Show HN: Hiro – Fast and responsive notetaking meets semantic search - <AUTHOR> https://alpha.hiroapp.com/ <comment><USER4> This is incredible and ignore the haters.

My advice: fine-tune this for different verticals. I'd really love to use a tool like this for taking notes for law school classes. Wire up the search engine with cool parsers (e.g. a legal citation parser[1]) or something that pulls the decision[2] of a case from Wikipedia just by writing the case name.

[1] [https://github.com/unitedstates/citation](https://github.com/unitedstates/citation)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission)

<comment><USER5> Thanks! That's exactly the thinking behind the potentially upcoming pro version, once we'd see that there's basic interest.

<comment><USER4> Awesome. Happy to give my $0.02 on any number of potential verticals. My is email is my HN name at Google's mail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I quite like the notes aspect. Good job!

The search feature is a total miss for me however. What problem is it solving? I already have Google, I don't need subpar search built into my notes app.

And searching automatically on highlighted text seems particularly confusing. I quite often highlight text while writing, not intending to make searches in the sidebar. It also took me too long to realize search results were being appended at the end of the list, not at the top.

The search text is also confusing. "All loaded, keep going." Say what now?

On the business model, $9 a month seems too steep as compared to the value prop of, say, Netflix. But I'm a cheap curmudgeon, so you should probably raise prices for all I know!

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the feedback, @ search bit of reasoning:

"Making lists, remembering good ideas or writing drafts mostly includes a lot of research. So you normally sit there with a ton of tabs open, copy and paste things etc. What if those tabs, that are normally lost, can be pinned right next to your notes? Or you can look up and replace a word with a synonym with a single click."

In short (especially with the Chrome plugin) it's saving (re)search next to your note instead of tabs that vanish.

9 bucks: Thought about it rather binary, either you'd pay nothing (you can a lot with the free plan) or you see a ton value/don't care that much.

+1 on the cryptic buddy'ing status responses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like it as a proof of concept. I don't like it as a product.

In general, and with notes especially, focus is important. You are essentially doing the opposite by bombarding the writer with distractions as they write.

I'm afraid your search would have to get shockingly smart for it to provide any real value to the writing process. Then again, I am only 1 potential customer and perhaps I'm just not your demographic so good luck!

<comment><USER5> You can switch off the searchbar with small brackets in the top right corner, which also adapts the layout a bit. On mobiles its hidden as default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> First thoughts from Chrome on Mac. Questions are stream-of-conscious rather than requiring real answers.

Looks sharp. Why is it offering me Wikipedia links in the right column? OK, at least I can make it go away.

Whoa, why does the page keep moving right-and-left every time I'm about to type. Oh, it's when I mouse over the left column. I tend to move the mouse cursor out of the way of my text area when I'm typing, and if I stow it to the left it triggers the slide-over as it passes over the left column.

Figure out that the 3-stacked-horizontal lines can close the slider. Click again to re-open --- that makes sense. But if I click to close, then move the mouse cursor off the page to the left it reopens. Repeat a few times, give up, leave it open.

Start typing. Nothing happens. Scan the screen for a typing cursor. Can't find one. Tab? Nope. Type again, don't see anything changing. OK, I guess they want me to click somewhere. Another couple dizzying screen slides, and I can type.

Ok, let's change the silly title I put in to start with. Up-arrow, up-arrow, nothing is happening. There seems to be no way to get there from here. Tab, shift-tab? Nope. Guess I've got to click. But I really appreciated that both Tab and Return took be back to the text from the title.

Type a bit, looks clean. But not sure what I'm supposed to be doing. I'll try creating a new 'note'. For the first time, open the slider on the left intentionally. Click 'new note'. Eeeeek! I'm greated with a giant multi- colored blocker in the middle of the screen. And it's wobbling a few pixels back and forth at about 2 Hz, making me nauseous.

Escape doesn't work. Back button doesn't work. Must get out of here. Click to close.

Maybe there is something I can read on the home page that would explain this better. Wait, the back button still doesn't work? Wait, they've broken reload as well? Maybe the unlabeled button on the bottom left. No --- that brings the wiggling nausea back! Fingers reflexively close the whole window with Ctrl-W.

Take deep breaths, write quick first impressions on HN.

I like the simplicity of the overall look. Design is very clean. But I wish things would't keep happening when I move the mouse, and didn't feel like I was able to test any of the features before being forced to sign up.

<comment><USER5> Nate, thanks a lot for the really great feedback.

Will definitely add very brief timeout on the sidebar and investigate where the Mac/Chrome wobbling is coming from, and also add more autofocus/keyboard shortcut functions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been looking for the perfect note taking application for a while and here are the things I'd really like that nobody else seems to have in one place (I understand that these things likely do not coincide with your goals but I thought I'd put them out there anyway on the offchance you implement them :) ):

\- Strong (technical) security so that the server is a knowledge free environment (no staff, governments whatever can read my notes). Ideally through client-side encryption (perhaps the search would grab some tokens and send them to the server for processing, rather than having the plaintext document on the server). Perhaps the encryption should be optional and encrypted notes wouldn't be sent at all? As a non-American, I _really_ don't like being forced to put my data on American servers where I essentially have no rights. The alternative to this is having a way to specify that the note should remain offline (in localstorage or somesuch) and never touch the server.

\- Ability to take the app offline and have it work mostly the same (without search of course)/

\- Web clipping (see the Evernote web clipper) with image rehosting

\- Markdown support

\- Desktop client

\- Client side plugins (these make the rest of the above much easier), ideally written in something like JS or Python.

\- Full-featured API

I really just want something where I can feel like I'm in control. When I use most services it feels like I'm surrendering something (security, convenience, privacy, ownership of my data).

<comment><USER10> Pandoc support would also be fantastic... this would be ideal for taking notes in comp sci/math courses!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I suggest that you add a typing-notation which means, 'search this'. Perhaps, "[supreme court smith maryland]". Then, when the close-bracket triggers the search, one of the 'pin' options on the results will offer single-click replacement of the "[*]" with a persistent association to that sticky sidebar- result.

If different users can plug in different search-backends, many hypertext- writing domains could be accelerated, including Wikipedia, legal, blogging, etc. Maybe even you could have an image-suggesting mode for finding quick (and perhaps liberally-licensed) supporting images?

(I'd add Pinboard/archiving-support as well... so everything pinned gets snapshot against link rot.)

Your links/refs column is also a bit reminiscent of [https://gingkoapp.com/](https://gingkoapp.com/) – your two projects can probably draw inspiration from each other.

Good luck!

<comment><USER5> Thanks, is also about picking something up again we tried 8 years ago ( [http://techcrunch.com/2006/09/14/systemone-wikis-with- semant...](http://techcrunch.com/2006/09/14/systemone-wikis-with-semantics- search-and-ajax/) ), just starting simple this time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I take almost all of my notes in an outline style, which means lots of bullet points.

So far, I haven't been able to find a note-taking program that does bullet- outlines better than Word, and that's a shame.

<comment><USER13> Could not agree more!

I use Evernote, but even there often the bullet points get out of sync and you have to manually realign everything. Evernote is fantastic, but there are certain things I don't understand why it lacks (LaTeX support and superscript/subscript would be another).

<comment><USER14> Evernote doesn't offer LaTeX support, but does support superscript/subscript.

In the Evernote Mac app, simply go to Format > Style > Superscript or Subscript.

There are even keyboard shortcuts: ctrl cmd + for superscript ctrl cmd - <USER2> subscript

<comment><USER13> So sub/sup _is_ offered in the Mac version, and on the web, but NOT on the Windows client. Isn't that crazy!! It's like they're trolling given the CMS can clearly deal with the idea of sub/sup

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yet another notetaking app, What about sync across devices; security/encryption; lock-in? Only ten notes in the free plan. What does this offer over notational velocity or Simplenote? This semantic research thing will have to be shit hot to justify even nine clams a month. What even is the archive, ffs? Haven't seen any searches. Is Disconnect or adblock+ killing them? [Update: searches appearing after about 10 mins] At first sight - <USER3> how many apps ever get a second? - this is laughably misjudged. And now I've noticed it doesn't zoom text reliably in the latest Firefox, trimming the top or bottom line. To expect to charge for this right now seems a bit bloody cheeky. And in use: [http://oi40.tinypic.com/8xn3sy.jpg](http://oi40.tinypic.com/8xn3sy.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a cool idea and the execution is slick too, but I'd like to know more about anonymity and privacy of both content and search results.

I'm talking about both the privacy of cloud notes, and of the explicit searches when terms are selected with the mouse for a narrow search.

People often take notes about things that are private or personal, and this is explicitly creating a historical association between your thoughts and (public) web searches on those thoughts.

You normally think of notes as a self-contained thing (even if the container is in the cloud), while this is broadcasting your note terms to third parties as you compose them.

I can't find a privacy policy link. So I'd like to know more.

<comment><USER5> Great line of thinking and very valid arguments, and also the reason we didn't think of any ad supported model.

Currently we encrypt the notes and store them within appengine, while the search results are saved/cached as plaintext. No formal privacy policy atm, but we don't give your notes and neither does one of the third parties (GA as the content comes after GA, intercom and sentry).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like the idea, but in my brief test drive (before I ran out of searches) I didn't find much value in the discovered links on the right.

