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The Average American Man's Body - r0h1n http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/10/this-is-the-average-mans-body/280194/ ====== DanBC The worrying thing about this is the shift in perception. Most people are going to put Todd at "a bit over weight", but not "near obese". Add a few kilos to Todd to tip him into obesity, and most people are not going to see much difference. Give people a Todd image of BMI > 35, with no physical activity, and still most people aren't going to call that Todd obese. And if it's a woman the discussion suddenly becomes polarised with accusations of "fat shaming" and "healthism" and "nanny state" and "causing eating disorders". Very obese women are called "curvy" or "voluptuous". Any attempt to discuss the health effects of over weight are dismissed as a fascistic attempt to control other people. There are so many _weird_ ideas around obesity - "it's not sugar, it's high fructose corn syrup! We weren't overweight until HFCS!". Maybe HFCS is worse than regular sugar, but we also didn't use to drink 64 fluid ounces of 10% sugar syrup. ([http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/01/the-7-11-dou...](http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/01/the-7-11-double- big-gulp-holds-200-more-than-the-average-adult-humans-stomach/)) ~~~ __--__ We also didn't used to have the government telling us to increase our consumption of grains and carbs and decrease our consumption of saturated fat. HFCS also didn't used to be in every piece of packaged food in the grocery store. I used to be able to buy pizza sauce without having to painstakingly search for one without soy in it. You're right, there are many weird ideas around obesity. They start with many weird ideas about food in general. ------ k-mcgrady The first time I visited America I was shocked at the portion sizes. I ate at a nice Italian restaurant. We took home the leftovers from my meal and that managed to feed another two people. I think it's the attitude that excess is good/bigger is better that's the problem. ~~~ Kurtz79 What I find curious is the presence of countries like Mexico, Lybia, Egypt in the same tier as the US. Apparently wealth and the culture of abundance are not the only factors affecting obesity. ~~~ yummyfajitas Mexico is not a poor country. It's GDP/capita (PPP adjusted) is similar to Poland or Lithuania. Not exactly the US or UK, but there isn't any shortage of chicharrones or chimichangas. ------ nextweek2 I'm the kind of person that always look at the positive in every situation. Which often makes me seem callous, this is one of those times. I see the average getting fatter and therefore that makes me more attractive because I am tall and lean. Obviously I'm not thinking long term about societies healthcare costs. But right now I'm feeling pretty smug. ~~~ axaxs You shouldn't feel callous - you have a good point and honestly deserve to feel good about yourself. Obesity, or rather weight in general, for some reason has become a touchy subject. It seems now mentioning someone's weight is taboo. The truth is, people need a wake up call. Being overweight gets way too much not only protection, but positive reinforcement. It's a tricky one to solve - you don't want overweight people to hate themselves or suffer, but at the same time you need the nation as a whole to recognize this as a dangerous issue and address it. ------ klepra Americans seems pretty short nowadays compared to some countries in Europe, where average is near 5-11 and a few over 6'. Still a few short countries here in Europe too. ~~~ judk America is a nation of immigrants, and genetics determine most of height, so comparisons that ignore country of family history are silly. ------ Choronzon This looks like a mean rather than a median distribution,so our American here is probably heavier than than the "average" normal. Weight distributions are starting to skew to the right due to the existence of a small percentage of utterly massive individuals. 15 kilos under normal weight is extremely skinny while being overweight can go into over 100 kilos at the extremes. ------ JoshGlazebrook I would rather see something on body fat percentage. BMI is not an ideal measurement in terms of health for a lot of body types. ~~~ Kurtz79 I don't agree. BMI accounts for height by its own definition and for health/body types by leaving large margins for the definitions of normal/overweight/obese. It might not be a precise measure for some individuals (athletic, heavy muscled males) but what percentage are those in the context of a whole country ? As an average/indicator over a large sample is perfectly acceptable, in my opinion. ~~~ yummyfajitas BMI is const x weight/height^2. Volume is proportional to height^3, unless you believe tall people grow in only 2 directions. So BMI ~ height. That's why most of the NBA is obese. ~~~ DanBC Everyone mentions athletes whenever BMI is mentioned. Most people are not athletes. Most people do very little exercise. When using BMI for an individual you ask them if they do any exercise, but for populations it's fine. ~~~ yummyfajitas I mention the NBA due to height, not athleticism. BMI is an overestimate for tall people and an underestimate for short people, due to the scaling law I described. ~~~ DanBC Most people are not NBA tall, so luckily it's no such a problem for BMI over mass populations. ------ Michellef So I will plan my next vacation to the Netherlands... ~~~ anigbrowl One of the first things you will notice is how tall people there are. The second thing you'll notice is that food portions in restaurants and cafeterias are much smaller. Strangely, nobody starves. ~~~ Theriac25 "One of the first things you will notice is how short people there are. The second thing you'll notice is that food portions in restaurants and cafeterias are much larger. Strangely, everybody feels hungry all the time." ~~~ anigbrowl Sad but true :-/ ------ elnate Well, time to work out. ------ alextingle Fat American Todd looks a bit like Charlie Sheen. ------ adamwong246 Ewww

Nokia Reveals iPhone Competitor And Prepares To Do Battle With iTunes - qhoxie http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/nokia_reveals_iphone_competitor_battles_itunes.php ====== mickt About time Nokia! However, it would be nice to see some Specs for the phone, how the UI works, and what this means for developers who want to write apps for this phone. Also, with all these different phones running different OS's it makes it harder for us developer types to target all the platforms, unless we could write apps using Java and/or Flex which Apple disallows. ~~~ greyman > It uses the Symbian S60 operating system Hmm...I don't want to parrot a hype, but I would prefer Android, maybe just for the sake of coolness. ~~~ shimi I agree, S60 isn't easy to develop, while Android is as sweet as sweet can be for developers. ~~~ schtog Why isn't it easy to develop for Symbian? I thought Symbian was the superior mobile-OS? Obviously that doesn't mean that it is easy to develop for it though so it could still be a great OS. ~~~ shimi Developing Symbian code is a challenge, Symbian developers are hard to find on great demand (if you want a pay rise you may consider dive into it :-) ) It was the best until a few years ago, but now the competition had caught up with it. RIM(Blackberry) were always good, the last Windows mobile is stable, iPhone is getting there, and mobile linux (where Android is on of its flavours) is looking to gain some market as well. I'm not saying the Symbian is going to die in the near future, but it lost a lot of ground, and they got a lot of catching up to do. ------ truebosko This looks really cool. I was just listening yesterday to Adam Curry totally saying how awesome his Nokia e71 (or close to that) was awesome. Before that, I never really thought of Nokia smartphones since they aren't very popular here in Blackberry central (waterloo, ontario)

AllNurses.com founder kills family and himself - bruceb http://www.startribune.com/investigation-continues-into-deaths-of-greenwood-family/326692481/ ====== qCOVET This is really sad. Here is an article for Startup founders and how to cope w/ stress and protect their mental health: [http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-startup-founders- can...](http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-startup-founders-can-fight- stress-and-protect-their-mental-health/)

A few questions about startups. - foof ====== foof Its often said that the startups are successful, especially by the venture capitalist firms who fund these startups. It is hard to say, what is intention behind the claim of saying most of the startups as successful, because as far as we could find on the internet there is not a single place which contains the facts and the figures about the success and the failure of the new ventures. And if so that the people were successful, who were they from were did they start, were their background as modest, or where they some geeks like Einstein or from the Wharton business school? Is there is a place where we can find who these people where and what was special in idea which made them successful? All that are stated at time are bug names like Sabeer Bhatia, and Steve Jobs. But definitely all cant be them, and that's for sure. In short is there any study available which can confirm or prove that taking a risk is not foolishness, but its a calculated path that could take you to success. ~~~ nostrademons _Founders at Work_. <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590597141> ------ gigamon I have never seen such a book but then I have never looked for such a book. I was convinced that when I started my first startup, I had a disease. Now that I have started my second, I know it is terminal. If you have read a book to convince yourself that you need to start, then chances are you have no need to. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. \--Denny-- Denny K Miu "Startup for less - Survival Guide for Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs" <http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/startup-for-less.html> ~~~ foof Denny, its not about reading a book o convince oneself, rather it is about taking a calculated risk. I want to convince myself about starting a startup based on rational thought and facts and figures, and not based on emotions. Everyone wants to start something new and make innovations, but I do not want to screw up my life chasing a though that has a very marginal success rate. It is not about convincing, it is about facts, and they can speak for themselves.

Lockerbie bomber conviction 'may have been miscarriage of justice' - vanusa https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/mar/11/lockerbie-bomber-conviction-may-have-been-miscarriage-of-justice ====== duxup >failure of the crown to disclose evidence, which could have been key to the defence and interfered with the right of a free trial I wish there was more detail beyond lines like that...

Fortnite seems to have been removed from the Play Store as well - cinntaile https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.epicgames.fortnite&hl=en_US ====== blunte Good. The sooner a big well-funded company hits this duopoly wall, the better. They will have the resources to fight this, and the outcome will hopefully be positive for all other developers. Apple and Google are gatekeepers to all mobile devices (practically), but the value they add as gatekeepers is questionable. Certainly there is some value in their delivery (and much lesser so, their security) service; but their fees are not market set (since they are effectively monopolies by device type). If there were actual competitors, their rates would be much lower... around 2-5% probably. ~~~ simonh Android has a plethora of app stores, there have always been tons of them. Some phones have shipped with three or more, one from Google, one from the phone manufacturer and one from the network. Then you could add another one from Amazon, etc, etc. Google Play Store won out on Android simply because the multitude of stores was a nightmare for customers. They don’t want multiple stores, they want one store on this phone, that will also be on their next phone. Any ‘monopoly’ wasn’t seized by Google, it was pushed eagerly on them by customers craving consolidation and simplicity. Same for me, I don’t want 5 blasted stores on my iPhone. I want one store and run by someone I trust. The same goes for my Switch too, I’m quite happy for Nintendo to run the store for it. If I don’t like how they run it, I’ll get a PS 5 or XBOX. That’s where the competition is. I have plenty of choices thanks. ~~~ ocdtrekkie This is completely false. The Play Store has "won" by Google chopping the legs off all the alternatives. They have to be sideloaded and you have to enable a scary checkbox to do so, that suggests it's less secure to use any app store but the Play Store. ~~~ megablast Yeah? you think users love hunting down a particular app store becauase that is the one that has the app you are after??? ~~~ untog If only there was an example of a platform where you downloaded apps from the web and installed them at your own will! Oh, wait. It’s what we all did and do with computers. This isn’t some mystical unknown. ~~~ scarface74 And we see how that worked out. Viruses, malware, ransomware, key loggers, 10 toolbars on your browser. ~~~ untog Which is where the (existing, robust) system of app permissions comes in. Something the desktop world never had. (besides, last time I checked my macOS machine is neither virus ridden nor covered in toolbars) ~~~ scarface74 Because no one bothered to write viruses for it. There were more viruses for Windows than Classic MacOS and it was a complete shit show compared to Windows between 1995 - 2000. It didn’t even have memory protection. ~~~ untog I’m talking about the macOS I run on my MacBook today. It is not virus ridden nor covered with unwanted toolbars. ~~~ scarface74 And again it’s because no one bothered to write toolbars and viruses for the Mac. I never got viruses on a Windows PC but are you going to say they don’t exist? You never had to clean up your less tech savvy relatives computer? ~~~ untog What I’m saying is that the vast, vast majority of desktop users have an entirely satisfactory computing experience today, using operating systems that let you install whatever you want. Yes, if you go back in time you find OSes with hideous security models that made things like keyloggers possible. Mobile OSes today do not have those problems, and have strict permission prompts that gatekeep functionality. Yeah, I’m sure there would be some shitty experiences if people could install whatever they want on their phones, it’s the price of giving everyone that freedom. But if desktop OSes in 2020 are anything to go by, it’s really not that big of an issue. ~~~ scarface74 So the whole ransomware and virus problem is imaginary? ------ bigtones The real reason Epic Games did this... Money - they were forced to hand over more than $500 Million dollars to Apple and Google in the past 12 months alone. That's $1.3 Million dollars per day. Epic gave Apple over $360 Million dollars in the last twelve months just to list the game in it's app store, and over $150 Million to Google to do the same. By any measure, having to hand over half a billion dollars is just an insane cut of revenue to have to give two companies that had absolutely nothing to do with conceiving, designing or developing such a successful game. [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/technology/apple- fortnite...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/technology/apple-fortnite- ban.html) ~~~ Ductapemaster "...absolutely nothing to do with conceiving, designing or developing such a successful game." But it has _everything_ to do with _distributing_ the game. Also it has a lot to do with outsourcing the maintenance of the mobile platforms — designing hardware, OS releases, etc. Epic did not design their own hardware, their own silicon, build entire global supply chains, design UX, etc. Apple and Google did. Do they not deserve a cut? I'm not here arguing the percentage of the revenue, just that that _some_ percentage is clearly warranted here. Their relationship with Apple and Google is clearly a partnership, meaning it has to benefit both sides. Same way it works with consoles. ~~~ wvenable > But it has everything to do with distributing the game. Because they're the only option. I mean there's no reason why Epic couldn't host the app on their server that people could download. It's not without precedent. But it's just not allowed for mobile. > designing hardware, OS releases, etc. Epic did not design their own > hardware, their own silicon, build entire global supply chains, design UX, > etc. Apple and Google did. Do they not deserve a cut? Seriously? You think Epic should have to pay for the hardware that we consumers buy for thousands of dollars? Apple has some of the highest hardware margins in the world. They don't need software developers to pay for the hardware that we've already paid too much for. These aren't consoles sold for a loss. ~~~ interpol_p > Because they're the only option. I mean there's no reason why Epic couldn't > host the app on their server that people could download. It's not without > precedent. But it's just not allowed for mobile. Didn't they move to the Google Play Store (from their own download manager) specifically because sideloading was too hard and scary for customers that it was having an impact on Fortnite installs? Having the option wouldn't be enough for Epic even if it were available on iOS, because it wasn't enough for them on Android ~~~ wvenable Well Google specifically doesn't make it easy or safe to install apps from other sources. But there's no reason why it couldn't be just as simple and safe as getting it from the app store. The problems mentioned below are really only possible because Google kind of leaves everyone to the wolves when it comes to sideloading. ~~~ interpol_p Epic's quote at the time was the following: > Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage, > through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security > pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and > carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing > third party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play > Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store. ------ soulofmischief A lot of people are giving Epic a hard time for this, but I think it takes quite a bit of gusto to disrupt such an insane moneymaker in order to rally its userbase against these anti-competitive practices. ~~~ MBCook Really? I don’t think I’ve seen anyone today with an anti-Epic take. Maybe I just haven’t gone down far enough in the comments. ~~~ echelon Twitter has Apple fans rushing to criticize Epic. I'm absolutely flabbergasted the freedom disruption blinders are so strong. Why _anyone_ supports Apple is a mystery to me. What if the web forced you to use Apple Payments? What if Microsoft forced all installs to go through the Microsoft Store? Apple took focus from the web and then extinguished openness. It's tyranny. ~~~ bhupy I'll try and play devil's advocate for you. Apple recently rolled out "Sign-In With Apple", which creates burner e-mail address that you can seamlessly use with 3rd party services. As a privacy- conscious consumer, this was great! On top of that, Apple forced all of its developers to support "Sign-In With Apple". This is one of the many reasons I continue to use Apple's phone and OS, because it gives me some peace of mind. Apple Payments, similarly, gives me some financial peace of mind by providing me with one centralized place where I can view and cancel my subscriptions/purchases. I can't tell you how many times I've forgotten to unsubscribe from a service that I don't use. With Apple's in-app payments system, I can keep tabs on _everything_. It's like a user-friendly financial reconciliation layer. Both of these Apple services place some amount of burden on the developer, and I'd even argue that the first example was pretty broadly celebrated by privacy-minded HN readers. The strongest devil's advocate argument is that the second example provides the same value to Apple customers, and that's a distinguishing feature of its platform that it ought to be able to maintain. There's a strong argument to be made that one ought to be able to side-load apps and install competing app stores on their iPhones (I tend to agree), but that's somewhat orthogonal to this particular issue, especially considering the Google Play Store action. ~~~ paulgb I think there are basically two ways to look at Apple's App Store policies: 1\. Apple acts like a sort of consumer union, coordinating behavior of a massive and lucrative audience so that apps have to meet certain minimum standards to reach it. 2\. Apple acts like a protection racket, extracting a piece of the consumer surplus because they can. It seems that you like the benefits of #1, and I agree with you. The problem is that in the Fortnite case, it appears to be a case of #2 posturing as #1. Does anyone truly believe that Fortnite players are _better off_ paying 30% more to Apple? ~~~ JumpCrisscross This is a good framework. One way to merge these views is with a graduated take rate. So Apple might take 30% of the first $10mm, 20% of the next $10mm and $10% thereafter. ------ reissbaker This is also bad, but Google still allows Android users to install Epic's game store (which does continue to list Fortnite), so I think it's a bit more defensible than Apple's ban in which it's now just impossible to install the game at all. Removing from the Play Store on Android isn't equivalent to removing from the App Store on iOS; you can install apps from outside of the Play Store on Android, but you can't install apps from outside of the App Store on iOS (at least, not without jailbreaking). ~~~ ridiculous_fish Epic already tried to make a run of it outside the Play Store, and gave up, citing Google's efforts to "outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store." I don't think there's a practical difference here. ~~~ reissbaker If I go to fortnite.com/android, I can still download and install the Epic Game Store for Android. So it's definitely better than the situation on iOS. In practice, you can still install Fortnite on Android (and it's only a Google search away — when I searched "fortnite android" just now, it was the top hit of the search results, just after the News section that's filled with the news of the Play Store ban); you can't install Fortnite on iOS at all. It's actually even slightly easier to install APKs on Android than installing non-Mac-App-Store software on macOS — with Android it prompts you right when you open to allow or disallow installs from the source you downloaded from, whereas macOS makes you dig around in Settings the first time. I tried installing the Epic store just now on Android, and it was a fairly seamless experience. I'm sure it gets fewer sales, since the Play store is bundled with most Android phones and the Epic store isn't. But it's pretty different than an outright ban: the Play store is charging you the 30% Google tax for reach/audience, but you're free to list on an alternative store if you choose to. ------ ivanstojic It's important to remember that Epic games isn't a champion of freedom here. After Epic store launched on the PC in 2018, Epic used their platform's growing popularity to bait and/or strong arm (it's unclear to me) indie developers into exclusivity contracts on Epic's game store. This action caused a massive uproar in the gaming community because with those exclusivity deals, Epic made developers break existing preorders. This isn't about freedom or choice or walled gardens. It's about cutting off a slightly bigger slice of a billion dollar pie. ~~~ el_nahual I happen to know some first-time indie devs that were given this deal. The deal is incredibly generous. Basically, epic offered them a bag of money in exchange for a certain period of partial exclusivity (basically "don't be on Steam"). That's it. This bag of money allowed the developers to: \- Grow the dev team enough to accelerate time to launch--QA extra engineers, heck, the devs even used the money to pay for _porting the game to other devices!_ \- Guarantee that they could continue to fund development of the game after launch. Bugfixes, DLC, etc. \- Have enough left over to "try again" and launch a sophomore game regardless of the performance of this one. You'd think that fans of indie games would _love_ this. Who could possibly be opposed to having an indie dev get funds that would enable them to graduate to managing a small indie game studio instead of a ramen diet & 20 hour work days in the living room. And yet they got enormous amounts of hate from so-called indie game fans and members of the gaming community. And yes, the devs were aware that the hate was coming from a disproportionately small number of people and that most people don't actually care at all. But still, the psychological toll of having to deal with the harassment was enough to make them strongly consider not taking the money--even though it was the right thing to do both from a financial pov and from a development pov (because it would guarantee they could finish and support the game). The crazy thing is that _even if you hate epic_ you should love these deals: cheer for your favorite dev, then wait a year and buy the game on Steam, doubly sticking it to the man. ~~~ donmcronald Exclusives on consoles suck, but the Epic store has been a huge win for developers and gamers. Bags of money, more choice, and competition and the only downside is needing to install an extra launcher. Yes please! ~~~ shuntress Important distinction: this is choice and competition for the developers but not for the consumers. It would be choice and competition for the consumer if users could access any game through either platform and choose their favorite. ------ 627467 Good for Epic to open this new battle front against Apple (and it seems Google). As I wrote in the Apple thread: I think Epic are the ideal entity to do this since - so long as Apple or Google won't actively erase apps from people devices - they already have large install base and it's unlikely to grow much more. Those who managed to install the latest update are already able to use epic "apple/google tax"less payment system so that protects their revenue for a while. If either of those para-monopolies start erasing apps from people's phone's that would only add to the narrative that Epic, Spotify, EU et al. are already pushing: these two entities have built a global extractive platform that keeps partners and consumers hostage by their fees. ------ mcint It may not just be for a lawsuit. They may provide fuel for a change of law, as Congress bumbles through an attempt at anti-trust enforcement, maybe they can become a test case for lawmakers looking for loss of competition and consumer choice. (Although existing lobbying dollars from Google, Apple, Facebook, & company may be effective in holding back representatives. Money in hand, in election season no less.) Epic Games can show just how much the on-going appstore tax prevent new business models from taking hold. They shown an incredible ability to entice people to separate from their money, even convinced Disney?! to partner for branded content. Alongside Epic Games licensing of the Unreal Engine at-or-below cost (12% [1]), I believe Sweeney's commitment to growing a "Metaverse" market at the expense of Epic's short-term profit. This comes alongside EPIC(.org)'s comparisons about American vs Chinese & emerging markets competitiveness, linked today [2]. [1]: [https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse](https://www.matthewball.vc/all/themetaverse) [2]: [https://epic.org/foia/epic-v-ai- commission/EPIC-19-09-11-NSC...](https://epic.org/foia/epic-v-ai- commission/EPIC-19-09-11-NSCAI-FOIA-20200331-3rd-Production-pt9.pdf) ~~~ mschuster91 Isn't Congress on summer vacation and then they'll all be fighting for reelection anyway? I hardly doubt anything will get passed until next year if it's not important enough to get a bipartisan vote. ------ nsgoetz The Google statement really feels like they're subtweeting Apple: > The open Android ecosystem lets developers distribute apps through multiple > app stores. For game developers who choose to use the Play Store, we have > consistent policies that are fair to developers and keep the store safe for > users. While Fortnite remains available on Android, we can no longer make it > available on Play because it violates our policies. However, we welcome the > opportunity to continue our discussions with Epic and bring Fortnite back to > Google Play. ------ jay_kyburz I look forward to putting my game Neptune's Pride in the Epic Games store and using PayPal to collect payments. ~~~ DetroitThrow I had been trying to remember the name of this game for over a year now, my few Google searches for "long term space strategy mmo" never yielded anything. I love that hackernews seems to dredge up the interesting parts of the net. Anyways, Neptune's Pride is very very fun and I can't wait to play it again! ~~~ jay_kyburz Hello DetroitThrow! Glad to hear my not very subtle plug for the game might get at least one player back! ------ Andrew_nenakhov I won't stop telling this: mobile platforms need not only third party app stores, but third party push notifications services too. Both iOS and Android love to kill apps in the background. This behavior, sans push notifications, cripples a lot of types of applications (chiefly, all messengers). If there ever would be some legal pressure on Apple& Google to open up their platforms, it is important to make this point known to legislators. ~~~ user5994461 Applications have to be paused to save battery, or killed to save memory. You can lookup the Android doc since the first version 10+ years ago, it explains very well the lifecycle of apps. Mobile devices would be unusable if it were not for that. ~~~ Andrew_nenakhov This obvious thing you say doesn't change the fact that there is no a way to wake an app from sleep without FCM push notifications or running a background service with persistent notification (which users hate), which has a lot of restrictions that get tighter with every new version of Android. ------ TillE I really don't see how Epic has a leg to stand on here, not on a platform which allows sideloading. The Apple case is complicated, but this seems like a straightforward violation of an entirely voluntary contract. ~~~ dannyw Microsoft got pinged for pre-installing Internet Explorer. Android could potentially get pinged for pre-installing Play Market and not offering a choice. ~~~ dagmx Doubtful. Android can be customized by the OEMs and many do provide alternate stores preloaded. They'd have to go after Pixel phones (not a massive market share) or after the requirement to use Play services to be in the store. ------ drusepth Not commenting on whether Fortnite should or shouldn't have been removed from either app store, but wanted to point out one HUGE difference between Android and iOS here: Removing Fortnite from the iOS store wholly removes the ability for people to download and play Fortnite on iOS devices, unless they're jailbroken. Removing Fortnite from Google Play does no such thing. It's still readily available to download and play from other app stores and/or Epic directly. No need to jailbreak or root. This is a huge difference in paradigms that'll probably go overlooked with headlines of "Apple and Google remove Fortnite from app stores". I think this is why Epic is so ready to "take on Apple" (see: their Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite ad). This'll be a legal battle that's exciting to see, especially in the current/brewing anti-big-tech political climate. ------ leereeves Confirmed by The Verge, who got a statement from Google: > The open Android ecosystem lets developers distribute apps through multiple > app stores. For game developers who choose to use the Play Store, we have > consistent policies that are fair to developers and keep the store safe for > users. While Fortnite remains available on Android, we can no longer make it > available on Play because it violates our policies. However, we welcome the > opportunity to continue our discussions with Epic and bring Fortnite back to > Google Play. [https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21368079/fortnite-epic- an...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21368079/fortnite-epic-android- banned-google-play-app-store-rule-violation) ~~~ crazysim It's definitely a statement that's very aware of the situation on iOS. ------ brundolf It's _fascinating_ that Google is deciding to form a unified front with Apple instead of playing the "good guy" and taking an opportunity to paint their competitor in a bad light. It really betrays just how important that 30% fee must be to them. The plot just keeps thickening. ------ tony If anyone likes to follow app store case law, Oyez has the verbal arguments for Apple v Pepper that follow with text captions: [https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/17-204](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2018/17-204) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Pepper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._v._Pepper) ------ jandrese As I see it this improves their chances of winning the suit. By having Google act in the same manner they have a stronger case that the market is a duopoly that restricts customer's freedom. Remember that courts tend to be very lenient towards business practices, so it takes egregious behavior to convince them to step in. This bolster's Epic's position. ------ jonplackett This is a PR move. They would have known they’d get kicked off for adding their own payment system. They didn't make this in the time it took Apple to reject it. It's all pre- planned [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6B4glqJFz0&feature=emb_rel_...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6B4glqJFz0&feature=emb_rel_end) ~~~ MereInterest So? That something is predictable does not make it ethically right. That Epic could predict Apple enforcing its monopoly does not make it right for Apple to have a monopoly. ~~~ cvandebroek Epic is also not ethically right. They shamelessly make their money on minors and pretend to do good for the gamers. ~~~ adtac What's wrong with that? Besides, how Epic makes money is irrelevant to this discussion. Your statement is blatant whataboutism. (FWIW I despise many of Epic's decisions, particularly their hostile attitude towards Linux as a platform, so no, I'm not biased towards them.) ~~~ cvandebroek It's not irrelevant when you start argueing about being ethical. Besides that, Epic themselves play Gatekeeper through the Epic Game Store and pay big money to ensure they are the Gatekeeper (excluding retail and other platforms), made on kids by loot boxing them. ------ rangewookie the 1984 ad is a little strange TBH. Apple was saying IBM wants to control the future of all information in this country, so come join us instead. Epic is saying, we want more money so standby while we go to court. Where is the epic smart phone alternative which is going to save us from the apple monopoly? It will be better for all developers if the gatekeepers lower their rates, but epic really doesn't strike me as a white knight here. ~~~ kmonsen I agree with the spirit here, what we really want are more phone operating systems and competition that way. They are of course really hard to make ... ~~~ suby The problem is that app stores are charging 30%. More Operating Systems and competition would be good, but it's not going to fix the problem. After all, Steam takes a 30% cut, and they've got a client for multiple desktop operating sytems, as well as numerous stores competing against them (Windows Store, Mac Store, Itch.io, GoG, Humble, Greenman gaming, tons more). Normal people are just not going to install another operating system on their phone, or app store for that matter. Apple or Google may cave in this particular case because Epic has some leverage with their userbase, but I'd be shocked to see either of them lower the rates for anyone other than Epic. I think it's going to take legislation to fix this. ------ mulmen I'm confused, the other story on this is " _Apple_ kicked Fortnite off the app store". Did Google coincidentally do the same thing? Did Epic actually pull their game in both places? ~~~ 3PS Epic pushed a server-side update which gave users on both iOS and Android access to discounted prices that sidestepped the usual 30% cut to Apple or Google. This was a violation of terms of service on both platforms, so Fortnite was removed from both the App Store and the Play Store. Epic already knew this would happen, which is why they prepared their PR and legal teams accordingly. ------ z3t4 One reason for the duopoly is that it cost more to have your app on more platforms. Its a disaster that for example government apps like id only works on the latest ios or android. There are also Sailfish, FirefoxOS, bunch of feature phone OS, and likely a lot I dont know of. The duopoly is self inflicted by the software industry. ------ Aissen It seems Google is still using the same tactics it used to kill Skyhook (Maps competitor on wifi location), and probably most GApps competitors: they blocked Oneplus from bundling the Epic launcher with system permissions (allows updates in background, like the Play Store): [https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/08/13/google- reportedly-b...](https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/08/13/google-reportedly- blocked-oneplus-from-pre-installing-the-epic-games-app-on-its-phones/) ------ dustinmoris It's important to remember that Apple and Google only have a Duopoly, because nobody else seems to be able to develop anything that is remotely appealing to customers. Microsoft tried with their own mobile operating system many years ago and they failed at every attempt. If Apple was told to open its App Store they could literally just shut down their App Store instead the next day and in a few days or weeks consumers all around the world would put too much pressure on any legislator to revert their changes, because not a single consumer cares about Epic, but everyone cares about their iPhone to remain as awesome as it is today, ad part of it is Apple's walled garden. ~~~ gizmodo59 I don’t see Apple shutting down App Store even for spite. Not sure their operating expenses on App Store but if they reduce their cut, it won’t look bad on the books. ------ gumby I really don’t understand the argument about Apple’s store, when Apple has only 20-25% of the installed base and the dominant platform has many stores to choose from. Customers are plainly choosing the open platform. ~~~ partiallypro First off, that's globally, not the US (in the US it's ~50/50.) Secondly, despite Apple not having a "monopoly" on the install base they do essentially have a monopoly on store expenditures and revenue. There is a reason why Apps launch on iOS first (usually), AppStore members are more likely to buy the app and do in-app purchases than Android users. This is BY FAR. I forgot the exact numbers, but I believe it's near double or triple that of Android. The AppStore is a cash register for Apple, 30% is insanity. ------ Mandatum What happens to players who refund everything from these stores once the apps are no longer accessible? Does Apple or Google just eat the cost? I presume Epic has already been paid out, it seems like Apple and Google wouldn't be able to claw back that refund money. ------ BooneJS Will my kid be able to buy new skins with something other than vbucks when this is all said and done? ------ grawprog Was fortnite on the play store? A few months ago I decided to try it for android, I had to download the epic games store app from their site and install it from there. This was in like February or something. ------ FridgeSeal I can do nothing but laugh - I have precisely zero sympathy for Epic here. ------ social_quotient Did this decision likely get made before the meeting with congress? Curious the lag time on corporate decision making on something like this. The fight was bound to happen but I’m fascinated by the timing. ------ tibbydudeza Hey does TenCent not own a big chunk of Epic ???. It would be great for Huawei if this whole closed appstore ecosystem would be broken up and give customers the freedom of choice. ------ bredren I thought they required an install from their Epic Games app store on Android, specifically to get around Google Play fees. ~~~ mcny They did. Seems like it only changed in April. Maybe they wanted to see the numbers and gather data. [https://archive.fo/Z0huU](https://archive.fo/Z0huU) ~~~ bredren Huh. I presume these numbers will look very bad for Google. There are no extra-app store options on iOS. If lowering the cost of app sales royalties to all 3rd developers is the only result of this, I'd say this will be worth it. ------ skc Google may have missed a great PR opp here. ~~~ SquareWheel I'm sure they weighed that against setting a precedent that developers can sidestep their 30% cut. The income was probably considered more valuable than the PR. ~~~ dragonwriter > I'm sure they weighed that against setting a precedent that developers can > sidestep their 30% cut That precedent is being set anyway, the Epic Games store still exists on Android, and you can get Fortnite through it, and this dispute can't do anything but bring more attention to that fact. Of course, that kind of does show a way in which they are better for devs and consumers than Apple, since dispute over store terms with devs are less of a total barrier to delivering/selling (for devs) or getting access to (for consumers) apps on the platform. ------ csneeky The link leads to nothing? Has been removed? (Sorry if late to the game but seems no one has mentioned this yet) ------ quotemstr Totally not coordinated at all. That Google and Apple have been completely consistent on demonetization, censorship, and general fuckery is just a coincidence. That the principal people involved all hail from the Bay Area and have similar social circles doesn't matter. Nope, no antitrust problem here, no cartel, no siree. ------ chrisan Don't xbox and playstation also take a 30% cut on sales? ------ tomcam Apple and Google are totally not acting like a cartel. ------ muyuu Any official statements released? ------ damnyou I've been very critical of Apple, but Google deserves the same as well. Hope Epic files a lawsuit against Google too. ~~~ dragonwriter Since there are alternative stores on Android (incluid Epic’s own, which, IIRC, they used Fortnite exclusivity to launch), to which developers demonstrably do resort if Google's pricing or other terms become unfavorable, there's a lot weaker antitrust argument with Google Play. ~~~ damnyou I use Android with alternate app stores everyday, so I'm intimately familiar with the issues with them. The most prominent ongoing issue is that they can't auto-update apps the way Google's can. It's not a level playing field. ------ baby-yoda the enemy (aapl/goog) of my enemy (antitrust regulators) is my friend? ~~~ markus_zhang No but you want them to fight at least ------ Datsundere This is exactly what DHH fought over apple to get their app approved in the play store. If you still think that having to pay 25% of your profit just to list your product that you didn't even use their tools to make, then you're insane. ------ scott31 As a Fortnite player, its time to buy an iPhone then ~~~ tveita You might have missed some steps of this still developing story: [https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/1293984069722636288](https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/1293984069722636288) ------ lwansbrough Crazy number of boot lickers in these threads. ------ teknopurge This is going to backfire for Epic. I see both sides, however, the App Stores have overhead to support free apps, and they need to be compensated. If a software developer has an issue with the distribution channel, then they can make their own, including the R&D and operate expense for the hardware. I know, really unpopular take. Bigger question is are Apple and Google (with hardware/software ecosystems) deserving of Bell-style regulation? The US already has a playbook for this. ~~~ wvenable According to another comment here, Epic paid Apple over $360 Million dollars in the last twelve months. I'm pretty sure Apple's overhead isn't so high that they need to charge that much money for just one application. Epic already has a distribution channel, payment processing, the whole 9 yards, what they don't have is anyway onto the hardware that you own. ~~~ teknopurge The amount paid to Apple is not a factor - it's what the agreement was. If that 360 MM is 30%, then we can also say I doubt Epic has over a billion in overhead. I do not believe the point is valid. Epic does have a way onto the phones: provide an easy way for User's to jailbreak them as part of the ingress to the Epic distribution channel. "In 2010 and 2012, the U.S. Copyright Office approved exemptions that allowed smartphone users to jailbreak their devices legally,[62] and in 2015 the Copyright Office approved an expanded exemption that also covers other all- purpose mobile computing devices, such as tablets" So all Epic needs to do is assume the cost and investment of managing the inter-dependencies of the hardware with various other pieces of software, including their distribution channel. ------ Wowfunhappy IMO, this was Epic's one misstep—they should have pulled Fortnite from the Google Play Store a week before this stunt. Apple is the big fish (revenue- wise) with the most draconian policy. Provoking two giants at once was not necessary. Every other aspect of how Epic played this has been brilliant IMO. ~~~ wvenable I disagree. This proves that one can be shut out of the almost the entire mobile software market in a single day. Apple is not a monopoly but Apple and Google together have just shown the incredible power they wield. ~~~ kmonsen Of course you can when you break the terms of services. Try adding some porn to your game and see it gone from both stores in a day as well. Or some other way to obvious break their terms. ~~~ wvenable This is a protest and a law suit against those terms of service. They have to break them to even have a case. ~~~ Wowfunhappy But the protest works is they're doing something which ought to be allowed. If Epic got pulled from the App Store for suddenly showing pornography, I don't think they'd get much sympathy. ------ emadabdulrahim Epic will lose this fight, because they initiated it the wrong way. You just don't start a law suite by violating the terms, then go ahead and cry about it. ~~~ ffggvv where did you get your law degree? ~~~ emadabdulrahim Epic Games, obviously. ------ wetpaws I predicted it one hour ago - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149151) ~~~ taytus Take it easy Nostradamus.

Reading disks from 1988 in 2018 - Doubleguitars https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/01/reading-disks-from-1988-in-2018/ ====== phs318u For me the interesting part of this article was the author discovering that he barely recognised his old self. I wonder how common this is? When I reflect on myself, I have a notion that there's a kind of continuity to my ego over the years that - despite the changes in the intervening years - I would recognise. But I'm not a diary writer nor do I have a stack of old disks from a distant part of my personal history, so I can't confirm either way. Has anybody else experienced what this author describes? ~~~ interfixus I have written quite a bit over the years. And some cartooning. I feel amazingly in tune with my fourty years younger teenage self. ~~~ kodisha Its easy to check, just go to gmail and rewind to first emails you ever sent. ~~~ zafka Your comment makes me smile :) I was 49 when it was released from Beta. Luckily i kept a journal for most of my twenties. I am making a concerted effort to get back in the habit now. It is great fun to see what my concerns and day to day events were 25 years ago. ~~~ interfixus Welcome to my age range :) Yes, Gmail is one of those recent things. _Google_ is one of those recent things. Though that is not my reason for using neither. ------ zellyn Let me leave a plug here for the rare hacker news commentator that has Apple II nostalgia, C++ skills, and Linux or Windows GUI knowledge. After having tons of fun getting my Go Apple II emulator basically working, I realized my efforts would be better spent improving an existing emulator than bringing mine up to parity, and switched my efforts over to working on OpenEmulator. It has a portable emulation library at its core, and a relatively thin layer of Mac OS GUI to show the windows, etc. If someone with the right skills helped to create GUI layers for Windows and/or Linux, I believe it would become much more popular, and start attracting more development to add functionality, peripherals, etc. It already has some of the best disk emulation, and almost certainly the most accurate CRT emulation of any Apple II emulator. If you'd like to try it out, try 4am's build: [https://archive.org/details/OpenEmulatorSnapshots](https://archive.org/details/OpenEmulatorSnapshots) ~~~ CJefferson What does it offer over MAME (which merged in MESS), the grand-daddy of multi machine emulators? ~~~ zellyn Areas where OpenEmulator is better: GPU-shader CRT emulation that looks almost just like a real CRT (I have real monochrome and color CRTs for my Apple IIe, and did a _lot_ of comparisons while implementing double hires support for OpenEmulator). Also, better disk emulation that (because of a quirk of how it works) can handle some copy-protect schemes better. Areas where MAME is better: cross-platform, and you can set breakpoints and debug etc. More devices. Probably more positives, but I'm not super familiar with it. I mostly used it to compare bugs while working on [https://github.com/zellyn/a2audit](https://github.com/zellyn/a2audit) :-) ------ userbinator As a contrast in backwards-compatibility, PC floppies from 1988 (MS-DOS, FAT format) would be immediately usable in a newish PC, just connect a suitable floppy drive. ~~~ nottorp For some definition of 'newish' \- motherboards have stopped including a floppy controller years ago. There's nowhere to plug it in. You'd have to get a USB floppy before everyone stops manufacturing them. ~~~ jzwinck The Intel DQ67OW motherboard has a floppy connector and an LGA1155 socket for Sandy Bridge (maybe Ivy Bridge too). 3.5 GHz Core i7 with a floppy drive is not too shabby. It also has both PS/2 and serial ports if you would like to plug in a mouse. ~~~ nottorp Yeah, I think that's the last generation when they included 3.5" floppy controllers. I'm on an Ivy Bridge mobo and there's no floppy. 5.25" controllers were gone a long time before that though. ------ th0ma5 I recently did a deep dive into all the 5.25" disks I could find around. I do sort of remember some of the stuff I found, but some of it was rather foreign. I now have a handful of "flippy" disks and have to set up an old 1541 drive to read these. I was surprised how much of it was readable, the amount of dust and bad smell these things developed over the 25 years in a basement, but also that I only had about 200 megs of data at the end of the multi-day process. I also spent some time digitizing Super 8 film too, so it has been a nostalgia trip. ~~~ pasta Some time ago I listened to my old casette tapes. I was amazed by the 'CD' quality some still had. Tape is more durable than I thought. Also: most floppy disks have dust cleaners. So they are not affected by dusk that much. Also remember drilling holes in the disk for more storage? ;) ------ zandorg About 5 years ago, I got a 1541 drive and an XA1541 plugged in the parallel port. The purpose was to 'rip' some disks (last used in 1997) I found in my mother's loft. Most notably, I found an old story I thought was lost, and a trove of insane Boulderdash caves/levels I wrote with a friend - in the Boulderdash level editor - in about 1993. I'm amazed that the disks survived. But finding the lost story - and some letters from high school - was great. Find instructions here: [http://decompiler.org/doc_c64_disks.htm](http://decompiler.org/doc_c64_disks.htm) ------ cavDXF He would've been better off buying a Kryoflux board. [https://kryoflux.com/](https://kryoflux.com/) He used an emulator anyway, why not using a faster and easier method, that even has error correction? ------ linker3000 I had a slightly easier task when I found some of my old 3.5" PC floppies, and I recovered some old ASM and Turbo Pascal work. The best part was rediscovering the ASM code for a PC program that wrote out the current time in words - I was inspired by a similar program by the late Jim Button ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Knopf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Knopf)), and I remember that at the time I had some fun working how to shave the code down, saving a few bytes here and there by using different coding or optimising the storage of the text data. There's also a map editor for the PC game 'Rockford', although, sadly, it doesn't work with the only version of the game I've found still available, which seems to be a 'gen 2' clone using a different PC game engine and a different map format. Anyway, I put my nostalgia here: [https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and- AS...](https://github.com/linker3000/Historic-code-PC-Pascal-and-ASM-) ------ lisper I had a similar adventure about ten years ago. That story is here: [http://blog.rongarret.info/2008/06/bugged- life.html](http://blog.rongarret.info/2008/06/bugged-life.html) ------ eltoozero Also the USB FC5025[0] controller, which unlike kryoflux reads floppies* like floppies and does not create multi-hundred-megabyte flux-transition maps requiring post-translation but instead gives you a bit level disk image, for many common disk formats. Also the Device-Side page is very HTML 1.0 and should appeal to HN peeps. *5.25” floppies. [0]: [http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html](http://www.deviceside.com/fc5025.html) ------ zellyn If you're interested in reading old Apple II disks, track down John Morris' recent AppleSauce work. It's fantastic. He's @DiskBlitz on twitter, and gave a talk at the last KansasFest about AppleSauce: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMrOiYCEuxc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMrOiYCEuxc) ------ fencepost What I want to know is how I can get all my old term papers off these floppies I used in the DEC Rainbow PCs in the computer center. ~~~ gumby They can probably be read by any CP/M or DOS system (depending on which mode you used it in). Though this article says "don't bother." ~~~ fencepost It was actually meant as a joke, the Rainbow used odd disks (SSQD) and a somewhat unique drive. I'm sure extracting the data would be possible but likely much more awkward than in the posted article. ------ forinti Acornsoft sold their games in 5.25" floppies inside some very nice black plastic covers. I found that floppies that had been stored inside these covers had survived, while those that were in the typical paper or cardboard sleeves had not. This was about 10 years ago, when they were about 25 years old. ------ BrandoElFollito Such articles show how useful cloud solutions for storage can be : the data is disconnected from the underlying hardware. When hardware progress occurs, files are transferred to new hardware and you could expect that 30 years from now, your files will still be there. ~~~ makapuf Well the ide interface has been there for quite a long time. ~~~ BrandoElFollito Yes, but disk drives (readers) are harder and harder to get. I have 5.25" floppy disks with some awesome software I wrote at the university which is now probably lost (even if I had a drive the content is probably gone). Same for 3.5"s, zips,... ~~~ zellyn Unless you left them near something magnetic at some point, allowed them to mildew, or left them in a _very_ hot car, they're quite possibly still readable. They are remarkably stable over time. See all of 4am's work for examples :-) ------ vidanay Interestingly, I still have the monitor from my IIc. I no longer have the computer, but the monitor is sitting in my garage. Sadly though I think it has water damage. ~~~ drudru11 Do you still want the monitor? ~~~ vidanay I have no need for it, but I would be VERY surprised if it is functional ~~~ drudru11 Are you in the SF Bay Area? ~~~ vidanay No, Chicago ~~~ drudru11 Ah - make sure it goes to a good home ------ 6d6b73 Just yesterday I acquired 3 5440 ibm disk cartridges.. I have no clue how/if I'm ever going to be able to read them, but some day I will try:) ~~~ zellyn Contact Jason Scott at the internet archive and he'll put you in touch with someone. ------ rcarmo I have a pile of similar stuff, including Zip disks (I still have an IDE drive for that, but nowhere to plug it in). Need to clear those out some day... ~~~ nmg That might be a herculean task - Iomega zip & jaz disks suffered from notoriously poor data integrity/longevity, and I'm pretty sure device drivers do not exist for any version of Windows newer than XP. ~~~ rcarmo I intend to hook that up to a USB adapter and try it on a Linux box. I'll post a writeup if I get it working.

Need Advice: Quitting Job to Learn to Code... (and start my business) - jaypreneur Hey everyone.<p>So, I've been contemplating this for a while and really need some advice. I'll try to be brief, but I apologize if I drag this on.<p>I work full time at a job I hate. Although it pays pretty well... I work until 9+ PM 25% of my time (like this week). It will be like that throughout January and February, for instance. Additionally, my commute (which varies due to where I have to be) is often two hours a day.<p>Ultimately, all of this time kills my ability to really learn code and focus on my business. I lose out on hours AND on mental stamina. It sucks. I'm all for working hard and would easily work 10+ hours (and can stay focused fairly easily) per day on something I am passionate about (this would include coding as 1. I know it'll help me create my business and 2. I think I'll enjoy it)<p>Currently, I have designed a website mockup, landing page, reached out to potential customers, and now I know I need to create. I consider myself competent on both the business and design side of things. I've been making small attempts to find tech co-founder, but it's difficult with no real traction (and no friends who do any programming at all, although one who is willing to learn... but that's another story).<p>So, I am at a crossroads. I am incredibly dedicated when I want something. I love learning. And I really want my business to succeed, not just for my benefit even, but because I truly believe my vision can make a great impact.<p>At this point, it looks like it will be very difficult to find a tech co-founder. Most are already doing their own thing, working for a startup with traction, or looking to work for a startup with traction. Someone like me, understandably so, is last on the list. Even if I find someone interested, I will be a difficult judge of talent. Additionally, we will need to work well together, have visions that fall in line, and so on... the perfect match is probably impossible. Even finding a reasonable match is incredibly difficult. It could take weeks, months, over a year...<p>In all that time/effort spent looking for someone, I am confident I can learn to code and develop something. I don't expect to be incredibly proficient, but be able to create something useable I hope. My idea isn't rocket science here. It's taking common internet technologies and combining them together. Ultimately, it's an idea and business that hasn't really hit its stride yet. I'm betting on the fact that it will and I want to be the business that is a part of (or the reason for) that.<p>I just don't know what to do. Fortunately, I am living at home for now and stay put if need be. That eliminates some obvious costs. However, having an income is helpful. Additionally, I definitely don't want to "waste" time. I'm one of those people who is always moving and doing something... I account for all my time internally. I want to make sure if I do leave my job it's the right thing to do and that I don't spend months without an income and end up with nothing to show for it.<p>So, if you guys could give me your thoughts, suggestions, anything you want to say, I'd greatly appreciate it. I would approach advice regarding the decision itself (i.e. "Leave your job! Go for it!" or "Stay there! Don't leave!") or advice on how to approach the situation after a decision is made (i.e. "If you leave, approach learning to code by reading X, Y, Z..." or "If you stay, look for a tech co-founder by trying X, Y, Z or use your salary to outsource a minimum viable product"). Or anything else you want to say! Please!<p>Last thing... I just want to say this forum is awesome and I love reading through the threads and great news articles everyone posts. I'm glad I found it. ====== nowarninglabel Sound like you are on the right track, and increasing your technical chops is definitely a good way to get to where you want to be or to at least give a better impression to potential future partners. That said, sounds like from this line: >I want to make sure if I do leave my job it's the right thing to do and that I don't spend months without an income and end up with nothing to show for it. ..that you are not ready to quit your job yet. It's a fairly high probability that this is exactly what will happen. If you aren't comfortable with that fact, then you don't have the risk tolerance necessary to go for this. At the least though, I can say that if you do go through with it, no matter the outcome, I highly doubt you will think you 'wasted your time'. If you look at the report-backs on HN of those who have failed, almost everyone has learned some skills and life lessons that made up for the experience. ~~~ jaypreneur Hmm... I guess I have to just think about what I meant by "nothing to show for it" to really think as to if I'll be okay leaving my job now and then looking back at what I accomplished. I think the way I worded it was too vague. I realize I won't be raking in money or something. Hell, perhaps I won't even have my MVP close to implemented after those months. However, I'm completely content if I feel that I've made good progress in terms of my learning to code and being close to my goal of creating an MVP (which is really my main goal right now, learning to code being the path to that). I guess I just want advice from you guys, as hackers, to someone who can just do HTML and CSS. Is it worthwhile to leave my job to learn code. Can I ever be proficient enough for a future tech co-founder or investor to care? I guess if I learn enough to create MVP and gain traction, then that answers my question. Thanks for that reply, it helped me think that phrase through a little clearer. If I decide to leave, I'll have to keep my expectations on my accomplishments reasonable. ------ fate_carver jaypreneur, 1) I wish you the best of luck. 2) As Buffett said, "Invest in what you know." 3) Hire the best you can afford to help you with the tech issues. Regarding 3: You go and learn all you can, write some code, etc. The more you learn the more you will realize you are in over your head (I hope you learn that). Besides the security issues you have never heard of, or the scaling issues, or the caching issues, you are not a Developer! To paraphrase Buffett, "Stick with what you know." If you have a good, marketable, revenue-generating idea then you are doing well. You can generate good ideas, that is great! Show your idea/attempt/mockup to potential tech co- founders. If the basics are sound any reasonable techie will see ways to improve it for you and take the bite. I am sure that you did not mean to insult all of the techies out here by saying you can learn to code in a year a two, but there is much more to our craft than banging keys or struggling with memory leaks...we have experience that you will never have if you part-time half-ass it. Either become a "coder" full-time, or find someone that has. I am known to be a hard ass, so please forgive me, but you don't have to code the solution/vision yourself...in fact, please don't. Reading your post I see a lot of 'impossible' statements. jay, if you want your idea to move forward with realistic performance, hire someone. If you don't have the money, search for the money, if you can't do that, search for the talent. If you believe in your idea and can convince a techie to believe in your idea, well, your search is over. I am sure you have heard this before but "Ideas are a dime a dozen." It is true, even with mockups, but if you need a tech co-founder, I think you came to the right place. Read 1) 2) 3) again. FateCarver ~~~ jaypreneur Thanks for the reply! (as well as your other one, which I've responded to in the wrong order, ha) I think my other reply regarding outsourcing vs doing it myself frames what you have said here perfectly. Ultimately, I do not at all think I can learn to code in a few months or a year or even 2 (well, be as proficient as I want to be and should be anyway). I know for that a fact, just based upon myself researching and learning about all the different languages, frameworks, terminology, and so on. Even that tiny amount shows the immensity of what there is out there. To be proficient, it takes YEARS. I don't underestimate it all. As a result, I do ultimately believe I have 2 choices: outsource or do it myself. I'm honestly leaning towards outsourcing at this point since if I need a technology guy regardless than why not get an MVP put together sooner (and better) by outsourcing? I guess it plays off what you've quoted: "invest in what you know" and I don't know coding, so perhaps I should hire what I can afford and ultimately look for someone to join forces with myself once I've created an MVP and traction and have something to really show for myself. I might not have the technical know-how to bring to the table, but I believe I have other valuable qualities and a great idea and vision. Thanks for wishing me luck and I appreciate the advice. Thank you for all the posts from everyone thus far! I really needed to have the conversation, get opinions, etc. It is so helpful. ------ pnathan \- How many months of savings do you have? \- How much selling do you have to do to break even? \- How long do you have until you get that much selling? That gives you the numbers. Coding is not as easy as some make it sound (nor as hard as other make it sound). If you get the functionality working to a degree where customers are paying for it and sticking around, you probably can find a techie to revamp it. Personally, I am sufficiently risk averse that for most products I've thought of, I'd have to see cash incoming before I quit my job. ~~~ jaypreneur Thanks for the questions. I will be asking myself those questions and analyzing the answers. A question they bring up in my mind though would be the opportunity cost of creating it myself vs. outsourcing. If I ultimately plan on finding a tech co-founder to come on board and revamp it, hopefully playing the part of CTO, then it seems wise to compare the costs of getting there via my own work vs. outsourcing, no? DO IT MYSELF Benefits 1\. I learn skills that will help when doing simple iterations (before having tech partner on board), assessing future tech partner, and attracting tech partner. 2\. I hate my job and would rather learn to code and build my business. Costs 1\. The time it takes to learn is time I can't be earning a salary. This could be up to 6 months or more. Let's say this costs me 30k. OUTSOURCING Benefits 1\. I keep my salary (even though I hate my job) while MVP is created. This could be positive 30k+. 2\. Outsourcing the MVP is likely far faster, let's say 2 months. This also means I can potentially get to customers faster and gain traction (maybe find partner faster as well) Costs: 1\. Of course, the outsourcing itself over those 2 months could very well be 250 hours of work. At 50 dollars an hour (reasonable?), that's 12.5k. Let's assume 10-15k range. 2\. Unfortunately, I lose out in terms of learning, which helps in terms of iterating (before having tech partner) and finding and evaluating potential tech partner. To me, it looks like outsourcing has the potential to save me in both time (a couple of months, at least) and money (15 - 20k). I guess I need to assess if learning to code myself extensively if worth that cost if I don't plan on really becoming incredibly proficient (as I recognize it takes years). Any opinions on that analysis of the situation? edit* I just wanted to mention I don't claim that my above analysis is accurate. It could very well take an entire year to develop a useable MVP myself, which would be 60k in opportunity cost. Additionally, the outsourcing estimate of 15k and 2 months could be 30k and 4 months, or more. I am not expert on the implementation and realize that. Please consider that and take the idea behind the analysis into consideration rather than the numbers themselves. ~~~ fate_carver How old are you? Outsourcing? To where? Part of the problem is a "Tech Co- Founder" is already making $300k+ a year. If you want someone to throw a few hours your way, you need to sweeten the pot and step up the talk a bit. Some "Tech co-founders" would actually have to use their time spent on your idea as a write-off. jay, I'm not trying to smackdown on you but what do you have to offer your tech co-founder? Even if you learn to code, what can you offer? Will you need a Marketing VP too? Or legal advice? Or accounting help? ~~~ jaypreneur I'm 24. In regards to "where" for outsourcing. That is something I have not looked into in detail, but potentially anywhere as long I received quality code. But anyway, to your other question directed at me (and no need to think your trying to smackdown because I agree entirely with your sentiment), what do you offer... The things I offer: 1\. Vision - I know, to some this (like an idea) means very little 2\. Design - I am competent with UI/UX, as well as designing using photoshop and illustrator. 3\. Sales/Marketing - I can sell. I'm a good orator and I'm passionate and persuasive (or so I've been told and experienced). In regards to marketing, I've read and learned plenty about it and am always learning more, although I won't claim to be an expert. 4\. Accounting/Business - I'm an accountant (well, auditor with CPA) so I do bring that to the table as well. Ultimately, along with accounting, I have a good deal of knowledge on finance and general business issues as well. Now, perhaps I'm naive to think the above is enough to offer a potential future tech co-founder. However, it's what I've got and, above all, I am incredibly passionate and hardworking. I know that would matter a lot to me in choosing someone to work with (perhaps more so than raw talent/skills), so I can only hope the same can be said the other way around. Anyway, you also bring up a good point about the problem about the "tech co- founder" in that they have far more opportunity (a good one anyway) than I might offer, so why me? It's the reason I have made this post and offer up the decision to code things myself or outsource. I know where I have a weakness, even if I learn to code, I still won't be as proficient as I need to be. So, I will need someone. I guess my hope is that by actually creating something and having customers, that traction (along with the list of things I believe I have to offer) will entice a "tech co-founder" to come join up with me. ~~~ fate_carver A CPA! Kudos. I know that is not easy, my fiancee just tested for her CPA...but I would hate to see the code she would write : ) This is way before your time, but Kenny Rogers had a lyric, "Got to know when to hold 'em, and know when to fold 'em" which can extrapolate to your perceived need to do everything. You can do everything, or anything, but where do you draw the line? Janitor? QA testing? Chief Bottle Washer? I'd "hold" on running the company, but "fold" on writing the code. If you do decide to "outsource" do you mean offshore? Perhaps Rent-a-coder isn't a bad idea, but just make sure the coder(s) are available after they write the code, have them sign a non-compete, and possibly outsource a second coder to review the code if you are not getting the warm and fuzzies from the first team. Ask for well-documented code including an overview explanation, approach, architectural considerations, and lots of comments. Ask for their best work. Again, I wish you the best and I hope that once you get your prototype up you let us all know so we can kick the tires with you. One last thing: Stop worrying about the tech co-founder and get this project in the bag! Heck, the more you type the less likely a Tech Co-founder is going to want to come on board! Get 'er done! ~~~ jaypreneur Thanks Fate. Good luck to your fiancee, I know it's tough. If she needs any advice on the exams, let me know. You are right. I will just have to get it done. At this point, I'll go with outsourcing, which doesn't necessarily mean offshore, but it could. I want quality work. I will have to do my research about it but will look into sites like rent-a-coder, odesk, elance, etc. I'll approach it as you said, I appreciate the help. I still will try to learn to code on a basic level to converse and not be entirely blind to what's going on, but I'm not sure if it's a good choice to try and program when it would take a significant time commitment. I'm not against a time commitment, but by saving that time, it frees me to focus on other areas of the business. ANYWAY! I will stop with the typing. It seems my choice is to stay with my job (although I might leave to find one that is less all-consuming of my time) and outsource the initial development. Obviously it would have been ideal if I already knew how to code or had a good friend who could code and wanted to join me. Unfortunately, neither is the case... and I'm not sure creating the MVP myself is the best proposition. If someone thinks otherwise, let me know though. Perhaps I'm missing something here. Lastly, any advice on outsourcing development would be appreciated. Thanks. ~~~ fate_carver Just had this pop up on my reader: [http://appicurious.com/2011/10/26/inglorious- applications/#....](http://appicurious.com/2011/10/26/inglorious- applications/#.TqiFepud77k) Like another poster alluded to, save up some money (keep your job). Interview 5+ developers with entrepreneurial tendencies, pick one, thank the others, hire the one you picked, tier their compensation on milestones. You already founded this, so looking for a co-founder is fairly moot. Hire someone, give them a chance to shine, bring them in as a partner. If trying to force the "tech co-founder" isn't working, try something else. As for outsourcing...I think it is a silly word that means "not committed". You're not committed to them, they are not committed to you...in the end you have your prototype, but know far less about it then if you hired someone, even an intern, and had them walk you through their process and the code...most outsourced help would probably not do that for you. A less risky move is to hire someone on 1099 for the project...you probably know more about those rules than most. If you _waste_ too much time fretting over the details, you'll never get it off the ground. Check your balls, take the leap. You will never be 100% correct (you damned accountant! : ) so take your best shot and learn what you are made of. Post an email link or phone number in your about and I'll give you a call and a swift kick in the ass if you need it. ~~~ jaypreneur I appreciate the link. It's good to hear someone say that design is important. I've read similar sentiments here and there, but it's often touted that the code is far more important (especially here, understandably so). I think there definitely must be a balance and hopefully that means my talents are valuable. Anyway, I appreciate the advice about hiring someone. I will have to consider a way to go about doing that, it's tough though... being that I cannot hire/pay someone for too much of an extended period of time. I just don't have that money. However, it is definitely a better route than outsourcing for the reasons you mentioned. I guess I'll just have to see if I can find a way to make it happen, the intern example is a possibility. I'll try not to waste too much time on the details and trying to be 100% correct (lol, you've got me with that one). I'll be making the leap, soon. I have added my email to my "about me" so feel free to shoot me an email and give me a hard time if I'm not getting going! Anyway, thanks again. I truly appreciate the feedback. ~~~ fate_carver You, and I and most of HN, see this conundrum every time we want to start something. In your case, since you don't have the geek chops, you have the following choices: 1) Get lucky and find a TCF willing to work for equity. 2) 'Hire' a company/freelancer to build your MVP 3) Hire someone to grow with you and build your MVP 4) Do it yourself My opinion is that if your product is actually worth all of this fuss then you have to put your money where your mouth is. I would keep the job, read more about development, save some money, and figure out how you are going to hire someone on a project basis (1099/freelancer)...there will come a time, MVP or not, that you will have to make that leap. Sure, today is not the day. Let's say you get your MVP created, its a hit, and then what? What about hosting it on EC2 or dedicated servers? What about some marketing? What about some legal reviews? What about incorporating (kinda need that to realistically spread equity to partners and investors)? If you did outsource the MVP how are you going to get your new dev team up to speed when you do hire...and what if it needs to be rebuilt from the ground up because the outsourced dev did not take scaling, security, or authorization into account? What about the other 10,000 things that are going to hit you? You'll be fine. I see a lot of people that have the best of intentions that are not fiscally capable of starting a business. You at least have a job. Some of these stories of creating the next whiz-bang site with 10 Million users on the first day and only $1.57 in startup capital are definitely the exception and not the rule. If you compare yourself to that success, then you are being unfair on yourself and on your future team. All of this lean startup talk ticks me off because some times you do need some capital to make it happen. That is where outsourcing may help a bit, but what ask yourself if losing the knowledge of the code is worth it? Fate's word of the day: Conundrum. ~~~ fate_carver jaypreneur's head must have exploded. : ) ~~~ jaypreneur Nope. Fortunately, no explosion. :) I actually just had a late day at work so haven't gotten a chance to come back to this. But in regards to your reply. It really sums everything perfectly and I can't thank you enough for your help. It has given me a lot to think about and figure out... and ultimately start accomplishing. I think the route of hiring someone to freelance and not just have it outsourced and part ways is a far better strategy. If they can guide me through what they are doing, why they are doing it, and even be there after completion as well... it'd be 100 times better than being left with a cheaper site but being a bit more blind to what's going on and when going forward. Again, I can't thank you enough for your help. ------ felipepiresx you already know the answer. you just want us to give it to you in better sounding words. we don't have crystal balls. fact of the matter is. if you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. go for it. calculate whats the most viable way and don't wast time . ~~~ jaypreneur Ha. When I think about it... that is exactly what I want. It's just a tough decision. Even if I know I ultimately want to leave and pursue this full time, being that I've never done something like this before, it's nice to get some on it thoughts, whether reassuring or against what I'm thinking, just to help me. Ultimately, what I have to lose is just potential income. My job is one that (especially in NYC) is in demand and I have the qualifications to get another job if things went south, so I'm not really afraid of being out of a job if I needed money. To be honest, I really never want to go back to what I'm doing anyway. I don't know if anyone else feels like this at times, but every moment I slave away I think about how much I could be accomplishing if I could use my time how I wanted to use it. The job sucked before I had that nagging thought... now it becomes unbearable at times.

