My Raspberry Pi Thinks It's a Mainframe - <AUTHOR> http://www.designspark.com/content/my-raspberry-pi-thinks-its-mainframe <comment><USER2> For those that are interested, the IBM Mainframe family is a fascinating architecture, completely and totally with nothing in common with modern mid- range or microcomputing.

MVS is the ancestor of a modern operating system, z/OS, also capable of running on hercules, albeit with much more by way of hardware requirements[1] (I wouldn't want to run it on a raspberry pi). IBM's licencing prohibits the installation of z/OS on anything other than IBM mainframe hardware, which in itself led to a bizarre situation where IBM, defender of open source projects and patent abuse decided to start abusing patents against an open source project[2]

[1] - [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRW4iPhCDSM&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRW4iPhCDSM&feature=related)

[2] - [http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/04/ibm- br...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/04/ibm-breaks-oss- patent-promise-targets-mainframe-emulator/) [2]

<comment><USER3> Long ago I found an IBM 360 emulator written in 2 pages of APL and published in some technical magazine. Anyone recall this and have a copy? (I've found websites with copies of similar articles, but lacked the straight-up APL code.)

<comment><USER4> You're not thinking of Falkoff/Iverson/Sussenguth's _A Formal Description of SYSTEM/360_ , are you? [http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~jhowland/class.files.cs2321.html/...](http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~jhowland/class.files.cs2321.html/falkoff.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Close, but not quite. As I recall (some 20 years ago) it had two pages of actual APL code (not notation, real runnable code).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author's comparison doesn't really work. The power of those IBM mainframes was in the entire architecture (SNA - System Network Architecture) not just the processing unit. Terminals such as the 3270 talked to cluster controllers that talked to batch controllers that talked to other controllers that fed the processor etc. (simplified).

Data making it's way through the device chain was nothing for a 3 MIPS processor with 64 MB of internal memory and 3MB IO to handle.

As far as IPL's were concerned, it was more common for the controllers to be IPL'd than it was for the processor. Because of heat and cooling issues, nobody ever wanted to shutdown the processing system or even let those boards deviate much from their operational temperature. Bad things always happened when they powered down and cooled off. Always.

Raspberry PI is better compared to a PDP-11, a VAX, or a Data General (Soul of a New Machine).

<comment><USER6> Why would cooling off cause problems? Stories like this make me feel as far removed from my computing ancestors as I feel from my farming grandparents.

<comment><USER7> As chips / boards / etc cool, they move and contract and (massive generalisation) this causes mechanical wear . I'm sure someone more versed in such stuff can give a detailed explanation of what can happen. (there are lots more side effects to power cycling gear as well)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Couple of years ago I did this on my shiny new N900, and for a brief period owned one of the world's smallest (if not _the_ smallest) MVS systems. Alas, time marches on and that N900 seems rather old-school now.

<comment><USER8> I once ported BCPL to the GP2X. BCPL came with an EDSAC simulator, so I used it as the test app for the BCPL port .. so for a while, I had an EDSAC in my pocket. ;)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDSAC>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gp2x>

XOX for the win!

<comment><USER9> Guys, if you ever encounter a woman with a t-shirt that says "Talk nerdy to me", I believe you will have her instantly jump on you and have wild sex, if you tell her exactly what seclorum just said. Which, by the way, I have absolutely no idea what it means. :|

<comment><USER9> Hmn, erm... I guess that didn't quite have the comical impact I was hoping or expecting.

My sincerest apologies to whomever this offended, it was absolutely not my intention!

<comment><USER10> You should avoid the whole gender/sex angle and just make some comment about extreme nerdiness.

"I'm a total a nerd and have been all my life I've been on HN for over 2yrs and I can honestly say there's nowhere else on the entire internet where people make comments that even come close to how nerdy yours does!"

That being said it still isn't that funny and it doesn't really add anything to the conversation, but likely wouldn't have offended anyone either.

EDIT: forget to mention kudos for apologizing and not whining about downvotes like most people seem to now.

<comment><USER9> It's a personal challenge that I have, not to take offense or go on the offensive and not taking it personally. A year ago, I would have reacted in a completely different manner.

But you're right, "That is the nerdiest thing I have ever heard in my life" would probably have been better. And yet, still not constructive in any way. At least this little altercation _is_ constructive, at least for my attitude!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While this is cute, a mainframe is so much more than just a CPU. The draw of a mainframe is the support for massive I/O and bulletproof hardware.

<comment><USER12> Old school Manframes have poor IO by today's standards as in less than a mid range wireless access point. And, the software and hardware where ridiculously stable by today's standards but, if you look at mean time between failures in therms of operations preformed not just time they once again fall behind.

PS: Still, to give an idea of why Manframes where considered such IO beasts a high end PC's IO is about ~1000x as fast (HDMI is 10.2 Gbit/s + USB + Gigabit Ethernet etc), but it's got ~1,000,000x the processing power.

<comment><USER13> Of course, if you don't pretend that mainframes stopped advancing, you see a different picture. Modern zSeries (or whatever new marketing they've come up with) have multiple 10Gbit interfaces to a network, and can keep them all fed. Not to mention special offload processors for AES and X509 certs, and of course hardware partitioning and virtualization built in. Mainframes are still pretty badass - a lot of stuff that is exciting and new in the server space is stuff that IBM was doing for decades in the Mainframe space.

There is just something very cool about handling something on the order of 10^5 fully ACID transactions per second, while still allowing real time database querying and on-the-fly hardware failure tolerance.

<comment><USER14> The levels of hardware failure tolerance are amazing. I believe that hot swap CPUs fit somewhere in that list, as does memory. (see the 'fault tolerance' section here: [http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/resiliency/datadr...](http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/resiliency/datadriven/server.html#design))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised someone hasn't mentioned attempting to supplant IBM's older mainframes with smaller units like Pi, Arduino or Bone. However, maybe it's generally known that ... you can't. Because IBM has the same hardware/software tying licensing arrangement that people decry Apple for having.

<comment><USER16> What is bone? ddg search doesn't find anything easily.

<comment><USER17> He means the BeagleBone. It's an ARM-based single-board computer that fits in a mint tin.

<http://beagleboard.org/bone>

<comment><USER18> I've been saving mint tins for something just like this....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Shortly after our 3270 terminal attaches to Hercules the VM system starts to boot, or "IPL" to use the IBM parlance._

Brilliant, I've wondered for a while now what my boss has meant every time he's told me that they're IPL'ing the mainframe and that I'll have to remount my exported NFS shares.

<comment><USER20> "Initial Program Load", which actually makes more sense than "bootstrap".

<comment><USER21> If you had been around that generation of systems and toggled in a 30 byte program in hex or octal that loaded a paper tape or card deck that then loaded the actual OS, bootstrap seemed a reasonable term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The [Hercules System / 360](<http://www.hercules-390.org/_> that the author mentions and links to is maintained by [Jay Maynard](<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Maynard>), ROFLcon alumni and better known as [Tron Guy](<http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tron-guy>).

</comment><comment><USER23> A really neat project is the Erlang Embedded and a parallel project, Nerves.

