Voyager 2 to Switch to Backup Thruster Set - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20111105.html <comment><USER2> From my wikipedia dive: the Voyager spacecraft are powered by "radioisotope thermoelectric generators", each of which is essentially a barrel full of plutonium spheres. As the plutonium decays, it generates heat. The resulting heat differential (one area is now hot, some other part of the craft remains cold) is then used to generate electricity via the Seebeck effect.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2#Power>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_gen...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator)

Also known as "things we really hope the press never hears about".

<comment><USER3> RTGs have been powering deep space probes since the beginning of our travels into space. It's really the only technology that will keep a craft powered for many years/decades. Without them you simply can't do these kinds of missions.

And they're not that scary. There's no fission (or fusion) happening here. It's just a radioactive sample that heats a surrounding material by it's natural radioactive decay.

<comment><USER4> When isotopes decay, the process is known as fission, so there is certainly fission going on.

<comment><USER5> He means there is no sustained chain reaction going on. It's neither critical nor supercritical. I have a chunk of uranium ore on my bookshelf doing it right now.

<comment><USER6> Where from, what cost, any requirements for potential owners?

<comment><USER5> I got it from a geologist buddy of mine a few years ago, I think he said he found it lying around in Arizona. It's fairly harmless, just looks like a rock really (unless you have a gieger counter).

As far as I know, there are no restrictions on such things. You can pick up pieces of uranium glass and old fiestaware on ebay for a couple of bucks (both about as radioactive as my rock :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the information security posture on these things like?

What I mean is, what was considered "secure" in 1977 (DES based encryption was state of the art back then, right?) would be considered laughable today... I wonder what precautions are taken by NASA to prevent someone from intercepting and decoding NASA's commands to the probe and then beaming their own commands to Voyager 2.

<comment><USER8> From what I've read, the signals from these probes are so weak that you need large receivers coupled with extremely low temperature electronics to detect them. That puts it out of the reach of everyone except the extremely well funded. In the end, it would be a short list of suspects.

<comment><USER9> Yes, you quite literally need one of these to communicate with Voyager:

<http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/files/images/browse/jpl9020ac.gif>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does it blow anyone else's mind that we have a piece of technology 9 billion miles away and we are actually talking to it?!

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know any details on what kind of software runs on Voyager 2 and how they program it from Earth?

Is there just a list of predefined commands (activate this, deactivate that, send images) or do they overwrite the 'firmware' with each upload or ...

<comment><USER12> It surprises me how little information about the Voyagers is on the internet. I'd love to know everything about what makes them tick.

<comment><USER13> Try exploring <http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/index.html> and <http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/>

The later has weekly mission reports all the way back to 1995. I also just submitted information about its onboard computers:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3204224>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Really cool to think we sent this guy out there which is now 9 billion miles away, and we are still in contact/command with it.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, and the fact that it takes DAYS for a command to reach it.

<comment><USER16> 13.4 hours [http://www.google.com/search?q=9+billion+miles+/+speed+of+li...](http://www.google.com/search?q=9+billion+miles+/+speed+of+light)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That these things still work is an amazing feat of engineering.

</comment><comment><USER18> The computer on that thing probably has the longest uptime in the solar system.

</comment><comment><USER19> What are they using the thrusters for at this time? Just attitude adjustment to get the antenna pointed at the Earth?

<comment><USER20> The Voyagers are 3-axis stabilized (vs spin stabilized) and they use the thrusters for attitude control. Without the thrusters the antenna would drift away from being pointed at Earth and we'd lose contact.

More modern spacecraft use non-propulsive systems such as momentum wheels and gyrodines to maintain 3-axis attitude control and use thrusters to reset only when those systems become saturated.

<comment><USER21> Do the thrusters use the same power source as the instruments?

<comment><USER16> No. The thrusters are chemically powered. The instruments are powered by radio-thermal generators.

<comment><USER21> "Voyager 1 changed to the backup for this same component after _353,000_ pulses in 2004."

Impressive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Slow to impulse, standard orbit, Mr. (Crusher|Sulu)"</comment>


Chrome Stable Bumped to 16.0 - <AUTHOR> http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/12/stable-channel-update.html

<comment><USER2> 200 million people will be silently updated within the next week and no one will complain about version numbers.

Hopefully, Firefox gets there soon.</comment>


Drawbacks of Python - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Python-programming-language-What-are-some-of-the-drawbacks-of-Python/answer/Dave-Wade-Stein?ch=10&share=9ec1027c&srid=43O3 <comment><USER3> I agree with the response that there are a few "gotchas" with python, like with any language! I have gotten caught up with a few type problems when dealing with sending raw binary data over serial and things like that - <USER2> luckily python has great unit testing frameworks to help with this.

My main beef with python is that it is harder to deploy projects to other people, without them setting up a virtual environment or things like that. I know that there are some tools to help compile but they aren't easy to use.

Also, it is hard to create GUI applications vs languages like C#!

Other than that I love using python and I think it is a great tool to use in embedded development along with c/c++.

<comment><USER4> I have the same two complaints. I've automated some large tasks at my job with Python, and avoided external dependencies because while I'm sure I could deal with it, nobody else here is a programmer and it don't think it would go well if someone had to try and figure that out later. "Install python (3.6 or later), point script at the csv file" avoids that complexity.

It'd be better if it were a self contained executable with a GUI but not worth the time to figure that out.

I messed around with TkInter a while back, not sure if anything's new since then. For executables there was py2exe, cx_freeze, and PyInstaller, but the situation with packaging DLLs into an executable that would actually work on someone else's computer was iffy last I checked.

<comment><USER5> if you just want to make a self contained executable for windows users I've used py2exe a few times and it always works well. It's basically one command and it gives you an exe of your .py file

[https://pypi.org/project/py2exe/](https://pypi.org/project/py2exe/)

<comment><USER6> py2exe and anything else that uses Joachim Bauch's memory loader is loading DLLs in a broken fashion that is bound to bite you sooner or later, assuming it works in the first place.

Reimplementing - in a buggy incompatible way - the Windows loader (which is what that code is doing) from scratch, is a gross hack and should not be used to build anything that's meant to be reliable.

Note that pyinstaller and cx_freeze do not suffer from these issues. Do not use py2exe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These are minor annoyances to me. The major annoyance I have with Python is that most Python code makes such heavy use of classes, even when it only needs lists, tuples, and dicts.

Why do I really need a class, when:

\- Instance fields can be added and removed at runtime

\- Private fields and methods are not actually private ("we're all consenting adults here")

\- No pattern matching on types and `if isinstance(foo, Bar):` is an anti- pattern because it's a duck-typed language

\- Interfaces are neither available nor necessary due to late binding. Abstract Base Classes are the closest thing to an interface, but they're also unnecessary because again, it's duck-typed.

\- Inheritance is widely considered to be a mistake ("Prefer composition over inheritance" etc)

\- Classes tend to complicate testing

I can use classes to write custom data structures, I guess, but in a language as high-level as Python, I can just model trees and graphs with dicts. If I need a more performant data structure, I'm not writing it in Python in the first place.

I've seen some very experienced Pythonistas recommend using namedtuple instead of classes for most use cases, and I tend to agree with them. That gets you immutability as well as dot notation for accessing fields.

Clojure programmers seem perfectly happy with just lists and maps, and after experiencing that, classes feel like a bolted-on misfeature in Python.

<comment><USER8> Isn't the reason to use classes the dispatch aspect of it? If I take in a duck-typed object and call obj.foo(), then I get an appropriate class-specific version of foo().

Like you said, isinstance() is an anti-pattern - I don't want to define a function that behaves differently based on explicit testing of input type, because that wrecks the duck typing. Right?

<comment><USER7> Yes, exactly. Nail on the head.

When I do have a datatype that needs to be handled differently based on some condition, I tend to use ABC's with only one level of concrete subclasses, just to make that implicit method interface explicit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like Python because of zen of python [1]. This fits my brain and had been very helpful. Indeed in 2004 I chose Django instead of Ruby On Rails just because explicit is better than implicit. Overall Python is productive and good. Yes it has some warts and corner case, but than its evident. Among programming language python has a humble community and very approachable. Also most programmer in Python will not hesitate to use low level language and interface with Python when necessary. It's not considered bad.

      >>>import this

" _Beautiful is better than ugly.

Explicit is better than implicit.

Simple is better than complex.

Complex is better than complicated.

Flat is better than nested.

Sparse is better than dense.

Readability counts.

Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.

Although practicality beats purity.

Errors should never pass silently.

Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

Now is better than never.

Although never is often better than right now.

If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.

If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.

Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!_"

[1] [https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/)

<comment><USER10> I agree with a lot of these things, but actually disagree that Python is good at exemplifying some of them.

For example, semantic whitespace is arguably implicit, hard to read, invites density (compared to an extra line for braces), and (again arguably) is ugly.

Yes, some of these things are subjective, but it's hard for me to confidently recommend Python to someone with these values.

<comment><USER11> I can't even tell you how many hours I've lost due to someone committing an incorrectly indented line in python. This often happens during merge conflicts, for example.

Because logic in python is interpreted via indentation, it's very difficult for python to realize when a line is indented incorrectly. It just assumes that if a line is indented a certain way, it was intentional.

In programming languages like Ruby or Javascript, indentation is stylistic and has no effect on the logic. You can actually use the "auto-indent" feature of many editors, and you can use linting tools to ensure formatting. If you have an extra "end" or an extra ending bracket, your IDE can immediately warn you. Not so with python!

