Faxes from the far side of the moon - <AUTHOR> http://www.damninteresting.com/faxes-from-the-far-side/#read-more <comment><USER2> Boris Chertok described how the first picture was received from the Moon. Korolev and others were in the room, the printer started to print, a very vague picture appeared. Somebody said "we know now that the Moon is round" \- so little could be seen on the picture. A chief project engineer apparently wasn't satisfied, said "we'll get another picture, a better one", took the paper print, torn it and threw into waste basket. Korolev was calm: "Do you understand, that this is the first - realize it, the first - image of the far side of the Moon, seen by humans?"

They did get better pictures later :) .

</comment><comment><USER3> We tend to discuss (understandably) how we don't see the far side of the Moon, discuss the difficulty of the "radio shadow", and are delighted to occasionally see pictures thereof.

Consider the reverse: someone (yes, hypothetically) living their life on the far side of the Moon would be completely unaware their quiet home is just 1.3 light-seconds away from a brilliantly reflective orb teeming with life.

<comment><USER4> Well, all Moonies have to do to see the Earth is to travel to the opposite side of it, whereas to do the opposite from Earth requires launching a vehicle out of the planet's atmosphere, across the orbit of the Moon, and back to Earth again.

Granted, it wasn't until several hundred years ago that Earthlings began to circumnavigate the globe, but the technology to travel long (cross- continental) distances have existed since ancient times.

<comment><USER5> Moonies is not the preferred nomenclature — Mooninites, please.

<comment><USER6> Moonmen, please.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fascinating story.

What's even more fascinating to me is to ponder that the space race was part of an arms race that goes back eons.

It's fun to imagine Og the caveman and his council trying to think up a defense mechanism against the evil Oog. The tribe of Oog's most recent innovation was the spear, allowing them to fight at a distance.

Repeat a million times or two and now we have cyber warfare.

</comment><comment><USER8> Of course there wasn't an 'array of 1000 vacuum tubes'. There was just one. It worked as a good old photo telegraph machine

[http://gorod.tomsk.ru/uploads/34046/1289982897/ta2.jpg](http://gorod.tomsk.ru/uploads/34046/1289982897/ta2.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER9> It was great we had space races during the cold war (and the fact it was cold).

Now we have no more space exploration and just hot wars in Syria. No troops on the ground - wait what, Russia is in Syria? Troops on the ground!

Hey I know, let's give Russia millions of dollars to fly American astronauts to the space station because we can't do it ourselves because we drove NASA's budget into the ground, that will teach them.

<comment><USER10> > _Now we have no more space exploration_

What?

[http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/](http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/)

[https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/all-systems-go-for- nasas-...](https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/all-systems-go-for-nasas- mission-to-jupiter-moon-europa/)

[http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/dawn/](http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/dawn/)

[http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/juno/](http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/juno/)

[http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/mars-science-laboratory- cur...](http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/mars-science-laboratory-curiosity- rover-msl/)

[http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/cassini- huygens/](http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/cassini-huygens/)

> _let 's give Russia millions of dollars to fly American astronauts to the > space station because we can't do it ourselves_

Oh, shit! Nothing is worse than nations cooperating^ to explore space! And it's not like we're working on any way to do it ourselves: [http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/05/18/spacex-has- aggressive-s...](http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/05/18/spacex-has-aggressive- schedule-leading-up-to-crew-flights/)

^ Yeah, this is technically unfair, because it's not so much cooperation as a literal lack of ability, coupled with Russia's occasional vague threats to block America's astronauts from getting to the ISS. It just felt good to say it.

<comment><USER11> Space exploration of this sort has a long lead time. We're reaping the fruits of year and years of labor with most of those.

Cassini started in the Eighties and launched in 1997. New Horizons was greenlit in 2001 after a decade of work and launched in 2006. Dawn was intitially greenlit 2001 and finally launched in 2007. Curiosity started in 2004 and launched in 2011. Juno was greenlit in 2005 and launched in 2011.

The Europa Mission will, presuming no delays, launch in 7-10 years. In between there is very, very little. (One asteroid sample return mission, and one Mars lander. Nothing beyond the asteroids until the Europa mission, and nothing greenlit for afterwards.)

<comment><USER12> Yeah, exactly! The saddest part of all this beautiful discovery and imagery is that we are about to be thirsty for more, and there are hardly any new robots in the pipeline. So sad.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Creating email templates with React components - <AUTHOR> https://assertible.com/blog/creating-email-templates-with-react-components <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, author here! This method of inlining CSS for email templates has been serving us well for a while now at Assertible. All of our emails are created with React components and then compiled down to static markup; with dynamic data injected via props.

I'm interested to hear some other ways people have achieved this, or answer questions for anyone looking to do something similar!</comment>


Supreme Court Justices Get More Liberal as They Get Older - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/supreme-court-justices-get-more-liberal-as-they-get-older/ <comment><USER2> This is not really news.</comment>


Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Semantic Web Is Open for Business - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/semantic-web/

<comment><USER2> A direct link to the podcast transcript: [http://talis- podcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/twt20080207_TimBL.htm...](http://talis- podcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/twt20080207_TimBL.html)</comment>


The Problem with Airbnb - <AUTHOR> http://bellity.tumblr.com/post/49355955347/the-problem-with-airbnb

<comment><USER2> Is there possibly a mixup between hosts and guests/patrons in the last-but-two paragraph?

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, fixed it !</comment></comment>


C++11 and The Long-Term Viability Of GCC Questioned - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI4NDU <comment><USER2> Certain "journalists" are seriously jumping the gun if they assume GCC is just going to shrivel up and die. In addition to mainline, it is used privately in a hundred different branches, several of which are commercially supported (e.g. Codesourcery, Google Native Client) and many the public will never know about.

There is a vast body of consumers who care more about maturity and stability than a few convenient front-end tricks, which the majority of C++11 ultimately amounts to. As for whether GCC is somehow "too far gone" to catch up, well that's just nonsense, the core technology has barely changed in 10 years. Things will improve when commercial needs arise and as eager PHDs hunt for final year projects.

While ancient, there is immense diversity in GCC's configurations, and AFAIK its code generator still maintains an edge over Free alternatives. Of the purported speed improvements elsewhere, anecdotal evidence from my Macbook suggests LLVM is slower at building smaller projects (predicted long ago by smart types that knew LLVM was only fast because it lacked features).

It's worth noting that GCC already supports significantly more C++11 than either MSVC11 or ICC, although this article makes no such comparison. Like the majority of articles from Phoronix, this one is blinded by the new hotness (LLVM) and a generally superficial appreciation of the subject matter.

<comment><USER3> GCC already "shriveled up and died" once -- the egcs project got so far ahead of regular GCC in development that the FSF basically just said, "congratulations, you are the new maintainers and your project is now the official GCC mainline".

GCC is stagnant, but the dynamic pace of development on the Clang front means that either the GCC developers will adapt, or the community will adapt GCC for them.

<comment><USER4> There's a bit of a difference, though.

For one, there wasn't any viable competition at the time. Your options were GCC, or a commercial compiler. If you actually needed access to the source code of the compiler for any reason, GCC was your only option.

So, when it became clear that the FSF and the community wanted to take GCC in different directions, the obvious choice was to fork GCC. The fork developed far more rapidly than the original, draining developer time (and users, for that matter) from GCC mainline. Basically, at the point where the FSF anointed egcs as the new GCC, the original GCC project was already dead.

Things are a bit different nowadays.

There are already disagreements between what people wanted to do with GCC, and the FSF. Especially around the tool support the article talked about - the FSF are against reorganizing GCC so that parts can be used as a library for political reasons. They were against plugins for the same reason originally. They have been resisting any attempts to clean up or modernize the codebase (they've been doing it, but very slowly, because it takes the steering committee a long time to... erm... steer).

There's an alternative - Clang / LLVM, which is built around that kind of tool support, has less niche stuff to get in the way, cleaner, simpler codebase, no legacy stuff. A good few GCC developers have jumped behind that instead, rather than trying to work against the FSF, and Clang isn't having the kind of problems attracting new developers that GCC is.

At this point, it does look like GCC is in trouble. The problem is that there might not be anything that anyone can do about it. As with all large projects with a long history, GCC has a hell of a lot of inertia, and it would take massive effort to shift the direction of the whole project, and make the changes that need to be made, especially considering that they can't just stop and spend a couple of years refactoring (which would definitely kill GCC).

<comment><USER5> Actually the reasons against plugins and GCC being used as 'a library' went beyond mere politics, it was also a practical consideration as it affected the relevance/existance of GCC.

Back then the there was an obvious threat of GCC becoming little more than a backend/frontend solution for proprietary interests which could lead to the open source part eventually wither and die.

Steve Jobs when at NeXT illustrates this problem as he tried to combine NeXT's proprietary ObjC frontend with GCC's backend and sell it under the reasoning that the 'end user would do the linking', he couldn't legally do so which is how GCC ended up with ObjC support which it otherwise hadn't, atleast not then.

Nowadays open source is established and it's benefits are well proven so these choices may look overly paranoid when viewed in the open source landscape of today, but back then and for a long time in GCC's development they certainly weren't.

