Sugar: Open-source software learning platform for children - <AUTHOR> https://sugarlabs.org/ <comment><USER2> For all the adults moaning about it on here, I showed it to my 5 year old (British/Brazilian) son and he loved it.

<comment><USER3> This is the most relevant comment here this far! Sugar wasn't designed for western adults, their prejudice and office work but for children's learning in pedagogical scenarios within developing countries.

<comment><USER4> Not trying to compete in developed countries was probably a mistake. That could offer them more exposure and welcome funding.

But, then, they'd need to offer support they weren't ready to. Working with governments has some advantages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I absolutely love the mission of OLPC, and I hate literally every decision they made. I think they sucked all of the oxygen out of the room, and I think Sugar is possibly the worst part.

<comment><USER6> It's really beyond belief that they insisted on reinventing the wheel with so much of the system. How much more sane would it have been to just ship a regular Linux desktop with a curated selection of libre applications and established programming environments/repls?

RPi is the learning computer that OLPC never was.

<comment><USER7> Keep in mind it was meant to be hackable by young, non-English speakers with limited literacy. Starting with Linux and heavy suites of apps meant and built for/by technically inclined westerners would not have been a better fit, IMO. Especially within the resource and budget constraints they had to work with. A mid-oughts, sub-$200 device just didn't have the capacity for layers of legacy software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was just playing around with Sugar in a VM and it reminded me so much of how the earliest GUIs on a Mac as a kid felt. In general I've been kind of struggling to how to introduce my kids to computing. They're at the age now where they ask about it and see me on the computer and want to be part of it.

Sugar seems to be a good introduction - one of the best that's just not just a normal linux distro with a bunch of edu apps thrown in.

<comment><USER8> How do you feel it compares to "just a normal linux distro with a bunch of edu apps thrown in"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Other options with more 'kid friendly' UIs like UKnow4Kids, Educado, DoudouLinux, or Leeenux Kids just seem to have stopped development many years ago.

Something like Edubuntu isn't really appropriate for small children - it's a little too complicated.

I don't think the UI is perfect, fwiw

<comment><USER9> I think the standard Linux Gnome or KDE UI is probably better for kids to learn than Sugar, primarily because the learning curve to transition to any other computing interface is pretty high because Sugar's UX is really poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I promise I'm not trying to be flippant, but is this still actively around? I see there have been two seemingly-minor releases this year, the first project activity since 2017.

I had insomnia a few weeks ago and was re-reading a bunch of "whatever happened to OLPC" stuff to remember that utter disaster, and AFAIK, the Sugar project is basically just a few people, its now under the auspices of the SFC and its really barebones with almost no hardware support (the last OLPC devices were sold years ago). Even the base image of Ubuntu it offers for the USB stick reached EOL more than 18 months ago.

We can all say this was a nice idea -- but this certainly isn't an active project in the sense that there is developer or monetary investment.

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting stats (on the bottom of the page[1])

3,000,000+ Users 11,531,321+ Activities Downloaded

Significant numbers altogether.

[1] [https://sugarlabs.org/](https://sugarlabs.org/)

<comment><USER12> "To date, OLPC has distributed more than 3 million laptops to children around the world."

Not quite 3 million active users, but 3 million machines that came pre-loaded with this

[http://blog.laptop.org/2015/09/03/olpc-announces- partnership...](http://blog.laptop.org/2015/09/03/olpc-announces-partnership- with-zamora-teran-foundation/#.XWl8pihKguU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wasn't that the original environment of the OLPC computers? IMHO nowadays an X220 with a Debian and a KDE/Gnome/xfce environment goes a long way for me.

</comment><comment><USER12> This was part of the One Laptop Per Child program, and the '3 million users' stat comes from the fact that this was preloaded on every one of the 3 million+ laptops distributed.

[http://blog.laptop.org/2015/09/03/olpc-announces- partnership...](http://blog.laptop.org/2015/09/03/olpc-announces-partnership- with-zamora-teran-foundation/#.XWl8pihKguU)

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks nice; name makes me cringe.

If I'm crazy and names don't matter, then why not call it "Cigarette: open- source software learning platform for rug-rats ... from Tobacco Labs!"

A parent that wants to reinforce a consistent "sugar is bad" signal to their kids will feel that such a thing undermines their message.

<comment><USER15> Funny you'd mention that. Philip Morris was a Media Lab sponsor in 2004 and 2005.

[http://web.mit.edu/annualreports/pres04/07.05.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/annualreports/pres04/07.05.pdf)

[http://web.mit.edu/annualreports/pres05/07.06.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/annualreports/pres05/07.06.pdf)

(Those are the years I happened to know of -- looks like there are more.)

[https://www.google.com/search?biw=1183&bih=978&sxsrf=ACYBGNR...](https://www.google.com/search?biw=1183&bih=978&sxsrf=ACYBGNR0daBOkOIRA7YO3G6rfkJvH58Uzg%3A1567203842906&ei=AqJpXcr1Ns3FwQKckKXQAw&q=site%3Aweb.mit.edu+%22philip+morris%22+%22media+lab%22&oq=site%3Aweb.mit.edu+%22philip+morris%22+%22media+lab%22&gs_l=psy- ab.3...0.0..52314...0.0..0.0.0.......0......gws- wiz.fDmFfjjZfL4&ved=0ahUKEwjK_uKi0avkAhXNYlAKHRxICToQ4dUDCAs&uact=5)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I see a link for "How to get Sugar on an OLPC XO Laptop".

Is this going to revitalize my old XO laptop? (I would really love to be able to do that.)

<comment><USER17> Your XO shipped with Sugar. Assuming it's an XO-1, the latest OS and installation instructions are here: [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/13.2.10#XO-1](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/13.2.10#XO-1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Then there was Playpower, open source learning games for the _$10_ computer -- an 8bit 6502 Famicom clone

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/04/playpower...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/04/playpower-80s-computing-21st- century)

</comment><comment><USER19> I gave my nephew an OLPC with Sugar on it. Must have been 10 years ago. He could not figure it out, seemed useless to him.

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought one of the original aims was that kids could easily explore and modify the code behind the apps (python code I think).

I like that approach but couldn't find the "show/edit source button" (using the Sugarizer web based platform)

Perhaps a simplified Smalltalk environment would be better?

<comment><USER21> Sqeakland.org has that: eToys.

Not that the UI is very intuitive there, too.

<comment><USER22> That kind of saddens me as well. How can a GUI be this clunky and confusing? Why would an application mainly for children use the "put every option on screen and in the one uncontextual contex menu" atitude? I think it's low hanging fruit to create the best educational and entertaining environment for children, ask 4.99 on an appstore and be set for some time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Those autoscrolling things are very frustrating. I start to read something or look at a screenshot then it goes away. I can't make it stop either.

I honestly don't get who thought this was a good idea but it makes me question the UX of the entire product when stuff like that gets okayed.

<comment><USER24> I figured it out by accident, after a whole lot of frustration: click on the image itself and the carousel will pause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> [https://imgur.com/l99s11R](https://imgur.com/l99s11R)

For those times when you want your child to learn about alcoholic beverages.

From a computer.

On the internet.

<comment><USER26> A child being able to identify a martini glass doesn't seem like a terrible loss of innocence.

<comment><USER25> Agreed. However, that's not a just martini glass, that's a martini. Maybe they are teaching kids about olives? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I really like this.

The concept resonates - even though I have no children.

One thing I'm not seeing is spaced repetition? It's one thing I'd really want if I DIY learning

<comment><USER28> 1\. Spaced repetition is for the end of the knowledge acquisition process. It crystallizes what you already understand pretty well. Sugar is for the very beginning: making kids aware that some subjects are interesting enough to learn.

2\. Spaced repetition is boring, especially for kids.

<comment><USER29> I'm going to disagree with you, but I'm actually very interested to hear your reasoning behind your comments on spaced repetition. It is a very interesting perspective that I haven't heard before so I'm quite keen to hear more.

Having said that, here's my point of view. Spaced repetition is not really directly involved with knowledge acquisition. When I say "acquisition" I have a very specific meaning in mind. In recent language acquisition theory there is a distinction between "learning" and "acquisition". Learning means to be able to go from not knowing something to being able to remember something. Acquisition means to go from not being able to use something to being able to use it appropriately without undue effort. Learning does not always lead to acquisition (something that's still not penetrated the organisations that do education, unfortunately).

Spaced repetition is wonderful for learning. You can go from not knowing something to being able to remember something for a very long time with minimal effort. Again, it does not necessarily lead to acquisition. From the perspective of language, to acquire language you need to be exposed to it in realistic contexts where you understand the meaning. Personally, I have found that learning can _help_ with acquisition because it kind of gives you a super fast dictionary to look things up and allow you to comprehend things when you are exposed to them. You need a lot of exposure and comprehension to actually acquire the knowledge, though -- and spaced repetition alone won't get you there. I think the same is true of all skill acquisition, but there is a lot of research to be done to show that (as an example, imagine learning all the rules of calculus -- you still won't be able to write proofs easily, but it _will_ help you to save massive amounts of time when you start studying proofs).

