Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100826/lf_afp/lifestylehongkongchinajapanculturetechnology <comment><USER2> David Moser's essay _Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard_ [1] has an amusing and enlightening passage about this "character amnesia".

 _I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??_

[1] <http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> "I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character."

Simple! 嚏 is spelt 口十冖田厶止. The first character, 口, meaning "mouth", is on the left of the other 5 characters, 十冖田厶止, which are stacked on top of each other on the righthand side. Those five are the picture of a body: 十 is the head, 冖 are the shoulders, 田 is the sixpack abs, 厶 are the privates, and 止 means "stop walking", for the legs. When he sneezes, the mouth becomes detached from the body, comic book style. Perhaps when Chinese students learn characters in primary school, they don't remember them because they learn them in rote style, not remembering WHY a character has a certain shape.

The character amnesia is because of the rote learning, not because of the enlarged character lexicon.

<comment><USER3> That is a great way to remember the character but it doesn't work as an explanation for why it's written that way. It is NOT a picture of the body. In fact, most Chinese characters are not pictures of anything.

The character amnesia is because the monosyllabic sound of each character doesn't not provide enough information to make it easy to remember how to write that character. (A consequence being that rote learning is practically the only way to memorize the characters.)

<comment><AUTHOR> "In fact, most Chinese characters are not pictures of anything."

Originally, most of them were pictures. Around 2000 yrs ago, they were simplified into "Clerical script", and many lost their pictorial resemblance. When new phonetic characters were created (i.e. one component semantic, the other phonetic) there were many choices of what to use as phonetic (e.g. any of 体提替etc could have been chosen for righthand side of "ti" to sneeze) and the one providing the most semantic clues is often chosen.

Another example of "ti" with mouth radical is 啼, meaning "to cry". The 帝 on the right (actually "di", close enough) looks like an eye (立) with tears flowing down (冖 and 巾).

I believe the reason I've had character amnesia as a foreign learner of Chinese in the past is because I was initially never shown how to "spell" characters into their components. One of the first characters I learnt was 喜 in 喜欢. I was told to practise writing it many times over until I knew it. But I needed to learn it as being spelt as 士口八一口 before I could remember it easily.

<comment><USER3> I know the _ancestors_ of Chinese characters were pictures but not the current characters (with a few unconvincing exceptions). Most of the characters now are "phono-semantic compounds".

Not to be offensive or anything but those "oh they picked that cause it looks like this" stories are bullshit. In my opinion at least. Take the example you chose 啼. That also means "wild animal cry". How does that help the picture theory? And even if this one story happens to be true, how does that explain all the other thousands of characters?

I understand that you're trying to apologize for the Chinese writing system. But there is no need. It just sucks. Horrible, hard-to-use designs are cobbled together all the time, the Chinese character system is just a particularly prominent example.

Now for a quote from David Moser's _Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard_ speaking about learning a French word.

And voila! I've learned a new word, quickly and painlessly, all because the sound I construct when reading the word is the same as the sound in my head from the radio this morning -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the next week I see the word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the sound by simply reading the word >phonetically -- "a-mor-tis-seur"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not at all surprised. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for Hanzi and Kanji.

The failings of these writing systems are manifold, but perhaps the most pernicious is the effect on education. The countless classroom hours wasted on memorising characters poison the classroom with a culture of rote learning. It should be no surprise that when the fundamental skill of literacy can only be acquired through mindless drill, that will almost inevitably become the default approach to the rest of schooling.

Those of us who work with the Japanese are often amazed at how so much schooling leads to so little learning, but with the millstone that is kanji I am surprised that so much is achieved.

<comment><USER5> The advantage of Hanzi is that it can be used for any dialect of spoken Chinese(or any spoken language), of which, in China there are hundreds. China is really 30 countries bound together by a unified writing system.

The tradeoff is that it's difficult to learn.

If you want a totally phonetic alphabet then look at Hangul(Korean characters). Beautiful in it's simplicity and how it mirrors the spoken language. But Korea would only be a small province in China, and Hangul would be useless to those who spoke a different dialect.

Hanzi will be around for quite some time, so few Chinese are immersed in technology to the point they forget how to write, in fact the majority of Chinese are peasants and don't even have an email.

<comment><USER6> I've _really_ got to look into learning Korean some time. It seems like a near-ideal written language (albeit at a potential loss to historical documents, _because_ it mirrors the spoken language. But that's what linguists and historians are for, and are needed in _every_ language).

<comment><USER7> > It seems like a near-ideal written language (albeit at a potential loss to > historical documents, because it mirrors the spoken language.

Actually, it's not ideal anymore. Hangul perfectly mirrored the spoken Korean language when it was originally created in 1440s by King Sejong's Hall of Worthies (a group of scholars). But like any other phonetic writing system, it stayed constant as the spoken language changed (a problem we have much experience with in English). This is obvious in something as basic as the word "Korea" in Korean. It is romanized as "Hanguk", but written in Hangul as "한국". As you can tell, the 4th and 6th letters are the same (a "ㄱ") even though they are pronounced differently in modern Korean.

However, it is indeed probably the closest one can get to perfection with a phonetic writing system.

<comment><USER8> The fact that Hangul closely mirrors spoken Korean is also probably due to the fact that Hangul is a relatively new invention as writing systems go. Chinese characters and the Roman alphabet have been around for millennia. By contrast, Hangul is only 570 years old, and less than 100 years since it actually became popular. It hasn't had much time to diverge from the spoken language, yet. Judging from the intermittent stream of Korean "experts" complaining about how laypeople are bastardizing their spelling, the gap between proper writing and everyday pronunciation seems to be growing.

Having said that, Korean is probably one of the easiest languages to type into a computer or a mobile phone apart from the Roman alphabet and its relatives. It uses only 24 symbols which can be combined in various ways. Fits perfectly onto a keyboard/touchscreen. No stupid menus asking you to clarify what you're typing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I learnt both Chinese and English as a child and all the way through my formal education (up to 18), and I must say, that the phenomenon of forgetting easy characters is pretty common.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters are ridiculously complex. The resultant expressive power is obvious, and it's no wonder why these are the few languages in which calligraphy blossomed into a fully-fledged artform, which I personally practice as well.

As with everything, we're going to artificially and naturally select the best language. I personally think that 'best' here is defined by flexibility and beauty.

Flexibility - no way would you have come up with a word like "globalization" in Chinese, it lacks the prefix/suffix system to do that. It also doesn't have the phonetic flexibility to include foreign terms like Japanese does. Eg: "Basketball" in japanese can be pronounced "baskeboru" but it's "lan qiu" in Chinese.

I think one overlooked point is that Chinese isn't a beautiful language, at least not in the opinion of youth today. It's conciseness has spawned some of the best poetry (i think) on earth. But as much as the French complain about how it's hard to sound romantic in English, it's even harder in Chinese (not to mention some of the dialects like Cantonese and Hokkien).

Kinda reminds me of how people despise Lisp (of which I'm also a fan of). It's an obscure language, but it's the most expressive one that I've seen, and will continue to admire it for it's beauty forever. That's probably the reason why it's still around after all this time.

Will the Chinese language suffer a similar fate to Lisp over the long run? I doubt so, since natural languages are a whole different beast. But the problems are real, and with more than a billion people potentially using the same character set, this will be interesting to watch.

\---

TL;DR - Chinese is difficult to learn. It's not as flexible as English; you can add "ization" to "global" easily in English, not so in Chinese.

It's also not a beautiful language in the way that youth see it; Chinese makes for great poetry about the mountains and the ocean, but not for whispering sweet nothings into a partner's ear (at least compared to a language like French)

<comment><USER10> Does Chinese not use 化 or something similar to mean "ization?" If not, how do they turn "global" into "globalization?" (I'm just curious)

In Japanese, the kanji 化 is almost perfectly equivalent to the English "ization," and I think it's very elegant. For example, 機械 is machine and 機械化 is mechanization. Or another very popular one in Japan these days is 高齢化, old- age-ization, used to refer to the phenomenon of Japan's "aging society."

That's actually one of the main benefits I see with kanji is the elegance and succinctness. The worst thing to translate from Japanese to English is a table (figure in a document). Kanji allows you to express things so succinctly that you can have lots of tiny columns with one or two kanji for the heading (no longer than the digits in the content). Often that heading has to be at least three or four words in English, and it's impossible to recreate the table in the same space.

<comment><USER9> Yep, you're right, and I could have chosen a better example =). Globalization is usually referred to as 国际化, "international" + suffix to mean "evolving to something"; ie - becoming international.

So yes, this is one of the ways whereby when Chinese is succinct, it's really succinct, hence loved by many of the older generation. But since Chinese doesn't share the recursive and context-free grammatical structure of English, and because tense isn't explicit, you lose some flexibility.

Eg: Instant Messaging can be shortened to IM, and can be turned into a transitive form but adding 'ing' to form IMing.

And of course, I'm confident that a language affects the way you think, as well as the memes that can be passed around. Best example, the word LOLcat and the associated lulz could never have evolved in the Chinese language.

Something else could have evolved perhaps, but different things for sure, with a different focus.

Should probably also bring up the fact that acronyms are near impossible in Chinese, at least in it's strict sense. I like Japanese for the fact that both the language and the culture is willing to evolve.

Or put slightly differently, Chinese is kinda like Java. Japanese is more Clojure-ish, with the ability to abandon formal declarations (arigato + many trailing speech placeholders) yet retain the good parts of its core.

