Legend Of Zelda - Link's Awakening, now playable in HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://grantgalitz.org/get_the_hell_out/LegendOfZelda_Links_Awakening/

<comment><USER2> If your keyboard is like mine, and it doesn't like pressing Enter + Shift + Z + X (which is how you go to the save screen here), you can simulate the key combination with this quick hack:

        function simuSave() {
          gameboy.JoyPadEvent(4, true);gameboy.JoyPadEvent(5, true);gameboy.JoyPadEvent(6, true);gameboy.JoyPadEvent(7, true);
          setTimeout(function() {
            gameboy.JoyPadEvent(4, false);gameboy.JoyPadEvent(5, false);gameboy.JoyPadEvent(6, false);gameboy.JoyPadEvent(7, false);
          }, 20);
        }

Put that in Chrome's devtools or Firebug's console and call it with simuSave(). YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER3> This runs... _incredibly_ well. Nothing short of impressed.

<comment><USER4> Actually, it runs at ~10fps on my Dell E1705.

<comment><USER5> Use Firefox 5, other browsers take a shit on putImageData performance when blitting to the canvas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Strange thing just happened when I fired this up. I was playing some other music, and it suddenly sounded like I was blowing out my speakers. I wasn't playing the music very loud, but the bass became extremely scratchy. As soon as I closed the tab, it cleared up. (Win 7 Chrome 12.0.742.100)

<comment><USER5> You see, the problem is that chrome has bugs. Try running it in Firefox 5 for windows. It's not my fault. period. See some comments in [http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/i9s9h/legend_of_zeld...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/i9s9h/legend_of_zelda_links_awakening_now_playable_in/) for other various chrome related issues.

<comment><USER6> Oh! I didn't mean to blame you! I'm well aware of Chrome's various issues, but this one was new to me.

I didn't mean to detract from an awesome project!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Unfortunately can't get this old chestnut to work with it.. otherwise great!! <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWdxSz65iXc>

</comment><comment><USER8> Very cool. It works for me in chrome, but its shows this message four times before working In windowStack::windowStack() : The DOM element passed was invalid.

It doesn't work for me in Firefox 5, but I don't have flash on my ff. Do I need that?

edit: more detail: On firefox, its sometimes a black screen, and sometimes a blue/green wavy screen.

<comment><USER5> I bet the resource files are 503'ing from server overload. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This incredibly awesome! I hope it doesn't get taken down soon

<comment><USER10> Truly amazing. Congrats!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Gives me an "Aw, Snap!" Chrome crash on 14.0.797.0 on Lion.

<comment><USER5> Use Firefox 5 then. Problem solved?

<comment><USER12> Look, the page itself doesn't have a 'Works best in Firefox 5'. There's no need to be so blunt/rude when people mention it doesn't work in other browsers. I'm sure they're not trying to insult your (awesome :) ) work.

<comment><USER5> Because these are OS-dependent bugs for certain browsers and should get fixed soon by the browser makers. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wow, lots of nostalgia with this one. I love the disproportionate hitbox of Links Sword and the sound of the Owl's 8-bit hoot.

</comment><comment><USER12> Cheaper than £4.40 on the 3DS E-shop.

</comment><comment><USER14> Two seconds per frame on iPad 1. And two times crashing mobile Safari at the intro. ^^

</comment><comment><USER15> WoW. Cant believe you can play emu games in browser... So in html6 i will be able to play World of Warcraft 2 or Crysis 3 with DX13 support. I love this world.

</comment><comment><USER16> Isn't this just the javascript gameboy emulator that has been posted here before?

Or maybe it's a different one: <https://github.com/grantgalitz/GameBoy-Online>

Gr, this link was hard to find, my Google-fu was weak. Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2266701>

<comment><USER5> Yup

<comment><USER17> My god this thing is loud. Also, at least on OSX, there is no way to lower the volume/mute that tab, individually(or even all of Firefox?!, which is insane, even Windows has the built-in). Can you add some kind of volume control? Or at least a mute button :)</comment></comment></comment>


RUMOR: Apple COO Tim Cook Leaving For HP - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/rumor-apple-coo-tim-cook-leaving-for-hp-2010-9

<comment><AUTHOR> It was just a rumor, but enough to bring APPL down by 6%, luckly:

"Entire Stock Market Recovers As Apple COO Tim Cook Says He's Not Leaving For HP"

[http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-coo-tim-cook-says- hes-n...](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-coo-tim-cook-says-hes-not- leaving-for-hp-2010-9)</comment>


When did Americans lose their British accent? (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://mentalfloss.com/article/29761/when-did-americans-lose-their-british-accents <comment><USER2> Other sources claim that Americans never lost their British accent. It is the standard British accent that has drastically changed in the past two centuries, while the typical American accent has changed only subtly.

See: [https://www.livescience.com/33652-americans-brits- accents.ht...](https://www.livescience.com/33652-americans-brits-accents.html)

<comment><USER3> I heard the USA has the English of Shakespeare age. That England changed the spelling of some words as well as how they pronounced them. The Queen's English vs Traditional English. Is that correct?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is interesting:

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

Pronunciation in 1600s sounds like a mismash of northern and Scottish accents. The 1600s "mate" is literally how someone from Lancashire would pronounce it. Boat sounds like a mild Scottish accent.</comment></comment></comment>


Google's Motorola Files New Patent Case Against Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-17/google-s-motorola-files-new-patent-case-against-apple-at-itc.html

<comment><USER2> New? This is 10 days old and has been discussed many time previously on HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> The new cost of doing business.</comment>


There's Math.random(), and then there's Math.random() - <AUTHOR> http://v8project.blogspot.com/2015/12/theres-mathrandom-and-then-theres.html <comment><USER3> A worth to read article by [Mike Malone]([https://medium.com/@betable/tifu-by- using-math-random-f1c308...](https://medium.com/@betable/tifu-by-using-math- random-f1c308c4fd9d#.a7ewychse)) explains the problem with Math.random() in more detail.

Quoting Donald Knuth / The Art of Computer Programming:

> "Many random number generators in use today are not very good. There is a > tendency for people to avoid learning anything about such subroutines; quite > often we find that some old method that is comparatively unsatisfactory has > blindly been passed down from one programmer to another, and today's users > have no understanding of its limitations."

<comment><USER4> Possibly ironically, here was the comment above the previous implementation

[https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8/+/2755c5a1b1cf7fc4c5...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/v8/v8/+/2755c5a1b1cf7fc4c5c614378e5231636e6dcff5%5E%21/#F1)

      //
      // This class is used to generate a stream of pseudorandom numbers. The class
      // uses a 48-bit seed, which is modified using a linear congruential formula.
      // (See Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 3, Section 3.2.1.)

It's still not entirely clear why this particular algorithm was chosen (it'd been cool if some explanation had been given in this blog post). I suspect the reason was related to the fact that, in javascript, you can only multiply two 16 bit numbers without fear of loss of precision (without doing a fair amount of gymnastics), and they wanted something they could easily port into pure javascript to be used as a optimizer test. As partial support for that theory, the new code has now been put back almost entirely into the C++ layer.

Then again, the author might be looking at that commit and wondering "Why _did_ we pick that algorithm?" :)

<comment><USER5> > you can only multiply two 16 bit numbers without fear of loss of precision > (without doing a fair amount of gymnastics)

You can do signed and unsigned 32-bit integer multiplication, but there's modulo/overflow there.

<comment><USER6> You can use 26 bits integers for multiplication without fear of overflowing with IEEE 754 doubles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do be sure to note the mention that the new algorithm is not considered a cryptographically secure PRNG.

Also because the specification has very little by way of requirements in that regard, no matter how good _some_ implementations may be you should always assume you code may end up being used in an environment where Math.random() is no better than the worst generator you can think of.

If you need specific properties in your PRNG then you still need to provide something in place of Math.random().

<comment><USER8> This is good to think about! Often when programming games that need certain properties, I'll write my own toy PRNG, but I'll admit I'd love to learn more about the craft.

Would you have any suggested reading material on the topic?

<comment><USER9> As an outsider to the field, I really enjoyed reading this paper: [http://www.pcg-random.org/paper.html](http://www.pcg-random.org/paper.html)

It's advocating for a particular new kind of PRNG, but it also includes a lot of great explanations and citations for more reading.

<comment><USER10> As a shameless plug, I wrote a JS port of this RNG algorithm a while back: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/pcg-random](https://www.npmjs.com/package/pcg- random) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems to me that defaulting to a non-CSPRNG these days is a premature optimization: for many purposes a decent CSPRNG (e.g. Fortuna) is fast enough, and avoids all the pitfalls of a non-secure or poorly-random generator.

Maybe it's time to have Math.random and equivalents call a CSPRNG, with a Math.insecurerandom when performance matters?

<comment><USER12> Are there any use cases for which a good CSPRNG, with a fixed 256-bit seed at process startup from /dev/urandom or equivalent, is not fast enough?

Last time this came up on HN, I measured individual reads from /dev/urandom, and _those_ are fast enough for many large-scale applications, like one per tweet: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10608843](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10608843)

(Obviously there are bad CSPRNGs, but there are also bad non-CS PRNGs. So let's not count those.)

<comment><USER13> It's complicated. For starters, if you're looking for a _secure_ PRNG most practitioners would strongly advise _against_ the system you described[1]. There's a difference between a cryptographically secure algorithm and a secure system. For the overall system to be secure you need to make sure the seed data is secured, which you're bound to fail at unless you really know what you're doing.

Providing a "cryptographically secure but not really secure" alternative implemented in user space alongside a "really secure" alternative that's been thoroughly vetted would likely just add to the confusion. If you _really_ need secure numbers you should be using the really secure one. The really secure one is almost definitely going to require a syscall worth of overhead, at least, so it's _definitely_ going to be slower than a PRNG like xorshift128+ which literally takes a single digit number of CPU cycles.