I imagine a little cluster of these things in my house :)

<http://www.erlang-solutions.com/news/1/entry/1307> <http://nerves- project.org/>

</comment><comment><USER24> But still you can't actually buy a Raspberry Pi ...

<comment><USER25> Sure you can, you just won't receive it for 2-3 months ;)

<comment><USER24> It's disappointing :( I work in education and would like to try this thing out for a variety of projects, but the delays in getting them to market mean I probably won't get one. There are alternatives, not least (for the very interesting original article) just setting up a Linux box and using Hercules, etc, on that. It's a real shame that supply problems risk putting a damper on the huge public interest and enthusiasm for the Raspberry Pi.

<comment><USER26> Its disappointing in the short term, but look at the big picture. All this extra interest and purchases from the private sector if handled correctly will let them buy in bigger bulks, twist more arms in manufacturing, and find and fix more bugs. In the long run getting this boards out to a wider audience will give you a more stable, feature-rich and cheaper product.

<comment><USER24> I hope that will be the case. My ultimate motivation is to get students interested in programming and all the other things (control tech, etc) a cheap expendable PC can facilitate. I could easily get 20 of these if they were available but getting one is tricky enough at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have only recently started looking at the Raspberry Pi, one thing that struck me was the use of SD memory for storage... I have used USB sticks to boot Linux before and they only lasted a few months of continuous use. Perhaps I'm missing something? Other than that I'm impressed, the device has lots of potential.

<comment><USER28> Don't use a swap partition. That's typically the cause of early flash death. I have an old EeePC 901, with 12GB of onboard flash - it's still going after 2-3 years of relatively heavy use.

<comment><USER29> Not swapping and getting rid of Linux's ridiculously noisy (for a personal laptop) and duplicative logs and perhaps mounting with "-o noatime" will help a lot as well.

Additionally, the SDD in your 901 isn't just a hunk of flash - it contains additional logic that will perform Wear Leveling on the physical flash modules, resulting in more write cycles before you see a failure. (Higher- capacity thumb drives also have wear levelers to fight against the OS's propensity to always allocate data sectors in the same order, but they're a different variety than those found in SSDs, from what I've read)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What about a data center, consisting of millions of raspberry PIs?

<comment><USER31> Are there any scenarios where this would be preferable to virtualization?

<comment><USER32> If you are an ARM shareholder

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's always amazing to see how people computed in the time of Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe.

just kidding...but I can't help but wonder if even the people who are kids now will realize this stuff isn't from the nineteenth century... I mean, just look at the device you're reading this on :) We've come a long, long way.

<comment><USER34> "It's always amazing to see how people computed in the time of Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe." - Then you'll love <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rzAL5YwFow> .

<comment><USER35> Thanks for the video. Can't wait for jgrahamc to build it.</comment></comment></comment>


Japanese fleet catches 177 whales in latest hunt - <AUTHOR> https://japantoday.com/category/national/japan-fleet-catches-177-whales-in-latest-hunt <comment><USER3> Meanwhile, Norway kills more whales than Japan on average according to the WDC[1] and proceeds to increase their quota for number of whales they can kill[2] all while running government-backed campaigns to market whale-meat as hip-and-trendy[3].

The real gruesome thing here is how we're not just hunting whales, but that the ones we do hunt are roughly 60% of the time pregnant ones[4].

[1] [https://us.whales.org/whaling-facts](https://us.whales.org/whaling-facts)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/07/norway-b...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/07/norway- boosts-whaling-quota-international-opposition)

[3] [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-30/whale-meat-marketed- to...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-30/whale-meat-marketed-to-young- norwegians-as-hip-and-trendy/9802006)

[4] [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/world/asia/whales- japan.h...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/world/asia/whales-japan.html)

<comment><USER4> Whatever anyone thinks about whaling, that article from The Guardian has a clear agenda of taking things out of context. It just says "Norway has announced a 28% increase" in year-over-year whaling.

That's true, but compare that to historical values:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NorwegianWhaleCatches.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NorwegianWhaleCatches.png)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_Norway#/media/File:...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_Norway#/media/File:Whales_Nordic.png)

It's pretty telling that they're not opting to tell you that it's a gradual ramp-up which is still around 1/2 of what they were doing in the 1980s.

The larger context here is that in 1992 Iceland, Norway et al. partially split off from the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and formed their own North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission (NAMMCO)[1].

Whaling quotas are now at an impasse where these countries decide them unilaterally, because the members of the IWC won't even have the discussion of what would be a reasonable science-based quota.

I have yet to see any suggestion that the whales being hunted in the North- Atlantic by these countries are threatened by these whaling practices. An large year-over-year increase on a relatively small quota tells you nothing. You need to look at how large the total stock is, how long it takes to renew etc.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Marine_Mammal_C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Marine_Mammal_Commission)

<comment><USER5> I was under the impression that most of the push back on whaling is because whales are intelligent/sentient.

It's like asking someone what they think a reasonable, science based quota for murdering people is. You're not gonna find a lot of room to negotiate when that's the belief

<comment><USER6> That's a slippery slope. Cows are intelligent, and have emotions. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA8dAnlD51o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA8dAnlD51o)

<comment><USER7> It is, but whales are pretty close to the top of that slope. If you elected not to kill any animals due to probable sentience, the short list would probably look like dolphins, elephants, and whales.

<comment><USER8> Wouldn't numerous apes that operate in groups that seem like simple societies, some of which have been seen passing down traditions like very simple tool use, make the list?

<comment><USER9> Yeah, don't eat those too.

<comment><USER6> Crows? Not that I'd _want_ to eat them.

<comment> King-Aaron Can confirm, have tried to cook up a crow over the campfire for giggles, and it was not something I'll do again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My head spins about how schizophrenic the vast majority of the population is when it comes to meat consumption and love of animals.

People shed tears over pets, yet pay others to abuse animals (factory farming) just to enjoy a meal that's equivalently tasty to easily available options. People will condemn the Japanese for eating whales or dolphins, the Chinese for eating dogs, meanwhile they themselves cause the suffering of significantly more animals.

I hope in very near future, the mocumentary _Carnage_ begins to resemble reality: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_(2017_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_\(2017_film\))

<comment><USER11> This is why I am incredibly excited about the impossible burger:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebNeUihciDI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebNeUihciDI)

It's the ultimate fake burger that has a 1/10 of the environment while being vegan.

Now if there was an equivalent for chicken then it I would never eat another animal again!

<comment><USER12> Another meaning behind OP's comment might be that you can eat food that is equally as tasty as meat, without eating meat or meat replacements. Obviously this wouldn't work for 50+ years since we're all entrenched in eating meat, but vegetarian dishes /can be/ just as tasty. I'd imagine hundreds of years of improving mostly meat dishes has made them better, but that could be fixed.

<comment><USER13> If you're going to eat vegetarian, there are some cuisines, like Indian, that give you more good options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I tried Minke whale when I was in Iceland. Unfortunately for them, they taste very good - Maybe the best meat I've tried. It's like a cross between beef and tuna but with a deep, complex (and very slightly gamey) aftertaste. It was surprisingly cheap too.

