Climate change cover-up? You better believe it - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=climate-change-cover-up-you-better-2009-11-24 <comment><USER2> > Has there ever been a nuclear reactor built anywhere in the world that > didn't rely on government to get it done? Sounds like socialism, doesn't it? > Hello France? USSR? USA?

I'm a huge proponent of nuclear power - I think it's one of the cleaner and safer ways to provide energy, and I think nuclear fission combined with fossil fuels is probably enough to last until we develop fusion or hydrogen based power.

Anyway, the reason there's been no nuclear plants built without government action is because it's illegal to build a nuclear plant without government action, since processed uranium can be used to make nuclear weapons. I imagine you'd see more nuclear plants if the restrictions were lessened, and I reckon there'd be plenty of private investors to do it, though I'm not sure it's altogether a good idea in this case.

That said, nuclear power restricted to government-only is the reason it hasn't been built privately, and it's too bad it's forbidden from some areas. Nuclear power would be a godsend to a number of areas on the planet where the local ecosystem is particularly sensitive to pollution and the terrain isn't suitable for wind, solar, or hydroelectric.

<comment><USER3> I am scared of nuclear power. I understand, believe and agree that we have today the technical means to use it safely. However, I also believe that its safety is directly dependent on being handled by competent, serious and accountable people. Now, I leave in Brazil (a country already able to enrich Uranium) and I know very well that third world authorities are the last people on earth I would trust my safety and health.

It might be a good idea in civilized countries; not in Brazil, Russia, Iran, India, China, etc.

<comment><USER4> You have to take into account the types of technology being used for nuclear energy. Enrichment in todays day and age is rather unnecessary and IMO makes a countries (read: Iran) reasoning to use it very dubious.

There are many safeguarded reactor designs (like the CANDU) that mean using them to produce plutonium for weaponization very difficult, in fact it's generally much easier to just build generally-unsafeguarded research reactors and harvest it from there (exactly what India did). The safeguarded reactors can be used to harvest tritium, which India did use to make a boosted fission weapon (fusion bomb). However tritium is regularly produced for medical reasons, and major demands are going to be required for the ITER and any commercial fusion plants.

Presently due to the lack of unsafeguarded reactors in western countries, there is a major shortage of medical isotopes due to the closure of _one_ reactor. This brings up other questions in the nuclear debate that many environmentalists don't want to touch, which is: Without nuclear reactors, how will the 20 million people annually who require radioactive isotopes (generally only producible in reactors that can produce plutonium) for medical diagnosis be diagnosed and treated (many times with radioactive isotopes again, either from the same reactors or using tritium produced from safeguarded reactors)?

The simple suggestion to eradicate nuclear energy is absurd. We need better safeguards and controls, but any countries willing to 'play by the rules' should at least have access to safeguarded reactors. In fact, any environmentalist worth their weight should be petitioning their own government to help provide grants for China to produce safeguarded nuclear reactors. If coal mining no longer becomes economically profitable inside China, then a huge swathe of the worlds fossil fuel emissions will be removed.

Incidentally a single coal plant can easily emit more radioactive material than every nuclear reactor in operation today. So ironically increasing our use of radioactive fuels, will drastically decrease the emissions of radioactive materials, specifically in some of the poorest and most vulnerable countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been a Scientific American reader for over a decade now.

(sigh)Each issue gets worse and worse -- the magazine has moved from science to advocacy, and in a huge way.

Sadly, this commentary just continues the trend. Right now the signal-to-noise ratio is about 1-10. If it continues to drop I'll have to go somewhere else for scientific-oriented news.

Come on, guys. You can do better than this!

<comment><USER6> The piece is clearly labeled as opinion and analysis. Opinion, analysis, and advocacy is part of many actual scientific journals, as it is of science itself. Go browse Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA for starters.

Now, why don't you enlighten us with exactly what you find wrong with the opinion or analysis in this piece, and provide a little more signal yourself. Science is cited in the opinion piece. Do you have an argument with the science cited? Or with the opinion?

<comment><USER7> There is no scientific content in the article. There is no analysis. There is nothing but a few scientific words, with 5 paragraphs (out of 9) devoted attacking skeptics.

 _Because the opposition here is not grounded in any robust scientific theory...but a hysterical reaction to the possibly of what? One-world government? The return of communism?_

 _...those working in the fossil fuel extraction and/or burning business._

 _There is, in fact, a climate conspiracy...launched by the fossil fuel industry_

 _...same flaks and hacks who brought you "smoking isn't dangerous."_

In the paragraphs that were not ad-hominem attacks, there was one grounding paragraph (mentioning hacked emails), and another paragraph which (falsely) claims the most damaging email is a complaint about funding. Only one paragraph provides a few links to climate-related science, and that paragraph is more or less tangential to the main article.

The main opinion expressed here: climate skeptics are right wing conspiracy theorists working for the oil and tobacco companies.

Not sure why this is hacker news, or even relevant to the issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _While the revelations about pressuring the peer review process and apparent slowness in responding to an avalanche of requests for information unveil something below impressive scientific and personal behavior, they can also be seen as the frustrated responses of people working on complex data under deadline while being harassed by political opponents._

"Apparent slowness"? Bullshit. The emails show a very active ongoing effort to suppress release of information and to "hide the decline", irreproducible results, appalling sloppiness in model construction. And now this apologia for anti-scientific behavior from a True Believer.

<comment><USER9> You quoted the exact same line that grabbed me as well. Sorry on this one, scientist are held to a different standard than the rest of the population. Any other scientist in any other field, would be summarily discredited for a fraction of the ethical violations that these individuals engaged in. All of their work should now be subjected to scrutiny and should be re-validated by a independent party.

<comment><USER4> IMHO their work should be re-validated, if it fails to meet the standard, and if even a minor portion of their work appears to show purposeful tampering or deceit, then _all_ of their work should be black-listed as well as these scientists themselves.

Politics and game-playing is only an ethical violation. Tampering with _ANY_ data is a violation of the very nature of being a scientist, and any 'scientist' willing to violate the core principles of the art cannot and should not be recognized as a scientist in any way, shape or form and neither should anything they produced be recognized in anyway as being scientific without complete validation from an impartial independent party.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I must be the only one, but I cannot for the life of me make sense of any of these stories. Every story I read about these leaked emails is drowned in sarcasm. I don't know up from down.

Can someone explain what exactly is going on in plain English?

<comment><USER5> I'll try.

1) Climate science has gotten very emotional -- both for those who think the planet's climate is in danger of spinning out of control and for those who do not.

2) For years the critics/deniers/skeptics have argued that the scientists in the field of climatology have not been working on the up and up. In other words, that there was a conspiracy to prevent the truth from getting out. These people were laughed at.

3) Somebody illegally broke into one place that does climate research and stole a bunch of emails

4) These emails show frustrated scientists who are trying to stack the deck in web forums, trying to prevent people with opposing views from being published, deleting critical data, fudging the numbers, lying to the press, and admitting to each other privately that something is very wrong

5) All hell breaks loose. Those on the side of the "end is coming" take to the web and print media with robust defenses of the scientists in question, pointing out how stressed out they are, how emails can be taken out of context, how the skeptics are mostly morons, how there's much more data than just being produced by this unit, etc. Detractors (so far) are mostly just countering by quoting the scientists themselves and demanding that if the research isn't totally open and reproducible, it's not science. Some have also demanded that the scientists in question step down (I count myself as one of these)

That's as unbiased as I can get. As for my own bias, I have no idea what the earth's climate is doing, but I know a rigged game when I see one, and _the nature of the debate on climate science_ has been in the toliet for a long time. It's good to see a little sunshine getting in. I hope it leads to better standards and higher ethical guidelines. If this is as serious as folks make out, it's even more critical that every little piece of research is beyond reproach. We have a long ways to go before we get there, unfortunately.

<comment><USER11> Point 4 of your summary is not entirely unbiased -- it's still not clear whether the emails show that numbers are truly being fudged or that truly critical data has been deleted on purpose. Because the meaning of the emails is unclear, it is what's being debated in all of these articles. Do the mails indeed show manipulation, lying and a consensus that "something is very wrong"? That's not a closed question.

<comment><USER5> I consider that part of the argument that _emails can be taken out of context_

Like I said, it was the best I could come up with. Prima facie, something is wrong somewhere.

<comment><USER12> That's exactly why #4 is not unbiased. You say in point #5 that those who seek more context prior to judgement are from the end-is-nigh camp. Reasonable people who are not in that camp also think the emails may have a very different meaning in their true context. Otherwise, great summary.

<comment><USER5> Thanks.

I used the term "prima facie" on purpose, because it's very apt here.

It roughly means "on first glance" or "on the surface". IANAL, but as I understand it, it's a way of saying "just glancing at the evidence here, it certainly looks like X"

The interesting part about this term is that _it's all subjective_. So as soon as one lawyer uses it, the appropriate response is to say, "but wait a minute! You're taking this out of context, words have more than one meaning, there was nuance involved, you're twisting what was actually said, etc."

I provided #4 the way I would provide it to anybody on any side of the discussion. I understand the appropriate reply is to get into meanings and nuance -- and I don't mean that as a slam. At some point it gets silly, such as in the famous "it depends on what you mean by the word 'is'" but we're nowhere near there yet.

