Farewell, USS Enterprise (the aircraft carrier) - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/2012/12/01/166242595/farewell-uss-enterprise

<comment><USER2> That feels so wrong. It is still floating and could be useful.

Destructing it is just destruction for the sake of it.

Why not at least sell it to a friendly country, who could use such power to defend itself from neighbouring enemies?

I'm sure Israel or Japan would welcome the gift - they sure could supply their own planes and weapons.

It's a real shame to destroy so much investment - especially since, as noted in the article, its speed is still competitive.

<comment><USER3> > That feels so wrong. It is still floating and could be useful.

It's also an extremely old ship, maintaining it can't be cheap.

> Why not at least sell it to a friendly country, who could use such power to > defend itself from neighbouring enemies?

A carrier is a force projection tool, it's for attacking stuff (or make clear that you can attack stuff), to defend a country an airbase is cheaper, simpler and more versatile.

> I'm sure Israel or Japan would welcome the gift - they sure could supply > their own planes and weapons.

And fuel supply and crew and maintenance? For a _unique_ ship? No other country on earth comes close to having an Enterprise-class carrier (let alone Nimitz-class), I'm really not sure they'd have any use for it. Not to mention a carrier on its own is basically dead (or a floating museum), you need a carrier group around it which costs the same as the carrier itself.

Also Japan is definitely out, they are not allowed to get weaponry for any other purpose than defense (Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution), and as noted above an aircraft carriers is anything but a defensive platform.

> It's a real shame to destroy so much investment

You do realize the Enterprise has been in active use for more than 50 years right? It's the very first nuclear-powered carrier in human history, and the one and only ship of its class (so replacement parts have to be custom-built, where there are 10 bigger, better, more modern Nimitz-class carriers)

<comment><USER4> I was going to say pretty much the same thing. I got to tour the USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) when it stopped by Alameda and was moored next to the USS Hornet (CV-12). Since our tour guide was caught up traffic we went over to the Hornet and visited, and talked to them about the challenges of that restoration/preservation as well.

Basically there were three things that stood out, first was that there was a lot of 'toxic waste' in the form of stuff we know now to be carcinogenic used in the construction of these things, and re-fitting them, or restoring them, often involved complex programs of setting up barriers to prevent material from escaping during refit, and then disposing of it. That is slow and expensive work. The Hornet is like 1/3 the displacement of the Enterprise (30,000 tons vs 90,000 tons) so there is a lot more space.

I was reminded of how sad it was to see perfectly functional 2U servers being broken down for scrap, they can't justify the power it costs to keep them running.

That said, I also thought "Ok, here is something the sea steaders could start with. Make this the 'core' of their first floating island and build around it. It solves two very real bootstrap problems, one it has a power plant that generates useful electricity and comes with a helicopter 'airport' built in for rapid transportation. Of course the chance of the US Navy handing over a carrier to civilian hands with an intact nuclear power source is about the same as a me winning the PowerBall lottery.

<comment><USER2> A bootstrap platform for sea steader ?

That's a great idea - it would be put to a good use, and be an interesting experiment in creating a community on an artifical island!

Hell, _anything_ would be better than just destroying it.

<comment><USER3> You do realize there's a 50 years old nuclear plant inside the Enterprise right?

<comment><USER4> This is true of course, but the power plant is very very simple. Its a fission powered tea kettle. All the 'complicated' bits, the steam turbines the engines, operate outside the tea-kettle part and have been maintained and kept up to date. I don't know if they have done any long term radiological studies on metal fatigue but there aren't a lot of moving parts to go wrong. No reason to think you couldn't continue to use it for another 100 years. And since it goes about 20 years on a single fill up, you'd probably get 50 years out of a refueling if it basically stayed in one place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hopefully they bring back the name for the 3rd Gerald Ford class carrier (CVN-80). It's scheduled for service in 2025 so presumably they'll name it in the next 5-7 years.

<comment><USER6> They announced today that CVN-80 will be the next USS Enterprise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A comparison of carriers in various fleets; the sizes, numbers, and countries:

<http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/carriers.htm>

scroll down for the image.

</comment><comment><USER8> My father served on the Enterprise in the 60's as part of the around the world tour. At that time the island was completely different as well as the air wing complement. We have this giant photo in our house of the old square island and an A-5 vigilante taking off. It's amazing to consider the the Enterprise has been reworked and refitted so many times over a long career.

</comment><comment><USER9> Honestly, I'd repurpose it for use in coastal disaster relief. The reactors and desalination facilities could provide emergency power and water, and if it were set up to carry helicopters instead of airplanes it could serve as a base of rescue operations.

<comment><USER10> The Navy has maybe half a dozen ships that are specialized for that role already.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> At the inactivation ceremony a couple hours ago, the Secretary of the Navy announced (via video) that the next nuclear carrier after the Gerald R. Ford will be named Enterprise. Cheers went up.

(I was a nuclear-engineering officer on this Enterprise.)

</comment><comment><USER11> I must say i don't understand why so many people here are so sad that a weapon is destroyed. In my book that's fucking great! I'm even somewhat disgusted.

But when i read the title i was sad as well... until i came across "The aircraft carrier".

<comment><USER12> I agree entirely with the idea of rejoicing at a weapon destroyed.

However, something like this represents world history, as well as personal history. Life is more complex and nuanced than "weapons bad," because we live in that world as it is.

I served on the Enterprise in the late seventies, and while I can't say I'm _sad_ , I'm definitely experiencing a nostalgic episode. (I never went to sea on the Enterprise, overhaul in the shipyard only, so I can't tell you anything more interesting than how to lay tile on a metal deck or how to use a needle gun to strip paint.)

<comment><USER11> That would explain it for you, but i doubt all those commenters are your ex colleagues ;) I'm aware that life is complex. But comments like "hey, let's give it to Israel they can re-arm it and have a nice weapon there" make me sick, sorry.

<comment><USER12> You don't have to have been somewhere to have nostalgia for it and its associations.

Edit: I agree, better not to give it to anyone.

<comment><USER11> Ah well, they should put it in a museum i guess, not scraping it.

edit: Or make a museum out of it, with the size of the ship :P edit2: I see, and according to another link, the ship basically will be destroyed by removing the reactor, so there is no way around it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A livestream of the inactivation ceremony is here: <http://www.livestream.com/usnavy>

</comment><comment><USER13> They're scrapping it?! That's a damn shame.

<comment><USER14> With respect I disagree.

While I understand entirely why the Enterprise as is was originally commissioned (dick waving with the USSR) the kind of missions the US Navy performs today require more flexibility and less brute force.

Now the Enterprise's speed is, even today, still damn competitive. But to get her ready to sail with her crew complement, supplies, and other logistical issues would likely mean she couldn't be used as part of a fast reactionary force.

She would be wonderful at long drawn out conflicts but how many of those does the US intend to take part in in the next fifty years? Any?

<comment><USER3> > While I understand entirely why the Enterprise as is was originally > commissioned (dick waving with the USSR) the kind of missions the US Navy > performs today require more flexibility and less brute force.

Meh. It's not like the Navy is decommissioning the Nimitz-class or scaling back the Gerald Ford class. The Enterprise is at life's end (it was originally planned for scrapping ~2015), and it's a pain as it's the only ship of its class.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Disengage. :(</comment>


Microsoft Wants 100 Companies, but to What End? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/10/microsoft-wants.html

<comment><USER2> Buy them, give them 6 months, then redirect them to MSN.com (Steve Balmer starts uncontrollable laughing here).</comment>


NYTimes and others cite a gender-blind hiring study that doesnt exist - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1097361742647123968 <comment><USER2> Do you have a link to the nytimes article? Can't find it in the twitter thread though it is mentioned there.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a white man in the industry. My understanding was that blinding resulted in less diverse hiring, so blinding was abandoned.

I work with some women. But more men. AFAIK my company actively recruits women.

</comment><comment><USER4> *doesn't</comment>


The Coin Toss and the Love Triangle - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/2/uncertainty/the-coin-toss-and-the-love-triangle

<comment><USER2> He took forever to say nothing.</comment>


Show HN: Baqqer – Equity Crowdfunding for Makers, Inventors, Developers and You - <AUTHOR> Hey HN!
I left my previous job three months ago, decided to die going broke and homeless building products I loved. I saw some awesome platforms out there, but nothing that really captured how I felt as a builder. I wanted something I could use to share what I'm working on, engage my audience in my building, raise some money, sell the stuff I made, and basically figure out a way to help me keep producing more of what people want.
I built Baqqer as this idea of folding in my audience into the every piece of the pipeline towards building a company. Maybe it's a radical take on transparency all the way from discover, to prototype, to market, and beyond.
Here is this baby. Give me some feedback. This is v1.0 so hook me up with your insights.
https://baqqer.com/ <comment><USER2> Based off of your website, I can't really see the difference between Baqqer and all the other crowdfunding websites. You should definitely explain your idea of engaging your audience through every piece of the pipeline up front. I think that's what makes you different from every other crowdfunding website around.

Also, as a maker, it's not that I want to "Crowdfund my Passion". What I would really love to do as an inventor is to bring "My Idea to Life" and hopefully be successful at it.

