Autumn - <AUTHOR> http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/autumn/ <comment><USER2> Other fun ones here: [http://oos.moxiecode.com/blog/index.php/experiments/javascri...](http://oos.moxiecode.com/blog/index.php/experiments/javascript- webgl/)

<comment><USER3> Playable ping-pong: [http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/ping_pong/](http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/ping_pong/)

C64 Music video: [http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/c64_shader/](http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/c64_shader/)

Attack on the Death Star with an X-Wing: [http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/xwing/index.html](http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/xwing/index.html)

<comment><USER4> Some more of my favorites, these are not only fantastic coding examples but also artistic or humorous.

Endless Forest: [http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/forest/index.html](http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/forest/index.html)

Particle Waterfall: [http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/waterfall/index.html](http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/waterfall/index.html)

Gold Rays: [http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/godrays/index.html](http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/godrays/index.html)

Spiders 2 (Hammertime): [http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/spiders_2_hammertime/](http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/spiders_2_hammertime/)

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: [http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/woods_xmas/](http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/woods_xmas/)

EDIT:

R-Type on the SNES! [http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/snes_retro/](http://oos.moxiecode.com/js_webgl/snes_retro/)

<comment><USER5> If you turn on the Gold Rays one in the background and watch the Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening one, the music and voice over just go so well together, I didn't realize it was a different tab playing the music at first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stuff like this makes me think about how we'll live in the future. I read the book Ready Player One last year (fun fiction read) and the story is set in a world where most people live inside of a virtual world accessed via VR headsets/suits (e.g. Occulus Rift).

Seeing this makes me think of a future when we'll be doing the same and instead of looking at this in a browser, we'll actually be able to stand under a tree and watch the leaves fall.

<comment><USER7> And hearing what you say makes _me_ think of a _present_ where I can stand under a tree and watch the leaves fall. Because it's October, the air is cool and crisp, and there's a park nearby. The resolution is much better too.

As technologists, we have to make sure not to get too caught up in our own bubble. We have to remember what kind of a job our technology actually does for people, what kind of a role it actually plays in their lives. And I think the VR enthusiasts right now have a tendency to lose sight of that.

<comment><USER8> but doing this in the rift would take at most 30 seconds... doing it in real life is an actual chore which takes at least 30 minutes if you also consider the way back.

<comment><USER9> A half hour walk to watch leaves in the park doesn't sound like much of a chore.

<comment><USER10> Are you kidding? Who has time for that? 30 minutes to sit around staring at trees?

This rendered like crap in my browser, but I'd probably take a 2.5-5 minute break once a day to look at leaves. That'd probably be about all I could stand. What's the difference between 30 seconds and 30 minutes staring at leaves? They're leaves. They all look the same and they all act the same. They're mostly the same color. They don't do anything interesting.

There's a disturbing undercurrent in industrial societies of fetishizing the "natural", and I think that's the only reason anyone would enjoy sitting in the cold looking at a goddamn _tree_ for a half hour -- to make a tribal statement about how ~enlightened~ they are because they can ~appreciate~ the ~beauty~ of ~nature~.

I mean, you're probably a developer, aren't you? Your time is _valuable_. Why waste it looking at a tree? Just keep this open in a small tile on your desktop and glance at it once every few hours if you really like leaf videos.

<comment><USER9> Are you attempting satire? Is very hard to tell.

edit - just in case it isn't satire. I habitually watch trees quite a lot. I have been obsessing a bit recently with how light reflects off particularly waxy leaves making the colours change with the sky. It doesn't particularly matter that they are trees though, I can watch buildings in much the same way. Is more to do with an appreciation of light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can anybody explain what's special about WebGL demos? I mean, don't we already know that WebGL exposes possibilities of OpenGL to JavaScript through browser? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER12> As others have pointed out:

1\. I click in Firefox and it just works

2\. I click in IE and it just works

3\. I click on my iPhone and it just works

… repeat as desired …

That's never been true of OpenGL (or 3D in general) before so there's always been this divide in what people consider possible for a web app (i.e. convenient, easily shared) and the conventional software model where someone needs to download and install something first – a big step up in delay and complexity, and a reasonable hesitation for the security-conscious.

The excitement comes from the fact that now none of that is necessary for many uses – if you're working on a non-AAA game, 3D object viewer, interactive diagram, etc. etc. etc. you get support for 70% of web users globally without having to take on the expense of desktop development and support or supporting so many different toolchains. This isn't a big change for the major players who are still going to do that for other reasons but it simplifies a ton of casual usage.

<comment><USER13> It really isn't true. It doesn't just work. I'm running Chrome 38 on a modern desktop PC and it doesn't render at a reasonable frame rate.

<comment><USER14> You're missing the point.

WebGL runs everywhere that is objectively a Good Thing™. Your criticism is aimed at the optimisation rather than the technology.

The person who created this could, theoretically, add a little slider to let you adjust the visual quality to meet your PC's performance characteristics.

Additionally WebGL can also be utilised for things which only get rendered once (e.g. single 3D frames). Like generating 3D graphs for one suitable example.

<comment><USER15> > The person who created this could, theoretically, add a little slider to let > you adjust the visual quality to meet your PC's performance characteristics.

If they wanted to, they could even auto-scale the quality based on frame-rate to ensure that everybody had a good experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Beautiful. Love the god rays. I believe this actually from last year as it uses [http://threejs.org](http://threejs.org) version 58. :)

</comment><comment><USER17> It feels pretty good to click the link on my iPad and see the leaves. Apple was the last hold out for WebGL. Hopefully, we'll see a big spike in WebGL usage.

<comment><USER18> Can you please explain how Apple was the last to hold out for those of us who are ignorant on WebGL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mozilla were the first to implement (Vladimir Vukićević's work) with Opera around about the same time. Chrome jumped on board a few years later, and IE as of version 11. Apple was the holdout for basically unknown reasons (they've had a working version preffed off for ~5 years now) but the basic assumption is that graphics card drivers needed to be hardened to provide a secure execution environment for shaders. It's one thing to buy a game and give it root, quite another to load a webpage that could start a WebGL process in the background and load executable code onto the graphics card.

<comment><USER12> Security is definitely the likely candidate (it was for Microsoft as well): even on Yosemite, where they enabled WebGL by default, there's a per-site permissions interface similar to things like location services access.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice demo. Is there any reason why every WebGL demo makes my browser burn the CPUs and drain the battery? Equivalent native code that produces output of the same quality does not have this much of an effect.

<comment><USER20> If web sites were allowed to execute native code on your computer, this would be a huge security risk.

Instead we have more restricted web languages, but at the cost of performance.

Basically.

<comment><USER19> Well, first, even assuming JITing JavaScript is expensive and produces expensive code, shouldn't WebGL demos mostly stress the GPU and not the CPU?

Second, web sites are not allowed to execute native code, but all the modern JavaScript engines compile down to native code. My intuition tells me to expect the performance of compiled JavaScript to be low, however I have seen endless benchmarks that say that's not the case and JITed JavaScript should be plenty fast.

However I feel this disconnect between those benchmarks and reality. The benchmarks say it's fast, while in fact I perceive it to be pretty slow and a resource hog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seeing this led me to investigate WebGL security vulnerabilities, since the shader code runs out-of-sandbox.

Interesting discussion: [http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/13799/is- webgl-a...](http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/13799/is-webgl-a- security-concern)

<comment><USER22> By "out of sandbox" you refer to the fact that shaders are statically transpiled into safe code, rather than getting executed in a dynamically memory-safe and sandboxed environment?

I agree the approach raises some doubts, as it gives untrusted web content a degree of indirect control over what kind of "safe" shader code gets passed to the GPU shader compilers. But the first-order issues are addressed by the specced security model ([https://www.khronos.org/webgl/security/](https://www.khronos.org/webgl/security/)).

<comment><USER21> Yes that's what I was referring to. I've only read the linked SO discussion, but it seems like security on that compilation step is a focus point for the companies implementing WebGL. Still, any time you're manually bound checking at compilation, there's a chance for error. (A SO comment mentioned something about open acceptance tests for this.)

Microsoft says the security is too bad to develop for, but that could be a play for DirectX (whatever it's called now) more than a real security worry.

Point is, it seems like a lot of the WebGL security is based on "don't worry, we tested everything!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anyone know why he put all of his scripts in a <font> tag? Is he just trying to hide them or is there an actual reason?

<comment><USER24> Looks like it's just an accidentally unclosed font tag in the #info div.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wow, I'm a Chrome user, but I'm impressed with how much better this performs in IE.

