Amazon Loses $3.2 million on Two Days of 99 Cent Lady Gaga Sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/retail/how-many-millions-did-amazon-lose-on-two-1005206452.story <comment><USER2> So they acquired a half millon customers for, ummm, $6.50 each.....

.... and they got a TON of press worth millions.

.... and the word of mouth has been staggering.

.... and they could do this every week for a year and still not lose as much money as was invested in the CueCate.

Move on peoples.... nothing to see here but common sense.

<comment><USER3> Why are you still bashing the CueCat? Yes, it was ugly, and yes they messed up the marketing, but it created the QR codes we see today. Sometimes, things are before their time and they get mocked unfairly for it. For example, Nikola Tesla demonstrated the first remote controlled device(a boat) in 1898. He was mocked for wasting his time with a toy. So I understand it's fun to have a go at the CueCat, but it was just an idea that was before it's time.

<comment><USER4> What does the CueCat have to do with QR codes? I've worked with phone code- scanning extensively in the past and the technology behind a dedicated 1D barcode scanner vs. a 2D code scanner (particularly working with consumer- level optics like mobile phones) are completely different.

A quick glance at Wikipedia shows that the QR spec was laid down long before CueCat even _existed_ , and the initial technology was based on parts tracking in industry, not consumer usage.

It should also be pointed out that _still_ nobody uses general-purpose QR codes. As a boarding pass? Sure. As a concert ticket? Sure. But when's the last time someone eagerly whipped out their phone to scan a QR code in a magazine ad?

<comment><USER5> Near nobody in America uses general purpose QR codes. In other countries they're pasted on nearly everything. Hell, I've seen them on TV before. Hold your phone up to the screen to scan.

But as you say, it likely has little to do with the CueCat.

<comment><USER3> Dave Mathews spoke about the CueCat IP on Jason's show recently and he said it's the CueCat patents that are behind modern QR code software. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8Tczfk1saQ&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8Tczfk1saQ&feature=player_detailpage#t=920s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This move was more than mere advertising, it was direct user acquisition. A certain number of people who would not have otherwise had amazon cloud drive accounts now do, and they have music they want on it.

It's a frontrun on itunes cloud as much as anything.

</comment><comment><USER7> They didn't "lose" $3.2 million, they paid $3.2 million to advertise their music and cloud service.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. Even the linked article's headline is merely flamebait. And, as others noted, this isn't just advertisement -- it's direct user acquisition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awesome 'found money' for Gaga and her label. Everyone who just wanted the free storage increase, or maybe decided to take the whole album because it was cheaper than a track, sent $8 her way from Amazon. She should have put out a promotion paying people $2 to buy the album through amazon, presuming her cut is greater!

I like the symmetry with the recent livingsocial promo ($20 at amazon for $10, where LS just bought the $20 credits at full price), which effectively flowed VC money to amazon to leverage amazon's brand appeal to acquire users to livingsocial. Amazon has now taken that money and given it to Gaga. How do I get on this train?

</comment><comment><USER10> Probably a carefully calculated loss and lot cheaper than getting this kind of exposure through advertising.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there any reason to believe that this promotion wasn't a partnership between Amazon and the record company? I'd expect Amazon to bare the majority of the discount, but would be surprised if they hadn't got some of the discount knocked off from the other end, as it was a great promotion for them as well.

<comment><USER4> Why would Lady Gaga of all people need to stoop to the level of a $0.99 promotion?

She's _already_ a household name, I just don't see the incentive for her, or her record label, to want to participate in a steep-discount form of promotion. That's a lot of money on the table.

<comment><USER11> Obviously on their own that would be too high a discount for too little gain. However, if Amazon say "we want to do a huge promotion and sell this for $.99, can you give us a $1.50 discount on all sales we make at this price), Amazon is still paying for the majority of the discount, and the increase in sales might well make up for the smaller amount that the record company lost (replace $1.50 with whatever was negotiated).

In marketing like this it's incredibly common for both companies to fund the promotion - I have no experience working with the music industry, but it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon negotiated this with them the same way they would with other companies they sell products for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For a company that deals in billions[0], this is more of an experiment to gear towards the future of media dissemination.

[0]: [http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/some-sales-figures-from- am...](http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/some-sales-figures-from-amazon-sales- are-up-46/)

</comment><comment><USER13> "Amazon will lose about $7.40, according to Billboard's calculation."

Yeah? Where the calculation? I just read this as; "We've made up some number".

<comment><USER14> > The similar title is selling for $11.99 at iTunes. The retailer typically > keeps 30% of the sale price, meaning it owes the label and distributor the > remaining 70% -- or $8.39.

<comment><USER15> That's what would happen if they did the normal thing. If there is any evidence that they did, the article does not present it. Of course, there's also no evidence that they did something different - but the fact that of the three versions of the album Amazon sells through downloads[1] two are not only cheaper than the $11.99 iTunes has it for but also cost less than what the article claims that they must pay the label suggests that this is the case (or that Amazon is taking a loss on every sale, which seems unlikely).

[1] One is just the album, one has a digital booklet, and one has the booklet as well as being a "special edition," whatever that means.

[2] One is $5.99, one is $6.99, and the third is $12.99.

<comment><USER4> It's widely rumored (with substantial reason) that Amazon MP3 got cut a much better deal from the record labels than Apple. Keep in mind when Amazon's entry first launched, iTunes was practically the _only_ digital music sales service around. The labels were desperate to avoid Apple gaining a unassailable dominance of the market and were throwing other providers significant deals in exchange for fighting Apple. It seems entirely likely that Amazon's normal "cut" for the labels is lower than Apple's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That is some seriously cheap user acquisition for Cloud Player and Cloud Drive - both great services IMO. Well played Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER17> great strategy to get new customers. they will gain more than they supposedly lost... this "loss" will be nothing more than a marketing expense.

</comment><comment><USER18> These kind of stats bug me. Because someone buys something at .99 cents does in no way mean they would have bought it for the full price.

<comment><USER19> ...but Amazon certainly paid the royalty. So it did cost them the stated amount of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How much money did Apple lose?

</comment><comment><USER21> We all lose when lady gaga sells music, or gives it away

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I bought the album just to get the 20GB Cloud drive space free for a year. Definitely a great deal and I'm sure the product awareness from the promotion was cheaper and more effective than traditional ads.

<comment><USER22> if anyone else missed out, there are actually 69 cent albums available that will give you the extra 15gb free:

<http://amzn.to/mt5Ihw></comment></comment>


Scientists torture QWERTY layout into the wearable/smartwatch space - <AUTHOR> http://thestack.com/qwerty-wearable-callout-zshift-zoomboard-050515

<comment><USER2> That screen looks too small for me to reliably input anything except bottom- left and bottom-right corner (1 bit per tap). In the long run it's probably easiest to learn a new input format. Some suggestions:

• Draw a shape with your fingertip on the watch face, and use OCR to tell which character it is.

• Map characters to sequences of simple up/down/left/right strokes, each of which conveys 2 bits of information (maybe include diagonal strokes too for 4 bits per stroke). This could work like Braille's dots or ASCII's bits, with N strokes per character, or use Huffman coding so common characters have shorter sequences. They could even try to match with the characters' shapes, e.g. up+down+up+down = M.

• Tap out Morse code on the watch face and press a physical side button to end the message.</comment>


Ask HN: Blogs that I must read? - <AUTHOR>

Startup, development, business marketing etc..<p>Must subscribe-to blogs that are updated frequently. Post your favorites! <comment><USER2> These are 2 threads where you will find a lot of interesting blogs: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4000394](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4000394) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7083921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7083921).

In my Feedly I follow Seth Godin's blog, Priceonomics and The Changelog.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/)

I don't think there have been many good blog posts for years (it's just promotional stuff now). But on that page, check out the middle column on the right that recaps the best posts.

</comment><comment><USER4> rc3.org</comment>


Verify your backups… or lose them all - <AUTHOR> http://carlchenet.com/2015/03/09/verify-your-backups-or-lose-them-all/

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes you can, Backup Checker manages streams, so you can pipe wget or lftp output command directly into Backup Checker. Have a look at the [https://github.com/backupchecker/backupchecker/blob/master/R...](https://github.com/backupchecker/backupchecker/blob/master/README.md) for more info

</comment><comment><USER2> is it possible to verify remote archives located on a ftp server?</comment>


Ask HN: system which allows messages to be decrypted at a given time? - <AUTHOR>

Could you create a system which allows some encrypted messages to only be decrypted after/at a given time t and without any authority?
There would be so cool applications of such a system, imagine if someone (like Snowden) want to share to the world some important document but which only are auto-decrypted in the future, whatever happen to the person.
Do you think this will ever be possible? I'm afraid this need the time to be provable? <comment><USER2> Like a timed escrow service?

In your example you would be relying on a system clock in the end, which is easily manipulated. Better to use a trusted person or machine who can reveal the data or the key to the data at a given time, or to use a dead man's switch.

</comment><comment><USER3> The easiest way to achieve this is to encrypt and release the data the set up some kind of timed mechanism to release the decryption key. I believe Julian Assange has already done something similar.</comment>


Urbit: A clean-slate functional OS - <AUTHOR> http://www.urbit.org/ <comment><USER2> A better link would be the front page: [http://www.urbit.org/](http://www.urbit.org/)

I guess on the Internets, you never release anything - it's released for you. Please be warned, (a) the doc is incomplete, (b) if you create an Urbit ship you'll eventually have to destroy it, as we don't have continuity yet.

<comment><USER3> Watching the video blew my brains out the back of my head. Figuratively of course. Thanks for not letting me get anything productive done for the rest of the day.