The fact that I don't see any projects and I don't know how much I could potentially raise is a red flag to me.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. I agree. I'll surface those things to the front.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> link [https://baqqer.com/](https://baqqer.com/)</comment>


Hate Crimes, Hoaxes, and Hyperbole - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/blog/2016/11/18/election-hate-crimes-hoaxes-hyperbole <comment><USER2> >police officer Michael English said the victim had not been the aggressor. A bystander who witnessed the attack told WTOP, "they jumped him and beat him up pretty bad,"

Today this is less serious a crime than:

>man in a car yelling "fag" as he drove by a gay couple

Obviously neither is appropriate, but I don't feel great about the pressure against free speech. The Obama administration is also engaged in the longest- lasting and most extreme battle against journalists in the history of the country, which makes the fact that saying something inappropriate is worse than violently attacking someone seem an even worse state of affairs.</comment>


Aws-virtual-bastion: A web terminal session to AWS EC2 instances without SSH - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/akittana/aws-virtual-bastion <comment><USER2> This is super awesome! We need a cli version of this! (yes I know I can use the aws cli...but a "shell" in my terminal would be great!)

The more I use AWS, GCP and Azure, the more I realize how much "nicer" it is on the AWS eco-system. While AWS in general is more expensive (to the point where in a large org, you'd need someone dedicated to keep track of cloud spending) - the ecosystem provided by Amazon is so far ahead in some cases

<comment><USER3> [https://github.com/itsdalmo/ssm-sh](https://github.com/itsdalmo/ssm-sh)</comment></comment>


Profiling Internet Users in Africa: Insights from the Google Play Store - <AUTHOR> http://afridigest.com/profiling-internet-users-africa-insights-google-play-store/ <comment><AUTHOR> Incidentally, I also installed Opera Mini on my iPhone, living in Nairobi. However not because of data concerns, but because it allows me to access Facebook private messages without having to install any of the Facebook apps.

</comment><comment><USER2> Opera mini is very much dominant in kenya, most devices coming pre installed with the browser.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best JavaScript framework for a multipage application? - <AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I am not a professional web developer. I have never seriously done front-end work.
I am writing an web application in Elixir/Phoenix. It is an app with many categories that does not fit the single-page application model.
That being said, I want it to look and feel like a modern web application by 2017's standards. Ideally, I could use a lean JavaScript framework for interactive UI elements, validation, assorted bells and whistles, etc.
Everything I've come across seems like absolute overkill for my needs. It's also hard to find a framework that isn't tightly coupled with the SPA label. I do not want to work around an SPA framework, nor do I wish to force my app to be an SPA. <comment><USER2> If you just want simple HTML I would suggest Express [1] with Nunjucks [2]. Use Express as your webserver/router and Nunjucks as your view layer. Nunjucks is very similar to Jinja2 and other common Mustache/Handlebar templating languages.

[1][https://expressjs.com/](https://expressjs.com/) [2][https://mozilla.github.io/nunjucks/](https://mozilla.github.io/nunjucks/)</comment>


Solving dynamic programming interview problems - <AUTHOR> http://blog.refdash.com/dynamic-programming-tutorial-example/ <comment><USER3> I've done a fair amount of interviews in my professional career, both as an engineer at Google as well as for my own startup.

In an eng. interview you want to maximize information divided by time, i.e. you want to learn as much as possible about whether the candidate would be a good fit for the company and spend as little time as possible doing so (because you have other things to do -- such as interviewing more candidates).

In my experience these kind of interview questions have a very poor information by time ratio. They are poor on information because they may give you an idea how well the candidate can do on puzzle questions but not so much how the candidate would do on actual real-world assignments. And they are especially poor on the denominator (time) because you are probably going to spend at least 1h with the candidate before you get past the obvious stuff.

Also I guess about 70% of (pre-qualified) candidates would outright fail the question, so if you let this influence your hiring decision, given that the question is really quite "puzzly", you're inevitably going to miss out on a lot of talent (the kind that does well on actual work assignments).

<comment><USER4> I very much disagree with this assessment, the reason being that, as an interviewer, the _least_ important part for me is whether or not the interviewee "gets" the problem initially. I have no problem giving the interviewee tons of hints about (a) it's a dynamic programming problem and (b) what the different cases are.

At that point though, what I'm really interested in, and what I think tells me a ton of valuable information about the candidate, is _how capably they are then able to turn the algorithm into actual code_. With many folks you can basically tell them the entire recursive steps that are necessary and they _still_ can't translate this into workable code. "How fast can you turn algorithm into code" is one of _the_ critical skills for all developers, and these kinds of problems give me good insight into that skill.

<comment><USER5> > I don't care if the candidate "gets" the problem

> "How fast can you turn algorithm into code" is one of the critical skills of > all developers.

I don't understand this industry anymore. If I have anything to say about software is that solving the right problems is the main skill in an Engineer. Then, figuring out an algorithm is the hard part of solving any problem, turning it into code is usually never as hard (except for technical nuances) and especially, not how quickly it becomes code. Not sure how someone can value "how fast can you turn algorithm into code" over "understanding/solving the right problem".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Speaking as someone who finds DP problems easy, I'd not figure it out from this approach. The way that I'd think about and tackle it in an interview is this:

1\. Write a recursive solution.

2\. Memoize.

If you can solve it this way, then you have a DP problem. Of course this forces you into the top down (aka recursive) approach. But in an interview, "easier to reason about" is all that matters.

Also the tradeoffs in section 5 has a mistake. Memory can and frequently does go either way. Top down can let you recognize which states you never need to think through. But a bottom up (aka iterative) approach can let you discard memory after finishing an iteration. The memory savings from that can be considerable.

<comment><USER7> Is recursion really worth the loss of clarity? Almost always no. The more clever you are in your code, the less likely anyone will ever see it (or want to).

<comment><USER8> Recursion is usually clearer that iterative because it assigns names to the work being done. I find that much easier to read. Better yet: when you can state your cases separately. That's even more readable.

<comment><USER7> I don't think you represent the average coder. I'm willing to bet most people if shown 10 recursive and 10 iterative solutions to the same problems would admit the iterative approach is more intuitive. Especially since with a for loop you can control the number of iterations which has a number of optimization benefits. Now if its just while loops vs recursive then there's not much of a difference, however that is not the case.

<comment><USER9> You might be able to trace the execution of the iterative code more easily, but in my experience it is often much less clear _why_ that produces the correct result and _how_ that code was written in the first place.

Take a look at the wikipedia page for computing Levenshtein distance: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance#Computing...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance#Computing_Levenshtein_distance)

The recursive version needs barely any explanation. But ask me to carry it out by hand and I'm sure I'll pretty quickly get lost. The iterative version needs a lot more explanation for why it is the way it is, but I also think I could carry it out on paper quite easily.

<comment><USER7> I mean if you label all your variables i,j, and k and use minimal formatting or bracketing then I see your point it is harder to read. Whats complicated about an iteration. If it works properly after the first one chances are it will continue to work for the millionth one. If you see problems, its because something is modifying it between runs, but that wasn't a fault of the iterative strategy, it was the fault of a bad programmer. Conversely, you must always make sure the stopping condition and all base cases are met during recursion. Forget one corner base case and you got a rare production bug.

<comment><USER10> > Whats complicated about an iteration

What's complicated about a recursion?

> If you see problems, its because something is modifying it between runs, but > that wasn't a fault of the iterative strategy, it was the fault of a bad > programmer.

> Conversely, you must always make sure the stopping condition and all base > cases are met during recursion.

You seem to be applying a double standard here.

> Forget one corner base case and you got a rare production bug.

Base cases are usually much easier to reason about.

<comment><USER7> Then why does NASA consider it unsafe for mission critical code?

How about unknown potential stack size?

How about factoring a large number with recursion?

Everything recursive can be transformed to iterative and yea sometimes it's not as sexy but neither is a helmet

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3dnsh1/nasas_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3dnsh1/nasas_ten_coding_commandments/)

<comment><USER10> > Then why does NASA consider it unsafe for mission critical code?

They also proscribe unbounded iterations (point 2). In any case, NASA's guidelines for mission-critical code are not necessarily good guidelines for general software engineering, given the constraints involved.

It's also worth noting that recursive solutions are probably more amenable to static analysis and automated theorem proving.

> How about unknown potential stack size?

If stack size is a problem, try an iterative solution.

> How about factoring a large number with recursion?

Go with iteration.

You keep editing your answer to add more cases where iteration is the way to go. I'm not disputing there are use cases where iteration is appropriate.

<comment><USER11> > Then why does NASA consider it unsafe for mission critical code?

More like they're using an old Fortran 77 environment which doesn't support recursive functions.

<comment><USER12> No that's incorrect. Their rules are C guidelines, and they are easy to Google. You might want to do that before making assumptions.

NASA's rules, the ones being referenced above, are designed for safety. They require code to be easy to statically analyze and to have absolutely predictable behavior.

Also to be avoided: memory allocation, unbounded loops, function pointers, preprocessor macros.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Developing_Safety- Critical_Code)

<comment><USER11> Most of the numerical code they're going to use is in Fortran, and interlanguage calling convention and the runtime might pose a problem.

This is in addition to not using recursive functions being pretty standard in anything embedded. Early computers and embedded systems had very limited stack space or had calling conventions that made recursion impossible.

<comment><USER12> > Most of the numerical code they're going to use is in Fortran, and > interlanguage calling convention and the runtime might pose a problem.

The rationale they used for these rules was written down. It has nothing to do with Fortran. I've offered links that you can read. You're making more assumptions. If there's C-to-Fortran calling at all, then recursion presents zero extra difficulty. Once you can make any function call, you can make all function calls.

> This is in addition to not using recursive functions being pretty standard > in anything embedded.

It's true that for small embedded devices, recursion is not used often. It's also true that function pointers and heap allocations and unbounded loops are generally avoided too. Though, often main() in an embed is a white(true){} loop. I wouldn't be surprised to see that at NASA.

