Why the sun is a poor dumping ground for nuclear waste (2010) - gus_massa
http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/shooting_for_the_sun/
======
leni536
> To reach the Sun you need to subtract 100 percent of Earth’s orbital
> velocity; to reach solar escape velocity you need only add 41 percent to it.

You could send the waste with near solar escape velocity to travel on a really
long ellipsis trajectory, at the furthest point you can get rid of the
remaining kinetic energy with minimal fuel and let the waste fall back
straight into the Sun. Subtracting Earth's orbital velocity is by far not the
optimal method to reach the Sun.

~~~
kllrnohj
A straight Hohmann transfer requires ~0.5-1% more dV than a bi-elliptic
transfer. Calling this "by far" not optimal is by far not correct. So instead
of 32 km/s you need 31.68 km/s. This changes nothing.

~~~
benjoffe
Where did you get the "0.5-1%" figure from? That may be true in some cases,
but not in this extreme case, here it's closer to half the delta-v (which, due
to the rocket equation is enormously less difficult to achieve).

Solar escape velocity is about 16.5km/s* , and since ~99% of this manoeuvre's
delta-v budget is used at launch the entire delta-v cost is asymptotically
this value.

*[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Launch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Launch) (see paragraph 4)

~~~
pdonis
_> Solar escape velocity is about 16.5km/s_

No, it's about 42 km/s, i.e., sqrt(2) times the Earth's orbital velocity
around the Sun, which is 30 km/s. New Horizons was launched to take as much
advantage of the Earth's orbital velocity as it could, so that the rocket
didn't need to provide all of the 42 km/s of delta-v needed for solar escape.

(You could use the same trick for your scheme, of course. The main issue I see
with your scheme is that it greatly lengthens the time that the waste is out
in space.)

------
aqme28
I always thought the biggest reason was that if a rocket carrying nuclear
waste exploded in our atmosphere, it would be catastrophic. It's a lot less
risky to just bury it underground and pray it never leaks.

~~~
cpeterso
Or bury the nuclear waste in oceanic trenches. It is out of the way and future
generations won't stumble upon it when humans forget where they buried all
this stuff.

~~~
sbov
Do we know enough about our oceans to know that there would be no harm from
this?

~~~
mindcruzer
No

~~~
bcmit
Really? Water is just about the best radiation shield in existence. It would
only affect the ~10 feet of ocean immediately around it.

~~~
mahranch
It's not about the actual radiation, that's easy to deal with. It's about the
containers cracking or leaking and having that stuff floating around in the
ocean, contaminating our food and the environment. Even the strongest
container we can make is still susceptible to the corrosive effects of the
ocean.

If you're going to bury it in the ocean, your best bet would be to bury it
near a subduction zone. But then you have the earth itself possibly being the
cause of the container cracks and leaks.

------
tbrownaw
_Every time the question of nuclear waste disposal comes up, someone is sure
to say, “Why not shoot it into the Sun?” It seems so obvious._

Or we could get over our stupid fear of recycling. The stuff's only hazardous
because we haven't taken all the energy out of it yet.

 _Nuclear fuel reprocessing is performed routinely in Europe, Russia and
Japan._
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing)

~~~
btilly
One of the downsides of reprocessing is that it makes plutonium easy to
separate out in a form that is good for making nuclear bombs. Therefore it
represents a nuclear proliferation risk.

~~~
opo
None of the countries that have developed nuclear weapons have gotten their
plutonium from nuclear waste because there are much easier ways to get weapons
grade plutonium.

Form the wikipedia page: "Ordinarily (in spent nuclear fuel), plutonium is
reactor-grade plutonium. In addition to plutonium-239, which is highly
suitable for building nuclear weapons, it contains large amounts of
undesirable contaminants: plutonium-240, plutonium-241, and plutonium-238.
These isotopes are extremely difficult to separate, and more cost-effective
ways of obtaining fissile material exist (e.g. uranium enrichment or dedicated
plutonium production reactors)"
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste)

As the wikipedia article points out a very good approach to deal with nuclear
waste would be burn the waste in pyrometallurgical fast reactors like the
proposed Integral Fast Reactor. (For background on the Integral Fast Reactor:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor))

Trying to throw the waste in the sun would be one of the worst possible
imaginable ways of dealing with nuclear waste.

~~~
mahranch
> None of the countries that have developed nuclear weapons have gotten their
> plutonium from nuclear waste

Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean someone won't in the
future.

You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that
someone may not _want_ to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty
bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not.

~~~
tbrownaw
_You 're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that
someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty
bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not._

So which is worse for that, having a fuck-ton of seriously nasty stuff sitting
around _forever_ , or concentrating the nasty stuff to a much more manageable
volume and then fairly quickly shipping it off to be _destroyed_ (in a way
that just happens to provide useful energy out of the deal).

------
kavalec
Use the Jules Verne solution: a cannon.

A solar powered mass-driver could sling a steady stream of pellets from Earth
orbit into Solar non-orbit using existing technology.

That being said, burying it deep near the the start of a plate subduction zone
makes at least as much sense.

~~~
joe_the_user
What does "Solar non-orbit" mean?

What would happen, if you managed to make sure all this stuff got escape
velocity, is you would wind-up with a bunch of junk (literally) in an orbit
around the sun that would inherently pass through Earth's orbit - as long as
it doesn't have solar escape velocity, once a thing is moving on pure
momentum, it is in orbit and since the orbit fairly closely an ellipse so the
object will return. As the article mentions, probably not when the earth
return to the point. But if you keep throwing stuff "out there", the chances
of a return are naturally going to increase.

~~~
jheriko
i think he just means any old trajectory that doesn't come back...

its not a completely rubbish idea.

if you shoot the right way you could end up cancelling enough orbital velocity
to intersect the sun before any return to earth.

------
parineum
Even if it were actually difficult to get to the sun, there are other options
that are nearly as effective.

Jupiter would be just as good of a dump or we could just launch on an extra
solar trajectory. Hell, we could just put it on a large, non-equatorial orbit
around the Earth and it would be effectively gone with the added benefit of
being able to recover it should we find a reason to. Space is a big enough
place to dump an Earth's worth of trash.

The only problems are cost and the risk of explosion during launch.

~~~
ignostic
Ehhh, orbit's not a great idea, especially lower-earth orbit. There's already
enough space junk in our orbit right now that we're running the risk of an
orbital chain-reaction. The chain reaction could take out most of our
satellites. I'm sure radioactive waste in our upper atmosphere wouldn't be a
good thing, either.

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

~~~
jrlocke
You are vastly underestimating the space of possible orbits and vastly
overestimating the size of debris and satellites.

~~~
tlb
Or possibly you are overestimating the probability of impact beyond which this
should be considered too risky.

------
iwwr
It could be much lower than that if you take roundabout trajectories with
gravity assists from Earth, Venus and Mercury. Not having to establish orbit
is definitely a plus.

Besides, nuclear waste is still mostly unburned fuel which could be
reprocessed and burned for power in special reactors.

~~~
tsotha
>Besides, nuclear waste is still mostly unburned fuel which could be
reprocessed and burned for power in special reactors.

That was my reaction. Future generations will want to use that stuff for fuel.
There's no reason to launch it into space.

~~~
hydrogen18
Well yes, it could be fuel in the future.

But at current in the US it is stored in holding pools all over the country.
None of those are getting any larger, although they are frequently reworked to
allow better use of the volume available.

Very little of it is 'weapons grade' and not many people have access to the
equipment to weaponize it into a nuclear weapon. But turning any of it into a
dirty bomb is trivial if you can steal it.

There is also the problem of accidents, why by definition are unavoidable.

So, you really do want to get rid of the fuel. Launching it into space is
impractical. But it should be stored in a difficult to access facility where
the chance of it escaping is minimal. The US federal government collected
billions for the construction of such a facility, but it was never completed.
So as a result, we have fuel scattered all over the US.

~~~
tsotha
Oh, we definitely should open Yucca Mountain. Maybe with Reid out of the
Senate it will happen. But we definitely don't want to "get rid" of it.

~~~
hydrogen18
Yes, but unfortunately logic and reason don't factor into the decision making
around nuclear energy policy.

People love to point scream and shout about the dangers of nuclear energy. In
conversation I've noticed that people think of nuclear energy as
interchangeable with nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are incredibly difficult
to build compared to a nuclear fission reactor. The experimental data you need
to build one either requires numerous tests or stealing it from a government.
Nuclear reactors on the other hand, can be very simple. The simplest reactors
are just lumps of radioactive material carefully bonded to thermoelectric
devices! The biggest risk from a conventional nuclear reactor is a steam
explosion and the dispersal of radioactive material. I reckon the second
biggest risk is having tons (quite literally) of spent fuel laying around the
country for no good reason. The storage ponds aren't 100%, accidents will
happen. For most of the ponds if the cooling systems went offline the water
would boil away and then the fuel would self-heat till it started to oxidize.
At that point you've basically got hundreds of miniature fallout generators
going. You better hope the structure above the pond is airtight because no one
is going to be entering it again in this century.

The same group of people that scream and shout about nuclear energy being
unsafe seem to actively ignore the dangers of conventional energy generation.
For example, steam explosions are still a risk to the employees operating the
plant. But I guess their lives don't matter? The pollution from coal isn't
exactly helping the environment. Then there is this matter of what to do with
all of the coal dust after it is burnt. You know, the same coal ash that over
1 billion gallons recently flooded an area of Tennessee. This contaminated a
river, people's land, and destroyed their homes.

Even if we ceased 100% of nuclear energy generation today, we still need Yucca
Mountain to deal with the spent fuel we already have. It seems that some
groups in the US believe that if they scream loudly enough, the problems of
the world will simply go away.

Also there is this issue of the fact that the energy consumers and the
taxpayers already paid for the fucking thing but aren't getting any of the
benefits. At this point it is basically just a boondoggle.

------
_ak
Anybody who's tried doing that in KSP knows how hard it is.

------
ChuckMcM
Back in high school I wrote a program that would let you pilot your ship in
orbit around the earth and try to dock with things. I discovered just how
annoying the physics of spaceflight can be!

Given the magnetic field of the Sun, one wonders if you could use a terminator
tether [1] to get the remaining delta-v.

[1]
[http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/2.3565](http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/2.3565)

------
rrss1122
We can make it to Mercury. In fact, putting a spacecraft in orbit around
Mercury is made more difficult because of the need to decelerate against the
Sun's gravity.

If you look at the Wikipedia page for the MESSENGER mission, you'll see they
tackled that problem by using gravity assists from Earth, Venus, and Mercury
to reduce MESSENGER's relative velocity with Mercury and allow it to go into
orbit. These gravity assists greatly reduced the propulsion requirements.

