An economist thinks US is bankrupt: What it means for retirement - <AUTHOR> https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/retirement/an-economist-thinks-us-is-bankrupt-what-it-means-for-retirement/ar-BBN2w0d?li=BBnbfcN <comment><USER3> "When a friend on the brink of retirement was planning to take Social Security before drawing money from his 401(k) plan, Kotlikoff persuaded him to reverse his plan. "

Advising someone to defer withdrawals so that they have a bigger benefit (unfunded and unable to be paid by a bankrupt government), means maybe he's not so convinced the US is bankrupt.

<comment> village-idiot Social Security is expected to go bankrupt by 2034. If you've got less than 16 years to live, betting on it is a good idea. More than that, it's a bad idea.

<comment><USER4> No bankrupt in 2034, just unable to meet 100% of current obligations: [https://blog.ssa.gov/social-security-funded- until-2034-and-a...](https://blog.ssa.gov/social-security-funded- until-2034-and-about-three-quarters-funded-for-the-long-term-many-options-to- address-the-long-term-shortfall/)

<comment><USER5> Isn't that the definition of bankruptcy though? A person, company, or government is unable to meet their current obligations, so they notify all their creditors and go to court to find an equitable solution.

<comment><USER6> > unable to meet their current obligations

Things get tricky with governments where it's kind of trivial to raise more money by a) raising taxes, b) simply redefining your obligations (in the case of programs like SS or Medicare/Medicaid) or c) just making more money ex nihilo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a strange article in that probably 5% of the sentences therein are actually dedicated to the meat of the headline and the rest dedicated to promoting his company which helps with the stated problem. I wish I could actually see the article debate his points instead of trying to sell me something.

<comment><USER8> Screams "promoted post".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Worst case for social security is that no funding changes are made and payouts stabilize to around 70% of what was promised. Very bad for a lot of people but far from the disaster that is many state's pension systems.

Medicare on the other hand...

<comment> village-idiot The problem is that a large number of unfunded obligations will probably come due at roughly the same time. We all know that our infrastructure is starting to crumble, but the problem is that every single bridge that needs to be rebuilt either represents a future debt to fund the construction, or a willingness to abandon the economic activity that the infrastructure (hopefully) enables.

The worst case scenarios is that Social Security, Medicare, some state pensions, and our infrastructure will all hit the breaking point at once. At that point we will need to make some _deeply_ unpopular changes, and it's unclear if our political system has the will or the coherence to pull it off.

If we're lucky, these systems will begin failing sequentially within the next few years, rather than all failing together.

<comment><USER10> If we're lucky, failures will compel voters and politicians to raise taxes to pay up and stop kicking the can.

<comment> village-idiot I think we're past that point. We can and should raise taxes, but reductions in expenditures is going to have to be on the table too.

Our expensive wars come to mind.

<comment><USER10> Agree, it's going to require regime change.

<comment> village-idiot I genuinely doubt we have the political will to do it. There are a large cohort of people who know they'll be dead before these issues come to a head, and they have reverted to a "protect what's mine" mode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Debt is about trust. Japan has the highest debt to gdp ratio, but that's not a problem because we trust it. With enough trust you can go pretty far. There are a lot of trust factors for the US, like its military or the petrodollar.

<comment><USER12> Trust, in an economic sense, is how much material is being dedicated towards a corporation's future existence... A corporation can be an individual, or a company of individuals...

<comment><USER13> Trust in this context means "If I loan you money, how skeptical am I that you'll pay it back?" I can be skeptical for a number of reasons, from the simple notion that I think you are just a crook and have no intention of paying back, to more directly economic ones like the fact that I know you've got no real prospects to make back enough money going forward to stroke the interest on my loan. There are shades in-between, like if I know you _intend_ to pay back the loan and can technically afford it right now, but your credit is bad all over town and you're one bad break from being totally and irreparably insolvent. If you're family or a close friend, I might loan you money without seriously expecting to get it back (though in these circumstances I personally just recommend just making it a gift).

By "how much material is being dedicated toward...[it's]...future existence" you presumably mean how much the firm or individual is investing in relation to their income or some similar measure. That can be part of it, but definitely isn't all of it. All market transactions are, contrary to the technocratic worldview of mainstream political economists, human transactions. The actual underlying human relationships matter, and the balance sheets only matter inasmuch as they facilitate communications between actual people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > An economist thinks US is bankrupt: What it means [...]

What it means is "the economist doesn't know what 'bankrupt' means or understand how public finance works for an sovereign entity whose debt is primarily denominated in its own currency and probably shouldn't be taken seriously on anything related to it."

Or, more likely, "the economist knows all this quite well and is engaging in political/commercial propaganda that relies on public ignorance."

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm 34 now. I have absolutely no expectation that there will be a social security system to speak of in 2049. Quite frankly it seems insane to me to expect that it would still be around.

<comment><USER16> How can you be so sure? You must have read something I haven't.

Why can't the US tax more to fund its liabilities? Or, why can't they have the Fed print more money and devalue the dollar?

<comment><USER17> Tax who?

The Elite class, who have captured the regulatory bodies?

Or, well, everyone else, are, frankly, fuckin' broke, and in student debt on top of that?

<comment><USER18> What is your theory, that huge portions of the population will go destitute and starving but do nothing about it?

No, at some point people won't take it anymore. At that point you get political change. It has happened many times before in the U.S. Where do you think Social Security came from in the first place?

<comment><USER19> It's a reassuring thought "at some point people won't take it anymore". But the front page of hacker news today is filled with articles about cheap food, the financial crisis, student loans and absurd housing costs.

It feels like an arms race between two groups - one trying to sound alarms about the direction we're headed (Bernie) and another that thinks Brave New World is a pretty good model to shoot for. I don't think the latter is an organized conspiracy, just that there are structural tendencies that make producing and marketing soma (literally with food and drugs, figuratively with social media) more lucrative than, say, teaching high school or nursing.

It might be better if there _were_ an Illuminati in charge of things - <USER2> presumably would be trying to steer between the extremes of another French revolution and a descent into a 1984 world (which seems depressing even for those in charge).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So long as the rest of the world keeps buying US debt they will keep trucking on. The US is too big to fail: nobody can afford that house of cards to implode.

<comment><USER4> "When you owe the bank $100, they own you. When you owe the bank $100M, you own them."

<comment><USER20> Yep, the EU saved a small country like Greece because the alternative was too horrible to bear.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What can I sell in Times Square?  - <AUTHOR>

A friend and I are hackers who want to learn how to sell better. We live in NYC, and we thought a good way to learn would be to sell stuff in Times Square. So far our list includes: 1) Buy a cheap costume, and then charge people to take pictures with us, 2) Sell I <3 NYC t-shirts in different languages, 3) Sell roses. Any suggestions on what we could sell or thoughts about our project? <comment><USER4> I was once having a very good day in NYC and an art-student-looking guy outside Cooper Union tried to sell me one of his hand-drawn "life maps" - <USER2> was holding a basket of little paper scrolls tied with shiny ribbons, with colorful lines drawn inside the paper scrolls - for a couple dollars, and it actually worked on me (well, I'd stopped and asked about them because I thought they were free, but he still convinced me to pay for one). People like pretty handmade things with some sort of emotional resonance (note also that I'm a girl socialized to like pretty things). It was a good hustle.

There are also people who go to farmer's markets and sell poems written on the spot on typewriters - <http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=poem%20store> \- similarly whimsical, handmade, and suitable for impulse purchases for people out on dates or whatever. You could multivariate-test the sign.

Also check out the licensing requirements for street vendors if you haven't yet: <http://www.nyc.gov/html/dca/html/licenses/094.shtml> (to help make sure you know what you're getting into, and also because it has exceptions for artwork and written matter).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link to the licensing requirements. To comply with the law, I think we will call whatever we are selling artwork, so we do not need to get a permit. I like the poem store idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It doesn't matter _what_ you sell. What matters is _how_ you sell it.

Case in point, Joe Ades with his vegetable peelers: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCUct4NlxE0>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing the video. That guy is an amazing salesman. It reminds about the mantra: It's not about the idea, it's the execution that matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sell experiences.

I'm not sure if you've heard of Joe Ades. He used to sell potato peelers in NY and has been mentioned on HN a few times:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Ades>

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/nyregion/03ades.html>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCUct4NlxE0>

I don't think it really matters what you sell, especially in this case where you just want to improve your sales technique. The main thing is that you sell an experience, not a product.

</comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of stories of kids setting up lemonade stands in Times Square, and even making a lot of money before getting shut down by the cops.

I can't find the exact news article, but this one is close ($200 profit/half day!):

[http://www.dnainfo.com/20110628/midtown/kids-set-up- lemonade...](http://www.dnainfo.com/20110628/midtown/kids-set-up-lemonade- stand-midtown)

</comment><comment><USER8> I think that you could get a lot of mileage by selling unique trinkets. Imagine taking a Escher style moebius ring and creating an actual ring or a necklace out of it (imagine doing it with flat links to form the necklace, and they all have connections to one another at a varying gradient, so that you can create that moebius strip) [ interesting link to set you up <http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~gershon/EscherForReal/> ]

If you think about it then there are tons of amazing geometrical shapes out there that would make amazing trinkets, and why limit yourself to pure mathematics? Imagine creating a trinket that represents plasma captured in a magnetic bottle. That would be beautiful if you can get it just right.

