UK Court of Appeal rejects Tesla's appeal in BBC/Top Gear case - <AUTHOR> http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2013/152.html

<comment><USER2> The underlying issue here seems to be that electric cars are not the same as petrol ones. Yes, car users need to change their expectations of what a car will be in the future if it is not gasoline powered. However, when paying double or triple the price for a new version of an existing product, we expect some improvement in the experience, not potentially crippling and extreme inconvenience. If Tesla hadn't done similar tests in their validation programme as the ones done on Top Gear and then said to themselves "How could this look bad on Top Gear?" then they are foolish.

I'm not really liking Tesla's approach to PR here, they could be engaging in a much more positive way instead of lashing out at the media. Somewhat of an own goal on this one.

Slightly irrelevant video of a Ferrari test driver destroying an engine: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La03k7FzlZA>

<comment><USER3> Just a recommendation, but maybe you should actually read something before you respond to it: In the article you are commenting on " In paragraph 7 of its particulars of claim Tesla also alleged that the film was false in the following respects:

"(1) The first Roadster shown (which was silver in colour) did not run out of charge; (2) The first Roadster did not have to be pushed back into the hangar as a result of running out of charge; (3) At no point were the brakes of the first Roadster broken; (4) The second Roadster (which was grey in colour ) did not become immobile as a result of overheating. (5) There was no time at which neither Roadster was available for driving." " The lawsuit isn't over a bad review. It is over a scripted "failure" of the vehicle. The vehicle didn't die. It's batteries didn't run out, and the Tesla engineers found the script for the scene as the test drive was beginning.

Tesla has every right to respond to having their product used as a prop for a scripted jab at electric vehicles.

<comment><USER4> Er, no.

1) & 2) "Tesla admitted that the range of the Roadster on the test track was about 55 miles and that if it ran out of charge it took several hours to charge it up again. "

3) A fuse broke that meant power-assistance of the brake failed. So the brakes clearly weren't working correctly. I don't think Top Gear should do fault finding on review cars.

4) TG claimed it had reduced power, not that it was immobile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also, slightly offtopic, but when you read the actual text of these judgments, you really get to see the depth of the analysis that is put in before a decision is made. It's not just a bang of the gavel and "Next case!".

It almost reads like a code review, the way the text is parsed ;-)

</comment><comment><USER5> Why go the lawsuit route - that just brings attention back to a bad review. If the claims of the BBC are false, play the media - suggest a rematch, ensure the terms are fair but supportive of your case, and use the latest model to blow them out of the water.

<comment><USER6> It's Top Gear. From a journalistic point of view, they are akin to the Daily Mail or Harry Potter. The outcome is decided up front.

They won't win a rematch, even if they do.

<comment><USER7> Please don't make stuff up. Cars have already failed, taken TG's advice, been back, been improved, and Top Gear have been more than happy to say so.

The outcome was not decided up front, you made that up. That is known as lying.

Problem now, is that Tesla kicked off accusing TG of being dishonest, and then completely lost in court. So why would TG want them back for a rematch? So they can sue again if they don't like the out come?

Tesla blew it. And very stupidly too as far as the UK is concerned. TG on side would have been a massive advantage for them. Tesla will get it right in the end, electric cars will be the future. Even TG know that, and would have been on side later down the line.

<comment><USER8> TG _was_ being dishonest. They use hyperbole everywhere so Tesla is by no means getting special treatment in that regard. I've seen them trash perfectly good cars because of stupid names and/or because the company CEO looks funny, but in this instance they took an up and coming (read: promising alternative) and kicked it to the curb :

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/22/bbc_top_gear_tesla/>

      ...according to the Top Gear spokeswoman, the tested Tesla was filmed being pushed into the shed in order to
      show what would happen if the Roadster had run out of charge

Edit: Straight from the horse's mouth...

[http://transmission.blogs.topgear.com/2011/04/02/tesla-vs- to...](http://transmission.blogs.topgear.com/2011/04/02/tesla-vs-top-gear- andy-wilman-on-our-current-legal-action/)

This was published when Tesla first sued. And accrording to Andy Wilman, the executive producer :

"Just so you understand there's nothing devious going on, you need to know how this filming business works. When you film a car review, the reviewer is only the tip of the iceberg. Behind the lens is a film crew, and only a day's worth of light to shoot the eight minute film. This means we have to prepare in advance a treatment – a rough draft of a script so that the director and film crew can get to work right away, knowing what shots they will need to capture. It will contain the facts about a car, and what we think of its looks and so on, but how well the car actually drives is added on the day. If we've driven it ahead of filming, as we do with most cars, we will also have an idea how it feels to drive. But, and this is crucial, as we uncover fresh information about a car whilst filming it, it is entirely normal for the treatment to be modified as the day unfolds. Jeremy is always tweaking the scripts to reflect what his driving experience has actually been on the day."

<comment><USER9> If I'm understanding the original case correctly Tesla lost in part because they couldn't demonstrate that their reputation would be any more damaged by someone believing that the car actually ran out of charge than they would be if that person realised it was a dramatization.

Which kind of makes sense - after all, Top Gear could have driven it until it actually ran out of power and got the same results, and Tesla Motors didn't dispute that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> boom. what a colossal waste of money that looks to have been.

<comment><USER11> Libel suits in the UK are astonishingly expensive to boot.

Congratulations Tesla, on lining the pockets of Carter-Ruck at your expense and causing the BBC to spend a small fortune on their own legal costs in pursuit of this pointless case.

<comment><USER12> Two QCs on Tesla's side as well....

<comment><USER13> What's a QC, for those not familiar with the British Legal System?

<comment><USER12> Senior barristers, or in Scotland senior advocates. Usually over 10-12 years at the bar.

We have a system where in higher courts people are represented directly by lawyers but by barristers/advocates - the theory is that they have a primary duty to the court and not to the client. A lawyer will instruct a barrister/advocate to run a case - in more serious cases a QC (senior) will be used along with a junior barrister/advocate.