Where I think you might be coming from is that there is a period when learning something where you just can't remember it for a significant amount of time. In most spaced repetition software (like Anki), you go from a 10 minute review spacing to a whole day -- and even going from 1 minute to 10 minutes can often be a jump.

What's interesting about that is that there is a _different_ concept called "spacing" (which is unfortunately very similarly named to "spaced repetition"). With "spacing" the idea is that you will reduce the slope of the forgetting curve faster _if you forget something_. This is a crazy idea, but it seems to work very well. If you want to read a _tonne_ of papers on the subject, google "desirable difficulties".

So my idea is that you initially want to space a repetition _longer_ than you would for spaced repetition so that you have to struggle to remember it. This will help you learn it faster. At that point you should switch over to spaced repetition. I say "my idea", because there are very few (or possibly none ;-) ) papers that discuss mixing spacing and desirable difficulties with spaced repetition.... If only I were a psychology prof...

Anyway, there is another concept called "Interleaving". With interleaving, what you do is intentionally change the subject frequently while you are learning something. This makes it difficult to remember and potentially reduces the amount of spacing you require to get the "spacing effect". Many papers suggest changing subjects every 10 minutes (which seems crazy -- imagine 10 minutes of math, 10 minutes of English, 10 minutes of Foreign language, 10 minutes of geography, then back to 10 minutes of math, etc, etc, etc -- but the studies I've read show really incredible rates of learning)

But again, the key is that learning is distinct from acquisition -- so while learning is useful it doesn't necessarily lead to skill acquisition.

As for #2 I don't think spaced repetition is boring at all -- especially for kids. Give a small child a cartoon on a DVD. Watch as they repeat it over and over and over and over again. Watch at they view the video today, the same video tomorrow, the same video the next day. It's really incredible. Kids love that kind of repetition.

I get your point that Anki might be boring ;-)

<comment><USER28> _> If you want to read a tonne of papers on the subject, google "desirable difficulties"._

I do. I memorize a lot of stuff (I'm a medical student) and my life will be way less stressful if almost remembering something means you're on the right track.

You probably aren't reading this, but thanks for the pointer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is really cool. Usually on HN the top post is some "controversial" contrarian opinion and people always fall for it.

</comment><comment><USER31> One of the coolest things about the OLPC was that adults couldn't figure out how to open it but little kids could.

<comment><USER32> Agreed that that is one of the coolest things about it. Two other features I loved: The screen -- great for coding outdoors. The DC-input -- the original Hardware Specification was for "10 to 20 V usable, -50 to 39 V safe, one- time fuse for excessive input" but changed to "11 to 18 V input usable, –32 to +40V input tolerated" ^0 with mine working fine from just below 11V up to 18V.

0: [http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Not to be confused with SugarCRM, which also goes by Sugar sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER34> "Nicotine – a learning platform for adults".

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm not 100% sure, but I think this might be the first thing I've seen on HN front page, in all my time on this site, that actually motivated me to jump right into criticism. Usually I just stay quiet if I don't have anything positive to say.

First of all, before even clicking through, my reaction to the name was negative. To quote henrikberggren's comment: "Naming a learning platform 'Sugar' is like naming a rehab clinic 'Heroin'."

Second, those stick figures look like skull-and-crossbones.

Third, your sample "fun activity" looks less fun than anything a kid with a computer has access to.

Fourth, creating a new user in your Sugarizer demo is an awful experience. It asked me to pick a name first, then let me go through the rest of the steps -- including "choosing" a new avatar color by clicking to get random colors until I just gave up -- and then, at the end, told me the user "foo" already exists.

Fifth, I don't find the UI intuitive at all. When I'm inside an activity, if I want to go back to the activity selection page, I have to click on an octagon with a square inside it. No idea how I'm supposed to associate that with "home" or "back" or any of the verbs I could think of.

Lastly, I tried out a few of the activities and I have no idea how any of that is supposed to help kids learn or collaborate. The "clock" activity just displays a clock. That's it. The "tam tam" activity has a confusing UI, but once you overcome the confusion, you can just pick different instruments to hear their sound. The most confusing was the "maze" activity, because I pressed one arrow key and it solved the whole maze. Later I realized that it follows the path until a decision point and then waits for input, but it's really weird.

I appreciate that this must have taken substantial effort, but I have no idea just how this is supposed to be useful. And let's face it, I gave it more time than an average visitor probably would.

<comment><USER35> Sugar is the original UI of the OLPC XO[1], circa 2006 - it's like a snapshot from a different world to us now. To be fair, lots of the activities are only fun when there are multiple users in the mesh network.

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

<comment><USER36> Is OLPC still active? I remember it being a big deal for a few years and then never really heard anything about it since.

<comment> core-questions It was a good idea, but probably too ambitious. I like better the idea of installing hardened kiosks in public areas - way easier to build and maintain with commodity parts. Portability is nice but it's honestly not critical.

<comment><USER37> This reminds me of the "hole in the wall" kiosk, installed in a slum in New Delhi in a way that was supposed to be accessible only to children: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimally_invasive_education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimally_invasive_education)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Naming a learning platform "Sugar" is like naming a rehab clinic "Heroin"

<comment><USER39> In half jest, how do you feel about "Slack" then? One can argue it makes the product more memorable.

<comment><USER40> I don't use Slack, but from what I gather it's general slowness and the way it aids constant distraction means it is a pretty good productivity killer, so calling it 'Slack' is actually Truth in Television.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does Google restrict your ability to conduct valuable research? - <AUTHOR> When conducting research on your desired topic, does Google search's flaws inhibit your ability to conduct the research efficiently? What are those specific flaws? <comment><USER2> Their softening of rules around "verbatim" searches is frustrating. I'll search for 3 words, all mandatory, and will get results that are missing one and have to click "must include X" or preemptively include quotes.

Verbatim quotes aren't compatible with other search filters, which particularly impacts my ability to search for JS things, since that info goes stale so quickly.

so I can't simultaneously search for "all these words in this order" and also newer than 2017

<comment><USER3> This drives me insane. If I search for "Einstein quotes on philosophy" and it by default excludes "Einstein", the entire search is useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't found any. It's usually the search phrase specificity that gives me incorrect results. As a basic example, if I search 'lions mane', I'll get pictures of male lions with manes. If I added 'mushroom' to the end, then I will get the mushroom I'm looking for.

I think Google has an academic search type if you want true research results.

<comment><USER5> Yes, Google Scholar. But that only finds things that look like academic papers.</comment></comment>


Predicting Popularity of Posts on Hacker News (2016) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2016/report/GengYuanWang-PredictingPopularityOfPostsOnHackerNews-report.pdf <comment><USER2> I predict this post would be a lot more popular if its title ended with "with machine learning".

</comment><comment><USER3> _The content of a news post is the most powerful source for predicting its popularity._

I would like to believe this is true, and I would guess that it's probably more true on HN than elsewhere, but I would really like to see them dive more into how they came to this conclusion.

I think the moderator led title editing makes this comparison more difficult (not bad necessarily) but it would be worth comparing popularity:content to popularity:title to have a more rigorous understanding.

Overall I applaud the approach they took. It seems however that the conclusion/output doesn't give better insight into the parameters which drive post popularity on HN, over previous approaches which seek to understand the underlying voting mechanism [1]. While different they are trying to basically understand the question "what makes for a popular post on HN."

Modeling the sentiment of a community under a formal mechanism (vote algo) is incredibly difficult to do correctly, so again kudos for the work and it seems like it's something that could be built on.

[1][http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker- new...](http://sangaline.com/post/reverse-engineering-the-hacker-news-ranking- algorithm/)

</comment><comment><USER4> It isn't too particular to hacker news, although I did like the tables, definitely recognized the topics.

SELECTED TOPICS EXTRACTED BY NMF

Topic 1 js javascript node react component python config browser

Topic 2 pple iphone ipad fbi mac cook sir headphone watch steve

Topic 3 invest startup fund venture capital entrepreneur tech raise

Topic 4 game pokemon vr nintendo virtual oculus headset steam

Topic 5 email clinton website inbox gmail slack spam campaign

Topic 7 tesla vehicle musk autopilot elect autonomous battery road

Topic 8 facebook twitter advertise zuckerberg messenger snapchat

Topic 11 docker deploy cloud kubernet swarm cluster microservices

Topic 12 ai intelligence algorithm neurual deep alphago deepmind

Topic 14 uber ride city lyft tax vehicle hail self did transport kalanick</comment>


Tired of Excel's VLOOKUP? Use SQL Queries on Excel Ranges - <AUTHOR> https://www.zoomeranalytics.com/blog/in-excel-sql <comment><USER2> How's the SQL engine implemented? I had a quick look at the xlwings code on github and couldn't see it...

