Glimmerglass Intercepts Undersea Cable Traffic for Spy Agencies? - <AUTHOR> http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15862 <comment><USER2> Tapping undersea cables is accomplished with the USS Jimmy Carter, unless they've since built another one. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_(SSN-23)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_\(SSN-23\))

<comment><USER3> According to unnamed sources in media reports, the USS Jimmy Carter's cable tapping abilities aren't functional. See e.g. The Shadow Factory by James Bamford.

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I'm catching up on Bamford right now. I'll put The Shadow Factory on the list. As far as tapping the cables. I can't imagine tapping a cable is much of a challenge for any nation at shallow depths. Having an operational submarine makes it possible to do so at greater depths and with less risk of detection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> as someone reliant on undersea cables for connectivity, there have been several suspicious/unexpected cable breaks that could have been used to install interception equipment over the years.

that is, if they even bother to install it on the cable itself and don't just force the endpoints to have their black boxes installed.

<comment><USER2> I wondered about those. According to some dude quoted in this[1] Wiki article, cuts are common. Note that I am not implying that the cuts weren't intentional. Cuts being a common occurrence gives good cover to someone who wants to install snooping equipment. Cutting a cable could also be a way to cause traffic to be routed, at least temporarily through a compromised route. What's more, everyone can play that game, it's cheap. Just pay some ship's pilot to drag his anchor perpendicular to the known route.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Asian_submarine_cable_dis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Asian_submarine_cable_disruption)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> the cables are owned by the companies that pay for them - like BT, AT&T, Level Three etc. sometimes they sell them, especially if they go bankrupt

tapping a fibre isn't easy, you need a special submarine for that. the U.S. did that in the 1970s to the soviets. but it is much easier if the companies give you direct access at the landing station, which appears to be the case for the NSA

<comment><USER6> A lot of cables are consortium cables (where the members are mainly telcos), too, especially earlier generation cables. I think that lowers the bar for monitoring to the minimum of any of the members.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If we can't sue the NSA, can we sue this provider directly. Looks like there is more than enough info publicly available to hold them accountable and they can't invoke the state secrets defense. Everyone whose data crosses those cables is a potential plaintiff.

<comment><USER8> As much as I'd like this to be true, I don't think it's the case.

There are both secret- and top-secret-level clearances for civilians, and are usually dealt with in conjunction to companies and labs providing products and services dealing with state secrets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So who actually owns the cables in international waters?

And what's to stop multiple countries tapping the same fibre?

<comment><USER10> In international waters, you still own your boat; The cables are owned by the company who laid them, under the sovereignty of their country of charter, with provision to international law regarding telecommunications and maritime navigation.

The biggest thing stopping multiple countries from tapping the same fibers is signal strength; I imagine that it becomes obvious that you've got a 'leak' after just a few splices. The other thing is that few countries posess the technology to pull off an undersea cable tap; There's only one USS Jimmy Carter, and I don't think the US loans it out, and while I'm certain that China, Russia, and some of the major European states have their equivalents, I doubt the list is very long.

None of this matters in context of the article, of course; Glimmerglass's technology seems to mostly live on the ends of these cables, in the comms cabinets just onshore where the cables emerge. There, you can tap as much as you want, so long as you're the sovereign. They simply wave a national security letter or equivalent in the face of the telco, and they've got a rack next to the cables doing whatever it is they want to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hate the misuse of the term "data mining" that plagues these surveillance stories.

On the other hand, it's forgivable -- based on the plain meaning of the word "mining", it's often a better fit than the "predictive modeling/machine learning" meanings the term actually has.</comment>


Job Applications and the Entitlement Complex - <AUTHOR> http://hicks-wright.net/blog/reddits-entitlement-complex/

<comment><USER2> "Similarly, I'll be more likely to say "hire" to the Eagle Scout, triathlete developer than a candidate who bludgeons me with all of their "accomplishments"."

That line struck me as a bit off base. My father works at a corporation where they were looking at hiring a security engineer. His boss wanted to hire a guy who had leadership qualities, and one candidate was on a basketball team that went to nationals. His boss was excited, and really wanted to hire this guy. The other candidate was fresh out of college, had a security background, skills and passion. The candidate wasn't nearly as well received, but he did end up getting the job.

Would you have hired the basketball player? I'm curious, not flaming. I legitimately want to know why accomplishments in the field are less important then those outside. I mainly want to know because my resume is chock full of things I've done in the field. If I need to change that, I definitely want to know ahead of time.

I for one could potentially list my BSA rank and efforts, but I'm not sure what business value that has.

<comment><USER3> So listing field-relelvant "accomplishments" is bad form at Fog Creek? Ahem. Good to know, I suppose.

Actually, it would be good if every company just listed this sort of "how we hire" on their web site, so that you can steer clear of the ones you find absurd.

<comment><USER4> It's probably my fault for the wording, but you're completely misreading that. All I'm saying is that someone with a personality has a better chance, all else equal. Without a cover letter, I can't know that.

<comment><USER3> Ok, that makes more sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > One, which was mostly held over at Hacker News, generated good discussion on > the value of cover letters in various hiring situations.

...

> The other group, from the Programming Reddit, was far more hostile.

This is a good encapsulation of the difference between the two sites. If you want a polite place where something is respectable because it is well written, and where agreement is the preferred outcome, this is the site for you.

If you want a place where ideas themselves are challenged rather directly, and where respect is not automatically given because of flowery writing or authority, then for all its faults, Reddit is actually far better.

You can tell which site I prefer to read:) I get sick of the way people here get modded up and lauded for ideas that contain at their core severe and inexcusable logical, scientific, or mathematical problems. What I think should happen is that we should be looking through the skin and presentation, seeing if those ideas are worth anything, and if they're not, helping each other out by saying so clearly.

<comment><USER6> I think the difference is more that the people on HN have a lot more shared culture and shared values, meaning many are willing to make the same assumptions and see the same outcomes; while the people at reddit are more diverse and many are starting with totally different assumptions which would make your argument invalid.

Also, I think people tend to link their HN profiles more with their real lives. They shed a little more anonymity to gain a little more credibility. On Reddit people are a lot more anonymous, which makes it easier to brutally attack someone because there aren't many repercussions.

In general I am happy that there is almost always a dissenting opinion in the comments on HN, pointing out flaws in the argument that I might have been too complacent to catch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there a Spolsky Complex over at Fog Creek? :) Come on, guys - there isn't _that_ much to say about the software process that haven't been said already. A short post with some code is way better than another discussion of "how to hire people". More _why, less Yegge.

(Anyway, can anyone point to a company that truly figured out hiring? From what I've seen, it's mostly down to decision makers having good people instincts. Resumes, references, cover letters etc only get you so far. They aren't even that useful as filters, since they often leave out good candidates as well as poor ones.)

<comment><USER8> "Can anyone point to a company that truly figured out hiring? From what I've seen, it's mostly down to decision makers having good people instincts."

Conjecture for discussion: This is true of almost _all_ aspects of running a successful software development group: Hiring, Project management, Architecture, UI Design...

Nobody seems to have "figured it out" to the point where you can write out an objective, repeatable process. It almost always comes down to having people with good "instincts" (i.e. They make good decisions) in positions where (a) they can make decisions, and (b) the team acts on those decisions without obstructing them or screwing them up.

<comment><USER7> Good point. Personally, I think that articles describing how _you_ do X (and why) - assuming the writer has some history of successfully doing X - are more valuable than articles that try to define how X _should_ be done. And even more valuable are articles about an actual thing you've done, and how you went about it. More show, less tell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Link seems to be broken - anyone have a mirror?

<comment><USER4> Forgot to enable caching. Should be up now.

<comment><USER10> Still timing out for me. I'll try later.

<comment><USER4> Gah...yeah, looks like my analytics package was killing it... It's up for now...hopefully it'll stay that way.

<comment><USER11> Looks dead to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: GraphCMS – The GraphQL Headless CMS - <AUTHOR> https://graphcms.com/ <comment><USER2> Wow! In your case moving to JAMstack is a great decision. I am seeing that Zeit also did that burying some of their core features - I am not so happy with that.

We have a gatsby blog on blog.graphqleditor.com. Will GraphCMS work well as a markdown editor for documents with extra props as fields or have you shifted in totally different direction?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That would work easily with GraphCMS!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> JAMstack is the only way to go and GraphCMS makes it easy... Keep up the great work!</comment>


Making Windows Slower Part 2: Process Creation - <AUTHOR> https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2018/10/15/making-windows-slower-part-2-process-creation/ <comment><USER2> Application Verifier is a feature of Windows for developers to use to check program correctness. Bruce says he turned on Full Page Heap, which makes every allocation go on a separate page, and tries to line it up so that the next page is not readable or writable. The idea is, if you go past the end of your memory allocation, the CPU raises a protection fault, and you catch the memory corruption bug at its source. Application Verifier can also do other things, like raise an error if your program ever passes an invalid HANDLE to a Windows system call.

Application Verifier is turned on by process name (i.e. "explorer.exe"). I think most of the time, developers turn on an Application Verifier feature, start just one process by that name, and then verify. But Bruce turned it on for a short-lived process that runs in a large build. So it runs thousands of times, and he hit this problem. It sounds like a great thing to fix, but I don't think it affects most developers using Application Verifier, and it definitely doesn't affect 'normal people' who are just using Windows on their laptop or desktop.

