Apple Power Macintosh G5: Flame On - <AUTHOR> http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com/2017/11/apple-power-macintosh-g5-flame-on.html <comment><USER2> You know what would be nice: Apple engineers and designers finding this thread and others like it and using it as inspiration to build another lovable Mac Pro.

The coffee can Mac Pro was a swing and a miss: an engineering achievement of sorts and an aesthetic bold move, but not loved by devs or scientists. I want an excellent case I can pack full of RAM, disks and GPUs, not external expansion with $70 cables that glitch and mess up the aesthetic in the process.

I don't know if Apple can make enough money on workstations to keep their attention, so maybe those days are gone.

<comment><USER3> > I want an excellent case I can pack full of RAM, disks and GPUs, not > external expansion with $70 cables that glitch and mess up the aesthetic in > the process.

I feel like Apple was onto something here, but they screwed up by trying to scale _up_ the mobile paradigm (black boxes connected by cables) when there's a very similar paradigm much friendlier to professional use—the server rack- mount paradigm—that they could just scale _down_.

Imagine a small "compute core" just like the trashcan Mac Pro (CPUs + RAM + GPUs, replace it all at once when the time comes)... except it's in the form- factor of a server blade, and is sitting in a rack roughly the size of a workstation PC.

You'd buy a "Mac Pro", and in the box would be the (very elegant, Apple-y) rack, one "compute core module" to slot into it, and one "storage module" as well (which is your boot device, making the compute-core diskless and so a commodity.) You could customize your order to get a RAID storage module instead. You could buy more pre-populated modules from Apple, or other vendors, or buy empty modules to install whatever components you want. Third- party empty modules would probably cost about as much as a USB hard-drive enclosure costs today.

And, of course, the modules would all connect to a shared backplane... which would just be PCIe. So it's all the same Thunderbolt idea, just shaped differently.

<comment><USER4> So basically you are imagining something like Razer's never realised Project Christine [1], but in a blade form factor? I would like that. Also something like that being made by Apple (which has the market power to sustain an add-on ecosystem) would make more sense, whereas Razer would have never had enough traction (hence the project being cancelled).

[1] [https://www2.razerzone.com/christine](https://www2.razerzone.com/christine)

<comment><USER3> Yes! Exactly. Apple could pull this off where Razer failed.

<comment><USER5> I think enclosing each module like Razer did is defeating the purpose. Problem is, if you _don 't_ enclose I imagine it's hard to get this past the designers. Apple would need a way to make the internals themselves look good. That being said, the old Powermac / Mac Pro towers had very nice looking internals, I could see them exposing them like that....

Plus, it surely would have a nice looking front door.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The note about the amount of fans, and how silent it is despite the relatively large power draw is interesting. I too ended up realising this when I purchased an Apple workstation - not the G5 but a Mac Pro, which was the first desktop I hadn't built myself since I had a Pentium 133 from Digital.

Until the Mac Pro I hadn't considered that a modern, high power computer could also be dead silent. It's stupid, but that was a revelation for me. I couldn't even tell it was turned on or not, except from the occasional hard drive seeking noise - which I fixed with an SSD. And 7 years later it still is as silent.

Unfortunately Apple is now focusing on keyboards with no depth and whatnot, so I'm back to building my own but I do keep in mind the lessons. My system now has 10 fans + 1 PSU fan, all running between 700-900rpm. I can hear myself think again.

<comment><USER7> You could try using a third party keyboard with a mac. I run an iMac with a mechanical keyboard, and the only thing I can hear is myself type :).

<comment><USER6> I meant the keyboard thing in general with regards to their apparent engineering direction. My current hackintosh does have a very loud keyboard otherwise :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is still one of the most beautiful desktop cases ever made. Hopefully the 2018 Mac Pro will come back to a similar design.

<comment><USER9> Agree with your sentiment. Also I really hope they include a low/mid range option for folks like me who want iMac-esque computing power, but don't need the display that comes with it.

The Mac mini is way too underpowered, but the next step up from there is $3,000.

<comment><USER10> They could even name it Centris or something like that - to indicate it's in the middle of their offering. On a serious note, try a hackintosh in the mean time. It's not difficult at all.

<comment><USER11> I like the Centris idea. We might as well call the Mac Pro Performa instead to emphasize its performance.

<comment><USER12> Assuming it's a Core i5/i7 with the same tower case as the new Mac Pro, Apple should call it "Mac Tower". The Xeon-based tower would then be "Mac Tower Pro".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I got one half a year ago just for fun (and because I wanted integers to be represented in memory the proper way round for the first time in my life. ;-))

I set it up at my workplace because my wife would kill me if yet another desktop PC appears at home, although the design might have appeased here enough. My colleagues just called me crazy for getting this useless old heat producing rubbish. I managed to install debian on it, which was a bit of a hassle (protip: If you only install one HDD, put it in the primary drive bay, otherwise openfirmware and debian will disagree about the disk naming/path and you'll have a bad time) but worked reasonably well in the end. Also, when upgrading RAM I must have mixed ECC and non-ECC (or buffered and unbuffered?) because I just grabbed the first DDR sticks I could find at work. The machine still worked, but memory bandwidth was cut at least in half or so, notably slower. After I made sure I had matching sticks, everything was fine and I could enjoy the incredible speeds of DOUBLE data rate memory.

</comment><comment><USER14> The first time I saw one of these was when my boss (a huge Apple fan boy at a time when that was a difficult lifestyle choice) managed to somehow convince the local Apple distributer to loan the office a demo machine for some reason.

You have to place the machine in the context of the time - the office was filled with crappy desktop machines from Dell, Compaq, and a bunch of white box OEMs. The G5 tower suddenly arrived like the monolith from 2001 with us all clustered around like filthy apes.

We never did anything useful with that G5 and after a few months it disappeared. But its job was done, over the next couple of years nearly everyone uplifted by that machine purchased at least one Mac for personal use.

<comment><USER15> > everyone uplifted by that machine

Darn monoliths, how do they work ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I had this type of G5 machine for _eight_ years. While I upgraded the disk and memory at some point, and decided to upgrade the GPU, the only thing that ever _broke_ was that I had to send in one of the displays for a couple weeks because of a power supply issue (so the display failed, not the computer). And when I finally decided to get rid of the machine, it still _worked_ perfectly; I gave it to a friend and his kids have been really happy with it. My reason for replacing the machine was purely due to needing a good Intel box for modern software development.

Apple really built things to last, and this is something I could never convince people of years ago. Everyone was _so sure_ that some crappy PC costing a few hundred less was somehow _so much better_ than these "expensive Macs" at the time, never understanding that the PCs were breaking all the time and the Macs basically never did.

<comment><USER17> > Everyone was so sure that some crappy PC costing a few hundred less was > somehow so much better than these "expensive Macs" at the time, never > understanding that the PCs were breaking all the time and the Macs basically > never did.

Eh, I'm the proud owner of a crappy PC costing many times less than a G5, and it's been chugging along with since 2007 just fine. Some of the parts have been periodically upgraded where appropriate, so calling it the same PC is perhaps a bit of a Ship of Theseus dilemma, but there are certainly components in there which haven't changed at all (e.g. 3x 320GB Seagate drives, which are still going and I'm too lazy to chuck out).

Being able to build and upgrade it piecemeal has allowed me to go for good specials, and I've generally been buying at the price / performance sweet spot at every turn. It shouldn't be underestimated how much of a saving that gives. I probably still haven't spent nearly the price of a G5 on it, and I have a PC which is basically on the VR-capable performance line.

Bu basically, just don't buy the cheapest components and you should be fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> They had great error-reporting features. If your kernel crashed, you'd know it if you were anywhere within 100 yards of it because the software-controlled fans would spin up to full blast.

</comment><comment><USER19> I just checked and if you include the Power Usage of the Apple Cinema Display, my machine idles at just over 180W

It's a pity, because it runs quite well - always has. I have 10.4.11 and 10.5.8 on there and favor Tiger.

I have been trying to sell it, but obviously nobody wants it. On the other hand, i still have Ableton Live 7 and Logic installed with all my plugins, GB's of Samples and loops on it and I am having a hard time letting go the ability to open my old tracks...I know I will never need to, but I think I'll always keep it for that reason.

<comment><USER20> > I have been trying to sell it, but obviously nobody wants it.

You can still make a nice PC Case with it - I turned mine into a hackintosh and it's just beautiful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> They also make for some beautiful furniture: [https://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/23/power- mac-g5-furniture/](https://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/23/power- mac-g5-furniture/)

<comment><USER22> Or a fine case for a hackintosh. As an owner of a intel version of that case, its remarkable how heavy and durable it is.

g5 upgrade guide.

[https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/the-best-g5-mod-so- far.23...](https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/the-best-g5-mod-so-far.235162/)

there is a whole forum. [https://www.tonymacx86.com/forums/powermac-g5.139/](https://www.tonymacx86.com/forums/powermac-g5.139/)

<comment><USER23> I used a G5 as the base for my first custom case [0]. It was a royal pain to work with, because Apple flipped and recessed their motherboards.

[0]: [https://imgur.com/gallery/WCrF1](https://imgur.com/gallery/WCrF1)

<comment><USER24> Isn't it more like they used that BTX standard or something like that?

<comment><USER25> Neither the Power Mac G5 nor 1st gen Mac Pro use any standard motherboard size or mounting points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As a college freshmen in 2003, I used my once in a lifetime Apple Student Developer 20% discount on a stacked PowerMac G5 dual 2.0GHz. I loved that machine and couldn't believe how snappy OS X was on it. The way I tested UI speed then was clicking on a menu item (say the File menu), and moving my mouse back and forth on the other menu items as fast as I could — the G5 was the first computer I had that could keep up and show all of the sub menus in a flash without stuttering.

