on_

Really means a lot. If you ever need a confidence boost though you should checkout 3000[0], I hear that developer is fucking killing it.

[0]localhost:3000

India has 1.23 Billion[0] people in it, and that wikipedia article is quite short, with only 4 sources. They don't cite any of the sources for the figure which stated 6460 people are in the program.

The program serves %0.000005 of India, or in much more familiar terms, if implemented at the same scale in America it would help slightly less people than there were killed by lions in Tanzania over the trailing 20 years[1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India

[2]http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/wildlife/5149977/Top-1...

[3]Off by one errors.

Paul Graham was talking about something that sounded like either a distributed compiler or search/computing engine in 2008 at PyCon[9] and it can be argued it is something like the decentralized computing trend happening now. He said it would be "a byword for impossible" The thing about google is that, like Microsoft, it is a highly diversified company that does one thing and that is dangeroud. Peter Theil calls it a monopoly, maybe I would be a bit more delicate. Google and Microsoft have a ton of different products but each company really only sells 1 thing, a utility.

Microsoft was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, and google was that for the web. For the reasons addressed in PG's article Microsoft is Dead, it is evident that needs change but utilities usually don't. If you read What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of? after this article, it is super short and basically says, the burden of proof is on you to not miss the next big idea.

So much crazy shit is happening now it is difficult to say what will kill google. This essay was in 07', but it was too eary or too obvious, as he closes with. If 4 things killed google I would say they are:

hardware: Hardware is definitely important, and we can argue about how and what context, but google doesn't build any. All their infrastructure, while massive, will be deprecated.

privacy:"Don't be evil" is !== "Be Good".

Advertising: Advertising is going to be A LOT less valuable, and the places it will be valuable have banned google.

Decentralized Tech: No idea what the interim search engines will look like but it will be __________ then Artificial Intelligence. I think it is private search, where you buy computational resources and algorithims from a network but supply the seed data for your preferences and retain them. Probably BTC/PGP will replace DNS and you will send or lease your own googlebot and people will sell distributed search algorithims. While Chrome and the v8 engine make a pretty good google bot, people don't really trust google anymore which is why microsoft lost. No idea what it looks like, but it feels like someone is building it now.

[0]http://www.paulgraham.com/altair.html

[9]If you know what I am talking about, and you know what he means by saying the name for it is "a byword for the impossible", I have been trying to figure out what he meant for ages.

> I feel like I'm in a time warp

Perl 6 was just released, and is at the top of HN. ;)

Yeah, all the hip new startups are using this technology. Obviously, NoSql makes it impossoble to change your data structure. You are going to see these Silicon Rust Belt companies or "Technologies Old Guard" if you will, scramble to pick this up. Ancient companies like Slack, Uber, Postmates, Google and Bitcoin had a good run but it's over. 2015 is the year of the sharing/on-demand economy and communication is getting revamped:

American Online

========================

They are going by just the initials AOL, and are poised for massive growth. People have said they are a total slack clone, but they are really just overlooking the integration with hotmail notifications. Rumor is Silicon Valley darling Time-Warner is poised to make a big investment.

Skour

=================

Travis Kalanick, a name a lot of people have forgotten, was the original founder of Uber but he bailed to disrupt the entrenched bitcoin/peer-to-peer/file-sharing industry with Skour. It is a totally distributed network for sharing your music. Obviously, it is a little derivative of stuff like Napster and pandora, but I wouldn't count them out. Box and Dropbox are companies that have been cold from the get-go. You have moore's law compounding to make storage and hardware super expensive, so profit will only go up as people clamour to share data even at high bandwith rates. Skour, is looking to capitalize on that idea, but allow consumers to save a bit of money by contributing to the network and sharing files from their own systems. With server prices skyrocketing, consumers are going to be the only one's who can afford dropbox/box. Look at Skour to hop into the Enterprise space with music sharing putting them on the map.

