NSA security guidelines (1994) - <AUTHOR> http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/nsa.html

<comment><USER2> Also known as "the folder no one reads" or "orders to immediately disregard".</comment>


Did the Greeks see themselves as white, black, or something else? - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/when-homer-envisioned-achilles-did-he-see-a-black-man <comment><USER2> Greeks didn't care for black or white -- they cared for cultural ties (language, religion, customs, etc).

Their word to collectively describe foreigners is literally "those who speak in an indecipherable language": "barbarians", where "bar-bar" was meant to be a vocalization of a random foreign language (like we would say "blah blah").

That said, they were white in the sense that modern Greeks, southern italians, and middle easterns (Egyptians, Lebanese and so on), eastern turks, and so on, are white. And modern Greeks still are closely related to those ancients according to studies [1][2], so you could look at George Stephanopoulos (both parents Greek-American immigrants) for a quick example.

There weren't however "white" with a modern European and American conception of "whiteness" which restricts it to anglosaxon populations.

In fact when they started immigrating to the US in the late 19th, early 20th century, they were considered decidely "non-white" material, and were subject to abuse and racist attacks (including being a major target for the KKK) [3][4]. At the time, the same was true also for Italians, Bulgarians, Albanians, Jews, and so on -- even Japanese and Chinese immigrants.

Generally, "white" then was whatever fitted the WASP look and worldview. So it wasn't just about skin pigmentation.

[1] [http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/greeks-really-do- have...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/greeks-really-do-have-near- mythical-origins-ancient-dna-reveals)

[2] [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-analysis- sheds...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-analysis-sheds-light- mysterious-origins-ancient-greeks-180964314/)

[3] [https://ahepa.org/about-us.htm](https://ahepa.org/about-us.htm)

[4] [https://www.thenationalherald.com/171404/no-greeks-need- appl...](https://www.thenationalherald.com/171404/no-greeks-need-apply/)

<comment><USER3> > There weren't however "white" with a modern European and American conception > of "whiteness" which restricts it to anglosaxon populations.

I don't know what era is referred to as modern, but southern Europeans, some Middle Easterners, and eastern Europeans are considered white in the US today.

<comment><USER2> > _I don 't know what era is referred to as modern, but southern Europeans, > some Middle Easterners, and eastern Europeans are considered white in the US > today._

That wasn't the case for much of the 20th century -- and you'd be surprised even for today if you speak to them about their experiences re: racism.

<comment><USER3> I agree with your comment about much of the 20th century, which is why I prefaced my comment the way that I did.

I'm in one of those categories and I've experienced extremely minimal racism in the US. I think the UK has more racism against my category.

I think that "some Middle Easterners" is the most controversial category in my list. I have a hard time imagining that Bashar al-Assad would experience very much racism if he were a normal private person.

<comment><USER4> Arabs are considered white according to U.S. law, but a "visible minority" according to Canadian law. So yes, they're out on the fringe of the radial category of whiteness.

<comment><USER3> I should have linked to this in my original post, but here is a photograph of Bashar al-Assad. I'm not familiar with Canadian or even US law, but I have a hard time imagining him as a visible minority in the colloquial sense.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Bashar_a...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Bashar_al- Assad_in_Russia_%282015-10-21%29_08.jpg)

I have no doubt that Mohammad bin Salman would experience racism in the US if he were a normal private person.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_bin_Salman#/media/Fil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_bin_Salman#/media/File:Crown_Prince_Mohammad_bin_Salman_Al_Saud_-_2017.jpg)

This is also why I said some Middle Easterners rather than all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems to me that the modern concept of race is one of the most ingrained illusions in our culture. Discussions of whether some person or some group is "white" or "black" or whatever have no more rigor than asking whether someone is a "jock" or a "nerd". First, there is no clear definition of "white" and "black" or anything else, and even if we take the most common conception of it, most people don't fit neatly into either category. For instance, by US census standards, both a Norwegian and a Yemeni are "white". What about the racial gradient in the region of the Isthmus of Suez? Where do people stop being white and start being black?

Furthermore, most racial conceptions obsess with superficial features that may not correlate with large differences in DNA. There may be two people that look more similar but have wider differences in their DNA than two people that look different.

<comment><USER6> The funniest thing about this whole ethnostate crap you see being pushed by the alt right is that a lot of these people don't even realize Europeans don't see themselves as one big ethnic group of "white people" \- and they literally never have. Hell, they even spend some time in grade school teaching kids about the discrimination early Irish and Italian immigrants faced in America where they weren't considered white or white enough by WASPs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A fascinating look at race and color among the Ancient Greeks, and well- contextualized.

It's as if the author is trying to exonerate the ancient Greeks from the pervasive ideological racism (I really wish there was a more specific word for this phenomenon than "racism" as ot is a complex result of many things) of modern European history by demonstrating that "white" and "black" races did not exist with them, or at least not in any form we would recognize.

But white + black != racism. Even if the categories came later, Aristotle did introduce the _idea_ of the "natural slave," or the claim that certain races of people are only fit to be subjugated in forced labor to others. That's pretty much the essence of racism. The priests Christianized it, while the merchants learned the _practice_ of transoceanic slaving from the North Africans. It's more like a pasta salad of evil with ingredients from all over the world.

<comment><USER2> > _It 's as if the author is trying to exonerate the ancient Greeks from the > pervasive ideological racism_

Well, they didn't have "pervasive ideological racism". Even making someone a slave (which they did practice) wasn't about considering them inferior -- just considering it just spoils for them having lost a war.

And they could care less if those were black or white or whatever. They could (and did) make slaves of people in the nearby city-states as well.

Aristotle's idea of a "natural slave" wasn't really widespread as a cultural norm them. That would happen much later, especially with later Christianism, and would find it's ideological justification with colonialism and writers like Gobineau.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The author just posed questions, arguments and opinions but nothing substantive. The subject of race has always been fluid. For instance, in the US Census Arabs, Turks and Italians are considered white yet neither resemble a Russian, Finn, or Swede.

If one looks to Egypt, Italy, Greece and Turkey circa 3,000 years ago, or all those countries within the Mediterranean basin, there is substantial evidence that the average "racial genotype" is much like it is today. (a mixed race hybrid between shades of beige and vey dark brown.)

Visual evidence can be seen when Comparing "Miss Egypt 2006"... [http://www.santabanta.com/photos/miss- universe-2006/619218.h...](http://www.santabanta.com/photos/miss- universe-2006/619218.htm)

...To the Egyptian wall paintings of King Tutankhamun's tomb: [https://www.timesofisrael.com/secret-tut-chamber-egypt- calls...](https://www.timesofisrael.com/secret-tut-chamber-egypt-calls-in- experts-to-examine-tantalizing-clues/)

Both representations above have straight hair, medium brown skin and awesome physiques.

<comment><USER9> > US Census Arabs, Turks and Italians are considered white yet neither > resemble a Russian, Finn, or Swede.

It goes to show how silly these questions are. Would a Greek Byzantine frame himself as the same race as an invading Ottoman? Assuredly not. Race being purely a matter of skin color is a modern idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "We might add that modern geneticists too find classification by skin colour unhelpful, and indeed avoid the term 'race' (a meaningless category in biological terms)."

But it's good enough for government work...

"There is relatively little genetic difference between the human populations of different continents"

There is relatively little genetic difference between dog populations on different continents...

"and levels of skin pigmentation are a very poor proxy for general genetic relatedness. The distinction between 'black' African and 'white' European peoples, then, is not just unGreek: it's also unbiological."

Completely wrong... if you're judging just between black Africans and white Europeans then it is a pretty good proxy for general genetic relatedness. It is absolutely insane to think otherwise.

<comment><USER11> > Completely wrong... if you're judging just between black Africans and white > Europeans then it is a pretty good proxy for general genetic relatedness. It > is absolutely insane to think otherwise.

Skin color is not a good proxy for genetic relatedness because it's only one of the many different traits that make up a human.

You would surely agree that two humans with different skin colors but all else equal are more closely related than two with the same skin color but nothing else in common.

And it turns out that is exactly the case. Africa has the most genetic variation since it's the origin of humans so a black African can very well be much more related to a white European than to another black African.

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

In computer science terms it would be trying to do a dimension reduction by only naively comparing the first coordinate. That would work only if skin color is the principal component of genetic diversity but it's pretty unlikely and insane to declare that a priori.

<comment><USER12> Your link directly contradicts the paragraph that precedes it.

<comment><USER13> What? I just read the link and one thing it says is that

> In general, however, an average of 85% of genetic variation exists within > local populations, ~7% is between local populations within the same > continent, and ~8% of variation occurs between large groups living on > different continents (Lewontin 1972; Jorde et al. 2000a). The recent African > origin theory for humans would predict that in Africa there exists a great > deal more diversity than elsewhere and that diversity should decrease the > further from Africa a population is sampled.

Which is literally what the GP said.

You should put up or not make drive-by comments.

<comment><USER11> Same quote stated more directly (emphasis mine):

> It is often stated that the fixation index for humans is about 0.15. This > translates to an estimated 85% of the variation measured in the overall > human population is found within individuals of the same population, and > about 15% of the variation occurs between populations. These estimates imply > that _any two individuals from different populations are almost as likely to > be more similar to each other than either is to a member of their own group_

<comment><USER12> Please see my post here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17055327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17055327)

In your paragraph "similarity" refers to looking at _just one_ genetic locus (essentially one gene) at a time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Most racial stereotypes we have now are a modern construct. In the ancient world, it was well known that empires/races were powerful or advanced independent of the color of the skin. Many nations of Africa were feared and admired, while many nations of north Europe were simply considered barbaric.