NB My wife qualified as an advocate in Scotland - best bit being that when they are training (mostly following a qualified advocate around for a year as an unpaid assistant) you are known as an _advocates devil_. The whole process of training is known as devilling and the advocate training you is your devil- master. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't get the lawsuit route at all. If your car is good then eventually people will come around to agreeing with that assessment even if the media likes gasoline cars today. If your car isn't good then you should fix it and move on with your life.

I realize a lot of money went into development but it seems crazy to sue your way to success or even think that could work in the first place. I don't think any of these major media outlets are really afraid of getting sued by Tesla anyway so if intimidation is the point then it won't work.

<comment><USER15> A negative review in TopGear and the New York Times is pretty serious, I think it can make a lot of people that are sitting on the fence dismiss buying an electrical car for another couple years. The impact of these reviews (regardless of wether or not they are true) are pretty big imho.</comment></comment>


How the secret police tracked my childhood - <AUTHOR> http://m.bbc.com/news/magazine-26838177?ocid=socialflow_twitter

<comment><USER2> Modern Belarus (well, it was in 2006 - 2008.) Me and some of my friends and their friends get together to organize some opposition performances or participation in national opposition events. As well as distributing printed gazette. No any kind of extremism or terrorism or whatever "-ism". I was probably the oldest one back then, around 22 yrs, the rest guys and gals were 18-20 yrs. All are students either at community college or getting their bachelors.

I was stopped randomly in car traffic because my car was "reported stolen" just to get every single piece of the car out trying to find "illegal" printed materials. One of these guys in our team also snitched for local police (so they recruited someone, i still don't know whom.) They tapped my cell phone and were able to meet us at place which was mentioned over one single cellphone talk...

My very small business suddenly became in focus of various state agencies, like IRS, fire department, etc. Each was able to find something to fine me for. I closed it.

It got to the point where my mom had "interview" with KGB where they openly told, that if she can't influence my behavior, probably I will never get my masters degree, my sister will never get into college, my mom will likely loose her job.

At some point I was "invited" to talk with local police chef about my "disturbances". At that time I already worked out a way to get out from Belarus for good and told about it to this police guy. He was very satisfied with this response from what I could see...

This was happening 6 years ago and from what I hear, still does. At least they did not prison and torture me, although it is probably more because I never cause too much trouble for them and was dismissed as not very important person to deal with.

<comment><USER3> Are your family fine and with you? Do you get to meet/call/email these friends now?

<comment><USER2> Once I moved out - everything is back to normal for my rest of family. They sometimes call my family to check if I am back, but getting "no" answer each time.

Yeah, with some of these friends I keep in touch.

So it played out well for me and my family. But definitely not for the people of Belarus.

<comment><USER4> Something similar but a little toned down still happens in Romania too.

For instance if you ruffle the wrong feathers your business may get "surprise inspections" from every government agency known to man.

And guess what they will always find a reason to fine your.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am a Romanian and I lived through all three systems. Why I say three: I lived 10 years through the worst period of communism, 10 through the savage transition and more than 10 through the crony capitalism.

And although I pay a lot for not leaving with all the waves of brain drain, it deserves all I pay to experience this, all three systems are so similar, the way they sell themselves is different.

At least they had the chance to survey those files and learn from them. Imagine us survey our files at NSA, GCHQ or any other services that gets its targets from linkedin. It will never happen.

<comment><USER6> Because in your country, just like in mine (Russia) it's not about the system, but the people. We don't know how to have a democracy, we have no idea how to be decent human beings, we do not how to deal with power, we do not know how to deal with money. We can change system as much as we want, we cannot change ourselves. This is the depressing reality of our countries.

<comment><USER7> You have a point. 'Western' liberalism has its roots in the Magna Carta of England, sparking the idea that the individuals have rights over the the state. This tradition, coupled with the enlightenment and the idea of liberal democracies has a very long history in Britain, and bequeathed to the US and other places around the world. It's not easy to just adopt these practices wholesale without understanding the fundamental concepts from which they spring.

I think you should have hope for your people and your countries - these ideas are contagious and we live in a world of instant communication and instant spread of ideas. Each generation hence will work towards improvement as long as they continue the fight against oppressive authoritarian socialist states re-emerging.

<comment><USER6> I had hope until our president invaded our neighbor. But I agree, things like more or less free communication, better educated population and politicians that are at least held accountable by their western counterparts and the rise of the global economy will most likely improve things for the better rather than worsen the situation.

Your analysis is spot on though as a lot of our 'misery' is engrained in our culture and that simply takes more/longer to change than merely switching government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "In a refugee centre in Rome we had been taught that Americans, when they ask "How are you?" don't really expect an answer"

Still true. I responded to someone's 'How are you?' yesterday with an actual status report, and they were taken aback.

<comment><USER4> I always respond with an actual status report.

If you're not interested then stop pretending to care.

Plus getting people off balance is always fun.

<comment><USER9> I work in a hospital. I ask every patient how they are today and 99% say "fine" or "good". The odd one that doesn't and says something like "I'm awful, that's why I'm here" is always interesting to chat to. I suspect that the majority of what we say is completely scripted and as such is startling when someone chucks a spanner into the works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _They bought two typewriters, one of which they did not register with the police..._

Evil regimes hate anonymous communication.

 _My father was sentenced to 11 years at the harshest prison of all, Aiud, for "fraudulent crossing of the border, punishable with art. 267 of the penal code"._

Evil regimes love to make it a crime to try to leave the living hell they have created. And look how official-sounding the law is. People who uncritically accept the government's position will think, "Well, the man did something fraudulent, after all... surely he deserves _some_ punishment."

</comment><comment><USER11> Will we ever get to read the files that the NSA, GCHQ and the CIA are keeping on us today?

<comment><USER12> Only if you attempt to rise above your station peasant; Otherwise it will stay in the store room

<comment><USER13> Does a freedom of information request give you the data that the NSA collects on you?