Kosmo.com

===============

You have this "on-demand" economy starting to really cool off, NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS. It is going to be big. Kosmo.com is a company that delivers anything, when you want it. No one is doing this right now. Older companies like Postmates and Uber have been here for years, and when you need a $5 dolalr sandwhich, where are these guys?. Uber has been doing delivery for so long that it is going to be tough to shut down their lobby. Talk about "Rent Collector", they built a business around monopolizing sharing and delivery. Kosmo.com is pretty unique though, and they have a huge war chest to get it done. A lot of people think that marginless micro transactions won't be able to scale out the volume required to be profitable, but let's remember Uber started as a delivery company.

Apple.com

==================

Apple.com is facing some serious competition from Apple.com. Now historically both companies have had their hand in a lot of pies.

Apple has some pretty compelling things going for it. They just hired their old CEO. Now running NeXT and Apple it is almost impossible not to draw comparisons with Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk. Jobs is poised to continue in the media space with a new media player which is supposedly better than the walkman. Job's also poached the NeXT team and are revamping the macintosh operating system. You are really going to see a return to Apple's roots here. Job's, an engineer, has been designing things from the ground up but his "Aspy" demeanor and liek of salesmanship have crippled the company in the past.

On the other hand you have Apple CEO Tim Cook's long track record to contend with but he is still innovating. You have a traditional guy like Jobs who is only willing to tackle the safe legacy stuff he brought over from NeXT. With a lose cannon like Tim Cook, it is pretty much disruption or bust. His media blitz 2054 was a massive success, and he has maintained a solid image amidst allegations of failure to share credit. The company has really been evolving the CAAS space. Camera as a service is going to be really big. He has been dumping resources into the iPhone camera for a few years, and this is the biggest driving factor of iPhone sales. Outside of a 10x increase in MP and zoom, he has really brought hackers on board by unlocking the "Walled Garden". On stage at CameraCon, he released a 2000MP camera that felt like you were inside the picture it was so good. That level of detail has set them apart of late, from companies tackling the solved problem of security and laten y.

Difficult to tell if Steve Job's fastpaced, borderline reckless product release cycles will be to complex and overengineered for the general public. OTOH, Cook's acquisiton of innovative hardware manufacturer BEATS is in the past, and people are wondering if he can continue to deliver the Mega Pixels customers are demanding.

So 2015 is the year of mySQL, postgrSQL *SQL, .NET. Get ready to port all your Mosaic/Netscape apps over to the Windows Phone because 2015 is the year of the apps.

edit: In summary/TL;DR SkyPan was explicitly allowed to operate a 55lb drone commercially if they stayed at an altitude less than 400ft, the drone would fly home after a lost connection for safety, they were more than 500ft from people, and were 5 nautical miles from an airport UNLESS THEY HAD WRITTEN CONSENT from air traffic control authority.

The FAA has only issued 333a exeptions for commercial drone use to ~399 firms, one of which is SkyPan. Exemptions are case by case. They give these FAQs[1] on their site breaking down what that permit is.

Here are some excerpts from the SKYPAN exemption. These are issued as letters if you see the link[2] below and are evaluated on the case by case basis, following are relevant intersting excerpts specific to skypan[3]:

ESTABLISHED PRECEDENCE

====================================

> FAA found that the enhanced safety achieved using an unmanned aircraft (UA) with the specifica tions described by the petition er and carrying no passengers or crew, rather than a manned aircraft of signi ficantly greater proporti ons, carrying crew in addition to flammable fuel, gi ves the FAA good cause to find th at the UAS operation enabled by this exemption is in the public interest.

TYPE OF VEHICLE

====================================

This is the operating drone Specs:

> Operations authorized by this grant of ex emption are limited to the Align T Rex 700E F3C when weighing less than 55 pounds in cluding payload.

GENERAL RULES (speed, altitude, oversite)

====================================

> may not be operated at a speed exceeding 87 knots (100 miles per hour).

