Why Amazon's data centers are in spy country (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/amazon-web-services-data-center/423147/?utm_source=atlfb&single_page=true <comment><USER2> There is no mystery here. The "spy country" link is more of a coincidence; after all, the Internet was a DARPA project, and Northern Virginia is where a lot of defense and government stuff is.

When DARPA Internet was turned over to the public, one of the largest interconnect points was at 8100 Boone Blvd (Tysons Corner), known as MAE East [1]. Once upon a time I had access to it, as did countless other people running small ISPs around the area and renting rack space in that building. But the building (it's actually three buildings, and the MAE gigabit switch [2] was in the basement across the street) was not really suitable for any kind of a data center, though above.net did manage to convert the whole level of a parking garage into one, albeit with very low ceilings.

Pretty soon everyone figured out that by Dulles airport rent is way cheaper, you can build from scratch, there is plenty of electricity and water and connectivity is cheap, and AOL was out that way too.

That's pretty much the story. Amazon barely existed then. There used to be a nice bookstore nearby called "Computer Literacy Bookshop", which eventually went all online and later got acquired by Amazon or B&N, can't remember...

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE- East](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East) [2] [http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/file.php?2,file=9012...](http://www.fairfaxunderground.com/forum/file.php?2,file=9012,filename=mae- east-in-the-parking-garage.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Pretty much the same reason why there are a ton of carrier exchange points in certain geographic areas of the SF Bay area. Or why the Westin Building in Seattle and One Wilshire in Los Angeles have become the defacto carrier exchange points/peering locations. Large numbers of ISPs began accretion in certain buildings in the mid to late 1990s and the process has continued through its own inexorable inertia.

<comment><USER4> IIRC when the Internet actually formed there were 7 places that you needed to be at in order to have settlement-free peering. Looking at various not-so- organized Wikipedia articles it appears that I am not recalling the earliest days. I think all of these still exist; MAE-WEST is still at 55 South Market in San Jose, for example.

At one point blekko moved into a brand new datacenter in Santa Clara which had only limited fiber connectivity. @ChuckMcM twisted their arm for a free interconnect to MAE-WEST so that we could move over our existing inexpensive transit and interconnect contracts. Everyone's in MAE-WEST.

<comment><USER5> I was just a pre/early teen when most of this was happening but I can remember reading about it and being amazed, after becoming interested after reading _The Cuckoo's Egg_.

Today, I'm a network engineer at an ISP. Go figure.

> _MAE-WEST is still at 55 South Market in San Jose, for example._

Yep, and fiber runs from there to 611 Folsom and into Room 641A.

(Edit: It probably wasn't quite _that_ early in the Internet's life but it was still very young.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People like to say it is s mini Silicon Valley here. A lot tech companies have some presence here Oracle, MS, Google, Verisign, AWS, etc. Obviously this is also government contractor land. Then there there are those buildings without any signs but with 3 layers of fences, and every other person seems to work for the "State Department" (cough cough CIA).

But I think another reason companies like it here is because of tax structure. I hear it is more advantageous for them than being in DC or Maryland.

Other fun thing, apparently if you dig around Tysons Corner you have a high chance of randomly hitting 3-letter agencies' fiber. And then black SUVs come and talk to you in a surprisingly short amount time: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/05...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/05/30/AR2009053002114.html)

<comment><USER7> > every other person seems to work for the "State Department"

I actually had a professor who specializes in algebraic number theory quit and move to DC, saying only that he was going to "work in Washington." I guess you can't really be subtle, there's not that many jobs out there in algebraic number theory.

<comment><USER8> I used to live near Fort Meade, and all our math PhD and linguist neighbors said they worked for the "Department of Defense."

<comment><USER9> I've heard that the official advice given to NSA employees is "If asked, say that you work for the DoD but aren't allowed to be more specific; do not lie or try to evade the question, since that will tend to attract even more attention."

<comment><USER10> The DoD is the parent agency to the NSA, so it is the truth.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, but that's a bit like saying "I'm from planet Earth" when someone asks you where you're from

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you want to know where all the data centers are in N. Virginia just fly into Dulles and look out the window. The approach into Dulles is usually long and low from the west and the data centers are the low large buildings with big generators and lots of chillers outside.

There's a fuck ton of them.

<comment><USER3> Aerial photos and satellite photos are also an easy way to spot 1MW+ sized diesel generators and heat exchangers. I have found a few wall street trading firms' unadvertised disaster recovery sites that way, when combined with other on the ground publicly available info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm actually quite suspicious about everything Amazon is doing out there. I was recently contacted about a job at Amazon that they advertised would gain me a government security clearance. The main problem being that I'd have to move to Virginia.

<comment><USER14> AWS maintains an entire region named GovCloud explicitly to isolate sensitive workloads and meet compliance requirements. The "security clearance" is basically just a background check to make sure you aren't a spy.

<comment><USER6> Not necessarily. I am guessing GovCloud doesn't require a security clearance. Just have to be a US Person. That means a citizen or have a green card. (At least for ITAR purposes that is good enough).

If they ask for a security clearance or are willing to sponsor it, it probably has to do with that $600M private AWS instance for the CIA.

But yes if you have a clearance here you can pretty much walk out of the building if you don't like your job and walk into the next one and they'll give you one. (That's the joke anyway).

<comment><USER15> > That means a citizen or have a green card

No, anything remotely close to the US government requires a full citizenship. I got slammed by that when I was in the middle of applications for scientific software companies which did government contracting on the side.

<comment><USER6> Depends on what you do. Often managers don't even know so they just use "citizen" as rule to be safe.

Also worked for the military and we had a variety of citizens, non-citizens, green card holders and non-green card holders. We had to go through silly gymnastics on who can talk about what and work on what depending on their status.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't think it has much to do with "spy country". The area just happened to be one of the first to build a co-location/interconnect site where different providers could join their networks. Then, as the article states, "Networks build atop networks" and it grew from there.

<comment><USER17> This is a good book to read on it. [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LG92LYM/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LG92LYM/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

It's a bit of both. Network providers were encouraged to build in the area to support government requirements lead by defense and intelligence. But that same infrastructure supports commercial. When Equinix built their exchange in the D.C. area to support those customers, it snowballed from there.

It also helps that the D.C. area has cheaper electricity than many parts of the country. And a major transmission line serving the east coast runs west of D.C. Fiber + cheap electricity adds up.

It's more than just Amazon that's out here. Azure and Rackspace have datacenters out here, as well as a large smattering of colos and smaller providers.

<comment><USER16> I have had that book on my Amazon wishlist since Jan 2016, so I guess it's time to get it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Its not surprising that anyone running data centres doesn't advertise when I worked for BT our data centre at staples corner had no external branding.

This was for security as DC and Exchanges are CNI targets - ironically the PIRA did blow up the building next door.

</comment><comment><USER19> One of the thing this piece misses in describing the weird banality of Northern Virginia is comparing it to someplace else. I'll compare it to San Francisco. For reference for people not used to the D.C. area, Northern Virginia (NoVA) is _about_ the same size as the San Francisco Bay Area...without the Bay. The major city it's associated with is Washington D.C. instead of San Francisco (two cities of _roughly_ the same size) and the regions have roughly comparable household incomes. However, the GDP of the Oakland-San Jose-San Francisco metro is about twice that of the D.C. metro.

Northern Virginia doesn't really have any incorporated large cities to speak of but it's just at the southern end of the Northeast Megalopolis mega-region [1] so it's quite urban in many areas. Notable "cities" might be Tysons Corner, Alexandria (a city without a county), Arlington (a county with a city), Reston, maybe a couple others. Large parts of the area are preserved as National Monuments, National Parks and Battlefields from the Civil War. However, most of it is very very suburb.

Despite the image of being , being near the seat of government it also has an amazingly diverse population. The boring suburbs are also punctuated with restaurants from almost every country you can guess, religious groups from JW to Jainism and even local theaters that will play Bollywood to Korean Horror.

And I don't mean like a few representative examples, I mean like a dozen competing large supermarkets that deal in goods for Asian customers from a dozen countries, a half dozen for Latin and Hispanic, African restaurants from around the continent, a reasonable Vietnamese-town like area, two (almost three if the third one can ever get established) Korea towns, a couple quasi Chinese areas, a dozen or so up-scale dining and shopping areas. One could easily eat a meal from a different country for every meal of the day for months and not exhaust the region.

The diversity is so intense and the population so large the area can support very niche kinds of services, for example, you can find several Indian owned coffee shops that focus on coffee and Indian desserts, or you can go eat Chinese Hotpot, then hop out for a few hours of conversation at a local hookah bar and finish your evening at a Korean spa, then wake up at 2 in the morning and go get all night Salvadorean food. The next day you stop at a Korean bakery for breakfast, work your hangover off on Ethiopian food for lunch before diving into your choice of Persian, Afghan, Lebanese, or Kazakh style kabobs for dinner. It gets kind of ridiculous and knowing how to eat with chopsticks, what to do with injera, roti and how to eat Pho, Sam Gyup Sal and that real Tacos aren't crunchy is basically expected among locals. Ndole, Silpancho or Pupusas for lunch and Thai, American Chinese, Szechuan, Beijing or Taiwanese for Dinner is not untypical. Locals feel weird in less diverse environments and don't understand why they can't eat from the world when they travel.

You get all the benefits of suburbia, but very few of the downsides (nightlife could be better). The weather is the worst form of all the seasons: hot, humid summers; cold wet winters; frequently overcast; with a few days of nice spring and a few days of nice autumn with colorful leaves. Because of the huge numbers of migrants, nobody knows how to drive in the winter, skiing sucks and Atlantic water sports are boring.

