Amazon begins temperature checks and will provide surgical masks at warehouses - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-amazon-com-masks-e/exclusive-amazon-to-deploy-masks-and-temperature-checks-for-workers-by-next-week-idUSKBN21K1Y6 <comment><USER2> How is this just starting? Here in Singapore, employers have been required to do twice-daily temperature checks for months.

This is the lowest of low-hanging fruit.

<comment><USER3> That's one of the most frustrating things about the response to this. Even now we don't have measures like having everyone wear face coverings, having temperature checks, limiting the number of people in establishments, etc., and it doesn't seem like anyone in power is advocating them at the moment. The response seems to be to first shut down the whole economy, then spend a few weeks thinking about what to do next.

<comment><USER4> I can relate to the frustration. The one observation I would make is that the US is not Singapore. Singapore is a relatively small city-state, run by a benevolent dictatorship and with relatively recent experience with other corona viruses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This response from Amazon is better than nothing, but given that recent figures show that up to 25% of people may be asymptomatic, might these temperature checks give people a false sense of security? They should have any employee with _any_ symptoms stay home and self-quarantine for longer than 3 days.

They should really focus on getting face masks for employees faster by using nonmedical fabric masks, which can help prevent asymptomatic transmission by blocking respiratory droplets from spreading. The article says the surgical masks won't arrive until next week. And they should really be using some alternative fabric mask, rather than surgical masks which should go to healthcare workers.

Each day that interventions are delayed makes a huge difference.

More thoughts at [https://shouldiwearafacemask.com](https://shouldiwearafacemask.com)

(Edited to remove suggestion to close until they get masks with a compromise to use nonmedical fabric masks.)

<comment><USER6> > They should shut down until they can get face masks for all employees and > make them mandatory. The article says they won't arrive until next week. And > they should really be using some alternative fabric mask, rather than > surgical masks which should go to healthcare workers.

And all the people ordering from Amazon? I would assume that on the whole, Amazon is better than every member of the public physically going out and shopping at a store.

<comment><USER7> If they required masks for all supply chain jobs right now, most places would have to shutdown due to the lack of masks. People would go hungry. We need guaranteed supply of masks and hand sanitizer at reasonable prices. This where the government could step in.

<comment><USER8> Hand sanitizer will be solved in a couple weeks. Every single distillery in my small town is pivoting to making it, as well as Bacardi and others, and I know this is happening everywhere.

N95 masks though, those can't exactly be ramped up and made in your shop.

<comment><USER9> This crisis we are in has doctors wearing halloween masks so there are people making masks at home. They're not N95 rated in the slightest, but it's better than reusing a mask to see a non-covid patient after seeing a probably-covid patient.

<comment><USER8> Source of doctors wearing Halloween masks?

<comment><USER10> how about doctors wearing sex shop costumes? [https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/28/medical-fetish-site- donates-e...](https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/28/medical-fetish-site-donates- entire-stock-scrubs-nhs-12469788/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This sentence stuck out to me:

"The company will also use machine-learning software to monitor building cameras and determine whether employees are staying at safe distances during their shifts, or whether they are often huddled too close together"

I can see that working in tandem with some kind of alarm or alert sounding when workers are too close together. The second order effect, would be some kind of Pavlovian response in Amazon warehouse workers even beyond this physical distancing period.

That's the kind of stuff you used to read in sci-fi novels.

<comment><USER12> In the same vein, it would be kind of cool if there was a wristband / necklace kit that vibrated aggressively if they were placed within close proximity. For example, most people touch their face between 2-3,000 times a day. The current CDC recommendation is to not touch your face, but people do this unconsciously.

So make two wrist bands, wear one on each wrist. Then also make a necklace of some kind, and if a wristband is brought within 1-2 inches of the necklace, vibrate the wristband somehow. This will alert the person that they are touching their face and after enough use, they will hopefully do it less.

<comment><USER13> I wonder if this could be done with a smartwatch alone.

Touching your face means that your hand is at a specific angle, and probably has some accelerometer and gyroscope readings that can be identified as "touching your face" vs "raising your hand" or lifting things or whatever else.

Dedicated hardware would be nice, but it's unlikely to be useful in time for the current pandemic. But an app that was like 90% accurate that could be released right now (or within a week or 2) might be able to make a difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They really should have been doing temperature checks a month ago. Amazon is pretty critical infrastructure right now. Many people would be up a creek if Amazon had to shut down.

<comment><USER15> I can see a parallel universe where the military shows up and "fortifies" critical supply chain locations like this, and they're the ones with the temperature checks and gate security.

Not sure we're there yet. But I keep thinking about how, "given the lag time in this disease, appropriate response should look like an overreaction."

<comment><USER16> > But I keep thinking about how, "given the lag time in this disease, > appropriate response should look like an overreaction."

That's a great point. The impact of the virus is going to be much worse than it could have been because it's behavior exploits some of our cognitive biases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Our local grocery store chain (Wegmans) _finally_ let workers wear masks last night, as well.

<comment><USER18> The Trader Joe's near me took the most serious steps so far. They are limiting to 30 people in the store at a time and setup 'lanes' six feet apart for carts to lineup for checkout. When you checkout, they take the cart and have you stand back while they ring up and bag your stuff. When it's time to pay they back up from the register and let you pay and take your own receipt. I say these are the most serious steps because the other grocery stores near me haven't changed much of anything last time I went to them.

It was a little weird at first, but I am willing to go through whatever hoops to make the grocery workers comfortable.

<comment><USER19> All of these steps have already been going on at my local Whole Foods for almost two weeks now. I don't know if it was a single-store thing or a broader Whole Foods thing, but it has been weird to me seeing people harp on Amazon's response to this when the Whole Foods near me has been the _only_ business seemingly implementing any safety measures.

It was weird at first, but everything went smoothly after the initial weirdness of people obliviously walking past the line in front of the store and trying to go inside only to be told to turn around and stand in line.

<comment><USER17> > it has been weird to me seeing people harp on Amazon's response to this when > the Whole Foods near me has been the only business seemingly implementing > any safety measures

It's not weird at all to me.

Amazon's treatment of warehouse workers and their treatment of customers are wildly different.

<comment><USER19> Reddit has been plastered with reports from Amazon warehouse workers that they have had temperature checks and PPE (except for masks due to shortages) for weeks now. It doesn't seem to be that different.

It just seems to be on a case-by-case (or per location) basis, while the media seems to be just choosing the locations where there isn't such measures and extrapolating wildly.

<comment><USER20> Any sources? Or at least 1-2 subreddits where one can read Amazon warehouse workers public discussions?

<comment><USER21> [https://reddit.com/r/AmazonFC](https://reddit.com/r/AmazonFC)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How are they so late on this? I thought Bezos was going to be all over figuring out how to keep people working safely, that's going to be a huge factor in the success or failure of businesses going forward.

<comment><USER23> The temperature checks and reviewing video are new, but they've been saying they will provide masks for a while but have been running into shortages actually procuring them.

If we assume most transmission is asymptomatic, this is largely a PR move that buys Amazon some time, but doesn't change much, except maybe the price they're willing to pay for masks.

<comment><USER16> Even if we assume most transmission is asymptomatic there's still a ton of value in cutting down symptomatic transmission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What is the accuracy of non-contact infrared thermometers sensors in detecting high body temperatures? If you use an off the shelf cheap non-contact thermometer then your will read ~32C when you measure your forehead temperature. As far as I can tell most health non-contact thermometers work by measuring the ambient temperature and using this to calibrate the measured forehead temperature. But there seem to be many factors in play: if a worker has just come from another colder or hotter environment, the size of a workers head, ambient air speed, hair covering, where the operator aims the device...

In the best study [1] I have seen using expensive ($25,000) equipment, the sensitivity vs specificity is too low [2] to suggest that they are useful outside of environments that can tolerate high levels of false positives. To catch 90% of the people with Covid-19 you will inadvertently turn away at least 10% of your workforce as false positives.

I would be interested in seeing studies from actual workplace screenings in terms of how many workers are turned away and how many feverish workers are actually detected.

