Java 4-ever - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrfpnbGXL70 <comment><USER2> Quote from my friend (who earns his living doing Java development):

 _"Java is COBOL of nineties. Future generations of programers will fly here from the Moon to piss on our graves for inflicting it upon them."_

<comment><USER3> You can always run more... civilized languages on top of the JVM, talking to Java classes without problem.

<comment><USER4> Or we could not use the JVM, because it's antiquated and never worked. I mean... that seems to be where everyone went five years ago.

<comment><USER5> In what way does the JVM "not work"?

<comment><USER6> I remember the days when the JVM only had mark and sweep GC and it interpreted bytecodes. I remember when the JIT kept on crashing, and Java apps were catching up to Smalltalk VMs on benchmarks, but wheezing on real apps because of poor GC. Then there was generational GC, but lots of real apps were still wheezing because no one knew how to tune the GC settings. It took a decade for the JVM to cover the same ground the Smalltalk VMs had covered 4 or 5 before it.

Now the JVM is mature, and it fricken kicks ass! Really, for a high-level OO language supporting VM, the thing just screams. It's still unwieldy and much better suited to server stuff, but as a Smalltalker and therefore a former longtime Java detractor, I have to say, I am really impressed.

<comment><USER3> So, putting it shortly, it does work.

I agree completely Smalltalk 80 kicks Java 2010's ass, but, still, saying Java does not work is kind of exaggerated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If Microsoft didn't use the excellent CLR (which is much more friendly to non C# languages than the JVM is to non-Java languages see e.g., F#) as a way to sell their crappy systems software, they'd have crushed the JVM: both in enterprise world (C#, while still a blub compared to OCaml, Scala, F# etc... it is a much better language than Java and has excellent tooling for the "large teams of average or inexperienced developers, lead by a competent architect" use case) and amongst technology companies (while J2EE is not used very frequently amongst them -- because of its association with moronic garbage like EJB 2.x -- plenty use standard Java or other JVM languages).

Dear Microsoft, Mono project has in fact already done the hard work for you. Why can't you embrace it (sponsor their developers, help them implement the latest specifications) and bless it as the "official" CLR for Linux and Mac or "alternative" CLR for Windows (much like Blackdown JDK was on Linux or the situation viz. IBM's JDK).

Sun has used this strategy in the past: use their excellent OS as a way to sell their crappy hardware ( _flame retardant suit donned for the Niagara and UltraSparc-IV fanboys_ ). They realized it's the wrong strategy, but it was too late.

</comment><comment><USER8> My general mindset about programming languages is that it doesn't matter much what toolset you use as long as it is one you know in and out.

Still, for some reason I personally wouldn't consider using Java for any programming task, ever. And I'm very curious about where this sentiment comes from. Java was my main programming language in the nineties, but the last five years I've avoided it like the plague. Whenever I hear about Java (like when seeing this clip), my spontaneous reaction is "Do people still use Java?". And that is with my wife working at Ericsson using Java as one of their main environments in huge projects alongside with C++ and Erlang. Still, it is as if I've been burnt by it. I don't want anything to do with it.

All I can come up with is that I maybe never fully grasped the build tools. I've worked in fairly large Java projects. But always with a feeling of not being fully in control, of relying on trial and error in some situations. With other toolsets I feel fully in control.

It's not you Java, it's me. But I still don't trust you. You never let me in on your secrets.

<comment><USER9> Most of my professional work life has been developing Java, and my feelings are similar to yours. I really can't stand it anymore.

However, I wonder if part of it is the experience that "most Java jobs suck", whereas in reality most jobs suck. So had I been a Ruby developer for the last 10 years, maybe now I would be sick of Ruby.

That said, there also a number of evident things that annoy me about Java.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has the Java the brand completely evolved from a enterprise Sun product, into a counterculture language? With GWT and other JVM languages, Java is starting to look cool again.

<comment><USER11> not cool, just mature/polished/stable.

<comment><USER3> Come on... The JVM is cool.

<comment><USER12> The JVM is the x86 of the VM world. Ugly, used for things it was never designed to properly handle, but also heavily optimized.

<comment><USER3> No way it could be as ugly as an x86. The x86 has been with us since the 8080 days (the 8086 was a 16-bit 8085, done in a hurry because the i432 flopped). It's a kludge wrapped in a another kludge.

Or, as people say, it's kludges all the way down.

<comment><USER12> It's not a generic VM. Sure it's got a lot of basic instructions for adding (signed) numbers together but a lot of important instructions are very high- level and very specific to Java. It was never designed to run anything else. So non-Java languages ported to the JVM do involve kludges. The comparison to x86 isn't far off.

<comment><USER3> It's improving. Java 7 is much friendlier to dynamic languages and, with it, many of the kludges will be a thing of the past.

It would need to be _really_ inelegant to warrant a comparison with the x86...

<comment><USER13> > _Java 7 is much friendlier to dynamic languages ... it would need to be > really inelegant to warrant a comparison with the x86_

Not that much, and not that inelegant ... at least x86 evolved a lot since 8086. The JVM itself evolved only in the internal architecture, but the bytecode itself is almost the same since Java 1.

The best VM for multiple language will soon prove to be LLVM, only because it makes your code cross-platform, while being low-level enough and not being strangled by a standards body.

It's actually easier to build a compiler for LLVM than it is for the JVM ... you might not go at first with a generational GC, and the speed might be terrible ... but at least you have room to grow ...

I have yet to see a language on top of the JVM beat LuaJIT2 (even Java itself can hardly beat it in simpler benchmarks). And the optimizations in Java7 can be achieved today in Java6 (with lots of workarounds, of course).

<comment><USER3> Saying the x86 evolved is like saying that, it would be evolution if I grew half a dozen tentacles, wings, two more unconnected brains, an exoskeleton and poison bags.

If you start with a can opener and attach it seats, engine, wheels, transmission and a steering wheel, all in ways it can still be in your kitchen and open cans, is it a car or a can opener? That's an x86.

I am not saying the JVM is the VM to end all VMs. It's just that it's nicely done. Much unlike the x86.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think I just found my perfect stand-up/kneel-down laptop stand

<comment><USER15> Yes, I was just about to comment that there's a comedic but still NSFW scene near the end.

<comment><USER16> The entire video is NSFW if you work in a .NET shop. But then again, those are likely to have YouTube blocked! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I laughed, but I don't think it was in the way intended by the authors.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's insane how a good music background can make a difference.

</comment><comment><USER19> ha, genius sound editing at 1:22!

<comment><USER20> i thought one of my vm's had shut down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> NSFW. A little courtesy next time.

<comment><USER22> you work at a .NET shop?

<comment><USER23> Or maybe a company full of boring, humorless teetotalers.