Two major airports, rail links, several ports nearby, a thriving tech industry (mostly serving the government) and a huge stable employer (the government) mean that the economy is remarkably stable in the face of massive economic up/down turns. It's hard to catch a wave up, but it's also hard to find yourself without a job, especially if you work in tech. You can drive for 30 miles in one direction on one road and see almost back-to-back-to-back tech companies. Traffic is easily #1 or #2 in the country with no predictable patterns or ways to estimate transit time, so out of towners expecting back- to-back meetings all over the area are very sad.

1 - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis)

<comment><USER17> This is an amazing post.

To give a sort of +1, I'll state that one never knows just how well they have it until they experience elsewhere. I'm a Northern VA native, but I lived in Germany for 3 years (returned last year). Germany is lovely, but came nowhere close to the cosmopolitan area I was used to. Everything bane described is true. The limited options for food was the most noticeable. If we were lucky, we could find some esoteric Asian spices for our paneer from the Feinkost downtown, but you'd pay 10EUR for a tiny glass jar. I missed the Lotte or H-Mart where I could grab a bag of the same stuff for $2.

And the diversity prepares you as well. People in Northern VA, have to, as a matter of circumstance, interact with people who may not speak the same language. (Some don't like this, I, don't mind.) Jobs are filled by people of all types. The services economy is hugely diverse, and you can quickly see all of the different facets to the economy and the issues people discuss in a few square miles.

Fairfax did toy with the idea of incorporating. Tyson's I'd agree is probably the closest we have to a city outside of D.C. Fairfax around Rt 50 and Rt 29 is pretty dense.

I visited S.F. once, and I'm envious of the atmosphere there, with the exception of the insanely high prices. (my perceptions of what constitutes reasonable rent is already distorted by my growing up here) That S.F. still keeps that vibe in the face of such prices makes me wonder how much it will last. But D.C. is gentrifying quick, and there's old sections of the city that are under threat of losing some of its diversity.

<comment><USER19> > I missed the Lotte or H-Mart where I could grab a bag of the same stuff for > $2.

It's really hard to explain to people not from the area how embedded the ethnic diversity of the food scene in NoVA is and it really forms itself in the consciousness of the locals. It really is its own thing. For example, when I was in Portland, the locals talked up the local foodie scene quite a bit, and the food really was excellent. But the diversity was totally different, e.g. thousands of variations of a few kinds of foods -- like microbreweries. The local competition in that limited menu-space made for excellent eating, but the non-American food selection wasn't there. It wasn't until I was in NoVA with some Portlanders that they "got it", we literally ate food for lunch from a different country every day of the week for weeks before we started ranging too far.

I think the only place I've been to that is similar in "feel" is NYC, but you really have to hunt down the food in the various historic ethnic enclaves.

Here's an example [1]. Nowhere particularly interesting NoVA, a couple small neighboring strip malls like anywhere, except there's: 3 Mexican places, a Peruvian place, 2xVietnamese places, a Szechuan place, Indian food, Thai, and an Indian grocer -- all mixed in with the usual assortment of fast-food, Starbucks, autobody shops and other typical things. This isn't even a particularly "ethnic" part of NoVA.

Here's another right up the road [2]: Pakistani, Turkish, Indian next to a Dunkin' Donuts and a Subway.

Here's one strip mall [3]: Salvadorean, Guatamalan, American-Chinese, Russian, Afghan, Vietnamese, Middle Eastern grocer, and a Middle Eastern restaurant mixed in with a Panera, Italian deli, Popeyes, Subway and McDonalds.

These three places are probably within 15 minutes of each other.

When I'm in Europe, it's great eating the local food for a few days. But then I find I start craving the diversity again and it's simply never there. Even very cosmopolitan cities like London aren't quite there.

1 - [https://email@example.com,-77.4508584,19...](https://email@example.com,-77.4508584,19z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x89b6415619677219:0x4041f0fc4316ad83!8m2!3d38.8942786!4d-77.4310992)

2 - [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-77.4099158,19z](https://email@example.com,-77.4099158,19z)

3 - [https://email@example.com...](https://email@example.com,-77.385335,17z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x7b6eb65d0fc0d80!8m2!3d38.9687061!4d-77.3744747)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> An incalculable, but very significant, portion of all human knowledge is locked away in secret, nondescript buildings.

I've always wonder what would happen if us-east-1 was somehow destroyed. How much would be lost?</comment>


Flat UI Colors – Color palettes for use in projects, designs, presentations - <AUTHOR> http://flatuicolors.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm genuinely curious, what's the methodology behind categorizing palettes by country? Just for fun? Or is there something more interesting here.

I'm from the states, but I think I might like that Dutch palette more.

<comment><USER3> Hello there, maker of Flat UI Colors here. I made collaboration with 13 designers from 13 different countries and palette names are given based on designer's country. The colors are not related with the country name or flag they are designer's own picks.

<comment><USER4> You should really make that clear on the site. It sorta comes off like you just sampled the flags or something, and what you actually did is WAY cooler.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> git-pull This is fantastic.

What's going on with Adobe Kuler aka Adobe Color CC? Looks like they made it easier to grab the colors recently: [https://color.adobe.com/explore/?filter=most- popular&time=mo...](https://color.adobe.com/explore/?filter=most- popular&time=month)

It works easiest when you mouseover and click "Edit Copy" (second button)

Anyone remember Color Scheme Studio? [https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/15962/color-schemer- studio](https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/15962/color-schemer-studio)

What happened to them? I can't find an official website. I could imagine people still wanting to buy their software today.

<comment><USER5> Kuler's pretty awesome still. I also use Paletton: [http://paletton.com](http://paletton.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd don't get it .. why are these palettes worth using above others? I'm not trying to be controversial .. I'm confused.

<comment><USER7> And that audio that is played when you select one... i dont get it.

<comment><USER8> You are questioning the UX while lwhi is questioning the utility of these palettes.

To answer your question anyway: it's fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Genuinely curious, as a non-designer, I don't understand what this offers over existing palettes websites [1]. Anyone care to enlighten?

[1] e.g. [http://www.colourlovers.com/](http://www.colourlovers.com/), [http://www.color-hex.com/color-palettes/](http://www.color-hex.com/color- palettes/)

<comment><USER10> I still use [https://coolors.co](https://coolors.co).

The thing is no one ever uses one of these pallets. You start off with one maybe as a base and then adjust everything to get stuff just right. The Coolors UI seems to be good at that.

<comment><USER11> I love coolors. Just hit space bar to cycle. Once I see a color I like, I just lock that color and continue hitting space bar and locking colors till I have a full pallet :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recently built an internal tool at work, and in an attempt to make things very readable used the EGA colour palette.

It isn't pretty, but everything is obvious.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_Adapter#Colo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_Adapter#Color_palette)

<comment><USER10> Wow, that's actually a really great idea. Takes you back to the days of simple 16 colors. It could even have that vintage Google UI look to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good work. Perhaps [https://www.colorion.co/](https://www.colorion.co/) is a better option

<comment><USER14> Hmm, what if you need more than 5 colors? If I had to make a chart with 6 entities I would choose this one instead.

For 5-color palettes I would choose [http://www.colourlovers.com](http://www.colourlovers.com)

<comment><USER13> Cool ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is the idea behind this that a UI uses different colors based on geolocation?

<comment><USER16> It looks like they use the flag colors to seed the palette.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What's the association with countries? Is it just where designer is from?

</comment><comment><USER18> What I'd like to see are each of the palettes used in context, e.g. as text color on white/black background or as a background highlight for black/white text. It's rare that I need an entire palette of colors outside this context.

</comment><comment><USER19> What's the license?

<comment><USER20> I'd expect it to be either public domain or uncopyrightable.

Hopefully that's the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The country thing isn't just and simple because people from those countries submitted suggestions?

And it even asks about more suggestions, and will priorize suggestions from countries that aren't there already.

> [https://medium.com/collect-ui-design-ui-ux-inspiration- > blog/...](https://medium.com/collect-ui-design-ui-ux-inspiration-blog/flat- > ui-colors-2-13-countries-13-designers-13-color-palettes-more-1d0ecdd66301)

</comment><comment><USER22> Honestly, if I was presented something like that site I would ask if they cheaply treat me as a kid. Colored flatness went too far, imo. Where is good old design, guys?

<comment><USER23> Good old design work has embraced flatness for ages -- literally, you can find flat design throughout the 20th century. It's also considered the more elegant by several design schools.

There's nothing about gradients, bezels, and such that makes them more "mature". If anything, it's the opposite (as flat can do away with often superfluous decorative stuff).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really dig a couple of those palettes, but _that website might be the most infuriating thing I have seen in a while_. Unnecessary slide transitions. Product Hunt begging. _Interrupting the back button_ (edit: or maybe interrupting a slide to a palette? I don't know, both are bad) with a beg for me to sign up for their newsletter. An interstitial added after they already interrupted me with an email beg--this one, a tweet-this beg.

Just...none of this is good. Stop. You came up with really nice, really neat color palettes. But now you made me think you're jerks. Stooooop.

<comment><USER24> Using NoScript or turning off javascript fixes all the problems on that site. Although then it's just a blank white page without even so much as noscript text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A worthy alternative: [https://yeun.github.io/open- color/](https://yeun.github.io/open-color/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Related:

[http://colormind.io](http://colormind.io) ("The AI powered color palette generator" \- the image upload option is pretty nifty)

[http://khroma.co/train/](http://khroma.co/train/) ("The AI color tool for designers")

<comment><USER27> AI? Wouldn't they just automate regular colour theory?

