A Cabinet of Infocom Curiosities - <AUTHOR> http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4834 <comment><USER2> Earlier this year, when I realized that all of the old Infocom games were in the public domain, I spent some time playing Zork I, Border Zone, and HHGTTG -- the ones I played most often when I was younger.

There was some sentimental fun to be had, but these games take a tremendous amount of time to play and are difficult in a way that modern games are not. Their puzzles are almost unsolvable in some cases, or can only be solved by combining every permutation of every verb with every noun in every place to get the right answer.

Relative to what's available in the modern gaming realm as well as conventional fiction, I've also been pretty underwhelmed by what the Interactive Fiction community is putting out, especially the games that are purely web-based. There are some authors, Andrew Plotkin comes to mind, that have picked up the Infocom torch, but the feeling that you are using 0.1% of what your computer can do at about 5% of the rate your mind can work is difficult to shake for me in our modern era.

<comment><USER3> > There was some sentimental fun to be had, but these games take a tremendous > amount of time to play and are difficult in a way that modern games are not. > Their puzzles are almost unsolvable in some cases, or can only be solved by > combining every permutation of every verb with every noun in every place to > get the right answer.

It's interesting how intolerable these games would be considered today. I have a choice of thousands of games on steam (not to mention other platforms), many for less than $5. I would give these games such a bad rating, not for "lack of graphics" or anything technological, but for lack of smooth gameplay. But I loved them, and they are considered foundationial to current games.

It's also interesting to me how much time I spent _patiently_ trying different solutions. Nowadays, if I don't get a puzzle in ~30 min, I'm off to google the answer.

I think we're way better off now, but I think there was some dedication/patience/pure-effort that we've lost with our vast number of choices, and access to information.

<comment><USER4> > if I don't get a puzzle in ~30 min, I'm off to google the answer.

The only loss here is that the reward in googling the answer will never come close to the high of figuring a puzzle out after 2 days.

<comment><USER5> We always had the option of the "invisiclues" but... you had to order those and wait (time and money) or drive to a local computer store and buy (money). Both put a damper on the urge to "cheat".

<comment><USER6> In so many ways, Invisiclues are a fascinating relic. That they existed (and were extremely popular) speaks to a number of different aspects to technology between then and now. (And, as I recall, Invisiclues were also available as some sort of 900 number service at one point.)

<comment><USER5> I don't remember any sort of phone in number. Possibly would have gone broke had I known of it.

I did find this...

[http://www.resonant.org/games/infocom/Infocom_Homepage/Invis...](http://www.resonant.org/games/infocom/Infocom_Homepage/Invisiclues/)

:)

<comment><USER6> Actually it apparently started as a pay-per-hint system. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InvisiClues](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InvisiClues)

(Although I know the various people involved I don't remember all the details.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you've never experienced what text adventures were like, this would be a fun place to start:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml](http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml)

(requires flash)

HN thread about it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8960933](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8960933)

<comment><USER8> HHGTG is notoriously difficult. If you've never played a text adventure before you're more likely to find it frustrating than fun.

Instead, I recommend playing something more modern. There's a community of people making these games who hold an annual competition, and the winner is usually very good: [http://ifwiki.org/index.php/The_Annual_IF_Competition](http://ifwiki.org/index.php/The_Annual_IF_Competition)

I particularly recommend the 2007 winner, "Lost Pig". You can play it in a Javascript interpreter here: [http://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2Fi...](http://iplayif.com/?story=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ifarchive.org%2Fif- archive%2Fgames%2Fzcode%2FLostPig.z8)

<comment><USER9> If you want to start with an Infocom game, I found "Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It" to be a fun little _amuse-bouche_. It's a wordplay game instead of a lengthy story full of old-style adventure logic, so you really can't get "stuck", and is also an interesting example of a game that fundamentally could never be anything but a text adventure.

(This may depend on your wordplay ability. A quick check on Wikipedia says fan consensus on the difficulty ranges from "Standard" to "Expert". Oh well. It's 2015. You're only about 30 seconds away from a walkthrough. Given the nature of the game, it won't ruin anything if you have to consult a walkthrough once or twice. In the meantime, it's the only Infocom I've ever beaten without a walkthrough at all. My brain seems to _really, really_ not jive with text- adventure game logic.)

Granted, it's very different than a text "adventure", but I think if you've never played a pure text-based game, it's a very gentle and genuinely entertaining experience.

<comment><USER10> I've been looking for a copy of that game for a while now. Is there an online version or a z(5,8) version I can run with frotz or something? Is it even in the public domain?

<comment><USER9> Crap, I thought GOG.com had the Infocom collection digitally available, but I seem to be mistaken, they just have a couple of things. Nobody seems to. I bought it a _long_ time ago, when digitally downloading things was a novelty.

Well, if the copyright gods will forgive me, it should be in this collection, which I can find no particularly legal way to purchase in a way that gives money to any rightsholders: [http://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-lost- treasures-of-info...](http://www.myabandonware.com/game/the-lost-treasures-of- infocom-ii-3dp) I don't know, but it is likely the core z5 files can be found in there with a bit of hunting.

The _first_ Lost Treasures of Infocom is legally available for the iPhone: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lost-treasures-of- infocom/id...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lost-treasures-of- infocom/id577626745?mt=8) Though, bizarrely, not for Android.

<comment><USER10> Wow, amazing, thank you so much for that link. That just took up my entire afternoon. I wish they made games like that these days… \ _sigh\_

Is it still possible to buy hard copies of games from Infocom? Or are they all lost relics now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Awesome. Could some rich entrepreneur please take this to the next level and fund a few million to completely scan in high quality every magazine in Steve Meretzy's collection?

<comment><USER12> That would be fantastic, especially the Computer Games Strategy Plus magazines.

Many, if not all, of the Computer Gaming World magazines can be found here: [http://www.cgwmuseum.org](http://www.cgwmuseum.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, this collection turns out to be beyond the wildest dreams of all Infocom lovers.

It's also pure gold for game designers.

</comment><comment><USER14> If you're interested in Infocom stuff, I'd also recommend Jimmy Maher's ongoing series on the history of Infocom: [http://www.filfre.net/tag/infocom/](http://www.filfre.net/tag/infocom/)

</comment><comment><USER15> The Get Lamp documentary looks awesome. It's CC licensed so you can watch it for free, but they also have some physical DVD copies left with all the extras.

<comment><USER16> It is awesome. As is his BBS documentary. Speaking of monetizing physical media, my wife went to some effort and expense to get me a personally signed copy of the BBS documentary for Fathers Day a long time ago, that was really cool.

As a disclaimer, I'm a financial backer of the upcoming 6502 documentary, looking forward to it.

<comment><USER17> Run, don't walk, to see the BBS documentary. It is fantastic in every way. Especially the segments with the fidonet guy.

<comment><USER6> It's more a series of interviews than a true documentary but, that quibble aside, it's a great window into a world that really hasn't been well documented otherwise because it happened outside of the main thread of the Internet's evolution. I see one (self-published) book on Amazon about BBSs but there really isn't much out there.

<comment><USER18> Ah yes, let's get into THAT debate. That's not a quibble - it's barely an opinion.

<comment><USER6> Come on Jason. With a bigger budget you would probably have done things a bit differently. But as I said, it's a well done (and appreciated) look into a neglected area of computing history. And frankly the interviews are probably the most important thing. I'm not being critical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> About 57391 neurons which have not fired in this particular way since 1989 or so have just fired.

Wow. I remember rushing to the store to buy Infocom games. Which were incredibly expensive on a student budget, by the way. Kids these days are so spoiled by how cheap games are.

<comment><USER20> Infocom games were the last computer games I played seriously. (I really don't have the eye-hand coordination for anything more recent. Or the competitive urge.)

I have the strangest feeling of pressure in my chest right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's some interesting creative subtext in Steve Meretzky's collection of documents from _Sorcerer_. ("Agency" refers to Giardini/Russell Inc., the advertising agency Infocom used to create collateral and 'feelies' for the game packages.)

       Client/Agency met to discuss Agency's recommendation
       that Enchanter II should be called Spellbreaker (rahter
       than Sorcerer), and that Enchanter III should not be
       called Spellcrafter.  After discussion, Client/Agency
       agreed to proceed with Client's preferred name for
       Enchanter II, Sorcerer. Name for Enchanter III will be
       discussed at a later date.

I can't wrap my head around the idea that the _ad agency_ is in charge of coming up with the game's title. That certainly isn't how things would have been done at any other game company I'm familiar with. I've always had a ton of respect for the quality and literacy of Infocom's collateral, so it was fascinating to learn how much of that was outsourced to a generic agency that would have sandwiched their work between full-page ads for furniture sales and TV commercials for used car dealers.

It seems that not everybody at Infocom was 100% on board with G&R's work: [http://i.imgur.com/WNBUY1w.png](http://i.imgur.com/WNBUY1w.png)

Overall, these documents offer a really interesting peek inside the sausage factory. Thanks to Steve M. for making them available and to Jason for doing the legwork!

<comment><USER22> I suspect it's giving G/R somewhat short shrift to describe their contributions so dismissively -- those "feelies" were part and parcel of Infocom's charm and reputation. The agency was, AFAICT, a huge part of Infocom's marketing, and titles are absolutely within a marketing department's purvey. (And I suspect they were not working on anything resembling full-page ads for furniture sales and TV commercial for used car dealers; that's not the sort of thing that ad agencies at that level do!)

<comment><USER21> _I suspect it 's giving G/R somewhat short shrift to describe their contributions so dismissively_

Sorry, that wasn't my intent -- I'm saying how impressed I was! That doesn't change the fact that they were knocking some _really_ lame titles around.

