Retrofuturism - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrofuturism <comment><USER2> Not sure there's a finer visual artist to produce in the medium of retrofuturism than Syd Mead - passed away late last year unfortunately but left an inspiring catalog and vision of the future that I imagine will endure a very long time ->

[https://www.iamag.co/the-art-of-syd-mead/](https://www.iamag.co/the-art-of- syd-mead/)

<comment><USER3> Simon Stålenhag does really great work that if not considered retro-futurism proper is something else that doesn't seem to have a name but certainly is at least in a space adjacent to retro-futurism.

[http://www.simonstalenhag.se/](http://www.simonstalenhag.se/)

<comment><USER4> Nathaniel Halpern (Legion) created an amazing adaptation of Stalenhag's artwork for Amazon. It's unlike anything I've ever seen and definitely worth a watch.

[https://www.engadget.com/amazon-tales-from-the-loop-simon- st...](https://www.engadget.com/amazon-tales-from-the-loop-simon-stalenhag- making-of-140005163)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gibson's excellent collection of short stories, 'Burning Chrome', contains a story called 'The Gernsback Continuum' which is very explicitly a retrofuturist work, I think. Maybe one of the best! In the first few paragraphs of the story he also uses the term 'raygun gothic' to describe this idea. I won't spoil it for you, but there are people in pulp sci-fi spacesuits.

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

<comment><USER6> One of my favourite William Gibson stories. A little gem!

<comment><USER5> Indeed :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is an analogy to computing here. I mentioned a couple of 30+ year old books here about what the future of software would be:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22093100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22093100)

by Brad Cox (inventor of Objective C) and David Gelertner (CS professor and entrepreneur).

I guess you could make Retrofuturistic software now by writing modern versions of those old ideas (which didn't turn out to be economically feasible / adopted, at least in the exact form predicted, although in some cases they were influential.)

</comment><comment><USER8> Back in the Google Reader days I subscribed to a few Retofuture blogs. Was really into this stuff back in the late 90s and early 00s. Love the scientific optimism. Not surprising that I am a huge fan of EPCOT, it had a huge impact on me as kid going there in the 80s.

This was one of the blogs I enjoyed, have not kept up with it: [https://paleofuture.com/](https://paleofuture.com/)

<comment><USER9> > This was one of the blogs I enjoyed, have not kept up with it: > [https://paleofuture.com/](https://paleofuture.com/)

Matt Novak moved to Gizmodo a while back: [https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/](https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/)

Did not know he had that site as an archive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Various parts of Disneyland exhibit versions of retrofuturism.

First is the original tomorrowland, a future of rocketships, futuristic cars.

Next came EPCOT of the 1970s on the heels of Earth Day and environmental sensibilities.

Then both tomorrowland and EPCOT were reburbished with a future of computers and videao games.

Most recently it is the Star Wars experience "long ago and far away" another blast from the 1970s.

<comment><USER11> I love 60s and 70s retrofuturist style, white everywhere and rounded shapes being the most recognizable marks. Starwars was very much in that style: R2 and Luke, with a revival in episode I and maybe II. Rest of the movies were much darker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> See also: Zeerust [1]

> _Something — a character design, a building, anything — used to be someone > 's idea of futuristic. Nowadays though, it ironically has a quaint sort of > datedness to it more reminiscent of the era the work came from_

For example, a science fiction show from the 50s showing a video phone with _a rotary dial_.

1: [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust)

</comment><comment><USER13> "the future according to the past" as my writing teacher called it quite pithily

<comment><USER14> the bigger mistake, isn't the future according to the past but the future according to the present, which is on the cusp of becoming the past.

It is almost impossible to see the now, we are too close to focus. My favorite in tech is that someone is porting from a legacy system. No that isn't how it works, you port from a legacy system to a future-legacy system. Be timeless and love your future self.

<comment><USER13> that's profound. we should have drinks.

your comment resonates with the thesis that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism—that our inability to imagine and provision for the future, is the death of our imagination, of our transcendence, and the world.

I like your take on it, that love has to point in every direction of time, timeless.

<comment><USER14> In the zeitgeist of HN, The Fence [1] and that everyone was doing the best they could at the time, we need to have empathy both for the past and for the future. That is why we strive to make things better.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence)

<comment><USER13> chesterton's fence is great. I've recently appreciated the synthesis of the conservative and progressive impulses—to respect what has come before as it encodes unseen wisdom, but to recognize that there are fundamentally new things happening that we must account for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thanks for giving it a name, I love this stuff. Old visions of the future are amazing. I love the German film "Richtung 2000" (towards 2000) from 1972 [0] (should be understandable auto-translated). It's great to get a sense of the situation at the time (oil crisis, the aero train just having been announced) and evaluate what of it has actually happened.

They were right (albeit about 15 years off) about many major things: Home automation, shopping and talking over the internet, a lot of work being automated away, the psychological issues these innovations cause ...

Sadly they were also wrong about many of the great things that should've happened by now. Space exploration has barely progressed (damn, I'm glad SpaceX exists!) and we still don't care nearly enough about our environment/quality of life to have electric vehicles and good local transit.

It's weird to see that so many of the things going on today were so predictable. It paints a concering picture of _our_ future.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4U2zW4IPDY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4U2zW4IPDY)

</comment><comment><USER16> Netflix's "Maniac" is an interesting recent example of retrofuturism in a show.

</comment><comment><USER17> Fallout is probably my favorite example of that.

<comment><USER18> Came here to say this. Not a video game fan but the series has a charm that I found very hard to explain to friends.

The genesis of that world is interesting enough too: a post-apocalyptic world which mixes the old and the new out of necessity, rather than a deliberate desire to model things on the past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Related from 2019: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18966421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18966421)

2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8148570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8148570)

</comment><comment><USER20> The future was better in the past.

<comment><USER21> Mark Fisher (RIP) made a good point in this vein: our vision for the future is stuck in the '70s and '80s. If you watch a really old sci-fi movie like Forbidden Planet[0] (or listen to its rather incredible proto-industrial soundtrack[1]), you get the distinct feeling that it's "cheesy" or "wrong", that its vision of the future has fallen greatly out of sync with our own. This feeling diminishes as you go forward in time, and basically subsides entirely once you reach the eighties. Throbbing Gristle, Kraftwerk, Blade Runner, Akira... all "futuristic", even to modern eyes and ears. Is this due to improvements in visual effects and electronic instrumentation, or have we "given up" on the future in a very real sense?

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWQbnyHNY3k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWQbnyHNY3k)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> People once envisioned a fantastical future, where _energy_ was practically free, allowing endless possibilities for transport and construction.

What almost nobody predicted is that _information_ would become _practically free_ thanks to the internet....

<comment><USER23> Well, energy is also almost free once you get some megascale space projects going. Sun is putting out a lot of energy that currently just radiates out to empty space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is a nice video 'in praise of retrofuturism' on the BBC Ideas page: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/in-praise-of- retrofuturis...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/in-praise-of- retrofuturism/p081y8lk)

</comment><comment><USER25> this remembering of the past and what they thought about us can mostly only mean one thing: we ourselves can't and haven't been able to think of the future.

<comment><USER26> I mean, there were also some remarkably prescient predictions made at the time. But the more accurate they were, the less likely they'd define a retrofuturistic artistic genre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Although, it is obvious, you cannot be close to the reality if you trying to predict more than 10 years upfront, to be more or less realistic, you have to go back from the present back as many years as you want to go into future and observe what did not change. Then extrapolate to the future that has changed and what has not. Say in 10 years we'll still have AMD64 computers on our desks, albeit 50% faster, we'll still be running Windows and Linux, we;ll probably have more than 10% cars running on electricity, we'll still be wearing jeans and t-shirts, yet there will be subtle change in the social order, perhaps a bad pandemic, change in social networking platforms etc.

<comment><USER28> We can't really imagine the distant future because we are very biased about the past and present. And we also can't account for developments that are entirely new.

People always imagined the future full of flying cars because cars and planes were the big thing so the combination must also be big. But nobody really imagined "social networks" 100 years ago, which are way bigger now than flying cars. They had no indication that this could possibly be a thing, at least not in their current form. We imagined/had forums and all sorts of communities but not really close to the current idea of social media.

<comment><USER29> Science-fiction tend to underestimate social changes compared to technological changes. The classic example is Asimov where we have an intergalactic empire thousands of years in the future but with gender roles stuck in the 1950's. Videophones are everywhere in SF, but who predicted people would prefer text messaging with emojis?

Smartphones and climate change crisis was predicted many times, but who predicted transsexual rights would become a divisive political issue in the US?

<comment><USER28> SciFi creators are also bound by the fact that their creations must be commercial successes. Touching on sensitive social topics can get in the way of that and it's the best way to get a lynch mob at their door. So even if one could have predicted in the '30s anything related to race and gender-related emancipation they would have been buried along with their work. Fancy futuristic tech? Yes, please! Radical social reform ideas? Solid nope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I was always under the impression that Lloyd Dunn coined the term.

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

</comment><comment><USER31> I'd be curious if there is someone designing art or tech in this style.

