Quake Champions – Raw Gameplay Trailer [video] - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2017/04/04/bethesda-releases-the-fast-raw-quake-champions-footage-you-crave/ <comment><USER2> Quake Champions is a complete bastardization of the franchise, and an attempt by Bethesda to revitalize the Quake IP with increasingly familiar Overwatch / Paladins / TF2 formula.

Will the game be fun? Probably. But I doubt you will see more than 50,000 peak concurrent players, and I doubt QC will be anything but a blip on Quake's timeline.

The ethos of Arena FPS has been abandoned by Bethesda. The community has been begging for Bethesda to remaster Quake Live with a modern UI and modern matchmaking. It took 4+ years to implement a party system, so you could join games with friends. The state they left Quake Live in is such a disappointment, especially considering its potential in eSports. How they came to the conclusion that it was the gameplay or the graphics stopping people from trying Quake Live is beyond me. People want lobbies, ranks, matchmaking options beyond quick play, etc.

The demand for photorealism over high visibility has had an unattended consequence in relying on game engines that are frankly too easy to cheat in competitive multiplayer. Even if QC became popular, it would be plagued by the same fundamental client trust issues that CSGO has. I would be very surprised if this game maintained any sort of following through 2018. QC is a serious misstep, especially when it offers nothing but brooding backdrops to compete with Overwatch, which is already a very good contender in the mass-market Arena FPS world.

/r/Diabotical gives me some hope. Reflex has quickly established itself as the replacement game for CPMA diehards. But real Arena FPS has not figured out a way to break into the mass market, and probably never will.

<comment><USER3> Quake Live community was thriving during 2008. Then starcraft II came out and it died out. I really miss it. I tried playing again, but they 1) dropped linux support (WTF?) 2) reimplemented game physics (WHY??) 3) added auto strafe jumping ???

so many idiotic choices. I don't get it. Oh well, back to playing Quake III at LAN parties with friends I guess.

<comment><USER2> Don't forget that it was F2P, and then it wasn't! Beyond that, the UI was horrible. The UX was horrible. It's not hard to imagine why the game never broke through. They added a party system, but no queue. Finding a duel could easily take 30+ minutes. Even with the party system, getting on the same team as a friend in CA took patiently waiting out the SPEC queue, and then battling the auto-balance to stay together. They finally caved and added QL to Steam, but Bethesda did nothing to make the game easier to pick up and play, and playing with friends (especially more than one) just wasn't fun or feasible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm glad they've gone back to a relatively clean and legible environment design and aesthetic. Some of the environments in Doom 2016 are really hard to look at, and consequently hard to play competitively because they devolve into a mist of brown/red details that obscure both the level geometry and other players.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hmm... I'm a bit torn on this. It's a little too slow to be Quake and the quips and movement remind me a little too much of Overwatch. It's like they're trying to fit the formula into what's currently popular without adding anything new just to try and capitalize on the nostalgia of the name.

There's a reason Quake was popular for so long and why Quake Live was popular after that. Just stick with the basics and add the things that weren't possible back then. Don't try to conform it to Overwatch or whatever the latest game is. You're not going to dethrone CSGO and Overwatch by trying to copy them and just naming it "Quake".

</comment><comment><USER6> I hope the UI is customization - there was a lot of stuff going on there that made it distracting. The more they are releasing the less I am worried about it so far, excited!

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks like actual Quake. Well done on that. Not sure why it needed a re- release?

<comment><USER8> Gameplay looks similar (READ: identical) to Q3:TA, but an updated release would put new blood into it.

Doom 4's multiplayer was kind of lackluster, but a new Q3A should be great.

<comment><USER9> Q3 or Quake Live? i've spend quite a few (hundred) hours in Q3 + CPMA...

<comment><USER8> What's the difference? I remember Quake Live as being Q3A with matchmaking, though I've only played a tiny bit of it.

<comment><USER10> Q3 had lots of mods and different types of player run servers. Quake Live also got 'balance' changes that Q3 didn't get (like changes to LG/Rail damage)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wake me up when Quake has CTF mode with grappling hook. Or maybe someone knows another game that has a CTF mode with grappling hook.

<comment><USER12> Off-hand grapple, preferably. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y5bJzZzXNc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y5bJzZzXNc)

How did gameplay get worse since Quake I, Expert mod? It was nearly twenty years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It will be interesting to see how it compares with new UT, that's free and available to open beta long ago.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ow my ears. Methinks they're going to need to revisit that sound design.

</comment><comment><USER15> Looking forward to it! I hope they also publish a CPMA mod! <3 :)

<comment><USER16> Me too.

It sounds like CPMA's creator arQon hasn't been heard from in a few years, but the source code is held by at least one or two other people[0].

[http://www.esreality.com/post/2839396/to-arqon-cpma- sources/...](http://www.esreality.com/post/2839396/to-arqon-cpma- sources/#pid2841001)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> does it R41LZ?</comment>


Why Can't the United States Build a High-Speed Rail System? - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/why-cant-the-united-states-build-a-high-speed-rail-system/375980/ <comment><USER5> A couple of points the author misses IMO:

1\. High speed rail is an order of magnitude more expensive than interstate highways. The cost effectiveness of the mass moving people via train vs. via highways (buses, carpool lanes included) is still an active debate.

2\. The author cites that many folks use interstate highways daily. That may be true but that vast majority of those commutes are 50 miles or less. High speed rail only becomes cost and time effective over much longer distances. Which fraction of the population need to frequently travel to cities greater than 50 miles away? It's a small subset of the population (and skewed towards wealthier citizens). Roads are much more democratic -- they are available to anyone with a car.

3\. While his argument about traffic is correct... where is most of the traffic on interstate highways? Answer: around major cities. The traffic is mostly local commuter traffic that high speed rail would not solve.

<comment><USER6> > High speed rail is an order of magnitude more expensive than interstate > highways.

Only when being installed. When operating, the true cost per passenger mile is much lower than for interstate highways and cars. It's best to avoid misleading economic comparisons.

A bus is more expensive than a car, but the cost per passenger mile is much lower.

A commercial airliner is hugely more expensive than a car, but an airplane ride from A to B is cheaper than an equivalent car journey for most trips.

> The traffic is mostly local commuter traffic that high speed rail would not > solve.

False choice. Cities have sophisticated, multi-level rail and surface mass transit systems for a reason -- they make economic sense.

> Roads are much more democratic -- they are available to anyone with a car.

I have to ask -- who are you working for? Your arguments are all paper-thin, easily torn to pieces. Roads and cars are democratic? More democratic than a seat in mass transit?

<comment><USER7> > I have to ask -- who are you working for? Your arguments are all paper-thin, > easily torn to pieces. Roads and cars are democratic? More democratic than a > seat in mass transit?

This is not at all constructive. And I believe the author probably meant "individualistic" rather than "democratic."

There are no sound reasons for investing in passenger rail in the US now. The current system is already meeting demand, and on a national level all lines except the North East Corridor requires heavy subsidy.

If there were a pent up demand for it, it would have happened. We could artificially create demand by jacking up the price of petrol, but then we are taking choice away from the consumer.

Building better, faster trains is hardly a guarantee that they will be used. My experience (which I admit is purely subjective) is that people who want nicer trains already use them. I live in a major transit corridor to NYC, and the folks who already ride the train would love it to be faster and nicer, but would they pay the higher prices? Why are they all taking slow NJ Transit instead of high speed Amtrak?

<comment><USER8> > We could artificially create demand by jacking up the price of petrol, but > then we are taking choice away from the consumer.

Jacking up the price of petrol doesn't take away choice. It may be internalizing the massive externalities associated with the use of petroleum based fuels and making the choice better reflect net utilities (including disutilities experienced by people outside of individual purchase decisions as a result of those decisions), or it may be artificially creating a new externality so that the decisions less-accurately reflect real net utilities, but in either case its not removing choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The U.S. is largely built out already.

So look at Japan. Japan is 152,000 ish square miles.

The United States is 3,717,000 sq miles that are already crisscrossed with Interstates, plus a great deal of air travel infrastructure, plus low-speed rail.

It may not be obvious, but rail _crashed_ in the U.S. More than once. There were worthless railroad stock certificates in many attics. These now have actual numismatic value. Then it crashed again after Eisenhower built the Interstate.

China is 3,704,000 sq. miles but doesn't have Interstates to the same extent that the U.S. does.

The U.S. does pretty well with _low_ speed rail for freight and to a lesser extent, passenger service. But the infrastructure in the U.S. is based on 50 year old technology. China should be able to do much better and by doing so, the U.S. should develop a twinge of envy and possibly emulate them, if it makes sense.

The U.S. should ( IMO ) do a lot more "moon shot" things but it didn't work out. I watched this in real time after the moon landing. The shuttle was cool and all, but it was nothing compared to what could have been. We said "BTDT" and went to the disco.

When it comes down to it, the U.S. is a lot about granite countertops and not much else. I will not say why I think that is.

But the geometry of the way the U.S. is laid out means that you can spend a great deal on air transport before you get to break even with high-speed rail.

<comment><USER10> I completely agree with you but also feel like the big problem is people tend to state it as a case of "why the country, as a whole, needs high speed rail" and as you point out the vast majority of country really doesn't. Or at least doesn't think they do. We'd benefit greatly if we instead looked at it as a case of "why [state/city] should have high speed rail".

High speed rail from NYC to LA, while it may be cool and might be a nice big engineering challenge, really just doesn't appeal to most people. But if I, in central NJ, could take a train into Manhattan in under 2 hours, that would actually be incredibly useful and I'd love to be able to. Right now the time and cost of me taking a train from here to DC is prohibitively high compared to driving or taking a flight. These regional cases are where high speed (or at least higher speed) rail would really shine in my opinion.

