Division of labor is the meaning of life - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/capitalism-division-labor-economy-life-society/ <comment><USER2> Oh hell no.

Division of labor can be reframed as people working together toward a common goal:

That is to experience, love, live, laugh, play, build, understand, and have all that endure.

We all find our niche, we all work in roughly the same ways, and most importantly, we all share basic ignorance.

Understanding, shared over time helps. And understanding is hard to secure, but once we have it, sharing it is a huge resource.

The list of things we actually know is damn small too.

The unknowns are profound. Some fill them with religion. Some just deal, and I am one of those. Want answers, but operate without them well enough.

There is no referee we can work with. There is no one else, just us. We may learn differently, and perhaps soon too. Who knows?

Honestly, it is flat out amazing that we are here, and with the animals too.

Despite that, this same ignorance drives people in bent, painful ways.

We shit where we eat. We kill one another, and use a considerable amount of our understanding to do it too.

We reproduce like weeds.

And only some of us seek to understand US, our nature. Many do not, or are more concerned with legacies, Marks on the world, winning whatever game we play.

We are not here very long either. And, our current understanding does little to suggest otherwise. One time through. The only time.

As I continue my journey, I find experiences, the joy of conversation and just how little, if anything we can know of one another, not to mention this awesome world we live in. So damn suggestive. Any one of us gets just a taste of what "real" is.

I know I am not spending my time here as my nature would have me do. And I know that is due to small numbers of us who do not have their priorities in order, nor perspective inclusive enough for that to happen.

And we are all young for a time to help others, build that which keeps risk at bay, to reproduce, to help others who are old, broken, fallen, as will happen to nearly all of us, should we not be snuffed out early.

I have no hard answers to purpose of life. None of us do.

But I can say it does not all boil down to money, labor. Labor and resources matter, and we must do and use them to endure.

But there is much more, each of us a story, each of us connected to others, young and old, near and now far.

While some of us want bigger better things, and that is good, part of our nature, we often forget what we need and where we live as if the human cost associated with those failures is somehow OK.

It is absolutely not. None of us are fundementally better than the others are. Not in the basic sense of being.

We may arrive here with gifts, and we may not. And that changes nothing about being, and what that means. Those gifts can empower us, entertain, bring understanding and all manner of bounty.

Even the least of us matters. Just beings here, alone, ignorant in so many ways. Clumsy too.

Every one of us is alive, present, deserving to be, do, play, laugh, love, be loved, to matter.

Perhaps more time spent getting to understand ourselves, others would see better priorities than what we struggle with now.

It is a very slow process. Slow enough, almost slow enough to forget it is even there. But it is, and to deny it is to deny ourselves, feign knowing, a folly that has costs difficult to describe, costs that accrue each day, costs that do not appear on a balance sheet.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Capitalism is boring," said the founding father of National Review, William F. Buckley. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex."</comment>


Ask HN: What should you do with non-technical cofounders who're quite useless - <AUTHOR>

I was hired by two college guys as the tech guy for their startup, and they keep expecting me to deliver even though I have exams, colleges to apply to etc. What's worse, these guys don't do anything, they just keep asking me why I 'haven't updated them on the project' or why 'this feature is taking so long'. What do you suggest I do? <comment><USER2> Chunky- I suggest you continue to give them status updates on a regular basis, but gradually drift off to be working on your own project.

By May or so, you should be ready to find a cofounder (Choose someone with some money, that you trust), and release a your own project, which is very similar (but not legally identical) to their idea.

After you get some initial traction, take off, and move to Silicon Valley, but leave your new co-founder behind. Maybe send him off to run the sales division in NY.

In SV, meet up with some charismatic bigshot (Preferably someone who had their own company before) to gain some publicity. Use him for intros to VCs. It's OK to party with him a bit.

When your Cofounder later comes to SV, dilute his shares to the point of basically kicking him out of the company.

Don't be surprised if the bigshot gets busted for drugs at a party at this point. He is Charismatic, after is.

At this point, you'll want to be careful- You're about to have some lawsuits.. Your Co-founder will sue you, as will the two college guys you're working for now.. But don't worry, your company is now on the road to success, and soon you'll be on the cover of TIME.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hahaha, this is brilliant! :) well there's nothing I'd like to do more than that, but seeing that I don't even have a college degree (and I'm not in NY) that would be really really _really_ hard to accomplish.

Yet, I probably will start working on a similar project like you suggested.(Although I have no intention of screwing over two harvard twins by stealing their idea)

<comment><USER2> If I were to give you real advice, it'd be to keep working on it, if you're enjoying it, or you think you can get it done soonish.

They're not going to want to go with a whole new team unless you're very very behind, since they'd have to train them up.

But don't expect a payout from these guys. They're likely not to go anywhere, and you're playing "agressively" by taking so long.

So.. Do it if you enjoy it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is what I don't like about non-technical people managing technical projects. They have no concept of how long something takes to create.

In this case, they are your bosses. I would just try to explain to them your situation. It might be time to quit or find another job.

<comment><AUTHOR> I started working on this to get some hands on experience, so quitting wouldn't really help me much. Unless there are startups out there ready to allow a novice freelance developer on their team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You should manage perceptions. You should give them "preemptive updates" - Tell them everything and anything, before it happens. Here's a sample template :)

Things I plan on doing today (Send it the same every day, as early as possible): (i) Homework - Required by school (ii) Reading 'X' chapters of a book, or Reading blog, code etc - Knowledge Acquisition To Help With The Project Or Personal Improvement (iii) Chores - Things that need to get done to live your life (iv) Thinking About The Project - This is how most "Features" get done. (v) Coding - Like 'Planning on adding approximately 100 lines of code'. To be clear, this is a fake measurement that is of no use to any developer, but for non-technical people, this is worth a lot.

And just before ending your day..

"FYI - I added 120 lines of code. This makes it 400 lines of code for this feature :)"

P.S: "e1ven" idea is much better :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Start asking them to deliver on their own project.

Just because they aren't technical doesn't mean they can't provide you with evidence of their input. Ask for more detailed specs, Spellchecked and proof read copy, mockups, copyright free images to use. Anything that will that will speed up the process for you and prove their commitment.

Ask to see evidence of their attempt at marketing, surveys with potential users giving feedback on proposed features, active twitter accounts networking, competitor analysis.

You need to get them to prove they're not useless. That they can contribute even outside of development.

If it turns out they ARE useless...you know what to do.

</comment><comment><USER6> What were the terms of your employment agreement? Was is expected you would be working full-time on this?

Have you given them any project timelines estimates, like "this feature will take about 30 programming hours to get roughly implemented, and I'm working 10 hours this week on it..."?

What they are, or are not, doing is probably not directly related to what their expectations are of you. Maybe they just have no idea how long it takes to get stuff done and you need to give them better guidance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, there aren't any terms of employment agreement actually. They just said develop this and we'll pay you. Since they're actually my friends I took this on faith.

No, it wasn't expected that I would be working full time on this and yet they insist (with daily reminders) that I implement things faster.

Actually most estimates I've made tend to be off by around a few hours, but since I give them estimates in days, this isn't much of a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is the company making any money yet? If not and you are doing this for future earnings, then I would suggest following what e1ven says. As a non-technical founder it is hard for me to advocate that, but that is the free market. If you don't offer something beyond an idea, you don't deserve to do it.

Stay legal, of course. If you have signed agreements do not do anything to break them

</comment><comment><USER8> You should watch The Social Network - it's basically a HOWTO guide for your current situation.

tl;dw Steal their idea & make billions.

(just in case it's needed... no. not a serious suggestion)

edit: somehow missed e1ven's post. do that!

</comment><comment><USER9> I suggest you do your job... You were hired to do that, weren't you? It doesn't matter if the 2 guys are slackers, hell they could just sit on a beach all day long. As long as they're paying you, they could do whatever they want.

<comment><AUTHOR> They're paying me out of the money that the startup makes. If they keep slacking off, they'll just be cheating me, but I still don't want to quite as this is the only place I can actually get some experience.

<comment><USER10> You can gain experience just working on your own small projects, if you aren't making money from something then there's no reason you need to work for someone else, you can gain experience on your own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Quit? It doesn't seem like these guys will be good business partners.

<comment><USER12> If you're afraid of burning bridges, find someone who is technically capable and would be interested in this project, and let him be your replacement when you quit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cheeky response: hire an outsourced developer to do your job for less than you make, pocket the difference. Everyone wins.</comment>


EC2 Reserved Instance Update – Convertible RIs and Regional Benefit - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-reserved-instance-update-convertible-ris-and-regional-benefit/ <comment><USER2> Holy hell, how did they manage to add more layers of complexity to their pricing? Thought if anything the automatic discounts of Google Cloud would influence AWS to simplify their model</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a free registry of investors for a specific company? - <AUTHOR> I know that there are services like AngelList or Crunchbase. What I'm looking for is whether there's some sort of free version of that? I suppose it could be created by the government? I just need a list of investors that a specific company has and be able to use their API <comment><USER2> In the US, the closest that exists is mutual fund ownership (form 13F) and company insider ownership (forms 3, 4, & 5) filings:

[https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answers- form13fhtm.html](https://www.sec.gov/fast-answers/answers-form13fhtm.html)

[https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse- edgar?company=&CIK=&type=...](https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse- edgar?company=&CIK=&type=4&owner=only&count=40&action=getcurrent)

These forms are only submitted about public companies. You can see the data on sites like Yahoo Finance.</comment>


Two Dots Too Many (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73 <comment><USER2> Atatürk gave Turkey a lot of great things. The alphabet isn't one of them. The dotted/dotless "i" in Turkish is just plain broken and there's no way to support it without 100% confidence in the text's language (which is impossible in the real world because multi-language users are a thing).

