South Korea to raise $500B for unification - <AUTHOR> http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/business/2014/11/18/6/0503000000AEN20141118006200320F.html <comment><USER3> I've been twice to North Korea on tours and I just don't see a true reunification happening anytime soon. This isn't like West/East Germany where both sides were still similar. North Korea is a fundamentally different country to South Korea in almost every single way. Any comparison between the two situations is stupid and naive.

There are plenty of opportunities for economic integration. But how exactly do you plan to reunify when significant parts of the North Korean government are actively against it i.e. they are doing well under the current regime. Or when the narrative has always been reunification under the DPRK banner ?

The only way any of this is happening is if China stops supporting North Korea and the UN Security Council/Agencies puts much of the government in jail for crimes against humanity. Then South Korea would effectively just take over and Pyongyang would be turned into a tourist attraction.

<comment><USER4> "One of the biggest misconceptions I think people have of North Korea is that they are simple and naive. But I feel that North Koreans as a group of people have gone through a lot of hardship, and their ability to survive in difficult situations are a lot higher that what people think. People think that unification will be a basketcase for North Koreans, but they will definitely be able to manage. People also think North Koreans will have a hard time adjusting to the market economy, but the black market is also growing under the regime's nose, and people are used to working in this environment. North Koreans are not naive."

From recent Kang Chol Hwan AMA

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2m87gi/i_spent_ten_ye...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2m87gi/i_spent_ten_years_living_as_a_prisoner_inside_of/cm1vsys)

<comment><USER3> The issue with all of this isn't the North Korea people. They are well aware of life in South Korea and elsewhere courtesy of all the black market DVDs that have been finding their way there.

It's the government filled with old socialist-era guys who surely aren't going to be so willing to just give up their power.

<comment><USER5> _It 's the government filled with old socialist-era guys who surely aren't going to be so willing to just give up their power_

And that's what this announcement is about. $500B pays a _lot_ of bribes (sorry, "industry reunification payments" or something). And don't think for a moment that the South Koreans will hesitate for a moment to pay them.

<comment><USER6> Won't they use the money to buy arms, etc to increase their power?

<comment><USER5> a) Obviously you structure it as payments after unification, and you let them set up up an industrial organisation like Samsung or Hyundai. That's plenty of power for most.

b) S. Korea would love to be able to fund almost any kind of opposition to the current regime in N. Korea. That's not what this $500B is for, but if there was a credible place to spend some money to undermine the regime I'm sure they'd be happy to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm glad they're considering doing this.

However, it's going to cost a lot more than $500 billion to raise per capita GDP by ~7 fold. It'll cost $500+ billion in the first ten years in just welfare support, security, education, infrastructure, disarmament, healthcare, job training.

$50 billion per year in net drag is perhaps even far too low of a number. There are 24 million people in the north. That's a mere $2,000 per year per person. It's going to cost a lot more than that to start bringing them up to speed. I think you could easily spend $2k per person, just on the person - <USER2> counting several expensive things I listed previously.

South Korea should plan for $2 trillion over 20 years. They'll intentionally under-shoot the numbers, to avoid freaking out the tax paying public, and the cost will end up ballooning far beyond the public relations numbers.

<comment><USER8> " cost a lot more than $500 billion to raise per capita GDP by ~7 fold."

That's a good point, but remember that North Korea, in spite of being the most backward and poor nation on Earth, is full of Koreans. A strong creative drive and high levels intellectual life and potential talent and a flair for protest and organizing reform will do a lot for a nation. Most nations would be lucky to unify with 15 MM Koreans, no matter how poor. Within a generation of getting freedom, I expect them to be doing well.

Remember that it only took RoK twenty years to go from a brutal dictatorship among the poorest in the world to the 1st world nation it is.

<comment><USER9> What is so special about Koreans that your comment couldn't have used "humans" instead?

<comment><USER10> I think they would have a hard time adjusting....look at the defectors who cant fit in in south

<comment><USER8> That's a real potential problem, as is the lifetime impairment of childhood malnutrition. But I expect defectors from any regime to be the kind of entrepreneurial misfits that never quite fit in and demand their environment adapt to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fareed Zakaria wrote in 2010 that too few were preparing for an internal meltdown of the NK regime: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/10...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/10/17/AR2010101702608.html)

He describes it as a black swan event that would not come on any predictable timetable, but something that would be far better managed if some preparations were made in advance.

Maybe that idea is catching on.

<comment><USER12> The notion of black swan events is rubbish. The theory makes no sense.

Even if it was a logical theory that had coherence not sure how it fits here.

We know countries unify. We know what happens. You can be sure North and South will one day unify.

Yes the only question is when. Prepare to early = big loss. Prepare to late = a loss.

It's just about creating a sensible plan on how to deal with something we don't have a timeline on.

When will a building have a fire? Who knows, just make a sensible plan for pre and post when it happens. You don't need to call it a black swan. It's just risk management.

<comment><USER13> > You can be sure North and South will one day unify.

How can we be sure? We know countries unify and we also know that countries split never to be unified again.

<comment><USER14> I'm looking forward to Brazil and Uruguay's unification.

<comment><USER15> You mean Uruguay and Argentina, right? :P

Short summary for non-uruguayans: Uruguay started out as the Spanish piece of the land on the eastern side of the river Uruguay according to the treaty of Tordesillas, and became a disupted frontier between Spain and Portugal.

During the May 1810 revolution (Argentinean revolutionaries against Spain), while the capital city was a Spanish stronghold the local leader José Artigas sided with the Argentinean insurgents and founded the United Provinces.

Artigas wanted a federal system, but the Buenos Aires leaders wanted centralism. So Uruguay actually became a province of the Federal League.

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

When Uruguay announced its independence from Spain, it became annexed to Argentina.

Then Brasil invaded, and it became a Brazilian province for a short time, thus the parent comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For comparison Germany unification has now cost roughly ~100billion per year for 20 years, so far. So roughly 2 trillion total. Given that the DDR was actually in relatively good shape compared to North Korea, that is there weren't any famines, it had a more or less working industry and a very good education system, I believe South Korea would have to bear much higher costs per annum.

<comment><USER17> North Korea also has a 50% larger population compared to East Germany at the time of reunification (~24M vs ~16M) which, it seems to me, would only increase the costs.

<comment><USER18> Nitpick: The East Germany had indeed 16 million people at the reunification, but the West was far over 24 million! I don't know where you took your figures from, but Wikipedia says over 63 million: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Germany#Population](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Germany#Population)

<comment><USER19> The 24 million he is referring to is the population of North Korea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've talked to Korean friends and they don't want reunification to happen, at least the younger generation do not. After living a life seeing nothing but hatred come from the other side as well as unprovoked attacks on innocent civilians, it's not surprising that that opinion exists. Certainly, the younger generation does not remember a unified Korea at all.

It seems like the rest of the world wants them to reunite, but they don't want to.

<comment><USER21> It isn't a question of desire. If the economy of the north collapses and millions of people are on the verge of famine, the south needs a plan to maintain some sort of order.

<comment><USER20> Perhaps then, the question is how much of the responsibility lies with the South after such a thing occurs. Would SK simply annex NK or would something like a joint/international humanitarian effort to help NK survive and may be start its own government be better?

Honestly, I don't have any right to say one way or the other is right because I'm not even Korean, I just think that we in the west need to stop taking as a hypothesis that if NK collapses that it is SK's responsibility. I think it is up to the South Koreans to decide whether they want that, and not us [1].

[1] And yes, that's what this article is about, the government is preparing for this contingency, but as we in the west know, our government doesn't always do what we want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Could someone give more background on this? Is the reunification something that's on the table now, is this just planning and hoping? It would be great to see that happen, it'd be great to hear from someone who knows more about this issue.

<comment><USER23> Nothing's on the table as far as what is publicly known. This is just the SK government trying to get prepared for the economic shock of having to absorb NK on short notice, which could happen at any time this century.

SK is also sending a message to the international society that we should all prepare for the collapse of NK, while sending a message to Kim Jong Un that "you won't last long, and we know it."

Just today, the UN General Assembly approved a resolution to refer NK leaders to the International Criminal Court for human rights violations. Totally unrealistic, to be honest, but I guess this is how political pressure works on the world stage. Timing the "we'll spend $0.5T" press release to coincide with the UN resolution is no doubt intended to increase pressure on NK -- if not directly, then at least indirectly by letting the people of NK know that $0.5T is waiting for them if they can get rid of their Dear Leader. (Yeah, the news is censored there, but I'm sure a few thousand people will have heard of it by this time next year.)

<comment><USER3> I don't see the people of North Korea ever getting rid of their Dear Leader for two reasons:

(1) A significant amount of the working population is part of the government apparatchik especially in Pyongyang which is where any uprising would need to start. (2) There is a pervasive culture of fear. Everyone is well aware of the "we will harm you and your entire family tree" approach to keeping everyone in check. There is a culture of people telling on other people and "someone always watching" which makes it hard to trust anyone.

So I think the ICC/UN will be key to all of it in particular China/Russia who need to be convinced to abstain from any resolutions. China's speech to the Australian parliament at the G20 was promising in that they are trying to be better citizens in Asia. And Russia surely doesn't want the US to be continuing to use North Korea as an excuse to build anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe.

<comment><USER23> I agree, a bottom-up uprising in NK would be difficult to kickstart.