~~~
rosser
I'm not sure how much I like the idea of using the Earth for a gravity assist
on a _nuclear waste_ payload. Getting that one wrong (anyone remember the
meters vs. feet debacle with a Mars probe?) wouldn't end well...

~~~
skrause
Well, we have done at least one Earth gravity assist with a nuclear payload in
the past. There also was some criticism about it back then:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens#Plutoni...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini%E2%80%93Huygens#Plutonium_power_source)

------
fleitz
This is why you'd use gravity braking to do the work for you...

You just have to change direction, not slow yourself down, as long as your
path intersects the sun you're done... we have sent spacecraft to the sun...
it's not beyond our technical capabilities.

Basically, it's like flying into a banked curve... as long as you're pointed
at the Sun when you exit the curve you're going to hit the sun with out
needing to bleed 30km/s.

The fundamental reason why it doesn't work is because it's really expensive
get stuff into space...

If it was difficult to hit things with large gravitational forces we wouldn't
see very many comets in the night sky...

~~~
Crito
> _" If it was difficult to hit things with large gravitational forces we
> wouldn't see very many comets in the night sky..."_

The difficulty does not come from the mass of the Sun. It comes from Earth's
velocity around it. The waste starts out with that velocity as well. Basically
the waste is already in a stable orbit around the sun, and getting it out of
that is difficult.

~~~
fleitz
It's not in a stable orbit around the sun...

If it has velocity to escape earth's gravity then it does not match earth and
will eventually go somewhere else.

If it does not it will fall back.

Only at a Lagrange point will it not deviate from earth.

Given that it is not heading to earth we simply point it at an appropriate
trajectory to intercept the moon and/or another planet using that planet to
perform aforementioned "banked curve" which directs it to the sun at increased
or decreased velocity.

The primary cost of shipping stuff to the sun is escaping earth, once you do
that the additional fuel required to reach the sun is nowhere near the amount
of fuel required to slow from 30 km/sec to zero.

Basically all we need to do is reach the moon... from there gravity does the
work for us with the correct trajectory and a small amount of fuel to correct
the trajectory.

------
jbert
Is there any way to use drag to decay the orbit? We don't have to reach the
sun _quickly_.

The solar wind is blowing past, is it possible to "sail" against that at an
angle and - over time - dump orbital velocity and so end up in the sun?

~~~
green7ea
From my understanding, solar wind can only push the payload further away from
the sun and there is no noticeable drag in space or the earth wouldn't orbit
for very long.

You are probably thinking that you can sail upwind on a sail boat but it isn't
the same in space. The boat's keel [1] and general shape keep it going
straight which is necessary to sail upwind. That doesn't work in space.

Another factor is that a sail works much like an airplane's wing and isn't
really 'pushed' by the wind. This allows the force to be perpendicular to the
sail in some cases. To my knowledge (take this part with a grain of salt),
solar sails works by receiving momentum as the photons hit. This could only
push it away from the sun.

[http://www.real-world-physics-
problems.com/images/physics_sa...](http://www.real-world-physics-
problems.com/images/physics_sailing_2.png)

~~~
btilly
The force will be perpendicular to the surface light reflects from, not
perpendicular to the light arriving at the surface. Therefore if the sail was
mounted at a 45 degree angle to the Sun, there would be a force that reduces
angular momentum and puts the object in a spiral towards the Sun.

------
johngalt
I'm not rocket scientist, but it seems like the author is calculating a
decreasing spiral into the sun rather than an impact. Why not slingshot around
a planet and barrel into the sun with all of the orbital velocity still
intact.

~~~
kllrnohj
Because if the orbital velocity is intact you will perputally miss hitting the
sun. The only way you can hit a thing you are orbiting is to remove all the
orbital velocity (well, remove enough of the orbital velocity such that your
orbit drops low enough to scrape the surface anyway).

~~~
Terr_
The sun's pretty big... And if you're worried about overshooting, you could
probably lose a lot of velocity just braking against the solar wind.

~~~
dalke
While the solar wind gets stronger closer to the sun, it's an r-square law
that balances the r-squared force of gravity. Fun fact: If a solar sail could
be in a fixed position at Mercury orbit then it could also be in fixed
position a Neptune orbit.

Quoting from
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail),
the "total force exerted on an 800 by 800 meter solar sail, for example, is
about 5 newtons (1.1 lbf) at Earth's distance from the Sun".

The Orion space capsule is ~25 sq meters. I'll round that up to 100 sq meters
(I'm being generous), giving a breaking force of 5/64 N on the waste barge.

The capsule mass is 20 tons. Assuming the waste barge were the same mass (I'm
being generous) gives a solar gravitational force in Earth orbit of 120
newtons. This far exceeds the push from solar wind, even with wildly
optimistic numbers. (Note: there's some 50,000 tons of high-level nuclear
waste in the US.)

So no, you couldn't lose a lot of velocity just braking against the solar
wind. Not unless you've also developed effective solar sail technology.

~~~
exDM69
Your calculations seem sensible, but you're only talking about _radial_
forces, ie. countering the "downward" force of gravity with "upward" thrust of
a solar sail.

But space flight maneuvers typically use _tangential_ or almost tangential
thrust. Slowing down or accelerating the orbital motion will cause the
altitude to vary, preserving the orbital energy and angular momentum. Placing
a solar sail in a 45 degree angle from the sun will change the orbit slowly
but surely, as there will be a little tangential and radial thrust.

I still don't think it's viable for throwing anything into the sun, though.

~~~
lmm
I think it's viable. There are no other forces acting on you. Set up the solar
sail at 45 degrees "against" your orbit. You will slowly but inevitably spiral
into the sun without burning any fuel.

~~~
dalke
If you have effective solar sail technology then all my calculations are
thrown out the window.

If you don't, then the time to spiral into the sun is large. Figuring 5/64 N
on 20 tons and an orbital velocity of 30km/s gives

      t = v / a = 30 km/s / ((5/64) N / 20000 kg)
        = 245 years to cut the orbital velocity

This assumes all of the force could be used to slow the waste hauler. As
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail)
points out, the force is cos^2(theta) so the actual time at 45 degrees is

      t = 245 * (sqrt(2)/2)^2 = 490 years.

The actual time will be smaller because you only need to hit the sun, and
solar wind will get stronger. So, 350 years? As a wild-ass guess.

That same page points out that sails don't work much inside of 0.25 AU,
because the temperature can exceed the material properties of the sail. Though
I think if the apogee is inside of 0.20 AU it's good enough.

To make it worse, the solar wind fluctuates, so unless there's active control
on the rocket, its orbit will be unpredictable over the centuries. When it's
still near Earth orbit, or when it approaches Venus orbit, what are the
chances of a gravitational assist leading to an Earth-return?

With 50,000 tons of high-level waste, and 15 tons per rocket => 3,333 rockets
in uncertain orbits, the chances become much higher.

------
everettForth
This is all assuming that we don't have a space elevator.

tldr; it costs a lot of money to launch mass into space.

Sending 1 pound of water into space costs $50,000. This is more than the price
of gold on earth. A space elevator changes the economics dramatically.

~~~
nothrabannosir
No, this is about the speed of the earth relative to the sun. E.g. even if we
wanted to shoot, say, the ISS into the sun, it'd be hard. As soon as you point
it towards the sun it will go into an elliptical orbit.

------
bbcbasic
I wonder.. would the spent rocket fuel generate more power in (an appropriate)
power station than the original nuclear material?

(Assuming gravity assist is used)

------
WaxProlix
I've been curious about his last paragraph for a while - send trash out into
nowhere - and unless I'm being an idiot, it looks like we'd still be paying
(at the author's implied Saturn-V costs) ~48 million USD per short ton of
waste.

Compare this to Yucca Mountain's current cost of $9b for ~77k short tons of
storage (~$117k/sh tn) and it's still pretty awful.

We do get the ongoing benefit of no upkeep and happy NIMBYs for spacebound
waste, but there are always the downsides of making a mess in our space-
backyard (what will the aliens think when they come to visit? How
embarrassing. Almost as bad, what if it comes back a la Futurama or gets in
the way of future endeavors) and losing access to that waste if we figure out
a means of making use of waste in the future.

~~~
Crito
I don't think he is seriously suggesting that we blast nuclear waste out into
space, only pointing out that it would be easier to do than throwing it into
the sun. This emphasizes why "throw it into the sun" isn't a very good idea.

------
Houshalter
It's not that I don't believe the author is correct, but I'm having a hard
time picturing why it is true. Imagine a rocket pointed in the exact opposite
direction the earth is orbiting. So the rocket starts to orbit the sun
slightly slower than the Earth, and so the Sun's gravity would pull it closer
and closer every year.

~~~
leni536
That's not how it works. It would just place the waste on an elliptical orbit
around the Sun.

~~~
Houshalter
But aren't the vast majority of possible orbits unstable? If the Earth were
travelling just a bit slower wouldn't it slowly spiral into the sun?

~~~
lmm
No, just the opposite. Given any position and velocity relative to the Sun (or
the Earth), an object in that position at that velocity is in an "orbit" that
will be a conic section of some sort. Most of them are ellipses i.e. stable.
The only way to _not_ be in a stable orbit is to go fast enough that it
becomes a parabola or hyperbola - a flyby - or slow enough that the ellipse
becomes so narrow that it's just a straight line (or rather, narrow enough
that it hits the thing you're orbiting).

When you throw a ball it flies in a parabola, right? But actually that
parabola is just one end of a very long, narrow ellipse, with the Earth's
centre as one of the foci. If you could "turn on noclip"[1] and allow the ball
to fall through the Earth, it would already be in a stable orbit.

(If you want to get a better intuition for this kind of thing, play Kerbal
Space Program)

[1] And if the Earth were a point mass located at its centre, which it isn't.
And ignoring air resistance.