<comment><AUTHOR> It's described in the last paragraph "Behind the scenes"</comment></comment>


MacPaint and QuickDraw Source Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerhistory.org/highlights/macpaint/# <comment><USER2> Great quote by Steve Jobs:

"A reporter asked Steve Jobs, "How many man-years did it take to write Quick Draw?" Steve asked Bill, who said, "Well, I worked on it on and off for four years." Steve then told the reporter, "Twenty-four man-years". Obviously Steve figured, with ample justification, that one Atkinson year was the equivalent of six ordinary programmer years."</comment>


Google Glass, beyond the hype: a true innovation of Human–computer interaction - <AUTHOR> http://codeinchaos.com/post/45119693182/google-glass-human-computer-interaction I've been suffering from Repeated motion injury due to the over use of touch devices ... when Google glass was announced, I didn't see a cool new gadget, I saw a new and important step in the evolution of human-computer interaction. <comment><USER2> There certainly is a future for human-computer interaction. It'll be interesting to see where it leads...</comment>


This software startup can tell your boss if you're looking for a job - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/09/06/this-software-startup-can-tell-your-boss-if-youre-looking-for-a-job-2/ <comment><USER2> Interesting that the article mentions Stack Overflow, as back in April we changed our Terms Of Service to explicitly disallow these kinds of scrapers: [http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/277369](http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/277369)

Of course that doesn't stop it from happening, but at least now we can send notice and take action when we find scrapers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Idea for the next unicorn: _" our new startup can tell you if your boss is using Joberate so you can get the hell out"_

We will have an IPO next week

<comment><USER4> >We will have an IPO next week

Not if Joberate acquires you first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm sorry, but I find tools like this so questionable. The idea the boss should know when his or her employees are planning to leave without even asking seems like a Orwellian nightmare waiting to happen.

Reminds me of those apps people install to track friends and relatives.

<comment><USER6> Why is it wrong for a manager to understand the needs and motivations of their employees? Sometimes you don't have to ask directly - there are other signals.

Rands covers a good portion of it here: [http://randsinrepose.com/archives/bored-people- quit/](http://randsinrepose.com/archives/bored-people-quit/)

<comment><USER7> While it's not wrong for a manager to try to make his/her employees happy, I think the parent covered it when he/she mentioned the Orwellian aspect of it. My other fear would be my employer deciding to see me out the door much more quickly if they found out that I was looking for another job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Funny enough - it's all too common for a company to poach employees directly from another job. It's an odd double standard (though understandable) that an employee could get backlash for looking, but recruiters actively try and poach.</comment>


Research study draws conclusions about the efficacy of 21 antidepressants - <AUTHOR> http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2018/02/john-ioannidis-discusses-meta-analysis-of-antidepressants.html <comment><AUTHOR> PDF of article in Lancet:

[http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(...](http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736\(17\)32802-7.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you validate your idea? - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea of a mobile app that makes sharing location easy.
How can I know if people actually want something like that or is it just me?
Are there some industry standard methods for that? <comment><USER2> I recently talked to nearly 100 entrepreneurs for my book titled "How We Did It". One thing that I asked most of them was how to validate the business idea before embarking on it. One common answer was to set up a landing page and advertise it using the right keywords on Adwords. Are people proceeding towards the purchase/download from here? In that case, there is a market and you could work on your idea.

Incidentally, the chapter about idea validation is available for free here: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/0evrb66hvg4ucoy/Preview- copy.pdf](https://www.dropbox.com/s/0evrb66hvg4ucoy/Preview-copy.pdf)

This is the Amazon link for the book : [http://www.amazon.com/How-Did- entrepreneurs-struggles-experi...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Did- entrepreneurs-struggles-experiences/dp/149759975X/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It really depends on the situation. In a recent endeavor, I took to sites like Quora, Reddit, HN, and I went outside and talked to people on the street.

It's all about asking relevant questions that open ended and not biased. In the recent experience I had validating an idea, I ended up getting great nuggets of information that helped us tailor our app to address the pain points users found in existing products. It's also important to note here that this doesn't mean that you're guaranteed money; all you have done at this point is understand that the issues exist and that you (hopefully) have a solution. Hope this helps!

</comment><comment><USER4> The most common feature I've found in successful tech products is ease of use. For this, a product should be intuitive. My definition of "intuitive product":

\- Simple, but useful: it must possess not too many parts or features, just the most useful ones.

\- Familiar, but innovative: the features it possess must look like other features from other well-known products, but have recognizable improvements also.

HTH ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> Write down 3 or 4 ideas (including your target idea) and poll your friends, family, coworkers, etc. Ask which one they would _pay for_. Have "none of the above" as the final option. If you directly asked what they thought of the idea, you might get a biased response. People tend to be encouraging - even if it's a bad idea. The little poll should help mitigate the bias.

</comment><comment><USER6> Check out this article:

[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/04/10/a-guide-to- valida...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/04/10/a-guide-to-validating- product-ideas-with-quick-and-simple-experiments/)

I read it and really enjoyed it. It seems like a great fit for your situation.

</comment><comment><USER7> If monitizable a concept can be tested using Adwords,FB or bing ads.

</comment><comment><USER8> The answer depends on how much money you have :)

More seriously nobody really know what will be the next big thing.</comment>


Inside The Matrix for Mobiles - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/news/2007/10/iphone_dev_platform

<comment><USER2> Cool. I wonder if there is room for a competitor in this market or if they are basically perfect. Anyone ever used their services?

<comment><USER3> A lot of the competition is outsourcing - get people in cheap places to do the grunt work of sitting around testing stuff with different phones.

<comment><USER2> So there are outsourcing firms that have all of the phones and people to test them?</comment></comment></comment>


Computer learns to play Civilization by reading the manual - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/90046-computer-learns-to-play-civilization-by-reading-the-instruction-manual

<comment><USER2> The source article is way more informative: [http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/language-from- games-0712....](http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/language-from- games-0712.html)

<comment><USER3> And was already submitted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2762783>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> According the the paper, they used Freeciv, because it is open source and they could modify the source code. Their source code is available here:

<http://groups.csail.mit.edu/rbg/code/civ/>

<comment><USER5> Not at expert in this area, but its interesting stuff. Obviously, its nothing like the headline of 'computers learns to play by reading manual'. Sounds more like 'manual provides context hints to help guide search'.

I'm not sure the baseline AI of civ is that hard to beat, so its hard to evaluate how good the headline stat of 78% is? Anyone?

The other thing that gives me pause, is that they performed their rollouts against the other AI player. That seems kind of unfair - might be concerned they might be specialising to beat the build in AI, rather than to play the game.

Finally, did they perform their rollouts during a training phase of their model, and then use just the fitted model during evaluation play, or did they continue to use the rollouts during evaluation? I presume it was the former, but I only skimmed the paper, and couldnt find it explicitly?

<comment><USER6> You make good points, but there are a few factors you have to think about. First, the built-in AI has been designed by people with great knowledge of the game and its strategy. The fact that a totally generic AI system with zero knowledge of the game can learn on the fly and beat the hand-tuned AI is pretty impressive.

They were training online during gameplay, so each round started fresh with an untrained system.

<comment><USER5> >The fact that a totally generic AI system with zero knowledge of the game can learn on the fly and beat the hand-tuned AI is pretty impressive.

Yes; but, like, Samuel's learning checker playing programs in the 50s and 60s did that.

>They were training online during gameplay, so each round started fresh with an untrained system.

I'm not really sure how that is considered training. Like Tim_Benham's comment, on a first read of the paper, I would be concerned that the AI is beating to inbuilt AI due to what could be termed 'save-game cheating'. And there's still the issue of whether it is overspecialised to just exploit the inbuilt AI in some way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Finally, someone learns to RTFM.

<comment><USER8> Or more to the point: finally some _thing_ learns.

<comment><USER9> What is the difference? Software is software, differences in hardware are boring and growing narrower.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How do you know the manual affected how well the computer played? IMHO Put a machine learning algorithm into playing enough games and it isn't so unreasonable it would do better than the default AI on at least some games.

They need a control where the computer doesn't have access to a manual and compare to that.

<comment><USER11> > They need a control where the computer doesn't have access to a manual and > compare to that.

Which is exactly what they did: <http://people.csail.mit.edu/regina/my_papers/civ11.pdf></comment></comment>


Assembly Committee Gutted California's Net Neutrality - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/rampant-corruption-assembly-committee-gutted-californias-net-neutrality <comment><USER2> "Assemblymembers Quirk-Silva, Kamlager-Dove, Holden, Bonta, and Low abstained or were absent while the remaining Democratic and Republican Assembly members joined together to vote in hostile amendments that gutted a whole array of consumer protections of the bill."

 _Shame_ on your blatant partisanship, EFF. This is a _flat lie_. The committee action that gutted the bill was totally Democrat-authored and the process Democrat-controlled. Democrats voted 7-0 for this (Republicans 2-1 _against_ ):

[http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVotesClient.xhtm...](http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVotesClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB822)

Mashable has a somewhat more objective account, see:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361154](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361154)

Even CNET reported it more objectively:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17359361](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17359361)</comment>


Neo4j 1.4 M01 "Kiruna Stol" released - <AUTHOR> http://blog.neo4j.org/2011/04/neo4j-14-m01-announcing-kiruna-stol.html

<comment><USER2> The Neo4j release naming scheme is cute: <Swedish city> <Swedish noun>.