The fact that an open source free compiler toolchain like GCC has established itself as such a 'de facto' solution has obviously had an incredible impact on the acceptance of open source in general, not to mention that Linux, the open source BSD's, and tons of other open source projects (and likely lots of proprietary projects aswell) would never have gotten anywhere near where they are today had it not been for the existance of GCC, a top-notch compiler toolchain free of charge and free to distribute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One intervening factor, imo, is that adding support for C++11 is a complex and unpleasant enough undertaking that few volunteers are able to do it, and fewer of those are interested in doing so. I would guess most language/compiler hackers would rather hack on something other than the mess that is C++ compilation, if they have a choice (and if they're volunteers, they do have a choice). So it ultimately boils down to what companies want to do, since many enterprises are heavily invested in C++. If someone pays their employees to contribute support for GCC, it'll get done, and otherwise, it's less likely. Not that much different from the Clang situation, where C++11 is only really getting implemented because Apple cares enough about getting C++11 support into XCode to pay for it to happen.

<comment><USER7> don't underestimate the capabilities of `volunteers', or floss developers; nearly 30 years of apple software was thrown away again and again, and apple jumped to something new without much backward compatibility. So, they _enabling_ sophisticated development by paying is a temporary illusion.

<comment><USER8> Are you referring to the move to OS X? Apple ran the previous operating system within the new operating system just to run those old apps, and Carbon was provided as a transitional API for many years. I'm not sure what this has to do with anything, really.

A backwards compatibility argument (whatever it may be) doesn't make sense here, as Clang has been designed to be backwards compatible with GCC-based projects.

<comment><USER9> Plus, being based on NeXTSTEP and the Mach kernel, OS X was not exactly a "new" operating system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Last few times I've seen Phoronix articles my impression is honestly "this is a troll website, right?"

But I was pretty surprised by the attitude that surfaced very early in the linked thread on the GCC list, too. Outwardly hostile, as if to say, "well damn, you losers sure better catch up with LLVM right this instant, otherwise you're making lame excuses". I don't have any involvement in either project (other than the fact that I've used and appreciated both compilers), but this strikes me to fundamentally misunderstand open source. Does LLVM have to fail for GCC to succeed?

<comment><USER11> The argument isn't about one or the other failing. For the same reason Cobol and Fortran are still used and iterated upon to this day, GCC will also never "die". It is deeply ingrained into many toolchains used by many companies. The article if vapor because the moment a company wants some C++11 feature in GCC, they have a value proposition - refactor their code base to work on Clang (which may not have feature parity with all their optimization / compiler flags from GCC) or contribute the missing parts into GCC.

And a lot of companies will still go with the latter. GCC is fine, and won't "die". The systemic problem in LLVM/Clang vs GCC is that the former is modular and has an intermediary language that makes _new_ compiled languages much easier to implement a compiler for. The resut is that if you were to write a new compiler, LLVM is so far and away the best choice it isn't even a content. So it has momentum GCC doesn't, and that momentum means it will see much more active development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The reason that gcc loses the original context is that rms wanted it that way. The "middle" of gcc is muddy expressly to make it difficult to "plug-in" a proprietary optimizer.

The forced transition to GPL v3 isn't helping. OS X and Free SD are both largely transitioned to LLVM. Linux is a holdout, but how long will it be able to prop up gcc on its own?

<comment><USER13> I wrote portions of this middle end. In fact, the "middle end" is the least muddy part of GCC at all.

It's muddy mainly because GNU coding standards and portability rules prevented people from doing things right when they had the time to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have to agree with Diego Novillo's comment about Clang's parser. Projects like the Clang complete vim plugin come to mind. Ctags/Cscope doesn't really work to well with overloaded functions and having something that "understands" the language rather than just matching patterns helps.

<comment><USER15> KDevelop has a very sophisticated C++ parser (duchain I think they call it) which even provides semantic information (e.g. you can syntax highlight pointers differently from objects, non-virtual method calls different from virtual, etc.)

Example overview: [http://zwabel.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/c-ide-evolution- from-...](http://zwabel.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/c-ide-evolution-from-syntax- highlighting-to-semantic-highlighting/)

<comment><USER8> But one of the points of Clang's toolability is that you don't have to write your own parser. You can use the compiler's and see what the compiler will see, avoiding inconsistencies as well as unnecessary work.

<comment><USER15> DUChain actually might even predate Clang from what I've been able to dig up today, but there's a few other points working against Clang supplanting it:

1\. DUChain was designed to support multiple languages (since KDevelop does). E.g. there is work going on now to offer first-class JavaScript support in KDevelop, which libclang wouldn't help with.

2\. No one has done the work to verify API/ABI compatibility guarantees, porting libclang into DUChain, etc.

There's interest though:

<https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=253650> <https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172622>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> LWN has great coverage on the modularity issue, from the time period when Clang was just getting started: <http://lwn.net/Articles/301135/>

</comment><comment><USER17> > Richard Guenther responded by saying, "Note that we can't > drive GCC into > the garage and refactor it for two years."

Wasn't this essentially what the egcs project did? It's possible that GCC might need another round of this; could doing that provide a potential avenue out of the current troubles?

<comment><USER18> Not really. EGCS was producing real, usable releases while it was forked. It wasn't a rewrite in any meaningful sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why oh why is the drivel from Phoronix repeatedly at the top of HN. In the few cases where I have know people involved in what Larabel writes about they have always said that he blows things out of proportions and that little of what is written is actually true.

</comment><comment><USER20> The last two articles from Phoronix that I've seen pee on the FSF/GPLv3 efforts. Do they have an axe to grind, or is this just my sample bias?

<comment><USER21> Articles which insults the FSF/GPLv3 seem to always get very highly voted on ycombinator. I read phoronix and I hadn't noticed a FSF-bias.

On the other hand, the stories also all seem true. There really is a serious problem with being attached to the FSF being a liability, and RMS really has held GCC back, and is (in my opinion) the main reason clang/llvm has been able to move ahead in some areas (in particular tool support), where for years RMS explicitly rejected any patch which would make gcc "tool-friendly".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I learned C programming in 1987 using Turbo C. I recovered several small programs I wrote for the C class and converted them to work on GCC under Ubuntu.

Most of the code didn't need changes, except where it handled strings (or the char *string1 type string) because somehow gets() caused a segment fault and when I switched to scanf() it worked without crashing. When I used the math.h library and the sqrt() function I had to use the -lm switch on the compiler to get it to work.

I rewrote them in C++ using the G++ compiler and found that the std::string works better than the old C string, and that the cin and cout commands work better than gets and scanf.

I really don't see much of a problem unless you are converting Pre-ANSI C code to the current standard or something. I think that the scope changed, but back in 1987 we were taught to keep variable names used in functions inside of functions, etc to keep the scope the same and don't try to access something out of scope. I guess that is why my programs converted so easily? They also didn't need a lot of resources or libraries and were simple programs written for the command line for DOS using Turbo C.

Should I use CLANG or LLVM instead? How about Visual C++ or Borland C++? Am I doing wrong trying to learn GCC and G++ or should I try learning under a different C++ compiler?

<comment> iso-8859-1 Why not just write code for the standard? Unless you are using your own stdlib or something, it shouldn't matter much what compiler you use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> And what about ARM, which is used on the majority of phones these days? AFAIK, LLVM/Clang is way behind GCC on ARM support.

<comment><USER24> iOS is compiled with Clang.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great!!!

How long until RMS lets us drop the GNU/ part in what he calls Linux?

</comment><comment><USER26> Something interesting to note is that the complexity and internal coupling in GCC was an _intentional_ design decision by GNU to make it harder for non-free software projects to make use of gcc.

Here's a pretty good talk about the philosophical motivations behind Clang and the current work being done on it:

[http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012...](http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/GoingNative-2012/Clang- Defending-C-from-Murphy-s-Million-Monkeys)

<comment><USER27> Although the Clang developers claim GCC was poorly adapted to non-compiler use on purpose, the GCC developers seem to have been very eager to accept patches that make these use cases work better. If they were truly opposed to people using GCC as a module in a larger system, why would they go out of their way to encourage modularization?

And please don't link to that RMS email as "evidence"; RMS has about as much control over GNU projects' technical details as Charles Manson does over the music industry.

<comment><USER28> >If they were truly opposed to people using GCC as a module in a larger system, why would they go out of their way to encourage modularization?

The claim I've seen repeatedly is that this is precisely because they must now compete with Clang/etc.

<comment><USER27> That implies that the previous lack of modularization was a practical decision, not a political or philosophical one. Implementation of the GCC plugins system started in 2008. Can you imagine the GCC team completely changing their philosophical stance almost overnight (Clang's first release was in mid 2007), just to get more users? It would be as if they'd relicensed to proprietary software to better compete with VC++.

Previously GCC's primary competitor was ICC, and they were compared based on the quality of their output. Now GCC's primary competitor is Clang, and they compete on how user-friendly their interface is. Modularization is a user interface improvement, just like better error messages or more comprehensive warnings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> C++11 is a theoretical language developed by a committee which doesn't really exist in practice.

That gcc, like most other C++ compilers, does not support it, means little.

<comment><USER30> I don't think denial is the best way to cope with the news.

Last time I checked C++11 has been an ISO standard since last August, with MS and Clang ramping up their support for it.