This will be challenging, artistically, to pull it off (perhaps you can use a 3D printer), but if you do I want one. (yes, I have weakness for such trinkets)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm starting a clothing company/website called <http://beerfarmer.com> and could send you some socks. I'm in montana and selling these primarily to mountain bikers and active lifestyles but would love to get some feedback from Times Square. Still working on product shots but...

[https://beerfarmer.3dcartstores.com/Adventure-Socks- _p_13.ht...](https://beerfarmer.3dcartstores.com/Adventure-Socks-_p_13.html) contact me through the site if your interested.

</comment><comment><USER10> Last year I was in NY doing some accounting and spent some time walking about.. One good con I fell for was some guys passing out demo CDs of thie mixtapes - sure I'll grab one as a souvinier! The guy offers to sign it and add your name - haha ok sounds fun. Turns out his fee for signing is $5! An it has your name on it too now. turned out a better souvinier than I expected. (just an anecdote, not a suggestion you learn how to street hustle)

<comment><USER11> I got hustled with that today haha!

They hand you a CD and tell you they're trying to get their music out there, etc. Then ask for donations. I felt like a sucker but the lesson was worth it I suppose.

<comment><USER12> I am curious: What was an the CD? Was it empty?

<comment><USER11> Music I assume, haven't actually checked it out

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Turn it into a competition with your friend. And don't be afraid to embarrass yourselves (remember it's a game/competition) in terms of advertising a little louder than normal. What helps also: Ask your potential customers about the pitch afterwards (what they thought about it, whether they liked it) - <USER3> side effect: you get to meet awesome people who'd like to help you.

</comment><comment><USER10> Theres a guy here in Tokyo who does dramatic readings of manga for people... He's amazing and has been doing it for years but I imagine it would work just as well with older cheesy marvel / dc / Archie comics. The key is he gives it 100% and then some.. You could probably get the comic books for dirt cheap

</comment><comment><USER14> Food/snacks (health laws?) Plastic rain coats / umbrellas local knowledge?

<comment><AUTHOR> We took food/snacks off the table because it requires health permits. Plastic rain coats / umbrellas are weather dependent, but a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I understand that experience is experience, but wouldn't you say that there are better places and alternatives to spending time trying to sell things in a 'tourist' environment?

<comment><USER16> There may be more "productive" things to do, but it sounds like their trying to actually have some fun too. It sounds like a great combo to me.

@murtza They do things like this in the Apprentice all the time. There's probably some good ideas there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. I will read some episode summaries of the show to see what they sold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> run around with an ipad and offer them to "get a real NY friend" on fb for just 5$. if you can sell that, you can sell anything.

<comment><USER4> I'd be slightly concerned that somebody would snatch the iPad out of their hands and run. :p (It reminds me of this: [http://www.dnainfo.com/20110531/downtown/iphone-thefts-on- su...](http://www.dnainfo.com/20110531/downtown/iphone-thefts-on-subway-on- rise) \- "Thieves are snatching the popular devices right out of straphangers' hands, especially in lower Manhattan's subways.")

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some other ideas I brainstormed: 1)Roses, 2)Guy Fawkes Masks, 3)Create and sell a guide. Maybe a "Guide to NYC Public Restrooms"

</comment><comment><USER18> well, its still warm in the sun, while at the same time heading towards winter. So maybe chestnut flavored ice-cream? Food vendor license may be too much trouble compared to hand made tourist kitsch.

</comment><comment><USER19> Water, umbrellas, maps, photos.. oxygen

<comment><USER20> Oxygen... What an idea. At Six Flags Magic Mountain, they sold oxygen with a sign that read: "BENEFITS OF OXYGEN". They must have sold out of ice cubes in Alaska.</comment></comment>


Why a Mortgage Is Not Actually an Inflation Hedge - <AUTHOR> https://www.kitces.com/blog/why-a-mortgage-is-not-actually-an-inflation-hedge-itself-but-can-provide-access-to-investments-that-are <comment><USER2> The title of this post is misleading IMO. Real title of the story is:

"Why A Mortgage Is Not Actually An Inflation Hedge Itself, But Can Provide Access To Investments That Are"

I don't even think his argument is totally correct, because buying a house on a mortgage is in many ways a leveraged investment in real estate, which certainly could qualify as an inflation hedge in and of itself.</comment>


Peeling Off The Painted Layers of NYC Walls: Experiments with Google Street View - <AUTHOR> http://www.nypl.org/blog/2014/06/24/peeling-painted-layers-nyc-google-street-view

<comment><USER2> Cool, and points up something about this brave new world. Point enough cameras at enough venues, and we quit needing scheduled events. If your art existed once, it exists online forever! Imagine an open stage and mic, where artists could queue up and perform under an omnipresent camera. Just record the timestamp and post yourself as a fraction of a larger continuous stream.</comment>


Ask HN: Examples where open source invented something new? - <AUTHOR> Joel Spolsky makes an interesting observation about open source in his review of the book Dreaming in Code, about the overambitious failed Chandler project (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/01/21/the-big-picture/):
"Open source doesn't quite work like that. It's really good at implementing copycat features, because there's a spec to work from: the implementation you're copying. It's really good at Itch Scratching features. I need a command line argument for EBCDIC, so I'll add it and send in the code. But when you have an app that doesn't do anything yet, nobody finds it itchy. They're not using it. So you don't get volunteers. Almost everyone on the Chandler dev team got paid."
And it seems true, at least for the time it was written - Linux, MySQL, OpenOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, XWindows, Gnome, gcc - all modeled after existing, successful commercial products. Commercial products proved the demand, did the overall design work, UI, conceptual metaphors, etc. - although no doubt they stood on the shoulders of prior commercial and research projects.
Was curious to see what others think - are of examples where a new, influential product type or category of software began as open source? Bitcoin perhaps? <comment><USER2> \- React and the rest of the tooling (Vue, etc...) that has abstracted us away from the DOM and towards a virtual-DOM.

\- Kubernetes, which has infiltrated the ecosystem in a way that has changed the way teams deliver software, and changed the way that we think of infrastructure

\- Ruby on Rails, which I think is kinda self-explanatory. Love it or hate it, it revolutionized the industry and has had ripple effects everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> TCP/IP

email

HTML browsers

IRC

The first web-cam. (so "streaming" as we know it today)</comment>


Redactor - WYSIWYG editor on jQuery - <AUTHOR> http://imperavi.com/redactor <comment><USER2> If you're looking for a Rich Text Editor, this is the only one I will recommend. I wrote a proprietary RTE last year and continue to maintain it because nothing available both worked and produced clean markup. Redactor came out this spring and is the only generally available RTE that does this. If you insist on OSS, WYSIHTML5 is the best available.

For those that care, Redactor uses the designMode technique, leans on the browser for most operations and keeps the markup clean via regexp cleanup. This is the cleanest solution for the most common use case of html email/html item entry. The other two techniques are full emulation and contenteditable.

Google uses full emulation in their products. You type into a hidden text field and the display/selection/cursor is entirely script rendered. This is especially good for things like docs where they need to emulate word's behavior. Downside is that doing it is a lot of code and it's easy to miss OS specific keybinds (e.g. CMD+left/right in OS X don't work in gmail).

Using contenteditable would be the preferred technique but it's buggy as hell. Of the editors I know about only Aloha and my editor take this approach. The amount of code is relatively small (mine is around 2k sloc) but it's all really ugly code that reminds me of the bad old days in 2002-2004 when I had my own DOM abstraction lib.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious why you decided not to use Aloha Editor, since it is also able to produce clean markup. Disclosure: I'm one of the Aloha Editor developers.

<comment><USER4> Download size is one big factor for me.

<http://cdn.aloha-editor.org/latest/lib/aloha.js> 1.1MB!

<http://imperavi.com/js/redactor/redactor.js> 168KB (odd, it is an encrypted version)

The actual minified 8.1.0 version that you get after giving them a fake email address is 41KB.

<comment><USER3> The aloha core is 239KB (minified but not gzipped). Plugins can be anywhere from 5KB to 50KB. The version on the CDN includes about 30 plugins.

I expect the size would be around 300KB if only the basic plugins are included.

Still, it's a lot bigger than redactor - point taken.

<comment><USER5> Having a slightly larger size is a non-issue for people who aren't willing to spend at least the 100 dollars...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks super slick, but worth noting there are open source alternatives. For example:

<http://jhollingworth.github.com/bootstrap-wysihtml5/>

This a bootstrap wrapper around the wysihtml5 project:

<https://github.com/xing/wysihtml5>

<comment><USER3> Also Aloha Editor (GPLv2)

<http://aloha-editor.org/>

<comment><USER7> Yeah but that has a GPL license. wsyihtml5 is MIT so would be compatible with more open source licenses and usable for commercial software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool. Also worth noting these guys have a CSS framework (who doesn't these days?) that looks similarly clean and elegant, though I didn't dig into it enough to make a truly informed call. But still, worth noting...

<http://imperavi.com/kube/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's a previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4034147>

</comment><comment><USER10> I notice that still a lot of editors use inline css for their image-styling (I assume, since the editor should correctly preview the way images are lined up). But this obviously creates problems when you decide to style such images a bit differently (adding some padding, whatever) without modifying tons of generated content. A centralized css declaration would make this much easier.