<comment><USER3> I do remember a coworker at another company complaining that their hard drive was filling up and it turned out the problem was the App Verifier log files. In that case the individual log files were enormous so a few dozen (hundred?) runs of the program under test was enough to be a problem. Different, but related, and perhaps more common than the problem which I hit.

<comment><USER4> If the log files aren't cleaned up, you'll hit this issue even if you don't run it 30k times in a minute. I ran into a very similar problem with pytest (python) creating sequentially numbered temp dir/files under /tmp on linux. Result: full / partition.

<comment><USER5> My version of this - OS (Linux) crashes due to overclock stability testing filled EFI NVRAM, and I had to manually delete the crash dumps after running into puzzling issues later on. Apparently it was possible (on some hardware, at least) for the automatic dumps to brick your computer: [https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=919485](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=919485)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of the Accidentally Quadratic series: [https://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/](https://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/)

These issues are quite common and seem to grow out of that initial expectation that N stays small which later turns out to not be so true for cases discovered later on. Scrolling through some of the latest entries, even Chrome itself had some accidentally quadratic complexity.

<comment><USER3> Accidentally Quadratic looks interesting. I've certainly found lots of accidentally quadratic algorithms throughout my career - and written a few as well. It's amazing how badly they can blow up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The thing that made the biggest difference for me when it came to experienced slowness was more or less always created by OEMs.

Bundled 3rd-party bloatware is one thing, but often the problem would be the actual drivers or utilities that came with the machine.

"Utilities" could usually be removed, but if the drivers are bad there wasn't much to to except try an older or newer release.

The second biggest problem was mandatory antivirus software installed by IT departments. (That is, on my machine. For a lot of people a bigger problem was adware and spyware.)

For the benefit of those who are younger than me: Reinstalling stock Windows used to be standard procedure.

Today the situation feels a lot better but I still prefer Linnux.

</comment><comment><USER8> Microsoft really needs to solve or at least mitigate these issues.

I've been using Windows as my main development environment for mainly JavaScript and Python for like 5 years now, and I've felt every single one of these pain points (if you haven't, go read parts 0 and 1 of the same series! They are great!).

Some of them I've tried to mitigate (I'll be looking over my suite of tools to see if any "file watchers" are causing issues now, as well as using the fantastic looking tool from the article to dive into this slowness I feel), but for the most part it's just a cost of working on Windows for me, and it's pushing me away.

With a fraction of the power, I can get magnitudes more "perceived performance" out of Linux or MacOS, and I'm now starting to use linux VMs more to get that performance back (which is such a weird sentence!)

There are things about Linux that I hate as a desktop OS (for me they always seem to "deteriorate" over like 6 months and need a reinstall to stay stable, and I've on more than 5 occasions installed something and restarted only to find the machine unbootable...), and there's things I hate about MacOS (the keyboards, the hardware requirements, being linux-ey enough that it feels familiar, but not enough that stuff just works for me), but I can't deny that when I work in those OSs, I'm more productive and spend less time waiting for my machine to do little tasks, and therefore have much less aversion to them (at this point I've almost developed a phobia of having to move, copy, or rename large numbers of files on Windows, and it shows as a lack of organization in projects because of how flakey and time consuming it can be).

I know it won't be easy, but MS is going to start losing devs and eventually users if this keeps up and the other OSs keep pulling ahead in percevied performance.

(As an aside, and just to jump the gun a bit with the expected replies, I'm fairly certain my Linux-as-a-desktop-os issues are self inflicted or come from a lack of understanding of something on my part, but I haven't had the time to dive into what they are, and a slow OS is better than a non-functional one. Hopefully my increased usage of VMs now will iron out those issues without as much risk)

<comment><USER9> To be fair, the way that JavaScript development works these days, particularly anything involving npm, is batshit insane. I should not have 400 MB of hundreds of thousands of tiny files sucked down into my node_modules folder for a simple web front-end, with 17 different version of lodash required by different packages, and dependencies nested so deeply that I can't even delete the directory without resorting to specialized tools. It's a complete disaster as far as being able to verify your dependencies, and we're sort of just blanket operating on the assumption that everything is always licensed with an MIT-alike license.

<comment><USER10> > and dependencies nested so deeply that I can't even delete the directory > without resorting to specialized tools

I think this hasn't been an issue on windows for a while

<comment><USER8> It is still an issue, but it's not nearly as common any more with javascript development.

npm a while back moved to a "smarter" way of deduping and laying out files in a more "flat" way to avoid the massive bloating and tons of copies of the same libraries. And other tools (like yarn) do the same (or better!).

And the long paths issue is solvable, but you need to use the funky `\\\?\\` path prefix, or the tool you are using needs to support long paths on windows (which annoyingly explorer.exe doesn't, so you are stuck using hacky workarounds or other tools to delete or modify those files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Microsoft could fix this problem by using something other than a > monotonically increasing log-file number. If they used the current date and > time (to millisecond or higher resolution) as part of the file name then > they would get log file names that were more semantically meaningful, and > could be created extremely quickly with virtually no unique-file-search > logic.

Does Windows have no equivalent of `mktemp`? Getting unique identifiers is a common requirement.

<comment><USER12> It does, but it puts them in the %appdata%/Temp folder. Which can be deleted by disk space cleanup.

I don't think there's a built-in to get unique names in arbitrary folders, other than the idiomatic timestamp method described.

<comment><USER13> You have it backwards. GetTempFileName() _only_ gives you unique names in arbitrary folders! If you want to use %APPDATA%\Temp, you have to call GetTempPath() yourself and pass that path into GetTempFileName().

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've definitely seen this practice, the solution I saw to "fix" this: after 20 attempts fail. Silently. It was a static file, but it didn't track last file created (of course someone had copied this static file... But that's a separate problem).

<comment><USER15>
      while True:
        fd = open(log-$timestamp-$pid-$randomhex, O_CREAT|O_EXCL)
        if fd:
           break

Hypothetically unbounded runtime, O(1) in practice.

<comment><USER16> Don't even bother with the while True. If you get a bucket collision with a random number, just don't log anything, or just fatally crash because you can't trust the platform's PRNG or don't have enough available entropy or are just plain unlucky. Keep it proper O(1).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm starting to get the same kind of vibes as with Mark russinovich's sysinternals 'the case of the ....' blog posts. Same investigative style. The blog is unabashedly technical, hands on, and yet crystal clear.

</comment><comment><USER18> The other two blog posts linked at the top are also entertaining and educational reading.

        Making Windows Slower Part 0: Making VirtualAlloc arbitrarily slower
        Making Windows Slower Part 1: Making file access slower</comment>


Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Sink as the FCC Goes 'Nuclear' - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/time-warner-cable-cablevision-sink-as-the-fcc-goes-nuclear-.html

<comment><USER2> The FCC had a choice here (after losing in court on the question whether it had so-called "ancillary jurisdiction" to impose net neutrality rules on carriers).

It could have gone back to Congress to get clearer statutory authority for its mandate to regulate the web. If successful, that effort would have led to a solution in the form of a new statutory provision that carefully defined what the FCC could or couldn't do in regulating the internet. While that would have been an ideal solution, it would have meant having to get support for the agency's net neutrality goals in Congress, and that support was doubtful.

The other choice was to do what it did here, and that is to take its existing authority over common carriers in the telephone market and attempt to extend it to the internet. The problem with this is that such authority is very broad-based and includes (among other things) the power to regulate pricing through a complex system of tariffs.

The FCC is claiming to do a "hybrid," however, by saying that, yes, we are going treat internet access providers like phone companies but we don't intend to regulate their pricing or exercise any of the other broad regulatory powers we might otherwise exercise once we use this this approach. In effect, the agency is saying, "we plan to come in with a scalpel and do only what is needed to implement our narrow regulatory plan that is focused primarily on net neutrality rules - so, don't worry about the rest, trust us that we will not overreach."

Of course, nothing is in place under the FCC's chosen approach to stop overreaching by the agency except its own discretion. By invoking existing statutes designed for another purpose altogether, instead of seeking to get a new statute from Congress aimed at solving the immediate issue of net neutrality only, the FCC is exerting government power in a way that may not have been contemplated by the original statutes and in a way that will most certainly be challenged in the courts.

Maybe this approach will work for proponents of net neutrality but it comes at a price of the government staking out a pretty broad claim to regulate the internet without any particular checks on that power beyond the FCC's own judgment as to what it should or shouldn't do in the future. Thus, this is basically an agency power grab - perhaps supportable, perhaps not - but almost certain to have unpredictable and potentially unpleasant side effects as always happens when there are insufficient checks on government power.

<comment><USER3> The whole net neutrality debate scares the shit out of me.

One the one hand, we have ISPs, all with near-strangleholds in their area, making decisions that the market can't effectively retaliate against (high barriers to entry and whathaveyou).

On the other hand, we have the slippery-slope of government regulation of the internet. I know I'm in the minority, here, but frankly, I find this option the more unnerving.

Are we simply damned if we do, damned if we don't? How do we take power from providers without giving any more power to regulators?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great move. It is simply tragic that we live in the country that invented the Internet, and yet the bandwidth available to the average citizen is very low compared to the rest of the first world countries.