------
kenj0418
Simple: Just invent a rocket that runs on nuclear waste. Then you have all the
fuel you need to get the rocket there. (joking)

~~~
CHY872
If you were to not-quite-spend all the fuel, you could use
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket),
which coincidentally would be your best chance at getting to the Sun.

------
WayneS
Ok, continuing the argument from the article and not discussing practical
methods of waste disposal...

Instead of using chemical rockets for the entire dV how about using a rocket
to get into orbit and then using an ion engine driven by solar energy to lose
the additional 20km/s? It seems the "fuel" weight required would be
significantly less.

------
tim333
You could swing by Jupiter and use the pull from that to bend the trajectory
back to the Sun. That's what they did in practice for the Ulysses probe:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(spacecraft)#Jupiter_sw...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_\(spacecraft\)#Jupiter_swing-
by)

------
mrfusion
Offshoot topic but noting how things we launch from earth already have all the
energy they need to orbit the sun, why isn't it really easy to get to earth
sun Lagrange points? It seems like we could kind of just float over there
since we don't need any additional speed to orbit the sun.

~~~
DrStalker
You can't just "float over" to another point along your orbit; to move the
forward Legrange point you would have to slow down, causing you to drop into a
lower orbit which moves around the sun quicker, then speed up to a larger
orbit that intersects with the desired Lagrange point and then finally speed
up again when you reach that point to stabilize the orbit.

To try this in Kerbal space Program: place two craft into the same equatorial
orbit, but with one 1/6th of an orbit ahead of the other. Now make them dock.

It's both counter intuitive and easy once you know how.

~~~
mrfusion
Ok, that kind of makes sense. But as an extreme example let's say you moved
out to earth sun L4 leaving from earth and moving at 1MPH*.

Once you got there, you're there besides station keeping. So in theory there's
no deltaV required? That's what confused me.

Of course moving at 1MPH you'd be expending energy fighting earth's gravity
until you got there. But I think that's a separate issue.

~~~
DrStalker
If you accelerate by 1MPH you're not in the same orbit anymore. It's not like
driving on earth, where you can go faster along the same path by pushing the
accelerator down; the speed you're moving at is a component of your orbit.

------
nitin_flanker
Could anyone here please explain why every time the rocket will return to
Earth’s orbit and,the Earth won’t be there.

Does our solar system is constantly moving? Isn't it stationary with sun at
center bending space and time and making planets to revolve around it?

------
tomphoolery
This article just ruined every Star Trek episode for me where they fly a ship
into a star.

~~~
nothrabannosir
To be fair, the problem here is that the waste is already in orbit (by virtue
of being part of earth). His point is that if you want to hit the sun: don't
orbit it. To stop an orbit around the sun is a hell of a job.

But if you're not orbiting in the first place: no problem.

------
geophile
Why does it have to be the sun? Why not just perpendicular to the sun/earth
plane?

~~~
tempestn
You'd still be in orbit, and would still cross the plane at regular intervals,
so you wouldn't "get rid of it", as with flying out of the solar system or
into the sun.

------
yCloser
Just leave earth SOI, and the vessel will be orbiting the sun. the orbit will
naturally decay in years/centuries/+

just try not to hit mercury too much. but even if this happens, not that big
of a problem

------
kolbe
Creating all that force ourselves isn't the only option. We could use gravity
assists from Venus and/or Mercury to alter velocity directly towards the sun,
too.

------
jheriko
the article claims that the sun is super inaccessible compared to escape
velocity, but they are extremely closely related. as an orbit gets more and
more ellipitcal, the delta-v required to get the orbit to cut through the sun
drops (for a well timed burn at aphelion), in the limit of escape velocity
this delta-v vanishes to zero... the implication is that they are comparable
in cost, if you were to use such a method to drop something into the sun.

------
a_c
And I thought the 11km/sec escaped velocity was intended to shoot rocket
without any further fuel supply nor any air-resistant? No?

------
WalterBright
Just set it down at the south pole.

------
acadien
It draws some doubt that the author lists accelerations in units of km/sec,
not km/sec^2.

~~~
tesseract
If you read "delta-v" for "acceleration" throughout the article, the whole
thing makes more sense.

~~~
maxerickson
The author always says "an acceleration", which is the same thing as delta-v.

I have no idea how particular it is to phrase it that way, but it isn't
confused.

~~~
acadien
The author says multiple times: "an acceleration of [X] km/s is required",
maybe they meant to imply that the magnitude of the change of the velocity?

~~~
maxerickson
Accelerating at some rate km/ss for a period of s results in km/s. So the net
result of "an acceleration" can be expressed as a velocity.

(what it comes down to is that "an" is an indefinite article and always
modifies a noun and km/ss is described by the verb acceleration. Yay English.)

------
kghose
Superman can do it.

~~~
TeMPOraL
So can Jebediah Kerman.

------
sabnffl
"Technology solves all problems!" \- every YC commenter

~~~
FroshKiller
This is a crappy comment. It would have been funnier, though, if you had
posted something like, "I could solve this with a Perl one-liner."

------
chucksmart
Why not just send it into deep space?

------
MichaelCrawford
Sometimes rockets fail. I mean like they blow up on launch.

When the Shuttle was first commissioned, my concern at the time was that
America's most reliable rocket was the delta, which failed every thirty
launches.

When it's nuclear waste, it's not good enough just to have launch insurance.

~~~
cryptoz
> When the Shuttle was first commissioned, my concern at the time was that
> America's most reliable rocket was the delta, which failed every thirty
> launches.

You were right to be concerned. The shuttle had "a 40% vehicular failure rate
and a flight failure rate of 1.5%", killing more people than any other space
vehicle. [1]

[1]
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2012/04/18/5-hor...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2012/04/18/5-horrifying-
facts-you-didnt-know-about-the-space-shuttle/)

~~~
whoopdedo
And the space shuttles carried many more people than other space vehicles
except for the current generation of Soyuz.

You don't measure failure rate by number built divided by number crashed. You
measure by how much it's used. The more often something is used the more
likely it it that it will fail one of those times.

~~~
wukerplank
The problem with nuclear waste is that you need a 0% failure rate or you might
detonate a dirty bomb in the atmosphere. It doesn't matter how often it worked
if it fails once.

Also it's a great target for sabotage for radicals.

~~~
lmm
> you might detonate a dirty bomb in the atmosphere

Which would put less radioactive material up there than coal power plants
already do as a matter of course.

~~~
wongarsu
But it's a bit hard to say at which altitude the failure would occur. Plenty
of rockets have exploded on the launch pad.

------
curiously
omg....when I was 10 I wrote a story about how humanity takes nuclear waste to
the sun. tl;dr results in nuclear apocalypse destroying the entire solar
system.

------
apalmer
Its generally not worth it to give smart answers to dumb questions. I guess
its a pet peeve of the author though.

~~~
mynameishere
I would argue it's a waste not because it's stupid, but because it's just
extraordinarily trite:

[http://www.reddit.com/search?q=nuclear+waste+sun&restrict_sr...](http://www.reddit.com/search?q=nuclear+waste+sun&restrict_sr=off&sort=relevance&t=all)

...variations include "why can't we put garbage in the sun", "why can we put
nuclear waste in volcanoes", etc. It's a great question coming from a 6-year-
old, but if an adult asks it, he's simply not the kind of person who will
spend one second in critical thought, or in researching anything himself. So,
yeah, not worth it.

~~~
washadjeffmad
You're right of course, we're free to determine how to spend our time. And you
thought it worth yours to search for reddit discussions to post here to
illustrate why you felt this topic not worth your time, perhaps as a lone
beacon to guide future generations who might be tempted towards the folly of
exploring questions which have answers you already know.

Discussing good explanations for a topic, no matter how common, is not a waste
for anyone who is interested, especially any curious people who might
currently be lacking the tools to solve it themselves. I don't believe any of
us comes fully equipped.


Going All-the-Way with the Client-Server App Concept - yannis
http://peter.michaux.ca/articles/going-all-the-way-with-the-client-server-app-concept
======
JoeAltmaier
I agree -splitting the app into client- and server-side pieces is like cutting
a banana long-ways. Also there's the performance problem. The web link has
erratic latency resulting in: hesitant response to form entry, lack of hour-
glass support, unpredictable page updates. When it works its fine; when it
lags its dang irritating. Worse, its hard to even code the app to accomodate
lag: the app lags when LOADING the next phase of the app, so "nobodys home"
when it lags to even respond to the lag with a progress bar or hourglass or
whatever.


Ask HN: Why does Facebook put itself under EU Data Protection Law? - rmc

Just something I was wondering about, I'm (obviously) not looking for legal advice or insights into the inner workings of Facebook
When you're signing up to a Facebook account, the terms of use ( http://www.facebook.com/legal/terms ) state, in §18(1), that:
> If you are a resident of or have your principal place of business in the US or Canada, this Statement is an agreement between you and Facebook, Inc.  Otherwise, this Statement is an agreement between you and Facebook Ireland Limited.  References to “us,” “we,” and “our” mean either Facebook, Inc. or Facebook Ireland Limited, as appropriate.
So if you're in the USA or Canada, you've a contract with a US company, else, you have a contract with an Irish company, that then has to work under EU Data Protection Laws.
But why would Facebook do this? Why not just tell everyone that they have a contract with the US company, and then you don't have to be audited by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (as they recently were). Why would they put themselves through that?
(And yes, the corporate tax rate in Ireland is 12½%, but that doesn't mean that end users need to have a contract with Facebook Ireland Ltd.)
======
jnorthrop
Facebook has operations in Ireland. As such they are subject to the EU Data
Directive[1] which gives much more control over the personal data Facebook
holds to the data subject (the user). Two things have happened to Facebook
recently:

1\. They were sued by the FTC[2] 2\. And a person, turned to a group, has been
making data subject requests to Facebook causing them some trouble[3]

All of these things lead to Facebook protecting itself legally with statements
in their terms of use. At the end of the day it is not that you are
contracting with an Irish company but globally Ireland's laws (EU Data
Directive) gives you the most rights, so they are pointing that out to you.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive>

[2] [http://www.bgr.com/2011/11/29/facebook-settles-privacy-
suit-...](http://www.bgr.com/2011/11/29/facebook-settles-privacy-suit-with-
ftc-will-submit-independent-audits-for-20-years/)

[3] <http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Objectives/objectives.html>


AR Lens Sessions Last 75 Seconds on Average - bolamike
https://arinsider.co/2019/12/02/ar-lens-sessions-last-75-seconds-on-average/
======
The_Founder
Yep, just enough time to open it, with for it to load, look around, see it is
useless and close it.


C++ vs. Lisp - fogus
http://www.ebhakt.info/blog/?p=2291
======
zachbeane
Blogspam. Copy of circa 2002 article, mirrored at:
[http://antigreen.org/vadim/ProgLanguageComparison/lisp-
cmp-w...](http://antigreen.org/vadim/ProgLanguageComparison/lisp-cmp-with-cpp-
java-etc/C++-vs-Lisp.html) (via "Daemerrung" here:
<http://funcall.blogspot.com/2010/05/c-vs-lisp.html>)

~~~
dasil003
Argh, that's insidious!!! Editors should change out the actual link... can
they do that?