But if Kim Jong Un's brutal execution of his own uncle is any indication, there's plenty of room for infighting within the elites, or even a full-blown civil war if things get desperate enough (more trade sactions, another massive famine, etc).

Sooner or later, one of the factions might realize that their best exit strategy is to hand the country over to SK in exchange for a guarantee of immunity and a comfy retirement in the Caribbean. If I were the leader of SK, I'd accept that deal and, several years later, arrange for their luxury yachts to have an "accident" in shark-infested waters ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In order to understand North Korea, you simply _must_ read Escape from Camp 14[1]. If not, then at least read the Wikipedia entry[2]. Dear lord, it's incredibly tragic...

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143122916/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143122916/) [2]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Dong- hyuk](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Dong-hyuk)

</comment><comment><USER25> If unification was going to happen I think maintaining two currencies until the two economies are on par would be most stable for noth Korean citizens. By stabilising the NK currency through having it managed by the SK central bank while having the currency maintain a lower value than SK's, stability can be maintained while retaining labor competitiveness. All they need to do then is open the country to foreign investment and gradually open up the border. This way minimal public funds will be required and the private sector will help the economies unify over time in the most stable and efficient way.

<comment><USER8> Germany just gave a huge gift to ever DDR citizen by trading the Mark and the DDR Mark at 1:1. With a per person limit of a few thousand marks, it wasn't that expensive and really set the unification up to succeed with popular backing.

<comment><USER25> They could do the same by just sending some amount of south korean currency to every NK mailbox (or do it more throughly through records which I'm sure NK has kept on almost every household), while maintaining two currencies to allow NK export firms to have a competitive advantage in cheaper currency, rather than suffocating them for a period of time after unification (as you can read in the link), slowing the economic recovery.

"East German currency was exchanged for West German deutsche marks at a rate of 1 to 1, although the market rate was 4 to 1, according to the FSC.

The overestimated currency conversion helped stabilize the livelihoods of workers from East Germany in the short term, but soon resulted in a sudden wage hike, which damaged the profitability of East German companies."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how much insurance companies could save through unification instead of war (* the odds of war). I have to imagine "rebuilding Seoul with 10% odds over the next 50 years" would exceed the direct costs of unification.

<comment><USER27> No way. Ever heard of a _force majeure_ clause? If Kim Jun nukes Tokoyo or LA, Progressive and Geico are not going to cover the damage to your car. In war, all contracts are off. You're simply screwed.

<comment><USER26> War risk insurance doesn't include such a clause.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I would love to see the US devote a huge portion of foreign aid to this development. Probably going to write my senator about this. Check this to see if your senator is on the subcommittee for East Asian Affairs, and write them about spending on the unification of North and South Korea ->

[http://www.foreign.senate.gov/about/subcommittees/subcommitt...](http://www.foreign.senate.gov/about/subcommittees/subcommittee- on-east-asian-and-pacific-affairs)

<comment><USER29> Just the US military mission in South Korea costs $1.1 billion a year. Dealing with the North Korean situation would make most of that spending completely unneeded.

<comment><USER30> Ongoing cost of the U.S. bases in Korea isn't likely an issue. You have to house those troops somewhere and bringing them back to the U.S. would require building and/or expanding of existing domestic facilities so the economics would make keeping the existing bases ideal.

<comment><USER31> I'm not sure how it works for the US army but don't people get "mission" wages which are many times the base wage they'd get if they were at home?

<comment><USER30> Not an expert but based on my research it doesn't seem like this is a meaningful number at an individual level or at the aggregate base level: [http://www.militaryrates.com/military-pay- incentives](http://www.militaryrates.com/military-pay-incentives)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The article talks about numbers, finance, GDP and economy without explaining the politics of it. How are they going to attempt reunifying with a country which is run by an autocratic regime that has essentially brain washed its citizens into hating the south? Is there going to be military intervention? What about north's nuclear arsenal? Or is it going to be an open reunification where the north government decides to stop ruling and handover the country to the south?

<comment><USER18> "has essentially brain washed its citizens into hating the south"

I've been to DPRK a few years ago, and as far I could see, their state propaganda is not aimed at southern ordinary citizens, but on the government of South Korea. They consider it to be a puppet government in the hands of USA. (There is actually more than that, but I think this reduction is accurate enough.) Overall, they are very open to the idea of having the entire Korea united, and in a lot of instances you can even find maps and logos depicting their country as the entire Korean peninsula.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The unspoken assumption throughout the article that the essentially globally failed model of central-bank inflationary capitalism (on someone else's terms) is the de-facto result of de-facto desirable reunification is, I think, the elephant in the room.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there a reason for this planning? Is this government or private enterprise? Maybe this is the south sending a signal to the north? Or private enterprise in the south with government backing? I swear Korean politics is more confusing than the east-west Cold War.

Reunification went well in Germany. Although even now there are vast differences between the east and west, the east is fully integrated. Think of it as the poor southern US vs the east coast.

<comment><USER28> I don't fully understand the politics either, but this is a clear signal that the South wants the North to flourish. Everyone wins when capitalism is injected into an economy. The South's private sector gains would be big because of the cheap labor, and the population of the North would have incredible wage growth. The effects of injecting capitalism would be magnified relative to the fall of East Germany because the differences in GDP are enormous.

If this happens, it would be the biggest win for capitalism/democracy I've seen in my lifetime (I'm born after the fall of ussr)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There should be scholarships for a phalanx of Korean economists to go to Germany and study the world's best example. Maybe we'd get some new answers about what's going on with the old DDR's economic malaise, too.

</comment><comment><USER35> _It also noted that currency conversion is the most sophisticated issue in unification as the exchange rate would be largely conditioned on political negotiations and social consensus._

Somehow I doubt that currency conversion is _the_ most sophisticated issue. The nuclear-powered dictatorship is also going to require a few brainstorm sessions.

</comment><comment><USER10> shouldn't they, the north koreans accept reunification first?

I wonder if there is some non public intelligence about north korea that is pushing them to do this.

<comment><USER3> The North Koreans already accept reunification.

Except that they assume South Korea will be unified into the DPRK under the leadership of Kim Jong Un.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There's no way the North Korean military will allow unification to happen. They're much farther advanced, technologically and militarily than South Korea so in any war, they will squash them.

Just watch this video of North Korean might: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-hyVzTVDLg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-hyVzTVDLg)

<comment><USER36> Hahaha. Everyone that downvoted me has no idea of the sarcasm here... The video is hilarious, btw.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: crowdfunding best practices / secrets? - <AUTHOR>

I'm running a little crowdfunding experiment now & I was wondering if the HN Community has any tips, do's & don'ts for crowdfunding. <comment><USER2> I think this is what you are looking for:

<http://conversionxl.com/the-key-to-customer-loyalty/></comment>


Ask HN: Help me verify my news app - <AUTHOR>

We've been testing an app that determines news the second it appears online.
Since our new version is up, one major US news event has happened which is the hostage situation at the Discovery Channel.
We broke this story at 1:07PM EST on September 1st, 2010.  We need to determine when other sources also published this event.
Any idea?  How do I go about this? <comment><USER2> Here's an idea for next time. Assuming you don't need the data in real time, but instead just need to be able to say, when X story broke, we broke it first 80% of the time.

This is probably a stupid idea but I've only given it a few minutes of thought, so thats all you get tonight :)

Take automatic snapshots of news pages, like Drudge.com, cnn.com or whatever you want to compare to. Maybe once a minute.

Now hook it up with Mechanical turk and pose the question (in turker language its HIT (human intelligence task), "does X story appear on this page at 10:00pm?". They answer as true or false, then keep moving the capture forward and keep asking the question.</comment>


From Kubernetes to a complete application development tool [video] - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/14/idea-to-production/? <comment><USER2> Very often on HN I see links describing the latest and greatest GitLab feature. It really seems like they've been working hard and doing a good job, and they seem to have a clear vision ("master plan", in their terms). Where is GitHub in all of this? Aren't they concerned about being outinnovated?

<comment><USER3> Github is so ubiquitous that they can't afford to move fast and break things like Gitlab can - another team at work considered moving to Gitlab to use all these new features, found bugs everywhere and eventually went back to Github.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback -- it sucks that they found so many bugs in the product. Any chance you remember what specifically they ran into?

<comment><USER3> Mainly intermittent errors clicking around the interface, particularly 404s when clicking on files that existed - they're not sure whether that was a problem in the web interface or the files actually temporarily went missing.

<comment><AUTHOR> That sounds more like a problem in the installation than a bug in GitLab. Was this self-hosted or on GitLab.com?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm very excited about this. Especially about the terminal we show at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7OIQfOJO-0&t=7m11s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7OIQfOJO-0&t=7m11s) AMA

<comment><USER5> Super quick one. One of the things I'm working on at work is a staging env per branch system. We use k8s too. Biggest consideration here is individual environment variables per branch.

Eg. For testing we have a separate db to work on so we have test data and a db where we can perform migrations if needed. Another example would be adding a new feature that requires a different env variable for another api key.

Curious how or if these features support it. Super sorry if it's in the docs. Since you were doing ama I thought I might ask it here :)

<comment><AUTHOR> We're not doing environment variables per environment yet but we would love to, see [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/issues/20367](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20367)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This video is really neat and it seems like the promised plan is almost done.

