How I made $2,000 in 7 days launching my ebook - <AUTHOR> http://joshearl.me/how-i-made-2000-in-7-days-launching-my-ebook/

<comment><USER2> Looks great! I'd love to see examples of your email promo, and also the time effort required to write the book. Is LeanPub really only good for technical books? Looks like the top best sellers there sell ~ 2000 books. But even books that are selling just ~ 500 copies are listed as Best Sellers... How does this compare with other platforms?

$2,000 in 7 days at a lowest price of $19 means 100 or fewer buyers. And I think you mentioned you had a pre-sell list of 154 interested parties. Sounds like most / all the sales were made to those who had already expressed interest in the first 7 days.

You did mention sales was closing in at $5k after the next 4 months, so if sales are consistent roughly month to month, sounds like you're picking up another 30-40 readers per month, which is good. Primarily word of mouth or are you doing more email list building / email marketing?

I think there was another post just like this that showed that you are best able to sell eBooks quickly if you build up an email list, promote your book BEFORE it is ready, build up some demand for it, and then sell it. You'll see a spike of sales for the first few days and then it will die off, but hopefully you'll have another eBook in the waiting if you want to repeat that cycle... if it's financially worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER3> How many hours did it take you to write the book? From an ROI perspective, if it took you 100 hours to write the book and your rate is $100/hour, you would need to make $10,000 to break even. Of course, if used as a marketing tool to increase your rate, you would get more ROI as an investment in yourself.

What was your motivation in writing the book?

</comment><comment><USER4> So, the email list still owns any other marketing channel. Not a surprise. Only a reminder to set up my own for my own ebook.</comment>


State Department Fails to Vet or Monitor Military Aid to Egypt - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/05/12/state-department-fails-to-vet-or-monitor-military-aid-to-egypt/# <comment><USER2> This was on HN front page with 13 points but tagged as [Flagged]. I clicked "vouch" because while I'm not a huge fan of The Intercept (some of what they write is great, at other times it feels like they'll write anything that makes the US look bad) this article feels like something that's fine to have on HN, even if it's not something I'll upvote myself.

Would anyone who flagged it explain the reason?

<comment><USER3> > some of what they write is great, at other times it feels like they'll write > anything that makes the US look bad

It's called being critical. A journalist job isn't to make the govt ( _any_ govt) look good. There are a bunch of publications dedicated to do PR for the USG so you're in luck.

<comment><USER2> I think you mis-understand me (I think my fault for not being clearer), I'm neither saying the USG doesn't deserve criticism nor that I don't want to read it. I love that The Intercept exists and think alot of their work is fantastic.

A journalist being critical isn't automatically a good thing, it's only good if they are being critical with reason. I'm not saying "if you write against the USG you should balance it by writing good pieces about them", either. Just sometimes I've read pieces from The Intercept that felt like scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for reasons to criticise the USG rather than finding good reasons and then writing about them.

<comment><USER3> Just because you feel that way doesn't mean that it isn't worth reporting on but I guess that would be a matter of opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Regardless of US involvement, this article is strange: it's written as is Morsi's government was actually democratic and didn't commit human rights violations, and Muslim brotherhood was some kind of a peaceful democratic coalition. I have no love for current Egyptian military government or their methods, but such a typical dictatorship is still better than a radical theocracy.

<comment><USER5> Morsi was democratically elected.

<comment><USER4> So? A lot of dictators get democratically elected while publicly expressing their negative views on the concept of democracy itself.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Dream job emails back shortly after accepting "very good" job. Thoughts? - <AUTHOR>

In October of last year, I applied to a handful of companies, one of them was something of a stretch (Game dev, where my background is systems coding/sysadmin work), but would involve working on a project I'm both professionally and personally crazy about.  Over the last 5 months I sent 2-3 queries as to the status of my application, I got through their round 1 within a week of my initial app, but then complete radio silence.  There was a time sensitive offer from another company (pick your favorite Google/Facebook/MS style bigCO) which I chose to accept (legitimately an interesting position, and certainly be a positive career move); I signed my paperwork, have begun talking to my team, and accepted my signing bonus.
Within the last few days,(a month after accepting ), I heard back from the "dream job", saying they wanted me to have a formal interview.  I had, on accepting the bigCo offer, sent an email announcing this to the other companies I had been pursuing, but apparently this went into the same black hole as the other emails.
This puts me in something of a strange position.  I feel in some ways compelled to continue at bigCo; call it my personal programming to finish something I set myself to full stop.  That being said, I worry that I may be turning down something I could be passionate about for pragmatism.  (And how do I even know, passion or not, that it would be a good fit?  after all, 5 months completely incommunicado doesn't bode well.)
There's also the option of taking the interview to "test the water" and be better prepared for future such positions, (and for the one in a million chance that they throw me an offer I can't refuse...), but I worry that I'd wasting their time for what is frankly a long shot (given bigCo).
Far past rambling at this point, thanks for bearing with me, any thoughts would be welcome on how to handle this professionally. <comment><USER2> You already accepted the offer from the second company. It's clear from the speed that the first company has been responding to your emails that they're either disorganized or not very interested in you - neither is a good thing for a potential employer.

In your shoes, I'd tell them that I'm grateful for the opportunity but have taken another position due to the delay and leave it at that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks; that's both what I've been trying to tell myself and what my other half has been telling me, but it's easier to believe when a third party says it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If the interview is local and they will pay more, why not give it a try. You could always walk from the already accepted position. However, the fact this co took so long to respond doesn't bode well. I think you accepted the right job.</comment>


When Money Talks – And Says Horrible, Bigoted Things - <AUTHOR> https://thereisonlyr.com/when-money-talks-and-says-horrible-bigoted-things-e016b185592#.miv8rvx1h <comment><USER2> > _So I hope that if Facebook doesn't do anything public to address this, that > at the very least, the Chan Zuckerbergs have a long talk with Luckey about > what it means to have wealth and to use it responsibly, and in a way that > isn't just about egotistical self-expression, and certainly not in a way > that is destructive to large swaths of society._

With a straight face this was written! With a straight face!

<comment><USER3> I love how it is all about having 'enough' or the 'right' education, this idea of herding the unbelievers onto the straight and narrow is quite Christian of them. At least he has not been cast out as a heretic. There is hope for Luckey yet.

Just the other day somebody was offering money to find something to blackmail Peter Thiel with. 2000 dollars for a bounty.

A few minutes ago I saw a declaration that all bigots must be removed from society/earth.

Imagine if this continues for a few more weeks. I will watch the new Purge movie in anticipation.</comment></comment>


Are there more open jobs than available developers? - <AUTHOR> http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/27590/26134

<comment><USER2> Thanks for pointing this. A lot of educational companies are repeating the mantra "more jobs than developers in two years". It is just a lie to have more clients (students).</comment>


Learn to code? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a lawyer and an entrepreneur, working a lot in marketing in the last few years. Because I would like to understand the core of our products, I have decided to learn how to code. For the beginning I would like understand the basics of programming, so when we're doing apps, I will know what all these lines mean. Where to start? What do you suggest? Should I start with HTML or go directly to HTML5? And after that CSS? <comment><USER2> While there are plenty of online resources for self learning, what will give you an edge is to find a mentor that can provide feedback for your questions, steer you away from bad practices, and give you a roadmap/advice. You can start with HTML and CSS yourself because they're the easiest. I would recommend going to a coding bootcamp or taking a course at your local community college. They cost money but provide structure that can speed up your learning.