> The UA must be operated at an altitude of no more than 400 feet above ground level

> All operations must utilize a visual observer (VO). The UA must be operated within the visual line of sight (VLOS) of the PI C and VO at all times. [I think PIC is person in control]

OPERATING AROUND AIRPORTS (SkyPan)

====================================

The UA may not operate within 5 nautical mile s of an airport reference point (ARP) as denoted in the current FAA Airport/Facil ity Directory (AFD) or for airports not denoted with an ARP, the center of the ai rport symbol as denoted on the current FAA- published aeronautical chart, unless a lett er of agreement with that airport’s management is obtained or otherwise permitted by a COA issued to the exemption holder.

OPERATIONS AROUND CITIES (SkyPan)

====================================

All Flight operations must be conducted at least 500 feet from all nonparticipating persons, vessels, vehicles, and structures unless: a. Barriers or structures are present that sufficiently pr otect nonparticipating persons from the UA and/or debris in the event of an accident. The operator must ensure that nonparticipating persons remain under such protection. If a situation arises where nonparticipating persons leave such protection and are within 500 feet of the UA, flight operations must cease immediately in a manner ensuring the safety of nonparticipating persons; and b. The owner/controller of any vessels, vehicles or struct ures has granted permission for operating closer to those objects and the PIC has made a safety assessment of the risk of operating closer to those objects and determined that it does not present an undue hazard.

SOURCES

======================================

[0]https://www.faa.gov/uas/legislative_programs/section_333/333...

[1]https://www.faa.gov/uas/legislative_programs/section_333/333...

[2]https://www.faa.gov/uas/legislative_programs/section_333/333...

[3]In the letter the decision is based on other proposals, so some of these rules are possibly boilerplate. However, as an exemption, when I say "specific", I mean these are grants, so these are rules and allocations the entity (skypan here) must follow, not neccessarily applicable to other providers.

They really drive home a few points often overlooked:

Business fundamentals are really important, while not the only thing, that are a critical aspect of longevity.

Ideas are less important than execution.

Porter's 5 forces model provides some basic criteria for evaluating competition. If you provide something easy to copy and the barriers to entry are low, it could be a good idea but not a great business. In one of Sam Altman's lectures the "when to expand internationally" question is brought up. I don't want to misqoute it, so I won't. The context might have been the Samwer bros, but he gives some good insight.

No sorry, I am usually a thoughtful commenter but that was a satirical comment which I doubled down on.

Yeah, I am sorry. I hardly ever make comments like this and it is doubly dubious because I lost my account recently, but this was meant to be satire. When the PM responded, I couldn't help myself but double down.

My account is new so it does look like a straight troll account but I was just having a bit of fun. TBH, as I stated in another comment ITT, wordpress provides a really easy way to test out this concept. I expanded my thoughts on the concept in that comment, but as to wordpress:

I bet reddit is just getting crushed with improvements and the engineering team is overworked. It is really easy and inexpensive to test this concept out without losing developer bandwith. wordpress provides a pretty good CMS (obviously bloated, [standard other wordpress criticsims], etc.) but they can get a tight feedback cycle on this idea and it could successful, but if not, will not be resource intensive.

I generally wish them the best of luck, they need something to work at a monetization level, and I hope this helps as it likely is not the long term solution.

I had a rough first experience with wordpress for a client recently and I just had to vent.

I have been pretty critical of reddit lately, but there was a time when I really enjoyed using it and it does provide a ton of value to many people. It is a great website in a very difficult situation due to the community culture (very anti-corporate/advertising mentality), diversity of users and content ownership issues. On a real level, the site is pretty awesome. I want to see them succeed because sub-communities and even the organization have stood for an opened internet and positive things.

I think upvoted looks really sleek and I hope it is successful, but they really need a way to monetize and it is a really hard problem to solve. Obviously, using a widely supported mature CMS like wordpress makes it easy to produce content with minimal effort and cost but that has been reddit users largest gripe. Upvoted is a curator/aggregator built on top of a curator/aggregator, which is weird. Reddit's success and problems stem from providing the long tail of content, allowing diverse topics and communities to be covered while allowing globally popular things to float to the top. This means that there is rarely community consensus, so while upvoted has little risk as it is cheap to make, I can't see it providing much financial support for the company.

