Three CSS features you need to know about - <AUTHOR> http://aptiverse.com/blog/css_features/ <comment><USER2> Wow, for a "three things you need to know" title, this article was surprisingly informative. Combining attr with :before is a nice trick; I'll be on the lookout for my own reasons to use that. And calc sounds great.

<comment><USER3> Here's a reason to use the :before + attr() combo: Combine it with media queries to progressively display more flair content when more space is available. Check this CSS Tricks article to see what I mean: <http://css- tricks.com/css-media-queries/>

Really cool stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://caniuse.com/> is a wonderful resource for checking exactly which browsers support new and exciting features, and whether they need a prefix.

<comment><USER5> Here's info on calc support: <http://caniuse.com/calc>

No support in Opera, requires -webkit prefix in prefix-encumbered browsers ;-)

<comment> X-Istence Meh, Opera now is WebKit ... so the -webkit prefix should work ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> -moz-box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-box-sizing: border-box;

...is a great alternative to the calc example - ie Set your width to 100% and your padding to 100px.

Edit: code is a little mangled, just Google it.

<comment><USER7> Box-sizing should be supported unprefixed as well (recent versions of IE, Chrome, FF and Opera; not sure about the current Safari).

<comment><USER8> And you should add the unprefixed version of a property to your CSS even if it isn't yet supported by browsers, to future-proof your code.

<comment><USER9> Unless the spec is still in flux and the unprefixed syntax changes, then you're SOL.

<comment><USER8> Still better to have the unprefixed version in your code than not to, I'd say. I really doubt the spec would change so that old code was still valid, but had a different meaning; most likely, the worst that would happen is old code would become invalid (and CSS's error handling makes invalid code not a big deal).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've found attr() useful on occasion, but I can't believe that I've carried on for so long assuming the only way to subtract pixels from percentages in my styling was to use JS.

As an aside, is Aptiverse in YC? If not, the logo could potentially be a case of mild trademark infringement.

<comment><USER11> Anything in an orange box is an infringement of the YCombinator mark? The Aptiverse logo doesn't have a white outline and is a different font, not to mention a completely different letter. There is certainly no confusion for me.

<comment><USER12> Most importantly, it doesn't even appear that the "Y" with orange background is even trademarked by YC.

<comment><USER13> Trademarks are acquired by commercial use. You presumably mean registered.

<comment><USER12> _"Trademarks are acquired by commercial use."_

Are you trying to differentiate between a registered and unregistered trademark? From what I understand, to get an unregistered trademark, you must add "TM" to your mark. That type of mark is mainly valid in the region/state that you're doing business out of.

To get a registered trademark circle r (R), you must file the right paperwork and pay a fee with the federal gov.

In both cases, to maintain your trademark, you must clearly show that it is your trademark with either a TM or a circle R (R). There are other requirements but these are the two I was looking for when stating that there is no YC trademark. If they do have a trademark on the Y with orange background, it's being maintained poorly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is calc() performant in modern browsers (IE10, Chrome, Firefox)? I got scared off of it a few years ago when it was first announced because I read that the performance hit was very noticeable...

<comment><USER15> [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/CSS/calc#Browser_co...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/CSS/calc#Browser_compatibility)

Looks like calc is supported in Chrome 19+, Firefox 16+, IE9+, Safari 6+.

<comment><USER16> He/she was asking if it performs well, not if it is supported.

<comment><USER17> One could argue that where a feature is not supported, it's going to perform terribly, perhaps taking O(∞).

<comment> qu4z-2 But it won't lock up the user's browser in that time, which is helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As I recall, calc should be avoided if performance is a consideration in your project.

<comment><USER19> I love calc, but there's also a webkit bug that causes transitions applied to elements with calc'd dimensions to crash the browser that I don't believe has been fixed yet. The crash is particularly rough for Safari (closes with no warning), but just stops the other browsers from loading the page once it hits that element.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> These are nice but it's funny how they fall short:

1: you can't combine attr() and calc() - calc(attr(data-count) + 10) <\-- nope

2: how would you count down from an arbitrary number of child elements? you need to set the total via counter-reset... and, no you can't do content-reset: foo attr(data-count)

</comment><comment><USER21> To those using calc(), WebKit requires -webkit-calc

<comment><USER22> Yeah.. I'm on Chrome 25 and was disappointed to see this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Examples and browser compatibility stats would have been nice additions to this post.

</comment><comment><USER24> How have I lived without calc() for all this time?....

<comment><USER25> No kidding. The _nightmare_ I went through trying to make a fluid CSS layout with more than one column. My god! The time I wasted! Arg!!!!!

<comment><USER9> Then again, ideally fluid layouts with multiple columns would use (ta-daaa) columns: <http://caniuse.com/#feat=multicolumn>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> is there a way for attr() (or similar) to access other css properties? In the example there is

        .child {
            position: absolute;
            left: 100px;
            width: calc(90% - 100px);
            background-color: #ff8;
            text-align: center;
        }

whould be gorgeous to write instead

        .child {
            position: absolute;
            left: 100px;
            width: calc(90% - attr(left px));
            background-color: #ff8;
            text-align: center;
        }

the mdn attr page[0] says it can also access properties, but I cannot find a way

[0] <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/attr>

</comment><comment><USER27> I've used attr()to do some localisation, i.e., add "Chapter" or "Kapitel" before an H1 chapter heading depending on the lang attribute on the HTML element. Useful stuff.

</comment><comment><USER28> These are really good tips. I use fancy CSS2 and CSS3 stuff all the time and wasn't familiar with all of these.

</comment><comment><USER29> wow, calc() is sweet enough to drop a LESS dependency in a lot of cases.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> attr() seems incredibly useful, and calc() nicely augments static calculations provided by LESS CSS et al. I'm definitely going to use these.

</comment><comment><USER30> Upvote for calc() function, Useful.

</comment><comment><USER31> display:none vs visibility:hidden is a need-to-know display: inline-block coupled with font-size: 0px on the parent is huge as well inset box-shadows are pretty cute too

</comment><comment><USER32> And which major browsers support all of that?

<comment><USER33> All of them except Opera (though webkit needs the -webkit- prefix on calc())</comment></comment>


Florida's governor singlehandedly vetos high speed rail project - <AUTHOR> http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/03/04/2097333/court-sides-with-scott-in-high.html

<comment><USER2> Aren't all vetos by a governor single handed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, my point was he should not have the power by himself to deny the project.

Rick Scott had no problem scamming billions out of federal medicare funds for his corporation, but somehow now has a problem with federal funded high-tech transportation to help the state.

For those that do not know what I am talking about: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott>

He won the election by only 1% and this is just the beginning of Florida's long nightmare.</comment></comment>


Couple Captured In Photo Together 15 Years Before They Met  - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/alex-and-donna-voutsinas_n_2910919.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I've often wondered about this type of occurrence, even imagining a tracking device that would one day make it possible for similar encounters. (This was before smart phones.) So here we are today, and that which I wondered is now possible. I guess now I'd envision an app that records your location at certain intervals and stores them in an archive. As an ice breaker, you meet someone and the app would match up any data points with that person's phone and returns time, date and location of when the two were ever the closest to each other, or attending the same event.

Of course with the increased worry of privacy concerns, I think it would have a hard time getting off the ground. With that considered, the app wouldn't broad cast your locations, and when pairing, it wouldn't transmit everywhere that you have been; just one or two instances where the two were standing right next to each other and didn't even know it.</comment>


Providing Stable Storage for the Diskless Crash-Recovery Failure Model [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://drkp.net/papers/diskless-tr16.pdf <comment><USER2> Very interesting paper...</comment>


Timeline of Canada's progress in tech industry and academia - <AUTHOR> https://cshope.org/canada/ <comment><AUTHOR> With many countries expressing anti-immigrant sentiments even at the federal levels, Canada is one among the few who are at least welcoming from the federal level. Keep yourself updated with what's happening in Canada's computer science industry and academia by visiting [https://cshope.org/canada/](https://cshope.org/canada/)</comment>


Benchmarks of different languages - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks <comment><USER2> I think that some nice graphics would be nice.

Are you interested in PR for other languages?</comment>


Making SGML a thing again - <AUTHOR> From the XML Prague tweets, I get the impression that SGML is a thing again in the markup community. Opinions?<p>[1]: https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%23xmlprague%20OR%20%40xmlprague<p>[2]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html5-dtd-slides-wrapper.html<p>[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy-b4jeJSas&index=14&list=PLQpqh98e9RgUcEmbXmI6RolisQaIRw9dm <comment><USER2> I don't think SGML _really_ ever wasn't a thing; it just took off some of its clothes and started calling itself "XML" instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but unlike XML, SGML can deal with HTML (arguably the most important markup application).

I mean, XHTML didn't happen, so let's go back one step to XML's superset SGML which can do everything that XML can, and more.

OTOH, the reaction of some people on the XML conference was like "what's this non-standard SGML thing?". Nevermind the fact that SGML is an ISO (United Nations) standard; doesn't get any more standard than that (with the possible exception of The Counsel of the Galactic Federation).

<comment><USER3> That being said, even IE9+ can deal with XHTML now, but the entire document must confirm to XML rules and this might not be always acceptable.

<comment><AUTHOR> IE9? That was about the time I last did a site using XHTML (2010?) and two years before W3C ditched their XHTML efforts officially.

<comment><USER3> *XHTML2

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember using some product, db-publisher I think it was called, back in the early 90's that used sgml. This was before I had heard about the web.

</comment><comment><USER5> Snowclone of "make ___ great again" is literally the most contentious snowclone of 2016

I mean, are right-wing folks going to flock to SGML? Is this an American partisan deal?

edit: cool beans, they changed title

it is one of the most partisan phrases in recent decades

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry, you're probably ... right.