Now to answer your question, if you're just talking about a CSPRNG algorithm they're probably fast enough for almost every use case. I think there's still an argument for some things like array shuffling, but those implementations could go out of their way to use the non-CS algorithm as an optimization. Unfortunately in Javascript land there's aren't many batteries included, so if you switched Math.random() to use a CSPRNG most people would end up using it for trivial stuff like shuffling arrays. If you're talking about a secure system... it's probably still fast enough for most things, but it's less obvious.

[1][http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/02/25/safely-generate- random...](http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/02/25/safely-generate-random- numbers/)

<comment><USER14> "good CSPRNG, with a fixed 256-bit seed at process startup from /dev/urandom" does describe a secure system. It doesn't take a syscall, and it's not fake- secure.

The failures come when you try to seed in userspace. Not when you use urandom to seed a standard algorithm, with no customizations.

<comment><USER12> To be fair, the failures in that article are from userspace CSPRNGs that got even that part wrong. Debian's problem was commenting out the lines that seeded the RNG from /dev/urandom, and Android's problem was developers that used the RNG unseeded. They trouble wasn't re-seeding -- they weren't seeding in the first place.

However, if we are going to decide as an industry that we need a userspace CSPRNG, it's not _that_ hard of a job to write a single, high-quality, cross- platform implementation of a seeded-once CSPRNG that introduces no vulnerabilities beyond the kernel CSPRNG.

<comment><USER14> You could do that, but the code to do something like create an instance of ChaCha20, fill the parameters from urandom, and pull numbers from it is a handful of trivial lines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >"Please keep in mind, if you find areas of improvement in V8 and Chrome, even ones that—like this one—do not directly affect spec compliance, stability, or security, please file an issue on our bug tracker."

Worst idea ever, this not-a-real-bug got a correction in just a few days without even being in the bug tracker, while there are real bugs stalled for years in the tracker. Writing a blog post and making a lot of noise on the internet works way better than using the bug tracker.

<comment><USER16> Wrong, making a bug report then being taken up on it is much better than publishing the issue as:is

<comment><USER17> This RNG problem had a bug report with hundreds of comments where a v8 dev downplayed its importance and insisted it shouldn't be fixed. So, bad example.

<comment><USER18> Where is that? There have been other issues where this has happened (like the infamous trig optimization bug), but I'm not aware of one for Math.random().

It's also worth noting that a good number of people (like [1]) outside of the V8 team were also skeptical because of lack of specification for the RNG, speed downsides to switching, and the availability of a CSPRNG in the browser and node. You can argue that they're wrong, but that's not immediately clear, Bug reports sometimes become that site of those arguments, and sometimes even the right arguments end up losing a round and having to come back in when the right people are noticing. Working as intended.

Regardless, the blog post or bug report dichotomy is a false one anyways, as obviously you can write a blog post and file a bug (as Mike later said he meant to). It's not like he was assailing the V8 team or something. The post was written a little dramatically, but he was engaged with the team in the followup bug (filed by a V8 dev) and elsewhere.

[1] [https://mobile.twitter.com/sleevi_/status/667636624256344064](https://mobile.twitter.com/sleevi_/status/667636624256344064)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wondered how the "static" visualizations were produced, then noticed the link under the image: [http://bl.ocks.org/mmalone/bf59aa2e44c44dde78ac](http://bl.ocks.org/mmalone/bf59aa2e44c44dde78ac)

There you can see the code and watch it run. Neat!

</comment><comment><USER20> This article[0] hints that Microsoft's Edge browser might also being using MWC1616, or something else that has a lot of the same limitations. Hopefully they jump on the xorshift128+ ship.

[0] [https://lwn.net/Articles/666407/](https://lwn.net/Articles/666407/)

<comment><USER21> The article actually hints that Firefox (not Chrome) and Edge used the same RNG. The article says "LCG imported from Java decades ago", but actually Java(OpenJDK)'s java.util.Random still uses the same RNG today, and it's not that surprising Edge also used it.

The generator (LCG with multiplier 0x5DEECE66D) is not bad. Its main problem is that it has only 48 bits of state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Somewhat related, I wrote a blog post about (P)RNGs a few years ago: [http://dvt.name/2010/clock-drift-hardware-prng/](http://dvt.name/2010/clock- drift-hardware-prng/). It's interesting to se V8 favor accuracy over speed.

I'd think that having a "secure" random number generator isn't that important of a deal given the fact that all code runs client-side anyway (so why the need for cryptographic security?).

<comment><USER23> That's actually not always true. Any application running on node.js is using the V8 engine as it's serverside backend, and might thusly be affected. There are also a handful of applications that do clientside encryption. (MEGA comes to mind, someone here should chime in with a better example.) Just because the use case is uncommon doesn't make it invalid.

<comment><USER24> > _Just because the use case is uncommon doesn 't make it invalid._

Yes! Designers of systems, APIs, and user interfaces should adopt this as a sort of mantra.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Pretty sure I saw the 'After' picture in the mall, circa 1992. If you cross your eyes and look 'through' it just right, you'll see the sailboat.

<comment><USER26> It's not a schooner, it's a sailboat!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Jan also wrote about this [http://jandemooij.nl/blog/2015/11/27/math-random- and-32-bit-...](http://jandemooij.nl/blog/2015/11/27/math-random-and-32-bit- precision/) in the context of Spidermonkey.

</comment><comment><USER28> For people concerned with cross-browser reproducibility as well as resuming a PRNG between sessions (e.g., to reproduce random sequences in replays or multiplayer), check out arbit, an NPM package I made. It performs close to Math.random and uses floats for state internally for max resolution (i.e., length and number of unique sequences):

[https://github.com/blixt/js-arbit](https://github.com/blixt/js-arbit)

I would also recommend running the provided DieHarder test, which is crafted to measure the quality of PRNGs.

</comment><comment><USER29> Previous discussion (from one month ago) on the referred article with discovery of the bug:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10598065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10598065)

</comment><comment><USER30> Is there an explanation anywhere of what technical or other criteria they used to pick xorshift128+? I haven't seen any from the handful of blog posts, etc. I've seen about the change. _"[...] having understood the problem and after some research, we decided [...]"_ is hardly a persuasive analysis.

Were any professional experts on PRNGs asked for advice?

</comment><comment><USER31> The first one looks more random to me? It has more runs. There was some article (can't remember the source) about generating a random coin flip - <USER2> way to tell the difference between a real physical coin flip and a computer is that the real physical flip will have a lot of runs, like 10 times in a row where you get heads. A computer random will attempt to "even out" the spectrum. The two images presented in the article looked similar to these but were reversed, true random looked more like a pattern, while computer generated random looked more like even noise.

TL;DR long strings of repeated results are a sign of true randomness. Am I misinterpreting the relationship between that and this article?

<comment><USER32> Randomness looks like white noise. You can't distinguish computer randomness (provided that it's a proper PRNG) from physical coin flips. Computers don't "even out spectrum". The longer the coin flip run, the less likely it is to happen, e.g. you would need on average 2046 coin throws to get 10 heads in a row.

TL;DR probability theory

(If you have free time and want to have some fun, throw a coin and draw a picture recording throws. I once generated a password by throwing a coin for more than hundred or times — each bit taking more than 1 throw to avoid biases — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_coin#Fair_results_from_a_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_coin#Fair_results_from_a_biased_coin))

<comment><USER33> > Computers don't "even out spectrum"

Not "on purpose", of course. But with a bad PRNG, the probability of 10 heads in a row is lower compared to a proper PRNG so in a sense the bad one is "evening out spectrum"

<comment><USER32> Yeah, it can also be higher. Or lower. Or bad PRNG can give the same number every time. Flipping a biased coin can also produce bad randomness. I'm not going to mention every edge case in my comment ;-)

Computers are trying not to produce results different from fair coin flips.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This kind of stuff seems scary to me. One JavaScript engine decides to use this algorithm, another that. This type of change could lead to _higher potential_ of bugs and unexpected behaviour, the average developer just can't figure out when say, using Firefox or Chrome for testing.

When algorithms are getting tinkered with behind the scenes, this leads me to believe there's still way too much churn in the JS space.

<comment><USER12> It's a random-number generator. It's not _supposed_ to have expected behavior.

<comment><USER35> If it's a seedable generator, it certainly is.

There are applications in creative coding and gaming where it's _critical_ to have a reproducible random sequence that gives the same results on all platforms.

<comment><USER24> > reproducible random sequence

That's a hell of an oxymoron.

 _Edit_ Yes, I know obviously the intent was to refer to a _pseudorandom_ sequence, but that's not what was said. It's also not what Math.random promises. It promises random-seeming output, nothing more, nothing less. It did _not_ promise a cross-platform, reliably reproducible stream of pseudorandom numbers, and it would be in error to abuse a black-box "random" API by considering it to be a fully specified pseudorandom stream.

<comment><USER32> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_generator)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is this some kind of private feud? - <AUTHOR> http://smartic.us/2010/06/30/landing-a-rails-job-with-no-experience-is-just-silly-talk/

<comment><USER2> It most definitely is not. I want to progress my community by helping where I can. I don't see the value in charging _my peers_ to get started. I'm under the each one teach one philosophy.</comment>


The Future of Ground-Based Transportation Systems - <AUTHOR> http://swiftprt.com/blog/2011/12/the-future-of-ground-based-transportation-systems/

<comment><USER3> I really like the idea of a fleet of computer-controlled electric cars that function like an on-demand taxi service.