The free market has failed the Internet. For some things, like utilities, government regulation works best. I think we all can agree that network access is a utility and should be treated as such.

<comment><USER5> _It is simply tragic that we live in the country that invented the Internet, and yet the bandwidth available to the average citizen is very low compared to the rest of the first world countries._

To some extent that is a _result_ of the fact that we had it early. A lot of money was put into the early infrastructure, and it now needs to be upgraded, but there's little incentive to do so as long as it's working well enough.

Whereas latecomers to the party can get equipment three generations better than what we started with, and install it for a lot less money than we had to sink into our old stuff.

This is not too uncommon in business, either, where (especially in fields where patents don't ensure a monopoly for the innovator), the innovator spends a lot of resources in development, setting up the supply chain, and driving consumer demand. The "me, too!" business then comes along and benefits from all of this without having to pay a dime, and can skip right past many unprofitable months and challenge the innovator to a game of catch-up very quickly.

<comment><USER6> It's called "leap-frogging." Preventing it is the goal of patents, but many here argue against those as well. It's like they want things to be better, but they don't want to allow the creators of those better things to benefit from the betterment themselves.

When you limit the innovators' ability to profit from their innovations, they'll stop innovating...

<comment><USER7> You're saying the goal of patents is to force others to adapt outdated technologies? Funny, I always thought the purpose of patents was to _promote_ progress of "science and the useful arts".

<comment><USER6> I can't imagine where you got that I was saying that. The goal of patents is to allow innovators to share their ideas, while still protecting their ability to profit from the idea.

The goal of patents is to reduce the risk of competitors taking profits for an idea without investing the R&D in the idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _the agency plans to impose more regulations on Web-access providers after a court stripped the agency of its powers last month._

What does that mean? Which powers were stripped? How can they impose more regulations if they have less power?

<comment><USER9> If I'm reading it right, basically the courts said that the FCC doesn't have the right to regulate internet providers like they do common carriers (like phone networks), so they're just going to reclassify them as common carriers, then regulate them.

IMHO this is probably huge for net neutrality, but I wonder where their (generally accepted) efforts at traffic shaping will end up in all of this? I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little.

<comment><USER10> _I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little._

Why would your 24MBit/s work slower for bit-torrent than other uses? The whole point of this net neutrality debate is that ISPs have no business deciding which traffic they prefer, much like your phone company has no business deciding which one of your friends you're allowed to call.

<comment><USER11> The issue is that network advertisers don't have the bandwidth they say they do. So they really can't give everyone 24 sustained, only burst.

<comment><USER12> God forbid they actually advertise their real and burst rates instead of picking a completely unrealistic, sky-high number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _This move by the government certainly throws a wet blanket on any deal speculations and hampers all cable and telco stock multiples," said Chris Marangi, an analyst with Gabelli & Co in Rye, New York. "It's going to be years-long litigation and the cable guys can't give an inch. Time Warner Cable sank $2.51, or 4.6 percent, to $52.48 at 10:35 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Earlier the shares dropped as much as 6.4 percent. Cablevision plunged $1.14 to $25.67, after earlier falling as much as 5.2 percent._

And all they had to do to avoid this was not act like greedy assholes.

I guess it was a matter of asking a leopard to change its spots.

<comment><USER6> Corporate leaders have a fiduciary responsibility to act like greedy assholes. We have to understand that. It's required by the SEC and the _law_.

Corporations _must_ grow. They must increase their share price. They must continue to do more and more and more to get more money or they die. If you aren't growing you are dead.

That's the problem with our system. But this system violates the laws of nature. Organisms in nature don't continue to grow forever. Those that don't stop growing eventually collapse under their own weight. That's exactly what is happening to our corporations -- and our society.

We have to create a new system, whereby corporations -- organizations -- are rewarded for their stability, for their consistency. For their remaining the same for a long time.

Small businesses can do this. At some point, the small business owner can say, "I have enough." But corporate leaders cannot say, "Our corporation is big enough." If they say that, they are fired. If you go public, you have to grow forever until your corporation collapses -- or is broken up by regulators.

There is only one destination for public companies -- destruction, either through collapse or regulatory fragmentation.

<comment><USER14> It seems to me that acting like greedy assholes to the point that the regulators step in, would actually be _failing_ at maximizing shareholder value.

I believe also that paying dividends would be an alternative to having a pyramidal share price.

<comment><USER6> You could say they are greedy assholes, or you could say they are trying to maximize the revenue potential of their investment.

Software companies do it all the time. Oracle charges Salesforce more for its database than it charges a university and it gives it way for free to some organizations.

Essentially, net neutrality is saying that the telecoms don't have the right to choose how to charge for their product.

If the FCC is saying the internet is a right everyone should enjoy at the same rate, why don't they create a public wireless grid? People argue against that saying the government will control our traffic, but essentially that's what they are arguing for here as well. They want the FCC to control the internet, but keep it private in such a way that limits the corporation's ability to profit.

I'd be angry if the FCC came in and told me what I could charge for my SaaS or my consulting hours. Why is it different for the telecoms?

<comment><USER15> > Why is it different for the telecoms?

Because the telecoms have gotten tons of help from the public, via the government, over the years. At the Federal level, the cable and satellite companies got the original anti-circumvention laws that led to the DMCA. They also get to be exempt from a lot of state level regulation that they might not like, in exchange for the far friendlier FCC. And at the local level, telcos get to use public rights of way and often have monopoly grants.

They're in no way comparable to a small entrepreneur. They're like a company that's been given (or bought) permission to operate a toll road. In exchange for being allowed to make money, they need to charge everyone the same tolls and the amount of the tolls that they charge is going to be subject to regulation.

As for why the government doesn't just build and operate the infrastructure itself ... if the telcos keep it up, that may just be what happens. Critical infrastructure has been a frequent target, historically, for nationalization when the owners of that infrastructure are perceived to be rent-seeking to excess. The public tolerance for toll roads evaporated in the 1880s [1] and they were almost entirely stamped out by the Progressives; the telecommunication operators of today would do well to keep that in mind.

[1] <http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/Klein.Majewski.Turnpikes>

<comment><USER6> Personally, I think it'd be great to have a public wireless grid, but think of the privacy issues. The government _could_ have much easier access to our emails.

But back to your point, the toll roads I travel on charge more for semi-trucks than they charge for passenger vehicles.

I understand the thought that the public is investing in these wires, so they own them, but the public invests in all sorts of industries, including pharmaceuticals (via the NIH), vehicles (buying GM), mortgages (fannie may, aig), but yet they don't regulate what gm charges for cars or Pfizer charges for their drugs.

I wonder why we believe it is okay for the govt to meddle in some areas and not others? Where and how do we draw the line?

<comment><USER13> _But back to your point, the toll roads I travel on charge more for semi- trucks than they charge for passenger vehicles._

Yes, because the semis cause more than their share of road-maintenance costs. This is akin to charging me 2x as much if I want to upgrade to a pipe that's 2x as fast. Nobody has a problem with that.

The problem happens when the government sells the tollway to a private corporation, who then starts up its own trucking line. The road's new owner charges its own trucks $0.25 and everybody else's trucks $5.00. How could you defend that?

 _I wonder why we believe it is okay for the govt to meddle in some areas and not others? Where and how do we draw the line?_

This isn't even a new question. There are some interesting parallels with the early telephone switching system. About a hundred years ago, an undertaker named Strowger noticed that his competitor was getting all the calls whenever someone kicked the bucket. It didn't take much investigation before he discovered that Betty the Switchboard Operator was the sister-in-law of Bob the Undertaker at the competing funeral home.

Nowadays we're faced with the exact same scenario, but due to the logistics of the last-wire monopoly, we can't solve it by inventing a new switching system like Strowger did. That's where the government has a legitimate role to play.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like being right about things, but it's a shame to be right when the Internet has to go completely wrong in order to prove a point.

NN was always a bad idea and this step by the FCC was obvious to anyone who saw through the NN BS. I'll never understand why people _still_ think the government can "help" them by solving problems that don't even exist.

Say hello you're new Internet nanny, the FCC.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, keep voting this down, that will make the Internet being controlled by the FCC better...somehow.

<comment><USER17> Do you prefer large corporations over FCC to "control the Internet"?

<comment><USER18> Absolutely.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Anker launches sister brand for home automation - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/14/eufy/ <comment><USER2> _> Anker's products haven't always proved completely reliable, but it has made up for any foibles with excellent, no-questions-asked customer service._

I have a bunch of Anker products because they have been, in my experience, the best quality and most reliable at good prices. I have a 5-port charger with "PowerIQ" that was the first for me that could fast-charge both Android and iOS devices (that for a while followed different charger standards, haven't checked recently) and not just on one port. My team also bought a box of some of their USB3 hubs/chargers because they worked well with some of our finicky pre-production hardware.

In summary: Anker provided what I wanted from a "brand" in a field flooded with dubious no-name products: quality I can trust.

<comment><USER3> I too have always found their products to be very high quality for the price point. I trust them more than a brand like Belkin. I once heard that Anker was started by a bunch of ex-Googlers, does anyone know if that's true??

<comment><USER4> I didn't know this either, but it's true...

