Wootz steel - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wootz_steel <comment><USER2> One of the things that threw me off when watching forging YouTube videos like Alec Steele was that he would take on these historical projects like Renaissance weaponry but using super-modern power hammers and such. But they actually had power hammers in the Renaissance, Wikipedia calls them trip hammers. They didn't appear in Europe until the Middle Ages, but similar devices were used in China 2000 (!) years ago.

The things you can do with just water, wind, and wood are incredible.

<comment><USER3> "They" had analogue computers [1] and steam turbines [2] two millenia ago. Power hammers a few centuries ago seem pretty mild by comparison.

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

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

<comment><USER4> I don't think I'd really call that a computer any more than I'd call an old watch a computer.

<comment><USER5> The line is pretty blurry. This (relatively) modern device [0] is a computer although it's probably less complex than some of the ancient ones.

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

<comment><USER6> Mechanical computers for fire control where the standard solution until very recently. Here's a very interesting video about them: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle has about 35 enjoyable pages on this process, if anyone's interested.

<comment><USER8> As an aside: I really wish someone would produce _The Baroque Cycle_ as a GoT scale epic.

<comment><USER7> Oh, yeah. As amazing as the Baroque Cycle Movie or series could be, or Cryptonomicon, or Diamond Age, etc... I'd vote for Seveneves over everything else.

<comment><USER9> Seveneves has been in my reading queue for quite awhile... I think I might go ahead and move it to the top of the stack. Thanks for posting this!

<comment><USER10> One of the best books I've read in years. If you have any space-geek in you, you won't regret it.

<comment><USER11> To be honest, I found it long and depressing. It must be something about this theme of the demise of society and space exploration that gets me. Same with Baxter's NASA trilogy. His early novels, like Snowcrash and Diamond age, are amazing, but Seveneves is really quite a different kind of a story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a highly entertaining account of the uses and properties of Wootz steel in Neal Stephenson's The Confusion, part of his Baroque Cycle.

(edit - beaten to it - see below)

</comment><comment><USER13> Hour documentary on wootz:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OP8PCkcBZU4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OP8PCkcBZU4)

</comment><comment><USER14> The illustrative picture on that article is absolutely useless without a scale of some sort. The feature look small, like maybe on the order of a weld bead but it might be on the order of mill scale but under massive magnification and I have no way to tell.

<comment><USER15> I think that is the fullered flat of a sword blade, so a couple inches or more across. The pattern exhibits at scales you'd need magnification to see all the way up to bands a mm across. I have a blade that was created using one of the reproduction processes. I have heard some say it is simply a very specific type of alloy banding.

<comment><USER15> I will add that while it cuts well and has good abrasion resistance, it isn't anomalously better than modern tool steel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's Niels Provos (author of bcrypt) attempting to make Wootz: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9j9vUGi0QA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9j9vUGi0QA)

<comment><USER17> Wait, what?! I've been subscribed to Niels Provos on YouTube for years for his swordsmithing content without realising who he was outside of that. What an amazing guy :) Thanks for pointing that out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nitpick: it's Wootz steel, not Wootz's steel. It wasn't named after someone called Wootz.

</comment><comment><USER18> India prior to the Brits, should be a case study in how to integrate places like the Rust Belt in US, Afghanistan into global trade.

Each village was an autonomous unit of production that traded directly with nearby villages, silk road and through merchant ships with the world. ( In some cases they had their own local currency ! )

A single village could be directly linked to markets in Europe and China, or form part of a supply chain of villages to larger markets. Shenzen is similar being a SEZ, allowing it to trade directly with any unit across the globe.

It is kinda ironic that we went from a more libertarian trade system to a more restrictive one, as technology helped the state exert more control.

Places like the Rust belt can't directly trade with Kenya, they have to go through hordes of middle men.

Same thing happens in inner India, even though its filled with excess cheap labor in close proximity.

<comment><USER19> I have no idea what you're on about but this lept out at me as being very obviously wrong:

> Places like the Rust belt can't directly trade with Kenya, they have to go > through hordes of middle men.

"The Rust Belt" can pretty easily trade with Kenya, thanks to the Saint Lawrence Seaway. I'm sitting in my office in the "rust belt," looking out at a shipping channel that accommodates ships from Europe pretty routinely.

If we're using "middlemen," e.g. relying on rail to bring Kenyan products across Africa to one of its western ports, or relying on rail to bring those products from an Eastern US port, it's because that is inherently more economical. There aren't "hordes" of middlemen involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems like a link to a random Wikipedia page should be accompanied by an explanatory comment...

<comment><USER21> This happens a lot here. I don't mind it.

<comment><USER22> I think it's a good thing.

If I'm not knowledgeable about the topic, I read the article. If I feel like I am knowledgeable about it, I jump straight to the comments. There I either learn something, or share knowledge.

It's one of my favorite types of HN posts :)

<comment><USER23> As a counterpoint, I think it drops the signal to noise ratio and makes HN less useful.

If I want to read a random Wikipedia article I can use the "Random Article" link on their website.

I don't think it's too much to ask for people posting random wiki links to explain why the article is worth reading about and discussing. Especially in cases like this one, where the linked article (apparently?) has little or nothing to do with the usual content posted.

I have no idea what the poster wants me to get out of this article.

<comment><USER22> > If I want to read a random Wikipedia article I can use the "Random Article" > link on their website.

Ah, but that's the thing - it's not "random". It's an article that someone who likely shares many of my interests found interesting. That's valuable enough for me :)

Have you considered adding a user stylesheet that hides or minimized submissions that link to Wikipedia? It shouldn't be difficult.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Groupon buys South African clone Twangoo for $1M - <AUTHOR> http://www.bandwidthblog.com/2011/02/17/the-twangoo-interview/

<comment><USER2> This is from February 17th of this year. Not sure what's so notable about it now.</comment>


jQuery UI with Richard Worth  - <AUTHOR> http://codebetter.com/blogs/matthew.podwysocki/archive/2009/08/14/ann-dc-alt-net-8-26-2009-jquery-ui-with-richard-worth.aspx <comment><USER2> So I'm new to codebetter.com, but this announcement is ony about a ?face-to- face? meeting? Whew - I hardly remember them. I was expecting an article/interview. That not appearing I looked for a video. No.

Am I missing the link to streaming of the event? ...or there nothing beyond an RSVP to Alexandria VA (if I can fly cross-country that day)?

</comment><comment><USER3> Yea, I'm having trouble figuring out what's going on in this article too, maybe I'm slow or something. Are they going to webcast this or do I have to show up in Virginia?</comment>


On-bike GPS navigation - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2018/04/on-bike-gps-navigation-is-enabling-a-new-era-of-adventure.html <comment><USER2> Bikepackers have been using on-bike GPS navigation for years. These newer devices just make it a bit easier to create routes by linking directly to your smartphone. The eTrex series of GPS from Garmin are more popular for long, multi-day rides because they run off AA batteries.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an ad. Bike computers are just really expensive single purpose smartphones.

<comment><USER4> And smart phones are really just hand-held computers.

I don't think "just" is appropriate. How many smart phones can handle rain or snow? How many support both GPS and GLONASS? How many have the UI (both screen and buttons) which fit with the needs of what many cyclists want?

<comment><USER5> I've used both dedicated bike computers and an iphone mounted on my handlebars in a waterproof case, and the only upside I noticed to the dedicated device was that it didn't drain my phone's battery. The UI wasn't any better and both were fine in the rain.

<comment><USER4> You are right. I researched this now and the details that were important when I last bought a GPS are now no longer relevant.

Other than battery life, some of the reasons people prefer a dedicated unit are: better aerodynamics than a smartphone+case, support for ANT+ sensors, more rugged in the face of falls (even for a smartphone in case), more easily controlled by hands in a bicycle glove, and the ability to still have phone service even if the GPS battery is exhausted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Minor nitpick: GPS doesn't enable adventure. If anything, having constant GPS guidance takes away from the adventure. Many of my best memories while biking have happened because I got a bit lost and stumbled upon something neat in a place I wasn't expecting to go. Same goes for road trips.

But that's just me being a Luddite. For now I think I'll stick to my phone's GPS if I need a map.

<comment><USER4> Minor nitpick, GPS _does_ enable experience for some people.

My riding partner has difficulty with converting the absolute direction of maps into relative left/right terms, and prefers GPS turn-by-turn guidance.

I go on cycle camping trips. I get lost most often when I go through cities, because I find it hard to keep attention on the map, pay attention to the traffic, and take in what I'm cycling through, all at the same time. I am tempted by a turn-by-turn GPS so I don't, for the n-th time, have to stop and redetermine my position and bearing.

That is not an adventure.