Wouldn't there be a possibility to put these styles in an external stylesheet? As the editor itself makes use of external css for it's own styling, adding a new stylesheet for the elements it creates would not be very difficult, right?

I'm sure this is conscious practice that is done with a purpose in mind. I'm only unaware of its explanation.

Also: I noticed that Redactor uses italic-tags () to style text as italic. Isn't this bad practice in terms of semantics?

</comment><comment><USER11> Then there is also my Hallo Editor, which is open source and uses contentEditable <http://hallojs.org/>

If you're using Create.js for making your stuff editable, it has editor abstraction that can drive Aloha, Hallo, and Redactor based on your configuration

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice one!

<comment><USER11> Oh, and while not enabled by default, Hallo has quite nice image handling. Some screencasts in [http://blog.iks-project.eu/semantic-enhanced-cmf-editor- now-...](http://blog.iks-project.eu/semantic-enhanced-cmf-editor-now- available/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> TinyMCE, CKEditor, CuteEditor, etc. There are over 60 public popular WYSIWYG web editors, about half of them are mature and free. Why would someone want to move to this, when it is fairly new and also not free?

</comment><comment><USER13> We're a happy paying customer of Redactor. Can't tell you how much we love it. It's literary the PERFECT WYSIWYG editor. Highly recommend you try it if you're looking for a fast & beautiful editor.

</comment><comment><USER14> Version 7.6 is on Github under CC-non-Commercial: <https://github.com/dybskiy/redactor-js>

Even version 8.03 (august 20120)seems to be free (<http://imperavi.com/webdownload/redactor/getold/>), the new licenses got apparently introduced in 8.1.0, which adds a plugin system and some other stuff (<http://imperavi.com/redactor/log/>)

<comment><USER15> I don't mind giving them $99 but I'd like the latest source on Github so I can fork and send pull requests easily.

[edit - ok. Not necessarily in Github but at least in a publicly accessible DVCS repo]

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love Redactor. I use it for an internal project and its easily the best compared to TinyMCE and others. Its clean, produces clean markup (you don't get random empty HTML tags like ..text) with no inline- styles.

I wrote a Python library to take its output and shove it in a word document: <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/HtmlToWord/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks very nice.

A few things I can't seem to see how to do (that I can do with TinyMCE):

1\. Define some CSS classes that I want to be available to the user (I'd never give colour and font controls to my users unless I wanted my lovely site design to end up full of bright-pink 42pt comic-sans)

2\. Supply a list of already-uploaded images

3\. Supply a list of internal links to the 'add link' dialog

4\. Resize handles for images (or even better - some preset sizes) - I process WIDTH and HEIGHT server side and replace the image with one resized on the server.

5\. Allow a couple of CSS classes for images (although I had to hack MCE to allow this)

<comment><USER17> #2: Looks like the Insert Image dialog has a list of images that have already been uploaded.

#4: There are no handles, but in Chrome 22 on a Mac at least I can drag anywhere in the image to resize.

The CSS classes/styles are the reason I'll probably stick with CKEditor for now. As cumbersome as CKEditor is overall, I can't lose the ability to add styles that my non-technical clients can choose from when editing their websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "unbelievably beautiful" - come on, it looks nice but it's just a wysiwyg editor - noone is going to moved to tears.

This apple initiated hyperbole should stop, it's pretty wanky and just devalues words.

Quiet understatement would be better; mention that it's well designed and easy to use instead.

<comment><USER19> Who's noone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would probably move HTML button to the far right of the menu and maybe get rid of strikethrough. Also, the P, H1, etc dropdown menu icon didn't immediately make sense to me. But those are all minor gripes -- this is really, really nice work. Congrats.

</comment><comment><USER21> Deobfuscated: <http://dpaste.de/1OJXR/>

</comment><comment><USER22> The Amazon S3 support seems to suggest that the authors believe it is acceptable to store your AWS key ID and "secret" key in your client-side JavaScript code. Am I missing something here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes you are absolutely correct. <http://imperavi.com/redactor/examples/s3/>

<comment><USER23> The AWS secret is nowhere in that code. Just the ID, which is not privileged.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The first thing I tried to do (in current Firefox) failed: select text over two paragraphs, change text colour. The selection then changes. Not a great start.

<comment><USER25> I got the same in chrome. I then pressed cmd-z (undo) and it duplicated the text that got changed without removing the color.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looks wonderful. Love the "clean on paste" function.

<comment><USER27> TinyMCE have something like this, but yeah, it should be a easy-access function.

The only downer for me : it uses JQuery, which I often avoid in admin pages.

<comment><USER28> Why?

<comment><USER27> Simply because my admin pages don't use a lot of JavaScript. Some Ajax, some image resizing... straightforward stuff, no need of a library.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Btw, even though the current Redactor editor isn't open source, one of the older versions is. It should be in Github

</comment><comment><USER30> This looks fantastic, I think I'll be using it soon.

What are the limitations of the free trial and how long does it last?

</comment><comment><USER31> Can't move images in Firefox 15.

</comment><comment><USER32> Quite impressive; given that it's smaller and faster at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER33> Will give this a go next week with a limited number of our admins

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there a moo tools equivalent of this?!

<comment><USER35> That was my first thought as well. For better or worse, I love MooTools and vastly prefer it to jQuery. It's the occasional time like this whene I have admit there's a cost to picking & sticking with the way less popular framework.

MooEditable is pretty good, but I'd plunk down the cash to swap this one in in a heartbeat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Such a simplistic but powerful tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed it is

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What's wrong with CKEditor?

</comment><comment><USER38> .</comment>


Endowment Effect and User Experience Design - <AUTHOR> https://remotebase.io/blog/redesigning-filters-for-better-ux/ <comment><AUTHOR> I recently tried to improve my project's UX.

Based on the experience, I wrote about why we are sometimes reluctant to improve UX, and how we can overcome that inertia.</comment>


Programming the Quantum Future - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/8/189851-programming-the-quantum-future/fulltext

<comment><USER2> Most likely not programmed by humans, at least at the highest levels.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes.</comment>


Non-publication of large randomized clinical trials - <AUTHOR> http://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f6104 <comment><USER2> _" Finally, we excluded trials that were registered with ClinicalTrials.gov more than one month after beginning enrolment, in order to ensure that the decision to register a study occurred separately from the decision to publish the study results. This decision was made because it has been shown that in spite of guidelines endorsing prospective trial registration, trials are often not registered for many months after the initiation of participant enrollment. In some of these cases, the registration of the trial is performed in preparation for publication and after the decision is made to publish the results. To the extent that this occurs, the inclusion of trials with delayed registration would bias our results. We limited this source of bias by focusing on trials for which registration was not delayed."_

I worry that the article is still examining a biased group. As it stands, over two thirds of the large trials (3710 out of 5427) were eliminated for registering after enrollment. It stands to reason, then, that this is standard industry practice. The remaining 10% that was studied is clearly bucking the common practice and I'd therefore suggest it's not a representative sample.

That said, I commend them for the study and can't suggest a better way to mitigate bias. I think it clearly shows a pervasive problem in the industry. I'd just be wary of citing the percentages too fervently.

<comment><USER3> I think the idea is that the number of studies unpublished because of negative results is a constant across all time scales.

The data here are probably sufficient to do this meta-analysis; looking at publication rate as a function of time between starting the study and registration, rather than looking at an arbitrary cutoff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 29% of large, randomized trials did not have published results. This is actually a much better stat than I was expecting, given the significant incentives for industry to hide bad outcomes. There's still an unquantified pile of hidden results that stem from studies that never register with ClinicalTrials.gov in the first place. (E.g. studies done outside of the US.)

<comment><USER5> _There 's still an unquantified pile of hidden results that stem from studies that never register with ClinicalTrials.gov in the first place. (E.g. studies done outside of the US.)_

How many studies done outside the US are not registered at ClinicalTrials.gov? If you intend to use your post-phase 1 trial for FDA approval, you have to register within 21 days of signing up your first person. Since the US is where drug and medical device companies make all their profits, I can't imagine why you would spend the money to do a trial just to have to rerun the trial later for FDA approval.

Plus if you ever intend on publishing in any of the major journals, you _have_ to register _before_ your trial starts or you'll be ineligible to publish (including phase I trials).

<comment><USER6> It doesn't make sense to me then why over 2/3rds of the trials this study looked at were excluded because they registered >1 month after enrollment started. Have they all found exceptions to, or ways to work around, the above restrictions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Non-publication was more common among trials that received industry funding (150/468, 32%) than those that did not (21/117, 18%)".

Oh, how unsurprising, BigPharma. When someone with an agenda discovers results that do not support that agenda, bet to bury those and never publish.

<comment><USER8> Is it really that malicious? Of course either way the result is the same, but I seeing some corporate actions I would expect that people are simply reassigned from failing trials and there's noone left to finish. If there's no incentive to publish the result and the producer doesn't get anything from it, why would they continue? It's not even malicious or stupid - it's just business as usual.

Providing some incentive that applies even when the study is not continued would be great. But the only thing I can come up with is escrow for some sum of money until the results are sent in. But that's also an incentive for fabricating any results once it's known that the trial is going to fail.