<comment><USER21> Not everyone has a boss that will casually look over their shoulder and laugh at the sex scene they're watching at work. Bully for you though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder what was Apple's Macbook Pro doing in that .net fanboi/freak house. They should be using windows on some dell/hp machine.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow that was funny! All roads lead to the JVM.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is precisely the type of content that shouldn't be here on HN. Sure, it's funny, but it doesn't help to facilitate intelligent discussion or add value other than humor.

<comment><USER27> You know having humor is actually considered a good character trait.

<comment><USER3> Not only that, but one of the best ways to achieve enlightenment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Funny! And the best humor usually has elements of truth to it as well.

</comment><comment><USER29> The one of the main activities of a man is to support their own [de|i]llusion and avoiding to see things as they are. ^_^

</comment><comment><USER30> Hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER31> A for effort.

</comment><comment><USER4> Heh if it wasn't for google Java would be completely dead.

<comment><USER32> Java is everywhere. You wouldn't see it on hacker news but rest assured major corporations around the world are still using java and will still be using java for years to come. I do acknowledge some may switch to dot net.

<comment><USER33> s/Java/COBOL/ig on your comment and it's just as true.

<comment><USER4> And COBOL is a horrible language.

But, I still think Fortran was pretty sweet. Also still has a pretty large user base. Especially among engineers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hackers break into Sega password database - <AUTHOR> http://www.gmanews.tv/story/223841/technology/hackers-break-into-sega-password-database

<comment><USER2> Notwithstanding that this information was reachable via a publicly breakable system, Sega appears to have done some right things, especially encrypting passwords and not storing payment information.

However, that doesn't mean users are off the hook. Having any personal data gives the criminals more scope for data mining, especially if combined with other broken data sources. And the password files are now subject to leisurely cracking in the comfort of the criminals' lairs.</comment>


How an Airbnb renter's horror story taught the company's CEO a leadership lesson - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.in/How-an-Airbnb-renters-horror-story-taught-the-companys-CEO-his-greatest-leadership-lesson/articleshow/47870665.cms

<comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr version: The embarrassment and frustration of the experience taught Chesky the lesson he considers the most important of his career: "A consensus decision in a moment of crisis is very often going to be the middle of the road, and they're usually the worst decisions. Usually in a crisis you have to go left or right."</comment>


Google installs giant Nexus S - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/23/giant-nexus-s/

<comment><USER2> I wonder how much something like this would cost if produced in bulk. I would love to run some of the iPad apps as a digital whiteboard.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft Surface sells for $12,500: [http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/Pages/HowToBuy/HowToB...](http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/Pages/HowToBuy/HowToBuy.aspx) . It's only 30 inches, but you're also getting software when you buy it.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure you can't actually buy them, any more. I know someone who tried.

<comment><USER5> my university acquired one this past fall. Not sure if it was donated (probably) or the CS department just decided "we want one" and got it.

Right now, it just sits in a corner on the third floor of our CS building, waiting for people to come buy and play chess or whatever. It's not used much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When walking through Building 43 on Google's campus for the Summer of Code Mentor's Summit I saw a version of this for the Nexus One. It was powered off but it looked like it responded to touch as well.

<comment><USER7> The second paragraph of the TechCrunch article states that "unlike the giant Nexus Ones that Google produced last year, which just played a looping video of the UI, this giant Nexus S _actually works_."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Touchscreen sensitive computer monitors are way overdue. They've had them in Kiosks forever, and I could never understand why they never tried building monitors with that functionality built right in. I want a Star Trek console already!!

<comment><USER9> Microsoft and their various 3rd party hardware vendors have been selling Windows 7 with touch screen monitors for a very long time now. Of course, no one really knows that because they're usually just sitting there at the local Fry's with no interest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would be cool to play Angry Birds on that!

</comment><comment><USER11> Great, more Android fragmentation.

</comment><comment><USER12> HELLO!? WHAT, I CAN'T HEAR YOU, I'M AT BEST BUY! WHAT? I SAID I'M AT BEST BUY! NO IT'S RUBBISH!

edit>> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYLMk8xplqw>

<comment><USER13> "This video contains content from Channel 4, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."

I'm in the UK :(</comment></comment>


Jet fuel from thin air: Aviation's hope or hype? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49725741 <comment><AUTHOR> _it will work by capturing CO2 ... from the air. In a separate process, electrolysis splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is mixed with the captured CO2 to form syngas, which can be transformed into jet fuel_ = really expensive.

 _While companies are experimenting with high tech ways to capture CO2 from the air, there 's already a very simple, efficient way to do it - <USER2> plants. And aircraft are already flying on renewable fuels made from plant biomass._

 _" alternative fuels will become competitive, if the environmental costs are built into the cost of flying, but that will mean more expensive tickets. It'll highly depend on social pressure but there are no technical objections."_

</comment><comment><USER3> Whatever happened to Prometheus? I haven't heard anything since their launch [0]. The website doesn't have any updates [1]. Complete radio silence.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240)

[1] [https://www.prometheusfuels.com/](https://www.prometheusfuels.com/)</comment>


Honeybees are found to interact with quantum fields - <AUTHOR> http://science.box.sk/newsread.php?newsid=6321 <comment><USER2> Horrible headline.

The part of the article that talks about quantum mumbo-jumbo is prefaced with this:

"At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded scholarship and enters instead the airy realm of speculation."

It also says,

"But she tends not to have much professional company when she reveals what she thinks is responsible for the bees' response."

I'd be happy to put money down that this turns out to be bunk. Not that I know anything more than the person making these claims, but purely informed by history. Many, many scientists (including most famously Roger Penrose) have claimed that quantum phenomena exist in the biological world. None of these claims have been proven.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Perhaps I can explain a little more what she discovered, and why this connection to QFT is almost surely nonsense.

The flag manifold in question comes from matrix groups; basically, consider some subset of 3x3 matrices which satisfy a certain property. I.e., certain types of transformations of a 3d space. While the space of 3x3 matrices has 3x3=9 dimensions, subsets can have fewer dimensions (in this case, 6).

The two-dimensional projections she discovered are functions of the 6 dimensional matrices.

So here is the occams razor explanation for what is happening. Inside the bee's head is an ODE (ordinary differential equation) solver, basically an analog computer. Just think of the ODE solver as a complicated timer, but with output depending on both time and some hidden variable. These are common objects in biology, and don't require many neurons.

The output of the ODE solver is wired to some neurons which reduce 6 variables to 2, according to the formula she discovered.

This is a fantastic discovery, a triumph of applied math. But the connection to QFT is almost surely coincidence: QFT uses symmetries of matrix groups over 3 dimensions, and the bee (which lives in 3 dimensions) also does.

This phenomenon is called universality. Certain objects repeat across diverse areas simply because it is the only logical way (or the most common logical way) that things could happen.

<comment><USER4> All at once you brought together Occam's Razor, Universality, differential equations, manifolds, and quantum field theory into a comment I actually understand. You should teach.