<comment><USER11> It's not just the example. Your entire point is ehrm, incorrect. Chinese uses radicals and entire characters to serve as the prefix/suffix. It's perfectly capable of performing character mashups or other mutations to create slang, and there are spontaneous word generations all the time... I mean how else could new ideas be expressed?

>Should probably also bring up the fact that acronyms are near impossible in Chinese, at least in it's strict sense. I like Japanese for the fact that both the language and the culture is willing to evolve.

Lol wut. There is some interesting bias and stereotyping going on here, but I find this so novel and shocking that I'm unable to respond.

<comment><USER3> I think he means the written language doesn't work well for acronyms and other shortening. Each character is already so much work. You could never get words like SNAFU.

<comment><AUTHOR> Chinese shortens words by replacing two-character words with one-character ones, e.g. 北京天津高速铁路 (Beijing-Tianjin High-speed Railway) is abbreviated to 京津高铁 (lit. "Jing-Jin High-Rail).

<comment><USER3> Yes, but that is still 4 characters = lots of strokes. Also, not everything can be reliably shortened this way. You can't get the kind of shortening you can with things like "TNT", "DNA". And what about when there are no two character words to be shortenened? Like WTF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Um, yeah. This has been happening since approximately 1980, when word processors became available. And it's also the reason why those were a lot more important in Japan than in the West: mechanical typewriters that would have allowed the use of 3000+ Kanji were simply impossible to construct, so digital word processors were a huge revolution.

<comment><USER5> Sorry but there has been a typewriter that supports this since the 40's, invented by the author of 'A moment in Peking'.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Kwai>

And a Japanese typewriter since 1929

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_typewriter>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is fascinating because in the 1980s when there was nearly a trade war between the US & Japan, part of the rhetoric from Japan was that their symbol- based system was superior to Western alphabets in that it used a different part of the brain and therefore somehow enhanced intelligence.

My own testimony is that my English-based handwriting (my native and only language) has gotten progressively worse due to using a keyboard daily for years instead of using pen & paper. It's also frustrating, because it's slower. It feels like labor now.

<comment><USER14> While language does not limit or boost what is expressible, conceivable or knowable it does impose a default in how we structure the world and what details we take in as important. There was a fairly interesting article in the NYT recently that goes over this. [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=1)

What I found interesting were the accounts on a particular tribe of Australian aborigines who had an amazing sense of cardinal direction - instantly knowing north from south regardless of orientation due to a language based on geographic instead of egocentric directions and the Matses people whose precision in relaying past events would make a Vulcan logician proud.

Intrigued I researched this concept to be evidentiality and epistemic modality. Enforcing such reporting precision into the grammar seems like it would combat sloppy thinking. I wonder if someone raised in such a language would have an easier time creating proofs, programming or studying subjects like bayesian probability or philosophy. I wonder how marketing would work in such a default. I bet statistics would not be a form of lying in that culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In here you have a very interesting video about Kanji I saw some months ago:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WxihOeMPBg#t=4m10>

(I put the flag to skip to the moment he speaks about this issue).

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a non-event when better tools come along. It's like people complaining they forgot how to carve writing on stone when paper and pen come along.

</comment><comment><USER17> As an outside observer I find this a little funny. It's very much akin to how some segments of America constantly blame technological advancement for what they see as the deteriorating quality of youth.

</comment><comment><USER18> I find myself forgetting how to write in cursive. To combat this problem, I force myself to write cursive periodically, just to stay in practice. It will never be as consistent and attractive as my grandmother's cursive, though.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have this problem in English, and I'm not even young by tech standards. I should probably spend some time re-learning to write, because it's kind of frightening.

</comment><comment><USER20> Not really much different from what has happened in the west, my handwriting (which was never easy to read) as flown of a cliff since I left grade school.

Which is mostly not a problem, except that I makes it more difficult to write on whiteboards.

<comment><USER21> But you can still hand-write any word you can spell, right? If you really try? Imagine trying to write on a whiteboard and just being completely unable to remember how to write "shoulder".

There's a big difference of degree here.

<comment><USER20> If by handwriting, you mean "painting" then yes, but only because there are so few letters and they are relatively simple.

I am Danish, and we have three letters that are not from the Roman alphabet. I constantly have to think about how to paint æ.

<comment><USER22> Even writing e.g. "frimaerke" is not unintelligible, though. One could also imagine that ø and æ were replaced by the more common ö and ä in the future.

I think the "there are so few letters and they are relatively simple" is the point here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> heck I think every written/human language but English should die out. If there are some words worth saving from those languages, let's figure out how to import them into English, then move on already.

<comment><USER24> Agreed. Some other things that should die out include: all operating systems but Mac OS X, all programming languages but C, all car companies but Toyota, all clothing retailers but Banana Republic, all coffee shops but Starbucks, all pizza chains but Domino's ...

<comment><USER18> With you so far...</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Weekly CSS Brain Teasers by email - <AUTHOR> http://www.cssteasers.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> There are lots of small CSS problems that engage the same part of my brain that reading IQ puzzles does, including that buzz you get when you solve them.

I think there might be other devs who feel the same way, and so from next week I'll be publishing a new CSS brain teaser every Friday that I hope they'll get a kick out of. My goal is to make each challenge fun, short, and educational.</comment>


Zerg - Erlang on Xen boots and replies in 0.2s - <AUTHOR> http://zerg.erlangonxen.org/ <comment><USER2> _" Over capacity

The demo is limited to 16 concurrent instances and 2 libvirt connections. Due to these limitations we were unable to spawn a new instance to service your request. Please try again later."_

Well...that's something, I guess.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess this tech demo will totally fall flat on HN :-/

Here's a google cached snapshot: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://zerg.erlangonxen.org/)

<comment><USER2> Seems like a really cool idea. I can't wrap my head around what I'd do with it, but it's cool.</comment></comment></comment>


Let's Encrypt and iTunes podcasts - <AUTHOR> https://www.dominicrodger.com/2016/02/29/lets-encrypt-itunes-podcasts/ <comment><USER2> Interesting. IdenTrust, who cross-signs Let's Encrypt, has been in the root CA lists for a long time. (Mozilla merged this particular root certificate, DST Root X3, in 2008, as a replacement for existing expiring IdenTrust roots.)

<comment><USER3> The problem seems to be Java/Oracle's root store, where IdenTrust is not included. Let's Encrypt has stated that they have applied to Oracle's root program with their own root certificate, so hopefully this will eventually be solved in a future Java version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe a little HN attention will prompt them to take a look at this issue.

<comment><USER5> Hopefully. I'm willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here that this was unintended oversight. Practically speaking, iTunes should use exactly the same SSL infrastructure as Safari.

<comment><USER6> The problem is in iTunes's server side component, not the app running in OS X on user computers. But yeah, it should have kept up.</comment></comment></comment>


Meatspace Chat - <AUTHOR> http://chat.meatspac.es <comment><USER2> Video about the demo at RealTimeConf here [https://vimeo.com/77376238](https://vimeo.com/77376238)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the craziest thing I have seen all week!

Short clips of people looking utterly bewildered flying by while a GIF of what I can only assume is the creator trying to explain the features of the site by pointing. All mixed in with large cubes of meat!

<comment><USER3> For the record I love it, great job!

<comment><USER4> As do I, I'm a sucker for all web cauldrons of weirdness, case in point: [http://artichoke.meatspac.es/post/126](http://artichoke.meatspac.es/post/126)

Also, I'm not sure what these are: [http://carne.meatspac.es/](http://carne.meatspac.es/) [http://artichoke.meatspac.es/](http://artichoke.meatspac.es/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some folks always grump about how social media is just an endless, random stream of strobing images and gibberish, but I never expected it to be _literally_ true.

</comment><comment><USER6> Meatspaces is right. Hello, white males.

</comment><comment><USER7> No flood protection whatsoever is making this even more useless than it was previously.

</comment><comment><USER8> goatse'd less than 10 seconds in. Sounds about right.

<comment><USER9> All great web services are measured in their initial "time til dicks" — or TTD.*

*Dicks can be substituted for Goatse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thank you everyone who just joined in my side-to-side game :)

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah side to side was fun, I also enjoyed spins

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would be amazing if you broke it down into channels/niches/rooms/categories.

</comment><comment><USER12> Cool concept. I can see this becoming a better way to browse and find random video chat partners. Especially as a girl, you don't want to be going through a bunch of dick videos on chat roulette. This quickly summarizes who's available and whether they look like someone you would want to chat with.

</comment><comment><USER13> What?

</comment><comment><USER14> I made a Firefox add-on that automatically scrapes the GIFs on Meatspace as they come in:

[https://github.com/fwenzel/refrigerateur](https://github.com/fwenzel/refrigerateur)

(Early version! Feedback and contributions welcome!)

</comment><comment><USER15> Doesn't scroll very well.

<comment><USER16> seems the posts self destruct after 10 minutes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like how many of the comments are people trying to find xss vulns

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow this had me laughing quite a bit, I love this community <3

</comment><comment><USER19> RATE LIMITING PLEASE

<comment><USER20> Fully agree.... someone was being a total troll on there. w0mp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can't get the delay right with the shot. There should be a counter that's like "3 2 1 SHOOOTING"

</comment><comment><USER22> I had to force quit my browser. I guess my old Core 2 Duo isn't up to chats anymore ...

</comment><comment><USER23> Funny how you can see all the xss attack attempts.

Also, I wonder why some people get a gif.