Online self-learning resources: <http://www.codecademy.com> (Free) <http://www.codeschool.com> ($25/monthly) <http://www.lynda.com> ($25/monthly) <http://www.learnable.com> ($29/montly) <http://www.teamtreehouse.com> ($25-$49/monthly)

Coding Bootcamps: <http://www.thinkful.com> (Online) <http://devbootcamp.com/> (San Fran) <http://codefellows.com/> (Seattle) <http://www.starterleague.com/> (Chicago) <https://www.hackerschool.com/> (New York)

There are several more, google is your friend :)

<comment><AUTHOR> By so many offers of online self-learning resources, it's always nice to hear a second opinion – so thanks. I'm already learning HTML @ codecademy (after that CSS) and I will try to go to a Boot-camp or something similar, to get the whole picture. Hope to discuss about some coding problems on Hacker News soon ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> While I think learning to code is a great thing, I don't know that it will necessarily be the fastest/best path to understanding the core of your products. I'm also non-technical (coming from a legal background as well), and while the process of starting to learn to code I think has been helpful, I think what was most helpful was just asking my technical cofounders a ridiculous number of questions. Stupid questions... ones you might feel embarrassed to ask.

If you are going to learn to code, I think a high level computer science course is a great place to start. I recommend Udacity's CS101 course. It really takes the mystery out of what's happening behind the screen. If you want a good book that will also help lift the veil, I'd suggest "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware & Software" by Charles Petzold.

Learning to code can be a long process if you aren't able to give your undivided attention to it, so I think actually dedicating the time to a bootcamp as others have suggested is a very good idea and something I think I'd like to do myself.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. ;) I'm already asking and bothering people with all these "stupid" questions, especially when we are adding something new, but still it just tells me what we are doing, but I still doesn't how to do it. It's like selling the best cake in the world – you know it tastes perfect, but you don't know how to bake it. I want to understand the recipe ;)

<comment><USER3> Ha! That's an awesome analogy, and I've definitely felt that way as well. I would say just the online courses I took (Udacity, Code Academy, Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way) gave me the context to understand better, and even chime in on topics. Learning how the pieces fit together helps a lot, even if you can't do much of it yourself. That CS101 course will help a lot. Have fun!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I understand exactly where you are coming from. I learned a lot of basics from codecademy.com, and their modules have come a long way.

However, no matter which way you try to learn, the best piece of advice I was given is to have an idea of something you want to build in the first place. Even if it's dumb, or too complicated for a beginner, it's good to have the ability to see what direction you want to go in as you are learning more and more about the different languages and how they work. Otherwise, you will get bored and frustrated pretty quickly, and you won't be likely to stick to the learning process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great advise – thanks ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> it depends on what you want/need to learn. Since it seems like there is a team developing these apps, I think it would be godo to ask them this question. At least to understand what to learn; then ask how to learn it.

A general area you could start with the "Learn code the Hard Way" series <http://learncodethehardway.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> try codeschool.com</comment>


Dear Moon - T-A https://dearmoon.earth/ <comment><USER2> "Some kind of celestial event. No — no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea."[0]

What a beautiful sentiment. This humanizes space travel. I really hope the team succeeds on this mission, even with delays.

As a kid, I always felt a sense of awe reading about space and space travel. Now I am in grad school and lost that feeling of awe along the way. The only times that feeling has come back were during the Rocketman livestream and now looking at this project.

I am looking forward to the day that we go back on the moon, maybe even build a base there (Kurzgesagt released a video today about a moon base[1], coincidence?).

Again, what a noble endeavor, a billionaire taking artists to the moon!

[0] [http://scifiquotes.net/quotes/139_They-Should-Have-Sent-a- Po...](http://scifiquotes.net/quotes/139_They-Should-Have-Sent-a-Poet) [1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtQkz0aRDe8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtQkz0aRDe8)

<comment><USER3> We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars. Carl Sagan, Cosmos

<comment><USER4> What is even more poetic is that the "most used" spaceport in the future is likely to be on the Somali coast, just north of the Great Rift Valley where _Homo sapiens saipens_ first evolved and looked out at the sea for the first time. [0] History, though it does not repeat exactly, certainly does rhyme.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_modern_humans) (ok, well, maybe that was the Atlantic, not the Indian, but still, Africa)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was pretty skeptical when I heard that private citizens booked a flight on Falcon Heavy. When those plans got shelved and these popped up, I had a similar level of skepticism. I expected it to be some random celebrity that wanted to go on a fancy tour.

This is anything but that. I feel more than humbled to be wrong. Bringing a ton of artists on a once in a lifetime trip for inspiration purposes is selfless, compassionate, and warm. It's awesome. I'm so glad I was wrong.

<comment><USER6> > on a once in a lifetime trip

AFAIR, Burt Rutan said he wasn't that keen to watch Apollo-11 landing because he assumed it's soon going to be routine.

So far it wasn't. But why do you think it will not become more routine - perhaps a lot more routine - this time? Surely one can't count on that - <AUTHOR> we do can dream and we do can bring some of our dreams to reality, even though we aren't always good with predicting when it'll happen.

<comment><USER7> There's literally (yes, literally literally) nothing there on the Moon, and going there costs more than going to the Mariana Trench.

No, it will not become more routine.

<comment><USER8> The Moon may be just a stepping stone to greater things. Maybe we "mine" on it, maybe we use it to more efficiently send things into orbit, maybe just tourism, who knows? You can't possibly know what possibilities there exist, right now.

I think we're lucky that ancient mariners didn't listen to the people who told them "there's literally nothing, nothing, in the Great Water".

<comment><USER7> > I think we're lucky that ancient mariners didn't listen to the people who > told them "there's literally nothing, nothing, in the Great Water".

You're making a false and dishonest equivalency. Those mariners didn't know what was in the Great Water.

We absolutely do know to a huge degree of precision exactly what is on the Moon. (A whole bunch of nothing.)

We know more about the Moon than we know about the Mariana Trench. We've explored the Moon to death already.

<comment><USER9> When I watched the NASA administrator meeting in which NASA plans were discussed, one of the reasons listed for going to the moon was that we have seen that our understanding of it is not complete. It was not the United States of America that discovered, for example, that there was water ice on the moon, though we later confirmed the discovery. Yet this is a critical insight into its composition which has major implications.

When I watched the NASA administrator meeting in which NASA plans for building a base on the moon were discussed, one of the reasons listed was also rooted in discovery. There are many challenges that such a base would face and it is better to solve them when the Earth is close and rescue is more reasonable than to go to Mars with those problems not yet understood and solved, since the time till return from Mars will be measured in months and years rather than days.

What makes you so stridently disagree that we have more things to learn while on the moon, when the experts disagree with you? Also, since they do, doesn't this also make his equivalence a very good one, rather than false? Certainly the argument that there is more yet to be discovered about the trench does not refute his claim, only serving to enhance the degree to which claiming there is nothing is not valid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honestly, this is beautiful. Let's fucking do it.

No seriously...let's do it. We're humans - this is the kind of funny, beautiful, impossible stuff we can uniquely do.

Capital allocation? Bleh, don't be so boring and uninspired!

<comment><USER11> How much of your capital do you plan to allocate? And do you plan to allocate any of mine (i.e., the taxpayer)?

<comment><USER12> How about not buying some of those problematic F-35's? Or, maybe, skip the next invasion of a foreign country. Do you have any idea how much a bomb costs?

<comment><USER13> How about not give the uber rich a huge tax break?

<comment><USER12> That's also an excellent approach. Preventing evasion through shell companies would probably be helpful too.

We need to teach our kids that, when the world is exceedingly generous to them, it's nice to care for the ones it wasn't so nice to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This puts Yusaku Maezawa up there in league with the de Medici's and Borgia's in terms of patron of the arts.

<comment><USER15> Perhaps in terms of absolute expenditures, but unlikely anything like it in terms of bang for the buck.

<comment><USER16> You might reserve that evaluation for a century or two.

Arguably, we're still cruising on the de Medicis' and Borgias' investments in the arts.

<comment><USER9> Right. In the optimistic case, people will still be learning about this art project while living in another galaxy. In terms of scale, there is the potential for MZ to end up as much more important, rather than on the same scale as, other patron of the arts. It is far too soon to tell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This guy is only worth $3B, he may be spending half of his entire net worth to make this happen. I hope he inspires the richest billionaires of the world to fund such lofty ventures.