Can you clarify at all what the plan is for supporting other container manager systems? I looked at Openshift and it doesn't look like something you can run on your own hardware. Maybe I am misunderstanding this though.

\--

EDIT: I had spent my time looking at openshift.com and didn't notice that there is an open source version located at openshift.org. Sorry for the confusion.

\--

I'm interested in using all the functionality shown in the video, but for a small team and on our own hardware. Maybe it doesn't make sense that way, any clarification would help!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your kind words. We would love supporting other container management systems. From the OP: "We believe container schedulers such as Kubernetes are the future of application lifecycle management and are working on Mesosphere support. We would love it if people would contribute support for other container schedulers such as Docker Swarm and for other Kubernetes providers such as Tectonic."

In the demo we use our own Openshift Origin installation on our own cloud servers, for more information please see [https://www.openshift.org/](https://www.openshift.org/)

<comment><USER6> > In the demo we use our own Openshift Origin

Thank you so much. I had spent 20 minutes this afternoon on openshift.com and was looking for an open source version and just failed to find it. Sorry for causing confusion with my earlier post.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem, at GitLab we used to have a seperate .org and .com site but we noticed it caused duplicate content and confusion so we consolidated under .com

Although great companies like Wordpress are doing a good job making it work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've got a gitlab-ce helm chart in review in the helm charts repo: [https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/pull/202](https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/pull/202)

While it's still in the process of working towards a merge, it will make for a very easy installation process: [https://github.com/gtaylor/charts/blob/gitlab- ce/stable/gitl...](https://github.com/gtaylor/charts/blob/gitlab- ce/stable/gitlab-ce/README.md)

This is probably most interesting to those who don't want to use OpenShift. There's some more fleshing out to do re: CI runners, but the basics are there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool to see this progressing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's the minimum monthly cost for running this setup? Can it be done on a single server? If the minimum setup requires a lot of redundancy, then I think this will still be a blocker for many side projects and small startups.

Does gitlab.com offer hosting for containers?

<comment><USER9> I can't comment on the monthly cost. You should be able to run everything on a single server, but I suspect that if everything is under load, that would need to be a decent server.

You can use our Docker registry on GitLab.com for free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wasn't sure what to thing about Cycle Analytics, and the metrics it provides ("time from thoughts to issue", "time from issue to code", "time spent reviewing"). IMHO these numbers may be too synthetic to give meaningful information. Plus, once we have this kind of dashboard, there is a risk of starting to optimize for the numbers (instead of optimizing the reality underneath).

That said, I see with this demo how these metrics could be useful to track, well, when reviews are taking too much time (needs more people? better repartition of reviewers?) – or when maintenance tasks are slowing new features (needs better tests? more maintainers?). I guess I'll have to try this out :)

<comment><AUTHOR> For more detail about the numbers see [https://gitlab.com/help/user/project/cycle_analytics#how- the...](https://gitlab.com/help/user/project/cycle_analytics#how-the-data-is- measured)

Do you mean that number are to coarse to indicate a specific problem?

Of course there is the problem of gaming the numbers. But we do think that compared to many other ways of measuring productivity (for example the number of issues solved) this is relatively robust against manipulation. Getting something out sooner is better most of the time.

But thanks for the thoughts and I hope you try it out soon.

<comment><USER11> > _relatively robust against manipulation_

My own view is that robustness to manipulation can't come from metric design, it can only come from culture.

If metrics are tied to reward or punishment, then no matter _how_ clever they are, they will be gamed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that everything will be gamed and that culture is the best protection. I do think that some metrics are easier to manipulate (cyclomatic complexity comes to mind) and some metrics don't correspond with effectiveness (lines of code written).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is OpenShift providing here that isn't in upstream Kubernetes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing, we just had to pick a quick way to install it and Openshift looked nice. All the features are intended to work with all Kubernetes installations down the road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That looks pretty darn neat!

As a sysadmin though, I do wonder how maintainable and especially upgradable is that thing without breaking half the world.

<comment><USER9> We release all of GitLabs components at the same time, guaranteeing that they work together. Every month on the 22nd. Updating GitLab is no more work than 'apt-get install'.

<comment><USER13> That's great. I was referring to the whole stack.

Should I upgrade all my hosts, docker, kubernetes, openshift, gitlab, mattermost ... what would be the chances of something to break to the point of ruining my day/week.

Not everything is merely "apt-get upgrade"-able alas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The paragraph on "move to the left" does not make any sense to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry to hear that. I should have probably included a drawing. Can others maybe paraphrase what they think it means or does it not make sense to anyone?

<comment><USER12> You're saying that people used to edit locally, build locally, test locally, _then_ upload to staging/the cloud; now you upload to the cloud first, then build/test/etc. (Of course, people did it this way with Heroku for years because it was harder to build locally, then the pendulum swung back with Docker...)

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The CIA Campaign to Steal Apple's Secrets - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2015/03/10/ispy-cia-campaign-steal-apples-secrets/ <comment><USER2> "Tearing apart the products of U.S. manufacturers and potentially putting backdoors in software distributed by unknowing developers all seems to be going a bit beyond 'targeting bad guys.' It may be a means to an end, but it's a hell of a means."

The government continues it's never ending campaign to save us from ourselves (or each other?)</comment>


Ask HN: Which are the best resources to document efficiently your projects? - <AUTHOR> At work we are using Confluence and GitHub. What to put in Confluence and what to put in GitHub? When to use GitHub wiki vs checked-in documentation? How to deal with information vs knowledge? How to avoid outdated documentation? <comment><USER2> Put business details in confluence and the technical in Github.

Business details:

* Product purpose - What it does.

* Business justification - Much money it generates or saves the company.

* Product Owner

* Business alignments/dependencies

Technical stuff:

* Describe what the product actually does, as opposed to what it claims to do.

* List all build and installation steps.

* Document how to run tests.

* Document technical requirements and business flow through the application.

* Try to autogenerate the areas of documentation that are most likely to go out of date. I wrote a build step in my Node.js app that does this so I don't have to manually maintain a good portion of the documentation.</comment>


Death by Accidental Complexity - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Death-by-Accidental-Complexity

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this talk is particularly pertinent given all the interest in event- loop-based systems like node.js lately.

"A lot of people, when they try one experiment with concurrency, they pick some braindead problem like serving constant strings in a little webserver loop in Python..."</comment>


Lego Upsets Fans by Taking Down Homebrew 3D Print Designs - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/lego-upsets-fans-by-taking-down-homebrew-3d-print-designs/ <comment><USER2> We have to _fight_ them! It would take all of a _week_ to create a website devoted _entirely_ to libraries of "block toy compatible 3D objects you can print at home."

I _have_ a 3d printer. I _can_ build this website, most of us here could probably.

Any lawyers in the crowd? Who is _with_ me!?

Lego has _no_ authority to do this. Thingiverse et al is just acquiescing because they have better things to do than lawyer up to Lego.

We need to _Barbara Streisand_ Lego onto the right side of history.

It's even _worse_ than patent trolling! Their patents have _expired!_

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a bit confused how they can do that, as hasn't their patent for the bricks etc. expired?

Were these designs the same as existing Lego ones?

And didn't Lego themselves copy Kiddicraft bricks.

<comment><USER4> Anyone can threaten a lawsuit.

Even if the threat's not credible, my understanding is the threatener can often force the victim to spend tens or hundreds of thousands in legal fees, not to mention inconveniences like having to spend hundreds of hours talking to lawyers, showing up and testifying in a faraway courtroom, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is ludicrous. The only people that are going to be printing 3d legos are the ones that already love lego and just want to do some custom things. I want to get a 3d printer specifically to make some custom stuff for my kids, and that will in turn just have us buying more normal legos.</comment>


The Parallelism Blues: when faster code is slower - <AUTHOR> https://pythonspeed.com/articles/parallelism-slower/ <comment><USER2> In Julia, where the paralleization options are explicit (SIMD, AVX, threads or multiprocessing), it always depends on the load, for small operation (around 10000 elements) a single thread is faster only for the thread spawning time (around 1 microsecond). And there is the issue of the independent Blas threaded model, where the Blas threads sometimes interfere with Julia threads... In a nutshell, parallelization is not a magical bullet, but is a good bullet to have at your disposal anyway

<comment><USER3> Do you know if Julia will add OpenMP support? It's clearly the way to go for offloading to hardware in a productive way.

<comment><USER4> Julia is actually initially had OpenMP backed parallelism (ParallelAccelerator.jl), but they're moving away from OpenMP towards a novel and native task parallelism framework more inspired by things like Cilk[0].

[0] [https://julialang.org/blog/2019/07/multithreading/](https://julialang.org/blog/2019/07/multithreading/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's also the problem of Turbo Boost.

My laptop's 9980HK will boost to ~4.5 GHz when only loaded to a single core.

However, when I load up all 8 cores, it might only sustain ~3.5 GHz.

Therefore the 8 cores might not actually result in the work being completed 8 times as fast, only 6.2x (8*[3.5/4.5]) real-time due to the lowered clock rate of each individual core.

This will show up as additional user time, since each individual core is able to do less work for each unit of time (seconds) compared to the single-core case.

</comment><comment><USER6> "It would be extremely surprising, then, if running with N threads actually gave ×N performance."

Basically impossible by Ahmdal's law.