<comment><USER24> Because we hit "Allow" when it asks you for webcam.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is awesome, but my camera isn't working?

</comment><comment><USER25> Annnnd spammers ruining it already...

</comment><comment><USER26> I was that asian boy. #mozilla ftw

</comment><comment><USER26> if this were a hackathon project at hackmit, you probably would be #1. lol

</comment><comment><USER27> Had a lot of fun! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow... pretty damn neat

</comment><comment><USER29> someone strlen() that pi numbers guy:/

<comment><USER30> nothing more fun than testing string buffers with pi to a million digits

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Awesome.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Such fun!</comment>


Telecommunications Backhaul - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backhaul_(telecommunications) <comment><USER2> Under the section "Cell towers moving from microwave to fiber optic" it is stated that 50-100Mbps backhaul links for cell towers are common. We're well beyond that; 5G trial sites they are starting to appear across the UK need 100G backhauls unless you want to severely restricted them.</comment>


Tron Guy makes "I'm a PC" cameo - <AUTHOR> http://www.istartedsomething.com/20080919/tron-guy-makes-im-a-pc-cameo/ <comment><USER2> Noooooooo! He is and always will be the "I'm Linux" guy.</comment>


The eardrums move when the eyes move - <AUTHOR> http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/01/22/1717948115 <comment><USER2> There is a medical condition where people can hear their own eye movements.

> The bizarre phenomenon of being able to hear the sound of the eyeballs > moving in their sockets (e.g. when reading in a quiet room) "like sandpaper > on wood" is one of the more distinctive features of this condition and is > almost exclusively associated with SCDS.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_canal_dehiscence_sy...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_canal_dehiscence_syndrome)

<comment><USER3> I can hear my eye movements. It used to be only when I was tired or sick, but with age it's become more prevalent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have always felt it, but presumed it was "cross talk" in the optical nerves being interpreted as "movement" in the outer ear.

You might be able to experience it yourself. Just move your eyes all the way (ALL the way) to the right or left and hold them there for a second, you might hear/feel a high-pitched sensation almost like a slight tickle right where your eardrum is.

<comment><USER5> Until you pointed this out, I hadn't noticed it, but it has indeed always been there.

I wonder what other sensory anomalies we experience without realising ?

<comment><USER6> This is why buddhist monks talk about reality vibrating - the continuity of reality is an illusion constructed by the brain, while the actual perceptions generated are a series of discrete experiences.

Also, eye saccades are a great example of this. If you look at your own eyes in the mirror and switch between looking at your left and right eyes, you don't see your eyes move. If you watch someone else do this, you do.

<comment> martin-adams Yes, it is also why when you look suddenly at a clock it appears to be stopped. This explains it in more detail: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNBTLbw1_2Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNBTLbw1_2Q)

<comment><USER7> This thing perplexed me to no end when I was younger. I literally used to sit around for hours after school, trying to catch the wall clock stopped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> interestingly the ear has recently been found to oscillate its follicles at frequencies which enhance what the brain wants to hear ... Hudspeth AJ [http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00316](http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00316) ... science has barely scratched the surface of even the feeblest understanding of biophysics, what a great time to be alive

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this why people turn the radio down when trying to look for an address, parking space, etc?

<comment><USER10> If I listen to the radio (speech) and then start to read and try to simultaneously listen to the radio it becomes incomprehensible. Quite weird.

<comment><USER11> Funny, it still works for me. Could it be an attention thing instead?

<comment><USER12> Probably has more to do with how you process written vs audio information. Richard Feynman had an anecdote about discovering that he couldn't read and count in his head at the same time but others could, turned out the person who could counted in his head by visualizing the numbers rather than 'hearing' them in his inner monologue which allowed him to continue reading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You might find this article easier to read: [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/when- you...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/01/when-your-eyes- move-so-do-your-eardrums/551237/)

</comment><comment><USER14> About 5% of the nerves in the auditory nerve are efferent, and act to modulate the firing of the afferent nerves. Perhaps part of the modulation they achieve is to prevent us "hearing" our eyes move.

<comment><USER14> Ah, for example:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3343276/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3343276/)

"Historical evidence in-vivo suggests that a primary function of the EVS is to tune vestibular sensation to the interest and needs of the organism, for example by decreasing the sensitivity during large self-generated movements [30, 31], and adjusting the background discharge characteristics of afferents [6]."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> My sister can blow air by the corner of her eyes... it might all be connected.

<comment><USER16> Tears are set up to drain into the nasal cavity, so when she does that she's probably just forcing air back up the drain.

[http://care.american- rhinologic.org/sinus_anatomy?print](http://care.american- rhinologic.org/sinus_anatomy?print)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This makes me wonder ... um ... this might be TMI, but I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced a sudden "clearing" of the sense of smell when washing the perineum. Do we have olfactory cells down there that kind of cancel out our own scent?

I'll start washing "downstairs" and experience a something analogous to clouds parting, but for smell. It's not the smell of the soap per-se, it's a sudden removal of some kind of dullness or dampening.

Always meant to ask about this, but was inhibited. Now you know.

<comment><USER18> Never heard of it, but I have a weird one too: my left ear pops when I crack my upper back.

<comment><USER19> Most of the tissue in the neck and exteding into the upper back is connected to the walls of the sinus cavities. Stretching the jaw, neck and shoulders/upper back does a good job of massaging the interal parts of the sinuses that are unrechable otherwise. Feels really good after you hydrate them, from a shower, and you might loosen and expell some nasty snot that could be draining your immune energy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Oh god I can feel them doing it now.

<comment><USER21> As soon as I tried to sense it I could and now I can't stop.

<comment><USER22> This is torture, how do you stop it???

Don't try this if you haven't!!

<comment><USER23> You'll forget about it by tomorrow. It's like when you think about your breathing you feel like you'll be stuck remembering to breathe for the rest of your life!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've noticed that when I'm lying in bed in the dark with eyes closed, a sharp unexpected sound (like the popping of a settling structure, not necessarily all that loud) will cause a flash of light across my visual field. I wonder if that is a side-effect of this kind of connection.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is this something a person would be able to perceive?

I am moving my eyeballs around and imagining I can also feel my ears move, but that might just be the muscles around my ears in my head, or I'm completely imagining the effect.

<comment><USER26> My guess is that the data gets sent to the brain but sometime during development the brain learned to ignore it (if it's not useful).

I think that when people talk about the "doors of perception" being opened by psychedelic drugs, often leading to experiences of synesthesia (seeing sound, etc), that it's this kind of sensory data that's made available to the brain once again, or that the brain is made unable to ignore it.

<comment><USER27> I recently read a study based in experiments which said that contrary to the idea that psychedelics make the world unfiltered and open up the brain to more information, what they actually do is the reverse. Psychedelics reduce information, reduce sensory input, and as a consequence the brain fills in the gaps via hallucinations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is incredible. You would think this connection would be obviously known, but it's only recently discovered? I wonder what other fascinating human body connections exist that have yet to be discovered.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how this works for blind people that 'look' somewhere?

<comment><USER30> This is exactly what I wondered while reading this. I would be very interested to see a study to see if this was still present with eye movement in vision impaired people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ever notice when you chew the sound gets attenuated when you clamp down?

<comment><USER32> That's one of the automatic functions of the tensor tympani muscle. It also does it when you talk, and as part of your startle reflex.

Fun fact: some people have conscious control of this muscle and can voluntarily "screw up their ears" (at least that's what it feels like, it also makes a roaring/rushing sound) to dampen sounds.

<comment><USER33> Haha that's what it is.

There's more tricks too, I'm able to close my nose by a muscle somewhere in the back of my throat. I've asked my friends if they could, but they al say they can't. Anyone else have that?

<comment><USER32> Is being able to close off your nose not normal? How do people blow up balloons (or otherwise blow air hard out of their mouths) without doing that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Interesting. I am no audio engineer but maybe this could add another layer of immersion to a VR system using binaural audio and eye tracking data.

</comment><comment><USER35> Anyone who can wiggle their ears can confirm this.

</comment><comment><USER17> I was wondering what that was. Never thought to investigate it. Huh.

</comment><comment><USER36> i thought that was just my brain trying to escape from my ears.</comment>


13k datasets, 100 million time series, 600 million facts - <AUTHOR> http://blog.datamarket.com/2011/01/23/13-thousand-data-sets-100-million-time-series-600-million-facts/

<comment><USER2> Fun to play with but no free level for the API seems odd. The FAQ is unhelpful: [http://help.datamarket.com/kb/using-data-from- datamarketcom-...](http://help.datamarket.com/kb/using-data-from- datamarketcom-elsewhere/api-basics)

<comment><USER3> As mentioned in the FAQ, there are 50 free API requests per month for every registered user. I updated the FAQ answer a little bit, but feel free to contact if anything remains unclear.

<comment><USER2> Maybe I'm dense but I don't see any API documentation on how to use it.</comment></comment></comment>


Software projects have an inherent bias towards unpredictability - <AUTHOR> http://gist.io/6949301

<comment><USER2> I dislike doing non-novel things. I dislike being paid for it. If I estimate accurately, it's probably not novel.

I dislike accurate estimates.

I'll do them, but I'm happy when I do it in 3x the time, not sad. And I certainly don't feel like I wwasted my time.

I just can't seem to find any employers or customers who feel the same way.

</comment><comment><USER3> What the author said is very true. We should accept that there is no good way to estimate the schedule because each software is inherently new. Simply that it will be done when it is done.

