The Caves of Clojure, Part 2 - <AUTHOR> http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/07/caves-of-clojure-02/ <comment><USER2> I like these posts, the presentation is quite good IMO.

You see the old game state --> new game state pattern a lot in functionally written games, but something about that has always seemed off to me. The functional retrogames series of posts (starts at <http://prog21.dadgum.com/23.html> ) summed up the issue well I think,

 _When I first mused over writing a game in a purely functional style, this had me stymied. One simple function ends up possibly changing the entire state of the world? Should that function take the whole world as input and return a brand new world as output? Why even use functional programming, then?_

<comment><USER3> Why does taking the game world as an input seem so odd? Thanks to Clojure's structural sharing "returning a brand new world" can be efficient.

Judging from later parts of James Hague's series, he was working with Erlang which doesn't seem to have this feature. He also complains of lacking a good map structure — not a problem with Clojure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great, I'm extremely interested in seeing where this goes.

It reminds me of my own (tiny) roguelike-in-clojure experiment: <http://thomcc.github.com/dunjeon/>

I remember having a great deal with trouble dealing with the lack of immutable cyclic data structures in Clojure, and not wanting to use an atom with atoms for the recursive parts, though there's probably more ways to make it work that I wasn't clever enough to think of :)

<comment><USER5> Me too, that's exactly the kind of code I rather write in Python than Clojure (many array accesses...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So the drawing code redraws the entire UI from scratch at each loop. This seems to work OK for now, when the UI consists of printing out a couple of lines to the console.

But what if we wanted a more ncurses type UI, with persistent indicators of the score, current location, etc, and some chrome around them? The impetus to do some kind of change-based incremental updating of the display would get strong, I would think. How is this generally handled in functional-reactive type UIs?

<comment><USER7> OpenGL draws millions of triangles many times a second. I'd suggest that this is not a problem we need to keep solving :-)

<comment><USER8> It's definitely true that you can just recalculate and redraw the entire terminal in a roguelike these days with decent performance. I've done it.

However, doing that wastes CPU cycles that you can use for other fun stuff in the game. In particular, monster AI will easily soak up any cycles you want to throw at it, and the more you can, the more interesting your enemies will be.

<comment><USER9> "Wastes CPU cycles." How many? Enough to noticeably weaken an AI? Unlikely. Especially since the problem space in a Roguelike is tiny.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it can, actually. Rendering graphics is slow. AI is slow. Doing either one of them inefficiently punishes the other.

AI code can easily eat any free cycles you want to give it: you can always crank up your pathfinding distance or the number of turns your AI looks ahead.

The problem space of a roguelike is massively larger than chess and that can certainly keep a supercomputer busy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Part 1 on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4212948></comment>


We Are Raising a Generation of False Entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@duttakapil/raising-a-generation-of-false-entrepreneurs-86f98d354176#.2s9rhfjsi <comment><USER2> This is a normative article written by a 19-year-old and reads exactly how you would expect a normative article written by a 19-year-old to be.

Also this stuck out: > If you allow me to generalize a bit, the millennials, and now the Gen Z more so, are without a doubt the most arrogant and self- obsessed generation in history.

Nobody who knows anything about the baby boomers would ever honestly write such a thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Based on the amount of feedback that I've received with an ageist attitude, I'm starting to wonder if it is even possible for people to criticize the piece without mentioning my age in a condescending tone.

My age has nothing to do with how this article reads. Maybe lack of experience in writing professionally, but not my age. I suggest you give the article another read, but this time try ignoring that innocent two digit number I publicly declared without any second thoughts (which I've deleted now, because I want genuine feedback).

And I'm not going to defend that generalized statement of mine. I don't agree with it fully myself anymore. There's no objective way of concluding which generation is/was the most arrogant and self-obsessed. My current stance is that, for every generation, the youth is always the most arrogant and self- obsessed, and the arrogance goes down as you grow older.

Thanks for the response though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "I am a 19 year old..." CMD+w

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I'm 19. And?</comment></comment>


Deal or no deal? Training AI bots to negotiate - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/1686672014972296/deal-or-no-deal-training-ai-bots-to-negotiate <comment><USER2> Interesting that the chatbots learned to show "fake" interest in an item, just to conceide it later in the negotiation process.

But I think what is missing, is the time component when negotiating with humans. A negotiation process is usually better for humans if the negotiation is quick and not dragging on too long.

And more importantly the chatbots never seemed to "walk away" from a deal. But in real life, you sometimes have to walk away to show the other party, that you are not a pushover. It would be interesting to enhance the model so that chatbots negotiate repeatedly with each other and "remember" how the other party behaves and how far you can push the other party to concede. Because some negotiations really are zero sum games.

<comment><USER3> > But in real life, you sometimes have to walk away to show the other party, > that you are not a pushover.

AI consider this human behavior a bug.

<comment><USER4> No, it's signaling that you're wasting time and need to move on.

Many situations cannot be resolved until you convince the other party that their business model or position or assumptions are wrong. Walking away is the only way to do that because it triggers escalation.

I had s sitstuiin recently where the account team couldn't get a term that we needed. We basically told them to go away and stopped 2-3 other negotiations. That let our counterparty get the resource he needed (SVP of product X) and balance returned to the force.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It'd be interesting if the agents developed their own language during the reinforcement learning stage that is unintelligible to humans but allows them to quickly navigate the negotiation. They use the model trained in a supervised way during the reinforcement learning stage to avoid this, but I'm curious to see what the agent learns when paired against another reinforcement learning agent.

Edit: Indeed, the paper says that not using the fixed agent trained on human negotiation leads to unintelligible language from the agents.

<comment><USER6> Can we measure if the language is more efficient at getting deals done?

<comment><USER5> I bet we could. The length of each utterance, the number of exchanges between agents, and the entropy of the symbols used in the utterances could give you some measure of efficiency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The most interesting thing to me is not the negotiation tactics that the agents learn but the idea of coming up with a more easily quantifiable (and therefore differentiable) quality metric for dialogue tasks.

</comment><comment><USER6> And so it begins.

I am worried when computers start getting better than people at these kinds of things. They already mastered heads-up poker.

Almost all of our systems rely on an inefficiency of an attacker - so they are vulnerable.

</comment><comment><USER8> So in a very limited sense these agents have a theory of mind - they can infer the beliefs and goals of their opponents and act accordingly. Agents/objects can be in an exponential number of possible relative positions, but this system factorizes structure from function.

</comment><comment><USER9> It would be interesting to see what happens when new untrained bots start negotiating with trained one. One new language for each pair of bots or one common language that every new bot has to learn?

</comment><comment><USER10> >To prevent the algorithm from developing its own language, it was simultaneously trained to produce humanlike language.

Not sure what this would look like, but I'd be interested to find out.</comment>


You cant buy advertising to sell advertising.. - <AUTHOR> http://rodinhood.com/buy-advertising-sell-advertising

<comment><USER2> False. I can think of multiple exceptions.

Let me give three. First some large companies (like eBay) which do not do a good job of figuring out where to advertise for themselves, and are willing to let affiliates scoop up margin instead of figuring it out. Second there are comparison shopping companies which buy ads to sell traffic, but with the trick being that the traffic is sold to multiple places. (This is actually a benefit to the consumer because it saves them having to look on multiple sites.) Third there are companies that collect enough information to deliver more targeted advertising than could have been delivered from the original spot the ad was placed. An example of this is Campus Explorer.

I personally know people who are making money with all of these approaches. Details differ widely. However the commonality is that if you're getting into this type of business, execution matters a lot. You are explicitly trying to live off of the difference between your ability to buy advertising and someone else's ability to do the same. So unless you can execute better than them, and better than your competitors, you're going to quickly find yourself losing money on every transaction. Which is the fate of most who try this approach.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, sound like 1999.

To me, however, the biggest reason this is true is that if you have to push your website (or product) so much, it's because it sucks - and if it sucks, you have to be able to draw in a pretty high number of suckers who will pay a disproportionate amount of subscription money for the kind of service you're offering, as for example happens with online dating services...</comment>


Net giants challenge French data law - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12983734

<comment><USER2> On Reddit there may be more insight on this: [http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/gkl77/hashed_pa...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/gkl77/hashed_passwords_outlawed_in_france/)</comment>


States with Faster Internet Access Have Smarter People - <AUTHOR> http://highspeedinternet.com/blog/technology/states-with-faster-internet-access-have-smarter-people

<comment><USER2> Particularly egregious reversal of correlation and causation.

<comment><USER3> I didn't read an argument for causation in the article, did I miss something? The title just states a fact: states with Faster Internet have smarter people. The biggest assumption I saw was that higher ACT scores = smarter. The author even speculated that investment in infrastructure as a value may be causing both.

<comment><USER4> Isn't there causation implied in that title anyway? Compare it with "States with smarter people have faster internet". The smart people were there first.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it is implied. I can't come up with a sentence with the same information and zero implications.