Some samples which illustrate the value of the semantic search would be helpful. The screenshot shows a virtually empty note with links on the right. What amount and type of content is best suited to the semantic search?

<comment><USER5> The semantic search part is pretty limited atm, because we have to build (more or less guess) entities that form a good Yahoo BOSS query. Thinking about adding more data sources, whhere we can do basic but full vector space magic. Signing up gives you 100 more searches, and you can also select words/sentences/paragraphs to limit the search while playing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Although this is really pretty, I'm not sure I get the concept.

Is this a web-based version of Notational Velocity with a sidebar that does a websearch on certain elements of what I'm writing?

Draftin.com already serves me well as a web-based note-taking thingy, plus great collaboration tools.

I guess here's the question: what's the use case for the sidebar?

<comment><USER5> Draftin, iA etc are good when you know what you want to write, but we kept 'quickdump' textfiles on our desktops and the occasional mail to ourselves.

The thinking is really in the details, fast in terms of as few clicks and taps as possible. Having to click 3 times to open the last google doc or similar just to paste in an idea or copy something over didn't cut it for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is really cool. The app is beautiful to look at. I find the search useful, particularly being able to pin results to the document. Highlighting a word and getting a list of synonyms is great, too.

This fills a niche similar to Microsoft OneNote's, but with the complexity scaled down admirably. Great job.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't get it. It seems like a very basic version of evernote posting everything that I write somewhere else. I am not comfortable with my text going to other unknown places.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't know why people are hating the search links on the right. It's a neat idea. There were many times in school when I had to write a simple paper where something like Wikipedia sources were acceptable. If it was something I knew about before hand, I would write a good chunk from memory and then back check it against Wikipedia and other sources online. This might have been a great tool for that initial run.

</comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone know of an open-source/forkable alternative that comes close to matching the functionality here? Not necessarily the searching piece, just the note management and content editing screens. I've seen a number of them fly by on HN over the past several months, but didn't capture any of the links.

</comment><comment><USER23> I built something like this before: [http://spiktra.com](http://spiktra.com)

</comment><comment><USER24> some feedback (most of it minor):

\- the text cursor seems oddly tall to me...

\- shift-tab should dedent, not indent

\- the searching google thing.. is weird. I don't get it.

\- not having bullets is =(

\- not having indents maintained on newlines is =(

( notes are often hierarchical)

\- doesn't work offline (can keep typing, but nothing saved). check out localstorage and appcache.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! Some browsers render the cursor according to line height. Will ad shift-tab, the rest would need a proper line based editor, kept it simple for the first round of feedback. Same unfortunately goes for offline access, where conflicts are the challenge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting, I was thinking the semantic search was actually somehow searching your content and interrelating it and finding patterns. This is pretty cool too, but imagine a notebook that found the common themes among your own notes. That would be pretty cool!

</comment><comment><USER26> Quick little nitpick thing, but how do you scroll within the document? I was messing around putting a ton of newlines, but I wasn't sure how to get back to the top of the document without using my keyboard arrow keys.

Beautiful UI by the way. Nice job!

<comment><USER5> Thanks! And sorry: Which OS/Browser were you using?

<comment><USER26> Firefox 24.0 on Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can I not share my FB friend list? Otherwise I'd like to extensively try it out

<comment><USER5> Sry for the default FB scope, just sign up via mail & password.

<comment><USER28> Have you considered Mozilla Persona instead of passwords? demo: [http://123done.org](http://123done.org) docs: [http://developer.mozilla.org/persona](http://developer.mozilla.org/persona)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! We have persona support in a feature-branch, it just didn't get merged/integrated, yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I like it but wouldn't pay for it. The search sidebar is appealing with the pin-it icons. Search results were pretty good if a bit generic. Doesn't seem to be very semantic but still a nice toy.

</comment><comment><USER30> (1) who owns this content?

(2) can this be exported?

(3) is this publically searchable?

(4) how is this better than org-mode?

<comment><USER5> \- You \- Yes (see small cloud icon next to title once you sign up) \- No \- In the clouds (syncs incl mobile) & less structured

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The only thing missing is : [https://github.com/daviferreira/medium- editor](https://github.com/daviferreira/medium-editor)

Good job, well done!

</comment><comment><USER32> You could use a filter for "adult" content. The top result for the (non- pornographic) film list I pasted in was something about "Milf Porn Movies".

<comment><USER5> Not the biggest fans of text safe search (too many false positives), but please excuse if anything was insulting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> You could create plugins for existing editors like Vim, Emacs or Sublime Text 2. This way the users would feel home but with the semantic search service helping them.

</comment><comment><USER34> Good idea!

Nitpick: The _Read More_ section on the right seems a bit of a misfit for a product that seems to take away distraction. I found it irrelevant and distracting.

</comment><comment><USER35> Markdown support would be awesome, great interface. Although, the hover to show the sidebar would be better handled with a click event in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER36> I used this in my android, and a big broken part was the lack of ability to use the back button. Whenever I pressed it, went back to HN.

<comment><USER5> Hm, is the case on all platforms, nothing is lost though. Which behavior would you expect?

<comment><USER36> In my case, what bothered me was when I accidentally opened up the various side bars. Usually on Android, I'd just hit the universal back button to go back to where I was (text input, not the menu screen). Since pretty much everything works this way, it's reflex. So it was odd when I hit the back button and returned to HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's amazing. I currently use AIWriter and it's not available on web.

Hiro meets all my expectations. Great work. Thanks!

<comment><USER5> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Does not work offline! No choice for me.

</comment><comment><USER39> Where is the search function? A good notetaking app should have awesome note search.

<comment><USER5> Wanted to wait for this, currently most usertests show that people use it for not many, but long documents (ctrl+f works for them in this case). As soon as the note/user count goes up, we'll think about adding this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> good idea in theory, but the search is "ridiculously" slow. Not to mention the fact that it doesn't work after the first search. Also, you're using the term "semantic" wrong.

<comment><USER5> HN effect, search should be < 500msec normally. It is indeed semantic (POS tagger & chunker), but as mentioned atm this only tries to build Yahoo BOSS queries, which can't OR and rank, thus the bit lame results.

<comment><USER40> POS tagger & chunker has nothing to do with search being semantic. Here's the definition of semantic search: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_search](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_search)

As I said, i think it's a good idea. I just think you should do some due diligence when using buzz words like "ridiculously fast" or "semantic search". A lot of people are allergic to buzzwords

<comment><USER5> After meandering through the Euro SemWeb ecosystem in 2005 i took the idiosyncratic liberty to include everything that uses semantics (eg POS) in that bracket. But definitely get the point, ridiculously was the next choice after "here's your weekly writer app".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This rocks reminds me of NVAlt for mac which I use for note taking locally.

</comment><comment><USER42> Is it just me or is the site down?

</comment><comment><USER43> love it!

</comment><comment><USER44> I prefer the phrase: "It's Always Free".

</comment><comment><USER45> The home page sounds kind of pretentious, so much so that I'm not even sure I want to try it.

<comment><USER45> I said this without thinking. I'm sorry.</comment></comment>


Precise (+-2cm) indoor "GPS" for autonomous robots - <AUTHOR> http://www.marvelmind.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Off-the-shelf indoor navigation system based on stationary ultrasonic beacons united by radio interface in license-free band.

Location of a mobile beacon installed on a robot (cart, copter, human) is calculated based on the propagation delay of ultrasonic signal to a set of stationary ultrasonic beacons using trilateration.</comment>


The Inventions of Stanford Ovshinsky - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-most-important-inventor-youve-never-heard-of/ <comment><USER2> I love to hear about people like this. I have been wanting to set up a research lab for years. My only fear is that my abilities might be faded by the time I have the ability to spend all my time in the lab. No matter what though, we truly live in a time of near magical material science.

<comment><USER3> Never fear, some of the greatest inventions came to inventors later in life. This whole "you need to accomplish early in life" is a trick to demotivate you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> the origin of the tech behind Intel's cross point memory

<comment><USER5> And mister Nickel Metal Hydride. I knew I recognized that name but couldn't place it.</comment></comment>


Increased rates of myopia linked to reduced time outside, studies suggest (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120 <comment><USER2> Its a very well studied dataset in (graduate) Stats. So many contingency tables where you correlate onset of myopia - myopia vs Asian/non-Asian, myopia verus Male/Female, with/without computer, w/wo smartphone, w/wo outdoor time, w/wo myopic parents, on & on.

If you know how to run a ChiSq, you can look at some 2x2 tables here. You can convince yourself with 1 line of R.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1771677/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1771677/)

Or if you want someone else to run the analysis & just skip to the interpretation of results, try this - [http://astro1.panet.utoledo.edu/~terencezl/projects/myopia.h...](http://astro1.panet.utoledo.edu/~terencezl/projects/myopia.html)

But honestly, there's a ton of data on this subject. Conclusion is mostly the same - if you spend more time outside, less likely to be myopic. That's the one factor you can control. The others (being Asian or male or having myopic parents etc) is luck of the draw.

</comment><comment><USER3> The other side of this problem is that more than one billion people around the world can't afford glasses.

