Decoding the Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculator: Antikythera Mechanism - <AUTHOR> https://fermatslibrary.com/s/decoding-the-ancient-greek-astronomical-calculator-known-as-the-antikythera-mechanism <comment><USER2> It's easy today to imagine we are smarter than people 2000+ years ago, but it's more like we are standing on the shoulders of a ton of generations before us. I always wonder if I went back in time 2000 years from today, if I would be able to translate my knowledge at all into the limitations of back then. The folks who built this only knew what they knew back then or could imagine, but were still able to build this complex machine.

<comment><USER3> It's strange to think about something like the Flynn Effect, which suggests people are getting more intelligent, and then do something like go back and read older authors.

I'm reading Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire now - and I'm often stuck by imagining how an author 300 years ago managed to write it. It's staggering to think how you could do so much scholarship, writing, and historical analysis without the benefits of computers, the internet, and the modern world. Not to mention the prose, which I absolutely love, and is so dense, thoughtful, and stylish.

I've also read a collection of letters from ancient Rome. Just random letters that have been translated, nobody historical or famous. The writing and thinking in the letters makes it hard to square with the Flynn Effect. The authors seem at least as intelligent, if not more so, than modern people I'm acquainted with.

<comment><USER4> I think this is similar to the "people used to live to 30" where the average can rise dramatically without the higher bound changing that much if you bring up the lower scorers to fulfil their potential.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't that metaphor suggest that there were lots of people with extremely low IQ as average lifespan figures were previously dominated by infant mortality?

<comment><USER4> Yep, exactly. Diet, education, illness etc. all take a toll on IQ.

People sometimes think you can't really change IQ via environment but that's because we've worked really hard to eliminate the things that can limit it.

(Plus the Flynn point is that some of the rise is about abstract sophistication rather than actual intelligence rising, people just getting better at what IQ tests test, which would be lower too.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He's been scarce for a while, but Clickspring on youtube has a series on rebuilding the Antikythera Mechanism. It's quite fascinating.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR- Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCworsKCR- Sx6R6-BnIjS2MA/videos)

<comment><USER6> He ended up discovering something new about the mechanism and has spent the past few months working on a research paper about it. Hopefully it'll come out soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's always shocking to me how much they were able to deduce from those fragments. Guess it really helps that gears are so evenly toothed so you can get a very good estimate of the total number of teeth just from a small segment.

Also I wonder how many of these existed and were just lost to time by people melting them down after they broke or if this was a one off commissioned piece for someone (which seems somewhat improbable given the complexity, you'd expect there to be similar devices with less features).

</comment><comment><USER8> Ancient Greeks were 1000 years ahead of their time. The more you study about their history, the more you go crazy. For example the first vending machine or the automatic doors, or machines that working using steam. They were talking about robots (Talos) and had a God of Technology (Hephaestus). Some scientists believe that if Greeks didn't invaded by Persians or Romans and continued to give all this knowledge and technology to the world, we would have the industrial revolution 1000-1500 years earlier.

<comment><USER9> Do you have some references or reading material on that?

I wonder why some of the technological advancements were lost due to Roman invasion, since the Romans themselves were avid engineers and has great admiration for Greek arts. I know that Roman rulers in provincial Greece were exploiting it for maximum financial gain using awful methods (at least for some time), but still... if some of these technological advancements were well known you'd think the Romans would invariably adopt and expand on them as they've done with so much they encountered in other civilizations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> People built one out of Lego. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLPVCJjTNgk)

</comment><comment><USER11> Something that I didn't fully appreciate until I had an opportunity to see it in the museum was just how _small_ it was. I had assumed it was larger (perhaps easier to fabricate in my mind).

</comment><comment><USER12> [2006]</comment>


Katie Hopkins permanently suspended from Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53111295 <comment><USER2> She's had a history of questionable and inflammatory communications. She was sued for libel and lost [1] after accusing someone of damaging a memorial. And she cost the Daily Mail a pretty sum [2] after accusing a family of being extremists.

[1] [https://inews.co.uk/opinion/comment/131000-katie-hopkins- rea...](https://inews.co.uk/opinion/comment/131000-katie-hopkins-realise- trolling-twitter-expensive-hobby-528109)

[2] [https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/mail-online-pays-out- substant...](https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/mail-online-pays-out-substantial- damages-to-mahmood-family-over-katie-hopkins-islamic-extremist-claims/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wait, isn't this the fake crosspoint lady?

Isn't there a meme about her aging faster due to all the hate she carries?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Context for non-UK readers: Hopkins is a former reality TV (UK version of The Apprentice) star turned right-wing commentator who has previously been retweeted by Donald Trump

</comment><comment><USER4> Some might consider banning somebody else's speech a "hateful" act.

<comment><USER5> We don't have 'free speech' here in the UK. Her comments have instigated hate crimes [1]. This isn't a hateful act; she's an awful person that doesn't need amplifying.

1\. [https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater- manches...](https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester- news/muslim-man-attacked-thugs-who-13237258)

<comment><USER4> So who are the gatekeepers of what speech is allowed and what speech is not? Must we all now conform to some proclaimed philosophy and not be allowed to even discuss alternatives?

<comment><USER6> "Alternatives": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Hopkins#Views_and_contro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Hopkins#Views_and_controversies)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Escape from Alcatraz - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23079269

<comment><AUTHOR> Not so much about tech, but it about survival and determination.</comment>


Summer of Startups 2011 Demo Day - <AUTHOR> http://aaltoes.com/2011/08/summer-of-startups-2011-demo-day-it-takes-a-community-to-raise-a-startup/

<comment><USER3> I really liked StreamDialog( <http://twitter.com/#!/streamdialog> ) - <USER2> pitch, nice idea, simple product and i was suprised with their end-result and partnership with vkontakt.ru (russian facebook), and all happens in 12weeks.

I think, BusFaster ( [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Xzvm6IOk1g&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Xzvm6IOk1g&feature=player_embedded) )is perfect example how to kill real pain.

</comment><comment><USER4> Stream Dialog demo is very interesting. They are changing video experience in a way that is useful for companies.

However, do they really deliver value for that 9$ subscription?

</comment><comment><USER5> All of the teams really outperfomed themselves - let's what happens to these rockstars in the near future!

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for the link, great pitches for such early-stage teams!

</comment><comment><USER7> just an awesome vibe in general. extremely inspiring. the community is growing and the culture is changing. can't wait for the segerstrale keynote to be online.</comment>


Clojure Workers and Large Scale HTTP Fetching - <AUTHOR> http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/8/16/clojure-workers-and-large-scale-http-fetching.html <comment><USER2> Since Clojure has been designed for concurrency, why does the author have to resort to Java thread pools to solve this straightforwardly parallel problem?

<comment><USER3> Because clojure has a number of built-in ways to manage state in a multi- threaded program, but does not re-implement work queues as there are quite excellent implementations bundled with the JDK. Rich Hickey mentions this during his concurrency talk, if Im not mistaken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good analysis of problems using Clojure agents for operations that can fail. Also, Mark McGranaghan's new clj-http project looks good (BTW, I had a slight problem with one of Mark's old projects over the weekend and he was helpful - good to see on open source projects).</comment>


Traditional embraces Transmedia – to great effect in kid's storytelling - <AUTHOR> http://www.appmarket.tv/news/1255-traditional-embraces-transmedia-to-great-effect-in-kids-storytelling.html <comment><AUTHOR> What emerged from this panel and others at this year CMC is overwhelming evidence that today's kids don't want to be a captive audience.</comment>


Golfers who play well are more likely to see the hole as larger - <AUTHOR> http://www.brainmysteries.com/Research/Perception_of_hole_size_influenced_by_performance.asp <comment><USER2> This is ridiculous. Almost CLEARLY a case of mistaking cause and correlation. It seems almost obvious to me that the "good" golfers see the hole as larger because they perceive the game as easier. It's not that they are better because they perceive the hole to be larger.

The idea that they are working on research to enable you to see the hole as larger in an attempt to improve play is laughable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does this notion generalize? Do pickup artists see women as 'looser?' I guess it works.</comment>


Is Elite College Worth It? Maybe Not - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-elite-college-worth-it-maybe-not-11553084146 <comment><USER2> I had a unique opportunity of taking a year of classes at a good state school (in the top 100 for most STEM fields), and then went to an "elite" school for undergrad (taking a mix of CS/non-CS courses at each).

You can absolutely find motivated peers and professors at state schools, particularly if you look at places like the honors college. If you want to land a good job, go to a good grad school, etc (which is the goal for most people), all of that is 100% possible from a state school.

However, if you want to do something non-traditional (startups, research abroad, "choose your own adventure" style careers), I found that the "elite" school offered a lot more opportunity. Part of that is due to funding/size, where top schools have more money to allocate to students who ask for it. Students at elite schools have more support on average (from family as well as the school itself), so they tend to have more opportunities open, earlier.

It's like the difference between a big city and a small town. Plenty of people are successful without living in a huge city, so it's definitely possible. You could argue that the average drive of folks in a big city is higher, but a lot of that has to do with resources and opportunities as well.

