The batty, explosive history of bats in the military and a new idea - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2018/07/02/the-batty-history-of-bats-in-the-military-and-why-this-new-idea-just-might-work <comment><USER2> Everything about the old story of the idea to arm a large quantity of bats with incendiary explosives, to attack a fire-prone city reads like information that might be fed to suspected moles in a counterintelligence operation.

The idea being that you wouldn't knowingly jeopardize real plans, by gambling their exposure among an untrustworthy audience, but, since counterintelligence is an understood expense, allocate some funds for seemingly outrageous boondoggles, and see if those secrets circulate.

      The bat bomb plan was stamped "top secret" and
      assigned the suitably sci-fi code name Project
      X-Ray.

Figure there were three types of people that were granted access to the classified information, while it was still classified: those hunting for moles, suspected moles, and authorized individuals kept unaware of the mole hunt, but confirmed as definite non-moles. Assume FDR was probably clued in on the nature of the exercise.

Why take it so far? Probably victimization by sunk cost fallacy, plus persistent suspicion and paranoia. Plus, when the time came to retire the project, it might have gained some extra inertia all its own.

<comment><USER3> This story was part of a news report sourced by the daughter of a general on NBC. I saw it between 1987ish (I may be off by a year).

> The project never recovered from this ignominious retreat, and it was > canceled in 1944.

It was "cancelled" after a shockingly effective test because the first A-bomb was going to be ready. Multiple projects were going on in parallel. Because bat-instigated fire was still an uncontrollable and unpredictable force to unleash on a population, it was wisely cancelled (the research kept, which is all that mattered) in favor of a more pointed and well-understood system. A big targeted explosion.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that the effects of the bomb were as well understood as we imagine, I think that unleashing the bomb on Japan was also a test. It was targeted at civilians and they just HAD to see what it would do, they knew that what it would do was going to be bad, but they didn't really know how bad. IMO they didn't really care how unpredictable or targeted it would be, they knew it would affect Japan only though, so thats all that mattered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really a dream i keep getting on and on. In the future we will genetically breed very large eagles, saddle them, and fly them to get from place to place. Everyone in future will have a pet eagle, like everyone has a pet dog now.

<comment><USER6> I like this dream, but think you need to pair it with a dream of cows the size of elephants as each day the eagle will need to eat a 1000 pounds of meat.

<comment><USER7> Lab grown meat or the eagle is genetically engineered to be a veagle

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was rather disappointed that this article wasn't about the worlds first guided missile, that was used to hunt ships in the pacific in WW2 — it was called the Bat.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-N-2_Bat](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASM-N-2_Bat)

<comment><USER9> I hate to be that guy, but it was a guided _bomb_. The Germans made the Fritz X, also a glide-bomb, and it came before the Bat.

I believe the V-1 is still the first "guided missile", i.e. self-propelled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a great episode of The Memory Palace about this: [http://thememorypalace.us/2009/01/episode-4/](http://thememorypalace.us/2009/01/episode-4/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Times were different during WW2. No stone, no matter how wacky, was left un- turned in the search for victory. They thought about building an aircraft carrier out of ice. They paid a bunch of academics to figure out if it was possible to make big explosions by splitting atoms (spoiler: it works very well). It should come as no surprise that they investigated releasing a bunch of explosive bats on the enemy. "Look what wacky thing was done because there was a slim chance it might somehow lead to victory" is a low effort (if interesting) article.</comment>


Goldilocks Analogue Kickstarter 90% Funded – Arduino and Audio I/O - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/feilipu/goldilocks-analogue-classic-arduino-audio-superpow/ <comment><AUTHOR> Getting sound and audio into Arduino projects has been difficult, because there are almost no integrated DAC and amplifier solutions for the Arduino Shield format. And there are fewer (none) that also have integrated microphone amplifier capability. Even the newer ARM based Arduino (Due, Zero, 101) boards with an on-board DAC don't have the headphone and op amp outputs, nor the microphone amplifier input, integrated on-board.

The Goldilocks Analogue has everything needed to build useful audio based projects, such as musical synthesizers, baby monitors, sound pollution monitors, and IOT audio applications.

Expanding on some of the project options...

Synthesiser - synthesising any waveform you like (using a look-up-table, or algorithmic calculation) is very cool. Then adding, convolving, and filtering these waves. Also cool. For anyone trying to get a handle on waveforms, and digital sampling and filtering (like me in 2nd year engineering) having a tool like this would have been great.

Anything using voice - How about a 802.15.4 mesh Walkie-Talkie? Xbee supports up to 24kbit/s real-world, I've demonstrated. With a bit of G.726 audio compression, you could talk to anyone "off grid" in a Xbee mesh using secure communications.

Capturing sound into an IoT Cloud service - A lot of low bandwidth networks (LoRa) can never support video, but they could support segments of audio. High compression encoding (no need for real-time), and then sending 15 seconds of audio surrounding an "event" over a LoRa network (0.3 kbps to 50 kbps) can provide context to the event, or be recognized and actioned by Siri / Cortana / Google in the Cloud.

I'm planning to make an audio environmental monitor which can sample sound at a location, and upload it to an IoT provider as needed. High sound levels alone are often not enough to determine what is good sound (wind noise), and what is bad sound (music at 3am), so having 15 seconds (for example) can be enough to differentiate a response.

</comment><comment><USER2> I don't get why you'd use this instead of plugging a Schiit Modi or Modi+Magni pair (depending on what you need) into an Arduino instead, it has USB doesn't it?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an Arduino compatible board, which provides probably the "most capable" micro-controller in the AVR range on the standard Uno footprint.

It can do analogue output from DC to 48k samples per second. And it has supporting amplifiers for headphones and microphones (sampled using onboard ADC).

It is not a musical instrument. It is a platform to develop and test applications using analogue output and input. Voice is one good application, but there are many others.

Its also quite cheap at AUD50 (USD40) each. The Modi or Magni devices are USD99 each. Different applications. Different cost points.</comment></comment>


Massive study on MOOCs - <AUTHOR> http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/04/massive-study-on-moocs/

<comment><USER3> "Across 12 courses, participants who paid for "ID-verified" certificates (with costs ranging from $50 to $250) earned certifications at a higher rate than other participants: 59 percent, on average, compared to 5 percent. Students opting for the ID-verified track appear to have stronger intentions to complete courses, and the monetary stake may add an extra form of motivation."

Would be interesting to know more about these people.

<comment><USER4> I'm one of them! But in the end I got behind in the course (it was on the Magna Carta, very interesting), and it closed before I could finish the material/assignments, so I unfortunately wasted 40 dollars (except I like to think of it as a donation to Coursera).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I took the Intro to AI and later AI for Robotics through Udacity but I was only able to get through one other course.

Now I am in my first semester of Georgia Tech's OMCS and I think it has been very challenging and enlightening. One improvement would be to get other colleges to make a macro-OMCS. Where you could take 10 classes across a wider selection. Maybe that will come with time. I also think there would be a great need for a $7k OBCS, that might be the next step in offering education to a wide group of people.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure that I see the benefit of a decentralized degree. Udacity & Coursera are already pursuing a path to aggregate content from many schools, and the OMS CS course catalog will not have traditional limits on availability -- once courses are in the catalog they can continue offering them every semester. As a fellow OMS student, the limiting factor has always been graders/TAs up to this point.

I concur about the need for an OBS CS (or ME, EE, CPE,...) at $7k. Cal State Monterey has a fully online BS program...that costs _more_ than the resident program. I don't understand how it costs $300-500 per credit hour for the undergrad programs, except to avoid devaluing the resident offerings.

<comment><USER7> "I don't understand how it costs $300-500 per credit hour for the undergrad programs, except to avoid devaluing the resident offerings."

In MOOCs thousands of people are enrolled at the same time, and support is provided by the community of students. It's incredible how this phrasing sounds positive - even to me - while it basically means that support by a qualified instructor cannot be guaranteed and is unlikely to be provided.

In (good) accredited online programs - BSc or MSc - there are 10 to 20 students enrolled per course and you have direct access to the instructor who will adapt his lectures based on the audience feedbacks and specifics. This costs money and therefore has to come at a price.

If the program doesn't offer the above, or if you are a passive student who don't ask questions frequently and interact with others, then I'm with you, "why paying this price ?".

By the way, I am not saying that MOOCs are useless. Personally I see it under this perspective : the Educational System is so broken that in many cases streaming a video to thousands of people without providing them dedicated support is equivalent to the experience they get in physical classrooms.

<comment><USER6> > In MOOCs thousands of people are enrolled at the same time, and support is > provided by the community of students.

The OMS CS at Georgia Tech (an accredited program) has about 2,500 students, with 200-500 per class. With a few rare exceptions, the instructor of record is an active participant, as well as the TAs. This model is viable for online classes.

My real point was that I don't understand how online versions of the _exact_ same classes at the same schools cost double or more of what they charge for the resident program. Keeping the example of CSUMB, they charge a flat $500/credit online [0] ($12,000 annually for 12 unit semesters), but only $5,472 annually [1] for 12 _or more_ units per semester. Even the non-resident tuition for the on-campus program ($372/unit) is less than the online price. It costs _less_ to go to CSUMB for four years than to go to a JC for 60 units and CSUMB online to finish a BA/BS degree.

How does any of that make sense?

<comment><USER7> Yea I got you. For the OMS CS at Georgia Tech, I would never enroll in such conditions to be honest, not for a Graduate program and especially not if I'll be paying thousands of dollars, whether it is on-campus or online.