<comment><USER12> > very difficult for python to realize when a line is indented incorrectly. It > just assumes that if a line is indented a certain way, it was intentional.

How is this different from some language not realising that a statement should be inside of the curly brackets instead of outside?

<comment><USER13> No compiler can read your mind. But in a language with brackets, the compiler can at least determine scope even when things are poorly-indented. In Python it can't in a lot of cases.

It's like static type checking: The class of errors the compiler can catch is larger when it's present. Likewise, with visible scoping characters, the class of errors the compiler can catch is larger than when they are invisible.

<comment><USER12> > But in a language with brackets, the compiler can at least determine scope > even when things are poorly-indented.

Yes, but can it determine scope if things are poorly-bracketed? Because that's the fair comparison.

<comment><USER10> Poor bracketing almost always causes syntax or compiler errors. As long as you have a language that's block-scoped (which is true of modern JavaScript and most other popular languages), you'll get an error if you make a bracketing mistake.

That's not true of indent mistakes. Semantic whitespace is lossy -- there's data contained in those brackets that some people think is low-value that it's expendable for the sake of saving keystrokes, but it does have value in practice.

<comment><USER14> With Python, generally speaking, if you are more than a few indentations deep you are doing something wrong.

 _Flat is better than nested_

<comment><USER13> That's a good heuristic for a programmer but it's no help to a compiler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So this just links to someone's opinion on Python 2 vs 3 instead of an actual discussion on the drawbacks of Python, right?

<comment><USER15> To be fair, it also highlights a benefit of Python 2.2 over 2.1. (I.e., improvements made in the language eighteen years ago.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dunno if Ruby locked my mind into a certain mode, but I've never felt good doing anything with python :( 2 different projects I tried participating with a lot of years in between, still felt the same. Granted, I can't say I've really studied it properly.

</comment><comment><USER17> Quora click bait. A dull and benighted article that adds nothing to the discussion.

</comment><comment><USER18> "No language is perfect" is the perfect reply to asking about the drawbacks. The ability to get things done in a language is what allows someone to deliver VALUE to a client (or for their own projects). A workable solution now trumps a perfect solution that will take too long to implement.

<comment><USER19> JavaScript is a pretty bad language in my opinion, but does have the universal deployment problem solved a lot better than any other.

<comment><USER20> JavaScript is the perfect example of give hackers a bit and they'll take a damned terabyte.

<comment><USER21> JavaScript is like Buckley's cold medicine - It's awful, but it works.

<comment><USER22> Unrelated to this comment, based on your earlier comment - check this out:

[http://www.classicshell.net/](http://www.classicshell.net/)

This transforms the start menu on Windows into any version of it you like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I actually expected some elaborate work about the imperfection of Python.

What I got was a list that started with at least three points that are already obsolete, because only valid for Python 2, which is already declared obsolete.

Every language with some history has its humble start and is evolving. To carry the errors of the past is just not fair. You could of course drag along the first Java version and conclude that Java is bad -- but you would really invalidate your own opinion.

</comment><comment><USER24> The main drawback of python for me, compared to NodeJS is the whole sharing projects onto different machines with virtualenv or whatever. package.json and node_modules just works by default in so much cleaner a way. You can use npm or yarn or just a zip of the node_modules to share the environment with a colleague or to deploy.

<comment><USER25> conda solves that for python at least as well as npm/yarn does. I don't understand while it is not in wider use (except for lack of PR).

<comment><USER26> If you want to add your own project to Conda, you need to use conda forge, because Anaconda itself is a curated distribution.

Maintaining a conda forge package has been, for us, a complete nightmare. If you depend on another conda-forge package you can have the issue that the library is configured to suit whoever first wrote the conda-forge package - i.e. by disabling parallelism or providing only shared/static libraries, and have that maintainer be completely unresponsive or unwilling to change it.

<comment><USER27> That is a downside of community maintenance, for sure. Conda-forge probably needs official policies and suggested workflows to have multiple varieties of recipes where feasible. There is never a one-size-fits-all solution when a community serves so many different people with so many different use cases. Spack fits the "my way and only my way" mentality better. Conda is more "close enough, and already ready for me to use."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have to deploy web applications written in Python on Windows... no uWSGI, no Gunicorn and no easy multiprocessing because no fork(). It's painful quite often and it makes me loathe the GIL, but I still enjoy writing Python code.

<comment><USER29> I'm curious what what your approach to this is. Relying heavily on Twisted seems to be the obvious choice?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Maybe I'm naive, but in my mind besides their ecosystems and superficial syntax differences there isn't that much functionally different between Python and Ruby, with the major to exception of blocks in Ruby.

In which case the decision between the two seems to be between a thing and a slightly better version of itself. I totally respect that many people see this differently and probably exactly opposite but to me it always feels really hard to justify using python for this reason.

Just for fairness sake I'm not trying to trash python. I think it's a great language.

</comment><comment><USER31> Back when I wrote a lot of Python, something I disliked was how one could easily reload a module, but existing instances of classes wouldn't get updated. You could implement the machinery to do so for your own stuff, but of course that could be arbitrarily flaky.

Performance was definitely _an_ issue, but for the sort of programming we were doing it normally wasn't a _big_ issue.

Duck typing could definitely be an issue — one had little confidence that code would run as desired.

Overall, I really liked Python, but these days I'd sooner use Go or Lisp.

</comment><comment><USER29> Almost every discussion of programming languages falls into bike-shedding[1] and this is no exception. The _only_ thing he mentions worth talking about is the GIL. Syntax and small API gotchas can be learned by a beginner programmer in a matter of days of using the language, and are fairly irrelevant to your overall experience. If whitespace and using the division operator are big problems for you, significant software development probably isn't within your abilities.

In addition to the GIL, other problems I'd point out with Python:

1\. At one point, Python was "batteries included". This is largely no longer the case any more--most projects are largely dependent on PyPI, and there's been a growing sentiment in the last few years that "the standard library is where modules go to die". PyPI libraries are of inconsistent quality and have a high turnover rate; the "standard" for what to use changes fairly rapidly. And if you manage to make good choices of mature libraries and not have to change them every year or so, you still have to manage dependencies, which complicates deployments.

2\. Fracturing community: there are now a bunch of different non-standard ways to install Python and Python dependencies, which conflict with each other, and none of which fit all use cases, so you have to use all of them and deal with conflicts. This exacerbates issues with 1.

3\. Increasing dependency on non-pure-Python dependencies which don't build trivially. There are reasons for this: Python often isn't performant enough for certain tasks, and other languages have some very good tools. However, this means you can't just `pip install` a library and expect it to work--even very common libraries like Pillow don't without fiddling. Again, this exacerbates problems with 1.

4\. Lack of a good desktop UI framework. It's apparent that not as many people are using Python for native UIs any more. tk is cludgy and doesn't result in pretty UIs, and despite being part of the standard library, it doesn't work out of the box on MacOS. wxWidgets doesn't build on MacOS without significant work, and documentation is for the C++ version of the library. This is sort of the intersection of 1, 2, and 3, but in desktop UIs they combine to form a perfect storm. If you're developing a desktop UI, there are better languages, but I'm not going to post them here because I'd rather keep this as a constructive criticism of Python than a language competition.

5\. Introspection being used to change language syntax without solving the problems the language syntax solves. I'm really looking at Django here, but they're not the only guilty ones. When you call a function, i.e. route_on_http_method(GET=get_handler, POST=post_handler), functions can fairly easily check arguments and throw an exception from a logical spot--i.e. route_on_http_method(GIT=get_handler) throws an exception immediately. But when you have `class MyView(GenericView): def git(self, request): ...` you get no exception until you try to call the view, in which case you get a wonderful cornucopia of meaningless line numbers in a useless stack trace. Sure, Django code looks nicer and more organized, but as I said, syntax isn't that important. Debugging IS important. Using the bikeshedding example, this is breaking the nuclear power plant to fix a problem with the bike shed. And this is a generous example: it's fairly simple and Django is one of the libraries that does a _better_ job of this. If you really want configuration-oriented programming, you'd be better off parsing in JSON files and doing explicit error checking when you parse them in, rather than introspecting out a syntax that's not really code and not really configuration. Introspection hasn't played out well as a Python feature.

You'll note that all these problems are CULTURAL problems, rather than problems with the language itself. And that's my point, because those are the problems you can't easily work around, and it's the problems you can't easily work around that make or break the language.

I say all this because I love Python. I've worked in Python for the last 6ish years, and don't see that changing any time soon.

[1] [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding)

<comment><USER32> > Syntax and small API gotchas can be learned by a beginner programmer in a > matter of days of using the language, and are fairly irrelevant to your > overall experience.

I agree with the first part but not the second. One can only write

      arraylist.add(arraylist.size() - 1, arraylist.get(arraylist.size() - 1) + 1)

before wondering if there's a better way to do this.

<comment><USER29> Even if your language doesn't support a better syntax, it probably supports functions, so you don't have to write this over and over again. Just pull out into `appendLastIncremented(ArrayList a)` and call that.

You'll have forgotten the pain of writing that function within an hour. I'll _never_ forget the pain of debugging a {bar: 1}.baz returning undefined (failing silently) and then going into a future inside a minified 0.0.2 versioned library that doesn't do any constraint checking before finally throwing an exception. Nor will I forgive JavaScript for this.