</comment><comment><USER15> The idea of multiple races of humans existing is post-darwinian (correct me if I am wrong please). I would imagine most humans that lived in the time of the ancient greeks saw different tribes and ethnicities. Even when they see someone from asia or africa, wouldn't they simply see a strange looking human from a strange land and tribe?

The modern view of race that categorizes other ethnicities as almost an entirely different species requires ideological flexibility which to the best of my knowledge isn't compatible with the world view and beliefs of most ancient people.

I am no history buff though, I would be interested in hearing a contradictory point of view.

<comment><USER16> I don't think Darwinism has anything to do with racism, except tangentially. Modern racism and the idea of some races being superior was the direct result of colonialism, and evolution was perhaps only one of the tools used to justify white supremacy ( another was Christianity).

It is fascinating to see the dynamism of race in India. The early British (pre 1800s) didn't seem to hold racist views of the natives, in fact many of them had Indian wives and children, and adopted Indian clothes and culture. Some even converted to Islam, many were fluent in Persian, the language of elites at the time. But that begins to change markedly when British supremacy is assured in secured in the 1800s after many successful wars.

<comment><USER17> I mean, this isn't exactly a new idea. If you go back to the Roman occupation of the British isles and the slaughter of it's peoples and the enslavement of the Judaic peoples and the Christian cults, based on Judaism. Hitler named his movement the third reich, meaning empire, modeling it after the Roman empire because he was a delusional nutbag but, again, unoriginal. But subjugation or slaughter of different races/tribes/peoples is certainly not a modern white person invention. The Romani have been singled out, more recently, I guess, if you want (they used to be more commonly known as Gypsies, but this is an Eastern European slur, so I've been told).

The whole "colonialism is to blame" is a new argument, to me, though. I do hear a lot more of these, "the past was a utopia, and modernity has screwed things up" statements of late and I can't figure out how..... maybe that wasn't your intention and I totally misread your statement. I apologize if that's the case.

<comment><USER18> You're mixing different things. "Subjugation or slaughter of different races/tribes/peoples is certainly not a modern white person invention". No, it isn't. But at least in the case of the Romans, there was no racism component in it (I'm not knowledgeable enough to say if other cases were racism related and therefore if it was or wasn't a 'white person invention').

The Romans were quite liberal, once you have let yourself be conquered by them. As long as you recognized the state and paid your taxes, you were free to do what you wanted.

There are very few recorded persecutions of religion cults in non-christian Roman times because of this. Christians, Jews, druids and the followers of Bacchus, they all were considered a threat to the state and that's the reason they were persecuted, not because of some form of racism.

<comment><USER17> Fine, but Romans aside, no one mentions Japanese, Chinese or Nepalese history. Central African history is whisked away (you ask them if they're the same race, and see what answer you get). The whole conversation is clouded is a horribly eurocentric manner, and put towards a narrative.

<comment><USER16> I sincerely don't believe you have researched your history well enough; and I'm trying to sound as nice as possible when pointing out this fact.

You don't just throw in entire civilizations as having racist views (at least in the terms that we think of today, according to skin color). AFAIK the Chinese did consider anyone living outside Mainland China as "barbarians" but to a great extent, it was true (Turkic, Mongols living on the border etc.). They considered Ancient Indians in high regard (specifically I believe due to the Buddha being born in India) and the many Chinese travelers through India have left a well documented account of their travels which are one of the most important sources for historic event during this time.

Japan has mostly been a self-contained country, occasionally fighting with Chinese until the Meiji Restoration and the Rise of the Japanese Armed Forces, which was late 19th century. One could credibly argue the racist views they picked up were as a direct result of aping the Western Powers that held similar views during this time period.

I'm not familiar enough with Nepalese history to even know what you are talking about.

Modern Racism is certainly a European invention, specifically brought about by European colonial interests.

<comment><USER17> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_China](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_China)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Greeks simply didn't think of the world as starkly divided along racial > lines into black and white: that's a strange aberration of the modern, > Western world, a product of many different historical forces, but in > particular the transatlantic slave trade and the cruder aspects of 19th- > century racial theory.

Exactly. The theory was developed to justify the prejudice and subordination, not the other way round. The idea of viewing Europe as a single ethnicity labelled "white" is extremely modern-American too.

</comment><comment><USER20> The black/white thing is an artifact of US slavery. Everyone else has historically allied by religion or national ID.

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure that's true. It was after all the French and Spanish that had separate names for the 'races' all the way down to at least 1/32nd black with the Mulato, Quadroon etc. distinctions. If you're differentiating between people 5/8 black and 3/4 black it shows you care quite a lot.

<comment><USER22> Then perhaps it's an artifact of European slavery, spread in modernity through American and British cultural influence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't have anything interesting to say about this, except I loved reading it. I tend to follow a lot of tech stuff, so I don't get outside my tech bubble as far as reading different things goes.

I just really liked it.

</comment><comment><USER24> What a silly article. They saw themselves as greek, or macedonian, or athenian, or citizens versus slaves. Everywhere in the world people saw themselves and other as where they were from, their culture, etc. Travel was very difficult and most people didn't read, so chances are you'd never see someone from somwhere else with different color or fashion sense.

The first mentions I know of people based on their race in when talking about "the negroe", but it is still implied as being people from Sub Sahaaran Africa, but by virtue of ignorance about individual tribes/regions, a common name was used. I remember a famous criticism to the constitution created after the French revolution that talked about "the rights of men"; instead of the rights of the French, the Englishman, the Turk; which were seen as completely different groups of people given the time and difficulty of travel.

Plus, I dislike the confusion between slavery and racism. People used to take what they wanted by force, and when allowed, they'd take human beings. I doubt it was because they hated other people, instead it was because they were allowed to subjugate other people; motivated by financial/power motives. Enslavement was a common practise until the ideals of humanism won over the super powers of the time; humanism won over human greed.

<comment><USER25> > I doubt it was because they hated other people, instead it was because they > were allowed to subjugate other people

This describes modern racism too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Since we're at linguistics of colour you might want to know that in modern Greek, the word for "tanning" is "blackening". I don't disagree with the article but I just want to make sure we all know ancient Greeks weren't actually black. You can argue that they weren't "white", at least with the modern American definitions, but there has never been any indication of them being black, you know, like Africans. It's not like their only difference with Caucasians is skin colour, you'd expect the morphological characteristics to show on sculptures too. The idea that Greeks were somehow black is purely the result of revisionist tendencies of modern African-American movements.

<comment><USER27> I'm not sure what you're criticizing but it's not the article since the article didn't say ancient Greeks were black.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What a silly article. How could they possibly see themselves as white given such limited contact with other peoples? Their entire world was the Mediterranean. You can't shoehorn ancient Greeks into today's ideologies.

<comment><USER28> Could you please substantiate those claims?

One obvious counterexample is that Alexander the Great's empire reached northwest India. The idea that Greek society would be so isolated from the world – not coming into contact with travelers or traders or captives from beyond the Mediterranean – seems ridiculous to me.

<comment><USER9> But the overwhelming majority of Greeks would have never seen a Indian or Ethiopian person in their lifetime. Why would they define themselves based on the differences between them, especially superficial ones?

<comment><USER28> Again: can you please substantiate that?

Speculation isn't worth much. Your intuition is clearly that someone _wouldn 't_ define themselves along those lines, but intuitions are often wrong. And it's not obviously and unequivocally true that the overwhelming majority of Greeks would never see someone distinctly foreign looking.

<comment><USER9> How does one substantiate something that didn't happen? The Greeks made very little discussion of their own skin color and we have no archaeological or literary evidence of Ethiopian or Indian people actually living in Greece. Look at the stretches the author had to make when discussing skin color.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The author is pulling people's legs. Or very young and truly ignorant to make these suggestions.

Referring to blackness had nothing to do with race, they're talking about people that went outside and worked. That's why the women were "white". Think antebellum south, holding an umbrella.

Even in my own family when someone would come in from working outside in a garden with a tan, my grandma would say their skin was black. It just means tan or darker.

The younger generations born in the last 25 years didn't even experience this world when people commonly left the laptop or phone and still went outside and worked. It's not surprising as a result that we're seeing such gross misinterpretations pop up.</comment>


Okular is an open source universal document viewer for Windows, Linux and macOS - <AUTHOR> https://www.ghacks.net/2020/02/13/okular-is-an-open-source-universal-document-viewer-for-windows-linux-and-macos/ <comment><USER2> ... also found on the BSDs...</comment>


HybridConf tickets on sale - <AUTHOR> http://hybridconf.net/?

<comment><USER2> Me too, really looking forward to meeting some of the other speakers and attendees.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looking forward to sharing some of my secrets when I speak here. Come along! :-)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've tried really hard to get a mix of seasoned and newcommer speakers :) Have so much excitement in the quality of the lineup.</comment>


Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams on simulating most complex magic system ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcgamer.com/dwarf-fortress-creator-tarn-adams-talks-about-simulating-the-most-complex-magic-system-ever/ <comment><USER2> I do wonder whether the future of gaming will eventually move towards a model like DF, ADOM, WoW, DOTA 2, EVE etc, whereby instead of completely new games every year that generally just feature updated graphics, we will instead see a few games in each genre becoming more and more fleshed out over the course of years or even decades.

Really, there are not a whole lot of different game genres when you get down to it. If one had a good RTS engine, for example, you could build a WWII simulator or a sci-fi setting on top of it with only a few mods plus new unit models. And from a player's standpoint, there is something amazing about playing a game that has been developed for decades like DF or ADOM, because it is so much deeper, more detailed, and well-balanced than the average new game. And has less bugs. I think this thinking is behind what must be a massive effort to reskin Morrowwind. The increase in modding's popularity is another indicator of this trend.