In spite of this, I'm not sure I would eat it again though; while eating it, I kept getting flashbacks of a video I saw of a whale being harpooned and pulled out of the water with blood everywhere.

Rationally though, I don't know if eating whales is more immoral than eating other animals. On the plus side, if you kill a single whale, you can feed a lot of people; you could save several dozens of cows... Not to mention that you're saving the lives of millions of krill that would have been eaten by the whale that day.

So if you're a shrimp sympathizer, then you should consider whaling a good thing. Personally, I can relate to feeling small and defenseless in this world so I can sympathize with the shrimp on some level.

<comment><USER15> As someone with experience in animal farming (through family and friends), the whale issue seriously does confuse me. The way commercial meat farming is done is outright fucking disgusting. It's one of the biggest environmental issues of our era.

Endangered species should be protected, absolutely. But if we're going to rag on countries for fishing un-endangered whales, it's very much hypocritical.

"The IUCN Red List labels the common minke whale as Least Concern.[30] The Antarctic minke whale is listed as Data deficient.[31]

COSEWIC puts both species in the Not At Risk category [1]. NatureServe lists them as G5 which means the species is secure on global range [2]."

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

For reference, I try eat as little meat in life as I can in general, and when I do eat it, I try to as ethical as possible. I'm not perfect, but I'm always trying to be better. I try not to judge other cultures on their eating habits though, when we're systematically destroying the planet so our cheeseburgers can be $1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I hate the Western eco-hypocrisy when it comes to whaling.

Japan (and most of Scandinavia) have been whaling continuously for generations. Dolphin 'farming' for hundreds of years without impacting yield or stocks. It's a huge cultural activity and they protect it.

But over the 1800-1900s the US, UK and Australia overfished whales at industrial scales making populations plummet. Whaling towns in Southern Australia literally ran red with rivers of blood. So in the 1970s and 80s after we'd reaped industrial benefit and destroyed wild stock, we Westerners decided that's whaling was in fact really bad and decided to ban it - <USER2> we f'ed it up for everyone.

There are arguments about cruelty during whale hunting, but the same can be said for all farming, but the hypocrisy that a group of people can come in decimate an animal population and then tell everyone not to participate in their culture just doesn't sit right.

</comment><comment><USER17> At least we know the ocean is not empty yet...

<comment><USER18> I have been browsing through Wikipedia articles on various types of whales recently, and I was pleasantly surprised how much some whale populations have recovered since most of the world stopped hunting them. The conservation status of humpback whales is LC ("Least concern"), gray whales, too.

It's not all good, far from it, but it is nice to know that collectively, we manage to not mess up _everything_ we touch every once in a while.

<comment><USER19> Only some whales are recovered. Lets not forget that other went extinct "yesterday", and some big whales didn't recover after fourty years of work. Is not so simple.

<comment><USER18> Unfortunately, you are right. I did not mean to imply that everything is fine for the whales.

Some species recover much more quickly than others, and in the mean time, we continue to mess up their environment, be it by overfishing, global warming, noise pollution (or just plain old pollution) or ships running over whales like cars run over rabbits.

All I meant to say was that at least _some_ species have recovered rather impressively under these conditions. Which is _far_ from perfect. But imagine mankind had just continued hunting whales on the scale that was common sixty or seventy years ago - there probably would not be enough whales around today for Japan to kill 177 of them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gmail auto labels - <AUTHOR> http://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/gmail-auto-labels/ <comment><USER2> Interesting.

I've recently gone through a bit of a reorganization of my inbox and filters, and as a slight alternative, I found that generally speaking, most providers are pretty good about keeping the "from" address that they send communication from relatively stable. My filters basically look like lists of the form `from:(email@example.com OR firstname.lastname@example.com OR email@example.com)` and I apply a label like `orders`.

I have most of it still coming to my inbox so that I can vet each one quickly before archiving, but from there they have an appropriate label applied, and it's easy for me to go back and find them again. Some very common emails, like when I get an email from Square as I buy a coffee, I add "skip my inbox" and have it archive automatically.

It may be a little more manual in that occasionally I have to go in and add a new email address to a filter, but so far I've found the required maintenance to be very minimal (order of minutes every few months) and it saves me from having to maintain a `+` address or script.

<comment><USER3> > I found that generally speaking, most providers are pretty good about > keeping the "from" address that they send communication from relatively > stable.

My observation is a bit different. I noticed that the marketing teams usually put a from address like "firstname.lastname@example.com", "michael@" or any other first name they use to make it more "personal". This makes my filtering a bit difficult, since I usually want those e-mails to end up in "Newsletter" label, but all others important from this address like "email@example.com" to remain in my inbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Using plus addressing is really handy, but unfortunately spammers figured it out about 20 years ago. First, they would just strip the part after the plus, and now sometimes I see them add stuff like +amazon or +facebook. It's still a good trick, but you might get spam showing up that wouldn't otherwise.

The slightly better solution is to register a domain that is just for email, and then allow any arbitrary email address to come to your main account, and filter on that. You can even do it in Google. Register an app domain (although I guess those aren't free anymore?) and then just set it to deliver all unknown addresses to the default account (and then forward the default account to your regular gmail while you transition).

I've been doing this for years, and it's a great way to figure out who is selling your email address.

<comment><USER5> I had wildcard emails on my domain for a long time. I gave it up after a spammer decided to try a gigantic list of email usernames with my domain. They wanted to spam a hundred thousand separate users, but ended up spamming me a hundred thousand times instead. After that, I switched off the wildcard and just set up a normal address.

This would probably not be as big of a deal if it happened today. This was in the early 2000s and the tools (at least that I had) didn't deal with huge volumes nearly as well as I expect Google would. But I still haven't gone back.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I had that happen when I was running my own mail server. Luckily I had a procmail rule that would /dev/null dupes like that.

Haven't seen it happen with Google, so either the spammers stopped or more likely Google just blocks it with all the other spam.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let me get this straight. If I email email@example.com, I'll automatically create a label for him? Brilliant!

<comment><USER7> Hi, yes that's it ! I have a "HAHAHAHA" label right now

[http://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/gmail-auto- labels/img/hahahah...](http://www.mathieupassenaud.fr/gmail-auto- labels/img/hahahahahah1.png)

<comment><USER6> Ha, I love that someone actually tried it. Was not me though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice. I have to admit though I was hoping you would collect a list of email addresses or domains in the script and tag it that way as well.

I'd love to take back control of my inbox from the google automatic filters. I rarely check my mail because it ends up taking forever to parse through all of those additional folders and filters.

My work email is all full of auto sorting rules. But my personal gmail lags behind too much.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice!!

Had an idea about a year ago to build a machine learning model using Latent Dirichlet Allocation to do topic discovery on email bodies. This would have allowed automatic tagging of emails based on topics learned from historic emails. If anyone is interested in the code let me know and I'll release it. I got sort of far with it, just didn't know how to integrate / build a UI around it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool stuff. I've been using Google app scripts at work and they're very under utilized Imo.