<comment><USER18> $10M-$20M is more than sufficient for a few generations (in a 100-200 years, our current understanding of the concept of money might not even be relevant, so it's pointless to plan for anything more than that). Anything more is just throwaway cash IMO. If you had the opportunity to become the first private citizen to go to the moon, you'd be stupid to not cement your legacy like that.

<comment><USER19> > If you had the opportunity to become the first private citizen to go to the > moon, you'd be stupid to not cement your legacy like that.

He decided to share the trip, so he won't be "the first private citizen", _merely_ "one of the first private citizens".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Honestly, I don't see how this is any bigger of a deal than going to the moon in the first place. There is a level of forced sentimentality here, as if a painter or a musician is going to see something different from a regular astronaut, because they're just special.

Any time I see something like the level of response somewhere, I can't help but assume everyone thinks they're saying what they're supposed to say. _" This is so beautiful, etc."_ It means _I like art_. I'm not an artist (I didn't take that risk with my way of life), but I _like_ and _can appreciate_ art which may as well be the next best thing, so I will post the comment saying I almost cried and everyone can know what a spiritual/sentimental/artistic person I am!

Sorry, don't mean to be cynical. I just don't understand how this is a big big big deal to cry over. I hope they succeed and make something great out of it afterward, just some of the comments here seem way, dare I say, over the top.

<comment><USER3> > as if a painter or a musician is going to see something different from a > regular astronaut

A scientist, after years of training, can look at a physical system, break it down into its component parts, figure out how to model each part using mathematics, synthesize the models, and then do experiments to confirm the overall model.

An artist, after years of training, can look at a scene from twenty different perspectives, understand the emotional impact of each perspective on different types of human personalities, can select a few that most appeal to them, and then synthesizes these selected perspectives into one whole coherent art piece.

If you are not an expert at something, then don't reduce what they can see and do, to only what you can see and do, and declare that they are doing nothing interesting.

<comment><USER21> Don't reduce artists and scientists to their professions?

Scientists can be artistic and artists can be scientific. They overlap.

<comment><USER12> I like to say I write executable poetry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This may go down in history as the most amazing (and maybe most expensive) art project of all time. I am just flabbergasted; this is astounding. I sincerely hope that the BFR comes to fruition in the way SpaceX has been billing it, and reasonably close in terms of timeline.

<comment><USER23> This is an "art" project because of the media/domains involved, but it's not an _art_ project.

It's very low-brow, but not the sort of independent low-brow that bursts with charm and zeal. It's too transactional, too structured, too contextualized, and too eagerly public. At best, this sort of big-money, one-off commission leads to the Teleharmonium and EPCOT and the Saatchi gallery, not Schiele or Baraka or I-Be Area.

If this project succeeds (which I hope it does, since that'll be good for humanity's efforts to get more active in space), it'll produce some _works that can be appreciated as art_. But it won't produce classics. People will forget about the works. The advancement into space will rightfully overshadow them. The works won't inspire other artists, and they won't advance any movements. They'll be curiosities studied by space historians, not art historians.

<comment><USER24> I had a friend like you once. On seeing someone just for a brief moment, she could comment for hours, saying things like "This person will never be rich", "Oh, she definitely has bad relations with her husband", "Obviously he's the kind of person that will fail every project". It turned out that most of her predictions that I could verify turned out false. She got some gut feelings and choose to follow that, but the data sample at her disposal was too small and she jumped to the conclusions way too fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wouldn't it be easier to train astronauts to be artists than to train artists to be astronauts?

<comment><USER18> Can you even train artistic talent? Doesn't it require a natural gift that you're born with?

Not to belittle astronauts, but space travel training is more teachable than true art.

<comment><USER26> I believe you have to have good taste and take it from there. [1]

[1] Ira Glass quote: > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's gonna take awhile. It's normal to take awhile. You've just gotta fight your way through.

<comment><USER27> Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap.

Ironically, or fittingly, I've been reading a comprehensive collection of his short stories, because it was impressed on me early in my life that he was a great author, and I have recently been horrified at how terrible many of his more obscure ones are.

The interesting thing is that the quality does not simply improve with time and experience. There are extreme outliers.

<comment><USER28> Weird question: I've been trying to find a short story I read years ago, which I think is by Sturgeon. Is there any chance you have run across it?

In it, an engineer is brought into a war zone, where giant tank-like creatures are on the edge of overrunning the front lines. The lines must be maintained in a cave system to keep extracting a valuable mineral. The generals keep pressuring the engineer for weapons, but he wants to understand the problem first. After lots of analysis, he directs the troops to destroy a certain structure. Within days all the tank creatures die. Then the engineer explains that the cave system is actually the inside of a caterpillar on a cosmic sized leaf, and the tank creatures were its immune system. Killing the caterpillar allowed the troops to loot the caterpillar's body in peace.

Ever heard of it? I'm not sure that my memory is completely accurate.

<comment><USER29> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killdozer!_(short_story)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killdozer!_\(short_story\)) ?

<comment><USER28> No, it's not killdozer, but thank you for the reply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have the feeling this should be bigger. This was 03:00 localtime for me and I expected to wake up to headlines about the moon everywhere.

But even here it vanished from the front page. No trends (Germany) on Twitter or YouTube. No top news on news sites.

My "friends" on Facebook aren't talking about it. My twitter timeline only has tweets from the obvious accounts (SpaceX, Elon Musk, …) about it.

What happened?

<comment><USER31> We've already seen several announcements of civilian space voyages planned for just far enough into the future that nobody's reputation will be harmed too much when the timeline quietly expands indefinitely.

The "boy who cried wolf" effect is very much at work here, and quite rightly IMO.

<comment><USER32> I mean, the project is cool and all, but it's a guarantee that a rocket that does not really exist yet will not send people to the moon's orbit in 5 years time. Anybody arguing differently is mad. This news is like a Molyneux announcement

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Heres the show Elon mentions as inspiring when he was young: "Moon Base Alpha"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNkKCFaqib8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNkKCFaqib8)

<comment><USER34> "Space 1999" was one of my favourite TV series when growing up. I looked up at the moon for a long while on September 13th 1999 and wondered what the earth would be like if it was missing on the 14th...

Adddendum: I enjoyed the fact that the props used were not traditionally sleek and glossy like most other sci-fi series. The Eagle Transporters were utilitarian and multi purpose. The moon buggies they used similarly so. The space suits seemed to be more modern, yet, true representations of those used by the first moon walkers. etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's worth keeping in mind "Elon Time". 2023 is a "no earlier than" date. It's if everything goes to plan, no new problems arise.

I'd love to see it happen on schedule but I have doubts.

<comment><USER36> Does it matter if it's 2026? Or even 2030?

<comment><USER37> or 2050 or 2099 or 2250, what's time anyway?

<comment><USER38> Time is just a concept that distracts us from living life at our own pace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Am a big fan of Michener and was reading his book Space recently. The paragraph below came up as two main characters were debating sending people to the Moon for a price VS sending machines to the Moon AND Mars AND Saturn for the same price. Felt it was relevant to showcase this initiative by SpaceX as meaningful for it is the beginning of something bigger.

"Man was the measure of all things, and although it was correct that machines could perform miracles, they could not enlist the emotional support of the public. Astronauts could, and he left this confrontation committed to the role of human beings in space, for without them as a measure, a criterion for meaning, the program had no viability."

</comment><comment><USER40> I also think this amazing! On the discussion as to what dollars should be spent on (tax dollars or private) I recommend listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson who explains in simple and very well [0]. It's mind blowing when you think about it really. Such a small fraction of all money in the world and it often leads to great solutions which we take for granted every day now.