I don't doubt this model is viable, I'm not even saying it's bad quality. Certainly you'll find many people who'll tell you that they learned a lot and that they've blosomed. However I doubt this is an optimal solution, there is clearly room to improve quality a lot by decreasing the class sizes - <USER2> increasing the individual support.

"The instructor is an active participant" means a lot. He becomes a "participant" instead of being an instructor. The reason is simple, there's no way to accomodate 200 people. Do you think he'll have the time to have something as small as a 10 minutes discussion with every student every week ?

When I was at college, I was regularly talking with my instructors for 30 minutes, sometimes hours in their office. To me it's crucial at every stage of education and not enough emphasized in the current system. But I think it is critical to have this direct, easy and unrestricted access to the instructor at graduate school.

At some college, I've seen a graduate school instructor complaning about the fact that he had to accept 23 students for a term instead of 15-18 because the demand was too high.

Concerning your main point, here are my thoughts :

\- If they set the online programs at a lower price, then it will "mean" that it is lower quality than the on-campus program.

\- If they set it at the same price, potential on-campus students will choose to enroll online to avoid having to attend lectures, thus taking the best of both worlds.

\- Therefore the best option for them is to price online programs higher so people who are able to be on-campus will go on-campus and the rest will go online. I wouldn't be surprised if they also take into account the cost of housing to avoid making the online option too attractive.

Tuitions are not the only source of revenue for colleges, so they have to be careful and make sure students keep coming on-campus.

<comment><USER6> > He becomes a "participant" instead of being an instructor.

I just meant that they are actively involved; they are certainly still teachers.

Regarding the pricing of online undergrad programs, I think schools have converged on a particular price level because it is adequate. The supply side of education is rather insular thanks to accreditation requirements (not a bad thing), but it means that there also isn't much incentive for competition on the price -- especially when the offering competes with your own core product.

The data so far indicates that the market for the OMS is disproportionately older and more fully employed than traditional resident MS students. Similarly, much of the core offering of traditional undergrad programs is focused on the 18-24 demographic, so I wouldn't be surprised to find that the online offerings appeal more to older and more fully employed undergrad students who can afford the higher tuition(perhaps with tuition assistance) in exchange for the increased schedule flexibility.

<comment><USER7> > I just meant that they are actively involved; they are certainly still > teachers.

Sure I got you, I was pointing that in such conditions it's unlikely that they can play they teaching role fully. They become more like participants in forums who will sometimes get involved in a thread, sometimes not.

> The data so far indicates...

Very interesting, but I think it's a consequence of the pricing and not the cause. People go online when they can't go on-campus for one reason or an other (job, family, live in another country, etc...). It is the purpose of the pricing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bye Bye Github - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eizesus.com/2010/2/bye-bye-github-7-2-2010/

<comment><USER2> "a real serious business would have created an infrastructure that will provide paying customers a better redundancy for their accounts"

He should apply the same argument he makes against Github to his own business. Putting together a Gitosis or similar setup mirrored to Github would have given him and his paying customers the necessary redundancy to deploy when one of the hosts is down.

EDIT: Figure while I'm here and it's not OT I should give a well-deserved shout-out to Gitosis which has made my life a lot easier the past two years or so:

Gitosis setup is a one-off, very low maintenance install (you add repositories and users by committing config changes and public keys to a git repository -- hardly anything out of your regular workflow). Once set up, mirroring to github or another service is a one-liner in your post-receive hook.

<comment><USER3> To borrow Jeff Bezos' analogy from Startup School, should all small businesses who pay a utility company for electricity also have enough generators to run their business should the utility company fail temporarily?

The raison d'etre for companies like Github is that small software companies can't afford to waste a lot of time building infrastructure. If they want to survive, they need to focus on their core competencies, their customers, and their products. If outsourcing infrastructure functions to Github doesn't allow you to do that, then there's not much reason to pay Github.

<comment><USER4> The electric company analogy is a good one, but I don't think you're looking at it correctly.

No service, not even electricity, has 100% uptime. If thinks are _that_ mission critical, you need a backup plan. Should you disconnect from the grid and generate your own electricity? Probably not. But should you expect that it might go out at any time? Yes. If you are not running a UPS than no one is to blame except yourself. If things are so critical that a UPS won't last long enough, then you should have a generator backup.

In contrary, what would the poster have done if his power or internet had gone down when he needed to deploy? Would he be cancelling those services? For some reason I don't believe he would.

The real key to all of this is not a question of avoiding downtime, it's learning from it and avoiding a repeat of the same incident. I think GitHub has done a great job of this, and they're very clear about what happened and what they've done to avoid it in the future. The poster, however, fails at this point. Not only does he admit he doesn't have a backup plan for deploying when GitHub is down... he flat out states that he knows what he could have done, and REFUSES to do it. Instead he's just going to cut and run, thinking he'll find another service that somehow is somehow immune to unexpected downtime. I wish I could live in that world.

<comment><USER5> Moreover: Nothing comes without cost. If you want a service like GitHub but with higher reliability, you are going to pay. Possibly in money, possibly in ease of use, possibly in the time it takes to _identify_ such a service (it's really hard to gather reliable uptime data, especially in a field that is constantly evolving).

And, all things being equal, I'm not anxious to pay more money for a more reliable Github. _Because it's git, people._ Why pay for five nines of uptime when you can just mirror your repo? Every five minutes, if you like? With a one-line cron task? _One of git's most basic functions is to make an efficient mirror of itself._

<comment><USER4> Indeed, GitHub's terms even state "GitHub does not warrant that ... (ii) the service will be uninterrupted..."

If uptime was a serious factor for you, you'd probably pay for an SLA to ensure uptime and compensation for downtime... and a SLA wouldn't be cheap.

<comment><USER6> One of our customers wanted an SLA with more teeth. They themselves with a straight face proposed an SLA that would give them ca 8 GBP in credit against hosting fees per _day_ of downtime. This is a multi-million pound business. We said yes, of course.

We'd happily negotiate something with _real_ teeth, as I'm sure most service providers would, and I'm sure Github would too if a big customer pushed for it.

But you're 100% right - if we did it'd be expensive, because we'd have to turn right around and insure ourselves against the risks incurred if the amounts were remotely serious, and we'd pass that insurance cost straight on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ignoring the fulminating a bit and concentrating on the substantive issue, there is a real leap in expected level of service once you start taking money from people, and again when you start hosting Mission Critical apps. (What an overused buzzword -- but a _true_ overused buzzword!)

Saying "He shouldn't have had anything Mission Critical on Github, he should have designed his infrastructure competently" is besides the point. Properly designing a fault-tolerant workflow involving git isn't something which is in the easy reach of everyone, and some people would prefer to pay money than to deal with the hassle of doing it themselves. (And trust me, it is a hassle. I have my own gitosis server because I had a business necessity to host my OSS on my own domain. Holy bleeping heck I lost a day of my life to getting that working. That's close to $1,000 of engineer time replicating something very close to what every git hosting company offers for $9 a month.)

People who don't have the skills and don't have the desire to set up a fault- tolerant git infrastructure pay other people to do it for them. Other people being... well... Github. That means that Github has acutely more sensitive uptime demands than somebody's blog on OSS topics or even paid services in less critical contexts. One reason my business is in a less critical context was because I knew that the constraints I was working under made it unreasonable for me to offer customers the assurance that they could build their businesses on me.

<comment><USER8> Does Github offer the assurance that customers can build their businesses on it? If you want an SLA you will probably pay more than $9 per month (beyond the implicit SLA of "I'll take my business elsewhere if somebody else has better uptime for the same price").

<comment><USER7> SLAs are largely meaningless pieces of paper invented by folks who either think that downtime can be wished away by writing the number 9 enough times, or largely meaningless pieces of paper meant to quiet the discontent of non- technical stakeholders by pointing them to a suitably impressive numbers of 9s.

<comment><USER9> I have just cut and pasted that into a presentation I am making tomorrow :-) Page 2.

<comment><USER7> I'd love seeing a copy of that if you don't mind. (Incidentally, should any of you ever want to do this to a quote on HN from me, feel free. I trust your judgement regarding whether it is substantative enough to merit attribution.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Git is decentralized. There's _no way_ Github can affect your ability to deploy. Code can only be pushed there meaning it was written and exists somewhere else.

There's also no way to run your own private SSH or git server without paying a minimal monthly fee. Any such server or Internet connection will go down occasionally.

Nobody is going to stop you from finding an alternative that suits you better. Good luck.

<comment><USER11> Thank you, you are the only poster yet that seems to get it. I agree, the point of git is that you already have your entire repo. Who cares if your remote host is down? Deploy using your branch and when github (or whatever) comes back up you push your changes to github. Done. I don't think of Github as a centralized server, but as a place to search and share code.

<comment><USER12> This is true, but it's a hassle. The one time I needed to deploy and github was down, I had to read a link on their website and set things up. It was a real drag and delayed my launch by at least 15 min!!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _shrug_

Well, I kinda agree, but if github is really a mission critical piece of your company, then perhaps you should be hosting your own repository.

Or at least mirroring it somewhere? Isn't that half the point of using git over svn?

<comment><USER14> With Git, every copy _is_ a mirror.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is really harsh and it sounds like he's looking for a scapegoat on why he is behind on client projects, "i delayed 3 client deploys in the past week due to Github's downtime".

GitHub is very transparent about their issues and from looking at their blog ( <http://github.com/blog/597-a-note-on-the-recent-outages> ), "Following three months of near 100% uptime, we've just been through three major outages in as many days."