In all honesty though, I wish them the best of luck and hope to see them do cool and intersting things in the future. Obviously, improving the search would be a great start because Google is an awesome search engine, but for content discovery and curation, Reddit is doing a great job. Best of luck guys and sorry about the sarcastic comments about Wordpress and PHP, it really is a good way to quickly test out something like upvoted without significant dev reources and is a good content management system, edit: [if used correctly]

Awesome, that is what I thought. PHP is one of those languages that wasn't designed by committee so there isn't that much documentation about it, but the founder built it specifically as scalable programming language and had been designing languages for years. I can see it replacing newer languages like nodeJS, Go and PERL in the future. In the next couple years people will start realizing that the consistency, speed and security offset the lack of communities using it, and I can see it becoming really popular. Wordpress will become big as well as LAMP architectures are really hot right now, and not a lot projects provide a CMS that has a minimal UI that provides only what a user needs and that makes it a really lightweight choice for a CMS. No bloat, high security and a trendy new design. Excited to see vip.wordpress finally getting some love!

Wordpress is an extremely new framework, so it will be new to a lot of developers, but it provides an extremely performant developer friendly product. One drawback is that it is highly specialized, so it only had a few applications but luckily upvoted fits into this niche. Hosting is really still a problem as their is a lack of providers and a steep complexity curve. No one has really provided a flexible way to host a platform like wordpress and coupled with the lack of maturity and bleeding edge nature it makes sense that they went with a managed hosting service. Even as new as the organization is, they have a great array of security products and plugins which will certainly shield it from the less scrupulous users. This is going to likely be the first major company using wordpress, but I bet it could be a platform that will underpin a large percentage of websites.

> I think you just agreed in a slightly angry way with plenty of citations.

I am not sure what you mean? The citations I included, I agreed with and included them to substantiate my claim, which was:

It is not dumb or irrational to get to $1b, I disagree with Sam there. This allows you phenomenal free marketing, exposure, access and capital. It is rational to continue to take money and increase your status as the market is placing a huge premium on reputation and hype. I do think a horrible equity structure would be a bad compromise to make, but given that these markets are private your value is basically your old valuation (which prices in extreme future growth) and your status/pr/exposure. So depending on your value you can fake your way onto the unicorn list.

PLS Logistics is a inc 5000 company, I do not know the valuation. I suspect it is much less than the article I cited stating the dropbox deal terms >$10b. To be clear, the article, which I agree with, states this is well overvalued, but the "price" is around that number by the market. Box stock has liquidity, less uncertainty (known financials), more enterprise customers (stickier) and is valued less. I think storage is a bad business to be in and it is likely in the twilight of 2016 price parity is reached between SSD and HDD drives, a terabyte SSD can be had for $300[0]. Consumers can use free solutions like google and apple, or a 256GB thumb drive and enterprise companies will migrate to locked down internal private networks.

Regardless, freemium and non-monetizing service companies are in bad shape. Investors and founders have an incentive to get their pseudo-value up, and I was addressing that point. Status, in a market with limited transparency or liquidity, is passing as capital and given the rate hike that is coming and the likely failure of a few of these companies creationg a series A crunch, it wouldn't be unwise to cash that status in for currency.

If you were referring to my other comments about the Samwer bros. I apologize for the long winded spiel above. Those were really bad punny jokes and allusions to Bloomberg not editing the story and referring to it as 'Y Contributor' which sounded like a knock of version of YC.

edit: If you meant that the: > It's an arbitrary number of digits in base 10 numerals.

I disagree in that, much like in a Casino, the value is def. not realized until you walk out. That amount of arbitrary digits when that bell on the IPO day, will make them anything but arbitrary. Having that number start high and go up is good, and even if they are loosely based on something, people will used past values as a benchmark, at least initially. By then some wil have cashed out. Depends on what others are optimizing for.

Digits aren't wholly arbitrary, but they will become important.

[0]http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/ssd-prices-in-a-free...

> How is it not dumb?