I'm really excited about seeing this succeed and what might come out of it. How will our world look 10 years from now.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYs8TpFzIPI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYs8TpFzIPI) (Here on Joe Rogan podcast)

</comment><comment><USER41> Impressive- it's a sample-return mission. Sending up cameras to capture photons or sample enclosures to capture bits of dirt is too pedestrian for SpaceX. Instead they'll send up artists to capture samples of space-ness, to be studied by humanity back on Earth.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm just fantasizing how it would be like, composing a song on my guitar in zero gravity while glazing at the stars. Whoever gets the opportunity, I cheer for you.

<comment><USER43> Chris Hadfield recorded a cover of Bowie's _Space Oddity_ on the ISS [1], including playing the guitar in space. It gives me chills every time I listen to it.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo)

<comment><USER44> Originally they only had permission to have the video on YouTube for a year.

When word got out that it would have to be taken down once the license expired they managed to get the license extended.

There wasn't a big "shit show" just Chris's son saying on Twitter (iirc) that this was the case and they (him and his dad, iirc the son did the editing on the video) were just thankful that so many people enjoyed it during the year it was up.

A few days/weeks later it was back up. Don't think anyone talked about the deal but I want to believe that David stepped in himself to pull the strings needed for it to stay up. I love the original but dam Chris's cover is a very close second for me...

<comment><USER45> Bowie is a genius,the song is amazing and still the number one version for me too, but in terms of art, context matters a lot, and you can't get more context than space oddity being played in space.

Other song played by Chris and the barenaked ladies that I personally enjoy a lot is I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)[0], space related songs being played in space make them much more special to me.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvAnfi8WpVE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvAnfi8WpVE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is truly inspiring and I am so happy to witness something like this happen in my lifetime.

</comment><comment><USER47> Are they actually going to the moon if they are only going to orbit it? Sorry my English isn't the best

<comment><USER48> They aren't going to actually orbit the moon, they're going around the moon. It's called a "free return trajectory".

This is actually less than Apollo 8 did (edit: only talking about the orbit): Apollo 8 actually went into lunar orbit with a burn, and then left lunar orbit with another burn.

However, this is using "orbit" in its formal sense. Most people would look at the diagram of the spaceship flying around the moon and call it an "orbit". I'm not going to tell them that they're wrong to say that.

<comment><USER49> Parabolic and hyperbolic orbits are still orbits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This is amazing and as a moon lover, I cannot wait to see the output.

Odd that Picasso is mentioned in their hypothetical, it seems he didn't care much for the moon (at least humans landing on it anyhow). See lesson 8. [https://www.complex.com/style/2012/10/10-life-lessons-we- can...](https://www.complex.com/style/2012/10/10-life-lessons-we-can-learn- from-picasso/)

</comment><comment><USER51> Also take a refugee and a homeless person from third world who starves regularly to balance things out. Would they, as they look out of the window, find their struggles irrelevant after looking at the beauty of the bright blue blob as it rotates gracefully about itself while also majestically traversing around the source of life as if paying obeisance to it, as seen against a stark black background filled with infinite bright dots that don't twinkle anymore, or would they be heartbroken that rich people around the world are splurging on such self congratulatory endeavors while millions of people like them could have had a sliver of dignity added to their existence had these patrons of futuristic science and tech expanded their horizons by getting real and looked inwards instead and brought some twinkle in their eyes, or would they feel something else completely unexpected? Lets find out. No really, lets find out that as well.

</comment><comment><USER52> Alan Bean would probably approve: "But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Bean#Painting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Bean#Painting)

</comment><comment><USER53> Livestream link of the SpaceX announcement with a lot more details on the BFR - [https://youtu.be/zu7WJD8vpAQ?t=1712](https://youtu.be/zu7WJD8vpAQ?t=1712)

</comment><comment><USER54> If they allow people to vote on which artist to be chosen then my vote would go to Andy Weir[1] (author of The Martian[2])... but then in his talks he stated quite clearly of his fear of flying, so ... :D

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Weir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Weir) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_\(film\))

<comment><USER55> But isn't exposure therapy a good way to get rid of your fears? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The director obviously has to be Jim Cameron if his health holds up.

<comment><USER57> I'd send denis villeneuve :)

<comment><USER58> Thousand times yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> As others have said, this is way better than anything I had anticipated this private citizen arrangement to be. What a wonderful way to kick off human space travel round 2!

</comment><comment><USER60> Reminds me a little bit of this: [http://www.povray.org/posters/](http://www.povray.org/posters/)

</comment><comment><USER61> "They should have sent a poet"

<comment><USER62> This time they are! First thing I thought of too. Almost brought me to tears when I read what they were doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I honestly thought they are landing on the Moon and got excited... I was a bit put off when Musk chose a possibly worse design over aesthetics. Unrelated to him smoking cannabis on the radio show, he always looks a bit high to me. He was definitely unprepared for this event as well.

</comment><comment><USER64> Set the alarm Yusaku Maezawa: [https://moon- countdown.netlify.com](https://moon-countdown.netlify.com)

</comment><comment><USER65> I think they should send a couple great sports commentators along with the artists to give a live play-by-play of the whole thing

</comment><comment><USER36> This is lunacy on a grand scale!

:P

</comment><comment><USER66> I almost cried

</comment><comment><USER67> Simply awe inspiring. A moon shot in true sense.

</comment><comment><USER68> Fuck yeah!! We need more mad men like them!!

</comment><comment><USER69> This makes me so happy :)

</comment><comment><USER70> A more fun art project would be if he sent two animals of many species around the moon.

</comment><comment><USER71> why did this story disappear? only to re appear and then the other story is gone.. weird stuff

</comment><comment><USER72> Why would you design a site like this? There's no reason for the content to be hidden when you scroll to it. Why should the visitor have to wait and see if anything fades in? Either make it a video presentation or make it a proper website. Don't do this weird mixture that's the worst of both worlds.

</comment><comment><USER73> Astounding.

I don't care what you have to say about Elon Musk's flaws; he's the most inspirational human to have lived in the past fifty years.

I am unabashedly a SpaceX fanboy.

<comment><USER74> Nelson Mandela? Barack Obama? Martin Luther King Jr? Neil Armstrong? Bill Gates? Stephen Hawking? Steve Jobs? Rosa Parks?

Elon would be lucky to make the top ten.

<comment><USER75> Seriously, Barack Obama? I'm neither republican, not democrat, but you've got to be kidding me with that recommendation. He was a politician, through and through. Yes, the first black one, but aside from that he presented very little that was materially difference from previous politicians. Just being first at something, given the random nature of the universe, isn't enough to wow me. Your ability to make things happen, and change the world - of which he did basically neither - is what wins you respect.

<comment><USER74> > isn't enough to wow me

I wasn't creating a list of people that wow you, or even a list of people that wow me.

The metric was "how many people did this person inspire in a positive way?" and Barack Obama undeniably did that by being the first black POTUS.

<comment><USER75> Oh, okay, sorry I didn't realize that the bar was so low to make your list! If that's the case, why stop at Obama?

[http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2017/8/justin- biebe...](http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2017/8/justin-bieber-has- smashes-two-twitter-records-for-his-massive-fan-base-492686)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> You can follow him on Twitter: @yousuck2020

<comment><USER77> That really is his Twitter handle: [https://twitter.com/yousuck2020](https://twitter.com/yousuck2020)

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> If I could donate money to this, I would.

Going to look into it.

</comment><comment><USER33> I hope the musician they choose isn't a pop artist like Justin Bieber or Cardi B. that would just be such a waste lol.

<comment><USER37> Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me

I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> If only humanity has spent the same energy, vision and resources on what's happening on f-ing planet earth, things could have looked very different...

<comment><USER80> I believe we can, and should, do both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I love this project. it's truly amazing.

The cynic in me wonders about the timing of this to coincide with a certain lawsuit by the diver...

</comment><comment><USER82> This is an expensive, pointless stunt, and all you nerds have you're priorities screwed up if you think it's a good idea.

<comment><USER83> Life is an expensive, pointless stunt. What is your point?