<comment><USER11> The problem is that it makes sense in the densest areas of the country, but because it's so dense it then ends up being the most expensive areas of the country to implement.

<comment><USER10> Agreed, and combined with NIMBY it'll be damn near impossible to build in densely populated areas. NJ Transit has been dealing with this for decades as people keep claiming they want more rail lines but don't want them in their own towns, they want them in the next town over so they don't have to hear the train. There's no reason to believe that trying to build a high speed line wouldn't face the exact same complaints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > we have a political system in which the federal government, having devolved > virtually all decision-making power to states

That's definitely not true. Just look at the ACA.

> California's high-speed rail progress—its proposed San Francisco-to-Los > Angeles line remains the only truly fast train project in the country—is the > exception that proves the rule; that state's size makes it no example for > the rest of the nation.

Yeah let's just pretend that California's train to nowhere is an example other states should emulate.

We can't build high speed trains because: (1) the government is corrupt, incompetent and beholden to interest groups and (2) the public doesn't really want them.

The best example of public transportation the US has is probably NYC and it really isn't all that great. It's dirty, slow, unreliable, crowded and surprisingly expensive. (at 100$/mo owning a car in almost any other city in the US is cheaper)

<comment><USER13> > the government is corrupt, incompetent and beholden to interest groups

Which in turn is because of the 2-party oligopoly. Instant run-off voting, to give 3rd parties a viable chance of winning, is part of the solution.

<comment><USER14> Another reason for corruption is pay-to-play. A full war chest doesn't guarantee winning the elections, but not having one guarantees that you won't get into parliament. And if you do get in your donors expect some kind of return. Campaign finance return is sorely needed, at the moment the system is plainly corrupt, and that doesn't help the legitimacy of whatever government is in power at the moment.

<comment><USER13> Yep. In the US, if we could get a viable 3rd party we could maybe get campaign finance reform. Until then there is no chance of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem European countries have with the high-speed trains is that they are not as cheap as normal (slow) trains, and by introducing the high-speed ones they retired many cheap ones - that were slower but still got you there. This reduced the number of travelers, forcing even higher prices to cover the expenses - so they are now not very far from plane tickets.

<comment><USER16> My (now out of date) experience is that high speed trains are significantly more expensive than direct flights in Europe.

I did a quick search and it looks like FRA to AMS return is about $400 by train, $164 by plane.

<comment><USER17> I just checked, you can get a ticket from FRA to AMS _and_ back for about 108 EUR (~ 150 USD) if you buy them a few days early and choose a favorable time- slot (full price, second class). I even did that trip some time in the last three years and the price is about right.

Train rides in western Europe are not that expensive and certainly not worth the hassle with airplanes over such short distances. Also, you can buy 25% and 50% discount cards for all tickets for a year for only a few EUR's. (25% for a year = 62 EUR, 50% for 515 EUR for inland travel in Germany).

<comment><USER18> Yes, the old experience of, "just show up at the train station and buy a ticket for today at the window" has just become a good way to overpay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The US got into air transportation with much more enthusiasm than Europe and this combined with our love affair with the automobile pretty much negated a need or desire for trains. For the longest time traveling between countries in Europe could be met with restriction or such, the distances most traveled were not that great. In the US, it wasn't uncommon to travel hundreds if not a thousand miles on the big family vacation and you had three ways to get there.

High Speed rail might have some applications in some congested corridors, most likely only in the North East, but for the rest - air travel isn't that expensive.

<comment><USER20> > air travel isn't that expensive

I would argue that air travel has become very expensive. I hardly can get a ticket, even for hour-long flights, for less than $400.

Most Americans cannot afford that (take your two kids, and its $1600). Combine it with the increased price of gas, and many Americans cannot afford to travel outside their hometowns. We need better public transit.

<comment><USER21> There's always Greyhound. I honestly don't mean that facetiously. If air is too expensive and driving is too expensive, there are always buses-- though I doubt they'd be cheaper for a a family of 4 than driving,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The electric, self-driving cars we will certainly have in less time than this rail system could be built will be using existing infrastructure - the highway system - to transport us, congestion-free and at higher speeds, to absolutely any city on the map - whether they have a train station or not.

Why waste money on a rail system when the whole country is going to look like the car scenes in Minority Report in a couple decades?

<comment><USER23> I don't really think that's the future. The most comfortable commute I ever had was the Metro North into Manhattan from Westchester. Can't beat having a bathroom on your commute. Can't beat the physics of rail having lower friction than car tires (especially at higher speeds). In a place like Manhattan, I see self driving cars as a replacement for taxis, not trains. Outside of Manhattan, well who cares about those places?

<comment><USER22> There's a bathroom every half-hour on a highway commute.

<comment><USER23> There's a bathroom on the train in a train commute. And other people. And space to get up and stretch your legs.

<comment><USER22> Rest stops have all of these features. So do busses. And planes.

Trains don't have a monopoly on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There are really only 3 or 4 viable high speed rail corridors in the US:

Northeast Corridor (Boston - Washington DC)

LA - <USER2>

Chicago - <USER3>

and possibly Seattle - <USER4>

Beyond that, the traffic densities present are not enough to justify high speed rail - not to mention, even nonstop at 200 mph from LA/SF/Seattle to Chicago (or any eastern point) is a minimum of 10 hours in transit, versus 3ish to fly.

<comment><USER25> > Beyond that, the traffic densities present are not enough to justify high > speed rail

Remember that building transit infrastructure will also create new traffic!

As an example, park and rides an hour out from Seattle are packed full of cars every day. Busses are then packed full of people every day heading into the city from as much as 40 miles out.

IMHO what would be more interesting would be Vancouver BC --> Bellingham --> Midway to Seattle --> Seattle --> Tacoma --> Portland

Of course going across the boarder makes this impractical. :(

<comment><USER26> What would be interesting to me would be a Seattle<->Spokane HS line. Maybe it could run along the Empire Builder route? The cities are separated by around 280 miles using I-90 and flights take around an hour tarmac-to-tarmac. If you flew tomorrow the flight would cost around $200 RT. But you have to fly via Seatac which isn't exactly convenient if you're going to the city. The Amtrak station is right downtown in both cities. Such a connection could bring some much-needed economic development to Spokane, and might even turn it into a bedroom community of Seattle for some people - the economics might work out considering that a $1M house in Seattle might run you $200K here.

<comment><USER24> again, I'd add that post PDX-SEA - You could call the whole thing the Cascadia Corridor, and eventually take it as far south as medford.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Per an engineer in the train industry [1], an essential requirement is effective mass transit in the cities where the high-speed rail stops. Without that, passengers can't reach the inter-city trains easily enough.

[1] The kind of engineer who designs trains (and related systems), not the kind who drives them.

</comment><comment><USER27> Speaking of the northeast corridor specifically, there is a crap ton of bureaucracy inhibiting the construction of a high speed line.

Think of all of the state/municipal level governments and unions that have to be satisfied before any deal is struck. This would essentially mix NYC, Jersey, Philly, Baltimore, and D.C. politics into one huge pile of WTF.

We couldn't even get a riverfront project going in Philadelphia because not enough (of the powers that be) palms were greased.

Only way this could be possible is if some benevolent Palpatine-esqe dictator comes along and makes shit happen.

<comment><USER18> Eh, I think the biggest problem is just right-of-way issues. It's easiest to build high-speed rail if you are starting from scratch, instead of trying to work around an active commuter rail line and an existing Amtrak service. But obtaining the necessary right-of-way to do a new build in the Northeast would be extremely expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The US has been bought and manipulated by the automobile and oil industries. From early on when GM and others bought the street car networks and shut them down, to lobbying the Eisenhower interstate network in place, this country has been and continues to be built around the idea that everyone should be required to use a car to participate in all aspects of their lives.

In order for an intercity rail network to work, it needs to link dense urban cores that also have useful transit systems. A train between Omaha and Kansas City does no good if you get off the train then face a 14 mile journey through the suburbs to your destination.

2 things need to happen before a rail network makes sense:

1\. Urban infill. I know Denver has a policy for this in place, I'm sure others do too. But sooo many city cores have huge tracts of land that are derelict, or unused. New development should be incentivized to make use of this land.

2\. Growth boundary regulation. Portland is the best example of this. With out this you get the exurbs and sprawl (sorry to point out Kansas City again, but it is one of the worst offenders here) which demand a car to traverse.

</comment><comment><USER29> Well, the business model is hard to get right. It's faster than plane and car on medium distances, but capital costs are enormous compared to either. As far as I know HSR can only be directly profitable with insane population density (Japan). I believe it can be a net economic win for society in general, but a certain kind of government and populace is required to consider that kind of argument.

<comment><USER20> > Well, the business model is hard to get right. It's faster than plane and > car on medium distances, but capital costs are enormous compared to either.

Consider the climate impact costs. Part of the problem is that airlines and car owners externalize a significant cost, making those modes of transportation seem relatively less expensive. In reality, everyone else covers those costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > California's high-speed rail progress—its proposed San Francisco-to-Los > Angeles line remains the only truly fast train project in the country—is the > exception that proves the rule; that state's size makes it no example for > the rest of the nation.

California's rail plan is a lie and a joke. It won't end up being "high speed" rail. It's a waste of taxpayer money. It's another way for politicians to line the pockets of their contributors.

Rail line won't meet target travel time.

[http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/27/local/la-me- bullet-t...](http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/27/local/la-me-bullet-train- hearing-20140328)

It will cost more than proposed to the voters.