"More than a billion people around the world need eyeglasses but don't have them, researchers say, an affliction long overlooked on lists of public health priorities. Some estimates put that figure closer to 2.5 billion people. They include thousands of nearsighted Nigerian truck drivers who strain to see pedestrians darting across the road and middle-aged coffee farmers in Bolivia whose inability to see objects up close makes it hard to spot ripe beans for harvest. Then there are the tens of millions of children like Shivam across the world whose families cannot afford an eye exam or the prescription eyeglasses that would help them excel in school."

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/health/glasses- developing...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/health/glasses-developing- world-global-health.html)

<comment><USER3> VisionSpring, a social venture, provides people glasses - which they say costs them $4-5 each. They claim that uncorrected refractive error costs the global economy an estimated $227 billion a year. [https://visionspring.org/why- eyeglasses](https://visionspring.org/why-eyeglasses)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related: myopia is one of the most common health problem that occurs to prisoners.

<comment><USER5> Do we know if that myopia is caused while in prison, or if it is just picked up while they are in prison. Because it would be very unusual to see myopic changes from emmetropization (eye remodeling) occurring in adults.

<comment><USER4> > Because it would be very unusual to see myopic changes from emmetropization > (eye remodeling) occurring in adults.

What makes you think it's unusual?

<comment><USER5> So some background information is necessary to get everyone on the same page. The optics of the eye are such that the lens and cornea focus light onto the back of the eye, the retina. That focusing power can be inadequate or overpowered depending on the axial length of the eye. You can imagine that you would need a diverging lens to help focus light better in a longer (myopic, or near-sighted) eye, and a converging light to help focus light better in a shorter (hyperopic, or far-sighted) eye.

We know from several large scale studies that eye reaches its maximum axial length by around age 13, and while the eye gets ever so slightly shorter (hyperopic, rather than myopic) as you age, it's far outweighed by the effects of presbyopia, whereby the lens of your eye becomes less elastic with age, and thus is unable to focus up close. In effect, it makes you more farsighted, and why people with myopia feel that their vision somewhat improves with age.

Sources (with references to the large scale studies, which unfortunately I cannot currently access): [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4347057/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4347057/) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3843406/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3843406/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a real issue in South Korea and many other Asian countries, where it's prevalent.

In these countries, having a "fair/light" skin signifies social prestige. Which is why most parents do not let their children go out to play and explore while the sun is out.

This mentality is primarily rooted from imperial times, where tan skin was associated with lower-class field or farm work. I personally experienced this, growing up in SE Asia. The population is also bombarded with ads for skin whitening soaps, creams, lotions, and even glutathione iv treatments.

It's a multibillion-dollar skin-whitening market in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and South Korea.

More on the subject:

 _The high prevalence of myopia in Korean children with influence of parental refractive errors_ :

[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0207690)

2008 Article:

 _Outdoor Activity Reduces the Prevalence of Myopia in Children_ :

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016164200...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0161642007013644)

<comment><USER7> In northern Europe it's the exact opposite. Youths go out of their way to get tanned skin as is signifies social prestige on Instagram and IRL, as in you can afford to go often on vacations in sunny places year round as opposed to the poor wage slaves who are at their desks most of the year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had 2020 vision till 2012 (39 years old then). I am convinced that my myopia onset was perceptibly accelerated with the purchase of my first "smart phone". And the constant use of it: Whatsapp & twitter.

Can the damage be reversed?

<comment><USER9> Is there any proof/research that it is because of smartphones (screens?)? My anecdote; I have had myopia since I was 7 (I am 45 now), 1 year _before_ my first computer. Since then I have spent most my waking life behind screens and my myopia has been getting less slowly since my first glasses. I now can see quite well without glasses which I could not do 15+ years ago. Also, I should be up for reading glasses soon, but I can read the tiniest fonts on the tiniest screens without reading glasses (I need my normal glasses for that though), which gives me a lot of real estate on small devices (for instance working on a 4k remote desktop on my iPad pro 10inch; of course it does not show the entire desktop at once (you scroll which makes it really a nice kind of 'virtual desktop' system for me) but for me it's comfortable to read while other people cannot even see what i'm doing as the fonts are really minuscule). My eyes don't get tired though and never have on screens, even when screens where crappy flickering low res CRT things (huge fonts of course, compared to what I use now).

Maybe the spending time outside is more related to it as this article says; I work almost exclusively outside. I abhor cold so I only spend my days in warm climes where I work outside behind my computer/phone/tablet/... for the entire day. When I have meetings, I try to get people to meet outside, which usually works (most people like this far more than staying inside, even if it's chilly, but not with freeze/rain/snow of course).

<comment><USER10> Pre smartphone days(1997) but when I was in college I had to get glasses to see the whiteboard at the end of the first year spent looking at monitors and a drafting board for large periods of the day. I spent my summers lifeguarding on a beach so three months off staring hard into the distance from 10am to 7pm 6 days a week with hardly any screen time. When returning to college in September I could see the board without glasses for the first 2-3 months but then would revert to needing glasses. This cycle repeated itself for several years but the time reverting to glasses got shorter each year. Sample size of 1, YMMV

<comment><USER11> Fascinating story, and I love the implication that you were lifeguarding without glasses. I know from personal experience that bright sunlight improves visual acuity (bright images, pupil constriction, and squinting all help), so obviously you were able to do your job, but the mental image is pretty funny!

<comment><USER10> I actually never though of that and had a good laugh reading your comment. I had to pass a medical with an eye test for the job so I presume I was safe. Eyesight is a complicated thing, I have one eye much worse than the other, can read the monitor fine with my right eye and not at all with my left eye. I can use a monitor OK for an hour or two with no glasses but after that I get a headache. My right eye defiantly compensates for my left.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've needed glasses for myopia since my early teens. As the inevitable decline in eye focusing ability set in (I'm now 52), I've taken to keeping a pair of glasses with weakened prescription (-1, 1.25, 1.5 diopter all seem to work equally well, just affects posture i.e. ideal distance to screen) near every computer workstation I use. With cheap mail-order outfits like Zenni cost is not an issue.

With these on, my eyes' comfortable (and nearly only remaining) "infinity focus" is used to work at a computer. One wonders, if myopia is, in fact, caused by long-term eye strain from excessive near focus time during developing years, whether a disciplined approach of using normal reading glasses designed for older folks, while doing all paper/computer work, might help against developing myopia.

I'm aware of bifocals and contact lenses/laser surgery (with these, ordinary cheap reading glasses would suffice) but I've always been most comfortable just wearing normal eyeglasses, so switching to weakened glasses as necessary works for me.

</comment><comment><USER13> I believe it. While I was in university, my eyes strained a lot to the point where they'd start to tear uncontrollably for days on end, I'd get headaches and my vision literally got worse. But every summer I'd spend weeks on end outdoors, camping, hiking, etc... It got better, all the eye strain went away. My mother used to have 20/20 vision, until a decade into her career as an accountant (it could have been age, but eye problems aren't prevalent in her family).

That's part of the reason I decided to do something outside of my degree path (that and the fact economics is depressing AF). I still enjoy computers, economics, all the things I studied, but working with my hands, stints in the outdoors, not staring at a screen makes me happier (and healthier).

</comment><comment><USER14> Since I started walking our dog everyday on the beach, for health reasons, I've noticed a definite improvement in my eyesight, I still don't need glasses age 56. I also remember when when I had a job in London that required commuting on the tube my eyesight deteriorated quickly, when I switched jobs and drove to work, it got better again, driving gives your eyes a good workout because one constantly switches focus between far and close objects.

</comment><comment><USER15> I moved to a ground floor place, and basically get no direct light. Sort of a shock after years of a sunny place.

I have some studio lights around for recording. Would these benefit the eye the way the sun does? I had considered using them while working for seasonal affective disorder.

It's hard to be sure but my eyes feel a little weaker since moving in.

<comment><USER16> I had a similar situation and did notice a positive improvement after getting a super bright (5000 lumen) light. Could have been coincidence but I was pleasantly surprised when my prescription decreased in strength.

I assumed using it at night would mess up my sleep, but it didn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Isn't myopia beneficial? When eyes get adapted to screens, books maybe it's bettter? I can see every single pixel on screens and it's very useful in daily life. Far sight is useful only rarely - when driving, and when hiking in mountains. And near sight worsens with age, maybe previous myopia slightly prevents that.

On quora they agree [https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-benefits-being-short- sigh...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-benefits-being-short-sighted- myopia)

Thanks for reminding me about myopia, I will get glasses (if anything, just for mountain views). One time I tried someone else's glasses and it was wonderful, completely different world when being outside, extremely sharp, not blurry.

<comment> frant-hartm No, I have -4D and can't see a screen clearly from more than 25 cm.

<comment><USER18> I have -5.50D and to be honest, whilst my vision is pretty poor I can definitely tell that, when not wearing glasses, my close-up vision is better. Not that it's actually helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I do an exercise each day where I try to (for at least 10 minutes) look at very distant objects like the horizon or a tree in the distance. I do this because it relaxes the eye especially if you work with screens all day (which I do).

<comment><USER20> I've heard the rule that it should be like at least 20 seconds every 20 minutes or so. Of course, it's all just heuristics, though.

<comment><USER21> None of these eye exercises have any benefit for myopia prevention. They might reduce eyestrain, but that is not related to the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Next correlation: Increased risk of myopia linked to time spent on HN!