<comment><USER26> I believe there is an extra layer of indirection in chrome. IE can implement WebGL using DirectX, while chrome uses OpenGL, which under windows is a wrapper over DirectX. This may not be true of all video cards/drivers but I believe it's the default implementation of OpenGL under windows.

<comment><USER27> OpenGL has never been implemented in terms of DirectX on windows. No idea what you are talking about here.

<comment><USER28> When Vista first came out, Microsoft forced OpenGL to be a layer above DirectX. But they pretty quickly backed down and let people build direct OpenGL drivers again.

<comment><USER26> Ah, this is where I got it from. I didn't realize they changed it back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> My experience: Ran for maybe 30s and then the tab crashed. Looked beautiful though. _Chrome Version 38.0.2125.104 MacOSX 10.9.4_

Edit: Didn't crash second time around. Still Beautiful.

<comment><USER30> Chrome lo-o-oves accident crashes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Cool demo. I like it.

I'm looking forward to a plugin-free web! Now if only we could get people to upgrade from IE8 and 9.

</comment><comment><USER32> At first I wasn't sure if there was background noise, or if it was just my laptop fan spinning up.

Fun demo.

</comment><comment><USER33> Beautiful! However I tried it on my Nexus 5 and it looks like a bunch of stuff is turned off and the display is kind of pixellated. Is there a way to run it full-res mode? Modern mobiles have surprisingly powerful GPUs.

<comment><USER34> Are you using up to date Chrome? The Android browser is a the new IE.

<comment><USER35> I tried it with the latest Chrome on my Nexus 5 and as AshleysBrain said, it is really pixilated in contrast to the desktop version.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wow, smooth on Firefox on Nexus 5! Never seen mobile friendly WebGL before.

<comment><USER37> Try [http://swooop.playcanvas.com/](http://swooop.playcanvas.com/) :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> [http://davmlaw.github.io/ProceduralGraphics/fall.html](http://davmlaw.github.io/ProceduralGraphics/fall.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> On Ubuntu 14.04 on Chrome with nVidia GTX-660 it ran smooth and was very beautiful. The CPU usage didn't look bad overall too.

<comment><USER40> It was much smoother in Firefox for me than Chrome (Ubuntu 12.04 with GTX 660).

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Now, if only I could replace my chromecast stand-by screen with this... :)

</comment><comment><USER42> Now if I could only set up items like this to be my desktop background.

</comment><comment><USER43> Beautiful, thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER44> really beautiful..

thanks for sharing

</comment><comment><USER45> works well in ipad with touch - very nice!

</comment><comment><USER46> super nice</comment>


Joe Biden calls game developers "little creeps" who "teach you how to kill" - <AUTHOR> https://www.techspot.com/news/83623-joe-biden-calls-game-developers-little-creeps-who.html <comment><USER2> Games that "teach you how to kill": bad. Institutions that literally teach you how to kill and then send you off to actually kill people: great!

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks Joe, very cool!

I'm sure video games are much worse than the actual wars you voted for.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ooft, wait until he finds out about the US army. He's in for a surprise.

<comment><USER5> "Mr. Biden, I have some bad news about the Middle East."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The jokes practically write themselves, so I'll leave that to others.

> When asked about Silicon Valley's expansion of power during his time in the > Obama administration, Biden said: "And you may recall, the criticism I got > for meeting with the leaders in Silicon Valley, when I was trying to work > out an agreement dealing with them protecting intellectual property for > artists in the United States of America. And at one point, one of the little > creeps sitting around that table, who was a multi- — close to a billionaire > — who told me he was an artist because he was able to come up with games to > teach you how to kill people."

> "And then one of these righteous people said to me that, you know, 'We are > the economic engine of America. We are the ones.' And fortunately I had done > a little homework before I went and I said, you know, I find it > fascinating," Biden continued. "As I added up the seven outfits, everyone's > there but Microsoft. I said, you have fewer people on your payroll than all > the losses that General Motors just faced in the last quarter, of employees. > So don't lecture me about how you've created all this employment.. The point > is, there's an arrogance about it, an overwhelming arrogance that we are, we > are the ones. We can do what we want to do. I disagree."

Given Joe Biden's fuzzy memory, I would take his recollection with a grain of salt. Even if this anecdote is true, I'm puzzled about what segment of the electorate Biden is trying to appeal to. If anything, he would gain sympathy by livestreaming himself playing some popular AAA title.

<comment><USER7> As much as I disagree with it, I doubt this is particularly calculated, this is probably just how he feels.

<comment><USER8> Authortarians have a real problem with anything that introduces children to the idea that they can defend themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't really care for politics on the front page HN; but yeah, the willful (and hostile) ignorance of our leadership in this nation shouldn't be tolerated.

We should be voting for the dude that doesn't have strange angry nonsensical outbursts. You know, the dude that's not Trump, Biden, Warren, or Bloomberg.

<comment><USER10> I kinda like Andrew Yang. He seems to be proposing actual solutions to our economy rather than just papering over everything. Then again I haven't heard much from his detractors yet.

[https://www.yang2020.com/](https://www.yang2020.com/)

<comment><USER11> IMHO (after all this HN), Yang is great but not president material, he would be great if future president would include him as VP or some other leading role.

<comment><USER12> Who is prepared to be a great president and have we ever had a great president? I honestly don't know. I'm only 30, and I haven't seen one in my lifetime.

<comment><USER13> You have no idea how much you nerd-sniped me with that question. (I spend far too much of my free time playing at historian, and am far too fond of Ken Burns to not give my thoughts, but take this as a caveat that I am no true expert.)

Unfortunately, I think, no one who would be able to be elected president nowadays. Consider some of the "Greatest" presidents of our history, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, all were very human/flawed individuals with powerful detractors, (Lincoln less in his personal life and more in the role he had to play, and I omit Washington because he's effectively immortalized beyond personhood as our 'Cincinnatus') and I have my doubts as to whether any could receive sufficient support in an era where any possible slight or discontinuity (or attachment to principle over pragmatism) is a critical weakness.

I realize I may have slightly dodged your real question, I'll admit I don't have a great answer to that even in the absence of the pathology I describe above. There's been no one in politics (perhaps due to the above) who even seems to have the cult-of-personality of e.g. Obama, let alone with the principles and power to carry out something positive with it. Not too many years ago I would have said McCain, but we all know how that went. (That said I've been _rather impressed_ with how Pelosi has wrangled the herd of cats that is the democratic party , but that's only one small piece of the picture and may show how far my bar has dropped.)

To be precise since I answered the second half of your question implicitly, I certainly think we've had great presidents, see my list above for an incomplete summary. There have certainly been individuals who managed immense feats of good in the presidency despite such adversity that we have not seen in our lifetimes. However, as I was lamenting to my wife the other day, I've seen far less of this as time has gone on, (in local government _as much as_ in federal govt.) and as I suggest above, I'm not sure how we come back from that without systemic change.

<comment><USER14> Do people consider FDR to be a great president? He ranks pretty high on my list of the worst given the internment of Japanese-Americans among other things.

<comment><USER13> It's a fascinating question.

Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Teddy Roosevelt's use of the monument act expanded executive power in ways that would be used as precedent for future abuses. As you say FDR did Japanese internment, but in that same vein you'd be remiss to not point out Jefferson's forced native american relocation program.

This is kinda my point of "these were unquestionably flawed individuals" above. At the risk of justifying evils, (I don't intend to but one could interpret it this way) if your standard for great is "did no wrong" then no president (individual?) will ever be great. At the same time I don't think greatness should shield someone from criticism for the evils that came alongside. This may be an artifact of my personal philosophies regarding innate and unavoidable fallability of human incentives, but I still find enough merit in the positive outcomes and challenges overcome to call them "Great" (Thus the quotes in my initial post). If you really want to lose faith in the consistency of my mental models, ask me the list of most damaging presidents, and note that the lists are not mutually exclusive.

In conclusion, I find the manner in which FDR handled international relations, helped ready the country and mobilize against the European war even with interventionism publicly abhorred, balanced the interests of the various VERY TENUOUSLY allied parties (Stalin, primarily), while simultaneously making good on public works and improvements post-depression (although efficacy can be debated) coupled with his civil rights works (e.g. FEPC) gives enough justification to call him "Great," although I'll echo, this in no way detracts from the observation you made, and I see the two as parts of the same picture.