<comment><USER6> This got downvoted, but I believe the comment is correct. Technically, as stated, the headline does not imply causation. It's like saying "cities with declining crime have declining rates of microsoft internet explorer usage".

That's probably true for most cities. The way I phrased it does not imply causation.

What's the difference between the two sentences? The first one presents a situation where causation seems plausible to us, so we infer it automatically. Whereas, causation seems implausible between crime and IE, so we don't read my sentence as implying causation.

Our brains are wired to automatically see causation if it seems plausible and there's a correlation. I teach the LSAT, and this is one of the topics tested.

Normally, the testmakers go to great lengths to disguise what they're doing. But on causation/correlation questions, they just present the correlation. They know we're so bad at it that the question will fool people without any other special tricks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See, I've wondered for quite a while whether the internet qualifies as a 'brain boost' device. Does a person on the internet do better on an IQ test? How much better?

<comment><USER8> That's one thing people have argued as the cause behind the Flynn Effect - basically our IQs have gone up in the last 20 or so years.

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

Of course it could be any number of things at this point. I disagree with any educational reform theories, but I think the internet and the elimination of lead are the two most likely.

<comment><USER9> It's documented since 1930, so I doubt its the internet. If you include radio and TV then it would make sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've always felt limited by the connection speed or hardware. I sometimes feel like I can think faster, but I have to wait for some page to load or some app to open (especially when my company uses outdated hardware and still on Office '03). Hopefully some day we'll only be limited by the "speed" of our brain.

</comment><comment><USER11> Or maybe these states have faster internet access because they had the smarter people to begin with?

But yeah, correlation is not causation.</comment>


Best attempts so far to skin Schrödinger's cat (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2097199-seven-ways-to-skin-schrodingers-cat/ <comment><USER2> Warning: you shouldn't be too quick to extrapolate anything about general attitudes in quantum foundations towards various interpretations from this "snapshot" poll. There exist at least two other polls I know of with very different results[0,1]. Interesting quote from one of the abstracts:

> the results do strongly suggest several interesting cultural facts -- for > example, that there exist, within the broad field of "quantum foundations", > sub-communities with quite different views, and that (relatedly) there is > probably even significantly more controversy about several fundamental > issues than the already-significant amount revealed in the earlier poll.

Matt Leifer has a quantum foundations blog, and is one of the most impartial voices that I know of. He has written up his opinion on these "snapshots" [2], making the amusingly astute observation

> What we can conclude from this is that people who went to a meeting > organized by Zeilinger are likely to have views similar to Zeilinger.

[0] arXiv:1303.2719

[1] arXiv:1306.4646

[2] [http://mattleifer.info/tag/survey/](http://mattleifer.info/tag/survey/)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Everett, who believed his theory guaranteed him immortality in some world or > other, had eaten, drunk and chain-smoked himself to an early death in 1982.

Sure, in this world, but in others he parties on.

</comment><comment><USER4> Another site that goes into an infinite reload loop on "googletag is not defined" if tracking is blocked.

<comment><USER5> FWIW, it's readable for me with JavaScript disabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I miss in this list is the "superdeterminism" class of interpretation.

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

In the last years this class of explanation had in my perception some kind of comeback because of "The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics" by the Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft:

> > [https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41285-6](https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-41285-6)

<comment><USER7> It also has a "comeback" because people are still very much enamored of something which is virtually indistinguishable from, "The Hand of God." Along with DeBB, it's still hanging on by the, "can't falsify this yet!" thread, but as with DeBB it adds nothing at all to the predictive power of existing theories.

<comment><USER6> > It also has a "comeback" because people are still very much enamored of > something which is virtually indistinguishable from, "The Hand of God."

If we try to find a "social" explanation why superdeterminism has its comeback, I would rather tend to the fact that progress in neuroscience gives a lot of doubt concerning the existence of free will. Superdeterminism fits quite well into this pattern, since it attempts to show that we can solve the problem of the Bell violation by simply refusing the assumption of free will.

<comment><USER7> Trying to insert biology into physics is a real non-starter, IMO, especially in QM. The standards are so massively different, and frankly, not comparable. Bell tests, and more generally BSMs don't measure anything like free will, and don't assume it. Worse, God or Superdeterminism isn't going to be falsifiable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If particles can be in multiple states simultaneously until an observer interacts with them then it seems like a tree could in fact fall in the forest and not make a sound.

<comment> crooked-v Well, no. It's possible that a tree could fall in the forest and make any number of different sounds the specifics of which are impossible to determine until observed, though.

Keep in mind, too, that "an observer" includes basically anything interacting with an otherwise closed system, not just a thinking creature.

<comment><USER9> >"an observer" includes basically anything interacting with an otherwise closed system, not just a thinking creature.

Isn't that a bit of a philosophical debate? It could be that things are only "observed" when their cone of causality reaches a thinking creature. I thought that was half the point of the tree question in the first place.

<comment><USER10> This is what I hate about the popular understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation.

Bohr's original idea was that until there's some interaction it's pointless to assign a specific state - you can only talk about certain probabilities.

Schrodinger's cat is not both alive and dead. We know nothing about its current state, only how probable certain outcomes are.

<comment><USER11> > _Schrodinger 's cat is not both alive and dead. We know nothing about its > current state, only how probable certain outcomes are_

That's the case with any cat we throw in a box and ask somebody to kill it or not based on a dice, and then we visit the place where the box is and open it...

In other words, the cat is in a certain state, but we merely don't know which.

But this doesn't capture what the Schrodinger experiment is supposed to show. Such an case wouldn't need the experimental apparatus Schrodinger describes either.

The core idea of the experiment is that quantum uncertainty is not just of the "we just don't know yet" kind, but of the fundamental "reality is inherently mixed-up and uncertain / many things actually hold at the same time until observed" nature.

The purpose of the Schrodinger's thought experiment then is to show how this fundamental quantum uncertainty (i.e. not mere not knowing: actual "fuzzy" reality) "pollutes" the macro world (in this case, a cat).

The quantum-based mechanism that releases the poison, is his trick to transfer the uncertainty of the quantum state into the macro world (the box with the cat). (Funnily, Schrodinger's purpose was to discredit this).

Those that believe it's clear that "the cat is in one state or another, we just don't know which", haven't understood the problem.

<comment><USER2> You've slightly misinterpreted the point of the previous post, or have at least overlaid some assumptions.

You're arguing against what one might call an objective Bayesianism stance. That is to say that our probabilities reflect our inadequate information concerning an objective (classical) state of reality for the cat.

However the phrase

> Schrodinger's cat is not both alive and dead. We know nothing about its > current state, only how probable certain outcomes are

suggests a perspective in which there is not an objective (classical) state of reality for the cat. Rather, probabilities might be seen as subjective assertions about the outcome of interactions with the system. It is meaningless to talk about the cat being dead or alive before looking. This is closer to what one might call a subjective Bayesian stance.

<comment><USER11> > _It is meaningless to talk about the cat being dead or alive before looking. > This is closer to what one might call a subjective Bayesian stance._

In actual classical reality, it's not at all meaningless to ask whether the cat is "dead or alive before looking". It might be uncertain, but it's not meaningless.

One might say "I think it's alive" and another "dead" \-- and they have a chance to be right even before opening the box -- we'll just need to open it and see which was right ALL ALONG.

In quantum physics, on the other hand, in most interpretations, none of them is right before opening the box. If one says "the cat must be dead", and we open the box and the cat is indeed found dead, that person, wasn't right all along. He only became right upon the opening.

That's the whole paradox that Schrodinger tried to point out as an absurd result of quantum mechanics -- but which nonetheless is accepted by physicists not as a counter-example against QM, but as something still paradoxical that actually illustrates a key point about QM.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Age and the Entrepreneur, Part 1: Some Data (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://pmarchive.com/age_and_the_entrepreneur.html

<comment><USER2> One key insight the original paper (by Dean Simonton) had was that creative peak varies by field. So, some fields like poetry, pure mathematics, theoretical physics admit of early peaks (by twenties). Well, turns out this is not true. Consider Yitang Zhang who was in the news all of last year (to the extent mathematicians can be :-), he was was almost 60 when he presented his most famous proof. Clearly no spring chicken.

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

new yorker article on yitang zhang

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/pursuit- beauty](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/02/pursuit-beauty)

When somebody researched the average age of Nobel prize winners (when they did their prize winning work, not when they received it), they realized a gradual drift upwards from 1901 to now. When quantum mechanics was new everyone making new discoveries was under 30. The average age now is 50. Chemistry rose from 36 to 46 and medical scientists from 38 to 45.

[http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111107/full/news.2011.632.ht...](http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111107/full/news.2011.632.html)

So, I think you should find a field you love and work in it. Keep your at-bats high and you might do ground breaking work in your 50's or 60's. Don't worry about IQ, beyond 120 it doesn't matter. I have my doubts if it is possible to do creative work beyond 75 but it is just a hunch.