<comment><USER28> (I made colormind.io) Color theory isn't an exact science, you could make random palettes from various color rules but they don't look good (imo).

as an experiment, try this:

go on [https://color.adobe.com](https://color.adobe.com) and click on one of the color rules (it will give you a random palette based on the rule)

now compare with a palette from [https://coolors.co/](https://coolors.co/) or [https://color.adobe.com/explore/](https://color.adobe.com/explore/) (user- uploaded)

if color theory + regression fully solved this problem, none of these color sites would need to exist.

<comment><USER29> HEY

I really liked colormind.io, and made a little toy Vue site when I was looking for a job (I grabbed your colors and pushed them to state so my website colors changed). See here: [http://q8z8p.net/#/color](http://q8z8p.net/#/color). I just wanted to thank you because I think that was helpful in getting my first job!

<comment><USER28> awesome, that's exactly why I put up the api!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What's next after this Flat UI trend? Textual UI?

<comment><USER31> I'm hoping that the next generation of designers mocks it as dated and embarrassing and embraces something ultra-baroque just to spite them.

It will be hilarious.</comment></comment>


3 reasons why our startup moved from LA to SF and why you should too. - <AUTHOR> http://www.tintup.com/blog/3-reasons-why-our-startup-moved-from-la-to-sf/

<comment><USER2> I wonder what LA startups think about this?</comment>


Using Unit Tests to Write Better Embedded Software - <AUTHOR> http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/technical-articles/unit-tests-can-help-you-write-better-embedded-software...-heres-how/ <comment><AUTHOR> Unit testing has saved my butt twice in the past week alone. It's hard to overestimate the development time savings you can get with unit tests and a good continuous integration pipeline.</comment>


Pixi.js is out - <AUTHOR> http://www.goodboydigital.com/pixi-js-is-out/ <comment><USER2> Host appears to be down:

Github of the project: <https://github.com/GoodBoyDigital/pixi.js>

Text from the article:

We are extremely proud and excited to announce that pixi.js is now available on github along with examples and documentation! That means that the whole world and thier dog can start tinkering and making fun javascript, cross browser, webGL, canvas, mobile, speedy 2D applications!

First things first, if you don't know what a pixi.js is then heres the rub:

Pixi.js is a 2D webGL renderer with a seamless canvas fallback that enables it to work across all modern browsers both desktop and mobile. Helping Goodboy and hopefully you achieve the big fat goal of "Build once, play everywhere"

If you would like to know a little more then why not have a little read of our previous blog post

What's next?

The current build of pixi.js available on github is now very stable. All that we need to do next is grow it!

We have a rich list of features that we plan on implementing and building into pixi.js as time progresses. Many exist already but require a little more testing before uploading and sharing with you all. Some new features will be obvious, like interaction. Others less so, but I promise they will allow you to create some seriously cool stuff. I could tell you more but then I would have to kill you, and I really don't have time for that right now ;)

Tell us what you think!

Of course if you do get stuck in we would absolutely love to hear your feedback on the project. The good the bad and the ugly! It will help us to improve pixi.js for you and for us. Think something needs adding? BAM! Give us a shout! Think something needs changing? BOOM! Give us a shout. hmm.. Actually, instead of shouting at us maybe you could email or submit an issue to github ;P

Contribute your brain codes

If you feel inclined to add a neat feature to pixi.js or contribute some source code that we can share with the world then that would be fantastic (obviously with full props to you!). Dont be afraid to get in touch if you have any questions, we are Goodboys (and Girls) after all!

Not much left to say now apart from why are you still reading this? You should be over on github downloading all that juicy pixi.js src code, planning to make some kind of awesome internuts creation! :)

Oh and once you have made something, we would love to see it :D Especially as we will be looking to create a nice shiny showcase section on our site!

We hope you have fun!

<comment><USER3> I'm surprised this isn't flooded with comments - this is great. Have been playing with the demo across a few different devices and it is really sweet.

Great work - definitely will be following your progress

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is simply put, MIND BLOWING! I had about 15-20k bunnies spawned and still had a decent 40-50 FPS!! Also, I think their best demo would be the game:

<http://www.goodboydigital.com/runpixierun/>

I can't wait to make a game with this library!

</comment><comment><USER5> A demo isn't obvious on the page. Try this:

<http://www.goodboydigital.com/runpixierun/>

<comment><USER6> This runs amazingly well on iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Putting Octocat in the header image for the blog post is a little misleading if you don't know what Pixi.js is, considering the only relation with GitHub is the repo is now hosted there.

</comment><comment><USER8> this is awesome! it would be even more awesome if it was created as components (github.com/component/component) so people can use individual pieces (and better over-all organization)

</comment><comment><USER9> Non of the demos worked on my Android(2.2) and only the bunny demo worked on my ipad(latest)

<comment><USER10> On my Android (4.1) the demos loaded and ran slowly on Firefox, but were best by far with Chrome Beta: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chrome.bet...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chrome.beta)

There were still obvious hiccups attributable to the GC. Most of the time the game was going a full 60hz.

<comment><USER11> On my Android Phone ( 4.1, Galaxy S2 ) the demos ran very quickly on the stable version of Firefox, but the stable version of Chrome struggled greatly until I enabled webgl in about:flags.

Even with webgl enabled, Chrome was still a bit slower than Firefox on the bunnies demo.

The flashvhtml site and game that was posted here a while ago also uses pixi.js. <http://flashvhtml.com/>

The html5 version of the game there runs very well on both Firefox and Chrome with webgl enabled on Android.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> website should have thought ahead and put themselves on coral before they got hakr'd.

<http://www.goodboydigital.com.nyud.net/pixi-js-is-out/></comment>


Why is "north" at the top of maps? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160614-maps-have-north-at-the-top-but-it-couldve-been-different <comment><USER2> Here in Japan, street maps, in train stations, subways, are oriented according to your position looking at them. It means that North is rarely up but all over the place and I'm always confused for a wile until I remember it.

</comment><comment><USER3> The first statement made by this article is wrong: there is a very good reason why the North pole would come first: it is the direction the Sun is headed to in our orbit around the galaxy. when you look up North, you are basically looking forward!

<comment><USER4> Why is the direction of travel more or less interesting than any other galactic coordinate system, when looking at the Earth from space? I can easily imagine using the center of the Milky Way as my reference point.

Why do you think the Earth moves like Superman, head-first into the void? Couldn't it be falling through space, bottom-first?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: List of projects leaving GitHub? - <AUTHOR> I'd like to know which projects have left GitHub around the time of the Microsoft announcements. How can I get this information?
Is there a stream of newly created GitLab projects available? Even better - is there a stream of recently closed GitHub projects anywhere?
Thank you. <comment><USER2> GitLab exposes a list of newly created projects over it's API: [https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects?order_by=created_at](https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects?order_by=created_at)

And Github allows to search by commit hash: [https://github.com/search?q=hash%3A04e699c8bc970423f243eca3e...](https://github.com/search?q=hash%3A04e699c8bc970423f243eca3eb4381d228c0be48)

By combining those two you could get a list of projects which are on GitLab and on Github. Using the created_at on both APIs you could figure out which one was there first and which one has been imported/pushed onto the other platform.

(you would of course miss all projects which have been already deleted on Github, although forks should still exists which should help in most cases)</comment>


Is Linux Really Ready for Simple Users? - <AUTHOR> http://desktoplinux.com/articles/AT7702650846.html

<comment><USER2> What is a simple user? The article was too long for me...

I have put my mother on Ubuntu and it works great. Most things are a lot easier easy than with Windows, and most importantly, security updates take care of themselves, too. Under windows it is just big mess. Usually applications come with their own updater software, which is ugly and spyware- ish by itself, and also very unreliable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now my grandfather is using Ubuntu with iGoogle. All he does is go and look at his stocks and the news, but it works really well for him for that. Every now and then he googles something. He uses a trackball because we couldn't afford a big touchscreen and mice are extremely hard to use once you get beyond a certain age (which my experience shows to be curved around 70).

In other words -- my 90 year old grandfather is successfully using the internet through a dynamic home page and a command prompt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The unix philosophy is that there are users, and there are sysadmins, and the sysadmins take care of the users' computers. The Windows philosophy, on the other hand, is basically that every user should be a half-competent sysadmin in their own right.

Windows has never been, is not, and never will be, for "simple users." It is for power-users, and those with power-users in their support networks. Unix was designed for "simple users" from day one, but under the simple rule that there be someone else around whose only task is to take care of the system.

I've always wondered why computer repair shops don't offer a service where they continue on as root of any repaired computers....

<comment><AUTHOR> They should, but there isn't a platform for them to do so. I've thought a lot about this problem but would prefer not to discuss it in public forums. So anyone that would like to discuss, please email me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hell No. Seriously, No way.

What I really don't understand is why the linux community even cares about the "Simple User".

<comment><AUTHOR> People should care about such users because computing isn't just for elitist assholes.

<comment><USER4> True enough. What I meant to say is why does the group of elitist assholes that is the majority of linux backers care to have their OS accepted by people they obviously have little regard for?

<comment><USER5> I use linux, but I would never call someone an "elitist asshole".

<comment><USER4> I'm not specifically saying that, (I was just using the parent comment's words) but let's be honest: the linux community as a whole is not exactly welcoming to the non-power user.

There's really nothing wrong with this. That's my point. Why does the community get all out of shape about being ready for the "average user"? Linux wasn't built for them, it isn't used by them, and it won't ever be good enough compared to OS'es that focus exclusively on them - i.e. Mac and windows.

<comment><AUTHOR> >it won't ever be good enough compared to OS'es that focus exclusively on them

I disagree. In the long term, open source is going to win. Maybe it won't be in three years, but in ten years I expect Ubuntu/Linux to be solidly better for every single user. The unlimited time of smart people working for free eventually adds up to something really amazing.

<comment><USER4> I can't see that happening for the same reason that enterprise software will never die: people equate quality with cost, rightly or wrongly.