[https://www.anker.com/about](https://www.anker.com/about)

"Anker was founded in 2009, the brainchild of a group of friends working at Google. Fast forward a few years and we're now the industry leader in mobile power."

<comment><USER5> It's a surprise their customer service is as good as people are saying it is, considering that.

<comment><USER6> Google's customer service is excellent, if you're a paying customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious why they chose to launch as a separate brand rather than continuing to use the Anker name for these products. From what i can tell, they have an exceptional reputation for making quality products, it seems weird to throw that away just to enter a new market.

<comment><USER8> Agreed - they've gained a bunch of brand capital, wonder why they're starting fresh.

<comment><USER9> My guess is they feel the brand capital is too invested in "battery chargers" and believe it will be easier to rerun their playbook for building cachet with the new brand rather than risk their current single category focused brand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting, however none of the products mentioned are related to home automation - well maybe the roomba clone. A desk lamp, a humidifier and a couple of desk lamps? None of these are automated, connected, 'smart', or in any other way automated... Odd choice for a headline.

</comment><comment><USER11> They make cables. Of course having a roomba-clone on every home will double their sales! those things eat cables like there's no tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you haven't already tried out a vertical mouse, Anker makes one for about $20 that works great. I use it at work and would never want to go back. If you have any symptoms of RSI or wrist pain do consider getting one.

Their power packs are great, too.

<comment><USER13> I bought the first gen one a few weeks ago. The scroll wheel failed within the first week (middle click still worked).

I just bought the second gen one, and it seems to be going alright so far.

As an aside regarding Anker, I left a review on the original mouse on Amazon saying how the scroll wheel wasn't working and got an email with a day from Anker confirming my address to send out a new one.

It hasn't arrived yet, but I was pleased with their customer service in that regard (I didn't expect it, hence ordering a new one!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow. First time I bought a product from them, it had a typo on it - "AC Adater". They've proven that there's still a market for quality products, not just for race-to-the-bottom goods.

</comment><comment><USER15>
        > humidifiers ($60)

Woah, what? People buy _hu_ midifiers? I've only ever known (here in the UK) people buying _de_ humidifiers!

<comment><USER16> There are people in places that are not as humid. Why does that surprise you so much?

<comment><USER6> Living in a climate that's humid year-round will do it. I've seen plenty of dehumidifiers, but no humidifiers.

<comment><USER17> Yes, my SF apartment gets moldy and musty smelling if I don't run my dehumidifier all the time. I think I have some kind of allergy. Does wonders for my PG&E bill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would like to mention Blitzwolf as some of their products overlap with Anker. I have recently discovered their products when ordering from a chinese website. For the price (cheaper), the build quality seems excellent. I am very happy with their quickcharge wall charger and the reversible micro-usb cable.

</comment><comment><USER19> Big fan of Anker products, almost every cable and charger I ever buy nowadays is from them.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is awesome. I absolutely love their power banks. They're the only ones that make an affordable usb-c charger that can actually charge my macbook.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why are we upvoting a press-release shown on techcrunch probably as paid advertising, for products that sell since two months ago on amazon already?

<comment><USER21> Well, I personally upvoted this because I have used Anker stuff before, and they usually pop up in verticals dominated by no-name things banking on taglines/designs for sales (e.g., cables, battery packs, etc). They managed to distinguish themselves by providing a generally consistent line of quality in this crowded and loud market. I think it's neat they're now expanding in to more product-ey products.

I don't get why they're making a new brand, though.

<comment><USER11> i bought their USB cables off amazon. they are like $18 when competition are $7 for 3.

after 6 months they got loose. I can only charge my devices if i wrap it under the phone. and even then it is not guaranteed to work.

I wrote a 2 star review, since it was 7x the price and failed within a year.

They contacted me in less than a week, send me replacement cables of much better quality (they even had a cloth pouch!) and then kept spamming me to give them more stars at amazon. Which i did. One. And waited another 6months to see if the same happened. It did. So while i guess they do hit hard on support, i don't think they want to improve their products.</comment></comment></comment>


Delete a page in Word - <AUTHOR> https://support.office.com/en-us/article/delete-a-page-in-word-174fedd3-b4e5-42e4-a4d0-5e25127a1404 <comment><AUTHOR> Microsoft wants to sell a service where someone will delete pages in your Word document for you.

"Want someone to delete pages for you? It's frustrating when something simple like deleting a page gets tricky. What if we had a team of Word experts standing by, ready to delete those stubborn pages for you? Would you use a service like that? Let us know."

<comment><USER2> It sounds funny, though I've encountered some blank pages that were very resistant to being deleted, for example at the end of a document. It took me a lot of trial and error, and compromising on other design decisions (such as adjusting margins) to make it go away.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually found this help page because I can NOT delete the first page in this document, which is blank, no matter what I try! I gave up and submitted it anyway (it was a form for a university).

It seems so sad that a WYSISYG editor designed for everyday people makes it so hard to delete pages that they have to sell a service for it.</comment></comment></comment>


Go Binary Sizes Are Growing out of Control - <AUTHOR> https://donatstudios.com/Golang-Binary-Sizes

<comment><USER2> We're on it: [https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=6853](https://code.google.com/p/go/issues/detail?id=6853)

A goal for Go 1.3 is to address this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> While this might make Go unsuitable for embedded use it doesn't invalidate it for a server backend where data structures, cache and database storage dwarf the executable size.

It is still easier to ship a single statically linked go executable than a language runtime and libraries with your code (eg python, ruby, php etc).

</comment><comment><USER4> Bah, as a Lisp programmer a standalone executable for hello world weighs in at 43 MB (SBCL 1.1.8 on Mac OS 10.8.5).

</comment><comment><USER5> If the binary sizes are a problem for you, a temporary solution could be to pack them with something like UPX.

[http://upx.sourceforge.net/](http://upx.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've used other packers and the reduction was slight, less than half.</comment></comment>


What's happening with WebKit? by Peter Beverloo - <AUTHOR> http://peter.sh/

<comment><AUTHOR> Peter's blog is just plain awesome: a weekly recap of everything significant that's going on with the WebKit/Chrome/Chromium projects.

Highly informative and recommended.</comment>


Michael Crichton has passed away - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-081105-michael-crichton-dead-story,0,269418.story <comment><USER2> People slag on him for his more recent work and speeches, but at least for me, his books really made me interested in the science presented in them. Even stuff like Timeline, which piqued my curiosity in everything it talked about.

<comment><USER3> His most recent work and speeches support the idea that we should be skeptical of popular opinion, as wildly popular opinions in the past were both popular and wrong. This includes opinions held by the scientific community. That strikes me as a good point to make.

He gets flack because he applies that skepticism to mainstream views on Global Warming, which many people insist should not be criticized because it is really really right and ought to be beyond skepticism. I guess time will tell who was right.

I was always a fan of his work. I loved the idea-centric fiction style that he pioneered and that authors like Neal Stephenson still use today.

<comment><USER4> _He gets flack because he applies that skepticism to mainstream views on Global Warming, which many people insist should not be criticized because it is really really right and ought to be beyond skepticism._

Most people get their views on global warming from the media, and our media is controlled by corporate interests who profit from being allowed to dump unlimited CO2 into the atmosphere. If people are discouraged from criticizing global warming, it's not because global warming is beyond reproach but because every individual criticism is picked up by the media and given equal credibility to the scientific consensus.

<comment><USER5> How does CBS benefit from people not thinking that Exxon should be more regulated?

<comment><USER4> Companies that benefit from the status quo won't buy ads on networks that advocate change. It's not that Americans have suddenly gotten genetically less intelligent in the last fifty years, but rather the reason our political system has fallen apart is (largely) because corporations came to control the media. Noam Chomsky has something to say about this in Manufacturing Consent.

In fact until fifty years ago working class Americans used to read the paper as much or more as upper class Americans. What happened is the papers of the rich started being subsidized by advertisers, so the working class papers couldn't compete and all went out of business. (Ads are worth much more in papers that target the wealthy, so the papers of the wealthy had a bigger ad subsidy, and thus sold for less money at the newsstand than the papers of the working class.) That's why poor people are largely illiterate and uneducated today, whereas only fifty years ago it was the working class that drove the progressive movement.

<comment><USER6> _In fact until fifty years ago working class Americans used to read the paper as much or more as upper class Americans. What happened is the papers of the rich started being subsidized by advertisers, so the working class papers couldn't compete and all went out of business. (Ads are worth much more in papers that target the wealthy, so the papers of the wealthy had a bigger ad subsidy, and thus sold for less money at the newsstand than the papers of the working class.) That's why poor people are largely illiterate and uneducated today, whereas only fifty years ago it was the working class that drove the progressive movement._

That sounds like nonsense. If the separate papers appealed to separate demographics, a separate income for one wouldn't affect the sales of the other. If people started switching newspapers they would still be reading so you wouldn't be able to pin to this a disappearance of literacy. The only way this could happen is if newsstands actually dropped certain papers in favor of others, but considering the demographic split, it seems unlikely that this would be possible in all areas.

Even if you grant that this actually happened, it's hard to say that this caused illiteracy rather than the reverse, Considering the shear volume of tabloids, magazines, and newspapers that cater to the relatively illiterate.

