Object Lesson: Why we need physical books - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121560/bibliophiles-defense-physical-books <comment><USER2> Halfway through and still not a single useful insight. It's just the same cloying nostalgia that caused "bibliophiles" to panic when the Kindle first hit the streets, and apparently still causes them immense anxiety today.

This despite the fact that the Kindle has caused more new people to read, and more new people to write, than any technology since, not to be hyperbolic, but... perhaps the printing press?

Now, if you want to talk _real_ issues, let's talk about the challenges of archival, or the danger of making the written word inaccessible to the poor, or the fact that you can't give away or resell an eBook, or lend it to a friend. Those are genuine concerns we should all be thinking about as more and more data goes digital. But, of course, none of that seems to matter to folks like this... they're far more focused on what's happening to _them_ , personally. It's a surprisingly egocentric perspective.

As a random aside, I have little interest in someone who owns many books. Now, someone who's _read_ many books... those folks are worth talking to.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure about the archival issue.

The only problem with archival that would make physical books superior is after civilization collapse that destroys the supply chain for computing devices.

Assuming DRM can be stripped, which it can be for most of the major ebook sellers including Amazon, ebooks can then be converted to epub which are just dialects of html with some xml metadata.

Even if html becomes deprecated in the future, there will be converters for html to new better formats.

Unencrypted ebooks can be backed up off-site, to cloud storage, to m-disc dvds or blu-rays stored in safe deposit boxes.

Physical libraries can be destroyed in fire or natural disaster almost as easily as an ebook collection on a computer. Physical books take up space and cost more, and cannot be cheaply backed up. There's a conflict between securing physical books against wear & tear and destruction, and allowing access to them.

It's worth distinguishing the sharing/lending issue as a legal problem, not an inherent deficiency of ebooks. Ebooks are better for sharing/lending in many ways... there's no need to spend time or money physically transporting them, and no need to worry about a friend accidentally spilling coffee on your favorite book.

<comment><USER4> A book stored on a shelf in a relatively temperate climate can last hundreds of years without issue.

For an optical disc to last that long and still be readable, you'll need:

1) Archival-quality discs (e.g. [http://www.mdisc.com](http://www.mdisc.com)). Normal writable discs will delaminate.

2) A drive capable of reading the disc, and capable of interfacing with your computer. Optical drives have a limited lifespan -- the drives used in Sega's Dreamcast, for example, are beginning to fail. Likewise, interconnection standards have a limited lifespan.

3) A file format that can still be read using existing technology. Will converters be likely in 50 years? Maybe. 100? Less likely. 200? Extremely unlikely.

That's just optical discs. You're also talking about live archival, for example, to "cloud storage" \-- this costs a lot more money than a book sitting on a shelf, uses a lot more power, is locked to a specific set of authentication credentials, must be paid for if the data is not to be lost.

That's before factoring in DRM and advances therein. Sure, you can strip Kindle DRM, with extra effort, but how many people will do so and then accidentally store the result in a place where it will keep for 50 years? What about when DRM gets better?

Ultimately, we suck at digital archival, and ultimately, there's only so much we can do with a medium that requires a great deal of complexity just to extract any amount of meaningful data whatsoever. There is a huge archival and preservation advantage to simple mechanisms that have fewer failure points.

<comment><USER5> Does the archive have to remain frozen in time? When the storage medium gets older, the files can be written to newer, cheaper, faster, denser devices. If a standard becomes old, convert to its successor while converters still exist.

<comment><USER4> That requires an attentive, active, and costly effort to maintain an archive, as opposed to a medium that survives even when forgotten.

<comment><USER5> On a large scale, don't physical archives need maintenance, as well? People need to keep the items stored in accordance with some sort of system (electronic formats make this easier), theft and fire prevention are needed, not to mention the amount of real estate that has to be bought, leased, and/or managed.

On a smaller scale, when someone moves, they have to move, or pay someone to move, their archive for them (I got a taste of this back in November).

<comment><USER4> Many valuable things don't wind up in an archive until after they'd have already been lost; a modern example of "what if she'd used Flickr?" would be: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Maier](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Maier)

Physical archives do require maintenance, but unlike servers, they don't convert electricity to heat at a prodigious pace, have a much simpler set of failure modes and environmental constraints, and generally remain readable even if you forget about them

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Many years ago," Gaspar said, taking out a copy of Moravia's The Adolescents and thumbing it as he spoke, "I had a library of books, oh, thousands of books -- never could bear to toss one out, not even the bad ones -- and when folks would come to the house to visit they'd look around at all the nooks and crannies stuffed with books; and if they were the sort of folks who don't snuggle with books, they'd always ask the same dumb question." He waited a moment for a response and when none was forthcoming (the sound of china cups on sink tile), he said, "Guess what the question was." From the kitchen, without much interest: "No idea."

"They'd always ask it with the kind of voice people use in the presence of large sculptures in museums. They'd ask me, 'Have you read all these books?'" He waited again, but Billy Kinetta was not playing the game. "Well, young fella, after a while the same dumb question gets asked a million times, you get sorta snappish about it. And it came to annoy me more than a little bit. Till I finally figured out the right answer.

"And you know what that answer was? Go ahead, take a guess." Billy appeared in the kitchenette doorway.

"I suppose you told them you'd read a lot of them but not all of them."

Gaspar waved the guess away with a flapping hand. "Now what good would that have done? They wouldn't know they'd asked a dumb question, but I didn't want to insult them, either. So when they'd ask if I'd read all those books, I'd say, 'Hell, no. Who wants a library full of books you've already read?'"

[http://harlanellison.com/iwrite/paladin.htm](http://harlanellison.com/iwrite/paladin.htm)

</comment><comment><USER7> When e-books have completely taken over, and the last dead-tree is tossed in the trash, one will remain: "Gödel, Escher, Bach", with its spine thoroughly cracked (though almost entirely unread) sitting proudly on every techie's shelf.

</comment><comment><USER8> A point not much discussed in the essay is that of technical books. In this area, physical books are somehow better.

Has anyone had any success with big e-ink devices? I'd love to switch, but they are a bit expensive, slow and lack good format support.

Moving around the world with tons of books is sadly very inconvenient.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, right now it seems tablets are the "best" option, but I actually think, for technical materials, where you're jumping around, marking pages, etc, more frequently, physical paper is still superior.

Well, save for the fact that technical books are rarely coil bound. At least a digital book stays open when I set it down on my damn desk!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I suspect you need to achieve a certain level of fiscal security before you can start to worry about the difference between the "experience" of a book as opposed to simply being able to read it.

</comment><comment><USER10> so the author is saying that we 'need' physical books because the physical presence of books adds an aesthetic dimension to reading?

wouldn't the value of that dimension decline over time? for the next generation of readers, the majority of reading will be done in digital formats, and the the level of emotional attachment to physical books will be significantly less.

<comment><USER11> We've already seen that this is not the case, as the current generation of readers is favoring the physical book over the ebook.

So there's obviously some value to the experience of reading from a physical artifact, and the younger generations are also obviously able to identify this value.

<comment><USER2> Huh, I hadn't heard that anywhere. Got a citation? Sounds like an interesting cultural phenomenon, assuming it's supported by the data.

<comment><USER11> Sure, here you go.

[http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/25/young-adult- rea...](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/25/young-adult-readers- prefer-printed-ebooks)

[http://www.publishingtechnology.com/research/](http://www.publishingtechnology.com/research/)

<comment><USER2> Huh, so this covered 16-24 year olds. So, a bit of history, recall the Kindle was first released in late 2007 (hard to believe it was both that long ago and yet only that long ago...). The youngest in that age bracket would've been 8 at that point, and the oldest 16. By the time ebooks really took off they probably would've been ten and 18 respectively, which means more or less growing up exposed to paper books before mass market electronic alternatives were available.