<comment><USER82> [https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/03/its-basically-just- im...](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/03/its-basically-just-immoral-to- be-rich)

<comment><USER83> And yet, you're here, commenting on Hackernews, when you could be donating your computer and time to the poor. Note how the authors stops at 'even millions' presumably, just shy of the order of magnitude of his own net worth. Funny how that tends to shake out: "Everyone richer than me is immoral for keeping their money".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> What a shame that such a unique opportunity is wasted on such a mediocre curator. This nouveau-rich collector could have sent a curator of renown in his place rather than making the project all about himself. Aside from the fact that he obviously lacks experience or any actual taste, it's widely considered unacceptable for any curator to highlight themselves in their work in this way. The exhibition is and should be about the artists and the art, not the wealth, connections, and boldness of the curator. This will read as overwhelmingly narcissistic in the art context, which means it will only ever be seen as a kind of publicity stunt in the same vein as high altitude sky diving (what if Red Bull repeated the event, but this time the aeronaut jumped from the balloon with a canvas and oils?) For instance it's laughable that he mentions Picasso in the first sentence, as if to insinuate that it is preordained that this project will produce historic works of art.

What's worse, the framing is absurd. What will they make when they return? Something quite similar to what they made when they left! An artist's practice is something built over years, not some kind of instantaneous response to a single experience. Perhaps it will affect the trajectory of their careers – probably unpredictably for having been associated with this bizarre, self- aggrandizing project – and perhaps it won't. To prescribe this outcome in advance of even seeing what happens is boring and totally closes the possibility of unexpected and interesting outcomes.

I think going to the moon for entirely impractical reasons is itself a conceptually beautiful act, but it's too bad it's been spoiled in this way. The story is thus: "rich man pays for himself and a handful of famous people to be flown around the moon and back." Cool story.

To me, the most interesting part of this is the incredible risk that all of these people who presumably have much to lose will take together. The true climax will be when they return safely, or not.

<comment><USER16> I cannot fathom why you find it so necessary to constrain discovery.

None of us knows what these artists will create after their flight. You think they'll do nothing beyond what they've done before. I think they might be inspired in ways we can't foresee.

I'm pleased those who are in position to do this are doing it. Maybe it'll be a bust. Maybe nothing new will come of it. Maybe they'll all die in a fireball at launch or during re-entry. Maybe the resulting art will eclipse Picasso.

Whatever the result, I'm deeply grateful to everyone involved in this.

<comment><USER84> > I cannot fathom why you find it so necessary to constrain discovery.

In turn, I cannot fathom why the face and money behind this project finds it so necessary to constrain discovery by prescribing the outcome in advance.

> I'm pleased those who are in position to do this are doing it. Maybe it'll > be a bust. Maybe nothing new will come of it. Maybe they'll all die in a > fireball at launch or during re-entry. Maybe the resulting art will eclipse > Picasso.

Yes, this would be an interesting framing for the project!</comment></comment></comment>


Challenge: Find Twitter memes with suffix arrays - <AUTHOR> https://jvns.ca/blog/twitter-memes-challenge/ <comment><USER2> The article starts with "a short series of programming challenge I'm writing with Julian". What is a "Julian" in this context? I thought it meant "Julia", the programming language, but then I see that her solution is in fact in Go.

<comment><USER3> Julian is the person she is collaborating with. If you follow the link after that sentence there is a link to his blog.

<comment><USER2> Oh, thanks, that makes sense. I feel stupid now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems like a really interesting post, but the text width is just 22.4% of `<body>` width... sure I can zoom in, but then the font is obnoxiously large.

It seems like maybe it's a mobile theme being misapplied to a desktop user agent? FF 71 on macOS.

edit: `#wrap { max-width: 45em; }` is the culprit. If I remove that the un- maxed `width: 70%;` is much better.

<comment><USER5> It seems like she's just maxing out the width at what's commonly considered the most readable line length (~80 characters). Not sure what the problem is with that.

<comment><USER4> It's great in my terminal editor. How many people use a browser at that width? If they do, guess what, it works anyway because it's a relative width. Why _force_ (such a small) maximum?</comment></comment></comment>


Bill Gates Meets Warren  Buffett - <AUTHOR> https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/25-Years-of-Learning-and-Laughter?WT.mc_id=20160705180125_25-Years-of-Learning-and-Laughter_BG-FB&WT.tsrc=BGFB&linkId=26235361 <comment><USER2> Interesting use of virtual reality and 360° video on the Gates Notes. I think it's clear that VR is the next big thing in terms of culture.</comment>


Mini Powerplant: two small blocks that can power an average American home - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/22/the-bloom-box-a-power-plant-for-the-home-video/

<comment><USER2> "....saving about $100,000 since installing its five boxes 9 months ago"

Might be a naive question, but can anyone please explain to me the economics behind this?

<comment><USER3> I was a bit distracted while the interview was playing, but what I gathered is that their efficiency in converting chemical energy (specifically, so far, natural gas and oxygen) to electricity -- perhaps, per a comment I saw elsewhere, when the resulting heat can also be used and so considered part of the equation -- is about twice that of utility generated and delivered electric power.

I don't know whether my understanding is correct, but that's how I currently understand the comments regarding greater efficiency and cost savings.</comment></comment>


Apple stock plunging, Google stock diving, Yahoo stock melting - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/09/29/apple-stock-plunging-google-stock-diving-yahoo-stock-melting/ <comment><USER2> Good. Google's P/E is less than 25...and they're a growth company. I can't wait to slowly start buying (weighted average cost please) some of these money earning stocks over the next few months (value, growth, everything). This is why you invest for the long-term and always diversify. If you have some extra money outside your emergency fund lying around, dump it in to a Roth IRA (Vanguard & Fidelity are excellent) and slowly start buying.

<comment><USER3> Certainly - for the long term, this is a buyer's market. Since it's too hard to predict when the bottom will hit, dollar cost averaging is a good strategy.

<comment><USER4> also as the dollar become inflated holding, i would rather hold shares than currency. i would also get my hands on some GLD

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes, of course it is. The whole stock market is.

<comment><USER6> Not the whole stock market. Berkshire Hathaway is holding up well.

<http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ABRK.A>

<http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ABRK.B>

<comment><USER7> And gold ;)

<http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AGLD>

<comment><USER8> And Stock Markets are Inversely Proportional to Gold.

<comment><USER9> Sort of.

The more interesting trade is long GLD short USO (oil). Bit of a decoupling in commodities.

<comment><USER10> The recession will reduce demand for oil, the Fed's attempt to get us out of the recession by inflating the currency is making money flee into gold.

The lesson is, you can't push a string, you can not force the smart people who kept their cash out of stupid investments to spend it before the market bottoms.

You can create inflation but that will just force them into gold and that helps no one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apple is effectively a luxury item vendor, and they may end up getting hit by a recession far more seriously than other tech companies.

<comment><USER12> Not luxury for everyone. A lot of people use Macs for work and will only buy Macs if they need another computer.

<comment><USER13> But businesses that are having a hard time getting credit now will be asking themselves "do I really NEED to buy new computers?" Anyone dependent on Macs already has them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Adwords spending will be reduced during a recession, so what? It's not going away.

<comment><USER14> On a related note, I increased my client's daily spending limit with Google AdWords 10% today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems sensationalist. If you look closely, the dow was down 7%. aapl's beta is 2.37, so we'd expect apple to fall 17%. goog's is 2.07 for 14.5%. yhoo's 1.19 gives 8%

since the market lost so much money last night, how badly are the tech giants fairing against expectation? aapl:-4% goog: 3% yhoo:-3%

so, either Oh NOES! teh sky is falling! or tech stocks are more sensitive to market activity.

</comment><comment><USER16> They will all be back up before long....hopefully..But in the meantime I second run4yourlives 'buy buy buy' remark!

</comment><comment><USER17> Gee, I'm glad I'm not in _that_ business...

Oh wait.

On the other hand. The time to buy is coming soon.

</comment><comment><USER18> Buy! Buy! Buy!