Either way, it's a massive generalization and I don't think it holds water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone who says that Michael Crichton wrote bad books does not understand the point of reading. You don't read to learn, you read because it's a form of entertainment. And Michael Crichton wrote supremely entertaining books. If you are entertained only when you read Shakespeare, then you belong to a small minority of people, and you should not criticize a popular and good author who wrote books read and loved by millions of people, and was behind some of the more spectacular films of the 90s.

Reading is like watching TV or movies to me. I like watching heavy stuff every now and then, but the bulk of my reading is for entertainment, and Stephen King and Michael Crichton are good examples of such work.

The same people who criticize Crichton will sit in front of their TVs and watch Lost, and then proclaim it as an excellent show. For people who grew up reading, Lost is the same level as most of Crichtons works.

<comment><USER8> _Anyone who says that Michael Crichton wrote bad books does not understand the point of reading_

That's a very strong statement to make. Are you sure it's not the other way around? Perhaps you don't understand the point of reading. Or perhaps there are several reasons to read?

I read entertaining books too, but I do try to keep a balance between books that merely entertain and books that not only entertain but also make me a better person.

I think literature serves 3 purposes: 1) entertainment, 2) exposing new ideas, 3) exposing deep, ages-old pieces of wisdom. Achieving 1 is hard. Achieving 1 and 2 is harder. Achieving all 3 is hardest. I don't think Crichton ever achieved all 3, and most of the time he achieved only 1.

 _The same people who criticize Crichton will sit in front of their TVs and watch Lost, and then proclaim it as an excellent show_

I think you have a bad habit of over-generalising.

<comment><USER7> I don't. I really dislike people who think that reading is in some way something special or unusual. People who think that reading is all about literature. That's like saying movies are all about French Films with 15 minute stretches of silence.

There are many types of books, and there are many types of reading. Books are just like talking, but written down. Talking does not fit neatly into your 3 categories. When Jay Leno does a monologue, do you criticize him for not imparting ancient wisdoms? No. But people have nothing against criticizing a writer of popular sci-fi for not doing the same.

Crichton was not a bad writer at all. In his genre, he was excellent. His purpose was never to create some long lasting work, it was simply to entertain. And succeed he did.

Books are not some mystical source of magical knowledge like so many pseudo- intellectuals seem to think. It's just someone telling you something, but in a written form. You may not like what a person says, but if millions like it, then he is doing it well.

Of course, I can make this argument as long as I want, but I'll never be able to make these people understand that having Dostoevsky on your bookshelf does not mean you understood it. When you read it and then all you get from it is the same as what one could get from Wikipedia, then you have failed in your attempt to access literature that is not for you to understand.

Some of the most ridiculous dialog I have observed is usually between two people talking about books that are noted in popular culture as being intellectual. What most readers can do is talk about the books, but they don't understand what the guy who wrote the words was trying to tell them. They see the surface, they analyse the tricks, but the fail to understand the meaning. Ridiculous!

It's often those same people who will criticize "lesser" books and "popular" authors. I really dislike this pseudo-intellectualism.

One has to achieve humility in interacting with other minds.

<comment><USER8> _I really dislike this pseudo-intellectualism._

+

 _One has to achieve humility in interacting with other minds._

=

Seems like you need to take a bit of your own medicine, mate. On the one hand you look down on those so-called "pseudo-intellectuals", "these people", for having a multi-dimensional understanding of the purpose of books, and on the other, you preach humility.

Get some humility into your own brain first. Those people you look down on see something you don't. That doesn't make them inferior, it just means your perspective is narrower.

<comment><USER7> I don't look down on these people. I dislike them.

And my view on books is that it's open. There are no constraints, so I don't see my viewpoint as narrow. A book is what you make of it.

I grew up on books and nothing else. No TV, no Radio. I read books at random, without a system, and I judge them by if I like them or not. And not by if others tell me I should like them or not.

Humility is not really something that can be explained easily, but when you finally become humble about the books you read, you will know it.

<comment><USER8> Are you disputing that it is possible to learn from (fiction) books?

Or are you disputing that some books do that better than others?

Or are you just disputing that some people have a preference for books which teach them interesting things as well as entertain them?

Or perhaps you're just accepting that all those concepts exist, but you simply find that learning from books is of no import to you?

I'm not quite sure what your argument is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The first book I read by him was the one about the bio-terror attack with a virus. I read it because the New York Times sais that then-President Bill Clinton had read it, and this had lead to some anti-terrorism initiative that I thought was bullshit. I said to myself, if this novel is going to be resulting in bullshit I have to deal with, I better read it.

What a piece of crap that book was. I much of my respect for Bill Clinton at that point, and more with the sexual scandals, although in retrospect he regained much ground and I like him more now.

Then I read Andromeda Strain, and that annoyed me too. It was better written, but a book that tries to be a highly realistic science fiction can't pull a cheaters ending like that. Supposedly the whole cloud of virus just mutates . . . what, every single individual, all at the same time ? Dude, spend a couple of hours scratching your head and come with an ending.

Nonetheless, one of my private dreams has always been to see a wooly mammoth cloned and alive, and if that ever happens it will be at least partly because of his Jurassic Park. RIP.

<comment><USER10> I don't think it is a good idea to lose respect of somebody just because of allegations against him by a third party. But to each their own.

<comment><USER9> William Clinton had a large press office that was quite capable of correcting the New York Time's reporting on his reading. In fact, knowing what we know about how newspapers and political offices work, it is probably that Clinton's press guys passed the stuff about reading Crighton's work to the New York Times as a ready-made anecdote to be inserted into stories about the terrorism boondogle.

Of course, he is still alive, and has more time now to answer correspondance. If you think the issue in doubt, email him. If you can get him to deny NYTime's reporting on the matter, I'll send you $100. If you are interested in the challenge, I'll dig up a link to the exact story in question.

<comment><USER10> Didn't you just write yourself that probably it was just a fabrication of his press guys? Anyway, no, I am not interested in the issue. I don't know the book in question, and I don't know Clinton.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Michael Crichton was an amazing scientific and creative mind and the world is worse off for his passing. His books inspired many from my generation to have more of an interest in science and opened a world to adults and children alike.

</comment><comment><USER12> RIP Michael.

I recommend his biographical work Travels -- I found some parts very insightful.

<comment><USER13> I always thought it was interesting that he was a Harvard trained MD.

It probably took a lot of work to get there and it must have been an interesting decision for him to leave that profession and start writing.

<comment><USER14> What's more interesting is that the man started writing (finished and published) several full-length novels while he was still in med school to "make a quick buck."

He also was suppose to declare English during his undergrad, but decided against it after he submitted an not-well-known essay written by George Orwell for a class assignment, and the professor gave it a B-. According to him, it was not an act of plagiarism, but a test to verify Harvard English Department's arbitrariness in critiquing literature. Afterwards, I think he dropped English in favor of anthropology (inspiration for Congo), which led him to med school (inspiration for E.R) and then later to a postdoc fellowship in infectious disease (inspiration for Andromeda Strain).

Oh, did I also mention the Crichton was also a star basketball player in high school? The man is quite the renaissance man.

<comment><USER13> He's a pretty tall guy at 6' 9" or 206cm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Its a shame he died. He wasn't a great author but he did have a few good ones. Sphere(the book) was among his better ones.

<comment><USER16> Really? I hated that one. Much preferred Andromeda Strain.

<comment><USER17> The movie absolutely sucked, but I loved the book.

Edit: was talking about the 90's Sphere movie.

<comment><USER18> I loved that movie. I'm guessing you're not talking about the 1971 version. Or if you are, then maybe you had to be there.

<comment><USER16> I liked the original version. I'd put it up there with One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest on the list of best adaptations. But I've seen some god awful remakes, most notably the recent miniseries with Benjamin Bratt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A great author indeed. May he rest in peace.

<comment><USER8> Not to be overly pedantic, but while I think he was a _good_ commercial author and extremely successful, a _great_ author is something else.

<comment><USER20> What makes a great author?

Recently a guy in the radio was saying that someone was great author if he/she was hard to understand. If you were able to understand him then he was not. I do not agree with such definition but still I cannot tell what makes someone a great author. I think it is more related to weather the author engages you and once you start reading is hard to stop.

<comment><USER13> One metric for greatness is how long a work survives. If people are still reading _Andromeda Strain_ in 100 years, then it may be considered a great novel.

For example, Charles Dickens's _Oliver Twist_ originally started out as a newspaper serial. It probably wasn't considered great literature at its time. Now, however, it's classic reading material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Man, when I was in middle school I was so proud of myself for devouring The Lost World in like 4 days. I loved his work, and though I haven't read one of his books in some time, I will miss him greatly.

</comment><comment><USER22> Michael Crichton was nothing short of a legend. RIP. Thoughts and prayers go out to his family.

</comment><comment><USER23> Oh, what a shame :-( I remember reading Jurassic Park 2, and then being appalled to see how the fairly reasonable science in the novel was just flat out massacred in the film. Worse yet, the film absolutely killed the best parts of the plot.

However I was yet another turned off by Timeline. It was the next book of Crichton's that I read after JP2, and I was seriously disappointed... I don't remember the details now, but there were several glaring flaws in the logic of the story, not to mention some of the stuff about language just seemed so far fetched to me.