For anyone not familiar with the problem, the two variants of the letter "i" in Turkish are considered two separate letters but neither the dotless nor the dotted "i" is compatible with the non-Turkish "i" in lower and upper case:

* the lower case of upper case "I" is the dotless "ı" (not "i" as everywhere else)

* the upper case of lower case "i" is the dotted "İ" (not "I" as everywhere else)

This is basically a bug in the original specification (ca. 19th century) that was never fixed and now causes all kinds of problems for anyone trying to support it (because languages no longer live in isolation).

<comment><USER3> >* the lower case of upper case "I" is the dotless "ı" (not "i" as everywhere else)

>* the upper case of lower case "i" is the dotted "İ" (not "I" as everywhere else)

It does make sense though.

<comment><USER4> Does it, though? Would you also say it would make more sense for the lowercase B to have two enclosed spaces instead of just one?

<comment><USER5> Would it make more sense to have just one glyph for a letter instead of two? Of course. We're not getting anything out of making the distinction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Honestly though, what killed these people was a stupidity - surely if someone says something this nasty where there's an obvious ambiguity in the language, stabbing them over it without asking first is just ridiculous behaviour.

<comment><USER7> Sure. And the bug should also be fixed.

Pretty much everyone here is changing the subject, so to speak, which I find telling in itself.

<comment><USER8> Telling of what, exactly?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Solid advise in this article: "Another is that it is best not to kill people who make you angry until you have carefully investigated the situation, if then."

</comment><comment><USER10> > The Turkish newspaper Hürriyet reports a tragic consequence of the failure > to localize cell phones.

Which assumes that murder is an appropriate response when someone calls someone else a whore...

</comment><comment><USER11> Autocorrect kills

<comment><USER5> In this case (as reported), the message was correct, but the recipient's phone wasn't capable of displaying Turkish letters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, what a disaster.</comment>


Ask HN: Which are some OS projects known for the quality of their code? - <AUTHOR> If I were to look at some Open Source projects because I wanted to know how quality JavaScript or  Ruby looks like, where would I look? Which ones do you know? <comment><USER2> One for Javascript: [https://github.com/reactjs/redux](https://github.com/reactjs/redux) It takes just a few minutes to read the whole source code. Given the popularity it may be interesting to spend a few minutes on it.</comment>


Pseudonyms: The Natural State of Online Identity - <AUTHOR> http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/pseudonyms-natural-state-online-identity <comment><AUTHOR> (My comment, reposted here.)

I recall a discussion on this topic a long time ago when I had a casual interest in anti-spam techniques.

The idea was that someone (JD) maintained a list of bad IP addresses. However, JD realised that some people might not want JD to maintain and publish his list, and would various means to stop him. (Lawsuits, DoS attacks, personal threats, etc.)

So instead, he would anonymously publish updates to his list as signed Usenet messages. The idea was that even though he was anonymous, he would build up a reputation for quality over time and spammers couldn't pollute his list by posting fake updates because those fake updates would fail the signature check.

The objection to this scheme was the man-in-the-middle problem. Under this plan, JD's first message to the world would be a unsigned PGP key over the same fakeable Usenet channel. What if, a spammer managed to capture all of JD's posts, including the initial key, and craft his own fake posts with the spammer's IP missing?

(In the real world Usenet, this attack would be a rather impractical, but that's beside the point. Just acknowledging the fact.)

<comment><USER2> my understanding: spammer would have to _intercept and modify_ the public key in the very first (and all subsequent) messages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> While _managing_ pseudonyms at the level of code is easy, dealing with pseudonyms when building a community is difficult. Pseudonyms present a double edged sword: an online identity, but the possibility of multiple online identities (sockpuppets), the possibility of impersonation, and the egocentrism of having your pseudonym more valued than your content.</comment>


How the Food Industry Engineers the Need to Eat - <AUTHOR> http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/12/10/food-industry-michael-moss <comment><USER2> > The food companies have marched around the grocery store, adding sweetness, > engineering bliss points to products that didn't used to be sweet.

This is why is now _really_ hard to cut refined sugar out of your diet, because they put it in _everything_.

> It is no secret that the rise in obesity in America has something to do with > food. But how much?

Those first two sentences seriously made me laugh out loud. What are the other possible factors? One might say a more sedentary lifestyle, except I've heard that rates of exercise and outdoor activity have been going up. (I'll see if I can dig up a reference.) But maybe more important is that fact that you can sit in a chair all day and not gain weight if you simply control your calorie intake to match you activity level... Which is the only thing that needs to happen regardless of what you do during the day, inside or outside, lazy or active. Maybe that intro was trying not to come out and blame the food industry for the whole thing in the first 10 words, or leave the reader hanging so they don't stop there, but the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero.

<comment><USER3> The problem is in conflating weight with overall health, which most media reporting does. _Weight_ is primarily controlled by the quantity of food you eat (it is _not_ "100% due to diet" because there do exist conditions that cause people to carry too much weight even with a "normal" diet), but to assume all problems are purely a result of weight is reductionist and incorrect.

Being obese is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop metabolic and other health problems. Those problems arise from lack of activity, diet composition, and other factors beyond simply weight. Those problems are also the core plague of the "obesity epidemic", so it would behoove society not to focus so narrowly on weight and to focus on overall health (of which weight is a component).

<comment><USER4> That's like saying "smoking is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop lung cancer".

<comment><USER3> Which is also true, but the statements are not equivalent.

Tobacco use (and actually, all forms of smoke inhalation) has a specific, acute mechanism whereby use increases the chances of lung cancer and other respiratory problems. We do not have that kind of causal link for obesity- related diseases. There is a _correlation_ between weight and several so- called lifestyle diseases, but the causal link is fuzzy.

That lack of causation is why reducing the obesity problem to a simple matter of weight control is a bad idea. There are other mechanisms at play, particularly related to body composition, that appear to be sensitive to diet composition and activity levels. Telling people they can be sedentary as long as they don't eat too much (which is basically what the original post I was replying to was saying) is dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really, truely do not like the taste of sugar in my bread, pasta sauce, and yogurt. (I like the yogurt to taste yogurty, then add something sweet to it, like a banana or chocolate chips.)

But it's maddening going through package after package of bread, trying to find one without lots of added sugar. Free market capitalism is often advertised as just giving people what they want, but there are lots of cases like this where what people want and what is available to buy don't match up.

I really hope what the article says about food company profits dropping because people are buying less processed foods. Maybe it will become easier to buy food that tastes like something other than salt, sugar, and fat.

<comment><USER6> I've been wondering for years no why nobody offers sweetener-free pops. I just want something bubbly with a hint of flavor, but without the sweetness: like lemon-flavored club soda for example.

I have a hard time believing there's no market for this.

<comment><USER7> Like LaCroix? [http://www.lacroixwater.com/flavors/](http://www.lacroixwater.com/flavors/)

They sold it all over the place in Chicago when I lived there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would recommend a couple of documentaries in this context about sugar.

1\. The Botany of Desire [1]

See the part about selective breeding of apples that are sweet, where varieties with other tastes are either discarded or used for making apple cider vinegar.

2\. That Sugar Film [2]

This goes into detail on the amount of sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) added to all kinds of foods that people would consider as normal and "healthy". It's really shocking how invisible such things are to consumers.

[1]: [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1421383/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1421383/)

[2]: [http://thatsugarfilm.com/](http://thatsugarfilm.com/)

<comment><USER9> Fed Up [1] is another to add to the list, available on Netflix.

[1] [http://fedupmovie.com/](http://fedupmovie.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Someone was on the America's Test Kitchen podcast discussing artificial flavors. He said that on the one hand the chemists and food scientists have been making their flavors better so that artificially flavored things are more irresistible than ever--potato chips, corn chips, etc. On the other hand, on the fresh side, the scientists engineer the food so it is easier to ship and can stay on the shelf longer, making it less flavorful. Bad confluence.

</comment><comment><USER11> The Salt,Sugar,Fat book is great. Sections on Coke's tactics to get everyone hooked in 3rd world countries and the government cheese program are disturbing.

</comment><comment><USER12> due to some health issues that have me on an extremely low sodium (500mg/day or less) no caffeine (including things like chocolate/cocoa) diet some years back I had to switch to eating basically 100% unprocessed unseasoned food and never eating out, it was quite amazing how at the beginning it felt that food had nearly no taste, but nowadays many things that before required a lot of seasoning have a lot of salty/sweet tastes of their own.

Lately for example I have found that corn can be nearly too sweet to eat, I mean, plain steamed sweet corn, some varieties are extremely extremely sweet to my tastebuds; when reading that every year corn is engineered to be sweeter and sweeter I can definitely see why, it honestly tastes as sweet as ice-cream did when I still ate it.