<comment><USER18> _Much heavy lifting in design, layout, and verbiage for Infocom was done by a firm called Giardini /Russell, Inc. out of Watertown, Massachusetts. In fact, let's just make it clear – a lot of what people think of as "Infocom" is in fact Giardini/Russell. For example: The Zork logo, the names Infidel and Deadline, and, of course, the verbiage of the advertisements I previously discussed. They wrote manual copy (some of which was then re-written by the implementors) and a pile of other stuff. The story of Infocom's success, for all its considerable talents, is incomplete unless you realize this firm that contributed so much._

That's me a few years back, in [http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2172](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2172)

I knew putting these up would show some rough feelings. I've done my best to keep that to a minimum - I hope that'll be the case. But be clear - G/R is EASILY one of the most important contributors to Infocom's success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Awesome. I love these games and played a lot of them as a kid. Managed to solve a few too.

In the early 00's, I ended up with one of those little HP Palmtops running Windows CE. Could not figure out what to do with it, until I found it would run Frotz.

So I packaged up a few of the good ones, not too tough, and put in in the car for the kids. They actually played 'em. One would run the palmtop, reading it, and everyone would suggest options. They got through a few long trips doing that. Today, a phone would work much better than that old Palmtop did.

Somebody should make the voice input for these dead simple.

<comment><USER24> I installed Zork on my Fossil Wrist PDA, though I never actually played it much. I mainly played Sudoku.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is there an official mirror policy to ensure multiple copies remain alive?

<comment><USER26> Archive.org keeps at least two copies, Jason Scott probably kept one somewhere, but nothing official. You should grab it too - and join #internetarchive.bak on efnet if you want to help backup more collections :)

Also [https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Has the rift between textfiles.com and Wikipedia ever healed?

</comment><comment><USER28> Jason Scott is a hero. And also, of course, Steve Meretzky.

</comment><comment><USER29> Awesome!</comment>


Bitcoin at an all-time high - <AUTHOR> https://blockchain.info/charts/market-price?timespan=all <comment><USER2> Pulled up by the Bitfinex price being included - but the purported "price" in Bitfinex isn't realisable, because you can't get any hard currency (not just USD) out of Bitfinex!

Remember that the recent flash crash on GDAX ($1184 -> 6 cents) was courtesy just 100BTC of trades. I question the degree to which Bitcoin can be said to have a realisable "price".</comment>


Good blogs for programmers? - <AUTHOR>

What are some good blogs or websites for aspiring programmers, ones that keep you up with existing news for specific technologies or languages. <comment><USER2> This one is actually pretty good, slashdot has it moments... Both of these are good for general programming news bits not specific to particular languages.

</comment><comment><USER3> PVS-Studio blog: <http://www.viva64.com/en/b/>

</comment><comment><USER4> What about www.dzone.com, it has a lot of good stuff. It even has code snippets.

</comment><comment><USER5> arstechnica.com codinghorror.com catswhocode.com readwriteweb.com

</comment><comment><USER6> Similar question asked previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=752160>

I thought you might be interested in the replies.

Best of luck.</comment>


Being Homeless in not a crime, why are so many jailed? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nonforum.com/?nfid=9196 <comment><USER2> This is to a forum site. The actual content is at [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/03/being-...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/03/being- homeless-is-not-a-so-why-are-so-many-jailed) .</comment>


Ask HN: Any good Asterisk client open source projects for looking at their code? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for any client developed in any popular languages like Java or C# that works with Asterisk to adopt for my company needs. <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSipSimple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSipSimple) (Android SIP client)

For a more low-level stuff, it might worth having a look at [http://www.pjsip.org/](http://www.pjsip.org/) (a really good SIP library written in C with among others, Java bindings; CSipSimple is based on it).</comment>


Ask HN: Please review my site - PickFu.com - <AUTHOR> http://pickfu.com

<comment><USER2> Looks great. I think the price is right. The website is very clear. Maybe the examples should be more business oriented. You should also include the time frame to get the 50 answers: 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week?

Can we choose, or at least influence the demography (only women, only people below 35, etc.)?

<comment><USER3> another one of the creators here, thanks for the warm comments.

a follow-up question - how much more compelling would this be if you could choose/influence the demographics and # of responses (potentially at a higher cost)?

<comment><USER4> I would personally find it more compelling, but I'd suggest that it shouldn't be a premium feature.

When it comes to consume research, demographics are everything. Statistical significance of sub-samples can plummet quickly.

If I'm marketing a product specifically to, say, 30-44yo men, it would be valuable to restrict the sample exclusively to those men and I think i'd have a better chance of seeing statistical meaning in the sub-samples I'm looking for, eg, income, marital status, etc.

It seems to me now that I'd have to post it "at large" and the 30-44yo demo I'm looking for would itself be a sub-sample.

I am not a marketing professional, but as a small business owner its one of my many hats. I have used both Maritz and, more recently, Pinecone, and I'm probably wrong but I don't remember even being presented with an option to open the surveys to everybody.

And what I'm saying is.. I wouldn't even consider using your product without that ability. You have a fantastic 1.0, though, so I'm not knocking the product, just offering my $0.02.

And some demographics of your own: We've got a dozen of us on the payroll with 2009 sales looking to be a bit over $2MM.

And no joke, if I were you, I'd eat your dogfood and put up a survey to determine the importance of this feature!

EDIT: __

I do want to add that I get that your site is supposed to be intro-level market research. But if you're going to limit to 50 replies, demographic targeting would be very important to me, for anything other than a "should we get thai or pizza for lunch" questions.

If you do let me collect 500-1000 replies, I'd probably have more statistically meaningful sub-samples, so as long as you give me a nice drill- down interface I'd find it useful, even if i couldn't target my question.

<comment><USER5> To take the other side...there is currently a _beautiful_ simplicity about this idea and execution.

I pretty much just fall asleep when I start trying to deal with A/B testing, market research, ad effectiveness, etc. This is so simple that all I have to ask myself is, "Do I have a question I'd like to ask a bunch of people?" and "Do I have five dollars?" That's a really good place to be, because everybody in business has questions, and everybody has five dollars.

I will absolutely use this site. I do question _where_ the people are coming from, which I guess is a demographic question...but I think any time you ask of the user to choose it should be later in the sales process. For statistics wonks, mention it in the FAQ, or something. But I wouldn't clutter up the initial offer with too much stuff like that. I wish I had a product that was this simple of a sell.

And, of course, the more involved things get, the more expensive it will have to be. I _really like_ five dollar market research. I might not be so enthusiastic about $25 market research.

<comment><USER4> Fair enough... but if this is just a completely random, not-even-remotely- scientific man on the street approach, then what problem does this solve that a poll i can add to my website/blog/favorite forum via Fantastico in 180 seconds doesn't?

<comment><USER5> It puts it in front of people that don't already know about your product.

I can ask usability questions of my users, but their existing knowledge will effect what is "easy" and "intuitive" (intuitive generally means, "what I'm used to"). I can ask marketing questions of them, but I've _already_ pulled them into my site, so my current message will be the one that gets reinforced. I can ask "compare these two products" questions, but I already know a preponderance of people on my site prefer my product to our competitors (one of which is Fantastico, by the way). I can ask any number of things, and we do frequently ask our customers opinions on things, but by virtue of them being on our site the results are known to be skewed in exactly the way we don't want them to be for a large number of questions.

Also, I don't want to clutter up my site with constant polls. When someone is on our site, we have very clear goals we want to achieve: Teach them about the benefits, help them choose the right products, show them how to use it, answer their questions. Asking them random questions isn't my idea of good design, when it comes to those goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just used this site, and learned that 18-34-year-old women find a picture of me without a baby more attractive, while the 50+ demographic definitely prefers the picture of me holding my niece. Biologial clocks at work? Anyway, worth $5! ;) Well, sort of... I wish there was a way to view the votes by (gender,age-group) pair, but most of the respondents were female, so I think I'm interpreting the results correctly.

Also, I just emailed a friend about this and shared the PickFu URL for the results of my photo survey on facebook, which according to Derek Sivers is a great sign (<http://sivers.org/purplecow>).

Finally, note that you can see all the PickFu questions as they are distributed to Mechanical Turk (even the "private" ones, obviously) at

[https://www.mturk.com/mturk/searchbar?requesterId=AI2HRFAYYS...](https://www.mturk.com/mturk/searchbar?requesterId=AI2HRFAYYSAW7&selectedSearchType=hitgroups)

I hope your site can scale. I predict growth.

<comment><USER3> Actually, there is a way you can view the votes by (gender,age-group,etc.) - click on the "Option A vs. Option B" tab right under "Who responded to your question?" Is that what you were looking for? If so, it's our fault for not making it more visible.

Thanks for the heads-up about the mturk job search - we're making tweaks so that those previews show a sample question from now on. Helps keeps the responses more random too.

Thanks for sharing it!

<comment><USER6> No, "Option A vs Option B" isn't quite what I was looking for. Let us stipulate that, once I see the results, I decide that I don't care what guys think of my photo. I just want to compare the difference in response between 18-34-year-old women, 35-49-year-old-women, and 50+-year-old-women. I don't see a way to get that information from your current interface.

<comment><USER3> Ah yeah, I get what you're talking about. It's one of the features I've been wanting to add for a while too - filtering the responses by any demographic combination. Not pri 1, maybe in the next version. =)

<comment><USER6> I would be happy just to be able to access the raw responses in a .csv file or something, and do the filtering myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My first thought: Why can't I answer the questions?

I know you're going to say something along the lines of "we want to ensure that users are unique, and demographically diverse, blah blah blah."

Yeah, I know, but still. When I see "Mac or PC", I instinctively click on the "Mac" option, and when nothing happens, I think "Well, _THAT's_ clearly broken!"

