Broadband over wet string - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42338067 <comment><USER2> Source and discussion from yesterday:

[http://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over- wet-...](http://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet- string.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15908107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15908107)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's worth mentioning that the company that did this (Andrews and Arnold) is one of the few UK isps to provide unfiltered internet access.

[https://www.aaisp.net.uk/kb-broadband- unfiltered.html](https://www.aaisp.net.uk/kb-broadband-unfiltered.html)

"It is part of the terms and made clear at sign up that you are opting out of all filtering in the network, including any government mandated or requested filtering. You have an active choice on this - you can choose to take unfiltered service from us or not to take service from us."

(If you didn't know, most of the other UK isps have default on parental filters, and respond to government takedown requests to block domains. Pirate bay and it's many proxys are routinely blocked. I'm not in support of illegal downloading, but I'm even less in support of government censorship)

<comment><USER4> Their previous "active choice" wording from a few years ago ( [https://boingboing.net/2013/07/29/uk-isps-active-choice- on.h...](https://boingboing.net/2013/07/29/uk-isps-active-choice-on.html) ):

> If you choose "censored" you are advised: "Sorry, for a censored internet > you will have to pick a different ISP or move to North Korea. Our services > are all unfiltered. Is that a good enough _active choice_ for you Mr > Cameron?"

A&A is also, to my knowledge, the only XKCD/806 compliant ISP: [http://www.revk.uk/2010/10/xkcd806-compliance.html](http://www.revk.uk/2010/10/xkcd806-compliance.html) (ref: [https://xkcd.com/806/](https://xkcd.com/806/) )</comment></comment>


J.J. Abrams reveals new Force Awakens teaser, details - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2015/04/j-j-abrams-reveals-new-force-awakens-teaser-details/ <comment><USER2> OMG, I didn't realize it was December. I was assuming next May.

Going from the cinematography and art direction this movie seems to have more in common with the original trilogy than the second trilogy. Which is great. So much detail, such a "lived in" universe.</comment>


You'll Be Able To Deposit Checks To PayPal Via Mobile Pictures - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/paypal-mobile-check-deposit/

<comment><USER2> So when will the government require them to conform to banking regulations?

They've been lucky to dodge the banking regulations so far, but with the ability to cash checks it seems that PayPal could actually be used as an alternative to a bank account.</comment>


Show HN: Sleep therapy app to reverse chronic insomnia - <AUTHOR> http://www.sleepedy.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

We built Sleepedy to democratize Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) treatment for everyone suffering from Chronic Insomnia. CBT-I has been proven in clinical trials to be the best treatment for anxiety based chronic insomnia. Yet, prescription sleep aids far outnumbers CBT-I treatments. Our hope is by democratizing such an effective treatment, we can reduce sleeping pill dependence across our society.

One of our founders struggled with chronic insomnia and a Xanax dependency till he found a CBT-I therapist and reversed his chronic insomnia - [https://www.sleepedy.com/articles/insomniac- journey](https://www.sleepedy.com/articles/insomniac-journey)</comment>


Why we have skeptics - <AUTHOR> http://scott.wiersdorf.org/blarney/091128a.html

<comment><USER2> Some of best skeptics are scientists.

Some of best scientist are skeptic.

Skeptic and science go together in hands as brothers of gaining knowledge through doubt of knowledge.

When one or other says no to this doubt, and does not continue the knowledge they are as bad as other.

When one says no to evidence or it is another to say no to give.

These are both ignorance of transfer of knowledge. There is nothing knew of this halt in trade despite abundance. Only through doubt and then acceptance, doubt and then transfer of knowledge can both be truly the same.

With holding information neither will advance. The "high road" is not the high road, it is the only road. Only path that will take you somewhere other than already are.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author is naive and forgets one important detail: many "skeptics" are simply trying to muddle the debate. Think on how much the tobacco industry, the tetra-ethyl lead producers and other industries lobbied for years against serious research that threatened their interests.

The big problem is to understand if you're really convincing an engaging a skeptic or simply feeding a troll.

<comment><USER4> > The big problem is to understand if you're really convincing an engaging a > skeptic or simply feeding a troll.

Actually, that's not your problem.

And, even if it is, that doesn't justify unscientific behavior.

If you want to be treated as a source of reliable information, you have to actually be one. You don't get to complain about how other people behave.</comment></comment>


Yahoo to reject Microsoft $44.6 Billion offer, how will Microsoft respond? - <AUTHOR> http://www.clubenetwork.com/index.php?option=com_mamblog&Itemid=37&task=show&action=view&id=384&Itemid=37

<comment><USER2> I am very glad Yahoo rejected Microsoft's bid. Personally, I think the bid is undervalued, and Yahoo has too much potential to monetized its massive traffic. Jerry Yang is taking Yahoo towards the right direction -- streamline operation and cutting unnecessary headcount. And I think next step is to focus on its core strength.

Microsoft is likely to bid higher, probably no more than $36-$38/share. I sure hope Yahoo's board doesn't give in to the temptation!</comment>


ActiveStereoNet: Deep learning for active stereo systems - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/activestereonet-the-first-deep-learning-solution-for-active-stereo-systems-f52ed2c6cd2?source=friends_link&sk=3e355b8dc43c728f9593700f404b484f <comment><USER2> for a moment I thought this was some kind of NN for Rails

<comment><USER3> I'd clicked hoping to find an interesting article about using a NN to make my home 2 channel audio system better...

(Still interesting enough to bookmark for reading later, just not what I'd assumed it would be about...)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a community that stays focused only on technology and startups? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Facebook Groups there are few telegram groups as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd be happy if the moderators simply clamped down on submissions that had nothing to do with either, like posts about Trump's daily gaffes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I'll start a drama free one.</comment></comment>


TrueMotion's amazing 3D game controller makes the Wii look like a toy - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2009/01/10/truemotions-way-better-than-wii-game-controller/

<comment><USER2> The Wii _is_ a toy

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe the accuracy is its big benefit, but in the video, it looked like the lag would make it useless to actually play a game. And the demonstrator looked like he was moving gently and predictably in order to mitigate that issue.

<comment><USER4> I think it would enhance immersion, much more than the wii controller (which it turned out people wanted). But I agree the lag spoils it (esp visible with the baseball bat). Version 2.0?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I work for a well known video game company and spent some time evaluating this controller as well as the wii motion plus. Without violating non-disclosure there's not much to say except the new controllers are fun, will enhance game play, and still have some issues.

</comment><comment><USER6> Everything old is new again. Magnetic trackers are fun, but they have been here already for ages.

I used to play with Ascension's Flock of Birds [1]. You can get pretty accurate 3D position and orientation.

Though these older systems were pretty expensive (~$10K), I wonder what would be the price of these new toys.

[1] <http://www.ascension-tech.com/realtime/RTflockofBIRDS.php>

<comment><USER7> The article says $100. That's a big difference.

