SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage has landed at LZ-1 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzQpkQ1etdA <comment><USER3> I see a lot of comments about how boring this is becoming. It caused a bit of excitement for me, though.

The launch and landing happened around 7 am local time, and my house is only a few miles from the landing zone. So, I'm taking my morning shower, and I hear the boom. I'm thinking "Sounds like a SpaceX landing or a rapid unplanned disassembly". Then my houseguest from out-of-town yells into the bathroom: "David, I think something just hit the house!".

Me: "No, hun, that's what a rocket landing sounds like. Go check the internet, I'm pretty sure we're okay."

Best of luck to SpaceX, and thank you for not launching (and landing) any earlier in the morning!

<comment><USER4> There's a map here of how loud it is and noise analysis:

[https://www.docdroid.net/xfNMCgz/draft-supplemental-ea- space...](https://www.docdroid.net/xfNMCgz/draft-supplemental-ea-spacex-at- ccafs-lc-13-01-03-2017.pdf.html#page=104)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good business: make the hard seem easy and the nigh on impossible seem merely hard. They do these landings so well now it almost seems normal that rockets land after taking off and boosting a second stage to orbital velocity.

<comment><USER6> Nit: The first stage does not boost the second stage to orbital velocity. It boosts it to ~2,000 m/s, which is one-quarter of an orbital velocity, and one- sixteenth of the energy required for orbit.

I don't believe it's likely that we'll see recovery of an orbital velocity stage anytime soon.

<comment><USER7> > _I don 't believe it's likely that we'll see recovery of an orbital velocity > stage anytime soon._

Oh, I wouldn't be so pessimistic.

"Considering trying to bring upper stage back on Falcon Heavy demo flight for full reusability. Odds of success low, but maybe worth a shot." \- Elon Musk [1]

[1][https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/847882289581359104](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/847882289581359104)

Remember, everyone said they would never land the first stage....

<comment><USER6> > Remember, everyone said they would never land the first stage....

Everyone? That's a bit hyperbolic.

<comment><USER8> Actually almost everyone with experience in the matter said that SpaceX would never successfully reuse a first stage booster. That would be Boeing, USA, and a majority of NASA engineers. Granted many of those had an interest in seeing Space Exploration Technologies fail, but their opinion certainly holds weight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> NROL-76's mission patch[0] seems rather mundane. NRO patches are normally a bit more cryptic and bizzare.

I wonder how many people at SpaceX are cleared to know what the payload is. What are the finer points of payload integration in such a situation?

Does Elon even know what his own company just launched?

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NRO_launches#/media/...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NRO_launches#/media/File%3ANROL-76_mission_patch.jpg)

<comment><USER10> NRO-39's patch (the one in the wiki article) caused a small controversy - <USER2> tentacles enveloping the world seemed like pretty poor taste in light of Snowden. They probably decided that their PR team needed to see them first from then on.

<comment><USER11> To be fair, some of the patches for the NRO missions seem weirdly aggressive, with a bunch of different animals all clutching the earth. They've had bird claws (presumably an American eagle), a tiger, a three-headed bird monster, and even a big green dragon. It's odd that tentacles were somehow considered worse taste.

<comment><USER12> After reading up on some of the patches and their hidden meanings, the octopus could have been largely symbolic. For example, there could have been 8 components of the mission and the octopus has 8 arms. Something like that. Here's some background on why I think that might be possible:

"The patches' relative obscurity changed in 2000, with the launch of a payload known as NROL-11. The mission patch depicted what appeared to be owl eyes peering down at the Earth, where four arrow-shaped vectors, two per orbit, made their way across Africa. Three of the vectors were white, and one was dark. Based solely on studying the design, civilian satellite watcher Ted Molczan hypothesized that the patch showed a failed satellite (the dark vector), and that the newly launched satellite would take its place.

Sure enough, after the launch a new satellite appeared just where Molczan predicted. Pearlman, who reported on the story at the time, says that NRO at first told him "no comment" when he contacted them. About 30 minutes later they called him back and asked him not to publish the story. Pearlman told them no dice, and in the end, the NRO spokesman told him that the patches were just morale-builders for those who work on the launches."

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/creepy- kitschy-...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/creepy-kitschy-and- geeky-patches-us-spy-satellites-180953562/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Watch the whole stream, it was beautiful. There was a view from ground all the way from separation to landing.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is the first time, I think, we got to see the charred surface of the first stage. I wonder what kind of processing is involved to make the stage usable again?

Do they just put it through a car wash and re-fill for next time?

Is everything reusable on the first stage?

<comment><USER15> Anecdotal: I believe musk said that the charred outside was surprisingly only in need of a fresh coat of paint.

<comment><USER16> Wouldn't be surprised if it's similar to the coatings placed on the launch pad stabilizers. The paint is meant to char because it acts similar to a ceramic preventing damage to the underlying metal. There's a good youtube video of this on the moon launches where the tail fin hold downs char, but don't warp.

<comment><USER17> The grid fins have paint like that, which is why they catch on fire.

<comment><USER18> They're aluminium underneath the paint - and that _also_ melts a bit on a high speed GTO reentry, hence the likely switch to titanium grid fins in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The booster footage was amazing. Incredible to see just how much it flies through its own exhaust on the re-entry burn!

<comment><USER20> And I was surprised just how close to the second stage it still looked when the secondary engines started up.

I can't even imagine trying to steer a rocket to turn it around, with an open top, while it's in the exhaust of another rocket! It's amazing.

<comment><USER21> True story! The landing was fantastic, no doubt, but this footage is a thing of pure beauty: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzQpkQ1etdA&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzQpkQ1etdA&feature=youtu.be&t=1211)

<comment><USER22> I enjoyed watching Blue Origin's landing as well ([https://youtu.be/9pillaOxGCo](https://youtu.be/9pillaOxGCo)) and from their video it looks like engine restart is at five thousand feet with full burn at one thousand. Do we have similar numbers for Space X?

I am curious what threshold differences there are between teams, both are doing amazing work.

btw, this portion of the return where they did the entry level was most impressive for space x ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzQpkQ1etdA&t=1145s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzQpkQ1etdA&t=1145s))

<comment><USER5> SpaceX rockets have to shed a lot more velocity the numbers are not comparable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What is truly amazing is that this is becoming normal.

<comment><USER24> I said it on Twitter.. F9 stuck the landing 1 minute before I had to walk out the door with my 5yo daughter and she was really happy to see it. Then through the bus window as it was pulling away, she made rocket-taking-off hands that went up to space... and then came back down and landed again. I'll be able to tell her about how nice that was to see someday :)

<comment><USER25> Got a lot of frisson reading this comment. I just can't understand the people who love to criticize Musk as a charlatan and PR mastermind because either way, true or untrue, he and his engineers are doing undeniable good in inspiring the next generation of scientists.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, it is strange. A charlatan is someone who is lying and has no intent on following through on their unrealistic plans.

Musk clearly isn't a charlatan as he's trying his very best to make his unrealistic plans a reality, and has already succeeded tremendously.

Is Musk crazy? He might be. But he's earnestly crazy.

<comment><USER27> I think a lot of the criticism has come from moves he made on the business side, like having SpaceX buy SolarCity bonds.

<comment><USER28> Worked out pretty well for SpaceX.

At what point do you say "he's made so much money for us that we'll give him at least one major fuckup before we start trying to reign him in."?

<comment><USER27> The criticism is SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity are so tied together financially they'll all go down if one does. As an outsider I don't really care how Musk arranges his financial house. However, if I had a financial stake in SpaceX I'd be pretty upset to see my money getting invested in another company for Elon Musk's benefit.

<comment><USER17> That's up to SpaceX's private owners, now isn't it?

<comment><USER27> Yes it is. That was part of the postulation. I don't know how things are drawn up - they may not have had a choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> That never gets old :-) and I thought the external views were really awesome as well. On the previous return of SES-10 which was a geosync mission, previously SpaceX had said that the booster was unrecoverable in those situations given the additional boost that it gave the payload (so started from a higher altitude) but they tried it, and got it back anyway. Watching the grid fins nearly burn off from re-entry friction was a the most interesting bit of that one.

<comment><USER16> As far as I'm concerned these gravity assisted landings are technologically superior voodoo magic. The combination of materials, software and physics to accomplish the improbable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I do like how these landings are becoming more routine. They're making it seem like a piece of cake now. I don't think I'll get as excited again until the Falcon Heavy maiden launch.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is it just me or is this first time they've caught video of stage separation from the ground?