<comment><USER27> It's funny how little tests like that can make such an impression. I experienced the same thing with iPhones, which had the bizarre feeling (now more normal and expected) of the content being attached to my finger when I scrolled at any speed, even back when the newly revealed content would just be a blank grid until it had time to paint the real content. I distinctly remember scrolling web pages as fast as I could on my friend's original iPhone when it was first released, although I wonder how horribly sluggish that would feel now.

I had been trained by twitchy FPS video games from a young age to recognize even small frame skips in moving content, and the rarity of such frame skips is what enamored me about the early iPhones (although I didn't "switch" to iPhones until the iphone 4) and made me dismiss Android phones for many years (Android flagships have been good in this department for a few years now).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I would bet there are still quite a few G5's to be found in recording studios around the world, not to mention G4's and even a few G3's.

Post-2004, did Apple follow up with a suitable replacement for the G5 in that context, i.e., audio engineering? What was it?

Addendum: By "audio engineering" I mean "DAW" use with software such as Pro Tools, DigitalPerformer, etc. and some non-Apple, dedicated hardware for line level inputs and outputs such as that made by Digidesign, MOTU, etc. (The performance of "web browsing" on today's bloated web and other tasks not related to running the above software, which may include older versions, is irrelevant.)

Maybe Apple's acquisition of Logic had something to do with what happened?

<comment><USER29> G5, why not, G4 maybe a few, G3, definitely not.

I've a G3 Powerbook Pismo, it's not usable anymore for even basic task like web browsing (yay, 60 second at 100% CPU to load gmail, and with the most minimal setup I could come-up with).

For music, just no, for basic recording, it can do the job, barely, but for music editing (mixing tracks, applying effects, etc), you need a decent computer.

<comment><USER30> The modern web is an especially poor comparison. A big part of the reason why web works at all on modern computers is due to the intensive optimization efforts put into browsers, efforts that aren't backported to older operating systems or architectures. Chrome V8 will run on OS X 10.5 but not on PowerPC. So on a modern Macbook you'll get highly-optimized code from the JIT, and on an older G3 you'll get a much slower interpreter.

Native optimized apps that were made contemporaneously, like music studio software, are a different story. If it worked well on a G3 in 2000 it would still work well today. So maybe you have a bunch of plugins that you love using that you can't track down new copies of, or you don't want to pay for newer versions, or there's a computer in the corner with Gigasampler.

Music editing doesn't actually require that much processing power or I/O bandwidth, at least by modern standards. Quick back of the envelope math--your Pismo, if it runs at 400MHz, has a budget of ~200 cycles per byte to keep up with 16 tracks at 44.1kHz. That's easily doable, even if GMail is a mess.

Anecdotally, I remember looking at CPU utilization when I was working with DAWs back in 2000 or so, and it was never very high. You certainly can fill it with expensive plugins or huge stacks of oscillators, but even on a G3 there's a lot you can do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This piece seems incredibly negative. My first ever Mac was the dual 2.5GHz G5 and I loved it - sure, it was huge, but it was also powerful (for the time, and for a good while thereafter) and looked amazing. Yes, mine did make a weird chirping noise periodically and I think it did eventually become a bit unreliable, but that was after quite a few years. I have nothing but fond memories of that machine.

<comment><USER32> I agree. It is very easy to judge it harshly in retrospect. I find the comments about heat output especially strange. Perhaps they are forgetting some of the hotblooded pentium 4s of the day.

<comment><USER2> This was not a serious Anandtech review! It was funny and full of hyperbole. From our nice position 14 years later it is amazing how much power draw we had to tolerate back then.

To me it read like an affectionate piece, not a harsh critique.

That case was a beauty.

<comment><USER19> > From our nice position 14 years later it is amazing how much power draw we > had to tolerate back then.

I find it incredible how indifferent and uneducated I was back then, about how much power it uses and what the consequences are on a larger scale. I remember keeping it powerd on 24/7 (of course with periods in which it slept). Nowadays I am (hyper)aware of the power consumption of pretty much every device in the house.

<comment><USER33> I still have a G5 for some specific software, and it has amazing power management. Nothing at the time even came close. It would put itself to sleep without fuss, and wake instantly and seamlessly. It certainly used less power than my newer linux x64 box over the course of a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Two minor details I disagree with (in an otherwise very interesting and entertaining article):

> In the 1980s and 1990s home computers didn't use much electricity. No-one > cared about "thermal design power"

In fact, Apple DID have a notorious prior brush with thermal issues: [https://www.tekrevue.com/apple-iii-drop/](https://www.tekrevue.com/apple-iii- drop/)

> When Apple abandoned the PowerPC they temporarily took a step back into a > predominantly 32-bit world with the Core Duo, only fully embracing 64 bits a > few years later, with the Core 2 Duo and OS X 10.7.

As far as hardware is concerned, Macs with 32 bit Intel processors only shipped from January (iMac) to November (MacBook) 2006. I did wonder at the time whether gaining a few months was worth saddling software with i386 slices for several years (system frameworks had to be built for 4 different architectures, for instance). It's true that full 64 bit software support took a bit longer to emerge, but that may have been due to the need to support the 32 bit Intel Macs that were shipped.

<comment><USER35> The main cause of the Apple III's thermal issues was Job's instance that computers should be quiet with no fan and no vents.

And even then, those requirements should have been possible to meet, if only the Apple III hadn't been rushed to market without enough time for engineers to diagnose and fix these issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've got a first-gen Intel Mac Pro. My first real computer splurge, August 2006 right when they came out. Currently with 9GB of RAM and the twin 2.6ghz processors it came with. The computer and the Dell 2407WFP still work great to this day. I did, however, buy a new 5k iMac last March because the Mac Pro was simply getting too slow to edit the 20MP photos coming out of my pocket camera.

</comment><comment><USER37> Loved my G5. A huge beast of a machine but a lovely design nonetheless. Would be great to revisit the beautiful case and build something more modern in it sometime.

<comment><USER38> I am still happily using a stock(ish) Xeon-based 'cheesegrater' tower at home, but if you wanted to just reuse an old (PPC or Intel) Mac Pro case to build a new system in, there are some ATX adapter kits available[1].

1: [https://www.thelaserhive.com/product/mac-pro-atx-kit-with- ps...](https://www.thelaserhive.com/product/mac-pro-atx-kit-with-psu-mount/)

<comment><USER39> I had one of the Xeon Mac Pros and got way more use out of it than I expected after putting in an SSD. It felt like a brand new computer.

It was an "Early 2008" model and I finally replaced it in 2015.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands I remember very clearly going into the original Geek Squad offices on Washington Ave and seeing a bunch of these lining the desks of the agents. I was in complete awe. I asked the guy what they were (I knew they were Apple hardware, but had never seen them before). He just quipped, "New Apple G5's, they're insanely fast and never go down. We love em'."

</comment><comment><USER40> I purchased a "dual-dual" ("quad") Mac Pro G5 with two 970MP processors, 8 GB of ECC RAM, PCI Express system bus, and two SATA HDDs in November 2005 (?). Contrary to what many will tell you this machine was not water-cooled: that was the previous generation of G5s, which had multiple single-core processor chips clocked at higher frequency. This machine is air-cooled and varies between sounding like a thundering highway tuck and a jetliner on takeoff.

With a pair of CinemaDisplay 24" (?) it served as my main workstation well into 2009, and was a truly awesome machine and I keep it in working condition with OS X 10.7 for the purposes of nostalgia. It was by far the most performant-compared-to-prevailing-average machine I have ever owned (back at a time when such comparisons mattered).

<comment><USER24> But 10.7 is not PowerPC-compatible! You probably mean 10.5?

<comment><USER40> Just checked, you're right, I have 10.5 on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I run one of these at home as a server (NAS, Minecraft) to this day. Runs FreeBSD 11.1 very nicely.

I was going to email the author about it but couldn't find her email address anywhere - plenty of account details on the usual walled gardens, but no actual email address.

Sadly this is becoming more common :(

<comment><USER42> FreeBSD is definitely the best OS to put on the G5. I have a dual core 2.3 GHz model with 8GB of RAM running perfectly on a ZFS installation.

<comment><USER43> I have a 2008 Black MacBook (the BlackBook). I couldn't find much in the way of installing anything on it (I'd honestly looked at Ubuntu and Debian).

I found this for FreeBSD ([https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleMacbook#Apple_MacBook_support_...](https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleMacbook#Apple_MacBook_support_on_FreeBSD)). Maybe I'll give it another shot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I kind of wish that Apple would just make a "barebones" x86 case + mb... take a stock intel design, add in a "copyright" chip (to cover OSX license/boot) and let you add your own CPU/GPU etc (GPU from supported list, or onboard to start).

Of course paired with an apple designed ATX/mATX case. I'm not sure full ATX is really necessary, but at least mATX would be nice. Then leave it to the tinkerers to put together their own... Most that would want a more powerful desktop mac would be perfectly fine putting their own together. Then just do a motherboard refresh each year with whatever the current chipset is.

Don't even try to be everything to everyone, and leave it to "developer" macs. Just imho.

<comment><USER45> You just described the "xMac", the code-name that all the fans and nerds used for the computer they wished for during the 'aughts.

And I think there's some possibility that a computer like this is on the horizon. Apple wouldn't announce a feature like first-class external GPU support unless they had really big plans for it. Maybe the new Mac Pro they promised will be more like what you're envisioning...

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The G5 is cool and all, but my fanboy dreams really started with the 8100/110.

601 PowerPC baby.

<comment><USER47> I have fond memories of the first PPC gen 8100/80\. They really did amazing perf feats with the PPC CPUs. Apple managed to get lots of "faster than Pentium" ads out of those CPUs.

Also m68k IIci was really durable and upgradeable computer. They also lasted a lot longer than they were really needed <3

Been thinking of buys 6100/60 with PC Compatibility Card so I could have a retro gaming station with two different architectures.

Apple had bunch DOS/PC compatibility cards for handling best of the both worlds. The recent ones run even Windows 98...