<comment><USER32> I don't _want_ to write a random free function for one line of code. I want nice syntax:

      list[-1] += 1
      array.last += 1
      *(vector.end() - 1)++;

Having reasonable syntax and a strong type system are not mutually exclusive.

<comment><USER29> > I don't want to write a random free function for one line of code. I want > nice syntax

 _shrug_ Sure, me too, everybody wants nice syntax.

What I'm saying is that syntax is _never_ the most important problem with a language. People talk about problems with syntax because they're easy to understand, and the more important problems with a language are much harder to understand and talk about.

If a genie told me I could wish for three problems with Python to be instantly fixed, none of them would be syntax. I can't think of a language I've used where syntax would be on the list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sorry but it just seemed odd I didn't see a mention for GIL (global interpreter lock).

Because of this mechanism that ensures concurrency safety Python does not support parallel execution of threads. I am wondering if the rest of the HN community finds it as a major disadvantage.

</comment><comment><USER34> I love python and it is my main language for almost everything.

However, yesterday I was playing with python's async/await and I came to the conclusion that it is a bit... useless.

Not a big deal, because i can use other stuff to accomplish the same I was trying to do.

Or maybe I was doing it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER35> Python is the simplest language I know of that does operator oveloading. If I had to write my pet maths project in c++ I would not even have got started. Sometimes abstract "drawbacks" are irrelevant!

</comment><comment><USER36> _Simple is better than complex._

 _There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it._

[https://xkcd.com/1987/](https://xkcd.com/1987/)

<comment><USER37> Also, here are 4 different ways to do string formatting

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> From the article:

> Strings were just a sequence of bytes in Python 2, but now are Unicode by > default. Much better.

whelp, not trusting this guy's judgement anymore

<comment><USER39> Python also has a bytes type that's the same as python 2 strings. Why would you want your strings to not be Unicode?

<comment><USER38> Obviously nobody cares what I think, so perhaps you would prefer the words of Armin Ronacher, the creator of Flask.

[http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about- unicode/](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/)

<comment><USER40> I've been using python for years now, I don't know the last time I had to use `sys.stdin`. I (like most people) deal with `open`, and unicode-only file apis (or the very nice things like flask that mitsuhiko and others have built). For most people, this isn't a problem.

I've migrated literally, 10s of thousands, of files from py2 to 3. I've yet to encounter an issue with surrogateescapes or sys.stdin. Unicode issues yes, but mostly because we were previously being fast-and-loose with unicode vs. bytes, and mishandling, for example, emojis.

<comment><USER41> I certainly wouldn't trust Python to open the standard streams correctly, explicitly check the mode/encoding or reopen the descriptor.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Markdown to Deck.js converter for meetups and brownbags - <AUTHOR> http://deckmd.willrobotsdream.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Recently I had to turn a bunch of notes I'd taken in markdown into a presentation. So I threw together a nodejs parser that transformed the markdown into a single file deck.js app. Figured some others might find it interesting/useful.</comment>


Start-Up Nicira Plans to Disrupt Networking Giants - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/start-up-nicira-plans-to-disrupt-networking-giants/ <comment><USER2> On the one hand, currently building out some infrastructure, I can see the appeal of this. On the other hand putting another layer between the physical infrastructure and the actual infrastructure seems fraught with risk.

The risk is that generally when something is 'broken' (and by broken I mean say the port on your 48 port switch has decided to auto negotiate 100Mbit always), virtualization systems like these result in 'poor behavior' but not clearly broken behavior in a system. That makes fast diagnosis hard, fast detection hard, and isolation even harder.</comment>


Losing track of time very badly sleeping in total darkness - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/the-caves-of-forgotten-time/414894/?single_page=true <comment><AUTHOR> Could sunlight be modulating our sense of time?</comment>


Out of the Cell - <AUTHOR> https://granta.com/out-of-the-cell/ <comment><USER2> > As a little boy in Oxford, I was encouraged to worship the mind. I and my > friends, often sons of professors, were being drilled in French and Latin > and Greek before we turned seven,

> ...

> Marcus Aurelius had given me all kinds of wisdom for dealing with loss – > impeccable in theory – and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar had taught me about > the fury of the irrational. But when I thought of texts like that, I was > back in the mind of my schoolboy days, and that was the structure that now > lay in rubble.

> ...

> As a writer, I've come to feel that the best thing I can share with readers > is not dazzling argumentation, or references to the classics, but those > moments we all know when we sit, helpless, before ravenous flames, or sense > that we can only bow before those turns along the road, harrowing and > uplifting, we will never begin to understand.

Is the author really claiming that all that fancy book learning is overrated because it didn't emotionally prepare the author for having his house burn down? Does he really think reading the sorts of emotional retrospectives like the present one would have prepared him?

I hear this argument all the time from artists: "Oh you analytical types, you spend all this time with sophisticated theories and discussion, but you don't really understand X because you haven't experienced it." Which is fine insofar as they only argue that analysis cannot fully replace first-hand experience in some human affairs. Duh. But very often they continue by arguing (either explicitly or implicitly) that _consuming art_ somehow prepares you better. This is something that I've just never understood. Of the dramatic emotional experiences I've had, I've never thought art prepared me. Rather, I've very often thought "Wait, _this_ is what they were talking about? This is what all those love songs (or whatever) were written about? It is _completely_ different than I expected."

If artists were serious about accurately communicating experiences (either to prepare the viewer for ones they would later have, or to allow the viewer to know about something they could never experience), the practice of art would look a hell of a lot different. For instance, there would be much more effort made to _check_ to see if various artistic works actually communicated things accurately by (say) studying whether viewers who had an experience were surprised by aspects of the experience despite having previously consumed the relevant art. (This is useful even if most viewers never have the true experience.)

Instead, the practice of art looks much more optimized for giving viewer intense compelling experiences _without_ trying to maintain accuracy at all. And that's fine if that's the end goal. But they shouldn't pretend it's somehow about preparing you for life.

<comment><USER3> > For instance, there would be much more effort made to check to see if > various artistic works actually communicated things accurately by (say) > studying whether viewers who had an experience were surprised by aspects of > the experience despite having previously consumed the relevant art.

This is a fascinating idea. Imagine Facebook injecting various works of art into the timeline of 1 billion people (since the effect size will almost certainly be minuscule, you're going to need a large N). Then, as these people report various life experiences (ended relationship, etc), their happiness/despair/resilience scores (which are probably already being computed) could be assessed and the relationship to the art, if any, could be ascertained. ( _Caveat_ being that conducting a trial in the fashion I described would be pragmatic, but at least arguably unethical.)

<comment><USER4> That's an amazing idea and example of what something like Facebook could be, versus the more banal reality.</comment></comment></comment>


Lets Give Karen -The bus monitor- H Klein A Vacation - <AUTHOR> http://www.indiegogo.com/loveforkarenhklein?c=home

<comment><USER2> This video (and 2 others) are now in the hands of the Greece NY police dept. The last I heard (on CNN this morning) was that Karen was not pressing charges since she never felt "threatened". The police are continuing to investigate the case in case she decides to change her mind, and urge everyone to not go all vigilante.</comment>


How to Prioritize tasks like a Champ - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/building-things-people-want/if-teams-were-graded-on-how-they-prioritize-tasks-most-would-receive-a-big-angry-f-3522695d2542

<comment><USER2> I think prioritization is at the core of what it means to be 'lean'. We have to consistently and relentlessly look at our priorities and drop off the nice to haves so we can focus on the must haves. It helps you end up with a product that is so lean and elegant that the user is left with a beautifully simple and focused experience.</comment>


Ask HN: Are you put off by non-USD prices? - <AUTHOR>

US residents: Are you put off from paying for an SaaS service if the price are not listed in US Dollars?
The reason I ask is now that Stripe has finally entered the UK, I'm thinking of using it as my payment gateway for BugMuncher.
My only concern is that with Stripe I can't accept USD directly with out an American bank account. This is an issue as the vast majority of BugMuncher's customers are American. My current gateway (Fastspring) allows me to list prices in USD, or any currency.
Changing to Stripe will mean that prices will be listed in GBP (or EUR) and the buyer's bank will exchange it to USD (and probably charge them a fee for doing so). Do you think this will affect my conversions?
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> In general, Yes. I would prefer to see prices in USD as a US resident. However, can you not show both depending on the location of the user/visitor OR just display them in a table ? Something like:

USD | GBP

20 | 14

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response.

I could theoretically show two prices, but I cant guarantee the price a US user would eventually be charged.

All I can do is say 20 GBP / Month. It's up to the buyers bank / card issuer to decide what that costs in USD (exchange rate plus fees). I can see that causing more problems if I say £20 is $30, and then the buyer get's charged $33

edit: typo

<comment><USER2> You are right. I did not realize/pay attention that you don't have a US bank account. Exchange rates are a big PITA since I deal with them all the time personally.

Since US customers are critical for you, you have 2 options:

1) look into opening a US bank account if you can

2) Display the prices in all currencies with an * saying that the USD prices are an estimate based on today's rate and you cannot guarantee when the actual exchange happens. Not very optimal but better than losing customers completely .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can't you open an American bank account? I believe HSBC offers such a thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, I'll have to investigate that, thanks for the heads up!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm Canadian, but I'm used to seeing/paying USD prices online. I get slightly uncomfortable when dealing with Euros or GBP, because it feels like the service or product isn't targeted towards me (as if somehow I won't be supported or something). Its definitely a weird consumer psychology glitch. Do Europeans feel the same way when seeing online prices?