------
Qz
Why do people feel compelled to make websites with microscopic font sizes?

edit: apparently it's a splog so that answers that.

~~~
d0mine
Readability bookmarklet might help
<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

~~~
Qz
I have it and use it, I just don't understand why people choose those tiny
fonts to begin with.

------
barrkel
The problem statement link seem dead. I believe this is it:

[http://www.flownet.com/ron/papers/lisp-
java/instructions.htm...](http://www.flownet.com/ron/papers/lisp-
java/instructions.html)

Also, the article seems to be a duplicate of this one:

[http://antigreen.org/vadim/ProgLanguageComparison/lisp-
cmp-w...](http://antigreen.org/vadim/ProgLanguageComparison/lisp-cmp-with-cpp-
java-etc/C++-vs-Lisp.html)

Is it a splog? The date on the antigreen.org version is August 2002.

~~~
Daemmerung
Most of the articles of any size on that site have been cut-and-pasted from
elsewhere. Maybe it's a splog-in-training.

------
jacquesm
Why the extreme focus on lines of code?

That's not the best metric to begin with (I used to think so too, but someone
here pointed out that gzipped source is already much better), and besides
that, there are other ways of looking at it besides 'size', such as
readability.

~~~
gruseom
Hold on there. Gzipped source is a terrible metric. It would undercount
duplicate code, the worst kind of program bloat.

Not that I'm defending LOC. If one has to count something, counting tokens
seems less susceptible to noise.

~~~
jacquesm
That's the whole point. Even if you program in a 'sloppy' way the gzip
algorithm will see that and reduce accordingly so you are comparing the
_languages_ , not the programmers stylistic elements.

Besides, the article talks about implementing the same algorithm twice in
different languages, if you went about that in a completely different way then
that would of course be problematic. But when comparing the expressiveness
between two languages you'd assume the same major structures would be present.

~~~
nostrademons
Except that some languages encourage sloppy programming. Haven't you ever
looked at some Java code where two (or more!) functions do exactly the same
thing except that the types are different? GZip would compress that down to
almost nothing, but you still have to deal with the complexity, maintenance
burden, and API bloat of having multiple versions.

It also doesn't account for language misfeatures that introduce significant
additional cognitive burden for the programmer but don't appear much in source
code. For example, manual memory management in C++ results in a bunch of
"delete x" calls in code, which would get GZipped down to very little, but
impose a very high cognitive cost on the programmer. PHP's inconsistency in
argument order doesn't show up at all in code length, but also presents a big
cognitive tax that sends you back to the reference manual all the time.

Personally, I think that the best metric of language productivity is "The
amount of information you have to keep in your head in order to write code as
fast as you can type." Unfortunately, that's nearly impossible to measure.

~~~
jacquesm
Doesn't that suggest that such code 'bloat' is actually less important than
people make it seem ?

After all, there is not much to remembering that two functions exist for the
same type, it's not like you have to remember that there is something
'completely' new, just a routing that is almost the same as another.

~~~
gruseom
If you're right, then there isn't much value in abstracting over repetitive
patterns. I'd say that is pretty decisively contradicted by the history of
software. Why have functions at all then?

~~~
jacquesm
Because it saves space and because it makes maintenance easier, and it allows
you to label a block of code with a meaningful name.

Caching also means that if you execute less code you will have better
performance.

The actual instructions can be interpreted serially, in fact when you're 'desk
checking' that is exactly what you do, to unwind the way the code is written
to the serial stream that the processor is executing.

------
dman
Interesting article. Over time most of lisps features (generic functions,
garbage collection) have been ported over to other languages save two -
syntactic abstraction and metaobject protocols. On syntactic abstraction there
seems to be genuine difference in opinion between lisp (scheme) and other
languages. Lisp is on the side of allowing programmers to invent their own
syntactic abstractions hence making their programs shorter and at times more
understandable. Other languages have largely been unwilling to make that leap
of faith because syntactic abstractions dont scale up with the number of
programmers. They also make it harder to reason about the correctness of
programs and make tools like profilers, debuggers, code steppers. So this
continues to remain a genuine point of difference which means the lisp
programs will continue to have the whizbang sleek look which other languages
will find hard to emulate. On the other hands lisp programmers will continue
to look in envy at the development tools of other "less featureful" languages.

~~~
gruseom
I'm really tired of hearing this:

 _syntactic abstractions dont scale up with the number of programmers_

... as an objection to Lisp macros. It has become the invariable staple of
these discussions and is accepted (by the people who accept it) without any
question. Yet is there any evidence for it? I don't think I've ever even seen
any evidence alleged for it.

The fact is, to justify this statement requires more than proving it's true.
You'd have to prove that this failure of syntactic abstraction to "scale up
with the number of programmers" is worse than the failure of _abstraction in
general_ to do so. Indeed, in my experience, it's _programming_ that fails to
scale up with the number of programmers.

~~~
dman
I dont know what you count as evidence but here are two eminent authorities
speaking about related topics - Turing award winner Barbara Liskov -
[http://www.infoq.com/presentations/liskov-power-of-
abstracti...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/liskov-power-of-abstraction)
(Syntactic abstraction related talk starts at minute 17).

Heres what Dijkstra has to say about something that is tangentially related
(he is talking about the importance of read time comprehensibility of code).
"My second remark is that our intellectual powers are rather geared to master
static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time
are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise
programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap
between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence
between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in
time) as trivial as possible." This is from the influential GOTO considered
harmful paper.

~~~
silentbicycle
Dijkstra's quote sounds more like an argument for defaulting to immutability
than anything about syntactic abstractions. (I happen to agree with him,
there.)

~~~
dman
"to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and
the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible". Most programmers
read programs as plain source most of the time, ie not as macroexpanded
source. If editors showed macroexpanded source code by default, things would
be different. Also macroexpansion does in practice affect the ability of the
compiler to highlight what line caused the error, or the ability to step
through code intuitively (you are stepping through macroexpanded code and
sometimes its tiresome to be able to intuitively understand how that relates
to code that you wrote).

------
d0m
I have to agree that even thought STL is extremely powerful, it makes program
extremely verbose.

But, in my opinion, the real reason C++ code seems so verbose is because of
the lack of closures. In C++, when you need one, you have 2 choices: either
manually coding everything that would be in the closure or create a totally
new function.

In fact, in the new c++2k10, it could be interesting to have a STL-like but
with closures instead.. so one can do: some_sequence.sort_by(_1 > _2);

or: foreach(sequence, cout << _1 << endl); that's, again in my opinion, way
better than: for (int i = 0; i < sequence.size(); i++) { cout << sequence[i]
<< endl; } and again still better than: for (list<int>::size_type i = 0; i <
sequence.size(); i++) { etc..}

~~~
wuch
Actually his example can be written quite succinctly (but in general case
closures would be much more expressive):

copy(words.rbegin(), words.rend(), ostream_iterator<string>(cout));

------
tmsh
In case you're curious about 'EasySTL'

[http://web.archive.org/web/20070515062100/http://userpages.u...](http://web.archive.org/web/20070515062100/http://userpages.umbc.edu/~bcorfm1/software.html)


Kevin Mitnick Now Selling Zero-Day Exploits - privong
http://www.wired.com/2014/09/kevin-mitnick-selling-zero-day-exploits/
======
kauffj
People will decry this, but I'd argue a free and open market for
vulnerabilities would be a great thing. Here's why:

1) It would result in more vulnerabilities found

This is fairly axiomatic. An open market increases the price of
vulnerabilities which in turn increases the number of vulnerabilities found
(unless you want to argue the ability to find vulnerabilities is inelastic for
some reason).

2) It would result in more vulnerabilities being disclosed to the proper
authorities rather than malicious parties

This is more debatable, but since there should always be significantly more
incentive on good actors to prevent the exploit (i.e. the software creators
and/or community) than bad actors, the good actors should always win the bid.
Indeed, one could argue that it is only the _prevention_ of free negotiation
in the sale of vulnerabilities is the reason an exploit is ever sold to bad
actors (e.g. if I found a Windows vulnerability and told Microsoft $10m or
else, I'm a criminal).

3) It would ultimately increase the quality of software

Given more vulnerabilities are found and more vulnerabilities would be
disclosed to good actors, the quality of software increases.

I believe that 2) is essentially the Coase theorem
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem)),
but I am only an arm-chair economist. Also, I'm not sure that what Mitnick is
doing actually is a free and open market for vulnerabilities.

~~~
hawkice
I upvoted, not because I agree, but because I believe the people downvoting
you are downvoting because they disagree and not because your comment
shouldn't be heard.

Imagine he had said: I believe a free and open market for weapons would be a
good thing, because it would reduce the number of defenseless people, would
result in a power imbalance that puts generally-okay actors at an advantage
(say what you will, but the mob doesn't have 1% of the resources the US
government does), and would therefore reduce crime.

I do not personally find that argument compelling (and it is of identical
structure to the above), but me disagreeing with it does not mean it isn't of
sufficient quality for Hacker News.

~~~
tlrobinson
I don't think the weapons analogy is a good one. For the developer of the
software the purchase of the "weapon" is also essentially makes all other
instances of that weapon useless forever (assuming customers patch promptly).

Perhaps restricting the analogy to nuclear weapons would make sense. Only
nation states (software companies) and terrorists (malicious hackers... and
perhaps intelligence agencies) would be interested in purchasing such weapons.

~~~
hawkice
I think that is one of many salient differences between the scenarios.

My thought is: if one argument is good and another is bad, clearly the reason
for the difference does not exist within the properties they share. It must
exist where the arguments are different, or more likely in this case (as what
the poster said and what I said are so similar), in the outside world of facts
and understanding.

But if the shape of the argument allows for things that may successfully
convince you, then clearly that information is not enough to dismiss it
outright. It should be the start of a dialog with the parent comment.

Now, for something completely different:

If, for some reason, you want to actually engage _me_ on this particular
policy issue, angle your thought at this: my understanding is that it's 2014,
and if you want to regulate the information people share or sell over the
internet you've accepted a challenge I do not envy.

I would be particularly skeptical you could do this without building a
comprehensive computer spying system and perhaps outlawing crypto (it's been
tried), as you're trying to read communications of highly security-conscious
people.

As for if Mitnick is a good person (or similar things under discussion here),
I have not met him.