Of course I doubt new games will entirely cease to be made. There are certainly genres that haven't been discovered yet. But it seems that the bulk of player-time is moving gradually towards games like this IMO.

<comment><USER3> "I do wonder whether the future of gaming will eventually move towards a model like DF, ADOM, WoW, DOTA 2, EVE etc, whereby instead of completely new games every year that generally just feature updated graphics, we will instead see a few games in each genre becoming more and more fleshed out over the course of years or even decades."

You're assuming people want more complex games, but (note my complete lack of sources) history has shown that people move towards _less_ complex games over time. Dwarf Fortress will never go mainstream, because not everyone wants a complex game. A lot of people like games that they can wind down with, that _don 't_ need thinking for.

<comment><USER2> There are two factors at play here. First, if you track an individual gamer over time, I think they generally will gradually prefer increasingly complex games. Not necessarily "complex" in the sense of difficulty, but in the sense of depth; as sibling suggests, deeper worlds with more things to explore, etc, even if that exploration is not thinking-intensive.

But at the same time, the market for games has expanded greatly due to in- browser games, smartphone games, etc. Those people are "introductory/casual gamers". Some of them will remain casual, some of them will stop gaming entirely, but I think of those who continue gaming, many of them will come to want something more.

So, in short, the existence of lots of really shallow games largely reflects an expanded market IMO rather than some inherent shallowness of humanity. I share your cynicism in the sense that there are some who will never move beyond FarmVille, and that is sad, but I cannot imagine what mechanism would drive, or what evidence would support, the average _individual_ gamer preferring less complex games over time.

<comment><USER4> > _but I cannot imagine what mechanism would drive, or what evidence would > support, the average individual gamer preferring less complex games over > time._

Lack of time is a strong driver for some gamers opting towards simpler games, or at least games whose complexity does not translate into requiring additional time for mastery/understanding. In my circle of gaming friends, as our available time is under greater pressure we've purposely moved away from games that require significant investment of time to those that perhaps retain some complexity but reward a casual time investment.

Another factor I've seen that affects is the demand of contiguous blocks of time to game properly. Some games do not permit breaking up game sessions arbitrarily, so while one might have ample leisure time, there might be multiple interruptions in between which make playing certain games impossible or a burden.

<comment><USER5> _> In my circle of gaming friends, as our available time is under greater pressure we've purposely moved away from games that require significant investment of time_

The last game I seriously played was EVE. I remember I moved to that and stuck with it for a while because I made a decision that I would only play games where I enjoyed _playing_ the game (as opposed to not enjoying play but what the designers rewarded me with as a result).

<comment><USER6> How do you play eve in a relaxing way without putting much time into learning and developing complex excel sheets?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This game and it's creator(s) never cease to amaze me. Looking forward to all of the new "fun" this will create.

</comment><comment><USER8> I really wish DF was OSS. My great fear for this game is the developer dies and we lose an amazing piece of tech with him.

<comment><USER9> Ditto. I know it's his creation and he has the right to do what he likes with it, but it's such a damn missed opportunity. A game as complex and detailed as DF cries out for a vibrant coding/modding community.

<comment><USER10> Why don't all these people who cry for DF being open source and claim that it would create such a vibrant coding/modding community start to create their own game (with a similar spirit as DF) under open source conditions of _their_ choice?

<comment><USER9> Because you don't need to be a master chef to tell if a meal needs more salt. "Never criticize anything unless you could personally could do it better" is a ridiculous notion mainly proposed by oversensitive creators.

Also because it's annoying and wasteful to have to recreate years of effort from scratch because the people who've done it before won't share. Which is, y'know, the entire point of open source.

<comment><USER10> > Because you don't need to be a master chef to tell if a meal needs more > salt. "Never criticize anything unless you could personally could do it > better" is a ridiculous notion mainly proposed by oversensitive creators.

The people who want to add their own additions better understand what the source code does. So this argument does not apply here.

> Also because it's annoying and wasteful to have to recreate years of effort > from scratch because the people who've done it before won't share.

The original creators also had to invest the time. Where do the open source fans take the justification from that if they want something similar, but under _their_ preferred license, they should not have to invest a similar amount of time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As someone who is aware of DF but never played it, I am curious about how the game actually works.

I am roughly aware that it is a very complex simulation that exists under an ASCII art and menu presentation, but it's not clear at all to me how gameplay actually works. Does the game more or less "play" itself and allow you to nudge things in different directions to observe the outcome, or are you responsible for micro-managing all of your dwarves' lives?

<comment><USER12> Two basic modes, Fortress and Adventure.

Fortress is a base management sim, you don't directly control anything, you issue orders and then drwarves take those orders and do them in their own time.

Adventure mode is a rougelike with in a deep world.

<comment><USER6> And as mentioned in the article there's Legendary mode which is basically a magnifying glass for the results of the world generator. Apperently people use it just to see what happened during world generation, maybe even using the results as inspiration for other media like pen&paper RPGs.

So there is the option for the ant farmer as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Having world-gen create a unique magic system for each game sounds like it'll be a lot of fun.

<comment><USER14> I am now imagining a system based on live penguin sacrifice that can animate metal statues into war-trained metal golems, regrow lost limbs, turn quartzite into gabbro, charm otherwise useless elves into making shoes, and accelerate minecarts to lightspeed.

The DF world-gen and procedural generator invents some seriously weird stuff.

<comment><USER15> okay. As a long time DF player, If it is anything like that it will be wonderful!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow! The creator really knows what he is talking about.</comment>


"Excuse me, but I believe you've sampled my funk" (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://www.stonesthrow.com/news/2009/05/matthew-larkin-cassell <comment><USER2> Wat? I'm typically not your average "wtf is this doing on HN", but in my ignorance, I fail to understand the relevance of this.

<comment><USER3> Copyright,Sampling, Fair-Use and a bit of uplifting news.

I would be lenient about this even if it is not hardcore down to the bit techtalk</comment></comment>


Silicon Valley's grand experiment in jobs means employees are the guinea pigs - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/silicon-valleys-grand-experiment-in-jobs-means-employees-are-the-guinea-pigs/2019/01/18/606887bc-18d6-11e9-8813-cb9dec761e73_story.html <comment><AUTHOR> > When UBIans gather in their cryptocurrency WhatsApp groups — UBIans aren't > fans of dinner parties, as they tend to fast "to enhance cognitive function" > during the week […]

I felt that was unnecessary and overly dismissive. Demonizing the others, maybe?</comment>


Inncubator (Hacker Home) Invitation Open - <AUTHOR> http://www.inncubator.net <comment><AUTHOR> Hey we are in Palo Alto, and have hosted and currently live with many Y combinator startups and engineers. We all live together in this awesome community near Stanford and University Ave. We want to invite more like minded people!</comment>


An Introduction to Reflection in C++ - <AUTHOR> http://jackieokay.com/2017/04/13/reflection1.html <comment><USER2> > It would be really nice to compose objects hierarchally: for example, if I > had a widget class composed of several different renderable Rectangles, I > want to be able to automatically generate the rendering code for my widget > based on the existing rendering logic for its constituent shapes.

So one thing that I've learned about programming: Don't overthink it. How many different object types do you want to serialize? Maybe a hundred? So just write those 100 lines of boilerplate. Not a huge amount of work, even when there is the the occasional modification. An additional benefit is that you're not painting yourself in a corner - for example, you can leave out that additional bit of redundant information that you hacked in as an optimization.

What's really huge for maintainability is this thing called aspect-oriented programming: Don't litter each of your classes with a line of boilerplate for this and another line for that. Make a file "serialize.cpp" that contains the serialization code for all the types, and nothing else.

In other words, object-oriented is the wrong tool, for almost everything (sorry if that's old news).

<comment><USER3> C++ has "built in" serialization the same way that C does.. Except its not acceptable to use anymore, even though its orders of magnitude faster than the alternatives.. AKA you write your structures out directly as binary data. Bonus if you align them. The limitation is that you can't have classes/structures with actual pointers in them (rather using offsets) and you have to encourage your compiler to pack/align them consistently. Bonus if you override the new/placement allocator so that you can serialize gigabytes of data (including pointers) with a simple map/unmap call.

Frankly, the idea that data should be human readable is complete crap, especially for things which are going to be machine processed far more than human processed. AKA use XML for your config file, not for the gigabytes of data you send over the wire/store on disk/etc, that will never be read by a human. Its funny that HTML/etc has everyone in this strange mindset that somehow its more efficient to build human readable markup, which 99.9999% of the time is never read by a human, and has to be compressed with algorithms that further burn up tons of CPU time in order to squash the resulting data. The untold tons of carbon wasted transfering more data than necessary and/or compressing/decompressing it is insane for the possibility that someone will want to read it as it flys over the wire, rather than decoding it at the endpoint and viewing it in a debugger...

<comment><USER4> Dumping raw binary is a problem if you want your data to be readable across platforms or versions of the same code.

It is also a bad idea if reading a complete structure into memory is not possible, or a poor use of time. For example, if you need to read a single part of a gigabyte data set.

<comment><USER3> None of this is a show stopper, especially with a little planning. AKA pad the structures a bit initially, or put version numbers in them. Even if you fail to do any of that early on, it can be bolted on with a bit of preprocessing as part of a version upgrade. Its really no different than a schema change between version numbers. Plus, if your really paranoid, you verify field size and offsets at startup time against a previously generated bit of metadata.