[http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/cost-high-speed- rail-...](http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/cost-high-speed-rail-project- balloons-12325)

[http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_22929875/california-high- speed...](http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_22929875/california-high-speed-rail- costs-soar-again-this)

</comment><comment><USER31> holograham is correct.

The USA does not need a high-speed rail system. The interstate system and airport network is sufficient. Between high trafficked short-distance corridors? Fine.

What the USA needs is modern commuter rail supported by a network of private short-trip mini-buses. This would have the most significant impact for lowest cost.

<comment><USER32> Commuter rail is also a much smaller, cheaper target to reach for. And it would have a much greater impact on the quality of life in urban and suburban areas.

However, the barriers to commuter rail in much of the country are stupid and entrenched. In Raliegh, NC, the main barrier to commuter rail is a county commissioner who believes in some absurd conspiracy theories [1].

[1] [http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/display_exclusive....](http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/display_exclusive.html?id=9165)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Article seems kind of ludicrous. It weirdly blames Federalism, ignores the airlines, the auto industry and the rail freight business, all which would stand to lose if public transportation dollars and regulation moved to significant passenger rail investment.

</comment><comment><USER34> tl;dr: Basically, it's because the population density is too low.

High speed rail is great for population centers that are 300 miles apart, but not so great for ones that are 1500 miles apart. The competition there is primarily the airplane, and the time difference grows with distance. So does the cost difference. (You only need an airport in each city, no matter how far apart they are, but you need a mile of railroad for each mile of distance.)

The problem, then, is that the US doesn't have enough population centers that are big enough and close enough to each other. The northeast corridor (from Boston to Washington DC) is really the only one that fits.

</comment><comment><USER35> Off topic but the graph of trust in the government in Washington descending from 73% to 19% is striking. Now there's a system that looks like it could do with disrupting or fixing or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not a fan of the essay style where you dismiss a bunch of possible reasons with single sentences, then spend paragraphs talking about the one part you want to talk about. It overly simplifies issues.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think the problem is not national will, but cost. In my experience (in Korea, and Europe) is that high speed rail is heavily subsidized, but still not competitive with air travel.

</comment><comment><USER36> Because the citizens have been indoctrinated to not believe in public works and public goods.

Hence everything has to be privatized, and if something gives little or no incentive for profit, it should not exist (like municipal fiber or proper universal health care).

With the big exception of the army and the police of course, where it's handy that the multitide of common citizens fund the resource-grabbing and property protection of the few.

<comment><USER37> "Because the citizens have been indoctrinated to not believe in public works and public goods."

Really? By whom? Where?

Trust in government hasn't collapsed due to a sudden lack of people advocating government solutions for everything in the past 50 years. In a nutshell, it's collapsed due to government not being able to deliver on a great deal of what it promises. It's simply irrational for the public to pretend that the government has some sort of spotless track record over the past 50 years.

Given how many of those failed promises have been infrastructure projects themselves, it would bode poorly for trying to fix this distrust with yet another one.

And remember, if you're inclined to start making excuses for why the public may not trust the government, you simply end up explaining why the public doesn't trust the government, it doesn't make the mistrust go away. Consider that a list of problems to be attacked before the government has the moral capital to spend again on such infrastructure projects. (One rather potent way of looking at the government's trust problems is its repeated willingness by government officials to spend that trust without putting a lot of effort into depositing into that account.)

<comment><USER36> > _Really? By whom? Where?_

By the prevalent public discourse ever since the 50's at least.

>* In a nutshell, it's collapsed due to government not being able to deliver on a great deal of what it promises.*

Seems to be able to deliver just fine in Germany or Denmark for example. It might no be infallible, but then is there any private entity that is?

> _And remember, if you 're inclined to start making excuses for why the > public may not trust the government, you simply end up explaining why the > public doesn't trust the government, it doesn't make the mistrust go away._

If you change "making excuses" to "finding the causes", then it's actually the very first step to "making the mistrust go away".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It could be that the US's high-risk/high-reward/failure-positive ethic means that elastic transportation routings are more economically valuable than fixed-segment trains.

A train is 10% better than a jet from SF to LA. A train is much worse than a jet for SF to NY. All other pairings -- or so one might argue -- are so much lesser in density that the elasticity of roads is vastly preferable.

<comment><USER20> > A train is 10% better than a jet from SF to LA. A train is much worse than a > jet for SF to NY. All other pairings -- or so one might argue -- are so much > lesser in density that the elasticity of roads is vastly preferable.

I think there are many other possibilities, and also many people live in cities of hundreds of thousands, all over America, and they'd like to travel too.

* The NE corridor, from DC to Boston, of course. Maybe south to NC

* Chicago - Indianapolis - Cincinnati - Columbus - Pittsburgh - Cleveland - Detroit (- Toronto) (That would include a spur or two, of course.) And what about people in Green Bay and Grand Rapids?

* The Florida cities, maybe up to Atlanta or West to New Orleans

* Texas cities</comment></comment>


Darpa's Plan to Trap the Next WikiLeaker: Decoy Documents  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/darpa-trap-wikileaks/ <comment><USER2> The PI's publications page: <http://sneakers.cs.columbia.edu/ids/publications_l.html>

"Baiting Inside Attackers Using Decoy Documents" [http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~bmbowen/papers/DecoyDocumentsCam...](http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~bmbowen/papers/DecoyDocumentsCameraReadySECCOM09.pdf)

I'm not sure how this could catch a Bradley Manning without potentially influencing policy thanks to non-malicious users having access to the same documents.

Also referenced in the proposal:

"Designing Host and Network Sensors to Mitigate the Insider Threat" [http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~bmbowen/papers/DesigningSensorsI...](http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~bmbowen/papers/DesigningSensorsInsider.pdf)</comment>


Drive (Courtesy of Marc Andreessen)  - <AUTHOR> http://timetogetstarted.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/happy-new-years-get-after-it/

<comment><USER2> Link to original post: <http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/12/drive.html></comment>


Famous and effective growth hacks - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2014/01/26/5-famous-effective-growth-hacks-time

<comment><USER2> AKA the 5 most annoying ways to get spammed.

<comment><USER3> Referral rewards are hardly spam. Adding a signature to every email certainly is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If people are interested in getting traction, SFHN is having a meetup 01/29: [https://next-step-growth.eventbrite.com](https://next-step- growth.eventbrite.com)

Free as usual, food and drinks provided. Come out, meet someone new, maybe learn something.

Cheers. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Hotmail is not on that list?!</comment>


Robots at the Intersection of Cool and Useful - <AUTHOR> http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/robots-at-the-intersection-of-cool-and-useful

<comment><USER2> This article exactly describes the startling realization I had last October when I first used Arduino: all of the parts exist to create robots; they just have to be put together.

 _We have all kinds of sensors which can take information about the world and turn it into voltage pulses._

 _We have all kinds of motors and servos which can take voltage pulses and move._

 _We have microcontrollers and microprocessors which can use voltage pulses as digital input, and output digital signals as voltage pulses. Also these are robust enough to count microseconds and run several-thousand-line programs._

With these few parts, we can build numerous input loops. My favorite is having a motor scale output based on the input given from a distance sensor, so an RC car will slow as it approaches a wall. I have done this in ~40 lines of code. I want to see just how much can be done with ~4000 lines of code.

I am currently building a self-driving trash can from an RC car, Arduino, some sensors, and code I've hacked together. I have dreams of building robots that swap HDDs for rackmount servers and also building seeing-eye robots. While many hackers find satisfaction in seeing their code run on servers or be used, I find it much more enjoyable to see my code rolling across the floor.

<comment><USER3> And if you want to get more advanced, there's this great open source framework... <http://www.ros.org/wiki/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, totally. ROS support is definitely on my watch list, especially for getting an OpenGL virtual representation of what the bot is doing. I like the idea of ROS -- a publish/subscribe hub of messages between every thing on a robot -- however, I don't know if I'm going to love the actual implementation. It feels like Too Much Code. But again, I'm speaking from non-experience actually using ROS.</comment></comment></comment>


Urbit sample apps - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/urbit/sample-apps <comment><USER2> I've been seeing this off and on for about a year now and I still have no idea if this is legit or some long-con troll type thing. Anyone care to shed some light on it?

<comment><USER3> It's a "troll" of computer scientists in roughly the same way that Bitcoin is a troll of economists.

<comment><USER4> Urbit is postmodern computer science ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism)). It is not intended to be a troll, but it is intended to be deliberately obscure so that only the elites will "get it". My personal opinion is that the emperor has no clothes, but I wouldn't bet my entire life savings on it. Curtis is crazy, but he's not an idiot.

<comment><USER5> Urbit is not intended to be deliberately obscure. Communication is hard, especially with such radically new ideas. That's why we're building this repository, to lower the barrier to entry. Urbit is vast and new and often difficult to comprehend, but if there's any way we can help you guys understand it, let us know.

<comment><USER4> > Urbit is not intended to be deliberately obscure.

Well, you sure fooled me.

> Communication is hard, especially with such radically new ideas.

No, it's actually not. You start with a description of the problem you're trying to solve. Then you go on to explain why existing solutions don't solve it. Then you describe your solution, and what it is about your solution that solves the problem where previous attempts have failed. It's really quite straightforward. If you can't do it, that's a pretty good indication that you don't actually understand what you're doing.

> if there's any way we can help you guys understand it, let us know

A white paper would help a lot.

But since you asked, here are a few specific questions:

1\. What problem is Urbit supposed to solve?

2\. What is the benefit of reinventing computer science from the ground up with nock and hoon? Why not start from an established base like C or Lisp or Scheme or Haskell or even the lambda calculus if you want to be purists about it? (Surely someone on the Urbit team has heard of Turing-equivalence?)