<comment><USER4> Like software developers would be some fairies living in mystical land? It is not working that way from other point of view, and that point of view is where money come from ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've seen a trend in HN where the comments from a previous story are cherry picked by a third party and turned into a blog post, which is then submitted to HN. It could be coincidence, but it looks like that's what happened here. The counter-argument is that great minds think alike.

<comment><USER6> I'm the author of the gist. The submitter is a good friend of mine that felt like posting it, and I don't mind.

It was a reply I made to another friend and previous co-worker on twitter a while back that was talking about software estimation. It wasn't a comment on any other blog post or hackernews story.

I was thinking I should edit and elaborate on it into a full blog post at some point, but that would also require setting up a blog ;P I didn't take the time to write this up to the standards of an adversarial blog aggregation audience. And I don't care to defend it as such or in detail. It's meant to outline a broad point I think is true, but not to be ironclad in it's argument.

Anyhow, no cherry picking or anything unethical going on here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Pretty much every piece of technology and algorithm that I use has been known since the 70's and the only thing I do is hook up those technologies in various ways to accomplish a goal. To say that it is "novel" or "unpredictable" is definitely a mischaracterization."

</comment><comment><USER8> """ it's likely that adapting old code to a new context is less work than starting from square one again. """

It has been measured that changing more than 25% of software incurs more than 100% of the cost. So your mileage may vary.

<comment><USER9> Any chance you remember where that measurement came from? I could use that with a client right now, given we're discussing a major refactor of about 25%-30% of the code base.

<comment><USER8> It was mentioned in this talk: [http://vimeo.com/9270320](http://vimeo.com/9270320) and in the corresponding book "making software" [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596808303.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596808303.do)

have fun.

<comment><USER10> Have you been able to find the Thomas et al paper that supports this claim? I have been unable to find it, and others seem to have this problem as well:

[http://www.gdb.me/computing/citations-greg-wilson- cusec.html](http://www.gdb.me/computing/citations-greg-wilson-cusec.html)

<comment><USER8> the slides from the talk are here: [http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/bits- of-evidence-2338367](http://www.slideshare.net/gvwilson/bits-of- evidence-2338367) (see slide 20)

I realized today I got it from somewhere else.. (Facts and fallacies of Software engineering) Looking up the whole reference in that book gave me the title, and googling that gave me the the paper

[http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/703/2/CS- TR-3424.pdf](http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/703/2/CS-TR-3424.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Contrast:

"You mean you _didn 't_ have a complete design for that bridge before you started building it??"

"You mean you waterfall designed and implemented your YC app project??"

</comment><comment><USER12> Theoretically true, but in practice you see millions of programmers doing "more of the same" and "yet another"

</comment><comment><USER13> True for some projects, not true at all for many others. If you build e-commerce online stores, or other standard sorts of offerings, you may very well be able to "lay the bricks" in a very predictable amount of time after you've done a few.

<comment><USER14> Having never worked on an e-commerce store or anything like it, do those sorts of products usually exceed their schedules?</comment></comment>


Temporary, Disposable Phone Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.notmynumber.net/

<comment><USER2> Do they reuse the phone numbers after a while? Will I get phone calls for previous users of that same number?

<comment> UVB-76 I would assume that's the only viable business model for this kind of thing.

<comment><USER3> Do phone numbers really cost anything in the US? Or is there an upper limit to the length of a phone number? Otherwise, they can just allocate a million which would be enough to have a grace period of at least a year until phone numbers would be reused.

<comment><USER4> All phone numbers in the US (actually, North America and some Caribbean islands) are the form AAA-XXX-YYYY, and there's a finite number of AAA (or area codes) that have been issued so far. And some types of numbers are not possible, mostly for historic reasons. I'm not sure how much a block of numbers actually cost in the US, but they're not free. I know a company I worked for tried hard to compress the range of numbers they had so they could give back part of an exchange to save money.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Numbering_Plan#N...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Numbering_Plan#Numbering_system)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We had this back in the 80's. It was called just calling someone with your phone. Because there was no caller id.

I remember when a group of girls called me, not saying who they were, and trying to trick me into meeting them out on the track at night at school, where they surely would not have been. OH, anonymous fun. :(

</comment><comment><USER6> anddd pulled off the app store already. Anyone know what happened?

<comment><USER7> Not sure why this is anything special. AAISP in the UK sell SIP phone numbers for £1.20 per month ([http://www.aaisp.co.uk/telecoms- prices.html](http://www.aaisp.co.uk/telecoms-prices.html)), they take about 10 seconds to set up, and I can use them trivially from my Android phone. Surely it's much the same in the US?

What's the point of the "App"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> there is an equivalent service for Europe without having to download an app: [http://www.cleverphone.com/](http://www.cleverphone.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder why they chose to support iOS and Windows Phone first and not Android.

<comment> simba-hiiipower not sure, but as a wp user that made me sort of happy - probably the first time i've seen that on hn..

my guess would be ease of porting, though that's purely a guess. i am though starting to notice an increase in the number of same-day releases for wp as ios, and in some cases (like disney games recently) ahead of android.

though still small, i really think the platform's gotten to the point where it makes sense for devs to at least consider it, especially as many times the effort to port from ios is sufficiently small to justify the work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Isn't this exactly the same as Burner? How is this even on the front page of HN?</comment>


A Simple Stunt Reveals How Blogs Will Print Anything for Pageviews - <AUTHOR> http://betabeat.com/2013/07/exposing-the-racket-a-simple-stunt-reveals-how-blogs-will-print-anything-for-pageviews/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting read. Definitely paints an interesting story about sensationalist "news" story like Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack.

Here's a good quote:

"Gen. Smedley Butler defined a racket as something that 'is not what it seems to the majority of the people,' where only a small group of insiders know what's really going on and they operate for the benefit of a few and expense of basically everyone else.

It's become clear to me that this is the only definition of the online-driven media system of today: a racket."

</comment><comment><USER3> This is not limited to blogs. Most news outlets do the same.</comment>


Introducing Opencall - <AUTHOR> I've been bootstrapping a tech start-up for the past year (having spent $25k+ on development of our platform plus all the other expenses that come with setting up and running a business) and last week a major competitor entered our niche market.
The money for the start-up was coming from my own pocket and funds were/are running low - it was crunch time, do I throw my last remaining cash trying to catch up with this competitor, or do I shut down.
I asked advice from a number of different sources, and the overwhelming response was to pivot the business by open sourcing and selling services around the platform such as hosting.
After a long weekend of thinking, designing, planning and building, I give to you:
* Opencall http://www.ocall.org
* GIT Repo: https://github.com/calltrackingasia/opencall
It would be great to hear your feedback and to find out if anybody would be interested in becoming part of the project. <comment><USER3> You have some usernames and passwords (to what looks like production servers) sprinkled throughout your app. May need to change those ASAP, wipe your history, or something.

Lots of suggestions:

* Don't write your own cron scripts, use Symfony Commands.

* Delete the Acme Bundle.

* Don't store your vendor directory in Git! Completely unnecessary and waste of 47MB.

* Don't commit parameters.yml, that's what parameters.yml.dist is for.

* Use a migration tool (Doctrine Migrations are fine) instead of one big SQL dump.

* Not sure what mongodb/example.php is for.

* Why is all the plivo stuff in web/plivo/ instead of being a callable controller?

* Are you manually generating your Doctrine entities?

* Don't commit your asset directories (they should be symlinks).

* No need to use PHPMailer (or include the entire project in your repository), Symfony comes with Swiftmailer which is great.

* Same with src/Phone, add that library through Composer ([https://packagist.org/packages/practo/libphonenumber-for-php](https://packagist.org/packages/practo/libphonenumber-for-php)).

The design looks great, but I wouldn't trust a lot of this (especially after seeing how many hosts and usernames and passwords you left scattered about).

<comment><USER4> > Don't store your vendor directory in Git! Completely unnecessary and waste > of 47MB.

I find that it simplifies versioning as well as making it so you don't have to download individual dependencies. What is your suggestion otherwise?

<comment><USER5> There is a composer.json and composer.lock file in the repository. All you'd need to do to download all the dependencies is have composer installed and run "composer install".

<comment><USER6> Thus making your application build process require full Internet connectivity, and making it require that every dependency hosting site is working.

Committing dependencies is a solid decision to avoid taking a dependency on a bunch of third parties.

<comment><USER7> "application build process" or simply the checkout process? I'd suggest your deployment process shouldn't include a public git repo others can change. Instead, use your own fork on Github, or alternatively host a git repo local to your deploy network. After all, you're trying to avoid dependencies on things like Github working/failing, right? ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am in this business and I think the general execution seems reasonable if it works as advertised. However you need to secure at least one big partner or a few smaller ones. May be Plivo themselves, they should be interested to help out promoting a good product based on their platform. You will need funding to develop the whole thing into a unique appealing product with some differentiators - some harder technical features, better artwork/UX if you will.

My advice is don't put more cash into it for now, go talk to Plivo, talk to a few call center companies see if anybody wants to be a partner on reasonable terms. In the mean time look for a team and funding. Not freelancers, a few guys part time, working for shares is better for VC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you - this comment is buried but it's excellent advice and I will be taking it seriously. Currently chatting with one of the co-founders of Plivo so watch this space :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just adding a comment to make it easier to click the links:

Opencall [http://www.ocall.org](http://www.ocall.org)

GIT Repo: [https://github.com/calltrackingasia/opencall](https://github.com/calltrackingasia/opencall)

<comment><USER9> Looks pretty sweet. Do you have a style guide for contributions? There are a lot of low-hanging fruit here that would be easy for contributors to get in and start making pull-requests.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - no I don't, any tips or resources on the best way to get this prepared?