Plain carrots are fairly sweet tasting, some brands more than others, but a lot more than I had expected; plain potatoes are salty, not too strong, but definitely noticeable, things like clementines / tangerines / mandarins / pomegranates taste way absolutely amazing, much much much better than any dessert I had when I was still eating processed food.

As much as I theoretically now could eat oil and sugar (there was a period of time where they really did not sit well with me) I honestly don't miss them, especially the sugar / syrups which nowadays taste way way too strong.

I doubt anybody nowadays would want to eat 100% unprocessed as honestly it can be a bit of a drag having to cook from scratch every meal starting from unprocessed ingredients and not adding any salt etc., not to mention it definitely will impact your career to not be able to go out to eat with coworkers, but if you find yourself concerned about having to have a lot of processed food for taste reasons, when you are on vacation it might be a worthwhile investment for you to try to eat this way for a few weeks to "reset" your tastebuds a bit.

It's amazing just how one can go from eating 5000mg of sodium a day and foods tasting "normal" to 500mg and after a period of adaptation them tasting "normal" as well, same deal for sugar.

(edit) and btw, as another interesting n=1 datapoint, although that was not the reason for the low sodium, going from 5-6000mg/day to 400-500mg/day my bp went from 135/85 to 105/65 over a few years, without really changing how I felt, and without taking any medications, that was surprising as I always thought that bp would not vary _that_ much just due to diet.

<comment><USER13> Well, in my family we always cooked everything ourselves. Everything. No tin can food, ever.

When my mum, due to medical condition, had to switch to low iodine diet, we could just switch our salt we used, and it was easy to adapt.

But I can say, you're right – I hate corn. Literally, I can't deal with the annoying sweetness of it. It's horrible.

Carrots are the perfect level of sweetness, we used to grow them ourselves, but don't do that anymore.

But, still, doing this myself without having any medical need myself, I obviously still add nutella to my pancakes, or so on.

To me it's just surprising how many people in this thread don't make their food on their own. Even if you just boil a pot of potatoes and put some onions in the frying pan in a bit of olive oil, you can quickly make some neat food. Or scrambled eggs with Bratkartoffeln and bacon, or noodles with your own sauce, and so on. Making your meals yourself is so easy, and quick.

I'm literally disgusted by the whole Soylent movement. NO! instead of spending less time for food, just spend less time for work! Unionize, damn.

<comment><USER14> Uhm, is Bratkartoffeln an English word now or is that just a slip? (Just curios, I like those adapted words.. übercool.)

<comment><USER13> I don't know – I was just too lazy to translate it, and then I usually pretend that the German word would be english. Most readers never notice anyway.

<comment><USER14> Haha, true that. Grüße nach Kiel aus Heidelberg. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I do think this is an unfair characterization of food manufacturers. In a real sense, they only make what WE want to eat. And we only buy, for the most part, what we WANT to eat. So there's a arms race that's been building ever since food became an industry. When one brand of bread adds sugar to their recipe, consumers love it and all the other brands must follow suit. Breaking this cycle will just as hard as breaking the industrial inertia towards fossil fuels.

Opting out of this is hard, expensive and against our natural desires. Or, to reiterate my other post, "Soylent, FTW."

<comment><USER16> > they only make what WE want to eat

This is the same justification for every consumable. If people didn't want X, companies wouldn't make X.

Calling companies out for increasing our _desire_ for their products, especially when that desire goes against our better interests (mental and physical health, in particular), is not unfair, it's smart. It gets people thinking about what they're doing and why so they can make better decisions, even when all the advertisement (obvious or not) is directing them away from what they should be doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > did his high math regression analysis thing, put the data in the computer, > and out comes this bell shaped curve where the perfect amount of sweetness, > not too little, not too much, is at the very top of the curve

What is High Math, exactly?

</comment><comment><USER18> I bought scan of chili the other day. 16 grams of sugar! I was stunned.

</comment><comment><USER15> Soylent, FTW

<comment><USER19> Have they fixed their backlog issue? I canceled my order after they pushed the delivery date back two months three separate times.

<comment><USER15> it's much much faster. It's not perfect but I usually get my soylent in about a week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> On HN, "engineers" is usually a plural noun. This took a few re-reads to parse.

<comment><USER21> It's a Garden Path Sentence: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is it 2013 all over again?

This book is old news.

</comment><comment><USER23> So they're guilty of making too good a product? Too tasty a food? lol

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm not quite understanding this story on HackerNews. What platform does it run on? How do I hack it?

<comment><USER25> What do you think is on topic for HN? Why do you think that?

See dang's reply here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8348200)

<comment><USER26> I've seen people say they stopped visiting Hacker News because it includes so much non-programming/startup content.

<comment><USER25> Do you have any evidence that the ratio has changed?

<comment><USER26> No, I'm not that interested. I like the non-programming/startup content.

But every post from the beginning is still available. It wouldn't be too hard to write an app to research that question if you are.

A fairly recent archive:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10002791)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Spacecraft for All: The Journey of the ISEE-3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.spacecraftforall.com <comment><USER2> It is very annoying to see more and more pages that say use chrome to look at this page.

However this page seams to work fine in Firefox anyway. And it looked very cool :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Reminds me of yesterday's chrome vs firefox debate ;)

<comment><USER3> Link?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8151180](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8151180)

Be warned - it's a lengthy debate ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ok, I get it, we're all looking at page design and visualisation issues, which is the kind of thing we do here. But isn't anyone going to just marvel and express wonder and astonishment at the sheer majesty of the extraordinary achievements described in the videos?

</comment><comment><USER5> This was definitely a fun project to be a part of (the reboot, not the chrome experiment). We out here at the Arecibo Observatory are proud to be a part of this moment in history. It was a joy to work with Dennis Wingo and his team, they are definitely cool guys.

</comment><comment><USER6> A live webcast is running - [http://spacecraftforall.com/live](http://spacecraftforall.com/live)

Edit: Here's the Hangout link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdtUIXPjVgk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdtUIXPjVgk)

</comment><comment><USER3> I find it frustrating that one can only rotate the view within a limited range. Otherwise great work!

</comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't work on latest Chrome at all, but works beautifully in my Firefox Nightly.

</comment><comment><USER8> For others wondering how to escape this page on an iPhone, rotate to a vertical orientation to show the address bar, then tap the address bar to bring up the Safari controls.

</comment><comment><USER9> This page is barely usable and almost fried my mac. Kinda reminds me websites built with flash. Is there any other way to watch that video about ISEE-3?

</comment><comment><USER10> Though it says "Chrome Experiment", it seems to work mostly okay in Firefox, but occasionally some things seem to be missing from the view.

</comment><comment><USER11> What an incredibly well done presentation.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why are there loops in the heliocentric orbit?

</comment><comment><USER13> Great Stuff!!</comment>


Pinterest's Unlikely Journey To Top Of The Startup Mountain - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/08/pinterest-startup-mountain/ <comment><USER2> Pinterest is a compelling story. As mentioned in the article, the main source of their monotonic growth early on was that their users loved the product, and personally recommended it to their friends. Seeing a product grow all by itself with little other advertising or marketing is always a good sign.

I actually use Pinterest myself to keep track of cool gadgets, books, and since I am in academia, papers, research, algorithms and ideas.

I've though about Pinterest's success for a while, and I think its special sauce has to do with permanence, where as most other sites are currently focused around recency. Posting an item to Pinterest feels additive: I am collecting and curating good content, and the entirety of my work is displayed for all to see in very few clicks. On the other extreme is Twitter/Facebook/Google+, where I've even stopped posting good content unless it falls in specific time on a weekday, or I know that it will sink into oblivion, never to be seen again. The time of a post can easily be the difference between 0 and 50+ retweets. (I tested this.)

The other major aspect of its success, I believe, is that Pinterest is very visual. This simple truth is obvious, but rarely executed on: People love pictures, and they don't like reading too much.

So Pinterest is doing many small things right, but more importantly it's filling a gap in people's desire to express themselves. Luckily, the team realized this and stubbornly believed it.

<comment><USER3> fantastic point! ben had spent a ton of time researching the psychology of collecting and you seem to be highlighting that really well - "Posting an item to Pinterest feels additive"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stories like this give me hope as a bootstrapped founder. One year into building a thing (skillsapp.com), we have users but no hockey-stick on our charts. It takes time to refine and refine some more. Pivots aren't always about solving the same issue a different way. It's unsexy, but sometimes it's a long learning slog until you hit on the right formula.

Respect to them for having the fortitude and not giving up.

<comment><USER5> Your startup scares me. I don't have much viewable to the public therefore you would rank me pretty low without actually realising that I might be an amazing programmer who has just spent all of his time being amazing rather than being part of the scene.

I hope your software is never taken seriously.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand why this was down voted? Surely I make a good point? I'm sure there is a lot of amazing talent that don't spend any time at all working on stuff that other people will ever get to see beyond the domain of what they are working on?

Sorry I don't have a github account or a blog but I was too busy making sure Google search actually works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Stories like this make you wonder if some companies pivot too quickly.

<comment><USER6> I believe they do. I think we're getting too caught up in this concept of fail fast, fail early, fail often and we're not sticking with ideas long enough to see if they could be a success.

After all, sometimes ideas don't fail because of the idea, they fail because of execution or sales or marketing. In which case moving on to a new idea is not going to yield any better results. People should stick with their current idea while learning all the other stuff they need to know to succeed and stop blaming the idea.