3\. If your intention is not to be obscure, why do you employ overwhelmingly obscure terminology and punctuation? Why do you use ultra-short identifiers in your code? At a casual browse I can't find even one identifier in your code longer than five characters. (You do know that you can get more than 640k of RAM nowadays, yes?)

I'm sorry for the snark, but I find Urbit incredibly frustrating. Curtis is very smart, which is pretty much the only reason that I don't just come right out and call shenanigans. But Urbit has been pegging my bogometer for a very long time.

<comment><USER6> _At a casual browse I can 't find even one identifier in your code longer than five characters._

I found an identifier named "sivtyv-barnel", so apparently six-letter words are also allowed as long as the resulting name sounds like a Norwegian actress.

<comment><USER4> Maybe they're using the Travoltifier:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/low_concept/2014/03/john_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/low_concept/2014/03/john_travolta_called_idina_menzel_adele_dazeem_what_s_your_travolta_name.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> According to [http://urbit.org/](http://urbit.org/), Urbit is unlaunched and doesn't especially appreciate tons of attention quite yet.

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh dear, isn't this Mencius Moldbug's startup?

<comment><USER2> Yes, which is one of the a whole host of other reasons to stay away from this. Urbit openly states that it has backdoors in place to allow policing by any government.

<comment><USER3> Source?

<comment><USER9> [https://github.com/urbit/urbit](https://github.com/urbit/urbit)

<comment><USER3> You really have to be more specific for such a strong claim. Especially when it's qualified by "openly states". I call bullshit.

<comment><USER10> The actual source is this blog post [http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2013/12/a-brief- int...](http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2013/12/a-brief-introduction- to-urbit.html) , which has mutated over time into "full of backdoors", apparently. As for the original statement from that post, the creator of Urbit "definitely would not endorse" it. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8581416](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8581416)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reading this is so strange feeling. Its like weird science fiction or something where many of the important words are made up, but the rest is normal English.

urbit ship vane hoon!

At least math is the same.

</comment><comment><USER12> what is urbit?

<comment><USER13> It's an operating system: [https://github.com/urbit/urbit](https://github.com/urbit/urbit)</comment></comment>


Report on the characteristics of Covid-19 positive deceased patients in Italy [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-COVID-2019_17_marzo-v2.pdf <comment><USER2> Some excerpts (courtesy of Google translate):

The mean age of deceased and positive COVID-19 patients is 79.5 years (median 80.5, range 31-103, RangeInterQuartile - IQR 74.3-85.9). There are 601 women (30.0%). The figure 1 shows that the median age of patients COVID-19 positive deaths is more than 15 years higher than that of patients who contracted the infection (median age: patients who died 80.5 years - patients with infection 63 years). The Figure 2 shows the number of deaths by age group. Women who died after contracting COVID-19 infection they are older than men (median ages: women 83.7 - men 79.5)

The Figure 4 shows the therapies administered in patients who died COVID-19 positive during hospitalization. ThereAntibiotic therapy was the most widely used (83% of cases), least used antiviral (52%), most rarely steroid therapy (27%). The common use of antibiotic therapy can be explained by presence of super infections or is compatible with initiation of empirical therapy in patients with pneumonia, pending laboratory confirmation of COVID-19. In 25 cases (14.9%) all 3 therapies were used.

The figure 5 shows, for the patients who died positive COVID-19, the median time in days, who spend from onset of symptoms to death (8 days), from onset of symptoms to hospitalization (4 days) and from hospitalization to death (4 days). The time elapsed from hospitalization to death was 1 day longer in those who were transferred to resuscitation than those who did not they were transferred (5 days against 4 days).

To date (17 March), 17 COVID-19 positive patients have died under the age of 50. In particular,5 of these had fewer than 40 and were all male people aged between 31 and i39 years with serious pre-existing pathologies (cardiovascular, renal, psychiatric pathologies, diabetes, obesity).

<comment><USER3> huh, no one else has mentioned this, am I interpreting this wrong? If 30% of deceased positives are female, then 70% are male? That's quite a big difference!

<comment><USER4> this is highly anecdotal, but my family is from a small town in italy, population of ~1500, and the men are way less healthy from a lifestyle perspective - lots of drinking, smoking, hard manual labor without lung protection, etc etc, while the women mostly stay home handling home duties and socializing

<comment><USER5> I think prior lung damage is going to shake out as the number one prior factor in the likelihood of severe infection and probability of death.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some interesting data here.

\- Mean age of 79.5 sheds light on Italy's extremely high fatality rates; in essence, it's the (very) elderly that are dying due to complications from viral pneumonia. Which begs the next question...

Why are they overwhelmingly treating patients with antibiotics in cases of viral pneumonia and _not_ antivirals (Remdesivir)/ chloroquine?

Sure, these are "experimental" therapies but decent data out of China/South Korea shows these therapies work. Perhaps they found out too late?

\- The younger fatalities (17) show multiple, serious co-morbidities and smoking is not listed; an assumption can be made a fair amount of these younger patients smoke. But again, an assumption.

\- Almost 50% of patients showed 3 or more co-morbidities - this is high and important to note. 25% of patients showed 2 co-morbidities. Roughly 75% of patients had 2 or more co-morbidities (!).

\- Sample size (2003) is good given their current 3,500 fatality numbers.

Not a medical doctor but a few things I'm struggling to figure out:

\- How did so many elderly get infected? Did the disease simply spread in close quarters where many elderly live? Elderly folks aren't necessarily out and about drinking espresso and touching surfaces yet alone having younger asymptomatic carriers cough on them.

I wonder if Italy is similar to a Kirkland, Washington situation. High density of elderly folks spreading infection.

It's obvious that SARS-Cov-2 is highly, highly contagious but it's interesting how we're seeing these somewhat "bomb" explosions of infection: Wuhan > Daegu > Kirkland > Lombardy > NYC next.

Sure, quarantine works but the rate of new infection stays rather localized and then just annihilates everyone around it.

Perhaps it's a viral load issue; viral load increases exponentially the more we have infected. Why you see doctors and nurses infected / critical and dying even with full PPE.

Let's hope the Italians figure out a way to get this curve to fall of ASAP. Hoping they have a similar effect to Wuhan's curve and just drop down rather than flatten.

<comment><USER7> > Elderly folks aren't necessarily out and about drinking espresso and > touching surfaces yet alone having younger asymptomatic carriers cough on > them.

From what I understand about Italian culture, they kind of are. Older Italians seem to have much stronger social lives than in the US.

<comment><USER6> There's truth to this and perhaps I jumped to an invalid American based assumption, stupid given that I'm European.

In Europe, the elderly are out and about, walking, sitting at parks, drinking coffee, the works. They're actually still doing this as we speak in countries, from what friends and family tell me. Go figure.

However, even if they are in cafes, grocery stores, parks - the numbers are still very high.

This virus is either incredibly efficient and contagious (spread by totally asymptotic carrier pigeon patients > elderly) and/or it's been there for a long time. Months.

<comment><USER8> If my experience with 'southern' cultures is anything to go by, the amount of interaction between young and old people probably plays a huge role.

For comparison, I live in NL and for me and the vast majority of my 20-30-something friends, visiting grandparents is relatively rare. For many of us even visiting parents is a 'once every x months' kind of thing.

On the other hand, when I lived around the mediterranean, not only was it expected to regularly interact with parents and grandparents, but it was often the case that they lived together, or at least close by.

Perhaps the 'quarantining'/neglect of the elderly in Northern-Europe that I've often criticised as inhumane is actually saving them in this particular situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Summarizing the deaths, by age distribution is quite telling (page 4):

\- no deaths under 30

\- Less than 1% of deaths under 50

\- less than 4% of deaths under 60

\- 87% of deaths above 70

This disease is incredibly dangerous for our elderly, and isolating them to prevent infection should be our top priority.

<comment><USER10> That's because Italy's hospitals are overcrowded and very old patients are simply not treated at all. It's a vicious circle because they're thought being less likely to survive, are denied treatment, which makes them even less likely to survive.

<comment><USER9> Triage is unfortunately applied in some hospitals, especially around Bergamo.

But you would need to provide some data to make the claim that the stats are skewed this much purely because all elderly are just cast away. Given the vast majority of hospital cases are actually the elderly.

Finally, proper ethical triage never looks at how long a patient is expected to live after their recovery as a condition.

<comment><USER11> > Finally, proper ethical triage never looks at how long a patient is expected > to live after their recovery as a condition.

But it does look at chances of survival, which for this particular disease looks very closely correlated with how long a patient is expected to live after their recovery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Doesn't the median age of 60 years for positively diagnosed patients suggest a huge number of non-detected cases?

<comment><USER6> Probably tens of thousands of undiagnosed, asymptomatic.

Aka super carriers.

The virus is smart and has evolved from an evolutionary standpoint. Infect younger and asymptomatic patients with the goal of spreading and infecting as many as possible. Eventually, the more infected, the more that will die. The young are just carrier pigeons and don't even know it.

<comment><USER13> > The virus is smart and has evolved from an evolutionary standpoint. Infect > younger and asymptomatic patients with the goal of spreading and infecting > as many as possible.

I think you are giving a bit too much agency to the virus. It has evolved in such a way that optimises for further spreading for sure, but I do not think it has a sneaky strategy to use young people as attack vectors.

What's more likely is that it has evolved to replicate and spread within the human population, while not acting so fast as to kill most people. The problem is that replicating at a rate that doesn't kill most people will kill some of the oldest and sickest within a population.

<comment><USER14> Another important insight is that Viruses, and germs in general, try to evolve and adapt inside the host. They don't gain if they end up killing the host because that ends them too. Not to sound apocalyptic but I think their holy grail is something like what the machines do to humans in the movie Matrix

<comment><USER15> > Another important insight is that Viruses, and germs in general, try to > evolve and adapt inside the host.

