Hawaiians call Mark Zuckerberg 'the face of neocolonialism' over land lawsuits - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/23/mark-zuckerberg-hawaii-land-lawsuits-kauai-estate <comment><USER2> This article describes the process in significantly more detail: [http://www.staradvertiser.com/2017/01/18/business/facebooks-...](http://www.staradvertiser.com/2017/01/18/business/facebooks- zuckerberg-sues-to-force-land- sales/?HSA=74dae150a1d9f99e2592d0eac31ea430d01f35d5)

The wikipedia article on quiet title is also clarifying: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_title](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_title)

So is this article on quiet title: [http://www.nolo.com/legal- encyclopedia/who-can-claim-propert...](http://www.nolo.com/legal- encyclopedia/who-can-claim-property-based-adverse-possession-hawaii.html)

If I understand it right, the issue here is situations like the following. You've got a parcel of land which was 1/2 owned by brother A and 1/2 owned by brother B (due to, e.g., inheritance). Brother A occupied the parcel for 20+ years and eventually sold it to someone else. At this point, according to Hawaii's adverse posession law, brother A owns it but owes compensation to brother B. Now many years later, brother A or his descendents sold to Zuckerberg (or some similar chain of title), and brother B's descendents may not even know they had some right to the land.

There's a theoretical possibility that some descendent of brother B may show up and claim the land.

These quiet title lawsuits are a way for Zuckerberg to pre-emptively settle all such issues. It's also apparently a very common and accepted way to handle such issues in Hawaii.

This is basically just a horrible legal hack around the fact that Hawaii (like many places) has a totally broken title registration system. Without this hack it might be difficult/impossible for a land owner to know with any certainty that they actually own the land they just purchased.

If someone knows more about this, or if my understanding is incorrect, please correct me. I know little beyond what I learned via google.

<comment><USER3> I once heard someone describe law as simply software for people. I love how you describe these maneuvers as hacks.

<comment><USER4> That is a common misconception, especially amongst engineers. There's a large cohort of smart people who've read a contract and think this means they grasp the law; but without understanding jurisprudence or equity, common/case law, the myriad forms of legislation, actual legal proceedings &c &c.

In reality the law is not a programming language, and trying to treat it as such is a common cause of disappointment, frustration, anger, needless bickering, extended conflict, and vexatiously long and mostly unenforceable contracts.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. One of the most startling discoveries I had about contracts was the concept of "consideration", i.e. that both parties of a contract should be getting something of roughly equal value. Without consideration, the contract becomes unenforceable. Prior to learning that, I viewed contracts as a set of rules, and if you didn't like the rules you agreed to, well, you lost at the contract game. Consideration turned out to be the first of a lot of contract concepts I didn't know of (and doubtless there are many concepts I still don't know about).

My ex went to law school, and I found the attitude of "non-lawyers have no business having opinions about the law" that her law school promoted to be vile. That said, I've found that it's a good idea to assume that any legal issue is NOT straightforward. Doing otherwise usually ends up making me look ignorant, and has me spreading false conclusions to other non-lawyers around me.

<comment><USER6> > something of roughly equal value

The value doesn't have to be equal, simply that both sides offer something of value: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration#Monetary_value_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consideration#Monetary_value_of_consideration)

<comment><USER5> Many record contracts are overturned once the person gets famous. I was told this was usually due to consideration issues, though I don't know that is a fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I live on Kauai. I moved here 5 years ago from Canada. I can tell you most people don't understand Hawaii has a much different culture, history and people than "mainland" America.

Mark is making a huge mistake. The people on this island in particular are much more community and heart based. The fundamental mistake Mark is making is that he is entering into a lose-lose situation. This will NEVER be forgotten and he will NEVER be welcome here. He will always have to watch his back while he is here.

In my opinion his best course of action is to stop all law suits and make amends. People will forgive him for making a mistake but only if he can admit it first. This is not California. The island will "spit him out".

Kauai is known for being the last island of Aloha. Good luck Mark.

<comment><USER8> > He will always have to watch his back while he is here.

What do you mean "watch his back"? People will physically attack or steal from him? Because that sounds like the kind of society any reasonable person wouldn't want to be a part of.

<comment><USER7> Your guess is as good as mine. What would you do to someone that used their money to take away home land that has been in your family for generations because you didn't have the right paper work to prove your ownership in a court of law.

Living out here you realize that the bodies are not buried in dirt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can understand him wanting to make sure land ownership claims are settled.

On the otherhand him taking about how he is against walls then litterly building one in Hawaii that blocks people's view of the water is the height of hypocrisy.

<comment><USER10> > how he is against walls then litterly building one

1 mile, long, 6 feet tall?

<comment><USER11> A wall one mile long to protect one guy from trespassers is reasonable but a wall two thousand miles long to protect 250 million people is ridiculous, according to Zuck.

<comment><USER12> I think calling people traversing the property _tresspasser_ is part of the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The thing is, a lot of Hawaiians don't want to sell. This lawsuit forces sale of their rightful property to the highest bidder. It's a clever way for rich mainlanders to obtain property from Hawaiians. A lot of Hawaiians are not interested in the money.

Several local people living on the property were kicked off when Zuckerberg bought the land. A 6 foot wall was built and police began regularly patrolling a nearby road off the property questioning people walking on the road.

<comment><USER14> If those Hawaiians don't want to sell they can buy out their co-owners at which point they would own full title to the land.

<comment><USER13> In mainland terms that makes sense but in Hawaiian culture it does not.

They do not have money. Their wealth is in the community, sharing, fishing rights and land rights.

They don't believe in buying each other out. Sharing is a big part of their culture and is part of aloha.

Our mainland system is being imposed on them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone who was born, raised, and lived a significant portion of my life in Hawaii, I really wish he approached this in a better way or just chose a different place. There is still a lot of negative sentiment (arguably justifiable given history) towards "outsiders" within the islands and maneuvers like this do not help things. I don't see how the negative publicity surrounding this is worth having property and "joining a community" that you'll probably only spend Christmas in.

</comment><comment><USER16> The idea of someone living in multiple places is just hilarious. The epitome of privilege.

That being said, didn't Z just buy the land from other people? How was he able to even "buy" the land without full agreement of all of the owners to begin with? Shouldn't the land not belong to him until the transaction is complete?

In any case, the regular people always get screwed in these cases and always will until things are completely communal. Land shouldn't be owned by anyone. Rather, it should be able to be used freely. There are obviously logistical issues, but perhaps that should be and place and we'll figure out the rest?

> Makaala Kaaumoana, the executive director of an environmental group in > Hanalei, Kauai, said that the lawsuits would help identify and inform > descendants of links to the land they may not know about, which is "a good > thing".

> "It is always a sad thing when families lose their land, for any reason, but > at least this way they are compensated," she said.