I have been "lost", in the sense of not being where I thought I was, and being further off the route of where I planned to go, many times. So far _none_ of them have resulted in an adventure.

Nor have none of them been of the sort described in this article, where getting lost near sunset increased the risk of hypothermia.

What has resulted in an adventure is looking at a different route, wondering "where does this go?", and taking it - knowing that I have enough mapping technology with me to both see that it might be an interesting route, and not get more than temporarily lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I normally use ridewithGPS and a cheap head unit for brevets -- but i carry cue sheets, too.

</comment><comment><USER8> so this journalist used a gps and it was great experience? great story!!

<comment><USER4> Ummm, no. This journalist used a different type of GPS-based mapping system and found it was a better experience for the types of activities she does.</comment></comment>


RubyGems 2.0.0 Released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rubygems.org/2013/02/24/2.0.0-released.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A side note, RubyGems 2.0.0 is released for both Ruby 2.0.0 and Ruby 1.9.X.

To install: gem update --system

<comment><USER2> You may have trouble with bundler, though; it's documented to work only with Bundler 1.3.0 pre-releases.</comment></comment>


Claim your short URL to Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://togpl.us/ A friend of mine just launched this.. <comment><USER2> Cool</comment>


Ask HN: Max no. of EC2 instances used by a single web app? - <AUTHOR>

Including DB & API machines, our web app occupies 18 heavily utilized Amazon EC2 instances under a  traffic load of ~7k RPM. "Conventional wisdom" says that we're mis-using EC2 by keeping so many virtual instances running but I prefer hard data to "conventional wisdom".<p>Curious to hear from the HN community: what's the most long-running EC2 instances you've seen in a successful web app? <comment><USER2> Some other data points:

* Animoto was running several thousands of machines in 2008 (<http://bit.ly/EDLtt>)

* Litmus runs 400 servers (<http://bit.ly/d7Hc7y>)

* 99Designs runs entirely on EC2 (<http://bit.ly/aotKgg>)

I've personally had long-running EC2 instances with uptimes in _years_. You could do it cheaper in terms of hardware, but at the cost of wasting time at the colo while you could be building cool shit.

<comment><USER3> Good start - I wasn't aware of the Litmus environment. The Animoto example is great, I love telling that story to people just starting to look into cloud computing.

To add to the large-environment roll call, here are the persistent server counts of some 100% cloud-hosted companies:

\- Bizo: 100+ instances (I work here)

\- Reddit: 100(?) instances ("256 Virtual CPUs" <http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/schedule/event/148/>) - HNer jedberg runs this

\- ShareThis: 250 instances (I worked here)

Longest-running instance I've had is at two years and still going strong.

<comment><USER4> Is Reddit profitable?

<comment><USER5> We don't discuss that, but Conde isn't a charity. They wouldn't keep us around if it wasn't worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Zynga runs over 12,000 EC2 nodes total. A single app like FarmVille, which runs entirely on EC2, will be a few thousand. It's safe to guess we're Amazon's biggest customer.

<comment><USER5> You're not their biggest customer, but you're up there. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've got two running now. A large for the webserver and a medium high CPU for the database. Roughly a couple hundred reqests per second.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll go first: we (140 Proof) actually have 20 instances, not 18. How many instances do other people's apps use?</comment>


Windows XP Significantly Outperforms Vista, Tests Show - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203975

<comment><USER2> I can definitely see this. I like a lot of things about Vista. One of them is not the speed.

I'm wondering if MS just decided to optimize the user experience aesthetically and let the hardware catch up on speed, figuring that in 4 years everyone will be running 16 cores and an SSD.

<comment><USER3> I think the average hardware has not caught up to Vista yet. I just reinstalled it after 6 months when I upgraded my computer to 2x Raptor Raid 0, along with the existing 4gb ram and quad core. It's running really great now. I can have all my work apps open and then load up a game like COD4. I think the hard drive transfer speed was the biggest bottleneck.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if Vista will be best run in a future "Vista Light" edition that will be hacked together by software pirates... though I guess it will probably be best run on a solid state drive.</comment></comment></comment>


Spark as a Compiler: Joining a Billion Rows per Second on a Laptop - <AUTHOR> https://databricks.com/blog/2016/05/23/apache-spark-as-a-compiler-joining-a-billion-rows-per-second-on-a-laptop.html <comment><USER2> To put this into context I would recommend reading 'MonetDB/X100: Hyper- Pipelining Query Execution' [0]. Vectorized execution has been sort of an open secret in database industry for quite some time now.

For me, is particularly interesting reading the Spark achievements. I was part of the similar Hive effort (the Stinger initiative [1]) and I contributed some parts of the Hive vectorized execution [2]. I see the same solution that applied to Hive now applies to Spark:

\- move to a columnar, highly compressed storage format (Parquet, for Hive it was ORC)

\- implement a vectorized execution engine

\- code generation instead of plan interpretation. This is particularly interesting for me because for Hive this was discussed then and actually _not_ adopted (ORC and vectorized execution had, justifiably, bigger priority).

Looking at the numbers presented in OP, it looks very nice. Aggregates, Filters, Sort, Scan ('decoding') show big improvement (I would expected these, is exactly what vectorized execution is best at). I like that Hash-Join also shows significant improvement, is obvious their implementation is better than the HIVE-4850 I did, of which I'm not too proud. The SM/SMB join is not affected, no surprise there.

I would like to see a separation of how much of the improvement comes from vectorization vs. how much from code generation. I get the feeling that the way they did it these cannot be separated. I think there is no vectorized plan/operators to compare against the code generation, they implemented both simultaneously. I'm speculating, but I guess the new whole-stage code generation it generates vectorized code, so there is no vectorized execution w/o code generation.

All in all, congrats to the DataBricks team. This will have a big impact.

[0] [http://oai.cwi.nl/oai/asset/16497/16497B.pdf](http://oai.cwi.nl/oai/asset/16497/16497B.pdf) [1] [http://hortonworks.com/blog/100x-faster- hive/](http://hortonworks.com/blog/100x-faster-hive/) [2] [https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-4160](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HIVE-4160)

<comment><USER3> How much of this work gets the working set off of the JVM heap? They are generating JVM bytecode? Compact heap layout is the next big win.

<comment><USER2> OP points to SPARK-12795 [0] and is all open source. They generate Java source code. You can read more at the prototype pull request: [https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/10735](https://github.com/apache/spark/pull/10735) (I couldn't find a spec doc). If I understand correctly they insert a `WholeStageCodegen`[1] operator into the plan:

        /**
         * WholeStageCodegen compile a subtree of plans that support codegen together into single Java
         * function.
         *
         * Here is the call graph of to generate Java source (plan A support codegen, but plan B does not):
         *
         *   WholeStageCodegen       Plan A               FakeInput        Plan B
         * </comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=
         *
         * -> execute()
         *     |
         *  doExecute() </comment><comment>--->   inputRDDs() </comment><comment>-> inputRDDs() </comment><comment>> execute()
         *     |
         *     +</comment><comment></comment><comment>----->   produce()
         *                             |
         *                          doProduce()  </comment><comment>-> produce()
         *                                                   |
         *                                                doProduce()
         *                                                   |
         *                         doConsume() <</comment><comment>--- consume()
         *                             |
         *  doConsume()  <</comment><comment>--  consume()
         *
         * SparkPlan A should override doProduce() and doConsume().
         *
         * doCodeGen() will create a CodeGenContext, which will hold a list of variables for input,
         * used to generated code for BoundReference.
         */

[0] [https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-12795](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-12795) [1] [https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/0e70fd61b4bc92bd744fc44...](https://github.com/apache/spark/blob/0e70fd61b4bc92bd744fc44dd3cbe91443207c72/sql/core/src/main/scala/org/apache/spark/sql/execution/WholeStageCodegenExec.scala)

</comment><comment><USER4> >> This style of processing, invented by columnar database systems such as MonetDB and C-Store

True, since MonetDB came of out of the Netherlands around 1993, but KDB+ came out in 1998, well over 8 years before C-Store.

K4 the language used in KDB is 230 times faster than Spark/shark and uses 0.2GB of RAM vs. 50GB of RAM for Spark/shark, yet no mention in the article. It seems a strange omission for such a sensational sounding title [1]. I don't understand why big data startups don't try and remake the success of KDB instead of reinventing bits and pieces of the same tech with a result in slower DB operations and more RAM usage.

[1] [http://kparc.com/q4/readme.txt](http://kparc.com/q4/readme.txt)

<comment><USER5> Because Spark is far, far more than just about storing data and doing basic queries. It is also an analytics e.g. machine learning/modelling platform and a framework for building complex applications on top of Hadoop.

<comment><USER4> KDB+/Q/K is all about analytics too. It is used in more than just financial time series data. Such as power utility usage and resourcing for one.