<comment><USER4> The music is great. I stopped watching and just listened while continuing to get work done.

<comment><USER5> Brian Eno - An Ending (Ascent) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It4WxQ6dnn0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It4WxQ6dnn0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a project ostensibly inspired by K&R C, the copy on this site is _amazingly_ opaque and full of its own rhetoric. Recommendation: delete all the linguistic posturing and get down to the hard work of casting light on your ideas. Let that speak for itself.

By way of example, the K&R C book had a beautiful clarity and ability to fluidly move between the realms of reference, spec, and tutorial. If you're going to hold K&R C up as a model, you'd do well to mimic its documentation philosophy.

<comment><USER2> That's an excellent criticism. Of course the problem is exacerbated by the HN link pointing to the philosophy doc. The greatest philosophy is to have no philosophy at all, but perhaps we're not quite there yet.

Actually the K&R equivalent for Hoon doesn't exist yet, and when it does it will be the first thing to read. Since it doesn't, the Arvo tutorial is the first thing to read:

[http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-1-arvo.html](http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-1-arvo.html)

But this itself is incomplete. Watch the video first:

[http://www.urbit.org](http://www.urbit.org)

Then build Arvo and use the sekrit code it generates to, basically, subscribe to our newsletter.

It's just a bad idea to document anything before it works completely, because you end up with doc that validates this criticism. The right way to build a language is to build it, use it, get comfortable with it, actually master it and become an expert of sorts... then document it. Sadly, not too many of us can live up to this ideal.

<comment><USER7> I for one love the whimsy. We need more LearnYouaThings and Shoes and runtimes that spit out lovecraftian quotes...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just some background, this is by Mencius Moldbug, a.k.a. Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. C. Guy Yarvin of Unqualified Reservations fame. It's been in the works for a long time and is certainly a serious project.

[http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-f...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html)

[http://moronlab.blogspot.com/](http://moronlab.blogspot.com/)

<comment><USER9> Someone earlier in this thread mentioned his apparent disdain for PL research. If you want some background on his experiences, as well as some great musings on the current state of CS grad programs, I recommend these two articles:

[http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my- navr...](http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navrozov- moments.html)

[http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-wrong-with-cs-research.html)

<comment><USER10> I will not comment on the judgement passed upon the education system. The second article exhibits eristic tricks, obfuscatory language, and a plain confusion of ideas, especially when speaking about proof-carrying code and type theory.

It's interesting to see the author wishing for a Python of functional programming, and yet Hoon's syntax appears deliberately obscure.

However, there is one paragraph with which I wholeheartedly agree:

 _> I think the world could use a charity that funds creative programming. The software systems that people use today — don't even start me on "Web 2.0" — are awful and ancient, and hardly anyone has any reasonable plan to improve them. Free-software programmers are not at all bad at supporting themselves, but nothing like Xerox PARC exists today, and it should._

It should, and, hopefully, it will. Soon.

<comment><USER11> Deliberately obscure, yes:

>We should note that in Nock and Hoon, 0 (pronounced "yes") is true, and 1 ("no") is false. Why? It's fresh, it's different, it's new. And it's annoying. And it keeps you on your toes. And it's also just intuitively right.

<comment><USER9> Well, it's no different than Unix:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_and_false_(Unix)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_and_false_\(Unix\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> """ _Its self-compiling kernel, 7000 lines of code, specifies Hoon unambiguously; there is no Hoon spec._ """

You realize there's such a thing as over-specifying something, right? You realize that using source code as a spec does this?

If you don't realize; consider that non-data aspects of a program, such as runtime and memory usage and bug compatibility, can sometimes form part of a specification, and sometimes don't. A specification says as much what is _not_ required of an implementation as what _is_ required. By claiming your one true implementation is _the_ spec, one has no means of ascertaining what behavior is incidental, and what is actually required/able to be relied upon.

I'm not normally an XKCD fan, but this strip sums it up perfectly: [http://xkcd.com/1172/](http://xkcd.com/1172/)

.

""" _Hoon can be classified as a pure, strict higher-order static type- inferred functional language, with co /contra/bivariance and genericity. However, Hoon does not use lambda calculus,_"""

A higher-order functional language does not "use" the mathematical definition of higher-order functions? In that case, what do you mean by "higher-order functional language"?

EDIT: I was going to make an analogy to the hypothetical claim that language X's arithmetic system doesn't use Church numerals (i.e. the mathematical formulation of natural numbers)… _but Hoon is actually implemented using Church arithmetic_. Go figure.

.

""" _unification,_ """

By what mechanism does Hoon implement type inference? Honestly, that's kind of like saying Hoon doesn't use, say, queues. Great, but, why?

.

""" _or other constructs from "PL theory."_ """

Disdainful much? I'm really curious what's the background behind the scare quotes here.

.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I'm not claiming your project is uninteresting or not worth your while. I just feel you're being overly dismissive of the, let's say "traditional" schools of thought, with invalid justification.

<comment><USER2> As for the type inference, you don't need unification to do type inference. Hoon infers only forward, not backward. Of course you could say it's a subset of unification, as it is.

I find Hindley-Milner inference systems too powerful. The programmer has to model what the inference system is doing in his or her head, and it's a source of significant cognitive load. Hoon's inference algorithm is slightly too smart in some cases, and requires slightly too much typing in others, but I think it's generally well matched to human capacities - especially for those of us who are not natural mathematicians.

<comment><USER13> What? Why do you have to think about what the type inference is doing? I've never needed that with H-M in practice, and I've spent a fair amount of time with both Haskell and OCaml.

When I use a good inference system like that, I simply don't think about the typechecker most of the time. It just doesn't come up. The types simply work out, largely because the inference is sufficiently good.

The only times I've had to model the inference in my head is when it is _insufficiently_ powerful, like with OCaml objects or certain typeclass patterns in Haskell. That is, it's only a problem when the inference _breaks unexpectedly_.

Type inference just works, until it doesn't. And that's the only place I've had difficulties: when it doesn't.

The solution to a problem like that is not to make it break _more_ often! That just exacerbates things.

A less capable system (say Scala or, god forbid, Go) just makes life more difficult. Even if it's easier to run the algorithm in your head. Especially then, in fact: you shouldn't be thinking about it on the first place.

<comment><USER2> My feeling is that there's a relatively small subset of programmers who adapt well to unification inference, and they think the way you do - they grok the logical problem the inference engine is trying to solve, and don't worry at all about how it does it.

There is a larger set of programmers who try to understand it and run into, well, stuff like this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner)

I hope you're not seriously suggesting that this content is on the same intellectual level as, say, a good RFC.

A good RFC in fact works very hard to be as stupid as possible, and one source of irritation from the RFC-producing world to the PDF-producing world - so to speak - is that the PDF-producing world doesn't seem to even understand that they _have_ this job, much less are making any particular effort to do it.

The way people should understand the Hoon type inference engine is to think about the concrete reality of what it's doing, not the abstract mathematical problem it's trying to solve. This is simply because human beings aren't very good as a species at mathematics. Hate that that's true, but that it is true I don't think anyone can deny.

<comment><USER13> I think you're just projecting your familiarity with things like RFCs as somehow more intuitive. People have _plenty_ of problems with the network stack and its associated abstractions! TCP/IP or even just HTTP lead to plenty of confusion. In a vacuum, I am not convinced the RFC would be any easier than a paper on Hindley Milner. (Wikipedia is not a good replacement for either.)

"Intellectual level" isn't exactly a well-defined term. It inevitably conflates the inherent complexity of something with the background needed to quickly understand it. The difference in the two articles is not in how accessible they are to somebody with no relevant background--both the RFCs and H-M would make no sense to a layperson!--but in the fact that they target different audiences.

Both are very stupid in the same way: they are very explicit about every little detail. It's just where an RFC uses technical terminology mixed with a legalese-like language (SHOULD and MUST and so on), H-M uses mathematical notation and inference rules. I do not believe that one of these is so much more inherently difficult to understand than another; it's much more a matter of experience and background knowledge. Without that, reading either is going to be relatively slow and laborious. Having gone through both RFCs _and_ type theory, I've found both similarly slow in terms of content; the main difference is that the mathematical notation happens to be much more dense. So perhaps it takes me five times longer to get through a page about type theory as a page of an RFC, but that single page contains the same amount of information, just encoded differently.

Also, I don't buy that you have to understand how the inference works to use it, any more than you have to understand or think about the OSI model to write networking code. You can use both perfectly well--and most people do--without needing to think about or understand everything. Moreover, you won't be able to learn either without a good deal of work and the relevant background. I suspect that it just happens that the background for one matches much more closely with yours than the background for the other.

Sure, humans as a species are not very good at mathematics. But they aren't very good at engineering either! They are really bad at keeping a bunch of details in memory and running (even simple) algorithms in their heads. All told, it's better to avoid it.

<comment><USER2> For the source of my bias, I have actually spent a considerable amount of time working with people in the "RFC world." For example, I wrote the kernel of the Openwave WAP browser, which shipped about a billion units, even if it sucked and no one used it. I have spent just about no time in the PDF world, and even when I was in grad school I was an OS guy. (Here's a fun old paper of mine: [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.41.7...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.41.7414)). So, zero time in the "PL theory" world.

I can tell you how this world sees the "PL theory" world. They say: look, you have your own way of formalizing computing, there are infinitely many ways of formalizing computing, the one we use seems to work just fine, so why should we learn yours? Whether they won't, or they can't, or they are too pigheaded to - the answer is, they aren't.