Still, there can be no doubt that Crichton was a very talented man. His contributions to our culture will be missed.

</comment><comment><USER24> I always find his work enjoyable and present enough level of detail to make me feel "reading fiction and learning heaps". RIP.

</comment><comment><USER25> Most of his books appear as if they were written to be made into movies. Most of them were thoroughly enjoyable too - Jurassic Park, Congo, Timeline, Prey etc., though his recent works weren't as good as his older ones.

RIP

</comment><comment><USER26> Was so shocked to hear about this, didn't know he had cancer.

RIP and my condolences to his family :(

</comment><comment><USER27> I like his milder films, like Looker and Rising Sun

</comment><comment><USER28> Bummer :-(

</comment><comment><USER5> Passed away? What a relief! I heard a rumor he died. Whatever happened to him instead sure sounds ambiguously pleasanter!</comment>


Bitcoin conf stopped taking Bitcoin payments because they don't work well enough - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/10/bitcoin-conference-stops-accepting-cryptocurrency-payments.html <comment><USER2> I dunno, I suppose one wouldn't be surprised if a gold conference didn't accept gold payments.

That is, in its current form, Bitcoin is _terrible_ for general transactions. However, given its tremendous market capitalization, it may yet turn out to be a viable way to store value.

<comment><USER3> > However, given its tremendous market capitalization, it may yet turn out to > be a viable way to store value.

The circular logic of bitcoin shysters never ceases to amaze.

I have created a new coin called "sand coin". Each coin is a grain of sand from my backyard Yesterday my friend bought one grain of sand from me for $1. Therefore, given the fact that there is billions of sand grains in my backyard, their market cap is _giant_. Given its tremendous market cap, Sandcoin is a great store of value.

<comment><USER4> Every day, $33 billion dollars worth of "traditional" currencies are traded for $33 billion dollars worth of cryptocurrencies[1]. Coinbase, the top bitcoin exchange, is the 5th largest personal finance site in the US[2] -- the only bigger ones are chase.com, paypal.com, wellsfargo.com, and bankofamerica.com -- and Coinbase is rapidly closing the gap and is on track to overtake all of them within 6 months [3].

This is nothing like the "sand coin" from your example. It's real, measurable economic activity on a massive scale.

[1] [https://coinmarketcap.com](https://coinmarketcap.com) (cryptocurrency 24 hour volume)

[2] [https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries;1/US](https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries;1/US)

[3] [http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/coinbase.com#?sites=coinbase.c...](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/coinbase.com#?sites=coinbase.com)

<comment><USER3> Again. Circular logic of crypto shysters at work.

> It's real, measurable economic activity on a massive scale.

What economic activity? It is people speculating. Nobody is using bitcoin for buying coffee or sending micropayments to websites. Nobody is using it as a "store of value", despite what the shysters say. It is just people buying and selling a meaningless ticker symbol hoping to get rich and buy some island in the south pacific (using fiat, I might add).

With bitcoin, you might as well just throw away the technology behind it and just trade on the BTC ticker instead. I mean, that is almost what is happening given all the trades on any given exchange are off-chain transactions happening in a centralized exchange-owned database. There is no rumbling of miners recording every trade. The only people doing cross-trade are people trying to arbitrage away the price difference between exchanges.

<comment><USER5> > Nobody is using bitcoin for buying coffee or sending micropayments to > websites.

I was, I've spent more Bitcoins than traditional currencies on buying actual products during last year (electronics, games, hotels, flight tickets, etc.). That ended, 1 months ago when fees rose to a point limit that made such relatively small operations inviable.

That said, I still hope for new cryptocurrencies to provide a solution to scalability issues. Maybe [https://failsafe.network/](https://failsafe.network/) or maybe something else.

<comment><USER6> You paid flights with bitcoins? Who accepts them?

<comment><USER7> A fair number of vendors, actually. The first comment in this Reddit post has a list:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6pgxb6/where_can_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6pgxb6/where_can_i_buy_plane_tickets_with_bitcoin/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hahahahaha this is hilarious, where are all the bitcoin fanatics now hmmm? Does this confirm its singular status as a vehicle of enormous speculation or do we have to wait till people finally agree it is worth precisely zero US dollars...

<comment><USER8> I see people downvoting my comment, but honestly if you think this is anything but hilarious then you may be too deep in this speculative bubble!

<comment><USER5> Essentially because every HN post concerning cryptocurrencies has become a joke, and long threads of cryptofanatics and cryptosceptics throwing shit at each other. No one is willing to just have rational conversation on the points they agree/disagree with, but instead write attacks like: " _Hahahahaha this is hilarious, where are all the bitcoin {fanatics,sceptics} now_ " that don't contribute to the discussion at all. You will always get downvoted by one of the sides. Personally, I would downvote you if I could for adding yet another stick to the bonfire.

To be honest, this looks like a quarrel between baboons that have invested too much, and baboons that have shorted too much. I've never ever seen HN in such a state and hope to not see it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bitcoin is made of software . . . do people not know that software can get better and better over time??

I used a js map function yesterday, worked like a charm!!!

</comment><comment><USER10> This news was confirmed fake.

The conference does accept Bitcoin.

<comment><USER11> [https://web.archive.org/web/20180111023048/https://btcmiami....](https://web.archive.org/web/20180111023048/https://btcmiami.com/tickets/)

        Due to network congestion and manual processing,
        we have closed ticket payments using
        Cryptocurrencies — Hopefully, next year there
        will be more unity in the community about scaling
        and global adoption becomes reality.

        We have, and always will, accept cryptocurrencies
        for our conferences, up to fourteen days before the
        event. However, due to the manual inputting of data
        in our ticketing platforms when paid in cryptocurrencies,
        we decided to shut down bitcoin payments for last minute
        sales due to print deadlines.

<comment><USER12> I like how they give two what looks like entirely separate excuses.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: GHWN – Desktop notifications for GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://typicode.github.io/ghwn/

<comment><USER2> I'm ashamed that I never knew about pinned tabs. Thanks for this. It's nice because I only get notifications on issues to my email, and I ignore my email until the end of the day. But I like to be notified of issues immediately.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you find it useful :)</comment></comment>


A Former Google Executive Takes Aim at His Old Company with a Search Startup - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/technology/google-neeva-executive.html <comment><USER2> Common Crawl's public dataset for May/June 2020[1] weighs in at 53TB (compressed).

As of 2019-05-15, SanDisk's 1TB SD Card was listed[2] for sale at $449, and the SDUC standard[3] today provides for storage volumes up to 128TB in capacity.

Elasticsearch[4] is a mature, proven and freely available open source search engine, and new entrant search engines continue to become available.

We might still be a few years out from this in practice, but I'd argue that the search engine that could most verifiably preserve your privacy would be one that runs on your own personal device(s).

[1] - [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per- gigabyte/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/)

[2] - [https://commoncrawl.org/2020/06/may-june-2020-crawl- archive-...](https://commoncrawl.org/2020/06/may-june-2020-crawl-archive-now- available/)

[3] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#SDUC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#SDUC)

[4] - [https://elastic.co](https://elastic.co)</comment>


Symmetry Investments and the D Language Foundation Are Hiring - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> I've never used D but it's awesome to see languages get funding.

Out of curiosity, I'd love to hear who's using D and why was it chosen over other langs & ecosystems?

<comment><USER3> I probably learnt it out of a desire to be different, but the language is a incredibly (reassuringly) pragmatic language that was written by a compiler writer(Walter) and a C++ Wizard (Andrei) and it shows. It's still a top down systems language, but you can generate enormous amounts of code for free at compile time, e.g. your parser generator can trivially be written in D but use itself to parse new BNFs and compile them at compile time using CTFE.

The standard library is very professional too, not as wide as some languages but the range idea is very pleasant to work with. Very snappy compiles, best in class interop with C _and_ C++, things like that.</comment></comment>


What Ever Happened to SCTP? - <AUTHOR> In the mid-2000s this technology seemed to be up and coming. The world has become ever more mobile. The need for this technology has only increased.<p>So what happened? <comment><USER2> The networks, OSes, ... weren't ready to accept a new protocol at such a low level, so it never worked reliably over random public connections and stayed in a niche for internal use cases. Things like QUIC, WebRTC, MP-TCP, ... rebuild aspects of it over TCP or UDP to get around this problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess that makes sense. I remember doing a research project in school and it seemed then like it would be the future. IoT and mobile phones would definitely benefit from a connectionless protocol like that.

That is the very reason I use `mosh` to connect to my servers. My laptop isn't always on the same internet connection and I'd prefer not to have to reconnect all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Turns out, there is a lot of advanced routers, firewalls, IDSes, etc.. which like to inspect and filter the traffic, and they often drop unknown protocols.