The top students at a good state school would absolutely fit in at an elite school. The only difference I saw was in the support/resources they had before coming to college.

<comment><USER3> > startups, research abroad, "choose your own adventure" style careers

I'd add scientific research experience. I had a professor who I worked for and gave me research experience. I was meeting with him 1-1 as if I was a graduate student of his at my top-25 undergraduate university. I also got a publication out of it. This gave me a huge leg up in my graduate applications for PhD, and it helped me determine that was something I was interested in to start with.

That sort of very personal relationship is much harder to find at the big state schools.

<comment><USER2> That's a great point. One of my favorite parts of college was small research- based classes with 10-15 undergrads/grad students. The level of personal interaction and feedback from professors was the most valuable part.

That being said, I was fortunate enough to have similar experiences re: research at the state school as well (a professor who went out of his way to mentor me, leading to a few publications). It was definitely harder to find (because of how many other students professors at big state schools have to deal with), but it was more a function of professors' time than their willingness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem I see it is the bar is so high that the only way to get into elite schools is to spend your childhood practicing standardized tests and doing prescribed extra-curricular activities. As a result I suspect these days the elite universities must be filled with really dull people who wont achieve the same "success" as previous generations at those institutions.

<comment><USER5> Your post is rather presumptuous. Do you consider playing classical piano, debating important issues, and helping the community as "really dull"? Because that's what I did that was "prescribed extra-curricular activity." And yet, I loved it all and got accepted to multiple "elite" schools. I didn't grind test prep either, acing my schools' coursework had prepared me over many years.

The real issue with these modern elite school graduates is that either they are massively indebted or that they come from an increasingly insulated wealthy class, not that they are dull.

<comment><USER6> > _The real issue with these modern elite school graduates is that either they > are massively indebted or that they come from an increasingly insulated > wealthy class..._

This issue actually can't be overstated. It's a real problem not only with elite schools, but even with a lot of non-elite graduates as well.

Not sure what a good solution for that is though?

<comment><USER5> It may be the most boring solution of all: education. Without someone telling our 16-18 year olds the idea of VALUE in education, they will end up over- spending. See the story below for my own analysis of myself:

When I compare my skill-set and knowledge-set now to 12 years ago, when I was 18, I am remarkably astounded by the huge amount of $$ I casually dropped on an elite education. Even with $20k paid by merit scholarships and research grants, I was dropping $40k yearly for an education that was maybe 10-15% better than what I could've gotten for $5k yearly at a local school. If I took that $35k yearly and invested it into the stock market, I'd probably be about $200k richer today. Is that 10% of a difference really worth $200k to me now? Is a slightly deeper/broader knowledge better than half a home, in my MCOL area? Is it better than a Tesla and a yearly $10k vacation to expand my horizons? I doubt it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I went to professional school and graduate school with some people with elite undergraduate educations. Of the few that expressed something like an opinion about it, I would say that most of them didn't regret going to elite colleges, but that doing so certainly wasn't obviously worth it.

The answer is always going to be: It depends. Right?

Sometimes college isn't worth it at all, elite or not.

<comment><USER8> Just a counterpoint: The decade after undergrad is probably not when the network gained by an elite undergraduate education is most useful.

<comment><USER7> Yes, that's a good point. Not obviously worthwhile at the time is not the same as never-going-to-be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My Grandfather was employee #3 at his company and over 35 years of hard work eventually became CEO and helped grow the company until it was listed on the NYSE. He preferred to hire people whom attended state schools and with B averages. Moreover, he thought private colleges and out of state schools were a huge waste of money (even as CEO and worth tens of millions lived in a modest 3 bedroom house and drove a 20 year old car).

He would repeatedly say to me: "I'd rather hire people whom got B's in school and had a social life than automatons who got A's." and "College is like driving cross-country. You can get there in a pinto or a Mercedes, what you see and learn along the way is up to you!"

<comment><USER4> > "College is like driving cross-country. You can get there in a pinto or a > Mercedes, what you see and learn along the way is up to you!"

Perhaps this is a great analogy in more than he meant. Either car enables you to do great things, but if you're unlucky and get hit by a truck, the merc was the safer option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://outline.com/wWr2v3](https://outline.com/wWr2v3)

</comment><comment><USER11> It depends on the degree. For STEM, not so much. For law, business, humanities, absolutely.

<comment><USER12> I disagree. How many NC State grads become tech luminaries? Very few. How many Stanford, Harvard, UWash, UIUC, even Cornell or Yale CS (not as highly ranked) become tech luminaries? A lot more. (FWIW, it's so hard to get into CS at UIUC/UWash today it's equivalent to getting into an Ivy).

Of course, you could always say that this is a function of inherent talent and drive more than institution, which is possible, but even then it's just a vital social signal and leaves out the 99% who could never stand a chance of getting into elite institutions like me.

<comment><USER13> Being a "tech luminary" is a pretty high bar, no? Who would self-identify as this anyways?

I graduated from NC State in 2000 and I've had a really awesome, rewarding career filled with interesting problems and fun. As an engineering manager I've had many, many colleagues who have advanced degrees from fancy schools that I never could have gotten into (or afforded). I use stuff that I learned at NCSU in my job every day, and am extremely thankful to have gotten such a high quality education at such a bargain basement price (in-state tuition was very cheap, I used to put it on my credit card). I've never felt like my degree or lack of a fancy school has hindered me.

As a hiring manager, unless the person is coming directly out of school, I don't even look at their education. There's a great many people that I've hired where I had no idea if they had a degree at all, much less CS.

<comment><USER14> Remind us not to interview there lol

<comment><USER15> Why?...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think your own drive and achievement can be compounded by the prestige of the school you go to, but the latter is no longer a substitute for the former.

</comment><comment><USER17> An anecdotal but first-hand data point: I was accepted at three top-tier schools (MIT, Stanford and Caltech) but decided to go to Virginia Tech because they offered me a full scholarship and my family did not have deep pockets. I ended up as a Principal at NASA, an early hire at Google, and selling a startup I co-founded to Richard Branson (among other things).

I will always wonder how things would have turned out if I'd gone to a top- tier school instead. No doubt it would have been different. But I cannot imagine how things could have turned out any _better_ for me than they did.

Nowadays I care much more about an applicant's github repo than I do about their diploma.

</comment><comment><USER18> I naively thought that "worth it" had something to do with the quality of education. I shouldn't be surprised, after peeking at the outline.com link, that the WSJ is evaluating strictly in terms of future income.

With an MIT founder, we hire a lot of MIT grads. After that, I didn't think it mattered much, but then I was involved in hiring a summer intern. HR gave me a couple hundred resumes, almost all from elite schools: MIT, Harvard, CMU, Brown, Yale, etc. I ended up picking someone from Yale, who was fantastic, but I can't help but thinking that the apparent school filter kept me from seeing a lot of great candidates.

</comment><comment><USER14> These kinds of questions are an entirely subjective debate. What's up with these pat on the back articles?

<comment><USER19> You didn't hear? Journalism is dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How many WSJ journalists come from elite college? How many of them are sending their children to elite colleges? I bet most to both categories.

Elite colleges aren't worth it if you want to live an average life. If you want to be a 9-5 corporate desk jockey, then going to an elite college probably doesn't matter.

If you want to excel - a prominent businessman, politician, journalist, scientist, etc, then going to an elite college is most definitely an asset.

I find it strange how the elites are telling the masses elite colleges isn't worth it. I bet they don't tell their own children that. But that's understanable. Why would they want more competition to power for their own children.

<comment><USER21> I have to ask how much of this comes down to "reputation" more than quality of education. I'm a dropout who largely thinks college is overrated, and even I will be impressed by "MIT" or "Harvard" on a resume.

I have given a _lot_ of interviews at this point, and while I personally cannot speak for everyone (nor does my word override a statistic), but I haven't noticed a huge difference in the quality of applicants between a normal state college, and a brand-name college. Granted, I interview for the "9-5 corporate desk-jockey" jobs, so maybe I'm not getting the next Von Neumann applying.

That said, I _have_ worked for New York University (which I believe is considered a pretty-good school, and is certainly expensive), and I got to see the whole cross section of professors from basically every brand of university. My conclusion? Largely inconclusive: it largely made _no difference_ where the people went to school (though admittedly the dropouts (including me) were typically not as bright).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Couldn't read due to paywall, but how many YC companies are NOT founded by people from elite colleges? Isn't that really the point of going to an elite college? That someone will give you money to start a company as soon as you finish, no matter how wacky your idea? It almost seems like the old "no one got fired for buying IBM", but updated to "no one got fired for funding Stanford grads". Of course, the defense will be that elite schools are a good "signal" of competency, but at the same time VCs shrug their shoulders and say a 90% failure rate is unavoidable. What a signal indeed!

<comment><USER12> This is true. All of the YC founders I know of that went to my alma mater had cofounders that went to Stanford, Harvard etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> 'Elite' has a special meaning; otherwise, USC, UCLA would become elite schools, just because some families bribed some coach to let in their kids.