Beautiful video in any case. It's fun to see the first stage engine cut off, separate, flip over, and the second stage accelerates away.

[https://youtu.be/EzQpkQ1etdA?t=857](https://youtu.be/EzQpkQ1etdA?t=857)

</comment><comment><USER31> Didn't they say it was classified? I think just before the separation of the rocket and payload, they said something about what it was.

13:38 in the video "Falcon X is delivering the, National Reconnaissance office's satellite to orbit right now"

<comment><USER32> There's nothing secret about that. It's a satellite and it's for the NRO. What's secret is what it does, and what its orbit will be. (Once it gets to its final orbit, I guess there are amateur satellite trackers that will figure it out, but not until then).

The webcast host may not (I'd guess he _probably_ doesn't) know what the satellite does or its final orbit. He does mechanical design. I'd bet they keep that information compartmentalized within SpaceX so only the operations personnel who need to know would know.

<comment><USER31> In the beginning they said that the payload is confidential too, not just the destination. Rewatch it ;)

<comment><USER32> "satellite" is not a description of the payload.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Another great achievement. I am OK with this becoming a regular boring affair.

</comment><comment><USER34> Wow! What amazing work being done by SpaceX.

</comment><comment><USER33> What was the payload?

<comment><USER35> I believe it was an NRO spy satellite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amazing video from the ground this time. Link to the webcast at the time of separation. [https://youtu.be/EzQpkQ1etdA?t=1211](https://youtu.be/EzQpkQ1etdA?t=1211)

<comment><USER37> Thanks! We updated the link from [https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/859006000136769536](https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/859006000136769536).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> You almost forget that it was an NRO spy sat payload.

<comment><USER39> No, they didn't forget to add that extra detail which adds nothing to their post.

<comment><USER40> But, wouldn't it be interesting if one of the reasons we had such great ground coverage was somehow related to the NRO being a customer?

<comment><USER41> I guess the better coverage of the first stage is that they landed in land and not in a small ship in the middle of the sea. It's more difficult to put cameras in the sea and keep a good connection.

I think it's indirectly related. Probably, the satellite has a low orbit to have a better sight, and they don't expect to have the satellite for too long so care about some drag. So the rocket has more fuel to a return to land maneuver.

Also, it was very strange that they cut the transmission so soon. Usually they continue with the second stage and they highlight many times that the main mission is the satellite and they transmit as much of the satellite as possible in case they have an RUD. This time they closed the transmission as soon as the first stage landed.

Anyway, an amazing transmission.

<comment><USER42> > Also, it was very strange that they cut the transmission so soon.

That's an NRO requirement.

<comment><USER43> Yep. Same reason the cheering crowd at SpaceX was much smaller than a usual launch - only folks with clearance allowed in.

<comment><USER44> I wonder how much was that, and how much was the fact the launch window opened at 4am.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


This Isn't Hard, Mr. President: Can You Kill Us on American Soil or Not? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/02/this-isnt-hard-mr-president-do-you-think-you-can-kill-us-on-american-soil-or-not/273207/

<comment><USER2> Let me rephrase the question in way that is probably more likely to be thought about by a second-term president:

"Given that you obviously feel you can kill foreign citizens in their own countries along with an "acceptable" number of innocents without fear of reprisal, do you feel you can do the same in your own country where you have complete authority?"

While I feel many of Obama's policies are laudable, I think his wanton disregard for international law is reprehensible and ultimately doing more harm than good. Extraterritorial strikes are based on the classic notion of attrition warfare. i.e. If you kill enough of the enemy eventually there won't be any left. This strategy failed in Vietnam, failed in Iraq, and is in the final stages of failing in Afghanistan. What should make Pakistan any different? If it weren't for the Taliban's own atrocities (e.g. The shooting of Malala Yousufzai), anti-American sentiment and pro-Taliban support would be at an all time high due to outrage over the regular violation of Pakistan's sovereignty by drone attacks.

These strikes also set a very ugly precedent. As private use of UAV's begins to take off, it's going to become increasingly hard to prevent foreign interests from using them on U.S. soil. e.g. How will police be able to distinguish a tacocopter in San Francisco from a UAV packing a charge of explosives for an assassination? If foreign countries have the capability of killing U.S. citizens on U.S. soil who are inconvenient to _their_ interests, what legitimate protest could the U.S. possibly raise against the practice at this point?

</comment><comment><USER3> Sometimes the lack of an answer IS the answer. He won't say "yes", ever, to such a question - but the fact that he didn't say "no" immediately and unequivocally means his answer is "yes".

Insofar as any justification via "invasion or insurrection" clauses may apply, war must be declared - and, in the issue at hand, it hasn't.

Given the recent propensity for this administration to paint "tea party" types as some form of "terrorist", some of us are rather concerned.</comment>


The Energy-Efficient $70 PC - <AUTHOR> http://cleantechnica.com/2008/11/03/ncomputing-the-energy-efficient-70-pc/ <comment><USER2> these sorts of machines have been around for awhile. We use them at University Hospital in New Orleans. They're skippy and all, but the virtualization is heavily dependent on the network, and when every doctor, nurse, resident, and med student comes in between 0530 and 0630 to check on every single patient, the added graphics requirements over the network turn simple database queries into tens of seconds between each mouse click.</comment>


No, I will not debate you - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2018/09/18/no-i-will-not-debate-you/ <comment><USER3> I think the article restates Popper quite well on why a tolerant society must not tolerate intolerance. Free speech absolutists will drown Western society with their simplistic good intentions

</comment><comment><USER4> Sort of a strange issue with the premise, right? On one hand, "I won't debate you because it only brings legitimacy to your hateful cause" is debatably valid (I disagree somewhat, but don't think the choice is wrong by any means) - but the post itself mentions the person she refused to debate six times. I'm not sure refusing to debate the person and then blogging about them is consistent with the point of not giving them the spotlight.

Also... "Sunlight is neither literally nor figuratively the best disinfectant. Modern white supremacy does not grow like bacteria — it grows like a weed, aggressively, crowding out everything else that stretches towards the light"

That's not how ideas work. Ideas spread from human being to human being - <USER2> aren't infectious like bacteria, nor do they have their own life like weeds. This is -almost- McCarthy-esque - who would often suggest communism was like a "fever" or plague.

<comment><USER5> The idea that fascism is growing out of control is a popular one these days, but I have yet to see anyone present hard evidence that this is really what's happening. Does anyone here think this? What's your reasoning?

The people who say these things come of like they are acting in a way, like they want to play the hero in this super simplistic narrative where the bad guys are taking over the world. To me it's really off-putting because I can spot 100 of these self-righteous people for every bigot (and like 10000 of them for every actual nazi).

<comment><USER6> For concrete data, take a look at for example the Netherlands; where right- wing extremist parties led by Wilders and Baudet have shifted public opinion such that the 'moderate right-wing' parties have taken on considerably more xenophobic and fascist rhetoric over the past few years, because that was the only way for them to compete against Wilders' and Baudet's brand of populism.

This is fundamentally the problem with fascism; it doesn't come into power through people saying "I'm a fascist". It comes into power by 'infecting' everything around it, and gradually shifting the Overton window such that the populace will eventually _willingly grant_ power to the fascists.

That also means that such a 'fascist takeover' can only be detected and interpreted through a trend in public discourse, not as an easily calculable single metric.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's an example of why it's useless to debate Ms. Penny --

> If Bannon has to have a public platform, make him work for it.

Fine.

> Have him stand on a stage and play the audio footage of the toddlers at the > Mexican border screaming for their parents as they're dragged away to > detention.

Without examining actual data, how does she or anyone know the adults accompanying the toddlers were their parents? Or is that an assumption used for maximum emotional effect?

> Have him answer to the mothers of children who were gunned down by police > because of the color of their skin

An assumption that we can read the minds of police officers.

> or to the friends and family of migrants who drowned in the Mediterranean.

Whose safety and happiness apparently rests solely on the shoulders of Europeans.

>That's not a polite thing to say. It wouldn't be a polite thing to do. But the idea that politeness and civility is owed to anyone in a position of power is one of the great gotchas of liberal thought.

No, it's not Ms. Penny. Moreover, it's as intellectually dishonest as anything Steve Bannon says. Because implicit in the statements is somehow we have to take extraordinary measures for children we've never met. To assert otherwise is to be labeled infanticidal. Not that Ms. Penny would ever use such a term. But that's the effect her statements intend to achieve.