The rationalization afterwards is also interesting.

> And Matt Goodale, a neighbor whose 10 acres of breadfruit, banana, mango, > lychee and longan trees lie about one and a half miles from Zuckerberg's > property, said that the CEO's purchase of the land was much better than the > alternative: an 80-home development.

Good to know the rich look after each other.

<comment><USER17> > Land shouldn't be owned by anyone. Rather, it should be able to be used > freely.

How would this work? Honest question.

I agree that the concept of land ownership is a little weird - it's one of the most limited, exclusive resources we have.

Hypothetically, I would love to be able to use this land that Z is "buying" under the current land ownership paradigm. But that free use, to me, would look like pouring a concrete foundation and building a structure with a bunk room, kitchen, bathroom, common area, with storage for a Hobie Cat, some surfboards, and SCUBA gear, and a patio overlooking the ocean. I'd want the rest of the land to be nicely forested. I would come out for a week every couple months. Would I have freedom to do this in a non-land-ownership system? What would prevent others from building in front of me, or using my structure when I wanted to be there?

<comment><USER16> I won't pretend like I'm an expert. However, I will say that in our supposedly democratic land, a useful heuristic would be just to vote. If the land was not owned by anyone and this could be magically enforced, then the people would simply vote for its use, right?

As things come up people would just revote. Since no one owns the land there wouldn't be any conflict of interest. You may point out that those who originally voted may be conflicted, but I disagree: any proposition that would benefit the majority would clearly win. Any proposition that doesn't would necessarily be struck down.

This kind of system has its own problems, though. Long term sustainability is one, requisites for voting is another. But these problems I think are separate.

<comment><USER18> You forgot about protecting minorities. What do you do when the majority of the people in a jurisdiction like (eg.) Mississippi consistently vote down land use by black people? Just accept that the people have spoken and that black people are unwelcome in that jurisdiction?

This is not a theoretical exercise. This happens everyday in America in co-op boards, HOAs, etc and it doesn't require anybody saying out loud why an individual is being rejected. The current US president got caught doing this in the 1960s. If you want to redesign land use rights wholesale I would hope you wouldn't make this kind of discrimination more common... maybe that's just me.

<comment><USER19> >You forgot about protecting minorities. What do you do when the majority of the people in a jurisdiction like (eg.) Mississippi consistently vote down land use by black people? Just accept that the people have spoken and that black people are unwelcome in that jurisdiction?

Well, yes. That's how democracy works: there's a vote and the majority wins. Are you opposed to democracy?

Yeah, it sucks if you're a minority, but what can you do? This is a fundamental flaw in democracy. We attempt to mitigate it by having constitutions and laws and representatives who are voted on in multi-year cycles, which in engineering terms has the effect of creating a long feedback loop so that the populace's short term emotions don't create too much instability and chaos, but it only works to a point.

The alternative is a non-democratic system like what they do in China. And they don't seem to be too keen on protecting the rights of minorities either.

<comment><USER20> The alternative is a republic, which is supposed to protect the inalienable rights of the minority from the whims of the majority.

<comment><USER19> Are you one of those people who thinks a modern democratic republic somehow isn't democratic? Did you miss my whole line about constitutions and laws? Those are fundamentals of a modern democratic republic. Why is it that every time someone mentions a democracy, someone like you pops up and claims that a modern democracy isn't a democracy?

Read this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_republic)

Line 1: "A democratic republic is both a republic and a democracy."

Furthermore, not all republics are democratic. North Korea and China are both republics, as is Iran. I already mentioned China in my previous post. Do you really think North Korea protects anyone's inalienable rights? Or Iran?

<comment><USER20> Maybe if someone always pops up to correct your vision of democracy, you're not communicating very well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I went to Kaui for a 2 week camping trip a few years back.

I would listen to the local radio broadcast at night, which I really enjoyed. It was some local DJ that would talk about native rights and issues. One thing that stuck out to me was an interview he did with a Native American from the main-land. The guest was amazed at how much local Kaui natives were able to defend their rights and maintain (at least influence) control.

</comment><comment><USER22> If my understanding is correct, the media is treating Zuckerberg very unfairly. My understanding is:

1\. The land ownership has been diluted over time such that there are many people who own small shares.

2\. Zuckerberg is working with the majority owners of each parcel to trigger a forced-sale of the full ownership, which he intends to purchase.

This is no different than a majority shareholder forcing the sale of a business. It's a total non-story.

<comment><USER23> > _" It's a total non-story."_

If he were Hawaiian, that would be true. But he's an outsider and he's world famous.

It's a story.

<comment><USER22> An outsider? He's an American and he has the same right to buy property in Hawaii as anyone else in our country.

<comment><USER24> Do you know how Hawaii came under American control?

He is absolutely an outsider in Hawaii.

<comment><USER25> Less than 25% of Hawaii is ethnically native.

<comment><USER24> That has nothing to do with the culture of the place. If I invite you into my home, and ask you to take off your shoes, it doesn't matter whether or not I'm white, black, or reptilian. Please take off your shoes.

<comment><USER26> Isn't it a bit different if your home isn't actually yours, but belongs collectively to whoever lives there, under a system of rules decided by the people who live there, and those rules say it's fine if he doesn't want to take off his shoes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> TBH this doesn't seem like a Mark Zuckerberg problem as much as a Hawaii laws problem. How is it that there is land with no clear ownership? And how is it that the law (the quiet title process) is written such that if the ownership of that land is determined those people can be forced to sell? It seems like a very strange system of rules.

<comment><USER27> The rules were probably designed by and for a group of people with a specific culture and worldview, who didn't plan or design for wealthy entrants (even pre-Zuckerberg).

<comment><USER28> interesting. i wonder if maybe we should look at it in the opposite way.

i mean, it kind of seems like the rules were designed by people who _did_ plan and design for wealthy entrants.

Zuckerberg is going to have to track down all of these unknown people and cut a deal with them individually. and they know he's a zillionaire. what a lousy bargaining position. i would think it makes the task of transferring ownership a whole lot harder, slower and more expensive than buying a piece of land, in say, Columbus, Ohio or Fresno, California.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Not very good optics if he really is planning on running for public office.

<comment><USER27> "Mr. Zuckerberg, is it true that you screwed a bunch of Hawaiians out of their property?"

"That means I'm smart. When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by their huge tracts of land. You can do anything."

<comment><USER30> "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and rip somebody of their lands and I wouldn't lose voters"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > "fell in love with the community " ... and decided to "plant roots and join > the community ourselves".

By suing the locals and hiding behind a walled, 700 acre estate. Sounds very neighborly.

</comment><comment><USER28> people that rich live by a different standard. we can expect more from them than from a middle class home buyer.