Given that, I wonder if we're still in a generational swing here.

It's possible that's not the case. But I'm not convinced this study absolutely proves that "there's obviously some value to the experience of reading from a physical artifact, and the younger generations are also obviously able to identify this value." It could simply be that people prefer what they grew up with. _shrug_

<comment><USER11> > It could simply be that people prefer what they grew up with. shrug

If this was the case, there wouldn't be a generational difference between that age group and older age groups, since everybody born before 2007 would have "grown up with" regular books.

<comment><USER2> Hmm, unless I'm missing something, neither of the references you provided support the hypothesis of a generational change.

The one study looked at reading preferences of 16-24 year olds and found 62% prefer paper.

The other study analyzed reading _behaviours_ (not preferences) of 18-34 year olds, finding 64% (UK)/79% (US) read a paper book in the previous year.

Now, from behaviour let's say we can infer preference. In that case the second study found that an overwhelming majority of 18-34 year olds read print books in the last year, which seems to align with 16-24 year old preferences (though, again, it only speaks to behaviour not preference). That would seem to refute the idea that there's a generational difference at play, here.

Of course, I could be missing some key point. It wouldn't be the first time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I read from screens all day: phone, tablet, desktop. I just finished reading The Martian on my phone. The only time I find I absolutely must have text on paper is when I'm memorizing lines from a script for a play. I've even tried using flashcard software as well as audio I've recorded for my lines and cues; it doesn't work for me.</comment>


Ask HN: I am designing a iOS app. Is there a cheat sheet for sizing? - <AUTHOR>

Also, for retina display, don't I basically need to make the designs twice to accomodate for both retina and non retina displays? Thanks for all your help. I'm new to mobile design. <comment><USER2> You want to think in terms of aspect ratio first, and pixels second. Currently (and this may change) the iPad has the same aspect ratio that's shared between an iPad, an iPad with Retina and an iPad mini. On the other hand the iPhone 5 and say the iPhone 4s have different aspect ratios since the iPhone5 is taller.

Also don't forget that your design has to be responsive so that it can go from horizontal to vertical. And then keep in mind that if at some later point you want to port to Android that there really aren't any fixed aspect ratios since there are so many devices.

My advice is that you should sketch and then use an app like Keynote to see what your interface looks like on the device. You can be shocked sometimes just how different things feel when you go from a personal computer to a mobile device.

</comment><comment><USER3> No, you need 'textures' for both displays, but not geometry. The geometry has not changed in retina displays :D (This question was answered dozens of time @ stackoverflow, you should check there)

This is why I'm converting an open source app I built to just render everything (using CG, not CALayer) instead of using images. Yeah, images are faster. But I hate to repeat myself and exporting images from photoshop is more time consuming than it seems.

(Edit): Images are usually faster, but that's not entirely true if you use only CG calls on a drawRect. From a memory standpoint, keep in mind that a PNG file will occupy the 'framebuffer' + the original image + all the crap that comes with UIImage. By drawing it yourself, you will burn a little cpu time but than only the result buffer will allocated.

<comment><USER4> I don't really know what graphics you're drawing in your app, but this approach will kill the performance of anything that relies on the GPU.

Since you're only using Core Graphics, this is acceptable. Core Graphics only has a CPU implementation on iOS. Core Animation has a CPU implementation that only gets activated under certain conditions; otherwise, it renders through the GPU by default.

If you're planning on using CA...

\- outside of -drawRect:,

\- with no shadows or masks (transparent gradients, for instance,)

\- without text (CATextLayer, UILabels, Core Text, UIFont,)

\- with -shouldRasterize: assigned to NO (the default,)

\- without overriding -drawInContext: (which draws a CALayer's content to a CGContext,)

\- with any OpenGL code at all,

...you're going to quickly end up in the land of seconds per frame instead of frames per second.

<comment><USER3> "Core Graphics only has a CPU implementation on iOS."

No. :D

<comment><USER4> Would you care to elaborate, rather than be glib?

QuartzGL runs all Core Graphics on the GPU[1]. It's only available on OS X.

If you can show me evidence that some API on iOS runs Core Graphics on the GPU, I'd be happy to know. I do a fair amount of work running Core Animation, CG and OpenGL at the same time, so it would be a big help.

[1] - [http://www.cocoawithlove.com/2011/03/mac- quartzgl-2d-drawing...](http://www.cocoawithlove.com/2011/03/mac- quartzgl-2d-drawing-on-graphics.html)

<comment><USER3> This really isn't the place, but: You are confusing the composition and the actual rendering. When you use CG you are composing in the cpu but the actual result is always rendered by the gpu, there is no such thing as rendering by cpu in ios devices. When using opengl the composition and rendering will happen in the gpu. But this is not really important for static objects like buttons, they are built once, unless use force changes, it wont touch the cpu (written on a phone, sorry about typos)

For instance, this is 100% gpu: [http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/ipad/#documentation/G...](http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/ipad/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Reference/CGAffineTransform/Reference/reference.html%23//apple_ref/doc/c_ref/CGAffineTransform)

<comment><USER4> This is the place. It's HN!

I have a strong suspicion that CGAffineTransform and its associated methods are calculated through the ARM NEON co-processor. I don't see anything in the documentation you provided that mentions the GPU.

It _could_ be done in a vertex shader on the GPU, but looking at the API, the use of Rotation, Scale and Translation methods seems more consistent with it being done on the CPU or the CPU's floating point co-processor. Otherwise, there would be something equivalent to glBegin() or glEnd() to prep calls to update the uniforms for the shaders and render to the frame and render buffers, much like CA's transaction based API for animations - the block based API is similar, too.[1] Frankly, switching to a shader just to do rotation/scaling/translation is a bit much, and better left to the CPU in most cases.

Andy Matsuchak of Apple claims that "When you implement drawRect or draw with CoreGraphics, you're using the CPU to draw, and that drawing will happen synchronously within your application. You're just calling some function which writes bits in a bitmap buffer, basically."[2]

That is rendering. Unless you're confusing rendering with compositing layers, the act of blending several CALayers/UIViews together.

The compositing bit is completely dependent on how you opted to draw your layers; some can be composited on the CPU, others on the GPU. I've listed all the ways that a layer can be composited on the CPU, it's just something to watch out for.

[1] - I'll grant you that CA has an implicit animation API, but CA also has a much more elaborate system of keeping current state and projected state in place. CA has layer trees for each to avoid having to block the CPU and wait on the asynchronous GPU for results, which CG doesn't.

[2] - [http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/36591648724/designing- for-...](http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/36591648724/designing-for-ios- graphics-performance#comment-720533654)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Check out the articles here: <http://bjango.com/articles/>

Great resource for what you're looking for. Including downloadable Photoshop actions to make it all easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. That'll help a lot. I'm tempted to leave the designing up to a professional.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff? - <AUTHOR> Is there a website out there that's more technical than HN, has less negativity, and leaves out the "social" aspects of technology?
What I'm looking for is a site where I can discuss things like:
-Programming language design (functional languages, different type systems, point-free style, etc...)
-Interesting mathematics (deeper understanding of statistics, implications of Godel's incompleteness theorem)
-Interesting science (advances in quantum mechanics, optical gyroscopes, etc.)
-Other technical oddities (Turing complete systems, global illumination on GPUs, supercomputing)
-News on start-ups that solve technical rather than social problems (DE Shaw instead of Socialcam)
I'd like to avoid:
-Tech products
-Heated arguments that make me feel bad after reading the comments instead of enlightened <comment><USER2> I have a somewhat radical, sadly not novel suggestion: build what you're looking for.