<comment><USER27> But neither fully supports it yet, just as GCC doesn't. Even when they claim to support every feature in the standard, that's just the beginning -- next comes fixing all the bugs and corner cases that naturally arise from a spec as complex as C++11.

<comment><USER31> And? Essentially the same thing happened with C++98, and in the long run it didn't hurt adoption too much. To me, it seems like the compiler are doing a better job this time around.

<comment><USER27> The point is that it's silly to criticize GCC for having incomplete C++11 support one year after the standard has finalized, and even sillier to point to other compilers' less-complete support as evidence that GCC is falling behind.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Windows Server Containers Released in Preview - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2015/08/19/new-windows-server-preview-fuels-application-innovation-with-containers-software-defined-datacenter-updates.aspx

<comment><USER2> That's a lot of crickets for this announcement.</comment>


Solve a big problem for a few folks or a small problem for lots of folks - <AUTHOR> http://rodinhood.com/Confessions-Digital-Entrepreneur

<comment><AUTHOR> A pretty awesome read. Though peppered with references to Indian culture. For ex, Marwaris - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marwaris> If you are curious about some other things, I can probably chime in !</comment>


'Doomsday' Math Says Humanity May Have Just 760 Years Left - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/doomsday-math-says-humanity-may-have-just-760-years-left-11561655839?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> "Since it is equally likely that those of us living today are in the first or second half of all past and future human births..."

Something about this predicate seems suspect. I can understand the reasoning, but it seems like we're mixing two separate domains of probability to arrive at the conclusion, much like the common wrong answer to the Monty Hall problem.

<comment><USER3> One key problem with the premise is the assumption that your (lack of) priors indicate a flat distribution. It sounds reasonable at face-value, but in the bayesian framework it is actually a rather strong assumption that can be leveraged to arrive at far less reasonable conclusions.

<comment><USER4> It's a credible sounding way to sneak in the law of averages.

edit: it only works for German tanks because you can reasonably assume that the Germans aren't warehousing significantly more tanks than you've seen.

<comment><USER5> In lieu of German Tank serial numbers, Gott's original paper uses projections from Ehrlich and Ehrlich's 1990 Population Explosion paper that the world's population will top out at around 10 billion, then essentially cause a dumpster fire and crash and burn. Obviously extremely speculative stuff that's been sensationalized here.

<comment><USER6> Why the dumpster fire and crash though instead of stability or expansion into space for example?

Seems like a silly guess. Plus bad climate and famines and wars can stop it much earlier than those 10 billion.

<comment><USER5> I can't get past the paywall to read the original Population Explosion paper that Gott uses, but the dumpster fire premise seems to comes from the assumption of tragedy-of-the-commons-style environmental degradation. The Wikipedia on Ehrlich offers the following comment:

> When is an area overpopulated? When its population can't be maintained > without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources (or converting renewable > resources into nonrenewable ones) and without degrading the capacity of the > environment to support the population. In short, if the long-term carrying > capacity of an area is clearly being degraded by its current human > occupants, that area is overpopulated.

I agree with you that it is questionable set of assumptions, though I think when considering some of issues humanity is facing in the realm of climate change and water shortages, it's not an entirely untenable hypothesis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So let's say we did this way back in time, when only 100 humans had been born. They could have been in the 1st half or the 2nd half. In either case, this would seem to predict that no more than 100 more would be born, which is clearly absurd.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER5> I think you're missing that this columnist may in fact be a sensationalist hack. As far as I can tell, nowhere in Gott's paper does he imply that we will end in less than a thousand years. From a quick scan of the paper, Gott's most incendiary statement is that there is a 95% confidence interval that our remaining species lifetime is in the range of 12 to 7.8e6 years.

If anyone wants to check for themselves, hopefully it's not against HN rules to link the paper: [https://sci-hub.tw/10.1038/363315a0](https://sci- hub.tw/10.1038/363315a0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's an assumption here that you're sampling an ergodic process.[1] 'All tanks the Germans have built so far' satisfies this assumption (assuming equal likelihood of capture). 'All tanks the Germans will ever build' doesn't. In other words, you can't sample the 200Bth human because they haven't been born yet, and this isn't evidence they will never be born.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary_ergodic_process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stationary_ergodic_process)

<comment><USER6> It can be limit process though, like a sigmoid, that eventually becomes stationary. That is a big assumption though. Evolution was punctuated by such seeming stable domains only to reset everything once conditions changed... Or push past previously known barriers. This including technical progress early in human history. The population function over long time is not exactly smooth either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Im pretty sure I watched a numberphile video on this. I'm having trouble googling it. Anyone know the video I'm talking about?

This is the sort of thing that belongs on HN, but not WSJ. WSJ should be talking about the privacy issues they vaguely touch on before going back to talking about doomsday by statistical argument.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Equation that powers today's computer algorithms"

Uh, what? I closed the tab at this point.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps if you open the tab back up, you'll find your question answered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given that we have already experience 5 consecutive "500 years summer" in the past 5 years, we might be living in the last 7 years of our 760 years.</comment>


What Vietnam Taught Us About Breaking Bad Habits - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/01/02/144431794/what-vietnam-taught-us-about-breaking-bad-habits <comment><USER2> An implicit environmental factor that they don't stress: being in an environment where people are actively trying to kill you might well make people take refuge in drugs or alcohol.</comment>


Why Did Friendster Fail? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15friend.html?ex=1318564800&en=3e9438ed349f7ce7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss <comment><USER2> Interesting read. Sadly, the article's chart takes figure distortion to new levels. (is that even deliberate?)

<http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2006/10/14/business/15friend_Chart_ready.html>

<comment><USER3> Looks like someone didn't know that doubling the radius quadruples the area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why they think Friendster failed: the mostly non-technical board of directors did lots of bone-headed things.

<comment><USER5> While the article certainly emphasizes that the non-technical board was a detriment to the company, I think that the fundamental problem is revealed in the quote "We completely failed to execute." Their product didn't work well, and this problem existed before the influx of money and board members. Blaming it on the board is conventient, but even the best board can't make a company successful if their product is broken.

<comment><USER6> The board, however, can direct attention toward fixing the broken product. From the article, it sounds like Friendster's board didn't do this. Instead of focusing their attention on fixing performance problems and making the site usable, they had pie-in-the-sky notions of beating Google and Yahoo and getting into the VOIP space.

One of the best pieces of engineering-management advice I ever got goes like this: "Engineers do what you tell them to do - repeatedly." If the board is spending all its time thinking about cool new features, the engineers will implement cool new features. If the board starts talking about performance and communicates that downwards, the performance issues will get fixed.

Remember how Microsoft won the browser wars: Bill Gates took all the company's best developers, put them on the IE team, and refused to speak to anyone unless it was about the Internet. That's the kind of single-minded focus you need to turn a company around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's a funny line where a social networking startup has a meeting with a VC.

The startup guys claim they're going to the next MySpace.

But the VC isn't impresseed, he retorts "Tell me why you aren't going to be the next Friendster" !

</comment><comment><USER7> Notice how many mistakes Digg is now repeating? Amazing... they haven't learned from Friendster.

</comment><comment><USER8> """ trailing even myYearbook.com"""

To be fair, that site literally bought 90% of its users.</comment>


U.S. Will Join G-7 Artificial Intelligence Pact, Citing Threat from China - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-28/g-7-ai-group-adds-u-s-citing-threat-from-china <comment><USER2> How can I read this article when I have no free articles left?

<comment><USER3> [https://web.archive.org/web/20200528023707/https://www.bloom...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200528023707/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-28/g-7-ai- group-adds-u-s-citing-threat-from-china)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How are teams whiteboarding while working remote? - <AUTHOR> We've all just been thrust into working remotely and one of the challenges our team is facing is how do we do whiteboard collaboration? Our team space features a wall that's a whiteboard where we brainstorm architectures and designs. Once we've settled on an approach we capture that result more formally but we use whiteboards to do our brainstorming. How are you doing this while working remotely? <comment><USER2> So there are actual whiteboard type solutions like Vibe (paid product) that can plug into Slack or Zoom etc, but I have not used them personally.

I have tried a number of different things with my teams over the years. One is of course just a screen share and use a drawing app or UML etc (Visio was common). But what I like right now is to use a document share app, specifically Quip for us, which allows everyone to open the document in real time and it supports drawing, shapes and text entry etc. Plus when you are done it is a saved document that everyone has access to so you have the documentation done now too, and if any changes are needed you have change tracking built in. It is far from perfect, but for most smaller teams it works well and doesn't require extra licenses or anything.