In any case, entrepreneurship would seem like a field that would peak the later part of life curve, so if you want to do it in your 60's go for it. Of course, just like quantum mechanics in early 20th century, something completely new like social media would be grokked by younger entrepreneurs but that is only one field. Remember the greatest entrepreneur in modern era, Steve Jobs, made his biggest hits after he turned 50.

</comment><comment><USER3> seems to imply that in old age say just 'go bat more' and with your constant probability of success you'll produce more good work (if only you could motivate yourself) but there may be a causality issue, where your motivation to 'attempt' is not a blind thing but a function of whether you think you have a good idea. i can accept that this judgement might be constant over time, but 'potential attempt material' seems unlikely to be purely exogenous..</comment>


Ask HN: How to keep your skills up to date on all your programming languages? - <AUTHOR> For multilingual programmers, assume your day job only let you program in 1-2 languages, how do you keep your skills up to date for all the languages you are able to program professionally? <comment><USER2> Why do you need to keep current on multiple languages? Is it to keep you still marketable so you can leave? Or just a bragging right for yourself?

Why not specialize in one or two languages... become a leader and specialist and not a generalist.

<comment><USER3> I'll tell you why to keep being a polyglot: to have a _choice of tools_ for solving problems and to have a _perspective_.

I routinely write tools in half a dozen languages and pretty much always I'm glad that I could choose one or another, because it fits the problem at hand much better than anything else.

And the perspective is about knowing different approaches to a problem. Sometimes I transfer the good ideas from one language/runtime/framework to another, where it makes sense, but is not a common practice. And I can easily use a language I haven't had much experience before, just because it's the same paradigm as I already know from several other languages (I did this a few times already).

And no, I'm not a generalist. I'm quite specialized in my work. I write tools for OS administration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why do you assume a polyglot would work in a setting that _disallows_ use of other languages?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not about top-down disallow, it's just restrictive for many reasons. To use a programming language to build a system within a company, I need not only the approval of my boss but also other developers in my team to know that language or at least eager to learn, that's not always possible.</comment></comment>


When to Redis - <AUTHOR> http://www.paperplanes.de/2009/10/29/when_to_redis.html

<comment><USER2> Related: Redis 1.1 (currently in beta but ready for some test) implements a sorted type supporting range queries. It's pretty useful when the need is to take million of items sorted with very fast top-N items operations or items with score between min and max, especially in presence of continuous updates to the items scores.

If you are interested check <http://code.google.com/p/redis/wiki/CommandReference> (All the commands prefixed with "Z" are about the Sorted Set data type). Btw both insert / remove / and update-score operations are O(Log(N)). Top-N items is O(N) since the list of items is already sorted.

Redis 1.1 will be released as stable in one or two months at max.

For data structures and algorithms geeks: the sorted data type of Redis is implemented with a skip list, hacked to actually build a doubly-liked list, with the backward pointers being only at level 0 (we have reverse range operations, ZREVRANGE). Every element is also taken inside an hash table, so that it's possible to update the score of an element already inside the sorted set in O(Log(N)) time because we can get the old score in O(1) from the hash table, and then find the element in the skip list.

Even when the scores are not distributed but there are large clusters of elements with the same score, the update is still O(Log(N)) thanks to some interesting trick.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Redis is particularly useful for implementing simple message queueing systems where the full functionality or power of something like RabbitMQ is not required.

For example, when parsing incoming data into a database, push incoming data onto one end of a Redis list, and have a seperate worker process popping them off the end and into CouchDB, MySQL or whatever.

The fact that Redis list operations are atomic mean that multiple worker processes (possibly on seperate physical boxes) can process jobs simultaneously.

Result: the internet is entirely decoupled from both the hard drive and the database, and extremely high performance is possible.

Twitter Streaming API, anybody?..

</comment><comment><USER3> There was a post earlier in the week about why Redis was "awesome" and a "lifestyle" and I posted a kind of snarky comment about why posts like that scare me away from Redis.

After this post, I had an hourlong discussion with my lead dev on swapping out memcached for Redis so we could use it for our job scheduler. This post makes an excellent, compelling case for Redis.

Just an interesting example of how two different evangelistic approaches can play out. I don't know if I'm representative of "normal people", though. (Don't say it.)

<comment><USER4> Indeed. I went to a CouchDB presentation at a local conference, and afterward I asked about some transaction-related details. The presenter didn't understand, but kept repeating that the technology behind it was "way sexy". It was useless _and_ off-putting.

<comment><USER5> Which conference was that?

<comment><USER4> A BarCamp in Grand Rapids, MI, US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Redis is really cool, I can think of lots of uses for fast and lightweight and there's at least one project where it would have saved me a lot of effort if it had existed then!

Watch out for the Python library though! It doesn't even try to sanitize key names so malformed names cause all sorts of problems (including executing arbitrary commands). Plus unicode strings with non-ascii chars cause it to blow up.

All very easy to fix of course, as soon as I get a chance I'll submit a patch if it hasn't already been done by someone else by then.

<comment><USER7> Please submit a few reproducible cases to the mailing list. I'm sure Ludo or I (or you) could even patch it quickly. Thanks!

<comment><USER6> I've committed a quick fix for the problems to me clone of the Git repo here: <http://github.com/almost/redis>

Check the changed doctests for examples of why it was a bad idea not to sanitize key names and other params. Ignore the changed doctests involving Decimals, I had to change those to get them to pass on my machine but they're not related to me fixes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is Redis stable enough to replace using a database as persistent storage. There seems to be some indication that it is, but then there are paragraphs in the documentation that makes it seem like it's not. Particularly if your database size exceeds the machine's memory then you could lose data.

Is one of the goals of the project to replace the need to use a database? Or will it always be more suitable cache or worker queue replacement?

<comment><USER2> Hello, the documentation should be updated indeed. Now Redis supports the maxmemory directive that will start to reply with an error on write commands when the database is using more than the specified bytes of RAM.</comment></comment>


SpaceX launches first U.S. national security space mission - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-spacex-launch/spacex-launches-first-u-s-national-security-space-mission-idUSKCN1OM0D9 <comment><USER2> I gather this was Falcon 9's first EELV-certified mission, but to call it its first national security mission is quite the overstatement. Falcon 9s have already launched an NRO spy satellite, the Air Force X-37B, and the mysterious Zuma.

</comment><comment><USER3> More importantly it is SpaceX's 21st launch of the year. Making 2018 the year with the most launches ever. One of the things that contributes to this is a stock of 'previously flown' boosters that allowed for more launches without having to build more engines and boosters. As the cadence improves the financial picture for SpaceX only gets better as far as I can tell.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do they mean first "successful" launch to orbit? I thought the launch where the payload failed to separate was the first launch, even though the launch was a success and the deployment failed. Why is this launch considered first?

<comment><USER5> They've successfully launched successful national security missions before that successfully separated (e.g. NROL 76). The headline is just wrong.

I think it is the first satellite in this particular set of related launches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> SpaceX had to use a fully expendable Falcon for this launch. What makes a GPS satellite so heavy?

<comment><USER7> Two things:

1\. A GPS satellite is in a very high orbit compared to LEO, and so all stages were requested to burn to completion, to ensure the satellite has enough margin to reach that orbit.

2\. The second stage ends at a ~800 km orbit, while the satellite itself needs to increase this to ~12,000 km (I'm rounding these numbers). The sat has to carry enough on-board propellant to raise it's orbit that much which necessarily increases it's wet-weight due to the rocket equation.

<comment><USER6> Still SpaceX routinely recovers the first stage after launching geostationary communication satellites. I thought GPS should be lighter as they are closer to Earth and needs to send much less information in their signal, so the power requirements and size of Solar panels should be lower.

<comment><USER8> This sattelite was some 8000kgs, vs. 4000-ish kgs for the previous-generation GPS satellites, if I remember correctly.

<comment><USER9> Any idea why their weight increased so much?

<comment><USER10> The latest generation of GPS satellites has more antennas and more powerful transmitters. This improves signal reception and reduces the impact of jamming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> no employee protests against DOD projects :)

<comment><USER12> yeh cause doing DOD projects from an American Company to increase GPS is a good thing

<comment><USER13> Not for those on the receiving end of JDAMs

SpaceX is taking defense money to launch satellites that are primarily for military use in guiding platforms that deliver things to lethal terminal effect. That's just as martial as Raytheon building the Tomahawk guidance module.

Thought experiment: would SpaceX take Russian money to launch GLONASS birds? I'd wager not because it would be 'immoral'.

<comment><USER14> Beneficial civilian use of GPS is orders of magnitude more common than military uses. Military systems also never _require_ GPS, because you can't count on the enemy not to jam the signal or shoot down the satellites, so there are always alternate navigation methods. For example, JDAMs also use inertial navigation.

I would not want to work on a weapons system but I'd have no problem working on something like GPS.

I see no evidence for the conclusion to your thought experiment. You can't just make up a conclusion to support your argument, it needs to actually be based on something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How is an upgraded GPS satellite a "national security" mission?