One could argue that all of these 10 NASA rules represent some standard practice in embedded code and/or some degree of common sense. They're not claiming to be new or non-standard or unintuitive or innovative; they simply wrote down what people agreed are best practices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a fantasy. In the fantasy, an interview candidate says "this problem has an optimal substructure" or "this problem can be broken into overlapping subproblems" and then observes "reusing the results of overlapping subproblems to avoid re-computing them is sometimes called dynamic programming"

At this point, balloons and confetti fall from the ceiling as Donald Knuth jumps out from under the table to hand the candidate an award for being the first known example of a candidate using "dynamic programming" correctly in a sentence.

<comment><USER14> You know you've made it when you have Knuth on standby under the table

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Potentially interesting data point: the company I'm at right now has been pretty successful for over a decade and has, to my knowledge, never once asked a dynamic programming question in an interview for any candidate in that entire time. We've managed to hire a lot of great developers and have very rarely had any real issues.

<comment><USER16> Does the company you are at now pay developers the same as the companies that ask these types of questions? In my experience the companies asking these types of questions are picky because they can be.

<comment><USER15> We pay very well for the area. We are not in Silicon Valley, but I know some of our salaries are higher than those of my friends who are at Google's MV campus.

<comment> coastal-fiesta It's not terribly impressive to have a higher _salary_ then a GOOG employee, but higher total compensation after stock and bonuses would be saying something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Step 1. ur problem graph better be a dag

Step 2. ur sub problems better overlap

Step 3. time to table dat dag

Step 4. solve ur problems and build ur table graph the way a dag would : to- po-lo-gi-cal-ly

<comment><USER18> I think the DAG approach is a good one, but the problem is its not great for being applied generally. For me, it's difficult to think of something like the "House Robber" problem as a DAG.

<comment> et-al Can someone explain what DAG stands for? Thanks.

<comment><USER19> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph)

<comment> et-al (Thanks)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Unpopular opinion, but the best way to prepare for DP problems is to solve the well known ones and memorize them and their recurrences. Only 2-3 companies like FB and Goog ask them (well they're the only ones worth studying DP for anyway). Coming up with a recurrence on the spot is very hard. The edit- distance paper was an award winning ACM paper and expecting someone who has never seen that before to code it up (even the memorized one) is ridiculous.

<comment><USER21> The best way to perform well in an interview is to have seen and worked on the problem at some point beforehand.

When I got a job at Google (in a previous life), two of the questions in my interview loop were ones that I had seen in previous interviews. I kept my mouth shut about that and faked brilliance in the moment. That is, I pretended to be stumped for a second, then I created a narrative where I had a sequence of 2 or 3 "Ah-ha!" moments where I figured out how to refine my solution.

I cued off the interviewer, waiting until they seemed just about to blurt out a hint, when I raised my hand and said, "WAIT! Maaaybe.... I can use a BFS instead of a DFS here and label the cells!" Then the interviewer would usually smile and nod in satisfaction.

Finally, I "stumbled on" the "right answer" and slammed out the code that I had pretty much memorized up to that point.

Make a stupid game, I'll play the stupid game, and have fun doing it.

For the record, I kicked ass at Google (getting promoted twice) before moving on to greener pastures.

<comment><USER22> Yep, 100% this. I recently finished a series of interviews after extensive preparation and had at least 3 sessions that went something like this. Practice enough problems and eventually you start seeing them crop up in real interviews.

Doesn't say much for the usefulness of such an interviewing paradigm but that's a whole other conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I recently had a programming interview where, at the whiteboard question, I said "this may be a dynamic programming question, let me see--"

and the interviewer said "STOP! Stop, every time someone says that, they end up flopping and never getting anywhere. Don't go down that path, I'm telling you."

I think it had more to do with the interviewer being a poor interviewer, however.

<comment><USER24> I got screwed like that on my Google interview. You should not be blamed for assuming, when talking to Google, that the O(n!) or O(n^2) solution is not even worth talking about. So I flopped around on O(n), O(nm) and O(nlogn) solutions after trying to whiteboard a recurrence relationship and giving up on O(1).

Interviewer had already decided that somehow the crazy rules I related to him about the industry I was coming from were somehow personally my fault to he had fun letting me twist in the wind.

Personally, I think that given how small the industry is, one of the goals of the interview process should be not to make an enemy of the candidate. Candidates have friends, and sometimes candidates come back in a few years after they've gotten more experience or you're looking for different skills. None of this will matter to Google until they find themselves in a MS-style hiring crisis in another five years when they aren't cool anymore.

<comment><USER25> > You should not be blamed for assuming, when talking to Google, that the > O(n!) or O(n^2) solution is not even worth talking about. So I flopped > around on O(n), O(nm) and O(nlogn) solutions after trying to whiteboard a > recurrence relationship and giving up on O(1).

Did they say that they don't even want to listen to O(n^2) solution?

<comment><USER26> I'd be super surprised if they did. Google interviewers usually _encourage_ you to spit out an easily-verifiable O(n^2) (or even worse!) solution as fast as possible. That way, if you get stuck and honestly can't finesse a faster solution, you can code that up and provide a code sample. People still try to fake their way through the process so being able to code up something close to a compilable function is a useful metric.

<comment><USER27> Yep. This is how I conduct my interviews. I don't ask trick questions. Many of my candidates can quickly notice the simple solution but fail to write the solution in code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I often use the declarative programming language Prolog to solve dynamic programming tasks, because it is easy to type and helps you to declaratively express what a solution looks like. After you have expressed what must be the case in a solution, you can easily enable memoization on top of the existing code.

For example, here is how you can use Prolog to solve the task from the article. The following Prolog predicate is true _iff_ a given runway (represented as a list of "t" and "f" elements) is safe with a given speed:

        :- use_module(library(clpfd)).

        safe_runway(0, [t|_]).
        safe_runway(Speed0, Rs) :-
                Speed0 #> 0,
                Rs = [t|_],
                (   Speed = Speed0
                ;   Speed #= Speed0 - <USER2>
                ;   Speed #= Speed0 + 1
                ),
                length(Prefix, Speed),
                append(Prefix, Rest, Rs),
                safe_runway(Speed, Rest).

Sample query and answer:

        ?- safe_runway(4, [t,f,t,t,t,f,t,t,f,t,t]).
        true .

One interesting aspect of this solution is that we can _generalize_ this query, and also use the same program to answer the question: _Which speeds_ are actually safe for a given runway?

For example:

        ?- safe_runway(Speed, [t,f,t,t,t,f,t,t,f,t,t]).
        Speed = 0 ;
        Speed = 2 ;
        etc.

To enable _memoization_ for this task, you only have to use your Prolog system's _tabling_ mechanism. For example, in SWI-Prolog, you turn this into a dynamic programming solution by adding the directive

        :- table safe_runway/2.

This makes the Prolog engine automatically remember and recall solutions it has already computed.

</comment><comment><USER29> So, the OP has:

> Dynamic Programming – 7 Steps to Solve any DP Interview Problem

Here I see "any"!!!

Dynamic programming is a huge field from work of R. Bellman, G. Nemhauser, R. Rockafellar, R. Wetts, D. Bertsekas, E. Dynkin, W. Fleming, S. Shreve, and more.

E.g., there is, with TeX markup,

Stuart E.\ Dreyfus and Averill M.\ Law, {\it The Art and Theory of Dynamic Programming,\/} ISBN 0-12-221860-4, Academic Press, New York, 1977.\ \

Dimitri P.\ Bertsekas, {\it Dynamic Programming: Deterministic and Stochastic Models,\/} ISBN 0-13-221581-0, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1987.\ \

George L.\ Nemhauser, {\it Dynamic Programming,\/} ISBN 0-471-63150-7, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1966.\ \

E.\ B.\ Dynkin and A.\ A.\ Yushkevich, {\it Controlled Markov Processes,\/} ISBN 0-387-90387-9, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1979.\ \

Dimitri P.\ Bertsekas and Steven E.\ Shreve, {\it Stochastic Optimal Control: The Discrete Time Case,\/} ISBN 0-12-093260-1, Academic Press, New York, 1978.\ \

Wendell H.\ Fleming and Raymond W.\ Rishel, {\it Deterministic and Stochastic Optimal Control,\/} ISBN 0-387-90155-8, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1979.\ \

some of my work, etc.

Dynamic programming has been and is a major interest of the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) at Princeton.

Uh, "any" seems a bit optimistic!

<comment><USER24> If I had to guess, I'd wager that the Venn diagram of Dynamic Programming questions and _interview_ questions is a narrow sliver.

That is, unless you're being hazed, the sort of questions to show up in an interview might be at the shallow end of the pool.

<comment><USER30> lots of places have a fetish for dp questions

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> And most of the interviewers asking these questions just want someone who can help develop yet another software as a service CRUD app....

<comment><USER32> Exactly. I've been a C, C++, and java developer for the past 12 years and never used Big-O for anything other than a shibboleth to get past the door. A couple places practically used C++ itself as a gatekeeper: they want people who are smart enough to program in C++ and survive it's rigorous interview process, but their main product is filling out forms and routing documents through a document management system.

<comment><USER31> I did have to do one algorithm type interview in 1999, but the company was actually writing cross platform (Windows console, Unix, and MVS) C code where we had to implement everything from scratch, so it made sense. But unless you're Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc. where you have to solve problems at a scale that no one has had to solve before, most of the algorithm style questions are meaningless in your day to day work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Great post about how to attack solving a problem using DP. But this is not a good interview question.

It's a toy problem, not something you'll ever need to solve in real life. Maybe if you squint hard enough it's close to pathfinding algorithms, but be serious. I hate questions that aren't remotely relatable to something the candidate might experience. I get that interviews are short so you need tiny problems, but making them somewhat relevant will make comprehending the problem that much easier and give plenty of time for working on a solution.

