Kava: Fiji's psychoactive brew - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/05/the-great-kava-boom-how-fijis-beloved-psychoactive-brew-is-going-global <comment><USER2> I recently tried kava, and found it to be quite relaxing. I found the numbing effect to be mild, even after having quite a few, and otherwise would compare the experience to drinking coffee (but obviously going the other direction) in the sense that it was enjoyable and seemed mostly harmless. It had the added benefit of being a way to enjoy a night out with a friend in a sort of bar like atmosphere, but without the negative effects of alcohol. In fact, I think what was most noticible was that the atmosphere was festive and convivial, but without all the stupid bullshit that happens with drunk people. I would recommend trying this to anyone looking for that kind of alternative.

If there was a downside, it was that getting myself stuck with a $70 kava-bar tab from tieing one on in the Haight kind of made me want to rethink my life choices at the end of the night. On the other hand, much greater regrets can be had from going out drinking...

<comment><USER3> Bulk kava is crazy cheap on Amazon.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious what they purport adds so much value to their kava in the OP comment.

<comment><USER5> Same reason a beer that's $8 at the bar costs $1-$2 if you buy it at the supermarket.

<comment><USER6> Right, everything sold in a bar environment needs enough margin to offset the overhead of dealing with people at their worst behavior.

<comment><USER4> I was hoping it was some brand name I could look up for their pitch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Random note: the word "kava" is Tongan, not Fijian. In Fiji, it's called _yaqona_ , pronounced "yanggona".

I also don't think kava is ever going to take off worldwide until they figure out a way to deal with the taste and appearance. It's not actively terrible, but it really does look and taste like a muddy puddle.

<comment><USER8> Agreed, a muddy puddle is perfect. Friends wanted me to try some at a local kava bar. The buzz I got from a "double dose" drink was basically a decently mild nicotine buzz except my mouth went numb a bit like after getting a novacaine shot. Not really for me.

<comment><USER9> Keep in mind the strength varies wildly, even on pacific islands the difference between bars 10 minutes apart can vary and the tourists ones are generally much more watered down, or so I've been told. I had the opportunity to go to a locals bar in Vanuatu and 2 cups was like being severely stoned, right down to the room spinning and the desire to vomit. I had considerably more at a tourist trap and could barely feel the effects.

Really flushes out the internals too.

<comment><USER7> Fun fact: even in Fiji, Vanuatu kava is sold at a premium. The cheaper/stronger varieties are known in pidgin as _tudei kava_ (as in, 2 day) because that's how long the buzz/hangover lasts.

<comment><USER10> > even in Fiji, Vanuatu kava is sold at a premium

Not true. In fact Vanuatu kava is hard to Fiji in Fiji despite the fact that so much of it is imported. Tudei kava, when imported to Fiji (and the US) is usually mixed in with Fijian kava to temper the horrible side-effects.

> The cheaper/stronger varieties are known in pidgin as tudei kava (as in, 2 > day) because that's how long the buzz/hangover lasts.

Stronger yes, but not at all in a good way. Think headaches, horrible nausea, and worse. Hence the export of tudei kava is banned in Vanuatu except for if the buyer explicitly requests it. Tudei kava should not be sold for recreational consumption and its use is strongly discouraged.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For anyone interested in trying kava recreationally (or really any new psychoactive drug), I highly recommend you read up on Erowid before partaking in consumption. Erowid is an amazing repository of knowledge, from scientific articles to dosage recommendations to anecdotal trip reports.

Link here: [https://erowid.org/plants/kava/](https://erowid.org/plants/kava/)

<comment><USER10> While Erowid is great for obscure drugs, you'll get much better info from communities of thousands of active kava drinkers like /r/kava and kavaforums.com

That Erowid page is pretty useless since the vast majority of reports on there aren't about kava at all but about kavalactones extracted from kava root and put into capsules and tinctures. That's like a review page claiming to be about coffee but in fact filled with reports of people taking caffeine powder. This is a problem because just like caffeine doesn't have a long history of safe use (and in fact there have been recent fatalities from it) in comparison to coffee, kavalactone products have been blamed in a number of liver injury cases while kava has a long history of safe use.

Also, the Erowid page on the liver FUD is almost two decades out of date. The WHO report in 2016 pretty much cleared traditionally prepared noble kava. See also: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Kava/wiki/does-kava-cause-liver- dam...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Kava/wiki/does-kava-cause-liver-damage)

Kava is a beverage made from water and the root of the kava plant. This is so both in the traditional sense (what the word means in the Pacific Islands) as well as in legal sense (as it will soon be listed in the Codex Alimentarius). Pharma and nutraceutical firms trying to peddle kavalactone products while piggybacking on the long history of safe use of kava are doing the world a disservice.

<comment><USER11> Thank you for the clarification. I personally have never drank kava or used any sort of kava derived product, but I have used Erowid to great benefit concerning a wide range of other substances and thought that the information there would be up to a similar standard. Still, there is information there that echoes what you've outlined in your comment - so it doesn't seem like it was all hooey.

How does that saying go? The road to good answers is paved through Cunningham's law? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've drinken kava myself and I recommend it over alcohol. It gives an immediate clarity in the head and an overall very pleasant music-like feeling. The thoughts in the head get unstuck.

I recommend you to try it as well.

</comment><comment><USER13> People with Bipolar: Seriously talk with your psychiatrist before trying Kava - it was great for me at first, but then I noticed some undesirable mood changes. I wish we knew more about Kava and also drug interactions.

(This comment doesn't really need a thread or arguments about natural solutions :-P ... just a note/data point to maybe save someone a bit of trouble)

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the anecdote; it's probably the first one I've read from someone who's Bipolar. There are a lot of anecdotes from people with OCD (mostly positive). The latest study found kava to be ineffective in the treatment of Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD), although the authors of the study (and countless anecdotes online) still recommend it for situational anxiety (say before public speaking or an interview).

Like you, I wish we knew more about drug interactions. One to keep in mind is the grapefruit rule. Drugs that are incompatible with grapefruit are incompatible with kava.

<comment><USER13> Nice! It sounds like you are keeping tabs on this anecdotally/with studies for multiple mental disorders. Maybe my comment is sort of useful to some! Also, I'd like to expand a bit, actually. My "version" of BP is "Type 1 with Psychotic Features" \- it's a rough one, so doc recommended __total__ sobriety (for me, that was only quitting marijuana). The reasoning was because of potential med interactions and a higher chance of going into mania/depression. My comment above says "[Kava] was great for me at first" because it was like 20% of a marijuana high, very calming, and I thought it was safe/not a "drug". I actually felt like I was cheating and then noticed instabity pretty quickly after that.

I've been sober for over a year and a half (strictly for my disorder, not because of typical reasons e.g.: drug addiction). At this point, I'll take stability over any tea (or anything) that provides a light high. :-)

For everyone else, I'm hopeful Kava is a helpful medicine.

<comment><USER10> > Maybe my comment is sort of useful to some

It definitely is. And thank you for the extra details. In Fiji (where I live), kava is a recreational beverage and there is almost no info on medicinal use. As kava use grows in the west we're slowly learning from anecdotes like yours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of my best client experiences was advising a surf resort in Fiji, and of course we had to go stay there in order to understand the business model.

Part of their community support is organising a welcome ceremony, hosted by the local village (where they also fund the school) and given to every guest. Sadly for us, no other guests overlapped with our visit and we missed out. No doubt watered down for the tourists, but that would have been my kava opportunity.

I keep offering them a Strategy Review! Next time...

</comment><comment><USER15> For those who are interested in buying, look for "noble Hawaiian kava," preferably certified. The quality standards are way higher and you're less likely to get hit with an unpleasant feeling after drinking it.

<comment><USER16> Thank you, this was helpful

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anyone curious about trying kava should check out /r/kava or kavaforums.com for advice on reputable vendors. This is especially important if you're in the US where dietary supplements are barely regulated.

</comment><comment><USER17> The only effect I ever experienced drinking Kava some 30 years ago was that my tongue went numb... severely so :)

It tastes — and looks — like water from a puddle on a gravelled country road.

<comment><USER18> It's a subtle high. Once you notice it you will notice it every time you drink it, and it's very pleasent, but it's subtle. It's about as strong as one beer and the effects don't get much stronger the more you drink.

Im from Hawaii, my parents used to give it to me when I had a soar throat and I never noticed the high. Tried it again as an adult and felt the high, since then I notice it everytime I drink it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wish the article had said more about what the alleged psychoactive effects are. The description makes it sound like a pretty run-of-the-mill CNS depressant.

<comment><USER2> Yeah. I'd say it was like I took half a Xanax. Relaxing and mildly dis- inhibiting, but I couldn't get to sloppy. I'd call it pleasantly relaxing, but not terribly strong. Perhaps out of an abundance of caution, I would hesitate to drive home after having a lot of it, or if I wasn't a seasoned kava drinker.

<comment><USER20> A bar or a football?

<comment><USER2> OK, I guess I don't know that much about Xanax(TM). I meant, like 500mcg of alprazolam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Drank enough to upset my tummy but no real buzz beyond young numbness. Tried it at multiple sources in Fiji always the same effect or lack thereof

<comment><USER10> How much did you drink? Fijians (and Tongans) love their kava weak. It's often more about the socialising around the kava bowl rather than getting "drunk" off kava. You'll find Fijians mix weak batches of kava and then drink it for hours.

ni-Vanuatu on the other hand, make really strong kava and then only drink 2-3 shells of it.