Of course, it will have to come down farther if video game manufacturers are going to consider spending $ developing features for people using these. Right now, spending time designing a game for this kind of interaction means you'll be able to sell it on the Wii.

When the PC, PS3, and XBox start having these kinds of input devices, game (and software) manufacturers will take much more notice.

<comment><USER6> Ah, I'm blind. For $100 it's well worth it. It's completely different type of interaction, true 3D (actually 6D as you get also orientation). I would get it even without games, just for hacking.

BTW they say it will ship for PC.

<comment><USER8> I think that means they will ship for PS and XBox, also, since those controllers are pretty much equivalent to USB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While the possibilities are definitely interesting, ultimately I think this will be not much more than a gimmicky toy - kind of like VR Helmets for PC's.

<comment><USER10> This control probably won't be any more. I think, however, that motion controls are here to stay and improve.

Why? Simple: it removes complexity. You can do things more intuitively and more subtly (think d-stick versus d-pad), and you can suddenly do more with fewer buttons. You need one less stick for aiming at the screen. It makes games better - more involved - while at the same time allowing more people to play it.

<comment><USER9> I don't doubt that whatsoever, I originally was going to expand on what I meant but it didn't come out right, so I removed a large part of my response.

I think the problem extends mostly from the poor choice of platform - the PC

In the greater consumer market (think non geeks), the PC is generally tethered to places that don't have much open space associated with them, eg on desks either in bedrooms, home offices or out of the way places.

I think this is the greatest restriction placed on them, especially for a control device that gets you ducking and diving through a magnetic field.

This is why I don't think the Wii has anything to worry about, it's a dedicated gaming device thats nearly always permanently connected to the main TV in any household and that particular TV has plenty of open space in front of it for swinging your arms around.

Now if they were bringing this out for one of the other consoles with dedicated developer support, that's a whole different story, but right now as an additional controler for a PC I don't think it will do too well.

Great Idea, poor execution IMO

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> great... another game, another distraction... but looks fun :-)</comment>


Why Poverty Is Like a Disease - <AUTHOR> http://m.nautil.us/issue/68/context/why-poverty-is-like-a-disease-rp <comment><USER2> Original 2017 version comments, 300+ points:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14201822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14201822)</comment>


Finding a Co-Founder - <AUTHOR> http://www.women2.org/finding-your-startup-co-founder-with-founderdating/

<comment><AUTHOR> My cofounders and I met through Founder Dating last April. Then we met at a coffee shop to hack out & release a product in 12 hours.. pretty good so far. We kept working together all summer (evenings & weekends) before deciding to move in together for 3 months and start a company (Curebit) together. At the end of those 3 months we had customers & traction, so we got funded by YC. Now we just finished demo day, got additional funding, and are happily growing.

So yeah -- Founder Dating works. If you're looking for a cofounder, check out the Founder Dating event in SF on April 27th. Apply by April 15th.</comment>


How Generative Music Works - <AUTHOR> http://teropa.info/loop/ <comment><USER2> If anyone's interested in more examples, I spent last month doing a "thing a day" bunch of procedural music experiments with Web Audio. A couple of the ones that seemed to work:

* tries to create a semi-randomized fugue: [http://aphall.com/2017/12/advent-18/](http://aphall.com/2017/12/advent-18/)

* jazz combo improvising over the title theme from _Metroid_ : [http://aphall.com/2017/12/advent-16/](http://aphall.com/2017/12/advent-16/)

* generates a chiptune over the progression of Autumn Leaves: [http://aphall.com/2017/12/advent-17/](http://aphall.com/2017/12/advent-17/)

Caveat, they're likely too CPU-intensive for mobile devices.

<comment><USER3> Love your autumn chiptune! Is the project open source? It would be amazing to be able to play around with its parameters.

<comment><USER2> Thank you! I wish I could say there was a cohesive thing with tunable parameters inside those demos, but basically each of them is a separate blob of ad-hoc ways of choosing scales, rhythmic patterns, etc.

The modular bit, which is reused across all the demos, is the bit that actually plays noises through Web Audio, and might be worth checking out: [https://github.com/andyhall/soundgen](https://github.com/andyhall/soundgen)

(If it's not obvious, there aren't any pre-made audio samples in the demos, all the noises are built at runtime out of Web Audio oscillators and filters and so on, inside that library.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've recently been messing with very simple generative music with sonic-pi[0], a Ruby DSL which makes things very easy. It's been great fun, and you can get up and running very quickly. Here's the source code for some pretty listenable (IMO) generative music of infinite length[1]. Being able to read source-code comments to something while listening to it is strangely satisfying.

[0]: [https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi](https://github.com/samaaron/sonic- pi)

[1]: [https://github.com/samaaron/sonic- pi/blob/master/etc/example...](https://github.com/samaaron/sonic- pi/blob/master/etc/examples/algomancer/cloud_beat.rb)

</comment><comment><USER5> To be honest I never found these things to be anything more than a curiosity. I'm yet to see a system that produces music that I would call "good".

<comment><USER6> _" I'm yet to see a system that produces music that I would call 'good'."_

This is really in the eye of the beholder. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

There's plenty of incredibly popular music created by humans that I absolutely detest, compared to which computer-generated music (as boring, random, or predictable as it might be) can't possibly be any worse.

For my own personal taste, it's rare that completely computer-generated music sounds "good" to me, but it happens. Here's an example, from one of David Cope's EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence): [1]

When we depart from strictly and completely computer-generated music to music that contains some generative elements which are "curated" or guided by humans, to my taste the music gets much better. Then we get in to the realm of what could be termed human-computer collaboration.

I like Brian Eno's analogy of "composer as gardener", in which the composer may plant musical seeds and then guide the music to fruition, while not controlling or being the "author" of every nuance as happens with more traditional views of composition.[2]

[1] - ftp://arts.ucsc.edu/pub/cope/beet2.mp3

[2] - [https://www.edge.org/conversation/brian_eno-composers-as- gar...](https://www.edge.org/conversation/brian_eno-composers-as-gardeners)

<comment><USER7> I actually have a musical project I call Intercal which is based on the idea of obfuscating well known musical works algorithmically. It generally takes a lot of attempts to find something that works, but I've had some promising results.

[https://m.soundcloud.com/revjohnnyhealey/sets/intercal](https://m.soundcloud.com/revjohnnyhealey/sets/intercal)

[https://revjohnnyhealey.bandcamp.com/album/obfuscated-x- mas](https://revjohnnyhealey.bandcamp.com/album/obfuscated-x-mas)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I heard about this via John Arundel @bitfield: [https://twitter.com/bitfield/status/956167710156746752](https://twitter.com/bitfield/status/956167710156746752)

> This is genuinely amazing, not just for the content, which is excellent, but > it's also one of the most innovative websites I've seen

<comment><USER8> I enjoyed the presentation but genuinely hated the website. Like, on a deep and personal level. I'm a little bit mad about how bad the experience of using this website is. There were several pages where I had no idea if I was waiting for something to finish loading, or if I was supposed to hit space to continue (I'm on a slow/unreliable 4G connection...I often have this problem, but I can usually figure out what's happening based on surrounding content and commmonly used affordances that hint at what actions are available and when). I know it's one-key navigation, very simple and seemingly impossible to get wrong, but because it's frequently loading large files, I frequently was in limbo about what to do (though by the end I stopped waiting and just started trusting it would do something if it had something to do...this ended up skipping at least a couple of things that I think would have been musical or interactive or something had I waited for them).