#makesgmlgreatagain was tweeted at the conference.

edit: changed title

<comment><AUTHOR> SGML an American partisan deal? LOL

Considering people into markup are really frustrated with the 'net they once created in an open/liberal mindset being used for propaganda against them.

edit: hey why the downvotes? I was really laughing about the phrase in this context</comment></comment></comment>


Do small businesses create more jobs? (pdf) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nber.org/tmp/62825-w13818.pdf

<comment><USER2> summary: small establishments and firms do create more jobs, but the effect isn't as much as is thought. Also, this relationship doesn't hold for manufacturing companies.</comment>


Ask HN: Have search engines become hard of hearing? - <AUTHOR> Maybe my judgement is clouded, but it seems Google and other search engines have started to reinterpret search queries to a really annoying degree. More often than ever I have to put things in quotes to get what I am looking for. I often use quotes even with foresight that it will show nonsense otherwise. Is this a result of forcing "AI" methods to be a main ranking signal? I wished search engines would return to give simple full-text search precedence, or at least allow users to configure their own weights for different ranking signals. <comment><USER2> No. It is a simple profit motive.

If the search results were 100% good (impossible) or even 70% good (state of the art) you would click on the results instead of the ads. The worse the results, the more ad clicks.

There is no real competition (not unless you are going to pay for a search engine directly as opposed to bloated prices for everything) so no incentive to do better.</comment>


Harvesting Hydrogen from Nanogardens - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-07-harvesting-hydrogen-nanogardens.html <comment><USER2> I'm not sure the "garden" metaphor helps here

<comment><AUTHOR> >"Nano-garden cultivation" for electrocatalysis: controlled synthesis of nature-inspired hierarchical nanostructures

[https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/TA/D0TA0...](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/TA/D0TA00870B#!divAbstract)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The important information is missing from this article: How many joules per mole of hydrogen? How long does the catalyst last? How expensive is it to make?

</comment><comment><USER4> Advances in catalytic activation of electrolysis are coming thick and fast.</comment>


AMD Radeon RX 480: June 29th for $199 - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/10389/amd-teases-radeon-rx-480-launching-june-29th-for-199 <comment><USER2> The big deal about this card can be summed up thusly: "AMD is planning on heavily promoting the VR aspects of the RX 480, as it brings the necessary performance down from a 250W, $300+ card to a 150W, $200 card."

So the card is more accessible from a financial standpoint and the 100W decrease in power draw means that it both reduces the overall cost of a new build in addition to its own lower cost by requiring a less beefy power supply and makes it a viable option in a greater array of existing desktops without needing to also upgrade the current power supply.

</comment><comment><USER3> If AMD released decent Linux drivers I might consider it over an Nvidia card, but as things stand now they're useless in a Linux box, and useless in a Windows box (but that's just because it's windows)

<comment><USER4> >useless in a Windows box (but that's just because it's windows)

Care to expand on that? You do realize that Windows dominates the gaming market, right? (and don't respond with anything involving mobile please).

<comment><USER3> It was just a cheap jab at Windows, cuz everybody likes to slam Windows! Agreed, Windows dominates gaming market.

My interest is in machine learning, so I would like to see decent Linux drivers and more work on the OpenCL environment.

<comment><USER5> Technically, iOS dominates the gaming market :)

<comment><USER4> What did I say about mentioning mobile games? :D</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Liver: A 'Blob' That Runs the Body - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/health/liver-bodily-function.html <comment><USER2> The flip side to the liver's amazing duties in the body is the catastrophic impact on health when it fails. A failed liver takes out basically every body system.

When the liver can't break down bilirubin, you get jaundice and itch all over.

When the liver becomes cirrhotic, blood can't move through it, increasing pressure in the portal vein and precipitating life-threatening bleeds in the stomach and esophagus. For an extra bonus, clotting factors are manufactured in the liver, so these bleeds can be uncontrolled.

The spleen enlarges and gobbles up white blood cells, compromising immunity.

Ammonia and other yet not fully understood toxins that the liver can't filter cross the blood-brain barrier and cause hepatic encephalopathy, ranging from brain fog to coma.

Liver disease is also tied to hepatorenal syndrome (kidney failure) and hepatopulmonary syndrome (lung damage), both of which can be sudden and fatal.

Ascites (retention of fluid) also accompanies cirrhosis, often requiring paracentesis, which in turn is correlated with sepsis that the compromised immune system can't fight (also often fatal).

Low Vitamin D in cirrhotic patients leads to osteoporosis, including vertebral fractures.

Inability to process protein leads to muscle wasting and weight loss, reducing strength and immunity.

And finally, cirrhosis is correlated with an increased risk of liver cancer.

The cure for any of these conditions? Transplant, if you're lucky and the other systems aren't too badly damaged. Everything else is just holding on.

And to get a transplant? You have to be sick enough and sufficiently close to death that you're eligible, but strong enough to survive major surgery. No insurance in the US? They won't even assess you.

A liver transplant saved my life three years ago. I've lived this list of symptoms. My debt to the universe is to educate when possible, to console when necessary.

<comment><USER3> > _No insurance in the US? They won 't even assess you._

Do you have a source that goes into the reasoning behind this? I could guess, but I'd prefer to give the subject the respect it deserves.

<comment><USER2> Liver transplants can cost $700K to $1M+. In the US, insurance (or Medicare) typically engages in a special negotiated contract with the hospital. This amount is too expensive for a hospital, or even many affluent individuals, to pay without insurance. (I'm sure there are exceptions for the exceedingly rich.)

For me, a magical additional insurance policy appeared in my hospital account to which all transplant-related expenses were charged.

In addition, to get an organ in the US you must pass a series of exams regarding your physical and mental health, diet, your ability to get post- transplant support, and your willingness and ability to take care of your new organ. Alcohol and drug tests as appropriate. And for these evaluations, money can only indirectly help you.

I would also guess that there is a correlation between those people who have insurance and those that can pass the transplant evaluation, though that's a hidden variable that the powers that be probably want to stay hidden.

Organs are just too scarce to waste on a person who will squander one. It's a life and death competition between patients. It's horrible to see the people who get left behind, who wait too long, get sidetracked by some "miracle" cure, or even happen to live in the wrong region of the country where organs are scarce.

But the true miracle of a successful transplant is almost unfathomable (and that's said by a rationalist). From death's bed to walking a couple kilometers in a month and a half.

<comment><USER4> >Do you have a source that goes into the reasoning behind this?

A simple "no" would have sufficed.

That 1M "cost" you mentioned isn't actually the cost is it? It's the amount the hospital wants to recover from an insurer. The true dollar cost is much lower.

I'm not saying it's easy to get an organ transplant without insurance, but to say it's impossible without anything but speculation isn't very useful.

<comment><USER2> I was evaluated by two US transplant centers that function under a government- regulated evaluation regimen, and spent more than a year researching the process.

Neither would proceed with any paperwork or testing without proof of insurance coverage specifically for transplant.

Honestly, I'm not especially concerned with edge cases like "is it possible to get a transplant without insurance if I offer to pay cash?" or questions about what a transplant really costs.

Those are irrelevant academic questions for the vast majority of transplant patients.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Liver failure is a big thing, but thankfully we have a drug for curing HepC now, which uncured causes liver damage.

Liver regeneration is also fantastically interesting. If only we could figure out how to trigger that regeneration when the liver is too damaged.

I'm reminded of Star Trek 4, where McCoy gives an old woman what looks like a candy, then you see her later on talking about how she grew a new kidney.

<comment><USER2> The HepC drugs are remarkable. They also open new opportunities for transplanting HepC positive livers into HepC positive patients (expanding the donor pool), then zapping it post transplant.

But while HepC may be one of the first viral infections we can cure, non- alcoholic fatty liver disease is on the rise, even in young people. And this population is on average less motivated to make lifestyle changes that can stop or slow the disease.

<comment><USER6> > And this population is on average less motivated to make lifestyle changes > that can stop or slow the disease.

Hmmm, how do you mean? We've seen a lot of people try to change their diets and lifestyle to be more healthy. Anecdotally, all my coworkers are very diligent, or at least mindful, about eating healthy (of course they splurge when going out, but on a daily basis they try and stick to healthy food). Granted most of my coworkers are younger millennials, but I think a fitness/healthy eating lifestyle has permeated US society.

<comment><USER2> Let me try and be more precise. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is strongly correlated with obesity. Obesity is a public health problem that is getting worse, not better. It is tied to diet and lifestyle that cannot quickly be corrected, even among highly motivated individuals.

Compound that with the fact that fatty liver disease (or any liver disease) will probably not be detected before symptoms emerge that indicate actual damage to the liver has occurred. It's impossible to quickly become un-obese, even for the motivated patient. This puts these patients at risk for advancing liver disease.

Contrast that with HepC. It can be detected before overt symptoms of liver disease sets in. It can be cured in as little as eight weeks. The cure itself doesn't require any lifestyle change (though IV drug users need to prevent re- infection, and insurance companies in the US won't give you a second chance). And the cure has been shown to allow the liver to heal.

Your co-workers aren't the at-risk population.

<comment><USER6> Good point. Just wondering: is there any way I can proactively check for liver health to make sure its healthy? It seems like a ridiculously important organ to not have checked at some regularity.

<comment><USER2> Ask your doctor about a liver enzyme test, and get an HepC test if you have any possible risk you contracted it.

The liver enzyme tests will tell you if the liver is fighting off anything.

That said, you're probably OK if you don't have any major risk factors or symptoms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What a fascinating organ!

I never realized the liver only holds 400 calories. I always figured it was a few thousand. (I just looked it up)

So is your body always burning fat or does the liver glycogen have to be depleted first? Does the liver deplete every night when you're sleeping?

I really don't have a great mental model of this stuff.