Z has a _lot_ of options. buying "700 acres of rural beachfront land" to create a "secluded family sanctuary" and "enhance the seclusion" is only one of them.

imagine if, instead, Z wanted to win a local popularity contest: he could create a permanent arrangement where he gives the state of Hawaii 699 of those acres for use by the local families that used to own it, or the general public -- keeping, say, one acre for his own family's use. it's an option.

there are other less extreme options, too, options that would also generate positive, as opposed to negative, attention in the press.

of course, none of this is required by law, but we should keep in mind that Z has many possible choices which the rest of us lack.

given the limited quantities of land -- especially beach front land -- in Hawaii and the long-term traditions (and poverty) of the local, long term inhabitants, it's understandable that people in Hawaii would scrutinize his choices and expect something less selfish.

even if he manages to gain full, legal title to the land, what can we expect the attitude of local people to be when they have even less access to that land than they did in the past?

</comment><comment><USER32> The article is much less aggressive than the title.

</comment><comment><USER33> [dupe] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13468767](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13468767)

</comment><comment><USER34> This is gentrification for the Hawaiian right? I was just in maui last week and it was beautiful. Mark buying 700 acres just signals other billionaires in a dick measuring contest. Maui real estate is already insanely priced for the average person.

I only hope the Silicon Valley dickbags work on fixing the homeless situation in SF rather than making more people homeless

</comment><comment><USER35> Zuck is just trying to straighten out who owns the land and who should be compensated. The article throws around the word 'lawsuit' with the intent of invoking its negative connotations with the reader. There is a good discussion to be had about Hawaiian land ownership but Zuck is not the (only) villain here.

</comment><comment><USER36> "Neo"?

<comment><USER37> Ya, sounds like the same stuff that's being going on the whole time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Zuckerberg seems like a good guy, he clearly has some very strong philanthropic ideas about how he will spend his vast fortune, and he seems to be trying to navigate the strange property laws of Hawaii in the right way. Having said that, it kind of pains me to see one of our millennial altruistic thought-leaders already fully engaged in such wealth and property consolidation. $100M, multi-hundred acre estate in a place he may spend a couple weeks per year? It doesn't give me a lot of confidence for the future of our species, sadly.

This is not a popular opinion, but the more I see where the world is going, the more I would be encouraged by seeing aggressive taxation or forced charity/redistribution from the bulk of inheritance. Our system of capitalism needs some serious brakes if we want it to be sustainable in the long-term.

<comment><USER39> I saw a comment on HN about this recently where someone suggested a 100% inheritance tax. I wonder what society would be like if we were able to implement this effectively.

<comment><USER14> It seems to me that would only incentive rich people to be more outlandish consumers during their lives. If the government won't let me give it to my kids I might as well go ahead and buy that yacht.

<comment><USER40> I'm not nearly knowledgable enough on economics to determine the overall effects of such a tax, so please take this with a very large grain of salt, but couldn't it be argued that you purchasing a yacht would be better for the economy than passing on a fortune to heirs?

Yachts seem to require a ton of skilled labor to build and maintain. I assume they provide for many solidly middle class jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> What happened to "bridges, not walls", Mark?

</comment><comment><USER42> I find it interesting that colonialism is bashed so much when in reality it brought much of the world into the modern era. would the world really be a better place if colonialism never happened ?

<comment><USER43> Colonialism killed hundreds of millions.

[https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COMM.7.1.03.HTM](https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COMM.7.1.03.HTM)

Edit: Their land stolen and plundered.

<comment><USER42> "their land?" the land on this world needs to be shared.You cant just expect to own an entire continent for yourself and not have to share it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ersatz - Deep neural networks in the cloud - <AUTHOR> http://www.ersatz1.com <comment><USER2> Recommendation: Reach out to my colleague James Bergstra, and build out automatic hyperparameter selection. This will make your offering work off-the- shelf, which is what is necessary for it to see wider adoption.

Why? The real pain in the ass in training a deep network is the hyperparameter selection.

What is your learning rate? What is your noise level? What is your regularization parameter?

Choosing these values is a far bigger pain than almost everything else combined.

Doing a grid search is intractable. Random hyperparameter search is better. You can use a sophisticated strategy, like Bergstra et al have proposed.

<comment><USER3> I agree that the hyper-parameter selection is a huge pain, personally though, I am more familiar with the work of Snoek et al. [1] from NIPS in December last year. He even distributes a neat Python package that will perform Bayesian optimisation combined with MCMC [2] so that even people, like me, that are not yet familiar with Gaussian Processes can deploy it easily.

[1]: <http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.2944v2>

[2]: <http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jasper/software.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> OMG I have been waiting for something like this. Deep Belief Networks have been smashing machine learning records in jsut about every domain. The only problem was that they were annoyingly slow to converge, and hard to program/debug

see Hinton's google code slides for more info on how powerful these things are:- <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M> (that's 2007, things are even spicier now)

<comment><USER5> That was a great talk, and an impressive demo of feature generation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Little bit confusing on what this actually is. Is this

1) Cloud GPU computation where you upload some special model code that is run on the neural network? ie. your own code

2) Upload data and run some pre-specified models on it, such as in the example you have a '-d model=spanish_speech_recognizer' - in which case the offering is all about how many and how good your pre-defined models are.

The two different use cases are for completely different target audiences.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, I see the confusion.

So basically, you bring the data, pick the neural network architecture you want to use, and set its parameters. The model trains on the data you've given it using a GPU cluster (which still takes a while)

'spanish_speech_recognizer' is the name of the model you just trained, where 'MRNN' is the actual architecture (a multiplicative recurrent neural network as described in <http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ilya/pubs/2011/LANG-RNN.pdf>) used in the example.

So the models themselves aren't pre-defined, but the architectures you can use are. You can play with a lot of different parameters (if you want), but you don't have to worry about optimizing the code for GPU or making sure your implementation of the algo itself is correct. At least that's the idea.

<comment><USER7> Just curious, are you using an existing library like Theano, Torch or some other GPU-enabled lib?

<comment><AUTHOR> Theano mostly--it really is good at what it does

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does this, and the Google Prediction API, and similar emerging offerings, herald the beginning of an "AIaaS" (Artificial Intelligence as a Service") market?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd like to see a post-mortem for this submission one the traffic dies down. Most startups these days feature flashy designs, and I've always wondered how much it really mattered. This design is straightforward and not flashy at all, so I'd be interested in seeing the conversion rate of an "academic-looking" design.

</comment><comment><USER10> This seems like a very small market you're going after. It requires people to have good knowledge of deep neural networks (they have to choose the model, architecture, hidden units, multiplicative units, etc.) I think it would be more interesting and open things up to a wider audience if some of these parameters could be chosen for you.

