Ask HN: What are your music prototyping solutions? - <AUTHOR>

I am not a professional musician (just played on a music keyboard for ~8 years till I stopped ~10 years ago), but sometimes various ideas flow into my mind or I want to quickly transcribe (at least some parts of) heard music. The problem is with figuring out and writing down the stuff (or staff if you prefer, but literal staff is not needed, anything easily convertible to SMF or music XML would be fine). And doing it efficiently, obviously.
I lack sound recognition skill (cannot immediately reconstruct heard or thought sounds, have to find them out using trial and error method, which sometimes becomes more effective if I am getting into vibe of currently analyzed tune).
I have my old Casio CTK-750, but:
1. It's not next to my PC, so I have to relocate (it would be acceptable if not the other things below).
2. It has memory only for 2 songs. (There are though many tracks, so I can abuse them going with single idea per track and muting all others during recording/playing. Cumbersome.)
3. After recording I still lack the score and next day I can easily forget how I played it before.
There is a MIDI stuff. Haven't tried it recently, because my current desktop doesn't have gameport or I don't have the cable anymore or both (don't remember now the exact state, sounds ridiculous, I know). But I tried it many years ago on my AWE32 (that was really expensive and huge back then!) and Cakewalk was getting some more notes than I played (some very high and very low tones), so it was practically useless. Never figured out whether it was bad cable (didn't have the second one), bad keyboard (didn't have the second one) or bad gameport (didn't have second sound one). Maybe I should buy MIDI-on-USB, cable, and recheck it nowadays.
Ad rem. I tried some applications (haven't checked them thoroughly, though) like musescore, noteedit, nted, rosegarden, milky tracker, (modplug on Windows also) and possibly some others I don't remember their names now, but apparently no one has sane recording/playing via keyboard feature. The best what you can get are shortcuts for notes, like C for C, D for D, etc. which are possibly ok for slow editing/tuning purposes, but far from being even acceptable for "live performances". Having some music keyboard mode is so obvious that I am amazed not seeing it anywhere.
Well, there is VMPK, but it doesn't have good enough way of mapping tones (tones -> keys instead the other way, which means you cannot have same tones on two different keys) and I failed at seeing/hearing its output in musescore, i.e. did set the connection via qjackctl's connect dialog box, but musescore doesn't have any way to choose the input provided to it in IO tab. Musescore is not the best target actually, as it is ok only for storing notes alone, without timestamp and duration information.
(I have voluntary preemptable Linux kernel right now in my debian squeeze, so it's suboptimal for MIDI stuff and audio in general, but still have to say that latency I get in VMPK is extremely awfully annoying.)
So tell me HN, what are your music prototyping solutions, suggestions, tips, favorite apps, etc.?
My first AskHN thing here, hopefully it's not too long and I'll get some insightful comments. <comment><USER3> Digital trackers.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracker_(music_software)>

I have yet to find a faster way from idea to music. It's clunky to get into until you spend some time to learn the idea and build up a collection of music and wrap your brain around the entire concept, but it's a few decades old a very mature concept with tens of thousands of works created with this method.

Here's a site that streams tracked music 24-7 <http://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/>

Some of it is quite good (thought the quality obviously ranges quite a bit though both talent and technology).

If you want to see the music with a visual production try <http://demoscene.tv/>

I've been working with a piece of software called MadTracker 2 for a while, but I'm about to transition to Renoise (MadTracker 2 is long since a dead project) which is available for Windows, OS X and Linux and is about as professional as a piece of software has any right being.

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

In a rush I can crank a reasonable tune out in a few hours. I've heard of at least one major artist cranking out an entire album (vocals and all) in less than a week.

<http://hunz.com.au/>

Most of the modern trackers will let you render individual tracks to file for final downmixing.

Note: These _are_ most definitely not intended for live performance, though a few folks have used them for that purpose.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. I am aware of digital trackers (I mentioned modplug), was even using FastTracker 2 back in the old days (but not for a long time). I like scene music, especially old school chip tunes.

I heard about renoise before. I'll maybe try its trial version, but I doubt trackers are really what I am looking for as they lack proper recording feature (at least the ones I tried). Check also the comment in my new thread.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it seems like you might have more of a desire for live performance tools. Maybe even something simple like this:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miMM8R1CSM8>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25VGdNU3nrU>

which can produce really great results.

And once you're happy with the results, "record" the individual parts with a midi tool so you have the notes down someplace for recall later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. Maybe you're right. These YT examples are really nice. Even though I can hum or sign accurately (thus this has clear advantage over playing), I am more inclined in getting track of my melodies early (i.e. what I am actually crafting, is it F#, G or G# scale, etc.), so I don't think voice-way is the right solution (maybe I'm wrong, as it would be more efficient assuming good recording and looping devices, still it's not that good for every kind of music), but definitely interesting one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use a little Akai LPK25 keyboard (fits perfectly right above my computer keyboard, so I just reach up a little to play) with seq24 for editing/recording MIDI notes and zynaddsubfx as a synthesizer on Linux. It's a straightforward, simple, and clean setup. Notes in seq24 are displayed in piano-roll format, and you can compose looping patterns that you can then combine into song patterns. I'll also use an electric guitar with jack-rack to mess around with ideas on and record stuff in Ardour with, or even tab it out in tuxguitar, since I can find my way around the notes on a fretboard a bit more easily sometimes.

I also bought a license for Renoise, which I use occasionally, but trackers are too involved for my tastes and I prefer a piano roll layout for editing notes. It does allow you to use your computer keyboard as a music keyboard though, and the layout isn't bad, but you're still better off using a small MIDI keyboard.

I used to use Cubase (got the full version in a box somewhere), but it's overkill for an amateur like me, and I don't even have a Windows PC or a Mac to run it on anymore. Maybe someday I'll buy a Macbook Pro or something.

<http://www.akaipro.com/lpk25>

<http://www.filter24.org/seq24/>

<http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/>

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't know there is such USB keyboard (but I felt that there should be something like that). Thanks for informing me about it and apps I didn't know before.

Two octaves (actually almost three) I could easily get on computer keyboard (not that convenient, I know), so it doesn't look that useful to me, also because 2 octaves are not enough for most of two-hand plays.

So Renoise has computer keyboard as music keyboard mode? Good to know. I'll have to check it whether it works as I would like it too.

<comment><USER4> No problem, but I would encourage you to reconsider your train of thought.

The LPK25 is limited, but it's definitely more convenient for getting down ideas than using a computer keyboard, since once you have it set as the MIDI input device in an application, you can hit keys and play notes without having to worry about what application is in focus and what its keyboard shortcuts are. Computer keyboards also only recognize up to a certain number of keys being held down simultaneously (since they're designed with the assumption that you won't be pressing five keys in the same row at the same time) and don't provide velocity or intensity information, but you always get note intensity and velocity MIDI information out of a MIDI keyboard. As for the limited number of keys, you can shift the keyboard down or up entire octaves with the buttons on the left and then record the left and right hand parts separately in two passes. You can also look at it and see what notes you're pressing instead of having to translate between a computer keyboard and a musical keyboard.

So I'd say it's quite useful compared to having just a computer keyboard, and the small size means you're that much more likely to have it with your computer, even if your computer is a laptop and you travel a lot. Your argument that it only does what you could still do with a computer keyboard is like saying the virtual keyboard on an iPad is just as good as using a bluetooth keyboard, since they offer the same keys and basic functionality... so a bluetooth keyboard for the iPad is useless. But you'll probably still want to use that bluetooth keyboard with the iPad if you're doing any amount of writing, because it just makes it easier to type (and it frees up the screen space for what you're writing).

If you have the desk space though, Behringer makes some cheap gear that usually works fine, so go with a larger keyboard and check out the Behringer UMX610, which should work perfectly with Linux:

[http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/672870-REG/Behringer_U...](http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/672870-REG/Behringer_UMX610_UMX610_USB_MIDI_Keyboard.html)

You could even use such a keyboard for actual performances if you absolutely had to, but it probably doesn't play as nicely as your Casio, and you should probably figure out your latency problems in Linux. (To be honest, if I were doing anything music related on an everyday basis, I'd much rather use Cubase on a Mac. Linux software is a disheveled mess of parts that can fit together quite nicely, but can also cause a lot of hairpulling too.)

Finally, you probably don't want to hear this, but if you have time and energy for ear training practice, relative pitch recognition would make your life a lot easier and solve most of your problems. Then if you can work out what the first few notes of your song are and you figure out the key, you can figure out how to write down the rest pretty easily from there. Then you could use some of the score editing software, trackers, or anything else that people mentioned in the other replies.

As it is now, it sounds like most of your musical fluency is trapped away in the muscle memory of your hands, and that's the real source of your current problem, since it's the same as being able to speak and listen, maybe even read a bit, but not write anything.

Anyway, just something to consider. Good luck, and I hope you find something that works for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this insightful comment.