"Don't look for the next opportunity. The one you have in hand is the opportunity." -Paul Arden

<comment><USER7> I guess it's because it's easier? If you've done a v1.0 of a startup learnt some lessons, you look around and see what's "hot" right now, you see what investors/angels are throwing money at and think "I can take the lessons I just learnt and apply it to _insert hot market here_ and this time I might have some money to work with".

<comment><USER6> > I guess it's because it's easier?

I don't think it's easier. It's just that when you're stuck on your current idea, creating a new idea _seems_ easier - but it's a false economy.

> apply it to insert hot market here

I don't chase what other people are doing, that's for the samwer brothers ;) (although let's not forget they have multi-millions so they are probably successful by their own defenition)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using sperm to deliver cancer drugs - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2156525-hijacked-sperm-carry-chemo-drugs-to-cervical-cancer-cells/ <comment><USER2> That is a really cleaver idea. How come the drugs don't kill the spwem?</comment>


The first 6 months of Reddit (YC S05): "Entrepreneurship is a bipolar existence" - <AUTHOR> http://thestartupfoundry.com/2011/03/15/the-first-6-months-of-reddit-yc-05-entrepreneurship-is-a-bipolar-existence/

<comment><AUTHOR> Highlights of this video:

1\. Initially the Reddit team was rejected by YCombinator. Paul Graham then followed up with them via a phone call and said "as long as you ditch your original idea, you can come be a part of YCombinator". This is a great reminder that investors often care more about the team then they do the product.

2\. Alexis also talks about how Reddit was able to get new users by creating fake accounts to simulate an active community.

3\. Alexis talks about a meeting they had with Yahoo, but he felt that the meeting sucked because Yahoo was more interested in the traffic they were generating then the actual mission of the site.

4\. Met with Google, and things went really well. This was a huge boost of confidence for the Reddit team as "some very smart people at Google were interested in our product".

5\. Alexis also reminisces about doing "digital grunt work". Alexis attributes a lot of Reddit's success to doing things that aren't glamorous. Great reminder that entrepreneurship is all about "the hustle".

6\. Entrepreneurship is a Bipolar existence. Sometimes you feel like you're building an online empire, and other days you feel like a nobody. This is completely normal.

7\. A tip that Alexis shared for other startups was to "celebrate quick and easy wins" (especially in the first 6 months). This helps to build momentum, and establishes comradery on your team.

</comment><comment><USER2> What I love about this video is at the end it repeats the introduction again. It's super awkward, but it shows how unpolished something can be and STILL be useful/valuable.

The take away lesson: Do something publicly and reap the reward. Keep it private as you perfect it and loose big time.

Andrew Warner has competition now!

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think pg is given enough credit for his hand in reddit. I wonder how many redditors have heard of him and/or YC.

<comment><USER4> It's funny you mention that. Just yesterday I made a graph of how many accounts were created each day since the beginning of reddit. It's very clear which day Paul mentioned reddit in his essay, because there was a 3x jump in signups that day. More importantly, it never receded from that level. I like to think this is because people kept finding his essays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Alexis also talks about how Reddit was able to get new users by creating fake accounts to simulate an active community."

"simulating" is probably too strong a word. the early adopters didn't care if it was the team posting or other people; they liked the content and the discussion.

<comment><USER6> Not discussion. Reddit didn't get comments until much later.</comment></comment>


How Do We Solve America's Oversupply of Bread? - <AUTHOR> https://www.eater.com/2017/9/1/16239964/bread-excess-waste-production-problem-solution <comment><USER2> Its a 3-step plan:

1\. stop subsidizing it. 2. stop buying it. 3. deal with the monumental consequences of step 1.

An optional 4th step might be taking some time to understand basic economics.

A 5th step would be to address the underlying causes of poverty in our communities, rather than complain that we have too much food to give away. (Note that taking step 1 will probably change the economics of food such that there is much, much less free food floating around)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wrong question. Right question: how can we get people to make quality bread instead of the trans fatty/overly salty stuff flooding the shelves?

<comment><USER4> Salt is not bad for you

<comment><USER5> Too much of anything can be bad for you.

<comment><USER6> Too little of anything can be bad for you. By definition.

<comment><USER7> Arsenic? Cyanide? Mercury?

<comment><USER8> They're being pedantic (probably to highlight the complete lack of useful information provided by the post they responded to.) "Too little" means "not enough" and "not enough" is not enough by definition. There's no such thing as "not enough" of those things because none is enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is this a problem that needs solving?

>What if independent bakeries baked only what they thought they could sell and no more?

Then they would lose money, period.

</comment><comment><USER10> _There's also the fact that, except in the most exclusive bakeries, a bare shelf is a no-no._

Amusingly, I was in a mountain village in Switzerland for several days. If you got to the bakery too late, you were SOL. You could still go down to the Co-Op and get bread, but it was noticeably inferior.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why is this a problem?

The author points out that excess bread is given away to those in need or used as animal feed.

</comment><comment><USER12> Oversupply? America has almost no real bread.

Maybe instead solve the overabundance of sugar, mass-produced, full of BS preservatives and artificial flavors BS that passes for bread in the US?

</comment><comment><USER13> One nice thing about the oversupply is that if there ever is some kind of shock to the food supply like Krakatoa or a blight, we have a buffer available by just not wasting as much. Probably more sustainable as backup capacity than some kind of government-funded granaries.

Also, I believe white, refined flour is so dangerous to your insulin resistance that it's usually better to throw it away than to eat it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is it just confined to bread? I feel like subsidies/industrial farming have led to a homogenized diet overall -- to the point where it can be hard I think to confine the definition of oversupply to only one foodstuff.

</comment><comment><USER15> Just read the other day about how this year's U.S. wheat harvest will be the lowest since some year in the teens of the prioir century.

Wheat prices are down significantly. And vegetarian protein demand is up. Farmers have been switching to garbanzo beans (chickpeas) and lentils.

Sorry, I don't have the link right at hand.

<comment><USER16> For some context if anyone in interested, it appears that before WWII, the peak production of wheat in the United States was in 1915 with ~1 billion bushels/year. The expected production for 2017 is over ~1.7 billion bushels/year. The last time production was even close to the peak pre-WWII level was in 1962.

Sources: the absolutely amazing "Crop production historical track records" from the USDA available at [http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/htrcp/htrcp-04-...](http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/htrcp/htrcp-04-13-2017.pdf) for historical numbers and [https://www.usda.gov/oce/commodity/wasde/latest.pdf](https://www.usda.gov/oce/commodity/wasde/latest.pdf) for 2017 estimates.

It may be interesting to note that the area harvested has gone down by ~40%, but of course the yields have increased -- by a factor of ~2.7.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How do we solve America's oversupply of people writing articles without a basic understanding of economics?

<comment><USER18> Some things have negative externalities that ought to dealt with. Market forces are such that these negative externalities sometimes exist and so just resorting to, "This is what the market demands" is not sufficient and is bad policy.

<comment><USER19> Being able to give free bread to hungry people at the end of the day is a _positive_ externality. I'm sure there are negative ones too (wasted water from farming excess wheat being one) but bakers pay for that, and if they're not cutting down it's because maintaining a sufficient inventory is worth more.

<comment><USER20> _> wasted water from farming excess wheat being one_

As a wheat farmer, I am curious to know what water you think is wasted? Wheat is normally harvested at 14% moisture, so what water content the crop has taken on by harvest is minimal. Otherwise it seems like the rain is going to do what the rain does. What am I missing?

Do you mean that the rainwater could have been used to grow some other crop? The primary reason I grow wheat is for plant and soil health reasons in order to sustainably grow the pulses and other legumes that the consumer demands. There is not much money in wheat, but it is hard to argue with the ecosystem benefits that it provides. Crop rotation is a necessity for good farm management.

<comment><USER19> I know nothing about wheat farming or it's environmental impacts, obviously my guesses were off the mark. Thanks for the correction on matters of fact, though it looks like our conclusions weren't really at odds -- mine being that the wastage that is paid for is manageable, and the externalities not outrageous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How about supply management of wheat like Canada's dairy board?

</comment><comment><USER22> The Conquest of Bread

</comment><comment><USER23> Sorry, but American bread (at least on West Coast) is really bad. Maybe you can find something edible somewhere, but most of the shops carry only the worst of worst IMO. In Europe (not including UK) the quality is like night and day. I've noticed bread getting worse as it's produced in bigger batches since couple of years, but american stuff is in its own category of bad.

I hear that East coast has more european style (of cities, buildings and cuisine), so maybe it's better there. OTH, perhaps just missed all the good bakeries.

<comment><USER24> Have you tried Tartine, Josey Baker, ACME, Craftsman and Wolves, or Arsicault for bread in San Francisco when you were in the west coast? San Francisco is considered one of the best bread cities in the world, especially when it comes to natural starters and sourdough...

Bi-Rite Market's bread section has a really nice selection. I'm assuming none of those were to your satisfaction? Some French people have told me that Tartine's baguette is better if not equal to French baguettes, so I'm curious to know why it is so distant to European quality in your perspective.

<comment><USER25> > San Francisco is considered one of the best bread cities in the world...

I've never heard this before. By who?