<comment><USER11> What kinds of things do you use it for?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Request for help (designer co-founder needed) - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
We need help. Linked-In has a gap in how it handles recommendations. Sites like http://onething.com, http://talentag.com and http://endor.se have picked up on this and have already launched. We have been working on our own version of this here and there for a few months, but we need help. We are both developers, and for this to really work the interface has to be right.
If you're a designer with some spare time and want to work on a startup (you can work from anywhere, part time is fine, as we both have a full time job), shoot me an email at maxdemarzi AT gmail DOT com and we can go from there.
Our not yet finished prototype is at http://dev.getvouched.com . It's not much, but we're just making the point that we're not an "idea guys" looking to get someone else to do all the work.
If you don't like the idea of working on something someone else has already done… remember it's not about the idea, it's about the execution. The sites above are making what we believe are mistakes in their approach to this problem that we have figured out.
Thanks,
Max and Alex <comment><USER2> I know of quite a few designers in the valley. If anyone is looking for some my contact info is under my user name.

@Maxdemarzi, I'd be happy to connect you. In a bout of irony, I can't really vouch for them since I haven't used them, so it's up to you to screen.

</comment><comment><USER3> Check this out! <http://elegant.ly/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I had not seen that. Interesting concept.

<comment><USER3> yeah a friend told me about it today

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A viable alternative is to check out professional designer services; themeforest, and 99designs spring to my mind. You can substitute potentially giving away a portion of equity with smart usage of available capital.

</comment><comment><USER3> finding designers is so hard...too many programmers too few designers

(I am developer myself and having hard time finding designers. Maybe it has to do something with my circle.)

<comment><USER5> Somehow I couldn't find programmers. I'm a designer and I had to learn linux/python/django etc. just so I could build my ideas.

<comment><USER6> It is difficult is to find a partner, no matter the role. I am a developer and I had a hard time finding a business person.

<comment><USER4> Everyone, who's any good, is already buried with lucrative contract offers, or building a startup of his own.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to push your vision into a level of reality , at which these kind of people would give up dreams of their own to join forces with you.

Supply&demand at work.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hackers meetup: StartupDrinks in Montréal this wednesday - <AUTHOR> http://techentreprise.com/Montreal/events/91-Montreal-StartupDrinks-March-Brutopia

<comment><USER2> I am a Montreal hacker/entrepreneur and I can honestly say that Montreal has an incredibly tight-knit startup community. I'm in the valley this week so won't be able to miss it, but come out if you are in the city.

<comment><USER3> I was looking at the members list and David Usher (vocalist for Moist) is going to be there? Hacker meetups in Montreal are much cooler than the ones in Silicon Valley...

<comment><AUTHOR> He is listed as "maybe", I've seen him coming to a couple of tech meetups (beta launch of akoha.org for instance)</comment></comment></comment>


Maze Generation: Kruskal's Algorithm - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/1/3/maze-generation-kruskal-s-algorithm <comment><USER2> In order to get the O(log(n)) runtime that you talk about, you need to take care that the Tree data structure doesn't devolve into a list, e.g. by keeping track of a child count and always putting the smaller tree as a child of the larger tree (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjoint-set_data_structure>)

Discussing asymptotic behaviour is only useful if you're able to understand how your code needs to look to actually achieve it.

<comment><USER3> The disjoint set is one of my favorite data structures because the amortized running time of its basic operations is O(α(n)), α being the inverse of the Ackermann function.

The Ackermann function grows extremely quickly (quicker than any primitive recursive function I believe), so its inverse grows extremely slowly. In fact, α( _x_ ) is less than 5 for "reasonable" values of _x_ such as the number of atoms in the universe. Therefore, the amortized run time of the disjoint set operations can be thought of as essentially constant.

Also of interest to me is that the inverse Ackermann function is proven to be the asymptotically optimal run time for the disjoint set operations. I'm not equipped to understand that particular proof of asymptotic optimality, but other such proofs (like the O(n lg n) running time for comparison sort) are elegant and awesome.

<comment><USER4> > The Ackermann function grows extremely quickly (quicker than any primitive > recursive function I believe)

This is correct. It was basically invented to show that primitive recursion is not capable of computing every computable function.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm loving this series of articles.

Here's a simple (not very efficient) implementation you can play with, in both senses: <http://s3.boskent.com/mazes/kruskal.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> Here is some Erlang code doing pretty much the same: <https://github.com/nicolasff/mazes-erlang>

And a sample output: <http://i.imgur.com/uV4XR.png>

I find that the Kruskal mazes often have long walls or large open spaces; they don't have those tricky dead-ends that you can find in newspaper mazes, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER7> Are there efficient algorithms to generate uniformly random mazes? i.e. selects a maze randomly with uniform probability from the set of all valid mazes.

<comment><USER8> <http://www.astrolog.org/labyrnth/algrithm.htm#perfect> says that both the Aldous-Broder and Wilson's algorithms will generate "all possible Mazes of a given size with equal probability". But neither meets your criteria of "efficient", since neither is even guaranteed to finish. I'm curious, too, whether there is an efficient algorithm with the same property (generate any valid maze with equal probability).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Previous maze discussion from Jamis's series: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2048752></comment>


Jsperf.com brought down by flood of spam - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jsperf/jsperf.com/issues/18#issuecomment-113569132

<comment><USER2> This "+1" spam is one of the things that really dislike about the GitHub community. That and the reaction faces/gifs/image macros that constantly get posted on popular issues.</comment>


Show HN: The Social Media Publisher for Teams: New Landing Page – Open Beta - <AUTHOR> https://kunvenu.com <comment><USER2> nice LP. pricing is a bit high, not?

<comment><AUTHOR> tks. With an actual set of features, you are probably right. BUT. Open Beta is free and I will change it to Non-Beta only after all main features announced on [https://kunvenu.com](https://kunvenu.com) are ready (missing is mainly scheduling)</comment></comment>


Want To Sell More Apps? Cut Your Prices - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/erik-sherman/drop-your-price-to-sell-more-apps-yes-and-no.html

<comment><USER2> want to be popular? Be good looking.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do I start in a potential transition to DevOps? - <AUTHOR>

Howdy! I keep hearing this damned buzzword, "DevOps," everywhere I turn, and it happens to come at a time in which I'm looking to refocus my career anyway, so I'm looking for some feedback and advice.
I own a very small software firm (1 subcontractor, a few clients, $120k-ish revenue), but I've quickly fallen "behind the curve" on the latest and greatest languages, platforms, and standards - I got busy with existing code bases, then spent more and more time on the business relationship side of things, then realized I was way behind when I started looking for more work.
It's okay, though, because I don't like contract software development anyway. I want to move to a two-fold situation. I want:
1) A "productized" service offering or two to build sustainable revenue and, 2) To develop and sell my expertise as a pure consultant in some field.
I have thoughts on how to approach #1, but I'm looking for that field in which I can shine for #2.
I love people, and I enjoy process, but I am an absolute neophyte when it comes to CI, testing, etc. (I know what Jenkins is... does that count?).
Where do I start? Any thoughts from people already working in the field?
<comment></comment><comment>----
Way TL;DR:
I am a contract software developer looking to move into DevOps consulting, but I have no experience at all in CI or testing, much less automated testing. Where do I start?
Thanks! </comment><comment><USER2> I think of devops as dealing with infrastructure to host some business application - and to that end, the mentality you need to have is to automate everything.