I know you probably don't want to create just another hot-or-not site. But, since you have public commenting that's separate from the "official" responses, why not also have public voting that's segregated? Maybe if I give you my demographic info, you could let me answer questions.

The bonus is that you don't have to pay me ;) So, perhaps you could offer a few options: $5 for "valid" demographically-distributed statistically- significant mechanical turk answers, or you can get all the answers you want for free from the PickFu.com community (still organized by demographics.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea. We've heard similar feedback before but haven't had a chance to get around to it. We'll revisit it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reminds me of a design client of mine... <http://www.feedbackarmy.com/>

Similar concept but a bit more information from the Turks at a slightly higher cost.

</comment><comment><USER9> A user friendly MTurk front end. Not a bad idea. I wish you the best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER10> Micro-surveys. Cheap Price, Fast response. I could actually see using this in the future.

</comment><comment><USER11> I may not be typical, but of all the "review my site" postings, both good and bad, this is the first one I actually plan to use. Pickfu.com is now a Favorite.

1 vote with $ = many votes without $

<comment><USER12> I think simplicity is the key here. It is going to be useful to masses and not constrained to just big companies. I personally used it as soon as I saw it and will be using it again and again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I misread it the first time and wondered what you had against Pi.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great idea guys! If you have to time to come up to SF you should definitely drop by our Crowdsoucing Labor/Mechanical Turk meetup on June 10th. You can RSVP here: [http://www.meetup.com/Amazon-Mechanical-Turk- Crowdsourcing-W...](http://www.meetup.com/Amazon-Mechanical-Turk- Crowdsourcing-Work-Meetup-Group)

The Amazon VP of Mechanical Turk is going to come by to answer questions, and I'm sure she would love to talk to you all.

<comment><USER3> Thanks Lukas, I plan on being there. Looking forward to meeting up - you guys are doing some awesome things with MTurk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Also see <http://ask500.com>

</comment><comment><USER16> Rockin' idea. I was just looking for something like this to do some quick-and- dirty market research for my startup.

I don't have much experience with mturk, but my one concern would be that respondents may simply click randomly rather than honestly answering the question; do you have any data on how honest and accurate your responses are?

<comment><USER3> Our respondents don't get paid unless they actually explain their answers - which both reduces false responses and provides unique value and insight to the service.

For example, we used this feature to dogfood our own FAQ page: <http://pickfu.com/4UQM7U>

<comment><USER17> I still think doesn't help. I liked the idea and did the turk for one of your questions (this was my first time doing the turk, btw). I was asked to visit a myspace webpage, listen entirely to 2 songs and say which one I like better and why. All this for 3 cents? I did it, cause I am a good fellow but I have hard time thinking of people who are willing to spend 10 minutes of their time for 3 cents.

the FAQ example is a bad example: I can always answer "yes" and then supply as reason "every questions I had was answered". No need to read the FAQ page, of course.

I think if you want to insert any kind of validation system you would have to count the time it took for the turk to answer your question and make sure we are in that range for every hit.

<comment><USER3> As noted before, it's tough to know that 100% of the responses are truthful on any survey. With PickFu, you can read the explanations to get a feel as to which respondents put some thought in.

I'm sorry you had a rough experience with that specific music-listening job - we've never had a more time-consuming question submitted. Most are in the order of "which site do you prefer?", like this current one: <http://pickfu.com/AGSIBT>. These get answered far faster by the MTurk workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Another similar site:

<http://www.ask500people.com/>

</comment><comment><USER19> Here is a controversial thought: Your price is too low. You tell me $5 for 50 comments, and I think, these are low quality comments.

You're underselling yourself IMHO. Position your service as a more premium offering.

I'd do $50 for 50 comments. At least.

<comment><USER20> I disagree. I am almost guaranteed to use this in the near future because it's so ridiculously cheap. At $50, I'd think about it a lot more and probably attempt to do it myself. Are there more people like me, or more people who wouldn't use it because it's too cheap to trust?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great app. A few thoughts.

\- The demographic segmentation just doesn't work with 50 answers. Maybe package it (say $5, $20, $50) & either only offer segmentation to the higher ones or recommend against reading too much in to the lower ones.

\- Host the images & otherwise make the image part easy. I'm guessing this is an upcoming feature. Since you clearly set out to make market research cheap & easy, this is part of that. You'd be surprised how many people don't know an image has a URL. Also make it easy to get online images from websites without knowing images have URLs.

</comment><comment><USER22> Nice site. Clear goals. One suggestion: Why limit at 50 responses? What if I want more than 50 people to participate in the survey/market research? Can I setup something? It wasn't obvious from the web site.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's limited mainly for simplicity. Since it's intended to be a cheap and quick answer, we figured $5 and 50 questions seemed reasonable for most. Perhaps we can keep the standard, advertised solution at 50 for $5 but when you buy offer the option to upgrade to more questions.

<comment><USER23> I personally think $5 is a great price point, but would make 3 tiers of plans.

1) Free, limited number of responses (maybe 5/month?), ad supported.

2) $5, Unlimited number of responses, no ads.

3) Skinable version for companies, allows them to manage questions/responses asked by employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Really nice overall, but I have one UI issue:

When I go to an example page, it says something like, "Survey says: B! (18 of 33 answers)"

And then I never remember which was A and which was B, so I have to look.

Why not "Survey says: Gmail!" or "Survey says: Obama" instead? Especially for the text ones. For the image ones it kind of makes sense to do A/B since they don't necessarily ever tell you a name for each image (though you could change that), but for the ones that are just text, it would be way more user-friendly to put the name in.

</comment><comment><USER25> I know domain names are hard BUT

.

your domain looks like :: PickFuck :: to a casual glance.

.

Similar to how the FCUK brand (intentionally) looks like FUCK.

\--

I think your site is good, although it seems the demographics are exclusively American. Hopefully you could add some multinational demographic later.

Good luck and well done!

</comment><comment><USER26> Impressive! Keep up the good work.

Just wondering, how has RPX ( <https://rpxnow.com/> ) Login outsourcing/integration worked for you guys? Would you recommend it highly?

Edit: Btw, the Yahoo OpenId login prompts: "Warning: pickfu.rpxnow.com has not forwarded their Privacy Policy."

<comment><AUTHOR> For a site as simple as this one it's worked out pretty well. Easy to drop in and 1 less thing to think about it.

Thanks for the privacy warning - we'll look into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is an excellent idea. Flying way, way under traditional solutions.

</comment><comment><USER27> Who is your target demographic (whom do you expect to purchase these surveys)? Small companies?

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone on a budget or looking for a quick, cheap answer. Small businesses and entrepreneurs like ourselves were the initial target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What is the geographic distribution of your responders?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's almost entirely US-based.

<comment><USER29> I'd make that clear if you haven't already :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wow, this is pretty upsetting because I have been working on the exact same idea as you. How long has it been up, what kind of volume have you been doing, and how long did it take you to make it?

<comment><USER31> How about change "upsetting" to "motivating" and you're good.

The world is a big place, and competitors mean the market exists.

<comment><USER30> Competitors doesn't mean a significant market exists, it means multiple people have come up with the idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> _"You can spend hours at a coffee shop polling 50 random people or bug everyone you know, but you'll be getting a skewed population"_

Not to rain on your impressive parade, but I'd consider the type of person that wants or needs to use MTurk to be a pretty skewed population too, just in a different way.

Not saying it's not valuable, it may well be, and certainly more honest than asking friends - but I would expect a fairly low-income or bored-teen demographic.

Actually, an interesting meta-survey might be to survey the MTurk population itself, see what they think, their incomes, political beliefs etc; might be an interesting use of this very service.

But enough nit-picking - congratulations on a great idea, swiftly executed.

<comment><USER33> _survey the MTurk population itself_

a few people have done this already

[http://behind-the-enemy- lines.blogspot.com/2008/03/mechanica...](http://behind-the-enemy- lines.blogspot.com/2008/03/mechanical-turk-demographics.html)

<http://waxy.org/2008/11/the_faces_of_mechanical_turk/></comment></comment>


Tell HN: ProtonVPN is awful - <AUTHOR> And, there is virtually no support even for paid plans. After sending reports of connectivity and authentication issues, log files, and more, their "support" department is totally unresponsive nor helpful.
Since the service was upvoted heavily here, I wanted to caution anyone thinking about trying it, since there is also no trial period.
EDIT: Correction, I did receive one email response after a week instructing that in regards to intermittent authentication issues to "check your username and password" although the service authenticates successfully around 50-ish% of the time. <comment><USER2> I've been using it on my android phone with no problems, and without paying a dime. Not sure why all the negativity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear the free tier works. Thanks for your report. It sounds like maybe that is better tested and also doesn't require any support.</comment></comment>


We recently awarded our biggest bug bounty - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/BugBounty/posts/778897822124446/#

<comment><USER2> The duplicate submission detector was messed up by the noncanonical URL on the submission

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7105815](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7105815)

that reached the main page of HN yesterday. I shared this on my Facebook wall after seeing yesterday's HN discussion.</comment>


The Art of the Interpreter -- Steele and Sussman [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-453.pdf <comment><USER2> This is the sort of ugly typesetting that spurred Knuth to create TeX.

<comment><USER3> Is this your opinion, or do you have evidence of this (for example, have you asked DK about this?)?

<comment><USER2> I believe I read it in an interview.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> i like the joke:

Guy Lewis Stelle Jr. - NSF Fellow

Gerald Jay Sussman - Jolly Good Fellow

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me or is that "ipaper" an absolute POS?

Could not print, bookmark, select text . . . what is that good for? I mean seriously, someone please enlighten me.

<comment><USER6> Hi mroman,

I'm a developer over at Scribd and happen to work on iPaper. Although Adobe- style bookmarking has not been implemented (PDF's intradocument links work just fine), the inability to select text in this document is not an iPaper limitation. It just so happens that this PDF contains no text data, just hi- res raster versions of each page.