Think about it, you need to leave for work at a certain time? Just jump on Google Taxi (I use Google as they're the only company that has working driverless cars that I'm aware of at the moment), log-in using your account (that you either pay per ride, weekly, monthly, yearly, yearly+ etc.), calculate your commute, and reserve a car to show up at your house at that time and place. It takes you to your destination then shoots off to an electric or hydrogen-based fleet of these cars standing by at charging facilities in neighborhoods and cities all over the world. If they became ubiquitous enough you could have as little as a five to fifteen minute wait for a car.

However, I think the auto industry would fight like hell to keep this kind of system off the roads as it would severely dent auto sales. I mean hell, I know I wouldn't want a car if I could just have a subscription to a car. Especially if it wasn't just like Sedans. Imagine being able to rent a truck immediately at a moment's notice, then ride back home in a Sedan, all without having to worry about driving anywhere?

That's a world I would like to live in. Then once populations reached the 5,000+ ppl/km2 we could start building mag lev rails and get more into that kind of public transportation.

<comment><USER4> I think a lot of that will happen.

But what technologies power the vehicles or enable the roads are secondary. The efficiencies gained by reducing vehicle size will slash costs.

A great many people will commute in a single seat vehicle with 50 horsepower if its a quarter of the cost per mile. Especially if they aren't stuck with it the rest of the time. As long as they can just as easily get larger vehicles for other occasions.

As far as alternatives to conventional roads, we already have them in major cities. Some are elevated and some are underground. Today only mass transit uses them, but I fully expect robotic cabs to destroy mass transit. Even people who don't value convenience will ultimately go for them. So subways and elevated railways, once abandoned by trains, will be converted so they can be used by individual vehicles.

<comment><USER5> I disagree. See "one lane road" problem. Throughput will be very low and average speeds for urban areas will be close to that of bikes, at best, unless you're doing on/off ramps.

Also, re: many smaller cars... who will purchase/maintain all those? We don't have the infrastructure to support that on many levels.

Personally, I think a system like that in /I, Robot/ is much more likely.

<comment><USER4> People will operate businesses that own their own cabs or individuals their own personal vehicles. Just as we do now.

And the infrastructure we have now will continue to operate.

How will such an infrastructure be built and be operated. Its a mystery. But its already been done by private enterprise.

As to why only one slow lane could be used, I don't see why that would be. Perhaps you could explain. We have many lanes operating now and robotic vehicles would simply use the same lanes.

Perhaps PRT has these limitations. Robotic vehicles that operate like the vehicles that operate like the vehicles we already have wouldn't.

Of course, we do not yet have robotic vehicles that can be trusted to operate in rain or other extreme conditions and that can discern their environment well enough to be safe.

But once we, there's no reason to follow the PRT pattern. We'll simply follow the patterns we already have. Only with much more sharing (cabs) and much more efficiency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is already happening in the real world, driven by a number of companies which the author does not mention:

<http://www.ultraglobalprt.com/> <http://www.2getthere.eu/> <http://www.vectusprt.com/>

There is currently a system operating at Heathrow Airport; another at a campus in Abu Dahbi; and a third under construction at a national park in South Korea. Additional small systems are in the planning stages for a few more cities / institutions around the world.

Skimming the article (unfortunately I don't have time to read it in depth), it appears that the author has basically reinvented <http://www.skytran.net/> \-- a conceptual PRT system which has been kicking around for at least a decade and a half. Real-world PRT systems tend to be considerably more modest in their ambitions, following the "find a tiny niche" strategy of classic disruptive technologies (in the Christensen sense of the term), rather than trying to immediately become the be-all end-all of urban transport infrastructure.

Also, skimming the article, it appears that the author makes a number of quite silly mistakes -- curiously, the exact same mistakes that the Skytran people do -- concerning the dynamics and requirements of urban transport. For example, assuming a mean speed of 45 mph for existing transport is grossly wrong: it ranges from about 35 mph to well under 20 mph for more congested cities. (Here in London, it's 16mph -- a number which hasn't changed for over a century). This has some profound implications for how fast you need to go to provide a highly effective alternative, and correspondingly what your grid sizes, turning radii, etc. should be. It looks like the author gets all of this wrong, starting from a few bad assumptions.

Disclaimer: I used to work for Ultra PRT, and currently work for a large transport/planning consultancy, advising on PRT installations around the world.

</comment><comment><USER7> For everyone who has not read it: Aaron is not proposing the future of ground- based transportation. This is an analysis why he scraps his plans for a magnet-levitation, personal transportation system and a call for new ideas.

<comment><USER8> To clarify, there is an urban density limit on this conclusion: "Time to get to a station (walking, or drive plus park) kills the effectiveness of most personal rapid transit and light-rail systems until you have a population density of 5000+ ppl/km2."

So for population densities of 5,000+ ppl/km2 this might work (emphasis on might).

Interestingly, urban areas of the developing world might qualify:

[http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities- density-...](http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities- density-125.html)

The problem is that many of these cities might not maintain their high densities as their economies grow. My guess is that a lot of the high density is due to extended families living together. But maybe not, there are quite a few developed world cities on the list (e.g. London, Madrid, Seoul, Tokyo).

Unfortunately, I cannot vouch for the reliability of the statistics presented here, there just a result of a very quick google search. I've got to stop spending so much time on HN.

<comment><USER9> The overall trend worldwide is toward higher urban density, not less. This is more so in the developing countries - it's unlikely to swing away from this. As long as population is growing, the cities tend to grow (and become more dense) with them.

<comment><USER10> That is correct in the aggregate: people are moving from sparse rural areas to denser metropolitan areas. However, the urban density of metropolitan areas themselves is decreasing in the developed world. Most of the growth occurs in relatively sparse suburbs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The obvious problem seems to be that he wants a 200km/h speed which causes problems on corners and for getting vehicles into the traffic stream.

This is causing a doubling of his costs which wrecks the business model.

However even a 50 km/h speed ( remember no stopping at lights or for jams ) is going to be good-enough for many urban areas ( perhaps amining higher between suburbs ) so he can bring his cost back down.

The ULTra system ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULTra_%28rapid_transit%29> ) currently has a maximum speed of just 40km/h although they are working on faster speeds and reduced spacing between cars.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I noticed that assumption too, and a few others(for example the assumption of "car parked outside home" - now you have to value either the cost of car ownership and parking, or the time cost for an on-demand fleet to reach the passenger) With a lower speed target the system may still offer benefits over roads and mass transit in terms of reliability/availability. The number of existing PRT companies continuing with this approach suggests it has some merit.

Maglev PRT still seems worth researching for intercity traffic though - <USER2> requirements for routing get a lot easier, and you still have benefits of speed and lightness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How about bicycles? I live 4.2 miles from my NYC office and it takes me 45 minutes to walk/bus/walk. On bad days, it can be 90 minutes. The congestion in the NYC tunnels and in the bus station during rush hour is unbearable. Let me grab my bicycle and a place to store it during the day and I'll use it 10 months out of the year.

<comment><USER14> I bought a Brompton folding bicycle in NYC. It's great. Very easy to bring on the subway, ferry or even a taxi.

The only downside is the small diameter of the wheels makes climbing a bit comedic.

<comment> T-hawk I have a Strida folding bike for commuting in NYC by ferry and subway too. Love it.

Wheel diameter doesn't matter for climbing, though. Bigger wheels are more efficient on a flat surface by way of less rolling resistance; the bigger wheel creates a smoother tangent with the road surface, and contains more air so deforms less under its weight load. But when you're climbing, rolling resistance means almost nothing compared to the energy you need to supply to climb the well of gravitation potential.

The problem with climbing on a folding bike is frame rigidity. The geometry required by most folders (long single tubes connected by joints with necessary slop for folding) means that a fair bit of the energy you supply goes into stressing and flexing the frame rather than transmitting into the drive system. The traditional brazed diamond frame doesn't have that problem. To make an extreme metaphor, climbing on a folder is a bit like pushing a string, where the energy goes into deforming the nonrigid body instead of moving it.

If wheel diameter mattered for climbing, then either skateboards couldn't climb hills or they'd have bigger wheels for doing so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem with a system like this is that it requires us to throw out the existing system and replace it. This is unlikely to happen.

I would assume that a more realistic system would to drastically expand our existing light rail, subway etc systems and fix the last mile issue with automated taxi cabs.

Automated cars have the advantage of using our existing road system without the existing issues of storage and accidents.

Combining them with an efficient mass transit "core" we could achieve all the above goals with minimal changes to our existing infrastructure.

<comment><USER16> I guess you didn't read the article:

""We live in a world designed around cars. Because world population has grown five-fold during the age of cars, we will be stuck with their legacy in roads and low-density metro configurations for at least the next century. This realization is a difficult one. I set out to start a company that could radically transform transportation. But neither the physics nor economics work out, and in fact will not work out until population density is much higher.

It is the ubiquity of roads, more than the greatness of cars that is difficult to defeat. And so, the future of transportation is, perhaps disappointingly, simply better cars. Our abstract criterion for the perfect transportation system is one that is fast, ubiquitous, has on-demand departure, and is quiet, private, and safe. The solution to all of these is a self-driving car.

It is clear that a maglev based personal rapid transit elevated track system should not be pursued as a business.""

<comment><USER9> Cars didn't invent the road, certainly not the city-based road, anyway.

Most of the worlds largest cities were designed and laid out long before a car was ever even dreamed of.

Roads, laneways and streets are a feature of every single ancient civilization. Mass transit is good at being mass transit, but personalised transportation (whether foot, bicycle, animal or vehicle) is always going to be with us.

Of course the future is cars for the majority of people, because the majority want personalised transport where mass transit is incapable of bridging the gap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The reasoning and analysis is so silly I would question all of the thinking that went into this article:

"The real problem with PRT in dense urban areas is parking. During non-rush hour periods, what do you do with 333k vehicles?"

What a huge face-palm.