I will say none of these solutions are perfect, but I am also the person that still likes to write my notes and draw on whiteboards to let me think through problems. And doing that with any digital software just never feels as natural (or fast) to me. I may just be getting old, but even when I am just doing architecture drawings myself I write it down first (whiteboard/paper etc), then document it digitally once I have settled on something more well thought out.</comment>


'Atomic Annie' Was the World's First and Only Nuclear Gun - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/atomic-annie-the-nuclear-gun <comment><USER2> It wasn't the 'only' nuclear gun, it was only nuclear gun _used_. The US had many other 280mm, 203mm and 410mm cannons that were able to fire nuclear shells in their inventory from 1953-1992, and the russians developed a number of nuclear artillery shells that were (at least officially) not used in tests, but remained in the inventory for use.</comment>


Ask HN:  Best Fiction Book(s) You Have Read In 2011 - <AUTHOR>

Doesn't have to be published in 2011. <comment><USER2> Fiction? Hmmm... I'd say:

 _11/22/63_ \- Stephen King

 _77 Shadow Street_ \- Dean Koontz

 _The Name of the Wind_ \- Patrick Rothfuss

 _The Wise Man's Fear_ \- Patrick Rothfuss

 _Zero History_ \- William Gibson

 _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ \- William Gibson

</comment><comment><USER3> The Name Of The Wind and The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss

De ontdekking van de hemel (The Discovery of Heaven), by Harry Mulisch

1984, by George Orwell

Night Angel trilogy, by Brent Weeks

Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies, by Robin Hobb

Gentlemen Bastards series (first two books), by Scott Lynch

Das Parfum (Perfume), by Patrick Süskind

Some may have been from end 2010</comment>


How My Music Was Plagiarized for Profit and How I Fought Back - <AUTHOR> http://jeremylimmusic.com/legal/how-my-music-was-plagiarized-for-profit-and-how-i-fought-back-joseph-ti-into-the-deep/

<comment><USER2> If everything Jeremy Lim is saying is true, it's encouraging to see the dreaded DMCA being used to fight against actual IP violations of "the little guy," as well as companies going above and beyond to help him out. Kudos Jeremy - nice artistic work, and working with the system to recover your work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't believe how selfish this guy is. Doesn't he know that having other people lay claim to his music is the highest form of praise? Praise that he doesn't deserve, since he doesn't play live and appears to think that he should be entitled to exploit his own creative output for financial gain. A real parasite on society.

/sarcasm

<comment><USER4> _Steal my music? I can accept that and can even appreciate the exposure. Steal my music with someone else's name on it? Oh, man. I wanted to hurl._

Sarcasm aside, this is a wide miss when it comes to this guy. There's a huge difference between a fan that wants to hear your tracks for free (which they can _all_ do right on the artist's website and youtube channel) and a predator who searches for that perfect nexus of mildly popular up-and-comer who lacks the legal muscle to fight back in order to exploit both artist and fan alike.

<comment><USER3> I don't know why the three of you insist on trying to shift the argument to piracy, which I didn't even bring up. There, unfortunately, lots of people who defend the idea that 'there's nothing new under the sun' and therefore it's OK to appropriate the work of others for remixing or what-all else.

The fact that you're defending against an argument I never made in the first place strikes me as a classic case of 'protesting too much'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A quick search on Google Play still lists the track mentioned: [http://i.imgur.com/IUe6qwE.png](http://i.imgur.com/IUe6qwE.png)

</comment><comment><USER6> This happens quite often. Something similar happened to Bjorn Lynne, who some might remember as "Dr Awesome" from the days of .MOD files. Bjorn posted his story via updates on Facebook:

[https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1015166480...](https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151664802911868&id=41670261867) [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1015166480...](https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151664803161868&id=41670261867) [https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1015168726...](https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151687263021868&id=41670261867)</comment>


Zencoder releases the cloud's most efficient HTTP Live Streaming - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zencoder.com/2011/12/08/announcing-the-clouds-most-efficient-http-live-streaming/

<comment><USER2> Title might be more accurate as "efficient _encoding_ for HTTP Live Streaming." Also, from the article, it's with "a similar level of optimization to Apple's own [encoding] tools."</comment>


Google Invests $168MM in World's Largest Solar Power Tower Plant - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/04/12/ivanpah-google-solar-energy/

<comment><USER2> That is such a smart design (using mirrors to focus sunlight onto one point rather than using lots of solar panels spread about). How long have scientists had this idea?

<comment><USER3> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#The_Archimedes_Heat_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#The_Archimedes_Heat_Ray)

Two millennia or so. Power generation has always been applying new ways to boil water (save wind and hydro).

<comment><USER2> Actually I misconstrued what the design was. I thought the mirrors would project a higher concentration of sunlight onto a traditional solar panel (except one designed to accept much higher input/density), thus saving the cost of making many panels and many periodic replacements. Mirrors are presumably cheaper and/or more durable than solar panels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone come across a calculation on how this affects the local climate? Won't this system be sucking 390MW of energy out of the environment to convert to mechanical energy?

The effect must be noticeable. I get the same feeling about wind. If solar ever became large scale wouldn't we be directly countering global warming? And won't solar panels/mirrors be directly competing for the solar energy that wind uses?

<comment><USER4> Total energy consumption of the world: 474 exajoules. Total solar energy absorbed by earth: 3,850,000 exajoules

But your argument is even more rudimentally answered as such: energy captured by solar panels is still in the Earth's atmosphere. It'll appear later as heat anyways, once its energy is used practically. If you want to counter global warming with solar panels directly, they would have to be situated above the atmosphere, and NOT transmit any energy down to the surface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are a number of solar thermal plants in development now. It is worth noting that it is possible to store the energy for use in dark times by including storage tanks in the molten salt loop, though I don't see that in this plant's description and it isn't important until there is a significant solar contribution to the total energy production.

</comment><comment><USER6> Original announcement: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/investing-in- worlds-l...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/investing-in-worlds- largest-solar-power.html)

<comment><USER7> A better summary, as it gives you some specifics, it's a 392MW (gross) generating plant (I found another link that also mentioned 370MW nominal). Compare to a typical coal-fired plant at 500MW, up to 1,000MW or more.

<comment><USER8> I guess that means that 370MW is the nominal optimal generating power? From what I read, thermal solar has a capacity factor of only about 20% [1], which means this solar farm will average out to about 70MW, which isn't that much.

Coal has a capacity factor of about 60% and nuclear 90% [2], so this is similar to a 120MW coal plant or a 80MW nuclear power plant. Of course, you can't really compare them only on total power provided, as solar provides most of its power during the day, which is also the time in which the energy demand is the highest.

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

[2] [http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epaxlfile5_2.pd...](http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epaxlfile5_2.pdf)

<comment><USER9> Quoting your [1] (end of power tower desing paragraph [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Power_towe...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Power_tower_designs) ):

>The capacity factor for power towers was estimated to be 72.9% and 56.2% for parabolic troughs.

so the 20% figure is simply incorrect, and is probably the one applying to rooftop solar heaters, which are a totally different type of design.

<comment><USER8> The 20% efficiency is, as stated in the other comment, about correct for a plant without thermal storage. See far example [1]. What happens with the higher efficiency ratings is that they put more mirrors on the tower, or have a smaller turbine. That is, the ratio between thermal input and electric output increases. They can do this because any heat that isn't used by the turbine right at that moment can be stored temporarily and then used later on when the incoming heat isn't enough to power the turbine at 100%.

Which means that with an efficiency rating of 73%, you still need many more mirrors than with the capacity factor of 25%, but you just don't upgrade your turbine, and instead rely on thermal storage. Which one is preferred (bigger turbine or thermal storage) depends on the cost of turbines and thermal storage, and on whether you want to have baseload power or higher output during the day.

As a note, the 72.9% and 56.2% you quoted were estimates made in 2003 for the year 2020, so I wouldn't put to much trust into them.

As for Ivanpah itself, it appears to not have any thermal storage planned (which would have to be the biggest thermal storage ever created to be useful), according to [2], so it would be limited to about a 25% capacity factor.

[1] <http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/49303.pdf>

[2] [http://www.basinandrangewatch.org/IvanpahFSA- reliability.htm...](http://www.basinandrangewatch.org/IvanpahFSA- reliability.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the best test for statistical randomness? - <AUTHOR> Current choices seem to be NIST SP-800-22, DieHarder and Test U01, all of which certainly overlap.<p>Why is there no battery of tests that includes standards developed by different countries and their obvious biases? <comment><USER3> Broad statistical tests are good enough for most all non-crypto RNGs - <USER2> you pass DieHarder you're probably good enough for practially all common RNG uses.

Breaking crypto RNGs is a subtle enough art that having a standardized set of tests wouldn't actually prove anything useful - it would be like saying "We tried every key in our collection on this new padlock and none of them worked, therefore the padlock is secure."

-Austin, author of SMHasher

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://random.mat.sbg.ac.at/tests/](http://random.mat.sbg.ac.at/tests/) "On this page, you will find information on tests for uniform random number generators (RNGs)"

</comment><comment><USER5> Lossless compression algorithms. True randomness should yield near 0% compression ratios.

</comment><comment><USER6> PractRand is a useful test suite.</comment>


Rare 1930s Audio: W.B. Yeats Reads Four of His Poems - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/rare_1930s_audio_wb_yeats_reads_four_of_his_poems.html

<comment><USER2> That's lovely. Sometimes I thought of the Innisfree poem while I toiled in front of my computer!

Related: Auden wrote a great poem called In Memory of W.B. Yeats. Read by the poet: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygjgQt76x5w>

</comment><comment><USER3> salon.com used to have T.S. Eliot reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" but the web page that references the audio (<http://www.salon.com/2000/10/05/eliot/>) no longer has a link to the audio. One of those sad losses to website redesign, I assume.

