wifi/ <comment><USER2> On the surface, it looks like a really cheap scam.

The demo is so easy to cook: the device already has a battery, and you can load a blackberry when you plug it to it? Sure. How do I know the energy is coming from "ambient wifi signals"?

I'm also suspicious of basic physics. Basic specs for a blackberry charger: 5V at 800mA.

In theory, I could place 100 of those devices easily in a room, and they would all be able to generate such power. I'll be nice and assume that I can't stack them in 3D because they'd block each other's reception, so I'll agree that I can't stack 10,000 of them in one room and get the same results.

How much power do 100 blackberry chargers generate, and how does it compare to the power generated by one wifi antenna? If the former is more than the latter, we have a serious physics impossibility.

<comment><USER3> 5V * 0.8A = 4W.

Wireless access points are around 50–100mW. Even if you put a 100% efficient Dyson sphere around your APs, you'd need 40–80 of 'em.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why use WiFi? Don't AM, and TV signals have way more energy? Is WiFi really the highest energy source available to you?

Or is this just to make it buzzword compliant?

What about visible light? Even indoors, if the lights are on, there is far more energy available via visible light.

And WiFi barely even transmits if someone is not using it. Does this device have some sort of busy loop keeping the accesspoint constantly transmitting? That's really going to be great for interference won't it.

<comment><USER5> And if it works with wi-fi at 2.6GHz, why would it not work with the more broadly available and higher-powered 3G cell signals at 2.1GHz?

<comment><USER6> The device would need a power meter to detect and switch channels, which involves altering the resonance frequency of the antenna, ( I suspect an amperian loop ) [http://www.physics.upenn.edu/courses/gladney/phys151/lecture...](http://www.physics.upenn.edu/courses/gladney/phys151/lectures/lecture_mar_07_2003.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Near as I can tell from the video, that little white box is just a little white box. The Lexan box that guy is leaning on appears to have a much larger antenna in it, and that's what the cable plugged into the BlackBerry is plugged in to.

The guy even says "The _goal_ is to get it down to a box this size". That information seems to be missing from the blog post.

<comment><USER8> It appears that it's this box that is currently harvesting the energy

[http://www.engadget.com/photos/airnergy-wifi-power-system- ha...](http://www.engadget.com/photos/airnergy-wifi-power-system-hands- on/#2603262)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So now we can have self-powered Wifi access points? ;)

I'm surprised this has the RCA name on it, I don't see how you could physically make this device work with any degree of reliability in a common environment.

Given the size and price tag ($40), there can't be a whole lot in this box, other than a tuned coil and some passive circuitry. It seems like if it was "that easy" it would have been done by now.

</comment><comment><USER10> Physics fail. I can't see how they would be allowed to market this?

<comment><USER11> Kindly demonstrate the alleged 'physics fail'. Harvesting the energy of a dozen wifi and GSM signals 24/7 seems a reasonable way to yield a significant amount of energy.

Wait, I'll do the math myself: my accesspoint sends at 100mW. If this harvesting device is 10x10cm and, on average, 1 meter from the accesspoint, it will pick up 0.01/Pi ~ 0.3% of that signal, or 0.3 mW. Let's cut that in three to account for conversion efficiency: 0.1 mW.

My phone has a 0.9 Ah battery. At 3.7V, this is 12kJ. With an uptime of 200 hours, this means it sends out 17 mW to the world. So could I use this device to power my phone? Only with 170 close-by accesspoints and after 200 hours would my phone be fully charged. So it indeed sounds pretty bogus.

Edit: updated as per commentary below and I grant this probably overestimates the actual working of the device. Evenn on an expo, with a couple of hundred hundred GSM signals in the vicinity, it wouldn't work.

<comment><USER12> You're still off by a power of ten in the areas: 10x10cm = 0.01 m2. (Edit: by the way, I think you also plugged in the sphere _volume_ formula - surface is 4.pi.r²).

Radius of one meter is a bit close - make that three, and you're off by another order of magnitude - 10 uW harvestable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this technology related with spaced-based solar panel satellite as they use a smilar principle ?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power>

<http://www.nss.org/settlement/ssp/library/index.htm>

If we can transform a huge wifi-like signal coming from space onto electricity, surely it's possible to do the same thing at a smaller scale?

</comment><comment><USER14> The plug in charger is a nice idea, but the wifi recharging battery is a killer app. If they've got a patent on the battery, and they can have it built into ebook readers and other mobile devices they stand to make a lot of money.

</comment><comment><USER15> If everybody ends up using these devices (and creating black holes for the signal), the gsm providers have to increase the output power on their antennas in order to get the same coverage as before.

</comment><comment><USER16> A few months ago MIT's Technology Review (<http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/22764/>) said this could be in the market in 3-5 years, so it makes sense to see a product testing the waters and reaching out for early adopters at this point.</comment>


Show HN: HTML to Figma – Import a Live Site Design into Figma - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/builderio/html-to-figma <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

I made this to make my design and development workflows much quicker and easier. I use it for lots of things, such as -

\- Importing a page of mine as a starting point for mocking up a new feature or design change for it

\- Importing a web design I like as a starting point for a design I want to make

\- Importing live code components to save as symbols for a design library

If you have any feedback at all, please share!

<comment><USER2> This is amazing and exactly what I've been looking for. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is great, but what would be even more awesome would be to also go the other way!

<comment><AUTHOR> funny you mention, that's exactly what I'm working on for it next!

<comment><USER2> That would be nice, but the conversion from HTML -> Figma is definitely most awesome for my needs. I start with a lot of designs that need to be reworked, but the other way is also definitely useful!</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Zesty Nimble, lightweight direct drive extruder for 3D Printers - <AUTHOR> http://zesty.tech <comment><AUTHOR> A friend and I have been working on this for close to a year now, carriage weight per hot-end is now under 35grams.

Feel free to ask questions.</comment>


Show HN: A webextension that bothers me about what I am currently working on - <AUTHOR> https://waywo.simon-frey.eu/ <comment><USER2> Interesting! What did you use to make your landing page? I like how simple it is.</comment>


Apple's iTouch Tablet Will Become Its Flagship Product - <AUTHOR> http://seekingalpha.com/article/151137-why-apple-s-itouch-tablet-will-become-its-flagship-product?source=yahoo <comment><USER2> > We are witnessing a transition in the way the Internet is used. Mobile > content requires a tailor made user experience that is not efficiently > delivered by the traditional website model. Although we have grown > accustomed to navigating the Web by browsing websites on our PC, consumers > are showing an affinity for the App Store model.

Couldn't agree more.

Some of us might dislike this but it's hard not to see where the users are going.

At least in the near future. But I can't foresee a reason for turning back to the browser.

Appstores are also a solution to all the speculations about how to monetize content. If the medium is the message, websites (when interacting with them with the browser) are mostly perceived as free content. Appstores are a different brainframe.

Like I said in other comments I'm just observing the trend. I'm not saying that I'm absolutely happy with this.

<comment><USER3> I think it's hard to make the claim that apps are more popular than websites on the iPhone. Unfortunately, it's hard to find data on overall mobile web traffic (or total web traffic in general), but over 60% of all web traffic from a mobile device comes from the iPhone. My guess, though, is that the number of websites visited since the iPhone's release hugely eclipses the number of apps downloaded.

And I'm not sure you can call the app store a monetization solution either, considering that >90% of all downloads are free apps.

<comment><USER4> that's not what I've heard at all.

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/15/free-apps-no-longer- dom...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/15/free-apps-no-longer-dominating- iphone-app-store/)

according to that article, only 20 percent of apps in the store are free.

<comment><USER5> Apps in the app store and apps downloaded are two very different things, and that article doesn't cover the latter.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. We're talking about download ratios, not sheer number of apps available. And the total numbers are extremely lopsided in favor of free apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> More accurately titled "I want you to believe Apple will have another iPhone- like hit because I'm long on Apple stock, and I'm pitching my hopes on the Apple tablet rumours finally being correct (it's got to happen someday, hasn't it?)".

But that's not quite so catchy a title.

<comment><USER7> I don't agree with the article but I don't think it's fair to accuse the author of trying to sway opinion for the sake of his stock. After all, he probably wouldn't be long on AAPL if he didn't believe what he was writing.