Hadoop is also about distributed computing, but if the process requires 250x as much RAM, you're going to have a very high TCO regardless of how cheap RAM or servers can be.

J is an opensource APL-derived language, but different in some important ways, but it is not as fast as KDB+/Q/K. J is truly an array-based language, whereas K is list based, so it has more in common with Lisp in that singular respect.

Kerf is a new language being worked on by one of the creators of the Kona language, an opensource version of the K3 language [1].

It seems these type of articles ignore non-opensource solutions even if they are more efficient in many ways including TCO. How many man-years need to be spent to try and duplicate an existing solution, and still not be a better solution?

[1] [https://github.com/kevinlawler/kerf](https://github.com/kevinlawler/kerf)

<comment><USER6> I often feel like the one eyed man trying to describe color and shape to a world of blind people when describing the power of these programming systems. I realize everyone wants free stuff, but folks seem to find it difficult to comprehend how much more powerful and performant some of the pay-for systems, in particular the array(ish) systems are than stuff like Spark. In principle, peer review should make all open source systems superior. In practice, the people most capable of making something like Spark fast work for Oracle, Microsoft or Kx on database and machine learning engines people pay money for. While much software development is just hooking components together, there is still such a thing as software engineering, and those skills are extremely rare. Even looking at humble stuff like file systems... I thought EXT4 was pretty good until reading of the wonders of ZFS. Thanks for mentioning Kerf. I'll also mention Nial, which has had some exciting developments lately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been personally very impressed with Spark's RDD api for easily parallelizing tasks that are "embarrassingly parallel". However, I have found the data frames API to not always work as advertised and thus I'm very skeptical of the benchmarks.

I think a prime example of this is I was using some very basic windowing functions and due to the data shuffling (The data wasn't naturally partitioned) it seemed to be very buggy and not very clear why stuff was failing. I ended up rewriting the same section of code using hive and it had both better performance and didn't seem to have any odd failures. I realize this stuff will improve but I'm still skeptical.

<comment> tma-1 I have been extensively using the dateframe/sql API and I just love it. Most of the issues I have had stemmed from the cluster / Spark configuration and not the API itself. Using SQL is so much more intuitive them using multiple joins, selects, filter etc on an rdd.

<comment><USER7> So I did find it useful for doing additional exploratory aggregations once the data was already cleaned and denormalized. My comment was more directed at the upfront initial data processing (In our case, extracting time series data out of a large amount of files).

I did hit issues w/ multiple joins and shuffling though. Have you not hit issues w/ shuffling?

I was using Spark 1.5.1 for the record.

<comment> tma-1 Have you tried tuning Spark's memory parameters?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting to see that as further work is done on spark (and I'm pleased they're actually improving the system), it behaves more and more like a database.

</comment><comment><USER9> Reading about databases always makes me sad about the enterprise database I work with.

<comment><USER10> You can read about the awesome theory behind relational algebra. Gave me a great appreciation for how awesome SQL databases actually are (and why they work the way they do).

<comment><USER11> Any good books on that?

<comment><USER12> This java project gives you a glimpse at how it all works. It was extracted out of a now defunkt db vendor (I think?). [https://calcite.apache.org/](https://calcite.apache.org/)

<comment><USER13> Yeah, it came out of the Eigenbase project. ([http://luciddb.sourceforge.net/](http://luciddb.sourceforge.net/) and [http://www.eigenbase.org](http://www.eigenbase.org)). DB internals are indeed quite fun. (I worked on LucidDB([https://github.com/LucidDB/luciddb](https://github.com/LucidDB/luciddb)) for a time.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Typesafe plans to add support for vectorization into Scala compiler for Akka. Also JVM 8 JIT compiler does it to some extend already.

<comment><USER12> Where'd you read this, I'd love to take a look.

<comment><USER15> [https://github.com/dotty-linker/dotty](https://github.com/dotty-linker/dotty)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'll have to benchmark Spark 2.0 against Flink, it seems like it could be faster than Flink now. It does depend on if the dataset they used was living in memory before they ran the benchmark, but it's still some pretty impressive numbers and some of the optimizations they made with Tungsten sound similar to what Flink was doing.

<comment><USER17> Really depends on the use case. If you're trying to do streaming, spark will introduce some latency because it's based on micro-batching. Flink and Storm are better for low-latency scenarios.

<comment><USER16> I agree that Flink is better for low latency, but I was also under the impression Flink's DataSet API was faster for batch processing than Spark. Now that they're purporting Spark 2.0 may be up to 10x faster than 1.6 I'll have to take another look.</comment></comment></comment>


A Libc in LLVM - <AUTHOR> https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2019-June/133282.html <comment><USER2> A cross-platform libc included with LLVM is much needed! Languages like Go, Rust, .. already abstract away arch and OS details, while one of the oldest high-level languages, C is still battling this fundamental requirement.

There's much argument to be made to use the OS specific libc, but that is _only_ for OS specific tasks (ioctl, specific syscalls, etc). If we can make a cross platform libc that implements and abstracts aways the 200 most commonly used syscallc on Linux, I believe 95% of user programs will just work across all OS-es

</comment><comment><USER3> At some point it would be nice if some large organization would move us past libc. Printf and kin are a nightmare. Really we need a more rigorously vetted set of functions. Something typesafe would be nice and having a c++ version would be great, imagine a memcpy that works with std::array natively.

</comment><comment><USER4> Another interesting tack would be to include trivial functions like strlen, memcpy and friends with LLVM (excluding, at least initially, things like sockets). This would help a ton with WebAssembly as we wait for all browsers to support WASI!</comment>


IBM acquires SPSS - <AUTHOR> http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/27936.wss

<comment><USER2> Interesting how even the word 'acquires' is different with IBM. SPSS is in analytics software, but its a 41 year-old company.

Its unlikely its founders 'planned' their exit strategy when they started. I also don't think I will see Google or even Microsoft 'acquire' a 20+ year old company, let alone a 40+ year old one.

<comment><USER3> Isn't SPSS the very first independently sold commercial software package?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IBM, please fix their software, it crashes all the time, the new versions of SPSS are slow, the charts are ugly as hell and the file formats are not open.

It would be the best thing in the world if they could open source it, but I'm not holding my breath. I guess I could learn R, but old habits die hard...

<comment><USER5> You're putting a lot of faith into IBM as far as user experience goes. You, my friend, have apparently never used Lotus Notes.

<comment><USER4> My only exposure to IBM products were their Thinkpads and the various open source they contributed to.

I heard about Lotus Notes, they say it's the hell-spawn of a whore and a prostitute.

<comment><USER6> Internally we prefer to refer to it as "Bloatus Goats" :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting. I always thought IBM would invest more into the R project which would seem more synergistic with their Linux strategy.

<comment><USER8> Their "Linux strategy" is to sell hardware and consulting. In fact at IBM that is just called "strategy".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe IBM will fix the ridiculous licensing situation with SPSS... Ehh this is IBM I'm sure they'll make it worse

</comment><comment><USER10> I reversed engineered their data files back in grad school while studying statistics. They were coded in base-three. I never figured out why.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> found via @monkchips on twitter</comment>


Greenland ice sheet melts 97% in 4 days - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/24/greenland-ice-sheet-thaw-nasa

<comment><USER2> This title is terribly misleading "Greenland ice sheet melts 97% in 4 days". The reality is that 97% of the surface experienced melting, not that 97% melted, or that it shrunk by 97%. There's still a ton of ice there.</comment>


Offensive security work and addiction: why offense is hard to contain - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Sv8IHkBtBEXjSW7WktEYg4EbAUHtVyXIZBrAGD3WR5Y/preview?sle=true

<comment><USER2> TL;DR : Organisations seem suceptible to hacking addiction.</comment>


Excel parser and preview in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://sheetjs.github.io/

<comment><USER2> Please do not repost the same articles repeatedly. Please especially do not delete and repost. That's an abuse of deletion.

Stories are killed as dupes when they've had a significant discussion on HN in about the last year.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there any indication that the posted link was already submitted? I would have expected some sort of warning.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do React Native rich text/WYSIWYG editors exist that work with 0.42+? - <AUTHOR> I've been trying to get different forks of react-native-zss-rich-text-editor working, but it's not maintained and relies on a Web View bridge which seems unnecessary-ish...<p>Are the any good rich text / WYSIWYG editors out there for RN like the WordPress Editor iOS? <comment><USER2> We are preparing one RN WYSWIG for the [https://www.reactjs.co](https://www.reactjs.co) tutorial (React Native tab). It's not published yet, but in progress. Please let me know, if you maybe you have found any other way around.</comment>


Facebook reportedly disables account of attorney Mark S. Zuckerberg - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/05/facebook-disables-account-of-attorney-named-mark-zuckerberg.html <comment><USER2> As draconian as it seems, there was great wisdom in the decision by the Screen Actors Guild that no two members can go by the same name professionally---you can't even use your own legal name if someone else has already taken it. The policy totally prevents snafus like this.