</comment><comment><USER23> I can attest that I'm short sighted and the problem becomes much much worse if I spend a lot of time in front of my computer.

Some days when I go out early in the morning I can see everything perfectly, and other days I can't even read a number plate that is five metres away.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Increased risk of wetness linked to reduced distance from water, studies suggest."

Human bodies autocalibrate for their environment to a remarkable degree on virtually every axis, moreso during childhood and adolescence and to a lesser degree after reaching maturity. I can't fathom why anyone would doubt that spending all of your time staring at nearby objects causes your eyes to adapt to staring at nearby objects.

<comment><USER21> This article specifically says the near work hypothesis does not fit the data.

<comment><USER24> I'm not talking about the near-work hypothesis (ie. "too much close work causes myopia"), but the related idea that "not enough far work causes myopia."

And this perfectly fits the article's findings.

Anecdotally, a few of my friends are into sailing, in a 'crewing a large sailing ship' sense, and apparently some have seen noticeable improvements to their myopia after being out at sea for a couple of weeks and spending a lot of time staring at the horizon.</comment></comment></comment>


Scientists maybe able now to speak their mind in the uk - <AUTHOR> http://www.5rb.co.uk/case/British-Chiropractic-Association-v-Singh-(CA)

<comment><USER2> This is sufficiently crazy that I had to Google the case to be absolutely sure that it wasn't a subtle April Fool's joke. It is not. It is completely real.

The scientist was sued for libel for making statements of fact about chiropractors. (Remember that in the UK the fact that you're saying something true is not a defense against libel. This is one reason why people seeking to sue for libel try to sue in England.) But that was overturned because it was ruled that the scientist was making a statement of opinion, not fact, and therefore could be held to a more generous standard.

So scientists are allowed to comment about pseudoscience so long as they are clear that they are making statements of (supported) personal opinion rather than statements of fact. As messed up as the USA can be, I'm suddenly glad I don't live in England.

<comment><USER3> The truth is an absolute defence against libel in the UK - the difficulty is that the defendent must prove the truth.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for the correction.

My understanding of UK libel law was based on comments made by Greg Palast some years ago about the difficulties he'd encountered in England, and then noticing reports in the BBC and elsewhere over the years about libel tourism. However a quick check of Wikipedia verifies that I was mistaken, the truth is a defense. Though one that seems too hard to apply in practice in the UK.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: When would you choose Electron and when would you go Native? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> when I don't need too much ui customization and when I want the ui looks more akin to the system default, I go native.

When the ui requires customization that is easy to create with html, and performance and install footage isn't a constraint, I go with electron.</comment>


Show HN: A digital platform to connect future home buyers and sellers together - <AUTHOR> https://homematchx.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys I recently launched Homematchx.com as an interactive way to connect future home and buyers at similar stages of the real estate process. Unlike other real estate listing platforms that shows move-in ready homes in less than 30 days, Homematchx list future homes and buyers at various stages of the real estate process to empower users to find the right match to close when they're ready. Everyone has a plan and a price! Why wait until you're 30 days from buying or selling when you can find the perfect match to extend the closing date at your convenience.

I wrote on YC here [https://www.startupschool.org/posts/32092](https://www.startupschool.org/posts/32092)

Your feedback is much appreciated.

Thank you

Stephen L.</comment>


Alcohol use disorder largest risk factor for dementia - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180220183954.htm <comment><USER2> I've been reading Why We Sleep, a really good and important book about sleep from a noted sleep research and professor of neuroscience Matthew Walker. Some of this intuitively makes sense based on his research.

Alcohol interfers with sleep, specifically the ability to remember information and to form new memories by harming and reducing REM sleep. This effect lasts for stuff you learned days earlier (read a book on Monday, get drunk on Wednesday night and you'll remember less than you would have otherwise). Alcohol and sleep don't mix. He recommends you drink earlier in the day (the closer to bed time the worse) and to not consume too much.

Based on this book, I largely no longer drink during the week after work (he also recommends not drinking caffeine much past noon). I've changed my habits, and am sleeping better.

Better sleep will make your mind sharper. It's not just the amount of sleep you are getting, however. Quality is really important. Alcohol interferes with our ability to sleep, specifically, REM sleep, and if you allow decades of daily interference with such a critical life system, I could see it leading to cognitive decline. Even if you don't get dementia, drinking alcohol too late in the day will cause cognitive issues.

<comment><USER3> Bavarians with their Weißbier (wheat beer) for breakfast were right all along.

<comment><USER2> Walker literally says the best time to drink is at breakfast (for the mind at least).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well I don't drink to remember...

</comment><comment><USER5> This is specifically for "heavy drinking". In case folks are wondering how that's defined (per the study, computed based on volume of 60 g of ethanol), it's:

\- 1.5 L of beer (at 5% ABV)

\- 0.5 L of wine (at 14% ABV)

<comment><USER6> per day. Every day.

<comment><USER7> It's hard to believe someone with that habit lives long enough to get dementia.

<comment><USER8> People get dementia in their 50ies and 60ies, sometimes earlier. It's not the most common, but it happens. Also, the brain begins to degrade years before symptoms are noticed, usually subtle changes in behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> study (pdf): [http://www.thelancet- press.com/embargo/dementiaalcohol.pdf](http://www.thelancet- press.com/embargo/dementiaalcohol.pdf)

press release: [http://www.camh.ca/en/hospital/about_camh/newsroom/news_rele...](http://www.camh.ca/en/hospital/about_camh/newsroom/news_releases_media_advisories_and_backgrounders/current_year/Pages/Largest- study-of-its-kind-finds-alcohol-use-biggest-risk-factor-for-dementia.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER10> Getting mixed messages here! Also today: [http://www.newsweek.com/drinking- alcohol-tied-long-life-new-...](http://www.newsweek.com/drinking-alcohol-tied- long-life-new-study-813013)

<comment><USER11> Not really. The study in Newsweek is about moderate drinking, not disordered drinking. Also there are plenty of confounding factors in that study. If you're healthy in your 90s, you're more likely to be at social events where you drink, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> *Alcohol abuse is largest risk factor

> Most reviews point to a possible beneficial effect of light-to-moderate > drinking on cognitive health... By contrast, heavy drinking seems > detrimentally related to dementia risk, whatever the dementia type.

<comment><USER13> _> Most reviews point to a possible beneficial effect of light-to-moderate drinking on cognitive health._

Citation needed

<comment><USER14> Until five years ago the consensus view was that moderate alcohol consumption lowered all-cause mortality compared to non-drinkers.

Latest meta-analyses say that after controlling for reasons behind non- drinkers ('former alcoholics') the effect disappears.

Good starting point is [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26997174/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26997174/)

<comment><USER15> Thank you for sharing this research. As someone who abstains from drinking and is very health-conscious, I've been conflicted about all the research supposedly showing health benefits of moderate drinking. The evidence just seemed too intuitive. This gives me something to explore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Heavy drinking. Given this is France, what is heavy drinking?

<comment><USER17> It's defined in the article. Around 4-5 standard drinks a day for Men or 3 for Women. Which is quite a bit of drinking.

<comment><USER18> Where 1 "Canadian standard drink" is 1 bottle of beer, 1 glass of wine or 1 shot of liquor.

Source: [http://www.rethinkyourdrinking.ca/what-is-a-standard- drink/](http://www.rethinkyourdrinking.ca/what-is-a-standard-drink/)

<comment><USER19> That shot size is 43ml so 5 shots totals 215ml of 40% spirits. In the UK a single is 25ml so it's equivalent of 8.6 'singles' / 4.3 'doubles'.

<comment><USER18> Didn't see the unit, sorry.

So, 1 standard drink = 1 bottle of beer = 1 reasonable glass of wine = 2 shots of liquor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'll drink to that

</comment><comment><USER21> I am surprised it's not age...

</comment><comment><USER22> The scientific article states alcohol use disorder, not alcohol use.

The scientific article is about early onset dementia, not all dementia.

The scientific article uses a large sample size, but the entire population is French.

I would rewrite the title "Alcohol use disorder is the largest risk factor for early onset dementia in French population."

<comment><USER23> I'm not French and I am not close to anyone who is, so there is nothing in here of any possible relevance to me?

While there are a lot of posters here eager to point out the limits to what this study formally investigates, the inclusion of the French dimension underscores my suspicion that finding a reason to regard this study as irrelevant to one's specific circumstances is not the best way of looking at it.

<comment><USER24> I didn't write the parent comment, but I don't think what they're trying to do is

> finding a reason to regard this study as irrelevant to one's specific > circumstances

It's more about being precise about what exactly the study found. There's a real problem with legitimate studies being reported as something sensational, and then when the headline is proven to be false the public loses respect for the scientific process.

<comment><USER22> > There's a real problem with legitimate studies being reported as something > sensational, and then when the headline is proven to be false the public > loses respect for the scientific process.

I'm the author of the root comment. This phenomenon is one of my greatest disappointments in the modern internet. More than drm, surveillance, and commercialization. The internet is the best avenue for public education we've seen, but instead it's used to sell high sodium processed food and $15/month entertainment subscriptions. The education (on the internet) has to be watered down to be entertainment, because the entire platform is becoming entertainment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't like when titles obscure the actual findings. It should be Alcohol abuse largest risk factor for dementia. Its not just drinking alcohol, its drinking alcohol problematically.