There's also not much depth to it. Either they can get a naive solution, get the DP solution, or just can't solve it. Maybe I'm just not creative enough but the only follow up I can think of is the typical 'how to test' and this isn't even a good question for that. For me as an interviewer, it is better to start with an easy problem, and then later on additional complexity. For example dealing with concurrency, how to generalize the solution for other cases, etc. These follow ups don't even usually need full code written out so you can get much deeper since it's faster. Whereas if you start from a hard/tricky problem and have to keep explaining it and hinting at how to solve it, both candidate and interviewer feel bad and you haven't learned much.

Not that this is a particularly hard problem, it will fit within an interview slot if they are on top of things. But it's similar enough to questions I hate asking/getting (e.g. min of maxes of sliding windows) that I would definitely never ask it.

</comment><comment><USER34> In python you often need sys.setrecursionlimit for the recursive solutions since the default is really small.

I found out the hard way in a recent Google CodeJam problem[1] that even that wasn't enough and sometimes you really do need the iterative solution to not time out. (I still believe that the limits for python for this problem was set too low since even the iterative solution required hand optimizing of the memory usage to pass but the equivalent C or C++ solution didn't require any tweaks)

[1] [https://codejam.withgoogle.com/2018/challenges/0000000000007...](https://codejam.withgoogle.com/2018/challenges/0000000000007765/dashboard/000000000003e0a8)

<comment><USER12> Yes that, or code the recursive solution in a heap-allocated space rather than on the stack. It somehow seems easier, safer, and more explicit and controllable to me to adjust the code & data to use manual recursion with backtracking than try to adjust system stack limits. Often it consumes a lot less memory too, since you have more control over what your "stack frame" looks like; you don't have to store all your local variables for every step.

<comment><USER35> Any examples of code for this approach? From what I guess, you are implementing some kind of assembly like approach with explicit saving of stack frame, but I am having a hard time imagining it as being easier.

<comment><USER36> Not OP, but they probably mean something like the following toy problem (in C++):

      struct BinTree {
        long value;
        BinTree *left;
        BinTree *right;
      };

      long long RecursiveDFSSum(BinTree *node) {
        if (NULL == node) {
          return 0;
        }
        return (long long)value + RecursiveDFSSum(node->left) + RecursiveDFSSum(node->right);
      }

      long long IterativeDFSSum(BinTree *tree) {
        std::vector<BinTree *> custom_stack;
        custom_stack.push_back(tree);
        long long value = 0;
        while (!custom_stack.empty()) {
          BinTree *node = *custom_stack.rbegin();
          custom_stack.pop_back();
          if (NULL != node) {
            value += node->value;
            custom_stack.push_back(node->left);
            custom_stack.push_back(node->right);
          }
        }
        return value;
      }

Did not check this actually compiles etc. but you get the point. Both ways will give you the same solution in the same way, time complexity, space complexity etc. but the second one is not bound by max call stack size (only by max heap size). Additionally, the second one is slightly more space efficient, since the recursive solution requires saving an entire call frame into the stack (e.g. stack pointer, return address) whereas the iterative solution just stores one pointer per stack item.

<comment><USER12> This is exactly right; thank you for providing the example. This is manual recursion in a heap allocated space.

If you were coding a DP problem, then custom_stack might have a fixed size you can pre-allocate, and it might also be 2 or 3-dimensional.

For some image-based recursion, your backtracking doesn't even need to store real pointers in the stack frame. For example when I've written a flood fill, I can store the return pointer as a one pixel offset in as little as 2 or 3 bits, depending on whether I include diagonal pixels (4-surround vs 8-surround).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I did watch live where Nikola solves this problem, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKhnYLpME3w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKhnYLpME3w). It covered most of requirements of dynamic programming. For me the interesting part was coming up with algorithmic complexity (Big-O) of the solution.

</comment><comment><USER38> Above all else, Dynamic Programming is useful for making yourself feel like a superior programmer and writing blog posts about it. In 10+ years of working in this industry, I can't recall using it once outside of interviews.

</comment><comment><USER39> 6 points and already hugged to death...?

      <h1>Error establishing a database connection</h1>

<comment><USER40> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bP5uFme...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bP5uFme-168J:blog.refdash.com/dynamic- programming-tutorial-example/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing the link while it was down. Appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> A tiny correction in the following:

        if (position + adjustedSpeed in memo and
            adjustedSpeed in memo[position + adjustedSpeed] and
            adjustedSpeed in memo[position + adjustedSpeed]):

The middle line is not needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Corrected it now to remove the duplicate line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's a bad sign when a self-proclaimed authority lifts the definition of the topic from Wikipedia. Unless said authority wrote the Wikipedia entry, in which case I humbly apologize.

</comment><comment><USER43> I just give them a real world issue/bug/feature and ask them how they would complete it. Obviously im looking for as best an answer they can give me without knowing my whole stack, but what's even better is if they ask questions about my stack. Shows they know how to do requirements gathering and if they ask the right questions.

</comment><comment><USER44> I think the problem is easier viewed as just a standard graph traversal (although you can view graph traversals as DP...)

[https://ideone.com/rU5COm](https://ideone.com/rU5COm)

</comment><comment><USER45> Is it just me or the Big O algebra at the end doesn't seem right?

<comment><USER46> What do you think is wrong, I did not notice any really obvious mistake? Admittedly you would miss the improved bound unless you actually modified the implementation to abort further evaluation once you reach the maximum speed that still allows stopping, but I assume that is implied. I also guess one could even further improve the exponent to 1.25 by taking advantage of the fact that the maximum speed that still allows stopping decreases from left to right but I did not actually think it through, it is just my intuition that you would gain another square root.

<comment><USER46> Being able to improve the exponent to 1.25 is probably wrong. After thinking about it more carefully I think you end up with a number of steps proportional to the generalized harmonic number of order -0.5 of L which seems to be Θ(n^1.5) but I am not really sure about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Being able to solve dynamic programming problems may or may not get you a job but it certainly will get you a medal at high school programming/informatics Olympiads.

</comment><comment><USER25> I really wanted to try out your service couple of weeks ago, but turns out you are only in US. Any plans of opening it for Europe?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, currently it is only available for people searching for jobs in the US. I would say the answer is yes long-term, but probably not over the next few months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I was excited for the article based on the title, but the example problem makes absolutely no sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER49> What kind of companies ask dp problems in an interview? Seems pretty absurd.

</comment><comment><USER50> A blog post Peter Norvig commented. Nice.

</comment><comment><USER51> I have always found the word DP to be a bit confusing. DP problems are essentially recursion + caching. I do not even like the word "memoise".

<comment> coastal-fiesta Indeed, it sounds like someone is just saying "memorize" incorrectly.

<comment><USER52> That's what happens when you "recurse".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> why are there so many companies trying to "solve hiring". i get it's a big expense to make a bad hire but how are there like 10 different companies thinking they have an edge on

1\. existing practices 2\. each other

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not only a big expense. It is a stressful, biased and highly ineffective process. There is very little (if any) correlation between performance in interviews today and work performance.

It's a hard problem that requires people to approach it seriously. And it is only getting worse with a high growth in number of people getting into tech.

It's interesting to try to solve it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: UploadChimp - <AUTHOR> https://www.uploadchimp.com <comment><AUTHOR> Found myself out of work recently so I built a simple, free, no reg, file upload/transfer web app.

Hoping to compete with wetransfer etc. It's only ad supported atm.

Free custom branded pages are in dev now. Built with Elixir.

It has basic PWA features for iOS but not yet on Android so it's pretty easy to use on iPhone when added to home screen.</comment>


Why is syphilis on the rise? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-44384289 <comment><USER2> In Sweden, I'd say it's mostly due to the immigration. The prevalence is much higher, unfortunately also strands that are harder to treat. It's not only stds, also other diseases such as hepatitis and tuberculosis etc, but it's not really addressed. No mandatory health checks, etc, that could help. Not totally sure why, it's a known fact and shouldn't be a touchy subject.

Edit: Oh, and Grinder is probably not helping in certain demographics...

Also, compared to today, there was such a scare when I grew up regarding HIV and AIDS, with non stop campaigns for safe sex. It really made us more careful and more worried.

</comment><comment><USER3> My guess would be that because more people are on PrEP, fewer people are using condoms.

<comment><USER4> For the hacker news crowd, I think this would be a very interesting data mining project: correlate the prevalence of bareback gay porn with overall rates of bacterial STDs.

In the late 90s and early 00s, gay bareback porn was quite rare, and it was mainly "vintage" porn from before the AIDS epidemic. There were some studios around the mid 00s I think that focused on bareback sex, which caused lots of controversy in the time before PreP. Since PreP became widespread in the past couple years, bareback porn has become very common.

I don't think anyone consciously thinks "Oh, that porn star didn't use a condom, I don't need one either." But I think the overall change does tend to desensitize people into just making the negative consequences of barebacking easier to forget.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't this approach have the same issue as trying to correlate violent video games with actual violence?

<comment><USER6> Watching porn makes people horny. Watching violence does not make people aggressive and murderous.

<comment><USER7> According to accepted psychological research ... it does. Well, not murderous, as that sort of research would never get approved.

But aggressive ? Certainly.

Why can't people accept this ? It's the very idiotically basis of how the human mind works: it learns. 99.99% of the time it learns by imitating something else. Give it something violent to imitate (no matter how artificial, fake, drawn, ...), and ... surprise ! It will come up with more violent answers in the future. How is this strange or unexpected in the least ?