Show HN: Introducing Glitch Playground (beta) - ahmed-taj https://dev.to/ahmedtaj/introducing-glitch-playground--69k ====== ahmed-taj This project is NOT affiliated with, funded, or in any way associated with [https://glitch.com](https://glitch.com) ------ fiatjaf Is this related to glitch.com? ~~~ ahmed-taj No it's not. Does it sound so?

Ash HN: What are some cool JavaScript projects that would impress kids (7-12yrs) - rorykoehler ====== detaro graphics stuff is always nice: take a webcam picture and make "instagram" filters for it, 3D stuff, voxel-style graphics (Minecraft!), ... ------ logiczero phaser.io

Anywhere but Medium - minimaxir http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2016/01/20/0900.html ====== notacoward He never seems to identify anything actually wrong with Medium except that it's popular already. People _might_ be disinclined to write anything critical of Medium on Medium itself? Weak sauce. It comes across as a hipster-ish "I was blogging before it was cool" whine, or maybe somebody from Medium stole his girlfriend. What it's _not_ is convincing. I'm actually more likely to use Medium now than I was before. ~~~ jerf I'd observe that Dave Winer, and I guess me too now, have lived through several instances of this. The question to me isn't how you feel now; it's how will you feel 5 or 10 years from now? Do you still think Medium will have your stuff? Do you think they're going to have your interests in mind? My weblog ain't nothing special and gets basically no hits (as befits its basically-no-new-posts), but it's 16 years [1] old and still all there (albeit with the first couple of years somewhat scrambled from some importing across systems; just never taken the time to sort it out), and all mine. Has your content lasted 16 years? The only thing about his piece that surprised me was referring to putting something on wordpress.com as a happy ending, since it seems like the same basic problem. [1]: Jeepers, my blog can get a learner's permit. When, metaphorically, did that happen? ~~~ tejaswiy To continue his analogy with RSS, When Google killed reader, they did provide an option to export all your feeds. Several RSS clients came out, but RSS itself was under attack by Twitter, Facebook and co., and it never regained steam. Ten years from now, unless you believe weblogs are going to die, I don't think you should be too worried about having Medium disappear and take all your writing with it. What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let users take their content away? As it stands now, they offer the best writing / reading experience on the web and while I'm all for competition and innovation, I'd be satisfied with their product even if it does not change for the next 10 years. ~~~ pluma > What incentive would they possibly have to not have an export option to let > users take their content away? Wrong question. What incentive would they possibly have to have an export option? If they're going to disappear, what makes you expect that the most likely scenario involves them helping users transition when the vast majority of startups haven't done this? You can be happy if you get some advance notice that the service is going to shut down. Getting advance notice AND the option to export your data AND that data being in some remotely useful format is hitting the jackpot. ~~~ Futurebot Medium already has an export feature. If you're arguing that they may take it away (which I think is vanishingly unlikely), then that's another thing entirely. The feature is there, though, so incentives about building one don't seem relevant to the discussion. ~~~ slyall But even if you can get all your articles and re-upload them (and they look nice still) the URLs will change so anything that links to your channel or individual articles is going to break. ------ pc86 > _So I suggested he post the comment to a blog so I could give it greater > circulation by pushing it through my network._ > _In the back of my mind I thought that he 'll probably put it on Medium. > ..._ > _Well, he did put it on Medium and sent me a link, and I sent back a comment > saying that I was worried he 'd do that, and unfortunately while I love his > post I am reluctant to point to it on Medium._ What an ass. If you feel that strongly about it, say something up front. But don't wait for someone to do the obvious (for better or worse, if you don't have a blog and want to get out two thousand words, Medium is the obvious place to do it) just so that you can lord your self-decreed moral superiority over them. ~~~ lucb1e > don't wait for someone to do the obvious For what it's worth, I would not for a moment consider that someone might use Medium when publishing something in a blog post. I'd expect some Wordpress install, or perhaps Blogspot or wordpress.com if they're lazy. In fact if I'd have to rank methods of publishing by likelihood among my friends, a text file might be higher up than Medium. Perhaps in Silicon Valley it's very popular and perhaps this 'friend' (that posted it, to his dismay, on Medium) is indeed from there, but it's not as if it's that obvious that everyone would post to Medium. But yeah I do agree, if you think of something like that, you might as well say it instead of waiting. ------ chasing For someone with any amount of tech savvy, I just don't think there's any excuse for not posting writing on your own, self-hosted system. HTML in its most basic form is literally designed for this use case. Medium's cool now, but it won't necessarily be in a few years. And it's completely within the realm of possibility that they will disappear entirely at some point. It happens all the time. Big sites that people have contributed mass amounts of content to blink out of existence on a very regular basis. Sometimes without warning or the ability to back-up data. But the best case, like Winer points out, is that any links in become broken, comments get lost, etc. Your writing is yours. Own it. ~~~ npizzolato I don't write a blog. I've thought about it quite a few times, but it turns out writing is hard and writing things regularly that people want to read is even harder. If I ever get over that hump, I certainly wouldn't want to make it harder on myself by hosting my own web server. I would want to _write_ , not manage a server, with whatever complications that brings. That's what makes Medium (and others) attractive. ~~~ lucb1e > writing is hard and writing things regularly that people want to read is > even harder. For the second part, I don't write regularly. I don't look for an audience tuning in every Thursday evening. I write when I feel like I have something to write about; when I learned something new and interesting that I want to share, that more people should (or might want to) know about. This gives me a URL I can share with friends and/or post on sites, instead of telling friends individually or writing a post on a gated community like Facebook. It gives me some of history on what I've been doing over the years, showing a potential employer I've been doing IT stuff out of school as well (very useful as a young professional). It even serves to remind myself now and then, e.g. my IPv6 post[1] I fairly regularly use to check stuff like "what was the maximum address length again". In fact, not writing regularly might be more useful to many potential followers. If you only write now and then, they can follow you without fearing their inbox/feed will be flooded, and posts are much more likely to be of quality. When deciding whether to follow back, irregular or semi-regular Twitter users are much more likely to get one from me because they are usually more interesting and not a day to day burden. [1] [http://lucb1e.com/!IPv6](http://lucb1e.com/!IPv6) ------ redwards510 Interesting. I have my own reasons why you shouldn't post to Medium. It makes you look like an elitist blowhard. The majority of Medium blog posts that I have read are: * 25 year old founder wants to explain how the reason his startup failed wasn't his fault. * 25 year old founder has a list of "10 ways to live a meaningful life" * 23 year old Javascript programmer proclaims "Node.js is dead, long live Node.js" (3 paragraphs) * 20something Bay Area resident thinks he's solved the housing crisis in 4 paragraphs. 95% Egotistic tripe. I can't think of any Medium posts I ever shared with someone else. ~~~ evanriley So I shouldn't post to Medium because other people, who to you are essentially just assholes, post there? Assholes use blogspot, or tumblr, or WordPress, or really anywhere on the internet. So my only option would be to host my own or go through some fairly unknown blog hosting service to avoid being included with the assholes of the service? I've only used Medium once, so I'm not really here to defend my use of it, but from my use it was incredibly easy to type up and piece and have it look decent. Is there anywhere that you recommend someone writes what they want to write without being included with assholes? Otherwise, They're just going to go with the easiest solution, which happens to be Medium. ~~~ derefr There's nothing wrong with using Medium as a glorified pastebin; the OP does that by having Medium mirror content they post elsewhere, and it completely avoids the "assholes." The problem only comes if you actually go in on the "game" of the platform—allow your writing to be led around by the incentive system inherent in the structure of the platform's network effects: recommendations, promoted posts, likes and shares, front-page status, etc. If you "buy into" the platform like that, then the culture of the rest of the _community_ on the platform (i.e. the other people who have "bought into" the platform) will start to matter. If they're mostly assholes, you'll have been tricked into playing a zero-sum game against assholes. You know what a private Minecraft server with no moderation is like? It's an infinite expanse of dick-shaped monuments, where anything genuinely creative is quickly torn down or blown up. The parent poster is basically saying that Medium is the same way. The dick monuments are figurative, but they're still dick monuments; the tearing-down is social, but it's still tearing-down. If you don't play the platform's game, none of this matters; you just get your little sandbox within the dickscape and can ignore the community around you. But the platform wants to engage your readers—through links back to a front page, or recommended follow-up posts, or whathaveyou. Building your sandbox in a dickscape leaves open the possibility that your readers might look out the window. ------ ak217 WTF did I just read? The guy relates so many ways in which he thinks we shouldn't use Medium, but never presents an argument on _why_. ~~~ eva1984 Yeah..weird. I think somehow he is going to rant about how medium is a close platform, bad for the web...But in the end, it seems like all leads to Medium is a start-up and will eventually die???? What the heck... ------ ThomPete As with the Mac App Store I think the danger is to think about your content as something that only should live one place. I decided to treat my content as I do my apps. As individual assets which are just looking for distribution. That's why I have my personal blog and then use medium as just another distribution channel for the content I write there. I also post it on linkedin and a couple of other places. If something else comes up I will also put it there if it makes sense. I normally get a healthy number of visits on my blog and while I wont get the traffic to my personal post I still get my thoughts out there when i use Medium (and some of the readers do cross from one destination to another) Just my 5 cents. ------ lucb1e TL;DR: Medium is a single platform with many blogs, instead of having each blogger have his own server to host on. Posting on Medium centralizes (as in, the opposite of decentralization). And Medium does not publish a 'statement of principles' to declare that they won't not put things on the front page just because they're critical of Medium itself. And the Medium page is larger than the plain text version, how terrible. We should not let Medium 'own' the media type called 'blog posts' (like Youtube 'owns' videos). My thoughts: he's saying Medium is evil because it's like every online platform ever. Now I'm a sucker for principles and host my own email, vpn, ftp, btsync and web server, and I indeed don't use Medium because I want to own and have control over what I publish, but saying Medium is evil because of these properties... maybe if it had been a post about online platforms in general, it might have had a point. ------ danso I don't disagree with the OP's overall sentiment, but it's worth noting why Medium has succeeded in attracting authors despite being yet another blogging platform. The implicit integration with Twitter probably helped adoption...but undoubtedly the "beauty" and simplicity of the authoring and reading interface had an effect...It's always been frustrating me to explain to people who want to get into blogging that _writing a blog post_ is separate from the work of making the blog itself look beautiful, and that should focus on the former and we can then work on the latter. Medium gives the latter without much work, and for aspiring writers, that's the incentive to finally try blogging out and feel like they've done something substantial. If it gets more people into the mindset of being creators instead of passive web consumers, I think Medium has been a good thing overall. ------ redthrowaway So, Medium is big. That's pretty much all I took from that. He lists no problems with it, except maybe they might one day be the sort of company to do something you don't like. This isn't a criticism. It isn't even a rant. It's not focussed enough to be either. It's somebody worrying about writing on the Internet being largely controlled by a single company. Which, of course, it isn't. Never was and never will be. ------ blt _> Medium is on its way to becoming the consensus platform for writing on the web_ Jesus, I hope not. I have better ways to burn my phone battery. The Medium version of this post contains 388kb of javascript and 312kb of CSS. Medium's engineering is terrible. ------ krallja Medium broke the "Signal v. Noise" RSS feed by truncating articles. I complained to Basecamp; they blamed Medium. I complained to Medium; they said they might consider fixing it. Run your own blog on your own website. Then you don't have to depend on someone else to fix your bugs. ------ minimaxir Relevant discussion: "Why have most tech and startup-related bloggers moved to Medium?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10839118) ~~~ davewiner Thanks for posting that link. It's important background info that apparently the other commenters weren't aware of. They basically have, due to their excellent product, deep pockets, and professional promotion, become the default place to post not just start-up posts, but political ones as well. All that background is assumed in my post because I've written about it many times before, in different contexts, and posted links to other commentary about Medium. As often is the case commenters on Hacker News don't always thoroughly research the background for THEIR opinions as they excoriate others for the same. ;-) ------ valar_m In case you want to read it on Medium: [https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2...](https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2c1#.1y9dqf7v7) ------ funkysquid This is more fun to read as the cross-post on Medium ([https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2...](https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2c1#.6dawtzuj4)), especially the parts about how people can't criticize Medium on Medium. ------ FussyZeus I don't use anything I don't own. I spend maybe a hundred bucks a year on a good virtual host and operate four websites off of it, along with a CloudFlare subscription for speed. I run an ownCloud server at home, everything is backed up locally and then offsite to one company I trust. If any of these entities went under I'd be out a small amount of money and some time getting setup somewhere else, but I'd be dinged, not dead. I get extremely uncomfortable with "platforms" of all types. I've been burned so many times when the shiny new website everyone used isn't shiny and new anymore and suddenly is gone, and bang, there goes everything you made right with it. And yeah, never used Medium. My websites don't get a ton of traffic but I don't need to be famous so, I really don't feel the need to produce content for a faceless Silicon Valley attention company. ------ jseliger I don't see anything particularly wrong with Medium that might not be equally wrong of Wordpress or something similar. That being said, don't people who've generated an audience with a particular URL or platform want to keep that URL or platform? I write a Wordpress.com hosted blog at jakeseliger.com, for example, and lots of links point to jseliger.wordpress.com, and I wouldn't want to lose those readers by switching. At the same time, I contribute to a self-hosted WP blog at seliger.com/blog. From my perspective neither seems dramatically better or worse. But both have years of traction. ~~~ minimaxir Medium now allows custom URLs which alleviates that particular branding problem slightly. It does not fix the branding problems of every other looking the same and having to shove self-promotion at the end of every damn article. ------ dexwiz Medium is the next generation of magazine where the users are content creators instead of the publishers. You can post to medium and get the distribution benefits of a publisher that people know and look to for content. Not everyone wants or can spin up their own hosted blog and drive people to it at the same time. Many people want to focus on writing, not publishing, so they use something like medium or twitter. I agree there should be other publishers, but the doom and gloom over medium is a bit strong. Any publisher, social network, or central repo suffers from the same complaints. ~~~ minimaxir > You can post to medium and get the distribution benefits of a publisher that > people know and look to for content. As noted in the article, _that is exactly the problem_ as Medium is not an impartial judge. ~~~ davewiner And of course Medium didn't pay you to write the post, another difference from magazine publishers. ~~~ LukeB_UK And of course Medium didn't charge the reader, another difference from magazine publishers. ------ bootload _" When you give in to the default, and just go ahead and post to Medium, you're stifling the open web. Not giving it a chance to work its magic, which depends on diversity, not monoculture."_ If you have read enough of Daves posts you'll realise this is the Internet version of what happened with Microsoft and Apple. Something about absolute power and corruption. Dave has been remarkably consistent in this observation over the years. _" Well, he did put it on Medium and sent me a link, and I sent back a comment saying that I was worried he'd do that, and unfortunately while I love his post I am reluctant to point to it on Medium. I asked if he'd consider putting it somewhere else. He asked where else. Hence the tweet."_ One reason not to put things on medium is the poor url design. Try remembering then typing this url into your browser ~ [https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2...](https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2c1#.2gv2klp7h) The design is ok. We can understand up to the end of the title, _' anywhere- but-medium'_ then we get robot vomit _' 5450cb19f2c1#.2gv2klp7h'_, junk parts of the url no use to anyone except machines. ------ Futurebot For anyone confused about Medium's export feature, it's available under Settings->Export Content from the user menu. Worries about platforms not providing this are warranted, but I think Medium already has this covered, even if some of the export HTML is messier than some would like. Until Medium, I hosted my own blogs on my own web servers (for ~17 years). I eventually got tired of dealing with updates, comment spam management (even with Akismet and friends), breakin attempts, and all the rest, so I moved there. I'd still like to see friendly URL and custom domain support, as well as some fixes to the editor (bulleted lists + blockquote indentation bugs are very frustrating), but overall, I've been fairly satisfied with it. His concerns might be a tad overblown in this instance, even if I agree with many of his concerns about the open web (and I personally still think RSS should be everywhere by default. It's still incredibly useful, even if only used for API consumption.) ------ 6stringmerc > _Since you 're counting on them not just to store your writing, but also > build flow for it, the inclination is to praise them, to withhold > criticism._ BZZZT! Wrong! Maybe for you, but not for me! I have no ingrained suppositions that the platform, free of charge, which hosts cheap-ass text in a usable format, and seems to be stable, would actually be bothered or compelled to promote my material. Not one bit of assumption on my part. I use it as a writing platform simply because it fits a need, and I didn't have to fork over for a domain and the maintenance that goes along with a self-implemented system. Or, if flow simply refers to it working, yeah, I guess I'm assuming that, but that's like a core competency. It almost reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke, the one where a chef becomes a master chef, and then a person asks, "Well, can you farm?" as though they should be a master of every aspect. I write. Medium hosts my writing, and I like the way the software works. Good deal for now, if it changes, I'll tear down and move on (like I did with Blend.io when they pivoted in a way I did not want to follow). If we're talking ownership, well, that's a "backup" issue for each writer. For serious, lengthy pieces, I'm working in a software like Word before I'm posting online. It's just habit, and I can save locally/backup and Medium is the finished, public product. Simple. In my experience - coming from music - the distributor is distinct and separate from the promotions arm. Though they may collaborate (PR working in conjuntion with Distributor to announce big release, etc), they are separate avenues in my opinion. In this piece the author really undercuts their own point by referencing Facebook...mostly because if I had to write a correlative article about the one website where _NOT_ to host music or artistic endeavors because of the single-platform lock-in risks mentioned...it would be Facebook. Anywhere but Facebook. Distribution and Publicity are moving targets, faster now than ever. ReverbNation. That's a site that does distribution and promotion, and I don't think it's very good. BandCamp is more about distribution than promotion, and I see a lot of pretty happy customers over that route. Facebook is, for lack of a better concept, a necessary evil but simply one aspect in a fully functional, diversified approach to coming to market. Which also includes YouTube, the radio of the internet generation. ------ zachgersh If you wanted both a platform and an OSS approach why not just deploy something like ghost: [https://ghost.org](https://ghost.org) I like supporting OSS business models that allow me to host my own platform or just post my content to their hosted version of said platform. ------ ageitgey Dave Winer makes a point about how he posts to his own blog and only syndicates his content to medium.com via rss because he wants his content to live on for years. Ironically when you visit the medium.com version of his post[1], all the links in it were hijacked by ifttt.com and turned into ift.tt shortlinks. So his effort to escape the medium.com content jail landed him right inside the ifttt.com content jail as well. Double jail. Will those ift.tt shortlinks still load in 5 years? Who knows. [1] [https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2...](https://medium.com/@davewiner/anywhere-but- medium-5450cb19f2c1#.53guhnze5) ------ Ecco The very same reasoning could be applied to any market leader. So then why is this guy hosting his repos on GitHub? Hell he should host his own GitLab instance, or even go all-in and ditch git altogether... ------ kmfrk I think everyone using Medium at least owe it to themselves to try out the export feature and migrate one blog post. I did that with a few for archival purposes and such, and the export feature is basically an HTML file with all kinds of stuff going on in it. The idea of Medium is awesome, but the combination of their weird CMS and the way in which they store blog posts is annoying. Pros and cons and all that. That said, it's not like other blogging platforms are saints. I'm sure it'd be a mess to export my Tumblr posts too. ------ microcolonel Can't read this page without Javascript. Anything but scripting.com. ------ ph0rque No mention of svbtle? Edit: I just visited the site for the first time in ages, and noticed it's no longer free to sign up. I take back any implied endorsement thereof. ~~~ seiji What is it and why would people use it? Mentioning something nobody uses and nobody has heard of doesn't seem like much of a a priority when critiquing a popular service. ~~~ cballard It's an invite-only blog network, for people that are sufficiently intelligent and witty. If you don't know about it or don't have an account, it's probably because you're unintelligent and not funny. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742314) ~~~ DrScump <If you don't know about it or don't have an account, it's probably because you're unintelligent and not funny.> What if I'm unintelligent, but _funny_? Can I get a part-time account? ------ kzahel The text is too large on this blog post on a mobile device. If it were written on medium, at least it would be more legible. ------ needz Well, at least medium.com loads. (site is down this moment) ------ strictnein We need to all go back to GeoCities.

How to Accomplish Big Things, Even When You Feel Small - rspivak https://unstoppable.me/accomplish-big-things/ ====== ambivalents Has anyone else given up TV and noticed beneficial effects? "I replaced all TV time with reading time. TV is full of stories of murder, betrayal, and pain. It’s riveting, but it also messes with your mind. Once I figured this out, I started going to the library every day instead of watching TV." This part resonated with me and I want to give it a shot. I default to TV when I have nothing to do, but I recognize how passive and lazy it is. You basically outsource your thinking for a couple hours a day. And I hadn't thought about how the stories we watch might be subconsciously changing the way we think. ~~~ madiathomas I eliminated TV 4 years ago and noticed these benefits: \- Finished 3 years qualification in record time \- Doubled my salary \- Managed to complete 3 profitable side projects \- Improved my software development skills tenfold \- and more... In the process, I lost friends. I used to host 300+ people parties. I doubt I can be able to bring together 20 people in one place for a party. ~~~ croh I am sure that you can rely more in those 20 people than 300+. ~~~ madiathomas That's the beauty of it. I am left with real friends, not those who were hanging around me because I used to throw cool parties. ------ plinkplonk How exactly does he make money? (sorry if I missed this in the article). As far as I could make out he is some kind of productivity guru? Great story, but the writing has a very new age, 'will a new reality into existence' Tim Ferris productivity porn vibe to it, which makes me just a little cautious. EDIT: added after scribing the above: Some Googling reveals: "Over the last decade, Jon helped build three of the most popular blogs in the world, Copy Blogger, KISSmetrics, and Boost Blog Traffic (now Smart Blogger). Collectively, they have garnered over 200 million page views, earning over $50 million in revenue. His main passion is Smart Blogger (fomerly Boost Blog Traffic) of which he is founder and CEO." He seems to make money from devising traffic increase strategies for blogs and training courses for bloggers (at least that is what I could make out) ~~~ TomMckenny >...Tim Ferris ... The most regrettable thing about Tim Ferris is his popularity essentially annihilated discoverability for a great science writer with essentially the same name. ~~~ sizzle Can you share a link please? ~~~ jsty I'm guessing it's [https://www.timothyferris.com/](https://www.timothyferris.com/) ------ codesushi42 Inspiring story for sure. But even if you pull the trigger and make all of the needed sacrifices, you can still be a lifelong failure. Hard work, an appetite for risk and resilience are required for success. But they are in no way a guarantee. Instead of taking an all or nothing mindset, you can choose to invest in yourself over the long term. Financial investments, education. Maybe this won't be enough to achieve your goals, and you'll still live with regret. And maybe you'll die before you reap the benefits. Or maybe this will be enough for you. Who knows. The only certainty is death. Doing something is better than nothing. ~~~ croh It's not about success. In fact it is never about success. It is about finding the process you love and if you die doing it, you will be still happy instead regretting. Pull the trigger to get yourself on the process and stick to it. Fast lifestyle of our generation has made it very difficult to figure out what does success really mean to us as individual. ~~~ hhc Great peace of advice. Thank you ------ starbugs Great article! I admire him for not giving up and even becoming a successful entrepreneur under these severe circumstances. Yet, I'd like to post a warning here. Putting the metaphoric gun to your head, as the article suggests, may sometimes be the only feasible option, but it can also lead to psychological problems later on. Not everything works better with force. In fact, there are things that require the opposite. It's easy to unlearn that when you put yourself under constant force and pressure, and your success becomes based on that solely. ~~~ rajlego I feel like the gun to the head thing is a good way to get started on things, which is what people struggle with the most. If you put a gun to your head trying to learn or study something and you’re hating it you won’t get great results, if you overcome your initial inertia against starting and find you enjoy then I think depending on the enjoyment is likely better. ------ czbond Anyone have tips on self imposing pressure? I perform extraordinary under pressure. Literally, I become unstoppable. However, I have a bad habit of rationalizing (almost in a Nietzsche way) that the pressure is artificial if self induced, and it won't work. I can't pscyhe myself out. ~~~ mfrye0 It depends on your situation. Part of mine is that I've had 3 bosses straight up steal money from me over the years. So the fear/pain of getting screwed by another boss is greater than the pain of starting a company. Apart from that, I don't know about you, but I came to the realization of how short life is awhile back. You have 70 or so years to do your thing, then that's it. You're dead. For me at least, the pain of dying and not having done anything with my life, is more than the short-term pain of working on your dream. So I don't know man. I'd say it's more what do you want out of life vs self imposing pressure. ~~~ sizzle This is a profound and compelling perspective. Thanks for sharing, I have quite a bit of things to rethink of in my spare time... ------ arikr I thought this was going to be some typical blogspam type article, but I was wrong. I really enjoyed this piece - highly recommended. ------ epiphanitus You know, I was thinking about the US founding fathers, and how people back then accomplished so much when they were teenagers - teenagers! and it occurred to me: 1\. No smartphones 2\. No internet 3\. No social media 4\. The news came maybe once a week (correct me if I'm wrong) 5\. No TV or movies 6\. If you wanted to be entertained, you would have to physically go somewhere 7\. Otherwise, you would have to create your own entertainment yourself - like playing an instrument or writing something ~~~ freetobesmart you forgot the big one. Especially when you talk about founding fathers 8\. No government. Government restricts and funnel much of what we do now. Responsibilities ment freedom because there was no one to do it for you and no one to tell you not to. We need distractions because if we didnt have them there would be nothing for us to do. America has created subsistence of mediocrity. No way to win or lose. You dont get to have a say in your society because its not yours. Remember to vote because this is the only chance you get to effect your surroundings that the government allows without tons of red tape. And we know that it really doesnt matter that much. Where's the border wall? What democrat would really change wallstreet banking and think of the little people? Government will be out of our way when we stop relying on politicians to act. I dont care what side you are on. Our politicians are thin veils to give the rich access to powers that the constitution would not normally grant. ~~~ epiphanitus I personally would attribute most of our current standard of living to better technology and better healthcare. Besides, we live in an innovators paradise, where thanks to the cloud you can build whatever you want for peanuts and there are VC's lining up to fund the next big idea. Starting a business is not hard, it's staying in business that's the hard part. ------ arandr0x This guy makes several pretty clear references to needing his mom to do things like take him to Mexico and turn pages of books for him. Does anyone think _she_ thought "hey why don't I accomplish big things" or "what do I need to sacrifice to get to where I want"? No? Was sitting in a library turning pages of books for someone part of her life ambition plan? Accomplishing big things sometimes is getting a lot of help from your family and friends. They're not telling themselves Fight Club quotes as they're lending you money, talking you off the ledge or making you your favorite dinner every Sunday. They do it because it's the easiest thing in the world. Maybe it's the most valuable too, even though no one, like, actually writes about it. ------ war1025 Fight Club is such a great motivational story for the first half or so. And then it goes completely off the rails. I often credit my current position in life to watching Fight Club with a friend when I was 16 and forming my views on the broader world and how I would fit into it. ~~~ czbond I'm curious - could you give an exmample of how it framed your thinking? ~~~ war1025 I guess the message I got from it sort of was that most of us live in boxes that we've built around ourselves that aren't actually there. "Working jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need" was a big one for me. Also "You're not your job. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your f-ing khakis." "First you have to give up. You have to know, not fear, that someday you're going to die." and the Raymond K Hessel thing from the article. You only have a limited amount of time and there's no point wasting it waiting for "someday". There's just a very real current of minimalism and intentionality underneath the absurdity. ~~~ czbond Great points - I'm going to have to re-watch it. It sounds right up my alley, as I'm a bit too defiant and minimalistic. "You're a slave to the system, working jobs that you hate for that sh!t you don't need" \- Papa Roach ------ ultrarunner This was pretty intense. I often think that the world could use more of this brand of intensity. ------ Ultcyber I have a deep respect for him overcoming what looks like unovercomable circumstances to achieve what he dreamed about. Judging only the article however - what always lacks in my opinion in those kind of motivational articles is an approach to achieving minor, everyday goals. Not all of us have a desire to "threaten themselves with a gun" to achieve a goal - sometimes we just want to do something but nor think about it every second of our lives. ~~~ chrisa For that, I highly recommend the book “Atomic Habits”. One of the major takeaways is that every time you do something, you’re making a vote for the type of person you want to be in the future. And from that mindset, if gives a lot of advice about how to turn actions into habits. ~~~ CamelCaseName The way I like to think about this is that every decision I make helps build the brain I'd like to have. After all, each decision stimulates a certain series of neural pathways. The more those pathways get used, the easier and more accessible they become. I still fail, a lot, but I try to keep the phrase, "build the brain you wish you had" a lot. Which is really just synonymous with building habits, but there's something more physical about influencing your brain. ------ pouta Amazing story! I had a student in one of my software engineering classes with a similar disability, a few years after I dropped out I found he developed a VR game and Playstation bought it! Sometimes I wish I had the same willpower. ~~~ SolaceQuantum _" Most people think it’s a tale of courage and persistence, a feel-good story of a young man and his mom who overcame the odds, and I suppose it is, but it’s also a testament to the astonishing, almost limitless power of having a gun to your head."_ It's not about willpower. ------ handoflixue "I refused to hang out with other disabled or impoverished people." Uh... wow. I've got my complaints about disabled people being used as Inspiration Porn, but throwing that in really makes it clear how much this piece is an insult to the disability community. Grats to him for being in a situation where his disability didn't get in the way of what he's talented at, but not everyone is so lucky. And "avoid minorities" is... really shitty advice, no matter how you phrase it. Why not just focus on the groups he did join, instead?

Reddit's /r/forhire debates allowing jobs that pay only in Dogecoin - drewvolpe http://www.reddit.com/r/forhire/comments/213wy6/mod_post_do_you_want_jobs_that_pay_only_in/ ====== thesausageking Interesting reading the comments. You see the three big reactions people have to crypto-currencies: some people get riled up and are insulted it would even be considered, some people see crypto-currencies as the future and want to see it advanced, and some are pragmatists who view it as just another mode of payment like Paypal.

Self-driving cars are getting into accidents in California - bko http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-self-driving-accidents-20150512-story.html#page=1 ====== wimagguc > But the cars, three owned by Google and one by Delphi, were in collisions > caused by human error. Also, these are rather amazing stats actually. I reckon if we randomly select 50 human drivers, each doing 10,000 miles a week on city streets, they would encounter a much higher number of accidents in 6 months time. Hang tight, the future is approaching. ------ jchrome What a terribly misleading title. Yes, self-driving cars are getting into accidents. No they are not the cause of those accidents. Whats the story here?

Intro to statistical data analysis in Python – frequentist and Bayesian methods - sebg http://ipython-books.github.io/featured-07/ ====== icki I also recommend Probabilistic Programming & Bayesian Methods for Hackers [http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/minrk/Probabilistic- Progr...](http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/minrk/Probabilistic-Programming- and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers/blob/master/Prologue/Prologue.ipynb) ~~~ misiti3780 agreed - i think this is the best applied bayesian book on web - in python anyways ------ niels_olson Most helpful thing I ever learned about Bayesian statistics came from Kant: all of a sudden the "prior" and "posterior" were easy to remember. In his introduction, he discusses the origin of synthetic knowledge, and sets about distinguishing between _a priori_ and _a posteriori_ knowldge: that which one had before, and that which one has after. Of course we all know about "a priori" but I had never associated "a posteriori" with the same line of thinking. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_priori_and_a_posteriori) ------ syedahmed Sweet! Bookmarked. Thanks for sharing. I'm just getting started with Python and this will indeed serve as a great resource once I start delving in Data Science stuff. ~~~ sebg If/when you start delving into Data Science stuff, you should check out Data Science Weekly [http://datascienceweekly.org/](http://datascienceweekly.org/) (I'm co-editor) which is a free newsletter of data science articles, blog posts, job postings, resources, and interviews with data scientists. ~~~ cblock811 Data Science Weekly is great. Definitely worth looking into for anyone interested in data science. ------ sebastianavina I love how every day there is a new post about R and statistical data analysis. It's really a hot topic. I hope somebody could upload a course using measure theory for the ones like me interested more in the abstract probability concepts. ~~~ grayclhn 1) "R _or_ statistical data analysis", since this is most definitely python. 2) enjoy: [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-466-mathematical-s...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-466-mathematical- statistics-spring-2003/lecture-notes/) ------ JHonaker I use R for my statistical programming mostly, but I use Python for a lot of other things. It's nice to have this as a reference when I don't feel like moving back to R. ------ abhishekkr541 Awesome to have this page. I was wondering about this only few days back, if I could find a website where I could learn Statistical Data Analysis in Python. :) ~~~ TallGuyShort For those interested in this topic, I just finished and highly recommend [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023784.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023784.do). It covers IPython, NumPy, Pandas and matplotlib. It doesn't cover algorithms and analysis so much, but it's great for learning the tools if you already know the statistics. ------ kylebgorman Consider using good Python style (like consistent use of whitespace) when trying to teach people to use Python (in any fashion). ~~~ if_by_whisky semicolons oh my goodness ------ blumkvist Are there similar resources for social sciences, preferably marketing/micro- econ.? And also preferably in R.

Show HN: Smarter Way to Compare Phones/Tablets - mohit_agg http://photab.com ====== danso Is there anything more than a LaunchRock page yet? ~~~ mohit_agg currently building it. have got basic functionality going but need to work on UI.

What visa type do you need, exactly, to legally participate in Y Combinator? - dotBen http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2012/02/what-visa-type-do-you-need-exactly-to-legally-participate-in-y-combinator/ ====== dotBen This is basically my response to the "My US border entry nightmare" YC post earlier in the day (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3545548>) Which became too long as a comment, so I blogged it. ~~~ arctictony Yep, I had this issue. No visa covers a foreign entrepreneur wanting to come and create jobs in the US. In the end I had to go through contortions to get an O1 but it wasn't pretty.

Haskell in the Real World - building real time finance systems for profit - dons http://www.starling-software.com/misc/icfp-2009-cjs.pdf ====== smokinn Here's a link to the PDF where you can actually use your mouse wheel to scroll: <http://www.starling-software.com/misc/icfp-2009-cjs.pdf> ~~~ mncaudill All PDFs that are linked to on HN link directly to the PDF, as well as to scribd. The title is linked to the former, the "[scribd]" is linked to the latter. ~~~ smokinn Oops, guess I clicked on the wrong part of the link. Thanks for the explanation.

Wanted: Console Text Editor for Windows - rhabarba https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/02/15/wanted-console-text-editor-for-windows/ ====== userbinator No mention of MS-DOS EDIT which came with Win95 and AFAIK is still there in Windows 10 (32-bit version only)? That would probably be the editor I've used the longest, alongside Notepad and vi. It has a very useful "binary" mode that is somewhat of a cross between a text and hex editor; I've done a lot of binary patching using it. ~~~ discordance The author tried to use EDIT in the first screenshot at the top ------ petepete I used to work with someone whose editor of choice was Epsilon[0]. I've never seen or heard it mentioned anywhere, it never figures in any discussions on technical forums/sites I frequent, but it appears to have a bit of a cult following. Also, it definitely has the best mascot[1] [0] [https://lugaru.com/](https://lugaru.com/) [1] [https://lugaru.com/pics/changing.gif](https://lugaru.com/pics/changing.gif) ~~~ rhabarba Epsilon seems to be a GUI editor? ~~~ rhabarba I stand corrected: It seems to have both versions included. Still, 250 US$ seem to be obscene. ~~~ petepete Yeah, it's a hefty price tag. The programmer in question (super experienced Perl-slinger) had been using it so long he knew just about every command and trick, and he'd customised his set up so much he'd locked himself in! Edit: an excerpt from the website that indicates its age > Why not settle for the "free" editor that comes with your compiler, or some > lesser programmer's editor, or even try to use a word processor to edit your > programs? ~~~ rhabarba Must be a Perl thing - even Epsilon’s website is a cgi one. ------ stevekemp I had a sudden memory of using edlin, and "COPY CON FILE.TXT", but it has been years since I've used a Windows desktop so I don't know what is available for the console. (Of course everybody knows about Notepad..) ~~~ rhabarba EDLIN has been removed for quite some time, its successor, EDIT.COM, has not survived the let’s-get-rid-of-efficient-software Windows XP era either. ~~~ tartoran I still casually use copy con in windows. Sometimes i forget which is the save shortcut. I think ctrl-z, right? I also fondly remember edit.com, too bad it didnt survive.. ~~~ rhabarba Ctrl+Z would work, or F6. ~~~ tartoran Nice, i didnt know about f6 ------ azizuysal There is micro ([https://micro-editor.github.io](https://micro- editor.github.io)). It works great on Mac and I think it works on Windows too. ~~~ lillesvin Yeah, for his criteria it seems like a perfect match. He mentions it as the very last one and seems to like it but think it ought to include a file browser... I disagree, though. File browsing is a different beast, and a good file browser would be able to launch micro for editing a file. Likewise you can probably configure micro to use [file browser] for browsing files. ------ drummer Anyone remember Sidekick? It was the first 'terminate and stay resident' program I saw back in the day. Used it as source code editor in DOS. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Sidekick) ~~~ rhabarba Borland surely had many editors, it seems. ------ dugmartin My goto editor in the 80s for DOS and 90s for Windows was Norton Editor. I had it on various diskettes to use when I needed to edit files on customer's computers when I worked in a computer store in college. However it looks like Windows 98 broke it (according to this message: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.editors/l24T-Wh...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.editors/l24T-WhI17I)) For anyone brave enough to try random downloaded apps it looks like it is available here: [https://winworldpc.com/product/norton- editor/20](https://winworldpc.com/product/norton-editor/20) ------ deepspace Interesting to see The Semware Editor in there. Way back before Windows, I used to use Qedit, the predecessor of TSE, and at the time it blew most other DOS editors out of the water. I believe it is the first shareware software I gladly paid for. By the time Windows and TSE came along, there were many other choices, but a 64 bit build of TSE might be worth looking into again as a console editor. My fingers still default to the Wordstar keymap from Borland Pascal/C days, so my daily driver in Linux is Joe - wish there was a Windows build available. ~~~ rhabarba Joe actually has a Windows build - right from their website. [https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io](https://joe-editor.sourceforge.io) By the way, there is a free semi-GUI WordStar clone named WordTsar. ------ BeetleB > MC overall seems far nicer than FAR On Windows, use FAR, not mc. Some aspects of mc I think don't work on Windows (last I tried), and frankly, FAR is significantly more powerful. ~~~ rhabarba Some of FAR’s best features only work inside ConEmu though. (I think that hasn’t changed in a while.) ~~~ BeetleB A lot of mc's features don't work on Windows. FAR without ConEmu is still better. ------ jakear VS Code’s remote ssh extension could help here. It’s basically a “headless vscode” running on the remote instance that your local machine can connect to. (A la. emacs, from what I’ve been told.) The language services and etc. all run on the remote instance, so there isn’t the giant network penalty you get from sshfs or whatever either. Disclaimer: on team, but not in this area specifically :) ~~~ andreareina Connecting to a remote emacs client is a bit of a pain. What it does do is handle remote paths via TRAMP: pretty much anything that takes a path (file editing, magit, shell mode, etc) handles ssh automatically. ~~~ jakear Sounds like you know a bit about this, have you tried using the remote-ssh extension for VSCode? If so, how does it compare? ~~~ andreareina I've never used VSCode. A cursory look suggests that the VSCode way performs better (in particular, no need to ship files back-and-forth), but depends on the remote end also having VSCode installed. The TRAMP way suffers a bit when dealing with large files, or large numbers of files, but works anywhere ssh + the usual shell utilities does. ~~~ jakear We do try to make the remote install easy. It happens behind the scenes on first connect and will even tunnel through the ssh tunnel in cases where proxies/etc. would typically make things annoying. ~~~ rhabarba Which operating systems are possible on the remote end? ~~~ jakear In short: x86_64 and ARMv7/8 Linux, Windows 10 / server 2016/2019\. MacOS Mojave. In length: [https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh) ~~~ rhabarba I understand that it’s not a solution for my BSD servers then. Thank you though, I didn’t know about that and I might try it later. ------ deeblering4 I respectfully disagree that “learning curve” is a reason not to go with a well established console editor like VIM. There is a learning curve for everything, including the code and configurations being edited. I think taking the time to learn tools, like editors, that are available on many platforms saves time in the long run and helps to manage diverse systems more effectively. ~~~ jpalomaki Investment in learning something like vi makes sense in the nix world, where it is available everywhere by default. On Windows side the problem is that there's no comprehensive "default editor" to learn. If you are doing server side sysadmin work on different environments then you might be limited to what is already available. Often you don't want to go through the trouble of getting a specific editor installed in order to edit some config files (3rd party software may require approval, somebody to install it, etc). ~~~ rhabarba > where it is available everywhere by default It is not (anymore), so not even that is clear. ------ Renaud The author seems to focus a lot on having 64 bit versions of the editors. I'm wondering what's the downside of using a 32 bits in the case of a console text editor? I doubt that it's because you could theoretically need to load 4GB+ text files in memory. Is there a good reason to want a 64 bit version of an editor to the point of excluding it if there isn't one? ~~~ jussij On Windows the executable will most likely only have access to 2 GB of memory. The Windows PE header contains the LARGEADDRESSAWARE flag which controls the memory available to the executable. When that flag is off (i.e. the Microsoft recommended default value) the executable only has access to 2 GB of memory. To access more memory that LARGEADDRESSAWARE PE flag set to on: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/cpp/build/reference/largead...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/cpp/build/reference/largeaddressaware-handle-large- addresses?redirectedfrom=MSDN&view=vs-2019) But in any case, you would think 2 GB is more than enough RAM for most text handling scenarios. ------ hazeii I've been using WordPerfect's 'Programmers Editor' since the days of DOS; the C rewrite works for me (on Linux, DOS and Win-whatever), works best with a keyboard with F-keys on the left. It's about a 75Kb executable on Windows (50K stripped on linux). ------ tuckerpo 4coder exists ([https://4coder.handmade.network/](https://4coder.handmade.network/)). Quite popular with the "handmade" crowd of folks (Casey Muratori & friends). ------ eatonphil My laptops run Windows but I do all my development in Linux VMs via Powershell's built-in SSH client. My biggest ask on Windows is for a native mosh client. There aren't currently any. ~~~ jesse9766 Have you tried using Fluent Terminal? It is available on github and the Windows Store. To use mosh you need to connect via the quick connect menu in the top left corner of the program. ~~~ rhabarba I’m not sure whether a JavaScript-based terminal is a good idea. ~~~ jesse9766 I haven't done a test yet, but the Fluent Terminal seems fast enough and doesn't eat up that many resources surprisingly. As a UWP program it feels very snappy (as opposed to Hyper being a full on electron app using 200MB for simple text output!) I don't care what technologies they use to build a program, as long as it works. I haven't experienced any hangups using SSH, so it's good enough for me. ------ bitwize Emacs runs in Windows consoles. Presumably you start it the usual way, by saying: emacs -nw When you have Emacs, why use anything else? :) ~~~ rhabarba Even in CUA-mode, Emacs is very unusual in quite a lot of ways in the DOS world. That’s why, I guess. ------ inakarmacoma It's interesting, a shame emacs org-mode is discarded so quickly. If only the barrier of entry weren't so high. ~~~ rhabarba The author implies that vi/Vim and an Emacs are the usual suspects here, but they’re rather foreign on Windows and DOS-like environments - which is true. Other editors in the list are - at least, UI/UX-wise - much more common to DOS people. ~~~ yellowapple Emacs has a CUA mode to address that specific issue: [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/CU...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/CUA- Bindings.html) ~~~ rhabarba It still feels rather different than (e.g.) TSE. Don’t misunderstand me, I surely like Emacs and I use it regularly, but the command-line version is a strange thing in a DOS environment. ------ lsllc The TSE/QEDIT and FTE TUI's look like they were made with Borland's Turbo Vision framework [0]. Oh man, so much retro-computing these days on HN, I love it! [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision) ------ craz8 Microsoft did release a nice editor called M back around the end of the 80s Here’s some info about it, and maybe a way to get something that works today [http://www.os2museum.com/wp/microsoft- editor/](http://www.os2museum.com/wp/microsoft-editor/) ~~~ LocalH That guest post was by the same author as the linked post. In fact, the linked post is also present in your link, linked in the first sentence. ------ karmakaze There was this awesome editor called Kedit that I used on OS/2 and Win NT. I think there were text and GUI versions, but not free. Edit: search turns up a free/shareware GUI version, no mention of the 'classic' text-mode one ~~~ rhabarba KEDIT, the XEDIT clone? There is a free version of that, The Hessling Editor. ~~~ karmakaze Yes. I's forgotten its xedit roots. Lots of interactive operations like block editing a subset of lines matched by pattern. And it could edit huge files fast. ------ the-dude I remember using The Boxer, console based editor last century. This was on OS/2, but I seem to recall it was available for Windows too. Not sure though. ~~~ rhabarba There (was and) is a Boxer text editor for Windows, a commercial BRIEF successor. Its developer, Boxer Software, was founded in the early 90s, so it could have had an OS/2 version once. ~~~ craigching Nice! I’ll have to check that out! I used BRIEF back in the early 90’s developing plant monitoring/management software. Our products ran on DOS and Windows after that. I’d been using emacs at school, but BRIEF was our editor of choice for this. The column copy and paste is something I still haven’t found as intuitive as BRIEF in any other editor. ~~~ rhabarba GRIEF is an open-source BRIEF clone, it can probably do that. (The article made me try it. I found and reported a few macOS problems, but the Windows version seems to be functional. I might keep it.) ------ Lammy How about `ee`? [https://github.com/herrbischoff/ee](https://github.com/herrbischoff/ee) ~~~ rhabarba Does it have a Windows version? ------ rhabarba (tenox /does/ have a point here.) ------ techntoke Vim works great. Don't see why you'd want to use anything else, except maybe Emacs. ~~~ rhabarba I am quite happy with (Acme and) GNU Emacs as my GUI editors, but Emacs is really annoying to use on a console to me, especially on non-native platforms like Windows. One of the reasons why I like the article. ~~~ techntoke Until recently with Windows Terminal the Windows console app has been garbage. Any text editor would suck using the classic Windows console. ~~~ rhabarba I find the Windows Terminal much inferior to ConEmu. Anyway, text editors specifically written for DOS environments integrate rather well with the „classic Windows console“. ------ 29athrowaway If you mention HT editor, you also have to mention Hiew. HT is sort of a clone of Hiew. ------ grzm (2018) ------ keithnz honorable mention, even though you are likely not to run it on a headless windows server, is with a WSL shell you can run any *nix terminal editor and edit windows files just fine. ------ stOneskull i noticed he made a 64bit version of fte himself, so i went and got that, and it's great. i didn't even think about a console text editor in windows before. good article. ------ slim openwatcom vi looks great ~~~ rodgerd It does. If the vi that shipped with Linux distros had that TUI, a lot fewer people would hate vi. ------ agustif micro works nice under wsl/shell env in windows ~~~ rhabarba Why would you do that as there’s a native micro for Windows? (I, personally, find micro too nano’ish. YMMV.) ------ jedisct1 I use Jed. ------ justinmk scoop install neovim

Hacking... trees? - DanLivesHere http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=2889002ad89d45ca21f50ba46&id=d747c1d468&e=df8918339e ====== mapleoin And here's the wikipedia article that this was taken from: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_shaping> ~~~ DanLivesHere I actually relied a lot more on the Gilroy Gardens' website :) ~~~ duck How did you do that subscriber sign-up box only on your archive page? ~~~ DanLivesHere <http://www.mailchimp.com/resources/merge/> ------ edkennedy I first heard of this from the remarkable gardens of Peter Cooke, which can be seen at their website: <http://www.pooktre.com/> And it also reminds me of the fantastic sci-fi novel by Leo Frankowski, Copernick's Rebellion in which the hero genetically engineers trees to provide housing & food for the globe. ------ sammyo It's an art project but there are upside-down trees at MASS MoCA <http://www.massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=29> ------ DanLivesHere By the way, this is from my daily "learn something new" email -- if you have any general feedback about the endeavor, let me know. Thanks :)

Show HN: Hacker Uses This - aartur https://hackerusesthis.com/ ====== JoshTriplett Interesting. What algorithm is this using to make recommendations? If you're not already, you should consider an algorithm that places less weight on more commonly used tools; right now, a huge number of people add "git", for instance, so it shouldn't carry much weight when looking for similar people and recommended tools. This could also use a "not interested" or "actively don't like/want this", to filter out unwanted recommendations. Looks like there are two copies of "Google Chrome". ~~~ aartur Yes, I'm already planning to add a button to "remove" recommendations. The recommendations algorithm is based on some heuristics to detect how similar are two users. Nothing "generic". I'll describe it in detail if you are interested. Now I'm trying to get information about why the HN submission is invisible... EDIT. The submission was flagged by users. Weird. Two Chromes - one is in Desktop category and the other is in Mobile. ~~~ aartur I noticed that the recommendations are probably equal to the union of fuzzy intersections of a tool set of the "logged in" user and every other user's tool sets, where the "fuzzy membership" function is an assignment of importance scores to tools. By "fuzzy" operations I mean the mathematical theory [0] I see that many people didn't change default importance score from 5, looks like UI is bad for this. [0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_set](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_set) ------ nstart Been playing around with it for a while. Surprised that I was the first person to add Vagrant to my toolset. EDIT - Forgot to say, great job. With some polish it'll definitely make a fun tool discovery service. Thanks for this ~~~ aartur Thanks, I'm planning to make a few changes mainly to allow excluding common tools from recommendations. Maybe I'll also add user following functionality. ------ mattmurdog Uh no they don't. Developers do. ------ captn3m0 You might wanna re-submit this. HN went down shortly after this was posted.