The problem is that the requester asked somebody to explain it to him. As "somebody", I felt it appropriate to explain what I found prima facie and also my bias.

In highly emotional environments I've found that it's impossible to strike the right tone. Apologies if I could have done better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm quite disappointed about so many "sceptics" on Hacker News . The term "sceptic" alone gives someone credibility, it sounds like someone is actively engaging in a scientific debate, but no "sceptic" is.

The basic scientific fact on which every other argument rests is the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect> greenhouse effect. This alone should end the argument for any sane person.You can replicate the effect in every lab with the same results. The calculation that we are having an effect is simple. The co2 measurements are absolutely clear, co2 is rising and is now on its highest level ever.

I don't understand what your argument is? That correlation doesn't equal causation? You can prove the causation in every lab, just replicate John Tyndalls experiment from the 1850s <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyndall>.

I don't care if two models work or don't work, or if some scientist has doctored three numbers, it doesn't change the basic fact. The argument they are having is about the current speed of warming and I don't care about that, because it doesn't matter. It might well be that the planet is warming much slower because of some natural effect, now if this is the case we should all be happy...and start reducing greenhouse gases immediately. All we got is a chance to react, the basic scientific fact didn't go away.

<comment><USER14> If the Greenhouse effect was the only effect affecting climate, you'd have a point.

<comment><USER15> why is this being voted down? simplistic models of complex systems are obviously a bad idea when the results involve spending billions of dollars that could otherwise directly save lives today.

<comment><USER13> climate is an enourmously complex system in the short run, but quite simple in the long run.

Yes you can still reduce all the arguments we are having to the greenhouse effect. You both didn't answer my post you side stepped the issue. "simplistic models of complex systems are obviously a bad idea" this is not even an argument, it's just a weird theory, masked as common sense. But occams razor <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor> doesn't ask for the most complex theory does it? why are the simplistic models bad if they work? It is also a common "sceptic" strategy to sidestep the core arguments and go back to talking about process (complex argument, bad emails, sceptics are not heard, global conspiracy...but no arguments none).

So what is your argument against the greenhouse effect? That something will offset it? Or that it doesn't exist? Or that there is no correlation between co2 and global temperature in the long run?

Explain, Argue stop running, if you care about the future of mankind you should at least accept the possibility that you are wrong. In that case you have to engage in a honest debate about the facts.

<comment><USER16> The real problem is that ecologists don't tell you that the clime fluctuates all the time. Have you heard of the little ice age (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age>)? We should already have a real ice age, but fortunately it haven't started yet (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok-ice-core-petit.png>), would you like to live on a glacier?

Do you know that the same scientists that propose global warming now have said that there will be global cooling (in 1960s/1970s)? Oh, and BTW, its interesting that now they say it's "climate change" not "global warming", are they preparing to change what they are saying again?

<comment><USER13> I have no idea what ecologist have to do with it, but every climatologist is easily going to have a lenghty chat about climate variance and fluctuation with you. Basically that's what climatologists study. Yes I know what the little ice age is, but I really can't see your point. There is a lot of natural fluctuation, but that doesn't disprove the greenhouse effect. Just because the sun or vulanic activity cause a cooling effect in the short run doesn't change the basic fact of the greenhouse effect in the long run.

Your Link to the Vostok Ice Core Data should really make you scared just add 100ppmv to the co2 level and try to imagine the temperature.

Global cooling was never a widely accepted scientific theory, in fact the scientific consensus even back then was that global warming was going to happen in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As far as I can tell, for example by reading the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Clime Change) report (summary: [http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment- report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm...](http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment- report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf)), the overwhelming scientific evidence and consensus is that global warming is real and man-made. I've yet to see anyone critical of this view make a case (much less a convincing one) that anything in these emails provides any reason to doubt the overall scientific conclusions and policy implications. Until someone does, I'm planning to ignore this "controversy" and use any time I spend on climate change to better educate myself on the general scientific consensus and the implications for policy. If we're interested in doing something about global warming, we shouldn't be nitpicking about whether some few lines of code were commented out or not. We should be making the case for cap-and-trade legislation and doing what we can to get it passed here in the U.S.

<comment><USER18> You speak like a true believer. The mails have shown, precisely, that IPCC process is manipulated. That is the problem. Does warming exists? Most likely. Is it human-made? Who knows.

P.S. Yes, I am paid by Royal Dutch/Shell to post deceptive comments on HackerNew.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _As physicist and climate historian Spencer Weart told The Washington Post: "...[W]e've never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance..."_

There are two hypotheses that might explain this behavior. The first is unprecedented boldness of the enemies of science. The second is one I suspect Dr. Weart is not yet ready to face.

<comment> alan-crowe The important criticism of climate science is very different from the criticism that Spencer Weart choses to respond to.

Compare the financial crisis and the climate crisis. The origin of the financial crisis lies in people believing. Believing that house prices never fall, believing that structured financial products reduce risk. Critics do not impugn the motives of the believers. Helping minorities to buy houses, moving financial risk to those who can shoulder it, these are noble aims. Critics complain that those in charge should have been intellectually rigorous but were merely well meaning and enthusiastic and that this was sufficient to cause disaster.

Contrast this with the climate crisis. Climate science is excused its bumbling amateurism on the grounds that ad hoc adjustments to the data are not sinister. The excuse for losing the raw data and the calibration scripts is that, far from attempting a fraud, the researchers are well meaning and enthusiastic.

We want to know whether the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming is true. The allegation against against climate scientists is that they should have been intellectually rigorous but that they stand revealed as, at best, merely well meaning and enthusiastic. This works no better in science than it does in finance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> By "apparent slowness in responding to an avalanche of requests for information" don't they mean deliberate deletion of data and an illegal campaign to deny specific people a handful of requests for data? And most of those requests were just follow-ups after initial denials.

Spin spin spin Scientific American, at least we know what your true colors are.

</comment><comment><USER21> _There is, in fact, a climate conspiracy. It just happens to be one launched by the fossil fuel industry to obscure the truth about climate change and delay any action. And this release of emails right before the Copenhagen conference is just another salvo—and a highly effective one—in that public relations battle, redolent with the scent of the same flaks and hacks who brought you "smoking isn't dangerous."_

Citations please!

</comment><comment><USER18> "While the revelations about pressuring the peer review process and apparent slowness in responding to an avalanche of requests for information"

Ja, ja... sure...</comment>


Performance of WordPress Hosting Companies Compared - <AUTHOR> http://www.wpsitecare.com/performance-of-7-top-wordpress-hosting-companies-compared/ <comment><USER2> More useful than minima and maxima by themselves would be an mean and standard deviation.

It's more useful to know how the sites perform _most of the time_.

I'd also have been interested to know if tests were controlled for time of day. For example, the sites I host are almost all Australian and so the traffic I see follows a 12-hour wave as daylight crosses the continent from East to West, with small peaks around lunch time and after dinner.

<comment><USER3> Yep. These are all great points. This is the first set of many many tests to come but it was good to get a baseline. If you check the timestamps of the full tests, you'll see that all of them were run back to back to back within the course of about 2 hours total time, so there shouldn't be much variation. That said, locking down ALL of the potential variables is definitely something I'm striving for long term.

<comment><USER4> Hi Ryan, my name is Sean. I'm the GoDaddy product manager in charge of WordPress hosting. Thanks for including us and I'm glad we could surprise you with some fast speeds. In the past few months we've really made some huge strides in reducing page load times and are at some impressive speeds across the board right now. However, seeing your response times fall off a cliff surprised us too. There's been a big email thread going on this weekend to nail down exactly what happened so we can fix it :) I'd love to talk more and share some of the details around a new WordPress experience we're delivering in a few months. My email is in my HN profile.

<comment><USER2> Check what kind of traffic you are seeing on /xmlrpc.php.

What tends to happen is that spammers hit that file up and ask it to perform slow operations (the Wordpress team recently greatly expanded its capabilities). A PHP instance gets tied up for the duration. I've had instances lock up until killed by timeouts of 2 minutes.

When a bunch of traffic arrives at once, it only takes a handful of badly behaved instances of xmlrpc.php to render the server essentially inoperable.

I just went through this a few months ago. My bloggers don't use it and it can't be deactivated from within Wordpress any more, so I just 404 it in nginx.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the tip. After reviewing Ryan's logs, it turns out a software security layer, Sentinel, was detecting the load test as a DoS attack since LoadImpact was sending all traffic from a single IP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd have preferred all the hosting times use the same scale on the left hand side to more easily relate response times. It would also have been cool to see all of the graphs stacked on top of each other in one graph or visually grouped the separate graphs together in a single page's height.

I guess as a marketing piece it gets some interest, but it lacked in actual utility for me.

<comment><USER3> That's definitely fair feedback. One thing to keep in mind is, that with an outlier of 4 minutes and change, the graph would have to be blown up to a massive scale in order to see any variation in response times from the other hosts. Otherwise the other 6 hosts barely would have come up off the x-axis. The good news is that we have the data to produce exactly what you're talking about, but in terms of practicality for this article it was a little tough to justify. That said, I hear you and putting that together will be a fun new challenge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really don't understand Wordpress as a blog platform sometimes. Why so many database queries? Why even have database queries at all- aside from perhaps comments? Static pages make significantly more sense for almost all blog setups (Octopress ftw). Making a blog handle this amount of traffic should be trivial, but Wordpress itself is often an issue.