<comment><USER14> Some people tried this when the first Snowden leaks came out, and were promptly shut down with a response that revealing what information they had on that individual would indirectly reveal what information they had on everyone, thereby threatening national security.

<comment><USER15> > thereby threatening national security.

A couple words missing:

... thereby threatening _the_ national security _agency_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The security services of the eastern bloc were terribly inefficient; just imagine how effective they could be today!

<comment><USER17> The funny part is there are more police-men now, then during communism.

<comment><USER4> With so many informants why would you need police men.

Statistically every 10th person you met at that time was most likely as intelligence service informant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What surprises me with all this detailed record keeping is the sheer cost of all this -manual- security apparatus. Sure, not every resident was a 'dissident' to be monitored, but it sounds like this family had a team of ten people working their case, round the clock.

I suppose a lot of the informants and plants were not paid, but forced to participate through threats, but it still seems like a staggering amount of organization at incredible cost.

<comment><USER18> Yes, and the interesting thing about _that_ is how few dissidents it would have taken to completely overwhelm their ability to keep an eye on them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds awfully familiar - my dad's story and his experience with the GDR's police state and socialist totalitarianism was quite similar. It's really a chilling account and makes you appreciate every tiny bit of freedom.

</comment><comment><USER20> You need to understand the scope of surveillance, its primitive basis:

        Magical Combat should be differentiated from psychic attack,
        with which a large proportion of 'fringe' occultists concern themselves
        with, and is largely a product of self-delusion and varying degrees of
        megalomania. True magical combat has its own rules and boundaries,
        which are known to the skilled, while the trainee must quickly learn
        them if trauma is to be avoided. Caught up in a situation which s/he
        finds incomprehensible and alien, the trainee only knows confusion
        and terror. Stripped of the smug self-assurance of "it can't happen to
        me" s/he learns to perceive the environment with clarity, to give attention
        to the rhythms and pulses of the world. Truly, Death is a great teacher.
        If you can reach forwards and see the moment of your 'death', then that
        moment will give you a glimpse of your potential.[0]

Look at this from a naturalistic framework. Jesus, for instance, may have simply been a very eccentric man who behaved linguistically and personally in ways that were revolutionary. He probably induced too many magic mushrooms, or some atypical neurological condition set him extremely intuitively in line with a mystical tradition — nevertheless, these are historical implementation details of _this_ Universe. Not uniquely _interesting_ either way you describe it.

Now imagine that these features of a society become more widespread — where you have {J1, J2, J3, ...}, then imposters, {I1, I2, I3, ...}, and then of course randoms, {R1, R2, R3, ...}. This is an oversimplified model, but it captures the problem well enough.

Surveillance becomes a psychological management strategy that naturally emerges given the task of ruling out true adepts (altruistics) and delusionists (potentials who cannot manage their own psychic powers).

"Psychic powers" does not amount to some belief in the supernatural. If I mention the word "chair", this will not sit with you as mental residue (surely, contextual and relational analysis apply, but on the whole it will not) — but if you take recourse to JL Austin's "How to Do Things With Words" — you will certainly need to shake off words like "preapopstaticontinentalism". The first point is that a speaker has produced the word, then it comes that decision procedure of whether or not it has literal meaning. The brain _has to do work_ — which is the basis of "psychic forces" (reducible to behaviors of neurological substrata).

—

[0]: [http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/apikindx.html](http://www.chaosmatrix.org/library/chaos/texts/apikindx.html)

<comment><USER21> I was confused, until I realized that the parent post itself was a form of psychic attack. You are supposed to be confused by it.

Also, I erect a Tower of Iron Will around the party. (rolls d20)

<comment><USER8> I hope you spent some extra power points on that, because PR 19 is not enough here. So confused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hope that more people who believe in a "new collaborative economy" for America come across stories like this.

<comment><USER23> ???

<comment><USER22> Well, like in this article [1] on the front page yesterday, there's a sentiment that individual rights and private property per capitalism should give way to something more "collaborative." Only "collaborative" is not new, it stinks of failed historical experiments and the exact kind of repression described in this article in Romania.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/31/capital...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/31/capitalism- age-of-free-internet-of-things-economic-shift)

<comment><USER23> Connecting those two stories is a real stretch. Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It still amazes me that the US accepted political refugees from the eastern bloc. Their involvement in Romania was extremely thin. From what I can tell it was just Voice of America propaganda[1] and the unfounded rumor that american saviors are coming any day now.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America#Law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America#Law)</comment>


The Multiverse Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be in 'Come with Me' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/books/review-come-with-me-helen-schulman.html <comment><USER2> Wow this story is basically ripped right from an episode of Rick & Morty right down to the multiverse goggles. Brilliant episode though so probably makes for an excellent book.

<comment><USER3> That does indicate the writer has an extremely high IQ, to be fair.

<comment><USER2> True that. And I should say, great show, not just great episode. Hell most of Rick & Morty's could be made into stand alone books/movies.

Love that I'm being downvoted for pointing this fact out, ah HN.

<comment><USER4> You're probably being downvoted because these topics are not unique to that show. Also, the "high iq" thing is a joke you fell right into.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, to understand the subtlety of hacker news you have to have a high IQ and at least three ML papers.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook must buck trend to stay on top - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Facebook-must-buck-trend-to-stay-on-top-3725035.php <comment><USER2> I, for one, would welcome it if FB would drift away into irrelevance.

It's not about the users anymore (not that it ever was, but it's becoming more visible daily) so it's just a matter of time until even the most clueless will wake up and take their data elsewhere (wherever that might be)..</comment>


Apple Numbers For Normals: It's The 5C, Stupid - <AUTHOR> http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/02/02/apple-numbers-for-normals-its-the-5c-stupid/

<comment><USER2> Here's the series that blows my mind: Here's a little table of results for the past 8 years.