It makes me glad I have a (nearly) unique name; although I'm likely to see a variant of this problem as I'm moving to a town (in Virginia) named Farmville ---est'd 1798. _sigh_

<comment><USER3> Well, yes, that makes sense for a membership association like the Screen Actors Guild. Unfortunately, if Facebook wants to retain its real-name-only cachet, it simply can't afford to have too many stories like this pop up.

This story is particularly worrisome when you consider the amount of ID- verification that this account must have had on file after he already faxed them 3 pieces. What does it take to proof yourself from peremptory nullification if a driver's license, birth certificate _and_ bar association license don't cut it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's the problem with trying to establish real identities over the Internet- its very hard. Quora has had this problem, and so has Facebook.

I can't believe websites still think its a good idea to associate a name with an account rather than just a handle.

<comment><USER5> I use my real name as my username because I'm bad at coming up with new names/aliases/whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Facebook or no Facebook, anyone thinks this story would turn out good for Mark S. Zuckerberg? Free publicity everywhere?

<comment><USER7> Facebook, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you were to look up my name on facebook I am apparently some super hot blonde female.

</comment><comment><USER9> I hope he gets his Facebook page back and shuts down his business site: <http://www.zucklaw.com/>

Or at least, take down the auto-playing flash movie of him popping up and talking a la Princess Leia's hologram in Star Wars. Only reason I even looked is because we're in the same city.

</comment><comment><USER10> The headline reminded me of this similarly tragic tale: <http://goo.gl/3r5VC></comment>


Google Chrome Market Share - <AUTHOR> http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4024/4499455073_a729acd621_o.png <comment><USER2> What's great is that Google is getting everyone upgraded to each new browser. If only Microsoft could do that with IE, and Mozilla with Firefox.

Too bad Google isn't as effective with Android versions.</comment>


Vanguard Patented a Way to Avoid Taxes on Mutual Funds - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-vanguard-mutual-fund-tax-dodge/ <comment><USER2> They also __legally__ unload a large amount of tax burden by working with APs[1] on special custom ETF redemption orders.

For example, an AP will place a redemption order for an equity ETF. Typically, they will either receive cash value of the ETF or a basket of equities that are selected by the Front Office that are part of the underlying index represented by the ETF (the selection for a given _standard_ basket is its own topic of portfolio management). However, in the case of the aforementioned custom orders, Vanguard and the AP will negotiate a special basket of equities to be given in return for the redeemed ETF. Sometimes this basket will just contain a large number of shares of simply one security. It's even possible that _both_ parties make money off of this transaction due to the tax code. This transaction allows Vanguard to unload a large number of securities without paying taxes on them, and allows the AP to obtain these securities a negotiated, cheaper price.

Essentially, the transaction could like something like this:

->Vanguard has 1,000 shares of CompanyX they want to unload. This company can be found in Index Z.

->AP has 1 share of the Vanguard ETF that tracks Index Z. They want to redeem it

->AP gives their 1 share of the ETF to Vanguard

->Vanguard gives them n shares of CompanyX, at say a 5% discount so that: .95 * $CompanyXPrice * Shares = 1 share of Index Z value

->Vanguard is spared the capital gains tax on these shares. AP gets these shares at a discount. They both (on paper) make or save money.

This is legal in the current tax code. The above example is simplified, but it should illustrate the situation (hopefully) well enough.

A brief blurb about it here too: [https://www.pennstatelawreview.org/print- issues/articles/the...](https://www.pennstatelawreview.org/print- issues/articles/the-great-etf-tax-swindle-the-taxation-of-in-kind- redemptions/)

[1] [https://www.etf.com/etf-education-center/21021-who-are- autho...](https://www.etf.com/etf-education-center/21021-who-are-authorized- participants.html)</comment>


"Watching for Watchers" - STRATFOR on telling when you are target of a crime - <AUTHOR> http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100616_watching_watchers <comment><USER3> I think this article is a great, _sophisticated_ version of those chain emails that are targeted at women, telling them not to get into their car in some manner in a parking lot.

<comment><USER4> I was fascinated while reading this, but eventually realized it was targeted more at paranoid loons than secret agents.

<comment><USER5> I think you have to consider the matter from a Bayesian perspective before just labeling it as "for paranoid loons". If I behaved this way in my environment, I would pretty much be being a paranoid loon. On the other hand, if I were riding the New York subways every day, it would be nice if there were at least a few civilians keeping an eye out for things. (Not everybody, though; that's a recipe for hundreds of false positives.) There are other people who aren't being paranoid loons, like researchers who use animals; for them this is a real concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's this generally misguided sense of what "intelligence" means - <USER2> spooks are different from you or me. I don't believe it. All sorts of people pass information back to the government in both formal and informal ways, paid and unpaid. Does this make them spies?

All this article is saying is that the vast majority of people are so out-to- lunch most of the time that they don't even notice when sketchy stuff is happening right around them. And the very reason this happens has been proved out in the comments - because people don't want to think of themselves as "paranoid loons" or crazy conspiracy theorists.

While tech intel is a bit different than the so-called "situational awareness" described in the article, I think we all participate in the intel process in some way (though maybe not directly by talking to the government, but remember how there's no more privacy on the internets?)

</comment><comment><USER7> I notice that they imply that Greenpeace is a terrorist organisation.

<comment><USER4> No, actually they include Greenpeace in the category "criminals and terrorist organizations", which is more accurate, since Greenpeace has been known to commit crimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reads like the narrative from Burn Notice. But better.

</comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only one who felt the intended audience was surveillers rather than surveillees?</comment>


Pentagon officially releases UFO videos - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/27/politics/pentagon-ufo-videos/index.html <comment><USER2> This comment on ArsTechnica on the same subject links to some videos which have nice explanations for the videos: [https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/navy-releases- three-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/navy-releases-three-videos- that-showcase-unidentified-objects/?comments=1&post=38845980)

Basically lens flare, balloon, and a plane.

<comment><USER3> Love these explanations, thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's an interview with one of the Navy's pilots that actually chased one of those things! [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco2s3-0zsQ](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Eco2s3-0zsQ)

</comment><comment><USER5> The folks over at ArmsControlWonk Slack channel are saying they are likely guided MRV tests.

It's easy to get objects with no wings to travel at incredible speeds if they are in re-entry. It also explains multiple objects flying in formation.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here is a post reasoning how the videos might be explained by drones/planes/balloons:

[https://www.metabunk.org/threads/explained-new-navy-ufo- vide...](https://www.metabunk.org/threads/explained-new-navy-ufo- videos.11234/)

</comment><comment><USER5> main thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23007042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23007042)</comment>


Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://distill.pub/2017/aia/ <comment><USER2> My work is very relevant here.

I'm a graffiti artist and a programmer. I started using machine learning techniques to augment street art with various nature landscapes (drone images, rolling hills, etc).

By using simple techniques, such as Style Transfer, I have been able to create some interesting images that are aesthetically pleasing, but unusual. I took the digital results and painted the contents on large canvases.

I recently invested in some GPUs and a new deep learning rig. Im planning on exploring what unique results I can make around graffiti LETTERS, which are interesting in themselves.

Take a look!

[https://becominghuman.ai/digital-processes-inspiring- analog-...](https://becominghuman.ai/digital-processes-inspiring-analog- paintings-a358eb7801a0)

<comment><USER3> Please take the following as a form of intellectual sparring, and spoken loud hypotheses about art theory.

"I processed pictures using the Artistic Style Transfer algorithm and then painted them."

Isn't that just effectively painting by numbers? Autotune for visual arts... and it's not interesting once one learns to percieve the effect.

The problem is that one takes a less interesting input domain, and runs it through a filter that makes it more aesthetically interesting. Once one learns to percieve the common transfer function my brain filters it back into the less interesting input domain. Music and visual arts as well.

When digital images became common there was a huge influx of people who ran their images through photoshop filters and called their output "art".

What one likes, one likes, I have no qualm about that.

For me personally, though, that is just tastless, unimaginative and boring. Maybe it's because once people use well known domain transfer tools, my brain learns to discern those domain transfers and robs the output of it's pleasant features induced by the domain transfer.

To provide actual value, the process should make the content somehow more "alive" or "interesting" than just by applying a "trivial" domain transfer, like a well known neural network domain transfer or photoshop filter.

Maybe a person should invent ones own domain transfer system, thus not make it commoditized?