<comment><USER2> > _Why even have database queries at all- aside from perhaps comments?_

Comments are non-negotiable features for many bloggers. 3rd party javascript is not the same in the eyes of many (including my little network).

<comment><USER7> Unless things have changed dramatically recently, Hacker News uses the file system to store comments ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5229522)) and it seems to work well. I can imagine a few cases where having your comments in a DBMS would be a requirement, but none of them seem applicable to situations where WordPress where one might want to use WordPress anyway.

Of course, this is guess from a priori reasoning. I would be genuinely interested if somebody tried file-based comments for a WordPress (or a similar platform) based site and it fell over or failed in some way.

<comment><USER2> Reasonable point, insofar as it's unlike that comments will ever be joined with unrelated articles.

The main reason you'd get failures in a flat file system would be the normal reasons you get a relational database in the first place. Either you get update anomalies, or you want to compact the data into single atoms, or you want ad hoc querying rather than a specific pattern of access set in advance.

It doesn't help that until 5.6 MySQL's query planner joined on disk if you tried to join any two tables in which one or both has a TEXT field, regardless of engine and regardless of the actual fields selected.

As you can imagine, this slows things down a bit, considering that's the core join performed for single post generation. It also makes every kind of "recent comments" plugin a performance nightmare (quite aside from their cache-busting power).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I personally use Rapidpress. For less than $3 a month (the cheapest I've found) I get great service and great speed/uptime. No quantitative numbers to back it up but its great so far.

[https://www.name.com/rapidpress](https://www.name.com/rapidpress)

</comment><comment><USER9> I use A Small Orange for VPS, so I can't comment specifically on hosting Wordpress, however, their support is great. Their chat support is very responsive and helped me get nginx configured properly (I wasn't expecting them to go to such lengths to help me!).

</comment><comment><USER10> What is the prevailing opinion on dedicated wordpress hosting providers such as zippykid?

</comment><comment><USER11> No uptime mentioned? The common issue with shared hosting providers is frequent downtime.

<comment><USER3> For this particular article I didn't record any uptime. It's definitely a metric worth measuring, but I wanted to get super specific with this test. Lots more testing to come :)</comment></comment>


Ad-Blocking Extension Ghostery Actually Sells Data to Advertisers - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/ad-blocking-extension-ghostery-actually-sells-data-to-a-514417864?utm_campaign=socialflow_lifehacker_twitter&utm_source=lifehacker_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

<comment><USER2> 1\. It's opt-in

2\. It's opt-in

3\. You guessed it, it's opt-in

Hell, they even _tell_ you they sell it if you're curious right next to the preference

 _GhostRank sends anonymous statistical information about the trackers, ads, and other scripts that Ghostery encounters and the pages on which they 're found. It does not make use of browser cookies or flash cookies and stores no unique information about the user (not even an IP address).

Ghostery uses this information to create panel data about the proliferation of these scripts and shares this data with the Ghostery community, companies interested in measuring their own activity and compliance with privacy standards across the web, and organizations dedicated to holding these companies accountable. GhostRank data is not used to target advertising and is never shared for that purpose. For more details on exactly what GhostRank collects, please visit our FAQ.

By participating in GhostRank, you're agreeing to become part of this anonymous panel and you're helping to support Ghostery as you browse the web._

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't understanding the outrage either.</comment></comment>


Raspberry Pi - The alpha boards are here - <AUTHOR> http://www.raspberrypi.org/?p=78

<comment><USER2> I get the impression that it's becoming easier to knock together a linux system on a custom motherboard build around ARM.

I have a project where I'm trying to get USB-to-ethernet to work for pandaboard. But I'd prefer to have two ethernet adapters on the board.

If it's becoming straightforward to built these platforms, how long until you can just go to a website, click some checkboxes, and order a set with the features you want?

Update: another issue. If you're running several of these things, you need multiple DC adapters plugged into the wall. This seems like waste - it would be useful to have a single power unit with multiple leads. Does anyone have ideas about getting such a unit?

<comment><USER3> I've been looking into embedded ARM systems with ethernet lately.

The Pandaboard & Beagleboard are completely out since my embedded RTOS application has no USB stack.

The two boards we're dealing with are the TS7800 and the Gumstix Overo series. For you, the Overo on a Tobi Duo is a reasonable way to get dual ethernet, though it's only 100mbit. The 7800 has only a single gigabit.

The abundance of embedded ARM devices is really a great thing for small projects. A small, passively cooled ARM computer can do most tasks that you'd have needed a 1U rackmount system for only a few years ago.

As well, they're great for learning. Bootstrapping an operating system from nothing is far, far easier on an ARM system than an Intel/x86 one.

<comment><USER4> Do you have more information or some links about OS development on ARM?

<comment><USER5> Implementing an operating system isn't that different between the main CPU architectures. I think mcpherrinm was just saying that you have to do a lot less work than for x86, for example, in order to get a minimum of functionality.

Unfortunately I don't know of any guides on implementing a toy OS on ARM. The operating systems course I've taken was a decent starting point, but it mostly deals with theory: [0].

There's also a first year ARM architecture course: [1]

Another course I've taken was about ASM programming on ARM, plus programming some simple hardware[2].

I'm not sure how useful are those materials for someone not taking the courses, but they might offer a list of things to look up somewhere else. Wikipedia actually has some good background theory.

Finally, you might look over the ARM port of EDK2[3]. EDK2 is a BSD-licensed implementation of UEFI[4]. It implements a lot of the functionality of a regular operating system, with the notable exception of multithreading. I find the source code of EDK2 to be easier to understand than the source of the Linux kernel. Probably because it is a lot more lightweight. You can run it on BealgeBoard, by the way. I'd say it's alpha quality software at the moment, so you might get some weird bugs.

Disclaimer: I'm a CS student at Manchester University and I work on EDK2.

0: <http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/2010/COMP25111/>

1: <http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/2010/COMP15111/>

2: <http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/2010/COMP22712/>

3: [http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tianocore/index.php?ti...](http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tianocore/index.php?title=EDK2)

4: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Int...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fantastic. If I understand correctly, they've switched from the teeny board (or is that a model A?) to a larger board that will be shrunk to credit card size in production, with expanded I/O, USB, HDMI, SD, 10BaseT.

Really looking forward to getting my hands on one of these.

<comment><USER7> That's interesting...any idea why? I was always under the impression the teeny USB stick device was the entire device.

<comment><USER3> The alpha boards are not going to be the same as production. These are prototypes and are a step towards a finished product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to see an ARM based router with a decent amount of flash and RAM. Most of the current ones are MIPS based.

The reason for this is that there are a lot of interesting ARM-specific code for embedded devices, like LuaJIT and similar.

<comment><USER9> You can use one of these as a router:

[http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.asp...](http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/t-guruplugdetails.aspx)

It has 2 ethernet jacks, wifi, and draws 5W.

<comment><USER10> Please, for the love of all that is holy, please stay away from Guru plugs.

I got three (I wanted one, boss ordered three, sigh!) of these to develop on a "ARM", when Tonido did not have enough in stock.

These sound like a small turbine. It is impossible to work with these switched on.

The earlier versions were heating up so badly and melting electronics, that the manufacturer decided to put a crappy fan inside and create a new problem.

<comment><USER9> They have another version that is silent, dreamplug.

<comment><USER11> I've been using dreamplugs. They are nicely done. They aren't tiny like a wall wart, more like a tall paper back book, but I've happily replaced all of my OpenWRT based systems and won't look back.

Get the JTAG/UART device, it will save your ass when you render the poor thing unbootable with a kernel replacement. There appears to be a network boot attempt in the power up, but I haven't seen documentation for it.

One caveat: The wifi range is ok, but not top notch, and when running as an access point it can only support 8 devices, which isn't much when people show up with a phone-ipad-laptop bag.

<comment><USER12> Is the 8 device limit a hardware or software limitation?

<comment><USER11> I think it is in the firmware loaded into the wireless hardware. I browsed through the driver source and didn't find anything to account for the limit there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Raspberry Pi site really needs a one-line blurb below the logo explaining just what it is, or failing that, a prominent "About" link. I shouldn't have to go through several blog posts, an unhelpful FAQ, etc. just to infer that a Raspberry Pi is some kind of embedded board that runs Linux, and still have no idea what CPU it uses or how fast it is.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've got Efika-MX smart top (and there is smart book) and love them. They are not that expensive - $130 for the smartop, $200 for the smart book.

<comment><USER14> yeah, for the price of a dreamplug you can get a netbook. dreamplug are useless.

btw, did you get video acceleration on yours?

<comment><USER13> Yes, I do - it's OpenGLES2 using the imx drivers. I think it's PowerVR device. glmark2-es2 works (though I think there is an artifact with the z-buffer).

They have forums at power-developer.org - very nice bunch of folks.

It's sell Ubuntu 10.10, until they get their drivers up to 11.04, but on the site there are many other different distress, and even people experimenting with armhf (hard floating point).

<comment><USER14> openGLES is fine, i was asking more about hardware acceleration for video.

if you play a full HD video, does it skip frames like crazy? is the CPU on 100%?

<comment><USER13> I haven't tried any video on it. Check power-developer.org

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ETA for somebody to hack together their own handheld emulation console using a Rasberry Pi as the computing core? 6 months.