As for printing, I was able to print just fine in FF on a PC (once the 10+ MB file had finished downloading). Would you mind emailing me at the address in my profile with your environment info so we can try to replicate your issue?

Thanks!!

Ed

<comment><USER5> Hi Ed,

I just emailed you my environment info.

I was referring to bookmarking the page in my browser favorites.

Right. No text data. Personally, I find a text version of a document to be indispensable.

I actually waited for the download to complete, and was still unable to print. First time I have ever had that problem.

What would be wrong with ditching iPaper altogether? Personally, I would convert the document to HTML, and provide links to download or view both the .pdf version as well as a plain vanilla text version.

That is just me though. I do appreciate your post however.

Maurice

<comment><USER7> To convert the document to HTML, you'd need to do OCR, and then some more formatting...

<comment><USER5> I don't doubt it . . .</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is a particle collider? - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/05/wtf-is-a-particle-collider/ <comment><USER2> "Effectively twice the speed of light"

 _sigh_

I wish people wouldn't use the word relativistic when they clearly don't know what it means.</comment>


A static file server in x86 Assembly - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jeaye/toybox/tree/master/httpd-asm <comment><USER2> Why not a full featured one: [https://2ton.com.au/rwasa/](https://2ton.com.au/rwasa/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is really cool. For simple stuff where you just want light and fast, it's good to see an ASM rewrite.

<comment><USER4> Light? Sure

Fast? Nope. Look at http_write_response for example - it does 5 syscalls instead of 2 required. And there is no caching headers support, so the browser will download things more than necessary.

For simple things, I highly recommend a small C-based server. This server has educational value only.

<comment><USER5> Check out "filed" [0] for a small C webserver that does a lot to be fast.

[0] [http://filed.rkeene.org/](http://filed.rkeene.org/)

<comment><USER6> One thread per request doesn't scale and becomes inefficient once there are too many requests because of the context switching.

<comment><USER7> This depends on the scenario. Before the async revolution most app servers were using this model and I'm sure that a very significant portion of the current internet is served with this model.

It may not be the fastest in all cases but I still find it way easier to build something with this model than with async-everything.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Surfly's co-browsing technology - <AUTHOR> https://docs.surfly.com/introduction/the-technology.html?utm_source=hackernews <comment><USER2> Yeah, founded a startup based on this idea in 2006 or so, called WeBrowse. The technology wasn't quite ready although I got pretty far with a prototype based on DOMMutationListener and XHR.

Pretty clearly something like this needs to exist, and it will probably not be nearly as useful as it's inventors think it will be. Screen-sharing is more general, and the niche for low-entropy real-time synchronization of browser state _feels_ pretty small right now. But who knows? Heck, I thought the iPad was going to be a giant flop.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool! I do agree this concept is under-utilized. Best of luck!

(Heads up: if you shall ever venture to patent this tech, I think I'll be able to present compelling prior art from like 1996. This was also a proxy-based re-writing mechanism for co-browsing and from your description it does sound kinda similar. It also happened to use HTML frames.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Mozilla together js did this a while back.. [https://togetherjs.com](https://togetherjs.com)

</comment><comment><USER5> I remember customer support doing co-browsing back in 2008. Hopefully the mechanisms have gotten a little less hacky over the years.

<comment><USER6> TogetherJS as mentioned in the sibling comment is great. I got it working in a few minutes: [https://togetherjs.com/](https://togetherjs.com/)</comment></comment>


2 Serious Issues Facebook Needs to Address…Soon - <AUTHOR> http://inklingmedia.net/2010/01/2-serious-issues-facebook-needs-to-address-soon/

<comment><USER2> Interesting points. I suspect that Facebook doesn't allow you to change the name of your business page because of the way they anchor them in their database... but at the same time, I believe you can change your personal page in a way that requires redirecting to a new permanent link. This is the same on twitter or tumblr. On both you can change your name and it will automatically change your personal URL to match. As someone who has had a business page, both of these are complaints that I agree with completely though.</comment>


Waymo granted a permit to operate as a Transportation Network Company in Arizona - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/02/robotaxi-permit-gets-arizonas-ok-waymo-will-start-service-in-2018/ <comment><USER2> I'm just excited for the time when I can purchase a self-driving big rig and stick a living space in the back of it. Work remotely while traveling all over North America.

Maybe even all over Europe!

<comment><USER3> Wow, never thought about it that way. That would be awesome.

Why limit it to US And Europe. The world might soon be a better place. Imagine Starting out in Berlin Then over a couple of months go to Turkey, then India, Vietnam and beyond and then back without ever driving a single km. Just let it drive while you sleep.

<comment><USER4> Is anyone even talking about let alone demoing self-driving in a seemingly chaotic urban driving in India and elsewhere? My uneducated guess is we are decades away from being able to navigate anything real world like this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLUm3Q-7iZA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLUm3Q-7iZA)

If you zoom out, you'll see that there's a method to the madness but a lone driving car that's not a part of a fleet doesn't have such luxuries.

I don't think the problem is solely image processing and machine learning. I just don't get self driving and how we're supposed to wow the logic. You have to be aggressive to drive in a city or people will constantly cut you off for hours. This means you will hold up traffic making the situation worse for everyone. However, you can't be too aggressive. Imagine the damage we will cause to the "optics" of self driving if we run over (at a slow 10 mph) stubborn people who cut us off. That will just look like murder.

<comment><USER5> Based on economics, self-driving cars are not necessarily attractive in India.

Consider that in US the cheapest ZipCar is ~$8/hr.

Adding even the cheapest human driver working at minimum wage is ~$15/hr.

Adding a human driver in US makes the trip 3x more expensive.

Or to put it another way: a self-driving trip can be 3x less expensive.

Or to put it another way: a $30 trip from SF downtown to airport becomes $10 trip which is competitive with BART prices.

I don't know what is the minimum wage in India, but per [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_India) per capita income is $1670 / year which is probably less than $1 per hour.

In other words: self-driving cars only make economic sense in countries where humans are expensive.

<comment><USER4> > Or to put it another way: a $30 trip from SF downtown to airport becomes $10 > trip which is competitive with BART prices.

I looked up BART because of what you said and it looks pretty bad.

[https://github.com/enjalot/bart/blob/master/data/bart- comp-a...](https://github.com/enjalot/bart/blob/master/data/bart-comp-all.csv)

175 people make six figures in base pay. The total cost of employment is ridiculously high. I don't know anything about BART but they clearly need to lay off a lot of people. This is ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This appears to go against Rodney Brooks' (former director of MIT's CSAIL, member of NAE, and a robotics expert) predictions, which was just published last month: [https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated- predictions/](https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/)

"NET (No Earlier Than) 2022"

"First driverless "taxi" service in a major US city, with dedicated pick up and drop off points, and restrictions on weather and time of day."

"The pick up and drop off points will not be parking spots, but like bus stops they will be marked and restricted for that purpose only"

A possible resolution is in the case that he meant somewhere more 'major' than Phoenix, AZ (1.6 million population; 5th largest city in the US), but that is a bit hand-waving.

Any insight or comment for this?

<comment><USER6> Yes. This definition of his:

"My milestone predictions below are not about demonstrations, but about viable sustainable businesses. Without them the deployment of driverless cars will never really take off."

In particular, he's predicting when a company does this profitably, not at a loss as part of research.

(Btw, thanks for linking - that prediction list was a great read.)

<comment><USER7> Arguably, that milestone hasn't been reached for rideshare apps in general, even ones that use real drivers!

<comment><USER8> That's just a deliberate business model decision though. If all the ridesharing services decided tomorrow to double their prices and downsize in line with reduced ride volume, they could probably turn a profit fairly quickly, albeit on lower revenues and (probably more relevantly) sharply reduced valuations. People will still use them even if they cost as much or more than taxis. They just wouldn't use them as much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I live in Phoenix and applied to their beta program. Haven't heard a word since but I've seen a few passengers riding in them. My guess is that they're hand picking people with compelling stories for marketing reasons.

Gotta say though...it's quite amazing to see 5-10 SDCs/day.

<comment><USER10> Are they already fully driverless or do they still have a safety driver?

<comment><USER11> Google moving them out of driver seat. So not possible to fake it.

[https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-google-arizona-phoenix- dri...](https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-google-arizona-phoenix-driverless- self-driving-cars/) Waymo Finally Takes the Driver Out of Its Self-Driving Cars | WIRED

<comment><USER10> I think I've read a about a dozen announcements like that stating that they are going to start having the cars drive without safety drivers, but all the videos I saw on Youtube still have safety drivers, that's why I asked.

<comment><USER12> Even without a safety "driver" you can have an employee monitoring with a finger on the kill switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Waymo has been running a pilot program that lets people hail rides in its > cars, at first with safety engineers riding in the driver's seat, but fully > driverless since November 2017.

Perhaps a stupid question... Does that mean that when the service starts the car will be devoid of any human (except for the paying customer/customers)?

<comment><USER14> I think so, although apparently it's possible for Waymo to control the car remotely. Not sure if that means fully driving the car remotely, or just giving it higher level instructions.

<comment><USER15> wouldnt it be simpler and cheaper to just have an emergency driver in?

<comment><USER16> I think they have considered that

Remote driver with xbox controller who controls a car every 1,000 miles.... one person per 1,000 cars? Or your idea of 1,000 drivers for 1,000 cars. Hm....

<comment><USER8> Well, that assumes that solving whatever problem can be handled by a remote driver with no situational awareness of what's going on can plug in 5 minutes later and deal with things.