<comment><USER8> > Because implicit in the statements is somehow we have to take extraordinary > measures for children we've never met.

Yes, we do have to take extraordinary measures for children who arrive on US soil, because they cannot take care of themselves, and we can afford to do so.

The alternative is simply monstrous, and causes irreversible behavioral harm to the children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a shame. The author offers reasons why they will not debate white supremacists, as it would "dignify them".

It is incredibly easy to defeat white supremacy in a debate. Just point out the arbitrary deficiencies of certain members who are generally agreed to be white.

Done.

<comment><USER10> Weak argument, but I don't want to dignify your anon-cowardice with a response.

<comment><USER11> You just did, also IMO its a a really fuckin strong argument, ad hominems win debates. What's your criticism?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ironically, The author sounds super right wing in her critique of the right wing. She's using incredibly conservative and right wing reasoning throughout this essay. She says she's a liberal but her reasoning reveals that actually she's conservative. She wants to conserve access to the public sphere, not dole it out liberally. The author is conservative, not liberal.

<comment><USER12> Can you elaborate? I do not see any of the textbook talking points or perceptions attributed (usually in a biased way, such as yours) to either extreme. Why the need to extrapolate some ideology when the topic is clearly defined? This increasinly is what modern bigotry looks like.

<comment><USER11> I'm not extrapolating anything. The crux of her argument is a desire to CONSERVE resources (access to the public sphere), not dole them out liberally. She is quite literally making a conservative argument because her entire position is based on CONSERVING resources instead of doling them out liberally. Thus it's extremely hard/impossible to understand her position because she is actually adopting the same emotional stance (wanting to conserve resources) as the people she claims to oppose who also want to conserve resources. The liberal argument would be to allow anyone into the public sphere but she is arguing AGAINST that. Which is a fundamentally conservative argument.

I'm not extrapolating an ideology I'm calling a spade a spade and a conservative argument a conservative argument.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN? State of python greenfield development as to versions? - <AUTHOR>

What is <i>really</i> being used out there for greenfield development in shops that already use python? What important libraries/frameworks really aren't moving to 3.3, or have completely abandoned 2.7, so are "Reasons to pick" that version? <comment><USER2> 2.7, mostly. Check here though; if the libs you use are green consider using 3.

[https://python3wos.appspot.com/](https://python3wos.appspot.com/)

<comment><USER3> Is there a way to check compatibility with less known packages? I use Flask quite often and it has been Python 3 compatible for a while, but there are a lot of extensions for it which of course can't be found in such a list. Some only mention support in their changelogs, some not at all.</comment></comment>


You Were Funded for a Liquidity Event – Start Looking - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sgblank/what-founders-need-to-know-you-were-funded-for-a-liquidity-event-start-looking-3b01db1405f9#.d5p9wjbhy <comment><USER2> Overall a good read, but I take issue with one bit:

 _The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! The same is true about liquidity. It's detrimental to tell your employees who have bought into the vision, mission and excitement of a startup to know that it's for sale the day you start it. The party line is "We're building a company for long-term success."_

This sort of two-faced behavior doesn't succeed with even moderately- intelligent or observant employees, especially these days where the subject matter has graduated to meme status.

At least for your early employees, the folks building your teams and covering for your weaknesses/inexperience, you need to be on the level or they _will_ make a toxic environment.

I think the hesitancy to talk about this is a function of both outmoded views of employees as resources without real understanding or stake in the business (hence the apparent moral permissibility to lie to them here) and also the reluctance to make a real exit for the employees--it's only awkward to talk about the exit for the business if the employees see that they aren't getting a slice of the pie.</comment>


Simple blog builder in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mamal72/python-simple-blog

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a simple python based blog builder using Flask. It has a simple CLI script and can be used both as an app and as a static site builder. It's one of my first Python projects. I'm learning this language so... It may be so bad. :( xD</comment>


Anders Hejlsberg on Modern Compiler Construction (2016) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSdV1M7n4gQ <comment><USER2> Original author of Turbo Pascal, chief architect of Delphi, lead architect of C#, creator of TypeScript. Does anyone else in language design have as many accolades as this or designed languages on which trillions of dollars of commerce depend?

<comment><USER3> Martin Odersky, created Turbo Modula-2 for Borland, member of the Pizza language whose design lead to Java generics implementation, designer of the Scala language.

Erik Meyer, member of GHC design team and Haskell community, responsible for LINQ design bringing FP to the masses, reactive extensions in .NET which lead to the RX model adopted by Netflix, nowadays contributing back to Haskell at FB (if I am not mistaken).

Niklaus Wirth, creator of Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07. Helped Apple design Object Pascal for Mac OS and Lisa. Contributed feedback to Active Oberon and Component Pascal. Built single language workstations using the Modula and Oberon family of languages.

<comment><USER4> In other words,no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's so much that's great about C#, and that results from really smart, pragmatic, forward-looking language design, that I find it surprising how many aspects of C# development are hampered by really bad design.

Specifically, the backwards compatibility story of the standard library is a mess (all the different .NET Framework versions, or wait, do I mean .NET Standard, or WinRT, or...?) and the package manager (NuGet) is not very impressive.

I figure that the good stuff (the core language design and CLR) comes from Hejlsberg and his team, while the clunky stuff comes from the wider Windows teams at Microsoft.

Are there many people using C# for things other than Windows apps and cross- platform games? I get the impression that Java is still much bigger for cloud infrastructure, finance etc, but maybe I'm wrong.

<comment><USER6> Every time I hear someone say that C# is a well designed language I think of the story of how they had to hack the compiler to get async/await to work, and how F# implemented the same feature as a library. I guess there are different levels of "well designed".

<comment><USER5> I don't know about the compiler internals, but from the perspective of a C# user, async/await is really excellent. It's easy to use and the resulting code is easy to read and understand. Much simpler than chained futures, Go-style channels, etc. It's good language design in that sense (the _implementation_ may or may not be good).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11685317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11685317)

</comment><comment><USER8> I must admit I fantasize that this great mind will one day return to his Turbo Pascal roots and "rescue" the Delphi project! (More wishful thinking than imagining DT admitting climate change, I know.)

<comment><USER9> I really, really want a Turbo Pascal 5.5 with objects for linux.

<comment><USER10> FreePascal is about that.

TP 5.5 with objects was a really clunky object system though (designed by Apple, IIRC). Object slicing by default. Vtable pointer added on definition of first virtual method in object hierarchy, like C++. And to invoke a constructor on a new heap-allocated object, you had to pass it as an argument to New(), with this weird syntax - "New(myObjPtr, Init(...))". Delphi's object system was far superior.

See some examples: [http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Web...](http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Website/articles/DDJ/1989/8907/8907e/8907e.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The strategic, non language focused thinking here is amazing. Tooling is a very important topic for modern compilers. The modern language servers and supreme support for Typescript and C# in any editor is a core result of this work.

However, it could only achieved because MS financed a redo of the compiler. Instead of keeping the original.

</comment><comment><USER12> Not 100% related, but in 2004-2006 I was an entrepreneur in Italy, AND a full professor at a local university, teaching "Compilers and Programming Languages Lab" to students only a few years younger than me.

For some reason, the budget for a full professorship (not permanent, but only 1-year long) was meager, I think it was ~1,600 Euros for the whole year. As a consequence, the usual corrupted nominations didn't happen for this one, and I ended up being selected among one or two other candidates with a similar curriculum as mine (which, to be honest, wasn't particularly strong on Compilers stuff).

When I found out I was assigned that professorship, few weeks before the start of the course, I spent time preparing the material and studying a lot more, as I felt my preparation needed some beefing up.

The text book, the (in) famous Dragon book, was available only at 150 Euros, more than 4 times the average cost of a textbook back then, and it contained way too much information for that course. I then decided to create content specific for that course, and to release it with a creative commons license.

It was the first time in that University (year 2004) that a professor released content under Creative Commons, and that content was available online, and that it was free.

I might not have been the best professor on the planet, but I felt really proud of that. The beauty of internet is that, 14 or so years later, you can still find that content somewhere [0].

I gave hundreds of hours to teaching, only for pennies, and I'm still very grateful for that opportunity in my life.

End of the story (assuming you're curious now) is that two years later a proper budget was allocated, and of course I was not renewed. Someone with much more political clout and influence was selected, as it usually happens in Italy.

I decided that the academic world was not for me. I pursued a career in the private sector, and 2-3 years later I landed a job at Amazon Web Services, and left Italy. [1]

Ten years later, I know for sure that being an academic would have not made me happy. I would have not been able to stand the bureaucracy, or the defined and determined career path.