I don't view language design as an opportunity to change the world to this extent. And I think many, many good ideas are getting lost in the PL theory world. So, my goal was to replicate these ideas, as best as I can, for programmers who think about programming the way I do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was with you til you introduced the Hoon syntax. Why ruin a great concept with a shit language? WHAT IS WRONG WITH LANGUAGE DESIGNERS?! Just come up with a sane language with a sane syntax on a great platform. This is apparently asking a lot. It's not fucking rocket science.

<comment><USER2> I agree entirely! This is so much better than the typical "middlebrow dismissive" that I upvoted it...

And actually, if you don't like Hoon you can build your own language on this platform. So long as it compiles to Nock. You'll probably have to write your first compiler in Hoon, but we do have pretty decent combinator parsers. If you can swallow the syntax...

<comment><USER14> I like that you upvote your critics. That amuses me greatly. I had not viewed the video before I made my first comment but after watching the video I'm impressed with your implementation and solid practical concepts, but I still abhor your Hoon syntax. I haven't looked into Nock yet but I have a feeling I might knock its syntax as well, pun intended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >I ate something I shouldn't have the other day and ended up having this surreal dream where Mencius Moldbug had gotten tired of the state of the software industry and the Internet and had made his personal solution to it all into an actual piece of working software that was some sort of bizarre synthesis of a peer-to-peer identity and distributed computing platform, an operating system and a programming language. Unfortunately, you needed to figure out an insane system of phoneticized punctuation that got rewritten into a combinator grammar VM code if you wanted to program anything in it. I think there even was a public Github with reams of code in it, but when I tried to read it I realized that my computer was actually a cardboard box with an endless swarm of spiders crawling out of it while all my teeth were falling out, and then I woke up without ever finding out exactly how the thing was supposed to work.

[http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ipu/open_thread_septemb...](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ipu/open_thread_september_2329_2013/9szc)

</comment><comment><USER16> _Hoon is a high-level language which defines itself in Nock. Its self- compiling kernel, 7000 lines of code, specifies Hoon unambiguously; there is no Hoon spec. Hoon can be classified as a pure, strict higher-order static type-inferred functional language, with co /contra/bivariance and genericity. However, Hoon does not use lambda calculus, unification, or other constructs from "PL theory." Hoon also excels at handling and validating untyped data, a common task on teh Internets. Its syntax is entirely novel and initially quite frightening._

Crank detected. Homing in for the kill.

<comment><USER2> Have fun!

I recommend you start with the Nock tutorial:

[http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-2-nock.html](http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-2-nock.html)

The build instructions in this file are out of date, use the ones from the Arvo chapter. Also, probably the best short overview is the header comment in the Hoon compiler:

[https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/hoon...](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/blob/master/urb/zod/arvo/hoon.hoon)

Also don't miss the video: [https://vimeo.com/75312418](https://vimeo.com/75312418)

<comment><USER17> Oh wow.

After watching the video I'm legitimately interested in more than the language. You've got some cool ideas going on there. I'll be emailing for a 32-bit destroyer in a second.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I distinctly get the impression that the authors of this project will already know what Lojban is. This language (especially when you get to the part about reserved words, actually made up with special characters as runes, and how to pronounce them) made me think of the structure of Lojban right away.

For anyone who hasn't heard of it, [http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/](http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/lojbanbrochure/lessons/)

Urbit of course having the advantage that it can be programmed in... the video is very cool!

<comment><USER2> mi prami la lojban .ui

<comment><USER19> ge'edai

<comment><USER18> I googled, got 1/3 of the way through "Subsequent UI Cmavo", and gave up.

If you explained in lojban, I promise I'd struggle a few minutes longer before giving up :D

[http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Subsequent+UI+Cmavo](http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Subsequent+UI+Cmavo)

I read Arabic fairly well but I did not understand Lojban, not having any framework to understand it in, whereas I took Arabic classes for basically four years of college.

I got "prami" to mean love, and .ui to mean ":)"

Why do you put .i at the beginning of some sentences?

<comment><USER19> Disclaimer: I'm no lojban expert myself, so this may be inaccurate.

{mi prami la lojban .ui} is pretty straightforward: I love lojban, plus the {.ui} attitudinal, which indicates happiness (or as you said, ":)").

The period {.} is an interesting part of lojban. It indicates a glottal stop. Most words in lojban start with a consonant, so glottal stops are placed before words that begin with a vowel (mainly just attitudinals and names). This is to prevent words from flowing into one another when speaking rapidly, which is important since one of the design goals of lojban is to avoid ambiguity.

{.i} is actually punctuation: it marks the boundary between sentences. All punctuation is pronounced in lojban. This may sound exhausting, but again, it reduces ambiguity.

{ge'edai} is intended to mean "I know that feel" \-- {ge'e} meaning "unspecified emotion" and {dai} meaning "empathy" \-- but I'm not sure if combining them is grammatically correct. Perhaps {dai} alone would be more accurate.

<comment><USER18> I know about . and it makes sense to me because of hamza in Arabic. It's the same. It's not a letter, it only serves to reduce ambiguity, but they wouldn't say it's punctuation either. Thanks for breaking it down for me!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Well, I've read most the docs, let's say _skimmed_ the code examples, and I think you're a very smart, competent engineer with a sense of what makes for good language syntax that is utterly, incomprehensibly alien to me. So I guess, martian-language mission accomplished?

</comment><comment><USER21> This is art.

"There is never a reason to program in Nock. Except to learn Nock." Classic

</comment><comment><USER22> I love the project concept. A toy functional OS would be an admirable counterpart to e.g. MINIX. That said, I have one minor quibble:

 _A programming language is called a language for a reason - it should activate the human linguistic lobes._

Another programmer said this, a long time ago, and that's how we ended up with Perl. Please don't seek to emulate Larry Wall. Perl is great for quick automation, but anything complicated built with Perl quickly converges to unintelligible line noise (barring the exercise of zen-like discipline). If you're making something for beginners, please, please, give them the tools to build abstractions in a consistent and understandable manner.

<comment><USER2> Well, of course, Larry Wall is a god.

But that said, the main difference between Hoon line noise and Perl line noise is that most of the ASCII we use has a very regular structure, with a (relatively) limited set of exceptions. So it looks about equally alien at first, but the Hoon ideogram (digraph) set should be easier to learn. Unfortunately at present the set of people who know it is very small - so the theory really hasn't been tested.

It is what it is. But at least there's no Unicode. (Not that you can't have Unicode in strings, of course.)

And anyone who doesn't like line noise has to stand up for reserved words. Some of us welcome that conversation...

<comment><USER23> The unicode-in-strings but not in variables/etc bothers me about Java (coming from Go, where unicode is allowed in variables). It seems inconsistent to have two separate character sets for different semantic subsections of what is a single text file.

What about unicode in comments? If I put a string in a comment can it go there?

<comment><USER2> Restricting symbols to a strict subset, rather than a strict superset, of global keyboards in practice, is about cultural literacy in practice.

If you put unicode in variables, perhaps because you're using a national keyboard with special unicode powers, your code will be extremely hard to work with for programmers using a different national keyboard. Thus, even if you could do it, you shouldn't.

Now, the symbols on American programmers' keyboards are not all on every keyboard in the world - but pretty much every programmer in the world knows how to find them. Thus, sticking with ASCII is basically sensible use of Postel's Law in the language design context.

In comments - it should be ok but I think it breaks right now. Not a high priority bug, but definitely a bug.

<comment><USER20> Spread the word of .Xcompose?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> A demo video: [http://vimeo.com/75312418](http://vimeo.com/75312418)

<comment><USER10> The video shows an utterly fascinating mixture of Lisp, Erlang, Plan 9, and Bitcoin. The only missing ingredient is a proper static type system!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> With all that jargon I was expecting a set up for a punch line at the end. Don't nock it so hoon, it's not done jet. Ha!

<comment><USER2> Sigh, HN really is turning into - never mind. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If ever there was a right attitude about bringing a radical project in to the world: this is it.

I just spent 15 minutes just _reading_ the documentation. Because it's _interesting_. That never happens.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is really, really neat.

I really like the concepts in Avro and Urbit. Particularly interesting for me is the checkpoint/replay, distributed version control, and neighbours.

This is a really cool experiment!

<comment><USER2> Thanks, but Avro is someone else's cool project!

(Arvo is named for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt.))

<comment><USER26> I think I've lost all precious free time I have... this is great stuff. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> You say addition is O(n^2), but I think you can write an O(n) addition with only increment, recursion, and equality testing.

In Python syntax:

      def add(a, b):
        return add_r(a, b, 0)

      def add_r(a, b, c):
        if b == c:
          return a
        else:
          return add_r(a, b, c+1) +1

<comment><USER28> Yeah... just one of the many many things we haven't gotten around to fixing. Since it doesn't really matter for a jet-propelled function.

[https://github.com/urbit/urbit/issues/11](https://github.com/urbit/urbit/issues/11)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm pretty sure this is a giant joke ? Or nothing is implemented yet (and still, kind of jokish especially in description)?

<comment><USER18> Is this comment a joke?

I haven't tried compiling it, but even if large parts of the documentation say "this isn't finished yet" there are code and compilation instructions for Linux and OSX. If it's a joke then it's a joke that two contributors seem to have taken very seriously for a number of months now.

EDIT: Not like, say, Flynn... _jab jab_

<comment><USER29> I meant in a similar vein to say, esoteric languages or subsests like jsfuck.com.

I see this is considered more art, and I would agree with that.

It appears as if it is a large art + learning experience, and I appreciated that after I watched the movie.

Not a lot of _novel_ ideas per se, but an interesting mixture of things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So rather than having a lengthy standard it has lots of small non-standardized and brittle performance optimizations?

I remain skeptical over whether this tradeoff is worth it.