Is it true that you need to reach high insulin levels before the body starts storing fat?

<comment><USER8> For most people the liver does deplete throughout the night, which is why early morning "fasted cardio" is popular for burning fat.

But as the food in your stomach processes the liver is continually getting more calories. So if you eat a huge meal right before going to bed its possible to never switch to fat burning.

<comment><USER9> >But as the food in your stomach processes the liver is continually getting more calories. So if you eat a huge meal right before going to bed its possible to never switch to fat burning.

Probably that's because some people advice eat pasta a night before your sports event. To have some calories in your body to burn in the morning until first food stop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _Others have found that signals from the liver may help dictate our dietary > choices, particularly our cravings for sweets, like a ripe peach or a tall > glass of Newman's Own Virgin Limeade — which our local supermarket chain > has, to our personal devastation, suddenly stopped selling, so please, > liver, get a grip._

What the heck is that doing in an otherwise (seemingly) scientific article?

<comment><USER11> >> Newman's Own Virgin Limeade

> What the heck is that doing in an otherwise (seemingly) scientific article?

Particularly since both Limeade and sugar/simple syrup are easy to make.

Syrup: 2c sugar/1c water, heat until clear, cover, cool, store in a squeeze bottle.

Limeade: 10% fresh squeezed lime juice, sugar syrup to taste but probably no more than 10%, 80% water. Depending on size & squeezer, figure maybe 1/2 oz of juice per lime. It's even easy to make single glasses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some case studies that I find interesting:

Cirrhosis presenting as Parkinsonism - [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2771969/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2771969/)

Reversal of parkinsonism following liver transplantation. - [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12578945](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12578945)

</comment><comment><USER13> The liver storing ability to store glycogen is one of the reasons many fitness enthusiasts would avoid (or not) fructose.

From what I have heard fructose often gets broken down in the liver and thus often gets stored there (I'm probably missing a whole bunch here so assume I am wrong).

Because of this various athletes and bodybuilders would use fructose to either gain weight or rapidly fill carb stores but only would do so sparingly (ie during carb refilling during a ketogenic diet).

<comment><USER14> With respect to endurance sports where you will exercise long enough to exhaust glycogen stores, you actually want a mix of fructose and another sugar such as maltodextrin.

[http://fellrnr.com/wiki/Fructose](http://fellrnr.com/wiki/Fructose)

[http://fellrnr.com/wiki/Nutrient_Timing](http://fellrnr.com/wiki/Nutrient_Timing)

When you hear a marathon runner refer to hitting the wall, what's happenened is that they've exhausted their glycogen stores.

<comment><USER15> Cyclists call it 'the bonk' and it's fucking horrible.

It's like been incredibly drunk and tired at the same time.

Happened to me the first time I did a 60 mile ride in winter, wind back was brutal, I got about 10 miles from home on the outskirts of town, found a petrol station ate a cornish pasty and two mars bars and it took about 30 minutes before I could summon the energy to get on the bike and coast home.

I learnt the lesson the hard way that day.

I've found it relatively easy to avoid since mostly by drinking at least a litre of isotonic an hour on the bike (adjusting for climate) and eating reasonable amounts of carbs the day before.

<comment><USER16> Some people eat restricted carbohydrates and then exercise to bonk _on purpose_. It's based on research by a Dr. B.K. Pedersen of Copenhagen.

And some medieval monks wore shirts made from hair. "Bonk training" seems like a perfectly horrible way to lose body fat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "In order to access our website, your browser must accept cookies from NYTimes.com"

Why would they need that?

<comment><USER18> To prevent you from bypassing their paywalls by using private tabs.

<comment><USER19> What browser doesn't use cookies in private tabs? In chrome it's basically treated like an isolated sandbox, but it will still gladly accept cookies.

<comment><USER20> Safari uses different cookie jars for each private tab. Chrome uses different jars for each private window. (I believe.)

<comment><USER19> Right, I'm just saying being in a private tab wouldn't prompt a cookie error

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone take Milk Thistle? It is supposed to help the liver, especially if it has been damaged, say by years of moderate drinking. Asking for a friend.

<comment><USER22> I'm no expert, but I looked into this issue for my mom some years ago (had cancer on her liver) and what you're looking for specifically is Silymarin, the ingredient in Milk Thistle that actually has the protective benefits.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21466434](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21466434)

The issue with raw Milk Thistle supplements is that it's a lower dose of Silymarin as you're just getting the plant, you'd want "Milk Thistle Extract", which is concentrated Silymarin. As with all supplements though, read the label and research the brands you buy. Counterfeit products are rampant in the industry, as is inconsistent dosing.

Mayoclinic has some dosing reccomendations: [http://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs- supplements/milk-thistle/dos...](http://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs- supplements/milk-thistle/dosing/hrb-20059806)

<comment><USER23> Interesting recent stories out of Santa Cruz and mushroom poisoning (generally: hepotoxic), treated with Silymarin.

Well, 2014 recent:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/02/most_dangerous_mushroom_death_cap_is_spreading_but_poisoning_can_be_treated.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Love the sponsored content food items

<comment><USER25> I thought it was odd as well, but I'm not sure that it's sponsored? From my understanding, FTC guidelines necessitate that publications disclose sponsored placements and I imagine The New York Times would be at the forefront of these requirements ... Or am I mistaking?

<comment><USER26> The NYT content falls well within "free speech" and any attempt to constrain it would backfire horribly regardless of what the laws or regulations say.

Smallet outlets would be a better target, but still likely to backfire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Check [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index)

</comment><comment><USER28> Great article, but 'runs the body' is a bit overkill. If you want to endanger your personal safety, try convincing a nephrologist that the liver runs the body.

<comment><USER29> Or a cardiologist.

Turns out you need pretty much everything in there.

<comment><USER30> And yet, according to my wife's surgeon, gall bladder removal surgery is the most common surgery in America. (Though he might be biased.) You don't appear to need your appendix. You can live fine with one kidney, or half a liver. I _think_ you can get by with one lung. I've had friends who've had huge portions of their digestive tract removed.

I realize that that just speaks to the body's generally robust build, and its redundancy, but you can probably remove more organs from a human body and have it keep running than random parts from under a car's hood.

<comment><USER31> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherectomy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherectomy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> UberLivers anyone? I fear organ donation is scheduled for disruption. I found this programme discussing issues around social media donor-matching campaigns quite interesting- [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08nq6fh](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08nq6fh)

</comment><comment><USER33> > Scientists hope that the new insights into liver development and performance > will yield novel therapies for the more than 100 disorders that afflict the > organ, many of which are on the rise worldwide, in concert with soaring > rates of obesity and diabetes.

No need to wait, an excellent book explains how to easily clean your liver: [http://www.ener-chi.com/books/the-amazing-liver- gallbladder-...](http://www.ener-chi.com/books/the-amazing-liver-gallbladder- flush)

The thing is you can literally see all the things that have been jamming your liver for years, as they're being "washed" out when you go to the toiled - very impressive. Keep in mind that a liver that is jammed does not fully clean your blood. If your blood is not clean, it will eventually cause trouble all over your body.

<comment><USER34> Downvotes are for signaling failure to honour conversation protocol, no disagreement of opinion. You guys shoud know better.

If you want to argue that liver cleansing is a quack, do so in a comment. Better yet, ignore the parent and let it fall to the bottom of the conversation.

<comment><USER35> That is not accurate. Downvotes are for comments that negatively contribute to the conversation. One way a comment can negatively contribute is by failing to honor protocol, but it is not the only way. Even simply extraneous comments like lazy jokes probably should be and conventially are downvoted on Hacker News. Promoting pseudoscience definitely doesn't seem like a very good contribution to me.

<comment><USER34> Then you should argue against it, and let the best argument win.

Last time I checked, Chc was not the infallible God of Truth and Goodness. Maybe it is not a good contribution, but it is not for you alone to tell.

<comment><USER36> > _Maybe it is not a good contribution, but it is not for you alone to tell._

"Maybe it is an abusive, racist comment, but it is not for you alone to tell."

Your argument is hollow, because it applies to literally every reason to downvote. But technically you're right. Which is why we have _voting_. Collectively the readers decide which comments contribute to the conversation.

There is no moral obligation to give equal airtime to quackery and fraud.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I'm wrong. _ - <AUTHOR> http://synk.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Original Title: "Snyk.io, a security manager, has a different site over HTTP"

Other comment pointed out I can't read.

Compare:

[http://synk.io/](http://synk.io/)

And

[https://snyk.io/](https://snyk.io/)?

What's going on here?

<comment><USER2> aren't those different domains

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Scracth that, look at the domain names you have provided

snyk vs synk

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah. Dyslexia.</comment></comment>


Duke Nukem Forever.. is back on. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pikimal.com/geek/2010/09/03/piki-at-pax-the-duke-he-has-returned/ <comment><USER2> More details in The Wall Street Journal:

 _The game is being finished by Gearbox Software and will be published by Take-Two Interactive, publisher of the Grand Theft Auto series._

 _The game is currently expected to ship in 2011, although given its history, Pitchford [CEO of Gearbox Software] is understandably reluctant to be more specific. "We're in the polishing phase now. This is a game where we can not make a promise we can not fulfill," he says. "We need to get past the shock and awe and then we can go to all the retailers and first parties and work out a launch plan."_

[http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/03/controversial- long...](http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/03/controversial-long-awaited- duke-nukem-forever-will-finally-be-released/)

\----

Edit: And some more from Kotaku. Here is a video of people actually playing it at PAX:

[http://kotaku.com/5629655/your-first-look-at-duke-nukem- fore...](http://kotaku.com/5629655/your-first-look-at-duke-nukem-forever-in- action)

Few screenshots:

[http://kotaku.com/5629778/the-duke-nukem-forever-pax- demo-a-...](http://kotaku.com/5629778/the-duke-nukem-forever-pax-demo-a- not+for+kids-photo-gallery/gallery/)

First impressions:

[http://kotaku.com/5629782/duke-nukem-forever-impressions- two...](http://kotaku.com/5629782/duke-nukem-forever-impressions-two-girls- one-duke)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is interesting. Modern graphics is beginning to make his character look dated, rather than stylized. (Not because we are 'used to better', but because of a more realistic background) They can't really change how he looks much either, because everyone and their brother knows what he is supposed to look like.