      Cash generated by operating activities, Q1
      Year Dollars, millions
      2007  1,813
      2008  2,787
      2009  3,938
      2010  5,781
      2011  9,773
      2012 17,554
      2013 23,426
      2014 22,670</comment>


New twist on sofa problem that stumped mathematicians and furniture movers - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-03-sofa-problem-stumped-mathematicians-furniture.html?utm_content=buffere4dad&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> Some discussion already over here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13922567) (7 comments)

Interestingly I posted[0] a link to exactly this story[1] from a different source around 12 weeks ago - it sank without trace. I wonder if this will fare better ... it's an interesting problem.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13263532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13263532)

[1] [http://blogs.ams.org/visualinsight/2016/12/15/romiks- ambidex...](http://blogs.ams.org/visualinsight/2016/12/15/romiks-ambidextrous- sofa/)</comment>


Demo of Mozilla's Social API coupled with WebRTC - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2012/11/30/webrtc-makes-social-api-even-more-social/

<comment><USER2> This is awesome! Mozilla is really heading in the right direction.</comment>


How I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days - <AUTHOR> http://www.sigbus.info/how-i-wrote-a-self-hosting-c-compiler-in-40-days.html <comment> bad-joke I really enjoyed reading this. It's informative, fun, and has a refreshingly honest tone. Too often, stories passed around by computer scientists entail clever solutions and elegant insight striking the protagonist like lightning in the hour of need. Rarely does the programmer express regret, make self- corrections, and confront fear and doubt along the way:

>I should have written beautiful code from the beginning, but because I needed to learn by writing a working code, the rewriting was unavoidable.

>I should probably change my mind to implement all the features from end to end. I may find it fun as I'm approaching the goal. Sometimes, I have to write more code than I want to write in order to achieve a goal.

>In a tough situation like this, I probably should recall the fact that the compiler was just in one file, to see how much progress I've made in a month. It just reads an integer with scanf() and prints it out with printf(). Really, I made so much progress in one month. Yeah, I think I can do this.

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of this going on over at /r/adventofcode, people are abusing the hell out of languages just to get their answers as quickly as possible to make the leaderboard.

For those of you who don't know what Advent of Code is, think of it as the advent calendar you had as a child (you know that thing with the chocolate behind the paper doors?), except you get a new coding problem every day and you get stars instead.

[https://adventofcode.com](https://adventofcode.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > I suspect that he [Dennis Ritchie] invented a syntax, wrote code for it, > which turned out to be more complicated than he had expected. And that was > eventually standardized by the ANSI committee. It's hard to implement a > standardized language because you have to get everything right. It's rather > easy to write your own toy language.

Love those lines

<comment><USER4> It's actually a clone of BCPL, which invented keywords & "programmer in charge philosophy." They ported it to PDP's with a few changes for UNIX. Standards came later. Specific details every step of the way are here:

[http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG](http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG)

<comment><USER5> That vimeo talk was rich.

ps: [https://vimeo.com/132192250](https://vimeo.com/132192250)

<comment><USER4> It's in my references.

<comment><USER5> I just wanted to put it upfront rather than a link at the bottom.

<comment><USER4> It's all good. Makes sense. Just making sure one of us didn't overlook it in the references.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting, and quite funny to read with a sense of humour that reminds me of the movie PI. The author of the compiler goes from rational to something more... spiritual.

"Day 52

I was looking for a mysterious bug for three days: ..."

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I was a little surprised that the author was able to manage both C11 and the preprocessor in that time. The preprocessor is hard. But there was existing code from a previous version of it, which makes sense. Still, a fantastic achievement! Congrats to the author!

<comment><USER8> Out of curiosity - why do you consider cpp particularly hard? It's easier than the compiler, actually :)

<comment><USER7> Well... easier than the compiler but very hard to do the last 20% (I never had the time; hobby project) because docs are so hard to find. Or at least were-- maybe that's changed.

<comment><USER8> What docs? It's all in the standard

<comment><AUTHOR> The standard says too little about the preprocessor. I don't think you can implement a preprocessor that can read system header files only with the standard.

<comment><USER8> System header files usually employ platform-specific extensions not only on the preprocessor side, but in preprocessed code as well AFAIK. That is, the compiler has to support them too.

My comment was not to say that coding cpp is _easy_ \- just that it's not a _particularly hard_ task compared to the compiler itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thought this was going to be an inspiration to me to continue with my pet project of writing my own little programming language. But it starts off on day 8 with him already having written a basic compiler, with no explanation of how he did any of the basics. Still interesting, just not what I thought it was.

<comment><USER10> Same here. I have been trying the same project as you... and get stuck on the grammar, every.single.time.

Are you done with that part yet?

<comment><USER11> What do you mean "stuck on the grammar"? Can't figure out how to write a grammar, can't get all the fiddly implications correct so OOO fails, can't figure out how to write the parser, can't muster up enough enthusiasm to finish the work...?

One option is to punt for a bit and use what I sometimes call the "Lisp non- grammar", even if you don't intend to be writing a Lisp; use parentheses to directly encode a parse tree, and whatever other hacky symbols you need for now to set up atom types or whatever. You might still be able to explore enough what you're interested in to figure out what you want in the grammar. Whatever the core idea of your toy language is, you should try to get to that as quickly as possible, punting on everything else you possibly can, so if the point of your language isn't to have an innovative new grammar, you might want to try to defer that work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Honestly, the most difficult, time consuming, and mundane aspect to this project would have to be the parser, which was apparently written in C by hand. So bravo.

Getting to some of the final notes:

> ... I'd choose a different design than that if I were to write it again. > Particularly, I'd use yacc instead of writing a parser by hand and introduce > an intermediate language early on.

That's why I found the LALRPOP post by one of the Rust developers interesting. Writing your own parser generator is actually much easier than writing a parser by-hand (depending on the complexity of the language, here not that complex and still difficult), and I think it's more instructive than using a free or open parser-generator or compiler compiler. The downside is that it is less practical, because almost none of the important aspects of language implementation involve the parser.