<comment><USER32> Zillions of people. Usually it gets called steampunk (18xx) or dieselpunk (193x-194x). 195x-6x futurism usually ends up going very Googie. And we're starting to see 70s/80s retrofuturism, mostly I'd say the word associated with that is vaporwave.

More art than actual tech, and most of the tech is one-off hand-built stuff.

<comment><USER33> Would cyberpunk count as 90s retrofuturism? Or have we decided it hits too close to home for present times?

<comment><USER34> Nah cyberpunk is it's own thing and the aesthetic way predates the 90s.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think of Bioshock when I see that word

<comment><USER36> Agreed, as in: Steampunk is actually a form of retrofuturism

<comment><USER37> The Wikipedia article does describe steampunk as a high-profile example.

Also interesting to note the two non-distinct forms of retrofuturism: "the future as seen from the past" and "the past as seen from the future". Steampunk is an example of the latter.

<comment><USER38> Renditions of things described by Jules Verne could be considered both "the future as seen from the past" and "Steampunk"

<comment><USER26> Or working models of Babbage's machines!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Time to read Jules Verne books again.

</comment><comment><USER40> I see a new wave of futurism with solarpunk. I hope it will catch on.

</comment><comment><USER41> See also: false nostalgia

</comment><comment><USER42> my favorite style of art!

</comment><comment><USER43> What then is the converse of retrofuturism where the present or future is represented with a mix of obsolete technologies along with contemporary and/or hypothetical future ones?

<comment><USER44> A post-apocalypic present with ancient and highly advanced technologies unearthed from ruins that humanity no longer has the skill to remake. Miyazaki's Nausicaa comes to mind.

Or maybe a world where technology is futuristic but the societal structure is from the past. Warhammer 40k, the Roman empire but in space.

<comment><USER45> RPGs are often like that. Powerful items are never something like the _optimized, advanced light sabre of performance_ but always something like the _ancient rusty sword of the primordial elders_.</comment></comment></comment>


FCC orders 2M people to power down cell phone signal boosters - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/fcc-orders-2m-people-to-power-down-cell-phone-signal-boosters/ <comment><USER2> You know, technical arguments why some customer should not be transmitting willy-nilly on these spectrums aside, I always end up at the same conclusion: the customer is fucked. That seems indicative of missing regulation. Picture the scenario.

FCC auctions spectrum to BigBadMobile. Customer enters into contract with BigBadMobile, whose mobile network is completely overloaded and barely reachable for customer, but there are no other providers. Customer installs signal booster at his own cost to enhance the signal to the only provider. FCC turns around and tells customer they can't do that.

Now maybe the FCC should connect frequency allocation with requirements to provide adequate power and coverage to customers, and we wouldn't be having this discussion. Thats how state sanctioned monopolies work, right? You get a monopoly on X but you have to provide service to those that would not normally be profitable to service.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting, since some signal boosters are pretty much carrier agnostic, boosting any of the various 3G bands, I wonder how that plays out. Can Boost Mobile give permission even though the booster also boosts signals in the AT&T bands?

And why do the carriers even care if the signal is getting better for their customers? We already have interference requirements that cover problems with interference. Sigh.

<comment><USER4> Because carriers have figured out how to sell consumers a Femtocell device at the customer's expense, while offloading traffic to wireline transports, thus negating the need for network upgrades.

AT&T version: <http://www.att.com/standalone/3gmicrocell/?fbid=FQSS3QyGy51>

Verizon version: <http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/device/network-extender>

This, and what rayiner said. Cell networks are really difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> Wireless boosters are "saving the carriers money by not making them build more towers, but now they can charge you for improving the holes in their own network," Feld said.

>> "For some reason, the commission has delegated authority to the carrier."

I wonder if the FCC is receiving kickbacks from the carriers for implementing these rules? Is this worthy of petitioning the President to call of the dogs at the FCC? I can just imagine some greedy, beady-eyed Scrooge type at some large unnamed carrier wringing their hands in anticipation at the prospect of adding ... more fees to our bills.

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't see anything there about 73-element boosters.

<comment><USER7> What?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 2 million people != 2 million devices</comment>


Scientists over the age of 40 make most of the major breakthroughs - <AUTHOR> http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/nobelage.htm

<comment><USER2> The study doesn't cover one of the possible reasons for this.

For example, take George Zweig who discovered quarks before Murray Gell-Mann did, however Gell-Mann got the credit because Zweig was an undergraduate and Gell-Mann was a well known name in the physics community.

Gell-Mann ended up getting the Nobel in 1969, and Zweig ended up leaving physics and going over to the neurobiology camp and made significant contributions to wavelets.

<comment><USER3> > Zweig now works for Renaissance Technologies on Long Island, NY. [Wikipedia]

That's depressing.

<comment><USER4> > Renaissance Technologies is a hedge fund management company

Even more depressing.

<comment><USER3> (Yes, Rentech being in finance is what I was referring to.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the PhD/post-doc system may have something to do with this as well. Have you ever looked up the biographies of the big names in science? PhD in 3 years and no post-doc (usually independent research at some famous institute).

So back in the early 1900s, you could get a PhD and be an independent scientist at 24-25. By the time you hit your 30s, you have had several years to pursue your own research.

Flash forward to the present and you've got PhDs that are 5-6 years in length followed by numerous post-doc positions before you can ever be considered for a faculty position where you can pursue your own research. Most PhD level scientists are close to 35 by the time the process finishes.

<comment><USER5> I guess I should RTFA, it pretty much states exactly what I said.

I think the people that say "those over 40 take credit for discoveries" are correct too. You could do amazing work as a post-doc and there is no way in hell you'll ever get more than second author.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The title should be this -

"Scientists over the age of 40 _take credit for_ most of the major breakthroughs"

</comment><comment><USER7> The low-hanging fruit are being picked.</comment>


Gallery: The Year's Most Amazing Scientific Images - <AUTHOR> http://www.popsci.com/science/gallery/2009-12/gallery-years-most-amazing-scientific-images

<comment><USER2> Sure, I'll stand there while you fire up your home made helicopter. Those blades are safe right?</comment>


TransformJS – Exposing Transforms to JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sproutcore.com/transformjs-exposing-transforms-to-javascript/

<comment><USER2> Nice.

The ability to use transforms without constructing huge stylesheets for x-browser compatability is nice.

Thusfar, I've been using Compass helpers to accomplish things like this — although since you can manipulate the rest of your styling with jQuery, it's nice to have the ability to work with transforms as well.</comment>


PyPy v5.8 released - <AUTHOR> https://morepypy.blogspot.com/2017/06/pypy-v58-released.html <comment><USER3> I have a question and then a general vent

1\. Does anyone know the latest update on NumPyPy? PyPy for me is just not a usable proposition because I heavily use Numpy (and Scipy et al). So I am forced to use slow Python + fast Numpy or slow Numpy + fast Python. Very saddening. The C-Extension is just so off the pace, NumPyPy was meant to solve that quandry.

And I know some smart Alec will trot out the usual 'downshift into C' line that everyone (including Guido) use as the final goto solution for performance but that is simply a disgrace in 2017. Even JavaScript is fast. Why can I not choose to write Python and it be fast?? And yet Python 3 is getting slower. Don't agree? Look at these benchmarks of Python heaps written in Python (not using the C based builtin heapq) [https://github.com/MikeMirzayanov/binary- heap-benchmark](https://github.com/MikeMirzayanov/binary-heap-benchmark) Python generally is off the pace but Python 3 is about twice as slow as 2 and miles off JavaScript.

But PyPy is proof that Python can be fast. It makes quote/unquote "Pure Python" within striking distance of Go and and when I run that test suit on PyPy, its similar to the Node.js score. Why does this matter? Because I want to write bloody Python not C.

And it is so tantalisingly close - look at a blog post like: [https://dnshane.wordpress.com/2017/02/14/benchmarking- python...](https://dnshane.wordpress.com/2017/02/14/benchmarking-python- heaps/) The performance of the Fibonacci Heap that someone wrote in quote/unquote "Pure Python", when run in CPython can never compete with HeapQ (the C based builtin lib), but on PyPy it can. Fast code written in Python. So what are the problems holding back PyPy? I think possibly money and number of devs working on stuff. Javascript had Mozilla, Google, Microsoft and Apple in a browser war + loads of open source input.

But is the biggest stumbling block not Guido himself and the core Python devs? Do they just philosophically not agree with PyPy or is it just disinterest?

Well whatever it is, it is heart-breaking to want to write fast code in my favourite language and leverage all its power including Numpy/Scipy etc and not be able to. And yes my use-case is perhaps quite unique, a very CPU intensive service that ideally computes and returns a real-time calculation (that includes 500k function calls) in 10-50ms.

But getting fast Numpy in the PyPy mix (i.e all the speed of the JIT + no worse Numpy) would be a HUGE step forward for me in PyPy adoption. What is the latest? How can I help?

<comment><USER4> in short - funding. If we can find someone who wants fast numpy AND fast python under the same hood, we can combine the approaches of cpyext and numpypy and make it fast. The project is just too big to do on spare time. I've been trying to find some funding for that for quite a while, but I haven't been able to find any sizable backer just yet.