And yes, I get it, you feel like you are in control of your own mind. By the way, how do you explain how advertising works if that were true ? Or the obvious influence mass media have ? Or why absurdly large groups of people keep coming to the same conclusion (from culture, to political "winds", to google searches ... all shows strong correlations between huge groups of people).

Now granted, this is results like 10% more likely to use minor violence in a "get something taken from me" situation among children (the other alternative generally being getting adult help, which may or may not cooperate depending on the study). None of those studies are saying Rambo turns toddlers into terminators. But objectively, measurably more violent ? Yes, yes it does. It does so heavily in the short term (hours), then the effect slowly dies down (but it's still significant 20 years after the exposure).

This has been incredibly thoroughly tested and yes, we are VERY sure this does in fact happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Their best guess is that group sex among men enabled by hookup apps and enhanced by "chemsex" (where inhibitions are counteracted by drug usage) in conjunction with cutbacks in health spending have resulted in an increase in incidence.

<comment><USER9> In regards to both the headline (syphilis) and chlamydia it seems to be limited to male-male hookup apps while it stayed the same largely for heterosexual and female-female hookups. Even though one would assume all parties had equally greater access to random hookups thanks to apps. Im genuinely curious why that is. Tinder has most certainly made anonymous hookups more socially acceptable for straight people. Or is this just one of those cultural trends which impact gay culture first, before it reaches mainstream culture, as happens (stereotypically) with fashion, music, and other trends?

<comment><USER10> MSM are generally more interested in hookups that involve barebacking because it is considered both more pleasurable and more 'dirty', and MSM are not likely to get pregnant. IIRC MSM also have many more partners than either heterosexuals or WLW.

MSM until very recently had a very big incentive to use condoms in the form of HIV, but these days PrEP is widespread and not expensive, so that risk has largely abated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Because it evolved. You cannot outrun these.

<comment> barry-cotter You absolutely can. If the U.K. made extramarital sex illegal and enforced it syphilis cases would fall. There are plenty of other less drastic measures that would have the same directional effect.

Evolution isn't magic. The USA used to have malaria. Now it doesn't.

<comment><USER12> Because that certainly worked for the past 2,000 years. Must be why nobody ever had syphilis when extramarital sex actually was illegal. Oh wait.

<comment> barry-cotter I suggest you learn to read more carefully. I did not suggest syphilis would be eliminated by making extramarital sex illegal. I said its incidence would be reduced. If you make something more expensive people do less of it. Fewer people smoke marijuana now than will once it's legal because part of the cost is the possibility of a criminal record and all that entails.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Startup investments set to cool under pressure, except for regtech - <AUTHOR> https://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/investments-vc-private-equity-2020-regtech <comment><USER2> That sounds like a pretty aweful outcome, honestly.

As overused and made to mean breaking the law, disrupting is a kind of exciting thing to be a part of.

You're changing the game, reinventing an industry or something of those sorts.

Regulatory-tech, what's the world changing story there? We help you stay in business while the ever increasing amount of paperwork and scrutiny increases?

Everything follows what came before it, and what came before and is paying off now turned out to be plenty of dishonestly in business in search of returns. In a word greed.

Now this next "generation" of startups is going to pay for it.</comment>


On Living and Thinking in Two Languages at Once - <AUTHOR> http://lithub.com/on-living-and-thinking-in-two-languages-at-once/ <comment><USER2> I speak almost exclusively my non native language (English) and over time it has become a second nature but while everyone around me congratulates me for my fluency and vocabulary, I KNOW I'm not as nimble and witty in English as in my second language. Having an intellectual argument is exhausting in the same way swimming with a tshirt on is harder than just swimming naked. Words come from a different place in my brain, I can just feel it, and connections sometimes are made that I cannot fully express. Seems like cause-effect logic is able to form itself in my mind but then gets lost as I try to translate it to English. It's very frustrating and I feel that has partly affected my ability to be convincing.

<comment><USER3> Frankly when I first moved to the UK (~7 years ago) I tried to stay way closer to the classical archetypes of the society that are implied from the literature/movies I had seen; than I do now (let's call them the "visible" traits).

I then realised that while some of the stylistic mistakes I make when I try to be more "myself" in the language are a function of my own personality and not the lack of knowledge of the language (for example, I would be making the same stylistic mistake in Russian just as much as I would be making the same one in English).

Over time you also tend to note that most of the native speakers don't really know their language beyond the context in which they were born. So you do sound stylistically weird to them, but not due to you not knowing the language.

Later on you find people that could have found a way better recognition in your own country than you yourself if they were to move there.

So I would not go as far as saying that it's "more frustrating" to not speak your own language. Culture is quite a non-linear concept imo.

BTW: I was born in Lithuania to Russian parents. So to be frank the definition of the culture I belong to has always been quite vague for me.

<comment><USER4> "Over time you also tend to note that most of the native speakers don't really know their language beyond the context in which they were born. So you do sound stylistically weird to them, but not due to you not knowing the language."

Fair enough but you do have to also allow for the fact that there are many strata to any language. There is no such thing as a regular en_GB. I'm English as in I live in England but I make use of a weird amalgam of dialects as well as regular "English". Perhaps that is the thing - a regular bedrock, which when deviated from marks out a non native speaker.

When I say bedrock, I mean shared knowledge about the way things are done in a particular place. For example you should be familiar with how to deal with weather conversations. Britons are not really fixated about the weather (OK we are!) but it is an easy way to spark up a conversation with a stranger or break the ice when conversation is faltering. The rules are very simple: mention the weather eg "will this rain ever stop" or "lovely morning" and then wait for the response and follow the formula. It is quite acceptable to respond with something like "yes", "typical", "t" and simply move on but friendly contact has been made. However if you have time to kill or whatever you will follow the formula. Now the full formula is quite involved but is known by every single Briton, without exception. It also works in Ireland (Eire) in its entirety (tested by me).

The weather thing is quite well known about but there are quite a few other cultural oddities around here that you might be oblivious to. Does this mean anything to you: "fork handles"/"four candles"?

Good skills on moving a fair few 100 miles from home, taking on a foreign language and integrating into a foreign culture.

Are you really frank? He owes me £20.

<comment><USER3> Oh yes, absolutely. "The bedrock" is what defines the culture.

But it's quite a vague predictor for whether you're going to build a good business together; or whether your jokes about other cultures or sex would be perceived as racist, ironic or simply a matter of pragmatism; or what is acceptable as part of your personal life.

Honestly I find the perceived notion of having a shared culture is detrimental to actually realising that you disagree on many deeper important issues.

For example, many of my current middle-class co-workers were quite surprised by the results of the Brexit referendum, while it wasn't that clear to me as I've spend a fair amount of time in Leeds hanging out with the working class or working for a few supposedly full of middle-class media agencies. They didn't tend to be too humble to share what they actually thought of being a part of the EU, while they were quite humble at sharing this with their friends (shy tories, etc.?).

Besides, I would never agree I know British culture in it's full depth. It's funny you mentioned "fork handles"/"four candles" \- which is exactly the thing a friend of mine said this weekend. I just Googled it. A culture enthusiast would follow this up with a binge of the show.

But this still does not make a foreign speaker seem more genuine if he suddenly starts speaking northern accent, uses common grammatical variations (I was/I were) or borrows from a local vocabulary. Neither does it do any good for someone northern to come to London and try to negotiate a contract with someone of South African descent without any appreciation for a more common pronunciation or cultural grounds (although well - aren't they both practically British?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had one day where I was thinking in 4 languages. That's all languages I could possibly claim to speak: Dutch, english, french and german.

Dutch is my native tongue, so I think in that. I also think in English, part of this is the internet. Part of it is due to understanding most of CS and math in english terms.

I was alone on vacation in France, I learned some french in high-school. That combined with basically only speaking french to people there made me think in french a bit. Finally on that day, I had met a group of German scouts. I learned even less German in high-school, but it's closer to dutch.

So there I was, thinking in four languages. I recall at one point thinking of some English phrase and then thinking 'comment je le dire en allemande' which is my french attempt at 'how do I say this in German'.

<comment><USER6> Hah! I also learned French in High School, but then much later in life I learned Dutch. Now whenever I go to France and try to speak French, Dutch words push out the French words in my head, sometimes too fast for me to stop from actually saying them in the middle of an already dubious French sentence. It's quite infuriating.

Usually I do still know the word in French, but the Dutch words are always so much closer to the surface.

I love living in Europe :)

<comment><USER7> I get the same thing, try to recall a German word and a French word pops up. Interestingly it also happens with BSL (a sign language), I try and recall a word and the sign pops up; I'm not that accomplished in any language other than English, perhaps that's related but it struck me that words with the same/similar meanings across languages must get stored "together" (spatially, logically, whatever) some how.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I relate to most of the things she talks about, except I think exclusively in English, to the point I'm losing my French even though I live in France.

English is convenient and quick. And everything feels less severe, I feel like a completely different person when I use it, more confident and light-hearted.

Another thing I've noticed is that I'm much more prone to swearing, the worst swears in English seem light and cute compared to French for some reason.

It'd be interesting to figure out whether these differences stem from culture, context of use, or inherent properties of the languages.

<comment><USER5> I shouted 'fuck' my first time in an airplane taking off. It was a surprising G-force and the surprise made me swear.

Thing is, we were on a flight to Ireland. It was not appreciated. I think this is basically how you were raised. My parents didn't consider it a horrible word, so I didn't either. I kinda learned that day, but it still carries much less weight than 'godverdomme'.

<comment><USER9> Next time you find yourself in that situation, try shouting "feck" instead, which is regarded as a fairly mild swearword (indeed, barely a swearword at all).