Turnbull uncoops 'electronic pigeon hole' for all Australians - pwg http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/397526/turnbull_uncoops_electronic_pigeon_hole_all_australians_/ ====== iwwr This creates a lot of possibilities for data breaches, especially with a single database. Maybe it would work better with 2-factor auth dongles. But the hardware & software side has to be auditable.

Ask HN: Why is down voting disabled on some submissions? - jug6ernaut As title says, down voting is disabled on some submissions. For example the recent SpaceX Thread [1].<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8071070 ====== sp332 If the comment is over 1 day old, you can't downvote it anymore. See, you can still downvote this comment on that thread because it's only 18 hours old. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8081863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8081863) ~~~ jug6ernaut Ahh thank you, this makes perfect sense. ------ timtamboy63 You can downvote? Does it come with higher karma? ~~~ DanBC There are downvotes and flags. People with at least 750(?) karma can downvote comments, so long as they are less than 24 hours old. No one can down vote submissions. If a submission does not belong on HN you can flag it. Be cautious with flagging because you can (apparently) lose flagging privlidges. (I think I flag too many submissions and I have cut back on that. I think I flag comments carefully). You can flag individual comments by clicking the [link] link which should then provide an option to flag. There have been some discussions and guidance about the difference between downvoting and flagging but I can't find them at the moment. (But if you do get downvoted it's nice to remember that some people use it to express disagreement). ~~~ logn I can confirm personally that you can lose flagging privileges :) My advice is not to flag off-topic posts and just stick to flagging spam or obscene content. ------ kordless A better title would be "Why is down voting _on comments_ disabled on some submissions?" ~~~ jug6ernaut I said submissions because it seemed to apply to the whole post. Another comment has indicated it is because of the posts age, which makes sense for my example.

NixOS: A lasting impression - Jeaye https://blog.jeaye.com/2017/07/30/nixos-revisited/ ====== Jeaye Relevant /r/NixOS post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/6qk0zq/nixos_a_lasti...](https://www.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/6qk0zq/nixos_a_lasting_impression/)

The Donut Hustle - zavulon http://www.theplayerstribune.com/arron-afflalo-knicks-kendrick-lamar/ ====== timbrah The song "Black Boy Fly" on Kendrick's Good Kid Maad City talks about how he was jealous of Afflalo. [https://youtu.be/BPAxrGT2emw](https://youtu.be/BPAxrGT2emw) ------ bluedino I paid for my first PowerBook G4 this way. I didn't buy the built-in SuperDrive because I knew I'd burn it out in a few months, so I got a Sony FireWire DVD writer. I had my PC setup with all the file sharing programs, hammering my cable modem 24/7, downloading movies and music. DVD's were $10 and audio CD's were $5. My main competition was bootleg movies on regular CD's that you could buy at flea markets, gas stations and party store but they had terrible quality. Not just because they had to fit on a CD but many of them were shot in the theater with a handheld video camera, not rips from IRC channels. They were only $5, though. It was way too much work driving around dropping discs off and I couldn't use my laptop for learning Cocoa, so I stopped doing it after a few months. ------ klean92 I have more respect for hustle than intelligence. Love this story. ~~~ crabasa I think you mean "knowledge" or "education". There's nothing in this story to indicate the writer isn't intelligent. ~~~ dkrich There's nothing in that comment that implies that the author believes the writer isn't intelligent. ~~~ klean92 Yes. The writer is definitely very smart. But on top of smart, he hustles. That's the part I admire most. ------ beatpanda My friend and I also hustled bootleg rap albums in the early 2000s, but in our case, we were two white kids selling the explicit versions of the albums you couldn't buy at the nearest music store, which was a Wal-Mart. Lots of our customers already had the album, they just wanted the version with the curses left in. It was also (to us) INCREDIBLY expensive to buy a CD burner, so before either of us could get one, we made cassette tapes of the albums, and sold those. The weirdest thing for me to think about looking back on it is how many of my peers still had cassette tape players in the year 2000. ------ nommm-nommm We also had two $5 CD hustlers in my high school in the Napster days. I can attest - The demand was insane. Retail price was really high and $5 seemed to be the sweet spot of affordability. ~~~ mrspeaker I remember someone back in the pre-napster days when CD writers were thousands of dollars. They were selling "The Best of Bill" on CD for $15 a pop: it had Windows 95, Visual Basic, Word etc, Visual C++... ------ vonklaus _If you’re a man of your word and people can count on you, it cuts across all lines._ This was a pretty inspirational story, I really enjoyed it. He seems like a smart guy, and I am sure he enjoys playing ball, obviously a very successful guy. He picked an avenue and followed through going pro. If he had more opportunities it would be interesting to see if he turned out as an academic or entrepreneur or if having to fight for everything he had is what made him so great. ------ roflchoppa By the time i hit highschool, it was easy to find music and movies online, but modding the hardware to play it, PSP, DS flashcards, chipping xbox, PS1, was ripe. esp. because no-one else knew how to use a soldering iron, and the whole bricking your device warning turned people off. ------ Graziano_M I made dozens of dollars by running across the street to buy 5c candies only to sell them for 10c each. Good times. ------ jongraehl Really clear writing. Sweet story. ------ wmeredith This is an engaging story, but that's one of the worst, most distracting websites for reading I've ever seen. Random page animations? Fuck off. ~~~ swampthinker Are we looking at the same website? It looks very clean to me, with the exception of the animation at the top. ------ webwanderings It's a good read, but I don't know what it is teaching. Ethics anyone? ~~~ orthoganol Bluntly, that's a very white person response. Do you know about Compton? Anything that's not selling drugs or gang related to get out is fine. What's right or wrong has a lot to do with the circumstances you're in. ~~~ wavefunction I am a white person who worked at McDonalds to get money as a teenager. Presumably something like that would have been ok? Or is that too "white?" (Keep in mind I had friends in gangs, not Compton but they got in shootouts nonetheless.) ~~~ rdancer What valuable business skills are you gonna learn working at that fast-food establishment?

Lisp-based OSes - fogus http://linuxfinances.info/info/lisposes.html ====== rst The Unix-style process model has virtues that the OP doesn't seem to grok. It's sometimes helpful to be able to restart one server from a completely clean memory image without taking the rest of the system down. Beyond that: the OP sez that "if the whole system is constructed and coded in Lisp, the system is as reliable as the Lisp environment. Typically this is quite safe, as once you get to the standards-compliant layers, they are quite reliable, and don't offer direct pointer access that would allow the system to self-destruct." But as I write, we've got two Lisp posts on the front page, and the _other_ one[1] is about the performance of code compiled with (declaim (optimize (speed 3) (safety 0) (space 0))) That is --- "omit safety checks, just trust me that my array accesses are all in bounds and I'm getting the types right." Code compiled this way is _not_ inherently safer than C, and has to be coded up with equal care. So, at the very least, the "quite safe" guarantee applies only to code compiled with full safety checks, which typically come with a very large performance hit. [1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2192629> ~~~ neutronicus The other half of his point was specially tuned hardware - the author seems to believe that the type-checking, gc, etc. don't cripple performance the way they do on x86. I don't know if he's _right_ , but that seems to be his point. ~~~ ohyes The idea is that you would have bits in the hardware dedicated to type checking and garbage collection. The example being, that in the assembly language/machine code, you may have a single arithmetic '+' operation. Determining which hardware path to use to add two numbers would be done in the hardware itself. Check the type bits of the numbers and feed it into my ALU. Compare this to an x86 lisp, or compiled C, where 'type' of a 'number' is determined by the assembly code instruction that is used on it. This isn't just a performance improvement, it is also an improvement in the safety of the dynamic language. There are a lot of different things that you could do for garbage collection. You could have in-hardware reference counting, or 'dirty' and 'clean' (or color) bits, for a mark and sweep collector, or 'generational' bits for an ephemeral garbage collector. The idea is that any time you take something out of software, and put it into specialized hardware, you should get a performance improvement. This doesn't mean that the lisp on a chip would be faster than C on a comparable x86 chip, it means that the things that make lisp (and other functional languages) safer and easier to use would be supported in hardware-- therefore not slowing things down as noticeably. ~~~ derleth > it means that the things that make lisp (and other functional languages) > safer and easier to use would be supported in hardware-- therefore not > slowing things down as noticeably. Or, at least, forcing every language implementation on that hardware to use the same safety mechanisms, making some apples-to-apples benchmarks impossible. It would be interesting to see what a C implementation for that hypothetical modern Lisp machine (CADDR?) would look like. A close parallel is AMPC, which compiles C to JVM bytecode.[1] The vendors say it's standards-compliant, and I actually am pretty sure it is, but it doesn't do a lot of the nonstandard things C programmers have come to depend on. For example, the 'struct hack', where you pack data of multiple types into a struct and proceed to index into it as if it were an array (usually an unsigned char array), flatly does not work, due entirely to the runtime type checking done by the JVM. This always seems to lead to major debates over whether it's a very good compiler. [1] <http://www.axiomsol.com/> ~~~ sedachv The 'struct hack' is when you leave the type of the last member of a struct undefined (effectively making structs variable-sized). This is actually not a problem for runtime type checking, and is C99 compliant. What causes problems is casting pointers to ints and back, and casting all other crap to chars. This is not standards compliant. Casting ints to pointers will never be type-safe, but one way to get around that is to just ignore the cast, and overload arithmetic operators to work correctly on pointers - the pointers will carry around their type info, and everything should work ok. Casting other crap to chars will never work because it interferes with the way the other crap has its type encoded. Luckily in most cases this casting is done to perform I/O, where you can also just ignore the cast, and specialize the lowest-level I/O functions to dispatch on the actual types. The moral of the story is that you should basically ignore all the line noise the programmer produces about types, and look at the actual objects. This is exactly how Java works, btw. WRT hardware tagging and type checks, there's really no reason to do it on a byte-addressed superscalar processor. If you look at 64-bit Common Lisp implementations today, you'll actually find that they use only about half the available tag bits in each word. The only thing that needs to be boxed is double-floats. ------ danking00 DARPA recently assigned a grant to Olin Shivers, along with members of Northeastern University's and University of Utah's faculty, to "seek to develop bug-free, secure technology using brand-new programming languages that enable programmers to write large, complex software."[1] Around campus, it's been described as an opportunity for Shivers et al. to write a Operating System built completely with functional languages, from the low-level drivers up to user space tools and new programming languages. My personal thoughts is that it'd be awfully cool to have something like "Emacs as a real OS." Perhaps it is lack of knowledge and self-confidence or the limited nature of Emacs, but I find it way easier to change the way Emacs works than to change the way the Linux kernel, GNOME, GNU tools, etc. work. [1] Page 12 of <http://www.ccs.neu.edu/news/CCIS-Newsletter-Fall-10.pdf> ~~~ pnathan I think it would be interesting to chop a *macs into an operating system. I would approach it in an iterative fashion with these initial goals: \- Replace elisp with Common Lisp \- Build os-level threading support \- Build a hardware abstraction layer / target a 'bare' machine. That gets someone a 'ways' towards a traditional Lisp OS. I think one of the big questions that arises in for a modern Lisp system is the design of of multiple processes and multiple users. ~~~ danking00 Personally, I'd rather toss Lisp entirely and go with Scheme, but something definitely needs to be done about elisp. There's a small group of undergrads here at NU hacking on Edwin, a Scheme based Emacs clone originally developed at MIT. They're (we're, I suppose) porting it to Scheme48. Those last two would certainly be important as well, but something I have no context on. ------ mark_l_watson I bought a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine in 1982 and loved it for the great display, windowing system, and awesome InterLisp-D development tools. That all said, I prefer the modern world of general purpose operating systems with good commercial (Franz, LispWorks, etc.) and free (SBCL, Clozure, Clojure, etc.) Lisp development environments. ~~~ bane On a whim, have you ever looked into any of the LISP machine emulators? ~~~ mark_l_watson Yes. I found a simulator for the 1108 bundled with a NLP package and ran it for an hour, then deleted it. Not the same experience as using my old 1108. ------ stcredzero Combining the Unix style process separation with mechanisms in the language might be useful. A problem with such environments might be the availability of widely used applications like Google Chrome or Firefox. A way around this might be to expose the language's Virtual Machine as bytecode or some other intermediate, and target C compilers to that. This way, an entire POSIX environment could be built on top of the Lisp based OS, which would be more comfortable for many users, yet still offer an omnipotent, seamless access to code everything "from the bare metal-up" in Lisp. ~~~ thmzlt I recently found this Scheme to C/JVM/C# compiler: <http://www- sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Bigloo/> ~~~ igrekel I've heard people having good results using Gambit to generate C code from scheme to write software for unusual platforms. <http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/doc/gambit-c.html> ------ 1337p337 Surprised no one has mentioned MonaOS. It's a small, Scheme-based, x86 OS. It's got a lot of parts written in C and assembly and is occasionally buggy, but is fun. It is largely a one-man show, but it's already fairly functional. There are images at <http://monaos.org/> and the github repo is at <https://github.com/higepon/mona> . ------ limmeau I'm surprised that none of the efforts listed seem to target hypervisors like Xen or KVM. A few weeks ago, Azul's VM was on HN, and its GC benefits from tight integration with the virtual memory system. ~~~ sedachv You can get Azul's Linux patches here: <http://www.managedruntime.org/> From what I understand, the main win is that they use nested page tables to let the JVMs handle page faults directly, which is how they implement high- performance read barriers. I don't know a lot about garbage collection, but read barriers seem to be the essential piece for implementing real-time (which really should be called "non-blocking") GC. There's a good discussion on LtU about this: <http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/4165> [edit] I should mention how this relates to Lisp operating systems: if you replace the virtual memory system with a garbage collector (ie push the GC into the kernel), you can get the same effect but without needing nested page tables/VT-x/RVI, even for user-space processes. It should also be more efficient and waste less memory on fragmentation than going through a dumb VM. ------ defroost While not a Lisp OS, StumWM <http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/index.html> is an interesting project. I run it on Debian, and I like to pretend I using a Lisp Machine. ------ nwmcsween Unix as in POSIX days are either numbered or is going to be perpetually hacked into something it can't do without issue. Distributed computing is becoming more of a norm with consumers having many devices. A look into what future operating systems might look like are Midori or Inferno (which was way ahead of it's time) or any other vm based operating system. ------ pnathan Does anyone know if there's any sort of open source project for a modern Lisp OS that is ongoing? ~~~ sedachv <http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/> Frode V. Fjeld doesn't seem to have much time to hack on it anymore, but the mailing list is active and you can hack on it today. ------ Stormbringer If there really was a tool (whether that be hardware or software or a combination) that for a couple of thousand dollars would genuinely make you 10x more productive, you'd be an absolute fool not to run out _now_ and buy it. Since people aren't willing to do this it goes to show that the claims of the Lisp junkies are just pipe dreams. If programming on an all Lisp environment really was 10x more productive even a ten thousand dollar price tag would be chicken feed. Lisp fans like to talk it up about how great it is, but at the end of the day are unwilling to put their money where their mouths are. ~~~ justinlilly This is only the case if productivity is your only concern. There are also considerations such as support, security, and familiarity.

QuorraJS - impostervt https://quorrajs.org/ ====== afloatboat Laravel seems to be a popular framework for inspiration. AdonisJS[1] has the same idea and has been posted to HN a couple of times before. I really like the simplicity of AdonisJS and QuorraJS, but I can't justify investing in investing in a framework with such a small userbase versus Express. [1] [https://github.com/adonisjs/adonis- framework](https://github.com/adonisjs/adonis-framework)

S4 - Super Simple Storage Service. Read Only Cloud Storge - iamelgringo http://www.supersimplestorageservice.com/ ====== dxjones ha ha, I thought April Fool's was a coupla weeks ago

Semantic Import Versioning - SamWhited https://research.swtch.com/vgo-import ====== calcifer From the "Avoiding Singleton Problems" section: > Another problem would be if there were two HTTP stacks in the program. > Clearly only one HTTP stack can listen on port 80; we wouldn't want half the > program registering handlers that will not be used. Go developers are > already running into problems like this due to vendoring inside vendored > packages. This is only a problem if you allow nested vendor/ directories, which "dep" (you know, the "official experiment" that suddenly got discarded to the surprise of its developers) doesn't have because it recurses through the entire dependency tree and reduces it to a single vendor/, just like many (most?) other languages. The whole post reads like the author thinks Go has a very unique dependency management problem that no other language ever had which somehow necessitates a completely unorthodox solution. Three blog posts into "vgo", I still don't see why... ~~~ dkarl Go doesn't have a unique dependency management problem. This problem is shared by many other languages that have all solved it poorly. I haven't written much Go and am not a big fan of the language, but I am watching this discussion eagerly because a successful solution in Go will be an example for other languages to follow. ~~~ kenhwang Curious about what languages you think solved it poorly, and why. ~~~ dkarl I guess now that I think of it, all the solutions I've seen break down into two techniques. First, loading different versions of the library under the same name to provide to different parts of your code. This has different risks depending on how and when symbols are looked up or linked. In some languages you can end up with the two versions accidentally calling into each other or using each other's symbols. In other languages you run into the "expected Foo but got Foo" type errors mentioned by munificent. That's what happens when you use classloader tricks as a half-assed way of isolating "components" in Java. Second, loading different versions of the library under different names. This requires hacking the compiled code or the source code; convenience and reliability will depend on the quality of the tools you're working with. Sophistication ranges from using sed to munge source code to using tools like objcopy that can read and rewrite compiled artifacts. Java "shading" (not "shadowing" as I said earlier) relies on rewriting class files. ------ JeremyBanks This article actually made the issue finally click for me: Go is having trouble solving this problem because it has more going on in the global environment, like its ancestor languages, and unlike more modern languages. They need to come up with a complicated framework to reign in their spooky action at a distance, because they have lots of implicit global relationships where we might prefer more explicit and local ones. Yikes. ~~~ ithkuil > where we might prefer more explicit and local ones. could you expand on this? who is "we" and what are those explicit and local relationships? are you talking about an opensource ecosystem or a private enterprise? ~~~ JeremyBanks In this case I mean open-source communities and the companies that heavily rely on them. ~~~ ithkuil I'm not sure I understand your point. It seems you're implying (please correct me if I'm wrong) that ecosystems of modern open-source languages are more local, more tightly coupled and having people working in concert towards a common goal. In my experience this is often what happens when a new community is spawned. E.g. when nodejs started it was there was always one single implementation of that thing I needed and it was reasonably up to date with the rest of the things around it (including the runtime environment, of which there was only one or perhaps two mayor versions of). As time went on more people started to contributing, often with different levels of commitment. Often "modern" gets conflated with "young". Almost by definition, young communities don't develop the same kind of problems of mature communities, yet. ------ bbatha I like this quiet a lot, it fits very nicely in the go stack. Absent this article is a discussion of alternatives to renaming. Reading the article would hint that a semver major bump would just leave you high and dry! This is certainly true in some ecosystems like Ruby or Java < 9\. But other ecosystems have solved this problem at the language level. Javascript, Rust, and others allow you to import multiple versions of a module so long as you don't expose types from that module in your public interfaces (not enforced by JS -- but by convention). You still reach the problem the article references once you have those types in your public interfaces or they use singletons. That means that your langauge's package manager needs to handle these dependencies differently (peer dependencies) giving you more flexibility at the cost of additional complexity in package management. ------ ryanianian Basically some motivation and how to use go + semver. But is there a way to statically-compile dependencies? Is that even a thing? (I'm not a go user so forgive me if I need a good RTFM session.) It seems like a lot of these problems come from two dependencies wanting different versions of a third dependency. Instead of just depending on a dependency as a semver string, I could (theoretically I think) depend on a statically-compiled version of the dependency so it's free to call whatever libs it wants - effectively eliminate the concept of transitive dependencies. For projects with large dependency graphs, you may end up with relatively large binaries since you end up with lots of duplicate object-code for common libraries, but I wonder how much of a problem this actually is (and if simple de-duping may solve a huge chunk of it). We spend lots of engineering effort to resolve dependencies as source just to end up compiling them into our executable anyway. I'm sure this isn't a new concept, but it struck me as odd that go is fighting with it so much recently considering statically-compiled, "library-free" executables is definitely in go's wheelhouse - why not extend it to libraries? ~~~ pjmlp The problem also happens in static linking, this is as old as the library concept. For example, the public symbols of the libraries might collide, they might have side-effects that misbehave because there are multiple versions, they can rely on yet on another library that can actually only be linked exactly once, .... ~~~ ryanianian Isn't that just a 'bug' in the algorithm for code-layout - that the symbol names weren't unique enough or something? This would require some breaking- changes in the way libraries are laid out and linked against, but basically you "should" be able to statically compile a dependency and then effectively hide all the symbols from its dependencies so nothing else knows how to link against them directly. ------ lifeisstillgood Am I over simplifying things in the article to say "At some point you cannot transparently support multiple target platforms" we are all used to different builds for intel, ARM, 32/64 etc. why should we be surprised to see Azure and AWS as fundamentally incompatible. I mean I know i was horrified when I grepped my nose dependancies to find 900+ packages, but i was pleased to find i had a clear version number on each of them. (Yes I am hand-waving what the depenancy manager resolves which is I guess the point of this post in some manner, but the post here seemed to be saying when you have incompatible requirements you are stuffed. And yes, that's true. So don't have transitive errors - this is only a problem for package maintainers not for developers, and so i suspect is a package _aggregation_ problem? ------ munificent _> "Incompatible changes should not be introduced lightly to software that has a lot of dependent code. ..." I certainly agree that “incompatible changes should not be introduced lightly.”_ This is agreeing with a sentence that the semver authors didn't write. The clause "that has a lot of dependent code" isn't in there arbitrarily. What everyone in an ecosystem wants is high quality, easy-to-use, stable packages. In a perfect world populated by programming demigods, v1 of every package would be all three of those. In practice, human software engineers do not design usable APIs and write robust bug-free code without feedback from users. In order to act on that feedback, they need to change their code, which sacrifices stability. The way this works in other healthy package ecosystems is that packages have a lifecycle. Early in the package's lifetime, it is undergoing rapid, breaking change while it finds its way. It can do that relatively easily because there are a small number of users harmed by the churn. If it gets popular, that implies it has found a good local optimum of design and quality. At that point, stability takes precedence and the package's evolution slows down. The path to a great library is usually through several versions of a kinda- shitty one. A good package manager supports both maintainers and consumers working on packages at all stages of that lifecycle. _> Able to predict the effects on users more clearly, authors might well make different, better decisions about their changes. Alice might look for way to introduce the new, cleaner API into the original OAuth2 package alongside the existing APIs, to avoid a package split. Moe might look more carefully at whether he can use interfaces to make Moauth support both OAuth2 and Pocoauth, avoiding a new Pocomoauth package. Amy might decide it’s worth updating to Pocoauth and Pocomoauth instead of exposing the fact that the Azure APIs use outdated OAuth2 and Moauth packages. Anna might have tried to make the AWS APIs allow either Moauth or Pocomoauth, to make it easier for Azure users to switch._ Those decisions are only "better" because they route around a difficulty the package manager arbitrarily put in the first place. There is already _plenty_ of essential friction discouraging package maintainers from shipping breaking changes arbitrarily. Literally receiving _furious_ email from users that have to migrate is pretty high on that list. I don't see value in explicitly adding more friction in the package manager because the package manager authors think they know better than the package maintainer how to serve their users. _> To be clear, this approach creates a bit more work for authors, but that work is justified by delivering significant benefits to users._ Users don't want all of the work pushed onto maintainers. Life needs to be easy for maintainers too, because happy maintainers are how users get lots of stuff to use in the first place. If you push all of the burden onto package maintainers, you end up with a beautiful, brilliantly-lit grocery store full of empty shelves. Shopping is a pleasure but there's nothing to buy because producing is a chore. Good tools distribute the effort across both kinds of users. There's obviously some amortization involved because a package is consumed more than it's maintained, but I'm leery of any plan that deliberately makes life harder for a class of users, without very clear positive benefit to others. Here, it seems like it makes it harder to ship breaking changes, without making anything else noticeably easier in return. _> They can't just decide to issue v2, walk away from v1, and leave users like Ugo to deal with the fallout. But authors who do that are hurting their users._ Are they hurting users worse than not shipping v2 _at all_? My experience is that users will prefer an imperfect solution over no solution when given the choice. It may offend our purist sensibilities, but the reality is that lots of good applications add value to the world built on top of mediocre, half- maintained libraries. Even the most beautiful, well-designed, robust packages often went through a period in their life where they were hacky, buggy, or half-abandoned. A good ecosystem enables packages to _grow_ into high quality over time, instead of trying to gatekeep out anything that isn't up to snuff. _> In Go, if an old package and a new package have the same import path, the new package must be backwards compatible with the old package._ This doesn't define _for whom_ it must be backwards compatible. Breaking changes are not all created equal. Semver is a pessimistic measure. You bump the major version if a change _could break at least one user, in theory._ In practice, most "breaking" changes do not break most users. If you remove a function that turned out to not be useful, that's a "breaking" change. But any consumer who wasn't calling that function in the first place is not broken by it. If maintainer A ships a change that doesn't break user B, a good package manager lets user B accept that change as easily as possible. As far as I can tell, the proposal here requires B to rewrite all of their imports and deal with the fact that their application may now have two versions of that package floating around in their app if some other dependency still used the old version. That's pretty rough. What you'll probably see is that A just never removes the function even though it's dead weight both for the maintainer and consumer. This scheme encourages packages to calcify at whatever their current level of quality happens to be. That might be fine if the package already happens to be great, but if it has a lot of room for improvement, this just makes it harder to do that improvement. ~~~ matt_m Well, the article calls for a v0, which seems to be exactly for the use case you describe? There are no import path changes, undergoing "rapid, breaking change" is allowed, and if you ever find a good local optimum you can graduate to v1 without any import path change either. I don't see any requirement to ever move to v1, although users may understandably prefer libraries that do. I don't quite understand what additional support you are looking for from "a good package manager". I'm also not sure this makes it harder to ship a v2. Sure, users will have to change their import paths, although I'm sure tooling like GoLand can easily automate this. But this also frees library maintainers to do extensive API redesigns, without worrying about breaking everything or hanging their existing users out to dry. In particular, the ability to make v1 depend on (and become a wrapper for) v2 is quite nice. Not only does this pattern not break existing code, but it even allows users who have not yet migrated to the new API to benefit from the active development on the latest branch. And of course there is the potential for some degree of automated migration, through inlining wrapper functions as mentioned in the article. ------ throw7 Has something like gcc symbol versioning been talked about? I can probably sense the sneers from some, but I'd imagine there could be an evolution/"go way" to implement it. ~~~ 4ad This is about software (source code) versioning. Shared library symbol versioning is a completely orthogonal concept. ------ __david__ I feel like the article made its case pretty well, but I really dislike idea that I need to duplicate my library into a "v2/" directory (or a different top level git repo) in practice. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but this seems to be exactly what branches are for. If I'm not able to specify a branch name in the package "path" then there's something really wrong. ~~~ matt_m It wasn't obvious to me either, but apparently vgo translates that into the appropriate git tag, it's not actually a separate directory. ~~~ 4ad Yeah, it's just the import path that it's changed, but it's still ugly as sin and makes the mapping between import paths and filesystem paths non-trivial. ------ k__ While I still think SemVer is crap (because of the edge cases) this seems to be a reasonable approach to library versioning. ~~~ 4ad Mind to expand about SemVer? ~~~ k__ It says only majors should break the API, but bugs do it all the time. So that rule is just wrong and gives a false feel of safety. ~~~ 4ad And the alternative is? ~~~ k__ Simply treat every new version as a major release, everything else is a lie. Sure, you can structure it by "intent" but don't pretend a bugfix can't break your API ------ justicezyx I am guessing my view of versioning being the fundamental abstraction for constructing software system is not well shared. I did not see anything that isn't an approximation of versioning with added semantic tailor to more focused use cases.

Container Runtime Interface (CRI) in Kubernetes - philips http://blog.kubernetes.io/2016/12/container-runtime-interface-cri-in-kubernetes.html ====== vidarh I can't get over how much of a smell the requirement of an RPC interface in order to interface with tools that may or may not have any good reason to be running on an ongoing basis is to me. I'm sure there may be cases where you interact with the containers frequently enough that spawning a process each time is actually a worthwhile optimization, but more and more of these containerisation systems are becoming an unholy mess of daemons that needs to run in order to run and manage containers that need not depend on anything but the host init/systemd. E.g. one of the really appealing things of rkt for me is the simplicity - depending on the level of isolation everything is running either direclty under systemd, or under an individual isolator like systemd-nspawn. I disliked this tendency towards a herd of daemons intensely when Docker continued as it started and used HTTP for volume/network plugins, and I dislike it just as much now. It's as if someone sat down and thought long and hard about how to add more complexity and more "fun" failure modes. ~~~ wmf It's the microservice philosophy: Why use a function call or fork/exec when you can use RPC? (At least CRI is binary RPC instead of JSON over HTTP/1.) Also, Go doesn't dlopen AFAIK. ~~~ vidarh It gets better. Take a look at rktlet, a CRI implementation for rkt (EDIT: I originally mistakenly wrote Docker). Specifically the runtime [1], which ends up shelling out to the "rkt" binary. So you end up running a new daemon that communicates with Kubernetes via gRPC, that then spawns rkt anyway. So you get to RPC _and_ fork/exec. I'm sure that ends up "optimized away" at some point by e.g. having a rkt CRI implementation that just links in the relevant rkt code. But I'm left wondering why we need this complexity in the first place. [1] [https://github.com/kubernetes- incubator/rktlet/tree/master/r...](https://github.com/kubernetes- incubator/rktlet/tree/master/rktlet/runtime) ~~~ chrissnell I don't get your argument. If I'm reading this correctly, you're arguing that system calls and/or a call to a shared library function are cleaner than RPC to another process? The overhead of RPC in an application like this is tiny and the cost of an additional process on 2016 equipment is non-existent. ~~~ vidarh It's more things that can fail that now needs monitoring. (EDIT:) And in the specific case of rktlet you _still_ end up forking/execing anyway. The overhead isn't necessarily a big deal (and can easily go the other way - if the request frequency is high enough, it's cheaper to keep the process around), but it does also potentially add up. ------ philips This was posted last week but here is rkt's roadmap around Kubernetes's CRI and use of OCI's runc: [https://coreos.com/blog/rkt-and- kubernetes.html](https://coreos.com/blog/rkt-and-kubernetes.html) ------ cyphar Currently quite a few people from the OCI community (including myself) are working on implementing a CRI-compliant runtime[1] around runC and the various OCI specifications as well as the containers/image and containers/storage projects. There's a lot of cool design to ocid which means that it doesn't require a daemon to be constantly running. [1]: [https://github.com/kubernetes- incubator/cri-o](https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/cri-o) ~~~ vidarh Do you have any more specific pointers regarding using it without a daemon? As the examples seem to start with starting a daemon, unless I misunderstand something. If it doesn't need that, then that's a big plus in my book. Though, I'm getting more and more disillusioned in general with where these specs are heading - the complexity seems to be skyrocketing for sometimes very little benefit. Not necessarily specific to Kubernetes and/or OCI - Docker is a prime offender. E.g. typical example: the highly coupled nature of many of the networking alternatives where routing, fabric and ip allocation gets muddled all up, when there are well developed, stable, well tested independent and orthogonal alternatives for tunnelling and route propagation there's a serious level of Not Invented Here syndrome at work in many of the container projects. I'm sure _some_ people need all the complexity, but I'm getting more and more tempted to ditch many of the higher level tools in favour of composing smaller, simpler tools. (Incidentally I'll make one prediction: one good thing likely to come from CRI is that I suspect it will lead to a new array of Kubernetes "replacements" from simpler composable tools; the APIs don't look all that bad - I just don't like the RPC dependency) ~~~ cyphar > Do you have any more specific pointers regarding using it without a daemon? > As the examples seem to start with starting a daemon, unless I misunderstand > something At the moment, the RPC requirement means that you need to have a process that can accept RPC requests (a "daemon" if you like). However, unlike Docker (and containerd), ocid's lifetime is not tied to the lifetime of its containers -- which is one of the main downsides of Docker/containerd IMO. So in principle you could have ocid set up to only start up when kubelet is telling it to do anything. The real benefit of the design behind ocid is that _in the future_ we could switch to a fork-exec model with the kubelet and it would still work. For example, currently kubernetes is adding a requirement for runtimes to include a "kpod" binary that can do container and image operations even if the kubelet is down. My hope is that eventually they will just make the kubelet shell out to this binary so the CRI is defined through some sort of "here are the cli flags you need to accept" interface. > the complexity seems to be skyrocketing for sometimes very little benefit. I wouldn't call the current CRI "complicated", it's just that the gRPC requirement IMO is a bit too much. However, I would hope that since ocid and rkt both don't require daemons (well, rkt requires systemd but that's a given) that they'll reconsider their method of communicating with container runtime runners.

Ask HN: For a new iOS app, sole proprietor or corp dev account? - relaunched I haven&#x27;t setup a new corp yet, so I was thinking sole proprietor (after all, the venture might go nowhere). But, if it goes somewhere, are there things that will prevent me from changing accounts later or that will cause unnecessary pain? For example, will apple let me move the app to a new account? ====== st3fan It is easy to move apps to different accounts. This is something they added recently.

MIT Challenge - ph0rque http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/mit-challenge/ ====== vonsydov How old are you ? I def feel much more smarter than I was when I was in school--in terms of solving problems. I think for a large part you just become more creative as you age and you're able to cut through the jargon and simplify the given problem. You also get much better at consuming technical and scientific information. Getting the curriculum done in 12 mths would be a challenge. Don't forget the projects though :) A lot of classes have that. !! Its a great experiment though !! I didn't go to school at mit, but i did get my masters there. But, I what I'd say that my undergrad was a complete 4 yr waste of time and i'd rather pick and choose what I want to learn rather than get indoctrinated by idiots. But the crowd at MIT is pretty good though. ------ cal5k Are you planning to do each course sequentially, one at a time? Also, do all of these have lecture videos or do many require just reading and following the curriculum? ------ ekm2 8.012 is a lot more interesting than 8.01

Predict diapers that your child needs - anacleto http://nappee.com/ ====== cahlansharp Although the homonym "nappy" is unfortunate, I can see my family using this. Here's to hoping it delivers on its promise.

Debugging Serverless Apps: from monitoring invocations to observing systems - n0debotanist https://read.iopipe.com/debugging-serverless-apps-from-monitoring-invocations-to-observing-a-system-of-functions-578c2ef8b3de ====== jgrahamc We've recently been publishing a lot of information about Cloudflare's serverless platform (called Workers): [https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/serverless/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/serverless/) This blog on bootstrapping a Worker using Typescript shows how slick development on the platform is: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/bootstrapping-a- typescript-worke...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/bootstrapping-a-typescript- worker/) and we'll be posting more in coming days about how to debug on the platform. ------ Myztiq Identifying cold-starts is a huge win here, using something to keep your lambdas warm is important for user-facing functionality. That functionality alone makes a compelling feature. ~~~ golangnews I don't really understand this - if you need to 'keep your lambdas warm' why not just run them as a process? There seems to be a lot of book-keeping and ritual for something which is supposed to just let you focus on the important bits of code, without worrying about how it runs. ~~~ l_t If you're already "serverless" (or want to be), it's not that easy to just "add a process". Usually if you're running a process, you're maintaining one or more virtual servers, which can be a lot more operational overhead than a Lambda. Having said that, I agree that there seems to be an inordinate amount of effort/thought going into keeping Lambdas "warm" (i.e. always running). I think the prevalence of these hijinks indicates that AWS Lambda should consider adding a "keep running" option that ensure the particular function is always "warm", but costs a bit more. ~~~ kthejoker2 Azure Functions offer an Always On option under a premium tier of Azure App Service but I don't know be that'd I call that just "a bit more", especially at scale. Might as well containerize it and accept the overhead of some maintenance to ensure the lowest cost guaranteed availability and performance. ------ cmjqol They could at least have a decent pricing. 299$ / Month for this is insulting knowing AWS X-Ray is built in Lambda and does it for Free. Clearly I do not take any startups working in Serverless seriously if they don't have a serverless pricing themselves. Serverless is not just Lambda. It's an entire philosphy and pricing model that goes with it . Here it's the exact opposite. ~~~ ewindisch There's a free tier and we're happy to discussing pricing privately. Startups, individuals, open source projects are dear to our hearts and we want to make the product accessible to those that need it. ------ k__ At least they could also have serverless pricing.

Why Positive Thinking is Bad For You - cwan http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/creativity-and-personal-mastery/201004/why-positive-thinking-is-bad-you ====== s2r2 [http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_C...](http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=TO&Product_Code=QC- THINKPOS&Category_Code=QC)

How Cincinnati Salvaged the Nation’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood - rockdiesel http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/what-works-cincinnati-ohio-over-the-rhine-crime-neighborhood-turnaround-city-urban-revitalization-213969 ====== llamataboot I grew up in Cincinnati and grew up with current staff members of both 3CDC and other active development groups in OtR. They have had good goals, overall, with active talk about in-fill development that at least gives lip service to gentrification concerns. However, they have also had decidedly non-diverse staffs, have held lots of non-public meetings even when the public was clamoring for meetings, and arguably just pushed poverty out of parts of OtR into other areas of the city. Here's some articles that have a different perspective: [http://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/citywiseblog/3cdc-in- over-...](http://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/citywiseblog/3cdc-in-over-the- rhine-between-two-worlds/) [http://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/letters/2015/03/18/l...](http://www.cincinnati.com/story/opinion/letters/2015/03/18/letter- otr-wealthy-poor-gentrification/24951835/) [http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24138-econocide-over- the-...](http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24138-econocide-over-the-rhine) The Brandery is a pretty big incubator, I bet there are some HN readers that have been through it or work there. Looking forward to hearing their perspectives. As far as the perspectives of the people that have lived in OtR through the 90s and 2000s, don't think you'll get many of them. I lived/played in OtR in 2001-2003 and grew up running around there in the 90s going to house shows, art openings (from the very first wave of incidental gentrifiers, one might say), boozey dive bars, the local goth club, etc. ~~~ jmathai I grew up in Cincinnati until my late 20s and before Over the Rhine was gentrified. My experience in OTR was volunteering every weekend at Washington Park. I would talk to the folks who frequented the park; many homeless. They had stories and weren't much different from myself. Except I had a bigger safety net, wasn't as unlucky and made different bad decisions. I remember how attendees of City Hall would walk past the homeless on their walk into the opera. It was sad. That's where I remember it all starting though. The "no loitering" laws and "no sleeping in the park" laws. OTR is better for middle class and above people. But those people who used to be in OTR didn't disappear. They're somewhere and I hope they found another place to hang out. Spike Lee's response to someone on the Gentrification in NYC is a great listen. [https://soundcloud.com/daily-intelligencer/spike-lee-on- gent...](https://soundcloud.com/daily-intelligencer/spike-lee-on- gentrification) ------ Animats _" In the process, it has earned the ire of longtime residents and homeless advocates, who say their desires, suggestions and dreams for the neighborhood—until recently 80 percent African-American—are seldom consulted and rarely implemented."_ Yup. "Urban renewal means Negro removal", as James Baldwin once said. Silicon Valley did this in Whiskey Gulch, the small piece of East Palo Alto that's west of 101. East Palo Alto was Silicon Valley's one black city. In the 1980s, Whiskey Gulch was mostly liquor stores and bars, hence the name. When I lived a few blocks away in Menlo Park, I'd hear automatic weapons fire from there most weekends. (This was the era of the MAC-11 machine pistol, "the gun that made the 80's roar".) It's the only place I've ever seen a fully armored fried chicken outlet; you got your chicken through a turntable in the armor glass. That problem was solved in 1997 by leveling the entire area and building a Four Seasons hotel and an office building full of lawyers.[1] Amazon AWS recently moved in there. No more black people, and no more gunfire. [1] [http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/cover/1997_Mar_5...](http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/cover/1997_Mar_5.COVER05.html) ~~~ nerdponx Just playing devils advocate here: do you think the solution would have been different if it had been white people shooting each other? ~~~ jjawssd Nope, Shivetya hit the nail on the head. It's more about economic and political capital. Lacking areas are more violent. ------ skrowl I'm from Cincinnati and have lived here my entire life. Much of the area formerly referred to as OTR remains unsafe after dark. In addition to the gentrification, they've also successfully rebranded "OTR" to just be considered to be the 2 streets (Race and Vine between Central and Liberty if you're looking at a map) that are revamped. The remainder of what used to be called OTR is still derelict buildings, soup kitchens, and other obvious signs of a blighted area. ~~~ mathattack I thought that the gentrification happened in the mid-90s. What happened? Not enough new residents? Things set back by riots? ~~~ mediaserf It did start in the mid-90s with people buying and renovating townhomes on Milton and Liberty Hill. I'm sure the riots slowed it down, but the article does inaccurately assert the speed of the change as well as where it came from. A lot of the residential turn-around wasn't corporate sponsored. ------ hackeradam17 I am from and live in Cincinnati. As some others have stated, this article greatly overstates the changes that's occurred in OTR. Yes, parts of Vine and Race street have been cleaned up a great deal, but go just a street over, or even a little further on said streets and you are right back in an area that is anything but the "good" part of town. It's not at all uncommon to go into these areas and see sights such as drug deals and prostitution occurring right out in the open. When I worked for Kroger (which, granted, has been several years now), they used to have to keep a police presence at the Vine street store because it was so common to have problems there. Sadly, much of OTR is still what I would consider urban plight. ~~~ ToasterOven A street over would be Walnut or Main streets, which now have a packed barcade, and a pretty solid empanada place, etc. The change even in the last two years is extremely positive, and I would have to disagree that the article greatly overstates it. That said, past Liberty or Main certainly has some unsavory characters, but for the most part they're only dangerous to each other. I lived in that area recently and go back frequently. I never felt unsafe in the area that's experienced significant development, even late at night. I think a lot of people who formed their opinion of OTR back in the race riots would do well to revisit and go in with an open mind. It's quite a wonderful place now ------ cinquemb Grew up in the west end and went to elementary school there before the school moved to some countryside and still lived there until highschool before parents split… it was bad, but when I was younger it never seemed that bad as people make it out to be. I rather gunshots, prostitution, having to stay in after hours sometimes or not being able to go home a couple of nights because some guy is barricaded in some abandon house across the street and the swat team is there than metadata drone strikes… some people don't get a choice where they live, or die… and in twenty years or so when this area becomes a slum, at least the buildings will be newer, up to code or w/e trendy bullshit people are selling these days :P ------ mauvehaus If you are in the area, there's a tour you can take that gets you into some of the unrestored buildings and the underground spaces beneath them. In particular, the breweries in the area used to lager their beer in manmade caverns that they cooled with water from the river when it was cold enough. In the context of the article I make the recommendation with some reservations. You can spin it as poverty voyeurism or gentrification if that's your thing, but it also offers a glimpse into how things were when the area was a vibrant community. It also offers a peek into historical infrastructure (well, insofar as you can consider the aging and moving of beer infrastructure) when it was still more economic to chill beer with cold river water than electricity. Not affiliated, but I did take the tour a couple years ago. [http://www.americanlegacytours.com/queen-city- underground/](http://www.americanlegacytours.com/queen-city-underground/) ------ ececconi Never knew Over the Rhine used to be the nation's most dangerous neighborhood. I'm on a consulting assignment here in Cinci and I go there all the time for trendy food and bars. Yes it does have pockets where I'm a bit scared to walk at night, but not enough so that I don't. ~~~ mywittyname If you were here even as recently as 2010, you'd have been scared to _drive_ in OTR in broad daylight. This isn't an exaggeration at all. Attempted car jackings were pretty common. ~~~ dionidium That's an exaggeration. These "most dangerous" designations are pretty meaningless, anyway. Neighborhoods can be dangerous for many reasons, in many different ways, and for different people, at different times of day, dependent on context. All but the most careful comparisons are suspect. ~~~ ececconi You can say the same thing about almost any other kind of comparison that's not strictly numeric. Fact of the matter is, people make comparisons and they're valid for many reasons. ~~~ dionidium _You can say the same thing about almost any other kind of comparison that 's not strictly numeric._ That's an argument against making similar comparisons in other domains, too; you're supporting my claim, not contradicting it. People absolutely _do_ make these comparisons, but I wouldn't point to what people happen to do as evidence that any random one of those things makes any sense. I get it; we like these comparisons. They're fun. They're also -- at best -- misleading. ------ refurb This part confuses me: _" From 2010 to 2014 it went from about 60 percent black to two-thirds white, while the still-undeveloped section north of Liberty Street has remained over 80 percent African-American."_ Is the neighborhood becoming more white because white people are moving there? Or because black people are leaving? It sounds like the population dropped dramatically with the crime. If it's because there were 4000 blacks and 1000 whites and now there are 4000 blacks and 4000 whites, that doesn't sound like a problem to me. ~~~ crisdux The census and 5 years estimates shows the picture very differently. 9,572 was the total population in 1990. The 2014 estimates are 4,568. The black population living in the neighborhood declined 65%, white population declined 33%. 3CDC and Cincinnati are creating a vibrant neighborhood for affluent whites. Just recently has the population started to increase for the white population. As the whole the neighborhood is declining in population and becoming much more affluent and much less dense. Graph with population numbers. [http://infogr.am/o65l3dVQjEXPYKWO](http://infogr.am/o65l3dVQjEXPYKWO) ------ mountaineer22 Related: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Subway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Subway) ------ fhood Short answer, by pricing out the poor people. ~~~ logn The 2001 riots destroyed the neighborhood and most people left. Then 3CDC bought the majority of the buildings. ~~~ api I grew up in Cincinnati and was in OTR during the riots, albeit in a third floor secure apartment. It wasn't nearly as bad as the press coverage made it out to be... mostly a bunch of stupid kids trying to smash and grab. But the bad press definitely ruined OTR's economic prospects for a decade. ------ subzidion Here's a TL;DR > "the Cincinnati Center City Development Corp.—better known as 3CDC—has > invested or leveraged more than half a billion dollars into Over-the-Rhine, > buying and rescuing 131 historic buildings and building 48 new ones, while > maintaining subsidized housing, rehabilitating parks and driving out > criminals with cameras, better lighting, liquor store closings and the > development of vacant lots" ~~~ antisthenes Here's a TL;DR for your TL;DR. Real estate development corp invests $500 million into gentrifying an area. ~~~ aminok You know how far gone social justice is as an ideology when "gentrification" has become a bad word. Gentrification means more safe high quality neighbourhoods for people to live in. The local effect might be to price some low income people out of their community but the systemic effect is to increase the supply and therefore reduce the cost of better quality housing.

What is a good file manager for Linux? - yapcguy http://xmodulo.com/2013/10/good-file-manager-linux.html ====== forktheif I wouldn't call PCManFM a "good" file manager. It's one of the consistently buggiest pieces of software I've used. Not major show stopping bugs, just a constant stream of minor problems every day with the occasional crash every few weeks. ------ damaru Not even sure why people are using file manager anymore. I stop using one few months ago and I waste a lot less time clicking around. I don't feel a gui really help on the file management side of the computer world really. ~~~ unsignedint The way I see is if you already know what you need to do to a certain set of files, then CLI would win any days, but there's still purpose for GUI, especially when you have to manipulate on an ambiguous set of files that are not necessary logically organized... ~~~ damaru you're right on that, when the naming and placement of files are ambigous and not structured, gui file manager helps to find and organize. Actually not using a gui file manager forces you to get organized and finally choose a good naming convention and folder structure. I am still amaze how file/folder gui structre haven't evolved much since it's inception ~ still dreaming about a 3d tree of my file system ;) ------ xtraclass Krusader is the best, at least according to some articles I read in the last years. I am using it for about a year and am very happy with it.

Ask HN: Why don't more apps use OTP as the first factor? - theschmed Hi,<p>Is there a reason besides inertia why most applications that require authentication use a secret like a password for the primary factor, rather than using a OTP app?<p>For context about me: I am pretty new to programming, learning web application development. So maybe this would be a Very Bad Idea, and I just don&#x27;t know why yet!<p>But it seems to me that some advantages of using a OTP would be:<p>1. It would be easier to temporarily grant someone else access to your account - as long as the app gives you a way to log out all other sessions and reauthenticate<p>2. It would remove the burden of remembering&#x2F;managing unique passwords from the user ====== gpapilion Otp apps require a device or a token. Requiring this removes the ability for a user to get in if their phone is dead, or lost. The support burden is also higher for a reset. Nothing is a show stopper, but also painful enough to prevent wider adoption. Back in the old days you used to get single use passwords for secure system. This creates a similar problem, where loosing the sheet meant you needed new passwords. ~~~ ksaj When I worked in Zurich, OTP was handled in exactly this way for visitors like myself. The company I was working with referred to it as a strike list. ------ bruce511 An OTP falls into the "something you have" category[1] whereas passwords are in the "something you know" category. Things you have are generally less convenient than things you know - which is why they're typically the 2nd factor, not the first factor. [1] I'm assuming you need something to tell you the OTP - that you haven't memorized them all. ------ gtsteve For example, there are 999999 combinations for TOTP. You might not be able to get through all those combinations in 30s but you could probably get through enough to give you a good chance of access on a long enough timeline. So, you lock out IP addresses. The attackers move to using a botnet. So, you lock out specific accesses to an account. The attackers can't move forward now but they can quite easily and cheaply deny access to a given account indefinitely. So when implemented correctly, with a strong enough password policy and a way to introduce delay, i.e. with bcrypt2 and IP address locking, etc, 2FA makes it more difficult. The time to access is considerably longer for an attacker. Of course, you've got similar problems with a password and a second TOTP but you've increased the difficulty level massively as the attacker must now have a working password before they can work on the 2FA dialog. At this point, you can easily spot suspicious behaviour and warn users, etc. ~~~ godot Maybe I misunderstood the OP or the standard usage of the acronym OTP/TOTP is only for referring to 2FA tokens? I interpreted his question to mean a one-time-password, not necessarily a numeric 2FA token, but a string password with ascii characters, with any length (or a reasonably long one at least), emailed or SMS'd to the user. I don't have a great answer for OP other than, I've seen some big sites do it. For example, I never remember the password of my rarely-used Twitter account. Every time I have to log in, I use the OTP feature and get emailed a login link. ~~~ theschmed Password resets are a great example of an almost universal usage of OTP, thank you. Of course, they deliberately discourage you from using that regularly, by making you set a new passphrase when you log in from a "magic link" sent by email. ------ gabrielsroka I think Okta can do (something like) this: [https://help.okta.com/en/prod/Content/Topics/Security/mfa- fa...](https://help.okta.com/en/prod/Content/Topics/Security/mfa-factor- sequencing.htm) ------ muzani It also means one point of security. Anyone with my phone has access to the OTP as well. ------ Raed667 Most users don't even know what an OTP is.

Chinese toddler disables mom's iPhone for 47 years - DyslexicAtheist https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/06/chinese-toddler-disables-moms-iphone-for-47-years.html ====== sh4z How does this work? Can I try to enter a code unlimited amount of times, and then once I stop it adds all the failed attempts up? Great brute force defense. Shouldn't the time limit incrementally increase. Wrong answer, try again. Wrong answer, try again. Wrong answer, you can try again in 1 minute..? Was the toddler left with the phone for 20 years? ------ gutnor I don't know what to think of this, that seems a weird implementation, is that a genuine iPhone ? I would have thought that the cooldown would prevent entering a new passcode for an increasing period of time. There should have been several more reasonable cooldown period but way beyond the patience of the most tenacious toddler (eg: 1 day) before hitting 47 years. What's going on then ? The iPhone allows you to try as many times as you want, but upon success, it tells you "Sorry bro, you have tried 1000th time before so you'll have to wait 80 years" What's the point ? Why no just prevent even attempting it ? ~~~ dvtv75 The toddler granddaughter of a colleague played with the colleague's father's (genuine) iPhone back in 2013, and disabled it for more than 43 years. ("iPhone is disabled try again in 22,685,550 minutes") It's definitely not a new thing. ------ jkahn I don’t buy this. My toddler plays with my phone all the time and the most it’s been locked for is 5 minutes. ~~~ debt try using a smarter toddler ~~~ cbluth Or a dumber one ------ aylons Well, that goes for Android - if your passcode is locked, you may always re- authenticate using your full Google Account password. Quite surprised this is not the way for iOS devices. ------ deweller So are you telling me that you can continue to enter wrong passwords while the phone is under a lockout period? And doing that will continue to extend the lockout period? If so, that is an overlooked implementation bug. Apple should fix that. You should not be able to extend the lockout period while the phone is locked out. ------ Casseres I think it's crazy that there's no upper bound in the time delay. Surely 1 month or even 1 year is long enough between inputs to penalize someone trying to brute force it? ~~~ eat_veggies There used to be an upper bound of a few hours (not sure how many, but less than 24) where it'd prompt you to plug it into itunes, and wouldn't let you enter any more attempts. I'm not sure if they removed it. ~~~ lttlrck When this happened to me last month it hit 1 hour, then on the next attempt required connection to iTunes. ------ Zanni "I couldn't really wait for 47 years and tell my grandchild it was your father's mistake," the woman was quoted as saying.

