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Issue #85 - October 18, 2020
Here are the top threads of the week, happy reading!
1. Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers?
Top comment by lpfabiani
I worked for a while in the R&D department of HP printer division. As @jacquesm said, good 2D printer costs peanuts. The amount of R&D in color quality, speed and other parameters is huge. There were a lot of teams involved: mechanical, electrical, software, chemical... And because of that investment, there are thousands of patents that the big players are continuously paying each other for. It's a very old market with a lot of legacy. For most of us, a printer is something for home photos, some documents, and so, but that's only a little part of the cake: the money is in professional printing, ads, designers, etc.
Once that is said, it should be possible to work in a general-purpose open source 2d printer. The open community has achieved bigger goals. The biggest problem I can see is the entry barrier: to get a very basic printer, you have to invest thousands of time with a lot of knowledge in different areas, when a basic printer, even from the large companies, is not very expensive.
I think that one of the only chances we have for that to happen is that a company frees its designs and patents and community starts working from there.
2. MIVD boss: Meet without a smartphone, risk of espionage too great
Top comment by fxtentacle
That is sound advice. Also, when smartphones are gone, it's like magic and people pay attention to the speaker again :)
I would add one hint, which is to also NOT have internet-connected Smart TV's in your meeting rooms.
They might be streaming whatever you say for "diagnostics" or to "improve customer service" or just to shove more ads into your face the next time you turn it on.
"Samsung's small print says that its Smart TV's voice recognition system will not only capture your private conversations, but also pass them onto third parties."
https://www.cnet.com/news/samsungs-warning-our-smart-tvs-rec...
3. Ask HN: What are good resources to learn system design?
Top comment by exdsq
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Recommended by the CTO of Azure, creator of Kafka, and many HN users on other threads including me :)
https://dataintensive.net/
4. OpenDeck: 1,200 startup slide decks by category – Team, Market, Funding
Top comment by blululu
Maybe not the intended purpose but this is a great resource for playing a round of slides roulette with friends over a video call. It’s an improv game where you go around and assign people with a random slide deck to present to the group. The more Corp speak and biz-talk the better. Fun way to hang out with friends remotely.
5. Ask HN: How to Become a Consultant?
Top comment by yungookim
In my experience, scaling a consulting business is more to do with sales and building long-term relationships. Sales is a skill that can be acquired, and you don't have to be very good at it to get started. Learn the basics of business development and sales; try experimenting with different approaches. See what fits you best.
IMHO, I think the problem is "getting projects from 0 to POC/MVP state." These are projects that typically have an expiry. Either the MVP fails to validate its viability, or when it succeeds, the business will try to find someone who can commit full-time. It's hard to find something in the middle. More often than not, consultants who position themselves here spend more time on finding new contracts than doing the work. Since once a contract is completed, there is little continuity to it. Aside from a small maintenance contract, which is not enough to keep the light on. Doing the work pays, searching for work does not.
Another problem is, you are in the space where you have to compete the most, and therefore "building MVP" contracts become a pricing competition. Competing with offshore dev shops on price is hard to do.
So, to sum up, in my humble opinion, you need to spend time upgrading business development and sales skills. Think about what unique skills you can offer that are less price competitive in the market and offer you a long-term contract. I hope this helps.
6. Ask HN: What are some good methods to prove current time?
Top comment by petertodd
The easy thing to do is prove a message existed prior to some point in time. That's a timestamp, you can do that easily for free with my OpenTimestamps project, which uses Bitcoin for the timestamp proof: https://opentimestamps.org/
The way it works is pretty simple: your message is hashed with a series of cryptographically secure hash/append/prepend operations, leading to a Bitcoin block. Since they are one way hashes, your message must have existed prior to that Bitcoin block.
The hard part is actually proving a message existed after some point in time. To do that, you need a random beacon: a large number (also known as a nonce) that we know was created at some point in time, and prior to that point in time, was impossible to predict. Newspaper headlines are a weak form of random beacon, as it's hard to predict the news in advance. Bitcoin block hashes are even better, as the proof-of-work ensures that even trying to force a single bit of the block hash is extremely expensive. I also run a project to inject other random beacons into the Bitcoin blockchain, such as the NIST Random Beacon: https://github.com/opentimestamps/nist-inject
But in the age of deep fakes, what does any of this actually prove? See, while a timestamp proof mathematically depends on your message, with a random beacon it's the opposite: your message needs to depend on the random beacon. For human meaningful messages that's not easy to achieve. A photo can be photoshopped, a video deepfaked, etc.
The best you can do in general is try to make the random beacon time, and the timestamp, be as close together as possible to make it as difficult as possible to do a photoshop, deepfake, etc. But deepfakes are good enough these days that IMO that's dubious security.
Probably the best approach here is to actually think about what exactly you are trying to achieve - are you kidnapping someone? proving you've recovered from the plague? launching a cryptocurrency? There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to this problem.
7. Tell HN: Rackspace apparently lost some storage volumes
Top comment by folkhack
This is completely anecdotal:
If you find yourself on Rackspace hosting I would absolutely migrate to something more mature. Personally I've had great luck with Digital Ocean and Linode for basic/affordable VPS hosting, with AWS being a great cloud provider with an incredible tool-box at your disposal. Hell, GPC, Azure... there's just so many better options.
IMO Rackspace has been on a steady decline for years. They were a choice provider back in the early 2000's when a managed/unmanaged beige box/shared cPanel/Plesk hosting was common. Back then their support was incredible. Sometime around 2010 though things started to go down hill, and I experienced more and more support issues with them. These would range from annoying all the way to "that shouldn't happen" (like losing volumes, which happened to me).
The final straw was when a dedicated server was turned down by mistake, causing a major outage for 20+ of my clients at the time. This was 10 years ago and I've never looked back. They did a pretty good job at turning me into an advocate against their services.
Oh and the Slicehost transition was crap too. That sucked to get over to a first-gen VPS provider only to have it sucked right back into the beast that you were trying to escape from in the first place...
Sorry for the mini rant. I'm still not over the PTSD that Rackspace has caused me.
8. Ask HN: Best HVAC system for a new house?
Top comment by realitysballs
I work for a high-end custom residential GC and have see a lot of high end HVAC systems.
The new trends are as follows:
HRV (heat recovery ventilators) are pretty in. Basically they are auxiliary units that source outside fresh air or exhaust stale air when there is a heat differential between a specific heating/cooling zone and the outside temps. So if you are in a basement that is cold and the outside is hot it will just bring in outside air instead of turning on the heater.
Radiant floor heating and radiant cooling zones are also in. And run water through Your floors to heat or cool zones. It is one of the most efficient ways to heat a structure and feels good as well.
Geothermal is also pretty in for high-end residences but there is a high first cost to evaluate geothermal potential.
Most of these new technologies are usually coupled with standard split-systems or VRF systems and add additional efficiency (life cycle cost value) over the span of occupancy but have higher first costs .
Lastly— always consider passive heating and cooling strategies they are highest value options (insulation , shading, glazing specs , solar orientation , landscaping , etc.)
10. Ask HN: What are some evergreen HN threads worth revisiting?
Top comment by tlb
You might start with the links on https://news.ycombinator.com/lists