It was a pleasant reading and of my favorite things to listen to from time to time...I post the comment hoping someone can help me find the link somewhere. So far, I've not had luck.

<comment><USER4> There are several such videos on Youtube. Was it this one? <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAO3QTU4PzY>

I enjoy listening to these old recordings as well.

<comment><USER3> Yes, thanks. I found a few other recordings this time searching Google (<http://town.hall.org/radio/HarperAudio/011894_harp_ITH.html>), so who knows why it failed before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Listening to his description of the creation and meaning of the Lake Isle of Innisfree makes me realize that I overthink the meaning of poems.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good. If you are into these things, this is also a good audio

Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu - Antonin Artaud - 1948 [1]

[1]: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiTiz2fxJcM></comment>


When scientists become hedge fund managers - <AUTHOR> http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/06/25/1057601/when-scientists-become-hedge-fund-managers/

<comment><USER2> The same argument can be made about other sectors that are considered hot. We're having a hard time attracting young talent into mainstream R&D engineering because dotcom and social media companies are sucking talent into faddish and ultimately doomed companies.

On the other hand, like several commenters on the FT site noted, maybe we're better off hiring whoever isn't chasing the latest trend.

<comment><USER3> It's funny because before I started here in Silicon Valley, I've periodically applied to many large companies that have traditional R&D. My experience in academic R&D at the DOE National Laboratories made me want to transition over.

IBM, Intel, and many others, simply ignored my application. I didn't go to a top ten school, or I didn't have "8 years experience in XYZ," so I was overlooked.

Right now I work at one of the biggest Internet companies in the world, but do you know how I got in here? Through an acquired startup. The people in my small area had the vision to see that I had skill, even though my resume didn't say Stanford or MIT.

My suggestion to you is that maybe the big traditional companies are not trying that hard to hire. Let's face it, it's going to be harder and harder to get grads from the top schools as long as they're getting millions in funding from VCs.

<comment><USER2> I agree, that's part of what's going on. A big company is going to have a hard time making an exception from it's salary curves to attract a top candidate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The paper linked in the article also indicates that it isn't exclusively about talent, but that scarce capital can also be misallocated towards the financial sector during financial booms:

"Second, we note that finance requires financing. That is, financial intermediaries compete with non-financial intermediaries for financial resources. This leads us to conjecture that firms that rely more heavily on external finance will be in more direct competition with the financial intermediaries themselves for resources."

( from <http://sirc.rbi.org.in/downloads/4Cecchetti.pdf> )

</comment><comment><USER5> The analysis isn't so straightforward. What about scientists who use their hedge fund windfalls to fund fundamental scientific research? <http://www.deshawresearch.com/></comment>


Segway introduces an egg-shaped transportation pod - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/segway-s-pod-personal-transporter-egg-hoverchair-2020-1 <comment><USER2> Anyone care to give a price estimate?</comment>


China Argues for 'Internet Sovereignty.' Is It a Good Idea? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/06/23/chinas-lays-out-argument-for-internet-sovereignty-convinced/

<comment><USER2> No.</comment>


43-Man Squamish - <AUTHOR> https://43-mansquamish.weebly.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Fun fact: This page is about 43-Man Squamish, referred to by the 6th question on the faux Trivial Pursuit game card shown for a brief instant, at approximately 1:10 of Wierd Al Yankovic's "White And Nerdy" video:

Video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw)

Trivial Pursuit Game Card:

[https://imgur.com/gallery/vhbTBFd](https://imgur.com/gallery/vhbTBFd)</comment>


Nearly 9,000 Artifacts Uncovered in CA Desert, Spanning 11,500 Years of History - <AUTHOR> http://westerndigs.org/nearly-9000-artifacts-uncovered-in-california-desert-spanning-11500-years-of-history/ <comment><USER2> Still there because mostly undisturbed I imagine. Any sites near human habitation get messed with pretty badly.

My wife grew up on a mesa in New Mexico - White Rock, near Los Alamos. She reports exploring as a child with neighbor kids. They found stone houses with intact pottery inside, wooden frames and tools. The kids messed with them, then the boys knocked everything down and threw the pots over the side of the mesa. Nothing left but a few broken fragments today.

We'll be running out of places for archaeologist to explore one day.

<comment><USER3> FWIW, there's no way of knowing those houses are actually ancient artifacts.

<comment><USER2> I know of no modern population in the American Southwest that produced pottery and stone houses on mesas. It seems a pretty safe bet. The other preserved sites in the area are estimated at 500 years old. Not terribly ancient; but worth preserving.

<comment><USER4> Acoma Pueblo is currently producing pottery and stone houses on a mesa, as they've been doing for 900 years, although like everybody else, they buy a lot of their pottery at Wal-Mart. But they also make some to sell to tourists. And more of their construction is adobe than stone at the moment, but a lot of it (especially the older parts) is adobe-grouted masonry.

Wouldn't be surprising at all if those houses were 50, or 100, or 150 years old, rather than ancient artifacts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The best live digits angular directive ever (open source) - <AUTHOR> http://uditalias.github.io/live-digits/demo/

<comment><AUTHOR> Any other equivalent solutions you know about?</comment>


World's poorest countries to aim for 100% green energy - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38028130 <comment><USER2> Not to undermine their intentions but do these countries have oil and coal to begin with? Everyone is going to play their economic advantage and they will be the biggest losers in global warming.

I say this as someone who believes in renewable energy and should invest in it.

I am sure as hell trump would see it this way.</comment>


I got this Cease and Desist for scraping someone's site - <AUTHOR> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15758821/scraping.png <comment><USER2> I'll be the one to say it then.

It's a trap!

Don't do anything without an attorney. The Monday deadline is to ensure you don't stop and think of that option.

Do not respond.

Call an attorney. Let the attorney write the response, if any. Don't send a potential adversary evidence they don't have and don't try to figure this out yourself without professional legal advice.

Consider the legal fees insurance against an irrational amount of future awfulness.

<comment><USER3> This is the best advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do you have some old full-sized SCSI 40MB drive lying around? It'd be amusing to see them trying to connect that to any modern computer... [http://www.biocomp.net/seagate_st4766n.jpg](http://www.biocomp.net/seagate_st4766n.jpg)

<comment><USER5> You could also mention that the original data is on a SSD drive that is soldered to the motherboard of your MacBook Air/High-End Notebook/Chromebook and point out that even if you did send them a hard drive with a copy of everything downloaded that it would be just a copy. The original is uploaded 'onto the cloud' and not easy to delete even if you did smash the MBP to pieces, GCHQ/Guardian style.

Therefore, there is no need to send a drive, even a small child could understand that. A lawyer-type asking for 'the drive' does not get around this detail of how 's and 0's can be easily copied. Point out there is no need for the show.

Finally, go nucular on them. Say you are going to post your scraper tool onto github with full instructions on how to scrape their site unless $3,141,592.65 is donated by them to the EFF by teatime on Tuesday.

<comment><USER6>
        > SSD drive that is soldered to the motherboard of your MacBook Air/High-End Notebook/Chromebook

Nitpick of something I hear a lot: No SSD is soldered on in a MacBook Air or any Chromebook I've seen[1]. You may need an unusual screwdriver (MBA – maybe worse for a Chromebook) to get the bottom cover off, but then it's just a single screw. The PCs I've seen are similar, but I don't have as much experience there.

I assume the confusion started because the RAM _is_ soldered.

[1] You can see internal pictures at chromium.org, e.g. [http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information- fo...](http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-for-chrome- os-devices/acer-c720-chromebook)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So they want you to send them your physical hard drive, presumably to assure themselves that the data has been erased...

But then they also want you to 'delete any data in your possession', so they already know that that is bullshit.

<comment><USER8> It's so that they can nail you to the wall with the evidence you willfully sent them when they take you to court.

<comment><USER9> Damn straight. Do not engage these people, do not answer any correspondence - speak to a lawyer if they proceed to legal threats.

<comment><USER10> This. They're just gathering more evidence by getting you to hand them a hard drive with this on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Web scraping may be against the terms of use of some websites. The enforceability of these terms is unclear.[5] While outright duplication of original expression will in many cases be illegal, in the United States the courts ruled in Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service that duplication of facts is allowable. U.S. courts have acknowledged that users of "scrapers" or "robots" may be held liable for committing trespass to chattels,[6][7] which involves a computer system itself being considered personal property upon which the user of a scraper is trespassing. The best known of these cases, eBay v. Bidder's Edge, resulted in an injunction ordering Bidder's Edge to stop accessing, collecting, and indexing auctions from the eBay web site. This case involved automatic placing of bids, known as auction sniping. However, in order to succeed on a claim of trespass to chattels, the plaintiff must demonstrate that the defendant intentionally and without authorization interfered with the plaintiff's possessory interest in the computer system and that the defendant's unauthorized use caused damage to the plaintiff. Not all cases of web spidering brought before the courts have been considered trespass to chattels.[8]

</comment><comment><USER11> Will you be in any way released from legal liability by complying?

This sounds like "We don't quite have enough evidence that you did it, please admit to it fully so we have enough to throw the book at you".