<comment><USER9> I usually just start out with an existing style guide. Maybe take something like the PEAR style guide [0] and distill it down to the basics. You basically just want people to know how you want things formatted and what is an acceptable structure for commits.

Looks like a pretty cool system. My products are all Twilio-based, so I could see a lot of value in making your system telephony-agnostic instead of relying on Plivo.

Sweet product though.

[0] [http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.php](http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.php)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really useful, thank you. The system will work with Twilio if you override the default XML responses when adding an advert, but for now that's not built in so I haven't officially put that it supports Twilio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you can edit the post it would helpful if you included something to let people know what the project is. Something like:

      Opencall: open source call tracking software

      Self-host your call tracking solution – own your data, cut
      your costs and track calls in any country.

</comment><comment><USER11> Any market that is worth entering will have competitors. Look at what you are doing as a strategy not a last-ditch effort. Open source is a very valid way to build a business in a market with entrenched proprietary competitors, and it's exactly what my company is doing right now. I wish you luck, and go sell some software!

</comment><comment><USER12> Just another reminder:

In adult life, usually best to post from a position of strength, or people will dump on you.

<comment><USER13> Interesting that you think that, do you have any HN-Show examples to support the point, or other sources? Not to be pedantic, I am really just curious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems a lot like OpenVBX[0] just powered by Plivo, not Twilio[1]. OpenVBX is also open source.

[http://openvbx.org](http://openvbx.org) [http://twilio.com](http://twilio.com)

<comment><USER15> Seems like OpenVBX is a call router of sorts, whereas Opencall is call tracking software. Similar, but different.

<comment><USER16> so, this is a subset of openVBX?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So here is the interesting thing. I am an ACTUAL user of this type of software and a paying SUBSCRIBER to two different SaaS call tracking platforms. I run a marketing agency and have almost 200 clients using call tracking on the twilio platform.

Firstly - thank you! What an awesome contribution to the community. I cant comment on code quality or license attribution but I can tell you that it is an extremely valuable service.

I have not downloaded and installed your code, but I will - here is where I see the market need these days, and its far greater than just source attribution.

Google has done a great thing by encrypting searches, but it is terrible for website owners and marketers because it is so difficult to prove ROI.

The place that we use using this successfully is by using the UTM source information of a click to change the incoming phone number on the site using dynamic number insertion - this helps clients have a justifiable ROI to continue to use the service.

If you have questions about how I am using this, please feel free to let me know - but kudos to you on building and open sourcing it.

</comment><comment><USER18> A couple points.

1\. The advice to pivot and offer it open source is good. Kudos to you for following up on it. This gives you some free marketing that you might not otherwise get.

2\. It isn't quite clear to me how to integrate other telephony products based on the discussion. If in addition to http, you could support either IAX2 or SIP, this might provide significant improvements in terms of reachable market, because you could integrate with existing soft phones and open source PBX's, including both Asterisk and Bayonne.

Those two things strike me as being things which might increase your market reach significantly.

<comment><AUTHOR> SIP is currently supported on the outbound leg. Definitely the plan to integrate with other telephony products and hopefully by going the open source route we'll be able to make it happen sooner rather than later.

Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What _is_ call tracking?

<comment><AUTHOR> In sales/marketing language: it allows companies to boost their sales & ROI, reduce advertising budget wastage and optimise their teams performance on the phone by tracking inbound phone calls from their customers.

<comment><USER20> No, those are all outcomes. What does your thing _do_ to achieve those outcomes?

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but if that's your elevator pitch, well, right there is your problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on who I'm pitching to - if I'm talking to a CEO of a company, they're less interested in how it works and more interested in how it's going to make/save them money.

What is call tracking? It lets you track statistics and recordings of inbound phone calls (usually from your customers) so that you can identify trends, strengths, weaknesses and understand the performance of your sales and marketing campaigns.

Time of day, day of week, failed calls, total calls, caller id, caller country, call duration, hangup reason - all these stats and more are available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> IMHO (I'm just a stranger from internet)

1\. Call to action is hidden. Your goal it to sell SaaS service?

2\. Price comparing plans should be easier, less text more icons. ex. [http://uxmovement.com/content/7-useful-design-strategies- for...](http://uxmovement.com/content/7-useful-design-strategies-for-a- successful-pricing-table/)

3\. Too many features. 3 features is optimum, 7 is max. (except selling to corporation, then you need a datasheet). look at [https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales)

4\. Products that do everything, are not successful.

5\. Who is your customer? Maybe put remaining money in advertising.

6\. Set it as beta and put on [http://betali.st](http://betali.st) or other similar sites. Get more feedback, involve users, because you don't need one time customer you need audience (loosely quoting rework)

7\. Where is competition there is a market. Competition is the greatest thing on the earth. Maybe you could beat them with the best customer service ever? Or with openness and community around your product? or your product will be super easy with minimum features? or will not require hours of trainings

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As my account is new I'm having trouble replying to comments ("You're doing that too much!"). I promise I will reply to you all - thank you for all your fantastic feedback and security tips. We've started implementing some of these changes.

</comment><comment><USER22> Would be curious to see/know which major competitor you're referring to

<comment><USER23> Im sure a quick Google search will show you ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> hehe, your server is HN'ed :)

I'd replace the homepage (temporarily) to the absolute minimum during the time it's bombarded with requests, unless you have a vserver/cloud-host that you can scale up. Or change the server your DNS records point to, if you use CNAME, to one at rackspace, github homepage, or anywhere else with a minimal homepage. But I'm sure the guys @HN have better tips :)

I don't know much about legal stuff and licenses, but I would allow anyone to use your software as long as it's code is shared, except for enterprises. Companies who want to use it commercially and have more than 1-5 employees would need to obtain a license. Open Source doesn't mean that you cannot put a price tag on it.

But as you said, prepackaging the stuff as a deb/rpm and allowing white- labeling for enterprise customers would be a good way get some money back from this. Just saying, but you could, if you wanted to, add advertising into the opensource product and disallow it's removal unless a license is obtained. If you were an SaaS, you could collect data and metrics, that you could monetize, but I'm glad you aren't anymore :)

@pg I think there should be a sticky informing website owners on howto react, when their website is HN'ed. Somewhere in the footer of the homepage or so.. This is happening a bit too often and many aren't prepared for such high traffic peaks.

<comment><USER24> > Companies who want to use it commercially and have more than 1-5 employees > would need to obtain a license.

> but you could, if you wanted to, add advertising into the opensource product > and disallow it's removal unless a license is obtained.

That's not Open Source. The phrase Open Source has definite meanings and a strict definition, and people have a set of expectations when they hear that phrase. [http://opensource.org/osd-annotated](http://opensource.org/osd- annotated)

Granted, you certainly can do what you are proposing, but

\- That's a very different business model from an Open Source one, as commonly discussed and understood.

\- You really shouldn't call it Open Source. This is important beyond mere pedantry as people spent a lot of time building up the Open Source movement with strong principals, and we all benefit immensely from it. If we allow the Open Source label to be ruined by things like this we will all suffer.

<comment><USER13> @jarofgreen nice of you, but I think you got me a little wrong, or I wasn't clear enough. My main message regarding opensource was:

> Open Source doesn't mean that you cannot put a price tag on it.

The other things could be done, but you're right, they don't fall under the strict definition of opensource. It would require a different license :)

Oh, btw, the op should take a look at [https://pkgr.io/](https://pkgr.io/) and [https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm](https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Thank you so much for releasing this as free-as-in-freedom software! Since this appears to be server software, I'd like to recommend switching to the Affero GPL; its only additional requirement over GPL is that network operators must release the source version they're using. This way, the software remains free and no one can take your hard work and refuse to to share it with your users. Good luck selling your services!

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't aware of Affero GPL, will look into it. I've had some conflicting advice when it comes to licenses. Some are recommending BSD as it's more permissive (i.e. big companies can develop it in house without having to give back to the community). From a business perspective, that might be easier to sell to some companies, but from a community perspective it's not ideal.

Would be interesting to hear your thoughts.

<comment><USER24> You will definitely get conflicting advice on this. :-)

AGPL/GPL:

If you do this people in the community may like this. But you will have problems selling commercial licenses to people. To get around this, many companies do a dual license model where you can get the code under AGPL for free or pay for a commercial license. However, to make this work, you will have to get all your contributors to sign a contributors agreement giving you some rights. Some will hate this and won't.

BSD:

There is a risk that an outside company will take code and profit from it without giving back. Some contributors will avoid because of that. But then, no issues folding community contributions back into your commercial codebase. Contributor Agreement much simpler and less controversial.

I personally went the BSD route for [http://ican.openacalendar.org/](http://ican.openacalendar.org/) \- I like simplicity.

<comment><USER26> It all depend on what one want to do, and what ones business model is.

Looking at the Opencall website, your are only selling it as a hosted service and not as a product. Both GPL and BSD will allow someone to create a competing hosting service and add any proprietary addition to it without having to share it back. AGPL would make sure that any such addition is shared back, so your business will always has access to improved versions.

Contributor Agreement is irrelevant since you won't need one if you just do hosting.

<comment><USER24> Contributor Agreement is absolutely relevant. If there is any chance that the project will accept patches from random people then release those patches as part of the core code base under a license .... you need a contributors agreement.