<comment><USER7> Of course in the general case Amdahl's law is inescapable, but some tasks on modern systems can show > ×N speedup over single-threaded performance if, for example, a single thread can only exploit at maximum some fraction of the total memory bandwidth or some level of the cache hierarchy.

<comment><USER8> Do you have examples where running n threads instead of 1 results in a speedup greater than n?

The only thing I can think of would be that the additional threads would kick the CPU into using a higher frequency, but a single thread using 100% of the CPU should already do that.

<comment><USER9> There are some broad examples of that effect here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedup#Super- linear_speedup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedup#Super-linear_speedup)

<comment><USER10> The caching effects mentioned there have to do with adding additional hardware resources that change the effective cache sizes and shift the working set into higher performing storage or memory.

You can also encounter a funny software engineering effect. Refactoring an array-based algorithm to work in parallel often involves the introduction of block-decomposition. This change allows sub-problems to be spread to different workers. Sometimes, this change will also accelerate the sequential code, as the new block-oriented access patterns improve cache efficiency!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> None of this is surprising, right? Unless your system has fewer threads than cores (which it probably doesn't even without your program) there will always be some context-switching overhead. It's worth keeping in mind I guess - especially the fact that numpy parallelizes transparently - but generally these results are to be expected.

The title is also misleading; it suggests that the _wall clock_ time might be longer for parallel code in certain cases. While not impossible, that isn't what the article covers.

<comment><USER12> > the wall clock time might be longer for parallel code

That is exactly the case, if CPU is the bottleneck in your already-parallel application. It's a case where we really shouldn't be layering different parallel bits together in one codebase, but might be doing it naively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article uses the term "parallelism" when it is talking, instead, about concurrency.

Parallelism is specifically the stuff that actually does happen completely independently on all processing units, that actually goes Nx as fast on N units (clock depression aside). Concurrency refers to the overhead of coordinating activity of those units, that keeps you from getting your Nx. It is overhead on top of any actually serial parts of the computation, which Amdahl's law addresses.

In other words: Parallelism giveth, and concurrency taketh away.

The distinction gets more useful the more you think about the subject.

</comment><comment><USER14> On 64 core Xeon E5 this example gives 1.8x increase in user time, but 8x decrease in wall-clock time

</comment><comment><USER15> This is perfectly normal behavior when Intel Hyperthreading is involved.

I'm on my phone, so rather than trying to type out an explanation, I'm going to link to Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper- threading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading)

<comment><USER16> The benchmarks were run on a computer with hyperthreading disabled.</comment></comment>


Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better - <AUTHOR> http://www.ausgamers.com/news/read/3093969 <comment><USER2> I think what they're doing is great, but I see two problems with their presentation. First, computer rendering techniques are extremely well understood and well researched. We've picked the low hanging fruit, much of the high hanging fruit, and everything in between. There is no "groundbreaking new technology" to be invented. They're converting polygons into voxels (although each voxel is probably a sphere for cheaper computation), and using software ray-tracing to render in real time. Since ray-tracing is trivially parallelizable, the multicore technology is just about there now. A 12-core machine will give just about 20FPS. The reason why they can get away with an incredible amount of detail is that ray-tracing diffuse objects is fairly independent of the number of visible polygons in the scene.

The second problem is that 10^4x improvement in level of detail _does not_ mean 10^4x aesthetically pleasing (or in fact, more aesthetically pleasing at all). Ray tracing gets very expensive the moment you start adding multiple lights, specular materials, partially translucent materials, etc. It is very, very difficult to do _that_ in real-time even with standard geometry, let alone with 10^4x more polygons. This is why their level doesn't look nearly as good as modern games despite higher polygon count (compare it to the unreal demo: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttx959sUORY>) They only use diffuse lighting and few lights. In terms of aesthetic appeal of a rendered image, lighting and textures are _everything_.

Furthermore, one of the biggest impacts on how aesthetically pleasing a rendered images looks is made by global illumination. That's also something that's _extremely_ difficult to do in real time with raytracing, but is possible with gpu hardware with tricks. The trouble is, these tricks look much better than raw polygons.

Again, I love what they're doing. Real-time ray-tracing is without a doubt the future of graphics, but it would be nice if they were a little less sensational about the technology, and more open about the limitations and open issues.

<comment><USER3> And there are no moving objects in this demo. Voxel animations are much harder than poly animations.

Then there is memory. The elephant is looking great, no doubt about that. But I think you will need a lot of space for it. On a PC this might work, but I'm not sure it can be used on consoles.

<comment><USER4> That and I don't know of anyone (outside of using them as particles) that has successfully created collision models with voxels in real time. The collision calculations of just a few of their scanned rocks and a ground plane would be plenty complex - a whole scene perhaps even a little insane given today's specs.

They might have to resort to polygonal collision models in the same way that polygonal games end up using low-poly collision models (with the same pitfalls such as moonwalking, blocked projectiles or mystery-bouncing).

<comment><USER5> What about this: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y&feature=related)

<comment><USER4> Sorry for the belated reply. Yeah, I saw Atommontage and it's quite interesting. Despite the realism of the track marks left and suspension movement, the truck still seems to exhibit some unnatural "floating" feeling. These are the very pitfalls of dealing with lower-res poly collision that I was speaking about. Kind of an uncanny barrier for movement.

I do feel that this author is a bit further along at something ship-able than the Euclideon folks are though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> John Carmack's repsonse:

"Re Euclideon, no chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several years from now. Production issues will be challenging."

[https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/statuses/98127398683422...](https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/statuses/98127398683422720)

<comment><USER7> I trust Carmack's response over pretty much anyone's in matters of rendering engines. The guy is a god of coding them.

<comment><USER6> I saw a comment on Reddit about this 6-7 hours ago suggesting that Carmack had a horse in this race and that we might be best to presume the very slightest of bias in his response(s).

That said, I also view his perspective in this field as tending towards unquestionable. He's always seemed to have had a pretty sparkling reputation as well as the obvious talent.

<comment><USER8> The tech basically has to be a variant of sparse voxel octrees. Carmack has mentioned it in an interview years ago, It's reasonable to assume he's built his own prototype, as he does with pretty much anything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'll say the same thing now as I said last time these guys released a video: I'll believe it when I see them make a single blade of grass move, or when they place a single dynamic light source and cast a single dynamic shadow. Until then, this technology is awesome, but more or less useless.

<comment><USER10> Also if they actually make a scene with different things in it. Having millions of objects in your scene is not that hard if they are all copies of the same object. The old demonstration showed a bunch of repeated copies of a single object. This one showed a lot of copies as well, although not as obvious.

<comment><USER11> It is hard in that you still have to draw every poly in every copy of the object. Instancing allows you to reuse some per-vertex calculations but it doesn't help at all with fragments, which is where most of the power is typically used.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, it "only" solves the memory use problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone who has worked with GPUs and software renderers for over a decade:

I am pretty sure that their tech depends on a few types of repeatable data, which they are able to cache effectively based on rotation -- in other words, they have come up with an efficient way of querying the front-facing voxels in a large set of data based on the resulting view matrix. Where this falls flat is if the data is not procedural, or it is not diverse - as you can see in the video, there is a bunch of the same data copied over and over. However you compress it, such detail is not free and I am guessing there is a lot of data that depends on a good deal of memory/storage to work properly.

I am not so worried about animation or dynamic lights or textures as everyone else is. If they can render it to a buffer and get the normals/depth/UV coordinates, the rest of the rendering can be done in screen-space, including SSAO, deferred lighting, and similar rasterization tricks. Animation can also be rendered on top of the scene, and intersected with the former depth buffer. The only thing I am worried about is the size of the data set and ability to create more diverse landscapes.

<comment><USER13> Also, for those interested in seeing a LIVE demo of very similar technology, there are many examples, but here is one:

<http://voxels.blogspot.com>

It is not likely to be the exact the same technique, but I am guessing they are using similar methods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's no accident that there is that much repetition in the models. It's also no accident that they are all nicely tiled in power of two axis aligned bounding boxes. Clearly these things take up enormous amounts of memory and need to be in some big octtree like hierarchy - so while they can instantiate these pretty impressive leaf nodes they can't do things like have them on uneven ground.

So much work left to do.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm sorry, but as much as I respect people both on Reddit and Hacker News, I wonder where does all the enthusiasm come from, when:

* demos show nothing new from a technological perspective

* the presenter sounds like a door-to-door salesperson

* as it seems to me, the only purpose of the demo is to raise a hype and somehow (I still don't understand) they succeeded

Euclideon got financed by Australian government.

I really hope the board took a critical approach and relied on at least /some/ technical expertise to grant these people A$ 2m. If they made this decision based just on a demo - I'm moving to Australia at once, where I will invent a technology you have never seen in your whole life before. Ever.

<comment><USER16> The startup grant program was this one: [http://www.commercialisationaustralia.gov.au/WhatWeOffer/Ear...](http://www.commercialisationaustralia.gov.au/WhatWeOffer/EarlyStageCommercialisation/Pages/default.aspx)

Terms in that program are you have to match the government funding 1:1 so they must have (or raise within 2 years) $2mil to put against the government's. They also have to pay it back "on success" (5% of revenue once that reaches 100k total) and are monitored closely for "fast failure" (they are expected to succeed and repay within 2 years, they have to repay even if they fail after 5 years). Euclideon claims to have had a 2010 funding round so maybe that's how they got into this program. It also says this program is not to be used to "Prove to the applicant that a certain technological problem can be overcome (R&D projects)" so they must have shown it as a viable product that just needs to be packaged up for sale.