</comment><comment><USER15> I can't remember what this is, the "home" page is a list of their recent blog posts and their FAQ is useless to anyone who doesn't know what Raspberry Pi is. How do so many people make this mistake?</comment>


Machine learning algorithms used to decode and enhance human memory - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/ml-brain-boost/ <comment><USER2> This study is interesting, but it's not really AI and it's not really novel.

The researchers fit a regression to predict word recall from high-frequency EEG activity when memorizing the word. We've known for several years that high-frequency activity predicts memory success, so this part isn't new.

In addition, several papers have tried to improve memory through high- frequency stimulation from brain implants, with various results. This paper proposes "closed-loop" stimulation, delivering stimulation only when the classifier predicts failure. They find that closed-loop is effective.

What the authors really want to claim is that closed-loop is _more_ effective than open-loop, because otherwise their fancy "AI" classifier is useless. Surprisingly, this study does not compare closed-loop vs. open-loop.

<comment><USER3> I'm sad that the AI acronym has become overused, and has lost its credibility. Back in 2004 even the expression "Expert System" was warily used, and only when appropriate. The way this is going we're going to have AI toasters by the end of the year.

<comment><USER4> _The way this is going we 're going to have AI toasters by the end of the year._

I'd be surprised if they don't exist already. We already have AI rice cookers: "Zojirushi's top-of-the-line Induction Heating Pressure Rice Cooker & Warmer uses pressurized cooking and AI (Artificial Intelligence) to cook perfect rice." \-- from [https://www.zojirushi.com/app/product/npnvc](https://www.zojirushi.com/app/product/npnvc)

<comment><USER5> I realize this is somewhat ridiculous, but I actually found their FAQ [0] and the product very interesting.

The term "AI" has become somewhat meaningless, but in this case they appear to be adjusting cooking time based on previous results. I'd guess they are probably adjusting a couple of parameters.

My basic understanding of how rice cookers work, is that they essentially apply full heating power until all the water has boiled away/been absorbed. They know when this happens by monitoring the temperature, the temperature wont rise above 100 degrees until all the water has boiled away. At this point they shut off.

I guess more "intelligent" rice cookers can do a little more than this, maybe if they see that it's consistently taking less time than expected to cook the rice they can heat to a lower temperature at the start to aid water absorption or something? Would be interested in knowing more.

[0] [https://www.zojirushi.com/app/faq/rice- cookers](https://www.zojirushi.com/app/faq/rice-cookers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Personally what I worry about is that there are too many conflicting, adaptive, self-correcting systems that we don't understand from first principles.

The body has it's own internal "AI" that also responds and adapts to these incoming pulses over time. You could probably snort some speed and get the same effect described here ... but if you keep doing it, it won't keep working. Now replace the Speed with AI that generates the pulses and can adapt the dosage in response to the bodies AI... we just don't know what it would do long-term.

The real problem IMO is that the AI prescribing the dosage doesn't have any of the sensory inputs the human brain does. So it might boost working memory in a way that is maladaptive to the situation.

All in all -- I think these technologies could be quite interesting for allowing us to hyper-evolve out of our mental limitations that are still over- fitted to living in the jungle... but might make us weak as a species in the long run by forcing us to have sensory stimulations that are overfitted to a particular prescribed state that we label as "good".

<comment><USER7> It seems that almost every technological development will cause us to become "weak as a species," for the simple reason that these developments remove difficulties we have faced in the past.

Cars and bicycles damaged our endurance. Shoes softened our soles. If these technologies disappeared overnight, yes we would be worse off as a species, but that says nothing about the benefits of these technologies.

If these technologies improve our mental effectiveness, even if only within a specific type of sensory stimulation, it's likely that we would adapt our sensory perceptions to deliver these "optimized states," possibly through new technology, for an overall net gain in efficacy.

<comment><USER8> "If men learn this ... they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written" - Plato on literacy, ca. 350 BCE.

<comment><USER9> He was right to some extent.

<comment><USER7> He was absolutely right. It's just that the benefits of written language massively outweigh the small loss in memory performance we experience.

If your computer's OS and all your files were stored on a 64gb ramdisk, it would be fast, yes, but not very useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The fact remains that while Kahana's system can improve word recall in > specific circumstances, he doesn't know exactly how it's improving function. > That's the nature of machine learning.

> Luckily, Kahana's team has thought this through, and some algorithms are > easier to scrutinize than others. For this particular study, the researchers > used a simple linear classifier, which allowed them to draw some inferences > about how activity at individual electrodes might contribute to their > model's ability to discriminate between patterns of brain activity.

Isn't linear regression the easiest of all ML to understand? It's neural networks that cause black boxes.

<comment><USER11> simple linear classifier... I'm guess logistic regression? And yes, neither would be a black box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Better title: Tickling the brain with low-intensity electrical stimulation in a specific area can improve verbal short-term memory.

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180129134354.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180129134354.htm)

<comment><USER9> It can also lower IQ scores.

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150505152140.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150505152140.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The "AI" algorithm used in the paper is far from a black box. It's logistic regression, which is extremely well understood and has been used by statisticians and scientists for decades.

</comment><comment><USER11> "The fact remains that while Kahana's system can improve word recall in specific circumstances, he doesn't know exactly how it's improving function. That's the nature of machine learning."

Seems like its also the nature of electro-stimulus to the brain.

Is the real story here in ML/AI, or in advances regarding 'when is it helpful to shock your brain a bit vs when is it not'?

<comment><USER14> It's not totally clear to me whether there is a real story in ML/AI or neuroscience.

The authors used logistic regression to try to determine whether a subject will remember a word or not, which the classifier did better than chance, but still did pretty badly, with an AUC of 0.61. Then, when the classifier said the probability of remembering the stimulus is less than 0.5, they sent some current through some electrodes. The set of electrodes to stimulate and the current were selected in consultation with a neurologist and fixed at the start of the session. They found that stimulation in the lateral temporal cortex was associated with a significant (but just barely) increase in recall compared to no stimulation or stimulation outside of lateral temporal cortex. (But it's unclear whether this decision to look at effects in LTC vs. outside of LTC was made a priori. If it was not, and many comparisons conducted before arriving on this story, then the effect may not be statistically significant after adjusting for the comparisons.)

Beyond the question of whether the outcome was selected post hoc, the main problem with the study is that, unless I have missed it, there is no control to demonstrate that selecting the trials on which to stimulate using the classifier is better than stimulating on every trial. This control seems necessary to demonstrate that the linear classifier (which is apparently now "artificial intelligence") is in any way useful. Otherwise, this paper has little scientific value, short of possibly providing another data point regarding the effect of stimulation upon memory.

Link to paper: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02753-0#Sec19](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02753-0#Sec19)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You can see better improvement simply by learning how to use your memory properly. The memory palace technique has saved my life

</comment><comment><USER16> A recent innovation we thought you should be aware of is related to the ability to provide for increased spatio-temporal resolution of the underlying EEG data set as a pre processing step prior to feeding the recorded EEG data into machine learning algorithms. TRUUST has pioneered this and is seeing fantastic results Pre-Clinically on MEA's in drug discovery research for Fragile X and Epilepsy indications. The technology was developed with Epilepsy in mind however. If anyone would have an interest feel free to reach out to us firstname.lastname@example.com and below are related publications and resources. We thought it made more sense to enhance the data quality first rather than trying to optimize the crap out of algorithms given the problem generally results in better outcomes when better data goes in; garbage in garbage out sort of deal.

Published paper in Journal for Neuroscience Methods: [https://www.clearslide.com/view/mail?iID=3f3TTfMPJNBRhXhRDJD...](https://www.clearslide.com/view/mail?iID=3f3TTfMPJNBRhXhRDJDt)

Published Poster with Scripps at SfN for Fragile X: [https://www.clearslide.com/view/mail?iID=C5dp3gjmMWnMxKktk44...](https://www.clearslide.com/view/mail?iID=C5dp3gjmMWnMxKktk44j)

Cool video showing what is possible with recorded EEG: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhRwpAA1KeA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhRwpAA1KeA)

</comment><comment><USER17> It would be great if people started referring to classification and regression algorithms as Statistical Learning instead of Machine Learning. But then no one would write an article like this I guess.

<comment><USER18> Statistical learning by using gradient descent on functions with a special structure, which significantly improved classification accuracy in the tasks some people tend to associate with intelligence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> >But people—and institutional review boards—aren't usually amenable to cracking open skulls in the name of science.

I feel as if future civilizations (if we get there) will look back at the lack of practice quoted above with the same demeanor as we do now for geocentrism:

Should the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few?

</comment><comment><USER20> Summary: Researchers collaborated with epilepsy patients, who already had electrodes implanted in their brain to monitor seizures, to improve the patients' memory. The electrodes are capable of both reading brain patterns, and stimulating brain activity. ML algorithms learned what each patient's brain pattern looked like when they successfully memorized a word. The ML algorithms would then provide a jolt to mirror those successful-memorization- brain-patterns for words that the patient would historically not have memorized.

<comment><USER21> It wil turn into a kind of pre-crime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thats not what we want. The memory should be recalled from external brainz. I just want to be a professor and a doctor of everything and clearly remember every paper written about everything complete with animated visuals and indexing.