<comment><USER26> Is "problematically" a well-defined term in this study?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The title doesn't seem accurate. The summary says:"Alcohol use disorders are the most important preventable risk factors... "

Furthermore, the article states:"This study looked specifically at the effect of alcohol use disorders, and included people who had been diagnosed with mental and behavioural disorders or chronic diseases that were attributable to chronic harmful use of alcohol."

So while I'm quite convinced that prolonged alcohol abuse has serious consequences, I don't think the claim that it is the single biggest risk factor of dementia across the population is supported by this study, as described by the article linked anyway.

</comment><comment><USER28> The title should probably be changed. The study was looking at "chronic heavy drinking" and "Alcohol use disorders". Not "alcohol use" in general.

</comment><comment><USER17> The title is terribly inaccurate. The study specifically mentions chronic heavy drinking and alcohol use disorders as the problem, not alcohol itself.

</comment><comment><USER29> Shit.

</comment><comment><USER30> Of course, people who drink that much may have other issues that lead to said dementia, and alcohol use was a (poor) self-medication.

Then again, that is a lot of alcohol. Bound to have some negative effect.

<comment><USER8> I know schizophrenia can develop into dementia if not treated. Perhaps depression, anxiety and other mental disorders also result in faster brain deterioration. I've also found studies linking calming pills like xanax and valium to earlier dementia.</comment></comment>


Can Neural Nets Detect Sexual Orientation? A Data Scientist's Perspective - <AUTHOR> http://www.fast.ai/2017/09/13/kosinski/ <comment><USER2> Interesting research and commentary.

Only thing that tripped me up is the old Target-Pregnancy factoid. Most likely never happened, and now I cringe every time I hear about it.

[http://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen- pregnan...](http://www.kdnuggets.com/2014/05/target-predict-teen-pregnancy- inside-story.html)</comment>


Number theorist fears many proofs widely considered to be true are wrong - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/8xwm54/number-theorist-fears-all-published-math-is-wrong-actually <comment><USER2> Headline is waaaay overblown, but not all of it is total hyperbole -- checkout out arxiv and try to read the abstract from just about any paper.

It's basically totally impermeable. I'm almost done with an undergraduate degree in math and basically have no idea what ~90% of the research is about at anything other than a topical level. This is fine, it's written for specialists in the field (hopefully), but damn, for most fields, it's not a whole lot of people.

Compared to physics or chemistry, math gets very specialized, very quickly. Depending on the field, there's no easy real world isomorphisms either, making it even more difficult.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't mean that it's wrong, it means that you need to read more. In a lot of fields, undergraduate material doesn't qualify you to read papers, a PhD does.

If all papers actually were written to undergraduate level, many would be 500 pages long. Who has time to write a book-length exposition of the basics of their field every time they publish? I mean, have you ever published a technical work? If so, did you go out of your way to make it completely accessible to high schoolers? If you didn't, you get why professors don't do the same for undergrads.

<comment><USER4> Suppose a narrow field where only two human beings can understand. How could the society judge the progress of the field or the merit of a new project? I don't think it is possible to avoid collusion or groupthink in such a field and it would be difficult to differentiate the two.

So does it mean we should curb some superhuman thinking and let them explain better to other human being? I'd think so. It is all about balance or trade- off, but at some point, a field would become too esoteric for a society and it might need to slow down the short-term progress to ensure consistent long-term progress.

It seems the math field as a whole (or more specifically the number theorists?) needs more of good communicators who can link the cutting edge and more general public. The math academia could give incentives to such activities in addition to pushing the boundaries.

<comment><USER3> Scientists and mathematicians already spend an extreme amount of energy trying to think of the shortest, cleanest possible route for people to learn their fields. The resulting documents take years to create, and are called textbooks. (At least, the good textbooks are like this.) Often people will work for thousands of hours on their books, essentially for free. Students go from outsiders to participants by reading them, all the time.

The problem is that things genuinely are hard, and there's only so much compression you can do before you're reduced to meaningless handwaving. Textbooks are already compressed by a factor of 100 relative to the original research literature, sometimes even oversimplified. Demanding something a factor of 100 better than a textbook is going to get you something like one of those useless "learn C++ in 24 hours" paperbacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like a sales pitch for Lean (Microsoft's theorem prover), even though Coq [1] is the standard tool for the UniMath [2] project.

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

[2] [https://github.com/UniMath/UniMath](https://github.com/UniMath/UniMath)

<comment><USER6> Well, having used both, Lean really is a lot more ergonomic. Unimath is mostly category theory; other parts of mathematics are woefully underdeveloped.

<comment><USER5> That's fair.

I actually find Coq rather painful to use. It gives me the distinct impression that it has been designed/implemented by somebody who has never written human- computer interfaces before.

When it comes to adapting humans to Mathematics, or adapting Mathematics to humans - I prefer the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "I believe that no human, alive or dead, knows all the details of the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. But the community accept the proof nonetheless," Buzzard wrote in a slide presentation[...]

That s 100% clickbait. People knows the demonstration and the demonstration helped to create entire new fields. By the way there are new and shorter proof of the theorem.

<comment><USER8> Also, that is quite a remarkable and provocative statement given that Andrew Wiles is still very much alive.

<comment><USER9> Sure, Wiles obviously understands the main thrust of his proof. But one could argue that Wiles' result depends on lots of other results, which in turn depend on other results, and so on through decades and decades of work, ultimately going back to the foundations of mathematics. Neither Wiles nor anybody else can claim to rigorously understand all of it. You can imagine this as a tree, with Wiles' work as root, and his dependencies as ancestors, and so on. An error at a lower level of the tree could, in theory, invalidate the root node.

I do agree with Buzzard that it's hard to be sure. I've definitely read papers where a critical argument isn't well written or what is written seems wrong. However, if there are low-level errors, I suspect that with some work things could be patched up.

<comment><USER8> Right, speaking as a lapsed mathematician, I definitely see errors or gaps in published work. Wiles' original FLT proof had one. And yes these can generally be patched up. I'm not quite as alarmed as the author is, because generally a major false result would have all sorts of alarming ripple effects and implications which would be pretty easy to spot. FLT is an extreme example where literally anyone with a calculator could in theory disprove it. The fact that no one has suggests to me that it's likely true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This short pdf which the article cites is more useful than anything the article itself contains:

[http://wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/~buzzard/one_off_lectures/msr.pdf](http://wwwf.imperial.ac.uk/~buzzard/one_off_lectures/msr.pdf)

<comment><USER11> Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20909404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20909404)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Summary: Motherboard interviewed an attendee at the Interactive Theorem Proving conference who says that he thinks Interactive Theorem Proving is important. Also, professors specializing in proof theory think their tooling may become important but "the technology still needs improvement".

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm currently working on the formalization of Catalan's conjecture (or Mihăilescu's theorem) in Isabelle/HOL/Isar.

My personal impression is that more formal verification is necessary in math, and it should be tought to every student of Mathematics in introductionary courses because it gives an unforgiving but also rewarding learning experience with formal proofs.

Feel free to ask questions.

<comment><USER14> How much research is being done on making these tools more user friendly? I spent a little bit of time using Coq about a decade ago, and while I agree that it's very important to make things like that widely used, there was a pretty steep learning curve.

<comment><USER13> I can't answer how much research or work is done to make the tools more user- friendly as I'm rather exclusively on the user-side. There exists extensive documentation in form of multiple PDFs, but they are only of little help to me as they lack useful examples. Sadly Google thinks every possible answer about Isabelle/HOL is answered by these PDFs as they are often the only relevant search result.

However, Isabelle/HOL/Isar allows proofs to be written in a very human readable way, so the "documentation" I use is the existing library and how things are done there. There is a convenient Ctrl+left click action on terms to jump to their definition. That is very helpful to navigate unknown libraries. In comparison, I couldn't read and make sense the proofs I've seen in Coq.

There is a learning curve with Isabelle/HOL/Isar. It can be extremely frustrating to not know how to express "simple" arguments or definition. But for someone familiar with manual "formal" proofs in mathematics, most can be learned in some hours under guidance, like in a seminar on a weekend with a couple of hours on each day.

I'm learning rather autodidactly by trial and error. I think there would be value in a series of blog posts about "This is how you define a group" or "This is how you reason in nonclassical logic" or "This is how to proof the fundamental theorem of Algebra" all applied to Isabelle/HOL/Isar. There are often multiple ways to define things, and to be honest, I don't know the specific advantages and disadvantages. For example, I think you can introduce rings as type classes or as locales or using axiomatizations, and possibly more. This is one example of stuff I don't know how to manage in the system, but there is already a lot of structure defined, and I can reuse that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> To mathematicians,

Welcome to our world!

[https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2019/09/27/does-anyone- kno...](https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2019/09/27/does-anyone-know-a-proof- of-fermats-last-theorem/)

 _Actually working through some of [the details], when formalising them, made me understand that some of these issues were far bigger and more complex than I had realised._

 _In the perfectoid project there is still an issue regarding the topology on an adic space, which I had assumed would be all over within about a page or two of pdf, but whose actual proof goes on for much longer_

Yeah, that's how software developers feel, all day, every day. That's why we all moan about being asked to give estimates for things. You don't really _understand_ a thing until you've formalised it in code, and often things that look simple and easy turn out to be unexpectedly deep.