<comment><USER3> If a clinical trial is failing, and the corporation decides to reassign people, then the scientists involved still have an obligation to publish a result, even if that result is a short note saying "we broke the blind and the test results are useless".

The notion of having to register early in a study is an excellent one. In a perfect world, the FDA should interpret an unpublished clinical trial as "EVERYONE WHO TOOK THIS DRUG CAUGHT FIRE AND DIED" and factor that in to the decision to approve or deny a potential drug/device/methodology.</comment></comment></comment>


HN has ads? - <AUTHOR> http://efnx.com/hn-has-ads/ <comment> super-serial 'Jobs? Where we're going we don't need jobs.'

I've always wanted to have a parody shirt with that phrase on it, with a pic of Doc Brown wearing his metallic glasses... above it it would say "Entrepreneur" in 'Back To The Future' text. If I had money I would pay an artist to make that t-shirt design.

Sorry - that's what this "ad" reminded me of.

</comment><comment><USER2> Look at the "jobs" tab, that's for YC partners to advertise positions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. So does each job listing just slowly fall down the front page?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm relatively new here and I realized this quickly.</comment>


OpenNN – Open Neural Networks Library for Advanced Analytics - <AUTHOR> http://www.opennn.net/ <comment><USER2> Considering the glut of neural network libraries, it'd be useful if there were some blurb about what makes this "special".

To clarify myself, "what niche does this belong to". Caffe for instance remains (to the misery of people like me) the standard library on which reference CNNs are implemented (other than that little pony's YOLO :P).

Tensorflow/MXnet/Chainer/Torch have nice dynamic interfaces... but basically are doing the same thing underneath (calling cuDNN/GEMM), and have the backing of well-known researchers/big corporations (maybe not Chainer...).

<comment><USER3> It always hard to evaluate software from a website. I poked around it and found these samples, which tell a little more about usecases and usage:

[http://www.opennn.net/documentation/templates.html](http://www.opennn.net/documentation/templates.html)</comment></comment>


An HTML6 proposal for single-page apps without JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mozumder/HTML6

<comment><USER2> I'd rather see a new version of HTML that looks something like HAML or YAML rather than XML. This would make it smaller, easier to read, and less resource-intensive to parse.

HTML _should_ be something that can be used to describe any kind of user interface. It is used across a lot of applications, but it's still not well- suited to being the universal interface layer for all of computing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm really not sure why now is the time to solidify exactly what a single-page app is. It's a constantly moving target, so why not just stick with JS frameworks that can be a lot more flexible?

</comment><comment><USER4> sounds cool, but what about non CRUD operations like, animations, modals, toasts...</comment>


Gold coins found in Netherlands from last days of Roman Empire - <AUTHOR> http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/47551 <comment><USER2> This story reminds me of my Uncle, who is one of those end of the world preper type people who has been convinced for the last 30 years that we are on the brink of some sort of collapse. So he bought a bunch of gold and buried somewhere it out on the farm where he lives. He has not told anyone where including his own kids because he doesn't trust anyone. I am guessing his heirs will be out there with metal locators when he passes because I don't think he will ever tell anyone where it is. He is mum about how much gold but the speculation by the family is that it has to be pretty significant just based on his net worth. If they don't find it, maybe someday archeologists will dig up a big box full of krugerrands.

<comment><USER3> Nice. And this is how little treasure maps / quests are born :-). In 2013 a couple found a bunch of gold coins in California from the late 1800s[1], they had a 'face value' of $27,980. Had the unknown owner of these coins instead given them to a firm who would buy and equivalent amount of the brand new Dow Jones Industrial average stocks (first conceived in 1896) with its nominal value of 62.76. They would have gone through many ups and downs and be worth just under $10M, but as collectibles they are worth over $11M, so remember that when people say your Uncle is crazy :-). If you wait long enough, even crazy stuff seems reasonable.

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

<comment><USER2> My uncle is crazy, but not stupid (he has a PHD in physics) so, who knows :) Chuckle.

<comment><USER4> Getting a PhD means you went to a lot of school. You can still be stupid.

<comment><USER2> One more sort of funny thing about uncle Bernie, he worked for a very highly respected aerospace company for 40 years developing all kinds of crazy things. When he retired, he was the only one who knew how to make a very specific type of klystron tube. The DoD still orders about one or two of them a year which keeps him quite well off since each tube is well into the six figure territory! He bought all the equipment when he retired and makes about 2 or 3 tubes a year on a quonset hut on the farm. Kind cool really. Even though I think he is a nut, I still sorta have to give him all due respect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >archaeologists suspect the Middle Bronze Age tomb, perhaps on what was then a hill, was used in the 5th century as a handy place marker for the hoard.

This is like a mix of that scene in Fargo (movie version) and the season finale of Breaking Bad where the drug dealer is about to bribe Walter with the location of the remaining cash. Fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER6> Curious what these coins are worth and if the finders were compensated.

>The modern finders of the gold coins and the landowner have given the solidi on permanent loan to the Museum Valkhof in Nijmegen, which contains the largest collection of Roman finds in the Netherlands, where they are now on display, together again for the first time in decades, maybe even centuries.<

</comment><comment><USER7> its really interesting the things you find, even in open fields. usually useless iron and sometimes old guns.

once i found what looks a Smith & Wesson Model 1 - its mostly rust so hard to tell. it was in the cocked position, so I couldnt help but wonder if there was a story behind it.

Unfortunately, no gold coins =( that'd be an ultimate find

<comment><USER8> Off topic but curious, who makes good metal detectors today? I haven't used one since I was a small kid. But I might look at one. I just don't even know who makes good ones these days.

<comment><USER9> The Tesoro Compadre[0] is pretty great and very affordable.

Best in higher end might be Nokta[1] and its sister company Makro[2].

Anything from any of those three companies will be good and high value.

[0][http://www.tesoro.com/product/detectors/compadre/index.html](http://www.tesoro.com/product/detectors/compadre/index.html)

[1][http://noktadetectors.com/](http://noktadetectors.com/)

[2][http://makrodetector.com/](http://makrodetector.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Company sent email to 400+ applicants without BCC. Hilarity and stupidity ensued - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/mXJk5xN.jpg <comment><USER2> Either my sense of humour is different or this is not hilarious at all. Embarrassing for the company, maybe, but hilarious?

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, stupidity anyway. Do programming jobs really get 400+ applicants?

<comment><AUTHOR> Judging from this email, yes it does. It should be noted that it is a remote position.</comment></comment>


A Psychologist In Y Combinator, And His Mission To Revolutionize Therapy - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026967/a-psychologist-in-y-combinator-and-his-controversial-mission-to-revolutionize-therapy

<comment><USER2> A quote: "Your Listener--who could be a mental health professional, a student, a part-time mom ..."

Or an instance of Eliza, for those with little grasp of computer history:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA)

[http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3](http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3)</comment>


Hashids – Generate short hashes from numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.hashids.org <comment><USER2> > use them as forgotten password hashes

Please don't.

The author tries to trick you into believing it is secure by including a salt. However the resulting key space of the "hash" gives you the same security as a 5-6 character alphanumeric password. A motivated attacker could enumerate all possibilities in a few hours.

<comment><USER3> You could use that argument to say 4-digit bank card PINs are really bad security - and you'd be right, except that they're always locked out after N attempts.

Why not the same approach here? if you try to brute force a password reset, you lock out further attempts for a few minutes.

<comment><USER4> You can then use this lockout for a denial of service attack.

<comment><USER3> oh no ... I am unable to change my (perfectly secure) password for ten minutes because an attacker is attempting to brute force my password reset. I'd regard that as a feature, not a bug.

you don't need to lock out the entire account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. Effectively it's base62 encoding with a fixed salt. I think saying "encrypt" and "decrypt" is sort of misleading, even though you call the non-cryptographic nature of the hashing in the README files.

For my own products I do something a little different. Instead, when I create a record I generate a random number (with Ruby's SecureRandom module) and store the base32 encoding in the database. With the universe set at 1bil, this reliably generates a random 6 character string that I can safely show to the customer.

 _Edit: base62, not base82_

<comment><USER6> You're storing 6-char base-32 values, so 1073741824 possibilities, but you've got 50-50 chance of collision after 38582 values - that's not a lot, the birthday paradox bites again! Using much larger random values or hashes gives you a better safety margin.

<comment><USER5> I also have a unique constraint on the value and re-run the generator if there's a collision.

<comment><USER7> That is something that hashid avoids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If it is encryption and decryption why is it called 'hash'?

<comment><USER7> They explain that on their website.

<comment><USER8> Oh, I see:

>> _A true cryptographic hash cannot be decrypted. However, to keep things simple the word hash is used loosely to refer to the random set of characters that is generated -- like a YouTube hash._

What?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've used the Blowfish cipher to obfuscate database IDs into youtube-like URLs. Blowfish has a small 64-bit blocksize which fits nicely into a base64'd URL param.

</comment><comment><USER10> I recently tried using this for a project but ended up switching. I don't really need the encryption ability. More of an issue though is that there is no way to force that the hashes are "short". If you use their example for hashing the default _id in Mongo, you'll end up with a fairly long hash. The only way I could get them short was to switch to an auto-increment starting at 1 and then they will remain short for as long as the number is small. This presented other issues and in the end I found ShortId [1] which made the whole process much simpler.