Also, if you happen to need to pick out a tiny bit of data from some huge tree/whatever data structure then map it with appropriate madvise() and simply let the kernel page in the portions you need to access. The whole dataset doesn't need to be read to pick out a couple bytes here and there. Further if this is a common use case you probably shouldn't be using this method anyway, rather storing the index separately from the data in a manner which allows them to be accessed independently. This mechanism holds up for multiple TB sized datasets, and can be tuned by playing with the amount of physical ram in the machine vs the speed of the disk. Then when storage class memory takes off, you don't even have to rewrite your application.

Finally, for a single GB dataset, doing a bulk read is likely well under a 1 second operation on most reasonable storage mechanisms available for server use. Compared with picking off a couple hundred thousand fields from an object storage mechanism this is going to seem pretty speedy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I learned some things from reading that article. I hadn't heard about those other schemes to do rtti. I just want it to be as easy as objective c was, and I still like those smalltalk like api calls that were in that.

But the article reminds me why I still feel frustrated that my programming work is divided between java and c++. There are so many things that are easy in java and hugely painful in c++, and c++ slowly adds those ideas yet it makes the language more painful to use over time. I basically want to throw c++ away and replace it with something that is more regular and doesn't expose so many complexities to the end programmer like the endless nuances of memory allocation, moving, &&, r values etc. But there's no hope of that. For the rest of my life every year or two there will be additions to c++ that I will have learn about and use and gradually discover their own warts, yet java will still keep cruising along.

<comment><USER6> What I want is a language over C++, as typescript is over JavaScript, that keeps compatibility with C and C++ code (Qt, boost...) and provides a clear syntax and some advanced features (as reflection) even paying a price for it. This is it, no more zero cost abstraction.

<comment><USER7> Like D?

<comment><USER6> No, D is a separate language. A bit too much. Ideally you will be able to move between a version of the language or another at Class level to alllow a incremental migration of the code that must be "modernized".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A shame that D[1] wasn't mentioned under other alternatives as it has a comprehensive system for compile-time introspection built in!

[1] [http://dlang.org/](http://dlang.org/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I am writing a game engine and C++'s lack of proper reflection is a real hindrance for a variety of serialisation/deserialisation interfaces, be it networking or saving things to disk and loading them. You just end up writing redundant and more brittle code for no reason other than that a language feature is missing. I think it is great that this problem is given attention.

Edit: After thinking on it for a few minutes. All I want is a generic function that takes a class as the generic type T, and a string as an argument, and returns me a completely filled in object of type T, or throws an error on malformed input. I really don't think I am asking for too much here.

<comment><USER10> i'm not sure about your particular issue, but every time i had to choose between being smart and generic with serialization over being straightforward and boring ( at the cost of writing one small line of code for each and every property), i always choose to stay boring.

Not only is it nicer to the person that's going to maintain your code and may not know about your smart trick, but with generic code there is _always_ an exception that makes you need to write some code somewhere that breaks the abstraction.

<comment><USER11> Same here. Generic serialization often breaks when there are some changes to the data and you have to be compatible with different versions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The author made a small mistake in this article which may be worth pointing out: -fno-rtti does not disable the generation of vtables (which would break virtual method dispatch) but only runtime type information. The two are connected in that RTTI is generally stored with an object's vtable, so objects with no virtual methods don't get it. The alternative would be to include a pointer to type information in all objects without a vtable, but the amount of memory this would require would be substantial, and it would break expectations about the size and memory layout of "plain old data" structs.

<comment><USER13> True, I will correct this in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is anyone doing a strong constexpr hash for use in compile-time serialization? It would be impressive to combine compile-time serialization with a consistent method of evaluating type differences. I've heard of people doing this with a dedicated compile/link step.

<comment><USER15> Be careful with doing this - the serialized identifier for the type needs to be separate from the type name or else you can never rename.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Generally trying to come up with complex compile time higher level abstractions in C++ is a waste of time. A better idea is to figure out a relational schema for the runtime presentation of the data and represent that with a combination of standard datastructures and PODs. I really, really would see mental efforts spent in systems design and simplifying the problem and not in findindg the best way to contort C++ to some other languages paradigm (on the compiler level - runtime behaviour for any complex dynamic data might start to appear like lisp but please don't try to make the compiler understand that).

</comment><comment><USER17> >$, as a way of getting object metadata out of a class, namespace, etc. (Using $ has been argued out of favor because it is common in legacy code, particularly in code generation and template systems which are not necessarily valid C++ but produce C++ sources.)

you have got to be kidding me, right ? "$" adding this character too to the C++ ? What left we haven't add ?

Why not use _only_ something like "reflexpr" which is more C++ish than $ character. Why make C++ more difficult to parse and read with every release ?

TBH I genuinely don't understand why we need both ? why not only have "reflexpr".

<comment><USER18> It's a matter of taste; for me 'reflexpr' is about as disgusting as 'constexpr'.

<comment><USER17> No it is not matter of taste. I dont have anything against $ in php, perl, or most other languages. But it is not consistent with C++ syntax at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What blogging engine is that? It looks nice.

<comment><USER20> Looks like one of the standard jekyll themes. I could be wrong though

<comment><USER21> Yep: [https://github.com/jacquelinekay/jacquelinekay.github.io](https://github.com/jacquelinekay/jacquelinekay.github.io)</comment></comment></comment>


FundersClub Unveils Venture News - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/27/fundersclub-unveils-venture-news-a-community-news-site-for-investors-exclusive/ <comment><USER2> Not only is there a chicken-and-egg effect in creating a successful Hacker News spinoff, but looking at the sample content on Venture News, it seems that all the content on VN is redundant with content that generally hits the Top 5 on Hacker News. (Are people who use FundersClub and Hacker News different demographics?)

Compare with the launch of [http://www.usv.com](http://www.usv.com) which nowadays appears to consist of mostly stories and comments by USV employees/partners, with a low volume of posts in general.

<comment><USER3> > which nowadays appears to consist of mostly stories and comments by USV > employees/partners

At its inception, Hacker News (then called startup news) was intended primarily to share stories amongst the y-combinator network. Reddit was used for this purpose earlier, but due to its rise in the mainstream consciousness, most stories were no longer geared towards hacker/founder-focused YC.

If you view HN's early days on the internet archive, you'll see that a large portion of content came from yc-affiliated folks. So clearly, a news site for a small community can have value _for that community_ , irrespective of mainstream adoption.

FundersClub's community (though it shares a lot of YC dna for obvious reasons) is distinct from HN in that investors & founders of _funded_ startups are the largest component. Of course there are many of these people on HN as well, but they are a small minority. A glance at "venture news" demonstrates that the focus is much more startup/industry focused than HN.

The difference is also clear from the name: "hacker" news vs "venture" news.

<comment><USER4> On the chicken&egg problem, imho a front page with the 1st news having 2 comments and all others with just the button "discuss" is a first evidence of missing community.

I'd consider hiding that at the very beginning in favor of other signals that actually show the presence of the initial community.

At Theneeds.com, where we aim to create a HN-like for "normal" people, i.e. no hackers (and no ventures :), we started with a facepile that generically represents users that interacted with the content, wether they simply upvoted or actually discussed it. I understand that the style here is less graphical, but I think the idea can be elaborated to reduce the "sense of desolation".

Well, it's actually Monday night... good luck for tomorrow morning ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hard to read. The colors for the fonts are just too light. Its pretty, but not very readable. At least for my old, tired eyes.

<comment><USER6> This is Will from FundersClub. Thanks for the feedback. We will consider ways to improve contrast and legibility.

<comment><USER5> All you need to do is darken the font to the content-related links. If you want to keep it stylish and a dark gray will match with the gray-ish blue you currently have. It will be a nice contrast, and will improve readability while keeping the style intact. #222 is what I'd suggest.

I made the changes to show what I mean. Please refer to: [http://imgur.com/6ombpd7,IdjJn6x#0](http://imgur.com/6ombpd7,IdjJn6x#0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "People who are interested in angel investing often do not have the time to source deals and conduct due diligence on their own."

^ That's a shame. IMO if you're gonna do it, you should do it right.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd really like to see less FundersClub header/footer/sidebar spam on the page. HN itself has very little from yCombinator on the site, but subtle is powerful.

<comment><USER9> Alex from FC here. Good feedback, we'll work on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here is the link in case anyone is interested in checking out the site:

[https://fundersclub.com/venture-news](https://fundersclub.com/venture-news)

<comment><USER11> The chat box give the impression that it might be a spammy hard-sell feature.

What am I going to get from a one-on-one chat with [faceless website]?

A sales pitch? What headless collective entity will I be conversing with? How many people can see the message queue I'm dumping chat messages into?

<comment><USER9> Haha, nice catch, that's not supposed to be there (it's for other parts of our site). Our dev team is removing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If FundersClub reads this, please consider adding a full RSS

<comment><USER6> This is Will from FundersClub. We're considering that. Thank you!

<comment><USER13> Consider this another "vote" for an RSS feed. RSS is essential!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why not just partner with SeekingAlpha or the Motley Fool?</comment>


Glowing reviews tout counterfeit cash on the dark web - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pol-dark-web-counterfeiter-20190201-story.html#nws=mcnewsletter <comment><USER2> Why does American law enforcement resort to such high profile raids if they know the suspect was dangerous.

Surely they have better tactics to neutralize someone without ending up in a gun battle.

A night raid, tailing the suspect, gas masks?

Note: I am a Brit not American, therefore genuinely interested to hear from law enforcement people on this.