~~~
razster
If and when you do meet him, just take all he says with a grain of salt. Very
full of himself :)

------
drzaiusapelord
It amuses me to hear how middle-class people are baffled by the fetishization
of criminality in hip-hop culture, when we fetishize the same type of assholes
in our culture. Mitnick is a criminal and all the pro-hacking sympathies have
been wasted on a very, very undeserving person. Funny how easily you can
manipulate public opinion with the right PR and anti-government message.
Everyone wants to be the rebel against "the system." Everyone seems to think
they're the Ayn Rand hero amongst the idiots, when in reality, the rebels and
the intellectually vain are easily co-opted politically. The rise of
libertarianism in geekdom seems to fall under the same dynamic.

~~~
rickdale
I was fooled into this when his first book was released, "The Art of
Deception". I think I read the first three pages and heart sank because it
wasn't a book about computer stuff really at all and I started thinking this
guy is a fraud. but mostly I was fooled by marketing. (I was 12 at the time).
I just remember being very let down by the book and not being a fan of Mitnik
for that reason.

The comment section of this post has an underlying anger towards the hi-
jacking of the word 'hacker' as it was and is applied to kevin mitnik and thus
misunderstood by the public waaaaay too often.

~~~
malexw
Interesting, I had the exact same reaction as you. Bought the book (along with
Michal Zalewski's Silence on the Wire), got less than a chapter in, and put it
down in frustration. I've since wondered if I should go back and give it
another chance. Sounds like no?

For what it's worth, I really enjoyed Zalewski's book. He seems like a really
smart guy.

~~~
robin_reala
Silence On The Wire is an excellent book: both a good read and also
technically informative. I’d highly recommend it.

------
mhurron
"Mitnick became a symbol of government oppression in the late 1990s, when he
spent four and a half years in prison and eight months in solitary confinement
before his trial on hacking charges. The outcry generated a miniature industry
in “Free Kevin” T-shirts and bumper stickers."

I wonder if money could be made selling 'Fuck Kevin' shirts and bumper
stickers now.

Incidentally, Fuck Kevin.

~~~
westernmostcoy
There actually were "Fuck Kevin" stickers all over DEFCON a few years ago.

~~~
mhurron
Well damn. I almost might have been motivated to do something.

------
chubot
_" My clients may use them to monitor your activities? How do you like them
apples, Chris?"_ \-- Mitnick to ACLU technologist, last line of article

Wow what a first class dick. He's implying that he will be glad to sell zero
days to the government to illegally monitor ACLU activities (e.g. free speech,
etc.)?

~~~
dennissmith
Look at Mitnick's twitter feed. He clarified that the comment was just a "fuck
you" in response to Chris you are a felon comment. Mitnick said he wasn't
serious.

------
saosebastiao
I've always thought it would be a just punishment for a neutral, but
government arbitrated, third party to hold a highest bid auction for zero-day
exploits, where the breached company has the opportunity to buy back their bad
security at a market price. I feel as though making it public and legal would
force larger targets to make better security decisions, instead of the current
status quo of letting them off with tiny fines if anything at all.

~~~
andrewljohnson
+1 for the creative thinking. We need the market forces improving security,
but at the same time, brokering for profit seems imperfect.

~~~
opendais
Eh, just require all profits above $XX million to go to paying down the
national debt. Its a government sponsored monopoly that he is suggesting, its
reasonable to cap its profits.

------
vtlynch
“Researchers find them, they sell them to us for X, we sell them to clients
for Y and make the margin in between.”

A glorified reseller and scumbag. Pathetic.

~~~
depingus
Worse than a reseller. If you read his website, it turns out he's just a
broker. He doesn't actually buy them from the researcher and then try to sell
them. He just brokers a deal between the researcher and the buyer (if he can
find one); taking an exorbitant fee in the process.

~~~
dobbsbob
That's exactly what thegrugq does too. Tomorrow if I find an iOS bug that's
exploitable I don't have a rolodex of contacts to sell it to hence the need
for this service. As a middle man he can confirm the bug hasn't already been
discovered and is generally trusted not to keep a copy himself and hack the
planet with it after sale. This arrangement protects the seller too from
revealing their exploit code to the buyer before payment. Anybody could create
a Tor market for auctioned exploits but somebody has to verify the goods first
or you get swamped with junk offers.

------
raverbashing
Well, this is what happens when researchers are snubbed by software vendors.

I don't agree with the attitude and sale of vulnerabilities, but if someone
approaches the vendor and get the responses "this is not a vulnerability" or
"why are you hacking our software, we're calling the authorities" this is
where it ends up...

~~~
VikingCoder
...but then you end up with the question of "what's a fair price?"

I don't know what to do about it, either.

About the best I can come up with is to support software that I feel makes the
best effort they can to defend against exploits.

~~~
wdewind
I'm not sure you do. White hat the price is free, the only request here is
that you don't sue me for pointing out a hole in your system.

~~~
VikingCoder
No dice.

/smirk

------
josefresco
For those wanting to criticize Mitnick's actions, what I gather from the
following quote is that there is an existing "industry" around finding, and
selling these exploits...

"Researchers find them, they sell them to us for X, we sell them to clients
for Y and make the margin in between."

Can anyone shed light on these "researchers" and how they sell their exploits
now? Or is this just a friendly way of saying "we pay hackers for exploits and
then blackmail vendors"?

~~~
danielweber
They generally don't blackmail the vendors. Someone paying $100,000 wants to
get in someplace.

I can't say I like the money-for-exploits thing, but one good thing is that
it's made most companies be very nice to people to want to voluntarily report
bugs. Silver lining and all that.

------
andrewljohnson
My initial thought was "this should be illegal" \- but if there's no market
for exploits, security will remain poor. So, this sort of business is a bump
on the road to global security, which I have some hope we're heading towards.

Either way, an exploit market is a grimy business, basically war profiteering.
I wonder who is off-limits to sell to - certainly the Iranians, but who else,
and who decides who is evil and who is good? People will _die_ from some of
these sales.

I think we'll see pervasive encryption and P2P (blockchain-based) applications
that will push back tyranny a bit. There will be technological solutions to
things like secret legal proceedings and warrantless wiretaps. And by pushing
computation back out to decentralized nodes, there won't be such juicy targets
to attack.

~~~
dmethvin
> "this should be illegal"

Governments define legality, and governments are likely to be some of
Mitnick's best clients. Funny thing is, if I were Iran's government I would be
concerned about buying exploits there because for all I know Mitnick has
double-crossed me and given the US government info on the exploit and how to
neutralize or detect it.

Pervasive encryption only helps if the endpoints doing the encryption aren't
compromised, and this type of service is aimed at those endpoints.

~~~
apetresc
That's irrelevant. Governments are in the habit of doing lots of things that
would be illegal for me and you to do. For example, jail systems can exist
while it's still illegal for me to keep people locked up in my basement.

------
ascendantlogic
I'm old enough to remember this guy's moment in the sun by getting himself
arrested. It was easy to fall into the "Free Kevin" mindset but now he's just
trading on the name to make money. It's hard to keep that same "fuck the man"
vibe when you become the man.

EDIT: I realize he's been trading on his name for a while now but I was cool
with it when he was a "white hat".

~~~
wavefunction
He wasn't ever a white hat, grey at best.

~~~
ascendantlogic
Hence my quotes.

------
at-fates-hands
So the same people who support Silk Road and black markets suddenly say,
"Yeah, Fuck Kevin Mitnick!" because he's a capitalist and using essentially
the same system to make some money??

~~~
Jtsummers
> So the same people who support Silk Road and black markets suddenly say,
> "Yeah, Fuck Kevin Mitnick!" because he's a capitalist and using essentially
> the same system to make some money??

Who says it's the same people? Because it's people on the same site?

If you treat the commenters here as a single entity you'll really hurt your
head trying to make sense of the HN consensus. There often isn't one because
so much of this boils down to opinions about and attitudes towards
governments, economics, personal responsibility, corporate responsibility, and
laws.

------
Pxtl
... I think a lot of geeks might be burning their "free kevin" t-shirts.

------
sarciszewski
So, who did he buy the 0days from?

I know he didn't find them himself. The boy can't code.

[https://keenot.es/read/kevin-mitnick-is-celebrated-
nobody](https://keenot.es/read/kevin-mitnick-is-celebrated-nobody)

~~~
sp332
_Unlike Mitnick, Gonzalez is still in prison and doesn 't have speaking gigs
that cost (from a leaked email in Zero For 0wned 2) $18,500 USD plus business
class travel and expenses for one hour of speaking and 15 minutes of Q&A._

Sounds like Mitnick is well ahead of Gonzalez, there.

~~~
sarciszewski
Depends what you mean by "ahead". They're both scumbags who deceive others for
personal gain.

------
boomskats
It's all very nice hoping that a free market for this kind of thing will
improve security, but I don't see how that's going to happen. Government
agencies are probably going to be his top customers... let's face it, they
obviously have more funding for this kind of thing than they know what to do
with, and it saves them having to do any hard work.

It's going to bring way way way more detriment than it is benefit, especially
if his clients start looking at using semi-legal tactics to protect their
investments.

------
joshfraser
The prevalence of 0-day exploits and the booming marketplaces for them are the
biggest challenge for our industry today. The economic incentives mean that
the worst vulnerabilities will increasingly be sold instead of responsibility
reported. Why report it to the company in hopes of a 5k bounty, when the US
gov will pay you 100X that for exclusive use? We're at a point now where
everything has been compromised -- the network, every OS, every browser, every
popular application. The software we all rely on can not be trusted to be
secure from governments or well-funded organizations. Having unbounded access
to every computer in the world is a frightening amount of power for any
government or organization to hold. Until we find a way to change the economic
incentives, I'm afraid the consolidation of power and the associated abuses
are only going to continue. I have no idea how we fix this.

------
Pxtl
Isn't this blackmail?

"Pay us for all your secret vulnerabilities or we'll sell them to the highest
bidder".

------
mathetic
Basically, he is doing arm trade in 21st century.

------
mindcrime
It's disappointing to see that Kevin would sell exploits to a government body,
but I don't otherwise see a problem with an exchange for exploits. I mean,
they're going to get developed and sold eitherway, whether it's here, on some
darknet forum, or whatever.

------
sauere
Not another story about this overrated dude.

Don't get me wrong, im sure hes a nice guy. But he hasn't demonstrated
anything useful for 20+ years and it seems he is mainly making a living
writing vague non-technical h4ax0r books and giving interviews. Hell, i think
he cant even code.