<comment><USER5> He invoked Occam's Razor. But most of the other stuff he only mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting article, but the headline is a bit misleading:

"At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded scholarship and enters instead the airy realm of speculation. The flag manifold, she notes, in addition to providing mathematicians with pure joy, also happens to be useful to physicists in solving some of the mathematical problems that arise in dealing with quarks, tiny particles that are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. And she does not believe the manifold's presence both in the mathematics of quarks and in the dance of honeybees is a coincidence. Rather she suspects that the bees are somehow sensitive to what's going on in the quantum world of quarks, that quantum mechanics is as important to their perception of the world as sight, sound, and smell."

</comment><comment><USER7> Sigh. What the article claims is that the structure of bee dances are like the structure of the maths used in quantum physics. So what? bee brains could have neural nets that produce similar output as the quantum physics models.

Correlation is not causation - that's an elementary mistake.

And I'm still not sure what a "quantum field" is. The probability of an electron being present? We all interact with those when we press up against you know, matter.

<comment><USER8> _bee brains could have neural nets that produce similar output as the quantum physics models_

I think that's the point of the article. Bee brains couldn't with only a few million neurons. That's not to say she is right.

<comment><USER7> Why ever not with "only" a few million neurons? Have you proved, mathematically, that there is a lower limit?

How many neurons does it take to crunch a few patterns? I'd think that a couple thousand ought to do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awful headline, and article could benefit from an editor and some pictures of the dances/projections described.

But, the similarity between bee dances and smaller-dimension projections of 6-dimensional shapes is very interesting... it bees have evolved an efficient storage/communication format for their path data.

And yet, what are the 6 dimensions? 3 for coordinates in space; 1 for time, then... ? Magnetic field strength? Environmental scent gradients?

Oh, I know! Just like ants leave chemical trails, bees would like to do the same. But in the air, chemicals would blow away.... in _our_ universe. So they use their wings as tiny oscillation overthrusters and leave a stigmergic trail in _the 8th dimension_. Someone tell Dr. Banzai, and watch out for lectroids.

<comment><USER4> Given what's already known of the bee dance I suspect it's all about radial vectors:

Angle of the sun to the hive

Angle of the hive to the food

Distance to the food

Angle of horizon to food (height)

Angle of up (gravity)

Angle of magnetic north

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's funny about this headline is that almost everything interacts with quantum fields. Indeed, that's what matter is. If you look at in the right way, a honeybee is what you get when you apply just the right sequence of field creation operators to the vacuum.

</comment><comment><USER11> Golden ratio, quantum mechanics... Those bees are quite sophisticated.

BTW: *.box.sk == old school

<comment><USER12> Tell me you remember the timeless astalavista.box.sk ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thanks! Very interesting discussion, just let me add two little pieces of information that might be useful to the people who would like to inquire further:

One of the first if not the first to propose quantum mechanical processes related to consciousness was Evan Harris Walker his book "The physics of consciousness" (Basic Books, 2000) which makes a very interesting reading.

The latest on this, as far as I know, can be found in the book "Quantum Aspects of Life" (Word Scientific, 2008)

Happy New Year!

</comment><comment><USER14> box.sk found to interact with nut jobs

</comment><comment><USER15> Emperor's New Mind, anyone?

</comment><comment><USER16> they must do something to that site. way too painful to read.

</comment><comment><USER17> Read Richard Dawkins.</comment>


Chinese woman offered refund for iPhone X after facial recognition failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2124313/chinese-woman-offered-refund-after-facial-recognition-allows <comment><USER2> Is the iPhone X racist now?</comment>


Show HN: A new image sharing service - <AUTHOR> https://itsosticky.com/ <comment><USER2> You should read this:

[https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of- onli...](https://drewdevault.com/2014/10/10/The-profitability-of-online- services.html)

Disclaimer: I wrote it

<comment><USER3> tl;dr: what about developers?

When I started building Theneeds, we wanted users to be able to post, like in Twitter. And soon, we wanted users to be able to attach photos or other media.

For media in the sense of an url that we then embed/display it's relatively easy. And even easier if you pay for an external service like embed.ly to do the job.

For images it's a mess. We had to take care about uploading, resizing, posting async to s3, invalidating caches, and of course displaying. If I had to do that again, I'd surely look for an external service (that I didn't find at that time).

Maybe this is a viable way to monetize? I guess that there are quite a good number of companies that need upload+display of UG images, or at least that they could do it if it was easier to plug in.

Just for reference, embed.ly costs 20$/mo for just display, so I guess you could at least ask for that + storage costs.

Next, you could add additional services such as cdn support, or anti spam/copyright infringement/adult content/etc.

<comment><USER4> imgix offers a solid solution in this space nowadays

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A new image sharing service

Itsosticky is a brand new image sharing service with some ambition, just launched after a year of development.

More info is available here [https://itsosticky.com/about](https://itsosticky.com/about)

There are several things that make this different to other image sharing services. Itsosticky will quickly and automatically rescale images that are above a certain size threshold, with auto-orientation of JPEGs uploaded from phones. The layout is fully responsive, allowing for consistent URIs when shared across devices. It's light weight, with no advertising technologies.

Many of the images currently displayed in the gallery are simply placeholders dropped onto the site by helpful beta users, and there are surely bugs to address here or there, but by and large, Itsosticky is ready for use.

Thanks for taking a look. Feedback from mobile devices would be particularly valuable.

Please upvote if you think this service is worthwhile and deserves to go somewhere.

<comment><USER5> How do you plan on enforcing the no-NSFW policy? That seems close to impossible pre-monetization unless you spent most of that year training a neural network.

<comment><USER6> Could always use [https://www.projectoxford.ai](https://www.projectoxford.ai) or something like it. I know Google just came out with an API for generating text descriptions of images. Perhaps if scanned images passed through this api were tagged with certain words, the images could be marked for moderation and not shown until approved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks extremely similar to Imgur, including the colors and modals. What would you say separates it from Imgur? Why did it takes a year to develop?

<comment><USER8> > Why did it [take] a year to develop?

I believe this is your answer (from the About page):

> Almost every piece of code is ad hoc, built from the ground up to be as > lightweight and efficient as possible.

My opinion is they most likely built many things which were already available in the open-source world.

<comment><USER9> > ...built from the ground up to be as lightweight and efficient as possible.

This is my favorite part. So many sites start out this way, then become slow, unresponsive and bulky. Here's to hoping it stays slim and quick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's cool. How do you plan on getting people to use it? The reddit userbase basically propelled Imgur into an overnight success.