[1][https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/16/11/10-0703_article](https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/16/11/10-0703_article) [2][https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/16/11/10-0703-f1](https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/16/11/10-0703-f1)

<comment><USER25> For the sake of safety, I think it is better to err on the side of false- positives in this situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> 1\. Everyone should wear surgical masks

2\. Temperature checks everywhere

3\. Testing needs to be ubiquitous and fast

4\. Backtrace every outbreak and quarantine everyone that was in contact

<comment><USER5> I agree in general with one change:

s/surgical masks/nonmedical fabric or homemade masks/

At this point there is a shortage of PPE for healthcare workers, so the general public should wear nonmedical fabric masks or homemade masks.

<comment><USER27> I can agree wholeheartedly with this. We need our best PPE on the frontlines. That said everyone should be covering their face when they go anywhere they could have contact with other humans (grocery, pharmacy, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It looks like they're being sent home, not given sick leave. Amazon can absolutely afford paid sick leave for people they deem unfit for work.

</comment><comment><USER29> At a question and answer session in my region (we have them daily) one question was about masks.

The doctor who answered said most (non medical) people don't know how to wear them properly. Another problem is taking the mask off without infecting yourself.

</comment><comment><USER30> Do not wear your face mask like the gentleman front and center in the photo! Not covering your nose has become the source of many memes but it still widespread. Simply having the fabric on your face does not grant you a protective aura.

<comment><USER31> The primary purpose of everyone wearing masks is so that people who are asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic minimize the spread of their droplets to everyone else. If the mask also protects you from sick people, that is an added benefit but secondary. Only N95 masks worn properly can guarantee protection for the wearer.

That means covering the mouth is most important because even breathing releases droplets. And the nose should be covered too, but only covering the mouth does help.

<comment><USER32> Ah no any mask decreases the chances of your catching the virus. N95 masks provide complete protection so are important in hospital and health setting. Other masks might not provide 100% protection but if everyone wears them even 50% protection would bring the R to less than 1. People habitually touch their mouth and nose if it is covered they would not do that so that would help as well.

<comment><USER33> The 95 in N95 literally means 95%

<comment><USER34> But 95% of what?

Probably not calibrated on Coronavirus transmission.

<comment><USER35> Non-oil particles over 0.3 nm, of which droplets containing viruses is one of. There are P100 masks (oil+non-oil) as well, but they're more expensive and harder to breathe through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> They seem to have randomly stopped delivering some items for 3 weeks even though they have them in stock. It's very inconsistent; I need a new inner tube which will be delivered tomorrow but while I'm at it I could do with new tires too, but those don't turn up until 30th April even though they are in stock. Could they not just deliver the items all at the same time?

</comment><comment><USER5> Everyone who is still working to provide essential services should be wearing masks.

There is a major shortage of PPE, so non-healthcare workers should be wearing nonmedical fabric masks or homemade masks. [https://shouldiwearafacemask.com](https://shouldiwearafacemask.com) for a full explanation with the science.

</comment><comment><USER37> I cannot find accurate information, but the duration of the illness for the people that do recover from mild cases is around 12-15 days; sending people home if they have fever for "minimum 3 days" does not make sense, you send them home until they have no fever for at least 3 days, so they are clean.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm sure there's a German word for "a company announcing a positive step that hurts its reputation because everybody thought they were doing it already". Closely related to the "software feature announcement that everyone can't believe it didn't have already".

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm also curious about how they are dealing with the actual sent packages. From past videos I've seen, workers place the objects in boxes. So if a worker is sick, wouldn't they be sending contaminated items out? Is amazon doing anything about that in particular?

</comment><comment><USER40> Imagine if we had a healthcare system like Singapore. Not like the one we currently have now, where the government interferes in the free market and as a result the cost goes through the roof.

</comment><comment><USER41> Both Amazon, Facebook, and eBay should be sued for enabling price gouging. I report at least 20 ads a day on Facebook for overpriced face masks, there are still tons of masks and respisrators on eBay and other overpriced necessesities such as toilet paper, paper towels, and hand sanitizers. Amazon also allows a lot of crooks to sell stuff and never deliver it and now they blocked a lot of non-medical grade stuff for "governments and hospitals" like 2 oz sanitier gels and others. In addition, Amazon also now has all out of stock items as "Temporarily out of stock.", i.e. lying to you and tricking you to place an order and wait for it to be delivered... one day!

</comment><comment><USER42> Love how Amazon staff will get surgical masks while doctors in America have to re-use theirs and use them for a whole shift.

</comment><comment><USER5> TL;DR: starting next week, Amazon will start:

1) taking temperatures of employees, fever >100.4°F to be sent home for min 3 days

2) giving surgical masks to employees once it receives shipments of orders of "millions"

3) using machine learning-powered video software to monitor social distancing

(Shameless plug for a little site I made to help spread the word that we need #masks4all: [https://shouldiwearafacemask.com](https://shouldiwearafacemask.com))

<comment><USER43> Is there any reason you couldn't just write "Amazon"? I see people do this thing often on HN, for instance "At $DayJob, we do...". Is it like a sign of belonging to a tribe?

<comment><USER44> Reminiscent of the Micro$oft days of yore at Slashdot.

<comment><USER5> Yes!!! :) I miss that Bill Gates borg image: [https://lurkertech.com/bill-the- borg/](https://lurkertech.com/bill-the-borg/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> How are temperature checks useful? I thought I'd read that people are asymptomatic for up to 2 weeks, during which time they can spread it. If that is the case, temperature checks do absolutely nothing to stop the spread here...

<comment><USER46> I am seeing this logic a lot: "this preventive measure isn't 100 percent perfect, therefore it's completely useless."

Even measures that are only partially effective can make a substantial difference, especially at a population level.

<comment><USER47> I get the feeling a lot of HN commenters would recommend against condoms because they're only 98% effective, and only if used correctly, therefore completely useless.

<comment><USER37> No, they would not recommend the day-after pill as one of the core measures. Taking the temperature means you find out something is wrong a week late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Lagging indicators?

</comment><comment><USER49> I just hope Amazon has bulked ordered masks of sufficient quality that we ourselves can buy some from Amazon.com that are sold by Amazon.

We have to move to a mask culture until we get a vaccine.

</comment><comment><USER50> Correct me if Im wrong, but even with temperature checks which you may not have you are still potentially a carrier? If so, I hope we can find a better detection system if a vaccine isn't created ASAP.

<comment><USER51> The point of mitigation measures is to reduce the spread, not to slow it to zero, which is impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> For those interested in reading the actual journalism, not a blog re-writing someone else's work:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus- amazon...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-amazon-com- masks-e/exclusive-amazon-to-deploy-masks-and-temperature-checks-for-workers- by-next-week-idUSKBN21K1Y6)

The HN link should probably be changed.

<comment><USER53> The link should be changed anyway - that cookie control thing is the worst ever, offering no control.

<comment><USER54> The one at Reuters isn't that much better. If you refuse, Reuters will immediately forget your "Managed Consent" and slam you in the face again on your next visit.

I suspect they have no problem remembering your consent forever, it's just refusal that gets immediately forgotten.

<comment><USER55> If you reject their use of cookies how are they supposed to remember your rejection the next time you visit?

<comment><USER56> If the law doesn't make a single exception so the webpage can store a boolean value into a cookie to know this user doesn't want to be bothered with any _other_ cookies the law is wrong.

<comment><USER57> It does make exception for cookies used to make the site function.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I thought here in the west that it was well-established that temperature checks and mask do not work against the corona?!

<comment><USER59> Unfortunately, it's becoming more clear that the government-science bodies like the CDC and the WHO have been spreading inaccurate information.

<comment><USER60> What's clear is that the entire system has degenerated as the competence of the average person has been eroded over the last few decades.

Failures across the board. Federal government, state government, local government, hospitals, insurance companies - no one in positions of authority saw this coming in January? No one with clout or power had the foresight to stockpile masks or other PPE, just in case?

Why isn't a national emergency stockpile being maintained when we've seen a dozen potential global pandemics in the last decade alone?

Apparently even officials aren't immune to senseless groupthink.

<comment><USER21> >Failures across the board. Federal government, local government, hospitals, insurance companies - no one in positions of authority saw this coming in January?

People did see it coming. The administration ignored early warnings about the virus and publicly downplayed the severity of the issue in order to preserve the stock market and Trump's poll numbers in an election year. This after dismantling much of the infrastructure and firing the personnel needed to respond to this issue in order to cut costs.