<comment><USER11> machine learning in general is a domain for specialists, it won't most of the time if you don't know what you are doing. As for a small market, I disagree. there may be few people who understand it but these are the ones that are put in charge of trillions of rows of data to analyze too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The company I work for could be very interested in testing this service. I requested a beta invite and filled out the survey. Any idea when you might start letting people test it out / accept beta invites?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, most likely Monday. Are you with IOTworks? If so, I've got your survey and will be sure you're on the list.

Although I should add that the response so far has been way beyond what we thought it would be (which is fantastic!), so it may take some time to get to everyone. The beta literally just opened this morning, and I'm not ready to open up the product before working with beta users to polish it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't the CPU/GPU intensive part of working with neural networks the training of them? Once the network is trained to within an acceptable error-rate why would you need the cloud?

</comment><comment><USER14> How about presenting some demos to see how it works and what it can do? I worked a bit with Theano and would like to see (video/tour) how this relates.

</comment><comment><USER15> Layout is broken for me <http://imgur.com/Les2I>

Latest Firefox on Ubuntu 12.04.

</comment><comment><USER16> Demo demo demo!

</comment><comment><USER17> Can we process images and/or video as inputs to this service?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are you hosting your own cluster of using EC2 GPU instances?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hosting our own for now--although weighing pros/cons of using AWS.

On one hand, AWS GPUs do seem a bit slower than bare metal, and it's theoretically (actually?) more expensive. Plus we get more control if we host our own.

But then again, running a data center is a problem that has been solved and I'm not sure we can create much value there. In practice, it will probably end up a bit of both, depending on demand.

<comment><USER18> Hah do you guys just have servers sitting around or are you at least co- locating?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can we export the trained model back out and use it, or only query it with the API?</comment>


New Google Sites - <AUTHOR> https://sites.google.com/new <comment><USER2> I thought the Internet had grown beyond this sort of behavior:

Google Sites works with the two most recent desktop versions of the following browsers:

-Chrome -Firefox</comment>


Sailing Hydrofoils and the Fold Catastrophe - <AUTHOR> http://www.penzba.co.uk/Catastrophe/ <comment><USER2> An interesting fact is that Concorde had a similar inversion in its drag curve where as it slowed down the amount of drag increased meaning you had to throttle up to maintain the same speed.

In Concorde's case this was caused by the massive delta wing which created huge vortices at high angles of attack which allowed it to fly at reasonably low speeds (high compared to normal airliners but manageable) while having suitably low drag to fly at 2.5 times the speed of sound.

<comment><USER3> Almost all aircraft have a "slow flight mode" (google for it) like that at a high angle of attack. I'd say all, but its probably only 99.9% and someone would bring up the X-3 perhaps confusing its pitch-roll coupling with slow flight or something weird like that.

The stall angle of attack usually is not coincident with peak lift to drag ratio. In fact I'm not even sure you can FAA certify an airframe where peak L/D AoA is ever at stall AoA at any airspeed, they'd probably totally freak out about spin susceptibility, or at least I certainly would. So you have an engine failure and automatically by training go into best AoA flight mode, with that design any turning or even a little wind gust or whatever would probably mean a possibly unrecoverable spin, which would kinda suck. I mean I think you could theoretically design a wing airfoil that way, and physically build it, but you'd get flamed pretty severely about it. I think this would also make takeoffs and landings overly unstable/exciting. Airframes traditionally have pretty cruddy maneuverability/performance at stall AoAs although you could probably fix that (lots of exotic jet fighters do pretty well under those flight conditions, then again they aren't "most planes"...)

Also you're going to get pilots and CFIs all wound up, by trying to talk about using throttle to control speed, at least theoretically to reduce pilot induced oscillations you'll formally be told that AoA should be used to control airspeed and throttle should be used to control rate of climb (aka altitude, in the calculus integrated sense). A smooth experienced pilot makes it very hard visually to tell exactly which control input at which time is having what effect, but at least in theory this is what you'll be trained at least for major flight maneuvers, in practice very small scale triming / autopilot is usually the other way around as you describe, or so it seems. And those "in between" adjustments make a formal definition kinda complicated, or meaningless.

Piloting is a very hands on experience, so its like trying to teach someone gymnastics by writing articles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems a bit of a leap to tag that with catastrophe theory? Surely that's just hysteresis, and that's found everywhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I need to expand that bit. The individual craft simply displays hysteresis, but the point here is that hysteresis is what you get if your system is a slice through a fold (or other) catastrophe. By looking at the parametrized systems you get the fold emerging, even though each one individually is "just" a system with (or without) hysteresis.

Understanding hysteresis as a part of a larger topological structure is a rather deep insight, and one that I've struggled to convey completely.

So thanks for your comment, it's helped me think again about how this should be expanded and enhanced to make that point clearer.

<comment><USER4> Hmmm. Is there really a fold though? If you added velocity and position above the water into the mix then the state transition is unique and smooth. The fold appears because important quantities are not plotted and resolved elsewhere.

The only real discontinuity is the when the hull touches the water.

Maybe I don't really know the definition of a catastrophe. To me a PID controllor exhibiting ringing would look "folded" in position space (smooth in position/velocity space).

<comment><AUTHOR> If you plot "Steady State Driving Force" against "Steady Speed" then for any given craft there is a curve. This curve the changes from simple quadratic(ish) through to the version discussed for the hydrofoil. We can think of this as adding every more efficient and effective foils to a more-or- less standard craft.

Now in the space "Foil Size" x "Driving Force" we plot "Resultant Speed" and we get a classic folded manifold, including the singularity.

So yes, there really is a fold.

Physics tells us that if you include lots and lots of things in your phase space then all the transitions are "smooth." Even here, when the craft touches the water and decelerates dramatically, almost "catastrophically", the transition (when considered in sufficient detail) is smooth. We can plot keel height above water, and as that gets to -1 mm then the deceleration is increasing smoothly, _etc._ However, dealing with this on a macro level, it's more useful to consider the dynamics as being a fold catastrophe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And now I really want to try sailing a hydrofoil just to experience the "pop".

<comment><USER6> You can feel this in any boat that can plane (e.g., a small sailboat like a Laser or 420, or a small powerboat like a Zodiac or a Boston whaler). Once you get up on a plane in a power boat, you can cut the power back considerably (maybe 10% less throttle in practice) without losing any speed. When racing a small sailboat, this becomes an important tactic when heading downwind -- do whatever it takes to get on a plane, and then be careful to stay there. It's a very cool feeling.

<comment><USER7> Having sailed a 420 competitively, I can confirm that standing out on the trapeze wire whilst on the plane is indeed "a very cool feeling". :-)

For real hydroplaning dinghies you could try a Int. Moth: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK60RZDtnT8></comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News: Top Colors - <AUTHOR> http://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors <comment><USER2> I use D5B390. It's very pleasant.