</comment><comment><USER12> So all these ignore it comments are generally ok but it depends on who you're dealing with. Remember that TOS violations are covered under the CFAA, CL has a reputation for this sort of behavior.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm definitely complying.

<comment><USER12> I don't think you need to comply unless this is a court order. I wouldn't comply with anything short of that because you're essentially helping them build a case against you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some more context here: [https://twitter.com/recborg/status/482629723663507456](https://twitter.com/recborg/status/482629723663507456)

> @redheadjessica it's a business with a physical location that I sometimes > frequent - they'd ban me from it.

[edit: I wonder if the pages scraped a publicly accessible. Maybe they are only accessible on LAN while at said location? This might put an interesting twist on things (as everyone here is just assuming a site accessible on the public Internet.]

</comment><comment><USER14> Gut instinct is that that looks like a nigerian-scam level email. Not quite sure what they are fishing for or what they hope to get out of the disk they want you to send but I'd just ignore it. Almost certainly that will be the end of it. If they escalate to a real lawyer contacting you by paper mail, then look into a quick consult with a local attorney to see what if anything you should do.

But do stop scraping the site and stay clear of any involvement with it in the future.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why would you post the text of such an absurd claim and not name who it is? Do you really fear them that much / desire to use their services that much that you would put up with this?

<comment><USER16> Do +not+ comply with the demand.

There is nothing (law, morals, or else) that prevents one from scraping a publicly accessible website.

<comment><USER17> "There is nothing (law, morals, or else) that prevents one from scraping a publicly accessible website."

Can you point to any legal precedent that supports your contention (honest question)?

<comment><USER16> No, it would be the other way around. You would have to find legal precedent that implies you must obey random requests for data from website operators...

(and I'm pretty sure there is none).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How did they link up your visits/scrapes to an email in the first place? You shouldn't have responded to the emails. If they're serious, I would think they would/will have sent certified mail. Then you can take it seriously, but not until then.

</comment><comment><USER3> as a condition demand a signed letter of the cease and desist that includes releasing you of legal liabilitie to be sent to yourself and the state attorney to be signed on delivery.

</comment><comment><USER19> It might be fun to mess with them a little, but if they send you any real legal threats consult an attorney, and don't reply to any more of their email's.

</comment><comment><USER20> IANAL but ignore it

</comment><comment><USER21> Why did you take the site down? Wouldn't that appear as an admission of guilt on some level?

</comment><comment><USER22> does an email attachment with their data constitute returning it to these people? You may not need to go to all the trouble of dropping off your hard drive.

But in all seriousness, enjoy your new toilet paper because that's all that letter is good for!

</comment><comment><USER23> just curious; what evidence do they have that you saved any data in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER24> Wtf...

Even if you were going to comply, how can you be sure they wouldn't steal YOUR data?

<comment><USER25> They asked for a copy of the data on an otherwise clean hard drive, likely because they want to assess what he copied.

From the letter, it's clear that they don't expect anything else to be there, since they comment that they're going to wipe the drive when they're done looking at it, before returning the drive.

The drive is just meant as a convenient way to transfer a large amount of data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Who was it? Call them out.

</comment><comment><USER27> This calls for a very simple response: "rotfl!"

</comment><comment><USER19> Can you give us more context on what you scraped?

</comment><comment><USER28> "Very truly your"

</comment><comment><USER29> I'd just ignore it. Or send them an old (blank) drive, along with an invoice for your time.</comment>


Leland Yee investigation: 8 shocking details from the affidavit - <AUTHOR> http://www.scpr.org/blogs/politics/2014/03/27/16215/8-shocking-details-in-the-leland-yee-corruption-in/

<comment><USER2> Lazy writing. They left out that he suggested he could steer contracts to do developement work on California's electronic voting machines to his (undercover) interlocutor's software consultancy firm if Yee became secretary of state. Also, Yee's facing up to 125 years in prison, since there's no gurantee of sentences running concurrently and he's charged with 6 offences each of which carry a 20 year sentence (though realistically, he'll probably do much less).</comment>


S3Proxy allows applications using the S3 API to access other object stores - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/andrewgaul/s3proxy

<comment><USER2> I was considering something like this to have a local (or local networked) cache store for S3, I am doing 99,9% of readings, so it could be nice to put the cache in the S3-layer.

Does anyone knows if that exists?

<comment><USER3> I think you can setup nginx proxy with cache. Unfortunately, that's easy only for public files and authenticated requests won't save you much (for that you can also write a small script to authenticate yourself if there's a cache hit).

<comment><USER2> Oh, yes, thanks for the suggestion. I will see if I can use NGINX as a proxy, all my files are public anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does this work when the object stores don't support all the features of S3?

For instance Atmos doesn't have public buckets, DNS names for buckets, named keys implemented like S3, regions, etc.

But it does have features that S3 doesn't have like byte range updates, erasure coding, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> S3Proxy cannot provide more that the S3 API allows, such as byte range updates, although some features can be enabled by bucket-level policies. S3Proxy can emulate features that other providers lack like public buckets and could provide other features like bucket-in-hostname. Apache jclouds provides the underlying object store compatibility so S3Proxy will benefit from improvements to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Little help, please.

We have a process that uses s3express (aka using the S3 API) to copy files from local filesystem to S3.

S3Proxy would allow the process to copy files to [another_server, atmos, azure] ?

<comment><USER6> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great timing for me, currently working on trying to iron out some bugs in a project with S3, and this helps me eliminate one line of inquiry. Nice project!

</comment><comment><USER8> Shouldn't this be solved on the client level via proper adapter support?

I like how it can be attached to a black box though.

<comment><USER9> [the author of s3proxy is my friend]

It seems silly for every client to implement support for every single object store out there. Libraries like jcloud can handle it, but then it's tricky if your client is not written in Java.

Also, sometimes it's not trivial to add support to existing projects. For example, you can use s3fs with s3proxy to store your files on non-s3 object stores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very cool project. What sort of latency does the interface add? I imagine not much, but I didn't see any stats in the readme.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. Even I was looking for the statistics in the Readme. May be, they will add after seeing your comment.

<comment><USER12> Surely the latency cost would be trivial compared to the inherent latency of using an off-site storage anyway?

I'm not sure why you're both asking for it, bit strange given how tiny the cost of using a generic interface is compared to the cost of sending a file over the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does this work with the s3cmd CLI?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately s3cmd requires bucket-in-hostname support which S3Proxy lacks:

[https://github.com/s3tools/s3cmd/issues/149](https://github.com/s3tools/s3cmd/issues/149)

[https://github.com/andrewgaul/s3proxy/issues/8](https://github.com/andrewgaul/s3proxy/issues/8)

I also added a compatibility list wiki:

[https://github.com/andrewgaul/s3proxy/wiki/S3Proxy- compatibi...](https://github.com/andrewgaul/s3proxy/wiki/S3Proxy- compatibility-list)</comment></comment>


Why VCs Say No To Good Ideas  - <AUTHOR> http://www.markpeterdavis.com/getventure/2010/03/why-vcs-say-no-to-good-ideas.html

<comment><USER2> I'm going on hearsay here, but I've heard one of the problems is that, even though no one will admit to kicking people when they're down, a lot of VCs look at you as a second-class citizen if you haven't completed an exit yet.</comment>


Show HN: Our weekend project – isexdb - <AUTHOR> http://www.isexdb.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I use a throw away account for this post. This is a weekend project of me and my buddy, actually more of my buddy to be honest. We hammered it together last year over a weekend after lots of drinking. It is based on Django. We had 20k visits a month but this had declined due to a spam problem. We had to delete all the comments and use a captcha to prevent this in the future. We want to spent a little time now in this project to see if we can gain traction.

So, Any comments?

</comment><comment><USER2> An automatic location-based search would be cool. Btw, how did you populate the database?

<comment><AUTHOR> OK. Good point. (We have not worked on the code since over a year).

Database? Some lists are public available and for the rest we paid a dude on the Philippines. Also, some locations contact us now since they want to be in the database.</comment></comment>


LinkedIn Prices IPO At $45 Per Share, High End Of Range - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/18/professional-social-network-linkedin-prices-ipo-at-45-per-share-high-end-of-range/ <comment><USER2> This is going to be incredibly interesting to see what happens starting tomorrow for the remainder of the trading week. From a business perspective, this company is hardly worth its 4.5$ billion valuation. However, I have a theory that we're starting to see companies that are valued based on unquantifiable social utility as opposed to just hard economics. Although, this could just be "the bubble" finally forming...

</comment><comment><USER3> With 2 million in income for the last quarter unless LinkedIn has something up their sleeve, 4.5 billion is a little too much. About having something up their sleeve, I haven't seen any innovation from them in the past 4 years or so.

</comment><comment><USER4> Anybody know what Pets.com's revenue multiple was?

<comment><USER5> Ultimately, earnings > revenue. However:

For a business like Pets.com (or Amazon, etc....), earnings is what I'd worry about (EBITDA, maybe, but probably just straight earnings). It's easy to sell $20 pet food for $10 and throw in free shipping and get a lot of customers. It's hard to sell $20 pet food for $10 and actually make money doing so.