Post-factum edit for color: I've actually contemplated similar questions as yours but along a different vein for some time now, since FDR was rather sneaky in how he readied the US for war, and pushed out the various cash/carry lend/lease plans, as well as effectively participating in war without congressional approval (another storied tradition of "great" presidents with very questionable implications) but in the long run _it worked_ so to some extent, I don't have a good answer for when the ends justify the means, as it were; Lincoln is even in a similar boat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps this is just Joe Biden trying to refocus the term "creep" this election cycle, since he has trouble keeping his hands and nose to himself.

<comment><USER16> This is precisely the same trick Boris Johnson used to seed google with fake results for "boris johnson bus" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21122806](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21122806) "Boris Johnson uses search terms in interviews to hide negative articles"

Google: "creepy joe biden" and look at the pictures :o :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So predictable...

</comment><comment><USER18> With each of these out of touch comments creepy uncle Joe Biden's hands grow.

</comment><comment><USER19> The stereotype is that developers lean liberal, and tend to be in favor of gun control and opposed to glorifying war. As such, is there a conflict between those positions and working on games like CoD?

<comment><USER20> I've never come across that stereotype.</comment></comment>


The Wuhan Virus - <AUTHOR> https://www.genomic-quirks.org/post/the-wuhan-virus <comment><USER2> From the scattered information I have read, the infection has a very long dormant period (2 weeks), during which it may be contagious, and a high R_0 value of at least about 2.0. The R_0 value states how many people will catch the virus from an existing infected person.

These two factors together are scary. I am extremely interested in seeing better data though.

<comment><USER3> Higher than 2.0

"The mean estimate of R0 for the 2019-nCoV ranges from 3.30 (95%CI: 2.73-3.96) to 5.47 (95%CI: 4.16-7.10), and significantly larger than 1. Our findings indicate the potential of 2019-nCoV to cause outbreaks."

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.23.916395v1](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.23.916395v1)

<comment><USER4> Preprint and not peer reviewed. The WHO had it at 1.4-2.5 a few days ago.

[https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/23-01-2020-statement- on...](https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/23-01-2020-statement-on-the- meeting-of-the-international-health-regulations-\(2005\)-emergency-committee- regarding-the-outbreak-of-novel-coronavirus-\(2019-ncov\))

<comment><USER3> Earlier measurements are likely to be biased downward:

[https://www.academia.edu/41743064/Systemic_Risk_of_Pandemic_...](https://www.academia.edu/41743064/Systemic_Risk_of_Pandemic_via_Novel_Pathogens_- _Coronavirus_A_Note)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > All the viral genome sequences from affected individuals are very very close > to each other. Several are identical and none has more than 5 differences > (99.983% similarity). This strongly suggests that transmission into humans > came from a single pointed source and happened very recently, between Sep- > Dec 2019.

> Given what we are learning from viral genome sequencing above, and given all > the emergency measures being put in place in China in particular and around > the world in general, there is every reason to believe that the epidemic > will be controlled shortly.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure what the latter is based on. Up to 5m people may have left Wuhan before the city was locked down.

What's more is that Hong Kong has still not restricted travel, while offering free medical care to anyone. As a HKer, that makes me especially nervous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I thought it was understood as courtesy to not name the epidemic after the city, which will forever become a blemish on local tourism?

<comment><USER8> I don't think about Spanish flu when I think about travel to Spain.

<comment><USER9> You shouldn't, it didn't originate in Spain.

 _Even today, experts aren't certain where the outbreak originated. Some say China, some say the American Midwest, and others suggest France. But one thing's for certain—it wasn't Spain.

"Nobody calls it [the Spanish flu]," says Albert Bosch, president of the Spanish Society for Virology. "It just happened to be the place where it was reported, and that's it." Arnold says the Spaniards themselves had different names for the virus—sometimes "the French flu" for their historic rival, sometimes "Naples Soldier" after a popular musical—but it was the name in the Times that would stick._

[1] [https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-origin-of-the- spa...](https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-origin-of-the-spanish-flu/)

<comment><USER10> And it was only reported there because every other country was at war and censored internal news:

[https://www.history.com/news/why-was-it-called-the- spanish-f...](https://www.history.com/news/why-was-it-called-the-spanish-flu)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I find genome sequences fascinating, life's binary code has only 4 opcodes, a, c, g and t. I wonder if any computer VM will ever be able to actually fully run it. Still, the massively parallel capacity needed to run it "realtime" is not quite here just yet.

<comment><USER12> Yes, amazing stuff:

(1) If we have a rock, can we expect slowly by small modifications to make it into a hammer?

(2) If we have a horse, can we expect slowly by small modifications to make it into a Model T?

(3) ... a mechanical adding machine into an iPhone?

(4) ... a log cabin into the Empire State Building?

(5) ... a pocket knife into a computer numerically controlled milling machine?

(6) ... any software from the earliest operating system or simplest application into to all the software we have now?

Especially for software, we believe that lots of little modifications will lead to _technical debt_ , need for _refactoring_ , to throwing out and starting over with a _clean sheet of paper_ , to "plan to throw one away because you will anyway". In software, often it seems that there is no reasonable way to get from here to there and, instead, have to start over.

Well, with DNA, on this planet apparently the first version of life able to reproduce at all significantly was based on DNA, and all versions of life since then, including us, have also been based on DNA. Moreover we got here by small modifications of the DNA.

So, maybe the point is, DNA is not really life but just a design for a life, not a species but just a design for one. And we do believe that easily enough we could go to an architect and building engineer with standard tools for generating blue prints and doing the engineering for buildings, and they could use the same tools for a log cabin or a floating city.

Okay, but for life there hasn't been any design means, hasn't been any alternatives, other than just DNA.

Moreover, the simplest design tools for life have also been sufficient for the life to understand the design tools, life, the earth, and the universe.

Moreover, we are about the first, one of the first _graduating classes_ of life that understands DNA, life, ..., and the universe: It's been about 14 billion years since the big bang, and our solar system was made about 5 billion years ago from the results of exploding stars that grew and exploded in the first 9 billion years which is not much longer than it took for the first stars to form and explode. So, apparently to get life able to understand the universe had to take about 14 billion years from the big bang and we are among the first instances of such life.

YMMV, but looks amazing to me!

Hmm ....

<comment><USER13> > Well, with DNA, on this planet apparently the first version of life able to > reproduce at all significantly was based on DNA, and all versions of life > since then, including us, have also been based on DNA. Moreover we got here > by small modifications of the DNA.

Are you sure? I remember that life started as RNA not DNA.

<comment><USER14> They behave alike in a lot of ways, so I imagine they were never really separate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> But what happens if the virus mutates? Wasn't this the case with the Spanish flu? The first wave, then the mutation from which causes the second wave. Could that potentially occur?

<comment><USER16> Yes. Although it's important to note that mutation doesn't necessarily imply increased virulence. A blog post from This Week in Virology from a few days ago noted that the SARS epidemic may have actually been blunted due to a mutation it undertook.

<comment><USER17> I was wondering about. Thinking about what exactly brought Sars under control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Article suggests the intermediary animal is unknown, but the early consensus seems to be that it's snakes.

[https://gizmodo.com/deadly-wuhan-virus-in-china-may-have- com...](https://gizmodo.com/deadly-wuhan-virus-in-china-may-have-come-from- snakes-1841161392)

</comment><comment><USER19> Maybe vaccine can be made similar as those of Mers,SARS since the virus is closely related to those genetically.

<comment><USER20> There isn't a vaccine for either SARS or MERS, in part because they don't happen very often. In the case of SARS, that one outbreak was it so far, while in MERS we've seen a grand total of about 1500 people infected worldwide, although the disease is still circulating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> this is probably the one thing going viral that silicon valley is not happy about</comment>


Ask HN: How to self-learn to build real things (ie: dishwasher)? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I've always started by consulting experts, i.e. people who already know how to do it and can instruct you. Want to learn how to build engines...? Try working with a master mechanic for a while... this leans on the apprenticeship principle, for a reason, it's a tried and true way to learn.

If you can't get that ( or as a supplement to the above ), try reverse engineering something, for example disassemble a dishwasher and study how/why each part or piece makes up the whole, until you understand it completely. Governments and competitive companies sometimes employ this tactic to gain knowledge in areas where they are deficient or far behind.

When all else fails and you can't learn under an expert and have no access to the products or tools, you could always fall back on internet videos, online classes, or even book learning.