</comment><comment><USER22> A step toward building neural laces.

</comment><comment><USER23> 15%

</comment><comment><USER24> Be careful what you wish for. Not all memories are good. Some are best left forgotten.

The irony is we keep failing to remember to consider unintended consequences.

<comment><USER25> Even if we consider them, what do you suggest? Stop all the research?

<comment><USER26> I would definitely suggest not using epilepsy patients as lab rats. First off, the article says "Machine learning is inherently notoriously inscrutable" which is extremely wrong and ignorant. Then they proceed to demonstrate how they essentially failed to force people to memorize useless words on a screen, by zapping their brains while not really know what they're doing or how anything works. This is NOT my idea of ethical, late-stage pre-market human research. This is something to do on rats, not people. This is the same as shock therapy of rebellious women in the 60's. It's horrible, has irreversible side effects and you need to stop doing it. These are people, not toys for PhDs.

<comment><USER27> I think you can chill out a little. These are volunteers and this is speculative research. And these people are already wired and receiving gross electric shocks to different nerve clusters in their brain to regulate epilepsy, so I doubt that more nuanced stimulation like this, is much worse, and may lead to new breakthroughs, and may turn what is a handicap, into a special abilility for these people. They are pioneers.

<comment><USER24> Ok. So when do we stop chilling out?

The fact remains: not all memories are desirable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is - <AUTHOR> http://exstreamist.com/72-of-consumers-dont-know-what-net-neutrality-is/ <comment><USER2> This brings to my mind some Sony Music executive defending their malware- enabling CD DRM - - "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care?"

<comment><USER3> That brings to mind a (probably unimplementable) thought I had around the same time: disallow people that do not understand what things are to make choices about it that affect everyone.

<comment><USER4> but what would congress do?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Doesn't surprise me at all - the level of energy in the most recent protests around the repeal was optically quite a bit lower than previous efforts.

We were basically warned this would happen too, that Net Neutrality opponents just keep beating the drum until the general population got tired of resisting.

<comment><USER6> > We were basically warned this would happen too, that Net Neutrality > opponents just keep beating the drum until the general population got tired > of resisting.

The general population never resisted, because they were never really participants in the conversation.

Most of the net neutrality activism happened within the bubble of people who work in or care deeply about tech. I don't know very many people in the general public who had heard the term "net neutrality" before I mentioned it to them, and I live in Silicon Valley, so I would expect the general public here to be a bit more technology-inclined than in the rest of the country.

This should be a wake up call to proponents of net neutrality -- better marketing and communication with the general public is going to be needed.

<comment><USER7> It's hard to fight with lawyers who have the full-time job of doing things like repealing net neutrality. This is even more true when they don't care about public opinion, have strong industry ties, and literally run the FCC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cracked even ran a commentary video [0] where all the hosts misunderstood how the internet works entirely (Netflix pays millions of dollars to Tier 1 providers (pre-Comcast deal even) every year, they don't use the networks for free, and Comcast didn't build them (nor own the companies that did) they only build the last mile - which is supposed to be maintained by their subscribers, not be used as a monopoly to be greedy with - they also pay Teir 1 providers to provide connectivity and maintain the internet).

[0] [https://youtu.be/EfAAHLTlhmU?t=35m30s](https://youtu.be/EfAAHLTlhmU?t=35m30s)

</comment><comment><USER9> Survey methodology and all that, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if most of the affected population didn't know.

Net Equality would have likely perked up more interest.

<comment><USER10> > Net Equality would have likely perked up more interest.

yeah, marketing is nuanced like that and i think this distinction would have made a good difference.

net-favorism, anti-throttling, anti-discrimination, equal-access would have also done better, i think.

<comment><USER11> I can't think of a hot name, but net neutrality is fundamentally about preserving a free market of information.

<comment><USER12> You have to be careful about that, because there's nothing in net neutrality that prevents restricted data silos, censorship, takedowns; it's really only about forbidding a specific network management practice that allows ISPs to impose a time cost on sites and services they disapprove of.

<comment><USER13> While accurate, it's a little misleading to phrase it like this.

Imposing a significant time cost makes certain types of applications unusable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 28% know what it is? That's more surprising to me actually.

<comment><USER15> 22% (6% answered not sure). But to be clear, 22% SAY they know what it is. I guarantee that if asked to explain what it actually is, some chunk of that 22% would get it wrong. Anecdotally, most people I talk to IRL believe it will either lower their cable bill or remove their bandwidth cap.

<comment><USER16> Or it's just more Government regulation that is trying to control the internet and prevent free market competition.

<comment><USER15> I think the counter one liner to that is something like: Net Neutrality keeps big companies from controlling what you can access on the internet. But not totally comfortable with that because "access" is overstating.

<comment><USER17> I would also counter with: The ISPs are where they are _because_ they in the opposite of a free market.

<comment><USER15> Good point, I think this is important to highlight, and might appeal to people reluctant to support net neutrality.

If one supports competition and free markets, recognize that the ISP business is not free and open to competition, and used regulation to gain monopoly or duopoly status. We need some regulation to either try and create competition, or at least prevent abuse of their current monopoly/duopoly status.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would probably help if more advocates agreed on what they mean by net neutrality. Having listened to advocates on various news networks, I'm pretty confused what they actually mean.

I would also like to see an actual bill with an actual legal definition. Given how regulations work, I would hope the authors of said bill put the actual regulations in it. I still want to see one of these advocacy groups put out a proposed bill.

<comment><USER19> I think the existing Open Internet Order does a pretty good job:

[https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-10-201A1.p...](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-10-201A1.pdf) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_Open_Internet_Order_2010](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_Open_Internet_Order_2010)

<comment><USER18> Now, someone just has to find a house rep to introduce the legislation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can someone point to the best ELI5 article, or tell me the best metaphor? I think I don't do a great job trying to explain net neutrality to family members.

<comment><USER21> Do you know how you have to pay extra to your ISP to watch Netflix or Youtube? You don't because of Net Neutrality.

If they are old enough you can use this metaphor:

Anti-Net Neutrality is for turning the Information Superhighway into toll roads.

If they need further explanation, go with the highway analogy. Imagine if all of the roads in the country were privately owned, but still free to use. You pay your tax and the money is distributed among the companies. Now the company that services your neighborhood decides that they want more money, so they erect tollbooths at the entrance to the neighborhood but tell companies that they'll wave the toll if you're going to a certain company. So Wal*Mart might pay the fee and get you free access, while Mom&Pop shops can't afford it so you have to pay a toll to visit them. They claim it is necessary because the Mom&Pop shop gets too much traffic and they aren't helping to pay for the roads in your neighborhood, even though the shop is in the next town over and the extra traffic doesn't really cost the road company anything.

<comment><USER15> _Do you know how you have to pay extra to your ISP to watch Netflix or Youtube? You don 't because of Net Neutrality._

That's a good scare tactic, but isn't very informative (or necessarily true). Net Neutrality only came into effect on June 12, 2015. I don't think people will recall paying extra to watch Netflix or YouTube before that date (because they weren't). And paying extra probably won't be the effect if net neutrality is rolled back, so it will undermine the argument to reinstate it.

The problem is that we need net neutrality to help balance the power against big vertically integrated Media/ISPs like Comcast and Time Warner. But it is more about the future potential abuse, so people won't care until there is some event that really affects a lot of people.

<comment><USER21> Netflix did pay a ransom to Verizon and Comcast back in 2015.

You didn't see it directly, but that money came out of the same pot that would have paid for more content on Netflix.

[http://time.com/80192/netflix-verizon-paid-peering- agreement...](http://time.com/80192/netflix-verizon-paid-peering-agreement/)

<comment><USER15> Not even sure this would fall under the net neutrality umbrella. Comcast and Verizon weren't specifically discriminating or shaping Netflix traffic. Netflix was buying and over saturating the cheapest bandwidth they could. The question became who pays to upgrade to accommodate it. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the current Net Neutrality rules don't address this situation.

<comment><USER21> It's kind of like a business saying that it doesn't discriminate against a minority, but when one of those people walk in the door they just never get served. It's still discrimination even if it's not overt. It's the kind of thing that Netflix could definitely argue as a Net Neutrality violation over at the FCC, especially once they got a demand to pay up.

It's not like the consumers could switch to a less dickish provider, they're often a local monopoly. You may also note that there were no repeats of this problem after 2015, even though many high bandwidth services appeared and grew in this time.

<comment><USER15> All Cogent traffic was being affected, not just Netflix, so the analogy doesn't hold. Everyone at the restaurant was being served, equally slowly.

 _You may also note that there were no repeats of this problem after 2015_

Implicit in that statement is that there have been no paid peering agreements (the Netflix/Comcast solution) since 2015, which I know for fact is not true.

 _many high bandwidth services appeared and grew in this time._

Examples? What high bandwidth companies appeared after 2015 that have even 1% of Netflix traffic?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> 100% of the remaining people don't know what net neutrality is. Pick two of them at random and their definitions will not line up.

It's just a blank slate for people to project their political biases on.

<comment><USER23> Zero collisions for a birthday problem? I don't think people waste that much space on wrong definitions of net neutrality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would believe that 28% of people have heard of it, but there's no way that many people know what it is.