<comment><USER26> They are actually famous for good sourdough bread.

 _French bakers brought sourdough techniques to Northern California during the California Gold Rush, and it remains a part of the culture of San Francisco today. The nickname remains in "Sourdough Sam", the mascot of the San Francisco 49ers. Sourdough has long been associated with the 1849 gold prospectors, though they were more likely to make bread with commercial yeast or baking soda.[7] The "celebrated"[1] San Francisco sourdough is a white bread characterized by a pronounced sourness, and indeed the strain of lactobacillus in sourdough starters is named Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, alongside the sourdough yeast Candida milleri found in the same cultures._

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourdough](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sourdough)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best coffee shops for startup work in Munich? - <AUTHOR>

Will be in Munich for awhile--where are the best places to get stuff done? <comment><USER2> I prefer, at nighttime, the McDonalds at Karlsplatz/Stachus or the new one in the central train stations (beware though, both are notorious for a lack of power outlets!), and if you're into bagels/muffins, head to tram 27 Schellingstraße, there is the Fresh Bagels & Muffins. Great bagels, dude.

If you're into cats, head to cat cafe Katzentempel at Türkenstr 29, it's in walking distance of FBuM.

Oh, and if you mean "getting wasted" with "getting stuff done", head either to Ostbahnhof's Kultfabrik area (just follow the drunks) or to the club areas at tram station Am Lokschuppen. The club "Nachtgalerie" is famous for cheap drinks, but well, it's mainstream music.

Have a nice stay!</comment>


Yahoo Mail Is The Worst - <AUTHOR> http://email@example.com/yahoo.blows.html

<comment><USER2> Welcome to the wonderful world of email, Zed. Self-righteousness won't solve the problem.

I suspect the problem is that the IP in question has been used in the past for nefarious purposes. The whole "It's a new server" argument is moot if the IP address it lives on had been used in the past (and it certainly has).

Get right with RFC Jesus, make sure your DNS resolves both ways, get your SPF records right, and if that still doesn't do it, setup DKIM. If that _still_ doesn't allow mail to go through to Yahoo addresses unimpeded, you'll have to contact them.

<comment><USER3> Exactly what I was going to say. Very likely, the IP of this guy's server is the same IP that an old spamming server used to have. It's happened to me more than once, and that's very likely the case here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is going on here is a process called "Greylisting" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting>).

The idea is that spammers don't use real mail queues and thus, if you send a temporary error, genuine clients will requeue the message, whereas spammers will just drop it.

Over time, this assertion has become false and now it's just annoying.

<comment><USER5> _The idea is that spammers don't use real mail queues and thus, if you send a temporary error, genuine clients will requeue the message, whereas spammers will just drop it._

 _Over time, this assertion has become false and now it's just annoying._

Do you have some evidence for this claim?

Greylisting heavily reduced the amount of spam I received when I started using greylisting years ago.

I still see large amounts of spam rejected, so I'd like to hear more about how it doesn't work any more - it seems to reduce the spam-level significantly for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm having a similar problem with hotmail currently, although hotmail seems to have firewalled our source IP (can't even connect) anymore, and the various contacts we have at Microsoft/hotmail can't even acknowledge that they are blocking a certain IP range, and keep making us run around asking us to "try connecting with telnet" (how do they think I've been verifying that one IP is blocked and other isn't?) and what our email client settings are, and how we've configured Exchange. And yes, reverse DNS is proper, as is SPF, and we've had this IP for years and hotmail has accepted mail from it in the past, and hotmail correctly accepts and delivers mail when sent from another IP.

I don't mind the blocking, I recognize that as a legit way of controlling access, but what is really frustrating is that the hotmail folks assume that I don't know anything about email and that they can't even acknowledge that they have a certain IP blocked. If they could just say "Yes, we've blocked that, and there's nothing you can do or say to get us to unblock it", then we could move on; but when it looks like no one at hotmail knows what's going on, everyone continuously believes that if they just say the magic words or contact the right person, it can all be cleared up.

<comment><USER7> The problem that I've experienced with Hotmail is even with proper SPF, if you do not stay below their 1% spam threshold, they reject your IP.

The solution that I came to in the past to overcome this, working for a large online dating site, was to build a mail relay system that would monitor the response ratio on each IP, and if it dropped below a certain percentage to switch it off onto another. Worked fairly well, only downside is having to manage a lot of IP addresses on your mailer boxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> About a year ago I worked in support at a large webhosting company. 99% of the blacklisted email issues we _ever_ had came from Yahoo. Some of the cases were legitimate (or is it illegitemate?) spam being sent out from our servers, but we would always find and eliminate these accounts. Unfortunately, Yahoo would blacklist the entire server IP, so none of the other users on the shared server could send email to yahoo either. This caused obvious problems, and we would spend days contacting support at yahoo to explain and get us un- blacklisted.

I also remember this happening with emailing addresses on the entire AT&T ISP. That effected about 40 shared servers (around 16000 hosting accounts, each with unlimited email). So yeah. Bad news.

<comment><USER2> You're speaking of a whole other kettle of fish. You had high volume servers providing mail service for barely trusted users. This post is about one mail server providing service for, presumably, one guy. It's entirely possible to reliably send mail to Yahoo if you control the server. In fact, it's not even that hard. I've explained how in another post.

We have a few hundred (mostly small) hosting providers running our software which includes a mail processing stack, and quite frequently they ask about stuff like this (and yes, Yahoo comes up more than GMail, but about the same as Hotmail). And, there is very often anger involved, just as in this case. But, the fact is...if you follow RFCs strictly (Zed has written his own newfangled mail server in Python; I suspect he's made some mistakes, as the mail RFCs are notoriously difficult to get right, though the MTA isn't necessarily dealing with _all_ of the messiness of the protocols), have DNS that resolves in both directions, and have accurate SPF records, delivering to Yahoo will work reliably and fast.

We've occasionally gotten comments that DKIM is necessary to deliver to Yahoo, but whenever I hear it, I'm surprised to hear that a major provider has finally started actually blocking on DKIM. So, I go check. I always find that no, DKIM is still not required to deliver to Yahoo. It probably helps, though.

I'm not saying Yahoo doesn't have an itchy trigger finger on the blacklisting process. Maybe they do. They certainly aren't as good as Google at non- obtrusively, but effectively, blocking spam, but very few providers are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> At first glance, this is an autoresponder that doesn't require a confirmed subscription. If that's correct, when some idiot spammer sends it a message with a spoofed envelope address (because they don't realize or care that 88fortunes is an autoresponder, not a person), it will send an unsolicited message to whatever address the spammer used. Anyone know how many "this is spam" clicks it takes for them to ban a sender having no history with them?</comment>


GitHub is Temporarily Offline - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/ Live Status on http://status.github.com/ <comment><USER2> This was rather disconcerting, actually. Is anyone keeping long-term stats on GitHub availability, somewhere?</comment>


Ask HN: Samsung M0 Tizen device - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, anyone has any ideas where I could sell a Samsung M0 Tizen device? It's a phone based on the Galaxy Galaxy S4 phone, but running the Tizen OS, for development purposes. <comment> Kilo-byte ebay.com</comment>


Auto Insurers Chase an Elusive Motorist: The Uber Driver - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/auto-insurers-chase-an-elusive-motorist-the-uber-driver-1491822002?mod=e2fb <comment><USER2> [http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/04/10/auto- insurers-...](http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/04/10/auto-insurers- chase-elusive-motorist-uber-driver.html)

(Link to content)</comment>


Almost fired someone for watching a movie - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/Jason/status/33377420287418368 <comment><USER2> I would have quit to save him the trouble of the decision. Developers should be judged on more than an incident like this. If the developer is as productive or more productive than the others, does it really matter if you catch him / her watching a movie sometimes?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it really does. Not only is this sort of behavior miserably unprofessional it corrodes morale around the office when everyone who isn't a developer catches wind that the prima donnas in IT are sitting around playing video games and watching movies while everyone else is busting their ass.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, then, I would blame the non-ITs (managers) for a bad organizational model where they don't have enough work for their IT department.

I have a sense that this might hold true for more non-development IT roles as it is very rare for actual developers to sit around watch movies doing nothing unless they're truly in need of a break. Engineers love to code...or the good ones do.</comment></comment></comment>


Mayan EDMS crowdfunding is over - <AUTHOR> https://www.mayan-edms.com/post/first-crowdfunding-over/ <comment><USER2> 1) Developer launches crowdfunding for $720. 2) Crowdfunding fails, because nobody cares about or uses the software. 3) Developer throws a tantrum.

Did I miss anything? Why is this Hacker News worthy?

<comment><AUTHOR> Funding and making free software sustainable has always been a top priority topic. Free software developers also need money like the rest of us.

<comment><USER2> Nobody forced him to become a free software developer or release his software for free. Bottom line: Even for free, nobody uses his software, that is why he is pissed off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > even with a worst case scenario of 1% conversion rate,

I don't know much about this, but wouldn't that be a very good conversion rate?</comment>


To Battle Yelp, Google Buys Appetas, A Website Builder For Restaurants - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/07/to-battle-yelp-google-buys-appetas-a-website-builder-for-restaurants-will-shut-it-down/ <comment><USER2> The title is misleading. From the Appetas blog:

 _To focus on our new endeavors, we'll be shutting down the Appetas service and working with our customers to transition their websites over to alternative platforms._

I don't know how many customers they have, but this is really nice:

 _We'll be reaching out to each customer individually to ensure a smooth transition._</comment>


Saudi court sentences poet to death for renouncing Islam - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/20/saudi-court-sentences-poet-to-death-for-renouncing-islam <comment><USER2> Muhammad killed or ordered killed many poets.