Good luck!</comment>


Despite anti-DRM revolt, Spore high on Amazon's bestseller list - <AUTHOR> http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/9/anti-drm-geeks-scream-don-t-buy-spore-no-one-listens-erts-

<comment><USER2> Another indicator that Spore is doing well are the 12 million plus creations that users have uploaded since launch. (To see them, go to Spore.com, click on one of the creations, and then click on "All Creations")</comment>


The Terrible Cost of a Bad Hire — Personalities to Watch Out For - <AUTHOR> http://www.hiringthing.com/2012/09/27/terrible-cost-of-a-bad-hire.html

<comment><USER2> Think they missed one... Talkative Ted: Talks and talks and talks, but never actually says anything. Can't / won't listen to what anyone says. Is the complete centre of every meeting, but always misunderstands everything he is told because he's too busy trying to come up with a witty reposte to actually listen. Commonly known in British English as 'a gobshite'</comment>


Scientific publishing is a rip-off. We fund the research – it should be free - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/scientific-publishing-rip-off-taxpayers-fund-research <comment><USER2> I wasn't aware that Robert Maxwell was instrumental in creating this situation. The article links to a long piece:

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable- business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science)</comment>


Show HN: Cor - the language of the web - <AUTHOR> http://yosbelms.github.io/cor <comment><AUTHOR> A language that compiles to javascript. Focused on simplicity, productivity and organization. Designed for large application development.

</comment><comment><USER2> "..., thinked to" should probably be "..., meant to / aimed at / focussed on".

<comment><AUTHOR> just a play on words

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is it possible to use Javascript libraries from Cor?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, it is possible. It is primarily designed to run in the browser.

You can use every javascript library out there, through CommonJS using "use" statement, or using globals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The syntax feels like Go, but without types.

<comment><AUTHOR> You got it. Cor borrows from Go, C# and Python(its philosophy). The idea behind is to take the simplest parts of the those language syntaxes, combine it, and make a new one focused on productivity and readability.</comment></comment>


Next generation of Scala Macros already in the works at EPFL - <AUTHOR> http://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2017/11/27/macros.html <comment><AUTHOR> More details at [https://gist.github.com/odersky/f91362f6d9c58cc1db53f3f44331...](https://gist.github.com/odersky/f91362f6d9c58cc1db53f3f443311140)</comment>


Effective Python › the Book - <AUTHOR> http://www.effectivepython.com/ <comment> r-w Subtitle should've been "The SQL to SICP".</comment>


Zen room for Vim: Focsuing only on the essential - <AUTHOR> http://amix.dk/blog/post/19744#Zen-room-for-Vim-Focsuing-only-on-the-essential

<comment><USER2> I'm so confused, why does this need a specific thing?

I'll just fullscreen {g,mac}vim and only have one pane if I'm set on doing this.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is to remove all the distractions (tabs, status bar, split screens etc.) and just focus on one thing. It also centers the content (which is non- trivial to do in vanilla vim) and includes special colors and settings to make Vim look like iA Writer when you are editing Markdown or reStructuredText.

Of course, it's not for everyone, but I like it when I am writing text or just editing one code file.

<comment><USER2> If you've fullscreened the vim container (eg, gvim macvim) then

        set lines=80

Will center it. Not super complex in vanilla vim :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I cant seem to get it working. I keep getting "You must be signed in to make or propose changes" and other errors. I have the .vim in plugin folder.</comment>


Google Have Had at Least 427 Meetings at the White House Over Obama Years - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3554953/Google-staffers-meetings-White-House-staggering-427-times-course-Obama-presidency-averaging-week.html <comment><USER2> I'm surprised it wasn't 1000 or more. I'm all for Google but the fact that they are one of the largest tech companies in the world means that they interact with governmental agencies all over the world. Some problems can only be solved by going to the top. Not only that, they have access to a large chunk of people's info. I'm sure the president is lobbing on the government's side to get access to it without having to fight in court.

What's amazing is that a company that started with 2 PhD students can get to a point where it can get access to the president of the US. Wow!</comment>


Scientists reveal new super-fast form of computer that 'grows as it computes' - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/10863.html <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/scientists- reveal-...](http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/scientists-reveal-new- super-fast-form-of-computer-that-grows-as-it-computes/)</comment>


Thin-Film Solar Startup Debuts With $4 Billion in Contracts - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/nanosolar/

<comment><USER2> Some questions about Nanosolar's $1-per-watt claim:

What happens at night?

What happens when its cloudy?

What happens during the winter-time?

Does Nanosolar's $1 per watt investment guarantee a consistent 24/7/365 source of electricity?

Does Nanosolar's $1 figure include the cost of installing transmission lines?

Does Nanosolar's $1 figure include the cost laying cement for a power plant, assembling the cells into solar panels, installing the panels, and commissioning the power plant?

Does Nanosolar's $1 figure include the cost of building base-load generating capacity to provide electricity for when the sun doesn't shine?

Installing electrical transmission lines costs about $1 million per mile. Most PV power plants are located far away from demand centers.

This sounds like vaporware.

This is precisely the problem with the Obama administration's plan for a "green energy" future -- trying to shoehorn high-cost intermittent power sources into low-cost high-reliability applications.

Nanosolar is ignoring what solar sells are good for.

Photovolatics have traditionally enjoyed a niche market in applications where cost is not a factor, where weight is at a premium, where there are no other power sources, and where frequent fuel delivery is not an option -- orbital telecommunications satellite solar panels, remote radio transmission towers, offshore oil and gas platforms, mobile power sources for forward-deployed military units, etc...

Utility scale power generation is extremely cost-sensitive, demands high- reliability, has no weight constraints, and has no constraints on mobility and/or fuel delivery -- the exact opposite of applications in which photovolatics make sense.

Nanosolar's emphasis on cost-per-watt suggests that their target market is utility-scale power generation -- a dubious proposition at best, considering the cost and reliability problems with renewable energy sources.

Marc Andreesen has famously argued that the number one job of a startup is to achieve product-market fit.

Nanosolar, like most renewable energy companies, has a product which they are trying to force unto a market that does not want it.

That's the trouble with government subsidies -- they allow people to operate outside the constraints of reality. At taxpayer expense.

<comment><USER3> Did you just cut-and-paste from the article comments?

 _Posted by: quilner | 09/10/09 | 12:28 am Some questions about Nanosolar's $1-per-watt claim: What happens at night? What happens when its cloudy? What happens during the winter-time? Does Nanosolar's $1 per watt investment guarantee a consistent 24/7/365 source of electricity? Does Nanosolar's $1 figure include the cost of installing transmission lines? Does Nanosolar's $1 figure include the cost laying cement for a power plant, assembling the cells into solar panels, installing the panels, and commissioning the power plant? Does Nanosolar's $1 figure include the cost of building base-load generating capacity to provide electricity for when the sun doesn't shine? Installing electrical transmission lines costs about $1 million per mile. Most PV power plants are located far away from demand centers. This sounds like vaporware._

<comment><USER2> Those are my comments.

<comment><USER3> You can hire PR agencies to do that kind of thing for you, you know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> $1 per watt refers to an industry standard of a theoretical peak energy production with ideal sunlight and does not include installation, mounting brackets and inverters. My calculation a few years ago figured a total cost of $2.5 a peak watt would be a break even (after subsidies), for residential use in areas with good sunlight.

<comment><USER5> That is for areas where a powerline is already available. If that is not the case the numbers are very different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> nice</comment>


Ask HN: Computer Science classes online - <AUTHOR>

I have 1 semester left, but i work full time. I would like to finish up in December, but to make things easier i like to take online classes whenever I can.
So, my question is does anyone know of any colleges that offer distance learning courses for computer science? I have been searching around and found a few potential classes, but not sure yet. I would like to gather some classes and see what i can get approval for.
Class I need:
Only need one

    C SC 437 Geometric Algorithms
    C SC 445 Algorithms
    C SC 473 Automata
 Only need one

    C SC 452 Operating Systems
    C SC 453 Compilers/Systems Software
 While i only need of each of the above courses i still need to take two more electives. These also have to be upper 400 level classes. So i can take multiple in each category.
Some other classes I can take are:

    CSC  447 - Green Computing
    CSC  425 - Computer Networking
    CSC  460 - Database Design
    CSC  466 - Computer Security
 I hoping to take one or two of these courses over the summer. If not, then online over the regular semester would be ok too. Any help in helping find these classes would be awesome or even a college that you think might offer them. Maybe you went to a college that offered distance learning. Some of these classes may be considered to be graduate courses too. Descriptions are listed below if you need.
Thanks!
--- Descriptions ---
Computer Security This is an introductory course covering the fundamentals of computer security. In particular, the course will cover basic concepts of computer security such as threat models and security policies, and will show how these concepts apply to specific areas such as communication security, software security, operating systems security, network security, web security, and hardware-based security.
Computer Networking Theory and practice of computer networks, emphasizing the principles underlying the design of network software and the role of the communications system in distributed computing. Topics include routing, flow and congestion control, end-to-end protocols, and multicast.
Database Design Functions of a database system. Data modeling and logical database design. Query languages and query optimization. Efficient data storage and access. Database access through standalone and web applications.
Green Computing This course covers fundamental principles of energy management faced by designers of hardware, operating systems, and data centers. We will explore basic energy management option in individual components such as CPUs, network interfaces, hard drives, memory. We will further present the energy management policies at the operating system level that consider performance vs. energy saving tradeoffs. Finally we will consider large scale data centers where energy management is done at multiple layers from individual components in the system to shutting down entries subset of machines. We will also discuss energy generation and delivery and well as cooling issues in large data centers.
Compilers/Systems Software Basic concepts of compilation and related systems software. Topics include lexical analysis, parsing, semantic analysis, code generation; assemblers, loaders, linkers; debuggers.
Operating Systems Concepts of modern operating systems; concurrent processes; process synchronization and communication; resource allocation; kernels; deadlock; memory management; file systems.
Algorithms Introduction to the design and analysis of algorithms: basic analysis techniques (asymptotics, sums, recurrences); basic design techniques (divide and conquer, dynamic programming, greedy, amortization); acquiring an algorithm repertoire (sorting, median finding, strong components, spanning trees, shortest paths, maximum flow, string matching); and handling intractability (approximation algorithms, branch and bound).
Automata Introduction to models of computation (finite automata, pushdown automata, Turing machines), representations of languages (regular expressions, context-free grammars), and the basic hierarchy of languages (regular, context-free, decidable, and undecidable languages).
Geometric Algorithms The study of algorithms for geometric objects, using a computational geometry approach, with an emphasis on applications for graphics, VLSI, GIS, robotics, and sensor networks. Topics may include the representation and overlaying of maps, finding nearest neighbors, solving linear programming problems, and searching geometric databases. <comment><USER2> Course work and credits are not fungible. I would strongly suggest that you check with your college or university to determine from what online institutions they would accept credit and which courses correspond to those you need to complete your degree.</comment>


Teeth Whitening and the Hygiene Hypothesis - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/26/color/have-we-hit-peak-whiteness-rd <comment><USER2> An aspect worth noting is, that our society is more and more redefining the meaning of "health" from the absence of illness to perfection of some universal subjective standard, which disregards factors like age or sex.

White teeth have at least some roots in biology - generally the younger you are, the whiter your teeth - still it makes no sense to compare the whiteness of different aged people and judge their health based on them.

Ethically we are on a dangerous path: Orthodontics for children are standard in Europe and the US, countries like Japan are catching up quickly. Teeth- whitening is common in the US and is becoming more popular in Europe, too. Orthodontics includes oral surgery more and more often. Korea is all in and full blown plastic surgeries are becoming the standard [0].

These surgeries cause pain and hinder you to eat properly for months. Still we are on a path to include them in our definition of health. In Korea parents often pay for them as a present for graduation.

People who the majority perceives as disabled or even just ugly are not necessarily unhealthy. We should make a clear distinction between body modifications and medicine. Unfortunately our ape brains see a high status individual and cluster these things together. This lets us worry about health problems we previously did not even know we had, making us psychologically and often physically unhealthier in the end.

Another big problem is, that we ignore the fact that we age. I do not think that care for the elderly should be an area of medicine. When your body breaks apart at 80 years old, that does not make you unhealthy, you are just old. You should not get the needed social interaction from doctors, who try to fix something that is perfectly natural to fall apart.

Some of the plethora of pills an 80 year old takes surely increase his or her life expectancy, I feel like others might not be worth the hassle. I surely do not want to ruin my last moments on earth organizing my calendar of doctor appointments trying to squeeze out the last couple of days I can possibly get.

[0]: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/about- face](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/about-face)

<comment><USER3> The NHS approach of putting monetary value on a year of life and comparing the drug costs to that is a good approach to reducing the spend on tired old bod's.

<comment><USER4> It is beyond offensive to imply that 60 year old individual is worth less to society than a 30 year old individual, and that there are life-saving measures appropriate for the latter that are too costly for the former.

<comment><USER5> I mostly disagree although I understand and appreciate the sentiment of your post.

You have to consider first of all that we're working with scarce resources. When we're not, it's not even an issue to compare two lives if you can save them both. But in the case that there are limited resources and you happen to have to choose between focusing on two different groups of people and make that tradeoff, you inevitably have to base your decision on something.

Now if you have a 15 year old kid and an 80 year old person, and both are dying from some preventable disease at a rate of 1% per year, and you have a scarce budget to focus on researching one particular disease, which one do you choose to focus on?

Well flipping a coin is probably shit. But making a ranking based on qualify adjusted life years[0] probably makes more sense. Of course it's not perfect, but it's not beyond offensive if you ask me to go about reasoning like this to partially inform policy decisions.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality- adjusted_life_year](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year)

<comment><USER6> What scarce resources are you referring to in the developed world?

Bill Gates turns 60 this year. It's pretty safe to assume he'll accomplish more in the next 20 years than you will in your lifetime.

<comment><USER7> The scarce resources implied here is the money that the government spends on medical treatment for the elderly, poor and disabled. Bill Gates obviously could always buy his own medical treatment.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but the money Bill Gates spends on medical treatment takes resources away from other things. Even if supply is elastic enough to adjust, it's unlikely to adjust immediately, and the adjustment will still reduce resources that would have been consumed elsewhere.

Money is a claim on future productivity. Spending it causes people in the world to adjust what they're doing to satisfy what you're asking for. Most of our claims aren't very large though, so this isn't particularly noticeable except in aggregate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Whiteness of teeth and _eyes_ are biological markers of being a good potential mate with [currently] good health and [presumably] strong immune system (evolutionary "hints" of having "good genes"), an analogy of peacock's tail. Breath is another important hint, btw. These are just hard-wired to our brains.

People are mere monetizing these "heuristics" into absurd.

<comment><USER10> Yes and the author tells a story about Western culture but I kept asking "how do you know?" Eastern cultures may have the same bias but without enough technological development over their history to actualize it at the same rate that we have.

<comment><USER11> A lot of Asian cultures actually have a culture around teeth blackening.

[http://www.traveldudes.org/travel-tips/tooth-blackening- forg...](http://www.traveldudes.org/travel-tips/tooth-blackening-forgotten- tradition/14811)

<comment><USER12> And some American subcultures have a cuture around teeth goldening!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I usually only notice how yellow my teeth are when I brush my teeth, by the contrast with the toothpaste that is usually whiter than white.

</comment><comment><USER14> Link doesn't work on mobile devices. It redirects to the issue homepage.

</comment><comment><USER15> Whenever I'm in the u.s. I think people look bizarre with their super-white teeth. I mean, my teeth aren't yellow or anything, but they don't glow in the dark either.

There are some things that don't transfer so easily between where I live (switzerland, but I think germanic europe in general) and the u.s.: super white teeth, visible tattoos, and piercings. (although I'll see a small nose piercing on women every now and then)

(and if you're German, you should probably leave your puma track suit and aviator glasses at home when you go to the u.s.)

<comment><USER16> How common is it, really, in the US? I genuinely don't know.

On the one hand, I hear that medical (and thus presumably dental) insurance costs a fortune, and even then the "co-pay" means that many hesitate to seek treatment. I can't imagine that "my teeth aren't as white as I'd like" is something insurance companies like paying for (or rather, they don't like paying for anything, but something purely cosmetic seems easy to deny), so how are people affording this? is it just the wealthy? If I wander around poorer areas, will I start seeing ordinary teeth?

<comment><USER11> Teeth whitening is very cheap, you can buy teeth whiteners over the counter in the US, and most toothpastes you can buy in the store have whitening agents in them.

<comment><USER12> Those whiteners don't create the super-bright almost-blue color you get from the dentist.

<comment><USER11> Are you sure? The handful of times I've inquired to an acquaintance about freakishly white teeth, they've always said it was just because they took really good care of their teeth, didn't drink coffee or soda, used whitening toothpaste, and had good genes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why We're Switching Off Airflow – Sort Of - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/flyr-labs-blog/why-were-switching-off-airflow-sort-of-780c4f58a660 <comment><USER2> We've got an old OpenVMS cluster at work that management has been trying to get rid of for years.

The team assigned to do this, along with the many consultants and contractors hired and fired over the years have tried just about every "modern" workflow orchestration tool you can imagine. When you put them side by side it makes you want to cry how badly everything compares to a 40+ year old system (the batch queues are built into the operating system and automagically distribute jobs to nodes in the cluster based on utilization and other metrics).