I wish, though, that I had the opportunity to teach someone a bit closer to my passions (e.g. Databases). That's a little regret left in me :)

[0]: [http://www.lulu.com/shop/simone-brunozzi/dispense-lab- lingua...](http://www.lulu.com/shop/simone-brunozzi/dispense-lab-linguaggi-di- programmazione-e-compilatori-informatica- unipgit/paperback/product-484250.html)

[1]: [http://brunozzi.com/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by- amazon.com...](http://brunozzi.com/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by-amazon.com/)

<comment><USER13> It would be nice to have similar "specific" content for Databases (implementation, I assume) as well... ;)

<comment><USER14> Here you go : [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHnBsf2rH-K7pn09rb3qvkA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHnBsf2rH-K7pn09rb3qvkA)

:)

<comment><USER13> Looks great! Do you know if this is (or maybe some other course) more project based approach, where at the end of the course you have e.g. SQLite-ish ACID compliant system completed?

<comment><USER15> I know for the advanced database course the students end up writing a new feature for an existing database called Peloton, which is a research project at CMU[0]. You obviously aren't writing the whole thing from scratch though.

[0]: [https://github.com/cmu-db/peloton](https://github.com/cmu-db/peloton)

<comment><USER13> The non-advanced one - intro, seems like a good fit - and you also get to implement a custom storage for SQLite.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The email Natalie Massenet sent to announce her £100M resignation - <AUTHOR> http://www.techinsider.io/natalie-massenet-leaving-net-a-porter-email-2015-9

<comment><USER2> So basically ousted from her own company...</comment>


Millions of Chinese CVs exposed on cloud server - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46864584 <comment><USER2> "Payback" \- The USA</comment>


Changes to Fusion 360 for Personal Use - <AUTHOR> https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/changes-to-fusion-360-for-personal-use/ <comment><USER2> Wow, I did not expect this. I started looking at Fusion 360 a couple years back because it seemed very hobbyist friendly, and while I primarily use it for 3d printing, I've dabbled in laser cutting and CNC too.

I always had the impression that Autodesk had positioned Fusion 360 as their gateway drug into AutoCAD or some other Autodesk software, but that it was remarkably full featured for that purpose.

Last year (or was it the year before?), they added some restrictions to their free version. No biggie, I thought. Most of the cool hobbyist functionalities remained intact.

Now, they have taken more away. The file export limitations in particular are crippling. No .step? .dxf? No extensions??? I can't even buy stress simulation credits?

...yikes.

US$495 a year to subscribe to the "full" version (they have "generously" granted a 40% discount until Oct, hurry before it's too late!). No cheap versions for hobbyists like me who just like to dabble and for whom a yearly sub is out of the budget.

Any suggestions for free/cheap and functional local-install alternatives to Fusion 360? Parametric modelling has really saved my butt, and motion joint functionality is very useful too.

<comment><USER3> While not as capable and well supported as Fusion, the two top alternatives that I am aware of are: [https://www.openscad.org/](https://www.openscad.org/) and [https://www.freecadweb.org/](https://www.freecadweb.org/)

With FreeCAD being closer to Fusion than OpenSCAD.

<comment><USER4> Give SolveSpace a try too.

<comment><USER5> I don't think solvespace has any offset or minkowski sum operation, it's a staple of mechanical modelling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No surprises. For all the arguments around FAANG and user hostility, Autodesk are the absolute pits. They have been price gouging for decades. They release buggy software and hold various industries hostage with their pricing. For an Architect with 100 users of Revit as an example, the fees are eye watering, and the support 'contract' is always with 3rd parties, which is invariably extremely limited. Horrible organisation.

<comment><USER7> wait until blender eat their lunch

<comment><USER8> Blender is not currently a parametric modeler. I think there is some effort to add some parametric functionality, but it is a loooooooong ways away from that as it's a complicated feature set.

Though it would be wonderful if Blender was eventually able to add this. It is probably not currently a priority for their financial sponsors though - CGI/game industry doesn't use parametric much.

<comment><USER7> Blender was barely a speckle on the map when it started it's now very capable. I'd bet 10$ it could grow a parametric whatever in 12 months

<comment><USER9> I'll take that bet. You've got $10 if stock Blender supports parametric modeling on 18 September, 2021. You are invited to email me at my HN username @ gmail.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've always found it a little surprising that companies haven't built/funded a open-source organization for parametric mechanical CAD, similar to Blender for games or KiCad for electronics/PCB design.

The upside for a ROI seems like it would be enormous, and pretty easy to make happen. Industrial seat licensing for products like Solidworks, CATIA, Inventor, and (now) Fusion are enormously expensive. It's not just private organizations either--CAD proficiency is such a basic skill that every serious engineering school has an organizational license for their students too, which I'd imagine also costs a bundle. It's not as if the tools themselves are expanding functionality at some sort of rapid rate, either; I haven't done much CAD in the last two years (so maybe I somehow missed some sort of feature explosion), but while a regular user between 2013-2018, I saw basically no change in the vast majority of my most-used tools for several different CAD programs, with the exception of some improvement in out-of-the-box simulation capability.

The existing FOSS alternatives just aren't at par. I've tried FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, etc., and most mechanical engineers/CAD specialists wouldn't touch a code-based editor. They're certainly better than before, but the rough edges exist and some of them appear in areas that need to Just Work (like assembly and drawings). From my understanding of their contribution graphs, private organizations putting even two or three full-time developers working on those projects could push them much, much closer to being a drop-in replacement for a lot work that gets done, and potentially even save those orgs some money in the short-term by reducing the total number of seat licenses they need in to function.

Edit: Added mention of KiCad, bc that's kind of important too

<comment><USER11> I think the tipping point for KiCad was when CERN realized how much they were spending on professional EDA licenses, and decided to pour those resources into improving KiCad instead. That's how I understood it, anyway.

I suppose some large-ish entity that relies on CAD will need to take the same view. I have less faith in academia there, however -- I suspect many of those sitewide licenses are heavily discounted in order to cultivate the addiction, to profit from it later. That's just speculation, though.

This is where we really need good software bounties. I'm sure a whole lot of scorned F360 users would throw a few bucks a month into a Patreon or something to advance the state of FreeCAD. I'm not even directly impacted by this; I have a F360 license through my employer, but I'm offended enough on principle to contribute if there's a place to do so.

<comment><USER12> > when CERN realized how much they were spending on professional EDA licenses

I've worked in national labs, and the bigger concern is how to guarantee the ability to open or update the current files in one or two decades.

(It was common to see foot-high printouts that faded over the years and became illegibile, to give an example of the time scale we're talking about.)

Hobbyists have a similar problem in that they want to be able to "hibernate" a project and update drawings in 5 years, but without thinking about monthly cloud fees. So free or perpetual licenses also make more sense for that use case.

Storing drawing files long-term in a vendor's cloud is undesirable if you really want local files for archival or distribution purposes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's a shame that Autodesk is cutting back on features for free personal use, especially the removal of STEP export (an open interchange format) and multi- axis CAM (used to convert 3D models into instructions for milling machines & lathes).

But - $495 for a CAD program as fully featured as Fusion 360 is a steal compared to $$$$ Solidworks & competitors. Plus it's cross platform which you don't typically find in the world of CAD.

Is FreeCAD a viable alternative? Not even close.

Should there be a usable FOSS CAD program? hell yes!

Unfortunately the FOSS foundations required to build a real CAD program haven't materialized in cohesive way. There are so many pieces, with many requiring teams of PhDs to produce: CAD kernels, constraint solvers, file format interop, sketching tools, assembly support (mating), simulation, etc... There are some advanced projects out there like the OPENCASCADE kernel, but Parasolid is more reliable and has real support through Siemens.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ugh. AutoDesk (sort-of) did this with Eagle (PCB design) when they acquired it -- in that case it drove me to learn KiCAD which in the end was what I needed to do! (and I think the AutoDesk acquisition of Eagle also invigorated interest and spurred development of KiCAD!).

I recently got a 3D Printer and have been learning Fusion360 and designing my first parts. Guess I'll take another look at FreeCAD.

In general, I'm happy to pay for things that "have value", but the pricing here ($495/year) is just too much to justify for a hobby.

<comment><USER4> >> I recently got a 3D Printer and have been learning Fusion360 and designing my first parts. Guess I'll take another look at FreeCAD.