~~~
razster
I wouldn't say nice, just full of himself. You're below him in a sense.

------
_archon_
As an off-topic note, I'd like to see if the font is showing up as poorly for
anyone else as it is for me. The kerning is atrocious, and several rounded
lower-case letters run into each other. This article is hard to read. ea, oa,
ce...

------
blake8086
If I were, say, some sort of Global Passive Adversary, I would try very hard
to spy on Mitnick's communications. Then I could have all the vulnerabilities,
and know who is buying and selling.

I wonder if maybe that has occurred to anyone.

------
alasdair_
I was surprised by the ACLU response given that sharing source code is very
clearly free speech.

Is the ACLU of all groups really interested in stopping/censoring people from
sharing ideas?

~~~
declan
Chris, the ACLU staffer quoted in the article, is not an attorney. Chris has
likened selling 0-days to being an arms merchant -- not a bad comparison --
but I'm not aware of an ACLU policy calling for a ban on selling 0-day
exploits.

To respond to your point more broadly, the ACLU has done excellent work on
many Internet issues, and has represented me in court on multiple occasions.
But it is not a monolithic entity, its board members do not always make the
decisions you and I might prefer, and it does not always come down on the free
speech side of an issue: [http://www.volokh.com/2011/04/27/harvey-silverglate-
on-the-a...](http://www.volokh.com/2011/04/27/harvey-silverglate-on-the-aclu-
and-free-speech/)

------
carsonreinke
Why does anyone need to legitimately buy a zero-day?

~~~
eli
A "bug bounty" is kinda like a vendor buying a zero-day about its own product.

~~~
kauffj
At below market rates.

------
hokkos
His website look like very "Free Kevin" era, with Flash replaced by CSS
tricks.

------
Elizer0x0309
This again, reminds me that money can buy you anything... apart from a free
CONSCIENCE.

~~~
forgottenpass
No, but the money is a great catalyst for dreaming up a rationalization that
lets you sleep at night.

There are plenty of things in business that can be seen as unconscionable from
the outside. I find more business practices disgusting than the general
consensus of Hacker News threads, I'm kind of amused that selling exploits is
one of the places where a line seems to be forming.

~~~
Elizer0x0309
I'm pretty sure the line is drawn here because it is pretty clear why this is
wrong.

The relaxed ethics of the general consensus of the Hacker News threads is
probably due to the lack of information rather than people here having
questionable morals, or so I'd like to believe :).

------
olssy
At least this way large corporations will start paying more for their
bounties.

------
tomelders
t'would appear he cares about nothing and no-one, and has opted to use his
powers for evil.

We shall have wait and see how that works out for him.

------
misiti3780
His website needs some work

------
Canada
Let me inturrupt this fascinating discussion for an important PSA:

All of you who don't produce 0 day: You don't get to have a say. Your opinion
doesn't matter and you don't get a seat at the table, not even as an observer.

And now back to telling other people what to do with their work product...


Simple realtime CFD via Processing.js - starpilot
http://bodytag.org/smoke2/

======
starpilot
Also <http://bodytag.org/fluid3/>


Cheat Sheets for Web Design and Development - tutorialfeed
http://tutorialfeed.blogspot.com/2009/09/16-favorite-cheat-sheets-for-web-design.html
In this post I'm sharing some very excellent cheat sheets to help web designers and developers. These cheat sheets includes Photoshop, CSS, HTML, JQuery, PHP, MooTools, MySQL, Ruby on rails, Flash AS and much more.
======
mildweed
A really comprehensive list of cheat sheets and tutorials: The Web Developer's
Field Guide: <http://360voltage.com/wdfg/>


Go version 1 is released - enneff
http://blog.golang.org/2012/03/go-version-1-is-released.html
======
SpoonMeiser
"We're announcing Go version 1, or Go 1 for short"

I foresee the next version being considered harmful.

~~~
masterponomo
Ahem. Beat you by a mile (or 173 days):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3085082>

~~~
espeed
In case anyone is wondering: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful>

------
bgentry
Congrats to the Go team! I've been looking forward to this release for a
while. Go makes it easy to do some very complex things, and much of this can
be attributed to the wonderfully built standard library.

For those interested, you can run Go apps on Heroku using this buildpack:
<https://github.com/kr/heroku-buildpack-go>

_Note: you may need to use the #rc branch until its changes are merged in
master_

------
exch
I've been using Go for 2 years now. It's been a lot of fun. It certainly
brought fun back into programming for me. Very happy to see the 1.0 release
hitting the public. Congratulations to the Go team and contributors for a job
very well done!

~~~
fmstephe
My god. Go is _so_ much fun to program. Apart from it's technical pedigree
this is its most remarkable feature.

~~~
olliesaunders
Essential question: what makes it fun?

~~~
fmstephe
For me it is probably this.

It works - easy as pie. No problems building, linking or worrying about
dependencies. (it should be noted that this is a common property of hobby
projects)

It's fast, which is nice for the small boy (or girl) in all of us. It is
gratifying to make software that can run like blazes.

I get the control over memory layout that I really want. By day I am a Java
dev, by night I used to hack Erlang. Neither of these allows me to lay out an
array of structs contiguously in memory. I did this for a quad-tree
implementation and got 2X speed up on read operations. This means that all the
stuff I am reading about CPU architecture, cache-lines and latency etc. can be
experimented with in an easy to use environment. That's just pure fun and
gratification.

Comprehension. In Java I recently wrote a SOAP server (I know, lame) and it
took me an hour of XML fiddling before a more informed person told me that we
do that with annotations now.

"Which annotations? These magical ones. Ah thanks"

That is a server in Java. At the end I was as ignorant as when I began. But I
had the annotations and I had a server. This is bullshit. Programming without
learning is like eating without tasting anything. In Go I am learning as I
code - this is ecstasy. When I am confused I can jump straight into the
library source code, ever tried that in a JEE server? It is painful.

Websockets are fun. Go supports websockets in the easiest way I can imagine.

Errors. Explicit errors in Go are just great. Verbose, yes. But, the clarity
of this approach surprised me. All the networking code I have written in Java
seemed mysterious. I would hack away and end up with a block of code that
would fail from 'somewhere' inside. Errors have taught me a great deal about
the different ways my networking code can fail. This is possibly my favourite
part of Go (which makes me sound a bit boring).

Green threads are great. I'm sure plenty has been said about this. And message
passing too. I won't say more about that.

Closures are marvellous. I have to say that I had a lot of reservations about
closures in an imperative language. But if you are careful they are as safe as
anything else (in that soup of mutable state). And so much fun.

It should be noted that a lot of my complaints about Java can be remedied. I
can read a book about the latest JEE annotations (I did start reading one). I
could study the Java networking code better and learn about things that way.
But the crucial point is that Go allows me to do all of this while I do what I
like best. Hacking. I can build systems and learn at the same time.

~~~
rejewski
I too like Go. But I disagree with some of your analysis.

Java annotations aren't magical; at least no more magical than
functions/methods. They're part of packages/libraries and should be
documented. You can even write your own annotations.

I'm still not convinced that the lack of exceptions is a benefit of Go. The
verbosity of error handling is problematic and seems indicative of a need for
a better abstraction. And with respect to your issue of Java exceptions -- I
don't know what you mean by "somewhere inside". Did you examine the stack
trace?

[Edited: added "of error handling"]

------
mace
Anyone care to share their experience writing something in go? I've toyed with
it but not built anything in production.

FWIW, the go dashboard (<https://godashboard.appspot.com/>) has a number of
interesting projects.

~~~
lolcraft
I have written a bit of Go. It strikes me as sort of the Unix of programming
languages. It's very opinionated, takes some overarching concepts, mostly
channels and interfaces, then proceeds to thoroughly not care what you think
about it: refuses to have generics, lambdas and tail-call recursion like a
pro. The polar opposite of design by committee. It even enforces a True Brace
Style to keep the parser simple!

Technically, it looks good to me. The toolchain is excellent. It looks ready
for production. Programming in it is fun. It fixes most issues of compiled
languages. Go has mostly replaced Haskell, for me.

~~~
ootachi
Why would you move from Haskell to Go? There's a night-and-day difference
between them. I don't understand why you'd switch to a language because of the
features it's lacking, unless you think those features are a bad thing (and I
have yet to see a reason why generics and TCO are a bad thing).

~~~
lolcraft
Of course they are not a bad thing. It's just that Go has character. It
doesn't have generics or C++-style classes just because every other language
has them. I respect that.

~~~
ootachi
Go has C++-style classes. Anonymous fields are just C++ multiple inheritance
with a different name (and without virtual functions or downcasts).

------
TylerE
Well, they got (at least) one thing exactly right: Doing away with the
"toolchain". Having one command that can figure out how to build your code,
including downloading external dependencies, is really nice.

Pity about the whole "not having generics" thing though.

~~~
johnpmayer
With interfaces, it's pretty simple to replicate patterns like a
Container<Comparable> or Channel<Reader>, to borrow common Java syntax.
Personally, I like how it forces you to think about parametricity whenever you
want polymorphism, like most functional languages.

~~~
TylerE
But, unless I'm missing something, it's missing the supporting bits you get in
a nice functional language, like algebraic datatypes and pattern matching,
which make that style much more pleasant.

Of course, most of the functional language DO have generics, and full type
inference to boot, also.

~~~
EdiX
The ML language family does, other functional languages (the LISP family,
Erlang) don't.

~~~
TylerE
Arguably lisp doesn't NEED generics since unless you go around setting lots of
type pragmas, the typing system generally doesn't intrude.

So, in other words, Lisp doesn't have generics in the same way Python doesn't
have generics.

------
peregrine
Been playing with the weekly versions of Go for a couple weeks now. Highly
enjoying it, my biggest pet peeve was that every library had a master and
"weekly" branch which required me to manually pull down the weekly. Shouldn't
be long and I can move to master!

~~~
dchest
Doesn't go tool handles that automatically (i.e. checks out the most recent
tag compatible with the current Go version)?

~~~
peregrine
Not sure, I am very much new to the new "go" command and how it works.
Everytime I did a go get on a repo it would get the wrong version. I'd just cd
into the 3rdparty dir and then pull/checkout the weekly branch and be ok.

I figured their had to be a better way but I was pretty focused on getting
projects done.

And to be specific this was on non-standard libraries the standard libraries
provided by go worked out of the box.