Cheers, Maciej Fijalkowski

<comment><USER3> Maciej, how much would that require, ballpark? I think this is something there would be massive support for. My company would support it

<comment><USER5> How much does it cost to pay a knowledgeable engineer for a few years? Probably the better part of a million dollars, at least.

<comment><USER3> Is your name Maciej?

<comment><USER6> Is this a private correspondence?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Awesome work, congratulations on bringing Python forward.

Still wishing one day PyPy might become the canonical implementation.

</comment><comment><USER8> PyPy is great -- while I still use CPython for our more complex webapp and associated tools that have heavy dependencies on C-extensions; I increasingly use PyPy for the more mundane cpu/data heavy lifting I do. It's typical to get 2X the performance (comparable to some compiled languages) and still use much of our utility code, configs, etc.

<comment><USER9> >comparable to some compiled languages

Given that python programs usually run an order of magnitude slower than compiled languages even a 2x performance increase doesn't put it in the "comparable" range from my experience. Not bashing python - I use it regularly - but for computational stuff it's a hog unless you're just passing stuff to C libs - like I have a resource build pipeline that does some blender 3D model transformations - code is written in python and takes forever - <USER2> code in C++ would take roughly 1/100 of the time and performance would be irrelevant but atm. we're seriously considering rewriting parts in C++ to reduce build times.

<comment><USER10> Blender Python lib by default is not optimized much. It has nothing to do with Python as a language.

Use numpy for matrices. If you have to implement an algo with a hot inner loop, use cython or numba.

I've never seen 100x difference in Python-C++ rewrite if Python was optimized already.

Here is a good article about some of the options: [https://rare- technologies.com/word2vec-in-python-part-two-op...](https://rare- technologies.com/word2vec-in-python-part-two-optimizing/)

<comment><USER11> The one time I saw 100x increase in performance in Python-to-C (which was done through Cython) was in code that worked with strings calculating a machine- learning related distance between two strings. The code was doing a lot of accessing particular positions in the strings, which in pure python resulted in slow retrieval of every character (lots of .__getitem__ calls), which were optimized to having 2 predefined empty arrays (in heap, not stack, and their corresponding counters of valid items) and then walking the strings and storing the "hot" values in them.

So it was a very specific case where we could get that 100x speedup at work.

<comment><USER11> Just noticed after a while: it was "in the stack, not heap" (about the arrays).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Coming from someone who uses python but doesn't really follow alternative compilers, PyPy sounds great. What are some of the downsides, if any? Are you sacrificing library compatibility for faster core+standard libs?

<comment><USER13> In addition to being incompatible with (some) third-party libraries, pypy tends to use significantly more memory than cpython. It's also slower than cpython for scripts that don't run long enough to warm up the JIT, so you probably wouldn't want to use it by default. (Disclaimer: I'm basing this on experience with older versions of pypy and haven't verified it recently)

<comment><USER14> He memory thing is still an issue. I had to go thru. Lot of tuning on max GC size to keep it runnable for long times. Too low and it is slow and too high and it kills the box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Awesome news, congrats to the team :) On an unrelated note, I wish Google gave them money to make it work with Tensorflow.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why are they still comparing to Python 2.7.2? I couldn't find benchmarks against Python 3.5 for their Py3 interpreter.

All the times I tried PyPy I came into a hurdle where one of the libraries I needs doesn't work (or underperforms) in PyPy, the most important ones being Numpy and OpenCV.

So in the end I just gave up with them, and stuck with Python 2/3 and Cython, which solved my speed problems without having to do all the work of C-extensions from the ground up.

Edit: the one benchmark I found covering PyPy3 is this: [https://pybenchmarks.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=py...](https://pybenchmarks.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=pypy3&lang2=python3&data=u64q)

It shows PyPy3 5.7.1 being about 8x faster to 100x slower than CPython 3.6.1.

For comparison, PyPy2 5.7.1 ranges from 10x faster to a bit over 30x slower to than CPython 2.7.13.

<comment><USER16> The benchmark showing a factor 100x compares a pure python implementation of "pidigits" running in PyPy3 vs one that uses GMP (via gmpy2) in python. I am actually impressed it's only a factor 100. And with progress made by cffi, I'd hopeful that a GMP-using PyPy version could be written rhat matches the speed of the code using gmpy2.

The next benchmark "only" runs 6x slower in PyPy ; still bad, but that paints quite a differen picture.

<comment><USER11> If it's running pidigits inside PyPy then it shows how much slower the C interface (not PyPys cffi, but it's CPython compatible interface) is compared to CPythons.

For the record, I'm not claiming PyPy3 to be 100x slower, these are benchmarks and they're hairy beasts that we have to shave and try to see what they tell us about performance.

My point is that PyPy3 is still behind in language features (in CPython we have a lot of nice things from 3.6 and 3.7 coming soon, while PyPy still lags behind having the complete 3.5 feature set), and they haven't optimized it as much as their 2.7 branch. But the PyPy people are always showing those "7x faster than CPython" claims (which come from an average of benchmarks, which seems to have been cherry picked to avoid the ones in which they're actually slower than CPython).

On the other hand, with Cython moving over to Py3 was never an issue (it actually helped in some cases), and it always helped to deliver better performance, and in just the right spot where it's needed. True, you have to know about profiling and identifying where to use Cython, but at my workplace it's been a far better tool to solve our performance needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any word on the "single codebase" aspect of supporting both major Python versions? I remember suggesting it years ago at a time when the team wanted to do Mercurial backporting instead. What changed their mind?

That looks like it could fix the lag on CPython releases, so it's a big feature.

</comment><comment><USER18> I guess the next release is the one that should support Python 3. At least as a non-beta feature.

<comment><USER19> FYI at least for everything I've thrown at it, PyPy 3.x works really well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here is the dumbest question in the world: our application has a gui which is pyqt, can we use pypy? Aside from pyqt, its completely vanilla python.

<comment><USER21> Most code that is vanilla Python will work just fine with PyPy. However, in real life, your code most likely also uses (imports) other Python libraries, you just need to make sure they work OK with PyPy.

Many, many, many libraries already work fine with PyPy, so give it a shot.</comment></comment>


ReplyAll Debuts The World's First "Blogcasting" Service - <AUTHOR> http://nibletz.com/2013/11/22/replyall-debuts-worlds-blogcasting-service/

<comment><AUTHOR> I had heard about the site but didn't really grasp what they were trying to do until that quote "think group blogging meets podcasting" and trying the site</comment>


How we test the TeamCity UI - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jetbrains.com/teamcity/2020/06/teamcity-ui-how-do-we-test-it/ <comment><USER2> Great post about testing, it's pretty much all you need to develop a robust app.

BUT TeamCity UX is the worst UI from all CI systems that I have used. From first version of Jenkis to managed stuff like CircleCI. People hate is so much that someone added a Slack icon :teamshitty: at work.

<comment><USER3> Having never used TeamCity (but being intrigued), what's so bad about it?

<comment><USER4> As somebody who does like TeamCity - it can be a bit clunky to navigate around. It's much like Zabbix in that once you figure it out it's not a problem, but the learning curve for anything beyond basic use can be steep.

I pretty much use Gitlab CI these days for anything outside my day job though, and the stuff at work is all Azure Pipelines (via Azure DevOps) now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The snapshots part is something that I completely disagree.

> Here, we change the engine type from turbofan to propfan. Just to test how > it works. Since the new engine no longer matches our snapshot, the test > fails. We've got a report, and our engineers are on their way to investigate > the problem.

I would be really happy if I know that the onboard computer has tests that checks if the engine being used is compatible before it takes off.

IMO, tests in general should be as close as possible to the real use-case ( kudos for the screenshot testing ) and as far as possible from the implementation. What happens with snapshots is that you are bound to the implementation. Maybe I have a logic somewhere in my code that does s/propfan/turbofan/. Would a user be interested in that or the functionality itself?

We ditched all JEST's snapshots statements in our code-base, because of code- coverage abuse and false sense of "being safe" just a couple of months ago. It was a good decision that helped us be closer to "what the user sees" rather than "what the markup should be"

<comment><USER6> Am I misunderstanding, or are snapshots basically just schema validation?

<comment><USER7> It's more akin to file diffing. Developers are notified of any differences in snapshots. The developer can they either accept the new snapshot, or investigate and fix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For E2E testing, is the browser still totally necessary? I feel the React rendering test libraries (React Testing Library/Enzyme) manage quite well? I have used Selenium and that ilk before but find you get odd failures every now and then (i.e. browser problems but also resources problems when you run parallel tests).

Also, I am sure this will be pointed out several times, but snapshot testing doesn't seem like a great idea. Your test is wrapped totally around your implementation and it is kind of unclear what you are testing i.e. change something, run test, snapshot fails because of UI update, update snapshot, passes...if you introduce some kind of unexpected bug with that change, how do you know? It works if you are testing for the same result but if you are making changes to the snapshot, you lose all coverage...tests are just as important then too.