\- [1] [https://github.com/dylang/shortid](https://github.com/dylang/shortid)

</comment><comment><USER11> I mocked up something similar [1] a while ago, although operating on fixed- length integers instead of db keys and not designed with any regard for the "decryption" process. I'm curious if it's flawed in any significant way for the purpose of converting sequential ids into apparently-random distinct ids.

1\. [http://ideone.com/qLQHI5](http://ideone.com/qLQHI5)

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been using this for a while now and I'm pretty happy with it. Java implementation of Crockford's Base32 algorithm for encoding simple numeric values:

[https://code.google.com/p/unsuck/source/browse/trunk/src/mai...](https://code.google.com/p/unsuck/source/browse/trunk/src/main/java/unsuck/io/CrockfordBase32.java)

</comment><comment><USER13> I have an old blogpost around the same idea that many people contributed versions in different languages to: [http://kvz.io/blog/2009/06/10/create- short-ids-with-php-like...](http://kvz.io/blog/2009/06/10/create-short-ids- with-php-like-youtube-or-tinyurl/) Hope it's useful

</comment><comment><USER14> If you don't need salts you can just use the inbuilt base64 functions:

       var numbers = [1, 2, 3,  4, 5];
       var encoded = btoa(''+numbers).replace(/=/g, '');
       var decoded = atob(encoded).split(',').map(Number);
       console.log(encoded, decoded);

</comment><comment><USER15> If you need a short code the user will have to type the legibility is more important than the length, you can optimize for human input like this:

[https://gist.github.com/hcarvalhoalves/5330d8af36e7163d58c4](https://gist.github.com/hcarvalhoalves/5330d8af36e7163d58c4)

<comment><USER14> You still need to remove '5' and 'S'. I'd like a to see people use similar algorithms for mobile input. The two most important characteristics would be to be purely lowercase and to cluster numbers and letters to minimize keyboard switching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I actually created something really similar, except with more options to fine tune the encoding/decoding process:

[https://github.com/mikecao/hashkit](https://github.com/mikecao/hashkit)

</comment><comment><USER17> FYI the salt has a max size n - All salts longer than n are equivalent to using a salt of substr(salt, 0, n)

</comment><comment><USER18> My only complaint is that not all the implementations yield the same results.</comment>


Contextualise: Manage your knowledge - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise <comment><USER2> For personal knowledge, most graph-based ideas were pioneered by Niklas Luhmann in his Zettelkasten system. This system is described with lots of detail in [1] and made him extraordinarily productive.

Essentially, Luhmann had one small card per semantic unit. Cards had alphanumeric IDs. Cards backlinked to other cards using said IDs. He also used a card branching mechanism implemented in IDs as e.g. 123 -> 123a -> 123a1 which he called Folgezettel.

Lastly, he also had cards whose role was mostly to connect topics by serving as a link hub.

It's a really simple system that you can implement using plain text, Org, Markdown or some note taking application like Apple Notes or OneNote plus a few conventions.

After trying many things, for personal use I think nothing beats plain text (or a plain text format). I don't need a server, I can easily sync things, and it's really future proof.

I have also scaled this kind of setup to larger organizations, albeit using a more classical wiki-like approach (read longer articles instead of small semantic unit cards). For example, GitLab has excellent continuous integration. You can use an Emacs or Pandoc inside a Docker to export Org or Markdown files into an HTML.

[1] [https://takesmartnotes.com/](https://takesmartnotes.com/)

<comment><USER3> org-mode is immediately where my mind went when I saw this story on HN.

It's an interesting problem domain that I think benefits from having so many people approach it from different directions, like the person you mention, OP, and all the people that hack on GTD apps, or org-mode customizations, etc etc.

I don't really have any valuable insight in this, just a mishmash of documents with TODOs, notes, plans and knowledge. I wonder how disruptive it would be if we had a highly focused AI that really understood how to organize people?

<comment><USER2> Org is great because it's plain text, but at the same time offers outlining, timestamps, tables, links and lots of other features. Following Emacs tradition, it doesn't impose any workflow on you. It just gives you some primitives to build the system you want.

A great feature of Org are programmatic views of your data, possibly from many files at the same time. Some are already implemented, but still customizable, like Org Agenda. I use Org Agenda to have a Kanban-like view of my projects. I can simply see all WIP tasks, approaching deadlines and events in a little plain text window.

That's, I think, the minimum viable productivity system. You have a list of projects with tasks, some deadlines, some events and some inbox. You select a few tasks to do every day, like Ivy Lee suggested, and you do them. You want to see these plus deadlines and scheduled events which can be easily achieved with Org Agenda.

A GTD-like system would tag tasks with contexts, and offer some context- specific views, but I find that's too much work. Another pitfall of GTD, in my opinion, is that it doesn't encourage WIP limits which eventually makes it overwhelming.

I credit GTD with popularizing the need for an inbox, the task-centric view to time management, and the distinction between tasks, tasks with deadlines and events. But I think GTD leads to too much planning waste, projects broken into tasks that get constantly outdated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very interesting. I always thought of knowledge as a graph (as opposed to a document or a tree), and browsing the graph of knowledge will be really useful for learners.

I think the obstacle is more on the authoring side (how to build/edit graphs as easily as plain documents). There is also standard taxonomy challenges, about choosing the "types" of the nodes and the associations (values of the `instance_of` of the `Association`s in TopicDB). If the platform restricts things to a fixed taxonomy, you lose expressiveness, but on the other hand if you let users create any-which category they want things can grow quickly out of hand).

A related project in that space is [https://metacademy.org/](https://metacademy.org/) whose code is here [https://github.com/metacademy/metacademy- application](https://github.com/metacademy/metacademy-application)

I was working on an app similar to contextualize a while back, but had to pause because of other projects, but I hope to come back to it soon. I hand't gotten very far on it, so maybe I can contribute to contextualize. My main focus is on building tools for serialization/deserialization of the graph data to a text-based format that can be stored in git repos so that multiple authors can collaborate on building out a knowledge base using pull requests, see data fixtures here [https://github.com/minireference/structure- api/tree/master/d...](https://github.com/minireference/structure- api/tree/master/data) )

<comment><AUTHOR> Really like the idea of a version-controlled text-based graph format. I'll definitely take a look at the GitHub repo. Thanks for your feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are interested in this kind of problems, you might want to learn about MediaWiki (the software behind wikipedia) and the SemanticMediaWiki extension. That allows for extracting and representing formal knowledge about wiki pages. It's quite powerful and allows for programming quite sophisticated databases ontop of MediaWiki (kind of in-system effect). Also WikiData is a project/MediaWiki extension worth exploring.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip. I'll take a look. What I am trying to accomplish with Contextualise is a straight-forward UI on top of a powerful, but still conceptually simple data model (topic maps).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pretty cool! I've long hoped for an open source tool that's competitive to Analyst's Notebook [1]. It's a tool that's a workhorse in all kinds of knowledge mapping domains. In a pinch you can force press yED to kind of sorta be a substitute, but AFAIK, there's no real user facing replacement.

1 - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Siq4LVy- tTg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Siq4LVy-tTg)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll take a look at the YouTube video you linked to. I hope to make Contextualise publicly available this week. Thanks for your feedback. It's appreciated :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Brett, thanks for this!

Literally just last night I was lamenting that there was no open-source software similar to Roam (roamresearch.com) and how I didn't even know where to start if I were to make it myself.

This is a great option, I can't wait to try it out!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome :) It's my intention to make Contextualise publicly available (free of charge) within the next week or two. I'll announce it on the project's GitHub page.

<comment><USER7> Really looking forward to it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use OWL ontologies for some projects and am about to build a very ambitious one for an lightweight ERP (basic idea is to let python users import the ontology into their excel environments to normalize their data across the org). Given tools like json-ld and Protege, what did those not do that prompted creating this? Really interested in alternatives.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I wasn't aware of, at least, some of those tools. But, also... Contextualise really fits my very specific needs and way of modeling knowledge/information. So, I was scratching a very specific itch. But, also I hope that with Contextualise I am putting something new on the table even if that is just a somewhat simple UI on top of a straight-forward but understandable data model.

Thanks for your feedback. Genuinely appreciated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Graphs aren't enough; we need path equivalence and multiple edges. We need categories.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you elaborate a bit on this. Sounds like an interesting take.

<comment><USER9> When I'm mapping out a narrative arc, sometimes I will want to indicate that some action is monotone or idempotent, or that it is isomorphic or reversible from some other state. Those properties end up being path equivalences.

Similarly, sometimes there can be multiple social relations between characters within a narrative setting; somebody might be both a friend and a parent, for example. Properly modelling this requires allowing multiple distinct edges between vertices.

And, finally, technically any hypergraph with path equivalence is a category.

When I'm doing narrative analysis on a whiteboard, the diagrams that I draw are category-theoretic, not graph-theoretic, and I'd like to be able to bring that richness into my narrative-mapping tool without having to flatten everything down into annotated graphs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I need to think a bit more about what you are saying. This is a very interesting point of view. Can I come back to you on this?