Mathematics is a field that's been doing the equivalent of writing pseudo-code for thousands of years. There are endless reams of pseudo-code that _looks_ like it might work, but as any programmer who's ever written pseudo-code knows, whether it actually runs when you try it out for real is anyone's guess.

So now mathematics is starting to experience the pain of multiple incompatible programming languages/ecosystems. There's Lean, Coq, Isabelle/HOL and some new JetBrains language too. Soon they'll start to discover the value of 'foreign language interop', rigorous code review, comments, style guides, design documents, package management, automatic optimisation etc.

Have you ever looked at a proof written in one of these languages? All code in these languages is a hot mess judged by the standards of professional software developers: tons of abbreviations, single letter variables, uncommented, ad- hoc module structure etc. I'm sure we'll eventually see mathematicians having raging flamewars about what clean style is and tabs vs spaces.

Luckily for mathematicians though they work at their own pace and are under no deadline pressure. They'll figure it out.

</comment><comment><USER16> Vice really does a disservice to the author. "All" math is not wrong, but I sure wish theorem provers were the preferred method of formalizing mathematics. But theorem provers really aren't quite ready for prime time either. But it sure feels like a lot of verification of mathematics is somewhat repetitive.

I think that programming/CS is to mathematics what neolithic revolution was to human culture. It allows for specialization in the stack. People can obsessively optimize different parts of the stack to everyones benefit.

</comment><comment><USER17> Suggestion to rely on AI for proof verification is just laughable. Neuron weights instead of formal definitions. So reliable.

<comment><USER18> You seem to think "AI" means machine learning. In this case it does not. Theorem prover systems don't use neural nets.

<comment><USER17> Okay but they are formal systems and don't have anything to do with AI either, do they?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The headline is certainly overblown, but there probably errors out there. The interesting question is where we should be looking for them. All of the major results in an undergraduate or introductory graduate textbook have been studied often and thoroughly enough that we can be reasonably confident there are no errors in their proofs. There are errors in very new or very obscure material, but those tend to get corrected as more people start paying attention to them. It therefore seems like the search should therefore be concentrated in recent results that are becoming more useful but still aren't standard.

On the other hand, we do need to build a standard library of results that can be used to prove those newer results. You can't do much in analysis without basic results on metric spaces, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER19> There is a big grey area between "not 100% correct" and "wrong and harmful". Like a faulty computer program that produces correct results in 99.999% of the cases a wrong mathematical statement can still yield useful results in practice. You just don't want to run into those pesky edge cases where it indeed is wrong.

Having a database of all mathematical proofs where all of them are checked for validity, however, is a very useful tool to actually find those edge cases where a proof is wrong and give future mathematicians a solid foundation.

Using AI as an extension of human capabilities is a given to me. Like with heavy machinery, we don't want to do the heavy lifting. We want to steer it properly to gain most benefit.

<comment><USER20> > a wrong mathematical statement can still yield useful results in practice

Yes and no. For some basic conjectures this might be the case, but one of the greatest utilities of certain theorems is how they can be applied to completely new fields. If a theorem used in this manner is not actually true, then the proof is invalid -- and it might be the case that (several proofs down the line) the conjecture you've ended up proving is almost entirely invalid.

There's also the slippery slope of "Principle of Explosion"-type problems with accepting "mostly right" proofs -- it means you will be able to prove any given statement (even ones which are outright false).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Soo... Unit testing / CI for math proofs? If it can be done in software, great.

<comment><USER19> To my knowledge the hard part is writing the input for the software. While in text you have a bit of leeway to glance over some details, with the computer program you must, indeed, write every last relevant detail down and you must get it right. This is very heavy work.

<comment><USER5> But it's once-off work. Thereafter the computers can take over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had these fears about my dissertation work, but then realized that the "elder's" papers were highly cited because they contained important machinery which could be modified and refined to prove other results... or the paper contained an important idea which went on to be proved in a variety of ways. Maybe it's different outside of PDEs, but I doubt it.

</comment><comment><USER23> I just can't help feeling that either the true should be correct, or the wrong should be false. But I guess English is not a strongly typed language.

</comment><comment><USER24> This just seems like a native advertisement for Lean...

<comment><USER25> I am not that perturbed by whatever framework they use, tools to translate the bulk of the majority of proofs from Lean to MetaMath to [...] and back will be made,

the more important thing is that the number of humans aware of the existence of this tech and the more actually use it the better society will be off in the long run

the following may seem totally impossible today but seems a lot less impossible to people who have been thinking about this for a long time: once sufficient mathematics has been translated, people can start adding physics postulates, one most physics has been inserted we can start formally verifying (up to validity of postulates on top of axioms) not just proper operation of digital circuits etc but also power plants and so on, and once interacting with proof systems becomes as widespread as alphabetic literacy, people might one day be able to formalize and vote on their requirements of society and policy, see predicted perverse incentives, or decide that policy can only be enacted when facets of their consequences can be proven. We might one day not vote on promises of strategy, also not vote on strategy, but rather on outcomes!

I know it _sounds absurd_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm sure this will help proofing papers. There will still be the problem of proofing that the software proofs what it is intended to proof.

</comment><comment><USER27> Headline is of course absurd hyperbole that does not belong here.

> "I think there is a non-zero chance that some of our great castles are built > on sand," Buzzard wrote in a slide presentation. "But I think it's small."

<comment><USER28> Well, they also quote him as saying:

"I'm suddenly concerned that all of published math is wrong because mathematicians are not checking the details, and I've seen them wrong before,"

<comment><USER29> [https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2019/09/27/does-anyone- kno...](https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2019/09/27/does-anyone-know-a-proof- of-fermats-last-theorem/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Extreme clickbait headline. The subheading is '"I think there is a non-zero chance that some of our great castles are built on sand," he said, arguing that we must begin to rely on AI to verify proofs.'

<comment><USER31> But, more consistent with the alarmist headline:

> "I'm suddenly concerned that all of published math is wrong because > mathematicians are not checking the details, and I've seen them wrong > before," Buzzard told Motherboard while he was attending the 10th > Interactive Theorem Proving conference in Portland, Oregon, where he gave > the opening talk.

<comment><USER32> Someone who says that is, ironically, not concerned with the details. _All_ of published math is wrong? No, a lot of is is understandable and verifiable by advanced undergraduates.

Most of the fundamental theorems in each field are understandable by humans. As you get more and more abstract, and get into more and more obscure areas, you start to see non-understandable proofs built on top of non-understandable proofs. There's a danger that those are wrong, but when they collapse it just means that one professor has wasted their life, not that _all_ of mathematics will suddenly collapse.

<comment><USER29> The headline is clickbait. A more measured debate about the issues is here [https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2019/09/27/does-anyone- kno...](https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2019/09/27/does-anyone-know-a-proof- of-fermats-last-theorem/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anyone interested in this topic, I have a prediction that the time is right for a new math, that starts from just 1 and 0, and builds every symbol up in a rigorous way.

We're working on the infrastructure to make such a thing easier, but the project does not currently have a leader: [https://github.com/treenotation/jtree/issues/83](https://github.com/treenotation/jtree/issues/83)

<comment><USER34> Disregard cranks, acquire Metamath: [http://us.metamath.org/downloads/metamath.pdf](http://us.metamath.org/downloads/metamath.pdf)

<comment><USER35> Metamath is awesome if you're willing to slum it :)

[https://jiggerwit.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/the- architecture-...](https://jiggerwit.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/the-architecture- of-proof-assistants/)

<comment><USER34> How long does it take your preferred proof assistant to prove things? Metamath's standard set.mm takes only about 10s to prove _everything_.

<comment><USER36> Actually if you use the smm verifier that's been cut down to about 800ms. :) However, most of the theorem provers of today have been built on the philosophy that performance doesn't matter, or at least is secondary to ease of use, mathematical cleanliness etc, from the functional programming community. It turns out that once you make this decision it's difficult to get that raw speed back, even if you start worrying about performance later, and the HOL family provers make it worse by defining correctness in terms of the running of an ML program, which bakes the runtime of the ML system into the proof checking time.

When you combine this with the fact that these ML programs are not proofs but proof scripts, that perform a lot of "unnecessary" work like searching for a proof rather than just going straight for the answer, it suddenly begins to make sense why these systems take on the order of hours to days to check their whole libraries.

Coq and Lean are somewhere in the middle, because they have proof terms, but the logic itself still requires some unbounded computations. Checking a proof here is often fast, unless you make too much use of computation in the logic. But people often don't care about proof terms, and still store the proof scripts, which are as slow as ever.

Metamath is in this setting somewhat unique in eschewing proof scripts altogether, or more accurately, inlining proof scripts immediately on the author's machine. The resulting proofs are often comparatively long and verbose, but I would argue this is only a display matter, since all the other provers are doing the same thing, they just aren't showing it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hyper 3.0.0 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/zeit/hyper/releases/tag/3.0.0 <comment><USER2> I just don't understand the use case here. It's an Electron-based terminal... that has a thousand pretty themes, but lacks basic functionality like being able to expand your scroll buffer. It's just not usable as a daily driver.

I'm not trying to hate on Electron (VS Code is my main editor now, and I enjoy it). But I just don't see the point here _other_ than, " _Look what they wrote with Electron!_ ". Is it the "social" aspect of posting color themes and seeing how many downloads you get, and I'm just old?