If you drink it in Fiji as a tourist chances are it was even weaker than the already weak kava the locals drink. You'd have to drink maybe 6 shells before you'd begin to feel anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've tried Kava twice at "The Root Kava Company" in Boulder CO - $12/pop and I can't say that I felt anything specific. I was hoping for sort of an anti- coffee that wasn't alcohol.

The taste was really good though, at least based on my assumption that the drink would taste like medicine. It tasted more like a raspberry lemonade.

<comment><USER10> > It tasted more like a raspberry lemonade.

:O Are you sure you had kava? I've never heard kava descried that way, and I'm a kava farmer.

Perhaps you felt nothing from it due to the drink having only a tiny amount of kava in it. Did your mouth go numb at least?

<comment><USER23> There's also cava, which is either the Spanish version of champagne or the Greek specialty wine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I lived in Vanuatu for a couple of months working, I used to have kava once a week. I found it to be a lot better than alcohol at helping me wind down from work, got used to the taste after a little bit.

</comment><comment><USER25> As far as I know, kava is still banned in the UK. It seems strange that a British newspaper doesn't mention this.</comment>


Eternal Terminal - <AUTHOR> https://eternalterminal.dev/ <comment><USER2> Hey all, ET developer here. It was an amazing surprise to find ET on the top of HN today. Since it's the three year anniversary of the project, I wanted to share a post that I wrote to my colleagues about it:

RejoinableTCP was a project that I started and abandoned in 11/18/16\. RejoinableTCP was supposed to be a remote shell that automatically reconnects without interrupting the session. It was supposed to be resumable like mosh but with the user experience of ssh. I never started it, because:

1\. Unix sockets, public-key encryption, and how TCP actually works are the stuff of eldritch nightmares.

2\. No one would switch from ssh just to save a few minutes each day. No one would switch from mosh just to get OS scrollbars

3\. I wasn't living up to my expectations in my day-job, and it was taking all of my time. There was no way that I would work on something new.

I created an empty folder and gave up on the same day. The next day, after using mosh for a few hours, I decided:

1\. I would give myself three weeks to learn these things before truly giving up.

2\. Even if no one else used it, I'd use it.

3\. I'd keep a weekly log of time spent and economize that time.

4\. RejoinableTCP was not a good name.

So on 11/19/16 Eternal Terminal was born, and three years later, here we are. Somewhere out there, there is some engineer today who has an idea in the same state that I was with Eternal Terminal three years ago. This post is for you:

1\. You can prototype anything in three weeks if you put your heart in it.

2\. Look around: all the engineers around you felt that same Calling, when you are building something amazing, time becomes fluid and things just flow. We may all come from different places and backgrounds, but that shared experience unites us. If you see a way to make this place better for you, it will probably make it better for others as well.

3\. If you love the job you do and the place you work, you can find a way through almost any situation. The entire company is rigged in your favor.

<comment><USER3> This really resonates with me because it was a very similar story with one of my projects (a $SHELL -- a bit like Bash et al). I started it as a short "what if" project and was really surprised at just how much already worked after only 3 weeks.

I think it's a great lesson for hobbyists: don't worry about perfection. Just POC something and if you're still passionate about it after 3 weeks you can always go back and tidy stuff up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since I often complain about bad landing pages, I want to take a moment to highlight a really good one. I arrive on the page and:

BOOM! "Eternal Terminal" the name of the project

But what is-- "H2: Remote terminal for the busy and impatient"!

In a sentence or two? "Eternal Terminal (ET) is a remote shell that automatically reconnects without interrupting the session. Learn how to install and use it here."

Oh sweet, now I know what this is. But I'm a power user, can't you also just do this in bash using-- "Here are alternative approaches along with explanations of why we're better"

Cool stuff, is this a new thing or-- "Here's our paginated version history with DATES! BEAUTIFUL WONDERFUL RELEASE DATES so you can see quickly that this project is at least a couple years old."

Sure sure, but what if someone on HN had just linked to the most recent release notes? "Let your eye and your mouse cursor drift naturally to the upper left hand corner, where the name of the project shows up and links to the landing page you just spent 5 minutes gushing about."

Bravo.

<comment><USER5> Actually, I found the homepage (landing page) not so great, and came here to the comments, in the hope to get some more information. Specifically, I use Mosh, and I would like to know, is this the same thing? If yes, how is it different? What are advantages/disadvantages? I would have wanted a more detailed comparison. The name is also a bit confusing; just from the name, I thought this might be a terminal emulator.

Back to Mosh: If it supports scrolling, how does that work? Is there also a prediction engine like in Mosh? What about ncurses apps? I skimmed briefly through the "how it works" page now, and it seems it also uses TCP instead of UDP. Shouldn't UDP be a better protocol for such a tool (also, that's what Mosh uses)? That page also does not say anything about how the prediction works (which is important in Mosh for the low latency), or whether it even does that (or how else could it have low latency)?

<comment><USER6> My understanding is: Mosh can't scroll because it doesn't send you the full output of the terminal. It only sends you the current "window" (visible terminal contents) at the current time. ET sends you everything.

So if a program suddenly outputs a massive number of lines, mosh will discard the beginning and only send you the visible end of the output. ET will send you everything - which might bog down slow connections, but provides natural scrollback.

Different tradeoffs.

<comment><USER7> I'd like something cleverer than that.

Act like mosh but use spare time/capacity to send the historical buffer too.

That way you get the best of both worlds.

<comment><USER8> That would be interesting, but also require support from the terminal emulator. Hence why ET is "native scrolling", I guess?

<comment><USER9> Oh, so it's actually an 'eternal shell'?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a current mosh user i'm interested but I don't know what "support native scrolling nor tmux control mode" means. Any insight?

<comment><USER11> mosh by default doesn't support native scrollback. The way mosh is implemented (by default at least) is to just paint the screen locally with the remote "view".

If you try to scroll back in your terminal locally (literally scroll up with a mouse/trackpad), it will scroll up your local terminal instead of scrolling up in the remote view. So your scrollback is literally capped at the vertical height of your local terminal window.

This is super annoying if you want to see long output of a previous command or even see what the output was of the command you ran five minutes ago.

ET solves this by basically doing ssh under the hood. So you have real scrollback by default. It's REALLY nice and is one of the primary reasons I use ET.

\---

As far as tmux control mode, in essence, it allows you to control tmux via your native terminal commands. On iTerm for example, you can use the key command to vertically split the (iTerm) terminal and tmux will actually hijack that command it do it in tmux. So you can use your native terminal multiplexing commands instead of the tmux key commands.

I only know of iTerm 2 that supports this functionality, just as a heads up.

<comment><USER12> Not being able to scroll was a pain, but nothing that tmux or even output piped to _less_ couldn't solve. It wasn't glorious, but it worked. That said, might be tempted to try ET just because scrolling through long winded outputs are a frequent thing.

<comment><USER13> Smooth-scrolling back through a command that unexpectedly dumped 500 lines of output, using Alacritty and a big scrolling trackball with acceleration, is pretty glorious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> At the risk of incurring self promotion issues (and I really don't understand what qualifies as acceptable self promotion), I didn't feel that this article was all that clear if you are an AWS focused user, so I wrote up all the steps it took to use Eternal Terminal in an OSX / AWS context including an Ansible playbook for configuration.

[https://fuzzyblog.io/blog/aws/2019/11/26/using-eternal- termi...](https://fuzzyblog.io/blog/aws/2019/11/26/using-eternal-terminal- with-osx-and-aws-including-ansible-support.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a good landing page. Every open source project should have something like this.

And this is how you create useful software. Looking for something to work? Try solving a problem you have. This is a so basic feature and so useful too.

<comment><USER16> I know it's cliche but scratching your own itch really is the way to go. At least you know your market exists, even if you're the only one in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My first question I couldn't find answered easily is "How does it work", e.g. "How does it maintain the connection?

The answer so far is that it does require you to install ET on the server too, along with the client. And then I searched github for "multiplex" thinking maybe it uses TCP multiplexing. And found a branch named "multiplex". Then I realized the Linux feature I was thinking of is actually called TCP Multipath, searched for it and no go. So I can only say that it _seems_ that it is _not_ using TCP Multipath for maintaining the connection over multiple connection drops.

Would love a more technical "How" here.

<comment><USER17> Here it is, I didn't see it hanging out at the top right of the page (#ux test).

[https://eternalterminal.dev/howitworks/](https://eternalterminal.dev/howitworks/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For someone wondering "how is this different from screen?/ what problem does it solve?", this article was actually quite nice:

[https://medium.com/@grassfedcode/what-could-be-better- than-s...](https://medium.com/@grassfedcode/what-could-be-better-than- ssh-e69561ec1b83)

<comment><USER19> I asked my self the same question, scanned the linked article and did not find any matches for "screen". So please, could you tell me in short, what the benefit is?

<comment> yoz-y They are a bit orthogonal. When you have a flaky connection, screen will help keeping your stuff alive on the remote host but you still need to reconnect all the time the connection drops. ET and mosh will make it look like your connection never dropped.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > While mosh provides the same core funtionality as ET, it does not support > native scrolling

NICE. I love Mosh but have always _ALWAYS_ hated how it messes up native scrolling.

<comment><USER21> Mosh also refuses to cut a new release, even after almost two and a half years. If you want truecolor, for example, you have to build from source.

<comment><USER22> Worth noting that most of the "bleeding edge" package managers will do this for you already.