<comment><USER9> Don't worry about me specifically. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00526](https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00526) is more food for thought, if you need it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Any feedback, pointers to additional resources and so forth... it's all greatly appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Knowledge management as a career typically involves a deep focus on the relationship between people, process, and organization as much as the epistemological hierarchy of data/information/knowledge.

I see this tool as conceptually useful, but like most knowledge graphs I still don't see the inherent process behind the transformation and relation of various nodes.

Is there a layer I'm missing from the overview?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I don't think you have missed anything from the overview. Yes, you're right... the process to construct and maintain the knowledge graph is not part of the application. In that respect, I have been considering several related features to help the user with that process: 1) topic map templates that allow for very quick creation of a predefined taxonomy and 2) machine-learning for auto-tagging and recommendations for associations.

Although the above features do not make for the complete process you are referring to, at least they assist users as part of that process.

Food for thought.

<comment><USER10> Interesting ideas, however it still sounds like you're tackling knowledge as if it's a fixed point in time. That's good to do when you're starting to build your knowledge base, but there's a stage of understanding beyond that which I'm trying to define and quantify.

As a knowledge manager, one of my biggest issues is the temporal nature of knowledge and conveying the cyclical nature of inputs and outputs to people. The "clean" process is often the exception in the real world, and short circuiting often occurs throughout the knowledge development process.

I don't think it really becomes apparent until you've been looking at the same knowledge for a while and start to see there's a pattern above the pattern. Changes in one part of the graph seem to be connected to changes in another part of the graph.

I'm searching for a way to visualize this extra dimension of data. I don't know if graph edges are complex enough to show the dimensionality of the change.

Perhaps a simple time-lapse overview of a graph would provide what I'm looking for. Or maybe there's a temporal relational layer that sits above topics and resources. I'm not sure.

edit: Hmm. A hypergraph seems like a relevant analogy. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraph)

<comment><USER11> This is almost certainly lower-level than what you are looking for, but I think you are describing a bitemporal graph data model: [https://opencrux.com](https://opencrux.com)

<comment><USER10> Thank you! The overview definitely sounds relevant. I will look into this deeper.

edit: Yep. The integrated bitemporality definitely lays the foundation that would be necessary to implement knowledge hypergraphs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there any easy way to sync the DB across machines? TopicDB is built on postgres. I have no idea which file to back up there. My current notetaking tool uses sqlite to store notes, that I know how to backup as it's one single file.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. I will, at some point, make it possible for a user to download their topic maps. But, yes... you have a point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oh wow! I didn't think anyone was using Topic Maps anymore, much less with Python! I'm definitely going to have to give this a closer look. Thank you for sharing!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome. Been using topic maps since, at least, 2006. After all these years still my go-to data model for both knowledge and content management.

<comment><USER13> I fell in love with them when I took a class on them in Library School, back in 2007. Like many others in the Topic Maps space, I now work mostly with RDF and OWL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, topic maps did originate from the library world, if I remember correctly :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> When installing Contextualise, please install TopicDB (the topic maps engine on top of which Contextualise is built) directly from GitHub. Instructions to install Contextualise and TopicDB are provided, here: [https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise#install- the-d...](https://github.com/brettkromkamp/contextualise#install-the- development-version)

<comment><USER14> You should build it into the Dockerfile so it's easy to try out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately my Docker know-how is severely lacking. I'm hoping that someone will help out with Docker support. In the meantime, I will try to get up to speed with Docker to be able to fix the current Docker setup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I tried my best to use Google Keep for a couple of years & finally gave up. I exported all my notes (maybe a thousand cards, each with multiple links, text notes & image snips) into a Jekyll-based static site on GitHub pages.

It's still a bit clunky but allows me more freedom to organize as I see fit. Plus, being a public page forces me to consider readability.

<comment><USER16> Google should invest in making keep into a auto flashcard learning system. It would be awesome if they integrate this with annotations from Google Books like Google Docs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very cool. I remember seeing a similar tool called Yewno that Stanford had access to that had a semantic web of topics linked by a graph, and wanting to find or make an open source alternative. I can see a lot of possible uses for this in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent. I will make Contextualise available at some point in the next week or two. I'll let you know when that happens, if you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Looks like Tiddly+graph plugin but with extra steps.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll obviously Google it, but what is Tiddly? :)

<comment><USER19> [https://tiddlywiki.com/](https://tiddlywiki.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Things I Won't Work With: Dimethylcadmium (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2013/05/08/things_i_wont_work_with_dimethylcadmium <comment><USER2> These are always a delight to read. Check out the whole series here:

[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thing...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/things- i-wont-work-with)

<comment><USER3> Sand Won't Save You This Time (the prequel to Chlorine Trifluoride: Some Empirical Findings) is also worth the read. Quoting John Drury Clark:

 _It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water- with which it reacts explosively._

[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/san...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time)

<comment><USER4> Worth the read for me.

I Googled the ISBN of the quoted book by Clark "Ignition" and found a PDF copy online.

[http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf](http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf)

<comment><USER5> There was some discussion when that PDF was posted here 3 weeks ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10683778](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10683778)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> it's not chemistry, but tangentially, I have another amazing read.

Liquid N2 is held in a dewar, consisting of an internal and an external tank with vacuum in between. In case of overpressure, there are blowout valves, designed to relieve pressure in a large hole rather than a small one. You'd rather have a large hole because a high pressure tank with a small hole is basically a rocket. Or a grenade. Also, the N2 liquid to gas expansion factor is roughly 1:700.

In any case, some special person at Texas A&M noticed a N2 dewar with a presumably damaged overpressure blowout valve and fucking _welded a brass plug in place_. Eventually, the tank catastrophically failed, most likely due to corrosion of the internal tank, leading to temperature increase and the aforementioned 1:700 volume increase. According to I believe the tank manufacturer, the tank mechanically fails at 1200 psi. When it finally went boom, it shredded the room it was in, put a 24-in hole through a concrete floor, significantly damaged a concrete/steel support beam, and was eventually stopped by a 3-in water main and other stuff in a mechanical room. Miraculously it went at 3-am or so and no-one was present.

When people determined what had happened, some unlucky dude who didn't get paid nearly enough got to frantically inspect every tank in the chemistry building to see if the mystery welder had "upgraded" any others.

There's a report pdf somewhere on the internet that I can't find at the moment.

I may have some details wrong but the boom part is definitely right =P

edit: [https://web.archive.org/web/20060901094515/http://finance.ta...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060901094515/http://finance.tamu.edu/ehsd/report_on_chemistry_301A.pdf)

it's worth looking at the pictures in the pdf

<comment><USER7> I'm surprised a 3" water main stopped it, pipes in general are typically made of very soft, low quality steel. It probably just ran out of energy after flying through everything else.

The plug wasn't welded, it simply screwed into existing pipe threads replacing an overpressure valve.

<comment><USER8> "It struck two 3 inch water mains and drove them and the electrical wiring above them into the concrete roof of the building, cracking it."

=> that concrete roof probably had more to do with the stopping than the pipes below it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I handle vapors of organometallic compounds everyday. dimethyl-X, trimethyl-X, tetramethyl-X and other long name OM compounds that can kill slowly or instantly. Recently theres HF vapors and today its a cyanide compound.

I'm lucky to still be alive!

<comment><USER10> 1) Why do you have to handle these compounds every day? (if it's for work, what sort of work (oh, and are you well compensated)? if it's for research, research on what? if it's for fun, _why_?)

2) What sort of personal protective gear do you have to use?

<comment><USER9> 1) I'm a grad student working on MOCVD and ALD, so no I'm not well compensated :(

2) Not enough. Respirator, coats and gloves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That was an entertaining read. The comments are worth it as brief glimpses into the wild west of consumer chemicals. I'm glad most of the toxic exotic compounds in my life are safely held within a laptop's plastic casing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Enjoyable read! My mum is a painter and was recently involved in a campaign against new cadmium regulation in the UK. It's used to produce a red paint that apparently has no substitute. They argued that since it's very expensive, little of it ends up in drains. I'm pleased to say the regulation went through anyway, but with an exception for oil paints.

</comment><comment><USER13> In grad school around 1980 I was doing some reaction under a hood using DMSO as the solvent and for some reason it was converted into DMS (DiMethyl Sulfide) and we discovered how bad the vent system was in the building (it was terrible). The building was evacuated and they forced me to go back in to look up how toxic DMS was (stupid grad students are expendable). Thankfully while it is chemical related to Hydrogen Sulfide it was not all that dangerous and in a couple of hours it cleared. However if you ever get to smell it you will run as far as you can and the odor is unstoppable. Forget tear gas, toss some of this into a building and watch everything run out. Cleaning out the hood was a terrible experience.

</comment><comment><USER14> ... I think I'm going to go through my basement and make sure I don't have any old nicad batteries kicking around now.

<comment><USER15> While cadmium is toxic, organometallic compounds are much worse than what you have in your batteries.

For example, you can play with mercury. You definitely SHOULD NOT, but it won't kill you. On the other hand, dimethyl mercury WILL kill you.