<comment><USER6> I'm just getting a bit bored of all the Apple tablet rumours. They've been circulating for years.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I agree. I suppose now that the phone is out we'll be stuck with tablet/netbook rumors for the next half decade until the next big "wouldn't it be cool if Apple made a ____ " comes along.... probably something wearable...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A tablet will simply never replace the Kindle and other readers like it such as thins article suggests. One of the most important feature of the Kindle is that it uses E-Ink! It holds a particular screen and only uses charge to change the text when a "page flip" occurs. A tablet will not come remotely close to matching this kind of machine in battery life or readability (since e-ink is less harsh on the eyes than an lcd).

I think people comparing the Kindle to the mysterious Apple Tablet is getting out of control. If Amazon would just lower the crazy price tag on the kindle it would spread like wild fire.....

I am anxious to see what apple does with tablet tech though. I own a tablet already and if apple can make a better one for cheaper I would consider switching.

<comment><USER9> Re tablets replacing Kindles: think PixelQi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Someone needs to keep track of these types of predictions and track how often the author is wrong. It is costless to make big predictions, because rarely do people come back and say "You were wrong." It would be nice if I could search for this author's forecasting performance.

<comment><USER11> That was the entire premise of my YC app back in 2007, actually. Here's a mockup, in case anyone's interested in working on it ;D

<http://reidesign.us/misc/veracifyWebsite3-5.png>

Promises are used like credit, but the tab often goes unpaid because people forget. Politicians, blogs (especially Apple blogs), and talking heads have made an art of exploiting this 'loophole', so it would be nice to have a website where you could track their past performance re: promises and predictions.

<comment><USER10> Exactly what I thought someone should write. I gather it didn't work out because it was difficult to monetize?

<comment><USER11> Honestly, it just never went anywhere. I'd pick it up today if I wasn't already seeing a lot of success bootstrapping an online retail store. It's often in the back of my mind, though.

In a roundabout way, I suppose monetization is the root problem -- I didn't (and still don't) have the time/money/connections necessary for a Twitter- style 'build it and the money will come' business plan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I very much doubt it. I see a limited market for this type of device.

Too expensive for the netbook market. Too big and redundant for the iPhone market. Too slow & limited for the MacBook Pro market.

So who buys it? PMP fanatics? Tablet fanatics? There's probably a healthy niche market there (ala Macbook Air) but not enough consumers to be a flagship product. All bets are off if Apple releases it at a much lower price point than rumored. A subsidized offering might play but only if Apple can work with carriers who offer reasonable data-only prices.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a ridiculous 'article'. Where to start... Just flag it Ronnie, just flag it.

<comment><USER14> It seems that "connecting the dots" failed in this article on so many levels...

1\. No, I don't consider .99 fart apps as revolutionary improvement of my living room

2\. Netbooks and Amazon kindles/other ebook readers comprise one of the most rapidly growing markets, "fad"? Whatever.

3\. Skype is already here. And, "free" and "Apple" don't go next to each other in a sentence. Steve will find a way to monetize on your free skype chats.

4\. Take any other non-apple phone - see, no carrier exclusivity.. right now, without needing to go to the future and buy new apple gadget.

No really, I think it might live in some homes but revolution? Now come on, there's not a single hint. I think it will be EOLed by 2011.

<comment><USER15> Isn't a "rapidly growing market" part of the definition of a fad?

<comment><USER16> Yes, but a fad involves a rapidly growing market, whereas a rapidly growing market does not necessarily have to be a fad.

I don't think netbooks are a fad, but I also don't think they will last in the long term. Netbook manufacturers have been cannibalizing their higher-margin products with razor thin margins on their netbooks. This cannot continue if these companies expect to survive.

Not to mention netbooks have been absolutely destroying user experiences all around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As seen here: <http://www.gibsonandlily.com/blogs/72>

I have heard countless rumors like this one; about apple developing a tablet.

The question becomes "why?".

I think that very few people would try to make the argument that the iPhone has NOT been a phenomenal success. Lets look at why...

The iPhone is a computer. A pretty one, that can run lots of shiny, pretty apps covered in gradients. When people see it, they are immediately aware of how hip the person wielding it is. Apple took everything great about their desktop computers (pretty, fashionable, stable, simple) and condensed them all into a small, even more fashionable, even more convenient, simple package called an iBook. Coffee shop dwellers wielding an iBook could let their fellow caffeine-solution enjoyers just how hip they were, just how PRODUCTIVE they were with their wonderful macbooks.

Then came the iPhone. Apple took all the wonderful things about their desktops (stability, simplicity, etc.) plus all the wonderful things about their notebooks (simple, fashionable) and combined them into a wonderful even MORE portable packaged called an iPhone. This iPhone could be carried in its owner's pocket. The look-at-me oppurtunities were endless. People could admire the superior technical prowess (complete with white apple logo displayed in stark contrast the black case on the back of the thing) of iPhone users on the train, or on the bus, or on the sidewalk, or in a coffee shop, or the office, or in the kitchen, at a restaurant...ANYWHERE!

A tablet, however...what does this supposedly offer that the iPhone doesn't? It isn't as mobile, meaning less oppurtunites for look-at-me, it would likely run Mac OSX or some derivative of it.. meaning a hefty tax to the apple gods...it would undoubtedly be covered in ultra-high-gloss plastic, meaning that any hopes of replacing something like a panasonic toughbook would be seriously mis-guided.

The only market that apple has not yet tried to dominate, and that it is in any sort of position to even enter, is netbooks.

They had a sort-of false-start called the MacBook Air, something that I think everybody would agree is an example of just how much of a failure apple can produce.

The next itteration of the iPhone is, most certainly, a netbook. The question is whether or not apple is willing to forfeit its position as a luxury item in exchange for increased penetration. A sub-300-dollar netbook is something that is likely NOT in apple's future.

Apple has got something really great going for them right now. People WANT an apple. Macs are seen as something that is, in some way, better than their windows-based counterparts. Even Microsoft seems to be willing to admit this in their latest ads.

In conclusion, apple will NOT be creating a tablet; it simply does not follow with the current trend of their products. If anything, they will produce a $500 netbook that is still seen as "better" than its competitors. If this happens, I predict low market penetration and ultimate failure.

</comment><comment><USER18> he forgot "fucking expensive" in his list. An iPhone is supported by a massive carrier subsidy. an iTablet would likely cost upwards of $700, seriously limiting its mass-market appeal.

Also, I'm rooting for nokia's next generation n900 tablet series.

<comment><USER19> The first iPod - look at those stats! So limited! - was $400. So I wouldn't pronounce this one dead out of the gate. (I wouldn't pronounce it a home run either, but with the right marketing, who knows?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What would be the intended target market/use case for such a device? Are people expected to carry around both this and a smartphone at the same time?

<comment><USER21> Well as a color e-book reader it would be way better than anything out there now. That is, if apple could manage the distribution correctly. So I can imagine, say, kids in college buying books on their device instead of carrying around heavy sheets of paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How is the concept of an iTouch tablet any different from a jailbroken iPhone with a bigger screen and a DisplayPort output?

<comment><USER23> And what happens when you give it a full-featured version of Safari? Does everyone still use closed App Store apps when you've got Safari on a 10.1" screen?

I know a _lot_ of developers would prefer to create web apps tailored to an iTouch via Cappuccino or whatever, rather than battle the App Store for inclusion. Even Apple started off telling app developers to use Mobile Safari along with standard HTML and Javascript.

This guy's suit-logic is a waste of time.

<comment><USER22> It's not suit-logic: I'm genuinely interested. Gruber had a blog post about how PowerBook specs from 2002 are equivalent to iPhone specs, and the Air's got gesture support. And Apple hasn't pre-announced anything, obviously, so everything that everyone's saying is pure speculation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This guy should consider comparing what he speculates about this product with other imminent products (ie crunchpad...)

</comment><comment><USER25> "Apple Finally has an App Machine" – aw, geez, i thought thats what my macbook was

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't see how can it be more popular than iPhone/iPod Touch and successors.

</comment><comment><USER27> If it was e-ink, maybe. Seems unlikely, though.</comment>


What it was like to pitch to Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/03/04/inside-apple-what-it-was-like-to-pitch-to-steve-jobs/

<comment><USER2> Odd to see Fortune just putting up a snippet and link to a Quora answer.

Original: [http://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-deliver-a- presentat...](http://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-deliver-a-presentation- to-Steve-Jobs)

Apparently Jobs sorted people by how or if they responded to the question "Are you smart? Are you going to waste my time?"