This refers to his statement about NY where he naively assumed the most sensible analysis was one that replaced the existing subway completely with PRT. \- Then, magically, every person would go buy a car ( why? ) \- All those people would need parking spots at the PRT stations that are within minutes walking distance \- He designed a one-size-fits-all solution instead of recognizing that a combination of several specialized solutions is even possible.

You're not going to replace the ultimate freedom cars give you, nor the huge capacity the subway provides. PRT does something else - it provides a supplemental point-to-point transportation.

Also, the peak demand measurement is flawed because it is based on existing infrastructure. X cars go on a freeway / hour. Y people go on a subway / hour. But you are forced to use the 10 freeway because its the only infrastructure that provides for MANY routes [ santa monica - downtown ], [ culver city - hollywood ] and so on. Considering the "mesh" feature of PRT requires an analysis instead of starting and ending destinations - not the infrastructure those trips used!

</comment><comment><USER18> Good lord, just making bicycling safe for everyone and there's your magic bullet.

</comment><comment><USER19> Cost of asphalt is going up significantly! Even with electric cars, cost of oil may end up making track based systems more effective.Also, what is the maintenance cost of a road. Vs a track? And what about reclaiming all the land on the ground, and land used for parking? In some areas, that will more than pay for the system!

<comment><USER20> Given the upwards cost, and this sounds dumb, but I was kinda hoping for a revolution in bricks for roads. The brick laying machine out of Europe combine with some embedded RFID chip in each brick (perhaps with a different code for the road edge and turning lane bricks) might make for an interesting experiment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think PRT will win. The next transportation revolution will not require duplicating the infrastructure we already have.

I used to be enamored with PRT. It seems so logical.

And it might win if you designing a city from scratch and could layout everything to minimize the inconveniences inherent to a fixed track system.

But has it even been implemented in such a new community? No, usually people in even a new community have a strange need to go to other places. There's a system that already works for that. So they simply extend that system a little further and gain access to all of its advantages.

The next revolution in transportation will take advantage of this existing network.

<comment><USER21> They tried (and failed) in Masdar - UAE: [http://singularityhub.com/2011/03/01/masdar-city-abandons- pu...](http://singularityhub.com/2011/03/01/masdar-city-abandons-public- transportation-system-of-the-future/)

And I think you didn't read the article. It gets to exactly the same conclusion you did - or are you just trying to be witty? :)

<comment><USER4> Interesting. Hadn't read it, but the basic idea has been tried many times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have to confess, that links and discussion like this are my secret number one reason to visit HN regularly.

By reading the comments on swiftprt.com I also found the interesting project of electric airplane takeoff <http://electrictakeoff.com/>

Is there an online community that discusses such questions more frequently?

</comment><comment><USER23> i remember seeing an example simulation 6 months ago out of europe where they were using high speed rail with feeder cars that would pull up alongside the main fast train to let people on/off, without slowing down the main train. this was thought up to speed train travel as the acceleration/deceleration of maglev trains contribute to their energy and time delays.

</comment><comment><USER5> I see this idea as fundamentally flawed in that it's trying to do 2-person cars. After I read that, none of the ensuing calculations mattered at all. We need to work around the train schedules, not try to work them around our schedules. Look at downtown SF. Mass transit there is AMAZING. Muni stations are every few /blocks/.

Also, why choose below-the-rail? Requires stronger towers, can't turn as fast as existing rail, etc. This was a silly decision IMO. I think these guys need to work with roller coaster engineers if they can only do /10kmph/ around curves.

Yet another still-born mass transit idea. Can we please just get the Cali high-speed rail done already to prove to the rest of USA something that other countries know already? High speed rail works great and can indeed "work" economically.

</comment><comment><USER24> In fact there are people, who are trying to implement similar system: <http://www.mist-er.com/> It is not MagLev, but the basic idea is same.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's seems like the "getting to the station takes ten minutes" problem is easily solved with things like the Segway, if people could be expected to actually ride them.

<comment><USER26> Since I sometimes commute by Caltrain, I have been very interested in this "last mile or two" transportation problem.

A remarkable number of engineer/entrepreneurs have sprung up attempting to offer devices that solve it. Here are some highlights of what I've found:

Segway: easy to ride and reasonably fast, but expensive, and worse, _much_ too heavy (100 lb) to pick up and take on a train.

YikeBike folding electric bicycle: looks not too hard to ride; a little slow, perhaps, at 15 mph. A technological marvel (anti-lock brakes!) but correspondingly expensive ($2000 for the 31 lb model, $3800 for the 24 lb carbon fiber model).

Conscious Commuter folding electric bicycle: this is a very nice-looking design whose development was recently funded on Kickstarter ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1585753369/folding- elect...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1585753369/folding-electric- bike-for-commuters)). No specs yet, but looks extremely promising.

Trikke EV: a very creative design. Looks fun to ride, but a little heavy for this purpose (38 - 46 lb depending on model) and not particularly fast (13 - 16 mph).

Metroboard electric skateboard: reasonably fast (20 mph) and extremely light (~20 lbs depending on model). I have one of these and it's an impressive piece of engineering and fun to ride, but it does require substantial athleticism and, uh, a certain risk tolerance. Not a mass market product.

If those aren't exotic enough for you, a number of people are working on self- balancing electric unicycles (!!).

<comment><USER27> If we're talking about a "last mile or two" what's wrong with a conventional bicycle? These other things seem to be needlessly expensive and complex solutions to that problem.

The big problem with all of these though is they are all unpleasant in inclement weather and cold temperatures.

<comment><USER26> Conventional bicycles are bulkier than these other solutions, making them harder to carry onto whatever mass transit one is using. On Caltrain, for example, bicycles are restricted to a special car at one end of the train. On other systems like BART, bicycles aren't even allowed on many trains.

The other problem with conventional bicycles is that it's hard to go very far without getting sweaty -- depending on the weather, of course, and one's patience for riding slowly. It's nice to have power assist.

Folding bicycles can be compact enough to carry on any mass transit conveyance. The Metroboard is certainly quite compact and portable. Not sure about the Trikke.

You're right that weather can be a problem.

<comment><USER28> I'd get a cheapo used bike and lock it at the station. Bike racks/poles are everywhere; personally, I think people carrying their Inspector Gadget $2000 foldabikes on the train are overestimating the utility of taking the same bike everywhere. As for getting sweaty, this is just the last mile we're talking about--if you get worked up on a 10 minute bike ride it's time for more exercise!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Aaron, why don't you work on self-driving cars?</comment>


Amazingly good explanation of Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP9-lAYngi4

<comment><USER2> The missing point around Bitcoin is the necessity of authentication and thus bank account name, given our modern society regulation (against terrorism financing and money laundering especially).

So the issue is not that much about total anonymity, which is a pipe dream (government will never let you have it, and Is the model Silk Road?), but about bank transfer, or how to kill card scheme (i.e. Mastercard and Visa duopoly). And there are some awesome experiments doing just that like Dwolla.</comment>


US bullying dozens of countries into following the DMCA model - <AUTHOR> http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/05/1925230&from=rss

<comment><USER2> The US propaganda has been particularly obnoxious here in Canada. There have been several attempts to enact a DMCA-style intellectual property law, but all of them have failed to pass before the end of parliamentary sessions. Nevertheless, US-based pressure groups ratchet up the complaints every year like clockwork.</comment>


Ask HN: Paypal down? - <AUTHOR>

Getting this after login:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, email@example.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log. <comment><USER2> [https://www.paypal- notify.com/eventnotification/event_detail...](https://www.paypal- notify.com/eventnotification/event_details_popup?eventId=6647)

</comment><comment><USER3> I use OTP and it's not working for me after I login - it just keeps spinning (I'm in the US).

Hopefully they will fix OTP support as I need to use a special link to login...

</comment><comment><USER4> Down in the UK - homepage loads but 500 server error on login

first noticed 6:40 PM

[https://downdetector.com/status/paypal](https://downdetector.com/status/paypal) seems to be widespread :(

<comment><USER4> still down 8:00 PM

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Same for me.</comment>


Show HN: A generator for random ASCIItabs - <AUTHOR> http://www.asciitabs.com <comment><AUTHOR> I made this site to help myself practice guitar / music theory and learn the basics of music composition.

It's all written in Go and hosted on an AWS t2.micro instance right now. I haven't implemented any caching yet so we'll see what happens if it gets any traction...

Feedback / bugs / feature requests encouraged. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> This is a cool tool...but, as a musician of more than three decades, I would discourage new players from spending too much time on tablature.

I'd recommend you jump to traditional music notation for your learning process, ASAP. You're learning new things, anyway, you might as well learn a tool that is generally much more useful. There's a wealth of music and exercises in standard notation available to practice with.

I'm not saying this to be preachy or holier-than-though, or to suggest you can't be a good musician without knowing how to read music. But, standard notation is technically superior to tabs, on nearly every dimension. It provides more information in a smaller space, it is transferable to other instruments and other musicians, it is much faster/easier to read once you are proficient with it, and it provides visual cues about the things that you're currently trying to learn that tablature does not (e.g. you can usually readily discern keys and chords from traditional notation, while it is not at all obvious from tabs until you've read quite a bit of it and mentally or physically applied it to the guitar).

I wish I'd learned traditional notation sooner and with more gusto. I would have been a better musician more quickly if I had.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this advice. You make a strong case for standard notation and I'll keep that in mind as I try and advance as a musician. I've found the 'Masters in Tab' series to offer tabs / standard notation interlaced, so perhaps that would be a good way to transition from one to the other ([https://www.amazon.com/Spanish-Guitar-Masters-TAB- Intermedia...](https://www.amazon.com/Spanish-Guitar-Masters-TAB- Intermediate/dp/0739000772)).