Yes, I understand that precise and reliable global navigation is essential to fighting wars and guided weapons, but such uses pale in comparison to the billions of people who rely on GPS every day to do non-war, non-USA stuff. It is neither national nor security.

Or do they just mean "in the role of defense contractor"?

<comment><USER16> GPS is lofted and maintained by the DoD. It's primary purpose is military. It would not exist as a free service without DoD's investment. Other satellite constellations with far fewer sats cost considerable amounts of money to use, and few of our modern applications for GPS would be very appealing at $xxx a month. Civillian GPS is a generous charity from US taxpayers to the rest of the world

<comment><USER15> No, its primary purpose is civilian. Its original and occasional purpose is military, sure, but as I mentioned, it is used far more widely now, by several orders of magnitude. Its military applications are so eclipsed now by non-war- related uses that the military origins are practically irrelevant.

<comment><USER16> Civilian use is wide yes, but this is only because it is provided for free by DoD. None of those uses would be economically viable if they had to bear the costs of developing, launching and maintaining the system.

Keeping track of the boats and missiles pays the bills. Everything else is just a happy accident of zero marginal use cost.

<comment><USER17> Galileo GNSS proves you wrong, since initially was designed primarily for civilian use.

<comment><USER18> Galileo's being primarily civilian in focus has no bearing on GPS' main purpose. GPS is a US system, funded and directed by the military.

<comment><USER17> You are right, but it proves that GNSS system can be civilian primarily and would be still feasible.

<comment><USER19> Nice goal post moving.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tracking down the true origin of a font used in many games and shareware titles - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/codeman38/status/1200243842521415681 <comment><USER2> I guess I'm just an old man but I truly do not understand why people use twitter for long-form content like this. It's like using the handle of a screwdriver as a hammer. You can do it but it sure isn't optimal. I understand there are a few tools to make it a little better to read, but that's a band- aid on the problem.

<comment><USER3> Is it 'long-form' content or is it a series of points in an overall thread, most of which focus on an image? It could almost be a gallery of images with captions, but I think it would seem very out of place on imgur, for example.

I can't think of a much better alternative, really. Maybe Medium, but I'd expect something there to be more content than this, with more rewriting and editing. This is more like a 'stream of thoughts'. Is there a specific harm in it being posted on Twitter?

<comment><USER2> I'll concede that this specific thread isn't super long but some of the ones I've seen posted here are _incredibly_ long and it's just frustrating to read them in that format.

Though when you consider the length of a tweet in general compared to the length of the thread, I think I would call it long form compared to the medium it's posted on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > So, to summarize: A font from an early 1st-party Mac game made it > (questionably?) onto some Mac shareware disks. A programmer at EA found it, > converted it, and included it with Deluxe Paint. From there, it then > appeared in a lot of other games whose artists used that program.

Squaresoft also famously used the original Mac system font, Chicago (designed by Susan Kare) for their English language SNES releases of Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III US, Secret of Evermore, etc — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_(typeface)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_\(typeface\))

<comment><USER5> The "1st-party Mac game" in question is _Through the Looking Glass_ \-- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Looking_Glass_(vid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Looking_Glass_\(video_game\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting story, though I wonder what the postscript would be if the original author was tracked down?

For anyone checking comments first, the font in question is the script font most famously used in Mortal Kombat.

<comment> compiler-guy Steve Capps is the original author and very well known. He wrote many programs for the original Mac. I expect this will make its way back to him and he will chime in.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's awfully close to the font used by Smalltalk-76 and later.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can someone do the same posts but for music in kid YouTube videos? It seems they all have the exact same music/sound effects

<comment><USER9> If they're from the YouTube Audio Library, then they get used because it doesn't trigger a copyright hit.

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music?nv=1](https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music?nv=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow - great detective work

</comment><comment><USER11> Hope the old SCO lawyers don't see this. ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> Url changed from [https://threader.app/thread/1200243842521415681](https://threader.app/thread/1200243842521415681), which points to this. (HN readers are divided on which format they like better, and the site guidelines call for original sources.)</comment>


1991 Macintosh Quadra with Mac OS 8.1 as an Electron App - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js <comment><USER2> Developer here! I'm so excited to see that people like this toy. I'm happy to answer any questions, if you have any.

But first, some important credits: Emulator: Basilisk II, a 68k Macintosh emulator, by Christian Bauer et al, modified and compiled with Emscripten by James Friend. Installed software from vintage computing archives: WinWorldPC, Macintosh Garden, and Macintosh Repository.

<comment><USER3> how easy is this to get running in an actual browser, rather than Electron*? I want to host some Hypercard stacks (some of which need Quicktime support, hence colour Mac emulation).

<comment><USER4> It appears to use this as the emulator: [https://jamesfriend.com.au/basilisk- ii-classic-mac-emulator-...](https://jamesfriend.com.au/basilisk-ii-classic- mac-emulator-in-the-browser) You can just directly use that instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to file a bug report: running Photoshop and using my wacom tablet, the lines are somewhat twitchy. On the other hand, it's responsive as hell: how nice to upgrade to a Quadra running inside Electron inside Mojave inside a pretty gnarly iMac Pro :)

I wish my old Performa 575 booted that fast or ran Photoshop 3 that well. I am old enough that I started with Photoshop 3 on such a machine, so this really was a trip for me. How utterly cool.

Now if I could run Photoshop 3 natively on THIS box… hoo boy would that be responsive.

<comment><USER6> I was a Macromedia fanboy. Photoshop is still a second class citizen in my mind to Fireworks. Even though Adobe felt different and nuked their best editor I still run it.

<comment><USER7> Amen! I ran my entire first business from Fireworks. Damn was it excellent. I hated what Adobe did to Macromedia's products after they bought them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Like that GAN that simulates Pac-Man, this is an exciting new level of inefficiency I couldn't even conceive of a couple decades ago.

<comment><USER9> We need to go deeper! Soon we'll have a machine learning algorithm conjure Mac OS by calculating the next frame to display, taking into account user input, based on watching thousands of hours of normal Mac OS usage

<comment><USER10> That's brilliant. Gave me the funny thought that GPT-3 could solve one problem we used to argue about back in the day. What's the right order for loading extensions? I don't remember the details, but I do remember my old office would discuss it endlessly. The black magic and superstitions to keep the system going as long as possible before the inevitable crash. Maybe, 25+ years later, there could be a definitive answer.

<comment><USER11> Surely there's a statistical approach to answering that question, isn't there?

<comment><USER12> I seem to remember a Cassidy & Greene program that would do all sorts of statistics to your extensions. I mainly used it to do a binary search to figure out which extension is causing the shareware app of the day to crash.

<comment><USER13> They also had one of the best classic Mac arcade games of all time.

Crystal Quest and it's sequel, Crystal Crazy

[https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5955-crystal- crazy](https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5955-crystal-crazy)

<comment><USER14> This was one of the only games I actually played in the Macs they had at elementary school (we spent most of our recess time on Napster...playing 12 different songs simultaneously in the same room, and nobody cared). I spent so long looking for this game, but I couldn't even figure it what to search for, because I didn't remember the title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Alas, it doesn't have Excel on it. I want to test my theory that Excel 5 in an old mac emulator would be more snappy for basic input tasks than Excel 16 native on a MBP.

<comment><USER16> As someone who regularly uses old Mac emulators on modern hardware, most programs are hundreds of times faster (despite emulation overhead). As someone who regularly uses an actual old PowerBook 2400 from 1997 for fun, I can say that Photoshop 4 is by far snappier on that than the latest Photoshop CS on my MacBook Pro...

<comment><USER17> This is depressing, but hardly surprising. The dedication to "just ship it" has really built up. The market pressure to build efficient software approaches zero.

All software will approach "human speed," whether it's adding two integers or getting near instant predictions from a GAN. All available resources will be used until it's "good enough. Just ship it," and efficiencies will multiple as in any natural selection: defensive measures like "confusing code," and "unrelated system fails when this one is changed" allowing mostly harmless dumb code to survive and propagate.

Some intrepid learner comes to study the code one day. "Huh, I guess this is how you're supposed to do it. Seems kinda weird but I'm sure it was written this way for a reason. It's been like this for a decade!" And so they copy the procedure into their greenfield project.

Efficient code will always be sacrificed to the god of "Just Ship It" as long as the overall performance is "Good enough." And why not?

<comment><USER18> >This is depressing

Only if you really have to use modern software (which, admittedly, we all have to from time to time). Vim, my terminal, grep and GCC are faster than ever!

To really enjoy computers the trick is to run old software on modern hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19>
      you'll find various games and demos preinstalled, thanks to an old MacWorld Demo CD from 1997. Namely, Oregon Trail, Duke Nukem 3D, Civilization II, Alley 19 Bowling, Damage Incorporated, and Dungeons & Dragons.

Oh this is not just looks, which would already be nice, but it actually runs stuff.