<comment><USER60> This failure goes far deeper than Trump. There are so many people in _so many_ positions of authority who could have acted - administrators allocating funds for emergency stockpiles, both private and public. Police, fire, everyone was sitting with their ass up their thumb waiting for what, big brother government to tell them to do something? The administration ignored early warnings about the virus and publicly downplayed the severity of the issue in order to preserve the stock market and Trump's poll numbers in an election year. This after dismantling much of the infrastructure and firing the personnel needed to respond to this issue in order to cut costs.

This is nonsense, if you presume the administration knew what was coming then they would have known that this would last up until election season, as it likely will. Unless you're implying that they waited deliberately for it to get worse so they could "fix" it. But you'd never prove something like that. In any case that still doesn't excuse the other tens of thousands of people for individually and collectively failing to act.

I started stockpiling mid January.

<comment><USER21> >This is nonsense, if you presume the administration knew what was coming then they would have known that this would last up until election season, as it likely will.

Here is an article pointing out that Trump ignored warnings about the virus from his own intelligence services as far back as January[0].

Here is an article about his efforts to downplay the effects of the virus, and calling it a Democratic hoax[1], also going back to January.

Here is an article about Trump's efforts to quickly scale back social distancing guidelines and ending the quarantine in order to get the economy going, again, for the sake of his reelection campaign.

Here is an article about the lies, minisformation and misdirection Trump has offered about the coronavirus[3].

> Unless you're implying that they waited deliberately for it to get worse so > they could "fix" it.

I'm not implying that. I will imply that Trump assumed the problem would just go away, and when it didn't, his primary concern became political damage control. FFS he's said he only willing to help blue states with funding if they stop criticizing him[4] and during a press briefing on the coronavirus he boasted about being "number one on facebook."[5] Clearly he cares more about his image and his ego than he does the health of the country.

Notwithstanding whatever other failures have occurred, when the Executive branch is being run like this during a crisis, the result affects the entire system. It affects funding. It affects procurement and distribution of goods. It affects the way people behave, whether they even believe a crisis _exists,_ and what actions should be taken. There's an entire "coronavirus truther" thing happening now resulting in people ignoring quarantine orders and that's directly a result of Trump convincing people the scale and danger of the problem has been overblown by the "liberal media" in order to attack him. That's directly his fault.

[0][https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us- intellig...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-intelligence- reports-from-january-and-february-warned-about-a-likely- pandemic/2020/03/20/299d8cda-6ad5-11ea-b5f1-a5a804158597_story.html?tid=lk_inline_manual_2&itid=lk_inline_manual_2)

[1][https://www.vox.com/2020/3/18/21184945/trump-coronavirus- com...](https://www.vox.com/2020/3/18/21184945/trump-coronavirus-comments- then-versus-now)

[2][https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-trump-wants- to-r...](https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-trump-wants-to-reopen- economy-to-boost-reelection-bid-2020-3)

[3][https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/trumps-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/trumps- lies-about-coronavirus/608647/)

[4][https://www.vox.com/2020/3/25/21193803/trump-to-governors- co...](https://www.vox.com/2020/3/25/21193803/trump-to-governors-coronavirus- help-ventilators-cuomo)

[5][https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1245476330193518596](https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1245476330193518596)

<comment><USER60> You are _far too eager_ to use this as an excuse to shit on Trump.

I'm not remarking in the incompetence and/or maliciousness of Trump and his administration. I'm pointing out that it's a failure across the board.

But you clearly are unable to look at things objectively. Again, I'm not here to flame about the president. Everyone screwed up. Tens of thousands of people with power failed to act. Including Democrats. That was my while point. Stop with the partisan politics, they have no place here.

<comment><USER21> I was trying to provide some evidence and context for the part of my comment you were calling nonsense, and you'll note I never actually disagreed with you, I just think we disagree on what share of blame goes where.

But fine, I admit I get a bit heated about Trump, especially lately, but it isn't partisan politics. I don't feel the way I do about him or his leadership merely because because he's a Republican.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> ...because their workers are striking across the country:

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/amazon...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/amazon- employees-coronavirus-walkout)

Labor organizing - it works!

</comment><comment><USER62> > Amazon has detailed someone measures its taking

Does techcrunch not have copy editors? Two errors in the first six words of this article. I was an editor at my high school newspaper and we would not have published this.

</comment><comment><USER63> I wish we knew more about how much the virus is spread by asymptomatic workers in those settings. Otherwise it seems like closing the barn door after the horses have fled.

EDIT FOR CLARITY: I'm referring to the conditions specific to these Amazon fulfillment centers. Not only specific to the screening regime that Amazon is using, but also to the airflow patterns, specific surface materials, cleaning schedule, etc.

Last I checked, it was generally accepted that covid19 can be spread while people are still asymptomatic, even if they practice 2-meter spacing and are wearing masks.

Because even with those measures in place, persons can still contaminate their hands with fluids mucus / saliva / tears, and then go on to touch objects or surface that will subsequently be touched by others.

Therefore, while prohibiting employees with fevers or other signs of covid19 infection are undoubtedly a good idea, there's still _some_ risk of person-to- person transmission even with those who pass that screening.

It's the probability of _that_ kind of transmission that interests me. Because if it's non-zero, there are a few questions worth asking:

\- Should Amazon take _additional_ measures to prevent person-to-person transmission? E.g., run most products through an anti-microbial UV lamp? Tweak their AI camera monitors to also look for people touching their faces?

\- If that can compare the transmission probabilities of (a) the employees who pass that screening system vs. (b) those who would not, and the probabilities are very close, is the world better off by allowing people in group (b) to continue working?

<comment><USER64> Aerosols. Masks are an efficient and low cost intervention for limiting such transmissions. Here's a review of 67 randomised controlled studies concluding that.

[https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_physical- interventions...](https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_physical- interventions-to-interrupt-or-reduce-the-spread-of-respiratory-viruses)

Is it ok to close the barn door now?</comment></comment>


A critical review of Tesla - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/26/15872468/tesla-gm-ford-valuation-justifying-disruption <comment><USER2> Discussed yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14637364)</comment>


Robert Morris was convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in 1990 - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris <comment><USER2> Is there really anyone here who didn't know this already? The Morris worm is as much an essential part of Internet history as the development of BSD UNIX, the creation of the Web, or the millenial dot-com bubble.

<comment><USER3> I knew about the worm but I'm not exactly a fan of the person so I had no idea he was a co-founder of Y Combinator. Next think I know you'll be telling me that a movie actress helped invent a torpedo guidance system.

<comment><USER4> It's a bit sad that most people know of Morris for his destructive, rather than constructive actions, but Paul Graham seems to be more of the 'face' of YCombinator.

<comment><USER2> However destructive the Morris worm may have been, my understanding is that it wasn't _deliberately_ so. I'd say it falls very much into the traditional hacker style of "creative endeavours".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> rtm?

I remember it was in our text book.</comment>


History of the Super Soaker - <AUTHOR> http://www.isoaker.com/Info/history_supersoaker.html

<comment><USER2> _Rumor has it that the CPS 2000 was removed from the market simply due to its sheer power. Anyone who has experienced a direct blast from a CPS 2000 can tell you that the stream packs more punch than most garden hoses. All future models based on the CPS systems appear to have been toned down in order to meet some forms of safety criteria._

A friend of mine got this for his birthday the month it came out. His party was a watergun fight. That was quickly abandoned when we realized how powerful it was. It knocked down 6th graders at close range.

Instead we spend hours taking turns who got to have the gun and stand on the deck. Everyone else ran around in the yard and tried not to get shot. Last person standing won the round.

This is one of my better childhood memories. I am really glad this link was posted so I can use it to back up the power of the water gun in the story.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I was around 13 years old I was interested in electronics, reading popular science, and listening to Run DMC and any other hip hop I could get my hands on. I really didn't see that many black inventors or scientist in the news or on TV(except the little black kid that would show up on Mr Wizad every now and then). It wasn't until I was a little bit older that I learned about the rich history of blacks in science. Being 13 years old living on a military base in North Carolina I assumed that the field was something blacks could not get into.