<comment><USER48> I owned a 6100/60 at some point.

I remember seeing the first texture-mapped 3D demo ever on it. I was in awe.

I think that was also around the time I played a lot of Escape Velocity and Giants: Citizen Kabuto...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I used to own one -- it was a fantastically designed machine, but holy cow was it a good space heater. I had a south-facing second story bedroom and during the summer, using my PowerMac, man, it was toasty in there.

</comment><comment><USER50> I purchased a G5 tower for cheap, on a whim, from my local university surplus store. There was a strange sign that said "may leak". I was really confused as to why they were talking about memory leaks W.R.T. hardware. Only once I got home and opened up the case did I realize that they meant leaking of the liquid cooling system... I have yet to repair the cooling and boot up the system. Any tips/guides for doing so?

I ended up using another second-hand Mac Mini G4 for PowerPC testing. Much less hassle but also much slower. LLVM builds take _ages_.

<comment><USER51> There's a good write-up on overhauling the liquid cooling system here: [http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/G5_CoolantLeak_Repair/G5_...](http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/systems/G5_CoolantLeak_Repair/G5_CoolantLeak_Repair_p1.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I still use my 15 year old Dual-2.5GHz PowerMac G5 every now-and-then, as Adobe Creative Suite still works perfectly fine on it. Best investment ever, especially with the 30" Cinema display.

<comment><USER40> I still use my 2005 quad G5 with Mathematica. I don't really understand all this hand-wringing about supposedly bank-breaking power consumption. Electricity (here, at least) is so cheap it is largely irrelevant as a proportional variable cost. (Or at the very least, I have never thought of it in those terms.)

</comment></comment><comment> King-Aaron I bought my G5 tower at the end of the PPC generation, and loved the thing. I think it was 2005 or 2006, and I ran the machine until only a couple of years ago. During it's working life, it never skipped a beat, and for a long time was still just as performant as anything being released new.

Then came the stage where I could no longer update OSX, couldn't really run the internet as no new browser versions were released... The machine was pretty much a brick.

But it was a goddamn pretty brick.

</comment><comment><USER53> "Leopard runs an obsolete version of iTunes, version 10, which is faster and easier to use than the latest version."

I still use iTunes 10.6.3 on Mac OS 10.9.5. It can sync my iPhone 4S over USB, so my contacts & calendars & music don't have to be in the cloud.

It's so much better than the newer versions of dumbed-down iTunes. I'm seriously considering rewriting my own version of iTunes 10 as a web app before jumping platforms to Linux about 5 years from now.

</comment><comment><USER54> Let's not forget about the notorious Xbox 360 "demo": [https://www.anandtech.com/show/1686/5](https://www.anandtech.com/show/1686/5)

</comment><comment><USER55> I owned a PowerMac G5, and still contend its introductory video is a thing of beauty: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSxXgtlX8ho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSxXgtlX8ho)

However, I remember mine being ridiculously loud. Ive promised me that more fans would mean less noise due to the "thermal zones" described in the above video, but, at least to my knowledge, that didn't pan out. It also had a habit of just blasting the fans in the middle of the night like an airplane if I remember correctly.

</comment><comment><USER56> > I ran the trial version of Geekbench 2, an older benchmarking utility that > runs on different platforms.

Hmm…doesn't the trial version run as 32-bit? I don't think this would be an accurate representation.

</comment><comment><USER57> Apple moving away from PPC to x86 effectively ended any remnants of PPC in the consumer market.

All that's left now is the server grade POWER, its really hard now for anyone to get access to PPC without getting an expensive POWER setup.

You can see that in the ecosystem as well, ppcel builds exist from Ubuntu, but I don't think their performance is as well tuned as the x86 ones. This is another takeaway, if you don't have hardware in the consumer market, your ecosystem will die out. Nobody will know you.

<comment><USER58> I don't think either Linux or MacOS X was ever tuned well for PPC, even when consumer PPC hardware was available.

MacOS X feels nice once you get above version 10.2 and above 1.5 GHz, but it never felt as snappy as MacOS 9 on 300 MHz. I always thought it was suspicious how snappy MacOS X was on the first Intel Macs, considering that NeXTstep was on x86 but never on PPC.

Linux on PPC always felt sluggish. It felt sluggish back when Power Macs were contemporary.

<comment><USER33> The graphics implementation was always inferior, just a basic framebuffer, which could never compare to the hand tuned assembler speed of Aqua. That made everything _feel_ slower, but Linux was as fast for everything else.

<comment><USER58> No, even starting text-processing commands in the terminal was oddly slow. Once the programs were running, they seemed fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> This (a Dual 2GHz PowerMac G5) was my first Mac. I remember buying with cash from summer jobs before heading to college in 2005 – I named it Jupiter.

The thing was a beast and I loved it. Two years later, I bought it a companion, the first Macbook Pro – named Mars. Later that summer, I bought the iPhone the day it came out for a cool $599 and named it Mercury.

These were all great products, and they inspired me to start the Mac Users Group at my university :)

</comment><comment><USER59> > "The G5's considerable weight is focused on these little pads. There were > aftermarket cork pads, but I've used masking tape to wrap a pair of old > cycle gloves around the handle-stands, which doesn't change the fact that in > 1998 The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, causing him to plummet > sixteen feet through an announcer's table."

I wasn't expecting a shitty morph!

</comment><comment><USER39> I was just thinking about how I bought a G5 Thanksgiving weekend back in 2004.

I bought the base configuration. It came with only 256MB of RAM, which honestly was a criminally low amount for that size of machine. My wimpy 12" Powerbook felt faster, because it wasn't thrashing all over the place like the G5 was. I think I lasted three days before upgrading the memory.

</comment><comment><USER60> I had one of these wind tunnels for a while in the 2000s. A dual 1.8ghz model. It looked ultra-cool, beautifully designed inside and out. But it ran really loud even by the standards back then...

There was actually a high end water-cooled model that was notorious for developing leaks - doubt there's many of those remaining in service these days!

</comment><comment><USER61> I never got round to get rid of my watercooled dual G5, as I was hoping way to long to find some neat use case for it. Mostly because it's probably the most performant non-Intel computer readily available (i.e. not some SGI Onyx cluster).

Anyone has a better use case to either inspire me or get mine donated for the cost of shipping from Gernay?

<comment><USER62> You can use the (excellent) case as a PC case, you can buy kits that allow you to fit a standard ATX motherboard in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> > The Pentium M didn't just outperform the Pentium 4M mobile chip, it also > benchmarked within a few percent of the desktop Pentium 4, while consuming > less power and generating less heat. After a brief diversion with the > Pentium D Intel essentially gave up on the Pentium 4 in favour of a multi- > core development of the Pentium M, which was sold as the Core architecture.

I have a personal story: the application I worked on at that time needed some complicated calculations and decisions during them -- and to complete every run took a significant time, measured in minutes, or even hours, and there was a lot to calculate. But once somebody ran the application on a Pentium M notebook, nobody could believe at first: on the notebook it run faster than on the Pentiums 4 desktops in the office, even if the notebook had _lower_ clock than the Pentiums 4 desktops!

The reasons are many, if I remember what I've understood then correctly, the Pentium 4 design was never meant to target (at least not much) the clock speeds at which it was eventually sold. Apparently there were marketing people in Intel who influenced the development of the new processors, who managed to press the engineers to target always "more GHz" \-- that was simple and easiest to sell, having more GHz than competition. So apparently the Pentium 4 design was made to conceptually enable up to 10 GHz clock speeds! Today it sounds science fiction, but before that time the clock speed did rise a lot for quite a years nicely. Also apparently, some engineers warned the marketing that maybe it's not going to be easy to reach 10 GHz. "You just design the CPU, let others design the thermal and other solutions." Of course, everything but the CPU conceptual design wasn't successful: it's not just cooling the CPU off that's the problem, although that is a problem enough. There are some specific dependencies that simply don't go linearly. So in practice Pentiums 4 have been sold with the lower clock that they were designed for, most of the customers didn't notice much.

So what were the Pentium M advantages? That was a processor developed by another team (not even in the USA but in Israel), and with the specific goal of doing more in less clock counts. It worked marvelously for the real life demands, like the calculations present in our application. Compared to the Pentium 4, the M also had more CPU cache, obviously enough for our application to shine.

For our application Pentium M was not "within a few percent" it was really _much better_ than Pentium 4.

<comment><USER33> The P4 NetBurst architecture used very deep pipelines, which allowed it to be clocked very fast. To fill that pipeline the scheduler had to predict a lot of branches. So if your code had an unrolled loop then it performed well. However, if the scheduler mispredicted branches then the time to flush all those wrong branches and refill the pipeline caused severe inefficiencies. The 'speed demon' design also suffered from power dissipation problems, excess leakage current at high frequencies.

The Core architecture did away with the super deep pipelines, and it sounds like that avoided a particularly pathological case in your application.

<comment><USER63> In 2004 there was already 2 MB cache Pentium M whereas Pentiums 4 had only 512 MB (4 times less). Core came out in 2006.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The G5 (and the G4) were from another time. Back in the early 2000's (and late 90's) it wasn't uncommon two have two machines at your desk. One for internet and email, the other for Microsoft Office. With OS X you could combine them both into one machine.

<comment><USER64> WTF are you talking about? You think people had 2 machines to run Office and Internet? I don't know if this is a joke or just a delusion.

<comment><USER65> I would have, if I had been able to afford to. ;-)

I have seen people use to machines for Internet and regular desktop usage for security reasons. Back in the day, you sometimes could not even finish installing Windows on an Internet connected machine without catching one of those nasty RPC worms.

Having a dedicated Internet machine you could easily wipe and install from scratch without losing your applications, settings and files was not a bad idea, if you could afford it.

(Alternatively, one could just use a decent operating system, but that is a different story...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> > Apple fans aren't like Amiga fans, thank goodness. They know when to admit > defeat.