<comment><USER13> > Writing your own parser generator is actually much easier than writing a > parser by-hand

Surely to write your own parser generator you will need to write a parser for your grammar language? So you are now writing that parser, and then your actual parser using your new grammar language? That can't be easier than writing one by hand.

<comment><USER14> I have written a parser generator to generate a parser for a compiler project for a class. It is indeed the easier route. Your parser specification language is usually a lot simpler than your target language. Your parser generator also just needs the features required for your particular grammar, which means that dirty hacks and regex parsing are a viable route.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What does it mean to be 'self-hosting' here? Does it just mean that it's a compiler that can compile itself?

<comment><USER16> I believe so. FTA:

"Looking at my code, even though I wrote it, it feels magical to me that it can handle itself as an input and translate it to assembly."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For anyone interested in compiler writing and looking for a good resource to start, probably one of the best is the "Dragon Book":

[http://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques- Tools-...](http://www.amazon.com/Compilers-Principles-Techniques- Tools-2nd/dp/0321486811)

I highly recommend it, but it's _heavy_ stuff. There are probably simpler guides out there that just cover the basics.

<comment><USER18> Please stop recommending the Dragon Book already. It is not just heavy, it is mostly outdated and irrelevant.

<comment><USER19> Please could you recommend an alternative?

<comment><USER20> Modern Compiler Implementation in C

<comment><USER21> By A. Appel? I heard that the ML version is better since much of the code apparently isn't very idiomatic (It was supposedly translated directly from the ML book). I would probably recommend both that and The Dragon Book, as they cover roughly the same material but in a slightly different manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is really interesting, and I was glad to see the author go beyond just the stated 40 days and give insight into where they went after it was 'self- hosting.'

</comment><comment><USER23> Long ago UNIX had compiler writing tools like yacc and lex. I wonder if they are useful for exercises like this.

<comment><USER24> They might, although no production quality C or C++ compiler uses anything other than a hand-rolled recursive descent parser, afaik.

The lex, parse and AST directories in Clangs source tree are ~100,000 LOC combined, and all hand-written.

<comment><USER4> Semantic Designs toolkit uses GLR to handle about everything one could think of:

[http://www.semanticdesigns.com/Products/DMS/DMSToolkit.html](http://www.semanticdesigns.com/Products/DMS/DMSToolkit.html)

<comment><USER25> Ambiguous use of 'handle' here. For an ambiguous parse, GLR gives a forest of possible alternatives that still has to be disambiguated. Interesting to see a reference to Semantic Designs here, Ira Baxter used to pimp DMS on stack overflow quite a lot, I have not seen anything from them in years, are they still in business?

<comment><USER4> Having tried to write similar stuff, I was quite impressed with the claimed capabilities of the tool and how they went about it. He summarizes some of the issues here:

[http://www.semanticdesigns.com/Products/DMS/LifeAfterParsing...](http://www.semanticdesigns.com/Products/DMS/LifeAfterParsing.html)

The stuff they support was also significant. Personally, I always thought they should open-source that then make their money on good front-ends, transformation heuristics, and services. Like LLVM, academic community would make core tool much better over time.

Far as in business, site is still up with more content than before and a current copyright. Last news release was 2012. Not sure if that's a bad sign or just a business that focuses less on PR. There's a paper or two in ResearchGate in 2015 promoting it with him still on StackOverflow but with less DMS references because of moderator pressure (explained in his profile). So, probably still in business.

My quick, top-of-head assessment of their situation, at least. Might be way off. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > I have a mixed feeling — I learned a new stuff, but I could have learned > that without spending this much time.

Story of my life!

</comment><comment><USER27> Anyone tried using it? How do I use it to generate executable (as per the code it should fork the 'as')?

Getting following error: [ERROR] main.c:144: (null): One of -a, -c, -E or -S must be specified

-c, -E and -S are working fine. Couldn't figure out from code what -a does.

<comment><USER28> Have you tried -o to specify the output file?

As for -a it doesn't look like -a is actually handled in parseopt, through process of elimination it looks like -E sets cpponly, -c sets dontlink, and -S sets dumpasm. So from main.c:143 if you don't set any of those, dumpast needs to be true, and the only way I see that getting set to true is by using this flag '-fdump-ast'

From this commit[0] it looks like -a was removed, but usage docs and error messages weren't updated.

[0][https://github.com/rui314/8cc/commit/614f6e7b643333b9baaf8fb...](https://github.com/rui314/8cc/commit/614f6e7b643333b9baaf8fbd6f0a4a8adc935307)

Edit: adding link to relevant commit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> 1) write compiler 2) get a job at google . . 4) profit

<comment><AUTHOR> I was already working at Google full-time (for an unrelated project) when I was writing this in my spare time.

<comment><USER4> So, I'm hearing (1) Has job at Google, (2) Makes profit, (3)..., (4) Publishes cool tech written in spare time. The kind of stuff we've come to expect from you Googlers. Haha.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is awesome. I wish more of top coders post their flow of thoughts so the betas can learn from it.

</comment><comment><USER31> rui314, thanks for posting this, you really were such a big inspiration to me writing my own. You were really quick!

</comment><comment><USER32> Now repeat for C++.

<comment><USER33> Considering that a considerably large subset of C is valid C++, it should be easy to modify 8cc to be valid C++ (e.g. by replacing implicit void*-casts to explicit ones), and then you already have a "self-hosting C++ compiler", but that could be considered cheating by some...

<comment><USER34> Except it won't compile anything but "C++" htat's really C code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What do you mean, "as a child"?

<comment><USER36> The parent poster is suggesting advent calendars are used most often by children. This is true around my area

<comment><USER37> And I think the person you responded to is implying his exit from childhood did not in any way slow down his use of advent calendars for chocolate-eating purposes.

<comment><USER38> Why would I purchase a device specifically designed to rate limit my chocolate consumption? Advent calendars are the Internet data caps of dessert.

<comment><USER37> It's probably good to learn a little calender-based self control when young, but I happen to agree Chocolate Is Life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Unbelievable Jeff!