The ‘Real You’ Is a Myth - prostoalex https://theconversation.com/the-real-you-is-a-myth-we-constantly-create-false-memories-to-achieve-the-identity-we-want-103253 ====== hrnnnnnn This sounds like the idea of "no-self" from Buddhism. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatta) ~~~ helloindia As someone who is studying at the moment, I thought the same. ------ Fri21Sep I disagree. I've been keeping a journal for more than 10 years (started when I was 14 and am 25 now), where I report important events and more importantly reflect on them, and also on general concepts. Reading old entries can be very enlightening. What comes out of it is that events are the "data", while personality/identity is the "software". The data is various, but the software is the same. The consistency of reasoning between now and then is incredible. When I read the setup of an old recounting, I start reacting to it while reading it from the point of view of my now-self, and then I see that the reflection of my old- self on this event to be very consistent with that. It's naive, uninformed and a bit rebellious (probably because of teenagehood), and sometimes because of that it completely misses the point, but the direction of reflection is the same. It's not alien, it makes sense. We're reacting to events by using our software on related data. The value of experience entirely lies in the data, which can sometimes create entire shifts in perspective, but the software is the same. If you read an old journal you'll see that most reactions are the same, and for those which differ you can point out exactly what piece of data was missing in comparison to today's perspective. ~~~ scarecrowbob I wonder if you'll change your view on this as you age. I'm 40. I've been through 2 divorces and 3 full-on professional careers (academics, music, and programming). I have a 17-year-old son. Although I can probably think out the evolution of my "software", it's really hard to think of my current releases as having a whole lot of backwards compatibility with that 0.0.1 version. If I had to give it a number, I'd say I'm somewhere around release 6.4.3. :D Personally (and this is just my conclusions, not one I expect other folks to come to), my views and strategies for working with the world are so removed from 25-year-old me that I have little problem saying that I am almost not the same person. Certainly, my "software" has so many revisions to essential functionality that it's hardly recognizable as the same collection of code: there is very little overlap between how I reasoned about things when I was 25 and now, and I feel like that's not just a matter of "data" aggregation. My conclusions is that the software isn't, in fact, the same. I feel like it's more that I've fundamentally revised the software on a number of levels to the point where there are so many essential differences the identity isn't even consistent. ~~~ Phenomenit I agree but for me the business logic is the same. It's trying to solve the same problems. I want the same things I always wanted and I'm not talking about money or material or social status and relationships. I still want the same specific skills and experiences that did I when I was a kid but outlook is totally different. ------ RikNieu Real me. Right. Which one is that? 2 Year old me? 10 Year old me? Current age me? Me yesterday? Me today? The me I experience phenomenologically or the me other people perceive, interpret and interact with? The different me's others perceive individually? Will the real me please stand up. ~~~ madacoo Would it be reasonable to define the real me as simply the perpetually mutating sum of all those things? ~~~ RikNieu I dunno, would it be reasonable to call a cloud that temporarily looks like Chewbacca Chewbacca? I suppose it would make sense in that particular moment in time, and in that particular context, but it's not an image of Chewbacca is it? Not really. It's just a conveniet way of refering to phenomena... happening and being perceived a certain way. In a similar way, I'd say yes, we are the "real us" at any point in time, but only in the sense that it makes convient sense in that particular moment, and only as a device to point at a set of particular processes/things happening. ------ stewbrew "The ‘real you’ is a myth – we constantly create false memories to achieve the identity we want" Isn't this somewhat self-contradictory? Why assume the real me has to be based on true memories -- and I don't even want to start a discussion of what a true memory, a true account (save anything subjective?) of some event could be. If we know who we want to be, we most likely also know our real me. ~~~ boomboomsubban It depends on how you define "the real you." Generally, people use it to mean some long term inner identity that defines them as a person. This is what is a myth. You seems to use "the real you" to mean your current state. ~~~ stephen_g Would many people agree with the definition of “real you” as self-identity? I’d define the term as more as a combination of somebody’s personality and how they act and think when not consciously trying to act differently. For example, at work you might inhibit some of your normal characteristics and be more serious, or act nice to people you don’t really like when you might not do that normally. I think people can do that to such an extent that’s it’s possible that they could be deluded as to the nature of their “true” self, thinking themselves, say, kinder, or more competent in certain areas, or less racist than they actually are when their guard is down. Sometimes you need someone else or some experience to realise you didn’t really know yourself! I think current state is part of it - for example, people might become more cynical over time through their life not going the way they want. Things like that can gradually become part of the “real you” without you noticing. ~~~ boomboomsubban >I’d define the term as more as a combination of somebody’s personality and how they act and think when not consciously trying to act differently. This article is about how personality is shaped by memory, and how flawed memory is. I'd say that definition is fairly close to the one used in the article, and there being no "real self" supports the shift over time and need for outside views that you have noticed. ------ senectus1 I'm fairly self conscious of the fact that I am at least 3 or 4 different people. My "work" personality is a completely different one to my "Home" personality. and My Online and internal personalities are all different people as well. which one is the real me? _shrug_ they're all real, just used for different purposes. I'm fairly sure I'm not unique in this, but then I suspect I'm better at compartmentalising than most others so maybe I am. ~~~ com2kid I've known people who, at the office, are devoid of logic and are unable to think through complex topics. They operate in a permanent state of lizard brain, reacting with panic to everything that comes their way. Perfectly normal and decent folk outside of work. Able to hold intelligent and thought provoking conversation, and talk intelligently about many fields. The lesson? Some people are so good at compartmentalizing that they leave their intelligence in another box. ~~~ pjc50 That sounds more into the range of a severe anxiety disorder, "dissociation" rather than compartmentalisation. ------ chrisco255 Be wary of your own self-delusions. Sometimes they might be useful. Other times, they might be detrimental. ~~~ imesh But what if it's your self-delusion making you think your non-delusion is a delusion? ~~~ shoo in that case, remain wary ------ thunderbong I find sometimes it's easy to be myself Sometimes I find it's better to be somebody else \- Dave Matthews Band - So much to say ------ vbuwivbiu not only that, but all perception is a constructive process based on predictions according to multiple competing models which run in parallel of which we are only aware of a few at most. As such, other people have no single or objective perception of us either. ------ p2detar _But what is selected as a personal memory also needs to fit the current idea that we have of ourselves. Let’s suppose you have always been a very kind person, but after a very distressing experience you have developed a strong aggressive trait that now suits you. Not only has your behaviour changed, your personal narrative has too. If you are now asked to describe yourself, you might include past events previously omitted from your narrative – for example, instances in which you acted aggressively._ I have been pondering on a similar question for some time now. I have an amateurish and somewhat _Jungian_ theory: I think the "real me" is a collection of archetypes that are constantly struggling to take control over the mind and body. These archetypes are also constantly being improved on or new ones are being acquired through life time experiences. The "I" or the consciousness is nothing more than an observer and it also has the role to create a reasonable explanation, a justification if you will, of the motives behind actions. But the motives of the "I" are entirely produced by its collection of archetypes. This, in reality, would mean that the consciousness mind has no real choice in what one does! It is the archetypes that drive us to do or say things and the conscious mind just observes and creates a reason out of our memories and knowledge. This would explain situations where, for example, one gets angry and says something that offends and hurts another person, but they would then almost immediately ask themselves "Why the heck did I even say/do that?" and the conscious mind creates a justification. After that another archetype prevails, e.g.; the one of compassion, and an apology would follow. Of course, none of this explains how archetypes came to be in the first place. ~~~ snikeris This is similar to what is presented in Minsky's Society of Mind. What you're calling archetypes, he calls agents. Question for you...I agree with your observer idea. But why have an observer? What purpose does it serve? Couldn't we make do as just a collection of agents? ~~~ p2detar An observer could be required because of the causality nature of our reality. I would assume the observer is an _agent_ that connects cause and effect. It could be the one thing that brings order out of chaos in reality, if by chaos we mean the collection of agents. I want to thank you about mentioning "Minsky's Society of Mind". On my reading list. ------ qwerty456127 The good news is "real you" probably are not your memories - these are _yours_ , not _you_. The bad news is you are probably going to forget this and have a hard time getting the clue if you lose your memory. But perhaps it may be right the opposite - maybe one with all their memory lost may automatically get "face to face" with their "real self" actually. I would love to test that given a guarantee that all my memories are going to return soon. I've heard some psychedelics can induce this experience (and the memories are supposed to return as it wears off) called "ego death" if taken in sufficiently high doses. Perhaps I have even had such an experience but I'm not sure if it was that: I've once smoked some strong weed after drinking too much booze and forgotten everything (for about half an hour) - the feeling (but no information) of self-identity remained perfectly intact but I was afraid to leave the bar as I had no idea of where do I live and how do I get there. ------ yboris A related book: "Strangers to Ourselves" by Timothy D. Wilson [http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674013827](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674013827) Excellent book with excellent advice about how to proceed. ------ throwayw32 This has been dealt to death in Dharmic philosophies; I'm surprised there is zero attribution to this anywhere in this article. This is not the first such instance though; I have to wonder why standard academic ethics is not followed with anything concerning Indic traditions. ~~~ bitexploder I often find modern psychology heavily resembles ancient life philosophies. For example, CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is, effectively, applied Stoicism. If you were to explain CBT to an ancient stoic they would just nod and agree, understanding the approach intimately. ------ etiam _Mazzoni G, Scoboria A, Harvey L. (2010) Nonbelieved memories. Abstract: This is the first empirical study of vivid autobiographical memories for events that people no longer believe happened to them. Until now, this phenomenon has been the object of relatively rare, albeit intriguing, anecdotes, such as Jean Piaget's description of his vivid memory of an attempted abduction that never happened. The results of our study show that nonbelieved memories are much more common than is expected. Approximately 20% of our initial sample reported having at least one nonbelieved autobiographical memory. Participants' ratings indicate that nonbelieved memories share most recollective qualities of believed memories, but are characterized by more negative emotions. The results have important implications for the way autobiographical memory is conceptualized and for the false-memory debate._ "Approximately 20% of our initial sample reported having at least one nonbelieved autobiographical memory." and an anecdote of Piaget vividly remembering something wrong after being consistently misled by his mother as a child. Some discrepancy between that and "we constantly create false memories to achieve the identity we want". If _my_ memory serves right it's well established in laboratory conditions that autobiographical memory is vulnerable to adversarial manipulation, but last thing I heard it wasn't at all clear that it spontaneously malfunctions under normal living conditions. I see very little in this piece that gives me reason to revise that impression. ~~~ boomboomsubban That's the research showing that memories shape personality. The research about about autobiographical memory is further down the page. ------ emodendroket Wow, the claim of the headline does not follow from what the article explains at all. OK, people craft a narrative that fits their self-conception and use memories selectively to that end, some of which are not even real. How does "the 'real you' is a myth" follow from that at all? ------ rusk Since having a child, and seeing my friends and sibs having children I have come to the conclusion that there is a large degree of our personalities are "hard-wired". It's amazing how each child comes out differently with their own personality right off the blocks. You typically see invariant characteristics persist through life. To me this is "the real you", the aspects of your personality that are with you throughout your life. If I had to put a figure on it, to avoid argument I'd say it accounts for between 30 and 50% of your behaviour. The rest is shaped by social conditioning, life experiences and the environment we find ourselves living in. But even these could be said to be mediated in some part by the initial 30%. ~~~ hrnnnnnn I read The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature a while ago and your numbers are pretty close to what Pinker says. About 50% of personality from genetics, 50% from environment, and approximately 0% from parental influence. ~~~ tomp > 50% of personality from genetics What's the source of this? Given that siblings are often so different between each other, and from their parents, it could be that _most_ of personality traits come from the environment, but we're still _born with it_ (i.e. it could be influence in early development of the fetus, from the environment (womb, food mother eats and her hormones, sounds and movement from outside, ...) not from genes). ~~~ naasking > Given that siblings are often so different between each other But most _identical twins_ are not so different from each other. Read up on twin studies, where twins were separated at birth. They tend to have very similar personalities and outlooks on life, despite never having had contact until the study was conducted. ~~~ tomp That still wouldn't separate genetics vs. common pre-birth environmental influences (e.g. mother's hormones and nutrition). ~~~ TheOtherHobbes There's not much known because it's almost impossible to research, surely? You'd have to have one identical twin developing naturally, and the other brought to term inside a surrogate mother. This probably doesn't happen very often. (TBH I don't know if it's even possible.) ------ Orlan If anyone caught Derek Delgaudio's Off-Broadway show "In and Of Itself", he dealt with this concept. Great show, limited run just ended recently. ------ messit The 'Real You' is not a myth, and it is not based on thoughts. It is what you truly are, and what is lost when you die. ~~~ kaolti How can you actually know what is lost when you die? ~~~ rusk who said it's about knowing ~~~ kaolti It was implied in the comment I was replying to. ~~~ rusk _> The 'Real You' is not a myth, and it is not based on thoughts. It is what you truly are, and what is lost when you die._ I don't think it was ... if anything _" it is not based on thoughts"_ would imply the opposite! An object "is" an object whether it knows it is or not. EDIT I think maybe you're interpreting the final clause of the sentence _" what is lost when you die"_ as "what is lost to _you_ " but I read it as "what is lost _to others_ ". ------ Muha_ "I" is most valuable thing I have and only thing undoubtedly existing. And this thing not exists at all if I believe thats the world exists independently of me. This is not about natural sciences, it's a philosophical paradox that will never be solved. ------ evook Cogito ergo est. ~~~ emodendroket "I think therefore it is"?

New cystic fibrosis drug could turn deadly disease into a manageable condition - mhb https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/10/31/long-awaited-cystic-fibrosis-drug-could-turn-deadly-disease-into-manageable-condition/ ====== m-p-3 I'd add the drug name (Trikafta) in the title, in case someone is wondering or try to search for it.

Commitment - Icylicious http://icylicious.herokuapp.com/commitment ====== toutouastro I am 17 and had a lot of problems because of programming.I studied at this prestigious school got kicked out because of my grades.I was learning python and didn't care about school but I never regretted it

Google’s next advance will be hard fought - stevewillensky http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/googles-next-advance-will-be-hard-fought/article4367486/ ====== jaywalker Google is a company which is not short-sighted at all. I recently shared a story about Google's chairman's mysterious visit to Pakistan: [http://www.thejaywalker.net/2012/06/googles-ceos-mystery- vis...](http://www.thejaywalker.net/2012/06/googles-ceos-mystery-visit-to- pakistan.html)

Thousands of GitHub projects need contribution – Cadeify - srajbr http://www.srb.madroids.com/cadeify-a-github-discovery-project/ ====== srajbr Cadeify [http://cadeify.madroids.com/](http://cadeify.madroids.com/)

Google's Colossus Makes Search Real-Time By Dumping MapReduce - brown9-2 http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/9/11/googles-colossus-makes-search-real-time-by-dumping-mapreduce.html ====== stingraycharles I don't get it. They were using Map/Reduce as a way to build the index, which they were able to query in mere milliseconds. This article claims that in order to facilitate Google Instant, they had to ditch the Map/Reduce-oriented updating of the index. How are these mutually exclusive? If you look at quotes like these: "Goal is to update the search index continuously, within seconds of content changing, without rebuilding the entire index from scratch using MapReduce." To me, this seems as if this change has nothing to do with Google Instant. This has more to do with being able to respond instantly to new content, instead of being able to query the index quickly. It sounds like they added support for distributed stored procedures on top of BigTable, which reminds me a bit of the way MongoDB implemented Map/Reduce. But I bet that they in no way at all have dumped Map/Reduce. ~~~ fizx > To me, this seems as if this change has nothing to do with Google Instant. > This has more to do with being able to respond instantly to new content, > instead of being able to query the index quickly. Right, this was part of the caffeine update, which happened months ago. > But I bet that they in no way at all have dumped Map/Reduce. The old way of doing calculations on the web graph was giant iterations on the adjacency matrix via map reduce. In the new system, they are probably doing local walks in the instantiated graph. These local walks are simple iterations, not map-reduce. ~~~ Anon84 > In the new system, they are probably doing local walks in the instantiated > graph. These local walks are simple iterations, not map-reduce. Actually it using Pregel, a variation on Map/Reduce: [http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/large-scale- graph...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/large-scale-graph- computing-at-google.html) [http://horicky.blogspot.com/2010/07/google-pregel-graph- proc...](http://horicky.blogspot.com/2010/07/google-pregel-graph- processing.html) <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1582716.1582723> ------ tarvaina The Register article linked by the blog post ( [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/google_caffeine_expl...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/09/google_caffeine_explained/) ) is more informative than the blog post itself. To me, it looks like the blogger makes a few wrong assumptions: He confuses Google Instant with Google Realtime. He assumes that "something like database triggers" is actually very much like database triggers and could be e.g. used to check the integrity of the data. He goes wildly off on a tangent with Internet DOM. ------ DougBTX This article seems to confuse real-time search (producing results from web pages put online moments ago, such as news articles and twitter feeds) and Google Instant (search as you type results using Google Suggest). ------ fauigerzigerk Today it's MapReduce but wait a few years... 09/11/2020: Google has found that its BigTable database is very limited in terms of the types of queries it can perform and that the kind of data modeling it enforces leads to a number of nasty inconsistencies. Under lead engineer Matt Codd, Google researchers have been working on a secret project codenamed 'Join' in order to remedy this situation. At this year's I/O conference the search behemoth will present the successor to its dated BigTable system. The new database system is rumored to be named DB2. ------ mkramlich I doubt they abandoned Map/Reduce, just changed where/how it's being used in their architecture. It's way too powerful of a technique, especially at their scale, to abandon it entirely. Also, I didn't find this article to have a lot of substance. If anyone knows of any more detailed description of the under-the-hood changes, please point it out for us. ------ guelo As an engineer I'm blown away that they can pull this off at all. As a user one thing that's pissing me off about Instant is that it doesn't honor the 'Number of Results' search setting, it always returns 10 results. I feel like the Louis CK airplane internet guy, "pfff this is bullshit" <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOtEQB-9tvk>

Ask YC: What's your Advice on Performing Market Analysis for a Startup? - iamdave I'm in some early stages of a startup concept, and part of the conceptualization involves some pretty intense and detailed market analysis. I would need to contact various hosting vendors and dedicated server individuals and gather information like data transfer rates, processor usage, hardware acceleration, very detailed stuff that goes beyond your ordinary analytics (like what's your typical bounce rate of a user coming from x site).<p>What's the best way to gather this kind of data without raising the red flag? ====== iamdave Thanks for all the suggestions and feedback guys. A lot of people are concerned with me saying market analysis versus industry analysis. I use 'market' analysis because I'm not exactly reinventing the wheel any less than I'm redefining how it's used and open up a new sector of the market. I've bookmarked the links and will be reading them. ~~~ Flemlord "It's a completely new market," and "we have no current competitors" are usually looked upon with suspicion by sophisticated investors. It's rare to have a completely new market--Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook... they all had competitors and were going after a specific market. Update: I'm not saying you _haven't_ discovered a completely new market, just that it's very rare. ~~~ iamdave Perhaps new 'market sector' is more appropriate? I plan to have a writeup of my idea done sometime by the end of next week so hopefully it will make a little more sense why I use the rhetoric I have. But I certainly understand what you're saying. ------ Flemlord Not to nitpick, but I wouldn't call that a marketing analysis. Marketing analysis is more like how big is the market segment? Who are the biggest players in the space, what are their products, and what are their weaknesses? These are questions you'll be asked by any VC (even though they usually know the answers). I managed to land my first round without knowing that data, but I looked bad because I didn't. You get that kind of data from research companies like Forrester or Tower Group. They do reports on different market segments every so often and charge upwards of $10,000 just for a single copy of the report. Startup Tip: If you have a friend at a big company or venture capital group, they may have access to their company's research subscription. If so, they could get you the report(s) for free. ------ OpenWebU I did the same as thorax. Often if you say you are considering becoming a customer, they will give a one to two week free trial. You learn a lot from salespeople and their sales consultants. You may enter this trial thinking that you will compete, but you may also learn a lot -- like info to feed into your product strategy -- in my case realizing that I'd like to outsource some components of what I'm doing and focus on what is original/unique about my idea. ------ craigh123 On the business side, there is lots available online from the sec for public companies that can help you do things like size a market, list the top competitors, etc. See <http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml> . You can also use the google for talks by top execs, esp to analysts (esp. wall st.). That's a great quick way to get a sense of how they think about their different markets. You're giving yourself a huge mountain to climb of research. Can you focus on a subset of issues? Note that customer info can be simplifying - if people are convinced something has poor performance, then that defines the market reality. ------ dkokelley What it looks like you're trying to do is go beyond market analysis and into industry analysis for your startup. Your market is much broader and includes your industry as well as your consumers and everything that affects both of those. Probably the best way to get the information you want is to get a job working at one of those places for a few months. You will learn the industry inside and out if you keep yourself open to gathering information. Another (probably obvious way you've already considered) is to call the companies as a potential customer. Ask them questions about their products/services that you would expect them to answer for a regular customer. That should be enough to get you started. Good luck! ~~~ aagha Good suggestion on acting like a potential customer. Furthermore, I agree that these questions may be at an "industry analysis" level. As such, I'd advise looking into utilizing <http://www.marketresearch.com/> or <http://www.gartner.com/>. ~~~ nikiscevak Honestly, you'll waste your time. They'll see you coming from a mile away. A fantastic source of market research is from larger public companies. Look up their most recent 10-K (annual report). They are legally obligated to give a fairly detailed market analysis (that synthesizes the research from folks like Gartner etc.) in each annual report. It's a great starting point. Also, for most startup 'markets' there isn't actually a market. It's completely new. So 'market research' in this sense is not very useful and you should examine the premise that you need to do market research at all (versus say concentrating on whether consumers actually have a problem that you can solve). ~~~ mosburger Totally agree w/ nikiscevak. I abandoned one of my ideas for a wireless MVNO after analyzing the 10-K's of some publicly traded wireless companies. Just reading through the summaries will give you good nuggets of information. ------ thorax I did it simply by renting from the bigger companies at their smallest levels for the shortest periods, asking their support team about the service and gleaning what one can from those. Does require some money to do that, though. ------ sillydude I think it is important to pay attention to the market in an effort to better understand who your core customers are and anticipate their future needs. In doing so, you create early opportunities to differentiate yourself which makes it easier to compete. It's not just about raw numbers and figures, often these figures don't exist yet in new markets. RivalMap (previously Competitious) is an excellent tool that helps us organize and discuss market analysis in our startup. There is a free edition for 3 users and I think they are adding news soon too. ------ prakash To get accurate answers and hard data, it's best to talk to someone on the inside i.e. who has spent some time in that industry. A couple of good starting points: \- www.webhostingtalk.com \- www.streamingmedia.com ------ mynameishere _data transfer rates, processor usage, hardware acceleration_ (Market Analysis?) Since you don't seem to have the vocabulary down, I recommend starting with the basics: [http://www.va- interactive.com/inbusiness/editorial/sales/ibt...](http://www.va- interactive.com/inbusiness/editorial/sales/ibt/market_analysis.html) ------ OpenWebU also, i'd like to comment is that you are doing 'market analysis' third-hand -- the products that companies offer are a combination of their opinion of what the markets need, and their own response to customers. IMHO, true market analysis is going to the real end-customer (the customers of the hosting vendor). If it is obvious what the very they need and what they are willing to pay for, then no need to do this. But let's say as an example, the true end-customers are large IT departments. I'd look around and find someone in that IT department to interview and find them across industries, and see what they are willing to buy. Often these customers are listed as references on their website. ------ jdavid you are a startup, the only market analysis you need are sales. overtime update your business plan with things you find on the web, and compare them to your sales figures. the only customers you should trust are the ones willing to actually pay you for your product. ~~~ skmurphy I would have to agree. What you want is market exploration: who is your customer. Start talking to them. Ask their opinion of what's missing from current solutions. Don't try and chase existing players, talk to dissatisfied customers and folks who should be customers but aren't--find out why. If you chase the existing players you end up with a large feature set and the need for a large development effort that looks more superset than distinct. Think about features you can delete from existing solutions and still appeal to a segment of users. Think about one or two missing features you can add after you have deleted many of the existing ones. A really good book on this is "Four Steps to the Epiphany" by Steve Blank, cheapest place to buy it is here <http://www.cafepress.com/kandsranch> ~~~ felipe "Four Steps to the Epiphany" is a must-read. Also, get "Bootstrapping" from Greg Gianforte. ------ rokhayakebe launch. ~~~ Raphael apt. ------ sabat Why be concerned about raising red flags? I don't think I would be. As PG has reminded us, the idea is far less important than its implementation.

Ask HN: What do I need to know about Heroku to launch my app? - guynamedloren I have been developing my first rails application using free server space from Heroku. Now that I am pondering going live (a small private beta), I'm assuming that I'll have to move beyond the free space I've been developing with. The problem is I know absolutely nothing about any of this - dynos, workers, etc. I've looked over the Heroku website and docs a few times, but it looks like it requires a basic level of sys admin knowledge - something I certainly do not have.<p>How do I know how many dynos or workers to add? What if I add too many and I'm wasting money? Or do they scale up as needed? Do I need a dedicated database? I read something about free Heroku apps shutting down if idle for 24 hrs, causing a short delay the next time the app is launched. How do I prevent this from happening? Please educate me on Heroku, HN!<p>Thanks! ====== jjoe Benchmark! That's how. Order the least amount of resources and then benchmark your app to see how well it's performing. If your goal is handle 100 req/s, then benchmark with that goal in mind. Your benchmark unit tests need to touch the whole stack (Ruby & SQL). As for the 24-hrs idle time, run a periodic script that keeps it alive (by simulating a valid app action). I'm not a Heroku user. Regards Joe ------ nolite Filesystem is read only, so nothing that writes to disk ~~~ guynamedloren Care to elaborate? I'm not sure what you're referring to here.. ~~~ nolite sorry.. perhaps this is a better explanation <http://docs.heroku.com/constraints> Another example, if you're using Sass for CSS, I don't think that works seamlessly either due to this read-only filesystem restriction As for the delay to restart your app.. its really nothing to worry about.. its probably on the order of a few more hundreds of milliseconds, but if its shut down due to low traffic, you probably don't need that kind of responsivity anyway. If its getting alot of traffic, then this sleep period shouldn't happen.

Tutanota: GPLv3-licensed, end-to-end encrypted email - jokoha https://tutanota.de ====== mike-cardwell Loads external images. By Default. With no option to turn off. Not a viable webmail client for anyone who expects privacy. [edit] The email that it sends to external addresses does not have a text/plain part, only html [edit] Stores your email address in session storage and then pre-fills next time you log in. Does not let you opt in or out and doesn't warn you that this will happen. Unsuitable for a "public" machine. [edit] Nice, they support DANE. When I email a Tutanota user, or a Tutanota user emails me (@grepular.com), SMTP is _forced_ to use SSL or fail, and the certificate is _forced_ to verify with the fingerprint published in our DNSSEC secured DNS zones. No SMTP MITM's here. ~~~ darklajid I'd say these things are fixable so far [1]. \- Image loading: I'd assume that this is possible to implement, given the current implementation? \- text/plain & multipart mails: I'd expect the same, really. Doesn't sound too bad to build it. \- same for session storage I agree with all your points, but these are things that are conceptually quite viable, imo. I'd expect these to be valid issues on Github [1] and reasonably easy fixes, no? 1: [https://github.com/tutao/tutanota](https://github.com/tutao/tutanota) ~~~ mike-cardwell Yeah, they can be fixed. FWIW, I used their feedback form to mention the automatic image loading privacy leak. ~~~ MatthiasPfau I am one of the founders. Thanks for your feedback. We will fix this early next year! ~~~ mike-cardwell FWIW, I discovered the image loading problem by using [https://emailprivacytester.com/](https://emailprivacytester.com/) with a test account. Might be worth testing any such changes that you make there. (I am the author of that website). ------ aswerty I'd be wary about potential lock-in. The service seems to rely on everyone using their product. I'd like to see an end goal where they can communicate with other clients that support PGP or S/MIME. I do like how their approach avoids ever having an email sent from Tutanota in plain text other than when either the sender or receiver views it. Of course the main issue is the receiver has to jump through hoops if they don't use Tutanota. I imagine most people will not enjoy the hoop jumping. ~~~ jokoha In their FAQ they say: "We are planning on making Tutanota interoperable with pgp" ~~~ aswerty Ah yes, I missed that (the FAQ is quite long). It'll be interesting to see how that works out. ------ onli The statements about german law are wrong or at least very misleading, and that might be important here. Mail Providers of a specific size here are obliged to implement Lawful Interception interfaces. It is quite obvious that in the current climate, there is no guarantee at all that those won't be used by the german intelligence and then transported to the NSA. Note also that their source-link in that paragraph is not working. However, the situation might actually work. If they have a true zero knowledge system, it could indeed be very hard in Germany to force them to produce additional data, and what they can't have they can't deliver. That is however not as clear-cut as they make it look like. That is comparable to the Vorratsdatenspeicherung, ISPs saving the traffic metadata. While the effort to force them to do that failed, all ISPs still save those data - meaning that Germany is not the described data heaven. ~~~ higherpurpose I doubt any system designed in such a way that the provider simply _can 't_ access the information, could be forced by authorities to provide some kind of backdoor into it, if it's a somewhat lawful country, and not one such as North Korea or whatever. Whether companies can be _intimidated_ into doing it is a whole other story, but legally, I doubt any democratic government should be able to force them to do that. ~~~ ianopolous Here's an example of that for PrivateSky: [http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/gchq- forced-privatesky-secure-email...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/gchq-forced- privatesky-secure-email-service-offline-529392) ~~~ aswerty PrivateSky looks like it had the same failing as LavaBit in that the service provider actually had access to the decryption key for your email. So encryption in these services was vulnerable to a court order imposed on the service provider to use or share the key. I'm not saying Tutanota don't have an issue like this but their main selling point appears to be that this isn't the case. ------ bainsfather I've just signed up for this. It looks like exactly what we want from 'secure' email: (0) you can send unencrypted email just like any other webmail service. PLUS (1) end-to-end encrypted if sender&receiver use tutanova. (2) if receiver does not use tutanova, you can still send them encrypted email if you want to: they get an email saying - 'you have an encrypted mail, click this link to view it' \- on clicking the link, they decrypt the mail by entering a pre-agreed password. (3) it is free. they seem to be making money from the 'enhanced features' in their 'Outlook Addin' package. ~~~ e12e I don't know, it's missing (4) "Host your own (encrypted or not) email" ? ------ feld Even GMail could launch end-to-end encrypted email if they wanted to do so for all GMail users. They own the entire infrastructure end-to-end; that's not the hard part. The hard part is encrypting email for _anyone_ \-- even if they don't use your service. ~~~ phaer Well the hardest part is to persuade most users that end to end encryption is something they actually want. If GMail would launch an integration with PGP (or similar), call it "Secure GMail - now extra private" or something and start to refer to unencrypted Mail as "unsafe", "untrusted" or something like this much would have been won. ~~~ hobarrera The problem with GMail launching browser-encrypted email is that you have two groups of people: (a) People that don't care about encryption. Unlikely to get any signifacant amount of adoption. (b) People who do. This group of people know that browser- based encryption can't be done in a trusted manner, hence, won't want to use such a product. ~~~ tokenizerrr Luckily Google's thought of that. They're working on an extension: [https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/](https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/) ------ jmnicolas I'm waiting for someone respected in the crypto circles reviewing their crypto soundness before even considering using this. Being GPL is a good point but it doesn't mean they don't have a fatal flaw in their code. I wish I had the skills to review the crypto I use. ~~~ tptacek It's hosted web mail that does crypto in Javascript. How closely do you expect crypto engineers to look at it? Don't use web mail for secure messaging. ------ tptacek Don't use web mail for secure messaging. ~~~ bainsfather I'd like to send email messages to people without them being routinely read, stored and indexed by my govt, other govts, the hosting company, etc. Naively, this sounds simple enough to do, and you'd imagine that everyone would want&use such a system. How to I persuade other non-technical people to use something that is moderately secure? Tutanota seems like something I might be able to persuade people to use - 'hey, sign up for this, it is free, it is just like your current webmail _plus_ if we both use it, our mail is encrypted.' That is an improvement on what they currently use, no? Do you know of any 'good' (or just 'good enough' (or even just 'better')) options? ------ hobarrera Wow! This is new "encrypted email" service is just like good old encrypted email (eg: GPG), but with user lock-in! ------ upofadown When reading these things you can save a lot of time by just skimming the front page to see what standard protocols they implement. In the case of this thing time was saved... ------ legulere I don't know what people think when they put their code under GPL (especially v3) when they want to make a better version of an already open standard. One reason why tcp ip was so successful was that everybody could copy the implementation from BSD into their product. ~~~ icebraining Probably because they want people to use their own systems and apps.

Damning verdict on doctor who linked vaccine and autism - prat http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18447 ====== timclark The true scandal was the championing of the original story by the UK and worldwide media. If it had been reported responsibly and not sensationalised hardly anyone would have heard about the supposed link between vaccines and autism - read Ben Goldacre for a good discussion - <http://www.badscience.net/2008/08/the-medias-mmr-hoax>. ~~~ room606 I was just about to post that link but you beat me to it. It's more than a little unfair that Wakefield is being blamed for the MMR scare when the mainstream media in the UK did everything they could to fan the flames yet remain for the most part innocent ~~~ anamax > when the mainstream media in the UK did everything they could to fan the > flames yet remain for the most part innocent What definition of "innocent" are we using? They may not be liable, but they're not innocent. ~~~ carbocation From my read of your post and that of the parent, the two of you are in agreement on that point. ~~~ room606 Yes, carbocation is correct, we are in agreement. The mainstream media still refuses to acknowledge their complicity in all of this. When all of this was going on in the UK, MMR scare stories were front page news but not once did I see a headline on the cover of newspaper proclaiming "MMR Hoax, Sorry My Bad" says . As Goldacre says, it's crazy to think that one man created this entire mess. ------ pragmatic It would be nice to get back on track looking for the real cause(s) of autism. Our son was diagnosed and has received intense IBT/ABA therapy (along with spech, OT and PT). It has been fantastic. Total turn around. No low gluten diet, Jenny McCarthy BS, just Cognitive Behavioral Therapy <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy> . Sadly as of the latest information I have, we don't know what causes Autism and CBT is one of the only effective means for treating it. ~~~ chollida1 > No low gluten diet, Jenny McCarthy BS, I wouldn't link a low gluten diet with "Jenny McCarthy BS". My wife teaches autistic children and she told me that all the children, not most, all children in the classroom have had improvement when put on low gluten diets. I don't pretend to be as close to the issue as you, but you would be wise not to dump on an issue just because it didn't work for you:) ~~~ tokenadult <http://www.asatonline.org/suggreading/reviews/elder.htm> A carefully designed study, <http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html> rather than anecdotes, doesn't support a conclusion that gluten-free diets are helpful for autism. Nonetheless, the study reports, <http://www.asatonline.org/suggreading/reviews/elder.htm> "even after being informed of these disappointing results, some parents opted to keep their child on the GfCf diet." Patient human interaction with autistic children does seem to be helpful, and my cheers to anyone who is providing that. ~~~ KirinDave Going to show that the three most dangerous words in medicine are, "In my experience..." They are both a blessing and a curse. ~~~ DenisM The scary part is that once I realized this I was feeling all enlightened. Then I realized it again and then I felt even more enlightened. And then I stopped and asked myself - is my current realization the final one? How deep is the rabbit hole? This is some seriously scary stuff. ------ ivankirigin Vaccines don't cause autism. That should be the first sentence of every story about this topic. Many people will die because of this bullshit. ~~~ dschobel There's a reason you'll never see that. The problem is that there's no scientific evidence for the causation for the same reason that there's no scientific evidence that smoking causing various cancers as in either case it would be unconscionable to conduct a trial to see if it truly is possible to induce autism with a vaccine or induce cancer via smoking. That's why the strongest statements you'll ever see from health organizations (who usually care about things like scientific rigor) is that there is "no known link". Which obviously is totally uncompelling to a lay person and taken advantage of by the conspiracy theorists much like the tobacco companies continued to use the "no scientific evidence" line until the landmark settlement of 1998. So no, there continues to be _no evidence that vaccines cause autism_. And people still remain unconvinced until they hear something stronger. ~~~ ivankirigin You're obviously correct. You are also 3 sigma out in your understanding of the issue. The response to bad science should be in the same dumbed down language that the bad science used. ~~~ dschobel I disagree. You can see the repercussions from that in things like the Global Warming stories where everyone at HN collectively cringes when terms like "scientific consensus" are tossed about. There's no short-cut to good science and dumbing it down fundamentally diminishes it. Honest people still care about facts and science. ~~~ ivankirigin Global warming is a perfect example. There are way too many people that point to a cold day and say: see?! The message should be: there are huge changes going on right now, on a huge scale, beyond today's temperature. The debate is also often linked to a proposed solution, which is a big mistake. Cap & Trade or a carbon tax are two of dozens of potential solutions. ThatSmugFucksPrius™ is not a solution, but way too often involved in the messaging. Do you think there would be a big global warming debate if the proposed response was $200B a year in research? I don't. That is chump change with a bunch of positive externalities. ~~~ ryanwaggoner Sorry, but if the US decided to spend $200B per year on climate change research, which is decidedly not chump change, "debate" hardly describes the furor that would erupt. ~~~ ivankirigin It depends on how you wrap it. You don't even need to mention climate change. It's a "technology push for job creation" What it isn't is an obvious friction imposed on the entire market. People don't like that. We spent 10X this number of bank bailouts and such. That didn't piss normal people off because the messaging was that it was needed to fix the economy. Obama should do this as a followup to 2010 being a year to push job creation. The rest of the initiative could be to lower certain taxes and regulations, which is generally free. Then the messaging could be "Obama backs $200B job creation effort". ~~~ ryanwaggoner _We spent 10X this number of bank bailouts and such. That didn't piss normal people off because the messaging was that it was needed to fix the economy._ I think you're out of touch. Virtually 100% of the Republicans I know were completely opposed to the bank bailouts, and a huge portion of the liberals I know were as well. Almost every poll I saw showed that the majority of Americans opposed bailing out Wall Street and the auto industry. ------ ikitat Sadly, this will only put a small dent in the anti-vaccination cloaked as autism advocacy movement. ~~~ prat There aren't as many pseudo doctors as there are pseudo scientists. This bit of pseudoscience is not as resilient as intelligent design. I think this dent will quickly kill the movement. ~~~ lbrandy I appreciate your optimism but I fear you haven't been following this very closely. This is not the first time this guy and his work has been completely tossed under a bus. The antivax people have known for a LONG TIME that this guy was being seriously discredited and chalked it up to "big pharma funded" witch hunting. See for yourself: [http://www.ageofautism.com/2010/01/naked-intimidation-the- wa...](http://www.ageofautism.com/2010/01/naked-intimidation-the-wakefield- inquisition-is-only-the-tip-of-the-autism-censorship-iceberg.html) This won't go away until serious and preventable diseases start frequently killing children. ~~~ coolnewtoy I think it will be more closely tied to progress made in identifying preventable root causes of autism and the diagnosis rates start coming down. I actually doubt the illnesses of other people's children will register as loudly as the autistic symptoms of antivax advocates' own children. ------ patrickgzill Can someone describe the editorial policy of The Lancet, given that the doctor in question rose to prominence on the strength of being published there? ~~~ tokenadult From the submitted article that opened this thread: "The Lancet itself said in 2004 that in hindsight it shouldn't have published the paper, following publication of a retraction by 10 co-authors on the paper." The Lancet editor commented on the 2004 retraction that the Lancet needed to change its editorial policies, which I think has happened since. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC381161/> ------ apinstein Just a few weeks ago it was announced that autism can be diagnosed very early via brain scans: [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100108101421.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100108101421.htm) Now it's only a matter of time before this technique should definitively prove that autism is there _before_ vaccines so that the autism/vaccine link can be finally and thoroughly be tested (and likely debunked). ~~~ ovi256 I would very much like it to be so, but the vaccine objectors are far from rational, it seems to me. They literally build cults of personality for their various champions, and believe with religious fervour. ~~~ frossie _believe with religious fervour_ Did you see the reports that the panel got heckled by some women when they announced their conclusions on Wakefield? They were told of the proof that this man compromised the herd immunity of a nation and unethically experimented on children for no good reason and yet they still cheer him on. We're not in rational-land any more, Toto. ------ martythemaniak Evidence against the conspiracy is actually evidence _for_ for the conspiracy. In this case, They charged him because he was right and they felt threatened by him. ~~~ rauljara Ah. So if I provide evidence that you are wrong, really I am providing evidence that you are right. Because I wouldn't bother presenting the evidence that you are wrong unless you really were right and I felt threatened by your rightness. Never mind the evidence itself. ~~~ jjs I think he means, from the anti-evidentiary viewpoint of the conspiracy nuts. ------ prbuckley I thought that the theory for linking vaccines to autism had to do with the use of methylmercury as a preservative. Methylmercury is a known neurological toxin, here is a great resource... [http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability...](http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/ucm096228.htm) The fact that this article brings up the fact that Wakefield had a patent in the same area as his research seems fishy to me. "The panel resurrected and upheld most, if not all, of the main charges against Wakefield, such as his undeclared conflict of interest in having filed a patent relating to treatments for bowel conditions a year before his Lancet study appeared. "The panel therefore rejects the proposition put forward by your [Wakefield's] counsel that third-party perceived conflicts of interest did not fall within the relevant definition at the time," it concludes." I used to be a research scientist and it was common place for researchers (or their institutions) to file patents on research that led to publications. No one I know ever listed this sort of thing as a conflict of interest. It sounds like this counsel might be reaching to try and discredit Dr. Wakefield. Sadly their is more politics in science than most people want to believe. ~~~ tokenadult <http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=14> "Regarding the question of vaccines and autism, for ethical reasons we cannot do a double-blind, randomized, control trial of vaccines with and without thimerosal. However, we can do the next best thing, and, indeed, we now have several good studies since 1999 that do just that. Some of these studies are epidemiological; some are ecological. What allows us to use them to reject the hypothesis that mercury in vaccines is an etiological agent that is either associated with or causes autism is a very simple but powerful prediction that the hypothesis makes. Quite simply, if the hypothesis is true and thimerosal- containing vaccines (TCVs) cause autism (or are even merely a significant contributing factor), we would expect that the removal of thimerosal from vaccines would lead to a rapid decrease in autism incidence and prevalence within 2-5 years. "There have now been several studies that examined this very hypothesis in countries that removed thimerosal from their vaccines before the U.S. did. For example Hviid et al3 reported that autism prevalence in Denmark increased from 1991 to 1996 despite the removal of thimerosal from vaccines, while Madsen et al4 looked at the time period from 1971 to 2000 and concluded that autism diagnoses continued to increase after thimerosal was removed from vaccines. Neither study supported a causal link between TCVs and autism, and they were a prominent part of the dataset that was used by the Institute of Medicine to conclude in 2004 that there was no good evidence to support a link between TCVs and autism. A more recent study by Eric Fombonne5 in Montreal examined 27,749 children born from 1987 to 1998 attending 55 different schools. Cumulative thimerosal exposure by age 2 years was calculated for the 1987-1998 birth cohorts. This exposure ranged from 100-125 μg from 1987 to 1991, 200-225 μg from 1992 to 1995, and then none after 1996, which was when thimerosal was completely removed from vaccines in Canada. The result was that autism, ASD, and pervasive developmental disorder diagnoses continued to increase in all periods, demonstrating no relationship between TCVs and autism or ASDs. Even more recently, a large study6 failed to support a relationship between thimerosal and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, a result that led one of the investigators in the study, Sallie Bernard, a proponent of the thimerosal hypothesis, to disavow the study in a case of sour grapes, because it did not show what she had hoped that it would show." ------ rbanffy I am not aware of this specific episode. What the hell does a British sci-fi series have with vaccines and/or autism? ------ dimas I know that I will probably get down voted for voicing opinion against majority but I will go with it anyway. There are evidence that vaccination is not safe, contains mercury and has negative long term side effects. Also there are long lasting debates on whether the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the harm. I have looked at both sides of the argument and based on what I have read and concluded that I would not vaccinate myself or my kids(see my reasoning below). Government cares only of the short term effect and keeping society from outbreaks of deceases where they are less concerned of long term effect that will be hard to link to any past vaccinations anyways. Even the fact the insurance companies do not cover vaccination due to possibility of severe side effects poses a question why? The long trim effect of vaccine is not well studied yet. If you look at both sides of the argument, the major question is what side has more benefit for fighting. Pharmaceuticals make tons of money on vaccination and have tons of money to promote it including usage of science as well government policies. So looking at both sides where none have concrete scientifically proof on long term effect of vaccines, what side would you take thinking on benefits that each side might have in the argument as well as possessing knowledge of possible danger of vaccine including the fact that vaccine do not work 100% as well. So the ultimate question, would you put substance containing mercury in your body knowing that it will have side effect for sure what might be mild or severe in long term against some low chance possibility of getting diseases that your body will fight anyway and that having vaccinated might not even protect you against. Here is some more info for consideration: <http://www.relfe.com/vaccine.html> ~~~ run4yourlives I up-voted you because you are wrong, in the hopes that as many people as possible will give you reasons as to exactly how. There is no grand conspiracy to make the world sick via vaccines to profit. If they are truly 'evil', both insurance and big pharma would benefit much, much more in not having people vaccinated and overpricing drugs every time there is a panic and a run on supplies, ala H1N1. Could you imagine the demand with today's media if there was a measles outbreak in a major city with many deaths? There is no conspiracy. As for mecury, you ingest much more of it every time you eat some fish. It is a fact of life. With every medication, a certain percentage of people will experience side effects. People have died from taking aspirin after all. The point is that a major outbreak of a disease like measles, mumps, rubella, etc would be catastrophic for a large group of people. It is in all of our interests to do what we can to prevent this from happening, even if it means a small, small percentage suffer in the process. Look at a history book. There is but one constant dread in every story: plague. Disease has culled populations quickly and dramatically in regular fashion for as long as humanity has existed. When is the last time you remember a major outbreak killing off half your neighbourhood? Exactly. That's due 100% to vaccinations. Get vaccinated. Help yourself and your children; help our civilization survive the horrible effects of these diseases. ~~~ dimas First of all, I was not referring to any conspiracy at all, it is simple business and benefit analysis unless you believe in idealistic and humanitarian business that only care about human well being(I am not saying they do not exist either). Second, the mercury and heavy metals that fish you eat might contain are not injected into your blood and small amounts if any gets there. Third, "According to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, childhood diseases decreased 90% between 1850 and 1940, paralleling improved sanitation and hygienic practices, well before mandatory vaccination programs. Infectious disease deaths in the U.S. and England declined steadily by an average of about 80% during this century (measles mortality declined over 97%) prior to vaccinations.". Once again I am not forcing you to believe in what I believe and made conclusion based on what I have read and reasoned so please do not attack me as an enemy of humanity I am just voicing my opinion and believe I have a valid argument. Though I like when people tell me that i am wrong, otherwise there will be no arguments and learning. ~~~ run4yourlives _it is simple business_ Yes, and I just gave you a better business case to not vaccinate. _Second, the mercury and heavy metals that fish you eat might contain are not injected into your blood and small amounts if any gets there._ Fish are the number one source of Mercury poisoning incidents, according to the USEPA ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_poisoning#cite_note- EPA...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_poisoning#cite_note- EPAMercuryStudyIII-3)). There is no protection offered from your digestion system against this heavy metal. Your argument is irrelevant here. _childhood diseases decreased 90% between 1850 and 1940, paralleling improved sanitation and hygienic practices, well before mandatory vaccination programs_ Really? Source this please, because according to wikipedia, the UK Vaccination of 1840 first introduced vaccinations, which were made mandatory by the 1853 act. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_Act#The_1840_Act>) That seems to coincide pretty well with the drop in diseases, actually. ~~~ prbuckley I think a lot of this disagreement could be cleared up if there were studies done on the long term effects of low doses of mercury. Mercury is bioaccumalitive and so I think such studies are justified. Why is no one doing this? Also from a business perspective if there is such concern about methylmercury in vaccines why doesn't someone bring to market vaccines that use a different (more natural?) preservative? It seems like this would be a win win all around. Also I would avoid using wikipedia as a direct source. ~~~ mhansen [http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Concerns/thimerosal/index.h...](http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Concerns/thimerosal/index.html) Thimerosal is a mercury-containing preservative used in some vaccines and other products since the 1930's. There is no convincing evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines, except for minor reactions like redness and swelling at the injection site. However, in July 1999, the Public Health Service agencies, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and vaccine manufacturers agreed that thimerosal should be reduced or eliminated in vaccines as a precautionary measure.

Planetonline.net out of business? - jusob http://www.planetonline.net/ ====== jusob I have .mn site registered with them. Either they forgot to renew their domain name, or they are out of business. Twitter and Google do not have any info on this. Is it possible to transfer a domain name to a new registrar if the current registrar is offline or out of business?

The Apple TV Aerial Video Screensavers - coloneltcb http://benjaminmayo.co.uk/watch-all-the-apple-tv-aerial-video-screensavers#b8-2 ====== M4v3R My favorite so far is New York City at night, GTA 2 style [0]. [0] [http://a1.v2.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/us/r1000/000/Fea...](http://a1.v2.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net/us/r1000/000/Features/atv/AutumnResources/videos/b10-2.mov) ~~~ lostlogin I didn't see any marching bands. Great link though, thanks. ------ andrebalza1 There's an osx screen saver picking the same video feeds: brew cask install aerial ~~~ lobster_johnson You can also just download the file from the Github page: [https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial](https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial). ------ izacus Note that if anyone wants to commit heresy and use these screensavers on their Android TV (or any other Android) device, they can use Aerial Dream ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codingbuff...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codingbuffalo.aerialdream&hl=en)) and set it as default under Settings -> Daydream :) ~~~ givinguflac I use this on my Shield TV and it's great. I also have an ATV4 as android AirPlay doesn't work nearly as well. Makes it confusing sometimes to tell which input the TV is on haha. ~~~ rpgmaker Woah. I totally missed the news about nvidia's android TV device. Is it too locked down or buggy (my main critique of most android TV devices)? ~~~ ochoseis I think it's the best equivalent to an Apple TV in the Android ecosystem. Great performance and 4k, but way less apps (notably no Amazon Prime TV app). If you're into cord cutting they do have an app for Sling streaming cable service. Chromecasting to it is straightforward, and on par with Airplay. That was the one thing holding me to iOS for a long time. ~~~ rpgmaker > but way less apps (notably no Amazon Prime TV app). Doesn't it use the Google Play Store? ~~~ bshacks07 I agree with the best STB, at least all the ones I've used recently. There's an unofficall Amazon Video app that I've been using for quite awhile with little problems, the ShieldTV does use the Google Play Store and I've used other stores like Aptoide and AptoideTV. ------ asadlionpk I have been using them as screensaver for a while now. Here it is: [https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial](https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial) ~~~ colindean Installable through Caskroom via brew install Caskroom/cask/aerial These videos look amazing on just about any screen. I've got a 15" MBP Retina connected to a 34" Dell Ultrawide and I've caught people just _staring_ at the big screen with many of these videos. ------ redskatest Which brings us to one often debated question in our company: Are those screensavers real footage or animated? Anybody has an idea on the making of? ~~~ sagichmal They are definitely real. In the SF one that goes over the bridge, you can see the shadow of the filming helicopter at the bottom of the screen. ~~~ csixty4 And when the lens flares show up at the beginning of SF you can really see how hard the image stabilization is working to keep the image steady. ------ webXL I've been running these as a Kodi screensaver for a few months now, but it pains me that they aren't 4k! Not a big deal for 1080p movies sitting back 12 feet, but this kind of stuff is like artwork hanging on my wall; I walk up to it, so every pixel counts. I hope that they're shot in 4 or 8k and Apple is sitting on hi-res versions until the Apple TV can support them. ------ benjaminmayo I appreciate the publicity, but I first posted this in October 2015. Any reason why it is gaining traction today? ~~~ jackgavigan It looks (from searching past submissions[1]) like this was the first time it was posted to HN (surprisingly). 1: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=benjaminmayo&sort=byDate&dateR...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=benjaminmayo&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0) ------ gapchuboy If you want to download them all curl [http://benjaminmayo.co.uk/scripts/apple-tv- screensavers.json](http://benjaminmayo.co.uk/scripts/apple-tv- screensavers.json) | jq .[].assets[].url | xargs wget ~~~ koko775 jq? ~~~ gapchuboy [https://stedolan.github.io/jq/](https://stedolan.github.io/jq/) ------ fsociety Is there anyway to get this to play on the Windows 10 logon screen, instead of a picture background? I found the Windows version for the screensaver on the link below, but no way to set it as the logon background. [https://github.com/cDima/Aerial/](https://github.com/cDima/Aerial/) ------ bgammon I wish there were footage of a large urban area in China. Would there actually be too much pollution to get a clear shot in most areas? ------ Jaruzel Has anyone done a Windows screen saver of these? If not, then I will. ~~~ detaro found on GitHub, not tested: [https://github.com/cDima/Aerial/](https://github.com/cDima/Aerial/) ~~~ Jaruzel Just skimmed through the code. It's nicely done (way neater code than I'd ever write). Seems to pull down each video to stream directly, unless cached locally (toggable), there's also some/day night code in there, and it supports multi monitors. Totally usable and saves me a job. Cheers! ------ joeblau Every time I see the screen saver with The Great Wall, it blows my mind that the wall is 5,500 miles long. ------ rread San Francisco "Night #5" is actually morning. ------ ape4 Will these actually work as screensavers. If you loop the same video(s) over and over again... seems like burn in could still occur. ------ eva1984 Is this copyrighted?