That's really an interesting puzzle. What do you do when graphics outstrips your content?

<comment><USER4> You either up the realism on the character model or scale it back on the environment, physics, sound, story, gameplay, etc..

The Team Fortress 2 art style would be perfectly appropriate to keep him looking smarmy and impossibly perfect.

A grittier character model like what you see in most modern war games would work too. You can still give a guy blonde hair, huge muscles, and dark glasses without making him cartoony. You'd just make him look like Ivan Drago or something.

<comment><USER5> I think that Dolph Lundgren has all the necessary qualifications:

In January 2009, Lundgren's Marbella home was reportedly broken into by three masked burglars who tied up and threatened Qviberg, but fled when they spotted a family photo and realized that the house was owned by Lundgren.[Wikipedia]

<comment><USER6> Full link to the passage: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolph_Lundgren#Personal_life>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I knew it! Duke Nukem forever couldn't really die. It must remain The Ultimate Vaporware for decades to come :)

<comment><USER3> Naturally. Without Duke Nukem Forever, how would we know what vaporware is?

<comment><USER8> Perl 6.

<comment><USER9> We've released 34 versions of Rakudo. As well, I've had publicly available and working Perl 6 code since 2005.

<comment><USER10> Building current trunk weekly != release. It was acknowledged that those "releases" are not what people in the "real world" are waiting for (<http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39411>). It was fixed with Star which is a release for "early adopters". It's polished alpha by another name. It's only one little step ahead of vaporware. Can we get over it now?...

<comment><USER9> > Building current trunk weekly != release.

I agree, and that's why we've had a documented and polished release process for almost three years now.

Existence is a binary condition, and binaries have existed for (almost) three years. A claim of vaporware is trivially dismissable FUD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's supposed to be a fantastic game according to the review:

[http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero- punctuation...](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero- punctuation/1968-Viewers-Choice-Duke-Nukem-Forever)

</comment><comment><USER12> Well, it has to be. How could it remain eternal vaporware if someone isn't continuously claiming that they're working on it?

</comment><comment><USER13> Let me guess... it's now going to be a skateboarding game with a turtle as the main character. ;-)

<comment><USER14> great book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It will be strange to live in a world where Duke Nukem isn't vaporware. It's status as vaporware has always been one of the basic tenants of the internet as I know it, up there with Rule 34.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone get the feeling this game is going to sell like crazy. It's like an urban legend you can purchase. They should embrace the jokes and try to leverage it to build suspense and PR before the release. I was awaiting this game as an 8th grader for crying out loud, and now I'm 28!

<comment><USER16> I'm with you. The first ever issue issue of PC Gamer I bought in 1997 had this game on the cover as "coming next year". I was psyched!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Forever is how long I'm willing to wait to play this game, in that I have little to no excitement and don't care if I don't play it within my lifetime.

I loved Duke, he was a hero of mine. Now, because of fucktardRealms his franchise has died, he's now associated with the most successful money-hole ever invented and it's going to have to be a complete reboot to even hit relevancy now.

Seriously kill Forever and start a new game called 'The End' and release it in 2012. (Edit: I'm serious, do a parody alien-Mayan end of the world, cash in on the popular hype, sell it to a new expanded market and _then_ do Forever)

<comment><USER18> Parody alien-Mayan Duke Nukem ... didn't Serious Sam already do that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I guess it's because I'm slightly too young to have enjoyed it in its prime, but I don't get the excitement over the Duke franchise.

It seems like a standard FPS with some cheeseball bravado, sexism, and sex wrapped around the mechanics. Also, I can't imagine why anyone would think the same people could make a modern game, which is 1000x more complex and expensive to produce than the games of old, with the same success that they made the old, relatively simple one.

So what's the major excitement here? Humor? Pure nostalgia for the days when the cheeseball stuff was really satisfying?

<comment><USER19> I think that the major point here is that you consider Duke Nukem 3D to be a "standard FPS". You have to understand the 1996 context in which it was released. Prior to that, the "best and most advanced" FPS was Doom. There was no "real 3D", whole maps where flat. You could never stack monsters and players and items over a Z axis.

Duke Nukem 3D brought the 3D into FPS. Because of this 3D, aiming with the mouse became the standard for generations of games. A few months later ID Software published Quake, which was also mind bending. I don't feel like FPS have evolved at all since that time. Better story lines, more guns and spells, more details in the physics engines, but the 3D is still the same for the vast majority of large studio productions.

This is why Duke Nukem is so mythical (and Quake 1), it set the foundation for modern FPS games. Over the time, people forgot about their 1996 experience but where kept on the bandwagon by "Duke Nukem Forever in the following year".

Now I'll agree that the probability that this game lives up its expectations tends toward zero but hey, its like a software game soap opera going on!

<comment><USER20> Duke Nukem 3D used a 2.5D engine; it was like Doom, in that the map was strictly 2D with ceiling and floor heights: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_engine>

I can't agree with you that FPSes haven't changed since then; it's only true if you are very selective about what you consider important about a FPS. What you have said implies that you don't care about story line, realism of physics simulation, gameplay, etc., which I'm quite certain is simply not objectively true of the gaming marketplace. Even if you think it's the "3D" that matters, then things were vastly better in Quake than Duke Nukem, where you could look directly up and down without bad distortion etc.

And then, one needs to ask, what quality is it of the 3D that matters? Simple things like decent texture scaling (trilinear filtered mipmapping, anisotropic filtering etc.) and antialiasing make a big difference, but are often only viable at high resolution in 6-month old games with the latest hardware, such are the demands of the processing.

<comment><USER21> > I can't agree with that FPSes haven't changed since then

Yeah, I found Portal by Valve Software a couple of years ago the same groundbreaking experience in terms of gameplay that I felt with those first 3D games. Some of my friends said the same about HalfLife before it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does anyone know if any of the original developers are still working on the game? I'd like to believe that this is the story of a few intrepid programmers overcoming great odds to ship a release that everyone had given up on. But I suspect that all remnants of the old team are gone and a whole new team was put in place when the IP changed hands recently.

</comment><comment><USER15> In the spirit of Duke here is the best web comic ever: <http://www.pidjin.net/2010/01/25/iwish/>

</comment><comment><USER23> I was at a mutual gathering and I ran into someone who had worked on an iteration of Duke Nukem Forever. He seemed genuine about the product and he definitely said it was still on... even though he wasn't actively working on it.

We all want it to be coming, that's the point. :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Any word if George Broussard is involved at all (or any other ex-3dr people)?

</comment><comment><USER25> You can relive the nostalgia here <http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/duke_nukem_3d_atomic_edition>

</comment><comment><USER26> Shake it baby!

<comment><USER27> I think this is Tanya's line from Red Alert.

<comment><USER28> That was Duke all right.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_3D#Controversy>

<comment><USER27> It seems that we're both right according to "Top 10s: Best In-Game Quotes" [1] and this making of video [2].

[1] <http://www.armchairempire.com/Features/Top-10s/quotes.htm>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE46xsJ11GU#t=0m47s>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Please don't delay this product another 10 years... This should be a good one!

</comment><comment><USER30> The real enemy of the Duke: "Rest in pieces 3DRealms!"

</comment><comment><USER31> ...and it will run on a new line of Amigas.

</comment><comment><USER32> I never gave up hope.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is a joke right...riiiiiight??? Who knows it could be real. Look at Chinese Democracy, that eventually got released.</comment>


Bye, MongoDB. Hello, Cloudant - <AUTHOR> http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/37338222496/bye-mongodb-hello-cloudant

<comment><USER2> I really wish they had been more specific about the problems they faced. It sounds like part of the headache was that they had to write their own MongoDB to ElasticSearch connector. However, 10gen has now written one which they could use to avoid writing and maintaining their own: [http://blog.mongodb.org/post/29127828146/introducing- mongo-c...](http://blog.mongodb.org/post/29127828146/introducing-mongo- connector)

<comment><USER3> Hi Ben, the ES connector was part of it. At a certain point we had our custom oplog follower working well. After so many years working with MongoDB, we just lost trust in it, to be honest. We ran into so many bugs, replication issues (two secondaries and no primary) and the only way to get what we needed out of it was to use all SSD storage (Even flashcache did not work).

I have to admit that this was for our use case, and I know that MongoDB works extremely well for some people. We still use it in Beanstalk for our deployment logs and have no complaints. It's a much smaller dataset though.

Really nice to see that 10gen made an ES connector. ES is still young, but it's amazing. One thing that I always respected about 10gen is how they maintain all of the drivers and code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We run BigCouch from Cloudant and it's amazing. They are awesome folks and spoke at our conference last year.

<https://github.com/cloudant/bigcouch>

Disclaimer: I'm the community manager for <http://www.2600hz.com>

<comment><USER5> I love CouchDB. There was talk on the mailing list and IRC channel about eventually merging in BigCouch with CouchDB code base. That would be awesome.

<comment><USER6> That's well underway and planned for the 2.0 release of CouchDB.

<comment> clark-kent Can't wait!

<comment><USER7> WoW! Really good news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting to find out what was going on behind the scenes at postmark. As a (albeit small) customer, we were noticing something was going on, but not exactly sure what. It's great to see the postmark guys sharing the info and being transparent. Overall I really like the service despite the recent issues.