<comment><USER9> Nah. Sell puts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> is there a stock that actually goes up when the whole market crashes?

<comment><USER20> Various ETFs. Start with SDS</comment></comment>


Royal Free – Google DeepMind trial failed to comply with data protection law - <AUTHOR> https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/news-and-events/news-and-blogs/2017/07/royal-free-google-deepmind-trial-failed-to-comply-with-data-protection-law/ <comment><AUTHOR> ICO is the Information Commissioner, the English regulator for privacy law.

Royal Free is a hospital, run by an English NHS foundation trust.

The regulator hasn't said these collaborations with Google are outright not legal. They have said that any future collaborations need to include some minor changes, and that these minor changes are not a hindrance to innovation.

The blog post provides a bit more information.

[https://iconewsblog.wordpress.com/2017/07/03/four-lessons- nh...](https://iconewsblog.wordpress.com/2017/07/03/four-lessons-nhs-trusts- can-learn-from-the-royal-free-case/)</comment>


Group Chat Emerges as the Hottest Thing in IT - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/group-chat-emerges-as-the-hottest-thing-in-it-1478459151 <comment><USER2> Seems a paid article for XxxXxxx (that I won't mention, so not to give even more publicity).</comment>


IGuardian – The Home Internet Security System by Itus Networks – Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/itus/iguardian-the-home-internet-security-system <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this here. Let us know if you have any questions/comments. we think it's a step in the right direction and an interesting solution for consumers. But also for hackers thanks to the specs and the price.

jock [at] itusnetworks.com</comment>


Iceland looks to serve the world. - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8297237.stm

<comment><USER3> Do you really want to build your data center on top of 130 volcanoes?

 _The island has about 130 volcanic mountains, of which 18 have erupted since the settlement of Iceland. Over the past 500 years, Iceland's volcanoes have erupted a third of the total global lava output._ \- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanism_of_Iceland>

<comment><USER4> I can't recall ever hearing about a volcano on Iceland threatening people, though.

The earthquakes are probably a bigger problem, since they affect a larger area don't all occur in specific locations. Design the building properly and even that shouldn't be a big problem.

<comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldfell>

5,300 had to be evacuated from the island of Heimaey due to an eruption in 1973.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A couple of problems: Iceland is small so although it has an image as a cool sensible safe Scandinavian country it wouldn't take many voters to put in a far right/far left president who might screw up your business model.

Do you know the details of Icelandic law? Does your corporate lawyers? Your regulation compliance officers? How many Icelandic Intelectual Property specialists can you hire tomorrow? There is a reason that banks have HQs in London/New York - they have a few hundred years of case law that they understand.

Iceland is bankrupt, which means it is under thumb of the IMF which means it will do whatever Washington says. Do you want your data to be ruled officially by Reykjavik but unofficially by MPIA/RIAA/Whoever says.

<comment><USER7> It shouldn't be too much of an issue considering Iceland is going to eventually join the EU.

<comment><USER6> Austria is in the EU, would you trust Jörg Haider with your gay rights mailing list?

<comment><USER8> That would be a highly suspicious situation, considering the fact that J. Haider died in a car accident more than a year ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like the idea that the internet will be plugged in and powered by the earths own internal heat. It's like the virtual world and natural world becoming as one.

<comment><USER10> The duality is an illusion. Free your mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _A company would save greater than half a million metric tons of carbon annually_ by putting their data center in Iceland.

A typical server uses 1 ton / year. Not many companies have more than half a million servers. Perhaps only about 2 companies.

<comment><USER12> Just how many data centers have even _close_ to 100,000 machines in them? There can't be _that many_ of them, but the article makes this sound commonplace. There are probably quite a few installations with 100's and 1000's of machines. Once you get into 5 digit numbers, you are starting to reach rarified heights.

<comment><USER13> The problem is in the explosive growth. The demand for computing power has grown dramatically over the last few years because of the shift to cloud computing and the fact that people are expecting "smarter and smarter" and "more and more" and "faster and faster." If Google had 10x the datacenter capacity, it could (theoretically) crawl the web 10x faster and return more up to date results.

<comment><USER14> If you really want to get picky though, more web crawling from Google means more energy usage on the other end of the line (the crawled server).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I spent a month in iceland this summer and it is an amazing place. Beautiful landscapes, long nights in the winter/days in the summer, and it's sparsely populated. I'm not sure how great of an idea it is to put a bunch of data centers there, but I would love to figure out a way to colocate _myself_ there. I feel very confident that they will find a way to recover from the unfortunate events of the past year.

<comment><USER16> Just don't go there in winter. The lack of sun can be depressing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was living in Canada last year and thinking the same idea in the freaking cold winter. I guess for North America it might be a better idea to put servers in the cold areas (e.g. Northwest Territories) in the same continent instead of running optic fibers under the ocean to Iceland and worried about earthquakes and volcanos ...

<comment><USER18> Not to mention sabotage and blackmail. "Pay me millions or I'll chop your cables". Hmmm, new meaning for the term "Hacker"...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember asking engineers at deCODE about building server centers in Iceland. They said it was too expensive to build and staff a server center and that there was no surplus bandwidth to depress costs. They said that limiting constraints for computing in Iceland were personnel, then logistics, then bandwidth ---not energy and cooling.

"And, in an irony not lost on a country brought to its knees by finance, one early customer rumoured to have signed a deal to move servers here is - <USER2> who else - one of America's biggest investment banks. "

This "server farm to save the world" story smells like spin for a dish-washing debt service ---probably because Iceland hates aluminum smelting and fears the imported masses who'd work there.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think this is a great idea. Iceland needs a new industry and this just makes sense. Data centers are to the tech age as factories were to the industrial revolution.

The government can ensure/facilitate high speed fiber links to the continent and then let the rest take care of itself. As long as there is enough network capacity this should be a no-brainer.

</comment><comment><USER21> One way we solve and the solution backfires later. But let's go with the greedy method for now.</comment>


How Mushrooms Could Hold the Key to Our Long-Term Survival as a Species - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-mushrooms-could-hold-the-key-to-our-long-term-survival <comment><USER2> Interesting. The idea that mushrooms could purify pollutants seems reminiscent of this movie: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087544/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087544/)

<comment><USER3> Or this movie: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108255/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108255/)

<comment><USER2> But the only way to save Dinohatten is by transporting it to our own dimension!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While the vice article suggests that mushrooms will make food for themselves or other organisms from the pollutants they pick up, not all compounds are broken down in mushrooms. For example it's suggested not to eat mushrooms from old apple orchards as they may have a higher lead content.

It still may have a practical application to treat soil in an area (as long as you harvest the mushrooms) but not all of the compounds drawn up by mushrooms are broken down.

[http://www.fungimag.com/winter-2010-articles/shavit- morels.p...](http://www.fungimag.com/winter-2010-articles/shavit-morels.pdf)

There have been some other studies where mushroom mounds were created on the boundaries of farms to help collect phosphates and nitrates in water runoff with some promising success. Couldn't find the specific study I was thinking of with a quick search, will update this comment if I find it.

<comment><USER5> The mushrooms aren't necessarily being used to _break down_ the compounds, so much as to facilitate their _sequestration_. You can then harvest and destroy the mushrooms and have clean soil.

<comment><USER6> > _destroy the mushrooms_

What are some ways this would be done without spreading the pollutants elsewhere?

<comment><USER7> Pollutants can be re-treated to be less harmful, or incinerated, or simply dispersed over a large enough surface/volume so that they would not be considered pollutants anymore at low enough concentrations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm sympathetic to the argument (and I enjoy Paul Staments) but this article is a poorly-written regurgitation of Stamets' ideas, which adds little value and makes some overly strong unsourced statements along the way.