At the rate that the replacement project is going, I'm probably going to retire before they get rid of it.</comment>


Microplastics Find Their Way into Your Gut, a Pilot Study Finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/health/microplastics-human-stool.html <comment><AUTHOR> Reload in incognito mode if you have reached your article limit, or read the same topic at the Guardian:

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/22/micropla...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/22/microplastics- found-in-human-stools-for-the-first-time)</comment>


Uber's underwater investors - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/uber-ipo-investor-losses-d9b01daf-ece4-47d2-8f68-fe56dd98321b.html <comment><USER2> Its weird they'd use Pitchbook as their source for funding when Uber disclosed information in their S1 under the table titled "Redeemable Convertible Preferred Stock". See page F-51 here: [https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519103850/d647752ds1.htm)

From that table, they didn't raise 15B at 48.77 but closer to 8B. The article is off by 50%. Still a stunning amount of money under water.

What's also not highlighted in the article is that holders of that series G preferred stock are entitled to a $3.90 annual dividend per share (again, see the table in the S1). If you assume a 10% discount rate for 5 years of dividends, that dividend is worth like $14 per share today. So maybe they aren't as under water as the article claims. [EDIT:] if you read further along, it looks like Series G got converted to common stock in 2018, so they no longer get paid this dividend.

That said, people who bought common stock do not get dividends as of today.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sorry for the nitpick, but I've only heard "underwater" to refer to when you own an asset worth less _than you owe on it_. I've never heard it used to refer to all losses in value from investment. So it doesn't seem to be the correct usage here. Am I wrong?

<comment><USER4> generally in finance "underwater" simply means you've net lost on your investment (it's worth less than you paid for it, or other costs such as funding, legal etc more than offset any returns)

<comment><USER3> Interesting. But I checked Investopedia and it only lists the case I gave, plus out-of-the-money options:

[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/underwater.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/underwater.asp)

<comment><USER5> I've definitely heard the broader use, but I suspect it partly stems from the fuzziness of "owes". If my mortgage exceeds the value of my house, I'm definitely underwater. But if my pension fund owns a ton of CDOs on bad mortgages and can't make payments, it's sorta-kinda underwater too. Broaden things even more, and any institutional investor promising returns can be 'underwater' on a bad investment.

<comment><USER3> Hm, I could maybe understand if a hedge fund (or other investment firm) were operating on a "high watermark" standard (i.e. they have to get the fund's holdings past their previous all-time-high to get paid at all), then I could accept them being "underwater" in that sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article was written before today's worse selloff - Uber is now less half the expected value earlier in the year. I wonder if this is the end of the current tech bubble. All those unlisted companies really aren't worth what everyone assumes they are.

<comment><USER7> A few hyped companies with bad business models are not necessarily representative of all tech IPOs. But the problem is that these few bad apples can poison the perception of the entire sector for retail and institutional investors. Nothing wrong with a $1 billion B2B SAAS company going public.

<comment><USER8> Seems to be normal form. I don't have enough fingers to count the number of times companies go public, primary investors exit, stock slumps. Employees who have been with the company several years get stuck waiting 6 months to sell any shares at which point the stock is well under water preventing an exodus of talent. It's completely by design.

It would be more concerning if these stocks were spiking after IPO because it means the underwriters messed up and the market is irrational.

<comment><USER9> My experience is that employees who are underwater get demotivated and eventually just quit. That is why companies are switching to RSUs.

However for AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) purposes, the price as of your IPO is money you earned, even if you couldn't sell. Which during the dot com crash lead to a lot of people owing more in tax than they made, and with shares that couldn't be sold to cover it. I personally knew several who didn't have to pay taxes for several years afterwards because they were able to carry forward the losses from that disaster.

<comment><USER8> The long term capital gains loss is funny. I think I ended up with something like 30 years worth of LTCG losses I'll be able to carry forward. It's like a reminder that just keeps on reminding year after year how badly you can get shafted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As I said in the other thread a few days ago, Uber should obviously be shorted, both in the short and the long-term.

Their investors are simply trying to hedge their losses by bringing this stock public.

Uber's entire valuation hinges on the idea that they will be in the big three of autonomous driving, and I simply don't think they A) Can sustain long enough to achieve this, B) have a large enough Moat to prevent outside competition from jumping in (which already happened to their ride-sharing all over Asia) and C) They bet on the wrong horse with LIDAR, vision (camera arrays) will be the future of Autonomous driving.

<comment><USER11> Why is Lidar the wrong horse? Because Elon Musk made a slideshow and you drank the Koolaid?

I don't like Uber but as far as autonomous driving is involved, Uber and Waymo use Lidar AND camera arrays versus Tesla only using camera arrays. I don't see at all how that is a deal breaker.

<comment><USER12> Fundamentally, if a product can exist without an expensive component, it will beat solution's that contain that expensive component.

<comment><USER13> > it will beat solutions that contain that expensive component

It will beat _comparable_ solutions that contain that expensive component.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I mean... paper losses. It's going to take more than a few days of trading to figure out whether anyone lost money here.

I'm sure none of those institutional investors were looking at the IPO as their liquidity event.

<comment><USER15> Paper loses...if the stock increases. Uber already was valued at $80 BILLION, it takes a lot of money and feet in the ground to increase revenue and share, it's different from Google and FB.

<comment><USER16> I think that is part of the big disconnect between private and public markets. The public market has been valuing simplicity in business models lately with old conglomerates like GE, Honeywell, Phillips, and UTX selling or spinning off units. The private market has been valuing potential and multi industry domination to some extent. Some companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft have been able to have multiple avenues, but this has come after multiple successes, and what I would classify as cleaner underlying objectives.

At this moment in time, Uber and Lyft would be better served proving the underlying unit economics work to receive a better public market price. I think if both could show meaningful progress in this regard, it would help stabilize their stock prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm a bit surprised to see it stated that large investors ended up underwater, simply because they usually protect themselves first. Maybe the demand in Uber was so high they could skimp on their normal protections.

A year or two from now, I'd love to see what the actual paper losses were at this moment.

<comment><USER18> Yeah I thought they had liquidation preferences. Would they not have some deal where Uber has to make them whole by issuing them more stock up to the valuation price? Maybe that all goes away at the IPO, but surely to get sign off to have the IPO they must have gotten some guarantee.

<comment><USER19> Liquidation preferences go away at an IPO because the preferred shares convert to common.

<comment><USER18> Right, but if the value was $42 a share at IPO and that is less than what the late stage investors expected, then why would they sign off on the IPO without extra shares being issued?

<comment><USER20> The late investors aren't forced to liquidate and any liquidation preference is extinguished at IPO... the terms of the IPO having been properly authorized, the formerly-preferred holders simply have no special say in the matter anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > To make billions of dollars out of Uber, like Benchmark Capital did, the > secret is to invest millions of dollars in the Series A and then allow other > investors to invest the extra billions needed to scale the business and fund > ongoing losses.

They missed a step there. The first thing is to get your fund to have Benchmark's reputation to have a chance to look at and invest in a deal like Uber early on.

For those not familiar with Benchmark, they made their name on Ebay. They go way back.

<comment><USER22> It's funny you're saying this about Benchmark. Didn't they have a bitter lawsuit with some founders they invested in? [https://venturebeat.com/2005/01/25/epinions-founders-sue- ben...](https://venturebeat.com/2005/01/25/epinions-founders-sue-benchmark- august-et-al/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > _Uber is the ultimate minotaur — a company where billions of dollars of > private-market funding were supposed to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of > dominance and market power. It hasn 't worked out like that._

Ok, ok, so the strategy doesn't work for "the ultimate minotaur" because it's in a commodity business: transportation. It's sorta like airlines, which, taken as a whole industry, also lack dependable high profits.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if Uber is going to turn out to be a MoviePass

<comment><USER5> My favorite startup metaphor (originally applied to Groupon) is that the basic "get users, then improve margins" model would justify selling dollar bills for $0.50. After all, there's tons of demand, and it's clearly a real business opportunity because the users all stick around as you move towards profitability! Then you hit that final price hike to $1.00, and discover just how nonlinear demand can be...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A question: if you can make one assumption about Uber (or fix one thing about it) such that Uber will be sustainably profitable in the future. What will it be? Why do you think the assumption implies sustainable profitability in high probability?

<comment><USER26> I feel like you are fishing for "autonomous driving" but I think the real answer is: Lyft going out of business.