<comment><USER3> The 2002 Moscow theater attack shows gas-based raids are not any less dangerous

<comment><USER4> well, they're as dangerous if you use carfentanyl. if you just use tear gas or something...

<comment><USER5> >if you just use tear gas or something...

The FBI tried that once upon a time in Texas. Most formulations of tear "gas" are actually a powder that happens to be flammable powder. It makes nasty poisonous things when it burns (burning already poisonous things has a tendency of doing that). It didn't go well.[1] It's generally not prudent to use tear gas if you're not ok with substantially increasing the likelihood of many people in the target area dying. What's acceptable when you're trying to gas some enemy combatants out of a tunnel in a war zone is not necessarily acceptable for a civilian law enforcement agency to do domestically.

(possibly NSFW) [https://www.documentingreality.com/forum/attachments/f240/14...](https://www.documentingreality.com/forum/attachments/f240/149052d1270518862-waco- autopsy-photographs-february-1993-untitled-1.jpg)

<comment><USER6> Except for drills and riot control, it's illegal for militaries to use tear gas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >>Johnson had served three years in federal prison for selling pirated copies of Microsoft Office.

Like, that's just fucked up.

<comment><USER8> How so? He committed a crime. He wasn't in prison for having a pirated copy of Office – he was literally profiting from selling it to others.

<comment><USER7> Because I'd like to think that we put people in prison when they are danger to others or the society. Someone selling pirated copies of Office is neither. Fuck,I'm a software developer and I wouldn't want someone selling pirated copies of our product to go to prison. Especially not for 3(!!!!) years. Especially not in an American prison. Maybe my complaint should be with the ridiculous system that allows this to happen though - there's plenty of other punishments that could be used instead of locking someone up for three years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The agent clicked "buy" and in September 2017 purchased four fake $100 bills > for $120 in bitcoin, the online cryptocurrency.

That's a fairly conservative ROI if you ask me ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER10> Keep in mind, his overhead is only that of ink/paper/his own time (presuming it was a one man operation), so that's still probably 99% profit margins. Plus, counterfeit currency would need to be substantially cheaper than real currency to be worth using in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is simple possession of counterfeit cash illegal in and of itself, or only when spent? I have a collection of 'fakes' and this would be a fun addition, but wouldn't want to risk federal prison for it.

<comment><USER12> I looked through 18 U.S. Code Chapter 25. I am not a lawyer. It does not look like simple possession is illegal, you have to spend it with an intent to defraud.

That said, it could also be illegal to buy counterfeit currency, even if you don't intend to sell it.

<comment><USER13> I wonder how research gets around it. Most printer/copiers have detection software in them to determine if someone is trying to print out money and then cancels the print job. I can imagine that those kinds of folks would need counterfeits to test against. Also, there is a good case for educational purposes and museum collections, in addition to things just like stamp collecting.

<comment><USER14> > Most printers/copiers have detection software

Do you have a source for this? I've never heard of it but would be really interested in looking at, say, a disassembly of applicable firmware.

<comment><USER15> The Eurion Constellation is how this is usually done. Most US bills above a certain value and most larger Euro bills have this embedded somewhere.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find it ironic that the guy spent so much energy prepping for the end of the world. Then he chose a profession that would end his life severely prematurely.

</comment><comment><USER17> Oh wow, providing a tracking number, huge OPSEC mistake

<comment><USER18> > Oh wow, providing a tracking number, huge OPSEC mistake

Double mistake: he habitually used the same postbox to mail his packages. He might have had better luck if he drove well out of his way to mail them.

Though I'm kinda surprised the police weren't able to get a firmer lead on him from the tracking numbers. Is it really possible to get those anonymously issued? I'd assumed they'd at least be able to track him back to a store with security camera footage.

<comment><USER19> The article mentioned that he mailed them from a box across from a police station, not a store.

And basically yes. You get the tracking number when you create the shipping label, and the info is generated when it's first scanned, no need to be physically present when that occurs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Curious how much bitcoin he had.

> When they searched Johnson's body, they found a computer thumb drive jammed > in an ankle holster. The device contained 50 screen grabs of text messages.

Wallet word seed?

</comment><comment><USER21> It's interesting they couldn't decrypt his computer.

Does anyone know if FileVault on mac has any known exploits?

<comment><USER22> That's what they say.

<comment><USER23> It could be what they would say if they wanted to keep you using it. Although, they could say they decrypted it when they didn't to get people to switch to something possibly less secure. This is all speculation though.

<comment><USER24> > It could be what they would say if they wanted to keep you using it.

I mean, for most users it's better than nothing, since they're not likely to use anything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How can someone buy a truck for $58,000 in cash and not set off one billion alarms?? :O

<comment><USER26> The strategy drug dealers use is they know the cash limit before required notification. Let's say it's $5k. Buy a $4k car, drive it a couple months, trade it in for an $8k car paying the difference in cash, rinse and repeat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> 'They were so good that even I accepted them as legal tender!'

</comment><comment><USER28> Perhaps he wanted to die, but wished for something more dramatic than shooting himself in the head. It is good that he didn't kill anyone else.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's interesting that the reviews also touted the fact that a "your money back" guarantee was offered. ISTM that very few people would trust a money- back guarantee from a counterfeiter.

<comment><USER30> because the payment would be in bitcoin, can't counterfeit bitcoin.

<comment><USER31> wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It cost $120 in bitcoin to buy a $100 counterfeit bill? How does that make any sense

<comment><USER33> > four fake $100 bills for $120 in bitcoin

You get $400 for $120 in bitcoin.

<comment><USER34> A 330% ROI.

I can understand the appeal, though I question the sanity of ever trying to pass the $100 bill off after purchasing it on the black market.

<comment><USER35> Trade them to suckers for more bitcoin and repeat?

<comment><USER36> A friend of mine was scammed in exactly that way. So, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > "There are so many questions I would have liked to ask him," said Wesley > Gillespie, a Secret Service agent who chased Johnson for a year. "How did he > learn to make these so well? Who taught him? Where is the bitcoin?"

The Dark Web is very educational

Its the real HackerNews

<comment><USER37> Is it, though? Do you have first hand knowledge of this? Every time I try to look at things on "the dark web", I read through hidden wiki, see a few completely empty forums, laugh, then turn tor back off.

<comment><USER38> That's because hidden wiki was seized and doesn't exist anymore. What you saw was a mirror of now severely outdated information + with more unsavory links deleted.

<comment><USER39> Exactly the same experience as GP. Please educate how to find better sites/forums/discussions. Once I saw one ad for 'r __* __*e videos ' in some onion site while exploring and I immediately closed tor.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Don't Buy A $600 Camera If You're Just Going To Put A Cheap Lens On It" - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2013/05/09/cheap-lens <comment><USER2> Camera snobbery, pure and simple.

The 18-55mm kit lens you get with the Canons (at least the 300D, 350D, 400D) is capable of good photos -- if you know what you're doing and work with the limitations of the lens.

But that applies to every lens and camera.</comment>


Scatter is open-source and free. Come join us - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ramijames/how-open-source-technology-is-helping-me-find-my-path-forward-7d6e078d5148 <comment><USER2> Ohh, okay; not Elias Naur's Scatter (Axolotl double ratchet over SMTP).

[https://git.sr.ht/~eliasnaur/scatter](https://git.sr.ht/~eliasnaur/scatter)</comment>


How powerful was the Apollo 11 computer? (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/07/20/how-powerful-was-the-apollo-11-computer/ <comment><USER2> Minor nit-pick: The PC came out in 1981 but the XT came out in 1983. But they both have 8088 chips running at 4.77 MHz. The main difference was that you could get it with a 10 MB hard drive, but my PC (not XT) had upgraded ROM BIOS chips (you had to change the actual chips because they were not flashable) from around 1984 and so it has a 20 MB Seagate hard drive. (Which still works.) The XT also drops the cassette port.

I recently got ahold of my PC from storage again and when I opened it up I was surprised that the floppy drive uses up one of the five 8-bit ISA slots, even though it has very few simple chips. (The XT has 8 slots.)

(Pic of the floppy controller. [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/IBM_PC_Or...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/IBM_PC_Original_5.25_Diskette_Drive_Adapter.jpg) )

</comment><comment><USER3> Though multitasking and VMs on the AGC were a feat, that's not what amazes me. The IBM 360 demonstrated that both were possible at the time, and the AGC impressively did it on less hardware. What does amaze me is how long it took such things to come to the personal computer, and arguably how much DOS/early Windows held things back. Unix, with its multitasking, ran on PCs and Macs in the 80s, so we only waited 20 years after the 360 (and 15 after the AGC) for multitasking. But usable VMs didn't come (or at least weren't commonplace) until, what, mid-90s? 30 years after the 360, and 25 after the minimal AGC? What the heck took so long?

<comment><USER4> Few personal computers had protected memory until the late 1980s. Unix didn't run on PC or Mac until protected memory hardware was available.

Emulation was always popular, and it is a type of virtualization. Few people wanted to emulate the same platform they already had. Pure software emulators were pretty slow in the 1980's, unless the target platform had the same cpu as the host.

My family had an Amiga and we had both a bridge board and an A-Max. The bridge board was a full PC on an expansion card, so its not really a VM. The A-Max was more like a VM. Its hardware contained the Apple ROMs and a floppy disk interface because the Amiga floppy drive could not read Mac disks. The software used the ROMs and Apple floppy drive to emulate a Mac.

Now that I think about it, I think the real reason was ram and to a lesser degree hard drive space. My first encounter with virtualization in Linux happened when most people were running between 8 and 64mb of ram. 64mb of ram was very expensive. That's a pretty big constraint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I still love this story -- even four years later! (and not just because my husband is the author!)