You're right, music keyboard is obviously better than computer keyboard in all ways. I didn't want to argue opposite statement.

Behringer UMX610 looks more interesting, but it's a bit more expensive. Having my old casio, which has nowadays only one really annoying thing (less annoying is broken volume potentiometer, so only one speaker works above ~10% level) - clappy sound (don't know any good term for it) of its keys - I don't have real need for new keyboard (I don't intend to compose being outside of the home, but OTOH having small keyboard next to keyboard would be possibly convenient). It's still unknown about this casio's MIDI capabilities, i.e. whether they are working correctly. First thing I have to do in spare time is get some MIDI on USB interface cable (like Roland UM-1G, which is already more than 100PLN) and test my keyboard on it after years to see whether old problems are still here.

As I stated in response to troyal7562, I have some relative pitch recognition skill (not accurate) that combined with the knowledge of key indeed gives good results, but not good enough for real-time transcription-through-play.

Well, I can write, but not off-hand, that's the point. Also via playing you can develop and change your ideas further, so I wouldn't call this additional stage as trapping. Remember I am talking about prototyping, not crafting final version of some music piece. That is also why having it in my computer, when I can (or should be able to) easily alter, improve and combine my musical sketches, is that important. But surely having perfect sound recognition skill would ease all of my efforts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you absolutely can't spend money on anything, I'd go with PxTone for bare- bones prototyping. It runs on Wine. It is point-and-click tracker.

<http://buzinkai.net/PXTone/tutorial/>

It's an incredibly lightweight tracker or whatever, and comes with preloaded instruments (basic chiptune-ish sounds). But when you're prototyping a song or trying to get an idea down really fast, you shouldn't worry too much about the instruments or anything. PxTone is strong in this regard, it's VERY FAST and intuitive to just jot down a melody.

I find PxTone is great if I think of some short melody and want it sort of stored so I can come back to it later and maybe work with it on something more involved than PxTone.

Of course it's mostly useful for the prototyping stage. Any sort of recording with real instruments, or effects more than just panning/volume/reverb/echo/overdrive/portamento, you'll want to look elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. Point-and-click is not what I am looking for (at least for input stage), but I'll look at it later. It's not that I cannot spend some money, but I would like to definitely avoid additional expenses (see also comment in my new thread).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Logic or Digital Performer on the mac, Cubase on PC. If you're very score- centric, Sibelius. Buy a quality audio interface with MIDI ports. Not cheap, but the only way to get genuinely high quality MIDI and score editing.

Trackers are a crutch for people without a musical education and simply aren't sophisticated enough. They represent music mechanically, using an abstraction that collapses in the face of something as mundane as triplets. There are no good sequencers on Linux. Lilypond does excellent engraving, but there's no Free software that'll prepare a score without endless hair pulling.

<comment><USER7> There's a delay column in Renoise that make triplets trivial.

The Lua API and users writing scripts, such as this "Fractional Notes Generator" makes it even more trivial:

[http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?/topic/28248-allow- fl...](http://www.renoise.com/board/index.php?/topic/28248-allow-float-values- in-edit-step-for-quick-triplets/page__p__221850#entry221850)

I thought this was hacker news were people actually knew how to code? Musically educated in what? Last time I checked we're not troubadours performing occitan lyric poetry in the high middle ages.

Trackers aren't for everyone, some things are clearly not reasonable to do in them (recording a live band comes to mind), but the "musical education" and "crutch" comment is without foundation.

<comment><USER6> Musically educated in what? Music. Not genre-based electronic music, but music in it's broadest sense - from bebop to Bulgarian folk music, from Stravinsky to Stockhausen, from Abba to Zappa.

I write music for sync. I need things like timecode support, which is a weird niche thing, but also things like tempo and time signature maps, which aren't.

In a proper sequencer, I can play in a phrase, then instantly quantise it to any time signature and any tuplet I want. Septuplets in 9/8 are no more difficult than straight eights in 4/4. The grid in my piano roll display will conform to my chosen timing, as will the output of my score editor. I can draw in a series of gradual tempo changes to an automation channel, or extract tempo and groove from an audio or MIDI track to use as a tempo map. If that sounds like an exotic requirement, try arranging a piece in a tracker based around drums recorded without a click, or using a tracker to arrange a version of, say, "Anyone Who Had A Heart" by Burt Bacharach.

Trackers represent music in a way that is alien to people who can read classical notation and who have studied composition. Someone with a modicum of training can follow an orchestral score with dozens of parts, scanning the score in real time and picking out the harmonic progression and main melodic theme. That's simply not possible with a tracker, either using numerical or piano roll display. Not an issue if you make primitive electronic music, a cataclysmic failure if you deal with big, complicated arrangements.

Trackers are a toy. They're intolerably crude if you're a professional user who has deadlines to meet, but also intolerably crude if you're merely an amateur with musical training. Tracker users don't know what they're missing, overwhelmingly because they can't read or write music, have little understanding of musical theory and no experience of playing in ensemble with trained musicians.

<comment><USER7> Again, you are confusing "right tool for the job" with your silly prejudices.

Take me for example, I know Stockhausen because I studied him in my fine arts undergraduate degree in Electroacoustic studies at university.

To recap, the question was somewhere along the lines of "how do you prototype music, I have a casio?" not "how do you write a serialist score for a chamber ensemble?"

Even then, The Linux Laptop Orchestra based in the music department at Virgina Tech uses trackers. Of course this isn't the score to Star Wars and a house in Malibu; it is very left field stuff, but it can't be denied that this is serious contemporary practice for anyone in the know.

Regards,

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you conner_bw and jdietrich for covering topic a bit more deeply here. I am open-minded and I like discussions from various PoV. Even if I am only a guy with casio (somehow it sounded like a really lame thing, is it? :>), I happily get to know more about professional-like stuff, as I am perfectionist deep in my heart. But I also almost always try to find the most effective way of what I am doing (and often this finding part takes more time than doing the job, oh well...), like writing scripts for one-time task that could be done quicker by hand, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you all for great comments. I think I should add a few more words here.

In my case playing music (and recently composing) is just a way to break from daily activities or relax in spare time. I used to do it years ago and somehow this year I started doing it again. This is why I do not intend on spending money on it (like > 22$/30EUR/100PLN), just want to use whatever best free tools are out there.

By best in terms of music prototyping I mean the most effective ones:

\- giving the possibility to quickly store my musical ideas, like by supporting input from playing on a computer keyboard (by "live performances", mind I used scare quotes also in starting message, I meant rather playing for recording purposes than for amusing of others than me in the room),

\- allowing me to easily rearrange, tune and mix my crafted pieces.

Once again, literal score is not the purpose of music prototyping, but some way of saving the music sketches, overwriting and enhancing them, etc., just working on them (but doing it in a efficient manner) seems crucial to me, as otherwise I'll lost idea before writing it down or won't have enough time to tediously input it in clunky tracker/sequencer/staff editor/whatever.

No comment explicitly addressed my wish for rapid prototyping/transcribing (don't get me wrong, I am not complaining here just stating the fact), but I've seen some new app names that I'll try to test later and check how they fit (if at all) in my idea of composing/music recognition workflow.

Maybe I'll have to prototype my own tool for music prototyping one day. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> If you have an iPad, check out: <http://symphonypro.net>.

The app allows you to create and edit sheet music. There's a built in keyboard and a real-time recording feature. If you have a Core MIDI compatible device, you connect it to your iPad and input notes in real time from that as well.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for slipping in. I don't have any Apple product.

(But I'll possibly buy some MacBook if there will be TrackPoint in it - <USER2> I feel it is quite unlikely to happen. I know there are others like me, though.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> the problem is finding a software sequencer you can get comfortable with. pick one and stick with it, and use it every day. don't give up on a track till you've spent an hour on it, as there's no better practice than finessing an idea you're not sold on to improvement (this will come in handy if you end up doing it for money). with an apt combination of keyboard shortcuts and smart combinations of presets, no amount of software will hold back your ideas from fruition. i use FL studio in this manner to great effect, and can have a 5 minute song assembled to some structure in about 30 minutes. from there it's a matter of EQ and balancing.

another option may be to use something like audiomulch or PD to create the sort of work-flow environment you need to sit down and start sketching.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for a good tip. Being good in anything usually requires spending some time on it. I'll possibly invest more time if I found that particular sequencer/tool that works as I would like it to and its workflow is convenient for me.

I'll check audiomulch later. What is PD?

<comment><USER9> PD is pure data, which is an open source clone of the (surprisingly) closed source MAX/MSP. <http://puredata.info/>

it's basically an open-ended programming environment for music/data/midi -- it's got a steep learning curve but disclaimers like that have no place on a site for hackers =)

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoa, another interesting stuff. Thanks for explanation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The best solution, of course, is to develop this "sound recognition skill". While the amount of work it takes get there is significant, the benefits far exceed the mere ability to transcribe what is in your head. Most people think that the ability is magic, so that whe you develop this ability, people will think you are some kind of musical genius. It is similar to how the computer illiterate respond to programmers.