OSX is essentially BSD++ with a massive price tag associated with it. You could put the exact same OS out as open source and it would remain in the realm of the power-user/hobbyist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps it won't happen in ten years. But I'd be willing to wager that it will happen in 75 years. In the real long term, for products like desktop environments that aren't niche products, open source can't lose.

<comment><USER4> In 75 years I'd be more willing to bet that the notion of a "desktop OS" will be irrelevant. :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can you tell a programmer/language inventor from a killer? - <AUTHOR> http://www.malevole.com/mv/misc/killerquiz/

<comment><USER2> Assuming Hans Reiser isn't on the list.

<comment><USER3> He could well be. I got a programmer/serial killer trick question.

<comment><USER4> Isn't it the same 10 people every time?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it is. Task: build a nice app with a lot of pics :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Given that I've done this quiz before, it's surprisingly hard. I'm not sure though if this is supposed to tell me something about serial killers, or about programmers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Simple... the fairly normal looking ones are the killers, and the creepy looking ones are the programmers.

</comment><comment><USER7> seen this before. it's funny. I always guess serial killer.

<comment><USER8> I got 9/10. But the guy I guessed wrong was a programmer and a serial killer. (Although not a language inventor.)

<comment><USER3> I got 9/10 but one of the serial killers looked like someone else who was a programmer.

Is it just me, but do the programmers seem happier and the serial killers seem more like they're trying to look happy or trying to hide unhappiness?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I guess Lombroso was wrong then...</comment>


How Quake (the videogame) changed my life forever. - <AUTHOR> http://derelict-compendium.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-quake-and-my-wife-changed-my-life.html

<comment><USER2> Quake is also responsible for changing my life: after years of muddling around in BASIC and LOGO I started writing mods in QuakeC, which required me to write code, design a website, design and build models, and test and test and continually tweak and iterate on the experience. For the first time I was writing large code and doing serious graphics work, and I loved it deeply.

It lead me towards building websites and writing about games, and out of the Quake community I met people who ran Unreal websites - they gave me a copy of their CMS, and I ended up learning PHP/MySQL from it and building and designing bigger and better websites.

I dropped out of my Mechatronics/CS degree to pursue programming for a living - which lead to my first exposure to the then-revolting idea that programming and design were different disciplines. I spent years bouncing back and forth between the two, never quite fitting in, but learning a ridiculous amount along the way.

Now I'm at Google, technically employed as a software engineer but leading the design of a large product. I probably would have ended up somewhere in the software industry anyway, but I believe that I'm in this exact position, the best job I could possibly imagine, because of a chain of coincidences that were kicked off by Quake and its modding tools.

</comment><comment><USER3> The quake community and game changed my life. Of course, when I started, it was mplayer. I had just traded my Playstation 1 for a 486DX, a huge mistake in everyone's eyes. I used my rich friend's grandmother's AOL login to get online. (This continued for 3-4 years, my mother still wonders what the "weird noise" was on the phone lines past midnight).

The broken physics and quirks of Team Fortress in QuakeWorld is what really caught my eye. I was hooked like a fiend. I was recruited by many guilds and known for my 9600BP lagging , teleporting and fragging! Not to mention my 1MB cirrus logic integrated video card, it chugged along at ~12FPS in 320x200(?).

I got interested in manipulating Quake. Living in MS, there were no mentors for learning to program or script. I went in blind and came out with a few mods.

Years later, I ported team fortress with quakeworld physics into Enemy Territory, (Feb/Mar 2004?), but never found anyone interested in doing the sound or graphics.

Obviously, my original endeavor into quakeC led to a whole new world of coding and languages!

At this point, I had a few life changes. I made a handful of lifetime friends from IRC and my old clans.

Now, looking back, it was Quake and my natural ability to tinker that led to my pursuit of a degree in computer science/bioinformatics. I am currently in my junior year.

I emailed John Carmack a few times asking for legal advice regarding using shareware Quake 1 models in a development version of my port of QuakeWorld to ET. He gave me good advice and has been a great influence.

Oh, and trying to figure out how to make VIS run faster on a BSP map was the end of me. VIS took forever, and I mean forever, to run on my 100mhz computer.

</comment><comment><USER4> IMO, his wife changed his life. Having dreams / passions is very common, having the push to pursuit them, very rare.

<comment><USER5> The author definitely agrees!

<< At the end of all this, it wasn't just Quake that really changed my life, my wife did. Quake gave me a direction to point in, and my wife picked me up and pushed me forward when I thought the road was closed to me. >>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like how he didn't even get started till he was about 24 and had no head start from previous work. It seems rare to read a success story that doesn't involve people getting obsessed with an activity in their mid-teens (often building on a good academic performance in maths or something like that).

</comment><comment><USER7> I wouldn't say it changed my life, but the first pretty serious piece of software I ever wrote was a game loader for Doom/Doom II/Heretic/Hexen. You could select which game you wanted to play, and which WADs you wanted and if the WADs were originally created for a different game it would run them through a conversion script for the game you wanted.

Later on I added support for DeHackEd so you could modify the exe to change things like weapon speed power. Pretty sure I had support for setting up multiplayer games as well.

It was all written in Turbo Pascal and had a really nice GUI where I programmed all the primitives (radio boxes/check boxes/scroll boxes/buttons/etc) myself from scratch.

I really really wish I still had source code to the thing, but I lost it years ago. I was really proud of it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Quake also changed my life. I bought my first computer to play Quake which got me into scripting and making video game websites. That got me interested in programming and lead me to getting a masters in CS and programming jobs while in school. Now I'm at Amazon thanks to John Carmack!

<comment><USER9> My first foray into programming was actually a yearning to figure out someone else's aimbot for Quake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Quake changed a lot of people's live. I don't think there is a single game out there that created jobs for so many people as Quake, the two most largest examples being Valve and Gamespy. Quake also pretty much single handedly got the the 3d video card revolution started.

<comment><USER11> Not to mention inspiring thousands to take up a carreer in various fields tangentially related to game development.

It's a bit like the Apollo project :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pretty inspiring story but this really made me laugh:

"The kind of stuff that most people think is really cool now, but would immediately relegate you to punching bag status, and honestly not very cool with the chicks back then."

I think you probably just started spending a larger proportion of your time with people who share your interests. Fantasy novels are still not cool in high school. :)

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://gamessavedmylife.com/> is a growing collection of stories about how playing games has helped people emotionally, often in ways their creators probably didn't envision.

But of course, games and game modding has had a profound impact on a lot of technical folk. Many late nights bending BSP trees to my will in Valve Worldcraft ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> I started out with tools like Deluxe Paint and Animation and QBASIC. I learned 3D modeling long before I touched a level editor, using tools like POVRAY and some crappy Windows 3.1 3D rendering/modeling package. I think the first level editor I used was Ken Silverman's for Duke Nukem 3D. But if I had to point out a game that really changed my life, it was Ultima 7 - it inspired me to learn art, programming, design, etc. It was so far ahead of its time and even was more interactive than many games are today. It was the closest thing to a "sandbox" game at that point in time, I think.

</comment><comment><USER15> Awesome wife. I'd say love, even more than Quake, changed the OP's life.

Great story.

</comment><comment><USER16> I bought my first computer to play games. I thought I could do better, so I started modding games (X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter). I got tired of fighting other people's game ideas and wanted to make my own. And the path to that lay through a BSCS. Then I realized that there were more interesting and fulfilling aspects to programming besides games.

But my story isn't as awesome as the author of the article's.

</comment><comment><USER17> A rotating clown's head changed my life. I think it was 20 years ago. I would love to see that animation again. I think it was a FLIC file. The beauty of the lighting started the (3D) programmer / designer in me.

<comment><USER18> Clown.zip listed here? (<http://cd.textfiles.com/powerpakgold/FILES_RA/FILES.2>) and downloady here? (<http://cd.textfiles.com/powerpakgold/ANIMAT/>)

<comment><USER17> Wow, that's it! I've been searching for this. Thank you.

Amazing that a simple 256 color animation from 1989 can change your life ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just have to chime in with one more "Quake changed my life", though perhaps even more so than most - loving Doom to death, I was _utterly_ obsessed with Quake modding and map making. Then I sensibly dropped out of college in 1997 and went to Raven Software to work as a programmer, where I got to work with the Quake engine while its paint was still wet, and even more so with Quake 2 while it was being developed. The amount of brilliant co-workers I had who came up through the mod community at that point is actually pretty astonishing, in hindsight.

Thanks id.

</comment><comment><USER20> > _I think it was either Qed, or Qoole..._

Ah, Qoole was the first level editor I ever tried. What I vividly remember about Quake 1 though was all the mods! I spent hours tying up the phone on a 14.4K modem hunting for new stuff to try.

Grappling hooks, bots, friendly attack dogs, Quake Rally which converted it into a racing game, Air Quake which added pilotable helicopters and tanks... I didn't get into coding until UnrealScript, but Quake 1 definitely got me into the internet.

</comment><comment><USER21> For me it was Team Fortress Classic. I was in between A-Levels and University, not entirely sure what I wanted to do with myself and working a boring job in Office World (UK equivalent of Office Depot) - but in the evenings I was running a TFC clan, then later running a TFC news website. I ended up being hired by an online gaming dotcom which is where I realised that web development was what I wanted to do.

</comment><comment><USER22> Quake reignited my passion for computers after I spent several years off focusing on automobile related hobbies.

I had been exposed to Linux before but Quake was what caused me to run it on the desktop at first. The networking stack was significantly better than on Windows. It also caused me to learn scripting in a unix environment to parse logs on the server we placed at my brother's office.