</comment><comment><USER40> Self-hosting is pointless. Go has it--who cares. I wrote a program 1000x faster than the ruby one (at work) with zero bugs in Go, but I still don't want to use it(Go). Java is fine. Do I care if Java is self-hosting? No. I'll do (another) language in Javacc (my first one is still awesome) or ANTLR.

<comment><USER31> If you want to create a self sufficient system then it isn't pointless at all. That just happens to be something that isn't in your requirements.</comment></comment>


Apple now runs ObjC in the browser - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/lrz/status/1250453967957561344 <comment><USER2> Does this mean you can now use AppKit to build Electron apps?

<comment><USER3> No. As per the tweet and follow up tweets, only a small subset of Foundation made it along with this wasm port.</comment></comment>


9/11 Holds little meaning for teenagers - <AUTHOR> http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2009/Senate/Maps/Sep11-s.html#6

<comment><USER2> This is really no surprise. I was just wondering the other day what pre- packaged, universally-accepted name would be given to the 9/11 attacks in history books.

</comment><comment><USER3> That report had no meaning, so I guess they're even.</comment>


Call it "3G" or "4G," America's wireless networks are still slow - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/the-wireless-generation-gap-america-in-the-slow-lane.ars <comment><USER2> A big reason our wireless infrastructure sucks (and won't improve a whole lot) is that we devote a huge amount of the best spectrum space to broadcast radio and television. Signals sent on TV or radio-sized frequency travel farther and are less vulnerable to interference than cell phone signals or LTE just about anything else except for some channels reserved for military communication. We have the ability to send a whole lot of data over the air more robustly than we can right now, but it's being used to support obsolete technology.

The FCC auctioned off or gave away a lot of prime spectrum to radio and TV providers back when it wasn't nearly as precious as it is today, and they adopted old, inefficient formats that need an enormous range of frequencies to transmit very little data. Do you know anyone who has used broadcast television over the past ten years? I don't, and I don't think I know very many people who have either. Yet we still use a whole lot of really good VHF space for wasteful analog communication. Meanwhile, the channels used for some of the most important things, like Wi-Fi, need to use some of the crappiest spectrum around, because everything else has been allocated already.

Things are improving, albeit slowly. The switch from analog to digital broadcast TV is opening up a whole lot of space, much of which is being used for WIMAX. But radio uses up even more space than TV did, and there are no plans on the horizon to change it at all.

<comment><USER3> actually, i know several people who still use both broadcast TV and radio.

a major issue that many people seem to miss is that all communication necessarily self-selects for people who can receive it. today, in what many people consider to be the "internet-age", those of us who use the internet tend to forget about those who do not (or simply miss them, if we do remember). and the people who don't tend to be those who are either disabled (because it is difficult for them to make use of the tech), or those who can't afford it.

while i'll definitely agree that we need to take another look at how we're allocating the spectrum, let's not forget as we do so that there are people who depend heavily on tech that is only obsolete for us personally, not for the world as a whole.

<comment><USER2> I have no problem with broadcast TV, although ubiquitous fast internet service could make that unnecessary. What I have a problem with is the use of really good spectrum space for analog signals inefficiently. TV now is a lot better than it used to be, but radio still uses up a huge band of frequencies, and it could use a lot less if we switched to digital.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem is the labels themselves which have been rendered meaningless. At a minimum, the US carriers should just cite the theoretical maximum rate. But maybe Consumers Union or someone of that ilk should create an objective, real world rating system that would reflect upload, download and latency speeds.

<comment><USER5> This is largely the result of cynical MBAs running companies. Can you imagine Google trying to water down terms to this degree? -- muchless just inventing buzzwords for "new technogies" out of whole cloth and cynically marketing them?

<comment><USER6> I kind of can imagine Google watering down terms to that degree: <http://www.html5rocks.com/>

I do think Google does it more judiciously. Simplification can be a good thing.

<comment><USER5> What AT&T has done goes far beyond simplification -- it's downright dishonesty.

 _Google does it more judiciously_

Comparing the two, that's an understatement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The big issue is that the US is so big. They talk about the new 4g in nordic countries. That would be like Verizon rolling out screaming fast 4g only in California, and leaving the rest of the country on 3g. That just wouldn't work.

Building a 4g network across the entire US is a big deal.

<comment><USER8> The term "big" doesn't really mean anything. The US has a higher population density. Per person served, it would be cheaper to cover the US than the Nordic countries.

<comment><USER9> Wow, I hadn't realized that. Yes, that's true: the US as a whole has about twice the population density as Scandinavia.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_European...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_European_countries)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_populati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density)

This makes Sweden, Norway and Finland roughly comparable in density to Colorado, Maine, and Oregon, which we tend to think of as relatively spacious states. By contrast, each is about the size of California, which has 5-6x the population density.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone here know, given current frequency allocations, what the theoretical maximum connection speed is? That is, allowing for improvements in hardware, how fast is really fast on a cell phone?

<comment><USER11> It's been way too long since my signals class, and I'm not even going to try since I know I'm going to be wrong (a whole lot of good that education did me, huh.). But I do know that it's proportional to the bandwidth available.

Careful reading of these [1] equations may yield you an answer. Flashbacks to college are an unintended side effect.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_capacity>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think there are a few extra layers to this problem that aren't frequently brought up. 1) people believe they need cell/data service and would never cancel their service regardless of how bad/slow the service is. How many San Franciscan's or New Yorkers canceled their iphone service? The answer: Not enough. Will we as a country continue to pay $30/mnth for slow speeds and spotty coverage. Hell yes we will.

2) I don't think most people would notice faster network speeds if they came. They would notice better coverage, but would most of us be able to tell 50mps compared to 5mps? I have a feeling the speed my phone loads websites right now is limited by the cpu, not the network. And with 5gb caps (if we're lucky), we can't use our networks for anything more intensive like video streaming. What would be the point of a superfast network if it takes 20 minutes of downloading to use up my monthly alotment?