I use pen and paper. Anything else is an (understanably neccesary) shortcut. I feel for the trees, but I havent found an iPad app that allows you to simply write on a representation of staff paper yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for comment. Developing such skill would be awesome. I have some grasp of intervals (far from perfect), but not scales, so I have to find the first tone to properly continue. When I find the scale, it's easier to follow the melody, but I can never go error-free on first play real-time.

Do you have any tips about learning this skill efficiently, useful resources, etc.? If I could at least improve in a short time, I would consider investing my time into it.

I understand (a bit) your feel about writing on staff paper. But I was never able to quickly do it and preserve acceptable look of my scores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another vote for the Akai LPK25 -- it's superportable, so it's easy either to keep right by your computer, or even to throw into a laptop bag and have along with you.

Personally I like Sonar (the current generation Cakewalk) on Windows as a software solution. I can't speak to Linux solutions.

I also keep some composition apps on my Android phone. If you really want to capture musical ideas wherever you are, a phone is perfect. I like Caustic and ULoops for Android, and I've also tried NanoStudio on an iPod Touch and found it quite nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. I don't have a smartphone, so I have to skip mobile solutions. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a Yamaha DGX-500 that I bought from a bloke at my office. It works great and is compatible with FL Studio. Saves about 5 songs, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. I know that some recent keyboards have memory for lot of songs, LCDs displaying recorded music and such, also USB port to store it on pendrive. It should be quite productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ableton Live with the Session view is how I make my music. In fact, here's a stupid rough video of how I do my stuff.

<http://www.bphogan.com/files/videos/livesession.mov>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for commenting. Ableton Live is undoubtedly a great software. AFAIK it's not suited for rapid prototyping.

Here is some nice stuff. Just in case somebody haven't seen it yet.

Making of "The Prodigy - Voodoo People" in Ableton by Jim Pavloff

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZYLp5uX9Yw>

<comment><USER13> Did you watch the clip I posted tho? Using the session view, I can prototype really quickly by recording simple loops. I used to use lots of other tools, but I am so much faster with the session view. I can record things in parts and then move them around to see if I like what I'm hearing. Very organic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I did not, as I am short on time recently. I have done it just now in speeded up way and indeed, session view looks quite interesting and useful for music prototyping (assuming you already clearly know what to play, doesn't look equally good for trial and error method).

Thank you for being stubborn and convincing me about AL usefulness. I won't spend 350EUR on it, though.

<comment><USER13> No problem. And depending on the USB midi input controller you get, you might be able to get a free LE (limited edition) copy with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know. Thanks for this remark, but USB MIDI controller with Ableton LE won't be cheap either. :)

Also quoting wikipedia:

 _As of version 6, Ableton also offers a stripped-down version of Live targeted at the non-professional market. It has limitations on the number of audio channels and effects and does not feature some of the synchronization (MIDI Clock, ReWire) utilities the full version has to offer. The current Live LE version is 8.1.4.

As part of the Able10 celebrations, Ableton introduced Live Intro as an effective replacement to LE. Registered users of Live LE can now receive a free upgrade to Live Intro. The current version is 8.2.2._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> checkout an earlier thread! <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3089010>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reference, In fact it inspired me to create this submission, as subject is not the same. (You missed my comment there, right? :>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Guitar, voice, imagination. Next I write a few notes and lyrics on paper. Then I start to record for real...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing your story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Chord chart on paper. Play, improvise, revise.

</comment><comment><USER17> I _am_ a professional musician. For getting things typeset, I use Lilypond, and the two tools I use are vim and rumor. (<https://launchpad.net/rumor>) Very simple, but it gets the job done.

For live performance, I have a USB keyboard and several voices in Csound (<http://www.csounds.com/>) and run the whole thing through a keyboard amp. Cheap and effective.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for comment. Did not hear about rumor before. I'll have to definitely check this out, even though it's not suited for prototyping. I'll test Csound too.</comment></comment>


NASA's $8B plan to find extraterrestrial life - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/inside-nasas-daring-8-billion-plan-to-finally-find-extraterrestrial-life/ <comment><USER2> The narrative, the drama, of the heroic rich person with single-minded vision is getting old to me. There's even a TV show about a rich guy taking over a police district in a major city - those working-class people who've been working on these problems for their careers are all fools; they need a rich guy and his money (not taxpayer money from their community) to tell them what to do.[0] There are other stories.

Remember that for the Apollo missions, it was a drama of a brave nation working together against the odds, and humble engineers and astronauts.

I also think that this glorification of the wealthy, and the unspoken assumption that it's a sign of merit, is unhealthy for society. I think judging people by their bank book is inaccurate, and pigeon-holes people and ideas into an economic class.

Finally, the less that's paid for by taxes, the more power is shifted to the wealthy. Do we want important decisions made democratically, by taxpayers, or by a few with money. Who gets to say how that new park will look, what medical research we invest in, etc. - the citizens or one guy paying for it?

[0] Maybe an unfair characterization; I've only seen the ads.

<comment><USER3> Who is the heroic rich person with a vision in this story? I read a story about a determined congressman. Is this comment on the right story?

<comment> T-A Subheading: "A congressman, a billionaire movie director, and an unparalleled mission of discovery."

The billionaire is revealed near the end, to keep you reading: "For this mission, he has a secret weapon. During the briefings at JPL, Culberson brought a friend with him, the famed Director James Cameron."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Invisibility is a stage in life evolution. As predation dominates the universe, life evolves to become invisible from other predators. So we humans are in a stage of evolution that we can be seen, and I consider extremely stupid flashing our position to most advanced forms of life that will anihilate us in a heartbeat.

So our only hope is to find life that is barely advanced, just like algae in a watery planet, or find life that's more advanced than us and say goodbye to our existence. Just like aborigins from America flashing lights to european explorers. We would be extremely lucky to find life in the 100,000 year span that takes species to gain conciousness and develop invisibility. Not that we can't just that's extremely improbable, and dangeorous for there are also more advanced predators watching. That's why we can't find them, they're invisible.

That's my hypothesis.

<comment><USER5> I highly recommend the Three Body Problem trilogy. The second book "Dark Forest" exactly deals with why the universe _seems_ so barren as far as intelligent life goes. The theory is that all intelligent species make the following assumptions:

1\. All other intelligent species have the potential to be hostile. Since there are large number of races in the universe, it's guaranteed that there are hostile intelligent species.

2\. One is highly unlikely to be or remain the most technologically advanced race in the universe. Even a currently inferior race can suddenly become an existential threat after technology explosion.

3\. All intelligent races prioritize their own survival and have reached the first 2 conclusions.

So combining all 3 of those assumptions, one can see the logical step is to assume the universe is a terrifying dark forest filled with dangerous animals. For any resident in such forest it's natural to conceal its own presence, and if anybody reveals their location, they will be immediately eliminated by a more technologically advanced race to insure they will not become a threat. This is true doesn't matter how technologically advanced a race is because there will always be a bigger fish out there somewhere that is trying to do the same thing.

In fact, I can't think of any reasons why we shouldn't take this approach. I'd love to find the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, but I think we are being extremely foolish broadcasting our location to the universe.

<comment><USER6> What if we decide to invade what seems to be small civilization, and it turns out to be a colony of a much larger civilization or alliance? What if it's a honeypot?

Maybe the best strategy is to make as many allies as possible expecting that some day that would increase the odds of surviving a hostile contact with a other civilizations or other threats...

Our understanding of life and the universe is limited. Our current version of the Drake equation is really off, and we do not have an answer to the Fermi paradox. Collaborate or compete are usually context sensitive decisions. The best thing to do is bounded to our understanding of game theory, which is a field full of open questions.

<comment><USER7> Drake equation always bothered me when used in argument of contact probability, because it doesn't take into account time. Yes, there might have been billions of extraterrestrial civilizations, but that doesn't mean there are currently ones that 1) already can communicate or receive EM waves, and 2) not yet deprecated use of EM waves. Oh and there's also speed of light issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lately I've been thinking... however improbable this is, what if we are the first intelligent species in the Universe?

I mean, not saying that because I think we are special, but just wondering what would it mean if we were "the first" (for some relatively-local value of first)?

Are there any hard sci-fi stories about this? or has anyone given any thought about it? or would it be a very boring outcome?

<comment><USER9> I think it ends up being a relatively boring outcome, because then it would very strongly imply that some previous step between organic sludge, and intelligent tool users is _very_ _VERY_ unlikely to occur. It would be good news in a sense, because it would imply nothing sinister about our future by comparison to past species, but it would be lonely.

In the best estimate, I suppose you've seen that version of humanity in the various "Ancients" or "Proteans" and other first races in sci-fi.