If you are Asian, and if you go to UCLA, your chance of getting into McKinsey or BlackStone or Goldman Sachs is very slim. However, if you go to HYP, your chances of getting into elite careers are pretty high. I had seen some conversations on collegeboard, where high school students are aiming for such jobs.

</comment><comment><USER24> This can cut both ways. I can't tell you how many times I've done well in 1-2 rounds of software interviews, to then be told the company suspects my compensation requirements are outside their budget (even when we have not spoken about compensation at all at that point), and it's almost surely down to the degree programs I went through.

If you sincerely get into elite programs by merit and demonstrated talent, and you do not come from a wealthy family, then elite institutions don't help you much at all. I've never once had doors open because of my degrees, but certainly have had doors closed presumably because people form a pre-conceived opinion about me or believe the degree prices me out of the market.

I've experienced similar things when I've shared my Stack Overflow profile during interviews. I am very highly ranked in a number of relevant technology tags, but this has not once helped me in any way, yet it has seemed like a liability.

Meanwhile, I know plenty of great engineers from a variety of "non-elite" schools, and they have never expressed having this problem. They express just having a pretty normal success rate with job applications and being evaluated for their skill and experience, and never sensing that their degrees have any significant effect on anything.

Being a "success outlier" often just puts a target on your back. People will write you off as elitist, coming from a wealthy family, getting places in life through favoritism, and never stop to meet you and see what kind of person you are or question their assumptions.

<comment><USER25> In Los Angeles they're giving junior developers straight out of bootcamp $75k because they need programmers so badly they're willing to hire anyone who can turn on a computer. I'm told companies are even more desperate to hire programmers in the Bay Area and NYC.

Hell, even I'm getting coding job offers and I haven't programmed professionally in a decade.

Where are you (geographically) that having an elite degree in a heavily in- demand field is keeping you from getting offers?

<comment><USER24> You've been very badly misinformed about the prevalence of software jobs. In fact, companies generally apply extremely difficult filters before hiring engineers and go to great lengths to keep engineering headcount as low as they can. Nobody is handing out tons of jobs to people out of bootcamps with no previous formal training. The recruiter spam you are receiving for coding jobs that don't apply to you is not evidence of much besides the widely known inefficiency of tech recruiters. They'll spam out recruitment emails to just about anyone, but ultimately won't actually present you for the roles.

In general in tech there is a huge, huge surplus of applicants (especially in my field of machine learning). My personal perspective after running a few teams inside bigger companies and dealing with corporate recruiting is that occasional hires from bootcamps and things exists mostly to suppress wages for other applicants. Companies are deeply resistant to paying market wages, and sometimes see that as a way around it.

The "scarcity" in tech hiring is a total fiction.

<comment><USER25> _In fact, companies generally apply extremely difficult filters before hiring engineers and go to great lengths to keep engineering headcount as low as they can. Nobody is handing out tons of jobs to people out of bootcamps with no previous formal training._

I know both these statements to be categorically false because I know a number of recent bootcamp "graduates" in the LA that were offered jobs straight out of graduation. As in, pretty much all of them. Most of these guys wouldn't have cut it as junior programmers before the "scarcity crisis" but right now they're making $75k/year coding React apps.

 _The recruiter spam you are receiving for coding jobs that don't apply to you is not evidence of much besides the widely known inefficiency of tech recruiters. They'll spam out recruitment emails to just about anyone, but ultimately won't actually present you for the roles._

The coding jobs do apply to me, in the sense that they're for roles I would have qualified for and possibly considered back when I was still coding. Moreover, they aren't "recruiter spam," they're contacts from when I used to program.

 _In general in tech there is a huge, huge surplus of applicants (especially in my field of machine learning)._

Ah. This is the problem. We're both talking about different fields, so our experiences are going to be different. For developers, there's a scarcity crisis and a lot of companies (though not all) will hire almost anyone. For ML, it appears there's the opposite--possibly because ML was oversold to graduates as the next big thing.

<comment><USER24> For general developers, the surplus of candidates is even more extreme than machine learning. The growth of bootcamps is more about suppressing wages.

For example, $75k for a junior position, fresh out of a CS undergrad program, is a _low_ salary for a major urban area like LA... like 30-50k too low. They can only do this because the market's flooded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The way I see it is the people that get into and go to elite universities are multiples smarter and more accomplished than I was at 18 - honestly, I think I'll defer to them about if something is worth it or not. I don't think they'll make the wrong decision.

<comment><USER26> One problem with this theory is that life continues past age 17/18\. As far as I've been able to tell, the difference between a typical MIT admit and a typical UMass kid is about two years of hard work. By age 20, many gunners from bad schools have already surpassed the party crowd at elites.

<comment><USER27> Dunno if MIT has ever been called a party school but point still taken. And I think to continue along your line, that's what getting into a good grad school is all about. Do well at UMass and you can get into an elite grad school. Party at an elite and you probably won't.

Indeed that's what junior colleges are all about, a second chance. Look, rich people who can afford elite high schools, etc, are going to dominate elite admissions. But allowing hard working kids from the wrong side of tracks multiple chances helps even that playing field.

Case in point, a buddy of mine, wrong side of the tracks, arrest record, freaky smart, he started over in junior college, killed it, went to Cal, murdered it, went to Columbia, got bored with it and became a quant.

<comment><USER12> > Do well at UMass

But even UMass Amherst is a pretty elite school when it comes to CS (~T30). It's not MIT level but it's still pretty highly ranked.

I went to a school that's just on the cusp of being irrelevant in ranking (~T50) and even the smart kids from my school don't get into elite grad programs for the most part. Most of them just continue their CS PhDs at the same school even with 4.0 GPAs and good GREs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Absolutely not.

<comment><USER21> Care to elaborate on this? It's not terribly useful input to just say "Absolutely not".

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm not able to read this article because it requires that I am a subscriber. Does anyone have a method of reading it otherwise? Would this be considered a paywall?</comment>


Chicago's Last Tannery - <AUTHOR> https://thedistance.com/horween <comment><USER2> I have a friend who quit his day job working as a developer for a design agency. He now makes handcrafted leather products for men because he likes the satisfaction of working with his hands on physical products. Incidentally, Horween supplies all his materials. As you would expect from reading the article, it's quality stuff. If you're in the market for some cool products that will last a lifetime, check out starkmade.com.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, how did he start or how did he get his first clients?

<comment><USER4> Hey there! I'm Erik, the guy behind J. Stark. I started by failing. I know that sounds funny, but I just started making things and learning 1 little piece to make better in the next iteration.

I worked nights and weekends. I'm still not able to support myself 100% with this venture, but I have my heart in it and I'm willing to hustle and grind until I can.

The first clients were free. Mostly friends and people I met that I asked what product they needed most. Then I went off and tried to make it. The reaction when someone holds something made by your hand is like a drug.

If you want to talk more about it, feel free to email me. info [at] starkmade [dot] com

<comment><USER3> great stuff man, sending email tomorrow

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I got Alden shell cordovans, which are made with Horween leather, and I can already tell that they will last years longer than my other shoes. Don't spend $100 on shoes every year, spend $600 on shoes that will last for 10 years.

<comment><USER6> That's not always the best advice, though. What happens if my shoes get ruined after two years? I would have been better off with the cheaper shoes. What happens if my taste changes and I don't like boat shoes (or now I only like boat shoes)? I would have been better off with cheaper shoes. What happens if I lose a foot in an industrial accident? I would have been better off with cheaper shoes.

<comment><USER7> One can argue "what-ifs" ad infinitum with no real efficacy or usefulness. Comments of this ilk are completely unhelpful. The parent comment is merely saying that, if one plans on wearing a type of shoe for an extended period of time (dress shoes like an Allen Edmonds Park Avenue, for example, have hardly changed in decades), one might as well buy the best, and have it last for a long time. One actually saves money by doing so.

<comment><USER8> > One actually saves money by doing so.

This is what the disagreement is over, though: empirically, do most people taking this route save money, or do they end up spending more money in hopes of long-term savings that do not materialize? It depends strongly on the shoe, wearer, and various failure modes (and how repairable / expensive to repair each of those failure modes is). In my own case, I've generally found that the expensive shoes fail to save money, because even though they're more repairable, the cost of repairs eats up any savings, vs. just treating shoes as a disposable good (might be different if I lived somewhere with lower labor costs; around here even a simple resoling costs $50, and anything more involved starts at $100+). That might still be worth it if you prefer the nice shoes, don't like unnecessarily sending things to landfills, or other reasons, but for me, from a strictly cost standpoint I've found it hard to come out ahead.

<comment><USER9> It took me a second to think through the premise that $600 dollar shoes might make economic sense. My guess is that people who wear $600 shoes don't walk to work, or really walk much of anywhere, at least not in their $600 shoes. So, they probably do last longer and fulfill the social signalling or whatever other purpose said shoes fulfill. I don't think anyone wears's shabby old 9 1/2 year old shoes that originally cost $600. I suspect people usually wear $600 shoes so that others can tell that they are not price-sensitive regarding footwear.