As a result, new IP-based protocols are likely to have the connectivity problems. So all the development moved to be UDP based.</comment>


Is Slack really worth it? - <AUTHOR> https://talkspirit.tumblr.com/post/142296128317/is-slack-really-worth-it <comment><USER2> Nice product !</comment>


Ask HN: Recommendations for becoming a git guru - <AUTHOR>

There are dozens and dozens of git tutorials out there, some are no doubt very good, some are certainly completely dire.
Yes, I can read the manual. Yes, I will be using git obsessively. But equally, it's useful to have some sort of guidance as to where to start, the gotchas that await, and what to try next.
So I turn to HNers.
What git tutorial would you recommend? <comment><USER2> Pro Git is good and free: <http://git-scm.com/book>

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like code school's hands on approach where you can try out all sorts of git commends. Learn as you go and quite fun! <http://www.codeschool.com/courses/try-git>

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://gitref.org> is very good.</comment>


Ask HN:  Feedback on my app engine project? - <AUTHOR>

Hello -- I built this simple app engine project...
I'd like to request suggestions, feedback, etc.
the site is:
http://www.wikifieldtrip.org <comment><USER2> I am getting this error when I try to access:

" The Google Maps API server rejected your request. This could be because the API key used on this site was registered for a different web site. You can generate a new key for this web site at <http://code.google.com/apis/maps/>. "

<comment><AUTHOR> hmm are you sure you went to www.wikifieldtrip.org and not .com?</comment></comment>


India's New National Education Policy Is Inherently Casteist - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/s3nkul/status/1288833075904831495 <comment><USER2> Nationalism taken too far. Learning regional languages and Sanskrit instead of English? Having a lingua franca is incredibly advantageous in the global economy.</comment>


What if we build the internet we always wanted? - <AUTHOR> https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/what-if-we-build-the-internet-we-always-wanted <comment><AUTHOR> I always found Mike Loukides to be insightful but this makes me wonder if he truly does not understand the dynamics underyling a networked economy. Google and Facebook are big not because the Internet wasn't built to prevent them but because friction went away at crucial points that made scale effects possible not seen before. No matter what protocol and infrastructure you put at the base of the network, at one point there will always arise some large aggregators one or two or more levels up.

Still, I wonder why not more efforts are put into building different network backbones and entry points besides the current ISP model. There are already local, successful examples of this, born out of necessity. (in Greece for example)

<comment><USER2> Article from another thread

is-decentralized-storage-sustainable

[http://blog.dshr.org/2017/07/is-decentralized-storage- sustai...](http://blog.dshr.org/2017/07/is-decentralized-storage- sustainable.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fascinating. Thx!</comment></comment></comment>


NASM Examples - <AUTHOR> http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/nasmexamples/

<comment><USER2> I think it is worth mentioning that the author's website[1] lists course websites which all seem to have similar notes about relevant topics. As an example, there's the Computer Systems Organization course[2] which has NASM Tutorial[3] page listed in notes which is much more suitable for actually learning assembly than the NASM examples. And, of course, there's a notes page for "x86 Assembly Language Programming" too.

Truly awesome stuff, definitely worth exploring.

[1]: [http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/](http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/)

[2]: [http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/classes/sp/](http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/classes/sp/)

[3]: [http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/nasmtutorial/](http://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/nasmtutorial/)

</comment><comment><USER3> A nice little page with some very helpful examples for someone just starting out with using assembly on Linux. (There actually isn't much that's specific to Nasm, though. Based on the page's title, I would have at least expected an example that demonstrated setting up a .bss section, with the special resd [et al.] directives, and some examples of Nasm macros, which have some idiosyncratic features. But that's just a minor quibble about the name of the page. The information that is there is plenty useful, and not always easy to find.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Note that the linked site, cs.lmu.edu, has a broken IPv6 DNS record:

        $ dig cs.lmu.edu AAAA
        cs.lmu.edu.             3493    IN      AAAA    ::1

When loaded on IPv6-enabled clients, you'll connect do localhost:80 instead.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seems like a good thread to ask, hope this isn't too OT.

I'm a CSE major about to graduate with about 18 months in the industry, mainly using JS/Java/Python. I've recently wanted to start getting into low level programming and wasn't sure where to start. I wanted to start with C and move up to C++ eventually, would it be worthwhile to start with ASM? Also does anyone know of any good resources for learning modern C? Is k&r still relevant?

<comment><USER6> There's "Learn C The Hard Way" \-- [http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/](http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/) . It teaches you the essential, modern practice of developing with Valgrind right away.

I'd also suggest going though the exercises in "Computer Systems -- A Programmer's Perspective", which uses Linux, C and some assembler. [http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/](http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/) Good C programming is mostly about good computer science, because the C language is small but you operate close to the metal.

K&R remains a marvel of concision, but its blithe, unskeptical usage of the C standard library is outdated and problematic.

<comment><USER7> I think the best (or at least my favorite) thing about Learn C The Hard Way was an extra credit assignment of going through the K&R book and finding a way to break every piece of sample code. Talk about a learning exercise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice explanation, the overall layout and text-to-code ratio make it easy/fun to follow. I would like to see the finished post when all the TODO's are filled in. I would suggest to add "AMD64" explicitly to the page title for clarity.

</comment><comment><USER9> This link seems to be broken :(</comment>


Rubinius 1.0 (Fabius) Released - <AUTHOR> http://rubini.us/about/one_point_oh

<comment><USER2> This is my favorite project we have at Engine Yard. I've been rooting for it and fighting to keep it alive for years now because I know that this is the future of ruby. Evan and Brian and all the contributors have done great work on this ambitious project.

I've had ruby aliased to rbx on my own personal laptop and run all of my development on rbx, I only have to bust out MRI every once in a while, like once a month. I write lots of code with event machine, redis, amqp and many other complex parts of ruby ecosystem and for the most part they all just work on rbx.

Huge congrats to rubinius team again, I predict this will be the default ruby for most people inside of a year if not 6 months.

Rubinius is ruby done right IMHO.

<comment><USER3> what is the performance as compared to Enterprise Edition ?

<comment><USER4> I ran a benchmark on a library i'm working on (fuzzy auto complete), and rubinius was the fastest (I didn't test 1.9).

The code is pure ruby, it creates a decent sized trie then walks it once to set data in each node (a sequential forward index, etc).

I'll release the code once my library is ready for public consumption, but the numbers were (in seconds):

rubinius ~ 4.85

jruby 1.5 ~ 5.45

mri 1.8.7 ~ 9.35

ree 1.8.7 ~ 9.35

and Yes, I did a warm up.

<comment><USER5> I'd love to see your benchmark to understand why JRuby wasn't faster than that. I assume you ran with the --server flag to JRuby as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One thing I'd appreciate with these kinds of announcements is a "what is it" paragraph preferably towards the top of the referenced web page. I suppose if I were working in Ruby I'd know what Rubinius is and why I'd care but a list of "what is new" doesn't particularly help me or folk like me.

<comment><USER7> Was going to say the same thing. Just looked through the site trying to find exactly what it is, and all I got is:

1\. It's a Ruby implementation.

2\. It's mostly compatible w/ Ruby & its components (Rails, gems, etc.) but not completely.

3\. ... ?

An About page would be nice - answer these questions, among others:

1\. What is Rubinious?

2\. What differentiates it from Ruby?

3\. What problems does it solve?

4\. Why would Ruby programmers want to use it?

5\. Why would non-Ruby programmers want to use it?

<comment><USER8> I'm so clueless as you.

From <http://rubini.us> you can read "An environment for Ruby, the programming language that provides performance balanced with accessibility, focusing on improving programming productivity"

The thing is, in this context, what is "an environment for ruby"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congrats to Evan and the team!

Now that 1.0 is out, how about adding a blog and a mailing list?

I'd love to see Rubinius pick up a large following. IRC-only makes it a challenge to build a thriving community.

<comment><USER10> We have a mailing list at <http://groups.google.com/group/rubinius-dev>, though it hasn't taken off much yet. Perhaps now that 1.0 is out people will use it more.

Blog wise, what would you like to see on a Rubinius blog?

<comment><USER9> Would love to see a big fat link on the front page that says "Help make the best Ruby implementation ever. Join us!" with a link to the google group. Clear call to action.

Blog wise: Bubble up some of the great activity going on behind the scenes. Design decisions, great implementation debates, calls for help on hard/easy problems, new releases, beta releases, testing calls, etc. The posts don't have to be more than a paragraph or two. Just enough so we can see where you guys are steering the ship and if there's something we can do to help.

I'm sure there are more than a handful of potential up and coming language implementers that Rubinius could help inspire and recruit. All it takes is an easy to find/read active conversation to get them engaged.

Also, I'm sure you're thinking about a 'the long road to 1.0' post. That would be great first post to talk about all the decisions and direction changes that lead up to the current design.

<comment><USER10> I think now that we've hit 1.0, the path forward is easy to break up into bits could be on the blog. Before the 1.0-rc cycle, it was hard to separate out individual things.

Given that people think this is a good idea, I think we'll go ahead and do it!

<comment><USER11> Please do! The number of vaguely interesting Ruby blogs that are updated frequently has taken a tumble in the last year or two. I need more to link to ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd like to see if / how many of my unit tests pass using Rubinius, but does it currently support 1.9-specific code?

Also, RVM installs RC2, not the 1.0 release. Maybe someone can give them a poke...

UPDATE: Nevermind, <http://rubini.us> clearly states that 1.9 compatibility will happen post-1.0. Can't wait, even if it's just to know that my code is compatible with what may be a very real option in the years to come.

AND: I should probably run "rvm update" first, to get the 1.0 release...