Worth noting that if you really care and have less than 250 karma, you could always install GreaseMonkey and change it (and other things) yourself...

<comment><USER3> I find your brown is a little too dark to go with the black text. Try f1e9d9.

<comment><USER2> Hmm, weird, what screen are you using? The black text is plenty readable here...

Your lighter brown is nice too, that said.

Edit: Gonna try your light beige for a little while...

Edit 2: Aha, the currently selected link (e.g. new, threads, etc) becomes almost invisible on this light beige... it's still visible on my darker brown! :-)

<comment><USER3> Ah, good point about the white text. The darkness clash isn't too strong, maybe it was just because I was used to the light color. I think I'll switch to yours for a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_orange>

</comment><comment><USER5> You can choose your own colors after your karma gets to 250, if I remember correctly

</comment><comment><USER6> When I get 12 more points, I'll be the first one with RGBA(0,0,0,0.5)!

</comment><comment><USER7> So I'm guessing top colors are so you can easily recognize which of your multiple accounts you are currently logged into, right?

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know what this is? Does anyone have any more info on where the colors come from?

<comment><USER9> In the user settings on HN, you can choose your own color for the bar at the top. I suppose these are the colors, sorted by popularity.

<comment><USER10> uhh, you can?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love orange, so the default color is good for me.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm really boring. 999999.</comment>


Show HN: Txr – Transfer files/directories to others with WebSocket streams - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/whatl3y/txr <comment><USER2> Interresting but it really doesn't seem that simple. I usually just use rsync whenever I need to move some stuff from one machine to the other.

I can't really take your word for it that you won't store any files, furthermore that might not even be legal, depedending on your country you must log transactions as a service provider.

What about SSL / encryption if you want to run the server your self, I took a peek at the source code and it be nice if certificate was configurable through the config files or ENV vars.

I think WebSockets should stay in the browser, but maybe that is just me being pedantic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback and recommendations. I agree I could add support for an SSL cert to be used within the express server (today the Heroku dyno is just using Let's Encrypt, which is abstracted from the app itself). I imagine I could add this over a weekend that I have time in the near future.

> _Interresting but it really doesn 't seem that simple..._

Thanks for the feedback, but can you elaborate on how you feel it's not? I'm not sure it could get any simpler to send files than `txr listen username` and `txr send -u username -f filepath`, but I'm willing to listen. Maybe you mean setting up the server isn't simple? Even that is as easy as `txr-server` from the command line though with the package installed...

> _I can 't really take your word for it that you won't store any files..._

I appreciate this sentiment, but that's why the server component is included in the package. If you don't trust the default server on Heroku (which is primarily just for someone to quickly gain an understanding of how to use it, not to actually use permanently moving forward), set up a server on your machine or local network and use it instead :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting.

Would it make sense to pair this with WireGuard, to provide end-to-end encrypted file transfer?

If we setup a WireGuard connections between two nodes, then run the server and client through this link, it should work seamlessly, right?

</comment><comment><USER4> Well fucking done. I wanted to build this ~5 years ago, but nodejs wasn't mature enough. I tried in Java but doing your own UPnP implementation is no fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah nodejs streams and async IO seemed like an ideal use case for this type of tool, plus I wanted to have the easiest approach to passing files between 2 people as possible (we use it at work all the time). Obv a lot has happened in 5 years with nodejs, so I realize it was likely an order of magnitude easier for me to get up-and-running in the last couple months with this tool than it would've been for you 5 years ago haha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Name taken almost nine years ago by the TXR Language.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads up on the name clash (obviously never heard of the TXR language before this). I named it based on a couple of factors being 1. something that's easy to remember and makes sense (txr ~ transfer) and 2. the NPM module name wasn't taken yet :)

I can change the name, but our projects are pretty much totally different and I'm not trying to make any money off this tool so would prefer to just leave it as is if it won't confuse too many people.

<comment><USER5> > _obviously never heard_

In 2009, I didn't rely on what I heard of or hadn't heard of; I googled very thoroughly before naming my project and its principal executable.

A name clash is a problem for any FOSS distro that builds both packages. People don't directly choose and use everything that is installed in a distro. A lot of is is pulled in by dependencies, for instance.</comment></comment></comment>


GitHub allows you to add a bio on your profile - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/settings/profile?focus_bio=1 <comment><AUTHOR> So apparently you can add a bio to your profile and mention other users.</comment>


How to be a wolf.  - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/1d48441aeee7

<comment><USER2> \- I like this post, please keep up the good work.</comment>


What skills should a product manager have - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bitscup.com/post/0b84c497f604/what-skills-should-a-product-manager-have

<comment><USER2> I wonder if this list should really be targetted at a good product manager. I'd say a good CEO, COO, CTO, CIO, and programmer should follow the exact same rules. These are the things that are important to a business.

Some might say "why does a programmer need to be involved in things like design, forecasting, prioritizing, etc. etc. I'd say it's because it helps them understand what they are building and why, and can therefore help them have the greatest impact on the business.</comment>


RIP BoostedBoard; it's been one hell of a ride - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/14/21175343/boosted-board-sale-crowdsource-reddit-repairs-fix-manual <comment><AUTHOR> There is also no pulse on their website; [https://boostedboards.com/](https://boostedboards.com/)</comment>


Facebok apps are getting bought - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2007/06/26/facebook-apps-are-getting-bought/ <comment><USER2> It's official, there is a bubble around "web 2.0".

I'm sorry, but there is next to zero value in an app that's sole purpose is to be a minor distraction while using another app that is itself a minor distraction.

I've had this bad feeling for a while now that facebook will be the app that we look back upon as the harbinger of the 2.0 bust.

It's a fad,(FB that is) and like all fads, from hula hoops to acid wash, it fades as fast as it grows. I honestly hope I'm wrong, but I'm starting to see more and more startups and such that provide little value for mega valuations. This isn't a good thing.

end of rant. (Sorry, it's before my coffee)

<comment><USER3> I don't know anything about your background, but it's clear that you are not Facebook's targeted audience. As a FB user from early (summer 2004), I can attest to how much it has impacted college.

Almost everyone I know is on Facebook. While this may just be my circle of friends, or my particular Uni (UCSB) it is clear that there is value with FB. Being able to keep in touch with your friends, to see what their up to, hell even to throw parties is all done on facebook.

Just this weekend, I asked my friend who was turning 21 why he didn't throw a party. He told me that having moved into his new place he didn't have internet. I asked what the hell that had to do with anything. He said that he couldn't create an event on facebook and thus no one would come.

So anyway, the whole point of this work-avoiding rant is that I wouldn't be so quick to judge the value of FB when it has already impacted my life and perhaps changed the college experience forever.