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes and no. If I've never seen the product before, then I probably will not buy. If I have seen the product before, it doesn't matter to me.

Isn't there a way to localize prices in web apps to reflect the location of the user?

</comment><comment><USER6> You may want to take a look at this post from last week: "Why Using Multi- Currency Makes Cents": <http://bit.ly/18Hilrv>

</comment><comment><USER7> If you detect an American IP, put (about $20) and an information symbol after the GBP price. Clicking on the symbol explains the situation in more detail.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes. It's not the currency, but rather shipping and language barrier that I'd be worried about. (GBP are obviously slightly less of a concern)

<comment><USER6> Gotcha. In case it's helpful, FastSpring order pages are localized into these languages: Arabic, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish</comment></comment>


Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit - <AUTHOR> http://users.tpg.com.au/users/tps-seti/baloney.html

<comment><USER2> I like to look flexibly at things. This is a good case in point. The submitter sees this as a baloney detection kit. I think it makes a good political campaign strategy guide.

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought all of these were common sense? ;)

<comment><USER4> This is from his book, 'The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark'. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World> I love this book for explaining in simple human terms why we need science so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Somebody send this to the IPCC</comment>


Is there a repo/service/one-stop-shop for plain CSS framework agnostic elements? - <AUTHOR> I find myself regularly wanting to use certain elements from Bootstrap, Bulma, Material Design or any of the hundred other CSS frameworks out there.
The problem with using any of these is that you are very stuck in a certain design philosophy. Your choice also impacts what buttons, form elements etc look like. Also, don't get me started on things like jQuery dependencies. Mixing different elements from these frameworks really doesn't work because your layout will be ruined. Why should wanting to use the bootstrap grid system also automatically decide what danger color a button has in your application? In the end, you spend a lot of time customizing these frameworks.
In my opinion what you really need is a grid system for easy responsive spacing, and then on top, you should be able to download elements in plain CSS code (or SASS, LESS, Stylus, whatever floats your boat) to not re-invent the wheel on every element. Also, there should be zero dependencies. It could be a community where people upload there programmed CSS elements and other people can download their code and upvote etc. Is there such a repo/UI search engine/product available that anyone knows of? Obviously, I know how google works, but haven't been able to locate what I have in mind. <comment><USER2> I think what you're looking for, good as it sounds in theory, wouldn't work in practice.

There are minimal frameworks, containing e.g. just a grid. People often use one of these and then build their own components.

There are also component libraries. While they ideally aren't as opinionated as you describe (forcing you to use a specific color scheme), they still impose on you a certain philosophy and require you to use the whole library, not just individual components. Unlike e.g. Node.js where you can easily stitch together different things, UI requires consistency, both in terms of how it looks and how it's coded. Mixing different sets of components would not just be a nightmare in terms of appearance, but maintenance as well.

\---

All that said, you might like [Basscss]([http://basscss.com](http://basscss.com)). It's one of the least opinionated CSS frameworks, giving you just the "tools" part, not getting into appearance of your website at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be a good idea if you could download components like webcomponents into your sourcecode, because the problem with publish components they are too static and the friction to make a small change is too big.

So it would be something like

          component install splash-screen
          .. Downloads to "components/spash-screen"</comment>


Will This Fancy Metallic Glue Kill Soldering? - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/will-this-fancy-metallic-glue-kill-soldering?trk_source=homepage-lede <comment><USER2> There's no mention of it's reworkability. If I want to replace a component attached with Mesoglue, would I have to throw away the printed circuit board, or is there some solvent you could use to free the part from the board?</comment>


Trump hires very best, greatest net neut haters to head FCC transition - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/21/trump_fcc_net_neutrality_haters/ <comment><USER2> While I agree with net neutrality, the internet as we know it is far from this model right now. Most people think of this issue as 'protecting' net neutrality, instead its more of the argument of should we move to net neutrality.

Content providers are more often than not stationing themselves at your ISP; this means that likely have a node of distribution at your ISP's datacenter or somewhere that openpeers with your ISP.

Who knows, maybe net neutrality isn't the answer we need to keep the internet open/neutral. Regardless of law, large corporations will always have a leg up on distributing their services because of their ability to easily ship out servers to datacenters. ISP's are likely to accommodate certain services over others because of user demand.

I think ISP competitiveness and more open peering contracts are the true solution to what we want, the issue here is local bylaws preventing new ISP's from entering the market (at least in the US). In my small city, we have a single internet provider that's protected by a cable coalition...many of the board members are past employees, family members, or have interest with that ISP. So I think all in all, targeting these local laws is the first step to net neutrality.

I'm not sure about all this yet, just my 2cents.

*fixed spelling</comment>


NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth - <AUTHOR> https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-kepler-mission-discovers-bigger-older-cousin-to-earth <comment><USER2> To help out anyone trying to search for stuff,

* This exoplanet is _now_ "Kepler-452b" (kepler_name),

* In the "Kepler Object of Interest" catalog, it's KOI "K07016.01" (kepoi_name),

* Its star is both K07016 and Kepler ID 8311864 (kepid),

* In the broader 2MASS sky survey, the star has the id "J19440088+4416392"

Sources (catalog search engines),

[http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi- bin/TblView/nph...](http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/cgi- bin/TblView/nph-tblView?app=ExoTbls&config=keplernames)

[https://archive.stsci.edu/kepler/kic10/search.php](https://archive.stsci.edu/kepler/kic10/search.php)

(edit): Here's a mirror of the Kepler catalog entries -- KIC for the star, KOI for the planet:

[https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/deef2bd542224f3...](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/anonymous/deef2bd542224f3a4d9b/raw/69713bafa0c9b1bd454c71ec266946f1ef146a28/gistfile1.txt)

<comment><USER3> I really like comments that are made to provide some provenance to a _news_ piece. These facts/references should arguably should have been in the text of the article. Double kudos for providing provenance for your provenance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The significance is this: it's very likely that there are a lot more such planets a lot nearer to us. This is because Kepler can only detect planets which lie in the same plane as earth and the star so the planet occults the star. Assuming random distribution, there's probably thousand fold amount of off plane planets.

There are 259 stars within about 30 light years. Communication could be conceivable with such distances...

[http://joy.chara.gsu.edu/RECONS/TOP100.posted.htm](http://joy.chara.gsu.edu/RECONS/TOP100.posted.htm)

<comment><USER5> >> Assuming random distribution (of plane of planets),

Has there been any research on this? I have no actual insight, but I'd guess the plane of the galaxy would affect plane of stellar rotation and perhaps also planetary disk alignment.

<comment><USER6> I've asked that before too and been told that they are randomly distributed. Here's a link!

[http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/236-are-the-planes-of- solar...](http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/236-are-the-planes-of-solar- systems-aligned-with-the-plane-of-the-galaxy-intermediate)

<comment><USER7> Thank you. I've been wondering about that for years but never got around to looking it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At 2 billion years older than Earth, I can't begin to imagine what kinds of things could possibly be living on this planet. Given, of course, that it's got the right ingredients for life to arise. What if it's suffered huge extinctions recently? What if there's a domineering species out to conquer the planet just like humans? What if there's a society there more sophisticated than us? It's a very exciting discovery.

<comment><USER9> I propose it's unlikely that any technological civilizations more advanced than our own have existed on this planet in the past few billion years, otherwise some subgroup of their species would likely have seeded the local universe with life (it's only ~1400 lightyears away) and they would be here instead of us. Unless of course the panspermia hypothesis is correct and that is indeed where life on Earth came from.

<comment><USER10> Apparently it has a diameter 60% larger than that of the Earth, and so if we assume it has the same density as the Earth it would have about 16m/s^2 gravity on the surface, and an orbital velocity of around 12km/s @ ~1000km (in comparison to the Earth, where a 1000km circular orbit is closer to 7km/s).

This means that merely achieving orbit would be approximately as difficult as launching a probe on a Hohmann transfer orbit to Mars is. (Except that such a launch vehicle would need nearly twice the thrust/weight, cutting down the mass ratio even further.) It is not unreasonable to think that a species on such a planet would have never seriously developed space travel.

<comment><USER9> To colonize or seed life you don't need to launch huge space vehicles with enough life support to maintain a breeding population, though. You can just launch some kind of self-replicating microbes capable of directing themselves into the forms of life you want to encourage over time. The precise ability to do this would depend on your current state of technology, but we're pretty close to developing full blown synthetic biology and genetic engineering ourselves, so it's hard to imagine they'd need to be more than a few hundred years more advanced than us at most. Microbes can be engineered to be immune to most dangers from space travel as well, similar to tardigrades.

To head off the common rebuttal of "maybe they wouldn't have any interest in it," with more advanced technology smaller and smaller groups of individuals would be capable of instituting such a project, to the point where any high school kid with a synthetic biology kit and some toy rocketry kits could colonize the entire universe (owing to relativistic effects). You'd have to assume their society underwent some kind of massive convergence of social norms away from any individuality such that no few members of their species ever had both the capability and desire.