<comment><USER6> Which statements are too strong?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can also make or rather grow bio-degradeable packaging solutions from Mycelium. We can look forward to many applications from funghi - got to support this

</comment><comment><USER10> It's almost like nature has code behind it we can fork and iterate upon

</comment><comment><USER11> Love this. If anyone is interested in getting into Mycology I help work on an open source project mushroomobserver.org

We're always looking for fungi loving techies to help us out: [https://github.com/MushroomObserver/mushroom- observer](https://github.com/MushroomObserver/mushroom-observer)

</comment><comment><USER12> This was a kickstarter commercial. Seems CNN didn't purchase Vice's integrity when they bought everything.

</comment><comment><USER5> The video in TFA is _so_ worth the 18-and-change minutes it takes to watch.

<comment><USER13> It would be nice if you could include a "why" for statements like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it by eating them? I like mushrooms.

</comment><comment><USER15> Would this article make the front-page if the word mushroom was replaced with mycelium or fungus which removed the hope of legitimizing psychedelics? I doubt it, even in the article they extol the virtues of "magical" mushrooms:

> While it's also being researched for uses in less cosmic concerns like > breaking addiction and treating cancer, psilocybin's third-eye-opening > properties aren't superficial. Some theories argue that modern human > intelligence itself was borne of consumption of the stuff. Magic mushrooms > are something about which Stamets is (naturally) an expert...

OTOH, maybe it's good to have the word mushroom in the title since it also signals to the rest of us that it's probably going to be an article by and for fans of psilocybin.

<comment><USER16> I doubt anyone read the title, and then upvoted, because they assumed it was an article about how psychedelics held the key to humanity's survival.

<comment><USER15> How many pot-heads have you known who would chew your ear off about hemp? It's innocence by association.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I'm working on a new release of my Google Analytics widget. Thoughts? - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/OOh9TBP.png Plus the existing version is on sale (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ga.today-widget-for-google/id936871747?mt=8) until the new one is approved! <comment><USER2> I really like the screen displaying multiple domains. I am assuming that it is the number of unique users that accessed the domain today.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the big number on the right is the number of currently active users (you can pick which metric you want though). On the left you get two other metrics, like users, new users, page views, conversions, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hot.

Any real time integration?</comment>


Is AMD Stuck in the Past? PGA vs. LGA - <AUTHOR> https://techplanet.today/post/is-amd-stuck-in-the-past <comment><USER2> Crappy copy-editing. Sentence 1: "and" should be "on", sentence 3: "air" should be "are", and more like that throughout the article. I think it was voice-to-text and never corrected.</comment>


What They Can't Tell You: Starting Up Outside a Hub - <AUTHOR> http://wensing.tumblr.com/post/18392646677/what-they-cant-tell-you-starting-up-outside-a-hub

<comment><USER2> I complete agree with your premise, in what hackers need to support them in a traditional, SF/NYC-style, VC-backed sense, but I disagree with your solution.

The solution isn't to run people through the gauntlet just because you had to run through it. That's the same sort of thing that causes open-source projects to run people out of town because they asked a question wrong.

In Austin, I studied the design and tech community and the problems that both groups have were essentially the same: a comprehensive lack of professional support in all areas. People tend to only hang out with their friends and their coworkers. They don't meet people from other companies. Those companies don't support the local community and don't work together with other companies to share resources and solve problems. There's no _community._ There's just a bunch of companies functioning as a silo, each with one or two employees who venture out when there's a free beer or a friend at a meetup.

The answer isn't to shake someone until they realize some sort of truth. It's to build that community, the one you don't have right now to support you, for someone else. It's to provide help and be a mentor and give guidance. It's to do the fairy godmother act, the one you no-one did for you, for someone else, and as part of that, to teach people that this is how good, responsible people and companies behave.

What you want is to change the culture. You want to start raising companies that look to all of the local communities and novice developers and talk about the work they're doing and buying them beers and offering them training. It's about building a comprehensive local talent pool through supporting meetups and offering apprenticeships -- not unpaid internships, not regular internships, actual apprenticeships -- so you never lack for qualified candidates in the good times and are always thought well of in the lean times.

It's about reaching out to other companies who use the same technologies and tools as you do and sharing resources, ensuring that future employees of both places have safety nets with each other, and that you never have to reinvent the wheel because you know all of the practices of everyone else using that same tool.

It's about not thinking in terms of zero-sum games and hierarchical advancement. A rising tide lifts all boats, and the money and the power and the experience will come if there's a reason for hackers to show up: a community.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response. I want to clarify that my quest isn't to run anyone through the gauntlet. To quote myself:

 _A scarier but more tractable solution is educating and arming first-time founders with the lessons and toughness they need to succeed against the tremendous odds facing them in this territory. It demands a brutal honesty that risks discouraging young recruits, but this is how the best of the best operate.

As a founder born and raised in South Florida that's had some measure of success (insofar as survival is a major component), this is my plan. To tell people of the dangers in no uncertain terms, to take a chainsaw to their ideas, and to inspire them to find ways to collect money from customers first, so they can collect it from opportunistic investors second, and on their terms._

I realize that this is mostly about teaching (and not acts of kindness, money or otherwise), but I do believe that it fits under your suggestion to "mentor and give guidance". It definitely isn't about just getting them to "realize some sort of truth." On the contrary, I welcome engagement in a very practical way. Hope that makes it a little more clear.

<comment><USER2> _"It demands a brutal honesty that risks discouraging young recruits, but this is how the best of the best operate."_ and _"To tell people of the dangers in no uncertain terms, to take a chainsaw to their ideas"_ are the passages I take issue with.

That sure sounds like a gauntlet, like putting someone through the wringer just because.

You can be supportive without cutting people down. A community doesn't have to be all cat fights and proving yourself to each other. It _can_ just be helpful.

I'm glad you're not planning on doing it that way, but your words suggest otherwise. Just something to keep an eye on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is so true - this article is so true. thanks.

..(vitovito) a comprehensive lack of professional support in all areas. People tend to only hang out with their friends and their coworkers. They don't meet people from other companies. Those companies don't support the local community and don't work together with other companies to share resources and solve problems. There's no community......It's to provide help and be a mentor and give guidance. (vitovito)

I have experienced the same story here in Germany. But I beleive it is not possible when you are an outlier, to do much on your own individualistic style - there must be a supporting system with you to push things through. It is wishful thinking that you can build community with few entrpreneurs. That is the reason that innovations take years and years, at least 10 years to reach market readiness.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have posted your article in my blog www.commercescience.blogspot.com</comment>


WhaleTail: Program to Reverse Docker Images into Dockerfiles - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/P3GLEG/WhaleTail <comment><USER2> This is pretty awesome. I built it and gave it a try. Where I work, there are a number of docker images for which the Dockerfile has been lost. On the tasklist is recreating Dockerfiles. I built the down stream images from the Dockerfile output by WhaleTail and ran it through the full test suite. 1 missed out of 159 passed. Woot.</comment>


Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All - <AUTHOR> http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html <comment><USER2> I don't know where you are from, but in germany basic statistic knowledge (like what you described: mean, median, standard deviation, confidence intervalls) is taught in high school. It's pretty common knowledge.

Where are you from?

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought this might be a good read for programmers who don't know statistics. Actually, I was also wondering as I was also taught basic statistics in high school (India) except confidence intervals.</comment></comment>


Schism: A library of CRDT implementations of Clojure's core data types - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aredington/schism <comment><USER2> Once you get past all the complicated math (honestly being into Haskell has helped with this), CRDTs are actually very easy to understand, at least their semantics are.

Here's are some decent primer talks:

John Mumm - A CRDT Primer: Defanging Order Theory -> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOlnp2bZVRs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOlnp2bZVRs)

"CRDTs Illustrated" by Arnout Engelen -> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xFfOhasiOE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xFfOhasiOE)

If you want to see it in action:

"Practical data synchronization with CRDTs" by Dmitry Ivanov -> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veeWamWy8dk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veeWamWy8dk)

Service Discovery using CRDTs by Mushtaq Ahmed and Umesh Joshi at FnConf17 -> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKSbiFDb3dU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKSbiFDb3dU)

There's also a talk with a guy sitting in a field which is the best I think I've ever seen, but I can't find it... but I can't find it in my youtube history :(

As people reason more and more about distributed systems I think CRDTs will become (if they're not already) almost required knowledge, like paxos/raft.