Tbf, you usually end up wrapped around your implementation anyway (i.e. checking to see if there is a button that has certain text) but I feel that snapshots are a bit shortcut-y and give false confidence.

Surely the point of UI tests is to really test the functionality from the point of view of the user...I don't think snapshots achieve this (and I have always got in trouble when I strayed away from this principle...personally).

<comment><USER9> Tests are a trade - you spend some dev time writing and maintaining tests, and in return you might save some time and money down the line, if the test prevents bugs from doing damage. Tests aren't always good. There are tests that are so difficult to write and maintain, that they basically never repay their dev cost.

All that is to say, I like snapshot tests. Snapshot tests can be created and updated automatically, basically making their dev cost close to 0. They are so cheap that they don't actually have to catch a lot of bugs for them to be a net positive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone have experience with successfully doing UI tests (especially screenshot tests) in a very young software product? We try to keep our "plumbing" code and backend code well tested, but the UI is changing all of the time and I'm quite worried it'd be a nightmare to maintain UI tests at this stage.

<comment><USER11> (Selenium project founder here.) Test maintenance cost is a sane thing to be worried about! Early on, there can be lots of code thrashing and UI changes. Better to keep the UI tests to a minimum at that stage - have them act more like smoke alarms. You only need a few alarms in the right places to tell you that _something_ is wrong. Other general advice is that in a young product, it's often more important to make sure you're building the right thing. ("Right" is subjective, but could be defined as "has users" or "makes money".) Having a well-tested product that has no users and/or makes no money is an even bigger nightmare than UI test maintenance. Once you know you've built the "right" thing (hopefully sooner than later), you can afford to invest more in all kinds of test automation (not just UI tests).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > For example, a huge amount of UI problems we catch belong to the Screenshot > testing stage. Fewer problems belong to the Linters / Unit / Render tests. > That doesn't make those tests meaningless. On the contrary, it could mean > that we work in these areas well enough to prevent tons of issues.

They don't say how they measure "issues" in their chart, but if it's through CI failures, it seems likely that "Linters / Unit / Render tests" catch fewer issues because developers run them locally before pushing code.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm curious what kind of practices people have put in place to minimize the need for UI tests? I personally believe a UI test should only be written as a last result if it's impossible to test through other more backend-ish means. When you combine concurrent test runs with shared mutable state, you get flaky unreliable tests, and it's almost impossible to avoid with UI tests. So it seems the better solution is to restructure your code as much as possible to get as close as you can to the UI layer as possible with unit tests. But how far can you actually push this? I'm currently sad because my team is in the middle of a push to integrate Cypress into their react frontend, and I'm dreading the future where we have a billion qa-written UI tests that are redundant compared to our unit test coverage, and flaky besides.

<comment><USER6> A billion tests most certainly won't be useful. Good tests target very specific things that are critical to your product. In my experience UI tests are only slightly more flaky than other testing methods as long as they are written well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a mobile developer I read this eagerly looking for any useful ideas to bring UI testing into my client projects. I'm digesting still but so far, no.

I'm intrigued by screenshot testing but can it work across all screen sizes, from iPhone 6 to XR to iPad, and work in all orientations?

Otherwise my problems are that our designer made tap pinned too small in a couple places without anyone noticing. Or that something isn't perfectly aligned or a line separator isn't long enough, etc. they always seem to require a human to use it and say, I don't like this or this could be better.

<comment><USER15> I have been experimenting with this and the possibilities are very exciting.

[https://userdashboard.github.io/dashboard- sitemap](https://userdashboard.github.io/dashboard-sitemap)

These screenshots are generated from the test suite for all my UI tests. I have puppeteer navigate a series of steps and save each screenshot, resizing to mobile resolutions. This is done in Chrome, Puppeteer also supports Firefox. The screenshots are then integrated with my documentation both as sitemaps like above and to demonstrate usage:

[https://userdashboard.github.io/administrator/reset- codes](https://userdashboard.github.io/administrator/reset-codes)

They are generated from a simple sequence of steps added to my tests, which can run with or without saving/generating the screenshots:

          req1.screenshots = [
              { hover: '#administrator-menu-container' },
              { click: '/administrator' },
              { click: '/administrator/accounts' },
              { click: `/administrator/account?accountid=${user.account.accountid}` },
              { click: `/administrator/account-reset-codes?accountid=${user.account.accountid}` }
          ]

The code for parsing those steps into Puppeteer actions is available here: [https://github.com/userdashboard/dashboard/blob/master/test-...](https://github.com/userdashboard/dashboard/blob/master/test- helper-puppeteer.js)

In addition to being user-friendly for documentation there is tremendous QA opportunity to being able to observe every page at every resolution. Everything required better code too, you cannot forget to link to a page or have some part of the navigated route not working or have anything going wrong anywhere.

I am finalizing localization so in the next week or so the documentation will also be able to switch between any combination of language and device.

Note: some of my documentation/screenshots hasn't generated yet

<comment><USER14> Im a native mobile app developer, need something that works with swift on IOS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd more interested in a post about how do they test IntelliJ UI

</comment><comment><USER17> The _Screenshots Diff_ section was amazing! Learned a ton from this section alone as I wasn't even aware you could do something like this for UI testing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Good post.. wish they would start with what Team City is...

</comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone know how to do ui screenshot testing for games and in c++ guis?

</comment><comment><USER20> Meanwhile the TeamCity classic GUI has frequent freezes that lock up the entire Browser tab, and they claimed that they fixed it but it's still happening in the latest release. Nice blog post but fix your shit please.</comment>


Why Are Corporations Hoarding Trillions? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/magazine/why-are-corporations-hoarding-trillions.html <comment><USER2> It's crazy to me that anyone would lambast companies for saving money and not spending it.

All of the examples given in the article are uber successful companies with thousands of employees (all paying taxes and spending money, which both help the economy).

I would rather have a company that actually lasts and employs lots of people for many years than the silicon valley idea of running a company that spend the majority of their capital and the workers have to find jobs every 8 months because the company goes out of business.</comment>


Trolling Has Ethics Too, Dammit - <AUTHOR> http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/09/trolling-has-ethics-too-dammit.html <comment><USER2> I think he's conflating "astroturfing" with "trolling".

Astroturfing has come to mean paid advocacy in the guise of grass-roots advocacy, in hopes of the advocacy assuming the crediblity of mere enthusiastic advocacy.

Trolling used to mean posting blatantly, fabulously wrong information in the hopes of getting some smarty-pants know-it-all to refute the wrong information in such a way as to reveal the smarty-pants' own personality flaws.</comment>


Ask HN: How are startups getting into office hours these days? - <AUTHOR> I know the next YC batch hasn't started yet, so where are these current companies doing office hours on startupschool videos coming from?  Are they former YC grads?
There used to be a form every now and then to ask to be in "open" office hours but the only one I see now is for females only.
I read the FAQs and can't find anything.  Any insight? <comment><USER2> I read on one of the threads here that someone reached out to certain startups in the founder's track of the MOOC who were (physically) near Stanford.</comment>


Ask HN: Online web crawling services that are affordable and support UTF-8 - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I'm just wondering if anyone can recommend any web crawling services that support UTF-8,
I've had issues with 80legs not supporting that when I used it some years ago, which gave me results which I couldn't use unfortunately.
Ideally I would be looking to pay less than £100 to crawl a site with a large number of pages.
Any advice would be most appreciated!
Cheers <comment><USER2> If your budget is that low, perhaps you just want to use wget. If you use a fairly recent version of wget (1.14 or newer), you can even produce a WARC file, which is great for archiving. (It captures your requests as well as the responses, with full headers).</comment>


Bose founder, Amar Bose, has died at 83 - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/obit-amar-bose-0712.html <comment><USER2> It's not well known, but Dr. Bose had a stroke a few years ago. I was an officer of a local Acoustical Society of America chapter in Boston. Dr. Bose had been awarded a plaque at the national ASA conference in the summer of 2011, but he wasn't well enough to travel to accept the reward, so we volunteered to host a reception in Cambridge to give him the award and recognize other prominent acousticians. At that point, none of us knew what had happened to prevent him from traveling (I figured he was just really busy), but we were informed shortly before the reception.

When he arrived he was clearly still recovering (he had difficult walking and needed time to collect his thoughts before speaking), but he was still able to make a barn-burner of an acceptance speech. Afterwords, he took the time to speak to anyone who wanted to talk to him, including me.

I know audiophiles and enthusiasts have a low opinion of Bose products and their litigation strategies (some of which I share), but I had Dr. Bose as a professor in college and he was a fantastic instructor (even without the free ice cream during tests!). Students would often challenge him based on audiophile beliefs, and he would always use sound engineering arguments to refute them. And he was the only MIT prof I have saw who regularly ate meals at the Lobdell Food Court.