<comment><USER10> Conversely I've always wondered what the effect on the zeitgeist would be if we discovered the ruins of an obviously advanced civilisation.

Like an Earth-like habitable zone planet who's atmosphere was heavily contaminated with fission byproducts.

<comment><USER11> It would probably enforce the idea of The Great Filter[1]. It would also show that it's not uncommon for civilizations to develop similarly to humans. I would argue that the concept of war is a very human concept and doesn't necessarily have to apply to alien live which developed completely independently of Earth life.

1\. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Let's hope they find some trace of intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!

(Mangled Monty Python)

</comment><comment><USER13> > A MacBook Pro operating at full capacity, 24 hours a day, would consume > about that much energy in a month.

What a bizarre restatement of its battery capacity -- I wouldn't think MacBook Pro power consumption is something people have an intuitive understanding of. Why not an iPhone? Or a light bulb? Or just compare it to the battery capacity of devices deployed on Mars in the past? Seems like the writer just looked around his desk for a good comparison and his eyes settled on the device that he happened to be typing on.

<comment><USER14> But how many libraries of congress does it consume? The people want to know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For those interested in this topic, I recommend "Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction" by David Catling. Catling details nine celestial bodies in the solar system that could potentially harbor life.</comment>


Don't Be Fooled: The Mac App Store Is Full of Scams - <AUTHOR> http://www.howtogeek.com/281849/dont-be-fooled-the-mac-app-store-is-full-of-scams/# <comment><USER2> While I have not been fooled by those apps I have stumbled upon them when searching for the genuine thing. The problem is real.

There seems discrepancy the way Apple treated the Dash developer and the way it generally polices the marketplace. I don't want to go back to that discussion as I believe Apple has to defend the integrity of the marketplace. But very uneven enforcement leaves Apple not only open to accusations of unfairness but all sorts of legal trouble.

The article focus on misleading advertisements for products (with a 30% cut for Apple). The fact that they set the rules and enforce them (sometimes) makes it difficult to claim this is none of their business. It seems that the neglect of the Mac App store has now reached a point where one could make a reasonable case for trade mark infringement. Maybe there would be one if Microsoft or Adobe were at war with Apple.

Apple, this problem is solvable. Improve the App store deliverability. It is overdue. Clean out dead apps. Enforce proper keywords. It "only" takes leadership (a different one?) and enough resources to take a short look at what you sell. There is no shame in falling behind Microsoft if you wake up and begin to catch up.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why Apple cannot have a verified check against some App Store apps much like how Twitter has them for user profiles.

I also think the App Store is suffering because Apple can't seem to decide whether the App Store should be a convenient technology that makes it easy for users to find, install and uninstall software (I.e. a macOS feature) or whether it should be a storefront. The naming and current policies, including the 30% cut strongly seem to suggest the latter, but I suspect Apple would be better served if they treated it as the former, and didn't look st it as a profit source.

<comment><USER4> > Apple [does not] have a verified check against some App Store apps much like > how Twitter has them for user profiles

They don't? Google Play certainly has verified developers, under the name "Top Developer". See for example here: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twitter.an...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.twitter.android)

The documentation states that "top developers" are "selected by Google Play team": [https://support.google.com/googleplay/android- developer/answ...](https://support.google.com/googleplay/android- developer/answer/1295940?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On a couple of occasions I've found broken rip-offs of my applications in the App Store, and Apple was very slow to remove them. It took 6 months on average.

In my case the scammers have learned how to stall the process — at each stage they didn't respond to anything until the very last deadline, and then lied and lied as long as they could (to absurd levels — in one case my name was in credits.rtf in their app bundle, and they still said it's 100% their app).

When the app is removed Apple doesn't issue refunds, and I wouldn't be surprised if the seller kept the money. So 6 months of sales per obvious, immediately reported scam is still a good business.

</comment><comment><USER6> The article claims: 'Over the summer at least one Mac App Store app installed malware onto users' Macs.'

But then links to [http://fortune.com/2016/07/06/mac-malware-backdoor- app/](http://fortune.com/2016/07/06/mac-malware-backdoor-app/) which seems to be about something called "EasyDoc Converter" which was stated to not have been in Mac App Store...

'The good news is that the malware, dubbed "Backdoor.MAC.Eleanor" by the researchers, is not available in Apple's AAPL 0.50% official App Store. Instead, the app has been advertised for download on third-party sites; for instance, a copy was available on the site MacUpdate until it was removed on Tuesday.'

</comment><comment><USER7> Apple has been going through and removing old/unused apps from the App Store more recently, fortunately. I agree it isn't fast enough and that they will hopefully do more about it.

[https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/apple-is-going-to- remove-a...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/01/apple-is-going-to-remove- abandoned-apps-from-the-app-store/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Can you even use an i-thing without an iTunes account and credit card?

Just asking I refused a work iPhone 4 way back when because it wouldn't let me do anything without one.

<comment><USER9> You can skip inputting payment information when you set it up with an iTunes account.

<comment><USER4> This. Otherwise a lot of Germans wouldn't be able to use Apple devices. Credit cards are not very common here, but you can purchase iTunes prepaid cards at many chain stores.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Apple reviews every single app that makes it to the store. Does the author really think this is not intentional?</comment>


Rubyist makes some Python code 5x Faster - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneems.com/2017/10/02/lifelong-rubyist-makes-some-python-code-5x-faster/ <comment><USER2> I thought it was an insane CPython interpreter optimization or something.

Turns out it was a specific chunk of python snippet that

> determining all possible moves for a Queen piece on a chess-like board

<comment><USER3> Yep, that's what I thought as well and was curious to see the link between the author being a rubyist and contributing to python. Too bad it wasn't any such thing.

On the plus side tho', I thought the principles mentioned go beyond the specifics of the code snippent which was being used more like an example.

The author being a rubyist has no influence to anything mentioned in the article AFAICT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be really good if the author actually linked to somewhere where you can reproduce the benchmark. Either way, I'm pretty sure the correct response is "use pypy", not that I can check it

</comment><comment><USER3> Ugh, what's with the cheeky/inflammatory/click-baity title.

That's a turn off from an otherwise good article on guidelines one can use to easily identify opportunities to potentially optimize python code.

<comment><USER5> Huh? I thought the title was a perfect description of the article. A dude who mostly uses ruby optimizes a piece of Python code. That's it.

<comment><USER6> The "rubyist" is completely irrelevant to the article. The optimizations might apply as well in any number of languages, because they all are related to minimizing heap allocations and keeping the execution pipeline lean (e.g. by minimizing function calls).

It's fairly easy to think from the title that the article is going to be something about how clever the rubyist is compared to Python programmers or how slow Python is or some such, as an intrinsic property of "rubyists" or Python.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an assignment from Georgia Tech's OMSCS 6601 class, Intro to AI. This was a super fun assignment, with lots of low hanging optimizations like this :)

</comment><comment><USER8> The board contains only binary values. So why not use binary comparisons in integers ?

For any row, you test the row value & the current col and have your answer.

</comment><comment><USER9> A Rubyist? Ruby is a nice language but because of its core design flaw of metaprogramming there's no point in trying to squeeze optimizations out of Ruby code. It's slow by design.

<comment><USER10> What on earth are you talking about?</comment></comment>


Please critique "Read My Tweets" -- using CAPTCHAs to increase your followers on twitter. - <AUTHOR>

Check it out:
http://www.readmytweets.com
It's like a banner exchange but applied to tweets with CAPTCHAs to ensure that people actually do read the tweets. <comment><USER2> Firstly, I don't really see the point here. Currently, it's basically a game that asks "Which tweet has a missing word?" There's no obvious reason behind why I would want to play it, though. I will assume by gaining "score" my tweets will show up on the site for others to "guess" about. However, as I was playing, I wasn't reading the tweets for comprehension, just to determine which was more likely to contain the (arbitrary) "missing word" and I certainly didn't click on any links (well, not that they were clickable). This basically nullifies any banner exchange benefit.

Secondly, the method you use to Captcha, i.e. missing words, is way too arbitrary and prone to wrong guesses. Take the following example: [http://img.skitch.com/20081231-cexmqnxetfktd6ybbdfei8dpgp.pn...](http://img.skitch.com/20081231-cexmqnxetfktd6ybbdfei8dpgp.png)

The first tweet was just ".net" which I presumed was missing a URL at the very least. The second wasn't even English, if it was a language at all. The other huge issue with this is the fact that, in general, tweets are going to be missing words because of the character limitation. I got a couple wrong simply because both tweets were missing words that would form a complete sentence, but only one of them was missing the word you wanted me to notice.

Basically, aside from some sort of novelty, I see no use for this service. Perhaps I'm missing something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tweets are generally not that hard to understand. Checking whether there is a missing word would probably force you to get some understanding of the tweet -- how can you avoid it?