Also have a look at SolveSpace. Version 3.0 is nearing completion but if you can build from source or use the snap store you can use it now:

[http://solvespace.com/index.pl](http://solvespace.com/index.pl)

[https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace](https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace)

There are also a few great YouTube channels with tutorials:

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEvJVXu3VfGMSOdpA0jrG...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEvJVXu3VfGMSOdpA0jrGRzoM7NlNOl5s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I only use fusion as a slicer to generate the tool-path for my MPCNC. The high-speed machining is great to allow to mill some harder materials without breaking the drill bits.

Removing the rapid movement seems like a petty move.

Removing the simulation is fine for me if that's not the simulation of the manufacturing operations which is absolute necessity.

Hopefully that move will help some slicer like Cura expand and do some CAM code, because up until now there was no need to develop because Fusion was really good and was free.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a great example in how not to write an announcement to your customers. Start with positive language, deliver a huge blow, make no apology.

<comment><USER17> Introduce yourself. Establish a connection or rapport with the audience. Set expectations.

"My name is Inigo Montoya..."

<comment><USER16> The expectations that the blog sets up are in the positive mood. It should really start off with, "This is going to really suck, everyone, and in fact it might be the worst thing you heard about this year. Just kidding, it's slightly better, but...". But instead it builds up positive expectations. Anyone sufficiently jaded just has to fight the urge to believe this fluff while desperately scanning to find the place where they tear it all down and tell you what is happening with the product, after needlessly building up for paragraphs at a time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I just uninstalled and wrote "fusion 360 hobby announcement" as the reason. I'm just a hobby user, so I don't have time to figure if/when I'll run into their new limitations. Just removed it and I'll go learn FreeCAD or something similar. I also use OpenSCAD where applicable.

</comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone have a recommendation for a FOSS alternative to Fusion 360 that is (1) reasonably popular and (2) has a similar feature set?

<comment><USER20> Solvespace has the parametric modeling and mill toolpath generation, but not the rest. FreeCad is closer to, but still far from, feature parity, and has a very different UI.

<comment><USER21> Is Solvespace so mature that it doesn't need updates? I see the last release was in 2016.

[http://solvespace.com/index.pl](http://solvespace.com/index.pl)

<comment><USER22> 3.0 release seems pretty close

[https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/552#issuecom...](https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/552#issuecomment-647863315)

[https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/milestone/2](https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/milestone/2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I spent enough time in FreeCAD to become really proficient. It's not as refined as F360, it lacks a number of features, but the latest version (0.19) is fairly mature. I've designed and built full assemblies with gears, and then printed or CNC'd it (FreeCAD has some support for CNC toolpathing).

I've tried F360 a few times and each time dropped it thinking "this is designed to lock me in and make me pay for it".

</comment><comment><USER24> I think they're deliberately trying to shed personal users because the hobbyist association is brand poison for Fusion in the professional space.

The people Autodesk wants to sell subscriptions to sneer at the "hackerspace" types and scoff at Fusion 360.

</comment><comment><USER25> Saw this come a mile away when they started jacking up the subscription cost for hobbyist licenses (~late 2019 according to my emails.) Instead of being an on-ramp for their serious offerings, it was just too good and needed to be hooked up to a milker.

</comment><comment><USER26> These restrictions seem fairly reasonable to me, most cause for concern would be further future restrictions I suppose. No generative design at all is a bit of a shame though, people do play with that ('needlessly') for hobby 3D prints.

Odd that it doesn't mention _small_ businesses though - wasn't it previously personal or <100k USD pa?

But also.. why? If it's already personal use only, and someone has an automatic tool changer for their personal use CNC mill, why _not_ let them use it? Get hooked on it? Continue to want to use it when they have a saleable product idea?

<comment><USER27> Fair to assume the 'hobbyist' license was being used in large scale production in cultures where people are comfortable being dishonest about such things.

<comment><USER26> But what does this really change in that regard? Some industries could no longer do that because they rely on generative modelling or ATC?

But designers of small PCBs (whatever their worth) or people 3D printing can continue unimpeded?

And I'm sure ATC can be added back in as a post-process, since it must at least stop for a manual tool change, or its CAM would be useless for even hobbyists.

<comment><USER28> > And I'm sure ATC can be added back in as a post-process, since it must at > least stop for a manual tool change, or its CAM would be useless for even > hobbyists

I believe ATC moves are implemented as macros by the machine. So the code emitted looks like:

M6 T2

and the ATC behavior is filled in with a macro for the specific machine.

To nerf ATC users, Fusion is preventing toolpaths with multiple tools from being exported in the first place. So you have to generate individual toolpaths for each tool.

The sad part is that hobby machines also make use of the "M6 T<tool number>" macros to move the machine to a place where it's easy to change tools and then do automatic touch-off before continuing. It's not only professional-class machines that will be affected.

It should be theoretically possible to run the multiple generated files through a script to put them back together, but this is likely too much complexity for the vast majority of users.

<comment><USER26> > Fusion is preventing toolpaths with multiple tools from being exported in > the first place. So you have to generate individual toolpaths for each tool.

Oh that's a shame, I'd assumed it would use the 'compulsory stop' code, so no ATC, but allowing the opetator to. I hadn't considered that non-ATC machines might do something helpful with ATC codes. (I don't have, but have recently become interested in having, a CNC mill or anything.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is what happens when you use desktop applications that live in other people's computer's instead of yours.

<comment><USER30> That's silly, any desktop app can implement a license check mechanism and decide not to run anymore, even though it's 100% located on "your computer".

The real lesson here is: that's what happens when you use software that's free as in beer.

<comment><USER29> Sure, they _can_ , but most don't because it's obviously a jerk move to require periodic (bi-weekly) internet access when your application doesn't require internet access in the first place.

<comment><USER31> You've never run FlexLM, have you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Am I the only one who thought Autodesk was very generous with Fusion 360 for years? It was basically the best software for hobbyist and it was offered for FREE.

<comment><USER27> 'Generous' implies an act of benevolence.

A bait-and-switch scheme is anything but.

<comment><USER33> indeed.

I'm sure the deer congregating at the corn feeder feel the same way, at least until opening day of hunting season.

And the Turkey must think "The farmer must love me. He feeds me and tends to my needs. Why look at the calendar, with Thanksgiving day just around the corner..."

<comment><USER34> The difference is the deer and turkey don't get to read and accept the ToS. Autodesk seems clear about what you sign up for[0] (1 year, non-commercial licence). You're choice to accept the terms and risk not being able to use this professional software for free.

[0] [https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/personal](https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/personal)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's a great time to learn FreeCAD!

It's a lot more user friendly than it used to be and still rapidly improving.

</comment><comment><USER36> The export filetype and 2d drawing limitations are sad.

<comment><USER37> They have always been jerks about filetype export. I have tried and failed to export .obj files for other 3D software many times. They really want to use some cloud process, and it never works.

I wrote a script that imports STLs into Blender and saves them as OBJs. No cloud required! Works every time! Wow!

<comment><USER27> Support for extensions (scripts) is one of the things banned by the hobbyist license.

<comment><USER37> Oh, I mean I save the thing as an STL and then run a Python program on the commandline to do the conversion. I didn't even know that there was a provision for making that even easier.

It is unfortunate when I read the list of things they are doing to make the life of a hobbyist harder, because Fusion 360 has been pretty useful to me. They should just make it something you buy for $50. Would instantly pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> FreeCAD is pretty cool and there are plenty of other great FOSS CAD/CAM tools worthy of mention. Is there something similar to the Blender Foundation geared towards CAD/CAM?

There are some great non-SaaS tools out there if you're willing to spend a little money. Rhino 3D is one stand-out in this space. And if you're looking for a decent CAM solution, check out Estlcam. It's a stand alone tool with a ton of great features at a reasonable price.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's still significantly less expensive than OnShape, which seems like its closest competitor. Unfortunately it's hard to actually differentiate between "hobbyist" and "small company" without cutting some really critical features. Most people, even professionals, just don't use that much of the overall feature set.

</comment><comment><USER40> This sucks. As I saw this news, I'm in the middle of writing up a tutorial involving exporting 2D files from Fusion 360.

<comment><USER40> Update from the FAQ: "You can still export DXFs, but only from a sketch. To do this, you'll need to right click on the sketch in the browser and choose 'Save as DXF. For more information, review How to Save Sketch as a DXF."

Fortunately for me, this is exactly what I'm writing up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> So the only hobby competitor (barely) is SketchUp which was acquired and is just being squeezed for profit while adding no new features, lacking MANY needed features and being quite buggy with terrible UX. So Auto desk pretty much has their hobby users in a corner.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's a shame they discontinued 123D design. I loved that for simple 3d printing projects and still use it.