</comment><comment><USER23> My story is similar. QuakeC was the first "C-family" language I've learned :)

I've been creating new weapons and battle modes on Amiga (in a tiny, tiny window) and playing those on PCs at school.

I've learned a lot about game physics, geometry and program design.

Kudos for making Quake programming approachable, portable and so much fun.

</comment><comment><USER24> Count me as another. Quake was a huge part of why I loved computers. I also created and published a number of maps and seriously considered trying to become a pro level designer. Linux and web progrmming eventually became more interesting but that inspiration was critical.

</comment><comment><USER25> Those who are against gaming are the ones who really need to read posts like this. Mario Bros for NES changed my life forever and it's wonderful reading about how others are affected. Even more interesting is how age is completely irrelevant to these experiences.

</comment><comment><USER26> Computer games are what dragged me into programming in the first place. Later, Quake II source code, Unreal Tournament headers for native development and UnrealScript taught me lots of valuable lessons about game code design and programming in general.

</comment><comment><USER27> I believe Quake had a big impact on the growth of my technical ability at a young age. Tweaking config files, creating maps, setting up game servers, messing with skins and mods. I cherish those days.

</comment><comment><USER28> Similar story in a way, games like ff7,8 and 9 got me into RPG game making, which then got me involved in community websites which then lead to me learning PHP to help improve these websites.

</comment><comment><USER29>
        LEAK LEAK LEAK

Oh how I hated you.

</comment><comment><USER30> In quite a different way Quake(3) shaped my life (being the engine for Call of Duty 4). I got paid to travel around Europe playing it for money.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I (submitter) am not the author.</comment>


The Disney Recipe (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-makes-a-good-corporate-st

<comment><USER2> You know how good tech companies feel like they're run by engineers and not MBA's? You get the strong sense from these charts that Disney was run by artists and not MBA's. Any other company at the time wouldn't stand for the frivolity of doodling cartoon characters on this kind of document, and even today it would come across as forced, but it comes across as genuine here. It's even lettered like a cartoon. Companies always feel more "real" when the people running them can also do the actual work. Could you imagine Bob Iger or Michael Eisner doodling a cartoon like this to explain their business strategies?

<comment><USER3> MBAs are pretty big fans of _paying someone else_ to make their internal presentations look shiny...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> here is bigger version: [https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2013/05/disn...](https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2013/05/disney-2.jpeg)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for that. I don't know why they would post that unreadable version in the arcticle

<comment><USER6> AFAICT, small, unreadable pictures is SOP for most blogs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's amazing how Disney hasn't deviated from this strategy and vision even today. If anything, the acquisitions of Marvel and Lucas Films reinforce this strategy.

<comment><USER8> The interesting departure from this strategy, though still related, is their interest in ESPN. I read (looking for the source, will add when I can recall it) that ESPN accounts for nearly 25% of Disney's overall earnings.

Edit: finally found the source! [https://500ish.com/the-9-bullet-points-of- doom-for-espn-a692...](https://500ish.com/the-9-bullet-points-of-doom-for- espn-a692d0f48182)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So the main idea is to cross-promote the same IP (e.g. Mickey Mouse) in many different media (films, TV, music, comics, books, merchandise, Disneyland). Kinda like superhero media today.

<comment><USER10> Superhero media today, owned by Disney.

<comment><USER9> Good catch :-) Time Warner too, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not such a fan of this chart. Their org chart though was really great. I really appreciated the different take on org charts that show purpose and include the clients/customers as creatively and genuinely as they did.

[http://mergy.org/2015/07/disney-org-chart/](http://mergy.org/2015/07/disney- org-chart/)

<comment><USER12> Interesting. Not sure how I feel about a children's media company (or any company for that matter) that has "Morgue" as a division within the management group.

<comment><USER13> I'd guess that's "morgue" meaning historical archive, not dead body storage.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgue#Alternate_meanings](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgue#Alternate_meanings)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I found a comment in the hbr's link([https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-makes-a- good-corporate-st](https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-makes-a-good-corporate-st)): by Faisal Khan 18 days ago

Though I have great respect for Todd but this piece do no justice with Walt Disney's strategic process and what's the message in the drawing for today's planners. The Disney recipe is definitely missing from this article and shouldn't be tagged as that at all :).

Can anyone elaborate this?

</comment><comment><USER15> Every time I see this chart, I like to post this quote from Walt Disney:

"We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is drawn from [https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-makes-a-good-corporate- st](https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-makes-a-good-corporate-st) which discusses it in a bit more detail.

<comment><USER16> Yes. We changed the url to that from [http://flowingdata.com/2015/07/14/disney-business- strategy-c...](http://flowingdata.com/2015/07/14/disney-business-strategy- chart-1957/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems to me they are structured in a holacracy[1] distribution.

[1] [http://www.holacracy.org/](http://www.holacracy.org/)

<comment><USER18> Oh you mean like this way of working where you need to pay to discover what it is actually about?

<comment><USER19> ... what?</comment></comment></comment>


Vending machine for homeless just launched in U.K., to debut in U.S. cities - <AUTHOR> http://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/ct-vending-machine-for-homeless-20180103-story.html <comment><USER2> This is a great idea, I wonder if a bio metric system rather than key card might be a better way of controlling the distribution of goods. It is my understanding that homeless people have a problem with losing their property through theft or cities just trashing their belongings when they are not looking. It would be a shame if a person could not access this service just because some jerk stole their card.</comment>


Interactive Programming: A New Kind of REPL - <AUTHOR> http://elm-lang.org/blog/Interactive-Programming.elm

<comment><USER2> Sorry for being the obnoxious fanboy of another language, but Lisp + Slime + Emacs has had this feature since forever: By including some swank-updater in your main loop you can have this functionality too. Example: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pMyhrDcMzw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pMyhrDcMzw)

<comment><USER3> State is preserved?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mathematica is also an inherently interactive programming language, with images, graphs, vector graphics, and GUI elements being first-class values.</comment>


Hypothes.is: an open platform for scholarly discussion on the web - <AUTHOR> https://hypothes.is/ <comment><USER2> I'm seeing yet another metaweb ... I think either NS4 or IE4 had a built-in tool do this and even with half the web having it at its fingertips it still flopped.

The only real metaweb that has worked has been the indirect "share a link" on a link aggregator + comments - exactly what reddit, slashdot, digg, metafilter (funny name huh?) and hn are.

The insight is that there Needs To Be A Central, Browsable Repository of What Pages Have this Meta Content.

Without what is effectively a 21st century web-ring, it's not happening. There should be a page that shows new stuff and a search engine ... I mean essentially reddit + wikipedia. The layer has to a centralized interface

<comment><USER3> I did a fun experiment last year with Chrome extensions: for some websites, it adds comments about the current page from Reddit.

For some websites it actually works quite well. Some users reported it actually "adds a dimension" to the page.

So while i agree universal metaweb is doomed, I do believe in some specific additions from relevant sources.

<comment><USER4> Thats interesting, there's been many times I've stumbled on a page "organically" and wished there were reddit or HN comments I could read about it. I would use an extension that found them for me.

<comment><USER5> It exists for HN: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- discus...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news- discussion/iggcipafbcjfofibfhhelnipahhepmkd)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Found via an article on the service at Nature News [1]

[1] "Annotating the scholarly web" [ [http://www.nature.com/news/annotating- the-scholarly-web-1.18...](http://www.nature.com/news/annotating-the- scholarly-web-1.18900) ]

<comment><USER6> More at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10655563).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting to see not all major publishers are involved, e.g. Springer and Elsevier are missing. Given their (especially Elsevier's) policies toward making content publicly available I'm not too surprised.

[https://hypothes.is/annotating-all- knowledge/](https://hypothes.is/annotating-all-knowledge/)

<comment><USER8> We've had discussions with them, they'll take a little longer to engage, but I'm encouraged that they probably will-- I think annotation is inevitable for scholarship, regardless of whether it's using our technology or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The video emphasizes that this is controlled by users, not site owners, and that annotations are permanent.

So if, hypothetically, I ever managed to incite the wrath of an internet mob, they could use this to tack up my family's personal information over my homepage and various profiles, without me being able to do anything about it. Great.

<comment><USER8> They're "permanent" in that they're not controlled by the site owners. But without effective moderation, a public channel of annotations will become unusable, so spam and trolls must be dealt with effectively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is being run as a coalition of corporations, academics, and publishers. This leaves me with some concerns over just how open, accessible, and ultimately successful this enterprise will be.

It is clear to me, however, that an annotation layer for the internet is the future. The time to build this is unquestionably now.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hey, the first Kickstarter I backed! Four years ago. Why is this on HN front page...? Did something happen?

<comment><USER12> Seems to still be active [https://hypothes.is/blog/](https://hypothes.is/blog/)

<comment><USER13> Not to mention there's a "We're hiring developers" link at the top of every page.

<comment><USER14> Which is there every time the seek for the new investors begin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This would be great for documentation. The number of times I've found something incorrect in the Android documentation and had no way to note it for others...

That said, I think it would have to be officially recommended by a website before many people would use it.

<comment><USER8> That's the thinking behind this coalition for the scholarly community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can see myself using this tool. A lot. But I'm missing a vote up(down?) button on annotations already.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to start? - <AUTHOR> I want to change my career to web programming at the age of 30. I am completely new to programming. I don't anything about computer science.
What should I learn to become a web developer?
Where to start? <comment><USER2> There's no wrong place to start, but a pretty good one would be a "Python for non-programmers" tutorial: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15010265](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15010265)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=python+for+non- programmers](https://www.google.com/search?q=python+for+non-programmers) (scroll down for more on the first page).

Python has a relatively real syntax, is actually used in real Web services and standalone apps (ie, you can build real stuff with it), and has an active community.