Software through APIs provided by cloud providers should be how you manage provisioning, deployment, and monitoring. Having a good one-button system for deploying code is essential to moving fast - you should be able to deploy any set of changes to your production fleet in under a minute with no fuss.

There are a variety of tools for helping with this, but at the core it's writing software to solve your problems instead of solving them directly manually.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Check job descriptions (from good companies) for the position you'd like to be working in.

2\. Learn the skills they list to an basic level of competence on your own through self-study.

3\. Get hired at a company where you can learn from more experienced people.</comment>


The State of Crypto in Python (PyCon US 2014) - <AUTHOR> http://pyvideo.org/video/2583/the-state-of-crypto-in-python

<comment><USER2> This was not a great talk. I am interested in their new library though.</comment>


XBMC clone in Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jansmolders86/mediacenterjs

<comment><USER2> Very cool. Always thought Id make something very much like this in node as a native app (like with the node-webkit), but the idea of cross platform in the browser sounds like its a nice secondary option.

Main features would be to track how long a file has been open and playing ( thus tracking the point at which the video is to be resumed at if you close it ). Then you could easily browse through your tv shows and movies, at a glance knowing what you've _actually watched_. Then ratings, prioritization, sorting. Additionally the ability to group any set of files an arbitrary number of times in any way, an example may be that one user of the service has a watch list ( like on a shared network ) and they generate groups for that, then they divide said groups up; eg. separating videos up for each day, or a group for when you want to take a set of videos on a device for a trip away.

A nice intuitive drag and drop interface and useful features like fuzzy match searching when you start typing, in every view. Filesystem manipulation. Drag/drop ordering within groups.

That and all the other easy fluff, like IMDB/TVRage scraping, custom skinning ( obviously an easy one considering html + css ) and integration with some RSS feeds I guess to generate a "This just aired/was released" with some user defined regex or something of that nature.

Though I've never really used a mediacenter before, shit would be cash. I hope this mediacenterjs is as cool as it sounds like it could be. Its too bad that those bugs are so critical and that crossplatform is so tricky.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use XBMC and myplex on a daily basis. And this seems to be closer to myplex than XBMC. Nice to see an open source version though. :)</comment>


NES.css: 8-bit style CSS framework - <AUTHOR> https://bcrikko.github.io/NES.css/ <comment><USER2> I'm currently evaluating a lot of CSS frameworks on how accessible they are (for an upcoming blog post), so I'd like to give it a go:

1\. "Focus ring" (focus indicator) is completely missing for buttons. I cannot navigate the site with my keyboard if I don't see the currently focused element. _Never_ remove the outline for focusable elements without providing a _sufficient_ alternative.

2\. The focus ring for the form elements is insufficient, especially for input fields.

3\. The green, blue and red buttons have insufficient contrast ratio. Use something like [0] to find accessible color combinations.

4\. Only native components are used (button, input) - that's great! This way, almost no ARIA is needed. Adding role="alert" [1] to the balloons is the only one I'm missing.

5\. The mobile layout is broken for inputs.

Unfortunately, many CSS frameworks either partially or fully ignore the accessibility aspect. It takes a lot of experience and time to make a website fully WCAG-compliant, but it's quite easy to follow some basic guidelines, like in this cheatsheet [2].

[0] [https://contrast-ratio.com/](https://contrast-ratio.com/)

[1] [https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria- practices-1.1/#alert](https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.1/#alert)

[2] [https://moritzgiessmann.de/accessibility- cheatsheet/](https://moritzgiessmann.de/accessibility-cheatsheet/)

<comment><USER3> I've been considering evaluating the accessibility of my sites and I would like to see the impact of the changes I make with WAI-ARIA. Can I do this with a screen reader and are there FOSS or built-in screen readers you can recommend I test with?

<comment><USER2> There are free and built-in screen readers: NVDA[0] (Windows), VoiceOver[1] (Apple) and Orca[2] (Linux).

I've been only working with NVDA so far. I highly recommend this NVDA Cheatsheet [3] to get a quick overview. It's also important to test NVDA with Firefox, as it has a better compatibility and thus it is the more common setup for users relying on a screen reader. Look into the difference between "Browse Mode" and "Focus Mode" (briefly explained in the cheatsheet) and how to switch between them. In the Focus Mode you can just tab through all of your focusable elements and check if the announced texts are understandable and no information is missing. In Browse Mode you go through all of the non-focusable content, and again, check if the output is clear and no (implicit) information is missing. This applies especially to all custom components which may announce gibberish if not handled correctly. Finally, you can look into my slides and examples for my "Accessible Web" talk [4].

[0] [https://www.nvaccess.org/](https://www.nvaccess.org/)

[1] [https://www.apple.com/de/accessibility/mac/vision/](https://www.apple.com/de/accessibility/mac/vision/)

[2] [https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca](https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca)

[3] [https://dequeuniversity.com/screenreaders/nvda-keyboard- shor...](https://dequeuniversity.com/screenreaders/nvda-keyboard-shortcuts)

[4] [https://darekkay.github.io/presentations/](https://darekkay.github.io/presentations/)

<comment><USER4> Accessibility is one place where you'll invariably be forced to pay at some point because the 800lb gorilla of screenreaders (JAWS) is also what's used most often in both home and in most corporate environments.

[https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/](https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My intuition was clear, it's made from a Japanese company! While the style is of course inspired on old Japanese games, the clear clue was "SNS" (confirmed by visiting the company link). If the authors are here, this is an example of _wasei eigo_ not used at all in international English, like "salary man" or "office lady".

Relevant: [https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/10624/is-sns- social-...](https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/10624/is-sns-social- networking-site-used-by-native-speakers-of-english)

<comment><USER6> Wait, "office lady" ain't used internationally? Could've sworn I've heard it in the wild here in the US.

<comment><USER7> American here...that's definitely offensive and would not be used in a professional setting.

<comment><USER6> I never said it wasn't offensive. Just that I've indeed heard folks use that term (in a very-not-professional-setting, mind you).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fantastic work, very cute - but you'd better get on renaming the project ASAP to avoid a cease + desist.

Nintendo does not take kindly to even the most casual use of their trademarks, even in FOSS projects.

<comment><USER9> Is NES trademarked as well as Nintendo? I would think as long as the word "Nintendo" itself is avoided it should be fairly safe.

<comment><USER8> Of course, do you not think they'd have that covered? ;)

[https://trademarks.justia.com/858/08/nes-85808681.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/858/08/nes-85808681.html)

<comment><USER10> Relevant is the scope ("Goods And Services"), which seems to be: "Downloadable multimedia files, namely, video games; downloadable electronic game programs; downloadable electronic game software; electronic game programs; electronic game software; video game programs; video game software"

So a CSS-framework named NES should be OK.