If this subject weren't _really_ of interest to me, I would have noped out within a couple of pages.

<comment><USER9> Additionally to what you said, I find the prezi-style panning and movement between pages extremely distracting and jarring to the point where I did nope out.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I generally dislike this style of site. I say it all the time: "Ease of use is often just what you're used to." And, nobody is used to a site working like this.

<comment><USER2> It's slides for a presentation that the author gave at an event. It's not meant to work like a regular website.

Also: sites on the front page of HN sometimes load slowly. Sure it can be frustrating, but hating the site on a deep and personal level over it seems a bit much.

<comment><USER9> I hate slides like this too. As I said in my previous comment, the movement is jarring and distracting. It breaks my concentration and focus. The worst offenders often leave me feeling almost dizzy. In my personal opinion, Prezi and the like has set presentations back quite a bit in terms of readability and comprehension. In a presentation, its even worse, because the slides often distract me enough that I miss some of what the speaker is saying too. Maybe my attenion span isn't that good, but I'm sure I'm not the only one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A few selected examples:

\- "Trams of Helsinki" [https://teropa.info/loop/#/tramsofhelsinki](https://teropa.info/loop/#/tramsofhelsinki) ("The trams are playing a pentatonic scale, mapped to central Helsinki")

\- "Music Mouse": [https://teropa.info/loop/#/musicmouse](https://teropa.info/loop/#/musicmouse)

\- "Markov Player": [https://teropa.info/loop/#/markovplayer](https://teropa.info/loop/#/markovplayer)

<comment><USER10> the music mouse is really cool - it doesn't sound generated or repetitive at all too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In b flat: [http://www.inbflat.net/](http://www.inbflat.net/)

</comment><comment><USER12> here's some more generative (improvised?) music: [https://www.youtube.com/user/ahsax](https://www.youtube.com/user/ahsax) (made with homemade software + sax improvising + logic pro)

</comment><comment><USER13> I want to reduce how much time I spend on the internet, but it's awesome stuff like this that keeps me coming back.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great work, thank you!

</comment><comment><USER15> Aside: I'm glad to see that (so far) no one's referred to it as _Krell_ music.

This is a reference to the 1956 science fiction movie 'Forbidden Planet' ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Planet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_Planet)), which was the first film to use an entirely electronic score, created by husband-and-wife team Louis and Bebe Barron.

The timbres ('electronic tonalities') were generated using rather fascinating vacuum tube circuits. Bebe Barron used these as the basis for her compositions.

The soundtrack superficially appears to consist of weird, unstructured, synthetic sounds. The film's music and sound effects intermingle. But there certainly is a _musical_ structure; it's _not_ just randomly generated sound.

Unfortunately, some electronic musicians generate random sequences or noises and call it 'Krell' music. It's a fundamental (lazy?) misunderstanding of what the Barrons achieved without the use of synthesizers.</comment>


Why aren't you organizing your local user group? - <AUTHOR> http://ryanbrunner.github.com/2012/04/27/7-reasons.html

<comment><AUTHOR> An anecdote I didn't include in this post - not only did I have to follow Yehuda Katz during the lightning talks, but my mic died just as I started. A bad combination for the first time talking in front of that large a group of people.

One selfish reason I wrote this is to have more participation in the Toronto Ruby Brigade. If you're from Toronto, and want to help, let me know at @ryanbrunner. We'd love a hand.

</comment><comment><USER2> If I'm answering the question from my perspective, it's because I'm 17, I have no income and I can't drive

<comment><USER3> It doesn't matter what your age is. What matters is what you do and how you do it.

Not being able to drive needn't stop you. You might be able to get a ride from someone else (family, friends) or take public transport. Not to mention the possibility of learning to drive.

As for income, you don't need it to organize a user's group. And if you did need it, you could try to get a job to earn some. Participating in and organizing users' groups is a good way to make contacts which might lead to job opportunities, by the way.

<comment><USER2> Oh no, the income is for paying for public transports to get me there

At the moment, I have a terrible, terrible portfolio/resume, so getting a job isn't on the horizon yet, but if I do I'll be learning to drive pretty sharp- ish

At this precise time in my life, one of the most important things in my life is getting code written for a portfolio

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What subjects are you talking about there? What is it's format?

<comment><AUTHOR> The hack nights I run are intentionally very free form. As I mentioned, 25% of the people attending are new to Rails, so there's usually a few people doing tutorials or code katas or something like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't like the way this is framed - but to answer the question: because I did this sort of thing with a LUG and organizing community events when I was much younger (it helped me get into college and get my first job) and quite frankly I've been there and done that.

It gets extremely repetitive after 5+ years of giving. This open source thing has been happening for quite a long time now. Like decades.

Also, it feels as though the battle has been 'won' now. Everybody uses Linux and open source; it is accepted in industry alongside commercial software. Others may disagree of course.

<comment><USER3> _"it feels as though the battle has been 'won' now. Everybody uses Linux and open source; it is accepted in industry alongside commercial software"_

Linux is definitely a mainstream OS on the server side. It still has a long way to go to making a dent on the desktop, however. And it's made some powerful enemies (like Microsoft), which want to see it wiped out -- and may still do so, using things like "trusted computing" (DRM) and UEFI, not to mention possible patent or copyright threats ala SCO (though that particular threat seems to have been abated, for now).

The war is far from won, though some battles have been won. And it probably never will be won, even if free/open source software ever becomes dominant on the desktop -- because it could always lose that dominance. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

That said, Linux users groups aren't really about fighting this war. They're mainly just about getting people who are already interested in Linux together to talk about interesting aspects of the OS and interesting software, and to help each other.</comment></comment>


Show HN: LinkThing.co - bookmarking for information hoarders - <AUTHOR> http://linkthing.co

<comment><AUTHOR> LinkThing is a bookmarking tool for people like myself - who have wide-ranging interests and bookmark a tonne, and are looking for a fast/powerful way to organize. Its not social or "beautiful," but it is effective (IMHO!).

LinkThing is private by default - bookmarks are not shared or public in any way, unless you create a Public Page and share that URL with others.

This is my perpetual side project. The most recent iteration is of the "less is more" variety - I've stripped out a bunch of features that weren't particularly well thought-out, and refocused on the core - tagging, searching, sorting, etc.

Thoughts/comments welcome!