I could add some heuristics about what sorts of words to remove. But note that you could always click "Skip" if the answer is not clear. Also, I took out the "No" option since it isn't fair: a tweet may still make sense after removing a word.</comment></comment>


New Story's first 3D-printed houses are now complete - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90440406/the-worlds-first-3d-printed-neighborhood-now-has-its-first-houses <comment><USER2> How is this cheaper than shipping in prefab blocks and bolting them together? There are lots of claims about it being low cost and affordable but little data to explain why.

<comment><USER3> This here is low cost and affordable: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau) Almost 100 years ago Germans discovered the way of cheap building. The first houses are still used according recent documentary. This 3D printing might be novel, but basically they move their factory each time for a new house while Plattenbau factory must be installed once. Plus Plattenbau has canals for cables and already installed windows and doors. Plus Plattenbau can be a high building. I live in one from 1965, it's really shitty. Insulation between concrete layers is gone, you can hear TV of the neighbors and it's cold in winter.

<comment><USER4> Prefab cross-laminated timber (CLT) is a modern equivalent. It is suitable for highrise buildings (no concrete, all wood including elevator shafts, etc) and it is a carbon sink for as long as the housing stands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really interesting idea and potentially a great benefit. I do find it funny that they decorated the house in a very American/European style. That works great for press photos aimed at US investors, but I wonder how all that will fare given the high traffic & use that occur in small dwellings.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious how they are bridging the gaps for windows and doors. I imagine toothpaste consistency concrete doesn't hang in the air very well. Or at least not nearly as well as thin, hot, stringy PLA, ABS or TPU filament coming out of the nozzle of a common 3d printer.

<comment><USER7> 3D Printers usually have support columns that are easily taken down once the print is complete. Maybe something similar?

<comment><USER6> Right, I've done this with auto generated supports in Cura for PLA and ABS fused deposition printing. Removed with needle nose pliers. But if done with semi liquid concrete wouldn't it cure together and become very difficult to break apart ?

[https://m.all3dp.com/2/cura-support-settings-optimize- your-s...](https://m.all3dp.com/2/cura-support-settings-optimize-your- supports/)

Looking at the photos of the houses, I wonder if they pause the printer at the point just before where it needs to draw the first layer above the top of the window frame. At that point a couple of workers manually lift the prefab window unit into place. Then the printer can resume and print that next layer on top of the top of the window frame.

<comment><USER8> They manually add headers for spanning openings and leave them in place. You can see here: [https://youtu.be/is2UVodNphY?t=37](https://youtu.be/is2UVodNphY?t=37)

That said, wooden and, more recently, foam forms have been used since forever. (At least a hundred years?) Breaking the forms away from cured concrete doesn't seem to be problematic.

EDIT: Also, in another video there's a brief shot where the machine is printing the internal zig-zag pattern over a steel mesh manually placed on the wall, presumably for reinforcement. I fast-forwarded through 4 or 5 videos and it's almost suspicious the way they avoid capturing these details. I guess such details don't fit the narrative they're selling.

<comment><USER9> I think that answers my question of how it's seismically sound.

There's got to be something in there that supports horizontal forces.

<comment><USER8> FWIW, they show the mesh in the first few seconds of this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCzS2FZoB-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCzS2FZoB-I)

Personally I think they should _emphasize_ the manual labor requirements. One of the strongest criticisms of 3D-printed and prefab housing technology is that it reduces demand for low-skilled labor. For the past 80 years home construction has been a major pillar of the American labor economy; likewise for China and many other countries. Free or reduced cost housing is great, but to the extent it comes at the expense of a sustainable labor economy, then it's problematic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool. But completely not a solution to affordable housing construction in rural areas.

What is the barrier to affordable housing construction in rural areas? Where I traveled in Uganda it was availability and affordability of materials and equipment. Cement was expensive as was corrugated roofing. Renting heavy equipment was expensive.

We had plentiful cheap unskilled labour, free bricks made from clay soil baked in the sun, lots of hand tools and a foreman with basic construction skills. Transportation was slow but not prohibitively expensive.

I hope this 3D printing technique is simply a way of waving a flag to draw attention to the need for better housing in these communities. There are many much better MVPs than an expensive machine using expensive materials operated by an expensive team.

<comment><USER11> In Uganda, it is legal to use cheap construction methods, like wattle-and-daub using cow dung, and thatch roofing.

Appropriate technology there is a hand-press for making TIB-style mortarless interlocking bricks from local dirt. (I have heard that Ugandan brick masons use way too much mortar anyway.)

The test site was likely in Mexico because building codes in the US have no provision for establishment and testing of new technology that is too far removed from existing construction techniques, such as inflation forms lined with rebar and sprayed with shotcrete, or 3D-printed corrugated-interior concrete walls. If the machine built 50 houses in the US, none of them could get certificates of occupancy from the inspectors.

The end goal is likely not to house the poor around the world, but to establish building codes that advantage the first-movers in printed-concrete home construction, so the patent-holders can build houses in the US that can be finish-ready for $5000, install windows, doors, electrical, and plumbing with assembly-line labor, and then sell for $75000.

<comment><USER12> In most states you need a professional engineer to certify that your odd construction is safe. This pulls in legal liability for failure so the engineer will charge a lot of money (and run a lot of calculations) before granting certification. It isn't a big deal to do that if you can figure out how to pay the cost.

By contrast though: I can design you a house that follows traditional design rules. So long as I use standard materials under the standard rules someone else has long ago done all the work to ensure the standard is right and so it doesn't need additional certification. It is quite likely I can violate something in the standard and still be safe - but then it is up to me to prove it is safe (I'm not qualified to do this)

<comment><USER13> Wouldn't there be economies of scale here though? Presumably the first print would be very expensive from certification standpoint, but wouldn't the marginal cost going forward be negligible?

<comment><USER12> Maybe, it depends. If you build exactly the same house on exactly the same soil type. However every change needs to be re-certified - you can get around this of course, the engineer can decide what changes you are allowed to make.

Houses get around this because engineers figured out the limits - a 2x12 can up to (note up to not exactly!) span x distance under these assumptions. The inspector just verifies you met all the conditions and you are good. You can do this with any form of building, but it is much cheaper for one building to just certify that exact design. If you only have a half dozen designs it is probably cheaper to certify each separately, but eventually you have enough different designs that you just figure out the limits and rules and never have to worry about it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any information on how soundproof these houses are? What is the expected lifetime? Maintenance costs compared to traditional houses? How difficult is it to repair the walls with traditional materials?

Edit: Waterproof? Earthquake proof?

<comment><USER6> The closest traditional construction low-cost design I can think of, which is somewhat common in Mexico, is built from concrete blocks like this:

[https://s3-us- west-1.amazonaws.com/contentlab.studiod/getty/...](https://s3-us- west-1.amazonaws.com/contentlab.studiod/getty/34565dbc533a4fbda21a58898585fc06.jpg)

<comment><USER15> My house is also built from concrete blocks, because they have quite good parameters when combined with good thermal insulation. Concrete walls were something like 3% of price of the house and they were done in a week, that is again something like 5% of (my) house construction time.

Concrete blocks can be produced locally with rather simple tools. It also has benefit that it may provide work to local people. In poor regions, labor is cheap and creating workplaces is always benefit to local commnunity, so I wonder if automating this out is positive thing at all. I'd like to see comparison of costs/benefits for houses built like this vs more traditional construction. Don't get me wrong, I love tech toys, but this looks very much as a solution looking for a problem.

<comment><USER16> I don't feel that this machine is ultimately meant for poorer regions with cheap labor. This is just mainly R&D.

<comment><USER15> I agree, this would make much more sense in areas with high labor costs, something like sea side resorts where you can produce many similar buildings with high building density.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I looked into this a few years ago. I discovered that even if I can build the 3d printer myself for free (including time), wood structures are still cheaper than the concrete. The only reason you would choose this over something else is if you want a unique shape that is impossible to do in wood. I wanted to build a cheap shed, but this was one of the more expensive options, and it didn't really save any labor either.

</comment><comment><USER17> They seem like such simple structures. I could build one of those out of rammed earth or cob in the time it takes to put up the rain shield. Cheap housing (especially in rural areas) is a solved problem. Cheap, legal, socially acceptable, housing is not.

</comment><comment><USER18> Neat, though I'm a bit skeptical about its utility outside of rural areas. Particularly in the US, the problem with housing affordability is mostly in booming metros where people want to live in already developed areas, the most expensive part is often the land, instead of the house, so you really need density/verticality to make a dent in affordability.

</comment><comment><USER19> Does it leave room for electrical and plumbing? Sounds like they still have to pour the slab manually.

</comment><comment><USER20> This clearly makes no sense.... but I'd like to see it go on.

I think since donors have to feel good about themselves they won't just donate concrete and bricks.

And since NGO's can't build houses that are not up to code they can't just use local labour.

So this might work.