<comment><USER10> I doubt it. People who want flashy shoes that people will notice spend money on more exotic brands, not Alden or Allen Edmonds.

Shell cordovan is a bit unique amongst shoe leathers. It is valued by the people who wear it primarily because of the way it looks. Shell doesn't develop creases when you wear it, it develops "rolls". It also (at least in colors other than black, like Horween's famous Color 8), develops a patina that leather made from cow hide doesn't. It looks much better with age.

I just sold my late stepfather's 40 year old shell cordovan shoes for $100. They have seen lots of wear over the years, but are in great shape, and look amazing because of the afore-mentioned patina. That is why people pay that much for shell cordovan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's interesting the migration of trends from the hand-crafter (but expensive) to the mass-produced, but cheap, and then starting to come back to the hand- crafted, where it can be afforded.

I'm not sure if that is a natural cycle of fashions - or a choice that has become repopular by increasing affluence.

I see a lot of low-volume, handcrafted things growing in size, whether it is low-volume hand-crafted vehicle manufacturers (like Morgan), low-volume handcrafted products (like craft beer) and even low-volume, hands-on farming.

At this point I take the re-emergence of these things as a sign of growing affluence, where there is so much disposable income it can be spent on things which are off the cost/benefit ratio in comparison to competitors. Perhaps it is a swing away from owning large properties as a form of wealth consumption and more towards individual items, betraying a gradual lowering in the average age of people who are able to afford such things.

At any rate, it's an interesting phenomena to watch.

<comment><USER12> I think the internet is enabling this trend. It allows you to bypass the middle man. The consumer is also able to educate themself on products more easily (because of the internet). So high-quality products are more affordable, but not necessarily cheap. It's awesome. You see this happening with everything from Warby parker to Tonx coffee to clothing startups like Frank & Oak.

My company, Original Fuzz, just launched a guitar strap that uses Horween leather ([http://www.originalfuzz.com/products/skinny-leather- guitar-s...](http://www.originalfuzz.com/products/skinny-leather-guitar- strap)), and we could have never made it with Horween 10 years ago. We're able to sell it for $48 because we can find customers from around the world through the web. You don't have to do the traditional keystone pricing and leave room for retailers and distributors if you don't want to.

<comment><USER11> A very good point. In order to match up the limited supply of handmade goods with the limited market of buyers, you need to have a long-tail searching tool, and the ability to tap into small but geographically dispersed consumers. The internet is indeed the glue that brings this together, probably moreso than rising incomes (which have been rising for a long time, anyway).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Go past the place quite a lot. Definitely know it's there, the stench!

<comment><USER14> I drive by all the time on Ashland. I just assumed it was another rotting piece of "Old Chicago" and would soon be turned into condos. Good to hear its a successful business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've never understood the need for putting the source of the article in the title of the submission. It's usually not important (I have no idea what The Distance is), it can be confusing (is The Distance the name of the tannery?) and it's printed literally right after the title of the submission (thedistance.com). I see it all the time, though, mostly on other sites like Reddit (Major Political Scandal Breaking - Forbes (forbes.com)).

Why?

<comment><USER15> The HN guidelines specifically ask submitters to take the title out:

 _If the original title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway._

[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER16> Quite. We've edited the title accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm a big fan of horween and alden. If you care about quality and craftsmanship, then I think the products are worth the price (even if it has gone up a lot in the past few years). It is possible to wear out cordovan, but you really have to work at it. Horween shell is an awesome material.

</comment><comment><USER18> Anyone who is interested in some really fantastic Horween products (belts, wallets, bags, etc.) check out Mitchell Leather goods, another family owned multi-generational business:

[http://www.mitchell-leather.com/](http://www.mitchell-leather.com/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Some day I will get one these bags made from Horween leather: [http://www.kaehler1920.com/shop/briefcases/leather- briefcase...](http://www.kaehler1920.com/shop/briefcases/leather-briefcases)</comment>


Ask HN: Who are your role models in this industry? - <AUTHOR> Last week I got my Software Engineering degree and I realized I've no role models to learn from, of course there's a lot of interesting people: Musk, Carmack, Swartz, Wosniak... but no one who I can regard as a role model.<p>Who are yours? <comment><USER2> This is a pretty good list:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders)</comment>


The One Weird Trick SecureROM Hates [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://iokit.racing/oneweirdtrick.pdf <comment><USER2> TIL SecureROM != SecuROM.

I came to this post anticipating a nostalgic trip about some ancient DRM and a stupidly simple way to break it.

Got confused when it was about Apple phone OS.

<comment><USER3> Same.

It was weird to see people from the jailbreak scene (easily recognisable because they all have names l1ke th1s) in such an exploit... turns out SecureROM is also something from iPhone

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cellebrite is listed under whoareus, but with a bunch of pseudonyms.

Is that the same Cellebrite?

<comment><USER5> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, it's really cool to read how things like this happen.

While we're here, is there anything I can use to remove the alphanumeric passcode from an iPad 4 (A6X chipset, no Secure Enclave) that I've forgotten the password to?

<comment><USER7> There's a device called "IP box" which may be able to do that, it's not cheap but a mobile repair/unlocking store would probably have one.

<comment><USER8> How does it work?

<comment><USER9> For a 4 digit unlock code, the device would enter them sequentially starting from 0000 and ending at 9999 [1]. Because there is a delay of 6 seconds between each attempt (on iOS 7.xx) it would take just over 16 and a half hours to try all codes.

[1] [https://www.fonefunshop.com/ip-box-iphone-password-unlock- to...](https://www.fonefunshop.com/ip-box-iphone-password-unlock-tool.html)

<comment><USER10> Right now with these tools you are just playing passcode roulette to recover your device if you forgot the code and you enabled factory wipe after N tries.

Out of these retries, at least 1/N correct passcode attempts are needed, so such tools are close to useless if your care about retrieving your data with factory wipe enabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why on earth would you have a heap in a zero-stage-burned-into-chip bootloader, not to mention a USB stack. It's just self-inflicted harm at this point.

<comment><USER12> USB stack is because one of the rom bootloader's primary functions is DFU mode so that you can reflash a bricked device.

<comment><USER13> A heap isn't needed, it is just super helpful.

Also DFU is not the world's best protocol, I am surprised Apple didn't just roll their own. It isn't exactly hard to replace DFU with something simpler that gets the job done.

<comment><USER14> Either all the senior engineers and PhDs working for Apple are idiots, or it's harder than you think.

This same heuristic can be applied all across the HN front page with good results.

<comment><USER13> > Either all the senior engineers and PhDs working for Apple are idiots, or > it's harder than you think.

I was part of a team that rolled our own firmware update mechanism at Microsoft . (I didn't work on the replacement myself, the engineer sitting next to me did.)

And deeply embedded USB stacks w/o a heap aren't exactly uncommon, considering malloc is forbidden in a large % of firmware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _lol_ The title is technically against HN guidelines (clickbait), but since it's so blatantly obvious that it's tongue-in-cheek/sarcastic, it's probably fine.</comment>


Godless Parents Are Doing a Better Job - <AUTHOR> http://jezebel.com/godless-parents-are-doing-a-better-job-1682844001 <comment><USER2> I can't believe they have the nerve to call this professional writing.</comment>


Boeing 777X scheduled to finally take flight Friday morning - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/lifted-on-massive-wings-boeing-777x-scheduled-to-finally-take-flight-friday-morning/ <comment><USER2> Updated: Boeing 777X's first flight postponed as weather fails to cooperate</comment>


Elon Musk-Backed SolarCity Seeks IPO Multiple of 19 Times Peers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-11/elon-musk-backed-solarcity-seeks-ipo-multiple-of-19-times-peers.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The IPO is scheduled for today would value the company at about $1 billion, or 8 times sales. Public competitors are valued at 0.4 times sales.</comment>


Show HN: Franc – Detect natural languages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wooorm/franc

<comment><USER2> Seems like this just compares the L1 distance of the trigram count vector to some preselected document in each language. That won't be very accurate. A much better way to go here is naive bayes. There are more sophisticated approaches but naive bayes will get you much further than this already. If you train this with wikipedia articles for the most popular languages you would most likely get >99% accuracy.

<comment><USER3> One method that I have used in the past was über-simple, yet extremely effective. It exploits ZIP compression, based on the the insight/assumption that two concatenated texts compress beter when they share their language.

I think I found it in this paper [1]. The implementation was like 13 lines of Python code. I wonder how it would compare.

[1] [http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/jaa/CSG399.05F/Topics/Papers/Ben...](http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/jaa/CSG399.05F/Topics/Papers/BenedettoCaLo.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a very interesting idea. Would it work accurate enough when scaled to 160+ languages?

<comment><USER3> I don't know, I think I used about 40 languages. The beauty is that zip- compression captures rich statistical properties of the languages, so representation-wise it should come a long way. But counting compressed output length discretises the lang-lang distance. For shorter text this might be troubling, since this could easily result in ties. So, maybe. Perhaps I should try :).