<comment><USER11> Knowing how this things are argued in C&D letters, I wouldn't put it past them saying the a CSS framework is a downloadable multimedia file.

They don't have to be right to send the letter.

<comment><USER10> In this case the focus is pretty clear on games/computer programs ("multimedia files, namely, video games"). But agreed, it probably would not be worth it to stand against a giant as small dev/company for a fun project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This kind of thing makes me wonder just how small (in terms of pixel count) a UI could be, while still being as intuitive as necessary and as complete as necessary to accomplish its goals.

I bet we're being super wasteful currently. Like REALLY super wasteful of screen space.

<comment><USER13> I'd quite like a guide for that. I imagine making something in as small a space as possible is even harder then most common design trends to pull off.

<comment><USER14> One of my early cell phones (AMPS days) had a solitaire game, and it fascinated me that solitaire could be played in such a small screen.

I spent a while figuring out the minimum number of pixels needed to play a game of solitaire. Unfortunately, this was years ago so I don't remember the number. But it seems like as good a benchmark as anything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's CSS-only, so works just fine with NoScript. That's kind of unexpected, compared to other modern web frameworks. Though using <i> tag for icons feels weird.

<comment><USER16> Font-awesome also does this, I've always found it strange but assumed it was done for some reason.

<comment><USER17> The i and the b tag are now superfluous as the em and strong tag has taken over their semantic meaning.

This frees their use for other things.

<comment><USER18> Actually, all elements still have kinda distinct uses:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/i](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/i)

> _represents a range of text that is set off from the normal text for some > reason. Some examples include technical terms, foreign language phrases, or > fictional character thoughts. It is typically displayed in italic type._

Typically, but doesn't have to be. It's just about stuff that's set off, but not necessarily more or less important, "just different" I would say.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/em](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/em)

> _marks text that has stress emphasis. can be nested, with each level of > nesting indicating a greater degree of emphasis._

Oh, I did not know it can be nested. At any rate, emphasis doesn't have to be bold, it can be anything that gets emphasis across.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/b](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/b)

> _is used to draw the reader 's attention to the element's contents, which > are not otherwise granted special importance. [..] However, you should not > use <b> for styling text; instead, you should use the CSS font-weight > property to create boldface text, or the <strong> element to indicate that > text is of special importance._

Okay, to be perfectly honest, I can't think of a good example for something I would want to draw attention to without considering it more important. Maybe the names of persons in a news story? Hmmm. I don't know, but notice making something blink is a perfect and sensible way to draw attention to it... so the blink tag never went away, it just got shorter, so we can use it more liberally.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/st...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/strong)

> _The HTML Strong Importance Element ( <strong>) indicates that its contents > have strong importance, seriousness, or urgency._

So basically, _this means flashing text in various bright colors while changing size rapidly_. I know how to read standards, so nobody even pretend it could be otherwise; let's just fix our websites accordingly. A "call to action" with a big green button is way too tame, if it doesn't trigger a primal survival reaction, you might lose the client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This would be cool to be paired up with a site using a Konami code. Do the code ("Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Select Start"), and it changes your stylesheet to use this. Hahah Would be fun!

<comment><USER20> Perhaps use space and enter for last 2 keys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It looks pretty cool but the containers, inputs, balloons look a bit funky on Android mobile.

<comment><USER22> Same on iOS. Containers overflow horizontally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Author needs to redo the demo page in black on white. That will be much more in line with NES styles.. I can't think of any NES UI with black text on white background.

<comment><USER24> Shadowgate and the other MacVenture games were black text on a white or beige background but they were originally Mac games so that explains the design.

Final fantasy was white on blue. As was Crystalis.

I suspect the reason it's not more common is the NES pallets sharing a color for color0. You can use black to indicate lines or shadow depth on basically all objects, whereas white is less universal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hm, it would be great to fix the pixel mixing. Cool nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER26> I love passion projects like this. Keep up the work!

</comment><comment><USER27> The controller in the top left is for the SNES (sorry). Really nice work though!

<comment><USER28> Just scroll down - the correct controller is on the end of the examples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Am I the only one experiencing an interlace effect from Firefox rendering the icons?

[https://i.imgur.com/N6vnaJe.png](https://i.imgur.com/N6vnaJe.png)

<comment><USER30> Firefox on Android @ 1440p also does this. I'd say it is because they are using svg for the images and the "pixels" are each separate rects. Just a guess, cannot look at the source rn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fascinating! As a joke, I wrote a similar CSS stylesheet recently that simulated the look and feel of a greenscreen mainframe app, complete with bright green text and blocky containers (I spent maybe all of an hour on it over a few days of tinkering). I added it as an style option in a web app that was supposed to replace a legacy system and the customer absolutely loved it. Unfortunately I had to explain it was a joke.

</comment><comment><USER31> I really like it, really pulls on my nostalgic strings :)

<comment><USER32> Really cool indeed. Got the same feeling. I still remember this geocities- bootstrap theme. Love it :)

[http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/](http://code.divshot.com/geo- bootstrap/)

<comment><USER33> My eyes! The goggles do nothing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Love it, and it works without js, great work!

</comment><comment><USER35> At least the checkboxes and radio buttons could use some user-select: none. Currently a mouse click is enough to trigger accidental selection on Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER36> Good work. Does anyone know a terminal UI style CSS framework?

<comment><USER37> [https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386](https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386)

enjoy

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I love stuff like this.

</comment><comment><USER39> need some fixing on mobile but works great, could be a great match to phaser.js games and the like, much better than slickui within the canvas

</comment><comment><USER40> This is amazing!

</comment><comment><USER41> This is pretty darn sweet - well done!

</comment><comment><USER42> Interesting - well done!

</comment><comment><USER43> Mixed pixel scaling and incorrectly offset items make this seem a little cheap and doesn't really give me the NES feel. Colours are also not necessarily so well picked either. Meh...

<comment><USER26> I really want to say something mean to this toxic comment. But if you're having a bad day/week, I hope things get better for you.

<comment><USER44> I think it's a fair critique. The lib is called "NES", yet doesn't appear to follow the NES's own available palette:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_console_pal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_console_palettes#NES)

<comment><USER24> And the icon is clearly a SNES controller.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Perfect for 1) kids, 2) grandparents

</comment><comment><USER46> This is amazing! Sharing it on Hashnode now.</comment>


Latest Revision to ARM Instruction Set Includes Optimizations for JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/10/11/arm-v83-javascript <comment><USER2> Previously discussed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18163433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18163433)

</comment><comment><USER3> That seems a little hyperbolic. Jazelle DBX is an example of "optimized for X language".

This instruction disproportionately helps dynamic languages that convert between int and float (of which JS is definitely most popular), but basically every program that does casting from float to int stands to benefit. That's much better design in my opinion.

<comment><USER4> The insn is definitely js-specific though. The architecture has int-float conversion insns already which work fine for the purposes of almost all languages (dynamic or not); but js requires some specific oddball semantics which this new insn provides.