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, I started coding on an 8 bit machine, 3.5 ~~GHz~~ MHz, up to total 64 kB of memory (static and dynamic together) - but keyword here is "up to", initially it was less than that. I had all the "OS" pretty clearly mapped out in my head, by address no less. My programs did contain sometimes jumps to physical addresses.

So I think I've some idea how the AGC operated.

<comment><USER7> MHz I hope :)

<comment><USER6> Darn. Yes, MHz. :) Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those interested in this subject, I highly recommend "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation":

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Apollo-Guidance-Computer- Architect...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Apollo-Guidance-Computer- Architecture/dp/1441908765/)

John Pultorak built a Block I AGC (think "version 1") and provides all of his work in the Public Domain here:

[http://klabs.org/history/build_agc/](http://klabs.org/history/build_agc/)

<comment><USER9> I haven't read that one, but enjoyed _Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight_ [http://web.mit.edu/digitalapollo/](http://web.mit.edu/digitalapollo/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think looking back at computer clock rates and memory is a silly endeavor. I remember a few months ago people commenting about "why we put a 2Mpx camera on the Curiosity Rover". The simple fact is, mission critical hardware/software is a different ball-game. You need reliability and fault tolerance.

If I was going to the moon today and had the choice of flight computers. Hands down, I would choose the Apollo 11 AGC over an iPhone A6 processor based system.

<comment><USER11> Ironically, the Apollo 11 landing was nearly scrubbed because the computer got overloaded with tasks and couldn't process everything in time, so that lack of power really was a problem.

<comment><USER12> The computer got overloaded because of crew error.

<comment><USER11> Procedural error, really. The crew followed their instructions, the instructions were just wrong.

In any case, my point is that a somewhat more powerful computer would have tolerated this problem while the real one did not.

<comment><USER12> I was going by the article, which called it a crew mistake, but either way, the computer was powerful enough for the correct procedure.

To me, more powerful is likely to imply more complex, and that can also offer more attack surface for bugs and mistakes, so to speak, and at the very least requires more work to prove correct.. so to just make it more capable than you actually need, just in case, may not always be the best choice?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> tl;dr - The Apollo 11 computer ran at 0.001GHz with 0.000002GB memory and 0.000032GB of storage (read-only at that). The display amounted to a few dozen 1-bit pixels.

And it took them to the Moon.

<comment><USER14> Now we seem to be completely dependent on computers, but at the time, I'm sure they didn't rely on them as much. The people pretty much navigated themselves to the moon

<comment><USER15> Some time ago, I was trying to buy a few hundred dollars worth of furniture, only to be informed that the cashier could not process my order because her computer was down. Everything I was buying had a price tag and I was paying cash, so I suggested that she find a pencil and some paper, and just write everything down, so she could enter it when the computer came back online. The concept apparently fried a circuit or two in her brain, because there was 6% sales tax on everything, and how was she supposed to know how much that would be? Plus, how was she supposed to know how much change to give me?

Nowadays, we don't have price tags on anything anymore. Prices are fetched from a database using the UPC as a key, so if the computer's down, the buyer is out of luck. At a previous employer, we sold specialty goods to contractors, so we had strong relationships with our customers. I drafted a plan to print up pads of paper sale forms that looked more or less like our (80x24 greenscreen) order screens, so if we lost connection to the mainframe, we could still move product from the warehouse to the customers; we'd just give them the product and bill 'em later. It was a risky move, but not really any riskier than sending our customers across the street to our competitors. To my knowledge, they've never had to use the manual system, thankfully.

We may not be "completely dependent on computers" just yet, but we seem to be getting there.

<comment><USER16> You don't have to wait for the register to go down to make a modern cashier have a mental segfault - just give them extra cash so you get less bills back.

For example on a $6.95 order hand over $12 and watch first for the bewilderment while keying in the amount and then the amazement when they give back the non-dollar bill change.

<comment><USER17> "fewer" bills back, not "less".

pedantic? yes. but as a fellow member of the "give-em-too-much-to-get-fewer- back" tribe, I feel that you might appreciate this particular bit of pedantry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The AGC is quite a feat, but already from the digital age. I find the TDC's used during the WWII more fascinating. I wonder how the space age would look like with electromechanical computers :)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpedo_Data_Computer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpedo_Data_Computer)

</comment><comment><USER19> How powerful was Shakespeare's word processor?

</comment><comment><USER20> Far Travelers is an awesome book about satellites that you can read for free. Much more information than you'd care to know about, it's amazing.

"Another significant improvement included the addition of extra "brain power" to allow the orbiters to perform more complex functions. Viking orbiters possessed two 4096-word, general-purpose computers that could operate in parallel or tandem modes. These replaced the small special purpose computers contained in Mariners 8 and 9. The capability for more rapid picture taking allowed for better site surveys and special regional studies. This capability was augmented by tape recorder systems that could store 2.112 megabits per second, with a capacity of 55 TV pictures-over half a billion bits of information."

[http://history.nasa.gov/SP-480/ch12.htm](http://history.nasa.gov/SP-480/ch12.htm)

[http://history.nasa.gov/SP-480/contents.htm](http://history.nasa.gov/SP-480/contents.htm)

</comment><comment><USER21> As someone who spends his time writing in High Level languages (though I have done lower level stuff in the distant past) these kinds of embedded computers hold a real fascination for me.

On my long term list of things to-do is get back into electronics and learn Ada (mostly because it's a million miles away from PHP).

<comment><USER22> Learning Ada is worth your while, embedded or no. Hint: If you have a problem and you find yourself reaching for C++, consider Ada instead. It's probably powerful enough for the task, safer, and more readable (therefore maintainable).

Try implementing Unix utilities (cat, ls, echo) in it for a weekend of fun. :)

<comment><USER21> My one true love programming language is Pascal (mainly because when I was exposed to it I'd only every used BASIC) and later Object Pascal.

Looking at Ada I see a lot of similarities, it looks like "home" to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> followed the links to the guy who built an AGC from scratch - [http://klabs.org/history/build_agc/](http://klabs.org/history/build_agc/) \- detailed technical info plus photos - amazing!

</comment><comment><USER24> The comparison with an early PC is not imaginative.

Think of the original Sinclair ZX81 with 1K of RAM and 8K ROM. Swap out the Z80 for a 6502 to get approximately the same register count. Without a screen to worry about (it took up too much RAM + CPU time) and you could do a lot, e.g. 1K chess or, as the adverts said, run a nucular power station with it. You could also service I/O with hardware interrupts.

</comment><comment><USER25> The details on the software and the in-flight patching in the Apollo 14 mission are quite amazing. Another point to make is that nowadays we have tremendous amount of computing power combined with comprehensive numerical analysis tools _on the planet_ which allows engineers to perform thorough simulations for the stages of space/air/sea travel and the behavior of vehicles.

</comment><comment><USER26> "(1/1000th of 1 MHz, much as 1 MHz is 1/1000 of 1 GHz)"

Half of 1 MHz is 500 KHz not 500 Hz ... it may sound slow but the PIC uCs we were using in the '90s were clocked at 20 MHz maximum and executed about 4 MIPS. For the 1960s, that computer really was rocket science!

</comment><comment><USER27> isnt all the code open source now? seems i read that it was not long ago</comment>


Startups On Steroids - <AUTHOR> http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/10/22/1022fastinternet.html

<comment><USER2> Sheesh, the article's only taking into account development time... I'm sure there was plenty of branstorming/planning time before actual implementation.</comment>


Businessweek Magazine's Classy Tribute to Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.socialcustomer.com/2011/10/steve-jobs-and-bloomberg-businessweek-magazine.html

<comment><USER2> More likely, they had this issue prepared ahead of time. They, like most observers, knew it was coming. No ads simplifies the logistics of swapping out the issue.

<comment><USER3> There's a story circulating about Time literally stopping the presses and creating a new issue in 3 hours. Wouldn't surprise me to learn this was done in similar fashion.

Source: [http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/06/apple_rivals_p...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/06/apple_rivals_partnerspress_pay_tribute_to_steve_jobs.html)

<comment> brown9-2 That Time-stopping-the-presses thing seems oddly/inappropriately self promotional also.

<comment><USER4> Here's the printing press for the LA Times:

[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/06/many-la- times-...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/06/many-la-times- newspapers-delivered-late-friday-morning.html)

It's hard to appreciate the drama of deciding to stop that enormous thing, pulp the hundreds of thousands of papers already printed, and re-print everything from scratch, without understanding the scale of the operation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> BusinessWeek has done some great design since Bloomberg took over, and this issue is no exception. Fitting, simple tribute.

<comment><USER5> Exactly! For those who doesn't yet know, Richard Turley, creative director of Businessweek has a tumblr page where he puts magazine's covers from time to time. Worth to follow. Url: <http://richardturley.tumblr.com/>

Some of my favourites:

Khadafi: [http://richardturley.tumblr.com/post/9373871854/now-about- th...](http://richardturley.tumblr.com/post/9373871854/now-about-that-oil- illustration-by-david-foldvari)

Bezos: [http://richardturley.tumblr.com/post/10807034868/amazon- the-...](http://richardturley.tumblr.com/post/10807034868/amazon-the-company- that-ate-the-world-jeff)

9/11: [http://richardturley.tumblr.com/post/8470431158/been-a- bit-q...](http://richardturley.tumblr.com/post/8470431158/been-a-bit-quiet- here-on-the-cover-front-mainly)

Moynihan: [http://richardturley.tumblr.com/post/9957165968/can- moynihan...](http://richardturley.tumblr.com/post/9957165968/can-moynihan- save-bofa-story-here)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > There was not a single ad in the issue.