<comment><USER3> I was fortunate enough to work at Basho, where CRDTs were part of nearly every technical discussion about how to progress Riak.

One of my former co-workers, Chris Meiklejohn, continues to push forward with CRDTs via Lasp[0]. He has a good list of reading materials[1] that it doesn't look like he's maintained recently but should still be useful.

Guess I'll plug my meta-list of distributed systems reading lists[3] (definitely currently unmaintained) while I'm here.

[0]: [https://github.com/lasp-lang/lasp](https://github.com/lasp-lang/lasp)

[1]: [http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07...](http://christophermeiklejohn.com/distributed/systems/2013/07/12/readings- in-distributed-systems.html)

[2]: [https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368](https://gist.github.com/macintux/6227368)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am the author of the CT vector CRDT, also the author of the Replicated Object Notation [http://github.com/gritzko/ron](http://github.com/gritzko/ron).

I tried to look into the code, and I am not sure which way they implemented list and vector. The explanation is a bit confusing, especially the mention of "insertion index".

      Definition and support for Schism's Convergent List type. The
      convergent list is a simple timestamped log of entries with a vector
      clock. Convergence places entries into the resultant list In
      insertion order. The vector clock conveys that an item has been
      removed from the list on another node."

      Convergence places entries into the
      resultant vector in insertion order, with insertions occurring by
      replaying insertions operations in order.

CRDT is all about _partial_ orders, so what does it all mean? Orders are different for different replicas.

(Disclaimer. I am not a Clojurist.)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I couldn't follow the descriptions either.

It looks like "list" only supports appending (conj), removing the first item (rest), and removing all items (empty).

The data consists of a list of items, a "clock" (map of nodeId to Date object), and a list of (nodeId,Date) corresponding to the values.

I think they're using the clock to determine whether to drop deleted items on merge. Code for the operations is [list.cljc:153-169]([https://github.com/aredington/schism/blob/master/src/schism/...](https://github.com/aredington/schism/blob/master/src/schism/impl/types/list.cljc#L153-L169)). The merge code is "synchronize" a little further down (I didn't read through it).

The "vector" object supports append (conj), pop, clearing the list (empty), and setting a value at a position (assoc). It does _not_ support insert/delete. It is structured similarly to "list" except using vectors instead of lists for the values and the timestamps. Code is at [vector.cljc:222-244]([https://github.com/aredington/schism/blob/master/src/schism/...](https://github.com/aredington/schism/blob/master/src/schism/impl/types/vector.cljc#L222-L244))

</comment></comment><comment> j-pb A thorough explanation of its semantics would be good. A set for which union is defined as the empty set is also a CRDT, but a pretty useless one. And the explanation sounds a bit like, it converges by loosing data consistently.

<comment><USER6> A thorough explanation for a 0.1 project seems a high bar. I'd like to see an example or two where it loses data in the manner he speaks of, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Turning "CRDT" into a link would be great! Wasn't familiar with that acronym.

<comment><USER8> _Conflict-free Replicated Data Type_ : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict- free_replicated_data_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict- free_replicated_data_type?wprov=sfti1)

<comment><USER9> Also, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xFfOhasiOE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xFfOhasiOE) is a pretty good conference talk that offers a high-level overview of CRDTs.

<comment><USER10> Wow small world! The speaker (Arnout Engelen) is also the author of the 'nethogs' tool, which I've used to diagnose networking issues.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gambler's fallacy trips up goalies - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/07/gamblers-fallacy-trips-goalies

<comment><USER2> The gambler's fantasy is a fantasy when you're trying to use it to predict a coin flip, not what another human will do. The penalty kicker has to make the same decision after looking at all previous results, and also may be making decisions about where to kick based on the direction of the previous kicks.

If the kickers attempt to second-guess the "this side is due for a kick" behavior by goalies, the goalies can try to second guess the kickers by knowing that they are intentionally trying to avoid even distributions over a moving historical window. It's the classic endless paper-rock-scissors strategy discussion.

<comment><USER3> From the OP, 70% of goalies chose the opposite direction of the previous kick after 3 kicks. That's the "gambler's fallacy".

<comment><USER4> It's not, because the direction the penalty taker chooses is not a random event. It may not be the optimum strategy, but it's not the gambler's fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In regards to the ending counterpoint that a goaler has no chance of saving a ball to the top third of the goal anyway:

A high ball should have a higher risk of missing the goal entirely. So the better you can predict the keeper, the lower and safer shots you should be able to take.

<comment><USER6> This was the point I was going to make. Even in this most recent world cup, we saw plenty of outright misses by shooters. Better to put it on frame and force the keeper to a save then to risk missing outright.

<comment><USER7> Why? In the end, its only goals that matter. Everything else might as well be counted as a miss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This comment left under the article, which is supposedly bullshit, says it all:

"Justin • 16 hours ago I have played goalkeeper for almost 30 years, and this article makes no sense. We are not randomly guessing which way the kicker is going. For important matches, you're going to study the other team's kickers penalty history. Most players have a direction they feel more confident kicking to. You pick that direction if the info is available. If not, I always found that even if a kicker was trying to convince me of one direction, his eyes would always give away the true direction right before the kick. Most kickers need to do a visual check of their intended direction right before striking.

I'll tell you what never in 30 years influenced my decision: the direction of the previous kicker."

</comment><comment><USER9> Watch the second half of kicks in the most recent World Cup, you can see that some kickers seem to wait for any indication of the direction of the goalie taking a dive in a particular direction.

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

At the level these guys play, they kick so fast it is difficult for the goalie to get to the far reaches of the net even when they guess correctly, so I can see why they jump early. In this situation, the bigger goalies definitely have an advantage. Changing the direction you jump randomly isn't going to help much.

</comment><comment><USER10> One counterintuitive piece of game theory trivia is that, in equilibrium, penalty kickers should kick to their weaker sides more often than their stronger sides.

In equilibrium, you should be indifferent to the goalkeeper's strategy, and if you're better at kicking to the left, that means you should kick to the right _more_ , not _less_.

<comment><USER11> Also, the goalkeeper may have a weaker side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If I were the shooter I'd visibly flip a coin before walking to the penalty point. I'd try to equally scan both sides of the goal, and do a neutral run-up that hopefully wouldn't give away which side I picked.

This would neutralize most mindgames, statistical analysis and self-doubts.

<comment><USER6> First you'd have to practice enough kicks to be equally good at each side. Most shooters have a preferred side of the goal.

<comment><USER13> Players have a stronger _foot_. But it's not particularly difficult to use that foot to strike the ball to one side or the other. It's a different technique, but it's one that every professional footballer has inevitably mastered.</comment></comment></comment>


Clever method for checking a 200 series HTTP Response - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/buildboxhq/buildbox-agent/blob/master/buildbox/client.go#L152

<comment><USER2> Really clever, thats why a comment is needed to clarify it.

</comment><comment><USER3> nice. so, go does automatic conversion/check for float/int..</comment>


The "Slow iPhone" Phenomenon - <AUTHOR> https://www.statista.com/chart/2514/iphone-releases/ <comment><USER2> Foreseen obsolescence... My strategy: use a Nokia 1616 from 2010 with 1 week autonomy. Other people use simple phone?

<comment><USER3> I did use a Nokia till very recently. Now I own a smartphone with lineageOS. I haven't really made up my mind what I like better. Dumb phones are quite limited but come with a great battery life and almost no bugs thanks to their limited capabilities. The smartphone otoh requires charging at least every third day and I am not even 100% confident that the alarm clock will always "just work". It is kind of useful at times (offline navigation with gps, for instance) but also a bit of a time waster.

Tough call.</comment></comment>