~~~
rsc
The go command will use the right version but only if the person writing the
library has bothered to tag the version to use. Many people don't. Part of the
point of Go 1 is to stabilize the language. We're committing to slowing down
the rate of churn and to not changing the APIs in backwards incompatible ways
for the lifetime of Go 1 (1.1, 1.2, and so on), so now there should be much
less problem with just using tip/HEAD/whatever in the repositories without
tags.

------
Meai
I'm still wishing that we could embed Go into a multithreaded c application,
just like we can with the JVM and Mono. I would like to use Go as a
"scripting" language. I have seen a thread in the mailing list that someone
was working on it on a personal basis, but I can't find it anymore. It doesn't
seem to be in high demand.

~~~
insertnickname
Why not just write all of it in Go?

~~~
Meai
I have working, tested, high performance software in C. Throwing all that away
and taking the risk of having Go underperform or be buggier than my previous
solution is just not acceptable.

------
jasonlotito
If anyone from the Go team reads this,
<http://golang.org/doc/go_tutorial.html> linked to from the blog gives a file
not found error.

~~~
mace
The Go tour (<http://tour.golang.org/>) is a pretty good introduction to the
language.

It provides an interactive in-browser panel to try out the language while
presenting its features.

~~~
slug
The "install go" link on the "Go offline" page gives "file not found:
/go/install".

~~~
mdaniel
You do realize that telling HN is not an appropriate way to have that bug
fixed, right?

I know lots of Googlers hang out here, but your comment is buried pretty deep.

~~~
seunosewa
They responded.

------
iamgopal
How good is go compare to c/c++ ? ( in terms of speed especially ? )

Can we now say that Google Chrome can be written in Go and it will be faster
and/or stable ? ( not saying it is not already. ).

Congrats to the team, just started using go yesterday and loving it.

~~~
chmike
The day Androïd will be written in go, we will see a significant performance
boost and battery lifetime extension. I don't program for Androïd just because
I can't bare eclipse. An IDE as simple and efficient as QtCreator would
generate a conversion tsunami.

~~~
ootachi
Nonsense. You would hate Android written in Go, because of the GC pauses.
Dalvik has a concurrent garbage collector; Go has a stop-the-world one.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Only because that's all that's been implemented. They're well aware of GC and
compiler optimizations being a target for future versions of Go.

------
melling
Hitting 1.0 should convince more people to use it in production. However,
getting any new language in an organization is always a struggle. Is there a
list of organizations that currently use it in production?

[Update]

A few high-tech companies were listed. I was hoping more for big pharma or
finance? There are some super convervative firms out there. Even Google, for
example, will only allow a few languages in their firm.

~~~
enneff
Google, Canonical, and Heroku to name a few.

------
fmstephe
This is great news. The best part of it for me is that now my more
conservative colleagues might dip their toes in the water. Combine that with
the Vitess project and Go is not just a great language. It's viable.

~~~
enneff
For the curious, Vitess is an open source project to scale MySQL
installations. It was written by the YouTube team in Go.

<http://code.google.com/p/vitess/>

------
vibrunazo
Is there any SEO trick for googling about "go"? It's really hard to look for
"go" related material;

For example, I tried searching for how to use Go on Android. But "go android"
returns all kinds of unrelated stuff.

~~~
mhansen
I use golang

------
Melyan
So is golang a semi-official name for this? I don't want it to be as hard to
find as the board game!

~~~
peregrine
Yep, if you are googling it use golang, much easier to find things this way.

~~~
luriel
There is also a custom search engine: <http://go-lang.cat-v.org/go-search>

------
BernardGui
"Initial reactions to Go 1 have been overwhelmingly positive, particularly
(and not surprisingly) on community sites like Hacker News, a Y Combinator-run
reddit clone populated by self-acknowledged hipster hackers." Hah:
[http://webdev360.com/google-releases-go-1-to-rave-
reviews-41...](http://webdev360.com/google-releases-go-1-to-rave-
reviews-41730.html)

------
remogatto
I used Go to write a concurrent ZX Spectrum emulator
(<https://github.com/remogatto/gospeccy>). The language perfectly fits for
this kind of task too.

------
Osiris
Does Go support Win32 development?

~~~
krakensden
yes: <http://code.google.com/p/go/downloads/list>

------
frou_dh
There's something intangibly nice about the main golang.org website. It feels
more like a consistent self-contained unit than a lot of such sites do.

Well done to whoever does the design and content.

~~~
canop_fr
And it's self-contained in the sense that when you code you may simply launch
it locally :

        godoc -http=:6060

Of course this will be less needed now that the API are stable but that what
really useful those last months, when my go weekly was almost never exactly
like the one described at golang.org nor tip.golang.org. I'll still use it in
planes and trains though.

------
pippy
They seem to have removed their page detailing ARM support. The debian ARM
repo still has an older version, I wonder if they've stopped support?

------
HeroNote
Free Go Language eBook: <http://www.heronote.com/files/Go.htm>

------
justauser
Has anyone had any experience with GO and Windows API/win32?

~~~
luriel
I haven't tried it, but you might want to look into WALK(Windows Application
Library Kit):

<https://github.com/lxn/walk>

Is designed to provide a Go-ish interface for win32.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Actually, that's mainly a UI toolkit interface. Not Win32 core . (Though a
tiny bit of core stuff is included)

~~~
luriel
Sorry, I'm not familiar with Windows stuff. This library might be more what
you have in mind then:

<https://github.com/AllenDang/w32>

------
redbad
Congratulations to everyone involved.

------
impeachgod
What happened to the ebnf package?

~~~
dsymonds
It's still around as "exp/ebnf"
([http://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse#hg%2Fsrc%2Fpkg%2Fe...](http://code.google.com/p/go/source/browse#hg%2Fsrc%2Fpkg%2Fexp%2Febnf)),
but the exp/ tree is not considered part of the official Go 1 API, so it may
change in backward-incompatible ways.

------
ericmoritz
anyone know what the time complexity of the append function is?

~~~
rsc
It is amortized O(1). When the append needs to grow the slice, it does so by a
multiplicative factor.

------
golango
next version will be named Go Laprofonda

------
huhtenberg
G#... any day now, any day.

------
elchief
countdown until:

GO IS AWESOME

GO IS A FUCKING WASTE OF TIME

HOW DO I MAKE JAVASCRIPT TALK TO GO?

------
ziggrat
its nice

------
GorbaChavez
Gogrammers, unite!

~~~
zemo
"gopher" is the preferred demonym.

------
rman666
Mad Props!

Propsed Theme Song: I got my Go, Go, Go, Go (gadget flow) ... Lupe Fiasco
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCf-ffDzopc>)

------
makecheck
I'm disappointed that after starting from scratch they created a "modern"
language that requires a module import just to print (and corresponding extra
syntax for that namespace when making the call).

How could this not have seemed incredibly clunky after using it for just a
little while? It's the same frustration one feels when simple print-outs fail
in C++ because you forgot to "#include <iostream>". Sometimes you just want to
print stuff no matter what file you're in. Languages should make it almost
impossible to fail at _extremely common tasks_. It's these little things that
make Python and Perl enjoyable to program in, and these little things that
every new language should begin with!

~~~
enneff
One of the design goals of Go is that the language is small. There's nothing
so special about string formatting that it should be part of the language
proper, and it would add a lot of complexity to the spec if it were.

With that said, there are built-in print and println functions that write to
stderr, which are useful for debugging. That would seem to address your
complaint. The fmt package is a lot more fully-featured than the built-ins
though.

<http://golang.org/pkg/fmt/>

~~~
makecheck
Thanks for pointing it out. I wish they used that in their "hello, world"
example because 'println("hello, world")' leaves a much better first
impression of simplicity.

I generally like to see things kept simple. But formatting is a _common_ need
and they've actually made things _less_ simple by providing both fmt.Println()
and println(). It means the same program will inevitably contain both,
depending on who did the editing. There are times when a feature is so basic
that it really should have _exactly_ one way to do it, and I think printing is
in that category.

~~~
enneff
Your position is not very pragmatic, and taking such a hard line is rarely
productive.

The fmt package does a lot of stuff. Check out the link I provided above. To
put all that stuff into the language spec - and then foist responsibility of
writing and maintaining that code onto every implementation of the language -
would be crazy. So it seems a good idea that the fmt package should exist and
that it should be written in Go.

On the other hand, it's nice to be able to print when working on low-level
libraries where fmt is not available (syscall, os, etc). The print and println
functions service this need, and that's really all they're used for apart from
temporary debugging prints.

It would be a mistake to use the built-in println in the hello world example
because it would demonstrate precisely the wrong use of the built-in
functions. Hello world should print to standard output and it should use the
standard means of formatting strings. In Go, that is fmt.

There are a few of such compromises in Go (not many, though). Sometimes you
need to put your ideals to the side in the name of simplicity and pragmatism.


Forget Skittles, WeAllHateQuickbooks Is Brilliant - iseff
http://www.iseff.com/post/83327071/forget-skittles-weallhatequickbooks-is-brilliant

======
3pt14159
FreshBooks employee here:

I think this is a totally stupid idea.

"We all hate Quickbooks?" really? Grow up. Quickbooks has made millions of
small business owners' lives easier. With out them they would have to spend
countless more hours figuring out which tax laws apply to them, how to account
for inventory, etc...

LessAccounting should focus on their strengths (and they have a ton,
seriously) rather than attack Quickbooks.

I could never dream of the company I work for ever coming out with a "We hate
{insert competitor}" campaign. We have friends everywhere, even at
Intuit/Quickbooks. We might compete with them, but that doesn't mean we hate
them. We share many of the same goals and we are all just trying to give our
customers the best solution to their needs. Hate is no way to grow a business.

~~~
auston
In my opinion - it's marketing. The point is to get you to talk about them &
remember their brand. I would never have known about Freshbooks had I not met
Mike McDerment in Miami. I would never have known about zoho had I not read
about their HS student recruiting tactics. Companies have different marketing
tactics - this is one of them.

Disclosure: I am friends w/ the less everything dudes.

~~~
tptacek
I'm not going to remember Lessbooks (or whatever), just that Quickbooks is the
market leader.

~~~
auston
It's LessAccounting - there, now you should be able to remember it.