Like pacman [0], which you can use on systems like Ubuntu and Debian via pacapt [1]

[0] [https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/mosh/](https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/mosh/)

[1] [https://www.ostechnix.com/use-archlinuxs-pacman-package- mana...](https://www.ostechnix.com/use-archlinuxs-pacman-package-manager-unix- like-oss/)

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure what you mean. The Arch Linux package uses 1.3.2, which is from July 2017.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm glad that it has tmux compatibility. Does anyone else have a love hate relationship with tmux? I hate its scrolling and buffer behavior, its almost impossible to get right. Been waiting for a good replacement for tmux to come along for a while now that isn't just i3. Right now I just use tabs in the terminal app most of the time because I dont want to mess with mouse mode, etc.

<comment><USER24> > Been waiting for a good replacement for tmux to come along for a while now > that isn't just i3 > Does anyone else have a love hate relationship with > tmux? > I hate its scrolling and buffer behavior, its almost impossible to > get right.

I wasn't planning on sharing my project on HN until I've written up more documentation, but I'm actually working on exactly this problem.

[https://github.com/aaronjanse/i3-tmux](https://github.com/aaronjanse/i3-tmux)

So far I've got i3-like controls, resizing & scrolling terminal splits with the mouse, and better color support than tmux.

My current roadblock has been lack of motivation, but if *anyone& on HN finds this interesting (or even just files a bug report), I'd be motivated to reignite my work on the project.

<comment><USER25> Funny, me too! I was adding some features yesterday, a few more today, but I took a few minutes to do screenshots and join the discussion.

If you are focused on better controls, our work may be complementary. Would you like to join forces on a high quality fork? A few things concern me with tmux currently.

Please read the following links and tell me whether you share these concerns: [https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/1019#issuecomment-318284...](https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/1019#issuecomment-318284445) [https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/1502#issuecomment-429710...](https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/1502#issuecomment-429710887) [https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/44#issuecomment-11975530...](https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/44#issuecomment-119755304) [https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/1391#issuecomment-403267...](https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/1391#issuecomment-403267557) Please tell me more about your color support issues, and check [https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel-testsuite](https://github.com/csdvrx/sixel- testsuite) to see if you can diagnose them more precisely

<comment><USER24> > If you are focused on better controls, our work may be complementary.

This is exactly what I'm doing!

> Would you like to join forces on a high quality fork? A few things concern > me with tmux currently.

I would absolutely love to work together. Please contact the email in my github profile (@aaronjanse).

I'd be happy to state my feelings on each of those issues, but it seems like you have done more research than I have.

Would you mind including some of your thoughts in the email you send me?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Jason, the author of this terminal, has a great podcast about programming with a cohost called Programming Throwdown.

<comment><USER27> Thanks for this, I have problems finding good developer podcasts, and at a quick glance of title + count, this looks promising.

Also...the podcast is more than eight years old!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I use mosh to connect up to a raspberry pi over a slow satellite link. For that, mosh works awesome but I've always missed the ability to scroll output when I'm trying to debug something. I'm anxious to give this terminal a try and see how it performs in comparison

</comment><comment><USER29> Ever since moving to eshell+tramp, all of these persistence tools, however beautifully designed, somehow strike me as solving the wrong problem.

<comment><USER30> Could you elaborate on this setup?

<comment><USER31> First, crash emacs 10 or 12 times...

<comment><USER32> Emacs daemon,emacsclient,shell mode and -nw ? Works ok if the disconnects are infrequent once an hour or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A downside is that compiling it on CentOS is not so straightforward. I finally succeeded with activating the devtoolset-8 toolchain.

</comment><comment><USER33> > mosh: Mosh is a popular alternative to ET. While mosh provides the same core > funtionality as ET, it does not support native scrolling nor tmux control > mode (tmux -CC).

I had no idea Mosh did not support tmux control mode. I was hoping to eventually use Mosh more, but not any more.

Glad to see Eternal Terminal works with FreeBSD too.

<comment><USER34> > Glad to see Eternal Terminal works with FreeBSD too.

Just installed it on my server. Package doesn't include any rc.d service file though. And I am fairly certain that unlike mosh, the Eternal Terminal etserver needs to run as a service, seeing as that is what they do on Linux and on macOS.

I'm gonna open an issue about it on their issue tracker.

<comment><USER34> I created an issue for it and then a PR also.

Issue: [https://github.com/MisterTea/EternalTerminal/issues/253](https://github.com/MisterTea/EternalTerminal/issues/253)

PR: [https://github.com/MisterTea/EternalTerminal/pull/255](https://github.com/MisterTea/EternalTerminal/pull/255)

Note that the version in FreeBSD ports was a bit out of date and they changed the command-line flags between then and now so I built the most recent version from source and had to make a small change in CMakeLists.txt in order to be able to build it, for which I submitted a separate PR.

CMakeLists.txt PR: [https://github.com/MisterTea/EternalTerminal/pull/254](https://github.com/MisterTea/EternalTerminal/pull/254)

If these two PRs are accepted and a new version of Eternal Terminal is released with these changes included then I can ask the FreeBSD package maintainers to update the port and for that rc.d service file to be included in the FreeBSD port and package.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I had used ET For a few weeks and it worked great except for when it didn't. I can't blame ET for sure, but I had some nasty problems with my ET crashing, having to SSH back in and fix ET, and realizing that it blew up my tmux with it. mosh has not caused this to happen :/

</comment><comment><USER36> Hmmm, I'll give it a try, though I'm quite happy with mosh. Having to open up only one extra port is nice. I use remote tmux sessions, and so I've never had a scrolling issue before.

</comment><comment><USER37> Holy shit, it's mosh with native scrolling? Why haven't I heard of this?

<comment><USER11> That's literally the only reason I use it. It's fantastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> How does this compare to ssh+gnu screen on the remote host?

<comment><USER39> Directly from the linked page:

> Ssh is a great remote terminal program, and in fact ET uses ssh to > initialize the connection. The big difference between ET and ssh is that an > ET session can survive network outages and IP roaming. With ssh, one must > kill the ssh session and reconnect after a network outage

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Does this support lag-free typing over slow connections?

</comment><comment><USER41> I am probably missing the point here, but how is this different than connecting via ssh and doing tmux attach?

<comment><USER42> That is explicitly and directly addressed in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Uses one TCP port instead of a UDP port range like mosh makes it easier to use through a firewall. Nice.

</comment><comment><USER44> It is down for me, I wonder if .dev domain is filtered for me? Anyone has issues accesing this?

<comment><USER45> If you ping eternalterminal.dev, does it go straight to localhost? If so, it's probably your own computer that's redirecting .dev to localhost.

<comment><USER44> Oh, that explains everything :) I feel so stupid now, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Eterminal.

<comment><USER47> e-Terminal, like it's 1999

<comment><USER48> I will never give up on writing "e-mail" rather than "email"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Does Eternal Terminal have any telemetry? I guess what I'm asking is, does ET phone home?

<comment><USER50> It doesn't appear so.

Is it normal for remote shells to have telemetry?

I hope you were sincerely asking a dumb question and not attempting to make a low effort joke instead of discussing the project in earnest.

<comment><USER51> > Is it normal for remote shells to have telemetry?

Well, tools that you wouldn't expect to phone home like text editors and compilers now do. See VSCode, the .NET Core compiler and even the Windows 10 _calculator_ [0].

[0]: [https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/issues/148](https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator/issues/148)

<comment><USER52> Yes, on the front page of HN right now is a post about Atom phoning home.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21642391](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21642391)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Petition to impeach Judge Roger Vinson for authorizing NSA Verizon surveillance - <AUTHOR> https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/impeach-federal-judge-roger-vinson-authorizing-warrantless-nsa-surveillance-millions-americans-phone/sKFwyNP8

<comment><USER2> There's plenty of anger to go around, but my understanding is that it's more productive to direct your efforts at legislators who approved the bad laws and the executives who take full opportunity to abuse them -- and not the judges who have a narrow role in this whole saga.

For example, if you live in California, perhaps you could call Dianne Feinstein, who when asked about this program today said, "It's called protecting America."

<comment><USER3> Feinstein is a long-time advocate for the national security state. She is up for reelection in 2018 in a state where she will not have a credible challenger from another party in a general election or her own party in the primaries.

You can contact her if you feel better. As for me, I have a folder full of form letter responses from her office explaining why it's so important that our civil liberties and privacy be curtailed to ensure our security. I don't think adding another letter to my collection will help anything. And I doubt her responses will do anything other than enrage you further.

The only sensible response at this point is to work to get her out of office in 2018. But I don't have hope for that, either.

<comment><USER4> 100% agree here. I loath that she is has no challengers. I had heard that she was going to retire and not run in 2012. I was so looking forward to that primary and when I saw her name on it my heart fell.

Unfortunately, the best we can hope for is that she retires in 2018.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A bill of impeachment has to be filed in the House of Representatives. The White House has nothing to do with this. This petition is a waste of time. If you're upset, try to convince your Congressman.

<comment><USER6> I'm convinced that the Whitehouse petitions platform is just a pressure release valve - a way to bleed off frustration so it's not manifested in more politically-weighty ways.

<comment><USER7> This! Over and over again. Whenever I see one of those petition discussion I am just baffled by the naiveté of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is the judge really so at fault at this? Serious question - do they have right to refuse approval under current legislation and can the administration just judge shop until they find a more susceptible judge?