I would say it's the other way around.

<comment><USER7> Given the perceived importance of the iPad (and digital publishing) to the future of the magazine industry, one might say this is a canny strategic move on Newsweek's part.

As I've said several times here, Jobs and Apple have made contributions across sufficiently many sectors of society that I do _not_ attribute strictly self- interested motives, but given 1) all the cultural and historical significance of his passing and 2) the value of a bit of kow-towing, the action on Newsweek's part doesn't entirely surprise me.

<comment><USER8> Not to nitpic, but it was BusinessWeek, not Newsweek.

<comment><USER7> Gah! Point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow. I might actually _buy_ this magazine from a newsstand. Way to differentiate!

<comment><USER10> Yep, I'm actually kind of excited to hit the news stand in the morning in hopes of getting a few. It's definitely a first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those marveling at how quickly Businessweek, Time and others have turned around tributes to Jobs, this is exactly where print journalists earn their stripes. Newsweeklies have to respond quickly to breaking stories, if they are going to be seen as relevant by readers.

For those who are prematurely predicting the death of print media, collections like this show how journalism professionals can still run rings around all but the best online news outlets.

<comment><USER12> You realize they all have this sort of thing prepared ahead of time?

<comment><USER11> See the Twitter links posted elsewhere in this thread, but for the most part it looks like they didn't. I'm sure that they had some advance reportage on- hand to draw from, but that's the case for almost any major story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Where can I get one of these in SF? Nothing in the mission seems to carry BW.

<comment><USER14> I just posted a task on TaskRabbit for it because I am also clueless on where to buy physical magazines anymore :(

<comment><USER15> Good News on 24th Street should have it by tomorrow.

<comment><USER13> Thanks. I'll check it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> On the night of Steve Jobs's death I stopped by the Fifth Avenue cube just to see what the mood was like (it was pretty much normal with a small crowd outside and some flowers) and I ran into a former colleague who now is a reporter at Businessweek. She told me that this week's issue was literally ready to go to press and then the news of Jobs's death broke, so they threw it out and she was there at 11PM getting customer comment on the event, and everyone else was putting in another 12 hour shift to re-create the issue (of course, some of the content had already been assembled in the event of Jobs's passing).

Great to see that their hustle and hardwork paid off. It's an entirely different thing to redo a weekly magazine the night of publication than it is a newspaper or website.

<comment><USER17> Not to discount Businessweek's release, but the reality is that media organizations devote enormous amounts of time to prepare for the imminent death of a popular/famous figure. I'd bet that weeks of effort were put into what consists of Businessweek's release on Jobs' death while Steve was alive. What they produced doesn't come together in a couple days.

Remember the Bloomberg accidental _17 page_ obituary release for Steve Jobs in 2007?

Don't discount the media's efforts when being the first with the "extensive article" on the death and past history of someone important puts you first out of the gate.

<comment><USER18> Agreed. It's a bit naive to think they assembled this at the last minute.

With that said, having a whole issue dedicated to someone in this manner (photos, quotes, no ads) is still pretty awesome.

<comment><USER19> It's perfectly alright to believe that they _assembled_ this in the last minute. It's a bit naive to believe that they _created_ all the content in the last minute. (Some of the content, however, most certainly had to be created in the last minute.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A fitting tribute indeed.

In fact, I'd pay to have something like this for some of my family members once they pass. Sure, everyone wouldn't have 60+ pages, but having a coffee table tribute mag that tells their life story with beautiful pictures and typography would be a fitting tribute to anyone.

Anyone do something like this? Great weekend project for someone to hack together.

<comment><USER21> You'd pay to have it done? Wouldn't it only be fitting if you made it yourself?

<comment><USER20> By have it done I mean:

\- I upload pics and timeline

\- Choose most important events or quotes

\- The site pushes out a preview that uses a professionally designed layout

\- If I like it I can purchase it

\- Nice tribute mag personalized for my loved one arrives in the mail

<comment><USER22> iPhoto can actually get you pretty close to this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there any way to buy this single issue online?

<comment><USER24> Yes. B&N allows single issue purchase of BusinessWeek viewable on the nook and nook apps. Amazon only allows you to view it on the Kindle (and not the Kindle app either). $1.50 for a single issue, no subscription....it's a no brainer.

<comment><USER23> I meant a physical copy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> is there any way the peeps outside of US can see it? i really want to read it.

<comment><USER26> There are high quality PDFs illegally uploaded to file sharing sites. Just do a search for it.

I couldn't find a way to buy the PDF unfortunately. It's always a shame when pirating something is the only way to get access to it.

<comment><USER25> well if they were generous enough to not give any ads and make is a Steve-only issue, they should also have made it publicly available for free. It makes no sense to charge for a tribute issue IMO :O

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just got the UK Kindle edition. It doesn't have any pictures! Does anyone know where I could find a print copy?

</comment><comment><USER28> Do you know whether this is sold only in the U.S. or worldwide as well?

</comment><comment><USER29> Anyone know if this will be available in Newstand on iOS5? The "Store" link on my GM seed doesn't work yet.

<comment><USER30> I just downloaded the issue on my iPad. Download the businessapp, and you'll need to subscribe (but you can cancel later) to download the current issue of Steve Jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> When does this issue hit news stands?

</comment><comment><USER32> Lovely tribute to a great man. Too bad I can't order this in Canada.

</comment><comment><USER33> There was one ad... a big Apple ad! Just kidding.</comment>


Dry erase board lined with IR sensors to record pen strokes [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxmVtfF6pIo <comment><USER2> My high school had these in 1995. Each marker color had a different reflective pattern on a band around the tip so the scanning laser could read it like a bar code. I remember the eraser having a solid reflective band all the way around. It was pretty cool, as we all got whiteboard "transcripts" emailed to us at the end of the class that you could play back / pause / rewind / etc... whenever you wanted.

Also, these boards had no projectors (they used real ink in the markers) and didn't require special markers (just the barcoded pen collars, which were removable)

<comment><USER3> And the erasers were circular, so that their rotation wasn't significant and didn't need to be known by the software.

<comment><USER2> Yes!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. If you'd like to see a kickstarter project out of this, please upvote this comment!

<comment><USER4> Not that you asked, but here are some ways I think you could go about releasing this to the public and make some money off of it (only one method uses Kickstarter):

1\. You could do a Kickstarter where you sold a kit that you sourced with hardware from Alibaba and code you wrote yourself. This would be a lot of effort, but could be fairly profitable if the KS succeeds.

2\. You could release some how to instructions on how people can make their own panel, and charge for software. You don't even need KS for this, just a PayPal (or other money transfer company) account.

3\. You could release your code on GitHub for free and let people pay you out of the kindness of their hearts, either through PayPal, Patreon, or Gratipay.

<comment><USER5> > 3\. You could release your code on GitHub for free and let people pay you > out of the kindness of their hearts, either through PayPal, Patreon, or > Gratipay.

Please don't do this, you will starve. Very few people are able to make enough money from open source in this way and I don't think this is the kind of thing that's suited to it.

Commercialize this technology, market it, sell it.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Corporate and university shops often come off like the rich-yet- freeloader archetype whom goes to the donation-based museum or listens to NPR but never puts anything in... with loads of cash they can afford easily afford it, but they won't it if they can have their maintenance folks can put it together for "free."

The main considerations revolve around:

a. Is it patentable? (OP should contact a former USPTO examiner or a reputable legal shop like Orrick.) Provisional patent a minimum, seems a must, or it's not worth going forward if Mr. Wonderful can knock it off in China.

b. Is it worth the effort to source and offer components which are commodities? Some folks want "batteries included" and will pay for it, so mark those up to where it makes sense to make it worth the while.

Disclaimer: I've worked inside ivy school research and non-research depts and enterprise shops too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please don't listen to all the naysayers (I was about to be one of them) who are saying this has "already been done." Sure, they are right. But is there one in every room of every office? No. But there could be.

The thing that has changed between back then when this stuff was first done and now, is that everybody has smartphones. The old dinosaur systems aren't priced to take this into account.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. Doing something for the first time, vs doing it well enough for adoption, or in a way that is more accessible is a creation itself.

If this was a frame or a kit I could attach to an existing board, I'd be ordering it right now. Shipping whiteboards is expensive so I hope that might be an option.

As the Apple Pencil has demonstrated again, most new things aren't always quite new. There's few form factor, interface, or screen innovations. What will be new is new ways to create using what we have.

Where you come across them, Naysayers are usually self-doubting doubt worshippers. Every person with unimpressed input should be taken with a grain of salt relative to how much a person feels the only thing of value is if it's something new or novel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you are interested in a full commercial version of this (sharing an analog whiteboard with a link), check out [http://smartkapp.com](http://smartkapp.com)

(Disclosure: Am employee of said company)

<comment><USER10> Ouch, I know that when you see someone has already created a product that you are working on you should take it as a validation of your idea and not become discouraged. However, seeing this I can't help feeling bad for the OP. The OP has a prototype, while this (seems) like a fully fledged and very slick product with all bases covered and it is even cheap.

<comment><USER11> $900-1200 isn't what I'd call "cheap" (OP says parts for their prototype is around $150).

Also, another person in this thread mentioned a 42" one from China thats $120 [1]. That is more in the "cheap" range.