</comment><comment><USER11> its ok. I still think imgur is slightly better to use. Just my common example : I will find images and using their url upload, upload the image so that I have an easily shareable link. On your page its a two step process. I had to first enter the url, press the www button (which wasn't immediately apparent ) and then pressed the upload button. On imgur its only enter link and upload.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can drag and drop from other web pages or copy and paste via Ctrl-v. Might be a useful one-step alternative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow that looks nothing like imgur :/

</comment><comment><USER13> Infinite scrolling is broken. [https://itsosticky.com/1srfcne](https://itsosticky.com/1srfcne)

Scroll down, scroll back up, scroll down again.</comment>


Ask HN: South African Internet Is Disrupted. Please Assist - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
The WACS undersea cable is reporting a fault (https://www.businessinsider.co.za/wacs-undersea-internet-cable-is-broken-again-2020-3). My immediate network relies on international bandwidth to participate in meetings and work sessions.
One approach I considered to overcome these limitations was to provision a VPS on a local host through analysis of peering agreements and how they mapped to physical undersea cables --> ZA. Algo server would then get us a route out that has better performance.
Does this sound reasonable? Any assistance would be appreciated.
Thanks, - nsomaru <comment><USER2> Huh!? Usually VPN to another more technically stable country should work.</comment>


Ask HN: What password management system do you use? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to start using random passwords for [almost] everything to be more secure. What do you use to manage your passwords?<p>(I'm on a Mac, but all suggestions are welcome) <comment><USER2> For my personal stuff, I've done pretty well with Keepass + Dropbox. I wrote a blog post about it some time back : [http://vermasque.blogspot.com/2011/04/simple-effective- passw...](http://vermasque.blogspot.com/2011/04/simple-effective-password- management.html)

On my Macbook at work, I just use the system keychain. It's simpler as I don't use my work passwords beyond that machine.

</comment><comment><USER3> For browser-based authentication I use lastpass.

For servers, encryption keys, or really anything I want to keep safe but available to myself, I use Emacs, Org-Mode with org-crypt, and Dropbox. Any Org-Mode header tagged with :crypt: will be encrypted against my gnupg key.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1password, it's great with dropbox but if you get the feeling you're buying the same program over and over again, it's because you are - mac, windows, ios, android at least is free.

</comment><comment><USER5> Keepass / KeepassX. The latter would work for you.

I bring around my database on a usb key and to add another layer of security have a key required to open the database itself.

</comment><comment><USER6> lastpass.com

</comment><comment><USER7> TL;DR: KeePass with Subversion.

In my previous position as a systems administrator, I shared responsibility for approximately 120 Unix and Windows servers. We used KeePass to house a master password list which was then stored in a Subversion repository.

We used KeePass because it would run on all three desktop environments used in our shop (Windows, Mac, Linux). The single password database was protected with a very long passphrase known by us five systems administrators and our manager.

We used Subversion to manage updates, distribution and backups of the password database.

The only caveat I can think of is that you have to have some sort of update policy for what versions of the password file is authoritative or the database(s) can get out of sync.

Our solution was to simply say the last commit into Subversion was authoritative and it was your responsibility to make sure the copy on your local machine was up-to-date before you started modifying it with new information. This effectively eliminated having personalized copies on your desktop because no one wanted to have to retype all the passwords if their version wasn't authoritative.</comment>


Bit permutations - <AUTHOR> http://programming.sirrida.de/bit_perm.html <comment><USER2> Some time ago I wrote a little function to calculate the nth point's coordinates on a Hilbert curve. It uses pext and pdep intrinsics to avoid loops, it's completely branchless.

[https://github.com/leni536/fast_hilbert_curve](https://github.com/leni536/fast_hilbert_curve)

[https://github.com/leni536/fast_hilbert_curve/wiki/How- effic...](https://github.com/leni536/fast_hilbert_curve/wiki/How-efficient-is- it)

Maybe I will write an explanation how it works and implement the inverse function similarly.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very good, but I wish it was more up to date:

From the link: "Finally I optionally challenge the methods gather/scatter and sheep and goats utilizing PEXT and PDEP. I do not know how fast these methods will be since there is not yet any real hardware and no timing tables available. I guess that they are not faster than one AND and one SHL/SHR/ROL instruction, and so I optimize to masking and shifting if possible."

PEXT and PDEP have been in everything since Haswell (2013) and are latency 3, throughput 1. His guess is actually correct.

Another approach to bit permute is to use the byte-level permutes in SSE/AVX2/AVX512. It's slightly ponderous, especially given the fact that AVX512 won't have byte permute before the VBMI instruction extension. But there will be a short instruction sequence that can permute up to a 64-bit word (or even across a pair of 64-bit words) via a trip through SIMD. Smaller scale permutes can be done with PSHUFB _now_ , of course, and sufficiently clever people can figure out how to compose these smaller scale permutes into bigger ones.

See [https://software.intel.com/en-us/isa- extensions](https://software.intel.com/en-us/isa-extensions) for details of the future instruction stuff (VBMI).

</comment><comment><USER4> If you enjoyed this you might also like [http://www.hackersdelight.org](http://www.hackersdelight.org) and the associated book.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bit Twiddling Hacks [0] is also good. (HN discussion: [1])

[0] [https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html](https://graphics.stanford.edu/~seander/bithacks.html)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12026879](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12026879)</comment></comment>


Europe is selling out its water... - <AUTHOR> http://www.right2water.eu

<comment><USER2> There's nothing to discuss in this link, nor any evidence that the EU is actually selling out its water.

<comment><USER3> This link represents a move to pushback on the EU directives that are trying to make water something that can be privatized. The link is about the anti- privatization move from the EU citizens. You should visit sites like: <https://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/17-2> to get a better grasp of the discussion before stating there is no evidence that the EU is selling "its" water. First, water doesn't belong to the EU. Second, the comission has accepted a report that pushed legislation towards water being privatized, exploiting some nations over others. You can read more at [http://corporateeurope.org/pressreleases/2012/eu- commission-...](http://corporateeurope.org/pressreleases/2012/eu-commission- forces-crisis-hit-countries-privatise-water) I don't know if this passes for "evidence" under your scrutiny, but the first site you found to have nothing to discuss shows how almost a million europeans are on to this corporate exploratory move.</comment></comment>


Firefox Lite now sending ad notifications, like a cheap mobile game - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/eozrdw/xpost_firefox_lite_is_now_sending_ad <comment><AUTHOR> The writing has been on the wall [https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/edgi2s/firefox_lit...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/edgi2s/firefox_lite_keeps_adding_more_bloat).</comment>


Show HN: A lightweight message based Java 8 Client-Server TCP library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vikwin/FunctionalTCPServer <comment><USER2> Hm, except it's full of IO leaks (finally missing when closing resources), it misses any synchronization, what is it good for ?</comment>


Ask HN: How many hours did you spend on investor pitch? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> To set the stage, it's been rumored that when Steve Jobs was preparing for press events he'd rehearse his presentation approximately 72 hours. So whomever suggests that you can over-prepare is giving you bad advice.

As for the pitch deck itself, if you have the ability to tell stories and design good looking slides, I'd give yourself 1 week on the first draft and then begin pitching to lower tier investors -- ask them for their take on the presentation and advice. Your deck is a living artifact so you may find yourself throwing out the first version and starting over or just simply iterating on it with each subsequent investor meeting. Regardless, use a template to get yourself out of the gate -- [http://newhaircut.com/pitch-deck- design](http://newhaircut.com/pitch-deck-design).