It wasn't until I read an article about the guy who invented the super soaker that I found out that your color doesn't hold you back from getting in any field. I learned that he held many patents and that the super soaker was just the most popular. It changed my whole outlook on things and made me do a lot more research. I knew then I had 2 loves, hip hop and electronics and I could do either one if I wanted.

</comment><comment><USER4> A true inventor. Even when manufacturer after manufacturer failed he kept pressing on. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of my old XP 150: <http://www.isoaker.com/Armoury/Analysis/1998/xp150c.html>

An unassuming Super Soaker by modern standards, it actually houses a deadly hack which makes it, by far, the strongest Super Soaker every produced.

The nozzle was removable to allow for a filter screen to be replaced. However, one was still able to fire with the nozzle removed. This revealed it's hidden power: The Super Soaker Shotgun. The lines feeding water up to the nozzle were exceptionally large, so it was merely the nozzle that regulated the flow. With it removed, the output capacity was massively increased. A fully compressed tank would empty in approximately 2-3 seconds. It didn't go far (10 feet tops) and required a bit of luck, but anything caught in front of it at the right time was instantly drenched in water. It was devastating. There is no modern equal and I don't know if any other guns have been produced with the capacity that this one had. I had won many a water battle with this little trick in mind. Oh, how I miss it!

Dammit, now I'm going to spend a ton of money on eBay when I really shouldn't...

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish I could be Lonnie Johnson -- R&D on squirt guns and whatnot sounds fun!

<comment><USER7> Invent an even better one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember the glorious day we discovered that the supersoaker reservoir tank was a perfect fit in the kitchen Soda-Stream.

Fill the tank almost full, saturate it with CO2, then attach to the gun and pump until you could pump no more. Then shake the whole assembly until the CO2 came out of solution.

Worked beautifully, and if I remember correctly, probably added another 30-40% range to it.

Unfortunately, we finally reached the manufacturing tolerances, and something burst quite dramatically, thankfully only spraying water everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER9> Man that brings back some memories. I was 11 and remember that big green bottle well.

</comment><comment><USER10> Never something I thought to read about, but definitely entertaining.

Now somebody needs to do a writeup on the history of Nerf guns!

</comment><comment><USER11> The current super soaker models are very disappointing to me. I've held a few "battles" with neighbors in my yard and the power is not what I remember from years ago. Taking a step back in product development makes very little sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER12> That writing out of numbers is extremely annoying. I can understand when writers do it with numbers that are unexpected, or very important. But here it is done almost consistently with every number. It makes me feel offended that the writer does not trust me enough to read numbers.</comment>


Ask HN: Can I ethically take a Tea Cup from my Office - <AUTHOR> I found this really cool Tea Cup in my Offce Today. The Thing is that I really want to have it, and I'm really not sure if it belongs to anyone.
It is not very new, and the design isn't really appealing per se. That is why I think, that it would not be missed, if I took it. But on the Other hand I am sure that it isn't provided by the company and instead belongs to someone.
If I would take it, I would of course bring a replacement (as I am not a Monster ;) )
So my question is; is it ethically correct (or at least ok) to take this cup, and replace it with a newer one. <comment><USER2> In law this is probably theft. You're dishonestly appropriating something, with the intent of permanently depriving the owner of it. You'll claim that you're replacing it with an item of similar value, but that claim fails because i) the act of replacement means you know you shouldn't just take the cup and ii) the replacement is not equivalent, or you'd just keep the replacement without taking the original.

> I'm really not sure if it belongs to anyone.

If you knew it was just a generic cup and you were replacing it with something that was equally usable, and the original was not going to be missed by anyone, I'd say it's ethically ok to take the cup. But you don't know this. Maybe that cup belongs to someone and they're just too shy / non- confrontational to tell you to stop using their cup.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would ask the office manager. It's his or her job (at least theoretically) to keep track of things like this mug.

If they don't know, and the two of you make the rounds asking everyone whether they brought in this cool teacup, it seems like one of those funny quirky stories that would make people think more fondly of their workplace.

</comment><comment><USER4> You have to think about the useless of material property. Kids are sensible to this "daddy I want this, I want this" until som tears let daddy gives this stuff to the little crying kiddy. But beeing older learn you to lay of this behaviour. Im sure you already have in your home a glass, a mug, or anything that can be filled with tea.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are surprisingly right, after asking this question I was consiering how I alreay have enought materialistic posessions. Altough its sentimental value is high in my eyes, I really don't need this, as you youself said, becuase I already have enough material posessions. Thank you for your answer, it really made me reconsider.

<comment><USER4> Of course, we all have this kiddy in ourself !</comment></comment></comment>


Please reinstate search-by-date to this site - <AUTHOR>

please. <comment><USER2> The discussion about the new search is in: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7118496](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7118496) . Most of the users are asking for the search-by-date option there.</comment>


Pre-Launch preview: Socialize, by AppMakr (avail for iPhone apps 3/15) - <AUTHOR> http://go.AppMakr.com/introducing-socialize

<comment><USER2> hey .. I am New to AppMakr, I want to build a iPhone app. Is free version reliable enough? Please advice

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, it's very bulletproof. AppMakr has been used to make thousands of iPhone apps over the past year. Give it a shot and let me know what you think!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man! Launching for all apps made by AppMakr on 3/15. The Seth Godin app will have it before then (I'll post link here when live.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Love it. This, plus user-created apps, could be powerful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yah we just counted; AppMakr's made over 4,500 iOS apps, live in iTunes. Android and WP7 are in beta; will be released this week.

Also check out the 2 minute sped-up video of a guy in our office making the SXSW Guide app in 14 minutes: <http://vimeo.com/20814861>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks cool, Daniel. :) Congratulations!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx Avery for the support; u should make a GetAround app using AppMakr! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love this already. Awesome.

<comment><AUTHOR> Try making an app next week; every app made by AppMakr will have Socialize built in. PBS & Seth Godin will be among 150 launch partners. Here's an app made by a 14 year old w/ AppMakr that has Socialize (was part of the beta group): <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/celeb-news/id381893266?mt=8>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great Job!

<comment><AUTHOR> Dave, what do you like about it? Would like to get more details on what does & doesn't work in your (and others') opinion(s).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking forward to the release. I still want to connect with you all so I can get that post written for THE Tech Scoop: <http://www.thetechscoop.net>.

Talk to you after the release.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good James</comment></comment>


WikiLeaked Cables Confirm China's Politburo Was Behind Google Hacking Incident - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/28/wikileaked-cables-china-google/

<comment><USER2> No, it confirms US _suspicion_ of Chinese state sponsorship of that attack. But that's not news, even a little bit.

<comment><USER3> People who can authoritatively talk about such attacks can't or don't talk. So, information out there is mostly anecdotal at best or just plain speculation. These cables add to that stack of information but from a much higher level of involvement. It may not be new or news but it's certainly from more credible source than what we usually hear from.

<comment><USER2> I'm objecting to the wording of the headline. I'm sorry if it seems like I'm arguing that there's no story at all.

The "China's official involvement in Google hack confirmed" headline is a serious overreach.

<comment><USER4> True. For the headline to be solid, these would have to be Chinese cables, not US ones. But this is probably closest we are going to get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not a new finding, Google is competent enough to realize who is behind such kinds of attacks. That's why they kicked up a big storm (threatening to leave China etc).

<comment><USER6> There is a vast difference in "knowing" who was doing it, and having proof.

<comment><USER5> The cables are not necessarily proof.

<comment><USER6> Granted. But they're a lot more substantial than the crowd-sourced judgement of the ignorant masses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> TC manages to sensationalize a NYT story and get it all wrong.

I really wish reporters would link to or provide citations to the relevant cables.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you read that cable (which I have not) who will actually verify the authenticity of the content ?

I don't see the US or China confirming or denying anything.

</comment><comment><USER9> Has someone found the actual cable yet? All the cables released so far have been posted on <http://cablegate.wikileaks.org/> but after sorting through them for a while, I can't find the one referencing Google.

<comment><USER9> Looks like Google has indexed the new release, and a quick site: search shows a few references to Google, but none of them seem to be the one referenced in this story.