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps you should ;) If, I'd be interest to know how it goes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The project does not seems to state clearly how the detection is made, does it call an external webservice or does it rely on a offline database created at some time?

shameless plug [https://github.com/allan- simon/Tatodetect](https://github.com/allan-simon/Tatodetect) it covers 179 language (actually as much as Tatoeba project does) and it can run offline with explanation on how to generate your own database from a CC-by corpus.

After the advantage of Franc is that it can be used directly as a npm library while Tatodetect is a micro-webservice, and for some edge languages, Tatodetect is certainly not as good as Franc (haven't done yet a test of both to compare)

<comment><USER5> Based on a 2-sec look at the code, it's using a built-in database of trigrams as a predictor of the language.

[https://github.com/wooorm/franc/blob/master/lib/data.json](https://github.com/wooorm/franc/blob/master/lib/data.json)

<comment><USER6> the question would be where he got the language data

If the original language data is available I'd suggest classifying the trigrams as "high" and "low" frequency, which should improve performance without needing to keep full frequency data.

<comment><AUTHOR> No full-frequency data is kept, only 300 top-trigrams are identified. A quick through the source also reveals wooorm/trigrams, and wooorm/udhr, as sources!

<comment><USER6> yes, I meant: keeping full frequency could have been avoided to save space/memory but having two classes high/low could be a good tradeoff.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an interesting thought. I might fiddle on it, but I'm not sure it would work in practice (d'oh). Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I'd really like to see is code that takes a body of text and extracts parts that are written in another language.

That's quite common, like in mixed-language IRC channels, quotes from English documents in documents mostly written in another language, and so on.

And stemming and indexing such a document for full text search usually gives crappy results.

(Bonus points of detecting programming code samples, so that this part isn't stemmed at all).

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be awesome :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting!

Sometimes it gets it almost right: I tried with this piece of text in Catalan (Balear variant) and it classifies it as Portuguese (with Catalan as 2nd option): "I s'horabaixa la deixam passar i me mires tan a prop que me fa mal, que surt es sol i encara plou, que t'estim massa i massa poc, que no sé com ho hem d'arreglar, que som amics, que som amants."

It's strange, because it's pretty different from Portuguese...

The Catalan poem "tirallonga de monosíl·labs" gets classified as French. ([http://www.rodamots.com/calaix.asp?text=tirallonga](http://www.rodamots.com/calaix.asp?text=tirallonga))

<comment><AUTHOR> It sucks, right? Currently, it's good at long passages. But for shorter values, the results are pretty poor. The amount of supported languages is just too damn high!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The 60% threshold for the single-language scripts seems to be way low for CJK languages. And your method to calculate the occurrence ratio is flawed.

CJK scripts and languages tend to be relatively more concise (in terms of # of Unicode codepoints) than many other languages, so it is possible that the ratio of CJK scripts over non-CJK scripts can be lower than the average. And the occurrence ratio is currently calculated over the number of characters including _non-letters_ , making the ratio much lower. Maybe the custom threshold per script based on the actual corpus (90th percentile, maybe?) and better occurrence calculation would improve the detection on those languages.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure. I don't know any CJK languages myself. I'd like some test-cases where the current methods do not work, as the example in the Readme seems to work pretty well: `এটি একটি ভাষা একক IBM স্ক্রিপ্ট` is classified as Bengali?

<comment><USER9> Some examples follow. I've really tested with arbitrary text on the Web, and I agree that they are somewhat marginal examples. (But I do think that Franc's margin for CJK languages is way wide.)

한국어 문서가 전 세계 웹에서 차지하는 비중은 2004년에 4.1%로, 이는 영어(35.8%), 중국어(14.1%), 일본어(9.6%), 스페인어(9%), 독일어(7%)에 이어 전 세계 6위이다. 한글 문서와 한국어 문서를 같은 것으로 볼 때, 웹상에서의 한국어 사용 인구는 전 세계 69억여 명의 인구 중 약 1%에 해당한다.

This text from Korean Wikipedia is about the ratio of Korean documents over all documents in the Internet. Digits distort the overall ratio and Franc doesn't give any candidates (even no "und").

現行の学校文法では、英語にあるような「目的語」「補語」などの成分はないとする。英語文法では "I read a book." の "a book" はSVO文型の一部をなす目的語であり、また、"I go to the library." の "the library" は前置詞とともに付け加えられた修飾語と考えられる。

This text from Japanese Wikipedia concerns about the distinction of objectives and complements in the English syntax. In this bilingual text it looks like that Japanese has reached the 60% threshold but the codepoint count doesn't.

<comment><AUTHOR> I pushed a fix, incorporating your suggestions, and your examples in the specs.

Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Quick test:

      ron? snn
      fra? cat
      swe? nds
      ita? und
      nld? gax

Source:

      var franc = require('franc');
      console.log('ron?', franc('Cate bere ai baut?'));
      console.log('fra?', franc('C\'est quoi le bordel la, putain'));
      console.log('swe?', franc('Jag kanner en bot, hon heter Anna'));
      console.log('ita?', franc('che guai'));
      console.log('nld?', franc('graag gedaan'));

<comment><USER11> Testing a statistical language identifier with texts this short is absurd. If you type in four or five words from

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_French_origin)

…do you expect it to return French or English?

<comment><USER12> It is not absurd. Generally, if humans can do it, it is a reasonable task for NLP to attempt.

Yes you can present edge cases where there is no definite answer, like the one you cite, but this doesn't mean that the task in general is impossible or useless.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree the task is neither impossible nor useless. There's work to do. Short passages should be supported. I do however think franc does a good job, and adds support for some languages which before today have never (I think) been supported. Franc, certainly, "attempt"s to fix language detection, which I would argue is an AI-complete problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The supported languages file ([https://github.com/wooorm/franc/blob/master/Supported- Langua...](https://github.com/wooorm/franc/blob/master/Supported- Languages.md)) lists Matu Chin as having 182,000,000 speakers. Having never heard of it this surprised me, but the Wikipedia page for it ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matu_Chin_language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matu_Chin_language)) lists 40,000 speakers. Mistake to fix?

<comment><AUTHOR> You seem to be completely right, I hand-crawled the data ([https://github.com/wooorm/speakers](https://github.com/wooorm/speakers)), but seem to have made big typo there! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> +1 for using those iso codes. I introduced them at work 4 yrs ago, and everyone looked at me like i had ten heads.

<comment><USER4> +1 indeed, but I think most of people have already a hard time to see why we need to make the difference between country code and language code, and even more that something that people consider as a "dialect" can actually be a totally different language (for example in China a lot of "dialect/fangyang" are actually not dialect of Mandarin, for example Shanghainese (Wu language) and languages from Hunan province)

after you can also try to explan them that the common "represent a language by a flag" becomes quickly broken and subject to strong arguing between people (what flag do you put for Tibetan language for example? or for each of Indian languages)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It would be interesting to see comparisons with language detection libraries written in other languages as well. Not just in terms of runtime, but also accuracy. Actually, it seems like this would be useful as a separate project to help the decision-making process when choosing a library.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed :)

<comment><USER4> for the case of "one sentence detection" you can use Tatoeba project database dump [http://tatoeba.org/eng/downloads](http://tatoeba.org/eng/downloads)

you have a CSV of iso code => sentence , which should be 99% accurate (as it gets user proofed), so on in which you can compare your tool with.

I think for longer text one could use Wikipedia dump or alike ?

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the pointer. I might decide to whip something up one of these days. I really have no need for language detection, but I just find it interesting and I'm curious to see wich libraries will win out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "»Butter and cheese« is proper English and proper Fries."

Unfortunately Fries is not supported, but I'd be interested in the results. But I don't think polyglots for natural languages are common, this is in fact the only one I know.

<comment><AUTHOR> And it doesn't have a Universal Declaration of Human rights: [http://www.unicode.org/udhr/index_by_name.html](http://www.unicode.org/udhr/index_by_name.html)

<comment><USER17> It does have several translations of the bible, though. I guess it would be a lot of work to find bible translations for all those languages - or was there another reason for using the Human Rights Declaration?

P.S. Kudos, very cool project!

EDIT: Frisian version should you want it: [https://www.google.com/search?q=Yn+betinken+nommen+dat+it+er...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Yn+betinken+nommen+dat+it+erkennen+fan+de+ynherinte+weardichheid+en+fan+de+gelikense)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Currently, the UDHRs are crawled, and I'd rather not include exceptions and maintain their plain-text and XML/JSON versions by hand. If you're into growing the language, I suggest contacting the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights of the UN, and the Unicode project, or fork wooorm/udhr and add support, I'll merge :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Tried "hey how are you?", gives me Haitian first.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's because Haitians always say that! No, joking, it's just that because of so may supported languages, the accuracy for very short inputs is extremely low.