If all you can manage to put together is a snoozer that will have your investor questioning your ability to breathe, let alone run a business, get some outside help. This process shouldn't take more than 7-10 days.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm of the opinion that it's possible to over think these things and be over prepared, so limit yourself to a time.

I'd spend the majority of your time prepping what an investor really cares about. That is, "how big is the market oppurtunity?" and "How do you generate revenue?". If those two things are compelling enough and you articulate them well, they will want to know more.

Overall I'd say 4-5 hours on the pitch deck and then 1-3 practicing (depending on how confident a public speaker you are). Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER4> Depends -- how well you know the subject matter & details. Have you thought through how to handle potential objections and areas of concern? Suggest reading Oren Klaff's Pitch Anything! > [http://salestipaday.com/2011/10/19/oren-klaff-pitch- anything...](http://salestipaday.com/2011/10/19/oren-klaff-pitch-anything-how- to-prepare-for-a-meeting/)

</comment><comment><USER5> The first one that got a tiny bit of seed money? under 10.</comment>


Grad school versus prison, quantified - <AUTHOR> https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/12/09/grad-school-versus-prison-quantified/ <comment><USER2> In my neck of the woods, southeasterm Europe, PhD students are the ones that are looking for an easy gig, usually less paid, with most of them having no ambition for academia and lecturing and yet without having any industrial plan with their thesis. Not really the cream of the crop, I'd say about 70% of them have no place teaching or grading papera, per my and my former colleagues' opinion. They're just looking to extend their student era. They're generally happy, some are aware of their lack of plan for the future and thus just a tiny bit anxious, but still optimistic. Of course some are simply gifted and simply born for research and teaching, but those are as rare as a good project manager. Funny.</comment>


Ask HN: Why don't browsers have billing+shipping APIs? This would kill Amazon - <AUTHOR> Every time you do a purchase online, you need to send the site two pieces of information
- billing information (credit card information)
- a shipping address.
You could go through the site like you normally do, create a shopping cart, then on checkout, the sites sends the user to an XML/JSON page saying basically:
"The user wants to buy this, can we have his billing information?"
At that point the user confirms the shopping cart locally, the the browser sends the billing information to the site.
This is done right now with credit cards but not with addresses.
If Mozilla or Chrome did this it would REALLY hurt Amazon but also really ENABLE smaller merchant sites.
IT would also make buying things from 3rd parties super easy.
One of the nice things of buying from Amazon is the one click shopping which doesn't exist anywhere else really. <comment><USER2> There literally is a web payments API, part of which is a PaymentAddress component.

It's supported by Safari, Chrome, Edge and Firefox, on desktop, Android and iOS, according to MDN.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Req...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Payment_Request_API)

<comment><USER3> Any websites that utilize this API?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I doubt it would hurt Amazon at all. In fact, if you could propose a way to do it without any serious UX or security concerns, they'd probably sponsor the effort.

There's a whole lot more to e-commerce than accepting customer information.

<comment><USER5> Yeah: unless Chrome also decides to handle shipping and fulfillment, and sets up a brick and mortar pickup location down the street from me, I continue to prefer to purchase products available on Amazon (to the point where I recently got sold on the idea of buying something, couldn't find it on Amazon, and so bought one of its competitors instead as I just didn't want to deal with a non-Amazon shipment).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This addresses one part of concerns with online commerce, and might well be relegated to a separate shopping application (total segregation of normal Web + commerce activity and resulting data).

It's still only a part of what a major ecommerce vendor offers, other elements being, potentially, supplier relations, purchaser guarantees, ratings and feedback systems, fraud detection (both buy and sell sides), fulfillment, physical delivery, advertising and brand awareness, lobbying, and more. Competition in these areas would remain.

Any browser-inherent features would also all but certainly move more slowly than independently developed capabilities.

Given the present browser market, it would also have to specifically appeal to Google, even Safari and Firefox are extremely distant rivals in that space. Though as noted at the top: a free-standing open shopping/commerce dedicated app might appear.

It's still quite possible an ecommerce monopolist could capture or repel such an initiative, whether in existing or new applications.

All that said, I'd encourage exploration of the idea, it's certainly occurred to me previously.

</comment><comment><USER7> If the web payments api was more used that would be a good way to do it. However, Amazon success doesn't just rely on simple payments, but supply chain, logistics and overall ubiquity in the market. Many of those strengths can be eroded for sure, with time, but not by the corner shop alone that decides to open a Shopify store...

</comment><comment><USER8> I find myself buying from Amazon for two main reasons:

1 Delivery is quick and my parcels will be left in a location selected by me - many other companies won't leave parcels. Lockers are great too, when I'm in a location that has them.

2 Great customer service

A billing/shipping API won't impact my reasons for using Amazon. I'd love to use other companies but they aren't getting the basics right at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER9> Apple Pay does exactly this, shipping/billing address and all.

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_web)

Here's a demo:

[https://applepaydemo.apple.com/](https://applepaydemo.apple.com/)

Scroll to "Try it: ApplePayPaymentRequest"

Select the Detailed Request radio button.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not everyone can take up banks for a sellers mistake

</comment><comment><USER12> Why kill amazon?</comment>


MacRumors Buyers Guide gets an shiny new UI - <AUTHOR> http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

<comment><USER2> Neat, concise, simple, clean.</comment>


Learn X in Y minutes - <AUTHOR> https://learnxinyminutes.com/ <comment><USER2> The site doesn't _quite_ live up to the title — you're not actually going to completely learn a language using it — but it's very neat nonetheless. I find that it works well to get a quick feeling for a language that I'm considering to pick up, or as a refresher on the syntax of a language I haven't used in a bit.</comment>


WebMynd · Demo - <AUTHOR> http://www.webmynd.com/demo?query=Angel%20Investors-Entrepreneurs <comment><USER2> Gosh, was surprised to see our demo page posted!

It will only work in Internet Explorer and Firefox right now since we have browser extensions for those two platforms only. And the purpose of the page is to show roughly how WebMynd will make Google look like once you install it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't see a thing in Google Chrome or Safari. It's fine with Firefox 3 though.

</comment><comment><USER4> EDIT: [ I have serious doubts that this is a bot! At the time of writing this, the account of "jg2009" is created 44 minutes ago!

There is another entry about justin.tv's down - the duplicated one, and I also suspect that who wrote it is a bot too!

I am afraid of that HN would being face another type of spam attack... but I am not sure.

]

After hanging up my Internet explorer 7 browser for 2 minutes (and was about being crashed), it worked hardly fine... The icons of Flickr, TC, and webmynd history don't show up... it's down.</comment>


Show HN: Get a free, hosted static website and help me out of debt - <AUTHOR> http://atyay.xyz <comment><USER2> I think you might have had more luck with clickthroughs if you had posted a higher debt amount. $2000 is nothing, at least in the US. Between just student loans and my car loan I've got over 10x that amount of debt, and I have a smaller amount of student loans than the average nowadays (and many times less than several people I know, some of which have over $100k in student debt...with a humanities degree, even).