That assumption has no basis at all. Evolutionary pressures don't happen due to a intentional guidance from the evolving species. Individuals mutate by chance and replicate as they can. That's it.

<comment><USER14> This does have basis Refer to this section in the publication from National Academy of Sciences. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK209710/?report=reader#...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK209710/?report=reader#ddd00005)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I found page 3 most remarkable: 48% of those who die of covid-19 in Italy also suffer from three or more other diseases (or did recently), and 99.2% suffer from one or more.

<comment><USER17> What counts as a co-morbidity? Obesity seems fairly ... well, trivial. I have high (total) cholesterol. Does that count? Constipation? Itchy spot on the back of my knee?

<comment><USER18> The co-morbidities reported here are mentioned in the report (in Italian). Translated by Google:

      diseases N %
      Ischemic heart disease 117 33.0
      Atrial fibrillation 87 24.5
      Stroke 34 9.6
      Hypertension 270 76.1
      Diabetes mellitus 126 35.5
      Dementia 24 6.8 COPD 47 13.2
      Active cancer in the past 5 years 72 20.3
      Chronic liver disease 11 3.1
      Chronic renal failure 64 18.0

Hypertension and Diabetes seems very prevalent in older people. Especially in western countries like the US.

<comment><USER19> Maybe it is just correlation between old age and hypertension, but I find it interesting how ACE2 which the coronavirus uses as its entry point into cells is also part of regulating blood pressure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is a summary of this by Bloomberg news: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of- tho...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who- died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says)

</comment><comment><USER21> [https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...](https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report- COVID-2019_17_marzo-v2.pdf&usg=ALkJrhhtAr5nOIYSlTRIwXfaWvyLmI0o8Q)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's unfortunately not yet translated but I think the graphs and tables are clear enough and can easily be translated by Google Translate.

Personally my surprise is that it seems half of those deceased people did not receive any kind of antiviral therapy.

<comment><USER22> Possible explanations for the absence of antiviral therapy: lack of availability, reluctance to prescribe untested treatment (all antiviral treatments are currently experimental), some of the antivirals actually work really well and a lot of the people who got them are missing from this study because they recovered. I hope it's the latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How many were so sick that they would have died anyway?

I read that they were testing dead people and the theory was, their count was so high because they would add people to it that would have died anyway but just happen to be infected right before their death.

Edit: I think this is an interesting question. Why do Italy, France and Spain have such high death ratios? Are they measuring more than needed or are the others measuring not enough?

<comment><USER24> Right, but you need to establish the cause of death and it's kind of important. Like for example my father was fighting cancer for 8 years before he died, but when he passed away the hospital wrote that he died of "cardiac arrest", since his heart just couldn't go anymore. So in some statistic somewhere he will exist as a person who died of heart problems, not someone who died because of cancer. That's not right either I don't think.

<comment><USER11> This is a problem with counting diabetes deaths as well. We have evidence to believe that people with diabetes are much more likely to get heart disease or cancer, which is what they usually die from. There's lots of debate on if mortality due to diabetes is underestimated for the same reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone has a translated version of of this?

<comment><USER26> [https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Infograf...](https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Infografica_19marzo%20ENG.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Confirms that this is a disease of the elderly and unwell, and everyone else should be getting on as normal.

<comment><USER28> This is about deaths, not cases. If everyone else tries to get on as normal then the virus will spread like wildfire among them and the elderly and unwell will quickly become infected.

<comment><USER27> Isolate the elderly and unwell, let the virus spread among the rest.

<comment><USER28> How could you possibly isolate 10s of millions of people who are thoroughly mixed in with the rest of society? Many of them live with or are dependent on the younger healthier people. Even if the isolation were possible, letting the virus spread like that would overwhelm the health system and push the death rate way up.

<comment><USER27> The same way they're doing it now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is encouraging for healthy youngsters BUT age and health are also the criteria for receiving treatment in Italy at the moment. As the epidemic grows the categories of people that get ventilation decrease and the deaths will get younger and healthier.

<comment><USER30> Even if a youngster as a higher change of survival, there are serious effects reported. Fibrosis (damage of the lung tissue) lasts for much longer (over 4 weeks) than it is known in any typical flu. And what happens after 4 weeks is still totally unclear.

As we don't know yet of the long term effects, please don't take that lightly!

<comment><USER6> Source for this comment?

All pneumonia's have decreased lung function post-infection and require therapy to retain full or close to full lung function.

Curious where you're getting this info from

<comment><USER30> Sure, thank you for asking.

My source is an interview in the first German state TV station (ARD). I am sorry that I can't provide you with an English source. If you understand German, please watch [https://youtu.be/IHF0IDtW6LA?t=882](https://youtu.be/IHF0IDtW6LA?t=882) from minute 14:42.

As a second source, I found a written report on the TV talk here, for which you may use, e.g., deepl.com to translate it: [https://www.express.de/news/promi-und-show/corona-talk- spd-p...](https://www.express.de/news/promi-und-show/corona-talk-spd- politiker-wagt-bei--maischberger--drastische-prognose-zum-wochenende-36440162)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Economist Opinion Cloud by Infomous and Appinions - <AUTHOR> http://www.infomous.com/site/economist/

<comment><AUTHOR> I have the feeling that this functionality could be a good match for hacker news.

However, I cannot how they could be added to news feed.

Do you have any idea?</comment>


Pure CSS Progress Bar - <AUTHOR> http://ivan.ly/ui/

<comment><USER2> Looks good, you did a good job with it. Are you planning to sell it, use it yourself, or open source it?

</comment><comment><USER3> Good work, but doesn't "Pure CSS" usually mean "CSS without JavaScript"?

<comment><USER4> I've noticed this too. A lot of demos claim to be pure CSS but not so when view source'd.

<comment><USER5> The Javascript is only for demonstrating the functionality. It does not effect the styling in anyway, this is the job of the CSS.

It is also worth mentioning that in any application which would use a progress bar, it would require JS to calculate progress, or update the DOM to display it.

As far as being a pure CSS progress bar, it is.</comment></comment></comment>


When A Facebook Rant Gets You Fired - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203710704577049822809710332.html

<comment><USER2> As a business owner, why would I want an employee that's constantly complaining about their workplace and spreading potentially harmful information about my company?

Employees already have most of the power in the US. They can quit at any time. However, I many be forced to keep a paying a bad employee.</comment>


Ask HN: How to solve HN-loop? - <AUTHOR>

Not just HN, but the entire internet is becoming too much of a timesuck for me, so despite the irony I thought that I should come to HN and ask if there is something like Leechblock, but for Chrome.
StayFocusd and Chrome Nanny don't cut it for me, because I am looking for something that can block every single site, except for the ones I specify. (Even better if it can give 5 mins of unblocked browsing every 2 hours or so)
And to prove my point, I only came here just then to ask this question, but ended up spending 8 minutes reading articles before jumping back to this tab....
Reminds me of this: youtube loop (urbandict): When you go to watch a quick 30 second video on YouTube and regain consciousness hours later having jumped from interesting video to interesting video. <comment><USER2> You could try

\- K9 Web protection

But I am still battling this myself - discipline is what it takes. I'm travelling this weekend for work and stuck in a hotel with rate capped internet (0.5mbit). It's so slow for browsing it's unbelievable. Yesterday I managed around 16 hours of work because I just got so fed up with the internet speed that I gave up browsing. So you could try that - download all the docs you need, get all the development tools setup on your local machine and then just go somewhere with no internet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try using Chrome Nanny and setting the blocked URL to .

It sometimes takes a second or two after startup to kick in, but it works. Make sure you set your home page to Google and whitelist it beforehand!

</comment><comment><USER4> You could try learning some self control. Just stop going to sites that take up your time.</comment>


Show HN: Browse Wikipedia articles as-of a specific date & time - <AUTHOR> http://whenopedia.kerzap.com

<comment><USER2> It's sort of a cool technology, but if it's intended to be a business, I don't think enough people want this for it to be a successful business. [http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed--it's just a utility.</comment></comment>


The mobile data apocalypse, and what it means to you - <AUTHOR> http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2009/11/mobile-data-apocalypse-and-what-it.html

<comment><USER2> "It's also possible to create some APIs that would tell a website how much bandwidth is available to it, so the developer could adjust its features accordingly."

Interesting.</comment>


Announcing Gatsby 2.0.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2018-09-17-gatsby-v2/ <comment><USER2> I tried using Gatsby for a project of mine. The moment I tried to do _any_ thing not supported OOTB, it seemed I was fighting the tooling (and webpack) at every corner. It was incredibly difficult just to get a simple tree navigation.

One thing I thankful for though is that it gave me a new-found love for the simple and non-flashy libs/tooling.

In the end, I wound up writing my own static site generator.

[https://github.com/pauldotknopf/statik](https://github.com/pauldotknopf/statik)

You may say to yourself "So you just wrote your own Gatsby!?"

No, I didn't. I wrote a thin lib that you can register endpoints and extract them to disk. It does absolutely nothing else. The idea is that I will wrote my own markdown rendering, navigation, html/css, etc for each project. "But what about the time it takes to implement all the features you need!" The time it takes to implement these minor things take far less time in the long run, and I will never have to be in an endless fight with the tooling to get simple tree navigation. Every feature I implement is exactly what I need, no more, no less.

Sure, it isn't as _cool_ as React, webpack, etc. But I'm a lot happier.

<comment><USER3> Did you evaluate Jekyll or Hugo for your use case?

<comment><USER2> I did. IMO, Hugo is the closest of any static gen to hitting the sweet spot of simplicity and feature set.