Because PLS Logistics Services does ~$100m a year more than dropbox (PLS rev is $515.6m) and has a growth rate of 42% and no one has ever heard of it. Dropbox was reportedly valued at $10 billion in November 2014, when it raised $350 million in its Series C[0]. You can plot the failure of the company on a graph inversely proportional to moores law, and yet they are "crushing it". So with less liquidity, they somehow have extracted maximum mileage out of being a 'Unicorn', being on the top of every 'unicorn list', and getting heaps of coverage in the media. They will IPO and exit which, after the lockup period ends, is a win.

So, to what extent is being a 'Unicorn' priced into the company? No one knows of course because we can't even see their financials. So other companies don't have to really engineer anything. Just get close to that num, and then wait 6 months. So, the point is, the media's obsession with ranking things is important and being in that top 10 list is helpful.

Donald Trump has become qualified to run America because he was on television, has > $1b, and is on a list.

[0]https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/dropbox-valuation-bubble/

I have nothing against them, they are an organization founded by smart MBAs with a strong focus on software and finance. Some of their media companies are a bit derivative, but what would you expect from a finance company. The organization is run by detail oriented, anal-retentive founders who know how to edit a team. Sometimes though, I think they get a bit lost in repackaging other peoples content, and in their haste, miss a few titular details.

> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-09-24/y-contributo...

Ahh yes, Dan Altman, a recent hire at SV clone "Y Contributor", talks about attention to detail, and working with the Samwer bros.

Edit: << pun intended.

There was a great discussion I wont be able to find about this recently on HN after an article about a zebra/leopard patterned couch. Thwarting an image id algorithim is not difficult and the researcher came on and spoke about the problems in the space similar to this xkcd[0] comic. It is a super complex problem to solve. How far away are we? It is like the turing test, everytime someone gets close the term is redefined. It is certainly coming, maybe reasonable models in ~5 years publicly acknowledged. What can someone really do to prevent it? Short of making an account every few months with a lot of your data but different pictures, what american doesnt have a photo that has been published on the internet? Even if you dont have facebook, someone you know does. The tech will take a while to dev and refine, and longer to deploy at scale, but I can't think of a scalable solution to this.

[0]http://xkcd.com/1425/

> Mr Snowden said GCHQ could gain access to a handset by sending it an encrypted text message and use it for such things as taking pictures and listening in.

This sentence is as much context as the article provides, and I won't rehash my other comment, but this could be from a recently purchased ~$20 burner to a ~$800 iPhone. Not every phone is windows/android/apple and connected. idk, I found it pretty eye opening.

Absolutely. The article didn't provide much color on it, but I am thinking about a <$20 pay as you go phone that is turned off, with the known information of simply a cellphone number. While the gov't has crazy access to these telco companies, there is really zero friction if this is universal.

Scenario: If you infect 'target 0' you now have a seed to feed to your maliscious googleR00t bot, that just indexes a phone book and sends these root sms messages out. Possible/likely even to and from powered off phones. They could even do a badbios/thunderstrike-like attack on a laptop or otherwise airgapped computer. If you find one person who has that number in their phone, even if never turned on, when it does, it connects to the network. Broadcasts the location and data, and becomes a carrier of some pretty next-level malware.

Now, if you think critically I guess the OTA phone attack thing is a conclusion you could draw. However, 'the Government' is a huge organization. The capabilities are clearly staggering and somewhat known, but who has access? Imagine if Edward Snowden, or someone like him, got the exploitDB and all the source? Who would know? The gov't can't admit it has zero days to every piece of technology and have packaged up these payloads into something as easy to use as a rails API or SMS message. That hacker for sure wouldn't let the public know because unknown vulns === big money. So, who is to say this hasn't happened, won't happen, or even how many people are 'legally[0]' allowed to use this in Virginia.

[0]this word can be interpreted quite loosely.

Feel like this is begging the question a bit. While a phone is a massive attack vector it is pretty non obvious that from a text message a user can have a stealth rootkit installed and persisted to all their devices.