Cheers!</comment>


Transmeta Crusoe - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta_Crusoe <comment><USER2> I worked on that as a QA Engineer. My favorite accomplishment was discovering that one version of a Crusoe-powered system would irrevocably hang while playing Tomb Raider 2 for between 15 and 45 minutes. It took an entire VLSI team over a week to debug that one. The problem had something to do with a voltage drop on a certain chipset.

I also enjoyed discovering that HTTPS didn't work on Internet Explorer 5.5, jump jets recharged at 10% the expected rate in MechWarrior 2, and a certain modem worked on PCI slots 1 and 3 & didn't work in PCI slots 2 and 4.

<comment><USER3> Thats why I was always skeptical of the Transmeta CPUs. They could 'run' the x86 ISA as its on paper, but they'd never be able to completely match all the nuances of the Intel CPUs to get 100% compatibility. The devils in the details as they say.

<comment><USER4> This statement is pure FUD. There were no meaningful quality issues and the situation is exactly the same for all alternative implementations of the same ISA. You could make the same argument to say that AMD or even a new Intel microarchitecture is incompatible as doesn't have the exact same runtime behavior (eg. shifters on the P4).

The only relevant metric: does it run the applications that customers use.

The Crusoe/Efficeon issues were performance related.

<comment><USER5> Just as a single data-point: I still had an old Crusoe-based TC-1000 [1] convertible lying around, that must be > 15 years old by now. About two years back I gave it a new hard-disk (some PATA to flash adapter), replaced the battery, upgraded to 768 MB RAM and installed a Devuan i386 OS on it (a Debian derivative). Even was able to make the pen work again (that needed some X-server source code hacks).

The computer is somewhat sluggish with huge software (like Firefox) and especially software that does JIT-compilation, maybe due to limited size of the "code-morphing" cache. For simple java programs the only way to make them start up timely was to fully disable the JIT-compiler.

But other than that it's a usable x86 machine (and all other laptops I know that are of similar age eventually failed to boot much earlier).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_TC1000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_TC1000)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Crusoe was a brave effort that never really lived up to its promise. There was plenty of hype before the release (transmeta.com was, for a long time, a blank page with a hidden message in the source, which combined with them employing Linus left people hugely excited about what they were actually going to make), but what we ended up with was a low power but fairly slow x86 that had some exciting bugs ([http://web.archive.org/web/20051202073851/http://www.cs.auc....](http://web.archive.org/web/20051202073851/http://www.cs.auc.dk/~fleury/bug_cms/)). In the pre-JIT times, being able to run Java bytecode directly would have been a win, but it doesn't look like that was ever an actual produce and even then it was unclear whether you would have been able to switch between instruction sets at runtime fast enough to support a mixed Java/x86 environment. And before long, Intel had chips that weren't far outside the power envelope but ran much faster.

It's a shame that the would only run signed CMS images - having a laptop you could switch over to running a different architecture would still be a very neat toy.

<comment><USER4> I was there from 2001 until the end (roughly).

History is written by the winners and outsiders tend to draw technology conclusions based business outcome, which is unfortunate and lacking in nuance.

Crusoe at the time of the release was far more power efficient than anything Intel had to offer and was a revolution to the notebook market. Intel has officially credited Transmeta's LongRun as the motivation for creating SpeedStep.

Performance of Crusoe ("Fred") fell short of the expectations as the approach assumed a faster VLIW core. CMS was very good, but couldn't compensate for the hardware. Had Transmeta not made terrible business screw-ups, the architecture could perhaps have had the iterations necessary the improve the technology. The third generation ("Tokomak") would have been significantly better and almost happened, except for ... business reasons.

IMhO, the original approach has two flaws:

1\. Software based interpretation of cold code leads to a dramatic performance difference that can be nearly impossible to catch up to for some applications. IOW, the difference between worst and best performance is much too big.

2\. Out-of-order execution is a much simpler and better way to deal with cache misses. The tricks and efforts that went into the architecture to compensate for the in-order execution were mind-boggling and were part of the reason the core was slower than it should have been.

NVIDIA's Denver improved (fixed?) 1. by added hardware acceleration for Arm decoding.

<comment><USER7> Curious, would OoO execution been possible with CMS?

It's complicated enough to resolve things when you're dealing with instructions + hardware execution units.

When that becomes x86 instructions + CMS + native instructions + hardware execution units... it seems a daunting task to hit stability and outlier response targets for the system as a whole.

<comment><USER4> The whole thing was already incredibly complex: getting the x86 semantics and state right, generating perfectly scheduled P95 code that had the the most useful speculation - while avoiding known hazards in the hardware, etc.

Using a speculative superscalar OoO would migrate part of the complexity from software to hardware. The major concern cited is usually power, but I don't know how much the renamer + scheduler would add relative to everything else; the hardware already had all the rest: extensive speculation support, branch predictors, large register file, store buffers, etc.

It's a fascinating topic and this isn't the ideal forum. However my point is this: there are very few companies out that that tries something truly new, and when one does and fail in the market there too much "told you so" going around.

<comment><USER7> > _However my point is this: there are very few companies out that that tries > something truly new, and when one does and fail in the market there too much > "told you so" going around._

Absolutely agreed. And from what I hear, the spirit of Transmeta ended up in a lot of other places (either via cleanroom design of similar tech, personnel working on similar projects, or inspiration).

People are also starting to wake up to the just how underhanded and illegal technology companies will behave to squash their competitors, whereas I think the 00s still had rose tinted glasses about the best technical product winning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My home NIS server is HP T5510 thin client running on Crusoe:

       $ lscpu
       Architecture:          i586
       CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit
       Byte Order:            Little Endian
       CPU(s):                1
       On-line CPU(s) list:   0
       Thread(s) per core:    1
       Core(s) per socket:    1
       Socket(s):             1
       Vendor ID:             GenuineTMx86
       CPU family:            5
       Model:                 4
       Model name:            Transmeta(tm) Crusoe(tm) Processor TM5700
       Stepping:              3
       CPU MHz:               798.025
       BogoMIPS:              1596.05

       t5510 ~ # longrun -p
       LongRun: enabled
       LongRun Thermal Extensions (LTX): active
       LTX setting: 75% reduction
       Current performance window: 0 to 100
       Current performance level: 0
       LongRun flags: economy

<comment><USER9> Cool! How long has it been running like this?

<comment><USER8> about more than 5 years now. I bought it used on ebay for 1 Euro.

<comment><USER9> Do modern Linux kernels still support the architecture, or are you just planning on running it in a configuration "that works" forever?

<comment><USER4> From the POV of software, it's an x86, not some different architecture. That's the whole point. However, most distributions have stopped supporting x86 (32-bit) and only support AMD64 ("x64", heh).

<comment><USER10> No problem...in the future you can change to OpenBSD or NetBSD, they will support x86 'forever'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I worked at Transmeta for a short time (about a year) after my undergrad. I loved it. However, there was always a running joke that the stock ticker symbol should have been "HYPE". It was sad to see things implode the way they did.