RIP Dr. Bose.

camera-phone picture of James Barger, Dr. Bose, Christopher Jaffe and Eric Unger at the aforementioned reception: [http://twitpic.com/d2amd3](http://twitpic.com/d2amd3)

edit: bose.com has a memorial up: [http://www.bose.com/remember/index.html](http://www.bose.com/remember/index.html)

<comment><USER3> Well put. One addendum:

> _but I had Dr. Bose as a professor in college and he was a fantastic > instructor_

Most folks knew him from the audio course. Less known was how long his history of teaching, eg his network theory book in the late sixties. That book was how I learned some of the more exotic transformations. (Most folks know parallel and series. It turns out that there are things like pi-delta/wye-delta and friends.)

RIP.

<comment><USER4> Do you have any links to lecture notes or the like?

<comment><USER3> It's funny, back in those days the equivalent archive of such things were that people would write a book for use in the class.

[http://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Network-Theory-Amar- Bose/...](http://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Network-Theory-Amar- Bose/dp/B0000CMXS1/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373729021&sr=1-1&keywords=amar+bose+network+theory)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "In 2011, to fulfill his lifelong dream to support MIT education, Dr. Bose gave to MIT the majority of the stock of Bose Corporation in the form of nonvoting shares. Under the terms of the gift, dividends from those shares will be used by MIT to sustain and advance MIT's education and research mission. MIT cannot sell its Bose shares, and does not participate in the management or governance of the company."

Wow. Respect.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sorry to hear. One of Bose's greatest contributions may be the Bose Suspension, which (to my knowledge) hasn't been put into production yet: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSi6J-QK1lw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSi6J-QK1lw)

<comment><USER7> It has been put into production: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=940wGYCeQ68](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=940wGYCeQ68)

<comment><USER6> I hadn't seen that, very cool. Though I'm not sure this is a licensed version of the Bose system or an all-new system. It looks like the Mercedes system uses computer vision -- no mention of cameras or CV on the Bose website.

<comment><USER8> right.. notice the video says "active" (not "bose active suspension")..

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

And in this article, Bose says they won't license the tech:

 _Bose is seeking a partner to help in these areas and take the product to market, but the company doesn 't want to just license its technology to a suspension supplier or car company. Bose wants to stay in this business for the long term as the supplier of its system._

[http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/a-surprising-new- active-...](http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/a-surprising-new-active- suspension)

<comment><USER6> Cool -- nice find with that article. Tesla / Elon, are you reading this? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bose got a bad rap.

In the 80's, everyone agreed Bose products were pretty but overpriced. Unfortunately that reputation stuck.

These days, we all gladly pay extra for good aesthetic design (see: Apple, and almost every electronic gizmo on Kickstarter).

Bose was ahead of their time.

<comment><USER10> Nothing epitomizes Bose so well as their minicube home-theater-in-a-box systems.

Somewhat expensive. Tiny and easy to live with (I believe the audiophile term is "wife-friendly"). Not very good sound quality.

Good audio requires some tradeoffs. A tiny box with tiny drivers and not a lot of power simply can't reproduce lower frequencies well. There just isn't enough cone displacement. Likewise, putting those little cubes in places that are convenient to live around rarely results in placement that makes the most of what little you have! Well placed speakers are usually in the way. These minicube systems were designed for people who consider sound quality to be of secondary importance to unobtrusiveness, and they serve that market well.

Bose realized that not everyone is an audiophile. Some people want to have sound that's "good enough" without huge tower speakers placed several feet away from their walls waiting for children to tip them over. Of course, these people don't want to feel like they're compromising. If you sell them cheap cubes that are marketed as being "good enough", they'll stay away in droves! If you market those "good enough" speakers as audiophile grade and charge a proportionate amount for them, people will buy them. Even more amazingly, they'll be _happy_ with them. Audio is one of those rare sectors in which you can actually make people more satisfied by overcharging them. Bose realized this.

Prioritizing convenience over sound quality and charging premium audiophile prices for compromise-making products is something Bose does indeed have in common with Apple. Mp3's are in no way a step up in sound-quality over CD's, but mp3 players were a tremendous improvement in convenience over portable CD players. There were mp3 players before the iPod, but the iPod was the first "premium" mp3 player. The first iPod's and their crappy buds cost more than a top of the line Sony discman with some rather nice cans, and people bought them in droves!

So, I agree that Apple has taken a page out of Bose's playbook, but I disagree with your statement than Bose was ahead of his time. Bose's timing was perfect and his company was wildly successful as a result.

<comment><USER11> > A tiny box with tiny drivers and not a lot of power simply can't reproduce > lower frequencies well.

I'd like to expand on this. The tradeoff has three variables: enclosure size, amplifier power output, and low frequency response. The reason is because as the audio frequency goes below the resonant frequency, the speaker efficiency drops (and eventually you run into Xmax limitations too). Resonant frequency scales with enclosure size.

Low frequency noise sounds good so a lot of speakers have deep resonances that exaggerate a specific low frequency at the expense of accuracy. Cheap, and impressive in the showroom, as long as you don't listen too carefully.

One speaker designer took the tradeoff in a completely different direction: mount a 10" speaker in a small cube, and use a very high-power amplifier to drive it below its resonant frequency. The speaker had to be specially designed with extremely high excursion (Xmax) and a voice coil that won't melt. The amplifer had to be specially designed to absorb a powerful back EMF as the moving speaker sent current back to the amplifier.

Apparently, the result was a subwoofer that satisfied not only the designer but his wife, who didn't want more "furniture".

<comment><USER12> Interesting

On the premise of Bose equipment being "good enough" it should be measurable (in real units, not "audiophile unicorn units"

Makes me wonder if it would be possible to have a better bass response exploiting non-linear effects and doing some "magic" (that is, some heavy signal processing and feedback loop including a mic)

<comment><USER11> > Makes me wonder if it would be possible to have a better bass response > exploiting non-linear effects and doing some "magic" (that is, some heavy > signal processing and feedback loop including a mic)

Non-linear effects of what? Speakers? Air? What would the microphone do? (Keep in mind that sound has to travel through air, which takes time, before it reaches the mic.)

You can already get better bass response by equalizing the signal fed to the amplifier, but the trade-off here is that it requires a bigger amplifier (and a speaker with higher Xmax).

<comment><USER12> "Non-linear effects of what? Speakers? Air?"

Air. Like this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound)

(yes, the article is not very good)

<comment><USER11> That requires a large amount of power, so you'd still have a big amplifier.

<comment><USER12> Well, not really.

See how big automotive amplifiers are for a given power. What makes home appliances big is usually a huge transformer inside (which for audio quality is good, even though switched power sources are getting better) AND the feeling that light/small is not good

A modern consumer audio system is around 80% empty space inside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> His last lecture here for those interested [http://video.mit.edu/watch/dr- amar-g-bose-last-lecture-of-fa...](http://video.mit.edu/watch/dr-amar-g-bose- last-lecture-of-fall-96-acoustics-course-6698/)

</comment><comment><USER14> As a ex sound engineer and now self described audiophile, I deeply admire and respect Bose products. Though expensive, I loved my Bose speakers till they fell off my computer desk onto the floor. The small cube satellite design with the sub on the floor, filled the room considering there such small size. They were good enough for me to mix and master with for my friends projects.

RIP Dr. Bose

<comment><USER15> Nobody in audio respects Bose products, though. They're overpriced and low- quality.

<comment><USER16> What about the sound engineer you just replied to?

<comment><USER17> Being a sound engineer doesn't mean you have good ears or produce good work, etc. It means someone is paying you to do a job. I post on HN because I'm a founder. I've founded 3 companies. None of which lasted more than 2 years. I use BIC ballpoint pens. Their clear plastic never failed me.

<comment><USER16> If you're going to argue by appeal to an unnamed authority like "everyone" it's just as easy to refute your argument using the inverse appeal.

So basically all your words are meaningless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, someone dies and there's so much negativity about headphones.

\--

I should leave it there, but since everyone is talking about headphones, I'll play too...

I love the QuietComfort headphones. This is true, even though they are expensive and I've broken a number of them. They are simple, so my bluetooth Sennheiser headset remains on the shelf. They are light and comfortable: I often wear them for 12 hours in a day. They have good sound. They have contributed to so many coding and writing zones over the past ten years I've lost count. They're probably the single most important productivity tool I own. They don't leak sound (unlike open headphones -- I had a pair of really great Sennheiser headphones that made my cubicle neighbours crazy years ago, as Portishead apparently sounds like torturing cats when listened to on open headphones). They are great for air travel. Hell, when you combine them with earplugs they even make float plane trips passable.

So, thanks Dr. Bose for one of your company's products.

</comment><comment><USER19> Never took venture capital or IPO'd; gave his company to MIT.

</comment><comment><USER20> The Bose trio is an inspiration to many in India 1) Jagadish Chandra Bose 2) Satyendra Nath Bose 3) Amar Bose

<comment><USER21> Subhas Chandra Bose too; albeit not in sci/tech context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Bose.com have a pretty nice tribute running right now:

[http://www.bose.com/remember/index.html](http://www.bose.com/remember/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> RIP.

Are there any other faculty members (not necessarily at MIT) who have managed to start their own companies which became successful, and yet have stayed on as a faculty member? That itself seems to be a rare achievement.

<comment><USER24> Barry Nalebuff of Honest Tea is a professor at Yale. I didn't really know anything about him or his company until I saw him speak yesterday, but both are quite impressive!