Earthship houses have shown after decades of having a cheap house design with cheap materials, that's not enough to solve the problem. Watch the docos read between the lines.

The actual benefit here might even be the fact the NGO makes the government give land titles for under the houses.

</comment><comment><USER21> "The printer works by squirting a concrete mixture in layers to build floors and walls."

Is that one a special type of concrete? In places where earthquakes occur I would expect some kind of reinforcement to that concrete mixture, or it would crumble very easily at the first hit, but from the article it doesn't seem they're adding iron bars or any similar reinforcement.

<comment><USER22> I don't want to downplay the good work they do but I can't stop thinking that these people are guinea pigs for the technology. Now, considering their initial housing they can't really complain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> They never mention WHERE in Mexico is that rural town exactly, not even the state name. They only say it's in the south. Weird.

</comment><comment><USER24> A lot questions about cost, but nobody is talking about speed. They said the frame was both fabricated and erected in 24 hours. That's a big one-up on prefab.

</comment><comment><USER25> We need Uber but for brick layers.

</comment><comment><USER26> I guess the attractive new plants out front are 3D printed too

</comment><comment><USER27> any plans to use traditional adobe?</comment>


CSS ELI5: Float: Left; - <AUTHOR> Suppose I have an inline SVG that I want to take up the entire width and height of the viewport. I also want to leave overflow visible for the container of my SVG-- this is so that scrollbars will appear when users of my webapp create SVG shapes that extend past the boundaries of the viewport.
So I set the body's margin to 0, I set my SVG's width and height to the viewport width/height (plus setting viewBox to "0 0 $width $height").
If I'm in quirksmode I'm done.
If I'm not in quirksmode, I get unexpected scrollbars unless I set the SVG's style to "float: left;".
So what is "float: left;" doing to save the day? And why is old quirks web the web of least surprise  in this case while HTML5 requires me to do CSS incantations to fit an element precisely inside a cavity?
Edit: clarification <comment><USER2> Ask this guy, he knows.. [https://twitter.com/ppk](https://twitter.com/ppk)

He's shared the deepest insights into this topic for many years.

([https://www.quirksmode.org/about/](https://www.quirksmode.org/about/))

<comment><AUTHOR> He doesn't have an email address listed anywhere, and his page says he stopped dev'ing in 2007.

<comment><USER2> He still tweets doesn't he?</comment></comment></comment>


Time warner cable down nationwide - <AUTHOR> http://downdetector.com/status/time-warner-cable

<comment><USER2> Down here in Austin, TX; from my home connection I can access www.timewarnercable.com but nothing else, and their site is inaccessible from my T-Mobile connection. Looks like their customer service dept might be affected too; @TWC_Help abruptly stopped tweeting about an hour ago.

More reports here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2epnwk/time_warn...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2epnwk/time_warner_cable_is_having_issues/)</comment>


More Than 300 Free Curated HTML Template - <AUTHOR> https://htmltemplates.co/ <comment><USER2> A quick scan of these templates gives a strong impression of, ahem, "the prevailing design aesthetic of today's web": [https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit- minimalism-846fc1...](https://medium.com/@mceglowski/chickenshit- minimalism-846fc1412524)

We live in a time when the old "holy grail" of column layouts is attainable without even too much contortion, even with the added wrinkle of adapting to small screens, but this is what we satisfy ourselves with now? What happened?

<comment><USER3> I am under impression that some web designers tend to follow the lowest common denominator, which is the vertical mobile touch display, then enforce the same experience across all platforms. This is why I sometimes see hamburger menus on desktop even though they have no place in any possible desktop design. PC games ported from consoles suffer from problems of similar nature.

<comment><USER4> Do you have examples? I find magazine looking layouts to be beautiful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please someone stop the Jumbotron monstrosity and those full screen stock photos.

</comment><comment><USER6> What about the license/copyright of these?

They do not include a license file and the Welcome.txt file included with Lexis only says:

" Please note we don't reserved the copy rights for used images. "

No license = undistributable or is that supposed to mean public domain?

</comment><comment><USER7> They all look the same. I miss the good old times when "mobile first" was nothing to think about and people went crazy and really hit the limits of what was possible and good loking...</comment>


The Fine Art of Baloney Detection (1995) - <AUTHOR> https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-fine-art-of-baloney-detection#email-newsletter <comment><USER2> I was born into a charismatic Christian cult and escaped in my early 20s, left to pick up the pieces of a completely shattered world view. No one in my life, at that point, really understood the internal turmoil I was in. This piece in particular and, in general, all of the Demon Haunted World couldn't have come at a better time for me. It gave me the tools I needed to overcome a lot of the biases and crazy charismatic thought patterns that were established at a very early age. I will forever be indebted to Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan for making my life a lot more bearable and for helping me out of the existential quagmire I was stuck in.

<comment><USER3> > charismatic Christian cult

These words don't go together. Cults are definitionally aberrant, i.e., non- Christian. Many of us in high Christian orthodoxy would certainly regard the entire charismatic movement as heterodox at best.

Lest anyone should cry "no true Scotsman," the difference is Christianity has a well-defined view of orthodoxy, as propounded by Scripture and understood by the Church going back to its earliest days. The Apostles' Creed, Nicene Creed, etc. are excellent examples of a united, cross-denominational understanding recognized by all _except_ the cults. That's not to say we don't disagree about some of the particulars in other areas, but all Christian churches believe in "one holy, catholic (universal), apostolic, Church."

Edit to add: I'm sorry you had trouble with a cult. I know there's a lot of real pain caused by many of these groups. Come check out the real thing. We'd love to have you.

<comment><USER4> You took someone's painful experience with a cult and No True Scotsman'd it into a sales pitch for your religion.

There is a time and a place for everything. And for the record, having also left an evangelical cult that tried really hard to get me to hate myself because of my sexuality, I'm not too sold on any branch of Christianity at this point. The last thing I'd wanna hear after telling people about my experiences like that is "but have you tried my flavor of Christianity?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > According to the World Health Organization, smoking kills three million > people every year worldwide. This will rise to ten million annual deaths by > 2020

We're up to 7 million according to the CDC, not 10:

> Worldwide, tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths per year[0].

Sagan predicted 7 million in growth and we only saw 4 million. That's a ~40% overstatement. And in the very next sentence from the CDC:

> If the pattern of smoking all over the globe doesn't change, more than 8 > million people a year will die from diseases related to tobacco use by 2030.

While we're on the subject of skepticism and 'baloney detection' whenever somebody says _X will happen in Y years_ there's usually a bit of baloney in there. It's a well-meaning practice to present bad scenarios to create social change but it happens so often that when somebody says "The oceans will rise X feet in Y years!" I get skeptical. Then I get in trouble for being skeptical which just makes me _more_ skeptical...

[0] - [https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...](https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/index.htm)

<comment><USER6> I feel you are not taking into account the importance of "unless something changes". I see the publication date of this as being 1997. That was around the time when globally it started to be conceivable that restaurants and public areas and even bars could be areas that were smoke-free. Changing the norm seems to have lowered the number of smokers and thus smoking deaths.

You scoff at these projections but I feel that turning your energy a bit and focusing it at how these projections indeed were used to good effect would get you closer to the truth than what appears to be your assumption that nothing was done and the projections were false. So much has changed in the intervening 22 years.

<comment><USER5> Maybe I wasn't clear enough because I'm seeing a lot of the same comment here.

At some point anybody who's producing statistics and projections has to decide what's more important between accurately predicting the future and changing the future. Is being truthful more or less important than being revolutionary? It's fine and noble to want a better future but it introduces a bias into projections and how they're reported.

Carl Sagan was more than smart enough to know that society was likely to learn the dangers of smoking and to act accordingly. I'm guessing he had his public prediction which he put in his book that deaths due to smoking _will rise to ten million_ but if you asked him over coffee when he wasn't driving home a socio-political rant about Big Tobacco he would probably produce a lower number more in line with what has actually happened.

If this sort of convenient number selection happens _in a lecture about baloney detection_ we should probably expect it to happen in other places, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I met Carl Sagan at a talk he gave at a local astronomy telescope in the 70's when I was just a kid. He pointed me to CSICOP (Now just CSI), and it made a huge impact on my young mind by leading me down the path of skepticism. I've always been incredibly grateful to that man for his approximately two minutes of personal advice.

www.skepticalinquirer.org/about

</comment><comment><USER8> And yet Sagan was one of the biggest promoters of the "Drake Equation" which takes advantage of the fact that humans are really bad at very large and very small numbers to make it seem like alien civilizations, of which we have never had any evidence of, are widespread throughout the universe.

This was just baloney wrapped in numbers.

<comment><USER9> The Drake Equation is perfectly reasonable. You just have to interpret it as "these assumptions imply aliens" rather than "there are definitely aliens."

<comment><USER10> It is not, because at least 3 factors of the equation are incredibly difficult to estimate. About as difficult as estimating the probability of an alien encounter. So the equation is basically useless.