[http://www.google.com/search?q=google%20site%3Acablegate.wik...](http://www.google.com/search?q=google%20site%3Acablegate.wikileaks.org)</comment></comment>


Day #1 of my startup: Making sales calls. - <AUTHOR> My startup currently does not have a blog (nor does it have a finished website), so I decided to post this here as a way to assist others in breaking the ice on day #1.
After worrying for about 2 weeks about how to get sales, I decided to jump right on it, and start cold calling / faxing / prospects.
Now, my startup is nothing new or even exciting: I sell low-cost, ready-to-use websites for small business.
You might say "Wait, that's not a startup!"
Well, after I get around 5 or 6 paying customers, I will launch an online business directory that will feature some useful apps for the local market. The apps are not yet coded completely, but (I guess) that qualifies it as a "startup" startup.
Anyway, I woke up early, went over my sales script, went over my marketing materials, and sat in front of the computer for about 2 hours.
I was terrified. The idea of picking up the phone and calling a total stranger (to sell them something!) was absolutely terrifying.
So I postponed and lost a lot of time while thinking of ways to get me to make the calls.
Life, eh? We dream of getting things, and accomplishing goals, but when the time comes, we get scared.
What is it about fear that makes up want to drop our dreams? Is fear more important than our goals?
Nope.
For me, it is not.
I finally sat down, picked up the phone, and called my first prospect.
To my surprise, they did not hate me. Hell, they treated me very well!
Not only did I realize that the enemy within was harming me more than anything else, but that sales require a lot of organization.
I did 4 more calls (a record for me), and decided to stop. I stopped to organize my sales related stuff. Without an organized system (term used loosely), you really can't call fast enough.
Here is what I learned on day #1:
1. Your fears will try to stop you from achieving your goals. Don't let it stop you. You are way more powerful than fear.
2. People are open to hearing your ideas, if you treat them properly.
3. Sales is more about the salesman, and less about the customer.
4. Being organized is a must. Prepare a prospects list before picking on the phone.
5. The fax is still a worthy tool of communication.
6. Realize that a startup is about building something. This will require you to roll up your sleeves and get "dirty".
7. There is no time like the present to get things done.
8. After all, you will realize that getting what you want is way more fun than settling for what you don't.
Even though it may seem like I did not accomplish anything (plus I did not make a sale), the lessons of today will allow me to continue working towards my goals.
I must go now.
Have a nice day, and kick some ass. <comment><USER2> This brings back memories of me 15 years ago with the phone in one hand and Thomas Register in another, trying to drum up business.

Tons of calls, not a single sale. But the education was worth it. Be unfailingly polite, "smile" at the phone and never forget that the worst thing they can do is hang up on you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thankfully, I'm dumb enough to keep trying.

Thanks for the input.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good to read that as I'm currently going through my call calling scripts (not for selling but for interviewing potential customers to get a feel of the market).

I also find it scary, coming from a technical background, to pick up the phone and ask for things to strangers.

Thanks for sharing that!

</comment><comment><USER4> Can you explain what you mean in #3 a little bit more? I just want to understand better. I'm about to start making calls as well. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is about the salesman, because it is you who has the choice to either stay at home or go out and sell. People will always buy, but they wont buy from you if you sit on you ass all day.

It isn't some secret, sales motivation comes from survival: if you sell you eat, if you don't, well, you don't eat (and if you got kids they don't eat either).

You have to realize that the sale is about you: your food, your car payment, rent, dipers, hell even the power bill.

The more you see it like that, the less likely you are to pussy out and be a chicken.

I hope that explains it well.

Sent from my C64.

<comment><USER3> I disagree: I would say it's about the customer since you have to imagine what it's like to be him in order to sell well. Sure, you need to make the sale to live, and maybe you need some visualizations of what will happen if you don't sell and that could motivate you, but in the end, it's all about how you can relate to the customer's world to understand what he needs and sell it to him.

If you think only about yourself, you're not going to be empathetic with the customer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should definitely drop by here to keep us updated on how things go! All the best.

</comment><comment><USER6> Thank you for this, time to make some mistakes

</comment><comment><USER7> remembering the worst thing they can do is say no is helpful when I'm in a similar situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is helpful, but somehow that did nothing for me.

You are going to laugh but I had to go and get a medal I won after running a 5K, and put it on. Somehow, reminding myself that I've done bigger things, let me acquire some much needed courage.

Weird thing is that it was a very enjoyable experience, and I want to keep doing it more and more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> call me if you want to run your sales call by me. email in profile

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Will do tomorrow.</comment></comment>


Aussie Tech Gold Rush - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/aussie-tech-gold-rush-nothing-off-limits-20111103-1mwyn.html <comment><USER2> I still think there's a very long way to go for Australians. If the US VCs decide to stop visiting, it's back to zero again.

There's no reason why a home-grown community can't be grown, rather than a SV outreach program. There's enough cash in Australia, enough smart people, enough regions with nice weather. But the risk-taking and open-minded parts are going to take a while to develop. Hopefully over the next decade things will develop further. I think what's needed is one or two massive wins (ie billion dollar valuations or exits) then the money stays here and goes around again.

<comment><USER3> We have a thriving VC community in Aus, with lots of awesome people and stupid amounts of money.

It's for Mining/Agribusiness.

Now trying to get a Tech VC community bootstrapped is going to be interesting, mainly because we seem to be stuck in a: Vcs are an oligopoly -> Nobody wants to go through them -> No new companies are formed -> No new VCs start here -> .... Cycle. The influx of a whole new environment to nurture startups recently seems interesting. Things like Fishburners, Silicon Beach, etc. Are doing good things incubating new startups adn getting them networked, but it stands to time if this recent upswing will get us out of the cycle.

<comment><USER2> Ha don't we all wish to be able to raise capital and get ideas going as much as a geologist with a promising patch of dirt.

Like I said - I think one big breakthrough startup would change everything. It would bring it to the attention of investors, employees, press, everyone.

<comment><USER3> I agree.

It would be nice to see one or two more innovative startups around the place though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats to designcrowd on the funding, however it seems like a clone of 99designs. IMHO I'd think there's a market for a different take on crowd sourced design, especially seeing as though there's such a huge backlash from the anti-spec work front. Something like a sortfolio for general design work perhaps?

<comment><USER5> They actually started just before 99 I believe.

<comment><USER5> But of course, haven't had the same growth.

<comment><USER6> ... 99designs grew out of sitepoint; it was a huge springboard having designers and customers using the sitepoint forums as a marketplace.

99 designs done really well, but freelancer have also now started doing design competitions, and now these guys.

It's an emerging segment, good luck to them!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's with the popped collars?

The problem with the Australian tech industry is most of the big players are just copy cats.

<comment><USER8> > What's with the popped collars?

It's a Sydney thing, I think. They've been suffering a long-term shortage of hats and/or common sense.

> The problem with the Australian tech industry is most of the big players are > just copy cats.

Yes and no. There's a lot of small and medium firms doing cool stuff, and several of the giants have offices doing important things. IBM's got a mainframe OS lab in Perth and runs a major Linux lab in Canberra. Google are in Sydney of course. Recently I saw a mob in Adelaide (I know, I know) doing cool things with computational intelligence.

But as for consumer-facing stuff, yes, it's mostly copycat. See a foreigner do it and launch something here before they turn up; ideally to sell to them. It's a proven, repeatable business model and investors like that.

<comment><USER9> _Recently I saw a mob in Adelaide (I know, I know) doing cool things with computational intelligence_

Curious minds would like to know more. I know of two companies in Adelaide doing stuff that could be called this and I'm interested which you saw (or other). Email's fine if it isn't appropriate here.

<comment><USER8> These guys:

<http://www.solveitsoftware.com/>

They do stuff with all the cool toys. Fuzzy logic, neural nets, evolutionary algorithms ...

They have a competition for students (edit: actually it looks like anyone can enter) at the moment. First prize is ostensibly $5,000 but what they're really looking for is potential employees.

<http://www.solveitsoftware.com/competition.jsp>

<comment><USER9> Yep, I guessed it must be them.

They aren't exactly a startup though - been around quite a while I think.

I was with these guys for a while, who played in an adjacent space: <http://www.intelligentsoftware.com.au/>

<comment><USER10> Adelaide is too small. Worked at Tomorrow Studios with Dom (Intelligent Software) and took Matthew's (Solve IT) Innovate SA course (which is superb btw).