I now have a semi-private "HN Reader" which has completely broken my HN habit while still feeding me stuff I might be interested in. Because I built it, I can make it do anything I want. I've started to turn it into a slightly broader search engine so that I can find the things that I'm looking for; I got sick of seeing search engines brag about the hundreds-of-thousands or millions of search results they were returning when I was trying to find something (really, what's the point of that?), so I'm building my own. I got sick of feeding some psychological trigger in my brain that made me nervously check the HN front page numerous times throughout the day, and I'd find myself clicking on items that had lots of comments and activity even if the subject was something I wasn't interested in. I guess I was thinking, "wow, lots of people over there, I should go check that out."

What did it for me was a bit of foggy nostalgia one day. I was thinking about "the good ol' days", how I -- we, all of us if we were lucky enough to be born at the right time in the right environment -- used to modify the crap of out of programs, change their interface, tweak their colors, cheat at games even when we were the only ones playing. We used to take things we didn't like and turn them into things we did like.

But nobody, or very few people, do that for the web, even though there are piles and piles of tools that make it easy and doable.

So I did it.

And it is glorious.

It's some of the most fun I've had at programming in years. Now when I'm feeling like a wet cat, I'll just go tweak my little reader-search-engine-toy, and then I feel better. Now I never feel like I'm missing out on something on HN, because my little toy is keeping an eye on it for me and saving the stuff I might care about it.

And if you're looking for a new _community_ ... well, build that too! It's clear from numerous threads on HN and other places that people are ready for something new. Make what you want, share it if you feel like, if enough other people like it maybe they'll join in and you'll have your community.

<comment><USER3> If anybody wants an easy way to set up their own HN, may I suggest taking a look at Telescope?

<http://telesc.pe/>

It's a real-time, open source HN clone built on Meteor, with features like invite-only mode, notifications, and a lot more stuff.

And since it's open source, if something is missing you can always code it yourself and contribute it back to the project.

<comment><USER4> How do you install meteorite? I can't get this working!

Frustrated!

<comment><USER5> <http://docs.meteor.com/#quickstart>

<comment><USER4> Thanks. I got this far after posting my comment. Figured out I needed NodePackageManager. I hate when instructions say npm and dont say what npm means. Now I am getting another error when I run mrt inside the telescope folder. I am working on it.. I love this. I spent weeks trying to get newscloud going, but never did...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A fairly transparent bit of rhetoric there :-)

In answer to your non-question question, yes that site exists, there are literally hundreds of them. They get a few users, then they don't get new news, they get a few 'bad' things (people get scolded for being negative, or chastised for being 'off topic' or 'social') and then no one wants to post because they can't really tell what is "acceptable" and what isn't. People stop going there. It fades into obscurity.

My suggestion is that what your looking for isn't a web site its friends. Get together once a week and hang out. You can talk about programming languages, mathematics, science and other oddities. Invite people who stick to the program, shun people who keep wanting to talk about tech products.

<comment><USER7> This is the real answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd possibly like the same thing, but I don't have much in the way of hope that it will materialize. I see you're a Chem Eng grad student. I'd say for programming language design, read the computer science papers from top conferences that interest you, starting with PLDI:

<https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2254064> (click on Table of Contents)

If you want to discuss them, send email to the authors, try and find some grad students or professors in your CS department, or find a way to attend some CS conferences.

I don't think you'll find deep research-quality conversation in a news aggregator, mostly because the people who are interested in having and also able to have research-quality conversations are for the most part busy doing research, and also because coming up with a reasonable opinion about something complicated that you're not an expert in takes a lot of work.

There are specific blogs, mailing lists, and (maybe defunct) newsgroups where you can discuss more focused topics, e.g. <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/>

</comment><comment><USER9> I can't believe noone mentioned LtU: <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/>

Also, try Prismatic maybe.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think Hacker News is as close to a "non-social" discussion forum as you're going to find, while maintaining high engagement.

The cliché is that humans are fundamentally social creatures, and I think one of the primary ways we maintain the high engagement in a discussion thread is by becoming interested in the other participants, not just the topic. That's usually a good thing, because it motivates us to respond and care about the discussion, but it also means that people will go off-topic, get into heated arguments, or bring up memes and social topics.

If it were possible to strictly enforce rules against off-topic or non- technical discussions, I suspect engagement would drop very quickly. Learning is a strong motivator, but I doubt it provides the same semi-addictive feedback loop that the social aspects of a site do.

(I don't have any evidence beyond my own gut feelings based on web forums over the years --- happy to be proved wrong! A high-engagement non-social discussion forum would be an interesting place.)

<comment><USER11> I think he means social in the buzzword sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> <http://lobste.rs> seems like exactly what you want. It's a good community, give it a try

<comment><USER13> reminds me of <http://hackful.eu> \- good links, good idea, good intentions, but almost no engagement, and the only link with more than 3 comments is a meta-discussion.

<comment><USER14> It's still growing. Development is active, people post plenty of interesting stories. Commenting is slowly increasing. These things take time, and the core group of posters are still posting links on a daily basis which is what a nascent community needs to survive the initial "lull".

I'm very hopeful for Lobsters.

<comment><USER13> I wanted to register, but there is no link. it's some exclusive club?

<comment><USER14> Quoting from the original "about" post:

> _Invitations_

> _Not for exclusivity, but rather, invitations will be used as a spam-control > mechanism. New users must be invited by a current member and invitations > will be unlimited (unless scaling problems temporarily prevent new > accounts). If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that > invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as > needed._

<https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters>

<comment><USER13> ah, ok, I get it. got the invite, signed up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> <http://lesswrong.com> and <http://forrst.com> come to mind. There are also a few subreddits that might interest you: <http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/> <http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci> <http://www.reddit.com/r/types>

</comment><comment><USER16> No mention of Usenet :-(. It scores on many of the points you mentioned (Reddit subreddits come close.)

I'm sad this part of the net has been fading into obscurity the last ten years especially since its alternatives have proven to be inadequate. Its greatest power was it being decentralised and thus couldn't be policed by anyone, the variety and custom readers.

Its greatest weak point was perhaps the trolls. Maybe others can supply more weaknesses?

Really, what does Hackernews as a website have over f.e. a newsgroup alt.news.hackers?

<comment><USER17> Voting, a threaded display that does not break, no insane quoting, some markup, karma

<comment><USER16> Agreed on most of your points except a lot of news readers supported the basic markup for bold, italics, underline, etc. one now sees in Markdown & friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > has less negativity

what do you mean by that?

ironically I'll probably sound negative, but are you looking for a place which enforces PC to an ubearable point where the only accepted state is, you know, people standing in a circle smiling while performing a certain activity?

<comment><USER18> HN is definitely not the most supportive place on the internet. I've gotten some really good feedback from people who know what they're talking about, and read some discussion which was more interesting than the linked article. But then, I've also seen some people with a lot of karma who just bicker about insignificant things. Also, the fact that the community rules and best practices are ridiculously opaque, and every new person is initially viewed with hatred/mistrust for being 'from Reddit' or 'from /.' makes the place seem a bit hostile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does any RSS/Atom client exist which can subtract feeds? So you can for example add HackerNews feed and subtract feeds from /r/politics and /r/worldpolitics so only link mentioned on HackerNews and not mentioned on /r/politics or /r/worldpolitics would pass?

<comment><USER20> We have designed and built intigi.com for this exact purpose: a secret weapon for hackers to consume news.

This is how it works: You tell intigi what sources (RSS feeds and twitter accounts) you want to follow. Then you provide intigi with what's basically a lucene query that you want articles to match. Intigi then monitors your sources, indexes the article's title and full body, and delivers to you only the relevant results.