<comment><USER25> Barry is a Professor at the Yale School of Management. He seems to be one of the few business school faculty (i.e. not a technologist) to have founded a successful product company. As opposed to a consulting company, of which there are many examples.

I remember when CK Prahalad took a leave from Michigan to start Praja, but I don't think it was very successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I had a set of Bose 901 speakers in the 1980s. They were a really innovative design, and certainly not "wife-friendly" with their requirement that the wall behind them be a certain size and distance away.

It had 8 smaller drivers facing towards the wall, angled to reflect off it and produce a more ambient sound. And one driver facing towards the listener to provide the direct sound needed for vocals. The speakers (heavy, heavy speakers, btw) had an earlier version of their waveguide technology, which channeled the back pressure of all the small drivers and combined them to provide the bass that a larger driver would have produced.

In order to correct some of the bad behavior of the small drivers & enclosure, there was an external electronics box that you inserted between your preamp and amp, or in a tape loop if you had a receiver (it had pass-thru capability) to get the speakers to sound right. Once DSPs became affordable, they changed over to them, instead of the analog components the series of 901 that I had used.

I think I paid $1300 at the military exchange for the pair, and the (essentially required) Bose stands were another $200 or so. Which was a lot of money at the time (CD players were still $500). But I had bragging rights until I got written-up by playing them too loudly. The 901s definitely preferred a high-current amp -- I used a Hafler 200 watt MOSFET amp. A Sony integrated-circuit based receiver went into shutdown trying to drive them.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm glad to see this article at the top of Hacker News. It is easy to not realize how big audio was in consumer electronics all the way up until the early 80s.

Many of the great engineers of their day worked in audio, and I find myself continually attracted to their creations. Many who work in software today, may have been building amplifiers and speakers in the 60s.

</comment><comment><USER28> His Acoustics class was arguably the best course I took at MIT. His numerous anecdotes about hard work, perseverance, and applying thought process to every challenge we face really stuck with me. The end-of-semester field trip left a long lasting impression. He made me a better person I am today. I'll really miss him.

</comment><comment><USER29> He obviously was a tremendous achiever, but the current Bose products I have heard are terrible sounding.

The signal processing they add to create the "spacy"effect destroys the mix, the balances of the instruments, the placement, it's all lost in a hazy phase fog of sound. I don't get it.

To my ear, even many of the cheap desktop systems from companies like Logictech sound better.

If you're looking for decent sound at a low price, there are many low cost powered studio monitors that sound pretty good, like these from M-Audio:

[http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=studi...](http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=studiomonitors)

I don't think they are good as professional monitors, but for everyday listening pretty damn nice.

</comment><comment><USER30> He was an inspiring speaker but I avoided his company's products. Due to no fault of his own, the company that bears his name turned into a marketing driven company rather than engineering driven.

</comment><comment><USER31> Any audiophiles here know if we'll ever witness Bose or Sonos type speakers(sound) built into our mobile devices?

Full disclosure - We created a web app that plays audio in sync across multiple Internet devices ([http://SpeakerBlast.com](http://SpeakerBlast.com)) & are curious about the advances being made in this field.

Could our IP devices used alone or in harmony ever produce the same sound quality of a Bose or Sonos speaker?

</comment><comment><USER32> Bell, Morse, Land, Kurzweil, Bose, ... the list of Boston associated inventors is never ending. Then again Polaroid or Bose corporation can't compete with the limelight of the web world.

Most audiophiles buy stuff very few people have heard off, and Bose products themselves are on the fence of trying to be audiophile, yet popular ... a tricky space to be in.

</comment><comment><USER33> I remember being blown away by Bose active suspension, and wondering why Bose was doing it. Seems like a Google play in a way: make a bunch of money in one area (audio/ads) and do awesome stuff in another (active suspension / cars, glass).

Video of active suspension: [http://youtu.be/q8sVDenpPOE](http://youtu.be/q8sVDenpPOE)

Incredible company. He'll be missed.

</comment><comment><USER34> Interesting that in the spirit of the usual startup discussions here on Hacker News, no one has mentioned that this is/was a single founder company. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_Corporation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_Corporation)

Kudos to Dr. Bose.

</comment><comment><USER35> Dr. Amar Gopal Bose, you will always be remembered. Thank you for the inspiration. R.I.P.

A short biographical sketch: [http://flic.kr/p/f8wZ6R](http://flic.kr/p/f8wZ6R)

Another write-up: [http://flic.kr/p/f8wZee](http://flic.kr/p/f8wZee)

</comment><comment><USER36> This is a great loss, a man that I only recently learned about through reading "Autobiography of a Yogi", which mentions his great achievement as an eastern scientist, breaking out into a western world.

I hope Hacker News black lines today out of respect for this man.

</comment><comment><USER37> My name is Amar too. A sad day for innovators named Amar. Shine On buddy, thank you for the contributions to audio technology that has enriched millions of lives. :)

</comment><comment><USER38> damn, i loved my dad's 380ZX soundsystem. its what turned me onto hi fidelity. neat to know it was named after someone and that he went to MIT. peace

</comment><comment><USER39> Silence.</comment>


Into the Big Surreal: 36 Hours in California's Isolated, Lonely Island - <AUTHOR> https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/06/02/into-the-big-surreal-36-hours-in-californias-isolated-lonely-island/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps we shouldn't keep fixing highway 1. It was built as a WPA project in the 30s. I think it's beautiful, but it's fragile and expensive. It might be better to build some perpendicular connections to 101 instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> If there was ever a time to bike Hwy 1, the time is now. Few cars and certainly no RVs.

<comment><USER4> Can ya get through?

<comment><USER5> Here's a very reliable (and often entertaining) source on road closures in the area: [https://bigsurkate.blog/](https://bigsurkate.blog/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I travelled in the USA recently and attempted to drive to SF from LA along the coast.

It seemed very odd to me that this road closure (rock fall) was not signposted well ahead. Google map directions didn't mention it either.</comment>


OnlyOffice removes Web/mobile editing (After Nextcloud 18 inclusion) - <AUTHOR> https://help.nextcloud.com/t/onlyoffice-removed-web-mobile-editing-from-version-5-5-0-of-community-document-server/74360/57 <comment><AUTHOR> Bit off a kick in the teeth for NextCloud and makes returning to LibreOffice Online's CODE a likely path?

For now the features aren't actually removed (as shown in the thread) but disabled via a bool and can be reenabled quickly.</comment>


Super Awesome Sylvia shows super simple Arduino - <AUTHOR> http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/08/super-awesome-sylvia-shows-super-si.html <comment><USER2> Sylvia's dad here,

Great to see the hacker news crowd has found the show entertaining and useful! We glossed over a lot of the programming aspect because the physical aspect of making something is far more immediately comprehensible for kids (which is why we emphasize getting out and making -something- above all else).

We made sure to get the source code as commented and as easy to handle as possible, but introducing it in the video not only requires a substantial programming background overhead, but may scare a number of newbies off a lot quicker than if they just copied and pasted something into an simple IDE.

Getting something working, that kids can feel some kind of accomplishment with, no matter how simple, can psychologically push them over the initial barrier of fear that an come with new, seemingly difficult things.

The Arduino itself as a dev board platform does a great job of erasing a lot of that fear with a friendly usb connection, holes you can plug things directly into and an open IDE with only a few simple buttons and configurations. The remaining hurdles exist beyond, in attainable projects that lets you poke and prod at the internals and get a good feel for how and why something works, or how to break it. Hopefully our little starter project are simple enough to get kids (or anyone for that matter) out there and -trying something-, no matter how silly or simple. If all you do is do something once and never again, you are still the better for doing it.

<comment><USER3> Great stuff, Sylvia's Dad.

Sounds like you've really helped her learn how to push forward into productivity - and in domains where she gets a thrill from the process and from being able to share it out in the world. Sounds like a great way to let her experience the entrepreneurial as well as engineering worlds!

<comment><USER2> Yep. Making a show is in itself an amazing discovery of what you could do. We keep everything simple, the script is only a basic guideline and she takes an active role in every part of the production.

I'm simply hopeful that as she blossoms into adulthood, some of the adventures her and I share in her youth help her out in the rest of her life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to share this (from reddit), because it inspires and encourages me the same way Khan Academy does. If I had kids, I'd definitely show them the channel. It feels like a mix of Mythbusters and Jørgen Clevin[1].

Maybe one day, we'll have enough YouTube content to create a TV package for children that will actually merit the time spent in front of the TV.

[1]: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnlVPv5TwGQ>

<comment><USER4> Can you link to the Reddit discussion as well please? I can't seem to be able to find it

<comment><AUTHOR> Here it is, relegated to a niche subreddit: [http://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/fc4dw/quite_pos...](http://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/fc4dw/quite_possibly_the_coolest_little_girl_of_all_time/).

I tried finding a link to something that summarized it better than a YouTube video and decided on using the MAKE link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's interesting is she just glosses over the programming aspect. This got me thinking. The C language presents a pretty big barrier to entry for young tinkerers, who have never heard the word "integer" before.