<comment><USER31> I think it's a fascinating tradeoff. A typical approach with JIT-compilation is to write relatively inefficient code and hope that the JIT compiler picks up on it and optimizes it for you. Their approach seems to instead be to say "if you generate particular sequences of instructions, we'll detect those and instead execute a more efficient version, every time".

IMO this is a really cool idea because the performance optimizations are quite a bit _less_ brittle than the ones you get with a JIT-compiled virtual machine.

<comment><USER32> > A typical approach with JIT-compilation is to write relatively inefficient > code and hope that the JIT compiler picks up on it and optimizes it for you. > Their approach seems to instead be to say "if you generate particular > sequences of instructions, we'll detect those and instead execute a more > efficient version, every time".

I don't see the "instead" there. Those seem to be two ways of saying the same thing.

<comment><USER31> The difference is one of universality.

Let's say that my VM of choice has a tracing JIT, and it will attempt to optimize traces up to 1,000 instructions long. Let's further say that in the current version of my code, the body of my hot loop is 980 instructions long. Then in a new version I add another few operations which push it up to 1,010 instructions. Suddenly the JIT stops trying to optimize that portion of my code and performance tanks.

Meanwhile some other guy wrote his code using a VM which used this sort of "Jets" approach. It's probably not as fast or as versatile overall, but when he adds another few dozen instructions to a hot loop he can do so secure in the knowledge that all the preexisting code will continue to execute just like it did before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Hoon is a keyword-free language - any alphanumeric text in the program is > part of the program. Where other languages have reserved words, Hoon has > squiggles.

But... why?

<comment><USER2> You're saying, why are reserved words a bad idea? I think most defenders of the humble reserved word would consider it, at best, a hack. Maybe it's a necessary hack, maybe not.

With reserved words you are overloading two very different namespaces, the space of language primitives and the space of user functions/variables. Sure, you can get away with this. But do you want to? A language is a UI, and the potential for confusing the programmer is immense. If operators and functions are really different things - as they are in Hoon, anyway - it's very confusing to mush them together.

<comment><USER33> I'm not asking why reserved words are a bad idea, just opining that I think having 100 single- and double-character symbols might not be the best UI for a language. Why not have just names (neither reserved like keywords nor inscrutable like symbols?)

I don't know, I am similarly annoyed by mathematicians because they usually use single letters for variables. It's a little more excusable for them because math functions are usually very short and have few variables, but still I'd rather use words. But I digress.

<comment><USER2> It's a different approach to learning that I think favors the actual learning curve, not the perceived learning curve.

Your brain is actually built to memorize symbols like this. (I feel I know the learning process pretty well because I have toddler-aged kids who are also learning Chinese.) Of course, kids are not grownups, but even for grownups the process of binding symbol->meaning is easier than it looks like it should be.

Also, when you have name->meaning, the name inevitably is chosen for orthographic reasons and supplies its own meaning, which may mislead from the actual definition of the primitive. If you bind a symbol directly to a semantics, you lose this source of confusion. It is replaced (ideally) by an odd sense of "seeing the function," which I think is also present in experienced Perl ninjas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I really like this. I hope some younger people with more time on their hands push this farther.

<comment><USER34> I'm not sure I follow what this is. Where would I use Nock and Hoon?

<comment><USER17> To build your startup? No.

To have fun? Why not.

<comment><USER34> I should rephrase my question: on what technology platforms would one use Nock and Hoon? Embedded systems? Anything (due to "portability")?

<comment><USER35> As others have pointed out, this is art.

You don't look at art, and ask "Why did you do this??". You simply enjoy it. The artist did it, to do it, and nothing further.

If you can not see this that way, then I am truly sorry.

<comment><USER36> If it is truly art then it doesn't make much sense why he is trying so damn hard to make it practical.

<comment><USER35> Think of it as great architecture...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Would you mind doing lots more screencasts? Maybe writing a jet, rigging a test, profiling, and maybe a bunch of other things. I very much like your demo style, and I have a hunch these docs are going to be pretty dense. ;)

</comment><comment><USER38> From pedestal to pinnacle, all things are quantum, not classical. The metaphor that better avoids scaling obsolescence for your project is perhaps Bohmian, rather than Maxwellian.

</comment><comment><USER39> Codex Seraphinianus of programming?

I think it's a true piece of postmodern art.

</comment><comment><USER40>
        So if we had to read the above decrement...we'd say:
        "luslus dec sigfas cen dec bartis a tis pat sigbar soq
        dec soq ketcab pat wutgal tis pel zero a per tislus b
        tis pat barhep wutcol tis pel a lus pel b per per b buc
        pel b lus pel b per per."

Absolute brilliance.

</comment><comment><USER41> Though I couldn't understand them fully...

The names are awesome! The concepts are awesome! And the music is awesome!!!

<comment><USER41> I see some similarity to Smalltalk or Windows PowerShell. And this made me to imagine typed Smalltalk/Objective-C style syntax on shell which would be great for usability...

<comment><USER42> Shell programs are expected to take streams of data and produce other streams of data. Shell programs are also supposed to, but often don't, have uniform configuration options. Instead, we have ps ax | grep chromium | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill

* ps accepts ax with no -

* awk is its own programming language lol

* xargs gets pretty complicated if anything bigger than this happens

(incidently, I know about awk '/chromium/ {print $1}' and killall. but i have seen that command line in the wild. because some people don't read the awk manual for fun, and i'm not sure if every unix system even has a killall command)

...and yet the shell is still the preferred tool for what it does because everything else requires too much typing (of both varieties)

Apparently urbit also has streams of raw data. It's about time someone came up with a new idea for a shell that keeps what's great about the shell (though personally, i would standardize on streaming a form of json, because it turns out that data is very often found as scalars, lists, and mappings).

So anyway. If urbit actually ends up being better to live in than unix, and having shell programs that are configured in exactly one way would be an improvement, and having data that's easier to parse than plain text while remaining as easy to read as plain text would also be an improvement, well, I've always wanted to live in a submarine. If it gets a nice editor and c++ compiler, that is. I do need the best performance possible out of my computer for my work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Okay, since you want comments here, here I'll put mine.

The reason you were so successful in coming up with a new political philosophy is that your "I'm a Martian" trick got you think thoughts that no respectable person would be caught dead thinking.

There aren't the same taboos in computer system design, so while you can refer to the systems people use every day as gigabytes of, what was it, of ass fucking more ass, there's nothing you say that I haven't already heard.

I'm still waiting for the Python of functional programming. Paul Graham announced Arc when I was in middle school. Maybe it will be released as the scripting system in Half-Life 3.

Being an alien from Alpha Centauri, and observing the growing collection of programming languages, what do you think people keep designing new ones for? Why do some Urplatians argue for Scheme and other Urplatians for Python?

Rather than asking the question of 'what is a programming language', and trying to design the axiomatically simplest possible thing, try asking the question of 'how do people use programming languages'.

Is your system a bit of syntax regularization away from the pseudocode people scribble on paper to explain algorithms to each other? No, that's Python.

Is your system something that compiles down to use the bare metal to its fullest potential while maintaining as much creature comforts as possible? No, that's C++.

Is your system something with an ancient history of having a solid ABI, that in fact every other language's ABI is described with? No, that's C.

Is your system a heap of cruft upon kludges with the original intention of providing programming access to a hypertext document? That's Javascript.

I wouldn't want to write a regex as anything but a regex.

In conclusion, you're asking a question that's been asked before and getting an answer that's been gotten before. But, maybe it is finally time for functional programming to come back. Maybe you're a popular enough guy to get people to use your system.

<comment><USER43> "Being an alien from Alpha Centauri, and observing the growing collection of programming languages, what do you think people keep designing new ones for? Why do some Urplatians argue for Scheme and other Urplatians for Python?"

Typical mind fallacy. [http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/)

Most people model other people as _just like themselves_ , plus or minus a diff. The trouble is that they don't understand just how wide-ranging human thoughts and feelings can be, and assume they will understand and be able to model based on the diff, even if the diff is larger than their whole mind.

It's why geeks keep coming up with "intuitively obvious" schemes no-one else can understand, and why engineers are _routinely_ surprised at what actual end users do with their products in user testing.

So people write new languages that suit their personal peculiar ways of thinking. Thankfully, many are quite aware that this is what they are doing and don't claim universality.

This is why Urbit is art: translating numbers and ASCII characters into nonsense syllables that you are actually expected to pronounce and think in suits Yarvin's mind, even as it leaves me thinking "there is such a thing as being too much of a Borges fan". Which is absolutely fine. But this is why Urbit is art (an expression of a unique personal vision), not anything people are actually going to use without similar levels of confusion to the present.

For an example of fully rampant Typical Mind Fallacy in Urbit, see the security document: [http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-6-security.html](http://www.urbit.org/2013/08/22/Chapter-6-security.html) About two-thirds of the way down, you can actually see Yarvin transform into Moldbug and start pontificating on how humans communicating on a network _should_ work, and never mind the observable evidence of how they actually have behaved whenever each of the conditions he describes have obtained. The very first thing people will do with the Urbit system is try to mess with its assumptions, in ways that its creators literally could not foresee (due to Typical Mind Fallacy), though they might have been reasonably expected to (given the real world as data).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> So this is what moldbug does in his spare time.

</comment><comment><USER45> Hey Moldy I just want to say 'ur-bit' is a pretty cool name B-)

</comment><comment><USER46> I can't tell what I'm more confused/impressed by, Hoon or the social model. Either way, I've got a destroyer and now I'm trying to understand just how zod works.

</comment><comment><USER47> Congrats on the launch (even if teh Internets did it for you)!