So anyway, when I saw that amount I was just like "Ha, that's nothing. My number is much higher." And I didn't feel that compelled to help. I don't really want to admit that, but I thought you should be aware of it, since it's your experiment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your ASKHN about html5 games, it was really helpful.

<comment><USER2> You're welcome. Glad it ended up helping people. I didn't really follow up on what people suggested yet. Your comment reminded me that I should look into that again, so thanks :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ignoring the fact that this isn't tugging at emotions, it's a straight up lie and you're aware of it, since you said it was a con.

This doesn't even prove that people are willing to give you "more" considering there isn't an option for less, to zero, amounts to donate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wouldn't not giving an option for less amounts be easier than giving it? If they don't want to pay more then they just don't pay at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://essays.eidetia.com/emotionmodel.html](http://essays.eidetia.com/emotionmodel.html)

<comment><USER4> Post by same guy : looks like an 'experiment'

<comment><AUTHOR> Bingo ;)

<comment><USER4> Hey , I am working on couple of projects would love to connect with you . Your blog looks interesting :) \- piyush

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, eidetia.com/contact.html Whatsapp me from the number given there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish I was only $2,000 in debt. I'm several hundred times that amount in debt!

<comment><USER6> Can you share how you got into such a big amount of debt?

<comment><USER7> They could be referring to their mortgage

<comment><USER8> And a car. Many people have car debts. 2k debt is nothing, for this debt society heh.

Note that i hate debt, and fight to have none of it and i'm not excusing it; but, i do have a car loan _(my only debt)_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm confused, how is this free if i pay $100 for it? I'm not knocking his pitch, or even talking about it at all really - i'm just trying to understand the title. What is free exactly?

<comment><AUTHOR> It was an experiment - essays.eidetia.com/emotionmodel.html And the title was a clickbait, so...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Get a free, hosted static website and help me pay my bills

Get a free, hosted static website and help me feed my children

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I apologize to everyone whose time was wasted by my silly experiment.</comment>


Why Nobody Can Match the iPad's Price - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/02/ipad-price/ <comment><USER6> One factor that the author doesn't mention is Apple's success at lining up deals with component manufacturers. A couple years ago (before anyone had heard of the iPad) they locked in great prices on flash memory and LCD displays. They could do that because they were about to invent a huge market, and they knew it. Anyone trying to get into the tablet business in 2010 had to pay much, much more.

Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive are no slouches, but Tim Cook doesn't get enough credit for stuff like that.

<comment><USER7> A hundred upvotes, really. Tim Cook turned Apple from a sloppy, cluttered mess to a perfectly tuned and calibrated machine. He designs business processes like Ive designs hardware enclosures. He's still at it, too, telling investors during the last earnings call that Apple once again snapped up a boatload of supply on an _unnamed type of component_.

I bet he'd be _amazing_ at Starcraft, once he learned the ropes.

<comment><USER8> I believe it. In Starcraft, Macro beats Micro.

<comment><USER9> Tell that to those tanks!

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3IbwjeCx6U>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _"That's (Apple stores) advantageous, because if the iPad were primarily sold at third-party retail stores, a big chunk of profit would go to those retailers, Hiner reasons."_

 _"Designing in-house means Apple doesn't have to pay licensing fees to third parties to use their intellectual property. For instance, the A4 chip"_

This is silly. Software development, retail, chip design etc. all cost money. Apple isn't just taking Bets Buy's cut, it's taking its risk and its costs. Same for chips, software, etc. Actually it's more risky and costly in many ways. If the chip turned out to be good but not ideal for iPads they're not going to go find a different market for it. Apple stores aren't free to cash in on whatever popular high margin non-Apple widget people are buying this season.

Vertically integrating obviously works well for Apple, but saying that Apple is able to sell iPads @ $500 because of it is missing the point. You now just have to explain what makes apple good at retail, software, chip design, etc.

<comment><USER11> iOS development was already paid for by the iPhone and iPod teams, as was chip design.

And the App store and iTunes are a benefit, not a cost.

However I agree, there are other reasons - their outsourcing of components has a very good reputation.

<comment><USER12> There is a bit of a contradiction. It cannot be both great that Apple doesn't outsource its retailing and great that Apple outsources its components production. Economically, it should buy from the cheapest and most efficient source all it requires. If best buy are more efficient retailers, then Apple should use them; but I think there are some advertising advantages to their stores.

<comment><USER6> "It cannot be both great that Apple doesn't outsource its retailing and great that Apple outsources its components production."

Why not? Outsourcing isn't always good or always bad.

Economically, Apple should do the things it can do well (software, design, retail) and outsource the things it can't do any better than anyone else (component production, assembly).

<comment><USER12> I think we are saying the same thing, and I just did not say it well. My problem with the statement I quoted is that it is unconditioned on efficiency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Apple is the most vertically integrated company in the world."

I struggle to see how that statement could be true for a company that outsources all of its manufacturing.

<comment><USER14> The wording here is "most" There was an article written in 2006 saying "Designed By Apple in California. Made in a sweat-shop in China." ([http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2006/06/designed_by_app....](http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/2006/06/designed_by_app.html))

Architecturally wise they are vertically integreated with all their in house hardware and software but I dont think anyone can argue that their manufacturing practices dont help that statement.

<comment><USER9> There used to be a time when Left-leaning people knew some history. Terrible as the worker conditions might have been at the dawn of the Industrial Age, they were a vast improvement compared to the past.

Equally so, unpleasant as Chinese factories may look to a Westerner, they are an improvement over the past. Have people actually asked those workers if they were willing to quit or had better prospects elsewhere?

<comment><USER15> > There used to be a time when Left-leaning people knew some history.

Everyone tends to view history from an angle that supports their preconceptions. You don't seem to be any exception.

> Terrible as the worker conditions might have been at the dawn of the > Industrial Age, they were a vast improvement compared to the past.

How are you defining worker conditions?

A family with a small plot in the countryside could not occupy their full time with cultivating the land. If you travel throughout the deep countryside of countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, China and the poorer parts of Thailand like Isaan, you still see much evidence of this today.

People moved to the cities because they could make more money. It's that simple. In no way were working conditions an improvement if you care about hours, health and safety. The ready availability of jobs for unskilled labor also created perverse incentives for parents to send their children to work at the factories. That was true in late 18th and early 19th century Europe, and it is still true today in the poorer emerging economies.

<comment><USER9> And you suppose making more money, or wanting to, is somehow evil?

<comment><USER15> I suppose, said or insinuated no such thing. What a childish comeback.

Of course it isn't evil. If you're starving then making money is not only not evil but a necessity. Beyond meeting your immediate needs, working endless hours at a repetitive, unhealthy job to support your family or further your children's future is commendable.