Don't worry about which tutorial you choose; at this point, it doesn't matter. The Wikibooks one ([https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non- Programmer%27s_Tutorial_fo...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Non- Programmer%27s_Tutorial_for_Python_3)) looks fine, but if you spend a few hours on it and don't like it, try another one.

If (when) you get stuck, Google the error message or a summary of the problem. If (when) that doesn't work, post to Stack Overflow or ask [https://www.python.org/community/irc/](https://www.python.org/community/irc/).</comment>


Open Compute Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.opencompute.org/ <comment><USER2> Has anyone bought open compute gear for internal office tasks such as local file servers, PBX, network services, etc?

It certainly does not seem like it's meant for small deployments, but I'm curious to hear what other have done.

<comment><USER3> Yes, mostly used units from eBay. Low cost, great performance and reliability. You'll need to make sure you have proper supporting infrastructure as they don't come in standard closed self-supporting enclosures. If you are single- system deployments they don't make much sense, but then again, neither would other rack-mounted systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a while the OCP-Permissive and OCP-Restrictive licenses seemed like they could move open hardware forward, but I don't see as much about them recently. Any idea what's happening with licensing and when OCP licenses make sense for other projects?

</comment><comment><USER5> Out of interest, does anyone have a ballpark figure for an entire rack of OCP boxes?

<comment><USER6> Most of the cost would be CPUs, RAM, and storage. I would expect the bare servers to be a small fraction of the rack cost.</comment></comment>


How We're Solving Data Discovery Challenges at Shopify - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/solving-data-discovery-challenges-shopify <comment><USER2> Love it!</comment>


Ask HN: Working with UX/UI as a Software Developer - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I'm looking forward to collaborating on my first mobile and web app with a designer (UI/UX). I'm more of a back end guy (20+ years programming), and have minimal front end and mobile experience.
What is the usual or preferred method of transferring the work produced by a designer to a web or mobile app? Do I have to recreate their designs programmatically for each platform? Or is CSSs, HTML and images assets produced by the designers helpful to alleviate the integration work? Help!
I'm thinking of using React Native or Flutter for a fairly simply application (not a game or anything CPU/GPU intensive).
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> Well I hope someone reads this ...?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Cricket chirps ...</comment>


Breaking the Barrier: the race for the 1 person $1Billion company - <AUTHOR> http://www.hvflabs.com/posts/breaking-the-barrier-the-race-for-the-first-1-person-1b-company

<comment><USER2> Note to self: Time to look at registering billiondollarhomepage.com

</comment><comment><USER3> For many reasons, I think this will never happen. I think we could go as low as 3-4 employees for a 1B exit, but nowhere below that number.

</comment><comment><USER4> I didn't see the data or any graphs. Does anyone have a source for that data?

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be fixed now. Note to self: host images on imgur not dropbox.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should you be suspicious if your comments only get upvotes? - <AUTHOR> It seems that in any given community, the best and worst ideas will often be rejected.
They are outliers by definition.
In one sense upvotes may mean you have a good handle on what is acceptable and can model that well.
But on the other, it may also mean that you aren't taking risks or that your ideas aren't that original.
Of course some types of originality will be popular.
In other words, don't feel bad about your downvotes!
Check to be sure you are delivering your ideas in a way that is consistent with the community, but having some downvotes is probably a good signal (or at least, shouldn't be immediately viewed as a bad signal). <comment><USER2> This may not be true everywhere, particularly HN. Since there's a restriction on who can downvote there's a tendency to ignore comments rather than downvote them. Of course, stuff does get downvoted here but I like to think the culture isn't quite as up-down vote driven as other platforms.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've noticed that any anti-nuclear comments that I make here are immediately downvoted. Should I be suspicious that someone is purposely trolling me? I put a lot of effort into making sure what I write is factually correct but nearly every negative nuclear comment gets downvoted to zero or even negative numbers.

One OP presented a well-reasoned opinion that no new nuke plants will ever be built in the US (after Sumpter) because it's not cost effective. My comment? "Hallelujah." And it was downvoted.</comment>


IBM has simulated a quantum computer with 56 qubits on a classical computer - <AUTHOR> http://www.alphr.com/technology/1007446/ibm-has-just-achieved-an-impossible-step-in-quantum-computing <comment><USER2> I always enjoy the Eureka moments:

>"My seemingly inconsequential moment came one night while washing dishes and using a bristle brush to clean a tall glass," said IBM's Edwin Pednault. "It suddenly occurred to me that if one looks at the gates applied to a given qubit in a grid circuit, the gates form a bristle-brush pattern where the bristles are the entangling gates that are being applied to that qubit." He then took this idea and applied it to simulating qubits.

So let us all applaud Louis F. Kutik who after inventing the plastic bristle brush in 1964 could not have surmised it's inspiration for advancements within the quantum computing domain.

<comment><USER3> Let us also remember the importance of taking a break and "walking away" from hard problems. Sometimes the best thing to do is to simply stop working.

<comment><USER4> Rich Hickey's "Hammock Driven Development" is a great talk regarding just this, for anybody who hasn't seen it.

I personally find this is one of the most effective ways of cracking a difficult problem. It's amazing what your subconscious is capable of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The work is about simulating wide-but-shallow quantum circuits (e.g. 49 qubits with 27 layers of operations, or 56 qubits x 23 layers [edit: HN title much better now]). The article entirely fails to mention the depth restriction. (The paper is very upfront about it: [1].)

Personally, I happen to agree with Scott Aaronson's take [2]:

> _The goal, with sampling-based quantum supremacy, was always to target the > "sweet spot," which we estimated at around 50 qubits, where classical > simulation is still possible, but it's clearly orders of magnitude more > expensive than doing the experiment itself. If you like, the goal is to get > as far as you can up the mountain of exponentiality, conditioned on people > still being able to see you from the base. Why? Because you can. Because > it's there. Because it challenges those who think quantum computing will > never scale: explain this, punks! But there's no point unless you can verify > the result._

Although doing that _and_ pushing into a regime that no one can simulate until a couple years later sure wouldn't hurt.

1: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05867](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05867)

2: [https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3512](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3512)

<comment><USER6> > But there's no point unless you can verify the result.

I thought there were quite a few problems (like factoring) which were hard to generate a correct answer, but easy to check whether an answer is correct?

<comment><USER7> A bit off topic to your question, but this reminds me. Where are we exactly progress wise with P vs. NP problem? I've not thought to track the millennium problems in a while. I'm sure I would have heard if something substantial had arisen though. I used to work with it at some point on specific variation of the problem with was the dorm room housing problem [1]. That particular scenario always stood out to me as something that should be relatively easy to solve and I worked on it for a few years. Anyways, I'm way off topic now.

[1] [http://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems/p-vs-np- problem](http://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems/p-vs-np-problem)

<comment><USER8> Every now and then there is a paper that attempts proving P=NP or attempts proving P!=NP, I've seen different papers on hacker news several times. The most interesting link someone posted was this one listing many such papers, nicely indicating [equal], [not equal], [undecidable] or [unprovable]:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20171006224902/https://www.win.tu...](http://web.archive.org/web/20171006224902/https://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus- NP.htm)

Archive link because original page has certificate error :(

<comment><USER7> I am especially intrigued by the argument made by Nicholas Argall. In that the question of whether P = NP or not is incomplete in and of itself.[1] I think this is very true on the basis that not all of these problems are the same or present the same criteria to solve. I think understanding these problems is going to require thinking from a different depth though. It's fun to me to think about and try to wrap my head around. I'm no expert but have a lot of fun with it.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20170817220728/http://www.win.tue...](http://web.archive.org/web/20170817220728/http://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus- NP/argall.txt)

<comment><USER9> The argument put forward in the link misrepresents Godel's theorem.

> 6) Therefore, no consistent and complete definition of the set NP is > possible Rationale: If we accept that the set NP can only be rigorously > defined via a language, this conclusion follows from the premises above.

This doesn't even make sense. Definitions do not change a languages completeness or consistency; they simply relate a new concept to previously defined concepts.

> 7) Therefore, no consistent and complete statement of the problem of P=NP is > possible Comment: A conclusion which is not only proven in this paper, but > supported by the years of argument between mathematicians regarding the > relevance of proposed answers to the problem.

This is not supported from Godel's theorem. The fact that you need a non- complete system to be able to reason about something does not mean the theorem you want to prove is not provable.

The main problem with the argument is that it works for other theorems that have been formally proven.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This news raise so many questions that not answered, provided little information for the issue.

This link is much better.

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2151032-googles- quantum...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2151032-googles-quantum- computing-plans-threatened-by-ibm-curveball/)

</comment><comment><USER11> The article's description of whatever they're theoretically doing is absolute fucking garbage, but it sounds like they're probably doing some sort of compressed representation like Young Tableaux for efficiently representing a subset of quantum circuits. Unfortunately, it's usually not the subset you're interested in.

<comment><USER12> If they found a method to make elliptic curve cryptography less secure, I would start to be worried, but I guess that's not the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> a.) I'm taking most news coming from ibm with a grain of salt, there was so much commotion around Watson and nothing came out of it

b.) quantum digital is boring, quantum analog, now that's flavortown

<comment><USER14> > quantum digital is boring, quantum analog, now that's flavortown

What do you mean by that? You mean simulating on analogical classical computers? Or quantum computers without qbits?

<comment><USER13> The latter [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous- variable_quantum_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous- variable_quantum_information)

<comment><USER14> Are there expected advantages from using continuous values?

I imagine error resistance would become incredibly harder. Does information density grow fast enough to compensate it?