</comment><comment><USER12> What I remember most about Transmeta was that they employed Linus Torvalds. This gave the name instant status and recognition among the Slashdot crowd and similar places.

<comment><USER2> The first Crusoe Product was a Sony Picturebook. Somewhere in Japan there's a prototype of that laptop with Linus' and others signatures, including mine. It'd be fun to try and track that down someday.

<comment><USER13> Not in Japan, but I happen to possess a prototype Picturebook and now I'm curious... Where did you sign it? Inside the case like the original Macintosh? Or on the outside?

<comment><USER2> Gosh, it's been a long time. I don't remember for sure, but I have a faint recollection that I signed it in the O of SONY. But honestly, I don't remember.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One important piece missing from this story: [https://www.extremetech.com/computing/250776-intel- quietly-t...](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/250776-intel-quietly- threatens-microsoft-qualcomm-x86-emulation)

</comment><comment><USER15> This brings back memories! I worked for Colin Hunter at Hunter Systems which was the company before Transmeta. It was in a similar space. Their product recompiled DOS 8088 programs--using a similar "dynamic binary translator" as the Crusoe--so they can run on various Unix systems (68k, MIPS) as "native code". I worked on the thing that remapped the video screen memory to VT100 commands so you can see your Microsoft Word on a template.

In a similar space today are these folks who figured out how to built an 8-bit CPU with only 17 TTL chips:

See:

[https://hackaday.io/project/165950-cscvon8-an-8-bit-ttl- cpu](https://hackaday.io/project/165950-cscvon8-an-8-bit-ttl-cpu)

This could have been built back in the mid 70s, there was just nobody smart enough to figure it out. It relies on a very simple set of instructions and microcode to implement the instructions of a more capable CPU.

<comment><USER4> No, we were as smart (if not smarter) in the 1970's but memory was WAY more expensive and the 64 KB the thing uses didn't even exit. Thus, all focus was on getting the most amount of performance out of the fewest bits.

There are plenty of new TTL design like the above that conveniently doesn't work with original constraints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I spent my hard-earned college freelancing money on a Sony Picturebook with this chipset. It was actually a really nice laptop! 8-ish hours of battery, and tiny. It had WiFi via a PCMCIA card, so it was great for the couch. The screen was really only big enough for a single terminal.

Despite the reputation for instability / bugs, it was actually rock solid running Debian.

</comment><comment><USER17> See also the most impactful cpu no one's heard of: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NexGen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NexGen)

</comment><comment><USER18> I used a Fujitsu P2000 Lifebook in college back in ~2001, it was awesome. 6+ hours of battery life (pretty wild for that time) :)

<comment><USER4> The Lifebook I had could swap the DVD-ROM drive for an extra battery. I _literally_ got 12 hours of battery life which at the time was incredible. It was a much loved notebook.

<comment><USER18> That's right, I can't remember if I picked up the extended battery. But I do remember it had a modular DVD drive bay and a trackpoint style mouse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Russian Elbrus CPU appears to be a Transmeta on steroids. I am quite skeptical of the things made by Russian Government, but this seems to be a genuinely good device, able to emulate x64 at Core Duo speeds.

</comment><comment><USER20> Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these babies…

<comment><USER21> That actually happened.

[https://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/11/19/2156246/efficient-s...](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/03/11/19/2156246/efficient- supercomputing-with-green-destiny)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had one of these in a Sharp Actius MM10, and I could write and compile C++ in Visual Studio for most of the day, using the oversized battery. When that time was spent sitting in a coffee shop I'd probably get 3+ people a day asking me about it, due to the size. It was an excellent device, and probably still ahead of its time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Don't remember verifying with people I used to know that worked at Transmeta, but I recall they originally were going to for performance but then Intel decided to up their game. That's when they decided to push the power angle. Can someone correct me on the specifics?

From another distant memory I remember a story from someone I knew at Transmeta bent over backwards on the Code Morphing Software to get a soft- modem (modem that used the CPU to do some of the work that traditionally would be done in an asic) to work with Crusoe. Sounded like a case of saving $2 on BOM (I'm just making up numbers) in order to get a design win.

<comment><USER4> ... I will say that the original goal was performance, but power efficiency was an [accidental] consequence and that because a focus. It had nothing to do with Intel (other than a general strategy of going after your competitions' weak spots).

Soft-modem story is correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I had a Compaq TC1000 which was powered by one of these things. Needed a battery-powered stylus, the keyboard never really could hold up the slate / rest of the computer.

Yet I used it nearly daily at school, since it was considered a 'study aid' because I took notes with the included Agilix journal system that came with Windows XP Tablet PC edition...right up until I discovered this thing called OneNote 2003 and well, let's just say that while the TC1000s themselves are in retirement on the shelf, Onenote is here to stay.

All thanks to that funkily-named processor Transmeta Crusoe .

</comment><comment> a-dub I remember Transmeta being the stealth startup that was super tight lipped about what they were working on back then. The skinnable instruction set stuff was really cool, but if I recall the only products that really made it to market were laptops with the x86 skin, where the coolest feature of them went largely ignored and they ended up seeing what market success they did because they had reasonable price/power/heat properties for low cost laptops.

</comment><comment><USER25> The Transmeta Crusoe CPU reminded me of an article I read years earlier about powerful CPUs. The article said the upcoming Pentium would be so powerful you wouldn't need a physical modem it would be emulated in software. That blew my mind that hardware could be emulated inside software.

</comment><comment><USER26> For many years I had to resist the urge to buy an OQO, which ran on the Crusoe (and you may remember as the handheld PC from the sci-fi series Jericho):

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

<comment><USER27> Looks like it's GPU is fairly well documented

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1OdaokgXVg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1OdaokgXVg)

<comment><USER26> So what you're saying is I'm definitely going to have to buy one, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "This page is not here yet." was the Transmeta homepage whilst they were in stealth mode.

</comment><comment><USER29> I knew a wannabe geek in high school who loved to brag about bullshit for nerd cred. My favorite lie was his boast about his dual core "transmeata crusoe" and how he morphed one of the processors into a 3D accelerator which made a GeForce unnecessary.

<comment><USER30> I love how young computer people are just like young car people. "My VTEC is connected to my NOX and can run with super high compression, yo!"

<comment><USER2> That would blow the welds off the intake manifold, especially if you granny shifting instead of double clutching.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Another similar CPU is Nvidia's Denver. It was intended to run both x86 and ARM, but patents got in the way so now it's just ARM. Is there any merit to this design?

</comment><comment><USER32> I miss my Compaq TC1000. Not for the performance but because it felt like I was "using the future" between the relatively novel 2-in-1 format and the CPU.

</comment><comment><USER33> I have a Fujitsu P2110 with the Transmeta Crusoe CPU. It was passed along by a friend who had upgraded to a more powerful machine but didn't want it to go into the trash. She said it was "slow slow SLOW".