</comment><comment><USER48> Love the fact you used music by the god of ambient, Bran Eno.

</comment><comment><USER31> The more I think about it the more I really like the whole "Jets" concept (although I'm not sold on the name, I'd love to learn that it's a known concept in the PL field with a nicer name). I'd like to see how such an approach would work out for optimizing something more "fundamental" like the Binary Lambda Calculus.

<comment><USER49> Haskell has rewrite rules which is how eg stream fusion is implemented.

[http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.1/html/users_guide/rewri...](http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.1/html/users_guide/rewrite- rules.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I love this concept of jets and how it allows a "completely isolated" VM to magically grow connections to the real world.

</comment><comment><USER51> A VM that can be precisely described in 200 words? Does that include the IO subsystem? I have my doubts that it's possible to describe a full set of IO operations that any modern VM needs in so few words, just because of the wealth of features that you usually need (file system access, sockets (TCP and UDP), pipes, IPC, ...)

</comment><comment> sr-ix I dig the Borges references riddled about.

</comment><comment><USER52> Reminds me of the punchline, "consider a spherical cow"

> To a Pascal purist, to anyone who thinks mathematically, this seemed > hideous. C isn't really a high-level language at all - it's a glorified > macro assembler. Mankind retreats to the cave.

Leaky abstractions are hideous too, don't you think?

</comment><comment><USER53> Astonished.

Reminds me a bit of A+, however. :)

</comment><comment><USER54>
      Hoon also excels at handling and validating untyped data, a common task on teh Internets.

Not sure if satire?

</comment><comment><USER55> using "teh Internets" on yr front page is a great way to put off anyone who doesn't subscribe to calcified "geek culture"

</comment><comment><USER56> so its root in forth?

</comment><comment><USER57> without flash of course there

</comment><comment><USER57> video not work in ff linux

<comment><USER42> i just finished watching it in firefox on a freshly-installed linux mint 15

<comment><USER57> nothing appropriate, gentoo and Im too lazy for fixing it (=^‥^=)</comment></comment></comment>


How Custom Javascript Events Will Save the Universe - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/savetheclocktower/how-custom-events-will-save-the-universe?from=ss_embed <comment><USER2> I agree using a pub / sub event model can help to decouple a UI and allow developers to build components that can be dropped in pages. For example I use event models to notify widgets that new data is available. If someone changes their account information I publish an account changed message and any subscribers are get the new data and are responsible for updating their UI. Further the one I love to use it for is analytical. When you write widgets that you will use over and over again, I never know what analytical library that a company will be using so setting all my track-able events up as event publishes allows me to write a module that can subscribe to the events and publish the data to Omniture, Unica, Google or whoever. This decouples the two and allows the analytical to be layered on after the fact.</comment>


Downsized dwellings: Inside Tokyo's tiny living spaces - <AUTHOR> https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2019/04/20/lifestyle/tokyos-tiny-living-spaces/ <comment><USER2> Whenever articles about this come up, especially as it relates to Japan, I think it's important to remember that "not everybody does this." I would advise treating these kinds of articles as a slice of life for a specific set of people.

Another example is a mini-documentary I saw recently about people in Japan living either temporarily or semi-permanently in Internet cafe cubicles.

It was somewhat sad just because the kind of person to do that sort of thing is usually a little lost or lonely. But that doesn't mean everyone or even most living in Tokyo is lost and lonely. It's a big place with millions of people, and they're not all the subject of alternative lifestyle documentaries.

Just like any other country on earth, there are undoubtedly Japanese people who trade commute time for extra space, just like we all do in just about any other city on the planet.

Actually, I don't think these micro apartments are sad - for the right person who's out and about a lot, maybe they're single, or have specific priorities on location or neighborhood, I'm sure they're a great option. They're also only about $600 a month.

To put this in further perspective, keep in mind that about 25% of the world does not have access to "basic sanitation," i.e. access to a flushing toilet shared by multiple families. In that context, perhaps our mental efforts sent toward pitying the lives of modern urban inhabitants with small apartments are misplaced. (Not to say that the main purpose of this article is to generate pity, but that might be someone's reaction)

<comment><USER3> > for the right person [...] they're a great option

Definitely -- anyone who disagrees needs look at the conditions that some high-rent NYC apartments are in. Showers in the kitchen, windowless bedrooms, brown tap water, any number of safety/code violations, and so on. They're not exactly common, but there's not much of a stigma and people will gladly pay 3-4x the rent of those micro-apartments just to live in the thick of the action. And wasn't there a story about a Google engineer living in a van or something?

Compared to the castles people have in midwest U.S., sure, they're a bit cramped. But $600/month to live in a major metro area with no roommates? Sign me up.

<comment><USER4> And, frankly, it's nothing new. It was a cliche at least back to the 80s that newly minted grads in finance would deal with tiny rat-infested crap apartments with roommates in Manhattan rather than get something decent in Queens for half the price. Because they couldn't imagine not being in the middle of the action (and most of their friends were the same).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Actually this kind of "micro apartments" are pushed by landlords rather than dwellers.

The basic problem is that there are a lot of small patches of lands in Tokyo that are too small to build a normal flat (recall that a patch of land is very, very expensive in Tokyo and you cannot just buy an adjacent land to expand it). Until recently, these small patches were left vacant since there was really not much use.

Recently, due to lots of cheap money floating around, some speculative developers (Spilytus, referenced in this article, is one of them) try to utilize these lands, by building such micro housings.

So it is a relatively new thingy pushed by supply side speculators and I honestly do not think these small housings have so much popularity among actual dwellers as this article suggests.

<comment><USER6> A speculator necessarily performs no capital improvement, so developers are by definition _not_ speculators. They're turning an unproductive piece of land into a useful commodity. Calling productive activity, that people apparently value, does a disservice to creators everywhere and entrenches NIMBY attitudes.

<comment><USER7> Their success is reliant on housing staying unaffordable. That is the only way to make "microhousing" profitable. They don't create anything unique. If anything this will make sure housing remains unaffordable and no one will create much of anything. What do you think "entrenches NIMBY attitudes" is if not financial interests?

<comment><USER8> This is like calling farmers speculators, because their success relies on food continuing to cost money.

<comment><USER7> No, I don't think that is the same thing. In this case they are specifically lowering the standard of living. If the standard of living returns to a more normal state, where more traditional accommodation becomes more affordable, their investment becomes unprofitable. That is more like if a farmer would permanently change their fields to something that is high priced at the moment. Which would be speculation.

<comment><USER8> Building additional housing lowers the standard of living? Obviously some people think it's more attractive than the alternative, or else they wouldn't live there...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is nice to be able to give up some living space in exchange for lower rent, or for a premium location. Tokyo allows this to a great degree. Where I live, in the US, the construction of small apartments is illegal, so the ability to make this trade is more limited.

<comment><USER10> I disagree that you can't do this in the US. Considering the UES in New York, just as an example, studio apartments are certainly cheaper than 1 bedroom apartments, which are cheaper than 2 bedroom apartments. Several people splitting a 2 bedroom living space will work out to be cheaper than a studio per person as well.

Also, the US is a big place with different local laws. Be careful about generalizing something across the whole country, because after a few Google searches, I couldn't find any Federal Laws about this.

<comment><USER11> There are zoning laws in many, many parts of the country that prohibit housing under a certain size, usually about 700 square feet, which is enough for 2 bedrooms and 1.5 baths.

<comment><USER12> What were the rationales for those laws being enacted?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing I notice looking at the descriptions is the extent to which technology plays a role in making these sorts of acommodations more feasible. Air conditioning, of course, but also computers.

If you look at photos of Tokyo apartments from the early '90s (eg _Tokyo: A Certain Style_, [https://www.gwern.net/docs/japanese/1997-tsuzuki- tokyoacerta...](https://www.gwern.net/docs/japanese/1997-tsuzuki- tokyoacertainstyle.pdf) ), which were often photos of people making very similar tradeoffs for the same reasons (cheaper rent in the heart of Tokyo but then-relatively-small apartments, often one-room), the apartments are much larger than these but also far more cluttered, looking like they have hoarding disorders. Stereo sets, TVs, landline phones, walls or giant stacks of manga, vinyl records, cassette tapes, reference books, books in general, musical instruments (he photographed some musicians and music students), visual arts equipment - all of these take up an enormous amount of space collectively. But they can all be replaced by a desktop+large monitor and a smartphone and perhaps a digital input device like a tablet or keyboard for arts. (Even the desktop is physically far smaller than in the '90s.)

And that's precisely what the photographed apartments here do: you see desktop computers, a small handful of books which perhaps are sentimental or favorites, and much of the bulk of the space seems to now be used up by clothes, with food-related items being the next biggest category.

This raises the question of what could be done to reduce those? Food patterns will probably shift further to takeout/online purchases because of the enormous investments in logistics for rapid delivery (I'm particularly impressed when I read about JD.com in China, and Tokyo is a logical megalopolis to reach similar delivery speeds), but clothes are a tougher nut to crack. New fabrics which are more dirt/odor-resistant to allow more wear? Reversible clothes which provide '2 in 1'? Fewer dresses and more mix-and- match? Rental clothing services powered by cheap delivery?

<comment><USER14> I don't know what the soil is like where these tiny apartments are, but perhaps a basement with lockable storage/closet?

The apartment I have in my midwestern city came with a closet in a shared room that is locked by my door key that I can use to store things outside of my apartment. Bulk food storage and clothing storage could then be moved there, assuming proper ventilation.

<comment><USER13> That's not a bad idea. I wonder why apartment buildings don't routinely offer storage space in their basements to begin with? It doesn't seem like they typically do that much with them, not even parking garages.