You can black list sources, domains, terms in the article. The advantage of this approach is that you can look through attention grabbing headlines and find fresh information that matters to you. You could also optimize for precision or for recall...

<comment><USER21> That's not really what he/she asked for. What your parent is asking for (and I would love to see this too) is a tool that treats RSS feeds as sets of articles, then lets you do set operations on those sets (i.e., get me all articles a \in A such that a \in HN \and a \notin rpolitics)

<comment><USER20> Hi there, good point. I didn't explain myself very well. You can do this with intigi, too. You can filter both at the content and the source level. So you could set up an interest that presents you with results that

a) appear in the HN RSS feed AND b) that don't appear in the r/politics feed

In order to do set operations on URLs reliably, we also solve the issue of canonicalization (resolving redirects, removing tracking markers, etc.).

<comment><USER21> Nice! I'll have to take a look. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> fp: <http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/>

</comment><comment><USER23> I usually follow a big mix of subreddits I'm interested in. This is one of my bookmarks: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming+python+vim+compsci+webde...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming+python+vim+compsci+webdev+learnmath+vim+gamedev+linux+linux4noobs+learnpython+algorithms)

</comment><comment><USER24> One suggesting is to visit new and upvote good stories; flag unsuitable stories; and submit excellent articles.

What you're looking for can be found in HN, and is appreciated by many people, but does perhaps need a bit of support and encouragement.

</comment><comment><USER25> <https://lobste.rs/> maybe.

<comment><USER26> Can I get an invite, please? Email in profile.

EDIT: Got it. Thanks. (So no one double-sends)

<comment><USER27> just sent invite..

<comment><USER28> could i have one? my email id is email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Check out lamernews <http://lamernews.com/>

</comment><comment><USER30> If you ever find this site, let me know. HN is this closest site to what you're looking for that I can think of. We could possibly improve on this by adding subsections, but then that would just turn into reddit.

<comment><USER31> Maybe not subsections, but allow users to create and up-vote tags on stories, or maybe have a simple dropdown on story submission with a dozen or so tags the submitter could apply. That way you could still narrow your focus when you don't want to miss certain content (ex. #Python, #AI, #Business, etc. at news.ycombinator.com/tagged/Python, etc.), but you wouldn't disrupt the current community feel of HN too much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> You see, about a year and a half ago this was what HN was actually like.

</comment><comment><USER33> Very sad to see all the 'HN competitors' (lobsters, hackful, lamernews) are all essentially dead (at least extremely dormant).

To me, all they needed were a small handful of dedicated posters/commenters (and to be open, i'm looking at you lobste.rs) to start to catch on; i'm very much reminded of the story of the reddit founders sockpuppeting to make the site not look like a ghost town; this kind of 'forced' activity doesn't seem to be necessary for long until the site would take on it's own life.

<comment><USER34> I totally agree. It would even be easy to find old, well-received HN submissions that have likely been forgotten and to queue them up for resubmission to your new service.

<comment><USER35> On a timescale, so that the site would be receiving at least one killer article from the past a day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> A well set up Google Reader account can do wonders... but it takes a while to get to that point.

<comment><USER20> Yes, that's a good start. And if you want to take it a step further, you could use a tool like intigi.com (disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders) which allows you to not only aggregate feeds, but also run Lucene queries on them to filter out the noise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Disrupt Hacker News! Come help change the way that we Hacker News Hacker News! :)

I'm not near as focused as you are, but I understand your discontent. I have two suggestions.

One, the easy thing (easy as in less work and commitment), which a few others have suggested. Help make HN better, make it what you want. It's probably already closest to what you want, among the alternatives.

Read /newest and upvote good content and good comments. I personally rarely downvote bad comments, I just avert my eyes. I do flag spam, it's like picking up litter. But downvoting is an option, and part of the deal. Just don't "be a downvoter," it will probably make you feel worse, and make reading HN like a burden. Don't carry a cross, just watch the parade. (Worst metaphor you'll read today.)

 _Write_ good comments. Respond seriously and helpfully to the occasional lame or hostile comment. Be the change you want to see, and all that.

But mainly, get good at ignoring what you don't like. There's still a lot to like.

Two ... this will take some work and time. You can do it in parallel with HN, or wherever you go from HN. Curate your own discussion group. Look around in your current social, academic and work circle, and talk to a small handful (less than five-ish, more than one), who you think might be interested in discussing what you're interested in. Establish some broad but focused discussion topics.

Set up a mechanism for you all to discuss privately. If you're all local, beer is a great mechanism. Otherwise the easiest and simplest thing would be email, and you should probably stop at that; don't focus on the tools (fun though they are, especially the beer), start discussing as quickly as possible; like, this afternoon. Really, this afternoon. If you like, one of you can maintain a forwarding address, so you don't have to each maintain lists. But you don't need that this afternoon, let that emerge naturally. I've been a member of exactly such a list for ... 15 years? Dayam.

Every once in awhile, invite a new individual in. Do it slowly and deliberately. Don't obsess or agonize over whether someone is right for the group; if you thought of them, they probably are. If they aren't, they'll stop participating. New people will change the dynamics and focus, and that's a good thing. Just do it slowly, not as a focus.

Be generous and engaging with your fellow list members. Accept heat, and let it dissipate quickly. The fewer rules you have, the less they'll be broken.

Over the years, your group might grow to five, or ten, or a hundred, it's up to you.

As you communicate with people you know personally (or online personally), there's a danger that the group might take on some social aspects. You may even become friends with some or all of them. That's a risk that you'll have to take. It's not so bad. :)

<comment><USER38> _But mainly, get good at ignoring what you don't like. There's still a lot to like._

I think this advice is crucial. I try to follow it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Most likely: Nothing is ever going to be _exactly_ what you want. Even if you build it.

And I see a fundamental conflict in your criteria: You want a less "social" site. You also want less fighting but with good discussion. Generally speaking, people who have the social savvy to encourage polite discourse are going to have some interest in social stuff. It is the nature of the beast.

</comment><comment><USER40> I am also tired of the amount of time we spend patting each other on the back. I learned node.js 36 hours ago and here's my Hello World! 230 points! That's wonderful, but that front page is precious and we should upvote things that are useful to the community, instead of being tools for external affirmation for eager beavers.

</comment><comment><USER41> To me some parts of stackoverflow might appear interesting to you.

<comment><USER42> Rather <http://stackexchange.com/sites> (as a side note, I've just made a map of their sites, here [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/157976/map-of- all-se...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/157976/map-of-all-se-sites- except-the-3-biggest) with a discussion, code on GitHub). There are very dedicated communities, from TeX to gardening.

The good thing is that there are great (just IMHO).

The bad thing is that, not everything fits in the question-and-answer scheme. There are many interesting subject, which are:

open-ended,

or requiring polling,

or - brainstorming.

Also, not every topic is covered, but it that case you can create your own SE site (with <http://area51.stackexchange.com/>); just it takes time and effort to gather the critical mass (at least 200, usually - much more).

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Someday I'm going to invent a place where people can gather to learn technical skills from masters of the crafts, and socialize with like-minded enthusiasts.

I could even "gamify" it and the players could earn points for passing tests to prove their knowledge, ultimately earning an "achievement" for mastering the craft at various levels of proficiency.

We'll allow a diverse range of players to apply and even come live there, maybe right out of high school. I'm thinking "friendiversity" for the name, because you'll make friends and there is diversity there, what do you think?

<comment><USER44> You could use every buzzword!

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> "Tech products"

Not so clear cut. I, too, am sick of the gadget wars infesting every single discussion. Unfortunately, the inanities resulting from this modern day religious war are pervasive and unavoidable. Let's call it Shoopy's Law: Any topic that involves Apple, Google, Microsoft, ${CORPORATE_ENTITY}, no matter how superficial, is bound to devolve into religious flamewars about nonsequitur gadgety things like framerate stutters and marketplace app metrics.