<comment><USER9> I worked with Dom from late 2010 to mid 2011 (at Tomorrow Studio too).

I'm thinking of all the people who's names I knew at Tomorrow Studio for anyone who was "pm" (if you had your name on your info I might know if I knew you.. :))

<comment><USER10> Paul from No Prisoners. I think I might've talked to you about Lua scripting at some point, since I think that's what you might've been doing.

We were the iPhone peeps.

EDIT: Wait, we moved out at the end of July 2010, so I must be thinking of the other programmer who was there. Don't remember his name now.

<comment><USER11> God HN has grown - few Adelaide users on here now.

<comment><USER8> How do you guys cope with being in Adelaide? I have a sister stranded there, her husband works for some mob doing Moodle work.

<comment><USER9> _How do you guys cope with being in Adelaide?_

OMG that never gets old!!!! Adelaide is Adelaide. It isn't Sydney or Melbourne, but it's not a rural backwater either - quite a lot of interesting stuff happens here.

 _her husband works for some mob doing Moodle work_

Netspot?

<comment><USER8> I _think_ so. Not sure. This officially makes me a terrible brother in law.

As for Adelaide. You guys seem to have more funeral homes than churches. Surely that's a sign.

<comment><USER11> Melbourne does feel a whole lot more .. enthusiastic shall we say? Still Adelaide has its perks if you have the right networks, and generally a decent salary/cost balance for what that's worth. Happy to grab a drink with any HN'ers that are in/stop by Adelaide btw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is innovation?

"Also today, professional domain name trader Winged Media, based in Australia but now with an office in the US, announced a $3 million investment from the Carnegie Innovation Fund."

<comment><USER13> Aye. I've done work for a startup (flipped, now owned by a larger company) that has a massive portfolio of domains. It leases out directory listings and sells domains. :(

It seems a common problem that "safe bet" ripoff ideas get funding. Atlassian is the big local exception (along with some other small groups like <http://crowdhired.com>, <http://99dresses.com> and <http://orionvm.com.au>). On the other hand you have DesignCrowd, and other funded copycat startups like <http://spreets.com.au>, <http://pygg.co> and <http://wooboard.com>.

<comment><USER9> BigCommerce isn't a rip-off, and it's a really good platform (from what I've seen).

OrionVM.... it's a good idea, but not exactly innovative. But then, "innovative" is worth nothing on its own.

<comment><USER3> Not exactly innovative? Interesting.

Would you mind telling me what gave you that impression?

The most common reaction we get is that we should sell off our tech and not bother being a service provider. Mostly because we are, at the end of the day, a tech company.

Just to take a moment to explain.

From the point of view of the consumer:

\- I want to make a virtual server on demand. It must be HA, must have hard disks that are reasonable and I need out of band management in case I lock myself out. \- I need a proper virtual network on demand. I need to be able to set my own ip addresses, use multicast (say for db replication for rack), etc. I want to be able to have multiple virtual networks, attach multiple networks to the same machine. I want to be able to connect up over MPLS or a crossover into one of these virtual networks.

Basically, people don't want randomly crippled servers. They want a virtualised datacenter. Can any other provider do this, at scale? We call this the virtual datacenter paradigm and we think that this is the future for cloud.

It's also basically impossible to build, which is surprisingly convenient.

Disclaimer -> I'm Alex Sharp, VP Development at OrionVM.

<comment><USER9> Forgive me, I probably have a very superficial understanding of what you do, and additionally I get all the Australian "Cloud" server providers confused.

I thought you were mostly doing the Citrix Cloud.com platform (which manages most of the setup you discuss), on Xen hypervisors.

I'm not discounting the engineering effort here, and I'm sure there is something I's missing.

Disclaimer -> I work for a (very) indirect competitor.

Edit: further discussion makes it clear you have built your own storage platform. That _is_ innovative, but isn't exactly clear from your website.

<comment><USER3> Ninefold is cloud.com on top of some EMC sans. CloudCentral is very modified cloud.com running on top of a damn cool san. Most of the others are all Vmware and such, all on fairly standard hardware.

And then people wonder why their support costs are so high (hint: Cloud.com isn't exactly quality), and why they can't maintain profitability (Those $1m sans....)

But yeah, we're a little different. Think of Orion this way: \- Take a standard HPC cluster \- Make its DSAN tankier and more customised to deal with virtual disks \- Run (very heavily customised) Xen on the (very horribly customized) nodes \- Build on a full cloud orch stack on top.

This lets us have a better experience then any other stack, whilst being orders of magnitude cheaper.

So you can have cloud servers with hard disks faster then dedicated servers, that are HA under hardware failure, and that have proper layer 2 private networks between each other and the outside world. All for cheaper then the standard dell server + EMC san arrangement most people end up with.

<comment><USER9> _Ninefold is cloud.com on top of some EMC sans_

Yep, I think their storage API is Atmos. (I should say that I think EMC Isilon is very cool, but I don't know a lot about Atmos)

 _CloudCentral is very modified cloud.com running on top of a damn cool san_

They built out a ZFS SAN right?

<comment><USER3> Isilon has damn awesome tech, albiet stupidly expensive. Atmos is absolutely horrific in most senses of the word.

iirc. Ninefold has a bunch of "cheapie" Dell EMC units, hence their troubles awhile back. Don't quote me on it though.

CloudCentral did in fact build a ZFS San, which they used to great effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The whole article feels so sleazy.

<comment><USER6> The age is a tabloid newspaper (as are all newspapers in Australia - even the broadsheet format ones)

<comment><USER14> That's not strictly fair. The Age online is absolute crap, but The Age in print is marginally better.

I do, however, think that the media in general in Australia is abhorrent when compared with other countries, though.

<comment><USER2> tabloid describes the format (as opposed to broadsheet).

The term is associated with trashy newspapers, but actually refers to the print size. So describing The Age as a tabloid is factually true.

If you want to drop your IQ a couple of points, swing past ninemsn.com sometime.

EDIT: I just re-read the parent, and is using 'tabloid' in the trashy sense. I'll leave the comment as a general knowledge point.

<comment><USER14> The Age is definitely a broadsheet in terms of print size.

<comment><USER2> My mistake in that case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a sensationalist article from a mainstream newspaper.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hmmm, a lot of negative comments so far. So in light of that, can anybody explain why the CW here is that so much of the Australian scene is a ripoff?

<comment><USER16> I think that the tech "gold rush" is still in it's early stages. It's still hard to convince investors in Aus that new ideas are worth betting on, so copy-cats with proven markets are currently leading the way.

However, on the ground here I don't just see the big guys. There a plenty of smaller bootstrapped companies that are genuinely innovative. I went to a startup expo at one of the uni's here last month and was completely blown away by the innovation of many of the smaller companies. If I had the money there's plenty I would be betting on.

"Just wait" is what I would say.

<comment><USER3> I'd give you that.

Our VC market is very good for farms and for mines and for not much else. It's changing, but slowly.

Going to SV makes this so much easier, but it means that you have to basically expand out of Aus, which is harder said then done.

Here's to hoping things get better in the future :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think the problem here is more getting decent angel investments locally, a lot of the deals mentioned here are fairly big VC deals. Still seems that the ones getting these kind of deals the easiest are either moving to the valley or spending significant amounts of time there.

Plenty of tech companies being started though so it will be interesting to see how many make it big.

<comment><USER18> There is some stuff happening in the world of angel investments/startup incubators here. We've got nothing like what the US has, but Startmate (in Sydney) started last year, AngelCube (in Melbourne) started this year, and York Butter Factory (also in Melbourne) is about to/has just started. And I'm sure there's more than this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Kaggle, another Aus startup, also got funding for big data analysis crowd sourcing platform (13Million) from Khosala Ventures and others.

<comment><USER8> I know their Chairman. Dr Gruen is a very smart guy.

<comment><USER8> Aha, no I don't. Looks like Max Levchin is chairman these days.</comment></comment></comment>


Gigapixel Cameras Create Highly Revealing Snapshots - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gigapixel-camera-revealed&print=true <comment><AUTHOR> This is a nice article about some recent work from my research lab. I'd be happy to (try to) answer any questions people have.