The entire plan is mostly laid out by: [http://www.tedxvienna.at/watch/why- aim-for-the-stars-when-th...](http://www.tedxvienna.at/watch/why-aim-for-the- stars-when-the-galaxies-are-just-as-easy-stuart-armstrong-tedxvienna/)

<comment><USER11> You seem to be assuming a notion of continual human progress. In a few hundred years, we'll probably be in another Dark Age, judging by current trends. We're like the Roman Empire in 200 AD.

Progress is the exception, not the rule, so far in human history.

<comment><USER12> > _Progress is the exception, not the rule, so far in human history._

You're either cherry-picking your intervals or have a very weird definition of "progress".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I want answers to three questions before I get excited:

1\. Does it have active plate tectonics?

2\. Does it have a working deep carbon cycle?

3\. Has its atmosphere hung on to its hydrogen (that is, has it managed not to lose it all to high-altitude UV splitting and solar wind)?

If the answer to all three of those is "yes" then this suddenly gets a _lot_ more interesting, whether or not we can see any free oxygen in the atmosphere. And while we won't be able to get answers to them using current technology, next-generation direct-observation planet seeking telescopes might be able to deliver within the 15-30 year time scale (if the astrophysicists I know are correct).

<comment><USER14> How would the physics of those three observations work, and what angular resolution would be required? I can see spectroscopy working for #3 and #2, #1 stumps me.

<comment><USER15> In theory #1 could be answered by looking for an atmosphere temperature that are similar to Earth's despite being in an orbit that should make the planet cooler. If there is no plate tectonics then all the CO2 gets locked up in carbonates and the temperature falls (e.g. Mars) or you get a run away greenhouse like Venus. It is plate tectonics that have kept earth in the habitable zone. In theory we should be able to detect such a temp delta.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Personally I find this discovery rather sobering.

It's becoming increasingly clear that solar systems are quite common. As our planet detection abilities increase to smaller and smaller planets I believe we'll find more and more of those too. Some of these (like this one) will be in the habitable zone of a star. Some of those assumedly will develop life. Some of those will develop sentient life.

I just picture a timeline like Earth's projected on this planet, which of course has no basis in fact. But imagine a civilization that's had _2 billion_ years of life longer than ours?

That's a really long time obviously. It's hard to imagine that such a civilization couldn't develop automated methods to populate the local space around them. This is one of the counterarguments to life being common in the universe of course. At 1% of the speed of light you could populate the galaxy with autonomous robots in a "mere" 10 million years.

So our inability to detect anything like this gives weight to the argument that no such starfaring civilization exists or that they're less than ~10 milllion years old.

Was there civilization on this planet and it died out for some reason? We'll probably never know.

As these planets mount up (as I believe they will), it'll further strengthen the idea that we're basically doomed (ie the Great Filter) and further suggest we are a mere cosmic blink.

</comment><comment><USER17> Live audio here [http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html?2015-07-...](http://www.nasa.gov/news/media/newsaudio/index.html?2015-07-23)

And slides here (currently on Figure 10) [http://www.nasa.gov/keplerbriefing0723](http://www.nasa.gov/keplerbriefing0723)

EDIT booooo - audio stream has gone down

EDIT yay!

<comment><USER18> The slides (specially #5/9/11) gives a very good info for people to understand the significance.

      The size and extent of the habitable zone of Kepler-452
      is nearly the same as that of the sun, but is slightly bigger because
      Kepler-452 is somewhat older, bigger and brighter. The size of the orbit of
      Kepler-452b is nearly the same as that of the Earth at 1.05 AU. Kepler-452b
      orbits its star once every 385 days.

Close to 300K people tuning in!

<comment><USER19> My viewer says 4.3K

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To rephrase another comment in the other submission - how do we know/can we infer so much about a planet so far away when we are just now getting reasonable pictures of Pluto?

Looking at the images (aside from the artist interpretation), it looks like they're just guessing based on size and location?

<comment><USER21> One thing to keep in mind is that there is one thing that happens with exoplanets that can never happen with Pluto: the planet can pass between its star and us (i.e. eclipse the star). This gives a lot of information about the planet's composition, because light from the star will scatter/change color according to the planet's composition. See this image: [http://seagerexoplanets.mit.edu/images/transitschematic.gif](http://seagerexoplanets.mit.edu/images/transitschematic.gif).

Now maybe you can do that with Pluto using some far-off star for reference, not sure. Also, I'm not sure if in this specific example the exoplanet made a transit of its star, or if it was detected by other means (usually by measuring its gravitational affect on the star, i.e. its star "wobbles").

<comment><USER22> > Now maybe you can do that with Pluto using some far-off star for reference, > not sure.

It has been done for Pluto, first in 1988, with an occultation of a background star[0].

[0] [http://www.space.com/29885-pluto-atmosphere-to-be- revealed-b...](http://www.space.com/29885-pluto-atmosphere-to-be-revealed-by- nasa-new-horizons-spacecraft.html)

<comment><USER23> And most recently with SOFIA at the end of June:

[https://sofia.usra.edu/News/news_2015/06_29_15/index.html](https://sofia.usra.edu/News/news_2015/06_29_15/index.html)

This will help tie in past and future occultation observations to the New Horizons data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "385-day orbit" ... Can't wait to have to take into consideration different "year" zone in my code.

<comment><USER25> seconds since January 1, 1970 on earth is still a valid strategy : )

<comment><USER26> Almost, but not quite.

While seconds since Jan 1, 1970 is a perfectly fine system, sadly unixtime has deviated from that simple definition, due to the introduction of leap-seconds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It feels extremely frustrating to know -- not just wonder but to know exactly where -- that there are planets similar to our own, which have a very high probability of harboring life, yet to be condemned to never be able to take a really close look at it.

No FTL travel, no working cryonics, no mind-upload tech. Just harsh reality.

<comment><USER28> Frustrating or motivating? As far as I am concerned, if I live long enough to get even a blurry image of an exoplanet, I will die happy. And the best part: I have a good chance of this happening: [http://exep.jpl.nasa.gov/presentations/AIAA_Space_2014Blackw...](http://exep.jpl.nasa.gov/presentations/AIAA_Space_2014Blackwoood%20_%20final.pdf)

<comment><USER29> Not saying that getting an image of an exoplanet at all wouldn't be exciting, but I'd die happier if we could land a rover there.

<comment><USER30> Maybe the happiness is in the hope. Is there anything you would find there that would actually fulfill you? Maybe it's like when people become rich and they realize that didn't fill them up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> pi-rat Now, if only NASA would announce that Kepler-452b is full of oil, we would have warp engines in under a decade.

<comment><USER31> Why go that far? Titan, Saturn's moon, is loaded with far more hydrocarbons than are available on Earth.

<comment> pi-rat Don't tell that to the politicians! We'll never get to leave the solar-system if they believe they can have all the oil they'll ever need right here in the neighbourhood!

<comment><USER32> That's probably the next logical step, though, honestly. Not necessarily oil specifically, but resources in general and even colonization of any nearby planets/etc. that will allow it.

How did we discover (and begin actually using) the Americas? Christopher Columbus was sent on a trip to retrieve resources from India. It was a financial trip, supposed to enrich the government, not an exploratory one.

That's kind of how it's always been. Societies have discovered new people, lands, and resources by accident while trying to expand their empires (generally).

Furthermore, as we continue to consume resources and grow our population, we should probably strive to expand our society to other locations before we overconsume and overpopulate to the point that it starts to cause problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> So wouldn't a good next step be to point a bunch of radio telescopes at this system and start listening?

<comment><USER34> IIRC, the amount of radio waves leaking from Earth into space has decreased substantially over the last few decades. I wouldn't be surprised if energy efficiency gets to the point where, if a foreign alien civilization notices radio waves from Earth, by the time they transmit a round-trip back at Earth we'll have long since stopped leaking terrestrial radio waves by accident into space.

<comment><USER35> True, but our radio telescopes have also been improving. The Square Kilometre Array, under construction in Australia, would supposedly be able to detect "an airport radar system on a planet 50 light years away". I suspect that an advanced civilization 500 ly away would still likely leak enough radio for us to detect it with current or near-future technology.

<comment><USER32> Unless their technology developed along a completely different path, and the concept of radio waves is too foreign to them because they use an altogether different method of communication that we can't even begin to imagine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> How big is it? They have 2 numbers:

>> Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth and is considered a super-Earth-size planet.

And then:

>> Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.

I noticed the lack of "b" on that second one, but they seem to be talking about a single planet.

<comment><USER37> I think "Kepler-452" is the star, and "b" is the 2nd planet in the system. I'm not certain of their naming convention. Edit: Another poster says "b" is the 1st planet found in the system, regardless of position in the system.

Earth is 12,742 km in diameter, so "b" must be 20,387 km in diameter.

Our Sun is 1,391,684 km in diameter, so Kepler-452 must be 1,530,852 km in diameter.

Since the star is 10% larger and 20% brighter, but the same temperature, does that mean it is burning fuel 20% faster, and will enter its later stages earlier?

<comment><USER38> >I think "Kepler-452" is the star, and "b" is the 2nd planet in the system. I'm not certain of their naming convention.

Yep, you understand it correctly.

<comment><USER39> I'm not sure this is correct. According to one source[1],

"The name of a newly discovered exoplanet is dependant on the name of the star which it orbits and also if any other exoplanets orbiting the same host star have been discovered. The first exoplanet discovered around a star is given its host star name with 'b' appended. The next exoplanet discovered in the same system gets the letter 'c' appended and so on. Planets in multiple planet systems are always labelled b, c, d… in the order of discovery."