The outages weren't "days long" so those delays in deploying a client's project shouldn't have been significant. If the client expected a deployment during a short window it is irresponsible for the development company to keep the code only in a single location. I cover this in a post about availability on my blog ( [http://www.bretpiatt.com/blog/2009/10/03/availability-is- a-f...](http://www.bretpiatt.com/blog/2009/10/03/availability-is-a- fundamental-design-concept/) ).

</comment><comment><USER16> We just had a discussion about this a couple of hours ago. If your deployment depends on an external service, your deployment is broken.

You're using git. Have a fabric script that pulls down the remote repositories that you need, and rsync's them to your servers. This works locally or on a remote box. If github is down, pass in local directory to sync instead. This way you can always push.

He built his infrastructure wrong, and is trying to blame someone else. Sorry, but you are just as much at fault, if not more, than github.

<comment><USER17> I don't think that's an entirely fair argument to make.

For example, I don't think it's unreasonable to write a unit test that expects an SMTP server to be available. Maybe doing so would break the deploy if the SMTP server ever went down, but at that point you have two options: rearchitect your deploy, or find a more reliable SMTP server to test against.

If the author would rather spend his time and money looking for a more reliable git host than rearchitecting his deploy to account for service failures, why is that so bad?

<comment><USER6> It is so bad because it fails to take into account that there are multiple failure points involved (his git host, his internet connectivity, multiple transit providers and routers beyond either his or his hosts control, electricity supply etc.) and that getting a more reliable git host won't even address one of them - no hosting will ever achieve 100% uptime, if only because of eventual human error.

He'd be better served first addressing the significant flaw in his overall process of not having a fallback that bypasses as many failure points as possible.

I.e. why does he not have a constantly updated clone of the repositories _locally_ at the provider hosting his actual sites, so that he can deploy as long as he can get hold of an internet connection somehow and is able to connect to his hosting environment?

This bypasses the local electricity supply, his office internet connection, the transit providers between him and Github, etc., because there are many easily accessible ways of getting an ssh connectio in a pinch, and the remaining dependency is his production hosting, without which deployment wouldn't work anyway.

It would be a simple, cheap and prudent safety mechanism if being able to deploy immediately is business critical for him. It's a matter of a single command in a crontab on one or more of his production servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think i need to clear it up a little bit. (Yeah, it's my post).

I agree that the post came off a bit too harsh maybe, but as far as reliability for a payed service goes, github was yet to provide a decent level. Ever since Github outages started (a while ago, even on EY's age) i decided to push into 2 separate locations and therefore giving Github a further chance (2nd location is another paid account on Unfuddle.com) but the delay on deployments was due to simple need on our side that resulted in the need to push another change to github (updating a vendored private gem) while this process may probably not be perfect it does not remove any responsibility from github as a payed service to provide a better way of supporting payed accounts.

i will review my internal processes further more to see if there's a better way of doing them, but as far as continuing a payment to an unreliable service.. that part is over.

<comment><USER19> I think when companies like 37signals talk about firing clients, you might be the guy they had in mind.

Just saying... I suspect that they can do fine and provide "four nines" without your $7/month contribution.

<comment><USER7> "Four nines" is one of the reasons SLAs are pretty meaningless. That's an hour of downtime every year. One unplanned outage blows that.

Google's flagship product (search) probably breached four nines last year for some users (they had 20~40 minutes of effective downtime with that one "All sites have malware" incident) and they're much, much better than you, I, or Github will ever be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> He makes some decent points about Github's response to their reliability issues, but that's about where it ends. This rant can be summed up as: Github is unreliable and they should work on this, pushing free users to the back burner in favor of their paying clients. Whether or not you agree with that, the rant was a bit unnecessary.

<comment><USER4> How would they do that though? If you look at the details of what cause the outage, it was not a matter of free vs. paid users. Even if they added extra redundancy for paid users that they didn't give free users, that wouldn't do any good in the case of a site-wide failure, which is what they had.

For that matter, I don't think they've ever had an issue that could be isolated to affect only free users, have they?

<comment><USER17> For Outage #3 they said "After inspecting the HTTP logs, we identified a Yahoo! spider that was making thousands of requests but never waiting for responses." Spidering isn't an issue for the paid private repos since they have nothing public to index. However, the web access to private repos went down due to the spidering of the free user pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think this article is being a bit harsh and overly dramatic. However, he does have a point in that the github folks should probably try to architect things such that their paid service is isolated from any mishaps that come from the free service.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't currently have anything hosted at Github, but I use them regularly to check out other people's code and their uptime history is disappointing. I know that they always explain what caused the downtime and I'm glad that they do. Explain what's wrong isn't enough, though. It seems like they have a poorly designed system that can be brought down by almost any piece failing. Their latest outage makes it sound like they don't know how to build a fault tolerant system at all. They have the parts there, like DRBD, but when things go wrong everything breaks anyway. It's like making backups but never testing them so that when you need them it turns out that they can't actually be used to restore anything.

It seems that they have the part that most companies miss, the communication, but that doesn't make up for the lack of reliability.

</comment><comment><USER22> This kind of feels like another "don't know how to use my tools" kind of post.

I was doing some critical work during the last time. I had to collaborate with another developer and he was unable to push through github. So we exchanged code a different way.

I was also doing EC2 tests of the code we were working on during this window. I didn't have trouble getting that deployed (via git, no less) during this time.

It's easy to do the lazy thing and rely on centralized systems when it's _completely_ unnecessary just to avoid a small amount of work to _greatly_ increase the reliability of your platform.

</comment><comment><USER23> Yes, it is pretty bad for github to have so many problems in so few days and if he isn't happy with the service he should leave.

However, seems like he doesn't really understand how to use Git if github being down is barring him from doing his job or deploying his work. Having a single point of failure while using a distributed version control system is incompetence on the developer more so thann it is a problem github being down. Github provides you a lot of nice features and fancy web based interfaces and some social aspect to coding, but to rely solely on it shows a lack of understanding and removes many of the benefits git provides a developer.

</comment><comment><USER24> Not sure what the big deal is.

Customer doesn't feel like the price they are paying is worth the value and leaves.

Only difference is that there are alternatives to this "critical service."

Had this been a rant about the electric company going down in the snowstorm no one would have cared because it was understood these things happen.

Have an absolute need for power no matter what? Better get yourself a backup generator. Just because you pay for a service doesn't mean it won't go down. Just means you should expect them to fix it ASAP.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've been very happy with repositionhosting.com uptime and support.

</comment><comment><USER26> I pay github for a private repo I rarely use, however I really depend on them for my development as all the open source libraries and documentation I use are stationed there. I don't see switching to something else as an alternative.

So what can we do to help them keep their servers up for the community's benefit?

</comment><comment><USER27> Just use gitorious <http://gitorious.com>. If you are not satisfied with the hosting, install locally <http://blog.alexgirard.com/git-gitorious-on-ubuntu>

</comment><comment><USER28> Ouch, that font is hard on the eyes. I have minimum font sizes for readability, but even turning it down, jeez.

Thanks again to the Readability marklet!

</comment><comment><USER29> It's the Internet. Everyone has downtime, even Amazon.

My only complaint about Github is how my profile is turned into a giant ad for github when a non-logged-in user visits it. I think it's really underhanded to use a paying customer's profile page to convince random people to sign up for github. If they want to, they will figure it out, just like the other million users.

<comment><USER30> Would you mind clarifying that for me? We definitely do not intend to do that in any way possible. For example, here is my profile page, logged out: [http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/kneath_s_Profile_- _GitHu...](http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/kneath_s_Profile_- _GitHub-20100207-181426.jpg)

There shouldn't be any excess GitHub branding apart from the obvious bits (header, footer, terminology).

<comment><USER31> On your screenshot I see two links for login and pricing on the header and right down to it.

<comment><USER32> Your username is rather priceless in the current context, btw :)

Rackspace costs money. Servers cost money. Bandwidth costs money. Salaries cost money.

There's nothing shameful about asking users for money. Putting a 'Sign Up' button or two on the page is just good design.

Would you prefer they buried a PayPal donation button on their About page?

I'm also curious about why jrockway thinks a Sign up button is underhanded. Maybe if there was some sort of bait and switch involved, I might see their point. But, the 112x23px button pretty clearly says "Pricing and Signup". Of the 920px x 3783px of content on kneath's profile page, that 112x23px represents 0.07402% of the page.

Plus, it may be _your_ profile page. But it's your profile page on Github's server. If you don't like it, why not build a custom HTTP front end to your privately maintained git repos?

<comment><USER4> Users can add a pledgie donate button to their repos: <http://github.com/devinross/tapkulibrary> Looks like it's bigger than that signup button too...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The large amount of grammar and spelling errors make me question if the author is at all interested in a "real serious business". And WTF is up with the horrendous comma usage? It's similar on his Nautilus6 and LinkedIn websites, too.

Also, how precisely did temporary downtimes prevent deploys? At best, it appears they would've been delayed by a couple hours, and the great part about Git is that you can work around something like that pretty easily. Granted, downtime is annoying, but his extended difficulties seem to largely stem from his own mistakes, and for $7/month he's not exactly paying top dollar to guarantee uptime.

Learn too spell: <http://iampaddy.com/spell/>

<comment><USER18> Like i noted on one of the comments on the post, the need to wait a few hours was due to a last-minute change we had to push.

yes, i do need a better process (even if this case WAS a very specific case that is not likely to happen again) but still, if i pay i want to get the service i pay for.