<comment><USER2> > each design relies on a ball-shaped lens

I probably just need to be thwacked with a clue stick, but what do they mean by a "ball-shaped lens" ?

Might be ironic, but are there any pictures of the prototypes?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a slideshow linked from the bottom of the 2nd page (bad placement, IMO). Here's a direct link: [http://www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow.cfm?id=gigapixel...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow.cfm?id=gigapixel- camera-revealed)

<comment><USER2> That's some amazing stuff. Thanks for posting.

I was curious if you're using off-the-shelf sensors or if you're using your own custom sensors?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rails 3 - Fully Loaded - <AUTHOR> http://intridea.com/2011/5/13/rails3-gems

<comment><USER2> Overall, a good summary.

> Since there is no more will_paginate in Rails 3, the only option is > kaminari.

This version of will_paginate seems to be fine in Rails 3:

<https://github.com/mislav/will_paginate/tree/v3.0.pre2>

While I'm on the Rails 3 things you can find on Github topic, ActiveScaffold has a nice Rails 3 port here:

<https://github.com/vhochstein/active_scaffold>

<comment><USER3> while will_paginate works fine on rails 3 it pollutes Array which kaminari doesn't. it's an easy switch as well (unless your doing some really custom stuff)

<comment><USER4> Be careful-- kaminari is much, _much_ slower than will_paginate: <https://github.com/amatsuda/kaminari/issues/37>

will_paginate may pollute Array, but it's been a great solution, that has _worked_ for a long time. Be wary of upgrading for the sake of upgrading, especially with that kind of performance degradation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I always get so much out of these kinds of roundups. It would be great if somebody smart did them on a regular schedule.

Ruby Toolbox is great too: <http://ruby-toolbox.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd be surprised if anyone that has built a few significant rails applications with devise would continue to use it. Unless you're going to have the most vanilla session/user/authentication management ever, fighting against devise gets downright nasty.

Have had moderate success with <https://github.com/NoamB/sorcery> lately, however I'm not yet confident in calling this a solved problem.

edit: Devise is great for getting up and running quickly. For that matter though, so is Joomla.

<comment><USER7> I recently started a rather large Rails project and am using Devise. Currently with authentication being pretty low on the list of things to do, it has helped get something in place rather quickly. Can you expand on the disadvantages of using Devise over time (and maybe compare it to your experiences woth Sorcery)?

<comment><USER8> I haven't used sorcery, but I have just finished quite a large rails project in which I decided on Devise right at the start. It was great in the beginning, but as soon as I needed custom behavior, it became more of a liability than a help. Doing simple things like changing a redirect on sign up or sign in, and a few other customizations were chores, some of which required overriding core devise classes, and I am still not really happy with the fixes.

If I were doing an app with standard model authentication, a Forum for example, I would use devise again in a heart-beat, but for any other project where I expect to have any slightly customized behavior at all, Ill be rolling my own.

Devise is brilliant if you want something straight-forward, but it is big, complicated (internally), and not very flexible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The best resource in my opinion is <http://www.ruby-toolbox.com/>.

</comment><comment><USER10> For Geocoding, here's another nice gem that uses Google/Yahoo/Freegeoip: <https://github.com/alexreisner/geocoder>.

<comment><USER5> Do you know how it compares to Geokit?

<comment><USER11> I just switched from geokit to geocoder in the app I'm building. I found geocoder to be significantly better for my purposes.

<comment><USER12> Can you expound upon that? What limits did you hit, how has geocoder fixed those, etc?

<comment><USER11> No technical limits were hit. They have nearly the same feature set.

Geocoder's api feels a little bit more modern Geokit (rails3 vs 2). Having read the code for both, Geocoder was cleaner and would be easier to tweak if necessary.

So really it's just a preference: they do the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is an awesome resource, there is an overwhelming amount of choice for people that are new to Rails development (I am encountering this myself at the moment).

While I hope to eventually be able to pick which gems I like to use best, for a beginner this kind of guidance is really valuable.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. Unfortunately I think it's becoming more difficult for beginners to get up and running with Rails. Perhaps that's how a community evolves... or perhaps I'm no longer the target audience ;)

<comment><USER15> I agree, what he doesn't say is how much effort is often needed to get all of the moving parts working together. For example, integrating Devise with RSpec and Cucumber. And then switching to an ORM such as Mongoid. A good tutorial like Michael Hartl's teaches the basics of Rails but putting together your basic starter app can get complicated. Sometimes it takes combing through a dozen (mostly outdated) blog posts to find how things are supposed to be done "Time.now".

I recently put together several detailed tutorials along with application templates that generate Rails starter apps using Devise, OmniAuth, RSpec, Cucumber, plus options for jQuery, Haml, etc. I loaded them up to my GitHub account and initially I was surprised at how many people were expressing appreciation and encouraging me to do more. Now I think I realize, it's not easy for many people to keep up with the ever-evolving Rails habitat. There's really a need for guidance that goes beyond the good intro tutorials and shows the steps need to assemble the pieces for real-world projects.

edit:

Here's a link to my GitHub account with the various example apps and tutorials:

<https://github.com/fortuity>

<comment><USER16> I've used your rails3_devise_wizard to get-up-and-running on a recent project, and to experiment with difference stacks and it is really useful. Projects like yours and <http://railswizard.org> are really useful for customizing the default Rails3 stack and customizing a customization of a given stack. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We used active_scaffold for an internal project. Its awesome to get a basic CRUD app going. <https://github.com/vhochstein/active_scaffold>

<comment><USER18> I'm a long time AS fan. While there are many rails crud/scaffold/admin plugins, and I have analysed them all, none beats the power, customisability and featurefullness of AS.

The only thing that holds it back is the learning curve, wich is strange, because behind it is just plain rails philosophy: controller methods + views with a tasty DSL to plug them together.

A big thanks to Volker for his huge work on pushing it to rails3 compatibility.

The current rails3 branch (Volker's) it very stable.

What remains to be done to make it even more awesome is:

* use nested_attributes_for and clean the custom nested attrs logic

* clean security layer witch at the moment uses gobals (and can only be used in shared nothing deploy)

* request local configuration copy to make it more runtimeasible, at the moment it uses a class var (global-ish) that, for some customisations, needs to be altered per request, and that again leads to only-shared-nothing-deploy

* ActiveModel API so Mongoid can join the fun too

* a child gem that bundles AS to make a fully featured admin interface, competing with rails_admin & friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We recently published a similar list of gem preferences at <http://renderedtext.com/toolbox>.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think is worth to mention <http://railswizard.org/> if beginners are in focus.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great list. It confirms a lot of my findings over the last few months.

Side note: I wish the Rails team would take more of the Django approach and build some of these features into the core.

</comment><comment><USER22> Great summary - it's hard to know what gems to use for a given problem and a curated summary from someone in the know is extremely valuable. Thanks!</comment>


Shape of errors to come - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/08/10/Shape-of-errors-to-come.html <comment><USER2> I really appreciate the user-friendliness of Rust's error messages -- I can't remember seeing a compiler tell me "maybe try this instead?" before (perhaps something from Clang, but never with the specificity of, e.g., a suggested lifetime annotation). And from a parsing / compiler-hacking perspective, it seems _really_ hard to get the heuristics good enough to produce the "right" root cause. Kudos to the Rust team for this continued focus!

<comment><USER3> It's taken... I dunno, 50+ years?... but it's nice to see more and more code being written that doesn't assume programmers are superhuman beings with an IQ of 250 and infinite concentration and working memory. We need all the help we can get, so that we can focus as much of our precious, limited cognitive firepower on what really matters. When even John Carmack is talking about getting all the help he can from his development environment [1], you really ought to listen.

[1]: [http://number- none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm...](http://number- none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.html)

<comment><USER4> > it's nice to see more and more code being written that doesn't assume > programmers are superhuman beings

I would say that most compilers don't even assume the programmer is human. The root cause of bad errors is that they emanate from the compiler, and are reported from the perspective of the compiler. That's why you get errors like "can't access method undefined of undefined", or the hell that is C++ template errors. Sure, the errors make perfect logical sense from the perspective of a compiler, but they make my human eyes bleed.