Kiruna = [http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...](http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Kiruna,+Sweden&aq=1&sll=41.017586,-73.623145&sspn=0.095845,0.220757&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Kiruna,+Norrbotten,+Sweden&t=h&z=6)

Stol = Chair

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone using it who can comment on Neo4j's usefulness as the primary data store of (eg., Rails-based) web applications? Or can point to relevant HN discussions?

</comment><comment><USER4> looks like they switched their license from AGPL to GPL3! didn't know until now. great news!</comment>


Show HN: A tool that finds high quality freelance gigs, using robots and humans - <AUTHOR> https://breefleads.com
Hi everyone, I wanted to share with you a new iteration of a tool I built that helps freelancers find more work.
Breef Leads searches platforms such as Freelancer.com, LinkedIn, PeoplePerHour, Facebook and Upwork.com to find relevant, high quality projects for freelancers.
There are two approaches to the way we find opportunities:
1. Third-party Leads. These are leads our machine-learning based service has found across the web, automatically filtered out the junk, leaving you with higher quality leads, and saving you the hassle of scouring through a dozen platforms manually. We share these opportunities for free via our weekly newsletter and freelancer platform.
2. Direct Leads. Unlike other platforms, we believe in creating a light barrier between a potential client and the freelancer, so for our Direct Leads we simply give you the option to see their requirements and (for a small one-off fee) reveal their contact details to get in touch with them directly (via email, contact number or social media profile)
I'd love to hear any feedback or questions you might have!
https://breefleads.com <comment><USER2> I had a look, and didn't sign up (yet) because:

The only breakdown for software is: games; mobile; web design; web dev.

My work is usually about improving ops/infra processes, developer tooling, system architecture, etc. Yes that usually relates to a "web app" but based on current trends, subscribing under "web development" would likely result in a bunch of react/angular/$flavour-of-the-month-JS leads.

Having said all that, I _just_ noticed that you source leads from places that I deliberately avoid, because I'm not interested in a race to the bottom using a "platform" that exists purely to skim a percentage from every invoice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! It sounds like you'd be looking for platform engineering leads. I completely agree on the categorisation and will be looking to add more specific professions soon.

With the platforms, again I agree with you that the way some of them are designed makes it difficult for freelancers to be valued for the work they create. That's why we not only find leads from these platforms but also seek to find leads from sources such as LinkedIn/Facebook where you can have a much more direct relationship with the individual looking for your skillset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I got a CORS error when signing up as a Freelancer:

Chrome:

> Access to fetch at > '[https://www.leads.breef.io/'](https://www.leads.breef.io/') (redirected > from > '[https://www.breefleads.com/api/freelancers/signup'](https://www.breefleads.com/api/freelancers/signup')) > from origin '[https://www.breefleads.com'](https://www.breefleads.com') has > been blocked by CORS policy

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads ups guys! Currently fixing issues with the breefleads.com domain but in the meantime you can visit and sign up at www.leads.breef.io

<comment><USER3> After signing up, I received a password via email in plain text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> it's not opening for me :/</comment>


Improved VPC Networking for AWS Lambda - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/announcing-improved-vpc-networking-for-aws-lambda-functions/ <comment><USER2> This is huge for Lambda. It allows devs to create "serverless" apps [1], with relational databases, without 10+ second cold-start times. In the article, they measure it as 988ms.

I have tried building an API using API Gateway <-> Lambda, but had to choose between using DynamoDB to store data (no-SQL, so challenging to query) or suffering unacceptably long response times whenever a request happens to cause a cold-start. Theoretically, this problem is now going away!

[1] [https://serverless-stack.com](https://serverless-stack.com)

<comment><USER3> *It allows devs to create those apps _within a VPC_.

You could always have fast startup with Lambda + database outside the VPC.

<comment><USER4> Also, wasn't Aurora Serverless created because of that problem?

<comment><USER5> Aurora Serverless also handles connections. The problem of having a burst of 1000 concurrent invocations accessing your databases still exists even with VPC access

<comment><USER6> That limit can be raised, apparently. I've seen mention of limits up to 30K concurrent invocations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> AWS announced this enhancement at 2018 re:Invent. It was slated for "sometime in 2019". I was excited, and I'm impressed that they released the feature well ahead of the end of the year (and before the next conference, which would obviously raise a few questions)

<comment><USER8> They did something similar with drift detection and cloud formation. They announced it at reInvent 2017 and released it one week before reInvent 2018.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This has been a /major/ sore point for Lambda use, amazing they fixed it, and always great to see they've documented the intense engineering requirements involved to make it happen.

AWS is a beautiful mix of business and technology, it's very rare to see such a large engineering-driven organization managing to balance customer friendliness. I'm an unashamed fanboy

<comment><USER4> Major is a bit harsh.

As far as I know this was only an issue for legacy architectures.

<comment><USER8> No. Using an RDMS instead of DynamoDB is not a "legacy" architecture. You also shouldn't expose your database publicly.

<comment><USER4> RDMS is not legacy, but perimeter security certainly is.

<comment><USER10> Honest question: what, in you opinion, is the state-of-the-art approach? Something like BeyondCorp?

<comment><USER4> I think zero-trust goes into a good direction.

[https://www.securityroundtable.org/zero-trust-approach- can-m...](https://www.securityroundtable.org/zero-trust-approach-can-make- cloud-secure/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This solves one part of the cold start problem. Starting the container and loading the image on to it is still going to cause some latency.

<comment><USER12> Which can be mitigated by invoking your own Lambda functions once every minute or 5 minutes. Usually does not blow the budget.

<comment><USER8> Which is a horrible idea....

How many lambdas do you keep warm? 5, 10, 20? Every new connection is a new lambda instance. You're still just delaying the inevitable.

Just use Fargate if you want to stay serverless and don't want the cold start times -- well at least before today.

<comment><USER12> Sorry but it does not matter how many since everything is automated and you create the warm up scheduler when you create the function. As other pointed out in this thread that are other challenges with this approach.

>> Just use Fargate

We were trying to and we decided that is not our cup of tea. Lambdas are.

<comment><USER8> Yes it does matter. In your scheduler, how do you ensure your ping (the way you start an instance) is actually creating another instance to keep warm or reusing another instance?

If you want to always keep 20 instances warm, you have to keep the first ping active until the 20th one is done.

In other words, if you want to keep 20 active instances warm and you send 20 requests in 5 seconds, if each request only takes .25 seconds. You will only have 5 warm lambdas. The 6th real concurrent connection will still have a cold start. Also while you are pinging the request to keep it warm, that instance can serve a real user.

Also, API Gateway has an algorithm to decide whether to launch a new lambda are cache a request hoping that using an already warm lambda will free up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow! That's great. Cold starts are no longer a show stopper! Rust powered APIs running on AWS .. It sounds really exciting

</comment><comment><USER6> This is great news, but I'm bummed they didn't bundle the NAT gateway with this service. In a typical function that calls out to get data from a service and reads/writes from a DB in a VPC, that requires the somewhat painful configuration of a NAT gateway and dedicated subnets, as well as a $36/month bill for the NAT gateway service.

There are some workarounds that using multiple lambdas, but they have their own gotchas.

Still, hooray, this is good news. The Data API is great for Serverless Aurora, but I can't use that with BI tools.

<comment><USER14> You can run your own gateway instance(s) for a lot cheaper than the nat gateway service. There are definitely some tradeoffs, but if $36/mo is an issue, they can be worthwhile: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/VPC_NAT_Ins...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/VPC_NAT_Instance.html)

<comment><USER8> This is not meant to be a criticism of AWS, I'm an AWS true believer, but the main purpose of going to AWS is to make the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" someone else's problem not to save money.

Going to AWS to save money on resources is about like going to the Apple Store to buy a cheap laptop.

<comment><USER6> I'm not against AWS or $36/mo. It just is kinda a drag when the promise of serverless is pay per user and scaling to zero. You could get a nice EC2 t3.medium and do a lot more RPS for the cost of that NAT and Lambda invocations.

<comment><USER8> If you don't care about cold starts, there is always Aurora Serverless with the Data API. I don't believe it requires either a NAT or for the lambda to be attached to your VPC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a great improvement for Lambda users, much reduced cold start times!

</comment><comment><USER3> Iconoclast view ahead (change my mind please):

AWS does tons of stuff around VPCs....I feel like they _really_ want me to use them (or their customers _really_ want to use them), but I just don't see why.

I just run RDS on the internet. I don't have to muck with the complexity or cost of NATs or peering or Lambda slow start or any other weird networking issues.

I know it's "public", but that seems irrelevant in the era of cloud services. This isn't any different than, say, how Firebase or a million other services run. Should I be concerned that my Firebase apps are insecure because someone isn't overlaying a 10.* network on them?

EDIT: I should clarify that I understand the legitimacy of security groups, especially for technologies that weren't meant to operate outside a firewall. But that's mostly a different subject; AWS had security groups years before VPCs and subnets and NATs.