> I don't think anything wireless(besides free space optics) will ever be able to match the bandwidth of fiber.

This isn't really the goal of the project. SpaceX needs to create a com link with Mars. Also, it can cheaply laucnch sattelites so it will be able to connect the world via satelite uplink. The goal isn't to beat wired networks but provide redundancy and in some cases primary connections.

SpaceX is betting on itself achieving reusability which will lower costs from ~$60M to a marginal cost of something like ~$600K. As a byproduct of the cellphone wars nanosats have become insanely cheap due to commoditization and miniturization of hardware. Making this more feasible

The reason they are doing this is to establish communications between earth & mars. Even a 50mbps connection could bring huge swathes of the world online and create a race for infrastructure to compete.

So if we could get 1-5gbps connections terrestriallydue to some market penetration and competition, it would bringlots of people online. The goal of the project is lofty, but would provide a lot of positive things.

Downsides: * personal satelites and the proliferation of spying. * space debris could lock us out of orbit. * space debris/launch failures could cause issues. * something like radiation or an unexpected externality could make this non-feasible. * we could literally create skynet.

I am pumped on it though, and those reasons, along with the many others I have assuredly missed make me really really excited to see this happen. We need a secondary network anyway and terrestrial speeds won't improve without competition so I would roll the dice on skynet for that.

legitimately considering moving to Atom for this. I use sublime text (i like it) but there is no terminal support. I have checked every package out and nothing really beats just using a hotkey on iTerm. If this works well, I would be all over it.

I skimmed Gruber's piece and it was written with the reverence of someone who understands tech and design, as well as something about Apple. The Isaacson book was massive, so I am sure there are some points to dispute or interpret, however I feel it was a pretty good appraisal given some of the interviews of jobs, woz, gates, etc, reading Isaacson and Return to the Little Kingdom, and general other tid bits. I don't think it was a hatchet job at all but a tribute to the man who had been part of making a huge piece of tech and hunan history. It just underscored that with his humanity. I quite liked it, although Isaacson's prose and depth are somewhat trying. Job's really was a social engineer and he and Woz are both amazing individuals.

Edit: just to add, I think Gruber had some valid opinions, but even if correct, don't really discount the larger corpus produced by Isaacson.

This sentiment is shared by many displaced blue collar workers in SV and NYC. They see finance and big tech taking jobs and ruining the economy. In the bubble, status driven workers push themselves hard until completely burned out and jaded they are stuck in a depressing cycle. On the otherside of the spectrum, I find myself markedly depressed at having no legitimate career or contributions. One can only hope to find something fulfilling and find balance.

Walter Isaacson is a well respected biographer asked specifically by jobs to write the book. I dont have time or the access to corroborate it, but it felt accurate reading it and was in line with other things i've read. Also, some objective facts like screwing over early employees and disowning his daughter make it easier to believe he was capable of pretty bad actions. Bill Gates also grew up a lot and devoted the latter half of his life to helping people, which helped. What parts were wrong?

Really helpful. Thanks for the detailed response. Going to dev, do a few experiments with this. Good luck.

Not tptacek, but could you give a bit more on the contrast between Ethereum an IPFS. Also, what is your "version" of DNS? How can I map a human readable name to a file/connection and verify authenticity? Project looks awesome, checked it out briefly last time an article was posted. Excited! Thanks.

I totally agree. leaving aside the granular details in the article this is the future. Bitcoin protocol, ethereum, ipfs, openbazaar, bittorrent etc are the blocks that content will be rebuilt on. The SAFEnetwork is a cool project as well. Someone needs to hash whatever DNS becomes into the blockchain so ther are no more CAs. This is all coming. Can't wait.

"Hacking" or "4chan" most likely.

> For example, Leiderman specifically pointed out the word “fag,” saying that an “IRC expert” would explain its use to the jury. (In chan culture, “fag” is frequently used as a suffix for anyone or anything).

While it was baseline insane to give a bunch of known hackers login credentials, I can't help but wonder how Kafka-esque this trial is going to get.