This also makes me think I should focus the website on where ASCIItab excels over standard notation -- editability as opposed to being a precise blueprint for how to play complex compositions. I think offering an in-browser editor would still make this a good tool for novice composers to get a feel for enhancing / creating music before they advance to standard notation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty cool, thanks for creating this.

A good addition would be audio output, or MIDI export.

From looking at the tabs, this seems mostly aimed at fingerstyle guitar playing, rather than playing with a plectrum. Some parameters to the generation could produce tabs for a wider range of styles.</comment>


Finishing Is All That Matters - <AUTHOR> http://excid3.com/blog/finishing-is-all-that-matters/ <comment><USER2> Too True. A while ago I started designing and developing my projects by using an incremental "Finish First, Polish Later" technique. And it works SO well.

Whatever I'm working on, do the bare minimum and upload version 1 to the server ASAP. UI is missing color? The about page just has my name and website? Everything isn't perfectly spaced out and aligned? I don't care. It works. Version 1 is done. Upload.

1st) Knowing I can start and finish something that quickly motivates me to get started.

2nd) Seeing the project done and uploaded for the world to see creates a feeling of success, relief, and achievement.

3rd) Knowing that everyone in the world can now see my unpolished site further motivates me to keep working on the project quickly so I don't look bad in front of others.

It's been working out really well for me. That's how I got last week's project <http://www.residentevilradio.com> done so quickly.

<comment><USER3> That feeling of shipping really really helps you on the next task as well. Shipping a side project like this (nicely done btw!) is great motivation for any work you need to do too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For me the problem in working on side projects in the morning, is that the motor starts to run, and then it's harder to disconnect my mind when going out to work - at day job.

Of course at night it's harder because we're tired and can easily loose focus, but if not most productive it's easy for me to arrange the time and set more or less half an hour - balancing sleep hours of the week - to end the line of thinking without having to run to the bus to go to work.</comment>


E17 is out - <AUTHOR> http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=news/show&l=en&news_id=77 <comment><USER2> "Also be aware that this page is large and is meant to provide a lot of important information. It is not for the tl;dr; (too long, didn't read) set of people with minimal attention span. It contains lots of that scary thing called "text" and "information". It is assumed that you can make use of the education you have been provided with that allows you to read and comprehend what has been written."

I rolled my eyes at that one. This is an example of the pretentiousness and snark directed at users that people complain about in open-source projects; especially Linux-related ones.

<comment><USER3> It is also an example of the stuff that these particular unpaid volunteers, working on their own project for fun for years on end, wanted to write.

Open source projects are not always about marketing, adoption and being friendly to everyone. Heck, this particular project didn't even have a stable release for over 10 years...

<comment><USER4> The E17 developers are mainly paid by companies like Samsung.

<comment><USER5> Samsung is backing the development of the EFL libraries behind E17 for the Tizen (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizen>) initiative. Possibly a hedge against Android.

Also note that E17/EFL is supporting Wayland (<http://wayland.freedesktop.org/toolkits.html>) - forward looking indeed.

Bo

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's disappointing that there's no 'what's new' or introduction to E or even a proper gallery of screenshots. I actually know E fairly well having used versions 14-16, but it's been about a decade...maybe presenting it a bit better would result in a larger userbase?

<comment><USER7> You may want to have a look at: [http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/e17&l=en](http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about/e17&l=en)

<comment><USER6> I did, that was what moved me to post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Opinionated software is tremendous. By removing bullet points and telling users to read 5 some odd pages of dogmatic documentation you're letting the passion ooze from your project. Its saying "if you don't care about your window manager, we don't care about you". Except in 13000 words instead of 13.

<comment><USER9> Enlightenment has been around since 1997, when "the internet" was still a dorky-sounding term (and it wasn't equated with "low attention-span theater").

Ever hear the old saw "Unix _is_ user friendly; it's just picky about who it's friends with." ? The E/EFL reflects this attitude, and you know what ? That's their prerogative. I don't think they're particularly worried about gaining huge adoption.

Not every piece of software is written to pad a resume, or try to take over the world, or make millions of dollars, or to build up somebody's ego.

<comment><USER10> If they weren't ego padding, they wouldn't take time to imagine and insult a hypothetical low-intelligence user base.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Enlightenment has been around for quite a while now, and back in the day I used to think it looked so stunning. For a sense of perspective, here's what it used to look like back when it started as a hack of FVWM:

<http://www.cactii.net/~bb/linuxreal/grab.jpg>

Looks very dated now, but even in it's earliest days I thought looked so much cooler than FVWM. It's kind of amazing how far we've come in terms of visual aesthetics...

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I remember getting a massively awesome desktop in 1999 with Gnome underneath. And even though it had that 90's jaggy feel to it, it was my mp3 encoder desktop and I favored it above anything. I'd actually love to have it back. I wish I had screenshots to go along with yours. Your's brought back a great sense of nostalgia. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> From a developer standpoint E17 is the best Desktop Environment you can dream of. Try to write a simple app with the Elementary toolkit and compare that with writing a Gnome app. You will immediately notice how much better E17 libraries are documented. With E17 it is fun again to write desktop apps.

<comment><USER14> Couple of questions. How is it compared to Qt ? Can you port your apps to other DE/OS if you use E17 libs?

<comment><USER13> Compared to QT much more rudimentary, simpler and way less features. Also it is written in C, not C++. However rendering should be much faster.

As long as the E-libs are installed your apps should work just fine on any system/DE. I haven't tested it with Windows though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> ...and hell freezes over! :-)

Congratulations to the E17 team!

</comment><comment><USER16> Ten years ago Enlightenment was pretty but not particularly usable. Now it's not even pretty anymore.

</comment><comment><USER17> So now we finally know why the maya calendar ends on 21 dec 2012 - they were waiting for the E17 release just like the rest of us!

End of the world speculations were just confusions with the phrase "when hell freezes over", which has also been used for E17.

</comment><comment> j-kidd Just tried E17 for the first time. Kinda bummed that the control panel doesn't allow setting mouse acceleration threshold to 0. Also couldn't find a way to change keyboard repeat delay / rate.

Looks like more thought was put into eye candy than input dev.

<comment><USER18> It's trivially easy to change those with xset:

> xset m <ACCELERATION> <THRESHOLD>

and:

> xset r rate <delay in milliseconds before auto repeat starts> <repeat rate > per second>

I'm of the opinion that it's not a window manager's job to deal with mouse acceleration or keyboard repeat rates in the first place.

<comment> j-kidd I can change them trivially in KDE, so there is no need to stick the commands in .xinitrc. FYI, allowing mouse acceleration threshold to be set to 0 was added in year 2003 in KDE:

<https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31189>

Anyway, I certainly agree with your opinion. It is just that I think E17 is more than a window manager, and I would place it in the same category as XFCE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone have any idea if the tiling module supports arbitrary arrangement like i3wm, or is it stack-based like dwm?

Edit: Ok, the tarball is 30MB, no way I'm going to be able to use this. My curiosity is purely academic now.

<comment><USER7> It's stack-based. You can have up to 8 stacks, vertically or horizontally.

You can find a presentation and a small demo of the features on that presentation: <http://billiob.net/blog/20110717_etiling.html> .

E-Tiling is now the default tiling module.

<comment><USER19> Blast. The programs that I usually work with really benefit from i3wm's model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool. E was my primary window manager from 1997->2001, at which point I switched to FVWM for about 10 years.

Not being too happy with current Gnome (its not that bad), I may give this a shot.

</comment><comment><USER21> I was looking and Enlightenment when I was considering a desktop for my Arch Linux install. I think this iteration looks quite a bit nicer, but I'm concerned about adding bloat to my system. After building it, I am pretty unwilling to add stuff unless I really need to. The system is also running on VM.

I'm currently running LXDE. What would Enlightenment offer me LXDE doesn't (aside from a nicer-looking interface)?

<comment><USER22> Have you tried no desktop at all, for even less bloat? I went from not installing X at all, to installing it with a desktop, then back down to X with just a simple window manager. I don't miss the desktop.

I'd love to go completely sans graphics but it makes basic web application testing problematic. And in the end, the bloatphobia is not warranted - just a curious pastime.

<comment><USER23> It's kind of funny to see comments like the one you're responding to. I remember when Enlightenment _was_ considered "bloated"... and then it stayed the same for a while, and suddenly was considered "lightweight".

Not sure if I'll actually try the new version though. I have E16 configs that haven't been touched since the last millennium, and still work. Would be tough to give up on that kind of track record.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Their website looks nicer than their DE. I've always found blackbox/fluxbox/xfce a nicer minimal fit

</comment><comment><USER25> The diagram in the Building Blocks section of [http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en](http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en) hurts my eyes. I had to zoom in to see if my eyes or the image was to blame.

<comment><USER26> I agree.

On Chrome (on OS X Snow Leopard) the white text on the blue boxes is blurry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is great news! I have been waiting for a very long time, and it is finally here.

A month ago I installed it in Fedora and Ubuntu, to get rid of Gnome3 and Unity ... and guess what? Linux is once again an amazing workstation—beautiful, fast, and flexible.

</comment><comment><USER28> Quick Ubuntu Guide (tested with 12.10, should work with 12.04):

        sudo apt-add-repository ppa:efl/trunk
        sudo apt-get update
        sudo apt-get install e17 libedje-bin

Log out, select Enlightenment from menu, log in, enjoy!

</comment><comment><USER29> The Duke Nukem Forever of window management, released at last.

</comment><comment><USER30> Kudos for bringing out a release after such a long time. Many projects don't make it this far.

</comment><comment><USER31> E17: Codename "Walthamstow"

<joke>

Congrats to the E17 team!