Many ancient master held their work strictly in secret before it was ready. Maybe, they realized that if the process was known people would recognize it simply as consequent application of various domain transfer functions and the magic would be lost.

<comment><USER4> Honest intellectual sparring over art comes in the form of art. Saying "I could have made that" is false in the context of art. If a person could have they would have. If they didn't, they can't. The proof is in the work.

<comment><USER5> That's ridiculous. Every artist has to make choices -- they can't pursue every avenue of creative development. Not everyone brings all their potentials to fruition. Opportunity costs.

To say "unless you have already done x, you cannot do x" is a mind-bogglingly wrong perspective to take.

Many people are capable of coming up with, for example, witty, plausible conceptual art ideas. Generally they don't pursue it because only a few famous players can make a living that way. In addition, there are the dynamics of charisma to consider: a successful artist needs to sell themselves, to persuade an audience that their work has value. It generally takes a level of narcissism to achieve that. All of that hype and marketing is peripheral to the ability to actually make the work.

<comment><USER4> An art idea, however witty is not a work of art. The hard part of art creation is the willingness to evaluate opportunity costs in terms of lost opportunities to make art. Saying "This sunset would make a lovely photograph" is not making a photograph of a sunset. Art is in the artifact.

The professional artists I know aren't famous. They don't persuade people. Sometimes they do what they do. Sometimes they make things they think people will like. Sometimes they make works on commission. They make a living at art, but it is something they were doing before making a living at art and had ordinary day jobs. As professionals artists their day job looks a lot like other day jobs in that they work a lot of hours and have to deal with paperwork and order supplies and collect money from customers.

<comment><USER5> Since the 1960s, conceptual art has been an uncontroversial thing. An idea _can_ be art. A gesture that leaves no perceptible trace can be art. "A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance." – Robert Smithson.

The reality of the trendy art world (high-profile artists and gallery) is that good PR is the one thing an artist absolutely can't do without. Everything else is optional. Anything can be art. No physical manifestation is required.

I'm sure the artists you mention are serious and professional. There's a distinction that's sometimes drawn between the kind of conceptual/trendy work and supposedly more honest, commercial or traditional art production. It's almost always the more conservative, conventional people who make that distinction -- it's a way of dismissing more conceptual work as pretentious or elitist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The quality of this journal is mind boggling.

<comment><USER7> Programmed frontend demos here and in places like news sites can be used to great effect. I how one could increase accessibility of these sorts of widgets to non-programmers? Deeplearning is a bit out of scope for that, but interesting graphics have a bunch of other uses.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Processing.js[0] might be a good start? Or maybe Paper.js[1]. Possibly including Tween.js, or something else[2]. It wouldn't be a memory-conscious thing at the outset (without investing much more work), but if there was a more convenient layer overtop of one of those, or a combination, as a drop-in widget that can be customized by some simple UI or much more rudimentary scripting as something possibly embeddable or native to a blog or news platform might cut it.

Sounds like a good idea. IIRC D3 came out of the NYT? Of course that was rather programmer-centric, but similar root need seems to have inspired it.

[0] [http://processingjs.org/](http://processingjs.org/) [1] [http://paperjs.org/](http://paperjs.org/) [2] [https://www.createjs.com](https://www.createjs.com)

<comment><USER7> I imagine some sort of excel-like tabular data -> charts with sliders and filters could work pretty well as a starting point.

Take a BI tool and trim all of the fat. All the BI tools in existence right now go hard on enterprise targeting, and they have all of the complexities involved in that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You are already being augmented each time you use a search engine, a calculator, an encyclopedia, a GPS, etc... an abacus even.

e.g: The pathfinding algorithm on a GPS is technically narrow AI. And if we stress this even further, a conditional statement could be AI. Your washing machine runs on AI (fuzzy logic).

Same with the term "technology". A spoon is technology, a chair is technology, a roof is technology. The term you would be usually looking for is high technology, which is state-of-the-art technology.

Having said this, AI is an ambiguous term and usually leads to clickbait, large disambiguations and waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER9> So far the generative models I've seen (VAEs, GANs) really just seem to morph between images.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's super interesting that by removing serif from a sans-serif font you get Comic Sans!

</comment><comment><USER11> Great article but some many typos ... sigh

</comment><comment><USER12> Isn't that Elon Musks approach with Neuralink?

I'm referring to the article: [https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html)</comment>


Deploying a Static Blog with Continuous Integration - <AUTHOR> https://www.loxodrome.io/post/hugo-on-ci/ <comment><USER3> Netlify[0] is the best solution I've found so far for my personal site. It's specifically designed for this purpose. One of the nice features they have is the ability to set headers on different pages as well as proxy certain paths to external services via configuration files.

[0] [https://www.netlify.com/](https://www.netlify.com/)

<comment><USER4> +1 for Netlify. I've been using it for a few months for my personal site. It took me maybe 10 minutes from creating an account to going live with SSL from a GitHub repository. I brought it work with me, using it to host a React prototype (and hopefully, eventually, production).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For a single provider solution GitLab pages has built-in CI and hosting.

[https://gitlab.com/pages/hugo](https://gitlab.com/pages/hugo)

They have gitlab-ci.yml files for most of the static page generators. Whether you use Hugo, Jeckyll, Pelican, etc there is a ci config to start with virtually no setup overhead for hosting or ci.

<comment><USER6> Didn't know about this. Very cool, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> An even simpler solution is to use github pages. So no CI needed at all. You push your changes and Github is doing all the work on its own. You get the final result as html.

No ssh keys, no circle CI, no environment variables. Just git push

</comment><comment><USER8> A brilliant solution to deploy static website is using Firebase Hosting. Works brilliantly - provisions free certificates, and is fairly easy to do. deployment is a question of writing a json file and using firebase cli to run deploy. You get all the advantages of Google CDN, etc. Also a cool feature is rollbacks, where you can go back to a previous version of the website.

The biggest problem is firebase cli - I really wish they had built a static binary using golang (firebase is a Google division after all). The dependencies in firebase cli are sometime broken, etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> _Although the site generation software here is Hugo it could easily be another provider such as Jekyll. The web server will be hosted on a Digital Ocean droplet running Nginx, and CircleCI will be used for for the continuous integration (often abbreviated to simply "CI")_

It's just a blog. Why is this better than running Wordpress, perhaps with a caching server in front if the traffic is heavy enough?

<comment><USER10> Another advantage is you can put your _entire_ website on a CDN provider like Cloudflare, because the whole site is static. This means my server can die completely, but Cloudflare can still keep on serving my site, and my readers have no idea of my ineptitude.

You can do this even with Cloudflare's free tier - no need to rely primarily on adding more VPS instances/load-balancing to 'scale' your static site - <USER2> CDN can help take care of this. I've recently moved my Jekyll based blog to the cheapest VPS instance I could find, and use CloudFlare to handle the load (not that it has much in the way of readers...).

<comment><USER11> be careful relying on that though.. Each pop has it's own cache, and when there's a miss, it'll hit your server.

Its pretty rare that a CDN gives you any insight into their caches, and there's no guarantee a file is kept in the cache. A file can be removed from the cache for many reasons--cache filled; file not popular enough; etc.

So even if your local pop is saying the file is cached.. the other pops may not have any files for your website at all... or might be missing parts of the page (images, etc). (The x-cache header only indicates the status of the file at the pop that served the request -- not all pops.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another option, ICYI is Aerobatic

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

The new themes gallery has you live in less than a minute.

Disclaimer: I work at Aerobatic.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't mean to be pedantic but I do get confused by people writing about tenants and building in one sentence, when they probably meant tenets?

"...we can leverage another one of it's key tenants, which is that the building,..."

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, fixed :p</comment></comment>


ASUS's Sexist Twitter Gaffe Angers Followers - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/06/04/asus-sexist-tweet/

<comment><USER2> Appreciating beauty is criminal. When will people learn?</comment>


Darpa Project Is About Thinking Computers - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/darpa-project-artificial-intelligence-2013-10 <comment><USER2> Hence, why we need MIRI [http://intelligence.org/](http://intelligence.org/)</comment>


My weekend project: anonymous, realtime message board with socket.io - <AUTHOR> http://oak.io/about This is just a simple node app on a small Joyent server! <comment><USER2> Do NOT go to this service! It does not filter JavaScript and so is succeptble to XSS and other hacks. I sent on and clicked on a chat named 'Natalie portman' and it can up with an alert box that said 'no chance bro' and kept on popping up and I had to shut down my browser. Other than that - pretty kewl! Is the code open source?

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually got tricked by that too haha. I went into the database and deleted that, and pushed a fix to production.

<comment><USER3> You are now totally qualified to start a Bitcoin bank.

<comment><USER4> I laughed a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is a fun little site, I really enjoyed playing with it. You really need to add some spam prevention, title & comment length limits, fix exploits, etc.