<comment><USER13> This is actually a really long answer but to give you a flavor, on an analog computer, you can sort in o(n) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_sort](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_sort) also you have integration and differentiation as primitives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It was unclear to me what the impossibility is that is referred to by the article, but it appears to be the exponential nature of the required storage for the simulation:

> _Simulating anything more than 49 qubits on a classical computer was thought > impossible because of the limited memory classical computers have compared > to their quantum counterparts. Because of the difference between classical > and quantum computing, each time you add a qubit to a simulation it > increases the necessary memory exponentially in the classical simulation._

If true, then the jump from a simulation of 49 to 56 was clearly not impossible in the first place.

Following some links, the term "impossibility" is first introduced by the _New Scientist_ , but it's not backed up by anything substantial, as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER16> Well, they explained it a couple of paragraphs later.

The previous record, a 45-bit quantum simulation, took 500 Terabytes of memory. I assume there's some sort of terrible exponential increase that would have made 49-bit simulations require four orders of magnitude more, or something impractical. But this one did 56 bits with just 4.5 terabytes of memory.

All seems pretty clear.

<comment><USER15> That's my point: impractical as it may be at the current time, I could not find an argument as to why it should generally be impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So, what does this actually mean for quantum computing? I have hardly any understanding of the subject, so to me it seems odd that a breakthrough in simulation is very relevant. I also don't have a research background, so it may be that.

<comment><USER18> From the paper ...

> With the current rate of progress in quantum computing technologies, > 50-qubit systems will soon become a reality. To assess, refine and advance > the design and control of these devices, one needs a means to test and > evaluate their fidelity.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05867](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05867)

It is for testing new quantum computers. We can now use classical computers to simulate larger ( > 49-qubit ) quantum computers. Previously ...

> Such calculations were previously thought to be impossible due to > impracticable memory requirements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TF06flI...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TF06flIYfa8J:www.alphr.com/technology/1007446/ibm- has-just-achieved-an-impossible-step-in-quantum- computing+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone know if this new approach, using tensors, also affects simulation speed?

<comment><USER21> It's not a new approach; the equivalence was published ~1999 IIRC. It also affects speedup; tensor slicing can now be fully parallelised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> can graphics be done with a quantum computer?

I feel like AI would be it's best field, i.e computing every possible move at once?

<comment><USER23> It does't really calculate all the moves. But you could probably use Grover's search algorithm to improve your odds of finding a good move. [http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post2644_grovers- quantum-s...](http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post2644_grovers-quantum- search-algorithm)

<comment><USER22> could quantum enabled graphics cards find better algorithms, and speed up it's rendering of a game for example?</comment></comment></comment>


Land of Lisp is finally out...and has a music video. - <AUTHOR> http://landoflisp.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HNers- I'm Conrad (aka drcode) the author of said book. Thanks guys for helping build the buzz around LOL! (I should also thank pg for getting me into this stuff in the first place.)

I'll be lurking in this thread today and tomorrow... feel free to post any questions about the book or about Lisp in general and I will answer them.

Here's the only coupon code currently for the book. I'm posting it exclusively on HN and proggit: 76738380768586 (ASCII for LISPLUV :-)

It gives a 35% discount on the Book+eBook combo on the No Starch site (<http://nostarch.com/lisp.htm>). It expires 11/3. (FYI- If you just want the eBook, No Starch already has a 50% off sale right now across the board. If you only want the print copy, Amazon has a heavily discounted price already, for reasons that are mysterious to me. Oh, and if you've already pre-ordered, just cancel and reorder to get the discount.)

<comment><USER2> Congrats on the release. I'm excited to finish reading the book. I just thought you should know, however, that there's a minor mistake (I think) in some of the walkthrough stuff in the pdf. On page 56:

      >  (defun pudding-eater (person)
          (cond ((eq person 'henry) (setf *arch-enemy* 'stupid-lisp-alien) '(curse you lisp alien – you ate my pudding))
      	    ((eq person 'johnny) (setf *arch-enemy* 'useless-old-johnny) '(i hope you choked on my pudding johnny))
      	    (t '(why you eat my pudding stranger ?))))

      > (pudding-eater 'johnny)
      (I HOPE YOU CHOKED ON MY PUDDING JOHNNY)

      > *arch-enemy*
      JOHNNY

_arch-enemy_ at this time should hold the value 'useless-old-johnny, not 'johnny

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you are right- You found the first errata!

At least the intent of the code is still clear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How fabulous. I smiled all the way through that video. There is something so happy about exuberant, unrepentant nerdery.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey, super stoked for this so I just went to check my amazon order history and discovered my order was no longer there? So I checked my gmail account and in my spam found:

"Hello from Amazon.com.

Due to a lack of availability from our suppliers, we will not be able to obtain the following item(s) from your order:

Conrad Barski "Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!" <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1593272006>

We've cancelled the item(s) and apologize for the inconvenience. We must also apologize for the length of time it has taken us to reach this conclusion. Until recently, we had still hoped to obtain these item(s) for you.

Your credit card will NOT BE CHARGED for this item because you only pay for items when we ship them to you."

I am just bummed I did not notice sooner but glad I caught this thread so I can re-order! SO excited - just wanted to give a heads up in case other people were under the impression that they should be seeing it arrive on their doorstep.

update: per the authors comment below I have used the promo code to order directly from no starch so I can read the digital version while I wait for the lovely physical copy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you probably ordered early this year or late last year. Some pre-orders were cancelled because of the delay of the book at that time- apologies. You will see a reference to that in the music video on landoflisp.com.

Right now you can order on Amazon without difficulty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has set the bar very high for Lisp book marketing. I am stunned. My plans for a Clojure Lucha libre exhibition look lame by comparison. I need a bowl of parentheses to help me think.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi fogus -Sorry I couldn't make it to Clojure Conj... liked your slides.

My philosophy of marketing is that you need to do something different that no one else has done before to attract attention. There wasn't a programming book with a music video yet, so I exploited that fact :)

But of course, there's still plenty other ideas that could be used to market other books/sites...

<comment><USER5> You're doing a great job. I can't wait to see what you come up with next. I hope to see you at a future Captial Area Clojure UG (<http://www.meetup.com/Cap-Clug/>). Do you think you would be up for discussing the Clojure-bits (well, all and any bits are just as good too) of your book one day?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I was there last month- Will try to come again tomorrow.

Happy to talk about Lisp/Clojure anytime. (with a little notice)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Conrad, absolutely loved your video. My 6yo will pore over your comic and Ill no doubt see land-of-lisp refs crop up in his battle scenes.

This all got me thinking about developing interactive stories and the ideal lisp game development environment...

I hear from people who want to create interactive books and lessons for iPad. I recommend they prototype things in PowerPoint or Keynote first, then hire a developer to turn it into a cocoa app or a HTML5 web app with webkit animations. Its too hard.

If the ideal tool was a web app, you could develop games and interactive lessons for iPad and other tablets directly on the device.

You'd want a DSL for standard slide/rotate/scale animations, and write code in lisp for game logic. This would bypass expense of developing native cocoa apps yet reach nice platforms.

Ideally you'd prototype quickly and be led gently into the best language. I guess mobile is the primary computer for most young people, so would be ideal to take a lisp environment to them.

</comment><comment><USER7> That video just made my day - awesome! Can't wait to get the book. I also realised when browsing the Amazon page that the author is the same guy who wrote 'casting spels' (<http://www.lisperati.com/casting.html>) which was also great.

If your reading this Conrad do you mind me asking you about your art work? It's, hands down, some of the best cartoon drawing I've seen on the web. I'd love to know what tools you use to do the drawing and make the animations, and what process you go through when developing them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Seriously? Best cartoon drawing on the web? I doubt that :)

I used to do all the artwork in ink and then scan it. Now I do it all on my iPad with SketchBook Pro (took me a while to figure out how to get decent quality this way- At first, I didn't think decent drawing on an iPad was possible)

The animation was all done by importing bitmap artwork into Toon Boom animation. It's a cheesy Windows program (i.e. save your work every 30 minutes, or else...) but is feature rich.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the reply. I asked about what you are using because I have recently tried doing some drawing with a Wacom graphics tablet and am having trouble (I have one of the cheap ones where you draw on the tablet whilst watching the screen - the disconnect between hand and eye makes it difficult).

I'll look at some of the things you mentioned and see about trying them.

(thanks again!)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I found Wacom tablets to be no good for me, for the reason you describe. The iPad is definitely a better drawing device, as long as you don't care about pressure sensitivity.

(Hope they release a large-screen iPad soon :)

<comment><USER8> Not the same thing, but the Cintiq is a monitor you can draw on, which is pressure sensitive and lets you use whatever desktop-grade software you want. I enjoy your drawings and explanations quite a bit; you'd probably find a Cintiq, even the smaller (awesome) one, to be the most natural drawing experience a computer can currently give.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> FYI, the Homebrew formula to install CLISP on Mac OS X is at <http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/pull/2707>

If the formula works well, please comment there and suggest the authors accept my pull request. (If not, I ll be very happy to help.)

<comment><USER10> It depends on 'libiconv', which is not part of master.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, my bad. I added the keg-only dependency libiconv. Is it working for you now?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm excited to finally be getting the book...I just wish I had read comic books as a kid so that I didn't have to struggle with picking up the proper 'comic reading flow' in my thirties ;-)

(BTW, Conrad, I think you meant to say 'geezer' instead of 'geyser' in the comic adapted from your epilogue...?)

I'm hoping I can use the book to teach lisp to some junior high kids in a disadvantaged youth program. Is it appropriate for that, or no?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks- I think I accidentally used an old bitmap- That typo is fixed in the book.

I'm not sure the book can really take someone from zero programming experience and teach them Lisp- It assumes at least some programming background. It would be fine for junior high kids if they already know a bit of programming, but I suspect they may not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The website totally convinced me. I'm buying the eBook now!