Github had outages since ever, and although they do seem to do the right thing and make it better, it seems that they are aiming at the wrong direction.

And about the spelling/grammar/whatever errors, i'm just not a native english speaker. Don't think that was the real issue in the post but whatever, one day i'll learn to spell.

<comment><USER4> The spelling/grammer issues just add to the feel that your post was a pissed off rant. My own typing goes to crap if I'm in a rage. The key is to wait a period of time to cool off and go back over the post and fix the errors before you send it, that's all.

<comment><USER18> i'll keep that in mind. (hopefully no "for next time" is required)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


If I were the NYT CEO - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2011/12/19/ifIWereTheNytCeo.html <comment><USER2> I don't really get why this essay on the importance of better Internet speed in NYC is tacked onto a timely and legitimate topic...not that the essay isn't legitimate, but the Times CEO has very little he/she can do in terms of improve citywide net quality than does the CEO of Time Warner.</comment>


Studying impossible systems with analogues - <AUTHOR> https://physicsworld.com/a/studying-impossible-systems-with-analogues/ <comment><USER2> Some of the most thought-provoking work I came across when I was studying optics (laser physics) is referenced in this paper on "Optical Rogue Waves": [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.3071.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.3071.pdf)

Rogue waves, made popular by their often ship-sinking behavior out at sea, are extremely rare and therefore difficult to study by waiting around for them to happen. Here, researchers inject noise into an otherwise stable laser system (recall that light is also a wave) that has some small nonlinear properties and rely on the high rate at which we can generate laser pules to observe rogue waves at a high enough volume to study their properties.

</comment><comment><USER3> A classic (quirky) electronics textbook teaches basic electronics with analogies from high-school physics (mechanics and acoustics).

Dynamical Analogies, by Harry Olson: [https://archive.org/details/DynamicalAnalogies](https://archive.org/details/DynamicalAnalogies)

It's in the public domain. I love it so much I had it printed and bound.

The book is based on lectures given in the 1930s & the math is nothing like what we use now. I can't follow a lot of it. But the tables are intuitive & the explanations are very clear.

<comment><USER4> How is the math unlike anything used now? I have a BS in mechanical engineering and the math in this looks entirely standard to me. Then again, I did get a heavy dose of similarly theory as an undergraduate, and that's rarely taught outside of fluid dynamics and heat transfer. Part of this seems pretty similar to that.

The math might be unusual for a CS graduate, but my impression is that many CS graduates seem unjustifiably afraid of continuous math, probably from a lack of familiarity. Often the continuous case is easier, so being familiar with both approaches can be useful.</comment></comment>


Loki: A promising plan gone terribly wrong [2002] - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20020418225227/http://www.linuxandmain.com/features/lokistory.html <comment><USER2> It seems amazing that so many people were prepared to support the company with loans. Particularly as such support was surely a strong indication that the company was in trouble.</comment>


Questions VCs Will Ask and What They Mean - <AUTHOR> http://www.socialtimes.com/2011/01/entrepreneurs-corner-10-questions-vcs-will-ask-and-what-it-means/

<comment><USER2> It's a great list of questions, but don't take the translations too literally. Usually when VCs ask "what's your exit strategy" they're just checking to see whether you've been thinking about, not looking to take you out as CEO. If you go into every conversation expecting the person you're talking with to be evil, it will really warp your experience.

<comment><USER3> That's true. Don't be too paranoid, otherwise that'll come across to the VC as "this might be interesting but too adversarial to invest in."

But also, don't overlook the prospect that the person you're talking to is evil. Happens more than we'd like to think; lot of sharks in these waters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I hear pitches by startups, I always despise the TAM slide. I'm more interested in markets that are too new to calculate.

I worry that VCs who ask what the size of the market is are looking for evidence where there isn't any.

<comment><USER5> "Start-ups CREATE markets" - Kai Huang

<comment><USER6> Need is infinite. All markets already exist and successful start ups just create products and services that capitalize on novel approaches to old problems. There are no blue oceans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "1. Where did you get your idea? Translation: if your simple idea is so great, why hasn't anyone else done it?"

I assume every idea I think up has already been thought of, in fact, I'm almost certain they have been. A better question to ask would be "How are you going to successfully execute your idea?"

</comment><comment><USER8> Sorry I'm late. Translation: I'm not sorry I'm late. Did you park in my space?

I kid, I kid. I love VC's.</comment>


28M Mail-In Ballots Went Missing in Last Four Elections - <AUTHOR> https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_million_mail-in_ballots_went_missing_in_last_four_elections_143033.html <comment><USER3> The article's title is misleading, and it misrepresents the content and conclusions of some of its sources.

The 28 million ballots in question aren't "missing"; they're ballots that were mailed to voters and weren't used.

In some cases the voters in question likely didn't bother voting (common in local elections) or simply forgot (I've done this when I accidentally stacked other mail on top of a ballot and then didn't find it again until too late). In other cases, voters may have moved and failed to update their voter registration. This situation isn't unusual or alarming, and the opportunities for fraud aren't nearly as plentiful as the article tries to imply.

The article cites a 2008 report by the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project as recommending that states abolish absentee voting due to fraud concerns, but that report contains only a single paragraph proposing a theoretical _potential_ for fraud due to "unsecured" mail channels. It provides no evidence that this is common or has even occurred, and in fact devotes significantly more space to discussing the inconvenience of mail-in punch-card ballots with Styrofoam backings — something I had never heard of despite having voted by mail for almost two decades.

The article also cites a 2008 Reed College study, which again raises theoretical concerns about fraud but offers no substantive evidence that it's an issue, and in fact states that "A report commissioned by the federal Election Assistance Commission, authored by Tova Wang and Jed Seberov, concluded, on the basis of interviews with experts in the area, that there was little evidence of voter fraud."

</comment><comment><USER4> There's nothing magic about ballot sheets. Anyone could run off as many as they want on a copier. What protects elections in vote by mail systems is the fact that you can check your ballot status and everyone can only vote once. If you steal my ballot, I get a replacement and we both vote, that will be flagged. Plus you need to know how to forge my signature, which they _do_ check.

<comment><USER5>
      everyone can only vote once

Does your registrar even check that? SV's doesn't even check if a given voter voted both precinct and absentee or if one voted in multiple precincts (e.g. prior and current neighborhood after a move to another precinct). They don't even check for existing registration in other precincts (let alone counties) unless the voter explicitly provides prior-address data.

<comment><USER6> Who is SV?

Every jurisdiction I'm aware of in the USA does ballot reconciliation, to detect double voting. Some are using electronic poll books, updated in near real time, to help prevent it.

<comment><USER5> Silicon Valley, e.g. Santa Clara County.

"Ballot reconciliation", executed _perfectly_ , can only detect multiple ballots by the same registration.

I'm talking about an individual registered _multiple times in separate precincts_ simultaneously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unreturned (uncast) ballots are not "missing".

USPS's UAA (undelivered as addressed) rate for first class mail is ~1%. Both ways. Something for postal ballot advocates to consider. Make sure your jurisdictions have online ballot trackers.

<comment><USER7> No, no, no.

These "improvements" are anything but.

If we value the integrity of our elections, we need to minimize the amount of metadata generated.

You need:

\- a small pollbook of legal voters

\- a location for those voters to obtain and secretly mark a paper ballot

\- a means to cast that ballot and tally that polling place's numbers

\- a chain of custody for all ballots that protects the election's legitimacy

Elections, and the political power that they grant, demand that we curb our natural tendency to over-engineer systems.

The more shiny, spiffy gadgets and doo-dads we apply to this process, the greater the harm its legitimacy.

If you want, I can flog this dead horse all the way down to glue.

<comment><USER8> > \- a location for those voters to obtain and secretly mark a paper ballot

But then how do you get more poor and minority folks to vote? These are the people harmed by not having mail in (or more appropriately called "time free" voting.

Don't we want more participation? Especially by those who find current rules end in a trade-off of wages for the ability to vote?

<comment><USER6> During the aughts, my small cadre opposed "vote by mail" (100% postal ballots, limited in person voting) because we believed it'd disenfranchise the poor, minorities, and students.

Anecdotally, because we had trouble accessing the relevant data, we reasoned those populations are more mobile, with inferior mail service, so postal balloting faces more challenges.

Until very recently, it seemed as though our predictions were proving true.

However, in my jurisdiction, since 2016, both voter registration and participation has increased, seemingly durably. I dare not hope, for fear of jinxing it, these trends continue.

Fast forward to today. I'm very worried about 2020. For so many reasons.

I've always supported postal balloting such that it enfranchises people who would otherwise be disenfranchised. (Postal balloting was invented for people serving in the military and otherwise wouldn't be able to vote.)

So during this pandemic I don't see any other choice than to permit postal balloting for any and all (on demand, no justification necessary).

But knowing firsthand the challenges my jurisdiction had with a gradual well funded switch over, it's going to be a nationwide fubar. Especially in non- urban counties without the institutional knowledge.

Now, more than ever, we need to pour resources into election administration. And managing expectations. For example, final results are going to take A LOT longer, so people (especially media) should be prepared to wait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > States and local authorities simply have no idea what happened to these > ballots since they were mailed – and the figure of 28 million missing > ballots is likely even higher because some areas in the country, notably > Chicago, did not respond to the federal agency's survey questions.

> This figure does not include ballots that were spoiled, undeliverable, or > came back for any reason.

</comment><comment><USER10> Blaming "ballot harvesting" on Hillary Clinton winning three popular vote is really something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well it's certainly part of the reason.