<comment><USER3> Ditto here. Given how performance- and security intensive a terminal emulator is (who wants to add JavaScript injection to their list of server security worries?), writing one in Electron seems a bit nuts to me.

<comment><USER4> well as long as it's not EVAL'ing the .... wait they wouldn't ... OH NO

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I gave up on Hyper about 8 months ago after only using it for a few weeks.

2.1 was close to unusable on Windows. Major prompt / cursor bugs (it would disappear all the time), ~200ms input latency (but a terminal's only job is to make typing feel awesome) and it took 5 seconds+ to open on an SSD. I reported a number of those issues but the maintainers didn't even respond even though people were commenting that it was a problem for them too.

Since then I've moved to wsltty for WSL and it's great when combined with tmux. Lightning fast with all of the terminal features you could ever want thanks to tmux (separate windows (ie. tabs), split panes, buffer searching and session saving / restoring). Close to zero input latency too as of wsltty 3.0.0.

<comment><USER6> Windows Terminal was just released yesterday, which might be a good option for you. It's even open source: [https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal](https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal)

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately that terminal requires an insider's version of Windows to run.

Enabling insiders means MS will track a bunch of data about you besides anonymous metrics and you can't opt out of it because insiders requests that info.

WSL v2 and / or that terminal sounds good but it may not be until Oct 2019 or Apr 2020 before the stable Windows channel sees it. They tend to release 2 major updates a year and if WSL v2 is only being released in June 2019 for insiders it's quite the push to have it ready by Oct 2019 for stable.

<comment><USER7> > Enabling insiders means MS will track a bunch of data about you besides > anonymous metrics and you can't opt out of it because insiders requests that > info.

As much as Microsoft tries to change it still remains the same...

So much for developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In before the JavaScript gripes begin. How about we skip the Electron whinging this time?

I haven't switched to Hyper because I have found it a bit pokey and that doesn't work for me, but I'll still give this one a try. I'm curious to hear about any interesting reasons other people _have_ chosen Hyper, or particularly cool things it enables by being built on web technologies. Anybody?

<comment><USER8> Update: Hyper 3 feels super-fast. Startup and new tabs are somewhat sluggish still but actual rendering responsiveness seems real nice.

<comment><USER9> Sad commentary on the state of the world when you feel the need to comment on the speed with which a computer can pain text to the screen.

If you read their changelog you'll see that Hyper 3.0 uses WebGL to achieve this.

OpenGL. To draw text at a reasonable speed. It's not individually an insane thing to do within the context of Electron, etc. but take five steps back and talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut...

<comment><USER10> It's not insane. FYI the fastest terminal (alacritty) achieves its performance by rendering via gpu, and it's written in rust. iTerm recently started doing it too.

<comment><USER5> But if you look at input latency benchmarks (there was one posted not too long ago on HN, maybe a month or 6 weeks ago) alacritty isn't close to the fastest terminal for pressing a key and being able to see the key on the screen.

IMO pressing a key and seeing it is the primary focus of a terminal.

<comment><USER11> Here is an output latency benchmark [1]

[1] [https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/673#issuecomment-4...](https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/673#issuecomment-459342135)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have been using Cmder on Windows for a while, but Hyper has also looked really good.

With the announcement of the new Windows Terminal, I wonder if these projects will become irrelevant. The only reason I use Cmder is for tabs, and once I have Windows Terminal with that feature, I doubt I would ever use Cmder or Hyper.

<comment><USER5> If you adapt using tmux then you are free to pick whatever terminal you want because tabs / split panes are done very well in tmux.

For example I tried nearly every terminal on Windows and ultimately use wsltty because tmux offers nearly instant tabs and split panes, buffer searching and everything else you could want in a terminal.

Here's a whole write up on the comparisons: [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/conemu-vs-hyper-vs- terminus-v...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/conemu-vs-hyper-vs-terminus-vs- mobaxterm-terminator-vs-ubuntu-wsl)

<comment><USER12> Perhaps. I love tmux for multiple terminals in one SSH connection, but I'm a big fan of tabbed browsing, tabbed file explorers, etc., so having tabs in my terminal just makes sense. I could probably get used to tmux handling tabs and split panes all the time.

<comment><USER13> What do you use/recommend for tabbed file explorer?

<comment><USER12> I mean I use Dolphin because I'm a KDE user, but I believe it's possible in Windows with the Set UI [0]. There are third party Windows file explorers but I don't have any experience with them.

[0] [https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/102362-turn-off-tabs- app...](https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/102362-turn-off-tabs-apps-sets- windows-10-a.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hyper certainly looks cool, but "looks cool" doesn't cut it when it comes to winning me over for what might be the #1 most important tool I use on a daily basis. Is there a page telling me why I should use this over my current terminal (iTerm2, FWIW)?

<comment><USER15> This is my personal experience, but for me, considering that the terminal is so frequently used, the small improvements add up over time.

I found the font rendering more pleasant on the eyes. I'm not entirely sure why this is, and I'd be interested to see what options could be tweaked in iTerm2 to make it visually similar, but Hyper just "feels" nicer to look at for me.

Second, I've found it useful to be able to customize my terminal with web technologies. Previously I used a custom prompt with lots of different bits of context (git status, node environment, python environment, Kubernetes context, etc). With Hyper it's been fairly easy for me to create a local plugin that renders a statusbar with those bits of context. It's built with React, CSS, etc, so personally the ability to easily adjust and create is super nice.

Two things I miss from iTerm2 are infinite scrollback and the ability to search output with Command-F. I would assume there's a plugin out there to handle searching, I just haven't looked that far into it yet.

Performance of Hyper 2 was adequate enough for me to switch. I'm interested to see how Hyper 3 compares.

I'm also interested in iTerm2 3.3, which overhauls the iTerm2 UI.

tl;dr - small customizations add up. It's basically the same migration as when I moved from Sublime Text to Atom (though I use VS Code now)

<comment><USER16> You say the small things. You mean like, how quickly the terminal opens and how quickly text gets painted on the screen?

iTerm2 blows hyper out of the water in those regards, and it actually does add up. Styling otherwise really isn't that difficult, but it begs the question of _why_ do you need so much information? Are you actually developing or just spending time tinkering on your terminal to have bells and whistles that you don't actually even look at? Surely a simple colorscheme + font that aliases correctly should be enough to "feel nice" to look at?

The only thing keeping me from the better performance of alacritty is iterm2's infinite scrollback and some other miscellaneous features that alacritty will probably never get.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I mean all this is very subjective. For me I don't care about terminal open speed since I keep the app always running, and my criteria for text rendering speed is it has to be fast enough to not be annoying, which is the case for me.

It's less about having lots of info and more about being able to control how it's displayed. I really only have a few things I keep around in my prompt / status bar, and they're all immediately useful to the task at hand and are reflective of the current project I'm working inside - I jump around a lot between tech stacks for personal and work environments, and being able to know where I am is important:

\- what's the git status of this project

\- is this a Python or Node app

\- am I inside a virtualenv

\- what's the Kubernetes cluster context name

\- what's the currently active Kubernetes namespace

I really hate visual clutter, so the ability to move some of this stuff to a status bar rather than keeping it around on every repaint of the prompt, and be able to exactly style it as desired with CSS, is what attracted me to Hyper. This applies to the whole UI, if there's any element I don't like, I can change it.

Similar to you, I've considered switching to Alacritty, but it doesn't hit the features/customization to performance ratio for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those wondering, HTML/JS/CSS terminal. [https://hyper.is/](https://hyper.is/) gives more useful introduction.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been using Hyper 3 Canary for a while, if you're on Windows it's a MASSIVE difference from previous versions - all the normal stuff you expect to work (select to copy, right click paste, rendering, readline shortcuts etc) works (with a little tweaking, see below). It's definitely usable as a daily driver.

I've been using Windows Terminal in the last 24 hours and it still has some major bugs. While I'd say Fluent Terminal is the best in terms of being lightweight and feature filled, and Alacritty for raw power if you have big shell workloads, Hyper 3 is pretty damn good and worth a try.

Sane defaults:

Use pwsh (not cmd, that's the Windows equivalent of launching 70's Bourne shell on a *nix box):

        shell: "C:\\Program Files\\PowerShell\\6\\pwsh.exe",
        shellArgs: [],

Normal new tab, close window keys, make readline keys work:

        keymaps: {
          "tab:new": "ctrl+t",
          // Also known as 'close tab'
          "pane:close": "ctrl+w",
          // Bug workaround for https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/2873
          "editor:movePreviousWord": "",
          "editor:moveNextWord": ""
        },

</comment><comment><USER19> My choices are as follows.

* Linux:

# Tilix - probably the best option in terms of performance, customization, looks and features.

[https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/](https://gnunn1.github.io/tilix-web/)

# Extraterm - in my experience the best electron-based terminal emulator in terms of performance. It has some neat features too. I catch myself using it more often than Tilix.

[https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm](https://github.com/sedwards2009/extraterm)

* Windows:

# CMDer - pretty much the only option. Has everything one needs, even built in bash on Windows. Useful on Windows 7 PCs at work that don't have WSL or admin rights to install more stuff.