It's not clear to me why they would begin with 'b' instead of 'a', but basing the order of names on the order of discovery makes intuitive sense. The largest planets would presumably be discovered first, even though they may be in the middle zone of their systems (such as in the Solar System).

EDIT: Kepler-26[2] is an example of the named order not matching the distance from the star. The planets in that system, in order of distance from their star, are: d, b, c, e

[1] [https://www.paulanthonywilson.com/blog/how-are-exoplanets- na...](https://www.paulanthonywilson.com/blog/how-are-exoplanets-named-the- explanation-behind-the-exoplanet-naming-convention/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-26](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-26)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Kepler has to be one of the most interesting NASA missions in the last few decades. We always suspected there were thousands of planets, but _knowing_ it is exciting.

</comment><comment><USER41> Does anybody know what the path is to performing some kind of spectroscopy on this planet? Detecting molecules that might indicate life - water, ozone?

<comment><USER42> When the planet passes in front of its host star, you can measure the change in the stars spectrum, the new chemicals that aren't normally present in a star are assumed to be the planet's.

Telescopes that can do this are still a tiny bit away reality I think.

<comment><USER23> This can be done now with bright enough stars. The trouble is that the stars in the Kepler field are typically very far away, and thus not really bright enough to do these sorts of studies. Spectroscopic observations of exoplanets have occurred with nearer and brighter targets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Due to the diameter being 60% larger than Earth's diameter, Kepler-452b's ESI score[0] cannot be any higher than 0.85.

It might not be the most earth like exo-planet as Kepler-438b[1] has an ESI score of 0.88.

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

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-438b](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-438b)

<comment><USER44> In the article they mention that Kepler-438b is likely subject to extreme solar radiation during flares because it's so close to its star. That would make it poor candidate despite scoring high on the ESI scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> What's next??? How do we find out if there is life?

<comment><USER46> More money spent on science and technology.

<comment><USER47> What benefit could that possibly have for humanity? /s

<comment><USER48> We'll learn how big the invasion force is, and when they're likely to arrive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> if there is intelligent life there and they point a telescope at us right now, they would be seeing earth ~ 500 years ago.

"check out this planet, looks like a promising place once we run out of materials here."

<comment><USER50> The planet is 1,400 light-years away. They'd be seeing earth at around 600AD.

<comment><USER51> by the time our today's signal reaches that planet, we ourselves will already be there to listen to it :)

<comment><USER52> FTL Travel?

<comment><USER51> of course. We know that it is possible - the light speed is the limit of speed only in fixed metric space-time, and the Universe itself shows that non-fixed metric space-time(expansion/contraction) can produce FTL speed - just look at all those far galaxies running FTL away from us. It is just a "simple" matter of engineering of local space-time metric geometry changes :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Things like this boosts my thoughts of life out there living alone, discovering/inventing everything from scratch over and over. While we pride ourselves on passing the knowledge generation by generation to be where we are now, imagine if we could learn/share it beyond our planet, solar system, galaxies.... Long way to go!!

<comment><USER54> I wonder if we'll abide the prime directive when the day comes ;)

<comment><USER55> The prime directive is fiction, so probably not.

<comment><USER53> Well, we would need something like that pro re nata! :) But the very possibility is exciting!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> > 1,400 light-years away

Very cool that we can find it, but I don't think we'll be visiting this one any time soon...

<comment><USER57> [http://www.universetoday.com/15403/how-long-would-it-take- to...](http://www.universetoday.com/15403/how-long-would-it-take-to-travel-to- the-nearest-star/)

<comment><USER58> So best case about 28,000 years.

Which is a bugger as I'm out that week.

<comment><USER59> I think there is a theory that we can travel nearly the speed of light , but yeah even then we are a millennia away :(

<comment><USER60> If you could accelerate at 1 _g_ , you could reach it in 7 years, in your reference frame.

<comment><USER59> Wait for the observer... isnt it.... 1800 / 17.... 100 years.

So that means, a baby could reach the exoplanet, before it dies of old age, on a spaceship travelling 99% the speed of light, which can theoretically built right now.

How did you arrive at your calculation of 7 years?

Thanks!

<comment><USER60> I eyeballed it from here[1], which I should have just linked with my post.

[1] [http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.h...](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I'm actually more excited about Mars-like terrestrial planets. Mars is large enough to have geologic activity and ores, yet it's small enough to be quite easy to get off of and into orbit.

</comment><comment><USER62> I had a bigger, older cousin when I was a kid. He was awesome. He showed me his Playboys and taught me how to shoot.

On a serious note, I'm looking forward to the discovery of a smaller cousin. That seems to me to be more promising for life: Stuff in water oceans won't sink as readily, so will be able to absorb more sunlight. Avian species will find life easier going (predicated on a suitably dense atmosphere). Any advanced civilizations will have an easier time getting out of its gravity well, and so on.

<comment><USER14> Buoyancy is actually increased under high G, as the recent SpaceX failure illustrated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> for proportion, studying that planet and its sun is like trying to observe a flea orbiting a ping pong ball floating in space as far away as the moon...

</comment><comment><USER64> It IS great news... But it's terrible to see the media here in Brazil going like "We're finally close to discover life in another planet" and things like that... And even worse, people sharing like crazy around the internet, without even reading it or trying to understand what really was discovered.

EDIT: typing error

<comment><USER65> I thought that was why we come on website like HN, to get above the average kind of discussions. I don't think complaining about normal channels of discussion is really relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> The 385 day year is mentioned. What about hours in a day? Do we know that?

<comment><USER14> Wouldn't be able to tell from the data. The yearly cycle produces a partial eclipse of the parent star. A day comes from the planet spinning on its axis and there isn't an actual image of the planet that we could analyse for varying brightness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> What is the statistical probability that a star will have a planetary disk that Kepler can view edge on and has planets that will occult the star?

<comment><USER68> Less than 1%. For every star Kepler has detected a planet around, there's a hundred more stars in its field of view with planets it can't see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I think the most important issue is:

Are they like us? a civilization that loves going to war and colonize others? that is the most important thing we need to know.

<comment><USER70> Are they enough like us be incapable of sustaining a space program?

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Can anyone show me where Kepler-452b is on a star chart?

<comment><USER72> Constellation Lyra

Right ascension (α) 18h 46m 35.000s

Declination (δ) +41° 57′ 3.93″

Apparent magnitude (mV) 14.467

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> "Where is everybody?" \--Enrico Fermi

</comment><comment><USER74> What are the odds that this is just a sunspot?

</comment><comment><USER75> Only news such as this has the potential to unite humankind.

</comment><comment><USER76> M class planets.

</comment><comment><USER77> is there one of me?

</comment><comment><USER78> There was an older article in the #1 slot with well over 200 upvotes and a ton of comments, but I don't know what happened to it? Perhaps the mods removed it for some reason?

<comment><USER79> It plummeted down off the front page, and is now a bunch of pages deep: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935198](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9935198)

I guess it hit some metric in the ranking algo!

<comment><USER80> It was probably just user-flagged since it was kind of a lightweight submission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Today NASA, apparently experiencing hard times with budget [1], announces "let's say" just found exoplanet. With pictures. Awesome high res pictures, reposted by every media in the world, of an object 1400ly away from Earth. Oh, uhm... of an object _as it was_ back in 1875.

Photoshop? Sure. For popularization? I wouldn't say. Begging for money? Yeah, more buzz, more money. From whom?

2 days ago Yuri Milner, Russian oligarch and media magnat, announced 100M$ financement of mission to discover new life. Literally 1 person got all this money - Stephen Hawking.

Another 100M$, Yura? Davai, at least now you know where to fly!

[1]: [http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/03/05/nasa_bud...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/03/05/nasa_budget_2015_more_cuts_more_politics.html)

</comment><comment><USER82> Meh, given the hype for this press-release, I was hoping for something more extraordinary frankly. Not that finding other exoplanets isn't amazing, just that we're all waiting to find out whether we are alone or not in the universe.

Finding out that other advanced civilizations exist out there would bring such an amazing new meaning to life. If I could ask for one wish, it would be to find out if we're alone or not. Somehow knowing we're alone would be a large one to swallow, but the universe works in ways that it doesn't care about our feelings.

<comment><USER83> Read: "Where are all the aliens?" [http://qz.com/452452/where-are-all-the- aliens/](http://qz.com/452452/where-are-all-the-aliens/)

"We're rare, we're first, or we're fucked."

<comment><USER84> Can't interstellar travel just be impossible?

<comment><USER85> Or at least, highly energy-intensive and fragile (due to problems like cosmic radiation) to the point of impracticality, particularly when it comes to something like panspermia (or, for that matter, sending high-energy signals directly at a planet that doesn't detectably have life from the perspective of the originating species). This possibility is not weighted _nearly_ highly enough in most analyses.

<comment><USER86> Interstellar travel is perfectly possible if you're not in a hurry.

Assuming there's no way to sidestep GR, the real problem is the human lifespan (and attention span.)

If our culture moved at 0.1% of the current rate and we lived a thousand times as long, a 1400 year round trip wouldn't be problematic.

It's possible to imagine low-energy lifeforms that move that slowly. But they wouldn't be looking for Earth-like planets to colonise - they'd be looking for much colder and more stable locations.

And we wouldn't be looking for the right spectroscopic signals to give them away, because we don't know what they are.