That's not necessarily unreasonable for handling rare and non-urgent events but it's a lot different from having an alert backup driver. (Of course, if you need an alert backup driver, there's no benefit to autonomous systems once you get past the testing stage.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If Waymo launches the service this year according to plan, how that will affect the upcoming Uber IPO in 2019 will be interesting to see.

It obviously depends on whether Uber has a similar service ready or imminent before their IPO. They have great AI and robotics people recruited from top places. However, such a feat takes time.

<comment><USER12> "recruited"

They basically hired away Carnegie Mellon's entire SDC research team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone here from phoenix who has tried them?

<comment><USER9> I live in Phoenix and applied to their beta program. Haven't heard a word since but I've seen a few passengers riding in them. My guess is that they're hand picking people with compelling stories for marketing reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bring it on. Can't wait until this is common.</comment>


Students should love computer science - <AUTHOR> http://ezeokoyecelestine.blogspot.com/2011/04/csc-lounge.html

<comment><USER2> This development is long over due especially in Africa, where the big brother(government) doesn't show enough interest in education.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you have any comments, questions or contributions, please feel free to comment. I'm actually expecting some :)</comment>


Creativity is saving lives . . . - <AUTHOR> http://www.art4meds.org

<comment><AUTHOR> this is really an interesting concept, started by a bunch of ex-UN colleagues based out of Geneva and DC.</comment>


Low-income countries might get drone deliveries before the U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/03/low-income-countries-might-get-drone-deliveries-before-the-u-s-heres-why/

<comment><USER4> You might expect any technology that's controversial or dangerous by first- world standards to get started in developing countries. However, I can't think of a big recent example. All of the following seem to be happening in the US as fast as anywhere else:

      - <USER2>
      - self-driving cars
      - stem cell therapies
      - <USER3>
      - electronic cigarettes
      - legal marijuana
      - secure communications

What could I find being done in a developing country that would make me wish the US wasn't so conservative?

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if you'll find those type of innovation you listed in developing countries, because none of it is their major pain point.

Their major pain points are infrastructure, public health, education, functioning government, and basic economy, all of which were addressed long ago by advanced countries.

So I think the article is misguided in that sense, and half your point is well taken.

More apt question would have been, which developed country was able to adopt novel technology quickly because of its high risk tolerance, or lax safety regulations?

But I'm not sure if such country exists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are thieves an issue here? The parts might valuable in these low-income countries. When drones land to drop down goods, they are quite "vulnerable" for a thieve to catch them. Getting them from the air shouldn't be a problem too. There's even a sport for that too ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdIHOV6VGNU#t=196](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdIHOV6VGNU#t=196)).

</comment><comment><USER7> They are already getting drone deliveries.

<comment><USER8> And the drone pilots thoughtfully ensure that everyone is home before making the delivery!</comment></comment>


Why isn't there a meta-browser? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@datashovel/why-isn-t-there-a-meta-browser-204997473c61

<comment><USER2> Web developers, on the whole, cannot be arsed to even stick to standards and keep their pages from being malformed. There's no reason to believe that they would provide consistent and machine-readable hints for a metabrowser about which browser to launch.

Building a metabrowser is trivial. (Moving state and features between the browsers within the metabrowser is not, but if all you want is the default experience, it's not too hard.) Herding half a million cats to convince people to enable some new feature is not (and determining which browser to use when displaying malformed pages that were written by twelve-year-olds against MOSAIC and abandoned in 1995 is worse).

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting points. It may not have been clear, but I kind of glossed over the idea that this would be a standard. So, for example, perhaps embedded in HTTP headers like Content-Type values.

So, I was being lazy in terms of the details, but to be fair I wasn't trying to be too technical.

Also, I may not understand the point, but I get the impression that a meta browser would make it so "cats can be cats" without the need to herd them, and without worrying that non-compliance could potentially disrupt innovation.

The meta browser would (in my mind) become the new browser, and all the meat that you get in Chrome, FF, IE would be encapsulated behind the scenes.

So it certainly would not be a trivial project (although I agree on the surface having a meta app whose only purpose was to encapsulate another application would be somewhat trivial) the ideal scenario would call for standardized apis that the meta app could interface with the browsers so things like browser preferences could be integrated in the top-level, and each app underneath would be able to read from that same set of options. Of course each browser would need to have name-spaced options as well for things that weren't globally recognized / standardized, but those kinds of problems I think have fairly straightforward answers at this stage.</comment></comment>


Use TRUSTWORTHY or Not for SQLCLR Assemblies? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nielsberglund.com/2017/07/01/sqlclr-and-certificates/ <comment><AUTHOR> We discuss the use of TRUSTWORTHY and certificates in SQL Server when deploying SQLCLR assemblies.</comment>


Liberated and Unhappy - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/opinion/26douthat.html <comment><USER2> For one thing, who said liberty equals happiness? It may be that the animal born in captivity is happiest, knowing nothing of the world beyond its cage. That does not of course cause liberty to be pointless. Liberty may enable you to better provide for yourself and others around you, but it also stresses you by exposing you to the elements. The problem is with the persistent popular narrative that equalises the two, its falsity rendering observations paradoxical.

<comment><USER3> how does it follow from this then, that men are happier?

<comment><USER4> Here's one possible explanation:

 _Apparently, women are happy with their lot earlier in their lives, whereas men have bigger financial goals and tend to be unfulfilled during their 20s, both financially and in their family lives, which makes them miserable.

But by middle age, men have fulfilled their financial and family life goals and have cheered up, whereas women are more likely to be unfulfilled and unhappy.

The authors think a major factor underlying this is the shift in the proportion of men and women in relationships: men are more likely to be single in their 20s, and women are more likely to be alone in middle age.

They admit that this rests on the assumption that being married actually makes people happy, but they point out that if marriage is something you really want (and they found that 90% of both genders did), then being single might get you down._

[http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortsharpscience/2008/07/a...](http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortsharpscience/2008/07/are- men-happier-than-women.html)

<comment><USER5> No surprise there. Being 19 and male is miserable, except for the few who are lucky enough to find a soulmate that early, and the low-quality sort of man who tends to be more generally successful at that age, but I'd much rather be a single 40-year-old man than a single woman at that age.

I wonder how these findings play out for people who are in long-term stable relationships. I'd bet that there isn't a huge gender disparity or "cross- over" for them, since their happiness depends largely on the health of the relationship, and the number of alternatives isn't really relevant.

<comment><USER6> _"Being 19 and male is miserable, except for the few who are lucky enough to find a soulmate that early"_

I get the impression that you didn't enjoy college. Who wants a soulmate so early? Seriously. Only weak and / or disabled people need someone else to look after them at the age of 19.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I need an automatic Ross Douthat filter.

He knows so much about women.

 _One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend's parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point--"Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?" she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn't sure what to say, but then I wasn't sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business... and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered--"You know, I'm on the pill..."_

From his book _Privilege_ , page 184.

See: [http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/03/fear-of-reese- withersp...](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/03/fear-of-reese-witherspoon- look-alikes-on-the-pill.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a simple issue: awareness of opportunity cost leads to unhappiness. The expanded perception of individual potential ("you can be anything you want!"), and the Feminism movement that has given that sentiment extra appeal ("you can have everything that men have, and more!") makes the awareness even more acute.

When your appetite is grossly inflated, you will be constantly hungry and dissatisfied, almost by definition.

I vaguely remember research that finds perception of opportunity cost giving the same brain response as the loss of a physical object (70% sure; I'll be gladly corrected). If this is the case, it's even more amusing: you can nearly create limitless unhappiness, because there is an unlimited number of "phantom things" that you can tell people that they "are capable of owning" but it is mathematically impossible for them to do so.

</comment><comment><USER9> The source cited by this article only indicates that women's happiness has declined, but not that it is actually lower than that of men. In fact I recall reading a report recently that men are still less happy overall.

Another possible explanation for the observed decline is that women, no longer expected to be so docile and submissive, are less inclined to pretend to be happy when they really aren't.

<comment><USER10> From the article: "Today, that gender gap has reversed. Male happiness has inched up, and female happiness has dropped. In postfeminist America, men are happier than women."

<comment><USER9> Yes, I believe the last sentence is false.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The first thing that comes to mind reading this is the emphasis Americans tend to place on skinny, Barbie like figures. We see it everywhere from the checkout counters at the grocery stores to the commercials on TV. Most women will never look like the covermodels, yet they're made to believe thats what it means to be beautiful. No wonder women are generally more unhappy now than they were a few decades ago.

(But as the author states, it's probably not so simple.)

</comment><comment><USER2> Another reading of the same results: <http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1456>

</comment><comment><USER12> So despite the fact that single motherhood has no apparent effect on happiness[1], his solution to the "happiness gap" is instituting a social stigma against sex, to prevent single motherhood.

[1] > A working-class Hispanic woman is far more likely to be a single mother than her white and wealthy counterpart, yet the male-female happiness gap holds in East Hampton and East L.A. alike.

<comment><USER13> Well, yeah - the author's a religious conservative (hired recently to keep some representation of Team Red in the NYT editorial pages), and he's shamelessly grabbing random data and trying to make them support his political goals.

<comment><USER14> [citation needed]

<comment><USER13> Citation available at the linked site. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Women's liberation since the 60s has only indirectly made women unhappy. Contraception has made women unhappy, and men happy.

</comment><comment><USER15> Women instinctively want to date and marry up. The recent economic equality discussed in the article has made that mathematically impossible. Just a thought.

<comment><USER16> > Women instinctively want to date and marry up.

On what basis do you make that claim? And doesn't the same hold true for men? (Maybe along a different axis, e.g. physical attractiveness - see "trophy wife")

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So much ado about nothing...

Lacking a rigorous and universal definition of what happiness is, all this talk is pretty much pointless. Maybe the whole feminist movement fed women with unrealistic expectations and their misery stems from the reality- expectation mismatch. Anyways, who cares?