For more complex stuff I used inventor fusion which was a free beta but I think this is now part of 360.

I still have to get into it as 123D is still sufficient for me :)

</comment><comment><USER43> Ugh. I literally just bought a second GPU for IOMMU for this application.

Fuck it, FreeCAD!

</comment><comment><USER44> On the path to solidworkification..

</comment><comment><USER45> There's only negative comments on the thread, but what most people missing here is software development takes resources. Heck, just keeping an online product alive costs money (check GCP/AWS pricing). A software engineer in the Bay Area costs $200k/year on an average. If you want to hire quality engineers, it takes a lot more.

They're not blocking it behind a paywall. It's still free. I understand that for hobbyists, it can be expensive. But if you are using things beyond the free tier, that's more than just a hobby. And I know this is an unpopular opinion, but being a Software Engineer, I really hate it when anytime a software company tries to charge for things, it's unfair and it's price gouging. But people fail to acknowledge that it is the only industry where you can even pick things up as a hobby for free. Literally anything else you want to pick up as a hobby costs money upfront. If all of the 645,000 users were willing to put up with those upfront costs, they wouldn't have had the need to price their plans so high.

<comment><USER46> When reading through the comments, it's mentioned that one of the reasons for the license change is because of people abusing the free hobbyist license:

> [...] as talked about in the announcement, we did not make these decisions > lightly, but it is necessary in order for us to continue support Fusion 360 > for Personal Use as a free offering, cut down on abuse of the license type, > and continue to develop advanced capabilities.

The issue of charging from the software is distinct from the issue of enforcing the requirement that the license is for non-commercial purposes. Even if they had a low cost hobbyist license with all the features unlocked, the people currently using the hobbyist license for commercial purposes would just use the inexpensive one as opposed to paying for the full commercial one.

Autodesk could've taken the approach of sending sternly worded letters to commercial users using the hobbyist license, or even deactivating commercial users with the wrong license type, since their software is partly cloud-based and requires an Autodesk account and internet connection. Instead, they've taken the approach of changing the feature set, which is why some people are annoyed.

<comment><USER42> I kinda see where they're coming from though. The account of times I've seen a business user carelessly closing the "please play fair" box of TeamViewer... And I'm not talking small businesses either.</comment></comment></comment>


Heisenberg 0.5- Most powerful AI engine that generates report on your ideas - <AUTHOR> http://heisenberg.ziraffe.in/

<comment><USER2> How do I check the authenticity of this engine ?</comment>


Ask YC: Have you ever used an embedded web server C library? - <AUTHOR> I'm planning to write a small, light daemon. It'll essentially maintain an event queue for my app. It must be (1) very fast, (2) capable of dealing with a few TB of data, and (3) gracefully recover from total machine failure. I've been thinking about using Berkeley DB as the data store for its replication features. That way, I could bring up a few of instances of this daemon, and use one active master with the rest available as hot replicas and read-only copies of the queue.
The Berkeley DB APIs for, e.g., Python, lag behind the C, C++, and Java versions because Oracle doesn't officially support them. I thoroughly dislike both C++ and Java, and I'm actually quite comfortable with C, so I figured I'd just write all the storage code in C.
Clients for this queue should communicate to it over some cross-platform messaging system. I expect Python and Java code to want to talk to it, for example. HTTP seems to be a convenient way for the queue to accept requests. (Any other cross-platform messaging mechanism out there? I've heard of spread, but it seems a little heavy for what I need, and I don't know how cross-platform it is.)
I found two reasonable-seeming libraries which implement embedded HTTP servers in C: libmicrohttpd (http://gnunet.org/libmicrohttpd/, available in the Debian distribution), and shttpd (http://shttpd.sourceforge.net/, available in MacPorts). I also found something called LibHTTPD (http://www.hughes.com.au/products/libhttpd/), but it looks like a semi-abandoned commercial project and doesn't seem to support multithreaded listening anyway.
Question: has anyone here used these libraries? Any war stories? Any other packages I should look into? <comment><USER2> small, light, fast, redundant: Erlang + Mnesia

<comment><AUTHOR> Not coincidentally, I'm prototyping this daemon in Erlang and Mnesia right now. (And struggling a bit with OTP.) I'm a little concerned about Mnesia's performance with tables of 100 million entries, though, which is why I'm thinking ahead about how to rewrite this component in C.</comment></comment>


We're underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/4/20/17109764/deepfake-ai-false-memory-psychology-mandela-effect <comment><USER2> I find it amusing that we're worried about the potential of fake video/audio. Like everything would be just be fine if it weren't for that possibility.

Deep fakes haven't really shown up in the wild as a significant threat and we already have large swaths of society that can't agree on the truth. Certainly fake media isn't going to help any, but folks, we're ALREADY fucked.

<comment><USER3> So is not agreeing on facts/truth The Great Filter?

<comment><USER4> It seems to me it's the mere fact that humanity's rise was borne on the back of its ruthless drive and selfish greed, and the same things that made us the best hunters also influence society in myriad ways.

In my eyes, greed, hierarchy, and limited compassion / an inability to share are the filter, and all society's diseases are the symptoms.

<comment><USER5> I'm really disappointed when I hear this kind of thing. It's a sentiment that so many people believe, and want to believe, and choose to believe even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

It's almost like a pernicious, psychological cancer, except it can also spread virulently to other susceptible hosts.

Humanity's rise is due to lots of factors, _especially_ the countless individuals who have worked to improve the health, well-being, safety, and wealth of the people around them. Greed is but one aspect of humanity, and unbounded greed destroys societies.

Yeah, there are problems in 2018, but to sit here today, in the relative comfort of modern society, and say "we only have all this because we're terrible animals" is hugely disrespectful to the work of a lot of people.

<comment><USER4> I'm certainly not saying that we have no redeeming factors. As you say, that would be an absurd mindset in this world we live in.

However, I don't know how you can deny that we are greedy and have limited ability for compassion. Do you deny Dunbar's number? If not the specific selection, the concept?

Do you deny that some men have 10 figures of wealth while others have nothing to their name?

Do you deny that we have, as a society, enacted a plague upon the planet, and are causing extinction of other species at a rate only witnessed within other extinction events?

Just because one has virtue does not mean one doesn't have vice, and certainly the same applies to the "one" that is human society. While we certainly have accomplished great feats and have seen great individuals, as a collective, we do not know how to relinquish the individual pleasures in order to facilitate comfort and health for all.

As the article I saw here recently that said something along the lines of "people are not stupid; life is just hard", your energies are limited, and there are those who take advantage of the splintered and uncoordinated thoughts of society to gain great wealth and power, and those who use their great wealth and power to splinter and confuse the thoughts of society.

That is the cancer, not my thought that these people exist; do not ignore that their existence is all but guaranteed by the very nature of the creature we must have been to find ourselves the dominant force of this planet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My personal belief is that we should be generating vast amounts of deep fake videos and audio clips now that the technology is available. We should intentionally and hastily move to pollute the information streams around us as rapidly as possible in order to force an evolution in how we process information.

To attempt to slow down this arms race, or to ignore its implications just puts us at a further disadvantage to those that want to capitalize on the potential it brings them to arbitrage our "default accept" mindset against their fake agenda.

For example, China's Great Wall will not protect them from deepfakes and indeed it actually makes the delivery of deepfakes into China more effective.

The advantage afforded by weaponizing deepfakes only lasts as long as the audience defaults to trust without verification.

<comment><USER7> So a form of targeted accelerationism? That's an interesting thought, but assuming it works as intended, wouldn't the end result of this be a total destruction of trust?

A whole society where all non-physical interaction is treated with total suspicion can't be a pleasant one to live in. Maybe that's the end result either way though.

<comment><USER6> The idea is to step back from the idea that we can trust media sources without verification. Trust _but verify_.

Small groups and towns, places where people live and have a regular continuous presence, are more likely to be places of higher trust.

Your typical broadcast media sources or your typical corporate social media sources, places where anyone with any agenda can buy their way onto your screen are not places that deserve high trust without verification.

Given what we know now, screens of all kinds should be (and IMO, will become) known as low trust environments. Hastening that is paramount because in the intervening time you have a population that's susceptible to all sorts of manipulation.