<comment><USER85> The problem isn't just sending something (or someone) to another star (though it would take far longer than 1400 years with any currently plausible technology and energy expenditure). It's sending something _accurately_ to another star (can't use too much energy adjusting course, since fractional additions to weight require tremendously more power) with a payload that's still operational by the time it gets there. Think about the myriad problems NASA probes have after just a relative handful of years or so in space.

Also worth noting is that all deep space missions thus far have had to rely on nuclear power, usually using 238-Pu with a half life of less than 90 years. With such technology, a well-shielded, self-correcting computer system traveling at reasonable speeds and energies could not survive too long because it would simply run out of power. AFAIK, workarounds for this rely on exotic power sources and unproven physics--it's entirely possible that these don't pan out, and this provides our "Great Filter."

<comment><USER61> There's been some nifty work done on the practicality of electrodynamic tethers and using them to turn a starship against the galactic magnetic field. You won't get sci-fi ship maneuverability out of this, but it's useful for course corrections without having to carry or expend reaction mass.

As far as onboard power sources go, fission seems perfectly cromulent. You just have to protect those radiators.

<comment><USER85> I can only find one source on using tethers in interstellar travel: [http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/2005021...](http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20050215611.pdf). To quote the article, for energy production:

> Since the tether current is 1,333 amps, ne = 3 X 10'' m-3 and the ship's > velocity is 900 km/sec, the effective electron-collector radius is > approximately 3 13 km.

This appears to have a toroidal-field ramscoop as a prerequisite.

For thrustless turning, a 0.06 degree turn requires a tether 10^3 km long:

> To obtain a six-degree trajectory modification during a 1,400-year journey > with the tether current assumed, the tether length must be increased by a > factor of lOOX to equal l0^5 km. This would increase tether mass to 2.7 X > lo5 kg.

And this is using a reference ship many scientists are skeptical about:

> ...it is assumed here that the primary propulsion for these ships is the > ultra-thin, space manufactured solar sail unfurled as close to the Sun as > possible at the perihelion of a parabolic or hyperbolic solar orbit. After > acceleration to interstellar cruise velocity, it is also assumed that sail > and cables are wound around the habitat section to provide extra cosmic ray > shielding. The sail is unfurled again for deceleration at the destination > star.... since the baseline sailcraft for this analysis is somewhat faster, > either more advanced sail/cable materials are required or the pre-perihelion > orbit is hyperbolic.

I'd definitely categorize that under "experimental power sources and unproven physics." Perhaps you are thinking of a different article?

<comment><USER61> I got that from a Robert Forward nonfiction book. The craft he described didn't have ramscoops, but were lightsail craft.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some of your most effective Ramadan Hacks? - <AUTHOR> As we are starting the month of fasting, I was wondering if the people here have some advice on how to keep productivity high while fasting? <comment><USER2> I'm curious, are you allowed flavored drinks like coffee or soda, or just water?

What about things like pills and medications (the ones you don't have to take with food)?

<comment><AUTHOR> The rule is no food or drink (including water) from dawn to dusk. If you are sick, you are not supposed to fast</comment></comment>


The dilemmas of trying to live ethically - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jun/12/the-dilemmas-of-trying-to-live-ethically <comment><USER2> Even when we see a great green field and stunned by its beauty we start running around enjoying it we step on living things. When we breath we breath living things as well. It is impossible to exist as far as I know without burning/kiling. The key I think is to be conscious about it; when you are conscious about it your experience is different, you know the full balance, you know and accept with humbleness, your future decisions will be in tune with you the conscious one.</comment>


Kids urged to study less, sleep more  - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/lifematters/kids-urged-to-study-less-sleep-more-20110310-1borm.html

<comment><USER2> This incessant competition for grades between children, deliberately inculcated by adults, is tragic. Done in the name of education, it has nothing to do with a love of knowledge. It is part of the schooling tradition: a set of memes surviving purely for its own sake, with a huge amount of suffering and worry generated as byproducts.

In a life worth living, success doesn't comes from doing the same old thing a shade more quickly than the next guy. It comes from _cooperation_ and from building a niche in which one can thrive.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really wish that education looked more like Conrad's vision in:

Conrad Wolfram's TED Talk: "Stop Teaching Calculating, Start Teaching Math"

From very early on, at least in my education, concepts and the reason 'why do this at all' was stripped from the curriculum. The other thing that I feel is lacking is confidence building, which to me is directly connected.

When solving a real life problem, the problem does not care about your GPA, rank, etc.

I have had well respected professors tell me about a hard problem they are working on, that I later solved with a google search...

Bringing together tools and concepts is very powerful. Solving real problems with them builds confidence and passion. Learning not to reinvent the wheel, even though you understand the concepts that would enable you to, is what allows us to cooperate and build to new heights.

Empowerment.

<comment><USER4> I saw Conrad's talk a few months ago and I couldn't agree more. In fact I am attempting to put his theory in general by teaching math through programming at the moment.

I wanted to add a caveat to your confidence point though. We need to engender the _right_ kind of confidence. A lot of kids are already confident, even arrogant. Yet it's completely unfounded since they are not actually acquiring human capital.

We need to promote the kind of confidence that comes from taking a hard problem, banging your head against it for a week, solving it, and repeating. The kind of confidence that comes from previous hard work.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. The current confidence you speak of is smoke and mirrors, the arrogance hits a brick wall and turns to depression.

In regards to math through programming, I always wondered how well it would work to have a supervised lab that students could use to write up a program verified as their own. Then, allow the student to use this in coursework. The geeks currently do it behind the scenes with their TI calculators anyway. Of course, increasing complexity of coursework would require them to revisit or rewrite their programs.

<comment><USER4> I don't teach math the way you are thinking about it though. What I mean by math is more like the way of thinking and not specific math concepts.

I mean they learn boolean logic but really it is more of gaining comfort with defining and working with functions, domain, range, and variables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I agree that too much of a good thing is a bad thing, I disagree with the spirit of the article. Yes, children should not be adults. But let's face it, America's percentage of overbooked, stressed, kids is nothing compared to the overwhelming masses which are under-challenged and not interested in school or learning. The U.S. is so far behind in education--having school years much shorter than the top countries like Finland and Japan--that overworking our kids should be the last thing we are worrying about.

Malcolm Gladwell makes a point about [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerted_cultivation>] Concerted Cultivation in his book Outliers that I think is very appropriate to the topic at hand.

One more thought: If a child from China read this article, he would probably laugh. I say, work our kids harder! Damn punks...

<comment><USER5> | The U.S. is so far behind in education

How did you develop this hypothesis? What does it mean to be ahead or behind in education? _Anticipating some of your answers._ Is it really meaningful to compare the test results of the US to those of Finland? What are the reasons for the differences between the test results of Finland and the US? Is a few more weeks in school really the best reason you can think of? Are you aware of the fact that if you only consider white people the US compares much more favorably to European countries, in fact score better than 30 of them in one particular test? Why do you think that would be?

Those are some of the questions that come to my mind when considering the issue. This is something I think about a lot, especially since I starting dating a elementary special ed teacher who has shared a lot of her experiences.

You can't consider these international test-score comparisons without also addressing the diversity of the US. In particular blacks in the US still score significantly lower than everybody else. Why is this and what are we going to do about it? Just declaring it to be "racism" isn't enough. If it's racism, what kind is it? What does this racism actually look like? If racism is still present in schools it is probably unconscious to those perpetrating it. I sincerely doubt it's just racism.

I don't know.

<comment><USER6> I think poverty may have a bigger effect on test scores than race. If you break down the PISA scores by state, the three lowest performing states are Mississippi, New Mexico, and West Virginia. While Mississippi has a huge black population, New Mexico is only 2% black and West Virginia is only 3%. While New Mexico is 44% hispanic, West Virginia is almost entirely white non- hispanic. One thing these three states have in common, though, is that they are all very poor.

There is definitely a correlation between a higher population of blacks and lower test scores. But there is also a strong correlation between higher rates of poverty and lower test scores, and a very large number of hispanics and blacks are poor.

Black students in Massachusetts perform much better than black students in Mississippi. Virginia, which is nearly 20% black, is one of the top-performing states, while West Virginia, which is 96% white, is near the bottom.

While the US is richer than most of Europe, our income inequality means that we have a much higher poverty rate. When you control for poverty, the U.S. outperforms every other country tested.

<comment><USER4> But "controlling for poverty" is the same as saying "if you assume that the US was something else without some of its key flaws _then_ "... Do you see that this line of thought goes nowhere?