NEVER!!!!!!!!!!!

</comment><comment><USER67> »The G5 has three USB 2 ports, two FireWire 400 ports, and a FireWire 800 port. In my life I have never used FireWire to transfer data. I will probably go to my grave having never used FireWire.«

Same.

<comment><USER65> IIRC, there was an interesting article posted here on HN about the history of FireWire. It sounded like an interesting piece of technology, but various circumstances prevented it ever becoming the big success it could have been.

I feel the same thing is repeating with Thunderbolt.

It's kind of funny/sad because neither technology is strictly tied to Apple machines - I had a work laptop (Dell Latitude D630) with a Firewire port. One of our CAD workstations has Thunderbolt on board (but, sadly no actual port).

But there were almost no peripherals to support it. The only person I ever saw using Firewire used it to transfer digital video from their camera to their PC.

<comment><USER33> It came down to licencing. Apple wanted $1 per port in 1999, which was too expensive. Intel would rather develop their own bus (USB) than licence Firewire from Apple. Apple eventually caved to $0.25 but it was too late.

Firewire was heavily used for digital video, still used for heaps of industrial cameras. Still very prominent in digital audio. The multimaster bus design, guaranteed timing and bandwidth (isochronous transport), and speed, made Firewire a winner. A Firewire 400 drive is practically twice as fast as USB2. So anyone who had to do lots of transfers used it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The last non-intel and non-x86 on desktop in wide use. I miss days of heterogenous computing at home. One could argue mobile brought that back in, but meh. Not the same.

<comment><USER68> What do you mean with heterogenous computing? Isn't that supposed to mean CPUs combining different types of cores like the Cell with SPUs or AMD APU with GPU? G5 was just a PPC implementation without any "sidekicks".

<comment><USER10> I meant a diverse set of CPUs and architectures on desktop, not an actual term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I've still got a Quad G5. Annoyed that I never got around to selling it when I stopped using it so much.

Guess I should whack it up on eBay.

</comment><comment><USER70> Regret selling mine. Absolutely gorgeous machine.</comment>


Super Mario Bros Coin Sound (1985) - <AUTHOR> http://365blanc.blogspot.com/2012/11/white-noise.html

<comment><USER2> A rather well-known video of a guitarist mimicking the coin sounds with harmonics:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFEepARd81g&t=0m25s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFEepARd81g&t=0m25s)

</comment><comment><USER3> While it's certainly one of the most recognizable pieces in the series (mind you it's only recognizable because it became ubiquitous later), can just 2 notes even be copywrighted? I mean we're not talking about a Brian Eno piece here.

</comment><comment><USER4> hmm. am i missing something or is it just plain wrong? isn't the sound really B E - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKCQqvpOa1Q> ?

<comment><USER5> Chords: G/D G6 (with jumpy voice leading), can be approximated nicely on the 12th fret harmonics of the guitar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always trusted <http://www.mariopiano.com/mario-sheet-music-coin-sound.html>

</comment><comment><USER7> The "white noise" sfx doesn't sound correct to me.

This does: [http://soundfxcenter.com/download-sound/super-mario-bros- coi...](http://soundfxcenter.com/download-sound/super-mario-bros-coin-sound- effect/)

<comment><USER8> "White noise" is just the title/label of the blog post. No doubt chosen for poetic purposes. Note the OTHER blog entry titles, listed on the right hand column.

<comment><USER9> "White noise" is not just the title of the post, it is also a link to a page where you can play an audio snippet of the coin noise.</comment></comment></comment>


Kickstarter Censors Movie Project About Kermit Gosnell - <AUTHOR> http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/05/01/gosnell-filmmakers-accuse-online-fundraising-site-of-censorship-in-a-big-way/

<comment><USER2> Smells like a trumped up controversy publicity stunt by the filmmakers.</comment>


First mathematical proof for a key law of turbulence in fluid mechanics - <AUTHOR> https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/features/4520 <comment> semi-extrinsic I can't for the life of me understand why they don't explain what Batchelor's result _actually is_ in these press releases.

So here goes: in turbulence, scaling laws are a big thing. Specifically, it's extremely useful to know how the power density in a turbulent flow is distributed between small and large whirls.

For the distribution of energy, we have the well-known Kolmogorov scaling law, that the power density scales with wavenumber to the power of -5/3\. This holds approximately for all except the very largest whorls, down to the scale where viscosity begins to dominate, where there are no smaller whorls. This is known as the Kolmogorov scale. Due to a phenomenon called intermittency, we have strong reason to believe it is not exactly -5/3.

These papers are concerned with the power spectrum of scalar mixing. Imagine dropping ink into a turbulent water flow, how does it distribute between small and large whorls?

Batchelor [1] arrived at the result in 1958 that the power spectrum scales with wavenumber to the power of -1. This result has always been thought to be much more robust than the Kolmogorov scaling, since different approaches have given exactly the same answer.

The papers linked here give a proof that this relationship is exact. From a quick skim, they are extremely technical in the mathematical sense, invoking measure theory and Sobolev spaces and Itô calculus.

Certainly these results are very interesting. In some sense the big question is whether their approaches can transfer to solving outstanding questions about other phenomena in turbulence.

[1] [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-fluid- mec...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-fluid- mechanics/article/smallscale-variation-of-convected-quantities-like- temperature-in-turbulent-fluid-part-1-general-discussion-and-the-case-of- small-conductivity/A8AEA175A906F98CDDB0F9ED146BB9FE)

<comment><USER2> I think this is a good lay-person's introduction to basis of Kolmogorov's length scale, specifically the Reynold's number: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtIhVwPruwY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtIhVwPruwY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The actual proof: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.11014](https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.11014)

</comment><comment><USER4> Excerpts:

"To understand fluid flow, scientists must first understand turbulence."

[...]

"Since its introduction in 1959, physicists have debated the validity and scope of Batchelor's law, which helps explain how chemical concentrations and temperature variations distribute themselves in a fluid. For example, stirring cream into coffee creates a large swirl with small swirls branching off of it and even smaller ones branching off of those. As the cream mixes, the swirls grow smaller and the level of detail changes at each scale. Batchelor's law predicts the detail of those swirls at different scales."

My Comments: Classical physicists look at matter as being composed of atoms (neutrons, protons, electrons), String Theorists look at matter as being composed of vibrating strings, Quantum Physicists look at matter as being composed of quanta, that is, the possibility of a measurement in a given place and time. I personally have considered looking at matter as the presence or absence of force in a given space at a given scale -- but perhaps there's another possible view here -- looking at matter as solidified fluids of various different scales where as you go to smaller scales, the fluids move faster / are less viscuous... If that view turns out to have any truth to it (not saying that it does; it's all theoretical), then understanding fluid mechanics, and more specifically, turbulence, might turn out to have an additional application in helping to understand those small spaces / interactions in matter...

Related: "An Introduction To Fluid Dynamics by G.K. Batchelor, University Of Cambridge": [https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/an-introduction-to- flui...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/an-introduction-to-fluid- dynamics/18AA1576B9C579CE25621E80F9266993)

</comment><comment><USER5> That's awesome and clicking through the links I learned that the proof for Navier-Stokes has a million dollar prize on it. I didn't even know that it's not proven, back in engineering school we basically took that as a given and starting point for so much useful stuff. I guess that's the difference between science and engineering.

<comment><USER6> Re: Navier-Stokes

The PDE that most analyses start with does not need to be proven. This has been rigorously derived since forever. The thing that actually needs to be proven is whether or not smooth solutions exist to the PDE for all cases of parameters. In practice, people tend to stick to working with simple cases that can be solved analytically, or use computer simulations to compute approximate solutions (to very high precision).

<comment><USER3> What does it even mean "to prove a PDE"? The million dollars is for proving certain properties of a PDE, in this case, whether smooth solutions exist.

<comment><USER6> I was just using the language of the parent. By proven I meant derived from Newton's laws, and that was my interpretation of the parent's comment.

<comment><USER7> The NS momentum equation is just Newton's second law written for all the forces acting on a fluid. We just don't know if it always works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These university PR department pieces are very often fluff/misleading; is it feasibly to have HN policy/custom to link to more independent/objective discussion wherever possible? (That's not to say that this particular HN link should not exist or that the research described in this one is not important.)</comment>


Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: 'This Is All About Income' - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/world/europe/fake-news-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-georgia.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news <comment><USER2> While I don't doubt that fake news is widely shared on Facebook, blaming the outcome of the election on it seems like a convenient way to dismiss the preferences of tens of millions of voters. It seems like there's a real effort right now to show or at least insinuate that _fake news is the reason Trump won._

There are so many disturbing things about that narrative I don't know where to begin. It would require a profoundly dumber US population than I believe exists. It would imply very cynical things about the US education system which don't mirror my experience growing up there (I have seen truly bad education systems overseas, and while the US could use some work, it's a paragon compared to some others). It would require the conservatives to be much dumber than the liberals, which just sounds like bigotry and arrogance to me. It essentially dismisses the concerns held by Trump's supporters--who are fellow Americans after all--which only widens the growing divide in the electorate. And finally if you believe this idea that fake news is a serious problem which needs to be curtailed, it almost inevitably leads to censorship mechanisms which will be abused down the road. How do you fact check the entire Internet? Anyone in journalism knows how much work it can be to fact check one article and often the facts are open to interpretation, particularly in politics.

Elites in government and business are now pushing for the creation of censorship mechanisms in order to curtail fake news, and they're hoping to get away with it because of popular disillusionment over the results of the US election. We really, really need to come together on this point and stop them.

<comment><USER3> I wonder though, how much influence fake news had on people, not help people choose who to vote for, but to dissuade them to vote at all. A sort of unpropaganda, if you will. This election got so far into the Tyson Zone[0] that the headlines of fake news became hard for even well informed citizens to parse. Fake news could have provided a chilling effect that influenced the election.