P.S. I do agree with you that FB apps are overrated. Most of my friends are sick of them, and the only one worth having is the Graffiti app.

P.P.S. Have some coffee. It helps.

<comment><USER4> Facebook is having an enormous lifestyle impact on current college students. It's a sociological shift. Most of my peers are so attached to facebook that the extraordinary valuations for facebook seem perfectly reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Create a classifieds/auctions listings only for Facebook apps that is a facebook app in itself :)</comment>


Components Are Taking over the World - <AUTHOR> https://www.componentdriven.org <comment><USER2> How? I see a promotional web site that does not stand out.

I'd be impressed if you could really render iled T-tetronimo shaped components, but that's just in the mind of your graphic designer, not something you can show me.</comment>


Ask HN - <AUTHOR>

If you're totally green, but, lurk on HackerNews dreaming about learning to hack so to one day hack what are the best resources? <comment><USER2> K&R

ESR's writings on hacking maybe?</comment>


Web app that generates a cozy and realistic window view - <AUTHOR> http://rainbowhunt.club/?viewer <comment><USER2> This is very similar to something I've been looking to find for a while. I have a large screen in my living room and I would love to stream/view 1080p video from scenic locations (top of a mountain, overlooking plains, a beach). I've read about the concept in several scifi novels but I've never found good footage to use. If anyone has suggestions, I would love to hear them. A good example is the live stream from the ISS [1] which atm is pointed toward the station but has been pointed towards the earth directly in the past.

[1] [http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-iss- stream](http://www.ustream.tv/channel/live-iss-stream)

<comment><USER3> Just use any David Attenborough documentary. There are several focused on different things depending on what you want

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks like a rip-off of Tympanus blog post (2015) [1].

1 : [https://tympanus.net/codrops/2015/11/04/rain-water-effect- ex...](https://tympanus.net/codrops/2015/11/04/rain-water-effect-experiments/)

UPDATE:

Seems that there is a mention in the credits section [2]

[2] [http://rainbowhunt.com/credits.html](http://rainbowhunt.com/credits.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> This seem to just be a frame for rainbowhunt.com ? Any reason why .club is better than .com, or is this a different user "cashing" in?

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm seeing a templating issue on the timer option in the menu. Great sounds!

</comment><comment><USER7> I perceive the rain as being on my side of the window.

</comment><comment><USER8> Constant reloads in Safari iOS 10.1.1.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> \+ sounds in addition</comment>


Who Spies More, The United States Or Europe? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2013/07/28/206231873/who-spies-more-the-united-states-or-europe

<comment><USER2> So the "beacon of freedom" is going to be replaced by "less evil than Europe" as a marketing slogan?

I don't know if it will withstand the fact-checking. The UK obviously has gone surveillance-bonkers, but some other countries remain remarkably "clean" (sadly, mostly smaller ones and possibly Poland).

</comment><comment><USER3> Funny, I looked on the Wikipedia page for tu quoque ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque)), and I didn't see anything about it being a foreign relations tactic.

</comment><comment><USER4> TL;DR: NSA man claims Europe more likely to spy on citizens than US. Uses study done without knowledge of PRISM (presumably) to back claim up.

</comment><comment><USER5> The answer is obviously Europe, not only could be under surveillance of their own country, but are for sure under US surveillance too, like the rest of the world.

So who spies more? US, that targets the entire internet population, not just their own citizens. Also, is not just spying what does, planting backdoors for future action is something not very discussed.</comment>


Understanding Science: An overview - <AUTHOR> https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/intro_01 <comment><USER2> I don't know, I think I have a pretty good natural instinct for science...

<comment><USER3> Was your uncle a scientist?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Science (the process) is how humankind learns.</comment>


Ask HN: How can hosting companies be improved? - <AUTHOR>

There are a bunch of these everywhere but they're all exactly identical. Except for companies like DigitalOcean, but it's still not much different.
What could you suggest that would make a hosting company different and better while still maintaining the basic principle, which is the distribution of servers? <comment><USER2> (1) I think similar to Digital Ocean, better backend admin panels that's simple to use yet powerful enough to do most remote admin tasks.

(2) Providing some sort of backup service that's cheap and easy to use. Along with this, provide a way to restore that's easy as well.

(3) Online chat support. Although I think this might be a little harder since this is really an issue of economics.

<comment><USER3> At least some hosts already have online chat support.

Bluehost, a "traditional" host I've had to work with plenty in the past, has good chat support.

I believe Dreamhost does as well.

Hosts dealing more with non-php applications (Heroku, DO), I guess, don't have it. But I've never needed to ask them for it, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the post-Snowden world, cloud hosting outside the US(and now possessed by US-based company) really matters.</comment>


Writing a thesis in a Nazi concentration camp - <AUTHOR> https://www.dropbox.com/s/odhke8lblkxnl1n/Roothaan.pdf?dl=0 <comment><AUTHOR> My Life as a Physicist, by Clemens Roothaan. Incredible story about doing physics in a Nazi concentration camp, surviving said concentration camp, and his career at Chicago. A lot is left unsaid in terms of how he dealt with his experiences, but his experiences are incredible in and of themselves.</comment>


How Many Humans Have the Same Number of Body Hairs? (Pigeonhole Principle) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMpSKjK9clA&feature=share <comment><USER2> Very very interesting</comment>


A blurring view for Android - <AUTHOR> http://developers.500px.com/2015/03/17/a-blurring-view-for-android.html

<comment><USER2> I've tried BlurringView on a full screen View, the right edge of the View seems not blurred... How can I fix this?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm wondering how fast drawing each frame of the underlying view into a bitmap is. That's not hardware accelerated is it? Or are you using some kind of off- screen gpu buffer to do that?

</comment><comment><USER4> Isn't RenderScript available since API level 11? And there is also a SupportLibrary version that is available for even older versions of Android. What do you mean saying that it's from API level 17?

<comment><USER5> I have tried using Renderscrip in a large scale application (+1 million daily users) with a min API = 7. It is in fact available through the support library from API 8. However : -The Gaussian Blur Intrinsic is buggy on some terminals ! The implementation of Gaussian Blur in the Nexus 10 makes a mistake in a division (1000 instead of 1024 or the reverse), so we have very visible artefacts on this terminal. It might have been solved with the Lollipop ROM though. -Using Renderscript on old terminal has proved to be a real pain in the ass. Since we have a large userbase, we also encounter some fairly exotic terminals. If I remember well, some Wikio phones (low cost chinese phones, but validated by Google) crashes as soon as you try to invoke Renderscript in a native thread (so you don't have any way to recover from this exception).

In the end, we removed Renderscript and replaced it by a custom blur implementation. In our case RS was not used for real time blur rendering, just blurring of a downloaded images, so the computation time is not vital.