More philosophically, when one's voting agency is shared with another person, as is the case in ballot harvesting, the opportunity for abuse multiplies. This is why most states have outlawed ballot harvesting.

Consider: I come to your door with a ballot. You had not thought about voting because you didn't particularly care about the candidates, but I am an agent for candidate A and because I got to you before the agent for candidate B, I convince you - good salesman that I am - to vote for someone you wouldn't have otherwise.

Thus the voting process become less about what the voters themselves think or care about and more about which candidate has the most resources to send agents out to ballot harvest.

The corruption that such practices invite completely undermine the voting process and it is only with a blatant disregard for the voting process - <USER2> fixation on power above principle - that a state would allow such practices.

<comment><USER10> > Well it's certainly part of the reason.

No, the reason is that Trump is a historically unpopular person and President. Blaming "ballot harvesting" is hilarious on the order of claiming Russia altered vote totals.

The article makes a similar point regarding the loss of Orange County Republicans, despite the fact that their prior strength has been eroded for years based on the OC's demographic trends, the vilification of refugees in a region with a vibrant Vietnamese community, and the elimination of the SALT deduction. The article is partisan hand-wringing, pure and simple.</comment></comment></comment>


Non-Valley, non-NYC ecosystems: No one you want cares about the cost of living - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/06/19/memo-to-non-valley-non-nyc-ecosystems-no-one-you-want-cares-about-the-cost-of-living/

<comment><USER2> _" Ecosystems should just stop making this argument. They're never going to get top entrepreneurial talent, and will only attract those people not aiming high enough, who are motivated by saving money, not making it, and not building something great — the mercenaries, rather than the missionaries."_

That's just a sweeping generalization offered without a shred of evidence. There are some phenomenally successful companies that were founded outside Silicon Valley or NYC. Amazon and Microsoft come to mind. (Microsoft may not be trendy now, but it definitely made its founders and shareholders a whole lot of money over a long period of time.)

Also, ten years ago, before there were a lot of startups in NYC, the author would have probably said that NYC was an entrepreneurial backwater that was "never going to get top entrepreneurial talent". Times change, places change, people move around.

<comment><USER3> I think he means that by "making this argument" (that is, 'hey, join us, we're based in a place with a low cost of living'), they're never going to get top entrepreneurial talent. Not that they're never going to get top entrepreneurial talent at all because of where they are.</comment></comment>


Howto: Copy/Tee/Clone network traffic using iptables - <AUTHOR> http://www.bjou.de/blog/2008/05/howto-copyteeclone-network-traffic-using-iptables/ <comment><USER2> this can be done easily with pf using the dup-to flag of a match statement.

using a span port or other physical network tap would probably be a better solution than these things in production, though.</comment>


Ask HN: Code Review as Interview Question? - <AUTHOR> Has anyone here ever had an job candidate conduct a code review on supplied code as part of an interview?<p>I have a theory that the way someone does code reviews will say a lot more about them than a white boarding problem. 1) You'd get a good sense of their attention to detail and ability to think about code without actually running it. 2) It could cover not just bugs/edge cases/performance issues/depth of knowledge, but also patterns and best practices. 3) You could see their communication style and their ability to offer criticism without belittling people. <comment> _-___________-_ I thought about launching code-review-as-a-service once, and if the code comes from a large codebase this could suffer from the problems that made me decide not to do it: the most meaningful/useful code review feedback can often only be received from someone who is familiar with the codebase.

However, if the code in question is solving a highly self-contained problem, I think this could be a good part of the hiring process.</comment>


Ask HN: Why am I not getting any interview calls? - <AUTHOR> I am a Java developer with 12 years of exp working for same company.Couple of years ago I got shortlisted by Amazon and 2 other companies, but couldn't clear interview.I gave up after a while.
This year I started trying again. I am targeting Seattle area specifically. I don't have much of a network, so I search jobs on indeed.com. However this year I am not even getting replies to my applications. It's like radio silence. What could be the reason?
1. Maybe my resume indicates I am not a good programmer? but then how did I get calls last time I tried?
2. Are the chances for job application without any employee referral very low?
3. Maybe nobody needs a programmer with 12 year experience. In fact, most jobs I see on indeed.com ask for 5-6 years of experience.
4. Maybe working for same employer so long is playing against me. If thats the case, I can't fix that.
5. My company uses technologies that are 5-6 years older. Maybe thats the reason? I keep myself updated by doing some sample projects, but most companies are looking for hands-on experience rather that just studying on my own.
6. I don't have official management experience. Maybe companies think why this guy is not leading people despite having so much experience? I mentor my colleagues all the time, but I was never in a tech lead or team lead position. My company once asked me to lead people, but I refused because wasn't interested that time. But now I regret it.
7. I don't have a CS degree, although I am an engineer. But I really doubt if that matters.
Were you in this position ever? If yes, what did you do?
Edit: This is what my tech stack looks like. Don't want to post my entire resume here.
Languages- Java, JavaScript, PL/SQL, Objective-C, Swift, Python, Perl
J2EE-JSP, Servlet , JDBC , Jersey, Spring, Hibernate, JPA, RMI, EJB, JUnit, Log4J, Ant, Gradle, Maven, KaOa
Web- HTML5, Java Script, JSON, JQuery, ExtJS, Less, AngularJS, BackboneJS, NodeJS <comment><USER2> Summary

1 - no one can answer this without seeing your resume(you could trying changing names of company/project/you)

2 - there are lots of jobs filled through indeed/etc..

3 - people are looking for dev's with experience

4 - some younger companies will see this as a mark against you, a lot of companies will see this as a benefit.

5 - easily fixable, build a side project put technology on resume.

6 - it's not management experience specifically but it might be a lack of visible career advancement(to the recruiter)

7 - most companies count engineering degrees~~CS degrees)

Fixes

Apply to older more established companies.

Build a couple of side projects with with new tech then put on resume

Make sure to craft story in your resume of career progression. Even if your title stayed the same show how your responsibilities and business value have grown.

So you don't have any problems a little elbow grease can't fix :).

</comment><comment><USER3> > My company uses technologies that are 5-6 years older. Maybe thats the > reason? I keep myself updated by doing some sample projects, but most > companies are looking for hands-on experience rather that just studying on > my own.

This jumps out at me. HR people just use buzzwords now and may not even be passing you any further down the funnel. People down the funnel will see this and assume that you stopped learning new tricks 6 years ago, and overestimate the distance between your current skillset and their tech stack.

I'd suggest open sourcing something relatively current. It's not enough to make toy projects for yourself: you need to make things publicly, and things that are actually useful to others.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats a great advice. I recently developed lot of interest in machine learning. I could probably create something useful out of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Applying to jobs on indeed / monster and similar sites has got to be about the worst way to look for a job. You might have better luck looking for opportunities on more niche job websites that are more software engineering centric or perhaps even targeting Java. Having 12 years of experience and only knowing a single language certianly doesn't look good either.

[http://stackoverflow.com/jobs](http://stackoverflow.com/jobs)

<comment><AUTHOR> I do know other languages. It's just that Java is primary language used at work. I've updated my post with my tech stack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Focus on how you can contribute to solving business problems, not on your "tech stack." No business has a need for more Java code. What they need are people who can understand business requirements and solve problems.

[http://typicalprogrammer.com/job-hunting-and- interviewing/](http://typicalprogrammer.com/job-hunting-and-interviewing/)

<comment><USER6> Many, many businesses hire dedicated people for that (Product Owners/BAs etc.) and have a budget to hire programmers to make more Java code.

<comment><USER5> I think that's confusing business needs with work product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You should post your resume.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have posted my tech stack.</comment></comment>


What I want in a recipe blogging platform - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pamelafox.org/2011/03/what-i-want-in-recipe-blogging-platform.html

<comment><USER2> That's very very interesting. I'm also curious if something like this already exists or is being actively worked on. I'm pretty sure most big recipe sites like allrecipes.com must allow you to make your own recipes, but the spin is centered more on the site itself. What you suggest would be more of a platform than a destination site, say the way wordpress.com compares to techcrunch.com (for lack of a better analogy).</comment>


Dilbert Principle - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle <comment><USER2> Possibly related to the Peter Principle[1], where people are promoted until they reach a position where they are incompetent.

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

<comment><USER3> IIRC Scott Adams intended (and accordingly named) the Dilbert Principle to be understood as a kind of Peter Principle 2.0

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, that makes me feel better about my lack of (titular) success. On the one hand, I'm paid well as an individual contributor and I do actually do work that I can see the results of, but on the other hand, my title is nothing impressive and my workspace is four feet worth of one of eight twenty-foot long tables in a 10,000 square foot open office bullpen... right next to the wall of Important People who have offices with doors that can close.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't know, I find it pretty irrelevant.</comment>


Ask HN: MacBook Pro replacement? - <AUTHOR> After all the threads and posts and hype around the "new" Macs, specially how it is expensive and does not worth the money, there are still a lot of things I cannot find in any other computer.
Not only hardware but also software.
Just a bit of history. As a normal, non tech person, in the beginning I mostly used Windows. After I started programming I started using Linux and I mostly used, and still use, Ubuntu and Arch, obviously depending on the purpose of the installation. But since a I got my first Mac I cannot replace it for any other computer I have tried.
Regarding the software part, there are two things that bother me:
* Iterm2: It is amazing, from the customizations (key binds, theme, fonts, etc) to the easy setup , it just works and allows me to do my job very efficiently. * General OS features: Overall performance of the OS, and also some minor features such as multi desktop navigation with the trackpad, etc.
In terms of hardware:
* Trackpad, there is no trackpad I have used that can be compared to the one in my Mac. It is so good that when I am on the move I do not worry not to have a mouse, I can use browser and what ever I want outside the terminal and it is amazing.
* The mac size, screen quality, keyboard quality and battery durability.
I have seen lots of discussions around this but still I do not have a replacement that can meet the minimum requirements for the change. Do you have any suggestions for all this points? <comment><USER2> If you have the money to (comfortably) do it, then just get a MacBook Pro. Otherwise: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815393)

<comment><AUTHOR> All of those trackpads are not usable.