I wanted to play around with it some more, but it's just pure spam now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I really hate spammers :\

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is just on a small Joyent server, running one process. I started it Friday night so there's still a few holes.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, like it's not anonymous. Someone figured out that you can see all ip addresses (tied to comments) when you open up firebug.

<comment><AUTHOR> I fixed that actually. You can still get around my fix but I will fix the fix later.

<comment><USER7> So it's totally anonymous except you store the IP addresses, huh?

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct.

<comment><USER7> Pretty misleading.

The whole point of your experiment was to see how people would act if completely anonymous, right? They aren't. So your experiment is flawed.

<comment><USER8> Seeing as how there aren't terms of service maybe YOUR flawed. It's a web app that never guaranteed your privacy.

<comment><USER7> "oak is an experiment. what will people act like if they are _truly anonymous_?" His words.

Note that I'm not "mad." I only pointed out that it was misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's like real-time reddit.. its be fun, but probably hard to make constructive, lol

I like it, and envy the fact you could just create this on a whim over a weekend. I wish I had that kind of discipline when it comes to some of my spontaneous ideas!

</comment><comment><USER10> This is actually a lot of fun man, kudos.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I had a lot of fun writing it!

<comment><USER10> Are you planning on open sourcing the code via Github or something? I haven't built a Node app myself just yet, would be interesting to see how you did it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I might! The code is still kind of gnarly right now but I'll clean it up this week and decide then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cool one!

It'd probably be a good idea to crop titles and contents if they exceed a particular length.

<comment><AUTHOR> Doing this right now!

<comment><AUTHOR> Pushed a limit of 200 chars

<comment><USER12> Might want to stop same IP from posting over and over again...

<comment><AUTHOR> I added a limit of 15 posts per minute for now

<comment><USER13> What if you try 1 post per 30 seconds ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just added a basic spam detector and truncated title lengths :|

<comment><AUTHOR> Also I had to upgrade my RAM pretty fast haha. Should be better now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice work dude! This is like 4chan, but real-time :D

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll take that as a compliment haha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice MVP with critical mass reached.

</comment><comment><USER16> What kind of server do you use?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is just a single process on a Joyent SmartMachine. It's the first time I've used them and I've been pleased!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> nice

</comment><comment><USER17> cool

</comment><comment><USER18> So you built 4chan without the user base.

</comment><comment><USER8> lol the xss possibilities on this thing are making me drool a bit

and that guy is not going to get banned

<comment><AUTHOR> I patched up the ones that were apparent, but I'm sure there's still some open.

<comment><USER8> oh trust me, there are still plenty. depending on how you handle the spamming and stuff, I might even contribute the ones I find myself.</comment></comment></comment>


Get 30GB free lifetime cloud storage from pCloud Use code "HACKERNEWS" - <AUTHOR> http://pcloud.com/promo <comment><USER2> Awesome! Hadn't considered another cloud, but 30 gigs is a bargain... Sign up was a bit confusing though

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers, gogojo, and enjoy your free space! Pls share a few more details what you found confusing?

<comment><USER2> No confirmation after I registered

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What if you already have an account?

<comment><USER4> It looks like there were two options in the promo page: "Register" and "Login", you should try with login.

Well, not anymore, since now it takes you to the promo form if you are already logged in.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! I feel so stupid not even trying the link and seeing it had a /promo in it. It worked just fine!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also, code is CASE SENSITIVE.</comment>


How we got the .com for our startup - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ajt/how-we-got-the-com-for-our-startup-b48fd6c5511/

<comment><USER2> Why has this been resubmitted? I'm assuming it's because of the unflattering comments made in the last thread [1]...I don't necessarily agree with the tactics employed either, and I think you guys should rethink using this blogpost as a way to garner attention.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7983501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7983501)

</comment><comment><USER3> > The problem is, you approached me to buy the domain before you launched and > before you had applied for a trademark. I told you that the domain was in > use, and you then proceeded to register the TM and pressed ahead with the > launch. I think that is quite a strange thing to do….

You know, I think they have a point.</comment>


Silicon Valley's New Spy Satellites - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/silicon-valleys-new-spy-satellites/282580/

<comment><USER2> None of these satellites will improve on the maximum resolution of Google Maps. Physics prevents it. They would need to be MUCH larger to get better resolution. Like: [http://spaceref.com/onorbit/kh-9-hexagon-spy-satellite- makes...](http://spaceref.com/onorbit/kh-9-hexagon-spy-satellite-makes-a-rare- public-outing-%28photos-and-video%29.html)

What they may be able to do is get more up to date information. I think this makes Planet Labs really interesting. With 28 satellites (even if only 20 make it operational) you still end up with being able to image every point on earth every hour or so contingent on cloud cover (granted we're talking really low resolution because those cameras are little more than a hand-held Canon lens you see at sports events).

The problem I'd be curious about for PlanetLabs is how they plan to downlink their information back down to earth. They wont be able to afford access to something like TDRSS ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_and_Data_Relay_Satelli...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_and_Data_Relay_Satellite_System)) but they may be able to do some really cool mesh networks to always get access to a single ground station. That would be a really cool and unique solution. Otherwise they need to wait for each satellite to fly over a single ground station which would only happen every 9 hours or so if they are lucky.</comment>


Avoiding Burnout - <AUTHOR> http://andrewdumont.me/avoiding-burnout <comment><USER2> I remember reading this published insight[1] from Marissa Mayer a few months ago:

 _Burnout is caused by resentment_

Which sounded amazing, until this guy who dated a neuroscientist commented[2]:

 _No. Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.

Subconsciously, then eventually, consciously, you wonder if it's worth it. The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work. As a biologist, I frequently put in 50-70 and sometimes 100 hour workweeks. The very nature of experimental science (lots of unkowns) means that failure happens. The nature of the culture means that grad students are "groomed" by sticking them on low- probability of success, high reward fishing expeditions (gotta get those nature, science papers) I used to burn out for months after accumulating many many hours of work on high-risk projects. I saw other grad students get it really bad, and burn out for years.

During my first postdoc, I dated a neuroscientist and reprogrammed my work habits. On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don't burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.

For coders, I would posit that most burnout comes on the heels of failure that is not in the hands of the coder (management decisions, market realities, etc). My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.

That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue._

Then I finally realized how many times I've burnt out in my life, and I became much better into avoiding it. Which is really hard to do.

And it seems to me that this is one of the many points that Ben Horowitz talks about on his _What's The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology_ [3]

[1] [http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by- resentment...](http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by- resentment.html)

[2] [http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by- resentment...](http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by- resentment.html#comment-478842490)

[3] [http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/01/what%E2%80%99s-the-most- diff...](http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/01/what%E2%80%99s-the-most-difficult- ceo-skill-managing-your-own-psychology/)

<comment><USER3> The people in the know now understand that what we call "burnout" is not a psychological disorder at all, but sub-clinical[1] adrenal fatigue caused by stress, period. In other countries with superior medical system integration, like Austria/Germany, this is an accepted medical fact.

If you stress out a rat long enough, its adrenal glands will actually bleed. If you stress out a human long enough, you cause first a huge ongoing spike in cortisol etc., and later, a serious drop as the damage is done. This can be measured easily using a 24-hour cortisol saliva or blood test, but it rarely is. (Related hormones: DHEA, thyroid).

Symptoms of burnout are just like the symptoms of CFS/low thyroid because they are part of the HPA (Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenals) Axis. They're tightly coupled.

While short bursts of endorphins will make you feel better, the effect will be temporary. Endorphins will not make your adrenal glands or thyroid work again. Instead, they mask the symptoms… but only for a while. There are only three ways to get better: Dramatically cut stress. Wait. Take medication. Pick 2.

[1] "Sub-clinical" usually means "not measurable," but in the case of "burnout" and adrenal fatigue, it is absolutely measurable. However, I call it sub-clinical because of the way most doctors think of the adrenal glands. Most doctors believe that the adrenal glands are binary: they are either working perfectly, or totally non-functional (Addison's disease). Unless you're on the verge of death from lack of cortisol, they will tell you you're fine.

If you have burnout, get your 24-hour saliva test. Take your morning temperature with an old-fashioned thermometer under your arm for 10 min. Look up the other symptoms of adrenal fatigue and hypothyroid. There's plenty of research published about how burnout is measurable and related to the HPA axis -- you don't have to take my word for it. There are lots of support groups, too, where the sufferers have often presaged the research.

And for god's sake, stop telling yourself it's about failure or investment or whatever and _stop stressing yourself out, period_ , or you can get like I am and it can become _permanent_.