2 Weeks with Ubuntu Linux on the Dell XPS 13 - dsego https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/07/19/ditching-windows-2-weeks-with-ubuntu-linux-on-the-dell-xps-13/#f69c98d18363 ====== oddity On the desktop, I've had an extremely positive experience using Ubuntu for the past few years. Honestly, at this point I find it easily a better desktop experience than Windows or macOS. However, I've so far stuck to macOS for my laptops and iOS for my other devices mostly because I tend to need more reliability for these (and a bit of my own bias). With how toy-ified iOS is and the progressively worse state (imo) of macOS- running hardware, I've started considering other options more seriously. Are there any tablet PCs that work well with Ubuntu? ~~~ VonGuard I'm in a similar place, with Mint on a desktop and laptop for some time now. The real issue is never on the desktop: it always runs fine. However, the laptop seems to have developed driver issues over time, to the point where the trackpad requires special care and feeding... The little nooks and crannies of laptop drivers remain the single reason I think Linux is so hard to get right on laptops. The successful users I know all have Thinkpads. ~~~ lykr0n Linux is the OS I need to reinstall every few months. It's like where Windows was during 7. I think a big reason is that if version 0.1.0 installs a config file, version 0.9.3 won't override it- even if it has better defaults. ------ H1Supreme Fwiw, my 13" Dell Inspiron 7000 runs Ubuntu Mate 18.04 as flawless as one can ask for. The Mate installer handled all the drivers, as well. I didn't have to install a thing manually. Touchpad works fine; haven't dealt with any palm rejection problems. Full disclosure, I have it docked most of the time. But, I've used the trackpad enough that I should have noticed any problems if they existed. I know XPS is default answer for new Linux laptops, but this Inspiron 7000 has been great so far. The one downside is battery life. It has a small battery, so I don't think it's going to work for people who require 8 hours of charge. I'm plugged in most of the time, so it's not been an issue in my case. ------ ganeshkrishnan A really bad combination. I had more success with Asus machines than these xps. Few of the issues that you notice after regular use: The fingerprint reader is not supported on Linux. GPU is worse off than windows. Nvidia has horrible support, there is no auto mode to dynamically switch Keyboard typing is laggy Touchpad does not support Palm detection for accidental swiping while typing Overall not satisfied with Linux on xps for such a premium price ~~~ symfoniq Ubuntu 18.04 is pretty buggy on my Thinkpad P50, too (graphics problems, trackpad issues, poor battery life, no backlight adjustment, etc). And Gnome is just ridiculously slow compared to Windows and macOS. I’m still not sure there is a Linux laptop out there that just works. ~~~ richjdsmith That is unfortunate to hear :/ I was seriously considering ditching MacOS on my next laptop and pick up a thinkpad carbon x1 with Ubuntu 18.04. Really hoping this improves. ~~~ srazzaque If buying a ThinkPad, definitely consider Fedora Workstation. I used Ubuntu for a few years before getting frustrated with some hardware+docking wake up issues, switched to Fedora and have not looked back. Also I hear a lot of the Fedora devs themselves use ThinkPads, so there's that too. ~~~ clircle Using Debian Mate on a T460 and I have to say I'm quite pleased. Sure Debian is stale, but as long as I can get a recent Firefox and Emacs, that's all the bleeding edge that I want. If I had a new Thinkpad T480, I would probably choose Fedora. Unfortunately, as a home Linux user, I find that the best strategy is to avoid new hardware. ------ andrewmackrodt I had a very positive time with the EU XPS 13 Developer Edition (and enhanced i7 touchscreen model which ran Ubuntu fine too) a few years ago. At the time Dell only shipped the EU versions in 8 GB variants. I'm in the market for a new 13 or 14 inch machine and am split on a new MBP, Thinkpad or XPS 13. Apple seem to have the best offering in terms of what causes me the least amount of annoyances with hardware/OS integration but don't offer a 32GB laptop. I also would prefer to run Linux natively. It's a tough decision given the ~2,000 GBP cost. Edit: a couple of replies mention not liking the touchbar or keyboard in the new MBP line-up. I used a touchbar 13" model daily for ~6 months at my last full time and after a weeks usage grew to like the keyboard and love the touchpad. The touchbar was .. meh, even with BetterTouchTool to map my IDE shortcuts. Apple need to add haptic feedback to the touchbar IMO but I didn't find the lack of physical keys too hurtful to my workflow. ~~~ jordanthoms The latest generation of MBPs has a 32GB option. ~~~ mightykan And a toy light bar whose brightness and duration cannot be controlled (which sucks precious battery life) and is an insult to the "Pro" name. Are there any serious options available? ~~~ timrichard You might see it as a toy if it's just an annoying way to trigger fn keystrokes. But for people who use applications like Final Cut Pro X, you can actually do a lot with it. Here's a course on it, for example : [https://www.macprovideo.com/tutorial/final-cut-pro- fasttrack...](https://www.macprovideo.com/tutorial/final-cut-pro- fasttrack-101-fcpx-touch-bar-essentials) ------ lozf Previous discussion (earlier today) : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17586411](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17586411) ------ known It's better to try Ubuntu with pendrive [http://tuxtweaks.com/2014/03/create- linux-mint-persistent-li...](http://tuxtweaks.com/2014/03/create-linux-mint- persistent-live-usb/) ------ hoosieree I had a similar "last straw" moment this morning and put Ubuntu 18.04 on the Minecraft/Netflix notebook. Very smooth install and having Minecraft as a 1-click install in the Snap store was a pleasant surprise compared to having to install Oracle's Java and/or find a ppa with the right configuration of Minecraft junk. Plus the LAN issues we were having with Minecraft have disappeared, and the trackpad response is better, and the fonts even seem crisper for some reason. BTW this is a $200 notebook with 2GB of ram and a 32GB emmc for storage. It didn't have enough free space to keep Windows 10 updated (even after removing Chrome, Minecraft, and assorted OEM bloatware). Now with Ubuntu (minimal install plus Minecraft) there is 20GB free. ------ yani I have seen many people switch from MacOS to Linux nowadays. Not because MacOS is bad but because of the new line of Macbook Pro. Hackintosh is more difficult than it should be. Once Adobe products start to support linux, there will be an even better adoption. ~~~ freedomben I've seen this too. I think that the "just works" progress of Linux has been a factor here as well. Fedora especially has been rock-solid. I've helped several people set up new laptops, and Fedora is my go-to these days because it's "just works" is so good. Now that they have proprietary driver support built in through Gnome software, as well as some non-free stuff, the experience is great. ------ torrance My idea for Linux compatibility: the ‘community’ picks two or three laptops a year, and works in common to ensure they ‘just work’ on a range of (documented) Linux distros. Focusing our limited resources around so few hardware configurations would surely help in ensuring full and complete support, and for people looking to buy for Linux they provide assurance ahead of time. ~~~ yjftsjthsd-h This is seems much more cohesive then I think actually exists. Generally the way it works is that I try to make things suport the hardware that I actually own. If a bunch of people come together and decide that they want to support one model, then that's great, but if it's not the model that I already have that I'm not going to contribute. ------ tbrock The XPS13 is garbage. Sure the screen looks cool but at the end of the day it’s still a Dell. The quality is miserable and the support when it breaks is abominable. Get a thinkpad (x or t series) or Mac, you won’t regret it. Note: Dell if you are reading this I desperately want you to succeed here and provide another viable laptop option. ~~~ prolikewh0a Nonsense. XPS 13 is a wonderful laptop and their support is fantastic for not having stores placed in every city across the country. I work with Dell Support on a weekly basis, and they're just as good as Lenovo. 2018 models have also fixed any and all coil whine that was apparent on some older XPS 13's. It also works near flawlessly with almost any distro of Linux right out of the box, Lenovo's and Macs do not work nearly as well with Linux. I have a really hard time picking out issues with the XPS 13 other than normal failures at around the same failure rate as both Macs and Lenovo laptops. ------ hackerbrother Anecdote: Lubuntu and Xubuntu have worked very well for me on a lower-end Dell Inspirion. I've had this same laptop for about 5 years now, and I think its trackpad is great. ------ earenndil I wonder why it is that linux distros having centralized package management is seen as a good thing, but the windows store is reviled by all ~~~ locusm Linux informs you that an update is available. Windows doesn't care that you're in a call to a client, update all the things. That was on a Windows 10 build from a year ago, not sure if things have improved. ~~~ prolikewh0a Windows still doesn't care, it updates when it wants, even if you're in the middle of doing things. I was in the middle of my companies earnings report a few months ago and it popped up the "We're going to update in 5 minutes, please close everything" with no option to delay or cancel. It shut down and I missed a good 30 minutes while it was updating. Really good for productivity and work (/s). I am now fully Linux except on my gaming PC at home which is rarely even turned on.

Show HN: Mailtrigger, web endpoints that trigger an email notification - Lukas_Skywalker https://mailtrigger.io/ ====== Lukas_Skywalker In order to finally advance my knowledge in Elixir and Phoenix, I decided to create this project today. You can basically register web endpoints that trigger an email notification when they are hit. Can be used for exception notification, IoT devices and much more.

Elon Musk provides $423K to buy laptops for all Flint middle schoolers - danso https://www.mlive.com//news/flint/2018/12/elon-musk-provides-423k-to-buy-laptops-for-all-flint-middle-schoolers.html ====== ddingus Awesome, but the water is still a mess. I am not putting that on Elon. He is just enabling damaged kids. Right, good thing to do. Many of them will benefit. As a nation, we are facing a priority discussion, Flint being only one of a painful, growing number of data points, each speaking to our basic priorities being very poorly aligned with "promoting the general welfare." How can we improve that? ~~~ thoughtpol [https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/state- watc...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/state- watch/382050-michigan-declares-flint-water-ok-ends-bottled-water%3famp) The water is fixed, but the trust in government is gone (rightfully so). ~~~ ddingus No it is not. Still a lot of very dubious reports coming out of Flint. ~~~ thoughtpol Oh really interesting, it seems even more inappropriate that the Flint official lie again after the EPA testing. ------ massivethrow What's going on with the water situation in Flint? Has that been fully resolved? ~~~ thoughtpol [https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/state- watc...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/state- watch/382050-michigan-declares-flint-water-ok-ends-bottled-water%3famp) Water is fixed, but trust is gone in government.

Google Private Key Compromise - andygambles https://twitter.com/ecctls/status/980607899188842496 ====== andygambles It isn’t real [https://medium.com/@ECCTLS/how-to-sign-with-googles- private-...](https://medium.com/@ECCTLS/how-to-sign-with-googles-private- key-5b8e99abcdb3)

On “Hacking” Y Combinator Interviews and Successful Startups - timr https://tyler.menez.es/articles/on-hacking-y-combinator-interviews-and-successful-startups.html ====== t0nyh0 I have strong reservations against the word "hacking" in of itself. From an engineering perspective, "hacking" is a quick-n-dirty fix, like "hacking" it together with duct tape. It seems so subversive and manipulative, especially in the context of "hacking" these interviews. I'd rather not say that I "hacked" together anything. What about diligently and properly planning, designing, researching, and implementing? Where are the "How I planned for my YCombinator interviews" articles? ~~~ tylermenezes Did you read the article? Because that's exactly what it's about. ~~~ t0nyh0 Yes I've read it. I'm merely emphasizing the word "hacking" in general. ~~~ lelandbatey Indeed, I find that it's used so much and in so many different ways that I really wish it'd fall out of favor. It now carries so many connotations and subtleties that linguistically speaking, it always seems like the "wrong tool for the job." ~~~ rhizome most of those are due to the refusal to use the word "cracker" for the connotations and subtleties that require it. ------ tyang Great read. You all need to relax on this hacking hate. Hacking is often just a way of saying tips. Just like "Fail Fast" means launch, measure and iterate quickly. Eric Ries isn't the only one who can change the meaning of words. :) ------ rdl I think there are a fair number of tips which would help especially for a YC application or YC interview and which would generally help your business but not as much outside of those contexts.

We should stop running away from radiation - brndnhy http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12860842 ====== callmevlad Having grown up in Russia and personally being in contact with a few people affected by the Chernobyl fallout, it's a bit hard to take someone who tries to diminish the impact of that accident to this degree. Yes, maybe the UN report showed such a small number of confirmed fatalities, but I have a sneaky suspicion that they based it mostly on data collected by the Soviet Union. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust any data that came from an authoritarian government, especially one run by a bunch of Russians, especially one that collapsed 20 years ago (likely destroying countless incriminating documents in the process), especially concerning a deeply embarrassing incident such as Chernobyl. The public may be overreacting to the nuclear threat posed by the Fukushima reactors, but this seems like a subtle attempt at rewriting history. (I wouldn't be surprised if there is a UN report 20 years from now proving that Saddam Hussein did indeed win re-election with 99% of the vote.) ~~~ daeken Have you seen the actual numbers of this, and seen them put into perspective? I'd strongly recommend looking at <http://xkcd.org/radiation/> \-- he puts the data into an easy to relate to format. ~~~ waterlesscloud The biggest problem with that chart is that it mixes different time scales, which it only indicates in the text, not in the visual comparisons. Take one of the ones that measures an hour's exposure and multiply it by 24. Or a day and multiply it by 365. Suddenly the visual comparisons look much, much different. ~~~ stuhood As mentioned in the BBC article though, doing that kind of math does not lead to an accurate result, due to the fact that your body is constantly healing. It's the bursts of radiation that are most damaging. ------ veidr The idea that we have a sufficient quantity of accurate data about Chernobyl to make sweeping claims about its impact on people living there, including how many died as a result, is frankly idiotic. We do not and never will have such data. This is a pernicious meme that frequently recurs on this board. Reject it. (The Fukushima disaster, on the other hand, has occurred in the open within the context of a reasonably free society, so it may provide us with data that proves useful for future nuclear accidents.) ~~~ Dove _The idea that we have a sufficient quantity of accurate data about Chernobyl to make sweeping claims about its impact on people living there, including how many died as a result, is frankly idiotic. We do not and never will have such data._ Okay, I'm just going to set your claim against the introduction to the report ([http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2008/Advance_copy_Annex_...](http://www.unscear.org/docs/reports/2008/Advance_copy_Annex_D_Chernobyl_Report.pdf)) referenced in the BBC article. There has been an unprecedented effort by the international community to assess the magnitude and characteristics of the health effects due to the radiation exposure resulting from the accident. As early as August 1986, a widely attended international gathering, the “Post-Accident Review Meeting”, was convened in Vienna. The resulting report of the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group (INSAG) contained a limited but essentially correct early account of the accident and its expected radiological consequences [I31]. In May 1988, the International Scientific Conference on the Medical Aspects of the Accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant [I32] held in Kiev summarized the available information at the time and confirmed that some children had received high doses to the thyroid. In May 1989, scientists obtained a more comprehensive insight into the scale of the consequences of the accident at an ad hoc meeting convened at the time of the 38th session of UNSCEAR [G15, K25]. In October 1989, the former Soviet Union formally requested “an international experts’ assessment” and, as a result, the International Chernobyl Project (ICP) [I5] was launched in early 1990; its conclusions and recommendations were presented at an International Conference held in Vienna, 21–24 May 1991 [I5]. Many national and international initiatives7 followed aimed at developing a better understanding of the accident consequences and in assisting in their mitigation. The results of these initiatives were presented at the 1996 International Conference on One Decade After Chernobyl8 [I29]. There was a broad agreement on the extent and character of the consequences. ... The objective of the present annex is to provide an authoritative and definitive review of the health effects observed to date that are attributable to radiation exposure due to the accident and to clarify the potential risk projections, taking into account the levels, trends and patterns of radiation dose to the exposed populations. The Committee has evaluated the relevant new information that has become available since the 2000 Report, in order to determine whether the assumptions used previously to assess the radiological consequences are still valid. In addition, it recognized that some issues merited further scrutiny and that its work to provide the scientific basis for a better understanding of the radiation‑related health and environmental effects of the Chernobyl accident needed to continue. The information considered included the behaviour and trends of the long‑lived radionuclides in foodstuff and the environment in order to improve the estimates of exposure of relevant population groups, and the results of the latest follow‑up studies of the health of the exposed groups. The effects of radiation on plants and animals following the Chernobyl accident are discussed separately in annex E, “Effects of ionizing radiation on non‑human biota”. Other effects of the accident, in particular, distress and anxiety, and socio‑economic effects, were considered by the Chernobyl Forum [W5] but are outside the Committee’s remit. The Committee, in general, bases its assessments on reports appearing in peer‑reviewed scientific literature and on information submitted officially by Governments in response to its requests. However, the results of many of the studies related to the Chernobyl accident have been presented at scientific meetings without formal scientific peer review. The Committee decided that it would only make use of such information when it could judge that the results and the underlying work were scientifically and technically sound. ~~~ veidr Yes, that's right: Working from outside of the USSR, they convened a group and produced an admittedly limited account of the incident. Three years later, when the Soviet regime finally requested (limited) help, and they did their best. A decade later, they revisited the issue, and made the decision not to use the results from many other studies that had been attempted, because they weren't necessarily scientifically rigorous. That was probably right decision, and I find it entirely plausible that they did great work given the enormous limitations that they faced, but there is only so much you can do when the authoritarian regime standing in your way happens to finally disintegrate, years later. ------ Joakal People are worried about cancer from electricity, phones, microwaves, terrorists, etc. Silent/Unseen killers are the scariest kind, almost as if it's a good bogeyman. Japanese can resolve this hysteria after seeing economic costs. However, the governments in lawsuit prone countries will go out of their way to make it very safe in almost everything. eg low speed limits, many speed bumps, background checks, etc. Otherwise the government would get sued for not doing enough, affecting the budget. Educational Video of Japanese Nuclear Boy for kids <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sakN2hSVxA> ~~~ sigstoat governments control the courts; they exempt themselves from liability for things all the time. for instance: try suing the cops in the US because they didn't do enough to protect you. ~~~ tumult Wrong, this happens all the time. For example, municipalities pay out all the time to the Westboro Baptist Church when local police are unable to defend them from the people they are intentionally enraging. (This is how WBC makes their money.) ~~~ younata That means that the WBC is the greatest troll of our time. They literally have nothing on 4chan. ------ nikster The author points out the solution for storing nuclear end products, its quite brilliant! 100m under a pro-nuclear persons house! Problem solved! Maybe those who think nuclear energy is very green might join the author? I am sure we can find a few 10,000, and then we have room for all that nuclear waste. The media overhyping things is nothing new and doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean nuclear power is safe, for example. Unfortunately, real journalism has all but disappeared from the world, to be replaced by what we'd refer to as trolling or link-whoring online. ~~~ roel_v I am sure there are many people who would not mind at all. Hold an auction for an amount per month would be paid to live there, so that people are compensated for the perceived risk. ------ Herring Good luck. The media (and people in general) are horrible when it comes to technical things and scary invisible things. Nuclear is both. ~~~ evanrmurphy What do you mean by horrible? I think it makes sense to be concerned about anything you're subjected to that you're not sure is safe. ~~~ thematt Concerned? Yes. Panicked? Probably not. I think the media's presentation of the situation is more the latter. ~~~ evanrmurphy Ah, I see. I was thinking more about the general concept of safety than this specific situation. I see what you mean. ------ switch I'd recommend The Oil Drum - <http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7706#comments_top> There seem to be a small group of people who want to play the contrarian game and claim that people are overreacting to the potentially huge damage the contamination (as opposed to radiation) that Fukushima is going to result in. It's easy to be holed up safe in Oxford and claim radiation is not an issue. Why doesn't this gentleman volunteer to assist at the plants if he thinks radiation is no danger at all. ------ stewbrew Who is "we"? If the the author speaks for himself, I have no objection against him moving to Fukushima or buying a house close to another nuclear power plant. I'm sure there are people willing to sell and the price for real estate in those areas has most likely dropped considerably in the last few decades. ~~~ sorbus I wouldn't be so sure about your implication that nuclear power plants reduce property prices: "In each of the seven regions, housing and real estate values have benefited from the operations of the nuclear facilities: total property values, assessed valuations and median housing prices have often increased at rates above the national and state averages. In each local area, housing prices were several times higher than prior to the opening of the nuclear facilities, and there is evidence that in Barnwell, proximity to the nuclear facility may actually increase housing values.[1]" [1] <http://www.misi-net.com/publications/IJNGEE-V1N1-06.pdf> ~~~ stewbrew For apparently no clear reason, nuclear power plants are often built near the border. Usually people on the other side of the border usually don't profit in whatever way from the power plant. The situation may be different if you live on an island. ------ hrktb What makes me uneasy about this kind of call is that the situation at Fukushima is ungoing, but we hear a lot of "the levels are ridiculous _right now_ , what you're scarred of?". The people running away or worrying about the situation don't care so much about the levels now. They care about the levels if/when shit happens, and only use the radiation seen now to check how good things are handled. And for now it's not as if tepco's engineers, as goog as they are, are yet mastering the situation. ------ mohawk Lets talk money. I think it is only reasonable to ask that avoidable civilian technology be insured against harm done by it. So: how much would this insurance cost? Cleanup, health care costs, disability payments, loss of property? Given just a slight increase in illness rate for the sheer number of people involved can give a hard to detect but significant cost. An insurer will have to set aside enough money for the expected amount of payout. What would Warren Buffett's premiums be? Some claims will be excluded by the insurer, and the rest of the population will probably be called to for economic assistance: how much will that be? What is the opportunity cost of having half a million people cleaning up the place instead of being productive? Feel free to peruse the [IAEA report about Chernobyl]([http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernoby...](http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf)). What is the total economic cost? Maybe "hundreds of billions of dollars"? See the report for estimates. So yes, we shouldn't run away from radiation. We should clean it up safely, then come to our senses and stop dispersing any more of it. This technology is a dead-end for normal energy production. ------ Ratfish A 'spokesman' has just announced in the last few hours that there are high cesium levels in leaking water that is measuring 1Sv per hour. That going to be somewhere in the depths of the plant, but living about as far away from this ad is possible is a comfort to me. ------ adlep I've seen a similar titled article about the Fukoshima plant on HN called: "Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors." ------ Derbasti How about all those people dying from cancer years later all over Russia and Central Europe? Radiation does not kill instantly, it causes cancer, which kills years later. Stop spreading such nonsense articles, please! Just because the immediate impact is comparatively low, that doesn't mean it's harmless. ~~~ cperciva _Radiation does not kill instantly, it causes cancer, which kills years later._ Radiation is a carcinogen, yes. But it turns out that radiation is a really puny carcinogen. A radiation dosage which will probably kill you if delivered rapidly -- 4 Sieverts -- has only a small chance of causing cancer -- about 10% (and an even lower chance of causing _lethal_ cancer). ~~~ callmevlad Would you happen to have a source for this? I'm finding it hard to imagine how a study like this can even take place given that there have (probably) not been many survivors among those who have received a dose of 4 Sieverts. ~~~ DennisP There's a recent book called Physics for Future Presidents, written by a physics professor at Berkeley, which has a lot of material on radiation risks. He says you can calculate your risk of cancer from radiation by dividing your exposure by 2500 rem. The level that gives you acute radiation sickness is 200 rem. This is called the "linear hypothesis" and is widely used. They use it in medicine to decide if diagnostic scans are worth the risk. The risk could actually be lower; some scientists think there's a threshold below which there's no risk. There's too much statistical uncertainty at low exposure levels to know for sure. ~~~ Lost_BiomedE The class is available as open courseware, too. It is a no math physics course that focuses on concepts. This is the course site, click webcast lectures on the side: <http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/physics10/pffp.html> ------ richardw Radiation has the ability to make entire areas uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. Any mistakes in small countries like the UK could result in devastating effects on available land. Anything that dangerous should be handled exceptionally carefully. ------ bjelkeman-again Often the argument about whether nuclear power represents an acceptable risk or not is then used to argue that nuclear power is a key solution to get rid of fossil fuel (a straw man argument?), as if there are no other parts of nuclear power which should be questioned. This particular article doesn't say so explicitly, but has links in the margin to: "Nuclear power: Energy solution or evil curse?" <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12730473> Key aspects of the discussion really is whether nuclear power is safe (for people and environment) and economical. A good discussion about the economic aspects can be found at: "Cost, not Japan crisis, should scrub nuclear power" [http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-17-cost-not-japan- crisi...](http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-17-cost-not-japan-crisis- should-scrub-nuclear-power) ------ tectonic I highly recommend the Battle of Chernobyl documentary. It's available in parts on YouTube. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv3a4LXi_qc> ------ BasDirks Uninformed idiots downplaying the issue just to stand out from the crowd, it's sickening. ------ Tichy Stopped reading at "more people have died from the Tsunami", which unfortunately was line one. if you want to make an argument about radiation, make it - Tsunamis have nothing to do with it, I don't think they are radioactive. ~~~ gommm The blurb at the top is not always written by the same writer as the article... But even with that said, why doesn't it make sense to compare the number of casualties and damages between different accidents? It's a way to put things into perspective. People have in general a rather faulty sense of proportion and understanding of statistics. ~~~ Tichy A billion people die of old age all the time. That doesn't imply that we shouldn't care about other causes of death. The Tsunami deaths have nothing to do with radiation. hence they don't belong into an article about radiation. ~~~ Natsu This isn't an article about radiation, it's an article about fear. Our sense of fear is _not_ rational. If it were, people in the US would be more afraid of bananas (which count as "highly radioactive" if I apply the scales used by some newspapers evenhandedly) than Fukushima. Which shouldn't count as scary at all. I just ate one, in fact, in spite of knowing that it's choc-full of delicious, radioactive potassium. We fear things that are easy to imagine over common but hard to see risks. The death of one person is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic. So the death of tens of thousands due to the tsunami will never register the same emotional impact as the picture of one deformed child from Chernobyl. It's the same in startup marketing, incidentally. That's why they give people testimonials (stories), help them imagine the benefits, etc. This is sort of the opposite: the media is making it easy to imagine all sorts of horrible things happening due to invisible killer radiation. A few bad things probably will happen. Oh yeah, tens of thousands of people were also buried under a 12m wall of water that crushed entire towns, but there's nothing new to say about that. ~~~ Tichy Where I live it is a lot more rational to be worried about radiation than about Tsunamis. I can't bring the Tsunami victims back alive. What could I possibly learn from the Tsunami story? That it could be dangerous to live too close to the sea, that's about it. It's not my fault if the media tries to milk Fukushima for all it's worth (they live on fear). Still, the kind of answer you give doesn't help much. If the radiation is just banana level, why do the workers there wear protection suits? I didn't follow the stories too closely, so I suppose you refer to some measurement somewhere that made it into the news. That's a complete strawman. What I heard is that radiation levels were rising in Tokyo's water supply, but not enough to be dangerous. Still I would consider it newsworthy that an accident 200km away that does not seem to be 100% under control affects the Tokyo water supply. The Tsunami probably also started just with a 1mm rise in water levels. And to be honest, I admit if I was living in Tokyo, I would probably still think twice about giving the water to my baby. Who knows how timely the official measurements arrive - maybe in the meantime the radiation levels rise some more (the real news is the movement in radiation levels, not any static data point). And by the way, so far I have not heard a figure > 20000 for the number of the Tsunami victims, so I think you exaggerate with "tens of thousands" (it's horrible, nevertheless - but don't play the same tricks you accuse the anti nuclear media of). ~~~ Natsu > I can't bring the Tsunami victims back alive. What could I possibly learn > from the Tsunami story? That it could be dangerous to live too close to the > sea, that's about it. They can improve seawalls and such, actually. And we can improve search & rescue operations. > If the radiation is just banana level, why do the workers there wear > protection suits? Those don't protect from radiation very well, they're to prevent contamination. It takes several inches of lead to block gamma rays (you'd have to be Superman to move in a suit that heavy) and neutrons can activate otherwise non-radioactive elements. Alpha & beta radiation are relatively easy to block, though, but normal clothing is almost enough. Also, it's just good engineering to take precautions. Also, near the plant, there actually are hazardous levels of radiation, it's just once you get further away that they're mostly harmless. > And by the way, so far I have not heard a figure > 20000 for the number of > the Tsunami victims, so I think you exaggerate with "tens of thousands" > (it's horrible, nevertheless - but don't play the same tricks you accuse the > anti nuclear media of). I have, but who knows with the news? I've heard radiation figures from "100x normal" to "1,000,000x normal" (the LA Times had a _much_ larger multiplier than the other papers I compared it to). Also, remember the tsunami in the Indian ocean? Last I heard, the deaths there were on the order of 100k, if memory serves. Japan did what? 1/10th or so of that (again, depending on which numbers you believe). I do not and cannot blame you for the media's hysteria, I'm just trying to help you not get caught up in it and to understand the real dangers that people are underestimating. Granted, you may not live in a coastal area, so you may not even have heard of seawalls before, but non-newsworthy things like improving them can save a lot of people. But those kinds of projects will get starved for funding. So we'll end up with a lot of panicked people in California who shoot down new nuke plants in favor of coal/natural gas (the coal miners who die are in China, so there are no political consequences) and underestimate things like seawalls. California is said to be overdue for a big quake, but I hope they're wrong about that. ~~~ Tichy Nonsense, Japan already has invested a lot in Tsunami protection, they will not starve funding for that. Who says it is an "either invest in anti-Tsunami or anti-nuclear-power measures" kind of thing? And no, I don't live in a coastal area, so enhancing seawalls is not my interest or priority. As for protection suit: contamination, why should it matter if it is only as bad as eating a banana? Your banana argument really makes no sense. I have little hopes for nuclear power to go away, nor fossile fuel plants. I think it would be possible, but lifestyles would have to change too much (for the better in my opinion, but many people would disagree). We certainly could save a lot of power, so it would not have to be necessary to replace nuclear power plants with fossile fuel plants. ~~~ Natsu > As for protection suit: contamination, why should it matter if it is only as > bad as eating a banana? Your banana argument really makes no sense. How radiation affects one's body is a complex issue. The inverse square law also comes into effect. So something can be dangerous close up, but no threat to anyone who doesn't get close. Ars Technica has a nice article about radiation that goes into these issues in more detail than I can: [http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/03/know-your- nukes-...](http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/03/know-your-nukes- understanding-radiation-risks-in-japan.ars) My main point about bananas, though, is that radiation is normal. You experience it every single day, even if you don't realize it. All sorts of background radiation is constantly going through your body. Not to mention intentional exposures like chest X-rays. It's sort of like fire, then. You can burn yourself and you should treat it carefully. You should fear it enough to avoid burning yourself, but not much more than that. It's also going to become just about as necessary to civilization as fire, soon, from the look of things. Maybe fusion will pan out and I hope so, but people are then going to have to learn all about neutrons and why they can make normal materials become radioactive.... But maybe clever moderator designs will make it so that most neutrons are absorbed by easily replaceable things that don't become anything nasty. ~~~ Tichy Radiation is normal, and so is water. I drink water every day with no ill side effects, yet it killed thousands of people in a Tsunami. How long does supply of nuclear fuels last anyway? Isn't it a limited resource? Will it be as necessary to civilization as SUVs? From the article it seems clear that inhaling or digesting contaminated stuff is dangerous. ~~~ Natsu A lot longer than any of our other energy sources, except maybe the sun, so fusion is a good thing to be able to manage, because hydrogen is so abundant. However, entropy will ultimately kill the universe. Once the entire universe runs out of available energy (which it can manage without any human help), then we're screwed barring radical new physics that can give us answers like "this is how you create another universe and then travel there." The good news is that it will take a looooooong time before anybody seriously has to worry about that. ------ VladRussian the moron who wrote the article doesn't know what he's talking about: >Nuclear technology cures countless cancer patients every day - and a radiation dose given for radiotherapy in hospital is no different in principle to a similar dose received in the environment. From [http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/coping/radiation- therapy-...](http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/coping/radiation-therapy-and- you/page6) : "Late side effects may first occur 6 or more months after radiation therapy is over. They vary by the part of your body that was treated and the dose of radiation you received. Late side effects may include infertility, joint problems, lymphedema, mouth problems, and secondary cancer." ~~~ shadowsun7 That moron who wrote the article is a nuclear and medical physicist at the University of Oxford. From the HN comment guidelines: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Judging from your comment history, you seem to enjoy calling names more than you do providing arguments. ~~~ VladRussian your post didn't provide any contra argument, instead you went for personal attack and "karma-bombing". ~~~ shadowsun7 A counter-argument to what, exactly? You took a statement that he made, concluded that he was a 'moron who does not know what he's talk about', and then backed that summary statement up with a lifted quote from cancer.gov that had nothing to do to the original statement? Allison's statement is accurate: a _single_ radiation dose is similar in principle to one received from the environment. His over-arching point is that we don't regard radiation doses in the hospital as scary, taboo and dangerous, and yet we regard _any_ environmental dose as toxic and worth panicking over. The rest of the article lays down his arguments for this view. ~~~ VladRussian >Allison's statement is accurate: a single radiation dose is similar in principle to one received from the environment. why do you repeat this utter and obviously incorrect crap? do you really think that localized deep tissue dose has the same health effect as if it was received whole-body? Do you just happen to possess the winning combination of being uneducated and too lazy to Google things up? If you ever make you brain moving, try to think how it can be "similar in principle" when 20S deposited to healthy tissue around cancer (out of total 60-80S dose the patient receives) rarely kills the patient while 4-5S received "environmentally" during comparable period of time would almost always be lethal. The article looks like it was written by somebody who is uneducated and has problems with logic, i.e. moron. Too bad it was written by a professional with an agenda. Intellectual dishonesty is much worse than plain stupidity and ignorance. ~~~ shadowsun7 All this name calling makes me sad. There was a time when trolls like you were banned from HN. Sigh. How times have changed. ~~~ VladRussian You post an illogical, intelligence insulting crap and become "sad" when somebody calls the crap out. You're right - the HN debate culture has gone down. The strongest and most logical argument you've managed in the discussion on radiation doses [non]equivalency is to call me a troll. ------ nikster I am going to make a completely unscientific argument now that I know the HN readership will look down upon, but I think it captures why we can't build nuclear plants. First, nuclear power started out as a cold war thing; they built nuclear plants because of one very interesting side-product required to build nuclear bombs. These days in those countries that already have nuclear weapons, that's a secondary concern - but this is where it came from. And for countries that don't yet have nuclear weapons, that's the reason they want to build them. Second, the accident in Chernobyl. Hold your statistics and studies. Just pause for a moment. Think about this accident. All children all over Europe were told to stay inside for a few days. And take Iodine. Any technology that is able to cause that is not fit to generate power. In fact the only man made processes that can cause such an event are nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants. Fail safe plants unfortunately don't exist - they're not fail safe, as evident in Fukushima. Does the chain reaction stop when everything fails? No? Then it's not fail-safe. Obviously. I am not a worrier - but when you're playing with forces that cannot be controlled with the technology we have, you have to do the smart thing and skip them for now. There's plenty of alternatives - I think the nuclear thing is a distraction from them, and kept alive by a very active lobby. I am happy to change my opinion if you come up with a new process that's actually fail-safe, that's actually guaranteed to not leak radiation, and that doesn't produce nuclear waste. ~~~ jbri What alternatives can you offer? Solar and wind energy are not reliable enough to provide base-load coverage, hydro power is restricted to very specific terrain and has a devastating effect on local ecology, and really the only other option is fossil fuels. At this point, the options literally are nuclear, or fossil fuels. And burning more and more coal for power (which puts out more radiation and kills more people than a nuclear plant, FYI) because anything less than perfection is not suitable just seems like a really, _really_ shortsighted idea. An alternative energy source does not need to be perfect to be worth switching to. It just needs to be better than the status quo. And nuclear power, currently, is _very much_ better than coal. ~~~ cperciva _hydro power is restricted to very specific terrain and has a devastating effect on local ecology..._ ... and isn't any safer than nuclear power. Four people died when the Japan earthquake caused a dam to fail -- that's more deaths than the Fukushima NPP has caused, but oddly enough nobody is calling for a worldwide halt to dam construction.

Ask HN: How do I build an online community in general? - m33k44 Assuming the online participants are from all walks of life, not from a specific community, age group, gender or interest. ====== eggsAndBacon Bring up topics and resolutions, to problems they care about, that are well thought out and meaningful. “Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” - Stephen King

3 Simple Steps to Being Lucky - epi0Bauqu http://blog.stevebarsh.com/barsh_bits/2009/01/3-simple-steps-to-being-lucky.html ====== noodle imo, its all about gathering your ingredients and waiting until the right time. its not worth heavily stressing about location, because location and ingredients are connected. you move location and it tends to drain ingredients. prepare yourself for an opportunity and go looking. thats luck.

Emacs Lisp's Future - rutenspitz https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2014-09/msg00434.html ====== mark_l_watson If it isn't broken, don't try to fix it. I am an old guy (professional Lisp developer since about 1981) and my age probably affects my opinion: It would be a disaster to mess up the Emacs ecosystem. I don't think that Emacs/elisp runs slowly and since I have to use so many different programming languages anyway, needing to know a little elisp is no problem. I don't care if elisp is not a modern language. Way off topic, something that I have written before about: think forwards several hundred years. What will the software landscape look like? My bet is that there will be many ancient software systems that have been debugged to near absolute stability over the centuries. Sure new software will be written, but I bet there will be many very old and stable systems that will see little change. ~~~ lispm Wouldn't it be nice when Emacs would not be blocked when some Lisp routine runs? Lots of people have written excellent code for GNU Emacs, but the implementation runtime hasn't improved that much. ~~~ e40 _Wouldn 't it be nice when Emacs would not be blocked when some Lisp routine runs?_ Yes, it would be nice, but can you imagine the bugs that will happen while everyone works out the details of how to do it properly? ~~~ taylanub Even in the current pre-alpha/alpha stage of Guile-Emacs, I can launch a thread from Scheme, do work, return to the main thread, then call an Elisp function on my result. (Scheme and Elisp data types are unified.) No bugs or unpleasant details there. Calling Elisp functions and accessing Emacs data types (buffers, windows) from multiple threads is another issue; if you don't want to bother with it then don't; you still get all the other benefits of being on Guile. (Calling to _any_ Guile module agnostically as if it were an Elisp library (including, say, Guile's OpenGL module), having an FFI, getting JIT or AOT native compilation in the future, etc.) ------ yason Given all the reworks of software projects that have a) been started b) then delayed c) then delayed more, "because this time we'll make it perfect" and d) then failed to gather traction because of incompatibilities, it's my humble guess that the only way would be to continue ELisp as it is and slowly rework the compiler/interpreter and the runtime into a more modern codebase, and add missing features such as thread/process based concurrency. Guile, Clojure, Common Lisp or whatever language are going to basically restart Emacs from scratch, no matter how well they're coated with compatibility macros. It's better to create slight incompatibilities gradually (so that packages can catch up in some humane timeframe). I could imagine the ELisp runtime being intertwined with the Emacs C code badly enough that making radical changes to it would seem "impossible", just like in the CPython codebase it is considered impossible to ditch GIL and modernise the code. But those kind of comments are often excuses because people are lazy and it's nicer to write new code. ~~~ JulianMorrison If I was them, I'd gradually introduce the minimum set of breaking changes to ELisp that converge it on Common Lisp. Even if those changes were unhelpful or removed features. Then eventually, when it maps 1:1 onto a subset of CL, just swap the implementation for a supported CL. ~~~ mjn Some years ago the a clisp maintainer actually made a minimal demo of Emacs hosted on clisp with just a compatibility layer for Elisp via macros/functions, which seemed to work pretty well. But it didn't progress any further because Stallman vetoed basing Emacs on Common Lisp (he considers CL to be too big a language, and to some extent just doesn't like it). In retrospect I'm not sure this was a good call: Guile as a general VM with custom infrastructure to support both Scheme and Elisp is not really a more clean, minimalistic infrastructure anyway. The semantics of Elisp/Scheme are too different to be able to just stick in a Scheme implementation with a smallish compatibility layer, like you could with Elisp hosted on CL. ~~~ JulianMorrison Too often it seems RMS is why GNU can't have nice things. ~~~ fleitz RMS would never let practicality get in the way of ideology. The GNU/RMS is best because you're free! (As long as your computing needs are a text editor, compiler, and some unix system utils) ~~~ rurban That's why I believe their FFI plans are doomed. We implemented FFI's for emacs over the last decades, but RMS always strongly opposed it, because you could call windows DLL's then. gtk-emacs e.g. ~~~ deng RMS is fine with an FFI as long as you cannot use it to inject non-free code. This is usually done by requiring an exported symbol saying that the code is GPL compatible. GCC does it this way: [https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Plugin- API.html](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Plugin-API.html) ~~~ rurban But you cannot call that a FFI then. A FFI is the abbrevation for "Foreign Function Interface", not "Friendly Function Interface". FFI's are not sugar coated. ------ hraberg I started a project to port Emacs (the C parts) manually to Clojure, with the Emacs Lisp automatically transpiled into Clojure in 2012, most of the work was done in early 2013: [https://github.com/hraberg/deuce](https://github.com/hraberg/deuce) It can boot Emacs on the JVM and take simple commands, but not much more. It's my intention to eventually revisit this project, but not sure when. ------ atgreen "Lack of some features, most notably FFI and concurrency." Cool -- my '90s hacks are in demand! I added threading support to Guile and wrote libffi back in the 90s. ~~~ slacka It seems your libffi has been used in Guile since 1.9.8, so does that mean Guile does support FFI and concurrency? ~~~ craigching Guile does support FFI and concurrency. ------ TeMPOraL I've been bringing the following thought up inside various threads but I think it needs to be said in separate one, since I see many people here and elsewhere missing this about Emacs. Emacs is _not_ a _scriptable editor_. You don't "script it" or "write plugins for it" in a classical sense of those terms. You reprogram, extend and augment a piece of running code on the fly. Seems similar, but feels different. Emacs is a live Lisp image with text-editing features bolted on top. It's basically backwards of how a typical editor/IDE is implemented. Therefore, it matters what language is used as a base. People mentioned Lua or JavaScript, but they are nowhere near useful enough for the task. Therefore, it feels to me - and I believe to many other Emacs users as well - it matters that there should be _one base language_. Emacs as an Elisp system with text editing capabilities _feels_ like a whole. Everything fits together nicely and interacts with each other. It is elegant. Aside for inviting maintenance upkeep and general chaos, making Emacs "run" multiple languages at the core is sort of like shattering its soul into many pieces. I don't want to have an editor with multiple-personality disorder. Imagine you're writing an executable in three different programming languages mixed together at the same time. That class is written in Common Lisp, but it's child classes are written in C++. And exception handling everywhere is written in Python. The sheer mental effort to make all of these work in a conceptual harmony inside a single program would be enormous. And it would still feel weird. That is what multiple-extension-language Emacs would feel. ~~~ lispm > It's basically backwards of how a typical editor/IDE is implemented. The main difference is that the implementation language is a dynamic language, which is also mostly the implementation language. That's similar to how some other IDEs work like Smalltalk or Clozure CL on the Mac. But those are not focused on implementing an extensible editor. Those are IDEs with editing features. ------ terminalcommand If emacs supported new languages other than elisp, a lot of new blood will join the community. Once we get the new hackers, they will try and find ways to modify the old codebase. Emacs is a wonderful editor, but to a newcomer it can be a lot daunting. For example, I have completed the emacs tutorial, I've even read the infos info tutorial and several info pages regarding emacs and still don't know much about ELisp. I downloaded the official emacs manual, which is more than 1000 pdf pages and plan to read it in the next 10 years. I love the editor, I want to continue to program in Emacs but Kate seems to be much simpler, elegant and quite functional. ~~~ rwmj Does emacs want the kind of developers who cannot be bothered to learn Elisp? Apart from the syntax, Javascript and Lisp are not really so different. ~~~ TeMPOraL They differ in semantics and elegance, and for that reason alone I wouldn't want Emacs to end up scripted in JavaScript. Sure it would bring new blood. It will also drive away old one; people, for whom Emacs is a Lisp runtime with a text editor bolted on top of it. Switching Emacs from Elisp to something else feels like selling its soul. Adding parallel support for JavaScript and bunch of other languages feels like turning it into a Frankenstein monster. ~~~ josteink > Sure it would bring new blood. It will also drive away old one; people, for > whom Emacs is a Lisp runtime with a text editor bolted on top of it. > Switching Emacs from Elisp to something else feels like selling its soul. While I agree with most of your statement, having Emacs switch/transition/support another, more modern form of Lisp like CL surely wouldn't count as selling your soul. On the contrary you would stay true to your ideals (a Lisp-runtime with an editor) except now the Lisp runtime just got a lot better. I like Emacs as much as the next guy, and I have dabbled some in Elisp. I can make due. But I sure as hell wouldn't mind getting some of that neat stuff the CL-guys are getting. ~~~ TeMPOraL > _While I agree with most of your statement, having Emacs switch > /transition/support another, more modern form of Lisp like CL surely > wouldn't count as selling your soul._ I... I'm not sure, but I'm leaning towards agreeing. I can tell you that I _don 't get_ those "we're lobotomizing it" vibes when I think about switching Elisp for CL. Maybe because those two look alike and have similar philosophy. But even a thought of switching to Scheme, which is still a Lisp, sends chills down my spine. I know, this is completely irrational. But maybe this is a part of Emacs's appeal. You get attached to it, down to its very core. ------ HerrMonnezza Tom Tromey started an automated rewrite of Emacs in Common Lisp in 2012, see the announcement at: [http://tromey.com/blog/?p=709](http://tromey.com/blog/?p=709) I couldn't find any progress report after [http://tromey.com/blog/?p=751](http://tromey.com/blog/?p=751) so I guess the project has been abandoned early. ~~~ eschulte I think this is the most realistic approach mentioned here, and tromey is actually familiar with the Emacs internals. ~~~ taylanub So is BT Templeton, the person who has been hacking away at Guile-Emacs GSoC after GSoC. :-) (They seem very skilled, don't be fooled by the fact that it's GSoC; no idea what the skill level of people who take part in that usually tends to be.) ------ informatimago I've got the impression that there is more Common Lisp code and programmers around than guile. ~~~ Blackthorn Literally dozens more. Look, neither Common Lisp nor any Scheme implementation are exactly topping the charts in popularity these days. This should be about the technical merits of the choice, because I'm pretty sure Emacs Lisp both has more code and more programmers (both represented in the forms of small scripts we've shoved into _scratch_ and evaluated) than both. ~~~ muuh-gnu The decision to go either Common Lisp or Scheme was made based on RMS very personal reasons and conflicts with close-source Lisp machine companies during the first half of the 80s. GNU has had two common Lisp implementations under their umbrella at least since mid 90s (CLISP (of Viaweb fame) and GCL (of Maxima fame)), but due to RMS' hate of Symbolics and Common Lisp, all of the effort was invested into making Guile run properly (which took them 25 years and still nobody is using it) and the two Lisps were basically orphaned. The latest effort of guile-ifying Emacs is more pushed by the Guile guys, in order to attach themselves to an already existing killer app (emacs) and to basically force more and more people to use Scheme, because nobody is doing it voluntarily. The Emacs guys, as you see from the post, are not _really_ excited about the idea of switching to another _language_. They want FFI, multithreading, etc, but they do not necessarily want Scheme. Actually they dont want Scheme at all, adopting Scheme would be just a price to get FFI, etc. Of course the proper way would be to go Common Lisp. Elisp is and has always been a subset of Common Lisp, and they've had a Common Lisp compatibility layer for decades, and a lot of packages use it. The problem is simply highly political. You'd have to confront RMS, and you'd have to finally get rid of Guile's "official GNU extension language" status. ~~~ tenfingers I've been programming with ELisp, CL and Scheme for a long time. Somehow Guile feels like an odd choice. Why not Chicken scheme, or Racket, or Bigloo; which are the top scheme environments you can choose from? AFAIK, Guile is not used much beyond a few random projects. Maybe I just don't know Guile, really. Maybe it has a decent implementation afterall. However, I would have gone CL. There are several "emacs-like" editors implemented in CL: [http://www.cliki.net/cl-emacs](http://www.cliki.net/cl-emacs) I would argue that implementing ELisp support in Climacs is actually easier, so we can run all the elisp stuff we already have, and slowly move on. ~~~ apgwoz Guile was _designed_ as an extension language, which CL was not. So, that's one reason. Guile also has a something like 90% working implementation of an elisp compiler to guile bytecode, a JavaScript implementation and (I think, though may be wrong) a working Lua compiler. None of the other mentioned scheme implementations were designed for embedding, even if they are fine implementations themselves (which they are). ~~~ levosmetalo If we consider "designed for embedding" as a driving point we can always take ECL (embeddable/extensible common lisp) as a base and get both very nice ffi and threading while still being CL. ------ CharlesMerriam2 This problem begs to think larger. Instead of starting with "we are missing these two critical features that the rest of the world has expected as standard since the dinosaurs perished", it might be interesting to ask "what sort of emacs language features would make it the best in the world!" It is far easier to get a minimum product out when the eventual goal is the stars. ~~~ fleitz I believe this kind of thinking is what led to the massive success that is emacs in the first place. ------ brudgers As I began really using Emacs about a year ago, I got the idea that the Emacs code base could actually be a foundation for a computer science curriculum - The Emacs code base touches on scripting, functional programming, application programming, systems programming in C, real-time problems, usability, cross- platform development, etc. etc. An alliance with Racket would be an interesting option from the standpoint of language communities. - The community's core is [ relatively ] vibrant. - The community has more than a passing interest in developing development tools. - The community is exceptionally stable because its members are often linked to academia. - It copes with endless September really well. - Its vision of open resources overlaps GNU somewhat. - Programming language problems are right up the Racket community's alley. ------ lallysingh I sent a note about using an elisp-on-llvm solution. Someone had done the work already, it appears: [https://github.com/boostpro/emacs-llvm- jit](https://github.com/boostpro/emacs-llvm-jit) ~~~ __david__ There's no way they'd do that. There's a rift because of LLVM's licensing philosophy: [https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html](https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2014-01/msg00247.html) ~~~ mwfunk The fact that he even uses the term "adversaries" in this post is disheartening. It's really disappointing that someone who could potentially be such a force for good in the world gets derailed by what is basically tribalism. Two parties can disagree on 99% of their beliefs, yet still find ways to come together on the 1% that they happen to agree on. These parties can work together to each others' mutual benefit, and the world is better for it. But nooooooooo, not RMS. He has to demonize anyone who is not 100% in lockstep with him on everything, to everyone's detriment, and throw his "adversaries" into a trash bin labelled "Others". It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's easy to drive people apart in the name of some ideal. It takes actual leadership to drive otherwise separate people together to actually accomplish something. I have wished for so many years that RMS would care enough to provide the latter instead of the usual former. ~~~ __david__ > It's easy to drive people apart in the name of some ideal. It takes actual > leadership to drive otherwise separate people together to actually > accomplish something. Right there is the crux of the matter. RMS is _only_ focused on the ideal. To him, "accomplishing something" is only relevant when the accomplishment is free software that can't be locked away in proprietary codebases. Viewed through that lens, his actions and beliefs have been remarkably consistent for the past 30 years. He really grates on people who don't share his idealism, and he's looked up to by people who do. He can be quite polarizing, to say the least. ------ swah Dream: "Common Lisp/Guile, and a Chromium based rendering engine". ~~~ josteink Maybe I'm in the minority, but I for one _really_ appreciate how Emacs can run in a terminal, over SSH, with almost no feature-degradation at all. Besides Emacs being a very nice programming (and programmable editor), this is one the key features which keeps me from even considering other more "modern" options. ~~~ thejdude I haven't used Emacs in a while, so I'm very rusty, but why would you run a remote Emacs in SSH, and not use your local Emacs to access remote stuff via TRAMP? In my Emacs days, I've never really used the terminal version. Multiple frames, yay! ~~~ krylon On my remote systems, about the first thing I do after a reboot is call "emacs --daemon" via SSH and then use emacsclient to edit files. For one thing, TRAMP has higher latency, and it also keeps state across disconnects and reboots of my desktop system. I regulary have lots of configuration files open, tail-mode buffers to watch log files, an eshell session, man pages, web pages (using w3m), and it is just too much of a hassle to open these all over again all the time. Also, if you have to access the remote machine through a low-bandwidth line, the terminal version at least feels more efficient than using TRAMP from my workstation. For most purposes, the GUI does not offer _that_ much of an advantage. ------ eschaton Why not start with Hemlock or CLIMacs atop a CLIM implementation, or take the (MIT-licensed) ZWEI codebase and bring that forward? Is there really all that much in GNU emacs that is really _widely_ used? ~~~ lispm Starting with ZWEI, written in Lisp Machine Lisp in the late 70s, is a very cool way forward. Move back to the 70s and start from there. Good idea. Maybe not. > Why not start with Hemlock or CLIMacs atop a CLIM implementation, Why? ------ pnathan If we (emacs users) can have an emacs that has a "modern" backend & language but is bug-compatible with the extant elisp code, I think that would be grand. Particularly nice would be thread support. I'm pragmatically indifferent as to whether the backend is scheme or common lisp (I'd personally prefer Common Lisp, but whatevs). ------ burtonator I spent about 2 years of my life in my 20s hacking on elisp constantly. I was infatuated with it. Then I spent about 5-10 years using that platform as my IDE. Guess what... Last year I migrated to IntelliJ IDEA and won't EVER migrate back. It's kind of sad... but IDEA is insanely awesome by comparison. ~~~ TeMPOraL Blasphemy! On a more serious note, could you elaborate a bit on how IDEA is "insanely awesome" compared to Emacs? What do you find more useful/enjoyable in the IntelliJ IDE? ------ systems who is Stefan Monnier? and why should we care about what he thinks? is he the main emacs maintainer? in other words, how seriously should we consider this email? ~~~ tjr [http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2008-02/msg021...](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2008-02/msg02140.html) ------ riffraff can someone more knowledgeable than me explain how is elisp closer to CL than to Scheme? ~~~ lispm Both Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp are coming from MIT's Maclisp dialect. There were Emacs variants written in Maclisp or its dialects before GNU Emacs existed. Emacs Lisp was a very simplified Maclisp. Common Lisp modernized Maclisp (especially lexical binding), preserved a lot of Maclisp features and standardized stuff like an Object System (CLOS), error-handling (Conditions), enhanced argument lists (especially keyword arguments). RMS especially did not like the addition of an object system, lexical binding as the default and keyword arguments. Those three things are quite central in Common Lisp. Emacs Lisp has no object-system in its core, lexical binding has only recently added and it has no keyword arguments. Scheme is quite different from both. But Guile is a very special Scheme dialect with lots of enhancements, which makes it as large as a Common Lisp implementation. I would expect that code sharing between Scheme implementations is more difficult than between Common Lisp implementations. ~~~ quotemstr Keyword argument support is in the Emacs core these days, along with the rest of the CL library. (require 'cl-lib) (cl-defun foo (&key a b c) (list a b c)) (foo :c 3 :b 4 :a 1) ------ tedks A lot of people seem to be reading this as if Emacs is choosing between switching languages to Scheme (Guile) or Common Lisp. Switching to Guile DOES NOT IMPLY switching to Scheme. There is 0 need for compatibility layer or what have you with Guile. Guile is a language-agnostic virtual machine. It has an implementation for Scheme, but also one for Emacs Lisp. Guile already runs Emacs Lisp faster than Emacs: [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2010-04/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2010-04/msg00665.html) The main issue the Emacs developers seem to have with Guile is that it will give developers choices as to whether to write Emacs extensions in Scheme, Elisp, or Javascript/Python/Whatever else Guile supports. ~~~ rthomas6 >The main issue the Emacs developers seem to have with Guile is that it will give developers choices as to whether to write Emacs extensions in Scheme, Elisp, or Javascript/Python/Whatever else Guile supports I don't understand why they care? Why would the Emacs developers feel the need to debug compatibility if someone else wrote a shitty extension? The onus would be on the extension developer to fix the extension. ~~~ babarock Quoting the linked email: So if we go for Guile-Emacs, we'll be stuck with Guile, i.e. we'd have (old and new) packages that use Elisp, new packages that use Scheme, maybe yet other new packages that use, say, Javascript (or some other language support by Guile). That would make the work of Emacs (and GNU ELPA) maintenance harder. ~~~ Steltek So don't accept packages into the Emacs core that don't meet their standards? It's okay to have project standards but limiting how other people use your tool seems terribly misguided for a GNU project. ------ sdegutis Seriously, why not just use Lua? It's perfect for this. ~~~ krylon I one were to start from scratch, writing an emacs-like text editor by building it on top of a small programming language you can use for customizing and extending the editor, Lua would a great choice. Lua has only a tiny standard library, but in writing the core of the editor, you probably have to supply the equivalent functionality yourself, anyway. But I do not see how you could bolt Lua on to GNU Emacs. You would have to start from scratch, and that would be a _lot_ of work. And even then, there is the fact, that GNU Emacs is already well-established, has a very loyal user base and is - by and large - good enough, even great for most purposes, so even if you wrote LMacs or whatever one would call it, you would probably end up with, like, a dozen users or so. (IIRC the Zile project, a small emacs-like editor, has tried this, but I do not know how far they got with this.) ------ linguafranca Why isn't Lua even a choice? It's small, portable, easily embeddable, lightning fast, supports high-level functional programming idioms, and is extremely flexible in creating and enforcing policies (via metaprogramming). ~~~ dbpatterson Because it is a completely different language and would require rewriting all of the thousands of packages by hand (and centuries of human labor)? ~~~ thejdude OTOH, Emacs isn't that accessible to many users, and its idiosynchrasies can be very offputting. I also quit Emacs after a while because I wasn't totally happy with it. I think that's why there are so many attempts to built new extensible editors in other languages, like Eclipse, or that Ruby thing there once was (probably still is), or the Chromium/JS monster that was on HN recently. I haven't yet found an editor I'm really happy with, so if I ever have time, I'll probably write my own as well. I'll lose the Emacs packages I don't use or even know about, but if you haven't bought into an existing ecosystem, that doesn't really matter. I'm unhappy enough with the existing systems that I don't mind throwing them away for something different.

Continue, pivot or quit? - misterparker I designed and built Lemonade - http://getlemonade.com - end of last year. Wondering if it's worth continuing to work on it, alter strategy on it, or just drop it? Looking for some honest feedback and opinions from the community. ====== danso The site appears to be down? ~~~ misterparker Really? It's up for me. are you getting an error? screenshot? Anything will help thanks! ~~~ danso I'm getting "Webpage not available" - the DNS lookup is failing, apparently Verified here: <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/getlemonade.com> ------ codyguy Your site's down.

Yash: Posix-compliant shell with fish-style predictive completion and more - codesections https://yash.osdn.jp/index.html.en ====== codesections From the project website: > Yash is intended to be the most POSIX-compliant shell in the world while > supporting features for daily interactive and scripting use. Notable > features are: * Global aliases * Arrays * Socket redirection, pipeline redirection, and process redirection * Brace expansion and extended globbing * Fractional numbers in arithmetic expansion * Prompt command and command-not-found handler * Command line completion with predefined completion scripts for more than 100 commands * Command line prediction based on command history I'm particularly taken with it's support for configuring the relevant keyboard commands, with strong support for both Emacs and Vi bindings. It also uses much less RAM than many other shells with similar interactive features, to the extent that matters to folks these days.