<comment><USER16> So making the actual listening port for a database server "public" is generally a bad idea as that is another attack surface of code that honestly is hardly ever made public... but if when you say "public" you mean you are using security groups (which are super trivial to use and easy to understand) to define which other AWS devices can access the port, then yeah: I have never seen any reason why this entire feature should exist and the concept of having to think about IP address ranges as if they somehow matter _is one of the things I was escaping when I moved to cloud in the first place_ , and somehow they wanted to reintroduce it? Why?!? _It doesn 't even work well_ (!!), and introduces tons of latency into everything it touches (not just Lambda) :/.

<comment><USER3> My theory is that a bunch of entrenched network engineers just really like subnets and IPv4 and NAT and don't realize how mostly unnecessary it is in an era of cloud infrastructure and IPv6.

My grandchildren are still going to be NAT'ing.

<comment><USER12> I think it is easy to have dev, qa and prod VPCs. Without VPC these separate infrastructure groups might be harder to split out. I usually reference security groups instead of subnets in security groups, avoiding referencing IP ranges (v4 or v6) entirely.

<comment><USER17> You can also use multiple AWS accounts to separate those environments, which also eases user management (usually you have different people with access to each environment, with some overlap).

This also means that developers can have close to admin privileges, since the worst they can do, is to disrupt work of another developer, without affecting either QA or production.

<comment><USER18> Accounts are the correct level to separate these at. Keeps credentials easier to manage for devs, techs, etc, and limits blast radius if unauthorized accesses take place.

<comment><USER12> >> This also means that developers can have close to admin privileges

>> limits blast radius if unauthorized accesses take place.

I am not sure if admin privileges are the right way of limiting blast radius. Reasonable roles with least privileges are.

"In information security, computer science, and other fields, the principle of least privilege (PoLP), also known as the principle of minimal privilege or the principle of least authority, requires that in a particular abstraction layer of a computing environment, every module (such as a process, a user, or a program, depending on the subject) must be able to access only the information and resources that are necessary for its legitimate purpose."

<comment><USER18> Yeah, and you want those roles and accounts scoped appropriately. Someone with the 'Admin' role in a pre-prod account wouldn't necessarily get that same role in a production one. Someone with admin in a standard prod account might not get that same privilege in an account that you manage for a customer, or one with extra compliance requirements, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is your brand influence on Youtube? Octoly knows - <AUTHOR> http://www.octoly.com

<comment><USER2> It's pretty crazy to think that so much of a brand awareness is actually from UGC...</comment>


Ask HN: LEMP-friendly project management software - <AUTHOR> Hello. I'm looking for a project management tool akin to OpenProject that I can self-host and use on a small scale (sub-10 users). I have not yet tried OpenProject in real life because I'm waiting patiently for Ubuntu 18.04 support, which is coming.
While I wait, I would like to look at alternatives with a view to ongoing use and offering something back to the community in some fashion, whether it's documentation, user support or something else.
I'm running a Linux, Nginx, MySQL (Persona) and PHP stack and something that fits nicely into that setup would be super. I do web ops by day, so I'm well-versed with the technicals. Until now, however, I've used only proprietary desktop software.
What would you recommend I look at, and also avoid? Any advice is very warmly received. Thanks very much in advance. <comment><USER2> Install Docker on your host and use any PMS you like that stores it's data in MySQL and have the project management software store it's data in your previously defined DBMS setup.

I like Gitlab, that's just me.

</comment><comment> a-fried-egg What is LEMP?

<comment><USER3> Like LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP) but replace Apache webserver with Nginx.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I build a search engine using elastic search and node express? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://www.compose.com/articles/getting-started-with- elasti...](https://www.compose.com/articles/getting-started-with- elasticsearch-and-node/)

[https://blog.raananweber.com/2015/11/24/simple- autocomplete-...](https://blog.raananweber.com/2015/11/24/simple-autocomplete- with-elasticsearch-and-node-js/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.</comment></comment>


Happy Pi Day - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_Day

<comment><USER2> MIT regular admission decisions are coming out on 3/14 1:59:26 PM Eastern Time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Incidentally, 3/14 is also Albert Einstein's birthday.

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000955.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm going to a Pi party later today at my former co-founder's house. He got about 40 people last year. Pie shaped items are the theme, but I was also considering bringing 3.141 pounds of _something_ but I have no idea what... Any suggestions?

<comment><USER6> If others are bringing pie, bring 3.14159 lbs of ice cream.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lol. Cute article. I've never heard of this before. But I will celebrate today :D

</comment><comment><USER8> Georgia Tech is sending out my acceptance/rejection letter today. gulp

</comment><comment><USER9> Ahem, it's actually steak and blowjob day: <http://www.steakandbjday.com/>

<comment><USER10> I created my own holiday a few years back which I've observed every year with friends since its inception... Nacho Friday.

It occurs on the 2nd Friday in July, you have to drink copious amounts of Tequila, consume lots of nachos and wear a novelty oversized sombrero all day.

Anyway, us Aussies have to celebrate Pi day next month (kinda) - 31/4 as today is 14/3 for us.

Although it seems wikipedia has an interesting article on the number 143, it can be created by adding up 2 different sets of consecutive prime numbers, which I found interesting.

<comment><USER11> If we're mentioning holidays that we made up, here's mine. March 5 (YYYY-3-5, when you write the date big-endian) is the _Square Root of Christmas_ (35 * 35 = 1225). This allows 10 days between Sqrt(Xmas) and Pi Day. This period of time is called _Nerdigras_.

[http://twopoint718.blogspot.com/2009/03/march-5-is-square- ro...](http://twopoint718.blogspot.com/2009/03/march-5-is-square-root-of- christmas.html)

There's already been a carol written:

[http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200903/square_root_of_christma...](http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200903/square_root_of_christmas.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Steve Jobs: His Life In Pictures - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/43479628/Steve_Jobs_His_Life_in_Pictures

<comment><USER2> Doesn't show on my iPad. The second screen says he created the first Macintosh computer in his garage, which has to be wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> Didn't know Steve Jobs was an arab.</comment>


The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Not Real (practice does not make perfect) - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/10000-hour-rule-not-real-180952410/?no-ist

<comment><USER2> Duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8206504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8206504)</comment>


Cosmic Rays May Explain Life's Bias for Right-Handed DNA - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/cosmic-rays-may-explain-lifes-bias-for-right-handed-dna-20200629/ <comment><USER2> Asimov wrote about precisely this, and hypothesised, well, exactly this, in his essay "The asymmetry of life" in the collection "The Left Hand of the Electron" - in 1972 - right down to gamma ray chirality due to electron spin asymmetry affecting an initial randomly distributed population.

See pages 65-67 of the below (pdf pages, not book pages).

[http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/asimov- electron.p...](http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/asimov-electron.pdf)

<comment><USER3> This is absolutely incredible. I've never read Asimov beyond one or two short stories, now I feel compelled to read his grander works. What an insanely keen mind.

<comment><USER4> Be sure to read his paper on the properties of resublimated thiotimoline. It's a disgrace he never got a Nobel prize for this.

<comment><USER5> In case anyone was wondering what this referred to (like I did): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline)

> Thiotimoline is a fictitious chemical compound conceived by American > biochemist and science fiction author Isaac Asimov. It was first described > in a spoof scientific paper titled "The Endochronic Properties of > Resublimated Thiotimoline" in 1948. The major peculiarity of the chemical is > its "endochronicity": it starts dissolving before it makes contact with > water.

> Asimov went on to write three additional short stories, each describing > different properties or uses of thiotimoline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I bet that if they found out the opposite, that the current chirality is less prone to mutations from cosmic rays, we'll have an identical article which celebrates their finding, except that they would propose it's better to have less mutations.

They need to prove that increasing number of mutations is even a desirable property.

<comment><USER7> >They need to prove that increasing number of mutations is even a desirable property.

Faster evolution is a desirable property, maybe not anymore, but in first life for sure.

<comment><USER8> Faster evolution is indistinguishable from cancer.

<comment><USER9> Sufficiently fast evolution is indistinguishable from cancer.

<comment><USER10> Tell that to Canine transmissible venereal tumors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Medlife Crisis, a cardiologist that makes educational YouTube videos[0], did a somewhat similar (and very very funny) talk about the chirality of of the human body, linking it to the chirality of DNA and beyond[1]

[0][https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgRBRE1DUP2w7HTH9j_L4OQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgRBRE1DUP2w7HTH9j_L4OQ)

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqv9HHNak0c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqv9HHNak0c)

</comment><comment><USER12> Plenty of mutations are already produced by faulty copying. This is how viruses mutate. An early organism would have very error-prone RNA copying. How would the cosmic rays, producing a tiny effect on top of this, be relevant at all? The author fails to explain this. The secret to chirality might simply be chance: once the machinery is running it can only understand its own chirality.

<comment><USER13> I believe the original paper's authors are suggesting that the effect of cosmic rays on mutations might be enantioselective (meaning they effect molecules differently based on their chirality).

See original paper: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.12138.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.12138.pdf)

And previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23294294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23294294)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would be interested to see more explanation for why cosmic rays turn out to have a specific chirality-preference, and the actual proportion to which they do. The article seems very light on information on that point.