<comment><USER15> The apartments I've lived in in the west/midwest do, but I know that in Cali many buildings don't have basements due to earthquakes.

<comment><USER14> In Florida you get a twofer of reasons:

1) most of Florida is barely above sea level, so digging down any significant distance results in hitting the water table

2) areas that are not right at the sea level are often prone to sinkholes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> it may be my Western sensibilities but I find those small apartments dehumanizing. Like living in a prison cell or some kind of distopian sci-fi novel.

note I've lived in Tokyo on and over the last 21 years. I've lived in college dorm sized apartments and visited friends in smaller. I get it's partly culture but isn't there some limit? Would living in a capsule hotel be ok to some? Is it 100% personal preference or is there some limit?

<comment> design-of-homes _" Like living in a prison cell or some kind of distopian sci-fi novel."_

I also find such small dwellings unpleasant. Small flats can be well designed, but these apartments take things too far.

The designers have recognised two features to amplify the sense of space: the double-height space and the large windows to flood the flats with natural light.

In fact, one aspect of more modern apartment design which is instantly recognisable no matter which country you live in: the long, narrow rectangular shape of apartments which allow more flats to be crammed into a plot of land. Compare these two identical studio apartments.

[https://imgur.com/FyhYi0j](https://imgur.com/FyhYi0j)

I'd be interested to hear opinions from anyone who prefers the studio apartment with windows at the narrow end (and why).

As an aside, it's interesting that you mentioned these apartments as something that might come from an "dystopian sci-fi novel". In J.G. Ballard's science fiction novel,"Billenium" the population of the earth reaches 20 billion and 95% of the population resides in cities. Residential floor area per person is limited to 4m2.

In 2010, that inspired Waseda university in Japan to run a competition with the premise: could you live with _another person_ in a home that measured just 15 square metres? The original competition website is long gone, but luckily, archive.org has a copy of the winning entries:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20110630063557/http://www.all- was...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110630063557/http://www.all- waseda.com/rikogakkai/toumon.arch/gakka100/prize_english.htm)

<comment><USER17> > I'd be interested to hear opinions from anyone who prefers the studio > apartment with windows at the narrow end (and why).

I've lived in both shapes (technically, they were 1 bedrooms, but had the same difference in layout). I much preferred the one with windows at the narrow end. It allowed me to actually use the walls for stuff - couch against one wall, TV opposite without having massive glare and my back to the window. Still allowed lots of natural light in.

The one advantage of the long layout was it allowed better airflow from a window at one end to a window at the other. But it also allowed way too much sunlight in during the summer, meaning that ventilation was less effective at cooling the space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is building upward prohibitively expensive due to needing to make earthquake- resistant buildings?

I know that in Sydney, Australia, there's a perceived "space shortage" but the true issues are regulatory, nimbyism, and behind most of that is a desire to protect the investments of existing property owners. We could just build upwards and have an abundance of centrally located dwellings. Most buildings in Sydney are just a few storeys high.

Tokyo reminds me of Sydney, except for the earthquake factor. If the earthquake factor isn't an issue, then the situation is truly extraordinary; millions of people living in the tiniest of spaces just to protect existing investors.

<comment><USER19> > We could just build upwards

You can't just build up and up and ignore the issues at ground-level. As you add more vertical housing you still need more space and resources at ground level, for public transport, for parks, for schools which need sports ground, for everything. Everything else continues to get more congested and building vertically solves none of these inherent problems.

<comment><USER20> An interesting question is: do all factors scale at the same speed?

The experience of e.g. Hong Kong and Manhattan seems to suggest that it's easier to provide for public transport, schools etc, in ultra-dense environments. One of the core advantages of ultra-density is that less space is needed for streets and motor traffic. Ultra-density also makes logistics for basic goods and services (e.g. food and health care) more efficient. Even greenery can be more efficiently provided in ultra-dense environments, because multiplexing is possible as parks are rarely used by the majority of the population at the same time. E.g. London parks are pretty empty almost all the time.

(See also the scalability limits that high-rise buildings have w.r.t. economics of floor space, that I mention in another post.)

<comment><USER21> Yet on a lovely day like we've had this weekend, London parks will be a horrendous sea of flesh, like beaches in Benidorm (or Brighton)

<comment><USER20> Out of the circa 8760 hours of the year, what fraction is like today? (Moreover, even today, parts of e.g. Hyde Park that are away from the main walkways will not be like Benidorm central beach in the high season.)

Why overfit on rare edge cases?

<comment><USER21> The point is that people want to use the parks when it's sunny. So they do. And it's hideous.

I don't care if it's empty when it's raining, there's a reason why that's the case.

Having access to Hyde Park is pointless for the purposes I like green areas (to enjoy when the weather is nice)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I lived in Japan in my 20's for several years and I loved my tiny studio in the middle of the city.

It was perfect for me. I lived in Tokyo not have a roomy house, but to be in the middle of the action. The closer I lived to the center, the better.

These apartments are the same thing. They are great for young professionals in their 20's, but if you want a family, they aren't feasible.

</comment><comment><USER19> We should build the equivalent of military messes but for civilians. Private bedroom and shower, and communal eating and living spaces. It's extremely social and would be perfect for young professionals.

<comment><USER23> "Sharehouse," very common in Japan. Most of the times it's a repurposed hotel or family house, but in the past it was not uncommon to see buildings designed with this purpose in mind.

Usually the shower, bathroom, and kitchen are in common, the former one on each floor. Usually there are paid professionals cleaning them regularly.

I don't consider them a bad accomodation. It's the equivalent of a school dorm. I wouldn't necessarily want to live there if working full time, but that's just preference.

You have to be an adaptable and accommodating person though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> They look absolutely beautiful. The finishing is great, with lots of natural sunlight. I am pretty sure the attention to details in Japan won't let most people down.

Compared this to living in HK [1], a 9m2 space would get you a toilet and kitchen combined as one.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2017/jun/07/boxed...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2017/jun/07/boxed- life-inside-hong-kong-coffin-cubicles-cage-homes-in-pictures)

</comment><comment><USER25> Whilst changing countries recently, I downsized to a 6m2 appartement for the days I came through the city. I've lived in 20m2 apartments before, and find the 6m2 vastly more comfortable, for a few reasons. 6 - 10m2 are tiny, which force you to keep possessions to a minimum, and stay neat and organised. 20m2 is double the size, but double the frustration: you can almost do many things in it, but always at a compromise.

I'd have never expected it until I lived it, but 10m2 is much more comfortable than 20.

<comment><USER26> Jesus I find my London 79m2 apartment claustrophobic do you spend any time indoors other than sleeping? What about Guests? Partners?

<comment><USER27> Finding 79 sqm of living space "claustrophobic", especially in one of the most expensive cities in the world, seems a bit odd to say the least. Just like most privileges in life, living space has a tendency to get taken for granted. A lot of people use extra rooms just to store possessions they should have thrown away a long time ago, or never should have bought in the first place. I personally think that seeing the times we live in, people in general really need to question their conscience when it comes to what you actually "need", and what habits we never question when it comes to how we consume. This doesn't just apply to living space.

<comment><USER26> How is it odd? a prison cell on 5th avenue is still a prison cell.

I have 1 bedroom, 1 office and a living room, I don't keep trash in the flat we have a storage unit, in fact unless we convert the 2nd bedroom/office to a closet we actually rotate clothes in and out of the storage unit because there isn't enough wardrobe space for 2 people for all seasons.

Tiny apartments are a health hazard they damage both your physical and mental health, they aren't any more environmentally conscious than properly sized apartments and this whole minimalism fad is complete horeshit litterarly sold too and by useful idiots.

A 6m^2 apartment is below what is legally can be called a room in the UK, In fact it's the size of a US prison cell (5.8m^2), 20m is blow the legal limit for a home which iirc is 37m2 but in the UK this only covers recent builds and conversion so you might still find 30m flats somewhere however depending on the council they are can be illegal to rent out.

For perspective this is what 6 square meters look like [https://weburbanist.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/05/6x9-jail-...](https://weburbanist.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/05/6x9-jail-cell-960x514.jpg)

So yes while I was a bit hyperbolic I don't understand how someone can live in a literal prison cell yet alone calling it more comfortable than living in a small hotel room. But no I don't to question my conscience regarding what I need or don't need, what I want is an apartment in an area I like, close to what I need and want to have, for a price I'm willing to pay. Besides that I would opt out to get the largest apartment I can, 2 baths is a must because I live with a partner, having an extra room for work and or guests is also nice especially since it allows us both to work from home on the same day and gives us some room from each other if things get too heated and I don't have to be in her face or one of us has to go out.

<comment><USER28> >> Tiny apartments are a health hazard they damage both your physical and mental health,

>> they aren't any more environmentally conscious

>> this whole minimalism fad is complete horeshit litterarly sold too and by useful idiots

>> can live in a literal prison cell

You seem to be ranting. I think most of your points are beliefs without facts or just things you've invented to be angry about.

<comment><USER26> A simple Google search would've brought up enough results e.g. [https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/artic...](https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/282150/)

Or you know just take an air quality meter and check it for yourself.

In fact sleeping in small bedrooms is also quite terrible for your health.

People should not live in prison cells let's stop making them sexy so developers can make more money by squeezing more people into a given area.

<comment><USER28> Fair enough. If you're going to make a point, do what "literally" all the other good posts do and footnote it. Don't put the burden of proving your point on the reader, that's your job in the OP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There's a good video from Living in a Big Tiny House covering one of these tiny Japanese apartments:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYVJbupG3Xg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYVJbupG3Xg)

<comment><USER30> Hah, the go-to video for everyone to start with! Did anyone else think they'd make a good couple?