Not being Irish, I'd never heard of it until I first saw _Father Ted_ [0], and was initially shocked at the characters uttering what I assumed was a dialectical variant of "fuck" every five minutes.

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

<comment><USER4> Good advice and I was going to suggest it myself.

To anyone wishing to swear in English (as a second language), "feck" is a very good choice to try and make as your instinctive choice. It really is not offensive - I suspect it might be based on the word feckless, rather than fuck but then I'm English and not Irish and have no idea. Perhaps it is an Anglicization of a Gaelic word.

<comment><USER10> Or to go even milder: _" Effing heck!"_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Do anyone think in a _language_? Do constructed sentences travel in your head? It doesn't make any sense to me and do not correspond to my experience of thinking...

If I'd try to describe my thinking, it would be about making connections, groking concepts, it'd be more graphical than verbal (but is neither). But I very much doubt I'm any special snowflake, am I wrong thinking humans do not think in a specific language?

<comment><USER12> Yes, you are. It seems to me that most people think in language, to the point where it's weird if you tell them you don't think in one. I used to think in language too (yes, I actually did have a voice narrating my thoughts inside my head), but I grew out of it.

I realize now that the thoughts are happening anyway, and that narrating them was just a way for my brain to be kept busy (ie the narration doesn't really matter). I was trying to explore this the other day, and managed to think complex thoughts related to solving a work problem entirely without language, while listening to an audiobook. Listening to the book probably helped, as my brain was half too busy understanding it to form its own speech.

<comment><USER13> English is my only language. When I read, I definitely narrate each word in my head. But something very interesting that your post has just brought me to realize is that I read code very differently from plain English. In fact, I barely have any mental narration for code at all; mostly it's this morphing blob of mental imagery and intuition.

Maybe this explains in part why, while I'm a very slow plain-English reader, I actually read/parse code faster than average.

<comment><USER14> The narration might not be mental at all. Many people speak without breathing while reading, you will notice it is your throat gets sore or tired after a long session reading a good book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The best way to find out what your brain does with languages is to try to pay attention to your dreams. It's hard to do that, but the few times I managed that (not on purpose), I realized that I would switch languages multiple times within the same sentence and it all "made sense", because my brain was picking the language that has the best fit for the concept it was trying to express.

Of course, waking life is more structured than that, but I find myself struggling with the same problem there: I want to express something that's best said in one language, but unfortunately I'm speaking to someone in another language and now I have to pause to look up the best translation.

Some things do seem to be subconsciously fixed, though. I find that when I have to count, I almost always do that in Serbian, my native language. Cussing, on the other hand, is something that I tend to do mostly in English, even when it's only in my head. That's probably because of my temperament, which makes me mentally cuss a lot. When I'm in need of serious cussing power, I switch to Spanish.

</comment><comment><USER16> Something amusing happened to me the other day. I'm Italian but at this point, I think and speak in English 99.99% of the time.

When I first moved to an English speaking country, I went to McDonald's and didn't know the word for "napkin", so I gestured my way out of it. (I also asked for mayo for my fries, but that's another story.)

The other day it took me a few seconds to remember the Italian word "tovagliolo" which translates to, you guessed it, napkin. It had a certain "things have come full circle" feel to it. :)

</comment><comment><USER17> I kind of switch between five languages. But that's nothing to brag about here because so does everyone here.

I work at a small ML startup (5 Engineers). Communication on Slack is mostly in French. Everything related to code (documentation, comments, commit messages, architecture diagrams) in English.

Conversations go like this: "On prendra une journée pour refactoriser le code.. take care of all code smells, hakda bach ki nebdaou l'application lokhra ykoun koullech ouadjed". That's French, English, and Algerian. Then I go home and speak Kabyle (most of my coworkers are Kabyle but we don't use it).

Since I've learned English, all my notes are taken in English as is most of my reading (it was in French when I was younger; raised on classics).

Job interviews are conducted in the three languages (although we test for English because it's important).

I joke often that bilingualism here starts with your sixth language. I yearn for bragging rights.

When it comes to _thoughts_ , however.. mine have no language. It's just a "vvvvvvvv vvvvvvvvv", as if I were underwater or in a womb. Images through which I can jump, become part of, and play with. Becoming so small as to go inside the fuel tank, follow the fuel to the pump, pass through the dirty filter, get inside the cylinders to be compressed by pistons and stay there for the boom.

<comment><USER18> Grew up in the suburbs of Paris, surrounded by people mostly born here but generally from parents who immigrated from Maghreb, that French / dialectal Arabic mix is the BEST, I just love not understanding what's going on in a sentence and suddenly "tilifoun" "pain au chocolat" pop up in there, MAGIC.

<comment><USER17> That's interesting you like it. Speakers always make fun of it as a duct-tape language (Arabic, Berber, French, Turkish, Spanish, and Italian).

Interestingly, as a student of Hebrew, Algerian is much closer to Hebrew than to Arabic MSA. Arabic suffixes a word with one or two letters for possessive, for example "House[letter that communicates subject]", whereas Hebrew and Algerian create a structure that goes like "The house of mine/his".

Learning Hebrew, Arabic makes it easier for a lot of words but Algerian structure makes me "get it".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > He feels that the words, once translated into German, have less power. They > have to travel through a surface that delays true reception of their > meaning. I guess it's the same for me when I write in English. The delay > between writing in English and wondering how the same would translate into > French makes me able to say things I might not have dared to say in French > directly

There is an interesting effect where we tend to be more rational and less emotional in our second language: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0094842)

> In general, we suggest that the increased psychological distance of using a > foreign language induces utilitarianism. This shows that moral judgments can > be heavily affected by an orthogonal property to moral principles, and > importantly, one that is relevant to hundreds of millions of individuals on > a daily basis.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can definitely relate with the author, as I'm also a native French speaker who's mostly entirely switched to English. I find myself doing everything in English in my daily life and thinking in English.

I'm starting to run into issues when expressing myself in French, losing less common vocabulary. French being my native language, the idea of losing it bothers me quite a bit. I take every opportunity I get to practice by conversing in French when I can. But already, I sound like a foreigner in my own country…

I also used to speak Standard German, Swiss German, Russian, and Spanish fluently, and a bit of Japanese. Those are mostly lost; at best I can say very few transactional things, and understand the rough context of conversations around me.

Forgetting languages is a real downer…

</comment><comment><USER21> Anyone interested in this might enjoy reading about Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti[1] and other "hyperpolyglots" in Michael Erard's Babel No More.[2]

An excerpt from the Introduction:

"...Mezofanti liked to quip that he knew 'fifty languages and Bolognese.' During his lifetime, he put enough of those on display -- among them Arabic and Hebrew (biblical and Rabbinic), Chaldean, Coptic, Persian, Turkish, Albanian, Maltese, certainly Latin and Bolognese, but also Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, and English, as well as Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, Syrian, Amharic, Hindustani, Gujarati, Basque, and Romanian -- that he frequently appeared in rapturous accounts of visitors to Bologna and Rome. Some compared him to Mithradates, the ancient Persian king who could speak the language of each of the twenty-two territories he governed. The poet Lord Byron, who once lost a multilingual cursing contest with Mezzofanti, called him 'a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech, a walking polyglott, and more, -- who ought to have existed at the time of the Tower of Babel, as universal interpreter.' ...

"On one occasion, Pope Gregory XVI (1765-1846), a friend of Mezzofanti, arranged for dozens of international students to surprise him. When the signal was given, the students knelt before Mezzofanti and then rose quickly, talking to him 'each in his own tongue, with such an abundance of words and such a volubility of tone, that, in the jargon of dialects, it was almost impossible to hear, much less to understand them.' Mezzofanti didn't flinch but 'took them up singly, and replied to each in his own language.' The pope declared the cardinal to be victorious. Mezzofanti could not be bested."

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

[2] - [https://www.amazon.com/Babel-No-More-Extraordinary- Language/...](https://www.amazon.com/Babel-No-More-Extraordinary- Language/dp/1451628250/)

<comment><USER22> Another great polyglot was Sir Richard Francis Burton [1]. Not only did he speak more than 20 languages, but he led an incredible life. Edward Rice wrote a great biography [2] (although I read the earlier edition). Burton himself wrote a great deal as well [3].

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

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Sir-Richard-Francis- Burton/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Sir-Richard-Francis- Burton/dp/030681028X)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton_bibliog...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton_bibliography)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have a similar experiance. German is my mother tongue, but I learned English from an early age at bilingual primary school. I «think» in both as well, but depending on the situation it might also be just one or the other. I have started to observe when I think in one over the other and found it comes down to subject matter. American politics is english only as almost all media I consume on the subject is english. Law (my field of study) is German, since I am studing in German. For other things it seems more random.

Similarly I find that when writing (just for myself and can thus choose the language) I tend to use English very differently and in different situations from German. I also sometimes choose one for stylistic reasons. A manifesto for instance sounds a lot better in German (not that I have writen a manifesto). I also found that for many words the literal translation doesn't always capture the same nuances.

English seems like the more "frivolous" language to german. Maybe thats because german is my second language, but I doubt it. Big words don't seem as big when spoken in English as compared to German.

On my fathers side of the family there are a number of en/de bilingual speakers, so we also speak a wild mix of the two picking and choosing what fits best (or just popped into my head first).

This experiance has made me very interested in learning French as well. I speak it a bit at it's mandatory to learn french in school here, but I am still far from being at the stage where I don't have to mentally translate everything in my head and just think in the language. I am moving to the french speaking part of the country soon for that reason (among others).

<comment><USER24> Do you technically know more than one flavour of German (e.g. switzerdeutsch vs. High German)? Are they much different in terms of practical day-to-day speaking to allow for different thought patterns?