As far as cloudant, I also never heard of it. Trying to go through the website, is this effectively a managed CouchDB in the cloud? Also, just wondering what's the migration path _out_ of it (or who provides alternative service) _just in case_ something doesn't work out.

<comment><USER3> Chris from Postmark here. We definitely had some trouble over the last few weeks. I am hoping we are beyond that in terms of architecture. So far everything looks great.

Regarding lock-in, this was pretty important to us when we decided to migrate. We prefer to control everything in our data center, so if it came down to it, we wanted that option. Since the Cloudant API is compatible with CouchDB, the migration path is not that hard. Although, considering our impression so far and their expertise, I don't expect it will come to that point.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the info Chris. I certainly hope you won't have to make another big move, but vendor lock-in is always a consideration. Also, I'm curious about network/other latency and bandwidth limits when it comes to accessing cloud- based database services. Did you do any measurements on that before or after switching?

...and regards to Natalie, Dana and the rest of the postmark team!

EDIT: noticed info about latency from cloudant on another comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We were running our own Bigcouch cluster and having all sorts of issues scaling to large numbers of databases (50k+), but after moving to Cloudant it handled it just fine.

It does cost more, but we don't worry about our database now and can focus on what we're actually good at.

Their search feature seems to be pretty good too. It is based on Lucene and is very flexible!

Chris Sharkey, Bislr

</comment><comment><USER10> Cloudant seems interesting, never heard of them before. The pricing is intriguing. (<https://cloudant.com/pricing/>) From what I understand, it's free for most small projects but could get very pricey very fast, but then, handling millions of customers is far from being trivial to handle so I'm sure it's worth the price. Thoughts about the Cloudant pricing versus in-house solution (or vps)?

<comment><USER11> Our pricing as stated on the page can be somewhat confusing. We're working on making it both less expensive and more transparent to the end user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this going to become a trend here? Some random start-up writing "Bye-bye <insert database name>" or "Why we moved from <db1 name> to <db2 name>"??

<comment><USER13> _Going_ to become a trend? Posts like this have been fairly common for years now.

<comment><USER12> No, I meant the frequency of such posts have increased in the past few months..

<comment><USER14> NoSQL databases are becoming very common place now and there are a lot more companies and hosted providers than there used to be. So naturally you are going to see more stories of people switching away from traditional SQL databases.

I work for a large enterprise who previously was an Oracle shop and even they are starting to using MongoDB and CouchDB internally.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, maybe you're right..

>I work for a large enterprise who previously was an Oracle shop and even they are starting to using MongoDB and CouchDB internally.

Whoa..that's a pretty serious claim..seriously? If yes, then I think it really is the start of a new revolution...

<comment><USER15> They're not shutting down their Oracle DBs though. Or at least I hope not.

<comment><USER14> No. But all new development isn't being done on it.

My point is that stories like this are becoming the new norm especially with companies like 10gen and Datastax wining and dining CIO/GMs pretty hard. MongoDB in particular is getting a (misguided IMHO) reputation as a drop-in replacement for MySQL. And the last MongoDB training session had developers from banks, insurance companies, finance houses etc.

I am pretty sure that many of the next 10+ years of in-house built enterprise apps will be using NoSQL databases. Which will in turn then result in university courses changing thus affecting the next generation of programmers.

<comment><USER16> "MongoDB in particular is getting a (misguided IMHO) reputation as a drop-in replacement for MySQL."

I am so confused by this. Can you elaborate? Besides the word "database", what do those systems have in common? How is it a drop-in replacement?

The only reputation common to both is regarding data integrity, and it's not a good one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We looked at MongoDB for our back end at <http://moj.io> and preferred CouchDB. It's currently a toss up between Iriscouch and Cloudant. Both seem like great offerings. We are particularly interested in the ability to sync to CouchDB on iOS/Android/Windows Phone in the future.

Does anyone prefer one service over the other?

</comment><comment><USER18> Can anyone share how latency is overcome using a cloud based database?

<comment><USER19> It's not a problem if they're both in the same data center, not sure who cloudant are using though.

<comment><USER6> (Mike Miller, Cloudant). Exactly, we run cloudant clusters in nearly 20 data centers globally on many different providers (ec2, softlayer, rackspace, joyent, azure, hostway, ...) so we make sure that the data and application tiers are co-located.

Dealing with direct connections from mobile is more fun.

<comment><USER20> You should address this more clearly on your sales website. It's the first question people will have regarding using a database-as-a-service.

So mentioning the data centers you are in would be helpful.

<comment><USER6> You're right, we should address that more clearly. Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER14> Seriously do. I spent a few minutes looking for the list of data centres. And when I couldn't find it I left with the assumption that it was going to be a slow, pricey mess.

Nothing is more important than transparency when you are providing core infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> On Mongo: "we were not big fans of the master/slave architecture"

I don't quite understand this, that architecture was basically deprecated a while back, can you elaborate?

<comment><USER3> Sorry, I need to correct that. I meant that shards are basically still primary / secondary with an arbiter for failover. We prefer horizontal nodes instead, like Cloudant, Elastic Search or Cassandra offers.

<comment><USER21> Ahh, I see. Why do you guys prefer that configuration? Space/resources, reliability?

<comment><USER6> Space/resources was certainly a concern in this case. A disk-based solution with predictable latencies enables storage of far more data than something that requires holding the working set in RAM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Grr.. I can't figure if you can deploy cloudant in an on ec2 avail zone that you have your app in. Can you you even deploy it on ec2?

I don't see anything stating answers to these questions clearly on their site. And they want my email to let me see tech docs! Are they run by former IBM staff?

Finally, if they are 'hosted and managed all day everyday' some place far from me. I dunno if I want to use it.

<comment><USER22> Ah. Spoke too soon. The comments here lead me to believe cloudant is to be used as a couchdb replica provider.

Maybe cloudant should say that on their pages! :-)</comment></comment>


Hacking Calculords part 2: Who needs fingers? - <AUTHOR> https://rkoutnik.com/2016/06/14/hacking-calculords-2-who-needs-fingers.html <comment><USER2> RKoutnik, regarding the neural net, if you're not specifically looking to play with neural nets but you just want to identify numbers, you don't need neural nets. Especially if you have a digitally-accurate dump of the screen, you just need one pixel that uniquely identifies the given number. Looking at the screen shots, while the numbers are different colors, they all have black outlines. It should be fairly easy to find simple combinations of pixels that uniquely identify numbers.

If you _want_ to play with neural nets, by all means be my guest. But if you're just looking to do the job, this is probably a much easier way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice - and if this weren't a completely bananas project, I'd be doing that instead. However, part 3 is a thinly veiled excuse to play with neural nets and I learned a ton (code is done, post is about 1/3 written). The opener to part 3 is an elaborate excuse as to why I didn't do the simple thing (as you've mentioned).

One quirk of using NN for that task is that since I've already got all of the possible outcomes, I need to deliberately overfit to my data (and it's a rare case where 100% accuracy is to be expected). Of course that's a good sign I shouldn't be using NN anyways, but we've beaten that drum...

<comment><USER2> Righty-o. More power to you and I look forward to your post. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "This drove the running time of the solver algorithm from an upper bound of 90 seconds to an average time of Out of Memory."

This, I almost peed I laughed so hard. And I had to pretend that my python code was hilarious to convince my coworkers I was actually working (not hard, it is hilarious).

<comment><AUTHOR> Fantastic! Glad you liked it.

(and nice cover-up with the Python, smart to use a language named after the greatest comedy group of all time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is fascinating. Although your AI algorithm might be faster if you could somehow sort inputs, starting with the most promising, and discarding the least promising, once an effectiveness threshold has been reached. Not knowing Calculords that well, I don't know if this is possible or not.

Also the line

>At this point, it was clear I had two options:

>Armed with a trivial example and an inept grasp of the tools available to me, I could write a snarky Medium post about how terrible JavaScript is

>WebWorkers

Having been on both the receiving, and a few times sending, end of such posts (although not on medium, and not about js, for sending) I understand, empathise, and cannot help but laugh. Steve Yegge at his best couldn't have phrased that better.

</comment><comment><USER5> I already tweeted this at you, and you already responded, but this is probably a better venue: does your code deal with cards like Mutate Stargod that spawn another number card to your hand?

Your tweet answer was: "Not intentionally, but since we're deploying everything in the same row, it should be able to take advantage of that."

But that doesn't make sense to me - if you optimize for your 9 cards to spawn all 6 available units/cards, but the best solution is still only 5, at the end you might be left with that remaining soldier and a [5] card in your deck - whereas the best solution for the _ten_ cards, including the newly-spawned five, might let you deploy all six units.

(There are other weird edge cases as well, such as the $2 card that lets you discard all of your units and draw 4 new ones.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, most of my work in this series is ever-better interactions with the game itself via code. If Calculords had a comprehensive API, I'd be able to build a smarter AI than what I currently have instead of working through things like `adb` and image detection (coming in part 3!). I'd love to dig further into strategy and ML but this side project has already occupied WAY too much of my time. I may revisit it in the future after completing part 3 but I've already got too many other ideas to make.

Unfortunately I don't recall exactly how Mutate Stargod works, from your response it seems like I've misremembered how it works, mind posting the card text here? (I thought it absorbed already-deployed mutates).

<comment><USER5> Ah, no - you're thinking of "Form Mutatro", which is a $15 utility card: "Your mutates in the target lane merge into Mutatro, the Goliath Mutate God!"

Mutate Stargod is an $85 "Tactician 5" card: Generates a 5 in your calculator when deployed, and gives all allied mutates in lane +1HP.

I think that even without machine learning, you could build a pretty decent AI just with the "spam maximum units" tactic; that's why my favorite deck is all mutates, preferring things that deploy multiple units.