I'm skeptical that could be an effective heuristic, but he apparently ruthlessly evaluated people based on their perceived intelligence. He even savaged his own team when they didn't measure up to outsiders, according to a comment in the thread by Paul Weinstein.

Ben Mattes later describes an intimidating presentation about Assassins Creed to a man reported to hate violence and "not get" videogames. It was successful, left Jobs "beaming," suggesting some people didn't know him as well as they thought.

Arthur Applegate describes Jobs as an advocate for autosave as early as the 1980s.

There are too many anecdotes to summarize. Fortune (much like this comment) is barely scratching the surface.</comment>


Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/genderandtech/ruby-on-rails-workshop-for-women/

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you imagine the reaction if there was a technical conference for men only - and a women could only attend as the guest of a man?

There are far too many grants/scholarships/opportunities that are explicitly only open to women or minorities (I'm a minority and it still bothers me). A hypothesis of implicit discrimination against group A does not justify explicit discrimination against group B.

This happens all the time in the tech (and Math/Science) community and it really bothers me. This workshop in particular is one that I would have liked to attend, but am being excluded from because of my gender.

Frankly, I don't know any women who would be interested in attending a 2-day RoR workshop so I can't go as a 'guest' - and I don't think that is too unusual.

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of all the clever kids in school during Black History Month who would ask, "And when is White History Month?"

The canned answer is, "The other 11 months of the year are White History Months."

This answer has become trite at this point, but the argument at its core remains valid. Unfortunately, there are serious biases in our society. Correcting those biases is a worthy goal, and one we should pursue. In the mean time, we can use Black History Month and Ruby Workshops for Women to compensate for the biases and at least try to treat the symptoms.

<comment><USER3> You don't even have to get into a discussion about whether meaningful biases persist. It's hard to go to a dev workshop if you're extremely rusty because you've been taking care of kids for 2 years, or because you've been forced by circumstances to work part-time.

<comment><USER4> It's also hard to go to a dev workshop if you are rusty because you've spend 2 years studying Judo or 2 years biking around India. Or, for that matter, if you are a man who's been forced by circumstances to work part time.

Spending 2 years engaging in non-development activities (by choice) is not limited to women.

<comment><USER3> Raising a child: a non-development activity undertaken by choice.

Biking around India: a non-development activity undertaken by choice.

Therefore:

We should all support paid family biking-around-India leave.

The logic is unimpeachable!

<comment><USER4> You haven't actually offered an argument for supporting any kind of paid leave. But yes, I do believe that job benefits should be decoupled from having children.

In any case, your mention of circumstances that could apply to people of any gender is a red herring. It's a workshop for _women_ , not a workshop for _people returning to the dev workforce after a 2 year hiatus_.

<comment><USER3> If you re-read the thread, I'm not offering a standalone justification for why a women's RoR workshop makes sense. Why bother? It's going to happen whether or not yummyfajitas likes the idea.

I'm offering a reason why a men-only RoR workshop would be offensive when a women-only RoR workshop isn't. A RoR workshop for people returning from long trips abroad also wouldn't be offensive, although the equivalence you imply between the two ideas is weak.

<comment><USER4> I guess I'm just not following your logic at all. Men-only RoR workshops are offensive but women-only ones are not because people of both genders sometimes leave the workforce for a year or three?

<comment><USER3> Men-only RoR workshops are offensive because there's no reason to have a men- only RoR workshop.

Former-long-term-traveler-only RoR workshops are not offensive, though they are a bit silly.

Women-only RoR workshops are not offensive, and I don't think they're silly either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While it's easy to appreciate the intent, there has to be a less backwards way to accomplish it.

Maybe run a workshop where the behavior/environment you find offensive is explicitly verboten?

Post it on the walls: this place is "attitude-free, newbie-safe and mama- friendly" and you'll almost definitely drive away the people you don't want there.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that would be as effective as directly marketing an event at a group of people. A group of people who might feel that traditional events in that field were just not welcoming.

In fact, I think you'd just end up with a pretty normal tech workshop (male dominated), but without some of the (rare) 'edgier' content that some of the Rails guys seem to relish. Business as normal then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> On a more serious note, I think its a good idea to hold outreach events for getting minorities working on your platform or industry. There arent many women in tech, trying to do something to increase the number is a good thing.

A man whining about not being able to attend a single tech event is laughable. The industry (and the culture of the industry) is so overwhelming male dominated. It's not like you are missing out on anything.

If events like these help get more women involved and participating in the industry or community, then more power to them. It certainly beats not doing anything to attract minorities.

<comment><USER4> _A man whining about not being able to attend a single tech event is laughable. The industry (and the culture of the industry) is so overwhelming male dominated. It's not like you are missing out on anything._

Um, women aren't missing out on anything either. They are just as free to attend the same industry events as men.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, but I mean, if I took up a sudden interest in crocheting or something and the best way to get connected and start learning was to go to a crocheting convention that's 99% female, I'd feel a little awkward/discouraged.

<comment><USER8> " ... I'd feel a little awkward/discouraged."

Why? Seriously.

Because you're a dude? Have you been to mostly-women gatherings before?

I believe that if people go to an event expecting to be treated as an outsider, they will behave in a way that will discourage people from welcoming them.

It's true that some number of guys have treated some women as lesser beings at tech conferences, but it's also true that some number of guys have treated other guys as lesser beings at tech conferences. Geeks are competitive and cliquish. It may be that way with people into crocheting, too; I would almost expect it. But my experience has been that most people are pretty accepting if you show some persistence and genuine interest.

<comment><USER7> I'm sure it is, and I would probably be fine. It's still intimidating stepping into unknown territory like that.

<comment><USER8> Oh. I'm sure. I've felt it myself, and still do at some events where I feel like a noob.

What I don't see mentioned much in the discussion of women and tech gatherings is that a whole lot of _guys_ feel awkward and unwelcome when attending tech events.

That doesn't necessarily mean there's no misogyny, but it suggests that the feeling of unease people feel is not (always) because of sex, but because some groups just are not so welcoming of outsiders until the outsider demonstrates some chops or other sign of "belonging".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if Harvard policy allows them to discriminate in this way.

<comment><USER10> Considering that they already discriminate in the admissions process, I doubt this is a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was never any intention to exclude men from the event, but rather enlist their help in broadening the community. MINSWAN everyone. We're opening the event up to anyone who would like to attend. Check out the blog post here: <http://bit.ly/2E9RLm>

</comment><comment><USER10> How do they determine whether or not you are a woman?

<comment><USER12> They do type checking.

Edit: The first hit on Google for "ruby type checking" is a post about adding it to Ruby, which would suggest to me that it's not already in there. Apologies for my ignorance on the matter.

<comment><USER13> No, they'd do duck typing, which could be a potentially embarrassing situation.. :-)

<comment><USER14> Better that than type coercion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Misleading headline:

"Men are warmly welcomed when they find a woman who wants to learn Ruby on Rails who will register and bring a guest."

<comment><USER16> That still bars the sort of guys who think discrimination against women in this industry is "hypothetical".

(OK, fair enough - that's no bug.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "We are seeking to create an attitude-free, newbie-safe and mama- friendly tech event to encourage women to join the Ruby on Rails community."

Wot no rockstar and porn-imagery fueled hijinx? That's no Rails conference.</comment>


Why Our Super Bowl Ad Failed – Cards Against Humanity - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@CardsAgainstHumanity/why-our-super-bowl-ad-failed-2af66e6a976c#.xyl3zi25c <comment><USER2> I bet their "Why we failed at X" satire article will do well with their target market.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Relevant: [https://thenextweb.com/creativity/2017/02/06/carads- humanity...](https://thenextweb.com/creativity/2017/02/06/carads-humanity- super-bowl-ad/)

</comment><comment><USER3> previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13576921)

</comment><comment><USER4> Last time foolish Super Bowl ads were put on the air by startups, was at the peak of the Dot-Com boom.

Is this a portent?

<comment><USER5> Not at all. This is a complete satire article.

Also, not that unusual for startups to have a Superbowl ad. I've seen a few in the last couple years.</comment></comment>


RSS to ActivityPub Converter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dariusk/rss-to-activitypub <comment><USER2> For those here who enjoy how ActivityPub allows you to push content and then receive comments back but don't have the mental bandwidth to implement such system for their blog, let me point you to:

      https://brid.gy/

It uses microformats and webmentions to find content in your blog and then pushes it to silos and other services. If someone comment about it somewhere that is not your blog, it captures that comment and send it to your blog as a webmention.