</comment><comment><USER45> Have a look at this: <http://functionspace.org/> I think this one may come close to your expectations

<comment> shawn-butler How does a landing page tell us anything?

<comment><USER45> The site is currently been developed and would be live soon. (It's been done by one of the close friends so I can assure that it is relevant). Sign up to get notified when it's up and more information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Slashdot? :-)

<comment><USER47> Huh? Slashdot is almost all politics, very little technical content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Well here's my shameless plug. I've been building <http://hawkee.com> for many, many years more or less as a hobby. Lately I've been trying to fill the void between GitHub, StackOverflow and even HN. I don't want to say too much, but if the goal is unclear then maybe I've still got more work to do.

</comment><comment> mkr-hn That sounds profoundly boring. But if you really want that, and have the time, you can get close with Reddit + RES: <http://redditenhancementsuite.com/>

Add the right subreddits and filter out sites, posters, and keywords to refine it into exactly the thing you want.

</comment><comment><USER49> graduate school

</comment><comment><USER50> For me it sounds like whole stackexchange.com network.

<comment><USER51> except you can't discuss things there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I've been thinking in making something similar: But I though people might not be interested having HN, Reddit and Slashdot.

</comment><comment><USER53> More sites should let people tag submissions by topic, to help sort it for readers.

</comment><comment><USER54> 4chan's /g/ board is pretty good, but at times brutal.

<comment><USER24> I couldn't cope with all the "LOL WOODSCREWS!!!1!" type trolling. There's a lot of partisan stuff, and meme-spewing. And while there are plenty of people who really know what they're talking about (to the level the OP wants and above) there are also arrogant but ignorant 14 year olds ranting stuff.

The text /prog/ board has some interesting discussion, but there's a lot of "Have you read your SICP today?".

And both those boards have some deeply NSFW content.

Some of the other chans are better, but still risky and with a lot less traffic.

There is a great bit of copypasta about installing Linux though.

<comment><USER54> >And both those boards have some deeply NSFW content. Rarely, /g/ is supposed to be SFW. >there are plenty of people who really know what they're talking about This is why I recommend it; a while back some guys were discussing how to build the low level functions of an OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Perhaps a series of SubReddits?

</comment><comment><USER56> nReduce is missing a great opportunity.

Competition is always good for the consumer.

</comment><comment><USER57> Go to the university.

</comment><comment><USER58> here here!

</comment><comment><USER59> Programming Reddit (Proggit) is more focused on programming (as opposed to politics, tech startups) and therefore, I would argue, is more likely to have the sorts of links you're looking for. But, in my experience, the quality of discussion is lower (though quite high in absolute standards) and you're more likely to have a good comment downvoted.

<comment><USER60> "and you're more likely to have a good comment downvoted."

This has never made sense to me. On some subreddits that focus on disciplines (like AskHistorians among many others), you can easily get downvoted (ie "dissapeared") just by asking a question, let alone answering one. Other times you'll won't get upvoted nor downvoted when you've actually contributed to the discussion. In these instances I lurk even when I can contribute because it's just not worth it.

<comment><USER59> Reddit's voting system has two issues:

(1) _Lots_ of strategic downvoting. That's why no thread stays above 75%. It happens to comments as well as threads. Some of it is spammers trying to improve their own ranking, and some is probably just trolls.

(2) "Stalker" downvoting, which is when a person retaliates to a comment by downvoting that person's contributions _en masse_.

I wonder if they've put any machine learning muscle behind this. Is it easy to fix, or is it just a hard problem?

<comment><USER61> The entire concept of the downvote is flawed and is very likely to be the absolute worst part about reddit.

In theory it may be a good idea, but in practice it's essentially a "CENSOR THIS POST" button that people use to get rid of content they don't agree with.

I've also noticed that negative points on a post completely destroys credibility despite cited evidence or a well thought out argument. I've seen identical comments on similar posts in the past where the first few voters determined the post's fate in that if the first few voters voted it down, the post would receive flames and even more downvotes, but if it was initially upvoted, more people would upvote it and it would receive well thought out replies.

Probably the most horrifying part of the downvote is that all it takes is 51% of voters to dislike your post to destroy it. For example, all it takes is 51% of viewers on the politics subreddit to turn the the /r/politics frontpage into a pseudo fox news where every single post praises democrats and slanders republicans.

It strikes me as disgusting that some people actually consider reddit to be a good place to have a controversial discussion when it's so pathetically easy to censor opinions that you don't agree with.

<comment><USER62> Each subreddit has different character, depending on the mods and the community that it attracts. Some skew one way, some skew another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Hacker news needs categories.

</comment><comment><USER64> stackoverflow or lobste.rs

<comment><USER65> Sadly stackoverflow has gotten to mean for anything but the most difficult questions, worded perfectly. They need to also be solved in the same paragraph to escape the wrath of stack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> >Heated arguments that make me feel bad after reading the comments instead of enlightened

1-There is bound to be heated arguments whenever two rational people with different circumstances & a different thought process are asked to opine on any issue with less than an obvious resolution. If you're uncomfortable watching a rigorous back & forth. Try North Korea.

2- You do realize you're asking a question of a social nature. you're contributing to making HN less of a technical forum.

3- Nobody forces you to read comments. The community does a pretty good job both down-voting comments rife with negativity or without any value. (maybe even this one)

I'm sorry, but it seems to me you're trolling.

<comment><USER67> How on earth does anyone think this is trolling? Anyway, I disagree with your points.

1) There is a very big difference between a heated argument and an argument. Maybe it's just a side effect of the medium we are using, but everyone seems to have so much trouble being civil. For example, instead of suggesting that OP go look to North Korea, you could have said "For me, the heated discussions are a good thing" or something similar.

2) OP realizes that HN isn't a technical forum, and isn't asking for it to change.

3) Comments are a massive part of the value that HN provides, and even if OP were to stop reading the comments, he'll still see the same mix of articles on the front page.

<comment><USER68> Everyone is suggesting Reddit, but there too you will find heated arguments [1]. In general, HN comments are way better, and trolls are kept in line.

[1]: [http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/135b5z/yes_the_f...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/135b5z/yes_the_fbi_and_cia_can_read_your_email_even_if/c716b7f)

<comment><USER69> No on is suggesting /r/technology though. There are subreddits out there that are a lot better.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How-To: Be an Über Coder - <AUTHOR> http://www.techhui.com/profiles/blogs/howto-be-an-ueber-coder

<comment><USER2> This is missing some natural categories of things.

\- Create a pet project. A subset of which is to create an open source pet project. As opposed to contributing to an existing one.

\- Get a job. It does so much to improve programming ability.

\- Also do exercises in books. It's one thing to do Project Euler problems, and it's a different kind of thing to do TaPL exercises or presumably CTM exercises, or problems in some signal processing book.

\- Get a real ergonomic keyboard, now! And use it. Unless you get sufficient wrist exercise from some other activity, you should do this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree... especially about the keyboard!</comment></comment>


Boston Uber Driver Accused of Raping Passenger in Back Seat - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/17/alejandro-done-boston-uber-driver-rapes-passenger_n_6344432.html?ir=India <comment><USER2> I'm starting to feel bad for Uber. Hopefully they have some data on the incidence of rape for taxi drivers to exonerate themselves, and, more importantly, hopefully they were not negligent in this.</comment>


Show HN: HushPad - PasteBin, but client encrypted - <AUTHOR> https://hushpad.org/about <comment><USER2> Like it! Interface is clean, site is really fast. I personally found the animated logo quite distracting. I would personally opt for some different colours, but they are fine at the moment. Maybe a night theme? Syntax colouring? Just some food for thought.