<comment><USER15> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_interaction#Violation_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_interaction#Violation_of_symmetry)

<comment><USER16> (Not OP) I read that earlier while trying to answer the same question, but it doesn't seem to explain the cosmic ray handedness. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER14> Likewise; that's what I'd like to know as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Really interesting. Tangentially related, this 2006 Astronomy Picture of the Day showing a render of cosmic rays coming down and the corresponding air showers is really illustrative [1]. These things happen millions of times per day. I'd love to see a more modern animation of it.

[1] [https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060814.html](https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060814.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> A pretty small effect, given that Earth has on net lost atmosphere over time there was less cosmic ray radiation on the surface back then then there is now. Which is in stark contrast to UV radiation which came in easily before the Great Oxygenation produced an ozone layer. LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, probably already had some oxygen resistance before then because UV radiation was always breaking up water molecules to produce tiny amounts of oxygen that it had to deal with. (Currently reading _Oxygen_ by Nick Lane)

<comment><USER19> UV radiation could not penetrate deep layers of oceans (where LUCA could potentially emerge)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting. SETI planned on identifying any left-handed chirality outside of Earth as a good indicator for life not formed on Earth as we haven't managed to find any on Earth yet.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is hugely interesting.

Tangentially: I was told once the reason spiral staircases go the other way (in castles usually) is that when running upstairs with a sword you want to be able to use your right hand to kill anyone coming down the stairs.

As a side note you do turn left in the UK roads, so this rule is not universal.

<comment><USER22> Wouldn't castles be designed to favor the defender at the top of the stairs?

<comment><USER23> Right, I think most staircases I've seen in castles have required you to go clockwise when ascending. This means the attacker's sword hand would be pretty constrained!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How much do the insights from this article overlap with this 12-minute stand- up comedy bit about (more or less) the same topic? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqv9HHNak0c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqv9HHNak0c)

</comment><comment><USER25> On a semi-related note, I wonder why, even though I'm right-handed, my left hand is considerably stronger than my right one or how common this phenomenon is.

<comment><USER26> Son, have I ever told you about the move some call 'the stranger?'

<comment><USER27> Hackney news is not the place for these kinds of jokes because they add nothing to the conversation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So, what they are saying is that if you climb a helix of a DNA molecule, you are always turning left?

How weird to call that "right-handedness"!

<comment><USER29> Make a fist with your right hand. Which way do your fingers curl?

<comment><USER28> Thank you for explaining the convention (I've heard it before). How does that relate to "righthandedness" otherwise?

I was just (jokingly) pointing out how introducing conventions for right or left requires memorization of some silly rule like this. I'd much prefer if they used made-for-purpose topological terms instead of pretending how this somehow relates to a widely known concept.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Aren't the cosmic rays polarized due to earth's magnetic field? (if so-- wouldn't field reversals have swapped it?)

</comment><comment><USER31> Are there any simplified explanations for the asymmetry of the weak force driving the cosmic ray polarity that doesn't require extensive knowledge in physics?

</comment><comment><USER32> do modal verbs in titles seem correlated with clickbait?

</comment><comment><USER33> oh this is genius!

<comment><USER33> ok someone didn't like this comment, lets see if I can make it better. The article linked doesn't have a lot of detail, but i'm impressed that someone has pushed through the standard reflexive though that either chiral form was equally likely and recognised that actually the universal has handedness that could have influenced the outcome. That's what I think is the stroke of genius here, not the conclusion, but the idea to consider other forms of handedness eg.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(electromagnetism)#H...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_\(electromagnetism\)#Handedness_of_electromagnetic_waves)

as context in which the left or right forms might not actually be equivalent.

The reason I think this is genius, is it is a question anyone could have asked. Lots of us have probably thought about it at some point and summarily concluded it was not a question we were capable of exploring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I was hoping this would explain handedness in humans, but it's semi clickbait.</comment>


Colombia's Cocaine Cartels Learn a New Trick - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,562603,00.html <comment><USER2> I am not sure why the drug dealers think that these delivery crafts have to have human pilots on board. With the kind of money that these guys have, it would be relatively easy to implement a self-piloting craft that can go anywhere.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but the more complicated it gets, the more expertise they need. That means they need some specialized people and by that they are just augmenting the risk of getting caught at some point in the process.</comment></comment>


SQL - A Failed Experiment? - code-dog http://nerds-central.blogspot.com/2012/01/sql-failed-experiment.html

<comment><AUTHOR> "Actually, it is the Relations Data Model which might well prove to have been a failed experiment or at the very most a brief distraction."

What a joke. The failed experiment, or brief distraction, of the _Relational Model_ and SQL has gone on twice as long as this guy's programming career, and is still going strong.

<comment> code-dog But it never unseated IMS - that is a bit of a kicker.</comment></comment>


Axial stack battery design could unlock the era of supersonic electric airliners - <AUTHOR> http://newatlas.com/axial-stack-battery-supersonic-electric-airliners/45537/?amp=true <comment><USER2> > But the airline industry is still roughly as slow, and noisy, and expensive, > and inefficient and dirty as it has been for the last 40 years

This is not true. Dramatic gains in fuel efficiency have been made. Such gains are the primary driver of new airliner designs. The 757, for example, had (if I recall correctly) 35% more efficient engines, and a more efficient wing. The 787 has something like another 20% less fuel burn - again, due to better engines, wing shapes and weight reduction.

You also don't see the black smoke trail anymore that was normal for the 707. The engines are much cleaner.

There is a limit to how far this can be pushed, but Boeing and the engine makers have done an amazing job in improving the situation.

<comment><USER3> you have to remember that a lot of gain come from economy of scale, making bigger planes, the gains are realized only if passenger traffic increase (hence total pollution).

<comment><USER2> The 757 was about the same size as the 727, but 35% less fuel burn. The gains I cited were for the same size aircraft. (I worked on the 757 engineering.) The gains are real, and the airliners fell all over themselves to replace the old, inefficient jets with the new ones, because the operational cost savings were immense.

Ever notice the little vertical "winglets" on the wing tips? They increase the wing efficiency. They worked so well that Boeing produced kits so older aircraft could get them, too. They're just one example. The plastic skin used on the 787 is for weight saving, another example of reduced fuel burn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This proposal seems to ignore so much.

Like the intense friction, and heating, supersonic flight produces. Concorde's service speed was limited by heat limits place on the aluminium alloy to ensure a decent service life. They were always white as that was part of the spec - dark colours would have taken heat absorption out of limit!

Wing roots varied by >100C each flight if I remember right, and _fuel was used as a heat sink._ Are we going to use the batteries?

If the outer surfaces are conductors, what are we doing about icing conditions?

Concorde, or likely most SST, engines put out a _lot_ of thrust in a very fighter-like profile (they were a continuation of a fighter engine, and had reheat). Electric fans aren't going to work efficiently in that profile and would probably be large diameter, which isn't very supersonic friendly.

How are we now handling taxiing and subsonic? Edit: To expand the last point, Concordes were horribly inefficient subsonic, and burnt something like 2t of fuel to get to the runway. Reheat was used at takeoff and going transonic. They pumped tonnes of fuel after reaching supersonic - for weight and balance and reduced drag. They were basically really big fighters.

<comment><USER5> > They were always white as that was part of the spec - dark colours would > have taken heat absorption out of limit!

Interesting. The SR-71 Blackbird was dark (almost black) in order to radiate heat efficiently [1]. Then again, the Blackbird flew much higher (at around 26 km compared to Concorde's just over 18 km) so maybe convection plays a bigger part in Concorde's thermal management.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird) (Although my primary source is the book "Skunk Works" by Ben R. Ritch and Leo Janos.)

<comment><USER4> Fascinating. Now I want to know why! Maybe at mach 3 more heat's coming from inside than being absorbed.

Concordes were specced with Anti-flash White (high reflectivity as used by US and UK nuclear bombers), and the main reason I remember is there was some publicity when France painted one Pepsi blue (not wings) for a sponsorship. It had to have speed restrictions.

Wikipedia has a little more (not much), but says the white finish reduced the skin temperature by 6 to 11 degrees Celsius.

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

<comment><USER6> The sun adds 1000 watts per square meter, and black body radiation is the fourth power of temperature difference. If you're heating the skin say 5000 watts per square meter due to friction or compression, then the 1000 watts from the sun isn't bad. But if it's only say 500 watts, well, then the sun dominates. They operated at different speeds and altitudes so it's not entirely surprising to me that they had different strategies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This 'proposal' seems to assume that the rest of the aircraft would be almost unaffected by the change, which is very unlikely.

Existing engines are designed to compress air, combust fuel, and recover energy from the exhaust to push air (to propel the aircraft) then compress more (to keep the cycle going). Once you are no longer combusting fuel, all of that compression is simply wasted energy. An electric aircraft is much more likely to have single-stage axial fans, with a much larger diameter than jets like the Concorde (because larger and slower fans are more efficient). This difference in propulsion will probably affect various other elements of airframe design.