All this is part of the (somewhat complex but beautiful when it works) standards and services that people from the IndieWeb movement are shipping. You can see more info about it at:

      https://indieweb.org/

The Bridgy service mentioned early can push your blog content to mastodon and pick replies, boosts, likes and send them back as webmention as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am still not super sold on the ActivityPub format as being better than RSS, any dissenters want to change my mind?

<comment><USER4> Push tends to be more efficient, and more responsive, for content that updates less frequently than the polling interval.

<comment><USER5> But it also increases load on small yet popular sources. On the other hand proxies, conditional request headers and HTTP 304 make for a great yet simple distributed caching infrastructure.

Of course if you're thinking in terms of "broadcast internet" with a Facebook at its center you may be correct

<comment><USER6> Mail is also push based, seems to work fine without a caching infrastructure.

<comment><USER7> Mmmm, RSS over e-mail. Is it bad that I want this?

<comment><USER8> Isn't that just a mailing list?

<comment><USER7> I guess I need to clarify. I don't want email summaries of blogs - that would be awful. I want websites to offer the ability to send raw RSS feeds over email as a push service.

So basically WebSub but you don't need to run a WebSub server - you could just parse feeds using, for example, a procmail script. Email is already a well- supported protocol; WebSub is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's also [https://fed.brid.gy/](https://fed.brid.gy/) : if your site has microformats2, it'll turn the site itself to activitypub.

</comment><comment><USER10> I also built [https://github.com/edhelas/atomtopubsub/](https://github.com/edhelas/atomtopubsub/) a while ago :)

Because XMPP Pubsub is basically a container for anything an [https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html](https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0277.html) already fully standardize the presence of Atom 1.0 in XMPP it's super easy to publish standard RSS/Atom feeds to XMPP and enjoy fully real-time, decentralized news system.

There is no need to "fake" an ActivityPub account or edit your articles content, the feeds (called Communities) can be managed with roles, subscriptions and many other features and the articles are basically standard Atom elements (like you can find on your average HTTP Atom feed, the container changes, the content stays the same).

All those things are already standardized for years (Pubsub is there since 2002, Microblog since 2008) and implemented in the main XMPP servers.

If you want to check things client side, I'm working on Movim that implements all those things already [https://movim.eu/](https://movim.eu/).

Here is the XKCD feed on XMPP Pubsub [https://nl.movim.eu/?node/comics.movim.eu/XKCD](https://nl.movim.eu/?node/comics.movim.eu/XKCD) and our Movim Blog [https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim](https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim) (notice the likes, the comments, the edited content, the rich content)…

<comment><USER11> Visiting [https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim](https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim.eu/Movim) seems to try to load some images via port 5280.

What's the reason for using non-standard ports?

<comment><USER10> Indeed, our image uploading system through XMPP used to use the 5280 port. This was changed recently to proxy things through the standard 443 port :)

Unfortunately we cannot change the existing URLs that were spread across the whole network so we're keeping an exception for the existing ones.

But the new files are now uploaded on this kind of urls [https://upload.movim.eu/files/9d94237298995552fa13436420195f...](https://upload.movim.eu/files/9d94237298995552fa13436420195fbca436dce7/pqIeRmT5iywLGPuFji9pgZsP4VH8mvfIAwWQEFxj/Aurora_wallpaper.png.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Moderately tangental - is a node development/runtime environment really so common that it need not be called out as a dependency (such as how this one specifies beanstalkd as a dependency)?

<comment><USER13> Node.js is the just "hippest" thing and if you're "cool" you already have it installed.

At least that's what I'm told, I'm one of those ancient beings who still remembers the old Javascript, back when it was the opposite of cool. I'm happy it's matured greatly since then.</comment></comment>


Depackaging the Nintendo 3DS CPU - <AUTHOR> http://gaasedelen.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/depackaging-nintendo-3ds-cpu.html <comment><USER2> This is incredibly awesome work, and I envy students who can actually take a course in this stuff!

However it makes me realize in what kind of weirdly antagonistic society we live. In an ideal universe, you could just ask the Nintendo engineers for the chip layouts, or for the boot ROM. It reminds me of a documentary I saw the other day where they tested the chicken content of chicken salad. Again, in an ideal universe, you could just ask the manufacturer. Of course that would be naive in the real world, since manufacturers and consumers have different interests. Most of the time we don't notice anything weird about this. A bit of competition is usually considered a good thing. But every now and then I have a WTF moment... Why are we working against each other? How much productivity do we loose through duplication of effort? Are the losses from this smaller or bigger than the gains from healthy competition? I have no great answer for that...

Oh and sorry for hijacking the comment area for a rant about the world and so on ;-).

<comment><USER3> In an ideal world, nobody would steal chip designs and boot ROMs to create counterfeit products.

<comment><USER4> In an ideal world, we'd all be living in a post-scarcity economy with Basic Income and no IP laws and no "currency" to speak of.

In an ideal world. An ideal world sounds really cool! The implementation details might get a little crazy though.

<comment><USER4> An hour goes by and no one has called me on this? "Basic Income" and "no 'currency' to speak of" seem contradictory. I'd go for no currency rather than BI now that I think of it. Replicators for everyone!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're interested in that kind of stuff I highly reccomend watching Karsten Nohl's "Reviving smart card analysis" talk from Chaos Communication Camp 2011 [0].

Basically he takes pictures of the circuits on the smart card and then reverses the logic _from that_. There's even software to assist with that [1].

As a pure software guy I was pretty baffeled when I saw this the first time.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFx6Rn57DrY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFx6Rn57DrY)

[1] [http://www.degate.org/](http://www.degate.org/)

<comment><USER6> There was also a great talk at Defcon 21 (last year) walking through a similar process all the way to using a picture of the ROM and image recognition to pull binary data. The first half is about building the lab to do this kind of work so you can skip the first 1/3 - 1/2 if you don't care about that part.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z4aF- qiziM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z4aF-qiziM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That page has web buttons that _overlap_ my _scrollbar_.... how is that even a thing? please make it stop.

<comment><USER8> For fuck sake, is it possible to have a HN comments page without complaints about the design of TFA? Speak to the author if you have a problem with their site! Don't mumble about it from a distance!

<comment><USER9> I think it's useful to point out egregious bad behavior in web design/implementation. Others can learn from the mistake, or people who wouldn't necessarily see something wrong with it can learn from the backlash it generates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I seem to recall that imaging the bootloader ROM straight off the silicon was how the original Gameboy's bootloader was finally pulled out.

I just forget who did it, which is unfortunate.

<comment><USER11> I spent a fair bit of time trying to find an article or something about this, but came up empty. I was especially curious to know how you can decode the program's bits from the silicon.

I found a similar idea here: [http://members.iinet.net.au/~lantra9jp1/gurudumps1/decap/ind...](http://members.iinet.net.au/~lantra9jp1/gurudumps1/decap/index.html) The photo in the upper-right looks like it could reasonably be turned into binary, if you knew what you were looking at.

Anyone have any more info about how this actually works?

<comment><USER12> Currently on mobile, will update tomorrow.

Start here:

[http://www.visual6502.org/](http://www.visual6502.org/)

Somewhere in that site they detail the step by step process of decapping, delayering photographing and identifying the logic.

There's also a JavaScript simulator, check it out.

The CCC also had a few lectures about decapping. The most interesting one is about backside scanning the die to bypass the safety features.

<comment><USER12> The CCC backside attack is here:

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

It contains lots of info and technical details.

Another one:

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

This is what an actual ROM looks like:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/18IGx18NQY_Q1PJVZ- bHywao9...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/18IGx18NQY_Q1PJVZ- bHywao9bhsDoAqoIn1rIm42nwo/edit)

As the last image shows, the ROM table values are extracted by graphics processing the photo.

It's also possible to dump the ROM by reading it byte by byte, but this depends on the architecture (not always possible) and is typically done for mask ROMs that contain data.

<comment><USER11> Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That is one classy lab.

<comment><USER14> the lab has broken down.. #mirror?