<comment><USER9> AIUI, no, the FISA court is pretty much a rubber stamp with a security clearance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had put up a similar petition here, which targets more widespread change: [https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/cease-overbroad- su...](https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/cease-overbroad-surveillance- american-people/sMfwGWX5)

The more signatures on both, the better the chance of an official response.

</comment><comment><USER11> Until you can overcome the R and D machines and convince the 20% of people who vote stupidly to do something different other than pull the straight party lever nothing will ever change. You can also forget about civil war or something like that as they have nailed before you even think about it.

</comment><comment><USER12> What authority does the Whitehouse have to force congress to hold a congressional investigation?

</comment><comment><USER13> Wow, you guys are in full-jerk mode today!

Currently, I am seeing 16/30 articles on the front page describing the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER14> So much press and attention on this today, when James Bramford surfaced even more intrusive and comprehensive `See Clearly, Act Quickly' surveillance in his 2008 book Shadow Factory. That's now five years ago.

<comment><USER15> What types of surveillance did he expose?

<comment><USER14> Israeli(then, now BOEING) NARUS(R U NSA(?)) built `glass vampire' boxes at all (6?) main trunk ATT overseas (routers?) scraping voice flagged words, names. Lengthy detail of Bush administration free reign of (all?) domestic digital surveillance. I may have this wrong, I read this some four, five years ago. Scared me then scares me still. See Amazon review, Wikipedia, etc. There's Youtube Bramford interviews, and more recently William Binney whistle blowing -quite disturbing re: NSA execs revolving door with huge growth of vast intelligence industrial complex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I seriously don't get why people would ever submit their information to wh.gov. It's like you are adding yourself to Obama's enemy list. I'm sure Obama is going to overturn a spy program he signs off just because some rabble rousers signed an online form. The US constitution is dead. He doesn't give a damn.

<comment><USER17> oh, and here's to the button monkeys:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president- obamas-d...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas- dragnet.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

"The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it."

So it's okay to submit as an article, just not for a mere mortal commenter to basically say _the same fucking thing_. Which reminds me, I use phrases like "'n shit" to distance myself from you lot. I could "polite talk" like the best of them, I just don't trust people who can't say "fuck", so I don't see a reason to. Think of it as garlic to vampires.</comment></comment>


Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning (2003) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-complexity/ITA-software-travel-complexity.pdf <comment><USER2> I'm working on a similar project (kind of "Uber for air travel via private chartering") with a few different variables but still huge dimensionality for a set of aircraft and pilots, among them relations between airport (AP), pilot (P), aircraft (AC)

\- AC can take off/land on AP (runway is long enough, runway material is compatible, flight rules are ok)

\- P is close enough (by car) to AP

\- P is allowed to fly to AC

\- P is available during out/inbound flight

\- AP opening hours are respected

\- AP fees (depending on AC and passengers) are respected

\- AC is available during out/inbound flight

\- travel time affects many of the above criteria, e.g., faster machines might fly to different airports (more because they're still open, less because they require longer/better runways)

\- when changing countries you need to go through an airport with customs

\- when travelling long ranges, you need to refuel

\- weights of passenger + luggage + fuel don't exceed predefined aircraft weight constraints

\- You may need to fly your AC to AP1 to pick up the passengers, then refuel at AP2 and declare your goods there and deliver all at AP3 and then go back efficiently (possible skipping AP1 and/or AP2) or stay there and wait for the passengers to go back using a different AP when declaring your goods upon reentry into your original country.

I'm doing this mostly using application logic (travel planning) and postgres queries (finding travel legs) and it works well for 1k airports and 300 machines but if anyone has suggestions or questions, I'll be happy to share details.

<comment><USER3> Might be interesting to use logic programming (for example Prolog) or some rule engine to deal with these. Put in the requirements and then ask what options are available. For example Prolog can do this via backtracking.

I was once doing research for an optimization task and found out the related term is "integer programming". Compared to linear optimization the difference is that you have integer constraints. Like the plane either flies or it does not, you can't use 0.9 of this plane and 0.1 of the other. It was also revealing to find out the problem is NP-complete, so there's no easy solution or some magical algorithm.

In your case, the proper thing might be mixed-integer programming. Setting some constraints as integers (you need to have 2 pilots, they need to be the same for the whole flights) and others like travel speed as linear.

I was checking these years ago and at least back then there was not too many open source packages for this kind of optimization. Various commercial packages did exist.

<comment><USER4> There is a bit of an art to formulating a correct and efficient mixed integer program (MIP) of non-trivial size, and in my experience, it's not something that can be picked up easily. It's easy to formulate toy problems (most of us use this guide [1]), but formulating large complex problems efficiently requires quite a bit of know-how and years of study (e.g. convex hull relaxations, custom cuts, heuristics, decomposition, leveraging randomness, etc.) This kind of thing lie in the domain of specialists (operations research folks) rather than software developers.

The performance of commercial solvers (Gurobi, CPLEX, Xpress) has improved a lot and many are used in things like airline crew scheduling. The best open- source MIP solver is currently CBC (SCIP is better but only free for non- commercial use), but commercial solvers beat these by a mile. Even so large- scale MIPs are still complex beasts. It's worth noting that if the problem doesn't require any optimization (merely constraint satisfaction), MIPs might be overkill. A rules engine would probably be easier to implement and maintain. Even SQL (which is set theory in disguise) will often get you most of the way there. And if optimization was needed, a greedy algorithm would probably work most of the time.

There are many successful commercial applications of MIPs but typically they are in circumscribed areas. MIPs are best deployed when there is a definite need for an optimal result, and when there is expertise available to maintain the resulting complex models. (Note: even ITA software in the linked article didn't attempt to model the problem as an MIP)

[1] [https://www.artelys.com/uploads/pdfs/Xpress/mipformref-1.pdf](https://www.artelys.com/uploads/pdfs/Xpress/mipformref-1.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Interesting historical note: Google bought ITA in 2010.

<comment><USER4> Right. ITA's flight search tool was best-of-class in its time (and still is). Their competition at the time were Amadeus and Sabre which were written in assembly and ran on old-school mainframes. ITA's founders were MIT AI Lab alum so they wrote the first version of their software in Lisp. [1]

ITA's code now powers Google Flights.

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/carl.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the excellent book Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal, about the life of J.C.R. Licklider, there is the story of how SAGE, the system used for command-and-control strategic planning, was modified to become SABRE, the first airline reservation system. This has been a computational problem for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Possibly relevant: [https://systemswe.love/videos/life-of-an-airline- flight](https://systemswe.love/videos/life-of-an-airline-flight)

</comment><comment><USER8> One neat thing is that their fallback mechanism is to have a human being sort out the mess. There are offices full of people whose job it is to find a workaround or at least smooth ruffled feathers. Sometimes it doesn't work out.

</comment><comment><USER9> i'm on a conference call right now about this very subject. No one understands how complex scheduling systems are or can become. It's easy to think about but difficult to automate.

<comment><USER8> I'd say it's actually not the easy to think about. There is a lot of complexity it's easy to just ignore when your brain keeps dragging you back to the trivial, computationally, scheduling concerns in your own life. It's a good example of how the brain can have a basically wrong model that is good enough for a tiny part of the problem space commonly encountered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd assume it has the same complexity that all scheduling problem have ( like the canonical college classes scheduling that most of us learn about ).</comment>


Where the wall once stood - <AUTHOR> http://www.tagesspiegel.de/themen/berlinergeschichte/zirkeltag-in-berlin-wo-frueher-die-mauer-stand-ein-vorher-nachher-vergleich/20921224.html <comment><USER2> missing the most famous view of the wall, next to Brandenburg Gate: [https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Wall-at-the- Brande...](https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/Wall-at-the-Brandenburg- Gate/1)

Background: today is the day the Berlin wall has been down for as long as it has been up - [http://nationalpost.com/news/the-berlin-wall-has-almost- been...](http://nationalpost.com/news/the-berlin-wall-has-almost-been-down-as- long-as-it-was-up)

<comment><USER3> I think I stood in almost that exact spot a few months ago during a trip to Europe. Crazy to think that there used to be a border there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Berliner Morgenpost published a cool little interactive thing last week where you draw where you think the wall used to be and it tells you how close you were:

[https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/berliner- mauer/](https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/berliner-mauer/)

(German only, but the headline basically just means "do you know where where the wall divided Berlin?")

I've lived here for a few years, but I found it really challenging myself!

<comment><USER4> Ah, and they just published some of the resulting drawings:

[https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/mauerzeichnen- auswertung/](https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/mauerzeichnen-auswertung/)

<comment><USER5> The most absurd list is exactly what I was hoping they would have

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Impressive how many of the buildings are still there and recognisable. Nice to see most of the 30+ year old apartment blocks still standing and well looked after.

Must have been so weird to look out from a high-up apartment on one side of the wall all the way over no-man's-land towards the windows of another block on the other side.

<comment><USER7> > Impressive how many of the buildings are still there and recognisable. Nice > to see most of the 30+ year old apartment blocks still standing and well > looked after.

Have you seen many cities where buildings that are merely 30 years old do not exist anymore ?

<comment><USER8> The situation with older buildings in central Berlin is quite interesting though, because so many quite grand buildings on the eastern side went untouched for 50 years after the war. Then in the late 90s large areas of east-central Berlin were restored at some speed, from bullet-holed crumbling blackened stone to smart painted render in what I assume was something like the original style.