</comment><comment><USER25> In my own experience I'd be surprised if that 22% that say they do would come even close to realy knowing even the basics. In my own 'tech-savvy' circle, I still find most people that once in a while utter the phrase 'net neutrality' not making the connection when their mobile ISP rolls out 'zero rating' for preferential apps.

</comment><comment><USER26> That's not bad. Over half the US population doesn't know that over-the-air TV still works.

<comment><USER27> They miniaturize people and put them in the box like on Willy Wonka.. Duh..

<comment><USER26> No, not "how". Merely that it still works at all. A big fraction of the population assumes you have to buy cable to get TV. Some think that selling TV antennas is illegal. [1]

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/millennials-unearth-an- amazing-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/millennials-unearth-an-amazing-hack- to-get-free-tv-the-antenna-1501686958)

<comment><USER27> I recently cut the cable and installed a digital antenna with a HomeRun for the AppleTV. I wanted to make sure I get football games when the season comes around. I couldn't be happier, the picture is as good as cable. We get around 42 channels, but a few duplicates.

I got Hulu which I'm not overly happy with. Playstation Vue was a lot better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think net neutrality would do better if was rebranded as the "free market" for the internet. Then it's got a cultural touch point that people already understand.

<comment><USER29> That wouldn't be exactly accurate. A free internet market would probably be the pairing of net neutrality repeal with the repeal of all local restrictions on running cables under roads and into appartments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Maybe I would have cared to speak up more for net neutrality if I didn't notice what an absolute joke it is to even worry about it at this point. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and all the news media services are heavily biased, actively censoring, and abusing the trust we have placed in them. I'm sorry I didn't have time to speak up, but what guarantee do I have that anyone would have listened? We gave away all our privacy, rights to speech, and everything else we had going in order to gain minor conveniences. The web has turned into a disgusting social engineering tool that tells you what to buy, think, and do at every step. Instead of fighting to keep our computing under our control, our data in our hands, and our upstream a combination of the two, we're all pretending net neutrality matters to anyone. What are you going to upload? Who is this affecting? Oh, poor Netflix can't actively change reviews and rating systems to lie to you about how favorably other users view their content because big old Comcast is throttling them? Well, fuck Comcast and fuck Netflix. I'm done with them. We need to reach Web 3.0. Whatever that means.

</comment><comment><USER31> Today I learned that US Citizens = Consumers

<comment><USER32> Unless you live completely off the grid, and are totally self-sufficient, growing your own food, making your own tools, etc. you're a consumer (in the economic sense) in some way or another.

<comment><USER33> But I can be a consumer without being a US citizen. The study wasn't done on global consumers, it was conducted solely on US citizens.

It might seem petty, but its important to be specific when reporting scientific results even for pop sci. This article chops and changes between consumers and US citizens a lot which could cause confusion

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Which is even more impressive when you consider how many FCC comments in favor of net neutrality were received.

</comment><comment><USER35> The general public cares about net neutrality about as much as they care about DNSSEC. I wonder how many people think their internet is already like a cable package - that they paid for a package that includes Google and Facebook and whatnot.

</comment><comment><USER36> My hypothesis is it has to do with the name chosen for it. If it had a more 'consumer-friendly' name it would be more widely known. Something like 'Internet Freedom' or 'Free Internet' would have more appeal...

<comment><USER37> That's actually probably a worse name. There are a lot of people who think it has to do with regulating online content (in a political viewpoint sense). "Internet Freedom" would only make that worse.

<comment><USER36> I agree that it's technically a worse name. Net neutrality is technically not a bad name - it just doesn't resonate and the stats on awareness (somewhat) reflect that. My point was more that it needs to better resonate with consumers. I'm not an expert in naming to come up with something actually better, but I am an expert in consumer behavior and know a name that lacks clarity when I see one...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If you can't define it on a bumper sticker, most Americans won't "know what it is".

As for the FCC, Ajit Pai, and Net Neutrality, I'm much more open-minded to the current FCC policy after having listened to him on the latest Recode/Decode podcast. His speaking patterns make him sound like he's an energetic jerk, but I don't disagree with lots of the policy agenda he mentioned. I detest the games they played with the citizen comment submission system and the "cyberattack" they claimed happened, but that seems only tangentially related.

I'm not sure that the FCC is the right instrument to enact net neutrality -- I feel like demolishing arbitration and allowing consumers to sue the crap out of ISPs for unfair competition actions would go further. The FCC has only been good at restricting speech, not protecting it.

<comment><USER39> If the FCC isn't the right body why change the rules? Why not leave the current status quo while Congress works on it (or until they do)?

<comment><USER40> Because the status quo is the wrong body setting rules. If you believe the FTC is appropriate, then the only thing to do is stop the FCC from enforcing rules and use the existing competition enforcement framework enforced by the FTC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> So basically the 80/20 rule, that applies to most everything. The internet is still the Blue E. Is something happening to that E? Then nothing to worry about.

</comment><comment><USER42> It's likely that many people who claim to "know what net neutrality is" don't actually understand it. Perhaps the 72% is simply honest.

Is every packet equal?

</comment><comment><USER31> Are ISPs really going to stop abiding by Net Neutrality rules?

Wouldn't that offer a big competitive opportunity for an ISP that supports Net Neutrality?

<comment><USER43> But it would make too much sense to criticize the artificial monopolies created by the state instead of complaining about ISPs!

<comment><USER44> "artificial monopolies created by the state"

I'm sorry, what?

While I'm sure you're going to beat a drum about "regulation" and "free markets" it might be worth stepping back and actually assessing the issue from a practical, rather than ideological stance

Utilities naturally gravitate toward monopoly. Would you want to have multiple sewer lines running to your house, because your upstairs bathroom costs more money than downstairs with a different "provider"?

Stringing up competing sets of coax cable, telephone lines or fiber optic cables is a losing proposition for the ISP's themselves

Why subject yourself to competition, when you can simply carve out your own market and be "the" provider in an area? Comcast doesn't want to overlap with Time Warner, because Time Warner is the incumbent provider. Even if Comcast offered a faster internet service, they'd be building their market share from zero

<comment><USER45> Actually, I really wonder why it doesn't work that way in the US.

I worked for an ISP company that grew from a tiny startup, connecting just a few buildings, to a successful ISP that covered a significant part (almost all, I believe) of small (200K) city in Russia.

I haven't really interacted much with our network builders department (worked on software, and left the company some years ago, moving to another city), but IIRC in overall it worked like this - people found our offers interesting and signed up to get their buildings/apartments connected. We chose new addresses we were able to physically reach, got the approval from the building owners and the city, and laid down the wires, extending the network's frontiers.

We laid our own fiber (or, sometimes, copper) and used wireless bridges whenever we weren't able to reach otherwise. We had also leased fiber from other companies (there are companies here that have business just by providing underlying infrastructure but not offering the Internet connectivity). It's not like adding an extra fiber to an existing conduit is comparable to installing a new sewer line.

In the end, having 4-5 actually different ISPs in a building - usually all with their own lines - was (still is) a norm where I had lived. Competing offerings drove prices down, and bad behavior (sans the state-mandated ones) were mostly non-existent.

What's so different in the US, that even Google had failed?

<comment><USER46> The US has draconic pole attach rules in most places. Local governments and regulations on when, where, and how you're able to run cable make it borderline impossible to efficiently get it done, no matter how much or how little money you have.

Things like this are not as much an issue in states like Texas that require only one permit to run cable anywhere in the state. Whether or not people would like to admit it, this is a case where we can see with our own eyes regulations are seriously hurting the ability for people to start up and compete, and is the only reason net neutrality is an issue in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Only 72% ? This seems quite low to me, as something that is quite esoteric to non-techies.

<comment><USER48> I thought this was quite high, since the net neutrality issue had a lot of coverage in the media, see for example the two John Oliver talks about it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Senator Isakson gave a townhall Monday. One of the questions was a rambling explainer that could be best summarized is "Net neutrality is about not censoring the internet so do you support it?" to which of course responded "I do not support censorship so we have to deregulate to ensure it."

The guy practiacally showed Isakson the door.

</comment><comment><USER50> Another great opportunity to explain net neutrality without linking out to another resource.

Man, so close.

</comment><comment><USER51> They don't know, because they still have it (mostly). They will only know when they lose it.

</comment><comment><USER52> If you agree with net neutrality, you probably don't understand it.

<comment><USER53> Okay comcast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I don't know what "Net Neutrality" is. I have looked and tried to find out. My best guess is that Net Neutrailty is a badly named concept that emcompasses lots of different things to different people. Maybe it means control of The Internet, or equal speeds for all sites? Besides squishy feelings is there a concrete meaning?

From what I can gather the FCC changed some things which might allow groups to do things which may end up worse for end users, at least for a while. Before the FCC "repealed" it, was there a single bill/rule/law called Net Neutrality?

No sarcasm in this question, just pure ignorance- what EXACTLY is Net Neutrailty?

<comment><USER8> The idea that governs the phone systems the modern internet was born from. That providers of network access must provide access to other networks equally. That the networks are neutral to the content flowing across them. This is about preventing monopolies of the physical lines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> If you're here, you can likely set up a VPN on a VPS provider. Do yourself a favor and spend the $5 / month for an instance. Get your hands on your parent's, spouse's, friend's, sibling's phones and get it set up for them too. Nobody needs to put up with this bullshit from ISPs or the Government.