Anonymous shell companies buying American real estate - paulpauper https://www.revealnews.org/article/unmasking-the-secret-landlords-buying-up-america/ ====== threatofrain > All-cash transactions have come to account for a quarter of all residential > real estate purchases, “totaling hundreds of billions of dollars > nationwide,” the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network – the financial crimes > unit of the federal Treasury Department, also known as FinCEN – noted in a > 2017 news release. Thanks to the Bank Secrecy Act, a 1970 anti-money- > laundering law, the agency is able to learn who owns many of these > properties. In high-cost cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles > and Miami, it’s flagged over 30% of cash purchases as suspicious > transactions. But FinCEN also cites this bill to hide this information from > the public, leaving the American people increasingly in the dark about who > owns their cities. > For journalists, it requires undertaking a tremendous investigative effort > to find the real owner of even one property, let alone millions. ------ scottlegrand2 Just charge a vacancy tax like Vancouver does. [https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty- homes-t...](https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes- tax.aspx) ~~~ grawprog And then the owners can do what they did in Vancouver and rent the properties out to students for a couple months before tax time, claim the lots aren't vacant and avoid the tax, then jack up the rent so high they're forced to move. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-16/college-k...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-16/college- kids-are-living-like-kings-in-vancouver-s-empty-mansions) [https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/in- van...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/in-vancouver- empty-units-evade-new-tax-amid-fuzzy-definitions/article38309993/) ~~~ ninkendo Couldn’t you just tax based on a percentage of the year a house sits vacant? ~~~ ethanbond Even better, just aggressively tax owners based on the land value. This requires them to either eat high costs for their speculation, or use it for income-producing purposes (someplace to live or someplace to work). ~~~ sumedh > just aggressively tax owners based on the land value. What about old people who bought the house long time back when it was cheap but dont have good source of income to pay the inflated tax? ~~~ wffurr Then they can cash out, realize their gains, buy a modest bungalow, and live out their golden years in style. Seems fine. ~~~ jrd259 That "modest bungalow" might be 50 kilometers away. These "old folks" lose their entire local social network, and perhaps have to buy a car. ~~~ internet_user a car that they might not even be able to drive. I never understood why people consider equity to be essentially equivalent to liquid money. ~~~ 2arrs2ells Because home equity is highly liquid. You can refinance your mortgage (and take money out), or take out a reverse mortgage (which pays you monthly in exchange for eventual ownership), or a home equity loan. Tons of ways to turn your home equity into cash. ------ killjoywashere This is not just a phenomenon of titans, there are plenty of mom-and-pop operations too. I worked with someone who got in a fight in the office with her father over the phone. He was pissed she wouldn't accept a $250,000 deposit into her US account from her uncle's account (his brother) in China. The goal was to buy a house in the name of her cousin in LA. ~~~ flomo Majority are likely small-time landlords, local investors, and etc, as it is very easy to set up an LLC. Also, I wonder if HNers describe their startups as "anonymous shell companies"? ~~~ anon87123 Honestly property ownership being default-public seems like a weird anachronism. Why should anyone who has my address be able to tell if I own the property? I haven't looked into the exact details as I've never bought a house but from what I can gather I'd want to wrap it in an LLC. Also FWIW the Sean Hannity example in the article seems like a weird strawman conflating consumer protection laws with "name and shame" accountability. If it's wrong to evict someone for XYZ reason, that should be protected by the law, not by fear of being "named" as the landlord. [TBC I am no fan of Sean Hannity.] ~~~ flomo > Honestly property ownership being default-public seems like a weird > anachronism Land registry is a necessary function of local government. But this is one of those things which was historically only available within a government office, and now can be found in a second on the internet. Personally I would be perfectly okay if my local government required disclosure of the personal ownership of LLC property owners. But I have no idea if that's constitutional or legal under federal laws. ~~~ ryacko >But this is one of those things that was historically only available within a government office If you want to know where a person lived pre-internet, you looked them up in a phone book, which is substantially less privacy preserving than looking up the owner of a house. Well, post-internet, 2FA has been leaked to advertisers. ~~~ flomo I was typing something in response, but I think the best advice is advocating mental health services. Sorry if that violates the rules. ~~~ ryacko Don't worry, Trump tweets assist in my mental stability. ------ Trias11 Why does it matter if owner is known or not known? Person or entity wants to keep invested in real estate to protect assets against market fluctuations and frivolous lawsuits and it turns that real estate is a great investment. Why is that wrong? As long as person/entity complies with all laws (including whatever - empty housing tax?) - it shouldn't matter. FinCEN _has the right to know_ and it does, but it hides this info from public because probably some prominent political figures are in play here. ~~~ jb_s It's not wrong for an individual to choose an investment vehicle that aligns to their overall strategy. However in an overall social sense, I do think that residential property investment in itself is wrong because I view housing as a utility and a basic necessity along the lines of water, healthcare, fire/police services and internet. The issue is actually a simple trade off - whether it's more important to ensure people can own their own homes, or that people are allowed to use real estate as an investment. I don't blame individual investors for this, but I do support the idea of introducing laws to limit property speculation. Bear in mind that I'm from Australia, where property investment has become a cancer that has drawn money away from productive assets (like startups) and into property, which is relatively speaking non-productive rent-seeking (outside of its effect on the construction and design industries). There's no net output from acquiring debt to buy a house so that you can do nothing but sit on it and flip it three years later for profit. ~~~ ethanbond You should check out Georgism/Land Value Tax if you’re not already familiar with it. This comment is spot on. ~~~ Ericson2314 Amend to that. Pity it is not better known. "homeownership" is such a rotten ideology in the US and has led to so many problems. ~~~ balfirevic I'm very sympathetic to Georgism, but you all seem to have taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a discussion about the real estate ownership anonymity. ~~~ rjsw Georgism won't work very well if you can't work out who owns the land or if it is owned by offshort corporations. ~~~ balfirevic Of course it will. You just need to charge the land value tax to the owning entity. The same is true now for any taxes, fees or fines regarding that property. If those are not paid, government can seize and auction-off the property. ~~~ Ericson2314 Yes anonymous ownership and Georgism aren't strictly mutually exclusive, but the path that led us here is a decidedly incompatible ideology of land just being another asset. ------ tomc1985 There really should be limits on who can buy residential property and how much of it one can own. Maybe property taxes that ratchet up exponentially the more residential property under one's ownership. Large anonymous property firms owning peoples' _homes_ simply shouldn't exist. ~~~ sien This has been done in Sweden. The results are disastrous : [https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news- insights...](https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news- insights/trending/bf9u6czrfvmwslicy1parq2) [https://www.reuters.com/article/sweden-economy- housing/swede...](https://www.reuters.com/article/sweden-economy- housing/sweden-grapples-with-housing-market-reform-as-risks-mount- idUSL8N28L43A) Stockholm, a fairly small city by global standards (~1.5M in the central area) is extremely hard to get a place to rent. It has been for 20 years. ~~~ dehrmann The CEO of Spotify (based in Stockholm) told the government the housing shortage is a problem for their growth. I'm not sure which policies are to blame, but Stockholm's not an example of good housing policy. [https://qz.com/661319/sweden-must-change-quickly-spotify- thr...](https://qz.com/661319/sweden-must-change-quickly-spotify-threatens-to- leave-the-country/) ------ bkohlmann There’s no doubt these laws can be used to maximize gains by nefarious individuals. At the same time, the ability to hold a property as an LLC, thus limiting overall liability to the property value alone in the case of a lawsuit, incentivizes more individual investors to purchase rental real estate. In many instances these assets help facilitate retirement savings that are more stable than market securities. I’m all for transparency - and it’s likely the increase in LLCs could be attributable to more savvy, legitimate investors rather than only attracting wrongdoers. ~~~ stanferder > ...limiting overall liability to the property value alone LLCs don't limit liability resulting from negligence, malpractice, or other personal wrongdoing, which may be germane in a lawsuit over something besides unpaid debts. [https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/limited-liability- pr...](https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/limited-liability-protection- llcs-a-50-state-guide.html) ------ stanferder Wouldn't it make more sense to simply fine the LLCs for their misdeeds, and confiscate the properties if the fines go unpaid? It is already kinda deranged that one's name and other details become public records in many states as soon as you buy property or start a company. EDIT: Surprising number of downvotes in a forum that often focuses on privacy concerns! ~~~ barbecue_sauce Some people value privacy but not complete unaccountable anonymity. ~~~ tossAfterUsing Seems entirely possible for the local government to hold the LLC accountable for following local rules without having to know who's behind the LLC The meta-conversation going on within these threads is more to the point of folks suggesting hard-to-implement laws about who can own what, and how much of a thing they can own, and what sort of penalties exist to control the way that the population of owners can develop. All that secondary stuff seems too chaotic to control... better to just - a> allow for the LLC to do what it was designed for: protect the owner from liability beyond the cost of the house and, b> let the municipality fine the LLC according to whatever rules exist about whether it's morally reprehensible to remove a renter for failing to pay a fine ~~~ FireBeyond The issue is that without knowing who owns the LLC, then you can use a different LLC for each property and skirt rules around taxes and other restrictions on multiple property ownership. ~~~ tossAfterUsing Maybe i don't understand... what restrictions exist on multiple property ownership? ------ m1sta_ All real estate should have named human owners. That ownership should come with the equivalent of fiduciary duty. ------ tuesday20 Is it hard to enact laws to prevent this? I remember reading some German towns buying properties from shitty landlording companies to control housing situation getting out of hand. I am a first time buyer and I am finding it hard to buy, despite making six figures a year ~~~ grogenaut Where do you live? ------ cosmodisk All this crap is essentially supported by a handful of countries: USA,UK( with all its dependant islands pretending to be innocent), Luxembourg, Switzerland, Netherlands and a few others. The rest of the world,including these countries themselves pay astronomical price for this. It's fascinating to drive down Park Lane in London and see empty building opon empty building in one of the most expensive streets on the planet. ~~~ fyfy18 Actually this sort of thing has been going on for hundreds of years in most European countries. In my city over half of the old town is owned by the Catholic church. This includes over 30 churches, but there are also many more adjacent buildings that are much larger in area. Most are derelict or unoccupied, and in very expensive areas if you were to buy. Properties are not owned directly by the Catholic church, but by local parishes or diocese, i.e. subsidiary corporations that are controlled by them. This is no different than the situation in Vancouver, except the church doesn't need to pay any taxes :D ------ cityzen America in 2020: If I use a VPN I have to prove to google I'm not a robot... but using a shell company to buy up real estate? Definitely no picking out all of the buses in a bunch of pictures. ~~~ dehrmann Disney used shell companies to buy up land for Disney World in the 60's. They did it so buyers couldn't find out it was Disney and demand more money. [https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-disney-shell- companie...](https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-disney-shell- companies-20160408-story.html) ------ H8crilA US net international investment position is at -$11T: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IIPUSNETIQ](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IIPUSNETIQ) That's ~50% of GDP. Worrying about a few homes here and there is quite pointless against this backdrop. ------ nickthemagicman It reminds me of Moldova after the fall of the Soviet Union: oligarchs running wild, stashing their gains in buildings,” James Wright, an attorney and former Treasury Department bank examiner, told me. He now helps foreign governments combat money laundering. “Back then, you’d walk down the street, and people would say, ‘That building is a washing machine.’ Everyone knew it. Today, America is not that different.” Are we that different from the Soviet Union? ~~~ xenospn Less sarcastic, but overall not that different. ------ ycombonator Look at Boston SeaPort. 80% of high end condos are empty and sold for a few years now. My guess is high networth foreigners- from Venezuela, China, Russia are “parking” their cash in these assets. ~~~ hanley I can't imagine anyone actually wanting to live in the Seaport, and certainly not for the price that those new units are being rented/sold for. ------ aussieguy1234 This is one more way corrupt government officials around the world can launder their stolen money ------ foogazi What problem are we trying to fix here? So much faux outrage ------ generalpass It's another bogeyman red herring. The issue is very straightforward: central planning fails. Nearly all critical infrastructure in the form of homes (zoning), roads, water, and electricity and related services are centrally planned. It is almost impossible to do anything outside of a municipality, which didn't used to be the case. Without this central planning failure it would be impossible to "take advantage" of any market, as home builders would just build homes until the "launderers" run out of cash. ~~~ empath75 Have you ever been to a developing country? They work they way you suggest. People just run electricity and water wherever they can and throw up houses anywhere. Turns out it’s not actually an improvement though. ~~~ aianus Nonsense, I've lived in several and it was great. $500/mo rent and much better quality of life than a similar $4000/mo place in SF. ~~~ empath75 Yeah living in the developing world is great when you’re there telecommuting and have an american or uk passport and can just leave whenever you feel like it. ------ willart4food Incendiary titles, written by ignorant writers, looking to impress politicians, and rattling the cage in order to gain eyeballs. There are many reasons NOT to own a piece of Real Estate under an individual name, under a trust (for estate purpose) comes to mind and it's now very cheap to do and the public in general is more educated on it; so that alone accouts for a large chunch of declining in % of homes owned by individuals. Then there are the Real Estate investors/entrepreneur landlord and flippers; who for liability purposes use LLCs. And yes LLC need not to disclose the name of their unitholders (shareholders). So what? That is not a problem. Yes money laundering is an issue, but picking the fact that LLC (and Corporation) are not required to disclose the name of their shareholder is not an issue. In some part of the world, those are called "Anonymous Society", sounds cool, but it ain't inherently bad or malicious. Can we have better writing and reporting instead of these emotionaly-driven pieces? ~~~ Thorrez >And yes LLC need not to disclose the name of their unitholders (shareholders). So what? That is not a problem. Why isn't it a problem? > Tenants can’t figure out to whom to complain when something goes wrong. > Local officials don’t know whom to hold responsible for code violations and > neighborhood blight. That seems like a problem to me.

Android 6.0.1 (CM13) on Microsoft Lumia 525 - thewisenerd http://forum.xda-developers.com/windows-phone-8/development/android-6-0-1-cm13-lumia-525-t3442630 ====== kchoudhu Is this as a result of the golden key attack[1] from a few days ago? [1] Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12259911](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12259911) ------ solnyshok LK boots Linux boots TWRP boots Android boots Display works Touchscreen works, but needs some calibration Virtual buttons (Back, Windows, Search) not works yet Sound not works yet Modem not works yet Wifi not works yet ------ thewisenerd youtube link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNlHMMWZm6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNlHMMWZm6U) ------ cvs268 Isn't it the NOKIA Lumia 525?... ------ cocotino At last, something useful I can do with my 520

How Seamless, Grubhub, and Yelp are Defrauding us - k__ https://mobile.twitter.com/chezpim/status/1221327600284397569 ====== setr The title is .. not great. They're listing restaurants without the restaurant's knowledge, and in this case can never actually fulfill the request (because the restaurant doesn't even do takeaway). But assuming stupidity over malice, it's not clear to me the restaurant is being defrauded -- more like they're being misrepresented. But if they did have takeaway... everything would be fine? I'm not clear how GrubHub benefits from the few false orders that would come through before the issue is resolved (they'll make a pretty penny from a few people, and trash their reputation and user-trust entirely? It would be _extremely_ short-sighted behavior) There are some other comments like pricing not being specified correctly, which might turn out more money for grubhub... But even that doesn't seem so clear cut. This entire thing seems like it's borne out of stupidity, and perhaps a shared poisoned dataset

Ask HN: App developers, did you hire a graphic designer? - submachine For those of you developed a mobile application and released it, did you hire a graphic designer? If not, were you able to make an aesthetically pleasing UI without one? I am working on a side project and would possibly like to release the app, but am not sure if it is necessary to hire a graphic designer or not. I guess this can apply to web apps as well ====== josephlord No I didn't hire a graphic designer but I wouldn't say my apps were a commercial success either although it has achieved 4.5* average rating in the App Store. As to whether the app[0] or the website[1] is aesthetically pleasing you be the judge of that. I went for a very bare simple look using the standard controls. [0] [https://itunes.apple.com/app/fast-lists-checklists- for/id481...](https://itunes.apple.com/app/fast-lists-checklists- for/id481282554) [1] [http://human-friendly.com/](http://human-friendly.com/)

Ask HN: Are there any other CPU designers here? - hnu0847 Are there any other CPU designers here? If so, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on the industry. I’ve been working as a CPU designer for several years and as I’ve watched the growth of the tech sector during this time, I can’t help but wonder if I should switch to software engineering. My reasons are:<p>1. Limited choice of employers and cities – The semiconductor industry has been consolidating over the last several years, and the trend seems likely to continue. Consequently, there are currently only a handful of tech giants designing ICs. Jobs seem limited to a few major cities. SWE jobs can be found in most large cities across a range of company sizes.<p>2. Lack of startup&#x2F;solo opportunities – SWE seems to offer many opportunities to found&#x2F;join a startup or work as an independent contractor. CPU design seems to have far fewer of these opportunities, likely due to the much higher capital requirements. Will the tech sector’s current interest in AI&#x2F;ML lead to many more startups in CPU design, as it has done for software design?<p>3. Lack of community – A search on Meetup reveals many software-related groups in my city. No such groups seem to exist for CPU design, likely due to its closed-source nature. Many free resources exist to learn the basics of coding, but learning CPU design using free tools is not as straightforward. Additionally, there seems to be little incentive to design and fabricate an open-source CPU when cheap ones can already be purchased, whereas there are many motivations for creating open-source software.<p>4. Compensation – I would certainly not describe CPU designers’ compensation as poor, but I’ve never read&#x2F;heard about anyone outside of executives receiving annual stock grants that exceed their base salary, whereas such things seem common for SWE’s at the largest tech companies.<p>Are my points above incorrect, &quot;grass is greener&quot; observations, or does SWE have much better career prospects than CPU design? ====== sloaken 1) I agree, but from my perspective it has always been a very limited profession. But IMHO it is also a very admired job. 2) I agree, startup cost in this field is extremely high, with a lot of competitors. 3) Although software has a lot of community it is also very fractured. Depending on what you specialize in you might find a couple of groups in your area or none. Of course you will find some online groups regardless. 4) Yes the grass is always greener. I am sure that there are 1000 SWE who received great bonuses, but there are a million who got zip. In conclusion, if your dream is to start your own company, then yes, switch. If your dream is to make money, and you are a super excellent SWE, and / or an average SPU designer, then switch. A large part of it comes down to what brings you pleasure. We in the IT industry have an advantage over most. We are paid well and love our jobs. Well some of us love the work. Many people have one and not the other. I have known people who worked in waste processing plants who worked in their profession (Biology) for very poor pay. They all said 'you need to get a degree that pays well'. I have had as many friends in IT who loved the pay but absolutely hated the work. Those that hated the work were rarely any good. Working at a job you hate because of the money is refered to as the 'Golden hand cuffs' ------ jecel All your points are valid, but I think that the RISC-V workshops are creating a bit more of a community than there has been up to now. And those involved in bleeding edge CPU designs have been meeting at Hot Chips once a year. [https://riscv.org/category/workshops/proceedings/](https://riscv.org/category/workshops/proceedings/) ------ slededit My startup is doing work in this area (more SPMD than traditional single thread CPU). We work with FPGAs to get the incredible costs of ASIC manufacture down so we can get our prototypes out there. For the specific workloads we target we can be competitive even with this technology handicap - which says a lot about the low hanging fruit that is out there. In my opinion the industry has really stagnated, with nobody really stepping back and looking at the whole picture. SWE certainly has more mindshare and development. But the CPU industry is seriously greenfield at this point if you are willing to try something different than stuffing more of the same onto a smaller die. ------ agitator There are a lot of startups popping up these days that are designing IC's for low powered, high speed, neural net processing. Lots of different approaches they are taking. However, many of them are still in stealth, but try scouring chip designers on linkedIn, especially in the bay area and see where they are working. Most of them have some kind of partnership with a large company that has a fab, that will allow them to produce prototypes and get some validation going. ------ excpudesigner I used to work in cpu design and I had the exact same thoughts as you. I think it boils down to the maturity of the technology and the associated high marginal cost in getting any improvements. I switched to SWE 2 years ago and am definitely happier with my career prospects. ~~~ hnu0847 What steps did you have to take to make the switch? How involved with software were you while (and before) working as a CPU designer? ------ crb002 Lots of hiring in FPGAs right now, especially in vehicle sector. Bitmain is rocking custom ASICs. Micron processors in memory are still maturing. I'd look into applying at a national lab in their team that looks into new/custom chips. The supremacy of TSMC has evened out the market and even Intel is no longer a sure bet long term. ~~~ jason_slack I just found out about Bitmain's Sophon card, but I don't think you can buy it yet. I'd like to explore chip design but I think that requires an electrical engineering degree which I don't have. ------ ylk1 I wonder about the same points for a CPU Architect too.

Why some people excel and others do not - Mindset, believe in your own potential - sergiutruta http://www.sergiutruta.com/2007/05/03/why-some-people-excel-and-others-don%e2%80%99t-mindset-believe-in-your-own-potential/ ====== whacked_new I like the general attitude of your article, but I'm not too fond of the certainty of tone used regarding the fairly general and debated topic of "achievement." I have a great interest in that subject, but far too often the writings about it are written too casually and to some extent, carelessly. Mindset and hard work are undeniably important factors. There has been an accumulation of studies dealing with this stuff, which is a good thing, but still not enough to be conclusive. Fairly recently, one such study surveyed two classes; in one class, students were told that intelligence is all genetic, and in the other, is changeable by effort. Over x years, the second class had an overally higher achievement score. This is encouraging news, but usually the metrics involved are fairly specific and limited, the timeframe too short (2 years in highschool cannot predict much), this and that and more. Regardless, every step is a step. But research artcile or not, when you deal with this topic, you need to have grounds for your discussion. All children are not smart. There are smart kids, dumb kids, and average kids. A kid who can read the NYTimes within 48 months of birth (Sho Yano) is no average kid. Self confidence is important, but you tread into chicken and egg territory: confidence is intertwined with external feedback. You can be confident because you think you are good. You can also be, because you _know_ you are good. There is a drastic difference here: the latter needs a foundation for reasoning. oops i wrote a bit too much... this is just an area im particularly interested in. but such an open ended question is probably not going to give you definite answers. anthony robbins probably has a lot to say, but half of what he writes is like pulled from the clouds... kinda fluffy and cool but all vapor and volumeless. ------ sergiutruta yeap, I'm pretty interested into this subject also. I don't have any grounds in this field, it's just about personal experience in dealing with smart/dumb people. and it's not related only to being smart or not, it's related to everything, even sports. I've met people who've set their mind to be great at something and they succeeded. I'm not talking about those exceptions who read or write when others can barely speak, I'm referring to the majority here. I don't agree with one of your points: intelligence is not changeable by effort, it's actually changeable by mindset and self confidence. For example the number one guy in my university was also the guy working the most. but he was not brilliant, he was only really determined to be the best. thanks for your comments ;) ------ sergiutruta why do you think some of us are good at what we do and others are not?

CPU feature flags and their meanings - NginUS http://blog.incase.de/index.php/cpu-feature-flags-and-their-meanings/ Not quite Black Viper, but a start. ====== ikbear Cool!

Meditation For A Stronger Brain - jamesbritt http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129324779 ====== srwh mmm-mm

Did the Guardian use Twitter as a weapon of free speech? - StevenHodson http://www.inquisitr.com/42350/did-the-guardian-use-twitter-as-a-weapon-of-free-speech/ ====== mooism2 "Even back in the _18th century_ the question about freedom of speech and the citizen’s right to know what was happening in the halls of its parliament was fought and won by journalist and MP John Wilkes. The end result of all that was the _1688_ Bill of Rights." Oh dear. ------ ErrantX Quite possibly. A more important question: is that a bad thing?

Ask HN: Ideas on getting inflatable rafts for flood rescue - bjacobt My home state in India is experiencing its worst flooding in 100 years [1]. While there are rescue efforts going on; there are small groups of people who are stranded in the second floor of their house in sparsely populated areas.<p>As the rain continues, the water level is rising to the top of house where people are seeking refuge. There are many heart wrenching videos of people with babies and elderly pleading for rescue. Most of them have already been there for a couple of days and running out of food and water.<p>I feel small inflatable rafts could help the locals find and rescue stranded people and was wondering if anyone had ideas on how to deliver some ASAP.<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;17&#x2F;world&#x2F;asia&#x2F;kerala-india-floods.html ====== yohann305 I’m sorry I’m not an expert and cannot bring much help but we all remember how Elon Musk was all in to help a dozen kids stuck in a Thai cave, maybe you should try to get him to help out. At the very least you will create public awareness which ultimately will get more people’s attention and focus on helping. Good luck Ps: Elon Musk seems to be quite easy to contact on Twitter ~~~ bjacobt Thanks, I'll give that a shot ------ anoncoward111 Is there not an Indian superstore that imports cheap $150 dinghies to the local capital city? Very sorry for your hardship and loss.

How to make a site really freaking fast - portentint http://www.portent.com/blog/design-dev/how-we-made-portent-com-really-freaking-fast.htm ====== irahul I don't know. The landing page <http://www.portent.com/> is painfully slow for me. The optimization listed are mostly frontend optimization. The first thing I would do is to figure out the bottleneck. curl -w "\nTotal time: %{time_total}\nTime pretransfer: %{time_pretransfer}\nTime starttransfer: %{time_starttransfer}\nSize download: %{size_download}\nSpeed download: % {speed_download}\n" http://www.portent.com/ Total time: 2.629 Time pretransfer: 0.375 Time starttransfer: 1.400 Size download: 32730 Speed download: 12449.000 Ok. Not bad. Backend seems to be fine. But then I did the profiling in chrome. Some cdn requests are well past 25 seconds in the timeline. For a user, the site load takes more than 25 seconds. Your cdn is the bottleneck - you should work on fixing the cdn first. ~~~ darkmethod Curl is incredibly useful. However, I noticed that your line above was truncated prematurely. curl -w "\nTotal time: %{time_total}\nTime pretransfer: %{time_pretransfer}\nTime starttransfer: %{time_starttransfer}\nSize download: %{size_download}\n Speed download: %{speed_download}" www.example.com ------ xamuel I hate how overhyped this article is. It should be titled something like "five basic tweaks to speed up your LAMP webpage". Instead, they're hyping it up as if they'd written their own custom http daemon. ~~~ portentint Don't mean to overhype, xamuel. For us non-geeks, this is pretty mind-boggling stuff. ------ ajross > When I first turned this on, I set the directive in the configuration file > to “Conneption: Keep Alive.” Apache began laughing hysterically at my typing > skills, and promptly crashed So a syntax error is now a "crash?". Web developers... ~~~ ceejayoz Today I learned people reboot apache without doing `apachectl -t` first. ~~~ batista apachectl -t? Why go ghetto? You should be doing something like "/sbin/service httpd restart". ~~~ ceejayoz `apachectl -t` checks the .conf files for syntax errors. For this reason, there's zero excuse for ever having an Apache install crash from a typo. ~~~ scdc We have Apache running on some Windows boxes-- haven't found a way to run apachectl on Windows... ~~~ ceejayoz `apache.exe -t` according to <http://www.zrinity.com/developers/apache/usage.cfm> ------ chris_wot Aren't these just standard website speedup techniques? If you ran YSlow on the site, then it's probably going to give you the same advise, but in more detail. And it won't miss obvious suggestions like combine the scripts/css into one file! ~~~ leeoniya pretty sure pagespeed tells you to minimize http requests. that's one of the top things. one of the points from what i remember was to combine js and css files. ------ dmethvin The site is still slow, but at least it's a start. There are still quite a few external scripts loading in the head that have the potential to block the page. The waterfall diagram from a test at webpagetest.org [1] shows a pretty dramatic example. It's not hard to load the Google PlusOne script async [2], and most of the other social network widgets can be lazy-loaded the same way. [1] <http://i.imgur.com/niDK1.png> <http://i.imgur.com/MLdj8.png> [2] <https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/+1button/#async-load> ------ xyzzyb And a great way to see if your site is getting faster or not is Blitz: <http://blitz.io/> ------ gfosco Not impressed at all... the site is quite slow. Way to toot your own horn. ------ kaolinite Um, you did make it really fast? Your site is pretty slow to me. ------ blauwbilgorgel You missed: \- Write compact efficient CSS (arguably the current CSS file is far too big) \- Combine all CSS files \- Don't use question marks in a resource URL (.css?v=234) \- Write valid compact efficient HTML (duplicate meta tags like: ICBM, unnecessary tags like Google verify, inline CSS, depricated HTML: align="left") \- Dont use spacer divs (div clear="all" style="padding-top: 5px") for a better render flow \- Delay loading javascript to the body of your site. \- Combine javascript files \- Compress javascript and CSS files. \- asynchronous loading of web fonts and analytics code. \- Load all CSS files before JS files. For the unoptimized 1000 images you can use a Wordpress plugin or roll your own batch script. ~~~ ibotty "- Don't use question marks in a resource URL (.css?v=234)" why? if you get the cache headers right, this is the way to go to let it cache forever. that's a nice thing. (i don't really get why they do not use a caching proxy in front, there even is a wordpress plugin for varnish, so wordpress behind a caching proxy does not suck that much.) unfortunately some suggestions are not possible with wordpress, so that alone could be a thing worth replacing. ------ leeoniya we're moving from apache to nginx + php-fpm + apc on linode. as well as all the stuff recommended by pagespeed. jquery cdn, gzip, css sprites, pngcrush, js-min + concat, css concat, async script loading via LABjs. the improvement is quite remarkable. sometimes i blink and miss the F5 refresh flash and wonder if the page actually reloaded. craziness. one funny thing pagespeed tells me is that google's own analytics ga.js needs a longer expire time than 2hrs, they should fix that especially for scripts loaded from common cdns (especially their own) since web authors have no control over this. ------ ceejayoz Well, that's one way, certainly. <http://cl.ly/402Y0p1028262I0Q2p12> ------ xyzzyb To make a site really, really freaking fast serve static content. That cool curl command against rakeroutes.com: Total time: 0.439 Time pretransfer: 0.175 Time starttransfer: 0.270 Size download: 17506 Speed download: 39888.000 That's off a regular ol' shared Dreamhost account. ------ jakejake The delicious irony is that I see a database connection error on the page. ~~~ portentint Well, of COURSE as soon as I say we made it faster, we screw something up. It's some kind of blogging rule. ~~~ jakejake The same applies for when you have to demo something to your boss that you just tested 50 times, and of course it crashes on the first try when you demo it! ------ ggasp It seems the site is down. At least I cant get to it from Chile. ------ mopoke The pingdom tests only check the HTML delivery, don't they? So the full page does not load in 1 or 2 seconds. ------ calinet6 > Error: Cannot establish a database connection. Aaaaand I think we're done here. ------ alainbryden Well it works razor fast for me, so congratulations. ------ clone1018 Or you know, you could not use apache. ~~~ will_work4tears Or WordPress... ------ snowwrestler Be aware of the potential downside to setting very long "expires" headers. There are sometimes caches deep in the darknesses of the Internet that obey these, which can cause havoc if you redesign and reuse any filenames (for instance logo.png). We've had situations where a site appeared broken to a subset of end users for weeks because we tweaked the look and feel, and the new logo (different size and look) was named logo.png just like the old logo...which had an "expires" header of about one month. So even after clearing all local and server-side caches, some users were getting our new HTML with our old logo horribly jammed into it--dutifully being served from some unknown cache somewhere until it hit the "expires" time.

Web.go: the easiest way to create web applications in Go - henning http://www.getwebgo.com/ ====== grok2 Doesn't it make sense to have a built in web-server for a Go framework (since it seems like a language well-suited to creating server type software) rather than have an external web-server like Apache? Just thinking...

Army Uniform Policy [pdf] - maxwell http://www.armyg1.army.mil/hr/uniform/docs/uniform/faq.pdf ====== spacecowboy_lon Rather boggled that they have regulations for umbrellas

The Big Alien Theory - miralabs http://www.thebigalientheory.com/ ====== TheOtherHobbes >No matter what degree of variability is chosen, alien planets are very unlikely to be much larger than the Earth. To be specific, we can say with 95% confidence that another planet with intelligent life, such as our nearest neighbour, will have a circumference no more than 20% greater than that of the Earth. Huh? I see no justification for this. I'm firmly in the "We know nothing about aliens and won't until we get some hard data" camp. Alien life will, by definition, be alien. We have no basis for assuming it's even going to be recognisable as life. Life essentially seems to be a persistent self-reproducing dissipative structure that responds to evolutionary pressure. There is nothing in the manual that requires liquid water, gravity, a planetary surface, carbon, or any of the other ingredients that define life on Earth. ~~~ JoeCoder_ > There is nothing in the manual that requires liquid water, gravity, a > planetary surface, carbon, or any of the other ingredients that define life > on Earth. On carbon, this is from [a recent Astrobiology textbook]([http://books.google.com/books?id=x83omgI5pGQC&q=%22there%20m...](http://books.google.com/books?id=x83omgI5pGQC&q=%22there%20may%20very%20well%20be%20only%20a%20single%20element%22)) which probably does count as a manual : ) "There are, after all, only a finite number of elements in the periodic table, and many of these are very poorly suited to support life for any of a fair list of reasons. Consequently, many of the 90-odd naturally occurring elements can be ruled out. So many, in fact, that in the end there may very well be only a single element--carbon, the basis of all life on earth--that is able to support the complex chemistry presumably required to create any self- replicating chemical system. The easiest way to appreciate the special, perhaps even unique, qualities of carbon is to compare it with silicon, its closest cousin. Many of the properties that suit carbon so well to its central role in Terrestrial life are shared or even exceeded by silicon. For example, silicon, like carbon, is tetravalent--that is each atom forms four bonds, allowing for the formation of a rich array of complex molecular structures. And, while silicon-silicon bond is weaker than a carbon bond, the discrepancy is only about 25%. Consistent with this, both silicon and carbon can form long molecular chains, For example, compounds of silicon and hydrogen, called silanes, with up to 28 consecutive silicon-silicon bonds have been reported in the scientific literature. Likewise, while carbon is the fourth most common element in the Solar System as a while, silicon is many orders of magnitude more common on the surface of Earth. Indeed, silicon is second only to Oxygen in terms of its abundance in the Earth's crust. Nevertheless, silicon simply cannot support the same rich chemistry as its "upstairs" neighbor in the periodic table. The problem lies in both the thermodynamics (equilibrium stabilities) of silicon's interactions with other atoms and the kinetics (rates) of these reactions... So carbon wins over silicon. But what of the 90 or so other naturally occurring elements? They fare even worse than silicon." ~~~ aagha > "There are, after all, only a finite number of elements in the periodic > table..." That's because we've only discovered or figured out how to make a finite number of them. Is there a reason that other (alien) elements can't exist that we've never been exposed to? ~~~ Analog24 The structure of elements/atoms is well understood based on their subatomic constituents. Naively, you might think that can you just keep combining increasingly larger numbers of electrons, protons, and neutrons to create new elements. However, the stability of an atom becomes problematic when the size of the nucleus approaches the interaction length of the strong force (i.e. the nucleus is too large for the strong force to hold it together). These elements are unstable and therefor not relevant as far as organic chemistry is concerned. Furthermore, the formation of elements in the Universe is also a fairly well understood process. For elements lighter than Fe it generally occurs through nuclear fusion in the center of stars. For elements larger than Fe it generally occurs through the r-process and s-process. With these we can model nucleosynthesis extremely well and it gives us a very good idea of the elemental composition of the Universe. That being said, there could be some crazy unknown element out there but it would contradict almost everything know about atomic physics. ~~~ nknezek Good answer, but I think you mean Fe, not Pb. ~~~ Analog24 Good catch! It has been corrected in my comment. ------ zby So they do something like this: Let's choose a human in random - he is more probable to be from Pakistan than from Slovakia. (OK) Now let's choose a country - now an average country like Slovakia is more probable than a country as big as Pakistan. (OK) So if you are a human - then it is most probable that you live in a country that is more populous than the typical country. (OK) Now they say - ok - so now instead of choosing humans let's do the same thing with sentient beings. If you are a sentient being it is more probable that you live on a planet where there are many other sentient beings rather than on a planet that there are few of them. But if you go to some random planet with sentient life - then the expected number of sentient beings there would be average. Then it goes on that "Physically larger species will on average have lower population densities." \- so most probably the random alien planet will have fewer and larger sentient beings than us. I don't know if I buy that whole argument - but I am too lazy to write the bayesian equations to nail it down. ~~~ leblancfg My only gripe is that he's only used vertebrates in his dataset (based on [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0078733)). It's "only human" to include close members on the phylogenetic tree, but I see it as a flaw. What if our imaginary aliens are plant-like, squid-like, or something we can't even begin to fathom, like symbiotic unicellulars? Sentient, self-replicating machine clusters the size of planets? Take a minute to think about this. I think his conclusion should then have been worded like: the random alien planet will have fewer and larger VERTEBRATES than us. And that's a probably very meaningless conclusion. I'm not saying his intuition is wrong, though. In fact I quite like it. But in this scenario, I don't think "whatever remains, however unlikely" lifeforms can even begin to be imagined by our tiny little human brains. ~~~ wrsh07 The statistics really doesn't care what type of sentient species we are. If you're confused by the examples given [for the approximate size], that's understandable, but the examples don't change the analysis. That's like saying "All of the countries in the example are in the northern hemisphere, so the analysis is flawed." ~~~ mombul Well yes the location of the country doesn't matter, but that's not at all what he said. He said that it's all based on vertebrates which is ridiculous. We can't begin to imagine what type of life form constitutes an alien, and if what we'll ever find will constitute a life form as we know it. We know what a country is. And there's very (very, very, trust me I'm an engineer) little chance we'll find new countries with characteristics unknown to us... ~~~ wrsh07 My point is that the initial discussion wasn't limited to anything except "sentient life." It wasn't limited to vertebrates or mammals or any such thing. Thus, the statistics are purely for the discussion of "what should other sentient life look like?" Finally, it's ridiculous to complain in a discussion about aliens "that we can't begin to imagine what type of life form constitutes an alien." You have to make some fundamental assumptions. For instance, we should be able to assume that they obey the physical laws of the universe. Anything else puts you in a totally unscientific world of discussion [your claims are no longer falsifiable], and that's not one I care to participate in. ~~~ leblancfg >[W]e should be able to assume that they obey the physical laws of the universe I don't think anyone is assuming otherwise... all I see is statistics and sampling being argued. You'll have to endure my wall of text, though, sorry XD. Let's take the planets again. We don't know the size of every single planet in the galaxy (i.e. the planet size histogram), so we need to make a guess. So we've been using Kepler's exoplanet observations, knowledge of planetary geology, etc. to fit a model, and it's well developed ([http://exoplanetsdigest.com/2014/07/25/exoplanet- statistics-...](http://exoplanetsdigest.com/2014/07/25/exoplanet-statistics- and-demographics-update/)). The size distribution is quite well understood, its bounds and modes are well defined. It's unlikely that our best guess of what the average size of exoplanets is will change drastically the more we know about planets. _That_ is why the article's first conclusion is legitimate. Now back to (sentient) species, and my original point. The definition of life in the SETI context has to be VERY wide. It has to encompass any scenario for a species that we might consider "intelligent" \-- and not just little green men. It might have (some would say, inevitably) evolved beyond the biological, and still be considered sentient. After all, life on Earth has only existed for ~4By, compared to ~13By for the Milky Way. As a base for extrapolation, just think how different to humans extreme life on Earth is. ([http://www.livescience.com/13377-extremophiles-world- weirdes...](http://www.livescience.com/13377-extremophiles-world-weirdest- life.html)) In any case, there are bound to be some weird-as-shit species out there, whose composition still obeys the laws of physics. In other words, there is almost certainly many _statistical modes_ of life out there that are, or can become, sentient. With that in mind, there's a very good chance that the overall size distribution of (sentient) species does not match the one the author used (that of vertebrates only). In statistics-ese: if the distribution is multimodal, the average of our unimodal sample is not a good guess as to what the true average really is. Maybe we can agree upon that? ------ Gravityloss This is a bit like the sleeping beauty paradox. [1] We have to be careful what we're sampling. Is it individuals or civilizations? An average civilization will be average sized. An average individual will belong to a larger-than average civilization. It's also a bit like the problem that in average, your friends have more friends than you do. (That's easy to understand. It's because they are not a really random sample of all people. People with more connections are over- represented in your friends.) If we assume that observation doesn't depend on civilization size, then we're sampling civilizations, and on average would find average sized civilizations. If we assume that we observe individuals and not civilizations, then we're sampling individuals and are likely to see individuals of a big civilization. Now, if I look at myself, if I'm a random sample from all individuals in the galaxy, it's likely that I'm part of a large civilization. That would mean other civilizations would on average be smaller than mine. If I look at my civilization, and assume it's a random sample from all the civilizations in the galaxy, it's likely that it's an average sized civilization. A random other individual in the galaxy would be likely from a larger civilization. I don't think either way of thinking is really justified. You can extend this to a doomsday argument by the way. Since I am alive now, it's most likely that most people are alive now. Hence in the past and in the future, there will be less people alive. 1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10149286) ~~~ jstanley This is good reasoning. Can you expand on the "waking amnesiac problem"? Google is coming up with nothing. ~~~ Gravityloss Edited the original to include the actual name, sleeping beauty paradox. ------ garbage_stain "Not even wrong". This entire analysis is built on reasonable statistics which are predicated on dubious and unprovable assumptions, which invalidate the entire thing. Consider "the size of alien species". Okay... so we are extrapolating about the size of beings we know nothing about based on those beings that have come to existence in our particular situation? Assuming that the distribution of weight across animals on Earth is the same as the distribution of weight across beings in the universe is dubious. This is a wonderful example of Brandolini's law. ~~~ jak1192 That is not an example of Brandolini's law. It took a whole website to spew the bullshit but only 3 or so sentences for you to refute it. ~~~ klue07 garbage_stain is only refuting a very small part of the entire website. Imagine the amount of effort to properly refute the entire website addressing each BS point. ------ bitdeveloper I'm unclear on why the author posits that we should assume a smaller population necessarily means the average being will be larger. For example, if a human did this thought experiment 2000 years ago - a blink of the eye in the scale we are talking about - we would have perhaps 500,000,000 humans on the planet, or something along those lines. We have 14x as many humans now. Yet we have not shrunk in size as the species has grown in population, and if anything, have grown larger. If we look at the total biomass on earth, we are a fairly small portion of it. So shouldn't we assume, as we are assuming our situation is average, that intelligent aliens are also a fairly small portion of their planet's biomass? And if so, wouldn't the size of the aliens themselves be something that has very little to do with the total energy reaching the planet surface? I get that it's just statistical probability and math, and it's fun, but this particular thing stuck out for me. It was a fun read regardless, so thank you for the break from work! ~~~ wrsh07 They actually respond to you in the FAQ: > "What if people who lived several centuries ago did a calculation on how > many births there would be?" > This appears to be one of the most widespread misconceptions on the topic. > Many scientists have fallen into this trap, such as Lee Smolin's article > from 2004 . In science there is never absolute certainty, only varying > degrees of confidence. We should never be 100% sure of anything. When > stating the degree of confidence in a result, typically 95%, it should be in > full knowledge that one time out of twenty, we will be wrong. 5% of the time > we will be misled by statistical chance. > Now if someone who lived tens of thousands of years ago estimates the total > number of human births, based on how many there had already been, they will > underestimate the truth. Because we now know there has been many more. But > those first 5% of people who ever lived represent the 5% of the time we > expect to be wrong. This is a basic premise of how science functions, how it > uses statistics. We must be wrong some of the time. In reality, we are wrong > much more frequently than statistical chance suggests, because of human > error or misunderstanding. ~~~ codys > several centuries ago > tens of thousands of years ago This appears to be blatantly moving the goal posts. > those first 5% of people who ever lived represent the 5% of the time we > expect to be wrong This implies that for only 5% of human history the calculation would be wrong, and the reset of the time it would be 100% correct. I'm not sure that is how statistics work. ~~~ fergussimpson That's exactly how statistics works. You make a statement with some degree of confidence (often 95%) and fully expect to be wrong 5% the time. ------ gibrown Interesting use of inference. Kinda feels like it ignores many of the discussions (or my limited understanding of them) around the Fermi paradox [http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi- paradox.html](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html) In summary: "We’re rare, we’re first, or we’re fucked." The article seems to assume that there are lots of populations just because there are lots of planets. But the time that those planets have been around matters too. ~~~ kirykl That's only if there's a great filter though ~~~ JumpCrisscross There's no accepted resolution to both Sagan's posited frequency of life and Fermi's paradox other than filters. ~~~ hodwik2 I would argue that this article posits a new, compelling filter. If most species are large, and from small planets, they will have much stricter resource constraints than we did. As a result, they are unlikely to have industrialized the way we did, as it would have depleted their resources too quickly. As a result, they are unlikely to be a silicon-age species. Drawing from the author's biological/size argument, they're likely to have longer lifespans than we do, and considerably fewer births. Given their resource constraints, and longer lifespans, they are likely to have strong communal systems of resource allocation, and are unlikely to have moved towards Capitalism. Given their longer lifespans, they are probably more risk averse than our own species -- as willingness for an animal to die is strongly related to size and lifespan. This suggests they may be less war-faring than ourselves, and thus less likely to have nations. Given their closer relationship with nature, due to their resource constraints, they're likely to have developed a Pagan system of thought, rather than a monotheistic theology. As a result, they are unlikely to be motivated towards large infrastructural, imperial or technological projects as a result of: profit motive, national motive, or religious motive. I'd argue then, that it is unlikely they have produced a civilization of significance. \-- Long story short; local alien species are likely to be tribal, communist, non- technological, and environmentalist. If through some strange force a species of this kind managed to become technologically advanced, they would likely look down on a species such as our own as a sort of vermin, because of our numbers, hunger and short lives. ~~~ kirykl interesting view that bypasses a great filter. Advanced without technology. Highlights that technology really might be an anti-pattern. But Carl Sagan would probably refute that - "It is perfectly possible to imagine civilizations of poets or (perhaps) Bronze Age warriors who never stumble on James Clerk Maxwell’s equations and radio receivers. But they are removed by natural selection. The Earth is surrounded by a population of asteroids and comets, such that occasionally the planet is struck by one large enough to do substantial damage." [http://gencodesignal.info/the-abundance-of- life-bearing-plan...](http://gencodesignal.info/the-abundance-of-life-bearing- planets/) ~~~ hodwik To be clear, I'm not arguing they'd become advanced. I'm arguing they'd never become advanced. I think the Drake Equation solution that Sagan proposes puts values that are orders of magnitude too large for most variables. In this case fi (where he confuses intelligent life with civilization) and fc. ------ anotheryou I can't wrap my head around the "we should expect to be in a large group". We, as a single species, found to the question "is there alien life besides us?". I'm no individual independent from the culture of our species. I don't come up with this question randomly, you pointed me to this today. The other way around: I have to expect to be in the large group only, if the large group makes it more likely that someone in it has questions about his group (more members -> more random thoughts -> greater total of thoughts about which group one is in). This is true for blood types (unless people with weird blood types commonly get in to issues making them wonder about their blood type...). But for aliens, probably either more or less all wonder collectively through cultural exchange, or it wasn't part of a public debate. Hm, you get the knot in my brain? can you solve it? ~~~ phreeza I do get the knot. My gut feeling would be that the definition of an individual in this case is "an entity that is capable of independent thought". So if all our thoughts as a species were perfectly in sync (borg-style), we would count as a species of population 1. Because of cultural exchange, one would probably have to count us as a species of effective size less than that of the actual population size. ------ pi-err Great thought experiment. I would have thought that a planet's life form, shape and variety would be determined by: 1- the energy output of nearest star 2- the planet's gravity He barely mentions gravity which is surprising. Earthlings probably wouldn't be as tall with 1.3x more gravity. Maybe life wouldn't even have made it out of water, or much more slowly. Evolution would mean "heavier" eggs would be harder to carry. The entire evolution process hangs around reproduction so what would that mean? Same for less gravity - except it would _probably_ be on a smaller planet. Gravity correlates with planet size in the solar system. Would <0.8G be enough to retain water, atmosphere, etc? Somehow I'm not surprised to find out one day that an intelligent alien life would look a lot like us, on a planet that looks a lot like Earth. ~~~ 1812Overture They'd look a lot like us except they'd all be 1930s gangsters or ancient Romans. ------ oconnor663 > Within the context of the animal kingdom, our species' position is clear. > Aside from a disproportionately large brain, we're fairly ordinary mammals. Oh yeah? :) [http://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/57702943181/mikhailvladimir...](http://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/57702943181/mikhailvladimirovich- bogleech-its-funny-how) ------ chmike This analysis is based on many unjustified assumptions. I don't think we can go reliably very far on this route. However, I do think that we can scientifically study some aliens today, or more precisely what we can see from them, through the UFO phenomenon. Yes, that thing! For me the only paradox in the Fermi paradox is that the UFO phenomenon is boycotted as a manifestation of Aliens on earth. The following three articles are a product of such study. They present a new electromagnetic propulsion system called PEMP inspired by the data of UFO observations. It also present a totally innovative method to produce the intense EM fields required by this propulsion system. These are currently only theories waiting for an experimental validation. The author is a physic theorist, not an experimentalist. "Pulsed EM Propulsion of Unconventional Flying Objects":[http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Propulsion.pdf](http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Propulsion.pdf) "Evidence of Very Strong Low Frequency Magnetic Fields": [http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Evidence.pdf](http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Evidence.pdf) "Production of EM Surface Waves by Superconducting Spheres: A New Type of Harmonic Oscillators": [http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Production.pdf](http://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Production.pdf) So there is no need to speculate. Just open your eyes and look at the data we already have for so many years. Note that this is the product of an inductive research process. The initial working hypothesis was that UFO are real and witnesses report real data on them. Now see if we can derive a valid propulsion system matching the described artifacts using only conventional physics law. It was initially a test, an experiment on a pure theoretical ground. The test is apparently conclusive. We now have a theory we can test in our lab and we could validate a disruptive discovery. Objectively, we still don't know if UFOs are real and they are aliens visiting earth. But we now have an opportunity to indirectly test that possibility with pure solid ground science and engineering. Thanks to these theories. ~~~ smaddox Poe's law? ~~~ chmike I'm very serious. Is that all you have as "argument" ? Supposing you referred to my comment on the big alien theory, as a biologist, I would say that this pure statistical analysis ignores the possible existence of yet unknown factors that could modulate the probability of existence of alien civilization of different size, planet size or intelligence. This is why I concluded that this work is based on a pure speculation that these unknown factors don't exist. I didn't say this work is false or bad. I said it won't move us reliably forward on this research topic. ------ marcus_holmes I don't get the stats here: \- I am an ordinary sentient being (for the sake of argument... just nod) \- I am a member of an ordinary species. according this theory one of these statements is wrong. ~~~ wrsh07 Analogy time: \- I am an ordinary human \- I live in an ordinary country One of these is wrong, and it's the second one. ~~~ marcus_holmes yeah OK that makes sense. So what about: \- Humans are an ordinary species \- Humans live in an ordinary galaxy Does that change our relative height? ~~~ wrsh07 I see what you're trying to do, but it doesn't work. Our arguments need to be like the Doomsday argument, presented here: [https://what- if.xkcd.com/65/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/65/) If most species looked at themselves and said "my species is ordinary" the majority of them would be right; however, it doesn't give you any statistical reason to think that _humans_ are ordinary. ~~~ marcus_holmes that was fascinating, thanks :) The counter-intuitiveness of it all is really intriguing. We really are evolved to think in small numbers. ------ matheweis Serious question; why are people willing to seriously entertain the idea of aliens, but not gods? ~~~ Grishnakh First, you probably need to define "god". Does a biological being like us but with extremely advanced technology count? Or do they need to be able to exist beyond conventional physics and have apparently limitless power in our universe, like Q? Or do you mean specific gods, namely the ones which various groups of humans worship? If it's #1, those are just aliens. If #2, I don't think you can discount the possibility entirely, but there's no evidence for their existence, but it's entirely possible. But spending any energy on the question seems a bit pointless, since no members of the Q Continuum have made their presence known to us yet. If #3, the problem there is there's no good evidence for their existence, only ancient stories passed down from oral tradition, and the old "telephone game" shows how reliable that is, plus the well-known phenomenon of hallucination, which can happen to people when they eat certain tainted foods. The question of aliens is worth considering seriously because we do know that life is possible (look in the mirror), we know under what conditions if can form (look outside; we have a planet to study that formed life), and now we know that lots of other planets are out there, and some of them may very well be similar to our own. If we can evolve here, it's quite possible some other beings evolved elsewhere under similar conditions. And with many billions of stars out there (just in our galaxy and nearby ones), the probability of other planets existing with conditions similar to ours is high. Furthermore, as our ability to detect exoplanets improves, it's quite possible we may detect signs of alien life: radio signals, industrial emissions in their atmosphere, weird starlight patterns indicating a possible Dyson swarm, etc. There's no way to detect any kind of god (whether it's one from some old book or the Q). ------ catpolice I think some of the math going on here is interesting and probably has some interesting consequences for people's expectations about means. But I'm not sure about that paper... I want to be generous here and assume I'm misunderstanding, but it does seem a bit like the argument begs the question a bit. The intended conclusion is that we should consider non-earth-like (i.e. non- earth-sized) planets as just as likely to be inhabited as earth-like planets. Which is to say that we shouldn't expect that population density is strongly correlated with planet size. And this is shown starting from a model where "mean population density is invariant to planet size". Hmm... ------ Touche Something not mentioned here is the relationship between oxygen levels in the atmosphere and the size of animals on a planet. During the era of giant creatures (dinosaurs) the atmosphere was around 35% oxygen, today it is about 21%. ------ Houshalter This strikes me as very similar to the simulation argument. That is most beings probably exist in simulations, and therefore you are far more likely to exist in a simulation than be a living person. Or similar anthropic arguments could be made about many things. You are more likely to be living in a bigger country, you are more likely to be living in the period of time where Earth's population is the largest, etc. ------ GrantS Interesting analysis, but after reading the FAQ at the bottom, it rests upon quite a few important hidden assumptions. For example: >However if there is any hope of finding life on other planets, there must be a huge number of planets with life in the Universe. Therefore, for the case we're interested in... So during the entire analysis, we were limiting ourselves _only to those universes in which we do make alien contact_ , regardless of how likely _that_ event is. ------ gone35 Reminds me of Joe Polchinski's calculation[1] that the probability of the multiverse is 94%. Unbridled Physics-ism (as in [2]) and Bayesianism definitely don't mix well. [1] [http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8149](http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8149) [2] [https://xkcd.com/793/](https://xkcd.com/793/) ------ tbabb What is the process by which "samples" are drawn from the population of intelligent beings? This is a keystone of the article's argument, but it entirely hand-waved. It is not as if "intelligences" are created in the void and then assigned with some random distribution (uniform or otherwise) to bodies on planets-- each intelligent being in the universe is itself with probability 1. ------ joeyspn A couple of weeks ago I read a more compelling theory, that also is an interesting solution for the Fermi Paradox. It said something like this IIRC: The normal evolution of a civilisation of smart species is to arrive to a point where they experience an Intelligence Explosion [0]. (or how Elon Musk puts it: _Chances are we 're the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence_) [1]. In a cosmic scale, given the fact that the timespan to go from industrial/high technology civilisation to a SuperAI is like a drop in the ocean (1000 or 2000 years), it'd be impossible to establish contact unless they co-exist at the same point of evolution, in the same (or near) star system, and in the same period of time. Something far from probable... I think that this is the most plausible solution for the Fermi Paradox, we haven't been contacted by Aliens for the same reason that we haven't "contacted" with ant colonies or microbes. We simply can't, we're in a different state of consciousness. We are probably living among Aliens, but they're too advanced for our reasoning and live in a different dimension/cosmic state. [0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_explosion) [1] [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/496012177103663104](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/496012177103663104) ------ gmaslov Couldn't a hypothetical Big Alien make exactly the same argument? There are plenty of exoplanets larger than Earth. ~~~ wrsh07 Of course they could. And they should! Statistically, if every single sentient being makes this argument, more sentient beings will be right than wrong. To quote: > Given the prevalence of the four different blood groups in the cartoon > above, the most profitable strategy here would be to bet on "A", as that > gives you the greatest chance of winning. Another way of looking at it, is > that if everyone adopted that strategy, the bookmaker would lose the most > money. ------ ccvannorman This article strikes me as a man who lives entirely inside a black and white room insisting that if he thinks hard enough, he can infer what colors in the world outside are like. It is true though, that if you spin a black and white patterned disk, you will see colors. ~~~ mesozoic It's more like he can say what the colors outside the room are PROBABLY like. ------ aab0 This essay would benefit from making the particular anthropics used like the Self-Sampling Assumption explicit (and the paradoxical implications of it which leads to rejection by many) and explaining examples like the Doomsday Problem. ------ mixedbit In 'Solaris' by Lem the whole planet is an alien life form. ------ frechtoast What is less worthwhile for a person to think about than the existence of aliens? Sure, solve world hunger, figure out inter-space travel, light-years distant communication mechanisms, prevent cancer, war, poverty.... Last I checked, aliens weren't threatening the continuation of our species, or even leaving the lid up after a visit to the john for that matter. How did this tinfoil-hat ridiculous article even make it into Hacker news!? ~~~ guard-of-terra If aliens are indeed to be found, this will readily become number one important event in human history. ~~~ frechtoast I bet!, And if a meteorite strikes my home and kills me, that will be the most important event in my life. Nevertheless, I've got more pressing issues than to debate the statistical likelihood of the size of the rock or it's expected mineral composition. ~~~ nickcano Yes, and those more pressing issues are among spending time debating why it's not worthwhile to spend time debating a topic that is less pressing than the debate about the time it takes, apparently. ------ JumpCrisscross Why isn't the conclusion "our population size is the most frequent" versus "largest"? ~~~ rory I think he's approaching it from the assumption that a sentient being should assume itself to be a random individual out of all the sentient beings in existence, across all sentient species. ~~~ JumpCrisscross Doesn't that ignore the obvious (and known _a priori_ ) correlation between sentient beings in a species? ------ srcreigh The idea of interplanetary species seems to invalidate this website in one fell swoop. ------ andrewclunn Wrong. We have no notion if we are more or less populas than other species, so we should assome that we are one of the many smaller (in number) by virtue of that being the more common, thus drawing the exact opposite conclusions. ~~~ deciplex That's what we should expect to see when looking for other _planets_ with intelligent life. But _you_ , andrewclunn, should expect to live among one of the more populous species. ~~~ andrewclunn That's the point, from the individual's perspective the correct prediction is completely contrary to that from the species' perspective based on this approach. ~~~ deciplex Right. So _you_ , the individual reading the article and posting on HN, should expect to live among one of the more populous species of life in the universe. e: Maybe you are implicitly assuming that the workflow for "determining" who you are born as goes: 1. pick a random species 2. pick a random individual in that species. But it's more like: 1. pick a random individual. ------ tronje Please, for all our eyes' sake, change the color of the font to something darker! Light-grey on white is just terrible. ~~~ fergussimpson Thanks, I've fixed it now! ~~~ tronje Thank you! I didn't mean to come across as overly critical, but I really think it is a much nicer reading experience now. Very cool that you considered my criticism :) ------ frechtoast I'm of the opinion that life doesn't exist elsewhere. That said, I don't care enough to even try to support my own bias. I'm not going to spend time trying to get anyone to believe either way, because we've got bigger issues right now. Aliens aren't here, starvation is. How did this ridiculous tinfoil-hat article even make it into Hacker News!? ~~~ drdeca Is it tinfoil hat? I was not under the impression that it was suggesting any sort of conspiracy or anything. Even if the arguments it makes are wrong I'm not under the impression that they are particularly kooky.