There are some details in this 2016 blogpost -- [https://community.arm.com/processors/b/blog/posts/armv8-a-ar...](https://community.arm.com/processors/b/blog/posts/armv8-a-architecture-2016-additions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This "the new iPhone is insanely fast at Javascript" story needs to die. It has always been wrong conclusions drawn from the wrong benchmarks. Speedometer is a _DOM benchmark_ with very little actual Javascript weight. DOM performance on mobile Safari is relatively good, considering that the DOM in general is a performance trainwreck. Apple has really done a good job optimizing this so that the "modern web" runs on their devices in an acceptable fashion. It probably has a lot to do with efficient GPU interfacing.

Furthermore, it is impossible to properly benchmark _any_ JIT language on a non-jailbroken iOS device, because JIT is not allowed on iOS, only Apple's implementations like JavaScriptCore are available. It's pointless to make such benchmarks and draw conclusions about the hardware. Even if you benchmarked JavaScriptCore on different platforms, it wouldn't necessarily be fair, because you don't know how much more effort went e.g. into the ARM backend.

<comment><USER6> One an run a JIT on an iOS device, it is that the app will get denied on submission. So it would be _possible_ to benchmark a JITed language on iOS. There are a ton of other ARM targets that could be used as well.

<comment><USER5> You can't make a page executable on iOS, which is an OS-level security measure that also rules out JIT compilation.

Separate from that, apps that download and run scripts may or may not be rejected based on App Store terms.</comment></comment></comment>


Wine 5.0 - <AUTHOR> https://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/blob_plain/wine-5.0:/ANNOUNCE <comment><USER2> I've recently used the wine 5.0RC from Debian testing, and my experience is mitigated. Once the software runs in Wine, it's impressive how smooth it can be. Be getting there was a lot work, in my experience.

Playing videos is a mess. winegstreamer relies on the system's gstreamer1.0, but, even after installing plugin-(good,ugly,bad), I couldn't make it work. wmv crashed, mpeg1 failed, mpeg4 was garbage. Various tricks are necessary: enabling devenum and quartz through winecfg, disabling winegstreamer, converting video formats, installing ffdshow through winetricks or externals codecs...

The console log was hardly useful when wine crashed. For example, a fatal error in msvcrt90 was caused by a missing font, but the default log made no mention of fonts, and even the `warn+all` level of logs was not clear. Fixing this and other problems took hours, and my final result was far from perfect. `winetricks` for fonts declares font substitution in Wine's registry, though Wine's changelog mentions using fontconfig, so I did not understand how fonts are handled (it's already hard to grasp in Linux, adding a layer won't make it simpler).

Overall, Wine is impressive, but, for some applications that are not documented for Wine and not packaged with PlayOnLinux, it may be hard to run them under Wine.

<comment><USER3> > I've recently used the wine 5.0RC from Debian testing, and my experience is > _mitigated_.

Not sure you really meant "mitigated" here, perhaps "mixed" is what you meant?

<comment> m-p-3 If the parent commenter is francophone it's possible he used the word "mitigated" because it looked similar to _mitigé_ , which basically translate to "mixed" in English.

<comment><USER4> Now that you are mentioning it I clearly see that as a francophone, I had not realized he/she had written something inconsistent. Thanks. In the meantime I will be upgrading wine to run Photoshop. Thanks wine team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like a great release. Wine works like magic, and it's a huge boon towards making Linux a daily driver OS. Big thanks to the developers.

<comment><USER6> It's good to remember lots of this is because of Codeweavers hard work on the paid/supported version of Wine. Sometimes I think I'd go sweep floors just to get a foot in the door there because I align with their business objectives so much.

If you like what wine has become, don't forget to thank Codweavers!

<comment> m-p-3 Valve also contributes with Proton, I'm not sure how much is upstreamed though.

<comment><USER7> They try to upstream whatever is acceptable. Only what can't be upstreamed for some reason (hacks or something Wine project doesn't want to accept) remains outside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's the relationship between Wine development and Valve's Proton?

Is Proton just a fork of Wine? And if so, do patches flow in both directions?

<comment><USER9> Proton is mostly a fork of wine with some not-yet-merged patches, combined with preinstalled dxvk (dx11 implemented in vulkan). AFAIK patches flow both ways.

<comment><USER10> > dx11 implemented in Vulkan

Also 9 and 10, FYI. DXVK targeted 10/11 initially, and merged in D9VK (a separate but similar project covering DX9) about a month ago.

Proton also has a branch that bundles in VKD3D (Vulkan layer for DX12), but that's still experimental at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Glad to see the graphics support improvements!

A bit off topic, yet does anyone have experience running Adobe CC products (Illustrator, Photoshop mainly) with Wine? The following page has stats for older versions, yet if anyone's tried CC2020 I'd love to hear about it.

[https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=vendor&iId...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=vendor&iId=12)

<comment><USER12> Tested Photoshop 2020 in rc6, works fine, but hardware acceleration is slow, better to disable it. No crashes.

<comment><USER12> v5.0 update : OpenGL works fine in X session, still slow in Wayland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Please someone rename Wine 5.0 to LSW - Linux Services for Windows :)

<comment><USER14> Isn't Wine also for MacOS too though?

<comment><USER15> Windows Subsystem for Unix...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any word on support for 32 bit Windows applications on MacOS Catalina?

<comment><USER17> Last I checked it was in a very early stage, so I wouldn't expect anything anytime soon. Here's the relevant discussion: [https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=32590](https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=32590)

You can downgrade to MacOS with proper 32-bit support, purchase Crossover 19, or ask Apple to put the libraries back in so tons of software people paid for continues to work.

<comment><USER18> > _ask Apple to put the libraries back in so tons of software people paid for > continues to work_

Reversing course on this would be very against Apple's longstanding m.o. of breaking backwards compatibility with every new OS version. Looking forward is how they make the rest of the world advance at the expense of a lot of bloodied bodies left on the floor.

<comment><USER19> Fortunately Catalina is still such a disaster for me (I've had to downgrade twice since I stupidly tried to upgrade twice) that Mojave might be my Snow Leopard v2. I wish Windows ran better in boot camp, I'd jump off macOS indefinitely if I could.

<comment><USER20> Runs ok for me, what are the issues?

<comment><USER19> My laptop reliably kernel panics every night.

<comment><USER18> Mine started doing that too a few weeks ago and I'm on Mojave, so I don't think it's a Catalina thing.

<comment><USER19> I don't know, it never happens on Mojave, reliably happens on Catalina, and stops when I downgrade back to Mojave. I'm not sure what the actual cause is but I also have no desire to actually try and find out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> While reading low level API stuff is interesting, give us the meat. Is there a list of which games did not work in 4.x that do work now, or worked in 4.x but are improved now?

<comment><USER22> [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-5.0...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wine-5.0-RC6-Released) Here is a partial list of fixed games.

<comment><USER23> > Some of the fixes in Wine 5.0-RC6 are for Brothers In Arms - Hell's Highway, > Tomb Raider, The Witcher Enhanced Edition, Serious Sam Classic, and other > games. There are also fixes for applications like 7-Zip, Acrobat Reader, and > Pale Moon.

That's a really short list. Hopefully there are no regressions on other games to cancel out the progress.