<comment><USER20> Are all these games abandonware? Even if not, I can't imagine anyone pursuing a legal case, but it would be the kind of thing I worried about.

<comment><USER21> Demo CD's would often feature shareware versions of software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Base hard disk size of a 1991 Quadra 700: _80 MB_

Size of this .app on my Mac: _866 MB_

Yes, I know, it's silly to snark on Electron app sizes by this point. You want to see some real bloat? Let's compare the included Adobe Photoshop 3 and Adobe Photoshop 2020:

Photoshop 3.0.5: _8.9 MB_

Photoshop 21.2.1: _2.76 GB_

Now _that_ is some bloat.

<comment><USER2> Hi, author here! This is silly, but I'm allocating the entire size of the _virtual_ disk on your actual hard drive. There's probably a smarter way to do this, but that's how it is right now. PRs would be lovely!

<comment><USER23> Have you considered using qcow?

Sadly I'm not terribly knowledgable if this is easily implementable or not but theoretically you don't need to allocate all the disk space, just the parts you've written to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Projects like these remind me that there are people in this world live in a different intellectual plane than us. For them, time probably moves slowly and the average person's intellect must surely amuse them. Because how is it possible for this to be made by one human?

<comment><USER25> This is really just a repackaging of work thats already been done. It uses the BasiliskII emulator which was compiled to Javascript with Emscripten by someone else a few years ago.

Still pretty cool but not some crazy technological feat.

<comment><USER24> Oh, that would nice to include in the README - changes my entire perception of this project. Thanks for the context!

<comment><USER26> If you squint you can see Basilisk II under "Credits" in the screenshot.

<comment><USER27> And if you look at `CREDITS.md` in the top level of the project source, you can see that the author of this project considers that the "real work":

[https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/blob/master/C...](https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/blob/master/CREDITS.md)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> if electron is not to your taste, you can run the emulator in your browser here: [https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/](https://jamesfriend.com.au/projects/basiliskii/)

coincidently today firefox 79 was released, which brings back support for SharedArrayBuffer, which is a key part of the browser port of this emulator

<comment><USER17> Just feel like mentioning that the "old" version (without SharedArrayBuffer) works just fine on my iPhone 7 Safari browser. What a time to be alive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Oregon Trail should be mandatory curriculum for passing the 3rd grade. Kids these days don't even know about dysentery.

<comment><USER30> Agreed. And if that's not enough, there's always the retro remake Organ Trail -- as brutal as the original, but with zombies!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> A few comments. This is a port of Basilisk II. If someone feels uncomfortable using an Electron app, they can still install plain Basilisk, which works just fine.

I don't know if you can distribute OS 8.1, but there certainly might be a legal issue with the original ROMs. You're including one and the thing is people used to look elsewhere for those. They're easy to find, and there are tools to dump them if you happen to own such a Mac which would make this issue disappear.

About some posts here. I've never had decent performance with Hypercard in Basilisk II, on the other hand Mini vMac works great for that.

Lemmings run nicely in Executor, which happens to be a nowadays free compatibility layer for 68K Mac software that doesn't need neither a dumped ROM nor any copy of the Macintosh System Software.

</comment><comment><USER32> Sure, great.

Let's take a fully functional emulator that works well on mac OS ([https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7361](https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7361)) and all 3 major platforms ([https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/basilisk_ii](https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/basilisk_ii)) and port it to JS using Emscripten, and then wrap that into an Electron app, and ship it again on mac OS.

Is this an exercise in how many layers of abstraction one can do things?

</comment><comment><USER33> This was the first graphical user interface I saw as a kid. Thank you for the trip down memory lane.

<comment><USER34> The graphical user interface still looks gorgeous! And it brings me a slight shudder that the look and feel might be more consistent that what we have today, even on the Mac.

<comment><USER35> Right until you open the AppleCD Audio Player… Music apps _never_ followed the UI guidelines. :(

<comment><USER22> AppleCD Audio Player is nothing…

[https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos80](https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos80)

…compared to the brushed metal and bizarre volume control in QuickTime in Mac OS 9.

[https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90](https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90)

<comment><USER30> QuickTime looks felt bizarre even to us Windows users. Even though we had no expectations of consistent or pretty UIs, every time I had to use QuickTime (a typical use case: watching movie trailers) I marveled at the grotesque bizarreness of its UI.

<comment><USER36> Modern windows has no expectations of consistency, but Windows in the 9x era would have a pretty consistent feel. Sure, there were two file pickers, and yes some people made their own, but other than media players and games meant for full screen, almost everything used system widgets and kept system colors etc.

<comment><USER30> You're right, I misspoke. I meant indeed that media players had quirky UIs in general... I was thinking of WinAMP for example. But even then, QuickTime looks felt both bizarre and unwieldy to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Somehow I thought OS 8 was the first major release to be PowerPC only. Wikipedia says they cut off 68K in 8.5 though.

<comment><USER38> likewise, I had a powerPC running on 7.x and 8.x. ooof, takes me back.

<comment><USER37> My friend had a power mac 6100 with system 7.1. It seemed pretty awesome at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ha, this is pretty cool. I remember the Macs of this era always seemed so exotic to me as a young PC user. I had one friend whos family had a Quadra and the OS seemed so cool and exciting and colourful the one time I used it. I also clearly remember how the floppy drive ejected with a motor rather than manually!

Even now, the OS seems really thoughtfully designed, you can clearly see the lineage to MacOS of today.

Small bug report, my cursor seems to jump around a bit after I've been running it for a few minutes!

<comment><USER40> The first time I encountered a Mac was in school. Because I had experienced cassette players eating tapes (along with other forms of device failure), I was never comfortable with any floppy drive without an eject button. Ditto for those CD drives, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Finally! A way for a 68k Mac to use more than 1 GB of memory! Jokes aside, this is a neat tech demo :)

</comment><comment><USER42> My father had a Quadra 610 that I used for hours when growing up. I have some huge nostalgia for Hellcats Over the Pacific and A-10 Attack!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellcats_over_the_Pacific](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellcats_over_the_Pacific) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10_Attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10_Attack)!

Wonder if I can play these@

<comment><USER43> A-10 Attack! was a truly wonderful game- the flight model was so impressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Downloading it right now! But...

> Can I connect to the Internet? No. For what it's worth, the web was quite > different 30 years ago - and you wouldn't be able to open even Google. > However, Internet Explorer and Netscape are installed [...]

If IE and Netscape are available I'd assume this would be alright, unless it's some Electron thingy going on... how's that so?

<comment><USER45> Certainly they can be installed on the VM, doesn't mean that the VM has network drivers installed.

Separately, very old browsers only talk HTTP 1.0 (No Host: header support, so they can't connect to non-dedicated servers) and no modern ciphersuites. (Can't connect to HSTS servers that disallow insecure ciphers)

<comment><USER46> But they support Gopher. And Clazilla exists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It's crazy to me that somehow "Alley 19 Bowling" has been lingering around in my brain for 20+ years. All of a sudden I feel like I played it yesterday.

</comment><comment><USER48> Q: Does it run my favorite game?

A: Even a Mac Plus runs Glider.

<comment><USER49> Glider. And Shufflepuck for good measure.

<comment><USER50> Shufflepuck!? Really?????

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is really nice. A little easier and more modern for someone just looking to run retro games than minivmac or qemu.

If you're looking for games or other software for this check out the always excellent Macintosh Garden. [https://macintoshgarden.org/](https://macintoshgarden.org/)

</comment><comment><USER52> My experience with the .deb version seems to be stuck during startup on "Loading emulator dependencies"

<comment><USER53> Same for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Any chance of emulating a PowerMac running MacOSX using PearPC or something that emulates PowerPC? It is so old that Apple should not care about it running in an emulator since they are moving from Intel to ARM.

<comment><USER46> Last Qemu suports PowerMacs. Check Emaculation.

<comment><USER54> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Amazing! Seeing the interface with an auto CRT filter within my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER56> I miss the spatial Finder

</comment><comment><USER57> I love playing with the MacinTalk (text-to-speech) voices. Be sure to enable talking alerts in the Speech control panel.

</comment><comment><USER58> This is extremely cool. Would be interested to see OS9 too; the emulator situation is kind of a hassle at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER59> Where exactly is the disk image? can't find it on the repo (also, github redesign removed file size?!?!)

</comment><comment><USER60> It's got Photoshop 3 on it! And it's... faster than it was on my old Quadra? This is awesome :D

</comment><comment><USER61> Does it theoretically also run A/UX ? I remember the Quadra machines were able to do so...

<comment><USER62> Unlikely, since it's based on Basillisk II and so does not actually emulate the MMU [1].

1: [https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=34664#3466...](https://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=34664#34664)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Holy cow. The online version is more responsive than most of the native apps on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER64> Anyone recall why some applications on Mac OS have a stylized "f" suffix?

<comment><USER65> "RandomMacApp ƒ" stood for "RandomMacApp's folder".

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Imagine the system requirements of this versus the original OS ; )

Cool toy though!