Of course I have no data to support this, but I think it would be a fascinating case study / sociological experiment.

[0] [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tyson%20Zone](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Tyson%20Zone)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A former boss of mine used to talk about how he found economics interesting, because unlike telling someone not do something and watching them ignore you, with economics you can change the rules of the game so they don't want to play any more.

"Fake news" is just another manifestation of the same old "Thirteen cat facts you won't believe" and even "One simple tricks" we've been seeing for years. It's economically profitable to make large amounts of people look at your site. Until that stops being the case, all of the parasitic crap we see on the web will continue to grow. It will grow bigger and faster, too, as more people get connected to the web, and don't know what's "true" and what's not.

I have no concluding remark to this observation, other than get used to it, unless you're a decision maker at Adwords, in which case pull your finger out and realise you hold the position of power to stop this.

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems inevitable that this sort of thing soon will be mostly automated. After all, Trump fans aren't alone in wanting to read conspiratorial affirmations of their moronic beliefs. We'd all like that, at some level. If any particular search engine or similar aggregation platform actually succeeds in curbing fakenews (rather than loudly crowing about initial attempts to do so, as in the current case), that platform will see its own popularity decline. Nobody wants that, so this "problem" will remain "unsolved".

<comment><USER6> It's not clear to me that anyone actually believes any of the sites mentioned. I mean, the business model only relies on people clicking the page and seeing ads, so in that vein, all the clickbait headlines we've ever seen on the MSM are pretty much the same.

Given what I've seen, the body of the article is probably superfluous. Just have a Markov chain regurgitate some utter nonsense and figure out how to generate viral headlines.

Worse, it's not like the MSM is immune to this, either. I mean, just look at this story: [http://fortune.com/2016/11/25/russian-fake- news/](http://fortune.com/2016/11/25/russian-fake-news/)

The story gets worse when you look at what was found on Glenn Greenwald's twitter: [https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/802247437289226240](https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/802247437289226240) "No-one I've spoken to listed as "allies" on their site had even heard of them before the WP piece."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is like USNews and USWeekly mags at the grocery store.</comment>


MkDocs 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.mkdocs.org/about/release-notes/#version-10-2018-08-03 <comment><USER3> We migrated a while ago all our python docs from sphinx and the free readthedocs to mkdocs. Two main reasons:

\- we like markdown more and starting (actually we converted to markdown with pandoc) with a bunch of markdown files was a breeze. We also did not lost advanced documentation features because there are plenty of fantastic mkdocs plugins.

\- readthedocs was unreliable for us but we also did not wanted to pay for our open source software documentation generation + hosting.

At the end we have an auto generated mkdocs with GitHub+Travis and all searchable with the fantastic mkdocs static page search functionality (maybe the biggest feature of mkdocs)

End result: [https://docs.pybossa.com](https://docs.pybossa.com) (hosted on GitHub)

Source: [https://github.com/scifabric/docs.pybossa.com](https://github.com/scifabric/docs.pybossa.com)

<comment><USER4> Github hosts your docs for free, with a custom domain name?

<comment><USER3> Yep, just search for DNS CNAME handling on GitHub docs. We put also Cloudflare DNS in front of it to get TLS/SSL but I've heard this is not necessary anymore nowadays.

<comment><USER4> Cool, thanks. Looking at your yaml, it looks like the title of each doc has to be configured separately? Is that required?

<comment><USER3> No this is optional. You can also just throw a bunch of .md files in a directory structure and run mkdocs over it to generate a tree for navigation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We moved the majority of docs for our projects ([https://github.com/2600hz](https://github.com/2600hz)) to use mkdocs to build our doc sites ([https://docs.2600hz.com/dev](https://docs.2600hz.com/dev) [https://docs.2600hz.com/ui](https://docs.2600hz.com/ui) etc).

I have a simple script that receives github webhooks on PR merges to master that fetches the latest version of master and builds the site. So from PR merge to the docs site being updated is now seconds of time.

We also integrated building the doc sites into our CI process so PRs will fail if they would cause mkdocs to fail to build the site (borked yaml, make sure docs are included in the yaml, other things).

This has been a boon for our community of users and developers. Coupled with our AST parsers that look for code changes that require doc changes, we're getting better about alerting developers of the need to document something, and reviewers of the need if the developer forgot. Not a panacea but has significantly improved doc coverage for Kazoo which has a broad set of APIs available to different types of users.

Cheers to 1.0!

</comment><comment><USER6> How do mkdocs and asciidoctor compare to reStructuredRext/Sphinx nowadays?

<comment><USER7> I'm not familiar with asciidoctor, however, I have a fair amount of experience with Sphinx & MkDocs.

POSITIVES OF MkDocs over Sphinx

* Markdown seems to be easier for people to understand and are familiar with as opposed to reStructuredText. However, Sphinx now does allow you to use Markdown as well as reStructuredText.

* MkDocs seems to have more themes that are actively developed. My favorite is mkdocs-material ([https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material](https://github.com/squidfunk/mkdocs-material)), example can be seen here: [https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/](https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/).

* Most of the features of Sphinx can be used natively or with some plugins for MkDocs. ([https://github.com/brianjking/1upkeyboard-docs/blob/master/m...](https://github.com/brianjking/1upkeyboard-docs/blob/master/mkdocs.yml#L67-L88))

* Easy to implement MkDocs with Travis-CI or other CI systems to test/build/deploy documentation on GitHub pages, Gitlab pages, etc. ([https://github.com/brianjking/1upkeyboard-docs/blob/master/....](https://github.com/brianjking/1upkeyboard-docs/blob/master/.travis.yml))

The times I feel Sphinx is definitely a better choice than MkDocs (from my personal experience):

* If you want to generate PDF & ePUB copies of your files Sphinx seems much more direct, especially if you can use ReadTheDocs ([https://readthedocs.org/](https://readthedocs.org/)). Although, there are several MkDocs methods of generating your docs as a PDF using pandoc or other systems. However, depending on what plugins you have in your mkdocs it may cause problems. ([https://github.com/search?q=mkdocs+pdf](https://github.com/search?q=mkdocs+pdf), [https://github.com/search?q=mkdocs+pandoc](https://github.com/search?q=mkdocs+pandoc)).

* Sphinx seems better for auto documentation for APIs and other code documentation.

<comment><USER8> sphinx allows to test code snippets in the documentation. is this available in mkdocs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If anyone finds it useful, some time ago I made a Docker image of `mkdocs` [1] (with a few extensions, check the dockerfile for details).

[1]: [https://hub.docker.com/r/elamperti/docker- mkdocs/](https://hub.docker.com/r/elamperti/docker-mkdocs/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome and congrats. We started using MkDocs for [https://aqueduct.io/docs/](https://aqueduct.io/docs/), and have since used it for a ton of projects. Some things that we found really useful were that it indexes all of your content for full text search automatically, and it's stupid simple to deploy it to gh-pages. With a minimal amount of scripting, we push to a mkdocs source branch and it builds and deploys nearly immediately. It has saved us a ton of time and delivered tremendous value.

<comment><USER4> Is that more efficient than building locally and pushing changes to a repo?

<comment><USER10> I've found that I'm at least more willing to make quick typo fixes and deploy them when I just have to make the change locally and do a single push. This is especially true (for me) when there is some additional web content that is not generated by mkdocs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg We love MkDocs! When we originally discovered it we believed it was "good for small projects" but as our product got more complicated we actually never hit any issues. It's amazingly easy to use, extend and customize with great results:

[https://gravitational.com/teleport/docs](https://gravitational.com/teleport/docs)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've just started writing documentation for my project in MkDocs like last week. So far, it's pretty good.

But I had to switch off the search functionality because it was causing a slowdown when displaying the page (you couldn't even scroll?).

Also I would appreciate if they made changing the theme easier - <USER2> there is only a minified bootstrap css which is a PITA to modify.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like a theme issue with the online search (we had also problems with search when theme was older or newer than mkdocs), do you experience same behaviour with other themes?

<comment><USER11> I've only tried the default one and made sure it's from the same release

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What about i18n/multilingual documentation with MkDocs?

Edit: Some answers in the issue tracker: [https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%...](https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+i18n)

</comment><comment><USER13> Yet they still have no way for me to buy them a beer.

[https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/issues/892](https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/issues/892)

<comment><USER14> Some projects are hard to divide up donations.

Does it split evenly to anyone who wrote code? What about people who only review and merge PRs?

What about if someone was unavailable for a month or two—do they still get a cut for current donations?

I help maintain marked.js.org and we currently don't accept donations because of these questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The search feature is nothing short of amazing. I love how fast it is. Is it scalable to large amounts of documentation? How is it indexed?

<comment><USER3> It flattens the text into one big json file and with some JS it searches this flat text file: [https://github.com/Scifabric/docs.pybossa.com/blob/gh- pages/...](https://github.com/Scifabric/docs.pybossa.com/blob/gh- pages/mkdocs/search_index.json) (1.1 MB) all done automatically on building the site. There are for sure some limits to this approach because it's all in memory/browser but we only write some software documentation on our side and not really big books.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> [http://asciidoctor.org](http://asciidoctor.org)

</comment><comment><USER17> Thanks for reminding me to updated and test my container. ;)

</comment><comment><USER18> The proliferation of yaml is rather unfortunate.

<comment><USER19> All JSON is valid YAML, so you can format your YAML that way and be just fine.

<comment><USER20> How the.. I just tried this, and it works, but I don't understand why.

I mean YAML is just another data serialization format and so can be trivially converted anyways, but I thought that YAML had completely different formatting rules than JSON.

<comment><USER19> In the spec ([http://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html#id2759572](http://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html#id2759572)) it says:

> YAML can therefore be viewed as a natural superset of JSON, offering > improved human readability and a more complete information model. This is > also the case in practice; every JSON file is also a valid YAML file. This > makes it easy to migrate from JSON to YAML if/when the additional features > are required.