That said, I've been pretty happy with Proton. More games work than don't, although if the game you like is kind of obscure the chances of it working do drop off. Also some games outright check if they're running under Wine and refuse to run, like Roblox.

<comment><USER24> This is not MAME, it emulates API of an OS that has very large amount of software it runs. I think the titles listed are ones that developers concentrated specifically on (also another person below mentioned that it was only relevant to this RC) to make them work, it's very likely that much more software was fixed.

<comment><USER14> > it emulates API of an OS that has very large amount of software it runs

I thought WINE stood for Wine Is Not an Emulator - has that changed?

<comment><USER24> They may be say that but if it isn't emulating Windows API what is it doing?

IMO (this is just a guess, and might be completely wrong) but I have a feeling that originally WINE stood for WINdows Emulator.

<comment><USER25> Emulation is typically reserved for processor emulation. A NES emulator works by simulating the CPU, PPU (GPU), bus and other parts of the NES system on the computer running the emulator. DOSEmu, QEmu, and Amiga Forever work in similar ways.

When Wine runs an application or game, that program is executing directly on the computer's CPU, so it is not an emulator.

Think of it like when you have a Qt/KDE or Gtk/Gnome application and run that on the other platform, or on Windows or Mac. You have the APIs the application is calling (Qt or Gtk) which are the same regardless of the platform they are running on; for Wine these are the Windows APIs. The libraries then map the library APIs to the platform APIs, like how Wine is mapping the Windows APIs to Linux/Mac/etc.

<comment><USER24> Word emulation means to pretend something else, just because most of the time emulating hardware is required doesn't mean that the meaning of the word change.

Since you mentioned Amiga, there was an MacOS emulator called ShapeShifter[1], it didn't emulate CPU since at the time MacOS used the same CPU as Amiga, but it still referred itself as an emulator. Actually I remember that MacOS run even faster on Amiga + ShapeShifter than original Mac with similar hardware.

If you are not convinced, what about FreeBSD capability to emulate Linux[2] ABI allowing to run linux binaries as if they were native. This also doesn't emulate the CPU and other hardware. And I suppose it is even closer to what WINE does.

[1] [https://shapeshifter.cebix.net/](https://shapeshifter.cebix.net/)

[2] [https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/linux- emulation/free...](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/linux- emulation/freebsd-emulation.html)

<comment><USER26> That's a lost etymological battle, just like we can forever repeat that "hacker" does not equal "cybercriminal": even though the thesaurus says otherwise, one narrower definition of the word has taken over.

<comment><USER24> I don't think this is comparable. World emulation exists outside of technology, and has specific meaning (pretending to be something else).

Also in this case (unlike word "hacker") the word isn't used incorrectly. It's just more broad than most people think. It's only WINE that claims itself to not be emulator, despite in early FAQ calling itself Windows Emulator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Has anyone tried using AVISynth and various popular plugins like QTGMC with wine under Linux? I'm starting to put together an automatic pipeline to capture old VHS tapes and automatically digitize them, and I'm debating the OS. Windows currently seems to have the best implemented deinterlacing algorithms, and avisynth is pretty nice for repeatable post processing pipelines.

<comment><USER28> Yes I use AviSynth and AvsPMod all the time under Wine. I use the Avisynth+ 64 bit version and it works great, QTGMC and even SVP with OpenCL acceleration work fine. I can give you my wine prefix if you want.

However like the sibling says, if you're doing something automated I'd recommend just using VapourSynth. QTGMC was ported to it ages ago and it will work better. I only continue to use AviSynth because the AvsPMod interface is still much better than the VSEdit equivalent, IMO.

<comment><USER27> Thanks all! Didn't know about vaporsynth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Has someone managed to install and activate a recent version of Office? I managed to install but it never discovered/talked to the KMS server of my uni.

<comment><USER30> Office 365 with Codeweaver

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Unfortunately, my main reason for keeping Windows is music recording. Until I can get my DAW and all my plugins working I am stuck in Windows land.

<comment><USER32> You may not be interested in learning a new DAW, but if you're feeling up to it Bitwig has native Linux support.

<comment><USER33> I just checked out Bitwig. Apparently it is a for-money app which is not available in the Mac App Store.

So far, every not-free-open-source app I have seen which is not on the Mac App Store has caused problems:

\- Spotify: does weird things to start at login and hide it from your system's start-at-login settings \- Dropbox: phishes you to get your root password \- Panic Transmit and Coda: exfiltrates your ~/.ssh/id_rsa file while not clearly documenting this

For 399 USD, I had hoped Bitwig could manage to get its app set up with sandboxing and into the store.

<comment><USER34> What's this about Transmit? Source for that? I use Transmit religiously and haven't heard anything about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What happened to Józef Kucia?

<comment><USER36> Died in a caving accident

[https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/jwhite/2019/09/08/a-...](https://www.codeweavers.com/about/blogs/jwhite/2019/09/08/a-tragic- loss)

<comment><USER35> That's very sad. =( But, at least he died doing something he loved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is great news! A big Thank You to the Wine maintainers! Wine lets me run some non-mainstream compilers and IDEs that would otherwise require Windows.

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats to the Wine team!

And don't forget wonderful dxvk project as well, which made DX9-DX11 games playable with great performance on Linux.

</comment><comment><USER38> Pls be compatible with 64-bit Catalina

<comment><USER39> I just run Windows in a VM. Is it worth trying to use Wine instead?

<comment><USER38> I wanted to use just Wine but then ended up rigging a VM. Just more steps. I'm lazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Can I run natively on Linux Windows 10 games? That's the Wine I want to taste! :D

<comment><USER41> Most games work nowadays, but there's still some that don't. Check [https://www.protondb.com](https://www.protondb.com) for a compatibility list.

<comment><USER42> I think he means UWP games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'd love to see WPF running in Wine, since it is open source now.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is progress being made there right now, follow this bug [https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24501](https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24501)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wish they'd fix the game Civilization 3 :,(

<comment><USER45> Still my favorite game

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> In my experience, the average macOS user is disappointed with apps that run under Wine.</comment>


Cervical cancer 'cure' closer with gene-editing breakthrough, scientists say - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-09/cervical-cancer-cure-research-gene-technology-qld/11583158 <comment><USER2> The media forget that not all cervical cancers are caused by HPV.</comment>


Schrödinger's cat among biology's pigeons: 75 years of What Is Life? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06034-8 <comment><USER2> It is a good read, and not too long. Recommended.

<comment><USER3> I found it historically interesting thought the bit about entropy at the end seems slightly muddled. It's kind a bit of a prequel to Watson's The Double Helix which I found a good read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tl;DR: This is a review of a book by Erwin Shroedinger published in 1944 entitled "What Is Life"?

IMHO this book is interesting as a historical curiosity, but little else. The question is horribly dated because today we know the answer: life is the result of the Darwinian evolutionary process, i.e. the copying of information under the dual influences of random mutation and a non-random selection process. With the discovery of DNA and computers, the question "What is Life" just has a straightforward answer, so it is not nearly as philosophically intriguing as it once was.</comment>