I'm suggesting nothing new. Be nice to people, and don't believe everything you read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FWIW, all audio/video communication technologies have been some what comically overestimated in their abilities. Two examples:

\- Henry Ford, believing that since "sight" was the universal language, movies (along with airplanes) would unite all people and places \- Many people who believed television was so captivating when it first started to be introduced in the late 20s and early 30s, that it would replace nearly all books and teachers in schools

I think people adapt really well to technologies more than we give them credit for. Of course the first few years lots of scams and dangers can arise, but they are figured out somewhat quickly by the powers that be.

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry, but your example falls a little flat when you look at how Fox News became the lynchpin of the shit-show the US is sinking in to right now.

People adapted to it, sure- but that's the problem.

<comment><USER10> If a single TV station had the power you describe you would think they might be a little more successful at using it by now. Not saying they have no effect, but if the station never existed I don't think our history would be drastically different.

<comment><USER11> What's make you think they are unsuccessful?

Sure, a TV station can't annoint a President of whatever. The power to destroy is a weaker power than the power to create, but is still an immense power.

Rupert Murdoch's lifelong business philosophy is that all information gatekeepers should be destroyed, so that no one's opinion (or facts) are elevated over any other's. It's pure libertarian-democracy of ideas that throws the baby (education and critical thinking) out with the bathwater (suppression of outsider voices). The modern "Internet of Trolls" is the culmination of his philosophy.

[https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2011/jul/18/reb...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2011/jul/18/rebekahwade- newsoftheworld)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Questioning the authenticity of records (be they second hand accounts of events, paper documents or 1s and 0s) has been the norm since it became common for people other than royals and clergy to be able to read and write. Jefferson and Adams would not find the concept of "fake news" foreign at all. The sophistication of the authentication mechanism for a document usually has to do with the use case. Official letterhead was good enough for most important routine correspondence. Birth certificates get stamped. Money has fairly sophisticated anti-counterfeiting features.

We'll remember the late 20th and early 21st century as the exception to the rule because during that time period if there was an audio/video recording of something you could be reasonably assured that it was legit. That won't be the case going forward. Audio and video will become a free for all like every other medium.

</comment><comment><USER13> It wasn't long ago that we didn't even have video, before that we didn't even have pictures. You had the option of believing or rejecting one or more accounts. You also had the option of suspending your belief/disbelief until you felt like corroborating evidence swayed you one direction or the other. Personally speaking, I'm often surprised at how certain people are about the information they ingest.

It reminds me of Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" where points out that people more likely to read a paper critically if it uses a bad fonts, poor layout and some typos. It's not a ground-breaking conclusion, but the studies also implied that people tended to read papers less critically when they looked good. The idea is the mind has the tendency to substitute out critical thinking with heuristic thinking whenever it can. If a paper superficially resembles serious paper from a well-respected journal, there's a real temptation to ease up on the scrutiny because many other signals are suggesting your enhanced scrutiny is a waste of time and energy.

I can't say for sure if our reliance on video and photographs over the last 100 years or so had helped or hurt our critical thinking. It's very easy to argue the hard work of photographers have been critical to bringing important issues and events to our attention. On the other hand, you can argue an over- reliance on images have stripped us from engaging our imagination.

I know in a world of fake news, it would seem like the last thing we need is to engage people's imagination. When we hear the word imagination, most of us think about the skill the lets one fabricate novel stories or alternate realities. We don't think about imagination as a tool that people use to try to figure out our reality. A vivid imagination not only knows how to fabricate alternate realities, but it also knows how to incorporate information from the senses, books, articles and information to test and consider different world views. We need people who can absorb information about how the world works, and can project possible realities as well as many possible futures.

I know I'm going long on this comment, and I don't want to come off as an optimist, but maybe we can use the advent of fake video to cultivate a culture that stops trusting passive sources of information (video) and begins to engage healthy critical thinking instead.

I could be way off the mark and would love to hear someone tell me what I'm missing.

</comment><comment><USER14> A good way to fight this is to cryptographically sign videos/audio. Might be a bit computationally expensive compared to a text message, but for very high- profile people, having a copy of the video/audio and it's cryptographic signature will be absolute proof against fakes. We don't even need AI algorithms to learn how to detect fakes in this case, it just becomes a matter of comparing hashes.

<comment> munk-a When there is a binary on the internets available from various mirrors with the primary authority on it distributing a SHA of it's contents then we can use that SHA to verify the contents of the binary...

The issue here is that there is no trusted authority on the video, the people distributing the video are the content originators so we can use a signature to verify the video wasn't corrupted in transmission but not that it wasn't edited before it was signed.

(this technique would work well if the concern was that videos from some primary source were being edited by a CDN entity helping to stream that video to viewers, which is entirely separate from the article)

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't the authority have to be the device manufacturers?

<comment> munk-a How would they technically accomplish this? Whenever a camcorder or phone or webcam was used would the hash be transmitted to the manufacturer and registered there? Would the device sign the video signature with some secret key? (similar to that big secret number you're not allowed to show)

Assuming you got it to work sanely, how would you ensure that all manufacturers properly locked down their devices?

Assuming there's a reasonable trust framework and you're able to enforce it... How would you allow legitimate video editing without allowing people to edit video to create misleading images? How would a movie cut between characters and an exploding model in a legitimate and signed manner without allowing someone to splice a politician's speech in with terrorist training videos?

There is a lot wrong with this "Tech can fix it" approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the risk is inversely proportional to how famous the person is. A political figure or celebrity will likely have the resources and publicly available metadata to show a video is fake beyond a reasonable doubt.

I'd be more concerned to see manufactured outrage having some random supporter saying/acting bad to someone on the other team, inciting the Twitter swarms to descend- by the time they dox the individual it's too late for that person to go back to their normal life.

<comment> temp-dude-87844 This has always been the case for libel and slander and other misinformation. High-profile people have more resources to fight bad information (devoted supporters, real life social networks, money, lawyers), and they're more likely to have detractors who've tested their capabilities already. The risk to them is great, but they have more tools to recover.

The ones least equipped to defend against misinformation are people who have suddenly broken into the public sphere but lack the support systems to help their case. Typical sorts of people in this situation are fresh politicians (often local), viral 15-minutes-of-fame celebrities, and internet randoms who are called out online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What this article is getting at is that memory and "truth" are not really compatible concepts, which I think most neuroscience supports. Research around vision generally shows that even what we see, first hand (not in video) is an assemblage or construction, not a "record." Yet humans in general tend to believe that if they see something, it's either real or "faked" (like magic) rather than suspect because of the natural limitations of our brain system (which are also advantages for survival). We also have an even harder time to distinguish 'reality' when our emotions are involved. "Fake" video does present more of an issue, I think, than past "fake media", because we simply have more emotional response to it than other media.

</comment><comment><USER18> Honestly, I have to wonder; is this just really returning back to the way things used to be?

Think about it, we haven't had video or photo evidence for all that long relatively speaking, and it's only over time that our ability to 'prove' things became more absolute. First it was just speech and choosing who to believe, then writing came into the picture (along with paintings and drawn art), then over time voice/sound/radio recordings, photography, videos, etc. For most of human history, we haven't had great evidence, and in many ways were in the exact same situation we may end up in after these fake videos hit the mainstream.

History is a long line of people attempting to 'prove' things, and fakers gradually getting better at lying in a near endless arms race. We survived with no evidence or entirely questionable evidence before, and we'll survive in that situation again in future.

<comment><USER13> > We survived with no evidence or entirely questionable evidence before, and > we'll survive in that situation again in future.

Surviving isn't the issue, quality of life is. You made the point that "fakers [have] gradually [gotten] better at lying in a near endless arms race."

While I understand that things have a tendency to stay the same, history has also shown trends that have lasted thousands of years can also be punctuated in relatively short periods. Sure, people have lied and faked for thousands of years, but fake videos just might be the critical inflection point that in our timeline that creates a huge asymmetry of power and influence.

What sets this apart isn't the technical quality of the lie, it's the agents that are performing the lie: Machines.

Not only are machines capable of fabricating evidence, they are incredibly effective at measuring the efficacy. Lies can be cheaply produced, tailored for very specific micro-demographics, and directly sent to their intended recipients.

The early 20th century showed us how broadcast radio could be exploited for propaganda warfare. The early 21st century could show us how history rhymes when well financed organizations or nation states can finance disinformation campaigns that leverage machine learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Another potential use of blockchain technology. When an image is first captured, the time and a fingerprint generated from it will be recorded in a public blockchain that can't be tampered with. Then we can disregard images that don't have valid dates that match when the image was supposed to have been recorded.