There is a great and easy to follow tutorial from DigitalOcean here: digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an-openvpn-server-on- ubuntu-16-04.

Edit: It seems as though this post is rubbing people the wrong way. I'm sorry to anyone offended by this post, that was not my intent. In my mind, one can simultaneously watch out for their own safety online and advocate for sensible internet policy.

<comment><USER56> > Get your hands on your parent's, spouse's, friend's, sibling's phones and > get it set up for them too. Nobody needs to put up with this bullshit from > ISPs or the Government.

I... I don't do this anymore. I've found myself overburdened with support calls when the tech I've configured invariable breaks. Whether it's weeks or months later. Even if what I've configured isn't the culprit, I'm still on the hook. This is actually one of the reasons why I recommend Apple products to the least tech-saavy in my circles. Just so I can direct them to Apple Support later on...

<comment><USER57> When I retired, I moved to a new, very rural, area.

This led to what was probably one of the dumbest things I've ever done.

Wanting to be nice, I fixed a new neighbor's computer. I then fixed another, and another, and it kept going. For an area with so little population, I was shocked by the numbers.

The good news is that this drove me back to Linux. Now, I can truthfully tell them that I don't use their OS and am not qualified to fix their problem.

Still, don't fix someone's computer. Certainly don't do it for free.</comment></comment></comment>


How Science Can Learn from Writing That Is "Not Even Wrong" - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/how-science-can-learn-from-writing-that-is-not-even-wrong

<comment><USER2> It's all well and good to classify non-falsifiable philosophies as "inspirational". However, many tenants do not look at dualism as mere inspiration.</comment>


Programming language you've never heard about won 10K prize - <AUTHOR> http://bcexcelsior.com/computer-programming-language-wins-grand-prize-at-media-lab-summit/ <comment><USER2> Remember. When writing about 'stuff' on the internet, never on any account provide links within the article, to any of the topics you're discussing. Having to hunt them down himself, makes it so much more fun for the reader!</comment>


Show HN: "Startup Weekend the Game" a SW Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.slouchcouch.co/SWthegame.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This was our startup weekend Omaha project - learning how to write an HTML5 video game. We really just wanted to have fun and learn something new. Our team of six had literally no video game programming experience prior to this, and in 54 hours we had this! Enjoy!

<comment><USER2> this is pretty awesome..good job</comment></comment>


Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1212013/Revealed-The-ghost-fleet-recession.html

<comment><USER2> It is time for Startup School to take to the ocean.

I think we should charter one of these vessels and sale around the South Pacific while building our companies.

We could fit 100 companies on board, charge each $100/day and turn a profit:

"You may wish to know this because, if ever you had an irrational desire to charter one, now would be the time. This time last year, an Aframax tanker capable of carrying 80,000 tons of cargo would cost £31,000 a day ($50,000). Now it is about £3,400 ($5,500)."

Anyone want on board?

<comment><USER3> Wow, $5500 a night is probably cheaper than a top stateroom on the Queen Mary 2, and a helluva lot bigger. On the downside, it probably doesn't include fuel or docking fees.

It would make an excellent lair for a supervillain, though.

<comment><USER4> Being a supervillain with a 'landlord' that you are renting you lair from is would be the equivalent of Bill Gates being a billionaire living in his mother's basement.

<comment><USER3> I was kinda assuming you'd pay the first month's rent while you got all your stuff moved in, then steal it and sail the seas, hijacking nuclear submarines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like the beginnings of Rife's Raft from Snow Crash.

</comment><comment><USER6> Google filed a patent for offshore data centers last year... [http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/09/06/googl...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/09/06/google- planning-offshore-data-barges/)

</comment><comment><USER7> anyone know why there is 'loading' activity whenever I select text on the page? I noticed the same effect on yesterday's esquire articles as well.

<comment><USER8> They're probably using the same text highlighting code as esquire.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/98o77/go_to_esqu...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/98o77/go_to_esquirecom_highlight_any_text_the_website/c0bte3m)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Spot the glaring fact-checking failure in this article...

<comment><USER3> How about you just point it out to save everybody some time?

<comment><USER6> There is no big secret about it, which is the sort of reason the Daily Mail is Fail. It's just not talked about much outside of the business pages - there's no conspiracy to kept the fact of the anchored fleet covered up.

There are two reasons for it to be there: one is that a glut in cargo ship availability (due to the long order cycle) has coincided with the recession, so that the expected growth in shipping has stalled. Hence the large number. As for the location outside Singapore, it's handily just north of the equator and so not subject to tropical storms and weather patterns, meaning it's the handiest place is Asia to park a ship without paying port fees.

Sure, it's interesting that there's so much unused capacity gathered in one place, but 'secret'? I think not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The daily mail is a sensationalist tabloid rag. Most of the article is probably BS.

<comment><USER11> I agree the mail is terrible, and as other comments have said it's no secret (try googling 'dry baltic index' for business news stories on the topic). But besides that, this article is far above the mail's usual standard.</comment></comment>


Apple Doesn't Want Your iPhone App to Make Money - <AUTHOR> http://hellosorld.com/tech/2010/04/16/apple-doesnt-want-your-iphone-app-to-make-money.html

<comment><USER2> And yet, apple has taken concrete steps to try to encourage more high quality (i.e. pricier) apps, including adding the "top grossing category" to the app store.

The post also fails to give any examples whatsoever of how apple is actively encouraging the cheap/free apps. One might argue that they kind of discourage it by charging the $99 fee to join the program that lets you post apps. Apple makes it so that it costs you money to give away your programs.

</comment><comment><USER3> At most, the only case made here is that Apple doesn't care one way or the other if you make any money selling your app; as long as apps are there and people are using them, Apple is happy.

The apps are a marketing tool for Apple. While they make some money reselling them, I can't imagine it's enough to get stockholders excited. All the sound and fury regarding app rejections and keeping the riffraff (Flash) out has more to do with brand management than technology or protectionism (not that Apple isn't protectionist...)

<comment><USER4> They're not just a marketing tool - they're also a switching cost. When you buy a new phone you have to consider which apps you'll have to replace, and which data you might need to move across. Less so than a large iTunes music collection, but still.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe, if Apple weren't collecting a commission on app sales. The brilliant thing is, whatever app hits the price point that maximizes profit * quantity, Apple collects the commission. Apple doesn't have that much motivation to artificially lower prices, if they just let the market go to work the market will maximize profits for them.

That's not to mention that the cost of apps is so low compared to the expensive iPhone/iPad that they are already effectively commodities. Unless you see a lot of $30 apps running around, which I don't.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Unless you see a lot of $30 apps running around, which I don't._

Right, but that's kind of the point. Apple has already commoditized the app market. Some apps cost a lot in terms of developer time, but you can't realistically charge more than $5 per app. I think there's still room for prices to sink lower though.

<comment><USER6> It'd be the point if people weren't already making a lot of money at the 99c and sub-$5 price points. But they are. Apple indeed encouraged cheap apps on the iPhone, but the market didn't really suffer.

<comment><AUTHOR> See here: <http://www.newsweek.com/id/216788/output/print>

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure what your point is.

People can make a living off the app store. A handful of people get very rich, and many don't. It's not different from _any other market_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The conventional wisdom is that a lot of people are making a lot of money selling apps in the App Store."

That's not true in the professional app developer community. Hobbyists can make golf-money on the app store, and of course everyone likes to point out the few runaway success apps, but anyone professionally making games, for instance, knows that the business case for iPhone development is weak if you're not one of the really big guys like EA.

Indie game devs are far more interested in Facebook. Mobile is still more work for less pay and everyone seriously playing in the space knows it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't think the author of this blog post supports his argument well enough. I don't personally see a conspiracy from Apple to make free succeed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think there's a conspiracy either. I'm only suggesting that Apple would rather your app cost $1.99 than $19.99, and that they have an incentive to make you believe you can make a lot of money even when the App Store is quickly becoming a race to the bottom.

<comment><USER9> I'd actually argue the complete opposite, that the race to the bottom has come and gone. You can't go any lower than $0.99 and free, and we hit those points a long time ago.

This next bit is anecdotal. There's so much shovelware and apps without polish on the app store, and many of them typically reflect this free and $0.99 price point. I'm starting to see trends of quality apps that originally priced at $0.99 to compete, changing their price points to $2.99 or $4.99 because compared to the competition, they're apps are of a premium and well-maintained quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There were several free apps in the top-grossing list last time I checked. And I think ad profits are worth mentioning. iAd is a pretty significant investment on Apple's part... not that they aren't hoping to profit from it -- but the more devs profit, the more they profit -- I think that's the real point. To say they "don't want" devs to profit confuses me.

<comment><USER11> _but the more devs profit, the more they profit_

The average App Store customer buys less than $20 worth of apps last time I saw numbers quoted. 30% of $20 is $6. Apple is a hardware manufacturer that sells $X00 phones at one of the highest markups in the industry and also gets a kickback from AT&T for every customer they bring to monthly billing.

Apples' incentives are almost totally non-related to developers' incentives: their primary interest in apps is to move more hardware and contracts.