I once wrote a rather personal ramble that touches on this, here [https://thebreakfastpost.com/2014/09/23/alte-schonhauser- str...](https://thebreakfastpost.com/2014/09/23/alte-schonhauser-strase/) with some pictures taken in 1993 of the area around Hackescher Markt. If you click through on one of the photos, there are a few more on the Flickr set that don't appear in the article.

<comment> et-al Thanks for sharing those photos. It's crazy how long Tacheles was in ruins. I was just there in January and there's actually construction breaking ground.

When's the last time you were back in Berlin? Have you seen how Neue Schönhauser Str. has developed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> FYI: The photos are not "side by side." They scroll over to see before and after views.

I didn't immediately realize it. My German is lousy. Etc.

<comment><USER10> Same for me, although I speak (and am) German. I just thought, "it would be nice if you could move this... oh look, you actually can".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Former canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield took a famous picture from the Internation Space Station that shows how it is still possible to see where the wall separated the city!

Check this: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/apr/21/astr...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/apr/21/astronaut- chris-hadfield-berlin-divide)

Pretty awesome, in my opinion :)

<comment><USER12> This is mostly because street lighting was different. Sodium vapour lamps in the East, mercury-vapour (or perhaps high-pressure sodium-vapour) lamps in the West.

<comment><USER11> Yes, that's exactly the explanation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seems like the wall of concrete has been replaced by a wall of parked cars.

<comment><USER14> For a very good reason - if you look at the old pictures, you'll often see the pre-1961 sidewalk embedded in the street. The Wall was often build in the middle of streets that had been used as demarcation lines between Soviet and other zones. When the wall came back down, those streets were rebuilt, and so car parking went down exactly along the route of the wall.

You can see this by looking at the ground; modern Berlin marks the route of the wall with a line of bricks in the middle of the pavement. In many of the current pictures, that line runs just between the traffic lanes and the parked cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Its amazing how much nicer most European cities have become since the '80s. The wall was one thing, but the general crime, grime and sense of decay was almost as bad.

<comment><USER16> Absolutely. The decay was grim. Take Leipzig for example, once one of the trade centers of Germany and what it became after 40 years of socialism: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cDOqb53Kfk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cDOqb53Kfk) [1]

And mind you, that when we're speaking about Eastern Europe, we're talking about the more prosperous part of the communist bloc.

[1] granted, WW2 left its mark as well but Western Germany started with the same handicap and didn't turn it's inner cities into Favelas.

<comment><USER10> > Western Germany started with the same handicap

It depends. Some counter-points:

\- Western Germany had all (or at least nearly all) of Germany's supply of black coal, the energy source that powered nearly all of Germany back in the day. East Germany only had brown coal, which has a worse energy density and is more complicated to mine and use e.g. because of the water contained in it. Over the lifespan of the GDR, about 40% of all investments in industry went into the energy sector as they tried to make brown coal more efficient and build nuclear reactors.

\- While the Western allies realized fairly early on that it makes more sense for them to integrate West Germany into their political and economical networks, East Germany had to pay huge amounts of reparations to the Soviets. Entire factories and hundreds of kilometers of rail tracks were disassembled and shipped to Russia. [1] That also took decades to recover from.

[1] While motivated by an understandable desire for a payback on the part of the Soviets (who suffered millions of casualties during the war), this was an incredibly stupid move for the Soviets: A lot of those reparations got lost to their "brother countries" through which stuff was shipped to the Soviet Union, and when machines managed to arrive in the Soviet Union, they often lacked qualified personnel to operate them. And, of course, it also reduced competitiveness of the GDR (and, therefore, of the Communist bloc as a whole).

<comment><USER17> Wow. Finland (which didn't get occupied and remained nominally neutral) also had to pay hefty war reparations (mostly in the form of heavy machinery) but that had an almost opposite effect: they kickstarted rapid industrialization and economic growth in the hitherto poor, largely agrarian country.

<comment><USER18> Nominally neutral? They fought the Soviets in alliance with the Nazis! It wasn't until the end of the Winter war they switched sides.

<comment><USER19> Finland was neutral before, and only worked with Germany after a massive, unprovoked military invasion by Russia and essentially no help from the allies during the entire Winter War.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've seen so many pictures of the wall in my life, yet I can't remember seeing even one taken from the eastern side. Probably because it would have landed you in jail?

<comment><USER20> So, two things:

1\. The wall was all around West Berlin, separating it from East Berlin and the rest of East Germany.

2\. There was a whole wide border defence strip, known as the death strip. _The_ wall was just the inner most ("western") part of it. From West Berlin you could walk right up to it (though sometimes there was a thin strip of East Berlin strictly speaking), but on the outer ("eastern") side there was the considerable "defence in depth" and guards and fences etc. Basically, if you ever stood in front of _the_ wall on the "eastern" side, you were either a border guard or about to be shot.

See pictures here:

[https://allymalinenko.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/wall001.jp...](https://allymalinenko.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/wall001.jpg)

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Bundesarchiv_Bild_B_145_...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Bundesarchiv_Bild_B_145_Bild-P061246.jpg)

[http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/berliner-mauer-der- geharkt...](http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/berliner-mauer-der-geharkte- todesstreifen/1627392.html)

EDIT to add:

3\. Similarly, there was a 1400 km border between East and West Germany, which was also heavily guarded. It also had a border defence strip on the eastern side, up to 5 km (3 miles) wide, which incidentally turned it into a habitat for endangered species. While this "innerdeutsche Grenze" is less unusual and thus less famous than the Berlin Wall, more people died trying to cross it than at the Wall.

4\. The crossings at that border were the stuff of spy movies: East Germany actually installed secret gamma-ray guns to detect people concealed inside vehicles. If someone arose suspicion and tried to flee with their car, there were 6 ton barriers, "Kraftfahrzeugschnellsperren", that could be catapulted across the road using hydraulic rams.

<comment><USER21> > though sometimes there was a thin strip of East Berlin strictly speaking

There were also secret doors in the wall, and on several occasion people from the western part who ended up on this thin strip adjacent to the wall were "kidnapped" by the stasi to the east and later usually traded for eastern agents captured in the west.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Are there no intact bits remaining? Last time I was in Berlin (maybe 10-15 years ago) there were a few places around the city where small sections still stood.

<comment><USER23> Yes, in some parts of the city the wall is still there. In other parts, like where I live, iron beams stick out from the floor to show where the wall used to be. And in other parts, you can't see anything (though you usually don't have to walk far to see some wall-related artwork painted on a wall or something like that)

<comment><USER21> Is this around Bernauer Str or also somewhere else? I've only ever seen it there.

<comment><USER23> Yeh exactly

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On some photos, you can see pavement blocks in the asphalt, where the wall has been. Not sure if it is in all of the length, but it sure is in some places.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I believe it is most of the length. Very helpful actually, because otherwise it would be hard to figure out where the wall has been as Berlin is changing so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> To me it didn't look like they tried too hard to take the picture from the same angle etc.

I remember a person from the old West Germany saying to me that they'd like that wall back twice as high and the same depth underground because of all reunification cost and the entitled attitude of 'osties'

<comment><USER16> Truth is, German Reunification was never an aim of West German politicians until it suddenly appeared as an option at the end of the 1980s. And even then, half of the political spectrum was strongly against it (eg Gerhard Schröder, who later became German Chancellor). Before that, anyone who argued in favor of reunification was eclipsed into the fringe.

Having been bombarded with arguments against reunification for decades by at least one half of the spectrum, will have shaped the views of many. A lot of people felt unease about an American president pushing so visibly for it, as Reagan did.

For the German Easterners it must be said, they were the only "revolutionaries", the only Germans who risked anything and showed courage and actually fought for freedom. Yet, there is almost no official commemoration of it. Partly because many Easterners were part of the system. Partly because the West-German left hated to be reminded of their own amorality.

Thus, "reunification costs" are only a translucent argument. As if the redistribution policies already existing in West-Germany weren't the real culprit why the West-German worker was left so little of his wage and why the job market was stagnating at best for years.

<comment><USER26> > Partly because the West-German left hated to be reminded of their own > amorality.

What amorality are you talking about?

<comment><USER16> Being against reunification. Being reminded of the failed experiment across the just deleted border. Being reminded that that failed experiment should have given them some doubts about their doctrines. Being reminded that in the most remarkable story of human progress in contemporary history [1], not only were they not part of the heroes - they were complicit agents in defending the status quo of an unfree Eastern Germany.

Which is why the SPD (with a few exceptions) and the Greens have never set foot in the East as did the conservative CDU.

[1] that remarkable story of course includes the whole of Eastern Europe and that human progress may only be equated to the rise of China (although not politically).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I met some East Germans in the US in July 1989. I asked them if the wall would come down. They said the prime minister said, "Not in the next 100 years."

100 years vs. 5 months. Pretty close...

</comment><comment><USER28> Looks like feckin' road engineers had their way with all the land freed up by the removal of the wall. Great!

</comment><comment><USER29> And now the world want exactly the same for Jerusalem. I find it's crazy.

</comment><comment><USER30> It is ironic that a country, which reunited after tearing a wall between its people in 1989, had a major role in breaking an almost neighboring country apart, taking part in its destruction and (subsequently) raising walls between people. I am talking about the former Yugoslavia.

A quote from a book "The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists" (published in 1999) by Martin A. Lee:

(Chapter eight "Shadow over the East", Page 299) Whereas the United States and the rest of the European Community tried to prevent the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bonn unilaterally recognized Croatia as an independent nation at the end of 1991 and twisted arms to get other countries to comply with its wishes. American officials subsequently charged that Bonn was responsible for provoking the crisis in Yugoslavia, which had existed as a single country since 1919, except for the gruesome interlude when Hitler created a Croatian client state.