<comment><USER17> In the social sciences, it's usual to use an operational definition [1]. For many variables are constructs [2] and they cannot be observed directly.

The authors of the above paper seem to have used different operational definitions, and they all point in the same direction. So one can state with reasonable certainty that women's happiness declined in the last 30 years.

A discussion about potential explanations for the phenomenon can hardly be called pointless.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational> [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construct_(philosophy_of_scienc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construct_\(philosophy_of_science\))

<comment><USER6> "Social sciences" is an oxymoron. Everyone with a functioning brain knows that....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> women were so "happy" 40 years ago they decided to march in the streets for the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment). women were so happy 40 years ago they were burning their bras for equality. women were so happy 40 years ago they made far less than their male counterparts and sex discrimination was open and readily accepted in business. yep, women sure were happy 40 years ago. the author is a nut!

</comment><comment><USER18> Modern womankind has, over the past decades, increasingly rebelled against the natural order of things as instituted by the God many claim doesn't exist and now, faced with the results of that decision they appear to want sympathy.

It occurs to me that 'seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added unto you' would be a response that gets to the nub of the problems demonstrated here.</comment>


How Two Women Turned a Joke into a Business That Sells Men - <AUTHOR> http://thehustle.co/how-two-women-turned-a-joke-into-a-business-that-sells-men <comment><USER2> can't imagine how the article would have turned it if it was the opposite with women serving men

</comment><comment><USER3> ha!</comment>


A History of .NET Runtimes - <AUTHOR> http://mattwarren.org/2018/10/02/A-History-of-.NET-Runtimes/ <comment><USER4> Few more missed include (Device CLR's were in C, Desktop/Server in C++):

(1) CLR for Sony/Ericsson phone OS and (2) Variant running on linux (in 2001/2002).

I worked on the Compact Framework team back in the day so there's a few more things to point out related to the internal politics of Microsoft at the time.

The devices strategy was a mess even back then due to Alchin/Valentine/Ballmers love of Windows desktop 'everywhere'. Windows and Office dominated the company so things like .Net were always going to be secondary to that.

The origins of the CLR can be found in the purchase of Colusa in 1996 which had the Omni VM for running C++ in a sandbox. The original C# language was called cool and came from that project.

<comment><USER5> Was the framework you mentioned in (1) a Microsoft project, or something else?

As a matter of interest, what did you do on the CF team?

<comment><USER4> Worked in the Compact CLR Execution Engine, IL Verifier, and other stuff. On (1) both were done at MS but ended up as proof of concept.

Post Sathya Microsoft has moved to a more open model, hence the full blown CLR on Linux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The AOT compilers misses NGEN, which is part of .NET Framework since v1.0, although it only does dynamic linking with very little optimizations.

And the cloud compiler created for Windows Phone 8.x, based on Bartok from Singularity.

[https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Mani-Ramaswamy- an...](https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Mani-Ramaswamy-and-Peter- Sollich-Inside-Compiler-in-the-Cloud-and-MDIL)

[https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012/3-005](https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012/3-005)

.NET Native is an improvement of this work.

<comment><USER7> I _tried_ to only focus on runtimes, although the line got a bit blurred at times! But yeah, it would be nice to have included a mention of NGEN. When I get a chance I'll update the post

> And the cloud compiler created for Windows Phone 8.x, based on Bartok from > Singularity.

Interesting, I didn't realise that all this came from Bartok, thanks for the info

<comment><USER6> They are not fully explicit about it, just talking about Bartok and MDIL as if invented for WP 8, but they are scattered all over Singularity documentation and papers, so it is quite obvious where they come from.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something that makes following Microsoft tech _different_ for engineers, in my opinion, is that naming has historically been driven by marketing/sales, not engineering. There is not a 1-1 mapping between the branded/advertised functionality and the technical components responsible for it. This makes sense when your audience is purchasers at a company. They care about what features/scenarios are supported, not how they are implemented (sorting through that is, at most, the job of someone lower on the totem pole).

Engineers, on the other hand, want to know how the system works. Even when it _shouldn't_ matter to us, we can't help but think in terms of the actual mechanisms driving the system's behavior. We don't like black boxes, because we experience daily the leakiness of all abstractions. And for an engineer targeting Windows as a platform, the technical details obviously _do_ matter.

I think this difference is especially jarring to developers used to the __nix world, where everything is much more developer-oriented. I would bet that the early success of Microsoft products against Unix is partially due to this difference in focus. Ideally, you communicate differently with both groups, but in reality you have to make trade offs. It would just create more confusion if there was one set of names /brands for end-consumers and another totally different set for developers.

(Another difference is that Windows has historically been one big project, so features _do_ in fact span technical components, which due to being under single management, are less regimented to begin with.)

The web has definitely changed things by making operating systems less important. At least the perceived importance of marketing to developers has increased. I think Microsoft has done a good job adapting to this change lately.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think the history of the _internal politics_ at Microsoft in regards to .NET and also the external industry trends is fascinating.

The common thinking is that C# & .NET was a ripoff of Sun Java because of the _" write once run anywhere"_ threat. That's sort of true but missing some nuance.

I'm not a MS insider but here's my understanding of what happened. We have to separate the C# language from the CLR runtime. In the 1990s, Microsoft was already researching how to enhance and extend the COM interoperability model. (Otherwise known as "how do we get multiple programming languages to talk to each other?")

Based on some old interviews with Don Box[1], instead of this work being productized and released as "COM+ version 3" or whatever, it morphed into the CLR. This was a natural evolution that would have happened even without Sun's JVM threat.

C# the language, on the other hand, was a more direct response to Java the language since Microsoft's J++ (Java clone) was abandoned because of Sun's lawsuit.

As for .NET, it's interesting that Microsoft always had this large internal group of programmers (mostly Windows kernel and Office teams) that didn't fully buy into the .NET vision. On the other hand, Bill Gates himself was a big believer in it. My pet theory is that since Bill Gates programmed in BASIC in the 1970s and not in low-level C/C++/assembly, he had a natural affinity for the vision of high-level C# & .NET being pervasive throughout Windows. Even with Bill's support, there was always an ongoing internal tension between the C++ vs the NET framework camps. (On a related note, it seems like Apple's internal programmers are more happily embracing Swift over Objective-C to a greater degree than Microsoft's internal adoption of C# over C++.)

Two major forces outside of Microsoft's control curtailed .NET's planned world dominance: (1) the rise of Javascript in the browser which negated .NET Silverlight, and also Java applets and Flash. (2) the rise of Apple iOS and Android.

.NET is still very popular but it definitely did not fulfill the more ambitious dreams that Bill Gates had for it.

(On a related note, I also wrote an old comment about the decline of .NET's WPF and its limited adoption: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14098832](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14098832))

[1] Was MS Technical Fellow and author of 1998 COM book: [https://www.amazon.com/Essential-COM-Don- Box/dp/0201634465](https://www.amazon.com/Essential-COM-Don-Box/dp/0201634465)

<comment><USER10> It does seem like all these .NET projects are reactions to rival technologies. C# is a Java clone, C# generics are an (arguably improved) Java generics clone, .NET Micro is J2ME, Silverlight is Flash, etc.

What are some examples of where C# / .NET paved the way and others followed? Maybe popularizing async/await?

I'm definitely not claiming MS as a whole is always a follower. It seems like Direct3D led the way for the whole industry, for example.

<comment><USER6> How come C# generics are a copy of Java when they were invented first and the only reason they didn't make it to 1.0 was not to delay the release schedule?

Java annotations are based on .NET atributes, and initially had a clusmy implementation requiring an annotations processing tool until they finally got integrated into javac.

LINQ paved the way to more FP acceptance among enterprise developers. Check "confessions of a language salesman" from Erik Meyer.

Also .NET always had AOT/JIT from the very beginning, whereas AOT was tabu at Sun and only commercial JDKs always had it as option.

<comment><USER10> Hang on, Wikipedia says Generic Java was 1998, generics were adopted in J2SE 5.0 in 2004, and C# 2.0 wasn't released until 2005. Am I missing something? I'm sure there was cross-fertilization both ways but it seems like Java generics came first.

LINQ is a good one though, that's definitely a .NET innovation.

<comment><USER6> Yes you are missing the remaining part of the sentence "the only reason they didn't make it to 1.0 was not to delay the release schedule".

Don Syme of F# fame was leading generics research since 1999, while they were designing the CLR, but it was clear they would have to delay 1.0 if they wanted to included them, so they just went ahead without them for 1.0 release.

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2011/03/15/netc- gener...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2011/03/15/netc-generics- history-some-photos-from-feb-1999/)

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/06/19/some- histo...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/06/19/some- history-2001-gc-research-project-draft-from-the-msr-cambridge-team/)

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/06/26/some- more-...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/06/26/some-more-netc- generics-research-project-history/)

Additionally C#, like Java, also had CMU, ML, Ada, Eiffel, Sather, BETA, C++ and Modula-3 as possible sources of inspiration for generics.

<comment><USER10> Just lost out in a photo finish, then (over a span of 5 or 6 years...!)

But Generic Java was started in 1998 (IIRC originally as part of Pizza). It seems reasonable to say that Java covered this ground first.

<comment><USER6> Faire enough I forgot about Pizza.

Although what Java got wasn't all of Pizza, which had better generics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone remember Rotor ? That thing (codeveloped with Corel) was pretty interesting. Too bad about the look but don't touch license model.

<comment><USER12> Yes...and I also had Ted Neward's book "Shared Source CLI Essentials" to go along with it:

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shared-Source-Essentials-David- Stut...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Shared-Source-Essentials-David- Stutz/dp/059600351X)

The problem with Rotor was that they ripped out of all the good bits and replaced with not so good things, for example they replaced the garbage collector with a naive implementation.