<comment><USER3> have you used them all? I get the feeling you just assume they're unusable. I used a macbook for years and happily switched to a HP Spectre, the different trackpad was never an issue. You could also just get a USB mouse, better than any trackpad (in my opinion).

<comment><AUTHOR> I have never used them as a daily computer but I tried using them in the store. So in this case I tried the Dell the Asus and the Lenovo. And they all kind of are not in the same league. Scrolling is not smooth. Weird ghost touches.

I cannot explain this better. This is my experience.

I have a 6 year old Asus and I cannot see much improvement in the trackpad.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AWS Lowers Data Transfer Prices - <AUTHOR> http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/ann.jspa?annID=313

<comment><USER2> Saturday I bitch at Bezos about EC2 prices, Wednesday they announce a price cut. I'll let my ego think that it isn't a coincidence :-)

<comment><USER3> But this is an S3 price cut, not an EC2 price cut.

<comment><USER2> It's a general data transfer price cut. It applies to both S3 and EC2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> umm, yes please. amazon actually sent us (justin.tv) an email showing how many dollars we'll save this month based on last month's usage.

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems like Bezos wasn't joking when he said Amazon is actively looking to lower their costs and pass the savings to the consumers.

</comment><comment><USER6> An amusing case where lowering your price raises the bar to entry for competitors. Well played Amazon, well played.

<comment><USER7> Not trying to troll, but isn't lowering prices always a competitive pressure on other players in the market.

<comment><USER6> I guess what I was going for was they were forgoing profits in the short term to preemptively shut out possible future competitors. They already have a big lead here... so they are trading some profits (realized through cost savings) for extending that lead.

Don't feel like a troll for pointing out that I was being redundantly redundant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am half joking. I realize there are real costs, albeit very small [orders of magnitude lower than AWS], for data transfer. For my application, I would love to outsource storage, but the economics using AWS are not favorable. I will continue to host my own storage.

</comment><comment><USER9> I guess it is some what expected when Google and Microsoft both are entering in same market.

<comment><USER10> Microsoft is entering this market?

<comment><USER5> If be entering the market we're talking about the magical platform that will sync all your data and applications across all your devices, wait no, just Windows devices, then maybe. But I hardly see that being anywhere close to S3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Still too expensive. Why charge for transfer costs?

<comment><USER3> Because it costs them money to transfer the data to you.</comment></comment>


Do You Have a Moral Duty to Leave Facebook? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/facebook-immoral.html <comment><USER3> I don't use FB for aesthetic reasons not moral / ethical. But to extend this question, do we have a duty to stop using NYT b/c they use advertising that violates user privacy? To avoid watching Roman Polanski movies? Or the big question, do we have a duty to stop paying taxes b/c our money goes to pay for bombs 'n' guns?

We live in a world where it is very difficult to limit our personal commerce to avoid indirect support for activities and people we may find repugnant. I am reminded of the Biblical parable of 'Render Unto Caesar'. While I applaud those who stand on principle, I do not condemn those (most of us) who find it necessary to separate personal from political.

<comment><USER4> Yes, we do need to stop paying taxes. The only problem is they put you in prison if you stop. We are slaves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [Note: I have a hatred toward Facebook the company and what it has done with its products and strategy.]

We have a moral duty to not do or support so many things, but we still do because of other people, social conditioning, believing that there's no better way, etc. Making binary decisions in life is not easy most of the time.

On Facebook, my belief is that people ought to quit it on moral grounds, but there are no comprehensive equivalents to its features on facebook.com for them to move to. There are plenty of alternatives for WhatsApp and FB Messenger that are far, far better than those. Instagram could also be replaced with some adjustment. But the Facebook timeline, news feed, groups, pages, events, etc., are not easy to replace with a single alternative.

I can't wait for the day when quitting becomes easy because alternatives are far better and easier to use.

</comment><comment><USER6> Man, NYtimes has really chilled out on their coverage of the tech companies...

<comment><USER7> Maybe it improves their engagement metric.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Times seems to be on an anti-Facebook crusade of sorts. Which is fine with me, but morality is usually the weakest & least important argument for doing anything. That's why so many people - the clergy - have to make a full-time career out of declaring it to be the _most_ important.

Quitting Facebook benefits you, selfishly and immediately; end of story.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ugh! This is getting tiresome. Yes, NY Times hates Facebook. I get it. Can we please stop posting story after story about that here?

</comment><comment><USER10> I left FB in 2013 because of duty to myself. If anything you should stay on FB because of duty to others. FB made it clear that they are not able to control what happens on the platform, so it's on users.

I would not like the idea of FB to fail (connect the world) but would like its current business model to fail (selling private information to highest bidder).

<comment><USER7> > I would not like the idea of FB to fail (connect the world) but would like > its current business model to fail (selling private information to highest > bidder).

They don't. This is completely _against_ their business model (which is - <USER2> the perspective of the target, aka you and me - the same business model google has). They don't sell your information, they want _all_ your information to sell advertisers the ability to target and tailor their ads to you (and convince advertisers to give them _more_ data so they can target more efficiently).

I don't understand why and how this trope keeps getting repeated, particularly among tech people.

Just the fact they are _collecting_ the data is bad (and incentivizing other business to throw their data in their databases), there is no reason for spewing FUD about what their business model is, or even touching how good/bad they are (or were years ago) at preventing that data from leaving their servers.

<comment><USER11> They sell targeted screen space seems more accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> No. You can do whatever you want. Look twice, and then once more hard at anyone that tells you have a moral duty to do anything.

<comment><USER13> You pretty obviously can't do whatever you want. From a legal perspective you'll be arrested and prosecuted if you commit a crime. From a philosophical perspective you have a moral duty to do good, by virtue of the intrinsic definition of good (whatever that may be in your ethical framework). Even if your ethical system says you should only do what makes you happy, you still have a duty to fulfill that goal as it is internally equivalent to the concept of good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This would be an interesting topic for an episode of "the Good Place".

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not going to tell anyone else what _they_ should do, but _I_ am unwilling to use or associate with any of their services or properties.

<comment><USER16> Could you explain why?

<comment><USER15> The article explains why.

Facebook is a genuinely evil company with genuinely evil people doing genuinely evil things to manipulate the world in negative ways, and I want nothing to do with them. They've been immoral/unethical from the start.

They manipulate their users, cause genuine harm to people, the world, and democracy, and should not be rewarded with continued use of their services.

Edit: Because people have been downvoting/flagging my comments, I'm no longer allowed to reply to people and continue the discussion.

<comment><USER17> Those are some mighty incredible claims. Care to defend them with proof?

<comment><USER15> [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46302140](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46302140)

[https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/facebook-role- rohingy...](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/facebook-role-rohingya- genocide-180313161609822.html)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook- cambr...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambridge- analytica-explained.html)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook- tinke...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with- users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/what- facebook-did/542502/)

Some of these are direct actions by the company. Some are unintended consequences. And this isn't even getting into the personal harm and unhealthy behavior that comes from use of Facebook and similar manipulative social media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I couldn't read the article because it has a paywall but I left facebook because it was ridiculous, not moral duty

<comment><USER19> If you open the link in an incognito window, it should work.

<comment><USER18> I will try that thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There seem to be at least one post every day on Hacker News that's negative about Facebook. Does anyone here know why?

<comment><USER20> Well first and foremost, there has always been primal hostility on HN and similar boards toward advertising, and anything with privacy concerns.

Secondly, HN tends toward the far progressive end of the cultural spectrum (with libertarian streaks). And in the shocked and confused search for explanations, as to how a boorish game show host could win a Presidential election, Facebook has emerged as a prominent scapegoat.

Lastly, but not least, HN's demographics seem to skew young, while FB's demographics are clearly trending older. The more that trend continues, the more FB will be seen representing a tribal "other".

<comment><USER21> Hmm, I'm not sure they're just a scapegoat.

I think there's very serious concerns to a society which seems to consume most of it's media as curated by AI and their online friends as opposed to say, a newspaper editor.

Especially when it seems like, half the time, people don't even read the articles and just get outraged by the headline which they assume to be true.

And the whole, people being in bubbles with their own viewpoint cannot be a positive.

<comment><USER7> > I think there's very serious concerns to a society which seems to consume > most of it's media as curated by AI and their online friends as opposed to > say, a newspaper editor.

Be careful - AIs may be wrong and manipulated and with authors with agendas, and newspaper editors can be wrong and manipulated and have agendas. There are countless example of newspapers being wrong and creating a narrative in the past (ex: look at "manufacturing consent" book) to either support the government or cover their (or the government) mistakes, or just plainly hide facts. And with media concentration, this is just going to get worse and worse :)

Or look at what the reaction by the NYT (or WaPo, or media in general) was to the massive social media presence and access of the Obama campaign [1] compared to what their reaction were after Trump won and they needed a scapegoat to somewhat make sense of it even after some voices called (on TV) for a moment of reflection about the dangers of them "being cheerleaders" [2].