[http://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Killings_Ordered_or_Suppor...](http://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Killings_Ordered_or_Supported_by_Muhammad)</comment>


The amazing trick the Commodore 64 used to create colorful pixel art – Polygon - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2015/8/20/9183219/the-amazing-trick-the-commodore-64-used-to-create-colorful-pixel-art <comment><USER2> Previous discussion of the linked video: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10082517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10082517)</comment>


Power9 to the People - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/12/05/power9-to-the-people/ <comment><USER2> The business model for these sorts of things should be "target ubiquity". Think GPUs. Huge computational power, low cost per computational power unit.

The problem becomes that Power9 is now effectively a substrate machine for NVidia GPUs more than it is a competitive offering by itself. In my previous life, working on building accelerated computing platforms a decade or more ago, some rules of thumb from customers were that they needed to see 5x at least performance delta to justify serious consideration. And that you couldn't charge 5x the price for that performance delta.

So if power9 is 5x the speed of a Xeon in a set of relevant test cases (ignoring GPUs), and comparable price for a system, sure, it has a good chance of being successful. If not, it is questionable at best.

As others have noted, cheap ... as in really dirty cheap ... development/test boxen for devs to build at home are critical for this. Back in my SGI/Cray days, I was advocating for, though failing to convince, management to enable us to sell older indys, indigos, etc. with IRIX and dev bundles for home/app dev use, at a very low price. My argument was (back then) that nothing could touch Irix for ease of use, and that it made sense to seed developers with this without worrying about making money on them, rather having them create the content that people demanded, that would help us sell machines. Management was worried it would decimate our developer revenue stream. Rather shortsighted I think in retrospect.

Power9 looks poised to suffer the same fate, though not because of OS/compiler costs, but because the hardware will be un-affordable for pretty much everyone.

This is why you have to target ubiquity. You need those developers. If they can't afford your boxes, or your stack, then you aren't going to get them.

<comment><USER3> > _our developer revenue stream._

This sounds terrible to me. From a POV of a platform vendor, the _only_ "developer revenue stream" I'd care about would be popularity among developers. Give away the basic tools, sell slightly more specialized tools for the price of a pizza, get as many people hooked up as possible. Send your machines to universities at a discount. Sell older machines to hobbyists, and support the community. Help open-source projects run on your hardware and take advantage of its unique features (if any).

Of course, there is a niche to actually sell top-notch enterprise-grade tools for your systems, too, because corporations gladly buy support and stability. But this is usually a tiny trickle compared to the hardware sales, and its very existence is _entirely_ dependent on your system being widely popular and ubiquitous.

As a bottom line, it's much better to get a 5% margin from a $100M market than a 25% margin from a $10M market.

<comment><USER2> Exactly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "If this doesn't work for IBM, if this doesn't give Big Blue a chance to really capture a bigger slice of HPC and take some aggressive share in machine learning and accelerated databases, it is hard to imagine what could."

No it isn't; why did all non-intel processors fade into obscurity and why does intel architecture with all of its Zilog 80 baggage dominate? Because one can't get a dirt cheap (under $500) POWER9 desktop or server; same goes for MIPS, UltraSPARC, anything else that's modern and non-intel... why is ARM so popular? Because one can buy it dirt chip for tinkering with it at home. That is what propelled ARM and intel, people would install a Linux ISO on their parents' old PC and it built up familiarity.

Until that happens with POWER (or any other non-ARM, non-intel architecture) history has taught me that it will fail. Hardware has to be easily accessble and dirt cheap, and things like software mirroring or compilers must come with the OS and all the software has to be gratis. Otherwise history says - fail! Sometimes of epic proportions (hp, sgi, _Sun_ , IBM).

 _Sun Microsystems_ for example eventually realized that the software has to be gratis and open source, but they lived in this fantasy world where they thought they could charge anything they wanted for hardware — and would indignantly argue about it when it was pointed out to them that it's way too overpriced and expensive. That lost them familiarity with the hardware and familiarity with the OS because for most people a second hand used PC-bucket with GNU/Linux _was good enough_ and the target audience wouldn't have known or cared about all the advanced features anyway. We all know how that ended.

<comment><USER5> ARM is the future. Example Apple's A11. For single thread ((which is what's most important on 90% of today's use cases) side note can this stop being true by 2020?) can compete with single threaded processes.

Apple's A11 (single thread) 4217 (multi) 10164 [https://browser.geekbench.com/ios- benchmarks](https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks)

Intel i7 8700k (single thread) 6089 (multi) 26654 [https://browser.geekbench.com/processor- benchmarks](https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks)

It appears that we are near the end of physically making smaller nano meters and we are back to the co-processors (Like the old Amiga days) Co-Processors and some kind of Assembly (A Lisp that complies to an ARM Assembly to much for one to ask for???) are going to be the way we improve speed in the future.

<comment><USER6> Coincidentally (as no doubt you are aware) yesterday Microsoft released Windows 10 for ARM devices with built-in emulation, and a couple of hardware partners launched suitable systems based on SnapDragon 835 SoC. The future is arriving very fast.

<comment><USER5> Softbank's purchase of ARM is looking like a genius move even more now.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but beyond that, I'm still of the generation (born 1981) that grew up hearing about amazing IBM RISC RS/6000 workstations, and so I'm still inexplicably drawn to any mention of this kind of technology as a "shiny thing". I know it's mundane and broadly available in the lowest common- denominator hardware but it still attracts me like a moth to a flame. I know I'm a sucker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can I rent this by the hour in bluemix?

Just due to volume and cost, I've basically given up on the idea of owning my own POWER system in my home rack. If ibm got aggressive with cloud pricing and put together some dev friendly packages that were all tooled up and ready to go, I'd be more than willing to play with it and see how it performs for my tasks. In spirit, I'd love to see a competitive alternative to AWS and Intel, we need it, but I have a hard time paying a premium for it to then experiment and find out if it can actually outperform Main Street.

Tooling is huge here too, there are very material advantages to the incredible hardware optimization done by node.js, pypy, llvm, etc.. since apple transitioned off of PowerPC, I don't think this platform has had nearly the same amount of attention. I'd love to see IBM giving away access to their version of a "micro" instance to OSS developers

</comment><comment><USER8> For those complaining about the price, here's some comparisons:

"two Power9 chips, four Volta GPUs accelerators, and 256 GB of memory" =~$65,000

The NVidia DX1 (8 Tesla GPUs, 2 Xeon, so much more GPU, less CPU) is $125,000[1]

Configuring up a SuperMicro GPU server looks to be around $50,000[2]

[1] [https://www.engadget.com/2016/04/05/nvidia-dgx-1-deep- learni...](https://www.engadget.com/2016/04/05/nvidia-dgx-1-deep-learning- supercomputer/)

[2] [https://www.thinkmate.com/system/superserver-1029gq- txrt](https://www.thinkmate.com/system/superserver-1029gq-txrt)

<comment><USER9> It's still an entry barrier. I can develop the software that'll run on the NVidia box on my $2000 Xeon workstation and have a reasonable expectation the $125K box will behave as expected.

While I trust POWER9 to be very fast, I have had odd performance differences (both positive - meaning I overspent in hardware and had some explaining to do - and negative - meaning I was too optimistic and had some explaining to do) when moving from x86 to SPARC, Itanium and POWER (and MIPS - I'm that old).

The Talon are good entry level POWER9 systems for reasonable prices, but I'd love to see parts trickling down to Xeon E5 prices.

If the barrier of entry is too high, only what already runs on POWER8 will move to POWER9. Xeons have good cost/performance and are a safer bet.

<comment><USER6> I really badly want to get myself a Talon POWER9 system, but I'm scared of being stuck with another "exotic" overpriced machine (in my time I've owned BeBoxes and NeXTStations). Do you have one? Do you use it as a daily workstation? Can I ask you some questions about it?

<comment><USER10> Debian is available for POWER9.

This means you'll have at least KVM so you can run nearly anything on top of that including Windows VMs with PCI-passthrough for gaming,etc.

The cost is non-trivial but I've been working up my nerve to pull the trigger and go this route.

<comment><USER11> KVM + Windows requires x86(-64) hardware. POWER9 and windows means QEMU, which is emulation and slow.

<comment><USER12> They did experiment with that in fact:

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing- systems/talos-s...](https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing- systems/talos-secure-workstation#legacy-x86-applications-on-openpowertm-via- qemu)

[https://player.vimeo.com/video/187042840](https://player.vimeo.com/video/187042840)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Power9 might be a better fit as the invisible hardware behind the #serverless services today (think BigQuery, etc...)

Lots of good points in this thread, but Power is likely going to go for the invisible de-facto cloud data center hardware route.

</comment><comment><USER14> I am not sure why water cooling. It is just so error prone.

<comment><USER15> Data centers. More space efficient and less hot air to deal with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Too little, too late. There's RISC-V now.