</comment><comment><USER32> their site is down now.</comment>


Three bad recipes generated by neural network (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://aiweirdness.com/post/159022733587/three-bad-recipes-generated-by-neural-network <comment><USER3> Actually, it's pretty amazing that it got the structure of the recipes right- title first (with subtitle), ingredients list next, complete with quantities, then preparation and even serving suggestions at the very end ( _Serve on ranged removable pieces_ ; lol).

There's no information on the training (the link on the top first asks me to accept targeted ads so, no) but it looks like an LSTM trained to predict the next character (hence the nonsensical names of the recipes and some other words, clearly invented by the network to approximate real words in its training data). In a way it's really impressive that this sort of setup can learn such rigid structure.

On the other hand, not an expert, but I'm pretty sure there are ways to force the network to learn that the ingredients list and the prepration section must be somehow related. I think, something something attention something would make for more coherent results :)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you put whole recipes into the neural network, of course it won't work. You need to separate the parts. One neural network for ingredients, and a separate one for "instructions".

Then you feed the output of the first network into the second to get a set of preparations that actually prepare the chosen ingredients.

<comment><USER5> What about your solution makes it right?

<comment><USER6> I would think it wouldn't get things right. But it should get things less incorrect.

The ingredients are a set of items. Preparation is a sequence of steps with the ingredients as input. A neural network taught on lots of recipes should be able to come with sequences that actually make sense given the ingredients.

<comment><USER7> The choice of ingredients is also a function of the desired preparation / serving. This will probably generate more realistic recipes but still nothing usable.

<comment><USER4> That would be accounted for though. If say the standard prep for chicken involves butter, all the training recipes would have butter with chicken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I get from this is that neural networks really have no idea what they are talking about (which of course is no news). How could they? Is a feature more important or relevant than another just because of its frequency?

People look at the output of neural networks and when they work they say - <USER2> course they do. And when they don't they rationalize it with "your model was wrong from the start".

(This is similar to how Alpha-Zero "discovered" the optimal chess openings. Of course it did, it was bound to find them by the rules of chess).

</comment><comment><USER8> It failed at making recipes but it excels at comedy!

<comment><USER9> apparently randomness is important factor in comedy, just like somewhat funny memes created by neural network [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302917) maybe joke-generation is actual future of AI?

<comment><USER10> Perhaps randomness is a shortcut to absurdity, but good comedy is rarely random. (Is it ever? Honest question.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Related: Awesome visual essay about using algorithms to generate (bad) cookie recipes [https://pudding.cool/2018/05/cookies/](https://pudding.cool/2018/05/cookies/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an amazing article about cookies!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> __Highly__ , highly related: [https://gist.github.com/nylki/1efbaa36635956d35bcc](https://gist.github.com/nylki/1efbaa36635956d35bcc)

I tried condensing it a couple years ago ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14376816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14376816) \- I was i336_ then), but I think the original is worth slowly reading through.

There are some definite gems in there that will most definitely cheer you up at the very least.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is it just me that wants to see another neural network which can generate a photos of these wondrous creations ?</comment>


Everything Is Private Equity Now - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-10-03/how-private-equity-works-and-took-over-everything <comment><USER2> To me, the most striking thing in this article ISN'T that there's a vast, opaque, multi-trillion dollar shadow stock market for institutional investors and elite individuals.

Instead, it's the fact that over the past 25 years, these vehicles have only managed to beat an S&P 500 index fund by 1-2% after fees. And that over the past 10 years, more than half of them are _underperforming_ a passive index fund.

Even if I had a few extra billion dollars lying around, I wouldn't get involved with private equity firms. This audience comes across like a combination of insolvent pension fund managers desperate for a way out, and wealthy individuals who just enjoy the feeling of being in an exclusive club. With dubious "financial engineers" fleecing them all through fees, and hollowing out thousands of private companies to make the whole system possible.

<comment><USER3> > I wouldn't get involved with private equity firms

The website you posted this sentence on is owned by a private equity firm.

<comment> barry-cotter The venture capital economic model is very different from that of private equity. VC makes relatively small investments in many extremely risky firms, hoping for a few massive blowout hits which return the entire fund by themselves. PE buys firms with proven economic models, cuts costs and tries to improve management in some form, whether by bringing in real estate expertise for franchises (think Starbucks or McDonald's) or doing bog standard MBA stuff like KPIs and improving staffing, hiring or internal IT.

At the high end of VC you get some overlap with PE, like SoftBank investing $X00 million in hot "startups" but PE does not chase 100x returns on investment. They're in the business of taking a company worth $100 million and turning it into one worth $500 million.

<comment><USER4> Venture Capital is a strict subset of the Private Equity industry. They are not outside it, they are deep within it. PE firms do _exactly_ what VC firms do (though often with different sorts of businesses), plus a lot more.

<comment><USER5> VCs don't do the same kinds of questionable financial engineering that PEs do.

<comment><USER6> Only because they can't. Leverage requires steady cash flows, fixed assets, etc. If VCs could increase their potential return while also increasing financial risk to their portfolio, they absolutely would.

Across private equity there is a spectrum from small cap to large cap with increasing leverage. The small cap funds do a combination of the leverage tricks available to PE investors as well as the deal structure tricks available to VCs (preferred, etc).

<comment><USER5> They can't so they don't. That's why its irrelevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Private equity is not, in itself, a problem.

 _Leveraged buyouts_ however are starting to become a serious problem. They allow the hollowing-out of functional but low-profit companies into debt- ridden shells. The most recent example in the news is Pizza Express: what is a restaurant chain doing with £1bn of debt? [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49957551](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49957551)

This is bad for staff and bad for creditors.

<comment><USER8> The bad LBOs are featured much more prominently than the good ones.

LBOs create long-term value for society by disciplining managers (see Nabisco) and allocating capital more efficiently. Debtors are not forced to lend, shareholders are not forced to sell (unless the offer is so objectively great the company has a fiduciary duty to sell), so everyone is a consenting adult.

People who get fired go work for a different company eventually, and the pool of companies workers can work for only improves in a competitive society.

<comment><USER5> LBOs don't create value, they exist to transfer value from stakeholders to shareholders. PE buyouts have something like a 10x rate of bankruptcy filing compared to the benchmark.

LBO's require buying a healthy cash-rich business, loading it up with debt, an then forcing repayment and management fees to the PE fund through cost cutting, dividend recaps, and other measures to transfer cash. Plus since the PE firm themselves puts in 1-2% of their own cash, they face little risk and huge upside for taking on large debts on their PortCo. LBO firms aren't responsible managers because they don't have the same capital stake that a real owner would have.

LBO's wouldn't exist if funds were responsible for the financial liabilities they place on their PortCos.

<comment><USER9> Wouldn't it be expected that companies who are targeted by PE are more likely to go bankrupt, independent of any actions by the PE firm? They say they're targeting poorly run companies, after all. (Not to disagree with your larger point, but want to correct any mistakes in my understanding.)

<comment><USER5> A very small portion of PE is funds focused on either turning around poorly- run companies or growing small companies, mainly because this is very hard and requires specializing in a sector. Plus exit horizons are longer than 3-5 years.

Most PE activity is about finding a cash-rich company with steady returns, having said firm take out large loans to service the debt, and using fees/dividend recaps to transfer company wealth to the PE fund. PE acquired companies have a much higher bankruptcy rate than the benchmark

<comment><USER8> The fact that there are poor performing PE funds out there doesn't make LBOs an objectively evil device.

You're simply arguing investors are dumb for throwing their money at PEs somewhat indiscriminately rather than only investing in high-quality PE funds with investments that do not go bankrupt as often.

Moreover, one could argue that the mere existence of LBOs forces managers to be more disciplined and act on behalf of their shareholders, which marginally reduces the challenge that agency costs pose on public corporations

<comment><USER5> The LBO model inherently makes operational flexibility difficult.

The whole idea that shareholders are the only ones that matter is both recent and poisonous to the long-term health of the economy.

<comment><USER8> > The whole idea that shareholders are the only ones that matter is both > recent and poisonous to the long-term health of the economy.

They are not the only ones who matter, just the ones who matter the most. My point was more about corporate kleptocracy and whimsical managers running wild. I did not claim shareholder value trumps everything else.

In fact, the agency costs of appointing managers to run a business affects not only shareholders but every other stakeholder.

But for the record, _Unocal v. Mesa Petroleum Co., 493 A.2d 946 (Del. 1985)_ established that takeover offers ought to be evaluated in the context of all stakeholders – "shareholders, creditors, customers, employees, and the community"¹ – with _Revlon, Inc. v. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, Inc., 506 A.2d 173 (Del. 1986)_² later modifying this test to put shareholder value above all other stakeholders _in certain circumstances_ ("Revlon duties").

Whether that is "poisonous to the long-term health of the economy" is most certainly _not_ a foregone conclusion and a bold claim to make, particularly given that we're currently in the longest period of prosperity³ and LBOs are everywhere to be found

––––––––––

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unocal_Corp._v._Mesa_Petroleum...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unocal_Corp._v._Mesa_Petroleum_Co.#Judgment)

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revlon,_Inc._v._MacAndrews_%26...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revlon,_Inc._v._MacAndrews_%26_Forbes_Holdings,_Inc).

3\. [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/this-is-now-the-longest- us-e...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/this-is-now-the-longest-us-economic- expansion-in-history.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I work in the industry and whilst the article does make some good points, it largely feels like a hit piece focused predominately on the negatives. In a way there is a clear lack of nuance....for instance: "the PE firm and its investors can put in a comparatively small amount of cash". PE deals are typically funded with ~40% to 50% equity with the rest in debt. They are putting substaintial equity into these companies. Secondly, the PE ecosystem is large with a significant number of places with a range of different investment strategies. I don't have the time to make all my points...PE is a lot more gray than the article paints and it's easy to point to the big, evil capitalist who make money and say they are ruining the world...