I might have tried to reintroduce Renderscript later on, at least for the latest API levels but now that blurring does not fit anymore in Android's design language, we will just remove the blurred views from our app.

<comment><USER6> What about libraries that use the NDK ([https://github.com/kikoso/android- stackblur](https://github.com/kikoso/android-stackblur)) or a Box Blur ([https://github.com/CyberAgent/android- gpuimage](https://github.com/CyberAgent/android-gpuimage)). Have you tried those?

<comment><USER5> I did not know of android-gpuimage until now so I don't have an opinion on this lib. I had a look at the open source alternatives to RS for blurring (including stackblur) and they were all very amateurish (crashes or graphical artifacts in some pretty simple usecases). I ended up writing my own implementation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Drugs May Aid Only Severe Depression - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/health/views/06depress.html

<comment><AUTHOR> "The team, led by Jay C. Fournier and Robert J. DeRubeis of the University of Pennsylvania, found that compared with placebos, the drugs caused a much steeper reduction in symptoms of severe depression (cases scoring 25 or higher on a standard scale of severity, putting them in the top quarter of the sample). Patients with scores of less than 25 got little or no added benefit from the medications.

"'We were able to give an overall estimate of effectiveness for the first time in this more moderate severity range, from 14 to 20 on the scale, in which there's no question that doctors would likely consider prescribing medication,' Dr. DeRubeis said."

This is good that the study used a depression rating scale to categorize patients in a way that shows which patients are most likely to benefit from drug treatments. As the article notes, there are other approaches to treating depression, and the friendly attention of doctors in a clinical trial is beneficial enough in itself that drugs are hard put to beat placebos except for patients who have more severe depression. Many other people bothered by depression may gain much more benefit from cognitive therapy.

</comment><comment><USER2> In partial response to tokenadult: There's absolutely no question that cognitive therapy (nowadays cognitive behavioral therapy) is a critical tool in fighting depression. On the other hand, it costs a lot more money than the "band-aid" of a 15 minute visit with a psychiatrist and an prescription of antidepressant. And "bending the cost curve" is the current zeitgeist....

The description of this study raises a few questions in my mind:

It's a meta-analysis of 6 studies, half with Paxil (paroxetine, which went generic years ago) and the other half with imipramine, which is the Gold Standard in the previous (pre-Prozac) generation of antidepressants. I'm a little uncomfortable with their using Paxil as a proxy for all the current generation drugs, e.g. not all are SSRIs, Lexapro is interesting because it's _laser_ selective in acting only on serotonin, etc. etc.

Just to bring in some anecdotal experience: I have somewhat refractory depression of a bipolar nature (I only go manic when taking the wrong antidepressant, e.g. Paxil :-) and I've tried all of the above drugs plus Serzone.

Self administered cognitive therapy made a _big_ difference (to the point that talking therapy afterwords has been entirely useless).

When things get bad enough, each of the above drugs made a difference, but weren't "miracles". And each was different in their own ways, not just in terms of side effects (the new generation is _much_ better) but in terms of how they worked and how well. And it's well known that if a patient doesn't respond to the first drug at a sufficient dose, you try another till you (hopefully) find one that works.

The whole field is at an extremely primitive state, akin to poking at the brain with sticks. We've observed that sticks with certain shapes have good effects, and we've guessed why, but the distance from those guesses to what's really happening in terms of mood is _huge_.

So I wouldn't be inclined to push this study too hard, except to note what's no surprise to anyone, I'd think, that those with less severe symptoms get less benefit from these drugs. But I confess I'm not too interested in that issue, mine is how to treat the hard cases like myself and a few of my friends. And for us, antidepressants are most certainly a part of the picture.

<comment><AUTHOR> _The whole field is at an extremely primitive state, akin to poking at the brain with sticks._

Yes, there is still MUCH work to be done on the issue of treating human mood disorders. And your point is entirely correct that a cost-benefit model of evaluating treatments tends to make cognitive approaches to treatment delivered by any person other the patient doing self-help look too expensive (as compared to prescription medicines with very occasional psychiatrist office visits).

I've been a lot more interested in prompting discussion of mood disorder treament on HN since one thread a few months ago in which a participant (perhaps using a screen name just for that thread) mentioned having repeated bouts of depression that appeared to be seasonal and were definitely recurrent. That thread had many comments self-reporting the same phenomenon in other HN participants. Then, sadly, a few days later it was announced that a YC co-founder with high HN karma had committed suicide. I hope that if one person's anecdote is "antidepressant medication X didn't help me," the response will be "maybe your individual pattern of mood disorder is better helped by another medicine," rather than "people should try in all cases to do without medicine." It does appear to be consistent with the newly reported meta-analysis to say "people with severe depression should definitely try out medicines under medical supervision while also trying out other therapies" while people with milder cases of depression may not notice drug benefits much, but may still benefit from other therapies. I agree that people with the hard cases should keep seeking help and not give up. There is help even for those cases, although it is discouraging that the help can't be specified just by a simple blood test or something of that kind.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: learning Ruby/Rails - <AUTHOR>

What advice would you give for someone with a Non-CS background (economics, to be precise) wanting to learn Ruby & Rails? <comment><USER2> This is sort of a link dump but with some clicking around you should find some good stuff. Good luck!

<http://rubyonrails.org/screencasts>

<http://railsforzombies.org/>

<http://www.workingwithrails.com/>

<http://www.railsmentors.org/>

<http://blog.envylabs.com/2010/12/rails-3-cheat-sheets/>

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/55574/learning-ruby-on- ra...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/55574/learning-ruby-on-rails)

<http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2010/10/14/stop-googling/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Ruby Koans is a great tool for learning Ruby in general as well as its quirks and differences with other languages.

<http://rubykoans.com/>

Basically, it presents you with a battery of broken tests. Your goal is to reach enlightenment by fixing them. The first ones are simple to fix and teach you simple concepts as you do so. As you go, complexity increases.

It's a great tool for someone new to Ruby and Rails as you will want a solid understanding of the language if you will be using a framework on which the language is based. Plus, it reinforces how automated testing can be a valuable tool.

<comment><USER4> This was interesting to try as someone who's never touched ruby before, it begins seemingly simple but gets quite complex. Does this really target beginners, or am I an idiot?

<comment><USER5> If you're an idiot, so am I. It gets really tough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not flaming you here, but you should search HN because this question gets asked at least once a month and there's lots of valuable advice in those.

Try Googling 'ruby rails site:news.ycombinator.com' without the quotes. Filter the result for the last year or so, older advice is either wrong or no longer applicable. There's a search on the HN site, but I prefer Google.

Definitely focus your efforts on Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3, in any case.

Edit: Link!