<comment><USER13> Ditto. And it's so awesome to see the author's whimsy pay off so well, judging by the overall response here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The comic on the Land of Lisp page is so well done. Click on the blinking words.

I'm speechless...

<comment><USER15> Clicking on them doesn't do anything for me (Safari), what do they do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone else with Safari having a problem? Please reply here so I know if a fix is still needed.... Clicking on the "throbbing text" should pop up a window.

<comment><USER15> It's fixed for me now, it may have just been my net connection. The descriptions are awesome!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Holly shit!~

 _(piano solo)_

"balance weasels on a rake .."

Too funny .. :-P

Conrad, you're awesome!

</comment><comment><USER17> Bought it, I can't wait. I'm trying get my colleagues to try lisp, but I didn't have the marketing tools necessary to convince them Now i do, the music video gives a lot of personification to world (land) of lisp, thank you!

</comment><comment><USER18> Congratulations Conrad on finally getting the book out! I just got my copy from the No Starch website and am reading the ebook now. On first blush the layout looks awesome. I'm looking forward to digging into it.

Also, your video on landoflisp.com reminds me of the music video John Carpenter produced with his band for Big Trouble in Little China (I mean that as a compliment): <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D03E9kUTTtQ>

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure I see the connection, but thanks :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Are the comic and game examples inspired by _why? (also reminds me of <http://learnyouahaskell.com/>)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think my comics at lisperati.com predate all of these, clearly inferior, rivals. (kidding- both are great)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> GTW? LOL! Seeing Hunt the Wumpus referenced brings back memories of my TI-99/4A and makes this a must buy. This book reminds me of the magazines/compilations I have with programs and games in TI-BASIC/Assembly Language.

<http://nostarch.com/download/Lisp08.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER21> Congratulations on the release! Music video and the comic (Continuation guild reminds me of Arilou ships from StarControl II) are AWESOME and made my day. I'm currently trying to get money for paper version of the book.

By the way, I've shown the music video and the comic to friends of mine, and two of them actually got interested and started to ask questions about Lisp. Their positive reaction makes me think that those materials could be good to show to people to get them seriously interested in parenthesis-oriented- programming ;).

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm learning LISP through this book, and it's fun!

On p.42, when explaining the c*r functions, I found it easier to just read the "sequence" right-to-left.

For example:

      (cadadr '((peas carrots tomatoes) (pork beef chicken) duck))
      BEEF

Read as "rest, first, rest, first" of the cons cells, where "a" means "first" and "d" means "rest of the cons cell(s)".

Aside: I am now beginning to appreciate Clojure more. :P

</comment><comment><USER12> I bought the print and eBook bundle and so far I'm really pleased with it. I'm at Chapter 3 already and it's an easy read; the author explains things in simple English that's very easy to follow. The illustrations help in clarifying concepts and also serve up some humor that keeps things interesting. Kudos!

</comment><comment><USER22> Hi Conrad - glad to see this available now - I saw your preview at the DC HN Meetup. I love all the art!

<comment><USER23> Conrad, I also met you at the DC meetup. Congrats!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like the "HN Effect" is making the site unavailable. Saw it briefly earlier and looked great!

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope- Just a random major outage at dreamhost- now fixed (hopefully)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I bought Land of Lisp as soon as I became aware of it. Every time I hear a truck out front I think, its here. Looking forward to total Common Lisp immersion. Thanks for all of your contributions past and present to the Lisp community and of course for the book.

</comment><comment><USER26> Been waiting for this book for a long time, glad to finally see it out. Already bought my copy, will be downloading it tonight to start working through it.

Congratulations on finally getting it out! :)

</comment><comment><USER27> Thanks for creating this book! I just picked it up, and everything I've seen so far from the website and the first chapter has been a blast so far. I'm excited to dive into the rest.

</comment><comment><USER28> If you'd like a video addendum, courtesy of @lisperati and @johnclaus (the videographer), to this post <http://bit.ly/cjDWg5>

</comment><comment><USER29> Thank you for an excellent way to introduce such a powerful language (that I've been longing to learn, I must add!)

Game programming + Lisp! That's some winning combo! :D

</comment><comment><USER30> I love this so much.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice, Conrad! I haven't tried to balance weasels on a rake in a while. I'm looking forward to seeing how you did it. _SMILE_

</comment><comment><USER32> Thanks for writing this! I also enjoyed the same game code books as a kid - looking forward to learning lisp.

</comment><comment><USER33> When I got to the meowing cats in the music video I knew I had to have a copy of the book. :-) Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER34> Page 194: "Hey Buddy! Why don't you try to prove the correctness of this!" - LoL

</comment><comment><USER35> Sorry for the OT question, but what tools did you use to make that video?

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.toonboom.com/products/toon-boom-studio/>

<comment><USER36> OT, but check out Digicel Flipbook if you're seriously interested in 2D animation - <http://www.digicelinc.com/> it will make your life easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Am I the only one having problems downloading the ebook after purchasing?

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems to be working fine for others right now- Please let me know at firstname.lastname@example.com if you continue to have problems.

<comment><USER37> It's seems to be fixed now and I could download the eBook after logging in to NoStarch. Thanks for the book!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Probably the most fun computer book ever released.

Conrad, you are my hero!

</comment><comment><USER38> the video is a little annoying but the comic is amazing.</comment>


Dotcom alleges Megaupload raid was part of deal to film The Hobbit - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-13/megaupload-kim-dotcom-opens-up-about-extradition-fight/4752410?section=business <comment><USER2> Ok, so I strongly disagree that the raid was part of a deal to film The Hobbit. It would imply some extremely poor negotiation on Warner Brother's part since the raid happened AFTER production had moved from New Zealand. If Dotcom was really such a big deal to WB, why not make filming contingent on him being raided?

Yes, there was a big brew-ha-ha around moving the production of the Hobbit offshore (from NZ). But that was due to negoations falling apart with the New Zealand actor's union[0][1]. This is the dispute that lead to negotiations with NZ's prime minister on 27 October 2010[2]. These negations take place _after_ the film was greenlit and Peter Jackson (not Guillermo Del Toro) is confirmed as director.

The result of these negotiations is that film workers in NZ loose their right to organize.

Now if I were Warner Brothers, and had actually made this deal to have the government raid Kim Dotcom in exchange for filming The Hobbit, wouldn't I wait until the raid happened before starting filming to make sure that New Zealand holds up their end of the bargain?

But, in fact, principal photography on the Hobbit begins on 21 March 2011. Dotcom is raided 9 months later, in January 2012. By this time, all photography in New Zealand is finished.

This timeline doesn't add up. What guarantee did Warner Brothers have that New Zealand would hold up their end of the bargain?

Furthermore, there's no mention of this deal in the e-mails and memos that were released around the Hobbit filming negotiations in February 2013[3].

[0][http://screenrant.com/the-hobbit-new-zealand-peter- jackson-k...](http://screenrant.com/the-hobbit-new-zealand-peter-jackson- kofi-83734/) [1][http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&o...](http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10682024) [2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(film_series)#Indust...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_\(film_series\)#Industrial_dispute_in_New_Zealand) [3][http://www.3news.co.nz/Hobbit-files- released/tabid/1607/arti...](http://www.3news.co.nz/Hobbit-files- released/tabid/1607/articleID/288190/Default.aspx)

<comment><USER3> I don't really buy this story, but I think the intended narrative is that WB was just shooting for the moon. They would have been ecstatic if New Zealand delivered a takedown, but it wasn't actually so vital to them that they'd hold up everything else until it happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _" Unlike its predecessor, Dotcom's new site Mega offers secure encryption, > which he says protects each user's identity and data."_

I haven't kept up with Mega much lately, but does anyone know if the security issues identified after the Mega launch were ever fixed (see e.g. [http://fail0verflow.com/blog/2013/megafail.html](http://fail0verflow.com/blog/2013/megafail.html))? It seemed like the Mega launch was rushed to take advantage of the free publicity they were getting, but I would expect that they've had enough time to get their house in order by now.

<comment><USER5> It wouldn't matter. You have no insight in whether Dotcom stores the keys to decrypt the data somewhere. Unless the entire mega fad is open sourced and we can verify the code in the repos runs on their webservers, you cannot justify using Dotcom his bussiness knowing what he has done in the past to obtain financial gain over the backs of others.

<comment><USER6> It encrypts in the browser, you can check the source code just fine.

<comment><USER7> The issue with browser-based encryption, is that you would have to check the source code _every_ time that it's served to you.

<comment><USER8> Not really.

You can verify it once and generate a secure hash from it. Then the second time you could just check the hash.

It wouldn't be too difficult to write a browser extension that did it automatically, or a javascript bookmarklet for it.

<comment><USER9> But then you have to generate the hash each time the source code changes. And you also have to verify the source code each time yourself because you can't know if it's a regular update from mega (they probably update daily or weekly) or if someone compromised the source code.

<comment><USER6> That sounds like normal software to me. Nobody is forcing you to update unless the ABI changes. And you can start a mailing list that talks about updates if you like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When a journalist uses the word "alleges" it's only by accident that it doesn't mean "we know we're reporting a fabrication but it'll get page views".

<comment><USER11> No, it means, "We'll get sued if we leave those 7 letters out."

<comment><USER10> "because, no, we don't have a single shread of evidence"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dotcom fights slide into Old News.</comment>


Introducing Postman for Mac - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getpostman.com/2015/12/18/introducing-postman-for-mac/ <comment><USER2> Since this is likely just an embedded webview I'd strongly recommend people check out Paw ([https://luckymarmot.com/paw](https://luckymarmot.com/paw)). It's a native app and works great.</comment>