As an example, I've seen private equity save companies. One group acquired a company that was losing millions with a plan to return it to profitability and keep jobs....these kind of deals are never discussed in articles like this because all we hear about are the bankrupticies because they go through court...

<comment><USER5> The PE "fund" puts in 30-50% equity, largely coming out of LP money. The GPs put in 1-2%. So while the GPs act like managers, they have little skin in the game and aren't liable for the debts they rack up on the PortCo.

Growth equity has seen some success, but the vast majority of PE activity is based around financially engineering a PortCo to transfer value from the PortCo to the fund, regardless of how it wrecks all other stakeholders or the long-term health of the PortCo.

<comment><USER10> I understand that the majority of equity is coming from LPs but that's not the point I was making. The way the author framed it sounded like the deals were 90% debt and 10% equity which is not the case.

It depends on the size of manager and I've seen GP commits range from 1% to 10%. The largest dollar commitment I've seen is in the ~$500m ballpark....either way what matters is whether the GP commit is meaningful in terms of their own net worth due to alignment of interest. Again this is not a black and white issue....some GPs do have skin in the game.

Most people do not understand debt including the author...at the moment, debt is so darn cheap, tax-effecient and covenant-lite that it's almost free money.... I would rather be on the equity side of the equation then be a lender....whether that would be a bank or high yield/junk bond investor.

I would argue that raising a PE fund is asymmetric for the manager since heads: I earn plenty of carried interest....tails: I get fat from the management fees and hold onto the portfolio companies for as long as I can (~10 years).

Which segment of the PE market are you refering to? What do you mean by financial engineering? I've spent a lot of my time in the US LMM and I see plenty of value creation/professionalization of small businesses. That said, I appreciate the fact that that kind of work is harder to do at the larger end...and it's more about the leverage, buying right with the right secular trends etc. Again not black and white....

For example on job creation:

"We find that the real-side effects of buyouts on target firms and their workers vary greatly by deal type and market conditions... This conclusion cast doubts on the efficacy of 'one-size-fits-all' policy prescriptions for private equity."

If I was to use an analogy with regards to the article, its as if someone tried describing the entire software industry to an outsider by only refering to Microsoft, Google and IBM...what about the rest of the industry?

[0] Pro Rata [https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-pro-rata- ed716a8a-37...](https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-pro-rata- ed716a8a-3790-4e1d-8a56-d05db1e4e803.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For the lazy/poor: [http://archive.is/DJJC5](http://archive.is/DJJC5)

<comment><USER12> i appreciate the link, was the "lazy/poor" word choice necessary?

<comment><USER13> I feel like there's some implicit self-deprecation in their comment considering in order to be able to share it they must have generated the archive link for their own lazy/poor self :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This tweet sums it up pretty well, even if you want to replace crypto with PE:

"QE turned your savings account into your checking account, the bond market into your savings account, the equity market into the bond market, the VC market into the equity market, and crypto into the VC market.

[https://twitter.com/joemccann/status/1181582031790067713](https://twitter.com/joemccann/status/1181582031790067713)

<comment><USER15> PE is definitely far more structured and reasonable than the VC market.

Holding periods are also much longer for PE than VC, with some holding for 30+ years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A good question is what is a retail accessible way to short all this credit that PE firms put on corporate balance sheets. So far the best I could come up with was LEAPS puts on BKLN and maybe LQD, if indeed the credit ratings have weakened and many BBBs are going to get rekd too.

</comment><comment><USER17> I am worried that index funds will stop being one of the only mechanisms the middle class have to build wealth over the next 30 years because technology has made them so easily accessible and everybody is starting to catch on participation wise.

</comment><comment><USER18> The main takeaway is you want to be a PE firm but may not want to invest in them.

</comment><comment><USER19> This page is way too 'big' \- if I zoom out to 50% the text is much more readable, but of course that makes it occupy a silly width, and the navigation far too small.

Is there a better way to handle (as a user) scaling content? Maybe custom CSS to change the font size that's remembered per domain?

<comment><USER20> In Firefox, in the menu (press Alt if it's not visible by default):

View > Zoom > Zoom Text Only

and then zoom in/out as you desire.

The setting is unfortunately global, so you can't zoom in the page on some sites and zoom in the text on others. (You can toggle the setting, though, and the "zoom amount" is remembered per-site, irrespective of toggling.)

There are probably also some extensions that would be more flexible and work on more browsers. (I'm pretty sure that Vimperator (RIP) had an option to separately change text size and overall zoom.)

<comment><USER19> Thanks, I didn't know about text-only zoom.

> the "zoom amount" is remembered per-site, irrespective of toggling.

I'm pretty sure it isn't with stock Firefox - I use an extension for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was sure it was going to be Matt Levine with a title like that!</comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite ad/popup blocker? - <AUTHOR> I reached some breaking point today, every site I visited had some annoying "support" bubble in the bottom showing messages and popups trying to get me to sign up for something or other. I have never really used a popup blocker before and would love to hear suggestions. <comment><USER2> I would second uBlock Origin too! Been using it for 3 or 4 years I think and works great on Chrome and Safari too. Make sure it's "uBlock Origin" and not uBlock only. You can read up on difference between "uBlock Origin" and "uBlock".

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I had ublock :). I switched to origin. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> NoScript + uBlock Origin.

Takes some time to whitelist a bunch of things in NoScript but after a while the combination of the two make for a much better/faster browsing experience.

</comment><comment><USER4> Would second uMatrix, although it can be high maintanence and/or intimidating to get used to.

uBlock Origin is my go-to, and low maintenance enough that my elderly parents have it installed and haven't called to yell at me yet.

</comment><comment><USER5> UBlock Original + Ghostery. Pretty much handles everything.

</comment><comment><USER6> uBlock Origin plus PiHole for ad blocking.

Popup blocking is in Firefox itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, another friend of mine uses ublock and is happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> uMatrix offers me complete control over the requests that get allowed or blocked, so there's no need for anything else.

</comment><comment><USER8> Grimd, DNS based blocker, like pihole</comment>


A Little Fellow with a Big Head: On Fernando Pessoa - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/07/27/a-little-fellow-with-a-big-head/ <comment><USER2> I see only five paragraphs in this article, but it feels very introductory like the beginning of a much longer piece. Is there more somewhere else that I'm missing?

</comment><comment><USER3> Created an account to comment on this.

The authors of this article seem to interpret this as an imaginative fancy of his that he "created"; rather, this actually seems to be a classic case of a polyfragmented DID system [of identities], also known as complex DID.

Oftentimes, alters are not formed consciously, and this is a severe disorder that is heavily traumagenic in nature. In my personal nonprofessional opinion, it's one of the harder non-neurodegenerative diseases to live with.

Source -- personal experience, I'm on the dissociative spectrum in some way, as best as I know. Expecting to receive a diagnosis shortly as an OSDD-1b system, and potentially DID under the ICD/ANP qualifications. The dissociative spectrum is actually shockingly common as a disorder, appearing in up to 1 in 12 in the general population, but is almost never diagnosed because much like PTSD in the 80's, it's heavily underemphasized and is seemingly not well- popularized in psychological circles today. Rather, the food fight over the legitimacy of DID seems to be taking away from work that could be done to further dissociative treatment modalities/other complex trauma disorders. Sauce on the 1 in 12 stat: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4579511/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4579511/)

More info on polyfragmented systems here:[https://this-is-not- dissociative.tumblr.com/post/18617448707...](https://this-is-not- dissociative.tumblr.com/post/186174487079/polyfragmented-systems)

<comment><USER4> I'm inclined to agree with you, that this sounds very much like a presentation of Dissociative Identity Disorder, with the reservation that I don't know the situation or the individuals beyond these simple reports.

It sounds like you've done quite a bit of reading on this and are consulting with a mental health professional towards a diagnosis. While this might not be relevant to you, if you haven't already, you may want to also explore and discuss together the schizophrenia spectrum. It's also much broader than many people realize and has significant overlap with the dissociative spectrum. It doesn't have to involve the kinds of extreme hallucination or delusion stereotypically associated with schizophrenia itself.

For instance someone with Schizoid PD might experience a sense of switching between personas when they are exhibiting covert characteristics. Or a person with Schizotypal PD might experience shifts in identity as a result of sub- psychotic disturbances, or might turn their suspicion inward to ruminate on the nature of their own identity.

You likely have a stronger sense of established alters since you specifically mention OSDD-1b, but for folks experiencing symptoms of depersonalization/derealization, you might be interested in looking into and talking with a mental health professional about the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and the cluster A disorders to see if any of them resonate with you.

At any rate, bboy13, wishing you the best of luck exploring your mental health.

<comment><USER3> Hi cjhveal,

This is like liquid gold to me. Thank you so much for sharing. It's been a long journey, and I'm of the typical self-studied knowledge base -- fractured, and an inch wide and a mile deep in spurious, seemingly unpredictable places that a "real" practitioner wouldn't waste time on.

There is a strange sense of depersonalization that doesn't fit traditional/vanilla DP/DR, and I'll absolutely have to take a look at the Schizoid PD and the surrounding literature. Any good sources to study to understand? Anything from articles to textbooks works for me.

Clusters B and C have been of more attention recently, as I have some overlap there, but as with everything, it seems like PDs aren't entirely discrete.

Now, you seem to be extremely well-studied on some of the intricacies of some of the PDs. Combinatorially, it could certainly be a very strong part of things. I find myself very social, generally, with interest in people and a variety of activities, but of course at times frozen in a fear response/very reclusive -- moreso than emotions might typically suggest. No traditional "hallucinatory" symptoms, though we both probably have experienced the vast gap between public perception and XYZ in some small areas or another.