Anyway, I wish we'd finally agree as a community to use one word for one thing, but not the other.

i.e., small homes: just small homes (like OP's link, serious and important approach to housing).

tiny houses: the new trend of putting a small home on wheels/trailer. (like 99% of the links on Google).

I'm all for the former (small units, when fit with modern-appliances, sound- proofing, and well-designed) can be a great way to live for young people for a few years, and help reduce costs.

Take a look at Amsterdam for example, it's population only recently growing back to the 1960s levels. [0] (suburbanisation happened in between).

However, housing prices grew by about 8x since the bottom.[1]

The funny thing you find is that we actually have way more housing than we used to, and until recently we actually had fewer people in the city than we used to, but prices are way higher. So what's changed? The most important change that I see is that, considering we have fewer people in more real estate, we all live larger.

And you can see this in a lot of data. Average home size in the US has grown way larger, while household size shrunk, you can see in this graph. [2] The axis kind of get exaggerated a bit, but still the effect is clear. We have twice the amount of space per person today than just 40 years ago. That's not ancient history.

This seems to be pushing up real estate prices more than anything. And one way to solve the issue is to simply reverse this trend of living larger. Instead, let's live a little smaller. If you look at other developments in our lives, this should make sense. A lot of our technology has miniaturised. We don't need a library of books or CDs at home, no record player, we have multiple virtual desks, some of us don't need a TV. We're more and more able to use public spaces to meet people, host people, be entertained. And of course, the nature of the family has changed, we marry less and later, have fewer children, live more individually. The trend of ever larger houses makes no sense in a world where we need smaller units, and often can't afford housing as it is. There's a lot of room for more (but always limited) smaller units in our housing stock, I think. Although I'm thinking 20-35m2, not 10!

The second trend of putting small homes on wheels/trailer, just isn't interesting to me. They're mostly just campervans, only a bit less mobile. They don't really solve any issue, as they're super low-density. They exist only in cheap low-density areas where they can be parked, where there typically isn't a housing shortage issue anyway, or in a HCOL environment, in a grey area of the law when parked in someone's garden or something, which isn't a solution at scale. They're fun, but not a serious approach to housing at scale. Yet these terms, small/tiny houses/homes are often intertwined and it muddies the conversation a bit.

[0] [http://destadamsterdam.nu/wp- content/uploads/2017/11/demofac...](http://destadamsterdam.nu/wp- content/uploads/2017/11/demofact-1900-2017-incl-fig-loop_parool-Chart1.png) [1] [https://www.nvm.nl/marktinformatie/marktinformatie](https://www.nvm.nl/marktinformatie/marktinformatie) [2] [https://azgolfhomes.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/07/American-...](https://azgolfhomes.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/07/American-Enterprise-Institute-Housing-Data.jpg)

<comment><USER31> >So what's changed?

In the UK it's availability of finance. Mortgages used to be limited to three times the main earners wage, now it could be four or more times joint wages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This looks about as big as my college dorm. Not exactly comfortable (given the fact that I work with hardware and have lab setup here) but also not the end of the world.

If I only needed a computer, I would actually have shit ton of space.

</comment><comment><USER33> Aren't those tiny places bad from a psychological point of view? wouldn't be incredibly stressful over multiple years?

<comment><USER34> Are 4 years of living in dorm rooms stressful?

<comment><USER33> Student life is not the same as a working person life.

<comment><USER35> Depends where you work. I just moved to SF and it feels exactly like being a student again, from communal meals to company run outings to the thrill of being in a new city.

I'll probably spend a year or two in a studio apartment slightly larger than the ones in the article and then find a house with housemates, just like I did back in uni.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If they didn't have to force a kitchen and bathroom into each room they could have a little more space. The boarding house model of the early 20th century was on to something.

<comment><USER36> That's certainly an option. I live in a sharehouse in Tokyo. 15 men and women of different nationalities, each with a private room but sharing three toilets (one per floor), three "unit baths," and two sinks. There is a common kitchen and living/dining area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> With population decline are these necessary?

Also maybe it is just me but I'd probabbly have to find some sort of method of dealing with air circulation and smell...

<comment><USER38> Population decline is mostly driven by the more rural areas of Japan. Tokyo's population is still rising.

<comment><USER37> Ah that makes sense, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Only as a data point, since 1975 there is Law here in Italy that makes some minimum requisites for living spaces, main points:

1) to be legally recognized (as a self-standing home) the surface of an apartment cannot be less than 28 square meters

2)the minimum height of rooms intended for "long permanence of humans" (which is anything but bathrooms, corridors and closets that can be as low as 2.40 m) must be 2.70 meters

3) all rooms as above need to have a window no less than 1/8 of the surface of the room

4) there must be at least one bathroom in the house with all four pieces: basin, bidet, wc and bathtub (or shower)

5) the size in #1 is intended for a "single" person residing in it, the minimum size for two people is 38 square meters and for each person living in the house (this is not usually enforced in practice) there must be at least 14 square meters of surface (up to the first four) and 10 square meters for each more person

Very often local councils impose bigger sizes for the minimum apartment (in case of new constructions or refurbishing of old houses divided in more apartments).

</comment><comment><USER40> Its sad that in the US building no non-sense _tiny_ , simple and _cheap_ apartment is doesn't really make sense (due to regulation and stuff). Every builder seem to want to build big and 'luxury' type apartment.

</comment><comment><USER41> I used to live in a 14 square meter (150 square foot) apartment in Uruguay while I was working and studying, for almost 8 years (definitely at age 25 like Sotaro Ito).

Honestly, it wasn´t bad - I was outside all day, and the miracle of the Internet meant that when I was inside I wasn´t missing much. I did my studying and meetings on university buildings, so it was basically a dorm room.

Several poor families (single mother and children, some immigrants) did live in the same 14 square meters and that was sad.

</comment><comment><USER42> At 6'5" this would be my nightmare to have to live in such a tiny space. I guess it's the price to pay to live in such an expensive area. Thankfully I work in a city with reasonable housing costs.

</comment><comment><USER43> Wouldn't want to fart in there.

</comment><comment><USER44> 50 years later people won't be able to even afford even those apartments anymore. Next will the hyper "efficient" 1m² apartment where you sleep standing in the toilet bowl.</comment>


Ask HN: Please review this site from my friend. - <AUTHOR> http://www.wirewize.com/ <comment><USER2> Analysis: Fail

I need to create an account to even get a hint at what value the site might have to me. Barrier to entry is too high, how do I know there is any value waiting on the other side of the account registration screen?

Now, my guess is that it's one of those kinds of sites that you'll use only a few times (you only need to connect your receiver to your plasma TV so many times). So, a freemium model may be a tough play here. Perhaps something like without an account you can select your components (to confirm they are known in the system) and see a low-def (composite audio/video) connection path, but not a high-def connection path.

End result, IMO, is that if everything is hidden behind an account registration it will be hard to get a good user base.

<comment><USER3> Surely the most obvious monetization would be in collecting a commission for cable sales. Given the extortionate cost of some of the cables :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why the hell do I need to create an account!

Homepage is good, I think it is fulfilling a painpoint that myself and others have. I'm not creating an account just to try it out.

Solution: Provide the option of allowing me to create an account AFTER I have entered my components and it has solved my problem. Similar to an "anonymous checkout" on an ecommerce site.

</comment><comment><USER5> Echo the account sentiment of others. You need to kill it.

The myPro bit is interesting, although I'm not sure how you go from getting the right cables to needing someone on the phone walk you through set up. If I need that much assistance, I'll call the geek quad or whatever and have them do it for me. (Hell, I bought the TV from them after all, they even ask me in the store.)

I'd strongly suggest talking to best buy or someone similar as a potential buyer, or talking to monster cables to get them to pay your bills like axod suggests. Nobody in their right mind is going to pay for this service alone.

</comment><comment><USER6> As others have pointed out, there's no need for this to make me create an account. To make matters worse, the "create account" box appears below the "how it works" sidebar using Firefox 3.0b5 and a minimum font size of 12px. It looks like someone got HTML mixed up with a page description language.

<comment><USER7> Zak, thanks for feedback. We don't see what your seeing, if you would be so kind as the send a screenshot to us at email@example.com that would be awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Regardless of what you decide to do with the user registration.. could you add an example or two to show how easy it is?

Like a static page with the output the site would give for a common scenario (such as a TV, DVD Player, and Satellite dish/DVR, for example). Just to let me see how awesome Wirewize is without me having to sign up (or try to put in my details)?

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm being nitpicky here, but in the about page, get rid of the "developed the definitive..." Its too alliterative. Also, what is " the definitive platform?" wirewize? another CEI product?

And we know nothing about you. Maybe some more depth and please avoid marketslick nonspeak, it tends to turn people off.

</comment><comment><USER7> Guys, thanks for the input. In fact we are looking at the account stuff closely. Keep it coming...</comment>


Rio's disaster is an extreme version of what happens to Olympic host cities - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenation.com/article/budget-failures-displacement-zika-welcome-to-rios-11-9b-summer-olympics/ <comment><USER2> > Brazil is an incredibly unequal society, with oligarchical elites who > disdain the poor, mourn for a lost military dictatorship, and don't > particularly care for democracy (all attractive traits to the IOC when > looking for an Olympic host city)

Well, how's that news. All societies have some inequality and "oligarchical elites who disdain the poor."</comment>


Is UBI likely to diminish the purchasing power of the many? - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1024938/ubi-is-just-a-bedtime-story-elon-musk-tells-himself-to-help-the-super-wealthy-sleep/ <comment><USER2> " _UBI inserted into our current economic software is likely to raise prices on many everyday goods. According to the late, noted US economist Hyman Minsky, one of these may be a rise in the cost of living. Even though there is UBI in your pocket, it is in everybody's pocket. Just as prices would be likely to rise with the introduction of a new basic wage, so they would with the introduction of UBI._ "

That's the question that keeps bothering me. UBI would be great for _me_ , personally, but wouldn't it cause price inflation in basic goods to produce yet another level of maximal acceptable misery?