<comment><USER13> Just updated rvm and can confirm 1.0.0 it's there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Very cool! I use Ruby 1.9.1 and JRuby 1.5 for production, but Rubinius may become dominant in the future because of using LLVM and because the code base must be much easier to work with.

</comment><comment><USER12> OT: I really like the HTML diagrams on <http://rubini.us/>. Is there a library that does that or are they hand-built?

<comment><USER10> Those are done by hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Now this is where Ruby is winning, so many different implementations, and that too successful ones! I love the community. Congratulations to the team. :-)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm just starting to get into Ruby but I'm pretty confused about this project. It sounds really cool, but doesn't Ruby 1.9 already have a GC and compiles into byte code? Maybe 1.9 doesn't have a JIT but couldn't they add it?

<comment><USER17> Ruby has had a GC since the start; it's a conservative stop-the-world all-or- nothing non-compacting mark-and-sweep garbage collector. Meaning:

1\. It can't tell the difference between a number on the heap that happens to look like a reference to some active data, and an actual reference to some active data. Hence it has to be conservative, and assume anything that looks like a reference, is one. Rubinius has a precise GC, and so doesn't suffer from this problem, which can lead to dead objects never being collected.

2\. The GC has to stop the VM while it's running. This is probably also the case with Rubinius, however:

3\. It has to walk over every object in the VM in one go, so it gets progressively slower the more objects you have. Rubinius has a generational GC, where objects are split into pools based on how long they've been alive for, and these can be scanned individually and at different rates appropriate to their age (i.e. long-lived objects probably aren't worth checking very often).

4\. It can't move objects around; when it frees something, it leaves a gap where the object used to be. If a new object doesn't fit there, it has to go somewhere else, wasting that space. In the long run this can lead to memory fragmentation. Rubinius has a compacting GC, allowing it to fill in these holes and make better use of memory, and also better use of CPU caches.

Yes, 1.9 compiles to bytecode, and yes in theory a JIT could be added to it, but that's a pretty big project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not available on Windows yet, would be fun to have (to show others) but I suppose if I'm going to use it for anything serious then it'll be on Linux.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hooray!

</comment><comment><USER20> Cool. Is Rubinius faster than 1.8.6 or even 1.9? Was that the goal? Or is it just a 1.0 milestone where the project is compatible enough to meet the 1.8.6 ruby language spec and native libs?

<comment><USER21> The biggest goal, at least a few years ago, was to have a Ruby that is substantially implemented in Ruby, as opposed to being a hundred thousand lines of C under the hood. Paradoxically, this can result in speedups, since it's easier to optimize expressive, well-written code. Avi Bryant gave a talk at RailsConf a few years ago about how Smalltalk contains all the "features" of Ruby that are usually blamed for its performance woes, but still managed to be pretty fast. It's not the language features that keeps Ruby slow; it's the opaque implementation.

<comment><USER22> I think they are on the right track. Given that this is a 3 year old project, I don't think we can compare it to smalltalk implementation with years of development. I wonder how well it would compare to something like pypy and other similar projects.

<comment><USER20> Better question: What happens if companies like google start eyeballing it and putting some real money behind it.

<comment><USER23> You mean the same Google where Python beat Ruby years ago?

<comment><USER20> Can't blame them, even a year or two ago Ruby and RoR were much inferior to today. And wait till RoR3 hits the shelves full steam. Granted I hope ActiveRecord3 will include everything by default like DataMapper does but whatever...

Ruby is still in infancy stages, Python is quite old. Hell Python was the inspiration for Ruby.

I mean look at what is happening in the Javascript space. If Ruby and JRuby implementations get really f-ing fast, we will get some major backings. The problem is that instead of improving Ruby, Twitter decided to ditch it. Maybe they really didn't have the people Google has when it comes to language builders. Since google app engine runs python it is in direct google interest to make it fast. Once it starts running ruby, vuala! So don't worry, they'll get to it.

<comment><USER24> > Granted I hope ActiveRecord3 will include everything by default like > DataMapper does but whatever...

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, but Rails 3 will still be a full stack framework. Something will be chosen for everything by default.

You'll be able to fully switch out ActiveRecord for DataMapper if you wish.

> Hell Python was the inspiration for Ruby.

I've never seen this before, usually I've heard Matz saying that it's Perl. Maybe a typo?

<comment><USER25> Matz has cited a number of inspirations, including Perl, Python, Lisp, Smalltalk, Self (I think), and CLU.

He's also referred to Ruby as "Matz Lisp."

<comment><USER26> > He's also referred to Ruby as "Matz Lisp."

So when does the "enlightenment experience" Eric Raymond promised come ? Or did Matz take it all :-D</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


30 for 30: Broke - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okFEZCgE5ag

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a documentary about professional athletes who go from being millionaires to broke.</comment>


Reaction Engines begins construction of UK rocket engine test facility - <AUTHOR> https://www.reactionengines.co.uk/reaction-engines-begins-construction-uk-rocket-engine-test-facility/ <comment><USER2> I really hope this company survives/thrives in spite of brexit, I havent seen much about the relationship with ESA recently but from memory its quite separate from the EU.

<comment><USER3> Here's a short article on the issue from Feb 2017: [http://spacenews.com/u-k- could-be-locked-out-of-some-aspects...](http://spacenews.com/u-k-could-be- locked-out-of-some-aspects-of-galileo-because-of-brexit/) and a better one from last summer: [http://spacenews.com/britains-quitting-the-eu-but-will-it- be...](http://spacenews.com/britains-quitting-the-eu-but-will-it-be-forced- out-of-eu-space-programs/)

TLDR: ESA is separate from the EU, but there are significant projects like Galileo which are EU projects - and the EU wants to be built in the EU.

Surrey Satellite Technology is a UK company -- despite being majority owned by Airbus -- and currently builds the navigation payload for Galileo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry to disappoint you guys, but Reaction Engines was founded in 1989 ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_Engines_Limited](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_Engines_Limited)) and every year they issue press releases stating they are on a brink of revolutionary engine. In this 18 years they didn't produce anything that actually works. Skylon is a "design" [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_(spacecraft)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylon_\(spacecraft\))] and SABRE is a "concept under development" [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_\(rocket_engine\))].

<comment><USER5> And this is a "hardware testing": [https://www.reactionengines.co.uk/1522-2/](https://www.reactionengines.co.uk/1522-2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Brits have engineered some amazing propulsion over the years and they have some really cool tech in this engine. It's hard to see how the Skylon vehicle will be able to compete with Spacex on cost.

<comment><USER7> Why? Its supposed to be significantly more efficient, given that its breathing air for launch which enables much higher specific impulse than anything a chemical rocket even could do, and it'd have the operational advantages of being a pure single stage to orbit skyplane, which SpaceX also can't do.

Hard to imagine what else one could even _want_ a launch system to do (except perhaps to be a nuclear turborocket ala [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C46Dt-X0V8c](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C46Dt-X0V8c) , if that were politically feasable). And you can hardly say that of anything SpaceX is doing, given that those are simply incremental improvements of existing rocketry tech.

Presuming they ever manage to make it work (which is prob the big question), it should bring significantly more to cheap launch than SpaceX ever could on their current trajectory.

<comment><USER8> The real question is why would you want to waste payload capacity hauling an aeroplane into orbit.

Skylon uses that extra efficiency to haul extra components into space. Such as the wings, landing gear etc. Based on the rocket equation it will only have usable payload if the mass of the craft can be kept very low. This would require lots of new technology and materials. Even with a better engine that would be very difficult.

The thing is that all that new technology could also be used by Spacex to improve a conventional rocket. And without the extra mass you would have have much higher payload. And the payload could be used by customers and not wasted on wings.

The best way to use new engine is probably to strap it onto a conventional rocket. Less complex and more payload. And maybe that extra payload could allow second stage reuse. That would make things even more competitive.

<comment><USER9> A payload hit is acceptable if the reusability is very great: they can just truck up bits of spacecraft, fuel for depots, crew modules and so on in many runs.

A fully-featured spaceplane is a paradigm-shifter. SpaceX decided not to try because the tech was too far down the line. Novel propulsion takes decades to prove out, and Reaction are working through it reasonably. The sticking point was the hypersonic precooler, and they've cracked that. A whole-engine scale demonstrator should be a relatively straightforward next step.

<comment><USER8> Why is a space plane a paradigm-shifter?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I recall seeing this technology in Popular Science many years ago. It's a great idea but they have yet to demonstrate a full scale prototype.

There's probably a lot of technical hurdles just to making a whole new type of engine. But they also need to design and build a new space plane. That's a brand new supersonic airframe.

There's a lot of engineering needed here. I hope we can see some indication of progress soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> They don't need to start from a spaceplane - an air-breathing booster that could give a delta-v higher than a Falcon 9 and still land would certainly be cool enough.

If they manage to get enough speed from the air-breathing phase, they may even have a single-stage-to-orbit + VTOL vehicle. Now that's a seriously cool tech to have.

The reason we do aerobraking and parachutes is that our engines are not efficient enough and we can't carry enough propellant to decelerate to a landing but if we have engines efficient enough, we can have a single stage drop a payload close enough to LEO that a cheap second stage can finish the job and the booster can still do a powered landing after circling the planet once, we have a game changer.</comment></comment>