Really appreciate you putting together a thoughtful response so much. I don't know whether you're a clinician, or what might have brought you into the PD neighborhood, but having another option to weigh and understand is vastly appreciated, and I was entirely unaware of the Schizoid PD before today -- I'd just thought it was a descriptor (and an odd one at that), so the expanding arena is much appreciated. If you have anything you're interested in that that you're willing to pass along, I sure would be.

Many thanks again,

B

<comment><USER4> I should have included in my previous post that I'm not a mental health professional. I'm also just an interested individual looking to make the most of the hand I've been dealt, and I too have very large blindspots. I don't mean to provide you specific advice for your situation but simply offer something else to explore.

To be perfectly honest, my own fascination with personality disorders has formed as a result of rumination, spending energy obsessing over perceived symptoms and the their implications to the detriment of taking action toward solving the problems. I think this is one of the dangers of trying to go about making sense of your mental wellbeing alone.

If you're not already working with a mental health professional, and it is at all possible, I would very strongly recommend finding a therapist with a PsyD licensed in your jurisdiction. When you find a good one, they will have the depth to talk with you at a high level and the breadth and experience to help you consider possibilities you wouldn't have known about on your own. I understand if that's out of reach for you given your circumstances, but it can be a huge help.

Ultimately you are right, personality disorders are not discrete, nor are they mutually exclusive categories. They're really just patterns of traits as observed by folks who spend their time studying this kind of thing, and none of them seem have as simple a pathology as something like Wilson's disease where a vast array of symptoms can all be caused simply by an inability to excrete enough copper.

That aside, specifically to your request for more information, I can offer the following:

I was recently introduced to the relation between identity disturbance and the schizophrenia spectrum via this paper[0]. I realized that I had a very narrow view of schizophrenia and started to learn about the concept of schizotypy, the difference between negative/positive schizophrenia symptoms, and how dissociation + depression can start to look a lot like it fits on the schizophrenia spectrum. Here's another paper[1] that goes a bit more into the ways that the two spectrums overlap and contrast. Finally, sometimes the personality disorder subreddits can be useful for both finding a community and exploring what folks are saying about their own diagnoses and experience there.

[0]: [https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/45/1/...](https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/45/1/106/4823553) [1]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5216848/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5216848/)

Feel free to reach out via the email on my website (in HN bio), if you have any other questions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can a sysadmin switch into (full-time) programming? - <AUTHOR>

I've been a sysadmin for 10 years now. I started while still in college (computer science/engineering) and when I moved to the private sector, I ended up being a developer for only about 8 months before quickly being pushed into doing more and more systems administration and less and less actual programming.
I love programming and there are plenty of opportunities to code as part of a sysadmin's job. I try to keep up with programming-related news, have my own small programming hacks on the side and, sometimes, like to sharpen my algorithmic skills with Project Euler-like problems.
Although right now I don't see myself looking at the same code base day after day, I sometimes wonder if I could still switch back into a programming job if I really wanted to.
So, what do you people think? Can a systems administrator really go back into programming? What would he need to (re)learn and what skills would he need to prove himself worthy? <comment><USER2> > Can a systems administrator really go back into programming? Of course. You > could start by availing yourself of the many opportunities to program as > part of your sysadmin job. That will give you plenty of practice and a > portfolio of useful tool you've built.

You probably know some devs at your current employer so, talk to them and see if there are any opportunities coming up. Or, you could find a new job at a smaller company or startup where sysadmin skills would come in handy.

Most of all, have a clear reason why you want to become a developer. Mine was (and still is) that I'd rather build products than babysit them. I was a full- time sysadmin before and during grad school (CS). Now I do programming and sysadmin, plus other soft skills like proj mgmt.

A great benefit to being a sysadmin is that you can talk to other sysadmins and get stuff done.

</comment><comment><USER3> You totally can. If you are a constant scripter, find ways in introduce technology that'll get you more involved with development. Are you a perl / linux program master? Switch to doing some administrative chores in python, from the command line. It'll be clunky and take way longer, but gives you an excuse to learn syntax and libraries.

Then, when you are comfortable with the syntax, use your free to time read projects / books and do side projects to get your skills up. When you feel comfortable, get into dev ops. At most companies, that means people that can write code and do their own sysadmin work.</comment>


The desperate patient causes the desperate clinician to do desperate things - <AUTHOR> https://thehonestphysio.com/2019/06/08/the-desperate-patient-causes-the-desperate-clinician-to-do-desperate-things/ <comment><USER3> I can attest to being a slave to "treatment" for a while. I used to clock into my local physician, who'd have a go at my back with manual therapy (post-op fractured vertebrae, ruptured vertebrae, and massive scar tissue from surgery) until we got "rid of all the knots" and I'd leave, skipper as anything - <USER2> they came back over the course of the next two weeks.

Eventually, after about 6 months of this bi-weekly physical therapy, I quit going because I knew it wasn't doing anything to deal with the underlying problems. I swapped to a different physio, who I complained to about having to go to physio so regularly but nothing changing. He gave me a list of exercises and told me "You want to cure your back pain? Do these until you can touch your toes. Don't come here back till then." Came back after breaking that hurdle. He gave me a new list, and said "Do these until you can touch your hips to the ground in downward-dog". Next one "Do these until you can hold a bridge for a minute." Rinse and repeat, until 18 months later, after about 10 appointments, I no longer had any back pain.

If you're struggling with injuries, I highly recommend shopping around for physiotherapists until you find something that works for you. I'd have been getting manual therapy on my back for the rest of my life if it weren't for testing the waters.

<comment><USER4> Most white collar workers have very weak "core" muscles from sitting all day. This is basically everything between the bottom of your ribs to your thighs — abs, obliques, and everything in the pelvic area. It's pretty obvious how changing from a life that requires us to stand / walk / run to one where we sit for long periods of time would work those muscles FAR less than sitting at a desk.

Weakness in your core leads other muscles — like those in your back — to overcompensate. For me, it started as hip pain, for others it's knee pain (yup, weak core muscles can cause knee issues too!) But back pain is probably the most common, and is usually caused by weakness in the obliques putting the weight of stabilizing your head / torso almost entirely on your back muscles.

Fortunately treatment is easy. Bridge poses, crunches, kettlebell workouts (particularly good for the obliques) and yoga are probably the best exercises to work your core. Consider your PT a personal trainer: one your health insurance carrier is more than happy to pay for given the link between physical fitness and overall health.

<comment><USER5> Barbell squats and deadlifts are probably a more direct and effective way of making your muscles stronger, including your "core" muscles.

<comment><USER6> I know you mean well but let's not optimize too much. If you do something, really anything, you are already way ahead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And we never found out what happened to Paul :(

<comment><USER8> I think the writer is fishing for comments from people wanting more paul :)

<comment><USER9> I'm desperate to know!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Recognise the power of the white coat (to most) and use it wisely.

</comment><comment><USER11> This also shows how easy it is for people (and medical people) to imagine there is some magical potion that will make everything perfect again, even if it is imaginary. I think in software we do things repeatedly thinking they are making thing easier or better when in reality the machine isn't even turned on.</comment>


Ask HN: What prohibits smartphones use as desktops - <AUTHOR> I am interested in understanding your thoughts on what are the barriers today to turning your smartphone into your main and only computer.
The idea of the carrying laptops when you have such powerful smartphones makes me curious about why are they not converged yet. What prohibits this convergence. Microsoft has continuum and Samsung/android has DeX. But they haven't seem to catch on like the leap that iPhone made over traditional cellphones. Why?
Is there just a lot of money to be made by companies by not converging and hence execution of this strategy is subpar or are there other genuine challenges that prohibit the convergence? <comment><USER2> Historically desktop computing has been about giving people a tool they can use to control the environment, whereas the smart phone is a tool that brands use to control you.

The mindset gap between those two things is much larger than the technical gap.

As for technical issues the devil is in the details. Often my hackathon kit has been a cheap android device with wireless keyboard and mouse. With an a ssh terminal and something like an RDP or VNC client you can do all kinds of software development. In fact many firms (e.g. the Bridgewater hedge fund) like to centralize people's desktop environment and if you do that a tablet is an option.

My understanding is that iOS devices don't support the mouse, which I don't get because mouse support "just works" on Android.

People expect a different software environment on the desktop as opposed to mobile. For instance, Windows can run on a tablet environment but it has a hard time being competitive because the Windows operating system is much larger than other mobile OSes.

It may be true that "Windows is bloated" but more to the point, Windows has more features than Android or iOS. For instance there is Hyper-V virtualization, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and Microsoft IIS. Most people wouldn't care about those things but some of us do and you wouldn't have "it runs as Windows" as a selling point if they hacked away a lot of functionality.

As for Apple, they have very profitable product lines in both the iPhone and the Mac. When you are expected to make money hand-over-fist the way that they are, they are not going to take the chance of raising the average selling price of a phone from $800 to $1200 by merging in "laptop" features and then lose to opportunity to sell you a $800 mac mini and a $1800 macbook.

</comment><comment><USER3> OS inflexibity and lock-down, lack of ports, and heat dissipation for sustained CPU load are probably the big three. Low RAM and storage are also factors for many desktop use cases.

It's really cars vs trucks. A phone is a car. A desktop is a truck. A workstation is a big truck / semi. Convergence between niches tends to result in something that is good for neither, like a car/truck that can neither seat many passengers nor haul big loads.

<comment><USER4> A phone is a bus seat.

You don't really own it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If it's just the phone as a portable for use in the go, then lugging a keyboard, monitor, maybe storage, etc would be a hassle vs a nice laptop. If it's the phone used in a docking station, why not use a more powerful desktop plus some cloud syncing for files?

</comment><comment><USER6> I want to know what prohibits someone from going to shenzhen and ordering a line of open bootloader android phones. Seems that would be a lot easier than what librem is doing.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wishful thinking: It'd be great if Ben from Stratechery did a post on this.</comment>