<comment><USER9> And what's the term for a figure that's hard to estimate but which you guess at anyway? An "assumption."

<comment><USER10> Yes, and in this case, an unreasonable one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Commercial culture is full of similar misdirections and evasions at the > expense of the consumer. You're not supposed to ask. Don't think. Buy.

> Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported experts, > constitute a steady rainfall of deception. They betray contempt for the > intelligence of their customers. They introduce an insidious corruption of > popular attitudes about scientific objectivity. Today there are even > commercials in which real scientists, some of considerable distinction, > shill for corporations. They teach that scientists too will lie for money. > As Tom Paine warned, inuring us to lies lays the groundwork for many other > evils.

It's gotten so much worse since Sagan wrote this. I wonder what he'd think of the advertising monstrosity we have today, courtesy of Google, Facebook, etc.

<comment><USER12> I wonder how long until there's a well developed product placement ad system in podcasts. Everyone is skipping livereads so they'll sprinkle ad names within the content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This fermatslibrary.com website is a great idea. I've been looking for a curated list of academic papers to read. They should be promoted like great literature.

The software they are building that augments long form writing works cleanly in the browser. Hopefully they have a long-term sustainable business model to keep this going.</comment>


Apple Threatens iTunes Shutdown over Royalty Dispute  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/10/thursdays-copyr.html

<comment><USER2> So it's soon to be $0.15 instead of $0.09 going to the publishers NOT the artists? As an independent artist, I get paid $0.65-0.70/song (same ratio per album), which is great! Once you're on a label I've heard that drops to $0.05-0.10 and the vultures and wolves fight for the rest. Sigh...

<comment><USER3> Just wondering Lux. Is that the number you get from CD Baby or was that from research somewhere?</comment></comment>


JavaScript-based Vi editor - <AUTHOR> http://gpl.internetconnection.net/vi/

<comment><USER2> Really cool idea. I'm having some trouble with basic things, though, like getting back to Normal mode from Insert mode -- escape doesn't seem to do it?</comment>


Google Glass to be banned from all UK cinemas - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-glass-to-be-banned-from-all-uk-cinemas-9570686.html

<comment><USER2> > Some have even used small children to disguise their intent.

Those bastards!!! Exposing children in drug sales and sex trafficking!^W^W^W^W^W illegal film watching... wait, what?

While I support the google glass prohibition (I have no intents of being recorded and uploaded in site <x> without my knowledge), the arguments used in this article are just plain stupid.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing like a bit of sensationalism, ey? You could just as easily replace 'children' in that sentence with any other large object, e.g. 'popcorn', 'cat scratching post', 'invisibility cloaks'...</comment></comment>


The Lambda Calculus for Fun and Factorials [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qC1iZN5ozw <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Since this is a video, I'll post the abstract, etc.:

by Ron Garret

The lambda calculus is widely known but also widely misunderstood. It it considered by most coders to be nothing more than a theoretical curiosity and not really useful for anything by itself. In this talk, I show how to write a factorial function in pure lambda calculus, i.e. using nothing but lambdas, in a way that is actually efficient enough to compute the factorial of ten in a few seconds. Seeing how this is done can provide deep insights into functional programming, compilation, and other useful programming techniques like CPS- conversion.

Bay Area Lisp and Scheme Meetup, [http://balisp.org/](http://balisp.org/) , Sat 17 Oct 2015, Hacker Dojo, Mountain View, CA</comment>


Ask HN: Payment Gateways? - <AUTHOR>

Reading up on the Chargify pricing increase (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1780348 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781156) led me to compare subscription payment services, which quickly lead to questions about gateways and merchant accounts:
1. How do payment processors like Speedly and Chargify relate to merchant accounts and payment gateways? 2. Are there any other pieces of the puzzle of getting the money from my paying, online customer to my account? 3. What should one look for in a payment gateway and/or merchant account? Does one need multiple gateways and/or merchant accounts? 4. Any recommendations for  payment gateways and/or merchant accounts? 5. Any reasons not to go with PayPal instead? 6. Any one have experiences with Braintree?
__________________________________________________________________
From my notes: Brief comparison online subscription payment processing options October 2010

    *   CheddarGetter (https://cheddargetter.com/)
          o Up to 20 customers free
          o $39/month for up to 1000 customers
          o $169/month for up to 10,000
          o $549/month for up to 50,000
          o requires merchant account
    * Recurly (http://recurly.com/)
          o $29-$699/month plans
          o +20-8 cents per transaction
          o +2-8 cents per user
          o must pay gateway and merchant fees separately
    * Spreedly (http://spreedly.com/)
          o $19 per month + 20¢ per payment transaction or 2% per payment transaction, whichever is less
          o Payment gateway required
          o 5000+ transactions per month, ask for bulk pricing
    * Chargify (http://chargify.com/0
          o  free development
          o $99/month for up to 500 customers
          o $349/month for up to 2000
          o $999/month for up to 10,000
          o branded payment pages
          o set up your own merchant accounts separately
    * Braintree (http://braintreepaymentsolutions.com/)
          o includes merchant account
          o payment processing with recurring payment add on option
          o 2.89% + 30 cents/transaction
          o $15/chargeback
          o $75 monthly minimum
          o one time $99 setup fee
          o $20 + 1 cent/card/month for credit card info storage
          o 20 cents/subscription per month for recurring payments
 <comment><USER2> FastSpring's subscription offering (in beta) includes a merchant account, the gateway, etc. Finally, a one-stop shop for SaaS e-commerce. No need to piece the puzzle together on your own anymore.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there some public info on FastSpring's beta subscription service? All I can find is: <http://www.fastspring.com/faq.php#twentyone>

I am currently debating between FastSpring and rolling out my own PayPal based payment processing for a e-product site. If FastSpring will meet my future subscription needs, my choice would be easy to make!

<comment><USER2> We'll update the FAQ. If you'd like to be considered for the beta, please email support at fastspring.com and mention you're interested. Thanks for your interest.</comment></comment></comment>


The 'balance of nature' is an enduring concept. But it's wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/balance-of-nature-explained/ <comment><USER2> Dynamic systems are hard, but it is important that people are at least aware of them.

For example, market balances. They will probably not last either, habits and technology and become catalysts for change in the market. This I think people can grok, and on a very abstract level, the same happens in ecological systems where species and environments change and upsets the previous order.</comment>


Apple is a great copycat, but did they actually improve anything? - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3050943/apple-event/apple-is-a-great-copycat-did-they-improve-anything <comment><USER2> There seem to be two different kinds of tech journalist, the kind that understands Apple, and, by extension, how hard certain things are to do, and the kind that doesn't. The latter will make statements like "But besides this latency improvement, Apple's Pencil itself doesn't actually offer any noticeable drawing features that FiftyThree's Pencil doesn't."

Such a ridiculous statement. Zero pen latency is something _nobody else in the history of general purpose tablet computers has ever been able to accomplish_. Apple managed to do it. It's a staggeringly hard thing to do, but just like everything else Apple accomplishes, they make it look so easy that journalists are all like, "so what?"

You can make fun of Ive's breathless self-pimping all you want, but at the end of the day, Apple does the things nobody else has the stones to even try.

<comment><USER3> > Apple does the things nobody else has the stones to even try

Well now, Microsoft's been aggressively pushing the latency limits for a while now. We don't yet know if Apple surpassed them. Regardless, it wouldn't be because Apple had the stones.

FiftyThree built a tool around the limitations of the current ipads. That said, FiftyThree's pencil (which I own) isn't very good. They get a lot of mileage from fancy packaging and self-important blog posts, but I've had better experience with other vendors' pens on ipad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love the Apple Watch nay-sayers.

In the last month - I put my Apple Watch through hell - took it swimming every day for 1 hour on vacation in a salt water pool. Spend 7 days in the furnace that is a Vegas summer. Spend a weekend cleaning out a horders house where the white band got covered in black "dirt". It never once failed me. A little dish soap and my fingers to clean the band and it's as white as the day I got it. If I did that to my Tagg Heuer watch I'd spend 2 hours with q-tips and jewelry cleaner trying to get it clean.

Plus - it let me check notifications, answer phone calls and the time without taking my phone into the pool; or without getting my phone dirty while cleaning out the house. It was get answering a phone call while in the pool and my phone was on a lounge chair 20 feet away.

I can't wash my phone; I can't take it in the pool and nor do I want to touch it when my hands are dirty. It's an incredible piece of electronics. So what - I charge it every night. Show me a real iPhone user that doesn't charge their phone every night - and if they don't, their charging it as soon as they wake up.

... This is Tim Cook's Apple now - and I think Tim Cook is doing a lot of things Steve Jobs didn't want to do (the iPad Pro stylus, the keyboard, 6plus, iPad multitasking, etc...) So there will for sure be a bit of catch-up to be done.

It's not who does it first. It's who does it better.