I think that's why I absolutely love YAML: I was able to start using it by writing JSON, then replacing parts of my documents with their "native" equivalents as I got comfortable with it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


On a small Greek island, practitioners of an ancient whistling language - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/3242/greece-sfyria-whistling-language <comment><USER2> I saw this a few days ago on a Japanese TV show -- the host was traveling around the world trying to find places that had never been visited by a Japanese person before. He found a small town in Greece, but then was disappointed that there was a Japanese woman living there... but her husband pointed him toward this island, where he had been born and raised.

They made a big deal about the whistling language and even had several live demonstrations. The two I remember are:

1\. They ordered drinks at a cafe, then one of the group added on an order for orange juice -- the owner brought out the complete order.

2\. The host asked them to whistle some specific things to some people across a valley; when the host went over to question them about the things, they answered correctly.

<comment><USER3> This has been making the rounds lately and also been on swedish TV.

But my impression of it on Swedish TV was completely different from yours.

Firstly when interviewing the whistlers you could tell that it wasn't a language. It was just a set of sounds they had taught each other for specific situations.

When they were standing 20 metres from each other and tried to say things like "take off your hat" or "pick up the shovel" they had to give visual cues after trying the whistle a few times and failing to get the message across.

So sure, they whistle across the valley, but just to get a very limited message across that concerns them and their daily work perhaps. Not to have conversations.

The swedish TV host tried to learn the language and also went to some bar to order. Maybe they do that as a standing gag there, with the ordering. But he didn't get it right until he played some school children whistling on his cellphone.

<comment><USER4> Just to give some context behind it.

The whistling is indeed word for word. In my village some of the over 40's still exchange whistles from time to time depending on their situation.

I am not the best at whistling, as I didn't have the nerve to learn it all, nor I communicated like that to my friends and family. Although I am able to understand some of it and get a few words depending on how clear the other person is when he is whistling. Some of the older folks whistle their words very fast, and the ones that can understand them are people that have been trained to listen to those whistles for most of their lives.

On the articles whistling on soundcloud I was able to understand 5/6 tracks. The alphabet both in the slow motion and in the fast version is pretty clear.

Disclaimer: I grew up partly in a village in Greece, where they do keep that form of communication. I recently returned to Greece and am permanently residing in that village. I am not fluent in the whistling language, but I know for a fact that there is an alphabet and proper words coming out of whistling.

<comment><USER3> Good insight.

Maybe those old folks grew up together so they have their own whistling dialect.

The report on Swedish TV did show school children learning the whistling language so I'd assume they'd all understand eachother. But even so, I just don't think whistling leaves room for enough nuances to carry on a normal conversation.

It seems to be more suited for commands or exclamations like "bring me a beer" or "rain coming".

<comment><USER5> > But even so, I just don't think whistling leaves room for enough nuances to > carry on a normal conversation.

> But even so, I just don't think rapidly moving air over skin to induce > vibration leaves room for enough nuances to carry on a normal conversation.

Ultimately, whistling is just the emission of sound. Given that we get by with throat-sounds, I'd bet that whistling language could be sufficiently developed to be capable of expressing complex thought. Both speech and whistling are just moving air.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Relevant "whistled register" of Spanish used in the Canary Islands: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo_Gomero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo_Gomero)

<comment><USER7> If you want to hear the story in song form (and French): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAlnL8JHetY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAlnL8JHetY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is a question, how do they determine who is whistling to them if they do not see them? Is whistler's identity encoded in a whistle somehow? And if yes, then how? In cetacean whistles it is believed that dolphin's identity is not encoded in a whistle that is why they need signature whistles.

On a side note, whistling language and cetacean whistling are nice examples of convergent evolution, cetaceans also use whistles for long distance communication, and use other sounds like burst pulses for short distance comunication with animals nearby. Sociality is another common component.

Another amazing thing about whistled languages is that they are still closely linked to their language of origin. If the language is tonal, the whistle will follow their language melodic structure. If the language is not tonal , whistles will try to mimic vowel resonance and convey consonants via how they whistle, i.e abrupt changes.

</comment><comment><USER9> Similar language is also being used in northern Turkey: [http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/08/whistled-turkish- tick...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/08/whistled-turkish-tickles-both- sides-brain)

<comment><USER10> Another article about the same thing: [https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-whistled- languag...](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-whistled-language-of- northern-turkey)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just a technicality really, but this is just an encoding of language — like Morse code or writing — it's not a language of its own.

<comment><USER12> No, this a language. You may be thinking of say written language which is an encoding of language sounds

<comment><USER11> This is most definitely not a language. The language is Greek, as the article also states: "It's the same as modern Greek — the grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure all remain intact — but the sounds come out in high-pitched musical notes." So you're just encoding modern Greek in a different way.

You could also call it a register (as the article does) and group it with shouting and whispering, I don't completely agree with that assertion but either way it's most certainly not a language on its own, it's a way of speaking Greek.

> written language which is an encoding of language sounds

That is absolutely false. Written language is _not_ an encoding of language sounds. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is, but there's a pretty long way from written language to IPA. Written language is a beast of its own and it's lagging way behind spoken language, but it's not an encoding of language sounds. It's a way of encoding language, but phonetics and phonology has nothing to do with it.

<comment><USER13> The Greek language is very very close to an encoding of language sounds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've witnessed a demonstration of a whistling "language" when visiting Tenerife. As far as I could tell the one whistled there was not a language in its own right but rather an encoding of phonemes into whistling sounds.

</comment><comment><USER15> I read the article and then listened to the whistles. Surprisingly (since the article said otherwise), they were rather intelligible. They don't use one whistle per letter, which would have been weird, because you don't just say letters when talking (like "aitch ee ell ell oh", you just say "hello").

Similarly, this just seems to be taking the cadence of speech and whistling it. I listened to the proverb whistle, and it "clearly" says "η ζωή είναι πολύ ωραία όταν μπορείς να είσαι αυτάρκης", which I definitely wouldn't have gotten if I didn't know what they wanted to say, but which is different enough from the English translation to show that I could actually derive information from it.

Overall, I don't think you can actually hold a conversation in it, it's basically like taking speech and encoding it in low-bitrate audio. Lots of nuance gets lost and you're left with the low-entropy signals, which are hard to disambiguate unless you know what they're saying.

</comment><comment><USER16> BBC article on the same topic:

[http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170731-greeces- disappearin...](http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20170731-greeces-disappearing- whistled-language)

</comment><comment><USER17> Just listened to the clips. Finally I know which language was spoken by R2-D2!

<comment><USER18> kimono is come from the greek

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone have a list of the other systems? Himalayan and Myanmar in particular.

<comment> happy-go-lucky Wikipedia has a list of whistled languages:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language#List_of_whis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language#List_of_whistled_languages)

<comment><USER20> There's an article in the Greek wikipedia: [https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A3%CF%86%CF%85%CF%81%CE%B9...](https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A3%CF%86%CF%85%CF%81%CE%B9%CF%87%CF%84%CE%AE_%CE%B3%CE%BB%CF%8E%CF%83%CF%83%CE%B1_%CF%84%CE%B7%CF%82_%CE%91%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%B9%CE%AC%CF%82)</comment></comment></comment>


The Hobbit Filming Locations mapped - <AUTHOR> http://cartodb.github.com/cartodb.js/examples/TheHobbitLocations/

<comment><USER2> There's a great startup doing this type of thing called Jump2Spot. They've mapped some pretty cool things, including Steve Jobs' life, most of NYC, and i think every DeNiro movie ever made.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems to be broken, at least in FF. I can't get anything to happen when I click on the locations. This is on FF 10.0.9 on OS X, and FF 11.0 on RHEL5.

<comment><USER4> The info windows work with Chrome on OSX, but not on Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the usabilty could be improved if you could click anywhere on the map to close a popup and the videos were embeded.</comment>


Should companies in small countries produce iPhone apps? - <AUTHOR> http://webdragon.com.au/main-site/welcome/should-australian-companies-produce-iphone-apps <comment><USER2> It's really a question of profit.

Why would developing an app for app store in XYZ jurisdiction be any different than the US?

If you have a single convenience store in the US it's probably the same business decision in Australia.

Everything that makes Australia "small" and unique provides niches that will never be filled by American iPhone devs, for example I'm sure there is money to be made in the Australian trucking sector which appears to me to be very different than in almost every other country.

<comment><AUTHOR> The main reason is population size.

For bricks and mortar retail (or most industries), costs scale with population size: a larger country requires more stores.

For apps, there is one relatively fixed development cost, no matter how many customers you have access to. It costs roughly the same to build the app whether you've got potential customers numbering 1 million or 100 million, so you're likely to get a lot less bang for your buck in a smaller geographic market.

<comment><USER2> There is a Tim Hortons app in Canada, we have roughly similar densities, 2.9/3.4 per km^2

Would you rather build an app for the US market, or Liberia, yet Liberia has a higher population density.

It sounds like you want to build store finders, to me this would mostly be boilerplate with a few images and a different location db for each store.

Build one store finder and then go shop rates around that reflect the fact that they are all the same. Heck it could mostly be done in HTML which means you can do a jqTouch app instead of Cocoa Touch.

Is there something about Australian businesses or addressing that would make abstracting these details impossible?

<comment><AUTHOR> The Tim Hortons app in Canada is a great example - having such a large network of stores, partially in the US, makes it possible to share costs over a large number of customers. The same is true of any large company with access to a large number of consumers (in Australia or elsewhere).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Every developer in Sydney seems to be working on iPhone and Android apps.

Australia might be "small", but aussie hackers and their work are exported to bigger markets daily :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true! The article is more about iPhone apps _for_ Australian companies (as clients) as domestic app users, rather than _by_ Australian companies for anyone worldwide. There have been some good high-profile success stories of game developers in particular making great apps for the international market, but so far only corporate giants seem to be building apps specifically for their Australian customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Disclosure: I'm a app developer who makes apps _for_ 3rd parties, so far from disinterested in this discussion.