<comment><USER25> I used to be able to speak schweizerdeutsch, but unlearned speaking it sometime in my youth due to disuse. I can't remember switching to it in my head, but it might just have been my age. I definitely do a fair amount of thinking in English (not when cooking and cleaning ;)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I speak 5 languages and have caught myself counting in 3-4 of them at a time. E.g one-two-trzy-cztery-fünf-... I'm not even consistent, sometimes a number will be in one language, other times a different one.

Right now I feel that I kind of stopped caring too much and just pick and choose whichever is easier at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER27> As a somewhat beginner in French (basically no formal education, but completed the English -> French DuoLingo course and daily reader of childrens news in French from 1jour1acu.com) one thing that intrigues me is how much easier it is to say emotional things to a stranger another language, for example, saying "tu es très séduisant" to someone (you are very seductive/attractive) feels very easy/natural, where as saying similarly the same phrase in English, to someone from England, would feel hard for me to do. I'm not sure if that is partly because there is a sort of disconnect, or whether it is because you know there is a language barrier that absorbs any potential embarassment.

</comment><comment><USER28> The subject of mental activity and thinking in languages is deeply fascinating to me.

12 years ago, at the age of 24 I moved to the UK (after being born and living in Russia until I was 21, and then spending 3 years in Germany - in English- centric environment though) and my language journey to English has started. Quite consciously I have decided to try to fully integrate and not get stuck in a diaspora (the impetus for my move was to experience British culture first-hand and not anything money or family related).

The mental conversion to English went in the order of: reading -> fast reading -> general speech -> fast speech -> counting in normal circumstances -> dreams -> sex -> swearing under pressure -> counting under pressure (gym reps)

Nowadays I almost exclusively think in English, except for when I talk to my parents for extended periods of time or start thinking of something in my childhood back in USSR. Funny enough, I do not switch to Russian if I'm reading text in Russian, or hear shorter quips of Russian in the street.

My English is fairly good, and it took on all the characteristics of my older Russian - I tend to use a lot of archaic words and somewhat obscure expressions (the type you'd find in 19th century literature). I'm rather bookish, always was ;-)

Most of the things I learned after the move, I can only talk about in English. I just don't have the relevant domain knowledge in Russian (for programming, general IT, pop culture, travelling, finance, love, sex, etc). In fact some subjects like sex or love are a complete no-go in Russian, as relevant Russian terminology makes it sound extremely rude and unpleasant to me (probably because I'm gay and while in Russia I had to completely repress that part of myself).

Remaining language annoyances after all these years: 1\. My accent is still thick, and it would appear there's nothing I can do about it. My best attempts at disguising it make me sound somewhat Portuguese, but generally most people guess that I'm from somewhere in Eastern Europea. 2\. I get to understand just how crap Russian language of villains in American movies is. Atomic Blonde, I'm looking at you! I mean, they shot that movie in the EU, which has millions of native Russian speakers - could they not get some extras from the Baltics?? 3\. Living in London, I get to understand all the crap Russian tourists say about the city and its inhabitants. It is an annoyingly common occurrence to hear them commenting about all the faggots, whores, etc... lovely people they all are.

</comment><comment><USER29> I sometimes think in English and sometimes in Swedish.

But I think I mostly don't think in a language but more in the underlying concepts.

I might be wrong about that, it's hard to observe yourself think...

</comment><comment><USER30> When visiting Gibraltar, I find it fascinating listening to the locals switching effortlessly between English and Spanish mid sentance. If you ask them why they change, they can't explain why, they just do it naturally.

</comment><comment><USER31> The easiest way to live and think in multiple languages is swearing in them.</comment>


HTML5-Centric Artillery Raises $2.5M To Make the Browser The Console  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/03/html5-centric-artillery-raises-2-5m-to-make-the-browser-the-console/

<comment><USER2> I think the problem there trying to address could be looked at like the OpenGL/DirectX issue. Sure you can code directly and in that it's fine though you have alot of things to do and redo each game. Now what happens is you have layers upon that OpenGL/DirectX called games engines be them the quake engine or Values offering or the many others. They allow the game writers to focus on the games and obviscate alot of the boring details that distract from the tasks at hand.

So in that if they were to create a game engine that would generate the html5 etc to allow them to run on a web browser then and only then do I feel they would of achieved there objective. Beyond that I can not see any insight at all into how they are to address the problem defined in the article beyond they will do betetr html5 games. If they were to create a development enviroment that generated the html5 and to the extent that you don't need to know html5 and can focus on using this `game engine` then I feel they will be onto something that will make them stand out and also help get html5 inplace. Rememeber flash did a wonderful job of allowing people to make html games, albeit with use of a flash plugin. Now html5 offers all(apparently from what we are told) features that flash offered then maybe the approach to the problem is how this issue is solved.</comment>


Outlet: My Lisp to Javascript Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://jlongster.com/2012/01/04/outlet-my-lisp-to-javascript-experiment.html

<comment><USER2> Very nice! What deviations do you plan to make from Scheme? And the ever- fearful question: what about debugging?

<comment><AUTHOR> The deviations are all in the run-time, mainly no continuations. Also, I'm not sure if I'll guarantee tail recursion, since I'm so dependent on the language I'm compiling to. Ports and vectors might be different too.

Macros, lists, functions, syntax, etc. will be the same though. I'm basically using the R5RS as a rough guide for a language.

Debugging is actually really exciting to me. I really want to learn how to write a debugger. So that is early on the feature list: a debugger written in Outlet itself so that it can run in any environment it compiles to. I'm thinking there could be a web interface to step through Outlet code. I'm not sure, but we'll see how far I get :)</comment></comment>


Wait a Second-will the iPhone screen Ever be Bigger? Maybe not - <AUTHOR> http://appchronicles.com/03/wait-a-second-will-the-iphone-screen-ever-be-bigger-maybe-not/

<comment><USER2> The picture says it all. Making the screen bigger will make the phone bulkier. One of the iPhone's big plusses is the relatively compact size.

</comment><comment><USER3> i hope so !!!

</comment><comment><USER4> iPhone doesnt need bigger screen it is already a decent phone with wide and viewable screen.</comment>


Show HN: SSM/KMS/ENV-aware Go template file fetcher and parser for AWS ECS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ian-d/ecs-template <comment><AUTHOR> Since ECS is missing k8s configMap/secrets style integrations for SSM and KMS I wrote this small tool to help get secrets into place without a bunch of ECS- specific custom entrypoint code. Scratches a particular itch I've encountered a number of times working with ECS and thought it might be useful to anyone else running AWS ECS services.</comment>


'Checkpoint of the future' takes shape at Texas airport - <AUTHOR> http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/story/2012-06-19/Faster-better-airport-security-checkpoints-not-that-far-off/55693916/1

<comment><USER2> "The key to speeding up checkpoints and making security less intrusive will be to identify and assess travelers according to the risks they pose to safety in the skies."

I can do that right now. Statistically speaking the answer is, "none". What a waste of resources.

<comment><USER3> Yesterday I took a domestic flight in a country outside the US. What a surprise.

Kept my belt on, kept my shoes on, no objection to a can of coke in my bag, just placed my bag on the scanner, waled through a simple metal detector, picked up my bag and kept walking.

Despite this casualness, we landed safely both times. The TSA has added one measure at a time, and the result is now impressively intrusive. And (given the smaller numbers of staff I saw) impressively expensive.

I wonder sometimes if America has forgotten what "normal" is, and if it can ever get back there.

It's sad - so much fear keeps the people in bondage. I'm amazed at folk in the US that still believe the TSA makes flying safer. I guess until that changes, they'll stay. And since people equate inconvenience to safety, their goal really is to make things more and more intrusive, and inconvenient.

<comment><USER4> It's not fear it's business.

The airports are more than happy to buy into the idea of extra security measures because it means that they will spend more money in the airport while waiting for the plane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Do you trust your retinal scan info and fingerprints to be kept secure by the government contractor who had the lowest bid? Just like the scanners that weren't supposed to be saving images? Reading through the article I just kept thinking, here it is, Minority Report style monitoring. Who is going to end up with my scan data and exploit it in the name of "targeted marketing?" And putting these current scanners in a tunnel still doesn't make them any less intrusive or more effective.

<comment><USER6> "Who is going to end up with my scan data and exploit it in the name of 'targeted marketing?'"

I'm not worried about "targeted marketing" so much (heck, Facebook knows way more about the average person than this database would), but more about hacking and this being a target for potential thieves. Like a whole new form of "identity theft."

Of course, giving up this information is "voluntary", but if the cost of not giving it up is having to get to the airport 3 hours ahead of your flight to stand in line the entire time, the government will suddenly have access to a whole lot of people's personal information.

<comment><USER5> Sure, it will be voluntary at first, and then eventually become the only way to board a plane/train/boat. At that point, someone will suppose that if our scans are good enough for the government to identify us for something so crucial, why can't we also use it for ID/driver's license/form of secure payment/house key/etc? After this has been established, yes, biometric identity theft will be an issue. We'll see a similar situation just like a US SSN - no one needs it but the IRS to collect taxes, yet everyone asks for it because it is the government's only way to uniquely identify a singular person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now screening for true patriots: "Those who voluntarily provide more information about themselves to the government would be rewarded with faster passage."

</comment><comment><USER8> Meanwhile those who would be terrorists are probably not even thinking about air travel when there are so many other ways to cause mayhem

</comment><comment><USER9> Delusional, illegal, fraudulent, wasteful, malicious, insulting, dehumanizing garbage - all of it.