<comment><USER20> All this will do is encourage the proliferation of innumerable bespoke blockchains, created by parties interested in stamping legitimacy on illegitimate content. Each of these blockchains will be presented as equivalent to "the blockchain" with respect to being trustworthy proofs of original untampered content timestamps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I suspect it will be quite confusing for a while; but once people have been cheated a few times because of faked video it will become something else. We will all start picking up on peoples kinematics and timing.

There is an opportunity for some type of chain of custody app that guarantees the integrity of footage from camera to screen...

<comment><USER22> > I suspect it will be quite confusing for a while; but once people have been > cheated a few times because of faked video it will become something else.

You're only half-right here. People will quickly wise up to fake video, but that will just make everything worse: every video that confirms their worldview will be seen as totally legit, every video contradicting it will be "fake", just like what has already happened with text news. Your hypothetical chain of integrity between camera and screen won't put a dent in that conviction.

<comment><USER21> > every video that confirms their worldview will be seen as totally legit, > every video contradicting it will be "fake"

Yes, this has been true for quite some time already since even innocuous footage can be made to lie with creative editing.

The chain of custody thing is already a problem and has been since courts started admitting photographic evidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Everyone's talking about fake news but I'm just excited for the potential of democratizing movie making.

<comment><USER16> Indie filmmakers could/would pirate actors' likenesses, the same way electronic musicians currently make bootleg remixes.

<comment><USER23> It shouldn't be any harder to create unique digital-only actors [https://news.developer.nvidia.com/generating- photorealistic-...](https://news.developer.nvidia.com/generating- photorealistic-fake-celebrities-with-artificial-intelligence/) than to pirate likenesses.

<comment><USER11> Your digital star would need to work to achieve fame comparable to a real star. It's possible, but a difficult competition against the existing human social systems.

<comment><USER24> Well, Hatsune Miku[1] says hello, as do all four members of Gorillaz[2].

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

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't think we're underestimating it at all, but we are simply already overwhelmed by fake text-based news like Twitter and websites/newspapers, as well as TV news shows spouting falsehoods. While fake video is surely going to be coming down the pipeline and will make things worse, the current issues are already terrible. Just looking at the 2016 US election, for instance, it was found that multiple fake stories were able to gain a tremendous amount of traction: whether that's the pope endorsing either candidate, health rumors about HRC, or the swirling controversies of Russia/emails/hacking.

The solution has to be that individual citizens become educated, I don't see any silver bullet here.

<comment><USER26> Certain types of elites will fight against education for this very reason. It erodes their control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> maybe it's just _fakenews_ for you, but I've watched the video and decided that Obama saying: "stay woke b __ches ", is the reality I want to fucking live in.

<comment><USER27> on a serious note, it raises a lot of questions for forensics & anyone currently relying on the assumption that CCTV footage is enough proof in court. Considering how many IP cameras are already on shodan this is worrying for a many of reasons [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17525443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17525443)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Are there any libraries for this available yet?

What are the solutions we will use to verify authenticity?

Will live speaking events become more valuable as a result?

Many different angles of video will probably not be of much use alone, but useful for public events. I can imagine events in which the audience is surrounding the speaker, creating difficult-to-replicate-from-multiple-angles background noise. But this is just delaying the inevitable.

</comment><comment><USER29> What are people supposed to do about fake evidence when the main problem is the technological ability to detect? This isn't exactly a legal or social awareness problem.

If a video is circulating the web and people don't know if it's real, but it looks real, and experts can't affirm its fakeness, then what are people supposed to do?

</comment><comment><USER30> We're also underestimating the mind-warping potential of _detecting_ fake video via carefully trained algorithms.

<comment><USER6> Why not both?

Generative Adversarial Networks [http://blog.aylien.com/introduction- generative-adversarial-n...](http://blog.aylien.com/introduction-generative- adversarial-networks-code-tensorflow/)

<comment><USER31> The particular videos are designed by this approach (GANs), and thus the generator is highly adapted to generate data that _can 't_ be distinguished from a real video with these techniques.

If it's built with state-of-art GANs, then you don't be able to reliably detect it with discriminators from these state-of-art GANs. If you manage to build a _better_ automatic discriminator than the authors did, then they could directly use it in the adversarial approach to build a better generator, and your detection approach would again cease functioning.

Remember that in the end there's a fundamental asymmetry - in theory, there _could_ be a perfect generator (not that we're close to perfect yet) that generates undistinguishable samples, and thus there can not be a perfect discriminator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Who will the public believe if it is a high profile video? This might just end in court...

This will induce peaks of paranoia into the minds of conspiratorial people.

The bad side effect is that now, you can call any video a deep fake, and attack the authenticity of any video used against you.

</comment><comment><USER33> We are entering a period where nothing not directly sampled by one's five senses can be trusted. Any electronically recorded evidence can easily be faked and often using off the shelf consumer-grade equipment and software.

<comment><USER34> Check out the "You Are No So Smart" podcast. The author goes through all of the ways that our brain can be tricked/is tricked in daily life. [https://youarenotsosmart.com/](https://youarenotsosmart.com/)

For example, in one episode [[https://youarenotsosmart.com/2016/10/09/yanss-085-memory- ill...](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2016/10/09/yanss-085-memory-illusions/)]: "Julia Shaw's research demonstrates the fact that there is no reason to believe a memory is more accurate just because it is vivid or detailed. Actually, that's a potentially dangerous belief.

Shaw used techniques similar to police interrogations, and over the course of three conversations she and her team were able to convince a group of college students that those students had committed a felony crime.

In this episode, you'll hear her explain how easy it is to implant the kind of false memories that cause people just like you to believe they deserve to go to jail for crimes that never happened and what she suggests police departments should do to avoid such distortions of the truth."

TL/DR: What is reality? How can I even trust my senses?

<comment><USER33> That podcast is great. Should also be required listening for anyone who does any kind of investment. One reason people keep falling for the same scams over and over is that they think they're too smart to fall for a scam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Pretty clear the powers that be are using the mockingbird media to step up damage control for when certain damning videos of very powerful people start to drop...

</comment><comment><USER36> Anyone know of technology to invisibly watermark video/audio?

This would be great for enforcing copyright on sites like youtube.

<comment><USER37> The watermarking scheme would have to survive the compression that YouTube applies to video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> We don't need fake videos when people like James O'Keefe and Sasha Baron Cohen can achieve the same effect using real footage obtained under false pretenses.

</comment><comment><USER39> at the moment, there are telltale signs of deepfakes if you know what to look for. various video editing issues, image glitches (visible in the obama/ahmadinejad photo in the article), lighting inconsistencies, sound oddities, etc.

frighteningly, these glitches can be hard enough to detect even when the fakes are made with an amateur's level of attention to detail. this implies that there is already a very widespread use of the technology by people with the capability to edit out these glitches.

with the technology of today, i think that state actors or potentially corporate actors could very easily generate nearly undetectable deepfakes if they cared to do so. i expect that they already have, in fact. but probably not where there would be a massive public eye to scrutinize an improbable or a ridiculous forgery. that would be too risky.

instead, the state of the art of deepfakes is likely invested in making the realm of the plausible "into reality" in a targeted way for the sake of shifting opinion of small populations rather than 100% forming new opinions or causing an about face of prior opinions.

consider, for instance, two allied militant groups in some warzone that the US has an interest in.

the default condition for these populations is the fog of war, wherein information is often hard to come by and rumor runs rampant, especially among the combatants themselves. the US doesn't want the alliance of the groups to persist for whatever reason. now, introduce a very convincing deepfake video of the commander from one militant group plotting to do something that the other group -- and perhaps some of the original group's members -- would disagree with.

there might be immediate chaos between the groups, but probably not. the most likely result will be that some people from each group see the deepfake and get convinced, then perpetuate the false information to others who haven't seen it. over time, the relations between these two groups will become strained, and their alliance may fray or fall apart altogether.

the incentive to be able to cause these kinds of changes is undeniable. especially when populations are compromised in their ability to fact-check information by hard problems like insufficient internet access, deepfakes will be especially effective.

the article worries about the total capitulation of reality at home to that of the fabricated image. no, that is not the risk at present. we have too many alternative channels to validate information. in fact, we are likely to evaluate information without even intending to by discussing information learned via one channel -- perhaps a deepfake -- with other people who may have learned about it via a different and contradictory channel. skepticism is becoming built-in. for people who aren't in the deep-information environment, however, deepfakes are already powerful enough to tilt reality to its preference...</comment>