<comment><USER19> A regularized prior would help.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm also really interested in trying something like this: [http://www.slideshare.net/shuyo/short-text-language- detectio...](http://www.slideshare.net/shuyo/short-text-language-detection- with-infinitygram-12949447) (slide 6). But I'd need a lot of training data, more than UDHR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am using IDOL OnDemand which gives good results too.

</comment><comment><USER21> On a slight tangent, are there open source dictionaries that developers can use for app localization, etc?</comment>


Carol Bartz Confirms Her Firing — From Her iPad - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/06/carol-bartz-fired/ <comment><USER2> Saying she's been fired "over the phone" seems a bit bush league. The CEO of a company serves at the pleasure of the board. We're not supposed to feel bad for her; this is the NFL. If things don't work, she's supposed to clear the way for someone who can, not spit in the board's face.

 _Not enough_ boards fire CEOs, is the problem we really have.

<comment><USER3> >Not enough boards fire CEOs, is the problem we really have.

Sure, but that doesn't mean they have to forego all tact in doing so...

<comment><USER2> You really feel bad for Carol Bartz?

<comment><USER4> It's not a matter of feeling bad for Ms. Bartz (at least I certainly don't!), it's just that it's super unclassy to fire somebody over the phone—unless they did something egregious—whether they're janitor or CEO.

<comment><USER2> I agree, for employees, or even m-team members. But the CEO should see something like a mile away if it's coming. The CEO-board relationship is _not_ an employee-employer relationship; it something different.

<comment><USER4> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems like her being fired over the phone is a bigger deal than sending email from an iPad. Would MG write, "From a Windows computer" if she sent it from a Windows PC? Or "From a BlackBerry" if from that? She has to send it from something right and the iPad is a pretty popular device. It's not like she sent it from a JooJoo or something.

<comment><USER6> I think you're reading too much in to it. It's simply amusing to see something with cheery intent being tacked on to such an email.

I immediately disable such options myself, for fear of looking like a ----

<comment><USER5> Given that those auto-applied signatures have been around for at least a decade, it seems odd to comment about them now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Confirming being fired from an iPad is so 2011, and it's actually a trend I don't mind seeing. Using Twitter, iPads, Skype, whatever - the tech is there so why not use it.

Getting fired over the phone, however, is a disgraceful move by the Yahoo board. She's the Chief Executive Officer. It's not a move that you make over the phone and without a plan about the response.

</comment><comment><USER8> The accompanying image looks like something off 4chan. What's the deal?

<comment><USER9> The deal is that 4chan is influencing the mode of discourse on the web. For what that's worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess Reddit Inc. will be getting an application soon. Nice to see Tech Crunch still upholding their high standards of journalism despite Arrington's struggles.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't see the significance of this article. CEO reads email on a tablet? Sends a note immediately to confirm it?</comment>


So you think you know Ruby - <AUTHOR> Computer science 101:
what is the value of x,y,z after these calculations:
x = true and false
y = 1 && 0 || 1
z = ( true or true and false )
Before typing this in your ruby irb console, please answer in your head what you honestly think the answer should be.
spoiler: [x,y,z] => [true, 0, false] <comment><USER2> Read:

[https://ruby- doc.org/core-2.3.0/doc/syntax/precedence_rdoc.h...](https://ruby- doc.org/core-2.3.0/doc/syntax/precedence_rdoc.html)

Live it. Love it. It's not that hard.

It's certainly easier than the following (granted that it isn't an order of ops thing, but it's much more convoluted):

[https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality- Table/unified/](https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-Table/unified/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, "and, or" are control flow operators, not boolean operators. I though most of the Rubyists learn this day one tbh.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is this style guide official? [https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style- guide/commit/592049745...](https://github.com/bbatsov/ruby-style- guide/commit/5920497452c1f6f604742a735f5684e86d4c0003)</comment></comment>


Text of Y Combinator article in Inc Magazine - <AUTHOR> http://zgarbow.posterous.com/paul-graham-and-y-combinator-article-in-inc-m

<comment><USER2> "5. If you could go back in time and do one thing differently, what would it be?

I wish I had taken advantage of all the free time I had in high school and actually learned stuff, instead of spending so much time hanging out with friends."

Really? That seems to me to be a minority opinion. Most people wish they did more "high school"-type things than spend time studying. They're not exclusive, but surely spending all free time studying and not socializing is bound to rob you of valuable experiences.

<comment><USER3> That wasn't a verbatim quote. All the things in that list were boiled down from a long conversation.

What I really said was that I wished I hadn't wasted so much time in high school-- that I'd realized earlier that it was my responsibility to teach myself, instead of thinking that all I had to do was learn the stuff we were taught in classes. Then he asked me what I did spend my time on in HS, and I said basically the same thing as any other teenage kid: just hanging out with friends, doing nothing in particular.

<comment><USER2> Hm, the use of the "I" pronoun implied it was verbatim to me. I'd hoped the reporter did a better job at distilling the intent behind interview answers rather than providing third-grade summaries. Do you feel the article did yc justice?

<comment><USER3> The article was above average for accuracy. But average is not very high: newspaper and magazine articles tend to contain a lot of mistakes.

The most misleading thing in the article was the whole guru theme. Maybe it made the story seem more interesting, but there is very little dispensing of abstract wisdom at YC. 99% of the conversation I have with people is about the specific problems of individual startups. Car mechanic would be a more accurate metaphor than guru.

<comment><USER4> To me, one of the more interesting pieces of the article was when it talked about the years you spent from '91 - '95 in a kind of consulting/painting period where you would consult for a while then stop and paint until you ran out of money then repeat until eventually you decided it was time to make some "real money", which was apparently when you decided to start a company. My question is, were you considering other options at that time (such as just getting a regular job) or were you always dead set on starting your own company?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I flagged this. Surely this is a copyright violation. If Inc hasn't put the text up on their web site then it's because they don't want the text in that form, no doubt they want you to buy the magazine.

<comment><USER6> Agree - even though I'd like to read the article I think we should accept the choices and income models of fellow entrepreneurs and businesses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Rather than a link to a blog post with a link to scribd with a link to a pdf, here is a pdf:

[http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/zgarbow/czK...](http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/zgarbow/czKBpnLyL8og7wIyznr5xHW4rjpF6FVZBArcROjStc2IE3AHEnCeQxXlpxAq/INC_Startup_Paul_Graham_articl.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Kind of ironic that scribd isn't working right for this PDF in particular, I must say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The picture is just like of Leonardo Da Vinci's "The Last Supper"!

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that made me a bit nervous. I realized what they were up to as soon as I saw how they had the table set up. But I figured few readers would get it, and it would at least be a good composition.

<comment><USER10> The picture gives me a sense of the youthful inspiration and commotion much like the articles does. A great picture and a great article. Anybody in their 40s founding startups these days or have we just accepted our waterboarding?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My favorite quote:

"Running a start-up is like being punched in the face repeatedly. But working for a large company is like being waterboarded."

<comment><USER12> Not a terribly good analogy. Working for a big company is painful in a very different kind of, much more depressing and sluggish, way.

<comment><USER13> I was going to say the same thing... it's more analogous to being drugged.

<comment><USER14> I was thinking it's more like spending time in solitary confinement. No explicit torture, just the slow creep of insanity due to social isolation and routine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They had to play the cult card didn't they.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hate it or Love it, you want to be part of the gang.</comment>


Carmack on why transatlantic ping is faster than pushing a pixel to the screen - <AUTHOR> http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-faster-than-sending-a-pixel-to-the-screen/419167#419167 <comment><USER2> I know fanboy gushing isn't really productive. But I'd just like to say that it's so awesome to live in a time when we can start a topic of conversation about someone of note, and there's a chance that this individual will join the conversation personally.

<comment><USER3> I pinged John on Twitter with a link to elicit an answer. I have to agree with you, having this proximity and immediacy through things like Twitter, Stack Overflow and services like HN is quite exciting. Just a few years ago this would have been almost unheard of (exceptions always prove the rule).

<comment><USER4> A few years ago (eek a decade) when a lot of the tech community hung out on slashdot and I remember seeing this same thing happen. We are social creatures and before tweeting (I know shocking) there was other ways and there will be new ways when no one tweets anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> LOL I used to own a computer game center and had two dedicated T1's bonded and traffic managed. The CS players would complain if the ping time spiked from 20ms to 25ms to a server and would say it was causing them to miss shots. I reviewed the connections for jitter and all sorts of things and they would never believe that the 5ms didn't make the difference.

To prove the point I downloaded a simple javascript stoplight app that would measure reaction time and told them if anyone could beat my times I'd give them an all day pass. And it never happened.. not even once.. and the times were lucky to be in the 210+ms range. 5ms wasn't causing them to miss the shot..