Reunified Germany's preemptive diplomatic maneuver led to a major escalation of the civil war in the Balkans, which took hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced more than a million people. Bonn exacerbated the conflict by supplying Croatia with large quantities of weapons. Between 1992 and 1994, Germany exported $320 million of military hardware — including MiG fighter jets, surface-to-air missiles, and late-model tanks — to Croatia, despite a United Nations arms embargo forbidding such commerce. Convoys of up to fifteen hundred military vehicles from former East Germany were discovered en route to the Balkan farrago. Germany also trained Croatian pilots and provided intelligence reports in an effort to vanquish their mutual enemy. Heleno Sano, an expert on German defense issues, commented on the psychological underpinnings of this policy: "In their 'historic unconscious,' the Germans have resented the Serbs since World War II, because despite the fact that Hitler sent in thirty divisions, he was unable to defeat the antifascist guerrillas led by Tito."

Under the auspices of NATO, German warplanes saw action for the first time since 1945, carrying out aerial patrols to prevent Serbian fighter jets from flying over Bosnian territory. And when the tide turned in Croatia's favor in the summer of 1995, Bonn agreed to contribute up to four thousand military personnel to enforce a tenuous peace accord. German intervention was widely depicted in humanitarian terms, but General Klaus Naumann had something else in mind when he lobbied behind the scenes for a wider military role. While some German officials expressed a genuine reluctance to interfere in a place that had been devastated by Hitler, Naumann saw a chance for his men to test their mettle in a combat setting.

<comment><USER16> Martin. A. Lee: When you thought conspiracy theorists were a specialty of the far-right, the left fringe is always good for a surprise.

<comment><USER30> Why am I not surprised?

(1) You are a German.

(2) You are advocating for German imperial interests.

(3) "Drang nach Osten" (und Süden) is alive and kicking!

Thus, if anyone interferes with that by quoting facts they are "conspiracy theorists", "heretics", "far-whatever".

Croatia is today, for the second time since the WWII, a German vassal. To "pay" for the German political and military support in the 90ies, they have had to sell everything of value to German interests for peanuts: Most hotels on the Croatian part of the Adria coast are in German hand, Croatian telecom company (actually, a strategic resource for every country) is now "Deutsche Telekom", every Croatian company of value is owned by some German company.

The consequence are a high unemployment and a mass exodus: 300.000, some figures go as far as 500.000, Croats have left Croatia since it became the EU member in 2013 (2017 figures; according to Wikipedia, population estimate for Croatia in 2017 is 4.154.200). Croatian MD's and nurses are in Germany, keeping the German wages low for German hospital owners while German nurses live off of social security (because they don't want to break their backs in 12 hour shifts for chump change). Needless to say, Croatian medical system is in disarray.

And this is only a part of economic woes Croatia goes through. I will not go deep into political woes but name one: Croatia is the only country in the EU and NATO, in which the highest ranking officials (President, cabinet members) (1) attend openly fascistic and nazistic concerts, (2) make a yearly pilgrimage to an Austrian town of Bleiburg where Tito (with the blessing from US and GB) has killed some 90.000 Ustasha (Croats) in 1945, (3) deny the role of the Croat people and their WWII Independent State in the genocide on Serbs, Jews and Roma, (4) actively work (together with the Roman-Catholic church) on rehabilitation of people responsible for those crimes.

One episode is illustrative: End of 2016, in the city of Jasenovac, which is near the concentration camp Jasenovac, Croatian veterans from the 90ties have installed a memorial plaque with words "Za dom spremni!" on it. It is Ustasha greet during WWII, similar to "Sieg Heil" of the German Nazis. Now, as a German, imagine that in the city of Dachau, near former Dachau concentration camp, some veteran group puts a memorial plaque with "Sieg Heil" on it. What would happen? They would be punished at the speed of light while the outcry in the media would be enormous. In Croatia that memorial plaque stood there for almost a year! (it was removed after 10 months in September 2017 and put in the city of Novska, mere 10 km from the old spot)

And what does a "democratic" and "denazified" Germany do while Croatia revives Nazism? It is DEAD silent! Vassal is still needed to do the dirty work (wage a war, any kind of it) for German interests (again: "Drang nach Osten" (und Süden))!

Now that we can understand who you are protecting by accusing others of being "conspiracy theorists" (it took me awhile), one last question: If Martin A. Lee is a "conspiracy theorist", what about New York Times?

[http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/08/world/germans-follow- own-l...](http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/08/world/germans-follow-own-line-on- yugoslav-republics.html)

[http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/16/world/europe-backing- germa...](http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/16/world/europe-backing-germans- accepts-yugoslav-breakup.html?pagewanted=all)

<comment><USER16> _You are advocating for German imperial interests_

Wait, what now? Where do you get this stuff?

 _" Drang nach Osten" (und Süden) is alive and kicking!_

By my actions? What are you even talking about?

By the sheer amount of words you use, I can see that you put a lot of effort in your reasoning. How about improving your thought by not masking out all the evidence that surrounds you, that neither Germans nor Croatians and other Easterners are all about to revive what the Holocaust hasn't achieved?

You know by assuming that I am

 _a German._

and thus must be

 _advocating for German imperial interests_

your reasoning has more incommon with the Nazi-Racists than you might want to realize.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Zaha Hadid, Groundbreaking Architect, Has Died - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/01/arts/design/zaha-hadid-architect-dies.html <comment><USER2> This is insanely sad. This brilliant woman had so much left to share with us. Zaha was given the title of "starchitect" for good reason -- and unlike so many people attempting next-generation forms in architecture, her work actually got _built_.

Since this still means something in the early 21st Century, it was also always quite inspiring to see an assertive Arab woman at the top of a highly competitive, male-dominated technical field. This woman was pure alpha. She played to win. And she usually won.

Please, everyone, take care of your health. Without it, you have nothing.

To understand more about Zaha and her brilliance, check out this excellent issue of Abitare, in which they trailed her for several months. I think there's a free iPad version of the full issue somewhere as well:

[http://www.abitare.it/en/research/2011/04/06/being-zaha- hadi...](http://www.abitare.it/en/research/2011/04/06/being-zaha-hadid-2/)

<comment><USER3> > unlike so many people attempting next-generation forms in architecture, her > work actually got built.

Not for a while: people used that same criticism against her for a decade. From the other thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11397904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11397904)

<comment><USER2> That was part of her alpha-ness: she actually got her stuff pushed through and built. The sort of personality necessary for accomplishing such a feat is so incredibly rare -- just think of how difficult it is to get people to adopt a new programming language or something, and multiply the inertia by 1000... She really pushed society forward in terms of the boundaries of what could be a real-world built form.

<comment><USER4> For a contrasting view:

[http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/08/the-heckler- architecture-...](http://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/08/the-heckler-architecture- would-be-better-off-without-zaha-hadid/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Somewhat disappointing that an article talking about how great of an architect she was didn't actually have any pictures of her architecture, let alone her most popular work, in the article.

I mean, it was easy enough to find on google, but it seems rather silly for a major publication to miss that.

Her work was quite good though. She is a loss, but thankfully we were lucky enough to have so many contributions from her.

<comment><USER6> Licencing issues?

<comment><USER5> Doubt it. Here's a large selection of images all licensed CC-BY-SA[1]:

* [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Buildings_by_Zah...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Buildings_by_Zaha_Hadid)

* [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:CITCO_with_Zaha_...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:CITCO_with_Zaha_Hadid_for_The_Secret_Garden)

* [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Furniture_by_Zah...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Furniture_by_Zaha_Hadid)

* [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wirl_%28Zaha_Had...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wirl_%28Zaha_Hadid%29)

And that was from a single 30-second search. Spending 1-2 minutes on an image site would easily return many other images with respectable licensing terms.

[1] - [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- sa/3.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those who don't know her work, here is a good recent overview: [http://www.ilikearchitecture.net/tag/zaha-hadid- architects/](http://www.ilikearchitecture.net/tag/zaha-hadid-architects/)

<comment><USER7> Are all these actual construction or some of them are just design? Loved all of them but the Sleuk Rith Institute left me speechless. I would have assumed it as an exotic cinema set.

<comment><USER8> Actual construction. Her pure design work is even more gorgeous:

[https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/zaha-hadids- dr...](https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/zaha-hadids-drawings-1/)

[https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/zaha-hadids- dr...](https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/zaha-hadids-drawings-2/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Coincidentally, I had dinner with someone at the weekend that worked with her. He said she was brilliant, but a horrible person to work with. I guess she had a bit of the Steve Jobs in her.

<comment><USER9> Good. I would think less of her if she wasn't.

<comment><USER10> If she wasn't... what? A horrible person to work with?

You can't seriously be saying that successful 'assholes' are somehow better than successful people who are generous or kind.

<comment><USER9> No i don't mean they should be intentionally horrible. But people who are excellent in their art often spend no time to please others. If they do, they won't be excellent in their art.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was on The Verge yesterday, noticed they included Aesthetica Magazine in something, which looked interesting, so I hopped over there and saw one of her designs, and was so taken aback by it I tracked down a larger version of it and pinned it, learning about her (for the first time) in the process. Today I open hacker news to see she's gone. :\

[https://www.pinterest.com/pin/44262008816410725/](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/44262008816410725/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Just last month Kirsty Young did a nice interview with Zaha Hadid on Desert Island Discs:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0713rtr](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0713rtr)

</comment><comment><USER13> Huge fan of Zaha Hadid. Really sad to read about her passing, brilliant brilliant and inspirational woman. Huge contributions to the art of architecture and landscape architecture. Rest well.