As an aside, Elon Musk has mentioned VTOL as a possible feature of electric aircraft, and this makes a lot of sense. If the fans can be tilted (to provide part of the 'lift' for takeoffs and landings), it means that the airplane could have very small wings, which are usually good for efficiency, but cause problems while landing conventionally.

<comment><USER8> > Once you are no longer combusting fuel, all of that compression is simply > wasted energy.

Not true. Instead of burning fuel, you can use electricity (something like an arc welder) to generate heat. And the efficiency with which that heat is turned into mechanical power will be dependent on the compression ratio, regardless of whether the thermal energy is coming from electricity or burning fuel.

Thermal energy in chemical fuel and the potential energy in a battery or a raised weight have the same units, but there's actually a difference. You can turn energy in a battery or a raised weight into mechanical energy with 100% efficiency - not achieved in practice, but there's no theoretical limit.

When you turn thermal energy into mechanical energy (via Otto cycle in a car or Brayton cycle in a jet), the peak efficiency you can achieve has a theoretical limit based on how much you can compress the working fluid (air) before injecting thermal energy (burning fuel or an electric arc).

So if you've got electic energy that you can turn into mechanical energy in a fan with 100% efficiency, why would you take the thermodynamic losses of "burning" that electricity? Because we don't know how to go supersonic speeds with a fan or propeller - the only way we know how, for now, is with a jet running on the brayton cycle. And all the advances we've made in high compression fuel-burning jets would apply to electric jets just as well.

If you're okay limiting your top speed to ~Mach 0.7, then you're correct spinning a large propeller using electricity is absolutely a better way to go, and you can make that propeller a lot bigger if you're able to tilt it.

Karem Aircraft has done extremely interesting work on figuring out how to tilt rotors, and much of their research would apply to electric motors as well: [http://karemaircraft.com/](http://karemaircraft.com/)

<comment><USER9> > Instead of burning fuel, you can use electricity (something like an arc > welder) to generate heat.

Why go through all the trouble of using electricity as the heat source in a Brayton cycle engine instead of the obvious solution, using electric motors? Your statement that "we don't know how to go supersonic speeds with a fan or propeller" is clearly wrong, since supersonic aircraft have been flying with turbofans and no afterburners for almost five decades now.

<comment><USER8> When a jet engine burns fuel, some energy goes into turning the fan, and some energy goes into creating thrust.

At low-mach, the fuel burn is primarily producing torque which turns the fan. This fan could be turned by electricity.

At high-mach, the fuel burn is primarily producing pure thrust, and the fan portion hurts the engine's performance.

Supersonic turbofans are a compromise that have to produce thrust from takeoff through to high speed. I may be incorrect, but I don't believe we have ever built a ducted fan which can use pure torque to generate supersonic thrust, although I guess I don't see why it wouldn't be theoretically possible. We can put megawatts of energy into a fast-moving flow using thermal energy and a brayton cycle. In order to put megawatts of energy into fast-moving flow using rotors would require a totally new design - nothing like the supersonic turbofans currently in production.

<comment><USER7> You have to distinguish the conventional (high efficiency) cycle of a jet engine at low Mach, from the reheat (low efficiency) operation usually used for high Mach.

No engine (of which I am aware) has air flowing past the fan blades at supersonic speeds, because the trans-sonic transitions tear engines apart. There is one prototype aircraft (a naval derivative of the F-84) which did have a supersonic propeller, but it was very inefficient and loud. All jet engines compress sub-Mach 1 flows, then expand them at the very back of the engine to produce supersonic exhaust.

<comment><USER8> > You have to distinguish the conventional (high efficiency) cycle of a jet > engine at low Mach, from the reheat (low efficiency) operation usually used > for high Mach.

Exactly. At high mach, almost all of the energy being put into the flow is from expanding combustion gases - not the compressor stage. If you wanted to go at supersonic speeds using only spinning fans, you will need a heck of a lot of fans. Maybe we could do it! But we haven't so far.

<comment><USER9> I suppose one way to do so is to build an electro-thermal equivalent of a low- bypass turbofan, with a jet section to deliver high-velocity thrust and a fan section to deliver low-velocity thrust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had to squint to look at the images on that site. The designs may or may not be a good idea, but if we can't read them then it doesn't matter. Bit of a poor show from whoever published the article.

Looking at the accompanying text, there are some problems with his ideas. Some of that "supporting" material is also about fail-safe design and heat distribution. A copper plate running through the middle of a battery will draw the heat out nicely. These batteries are all good and well until they fail, at which point you have a huge problem. With fuel, you can dump it. What do you do with you battery wing?

One of the massive problems is energy density, but that's not the only problem. With the batteries embedded into the wings, you need you to figure out how to effectively charge them too. Planes can't afford to sit for hours on the ground between flights and swapping wings over is not going to fly with safety regulations very well.

The intentions are good but I'm not convinced there is something viable here.

<comment><USER11> > I had to squint to look at the images on that site. The designs may or may > not be a good idea, but if we can't read them then it doesn't matter. Bit of > a poor show from whoever published the article.

Remove the ?amp=true from the URL and you'll get the proper desktop version.

<comment><USER10> I don't understand why that's set, but thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Too dangerous.

If the wing got smacked up a little and got bent, thus the positive and negative surfaces touch, you would have a massive short circuit, then heat-up and very possibly ignition of the electrolyte with a fire that is worse than a jet fuel fire.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not a better battery, just one with slightly less packaging. That's nowhere near enough for aircraft.

"Breakthrough" articles in the battery and "nanotechnology" (usually surface chemistry) fields need to be viewed with extreme skepticism. Those two fields seem to generate a high fraction of overhyped "breakthroughs".

</comment><comment><USER14> I can't imagine how this would deal with damage. A large amount of Tesla's safety comes from each cell having a micro-fuse connecting it to the module bus, so a failed cell simply disconnects itself. Large single battery plates might be lower-resistance, but they'd be incredibly susceptible to damage.

<comment><USER15> High performance, low maintenance and supply, fragile. Military hypersonic UAV, anyone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is unbelievably stupid. (1) Supersonic airplanes get incredibly hot, just by flying. Largest battery fire the world has ever seen? (2) It would be impossible to manufacture. (3) It would be too heavy to fly.

<comment><USER17> I don't believe he was intending the plane to fly supersonic. Instead he was talking about using the design of the wings because they have a larger volume.

<comment><USER18> What's the use of a supersonic plane that doesn't fly supersonic? Edit. It's unclear what your defence of the concept using this tactic achieves. The whole article talks of this as for supersonic flight. There are fewer issues with subsonic flight for this idea, though many (see above and below) remain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Luke Workman. Why am I not surprised to see that guy's name in this article? He took Zero Motorcycles from a battery pack that only went 40 miles to one that goes 120 miles while making the battery pack physically smaller. His work never ceases to amaze.

<comment><USER20> >He took Zero Motorcycles from a battery pack that only went 40 miles to one that goes 120 miles while making the battery pack physically smaller.

And what did he actually do? lithium ION batteries have been increasing in capacity over the years and quite considerably, 18650's are now nearly 4 times the capacity they were introduced in. I can't find anything he actually did other than hack batteries together to make "custom" packs, while this is some sort of an engineering achievement this is quite far from designing an actual battery.

<comment><USER21> Those "packs" are batteries. The thing that he did not design are electrochemical cells. The term battery pack is a misnomer invented by people who do not understand the difference between a battery and an electrochemical cell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Luke Workman is "some guy" who works for zero motorcycles and hack's EV's together.

"Some guy" is the best description I could come with because he isn't a scientists/researcher, he hasn't published a single paper, I can't find even a trace of his record as far as education or engineering achievements go besides soldering a couple of batteries and putting them in a motorcycle.

All records I could find of him and his company are pretty much from News Atlas (their sources and references link to their own articles) or it's affiliates.

<comment><USER22> I've met plenty of researchers and paper publishes who're full of crap. The most prolific people I know have no papers behind them. If you do science, you're a scientist; and education in its own is no more of an achievement than raising VC money is. It's just a tool.

<comment><USER20> Your dismissal of actual science is quite absurd. I would still not count anyone who takes of the shelf batteries and soldered them together a scientists, maybe an engineer in the broadest sense of term. I've seen nothing of this guy that makes me think that he is even remotely qualified to design a battery that would go into an aircraft.

<comment><USER23> I'm finding some humor in your accusation of dismissal considering that you are the only one expressing dismissal in this conversation. It's a very human sort of foible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wings flex while in flight. Either the cells need to handle that stress or the wing needs to be super rigid. Neither is particularly easy to achieve.

<comment><USER20> Wings can't be rigid, the fluttering would shred them to pieces or worse transfer to the main body and shred it pieces (tho at 35-40K ft it doesn't really matter what breaks apart ;)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The article mentions grid level power storage but I don't see any comments around that. What would the feasibility of creating one of these batteries as some kind of fixed structure be?

<comment><USER25> What would be the point? For land power storage you don't care about weight (or volume). Just cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> What if the battery terminal/wing is hit by lightning?