Well, yes. The machine had 256MB RAM, and the Crusoe grabbed 16MB off the top for code morphing. It came to me with WinXP SP2. XP wants 512MB RAM minimum to think about performing. It took _8 minutes_ to boot, and longer to do anything once up. It did a good job of emulating classic mainframe "death by thrashing" You could get a daughter card to add 128MB RAM, but that wouldn't help in this case. (There was another daughter card for an earlier Fujitsu model that added 256MB, but I couldn't find confirmation it worked in the P2110.)

I treated it as an experiment to see what performance I could coax out of low end hardware without throwing money at it. I swapped in a drive from a failed laptop, repartioned and reformatted, and set it to multi-boot. Win2K Pro SP4 actually ran, more or less, on the P2110, especially after I took everything out of startup that could be removed. I also installed two flavors of Linux - Ubuntu and Puppy, and FreeDOS.

Puppy was designed for low end hardware, and Puppy itself worked well enough. Applications didn't. The speed bump was apparently the IDE4 HD. IDE4 was a BIOS limitation, so swapping in a faster drive wouldn't assist.

Installing Ubuntu was a challenge. Xubuntu downloaded and installed, but performance was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums said too much Gnome had crept into Xubuntu, and Ubuntu had a steadily increasing idea of what "low end" was. The recommended what I did - DL the Minimal CD and install from it. That would give me a working bare bones CLI installation, and I could use apt- get to pick and choose what else got added. Lubuntu got the nod as desktop GUI, and worked, though it was noting I'd call speedy.

Puppy and Ubuntu were both installed on ext4 file systems, and mounted each other's slices when they booted. I spent some time arranging things so there was _one_ copy of large apps shared between them.

FreeDOS flew. The challenge with it was to get it to boot from grub2. I did, but have no idea which of the fiddles I tried actually made it work.

Ubuntu provided another quirk. A new Ubuntu release came out. This one required PXE. The P2110 didn't have it. Installation proceeded normally, but things went to hell in a bucket when I reboted after install. Lack of PXE made installation of the new kernel fail, and that caused a cascade failure. I had to wipe the Ubuntu FS slice and redo from scratch, carefully stopping at the last release that worked and staying put. A test in the installer to insure that PXE was present before continuing and refusing to upgrade if not would have been nice. I assumed the Ubuntu folks just never imagined someone would try to install on a machine that lacked it.

I got surprise email from a woman in Hong Kong who also had a P2110. She got the 256MB RAM expansion card, it worked, and she was running WinXP with acceptable performance. I tipped my hat in respect, but had retired the P2110. I was an experiment, the experiment was completed, and actual work got done elsewhere.

I still have the machine, but haven't booted it in ages.

</comment><comment><USER34> I was the last engineering employee of Novafora, which bought Transmeta. Shortly after, both were wound down.

Intel bought all the IP in a private auction for about $200k. (I was the other bidder, and hoped to Open Source the EDA tools.) The files were on a single old server, so not sure if anything still exists.

I own the tapeout server (CS22 - quad-CPU Opteron with 64 GB RAM) used by both companies, which I plan to donate to the Computer History Museum.

Transmeta only used AMD servers for some reason, I guess it was because they felt they were in competition with Intel. Kind of like how grocery stores don't want to use AWS because it would "pay the competition" (Amazon owns Whole Foods.)

<comment><USER35> How strong is the IP position around the CMS?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> So did they get bought out by the NSA or something? It's weird how the whole company and everything else just disappeared.

</comment><comment><USER37> This seems like the exact same story as Magic Leap among others.

<comment><USER38> No, not at all. Transmeta got a lot closer to nailing a much bigger market. They had actual products for a start. The problem was the underlying architecture was VLIW. Lots of people including Intel and Nvidia have tried to make it work and have been squarely bitten in the arse.

<comment><USER19> Now Russians (more precisely, Russian Government) are trying to use VLIW. Elbrus CPU seems to be an interesting device, able to emulate x86 at Core Duo speeds.

<comment><USER39> FYI. МЦСТ, a developer of the E2K CPUs has recently published an "Effective Programming of Elbrus CPUs" guide which describes its ISA. The document is in Russian.

Link: [http://www.mcst.ru/files/5ed39a/dd0cd8/50506b/000000/elbrus_...](http://www.mcst.ru/files/5ed39a/dd0cd8/50506b/000000/elbrus_prog_2020-05-30.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Healthy Diet For The Mind - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2011-01.html#e2011-01-08T10_41_10.htm <comment><USER2> About reading fiction apart from technical things - I believe that fiction writing is important and practical for society as a whole in a way similar to how thought experiments and simulations are important for scientists. Writers of books and TV shows create imaginery worlds in which they set up different scenarios, create problems and propose solutions. Those stories often create discussions, in which people generate and evaluate ideas.

For example, many science-fiction fans get involved in lengthy discussions about physics of space travel and social consequences of technology that doesn't exist yet. But it might exist in the future, as it is with ie. Orson Scott Card's writings exploring influence of global information network on society and governments back in 1980-s.

I believe the same applies to other genres as well - good stories contain simulations of events that might not be happening right now around us, but one day they might. It's a human way to create solutions before real problems strike hard.

<comment><USER3> > For example, many science-fiction fans get involved in lengthy discussions > about physics [...]

This always bothers me when talking to sci-fi fans that only read sci-fi. It also bothers me in more modern sci-fi when the author puts too much time into explaining the mechanics of whatever concepts are used.

The 1950s, 1960s and the earlier 1970s sci-fi is usually about _ideas_. The 'science' is mostly there as a plot device. This gives the author huge freedom to just take an idea (however absurd) and run with it.

Whatever kind of fiction your read, though, it's always characters, their development and their reaction to the environment that they find themselves in that is the key to a good story.

(Yes, there is plenty of good sci-fi to be found today, from the hard kind to the lyrical/meta-physical kind, I'm just commenting on the general development of the genre. Also, see Sturgeon's Law).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the worst things you can do for your mind is watch the eleven o'clock news. Before you head off to bed. Rarely do you see anything positive - it's all about calamities, accidents, and murders. And, of course, X product does something bad.

<comment><USER5> Suppose you were a news outlet and suppose you were trying to maximize your company's profitability.

Clearly,when folks change the channel away from your program, your profitability goes down. So, you might do a bit of research to find out what tends to make folks change or not change the channel.

Your research could indicate that strong negative emotions, such as anger, sadness or fear tend to make the viewer fixate and not change the channel.

Finally, you might ask yourself, how should the news be presented so as to maximize profits?

In many cases, a news outlet's profitability is directly related to the amount of emotional distress it can generate in its viewers. Sure isn't something I want to support when looked at that way.

<comment><USER6> I think you got it - "If it bleeds, it leads". I can't fault them for maximizing revenues, but I'd advise everyone to avoid them, just like you'd avoid a casino or social gaming.