Given that OpenCall is Open Source, this is very possible.

Good point re diff between on GPL/BSD and AGPL. Tho if I may add, AGPL will only state that in writing. A bad company may break that, and then it's up to how willing you are to get legal on them to enforce the AGPL. Some people may be unwilling to do this, so this may play into the choice of license you go for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The company I work for offers a service for Germany based customers where they can register a calltracking number and get usage analysis - all for free. Check it out if you're interested: [https://heldennummer.de](https://heldennummer.de)

<comment><USER13> Does it have any affiliation with lieferheld.de/ ??

 _The reason I ask: I hate their, and their competitor 's pervasive and mad behavior, when it comes to pitching their own product, whilst DDoSing etc. their competitor._

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I notice the only inbound telephony provider is plivo, do you have plans to support asterix or dialogic.

<comment><USER29> Plivo also has an OSS offering which is based on FreeSWITCH. So it could work with that too.

Disclaimer: I am part of the Plivo team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Great stuff @scottybowl! You can test the system live by signing up and getting a free number at [https://manage.plivo.com/accounts/register/](https://manage.plivo.com/accounts/register/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Couple of coding advise for Symfony2 application:

* use repo method in repo classes, * separate and contain related code logic into bundles: you should have your code like this: /src/OrgName/BundleNameBundle

</comment><comment><USER32> just a general comment: your instincts and advisers were probably right - <USER2> you can't continue past 25k without serious reservations, it's best to open source it and build a business around the project.

my cofounders and i spent upwards of $250k cash (on top of our own time value) of our own money before we gained any sales traction. an order of magnitude higher than your pain threshold. if you weren't prepared to spend that much either from earnings or savings or equity, i'd say you made the right choice.

</comment><comment><USER33> Any reason why contributions on the ocall.org site goes to a contact form?

A change to BSD instead of GPL would be nice too :)

I've been meaning to build something similar so I'll probably be bit of a contributor

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be fantastic to have you as a contributor - please feel free to email me on email@example.com so we can talk things through.

At the moment we don't have a community as we only launched the project today. The form is a placeholder while that community gets established, and will hopefully be replaced with a forum & docs very soon.

<comment><USER13> [https://github.com/discourse/discourse](https://github.com/discourse/discourse) ain't bad for forums

and

[http://daux.io/](http://daux.io/) and [http://apiblueprint.org/](http://apiblueprint.org/) look like a good way document your software

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> First look I'd suggest is separating the DDL and DML into separate SQL scripts, the mysql dump is scattered and hard to read.

</comment><comment><USER35> hey scott, met you before when I was working on Sponfed. kudos to open sourcing the software, wish you all the best buddy!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much! Ping me if you'd like to catch up for a coffee :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> great idea, the industry needs this. don't personally know a lot about the industry but I know I need to learn more about it.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm sorry to be pedantic, because I acknowledge you are in a tough spot, but just because you put $25k into the development doesn't mean the code is worth $25k.

<comment><USER38> I don't believe the OP ever said the code was worth $25K.

<comment><USER37> The original title of the post was something along the line of "I just open- source $25K-worth of code." It's since been ninja-edited.</comment></comment></comment>


A virtual meetup group for Indie Hackers - <AUTHOR> https://indieworldwide.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> We're a group of founders/bootstrappers/indie hackers or whatever you want to call us meeting a couple times a month to work together on our startups and meet new people around the world.

Sometimes we invite guests who've built something cool and ask them questions.

The format of the event feels a lot like an in-person meetup with a mixture of discussion group and 1 on 1 chat-roulette style matching.

</comment><comment><USER2> I love Indieworldwide remote meetups! Looking forward to the next one</comment>


1984, the Year of the 32-bit Microprocessor (1984) - <AUTHOR> https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-01/page/n135 <comment><USER2> Paged through some and found an article on Speech Recognition [0]:

Most interesting sentence: "Currently, it is not likely that such techniques would be used for domestic surveillance."

        Philosophical Issues
        The specter of Big Brother may not be of concern in
        Western society today, but the evolution of distributed
        intelligence among machines with speech-recognition
        capability certainly provides the technical base for
        monitoring our activities. In fact, the U.S. National
        Security Agency has developed what may be the world's most
        advanced speech-recognition algorithms. This system spots
        keywords in intercepted verbal transmissions from
        "unfriendly" nations. Currently, it is not likely that
        such techniques would be used for domestic surveillance.
        But speech technologists as well as the public must be
        aware of the potential loss of privacy.

[0] - [https://archive.org/details/byte- magazine-1984-01/page/n213](https://archive.org/details/byte- magazine-1984-01/page/n213)

<comment><USER3> This was five years before a 10000 dollar dedicated speech recognition card would be available for home PC's, I remember when we got one for testing when I was working during college at IBM and it was huge like those double slot graphics cards one can buy today, now we can do the equivalent on our phones - it's hard to predict sometimes how fast or where technology is going to advance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> By the requisites they list, which focus on the ISA, the original 68000 was already a 32bit architecture in 1979, but it would indeed take until 68020 in 1984 for the CPU to have a 32bit bus and for 32bit operations to not be internally split into 16bit ones.

I admire the foresight of Motorola in making the ISA itself 32bit from the get go.

<comment><USER5> According to Sophie Wilson, one of the reasons Acorn decided to go ahead with their own CPU design was the fact that in 1983 the 68000 and other contemporary CPUs were bottle-necked on memory access.

<comment><USER6> Of course within a few years _everything_ was bottle necked on memory access and the advantages of processors that could do memory access in few cycles (like the 6502 or early ARM) doesn't mean much anymore, as CPU speeds easily outstripped memory speeds.

<comment><USER7> Wider memory buses were still less bottlenecked than narrower though. See the transition from 32 to 64 to 128 to 256.

POWER9 has an absurd setup which is 192 bits wide at the CPU (2 controllers each with 4 24 bit DMI interfaces), but each DMI has a 256 bit path t memory.

[https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/ibm/microarchitectures/power9](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/ibm/microarchitectures/power9)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For some history—the early Macs in 1984 used 24-bit addressing. The 68000 itself had a 24-bit address bus, but the address registers were 32 bits. So you could use the top 8 bits for some extra data, and programs actually did this (including ROMs/system software for early Macs). This meant that your memory would max out at 8 MiB, with the other half of the address space used for something else (ROM?).

When System 7 came out, 32-bit addressing became available but not all software was "32-bit clean". So you could enable or disable 32-bit addressing in the memory control panel. This is similar to the A20 gate on IBM PCs.

By 1993 or so the hardware was no longer built to support 24-bit addressing. PowerMacs followed soon after.

<comment><USER9> I wonder if we'll ever have to make today's software "64-bit clean".

<comment><USER10> The address space of AMD64 was designed so that both the upper and lower spaces of the address are used when using less than 64 bus lines specifically to _address_ this problem.

<comment><USER11> That only ensures the programmer fixes the pointer before dereference.

Tagged pointers that don't make it to the bus are still a compatibility problem. It means malloc() can't return an address overlapping the tagged bits.

<comment><USER9> malloc usually gets _more_ aligned with time, not less. The tagging we're talking about goes in the high bits of a pointer.

<comment><USER11> Yes and as memory increases more of the high bits are used as actual address bits. X64 started with 40 physical bits. We're now at 48.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was an interesting year for S-100, and it's reflected in the ads. The writing was on the wall for the S-100 bus on microcomputers (the PC platform was displacing it), so they were pivoting to the high-end (look at the S-100 SBCs designed to be used in larger installations, the way that VME would eventually be used). There's a good mix of ads for both applications in this issue. The standard was eventually retired 10 years later.

</comment><comment><USER12> Page 147 shows an advertisement for computers and parts. One of the companies present is a Pied Piper.

<comment><USER13> You mean... you mean they figured out time travel tech???

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the same BYTE, something even today can be recognized as an absolutely amazing achievement:

[https://ia600609.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages....](https://ia600609.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/10/items/byte- magazine-1984-01/BYTE-1984-01_jp2.zip&file=BYTE-1984-01_jp2/BYTE-1984-01_0184.jp2&scale=8&rotate=0)

Turbo Pascal - IBM Pascal - Pascal MT+

Price: 49.95 | 300.00 | 595.00

Compile and Link Speed: 1 sec | 97 sec | 90 sec

Execution speed: 2.2 sec | 9 sec | 3 sec

Disk Space 16 bit: 33K with editor! | 300K + editor | 225K + editor

Disk space 8 bit: 28K with editor! | Not Available | 158K + editor

...

Locates Run Time errors directly in source code: YES | NO | NO

\----

Extended Pascal for your IBM PC, APPLE CP/M, MSDOS, CP/M 86, CCP/M 86 or CP/M 80 computer features:

\- Full screen interactive editor providing a complete menu driven program development environment.

\- 11 significant digits in floating point arithmetic.

\- Built-in transcendental functions.

\- Dynamic strings with full set of string handling features

\- Program chaining with common variables.

\- Random access data files.

\- Full support of operating system facilities.

\- And much more.

</comment><comment><USER15> The ads in this issue for long-forgotten products are amazing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes quite a treasure trove I noticed as well. A lot of disk copying services it seemed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ah, what days those were! Expecting the 68020 to be twice as fast as the 68000 at the same clock speed? Wow. Today we get table scraps of improvement. (On the other hand, the baseline is much higher now...)

<comment><USER4> >(On the other hand, the baseline is much higher now...)