That said I still learned quite a lot from studying and playing around with it way back then.

<comment><USER13> I've also read that book, it was excellent!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Back in 2008/9 I was a co-founder at a company (Red Five Labs) that created a .NET Compact Framework runtime for Symbian OS (featured on most Nokia & Samsung smartphones at the time). We got to a .NET CF 2.0 level of compatibility.

It was a venture-backed startup out of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Although we wrote the runtime ourselves, we made extensive use of some of the mono libraries until we were able to rewrite most of these optimized for Symbian.

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20100112091803/http://www.redfiv...](https://web.archive.org/web/20100112091803/http://www.redfivelabs.com:80/)

<comment><USER14> What happens to that code once the company disappears?

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately it went with it. There were some superficial talks about it winding up in the Symbian Foundation, but those didn't materialize.

And yes, it probably points to a major problem with a small company developing critical framework or tool components when the codebase isn't participating in an open source license.

There were many mistakes made along the way, in retrospect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is the .Net environment in SQL Server since version 2005 considered a different runtime?

<comment><USER16> No, SQL Server just uses the normal .NET Framework to execute managed code which is also implied by the name of the feature, Common Language Runtime (CLR) Integration. Well, maybe one could also read this as integrating - <USER2> the sense of implementing - a CLR into SQL Server.

<comment><USER17> Yes, SQL Server hosts the .NET framework runtime but with added security configuration. There are also other applications hosting the framework (like IIS), and you can actually host the framework yourself (both the full and core framework). I was actually playing with the idea of hosting .NET addons in Kodi but it turns out it is too much work for a single developer as a hobby project.

<comment><USER18> What would be the advantage of .NET Kodi addons over Python? They would be faster that's for sure, but if I understand it correct, addons are not the main reason of Kodi suboptimal performance. The downsides are obvious - <USER3> you can relatively easy skim over the source code of the Python addons, it wouldn't be easy with .NET binaries - and most of the addons wouldn't provide source code. And the regular user can easily hack the feature, fix or two into Python addon code by himself, that wouldn't be so easy with .NET addons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As someone outside the .net world, is there a wasm version? Can I run a .net language in a web browser and have access to the DOM, or render the UI for a .net app as DOM objects on a web page? That would be super useful.

<comment><USER20> Blazor is coming. It's not GA yet.

[https://github.com/aspnet/Blazor](https://github.com/aspnet/Blazor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The recent Software Engineering Daily podcast on "Unity and WebAssembly" mentions that Unity has a .NET to C++ toolchain. Is that some kind of stock Mono feature, or is that another .NET runtime?

[https://www.softwaredaily.com/post/5ba9fdd63e3767000494fe01/...](https://www.softwaredaily.com/post/5ba9fdd63e3767000494fe01/Unity- and-WebAssembly-with-Brett-Bibby)

<comment><USER22> That's probably IL2CPP, developed at Unity: [https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/IL2CPP.html](https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/IL2CPP.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> You missed two that I can think of: (1) the runtime written in F# that Frank Krueger's Continuous uses (and I believe also Xamarin Live player uses in some fashion.) (2) Goa WinForms was a C# compiler that targeted the Adobe Flash Player, and implemented part of the BCL and WinForms UI. If you include the CrossNet I think this also counts.

<comment><USER7> Nice! Thanks for the info, I'll check those out, I'd not heard of either of them.

I think that an update to the post is due, turns out that I missed quite a few!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Let's look forward for .NET Core 3.0 and CoreRT: This would make it very competitive to Go not only being both native and self-contained but also going ahead in desktop-based, GUI programming.</comment>


Is an MBA useful for starting a business? - <AUTHOR> https://farhad667.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/is-an-mba-useful-for-starting-a-business/ <comment><USER2> If the business makes money making spreadsheets, yes</comment>


Ask HN: Search metrics question - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I write tutorials for certain types of software and I want to have a better understanding of what people are routinely searching for via google etc as it relates to the specifics of said software.
So, I wanted to know if there are any websites that can help me assess this information.
I'm specifically interested in what people are searching for within the umbrella of certain criteria. This way I can conform what I write to demand better.
An example would be a website that allows me to type in "Final cut pro" and a huge list of phrases appear by percentage and popularity.
Thanks <comment><USER2> If Google Trends and the Adwords Keyword tool don't work for you, I have a kludgey suggestion: auto-suggest. For example, I typed into Google:

final cut pro how to ...

And I got:

cut, capture, edit, render, fade audio, separate audio and video, etc.

You can only get ten at a time, but you try lots of other combinations to get a healthy list. Obviously this won't work for the long tail and isn't a very analytical approach, but sometime it helps me find something new to look into in more detail.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know about that. I just wanted to pry further and see if anyone on here knew some other ideas. Thanks though.

One thing I like to do is type a topic and then run the entire alphabet as the first letter for the next phrase and let google fill in the blank.

Pro Tools A

Pro Tools B

Pro Tools C

Etc.

<comment><USER2> Yeah -- you can also get tools to help you do this automatically, like <http://www.keywordninja.com/>

Also, if your space isn't time sensitive, I would suggest rounding up a copy of the search data AOL released a few years back. You can get a copy via torrent. Then you can run the data in any way you see fit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Google "AdWords keyword tool.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with the adwords keyword tool is it doesn't really help with giving me insight with the specifics of what people are trying to do. The keyword tool just gives me a list of keywords. For example, When I type:

"Pro Tools how do I"

I simply don't get a list.

If I type "Pro Tools" I only get a list of vague search words, like "Pro Tools help" and "Pro Tools keyboard".

This isn't useful if I'm debating if writing a tutorial on tempo mapping or audio file conversion is more important.

Thank you for the response however.

<comment><USER4> How about Google Insights for Search? <http://www.google.com/insights/search/></comment></comment></comment>


Bringing Bash's powerful command line editing to Microsoft Windows' cmd.exe - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/clink/

<comment><USER2> Do yourself a favor, learn PowerShell if you have to work on Windows. <http://technet.microsoft.com/library/bb978526.aspx>

<comment><USER3> While powershell is a valuable and interesting option, the problem with it is that it changes the basic metaphor.

For 40 years unix shells and their descendants and derivatives including cmd.exe have used files and text streams as the metaphor for interconnecting processes. Powershell changes that, and it means the output of one command goes to the input of another command as "objects".

This can be powerful, but it is also very disorienting. Which means it can be hard to learn to do even basic things in powershell, things that would take only a pipe or two and a couple unxutls programs in cmd.exe.

In cmd.exe, easy things are easy and hard things can be really hard. In powershell, hard things are hard (as opposed to "really hard") and easy things are hard.

<comment><USER4> I'm not a fan of powershell but I have to use it in my line of work.

The only thing that I find sucks is that the pipeline is slow as snails. For example, an svnadmin dump piped to a file which takes 8 mins in cmd.exe takes 14 hours in powershell...

Apart from that it's bearable!

<comment><USER5> _The only thing that I find sucks is that the pipeline is slow as snails._

This is because CreateProcess in Windows is slow. It's the reason that run make on Cygwin on Windows for not-that-large Makefiles is really, really slow. The same Makefile on UNIX and Windows differ in startup time by a wide margin. It's really painful to type "make ..." and sit there for 30 seconds on a fast machine.

<comment><USER4> CreateProcess is only being called once in this case i.e. to spawn svnadmin. The exact script does the following:

       svnadmin dump d:\repo > repo.dump

The output from svnadmin has a lot of lines. Due to the fact that PS is written on top of the CLR, it reads each line into an immutable string before writing it to a file. So for every line it has to create a new System.String object and as another poster said GC it later. Also as lines are not predictable length it has to buffer them resulting in more overhead.

Effectively where *NIX shells use a fixed size buffer for pipe operations and operate on streams, PS has to convert it to lines first before writing it out.

That doesn't work when you have approximately 25 bytes per line and a 12Gb file which is where the issue is.

<comment><USER6> I can appreciate the technical explanation as a programmer, but as an end-user of PS: I don't care. It's slow.

<comment><USER4> For the majority of tasks it's fast enough. There are a few edge cases though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this different from Unix Utils? Every gig I've ever been on where I'm forced to use a Windows box, first thing I do is load the Unix Util exes into some directory and add it to the path. <http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/>

<comment><USER8> If you like unixutils, you might like GOW a bit more:

<https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki/executables_list>

<https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki>

Kept up to date, every .exe (once installed) is self-contained (no external .DLLs) and portable to just about any Windows box I've run into.

No Cygwin or MinGW installation required.

Bash is actually available in the list (albeit an older version) if you really wanted "bash on Windows"

<comment><USER9> Thanks. I used to use GNUWin32 (<http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/>), but this seems like a good alternative.

<comment><USER10> This was my thought too, but I pushed GOW to a lower priority in my to-do list after a comment in a recent thread that publicised it:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4085830>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks sweet.

I currently have to use Windows at the customer I'm working for. I've installed Console which gives tabs and better copy-n-paste on Windows. See <http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/>

I'm not sure if clink and Console will work together, but I'll have to try it.

<comment><USER12> Console2 regularly crashes on my Windows 7, and it looks like it's not actively developed.

I'm giving ConEmu a try and it looks awesome!

<http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/>

Scott Hanselman wrote a blog post about it:

[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ConEmuTheWindowsTerminalConsol...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ConEmuTheWindowsTerminalConsolePromptWeveBeenWaitingFor.aspx)

<comment><USER13> Console2 looks releases 1-2 releases per yer. Looks quite stable while not active as some other projects. Check dates here: [http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/files/console- devel/...](http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/files/console-devel/2.00/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've switched to powershell ISE on windows (shipped with it) rather than cmd hosted powershell. Does the job!