<comment><USER16> When talking about the toxicity of dimethylmercury, it is almost obligatory to mention [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn)

 _exposure to only a few drops of the chemical absorbed through the gloves proved to be fatal after less than a year._

<comment><USER6> wow. Apparently nobody thought to see if it goes through latex gloves, and it apparently does in seconds! Current safety protocol is now "highly resistant, flexible, plastic-laminate gloves [...]. For increased protection, such thin gloves can be worn under long-cuffed, heavy-duty outer gloves made of, for example, neoprene." Or just not using dimethylmercury.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


White Coat Waste Takes Aim at Animal Research – From the Right - <AUTHOR> https://undark.org/article/bellotti-animal-research-white-coat-waste/ <comment><USER2> Interview with Anthony Bellotti..

[https://m.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/white-coat- waste_n_594...](https://m.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/white-coat- waste_n_5942786)</comment>


BigScreen — Javascript library for HTML5 Fullscreen API - <AUTHOR> http://brad.is/coding/BigScreen/ BigScreen is a simple library for using the JavaScript Full Screen API. <comment><USER2> I wrote a long blog post about a few months ago about the perils of using fullscreen in modern browsers: [http://sorcery.smugmug.com/2012/06/06/using- html5s-fullscree...](http://sorcery.smugmug.com/2012/06/06/using- html5s-fullscreen-api-for-fun-and-profit/), which is cited as a reference (awesome!). This explains why some of the code looks similar, I'm glad it was helpful.

This library could use error detection and handling as there are situations where fullscreen could be aborted or fail to start.

It's much better to attempt going fullscreen and have callbacks for errors and successfully entering fullscreen mode. Users can have preferences set to not allow it, press ESC during the transition or a number of other scenarios can occur.

There's also some CSS fixes between browsers that could be included. Safari and Chrome don't stretch the element to 100% monitor width and don't apply a background color by default so you can see 'through' the fullscreen window.

That being said it's good someone is working towards something that's relatively cross-browser. The fullscreen API right now is extremely varied but a really awesome tool for advanced web apps.

<comment><USER2> To clarify I mean a onerror callback would be nice to have if something goes wrong when attempting to go fullscreen. If I have some time I'll write a patch!

<comment><USER3> My bad! There is a BigScreen.onerror, but I missed it in the docs.

It should cover most things, but I didn't fully test it. I also couldn't get any browser to fire the native event in my testing.

<comment><USER2> I think you can get it to fire if you trigger requestFullscreen outside of a user-initiated event? I'll have to check on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best JS library for fullscreen that I've found is <https://github.com/toji/game-shim>

It's good because it shims the W3C specified fullscreen API; you only have to learn the specified API, you don't have to learn some other API.

<comment><USER3> I actually really like that way of doing it, but I don't think it would work well for what I was trying to do with BigScreen, mainly for the video fallback behavior. When browsers do drop the prefixes, part of the functionality wouldn't exist anymore.

<comment><USER4> Your video fallback behaviour seems superfluous. If you want fullscreen on a video, why don't you just request fullscreen on the video rather than its container?

Having the fullscreen request shift to the descendent video also breaks the case where you actually have an element containing a video that you want to make fullscreen, for example if you have custom controls for your video element... This is simply impossible with your API.

<comment><USER3> If you have custom controls, putting that element in full screen will work if the browser you're in (and/or the iframe you're in) supports the newer fullscreen API.

It only falls back in the case where that doesn't work (older browser, no allowfullscreen attribute on the iframe) and supports the older API that is just for video tags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> For everyone that is blocked, the GitHub page is <https://github.com/bdougherty/BigScreen>

</comment><comment><USER5> @bdougherty Would be nice with some credit, seeing as you obviously based it on my lib:

[https://github.com/bdougherty/BigScreen/blob/master/bigscree...](https://github.com/bdougherty/BigScreen/blob/master/bigscreen.js) [https://github.com/sindresorhus/screenfull.js/blob/master/sr...](https://github.com/sindresorhus/screenfull.js/blob/master/src/screenfull.js)

</comment><comment><USER6> A possible fallback when the browser doesn't support the fullscreen API is to go "full page" (position:fixed;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%).

<comment><USER7> And some very high z-index value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So... this appears to do little more than normalize prefixes. So why not just throw a normalization gist up? The first part is:

      HTMLElement.prototype.requestFullscreen = HTMLElement.prototype.requestFullscreen
        || HTMLElement.prototype.webkitRequestFullscreen
        || HTMLElement.prototype.webkitRequestFullScreen
        || HTMLElement.prototype.mozRequestFullScreen;

<comment><USER3> It does way more normalizing than just the name of the function. It works around a number of bugs when the element is in an iframe, and it has a fallback if you're using it for video (which was the main reason I wrote it).

<comment><USER8> Hi Brad, I don't mean to discourage your work. This just fills like mostly a polyfill. Bug fixes should be included in polyfills. Nothing wrong with that, that's a valuable thing. But I don't want to learn a new API unless it provides a new type of abstraction over the Fullscreen API and this one doesn't seem to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know of a way to fix the problem when getting out of a fullscreen page in Chrome for Mac? Normally, when trying to exit fullscreen page when the browser is already maximized, it gets thrown out of its workspace - a minor annoyance, but it's irksome enough that I try to avoid using HTML5 fullscreen in web pages.

</comment><comment><USER10> This website is blocked as 'pornography' at my workplace. So... that's interesting.

<comment><USER11> As far as I can tell that's a mistake. At least that page is perfectly clean, but now I don't necessarily want to go hunting around to see why it was classified like that ;)</comment></comment>


What to Look for in an Accelerator Program - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/225242 <comment><USER2> Can anyone point to any serious exits from an accelerator program not named _Y Combinator_ or _TechStars_?</comment>


Blender's Prehistory – Traces on Commodore Amiga (1987-1991) - <AUTHOR> http://zgodzinski.com/blender-prehistory/ <comment><USER2> > Today Blender is one of the industry leaders, but it started quite small, > three decades ago.

Which of the major shops are using Blender?

Edit: This question isn't a dig against Blender, y'all, I'm genuinely interested in where Blender is seeing industrial use, as the article doesn't touch on this!

<comment><USER3> Before they went bust, some folks at Rhythm 'N Hues publicly talked about using it. It has pockets of usage at ILM, there are lots of software pockets though in these big design firms. Not all bitmap and vector tools are Adobe.

Unreal Engine has been pushing Blender a lot too, and attracted hires from ILM, they mentioned this a lot in their video podcast.

A lot of the time you only know a company is using something like Houdini because they pay for the promotion or give the customer a big license discount.

"Here at X we used Y for Z."

<comment><USER2> > It has pockets of usage at ILM

Very cool! Do you know if they are using Blender for modeling, or otherwise? I hear ILM is mostly prman on the rendering side, these days.

<comment><USER4> The primary modellers at ILM are Zeno, their internal tool, then Maya and then Modo, but especially in some departments, it's a whatever gets the job done mentality. I do not however know what usage Blender gets internally at ILM

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The history of Bender was pretty well explained in a long interview with Ton Roosendaal by Andrew Price of Blender Guru.

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

</comment><comment><USER6> Good times! I never came across Tracer or Sculpt 3D, but I did start out with Real 3D [1] which actually was created in 1983 for the CBM64 and later came to the Amiga in 1990.

About the same time Lightwave 3D [2] came out which first was bound to Newtek's famous VideoToaster but of course someone found a way to emulate the hardware so "everybody" could use it :) even for us who needed PAL (disk swapping was a thing back in those days).

I recon that Blender is a very capable 3D software as well (and as a NLE video editor (!)). I never got around to properly use as I was a customer with Newtek but I kind of giving up on Newtek so I might dig into the massive information and tutorials out there for Blender.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realsoft_3D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realsoft_3D)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightWave_3D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightWave_3D)

<comment><USER7> LightWave 3D, Cinema 4D, Realsoft 3D, Aladdin4d, Amiga Reflections, Sculpt 3D, Dkbtrace, Imagine, Turbosilver, Real3D.

On a home computer. In the 80's to early 90's. The future is where you have been.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> while we're going back, youtube has some video of 3D Studio DOS from 88 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6BIIL1CY9g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6BIIL1CY9g)

<comment><USER7> Let's go back a bit further - MIT Lincoln Labs, 1963: [https://youtu.be/t3ZsiBMnGSg?t=190](https://youtu.be/t3ZsiBMnGSg?t=190)

<comment><USER8> Lot more people have seen Sutherland than this little 3D Studio demo though :)

Still worth seeing</comment></comment></comment>


Trump is taking Hydroxychloroquine since last one and a half week - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/XtHbXshy-_A <comment><USER2> His conversation was not fulfilling to watch; no concrete numbers, names, or sources. "Lots of frontline workers are taking hydroxychloroquine..." Is there a study? Anything?