I think hardcoding exceptions and edge-cases like Tactician cards would vastly increase the number of calculations you'd have to make - because now the order in which you deploy units matters, and calculations have to be re-considered from every possible deploy-point on - although it may be enough to get to a solution in which you empty out your calculator, and hope that the second calculator deal lets you empty the rest of your units.

(This naive approach may not work for the harder bosses, though - spamming a single row against Hate Bit is a good way to roll out the red carpet for him to your base, since it's likely he'll get there before you do unless you get an incredibly lucky deal.)

<comment><AUTHOR> > I think hardcoding exceptions and edge-cases like Tactician cards would > vastly increase the number of calculations you'd have to make

The current algorithm is exhaustive, so one run will generate all of the possible solutions to the given deal. Once all the solutions have been computed, the AI could run through the top n solutions and pick the best. This way the number of calculations is additive, not multiplicative. That's still thinking per-round though (not at the game level). It should be possible to determine if there are enemy units within striking distance of the base and deploy counterunits (so your eggs aren't all in the same basket of the top lane).

I haven't encountered any tactician cards yet (confession: I haven't even reached Hate Bit, I've been so focused on the coding/blogging and it's easier to debug against Fancybot).

<comment><USER5> > _I haven 't encountered any tactician cards yet (confession: I haven't even > reached Hate Bit, I've been so focused on the coding/blogging and it's > easier to debug against Fancybot)._

Ooh, you're in for... uh... well, not a treat. But a challenge!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The title of this article should be Hacking Calculors, part 2: Who needs fingers?

The emotional roller coaster I just went on of:

"Did I miss the release of Calculords 2?"

"No... I am not that out of it."

<click>

"Awww... Punctuation got me again."

<comment><AUTHOR> Title of HN post and actual blog post fixed. Thanks! Good catch, didn't think of that as I was writing it. I'm awaiting the release of Calculords 2 as much as you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hah! I was just playing that game on my break. If I had a genie lamp, I would absolutely spend one wish asking for a multiplayer version; at this point, the only challenging AI opponent is the very last one, Hate Bit, and I win against it about 50% - and that number is slowly increasing as I improve my deck.

I actually thought about trying to make a web-based multi-player version, but I don't want to rip off Seanbaby's hard work. (I also don't want to make a 'skinned' version that I could argue isn't a complete copy, because I don't want to have to come up with the hundreds of units that would require.)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're in luck, Calculords 2 will have PvP: [https://twitter.com/Calculords/status/692528566794330112](https://twitter.com/Calculords/status/692528566794330112)

<comment><USER5> Oh thank god, I don't have to do any of the hard work myself :p</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: How I would improve Pokemon GO gameplay - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@giuliomichelon/how-to-make-pokemon-go-better-b830dd78ec75#.e0u1n78po <comment><USER2> I'm sorry, but this is very uninspired. One of your points is in progress at Niantic, two of them have been heavily discussed and likely to be in the works soon.

The last point is something Nintendo would explicitly not allow. It'd eat into their hardware sales and would require a major revision (e.g. retroactively setting new moves to all previous caught pokemon, adding PP for moves, a numerous number of new items, ability to use items in battle, etc).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a blog post which violates show HN guidelines.

</comment><comment><USER4> Obvious stuff.</comment>


Not So Superior Chinese Mothers - <AUTHOR> http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/18962.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting critique of Amy Chua's recent WSJ piece on suggesting the superiority of an autocratic parenting style that stresses individual accomplishment. Shannon Love points out the need for "teamwork" and suggest that it is a uniquely American strength. Open paragraphs:

Noticeably excluded from her children's activities is any kind of team activities. The secret of American's collective success as a people is our ability to self-organize ourselves on both the small and large scale into highly effective teams The relative inability to self-organize into teams is why China and some other cultures have lagged behind in the modern world. Americans have long relied on activities like sports, theater, marching band etc to teach that one critical American cultural skill. By excluding such activities from her children's life, Chua is depriving them of one of the most crucial skills an American must have.

American culture is based on the seeming contradiction of extreme individualism combined with a near instant willingness and ability to join a team to accomplish any particular task. The way New Yorkers spontaneously organized to evacuate Manhatten on 9/11 represented a large scale and dramatic example of the type of self-organization that Americans reflexively engage in on a daily bases.</comment>


Home Values Are Rising by $800 a Day in San Jose - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-09/home-values-are-rising-by-800-a-day-in-san-jose <comment><USER3> I have a pretty large group of generally geek-oriented friends across most of the western US, and tracking their migration patterns has been fascinating - we're basically all 1980's-born millennials.

In the 2000's was when we met, those who had grown up there and those who were moving were in the same age group. Only about 40% were college educated or in tech/programming oriented roles. Of those, a small amount has ridden the wave to prosperity. Most moved to Seattle (if looking for a career/home/etc), or Portland (if they pass the weird-test). There's been a steady trickle out of the Bay for anyone not in tech for the past decade, and now I think only 10% of them still remain. Now they're going to Colorado rather than Seattle, and a few more to Portland. Those that are currently missing the wave in Seattle are looking at moving to Colorado.

I have no idea which area is gonna be next - Colorado is now seen as the last "cool" place thats "affordable" and liberal (sorry screaming Coloradan's, you're next).

Personally, I just can't believe its gone on this long - the pressure release valve that I thought would be released from the bay every year for the last decade hasn't fully let go. Career or being able to afford a house seem to be mutually exclusive ideas if you're not in programming. This is creating a rather nomadic culture within my friend groups... welp, this area is too expensive, might as well move onto the next. Very few are putting down roots.

I wonder what this all will look like when we look back 20 years hence - <USER2> it really a bubble, or the creation of a permanent Elysium style class divide between those that had the capital (or took the risks) early, and those who didn't start out as well (or were conservative in leveraging themselves)? Every day it feels like I'm leading more towards the latter.

<comment><USER4> It's both. There clearly is a bubble. The Fed has essentially dumped easy money into the economy since the dotcom bust. 2008 saw another crash and again the spigots were opened. It only seemed to flow to certain areas though as top down economic policy tends to do. Now as the Fed raises rates, people can borrow less and thereby afford less. We may see zero percent interest rates forever and the government stepping in to prop up asset prices like Japan, but who knows for sure. [1, 2]

But California also has a unique factor, proposition 13. [3] This drastically disincentives people from moving. Palo Alto has the lowest property tax rates in the state.[4] Why move when you will pay significantly more monthly. This is especially pertinent to retirees. So no one moves which destroys market liquidity. Combine this with NIMBYism, an over abundance of protected lands, rent control, affordable housing measures and piss poor public transportation, and you get the shit storm that is the Bay Area housing market. Tech is simply a convenient excuse. There's a reason California is building a bullet train between SF and LA, but no public transportation from the east bay to the peninsula which would help an enormous number of workers and the environment. Despite lofty rhetoric, people vote their self interests.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/bank-of-japans-50-billion- quest...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/bank-of-japans-50-billion-question- when-to-stop-buying-stocks-1515973533) [2] [https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-11/wtf-chart-day- boj-...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-11/wtf-chart-day-boj-now- owns-75-japanese-etfs) [3] [https://medium.com/@michaellevinson_64108/landlords-and- heir...](https://medium.com/@michaellevinson_64108/landlords-and-heirs-why- prop-13-isnt-just-unfair-it-s-un-american-20a8597cb37b) [4] [https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/12/01/high-priced- californi...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/12/01/high-priced-california- coastal-homes-have-lower-tax-rates-than-inland-houses/)

<comment><USER3> Prop 13 doesn't exist in Seattle, yet prices are rising as fast or faster than the bay (on a percentage basis). There the lesson is supply/demand - there is only 1 month or less of housing stock available, when 6 would be a historically median market. Everyone is going crazy to buy something as fast as possible before they get left behind.

Absolutely though Prop 13 hurts liquidity in California though. There's a lot of factors, nobody can agree on them, so we're stuck with this massively overheated market.

<comment><USER5> Yep, Prop 13 is flagrantly unfair, but the general mechanisms by which land value rises is intrinsic to our system of land tenure.

However, these windfall gains can be recycled into public coffers via the tax system and lighten tax burdens on productive activity.

As a nice bonus, it would make it much harder to be an idle landlord in a prime area... the physical equivalent of a patent troll.

<comment><USER6> > Prop 13 is flagrantly unfair

How do you define "fairness" in this context?

* Edited to less confrontational question.

<comment><USER5> It privileges long time titleholders over newcomers, in addition to the basic problem of land speculation being exacerbated, allowing random titleholders to capture even more of the gains of surrounding economic development that they, in their role as titleholder, played no necessary role in.

In fact, by effectively being a tollbooth operator upon the prerequisites for economic development they are an active hindrance. Land titles are necessary, but it is not necessary that they keep the land rent, only the improvement values that they are responsible for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yeah... that's not going to be sustainable.

I know folks like to point at the big techcos in the area being flush with cash as evidence this can continue a long time. And in a vacuum, wage growth in tech could continue to keep pace, perhaps. But that is 300k in appreciation a year.

How far out will school teachers, janitors, chefs, mechanics, city employees, and similar need to live before their not-quite-as-quickly-increasing salaries fail to keep up, and they leave the area en masse?

Cut the NIMBYism and you _might_ see some improvement, but only as fast as the city can approve permits.

As Buffett likes to point out: be "fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful".

<comment><USER8> Won't school teachers' salaries grow in presence of diminishing supply and stable demand?

<comment><USER9> Proposition 13 imposes a fairly hard upper limit on the growth of teachers' salaries.

<comment><USER10> Not at all.

Prop 13 only has effect when houses do NOT sell. Whenever a property changes hands, which is the only event that matters wrt demand, it is assessed at current market value.