<comment><USER14> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xj_VqrM...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xj_VqrMIRmAJ:gaasedelen.blogspot.com/2014/03/depackaging- nintendo-3ds-cpu.html%3FshowComment%3D1395693517906+&cd=2&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=nl)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone who knows nothing about this stuff, can someone explain to me how soaking the CPU in sulfuric acid removes the packaging material, but does no harm to the chip inside?

<comment><USER16> Sulphuric acid is powerful enough to react with polymers, but not to dissolve silicon.

"does no harm" might be an exaggeration here. It's doubtful you'd have a functional chip. But the fine structure remains, clearly.

Toss some nitric acid in there, forming aqua regia, and you'll dissolve the whole chip including any gold.

<comment><USER17> > It's doubtful you'd have a functional chip

I have a couple of fully functional examples on my desk that say otherwise. If you actually want to keep the device usable to the point that you can still solder it to a board, then you normally preserve most of the package, bond wires, and leadframe which requires more care during decap. For this particular specimen we didn't bother because we just wanted the ROM.

Here's an example of a fully functional decapped device soldered back to a board: [http://i.imgur.com/UebB3FO.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/UebB3FO.jpg)

My lecture notes at [http://security.cs.rpi.edu/courses/hwre- spring2014/Lecture3_...](http://security.cs.rpi.edu/courses/hwre- spring2014/Lecture3_Depackaging.pdf) go into more detail on various methods, chemical and otherwise, for decapping with and without preserving the leadframe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, this is a world I've never seen before.

<comment><USER12> In you want more:

[http://zeptobars.ru/en/](http://zeptobars.ru/en/)

The nice thing is they decap old/common devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wait, so are they actually trying to _take a picture_ of the boot ROM used by the 3DS?

<comment><USER20> It seems that way. This looks similar to what byuu did for SNES games. Some SNES games have special dedicated chips, and decapping them allows you to recreate the logic. It's an expensive and very difficult process though, which is why it's rare to actually see someone attempt it in the open.

<comment><AUTHOR> More info on Dr Decapitator's SNES decapping escapades at Mameworld (archive.org link as the subsite is dead): [http://web.archive.org/web/20111115180306/http://decap.mamew...](http://web.archive.org/web/20111115180306/http://decap.mameworld.info/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's impressive how Nintendo can continue selling heavily underpowered processors to gamers and nobody complains.

<comment><USER22> I never understood this arguement. So Nintendo do not pick the most powerful CPU/GPU available. Why does that really matter? It is a lot more powerful than the device before it and it has amazing games on it still.

With a handheld the most important number, to me, is battery life. I still feel that Nintendo (and Sony) could do more by using a more efficient or lower power chip and get a couple more hours out of the device.

Then again I do not care that much for graphics so perhaps my opinion is in the minority. There are several things I would change about the 3DS if I could but upping the processing power is not one of them.</comment></comment>


Open Source Apps (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2013/open-source-apps/ <comment><USER3> @patio11's recent tweetstorm touched upon the core point

> Most open source software is written by programmers who are full-time > employed by companies which directly consume the software, at the explicit > or implicit blessing of their employers. It is not charity work, any more > than they charitably file taxes.

[https://twitter.com/patio11/status/936629310785437696](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/936629310785437696)

The actual monetization, as the post explains, comes from related products and services. The presented Oracle analogy to IAP is fascinating:

> Oracle offers a basic version of MySQL under a GPL license, with additional > closed source – and expensive! – add-ons that better fit specific > businesses' needs. The allegory here is in-app purchase: a basic experience > that gets the user invested in your product, with value-added options that > are more attractive because of said investment

</comment><comment><USER4> Apps don't "want to be free"; customers want to _try before they buy_ and there are not a lot of sane options presented for doing that in App Stores.

Why the _hell_ isn't there a simple "download now, pay if you keep more than 4 hours" kind of option, for example? Why no simple "upgrade to version 2.0 for 50% off" option? There are lots of common scenarios that _app stores should provide_ , saving developers from having to hack special purchases into the product. Worse, stores basically don't distinguish between _those_ types of purchases and the many, many scams so after awhile potential buyers equate "any in-app purchase = scam" and that option disappears. And on top of it all, good, reputable apps can eventually be updated with scammy features that you never used to have.

Terrible app search engines. Terrible browsing with unchanging top-10 lists. Terrible monetization options. Endless garbage apps competing for space. Yet 30% comes off the top _unless_ apps are free. So they're free, and you get mostly ads.

What a complete waste of potential in the app ecosystem right now.

<comment><USER5> > Why the hell isn't there a simple "download now, pay if you keep more than 4 > hours" kind of option, for example

So, one thing I've seen a _lot_ of new apps do is basically this; but sadly, includes some annoyances itself.

Instead of "download, pay after x hours", they instead have a subscription model gating most of the features of the app. They give you 1 (week|month) free, as that's easy to do with in-app payments automatically. Of course, now you have to remember to cancel this subscription if it turns out it's not what you're after, which is annoying, albeit pretty simple on iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > What makes the software market so fascinating from an economic perspective > is that the marginal cost of software is $0.

I see this claim a lot.

The marginal cost of software is actually its support cost﹡.

If some customers bought the product without a support contract, then the marginal cost of the good that is sold to those customers is the (non-zero) cost for support staff to categorize them and turn them away.

If _none_ of the license includes support, then the vendor doesn't need support staff or activities, and the marginal cost is indeed zero.

Only some software products — especially among commercial software products — don't include _any_ support at _any_ price point.

﹡ Also marginal increases in distribution costs. Also costs that stem from marginally greater exposure to product liability issues and claims.

<comment><USER7> Having more users even on the free plan gives many benefits: \- more testers means that bugs are detected earlier. This improves reliability. \- it gives more opportunities to try to sell the support and convert them into paying customers \- it increases the visibility of your product. It is free advertising.

IMHO, the marginal cost is generally better than zero.

<comment><USER8> It's a trade-off.

The benefit is "reach" which is beneficial for (a) marketing (b) OSS community (c) bugs and contributors.

The cost are the (a) lower conversion to payment (b) costs from a 'shared' community e.g. community management and user support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's not that apps want to be free, as much as apps that any reasonably competent programmer can make are driven down in price because many reasonably competent programmers do make them.

If you look at applications that require a large amount of domain expertise to build (CAD, audio/video editing, etc.) they're still expensive and have only recently begun to come down in price, in part because there are some free versions that, while noticeably inferior, are still useful to a substantial population of users.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can a monthly subscription support a collection of open source apps?

Netflix style. Maybe give donors the option to vote on features. I am interested in testing if there is a market for this. I've started writing clone android apps without the ads and freemium.

<comment><USER11> It might depend what you mean by "support", but in general, I don't see it.

For a non-open-source example, there's [https://setapp.com/](https://setapp.com/), but nobody has been able to explain to me how the economics are supposed to work. They're bundling thousands of dollars of software for $10/month, and then paying creators based on usage. Instead of $50 (a common price for these apps), once, developers will get a fraction of $10, repeatedly.

You'll break even if someone uses your app 1/2 of the time (of the Set) for about a year. If they use more apps or don't subscribe that long (which are pretty much the main reasons to use this), you're worse off.

Bundling, open-source, subscriptions -- at the end of the day, users simply don't want to (directly) pay what it costs to create software.

<comment><USER10> I think it is about lowering the price to increase users. The user experience is also improved as you just install and go.

Thanks for the info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a counterexample, Dark Sky is one of the few apps I pay for that has an endless array possible alternatives. The last time I looked all substitutes were ugly, clunky, bloated by ads, or all of the above. I pay so I don't have deal with an inferior experience in a frequently used app. So, while the details of what an app accomplishes may be easy to replicate... maybe there's always room for a premium experience?

<comment><USER13> Indeed I would say that with an app like Dark Sky the value is almost entirely in the experience, in a way.

The data is provided by the government for "free" but weather.gov is not as well designed and presented as Dark Sky and other weather apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This applies to a very, very narrow segment of software. If I have to run a server, then yes, I do indeed have costs. And those costs go up the more popular my app gets.

And if the app gains any kind of serious pickup, I am going to need a client service team to handle all the bull crap people will be flinging my way. (Seriously, how many open source projects die because the maintainers get sick of managing the issue board?)

<comment><USER15> If your costs are servers, your marginal costs are still $0 for the app itself. IMO, you're better off with a $0 app and a subscription model, than capturing the revenue once when someone purchases the app.