This is what all of these news sources my parents watch have in common that I wish would change - this loose relationship with evidence and sources. Ok he said it, but why, who, when, what? I don't want to complain about lack of critical thinking, but these statements aren't facts, they're opinions coming from trump.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wonder if he shines light up his butt and gargles with Clorox too?</comment>


Logging in with External Services - <AUTHOR> http://www.vertabelo.com/blog/technical-articles/database-design-logging-in-with-external-services <comment><USER2> You probably mean login in, and not logging which is definitely something else.</comment>


Announcing Rust 1.12 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/09/29/Rust-1.12.html <comment><USER2> MIR is here! End-users probably aren't going to be too excited about this just yet, since MIR's focus in 1.12 is in ensuring there are no correctness regressions (always a risk when you rewrite an enormous portion of your middle-end) or noticeable runtime perf or compile-time perf regressions. I do recall pcwalton remarking that MIR improved Servo's compile times by about 20%, though this is probably not what one would expect across the board. In any case, the upcoming 1.13 release is where the rubber is really going to start meeting the road: middle-end optimizations that operate on the MIR (i.e. [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/36388](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/pull/36388) ); outright removing old trans (which remains in 1.12 via a compiler flag) which allows us to actually start taking advantage of non-zeroing drop (a long-held dream!); an initial spike for incremental recompilation; plus big miscellaneous performance improvements such as [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/36524](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/pull/36524) . As ever, no matter how exciting Rust's present is, it somehow seems that its future is even more so. :P

(Which isn't to overshadow Jonathan Turner's heroic compiler error message overhaul that has been long in the works, or the dozens and dozens of new volunteers who answered the call to help us transition: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/35233](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/35233) . But I've had the new error messages enabled for months now, and it's easy to forget that not everyone has been enjoying them this whole time!)

<comment><USER3> I'm also excited about the possibilities MIR opens up. As I recall, non- lexical lifetimes depended on MIR. Does anybody know what the current ETA is for that feature?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's still in the pre-RFC phase, so there's no solid ETA. This was in fact one of the largest blockers, though, so we'll see how it goes. To make the status of MIR more clear:

      * 1.11: "old trans" by default, MIR with a flag
      * 1.12: MIR by default, "old trans" with a flag
      * 1.13: MIR only, "old trans" is gone

Given that we've had 6 weeks so far with MIR-by-default, everything is looking good, but in theory, making it more widely available might turn up issues. If something catastrophic happens, in theory, old trans could be brought back. So we'll see how the next few weeks goes.

That doesn't mean _no_ work has been done on non-lexical lifetimes, see [http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2016/05/09/non-...](http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2016/05/09/non- lexical-lifetimes-adding-the-outlives-relation/) (that's a link to the last of three posts). But there's still work to write an actual RFC, discuss it, and then land it.

<comment><USER4> The information about lifetimes will be available to IDEs? So may be possible to identify lifetimes by the color from each variable [https://medium.com/@evnbr/coding-in- color-3a6db2743a1e#.lu50...](https://medium.com/@evnbr/coding-in- color-3a6db2743a1e#.lu5021d0u)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's been really cool watching the design and development of the new error messages from the outside. There was significant inspiration drawn from the Elm language's fantastic error messages [1] and even a project that provided something similar (but not built into rustc) [2].

I've always thought that Rust's command line tooling is really top notch. The language may be complex, but the authors of rustc make it a point of pride to make it as easy as possible for users anyway. The new errors will make it that much easier to learn and be productive in Rust.

Also, the community involvement in this release is really spectacular. There were 83 participants working together on the new error messages [3] and 176 total involved directly with the rust compiler just for 1.12! (ok, well, including a few bots)

[1] [https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/compiler-errors-for- humans...](https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/compiler-errors-for- humans/2310/10) [2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/3totkg/dybuk_the_elml...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/3totkg/dybuk_the_elmlike_rustc_error_pretty_printer/) [3] [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/35233](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/35233)

<comment><USER6> > The language may be complex

Compared to what?

Edit: This was not meant as a slight, I quite like Rust's comapritive simplicity when held up to other non-GC 'systems' languages.

<comment><USER7> To answer you seriously—I think a great contrast would be the simplicity of Go. The GC and type system are both the opposite of providing complexity to the user; they provide the only way to get anything done, and it's easy to keep in your head.

For the record, I prefer rust.

<comment><USER8> I would like to switch from go to rust. But rust's standard library isn't as mature as that of go. Do you think there are compatible crates to packages from go's standard library.

I need

* json/gzip/etc. * string manipulation * good unicode support (normalization, etc.)

not much actually.

And one important question: which one do you think is best for large projects? Both were built to deal with difficulties rising from large projects but took two opposite directions...

<comment><USER9> > But rust's standard library isn't as mature as that of go.

I'm not really sure that's true. Rust probably has a smaller standard library overall, but there are things that it has that Go doesn't: B-trees, native OS string encodings, functional tools, round(), etc.

The bigger point is that the crates.io ecosystem readily has support for everything you're asking for, and it's much easier to pull in third-party dependencies in Rust.

<comment><USER10> I am fairly certain I successfully got binary trees deleted from the standard library. If you monsters added it back, so help me god...

(BTrees, on the other hand, thrive)

<comment><USER9> Sorry about that. Corrected myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thank you, Rust standard library maintainers, for making it very easy for me to contribute `BinaryHeap::peek_mut` to the stdlib, which landed in stable today!

<comment><USER12> Nice contribution!

I was just browsing the apidocs of peek_mut. Can you share a motivating use case? It wasn't immediately obvious to me.

<comment><USER13> I imagine if every item in the heap is a queue itself, you could use peek mut to get an item off the current max queue. After the modification, the former max element is sifted down to account for it's (probably) changed key.

<comment><USER14> The documentation really should mention the resifting, and why this is useful. It only mentions that the heap may be inconsistent if the `PeekMut` isn't properly dropped, without explaining why.

It's basically replacing the former (never stabilized) `push_pop` and `replace`, which Python folks can relate to similar methods in their `heapq`, for instance. With separate `push` and `pop` calls, the heap must be sifted twice, but with `peek_mut` you can update the head in-place and sift only once.

<comment><USER15> I agree-- you should send in a PR to the docs!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Optional JSON output for the compiler error messages is a really cool feature. This could improve web-technology-based Rust development (browsers, Electron apps), giving nice feedback to the editor, which could implement the error message highlighting _right there in your code_.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll just leave this here: [https://github.com/nrc/rustw](https://github.com/nrc/rustw)

<comment><USER4> It reminds me Play Framework!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo/pull/2857](https://github.com/rust- lang/cargo/pull/2857)

This will be nice. I couldn't possibly sell rust to my employers if we had to go to an outside source for packages like [EDIT: rust/crate currently does, with crates.io]. Being able to host our own mirrors (for CM purposes, if nothing else) is essential.

<comment><USER18> FWIW hosting your own mirror is possible today. It just requires a bit of work to match the crates.io format and specify it via .cargo/config ([http://doc.crates.io/config.html](http://doc.crates.io/config.html)). You can specify the index url as a "file://" and point it anywhere you like.

Definitely like this new approach though.

<comment><USER17> Thanks. My (limited) search for this a couple months back didn't turn anything up. This will be useful for my personal projects (I often work offline).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like the look of this language, and loaded it up to play around with for the first time yesterday. This was the first thing that struck me when I compiled the obligatory hello world..

      09/29/2016  04:51 PM         1,746,638 main.exe
      09/29/2016  04:51 PM                43 main.rs

1.7Mb for the exe from 43 bytes of code on windows 10. :/

AllTheLibs? I'm hoping I can improve on that a bit.

<comment><USER20> 1.7 megabytes is essential nothing in both modern disk/flash space and network costs. This isn't to say that efficient, small code isn't important, but it seems really common for a lot of programmers to freak out when there's some minimum executable size required for general "runtime" stuff, even when practically speaking it doesn't really matter in the real world outside of niche embedded system applications.

If each 43 bytes you compiled expanded to ANOTHER 1.7mb, then, yeah, that's not good, but that isn't the case here.

<comment><USER21> It might not matter to an individual user or developer, but if Rust is to be successful in the long run I think it's important for Rust-based desktop applications to be adopted.

If an application wants to be included in the standard install of, say, Ubuntu, one of the biggest costs from the Ubuntu maintainer's point of view is going to be "how much space will this take up on the iso, and what are we going to have to remove if we include this?" If the binaries are very small, it's a lot easier to make the case that they should be included.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's easier for a distro to do dynamic linking for Rust binaries, since they can mandate a single compiler version across the ecosystem.

<comment><USER21> True. If dynamic linking is all that's needed to get tiny binaries, then that's probably sufficient from the distro's point of view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Congrats to the team and thank you!

As always, I've updated my Docker image for 1.12. Both the "1.12.0" and "latest" tags are now 1.12: [https://hub.docker.com/r/jimmycuadra/rust/](https://hub.docker.com/r/jimmycuadra/rust/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Congratulations on all the good work to everyone!

Trying it out now.

</comment><comment><USER24> The awesome thing about Rust is that the behemoths don't know about it.

<comment><USER25> I don't know. I wish that someone like MS would take this and really spend some big dollars on it. Mozilla is doing a great job but better collaboration between the vendors would be extremely beneficial and really increase its development. That's my hope anyway.

<comment><USER24> I mean, yeah, that would be amazing for the ecosystem. Still! I hope some small guy comes and makes something awesome with it, esp. w.r.t AI, which Rust seems sort of perfect for. As much potential as the Amazon-Microsoft-Google- Facebook-Acme Co. collab has, I'm not convinced that they aren't going to use it only to build dull chat bots and give us marginally more relevant ads.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Maps full location history - <AUTHOR> https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0/ Google let you access to all your recent movements, logged both through iOS and Android apps. <comment><USER2> Ah, I thought this was killed along with latitude. Looks like distance to the moon is gone though. :(</comment>