[1] [http://goo.gl/N02wRa](http://goo.gl/N02wRa)

<comment><USER12> If parts for your prototype are around $150, most conventional electronic product pricing wisdom would put this at around $600-$750 retail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is cool as a DIY project, but digital whiteboards have been around since at least 1991: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Board](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_Board)

<comment><AUTHOR> All the previous whiteboards force you to buy a projector or invest in smart pens. This costs ~150USD to make vs. 1500USD+ for the kind of smart boards that existed in the past.

<comment><USER13> You get 42" versions from China for USD$118 each. I'd focus on the software improvements and benefits.

[http://goo.gl/N02wRa](http://goo.gl/N02wRa)

<comment><USER14> you could probably connect this to rPi to make it smart/connected.

<comment><USER13> It's probably using some no-name USB HID driver so yes, it will look like a mouse to a Linux system as long as the udev tables match up. Might need some tweaking to handle the multi-touch stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One tip from someone that has worked with IR emitters/detectors: make sure your product can handle direct and reflected sunlight.

I'd hate to see you getting all the way through a kickstarter and then finding out you need to rework your frame to reject ambient and stray IR.

<comment><USER15> Don't these types of systems always use AC modulation for just that reason?

<comment><USER13> Usually. Not always.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Fairly neat. Consider the listing status of the video. Right now it is discouraging people from sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Changed the status to public

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's a poor man's version that uses <$50 of hardware (a wii remote and an ir led)

If anyone's interested in playing around with it I'll put up some nicer usage instructions

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX8JnC7-K8k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX8JnC7-K8k)

[https://github.com/liamuk/Omniboard](https://github.com/liamuk/Omniboard)

<comment><USER18> i'm interested... i looked at your site, but didn't see any more info on it... thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is this working on a similar system to Optical touchscreen technology? Did you build the ir sensors into the edge of the glass or at the surface?

[http://www.planar.com/media/111012/touch_technologies_white_...](http://www.planar.com/media/111012/touch_technologies_white_paper.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Different technology. This is what we've used: [http://www.touchscreen- me.com/technologies-comparison-infrar...](http://www.touchscreen- me.com/technologies-comparison-infrared.php) Same result can be achieved with CMOS sensors mounted on the corners as well but ambient lighting conditions affect the way the board works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Out of interest, I was looking at one of the IR touchscreen frames you linked to.

The control boards seem to vary in terms of the number of touch points they can monitor.

So I'm wondering how you distinguish between a marker pen and the larger whiteboard eraser.

Is it possible to access the raw output from the IR sensors I wonder.

</comment><comment><USER21> Virtual Ink, anyone? [http://www.mimio.com/en- NA.aspx](http://www.mimio.com/en-NA.aspx) Think about how much fun it will be to try to sell expensive stuff to schools and colleges before you raise a lot of money for this.

<comment><USER22> Schools love spending tons of money on crap like this, instead of paying teachers. Blackboard is a huge company in this space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Really impressive. Must be pretty sensitive IR sensors to not have false detections when the marker/eraser gets close to the board but doesn't touch it. Any info on the hardware and software stack?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. If the pen is about 2mm off the surface, there is a false positive. Also haven't done palm rejection yet, so your palm needs to be off the board to write.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used an off the shelf IR touch frame bought from Aliexpress: [http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=AS...](http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=AS_20150911112236&SearchText=ir+touch+frame) All touch inputs fed into Raspbery PI with a wifi dongle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> couldn't we have a webcam to stream/record the video? or perhaps capture snapshots? If needed we might subtract the human from the video stream using some basic machine vision techniques.

<comment><USER25> Exactly my thoughts when I saw this. The problem with writer obstructing the view can be solved by place the camera _behind_ the board and using a translucent white plastic sheet for the board. If the front of the board is illuminated well, then the camera shouldn't have any problems in capturing the stuff being written on the translucent board. Mirror the image in software and you are done!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looked like it was zoomed in on the written part. I wonder if it would gradually zoom out, as you write more, or if you could scroll around on the display to see the rest of the writing.

</comment><comment><USER27> I remember my dad having something very similar in his office when I was a kid. You could write on it like a normal white board then it would print out a copy of it for you.

</comment><comment><USER28> Very cool DIY project.

Without details of price or advantage over existing tech I don't see it as a fundable/kickstartable effort... but good luck.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hey arey_abhishek I am an investor and have been looking to invest in a product like this! Let's talk! DM me @sidsays on Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER30> Impressive. What platform did you build this on?

</comment><comment><USER31> It'd be nice to do something similar to this on one of those cheap $200-300 40" TVs that go on sale sometimes (the kind that have very bad visual quality, but could reasonably display large high contrast text, and crude lines), and just record where a stylus is and make an extra cheap and ghetto pen TV out of it.

</comment><comment><USER32> I want one. Seems like you're saying we can't buy it currently?

</comment><comment><USER33> very cool.

practically thinking, why not buy a large touch screen and use some sort of stylus instead of this white board?

in both cases, the user needs to buy special hardware. so i would think the costs would be comparable.

genuine question, not diminishing your work

<comment><AUTHOR> A 85inch DIY whiteboard will cost about 500$ to make while the MSFT surface hub costs 19,999$.</comment></comment>


The MTV Problem with Product Managment - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/11/the-mtv-problem-with-product-managment/ <comment><USER2> The joke/trope about MTV not playing any music was alive and well when I finally got MTV around '98 or so when I was in high school. TRL was the show that was on when I got home from school. I remember when Eminem first was shown as a "hot" new video, then jumped to #1 on TRL. That's how influential the show was with their base (which was me I guess, sorta).

At first they would play a large chunk of the videos before cutting out, then as it kept getting more and more popular, less and less of the actual videos would play.

For example, they started inserting live "fans" talking about the video (e.g. I REQUESTED LIMP BIZKIT BECAUSE THEY ROCK _TEEN SCREAM_ ) which cut out the sound from the music video.

Then they started bringing in celebrities to hawk their latest album or movie, they'd spend about 20 seconds on the video, then cut to the celebrity for their reaction and then a question about their new video or new album or new product.

The producers of the show would also lick their lips whenever something "crazy" happened so they could repeat that clip over and over again in 5 different "music" clip shows and/or discuss it during the MTV MUSIC AWARDS. Example: Mariah Carey had her infamous breakdown on TRL and all they just played that clip of her non-stop. "MTV NEWS REPORTS MARIAH CAREY BREAKDOWN! YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST!", "TOP 5 CELEBRITY MELTDOWNS That Happened on MTV"

Basically MTV the channel became a, "hey remember when this happened on MTV?" show. Less and less of their content was being driven by music videos since music videos make $0. Bringing in celebrities, having celebrities, reality shows that cost almost nothing to make (I'm surprised they didn't figure this out right off the bat with Real World). That's where the real money laid.

</comment><comment><USER3> _> MTV could have grown with the teenagers for the 1990s and now be a music channel for people in their 40s._

The "could have grown" isn't supported by evidence. The author appears to be unaware of economic realities:

      1) record labels wanted MTV to start pay royalties instead of historically getting music videos for free

      2) youtube didn't exist in 1981-2005 [1]

      3) music's general decline audience attention (video games, web surfing, etc) and discretionary spending ($$$ peaked in 1999)

[1] Why Doesn't MTV Play Music Videos Anymore? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ysyZF- DZFY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ysyZF-DZFY)

</comment><comment><USER4> Globally the demise of MTV was even more obvious. During the music videos + beavis & butt-head years there globally was only one channel, which was awesome as you knew that the same thing was being watched by all other teens watching it around the world. Watching it felt like tuning in to a truly global teen culture, which resonated perfectly with the coming of the Internet that allowed you to communicate effortlessly with people around the world.

Then in the late 90s they had the bright idea to start splitting it off into smaller and smaller channels until all you had was a "your small local part of the world"-version of MTV, and the magic was gone.

</comment><comment><USER5> > The move resulted in an increase in the channel's audience share of nearly > 150%.

Not so much of a problem, it seems.

MTV also went through a time where we really changed the way we listened to music. With Youtube, Spotify and all the other similar services, anyone can watch the videos or listen to the music they want to. Their suggestions/radios are also very good at finding related music, so they have a become a good source to find new music.

All that makes the old MTV obsolete, IMO. Although you could say the same about all TV channels, even though they don't seem to be doing too bad.</comment>


Show HN: Search and browse About sections of HN profiles - <AUTHOR> http://skimhn.com/iama.html

<comment><USER2> You can actually use HNSearch for that[1]. Which is one of the things I've used to create HNWho a few years ago: <http://www.hnwho.com/>

But I really like this design though.

[1] [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=Software+...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=Software+Engineer&sortby=karma+desc)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops! Shame on me. Somehow I completely missed native HNSearch interface for users.

Nice work with www.hnwho.com btw! Very useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice - I used this to search my current city. Someone mooted a #HNMeetup in Brisbane recently [1], to 3 responses - now I know there are 21 people who list it in their profile, which is a bigger potential audience to start discussions with [2].

[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5205429> [2] Even accounting for people who live here and don't mention it, and those who haven't updated their profile since moving away.

</comment><comment><USER4> It would be nice to be able to search for parts of words. For example, typing "metamorphium" isn't enough to bring up my profile. I have to type the full "metamorphium.com"

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! You can use asterisks like this:

        *morphium*

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> could you highlight the search term? There are plenty of jQuery plugins to do it. Here's one: [http://johannburkard.de/blog/programming/javascript/highligh...](http://johannburkard.de/blog/programming/javascript/highlight- javascript-text-higlighting-jquery-plugin.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Thanks for your feedback! Great suggestion!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice. I'll be using this for hiring!

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't tell recruiters about it!</comment></comment>