<comment><USER14> You are technically correct - yes, an app is not the server it is deployed on. But practically speaking, if I saw a spike in my traffic and got hit with a huge bill, I'm not going to say to myself, "gee, it wasn't the app's fault the server got really popular...".

I think you missed my point that this article applies to a very, very small category of software. As soon as you have a subscription model, or any sort of payment structure, now you need an accountant! Those guys don't work for free.

It's like, calculator apps and notepads that this philosophy applies to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are too many counter-examples for this to be true:

\- Microsoft has been charging for years for Office before getting into the recurring payment model. The reason they got into the recurring payment models is that most office software requires server support and server support is a recurring cost

\- There may be future competition but let's not forget that software still costs money to develop. ie. if an entrepreneur sees a market with 2-3 strong providers, they will hesitate to enter in direct competition. And why would they, their profit margins will be minute in comparison to the cost of building the software.

\- The market may have software that is so good, that to catch up, competing players would have to spend years building the software (see point 2)

An example of this is Linux. It is free but it's rarely used by non-IT professionals. One can argue that Windows is effectively free these days, but it still charges a license and the price of a laptop is still affected by having Windows installed.

<comment><USER17> You've answered your own implied question. The price of MS Office is still high because it's in a category of its own, with no competition in sight. But all it takes is one well-motivated competitor to achieve feature parity and that would be the end of MS Office's cash cow position.

MS is already offering Win10 basically for free. Not because of competition, but because it doesn't _cost_ anything to make it free. They can risk changing their business model without being forced to throw money down a hole.

<comment><USER8> It's tough to make that argument.

Features are only a small part of how users consider change - and 'parity' definitely doesn't cut it.

Office is a good example ...

StarOffice originally and then RedHat, Suse, Mandriva (and the previous versions), Canonical and a host of other commercial Linux vendors I'm forgetting, plus Sun, IBM, Linux Foundation, etc have all put resources into competing.

OpenOffice is feature equal for most users - but, it didn't make much of a dent.

For me the Windows 10 situation is partially about competition, but it's mostly about protecting their core market. For the most part they make money from corporate users, not users buying 300 dollar laptops - those are just market capture for the serious money. Any time you hear a parent say "Jonnie is learning MS Office" (not word processing) that's a future corporate buyer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _Because all PCs ran Windows on top of Intel chips, there was no > differentiation, and prices dropped._

Umm, no. PCs ran Windows on top of _expensive_ Intel chips with little competition.

The lack of differentiation caused the prices _of much of the other stuff that goes into a PC_ to drop.

And ironically, that other crap, like network cards and whatever, going into PC's, _is_ differentiated.

That doesn't help because it's not differentiated in a way that the user cares about.

If processors were differentiated they way network cards, keyboards or mice are differentiated, it wouldn't make a difference, except making PC's even cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER19> The same would apply to any digital content (zero-copy cost) which can be _substituted_. For example, why watch film A when film B is available more cheaply. Of course, it's difficult to have substitutions for entertainment (for various reasons)... right now.

However, I do think the long-term trend here is downwards as well and I'd use music as an example. With streaming services, the cost of music is much lower compared to purchasing music. The streaming service acts as an aggregator for different content and has an incentive to pick the cheaper content (with the opposing force of consumers wanting particular things). But really, if the quality is high and the music chosen to be played is automatic (via recommendations) the underlying artist is less significant (in general - <USER2> know people can be _fans_ ).

</comment><comment><USER20> The marginal cost of software is not always zero. You may have cloud cost, support erc.

</comment><comment><USER21> (2013)

<comment><USER22> Thanks! Updated.</comment></comment>


Automatic Rails at Slicehost - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fiveruns.com/2008/9/24/rails-automation-at-slicehost <comment><USER2> For me personally, the hassle in getting Rails set up proved to be a barrier to entry. CakePHP or even Wordpress make for more convenient alternatives for small projects.

Maybe Slicehost will change that.</comment>


AskBox.me's 2min video submission for Philly DreamIt Incubator program  - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTwdJpbWwOs

<comment><AUTHOR> Any feedback at all would be appreciated, HN.

Was I clear in my explanation?

Was I audible?

Do you think I am crazy- or is this a viable idea?

<comment><USER2> On the video: i have seen you have also on your blog, link to that one, you do not really get credibility linking to youtube, even better, make a simple landing page. Even if people usually do not like landing pages that ask for emails a simple page with description and the video is much better. Also i got the idea when you said "twitter with videos" everything was crystal clear in my mind and so it would be to anyone who listens to your pitch. This is very important. Work on a strong elevator pitch. You must know it perfectly. And put some passion in it. I know you are excited because we are in the same boat. But other people don't. They will not get more excited than what you show, so if you do not show a large amount of energy they will never be thrilled. Do not get it wrong but you don't seem a marketing guy, I know I am like you, if you can find someone to do your marketing. I worked with a guy that started a website. He was totally not a tech guy and the website wasn't the greatest but the way he presented it made everyone interested.

On the idea: i have many doubts. The idea is nice, for sure videos make a more direct contact. But that is also a problem. People doesn't want a to make too much strong contact, not everyone wants to show his face. A service like twitter relies on it's user base, i do not know if enought people would do it. Twitter is also fast. looking at 100 tweets will take you 2 minuts. looking at 100 videos will take you at least 2 hours considering buffering times. And same goes to upload a video.

Anyway i wish you the best of luck! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for taking the time to give me such awesome feedback.

Everything you said will be taken into account. Your luck is needed, and very much appreciated.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it legal to crawl/index YouTube? Does Google try to stop it? - <AUTHOR> What's Googles attitude to this?<p>Are you in their bad books if you crawl/index YouTube? <comment><USER2> They have a sitemap, so i reckon it would be ok but honestly it would be better to use the youtube api.

[https://www.youtube.com/sitemaps/sitemap.xml](https://www.youtube.com/sitemaps/sitemap.xml)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing illegal about it.

They may have some opinionated terms of service but i don't think anyone bother reading it besides their own lawyers

</comment><comment><USER4> It is legal but ToS may prohibit it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Depends on where you live.</comment>


Gex (1997) - <AUTHOR> https://games.greggman.com/game/gex/ <comment><USER2> Seems like a good time to mention The Cutting Room Floor, an excellent wiki that catalogs cut/unused content, debug features, and secret messages left in video games.

The page for Gex [1] describes a good portion of the cut assets and secrets mentioned in the article.

[1] - [https://tcrf.net/Gex_(3DO)](https://tcrf.net/Gex_\(3DO\))

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, that's an old blog post. At first I thought the comments with datestamps of "16 years ago" were some kind of bug!

Pretty surprising this retrospective post was made only a couple years after the game released -- usually people wait a bit longer to "spill the beans" on development of games they worked on. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think one true measure of a superb game development studio is the ability to make a game enjoyable and interesting within the construct of the chosen setting.

It would have probably taken much more than the small team they had initially, but there's no reason in theory that they could have gone with their idea and made an extremely rich game, with different play styles in each thematic genre, for example.

Dark Souls does this well. Without modifying the properties of the universe, each area requires modified strategies and this keeps the game fresh, and clever, while staying within the confines of this medieval fantasy world.

Point is, you dont have to force platforming onto a game; but these guys were doing this 20 years ago on potato technology with an understaffed team. I didnt understand gex when I played it, but as a hobby game dev, I respect what they accomplished.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm always baffled by the randomness in such productions.

I mean, what is even happening there from a business perspective?!

Okay, people want to make a game that gets big and sells merch, but then the whole thing gets crazy, like nobody even thought about that they needed a game that was SO good that everybody wants to buy merch for it.

<comment><USER6> The problem tends to stem from misplaced feedback, not intentional badness. In this case the scenario is set by copy-pasting the dev cycle of previous games onto a new one. The game gets designed from the surface(marketing, and specifically marketing artifacts like the Gex character and a pitch that dictates the design) inwards and so ends up with huge gaps in what it wants to do versus what it actually does, and tons of stuff that gets thrown out as unusable. And then new technology gets in the way.

I am actually finishing up a project that went very similarly, just at a smaller scope.

<comment><USER7> A lot of game studios are also not ran by professional management (especially at the time, it's been slowly getting better in the intervening 20 years). I've worked for many different companies & a lot of stuff is really just decided/made up as they go without much process.