What strikes me most is anything under a Commonwealth funding agreement has to have the words "Funded by Australian Government through the XYZ Program. An Australian Government Initiative" in all their promotional material. Yet the shining star of Commercialisation Australia's portfolio forgot. Ouch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The last time we talked about this (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1179970>), the consensus was that it was a lot of snake oil and not useful for most applications.

</comment><comment><USER18> Every time this comes up I like to point people to the Atomontage Engine[1], which takes (what I think is) a more pragmatic approach, combining voxel and polygon graphics. Voxels are used where appropriate (eg. landscape, destructible buildings) and polygons can be used for dynamic objects.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sfWYUgxGBE>

<comment><USER19> It would be nice if that demo was more exciting. Also, the detail on the terrain (in the first minute) leaves much to be desired.

But it's a much higher quality demo than Euclideon IMO, from a technical standpoint.

<comment><USER18> I think the videos on the Atomontage channel show something I can actually see being a game, for example it shows destructible environments and terrain deformation, editing tools, and clever use of simulated DoF and a gameplay perspective that plays to the strengths and hides some of the weaknesses of the tech.

I could see it being great for a hybrid-RTS game like Ground Control, or some kind of god-game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anytime there's too much bragging--or any bragging at all--before the actual product is finished, my bogus filter lights up. And it's really hard to turn it off later.

</comment><comment><USER21> I thought it was interesting that they predicted some sort forthcoming schism between 'real' scene objects and 'artificial' ones. At first I thought he was talking about the characters and scenes of residing on one side of the uncanny valley or the other, which I think is a valid thought. But he wasn't talking about that at all and posited instead that objects will either be scanned in from the real world and placed in game vs assets created by artists. I don't think this will be the case except in games that strive for realism. It will be more like Photoshop, where real scanned in assets still require artists to perfect and stylize them for your game. Until high resolution, tactile VR arrives, you're still running into 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe'.

<comment><USER22> I thought replicated and fabricated were more appropriate terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> IMHO polygon count is not nearly as important as texture, lighting (and therefore also shadows) and animation quality.

Their polygon count is impressive and the object detail looks awesome, but, as other people commented here, I wonder how well it will hold up when dynamic objects, animation and dynamic lighting are added.

<comment><USER24> General consensus last time this rolled around, which I see no reason to change, is that once you add "dynamic objects [or] animation", it _completely stops working_ , so... it probably won't hold up at all.

Most obvious comparison comes in right at the 4:00 mark, where you can see the "polygonal" grass waving gently in the wind, then at 4:22 their "unlimited detail" grass appears to be carved out of some sort of grass-colored rock. Also observe how at the end they are excited about their improvement in "the lighting", by which they mean, _the_ lighting that you will get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I can understand that adding dynamic objects/shadows is difficult and their videos do not show them being capable of doing that yet. However, why can't 90% of the objects be rendered in the new static way like they do (statues, buildings, tree trunks) and dynamic objects be added on top of it using whatever method game devs use right now? I don't really care if the cactus is moving or not but I sure would like to see it in much higher detail.

Why can't we take the good from both and get better results?

<comment><USER19> They can be, and that's likely how it will work. Triangle animated characters + voxel static world.

<comment><USER25> Then why is everyone here complaining about the lack of dynamic objects?

<comment><USER26> Because they describe the tech as if was the answer to everything. It can do specific things very well and other things not at all. If they toned down the hype and were clear about the limitations, they would get nothing but love.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This has been "announced" since 2010 all the while being only "a few months" from release. So far nothing has materialized. Vaporware. Also note this is nothing but voxels plus an advanced search algorithm, for resource conservation.

<comment><USER28> Vaporware is exactly what this is, note also that they also push investment opportunities in their 'product'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> These guys are doing something similar and are demonstrating more dynamic lighting and destruction tech: <http://www.atomontage.com>

</comment><comment><USER30> The most unrealistic things in video games for me are faces. While increasing polygon counts and such will certainly help, I can't help but notice that faces will never cross the uncanny valley unless they can do something about the lighting.

Check out:

<http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/images/subsurf.html>

So, unless they can do all this AND ray trace it at the same time, it really won't make my game experience 100,000 times better.

<comment><USER31> Surely a lot of that is due, not to lighting/shadows/rendering, but to the incredible subtlety required of the animation?

HL2 has some pretty amazingly convincing faces, and that's obviously not because it has the best rendering engine.

<comment><USER32> I wouldn't go as far as "amazingly convincing". I think they look better after you've been staring at the HL2 world for a while, rather than the real world.

<comment><USER31> Nah, I had that impression from the very first scene the game loads, which is the creepy guy talking to you.

(I don't mean convincing in a "mistake-for-real" way, but in a "lets-me- suspend-disbelief" way.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I love how they mock other game dev companies for using skyboxes (they call it card board cut-out buildings in the distance @04m52) and then proceed to do exactly the same thing in their demo. Hell they even managed to do it wrong (their sky texture isn't stretched & compressed appropriately to hide the fact that its a cube @2m27).

To many bold claims & deception in that vid. Colour me skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER34> Polygon engines work nice with physics and animation. I'm trying to figure out how they could have a dynamic world based on particles.

<comment><USER35> make sure they're also waves?

<comment><USER36> Very good solution to needing a polygon that can interfere with itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> To all those talking about physics, interaction, lighting and shadows, what do they think of the Atomontage engine using similar technology: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CCZIBDt1uM&feature=BFa&#...</a>

</comment><comment><USER38> Regarding the technology used. In this video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWujsO2V2IA> you can see lots of artifacts and also talk of point cloud data, so it is clearly not raytracing but rather point data rendering. All the repetition seen is because of the memory constraints. The point data is probably preprocessed and compressed in numerous ways, which makes it very difficult to do animations. But as others have mentioned, even as a last resort they should be able to just use this technology to render terrain/background and then use polygons for moving/animated objects. This would probably also utilized current technology better as the polygon pipeline would not just sit there unused.

</comment><comment><USER39> Still no dynamic objects in these videos. A limitation they're not discussing and working on?

</comment><comment><USER40> I think these guys are on to it too. W/o govt. funding and "orders of magnitude better" marketing babble: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sfWYUgxGBE>

</comment><comment><USER41> If this technology is legit without problems with animation and lighting etc, what will it mean for the costs of game content creation? You still need artists to create the models, textures etc, and higher detail generally takes much longer with diminishing returns. I also find that environments with highly detailed objects also need far more objects to be convincing which compounds the issue.

In short, the tech sounds great, but will it result in better games or just more expensive games (and in turn, fewer games with more innovative but risky design)?

<comment><USER7> From what I can gather, 3D game artists tend to start with high-res models and then reduce the poly count, so it may not be THAT much of a problem. I think it's because a lot of the modeling takes place in more organic editors now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think a good game and a game with good graphics are two unrelated things.

What would my mom say? This game looks a bit better than this other game? Or this game looks 100,000x better than this other one :)

</comment><comment><USER43> Graphics don't improve linearly with the number of pixels or polygons added. I'd say the improvement is closer to logarithmic. E.g. 500 polygons/second is a step better than 50, 5000 is two steps better than 50, etc.

Improving the rate by 100,000 times is only a six step improvement and that's _if_ they haven't surpassed the limits of the human eye. I much prefer 72 frames per second to 36, but giving me a thousand frames per second is a waste since my optic nerve can't process most of them.

</comment><comment><USER44> Minecraft creator does the math and says: <http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam>

</comment><comment><USER45> Color me skeptical. However, I'd like to pose a question to HN:

If the claims from this video are legit, is this level of innovation deserving of a patent? (Yes, a _software_ patent.)

<comment><USER46> Maybe, you'd have to be an expert in rendering engines to know. Too bad none of those work for the patent office or are ever likely to.

<comment><USER45> [Citation needed.]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 20 FPS in software is pretty impressive, I wonder (if this is real and if it takes off) how long it will take to see hardware voxel acceleration.

<comment><USER18> They're here already. NVIDIA Research paper describing one approach: <http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/88889/laine2010i3d_paper.pdf>

Open source implementation: <http://code.google.com/p/efficient-sparse-voxel- octrees/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I think their point was if the same amount of research and money went into improving their technology, then future games would be amazing.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm hoping they show a nicer looking demo (instead of 'programmer art') to get a better idea of how much better it would be.

</comment><comment><USER49> Graphics are only a very small part of the advantage a truly volumetric world could present. A game that captured wind currents, scent, EM spectrum... these are just some of the attributes air normally carries that most games do not capture but that a volumetric system might be used to capture.

</comment><comment><USER50> It's kind of intersting until you realize that all their examples are static - there is no animation anywhere and there is a very good reason for that.

Yes, they might implement some kind of a hybrid approach but then they will lose all the things they hype about.

</comment><comment><USER51> I remember when the first video came out, they said their technology worked "like Google" to find the appropriate pixels to display on the screen. No further description of the technology. Seems too vague to be true.

<comment><USER52> I think it is true but it is hype. Assuming it is based on voxels, then the earliest game engine to have used the technology (to my knowledge) is probably Blade Runner circa 1990s. The hardware at that time, ofcourse, dictated the quality of the tech at that time. By extrapolation I would say this is very much possible but may not be such a huge deal as it is made out to be. The results however could be amazing if widely adopted by the industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm in Brisbane. Mmm I'm nearly tempted to apply for a job there.