------
wallflower
QuickBooks is like the wizard behind the curtain at many small businesses and
accountancy firms. Viral marketing isn't always for good.

~~~
redinger
That's too bad. Nearly every freelancer/small business I deal with dislikes
QuickBooks if not hates it. I am much happier with LessAccounting personally.

~~~
skorgu
At my former employer we did some work integrating QuickBooks with several
existing systems.

I wanted: Documentation; Intuit gave: Cut-and-paste C# examples.

I wanted: an easily parse-able format; Intuit gave: almost-XML-but-not-quite
(order of elements is important!)

I wanted: a Linux server; Intuit gave: something that was almost but not
entirely incapable of operating for six hours at a stretch without dying
silently.

I wanted: descriptive error messages; Intuit gave: "Yeah error $RANDOM? That
means restart the server."

To be fair the client-server API was reasonably sane, it was the interchange
format itself that was bonkers.

I'd love to calculate the number of developer hours it cost working around
those misfeatures just to get a reasonable facsimile of RPC working.

Anyway, I hate QuickBooks.

------
zhyder
I'm reaallly interested in a solid Quickbooks alternative given all the
negative feedback on it. But I'm having trouble trusting LessAccounting coz 3
favorable-to-them comments here so far have been made by brand new users
(chrisyour, redinger, joshuastreet). Any others used them?

------
rbritton
Yeah, Quickbooks sucks, but a totally web-based option is not better. There is
no substitute for locally-run software for many things and accounting software
is one of them for me.

------
thinkcomp
Does anyone use LessAccounting? I signed up for it but it doesn't do very
much. Disclaimer: I'm technically a competitor.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_I signed up for it but it doesn't do very much._

I think that's what they're going for :)

~~~
joshuastreet
Yeah I signed up. Love it!! Switched from Quickbooks. Free from the bulk of
options no one uses. I have enough to train people on. My assistant can
actually use it without needing to attend a class! And to freshbooks
employee...their marketing worked for me :)

~~~
pbrown
Considering you signed up to post this gushing post, you wouldn't happen to
work for them would you?

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Judging by the fact that he's hanging out on HN + a quick search for his name
reveals that he's probably this guy:

<http://joshuastreet.com/> <http://twitter.com/JoshuaStreet>

Doesn't look like there's any connection to LessAccounting...

I guess the moral is: don't let your first post on HN be laudatory towards a
startup. Damn vultures :)

------
rbxbxdev
re: Freshbooks employee --

If this is such a stupid idea why did it show up in my RSS Reader? Why are
people blogging that it's brilliant? Obviously it must be working to some
degree.

ps: somewhat affiliated with Less, but that doesn't change my views... or the
fact that I saw this thread.


Maxwell, A 64 FPGA Supercomputer (pdf) - 0x12
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.116.5709&rep=rep1&type=pdf

======
mmorey
If you are into high performance reconfigurable computing you might be
interested in some of the work being done by the CHREC group. Here is a list
of there recent papers: <http://www.chrec.org/chrecpapers.html>

------
hendler
Online previewing:

[http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.116.5709%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf)

------
sophacles
This is pretty cool! It's nice to see some good work being done on this
general reconfigurable stuff.

For an interesting but only tangentially related product, I've been playing
with one of these <http://rtds.com/index/index.html> this week. It's an FPGA
driven simulator specialized for power grid stuff. It is fast and quite fun.
It allows general programming within the domain, but not true general purpose
stuff. I'm sure similar technologies exist for other fields and I was thinking
"Someone has to be generalizing this right?". It's nice to see that thought
being done here.

Fun fact for startup people: the company is tiny headcount wise but has quite
a large market penetration -- it's a good testament to what a passionate,
dedicated and highly skilled team can do when they get to it.

------
jedbrown
Wall clock time alone isn't such a useful metric to compare CPU vs. FPGA. It
would be more meaningful to normalize by machine cost (initial investment and
operating costs). (Software development/non-portability is a separate
discussion.)

~~~
modeless
They address software development cost at the end of the paper, and basically
conclude that FPGAs are too hard to program to replace CPUs yet, even for
highly specialized HPC applications.

~~~
jedbrown
My point is that they should demonstrate what the potential hardware advantage
is before evaluating whether the software development costs are worthwhile.
There are a few HPC tasks that are very simple and possibly amenable to
specialized hardware. D.E. Shaw's Anton is an extreme example of pursuing
dedicated hardware. But the metric needs to involve purchasing and power costs
for the hardware. FPGAs can come out looking very good in this metric, but
comparing raw run times for different systems without cost normalization is
meaningless.

~~~
modeless
I disagree that software development cost shouldn't be considered before
hardware cost. The software development costs are so much higher for FPGAs
(both money and time) that they probably outweigh the hardware costs for many
applications. They are both important and equally worth investigation.

~~~
jedbrown
If the hardware cost benefit is not large, there isn't any point discussing
software development cost. If the benefit is huge, then the software
discussion is relevant. In other words, the decision table looks something
like

                      HW efficient     HW inefficient
      SW cheap        Yes              No
      SW expensive    Maybe            No

------
dhjones
Yet another FPGA vs CPU paper that doesn't compare with GPU's as well.

~~~
sliverstorm
And why should it? The CPU and the GPU are entirely different beasts.

~~~
modeless
That was true 5 years ago, but not today; GPUs and CPUs are converging. GPUs
are quite suitable for all of the applications described in the article, and
provide orders of magnitude speedup over CPUs while remaining relatively cheap
and easy to program vs. FPGAs.

~~~
dhjones
I couldn't agree with this more.

------
alain94040
Not to rain on anyone's parade, but next to my desk is a machine about 10
times more powerful than what this paper describes.

The main issues with the setup in the paper: latency between nodes. Gigabit
Ethernet is just not good for latency. To nitpick some more, Virtex-4 is
getting old.

~~~
neopallium
Gigabit Ethernet is mainly used as a control network. Each FPGA has 4 RocketIO
links (2-3Gb/s) and they are directly connected in a 2-D torus of point-to-
point links. The RocketIO network is used for nearest-neighbor communication
patterns. For reduction operations such as global sums, they call back to the
host CPUs for MPI reduction operations to be preformed over the GE network.

Also one of the main goals was to build the supercomputer from commodity parts
and "plug-in" FPGA cards, so they most likely had to go with FPGA cards there
where available and maybe cheaper then the latest/greatest.

The paper would have been more interesting if they had compared this machine
to other types of supercomputers then just CPU clusters.

~~~
kristianp
s/cheaper then the/cheaper than the/g s/then just/than just/g

------
4ad
Warning, PDF link.

~~~
0x12
Title updated, thanks!

~~~
david927
Great paper -- thank you! When is the publish date? 2008/2009?

~~~
rbabich
August 2007 - <http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4291933>


Show HN: The new Longform app, a reader for smart content - lammer
http://longform.org/app/

======
lammer
Hey - I know Longform.org pops up from time to time in HN threads and I wanted
to let people know that we have a new iOS app.

The app features the curated daily article recommendations you find on
Longform.org plus features that let you customize your own information diet.
We filter out the short linkbait crap so you're left only with engaging, deep
articles.

You can follow writers and get notified any time they publish any article
anywhere. Or follow friends and see what they're loving.

Our popular tab is a leaderboard for in-depth articles from across the
internet.

Anyway, feedback is greatly appreciated (and yes, we do want to do Android):
aaron@longform.org


(Un)building Software – English Version - geyslan
http://hackingbits.github.io/unbuilding-software-english-version/
======
geyslan
New link: [http://hackingbits.github.io/blog/unbuilding-software-
englis...](http://hackingbits.github.io/blog/unbuilding-software-english-
version/)


One entrepreneur's review of Seedcamp 2009 - c3o
http://emigal.com/2009/09/28/how-to-put-your-startup-on-steroids/

======
c3o
I thought this might help explain what kind of value teams can derive from the
events Seedcamp puts on _before even picking any winners to fund_ , which are
an important part of its model and a distinction to other micro seed programs.

For more context, some confusion but definitely also some valid criticism see
the recent thread at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844105>


Microsoft Announces ARM-Powered Surface Pro X - aminecodes
https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/2/20885572/microsoft-surface-pro-x-2-in-1-sq1-processor-specs-price-release-date
======
corv
This would make for a beautiful Linux device

------
whywhywhywhy
So no one going to talk about the removable hard drive?

------
colejohnson66
Didn’t Windows RT fail? I’m genuinely curious: what’s different here?

~~~
wilsonnb3
Windows 10 now supports x86 emulation on ARM processors, so most programs will
run on this device without a problem.

Unlike Windows RT, which could only run things from the windows app store.

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/19/17027026/microsoft-
window...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/19/17027026/microsoft-
windows-10-on-arm-apps-games-limitations-support)

~~~
Marsymars
Windows RT was especially hamstrung because without jailbreaking it couldn't
run Win32 desktop software even if it was compiled for ARM.


Sizeof(void) == 1 in gcc - mrb
https://twitter.com/#!/bcantrill/status/61503550966087681

======
apaprocki
GCC just happens to not even print a warning about this (even with -Wall).
That is pretty bad. The warning can be enabled by specifying -Wpointer-arith
or by using -pedantic, though. (Warning: "invalid application of 'sizeof' to a
void type")

IBM's xlc compiler produces a warning and compiles the code and it also
returns 1. (Warning: "1506-043 (W) The operand of the sizeof operator is not
valid.")

Oracle Studio compiler has the best approach and fails to compile. (Error:
"cannot take sizeof void")

------
mooism2
What does the standard say?


Python in Excel [video] - vj44
http://vimeo.com/53094126

======
krob
What tool is that guy using? Anyone know?

~~~
BigKRex
Through careful squinting I determined he's using
[https://datanitro.com/](https://datanitro.com/)


Why do a lot of developers dislike Agile? - gozzoo
http://brianknapp.me/developers-dislike-agile/
======
chrisbennet
I think developers dislike what I'll call "commercial agile" \- a process
imposed from above popularized by people or organizations with a commercial
interest in selling so called "agile" i.e. scrum certification, etc.

Poorly implemented agile where you have some agile-like processes coupled with
waterfall processes ["fragile"] can also sour developers on agile. ("If this
is agile, I don't like it.")


How Shazam Works To Identify (Nearly) Every Song You Throw At It - yarapavan
http://gizmodo.com/5647458/

======
stuaxo
Seriously? It works for about 1/20 tunes I try with it... I don't want to
sound like a hipster ("Ooh my music is so obscure") or anything but it's
annoyingly useless for me.