However, there were some features that I simply could not add to it. Features that if I didn't have the tooling bogging me down, I could implement in 10 minutes.

[https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/3659](https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/3659)

I can't fault Hugo for that GH issue though. The author's response is valid.

I know I sound grumpy. Hugo is great. It is a far better option than Gatsby. The features that it has are very simple and straightforward (no graph nodes/graphql/webpack- _esque_ abstractions). I actually highly recommend Hugo.

edit: To add onto my original comment, I encourage people to read this blog post.

[http://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/](http://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/)

<comment><USER4> I took the approach of bolting a second compiler on top of Hugo(a custom Python script) to get the extra things I wanted in Hugo.

It still took a while, but I did get to leverage the parts of Hugo that already work well.

I don't think there's much in the way of winning either way, since now I have a Build Process.

<comment><USER2> But it's _your_ compiler, that does _exactly_ what _you_ want.

;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hadn't heard of this before but it looks really good. Good documentation, lots of plugins and community support, and appears to be in use by some big companies. Anyone here had good or bad experiences with it?

<comment><USER6> I am starting to do my blog with it and so far it's really good. One thing I love is how it is built to be a Progressive Web App. If you don't know what that is: after downloading your page, your browser will start to download the other pages of your website automatically so they will be able to render instantly. It's also amazing for documentation. You go on one page and the other pages will be preloaded so that means that even without network you can still browse all the pages and again with rendering instantly. Go on their website and check in the Chrome DevTool in Network, you will see.

Another thing I like is how they leverage GraphQL. I am not a fan to use it as a back end language but for a query tool existing only on the front it all makes sense and it's really effective. You can easily build query to generate all kind of pages and contents automatically. And that from all kind of sources (markdown, CSV).

There are many other great stuff like their source/transform plugin to be able to query on any (if the plugin is made) source.[1] Or having to only learn 2 API call (onCreateNode, onCreatePage) and GraphQL to start to do many of the biggest things... Or I can talk about how when building the project Gatsby makes all the call to any headless CMS to retrieve all the data to leverage them while still being able to create a static website at the same time...[2]

Finally Netlify provides a dead simple way to host your project. You just need to create an account and link your Github repo on their platform and every time your master will change your website will be automatically deployed. Ho and it's free...

[1] [https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/source-plugin- tutorial/](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/source-plugin-tutorial/)

[2] [https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/wordpress-source-plugin- tutori...](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/wordpress-source-plugin-tutorial/)

<comment><USER7> Progressive Web Apps aren't universally a good idea. I'm sharing a 6Mb/s down link with 5 other people. The absolute _last_ thing I want is every website to pre-cache 40 pages for every page I browse.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely!

Gatsby tries to balance making your site work at some level offline w/ not precaching too much.

By default we cache the front page & then do "run-time" caching as the user visits different pages so ensuring they can at least return to the pages they've visited when offline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I built a landing page for a nonprofit I'm involved in [1] with Gatsby v2 (while it was in beta/rc), with close to no knowledge of the Webpack and React ecosystems. It's been fairly pleasant to work with, and I look forward to building more sites with it and contributing back where I can!

It was also fun to see my site achieve 100% with ease on Chrome's Lighthouse tests. I still have no idea what kind of impact it has on SEO, but every little bit helps.

Thanks to all who contributed!

[1] [https://cu.sg](https://cu.sg)

</comment><comment><USER9> My startup's website is currently built on Gatsby. I originally looked to it because we wanted to get something up very quickly for a tradeshow. 16 months later we've never gotten around to "we redo it down the road". It's still serving us very well.

My thoughts:

Pros:

* I love React, so Gatsby was a natural extension for me. It's very helpful to use the same toolchain/mindset in most places.

* I don't have to learn/forget/relearn all of the stupid bugs in Wordpress/Drupal/etc. Gatsby has some shortcomings, but in general if you've worked with React, you already know where the shortcomings and limitations are.

Cons:

* Deployment isn't terribly straight forward if you have a custom use case. I ended up manually building and serving with a small node script.

* It can be very, very (too easy) to accidentally share a server side ENV variable into the JS build. You have to be very careful not to leak an important key.

</comment><comment><USER10> I look forward to migrating to 2.0. I use GatsbyJS 1 for many websites. One website I regenerate every morning to build over 1600 pages ([https://frekvensapp.com](https://frekvensapp.com)). I'm told 2.0 has much better support for large sites.

</comment><comment><USER11> I built [https://www.goodlyapp.com](https://www.goodlyapp.com) using Gatsby the performance has been amazing.

The best things is using data at build time rather than run time. Which make everything so fast for the end user.

<comment><USER12> No offence but seems like a complete ripoff of their homepage design: [https://i.imgur.com/O1bGpvP.png](https://i.imgur.com/O1bGpvP.png)

<comment><USER11> Yes I was looking for design inspiration. Anything wrong with it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Congrats on the release! Looks great.

Looks like Gatsby has raised a ~4m seed. I'm curious: how does Gatsby (the company) make/plan to make revenue from Gatsby (the library)? Support, hosting, or something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're building cloud products which complement the OSS product.

We launched our product, Gatsby Preview, into alpha in July [https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2018-07-17-announcing- gatsby-p...](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2018-07-17-announcing-gatsby- preview/)

A lot of people really love building sites with headless CMSs and Gatsby. Gatsby Preview gives content editors live preview of changes they're making in the CMS on a real version of the site.

We launched with support for Contentful and are adding support for other headless CMSs along with traditional CMSs running in headless mode like Drupal and WordPress.

Also check out our launch blog post [https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2018-05-24-launching-new- gatsb...](https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2018-05-24-launching-new-gatsby- company/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Writing sites with Gatsby is amazing, but is there any way to opt out of JS/PWA completely? It'd be nice to have a setting where Gatsby just called ReactDomServer.renderToStaticMarkup.

</comment><comment><USER12> My project ([https://qards.io](https://qards.io)) was #2 on ProductHunt last Saturday and I can say I have some knowledge of Gatsby. The community is very, very vibrant and I'm surprised with the number of plugins they have.

The maintainers are very active and responsive and the project itself does many things...just right.

<comment><USER15> Somehow missed this and I'm a big PH user, but you've built an awesome product!

Love the simplicity and way you've refined the marketing around your app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats Kyle & team! So good to see your company moving forward and getting shaped into a great product.

[http://Graphene-Python.org/](http://Graphene-Python.org/) is still using Gatsby after 2 years from the first release, keep up the good work! :)

</comment><comment><USER17> The optimizations Gatsby does by default are great, especially if you're a web performance noob. But, I feel like Gatsby and static website generators in general are the product of front-end developers learning to code Javascript with no knowledge of HTML or the underlying technologies.

Nothing wrong with having a chance to make a website with your favorite front- end framework, but when you've been doing web apps with Javascript and websites with only a CSS framework if any, these generators just feel like a bit too much. Not everything needs to be an "app", if you catch my drift.

If you want to make a website that's blazing fast and you happen to know React well, Gatsby really is your best bet.

</comment><comment><USER18> This should be the recommended starter for React developers, over create- react-app!

</comment><comment><USER19> Congrats! Going to use Gatsby V2 to convert a WP website to headless WP with ACF and static Gatsby on frontend.

Reason why WP is because its still the best editing experience and very simple of anyone to get started with.

</comment><comment><USER20> How viable is the enhancement of Gatsby with client side interactive stuff (maybe with Create React App widgets) on a Gatsby site?

I'm currently reasearching different workflows and tools where you can transition from a landing page to a saas without changing the dev environment that much.

The closest thing I've found is in the Laravel/Vue ecosystem, where you can start with a static site generator (Jigsaw), and progress into a full Laravel application from there, as it uses the same stuff under the hood minus the backend.

</comment><comment><USER21> Looking at moving a fairly large site to Gatsby. Hoping v2 improvements will help us.

</comment><comment><USER22> Just finished publishing my blog using gatsby 1.8! Congratulations and great job!</comment>


Taps go dry as Bolivia declares water emergency for drought - <AUTHOR> http://www.bigstory.ap.org/article/cf976c1e333543a59acc848b466cb3a3/taps-go-dry-bolivia-declares-water-emergency-drought <comment><USER2> Man, south america can't catch a break.

Drought is horrible, both for drinking and washing purposes, as well as hydroelectric issues.

Venezuela's government desperately went to a 3 day workweek to try to minimize power usage [http://www.hydroworld.com/articles/2016/04/low-water- levels-...](http://www.hydroworld.com/articles/2016/04/low-water-levels-at- guri-reservoir-in-venezuela-lead-to-power-cuts.html)

It's not all because of the drought, of course. Government policies had a hand in the electrical shortage. But lack of water ruins everything.</comment>


Show HN: UX Principles in a new tab for Chrome and Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://brainytab.com/more-extensions/ux-principles/ <comment><USER2> Nice one @wgx</comment>


What are the lesser known but useful data structures? - mck- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/500607/what-are-the-lesser-known-but-useful-data-structures?rq=1 <comment><AUTHOR> There's a whole set of interesting data structures that are not very well known: succinct data structures[1]. The idea is simple: we want to store data in a compressed form, but also perform certain operations quickly without uncompressing.

These can be very useful for certain applications. The article on "Cramming 80,000 Words into a JavaScript File"[2] is a nice example. It shows you how you can store a compressed trie in memory but still use it. I also like this[3] series of blog posts leading up to wavelet trees.

These certainly count as obscure data structures, unlike many of the ones listed on SO. I had never even considered the _idea_ of compressing data in memory like this, much less encountered actual examples of succinct data structures! I have to thank Edward Kmett for introducing me to the whole field.