All amounts in USD.

I'd say the calculus for "should we make an app" matters strongly WHY you're making an app.

Many companies make "prestige" apps. These have little functionality, and are mostly toys or are basically sophisticated marketing materials. An example of this type of app: [http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i2e2...](http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3i2e2fd2bc31136679bc3101796b8b9235) [Coca-Cola]

Should you make this type of app? If you already have name recognition, or your industry functions off of it, YES. This type of application can basically be something that people toss away, but just like much of advertising, may make your customers take notice and remember you.

If your industry does NOT function off name recognition, I don't really see why this type of application is useful for you to make. They often disappoint people who want hardcore integration with your products and services, so they aren't without cost (not even costing development cost).

Now should you create a client/tie-in app for your business? It depends. If you work off of some sort of information that the iPhone can collect (even "Where is the user"), then really look at a strong case for developing an app. Functions the application can access are: Where is the user, what's a picture of something the user is near, how fast is the user moving, what is the user's email, what is the user's contacts, what are the user's phone numbers, shall the user call you right now, and would the user like to hear something right now. Odd pieces to consider separately, but depending on your industry, they may be appropriate. If you're a paint company, pictures of their room which you then make an app to show their walls (or even have real people doing mockups for them) could be a good selling tool. If you're a home improvement company, pictures of the job could be a great thing (see the excellent "JuJu List app" for an example of this) for making a good quote. If you're a company that needs to show a local area to users (say, here are our locations, or here is our delivery zone), then the app can do well for you. But remember, if people think your app COULD do something, they may go away disappointed if it doesn't.

For instance, if your company repairs heating and A/C, if the app doesn't show them the status of their call, and estimated time of the driver, you'll very possibly get negative reviews, bad press, etc (then again, bad press can be better than no press).

Additionally, iPhone apps are not inherently expensive. You can get them done for under 10k, but you _have to listen what's cheap, what's not, and be willing to cancel what's not_. Lots of medium to large size companies involve way too many people and expensive measures, and end up spending 40-200k internally and 20-150k externally before they get their app out the door due to overmanagement. Ideally, this sort of thing should be a 1-3 person job lightly managed at a company.

<comment><AUTHOR> In small countries like Australia, unless you've got tens of thousands of customers, or very high-value customers, it can be difficult to see the value even from a $10k investment!

<comment><USER4> Well then make a useful app that costs money! Then it's not just the advertising side, but the actual revenue as well you get to factor against the cost.</comment></comment></comment>


What would happen if you make reddit/HN submission score = to # of people who comment on it? - <AUTHOR>

Would this result in more and better discussion generally?  What sorts of submissions would make the front page? <comment><USER2> Controversial and flamey topics would shoot to the top and more considered, but denser topics would languish.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it'd definitely be a good idea to make submission upvotes not count towards karma, or be counted separately.

</comment><comment><USER4> It might be useful as one factor in a complicated score function. You need a factor that diminishes the score over time, too, so it can't be quite as simple as you describe. In general it seems like you don't want a comment saying "This is as insulting as it is factually incorrect" to count as an up- vote.

</comment><comment><USER5> More people would comment just for the sake of commenting. Comment quality would suffer.

<comment><AUTHOR> But poor comments would be downvoted.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps a more interesting solution: Make article points equal the total number of points in comments. (Naturally that's not a perfect solution either.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a good idea but it's not practical. It won't make a proper measure.

Sometimes I make 3 or 4 comments on a submission that I wish I could down-vote it.</comment>


Does the Crypto Suck? - <AUTHOR> http://doesthecryptosuck.org/ <comment><USER2> STUFF YOU SHOULD USE

POND - [https://pond.imperialviolet.org/](https://pond.imperialviolet.org/)

Yeah, right.

"Dear God, please don't use Pond for anything real yet. I've hammered out nearly 20K lines of code that have never been reviewed. Unless you're looking to experiment you should go use something that actually works."</comment>


Rehabilitating the image of the two-stroke engine (1990) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/08/business/technology-rehabilitating-the-image-of-the-two-stroke-engine.html <comment><USER2> The simple problem with the two stroke is its almost impossible to prevent some gas from leaking out via the exhaust since the inhalation and exhalation happen simultaneously. Environmental standards are so stringent that this is a non-starter, even though it could achieve much better gas mileage.

Even if you solved that problem you'd still have to burn the oil used for lubrication.

<comment><USER3> There are other options. If you have forced induction and direct injection you fix both those problems. You no longer use the crankcase for pressurizing the intake so the bottom end can be lubricated like a 4-stroke engine instead of adding oil to the fuel. With forced induction you can blow clean air through the ports expelling all the exhaust without wasting any fuel.

This obviously adds quite a bit of complexity to the design, though. It may not be economical in the end. And that's assuming you can get it to meet emission regulations.

<comment> cup-of-tea I believe that's how diesel two-strokes work. Can it work with petrol? Burning diesel is still undesirable.

<comment><USER4> The diesel cycle as such can work with gasoline, but actual diesel engine implementations not designed for gasoline won't take it very well due to multiple issues. The timing of the injection of diesel is not right for gasoline, and perhaps the compression ratio isn't also. Gasoline is thin and volatile, lacking lubricant properties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> KTM (large Austrian motorcycle manufacturer) have a EURO-4 emissions compliant 2 stroke by using fuel injection and metering the lubrication oil.

[https://enduro21.com/index.php/40-general/2184-first- look-20...](https://enduro21.com/index.php/40-general/2184-first- look-2018-ktm-250-300-exc-tpi-2-stroke-enduro)

</comment><comment><USER6> At least in Europe two stroke gardening machinery in the range between 20 to 50ccm is getting quickly replaced by current-powerd engines. When you use them, the accu is empty and after two winters out in the barn they are dead. But because gas powered two stroke engines are getting so quickly replaced they have become so cheap.

Sometimes I think replacing them with current powered engines serves as a testbed to improve storage technology and to drive manufacturing costs down for the car accumulator producers.

<comment><USER7> What is a 'current-powered engine'? Do you mean an electric motor? Is there some significance to the unusual term you're using?

<comment><USER8> The use of the word "accu" (short for some variation on "accumulator") rather than "battery" suggests that English is not the poster's native language. Here on HN, that should not be a surprising state of affairs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article talks about the innovative injection technology from the Orbital Engine Company.

Here's an article about that companies history and why it never caught on apart from existing 2 stroke markets (outboard motors etc).

[https://www.carmrades-blog.com/all- articles/2017/11/24/failu...](https://www.carmrades-blog.com/all- articles/2017/11/24/failure-to-launch-the-orbital-engine-company)

</comment><comment><USER10> So, what happened? And why are we seeing this again now? Especially, when internal combustion is about obsolete?

<comment><USER11> The simple reason ICE's will remain in use is energy density, no matter how much you wish it wasn't true.

Diesel packs 48 Megajoules per Kilogram of Mass, Jet Fuel 43 and plain old wood does 16.

Accumulators/Batteries manage betweed 0.25 and 0.9 MJ per Kilogram, exception being LiPo which can do 1.8 MJ per KG.

ICE's usually can do a 30% efficiency, even in crude designs, so even accounting for that you get like 16 MJ per KG of fuel out of a diesel engine while LiPo even at 90% efficienty manages a 1/10th of that.

If you're weight constrained like when you want to fly an aircraft, there isn't much choice but to have a combustion engine of sorts.

If you wanted to replace an aircraft gas turbine (usually a turbojet or turbofan) with an electric one, you'd have to make the engine and battery combo that weighs no more than a jet fuel engine while having the same power output.

For raw numbers

A Boeing 737 MAX has an engine that weighs 2'780 kg. Two of them. It has a TSFC of 0.012kg/kN*s which works out to 70 MW on continous thrust. The fuel weighs 19 tons at full load.

So the electric replacement for this engine now needs to output twice 70MW of power for up to 7'000 kilometers of range. At normal cruising speed that's 10 hours.

140MW over 10 Hours is 1400MWh / 2.5 Gigajoules. The best battery tech we have will result in a 2777.8 ton battery. If the electric motor can do 100% efficiency.

2777.8 tons vs 19 tons. (If my numbers are correct, which should be the case)

<comment><USER12> But what bit of the battery are you weighing?

If you look at how Tesla do their batteries there is the actual chemistry bit on some thin foil that is separated with some thin plastic. This is then put into a metal cylinder. This is then wired up in a module that holds the cells. This is then put in a tray that holds all of the modules. Then these trays are placed into a semi-structural floor unit which then has a titanium protection shield under the car.

So now the chemical bits that could probably fit in a beer bottle now weigh a metric tonne and are too big for all but American roads (Tesla cars are boat sized in Europe, too wide for garages and country lanes or city streets).

Meanwhile ICE juice is measured without the matryoshka dolls of containers within containers. Nobody takes the weight of the container into consideration.

Hopefully someone will one day invent structural batteries where the whole thing is a battery that neither zaps you or boils you to death. Then adding a few seats will add to the range. If you have to have a cabin anyway then, if it had dual use as energy storage, the actual energy density would not have to be in the same league as highly explosive hydrocarbons.

There should be easy wins in this, e.g. a bicycle. The current generation of electric bikes go for the bracket + holder + container of containers mounted as high as possible for poor centre of gravity. I am sure there are exceptions but ultimately the battery will end up in the frame tubes and you could double energy density plus power to weight just by taking the integrated approach.

I know nothing about engineering and why batteries have to be ultra bulky but I hope that we don't just stick with ICE because petrol is more energy dense.

<comment><USER13> In case you were wondering, here's a light-weight fuel cell made from aluminum. It holds 20 gallons of fuel and weighs about 22lbs according to the description.