5 Days of find: The Basics of find - aweber http://bashshell.net/utilities/find-basics/ ====== tspiteri Looking for files in the article is completely broken. To look for a file named syslog.conf, you need to say find -name syslog.conf otherwise find will not look for that filename in all subdirectories. So the shown find /etc/*.conf is only doing the equivalent of ls /etc/*.conf unless there is a directory the name of which ends in ".conf", in which case all its contents will be listed recursively. The required find command is: find /etc -name \*.conf And what "find / syslog.conf" is doing is to list all files and directories in /, going down subdirectories recursively, and list syslog.conf in the current directory. What should really be used is: find / -name syslog.conf which returns something like: /etc/syslog.conf ~~~ Sapient You are right, the commands in the article definitely don't produce the results which are claimed. ------ zdw To be aware of - sometimes the shell will glob the wildcard you're trying to pass to find. For example, if you're in a directory that contains a file named "foo.bar", and you try to search for files ending in .bar, then doing a: find . -name *.bar may return just "./foo.bar" as the shell expanded *.bar to foo.bar, and passed that to find. To fix, wrap arguments you pass to find in quotes if they contain wildcard characters. (edit: fixed formatting as HN uses asteriks to italicize) ~~~ rix0r Escaping the asterisk also works. find . -name \*.bar Also passes the unexpanded argument "*.bar" to find. ------ billswift While find still shines for finding files on metadata, I wrote a script elaborating on the 'du -a | grep "search term"' from Kernighan and Pike's _The Unix Programming Environment_. In many ways it does a better job of finding files by name than find does. du -a | grep -y "$1" | grep -y "$2" | awk '{print $2}' I am planning to rewrite to handle more than two search terms, but it works for me good enough for now. ~~~ tspiteri > In many ways it does a better job of finding files by name than find does. Your du command is: du -a | grep -y "$1" | grep -y "$2" | awk '{print $2}' The find command I would use for the same effect is: find -iregex ".*$1.*" -a -iregex ".*$2.*" How does the du command do a better job than the find command? ~~~ billswift Unless find has been changed since the last time I tangled with it; you need to explicitly put the search path in first (which yours doesn't do), which since that is opposite the utilities I used more often, I kept forgetting to. Second, find seems to react weirdly to wildcards in search terms, I sometimes ended up rerunning it with slightly different search terms to be find the file I wanted. Maybe I just wasn't using find right, but several introductory linux books have also claimed it is hard to use. Before I found the du -a | grep idea, I was using one I read somewhere else of grepping a directory listing (made by ls -lR ~/ > dir) rather than use find. ~~~ tspiteri The man page says that if path is omitted in find [path...] [expression] the current directory is used. I don't know if it's just that way for GNU find, or if it's standard Posix find behaviour. Regarding the wildcards in search statements, I usually just need to match a case-sensitive substring, so I use something like: find -name '*sub*' I don't know of any weird wildcard reactions, but that may be because I don't usually use complex searches or matches. One last thing, if you don't mind all the "./" prefixes, "find ." (or just "find") is just like "du -a" without the block counts.

WebFWD: Innovation Accelerator from Mozilla - anant http://webfwd.org/ ====== ZackOfAllTrades Stark contrast to startup accelerators/incubators: Everything must be triple-y open sourced. Profiting from the idea is fine but not required (or even heavily encouraged). No equity involved. Emphasis on technical mentorship from Mozilla crew. Sounds like a program that accelerates your chance of getting recruited by Mozilla to keep working on your project. None of this is a bad thing, it just depends on your particular bend in life. If I was trying to make the next jQuery or Modernizer, for example, I would be bouncing off the walls trying to get into this. ~~~ anant Only code written during the incubation is required to be open source, teams are free to fork it after that and continue onward (with traditional VC funding). However, Mozilla does encourage keeping the source open; certainly open source does not imply not profitable. ~~~ ZackOfAllTrades Yeah, it seems like it would be considered bad taste if you kept working on the project but no longer open sourced the results. ------ jrubinovitz I think the big catch is that they want your project to be open sourced. Otherwise, it sounds great. ~~~ mcpherrinm If that's a catch, then you're not in the right spot. This is about fostering innovation, community, and openness on the web. Fundamentally, that's what Mozilla is about: Improving technology for everyone. And so this is a really fantastic opportunity for getting involved, and hopefully driving some cool new stuff for everyone to use.

MIA – Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo - sqreept The disco subfolder is no longer on Ubuntu&#x27;s server (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ubuntu.com&#x2F;ubuntu&#x2F;dists&#x2F;) causing apt to fail installing packages. ====== finchisko non LTS releases (19.04 is one) have only 9 months of support, so I guess this is expected. ~~~ sqreept Not having support is one thing. Breaking apt is what happened here.

Codesign.io is now #1 on ProductHunt - pavelk2 http://www.producthunt.com/tech/codesign-io ====== pavelk2 Codesign.io is a minimal project management tool for visual projects such as web-sites, logos, presentations, photos or anything else that can be viewed as an image. Codesign is a great tool for studios and agencies collaborating with their clients. Codesign makes this collaboration clean, simple and well- organized.

Science to stop age clock at 50 - suprgeek http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8314442.stm ====== trebor Most people can drive their cars for years and years, because they give it the right maintenance and fuel. But somehow, they give their bodies almost no care, terrible fuel, and expect equivalent mileage? There's no replacement for prevention. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

Coronavirus: Prime Minister Boris Johnson tests positive - notlukesky https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-52060791 ====== dean177 “I’m shaking hands continuously. I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know. I continue to shake hands.“ Guess who said that a couple of weeks ago. ~~~ MulliMulli Guess that is what they call a super spreader. ------ philbarr Possibly completely unrelated: PM chief advisor Dominic Cummings seen running out of Downing Street in the last hour [https://twitter.com/AllieHBNews/status/1243520576007872513](https://twitter.com/AllieHBNews/status/1243520576007872513) ------ beaunative 'We are going to lose loved ones' ------ s0l1dsnak3123 He claimed to be going to see his mother on Mothers' day (5 days ago in the UK). He may well have killed his own mother out of sheer self-righteousness and ego. ~~~ lucozade Do you have reason to believe his mother is dead? Do you have reason to believe that he didn't just mean "seeing his mother" literally? I saw my mother on Mothers' Day. I stayed 200+ miles away from her while doing so. Facetime is a wonderful thing. I'd be tempted to ascribe the self-righteousness moniker differently.

PostgreSQL vs. SQL Server from the point of view of a data analyst (2014) - insulanian https://www.pg-versus-ms.com/ ====== netcraft My previous job(s) were primarily MSSQL and I was excited to get to use PG in my current position. In general I agree with the premise of the article - for just about everything PG is better. For me, the only places where MSSQL has an edge is: \- Management Studio is superior to any standard query manager ive found for PG. I currently use what is in intellij (which is similar to their datagrip product) which I find perfectly acceptable and in some ways superior to Management Studio, but PGAdmin isn't in the same ballpark. \- MSSQL visual query explainer is great - ive found some alternatives ([http://tatiyants.com/pev/#/plans](http://tatiyants.com/pev/#/plans)) and in general ive gotten much better at reading and understanding the text output of PG's explain, but I do miss MSSQL in this regard. \- MSSQL CTE's not being optimization fences meant that I got to use them in more places. But I can do more things with CTE's in PG (such as using an ORDER BY) - this is relatively minor but annoying - readability with CTE's vs subqueries is much improved. \- Snapshot and transaction logs with MSSQL is much better than any alternative ive found with PG, but tbf I haven't looked into it very far. When it comes up though it would be really nice to be able to restore to point in time easily with PG. \- I do occassionally come across missing functions in PG, but thats getting more and more rare. \- Cloud offerings - they exist for PG and are great for what they offer, but many extensions are not available or not fully configurable which is also sometimes hard to even determine. All that said - if you aren't already invested in the MS ecosystem, PG would be my preference for sure. JSON/hstore/arrays alone make so many things possible even if you arent using those datatypes in your tables. ~~~ zie pgbarman [0] will handle the restore to point in time use case above. There are other solutions as well, but I've found pgbarman to work great, and can't speak for others. [0] [http://www.pgbarman.org/](http://www.pgbarman.org/) ~~~ snuxoll Barman is awesome, have been using it in production for two years now - I cannot reccomend it enough. Funny enough, I found it easier to work with than trying to set up a maintenance plan with SSMS and restores are dead-easy too. ------ WesBrownSQL This is a completely anecdotal analysis. Every time this comes up it makes me cringe. Yes, I use MSSQL. Yes, I really like MSSQL. I know loads more about MSSQL than I do PostgreSQL and that plays a huge part in it. Like this person I am qualified to tell you how totally awesome MSSQL is. Also, like this person I AM NOT qualified to compare it to PostgreSQL even though I do use PG too. This isn't a problem of bias, this is a lack of knowledge on the part of the author. I don't know how to do X in MSSQL so PostgreSQL is clearly better. What needs to happen is experts on both sides sit down and do a true comparative analysis and then the reader can decide which product suits their needs best. ~~~ teh_klev Thanks, saved me the bother of saying this as well. That section on "Reliability" is pure comedy, the only time I had SQL Server "crash" was due to faulty hardware. And despite the best efforts of our previous data centre company (who we've since ditched) dropping the ball and losing power across the site multiple times over two years our MS SQL servers never lost any data, despite the rug being pulled whilst under some fairly heavy workloads. I should add that neither did any of the MySQL fleet, even the ones running replication. One day when I get time I'll get around disembollocking this flawed article. I don't say that as a MS SQL "fanboy", but as a DBA with coming on for 20 years experience managing and programming SQL Server in banks, blue chips and ISP's (yeah I know, "appeal to authority"-fail, but who the hell is this anonymous author, and what are his credentials?). Edit: sorry I should add I quite like PostgreSQL, and I'm hoping to roll it out as a service offering to our client base in the next few months, so no axe to grind from me with regards to its features and capabilities. ~~~ j_s My experience: SQL Server kicks its NAS off the network due to the NAS's own flakiness, but SQL Server has always recovered fine. I've had to boot it in single-user mode many times to cut the thundering herd down to size on startup/recovery, but then it's back to business. ------ breakingcups I'll repeat my comment from the last time this was posted: The last time this article came up the consensus was that the author was pretty biased towards Postgres and had little to no experience with actual MS SQL Server use. Also, the lack of author identity was frowned upon. Lastly, the conjecture and attitude towards Microsoft lacks some substance. Conclusion: The author is free to write whatever he likes, but take this resource with a pinch of salt. I use both Postgres and MS SQL Server professionally and whilst philosophically I prefer Postgres, for practical reasons I truly prefer MS SQL Server, if only because of its excellent development tools. ~~~ gaius What - other than fanaticism - would motivate an individual to register the domain name etc to put this up? I've been doing databases professionally for 20+ years. I've used all of the big names apart from DB2, just never encountered it. Whether it's SQLite, PG, MariaDB, SQL Server, Sybase, Informix, Oracle, there's a right tool for the job. Also a "data analyst" who never encounters a situation where parallel query will help is a person who works on very small datasets on a single disk or maybe a small RAID5 array. ------ dhd415 The fact that the author just dismisses columnar indexes because he doesn't use them leads me to question his credibility as a serious critic of tools for typical analytics workloads since columnar indexes make a huge difference in performance on many of those workloads. SQL Server has them built in and they're available as extensions for PostgreSQL. ------ okket Previous discussions: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9464505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9464505) (2 years ago, 135 comments, "dupe") [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8615320](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8615320) (2.3 years ago, 103 comments) ------ iblaine >But I have MS SQL Server skills, not PostgreSQL skills! >You'd rather stick with a clumsy, awkward, unreliable system than spend the trivial amount of effort it takes to learn a slightly different dialect of a straightforward querying language? Well, just hope you never end up in a job interview with me. I imagine anyone who easily dismisses MSSQL would be an easy interview. A good engineer will recognize the pros and cons of each database and make their decision based on their requirements. To dismiss MSSQL outright is pretty noobish, even for a lowly data analyst. ------ juliangoldsmith I'm a fan of Postgres, but I have to take issue with point 1.4. Last I knew, Postgres had no support for stored procedures, which makes integration with procedural languages almost useless. ~~~ dragonwriter > Last I knew, Postgres had no support for stored procedures, which makes > integration with procedural languages almost useless. So, going through old docs, Postgres seems to have had stored procs using procedural languages since at least version 7.1, released in April 2001. It clearly has had them for quite some time, at any rate. ------ jpster Any recommendations for a really good PostgresSQL tutorial? ~~~ rallycarre [https://pgexercises.com/](https://pgexercises.com/) I've found it one of the best tutorials of anything on the web. It's challenging and you learn through example. ~~~ nallerooth Thanks, that looks great! ------ sankyo I cannot stand it when a post is not dated. How can I know that this isn't some old, irrelevant comparison from 2001? It doesn't take much effort to add a posting date. ~~~ anshou- There doesn't appear to be any date on the site to indicate when it was written or updated. ------ frik MSSQL's SQL syntax like that found in MSSQL 2012 is very outdated. Many old rusty parts of MSSQL date back to the Sybase, MSSQL is a fork of it. Also WinNT (incl Win10), MSSQL and most other MSFT software is UCS-2 which they often mislabel as UTF-16. UCS-2 cannot manage emoticons and other newer unicode characters. Whereas everyone on the planet decided on UTF-8. So everything OP mentioned in the article is true. ------ krystiangw Base on the stats below seems that Mysql is still more popular than PostgreSQL. # Name | Popularity | Avg salary global 1\. Mysql | 7.44% | $56,506 2\. PostgreSQL | 4.32% | $61,505 3\. MongoDB | 3.2% | $64,206 4\. Sql Server | 2.71% | $65,959 5\. Oracle | 2.09% | $52,312 6\. Redis | 1.92% | $51,728 More stats and details here [https://jobsquery.it/stats/databases/group](https://jobsquery.it/stats/databases/group) ~~~ netcraft not sure if it was intended, but the article is discussing MSSQL not MYSQL. I think MYSQL has a popularity advantage over PGSQL because of a long tail of historical reasons, but this is just my opinion. ~~~ collyw Its a bit like PHP, its easy to install and get started compared to PG (I need to look up the docs every time I do a PG install to get the initial users started - Mysql often offers me that from the OS package manager).

Ask HN: What maths should I learn to have a solid basis for Machine Learning? - Jmoir I&#x27;m very interested in Machine Learning, especially when related to Natural Language Processing, such as comprehending stories.<p>I&#x27;m a complete beginner following along with dive into machine learning (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hangtwenty.github.io&#x2F;dive-into-machine-learning&#x2F;) and listening to machine learning podcasts etc.<p>It is clearly very maths-heavy. My question is, if I want to have a deep understanding of Machine Learning, with the goal of one day researching in that area, what should I learn (maths-wise and more)and are there any good resources you know of? ====== nostrademons Linear algebra. Things like constraint solvers, automata, Bayesian reasoning & other probability/stats topics, etc. may also come in handy, but the core is mostly applied linear algebra. Also, math will help you understand machine learning _algorithms_ , but if you want to be a practitioner, most of the hard work is in feature selection, data cleaning, backtesting, etc. These don't need a deep understanding of math so much as a deep understanding of _your data_ \- key skills there include graphing data; having an intuition for different statistical distributions; being able to build a webapp that lets you easily graph a candidate feature, drill into examples, and share the results with the rest of your team, and other very mundane tasks that are pretty basic software engineering with a stats focus. ~~~ Jmoir I see, thanks. Bayesian is a word that keeps popping up time after time. I'll definitely start learning Linear algebra then. Feature selection, data cleaning and backtesting. I see, well you are trying to get a computer to understand and learn from data, so it's only natural that you would have to have a good command over it to design a system like that. ------ kafkaesq This textbook is a classic, and downloadable as a PDF: [http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/](http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/) Don't be put off by what you don't (yet) understand. Even someone with a math PhD, but not specifically in the areas covered, wouldn't recognize much of the terminology they're introducing. But feel free to jump around, and look for concepts that seem more approachable -- particularly where case studies are presented, often with very nice charts and diagrams -- and you can get a feel as to whether it's something for you. Learning math is like learning a language -- it takes a lot of time, and not a lot seems to happen right away. But in the long run, it can be very rewarding. ~~~ Jmoir Thank you, I'll take a look at that. Also, thanks for the solid advice! I enjoy maths, recently I've been going through all the maths I've learnt previously to refresh my memory of it. Maths suits a Computer Science student's brain (Y) ------ mindcrime Definitely linear algebra, but also some calculus and some probability theory / statistics. By way of illustration, if you were to go through the Andrew Ng course on Machine Learning, you'll encounter mathematical explanations involving partial derivatives from differential calculus As it is, he gives you the derivations you need, so you can complete the class without needing to find partial derivatives. But the point is, a certain level of understanding of calculus will help with understanding exactly what is happening. As for probability / stats, you'll find more than a few uses of probability notation and basic ideas from statistics scattered throughout machine learning. ------ jayajay I'm from a physics background, and I am pretty confident that Linear Algebra is sufficient. Please know variational calculus, as well. You'd think you need a bunch of statistics, but I think highly specific statistics is unnecessary as long as you have a decent understanding. ~~~ jayajay Actually, I would recommend focusing on Linear Algebra before you delve into Matrix Algebra. Some universities offer courses on Matrix manipulation, which is too superficial. Learn vector spaces, basis, orthogonality, operators, transformations, inner products, tensors, etc. and you'll have a leg up on many machine learning scientists lmao. ------ orionblastar Khan Academy is a good place to start to learn Linear Algebra [https://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear- algebra](https://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear-algebra) ~~~ Jmoir Thanks, I'll give it a gander. I've used Khan Academy before, but I didn't take a liking to it really. I'll give it another go! ~~~ RogerL If you like videos, but not Khan, give Gilbert Strang's videos at MIT a look. His teaching is fantastic, and he wrote several of the core texts. Or you can just work directly from his books if you prefer that approach. ~~~ Jmoir Thanks, I'll take a look at his videos and books! ~~~ mindcrime There are several freely available LinAlg books on the 'net as well. Well, counting pirate books, there are _lots_ of them. But even limiting it to the legally available ones, there's quite a bit of learning material out there. For example: [https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~linear/](https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~linear/) or [http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/](http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/) This is also a handy resource to keep around: [https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.h...](https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html) ~~~ Jmoir Wow fantastic, I'll definitely take a look at these. Thank you very much.

As China Hacked, U.S. Businesses Turned a Blind Eye - derchu https://www.npr.org/2019/04/12/711779130/as-china-hacked-u-s-businesses-turned-a-blind-eye ====== watertom Forget about the hacking. U.S. business walked into China and handed over all of their technology and Intellectual Property, just to have it used against them by the Chinese government. China has only resorted to hacking lately in order to get more technology and IP. ~~~ TaylorAlexander And I think that’s a good thing. Intellectual Property is harmful to most and only benefits a few. If we abandoned the notion we’d be better off. ~~~ NicoJuicy Samsung spend 130 million on research on bendable phones. It got stolen by China. How can that be justified? [https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china- tech-t...](https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech- theft/index.html) ~~~ rcw4256 As a result of this 'theft', consumers now have more bendable phone options. ~~~ sgt101 But in the future they will see less innovation as R&D is further slashed. ~~~ izacus I see this thrown around all the time when we talk about monopolizing IP and having huge corporations put their lawyer boots on smaller company throats... but is it really true? Will making IP protection weaker actually stifle innovation? Was innovation in industrial era hugely stuffled by not protecting every single patent a huge multi-national conglomerates throw out? ~~~ sgt101 Well, yes, hence the development of patents. "The English patent system evolved from its early medieval origins into the first modern patent system that recognised intellectual property in order to stimulate invention; this was the crucial legal foundation upon which the Industrial Revolution could emerge and flourish." ([1]Wikipedia) Without patents what you do is create trade secrets, patents publish the concepts that are protected, they are fully disclosed (or the patent is junk) and after 25 years _anyone_ can use them. The 25 years is the time that you have to get payback on your invention - forcing investment in development _now_ before your monopoly expires. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent) ------ CharlesColeman > Hickton opened an investigation and quickly set his sights on a special unit > of the Chinese military — a secretive group known as Unit 61398. > Investigators were able to watch as the unit's officers, sitting in an > office building in Shanghai, broke into the computer systems of American > companies at night, stopped for an hour break at China's lunchtime and then > continued in the Chinese afternoon. > ... > But when Hickton went to the companies, eager for them to become plaintiffs, > he ran into a problem. None of the companies wanted any part of it. Hickton > says they had too much money on the line in China. There really ought to be a law that mandates that 1) companies disclose any and all hacking incidents/data breaches they become aware of and 2) co-operate with the government in the investigation of those breaches. Though I'm a little confused why they would need the "the companies to become plaintiffs." Wouldn't hacking be a criminal matter that's would be directly prosecuted by the government? Did they want to go against the hackers both criminally and civilly? ~~~ subcosmos Why is it that intelligence agencies are still conducting their activities during their countries working hours? You'd figure it would be easier to find nocturnal neckbeards anyways. ~~~ scintill76 In this case, the timezones probably line up to make Chinese working hours the best time to do this work. ------ _cs2017_ > unfair business practices originating from China are costing the American > economy more than $57 billion a year, White House officials believe And yet the companies who supposedly lose that money don't care. It reminds me a little of the $200-250B "lost" to piracy by the movie and music industry ([http://freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/how-much-do-music-and- mov...](http://freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/how-much-do-music-and-movie-piracy- really-hurt-the-u-s-economy/)). To be more precise it reminds me of how everyone likes to create large impressive numbers that prove their point or support their agenda. ~~~ westiseast I suspect the amount is a mix of things: * Investment in IP that then gets stolen. * Loss of potential earnings as American companies are locked out of Chinese markets * Loss of actual earnings as American/global consumers switch to Chinese companies (eg huawei) that are accused of unfair business practices or receiving unfair government subsidies. Some companies “don’t care” because they aren’t actually losing money, they’re just not making as much as they could be. But other companies are ‘coerced’ into not caring because what happens if they complain? They lose Chinese government contracts. They effectively admit to shareholders that their IP has been stolen and lost. They waste time and resources fighting unwinnable legal battles against Chinese national champions (ie. the Chinese state). I’ve met plenty of small/medium sized business owners who are so sickened by their experiences with China and the Chinese market that they’re happy to just ignore it all and save themselves the heartache. ~~~ _cs2017_ If you count being locked out of the Chinese markets, I think the number is actually much, much larger than $50B. But that seems to be rather unrelated to hacking? In fact most countries openly or secretly try to lock out foreign owned businesses. If the point is that China does it more than others, perhaps it's true, but it's a lot more complex issue than outright hacking. ~~~ westiseast I think the hacking and being cut out of domestic markets is fairly closely linked. If you’ve already stolen the IP, you don’t need to let the foreign business in to provide that service. Possibly even more widespread though has been the standard practice over the last 20 years of lettin foreign businesses setup shop in China, hacking/stealing all their tech, then the state uses its legal/political resources to make life horrendously difficult for the original foreign business. ------ aristophenes The government sponsored professional hacking team that was mentioned in the article was the focus of the infamous APT1 report by Mandiant (now FireEye), with investigations from 2006 and later: [https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye- www/services/pdf...](https://www.fireeye.com/content/dam/fireeye- www/services/pdfs/mandiant-apt1-report.pdf) There have been many APT groups named and tracked since then, not just in China. ~~~ tgragnato Oh, memento. Those events fit the climate described in the article. > Intrusion Truth's controversial approach of anonymously unmasking > government-backed hackers and exposing a foreign intelligence agency is > something new and seen as a method to put pressure on Chinese companies > cooperating with state-sponsored hacking efforts. [https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-04/intrusion-truth- my...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-04/intrusion-truth-mysterious- group-doxing-chinas-hacking-army) \- [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjka84/intrusion-...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjka84/intrusion- truth-group-doxing-hackers-chinese-intelligence) \- [https://twitter.com/intrusion_truth](https://twitter.com/intrusion_truth) \- [https://intrusiontruth.wordpress.com](https://intrusiontruth.wordpress.com) ~~~ dmix Also even naming the group APT which was a corporate buzzword at the time (for advanced persistent threat aka anything above script kiddies and aimless bots). ~~~ Spooky23 APT is anything that happens to you. ------ rrggrr USGOV and all but the largest businesses don't mesh. The solution to the spying threat is extending tort liability and statutory damages to negligence when there are compromises. Not different than product safety, liability will make quick work of the problem. ~~~ nostrademons Who's the plaintiff in your suggestion? The article is not about companies leaking Americans' private data to China (though I'm sure that happens too), it's about them turning a blind eye when _their own_ company confidential technology and product designs are stolen by China. For tort liability to be a factor here, the company would have to initiate a lawsuit against itself, which would never happen. The type of industrial espionage described in the article is actually a form of temporal arbitrage - it's present shareholders stealing from future shareholders and then hoping to unload the shares before the consequences of their decisions are reaped. In order to get access to the lucrative Chinese market _now_ (and goose this quarter's earnings), they put up with Chinese industrial espionage that results in reduced competitiveness 10 years down the road. In 10 years, they probably won't be working at the company, nor will they hold many shares, and so the consequences don't affect them personally. This is a big problem in general (not just with industrial espionage - short- termism also affects labor practices, financial health, social fabric, environmental pollution, and global warming), but it's hard to see how any legal solution would fix it. Future shareholders are generally not entitled to sue until they actually become shareholders, at which point everybody says "Well, you should've known how fucked up the company was when you bought the shares". Similarly, unborn children don't get a vote on societal policies that may destroy the earth or society they live in before they're born. Usually the best alternative is just to deal with the problem with band-aids in the future, once it becomes widely recognized as a problem. ~~~ pm90 > In order to get access to the lucrative Chinese market now (and goose this > quarter's earnings), they put up with Chinese industrial espionage that > results in reduced competitiveness 10 years down the road. Alternate reality: they stay alive instead of being hammered in earnings by their competitors, invest increased earnings to get better at security and prevent future data exfiltrations, use their existing corpus of innovation to get even more competitive and continue to exist long into the future. Innovations are important and must be protected. But the short-sightedness of today is partially driven by a change in reality: the rate of technological advances is brutally fast. ------ sonnyblarney "When I pressed them on why they were not taking stronger action against China, their response was, 'We have a multifaceted relationship with China.' " And this is it: don't want to upset the promise future sales. And this is how 'dividing and conquering' works. One side speaks with 'one voice', the other with 'thousands of little voices' \- and it's game. ~~~ creato And the one company highlighted in the article as speaking out is on the verge of being broken up by Western governments. The western world is being played like a fiddle. Negotiating power is everything, and western democracies and their private and corporate citizens have absolutely none compared to autocratic regimes. ~~~ math_and_stuff That one company has also completely reversed its stance over the last year and now openly defends censoring human rights and complying with the CCP's surveillance demands. Google has no reason to hold its head high. ~~~ vatueil Why is Google singled out for reprobation when, as the article points out, they've spoken out more than other companies? Sure, no one is spotless, but as it stands it's Microsoft that runs a censored search engine (Bing in China) and Apple that handed over its Chinese users iCloud encryption keys. To be fair, you could say Apple and Microsoft had their reasons for doing so (as people including the Chinese themselves have argued). But why all the focus on Google then? Is the idea of a Chinese search engine (which has since been cancelled) worse than actually running a censored search engine such as Bing China? It's gotten to the point where people commonly think Google is cozier with Chinese authorities than other companies, when if anything it's the opposite. That seems perverse. ~~~ math_and_stuff I completely agree with the argument that Google is no worse -- and have publicly campaigned to this effect -- but I was responding to the claim that Google should be proud of its history of standing up against authoritarian pressure. It no longer deserves that honor. But, yes, Microsoft and Apple are equally, if not more, deserving of shame. ------ paulcarroty “Honey or condensed milk with your bread?” he was so excited that he said, “Both,” and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, “but don’t bother about the bread, please.” (c) Winnie the Pooh ------ novaRom I remember iRobot was quite popular few years ago here in Europe, today everybody buys much cheaper Chinese devices. Same about smartphones: Apple/Samsung->Huawei. Same about Quadrocopters. It looks like it's just a matter of time until CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, E-vehicles will be designed/produced by Chinese companies. ------ novaRom Look, you can really protect your intellectual property in Europe and in USA, but you cannot do that in the rest of the world. It means your innovations will be copied and much cheaper products will be created. You can protect your own internal national market, but you cannot compete on all the remaining world markets. So what to do? End of intellectual property? Back to trade secrets? Even this will probably not help in long term. ------ aheneghana China hacked. Because it seems they are better at their job than their counterparts in the U.S. - saw first hand their capability. Small cubicles, 3 sq yd, 30 in a row, all with different language skills, ( any language ), Computer science graduates from the No 1 University in China. Pay is a fraction of what a compatible grad is being paid in the U.S. No competition. High pay won't make the leverage. ------ anonymous_fun I saw Mr. Hickton speak a few nights ago. It was really an interesting talk about some of the challenges for the future: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zktw-m5hTI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zktw-m5hTI) ------ freeflight It's super weird how everybody considered Trump odd for his hate for China, yet these days so many people just repeat the, usually completely baseless, anti-China FUD. Whether it's Huawei supposedly spying on everybody or the Chinese government putting implants on Super Micro boards, nothing is too absurd to be spread by, out of all parties, Five eyes themselves. Does China hack? Of course, so does the US, it even steals IP from allies. But I seriously doubt the damages for that go into the $57 billion, that's just a piracy-damages like inflated number. In reality, a whole lot of interesting innovation, particularly on the hardware level, has already been happening in China for years already. They gonna out-make the US maker movement, on a massive scale [0]. [0] [https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY](https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY) ~~~ whenchamenia There is plenty of truth to much of the china situation, not just FUD. While the Potus has bounced between 'i love china' and 'we need to do something about these people', the rampant IP theft negatively affects nearly everyone on HN. ~~~ freeflight > There is plenty of truth to much of the china situation, not just FUD. Yet FUD is all we get and people eat it up like the best thing ever. Even here on HN barely anybody questioned the Super Micro narrative, even tho that Bloomberg story was super sketchy from the very beginning by not disclosing who did that audit, just like their inability to produce a sample of the chip. Trump also never "bounced" on China, China is pretty much the only thing he doesn't bounce on, it's been his one constant since the election [0] and just because he throws an "I love China" in there, does not reflect or change any of his policy decisions. This is much more "I love my enemies because they are so stupid" posturing [1] than an declaration of actual sympathies. [0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDrfE9I8_hs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDrfE9I8_hs) [1] [https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/10-times-trump-attacked- chin...](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/10-times-trump-attacked-china-trade- relations-us/story?id=46572567) ------ netsa I think the root cause is because of China has no human-rights. ------ adinobro How is this any different to the NSA and Chinese companies? We already know the NSA did this to Huawei for multiple years. ~~~ wpasc One could make the case that Chinese businesses and governments have a tighter relationship where the fruits of such hacking could be used to benefit businesses. While the NSA/other US gov agencies may be hacking chinese companies, I have yet to see any indication that it is done for the purposes of IP theft and/or anything is being shared with US businesses. ~~~ hansjorg [https://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-32542140](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32542140) ~~~ Mindless2112 "[Checking] whether European companies were breaking trade embargos" is not the same as government-assisted industrial espionage. ~~~ hansjorg The EU claims information obtained by the US government was fed to amongst others Boeing and McDonnel Douglas.

Introduction to the Mill CPU Programming Model - luu http://ootbcomp.com/topic/introduction-to-the-mill-cpu-programming-model-2/ ====== TrainedMonkey Interesting, the architecture looks greatly simplified compared to even standard RISC (As opposed to lets say x86). Due to that simplification it will be power efficient while being inherently highly parallel. Would be interesting to find out: 1\. How high that degree of parallelism can be pushed, are we talking about tens or hundreds of pipelines? 2\. What frequency this will operate at? 3\. What is up with RAM? I saw nothing about memory, with lots of pipelines it is bound to be memory bound. ~~~ willvarfar Hi, I'm the author of that intro. The talks which Ivan has been giving - there are links in that intro - go into everything in much more detail. But here's a quick overview of your specific questions: 1: we manage to issue 33 operations / sec. This is easily a world record :) The way we do this is covered in the Instruction Encoding talk. We could conceivably push it further, but its diminishing returns. We can have lots of cores too. 2: its process agnostic; the dial goes all the way up to 11 3: the on-chip cache is much quicker than conventional architectures as the TLB is not on the critical path and we typically have ~25% fewer reads on general purpose code due to backless memory and implicit zero. The main memory is conventional memory, though; if your algorithm is zig zagging unpredictably through main memory we can't magic that away ~~~ sp332 33 ops/sec? :) ~~~ willvarfar Oooh, too late for me to correct that particular typo :) 33 ops / cycle, sustained. Last night we also published an example list of the FU mix on those pipelines here: [http://ootbcomp.com/topic/introduction-to- the-mill-cpu-progr...](http://ootbcomp.com/topic/introduction-to-the-mill-cpu- programming-model-2/#post-610) ------ JoeAltmaier Some kinds of code will benefit from this - long calculations and deep nested procedures. But lots of hangups on consumer applications are in synchronization, kernel calls, copying and event handling. I'd like to see an architecture address those somehow. E.g. virtualize hardware devices instead of writing kernel-mode drivers. Create instructions to synchronize hyperthreads instead of kernel calls (e.g. a large (128bit?) event register, a stall-on-event opcode). If interrupts were events then a thread could wait on an interrupt without entering the kernel. ~~~ willvarfar Actually, the Mill is designed to address this; it has TLS segment for cheap green threading, SAS for cheap syscall and microkernel arch, cheap calls and several details for IPC which are not public yet. ~~~ JoeAltmaier What about synchronization? Folks are terrified of threads because synchronizing is so hard. But a thread model can be the simplest especially in message models. ------ Mjolnir Very very interesting, thanks for sharing! What would the path be to using existing code/where would Mill appear logically first? Also, could something like Mill work well within the HSA/Fusion/hybrid GPGPU paradigm? E.g. from my very amateur reading of your documents, it looks like a much needed and very substantial improvement to single threaded code; how would a mixed case where we have heavy matrix multiplication in some parts of our code as part of a pipeline with sequential dependencies work? Would an ideal case be a cluster (or some fast interconnect fabric in a multi socket system) of multi core Mill chips be the future? Realistically, is this something that LLVM could relatively easily target? A simple add in card that could give something like Julia an order of magnitude improvement would be a very interesting proposition, especially in the HPC market. I come at this mainly from an interest how this will benefit compute intense machine learning/AI applications. Sorry for all the questions. ~~~ rcxdude The latest talk on their website mentions the LLVM status in passing at the end. Essentially they're moving their internal compiler over to use LLVM, but it requires fixing/removing some assumptions in LLVM because the architecture is so different, and the porting effort was interrupted by their emergence from stealth mode to file patents. ~~~ Mjolnir Thanks, I'll have a look at the talks. ------ fleitz Great idea, since it's all theoretical currently I'm wondering with the compiler offloading how well it will actually perform. Itanium was capable of doing some amazing things, but the compiler tech never quite worked out. ~~~ willvarfar Ah, but the Mill was primarily designed by a compiler writer ;) Here's Ivan's bio that is tagged on his talks: "Ivan Godard has designed, implemented or led the teams for 11 compilers for a variety of languages and targets, an operating system, an object-oriented database, and four instruction set architectures. He participated in the revision of Algol68 and is mentioned in its Report, was on the Green team that won the Ada language competition, designed the Mary family of system implementation languages, and was founding editor of the Machine Oriented Languages Bulletin. He is a Member Emeritus of IFIPS Working Group 2.4 (Implementation languages) and was a member of the committee that produced the IEEE and ISO floating-point standard 754-2011." So actually its been designed almost compiler-first :) ~~~ fleitz Still interested in how it works in practice. I'm pretty sure the Itanium team combined with Intel's compiler team have similar credentials. I'm not saying it can't work, not saying it won't work, but we know that most code pointer chases. While CPU and compiler design is above my paygrade I know that often a lot of fancy CPU/design and compiler tricks that make things twice as fast on some benchmark leads to 2 to 3% performance gains on pointer chasing code. Not sure how the Mill is going to make my ruby webapp go 8 times as fast by issuing 33 instructions instead of 4. ~~~ haberman > Not sure how the Mill is going to make my ruby webapp go 8 times as fast by > issuing 33 instructions instead of 4. 8x speed is not being claimed, 10x power/performance is. That could mean that the app runs at the same speed but the CPU uses 10% of the power. A lot of the power saving probably comes from eliminating many part of modern CPUs like out-of-order circuitry. ~~~ fleitz Ok, so now that it's 10x power/performance I buy 10 of these things and it still only delivers 5% more webpages. This kind of mealymouthed microbenchmark crap is exactly what the industry doesn't need, if I have a bunch of code that is pure in order mul/div/add/sub then I put it on a GPU that I already have and it goes gangbusters. The problem is most code chases pointers. Like I said, great idea, would love to see something that can actually serve webpages 10x as fast or 1/10th the power (and cost similar to today's systems) ~~~ sp332 I never thought of serving webpages as being CPU-bound. Anyway, to get a 10x speedup, you would have to buy enough of these to use as much power as whatever you're replacing. So if one Mill CPU uses 2% as much power as a Haswell, then you'd have to buy 50 of them to see a 10x performance improvement over the Haswell. ------ cpr Does anyone know how this compares with VLIW designs like the original Yale/Multiflow machines? Seems very familiar. (I ask as a survivor of Multiflow in the late 80's. ;-) ~~~ outside1234 Or more recently, how does this compare to the Itanic from Intel? ~~~ jmz92 Some of the memory ideas are similar--Itanium had some good ideas about "hoisting" loads [1] which I think are more flexible than the Mill's solution. In general, this is a larger departure from existing architectures than Itanium was. Comparing it with Itanium, I doubt it will be successful in the marketplace for these reasons: -Nobody could write a competitive compiler for Itanium, in large part because it was just different (VLIW-style scheduling is hard). The Mill is stranger still. -Itanium failed to get a foothold despite a huge marketing effort from the biggest player in the field. -Right now, everybody's needs are being met by the combination of x86 and ARM (with some POWER, MIPS, and SPARC on the fringes). These are doing well enough right now that very few people are going to want to go through the work to port to a wildly new architecture. [1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_load_address_table](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_load_address_table) ~~~ jitl > -Right now, everybody's needs are being met by the > combination of x86 and ARM (with some POWER, MIPS, and > SPARC on the fringes). These are doing well enough > right now that very few people are going to want to go > through the work to port to a wildly new architecture. That's not true at all. The biggest high-performance compute is being done on special parallel architectures from Nvidia [1] (Tesla). Intel trying to bring X86 back into the race with its Xeon Phi co-processer boards [2]. [1] [http://www.top500.org/lists/2013/11/](http://www.top500.org/lists/2013/11/) [2] [http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon- phi-detail.html) ~~~ Scaevolus The Mill aims to be good at general purpose computation. HPC is _not_ general purpose computation, and is a tiny fraction of the market. ------ solarexplorer > The Mill has a 10x single-thread power/performance gain over conventional > out-of-order (OoO) superscalar architectures It would be nice to know how they got that number. Because it seems to be too good to be true. ~~~ Guvante I am pretty sure they are talking about per-cycle performance. Since they can do 33 operations per cycle. IIRC the peak performance of an Intel chip at the moment is 6 FLOP per 2 cycles (or there abouts). Of course this is beyond ridiculous since a 780 TI can pull off 5 TFLOP/sec on a little under a GHz clock, 5,000 FLOP per cycle is a little more than 33. It seems like an interesting design, but comparing performance against what an x64 chip can do is a bit silly, you can't just pick numbers at random and call that the overall improvement. ~~~ pbsd A Haswell core can do 2 vector multiply-adds per cycle, which results in a peak of 32 single-precision FLOP per cycle per core or 16 double-precision FLOP per cycle per core. ~~~ willvarfar The instruction encoding talk starts with comparison between Mill, DSP and Haswell and tries to explain the basic math. The Mill is a DSP that can run normal, "general purpose" code better - 10x better - than an OoO superscalar. The Mill used in the comparison - one for your laptop - is able to issue 8 SIMD integer ops and 2 SIMD FP ops each cycle, plus other logic. ~~~ pbsd I was strictly replying to the Intel FLOPs claim of the parent comment. I have only a faint idea how the Mill CPU works, so I can't really compare against it. From the little I have read, the Mill CPU looks like a cool idea, but I'm skeptical about the claims. I'd rather see claims of efficiency on particular kernels (this can be cherry-picked too, but at least it will be useful to _somebody_ ) than pure instruction decoding/issuing numbers. Those are like peak FLOPs: depending on the rest of the architecture they can become effectively impossible to achieve in reality. In any case, I'm looking forward to hearing more about this. ~~~ willvarfar Apologies, I was replying to the thread in general and not your post in particular. Art has now published the 33 pipeline breakdown on the "Gold" Mill here: [http://ootbcomp.com/topic/introduction-to-the-mill-cpu- progr...](http://ootbcomp.com/topic/introduction-to-the-mill-cpu-programming- model-2/#post-610) A key thing generally is that vectorisation on the Mill is applicable to almost all while loops, so is about speeding up normal code (which is 80% loops with conditions and flow of control) as well as classic math. ------ sehugg For those that are mainly software-oriented, the Lighterra overview posted earlier is helpful background for understanding where VLIW fits into the zoo of CPU architectures: [http://www.lighterra.com/papers/modernmicroprocessors/](http://www.lighterra.com/papers/modernmicroprocessors/) ------ Symmetry This whole thing is just horribly exciting for a computer architecture geek like me. I am somewhat worried about the software side given the number of OS changes that would have to be made to support this. But then again, there are lots of places in the world where people are running simple RTOSes on high end chips and the Mill probably has a good chance there. The initial plan to use an older process and automated design means that the Mill can probably be profitable in relatively modest volumes. ------ adamnemecek This might be one of the most interesting things posted on HN. ------ petermonsson There is something that I can't get to add up here. The phasing claims that there are only 3 pipeline stages compared to 5 in the textbook RISC architecture or 14-16 in a conventional Intel processor, but this can't possibly add up with the 4 cycle division or the 5 cycle mis-predict penalty. What am I getting wrong? ~~~ willvarfar The phase says when the op issues. It takes some number of cycles before it retires. So an divide issues in the "op phase" in the second cycle, and if on the particular Mill model it takes 4 cycles then it retires on the fifth. If there is a mispredict, there is a stall while the correct instruction is fetched from the instruction L1 cache. If you are unlucky, it's not there and you need to wait longer. ~~~ petermonsson OK, so the phases aren't an apples to apples comparison to the traditional pipeline stage, but more in line with the TI C6x fetch, decode, execute pipeline which for TI covers something like 4 fetch stages, 2 decode stages and between 1and 5 execute stages. Thank you for the clarification ~~~ willvarfar We'll post the video of the Execution talk covering __phasing __to Mill forums today or tomorrow or so. ootbcomp.com /forum/the-mill/architecture/ ------ DiabloD3 I can't wait until designs like this become common. ------ the_mitsuhiko I still want to know how to implement fork for it. ~~~ kristianp There is some discussion of fork here: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.arch/sICkAag4ga...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.arch/sICkAag4gao) ------ chmike I'm skeptic of the belt efficiency. Memory storage will be wasted. What do we gain with it ? ~~~ Rusky From what I understand it would have very similar characteristics to current register renaming. You just get direct access to the whole register file rather than just a few ISA registers. I think it would require some instruction scheduling to make optimal use of it, but that means the silicon doesn't need that logic so cores can be smaller and more efficient. ------ snorkel Very interesting reading. Are such procs already being sold or is this still on the workbench? ~~~ szatkus No, it will available in few years :( ------ karavelov In my regards it seems that one of their sources of inspiration were Transmeta processors - VLIW core, software translator from some intermediate bytecode (x86 in case of transmeta). I hope they will get it better this time. ~~~ jlouis They don't translate. Rather, they compile code to their instruction set. ~~~ Symmetry Well, the plan is to distribute an intermediate representation and then specialize it to the particular mill pipeline the first time you load the binary. Probably a lot easier than translating something that wasn't designed for it. ~~~ mjn I believe IBM mainframes have traditionally used something like that: binary code is shipped for a general mainframe architecture, and on first execution is specialized to the hardware / performance characteristics of the particular model within that architecture that you're running. Also allows for transparent upgrades, since if you migrate to a new model, the binary will re- specialize itself on the next execution, (ideally) taking advantage of whatever fancy new hardware you bought. ------ cordite How well could LLVM be converted to the mill intermediate language? ~~~ willvarfar We are starting work on an LLVM back end now. The tool chain will be described in an upcoming talk, so subscribe to the mailing list if you want to be in the audience or watch any available live streams. I am also going to make a doc or presentation called "A Sufficiently Smart Compiler" to explain how easily the Mill can vectorise your normal code and so on :)

[Poll] What would you learn, and how much would you pay? - gmaster1440 http://iwanttolearn.heroku.com/ ====== sebg You should raise the price or multiply everything by a factor of at least 10 to 100. <http://teamtreehouse.com/> just raise 4.75million dollars around the sandbox you are playing in and they have 10k + paying members. Which means you are playing in a great sandbox - congrats, though it also means that if your competitors are charging your rates per month, then you should at least charge what they are charging right now per month or more. ------ sejje Was hoping this wasn't just a poll. I'd sign up. In case this post comes to much, I'm a hobbyist pythonista looking to elevate myself to "employable," most likely to do contract work and advance my own projects. I'm willing to pay. Anybody know anybody? ~~~ gmaster1440 It may be just a poll for now, but there are definite plans for providing such lessons.

So very sad to hear about the passing of Ruby legend Jim Weirich - davidchua https://twitter.com/dhh/status/436410949919313920 ====== JangoSteve Jim was an amazing guy, and I wish I had spent more time talking with him. There was a time several years ago when the Ruby community was very vibrant and energetic, and in all that energy, just a little hostile to newcomers. There was a lot of hype about the best new testing methods with RSpec and this new thing called Cucumber, 100% paired programming all the time, 100% TDD, and 110% test coverage, fat-model, skinny-controller, decorators and service-based architectures, and on and on. These were all good things on the path to quality software as a community goal, but to a newcomer, it was overwhelming. It was the fanatical attitude and the all-too-common phrase, "you're doing it wrong." I had already been doing Ruby for a couple years when all of this hype came to a peak. I remember pushing back over dinner table discussions with various speakers at conferences that this attitude was hurting the community. It was erecting a barrier to beginners. We were telling people they couldn't just build something that did something. They had to do it this way, using all these tools and methodologies. Unless you know and fully understand the purpose and constraints and context for what someone is building, how can you tell them they're doing it wrong? Where was the support for learning progressively? What happened to the joy of just building something? After all, this is where Ruby, as a language, shines! I bring all this up, because I met Jim at one of the first Ruby conferences I had ever gone to around this time. Though I had been doing Ruby for a couple years, I was relatively new to the conference-going community, and so not part of the "in-crowd". I remember the highlight of that conference for me was talking with Jim. He seemed not to care for the existence of any sort of clique while simultaneously being its unknowing leader. He was very approachable and friendly. But more importantly, he was a great listener and thinker. I remember talking with him about my views on TDD and pair-programming (at the time, the view that "it depends" was controversial), and how the hype was hurting the community. He was one of the few who gave it considerable thought, and after discussing it, even encouraged me to give a talk. As someone new to the conference and public developer community, and outside the speaker in- crowd, this was very encouraging. I had been asking what happened to the joy of just building something in the community at that time, but I can honestly say, Jim never lost it. Jim, you'll be missed. ~~~ auggierose I think once you started programming in "Ruby", you've given up your right to talk about how to program in the right way. Just saying. ~~~ karmajunkie I've seen a lot of snide, dickhead comments on HN, but dropping one like that on a memorial thread for someone like Jim Weirich takes the cake. ~~~ auggierose He's dead. Nothing I can say here will affect him in the slightest. ~~~ sweetcaroline No, it won't affect him. But his family will be reading these later and it will affect them. ~~~ auggierose Yeah. Like the family of a programmer reads HN. ~~~ sweetcaroline As a matter of fact they do. I'm very close with his family, and when I spoke with them yesterday they were looking forward to reading the many threads and posts about him on this and other websites. I can only hope they'll be strong enough to ignore the cruel remarks made by heartless people like you. ~~~ glanotte I don't know his family, but with Jim as their relative, I would pray they are wise enough to ignore a troll. Jim was a wonderful man and this little person doesn't matter, neither do his opinions. ------ venus That is really sad news. Jim Weirich was a real gem. Friendly, approachable and chatty, he didn't have that aloofness so unfortunately common to some "personalities" in the ruby commmunity. In the last couple of years he had been interested in controlling drones with ruby, regularly posting articles on the Neo blog and speaking about it at conferences. It was my great pleasure to spend an hour or so with him in Singapore last year just chatting about drones, his _argus_ control library, and applications present and future - he was a genuinely interested, interesting, friendly man with a fantastic, giving spirit. He was one of the founding fathers of what I like to think of as the "real" ruby community and will be sorely missed. ------ codebeaker As the author of Capistrano, we leant on Rake a great deal in the new version, Jim was amazing in helping us through some of the weirder parts of the integration, and always happy to discuss the pros and cons of our planned approaches. I hope that the community can select someone to replace him. He's done great work for the community. ~~~ cromulent Good old SwitchTower. Thank you. ------ Argorak Jim was a silent star of the Ruby community. Some newer Rubyists might not see how important his work on Rake was on Rubys road from a toy language to a serious development environment. Also, Rake was (to my knowledge) one of the first libraries that aggressively leaned on Rubys block syntax for writing DSLs. On top of that, he was well known for his talks and ability to explain things. A recommended read: an early statement on Ruby on the C2 Wiki (scroll down to "User stories") [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubyLanguage](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubyLanguage) ------ viraptor Just realised how often when working on some code I will try to contact the original author based on git blame... but in the future, a lot of those people won't be around anymore. I think we usually take for granted that people working on the same project will be here - but in a couple of years "anyone who worked on this module still alive?" may be depressingly more common. Not even from the development perspective, but working on the same thing as someone who's not alive anymore. Apart from long-term or famous construction projects, I can't think of many non-art places where the author is preserved in the history so permanently as in a source version control. ~~~ chimeracoder Not to detract from the work that this man (or anyone else) has done, but it's very rare for code to survive for very long without an active maintainer before it succumbs to code rot. Either someone else steps up to the plate and actively maintains the software, or something else will replace it. Source control makes it easier to revisit the past, but it doesn't ensure that the past will continue to stay current. ------ VeejayRampay [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FITJMJjASUs) This talk is a must-see, really shows off Jim Weirich's craft and overall ability to be a great pedagogue. ~~~ Derbasti Yes it is! This talk is absolutely awesome! ------ lukeholder Very sad to hear. his last commit was only a day ago: [https://github.com/jimweirich](https://github.com/jimweirich) ~~~ agumonkey Someone spoke to him just yesterday [http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/1yfeb7/jim_weirich_cre...](http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/1yfeb7/jim_weirich_creator_of_rake_passed_away_today/cfk1njr) he was hacking as usual ~~~ petercooper He seemed to really get into drones and copters whole heartedly over the past year and appeared to be having a lot of fun with it :-) ------ craftsman I met Jim at Rocky Mountain Ruby a couple years ago. He was friendly, easily approachable, and had that hacker humor that is so fun. You could just tell he loved everything about Ruby, hacking, and teaching and learning from others. He sang Ruby Coding High at that conference: [http://www.confreaks.com/videos/740-rockymtnruby2011-ruby- co...](http://www.confreaks.com/videos/740-rockymtnruby2011-ruby-coding-high) Thanks for helping us all get on a Ruby Coding High Jim, we'll miss you. ~~~ zefhous Wow, cool to see you post this. I had the pleasure of playing with him in that video! Many others have said it, but he was a joy to be around and always kind and generous. ~~~ craftsman Awesome! You guys were great. I thoroughly enjoyed that, so thanks to you too. ------ spellboots Fitting that his last publicly visible github commit is adjusting a Rakefile: [https://github.com/jimweirich/wyriki/commit/d28fac7f18aeacb0...](https://github.com/jimweirich/wyriki/commit/d28fac7f18aeacb00d8ad3460a0a5a901617c2d4) ~~~ rlt There's something deeply moving about his last commit becoming a memorial to him. I actually shed a tear when I saw this. ------ jcutrell Sad news indeed. I would say it is appropriate for any of you who have had the pleasure of knowing Jim to add some information to his Wikipedia: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Weirich](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Weirich) for those of us who didn't meet him. ------ jdhendrickson I met him at BigRuby in Dallas, he was kind, knowledgeable, and incredibly intelligent. He was interested in a very wide range of things, and I really enjoyed discussing metallurgy, blacksmithing, controlling drones, ruby, amongst other things. He was always willing to help, even if the problem was beneath him. Rest In Peace Jim, you will be sorely missed. ------ mbrock Jim Weirich linked warmly on his blog to something I wrote back in 2005. I was 17 at the time and found it very encouraging. That was possibly a reason I kept on practicing my writing. Thanks Jim! ------ bitwes I met Jim through a friend, and I've seen him at numerous conferences. He was inspiring to be around. His energy and enthusiasm for programming was contagious. Just hanging around the guy was great. I played my first D&D game at a conference with him, and a great board game called Cosmic Encounters. I always looked forward to seeing him. It is a testament to how great he was, that people could have such little interaction with him and he could have such a big impact on their lives. ------ lispm Haven't met him... just from watching some of his talks via videos I'll got the impression that we'll need more of these people. He had a great talent to explain things. A Hacker left us. R.I.P. ------ kayoone A great person and developer who will be dearly missed. He was too young, but sadly is a prime example for the risks factors of heart disease. With overweight like that over a long period of time, he most likely had blood pressure and cholesterol issues, along with not much physical exercise. Of course there are a ton of people in similar condition who get to be much older, but still, risk factors are risk factors. ------ aslakhellesoy I'm very sad to hear this. When I was more active in the Ruby community I'd bump into Jim regularly at conferences. He was such a charismatic, smart and above all - a very nice guy. ------ RDDavies Wow. This is astounding. I happened to meet him and Dave Thomas a year or so ago, and had lunch with them at a Ruby conference. Incredibly nice and funny guy, who was _really_ smart. ------ draegtun My first opensource creation was a port of Jim's wonderful Builder gem. Many thanks Jim for the inspiration you'll be sorely missed. ------ kidmenot This is sad. I'm not much of a Rubyist, but I leant on Rake quite a bit to automate builds and whatnot. ------ theceprogrammer Jim, rest in peace brother ! you will be cherished forever along with all the greats. You have joined the ranks of the fallen heros of both our craft and otherwise. A life well lived, full of joy, full of love.... we will miss you. ------ girishso I can never forget the discussion I had with Jim during Rubyconf India last year. He was so devoted to coding… I envied him. Very friendly and energetic. Very sad to hear the news. ------ charlieflowers Jim Weirich was a legend, and deservedly so. Rake was (and is) a masterpiece. I'm sad to see Jim go and I want to pay respect to his contributions and his life. ------ diminish Sad day, just read his last tweet few hours ago..... ------ seanhandley I'm devestated to hear this. I met Jim at Scot Ruby 2012. A sweet, bright, kind and funny man. RIP. ------ shahinh Jim was a great man and an awesome contributor to the Ruby community. He will be missed indeed. RIP. ------ jackson1990 Jim was a great guy and an awesome contributor to the Ruby community. He will be missed indeed. RIP. ------ shahinh Jim was a great guy and an awesome contributor to the Ruby community. He will be missed indeed. RIP. ------ jackson1990 Jim was a great guy and an awesome contributor to the Ruby community. He will be missed indeed. RIP. ------ jackson1990 Jim was a great guy and an awesome contributor to the Ruby community. He will be missed indeed. RIP ------ jackson1990 Jim was a best guy and an awesome contributor to the Ruby community. He will be missed RIP. ------ shahinh Jim was an actual guy, and I wish I had spent more and more time talking with him. ------ tedchs Jim contributed a great deal to the Ruby community and will be deeply missed. ------ jackson1990 Jim was a great guy and an awesome contributor to the Ruby community. ------ shahinh Jim was best guy, and I wish I had spent more time talking with him. ------ jackson1990 I wish I had spent more time talking with him. ------ shahinh Your post is Great read, thanks for posting. ------ UNIXgod This is sad. ------ mentaat what was the cause of death? ~~~ winslow From the other thread (Jim's last Github commit) it states he passed away due to a heart attack at age 57. [1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7271909](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7271909)

How Not To Sell Out: Talk by Matt Haughey of MeFi on growing a site into a small business - halo http://metatalk.metafilter.com/16577/How-Not-To-Sell-Out ====== halo I think this is a good antithesis to some the hype that you read about growing a big business on the "next big thing", people taking millions from venture capitalists before selling to Google and the like. Rather it focuses on doing something you love, making a small business out of it through organic growth and not seeing selling your company, community or soul. I think this is underrated - you don't hear much about this approach which should be painfully obvious. ------ jamongkad Reminds of this book Davidw recommend. I think it's entitled "How to grow a Business"? Again with the hustle and bustle of the Valley, people selling out here and there (mind you it's not bad but I believe it is not the optimal approach for some people) there is something to be said about growing a business the old fashion way. ~~~ pchristensen "Growing a Business" by Paul Hawken? (<http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0671671642/pchristensen-20> ) I haven't read that book but I have read other books by Hawken and I highly recommend his work. GaB is probably just as good (Joel recommends it too). ------ sutro Mmm-hmm. Um, would someone please provide a link to a different article, entitled "How To Sell Out?"