<comment><USER20> You don't need to worry about lighting the contraction/expansion from pressure and thermal differences alone is going to be interesting to see, put a battery in a low pressure chamber and see what happens to it. I'm also wondering how they are going to deal with the temperatures and other aspects that can affect the batteries.

Solar Impulse flew at 15,000ft, a subsonic or transonic jet would be flying at around 35,000ft, the pressure at those altitudes is about 22-23 kPa and the temperatures are around -55 to -60c, and if he's aiming for supersonic he'll have another issue which is the fact that the temperatures of the aircraft can reach several 100's degrees C from the forces of friction alone.</comment></comment>


Twitter Warned Repeatedly About Fake Account Run by Russian Troll Farm - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/kevincollier/twitter-was-warned-repeatedly-about-this-fake-account-run <comment><USER2> Techmeme summary: _Kevin Collier / BuzzFeed: Twitter took 11 months after being notified by GOP to shut down a fake Twitter account with 136K+ followers run by a Russian troll farm, posing as Tennessee GOP_

Original title from the article: _Twitter Was Warned Repeatedly About This Fake Account Run By A Russian Troll Farm And Refused To Take It Down_</comment>


Tweet a GIF simply with @blippybot - <AUTHOR> http://blippybot.com

<comment><AUTHOR> We made BlippyBot as hack project to make our Tweets more fun. It's really simple to use. Mention the bot (@blippybot) and a query term (excited) in your tweet. BlippyBot posts a relevant GIF. Hilarity ensues! :)

You can try it out without even connecting your Twitter account, but it works best when you're connected so that the GIF flows naturally from you in the conversation.</comment>


Understanding CPU port contention - <AUTHOR> https://dendibakh.github.io/blog/2018/03/21/port-contention <comment><USER2> IACA is awesome to understand the behaviour of your own hot loops. Sadly it only works on Intel. Luckily LLVM has recently merged llvm-mca [1] (machine- code analyser) which hopefully will in time bring all the features of IACA and more to other platforms as well.

I am working on making these tools easily accessible from Julia [2] and one of the things missing from llvm-mca is the ability to mark a region of assembly code to be analysed instead of analysing the entire provided assembly.

[1] [https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/llvm- mca.html](https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/llvm-mca.html) [2] [https://github.com/vchuravy/IACA.jl](https://github.com/vchuravy/IACA.jl)

</comment><comment><USER3> This bit caught my eye:

« According to Agner's instruction_tables.pdf load instruction that I use has 2 cycles latency »

and indeed that's what Agner Fog's tables say (and they further say this figure is « the delay that the instruction generates in a dependency chain »).

But all other sources seem to agree that the L1 dcache latency on the main Intel processor family is 4 cycles (since Nehalem).

Does anyone know what the distinction is here? If I do a a simple pointer chase through L1 dcache I wouldn't make progress at 2 cycles per step, would I?

<comment><USER4> Yes Agners doc is wrong or perhaps misleading here. He mentions that for loads and stores he tested a loop of load and store to the same location (essentially essentially testing store forwarding latency) to get the latency of that pair and then "arbitrarily divided" the measured latency between the load and the store.

He did that because to measure the latency of a single instruction the "domain" (eg GP register, SIMD register memory, etc)) of the input(s) as to be the same as the output.

Stores have memory output but register/address input so it isn't really possible to measure the latency of a store in isolation. That's why Agners paired up loads and stores to get a latency figure and did the arbitrary split.

All that out of the way, it _is_ possible to measure the latency of a load, at least for the load-to-address path like you mention with a pointer chasing load. That latency is 4 cycles minimum on all modern Intel. Add extra 1 cycle each for complex addressing modes or vector loads.

So yeah, a load latency of 2 is nonsense for modern Intel. Even talking about the latency is also nonsense since all the loads are independent so it's the throughput, not the latency that matters.

IIRC some chips have had 2 cycle L1 accesses: some P4 designs and one of the semi-recent POWER chips.

<comment><USER3> Thank you very much.

He does say he's reporting the minimum latency; I was thinking that no case would be faster than reading from L1 cache, but it makes sense that store- forwarding can be faster.

<comment><USER4> Right, but store forwarding is definitely not 2 cycles. 4 and 5 cycles is common for store forwarding although other values are possible. So I think Agner measured 4 cycles and divided it as 2 for the load and 2 for the store. For pure loads the latency is easy to measure and often widely reported and it's 4 cycles minimum for Intel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this contention mostly taken care of by out of order execution and hyperthreaidng? These topics aren't mentioned in the article (or I missed them).

<comment><USER6> Out-of-order execution doesn't help if you saturate the functional units. Hyperthreading also doesn't help; in fact, it hurts even more, since now the other hyperthread(s) are competing for the contended resource.

<comment><USER4> Well hyperthreading can help in the sense that the execution "slots" may not be wasted if the other hyperthread can use the ports that would be otherwise unused if only a single thread were running. That mostly only works if the workloads of each thread have very different port usage.

Consider one workload which saturates on p1, doing integer multiplication, and another one which is load/store heavy. Those two loads run on sibling hyperthreads could perhaps approach the best possible speedup of 2x since they use different ports.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, if instead of issuing a second bswap instruction, you were to issue an instruction that could go to a different ALU port, you would get that one for (almost) free?

<comment><USER8> If it fits (latency/throughput-wise), yes, unless you clog something else (like the decoder or retirement) with that instruction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I believe what you describe are called pipes, not ports.

EDIT: I was commenting on my day job, but what do I know :-) Reservation stations have ports, but the multiple executions units are commonly referred as pipes.

<comment><USER8> No.

Basically, in one of Intel's execution engines you have a reservation station which is fed µops and allocates resources to each µop. A RS port is what connects ALUs, load-store units, vector units etc. to the RS.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Clay, a CSS preprocessor as a Haskell EDSL. - <AUTHOR> http://sebastiaanvisser.github.com/clay/

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this before, but unfortunately, right after uploading my project page Github went down.</comment>


Setting up my Windows system for development - <AUTHOR> https://manu29d.github.io/writing/windows_setup <comment><AUTHOR> Hi. I am the author of that article. I'm still trying out my hand at writing. I posted it here to gather feedback and comments about it. Thanks in advance.</comment>


Stallman: GPL ramifications and purpose - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.misc.discuss/browse_thread/thread/fe9059768fdb5cf7/33eb7760a5c1d9c4

<comment><USER2> This headline grossly misstates the content of the post. Apple wanted a closed source front end that could be linked with the open source gcc internal/backend. At no point would the existing GCC code ever become proprietary under this flawed scheme.

<comment><USER3> This wasn't Apple at this time. This was after Jobs had been ousted and had gone with NeXT.

<comment><USER4> Also note that RMS wrote this in 1993

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Although I do not care for everything Stallman says and does, I do appreciate his consistency.

</comment><comment><USER6> And eventually Apple starts supporting LLVM and the rest is history. Less and less of GCC is being used by Apple these days.

<comment><USER7> And of course, LLVM is free and open source as well... just without the GPL.

<comment><USER8> And with proprietary frontends(like flash)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm just not wasting time reading anything RMS has written ... Thanks for the memories but:

\- You've jumped the shark.

\- You're no longer relevant.

\- You've alienated so many of your fans.

\- You've pushed zealotry to a new level.

\- You've turned a conversation into a continuous rant.

And the sad part is that I suspect you'll never look back on what you did accomplish and feel satisfaction. You'll just continue raging against the goals you couldn't reach.

</comment><comment><USER10> Registration required. Could somebody paste or summarize the link? Thanks.

<comment><USER11> It's the second message in this document: [http://www.anonymous- insider.net/free-software/research/1993...](http://www.anonymous- insider.net/free-software/research/1993/0704.html)

The first message also gives a little more context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why didn't Apple just have their front-end emit GNU C with #line directives?

<comment><USER3> It would have probably been far more annoying to compile to something like that. I've not programmed in Objective C but I believe that it was designed to avoid some of the issues that arose out of C++ being originally a preprocessor like that on top of C. Given that they wanted to do that, having to compile to some kind of IR, then to C, they would have likely had a much harder time getting the code optimized in any reasonable manner. I would also imagine that this would make debugging any part of the compiler that ended up producing incorrect code far more difficult to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Based on the domain next to the headline, I thought Stallman was posting to Google Plus for a minute. Heh.

(I was surprised to see Douglas Crockford posting there.)

</comment><comment><USER14> Keep in mind, Stallman is the douche who wrote this:

 _Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective._

I think he's lost the right to offer opinions about Steve or Apple.

<comment><USER15> Stallman wrote this in 1993.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Negotiating inflation-adjusted salary? - <AUTHOR>

Has anyone negotiated an automatic periodic inflation adjustment to their salary?  How was the idea received?  What, if anything, did you have to give up to get it? <comment><USER2> Where are you located? With inflation very low in U.S. and Europe, I wouldn't see point of that.</comment>


San Francisco 2018 State of Homelessness - <AUTHOR> https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/2018-state-of-homelessness/ <comment><USER2> SF has high rents largely because it has lots of high-paying jobs. Rents are lower almost everywhere else, and people with high-paying jobs should live somewhere else.</comment>