That does not mean worker conditions improved with industrialization as compared to working on your own farm or as a day laborer.

<comment><USER9> A standard of living is not made by just the raw hours of leisure. Industrialization also brought security from famine and allowed for hygiene, sewage and medicine. It also allows people to chose to work very little, _just to support their bare necessities_ (although very few chose to).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _"Designing in-house means Apple doesn't have to pay licensing fees to third > parties to use their intellectual property. For instance, the A4 chip"_

Isn't the A4 an ARM + PowerVR and doesn't Apple pay design licenses on both those?

<comment><USER17> More than just licensing the tech, Apple buys the companies who make it. Apple owns Intrinsity, which designed the A4 processor. Apple also owns P.A. Semi, which contributed to the A4 SoC. Apple partially (10%) owns Imagination Technologies, the makers of PowerVR.

<comment><USER18> > Apple owns Intrinsity, which designed the A4 processor.

That's a pretty long shot. Intrinsity clearly improved the A4, but overall A4 is a very standard Cortex A8 SoC.

> Apple also owns P.A. Semi, which contributed to the A4 SoC.

I have not seen any analysis or information pointing to actual PA Semi input in A4. Where Intrinsity is well known for improvements to existing designs (power-wise, mostly), PA Semi is generally credited with brand new and unique design, which the A4 isn't. I also understand most of PA Semi left after its acquisition.

<comment><USER17> > Intrinsity clearly improved the A4, but overall A4 is a very standard Cortex > A8 SoC.

Agreed. According to the Times, Intrinsity only made the Cortex A8 perform at a higher frequency [0]. An another Times article suggests PA Semi worked on the A4 [1], but no details are given.

[0] <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/technology/28apple.html>

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/technology/business- comput...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/technology/business- computing/02chip.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Apple has partnered with a few retail chains such as Best Buy and Walmart, > but those stores always seem to get a small number of units in stock. Hiner > rationalizes that the true purpose of these partnerships is probably to help > spread the marketing message, not so much to sell iPads.

The display unit at WalMart is behind plexiglass. If you want to touch it, someone with a key has to open the cover. I'm glad to see current Apple products at WalMart, but the actual sales experience is significantly less than going to an Apple store, or to BB.

IMHO, the real secret behind the iPad's price is supply chain management and very astute inventory control. Idle inventory can really wreck your bottom line.

</comment><comment><USER20> > _Designing in-house means Apple doesn't have to pay licensing fees to third > parties to use their intellectual property. For instance, the A4 chip inside > the iPad is based on technology developed and owned by Apple (not Intel, AMD > or Nvidia). The operating system is Apple's own, not something licensed from > Microsoft or Google._

Apple doesn't/didn't pay licensing fees to ARM or PowerVR for the A4 components?

What exactly do you have to pay to Google to "license" Android?

It seems like the author doesn't quite know what he's talking about.

<comment><USER21> >What exactly do you have to pay to Google to "license" Android?

For one thing, all of Google's core applications - Gmail, Maps, Search, Google Voice, Googles, etc. Same thing with the Marketplace too. All the handset manufacturers have to pay Google to include those apps on their handsets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> From the mouth of the CEO of motorola, the wifi-only Xoom to be priced at $600, he announced Wednesday.

[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/02/motorola-xoom- ta...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/02/motorola-xoom-tablet-will- come-in-wifi-only-version-priced-at-600.ars)

<comment><USER23> That's still $100 more expensive than the cheapest WiFi iPad and only $29 cheaper than the cheapest WiFi + 3G iPad.

<comment><USER24> and it's competing with a product announced over a year ago, not the next generation of iPad due any day now.

<comment><USER25> For that extra $100 you get 2 cameras, dual core instead of single core processor, 1gb ram instead of 256mb ram, 1080p instead of 720p, 1280 resolution instead of 1024, android 3.0 (built for tablets) instead of ios 4, expandable storage up to 32gb microsd, flash support, hdmi, usb 2.0, gyroscope, 4g (for the more expensive model), and a motherfrackin' barometer :)

And by the way there are perfectly good android tablets already available for around half the price of the cheapest ipad. You can already run android 3.0 on a $249 nook color.

<comment><USER26> Are you seriously comparing an iPad to a Nook Color?

<comment><USER27> Why not? Even if you compared it as "half the iPad at half the price" - <USER2> still is a touch based tablet computer with similar hardware to the iPad, albeit a smaller screen.

Nook color full specs:

Processor: ARM Cortex A8-based Ti OMAP 3621 @ 800 MHz (same processor as Droid 2 and Droid X) GPU Processor: PowerVR SGX530 Graphics Rendering: Open GLES1.1/2.0 Hardware Scaling: 854x480 scaled to 1024x600 Video Formats: .3GP, .MP4, .3G2 __Video Codecs: H.263, H.264, MPEG-4, ON2 VP7 __Image Formats: JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP __(same GPU as Droid 2 and Droid X) RAM: 512MB Hynix H8MBX00U0MER-0EM MCM (Stacked Chips 2x256MB each die mDDR) Internal Flash: 8GB Sandisk SDIN4C1-8g Removable Flash: 32GB via microSDHC Connectivity: 802.11b/g/n Security: WEP/WPA/WPA2/802.1x Mode: Infrastructure Display: 7" 1024x600 IPS Display w\VividView Cypress Semiconductor TTSP Gen 3 (TMA340) Touchscreen , kernel driver , reference LG Display LD070WS1 (SL)(02) LED Backlight Pixels per Inch: 169 Aspect Ratio: 16:9 Colors: 16 Million Viewing Angle: 178° (same as HTC 7 Surround and HTC 7 Mozart) battery Battery Life: ~8 hours Micro-B USB 2.0 High-Speed Accelerometer

So B&N is able to deliver a device with matching specs minus smaller display for $250 less than iPad. I am not counting magic or experience anywhere - <USER3> are talking about concrete stuff like hardware components here - <USER4> Honeycomb we could argue that it is possible to ship a iPad alternative with better hardware and equal or better software for $499.

<comment><USER26> I think your comparison is more than a little narrow. The Nook and the iPad are marginally similar but not really comparable devices. There's a reason why one has been far more successful than the other, and no, I'm not referring to any sort of "magic" or ephemeral voodoo.

But there's a larger point to be made in that I think your comments reflect a common attitude among many nerds - this obsession with specs. Most consumers don't make purchasing decisions based on a giant list of specs. Maybe you feel they should and they're stupid for not doing so, but that just isn't the reality of the market. And many manufactures, as well as Google, are starting to realize they simple can't put a faster processor and more memory in their products and expect to compete with Apple. Google in particular is putting a lot more effort in to the "polish" and overall "experience" of using Android devices. I know these are dirty words for some, but they reflect the market realities of how consumers make purchasing decisions. And I think it's a good move that will help Android increase it's market share even further.