Even succesful studios like Rockstar are not necessarily well managed, often success/money just papers over a lot of issues (plus burning out their staff with insane working hours to compensate for lack of planning).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >When I was interviewing at Crystal I was told that Gex was to be the next Sonic. It was to be a huge hit, the newest mascot, one of those titles that inspires all kinds of merchandising like toys and cartoons, pens, pencils, notebooks, underroos, ...

Gex certainly _felt_ like it was designed by a marketing team rather than a game designer with a vision. You could always tell by the "edgy" renders that would show up on magazine covers and the like. It never really appealed to me.

On the upside, the Gex 3 engine was used as the basis for Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, so at least we got that out of it.

<comment><USER9> To be fair, the mascot character was a fad at that point. There were a bunch of stand alone games (because they didn't do well enough to get follow ups) with character designs like that. Never played 3DO, but I played some of the later Gex games on Playstation, and found it enjoyable enough.

<comment><USER10> And they were all Sonic ripoffs. Nintendo had Mario, okay fine, but then Sega had to come up with a character to "beat" Mario and that was Sonic. Then all the other companies came out of the woodwork and _they_ had to have mascot (with 'tude!) of their _own_ to represent their brand. So we got GEX and Aero the Acro-Bat and... motherfucking Bubsy...

By the mid-90s, even Sega seemed discontent with Sonic headlining their brand, so we also got Ristar, Tempo, Wild Woody, etc.

But the lesson the marketroids failed to take away from Mario and Sonic is that this really only works if you have a strong _game_ , not just a strong character.

Two mascot platformers from the side-scrolling, Sonic ripoff period that really delivered on their promise, gameplay wise, were _Jazz Jackrabbit_ and _Rocket Knight Adventures_. Both of those had consistent gameplay, a tight feel, and neat mechanics that made them fun. Hence why I still remember these, but tend to forget all the others...

<comment><USER11> Maybe I have the sense of humour of a five year old, but Wild Woody sounds a _lot_ too NSFW for a kids gaming mascot.

<comment><USER10> I think that was kind of the point. He was a hideous CG pencil, and his attack was rubbing things out with his eraser ass. Cringe and gross double entendres all around. Of course inappropriateness was a hallmark of Sega's 3edgy5me days; Sonic was originally supposed to have a sexy, blonde, human girlfriend.

<comment><USER11> That's horrific in several ways, and in particular brings to mind the old joke about porcupines.

But it must have been a fairly old concept. I was a big Sega fan as a child, owning the original Sonic for the Master System, and don't remember any humans except for Dr. Robotnik.

<comment><USER10> It was nixed by a Sega of America staffer named Madeline Schroeder, who did a lot of streamlining and de-crufting the Sonic concept before the game was even made.

Oddly enough she would go on to establish Crystal Dynamics, the studio that made GEX. And Sega would go on to ship Sonic with a human in _Sonic the Hedgehog_ (2006).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The 6x investment needed to move from 16bit to 32bit, in the author's estimation and experience, makes me understand the trend toward 8-bit retro games a little better. Even if no modern "8-bit" games are that in anything but name and _some_ graphics only.

I've been hoping in vain for a couple years that the trend toward faux "8-bit" would pass as a fad, but it seems to really have become a niche with staying power.

Is there something I'm missing that's driving this trend? Or am I alone in preferring line art or other styles over "8-bit" graphics?

<comment><USER13> The curious thing about this is that vector graphics for 2d games is soooo much easier to make than pixel graphics. It scales better, it's easier to animate, and it's easier to edit.

Pixel art requires hand-animating each frame of each sprite. Want to change something about the character? You're now changing 20 frames worth of that same something.

<comment><USER14> They may be easier to make but I find 2d vector graphics tend to look very bland and generic.

<comment><USER15> My thoughts exactly. It's really hard to get any kind of interesting textures with vector graphics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I first though it was about "Gex: Enter the Gecko" 1998 (a Super Mario 64 like early 3D platformer): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gex:_Enter_the_Gecko](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gex:_Enter_the_Gecko)

But the article was about Gex 1995 (2D platformer): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gex_(video_game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gex_\(video_game\))

Trivia:

"Gex Enter the Gecko" (3D, part 2) used the same 3D engine as Tomb Raider 1 (from CORE Design). Crystal Dynamics improved the engine with every game (like Legacy of Kain) and in the end Crystal Dynamics won over the Tomb Raider franchise with Tomb Raider Legend (2006), where as Core Design's engine fork looked old-school by then and basically killed the company. Even to this day "Rise of the Tomb Raider" is still based on that engine, obviously much improved over those many years. (source: check the Wikipedia pages)

</comment><comment><USER17> Thanks for this, never read this before! I still remember how back in '95, after I had had my mind blown with titles like Tekken and after seeing it hyped in so many magazines, being so disappointed at what Gex actually was. Biggest disappointment since Vortex on SNES, heh.

<comment><USER17> And while the 3d sequels were at least somewhat competent 3d platformers, it's pretty crazy that Gex had a playboy sidekick in the third one. (Somewhat NSFW [https://i.pinimg.com/originals/18/20/93/18209312f22639374c84...](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/18/20/93/18209312f22639374c84847996a5ce08.jpg))

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very interesting read. However, I'm not sure why a game where you do stunts to make money is "a lame concept" but getting sucked into a tv isn't?

<comment><USER19> The point was that the second concept is more fantasy-like, so the level designers can get away with using more classic video game design elements.

If he's supposed to be a stuntman on a "real" movie set, they'd have to explain why their wild west set has magical floating platforms flying around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This was one of my favorite games as a kid. Loved the whole style of it.</comment>


Apple cloud services outage - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/ <comment><USER2> Days when multiple outages happen always remind me of this wonderful article: [http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming- sucks](http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks)

<comment><USER3> I've never read this til now...it. is. absolute. genius!!! I wish i could give you multiple upvotes for this. Thanks for sharing this!

<comment><USER4> You should also read James Mickens' USENIX articles if you haven't: [http://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james- mickens](http://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens)

The humour and tone is similar to the "Programming Sucks" article. I recommend starting with "The Night Watch".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe I'm crazy, but it seems _too_ coincidental that multiple services

(Amazon, Facebook, Apple... that I know of, so far)

have been affected, _on the same day_.

<comment><USER6> Are they all on EC2? Maybe EC2 is throwing a fit.

<comment><USER7> Amazon is, but Apple and Facebook both operate their own data centers.

Edit: I take that back, Apple uses several cloud providers, including AWS.

<comment><USER8> Apple does use S3 for storage. You didn't hear it from me.

<comment><USER9> You just have to run littlesnitch, and see all the AWS servers that Apple applications hit. I don't think it's a secret that a ton of Apple applications are backended by AWS.

<comment><USER10> All hail Little Snitch. So much insight available in that app. I wish there were rule sets for Little Snitch like there are for AdBlock Plus.

<comment><USER11> lost -i in the Terminal.app will do this as well.

With a little grep-fu you could have yourself a good watchdog.

<comment><USER12> I get 'command not found' so I'm assuming I have to install something? But I can't find anything when I search Google because of the generic name.

<comment><USER13> I believe he meant to write `lsof -i`

<comment><USER12> That works a lot better! Thanks both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Do these things _ever_ go red?

I mean, I understand the disincentive to do this, but for something like AWS (where error icons are even more subtle than this) I care about accuracy way more than looking scary.

<comment><USER15> Very occasionally:

[https://statusgator.com/services/apple](https://statusgator.com/services/apple)

(Side project of mine)

<comment><USER16> FYI: "An error occurred during a connection to statusgator.com. The OCSP server experienced an internal error. Error code: SEC_ERROR_OCSP_SERVER_ERROR"

<comment><USER15> Weird, thanks for the heads up. Will investigate.

<comment><USER17> Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> ITunes Connect and TestFlight in particular has been an absolute shambles for at least the last 3 months. Nobody there seems to give a shit or take responsibility (ranging from support up thru to the highest levels).

<comment><USER6> Total tangent but: I just had a hideously bad experience trying to get something done with my developer account. It's not the first time. The IRS is easier to deal with than the app store.

If iOS is their vision of the future of personal computing, then the future of personal computing is a walled garden presided over by a bureaucracy about as functional as a badly run DMV office.

There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of terrible customer support from a company with this kind of money. Their good UX near-monopoly and success seems to be making them lax toward their developer community... much like Microsoft became.