</comment><comment><USER67> I was convinced when I saw "Oregon Trail"

</comment><comment><USER68> Missing the best Mac classic game: Lemmings!

</comment><comment><USER69> The thing is a developer software and go back to the future.

Pascal ...

</comment><comment><USER70> Title: Quadra, not Quandra.

<comment><USER71> Fixed. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Why the "I'm Sorry" ?

</comment><comment><USER26> So basically [https://bellard.org/jslinux/](https://bellard.org/jslinux/) but with a macOS iso and Electron packaging?

<comment><USER73> JSLinux doesn't emulate 68K, but something like that.</comment></comment>


Laying a trap for self-driving cars - chris-at https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/17/laying-a-trap-for-self-driving-cars/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><AUTHOR> This definitely seems like an idea created and propagated by people with no idea about how these systems work. The Cruise Automation/GM videos show the cars crossing lane markings when a truck is blocking traffic in their lane, so these systems are being built to realise that while traffic laws may say one thing, practice requires something different.

Certainly entertaining though.

<comment><USER2> I agree, it was entertaining. You can imagine the next James Bond car has a gadget with two paint dispensers that shoots out on a rail to one side of the car, starts firing paint and then moves out to the right drawing a double yellow line that forces the bad guys in their self driving car off on to the shoulder :-). And no, I don't think any self driving car worth it's salt would fall for this. Fun to simulate though.

I enjoyed that 'smart car' joke that went "I was standing in the garage because I had forgotten where I had parked my self driving car, then it hit me."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I still want to see a self-driving car in Minnesota in winter. Road markings, what road markings? For that matter where is the road?

<comment><USER4> The road markings will be clearly visible, of course, since there will be self-driving snowplows around 24/7.

<comment><USER5> How are the road markings visible to the first snowplow?

<comment><USER6> Lots of other people talk about fancy GPS systems in this thread, but it's been done for far longer with much simpler, arguably more reliable technology: long poles/sticks either painted with bright high vis paint, or more recently, retroreflectors.

It reminds me a bit of the story about NASA and the gazillion dollar space pen, vs the soviet space agency and their pencils.

<comment><USER7> Sure, why not a "gazillion" at this point:

> When the solution of providing astronauts with a ballpoint pen that would > work under weightless conditions and extreme temperatures came about, > though, it wasn't because NASA had thrown hundreds of thousands of dollars > (inflated to $12 billion in the latest iterations of this tale) in research > and development money at the problem. The "space pen" that has since become > famous through its use by astronauts was developed independently by Paul C. > Fisher of the Fisher Pen Co., who spent his own money on the project and, > once he perfected his AG-7 "Anti-Gravity" Space Pen, offered it to NASA.

Via [http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp](http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp)

<comment><USER8> The Soviets used the Fisher Space Pen, too. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or- fiction-n...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa- spen/)

Pencils have issues with electrical systems, waste, and flammability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Of course, it's just a regular car he drives into it for demonstration > purposes.

Because a self-driving car wouldn't have any reason to drive into the circle, so it wouldn't get "caught".

The actual reason a regular car is used is because this is an "art installation" and not a serious critique of self-driving algorithms.

A more effective trap would be a "no entry" sign on a one-way street (or one side of a dual carriageway), positioned so the car can't see it before entering the street.

<comment><USER10> >A more effective trap would be a "no entry" sign on a one-way street (or one side of a dual carriageway), positioned so the car can't see it before entering the street.

reminds me of rollercoaster tycoon where you could trap guests indefinitely by using that technique.

<comment><USER11> you could make a "do not enter" sign with undertext saying "except non-self- driving cars".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if we'll eventually see a world where the former Uber drivers who are slowly being lulled into dependence fight back when their jobs are automated away. Autonomous vehicles could be an easy target in a lot of ways, especially when unoccupied. Slap some electrical tape on their sensors, chock their tires, or confuse them with clever tactics like this.

<comment><USER13> > Autonomous vehicles could be an easy target

An orwellian, neworked device with hundreds of sensors, cameras, laser scanners? Not so easy.

<comment><USER14> If you actually want to damage sensors of unattended autonomous vehicles you could do a lot worse than just like...shooting at it with a firearm. Delicate precision sensors don't take to bullets too well, also using firearms lets you be well outside the range of the target vehicle's sensors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm running an autonomous driving event in a few weeks. I guess we could try this out?

</comment><comment><USER16> I suspect you'll see some real world versions of this sort of thing from truckers when self driving semis get some traction.

Truckers are very well organized, both officially via unions and informally via radio shows, newsletters, online forums, and the like.

Not that it will accomplish much, but it will be a lively transiton.

<comment><USER17> Instead of putting truckers back on trucks, they will just put security on them, until it stops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Actually, this raises some rather large questions about intent of someone fooling a self-driving car. Laying a trap for the occupants, so that they can be easily robbed.

Like the mischief being mentioned against trucks and Uber's by drivers (we can almost guarantee this will happen), what about just strait up traps for robbery?

There were some cases of this with the Pokémon game right?

</comment><comment><USER19> In recent memory, someone posted a great collection of illusions for self- driving vehicles. Can't find it, though :(

</comment><comment><USER20> You could probably trap a self driving car just by walking out in front of it and refusing to move aside.

</comment><comment><USER21> People do this to regular cars already with acts such as stealing stop signs. In some ways self driving cars will be easier to fool, but in other ways more difficult (eg, intersections with stop signs may also be contained in a database).

<comment><USER22> The best ones I've seen don't steal the sign, they take a big wrench and twist the post 90deg

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Let's make art of our ignorance!

</comment><comment><USER24> What if someone drew (false) lane markers leading off the edge of a cliff?</comment>


OFA + AWS - <AUTHOR> http://awsofa.info/ <comment><USER2> Anyone know of a good tool to make these types of diagrams? Preferably automatically? I've been meaning to create something that plugs into Chef and or nmap/netstat. In my experience, any diagram/inventory/whatever that isn't automatically updated invariably drifts from reality.

<comment><USER3> We're attempting just that at <http://www.madeiracloud.com/> , would love to chat more: dan [at] mc2 [dot] io

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The diagram follows the style of the AWS Reference Architectures[0]. I have yet to find a published set of diagram components that compare well to that style.

Edit: Juan Domenech[1] has a small custom made component pallet in png form. And, it looks like the original diagrams are custom Adobe Illustrator drawings[2].

[0] <http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/>

[1] [http://blog.domenech.org/2012/06/aws-diagrams- palette-v10.ht...](http://blog.domenech.org/2012/06/aws-diagrams- palette-v10.html)

[2] <http://blog.domenech.org/2012/05/aws-diagrams.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> That's an awesome diagram and quite a few servers (but latency kills the map- overlay experience, i think a static png or svg might have been better...) Interesting that servers are are either paired autoscaling over two AZs, or statically provisioned in three AZs - or am i mis-reading the diagram? Two entire mirrors for testing and staging must have become a pretty big cost.

For others outside the US confused about what the application actually does, and what the Narwhal in the testing/staging pictures refers to, this helped; [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2012/11/built-...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2012/11/built-to-win-deep-inside-obamas-campaign-tech/)

<comment><USER6> Looks like the AutoScaling groups are applications or stores where they do not need to coordinate their actions. The 3-az deployments seems to be APIs, which I am guessing scales with each regions (to reduce data cost?) and probably brought up/down automatically with Puppet to handle post-launch configurations. (you are reading it correctly).

I would guess testing is a skeleton version of the entire deployment so the cost is minimal and just need to test new deploys and verification for tests.

Staging probably wasn't a full mirror, at best I would venture to guess they had hot swaps coming up in staging and then being switched against production via ELBs.

They mention costs a few times in articles, so I would venture to guess they did optimize around many of those corners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is really great - I'd love to have a similar diagram for data flow and components of the systems I work on. It might not benefit engineers very much but it'd be fantastic for clients or some of the less technical people in the company.

I wonder how hard (I'm thinking hard?) it would be to have a tool for something like this, making the layout easy and revealing more and more information as you zoom in.

Even better if it was live and updating with system metrics.

<comment><USER8> Yeah it looks kind of cool, but kinda hard to read. Is this graphic based on something else?

I would like to see one where the labels are clearer. It doesn't seem like the 3D perspective adds any clarity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> When folks from the Romney campaign complained of technical deficiencies in his get-out-the-vote operation, pundits and news outlets intimated that the complaints were scapegoating IT for bad policy.

But looking at this diagram, I'm pleased to see that engineering was a big part of the Obama campaign. It really hammers home how badly out of their league Romney's TechOps team was.

</comment><comment><USER10> <http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/obama/>

</comment><comment><USER11> Is each one of those little grey cuboids an virtual machine? If so, that is rather a lot of virtual machines. I am surprised so many were necessary. What kind of load was this system handling?