EDIT: If you google "burnout syndrome" you will read several sources claiming that there is no proof it's a real thing. This is 100% false. They also say it's not accepted by the medical community, but rather a quacky way to sell supplements. It's true that most doctors are unaware of the research, but the ones who do treat it with real medicine (see below).

It's painfully easy to say "There's no proof" but a 5-minute search of Google Scholar shows otherwise:

<http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/content/61/2/197.short> (from 1999!)

[http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&...](http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&UID=2005-13290-009)

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022399999...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022399999000070)

<http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/content/62/2/286.short>

<http://gimle.fsm.it/28/1s_psi/05.pdf>

The theories from doctors who've spent their lifetime researching it go as follows: Burnout happens in stages. In the early stages, cortisol etc. are elevated. In the later stages, the "fatigue" sets in, and cortisol is too low. I personally spent 3+ months in low-cortisol hell and it was the most awful time in my life… and there have been some really bad times in my life. .

And there are quite a lot of endocrinologists etc. who will treat low-testing cortisol patients with hydrocortisone, isocort or florinef or other _drugs_ which are not "supplements" by any stretch of the imagination.

IF you are stressing yourself out, and IF you keep going down that road, this is what you have to look forward to:

Being unable to get out of bed. Being unable to make the simplest of decisions without feeling like you're having a panic attack. Being unable to read, because it's too much information at once. Being unable to watch TV shows that have too many "facts" in them. All of the above -- including simple questions of "What do you want for lunch, honey?" -- triggered panic-like attacks in me, who'd never had a panic attack despite years of physical and emotional abuse as a child. It was like being surrounded and squeezed and shouted at by a million people all at once, just to try to _listen to my lunch options_. That is because cortisol is required to rise to the "stress" of every day living… standing up from sitting is a stress, making decisions, etc., all create tiny spikes of cortisol to help you cope. If your cortisol is too low, you are screwed.

Is there any "victory" worth a life like that? Can you even call that a life?

<comment><USER4> > Being unable to get out of bed. Being unable to make the simplest of > decisions without feeling like you're having a panic attack. Being unable to > read, because it's too much information at once. Being unable to watch TV > shows that have too many "facts" in them. All of the above -- including > simple questions of "What do you want for lunch, honey?" -- triggered panic- > like attacks in me, who'd never had a panic attack despite years of physical > and emotional abuse as a child. It was like being surrounded and squeezed > and shouted at by a million people all at once, just to try to listen to my > lunch options.

Holy...! You have described my current condition even better than I could. Interestingly, I just came back from a doctor who, after reviewing my blood tests(standard blood tests), said that there wasn't anything wrong with me and my issues were lack of exercise. Which may be true, but getting out of the bed currently IS an exercise for me. It is getting better though, two months after quitting my job - I can even enjoy Hacker News again.

Since you've gone down this path, what would you suggest? I am having a hard time convincing any doctors to do a more complete examination. I was going to focus next on sleep disorders, but now I think it might be worth talking to an endocrinologist...

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately there is no standard blood test for CFS/burnout. I agree with Amy that cortisol might be useful, but the problem is that it isn't always a reliable indicator of illness.

Anyway, just keep doing what you are doing and you will gradually recover. For more info, see: <http://www.mind-body-health.net/recovery.html> (a site I developed 10 years ago after recovering myself).

Unfortunately this is a very misunderstood area of medicine because doctors (and patients) like to pigeonhole illnesses as either physical or psychological, and psychiatric/psychosomatic illness has a very bad negative stereotype.

<comment><USER3> There are plenty of tests which can show what's wrong with you - but they're not "standard" in the sense of doctors using them.

If your morning cortisol is above a certain level or below a certain level; if your morning, before-you-get-out-bed axillary body temperature is above or below a certain temperature (under 97.8 or above 98.6); if your blood pressure deviates by a certain amount over a 16-hour day; if your average temps deviate by more than 0.2 F from day to day; if you have post-exertional malaise… you have an HPA malfunction of one kind or another.

I'd say "you should also get your thyroid checked" but the blood tests for that are atrociously useless. Check the symptoms. Low body temp, especially in the morning before you get out of bed (mine ranges from 96.5-97.4), slow heart rate if you're not an athlete (mine is 50-60 bpm and I am NOT an athlete!), puffy face/eyes, myxedema (non pitting) swelling/thickened rubbery skin on your upper outer arm or shin, changed ankle-tap reflexes, very cold extremities, Raynaud's phenomenon, etc., those are the signs that are actually diagnostic of a thyroid insufficiency.

These are how doctors have diagnosed and treated low thyroid successfully for a hundred years. The blood tests are a new thing but they aren't very indicative of actual dysfunction (or function).

All of the above is like a lot like low blood pressure. Low blood pressure is only defined by numbers when it becomes _dangerous to life_. Otherwise, you're diagnosed with low blood pressure if your blood pressure is "normal" or below and you have symptoms. E.g. I have low blood pressure at 100-110/60-70 even though that's considered just fine, because I feel faint when I stand up and other symptoms.

Generally, the best resource I've found is _From Fatigued to Fantastic_. It helped me get much, much, better.

<comment><USER5> While I agree with most of what you say, the problem is that a lot of studies have been done on the HPA axis and cortisol in CFS/burnout, but there is no agreement. Some studies find low cortisol, others don't. There is definitely HPA axis dysfunction, but nobody can seem to pin it down. I suspect that if you measured cortisol throughout the day and correlated it to a symptom diary and/or a stress test, you might be able to come up with a diagnostic test.

The other issue is that there is no cheap and easy cortisol test like there is for blood glucose. As far as I can tell it would be possible to develop such a test, but nobody has done it yet for a number of reasons (lack of demand, cost, FDA approval, etc).

If someone were to [1] figure out a definitive test for burnout/CFS and [2] develop/patent a home testing kit they would be very rich and help a lot of people into the bargain.

As for Teitelbaum: while he does have some useful stuff to say, he also peddles a lot of quackery.

<comment><USER3> Re: the contradictory studies… if you go with the group of practitioners who argue that there are different stages to the disorder, they're not contradictory at all. The stages argument says a person starts off with very high cortisol output (because you're under stress) and this is what causes the damage and fall-off of production later:

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10633533>

The 24-hour saliva cortisol test costs about $100 and should tell you a lot:

[http://labtestsonline.org/understanding/analytes/cortisol/ta...](http://labtestsonline.org/understanding/analytes/cortisol/tab/test)

There are definitive clinical (non-blood) tests for hypothyroid (I mentioned several of them), there are also ways to test for FM/CFS (muscle recovery among others). They just don't get used a lot.

As for quackery -- the only quackery I read in Teitelbaum's book was about the allergy treatment and it's not any more or less quacky than acupuncture (where the research was discredited) so I consider it harmless. Every "canonical" scientist has some kind of nutty side, from Isaac Newton on down the line. (Note: Not comparing Teitelbaum to Newton whatsoever. It's just an ideal, extreme, example.) Everything else in his book is supported with research citations. I've checked them, and others, because I followed his advice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> These ideas all seem like bandaids to me if they aren't personal goals that you care about. I've seen studies that show that burnout is caused by sustained imbalance between your personal goals and how you're living your life. This can also happen retro actively. For example, if you were to find out that you weren't going to get paid for a job you'd been working the last 6 months on, you would almost instantly be burned out. That is, if you were doing it for the money of course. Your personal goal is to spend a certain percentage of your time on things that will increase your wealth, and if you weren't to get paid, the sudden overwhelming sense of losing six months would burn you out immediately.

Likewise in a startup, I think the studies would say that you find yourself burned out because at some point, something inside you says, "80 hours a week for the last year wasn't really completely in line with all my personal goals. I have a goal to have personal relationships, spend time with my family, and exercise, yet this startup is the only thing I've been doing." At some point a voice inside says, "It wasn't worth it."

People have very different goals, so results will vary as to what causes burnout, but as a boss, something I know will cause burnout is anything that will pull the rug out from under an employee regarding benefits that they expected to receive. For startups this is super tricky because some employees are expecting an IPO with big payouts, and when they get disillusioned about that, there's really no way to stop the burnout.

</comment><comment><USER7> I feel like this is useful information for much more than just people involved in work. Specifically, as PhD students, my partner and I (and pretty much all of our colleagues) often face burnout, and are always looking for ways to combat it.

I quite like the sound of most things in this article, and think I will try to adopt some of the principles to my study and see if they will help. Specifically, I need to get back into fiction, because that really did help when I read lots a few months ago. Also, evening walks sounds like a beautiful way to wind down.

Does anybody else here have other advice on ways to combat burnout during a PhD? I (and every other student) would be most interested to hear.