Always remember "engagement" is a metric very important for newspapers too - their business model is _selling ads_ , exactly like facebook does!

[1] [https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975564499297226752](https://twitter.com/cld276/status/975564499297226752)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY3nRgEZTm8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY3nRgEZTm8)

<comment><USER21> Yes. I know newspapers sell ads. And I'm familiar with the fact that journalists may have biases and special interests.

I never said anyone should put their full faith in newspapers.

But they're certainly better edited than the Facebook feed.

<comment><USER7> On that, I have to agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> We have no more moral duty in leaving Facebook than we do in disabling our ad blockers.

<comment><USER23> Well.. I don't know about your ad-blocker, but mine does not play any role in genocide. Unlike FB in Myanmar.

<comment><USER22> Ad blockers are theft.

<comment><USER24> My refusal to read or view content that has been provided to me is an exercising of my right to consent.

Those providing the content are free to revoke their consent as well, and many do when ads fail to render.

It is not theft to refuse to consent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> By the way I think it's possible to leave facebook while keeping messenger. At this point, I feel like most of the people I know who are on fb use it or messenger rather than anything else.

<comment><USER24> I've been encouraging friends to use SMS instead.

<comment><USER21> FB messenger is probably more secure than SMS, especially if you use secret conversations (although you lose portability of conversations this way).

Signal and iMessage are my favorites personally.

<comment><USER24> My security conscious friends already use encrypted channels of communication. It's the ad-adverse and creepy-suggestions-wary that benefit from switching to SMS.

SMS doesn't require an app that requests invasive access to information.

<comment><USER26> SMS gives the involved operator(s) access to the content. Depending where you are, those may be pretty creepy themselves.

<comment><USER24> Sure, and depending on where you are there may be strong regulation on what they can do with that data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The article concludes that it is acceptable to stay on Facebook, but I take issue with its approach.

Underlying the logic is a premise: that because Facebook is used by some to spread propaganda and promote hate, it is (at least in part) to blame for the illiberal trajectory of some Western democracies. For many, it is more simplistic: there is a belief that Facebook is to blame for our election outcome. Of course, it is extremely difficult to know how much "to blame" Facebook as opposed to traditional media, and conclusive facts will be impossible to obtain. Both lines of reasoning, it should be noted, neglect the possibility that the election was determined by the will of people under a non-democratic system via the electoral college.

To me, the question is whether or not Facebook is a unique actor in this capacity. Does Facebook do something substantially different from other social media platforms or content providers that particularly undermines democratic values? I don't believe it does: Twitter spreads conspiracy theories, Snapchat is used for bullying and harassment, Google has comparable troves of data for sale to advertisers. While it has certainly had some public relations snafus, on the whole, as a platform it isn't that unique.

</comment><comment><USER28> When will New York Times point their Eye of Sauron against the things that you enjoy? They have no business spreading their version of "morality" lest it become a slippery slope into a new religion.

Facebook is an ad company. You don't have to use it if you don't want to. And even if they target you with ads, who cares? After decades of people saying "I don't notice the ads on web sites" all of a sudden web ads have the ability to take down countries? Don't dress it up as a "moral" issue, and plus, whose morality is the one judging this?

If you pick at every single company, you can find things that give you a "moral duty" to leave. How far will they go? Love video games? It encourages violence and gambling, you have a moral duty to leave. Do you have moral duty to not use Amazon anymore because they don't treat their workers the way the NYT wants them to be treated? Love muscle cars? It kills the environment with pollution, you have a moral duty to leave. Love cooking? Why aren't you feeding the homeless instead, you have a moral duty to do that instead of wasting money on fancy food.

<comment><USER26> How do you square this view with your public statement about having lost your respect for Yegge when he joined Grab? Weren't you doing the same thing as the NYT is doing here - voicing your opinion on what companies one should avoid for ethical reasons?

<comment><USER28> Nope, your analogy is deeply flawed.

I'm not telling people that they have a moral obligation to do or think anything. I gave my opinion that I lost respect in Steve Yegge, because he was being a hypocrite. I didn't say "People should no longer respect Steve Yegge because he's a hypocrite". There's a profound difference between the two.

<comment><USER26> You essentially said Steve Yegge had a moral obligation not to be an hypocrite, and therefore to not join Grab the way he did.

<comment><USER28> You have a moral obligation not to misrepresent what I write.

<comment><USER26> It's my honest interpretation. I don't see how they are not equivalent. Maybe you could help me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Python in the browser - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jimmy.schementi.com/2010/03/pycon-2010-python-in-browser.html <comment><USER2> Silverlight... with "performance" stuff in C#? What kind of client-side scripting is going on that we need to push it down to C#?

Javascript does a great job manipulating the DOM, especially with Prototype and the like.

Having a stronger scripting language in the browser like python (even ruby?) would be great if it didn't come at a significant cost and increased performance. If you'd ask anyone who spends a significant amount of time writing js code, they'd want it faster. Not Python that is built on top of a proprietary engine (plugin based!), that uses... JAVASCRIPT to embed it.

On top of that, the python code looks semantically identical to DOM manipulation in Prototype. So really the only thing you've gained is "writing client code in python" while dumping proprietary formats and a huge initial download on your users. I'll excuse myself as sensationalist when I say that it seems a little selfish on the developer's part.

</comment><comment><USER3> This was quite interesting, until, "This is because Silverlight is the Python execution engine."

</comment><comment><USER4> And now, Python in the browser without Silverlight (i.e., on pure JS):

<http://www.skulpt.org/>

<comment><USER5> "Skulpt surely isn't done yet...I'd call it something like 0.12 alpha if it had a version..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Python in the browser" ... with Silverlight.

</comment><comment><USER7> As much as I love .NET, I just can't get excited about Silverlight. When you require your users to install a new plugin, it raises the barrier to entry pretty significantly -- especially when you're talking about technical users.

Personally, I took a different route: I created a Python->Javascript compiler with a real macro system. Allows me to quickly hack damn near anything together and keeps me away from JS (which I can't stand, largely for aesthetic reasons), without imposing anything at all on my users.

<comment><USER8> So basically Silverlight loses out because Flash was first-to-market? They're essentially the same thing.

I mean, I don't do Silverlight either, but your reasoning seems suspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find JavaScript and Python are more similar than they are different.

Coming from Python, learned JavaScript, felt right at home. (just have to remember the vars, {}s and ;s)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is interesting in a very narrow niche. But even being a Python fanboy I'm more likely to bring JS into the server than Python into the browser. It just makes huge piles of sense.

</comment><comment><USER11> 1.5 MB, even if one-time only (assuming no cache-cleaning on client side), is quite heavy. Too heavy for vast majority of web applications.

<comment><USER12> Depends on your audience. For a lot of in-house applications, that wouldn't be much of a problem. But if you are trying to build a new social media web site, it might well be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What an ugly hack.</comment>


A2Z: A computer designed and built from scratch. Custom CPU on FPGA (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.io/project/18206-a2z-computer <comment><USER2> Cool project! It's interesting the dichotomy in tech communities between the 'minimalists' on one hand who love to get under the hood, work their way down to the bare metal and understand how everything works, and the opposite trend, building seemingly simple web apps that sit on top of 1,000 libraries and frameworks, pack their huge dependency chains into Docker containers distributed onto clusters (probably because the app runs so slow on a single VM), etc. I wonder if it's two fundamentally different kinds of personalities at work.

<comment><USER3> The first person you describe has to have almost endless amounts time and/or technical interest available to them. The second person you describe has a job to get done as quickly as possible and move on to the next job.

The whole reason libraries and frameworks were created is so everyone doesn't have to dig down to the bare metal to get a task completed. If my manager asked me to provision a server to run an application on and I sat down and built my own hardware from scratch and then wrote my own OS rather than clicking a single button in VMware, I'd be fired pretty quickly.

<comment><USER4> You sound defensive. I don't think the parent meant that one type is better than the other.

The fundamental difference is not amount of free time. It's just a question of interest and what you are good that. There are people who spend their endless free time making shiny web apps just like there are people who spend it designing CPUs for fun.

Depending on your line of work digging to the bare metal _does_ help get your job done quickly. I know a number of embedded systems programmers, bare metal _is_ their job. There are people paid to work on the Linux kernel, to program FPGAs for high-frequency trading, and so on.

And learning the low level can help doing your job quickly even if you are not a systems programmer. All abstractions are leaky and inevitably some low-level problem will bubble up into your high-level application and you will have to deal with it. If you understand the low-level it may take half or one tenth of the time to figure out and fix the problem.

<comment><USER5> There are tradeoffs everywhere. The parent made it sound like libraries and frameworks are always going to make you go faster, of course that's not always the case and I don't think the parent believes that. It's very often worth it to descend a level or two to do your job, some things can be done faster, lower, though it's rarely worth it to descend all the way to the bare metal or deeper (but sometimes necessary). Another but echoes your conclusion, sometimes a bit of knowledge at those layers will indirectly help at the layers above.

When the subject of many layered JS frameworks and dependency graphs with hundreds of mini libraries comes up I'm always reminded of Rasmus's 30 second ajax tutorial: [https://web.archive.org/web/20060507105529/http://news.php.n...](https://web.archive.org/web/20060507105529/http://news.php.net/php.general/219164) (And the modern equivalent: [http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/](http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/)) Very often libraries and frameworks are brought in because they "help us go faster [because of x,y,z]" with some x,y,zs like "we don't have to think about that problem" or "the global architecture/structure is taken care of", but the cost of dependencies sometimes outweighs the cost of thinking about the problem and doing it yourself. Libraries and frameworks are tradeoffs, you'll likely use a lot of them if you look at every layer you can actually influence, but they're not necessarily net boons.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I can agree with that. You'll get the most value out of understanding the 1 or 2 layers below. Digging all the way to bare metal is usually not necessary or practical, though it may help once in a long while.