</comment><comment><USER12> i guess this leaked. ;)

<comment><USER13> Please watch this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNsePZj_Yks>

You are materially responsible for the re-election of someone who commits large-scale crime (in the form of blatantly unconstitutional surveillance of Americans under no suspicion of criminal activity).

Please reconsider your choices. You are working for the wrong side.

<comment><USER14> _> You are working for the wrong side._

Which side should he be working for that doesn't do any of that?

<comment><USER13> The side building tools to resist surveillance, tyranny, violence, and war. You know, the one trying to prevent all the stuff his boss is up to.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The bat-virus détente: Why do bats have so many viruses? - <AUTHOR> https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/health-disease/2020/why-do-bats-have-so-many-viruses <comment><USER2> As the article points out close to the end, bats are really inefficient flyers. When bats fly they run really hot and consume lots of energy. Very high body temperature (above 40C) slows down many virus proteins.

Not mentioned in the article is idea that bats may have very weak immune response because they don't have energy for it. They need all the energy for flying.</comment>


Russian lawyer was probably beaten to death in jail, says Kremlin council - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/06/russian-lawyer-death-jail-kremlin

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe it's the one from this story <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1016515>

Hopefully at least the people who were responsible won't be able to do it again.</comment>


How DOOM fire was done - <AUTHOR> http://fabiensanglard.net/doom_fire_psx/ <comment><USER2> This effect was first developed by @thejare in 1993.

[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=15071](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=15071)

Old discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15828773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15828773)

More info here:

[http://www.iguanademos.com/Jare/wp/?p=2756](http://www.iguanademos.com/Jare/wp/?p=2756)

[https://www.hanshq.net/fire.html](https://www.hanshq.net/fire.html)

[https://www.gamedev.net/articles/programming/graphics/simple...](https://www.gamedev.net/articles/programming/graphics/simple- fire-effect-r222/)

<comment><USER3> Web version of [http://www.iguanademos.com/Jare/files/Fire/](http://www.iguanademos.com/Jare/files/Fire/)

<comment><USER4> Iguana! omg I still remember their hearthquake demo. It inspired me to become a developer

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I ported this effect to Pascal in Delphi, and won first place on the "Set the World on Fire" contest by Borland. Good Times!

[http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20487](http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20487)

<comment><USER6> Neat, what prize did you choose? I'm guessing the Delphi Pro?

<comment><USER5> If I remeber correctly it was Delphi 3 at the time. I loved Delphi, but I only got proficient on it thanks to Marco Cantu's "Mastering Delphi" book. I don't know what I would think of the book today, but it was a huge help at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love these DooM posts on my holiday break. There is some kind of mindfulness - zen like - ie. anti-stressing - reading about something so directly fun, trivial and specific.

</comment><comment><USER8> The mobile view of this website is an absolute pleasure to see. I've not really had a reaction this powerful before. The site is gorgeous to look at and the content is unhindered by poor design.

I'm impressed!

<comment><USER9> Thanks! Since I wrote the book I try to take extra-care of the overall typesetting. I have an iPad Pro that I use to benchmarks the overall "appeal" of each article.

For a time I considered writing only one-pager that would entirely fit on an iPad screen without need to scroll (like an actual granite tablet). It is unpractical but keeps coming back to me every times I scroll down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am kind of surprised, at the attention and fond rememberance Doom is still getting, compared to Descent, which though released around 2 years later, appears to me much more accomplished: levels of tunnels with complex spatial arrangements, the 6dof motion, even had a sterographic 3d mode.

<comment><USER11> DOOM was the first. Well, really Wolfenstein was the first, but it was limited to a grid. DOOM was many people's first networked game too. And the level editors were easy enough to use that they created a community.

Descent's 6dof control system rather counted against it in the days when people had keyboard, mouse and two axis joysticks. I remember struggling with it a lot, even trying two sticks at one point.

DOOM was also more memorable in its black metal aesthetic - the music and gory graphics. The E1M1 theme will stick with me while I can't remember a note of descent.

<comment><USER12> Ultima Underworld was released before Wolfenstein: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Underworld:_The_Stygian...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Underworld:_The_Stygian_Abyss#/media/File:Ultima_underworld_1_screenshot.png)

But Wolfenstein had lower requirements by not supporting the same amount of geometry variation.

Hovertank/Catacomb were released even earlier than the two and done with some of the same tech as Wolfenstein I believe.

<comment><USER13> Ultima Underworld successor System Shock (1) deserves mention here too. Another big step forward, and a couple of years before Quake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also see:

[https://lodev.org/cgtutor/fire.html](https://lodev.org/cgtutor/fire.html)

which is part of:

[https://lodev.org/cgtutor/](https://lodev.org/cgtutor/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Haha - I did an mmx version of this in assembler about twenty years ago for Konstantin Boldyshev's asmutils package. Doing things 8 bytes at a time made it ridiculously fast.

<comment><USER16> Nice! I did a size optimised version in assembler for MS-DOS a long time ago myself in 173 bytes: [http://www.humbug.net/projects/download/demos/js- fire7.zip](http://www.humbug.net/projects/download/demos/js-fire7.zip) It's not the smallest fire I've seen but I thought it was the smallest that still looked nice.

<comment><USER15> Very cool. Works like a charm in DOSBox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Funnily enough - I was just watching this mini-documentary on DOOM cheats this morning before getting out of bed:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L76uEtX4b7c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L76uEtX4b7c)

</comment><comment><USER18> I read the Doom Black Book over the holidays and it was a real treat.

<comment><USER9> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is only for the PSX port of DOOM, not for the original DOOM.

<comment><USER20> I was very confused at first. Fire effect in doom?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> >Notice that by adjusting how the fire propagates up, wind can also be simulated. I will leave that as an exercise for the readers who had the courage to read up to here.

This is what I cared to see.

The rest was not a mystery and seems like a pretty simple math/logic problem.

Although, now that I type this out, I am thinking the wind would be simple too...

Can anyone explain why the interest? I imagine there are college kids who do this type of logic.

<comment><USER22> yes, i am surprised that Fabien is doing the "leaving it as an exercise for the reader" on us. all authors have to do this at some point heh?

anyways, you see that "dst = src - randIdx + 1" line? that's what the "reader" needs to play with. right now "randIdx" is 0, 1 or 2. when it's 0, "dst" is one pixel to the right of "src", when it's 1 "dst" is at "src", and 2 is to the left. also remember we are placing it "below" because we are moving up, so we do "firePixels[dst - FIRE_WIDTH] = ...". hope that helps.

this article has renewed my interest in demo scene effects. canvas2d seems very friendly now. last time, i had a hard time with the animation boiler plate, manipulation of the canvas element and colors. colors manipulation seems to still be awful. i see Fabien had to write 15 lines of code for palette conversion. but that createjs library makes many things easier. hope Fabien can go through other popular effects... or maybe i should lol : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Seems similar to Hugo Elias's fire effect also ([https://web.archive.org/web/20160418004150/http://freespace....](https://web.archive.org/web/20160418004150/http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/models/m_fire.htm)).

</comment><comment><USER24> Heads up everyone, the DOOM Blackbook is 50% off on Amazon right now, which puts it down to a very reasonable $25. I just purchased it along with the WOLFENSTEIN 3D Blackbook which is also 50% off.

</comment><comment><USER25> This effect was used on the original Unreal engine to generate realtime fire effects that looked awesome. I don't know if the actual Unreal engine supports this anymore.

</comment><comment><USER26> Memories. Is this a lost art or do people still do this starting out? I mean now that everyone has unity to play with do people no longer have to know about the actual hardware?

<comment><USER27> I have the feeling many game devs do their own engine, but yes, the new people start with a existing engine.

<comment><USER28> Most game developers do not code their own engines. In fact unless you're doing something special (e.g. claybook, Miegakure, anything with true videos, or an unusual development pipeline/platform), it is immeasurably more economical to use an engine like unity/unreal with their large communities, asset stores, support and decent tooling. Even many 'AAA' games are now starting to use these commoditised engines (possibly with their own extensions/forks)

<comment><USER29> Uhmmm....I work for one of the top 3 largest game publishers in the world and all of our games are made using our own engines that were done in-house. Unity and Unreal Engine are only used for prototyping(with maybe one exception in Unity, but that was a small project done by a very few people).

<comment><USER30> I would fire you for your lack of knowledge. The top 100 mobile gaming apps are mostly unity based. Top 100 on steam heavily populated with unreal and unity based games.

<comment><USER31> You'd fire somebody for not knowing what people outside of a closed-loop corporate environment happen to use?

I mean, I posted 'cause he was wrong, but this is Bad Boss garbage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I remember coding this effect in C a long time ago. Back in the day we used to use the frame buffer as the data store too, not really feasible today!

</comment><comment><USER33> The effect looks a little like the moon fire effect in the genesis presentation from Star Trek II

</comment><comment><USER34> Interesting articles, infortunatly it has many typos: framebuffer is initiated full yellow, not black; pixel in code should be firePixel[src]; randomness should be applied symmetrically with rand+1 in [-1;1].