My favorite is a single missing semicolon that causes a cascade of unrelated errors, none of which indicate there's a missing semicolon.

grammars, parsers, compilers, and languages as a whole should be designed for humans _first_. Even if it makes the language implementation a little more complex, human users will benefit greatly and thank you for it.

<comment><USER5> I think that is why ADA became popular for mission critical stuff as you can inform the compiler a lot more about the constraints and so in effect make the compiler more user friendly. (Disclaimer happy to be corrected as I have never used ADA but I just finished listening to the podcast on embedded.com and thought it relevant)

<comment><USER6> The biggest correction I have is that it's not an acronym -- Ada, not ADA.

<comment><USER7> "ADA" as an acronym is more easily know as "Assistant District Attorney".

<comment> nommm-nommm I read ADA first as Americans with Disabilities Act ([https://www.ada.gov](https://www.ada.gov)).

In all seriousness,

Ada the programming language is named after a person - the English mathematician Ada, Countess of Lovelace known as "the first computer programmer" ( [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In my little rust experience the suggestions the error messages had, even in the longer explanations, were useless. Mostly it came down to me trying to do something that was simply not supported, but the compiler not knowing that and leading me on a wild goose chase.

From what I remember, I was trying to use the iterator trait, but return records that contained str pointers.. The goal being to parse a file and yield pointers to the strings from each line to avoid allocating memory and copying bytes around. Rust tries to tell you that you need lifetime specifiers, but if you try adding those nothing compiles anyway because the iterator stuff doesn't actually support that.

I eventually got it to work by returning copies of the strings.. maybe the unsafe stuff would have done what I wanted, that's what rust-csv seems to do at least.

I concluded that Rust is definitely not a language you can learn by chasing down error messages and incrementally fixing things. If you don't 100% understand the borrow and lifetime stuff, fixing one error is just going to cause two new ones.

<comment><USER9> Hm, iterators can definitely return pointers. Post on users.rust-lang.org or drop by IRC sometime! We're happy to help.

<comment><USER8> Oh? Maybe I was looking up the wrong thing. Now that I search again I think this is what I was trying to do:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30422177/lifetime-in- iter...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30422177/lifetime-in-iterator- impl)

though in my case I had a vec of &str or something like that.

What I do remember was the compiler sending me in circles. Honestly if it had just said something like "Hey dummy, you can't do that, go read the chapters on lifetimes again" I might have fixed it. But it kept telling me things like "Just add a lifetime specifier on this line" and I would do that and then get 2 more error messages. I think the errors sent me down the path of trying to do what the SO post mentions, which is

      fn next<'a>(&'a mut self) -> Option<Vec<&'a T>>

instead of putting the lifetime on the impl block, which probably never even occurred to me was something you could do.

<comment><USER9> Ah ha, yes, this is more than just pointers. It's a "streaming" iterator as opposed to just an iterator, and yeah, we need more types, IIRC, before that's possible.

As I mentioned below, we love bugs about bad error messages, feel free to file them!

<comment><USER10> Well, if you love this kind of bug reports, please take a look at the one I filed a while ago :) [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/11724](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/11724)

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Please put file locations (as many as might be relevant) at the start of _a_ line in the standard format!

The other changes look valuable. Improving error reporting is great.

Edited to add emphasis: I really did mean _a_ line, not _every_ line.

<comment><USER12> Those file locations repeated every line accounted for a lot of the noise in the previous format. I'm glad they're gone.

<comment><USER13> Please, take those complaints from others seriously.

There are plenty of tools that help people (including myself) to deal with compiler errors more easily, and they're not limited to emacs either.

For most purposes, having at least _one_ line in the standard 'filename:linenumber:[column:] {error,warning,...}:' format is sufficient for compatibility. You have such a line already; just remove the '\-->', add the 'error:' or whatever back in, and you should be good to go without sacrificing any of the (very welcome!) improvements from this change.

<comment><USER9>
      >  Please, take those complaints from others seriously.

We are absolutely taking it seriously. We do not want to regress on tooling for this, and in fact, plan on making it _better_ not worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would love to see an option for showing the error order forward or backward. My workflow is to start fixing compile time errors from the top of the `cargo` output but scrolling to the top can be fairly annoying when there are a lot of errors. Having the most relevant error at the bottom of the command line (where it automatically scrolls) would be useful as an option IMO. This probably causes some other unseen problems however

<comment><USER15> I find it's much easier to use editor integration to do this, rather than opening a separate terminal window to compile.

<comment><USER16> Do you use Windows? I haven't found an editor with decent Rust integration on Windows yet.

<comment><USER17> Visual Studio Code.

Its Rust support is the only reason I care to use a web based editor as desktop application.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very good! I always liked the content of Rust's error messages as it clearly explained the issue, but the _form_ of those error messages was a bit problematic, they were very noisy and it wasn't easy to see the issue by simply glancing, you had to scroll up, find the beginning of the error and read carefully.

</comment><comment><USER19> I always love it when we bring UX to the the tooling we use, and not just on the end product in our users' hands. Everyone appreciates a delightful UX, including software engineers. I've been eyeing Rust for a while now, this just gives me another excuse to hack with it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I love the clarity and readability of these errors. You can work on UX at lower levels, and it looks like this. Beautiful. I'm not even a Rust dev, I'm mostly in C# land these days, but I appreciate the effort this takes. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER21> Imagine what you could do if error messages didn't have to appear as plain text. You could have arrows, lines, shaded areas, and even multiple fonts.

<comment><USER22> What would this gain us, other than visual clutter and compatibility issues between IDEs?

<comment><USER21> Better ways to display non-local problems. Rust's borrow checker detects many errors that reflect inconsistency between two places far apart in code. This is hard to display.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Inspired by Elm?

<comment><USER24> Yes, here is a quote from the post:

> Those of you familiar with the Elm style may recognize that the updated > --explain messages draw heavy inspiration from the Elm approach.

<comment><USER25> Example: [https://twitter.com/GregorySchier/status/732830868562182144](https://twitter.com/GregorySchier/status/732830868562182144)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is great! Why keep the row/column numbers at the end of the source file though? Aren't they redundant (IDEs shouldn't be parsing command line output anyway so they don't need it).

</comment><comment><USER27> This focus on compiler usability is really fantastic. C calls these "compiler diagnostics" for a reason - they should help the programmer diagnose and fix the problem. I loved it when Clang started making C errors sane (and getting GCC to introduce better messages too!), and I'm glad to see Rust take the next step. Since I'm stuck in C++ for the time being, I'm (selfishly) hoping that Clang takes a page from these new Rust errors - these sorts of diagnostics would look great on C++!

</comment><comment><USER28> Not related to this article, but I was looking through the Rust survey mentioned at the bottom of the article and was surprised at the amount of people using it for web development.

I'm not very knowledgeable about Rust but I guess I assumed it would not be the best technology to use in that space. Is Rust really that prevalent in web development?

<comment><USER29> That's mainly my goal as i learn Rust. It's been a difficult learning process[1], but i persist because the code i write feels simply more correct. I also think as time goes on frameworks will improve the ease of use, much of the ecosystem is very young.

Even better _(or more crazy, heh)_ , i plan on using Rust for clientside as soon as we have a feasible Rust -> DOM api bridge.

[1]: My learning process was mainly involved in the type system, when writing my own libraries. Not so much to do with basic web development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Great to see an improvement over the already improved error reporting established by clang and later adopted by gcc.

However I don't understand why backticks are still being used - they tend to look ugly especially when pasting them into emails etc.

<comment><USER31> Backticks aren't used anywhere in the language itself so they're an obvious choice for a delimiter, and such usage has been popularized by markdown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> That looks really cool and I'll have to give learning Rust another try when this lands. Also, the title was pretty wonderful. I spent a bit thinking about it before looking at the domain and realizing what it had to be.

</comment><comment><USER33> damn... thats nice. Can't wait to dive into it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Do I understand correctly that since this is in the current nightlies, it's slated for 1.12? So, sometime in October?

<comment><USER9> Yes, current nightlies are 1.12. Anything can happen before release, though, so in theory, it's not guaranteed to land in 1.12 until the day that 1.12 forks off from master.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Nothing that Visual Studio and C# doesn't do.</comment>