LinkedIn (Facebook, Zynga, ...) is the kind of business where the most relevant metrics are userbase, engagement, and revenue; it's pretty low per user marginal cost (nil?), and thus scaling userbase, engagement, and getting people to pay something will feed directly into earnings; it's easier to track the sources independently vs. the sink.

<comment><USER4> sure, but when the rubber hits the road, pricing the IPO is hard line in the sand that crap like EBITDA can't match. As a user, I don't think LinkedIn is ready for IPO, qualitywise, but that's the way the machine works. in other words, only one of your examples is priced for IPO, what other companies fit their equation? :) I was wondering how far they were from Pets.com (as an extreme example), numberswise.</comment></comment></comment>


Django: Impressions from a Non-Web Developer - <AUTHOR> http://benkane.wordpress.com/2009/01/31/django-first-impressions-from-a-non-web-developer/

<comment><USER2> I would agree with the article that django has lowered the entry barrier but thats it. Problem with django is, it is easy to do 70% of the work but rest 30% would make you cry... as long as you have clearly defined problem, like newspaper cms or todo list etc., django is a pain to work with and the django ORM is a toy...

<comment><USER3> At DjangoCon, Mark Ramm warned against Django's "Z shaped learning curve". And, he's exactly right. Getting Django installed, pointed at your database, and opening up the admin is a joy. After, that, you have to roll up your sleeves and start learning.

It really takes a while to get used to the work-flow: Design a URL, created your model, created a view to push the data through to the template, design the template. Then, there's the Generic views, which are a whole other language to learn. After you get up to speed, it makes development a whole lot easier, but from the bottom of the "Z" to the top of the "Z" it takes a lot of struggling.

<comment><USER2> On the contrary with other pythonic frmeworks, the curve is not that difficult. Currently we are using the combo of cherrypy and dejavu in python, and the learning curve was surprisingly small.

Anyone who tried hands with sqlachemy or storm ?

<comment><USER4> We're using sqlalchemy here and it's been nearly painless so far. It scores on maturity (despite the 0.5 version number), great documentation and a very active and friendly community. The learning curve is steep (as with any ORM) but very rewarding because the pieces constantly fall into place. Everyday tasks are idiomatic and syntactically sane, plus even complex joins and subqueries can be constructed using the standard building blocks. So far we have not run into any limitations, unlike with the django ORM which gave us constant headache at some point. The latter really feels like a toy when you have tasted the real thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Valid, or at least plausible, point - these are just first impressions and thus I've barely scratched the surface. I don't know where Django stands compared to other web development frameworks, but it's proving sufficient for my admittedly basic needs at the moment. Future projects will undoubtedly expose the rough or missing edges.

This isn't a good place to raise the discussion, but I'm curious as to what the alternatives bring to the table (and will be reading up on it). Django certainly isn't the end-all solution, but I am content that it's at least got me interested in finding out what's available and how they stack up.

(Er, meant to be in response to vivekkhurana)

<comment><USER2> For python, if the work is simple, we use web2py and if we need something scalable or complex we build the stack ourselves based on the combo of dejavu and cherrypy. Lots of components are available in python for different segments of a web application.

For web server/dispatcher/controller I think cherrypy beats them all. Cherrypy alone can take you a long way. For ORM there is sqlachemy, dejavu and storm. For forms there is formencode, for json you have simplejson... let me know if you need something else...

<comment><USER5> I also need:

* Django admin

* Django ModelForms

* Django Middleware

* Django ContentTypes

* and someday maybe GIS

<comment><USER4> Django admin is a blender, albeit a nice one. When the auto-admin covers your entire use-case then that's great. But beware when you run into its limitations (which happens quickly) - then you're in hell.

The other stuff can be easily had in any other python frameworks.

* Modelforms => WTForms or toscawidgets

* Middleware => Built into cherrypy (called "tools")

* ContentTypes => I'm not sure what to make of that. Looks like some really nasty hack on top of their ORM to me, I can't even understand the use-case. I guess you wouldn't need such a thing with a real ORM like sqlAlchemy or dejavu.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


If Object-Oriented Programming were announced today - <AUTHOR> http://www.sicpers.info/2017/07/if-object-oriented-programming-were-announced-today/ <comment><USER2> It's not only FP.

Just look at Rust and Go, they are more like C than C++ or Java.

Or the different kinds of OO.

Classes like in Java? Prototypes like in JavaScript? Methods like C++? Messages like Objective-C? Multiple Inheritance like C++? Non inheritance at all?

OOP? I don't even...</comment>


A good tool for technical documentation? - <AUTHOR> Now we use google docs for writing design docs, technical specifications. A doc is shared with several participants who can write / comment. I think there must be a better solutions to write and store documents (ideally, with markdown support)  with a decent discussion / comments functionality. It can be a SaaS, but ideally something open sourced you can deploy. <comment><USER2> We recently launch Documentation Hub for Your Developers product [https://www.docsapp.io/](https://www.docsapp.io/)

* Overview of your documentation hub in single place.

* Support multiple versions of documentations.

* Full text search capability built right in to your documentation hub.

* and more...

You can see demo available here [https://demo.docsapp.io/](https://demo.docsapp.io/)

Any feedback let me know.

</comment><comment><USER3> I write all my documentation in either Confluence, MkDocs (Markdown) or Sphinx (Markdown & reStructuredText).

[http://www.mkdocs.org/](http://www.mkdocs.org/) [http://www.sphinx- doc.org/en/stable/index.html](http://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/stable/index.html)

Both MkDocs and Sphinx can deploy to ReadTheDocs.org which is very nice, especially when using Sphinx since it allows for PDF and ePUB downloads of the documentation as it's versioned.</comment>


Ask HN: What, to you, is the most inspiring philosophical/social movement today? - <AUTHOR> Just curious. There is no right or wrong answer. I'm going through a personal revolution right now and exploring the world with new eyes. <comment><USER2> Apatheism. Unlike theism it doesn't tie you down to a particular set of untestable beliefs. Unlike atheism you don't have to write a book calling people idiots. Unlike agnosticism it doesn't require any fence-sitting.

You just shrug and ask if the question of god(s) is even a relevant one to a bunch of meat hurtling from birth to death. This obviously doesn't work if you subscribe to a particular religion, because they tied to claim the imposition of existential penalties for this kind of thing, but assuming you've already concluded that religion is definitely a human invention separate from the "god" question, that presents no obstacle. After all, if there isn't a god, gods, afterlife and so forth, it's a waste of time to worry about it. If there is a god, gods, afterlife and so forth, then could we ever know for sure? Could we hope to understand it and are we really so full of ourselves that we think worship is important?

For me the answer is "no" let's get on with life, and leave what (if anything) comes later. If other people feel differently, that's fine. Plus I get to avoid a lot of boring debates and arguments between tribes of people who seriously think their ancestors figured out the secrets of the universe.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.theadvocates.org/](https://www.theadvocates.org/)

[https://www.lp.org](https://www.lp.org)

[https://mises.org/](https://mises.org/)

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.populationconnection.org/](https://www.populationconnection.org/)</comment>


Show HN: A self-hosted js compiler in 1k loc - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/maierfelix/mini-js <comment><USER2> I think the appropriate term for this is a _pretty-printer_. It isn't really a compiler, because the target language is the same as the source.

For a JavaScript compiler (or VM) to be genuinely described as _self-hosting_ , it would need to be able to run using _itself_ , without depending on an existing implementation such as V8, ChakraCore etc. The hard part is not outputting code that can be evaluated by JS itself, but implementing the semantics of JS in terms of a lower-level of abstraction, ideally native code.

<comment><USER3> > It isn't really a compiler, because the target language is the same as the > source.

I think it could still be deemed a "compiler" even if it output the same language if it was doing some significant transformation or modification of it.

But, yes, in this case I think you're right and a "pretty-printer" is a better description of it.

<comment><USER4> I'd say transpiler, or at least preprocessor. It does add a language feature, after all.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just added a second feature called "inout", which lets you pass variables by reference

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The immediate question I had was: "compiles JS to _what_ "?

Apparently the answer is: to Javascript. It's what some call a transpiler: it compiles Javascript plus some extra features down to a more "vanilla" Javascript (es5?). I tend to dislike the term transpiler (transpilers are just compilers that target high-level languages), but I guess in this case the term would have helped me understand what was meant!

<comment><USER6> I prefer "source-to-source compiler": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source- to-source_compiler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can make Chrome V8 in one LOC.

find ./chrome-v8-src | xargs sed -i ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n//g'

Boom!

</comment><comment> aaron-lebo I really like Douglas Crockford's Pratt parser which is similar. It doesn't compile down to JS but it's trivial to go from the AST to JS either manually or using something like escodegen.

Very elegant and easily extensible.

[http://javascript.crockford.com/tdop/index.html](http://javascript.crockford.com/tdop/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> would this allow something like - [https://ckluis.com/js-template- concept-e6de6912fd35](https://ckluis.com/js-template-concept-e6de6912fd35) \- to be feasible?</comment>


Ask HN: How could I simulate the TCP/IP Illustrated test network? - <AUTHOR> I just recently bought TCP/IP Illustrated volume 1 first edition for cheap -- as a /starting point/ to try to freshen up my basic knowledge of networking fundamentals since the book gets good reviews here -- and I see that they reference a test network throughout the book that looks like the following
https://imgur.com/5rpJQKV
Now I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but some of these operating systems seem to be quite dated, and I'm unsure if I can even find them to use in virtualbox. Additionally, I've no clue what a Telebit NetBlazer is or what would represent a modem if I attempt to setup a virtual environment to emulate this network.
So my question is, what would be the easiest way for me to come as close as possible to emulating this test network that the book references so that I can get the most out of the material? <comment><USER2> Maybe try Minix?