<comment><USER35> I love these kinds of articles but I also think there is a slight mistake. In my opinion it should say "upper-left is at array index zero" instead of "lower-left is at array index zero".

I don't think it matters if the randomness is not applied symmetrically and the fire moves slightly to the left. I also can't comprehend the part about the framebuffer being initiated yellow and not black.</comment></comment>


5 years later Microsoft catches up with RoR [video] - <AUTHOR> http://player.microsoftpdc.com/Session/e0c3ce51-9869-456c-a197-63dc0283f57e

<comment><USER2> I couldn't watch the video ... it requires silverlight to be installed!

<comment><USER3> So install silverlight. Or fire up a VM and do it there. It's scott hanselman, a smart guy and a good speaker. Even if you don't like microsoft or their platform, it worth knowing what they're doing.

<comment><USER4> Some of us are on mobile devices, or have half working silverlight plugins like Mac and Linux.</comment></comment></comment>


28 Cores of Bulls#t – Intel's "5GHz" Parlor Trick - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRH0-QwhvVQ <comment><USER2> Someone elsewhere mentioned that people worked out the heat per area output of this 5GHz chip; 2W per square millimeter.

This entire chip is a pure joke, there is nothing 5GHz about a silicon die that is about to tear itself apart under the heat stress comparable to early/late orbital reentry or a tenth of a fusion reactor (5 and 10 W per mm^2 respectively).

It feels like someone demonstrated me their race car and then I spot them swapping out the red hot glowing gearing that is dropping liquid metal on the asphalt after one round.

The motherboard they used also looked similarly ridiculous, it had at least two dozen VRM phases to handle the probably around kilowatt of power.

A fire extinguisher will likely have to be sold along with any such CPU if they ever sell this. And I doubt it. They promise 5GHz and they will either massively disapoint everyone or somehow manage to wizard up a 5GHz 28c CPU by Q4 (which is when the IIRC promised to unleash/release this onto consumers).

</comment><comment><USER3> This guy is one of the few shining beacons in the tech review industry at the moment. I love his approach.

As for Intel: I'm disappointed, but not surprised. I really hope that AMD can continue to regain a healthy market share and company stability so that this kind of behavior is discouraged via Intel's bottom line.

<comment><USER4> > I really hope that AMD can continue to regain a healthy market share...

As someone long on the desktop market with the processing and storage needs of home/office-based VR/AR/holo in mind (a few years out yet) I am for the first time in ages genuinely interested in large scale processors and that is mainly to AMD's credit. Here's hoping to some AMD backed answer to Optane as well.</comment></comment>


Hotel in Tokyo installs flight simulator in room (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.businesstraveller.com/business-travel/2019/07/31/hotel-in-tokyo-installs-flight-simulator-in-room/ <comment><USER2> _> however, guests staying for a night in the twin bed room can't sit in the pilot's seat or "touch the instruments", according to the hotel. A "transparent acrylic board" will separate the cockpit from the room._

So it's kind of like a minibar in your room, only instead of dispensing liquor, it dispenses 737-800 simulator hours.

<comment><USER3> At least you can drink the liquor ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "It was installed to celebrate the hotel's 15th anniversary."

AKA - The owner really wanted to figure out a way to expense a new flight simulator.

[Note: I have no clue about tax law in japan... that was mostly a joke because I don't see how this would ever recoup the cost.]

<comment><USER5> Especially at the seemingly-very-reasonable ~$225 for a 90 minute "lesson."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What the hell's the point if you can't book this room and use the sim all day?

<comment><USER7> It's a hotel, people would immediately use that cockpit for all sorts of things that are hard to clean and could damage the equipment.

<comment><USER8> Yeah. But uh, if that's the case wouldn't this make more sense in a lobby?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I bet pilots staying overnight in Tokyo after 12-20+ hour flights would love this room that way they can continue working in the comfort of their own bedrooms.

<comment><USER10> I don't hire any pilots that don't have significant side project flight hours on their resume.

<comment><USER11> Out of curiousity, how many pilots do you regularly hire?

<comment><USER10> Our hiring pipeline sifts through many candidates but so far none have been the 10x pilots our organization requires. We only hire the best.

<comment><USER12> Between autopilot and remote control, it's not too much of a stretch imagining one guy in an office making sure 10 autopiloted planes do what they are supposed to. Maybe have to make sure none of them take off or land at the same time.

<comment><USER13> That would be the Air Traffic Controller.

<comment><USER12> I meant a person replacing all the pilots, not assisting them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For the train otaku of HN - [https://global.trainhostelhokutosei.com/](https://global.trainhostelhokutosei.com/)

<comment><USER15> That is awesome. I took the Super Hokuto from Hakodate to Sapporo last year, some of the most incredible scenery of my life.

It is hard not to become a train enthusiast in Japan, especially when armed with a rail pass. I would essentially wake up in the morning, decide where to go, within the hour I had tickets and was on a train. Book a cheap hotel on the train ride, enjoy the new city until I felt like another train ride. Effortless and perfect for the unplanning wanderer.

<comment><USER16> do you know Japanese? how feasible would this be without knowing Japanese? It sounds awesome

<comment><USER17> Not OP, but for the most part you can get around fine without knowing Japanese. In two trips across Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Gunma, and Sapporo, the only transportation there wasn't any English for was a normal bus route in Sapporo; all other modes of major transportation, even buses in major cities, have English announcements and visual indicators.

For the bus I mentioned though, I just used Google Maps/GPS on my phone and guesstimated where to pull the stop request cord, etc.

For communicating with people, Google Translate works decently well. Obviously knowing Japanese would be ideal, and you should learn a few phrases, but it's ok to use Google as needed.

Can't speak for super rural areas, though.

<comment><USER16> Very encouraging, thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> But Why?

In high school when I studied Japanese I learnt of these gaming parlours that had pachinko machines. You'd purchase a bucket of metal ball bearings and pour them in and they'd fairly randomly get stuck and flow through and may release other balls that are stuck there. I learnt that when you win you can swap your winnings for a teddy bear from the prize cabinet.

Only years later did I find out that the real system was you could then take the teddy across the street and swap it for CASH. The teddy bear was a front for what was really going only, but in the process everyone saved face.

I suspect a similar thing is happening here.

<comment><USER19> That's because gambling for cash is illegal in Japan, you buy balls, and win balls, exchange those balls for tokens. Then across the street, you can exchange those tokens for prizes / cash, thereby circumventing the law. It has nothing to do with saving face, it's a loophole to allow for gambling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can't use it. A bit pointless then!

</comment><comment><USER20> I think they would literally get more bookings if they just installed wrap- around screens like that but with Microsoft Flight Simulator / joystick/keyboard.

<comment><USER21> I concur, when clicking the link I genuinely thought they installed Microsoft flight simulator, which really made me follow the link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Boeing has found their new revenue model.

<comment><USER23> Boeing's flight simulator probably crashes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think the idea of hotel rooms with high end simulators for driving, flying and other stimulants is a fabulous business idea and excellent for places of low scenic interest, ie you go and stay a weekend racing, drinking, eating and sleeping in your room.

</comment><comment><USER25> I remember going to a hotel as a kid where each room had some sort of theme (tropical, polar, etc. at West Edmonton Mall). It would be really neat if you could select an experience that has different levels of technology instead.

<comment><USER26> The Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo also has this room theming:

[https://www.madonnainn.com/viewrooms](https://www.madonnainn.com/viewrooms)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> In the future, AI overlords will determine that it is inefficient to drive airplanes, and will instead put humans in what they'll call a cockpit.

This room is where they'll be raised, before ready for service.

<comment><USER28> Made me think of Enders Game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> 2020 works from home version for pilots and flight attendants.

</comment><comment><USER30> Tokyo always coming up with the coolest things to attract tourists

</comment><comment><USER31> I still don't really get the appeal of civilian flight sim-ing. I like playing with the systems in DCS, but ultimately the end game there is to shoot each other. Usually, I can never sit there flying whereas I will spend hours lapping in rfactor2 or similar - in large part because if you're in an online race, you know that you are racing a human that you have to outbrake or outsmart.

Then again, racing cars is a lot cheaper than owning a plane.

<comment><USER32> If you can't get into flight simulators, just wait until you see the train simulators that are popular in arcades in Japan.

[https://kotaku.com/japan-still-makes-the-best-train- games-17...](https://kotaku.com/japan-still-makes-the-best-train- games-1785015249)</comment></comment>


26-year-old hacker Geohotz gets $3M for self-driving car startup - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/04/technology/george-hotz-comma-ai-andreessen-horowitz/index.html <comment><USER2> "I started to look around at the other players. These people are noobs," he said.

Pretty much all you need to know about this guy.

<comment><USER3> He's known to be acerbic and extremely difficult to work with, but he has an indisputable history of getting shit done. I respect people who can back up talk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> $3M seems low for something that is being made to sound like the next big thing?

Hopefully this doesn't turn into the next Theranos.</comment>