<comment><USER5> >It never once failed me.

Who is saying its delicate? The complaints are of its milquetoast design, lack of other designs (wheres the round face), and poor value proposition. Smartwatches are pretty tough in general. My Moto 360 has been to hell and back. This is not a problem to solve. Its been solved.

>This is Tim Cook's Apple now

and that's the problem. I think Steve's upper class fashionista tastes would have dictated more styles or a more stylish device. Cook's group is designing for the Walmart crowd. The best looking smartwatches are on Android. That's an Apple failure right there.

<comment><USER6> > Cook's group is designing for the Walmart crowd.

I'd like to know what is inherently wrong with this.

<comment><USER7> Well, historically Apple has pursued the high-end market.

Typically brands that go from high-end to low-end lose their high-end customers along the way, who don't want to be associated with low-end products.

Saying they are going for the walmart crowd represents a cheapening of the product, cost cutting, mass production approach that leaves behind what many people like to believe about apple (that it is much more artistic, concerned more about making the best product than selling a product to the most people)

There is nothing wrong with being in either market, but shifting between the two markets can be bad for business in that it's likely to lose previously loyal customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Really, find an Apple keynote ever where this wasn't said.

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." is the classic example. The iPad was eviscerated _everywhere_. The iPhone was laughed off as inferior in sooo many ways to Nokia's N95. Conversely, good luck finding an article predicting that podcasts would change everything.

\---

Yes, they improved a lot of things. They made a lot of good ideas standard functionality and in most cases, hard-wired them into the device hardware in a way that was unimaginable before. I'd bet a lot of money that we'll look at downloads on Apple TV's app store compared to FireTV and Roku's and laugh that they were ever compared.

<comment><USER9> _Really, find an Apple keynote ever where this wasn 't said._

The problem of this line of reasoning is that it can be used to bin any criticism levelled at Apple. Some criticism has merit other criticism does not. Judge criticism by that. (E.g., many of the criticisms of Ping or the 5c were pretty much on the mark.)

To be honest, I recognize some of the criticism of the article. On the other hand, _Good artists copy; great artists steal._ In the end it is all about execution. It is interesting to see who did it before (if not for computer archeology), but if they did it better, it will fly.

<comment><USER8> Criticism is fine, but I think it's fair to set a high bar (there've been some good and worthwhile technical criticisms in recent months that pass IMO). So much Apple keynote criticism is just lazy snark. Last year, the song and dance was a constant stream of "eh, it's just bigger". Which was fair in a sense, and it scored a pedantic point for those that argued the screen was too small, but it really missed the mark in giving the sense that the iPhone 6 was (a) a great phone and (b) basically about to upend the last vestiges of Android from the high-end (profitable) marketplace.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This post focuses on hardware which is a limited view, Apple certainly made very bold moves with respect to business. One reason I let go of my (very nice) Android phone and got an iPhone6 was that I was sick and tired of being at Verizon's whim for software updates and always had to use slightly older versions (while my friends with AT&T enjoyed a newer version of KitKat). I'd much rather deal with Apple, at least everyone's on same footing.

For me the biggest innovation that Apple did was to break the stronghold that wireless carriers had on phone innovation. Note that some others couldn't even think of this possibility (Moto, which killed it) or tried it in a half-assed way (Google).

I never agreed with idea in this passage:

"In the place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!"

If it's a necessary evil I, for one, would want to deal with a terrible Queen rather than the Dark Lord. And I sure hope that Apple aims cable companies next.

<comment><USER11> > For me the biggest innovation that Apple did was to break the stronghold > that wireless carriers had on phone innovation. Note that some others > couldn't even think of this possibility (Moto, which killed it) or tried it > in a half-assed way (Google).

Bless you my son.

I think unless you worked in the mobile industry in or around 05-07 you don't know how bad things were about to get.

Carriers took about 70 cents out of every dollar spent on their networks. They had been squeezing the Moto/Nokia/Ericcsons of the world hard and their new idea to squeeze harder was to go around them and buy white label phones from their suppliers (which is how HTC got big enough to become a name brand).

It was about a year before the iPhone launched that I got out of mobile because I realized the only people who would ever make any money on it were the carriers. They were getting free labor from VC-backed mobile startups ("eating their own young") and it was a losing game.

Their first phone was bad, but a conversation piece. Then the App Store launched, and they announced they would keep 30 cents out of every dollar. People in mobile danced in the streets. Finally, we can have margins! People who didn't know the situation cried foul, Evil Apple was taking a whole 30% of the profit for 'doing nothing'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder what the ramifications of Force Touch (err, 3D Touch) are for users with certain physical handicaps who may not be able to execute that particular gesture.

Apple has generally done a pretty good job for accessibility, so I'd be disappointed if they dropped the ball on this.

<comment><USER13> Force Touch looks more like a over-complicated long tap which anyone using a smartphone can execute.

<comment><USER14> I haven't used it, so I don't know how well it performs, but there should be two things different with force touch.

Firstly, it gives you double the number of click options. You had short vs long, now you can have either lightly or with more force.

Secondly, long clicks slows down interactions. Force click should be just as fast as a normal click. That may make it way more popular.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Cell phones before and after iPhone

[http://bit.ly/1JZ6MwF](http://bit.ly/1JZ6MwF)

<comment><USER9> Conveniently leaving out the LG Prada and others:

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

Apple nailed it hard- and software-wise, but that image is just an attempt to rewrite history.

<comment><USER15> It is square, but it was no competitor. Google around about Prada v iPhone.

<comment><USER16> If all those 'before' phones were 'competitors', why wasn't the Prada? Face it, that image is about as selective as it gets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For Live Photos, there is something which is much more similar than gifs. Even the 'animate while swiping through the gallery' is the same:

[http://www.windowscentral.com/trick-enable-nokia-living- imag...](http://www.windowscentral.com/trick-enable-nokia-living-images- pureview-luima)

</comment><comment><USER17> Nothing announced yesterday really caught my attention. 3D touch will make certain applications more expressive, such as art and music apps, and that's awesome. but I don't see it having much adoption outside of that.

<comment><USER18> Games will have a heyday with it.

<comment><USER17> I forgot about games! although i'm not sure how much of a hayday it will be; ideally 3d touch would represent a progressive enhancement to the app, and not a core feature that is required for usage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Force touch is like adding right click to mobile, but if you mention that then there is no story.

<comment><USER20> > Force touch is like adding right click to mobile,

That's a really amusing way to phrase it, given Apple's long history with the single-button mouse.

<comment><USER21> I HATE APPLE but force touch, Apple Pencil and iPad Pro made me think that Apple is finally away from the thumb of Jobs and is making things that are actually useful for some people and getting made. It use to seem like they made everything for the 90% and could care less for the last 10%.

<comment><USER22> > It use to seem like they made everything for the 90% and could care less for > the last 10%.

This is an interesting take when looking historically at Apple's marketshare.

<comment><USER21> Well if you look they did this with getting 90% of their target audience. They did it with how they made things for their audience. If it didn't fit the 90% of our users will use this they didn't make it. This is regardless to market share.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


My Boss, the Six-Year-Old - <AUTHOR> http://blackartdirector.com/post/23489313310/gaptoothstickers

<comment><USER2> This gives me faith in the youth of my generation...but also makes me feel like I am an idiot by comparison.</comment>


Tim O'Reilly: Books That Have Shaped How I Think - <AUTHOR> http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/favebooks_0705.html

<comment><USER2> Personally, whenever I see one of these lists, I look for fiction books. This is obviously a personal bias, but I find it hard to relate to someone whose life hasn't been mostly changed by works of fiction. In my view, those works are usually far more powerful than non-fiction about the same topics.

For instance, you can write about the duality of the heart and the mind at length, without ever coming close to the powerful argument of Narziss & Goldmund. And you can write about the cyclical nature of life till you're blue in the face (in the fingers?), but will you ever convey the sense of emptiness that one gets at the end of Marques' One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Non-fiction is useful, no doubt, but imho the truly great writings are in the fiction form.

<comment><USER3> I get a sense of emptiness when I realize that what an author was trying to tell me in some dreadfully long, dreary and depressing book could have been summed up in a page or two, and been much clearer to boot. But that's just how _my_ brain works. I'm still proud, though, of telling my high school literature teacher the same thing and getting a bad grade for it.

<comment><USER4> A great work of fiction is impossible to sum up in one page. You can recount the exact plot of Infinite Jest but it won't give you anywhere near the same experience.

<comment><USER5> For you, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this previous submission with no comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415893>

is not the only previous submission to Hacker News. That is a very interesting list of books. I'd probably prefer different books on psychology.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting to note that the majority of the books are about philosophy topics. This comes not as surprise but what makes me think is that most people I know have never read anything about philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER8> Couple I've read, couple I've been meaning to read, but, best of all, a bunch I've never heard of. Wish List updated.</comment>