For those who are interested:

<http://getyourwebsitehere.com/jswb/rttest01.html>

<comment><USER6> Ha, I love stuff like that test. I couldn't break 210ms though, 213ms was my best

<comment><USER7> You should hold the key down. I got 10ms average.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Carmack probably read the Anandtech article (from 2009) on this topic: <http://www.anandtech.com/print/2803>

So the short answer is: it takes that long to go through _all_ of the processors (input controller/keyb/mouse, usb, cpu, processing latency, gpu, more processing latency, RAMDAC/digital output, LCD pre-processing, LCD output, LCD post-processing, pixel transistor)

He doesn't mention using "game mode" on that display - maybe it doesn't have one. Game mode is supposed to minimize pre- and post-processing to minimize LCD latency, exactly for this reason.

Also note it takes about that long for signals to hit your eye, go through your brain, hit a switch that fires an action, that signal to travel down your arm and back into your finger ~ 113ms.

(How does that line up with 100ms game tick cycles? I don't know.)

<comment><USER9> If you read the link, he actually describes his methodology:

 _"The time to send a packet to a remote host is half the time reported by ping, which measures a round trip time.

The display I was measuring was a Sony HMZ-T1 head mounted display connected to a PC.

To measure display latency, I have a small program that sits in a spin loop polling a game controller, doing a clear to a different color and swapping buffers whenever a button is pressed. I video record showing both the game controller and the screen with a 240 fps camera, then count the number of frames between the button being pressed and the screen starting to show a change.

The game controller updates at 250 hz, but there is no direct way to measure the latency on the input path (I wish I could still wire things to a parallel port and use in/out Sam instructions). As a control experiment, I do the same test on an old CRT display with a 170hz vertical retrace. Aero and multimon can introduce extra latency, but under optimal conditions you will usually see a color change starting at some point on the screen (vsync disabled) two 240 hz frames after the button goes down. It seems there is 8ms or so of latency going through the USB HID processing, but I would like to nail this down better in the future.

It is not uncommon to see desktop LCD monitors take 10+ 240hz frames to show a change on the screen. The Sony HMZ averaged around 18 frames, or 70+ total milliseconds."_

<comment><USER8> This agrees with Anand's results - with vsync disabled and very fast input processing, you could have about 17ms for transmission from the video card (in the video _cable_ ), another 17ms for processing, and 4ms more for LCD response, giving the ~40ms that 10 frames would give.

(1/240 sec = .075/18 = .0041667 sec = 4.1667 ms)

<comment><USER10> This is why I play Geometry Wars on a Sony Trinitron CRT TV.

> _"you will usually see a color change starting at some point on the screen > (vsync disabled) two 240 hz frames after the button goes down"_

That's less than 1/100th of a second from the button press to the screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder what the margin of error is on marking when the button push is made. Controller button range of travel makes it nearly impossible to know exactly when the electrical connection takes place from a video.

I think it'd be better to touch wires together or something more obvious to reduce the margin of error.

<comment><USER12> It probably depends on how the button is debounced as well. Software and physical debounces are both generally tuned for at least a few milliseconds and potentially over ten milliseconds of latency.

A better trigger could be built by interfacing a microcontroller over USB HID and having it send a simulated keystroke or button press at the same time as turning on an LED.

<comment><USER13> I think you're being generous. I've had microswitches that needed a good 20-25 mSec to fully debounce. Good quality sealed switches (like Cherry) too, not badly plated counterfeit stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Maybe I missed it, but he did not seem to go into detail as to how the pixel was plotted. If the pixel was placed in a buffer, and then a texture was locked and the pixel was transfered, this would obviously induce significant overhead on its own (any time you need to communicate between CPU/GPU memory induces a huge lag, in shorter words)...although Carmack knows this better than anyone else.

Also, the actual pressing of the button could use more clarification. When did measurement start? On the button down signal? On the button up signal? As soon as the finger touches the button?

<comment><USER15> He is doing a clear which is pretty much the fastest path in hardware.

<comment><USER14> Oops I did miss that. I would argue that a clear is actually not the fastest method -- it would be faster to keep two buffers of different colors (pre rendered) and swap them on key press...although the difference should be pretty trivial ;)

<comment><USER16> You're right, clear can sometimes be quite slow on some hardware. Fast clears tend to only be limited to all 0s or all 1s and only full screen. In the worst case, the hardware has no support at all and has to setup and rasterise a full-screen quad and send that down the pipeline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In fast FPSes this makes a huge diff regardless of your ping indeed. Even in, game mode on some monitors/video card setups. You only see it well during LANs when the guy sees you half to a full second BEFORE you see him.

Then you realize no one was cheating, ur hardware is just crap ;-)

</comment><comment><USER18> I am not really clear on the measurement methodology. Why is a game controller involved?

Did he trigger the ping from the same game controller button?

Did the game controller trigger the frame buffer swap on the graphics card?

At 240Hz the lower-right pixel on an LCD will be painted 4ms after the upper- right pixel. Where were the measurements taken.

Yes, LCDs are scanned devices, just like CRT's, you don't see it because of the slow response time.

Lastly, I didn't see any numbers. Where are the measurements?

</comment><comment><USER19> The total length of wire in a microprocessor is currently on the order of 100km. A signal doesn't have to go through all of it, but processing often involves loops etc. Also considering the delays at logic gates (waiting for clock signals), it's not that surprising that a speed-of-light signal that needs complex processing may travel longer inside a microprocessor than on a straight journey of a few thousand miles across the ocean.

<comment><USER20> Uh, the packet still has to traverse the same loops of microprocessors. More loops, I would wager, than just sending some bits to a display.

<comment><USER19> I didn't say that network packets take no processing, just that the processing path matters. Contrary to your intuition, this path is significantly shorter for network packets, and an Ethernet board (first produced in the 1980s) is a much simpler circuit than the latest GPUs.

<comment><USER21> Transocean cables aren't just Ethernet boards on both ends. There's extensive, extensive gear on either end as well as at the peering points between you and the destination. I'd wager that the same packet traverses tens of microprocessors between you and the destination, so your point is questionable.

Just adding a router can add up to 30ms to a hop, if it sucks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


60 FPS Animations with CSS3 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/outsystems-experts/how-to-achieve-60-fps-animations-with-css3-db7b98610108 <comment><USER2> Animations via CSS have been a challenge in my experience. It's easy to create a demo with a single layer of DOM elements and have it work well, but as soon as there is overlap of any sort, lots of DOM elements to manipulate, or things like images or media, it can get twitchy real fast. In addition, every browser and every platform is different in rand ways.

I was doing testing on a scrolling carousel and couldn't figure out what was causing a stutter that appeared in an Android WebView, but not in the equivalent Chrome version on a Mac. It turned out that the desktop browser was doing an additional recalc in the middle of a bunch of other animations. I ended up slotting in a document.body.getBoundingClientRect() to force the recalc and make them work equivalently. You might think this would cause thrashing, but it actually smoothed things out. Crazy but true.

Also, CSS animations can "cancel" in odd ways... if I tell an element to translateX from a to b, then during the animation, tell it to actually go to c, some browsers will figure it out (most) and do the right thing, some will "start over", some will do wonky things with the speed (does it calculate the duration from the current position in between a and b, or from a?).

Don't get me wrong, CSS3 animations are great, but don't make the mistake that they "just work", because they don't.

<comment><USER3> Similar experiences.

CSS3 animations are cool because they have the potential to be superior, but 3 out of 4 times it seems that the equivalent JS/$.animate is smoother and more consistent.

It's the not the reality I want, but it's the one I've been shown.

<comment><USER4> It's very situational. I built a rich SPA with lots of animations a few years ago and sometimes I would have no issues and other times animations would chug on one or two browsers. I haven't done animation work in the past couple of years but I used GSAP for that product and it was great. It's very tough to navigate the animation world because fades work great in context A on FireFox but work like crap in the same context on Safari. You might see the opposite on context B with a different animation.

Hopefully in a few more years we will see better and more consistent performance across all browsers, but we aren't quite there yet with CSS

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article was useful and concise.

I urge web developers to consider the trade-offs when using CSS hardware acceleration. Properties like `will-change` or `transform3d` substantially increase the client device's energy usage. This has battery-life implications for users on portable devices such as laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. As with any other feature, ask "why" before "how" when prioritizing interactive motion in your webapp.

More info: [https://dev.opera.com/articles/css-will-change- property/](https://dev.opera.com/articles/css-will-change-property/)

<comment><USER6> A nice feature would be to add an "energy saver" option to your web app, which adds a class to your app and a stylesheet that disables all animations.

<comment><USER7> In user styles capable browsers you can disable CSS3 animations pretty easily, just using

        *, *::before, *::after
        {
          transition: none  !important;
          animation: none !important;
        }

(For not-so-capable browsers using author level pseudo-user-style sheets the `star` must have raised specificity, like `:not(#\0)`.)