</comment><comment><USER13> 4G is not what it is advertised for. my favorite is the marketing scheme behind 4G LTE(long term evolution), which is the same as saying "ohh we are thinking about 4G but it wont actually be here for a while"

</comment><comment><USER14> The best comment is that the speed doesn't matter so much. since downloads are capped, so your running throughput can be as little as 2 bytes per second throughout the month. I don't think Sprint is this way at the moment, however.

<comment><USER15> Sprint 4g access is unlimited, and 3g is limited to 5 gigs per month. Still better than any other carrier right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I usually get about 2mbps on my Verizon 3G, which is faster than my home ADSL connection. I´ve thought of my wireless as very fast, though perhaps not from a global perspective.

<comment><USER17> 2mbps is great, I remember having ADSL. However with cable internet I've maxed out at 14.5mbps on a 16mbps advertised connection, although I'm actually testing at peak usage time from a wireless connection, so in ideal connections I might actually get what they're advertising for me (until I hit their bitcap which will be spot on 16mbps).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if a strong public sector has something to do with the fact that European and Asian countries always (supposedly) have so much better networking infrastructure.

<comment><USER19> Actual competition between providers is probably the major reason. It's amazing how consumer choice can motivate corporations to invest in infrastructure so they can gain marketshare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Try Brazil ones them... you will love yours afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have an iPhone 3G, a 3Gs and a Tmobile MyTouch 4G.

Both iPhones are a complete joke. To the point of rage WRT ATT service.

The tMobile, while not having 'H' coverage everywhere in SF, is LIGHTNING fast by comparison.

There are several other factors, aside from network, that play into this. The OS and HW on the iPhones are just slow and old by comparison. Where - even on my home wifi network pages are slow to render in the browser.

(Even simply launching the SMS app on the 3G iPhone takes as much as 10-ish seconds to display text)

The MYT4G also has no progress indicator on the sending of SMS - where the iPhone does -- and it does the classic "Load to 90% quickly, then pause forever, if sending at all"

Finally, I have had the iPhone since launch day, and have gone through 9 separate handsets in that time. On every single one of them - the 3G and signal bar indicator have been an utter lie. At times when it claims to be online - it has, over a large percentage of the time I have been a user, not been able to "activate cellular data network" for various reasons - or simply "call canceled" so many times I am fed up.

The "call canceled" sound is heard at least 3 times a day minimum.

In closing, if I could have apple and AT&T reps in the room - I would like to kick them in the balls.

<comment><USER22> Where are you? In the Boston area, I've never had the kind of trouble with AT&T people talk about in NYC and SF.</comment></comment>


Design and Implementation of CSV/Excel Upload for SaaS - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementation-of-csvexcel-upload-for-saas/ <comment><USER3> > I simply didn't feel right getting that amount of value for free from two > projects which are run by very small teams, so I approached both and > convinced them to sell me an enterprise license to their project. It is > equivalent to the usual OSS license, except it comes with an invoice.

That's really cool of you, patio11! Most open source stuff I've worked on... I'm happy if I get a "thanks!" from time to time. Sure, it has other benefits, and I wouldn't be where I am today without open source, but handing out some actual cash is very classy.

I wonder if more companies would really consider doing this, though - <USER2> over money that you don't have to is not something I've seen a lot of. I've worked for people who don't even want to let the world they're using various bits of open source software, let alone contribute back anything.

Also, there is a concern that money can really change the dynamics of a community, but by and large, I'd rather see a lot more money funneled to open source than there currently is. For instance:

[https://twitter.com/antirez/status/557851219088375808](https://twitter.com/antirez/status/557851219088375808)

<comment><USER4> Convincing businesses to pay for OSS is a frustrating problem. I built a gem[1] that has had almost 5000 downloads, 89 since Monday night (rough proxy for production users), related to payments. Exactly zero people have had any interest in paying for the commercial license I offer, even though the gem is directly related to payments.

The pro offering is probably not quite where it needs to be, but to have zero interest at all is pretty discouraging.

[1]: [https://www.payola.io](https://www.payola.io)

<comment><USER5> Off topic: This is literally the first gem/package/piece of software I've seen distributed in this way that has sales tax attached to it for residents of a certain state. Is there some Michigan law pertaining to sales tax on software?

My business offers in consultancy-based software development so we are not bound by my state's sales taxes, I was just curious if Michigan has a software-specific law.

<comment><USER4> It's terrible. I'm a resident of Michigan and so I have to remit sales tax on "packaged software". The rules for what constitutes "packaged software" recently got changed to include anything downloadable. SaaS is specifically excluded, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a great tool! I think one challenge putting this into production will be all the "extra" stuff people put into spreadsheets:

\- one or more titles on top ("Patient Database", "current as of Jan 5, 2014", etc)

\- data in a bunch of different sheets.

\- multiple types of "stuff" all packed into one sheet, maybe separated by a few blank rows or maybe a summary pivot table pasted in the top-left corner.

It's easy to handle that if you are pre-processing the spreadsheets yourself, but getting to where non-programmers can prep a spreadsheet for uploading seems hard. How are they supposed to know that column headers belong on the first row, that each row of data should have the same "kind" of thing, etc.?

Anyway, good luck and thank you for the great writeup!

<comment><USER7> One of the commenters on the article suggested sending the customer an "import template," with all of the column headers predefined. The customer simply needs to copy-paste their data into your CSV import template, and upload it.

Never tried it myself, but it sounds like a decent solution to the problem of wacky formatting.

<comment><USER8> I tried it. Customers pretty frequently made their own spreadsheets that looked mostly like the template, but not quite. I was constantly fixing their uploads.

I built a system to validate their uploads and let them fix their errors on a website, and all that hassle went away.

(I still gave them the template so they'd know what it was supposed to look like, I just didn't rely on that alone.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thanks Patrick, I now have a url I can send to anyone who complains that $OSS_PROJECT they depend on isn't supported to the degree they'd like.