<comment><USER7> Why can't you fault a company for maximising revenues?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can we get a more descriptive title next time? I clicked this link expecting to read about food and diet choices that improved thinking and was incredibly disappointed.

<comment><USER9> I too expected that. But what I read managed to thrill me than disappoint me. This is some topic which isn't discussed much and I am glad such an idea is being discussed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was thinking about exactly this yesterday - so much of "media matter" is like junk food for the mind. I wondered if we could start an organic movement but for the content industry.

<comment><USER11> You might check out this novel:

[http://www.amazon.com/Davids-Sling-Marc- Stiegler/dp/06716536...](http://www.amazon.com/Davids-Sling-Marc- Stiegler/dp/0671653695)

Among other things, Stiegler posits a "Zetetic Institute" that teaches people how to think better -- effectively, an "organic foods" industry for the mind.

<comment><USER12> Isn't that basically what the Singularity Institute and <http://lesswrong.com/> guys are trying to do?

<comment><USER13> I added this from _David's Sling_ to the December Rationality Quotes thread on Less Wrong ([http://lesswrong.com/lw/37k/rationality_quotes_december_2010...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/37k/rationality_quotes_december_2010/)):

In the Information Age, the first step to sanity is FILTERING. Filter the information; extract the knowledge.

Filter first for substance. Filter second for significance. These filters protect against advertising.

Filter third for reliability. This filter protects against politicians.

Filter fourth for completeness. This filter protects from the media.

\-- Marc Stielger, David's Sling

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _You become the stories you listen to. Be mindful of the diet of ideas you feed your mind._

This applies not only to your reading list, but also to your own thoughts.

<comment><USER13> And your physical actions - Your attitudes and general outlook tends to follow your physical actions as much or more than the other way around. So act how you want to feel, then you will become more like you act. I actually learned this trick back in the eighties from a book _Self-Creation_ by George Weinberg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I welcome healthy discussion on the Story's role in shaping, sharpening, and healing minds (especially as we grow up and then grow older). At the very least, it's a big change from the "I have empirical evidence that degrees in English and the people who major in it are absolutely worthless" threads/links that run through HN from time to time.

Remember, all, those great characters and classic tales you've ever read and heard/seen are spun by someone who studied the language and the past storytellers just as intently as a software engineer studied the merge and bubble sort.

<comment><USER16> How many great novelists were English majors?

<comment><USER15> Douglas Adams, Stephen King, John Updike, Joseph Heller, JRR Tolkein.

Among other notable storytellers: Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Danny Boyle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree strongly with the sentiment of the post. My conception of self and world has been shaped in no small part by great works of fiction.

That said, I winced a bit at the author's particular use of the nutrition metaphor. The U.S. government's "food pyramid" is one idea that could do with a bit less mass consumption.

</comment><comment><USER9> Reading fiction shouldn't be brushed aside as something frivolous. When you read a story you live the characters. When you live different characters to acquire the ability to relate to different kinds of people that are not like you. In short you learn to empathize. You become more human.

</comment><comment><USER18> Anybody got any good sources of material to read?

</comment><comment><USER19> A little off topic:

In the "It Pays To Be Specific" post below the main story, I sure hope the student didn't get an F for the assignment, assuming his submission was otherwise correct.

<comment><USER20> Err, i think it's actually proof the guy paid someone else to do it. I hope he got a zero not an F.

<comment><USER19> Naive me, I thought it was because he knew more than one version of assembly.

One time, I did a database assignment in MySQL instead of SQL server because I was only running Linux at the time, and didn't have access to the school's lab the night before the assignment was due. Ya, I know.</comment></comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg: 'We've Made A Bunch Of Mistakes' - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2011/11/29/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-weve-made-a-bunch-of-mistakes/

<comment><USER2> > Facebook will be subject to privacy audits for the next 20 years, and > subject to $16,000 fines if it does anything deceptive.

The correct business plan would deem that Facebook should continue doing deceptive things and make its billions, then pay out its $16,000 fine when necessary.

<comment><USER3> I believe it's something to the effect of $16k _a day_ of the duration of the infraction, but regardless, it doesn't detract from the fact that the fine is off by orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER4> So Facebook just needs to make an extra $16k a day on top of what it would have otherwise. Not so unrealistic. (Just to carry on the point.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Facebook promised users that it would not share their personal information with advertisers. It did."

Wow, that sounds like a huge violation of user's rights and kind of contradicts everything Facebook has been saying about using "anonymized data."

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm uninterested in anyone's apology after they've been caught. If I'm convicted of a crime, I go to jail. No matter what comes out of Zuckerberg's mouth, anything less than people behind bars is a perversion of justice.

</comment><comment><USER7> "We've made a bunch of mistakes." And you haven't had to pay for any of them, congratulations.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here is Mark's blog post reference in the article. <https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150378701937131>

</comment><comment><USER9> "Contrite". yeah. That's what I think when I see this:

> _Overall, I think we have a good history of providing transparency and > control over who can see your information.

That said, I'm the first to admit that we've made a bunch of mistakes. In particular, I think that a small number of high profile mistakes, like Beacon four years ago and poor execution as we transitioned our privacy model two years ago, have often overshadowed much of the good work we've done._

</saveface,saveface,saveface>

</comment><comment><USER10> What's the point of this article? It is basically a summary of Mark's blog post...

</comment><comment><USER11> Mistakes all the way to the bank. Zuckerberg at the helm allows them to make all sorts of sophomoric apologies as if everyone at Facebook is "awe shucks" sorry about everything.

Perfect because he appears as a naive first timer and makes it sound like these sorts of changes were just an idea he had and they rolled it out like things work as a start up.

But it's more likely that there were very many long meetings about just how far to push it, and just how much money that would make them.

<comment><USER12> They may have had meetings about how far they can push it, but I'm not so sure about the money bit. Facebook has actually shown a remarkable amount of restraint when it comes to making money. It's in Zuckerberg's DNA - the guy just doesn't seem to care that much about money.

For instance, if Facebook was trying to maximize profits it could have fairly easily rolled out an off-site ad network ala adsense that is FAR better targeted (based on FB cookies) than adsense could ever be. They could displace Google practically overnight. But they've resisted doing that and instead just continued to make enough money to run and grow the company at a healthy clip.

I'm not a Facebook apologist - some of the "mistakes" are really scary and unconscionable, but I don't believe the motive is as simple as profit maximization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So they will have a "Chief of Privacy" stationed in Washington DC? Sounds closer to a lobbyist to change privacy laws than it does someone who makes sure Facebook abides by them.</comment>


Hide your Email for HTML Scammers/Parsers - <AUTHOR>

Created a cool little script that allows you to display your email but hides it from the html, JS so know when can scrape. Try it: --- <p id="eid_id"></p> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.leoreavidar.com/js/email.js"> </script> <script> window.onload = function() { appendStyle("username", "gmail.com") }; </script>
What do you think? <comment><USER2> Worked for me

</comment><comment><USER3> Fail

<comment><AUTHOR> what happened? did you get an error?