Great job, really like it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Plans:

* Explain better how we do safe delete your notes

* Release the source

* CLI tool

Like us?

* Spread the word!

* Use hushpad

* Contribute (code will be soon released)

<comment><USER3> Think your backend crashed. I'm getting HTTP 502 errors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice website,Like it!</comment>


The Orange Box: Cloud for the Free Man - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2014/05/the-orange-box-cloud-for-free-man.html <comment><USER2> So, I wouldn't use this box because it doesn't ECC Memory ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory)). Google some years ago did a study on DRAM errors in the wild, in order to determine if there was an actual need for ECC in modern datacenters / distributed computing applications ([http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf](http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf)). The short summary was that yes, they did need it.

Given that the processors ([http://ark.intel.com/products/64903/Intel- Core-i5-3427U-Proc...](http://ark.intel.com/products/64903/Intel- Core-i5-3427U-Processor-3M-Cache-up-to-2_80-GHz)) that are on these NUCs don't support ECC, I would probably avoid these units for any real workload.

It bums me a out a little bit that there is only a 1G fabric on these, when each board has two mini-PCIe ports, which is at 2Gbit/sec, and make a ring topology out of them, or using a PCIe switch. Another interesting approach could have been a usb 3 fabric.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah these aren't really intended for real workloads, it's to spin up a team of people with a self contained box that replicates what a real OpenStack deployment would look like.

So the idea there is you play with this is two days of training and then two weeks for your team to learn OpenStack while you're getting the real hardware ready, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The name is somewhat unlucky as The Orange Box[1] already exists.

1\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Box](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Box)

<comment><USER4> Indeed! It's a bit of an homage to one of the greatest video games of all time, applying it literally to our own bright orange cloud kit in a box ;-)

<comment><USER5> Does it come with a free crowbar?

<comment><USER6> No, Crowbar is from Dell. Ubuntu uses MaaS. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very nice. I like the idea of this "HDK" as the post mentions. It would be useful in case that you want to conduct an experiment and use this HDK as your platform, and provide an easy way for others to fully understand your environment and test your results, eliminating any other factors. In the same spirit, recently I found LittleFe [1]. I think it is now abandoned (based on the fact the the copyright message is still 2012 and the latest item in news was posted in March 2012), but it seems to be a good project.

[1] [http://littlefe.net](http://littlefe.net)

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there any estimate of the cost of this unit? This is the sort of thing that would make it very easy to set up and run in an industrial facility. Normally we don't have access to software devs, but could really use a solid hackable platform for process analysis. Having a single unit by a brand name would make requsitioning a system far easier from a Purchasing standpoint.

<comment><USER9> You can buy them direct from the manufacturer, Tranquil PC. [http://www.tranquilpcshop.co.uk/ubuntu-orange- box/](http://www.tranquilpcshop.co.uk/ubuntu-orange-box/) £7,575.00 is the base price.

<comment><USER8> Ah, thanks! I feel a little silly having overlooked that link. Pretty nice, considering the minimal cooling needs and raw power. I feel like this is exactly the sort of rugged, simplified system needed for use in a plant.

<comment><USER10> We use Poweredge VRTX systems in our branch offices to run minor stuff. It's not too pricey compared to this Orange Box and it's an easy way to replace what in some cases could be almost a full cabinet of systems in to 5U space.

[http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge- vrtx/pd](http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-vrtx/pd)

Edit: Oh yeah and it supports ECC memory, to address the comments here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740087](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7740087)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a similar designed solution that combines say 10 cheaper SOC (raspberry pi's?) and a 100mb network?

I would love to play with clustering setups at home, but almost ~$13k USD is way over my hobby budget. My only option currently is really visualization for learning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out the Banana Pi's: [http://www.bananapi.org/#about](http://www.bananapi.org/#about)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone else wish they had doubled the number of drives and used RAID?

10 nodes @ 1 disk per node = 1 drive loss kills the node

It seems you can only buy 'extra' disks for 4 of the 10 nodes, which makes disk redundancy across all nodes impossible.

<comment><USER13> These boxes were created mainly for development, experimentation, and mobility. More disks would mean more heat, cost, size, weight.

<comment><USER12> Fair enough. :)

I suppose I just think its neat and a production-ready version would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Get a few of them and use Ceph. :)

No quite what you want, but it'll do the job.

<comment><USER12> If only my hobby budget could afford two of them :(

<comment><USER14> You could run ceph within the cluster of 10. It is certainly enough to run a small cluster

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wish I had this 5 years ago when I was building a dev cluster.

</comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of the Protonet[1] box.

[1] [https://protonet.info/en/product/](https://protonet.info/en/product/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Am I the only one who thought this was going to be a Half Life 3 announcement?

</comment><comment><USER18> Finally, I always wanted a botnet and spaceheater in one. Sure, this is about 10 times what the actual value is, but no price is too great to pay for Freedom.</comment>


Letters from a Young Poet: The Final Correspondence of Sylvia Plath - <AUTHOR> https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/025_05/20624 <comment><USER2> It's really unfortunate that her husband burned the last pages of her diary after she died. It would have been fascinating to know what was going through her head in those final weeks.

<comment><USER3> I don't mean to be rude, but I think it's very unfortunate that so many people think they have a right to intrude into the marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, especially to pronounce judgments upon its terrible ending. It's the cheapest, easiest, and lowest form of "Lit Crit."

<comment><USER4> I don't get how finding out about the lives of two dead people can possibly be intrusive. It's not like they're harmed by the inquiry. What's the big deal?

And no one's pretending literary biography is equivalent to literary criticism.

As a fan of literature I like reading analysis of literature, and also enjoy finding out about the lives of my favorite writers. Why is that so wrong? How is my curiosity about or knowledge of their lives harming them?

<comment><USER3> I apologize, it wasn't directed at you so much as the many critics of Hughes who accused him of causing his wife's suicide for almost the entirety of his life after that event.

The other point is that certain details seem better unknown. I mean, why should we even know that he burnt any part of her diary? To me, that sort of thing crosses over into mere voyeurism. He may be the very one who told the story, but I've never been a fan of the confessional style of literature, which unfortunately seems to be almost the only thing left these days.

<comment><USER4> _" I apologize, it wasn't directed at you so much as the many critics of Hughes who accused him of causing his wife's suicide for almost the entirety of his life after that event."_

Of course, if the criticism is baseless and it causes harm to the target of the criticism during their life, that's wrong.

But that's very different from merely trying to find out more about a person's life -- especially once they're dead and can no longer be harmed.

 _" The other point is that certain details seem better unknown. I mean, why should we even know that he burnt any part of her diary?"_

To satisfy one's curiosity seems like a good enough reason to me. Curiosity is a big part of why I read literature in general. I want to find out about how people who are very different from me or who lived in very different circumstances or times lived. It's the next best thing to being able to live multiple lives myself. I say, why not?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shakespeare (programming language) - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_(programming_language)

<comment><USER2> What would be really fun is if the compiler parsed the program using NLP and rejected it if too much of the dialogue was not in iambic pentameter.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me that INTERCAL rejects programs that use too few PLEASES (program is "insufficiently polite") or too many (program is "excessively polite").

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's needed here is a front end that can read C++ source and translate it into Shakespeare, and also a backend that can output Javascript.

<comment><USER5> lol Who doesn't?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I saw this programming language some years ago and always wondered if anyone ever used it for more than just fun. Of course programming should be fun, but has anyone used it for a project they intended for actual use?

Would love to hear from anyone that has just for the anecdotal story.