</comment><comment><USER14> Her designs have had (and continues to have) a huge influence on my own work and many other designers out there. I remember seeing her Guggenheim show in 2006 and being completely blown away.

This is really sad to hear and my condolences to those closest to her.

A note on her website: [http://www.zaha-hadid.com/](http://www.zaha- hadid.com/)

<comment><USER15> > A note on her website: [http://www.zaha-hadid.com/](http://www.zaha- > hadid.com/)

It's offline now, what did it say?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Zaha Hadid designed the Broad Art Museum in East Lansing. I drive by it daily and it takes your breath away. It is clearly the best thing Michigan State has done for the community in a generation. The lady had a very special talent.

[http://www.inexhibit.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/eli- and-...](http://www.inexhibit.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/eli-and-edithe- broad-art-museum-university-michigan-05.jpg)

They used it as a set for the movie Batman vs Superman

[https://i.embed.ly/1/display/resize?key=1e6a1a1efdb011df8489...](https://i.embed.ly/1/display/resize?key=1e6a1a1efdb011df84894040444cdc60&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg.com%2Fmedia%2FB0Bchm6CYAIa91P.jpg)

[http://broadmuseum.msu.edu/](http://broadmuseum.msu.edu/)

<comment> guard-of-terra But will it be as good if you had to walk by it daily?

I'm afraid, for many buildings in this style, the answer is "no".

<comment><USER16> The design was controversial but once it was open won over all its critics.

They may seem like odd angles but the light inside is amazing. The Broad is an extraordinary place to view art.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Groundbreaking" architect? A pun in an obituary title?

</comment><comment><USER18> reviewed by jon stewart:

[http://www.cc.com/video-clips/q9k5o3/the-daily-show-with- jon...](http://www.cc.com/video-clips/q9k5o3/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart- unnecessary-muffness)

</comment><comment><USER19> It said she died of a heart attack after contracting bronchitis! Scary to think that something so minor can kill a person at a relatively young age given our medical system.

<comment><USER20> Very rare i guess but it happens. Even very young people sometimes die (>200k per year in the US) of sudden cardiac arrest for often no particular reason while being completely healthy.

<comment><USER21> Sudden cardiac death is different from myocardial infarction (heart attack).

Sudden cardiac death in younger people/athletes is usually due to hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy, a congenital defect. In older people it is usually due to ventricular arrhythmias, which can have their own etiologies.

Death resulting from an MI is typically more gradual, usually actually from complications of heart failure b/c the heart simply can't pump as well.

<comment><USER20> Yes, my point was more about that sudden deaths happen in our society and sometime even our advanced medical possibilities can't really do something, probably was not clear enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I always did love the angles and sharpness of the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati. I always felt like going into a building she designed was like walking into a real-life geometry problem set.

Granted, I am only marginally aware of the work of many architects, but I actively sought hers out whenever possible. I was never disappointmented. This is sad news, indeed.

</comment><comment><USER9> So sad to hear of the sudden passing of such a dynamic and inspiring (and even controversial) person. She has left a number of projects unfinished (including the 2022 world cup stadium).

</comment><comment><USER23> Damn. I based my entire GCSE coursework on one of her works a few years back, and I remember just sitting there loving every piece. It's a sad day.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am not much into Architecture and just some weeks ago found out about her and the work she did and was amazed by it. This is really sad.

</comment><comment><USER24> Incredibly inspiring work and background with a style as recognisable as Gehry, her Riverside Museum in Scotland is one of my favorites.

<comment><USER3> Gehry's designs are more recognisable because they're consistent: Disney LA looks like Guggenheim Bilbao looks like Gehry designed jewellery. He has a signature look and it's part of his branding.

Hadid's a lot more exciting because she evolved from boxy to hyper-aggressive acute angles to a final style that was combined softness with acute. It's great to look back through her oeuvre (see the other links in the thread) and see the evolution.

<comment><USER25> Indeed. Huge fan - she was easily one of the most creative and original architects of the last fifty years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Her achievements are no doubt singular and impressive. But still, did she really have to lend her artistic credibility -- and her "signature, voluptuous design aesthetic" \-- to a 619,000 square-foot convention center and performance hall named after this guy? Whose family continues to run Azerbaijan as their personal fiefdom; and whose son (and successor) has been compared, in leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, to a mafia crime boss?

 _As head of the KGB 's branch in Azerbaijan, Aliyev ran an anti-corruption campaign as a cover for purging his opponents.[15][16][17] Following the purge, he became the undisputed leader of Azerbaijan. During this time, Aliyev acquired wealth and prestige by developing prominent ties with the Azeri mafia. With its help, he amassed profits from the sale of various commodities, including Caspian Sea caviar, Sumgait oil, fruit, vegetables, and cotton—and from his involvement in Azerbaijan's border control (customs) and transportation industries.[15][16] In order to remain the unchallenged leader of Azerbaijan, Aliyev bribed Brezhnev with lavish gifts—such as the so-called "Sun King" diamond ring, worth an estimated 226,000 rubles, described above.[15][16][17] After two Moscow prosecutors investigated the Azeri mafia, one was tried and expelled from the Communist party, and the other was convicted and executed.[15] Aliyev became a candidate (non-voting) member of the Soviet Politburo in 1976. He occupied this position until December 1982, when Yuri Andropov promoted him to the office of First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers.[15]_

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


Tutorial: Apache 2.4 as reverse proxy - <AUTHOR> http://www.leaseweblabs.com/2014/12/tutorial-apache-2-4-transparent-reverse-proxy/ <comment><USER2> Perhaps I'm the weird one out that actually prefers Apache 2.4.x over Nginx for web and proxy services in much the same way. Huge fan of mod_proxy_balancer (not available in Apache < 2.4) when bundled with uwsgi for web workers.</comment>


Ask HN: Which open-source Ruby project to take part in? - <AUTHOR>

I think I know Ruby well enough. Recently, I was thinking about joining to some open-source project to become better as a developer. So now I have to choose which Ruby project to join. Rails is great but I think it's hard enough inside.<p>Maybe you can suggest me some interesting projects I can contribute? This project shouldn't be a web framework or a web app though. Just some cool command-line app or gem will be fine. Any ideas? <comment><USER2> What do you use in regular development? What itch needs scratching? Best to help out on something where you're a user and feel motivated to improve things.

Also, pretty much every project needs help with documentation, especially Ruby itself. One way to improve your Ruby-fu is to read the Ruby source code and write (or add to) the documentation. (This is more needed for the standard library than the core stuff.)

Warning: Not a single person on the planet thinks this is sexy. However, better docs will help make everyone using Ruby better at it; think of as lever that can move the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically Ruby itself, RVM, Bundler, Homebrew, Octopress (Jekyll based), Rails + many gems like Mongoid, Formtastic, Twitter, Cucumber, RSpec and many others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ruby</comment>


web app almost finished, how much for a design? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on my app for a few months and feature wise, it's ready for a beta. However, due to a) my general hatred for working with css b) my complete lack of css and creative skills, all the output is bare, unstyled html
I have $300 to spend. Is that a realistic budget for hiring someone to skin the app? it's a very data heavy with lots of data tables and graphs, so I'm not looking for a "site design" or branding. I'm looking more for a simple and clean user interface. I'd be happy with a set of styles for standard elements such as forms and tables.
is $300 unrealistic? if so, would people recommend launching (private beta) as-is or wait until I can afford a designer? <comment><USER2> I have designed a few web apps for personal use, but I do freelance design (bleikamp.com/work) and $300 would maybe get you 1 mockup from a decent designer - no XHTML/CSS or integration work.

I generally charge $75/hr for design and XHTML/CSS work - so not cheap, but also not nearly as high a rate as the rate as the "rockstar" designers out there ($150+/hr) or a design agency (a hell of a lot/hr) A full design could take anywhere from 40-100 hours, maybe more - it's hard to know, it depends how many individual pages you have or how many unique designs are needed.

Also make sure you know whether the designer includes a logo in his quote - many web designers / usability specialists aren't very good at logo work.

If you want a designer to do the XHTML/CSS with the design, check out the code they have written in the past - a lot of people suck at XHTML/CSS, even with how simple it is compared to OOP...

</comment><comment><USER3> Generally you get what you pay for, but in your case I would probably try to find some upcoming and/or young designer that will do it for the hell of it, and maybe to get experience and a portfolio.

$300 isn't a lot these days...

</comment><comment><USER4> You could maybe go with a free or cheap design from oswd until you get enough money or find someone good willing to do it for cheap.