Which unfortunately hasn't resulted in a more responsive user experience.

Faster CPUs just meant that optimising code got less important. Now, we're stuck with a bloated stack, top to bottom.

<comment><USER17> For some reason latency keeps getting worse.

[https://danluu.com/input-lag/](https://danluu.com/input-lag/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting to read about the NS32k. The only thing I ever heard it used was the Ceres workstation of the ETH Zurich, the native platform of Wirth's Oberon OS.

<comment><USER6> Jack Tramiel's Atari Corp. evaluated the NS32k series for use in their Atari ST. They even built a prototype. But the processor had bugs and quality issues and they went with the 68k instead. I understand NS did fix their issues but by then it was too late and it never caught on outside of anything but embedded applications (apparently used in laser printers...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Zilog z80000 wasn't introduced until 1986, but was pipelined and was in some respects about 6 years ahead of Intel. Apparently they are still used today in embedded application, though there was one moderately successful machine based on them back in the day.

<comment><USER20> I recall learning of the z80000 (via a datasheet) in '88, but never managed to find a machine using it.

I know of machines designed and built with the z8000, but I've only heard of the z80000 being used for embedded devices (possibly one main customer?).

Are you able to provide a reference to an actual general purpose computer built around the z80000?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I still have one of the original Apollo/Domain (DN300?) motherboards. It has _two_ Motorola MC68000L8 chips on it. It was explained to me that Apollo found they needed both of them to make virtual memory work. 32 bit data width, 16 bit data bus.

<comment><USER22> It's worth going into why the two CPUs.

Basically, the original 68000 isn't capable of atomically restarting an instruction interrupted during a memory access cycle, and so there's no way to implement a standard MMU.

So Apollo just chucked in a slave CPU that would detect the interruption of the master CPU, halt it, deal with any remapping or what have you, and then just completely reset the master CPU.

<comment><USER4> Also worth noting that this was solved in 68010 by changing the exception stack frame.

On that regard, it's a shame the Amiga released (1985) with a 68000 cpu. Particularly, move from SR became privileged 010+ and thus caused problems when Amiga finally moved past 68000. Those could have been easily avoided by releasing Amiga on 68010 to begin with, which is also a CPU with slightly higher IPC.

They compounded the issue by using 68000 _again_ on A500/A2000 (1987), for negligible savings.

Of course, this does pale next to the gross mismanagement Commodore did of the Amiga thereon, which ultimately led to Commodore's own demise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This byte article does not seems concerned about the choice of endianness (big-endian or little-endian).

<comment><USER24> Endianness matters when you share binary data between computers with different architectures. That didn't happen that often in 1984.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How important are terms and conditions? - <AUTHOR>

A lot of websites seem to have "terms-and-conditions" upon getting an account. How important is it to have them? Many of these are very verbose, and I don't know anyone who actually reads them. Is it possible to get away with a simple set terms such as: -> You are limited to one account per person. -> We will send you a cheque if you have earned more than $50. If you have earned below this amount, we are not obligated to pay you. -> You, or we may choose to cancel your account at any time, without reason.<p>Thanks for your opinions. <comment><USER2> I guess the issue with terms and conditions is that they're not important until they're important. Suddenly you act in good faith and get taken to court because a customer interprets something differently - precision leads to verbosity, particularly in the law.

</comment><comment><USER3> An online TOS is not worth anything _unless_ you can prove to a judge that the user did indeed read and agree to that _exact version_ of the TOS.

For example, a user can edit the html, print it out, and claim _that_ was what he agreed to when he signed up.

Or, after getting involved with a user legally, the website can alter the TOS on their site to better their own position.

Even if you register with a 3rd party (we get the police to date and verify with a signed document everytime we change ours by making them visit our website and printing off the TOS) - however that still is suspect to tampering.

The best way is to make the user print, sign and return the TOS.</comment>


Ask HN: Startups looking for volunteers? - <AUTHOR>

Where can one find resources connecting seed/early stage startups with people who are looking to volunteer (for the startup) part time? -are any HN'ers looking for someone to help launch a product, find clients, or find partnerships?
I like the idea of helping resource-constrained ventures in a non-technical capacity in order to learn more about how a business operates.
Jobnob.com looks like a good answer to this question. But I wanted to ask HN first. <comment><USER2> Maybe you should list some track record / qualifications ?</comment>


Dealing with LinkedIn invite overload - <AUTHOR> http://alexeymk.com/i-give-up-yes-we-can-be-linkedin-contacts

<comment><USER2> I often get the feeling that LinkedIn would become a lot more useful if everyone did as I do: mark invites from recruiters that I've never met as spam.</comment>


Reagan's Impossible Dream: The X-30 National Aerospace Plane - <AUTHOR> https://thehighfrontier.wordpress.com/2016/01/02/reagans-impossible-dream-the-x-30-national-aerospace-plane/ <comment><USER2> Ben Rich, while he was head of Lockheed's Skunk Works, looked at the proposal, and decided they would not bid. He'd worked on the SR-71, which was the highest performance aircraft ever built. His comment: "We used titanium. You know something stronger?"

Getting rid of the heat was the biggest problem. Rockets which launch vertically don't spend much time in the atmosphere. Aircraft which accelerate horizontally do. Hypersonic in-atmosphere travel means having to get rid of huge amounts of heat with no place to dump it. Running liquid hydrogen fuel over the vehicle exterior for cooling was considered and rejected for the SR-71. (Many rocket engines run the cryogenic fuel and oxidizer through cooling channels in the engine bell before using it as propellant. That's not a totally unreasonable idea.)

The X-30 was supposed to have a big cabin, which would have to be kept cool. Only a small part of the SR-71 is kept cool; the pilot is in a space suit. Even cooling the pilot was hard. Remember, at hypersonic speeds in atmosphere, there's no place to dump the heat; you have to bring your cold with you.

The only real advantage of this approach over rockets which get out of the atmosphere as soon as possible is that you don't have to carry oxidizer. That improves the mass fraction (rockets to orbit are > 90% fuel). Not enough to be a win, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting to note though that although Ben Rich explains that they decided they wouldn't bid, Lockheed WERE one of the airframe contractors in Phase 2 and it's difficult to imagine that the Skunk Works weren't a part of that effort especially given the work they did towards the scramjet powered X-24c in the seventies.

Also, they went on to the X-33 in the mid 90's so clearly felt confident in a suitable "something stronger" thermal protection system by then

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "DuPont's configuration devised under COPPER CANYON had included no landing gear, orbital manoeuvring system or fuel reserves."

I've long held the opinion that the real lesson to take from NASP is that the higher the level of decision making, the more detached it is from physics or business.

Air breathing works for cruise (limited speed and altitude range, long duration, low thrust requirements).

Rockets work for acceleration (wide speed and altitude range, short duration, high thrust requirements).

Orbital missions are only about acceleration. Bringing very heavy air breathing engines to orbit doesn't make sense at all.

The lowest dry mass (=lowest cost) single stage to orbit vehicle designs tend to be dense propellant pure rockets.

In Finnish there's a saying "ajaa käärmettä pyssyyn": make the snake go into a gun barrel. An organization trying to achieve a needlessly hard thing because of political reasons. Closely related to Not Invented Here.

<comment><USER4> I'll go beyond "dense, propellant pure" rockets - the whole concept of single- stage vehicles is a pipe dream.

Staging is immensely important because it lowers the "order complexity" of carrying additional payload. In order to add payload you need to add fuel, and then you need to add more fuel to carry that fuel, and so on. This is immensely easier if you don't need to drag the dead weight of your initial stages along with you.

Single-stage is barely even feasible to orbit. Anything past that is just flatly science-fiction.

<comment><USER5> With today's technology yes. Those that don't dream big however are destined to be replaced by tomorrow's technology.

<comment><USER6> That's rather naive. This isn't a failure to dream big. Everyone understands that SSTO will require major advances in propulsion and materials to be really practical and cost effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If the super-rich are in that much of a hurry to get from london to newyork that they will pay the ticket prices needed to sustain such an aircraft, I have a better idea. Build some mercury capsules. Stick them and a solid upper stage atop a one-engine version of a SpaceX booster. For what, 40K worth of fuel and upper stage (?) billionaires can now fly solo to NY in minutes, experiencing all the majesty of vomiting in zero G.

Think of what suborbital, zero-G, would be like in a plane with 100 passengers. Given the forces involved I cannot see suborbital transport ever replacing first class seats on BA.

<comment><USER8> A more luxury version of this is what I've long suspected the Virgin Galactic project to be: suborbital flights around the world. I've long thought it to be a stealth suborbital spaceplane effort that would add a very expensive but extremely rapid long range flight option to Virgin's lineup.

<comment><USER7> Virgin Galactic is suborbital, but the scheme has nowhere near the velocities necessary to cover any distance. It's just a rollercoaster. There is little point in launching a transport from a plane. Getting to 10,000m is nothing compared to the speed needed for london-NY.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hm, maybe add in fuel rods in place of the fuel to generate the heat? I mean, sure, an open and unshielded just sub-critical reactor is going to have 'environmental effects'. But if the point, from the black budget perspective, is to have an under the radar bomber, the environment is going to shit anyways. Project Pluto is a good, and completely insane, starting point into nuclear scramjets.