<comment><USER19> In fairness to the IRS, they're actually REALLY easy to deal with. Or they used to be, I'm not sure how the budget cuts have impacted them but I found their CS quite good.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it's totally unfair to compare the IRS to the Apple developer program. That's low.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Timely..been trying to apply a software update and download garageband for the last hour. Should've checked their status page. Guess, i'll wait it out.

Any relation between this outage and Amazon's from earlier?

<comment><USER21> Unlikely but a few of their datacenters are down the street from one another so could be related. We'll know when/if they tell us the cause.

<comment><USER22> > a few of their datacenters are down the street from one another

They have backup power systems and multiple backbone connections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm also getting some bad outage with Facebook's services. www.messenger.com outputs an error and the facebook website has half the components missing.

<comment><USER24> As am I.

There might be something larger going on ... amazon.com product search is down again, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I noticed my iTunes Cloud music wasn't working earlier. Reminded me how much better all the iCloud stuff has actually gotten over the past 2y.

</comment><comment><USER26> Some poor SREs have a shitty night ahead of them.

</comment><comment><USER27> Docker too.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11822562](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11822562)

</comment><comment> pi-squared What if they are relying on Docker [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11822562](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11822562)?

</comment><comment><USER28> thank god game center is still up!

</comment><comment><USER29> Could this be related? Today we got an email from Amazon that our EC2 instance server has degraded hardware. We have until June 16 to spin up a new server before they kill this one.

<comment><USER30> No. An email like that would be regarding a single box giving hardware warnings, like a stick of RAM sending out more ECC correction alerts than their threshold for acting. It wouldn't be because of activities much higher than that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> We were hit by a few AWS DNS issues over the past few days. Almost certainly a freaky coincidence.

</comment><comment><USER32> So this is why my AppleTV won't connect to Netflix / Hulu right now?

I want a refund.

<comment><USER33> You need a connection to Apple to use third party apps you already have installed? If true that's ridiculous.

<comment><USER34> I was watching a movie purchased via iTunes and it stopped playing due to the outage. I switched over to Netflix without any problems.

<comment><USER33> Okay, it seemed a bit outrageous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Might be an Akamai outage.

</comment><comment><USER3> "...Just kidding!" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucdZHR75iCM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucdZHR75iCM)

</comment><comment><USER36> Migrated to FoundationDB? =)

<comment><USER37> For those wondering about context: Apple acquired FoundationDB last year. [http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/apple-acquires-durable- data...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/24/apple-acquires-durable-database- company-foundationdb/)</comment></comment>


Formation of the moon brought water to Earth - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-05-formation-moon-brought-earth.html <comment><USER2> That doesn't bode well for the idea of habitable planets in other solar systems. If this kind of collision is relatively rare, most rocky exo-planets will have much less water than Earth has.

Reminds me of Asimov's storyline in the Foundation series about the rarity of the planet that humans come from (and the reason no complex lifeforms existed anywhere else), although his premise was a large amount of radioactivity on earth, IIRC.

<comment><USER3> We just don't know enough about life or planet formation to know how this bodes.

On its surface, everything that makes the formation of the Earth appear rarer would suggest life, in general, is rarer but honestly we don't know. We don't even know if there's life on Europa even though there would appear to be all the conditions present to make life as it lives at the bottom of our oceans.

We don't even know if water is a reasonable prerequisite for life. We don't know if life has to be carbon-based. Sulfur also presents a reasonable alternative. Would we even recognize other life if was right in front of us if it relied on completely different mechanisms? Maybe even our idea of time is too short lived or long lived to even recognize other complex systems as alive.

We shouldn't extrapolate too much from a single data point.

<comment><USER4> It simply isn't true that we're completely ignorant on these questions. We know an awful lot about the chemistry of all the known elements and it's pretty clear water and Carbon are by far the best candidates for supporting complex, rich chemistries across a wide range of environmental conditions.

It's not that alternative life chemistries are necessarily impossible, but equally it's plausible that they might well be non-viable above a very primitive level at best. They would have many orders of magnitude fewer options available to them for biochemical resources, pathways and molecular geometries to take advantage of. Chemically speaking, not all elements are created equal.

Take Sulphur for example. It's far more reactive than carbon, so chemically unstable in many more environmental conditions. It generally only forms linear chains, rather than the complex branching structures of carbon. It also bonds with far fewer other elements in ways that are likely to be chemically useful. If you have carbon available, Sulphur is a very poor substitute. It's high reactivity might make it a passable alternative to Oxygen though.

<comment><USER3> It sounds like you're paraphrasing the wiki page I attached in a different comment: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry)

To address your point, I would say we are extremely ignorant about what the solution space of life looks like. Hydrothermal vents are a very recent discovery. Before this discovery, it was unexpected that such complex and large organisms could exist without light from the sun. As a planet, Earth is teeming with life. Everywhere you look on Earth, you can find it. Even though we have a good understanding of chemistry, we have little clue as to what's important to form complex and self-propagating systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know if there are any astrobiologists or chemists, but this brings to mind one of my favorite pet theories regarding abiogenesis, one that I've been thinking of more and more since the new horizons mission.

When we did the flyby of Pluto, I was drop jawed when we saw how dynamic the surface was. I sincerely expected a rockier, more oxidized, surface with no clear evidence of a geological cycle. Obviously what we saw was far more complex, and it brought the idea that a geology of volatile ices would be possible on these more marginal bodies (like Pluto).

The question I have is regarding what kinds of chemistry are possible on icy bodies like Pluto. If there is a complex geology, this indicates to me that things are going from liquid to solid (nitrogen ice, oxygen ice, etc..), so are some kinds of chemical bonds (specifically, organic ones) can form if a body like Pluto is has a dynamic geology?

Is it possible that the organic precursors for life are constantly accumulating on icy bodies like Pluto, and while obviously, live can't form on Pluto, could an impact discharge a massive quantity of precursor chemistry onto a planet more hospitable?

Its an interesting aside that pretty much imminently after the earths surface solidified and cooled after the impact even, life began.

<comment><USER3> Not an expert here at all but asteroids often do carry precursors for life.

Asteroids on Earth have been found carrying organic compounds: [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the- building-b...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-building- blocks-of-life-may-have-come-from-outer-space-3884354/)

<comment><USER5> Sure, but my point here isn't about presence, but quantity. We've known that radiation can cause the creation of bio-molecules and precursor molecules for a very long time. But there almost no way that process can generate a significant enough quantity of these molecules to really seed planets. Largely its about concentration gradients, which is why I personal have found arguments about life forming via early oceans unconvincing. A couple asteroids (or even hundreds) worth of bio-molecules spread out over an ocean, is still basically nothing. You have to have enough material concentrated in a small enough space; you need a thermodynamic process that postpones equilibrium; then you need a gradient to drive the formation of more and more complicated molecules.

Like, Pluto type objects are far and away more common then earthlike objects. If there is a process that can accumulate bio-molecules in mass on these types of bodies, that's pretty game changing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The scientific article that this summary is based on can be found here[1].

[1][http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0779-y](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0779-y)

</comment><comment><USER7> So is Theia's core now Mercury?

<comment><USER8> The theory is that much of Theia was absorbed in to the Earth and the mass that was ejected during the collision became the moon.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_\(planet\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What would happen if we added (5 or 10%) more water to the Earth today?

</comment><comment><USER10> I was just reading that Mars was found to have the remains of an icecap one mile under the surface, so was Mars also hit with a meteor?

</comment><comment><USER11> wait what?

<comment><USER4> All the other inner planets and asteroids are dry, but Earth is wet, so it's always been a bit of a mystery where the water came from.

<comment><USER12> Where did the water on Mars come from? Any correlation?

<comment><USER4> Mars, as far as we can tell, has very little water compared to Earth, even back when it appears to have had liquid water on the surface. It's a bit further out, so we'd expect it to have more water compared to the rest of the inner planets. It seems to be consistent with occasional deliveries of water from collisions with comets. In comparison, Earth has vastly more water.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The secret life of plants - <AUTHOR> https://blog.thompson-morgan.com/the-secret-life-of-plants/ <comment><USER2> These are lovely images but I can't help but feel somewhat aggrieved that they swiped the title from Peter Wohlleben and then didn't nearly live up to quality or depth of work.</comment>