<comment><USER10> Bruce Schneier posted a good opinion piece today. In particular he notes that unlike virtually all other government activity, the TSA has never done a cost benefit analysis, and that tweaks to the process of spending an unlimited amount of money on security theatre won't actually achieve anything.

[http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/06/rand_paul_take...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/06/rand_paul_takes.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If people are complaining about airport security being intrusive now, think about the complaints that would result if this were to come about. While it's a nifty idea, this "spying" would never bode well with passengers, even in comparison to current standards.

On the other hand, this type of comprehensive filming already happens at banks and other institutions, so it is possible that after all the immediate sensationalism, people would get used to it.

<comment><USER12> I think that all of the privacy issues we face today will seem ordinary in the future. It was only a matter of time before we started to monitor and manage ourselves to this level of scrutiny.

<comment><USER13> I must object to your use of the word "ourselves" in this context. I didn't vote for these systems or the politicians who want them, and accepting shared blame for the actions of a select few is not to my taste.

I also disagree with the inherent inevitability of totalitarian surveillance. Were mankind not so subject to irrational fear, manipulation, and political warmongering, most of the problems that are "solved" by intrusive monitoring would go away.

<comment><USER12> I wish I could have your optimism. But I believe that unless the millennials and gen-y-ers radically shift political thought, most governments will go in this way.

Security to protect ourselves against ourselves, up to the extent of thoughts possibly...

I agree with you 100% in that I also disagree with the general direction, I meant ourselves in the way that if it happens, we let it happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So basically the TSA wants new screening technology installed in airports. Guess thats one way to justify your agencies existence, and give kickbacks to the companies that sell the equipment.

<comment><USER15> It's utterly astounding how quickly the technology seems to need to be scrapped and replaced in TSA-land.

I need to get in on this racket.

<comment><USER14> Step 1: create a new problem by making things inefficient Step 2: charge people to fix the first problem Step 3: repeat

It was sad knowing the rate of 350/hr people pre 9/11 versus at worst 60/hr and hoping to get 30% faster after this change is in place. Instead of asking: are we really getting concrete benefits from this arrangement at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Giant naked scanner tunnel.. how safe is that?

</comment><comment><USER17> I would find it strange that something like this is legal in a country like the USA. Then again, I would find it strange if something like that were illegal in a country like the USA.

</comment><comment><USER18> Scanning fingerprints or irises? No thanks.</comment>


RefME Bought by Cite This for Me - <AUTHOR> https://refme.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/articles/115000823509 <comment><USER2> I love RefME, use it for everything, started using it after using Cite This for Me became too annoying to use and bigger projects meant that I would have to find the money to buy a membership (which I don't have) to stop my references expiring after only 7 days. RefME has a lot of great features that CTFM doesn't have and it actually works well and looks good. This is why this is so annoying, it is essentially a downgrade. What I want to know is how much Chegg bought RefME for, to see if the price was fair for such an amazing and free service. I'll miss RefMe, does anyone know of any alternatives to CTFM?

</comment><comment><USER3> Ex-employee here, left a while before this process started. We had a really strong product, and loyal and growing user base, who rated us over Cite This For Me consistently. It's a shame for the users that it ended this way, I naively hope that CTFM pull their finger out and improve their product

<comment><AUTHOR> RefMe was amazing. The integration of app, folders, web clipper, annotations and all that were amazing and it saved me such a headache in my dissertation. It was a brilliant product.

I get the feeling from the FAQ that who ever wrote that isn't best pleased either, looks like they took great pleasure in highlighting the differences between the two.</comment></comment>


Who's Afraid of a Transit Desert? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/realestate/whos-afraid-of-a-transit-desert.html <comment><USER4> It's too bad that the potential to do the obvious thing - build trains to the transit deserts - is not an option even worth mentioning. This is the state of US infrastructure.

<comment><USER5> Someone owns the land on which that rail must run and the stations built. They may not want to sell. Eminent domain taking is time-consuming and expensive (probably should be more expensive).

In a most of these cases, this land is in neighborhoods that already have a housing shortage. If you're going to take the land of groups of people to build transit, you'll displace many households at once and into a market with reduced supply and increased demand. Anyone want to wager whether those property owners will be truly properly compensated? Anyone want to wager whether tenants displaced will be compensated at all, let alone enough to find a comparable place?

<comment><USER6> Someone once owned the land on which all of Europe's railways are currently running quite nicely, thank you. It's not really a convincing argument against building railways in general. Public service or private enterprise, it's pretty much guaranteed that existing occupants of the land will get shat on by whatever interests stand to profit from doing so, but that doesn't mean that building the thing doesn't benefit the community as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://archive.is/Hdi1H](http://archive.is/Hdi1H)

</comment><comment><USER8> Question: would it make more sense to have mobile housing?

Not RV living or tiny homes or tent cities, but actual moveable homes and large plots.

When planning new cities and townships, wouldn't it be cheaper to rent out a 5k-10k sq ft plot and keep moving with the job.

The idea tickles me especially because we started out as hunter gatherers and then nomadic tribes and pastoralists to urbanists. It will come a full circle.

Homes as shells and land with infrastructure. Of course, this means other changes too with city designs and roads and public transport etc, but as a thought experiment..would it work?

There may not be as many jobs in the future with automation, but we would still community spaces and living spaces. So cities can't be designed with transit and commute in mind.

<comment><USER9> Every time I see some architectural experiment talking about "shipping containers" yet destroying the main quality that makes them shipping containers, I weep.

Having said that, the problem with more "agile" housing is that lower cost inevitably gets taken over by the low end of the market. A large part of "having a house" appears to be the conspicuous consumption itself - <USER2> your presence on the surrounding area, subjecting yourself to a lot of property taxes, and being "part of the community". This makes sense if you flip from analyzing in terms of optimizing cost and think in terms of monkeysphere dominance. It's similar to why large companies are happy to hire as many unproductive seat warmers as they can regardless of the cost - <USER3> true measure of power is the army they command.

FWIW the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles has a good exhibit on mobile homes, back when mobile homes were new and hadn't yet been associated with poverty living. The idea certainly wasn't just a hack to skirt zoning regulations!

But yes it is interesting to think about how the regulatory landscape would change if topology could be easily reconfigured. One of the ideas of seasteading is that you could lower a section and float it under the others to move it out to a different group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This concerns me because they would be using open spaces and displacing habitat when they go for the 'untapped fringe'. Even deserts have habitat and an eco system.

Revitalizing existing cities is a much better option. The roadblock..as it were..would be governments. We have fundamental design weaknesses with utilities..water/power/sewer etc.

Cities need fresh perspectives. We need different kind of cities. New cities.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thirty minutes is a transit desert? Thirty minute walk to BART was considered central, urban, and transit-oriented by developers and planners alike in my old Berkeley neighborhood.

</comment><comment><USER11> _> farther from the train — at least a 15-minute walk_

That's nearby, only 5 minutes by bicycle. Just make sure there are some reasonable bike routes to the train halts.

<comment><USER12> Always amusing when young smug Californians tell everyone else of varying health, ability and weather how to live.

<comment><USER11> I'm not even American, and just getting used to not calling myself young anymore (but intend to keep cycling for many more years).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Calling a space a "transit desert" implies the problem is too little transit and pushes for more transit.

How about overdevelopment?

I'm all for public transit, but building and then calling for the public to provide transit service is externalizing costs to raise property value. In an overpopulated world, we don't need more growth but de-growth, at the city, national, and global level.

<comment><USER14> You think it's better to move out of cities, build highways and own cars?

The earth likes it better when we don't sprawl.

<comment><USER15> It's perhaps a little ambiguous, but I understood the comment as arguing the exact opposite. I interpreted "overdevelopment" to basically mean the kind of sprawl explainted here: [https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the- real-reason...](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason- your-city-has-no-money) ...where cities expand horizontally for short-term tax revenue gains/federal grants while accruing long-term infrastructure costs that their tax bases can't pay.

<comment><USER14> " In an overpopulated world, we don't need more growth but de-growth, at the city,..."

Perhaps it is a little ambiguous. However, the story is about New York City. There's not much room to grow outwards.

More mass transit in and around the city would reduce the need to own a car.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tens of thousands of $$$ lost because of a simple bug. Facing failures as a dev - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/cJsZchpvFLY <comment><AUTHOR> Web development is changing rapidly and sometimes it can be hard to be at your best. I made a mistake that cost us tons of money. But we also learned from that. And I...got an experience of a lifetime.

Also in a written form [https://dev.to/kethmars/tens-of-thousands-of-lost- because-of...](https://dev.to/kethmars/tens-of-thousands-of-lost-because-of-a- simple-bug-how-to-tackle-failures-as-a-dev-3o49)</comment>


Gerbil Scheme - <AUTHOR> http://hackzen.org/gerbil/ <comment><USER2> Very exciting, I love Lisps. Here's the tutorial for anyone else looking:

[https://github.com/vyzo/gerbil/blob/master/doc/guide.md](https://github.com/vyzo/gerbil/blob/master/doc/guide.md)

</comment><comment><USER3> Previously discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15394603](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15394603)

</comment><comment><USER4> Clicking (doc) leads me back to the landing page.

These bullet points are exciting but where is the docs? Examples? Anything?

<comment><USER5> Finding the docs took me less time than writing this comment. Here you go: [https://github.com/vyzo/gerbil](https://github.com/vyzo/gerbil)

<comment><USER6> That's beside the, point. If the website has links that don't work, generally poor UI, you're losing the audience of people coming to the website. If the docs are on github, then put a link on the website to the docs!

<comment><USER5> I think that discussing broken links is besides the point.</comment></comment></comment></comment>