<comment><USER3> [https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional- basic-...](https://medium.com/basic-income/wouldnt-unconditional-basic-income- just-cause-massive-inflation-fe71d69f15e7)

The housing aspect still worries me because housing does not follow supply and demand in many places.</comment></comment>


What's up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2010/01/04/what-s-up-with-the-beep-driver-in-windows-7.aspx <comment><USER2> I don't know why, but I absolute adore these stories of "Why does this obscure thing operate in the obscure way it does?" answered by the primary source. They're fascinating glimpses into the never-ending sea of trade-offs that is professional engineering!

<comment><USER3> Indeed.

The comedic value of the IBM PC architecture and its myriad of cautionary tales cannot be overemphasised. From the keyboard controller controlling a short to the A20 line to the rather questionable choice of using a programmable timer to generate audio (BTW, what was used in the cassette port?) and the 6845 sync frequencies that would ruin (if not set fire to) an MDA monitor, all the way to write-only EGA registers and the TSRs that were needed to keep track of which video mode the screen was on, the list and its hilarity, is enormous.

I assume the IBM engineers who came up with these ideas had a lot of fun.

<comment><USER4> > I assume the IBM engineers who came up with these ideas had a lot of fun.

IBM is incompatible with fun

It was about cost mainly and backwards compatibility

<comment><USER3> > IBM is incompatible with fun

Maybe officially, but it's hard not to appreciate engineers getting away making the most idiotic, borderline surreal, technical decisions for multiple generations of a machine architecture. The PC must have been the most hated piece of hardware ever to be designed within IBM and the outlet of countless corporate-induced frustrations.

<comment><USER5> Most things that look crazy from the outside probably had very good reasons for existing. There's usual some weird technical quirk that made it work the way it does, and working around the problem (or doing it right) would have required a few thousand more gates or a couple more pins which would have been expensive.

Making something correct with no regard for cost is relatively easy. Making something that works at all but costs less than $5 in bulk can be a lot more difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Back in the day the Win32 Beep() function was a pretty effective tool for debugging certain multi-threaded and server tasks.

You set up uniquely pitched beeps for certain events, and then listen for the order in which the events occur. It worked because a call into Beep() halted the entire process and all of its threads for the duration of the beep. It prevents multiple threads from beeping at the same time, and it slowed everything down just enough so that you could pick up each individual event with your ear. It beat the hell out of staring at a massive log file.

<comment><USER7> This reminds me of a talk by two of the Nobel price winners in medicine this year (Moser couple). They, together with O'Keefe, measured brain activity in various parts of the brain. Before computer loggers and visualization was very viable, neuroscientists hooked the sensors up to speakers. So they sat and watched mice move in a maze, and listened to various parts of the brain "fire".

<comment><USER8> The listening is still being done today in experiments. An experienced neurophysiologist (in the particular field of single cell recordings) can distinguish the sound of an actual braincell firing, or groups thereof, from all surrounding noise. Which is sometimes more convenient than recording the signal, feeding it into rather complicated template matching algorithms and waiting for results. Especially since braincells might die while being recorded from, so you have to decide quickly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This brings back some memories, but not the ones everyone else seems to have: I'd spent several hours (at least) looking at MSDN docs, various DLLs on my system, and the contents of the Windows SDK trying to figure out how to get an old fashioned beep.

I finally ended up on Larry's blog and, as it seemed like he'd know how it all worked, asked him.

I was quite pleasantly surprised by his response, as I wasn't really expecting an answer, never mind such an in-depth blog post the next day.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sun Microsystems hardware would halt processing to beep the console speaker for half a second; I worked on a _military communications system_ whose throughout would throttle to nothing whenever a long series of beeps occurred. Wiggling the mouse was enough to flush the alerts:

        "BEEEEEP...BEEEEEP...BEEEEEEP...beebeebeebeebeebeebeebeebeebeebeebeep"

and message processing throughput would return to normal. Operators in the field were trained to use the mouse for this purpose.

Edited to add: the programmers were aware of the problem, but there was a system level requirement that alerts must be audible and that's how Trusted Solaris worked until well into version 8.

</comment><comment><USER11> FYI, the PC and XT shipped with the 8253, the AT shipped with the 8254. And the 8254 is actually in the southbridge nowadays. I wonder whether the cheap Win8.1 tablets still have the speaker connection to 8254.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just pressed left shift five times to enable sticky keys on my Macbook running Windows 8 (native, no virtualization) and got no beeps. does anyone know if this has changed since Windows 7? I'm sure this generated a beep sequence in older versions of Windows.

<comment><USER13> I just got a beep through the regular speakers doing that on Windows 8.1 x64.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That makes me remember way back as an intern when I turned our testing tool into a crude music player by using a table of note frequencies and a text file format based on sheet music to make Chopin's Etudes play over the PC speaker by calling Beep().

<comment><USER15> Some people might remember from really old DOS games, but... You can even use the PC speaker as a "soundcard" (Actually as a 1-bit DAC. Here's the function called a few thousand times per second when using the Linux audio subsystem, updating the 1-bit output to the speaker (timer control of this output is disabled in this operation mode, kernel config is CONFIG_SND_PCSP).

[http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/sound/drivers/pcsp/pcsp...](http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/sound/drivers/pcsp/pcsp_lib.c)

"Say N if you have a sound card. Say M if you don't. Say Y only if you really know what you do."

<comment><USER16> There was this one game I picked up off the shelf at Target wayyyyyyyy back in the day (likely around 1990-1992) that had printed on the box a selling point that you could hear music without a sound card. It used the pc speaker. And sounded horrendous.

Still can't remember what the name of the game was and had been trying to track it down the last few years to see if it was as bad as I remembered.

I just remember high color (S?)VGA rendered/scanned in graphics, a man who was visiting alien planets and battling monsters. My 386 at the time was too underpowered to make the game remotely playable.

<comment><USER17> It likely used this technology: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound)

I played "Mean Streets" back in the day and was blown away by the sound.

I later saved up enough allowance/birthday money to buy a Sound Blaster Pro - several hundred dollars for a card that is probably < $10 today. Christ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always enjoyed his blogs, I wonder why he doesn't write anymore.</comment>


An iPhone app that has made 30K in 6 months - <AUTHOR> http://makecoolshit.com/the-designers-guide-to-iphone-apps-revenue/

<comment><USER2> The money was split with the developer, so they made $15K each. I'm assuming the 2-8 hours per week was 2-8 hours each. I didn't see where he said otherwise.

To me this looks similar to what you might make from many kinds of small app projects, but the App Store process seems to introduce so much additional risk.

<comment><USER3> Its like hearing from people who bought a lotto ticket and won $100. I recognize that these people have made their money back, but I'm really not interested in their story. Where's the > $100k iPhone app success stories?

<comment><USER4> Whenever those get posted, people complain about the AppStore "gold rush" stories. So you're damned if you do...

<comment><USER2> (+1) But the problem isn't the discussion of the risks, rewards, success stories, or how all of it was navigated.

The problem is the sheer emphasis on iPhone apps over seemingly everything else. We all would be better off (developers and consumers) if there was more discussion around cross-platform mobile development. I know there is some of this, but not at the enthusiasm level you see with App Store discussions.

<comment><USER5> I don't see the emphasis as a problem. The iPhone is a market leader and market leaders tend to get a lot of attention. Why should developers waste their time on other platforms if they aren't interested in them or don't feel there is enough market to make a profit? I only knew C before I got an iPhone, but I was excited to learn to develop for it. I think a lot of others share that same excitement, thus the amount of stories and enthusiasm surrounding the device.

<comment><USER2> > Why should developers waste their time

No one should do anything they really don't want to do. That's not what I'm saying. (And more power to everyone developing for iPhone, whether successfully or not.)

What I'm saying is that in the long run, this is a temporary state of things, and I personally feel we are better to move beyond it sooner than later. Geo- social apps are a great example that will benefit from better cross-platform support. And doing it in-browser, or some other compatible way, encourages more innovation faster than having to develop for n different proprietary platforms.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Colourlovers (YC W10) Coloring Book: Jonny's Startup Adventure - <AUTHOR> http://www.storenvy.com/products/36295-coloring-book-jonny-s-startup-adventure

<comment><AUTHOR> From COLOURlovers (YC/W10), we bring you the ultimate coloring book for Hackers everywhere...

"Through 14 pages of coloring you'll help him name his idea and color in the world he hopes to take over as he meets such characters as: Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Mark Zuckerberg + Sean Fanning & the Missing Dinner Guest, The Last Super Angels Supper, Steve Jobs, Paul Graham & The Ultimate Sign of Success... A Custom Zonda!"

 _You'll even get to color in your very own YC Dinner!_ <http://jonnysstartupadventure.s3.amazonaws.com/PGYC.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER2> A pain I know all too well...

[http://assets.storenvy.com/product_photos/131899/6-McClure_o...](http://assets.storenvy.com/product_photos/131899/6-McClure_original.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't help but feel that this would work much better as a coloring book if the artist hadn't included all those grey washes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair point... This is being fine tuned before printing.</comment></comment>


How to get a Facebook group restriction with a normal image - <AUTHOR> http://tux.so/word:facebook:image

<comment><USER2> It probably was used to massively spam.</comment>