Prop 13 does have an effect but only in the manner in which it supresses sales.

<comment><USER11> It limits property tax to 1% which I believe is pretty low compared to other coastal states. Coincidentally, California's public schools have fallen down the rankings since it passed.

<comment><USER12> > Coincidentally, California's public schools have fallen down the rankings > since it passed.

Last we checked, per-student spending in public schools was _negatively_ correlated with student achievement, so the hypothesis that funding levels are unrelated to performance would appear to be on pretty strong ground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Peter Thiel claims that the majority of capital poured into Silicon Valley startups ends up flowing to landlords.

[https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san- francisco/article/peter...](https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san- francisco/article/peter-thiel-silicon-valley-capital-landlords-12759450.php)

<comment><USER13> Yep.

VC -> Startup -> Employee -> Landlord.

Everyone blames tech workers, but they're not the ones raising the prices. Most of their money disappears into rent.

<comment><USER14> Landlord -> Property taxes -> Government benefits receivers, service providers and employees

The real beneficiaries are the people who gain from the increased tax revenue.

<comment><USER15> What happens when the source of the tax revenue decides they had enough and leave?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Lived in a rental house in SJ for 7 years now watching prices go up and deciding to sit it out, after having lost 30% on my house in the midwest years ago.

I'm kicking myself for not buying earlier, but not a chance you'd get me to buy in now. We're in a bubble that's ready to burst IMO.

<comment><USER17> > _We're in a bubble that's ready to burst IMO._

Not necessarily. Bubbles are based on speculation. The last bubble was powered by sub-prime mortgages, which is what burst.

The Bay Area has the problem of ongoing immigration, a very highly paid demographic, and housing market that isn't keeping up. Simply, Offer < Demand.

Offer isn't looking to catch up any time soon [1], and demand crashing would mean the tech economy will have crashed as well (or, you know, The Big One).

[1] I'll have to sleuth up the link from 6mo-1y ago about how maximizing consctruction at this point would only _keep up_ with demand, effectively only preventing a further increase.

<comment><USER18> Rents are flat the last three years. Values are up by over 30%. That difference feels speculative..

<comment><USER19> Looking at the Case-Shiller index for SF, I would agree it looks speculative.[1]

SF home prices went from an indexed 219 in Mar 2006, down to 120 in May 2009. That's a 45% decrease over two years.

Right now the index is at 259 and that's inflation adjusted.

[1][https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=SFXRSA](https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=SFXRSA)

<comment><USER20> I believe the Case-Shiller index is "seasonally-adjusted", not "inflation- adjusted"[1]. What makes you think it's adjusted for inflation?

[1] [https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2018/03/2...](https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2018/03/27/home- price-surge-continues-in-january)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They really undersold it. 800$ per day is what it earns in appreciation, but it earns even more when you rent it out.

If you have a house on the penninsula, I'd say it's time to cash out and move to the midwest and retire. ;)

<comment><USER22> Dont forget tax benefits.

<comment><USER23> You can pretty much forget about tax benefits, thanks to the 2017 federal tax plan that limits deductability of state and local taxes and reduces the cap on mortgage interest deductability. You may still get a deduction, but it's not going to be that much higher than the standard deduction.

<comment><USER24> For landlords, those new limits do not apply; they remain deductible, just like other qualified business expenses (which makes sense IMO, which is why I support the mortgage interest deduction, to keep owner occupants on relatively equal footing with landlords when contemplating purchasing property).

<comment><USER22> The real q is, why does government even subsidizing home ownership in the first place?

<comment><USER25> >The real q is, why does government even subsidizing home ownership in the first place?

Firstly, older people own homes and they vote. Secondly, homes are a significant part of people's retirement assets. As companies do away with pensions and as the Social Security age gets increased, home values gain in importance. So the government has an incentive to keep home prices high.

This hurts the younger generation looking to buy homes and raise a family. But the older generation votes in greater numbers than the younger people.

If you are politician running for office, you aren't going to say "lets raise property taxes" or "lets get housing prices down so that young people can afford it".

<comment><USER22> It also causes nimby. You own a house you vote in your best interest and oppose new housing.

Prop 13 is one big reasons, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We need to build much more dense places that people can actually own.

The housing situation is not sustainable. Many people end up living on the streets because affordable housing isn't available. There is too much demand and we aren't building dense enough to utilize the land available.

<comment><USER27> There's plenty of land in this country. I see no compelling reason why Google can't open up more offices in the fly over states.

I'm guessing, if offered the same salaries, Google could find plenty of willing takers to move.

<comment><USER28> > _I 'm guessing, if offered the same salaries, Google could find plenty of > willing takers to move._

There ought to be companies with data on this - some places allow fully-remote work without adjusting salaries for CoL. So I wonder: how many of their employees still end up living in high-cost cities?

Does anyone know of public data that could sort this out?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Looks like it's all about inventory. No one is selling their home in Santa Clara County (San Jose)[0]:

Homes for sale in March 2016: 1,254

Homes for sale in March 2017: 934

Homes for sale in March 2018: 516

[0] [http://scc.rereport.com/market_reports](http://scc.rereport.com/market_reports)

<comment><USER30> Why sell when your home value is increasing by $292,000 a year and property taxes are not going up? This seems like a very strong HODL time for real estate as an investment. The fundamentals are sound, there are tons of people looking for a roof over their head so they can continue working their dream job and supply constraints that prevent the production of new homes to accommodate them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Please contact your Senator and Assemblymember and ask them to vote yes on SB 827 and 828, which would make it much easier to build housing in transit rich areas that have previously resisted it - Atherton, West Portal, Palo Alto, Forest Hill, all of Marin County come to mind.

</comment><comment><USER32> If you want to do something about it: [https://yimbyaction.org/](https://yimbyaction.org/)

</comment><comment><USER33> And they're ugly townhouses too, the type that have been slapped up quickly, McMansion style. The Spanish roof tile thing will never die, even when it's applied to a townhouse.

<comment><USER34> That's pretty much most of the south bay in a nutshell tho.

</comment></comment><comment> d--b There is a double bubble there:

1\. low interest rates have been pushing people to buy houses for a decade.

2\. and cheap borrowing costs pushed investors into riskier businesses like startups increasing the flow of capital in that region.

Add the NIMBY mentality, and you get skyrocketing prices.

My guess is that raising interest rates are going to change all this drastically before year end.

<comment><USER21> I think it's because Google just set up shop in San Jose and started hiring like crazy.

I wonder, in san jose, How long will it take until families start living in garages like in Palo alto?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> And San Jose really is a really really boring suburb...

<comment><USER36> As someone who worked outside CA and ended up working for a company based in San Jose I was all pumped to visit the corporate HQ for the first time, silicon valley here I come. The offices were very nice, saw lots of signs for super cool companies that I knew. It was great .... except it was all just a lot of office park... and nothing else.

I'd take the train up to SF on weekends for things to do. Otherwise I was more entertained back home around Minneapolis than most places outside SF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> >Home price appreciation serving 'as a kind of second job'

I had this thought the other day, actually, when tallying my net worth for the quarter. My home went up by ~$100k in value since December (hot neighborhood near Apple) and my family earned about the same amount in income. Long term, we plan on cashing out and moving to the East Coast so it's not just idle numbers tabulating.

<comment><USER38> Won't that defeat the purpose of why you chose to buy and live long term on the west coast to begin with?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> To everyone hoping to wait out the bubble: We have this in Germany and it's been going on for 9 years now. I hope you enjoy waiting.

</comment><comment><USER40> if we only had some kind of network that would let us work remotely from anywhere in the world, but i'm just dreaming

</comment><comment><USER41> Autonomous RVs are going to pop this bubble. You're going to see a lot of people dropping static homes for RV's, or even a couple of them.

You'll see a new generation of people who have never had a static home, but always been at home wherever they are, and they'll never be more than a few steps from their own bed.

</comment><comment><USER42> Queue up some saying about trees, sky, growth, etc.

</comment><comment><USER43> ITT: rent-seeking.

</comment><comment><USER34> Sounds about right. Similar around the Bay in general tbh. My wife and I bought a place in Oakland in December and it's already up _20%_.

That's _insane_.

<comment><USER22> Something did happen in january.

<comment><USER44> What was that, for us non-Bay Area dwellers?

<comment><USER34> Seems like he's talking about standard seasonal variations (December is the worst month to sell in)

However the difference is crazy even _accounting_ for that

<comment><USER22> No, i lowballed at 15%. Some places saw 30% which is not attributable to that. I thought it was the tax laws, but still not clear what it is to date.

<comment><USER34> The supply has been almost nonexistent since September. Literally a handful of properties for sale.

Suddenly people started listing - so there's a LOT of pent up demand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I wonder what affect San Jose being a sanctuary city has on these increases.

It would seem me that a policy that encourages illegal immigrants to live in your city is neccisarily going to increase the supply of home dwellers, putting more demand on housing.</comment>


Lost Stories from Hunter S. Thompson's Stint as a Foreign Correspondent - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2015/06/read-18-lost-stories-from-hunter-s-thompsons-forgotten-stint-as-a-foreign-correspondent.html

<comment><USER2> One other funny story about him is that he was sent to cover the historical "Rumble in the Jungle" Muhammad Ali vs Frasier fight but he "chose to float in his hotel pool, a bottle of hooch in hand, while the great fight took place, and he was unable to file anything."

Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rumble_in_the_Jungle#React...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rumble_in_the_Jungle#Reactions)

<comment><USER3> Having spent a lot of my youth in Louisville, I admire both men. For those that don't know, both Hunter and Ali come from Louisville. Both men had troubled youth, but that's about where the similarities end.

Hunter was forced into the military to avoid jail time and, after that, went to Columbia (TIL, apparently, he only audited classes), and to write Hell's Angels, etc.