The rise of LinkedIn’s news feed - japhyr http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/15/the-rise-of-linkedins-news-feed-and-how-twitter-made-a-big-dumb-mistake/ ====== arturadib > "Feeds are now full of relevant engaging posts because LinkedIn user’s post > stuff they think will be relevant to their audience" My 200+ connections must be very quiet - all I see in my feed are job title and skill changes. That being said, if LinkedIn enabled folks to follow without connecting, that could be very interesting indeed. ~~~ diminish As a successful massive social network with engaged users Linked in makes me think what "engaged" truly means and how it can be measured. "X connected with Y. Z updated his profile." was all that comes out (I am a member since its first year) and now add to it some news. Linkedin seems to be club you went with all your ex/colleagues and ex/bosses. Since no one is drunk yet, no one dances or speaks. The only valuable engagement seems to be clicking on a profile of someone. Knowing that he will see you doing this, is what stops me from clicking. Finally, people mostly pay for membership due to this instinct to see "who looked at me?". ------ Aloisius I use LinkedIn's news feed quite frequently, though through Flipboard. It is hard to compare it to Twitter because I follow a radically different group of people. First five stories from LinkedIn right now on my flipboard: How to evaluate whether or not you should join a startup How to Win Over someone Who Doesn't Like You Why termites explode Twitter Marketing Software How Disney Built a big data platform on a startup budget My Twitter feed however is filled with mostly political and local news stories. ------ joshhart I'm a tech lead working on the feed backend at LinkedIn. I work both on storage and feed relevance. Happy to answer any questions if I can. I will say we're always looking for passionate engineers, especially those with a background in machine learning or information retrieval. ~~~ davros Could you please add an unsubscribe from the linkedin updates email - I've been told by customer service the only way to stop getting that is by deleting my account : ( ~~~ dmcy22 Not 100% if this is what you're asking, but if you go to settings (hover over the triangle near the top right corner) there's a "email preferences" tab near the bottom left. You can change the frequency and kinds of emails you receive there. ~~~ davros Thanks, you can unsubscribe from some emails there, but the linkedin update and a bunch of other email communications are not covered. I've solved the problem by marking it as spam. ------ dredmorbius Meh. I use LinkedIn for job leads. And that's only when necessary. I've been getting increasingly spammed by the site, and am getting consistently lower and lower quality recruiter contacts (both on and off LI), in conjunction with a number of privacy-violating moves, which have lead me to greatly reduce the information on my profile. LinkedIn has a certain role, but shouldn't push too far beyond that. Twitter? What's that? ------ hapless I turned off the news feed the second day I saw it. As it turns out, I don't really want to receive articles shared by every professional contact I've ever had. "People I've worked with" is just not a good filter function for content. ------ runn1ng Hm. I am not a LinkedIn user, but I was under the impression that LinkedIn is something like "Facebook for people that are looking for a job" and I have it, in my mind, connected with "boring serious business" issues. (I am a student with a really small income, but not currently looking for a job.) Did LinkedIn somehow became a social sharing platform while I was not looking? When exactly? How do you connect "a better kind of CV" (which I always thought is LI purpose) with social sharing? ~~~ dasil003 Like a cocktail party but online. ------ endyourif yeah i've been seeing some nice traffic from them for articles i share with my community.

Google AU -- Dont stop me now - delinquentme http://www.google.com.au/ ====== derrida In case you are wondering, press 'play'.

Daylighting Detroit's long buried rivers - rmason http://www.freep.com/article/20110509/BUSINESS04/105090350/Activists-Detroit-streams-once-turned-into-sewers-could-new-life ====== rmason Here's a map showing the locations of the rivers <http://www.freep.com/assets/freep/pdf/C417411359.PDF> I've walked the Bloody Run stretch in the Elmwood Cemetery while doing geneological research.

The Curse of Milk Sickness - samclemens https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2019/02/the-curse-of-milk-sickness-part-1-of-2.html ====== taneq Part 2: [https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2019/02/the-curse-of- milk...](https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2019/02/the-curse-of-milk- sickness-part-2-of-2.html) ------ alexandercrohde Interesting how important an animal's diet can be, something I didn't fully appreciate. Also it's nice to see accounts of how science semi-functioned historically. I'm fascinated by the role of human-factors in our attempts at objective- science. ~~~ cainxinth You are what you eat eats. ~~~ jjtheblunt That's cute, but partially false, and is the main reason animals eating other animals exists. Obligate carnivores, as an example, eat other animals not as a shortcut to the diets of the other animals, but because the other animals' livers manufacture amino acids that the obligate carnivores' livers do not. ------ goda90 I still distinctly remember milk sickness being used as the "story" behind some experiments they had us do in early science classes in middle or high school. Basically, a teenager was sick/had died and we had to figure out where the milk came from(then the experiment was to study density of different plastics to determine which dairy had bottled it). One thing that stood out to me was that the parents in the story described the victim's breathe as smelling like nail polish. One of the symptoms is the build up of ketone bodies like acetone, which might be noticeable in the breathe. ~~~ mrpoptart Friendly correction: you meant "breath" not "breathe." ------ loblollyboy Pretty interesting story. A little history, a little science. hi-sci? ------ kupiv I like it, very interesting informaton. Thank you for sharing this:) ------ symmitchry [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageratina_altissima](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageratina_altissima) ------ eps ... _continued tomorrow_ Perhaps could use a repost tomorrow then :) ~~~ aaron_oxenrider [https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2019/02/the-curse-of- milk...](https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2019/02/the-curse-of-milk- sickness-part-2-of-2.html) It's already posted.

Ask HN: Firms that both in US and London and do L-Visa transfers - s3nnyy I am a European citizen and I want to move to the US.<p>How to find startups &#x2F; firms that operate in London and US and are willing to do a L-visa transfer?<p>I know that Cloudflare offers this: If you start working for them, they promise that after a year in London you can transfer to SF. ====== falsestprophet The L-1B visa (for inter-company transfers) is meant for employees with specialized knowledge. Being a computer programmer should not qualify. USCIS has begun to enforce the laws in recent years, so I wouldn't count on slipping through the cracks. For example, here is a blog post about a law firm complaining about the law being enforced: [http://blogs.ilw.com/entry.php?5944-To-L1b-or-Not- to-L1B-Dif...](http://blogs.ilw.com/entry.php?5944-To-L1b-or-Not- to-L1B-Difficulties-with-the-L-1B-Specialized-Knowledge-Visa) ~~~ rahimnathwani The author of that blog post has an incentive to make the process seem as difficult and complicated as possible. After all, the more scary it seems, the more likely you'll pay them for assistance. ~~~ s3nnyy "Being a computer programmer should not qualify." Doesn't Microsoft use a L-visa to put people first into Canada and then transfer them to US?

FTC wants "Do Not Track" feature among wide-ranging online privacy changes - coondoggie http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/ftc-wants-do-not-track-feature-among-wide-ran ====== russell This is one of those issues that the HN community needs to think about. The solution is not simple. A simple do-not-track option in a browser breaks a great many sites, facebook for one. do you have a do-not-track policy version 3.4, add a new service and now v 3.4 have to opt in, but v 4 users get an implied opt in. Do a massive change and everyone needs to opt in again? This obviously needs clearly understood standards, probably legislated ones. If we rely on ANSI or even worse ISO, they wont arrive for a decade. Worst of all, a Sorbanes Oxley type solution. Sure you created a couple weeks of Ramesn to create your site, but you now have to spend a couple of million to get it certified.

Learning iOS development Swift or Obj-C? - Andrenid I&#x27;m keen to learn iOS development (just for fun&#x2F;curiosity), am I better off going the Obj-C or Swift path?<p>From a quick search Obj-C obviously has a lot more learning material and tutorials, but Swift seems like it&#x27;s going to be the &quot;future&quot; of iOS dev so might be better to learn now?<p>I come from a web background (LAMP, JS, CSS) if that matters. No CS background, this will be my first &quot;real&quot; programming.<p>Any pointers to the best learning material would also be much appreciated. ====== Vomzor I think the best argument against swift is the plethora of knowledge, tutorials, stackoverflow answers there is for objective-c. When I started learning Unity in 2009, I wanted to use C#. Yet 90 % of all the tutorials, docs, etc.. was in javascript at the time. As I was fairly new to programming then, translating from javascript to C# slowed me down. In hindsight, if I just used javascript I would've progressed much quicker than I did. I think the situation within a year will be different, the iOS community is producing swift tutorials en masse. But I would advice you to start with objective-c. The best iOS material is: \- Objective-C programming book from big nerd ranch or Programming in Objective-C from Stephen G. Kochan (more in-depth) \- cs193p from Stanford (iTunesU) iOS 7 course is objective-c. iOS 8 course (starting in 2015) will be swift. After cs193p you should know enough to make apps. If you want to be a great iOS developer, you should also learn: \- ios / cocoa design patterns \- cocoapods | git \- visit [http://nshipster.com](http://nshipster.com) \- visit [http://objc.io](http://objc.io) \- Learn from other apps source code: [http://maniacdev.com/2010/06/35-open-source-iphone-app- store...](http://maniacdev.com/2010/06/35-open-source-iphone-app-store-apps- updated-with-10-new-apps/) Handy links: Obj-C online reference: [http://rypress.com/tutorials/objective-c/](http://rypress.com/tutorials/objective-c/) Obj-C cheat sheet: [http://cdn1.raywenderlich.com/downloads/RW-Objective-C- Cheat...](http://cdn1.raywenderlich.com/downloads/RW-Objective-C- Cheatsheet-v-1-5.pdf) iOS tutorials: [http://nscookbook.com/recipes/](http://nscookbook.com/recipes/) | [http://www.appcoda.com](http://www.appcoda.com) | [http://www.raywenderlich.com](http://www.raywenderlich.com) ! | [http://nsscreencast.com/](http://nsscreencast.com/) ~~~ hackerboos "I think the best argument against swift is the plethora of knowledge, tutorials, stackoverflow answers there is for objective-c." I've been amazed at how quickly the iOS development community has started porting tutorials written in Objective-C to Swift. The learning ecosystem for iOS is light-years ahead of Android. ------ thewarrior Trust me it won't make that big of a difference. The main work is in learning how to use the in built libraries. Swift is still in flux and so my advise is to start out with Objective C and learn to build a functioning app. Once you have a basic understanding get some swift under your belt as well. ------ sdernley Personally, i'd go with Objective C but it doesn't hurt to know both! In the end though, it won't make much difference at this stage, just get your head around the platform with whatever you feel more comfortable with when you take a look. There's more resources for learning Objective C right now. Good luck with whatever you choose. ------ morkfromork Obj-C because you will eventually need to know it to some extent anyhow. The quickest way to learn Obj-C is to write command line programs for Mac OSX. Maybe find source for a C or C++ hello world program and convert it to Obj-C. Once you are comfortable with the language then try writing a Mac application or iOS application. ------ loumf If it's just for fun/curiosity, I'd say Swift. If you want to be a working iOS dev, you need to know Obj-C for now.

WakeMates are ready - spydertennis http://blog.wakemate.com/2010/12/18/wakemates-are-ready/ ====== jasonkester Look, I know it's Product Blogging 101, but it always amazes me when I see a product blog like this one that has: a.) No description of what the product _is_ b.) No direct link to the product website So now, after visiting that site, I know that Wakemates are ready. But I have no idea what a Wakemate is, and short of manipulating the URL by hand, I have no way to get to a website that will tell me anything about them. Since I'm on an iPad, it's orders of magnitude easier to simply hit the back button and write this comment, before forgetting about whatever this product was forever. ~~~ tdavis > b.) No direct link to the product website Except for the one in the sidebar that says "WakeMate Homepage". It's under a big white header labeled "Links". > Since I'm on an iPad, it's orders of magnitude easier to simply hit the back > button and write this comment... This is Hacker News. It self-selects for just hitting "back" and leaving a critical, half-accurate comment. ~~~ jasonkester You realize that this is a site full of entrepreneurs, who are here to talk about the business aspects of these links, right? If not, I'd recommend re- reading my comment in that light. As a product company, having somebody actually _on your website_ and interested in finding out about your thing is extremely valuable. It doesn't matter that it's technically possible to find a link to the homepage. The fact that it's not _trivial_ , as in linked from the logo, is what we're discussing here. If you have a blog about your product, every post needs to contain a way to ensnare random visitors who stumbled in from wherever. The ideal way to do this is a prominent sidebar or header with the product name, a 5-word description of what it does and why you need one, and a big shiny button labeled with your call to action. That's the "product blogging 101" bit that I mentioned above. That's why these guys need to fix their blog. They're bleeding interested visitors, and that's a big deal. ~~~ tdavis I completely agree with you: the blog should be better linked and branded. I run into blogs every day that have absolutely no way to get to the main site without changing the URL, and it's incredibly frustrating. I wasn't trying to disprove your overall argument regarding "product blogging 101", merely point out that your specific claim of having to change the URL is false (even if it is clearly non-trivial, relatively speaking, to find said link) and likely had no bearing on your decision to write your initial comment rather than investigate further. Frankly, your comment came off a bit snarky and holier-than-thou, which is what I was responding to in the first place. The basic merits of proper blog- site interlinking and branding were not meant to be brought up for debate. I take no issue with your points, merely the manner in which you chose to deliver them. Your follow-up here was much more thorough and useful. ~~~ delackner And yet both he and I went through these steps: get intrigued, look around the page for a link to a product description, get frustrated, hand edit the url to just 'wakemate.com'. There is no sidebar for me reading in firefox. Maybe it is some fancy script that got binned by my various anti-junk plugins. ------ naveensundar Congrats on shipping on a hardware product! The product seems great. A couple of questions... The site says the product is scientific. But the first paper I found after a bit of digging points to the use of Actigraphy which seems to be just a method of collecting data (even though you say it is a "clinically proven science"). The second pdf containing the excerpts does not answer the following questions. The questions 1\. Is waking up at the optimal time (light sleep before alarm) shown to reduce _daytime_ grogginess rather than just wake-time grogginess? 2\. Is the continued waking up at the optimal time free of any adverse effects in the _long run_ ? I did some googling to find answers to the above, but couldn't find anything layman readable or substantial. If I have to pay $60 for a product, it is really a pain to do the research myself. Some excerpts "subjects were presented a word list 1 min after arousal from different sleep stage ..." "The most important finding from this study is that sleep inertia reduces decision‐making performance for at least 30 min." If it makes me feel good just after waking up for an hour or so, then is it really that useful? (Edit: Read the second pdf) ~~~ spydertennis Your initial questions: 1\. The optimal wake feature reduces daytime grogginess only in the sense that it puts you in a better mood in the morning. Attacking daytime grogginess is something we address with the analytics portion of our product. 2\. Yes it is very unlikely to have adverse effects. You are just waking a little bit earlier at a point where your body feels more inclined to wake up. Your last question: The optimal wake portion of our product is addressed towards people who don't particularly like waking up in the morning. If that isn't you then no, it probably isn't that useful. The other part of our product, the analytics portion, is addressed to those who want to improve their sleep quality so they can feel better rested throughout the day. It sounds like that is more what you are looking for. tl;dr The WakeMate wakes you up at the optimal time so you feel refreshed and provides sleep analytics so you can maintain that fully rested feeling throughout the day. ~~~ natrius Your answer to the second question should show a little less certainty unless you have a study to link to. I think the original commenter gets that you're just waking up a little earlier, but consistently doing that every day isn't natural. Sure, neither are alarm clocks in general, but there are probably studies about those. This is a special case of alarm clock that could, in theory, have different long-term effects. There are probably legal issues with your claim as well. I'd just say that it's very unlikely to have adverse effects instead of "it is completely free of adverse affects". ~~~ spydertennis I agree that it is not a good idea to make blanket statements. I have edited my original comment. The WakeMate wakes you similarly to how you would wake if you did not set an alarm. That is why it is very unlikely to have adverse effects. Regarding your comment: "I think the original commenter gets that you're just waking up a little earlier, but consistently doing that every day isn't natural." It may just be because I'm familiar with the product but it doesn't seem to me that setting your alarm for 9:00am and waking at 8:55am can be construed as unnatural. ~~~ sciboy What is the confidence interval for the size of the effect that wakemate produces on percieved grogginess vs waking without wakemate? What is the size of the effect in the research? ~~~ tptacek Kinda going off the rails here. We get it: WakeMate is not rigorous peer- reviewed science. ~~~ sciboy I disagree. He makes two unsupported claims that reek of cargo-culting: "1. The optimal wake feature reduces daytime grogginess only in the sense that it puts you in a better mood in the morning. 2\. Yes it is very unlikely to have adverse effects. You are just waking a little bit earlier at a point where your body feels more inclined to wake up." Two claims. No data from either published literature (from other studies) or their own data. How do they even know it works? Why should we treat it any differently than claims of magnets improving your sleep? A free pass shouldn't be granted just because they are YC. ------ dongle I was one of the beta-testers of the WakeMate, so it's been a part of my life for about a month now. Prior to using the WakeMate, I had two choices regarding sleep: establishing a strict routine by retiring at midnight every night and waking up at 7:30 on the dot, or keeping other hours and feeling groggy all day regardless of the total amount of sleep. Since I have friends and an unpredictable work schedule, I've never been able to stick to fixed sleeping patterns for a prolonged period of time. With the WakeMate I still need about 7 hours of sleep each night, however, I can take those 7 hours whenever it is convenient for me, and wake up feeling about as great as I ever feel in the morning. The WakeMate costs as much as a week of coffee from a café – try it out. ~~~ brianmwang So what exactly does the WakeMate enable you to do to get refreshing sleep on an irregular schedule? ~~~ mike_h When you're on a regular schedule, your body gets in a rhythm where you'll usually end up waking up at the exact same minute every day, even without an alarm. When you don't maintain a regular schedule (or you're in sleep debt), your body can't do that. So your alarm may start buzzing in the middle of "deep" sleep, and you get stuck with sleep inertia. Smart alarms like this try to compromise by waking you up in "light" sleep, or ideally in moments of wakefulness that you'd otherwise pass up and go back to sleep. (If you're not familiar with the concept of sleep cycles: [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sleep#Sleep_s...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sleep#Sleep_stages)) ------ anon-e-moose Your website needs to have a one sentence explanation of what it does, e.g. measure sleep and wake you up when you're in a light sleep. You pretty much have to read the FAQ to figure out that's what it does. Not saying this makes it seem like a quack magnetic bracelet or something. Just a suggestion. ~~~ spydertennis We made the assumption that the average purchaser would not be interested in details like what phase of sleep you are woken up in. That is why those details are provided, but not prominently displayed. Thank you for your suggestion though. ~~~ reemrevnivek The average purchaser is probably not interested in the details, but they are most certainly interested in a sentence describing what it does. All that I knew about it when I clicked the link and skimmed the page was: \- They're ready \- I skipped some stuff about pre-orders \- I might not be able to get one before Christmas \- When you make them, they're all arranged in a big tray, are charcoal and light blue \- The manufacturing process somehow involves baking and cutting. I had to click in my url bar and type in "wakemate.com" before I got anything useful. It's a fuzzy bracelet, it has something to do with waking you up and making you feel better, a few platforms like iPhone, some video I don't have time for, and I finally read "Wake up at the optimal time in your sleep cycle." That sentence should be the first thing I read. ~~~ colomon I cannot upvote this enough, had the exact same experience. ------ garbowza I've been using WakeMate in beta for a couple months. As an engineer, I love checking the sleep analytics and comparing tags to try to determine factors that affect my sleep. At first I was dubious that I'd be less groggy when waking up with the device, but now I'm absolutely convinced. I even bring the WakeMate when I travel, to ensure I wake up in a fresher state (which also revealed to me that my sleep quality is better from hotels). ~~~ awakeasleep Do you wear the WakeMate all day? I loved sleep activity graphs in Brain&Behavior bio in college, wish I had heard about this earlier. Also, have you identified anything that benefits your sleep schedule? The site hints at things like exercise to benefit and alcohol to disrupt, but do you have any anecdotes for me? And one more: Can you identify different phases of sleep on your nightly graph? Thanks! ~~~ coolswan You only wear the wakemate when you're sleeping. You can identify different phases of sleep (REM, etc.) And the tagging is indeed the sweetest thing IMO, but you probably need a lot of the data before making a good conclusions. I found that I actually sleep really well when I'm sick or when I'm sleeping on the left side of the bed. Weird stuff like that. ------ whatusername Hey Wakemate team... I haven't got an email from you since April 1st (amusing with the first line "WakeMate's are shipping"). What's the deal? International pre-order, I sent paid my paypal deposit on 24/nov/2009, the refund came through -- but I'm not getting any emails. (Doesn't seem to be in gmail spam either) ~~~ spydertennis In the process of sending out the emails. ------ edanm A request for the people who ordered Wakemate - I'm sure plenty of people, like myself, aren't sure whether to buy a Wakemate or not. If you bought it, we'd all really appreciate you posting a review of it in a few weeks, after you've had a chance to try it out. ------ chollida1 Congrats It's a bit disappointing about the international shipping. I'm not sure how this snuck up on them so late in the game. Shouldn't this have been foreseeable? What happened to cause this mistake? ~~~ brandon The problem might not be strictly shipping related. Depending on the type of bluetooth radio packaged internally, the device may have needed FCC-type registration. Of course, an FCC ID is only good in the USA. In Europe, you need a CE mark. Australia sometimes insists on yet another registration for 2.4GHz equipment. Honestly, international RF regulatory certification is a mess, and the piles of paperwork involved make it easy to miss deadlines. ~~~ spydertennis Spot on. ~~~ brandon If you guys haven't already got a relationship with TÜV, you might consider talking to them about certifying your next revision. They handled all our regulatory (domestic and int'l) with a lot less difficulty (and deadline slipping) than doing it in-house. ------ invisible You should really have an "allow my data to be used for anonymous scientific study" option. It'd be really neat to see graphs of male vs female, young vs old, etc. similar to 23andme. I guess this is coming in the future with the "paid" wakelytics features? ------ mgrouchy Congrats to The Wakemate team for finally shipping! The device is pretty awesome,(I've been using during the beta) can't wait to see what these guys have in store next. ------ forcer Does the iPhone app needs to be running through the night for this device to work? that's what I hated about Sleep Cycle and would not want to use it if it has the same flaw. ~~~ spydertennis Why do you hate that? You wouldn't be using your phone during the night anyway? If you want the optimal wake feature to work you need to leave the app running. If you just want to collect data and wake up at a predetermined time you can background the app. Unfortunately this is a limitation imposed by iOS. ~~~ chollida1 > Why do you hate that? You wouldn't be using your phone during the night > anyway? I can't answer for the original poster, but for me... At night is when I charge my phone and there isn't always a plug near where I sleep. Having my phone have to run at night without a charge will mean it's not fully charged at the beginning of the day, which is a very big deal breaker for me. My phone will last the entire day, but only if it's fully charged when I get up in the morning. ~~~ spydertennis Oh I see. We did a lot of work to make the product use minimal battery on the phone so hopefully that helps. ~~~ chollida1 > We did a lot of work to make the product use minimal battery on the phone so > hopefully that helps As a person who pre-ordered the phone, that is appreciated very much:) ------ rsaarelm After reading the previous thread, I got interested in this and dug up the free ElectricSleep app for Android (<http://code.google.com/p/electricsleep/>). It seems to be pretty much equivalent to iPhone's Sleep Cycle app, it uses the phone's accelerometer with the phone placed on the bed. Only had time to test it one night so far, but it managed to wake me up easily from a duration of sleep that would usually have left me in zombie mode. Problem with these things is that getting psyched about a fancy wake-up technology is likely to create a placebo effect for a while, so I'll need to stick with the thing to see how well it works in the long haul. Might look into WakeMate if the accelerometer alarm thing is still working good after a month or so. An interesting thing to try with these things is doing the Everyman sleep schedule with a 4-5 hour nightly sleep and several 20 minute naps every day, and attacking the most common point of failure where you oversleep on the nightly core sleep with the smart alarm. ~~~ kevinelliott I struggle with placing items like my iPhone on the bed for 2 reasons: 1) althoughly likely harmless (not convinced, but it's prob true) my mind worries about having my cell phone at head level and so close while I sleep with radiation, and 2) since I know something is on the bed, it affects my feeling of space around me and contributes to poor sleep. Interesting how suggestive your own mind can be. ~~~ ashearer To address #1 at the cost of an extra step, you could turn on Airplane Mode. (That's worthwhile if only for the side-effect of disabling notifications and rings.) And maybe if that makes you think of the phone as safe and inert, not restricting your movement, #2 won't be such a problem? ------ mrchess A couple questions: 1\. Can anyone compare WakeMakes with that clock thing that tracks your eye movement by wearing an eyemask? The name of the clock escapes me at the moment, will edit this post once I remember. edit: it's called Zeo 2\. If I know I wake up at least once a night to use the bahtroom out of habit does this disrupt the wake-up system in any way? ~~~ clewiston We have a comparison chart here: <http://wakemate.com/compare/> WakeMate is cheaper, more comfortable, and easier to use. Getting up in the middle of the night won't affect anything. Our analytics system will, however, tell you that you woke up during the night. ~~~ Frazzydee You should probably update the price column. It still says $49.99, although the price increased to $59.99. ------ moozilla Is it possible to use this if you don't own a smart phone? ~~~ anon-e-moose Ditto. I'm quite happy with my qwerty-keyboard dumbphone, but I would love to buy one of these! ~~~ ellism It works with newer generation iPod Touches or iPad, so if you really wanted one, you could always buy one of these devices to use it with. ------ csomar _The WakeMate is a comfortable wristband that you wear when you sleep. It measures subtle body movements—a scientifically proven method ([link]Actigraphy[/link]) to map dips and peaks in your sleep cycle._ I was reading through the Tour page and clicked the Actigraphy link. I supposed to get more information about it, as it matters for me a lot to see the technology which the product is based on. However, it took me to the About page and I fail to find any useful information. Is this a mistake or am I mistaken? ------ subwindow I preordered for a WakeMate way back when I was a BlackBerry user. Wow. Regardless, I'm glad they're finally shipping (for real this time?). I hope it is worth the wait. ------ Sephr You're missing Android 2.3 on <https://secure.wakemate.com/compatibility/> ------ coolswan I've been using the beta product for some time now. Have to say when I got it became totally worth it just to monitor my sleep. The tagging system while sort of awkward to do right before you sleep, lets you categorize everything over time and see how things like a cough, sleeping on the couch instead of the bed or even a broken AC affects your sleep. The price is dirt cheap for something this interesting. Get it! ------ geekfactor Any thoughts on putting a buzzer in the wristband? There may be an interesting angle for married couples in doing so. I'm interested in the sleep-tech and prospects of "feeling better," but the thing that would be really intriguing to me is the idea of something that can wake me up without an alarm blaring, which my wife _hates_. ~~~ mike_h The overall UX isn't going to be as nice as with WakeMate, and there aren't currently any analytics, but if you want to take the technology for a spin you can use my app Circadian Alarm (has a silent feature): [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circadian- alarm/id330721657?m...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circadian- alarm/id330721657?mt=8) Anyone wants to try it, send me an email and I'll give you a coupon code so you get it free. ------ leif What's the problem with Android 2.2 on the Eris? All it says is "No upgrade available", this is pretty ambiguous. Do you mean that there is no upgrade to 2.2 on the Eris and that's the problem? There are 2.2 roms that run on it (I'm running one); if I have a build of 2.2 on my Eris, will it work? ~~~ spydertennis That's interesting. You'd have to ask HTC why it doesn't work but I'd be curious to see if it worked on your phone. Could you send me an email? ~~~ leif You might've misinterpreted my question, but mail sent anyway, thanks for the response. ------ lachlanj Great news, it a shame there are delays with the international shipping, I have had this pre-ordered the second that it was available for pre-order. I'm sure it will be worth the wait though. ------ evansolomon I just placed an order on the site and the confirmation said you would email me. Oddly, I don't remember giving you my email address in any of the forms. Am I missing something? ~~~ spydertennis Since you placed a pre-order your email address was auto-populated. You probably just glossed over the text field (it was on the first page). ~~~ evansolomon Actually after looking again the fields don't show up at all. I loaded the site in an incognito browser and it's there, but in my main browser it's not. This is a new computer since the time I would have preordered so I'm not sure how you're figuring my email out at that stage. I'll trust that you have my email address, though there is a reasonable chance that the one I gave you when I pre-ordered no longer works. Regardless, if I get a Wakemate and no email I won't really care. Edit: Just noticed there is a logout link, which I guess means I'm logged in but again I don't remember doing that. This is all quite clever if you actually have my email address. ~~~ spydertennis I just checked and we do have your email. Spooky :-). ~~~ evansolomon Well, cool. On that note, I have two questions: 1) The form I went through said $60 while the blog post says pre-order prices would be $50. From your explanations it sounds like I'm being counted in pre- orders, but it's unclear. I think I was in the paypal group that got the $5 refunded, but I honestly don't remember very well at this point. 2) Should I have received an email from you? Fyi I have not. ~~~ spydertennis Send us an email: [email protected] and we'll figure it out. ------ chancho Any users with small children care to share your experiences? Is it even worth the bother, given that huge uncontrollable variable in your sleep habits? ~~~ io I was kind of curious about this, too. If I wake up in the middle of the night to deal with a sick toddler, will WakeMate know I'm fully awake based on the fact that I'm walking around? I suppose it would be much like waking up to go to the bathroom, for those without young kids. Obviously the alarm's only going to help if I set it for a window I know is before the kids wake up. Otherwise it's their voices that'll wake me. On work days, that would suit my usual routine. On the weekend, I'm not sure it would be worth it to forego a potential extra hour of sleep by setting the WakeMate alarm. But it's still tempting, just to chart my sleep during the week and be able to measure the effects of caffeine, exercise, etc. I'll probably wait until there are reviews and testimonials from people who have used it for a few months. I was tempted a couple years ago by a much more expensive product whose name I can't recall. I think it was $300-400. In contrast, it's pretty easy to take a chance on $60. Cool product, guys. I hope you're wildly successful. ------ desigooner Have you compared some of your analytics/benchmarks with competing products? I am not sure I'm interested in an optimal waking time because I tend to wake up without an alarm at pretty much the right time. however, I'd love to view some analytics on my sleep cycles and such. It'd be nice to see a comparison of say Wakemate vs. Fitbit w.r.t the accuracy / tracking / battery life / etc. ------ kilian I'm glad you guys are shipping, but as an international customer with a pre- order since day one, I'm disappointed (again) ~~~ geedee77 I'm in the same boat. Just checked paypal, ordered on 25th Nov 2009, refunded on 4th August 2010 but with a shortfall due to currency conversion differences so I'm basically out of pocket (admittedly only a bit) due to lack of product. As I've said previously, I actually don't even own the phone anymore that I intended to use this product with. I just hope for the sake of the company that this is the beginning of the end of their constant problems. ------ bennesvig Do you guys not have a fan page on Facebook? ------ kgutteridge Well done guys, shipping a hardware and a software product was never going to be easy! hopefully you can now reap the rewards though of having a hardware product, thats far far harder to replicate pre ordered back in April so looking forward to receiving sometime in the new year I suspect, as it will be an international order. ------ brianmwang FYI, the following repeats under your FAQ question "What is an 'optimal wake point?'" An optimal wake moment can be thought of as a "semi-awake" moment – the lightest point in your sleep. Waking at these times will result in minimal sleep inertia or grogginess. More info can be found here: The Science of Waking ------ jiganti Sounds cool! Just ordered mine. I think you guys are addressing a real problem here, hopefully it works well. ------ jtagen Does anyone know if this can be used effectively for power naps throughout the day? I'd love to nap, but tend to sleep for an hour plus. If I set a traditional alarm, I always feel like I'm jarred awake and a little off for the next hour or so, completely defeating the point of the nap. ------ crocowhile How many pre-orders did you guys get? (magnitude is fine, I don't need the actual number). ------ SoftwareMaven I love the notion of Wakemate and even had some conversations with them early on. Unfortunately, my current financial situation puts it about $30 out of my range. Best of luck guys! As soon as the $30 in my wallet moves up to $60, I'll be on board. ------ gfodor After quitting coffee, waking up became easy for me. This feels like an over-engineered solution to a problem that's easy to fix: switch to decaf. There's a reason you feel horrible in the morning, and it's not because of "sleep inertia!" ~~~ jackowayed My caffeine intake is basically nil, but I still often feel drowsy when I wake up, especially from an alarm. It's usually when I haven't sleept enough, but sometimes if I've been sleeping roughly enough, waking up from my alarm leaves me very drowsy. Sleep is very complicated. Just because dumping caffeine fixed your drowsiness doesn't mean it'll fix everyone's. ~~~ gfodor Maybe my comment came off too strong, but I'd not be surprised (especially given the audience for the WakeMate) if a majority of WakeMate users have a daily intake of caffeine adversely affecting their sleep cycle. Another way to put it is this is premature optimization for those folks. ~~~ kin I don't drink coffee. I don't drink tea. I don't drink soda. I consume 0 caffeine and as a student I get my energy from good sleep. However, I've realized that more sleep does not necessarily mean I wake up refreshed. I've self observed with myself that if one day I sleep 7 hours or 8 or 5 and feel well rested and then I try to repeat that, I don't produce the same results. This is an excellent product that addresses this sleep issue and your comments are really not justified. ~~~ antareus Exactly. I'm in the middle of trying to let my wrists heal from RSI, and I've noticed that my sleep quality isn't consistently good. Deep sleep seems necessary for healing to occur. I'm looking for something that will let me try out different sleep tweaks (less ambient lighting/no caffeine at all/exercise in morning/exercise in afternoon/various diets) and see which ones are actually effective for me. Hopefully Wakemate fits the bill. I'll wait for the initial reviews to come out. I'm excited about the future of health afforded by devices like these. ------ wwortiz I have a couple questions which don't seem to be answered on the website if anyone knows the answers. 1\. Is the battery a rechargeable or normal battery that I have to replace? 2\. Can I easily download my sleep data to my computer to mess around with? ~~~ spydertennis 1\. Rechargeable. Lasts about 2-3 nights depending on how long you sleep. 2\. Not yet. ~~~ Sephr Could you elaborate as to why it's only 2-3 nights of battery life? I'd expect much more from something like this. ~~~ Zev Wakemate uses bluetooth, doesn't it? Thats bound to eat up power. ~~~ Sephr Bluetooth shouldn't ever be on except for when it needs to upload sleep data to your phone though (which I assume is done right when waking up). ~~~ brandon That's putting a lot of stock into the device itself. Conjecture: I think it's more likely that the device is something of an accelerometer paired with a bluetooth radio that can nearly continuously feed the phone/app with movement data so that the app can decide whether or not to rouse you. Rationale: The algorithm. Assuming they want to tweak their actigraphy parameters, if the algorithm is running on the wristband you're going to need to drop new firmware on the device. Field-flashing embedded devices is to be avoided at all reasonable costs. ~~~ Sephr Field-flashing isn't that bad as long as it can safely be done over bluetooth, and I'd be willing to take that risk to have reasonable battery life. ~~~ brandon So, again, I don't know anything about the device in question, so this is all conjecture... _but_ : Even given that OTA flashing is possible, why bother? The device has no means of waking the user without a phone in bluetooth range, so what's the upshot? I don't know that battery life falls into that category because the device would need some pretty serious upgrades, and cost would obviously increase: \- More RAM. Lots more. Enough to contain an entire firmware image during OTA and an entire night of sleep/movement history. \- More MIPS. Actigraphy isn't going to be as cheap as store-and-forward. \- A reliable RTC so that the device can ping the phone at the _right_ wakeup time. \- etc. If I was in their position, I'd build the device to be as dumb a peripheral as possible. Push the complexity out of expensive hardware and into software. I'd also probably have built in a sweet inductive charging pad, too, but I'm a sucker for shiny things. ------ javert The front page of your site says it costs $60, but your "Comparison Matrix" says it costs $50. Maybe I'm overlooking something. But chances are that if I'm overlooking it, lots of people are. Congrats on shipping. ------ Groxx Does the FAQ mean to have collapsing text chunks? I see the arrows, and they point right -> down -> right if I click them, but nothing happens. Everything is always expanded. Chrome 10.0.612.1 dev ------ duck I've never looked into WakeMate before as sleeping is one thing I can do really well, but I thought it shipped earlier this year? I only see one product listed, is this really new? ~~~ brandon There have been _several_ schedule slips. A previous rant of mine details a few: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1758288> Addendum: I'm totally still buying it. ------ robhu This looks really good. My wife and I only have one smart phone (a HTC Desire) between us - would we be able to run 2 wakemates off one phone or would we need two phones? ~~~ jlgosse You'll need two phones at the moment, but in the future it's possible we could make the app support multiple devices. ~~~ robhu OK... is it possible to connect a WakeMate up to a laptop? Like a Mac perhaps? ------ jaysonelliot Congratulations to the team, it's a big day! I currently use the Sleep Cycle app, which uses the iPhone's accelerometer to detect motion while asleep. How does WakeMate stack up against that app? ~~~ clewiston WakeMate uses a science called actigraphy to monitor your sleep patterns by measuring the movement of your body (via your wrist). Actigraphy has been used in sleep labs for decades and is a widely standardized metric of sleep in humans (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actigraphy>). The Sleep Cycle app, because it is not attached to your body, does not use actigraphy, and therefore cannot provide the same granular level of data measurement as a device using actigraphy, such as the WakeMate. Furthermore, Sleep Cycle is susceptible to false data collection since it can be easily influenced by the presence of others in the bed, such as a partner or pet. ~~~ mike_h If you're willing to attach an iOS device to your body while you sleep (between two socks works great, or with an armband) you can try an actigraphy- accurate smart alarm with my app: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circadian- alarm/id330721657?m...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/circadian- alarm/id330721657?mt=8) It's a dollar in the store but email me at michael at programmablelife dot com and I'll give you a coupon so you don't have to pay. ------ AdamGibbins Excellent news, thanks! Any ETA on international pre-orders (I'm UK based), notice I haven't received an email asking me to pay yet. ~~~ jackowayed I haven't gotten an email yet, and I'm in Delaware, US. So I think they haven't sent them out yet (or at least haven't finished) ------ zaatar Does it work with an iPad? Is there a disadvantage using it with an iPad instead of a smartphone? ~~~ jlgosse It works on the iPad if you download and use the iPhone app. An iPad app is in the works though. ------ Monkeyget WakeMate's website look very good. Elegent with only the information needed and good copywriting. ------ SteveC How does the WakeMate communicate with the phone to set off the alarm? Bluetooth or Wifi? ~~~ jlgosse Bluetooth. ------ cellularmitosis it appears you can order a replacement sensor for the myZeo. Has anyone looked into hacking it to see if you can build something cheaper than $250 which will use the sensor? ------ geekinthecorner Congratulations on shipping! I'm curious if after the setbacks, do you feel that YCombinator was the right model for a hardware start-up? I wonder if the exuberance and rapidity of the single web-app start-up lent itself towards overconfidence in your time schedules and understanding of time to market given the various manufacturing and design challenges?

Cost-Cutting in New York and London = A Boom in India - makimaki http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/business/worldbusiness/12indiawall.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss ====== sidsavara Wow 40% of jobs could be offshored? That surprises me. What is the 60% of jobs that requires a physical presence in wall street? ~~~ eugenejen Meeting customers in person. Sitting in meetings in companies that is going to have IPOs. Sitting in wealthy client's private jet or yachts in Saint Tropez talking about the new products to hedge the client's capital. And because it has to be in person, they would better dress nicely and are attractive. ------ noor420 It is a good time for Indian research-related startups to take advantage of this. Indian VCs should take note. "Over all, United States banks will cut 200,000 employees by 2009, the banking consultancy Celent said in April. " "Theoretically, as much as 40 percent of the research-related jobs on Wall Street, tens of thousands of jobs, could be sent off-shore"

Disabling SSL renegotiation is a crutch, not a fix - bensummers http://blog.ivanristic.com/2010/10/disabling-ssl-renegotiation-is-a-crutch-not-a-fix.html ====== cperciva I disagree. SSL renegotiation is something which should never have existed in the first place. We'd be better off if the TLS working group had removed renegotiation from the standard rather than trying to fix it. If you want new keys, open a new connection.

Warmest March in Global Recordkeeping - splawn https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/warmest-march-in-global-recordkeeping-2016-roars-ahead-of-pack ====== willholloway I've decided to become the guy that on every HN climate change post promotes the only technology that can restore the climate we had. There is a way to get us down from 408ppm back to a safe level like 350ppm, and that is Bio Energy with carbon capture and storage: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio- energy_with_carbon_capture...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio- energy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage) ~~~ zxcvvcxz Tell that to up-and-coming countries like China. Go ahead, see if they want to slow their economic growth for the "environment", let alone the breathing air of their people. And after you tell them off, take a trip to Africa (e.g. Nigeria) as well. By all means, we should work to make it an economical alternative. I suggest that a higher proportion of GDP in first-world countries go towards this type of basic research. But until then, it's not going to happen. ~~~ willholloway I have a filter that ignores pessimism. Here's why you are wrong. China is adopting solar on a massive scale. In fact it's the Chinese solar industry that broke the grid parity barrier. And yes, their people are and will demand cleaner air. And most importantly, new solar is cheaper than new coal plants, even in India. And as far as countries like Nigeria, I propose that the developed world begins to enact sanctions against reckless polluters to incentivize social nation state behavior. I think that we will find, just as transnational oil companies have found, that the governments of countries like Nigeria are easily swayed by outside money. And this idea that controlling carbon will slow economic growth is ludicrous. What do you think having NYC and Miami flooded will do to growth? What about 100 million refugees from Bangladesh. Look at the problem of Syrian refugees for Europe. We did one thing right, and we got solar pv cheap just in the nick of time. ------ hackuser Coverage in The Guardian as well: [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/15/march- tem...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/15/march-temperature- smashes-100-year-global-record) It's very disappointing this isn't a major story (outside the remaining climate denial outlets, such as Fox/Murdoch/WSJ). I don't recall seeing it covered in the NY Times, for example. Perhaps I overlooked it, but it should have been a big enough story that overlooking it was very unlikely. ~~~ ChuckMcM What would be the story? Climate change is real? I think that is pretty well understood by most of the NY Times readers. The story is now "This week in Apocolpyse Forecasting." Two things make this challenging, one is that the highest/lowest/largest/smallest in recorded history is like 150 - 200 years usually, and folks know that in human history at least people were living near gaciers and munching on Mammoth and Sabertooth. So clearly there are temperatures that are both "previously experienced by humans" and "not part of the recorded human record". I think climate change news now that would get coverage would be actions being taken (as opposed to observations being made). What actions will Texas take after this season to mitigate the risk of flooding? What actions will California take to insure reliable water sources across both drought and excess modalities? I think we've reached the "Ok, so what?" phase. ~~~ cryptoz The main problem with that thinking is that if the story is just about adaptation topics, we're going to be fighting a losing war for centuries. Adaptation is urgent to save human lives, yes - but vastly more important is to reduce greenhouse gas output. There is only one story right now for the US News to focus on: Donald Trump thinks climate change is a hoax. Ted Cruz also thinks climate change is a hoax. Hillary Clinton thinks climate change is not a problem and that we should increase our greenhouse gas output as fast as possible. Bernie Sanders considers climate change to be of critical importance and will act as a leader to curtail our greenhouse gas output. He is also the _least likely_ leader in the race right now. The story is not just about adaptation. The story is about how the US political leadership is passionate about increasing the rate of climate change and calling the entire science of climate a 'hoax'. ~~~ Snargorf Have Trump or Cruz ever used the word "hoax", or is that your reinterpretation of their position? Have either one of them ever said that there is no such thing as climate change, as your statement seems to imply? Or, do they just question the details of how the evidence is presented and emphasized, the tradeoffs in the proposed responses, and the perverse incentives involved? ~~~ Analemma_ [https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/721460062355468289](https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/721460062355468289) [https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/26589529219124838...](https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/265895292191248385) I suppose you _could_ interpret these as not necessarily saying "there is no such thing as climate change", if you wanted to be denser than a neutron star. ~~~ rybosome > CO2 is what every human breathes out; every plant, in turn,consumes CO2 That tweet from Ted Cruz is bizarre. We've removed 3.6 million square miles of forest (from the original 6 million)[1], not to mention the billions of tons of CO2 produced annually through fuel combustion. What does the fact that humans expel CO2 have to do with it? [1]: [http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/habitats/rainforests/in...](http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/habitats/rainforests/index.htm) ------ hackuser The same was true of January and February: [https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?e...](https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=3239) [https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?e...](https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=3264) ~~~ dsp1234 FTA: _The JMA measurements go back to 1891 and show that every one of the past 11 months has been the hottest ever recorded for that month._ ~~~ philliphaydon I wonder how the results would look if we used the same tools for those 100years. No doubt more accurate ways of measuring temp only skew results. ~~~ wang_li It doesn't help that the official US temperature record has been adjusted and readjusted to make the past cooler. ~~~ hackuser I wonder if there is a Conspiracy Theory of Gravity, similar to the Conspiracy Theory of Climate Change. There's this, I suppose: [http://wiki.tfes.org/Gravity](http://wiki.tfes.org/Gravity) ~~~ Zuider This particular Flat Earth Society is a satirical group where they entertain themselves with ingenious rationalizations such as the one you linked to. I wouldn't imagine that there is a single true believer among them. ------ joshuaheard I really don't see the point of these "warmest on record" articles. Since we are coming out of an ice age a mere (on the geologic time scale) 12,000 years ago, we should expect increasingly warm temperatures. Also, the "record" in this case only goes back 130 years, and the earth is 4.5 billion years old, so to try and make some sort of global warming generalization based on .00000000028% of the evidence is fallacious. ~~~ cryptoz Another climate change story on HN where the top comment is a denier citing logical fallacies about how statistics and science work. :( As crass as it may sound, I _really_ wish Hacker News would talk about all the money that can be made by building startups that aim at mitigating the effects of climate change, about the routes to renewable, sustainable energy sources (also worth untold trillions of dollars), etc. Instead, HN seems to mostly be composed of climate change deniers. \------------- Edit: HN tells me I'm not allowed to reply to rsync's comment below. Here's my reply: > You don't have to be a "denier" to be annoyed by hearing that the "most (X) > ever" is based on ~150 years of observations. The post author was not expressing annoyance. They expressed that the climate is not changing due to human activity: > Since we are coming out of an ice age a mere (on the geologic time scale) > 12,000 years ago, we should expect increasingly warm temperatures. That is not "a reasonable comment and a reasonable sentiment." It's an extremely damaging falsehood that does not have a place here on HN. ~~~ zxcvvcxz Please point out why the logic in the OP is fallacious. You shouldn't just call someone out like that without having some substance in your post. Plus, it would help undecided people like myself have more data points and logical arguments to consider on both sides. ~~~ cryptoz Sure. > Since we are coming out of an ice age a mere (on the geologic time scale) > 12,000 years ago, we should expect increasingly warm temperatures. No we shouldn't expect this kind of temperature rise. Not like this. This quote is entirely nonsensical, it has no logical backing at all. The rates of temperature rise we are seeing right now are _not_ to be expected based on our last ice age receding. The fallacy here is "made shit up and pretended it was truth". > Also, the "record" in this case only goes back 130 years, and the earth is > 4.5 billion years old The record is a real record. Putting it in quotes implies that it isn't a record. That's false. Also, this implies that the age of the earth is relevant to how we act today. Does NYC or SF care about the temperature of the Earth during the formation of our solar system? No. It's not relevant. > so to try and make some sort of global warming generalization based on > .00000000028% of the evidence is fallacious. Nobody is making that generalization, or using that scale of evidence. This is a fallacy because the post author has pretended that the IBM article quoted said that they (Weather Underground) used .00000000028% of available evidence to draw their conclusion. Again, this is false. ~~~ James001 Again, you didn't cite any actual facts. Repeating something doesn't make it true. You should reply with a citation proving that the rate of temperature rise is an anomaly. Cause right now you're ironically "making shit up and pretending it was truth", in your own words. Also, noting the fact that the record only goes back 130 years is merely pointing out how little statistical significance climate models based on "the record" have. Your post is rank with hypocrisy. ~~~ soundwave106 Longer sets of data exist that are not global in scale. The longest is the Central England Temperature set, going back to 1659. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_England_temperature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_England_temperature) Beyond that, people have attempted reconstruction from other evidence. For instance I found an attempt at a 2000 year reconstruction using tree ring data here: [http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/moberg2005/moberg2005.ht...](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/moberg2005/moberg2005.html) Assuming this reconstruction and others is sound, it is apparent that there definitely is a fair bit of natural temperature variability. But the recent temperature rise in the last 50 years certainly seem like aberration, in terms of rate of change. ------ nikolay Every month and year will be the warmest. You don't need an extraordinary intelligence to see where we'll be 10-15 years from now if we don't do something drastic about it! But I doubt there's much we can do at this stage - it's too late! Just imagine the migration flows of humans and animals from the soon uninhabitable areas like Africa and the Middle East toward the poles. You can foresee pandemics, civil wars, or even a world war. There are already a few tropical diseases that came to Europe like the Bluetongue disease, the West Nile Virus, and others - and this is just the beginning. Our livestock is not prepared, imagine the costs. With this in mind, I think Siberia, Canada, and Alaska are going to be the best locations for my near-future residence... ~~~ edgyswingset I think that's quite the over-exaggeration. While I agree with you in principle, it's a far more nuanced problem. But I will say this: we will have a crisis on our hands in places like Bangladesh. Investing in ways to remedy this will benefit us all. ~~~ nikolay Not an exaggeration, unfortunately - this is what even some NATO officials have been discussing. That's why the migrant crisis is so important - it's a test and it also shows how unprepared the EU for something like this is! ------ visakanv I'm in Singapore (we're right smack on the equator) and it's seriously sweltering here. Really, the hottest it's ever been in my entire life (25yrs). It's unbelievably intense. ~~~ kcarter80 I'm no denier, but take care not to conflate climate with weather. ------ andrewvijay We are going to suffer. I'm worried that my children are going to suffer too ;( ~~~ taberiand Don't worry too much - our children's children won't suffer. They'll be dead. ~~~ guard-of-terra I think you're overdoing it. In the history of Earth there were periods where climate were much hotter, with more greenhouse gases, yet life did not stop. Yes maybe we will suffer (maybe not so much), but don't over-dramatize the issue because drama does not last. ~~~ andrewvijay I think you are not realizing the scale of the impact its gonna create. ------ pink_dinner temperature != climate. This is what all of the same people writing articles like this chirp out whenever someone talks about current temperature changes having anything to do with climate change. ~~~ splawn How do global temp avgs not have anything to do with climate? I must admit though "Global Warming does not mean Global Warming" is at least a new one I haven't heard before, lol. ~~~ sickbeard The thing is when it gets unusually warm everyone cries climate change and when it gets unusually cold it's completely dismissed. That's what OP is pointing out ~~~ pink_dinner Exactly. These popsci articles aren't really based on any scientific facts. ~~~ splawn "Popsci" Says the troll with -4 karma. This story was directly taken from NOAA [0]. [0] [http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201603](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201603)