<comment><USER8> I have very clear advice for PhD: Agree to work 4 hours a day on your thesis + papers (including reading literature!), and stop. You won't get more done anyways, so enjoy the rest of your day guilt-free. It is a marathon, and the consistent 4-hour days add up. If you miss one day, don't do 8 hours the next day; just do another 4. Don't make more than 4 hours mandatory.

<comment><USER7> I completely agree. The only point where I fail at this is when I compare it to the 8 hour days I do once a week as a web developer (unrelated to the PhD). It seems so easy to power through the 8 hours and still feel like you could get more done. Then you go to uni, and if you manage 4 hours, it is a success. I always feel like I should be able to manage 8 hour days at Uni too, but of course it is a different kind of work which stresses different parts of your brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's funny. I work in New Zealand, and I do my 37.5 hours a week as required (any more than that, and I get over-time) but that 37.5 hours takes such. a. long. time!

When I was working for a startup, and working from whatever time I woke up, till 3am in the morning, time flew by so quickly. I could easily do 80 hours, and have great fun. I was creative, and energised.

As soon as I went from a startup to working for a large employer and was forced to do 8.30am till 5.00pm all my productivity and energy flew right out the window.

Sigh.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like there's a simple (to explain, not necessarily to do) solution for you. What's keeping you at the sucky job?

<comment><USER11> Not an OP, but I can answer the same.

Good pay, benefits, stability, lots of free time and overall an ability to "have life" now (between 5 and 8:30) as opposed to having it after a startup _maybe_ exits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Excellent article.

This is the first time I've deliberately activated the Kudos mouse-over thing on this guy's blog.

I can't count the number of times I've done it accidentally.

<comment><USER13> Agree on this Kudos :) I activated it by accident (didn't know how they work). I don't regret it. The article was entertaining. Ok. But. The number of false positives with this kudos system is probably very high. You should click to confirm. Anyway, I don't like a web page where I have to be very careful where I put my mouse over. Feels like a minefield. </off-topic>

<comment><USER14> Totally agree, I think the Kudos system implemented in Svbtle and other clones is fundamentally broken until there's a way to undo it. Just hovering and waiting in place for a trivial action is a pain (and many people toggle with it accidentally thinking it's some whimsical animation), no less that being at the top of the page is completely backwards in itself; put it at the bottom after I've already read the post enough to judge it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been sitting here at my computer since almost 8pm yesterday. It's 8PM now. I can absolutely identify with the OP. It's not just startups, having a full time job and going to uni as a full time student was a stupid move.

It's bad enough I work myself like this but there's also all that caffeine. The coke, chocolate bars, energy drinks I consume and not forgetting the smoking.

I tell myself 2 more months and I'll graduate. In the meantime I've made moves by dropping the nicotine, dropping coke and energy drinks and keeping a large bottle of water with me while I work. When the water runs out, that's my cue to get up, stretch, refill and maybe take a power nap.

</comment><comment><USER16> This article really hit home for me. If I could I would take this advice, but I literally can't afford to. My only option is to continue working 12 hour days or I'll actually become homeless. So if anyone here has been through a similar situation I would appreciate any advice you may have to offer.

<comment><USER17> If you're billing each hour of those 12 hour days and can't make ends meet, then you have a problem managing your finances.

If you're salaried and would lose your job if you didn't pull those hours, then I assure you you can find a more reasonable job.

If you're struggling to get a business off the ground, then I doubt that you're getting as much done in the long run at 12 hours a day as you would at 10.

12 hour day crunches can be effective if you do them for a couple weeks; after a month or two the tortoise that stuck with a 40 hour week is probably going to beat you.

At least that's true if you're writing code - longer days can still be semi productive if you're doing softer work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> You have a good regiment for burnout.

You can always feel burnout approaching which is usually about 2 weeks before it really happens (waking up and dreading working on the same thing).

Stop what you're doing and do something totally different for a while. For me its working on a vastly different project and spending weekends in the mountains.

This has never failed me yet as I always re-approach the offending project with the same drive I had when starting it.

<comment><USER19> > You have a good regiment for burnout.

Sounds like you've turned burnout into a military problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Obama makes the right call on the suits. Here's Dan Ariely on "ego depletion": <http://danariely.com/2012/08/15/understanding-ego-depletion/>

</comment><comment><USER21> while often overlooked in our industry, it's the importance of hitting the "reset" button. we're making sure clients are happy, sales people have the information they need, and that can creep very hard into the rest of they day. instituting a "hard stop" can go a long way, it did for me. i've spent 12-15hrs at the office, per day, dealing with meetings, questions, providing guidance and the like. eventually you must put you interests first. whether it's picking up that book, working on that personal project, or calling that friend who works in a different field. ultimately, the problems are not crazy new, but it's the day to day that burns people out. there's knowledge to be shared but when you feel like day in and day out it's the same old, then all the more reason to institute basic guides/metrics that let us know things are on track. vacation is equally important, truly the 'reset' button, get off the grid. after all, it things fall apart while we're getting replenished, it's time to rethink our priorities.

</comment><comment><USER22> Coincidentally, NPR profiled a productivity researcher from HBS this morning. (I haven't been able to find the segment yet, but when they post it I will link to it.) According to her research, the most important driver of productivity is motivation which aligns with Daniel's comment.

Her recommendation for improving motivation? Use tools like IDoneThis to track what you've accomplished each day and take the time now and again to reflect on your progress through that journey.

At Google, we had an internal product called Snippets which is functionally identical to IDoneThis. I'd always believed the purpose of Snippets was to improve communication across a team and company about the contributions of employees. But perhaps I missed perhaps the more important benefit: motivation management and burnout prevention.

<comment><USER23> What if your Snippets just say "tried to fix stuff. still broken" over and over and over again?

<comment><USER22> ha!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Has anyone ever thought that Hackathons are teaching kids how to code as well as how to get burn out?

</comment><comment><USER25> Excellent post. One of the top reasons I don't let employees work more than 40 hours a week, and start kicking people out of the office at 5:30 (if they're still there).

</comment><comment><USER26> Totally. I just left Contour and realized I spent most of my twenties behind my laptop. I was completely exhausted and it has taken me almost six months of doing nothing to have my full energy back. I wrote a similar piece about enjoying the ride. I missed a lot of it at Contour. <http://marcbarros.com/enjoying-the-ride/>

</comment><comment><USER27> Judging from the comments and the articles, it seems like I've never had a proper burnout. I always recover within days, this seems to be a longer matter however. The author talks about warning signs, and many of you mention you can feel it coming, even two weeks advanced.

Would it be possible to describe this to someone like me? Not the burnout, but the warning signs?

<comment><USER5> Google 'chronic fatigue syndrome' to see what the end-point of burnout is like.

Some warning signs: depression, anxiety, insomnia, loss of appetite, constant illnesses, dreading going into work, racing heartrate, etc. Although to be honest by the time you've got to that point you are already pretty burned out and you're well on your way to CFS.

My solution for the past 10 years has been to live my life so there is little/no possibility of ever having burnout (and it has worked :)

<comment><USER27> Ah thanks, those were the pointers I was looking for =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So your saying to avoid burn out dont work as much, this is amazing cant believe others havent thought of that!

</comment><comment><USER29> I cannot understand people who feel "on top of the world" yet are still working within a business that is not cash-flow positive month to month.

"We didn't need a break, we felt great. Better than great."

Yet they are still burning up runway. Just lunacy.

<comment><USER30> Because for some people happiness is about more than cash flow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Excellent article. The funny thing is that when you don't have time to exercise, then it is the time you need it the most.

<comment><USER32> Same can be said about getting enough sleep.

<comment><USER33> Same can be said about socializing.

In fact, here in grad school we have a rule: "Choose any two from -- Grades, Social Life, or Sleep".

<comment><USER34> A friend (who was an international level rower) was told at Cambridge: rowing, classes, social life - pick two. He tried all three and failed the classes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> So basically get a life

</comment><comment><USER36> You never burn out buying lotto tickets.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best (free if possible) Wordpress themes for coding blogs? - <AUTHOR> Hey, wanting to start blogging about my code learning and wondering what Wordpress themes people use for this? I guess I'm looking for something minimal which will look good with crayon plugged in https://github.com/aramk/crayon-syntax-highlighter. Looking forward to hearing your suggestions! <comment><USER2> I've used this one [https://wordpress.org/themes/commodore/](https://wordpress.org/themes/commodore/) very retro!</comment>


Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html

<comment><USER2> I thought the "interactive panorama" link in the article was neat. Had mouseover tooltips for each of the apps he had open, too.

His "dashboard" is cool in a way, but also sad. Makes me think of some rumors (perhaps well-founded or even true) that Sesame Street reduced the attention span of children because of the constant switching of scenes and characters and etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does there need to be a 12-step program for gadget addiction? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-step_program></comment>