<comment><USER9> POWER9 represents a colossal investment in high-performance processors. It'd take a couple dozen billion dollars for RISC-V to get there.

<comment><USER16> RISC-V is an ISA, while these high-performance processors are implementations of an ISA.

<comment><USER9> This was about the RISC-V ecosystem.

<comment><USER16> If it was IBM, it could get up there real fast in performance, by reusing power. Unfortunately, they're having issues letting go of the power ISA.

<comment><USER17> That's exactly what I said when someone wanted to know how to get RISC-V way up there in clock rate or single-threaded. The other possibility was semi- custom job at AMD or something. Just implement it in microcode with a little extra hardware if necessary. Reuse tens to hundreds of millions of silicon development. If not high in single-threaded but open, I suggested using Leon3 GPL for fast development or OpenSPARC for lots of cores. OpenPITON already taped out a 25-core chip on 32nm SOI based on OpenSPARC. Many academics used Leon for designs whether taping out or not.

IBM is different, though, in that they have a legacy system effect. Their locked-in customers are where this money is coming from. That's why they keep making the stuff to sell for exhorbitant rates. They really need to create different tiers of pricing justifying it by saying the firmware or whole stack is optimized for this, that, etc. If it's gravy train business, that optimized stack is priced at the fortune the marketing team says it's worth. If it's not (i.e. Raptor or RISC-V), it gets a steep discount just to encourage more adoption with associated software porting. They seem too dumb to do this.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What browser do you use for front-end dev/test and why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Regardless of which browser you used for development, wouldn't you need to test with every browser that your product supports? Even with modern browsers, browser-specific problems are unfortunately quite common.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes of course, I meant testing cycle while you develop. After that all browsers before releasing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Since I run Browserling (a cross-browser testing company), I test in all the browsers. :) Before I start testing, I use Chrome to get it done.

</comment><comment><USER4> Chrome because of the development tools.

<comment><USER5> Yeah I agree. I think it's a very personal preference thing though, but I definitely find the Chrome dev tools more intuitive than Firefox.</comment></comment>


First look at Windows 8 UI - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/06/01/windows-8-brings-entirely-new-look-and-feel-unifies-touch-and-pc-interfaces/

<comment><USER2> From the video: "[The apps] are designed for touch... but of course they work well with mouse and keyboard as well if that's what you have."

Sorry, but that's not how it works. Microsoft needs to realize this. Everything he was doing there would be _terrible_ with a mouse.

<comment><USER3> Most of his gestures were flicks to right or left as that's the only "dimension" that the Metro UI works in.

A scroll wheel could do most of them - the snapping of multiple apps being the only outlier.

All of them would work with a 2D scroll interface (trackpad with gestures, mouse with trackball/multiple scroll wheels or touch surface), and laptops are the main bit of kit people buy these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The main problem I have with this is the same problem I have with the horrible Xbox dashboard - The left to right sliding tiles hurt my eyes like crazy. It's like trying to look out a side car window as you are travelling along and your eyes don't know what to focus on. At least the old Xbox dashboard tiles lined up behind each other so your eyes were always in the middle of the screen, but with this, ugh my eyes hurt just watching the demo.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do they expect the enterprise to flock to this? As a nerdy consumer, I love that they're moving forward on UI, but as someone who deals with end users, this is going to scare the shit out of people. I don't see a start button anywhere in those screenshots.

<comment><USER6> If you watch the video, you'll see the Windows 7 UI pop up when he opens Excel. What he's showing looks like it will be just another layer on top of what we're used to with Windows 7 now.

Which means that for touch systems, this will simply end up like Windows Mobile 6: pretty UIs for touch screen, but as soon as you want to be productive, you need a mouse.

Sorry MS, I would _never_ use what's in that video on my desktop.

<comment><USER7> You realise that the new tablet UI REPLACES the Start menu and is mapped to the start button right so whenever you click start, that's what pops up? They spelled it out in the AllthingsD/Computex events, and also state as much in the press release.

[http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2011/jun11/06-01...](http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2011/jun11/06-01corporatenews.aspx)

With pinning/shortcuts, people barely use the "All Programs" part of the Start menu in the current Windows 7, so the only casualty is the start menu Search/Run, which will probably be re-implemented in the new start screen when you start typing on it.</comment></comment></comment>


Kula Ring - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kula_ring <comment><USER2> Sounds familiar.

Ah, yes. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorways_in_the_Sand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doorways_in_the_Sand) had an interstellar version of one as a plot point. :-)

<comment><USER3> Heh. "Doorways" was the first thing I thought of when I saw the article's title. Doorways was excellent prep reading for grad school.</comment></comment>


Prey Fish Turns Predator - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/animals/prey-fish-turns-predator.html <comment><USER2> "When we touch them with a rod (READ - Poke them with a stick), they show rapid escape responses" I find it interesting that stick poking is still considered a scientific methodology.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article seems wrong since it seems to based solely on the scientist's press release but the press release doesn't say anything about the fish "turning" from prey to predator, it doesn't use the word "adaptations" and it doesn't imply that something new is going on. The scientists just made some observations about what is going on and reported it, they didn't make any comparisons to previous behavior of the fish.

<comment><USER4> Here is their article in Science, where the authors describe what they believe to be new behavior and use the word "adaptation."

<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/329/5989/333></comment></comment>


Why Climbers Die On Mount Everest - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081209221709.htm <comment><USER2> If you are interested in why climbers die on Mount Everest, read Jon Krakauer's amazing first-hand account of Everest's worst disaster:

[http://outside.away.com/outside/destinations/199609/199609_i...](http://outside.away.com/outside/destinations/199609/199609_into_thin_air_1.html)

<comment><USER3> Looks like an interesting article, but 11 tiny pages and no print link that I can find? As much as I hate to be the guy saying it... FAIL.

<comment><USER4> Heh. You picked the exact wrong author to dismiss summarily.

<comment><USER3> Apparently. I stand by my decision though. Time\effort is worthy of defending.

Edit: It occurs to me now that I don't think I even dismissed the author summarily, just that website... I think I will be borrowing a copy of the book from a friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article states that most deaths seem to happen in the decent, rather than the ascent. This shows that the risk is climbers pushing themselves too hard. This just, well, seems obvious. There is ego on the line, if not other factors. The problem of pushing past your limit, such as mountain climbing, past your reserve capability and capacity doesn't clearly manifest itself at the point you've exceeded your capability, it is when you are trying to move back from the edge to a safe point that this becomes clear. The climbers are so focused on reaching the goal it is easy to forget about measuring the capability to get back down.

I've heard that rescue aircraft keep a reserve of fuel on board and once the craft reach this point, they turn back. It seems that at least some of the climbers don't gauge this properly. Some are lucky. They survive. Others are not as lucky, they are the 1-2 percent statistic of dying on the way down, having pushed too hard.

<comment><USER6> Down climbing is inherently more difficult than climbing. When you're "up"-climbing you can see your next steps more easily b/c they are closer to your eyes and the slope is at a better angle for watching your steps. You also have your ice axe held like a cane in front of you to arrest any fall, and the distance of the fall from feet to hands is shorter than on the way down.

On the way down, your eyes are much further away from your steps and the slope is angled away from you. Each step is longer, more dynamic and more likely to dislodge some rock / ice / snow. You are also putting a lot more force on each step so your legs can actually get more tired on the way down. When you fall you mostly go to your butt, slide and you need to roll over on your belly to self arrest. By that time you have often picked up so much speed that it's too late.

All these physical factors plus many well documented "horse to barn" psychological factors make down climbing the most dangerous part of the day.

<comment><USER7> While that all makes sense, it also seems possible that deaths happen on the descent simply because it takes that long above 8,000 feet for cerebral edema to kill you. It seems like, if those were the main issues, the descent below 8,000 feet would not have shown significantly fewer deaths than above.

<comment><USER6> Your point about the time it takes for HAPE to set in is valid. But I'm pretty sure that times in the death zone vary greatly. Most parties camp at least one night above 8000m and weather / SNAFU's often hold them there for multiple days So the total time above 8000 varies by much more than the half day it takes to walk down.

No doubt though, the death zone could kill people playing ping pong. Yet the down-climbing problem is global to mountains of any size. The extreme altitude on Everest amplifies it. More accidents occur on the way down on mountains less than half the size of Everest. The mountaineering bible, "Freedom of the Hills" discusses the phenomenon extensively:

[http://www.amazon.com/Mountaineering-Freedom-Hills- Mountaine...](http://www.amazon.com/Mountaineering-Freedom-Hills- Mountaineers/dp/0898868289/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229370716&sr=1-1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> After reading this article I would like to know what kind of training climbers engage in before climbing Mount Everest. It seems to me that at the types of elevations Mount Everest is working with, the preparation you would need beforehand would be quite intense. Not only that, but the technology you would need to offset whats happening to your body at those heights would be interesting to investigate as well.

<comment><USER4> I'd always understood that a lot of the deaths on Everest were the result of wealthy people not preparing properly for the climb. If you've seen the IMAX Everest movie, you see the incredible shape that team was in...and they still had a hard go of it. I imagine attempting in anything less than exquisite physical condition is asking for trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Mountaineering is for fun; it's not worth dying or leaving others there to die. Appropriate caution is the hallmark of the elite mountaineer – the mountain will always be there next year."