I learned to program when I was 6 or 7 years old, using Logo. Unfortunately, Logo is all but dead, but I still think it's the greatest educational programming tool ever. We even had a version of Logo that could interact with Lego motors and sensors called "Lego Logo."

So why can't you program the Arduino in Logo? I posted a quick proposal for such a system at <http://github.com/74hc595/Arduino-For-Kids> and hopefully I'll get around to implementing it soon. Feedback is welcome.

aside: Yes, there is a version of Scratch for the Arduino, but I personally think the merits of visual programming languages are questionable...

<comment><USER6> It's nothing to do with hardware hacking, but Python ships with a kickass turtle module: <http://docs.python.org/library/turtle.html>

For some reason it seems like a well-kept secret.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Best. Parents. Ever.

</comment><comment><USER8> My kids love this show and has gotten them sincerely interested in electronics (and putting cut-outs on sticks for puppet play) - keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER9> This is absolutely superb. Hopefully videos like this will inspire the younger generation to actually look into how things work and not just how to use them. Projects like Arduino really lower the barrier to entry to allow adults and children alike to explore these areas. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER10> I wanted to use Arduino for a project, but gave up on it because it has such a tiny amount of memory. <http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Memory>

<comment><USER11> 16K FLASH/1K SRAM/512 bytes EEPROM is pretty reasonable for a traditional embedded microcontroller. Think small (ie efficient), if you want to get into the spirit of such devices.

<comment><USER12> My first embedded chip had 256bytes of memory and 16 instructions

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> BTW, for those of who don't know, that natetrue guy she mentions is the same dude from cre.ations.net who built tap tap revolution for the iphone first unofficially and then officially.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is amazing. The line in the article, "gives me hope for humanity," is spot on.

<comment><USER15> The line should be more "most people don't understand what kids can do".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> very cool. in the age of the web and YouTube, this girl can serve as a role model for millions of others throughout the world. keep it up.</comment>


Steve Jobs Says 7-Inch Tablets Are 'Dead on Arrival' - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/tablets-steve-jobs/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

<comment><USER2> until they start arriving with an apple on them, that is =)

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Then the 7" factor will be magical. Though I do get what he is trying to say about "sandpaper for a finger"

<comment><USER2> It's a simpsons reference re: fat fingers and dialing wands. Hes saying theres not enough room on a 7" for workable sized buttons, but the counterpoint is that it's as big as it is and you go with what fits.

<comment><USER2> oops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems a bit silly for Jobs to argue that a 3.5 inch mini-tablet is awesome (iPhone) and a 10 inch tablet is also awesome (iPad) but anything in between is just a bad idea.</comment>


OneWay 0.5.2 Released – Thank you, Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://goto11.net/oneway-0-5-2-released/

<comment><AUTHOR> If you've already downloaded the application, simply launch it and under the "OneWay" menu, choose "Check for Updates". You should be prompted to install 0.5.2 - Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> another feature request: ZIP and upload. This is because I prefer to ZIP several images of an event and upload them afterwards. Thank you!

If one file is selected, make ZIP of this one file - then upload.

If multiple files are selected, ask for a name, make ZIP of files - <USER2> upload.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, that would be a pretty good feature. I'm thinking a preference pane that allows to enable something like this would be easy. I'm also thinking of adding a "rsync to ..." option that you can enable as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any plans to support SSH public key auth? It would be great if the app could use existing keys in ~/.ssh/

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. This is definitely in the works for the next release. Under the hood I am using libcurl which makes implementing public key auth pretty painless.</comment></comment>


Solar Impulse 2 completes 62 hour gas-free Hawaii to SF flight - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/24/travel/solar-impulse-2-plane-california/ <comment><USER2> That is pretty interesting to see that it only moves as fast as a car does. Very fascinating nonetheless, though. I would love to build this at a smaller scale yet still have the same range.</comment>


Top Developer and Engineering Skills Employers Will Look in 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://servicesangle.com/blog/2011/12/29/top-10-developer-and-engineering-skills-employers-will-look-for-going-into-2012/ <comment><USER2> For a competent developer the difference between not knowing an obscure technology and being proficient in it is about 6 months.

Smart employers concentrate on finding smart people.

<comment><USER3> Generally true, but due to the cut-throat competition among Internet companies, we (and I guess almost all other employers) want smart people with the right skills _now_.

<comment><USER4> But it might take you more than six months to find them. Are you working on plan B as suggested as well?

<comment><USER3> No need, we just limit the expansion pace if there is not enough people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Forgive a naive question. When posts like this (or actual job listings) say "HTML5", is what they're really saying "sites which use a lot of front end js and feel more app like"? I'm assuming there's not that much of a demand for people who can shorten a doctype, leave off closing tags in tables, re-encode audio files to ogg, wav and mp3 and who know how to make pretty canvas based demos...

<comment><USER6> A million times this. I work in the enterprise space, and I see people asking for HTML5 for all sorts of things, even though none of the details they spew out require use of HTML5. They can all be sufficiently done in HTML4, without concern for backwards compatibility. I think people just list HTML5 because they assume it will be some big thing. They have no idea what it actually encompasses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The Ubermedia team wants developers to build Java-based iOS apps.

There are a few ways you could explain this sentence, but its existence makes me distrust the article's premise of scouring Indeed's listings for "valued" skills as a whole.

<comment><USER8> Nah, it is properly some snafu by the journalist -- they properly said Java backed iOS apps. (Which is still weird -- why choose Java for the backend of a green-field project?) and the journalist 'improved' on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is Puppet actually "winning" the DevOps battle for server deployment? Just curious as I was under the impression that both Chef and Puppet were top-tier, and you really couldn't go wrong either way.

<comment><USER10> People certainly blab about Puppet more.

(Which suggest to me Chef is the one "winning". It is being used by the people who don't have the time to argue about which is better.)

<comment><USER11> Puppetlabs has certainly stepped up their marketing; 6-8 months ago you could have flipped the words puppet and chef in your post and it would have been completely true.

I'd argue puppet is winning any time there are operations staff, chef is winning when pure developers are also doing operations. Either is fine and both are leaps and bounds ahead of the competition (which is generally "no configuration management" or "a hodge-podge of homegrown scripts").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really? Puppet over Chef? Mongo over Redis? No Ruby, no Erlang, no EC2? I am skeptical of these choices.

I suppose if that is what the data says...

<comment><USER10> Ruby may be the darling of the startup industry, but how about the greater industry as a whole?

<comment><USER12> Ruby is used professionally at Coldwell Banker, Seachange, Mathworks, IDG, and other "non-startups" that I know of in the Boston Area. There is a kernel of truth to what you're saying though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You will have to forgive my ignorance on the matter as I have not been paying close attention to the popularity of NoSQL databases but has MongoDB taken the crown. Cassandra seemed to be widely popular for a while but this article seems to imply that MongoDB is the skill to have, which would lead me to believe that more people are adopting it than the other offerings in this space. Can someone enlighten me to the state of the NoSQL industry, has it picked the winner and losers yet? Or is MongoDB just enjoying it's moment in the sun?

<comment><USER14> Well, with the caveat that the differences between NoSQL solutions can be as big or bigger than that between SQL and a given NoSQL solution...

A quick glance at Stackoverflow careers and SF craigslist show Redis coming up a wee bit more than MongoDB, though I doubt it's statistically significant. Those seem like the top two, with most others giving significantly fewer hits. Regardless, MongoDB is far from undisputed king of the hill.

<comment><USER13> Thanks, I appreciate the info, it is an area of computing that I just have not had time to get into. I have used Cassandra before, but never taken the time to look at the other offerings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> These are trends and while important a bit misleading.

Yes HTML5 has seen 350,000% increase (yes, I typed that correctly) in job postings over the years, but it is still only in 0.3% of all job postings. Meanwhile C# is in ~1.6% and Java in ~3.3% of all postings.

Not saying you shouldn't get some HTML5, MongoDB, Android or iOS knowledge but these are hardly the "most looked for" skills.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish I could cause physical harm to people who write and post these types of articles.

<comment><USER17> You don't have to wish. You literally have that ability.

<comment><USER16> lol, so true. I guess I should say "without consequences."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can someone explain to me what "top 10" means?

The same source (Indeed) shows that the "top" HTML5 trend is a baby close to Sharepoint: [http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=html5%2C+sharepoint&l=](http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=html5%2C+sharepoint&l=)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm thinking something like this could be more relevant:

\- html / javascript / php \- ability to read code \- ability to read poorly written code \- charisma / good communication \- personal appearance \- relationship with someone in the company \- ability to create a decent resume / cv

</comment><comment><USER20> I keep on top of tech news and I haven't even ever heard of a couple of those. I'm sure they exist and are important in some very small niche, but if they were the "top" skills currently sought, I would have heard of them, seen them posted in articles, etc. Based on this my conclusion is that the article is up to something. Perhaps they need technology H and P people and thought that posting an article with several "real" top skills along with their pet fringe tech would result in people going back to school for training at no additional cost to the hopeful employer facing a shortage of people competent in their fringe technology.