<comment><USER7> Given that this language is essentially a slower, more verbose version of an assembly language, it's extremely hard to imagine. It offers literally no benefits aside from being silly, so naturally people will use it when they want to be silly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why do I have a feeling that for the majority of CS students, Shakespeare would be a less intuitive language then Brainfuck?

Some more programming and CS errata for those interested here, a collection of esoteric languages, algorithms, and an operating system: <http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/>

Piet is actually quite beautiful, and just about all of those are quite humorous.

</comment><comment><USER9> Esoteric programming languages are very interesting. "Whitespace" is probably my favourite. If you want to read more, have a look through this page (be careful, I've wasted a whole evening here): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language>

<comment><USER10> I'm not sorry for posting this link, but I'm not responsible for any loss in productivity that ensues: <http://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So, how do you write Hello, World?</comment>


Libsquashfs and squashfs-tools-ng 1.0.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://sourceforge.net/p/squashfs/mailman/message/37036464/ <comment><USER2> The addition of the diffing and conversion tools are a great improvement for my usage. I've previously hacked up similar things using squashfuse¹, but these are a lot better.

1\. [https://github.com/vasi/squashfuse](https://github.com/vasi/squashfuse)</comment>


Merriam-Webster Adds 850 new words and definitions - happy-go-lucky https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/new-words-in-the-dictionary-march-2018 <comment><AUTHOR> "dumpster fire"

what makes this one worth its own entry? You could make a word for every type of thing that can be on fire: "carrot fire", "chair fire", etc...

EDIT: I take my words back thanks to the replies. Learned that dumpster fire has a non-literal meaning so it's actually worth it. Gee what a dumpster fire this post is :)

<comment><USER2> Because it's an idiom that has come mean something figuratively, not literally? Like "hot garbage". Plenty of info about the meaning of "dumpster fire" online.

<comment><USER3> Idioms don't belong in a _dictionary_ though.

<comment><USER4> Why not? Since we're talking about definitions of words here, there's nothing in the definition of "dictionary" that precludes idioms. Indeed, having common idioms in a dictionary is useful, because you typically refer to a dictionary when you _don 't_ know something, i.e. you also don't know if it's an idiom or not. Better for the dictionary to tell you that it is an idiom (and what it means) than to simply omit it. People typically go to dictionaries to figure out the meaning of something they've just read or heard; whether or not something is an idiom, they still need to know what it means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most of the examples given are fairly unsurprising, but I'm unsure how to feel about "embiggen" being in the dictionary.

On the other end of the scale, I'm amazed "demonym" was previously absent.

<comment><USER6> Keep in mind that a dictionary isn't a manual on what does and does not constite valid English but a reference for how words are _used_ by English speakers and writers.

Whether you think it's good style or not to use embiggen if someone came across a text with the word it is useful to have it's meaning readily available.

<comment><USER7> Prescription versus Description is a false dichotomy. Certainly, the choice of words to include is prescriptive. Any other interpretation of the debate would be paradox, because, a descriptivist would have to describe it as prescriptive if many users think it's prescriptive. Getting out of that paradox requires reasoning that would be absurd compared to the simple solution that they are in fact being prescriptive whether they want to or not.

<comment><USER8> That doesn't make any sense. Descriptivism describes usage, not whether people think it's prescriptivist or not.

Each dictionary has their own standards for what constitutes enough usage to be considered a word. Otherwise we'd have infinite dictionaries.

Dictionaries look at what many people say, and log those as words eventually. They're decidedly Descriptivist.

<comment><USER7> They are prescriptive by extension, e.g. when describing usage from prescriptive speakers.

Language is not inherently descriptive or prescriptive, it is a false dichotomy, because language is acquired by copying, but it is is modified to suit needs, so it is used prescriptive. If language was purely descriptive, where did it first copy from? In a sense, I assume that language faculty is inherently prescribed in a natural way. And in another sense, the words show de-scription is copying (this doesn't work well in english, but in french e.g. it would be quite literall "ecrire de ..."), and pre-scription is what was written before it was copied. It's two sides of the same medal.

If they describe, somebody else will interpret that as prescription, whether that was intended or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Merriam-Webster is ahead of the curve. I just checked _Oxford English Dictionary_ online and don't see entries for _cryptocurrency_ or _blockchain_. I do see an entry for _Bitcoin_ on _OED_ , though.

</comment><comment><USER10> I personally don't like the inclusion of mutli-word phrases such as dark chocolate and dumpster fire. I feel like some of the new words don't yet have solid enough meanings to warrant a dictionary definition.

I may be quite wrong..

<comment><USER4> If I had to guess at their reasoning, it's because these phrases are greater than the sum of their parts. Dark chocolate isn't just literally dark in appearance, it has a higher percentage of pure cocoa. A dumpster fire isn't literally just a dumpster on fire, it's a situation that's FUBAR.

So having definitions for these phrases has additional utility for readers in a way that having definitions for "red firetruck" or "trashcan fire" does not. Consider that many users of English dictionaries aren't entirely fluent in English, and might be coming from a language where these metaphors are different or non-existent. For instance, the German word for dark chocolate (because German has compound nouns where other languages have phrases) does not call it dark, it calls it bitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Where's the list? They mention far less than 850 words.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can someone explain to me why the "life hack" should be written separately instead with a hyphen as "life-hack"?

<comment><USER13> One ... guide on the topic:

[http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/misc.html#analretentive](http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/misc.html#analretentive)

<comment><USER12> Got it, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seemed fine until the end, where metaphors have been mistaken for new words. Example: "dumpster fire."

Webster's continues its descent into stupidity.

<comment><USER15> > continues its descent into stupidity

Nice figurative use of the word _descent_ there.

Would you also object to "train wreck" used metaphorically being catalogued in the dictionary? Are these not useful phrases for a language learner? How about "danger money"? How about "white lie"? "Red line"? Where is your red line when it comes to these things?

Anyway maybe dictionaries don't only enumerate bare words. Who made that rule? Lexicographically why make a distinction between single word nouns and multi- word noun phrases? Also, would you ban phrasal verbs. We're allowed to enumerate "set" but "set down", "set up", "set upon", "set aside", … all these are _verboten_ or are they A-OK?

<comment><USER7> The problem is, what constitutes a word? Speaking as a native speaker of German: If it's idiomatic, make it a compound word, as with "setup",whereas "set up" is an oxymoron.

Of course compounds are no solution either unless you want to have runonsentence-monstrosities. English speakers recognized that and treat compound nouns as noun phrases. So it depends a lot on the _feeling_ of a word. If it is recognizable as a single entity that cannot be split up into constituent parts, then it's a word. Otherwise it is a phrase. And phrases typically don't belong in a wordbook. Otherwise you there would be really no end to it. Wiktionary has a rule to include everything with at least three notable usage examples; And it has another rule not to include "sum of part" phrases. So a lot of discussion revolves around whether something is sum of parts, which is quite subjective. A dumpster really is just something where something is dumped. I can only guess that "dumpster fire" proliferates because it rhymes with dumb. Hot garbage certainly is sum of parts if garbage is readily understood figuratively. Dumpster fire on the other hand just has too many syllables to be recognized as a single entity. It's really just sum of parts, still though, it's a heap of trash that's set on fire deliberately and quite well contained.

The term philology is quite suitable as analogue to philosophy, because it is not an exact science. So there are experts who have quite a good feeling for language. They need to release new words every now and then to stay relevant. And to keep the words relevant. By their own definition, I guess, those dictionaries are a dumpster fire.

<comment><USER16> If you think the phrase "dumpster fire" is the sum of its parts, then you don't know what it means.

And if you don't know what it means, a dictionary can help.