These data structures are important not just because they're neat themselves, but because they got me to think a new way. In particular, I realized that using pointers all over the place--to represent things like trees--is not always efficient. Instead of parsing data, it might be better to store it as a blob of some sort with a binary index. Just starting to consider details like that is valuable all on its own.

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

[2]: [http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php/?id=120](http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php/?id=120)

[3]: [http://alexbowe.com/rrr/](http://alexbowe.com/rrr/) and [http://alexbowe.com/wavelet-trees/](http://alexbowe.com/wavelet-trees/)

<comment><USER2> > Instead of parsing data, it might be better to store it as a blob of some > sort with a binary index.

This is exactly something I did for JSON, I call it semi-indexing: instead of parsing it into a tree of pointers, I create a succinct representation of the parsing tree, which is orders of magnitude smaller than the original JSON. Construction is much faster than parsing because there are basically no memory allocations, and access is not that much slower.

About performance of succinct data structures in general, it is true that they have shown poor practical performance, but things are changing, both because we have better CPUs (while memory latency is pretty much unchanged), and better algorithms are being found. I did my Ph.D. on practical succinct data structures. We found that in some applications, the access times are competitive or faster than the non-succinct counterparts, while the space is much smaller. One example is tries: in my thesis [2] there are experiments for string dictionaries, and for query autocompletion (for example for search engines).

Another area where (quasi-)succinct data structures are having some success is inverted indexes: recently proposed posting lists based on Elias-Fano [3] have been shown to outperform standard delta-encoded posting lists for queries with sparse intersection, and are used in Facebook's graph search [4].

Finally, the biggest success story of SDS has historically been molecular biology, because the size of the DNA sequences processed is so large that non- succinct data structures are impractical. Many sequence assemblers/aligners use variants of FM-indexes and Compressed Suffix Arrays, that are self-indexes based on the Burrows-Wheeler Transform and Wavelet Trees.

[1] [https://github.com/ot/semi_index](https://github.com/ot/semi_index)

[2] [http://www.di.unipi.it/~ottavian/files/phd_thesis.pdf](http://www.di.unipi.it/~ottavian/files/phd_thesis.pdf)

[3] [http://vigna.di.unimi.it/ftp/papers/QuasiSuccinctIndices.pdf](http://vigna.di.unimi.it/ftp/papers/QuasiSuccinctIndices.pdf)

[4] [http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol6/p1150-curtiss.pdf](http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol6/p1150-curtiss.pdf)

<comment><USER3> IMHO, the FM-index deserves to be highlighted. That it is possible to store a string in a compressed format which can answer length-P substring queries in O(P) time (with good constant factors) is quite surprising at first sight.

I recently wrote a few words about this here: [http://ocfnash.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/dna-of-a-password- di...](http://ocfnash.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/dna-of-a-password-disaster/) By the time I finished I decided the whole area was exciting and seems not at all as well known as it should be. I also think there are plenty of related, as- yet-undiscovered ideas, waiting for somebody to find them!

<comment><USER4> A nice application for the FM-index: it has massively accelerated alignment of short DNA sequences against large databases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > This question exists because it has historical significance, but _it is not > considered a good, on-topic question for this site_ , so please do not use > it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here.

Yet it's one of the best questions on SO. Something's very wrong with SO if this isn't considered a good, on-topic question for a programming Q&A site.

<comment><USER6> How is that one of the best questions on SO? There is always someone who wants SO to be what they want it to be. I'm not saying everything is perfect in SO but I think the standard answer is that if you want a site that is about subjective discussions related to programming you should make one...

<comment><USER5> How is it not one of the better questions on SO? It's educational, it's on- topic, it's more cerebral than the usual questions about jQuery, it has high quality answers, the question itself is as clear as day, it's interesting, and it's very popular in terms of views and upvotes.

There's a degree of opinion in most answers anyway especially as there's often multiple ways to do the same thing and every answerer will have a preference of some kind. I don't necessarily see this one as a particularly subjective discussion anyway, or why you think I'm trying to make SO be something it's not. In any event, why are marginally subjective discussions are a horrible thing anyway in a Q&A site?

<comment><USER6> How can anyone answer "really useful but are unknown to most programmers"? They are so useful we don't know about them? Aren't the answers, by definition, known, to a lot of programmers? Useful for what exactly?

I think I heard this criticism of SO for about 1 million times and this is the 1 million + 1 that tripped my fuse, so apologies for that. This question, and the answers, though IMO are bits of trivia and opinions more suited to a blog post.

Does it have some marginal usefulness in exposing some people without background to some random data structures or algorithms- maybe. The question is still there, it wasn't deleted, so SO is acting as the resource that you'd like it to be. If it's your first exposure to data structures I think there are better options out there (text books, online courses). If you are looking to solve some particular problem this is probably not the best resource. So it just stands as a (maybe interesting) bit of computer science trivia.

There are endless subjective topics that are tangentially related to programming and may be fun/amusing/interesting but SO is about things that have answers, not about discussions. I like it that when I have a question I can search and get a good answer for it, not just someone's opinion. For entertainment value and interesting things I go to other places, such as HN...

<comment><USER5> > The question is still there, it wasn't deleted, so SO is acting as the > resource that you'd like it to be.

Try asking such a question today, or any time in the last couple of years!

> So it just stands as a (maybe interesting) bit of computer science trivia.

Just because you label it trivia doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't important to the asker or the thousands of people that read, commented, and upvoted. Just like people asking about jQuery, the asker had a question in mind and wanted to crowdsource the answer.

> but SO is about things that have answers

An opinion can be an answer too.

> For entertainment value and interesting things I go to other places, such as > HN...

Why must the answers on SO be bland as tofu? You seem to give the impression that learning and the SO answers must be plain and dull, and any hint of entertainment must be quickly quashed. I see nothing wrong with being entertained and educated at the same time, especially as things that are entertaining tend to be more readily recalled.

<comment><USER7> Why do meat eaters have such a desire to disparage vegetarians in completely irrelevant contexts?

<comment><USER5> I didn't disparage vegetarians, and not even their diets. Tofu on its own is bland and that's really hard to refute. Tofu with other stuff is delicious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Even though they are included in the GNU C library, most people do not seem to know about Obstacks:

 _An "obstack" is a pool of memory containing a stack of objects. You can create any number of separate obstacks, and then allocate objects in specified obstacks. Within each obstack, the last object allocated must always be the first one freed, but distinct obstacks are independent of each other.

Aside from this one constraint of order of freeing, obstacks are totally general: an obstack can contain any number of objects of any size. They are implemented with macros, so allocation is usually very fast as long as the objects are usually small. And the only space overhead per object is the padding needed to start each object on a suitable boundary._

[https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Obstacks....](https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Obstacks.html)

Sure, they're not very _interesting_ , but the point is that you get them _for free_ in the GNU C standard library.

<comment><USER9> The FIFO equivalent can also be useful.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure what you are referring to, do you have a link?

<comment><USER9> I don't have a link, but it's an obvious transformation - basically, using a ring buffer for allocations where I can guarantee that older things will be freed before newer stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's not highlighting one thing, but Chris Okasaki's book on Purely Functional Data Structures, and this brilliant top answer to a question about functional data structures published since the book will keep you in reading material for a while: [http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/1550](http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/1550)

(it was all 'lesser known' to me when I started using haskell not so long ago)

<comment><USER9> I second the plug for Purely Functional Data Structures - brilliant stuff!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I use a Hierarchical Triangular Mesh for indexing gamma ray events from the universe. The data is partitioned in the database according to it's HTM id.

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0701164.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0701164.pdf)

Currently I use this for indexing ~11 billion gamma ray events. Researchers typically supply a region in the sky, a search radius, and some cuts (energy, event quality, etc...)

<comment><USER12> HTM is generally good. We used it to index white light data from out satellite. It makes for a very flexible way to store spherical surface data without losing context or information when projecting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looking at these lists, I strongly suspect that people upvote based on whether they personally recognize the data structure.

It goes against the intent of the original question, but iIt's almost ideally designed to make you feel good--you get the rush of knowledge then nerd sniped as you head to wikipedia.

<comment><USER14> Lest people think this is useless negativity, the point is that you need to scroll down and look at the other pages to see the really interesting ones. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love how the question was locked because "it is not considered a good, on- topic question for this site". It's crazy. Unless an extremely specific concrete answer can be given, a question immediately gets killed. SO has turned into such a turd of a website.

<comment><USER16> Speaking of which, is there a good alternative site for questions that are forbidden on SO?

<comment><USER17> There are other sites in the StackExchange network like Programmers and Code Review and some others for math and other things. But I'm not sure which site (SE or otherwise) would be the best for this particular topic.

<comment><USER18> Probably the CS stackexchange ([http://cs.stackexchange.com/](http://cs.stackexchange.com/)), or CStheory ([http://cs.stackexchange.com/](http://cs.stackexchange.com/)). Unfortunately, neither are anywhere near as popular as StackOverflow, so the chances of getting a good discussion are lower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm happy to see finger trees got mentioned. Finger trees[0] are extremely useful and general data structure that can be used to implement persistent sequences, priority queues, search trees and priority search queues. (Haskell's Data.Sequence[1] uses specialized 2-3 finger trees internally) They can form the basis of all sorts of interesting custom structures by supplying the appropriate monoid[3], but this does make them harder to approach if you are not familiar with the abstractions.

[3] A monoid is any structure that has members that can combine associatively. In addition, it must have an element that can combine with any other element and result in the other element. Some examples: (strings, string concatenation, the empty string); (integers, addition, 0); (natural numbers, max, 0); (booleans, and, True); (functions, composition, the identity function). The functional pearl[2] that describes the design of Haskell's diagrams library[4] goes into much more detail if you are interested in their application to programming.