<comment><USER10> That's probably worth an entire essay, but I don't think I'll be the guy to write it, as the topic makes me positively volcanic.

<comment><USER11> Justin Searls' recent talk "The Social Coding Contract" has a nice take on why expectations get so out-of-sync: [http://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2014-12-02-the-social- codin...](http://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2014-12-02-the-social-coding- contract.html)

Nobody is "the bad guy", but creators and late adopters have very different understandings of what OSS is for, why it exists, and what to expect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A very common and very real problem. At my last company we addressed this by writing a CSV library that really did handle all the Excel weirdness.

[https://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/csv/](https://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/csv/)

Actually some of that is not automatable, so this cannot by its nature be a complete solution, but with heuristics -- ugh -- it worked. Months and months of effort to get it to work, and we didn't even have the general public as customers, just a small set of B2B companies.

</comment><comment> daniel-levin Hey Patrick! I'm a huge fan of your work, and really enjoy reading your blog. I have one question though.

AR is HIPAA compliant, which implies that there is (medically) sensitive information hitting your servers. Why is it not an issue for you and your support agents to actually see that data yourselves (as you would when manually fixing CSV errors)? If your seeing this data doesn't violate the _letter_ of HIPAA, surely the ethical impetus behind the act would prevent you from doing so?

<comment><USER10> I have spoken all the eldritch rituals which legally permit a doctor to share patient information with me personally as long as they have a contract with my name signed in blood on it.

Just kidding. It isn't actually that bad. Appointment Reminder is a "Business Associate" of Happy Teeth Dental. I'm it's HIPAA compliance officer, attend a yearly training session, have been threatened with the most severe of sanctions if I misused patient data, see only the data required for my job, and have my name and access rights recorded in a spreadsheet ready to be audited (along with my access logs). That's probably half of the list. Clearly HIPAA can't completely ban non-doctors from seeing medical data or the entire medical sector grinds to a halt, right?

With regards to support agents, some people at the company are approved for access and some are not. The system enforces access rights, naturally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I had a discussion with the author of sheetjs about a year back as a response to my comment[1] on VBA and Excel. We went back and forth on building a kickstarter campaign - especially for his "transpiler" that converts VBA to JS.

I'm glad to see this has come so far ahead. My offer to contribute to a kickstarter still stands !

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361091](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4361091)

</comment><comment><USER14> Importing data from Excel shouldn't be this painful.

I'd love to see a service that takes in a user's mangled spreadsheet and some regex validation for each column and spits back perfect JSON-formatted data, walking the user through corrections along the way (ie: intelligently guessing column mappings, highlighting malformatted cells, column joins, down/up/title casing, and string substitutions). Something that could be integrated in a line or two of javascript would be fantastically valuable (especially if that "$100,000 in engineering time" heuristic is accurate).

<comment><USER10> This would be _particularly_ useful if you could somehow do it in such a way that the service doesn't need to actually be in possession of the CSV/Excel/etc data at any point. (That would be a non-starter for privacy reasons at many companies.)

Would I have paid, oh, $500 a month for this? Heck yes. I would have paid it for it on day #1 and continued paying for it for each of the last 4 years, and it would _still_ be cheap at the price.

<comment><USER14> Huh. That'd be tricky, but not impossible. You'd have to do everything on the browser, which would limit the size of the spreadsheet you could import (it would have to fit in memory), and may limit browser support. It'd also be harder to productize since the secret sauce is now just javascript.

I really want this to exist, though. Maybe it could be open sourced and survive on your proposed enterprise licenses. Hmm...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My assumption is Apache POI to "parse" native Excel files was never considered because OLE2 is famous for being an inception-like file format.

[http://poi.apache.org/casestudies.html](http://poi.apache.org/casestudies.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Thanks for sharing! The last section about enterprise licenses for OSS was especially great.

</comment><comment><USER17> I haven't heard of SheetJS before, but now I will definitely look into it! I have recently started using Handsontable though and its absolutely fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can't find any information on browser compatability - does anyone know?</comment>


UK ISP reaction to DRIP bill - <AUTHOR> http://status.aa.net.uk/apost.cgi?incident=1984

<comment><USER2> I wonder if the incident ID was "selected" on purpose ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently so (from [http://www.revk.uk/2014/07/dripa-and- aasisp.html](http://www.revk.uk/2014/07/dripa-and-aasisp.html)):

> It was so close I did an edit :-)</comment></comment>


The Outer Solar System Beckons - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/09/the-outer-solar-system-beckons/406075/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Enceladus has been my favorite moon since I was a young lad. I feel like it may have the best chance at life out of all the other places in own solar system. I hope I see the day when we visit it and possibly drill into the ice.

I know NASA, like any government agency, is a bit bloated and slow but they're also one of the few, hell may THE ONLY, government agency that can give people something to hope for and aspire to work for. I wish there was more government funding not just for NASA but for funding companies (through contracts or hell maybe even actual funding due to the prohibited cost of space flight) that could one day put people and robots into space.

I hope I'm alive to see the day when we drill into ANY of these amazing moons...but especially Enceladus.

</comment><comment><USER3> If I was one of those mega-billionaires, that's what I'd be spending money on. Sending probes to all the interesting objects in the solar system.

</comment><comment><USER4> > The ocean, you will recall, is where life is thought to have originated on > our planet, Earth.

Ah yes, Earth is the one with the people on it. Thank you for the helpful reminder.

</comment><comment><USER5> How about looking for life on earth which we cannot perceive without augmenting our senses.

<comment><USER6> That's sort of what biology has been doing for its entire existence, with microscopes, DNA sequencing, etc.

 _Edit: what sort of augmentation were you suggesting?_</comment></comment>


The 99 Percent: A Site About Making Ideas Happen - <AUTHOR> http://the99percent.com/

<comment><USER2> Love the idea and design of this site. The irony is that I'd be most likely to visit while procrastinating on a project.</comment>