<comment><USER54> I'm not sure if you can ask for a better job than doing computer gaming research on the government's dime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Oh, is this for real? I came across the video somewhere earlier today, but stopped watching after I got to "we give give computer graphics _unlimited power_ ".

</comment><comment><USER56> The big problem that I see is that they don't show any animation. A camera floating through a static scene can only get you so far in video games.

</comment><comment><USER57> Honestly - it's quite ugly - it looks like a game from 8 years ago. I'm not sure what are they drinking?

For sure their graphics are not 100,000x better.

</comment><comment><USER58> I just want to say that this is probably the best company name I've seen yet.

</comment><comment><USER52> So when they say atoms do they mean voxels or is it something else?

</comment><comment><USER59> I don't know much about current 3D graphics technology, but the fact that they're trying to disrupt it is really cool. They remind me of a crazy inventor, let's hope they got something =)

</comment><comment><USER60> But will the games be 100,000x more fun?

</comment><comment><USER61> Poll: Do you think this will result in _real_ games with 100,000x better graphics? [http://www.wepolls.com/p/1653402/Is-Euclideans-graphics- tech...](http://www.wepolls.com/p/1653402/Is-Euclideans-graphics-technology- really-going-to-allow-for-games-with-100,000-times-better-graphics)

</comment><comment><USER62> If this takes off the whole graphics industry is going to get so much better. I am talking from movies to games to everything else you can think of. I mean think if FIFA started to use this in there games, you could make it so you see a shoe lace move or individual hair strains moving.

I hope they get this out to market sooner rather then later.

<comment><USER63> Even if polygons weren't the limiting factor on the shoe laces or hair, the cost of computing the physics will limit how detailed things get. Need more cores...

<comment><USER19> Not really. Physics is computed against low-resolution polygon representations.

You don't want to compute physics against your art representation, because it's typically over-described.

<comment><USER63> Of course. My point is that polygons aren't the limiting factor today, so having unlimited polygons wouldn't "fix" that. The GPU typically determines polygon budget, with the CPU determining physics and AI.

Of course, you can dump physics onto the GPU, but that will cost you polygons. I guess that could, in theory (if you really had _unlimited_ atoms), give you more cycles for physics.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google 'discourages' users of old browsers with old versions of its search page - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29012038

<comment><USER2> How do people get as hung up on browser features as much as they do anyway? I hardly use bookmarks anymore. I'm a web UI dev and I don't know half the shit Chrome does that's not development related.</comment>


Ask HN: 404 Page Hijacking - <AUTHOR>

Is it just me or is Chrome hijacking 404 pages with their own? Like IE does? <comment><USER2> [http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=95...](http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=95671&hl=en)</comment>


Ask HN: Couple of HN words for the largest IT corps - grif-fin How would you describe the largest IT corporations of our time in couple of words? (the words that come to your mind...)<p>(In Market cap order)<p>- Apple Inc<p>- Google (Alphabet Inc.)<p>- Microsoft<p>- Amazon<p>- Samsung Electronics<p>- Intel<p>- IBM<p>I wish I all opinions could have come at the same time so opinions couldn't effect others. Just curious how synonymous the words will be. <comment><AUTHOR> Apple - slow and steady

Google - What's privacy?

Microsoft - times are a changing

Amazon - anything and everything, here.

Samsung - spread to thin

Intel - Not on mobile; not anytime soon

IBM - just another day in the server room</comment>


The curious case of the Carstairs key fobs has been cracked - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/carstairs-key-fob-mystery-solved-grocery-store-1.5003043 <comment><USER2> The culprit was a remote car starter that was left on.</comment>


Ask HN: Why have OS updates become so aggressive? - <AUTHOR> After the controversy surround the aggressiveness of Windows 10 updates, I was a little relieved to be a mac user.
However, this morning I was confronted with a notification to Update macOS to Sierra, the two options are "Install" and "Details". In addition an app icon has been added to the launch pad to install Sierra.
Is this the new norm? Why such a strong push requiring users to update? <comment><USER2> Last night Windows 10 popped up a notification while i was gaming "Windows 10 is going to restart in 3 minutes with options "Now" and "Cancel". I clicked cancel and 15 minutes later it just restarted in my face, while i was ACTIVELY using it, no notification, no popup, just blam, 1,5h of updates.

I might have been doing a project and lost half a day of my work just as well.

Now I have to go and take all permisions away from Reboot service in Windows 10

Also it keeps adding fucking Edge and Store to my quickbar every single update

Is Microsoft retarded? How can this be a good idea

<comment><USER3> I have never experienced this with Windows 10.

Every time I said 'no' to reboot, it never rebooted.

It only re-added Edge/Store to the taskbar after major updates (that is, the first one and the anniversary update). It never did that on Patch Tuesday for random updates.

I wonder what's different between your and my computer.

Are you using Home, Pro, Enterprise or Education edition? I'm on Pro here.

<comment><USER4> I'm running 8.1 Pro here at work and the exact same thing happened to me. We generally run the computers disconnected from the Internet.

I had connected to the Internet, came back to my desk to see a countdown dialog, rushed to click "Cancel." About 10 minutes later the computer was forcibly shut down to install updates. I figured, "might as well get all these updates out of the way." So after that round of updates installed it said it needed to restart in order to install updates. After that I checked for updates and it needed to restart a third time. I hadn't used Windows since XP and forgot how many times you need to reboot and how often updates get released (I'm used to Linux and MacOS). The aggressiveness is also very annoying--bordering on making things unreliable.

<comment><USER3> You may have a bunch of pending security updates that can't be delayed any longer. Plus, if you're missing more than one of the 'big updates', it'll reboot many times. The anniversary updates alone will reboot 2-3x.

I don't know for how long you have been disconnected, but it's to be expected the updates will pile up and will have to be dealt with at some point.

I'm dual booting Fedora and Windows 10 and I get way fewer updates on Windows than on Linux (every single day there's a new update). I've left a laptop with Fedora alone for 2 months and when I booted it, there were 1.4GB of updates.

Personally I like the bug fixes, improvements and security fixes. I think it's a fair trade-off (on whatever platform you're -- I get app updates on my Android phone every other day).

<comment><USER4> Fedora is the "cutting edge" and it's expected to have more churn than most OSes. Linux updates (excluding the kernel) don't require a reboot and the install itself doesn't require downtime. So daily updates to packages aren't a problem. Even with kernel updates I only have to reboot once. With a fresh install of Windows, it is 3 or 4 reboots with large downloads in between and sitting looking at an update screen for hours--that's frustrating.

> I don't know for how long you have been disconnected, but it's to be > expected the updates will pile up and will have to be dealt with at some > point.

Sure, but have some respect for the user. I told it not to install the updates right now. It shut down in a way where it did not ask to save my work. I also have no choice but to sit and wait for my computer to install updates instead of working. That could easily have been in a situation where it can cause someone to lose critical work, get fired or lose their business.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, those are very good points. Something is definitely not right given the all the reports about unexpected reboots. Maybe the situation is better in Windows 10 vs. 8/8.1 but I wouldn't know.

Because I'm used to daily updates from Fedora, maybe I haven't noticed how frequent/troublesome Windows updates have been lately. I remember reading an article on MSDN explaining how they had reduced the number of required reboots (completely forgot the details), but they need to do more work in this area.

<comment><USER4> The aggressiveness seems like the part that's new. There are videos of people live streaming and it dropping off to update to Windows 10 (not sure if any are faked) as well as other complaints like mine. I feel like Windows has always required reboots and many updates that required logout (which one would hope would get minimized).

I've also heard about bundling updates for new installs (or people far behind). Last I remember they were still about to roll it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Because if you don't push users to update they won't. And then they'll be owned by a 6 month old security vulnerability in a random drive by malware advertisement or internet worm or whatever and their machine will join yet another botnet.

It's designed to make not updating as difficult as updating so neglectful users don't default to not updating.

<comment><USER6> To the extent to which operating systems manufacturers care about this, they then need to address the actual problem: that operating system upgrades are not just useful security fixes but also "the entire computer now has a different user interface and no longer supports not only some of the software I was using but some of the hardware I rely on" (I know someone who upgraded to a new version of Mac OS X which rendered the $1000 multitrack mixer he uses for his recording job non-functional, and has since sworn off of updating anything ever, and I simply can't blame him).

<comment><USER4> Audio stuff has been notoriously finicky and late to support updates to the OS since the mid 90's. Most people I know go by,"Once it is set up, don't change a single thing." For quite a few years audio guys stuck to Mac OS Classic (9.x) because of the money invested in audio plugins. Audio hardware companies seem just fine with dropping support for new OSs forcing you to buy the new model.

<comment><USER7> OS makers seem just fine dropping support for older audio hardware forcing you to buy the newer model.

When did it become the new normal for OS's to break compatibility with older hardware? Or was all this hardware relying on undocumented and non- standardized interfaces?

<comment><USER4> I'm just talking about what I've seen for people who run businesses with large investments in audio equipment. It isn't just with updating software--that credo goes for which ports are attached, how things are wired, and even the levels on the console.