[https://www.amazon.com/20-Gallon-Lightweight-Polished- Alumin...](https://www.amazon.com/20-Gallon-Lightweight-Polished-Aluminum- Street/dp/B072JBGCGM/)

This is just some random fuel cell I found on Amazon. There are probably even lighter options out there. Racers are always looking to shed weight.

There are also lots of examples where the frame of a vehicle can perform double-duty and hold fuel as well. I don't think that any regular production car will ever do this as it's probably not safe, but the idea isn't a new concept. Here's just an example:

[https://bicyclemotorworks.com/product/built-in-fuel-tank- bik...](https://bicyclemotorworks.com/product/built-in-fuel-tank-bike-frame/)

<comment><USER12> I think you read my comment backwards, petrol always has a simple tank, even in F1 where a lot of baffles and what not go into the design for safety and performance reasons.

However, on electrified transport from the humble bicycle upwards there is a lot of extra brackets and boxes getting added.

It is like cars from before the monocoque era, a chassis where none is needed. With the bicycle example you could put the batteries inside the frame instead of in a box mounted on the rear rack. These 'chassis style' products are not fine engineering and set a bad example.

<comment><USER13> Oh yeah I see what you're saying. It's an afterthought on so many electrified vehicles. Makes sense and I agree. We have a lot of the Limebikes in our area, and the battery is just bolted to your standard bike rack. Always seemed like an afterthought to me too. Like you're saying, even in a simplistic design, it seems like you could fit a lot 18650 cells inside a tubular frame.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The cash panic sweeping the VC industry - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/the-cash-panic-sweeping-the-vc-industry

<comment><USER2> Wow, illiquid university endowment funds!

I guess that means cash is king right now. The Fed has been attempting to flood the market with cash but it is not working.

The whole banking system might have to be radically reformed.

I bet they will try to move it closer to a counter cyclical business model, not the current pro cyclical one.

It's not exactly helpful that banks try to sell you umbrellas when it's sunny, and hoard them when it's raining.

I personally would like to see the entry barriers to the banking business lowered.

A few years back Wallmart tried to get into retail banking and the banks lobbied hard to stop them.

The banks won, but I think what we need now is new banks eager to lend.</comment>


A Groove Can Quickly Become a Rut: A Reminder Not to Settle - <AUTHOR> http://sondry.com/posts/TurnLeftRightUp-JztyM-02-20-2014

<comment><USER2> My mouse is within easy reach of my groove. I barely need to move to upvote this.</comment>


Mail-Order Magazines Did More Than Just Sell Things - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/helping-shut-ins-sisterly-advice-mail-order-magazines-did-more-just-sell-things-180967857/?no-ist <comment><USER2> I have fond memories of the mail order oddities that were in the back of comic books as a kid. Sea Monkeys, mini hot air balloons, electric motors, and so on. Companies like Edmund Scientific. Patiently waited "4 to 6 weeks" many times.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. My first real swing at self-employment was thanks to an ad in either Boy's Life or some comic book encouraging kids to sell greeting cards door-to- door. I sent off for the kit (which I believe was free), waited impatiently, and happily received my sales kit. I then went all over town doing the door- to-door schtick. I believe I was in third grade at the time and learned a LOT about sales, customer support, product fulfillment, and the importance of customer retention. Over time I had other jobs and interests that brought my door-to-door operations to a halt but even when I was in high school I had certain customers acquired during that 3rd grade summer that would contact me to make sure I stopped by for their yearly orders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Village guides published in various rural areas of the UK share some vague similarities. They go out a few times a year (for free) with calendars of events, key phone numbers, lots of ads for local tradesmen, butchers and the like, and the occasional column about various local initiatives. Old people in particular seem to lean on them a lot, not necessarily being online, etc.

<comment><USER5> ^^ This. In the past, I've generated a lot of business from these printed, hyper-local 'guide books'. Anecdotally, the Yellow Pages, telephone directory and hybrid alternatives (Thomson in the UK, for example) are regarded as less credible the local guide as they are a national product customised for local markets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Its surprising how effective trash-print still is, even today. In Europe, its a very significant form of propaganda; the free daily trash-mag at the train station, literally provided free for the taking at the exclusivity of all other rags, is nought but fodder for mind control.

Its a principle means of influencing the minds of commuters; and it works so well, because nobody ever thinks "this is free, therefore its good", but rather "this is free, so everyone has it, so I must too.."

<comment><USER7> > _Its surprising how effective trash-print still is, even today. In Europe, > its a very significant form of propaganda;_

Just like the premium print, like Economist, NYT, and co, but cruder. Though these days one would be hard pressed to find the subtlety in the latter either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It looks like these publications may have been a precursor of click-bait web sites. Look at the second sample page from Comfort - one column of content and three columns of advertising.

<comment><USER9> I've got a few National Geographic magazines from the 1950s and they're FULL of adverts.

The December issue in particular has about 25 pages in a row filled with small and big ad spaces, with a few more sprinkled around the publication.</comment></comment>


World of Mathematics - <AUTHOR> http://world.mathigon.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Really love the idea of this website.

There hasn't been an update to the content here in a little over a year. The owners of the website accept contributions and I'm pretty sure most articles were voluntarily created and edited afterward. firstname.lastname@example.com seems to be accepting contributions to the content that has yet to be added.</comment>


Rackspace Offers Cloud Computing with Mosso - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/19/rackspace-offers-cloud-computing-with-mosso/

<comment><USER2> This is great that we have competitors jumping into the arena. Bandwidth really should be like buying gas - there are different grades of it, and it should be priced as a commodity. With viable alternatives to S3 we'll start to see a more competitive landscape and will be less impacted by outages of one provider as we can switch quickly over to another provider if one is set up to do so.

Not quite there yet, but that's the direction we're heading in with more providers jumping into the field. Exciting stuff.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cost more, no facebook apps (TOS) ... competition is only good for the market if its real competition. What are the advantages over Amazon?

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been using them for about 1.5 years, and while the road has been rocky, reliability recently has been much better. Their customer service is pretty awesome, and SSH is promised and is in the works.

Dollar for dollar, it's pretty comparable to running your own server, with ~infinite scalability and managed service to boot.

<comment><USER5> "SSH is promised and is in the works" - I don't get this one. You don't get shell access to the servers your app is running on? How can you do anything useful then?

<comment><USER6> I guess you upload your PHP code and it either works or it doesn't. Mosso is Web hosting, not VPS hosting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No support for Python despite the homepage saying it is.

Apart from that it looks like an interesting service, could maybe help with a lot of the headaches of hosting...

<comment><USER8> I think there is python support by way of CGI.

I use mosso for some static hosting, and it's a bit laggy when retrieving static files larger than a few kb.

<comment><USER7> Apparently they do now, the customer support guy I spoke to before got it wrong. Django doesn't work at the moment though he said they hope to have it working soon</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do adblockers work? - <AUTHOR> Why can some ads still get through them, and how can websites detect them? <comment><USER2> It's a cat and mouse game really:

1\. Overview of ad blockers and detection: [http://www.detectadblock.com/](http://www.detectadblock.com/)

2\. Ad network agnostic approach: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4869154/how-to-detect- adb...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4869154/how-to-detect-adblock-on- my-website)

3\. anti-adblocker... killer: [https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock- killer](https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer)</comment>


The 13th day of a month is more likely to be Friday than any other day - <AUTHOR> http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/may32014/index.html

<comment><USER2>
      > This tilt causes different parts of the Earth to be
      > nearer or further away from the Sun at different parts
      > of the orbit. It is this change of distance that causes
      > our seasons.

This is nonsense - it's not how close - the variation is negligible. What's different is the projected surface area. That causes a change in the total radiation influx per unit area. When tilted towards the Sun you get more radiation per unit area than when "tilted away." I'm sure the rest of it is reasonably accurate, but after a while I found myself thinking about other things, so I didn't check everything thoroughly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Doh! You are correct of course. I'll fix the article later this evening and update. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. /\/ick

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Spooky</comment>


Citing parental freedom, Arizona lawmakers move ahead with anti-vaccine bills - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/three-anti-vaccine-bills-move-ahead-in-arizona-despite-measles-outbreaks/ <comment><USER2> I would really like some of the free speech absolutists to explain how the resurgence of measles and other preventable diseases stacks up against the benefits of unrestricted public discourse.

There's evidence that trolls have significant involvement in anti-vaxxer forums, and the incidence of bad actors and manifest failure of the best available information to naturally displace falsehoods suggest that our model of public discourse is severely lacking in explanatory power.

<comment><USER3> This doesn't explain the _more_ severe measles epidemics in low-Internet-usage countries like Vietnam.

Measles doesn't spontaneously appear within a community; it's _brought_ in from the outside.

<comment><USER2> I have not looked into the Vietnam case but here's an report about how Costa Rica had not had a single case for 5 years until an unvaccinated french child presented at a hospital with the disease a few days ago. [https://boingboing.net/2019/02/25/tourism-brings-the- measles...](https://boingboing.net/2019/02/25/tourism-brings-the-measles- bac.html)

There might well be a different explanation for outbreaks in different places; I am certainly not asserting this as a universal causal factor.</comment></comment></comment>


Why American airports don't sell anything you actually need - <AUTHOR> https://quartzy.qz.com/1306733/why-are-american-airports-so-bad/ <comment><USER2> I don't think the article actually answered the implied question in the headline.

<comment><USER3> American airports are publicly owned, and get most of their income from parking, and no one wants to change it.

<comment><USER2> But the individual shops aren't, right? Why wouldn't they want to sell more things that travelers are interested in buying?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're ever at Pittsburgh International Airport (KPIT), there's a full- service Rite Aid in the air terminal, post-security. It sells everything that a normal drug store sells, at normal drug store prices.

It's awesome. I'm surprised that more airports don't have something similar.

<comment><USER5> I'm from the US, but I noticed that a lot of train stations in Europe had full drug stores inside - with normal drug store prices as well. Super convenient.</comment></comment>