</comment><comment><USER21> In D&D style, I strike back with a Brad-Feld rebuttal:

[http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2011/12/top-10-reasons- top-1...](http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2011/12/top-10-reasons-top-10-lists- suck.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> Knuth just told us, most of the Trend/Hot techs are bullshit.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> MongoDB is killing it in the NoSQL space. 10Gen proves it. Cassandra is still in the game but Apple and others are on a steep adoption curve for MongoDB.

Results for this list came from Indeed.Pretty reliable source.</comment>


Knowing When Your Baby is Ugly - <AUTHOR> http://waynechang.com/2011/03/21/knowing-when-your-baby-is-ugly/

<comment><USER2> Wow, I read it twice. Things I thought about when reading that page:

1) The OP hasn't a clue about market research. There is scale, there is volume, and there is price.

2) Anytime there is a massive lack of standards, there is a huge complexity play. This was a surprise?

3) Two pivots that were not mentioned, really high end home theater setups, and custom remote construction framework.

4) Vision limited by an individual's capabilities. Its good to know what you can and cannot pull off but its important to be able to see a bigger picture so that if you could find someone who could do 'x' (missing piece) it would be a better play.

I wonder sometimes about the urge to move to a bigger thing than the current thing. The post on Entreporn touched on this as well.

Oh and I got to see a spam comment in HN comments, that was interesting.

<comment><USER3> Chuck, thanks for the comments. At the time I was enthralled by the possibilities of the iPad and wanted to hack together something that was both useful for me and others. I intended it as a side project (instead of a full blown startup).

I don't regret doing it and I'm happy that I spent that month exploring (and brushing up on my Delphi skills!). I'm thinking about open sourcing the project but would need to clean it up some. It's all spaghetti right now.

Oh, and would love to get your feedback on my next project :-)

(And yea, that spam thing at the bottom is kinda lame)

<comment><USER4> Here's a point for doing most of it in Delphi. :-)

<comment><USER3> _phew_ I thought I was going to get flamed for using Delphi!

<comment><USER5> No, to get flamed on HN you would have had to use PHP :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was hoping this was about ugly babies...

<comment><USER7> That's pretty much an unsolvable problem.

If you tell someone their baby is ugly, not only do they don't believe it but they also hate you. You could anonymize it, but you're just back to even because they still won't believe you.

<comment><USER8> And to be fair, what would they do about it anyway? Trade it in?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sounds like the OP is just chasing after a lottery-ticket style product that is an instant success AND cheap to maintain AND manages to hold his interest for longer than a week.

Starting lots of different projects is just one tactic for possible, eventual success. Putting time, effort and a little patience into one project that you really believe in is another. Nothing is guaranteed.

<comment><USER3> I chase high-impact projects. They don't need to be lottery-style, but they do need to have degrees of widespread use. In this case, the market was premature. No matter how much "time, effort, and little patience" wasn't going to change the world overnight to use smart TV's! (Otherwise I would have stuck with it :)

<comment><USER9> "No matter how much "time, effort, and little patience" wasn't going to change the world overnight to use smart TV's!"

I think my point was that not everything needs to happen "overnight".

<comment><USER10> I guess he couldn't charge people money and then not support their system.

There have been a lot of attempts to consolidate the remote market. Woz tried. iRiver made an iPod mini competitor with an embedded remote. Then there's AppleTV.

It would take a lot of time to get everything consolidated. And when you are finally making a bit of money, the industry will consolidate itself and your competitors will just target the new, consolidated standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Of course, the control interface itself had to be gorgeous to fit with > Apple's design ideology. The client I ended up with, as you can see above, > used beautiful 3D effects, reflections, and animations to display the media > options (watch the video). I didn't get a chance to optimize for speed so > the touch response is a little slow.

And this is how software comes to be that drives me absolutely nuts with its slow UI.

Every time I've had to use a UI that is whooshing things about in a slow and laggy way, a little part of me dies.

</comment><comment><USER12> Like the article's first comment, I too abandoned a project I was very passionate about simply because an API was lacking. I attempted something similar with a HTTP interface remote application for VLC. I had it working to a "good enough" degree, but the lack of access to things as basic as album art via the API were incredibly frustrating.

Was ditching the project lazy on my part? Most definitely. Did I have the skill set to get work around the shortcomings? Probably not, and that's what it boiled down to. My baby was ugly, and I wasn't capable of fixing it.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's a distinction between what you have right now, and the _vision_ :

\- ugly baby _product_ : don't worry, keep improving it

\- ugly baby _project_ : give up (if it won't meet your needs); or pivot or something

For me, I've realized I don't need a huge market or revolutionary technology. Just enough to live on, doing work that makes a difference, is enough for me (though I like to leave the upside uncovered). Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.

Note: AppleTV itself is not a huge success for Apple, but Jobs keeps on with it, because he envisions that it can be (and the luxury of resources). Ugly duckling?

BTW: Woz also had a _universal remote_ project, and it also had business (as opposed to technical) problems.

</comment><comment><USER14> it really is difficult for builder/hackers to handle the paradox, to be tenacious yet realistic, because we love _all_ our children</comment>


Self-reference and Logic (2005) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.imm.dtu.dk/~tobo/essay.pdf <comment><USER2> This is great for understanding why simpler logics (Boolean) are computable but too expressive ones (FO) are not. As soon as the logic is able to make statements about itself, things get 'weird'. A not formal(!) but imho still intuitive example:

"This sentence has five words."

This is a true statement. And we know that the conjunction of two true statements should also be true.

"This sentence has five words and this sentence has five words."

With eleven words each part of this statement is obviously false and here we can't rely on the "and", which we are used to from the simpler logics, anymore.

<comment><USER3> _" This sentence has five words and this sentence has five words."_ In English "this" need not always be self referential, so I'll retort with "This sentence is imprecise".

The two "this"s could refer to two different things. However, the second _this_ would normally become _that_ to indicate comparison but grammatically the original is still sound [with notes]:

This sentence [indicates a sentence with five words in it] has five words and this sentence [indicates another sentence, also with five words in it] has five words.

<comment><USER4> Even if you try to separate what each 'this' refers to, there is still only one sentence, so the sentence becomes meaningless if you do that.

<comment> white-flame No, there are 3 sentences implied in the context, but only 1 sentence is visible in this specific example.

Natural language normally isn't a fully self-contained representation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An excellent paper, especially reviewing the connections of Peano, Tarski, and Godel.

I'm surprised that he did not mention Jim Propp's self=referential aptitude test. It starts with:

> 1\. The first question whose answer is B is question > (A) 1 > (B) 2 > (C) 3 > > (D) 4 > (E) 5

And, of course, Bolander's paper ends with an utterly delightful final sentence!

</comment><comment><USER6> Footnote 17 mentions a proposed approach of "extending logic to include _contexts_ ", but doesn't name any names. Anyone have a reference I can follow?

</comment><comment><USER7> If this sentence is true, then Santa Claus exists. Therefore, Santa Claus exists.

<comment><USER8> If P then Q is a true statement when P is false. (Assuming standard two valued logic.). The statement

If P then Q

being true does not mean Q has to be true. I don't think you can conclude Santa Claus exists based on your argument.

<comment><USER7> P = P -> Q

P = !P v Q

Q |= _|_

P = !P v _|_

P = !P

<comment><USER8> Your reasoning only works for valid statements. That is, statements that have a truth value. As you've demonstrated P does not have one. For no admissible statement is P equal to not P.

<comment><USER7> 1\. Premise: P -> Q

2\. Premise: ((P -> Q) -> P) -> P

3\. (P -> Q) -> P, from 1

4\. P, from 2 and 3

5\. Q, from 1 and 4

<comment><USER8> The P, in your original post, is not a valid formula since it does not have a truth value. You can construct all the proofs and whatnot you want but if P is not a logical statement (one that is either true or false but not both) then the arguments are not valid.

Your Q was generic and could have been any statement. In particular one that has been provably shown to be false. If your arguments are correct then you have the ability to prove any false statement is true.

Do you really think you have found a way to demonstrate that the standard two- valued logic used in mathematics leads to a contradiction?

<comment><USER7> Just repeating Curry's paradox from Wikipedia.

<comment><USER8> I see. The difference in our views comes from me being a mathematician. Curry's Paradox is not a paradox in mathematical logic due to my objections. In mathematical logic we don't allow statements that don't have a well defined truth value. The premise in the start of Curry's Paradox is a statement without a well defined truth value.

Curry's Paradox shows the limits if naive set theory. Thus mathematically we have to be OK with the idea that not all naive set constructions produce valid sets.

In informal setttings we can argue that

If this sentence is true then Santa Claus exists

can't be false. But then one usually assumes it must then be true. I would argue this isn't the case. There are sentences that have no truth value. For instance,

This sentence is false.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, this clarifies things for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Runtime Error: Stack Overflow in recursive function.</comment>


Why We Started Our Health Company - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@buoyhealth/why-we-started-our-health-company-b4e5496870c4 <comment><USER2> No more common cold and cancer in the same line

</comment><comment><USER3> Buoy Health > WebMD/Dr.Google</comment>