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

Choice Quote edit:"After delivering all its warheads, the missile could then spend weeks flying over populated areas at low altitudes, causing tremendous ground damage with its shock wave. When it finally lost enough power to fly, and crash-landed, the engine would have a good chance of spewing deadly radiation for months to come"

</comment><comment><USER10> So how does the new SABRE engine factor into this? Originally a lot of skepticism was there but BAE did invest in it so it might pan out

</comment><comment><USER11> Likely this dream will be achieved but perhaps not by the US:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOTOL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOTOL) [http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/](http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting.

So Wiki says a fully-loaded B-52 can carry 35 tons of bombs.

Everybody knows 1) re-entry after achieving orbital speeds is non-trivial, and 2) doing a stationary drop from orbital heights is possible. There is even some talk of "skydiving from orbit"

So you take a B-52 out over the ocean. At 50,000 MSL, you extend two rocket pods, point the nose straight up, and take yourself out of the atmosphere post-haste. Somewhere around 200-400,000 MSL, you roll over into a standard orbit configuration.

Burn about half your fuel. Once you get to where you want to go, burn the other half, reach a dead stop, then parachute into the lower atmosphere, do an engine re-start, and be on your way.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be a helluva ride, but I'm failing to see the part where we couldn't have done this 20 or 30 years ago. Perhaps the problem was that folks tried to imagine some sort of new propulsion system -- and the numbers just don't work out. Instead of solving SCRAMJET, maybe that money would have been better spent on truly reusable rockets and high-performance, plane-rated parachutes?

ADD: This comment was meant to address the problem of sub-orbital flight from point A to point B, not getting completely to orbit. Both SSTO and suborbital flight were mentioned in the article. My point was that suborbital flight doesn't have as many problems as we might think it does.

<comment><USER13> "Suborbital" refers to a ballistic trajectory that is "close" to an orbital trajectory, so that the projectile follows an unpowered arc, but one that is not wide enough to achieve orbit. The energy required for suborbital trajectories is still in the same neighborhood as orbital flight.

The reason your proposal doesn't work is that during the portion of the trajectory outside the atmosphere, you either need to be ballistic (and therefore suborbital if you're traveling intercontinental) or you need to be constantly directing a portion of your rockets thrust downward. The latter is fantastically inefficient, which is why planes operate in the atmosphere (where they can use air to convert efficient horizontal thrust to lift) and why suborbital rockets are ballastic for the large majority of their flight.

<comment><USER14> Suborbital just means you went to space but didn't achieve orbit. There's no requirement to be "close" to an orbital trajectory. Blue Origin's New Shepard and Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipOne are classic examples of suborbital spacecraft, and neither of those came anywhere _near_ orbital speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great article!

For the latest developments: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_\(spacecraft\))

<comment><USER16> How much of a future do you think the Skylon project has? A couple of friends in the aerospace industry have told me they think SpaceX will effectively "win" now that they can land the Falcon. Are they too optimistic about SpaceX?

<comment><USER17> All SpaceX did was building a normal rocket that can land again.

Which, as it turned out, was anything but trivial and took 14 years. Their main competitors – ULA and Arianespace – already announced they won't be able to manage similar capabilities this decade; and their plans for the next decade are still not as sophisticated as SpaceX's approach (they only want to recover the engines and build a wholly new stage around them).

Skylon is a massively more ambitious undertaking compared to that – if it works, it'll be the first practical SSTO, the first horizontal takeoff spaceplane, the first vehicle to use multi-mode engines, the first practical space plane to use a novel heat shield technology, …

That's an awful lot of challenges to tackle. _If_ it turns out to work, and _if_ it then turns out to be as re-usable as hoped (something that did never panned out for the Shuttle, and which SpaceX will only learn over the next years for their Falcon), _then_ it could beat SpaceX… in a decade or two.

<comment><USER14> The trouble with Skylon is that all of these things you mention make it more _ambitious_ , but they don't really make it more _useful_.

The main advantage Skylon would have over the Falcon 9 is the fact that the Falcon 9 is not fully reusable because they don't and can't recover the second stage, while the entire Skylon is recovered.

That's significant, of course. The second stage makes up about 25% the cost of the rocket, so that places a ceiling of about 75% on how much Falcon 9 reusability can save..

But then, starting from where the Falcon 9 is now, building a new rocket that can also recover the second stage doesn't seem _too_ difficult. It's a big challenge, to be sure, but relative to Skylon it's not too bad.

Skylon is certainly much more ambitious in terms of how it works, but it doesn't seem to be very ambitious in terms of what it can do, which is not a promising combination.

<comment><USER18> Skylon does have the advantage of burning atmospheric oxygen at low altitudes, meaning it would have a significantly higher payload fraction than the Falcon 9.

<comment><USER14> It's somewhat higher, but not dramatically so. Skylon is projected to be 325 tons loaded with a LEO payload of 15 tons, Falcon 9 Full Thrust a.k.a. Falcon 9 1.2 is 541 tons loaded with a LEO payload of 13-17 tons depending on who you believe. And that's comparing paper hardware with flying hardware. Spacecraft tend to get heavier as they go from paper to reality.

Plus, payload fraction is another thing like SSTO, horizontal takeoff, novel heat shields, and all the rest that are cool but just don't matter except for how they affect the end result. All that matters in the end is how much you can launch, and how much it costs.

<comment><USER19> >And that's comparing paper hardware with flying hardware. Spacecraft tend to get heavier as they go from paper to reality.

That's the critical point. Skylon is still vaporware, and they've really assumed the best case in published numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> btw, the BrahMos 2 Indian-Russian cruise missile coming in 2017 (well, of course there is always a big "if") is scramjet powered and expected to fly at Mach 7. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrahMos- II_%28missile%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrahMos-II_%28missile%29)

</comment><comment><USER21> And just think today we can't even get Congress to fund repair crumbling infrastructure

\- why do today what you can wait for a national crisis tomorrow?

<comment><USER10> while the numbers are large when measured in percentages it isn't that bad. Most of the deficient bridges are locally owned, this means at levels lower than state level. No one also ever seems to mention that at is peak in the 90s there were nearly 150,000 bridges found to be deficient and that number is down to near 60,000.

In other words, the Federal government isn't responsible for most of what is out there and many state and local governments refuse to fully fund their own obligations.

<comment><USER22> > No one also ever seems to mention that at is peak in the 90s there were > nearly 150,000 bridges found to be deficient and that number is down to near > 60,000.

Wow. No kidding that "no one also ever seems to mention"! That puts things in perspective a bit, doesn't it?

<comment><USER23> Believe you me, "crumbling infrastructure" has been a constant talking point of those who want greater federal spending for decades. Not to say it's all crying wolf, but if it had been true the whole time it was being complained about, by now things would be more obviously crumbled.

State governments in particular love federal infrastructure spending, since it is more or less a direct cash transfer to a) their own budgets, where local infrastructure spending can crowd out other priorities and b) the politically potent building and construction trades.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Apple Is A Great Marketer - simba-hiiipower http://www.forbes.com/sites/christinemoorman/2012/07/10/why-apple-is-a-great-marketer/

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, I agree, Apple is a great marketer, but what made them think up the first three points of Empathy, Focus and Impute that still drives the business in the first place? Was it based on research or gut feeling?

</comment><comment><USER2> What insanity is it that possesses website-makers to think that it's OK to have locked-on-screen ads on the mobile versions of their sites when this isn't even common practice for desktop sites? Mobile devices don't have very much screen area for content to begin with and reducing it further in this way is not something we should accept.

<comment><USER3> Using safari? Just hit Reader in the location bar and all that crap goes away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Incorporated in January 1977. They became the great marketer in the last few years so what is the suggested concept the article makes; that the 3-point marketing philosophy will have no large effect for 30 years and then boom, instant great market leader?</comment>


The top export of every country in the world - <AUTHOR> http://thesoundingline.com/the-top-export-of-every-country-in-the-world/ <comment><USER2> Wow! Cars, gas, and metals (some of which is used to build the cars?) seem to dominate the map.</comment>


Russia raises key interest rate to 17% amid rouble decline - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30490082 <comment> guard-of-terra Rouble crashed in value - more than 10% lost in a single day.

Then they did things to interest rate - +6,5%! - the news was published at 00:39 in the night, so that means "we are monkeys behing levers who don't know what they do".

Now FOREX shows Rouble rebounded a bit, but I don't know what happens tomorrow. Happily most of my savings (which aren't much) are in hard currency.

I'm going to tell "I told you so" to a countless number of people.

</comment><comment><USER2> Putin may not be the best leader but I find it scary that we are cornering a nuclear state into a hole.

<comment><USER3> They will be fine. Russia isn't a bankrupt by a long shot, but it hurts them. It hurts businesses more, kinda what's the point of the sanctions. I think Putin will be gone and leader will come around. But Crimea isn't coming back to Ukraine - this part would actually cause a revolt in Russia.

Russian folks are full of patriotic ideas right now what I hear from family & friends. But obviously what people in the West don't hear that Ukraine is even in a bigger hole than Russia. Western countries should help out now.

<comment><USER4> Well, there are similarities. Russia _had_ collapsed the last time the prices on oil were released [1] during a slowdown of economy. And it _was_ pretty scary, considered to be one of the times at which the world had come closest to a world nuclear war [2].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_oil_glut](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s_oil_glut) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, does anyone want to bet on Russian bonds? At almost 20% interest rates, this sounds like a pretty good bet.

<comment><USER6> Would you really buy bonds in roubles? It seems to me the risk of the currency's value decreasing more than 17% in a year is high enough to offset the attractive interest rate.</comment></comment>