<comment><USER7> It may be a flaw, but it appears not to be a flaw in ''education'' but elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> According to a poll by the National Sleep Foundation, 53% of teens take naps to cope with insufficient sleep. This is symptomatic of the problem and it does not just stop at teens. 44% of adult take naps to cope with insufficient sleep. For more info about sleep checkout <http://blog.wakemate.com/></comment>


Ask HN: Female hacker/startup looking for copyright advice - <AUTHOR>

Hi all - I'm working on dance choreography site. My vision is in the slogan, "Take a Choreo, Leave a Choreo": users will upload their original choreography, and in return, be able to freely user others' dance choreography - for recitals, dance workouts, small productions, etc. I'm a dance enthusiast and teach a few Zumba classes for fun; I started this site because I wanted something like this for myself.
Here's the link to my rudimentary prototype: http://choreoshare.com/ . There's no choreography on it yet, because I haven't figured out the legal issues...
Specifically - for the videos to really be useful, most of the choreography will need copyrighted audio in the background (Livin' La Vida Loca, for instance), so that people can tell what's happening on particular beats. There's a TON of choreo, with audio, on YouTube; I'm not exactly sure how they do this legally (or if they do).
So, a few questions... one, does anyone know of a way to legally include copyrighted audio in choreography videos, short of paying giant royalties? Is there a chance this falls under "fair use" laws, since the videos are meant for teaching purposes? Finally, does anyone have any experience with or knowledge about altering tracks to make them legal? For instance, the choreo could still be useful if it were synthesized somehow, or missing beats, and had just enough of the original structure to show the user how the choreography is intended to line up with points in the song...
Or, does the burden of providing legal videos lay enough on the user that I could start to promote the site before resolving all the potential legal issues? Is it better to ask forgiveness than permission and go forth boldly, or watch my back?
Many thanks for any advice you can give me. (: - A female hacker <comment><USER2> IANAL, but I suggest taking a look at this book:

Making It in the Music Business: The Business and Legal Guide for Songwriters and Performers.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=r8rU60NzsDMC&pg=PA42...](http://books.google.com/books?id=r8rU60NzsDMC&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=altering+songs+to+make+them+legal&source=bl&ots=M2cec0DpKm&sig=Q2A-BDOMvTHhWQ5dLevF2wkhPjA&hl=en&ei=PRxHTeyTG8P6lwfCs6wm&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CEsQ6AEwCTgK#v=onepage&q&f=false)

I think in the end you will be sued if you use any non public domain music. You may be found innocent in court under fair use, parody, education or some other loophole but it won't be until after buying your lawyer a new boat.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sorry I can't be more help but this really sounds like you need to seek professional advice on the matter with someone in your jurisdiction. Nobody on Hacker News is going to know your situation well enough to give you anything conclusive.

As an aside, is there any particular reason why you're describing yourself as a female hacker? I'm just curious as to how your sex is relevant (from your perspective at least) to the discussion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gotcha, thanks for the input. As far as the female thing, I'll admit it was partly to get noticed. Sorry if that was a HN faux pas.. though, people do ask where the female founders are, so here I am! (:

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. I'd probably avoid doing that in the future if I was you, it could easily backfire.

Still, best of luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know you want to hear different but it's illegal to use copyrighted music without paying the owners. Those YouTube users who do not opt to set their video to private are doing it illegally.

Fair use fro educators depends on several factors which I don't think are in your favor. One, fair use limits the percentage of material that can be used, and two, fair use must not hurt sales of the music. With your users likely uploading whole songs, and having the option to obtain paid licenses just like those for dance teachers and studios, either pre-condition is questionable.

BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC are the 3 orgs for the publishers, composers, and lyricists in the United States and they do expect choreographers and dance instructors to have licensing to use the music ( _Grand Rights_ ). So do recording companies if you plan on using pre-recorded music. You could contact them and see what they offer.

Otherwise, you could make the choreos available to logged in users only. Private exchange of videos may be ok, plus it's much less likely the publishing companies will find out.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for the pointers. For now, I'm thinking that one option might be to just cut the audio out of videos, and expect viewers to figure out how the choreography lies. If the title says "Livin' La Vida Loca", but the video contains no audio, surely there wouldn't be legality issues there, would there?</comment>


Mastering Motion: The Journey to Emulate MotionPlus - <AUTHOR> https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2019/04/26/mastering-motion/ <comment><USER2> > Just a year later, Nintendo announced their newest edition to the Zelda > series, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword as a MotionPlus exclusive.

I believe this should be Wii Sports Resort? The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword came out quite late in the Wii's lifecycle, in 2011.

> In a bit of good fortune, while developers were analyzing the calibration > data, the NSA released a reverse engineering tool called "Ghidra". This tool > helped Billiard more easily examine the calibration data and see how the > games were using it. With Ghidra, it only took a few days to determine what > all of the data meant, and give Dolphin the ability to generate perfect > calibration data.

I am curious how Ghidra helped here. Does the Dolphin team not have access to IDA Pro or other similar reverse-engineering software?

<comment><USER3> Have you seen the IDA pro license fee? It is obscenely expensive. At least it was when I was last interested in reverse engineering which is admittedly over a decade ago.

<comment><USER4> IDA 7.0 is free for non-commercial use, so I think Dolphin developers could've used it.

<comment><USER5> It has neither a decompiler nor PowerPC support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The fr mirror worked for me as the original server is overloaded... [https://fr.dolphin-emu.org/blog/2019/04/26/mastering- motion/](https://fr.dolphin-emu.org/blog/2019/04/26/mastering-motion/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I just wonder how people behind this emulator do that enormous amount of work for free. I mean it takes a lot of time from your regular job and your family to do an in-depth research like this, not to mention writing quality emulator code. They must be angels. Or demons. Or both.

<comment><USER8> Everyone needs a hobby - for a lot of people, doing this kind of research and development is just plain fun, especially if it involves working with video games you enjoy or collaborative work with a lot of people that share the same interests. I guess it's a bit like an online hackerspace?

<comment><USER2> Emulators in particular seem to attract a lot of extremely talented programmers, since they often demand advanced or novel techniques in reverse engineering, compilers, graphics, etc. and I guess serve as a nice "challenge" for those who are good at these things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's great to see Ghidra being put to good use</comment>


Static Website Hosting Using AWS CloudFormation - <AUTHOR> https://forestry.io/blog/automate-your-static-hosting-environment-with-aws-cloudformation/ <comment><USER2> Did they really have an output value of thier secret key and thier access key?

<comment><AUTHOR> I know outputting the secret key isn't ideal. Is there another way to retrieve it after it's been generated?

<comment><USER2> You shouldn't need the access keys at all to publish to the bucket.

How are you trying to automate publishing?

If more than one developer can publish to the bucket, you shouldn't be sharing access keys. Each developer should have thier own user name and access keys.

Really I would automate the push to S3. There are two ways. Either have a custom lambda function that gets called as a stage in code pipeline or create a code build project that runs AWS CLI commands to push to S3 after a commit.</comment></comment></comment>


MakeAppIcon.com - App Icon Auto Generator  - <AUTHOR> http://makeappicon.com <comment><USER2> Would be awesome if it generated all the different HTML link tags as well. For example:

        <link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico">
        <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="114x114" href="apple-touch-114.png">
        <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="72x72" href="apple-touch-72.png">
        <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="apple-touch-57.png">

</comment><comment><USER3> This thing is awesome, I handed the link to my artist.

He now can preview the icon (very good when testing designs!) and see how the re-scaled files will behave.

Current our process is re-scale the files, and edit the scaled ones as needed to improve them in low-res.

</comment><comment><USER4> This confuses me a bit (Android version)

It generates your ldpi, mdpi, hdpi by rescaling your xhdpi image. However, if you remove the ldpi, mdpi and hdpi images from the Android project, then Android will automatically rescale your xhdpi image for those lower dpi devices anyway.

So why bother at all in this case? Just put an xhdpi icon into the xhdpi folder in Android, and let Android handle the resizing anyway - and save some space on your download.

Am I missing anything?

<comment><USER5> Earlier versions of Android don't rescale xhdpi icons automatically. Sometimes supporting old versions is a business requirement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's only iOS, but this free photoshop template is a much better solution if you plan on spending more than 5 minutes creating your icon: <http://appicontemplate.com>

Includes actions to export in the correct formatting too

</comment><comment><USER7> Very basic and, on Android, not all the resolutions are provided. For android this one is miles away from the one provided here

(well maybe it doesn't have the fancy animation):

[http://android-ui-utils.googlecode.com/hg/asset- studio/dist/...](http://android-ui-utils.googlecode.com/hg/asset- studio/dist/icons-launcher.html)

An addition, this one is to actually be able to draw something :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Hmm, resizing? Isn't that rather low quality?

From my icon designer I know he creates a new file for each resolution as simply scaling down would add too much visual clutter.

</comment><comment><USER9> I expected it to make at least some changes to the icon like makeing it 3D for android or putting it in a box for iOS. My expectations were wrong :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> now that's misleading.. it generates icon files from a design.

Yay.

<comment><USER11> Even so, it works nicely in the browser, without having to install any software.

<comment><USER10> If you've designed an icon, you most likely have software capable of this installed already.

<comment><USER12> I can imagine using it for a prototype - the original image could be a photograph of a real object or a sketch rather than something created on the computer. The results won't be great but you'd get something working quickly.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Please review my football game: deeproute.com - <AUTHOR> http://deeproute.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, my users seem to dislike the color scheme a great deal. I know often people link to a particular website with color schemes. If you would be so kind as to choose a color scheme you think would work better using that site, great.

It was built initially awhile ago, so it is dated, but I've been trying to upgrade it. It's an American Football General Manager game, so the things people often most care about is the game engine. That gets a ton more time on it, and design and color scheme gets the least.

I'm trying to change that since we end up having a core audience of football geeks, but no traction with average people who find the game too complex, and not very appealing.

Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER2> Will the site measure player performance on some point system and rank teams similar to fantasy football?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am working an overall ranking now for teams. Less for the current players, and more for new users so that when they select a team, they can decide to pick a really good team.

Right now, some players can't handle losing and rebuilding a team, and they seem upset to get a team that is very bad.</comment></comment>