Ali (Cassius Clay) was several years younger than Hunter, and grew up half a city away ([https://goo.gl/maps/f76SJ](https://goo.gl/maps/f76SJ)). But, under similar, difficult circumstances. Found boxing at 12yo because he wanted to beat up a kid for stealing his bike.

I know that Hunter S. Thompson was a big fan of boxing (and football), and that he had stated Ali as a hero of his. But, I feel that it's sad and unfortunate to read something like this. It seems that Hunter spent a lot of his middle years floating in a pool. It really wasn't until they made the movie Fear and Loathing that he had a resurgence.

I can only look backwards through documentaries and commentary, but I find it quite surprising that the two only met once for an interview. Hunter was embarrassed that Ali didn't know who he was; [http://bloguin.com/queensberryrules/2014-articles/when- hunte...](http://bloguin.com/queensberryrules/2014-articles/when-hunter-met- muhammad.html). It just seems odd that these two people that were hugely influential (Ali more-so) during the 60s and 70s for civil rights and similar political beliefs, that they never actually met one another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As an aside, can someone explain the appeal of Hunter S. Thompson. I'm sure he was an amazing writer but was that it? Because, from my understanding, he was an otherwise terrible person.

<comment><USER5> Why do you understand him to be an otherwise terrible person?

Who'd he hurt? Who did he cause harm?

<comment><USER4> I saw a documentary on him--can't recall the title--which seemed to generally have a positive take on him but I came away thinking he was just awful.

He hurt his ex-wife and child by basically being a deadbeat father. And then dictated in his will that money be spent on a giant fist monument on his property. Money that could have, in my opinion, been put to better use by his family.

He apparently lied about candidates during the (I think?) 1972 Presidential campaign simply because he didn't like them. And by lies I mean he reported them as facts in the publication he was writing for. (come to think of it, I'm surprised that publication didn't fact-check him) Lies which affected the candidates negatively that might not have otherwise had his reporting been accurate.

In general he just seems to have a cult of personality where so many people like him simply because others do, because its the cool thing to do, much like they do with Che Guevara, without acknowledging the many flawed aspects of his character.

To those down-voting me, fine, I'll take your down-votes. If I'm wrong, I'll gladly stand corrected. But at least answer my original question instead of down-voting because you disagree with me. What is it you like about him?

<comment><USER3> I'll give you an up vote because it's a fair question. (And, I don't see any reason why someone would down vote.) I don't want to spin my appreciation for Hunter, but I'll provide you some articles. If you want some interesting reads, his most influential books are (pre-gonzo) 'Hell's Angels', 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas', 'Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72', and, much later, 'Kingdom of Fear'.

'Campaign Trail 72' is about the antics at the 72 Democratic Convention to get George McGovern the party's nomination. He was a longshot, but many young writers (including Hunter) started a movement to get him nominated; which succeeded. A lot of people thought that Nixon was undefeatable that year, but things got interesting after the youth movement behind McGovern. Unfortunately, his campaign failed miserably after his running mate, Thomas Eagleton, revealed that he underwent electric shock therapy years earlier. I think that many people would qualify McGovern as the first progressive democrat to be nominated, but, TBH, I don't know much about him, or his campaign, other than what I've already told you.

The other books don't need any introduction, from me, because you can easily find out a lot about them.

Articles by Hunter (personally selected):

"The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Deprived", notable for his first meeting with Ralph Steadman. [1]: [http://grantland.com/features/looking-back-hunter- s-thompson...](http://grantland.com/features/looking-back-hunter-s-thompson- classic-story-kentucky-derby/)

"He was a Crook" Obituary to Richard Nixon [2]: [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he- was-a...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a- crook/308699/)

... Somewhere there is an article about Hunter talking about his only conversation with Nixon. They talked about football. Both men hated each other, but Nixon had no idea who he was talking to at the time. Those events are fictionalized in the movie 'Where the Buffalo Roam' starring Bill Murray as Hunter.

"Fear and Loathing in America" \- Published September 12th, 2001 [3]: [http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1250751](http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1250751)

"Don't you dare cancel football" \- [4]: [http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=thompson/040...](http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=thompson/040727)

"Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray" \- His last article, submitted hours before his suicide. [5]: [http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1992213](http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1992213)

'Hey Rube, Page 2' Archive [6]: [http://totallygonzo.org/gonzowriting/hst-hey- rube-espn-page-...](http://totallygonzo.org/gonzowriting/hst-hey-rube-espn- page-2/)

Edit: As for the documentary that you watched, it was likely 'Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson' which was produced by his son, Juan, and narrated by Johnny Depp. As far as his family life, he raised his son, and remained friends with his first wife. I don't know the facts behind the abuse claims, but he was certainly a chaotic person. So, I would imagine he was a difficult person to be around.

Edit2: Fixed the documentary mentioned in the first edit, I had stated it was 'Buy the ticket, take the ride'.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Async.h – asynchronous, stackless subroutines in C - <AUTHOR> https://higherlogics.blogspot.com/2019/09/asynch-asynchronous-stackless.html <comment><USER2> Actual header: [https://github.com/naasking/async.h/blob/master/async/async....](https://github.com/naasking/async.h/blob/master/async/async.h)

<comment><USER3> I'm always on the close lookout for stuff like this because until recently I maintained some C code that really ought to use threads but can't afford the extra stacks/context switching. Here's my current view:

\- "Protothreads" are just the old switch statement coroutine trick. Local variables do not persist across async switches - this is expected and not surprising but that doesn't make it any less unnerving, it would be very easy to accidentally introduce very hard-to-debug problems in code using this technique. None of the author's examples expose this limitation!

\- async.h seems to be just the addition of a per-protothread structure where you can store your state (where the old coroutine trick typically has people just using static variables). This improves things a little but the author's examples still don't highlight the major issue that local variables don't persist. I suspect they didn't mention it because it seems so obvious, but that doesn't mean it isn't important.

I worked for about 2 years on code that's perfectly suited to these techniques (i.e. software that manages inherently parallel procedures, but that cant use actual threads), spent lots of time considering them, but in the end I think it's just better to manually manage your flow control. You end up with state coming in and out of functions as struct members (which is exactly the main idea of async.h IIUC) and the flow of your code doesn't look very naturally like the flow of the procedures it's actually managing. The solution IMO is just to code carefully, write comments, and draw diagrams.

My C files like this start with a couple pages of prose outlining the operation of the HW they're interacting with (if it was not interacting with HW, it would probably describe the protocol it's implementing, or the user interaction it's facilitating), and how that relates to the design of the SW in the file. Once you have that, I think the reader can see how the slightly unnatural function boundaries map onto elements of the broader system.

Sorry to be negative, these headers are cool and interesting and I'm glad people invent them. I just don't think we should use them in important software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What one should mention is that his version of coroutines is also stateless. That's why you need either stackful coroutines written in assembly or support in the language/compiler or operating system. Special case versions where you can avoid backing up the stack frame exist in other projects too, like in asio: [https://github.com/chriskohlhoff/asio/blob/master/asio/inclu...](https://github.com/chriskohlhoff/asio/blob/master/asio/include/asio/coroutine.hpp)

But in my opinion I would not use them for generic use cases and rather wait for the official support in C++20.

Of course I'm aware that I'm talking about C++ here and the situation for C might be slightly different.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone use Apple's libdispatch (aka GCD) on Linux production code? It seems to be pretty fast and has some neat features. It also gives you blocks/closure support in C (needs Clang).

<comment><USER6> Oh, libdispatch has been ported to other platforms?

That's great!

<comment><USER5> Was available in FreeBSD back in 2009: [https://wiki.freebsd.org/GCD](https://wiki.freebsd.org/GCD) Archived Linux port: [https://github.com/nickhutchinson/libdispatch](https://github.com/nickhutchinson/libdispatch) You can use this without blocks, but it is way more convenient with blocks.

<comment><USER6> Good to know, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And now when you just happen to decide to merge two statements in a single line, things start to crash and burn :)

Or, you know, when you happen to want to declare a few local variables.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ah yes the switch case statement hack :)

Does anyone have experience using libunwind for this kind of thing? You need to save and swap state for actual parallel execution.

<comment><USER9> It is a "hack", but not a bad one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Neat! I checked the async.h, looks like it doesn't support nested calls? I did a similar toy many years ago, which could be used with other async libraries such as libuv: [https://github.com/huxingyi/c-block](https://github.com/huxingyi/c-block)

<comment><USER11> Nested async calls are supported, there's an example at the end of the article. Ordinary calls simply have to return before the next await statement, and obviously you don't want to make blocking calls.

Async/await semantically doesn't support resumption from deep in the stack, so it's a good choice for this sort of trick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice hack :)

I don't see myself using this in any kind of real code at this stage, although it might serve as a base for a more comprehensive library of Rust-style futures.

<comment><USER11> My intent was to play around with different approaches for Arduino programming. I saw a bunch of blocking functions, like delay(), and thought that seemed silly and made me wish for async/await. I realised at that point that I could do it via macros with the same approach used by protothreads.

<comment><USER12> I found that computed-goto ([https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Labels-as- Values.html](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Labels-as-Values.html)) is cleaner than Duff's Device for this sort of thing. (It works for clang compiler too.) Take a look at [https://github.com/bxparks/AceRoutine](https://github.com/bxparks/AceRoutine) for an Arduino library that uses computed-goto.

<comment><USER11> Agreed, definitely more efficient and probably flexible, but two minor downsides:

1\. not portable C

2\. requires more storage for each continuation (4 bytes vs. 2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like it's just using Duff's device like you would use to implement a coroutine.

<comment><USER14> Yep, first line from the README:

> this is a header-only async/await implementation for C based on Duff's > device

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if there is anything between the complexity of HPX and this stack- less task libraries.</comment>