I have no idea if the examples I've seen ware relying on undocumented APIs and as a user it's irrelevant (there aren't too many choices in high end audio hardware and you can't always mix and match vendors). I've seen a new OS comes out, it no longer works with the hardware you have (or it introduced bugs), and nobody issues an update to fix it on either side. You're running a business, so you may or may not care about the new features, but what was working yesterday absolutely has to work today.

There's an article on the front page right now talking about how macOS broke the "poll" call. Nobody can say with confidence if it'll even get fixed. libcurl is working around it, but not everyone has the bandwidth to deal with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Two highly correlated reasons. 1) It speeds up the pace of innovation and change as these companies can now receive rapid feedback and see what works and what doesn't. 2) It heavily reduces the maintenance requirements as Apple is only supporting a relatively small number of platforms. By reducing the number of platforms supported, the companies can then reallocate those resources that would have been doing bug fixes on adding brand new features to the latest version. These all allow the marketing arms of these companies to crow about the new features they've added.

Think about it this way. Chrome's major innovation was being the first browser to rapidly update itself. That allowed it to quickly leapfrog over IE and Mozilla since they could push out many more changes over the same period of time AND those changes would be more likely to be stable. It also eliminated the need to support old versions like IE 6 with security fixes

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, that's not always good for the user. There are things I do like once a year; update my drivers license online, for example. If the web site is "good enough" and never updated, then great, I know how long it will take and what steps to take--I may even have automated most of it. If they change the website every 6 months with wiz-bang features I have to relearn it, I have no idea how long it'll take, and it may not even work. A web service is kind of a bad example since it require managing a backend.

To my parents, opening a spreadsheet or listening to music is the same. They lack the lexicon to discover newer interface trends like the hamburger icon, or ribbon interface.

Many people used IE6 because there was a huge investment in it. I agree it was terrible to support and write against, but I don't see any problem with using a payroll system that was written 10 years ago and dependant on IE6 if your needs haven't changed. It seems silly to constantly update or completely rewrite something that's working just fine if needs haven't changed. It just sucks that they would use the same browser for payroll as they do for browsing the Internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> (This is meant to be a serious, non-snarky answer.)

Because the "move fast and break things" of app development has hit the mainstream and crossed over into the OS.

It allows for faster iteration at the expense of some stability and familiarity.

</comment><comment><USER10> Users are lazy and if you don't force them to update, they won't. Then they get owned. Then they talk shit about you.

Why not make the world a better place, push the updates hard, and just jump to the shit talking? ;)

<comment><USER11> That is true for security updates which are critical and it makes sense to 'force' them.

But that is not a valid excuse to force major version upgrade like win8 => win10. It has little to do with security and it forces a different environment onto the user.

<comment><USER12> > It has little to do with security

It does when you start to talk about unsupported versions.

<comment><USER4> It can also break compatibility. I built a PC for the first time in probably 10 years. I went with Windows 10, but most of the my stuff didn't have drivers and support. I couldn't tell if things were broken or just didn't have driver support. I cobbled together a version of Windows 7 to make sure everything worked, then moved back to Windows 10.

South Park Studios still uses an image compositor called Shake. It's cross platform (OSX, Windows, Linux) and Apple stopped development in 2008, but they still use Shake to make new episodes. There's a good chance it won't run on the latest version of the operating system, but they've made a huge investment in software and hardware that works fine. Forcing and update would shut down production.

<comment><USER12> > There's a good chance it won't run on the latest version of the operating > system

Why? These companies do put in work to try and maintain compatibility.

> they've made a huge investment in software and hardware that works fine

Sure. and that bridge over there will work fine for forever too, so lets ignore any maintenance or safety upgrades. IT Infrastructure is still infrastructure. Admittedly when you are talking about a TV show it's not exactly critical.

<comment><USER4> The problem is that this is done on the OS vendor's terms, not the client's. Maintenance and safety upgrades aren't done to bridges on a whim. They're carefully planned to reduce the impact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Has no one realized that Microsoft and others are moving to a SaaS model, even with consumer OSes? Lots of other service providers update their platforms, and the user doesn't really have much say in WHEN it happens. We just get a message that the vendor is updating the software during a maintenance window, and that's that. 10,20 years from now we'll be subscribing to all of our software, and we will just be told when that software is going to update. We may also see something similar to what the Playstation does - ok, don't update now if you don't want to, but that means you can't use any network features! But either way, prepare for a new way to look at the applications running on your PC.

</comment><comment><USER14> Because hackers have become so aggressive. It's no longer just clandestine groups of anonymous people working through the internet. There are industrial scale state-sponsored hacking efforts across the world now, actively focused on exploiting every single release of every single OS, and it's only getting worse. Also, with the wide scale adoption of broadband internet it's become possible to adopt an "evergreen" model for OS updates now, much like browsers have been doing for years.

</comment><comment><USER15> User choice has gone out of fashion

</comment><comment><USER16> Uh, security?

</comment><comment><USER17> Windows 10 Home is brutal. There is no group policy editor.

Workaround is set each WiFi you use as a "Metered Connection" which will avoid updates.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are RationalWiki articles always high up in Google search results? - <AUTHOR> RationalWiki admits to their political-bias and outright incompetence in maintaining a purely objective stance on topics:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:I_thought_this_was_supposed_to_be_RATIONALWiki
So, why do they seemingly always show up high in Google search results? <comment><USER2> I was thinking to write along the lines of "there is no purely objective stance on topics".

But I see the page you linked to already covers that, in spades.

What searches are you doing to end up there? It rarely shows up in my searches, unless I'm searching for specific hot-button topics.

And are their answers incompetent?

<comment><AUTHOR> > there is no purely objective stance on topics

This is an objectively wrong statement. The existence of Mathematics is a negation of this statement in its entirety. Observations are purely objective. Measurements are purely objective.

> Are their answers incompetent?

Do you consider purposely substituting biased views in place of objective observation a form of incompetence? I don't. I consider it a form of intellectual dishonesty. That is far worse.

<comment><USER2> Then let's make it practical.

Name one news source which you consider to have "a purely objective stance on topics".

Because I can't think of a single one.

And I would rather have one whose biases are worn on the sleeve, than shrouded in a false disguise of neutral objectivity.

Even if we restrict ourselves to mathematics, consider Georg Cantor, who demonstrated the existences of multiple types of infinities. Quoting [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor) :

] Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers was originally regarded as so counter-intuitive – even shocking – that it encountered resistance from mathematical contemporaries such as Leopold Kronecker and Henri Poincaré and later from Hermann Weyl and L. E. J. Brouwer, while Ludwig Wittgenstein raised philosophical objections. Cantor, a devout Lutheran, believed the theory had been communicated to him by God. Some Christian theologians (particularly neo- Scholastics) saw Cantor's work as a challenge to the uniqueness of the absolute infinity in the nature of God – on one occasion equating the theory of transfinite numbers with pantheism – a proposition that Cantor vigorously rejected.

] The objections to Cantor's work were occasionally fierce: Leopold Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth". .... Writing decades after Cantor's death, Wittgenstein lamented that mathematics is "ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set theory", which he dismissed as "utter nonsense" that is "laughable" and "wrong".

Which of these observations were purely objective, and in the 1800s, how would you be able to tell?

> in place of objective observation

The choice of what to observe and what to report is based on views of what is important, so therefore subject to subjective bias. You cannot have one without the other.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Because I can't think of a single one.

This is beyond and silly and pedantic. We are all supposed to rely on what YOU can and cannot think of?

If you really want some mathematical objectivity then maybe go read through Serge Lang's Algebra and come back with me on which parts you found to be subjective. You might find some!

> Which of these observations were purely objective?

Sigh ... so you have an anecdote of something that at a particular point in time was unproven and conjectured. That status allowed others to make subjective claims against it. And you are using this to try to argue that everything at all times is never objective? That is silly. Can you really not see the flaw in your logic here? The clue word was: anecdote.

> The choice of what to observe and what to report

I never made this differentiation anywhere in my comment. I pointed at blatant intellectual dishonesty which is stating things either false or in a fashion that might provide a more naive reader with a false pretense or to perhaps make something concrete appear ambiguous, etc.

You are trying to restrict all possible forms of intellectual dishonesty to reporting bias. You are doing this is either out of ignorance or intellectual dishonesty. I am guessing the latter as you seem to have no moral contention with it.

And yes, you can have things that are not subject to bias. Dropping an apple from a window always causes the apple to fall towards the earth and not away from it.

This conversation is pointless because you are either a troll or a supremely dishonest individual.

<comment><USER2> You wrote: "We are all supposed to rely on what YOU can and cannot think of?"

No, of course not. I asked for your help in identifying "a purely objective stance on topics" precisely because I am limited in my understanding.

I am expressing my ignorance. You imply such sources do exist, so please educate me.

You wrote: "I pointed at blatant intellectual dishonesty which is stating things either false or in a fashion that might provide a more naive reader with a false pretense or to perhaps make something concrete appear ambiguous, etc."

Where did you point that out? You implied it, but have yet to demonstrate a concrete example.

> "you are either a troll or a supremely dishonest individual"

While you have yet to take any of my questions seriously.

1) "What searches are you doing to end up there?".

To clarify, among other things, RationalWiki contains summaries of activities by people that leftists sometimes categorize as "fascist", "fascist adjacent" or "white supremacist." It is one of the few sources which do that. So if you search for those names, then it's likely you'll come to a RationalWiki page.

2) "And are their answers incompetent?"