I don't like those sort of comments. I think one of the reasons people go mountain climbing is because they want to take the risk. The fear of maybe not coming back alive is part of the fun. But people say stuff like that, like every single thing should be safe. I might say that people are getting paranoid over safety.

For me the bottom line is: I surely don't want to get killed doing some boring job, but I hope to die doing something awesome and exciting.

<comment><USER10> I don't think it is paranoid to worry if the probability for death is 3%.

<comment><USER9> But if you're looking to do something dangerous, wouldn't you expect the probability of death to be above 0? And if you aren't looking for danger, why are you climbing everest?

<comment><USER10> I am not climbing Mount Everest. Honestly, I was hoping the article would provide insights on why people try to do it. Death wish? I suspect people just don't believe the 3% number, they probably think their own number is much lower. Maybe they think the number only applies to other climbers who are not as fit and well prepared.

Sure there are some risky activities that would interest me, but at the end of the day, there are more than enough interesting alternatives that are a lot less risky.

<comment><USER9> Not a death wish, but a survival wish. There are people who do stuff far more dangerous, like the first people to climb the everest and there are other even more dangerous mountains out there.

People who take those sort of risks don't think they will be in the n% of people that die doing it, but that they'll be able to survive despite it being hard and dangerous. Some don't survive, but those who do get their kicks for beating the odds, that sort of stuff. Of course, that's not for everyone. Most people want the most safety possible, that's why we live in cities and try to make the environment the most controlled possible.

<comment><USER11> If you are 36, and have a reasonable chance of living till 70+, a 3% chance of death is basically the same as dieing one year sooner. Is climbing mount Everest worth a year of your life? And I am not talking about extreme old age but reasonably healthy middle years?

Now it might not seem like much, but as I get older I am more willing to take risks because of this stuff. My risk threshold is basically one in 50,000. If it's more risky than that it's just not worth it IMO. At 70 I will probably have a lower threshold but for now I am happy, healthy, and hopefully have many more years ahead so taking 1% death risk seems stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a avid trekker and climber (I've trekked to Everest base camp - fun stuff) ~ if you're wondering why people climb Everest it can really be summed up best by George Leigh Mallory - "because its there".</comment>


Ask HN: How do you secure a client side (JavaScript) API? - <AUTHOR>

Ok, so here's the background. I am working on a widget, which can be plugged into any website add some functionality to it. In order to authenticate against the API, I provide an client token, and a secret.
When the client widget authenticates it passes a client generated challenge string, the client token, and a hash which is calculated as hash(challenge+secret). Everything except the secret is available to the client.
This scheme is currently vulnerable to copying the challenge string, client token and hash and then reused on any other site. Currently, the only solution I can think of to resolve this is to use short lived (say 20 mins) server generated challenge strings and use those to generate a hash.thus only the client token and hash would be available to the client and that will only be valid for about 20 mins or so.
Is there any better way to do this? <comment><USER2> I hope I am understanding properly, please let me know otherwise.

Off the top of my head, one option would be to embed the domain name into the hash so that you can validate it is from the domain that is authorized to use the token. If it comes from any others send back an error. You might have to provide a mechanism for people to test on localhost or on development/staging domains but that seems minor overall.

<comment><AUTHOR> How would I get the domain name from which the request originates? Referrer info can be easily spoofed on HTTP, and HTTPS does not forward referrer information at all.

Without being able to verify that the request is originating from the domain that is specified in the hash, it is still susceptible to the same attack. The hash, challenge and token are all still available client-side.

Basically the hash might say that it is from abc.com, but it could really be from any domain. So yes while the token might match the hash, if both the token and hash are copied it does not help.

<comment><USER2> True, I should have thought through that a little more. The domain could be spoofed, making it less than secure and leaving you open to the same issue.

For what it is worth, on our client accessible API, we require clients to authenticate and then send in the token we return through the http header for each request, and the token is reset often. The token is a hash of a few client identifiers, but it is calculated and sent to the client so the client never calculates it. We only allow https for the API. This seems to be a fairly common pattern.

EDIT: add link

This method is similar to how we calculate our token:

[http://billpatrianakos.me/blog/2013/09/12/securing-api- keys-...](http://billpatrianakos.me/blog/2013/09/12/securing-api-keys-in-a- client-side-javascript-app/)</comment></comment></comment>


Samsung Kills Headphone Jack in Latest Smartphone After Years of Mocking Apple - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2018/12/10/samsung-removes-headphone-jack-galaxy-a8s/ <comment><USER2> I guess if you can afford a thousand dollar flagship phone, you can afford a good bluetooth headset that will die in 3-5 years. I'll stick with my headphone jack in the meantime.</comment>


Ember Charts: An easily extensible chart suite built with D3.js and Ember.js - <AUTHOR> http://addepar.github.io/#/ember-charts/overview

<comment><USER2> How does it compare to [http://nvd3.org/](http://nvd3.org/) ? Ember Charts seem to have much fewer chart types available, what are your further development plans?

<comment><USER3> The main difference is that because we use Ember's object model throughout our charts, it is very easy to extend them and tie them in to your application with bindings and computed properties in a generic way. For example binding the charts interval to a dropdown is just a matter of declaring a binding in you handlebars:

      {{time-series-chart
        barData=barData
        lineData=lineData
        selectedInterval=selectedInterval
      }}

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the best parts of working with ember since 1.0 has been the way you can break apart code into components and easily drop and extend them in the application as needed. The consistent declarative API is really nice.

I hope there are more projects that come out like this and make it easier to get started building ember applications.

The current "drop in a JS library" usually involves learning and using too many JS APIs with very different styles.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is our 3rd or 4th attempt at making a charting library, but the first one we are actually happy with. Good APIs for charts are surprisingly hard to get right. It was actually one of our interns ([https://github.com/raykyri](https://github.com/raykyri)) who did most of the work on rewriting charts. Open source libraries are a really great match for intern projects.

<comment><USER5> THIS IS AWESOME. I was looking for something like this, and was really sad I was going to have to write something myself.... THANK YOU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks nice, but I am little confused why a client side charting library needs ember as a dependency. Maybe I don't understand the intended use case....

<comment><USER3> Ember's object model is really awesome ([http://emberjs.com/guides/object- model/computed-properties/](http://emberjs.com/guides/object-model/computed- properties/)) By writing our charting library with Ember we can make use of their object model while also making it super easy to use the charts inside Ember applications.

As per my example below:

      {{time-series-chart
        barData=barData
        lineData=lineData
        selectedInterval=selectedInterval
      }}

By using Ember we get all the bindings for free.

<comment><USER6> I can see the benefit there, but why make Ember a hard dependency? It seems you want the chart stuff totally decoupled, and then you could provide the above functionality as a built in wrapper or plugin. Then people who wanted to use Angular (or whatever their favorite framework is) can write their own wrappers, or you could add support for others as you saw fit.

<comment><USER3> Making a wrapper is a lot of work and you end up with an unsatisfying solution. One of my first projects was an Ember wrapper for Slickgrid, but very soon you end up hitting the walls of the abstraction, which is why we wrote Ember-table. If we use Ember throughout, we also get to use bindings and computed properties for writing the charts as well. I think in the future it might be easier to have charts depends only on specific parts of Ember and not the whole framework.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For what its worth, I've been pleased with a comparable library called Chart.js

Official: [http://www.chartjs.org/](http://www.chartjs.org/) Github: [https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js](https://github.com/nnnick/Chart.js)

<comment> k-mcgrady I like chartjs but a major problem for me is that it doesn't support hovering over points to see the value in a popover/tooltip. I remember seeing somebody had added it in an issue and submitted a pull request but the developer never accepted it (that might have changed, I haven't checked in a while).

<comment><USER7> I'm not at a computer to look at the code right now, but I have that working with chart.js and off the top of my head I don't remember having to tweak code. Feel free to look at the page / code: [https://pl.ant.sr/](https://pl.ant.sr/)

(Edit: Just re-read your comment. So, yes, its likely that they did add it.)

<comment> k-mcgrady Thanks, I looked at your site and that's what I want. I'll have to take another look at Chartjs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be nice if more of these chart libraries implemented box-plots: [http://informationandvisualization.de/blog/box- plot](http://informationandvisualization.de/blog/box-plot)

</comment><comment><USER9> Is there a way to get static SVG (i.e. no JavaScript) out so you can incorporate the chart into a document, edit in Inkscape, etc., or does SVG+JavaScript inherently mean that the result is stranded in the browser?

<comment><USER10> Checkout SVG Crowbar:

[http://nytimes.github.io/svg-crowbar/](http://nytimes.github.io/svg-crowbar/)

<comment><USER9> Thanks! It's unfortunate that it's Chrome-only. It worked well on their examples, but not on this (not a d3.js):

      http://www.cluster-text.com/tmp/news.svg

Still, it's an interesting start.

 _Correction:_ It somewhat works if you wrap the SVG in HTML:

      http://www.cluster-text.com/tmp/news.html

although, when I load it into Inkscape the positioning of some text labels is way off (some aren't too bad) and some hidden elements are displayed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> FWIW the horizontal & vertical charts are reversed in the preview images.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Any blog post detailing the reasons for choosing D3.js??</comment>