[0] [http://apfelmus.nfshost.com/articles/monoid- fingertree.html](http://apfelmus.nfshost.com/articles/monoid-fingertree.html)

[1] [http://hackage.haskell.org/package/containers-0.5.4.0/docs/D...](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/containers-0.5.4.0/docs/Data- Sequence.html)

[2] [http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~byorgey/pub/monoid- pearl.pdf](http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~byorgey/pub/monoid-pearl.pdf)

[4] [http://projects.haskell.org/diagrams/](http://projects.haskell.org/diagrams/)

<comment><USER9> _" In addition, it must have an element that can combine with any other element and result in the other element."_

Aka, an identity element.

Monoids that have inverses (that is, every element has another element that, when combined, produces the identity element) are "groups". Of the examples you gave:

"Strings over composition" does not form a group - there's nothing you can concatenate with a non-empty string to get an empty string.

"Integers over addition" does form a group. The inverse of x is -x.

"Natural numbers over max" is not a group. Once you get above 0 you cannot get back to it just by applying max.

"Booleans over and" is not a group. Once you have false you can't get back to true.

"Functions over composition" is not a group. Many functions have inverses, but some do not. If you restrict the set to "functions with inverses" then you _do_ have a group.

<comment><USER19> Exactly. I was trying to avoid any mathematical jargon while describing monoids because they are such general and pervasive structures in programming. Further, being able to construct useful new monoids is crucial for making full use of a finger tree and I didn't want to have someone find an interesting structure unapproachable because they had to walk through an abstract algebra jargon storm in order to understand it. I realize I referenced associativity without describing it, so I didn't quite achieve my goal, but hopefully the examples got the idea across to someone who might otherwise have dismissed it due to the perception that it was too academic and unapproachable.

As an aside, trying to remove the jargon from a definition like this is surprisingly hard and really expands the size of the definition. I think it is still worthwhile to try when writing for a general audience because algebraic structure is everywhere and very useful to recognize for people who are interested in rigorously manipulating abstraction, i.e. programmers.

<comment><USER9> I agree; my "aka" wasn't meant as criticism. It's easy to get lost in the longer definitions, so I was just restating it directly in the hopes that one or the other - or the combination - will be clear to most people.

Though I'm not sure "abstract algebra jargon storm" properly describes use of "associative" and "identity" \- I remember learning about the "associative property of multiplication" and such in elementary school and my wife confirms she had similar experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Bloom filters and count-min sketch are awesome.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count%E2%80%93min_sketch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count%E2%80%93min_sketch)

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't really consider tries and bloom filters all that poorly known. These commonly come up in interviews for fresh graduates at Google/Facebook. Zippers, skip lists, ropes, round-robin databases, etc. are more genuinely not known I think.

</comment><comment><USER22> XOR linked list: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_linked_list](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_linked_list)

It's a double-linked list with just one link per node. However, to start traversing it you have to know at least two adjacent nodes.

PS. May not be _useful_ per se, but interesting nonetheless.

<comment><USER23> The XOR swap is interesting, too. But I wouldn't want to see one in code someone wrote today, and which wasn't targeted at an embedded platform -- and a heavily constrained embedded platform, at that. (MSP430? Sure. ARM Cortex-M3? You've got enough space to do it properly.)

<comment><USER9> It's not just "you've got enough space" \- it's only _relevant_ if both operands are in registers already. If they're both in memory, then the xors are entirely redundant (first things you'd have to do is read values into two registers, at which point you can just write it back the other way).

I wouldn't object to seeing it in a critical section in high performance code with substantial register pressure, but ideally it could be inserted by the compiler!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was going to say Trie but it was the first response to the SO thread so I guess it wasn't as little known as I thought.

I implemented it because I was making a game that had scrabble elements in it and needed to check ahead to see if the player had a word that could still take letters (a prefix) or if they'd hit a dead end. Fit the whole SOWPODS into a remarkably tiny space with millisecond lookups. Probably my favourite part of the project.

</comment><comment><USER25> I found the following page in the Concatenative wiki particularly interesting: [http://concatenative.org/wiki/view/Exotic%20Data%20Structure...](http://concatenative.org/wiki/view/Exotic%20Data%20Structures) (Note that the page itself is not related to the concatenative languages.)

</comment><comment><USER26> Bloom Filters: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter)

Hamming Codes: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_code](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_code)

</comment><comment><USER27> Extendible hashing is amazing in space utilization while retaining the performance of hashing.

</comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone know of an implementation of rope in golang? Something a little more feature complete than [https://github.com/christianvozar/rope](https://github.com/christianvozar/rope).

</comment><comment><USER29> Let me just drop this video that is on my watchlist: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sEdiFMntMA&feature=share&lis...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sEdiFMntMA&feature=share&list=PLFDnELG9dpVxEpbyL53CYebmLI58qJhlt) (Erik Dermaine is the lecturer)

</comment><comment><USER30> I recently learned about the spatial index tree family in connection with data mining. I hope to implement a data-mining centric X tree (n-dimensional) solution for a data analytics package I'm writing soon. That family is is how you efficiently handle KNN lookups, afaict.

</comment><comment><USER31> Me and my friend were pretty serious about creating a new data structure called "drum". A drum is a one way store. You write to it but can't read from it. We put it off till we figured a practical use.

<comment><USER32> An append only log? The value of writing data is that you can read it, otherwise your structure is semantically equivalent to not writing at all.

<comment><USER9> Or reading some information computed from it, I suppose. Something needs to read it, ever, for that of course, but it doesn't necessarily need to be exposed in the interface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> imho most DS & Algo are like kihon - the basic principles t'werk just fine, it's about augments and applications.

</comment><comment><USER34> Cup-a-bits

</comment><comment><USER35> It's mentioned in the link, but circular/ring buffers.

I've been grappling with decoding/playing back an audio stream and wouldn't have gotten it working if I hadn't found out about boosts lockfree ring buffer.

<comment><USER9> Recently I learned that if you're using a ring buffer for message passing, the clflush opcode (after sending and after receiving) can dramatically reduce cache misses.</comment></comment>


Indian Nuclear Plants Hacked - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/e43a5084-fbbb-11e9-a354-36acbbb0d9b6 <comment><AUTHOR> How serious is this hack?</comment>


Show HN: Eternum: Easy IPFS pinning - <AUTHOR> https://www.eternum.io/ <comment><USER2> I've been looking for this service for a long time. I liked the way it works and the simple interface.

What happens if my balance is exhausted? Do you notify me or my files are just gone?

<comment><USER3> We notify you when your balance drops below $1, which should be enough time to top-up again. In the future we're thinking of having that notify N days before we estimate your balance going to 0.

By the way, the site uses trackingco.de for analytics, so I can give you some free balance to return the favor :)

<comment><USER2> Good to know about that, because I tried to top up $1 earlier, the browser didn't allow me, then I edited the DOM manually and succeeded in getting a Stripe payment modal -- however it seems that the notification system wasn't ready for misers like me.

Thank you for the free balance, that was very kind!

<comment><USER3> Haha, the $2 minimum was too much, huh? :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm trying to understand.

Why use this service when dropbox, microsoft and google offer free plans. And are 10x-15x cheaper at scale?

and this allows you to bundle multiple services together. [https://www.opendrive.com/opendrive-is-on- odrive](https://www.opendrive.com/opendrive-is-on-odrive)

<comment><USER3> This service is for pinning files on IPFS. Say, for example, that someone wants to publish a paper that they want to always be available (even if a government tries to take it down). IPFS helps by making distribution p2p, as anyone who accesses the file can also redistribute it until it expires from their cache.

Pinning removes this expiration, and serves the file forever. Eternum provides that service, making sure the file will always be on at least one node, and thus always accessible.

It's not really comparable to Dropbox or S3 at all.

Our marketing currently assumes you're familiar with IPFS, as I don't think the service will be too useful directly if you aren't. Maybe we should change that, though.

Another avenue for this is, for example, what IPFessay ([http://ipfessay.stavros.io](http://ipfessay.stavros.io)) does: it publishes a file on IPFS and then invites you to click a link to Eternum to pin it, even without knowing how IPFS or Eternum work.

<comment><USER4> you will still take it down with a DMCA request though.

<comment><USER3> From our server. We can't do anything about taking it down from the network.

<comment><USER5> If nobody else has a copy of the paper on the network?

<comment><USER3> If a file is so obscure that nobody has ever wanted to read it, and it was only on one node, and that node also stops serving it, then it leaves the network until someone puts it back in.

<comment><USER5> Well, then the pinning service is a bit useless, isn't it?

If it's popular it should not need pinning, if it's not popular it needs pinning but can be easily censored...

<comment><USER3> I don't understand. If you want to keep child porn available, I'm afraid you'll have to find another service. If you're writing subversive propaganda against the Erdogan regime, we're happy to keep that pinned.

<comment><USER5> This isn't about Childporn, it's about papers.

You claim to pin stuff on IPFS, however you also say you comply to DMCA.

Unless you want legal trouble, this means you'll have to comply with any DMCA request that might be remotely valid.

Search up "Alex Mauer" to get a recent example of how DMCA can and will be misused.

Unless you want to get in trouble with big publishers, you will have to censor users on your service, it is essentially useless for niche files that cause legal trouble, regardless of how that is resolved.

How is your pinning service useful to keep such files online? How do you plan to defend yourself against the Erdogan or Chinese Regime?

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what your argument is. Do you want to post pirated files, or files for which someone else has the copyright? Why do Erdogan or the Chinese Regime want to use the DMCA against you?

<comment><USER6> Why would they not use DMCA? It has been used for not-really-copyright-issue before.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>