<comment><USER10> You're right, I don't think apple is that interested in devs' profitability, or for that matter, app store profits. But I also don't think they have any incentive to actively harm devs' chances of being successful... It's the "don't want them to profit" part that I can't understand. Maybe "don't care"... But "don't want"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As with so many articles about Apple, this post completely ignores the issue of quality. If you assume that Apple would just as a soon have a bad app as a good one, then sure, this argument makes sense. But I don't think most people would make that argument, especially people who know Apple. It's not in Apple's interests to have lots of nonprofitable apps because developers have little incentive to support those.

</comment><comment><USER13> Where is the evidence? People like to make random statements a lot now days.

</comment><comment><USER14> Apple encourages two App business plans. They encourage high-volume cheap/ad- based apps, and expensive niche apps. Either of those can be profitable, but nobody's going to sell a $10+ App to an appreciable fraction of iPhone/iTouch/iPad users.

The high-volume cheap apps (free to $10) are for the general public, and in that area, the blog post is correct - Apple is mostly interested in competition resulting in cheap and good general-interest apps, because it enhances "there's an App for that".

If you want to sell a $50+ iPhone app, you need to look at niche fields. There's a bar exam prep app for $1000[1], and one of the apps demo'd before the App store launch. In general, the really expensive iPhone apps add a killer-app feature - a feature that justifies buying the iPhone itself. Like the "check your security cameras while patrolling"[2] app, or the "every medical and pharmacological reference ever written in the palm of your hand and instantly searchable" app (#8 on the list in [2]) or the "control your multi-thousand-dollar home automation system" app from ROSIE[3]. These types of Apps literally sell iPhones by themselves. I mean, the tuning forks you need to tune a high-end piano cost $450[4], so a $300 app which is a million times easier to use is a no-brainer if you're a piano repairman or performer.

[1] - [http://www.edibleapple.com/bar-exam-preparation-app-for- the-...](http://www.edibleapple.com/bar-exam-preparation-app-for-the-iphone- now-available-for-1000/) [2] - [http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-most- expensive-iphone-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-most-expensive- iphone-apps-2009-8) [3] - [http://www.businessinsider.com/most-expensive- iphone-apps-20...](http://www.businessinsider.com/most-expensive-iphone- apps-2010-1#8-rosie-home-automation-19999-tie-2) [4] - [http://www.mypianoshop.com/store/product.php?productid=16630...](http://www.mypianoshop.com/store/product.php?productid=16630&cat=42&page=1)

</comment><comment><USER15> Right! This is why the iPhone App Store defaults to the Free section of each category, massively reducing potential Paid sales.

Oh. Wait...

</comment><comment><USER16> I disagree with this premise. Apple makes money from App Store sales ($27M to $170M per quarter according to various estimates found on Google) which, while small compared to total revenue, is non-trivial. Also, paid apps tend to be higher quality, and it is strongly in Apple's best interest to maintain a high quality standard in the App Store. If Apple suddenly makes it hard for developers to make money, as the article insinuates, then they will deal with a larger percentage of low quality app submissions because it isn't worth the time to make high-end apps.

</comment><comment><USER17> free is actually a problem for apple, as the money goes directly to the developer/google for the banners. no cut for apple

hence. iAds

but they face an uphill battle against the monetization of mobile adsense

</comment><comment><USER18> But they would want your free App's _ads_ to make money.</comment>


No, Tech Isn't the Only Part of the Economy That's Growing - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/05/economy-isnt-just-tech.html <comment><AUTHOR> This rib on Sama was in my opinion taken out of context too much. But then sama's statement; if it were made to the non-tech population would be disingenuous. However it was made at a tech event, so wasn't to be misinterpreted. And when they mentioned food service; I thought all those food service apps, loyalty programmes, CRMs and all the technical hardware

<comment><USER2> Not really. What the world thinks of tech is pets.com. There was no clarification that tech isn't only apps and websites. Thats why they misinterpreted Sama

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Those graphs are pretty misleading. In the first one, manufacturing jobs rose from 11,500 to 12,100 over 4 years, or 5% growth over that period. The graph makes it look like roughly 1000% growth.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just realized that. At a glance it seems the entire US economy is growing at a tremendous pace. The mind by default has the Y axis starting at 0, till you pay attention. Out of a population of 300,000,000 I daresay even my native country, Kenya had a better growth in real numbers with a pop. of 42 million(<i>caveat</i>: unemployment is more than 20%)</comment></comment>


Hypewatch: Sun CEO calls MySQL deal "the most important in the modern software industry" - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/02/26/suns-ceo-talks-buy-mysql-deal-closes

<comment><USER2> Ha. If by "most" he means "least" then I agree.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if this guy actually believes what comes out of his own mouth. I sure he thinks others do.

</comment><comment><USER4> I totally don't get it.</comment>


Why Emacs is still so useful today - <AUTHOR> http://xahlee.blogspot.com/2010/03/why-emacs-is-still-so-useful-today.html <comment><USER2> Xah's article on how to pick prostitutes is much better.

[http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/las_vegas/20031015_cop...](http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/las_vegas/20031015_copulate.html)

<comment><USER3> That's both funny and an evil character assassination. If you leave his career of trolling usenet aside, he _does_ in fact write good tutorials on Emacs, Linux, Mathematics and Lisp (even though he hates them all.)

<comment><USER2> Hey, he wrote it, not me.

With that in mind; his Lisp advice is terrible. After years of writing Lisp tutorials, he still hasn't actually learned it himself. Every time he comes up with a convoluted way to write something very simple in Lisp; and then formats it like he's writing C++. Very annoying. I ignore everything he says.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _This is where emacs comes in. Emacs has several find and replace commands, by regex or by plain string, on a text selection, or entire file (buffer), or multiple files. The beauty is that it works all in a interactive way, with the option to do it in batch when you press a button._

Both Visual Studio and Eclipse have these features, I'm sure there are many, many other editors and IDEs that also have them. It's not exactly rocket science.

If you want to champion Emacs, you might want to point out the features that really are unique and unmatched, instead of common features that everyone else implemented 10 years ago. Yes, yes, Emacs did it 20 years ago. Woo.

<comment><USER5> More like between 30 and 40 years ago, but yes.

What makes Emacs so useful is not only what it has out of the box (it has a whole lot), but what it allows you to do with that. People often jokingly describe it as an operating system, but that's a surprisingly apt description. Everything in Emacs is accessible (most of it, anyway) and it is (a great part of it, at least) written in itself. To make a small function that searches for a, in this case, a booklike block, and replaces the classes with the proper ones is more or less a trivial task. I wouldn't use it for this case - it's too little work - but I would write a search-and-replace-with-option function that would highlight occurrences and offer me a menu of replacements.

If it doesn't exist in there already.

And that would also be a worthwhile exercise in IDE zen.

Contrast that with Eclipse or Visual Studio, where the job of writing extensions start to look like a whole career.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some of Erik Naggum's best flames were with Xah Lee in mind. [http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/search?q=xah&sort=of](http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/search?q=xah&sort=of)

</comment><comment><USER7> Not related to the article but related to the title of the article:

The only reason I use Emacs these days because it's the only decent freely available Common Lisp development environment (in conjunction with SLIME). In fact, I only use Emacs for Common Lisp. For everything else, there's vim / Eclipse / IntelliJ / Visual Studio.

</comment><comment><USER8> >However, if the markup is not 100% regular, the scripting approach won't work.

Sounds like you need BeautifulSoup.

</comment><comment><USER9> tl;dr; 99% of text is soup

Emacs has macros & M-x spoon

<comment><USER10> And a community of library writers so prolific that I actually went to check to see if M-x spoon existed.

<comment><USER5> Now it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why doesn't he actually step through the macro to format?

It's one thing to rave about Emacs, it's another thing to actually show its power. A line of elisp would have been much more of an argument.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been enjoying it since TECO EMACS on the DEC-20, so it's a bit depressing to me that still modern IDEs fall a bit short in basic areas (while adding their own nice features, it's true.) I know it's not easy to build a full- featured Emacs-equivalent, but jeeze, I've been going back to Emacs for almost 30 years now ... I've been expecting to be blown away by some new contender for that long.</comment>


Who Are the Real-Life Models of "Silicon Valley" Characters? - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/who-are-the-real-life-models-of-silicon-valley-characters-we-have-them-3507bc890d9a#.7k59i3oj8 <comment><USER2> Ahh nice, a call out to HN! I do often find the people here humourless.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder why the article was deleted.</comment>


[Seeking advice] Made a service for putting public sites at custom domains - <AUTHOR> Hey guys,
I'm building a service for putting public sites behind custom URLs, plus adding analytics, CSS, metatags, etc.
It's essentially "reverse proxy any public site" as a service, with some Lambda@Edge functions sprinkled on top to inject analytics, CSS, etc.
A typical use case would be something like "make your Trello roadmap available at roadmap.yoursite.com instead of trello.com/b/fsyFS8w3".
It started off as a fun little technical challenge, but I've managed to get some customers and tonnes of feedback.
I'd love to squeeze some wisdom/advice from some of the more experienced members of the community: Is this idea viable in the long run from an AWS cost perspective, if charging monthly? Are there any legal concerns behind offering a service like this? Any general tips for someone getting their first few side projecft customers?
Any other general advice would be much appreciated :).
For reference, the service is: https://cloak.ist/ <comment><USER2> Do you have any working example, for example a github page with one of your projects or something similar that is open and well known?</comment>