To clarify, I used "incompetent" because your top-level comment used "incompetence." I wanted some examples of answers which were demonstrably wrong, and some indication that they were wrong more often than other sources that Google might use, and perhaps some indication that their biases were the reason for being wrong.

You wrote "Dropping an apple from a window always causes the apple to fall towards the earth and not away from it."

But dropping a helium-filled balloon does not.

So if you are news source, and _only_ talk about falling apples and never about helium-filled balloons floating away, you are reporting the facts yet resulting in biased reporting.

If your news show often reports about fraud in the welfare system, and never covers wage theft, then it too is _both factual and biased._</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fifth Estate - Assange/Wikileaks Movie Trailer - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT1wb8_tcYU

<comment><USER2> I'll probably see this, because I love Cumerbatch and have personal interest in the tech of the story, but I hope it's more accurate than The Social Network. Good trailer.</comment>


Meet news:yc, the open source Hacker News client for your iPhone. - news-yc http://newsyc.me/??

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for releasing it as free software. <https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc>

<comment><USER2> On the page it says it'll probably be $4.99. So it is open source, but it may not be free.

<comment><USER3> "Free" as in speech, not as in beer.

<comment><USER2> I stand corrected.

For the uninitiated (as myself): ""Free software" does not mean "noncommercial." A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies. "

From <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html>

<comment><USER4> As far as I can tell, this gives anyone the freedom to purchase then give away the software. Meaning that there is no moral, ethical, or legal barrier for the original developer to charge $5 to the first purchaser and for the first purchaser to then give out free copies to everyone else.

Perhaps I also need to be initiated to comprehend this...

<comment><USER5> You are correct :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Upvoted for multiple reasons: 1) The app itself looks pretty good. 2) Open- source 3) You're a high school student too. (What year?)

<comment> news-yc Sophomore, so I'm 15 right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I ran across this earlier today and added a small feature to it[1]. The author is very receptive to pull requests, so I highly recommend forking away!

If you're interested in contributing and stumped for things to add or fix, check out the included TODO file.

[1] [https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/commit/01bc7bf30c10a2abd8f0...](https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/commit/01bc7bf30c10a2abd8f0ff7d481743b001eb6f01)

</comment><comment><USER8> With all the effort going into that app and the other web wrappers mentioned around here, I may be missing something but why is there no media query in HN CSS to adapt itself to iPhone, iPad _and_ other (WebKit-based at least) mobile devices. I weight it to about ten lines of CSS at most, setting font scale, body width and vote up image size. I am on the verge of creating a bookmarklet to load such additional CSS and sync it to my devices but couldn't resort to that yet because of it being a _total hack_ that I'd need to call on _each HN page load_.

<comment><USER9> Ever since Garry joined YC, I assumed (and suggested) this as one of the top things they get on making...just a simple UA detection for mobiles and more usable interface in CSS as you mention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's a question. Love the app, but can I login to my account? I don't have a normal YC-account, but rather one through Open-ID with my Google Id.

<comment> news-yc That's a good question, actually. I've never used OpenID so I have no idea what's involved in that, but I'll make a (mental?) note to look into seeing if it works (and probably fixing it) soon.

<comment><USER11> The simplest way to do it is to open a browser view to the login page, then let the user do whatever and just watch the cookie store for the appropriate key. As soon as it shows up, close the browser and use that key in the app. This works for all the login methods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks awesome, I'll happily buy it for $5 once it hits the store.

It's also nice that it's open source. Contributing to an actual iOS app could be a nice way to get a taste of iOS development without having to start a whole project from scratch (if you have no previous experience.)

<comment><USER13> Try wordpress for iPhone (<http://ios.wordpress.org/development/>) which has been developed for a long time. However I agree that it's easier to pick a project with less code in it to learn.

Another way is by writing an app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice work, this is the new best HN iPhone client.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been pretty happy with the Hacker News app by Michael Grinich, but this looks promising and competition is a wonderful thing.

<comment><USER16> I just bought that app after using <http://www.icombinator.net> for a long time. I like the app but wish it did things a little differently--default to mobilized articles, go beyond the top 30 articles, load comments more quickly --so it's great to have something to customize and hack on. Thanks!

<comment><USER17> There is also <http://ihackernews.com>.

<comment><USER18> I moved from icombinator to ihackernews since ihackernews acts more like a normal web app (icombinator locks the page as it reloads and makes it hard to come back to articles). However, it has a hard time grabbing comments (most don't work right), so it's frustrating to use.

<comment><USER19> What happens is my IP gets blocked by YC. So until the traffic dies down or I change my IP address, it errors out while getting the comments (YC serves me a blank page).

<comment> news-yc That issue is actually why I went with a distributed approach to news:yc. Yeah, it's a pain: no remote updates (App Store restrictions) and a lengthy review process for each change needed (do you know about how often the markup changes, btw?), but I don't have to deal with any caching, rate limiting, or anything else this way.

(Of course, I don't even think you _can_ do anything like that on the web (even JavaScript, cross-domain issues), so your approach is probably required there.)

<comment><USER11> You could probably get away with remotely updating some sort of declarative grammar/schema, as long as it doesn't allow arbitrary code execution.

<comment><USER20> If it isn't too slow, you could do the parsing with some remotely-updatable JavaScript, using UIWebView's stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is great, thank you!

Took me a while to figure out how to get signed in with instapaper... Turns out it's in the Settings app. I wish Apple provided an API to link from an app to its settings page, and back to the app from the settings.

<comment><USER22> +1 to this, I spent ages looking around the app trying to find a settings icon, with no luck. I think an Instapaper login would work much better in the More section of the app, than in the global settings app (especially if there's nothing else there).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> No Android love?

<comment> news-yc No Android love, basically, because I don't use Android and this was written (as is often suggested) so scratch a personal itch: Hacker News wasn't fun to browse on my iPhone. Perhaps Google will give out Android devices at I/O and I'll be able to work on a port then.

HP/Palm did send me a Pre 2 development device, though, so I may port it over there if and when I start using webOS for my primary phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wait, are you chpwn by any chance? Because you quite extensively use the slide-behind header trick from his last post on <http://chpwn.com/blog/>

<comment><USER6> That is correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Writing this comment with the app from my phone, thanks alot.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is cool. Oh, you're a high school student? Awesome.

</comment><comment><USER27> Chpwn, u have gained more respect from me with this app.

</comment><comment><USER28> where is the android version??</comment>


New York City to Replace Pay Phones with Free Wi-Fi - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-to-replace-pay-phones-with-free-wi-fi-1451970003 <comment><USER2> Something similar has been done in New Zealand. One of the 3 main providers of cellular service, Spark (and the only owner of phone booths, being formerly state owned), has installed wifi routers on top of all the phone booths. You get up to 2 GB a day for free if you're a Spark customer.

[http://www.spark.co.nz/discover/freewifi/](http://www.spark.co.nz/discover/freewifi/)

I presume it was fairly trivial to install adsl modems to the already existing telephone connections. It seems like a good use of already existing infrastructure.

In Wellington, we also get free wifi in the CBD: [http://cbdfree.co.nz/](http://cbdfree.co.nz/)

Apparently there are adverts for this, but I've never seen them, presumably due to my adblocking.</comment>


How Not to Find a Co-Founder - <AUTHOR> http://mlyoung.wordpress.com/2007/07/06/how-not-to-find-a-co-founder/ <comment><AUTHOR> Starting the good 'ol blog up again. We'll see how long this lasts...

Comments on the post much appreciated.</comment>


Show HN: Take the Guesswork Out of Scheduling Meetings – Appointment.one - <AUTHOR> https://appointment.one/?utm_source=hn <comment><AUTHOR> Founder of Appointment.one here. We've been expanding this offering for awhile now. Anxious to see feedback from anyone in our target audience which consists of people meeting outside their organization. Think sales, recruiting, freelancing, etc.</comment>


Tell HN: Annoyed with Go Lang - <AUTHOR>

As a Go player, I'm always interested in articles concerning Go, the game, but as I scan through the titles I see so many posts concerning Go the language that it's becoming annoying.<p>Imagine there's a language called Chess, wouldn't you find that annoying? Or is it just me? <comment><USER2> As a snake keeper, I'm always interested in articles concerning pythons, the reptiles, but as I scan through the titles I see so many posts concerning python the language that it's becoming annoying.

Imagine there's a language called ruby and you were a gem collector, wouldn't you find that annoying? Or is it just me?

\-- cheap shot, sorry --

Yes its annoying that most languages use names that are not invented for the purpose. But it only annoys a very small proportion of people. What's the alternative?

<comment><USER3> Better searching: "python snake" and "ruby gemstone"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why don't you use negation in your searches: "go -golang"

<comment><USER4> seto28 isn't talking about searching, but about reading the front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> i think a programming language called "Chess" would be awesome, it could be to C what CoffeeScript is to Javascript.

<comment><USER6> Harder to do with C. Either you'll just add a small syntactical layer on top of C, mostly for cosmetic purposes (similar to python indentation tools for C or #define END } ), or you'll basically have a language that compiles to C (like p2c, f2c, Vala, SmartEiffel etc.).

Haven't seen a decent "transformation" of C that actually gets you more than it is worth, especially when it comes to interfacing to existing C libraries.

Edit: If you ever decide to make a Chess language, please make an IDE called Bangkok.</comment></comment>