<comment><USER25> I was just curious, not expecting anything particular---I wondered if Uber's business and its problem space are fundamentally bad as some of the comments here suggest. Re: your opinion, I think it's a good news for Uber. If it just takes Lyft going out of business for Uber to surface above water, I would bet there's a realistic chance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd like to thank all the VCs who have been subsiding my travel needs for the last 4 years. I would also like to extend a future thank you to the retail investors who will be picking up the mantle going forwards - Much obliged!

</comment><comment><USER28> If 99% of the company's growth has been received pre-ipo, then the word IPO = It's Peaked Forever. Decacorn is short for "greater fool investment".

<comment><USER11> I wish but unfortunately I think Uber became "too big to fail". When there is that much VC and corporate money behind an entity you can be sure that the rules of the game will be bent so that the big players don't lose to much of their chips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> 'Uber loses more money than any other company to ever go public.' Says it all.

</comment><comment><USER30> Somewhat related, how is the strike price for the employee option holders determined?

<comment><USER31> Presumably Uber followed US securities law, which are pretty strict in regards to giving employees options. Or RSUs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's the Greater Fool theory taken to its logical conclusion.

<comment><USER11> the whole deck of cards is crumbling and the ones losing money right now are the little investors that bought Uber on IPO day because of the hype.

<comment><USER33> From TFA: "IPO investors have lost $655 million, while investors from 2016 and 2018 have between them lost $2.27 billion."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> At least the consumers benefitted by having their rides subsidized.

<comment><USER35> Consumers did not benefit in the long term if Uber nuked their local taxi industry and wrecked the efficiency of their local bus service before suddenly ceasing operations.

<comment><USER36> In my city (Toronto) taxis actually upped their game in response to Uber/Lyft, though not before fighting it tooth and nail. Before, you'd often get an ancient cab that the driver was (illegally) smoking in before you arrived and would often (illegally) refuse shorter trips. Half the time, the the electronic payment machines were "broken" and you'd get drivers threatening you if after arriving at your destination you refuse to go to a bank _with the meter still running_.

In most of North America, the taxi industry is notoriously corrupt and has been that way to protect their medallion systems. While I do feel for some individual cab ower/operators, I don't feel bad for the industry as a whole despite Uber being a horrible company.

<comment><USER37> I don't feel very bad for any taxi medallion owners who were exploitive, as I've heard some have been, nor for officials who let medallions become capital assets, but at least they were playing within the current local regulations. (And, even within the worst taxi medallion systems I've heard of, you'd occasionally hear of a driver who'd been saving up for a medallion, which they saw as their ticket to the American Dream, so they could keep more money from their fares.)

Then Uber comes in, knowingly ignores regulations everyone else played by, spews "sharing" nonsense, pricedumps on fares, temporarily attracts drivers and gets many hooked on loans for the recent-year cars Uber demanded, uses money and popularity of pricedumping rates to lobby politicians for official acceptance, then IPOs to keep the scheme going (and so some people can cash out).

<comment><USER38> >spews "sharing" nonsense

People forget that is how Uber got into this business - they started skirting medallions (which was an artificial market in the first place) by telling regulators that these drivers were headed in a particular direction and just picked up a fare.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Devops / server owners, what did you name your server(s) and why? - <AUTHOR> I imagine most people have interesting reasons for their naming schemes. Mine are all named after balaeric dj's like `villalobos` and `vath` <comment><USER2> vault ... because fallout :)</comment>


The Disturbing Rise of Openwashing - <AUTHOR> http://techrights.org/2015/06/12/openwashing-apple-and-microsoft/

<comment><USER3> That was kind of incoherent and rambling. It was poorly written.

There are real reasons to keep an eye on Apple and MS to make sure that they aren't abusing the Open Source community for marketing purposes. They are large companies that, should they see an advantage in doing so, they would not hesitate. This doesn't really help.

That being said...The "Open Source .Net" that they refer to in the article is actually a commerce platform from a third party that says it "takes advantage of open source Asp.net". Is that really so wrong? Asp.net has been open source for several years now. .Net core design meetings are available as streamed video if you want to join in and the license is MIT.

Also, articles that quote Stephen Vaughn-Nichols are like articles that quote FOX or ZeroHedge. I'm just automatically suspicious. Oddly, they quote him on this "open washing" but he doesn't seem to have problems with large companies publicizing the use of OpenStack or partnering with Canonical or any number of PR style things.

<comment><USER4> > That was kind of incoherent and rambling. It was poorly written

It's the current incarnation of BoycottNovell.com, so of course it is rambling and incoherent. Nothing has changed there except the name of the site. The author is one of the biggest conspiracy nuts on the net.

This particular article is actually one of the least incoherent and least rambling ones he's ever written.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The term "developer applause" cited in a few links from the article, which the article claims is "bizarre" to use, in fact refers to literal applause - <USER2> the audience at WWDC, consisting largely of developers (fans of Apple already - not representatives of open source, whatever that means). The wording in the first two of those links (which are the exact same text on two different websites) makes this pretty clear.

The rest of the article is only slightly more coherent.

</comment><comment><USER6> Apple is not an open company (by a long stretch) but they do make serious contributions to open software in many areas. Webkit, LLVM and related tools are particularly notable. In the case of other software they make fairly perfunctory source dumps.

The link between LLVM, Chris Lattner and Swift is especially promising for how Swift will be opened up so I'm optimistic that it will be done seriously and properly. And I have previously predicted that it would be opened up at some point so the announcement this week was not surprising although it was still very good news.

I am an iOS developer and I really like Swift. One of the direct benefits of it being opened in this way will be the opportunity to use it on Linux so that it can be easily deployed as server side code. Actually getting to see how it works, potentially tinker (although I don't expect to do much) potentially use it in education contexts where the requirement for a Mac is a blocker are secondary benefits personally although maybe bigger issues for others.

</comment><comment><USER7> Um, .NET is not openwashing. CoreCLR/CoreFX are MIT Licensed, Roslyn is Apache licensed, all of them are developed publicly on GitHub. This stack fully supports running your apps on FreeBSD, OS X and Linux.

</comment><comment><USER8> A couple years after British Petroleum blew a smoking crater into the floor of the gulf of mexico in the most-ignorant way, I stumbled across their page about their forward-thinking environmental practices.

I can google the link but it does not load for me:

[http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/environ...](http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/environment.html)

They did not even apply for an ecological drilling permit before they pulled that stunt.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well read Stallman, Open Source is not Free Software.</comment>


Contact tracing apps can foil both Covid-19 and Big Brother - <AUTHOR> https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/ <comment><AUTHOR> DP-3T is "Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing"

GitHub: [https://github.com/DP-3T/documents](https://github.com/DP-3T/documents)</comment>


Messaging APIs for SMS, Voice, Fax and Email - <AUTHOR> http://developer.telemessage.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> TeleMessage Messagings APIs offer a simple and powerful way to integrate your application software & IT systems with our business mobile messaging platform. APIs in REST, SOAP, XML, HTTP, SMTP & more. Documentation library.</comment>


What do you use for to do list? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I keep a combination did it/need to do it text file. Whatever needs done is at the top.

Also my unread email.

Also my memory.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wunderlist. I've tried Remember the Milk as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> todo.txt for my personal stuff so I can access it on my phone. taskwarrior at work since I don't need to access it on iOS.

</comment><comment><USER5> iOS/OSX Reminders. It does what I need it to do, and it's integrated with Siri.

</comment><comment><USER6> Email to myself.

</comment><comment><USER7> good ol' pen + paper</comment>


A New Roadmap for Lotus - <AUTHOR> http://lucaguidi.com/2015/01/01/a-new-roadmap-for-lotus.html

<comment><USER2> A solid project with very little visibility – I, for one, heard about it only with this post!

Good luck to Luca and the Lotus team in 2015!</comment>


Is Godaddy delaying domain transfer requests? - <AUTHOR> https://skitch.com/prateekdayal/gwdp1/dnsimple-transfer-status-for-reminderhawk.com <comment><USER2> Anthony from DNSimple here. We've definitely seen a lot more of these messages since the SOPA announcement just before Christmas. Prior to that I almost never saw domains stalled because of problems getting at whois data. Whether GoDaddy is doing it on purpose or if they are just overwhelmed with the number of domains that are being transferred out is pure speculation at this point.

In the case of DNSimple, if you get a message like that we are currently recommending that you email us (email@example.com) and let us know which domains are currently responding with that message and we'll cancel them so you can try them again. It's a brute force way of dealing with it, it's inelegant and may end up causing even more problems for GoDaddy, but we have found that has helped a bit.

To be certain, this is different than the 5 day waiting period that ICANN allows. That only comes into effect _after_ you've submitted the transfer request to the registry, and if you haven't received an email to authorize the transfer request then you aren't at that point yet.