[https://www.minix3.org](https://www.minix3.org)</comment>


Russia's Retro Lenin Museum Still Runs on Decades-Old Apple II Computers - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/retro-apple-computers-lenin-museum-russia <comment><USER2> If it gets the job done, it gets the job done.

One of the CNC machines in our workshop was controlled by a MicroVAX until recently. Did what we asked it to.

<comment><USER3> I do worry that the power consumption might be far too high for the amount of value you're getting out of it. I mean, a Raspberry Pi Zero probably has more computing power than an Apple II, while using a small fraction of the power. You could probably retrofit the software to work relatively well on an Apple II emulator on the Raspberry Pi, for that matter.

Increasingly I've been getting a bit worried about these "it gets the job done" mentalities; are the environmental externalities actually being properly accounted for?

<comment><USER4> If the museum is unchanged since 1987, then presumably the central heating (and the lightbulbs!) would be much juicier places to go looking for fat to trim.

<comment><USER5> It never crossed my mind, in 30+ years living in Moscow, that you can get off central heating, but you actually can![0] - although, it's unpractical for a private owner, living in the city.

But the museum in question is a village house, I'm pretty sure they don't have central heating.

[0] (in Russian) [https://www.garant.ru/news/1155577/](https://www.garant.ru/news/1155577/)

<comment><USER6> Isn't central heating more efficient than private heating though? Central heating usually works by using heat from a nearby power station, which would otherwise have been wasted, no?

<comment><USER5> Heating costs me about as much as if I ran a 1kWh setup 24*7 for my 56m2 apartment. Short googling suggests, that I could do better on my own, but not so much better to actually do anything about it.

Efficiency of any infrastructure depends on it's physical condition, and technocratic abilities[0] of local governments; both are ok where I live, but mostly much worse in smaller cities.

[0] for the lack of better terminology. I can't talk about "quality" of Mayor's work in general, for it should include not stealing votes, representing actual people etc.

<comment><USER4> Interesting figures. BTW, the terminology is a mess, but I think what you're describing would most clearly be called "district heating", as "central" often just means that your house has one burner in the basement (as opposed to a fireplace in each room, originally). I hadn't stopped to think what the museum would have.

And, somewhere in here there's a parable about capitalism. The engineers are correct that the district heating plant has economies of scale... but it's only as clean as your town's politics, and even a squeaky-clean mayor has to make a terrifying giant decision about whether to upgrade it, once every 30 years. Instead of every owner gossiping with his neighbors about what works & what breaks, and whether double glazing was worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It isn't called a retro museum for nothing!

(also, this is very symbolic. every former soviet union citizen knows that Lenin foresaw the advent of thinking machines, calling this as inevitable as an apple falling down from a tree - from Lenin Collected Works, letter to Julius Martov, 1903)

<comment><USER8> Is there an English translation of this somewhere? I googled around and couldn't seem to find it.

<comment><USER7> It is a made-up joke, partially grounded in a soviet tradition to supplement any thesis by some quote from Lenin Collected Works. Since Vladimir Ilyich had lots of opinions and was a very prolific writer - 5th edition of Collected Works ran 54 volumes 650 pages each - one could find virtually anything there. ANYTHING.

<comment><USER9> That's what I thought of when I read this in George Orwell's "1984":

"Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There was a thread about how to write zero maintenance apps, feels related.

Isolated, stuck in time envs are a must.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21192885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21192885)

</comment><comment><USER11> _Al Eisenstat, who accompanied [Steve] Jobs, recalled him talking about creating AI simulations of Soviet revolutionaries: "The one thing we can't do is to ask them a question and get their current thinking. Ahh, but in the future you are going to have artificial intelligence and you'll be able to ask Mr. Lenin a question or Mr. Trotsky a question."_

<comment><USER12> >in the future you are going to have artificial intelligence and you'll be able to ask Mr. Lenin a question or Mr. Trotsky a question.

giving the amount of Lenin's writings [https://www.cmlt.ru/getUserImage?id=17690783](https://www.cmlt.ru/getUserImage?id=17690783)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin_bibliography#Co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin_bibliography#Collected_Works) :

"His Collected Works comprise 54 volumes, each of about 650 pages, translated into English in 45 volumes "

i wonder what future we can already preview by training GPT-2 on it. Add to that a voice model built using his voice recordings and upload the combined model as a "Talk to/Ask Lenin" skill to Alexa... Caused the memory to dig out that USSR propaganda slogan - "Lenin is more alive than anyone living" (i kid you not - "Lenin zhivee vseh zhivyh").

<comment><USER13> the translation doesn't seem correct to me. it would be more along the lines "if lenin is alive then everyone is alive"

<comment><USER12> No. [http://marshallcenter.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/...](http://marshallcenter.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16378coll1/id/19/)

<comment><USER14> I don't speak Russian, but assuming GP does: Maybe it's a pun? Both meanings convey propaganda about him.

<comment><USER12> >Maybe it's a pun?

In the years when it was produced the pun here would have resulted in "10 years in GULAG without right for communication with outside world". Not even speaking about intentional pun, to get how fearful people felt about making just accidental mistake - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_(1975_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_\(1975_film\)) for example has a scene showing it pretty well.

I'm surprised by GP's translation and insistence. The translation is just simply incorrect language-wise. Just ask any Russian. While so totally incorrect the translation though has very deep Zen like qualities to it which would sound pretty profound in some other contexts and about some other persons. USSR and Lenin is just very far from Zen :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ah, I can relate. While not as old as these, all the interactive stations at my parents museum still run on ancient win nt 4 boxes connected via bnc. Guess who they call when one breaks again...

<comment><USER3> I worked on at a company that was running all their billing software on DOS with FoxPro (I was there in 2012).

We eventually "upgraded" them to a VM running OS/2 on a Windows XP machine (I wasn't able to get it working with DosBox or FreeDOS)...Management didn't want to give us budget to rewrite it in a modern language, sadly.

<comment><USER16> > ...Management didn't want to give us budget to rewrite it in a modern > language, sadly.

I fully agree with the management. The problem with software developers of today is that instead of being engineers and getting shit done they are more like script kiddies trying to do cool 1337 things. There are some golden rules in engineering: never touch a running system, if ain't broke, don't fix it and don't reinvent the wheel - just use it.

<comment><USER3> I don't think I agree with that at all. There aren't security updates, older hardware becomes harder and harder to get fixed.

It's easy to say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but in effect _everything_ is breaking all the time. Hard drives fail, processors burn out, security holes are discovered, and the more out-of-date something is, the harder it is to replace or fix. If there were periodic attempts to modernize stuff, the blow of this is less severe.

Example, I'm sure the people running the Target POS devices five years ago had the mentality "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", and it led to a huge breach.

<comment><USER17> > There aren't security updates

From the story i get that this doesn't matter as it is a single isolated DOS program they run inside a VM.

> older hardware becomes harder and harder to get fixed

I'm sure you'll be able to find billions of computers that can run OS/2 in a VM both now and in the future.

<comment><USER3> > I'm sure you'll be able to find billions of computers that can run OS/2 in a > VM both now and in the future.

Fair enough, I probably could have gotten it working in DOSBox at some point as well, further increasing the compatible devices, but that still doesn't deter from the fact that no one really knows Foxpro anymore. It's hard to fix bugs in dead languages.

<comment><USER17> AFAIK FoxPro is part of the xBase family of database systems and while these aren't as popular as they used to be, there is still a lot of information about them out there (and they were meant to be easy to learn and use). There are even some open source implementations (Harbour). So it shouldn't be _that_ hard to fix things, at least for a good programmer.

The hard part would be convincing said programmer to work on it :-P.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> About 10 years ago I saw a Soviet clone of IBM/360 in a mid size Russian investment bank

</comment><comment><USER19> Those probably are Pravetz 82 [0] - the Bulgarian clone of Apple ][.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers)

<comment><USER20> I also thought so, but in the article it says they are original Apple IIs imported via a front company.

Unrelated: I always found the II ][ and // naming so confusing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Elevetors in our building(SF fin. district) runs even older ones.

</comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of this article about an old Amiga computer running the AC system for multiple schools: [https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a16010/30-year- old-computer-runs-school-heat/)

<comment><USER23> Wonder how the replacement is going.

<comment><USER24> In my fantasies it's running an IO card on a Raspberry Pi with the UAE Amiga emulator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Back in the 80s I worked in a place running on Apple IIs

The biggest problem we had _then_ was floppy disks physically wearing out, as they were running all day

Did someone corner the market in 5 1/4 floppies to handle cases such as this? Does this museum have enough supply to keep running?

<comment><USER24> There are floppy emulators now, they could use those. Also if the diskettes are read only once per boot, they don't get much wear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I hope they don't update to Catalina if they want the old software to run /s</comment>