<comment><USER7> I think I pretty clearly showed that I understand what it means. The individual parts, each in a particular sense, dumb-store-burning, explain the sense rather well. If this is not readily obvious to a recipient, then it's misused and no dictionary can help that, if enough misuse occurs. But don't get me wrong, I have a dictionary under my pillow (my phone). On the other hand, obscurity might be intentional, so popularization (by inclusion in a dictionary and making a big fuzz about it in the news no less), will only drive the invention of new obscure terms. Which is probably a delight for every dictionary editor. And I choose to largely ignore it and fuel the topic with flame bait, probably because the term in question is negative in principle, eliciting negative emotions.

<comment><USER16> You've shown that you misunderstand the term. Your misunderstanding includes nonsense examples like "those dictionaries are a dumpster fire". Nobody else would say that.

The "dumb-store-burning" thing is something you made up and you've already managed to convince yourself it's the real definition.

Folk etymologies are never a good way to define a term, but this one is particularly weird and out of nowhere.

<comment><USER7> > Nobody else would say that.

calibrate your sarcasm detector, it's broken.

I know what a dumpster fire is in the broadest sense, a shit show, a farce, perhaps a tire fire that is toxic and impossible to extinguish.

The rhyme on dumb I think is certainly effective. Sure, it's my own observation.

> you've already managed to convince yourself it's the real definition

I prefer to speak with authority and leave my guesswork implicit. Mistakes I make then are problematic. I'm not above mistakes, so the assumption that I might be wrong is implicit as well. That's only fair, in fact it seems the only way to speak with conviction if the other site asserts authority in the same way. I call it ''objective'', when I can avoid making ad-hominem arguments -- like you do. Rhetorical question: Are you enjoying that?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If Craig Wright is Satoshi, how much tax does he owe? - <AUTHOR> he/she has 1 Million BTC or so it seems. <comment><USER2> unless he sells it for fiat not much, i think</comment>


Microsoft to Shut Down Sunrise Calendar After Integration into Outlook Completes - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/28/microsoft-to-shut-down-sunrise-mobile-calendar-after-integration-into-outlook-completes/ <comment><USER2> Damn, one of my favorite apps.</comment>


How Book Publishers Can Beat Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/31/opinion/how-book-publishers-can-beat-amazon.html?ref=technology

<comment><USER2> The author of this article is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Kohn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Kohn)

      "Bob Kohn is the founder, Chairman and CEO of RoyaltyShare, Inc., an outsourced royalty processing solution for the music, book publishing, brand licensing, and motion picture industries."

From his own site [http://www.bobkohn.com/](http://www.bobkohn.com/) :

      "Bob is the co-inventor on a patent covering a web-based royalty system and user interface."

It comes as no surprise that he wants the publishers to band together and "pull all their books from Amazon and throw their weight behind a law-abiding alternative."

I'm not saying he's wrong but it's disingenuous not to mention that in the blurb at the end of the article. Instead he's described as a lawyer and author.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you find out about webinars? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Twitter, blogs I read, colleagues, friends, GrowthHackers, Slack channels I'm in

<comment><AUTHOR> What are some of your favorite blogs?</comment></comment>


DEF Con 28: Safe Mode - <AUTHOR> http://defcon.outel.org/ <comment><USER2> Attending DEF Con 28 virtually will be made easy for you. Soon you will be sent an .EXE in email. Just click to run it. Click Install when it opens.

Then you can easily attend DEF Con 28 remotely.

<comment><USER3> Thank you so much for that long Laugh! Oh, and uh... can you give me a hand, I really want to attend DEF Con 28 virtually, but I'm having a bit of a problem logging in with this .EXE file on my Linux box.

<comment><USER4> There is no such .exe. Talks have been pre-recorded and online Q/A sessions are being conducted: [https://defcon.org/html/defcon-safemode/dc-safemode- quicksta...](https://defcon.org/html/defcon-safemode/dc-safemode- quickstart.html)

<comment><USER5> They were both joking! Sending out an executable to attend an event is the exact type of action DEFCON hopes to prevent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What are your favorite talks you've watched so far?

I enjoyed Bill Graydon's talk on "bruteforcing" physical/metal keys: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suN0IsifTyY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suN0IsifTyY)

</comment><comment><USER7> Another minimalist view of this I recommend is the Hacker Tracker app. I think it defaults to DEF CON, but if not, you can change the conference it's tracking in the settings.

</comment><comment><USER8> I want to watch docs but I don't even know where to start with this massive page:/

<comment><USER9> I agree its hard to find things on that page. These links might help:

[https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2028/DEF%20CON%20Safe%20M...](https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2028/DEF%20CON%20Safe%20Mode%20video%20and%20slides/)

[https://www.youtube.com/user/DEFCONConference/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/DEFCONConference/videos)

<comment><USER10> Thanks.

The page was terrible.

<comment><USER11> I'm open to constructive criticism and comments. What would you change to improve it? What made it bad?

<comment><USER12> I'm not the person you're replying to, but I'll offer my 2 cents.

Frankly, there is a TON of info present, and as someone who hasn't yet attended an on-site DEFCon (though I hope to someday), it's a bit overwhelming.

I certainly understand the appeal of a plain text format, but personally, I think it would be a big improvement to have a schedule grid (think TV guide or similar) with the village on one axis and the time slot on the other.

I think this would make skimming over the schedule a lot easier overall, as well as making it easier to focus on a particular village or time slot, while still being able to relate/compare it to the others. I also think this is especially helpful since the talks vary in size and can overlap with each other, so having a visual representation would IMO make it a lot easier to see at-a-glance what the conflicts are.

Of course, this could just be my personal preference, as this is what is used by several of other conferences I have attended or do regularly attend. I'm certainly no UI expert.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can chat on Discord any day.

<comment><USER14> I wish people would not use Discord.

I wish they would use open source tools like Matrix or Zulip.

<comment><USER13> Discord is really good, I would drag people to federated open alternatives if it were good. Zulip looks, feels, and runs _kinda okay_ overall. I could probably do it well if it were my job, the stuff Discord does well is in my wheelhouse.

I want to get off of it because of the PRC connection, but it's where the community is at for now.

XMPP is probably the worst thing that ever happened to open standard instant messaging.

<comment><USER14> Yeah Discord is really well-made. That's why I didn't tell that it was shit and that open source is better.

It's just that maybe it would help if cool people used the open source one. It would give them visibility, more bug reports, more pull requests, more donations.

Matrix isn't bad. Sure it's better to host your own server right now since their main one is often overloaded.

And the UX stuff is getting better and the p2p changes should be awesome.

<comment><USER15> Matrix for HOPE was solid as hell.

<comment><USER16> From the backend of it (I was on the team for it) Even with our "light" load, Matrix/Riot is a overbloated product overall. To handle the scale of Defcon would require hardware I don't think exists

<comment><USER17> I ran the Matrix server for HOPE and have fairly extensive experience administrating Matrix. For HOPE, we didn't even begin to approach anything that looked like capacity; any resources that were maxing out were either due to the DoS attack we were enduring (and made numerous changes to mitigate) during the conf, or applications in different threads that matrix metrics were picking up on (bug filed, will fixed in new versions).

Even so, we could easily - without a sweat - get 2000 people on a server. I wasn't even using more workers than we had cores. Make that a bigger box and you get a few thousand more. Then use a few different servers that are federated with each other for DEFCON and you have instant scale.

The matrix.org people run the matrix.org homeserver for over ~200k active users. You can see an outdated version of the stats here: [https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-the-current-project- status](https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-the-current-project-status) and they've said their active userbase has grown 300% in the past year.

The original plan for HOPE was to run multiple homeservers, but we didn't even begin to need to.

<comment><USER14> Also soonish, we'll have dendrite (go) and conduit (rust).

EDIT: And eventually p2p which might change everything.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>