Here's one from 2 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2329517>

</comment><comment><USER7> Same here. Thanks for the links. I am specifically interesting in learning Ruby THEN Rails. The other way feels backwards, but that might just be me.

I digress-I have a basic, I mean real basic question-what is a recommended environment to start coding ruby projects? I use XAMPP and Aptana for my front end coding (CSS/HTML) and then render in browser. How do I do replicate that work flow with Ruby source (and integrate it with my front-end code)?

Lame, I know. But hey stupid questions are the one's you don't ask.

UPDATE: rubykoans answered my editor question. Ruby resources still appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER8> TryRuby.org (<http://tryruby.org>) was what I started with.

When you're more comfortable with Ruby and want to get started with Rails, get a Heroku (<http://heroku.com>) account to play around with and check out Rails for Zombies (<http://railsforzombies.org/>).

I think you'll enjoy Ruby (and RoR). Ruby's a fun language to code in and I found it very beginner-friendly.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you're just starting out with Ruby I strongly recommend the book "Ruby for Rails" by David A. Black. It teaches you Ruby and shows you how Rubyisms work with Rails.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've found the Lynda.com video tuts great for a quick overview.

Also:

<http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/> and <http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on- rails-tutorial-book>

</comment><comment><USER11> I messed around for a while on <http://hackety-hack.com/> and now I'm playing with Ruby Koans also.

EDIT: Forgot that I first started with <http://tryruby.org/>

</comment><comment><USER12> Everything mentioned here is good. I also like RailsCasts - Ryan does a fantastic job with all his screen casts (<http://railscasts.com/>).

</comment><comment><USER13> Great stuff,I just started getting interested in learning Ruby and theirs some gems in here, excuse the pun.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Tks for all the feedback. This is an awsome list to get started.

On to reading & hacking away...

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm starting to learn as well, thanks for the links guys

</comment><comment><USER15> Your first stop should be to Rails for Zombies (<http://railsforzombies.org/>), buy Michael Hartl's book Ruby on Rails Tutorial (<http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book>), Learn to Program by Chris Pine (<http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/>) and also start learning Ruby (<http://pragprog.com/titles/ruby/programming-ruby>). Also, sign up to GitHub and Heroku, locate Ruby and/or Rails meetups close to you, follow the Ruby/Rails community via Twitter, podcasts, blogs. But most importantly, start building and deploying apps right away, no matter how small or trivial they may be.

Also, Sinatra (<http://www.sinatrarb.com/>)</comment>


When an Idea stops being an Idea - <AUTHOR>

This meme pops up from time to time, more recently. Ideas are cheap implementation  is where all the value is. Then again implementing  a bad idea has its consequences but that's a different thread.
Ok so I have an idea, well actually an idea was presented  to me. It was high level, needed refinement, and  had some holes. The market is BIG, the problem is HUGE, the solution is elegant. The individual who shared the 'idea' with me has domain experience, that's a plus.
A programmer I am not. By that I mean I cannot write software in a language
which can either be interpreted or compiled and executed. But I can write code in my language, the 'Dean' language (that's me). It's a really cool language. It has everything that every other language has and even has things I made up.  I add to in all the time, on the fly syntax. The best thing is that everyone understands it and everyone can add to it, it's very flexible.
I could hand you Mr Ruby, Mrs. Python, Sir Lisp, source written in this language and you could easily port it to your favorite language.
So I have this 'idea' written in the 'Dean' language which needs porting into another language. Do I have more than an idea?
There is another name for what I have its called a 'Spec'. <comment><USER2> Why are you wondering whether you have an idea or 'something more'? Just build it, or hire somebody to build it for you, or talk it over with some people. Anything that moves you forward. Wondering what you have isn't going to help you at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was a rhetorical question.

I did build it as I explained. I turned the idea into a 'spec'. A very detailed 'spec'. The point is that you do not need to be a programmer to start "building' the idea.

And yes the spec has been converted into to php at a very reasonable price. We have two paying customers and are getting ready for a launch.

The spec drastically reduced the cost of getting it 'built'. The spec is a form of implementation so the 'idea' is no longer just an idea when it is put into a detailed specification.

So all you non programmers you can start implementing your idea now, Just start 'building' it.

<comment><USER2> Okay, that wasn't clear to me, but it's a good point.

You could write up some advice to other non-programmers / "business guys" unsure of how to start: "writing a spec" is indeed a good way to start building.</comment></comment></comment>


Large-scale antibody test suggests Covid-19 cases underreported by factor of 50 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/17/antibody-study-suggests-coronavirus-is-far-more-widespread-than-previously-thought <comment><USER2> Math hints to this anyway. Isolated cases like Diamond Princess do show around a one percent death rate. And death is a trailing indicator by about 2 weeks. In 2 weeks the number of new daily cases goes up by up to 20x in hot areas. So to get an accurate estimate of cases you'd multiply the number of deaths by 2000. Currently the number of official cases is only 20x the death count. So, the result is not surprising.

This is also somewhat fantastic, as it means 1/6 of the US population has already had the disease, and maybe herd immunity is not a distant dream. (Though if any of this is true then that also means the virus is more contagious than previously thought, and the herd bar is even higher than the 75% experts have been mostly saying).</comment>


Show HN: Website/Twitter App that helps you curate your best tweets - <AUTHOR> http://www.tweetlights.com <comment><AUTHOR> I made this site over a weekend as a side project when discussing how hard it is to help new followers quickly get up to speed on what you've tweeted about over the years since you can only have 1 pinned tweet. Quick and dirty code here (written in python using flask as well as the requisite javascript scripting for the front end): [https://github.com/dbish/tweetlights](https://github.com/dbish/tweetlights). Site is hosted on AWS Elastic Beanstalk.</comment>


How to set a Dropbox file to be ignored (beta) - <AUTHOR> https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/restore-delete/ignored-files <comment><USER2> This is great to see. There's a use case here for temporary files generated by dev tools, when working on a project and switching machines. I used to switch from desktop to laptop during the night.

For me it's the vs folder used by Visual Studio.</comment>


A Multi-Disciplinary Reading List - <AUTHOR> http://projectmona.com/bits-of-brilliance-session-one/

<comment><USER2> While a lot of the material seems to be of high quality, certain things seem particularly dubious and not very enlightening, if not ideologically driven. That guide to deflation, for example: there are far better and broader reads in economics. Perhaps this list could use some pruning.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks great, thanks for sharing. Really interested in what you're working on with Project MONA! While this material mostly all looks great my initial impression is that it could stand to be curated a bit more aggressively. I've had the tabs for the first 3 "Bits of Brilliance" bookmarked for the last few days but there are so many links to wade through I haven't gotten around to it...if you chose the 5-10 absolute best items of content rather than 25-30 I'd be a lot more likely to dive in immediately :)</comment>