</comment><comment><USER5> You'd probably be better off adding a little bit of equity to the offer.</comment>


Why is everyone crying about Steve Jobs? - <AUTHOR> http://halvorson.tumblr.com/post/11112422479/i-dont-get-why-youre-crying-about-steve-jobs

<comment><USER2> I think the main reason is that he is such an inspiring man, that even those who hated him, mourned his loss. And that is something really rare. There is a lesson to learn in whatever he did. He drove people to push way beyond their boundaries and he set an example by doing the same. For a minute there, I had lost all hope on humanity when I heard the news and im not even exaggerating.</comment>


Antivirus sites may be helping spread the malware ransomware (WannaCry) attack - <AUTHOR> https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/05/13/warning-antivirus-sites-may-be-helping-to-spread-the-current-global-malware-ransomware-wannacry-attack <comment><USER2> The article doesn't say which ones.</comment>


Y Combinator Challenge #27 - Hardware/software hybrids - <AUTHOR> http://astartupaday.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/y-combinator-challenge-27-hardwaresoftware-hybrids/

<comment><USER2> 1\. Automated pet feeders: Add a scale under the food bowl and a scale where your cat/small dog sits to eat, throw in a webcam (and a mic to hear the crunchy sounds) and an embedded board to control it all and dish out the right amount of food and find a wealthy pet crazy audience who wants to see a graph of their pet's weight/consumption over time.

Have the 'community' compare breeds eating habits + figure out different eating patterns + types of food.

The deluxe model could have a speaker so you can voip to your pet loving sounds to help them digest. Partner with some of the GPS collars (and collars with accelerometers to figure out overall activity) for a full online profile of your furry obsession.

2\. Bird feeders: Capture some really closeup pictures of birds gorging themselves on your delectable food. Have a solar panel on the top + an embedded wifi board that can email pictures of cute birds eating their food to the customer.

Do it high res enough to know if a bird comes back the next spring. Email when food get's low. Create a community that shares the pictures + might even track a bird or two once they know that the reflective solar panel equals a great meal.

Have a deluxe model that weighs the bird as it stands on the perch. Add a mic to record their gossip. Give them a facebook page.

Find rich bird crazy people to pay $2k for it.

3\. Networked scale: Much like the pet concept, this would be a $500 scale that, barring dropping 20 pounds overnight, can detect you + update you on your health. It can tie into a weight watchers site, as well as play shower music.

You get a weekly email of a graph of your weight with motivational tools.

<comment><USER3> Great ideas - I actually was throwing around some remote pet-tracking ideas but couldn't crack it. The automated pet feeder idea is just crazy enough to work, my kind of idea. Also, as the lazy, gadget-loving owner of a fat cat myself (he prefers the term "pleasantly plump"), I could actually see myself purchasing something like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm really digging that iBear thing. Obviously, it needs to be ironed out a bit, but I think it has tremendous potential.

</comment><comment><USER5> i wanted to play with microcontroller for drip irrigation, pumps, solar powered etc

Simpler, natural solution exists for plant+fert+pesticide: wet field: a combo of rice+azolla+sheep+duck+fish dry field: a combo of rice+white clover

Similarly, i wanted to play with microcontrolled fish-keeping, pump, filter, aerator, heater, fertilizer ... fancy stuff

Simpler, no-tech natural solution again exists: just use soil+aqua plant+sunlight

Really, nature amazes me to no end, to the point that i hate my engineering knowledge ... i truly concern that my creation will be inferior to nature

For reference, the natural books: one straw revolution: masanobu fukuoka the power of duck: takao furuno ecology of the planted aquarium:diana walstad

</comment><comment><USER6> The iBear thing is stupid and kind of creepy.

The internet controlled switch is a good idea. It exists, of course, but most examples are expensive and aimed at datacenter type applications. There is also the X10 devices.

I think that most startup oriented entrepreneurs are overly focused on web apps right now. I think people overestimate the costs and complexity of hardware, and even desktop software.</comment>


Sixpack-Java: A/B Testing for Android Apps - <AUTHOR> http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/sixpack-java-a-b-testing-for-android-and-java-apps/

<comment><USER2> As a heads up, looks like your build status image is broken on GH: [http://oi61.tinypic.com/mj07rs.jpg](http://oi61.tinypic.com/mj07rs.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads up, badges should be fixed now

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does this support multivariate testing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sixpack doesn't currently support multivariate testing, but there have been proposals for it in our github issues. I'd imagine that it gets added at some point... until then, we accept PR's!</comment></comment>


Scientists discover 'hidden' code in DNA evolves more rapidly than genetic code - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110916152401.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29 <comment><USER2> It's an interesting study, but the article is somewhat lacking. First off, the title is imprecise. This is specifically about epigenetics (DNA methylation). "Hidden code in DNA" is very vague, and can also apply, for instance, to introns, which are also fast evolving.

Second, it is questionable to what extent the term "evolution" can apply to DNA methylation, since these changes are usually lost within a few generations.

Third, epigenetics are relatively inconsequential for animals, for which the Weismann barrier is hardly ever penetrated: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weismann_barrier>

<comment><USER3> Agree that this article isn't the most descriptive, and evolutionary may not be the best of terms, but it should be noted that epigenetics has caught the eye of developmental and neurobiologists for some time as explaining much more of human traits/behavior than our DNA itself.

The human genome is composed of roughly 20K protein-coding genes, not enough at all to code for all the complexities in our body (if there was a gene for every bifurcation in our capillaries, we'd run out of genes pretty fast; in addition to the fact that there is no single gene for specific human behaviors, i.e. "aggression").

Epigenetics, in its simplest form as DNA methylation, provides a powerful solution to many of the issues of "there aren't enough genes", and explains a lot of the chaos-elements / environmental impacts on heritability of traits.

DNA methylation, by consequence of wrapping the DNA in chromatin, controls access to which genes get turned off/on by transcription factors (TF). TFs in turn are often influenced by environment, especially neonatal. If you do the permutations of which genes are on/off, b/c a TF can/can't access the DNA, b/c the chromatin is on/off = a whole new set of permutations that entail a new information code.

A good example of the impact of epigenetics is obesity. Children's propensity to obesity often has a lot due to with epigenetic influences during neonatal development. For instance, if a mother is pregnant during a famine and thus doesn't eat much, the fetus' digestive system will adapt to starving conditions through epigenetic changes in chromatin that bind the relevant genes, thus developing a "thrifty metabolism" (digests food slowly). This trait then stays through generations, and when such people move to the West, their metabolisms incline them towards obesity as their body still digests food slowly thinking they were born into starving conditions.

So long story shot, epigenetics aren't "evolutionary" in the original sense, but they are redefining how traits/behaviors (too complex to be explained by genes) are inherited/developed.

<comment><USER4> > _A good example of the impact of epigenetics is obesity. Children's > propensity to obesity often has a lot due to with epigenetic influences > during neonatal development. For instance, if a mother is pregnant during a > famine and thus doesn't eat much, the fetus' digestive system will adapt to > starving conditions through epigenetic changes in chromatin that bind the > relevant genes, thus developing a "thrifty metabolism" (digests food > slowly). This trait then stays through generations, and when such people > move to the West, their metabolisms incline them towards obesity as their > body still digests food slowly thinking they were born into starving > conditions._

I think it'd be fair to characterise this as an early hypothesis?

<comment><USER3> The exact mechanism is still being studied for sure, but the phenomenon is well documented and continually researched (article a couple years back: <http://www.pnas.org/content/105/44/17046.short>).

The most widely cited example in humans is "Dutch Hunger Winter"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No wonder that there are people who believe in "intelligent design" with headlines like that. The word 'hidden' could be interpreted as someone or something has hidden it there.

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe Lamarckism wasn't all wrong!</comment>


Evo Morales' plane just took off from Gran Canaria - <AUTHOR> http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/fab-001

<comment><AUTHOR> If you watch the playback from yesterday you can see that the plane headed past Vienna, turned and went back towards Moscow again past Vienna. Unfortunately then the playback ends but obviously it must have turned again and landed in Vienna.</comment>


Wikipedia and sister projects prepare new, easier interface - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikipedia_and_sister_projects_prepare_new,_easier_interface?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+WikinewsLatestNews+%28Wikinews+Latest+News%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> Wikipedia has still this cutesy olden times feel to it. A skin with gradients can't change that. I kinda like it, but sometimes I wonder whether a optically sleek Wikipedia would be even better.

<comment><USER3> The "skin" is not just appearance. It changes how the editing boxes work. In particular, it adds a bunch of buttons for common tasks. It also moves interface elements to new locations (search box, etc.).

Go try editing <http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Sandbox> to see how it works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was rooting for a full WYSIWYG editor, but it doesn't look like they'll be doing that. I wonder how the new edit toolbar does in real world usability testing.

<comment><USER5> Hi there. I happen to be on the Wikimedia Usability team, but on a separate project from the ones discussed here.

The team did their latest formal usability test just last week. Those results will be posted soon. In the meantime, the results of the October 2009 usability testing are here:

[http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability,_Experience,_a...](http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability,_Experience,_and_Progress_Study)

In addition, they've been tracking the retention rates of people who try the beta:

<http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Beta_Feedback_Survey>

As for a WYSIWYG editor -- I can't speak for that team, but pretty much everyone agrees that this is required if we're going to achieve the goal of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

The WMF has recently instituted some permanent positions related to user experience, so stay tuned, or, get involved.

<comment><USER3> I don't care so much about WYSIWYG (I'd personally leave it off), but if it were possible to do some syntax highlighting in the editor boxes I think that would be tremendously useful.

Not sure where the best place to send feedback is, but one concern I have is that the text box used for entry breaks/removes Safari's neat bottom-right- corner box resizer widget that usually shows up for textarea elements. Anyone here know what causes it to show up/disappear?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can anyone recommend what the best open source or white label wiki platform is? Something that real people can use?

<comment><USER7> I would recommend MoinMoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was available a while ago if you had an account (you could turn it on). I have been browsing with it since.</comment>