For example, ORMs. If you try to use an ORM without knowing SQL you will have a bad time as soon as you hit performance issues or you have to do something that doesn't fit quite nicely into the ORM model. I have yet to see a project that uses an ORM that doesn't use SQL in places.

ORMs are not necessarily net positive. They make _some_ things simpler at the cost of an extra layer of indirection.

Going a level deeper, knowing how query planners work at a high level will help writing performant SQL queries.

Going as far as understanding how your RDMS is implemented should not typically be necessary. It would help for finding bugs in the RDMS, but that should be very rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's the great nand2tetris course [1] - teaches step by step how to build a computer from the simplest logical gates, using hdl, to building your own ALU, computer, and later on operating system, etc'.

[1] [https://www.nand2tetris.org/](https://www.nand2tetris.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> To quote the author (F4HDK) who designed everything from hardware to software, compiler,loader,assembler etc: It is a design that came from my imagination, not from existing CPUs. It is a RISC design, without microcode, and instruction are very low level. Therefore, the executable code is much bigger than for CISC CPUs. But the CPU core itself is very simple: especially instruction decoding is very very simple. It is also slower than CISC because the CPU takes lots of time just for reading instructions from the bus (and of course there is no execution pipeline)... But it works!

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice Job! Don't be discouraged when people say "What a waste of time, why didn't you just use an Arduino?"

When I went to college I had a choice of majoring in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering (there weren't computer systems degrees at the time). Since I really really wanted to know how to build a computer from the ground up (I had assembled one from a kit already in high school and was hungry to know more!) I chose getting my degree in EE with a minor in CS. I don't know where you are in your studies but if you have the opportunity you might find, as I did, that this path scratches that particular itch.

There are a number of books you might track down which you would find interesting given what you now have learned about computer internals. One is "A DEC view on hardware design" which talks about the minicomputers and their architecture that DEC designed. "Introduction to Computer Systems using the PDP-11 and PASCAL" (McGraw-Hill computer science series). And "Digital Computer Design" by Kline. All are out of print but a good computer science section in a library should have them.

One of the reasons I enjoy the older books on computer design is that they assume you don't know why different paths were chosen and so they explain in more detail why one path is better than another. Modern texts often assume you have learned these best practices elsewhere and so treat these design decisions as given knowledge.

If you ever do decide to pick it up again, the two places that you might find rewarding would be automated co-processing (like DMA controllers) and complex mathematical instructions (like floating point).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for this encouraging comment! I ended my studies 15 years ago, I made this project as an "autodidact". I don't know if I will work again on such projects, because I have tons of other electronic topics I want to work on (mainly radio). But if I pick it up again, it will be with a brand new CPU project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Needs a (2017) tag.

Cool project none the less. I build a custom CPU in FPGA as a school project once. Far less complicated than A2Z, iirc I copied an instruction set from a different CPU, so I could use the assembler (and subsequently the C compiler) from that vendor. Can recommend doing such project (VHDL is not that hard to learn), it's an awesome learning experience!

<comment><USER10> Why do we bother tagging recent articles with the year? Is there a reason that I need to know this was from 2017 instead of 2016 or 2018?

<comment><USER9> I think it's just a way to manage expectations. Since the project hasn't been updated for at least a year.

<comment><USER11> Also, RiscV has matured and had upstream gcc and linux kernel support. It is also completely GPL'd and you can run it on an FPGA.

This project is cool and done with the correct intentions by the author, but there are other projects with the same correct intentions that are already much farther along.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why do you compare my A2Z project with RISC-V? Have you read the pages and the blog posts on hackaday? Have you understood what A2Z is? A2Z is (only) a DIDACTIC project. The goal is _learning by doing_ , and therefore the goal is to reinvent the wheel, just for fun. The "learning by doing" method is the best method I know. The principle is absolutely NOT to take an existing CPU or OS and assembling existing parts. And of course, I have learned a lot of things with this method. That's why I'm sharing this project. I hope some people will begin such project on their own, and learn as much as I did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool project. I did something similar for an FPGA class in college. Prof gave us 3 C programs and we had to implement everything to make it work. Difficult project but one of the most rewarding.

</comment><comment><USER13> Under the hardware section the author states:

>"I have built this development board by myself, using wrapping technique, because I couldn't find any board with 2MB of SRAM arranged in 16bits. I wanted SRAM, instead of DRAM, for the simplicity."

I am have heard the term "wrapping" or "board wrapping" in historical references by Steve Wozniak and the original Home Brew Computer Club as well. Could someone describe what this "wrapping" process entails? Is this essentially translating the verilog into physical wires and pins?

<comment><USER14> It's a way of cold welding wires to the pins of electronics[1]. It's pretty much fallen out of usage as computers have gotten too small for the technique, but it's nice for prototyping because it's easier to undo than solder but more permanent than a breadboard

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

<comment><USER15>
      >> easier to undo than solder

Bonus fun - there would almost always be multiple wiring errors to find after wirewrapping.

You start with empty wirewrap sockets, wirewrap the board, then 'buzz' the board with an audio buzzer to check every connection, then add the electronic chips, then start debugging the circuit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's the software required to compile, debug, test the Verilog code for this project or other similar projects?

I used Xlinx VTPro 20, 10 + years ago, like to know the state of FPGA Software tools today.

<comment><AUTHOR> The source code is compatible with Altera Quartus II. You can also execute the A2Z emulator on your PC, without the Altera suite.

<comment><USER17> How long did it take you to do this? Did you have previous experience with all the various aspects (compiler, FPGA, instruction set etc) before or did you build it up as you went along?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am an autodidact for all these things (FPGA, compiler). This is my first FPGA-Verilog project and my first compiler project. I have learned these things specifically for this project. It took me 2 years to complete this project, during evenigs and week-ends. I have not counted exactly, but probably between 200 and 400 hours of work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Best part of the FPGA class I took in college was writing a processor from scratch. ALU, program counter, control logic, all in VHDL.

Wish I'd taken the followon course about writing peripherals.

<comment><USER12> Same. We had/got to implement a keyboard controller and VGA output as well and the grading was based on our system running prof's C programs, taking input, and producing correct output. Lots of late nights, but great fun when it worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Any recommended resources for getting into FPGA development? I've always been interested, but don't know where to start.

<comment><AUTHOR> It really depends on you current skills. If you already know about electronics, and roughly what an FPGA is, and if you know C programming, then you can jump rapidly to FPGA and Verilog. One good and very condensed training course below: [http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/pcheung/teaching/ee2_digital/Altera%2...](http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/pcheung/teaching/ee2_digital/Altera%20Tutorial%20-%20Verilog%20HDL%20Basic.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was reading through a gcc source code yesterday and found a moxie architecture, which seems like quite a similar very small project. It is from the autor of libffi and includes gcc, binutils, qemu ports.

It's probably a nice example in how to take this further and implement a gnu toolchain support for something like this.

<comment><USER21> From [https://hackaday.io/project/18206-a2z-computer/log/71637-5-a...](https://hackaday.io/project/18206-a2z-computer/log/71637-5-and- after-whats-going-next)

 _I'm afraid, Linux and a C compiler is totally not feasible.

A2Z lacks many things to achieve the goal of C retargeting and Linux porting.

\- A2Z only manages Direct Addressing in hardware. No complex address computation. If you want to implement data stack, recursive functions, then direct addressing is not enough. You cannot retarget a C compiler with only direct addressing (or if you emulate complex addressing modes by software, it would be very very slow).

\- A2Z has not interrupt management. You cannot implement/port a pre-emptive multitasking OS (Linux) without interrupt management.

\- A2Z has no memory management unit.

\- A2Z's ALU is compatible with nothing. _

<comment><USER22> Linux is probably out of the question but lack of addressing modes won't stop a C (-ish) compiler implementation; one only need to look at microcontrollers like the PIC family, the 8051, and the 6502 to see how far they've been pushed --- C compilers are available for all of the latter.

 _or if you emulate complex addressing modes by software, it would be very very slow_

This is exactly what 8051 compilers do, and it's actually acceptably fast in practice.

...and Linux is only "out of the question" if you rule out any sort of emulation. Otherwise... well, just take a look:

[http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit](http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit)

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I have not understood in details what you mean... but my A2Z CPU has no internal (hardware) stack pointer, unlike the 8051. The only available addressing mode is "direct addressing". Of course, you can emulate indirect addressing modes, and you can emulate 32 bits manipulations... But it will be not optimal at all (=very slow compared to programs using only direct addressing). Here, on A2Z, the compiler matches the simplicit of the CPU architecture, it is the same philosophy : only static allocation for variables. If I wanted a custom CPU compatible with a C compiler and with Linux, the CPU would have been totally different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This make me think about resurrecting my little toy RISC 32bit CPU...

</comment><comment><USER24> Absolutely Brilliant!!!

</comment><comment><USER25> Wonderful!</comment>


How to piss off a developer - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mxunit.org/2009/03/how-to-piss-off-developer.html

<comment><USER2> Agree with most of the points. But isn't it more of a rule these days than the exception ? Not much documentation, everything being urgent request etc. etc. Question is: How do respond to such requests.</comment>