<comment><USER3> Can you say a little about what it would mean for Whois to be "overwhelmed"? We're used to hearing about sites going down dealing with hundreds or thousands of requests per second, and as much as we'd all like to see GoDaddy collapse into rubble their transfers are probably more on the order of thousands a day.

How plausible is it that they could actually be seeing technical difficulties?

<comment><USER2> I agree that it seems unlikely that the whois server is having technical difficulties, rather they are probably throttling requests. Consider that spammers use whois servers as a means for harvesting email addresses and therefore they are likely limiting requests from specific IP addresses.

On the other hand, if I were a relatively large registrar I'd figure that I should have a mechanism for getting whitelisted at other major registrars, so I find it hard to believe that this issue should not already be resolved, although clearly it has not.

<comment><USER4> What incentive does GoDaddy have to provide a whitelist mechanism?

<comment><USER2> None unless someone can get ICANN to consider their behavior a violation of the ICANN registry/registrar agreement.

<comment><USER5> Interestingly enough, not long after a number of "blocked" customers (including myself) submitted complaints to ICANN about all this tomfoolery, GoDaddy contacted NameCheap and let them know that the blocking was all taken care of. Also, my stuck transfers suddenly unstuck.

We can all speculate about whether this was malice, incompetence, or just plain old DDOS protection working as designed. Either way, it looks like the squeaky wheel got the grease.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 3 days ago I transferred ~15 domains. The first half arrived just fine, but the last half is stuck. Those transfers have not shown in GoDaddy's pending transfer page, even after accepting Namecheap's verification emails.

<comment><USER7> Hm. It is possible that they set the system to start "throttling" the transfers after a certain number. I transferred 6 and saw no problems.

Anyone care to share their transfer numbers and "stuck" experiences?

<comment><USER8> I transferred 1 domain December 22. It is still with godaddy

<comment><USER9> Same here, the namecheap status is "Domain awaiting transfer initiation..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Update from namecheap: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3393330>

</comment><comment><USER10> Sudden uptick in requests + the holidays = a multitude of reasons why there might be a delay.

Don't get me wrong, I dislike GoDaddy. But let's not jump the gun on these things.

<comment><USER11> I just got this from a namecheap customer service chat:

"Please let me explain the transfer mechanism in order to make it more clear. On the first stages of the transfer process our system needs to obtain the full domain contact information from the old registrar. Their system should provide us with the full Whois data on the domain automatically in order for us to start the Verification process and be able to proceed with the transfer initiation. Currently Godaddy blocks our IP addresses and does not provide our system with the _full_ contact information (they are not disclosing the email addresses listed with domains), thus we need to gather this data manually"

I do a whois and get all the information, apparently they don't.

<comment><USER12> I am having the EXACT same problem. My domains look like this on namecheap <http://imgur.com/mtSsd> and they said that GoDaddy was blocking them from getting the Whois info as well.

I understand not wanting to jump to conclusions but I trust GoDaddy about as far as I can throw the elephants that their CEO shoots...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was planning on transferring only half my domains from godaddy this month, but now with this, I'm transferring them all.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." -Hanlon's Razor

<comment><USER15> When dealing with a profitable company you pretty much have to assume they're smart enough, leaving malice as the most likely explanation.

Especially on the heels of supporting SOPA, a pretty malicious thing to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like a good use-case for a distributed whois proxy... I wouldn't mind running a node for a few weeks to help NameCheap get through the backlog, especially if it helps liberates my couple of domains that are currently held hostage...

<comment><USER2> This sounds like a good idea, although the registrars would need to know that there are additional whois mirrors available and start using them, however there are other issues to consider:

* Registrars would have to trust that the data in the mirror has not been tampered with. I think there is an assumption that a whois server name that is provided through the registry whois server is going to be correct.

* Mirrors would still need to rate limit to cause problems for spammers who are harvesting email addresses, or they'd have to whitelist registrars.

The Whois protocol was a decent idea...15 years ago. What we need now is a better way of verifying domain ownership.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Transfers take forever, it's not a problem with godaddy. I transferred a domain into godaddy _before_ all this SOPA drama and it finally "arrived" yesterday, 7 days later.

edit: seems this is an unrelated issue and _before_ it gets to the transfer stage, my mistake.

<comment><USER17> 4 hours average over the past year, ime.

There is no reason it should take longer. Some of the delay is in the email cross checks with the domain owner. It does not takes a day, let alone days, to move a domain, even when retaining DNS info. Above 4 hours need an explanation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Not sure. Only 3 of my 15 transfer requests from Friday have gone through.

<comment><USER18> This explains it: [http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy- trans...](http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/26/godaddy-transfer- update/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can anyone who's successfully transferred a .COM domain to Namecheap verify which registrar appears on the new WHOIS, Namecheap or eNom? I'm still planning my own move and where to go is a tough move -- I think it's between namecheap and name.com now, and I don't want to move if namecheap is still reselling .COM through eNom.

Interestingly, I looked up all the recent YC-funded companies I could think of and 99% were still at GoDaddy. I was hoping to see some pattern in who they chose to move to, but they haven't moved (yet).

<comment><USER20> I transferred a .com from GD to Namecheap and whois is now showing:

Registration Service Provided By: Namecheap.com Contact: email@example.com Visit: <http://namecheap.com>

Domain name: simplehuckel.com

Registrant Contact: WhoisGuard WhoisGuard Protected ()

       Fax:
       11400 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 200
       Los Angeles, CA 90064
       US

Administrative Contact: WhoisGuard WhoisGuard Protected +1.6613102107 Fax: +1.6613102107 11400 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 200 Los Angeles, CA 90064 US

Technical Contact: WhoisGuard WhoisGuard Protected +1.6613102107 Fax: +1.6613102107 11400 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 200 Los Angeles, CA 90064 US

<comment><USER19> Thanks. Your domain is owned by ENOM. The "service provided by Namecheap" part is not part of the record at Verisign.

[http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/registry- data.jsp?doma...](http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/registry- data.jsp?domain=simplehuckel.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I received the same indication from NameCheap's support group. One transfer placed 24 Dec went through - the rest are waiting.

</comment><comment><USER22> Finally released the domains from GoDaddy by clicking on the domain and doing 'Accept'.

Now, when I do a whois it's showing as registered to eNom (I was xferring to namecheap) and then showing domain not found.

On namecheap's side it's showing as pending - not action required from me.

Anyone seen similar behavior?

<comment><USER2> I believe Namecheap still resells some TLDs from Enom. What has probably happened is that the name has been released at the registrar, Enom has received the transfer acknowledgement but NameCheap probably has not picked up the completed transfer (there is no notification mechanism so transfer orders have to be polled).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is this a Namecheap specific issue or more general to eNom who they are a reseller for. Nothing on the enom system status page... <http://www.enom.com/registrynews.asp>

<comment><USER2> Enom is definitely having issues getting whois data, although I was under the impression that Namecheap was now accredited and as such would have started communicating directly with the registry for .com and .net at least. Maybe not though.

<comment><USER19> You're right, Namecheap is an accredited registrar on its own, not a reseller anymore.

[http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and- services/domai...](http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and- services/domain-name-services/find-registrar/index.xhtml?loc=en_US)

<comment><USER2> They can be accredited and still resell, which I think they may be doing for some TLDs. For each TLD you want to be a registrar for you have to go through some sort of accreditation process with that TLD, so getting direct access to a large list of TLDs is quite a significant effort. It may just be that they haven't gotten to it yet for all of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Now, I'm more inclined to transfer my domains..

</comment><comment><USER25> Did you go and accept the transfer at GoDaddy? Otherwise it takes a week.

<comment><AUTHOR> I never got the email to accept. I have done this before and it took just minutes

<comment><USER25> Login to your GoDaddy account and accept the transfer from there.

<comment><USER2> If he has not received the authorization email then it most likely means that the transfer request has not been submitted to the registry which means that GoDaddy has no knowledge of the transfer yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. There is nothing to accept in Godaddy so far. It's been a few hours. Happening to another domain of mine too</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Erlang the Movie: just the calls - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/23/erlang-the-movie-jus.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+boingboing/iBag+(Boing+Boing)

<comment><USER2> And for an even more surreal take... <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1quwIFj- RvM#t=1m50s></comment>


Lambda calculus with Church encoding in C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/peberlein/c_lambda_calculus

<comment><USER2> Wow, that is really impressive! Unfortunately, this means lots of work for the C preprocessor (and the C compiler, then) at compile time. But it's cool that it works this way at all.</comment>