I used this in the past when I wanted to play 2048 as fast as possible, resetting also border-radius, text-shadow, box-shadow, text-rendering, image- rendering and background-image [1]. It really made quite a difference :]

[1] [https://userstyles.org/styles/103878/nofx](https://userstyles.org/styles/103878/nofx)

<comment><USER8> `transition: none` breaks pages relying on the "transitionend" js event (edit: and i guess the other transition-related events i forgot about), i noticed logging into google wouldn't work with it (it wouldn't hide some gray overlay)

here's what i use instead:

      /* forgot if this was needed but i think using !important here broke something */
      transition-property: none;

      /* maybe not needed */
      transition-delay: 0!important;

      /* non-zero to support "transitionend" event */
      transition-duration: 0.0000001s!important;

      /* possible tiny optimization */
      transition-timing-function: linear!important;

i don't know if `animation` has events associated with it but i haven't came across any sites breaking without them

<comment><USER7> This is insightful remark; I guessed it could break some presumably crappy designs blindly relying on transition-state or such, but … Google? Wow. Even considering their approach to user level style sheets [1] it is mildly surprising.

Side note: perhaps using `..duration: ..ms` in and `transition-timing- function: step-start;` could make some additional micro optimisation.

[1] killed it: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=347016](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=347016)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On a slightly unrelated note: Can anyone recommend a good SVG animation course that I could take. Or a set of guides that walk you through doing SVG animations / typical workflows.

I took this[1] course over the weekend and didn't find it very helpful because of a lack of code walkthroughs.

[1] - [https://www.lynda.com/Web-Development-tutorials/Advanced- SVG...](https://www.lynda.com/Web-Development-tutorials/Advanced-SVG- Animation/604272-2.html)

<comment><USER10> On a related note, are Lynda courses still absolutely dire?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My 2015 macbook pro will hit 150% CPU on basic SVG animation via CSS properties (like rotating an SVG element by setting `transform: rotate(90deg);`) even when using the best practices described in the article.

This means long, slow CSS animation absolutely kills browser performance. Independent of your opinions on animation in the browser, is there a less CPU- intensive way to do SVG animation?

<comment><USER12> It's either just using SVG at all that's the problem or something in the SVG that's a problem. SVGs are generally not GPU rasterized since GPUs are really not built for paths. That's a whole research area in and of itself.

There are things you can attempt depending on your browser, though, such as avoiding non-convex paths in the SVG.

If you want good performance everywhere though the only real option is just don't use SVG if you need to animate it.

<comment><USER13> > SVGs are generally not GPU rasterized since GPUs are really not built for > paths. That's a whole research area in and of itself.

It's not so much that GPUs aren't built for paths as that winding rules are not suited for parallelism. The solution is to use meshes instead of paths. This is my current area of work.

<comment><USER14> Do you mean the non-zero rule and even-odd rules? In the WP definition they don't inherently seem to have side effects or dependencies on previous computations, can you link to an elaboration?

<comment><USER13> Computing whether a pixel is filled requires computing its winding number, which depends on every path before it on the scanline. This is not a problem for a sequential algorithm, since you compute winding numbers as you go, but it is a problem if you want to fill every pixel in parallel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I hope browser vendors take note and make this guide obsolete.

<comment><USER16> This guide will be relevant until OS compositors fundamentally change from just dealing with bitmaps. Which is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

And doing UI layout on background threads breaks the basic design of pretty much every UI framework, web or native, which are usually single-threaded.

<comment><USER13> > This guide will be relevant until OS compositors fundamentally change from > just dealing with bitmaps. Which is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

There is absolutely no reason why browsers have to use the native compositor for CSS. It's a bad fit, and browsers should stop doing it.

> And doing UI layout on background threads breaks the basic design of pretty > much every UI framework, web or native, which are usually single-threaded.

That's why you have a render tree on a separate thread from the DOM. Look at how Servo does it (disclaimer: I work on Servo). We've proven that it works.

<comment><USER17> > And doing UI layout on background threads breaks the basic design of pretty > much every UI framework, web or native, which are usually single-threaded.

Dunno about the others but Qt has a threaded render loop ([http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquick-visualcanvas- scenegraph.html#t...](http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquick-visualcanvas- scenegraph.html#threaded-render-loop-threaded)) (and also has no problem handling 1080p/60fps animations on embedded hardware)

<comment><USER13> > Dunno about the others but Qt has a threaded render loop > ([http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquick-visualcanvas- > scenegraph.html#t...](http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquick-visualcanvas- > scenegraph.html#t...)) (and also has no problem handling 1080p/60fps > animations on embedded hardware)

Largely written by Glenn Watson, the primary author of Servo's WebRender, no less. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> c-smile Ideally so called rendering tree should reside completely on GPU. Or at least all heavy rendering components that it represents shall be there.

In this case each animation frame will be just a set of commands sent by CPU to GPU: render thing A at coordinate Ax,Ay, render thing B at ...

So animations that do not involve relayout will cost almost nothing for CPU. And even with relayout ( transition: width 2s; ) it will not be that bad as relayout is partial as a rule.

At least this is how it works in Sciter: [https://sciter.com/sciter-and- directx/](https://sciter.com/sciter-and-directx/) (demo of Sciter HTML/CSS rendering integrated into DirectX scene)

</comment><comment><USER18> Never buy a >= 120 Hz monitor. Everything else will start lagging :(

<comment><USER19> I have one. Didn't notice any lagging. What are you talking about?

<comment><USER18> I meant that after you're used to it, you'll start to notice "only" 60 FPS. Also animations which are capped at 60 FPS will interpolate badly to 144 Hz.

But it isn't the case with the technique described in the article (browsers also render with more than 60 FPS if the monitor refresh rate is higher), so my comment was a bit offtopic, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "but the human eye can only see 30fps!"

<comment><USER21> Sarcasm doesn't carry well on the internet, if that was your intention (not all of us know everything about everything). Please refrain, specially on this board.

<comment><USER22> I can't actually tell if you are being sarcastic.. As he actually has a point. If you're spending your time getting to make your hamburger work past 30 fps; then you may need to rethink priorities.

<comment><USER23> For a simple web app, yeah, I'd agree that trying to get over 30 fps is pointless, especially on mobile where I'll be concerned about battery usage.

But for gaming, anybody that can't tell the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps is blind. I have a 144 hz monitor, and I can certainly tell the difference even between 60 fps and 144 fps.

The UFO Test [0], while contrived, will show you the difference. If you have a 60 hz monitor, it will show things moving at 60 fps and 30 fps (And 15 and 7.5 fps, if you want). If you have a 144 hz monitor, it will show 144 fps, 72 fps, 36 fps, etc. The difference is clear, especially if you're following the UFO with your eyes. The higher framerate is less blurry. In games, this can be huge.

[0] [https://www.testufo.com/#test=framerates](https://www.testufo.com/#test=framerates)

<comment><USER24> It could be some kind of placebo effect, but I know the difference between 60 and 150+ fps even on 60hz screens. At least I'm sure I can feel it when gaming.

<comment><USER23> It is 100% placebo because a 60 hz screen can only render 60 fps. If you're getting 150 fps, then if you're playing with V-Sync enabled, only 2 of every 5 frames is being shown to you. The other three are being thrown out, never reaching the monitor. If V-sync is disabled, then you're only seeing about 2/5ths of every frame with a tear in the screen when the next frame was shown, causing rendered objects to shear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> TL;DR

These are the best css properties to animate with

Position — transform: translateX(n) translateY(n) translateZ(n);

Scale — transform: scale(n);

Rotation — transform: rotate(ndeg);

Opacity — opacity: n;

I'll add in that translate3d is generally faster than the other translate options. There's some good performance info in the post and it's worth the short read.

<comment><USER26> They also point out that substantial performance gains are given by using 'will-change,' as in the following.

      .app-menu {
    	-webkit-transform: translateX(-100%);
    			transform: translateX(-100%);
    	transition: transform 300ms linear;
    	will-change: transform;

}

And I'd point out that the authors are specifically stating that animating transform+opacity (via a 'transition') are more efficient than things like left, top, bottom, etc.—because those properties affect the layout stage, which is earlier than the composite stage (where the transform+opacity properties operate), and subsequent stages have to be recalculated.

They also discuss different ways of structuring DOM trees to create the same animation which have performance trade-offs.

<comment><USER25> Yep, the will-change was something new to me.</comment></comment></comment>


Donald Trump Speaks to Taiwan's President, Reversing Decades of U.S. Policy - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-calls-taiwan_us_5841f96be4b017f37fe4bcae <comment><USER2> TBH, this seems like a good thing to me. The spin of undoing what we did poorly in the first place seems a bit overblown. That said, this WILL ruffle some feathers. But reaching out is no new thing, only doing it publicly to the leader of a contested government. The US acknowledging Taiwan might be a good political play, but it does seem premature.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone else tired of doing email templates only for them to go to spam? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I have no sympathy. As far as I'm concerned, all automated email _is_ spam. If it didn't come from a _person_ you care about, it isn't worth your time.

<comment><USER3> Transactional, mailing list subscriptions?

<comment><USER2> When I buy shit, it shows up in my bank statement. I don't need or want an email from you.

Nor do I give a shit about your mailing list unless it's one in which I can participate by posting replies. Broadcast mailing lists can fuck right off: RSS or GTFO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's for a direct audience like we don't spam with unuseful or annoying stuff, they actually want real updates lol.</comment>