[https://github.com/cmderdev/cmder](https://github.com/cmderdev/cmder)

* MacOS

# Plain old built in terminal is actually nice ;)

# Extraterm is alright too, but it's electron based and the old mac-mini does not really like it.

# iTerm 2 - never got around to fully configuring it, but everyone swears by it.

[https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2](https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2)

<comment><USER20> cmdr/conemu's copy paste is broken on my work pc.

i tried all available copy-paste options (i think there were 4?). none worked. also, the screen keeps flickering with cmdr.

probably a byproduct from the cheap hardware or virus scanner... so hyper won by default.

i'm looking forward to the new windows terminal though. it'll hopefully get rid of that atrocity.

<comment><USER19> I usually use ctrl+c/ctrl+v for single line copy paste.

For multi-line the only thing I found to work was right click :) it then properly formats multi-line paste.

<comment><USER20> Even a single word copy paste is missing at least a few characters in the middle

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What's the point of using hypertext-(web)-standard-oriented multimedia-capable framework to create an application that just shows plain text (ok, plain text + 16 colors + bold).

Why would one package a 50MB terminal, packing stuff that will never be needed in a terminal.

It would make sense if they were to spend all that effort to create a terminal-based web browser.

</comment><comment><USER22> I thought this was the Rust HTTP client/server [1]. I've never heard of this.

When two notable projects share the same name, it's confusing. One of these projects should consider rebranding.

[1] [https://hyper.rs](https://hyper.rs)

<comment><USER23> I don't think there's all that much overlap between people who use Rust and people who think a terminal written in javascript is a good idea.

<comment><USER24> Contrary to popular HN memes, most Rust developers aren't zealots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm a daily user of Hyper. There has been some gripes of pretty basic things like scrolling and resizing. These aren't showstoppers for me, however I only do pretty basic operations in a terminal (some server maintenance, git commands, and basic file operations).

The big downside I see to using the GPU for this is that it is such a hit to battery life. I was an avid iTerm user, but noticed that when I had it running I only get ~2 hours of usable battery time, even when it was just backgrounded. I hope that Hyper doesn't have this same issue -- will keep a close eye on it.

</comment><comment><USER26> I tried hyper v2 recently, took some time to fiddle with plugins and config everything to my liking. It was usable, though missing the ability to launch different shells in different tabs (I'm a windows user, so being able to have a git bash tab, a cmd tab, a powershell tab, a wsl tab, etc. is kind of a must). This morning I was prompted to upgrade to hyper v3, I clicked yes, it refreshed. All my plugins and configs were gone. No prior warnings, no suggested upgrade path, just full wipeout. I uninstalled hyper and went back to cmder.

</comment><comment><USER27> Here is my comparison of terminal typing latencies on mac.

[https://imgur.com/yFDuVpR](https://imgur.com/yFDuVpR)

Terminal.app is still going to by my go-to terminal

</comment><comment><USER28> Command prompt on Windows is pretty fast but Git Bash is still unusably slow. I guess I'll try again next major release.

</comment><comment><USER29> Honestly speaking, I started using Hyper again this week after 3.0.0 came out, and I like it a lot.

I'm not really sure if there's any actual benefit to using it as opposed to the regular Mac terminal, but the colors are bit easier on my eyes at night.

The only thing I'm missing is the ability to move tabs around.

<comment><USER30> why not use iTerm if on OS X?

<comment><USER31> Agree. iTerm2 has been doing rendering with opengl for years. If you're on OS X its unclear why something like Hyper is necessary.

<comment><USER32> I stopped using iTerm2 in favor of the default Terminal because iTerm2 has worse performance and latency [1], and I wasn't getting anything out of its additional features. I noticed an improvement going back to Terminal.app. YMMV of course; but if we're asking why Hyper is necessary, I'd like to ask the same question of iTerm2.

[1]: [https://danluu.com/term-latency/](https://danluu.com/term-latency/)

<comment><USER33> iTerm2 has lots of features that Terminal.app lacks: [https://www.iterm2.com/features.html](https://www.iterm2.com/features.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you are a developer and using hyper, what language do you work with the most?

<comment><USER18> JS/TS. Occasionally Python or C#.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> >Disable VSCode type checking

okay?

</comment><comment><USER36> Aside from the plethora of themes and other visual niceties, can anyone explain to be the appeal of Hyper when less expensive, more performant alternatives exist?

A terminal written in Electron seems just silly to me...

<comment><USER21> Well, LaTeX is also Turing complete, so I wonder why has no-one tried programming a terminal in it. It would be fun to install 1GB of TeX packages to be able to open a terminal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've been waiting for Hyper to get reordable tabs (which to me is kind of a basic feature).

I wonder if this version will finally introduce this functionality.

<comment><USER38> May I suggest DomTerm ([https://domterm.org](https://domterm.org))? It has builtin tabs _and_ tiling, which can dragged and reordered with the mouse. It works very nicely (using the GoldenLayout package).

<comment><USER37> You may, thank you. I'm not really looking for a terminal built on web tech specifically, I use it for work and I care about reliability more than anything else.

I'll take a look and see if I can install it on Linux, though.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> "New Blazing Fast WebGL Engine". Wow really? Major changes - "Emoji support". For fucks sake, seriously?

Am I the only one that doesn't want anything of the following _bull shit_?

* A terminal emulator that is dependent on an entire web browser (not to mention the layers upon layers of bullshit abstractions all to run something from the 70s).

* Support for "emojis" (I mean, come on. It's a _damn terminal_).

* To execute code that can hijack control of my shell from any of the 956 dependencies[1] this _heap of shit_ relies on.

[1] $ git clone [https://github.com/zeit/hyper.git](https://github.com/zeit/hyper.git) $ cd hyper $ npm install $ ls -lt | wc -l 956

<comment><USER40> Like it or not: in the era of Unicode, emoji's are plaintext.</comment></comment>


Announcing Windows 10 China Government Edition and the New Surface Pro - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/05/23/announcing-windows-10-china-government-edition-new-surface-pro/ <comment><USER2> Windows 10 didn't have enough spyware.

<comment><AUTHOR> But it's the only Windows 10 without telemetry...</comment></comment>


In the Memory Ward: The Warburg is Britain's most eccentric and original library - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/in-the-memory-ward <comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this when it first came out but it didn't get much attention at the time. Today I happen to be sitting in the Warburg Library and remembered how good this article was. For anyone on HN who happens to live in London or visit it often, and is interested in the history of science or technology - this place is incredible. It's the only open-shelf rare books library I've ever seen. What this means is that you can just browse through shelves and shelves that contain not only secondary sources (the standard types of academic texts you find in a specialist library) but also original printings of primary sources (rare, historical works, which usually require a formal request to a librarian to look at).

So for instance when I browsing the section on early chemistry and alchemy, I found a German alchemical text from the 1530s just sitting there next to the 20th century stuff. It's remarkable.

<comment><USER3> This resembles how I feel about digital reference vs. hardcopy - <USER2> serendipitous accumulation of knowledge that comes from having proximity to the information you're looking for... For me, it lends to an understanding of "why" rather than "how".

I might forget some bit of esoteric syntax and I can look it up and move on with my life, but if I'm flipping through a book (or books) to find the information, I might better understand why that syntax came about. (I'm struggling with a particular instance of this which is why it comes to mind right now.)

Accepting answers instead of discovering them... maybe it doesn't scale anymore. (Insert get off lawn joke as necessary.)

<comment><USER4> You do get quite a bit of serendipity through following hyperlinks though :) .

<comment><USER5> Wikipedia does have that (pleasant) effect sometimes.

I can't say I see it much elsewhere though. On HN for example, sometimes a linked article contains links to other, sometimes unrelated, articles that attract my attention, but I rarely wander off along a chain of distinct sites.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Web Laureate Insight, "99designs:  Nourishment of Eyes" - <AUTHOR> http://web-poet.com/2010/04/08/insight-99designs/

<comment><USER2> Clever! I hope you don't mind if I share this with the team @ 99designs. :-)</comment>


Cure for Type 1 Diabetes Imminent After Harvard Stem Cell Breakthrough (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://uk.news.yahoo.com/cure-type-1-diabetes-imminent-harvard-stem-cell-125135549.html <comment><USER2> >>> Imminent

adjective 1.about to happen.

>>> It is hoped human transplant trials using the created cells will start within a few years.

No human trials means that this is preclinical, so we should wait 15-18 years before considering that we have a "cure".</comment>


Digital Boarding Passes - <AUTHOR> http://www.tsa.gov/approach/tech/paperless_boarding_pass_expansion.shtm And I quote, "O my god that guy just got on the plane with his phone" <comment><USER2> We've had this in Canada for a couple of years now.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> and I quote, "o my god that man just got on the plane with his phone"</comment>


Should Twitter Be Banned At Conferences? - <AUTHOR> http://chris.pirillo.com/should-twitter-be-banned-at-conferences/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure how you can even ban Twitter at a conference? How would that work? Pretty odd.

I'm all for setting twitter etiquettes during conferences. That way, sane people can still express their thoughts in a manner that helps. And dicks can be dicks for the world to see.

</comment><comment><USER3> The twitter stream should be projected over the speaker, like supertitles at an Opera. See Steven Colbert's "Word" sketches or Mystery Science Theater 3000 for inspiration.</comment>