<comment><USER14> Is it worth installing .NET 3.5 to run the ISE? I use Powershell but only have .NET 4 which runs it just fine. I'm a little surprised that ISE requires 3.5.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't make any difference. It required 3.5 as win7 shipped with that framework. You may actually have 3.5 installed already. Check for the following dir: c:\windows\Microsoft.net\framework\v3.5

If it's there you have it already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's wrong with Powershell?

<comment><USER16> starts too slow.

<comment><USER17> on my PC it is instantaneous, it is a matter of hardware.

<comment><USER6> No, it's not. I have a TI6x laptop, 4gb of RAM, plenty o' CPU and with no other user-space programs running, it still takes FOREVER to start. I feel like i'm launching Eclipse or something.

<comment><USER17> Try it on a T410, i7 with 8GB of RAM and a SSD, it takes 2s to start.

<comment><USER6> it's a SHELL for God's sake! I shouldn't need 8GB and SSD!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> just use cygwin

<comment><USER12> I feel like cygwin manages to combine the worst of UNIX and the worst of Windows. And the commands that use the cygwin runtime are noticeably slower than the native counterparts.

Also, AFAIK there is no 64bit version yet, which for me is a dealbreaker (I often work with files larger than 2GB).

<comment><USER19> I'm with you there -- I find Cygwin starts slow and unstable, and then seems to rot at an astonishing speed, to the point where it's usually unusable after I've had it installed for a couple of months.

<comment><USER20> Cygwin doesn't rot. It doesn't automatically update, and nor does it self- configure, so there's nothing to cause the rot. I've never had problems like you describe.

The biggest problem - and what I suspect is happening to you - is when you have third-party programs and utilities that interfere with Cygwin, most often by putting an older or newer version of cygwin1.dll on the $PATH (i.e. you may be using Cygwin as part of some other program and not be aware of it). Cygwin uses shared memory; multiple versions of cygwin1.dll disagree on the format of this shared memory, and things go pear-shaped pretty quickly from there.

Also some antivirus programs can trip up Cygwin; in its emulation, it sometimes has cause to open, close then open files in quick succession, but AV programs sometimes analyse files when they are opened by programs, and cause bogus timing-dependent sharing errors.

<comment><USER19> "there's nothing to cause the rot"

The rot tends to set in as I install packages to Cygwin; the more I add, the slower and less stable Cygwin seems to become, to the point of taking tens of seconds to reach a prompt after opening. Make of that what you will.

"Also some antivirus programs can trip up Cygwin"

That could well be a contributing factor in my case.

<comment><USER21> Did you try disabling bash completion[1]?

[1] [http://cfc.kizzx2.com/index.php/tag/cygwin-slow- performance-...](http://cfc.kizzx2.com/index.php/tag/cygwin-slow-performance- bash-completion/)

<comment><USER19> No, I didn't -- good spot, thank you.

I haven't bothered re-installing cygwin since the last nuke-and-pave, but I'll bear that in mind if I do and it's still relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Or just use Far Manager - <http://www.farmanager.com> \- it's Midnight Commander, Norton Commander type of program.

<comment><USER6> I've watched numerous Russian colleagues use it and it does not look appealing. These same colleagues do not seem to understand the power of a real *nix shell. You end up doing less typing if you really know your shell and how to pipe etc.

<comment><USER22> You can run cygwin shell from FAR, or any other shell. Seriously.

Think of Far Manager as Midnight Commander, more or less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why use this over a cross-compiled version of Bash?</comment>


Testing a $35 Firefox OS phone–how bad could it be? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-35-firefox-os-phone-how-bad-could-it-be/

<comment><USER3> Did I miss the part where they reviewed the actual phone features - <USER2> quality, address book, text messaging, etc - or did Ars forget that they were actually reviewing a smart _phone_?

</comment><comment><USER4> Would a newer FxOs perform better? I imagine the keyboard would be better, at least.</comment>


No word for sex - <AUTHOR> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001979.html

<comment><USER2> I remember reading a science fiction novel in which a story was recounted by one character to another of a "first contact" expedition to a world. The members of the expedition had been assured that the inhabitants were peaceful because they had no word for war.

When they landed, they were slaughtered.

True, the inhabitants had no word for "war" - that's not sufficiently refined. They had words for

* war because of land conflict

* war because of water rights

* war because of ancient insult

* genocide as retribution

 _and so on._

But no word for "war".

I can't remember the novel - perhaps some of you can. If not, I just might have to re-read my collection to find it.</comment>


Auroracoin: Cryptocurrency for every Icelandic resident - <AUTHOR> http://www.auroracoin.org/ <comment><USER2> From a link in other comment [http://coinmarketcap.com/mineable- all.html](http://coinmarketcap.com/mineable-all.html) (with alternative formatting)

> #: 3

> Name: Auroracoin

> Market Cap: $ 180,504,106

> Price: $ 17.05

> Total Supply: 10,588,226 AUR

> Volume (24h) $ 151,421

I can't get a precise Market Cap graph, but apparently the price doubled since yesterday, and it increased a lot in the last week. The 24hs-volume is very low, this coin has the #9 position in that order. With a small volume it's easier to manipulate the market.

> _Auroracoin is a cryptocurrency for Iceland. It is based on litecoin and is > 50% premined. The premined coins will be distributed to the entire > population of Iceland, commencing on midnight 25th of March 2014._

If we discount the 10,500,000 premined coins we 88,226 "wild" coins increasing slowly until March 25th. So the naive calculation gives a "wild" Market Cap of only 1,543,955. If this is successful, on March 25th the circulating coins well increase x120. A less successful hand out to a 10% of the population will increase it only x13. With a 1% it raises x2. I expect a big drop in the value and I don't understand why there are people buying this coin now.

<comment><USER3> My money is on people realising there will be a drop in value but want to get a return on the short term rise due to publicity between now and then. It's reasonable if you time it right but if everyone is playing the same game...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> as part of the local bitcoin meetup here in Iceland, almost universally we believe it's a scam. The name does not exist in Iceland (we have a national directory, only 320,000 ppl). Premined 50% doesn't help either as well as the lack of awareness here Iceland about bitcoin and currency controls. This thing is preying on most foreigners false narrative of Iceland.

<comment><USER5> Who is behind Auroracoin? Do they communicate with other Icelandic cryptocurrency enthusiasts?

<comment><USER4> they're mildly active on fb here, but the name is a made up one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> So am I about to witness something called a "pump and dump" where someone started buying up Auroracoins to inflate the price, and then will slowly start selling them back?

I really don't understand how markets work, and cryptocoins are probably a terrible place to learn, but it's not costing me anything except some electricity from a spare computer running a GPU card.

<comment><USER6> You are about to witness the same exact thing as what just happened in Iceland—a massive ponzi scheme.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's now the third most valuable cryptocurrency according to [http://coinmarketcap.com/mineable- all.html](http://coinmarketcap.com/mineable-all.html)

<comment><USER7> I think that you meant that is has the third biggest market cap.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, that's what I meant.

I'm new to following the whole crypto currency thing. It's all wildly speculative and way too risky to bet money on, but I'm enjoying learning how much I don't know.

\--

" War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."

      - Ambrose Bierce

"Bitcoin is the Devil's way of teaching geeks economics."

      - Revalin 165YUuQUWhBz3d27iXKxRiazQnjEtJNG9g

<comment><USER8> Bitcoin is the Devil's way of demonstrating F.A Hayek was on to something with his essay "The Denationalization Of Money."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't this obviously illegal?

" _I call on the cryptocurrency exchanges of the world to accept transactions with auroracoins._ "

That's plainly violating the capital control laws (on the Icelandic side). Notably, the central bank already declared that those laws apply to Bitcoin:

" _It is prohibited to engage in foreign exchange trading with the electronic currency Bitcoin, according to the Icelandic Foreign Exchange Act_ "

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

<comment><USER10> Isn't this the point of the coin? Iceland's government made it illegal to use Bitcoin, so nobody can buy into the currency. By giving the premined coins to Icelandic citizens, they are trying to create a stable crypto ecosystem and help icelanders avoid the legal repercussions of the Icelandic Foreign Exchange act.

The wiki page you linked said this: "commentators suggest bitcoins mined within Iceland could be freely traded."

The premine is expressly for this purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Everybody gets 30-some coins (which most probably won't happen). Then what? Who wants to trade them?

No pre-mine would have been the way to go. That would have made money change hands: people buy hardware, consume more electricity, pay the kid next door to take care of the mining rig, etc.

EDIT: I might have been too harsh. Good luck. I'm going bull on this, as might many others.

</comment><comment><USER12> Their has been at least one headline of Iceland's cheap electricity has been harnessed to mine bitcoin. Likely other ecoins as litecoin. That's a nice marriage of circumstances of a small island nation of talented tech (eg: EVE Online - CCP Games's evolving vast servers), botched economy, and few other natural resources to export.

</comment><comment><USER13> Original post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7271496](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7271496)

</comment><comment><USER14> They should call it tailings pile coin instead because it's been premined so badly.

</comment><comment><USER15> How do I get my coins? (I'm icelandic)

</comment><comment><USER16> Fascinating idea.

<comment><USER16> Wait. How do I get down-voted for saying this a fascinating idea? Does that even imply that I support it? Lame.

<comment><USER17> No, it's because you aren't following the guidelines. Post interesting content. This isn't reddit.

<comment><USER18> This truly is not reddit. I've noticed so many humor-less posts (not that every site needs a sense of humor) and so many grammatical errors that it really paints a picture; reddit is for bored, out of work english majors and this place seems to be for enlightened, snooty programmers.

<comment><USER19> I feel like on any given day I could fall into any one of those two camps.

<comment><USER20> I'm pretty damn sure I've got one foot in each camp.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>