<comment><USER3> What, you can't scrape that?

<comment><AUTHOR> no you cant. Take a look. Its not HTML. the email appears no where in the HTML,JS, or CSS. Its a hack that dynamically changes the pseudo selectors and combining the before and after to make a complete word.

<comment><USER3> A can scrape "appendStyle("username", "gmail.com")" just as easy as I can scrape "username at gmail dot com".

<comment><AUTHOR> I think your missing the point. The text is going to be encrypted in and then decrypted in the external JS. The append style parameters are just to show that nothing is in the html/js besides that.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is how its supposed to work:

<comment><USER3> Like I said, a scraper can easily decode your appendStyle parameters. Do let us know when you perfect perpetual motion though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: ALL_CAPS => sudo all_caps (Bash) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MonsieurCellophane/SHOUT.sh/tree/master <comment><USER2> FYI, in bash, "sudo !!" re-runs the previous command with sudo.

<comment><USER3> That's not "funny" enough, unless the "!!" is replaced by an emoji.

<comment><USER4>
        papln used multiple exclamation marks and is clearly insane. This incident will be reported.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of

[https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck](https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck)

</comment><comment><USER6> up arrow

ctrl-a (readline command for beginning of line)

type "sudo"

Also, ctrl-w is really useful. Heck, learning the readline editing keyboard in general is really useful.

<comment><AUTHOR>
            $ foo bar baz<cr>
            ^P^A<esc>u
            $ FOO bar baz<cr>

That's three keystrokes less - even for the history (!!) version. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Remember, all caps when you spell the man name.

</comment><comment><USER8> Most often case is when you forget to type sudo before command. This implementation propose to re-type executable name in all-caps (or type it in all-caps beforehand).

More efficient approach is to use keybinding like Ctrl+T to prepend sudo to the current command (or to the previous command if current is empty).

<comment><AUTHOR> As mentioned above, you don't need to retype:

            $ foo bar baz<cr>
            ^P^A<esc>u
            $ FOO bar baz<cr>

As for ^T, I'd wholly forgotten about bind, inputrc and all that- but of course both your proposal and the above can be put into an inputrc macro and bound to a key. However the all caps version is shorter when you remember you need sudo in the first place ;).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is hideous. Congratulations! :D

</comment><comment><USER10> Isn't typing 'sudo yum' faster than 'YUM'?

<comment><USER11> …is that a sarcastic question? How would typing 'YUM' NOT be faster than 'sudo yum'?

I can't deny that something feels terribly wrong about this sort of script, though.

<comment><USER10> because you need press shift while pressing y, u, m to type YUM. I definitely type sudo yum faster.

<comment><USER12> Do you not have a CAPSLOCK key?

<comment><USER4> Many people map capslock to Ctrl or Escape. Or both, depending on whether the key is held or tappped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Did some kind of automoderation break the title by changing ALL_CAPS to All_caps?

<comment><AUTHOR> I remember writing the title as

        ALL_CAPS => sudo all_caps

So it appears something did actually change it.

<comment><USER14> Titles are automatically titlecased when submitted but not when edited. The workaround is to submit and immediately edit afterwards.

Unfortunately many blogs have their titles all uppercase instead of using small caps. For me the use case where I copy an all uppercase title and want it to be titlecased on HN is much more common than the case where I actually want a string of caps. I'm quite ok with the current behavior.</comment></comment></comment>


List of US politicians that have reversed support for PIPA/SOPA - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/SOPA-PIPA-Blackout-Protest-Jan-18-2012/What-politicians-reversed-their-support-of-SOPA-PIPA-after-the-January-18-Internet-protests

<comment><USER2> For now, any way. As soon as it's out of the news, after the elections, they will almost certainly try to pass them, or another similar bill, again. It's a never ending game of Whack-A-Mole. Eventually, one will get through.</comment>


Importance of Having Technical Knowledge Onboard - <AUTHOR> http://shout.setfive.com/2008/12/05/importance-of-having-technical-knowledge-onboard/

<comment><USER2> The issue seems to come down to trust. How can you trust any third party to be acting in your best interest?

The situation comes up anywhere where you don't have domain knowledge of the project. I've seen several people get burned by shody contractors, plumbers, mechanics, ect. It strikes me like finding a competent and honest development team reduces to the same problem.

Unfortunately, in this era of outsourcing and globalization it seems significantly more difficult to find a local development shop that someone can personally recommend.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? -- Juvenal (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes>)

This is a lovely idea, but suffers from a severe bootstrapping problem. How should the firm choose the technical person to hire? Or which consultants to use to recommend a technical person?

I have seen plenty of situations where the technical person onboard is second- rate -- or worse. I have also seen plenty of over-priced second-rate consultants.

IMHO part of the solution will be the eventual emergence of meaningful certifications of technical competence. Although problematic in a number of ways, the IEEE CSDP is probably a good first effort. Other professions are licensed, and have continuing education requirements.

<comment><USER4> Who needs a watchman when your company has someone who's technical at its reins (or close enough to them)?</comment></comment>


Trained to use hard to remember passwords which are easy for computers to guess - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/936

<comment><USER2> How true. I'm sick of being forced to pick new passwords by algorithms which insist the ones I'm using are too short, don't contain enough $%^ _&_ ) symbols, or are too similar to passwords I've used before. My bank makes me put in a password every single time, which is a complete PITA on my cellphone. My wife's work Blackberry now requires a 14-character password every time she wants to use it.

This is not security, it is just more security theater. Just give me a pin pad or some little interactive puzzle mechanism that I can do in my sleep, but which has a large number of possible wrong combinations - if it comes back wrong several times in a row, _then_ ask me for the password. Right now it's _easier_ to get into my account without my overly-elaborate password, by saying I've forgotten it and then answering biographical questions - which of course I gave truthful answers to, back in the day, and which I am now unable to change. 1Di0ts.</comment>


Apache CouchDB developers respond to UbuntuOne issue - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Apache-CouchDB-developers-respond-to-UbuntuOne-issue-1388447.html <comment><USER2> The intended use of CouchDB in UbuntuOne seemed to be tailor fit with the technical design. (Distributed master/master replication and resolution, eventual consistency etc)

I'd love a write up with more technical details describing the issues.

<comment><USER3> I agree. The whole thing sounds like "It should have worked but, for an unspecified reason, didn't."

Unfortunately, I wouldn't be surprised if it never really comes out. Company proprietary information and all that.

<comment><USER4> Aren't Canonical and CouchDB all open-sourcey, community-first etc etc etc? Then why the secrecy here?

To me, it sounds like couchdb just failed to scale in a big way and revealing how would basically kill the project, so Canonical are trying to do the polite thing.</comment></comment></comment>