<comment><USER27> I am not denying the "experience" factor. You are right that most consumers don't care about specs at that detailed a level - they do care in general at high level about it, i.e. screen sizes and storage space etc. but that is besides the point.

What I am pointing out is that it is possible to produce and sell a device that can compete with the iPad on specs and experience - the original article said nobody else could sell a device matching the specs of the iPad at $500. It clearly is possible and with Honeycomb improving the experience the software part is also covered - mostly for free to Android tablet device makers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I guess it's also a problem with Android. When the iPad is sold for the low price, they're aiming for market share. This in turn, attracts developers which attract consumers where apple makes a nice 30%. But if Motorola competed for a low price, it wouldn't necessarily secure a future as it only furthers the Android platform, which any vendor can build on top of. Thus it doesn't make sense for any Android tablet vendors to play loss-leader, while it does for Apple to.

</comment><comment><USER29> As far as I'm concerned, I'm not sure this is about price. Yes, I have the $499 Wi-Fi iPad, but I bought it over the Kindle, Nook, and Galaxy because it's a perfect blend of technology and efficiency.

The Galaxy feels like a clunker, and the Nook isn't versatile.

I don't believe the iPad can replace a decent netbook or macbook for working on the road, but it works great for doing what it's supposed to do.

The reason the competition can't get it right is because they're trying to compete by adding more junk that we don't need. They do the same with phones too. Loading more memory or faster processors isn't what works for me - <USER5> works for me is a lightweight device that works.

I rarely use my iPad, but I wouldn't sell it because it serves a great purpose, which is as a tweener. The competition is trying to turn their tablets into souped up netbooks with touch screens, and that's why they are failing.

<comment><USER30> The Kindle is not a tablet though. That's not dismissing the Kindle (I own one of the big sized Kindle's and I lvoe it), Amazon explicitedly has set out to make an e-book reader, not a tablet.

The Nook is closer, but it still isn't comparable to an iPad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> When I read about the component shortages of 10" displays, I couldn't help but think about Steve Jobs rant last year about tablet sizes. He went on about how Apple had thought a lot about tablet screen sizes, and that you needed a 10" screen to get a decent experience. The companies deciding on a 7" screen had made the wrong choice.

It now seems like he was just mocking the competition about being unable to ship a similar price competitive tablet.

</comment><comment><USER30> The most ironic part of the iPad (and now Android) tablet explosion is that hard Bill Gates had been pushing tablets for _years_ at Microsoft. And now Microsoft doesn't even have a dog in the fight.

<comment><USER32> Bill was too early, didn't want to do the necessary UI work, and didn't have the hardware team to push the hardware standards up. I remember people trying to use windows tablets. They were full-on laptops running an extended version of windows, with a few apps and a handwriting recognizer slapped on top. They were heavy, confusing to use, and not terribly finger-friendly.

They've got good reason to stay out of this one. iOS came from Apple's phone OS (esp. in terms of UI). Until Windows Mobile starts getting some traction, MS is better off staying out of the fight. You can always commoditize your opponent later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Somehow, having a crapload more hardware hasn't entered the author's analysis anywhere. Why would you expect 1GB of RAM to cost the same as 256mb?

I can't believe people are buying this tripe. I'm willing to put down $20 that by the holidays, you'll see cheaper android tablets (same specs, not this bullshit), any takers?

<comment><USER34> I don't see what will change between now and christmas. Many of the android tablets are vaporware at this point so there is nothing to stop them from advertising that they'll be cheaper... yet they seem to be more expensive for the most part.

<comment><USER33> Well, you should go ahead and take my money then - I wasn't kidding about the bet.

What will change? First of all, the Xoom isn't spec-comparable to the iPad and second, other manufacturers will start shipping their tablets, bringing prices down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> nook color is $250 (sold at a loss, but available nontheless) xoom is $600 Archos 70 and 101 are $300 notion ink is $425

I call shenaningans

<comment><USER29> Are you really comparing a Nook to the iPad?

<comment><USER35> features that someone never uses aren't really a selling point.

<comment><USER29> such as?

<comment><USER35> you're the one touting the ipad. whatfeatures does it have that I can't do on a rooted nook?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What if Apple is selling iPads at/below cost in a bid for marketshare? I could see Jobs et al guessing this would be a big market, and choosing to sell (especially the entry model) at/below cost. Reminds me of the Jobs' perspective on why the the Mac stalled in the 1980s, "when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits." (<a href="[http://www.newsweek.com/2004/02/01/ok-mac-make-a-wish.html&#...). This time he's going for market share.

<comment><USER36> Botched the link, sorry: <http://www.newsweek.com/2004/02/01/ok-mac-make-a- wish.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel a lot of other companies are riding the tablet wave. Why would motorola underprice the Xoom when possibly they could make a killing on selling the next "iPad" killer.

If its true that Apple is sitting on a pretty price margin on the iPad, then the Xoom, I feel, wouldent be to far off. If they had to they could lower the price to gain momentum but so far this is Motorolas first good tablet release and I dont think they will want to miss an opportunity to make a pretty penny on this.

<comment><USER37> Apple locked down the 10" screens lcd market, why do you think samsung went with a 7"?

<comment><USER38> I don't know why samsung went with a 7" vs 10" but it makes a huge difference. In comparison its like carrying around a big hardcover book vs a paperback book. Watching youtube and stuff on it is fine, I don't find a huge difference. The biggest difference I find it much easier to hold with one hand, and manipulate the screen with the other without having to place it on my lap or needing a stand, and hold it like a real pad should be held and to pass around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Steve Jobs had already warned that margins are going to be down. It was a strategic decision to not earn Apple-sized margins on the iPad, but rather outflank the PC industry by introducing a new computing product.

Wired.com is right though on the ability to suck the air out of the touchscreen supply. It is an acknowledgement to the artificial gravitational field Apple exerts on the hardware components market.

</comment><comment><USER40> archos101 $300, 10 inch screen, 1024x600, android 2.2, usb host and client. of course, not a us company ;-)

</comment><comment><USER41> They should thank Foxconn! [http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=0&pz=1&cf=all&...](http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=0&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=apple+foxconn&oq=apple+foxc)

</comment><comment><USER42> The Notion Ink Adam is cheaper...

Notion Ink Adam with LCD & WiFi (no 3G) - $375 USD Notion Ink Adam with LCD, WiFi & 3G - $425 USD

Notion Ink Adam with Pixel Qi display & WiFi (no 3G) - $499USD Notion Ink Adam with Pixel Qi display, WiFi & 3G - $549 USD

<comment><USER43> The iPad is available to purchase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> bad

</comment><comment><USER45> Apple can sell the iPad for $500 because they have the iTunes store backing it. They know they don't need to make money on the sale of the device because the entire point of buying the device is to buy apps for it, and Apple as we all know gets a cut from every sale.

Other manufacturers don't have this working for them.

<comment><USER17> _"[Apple knows it doesn't] need to make money on the sale of the device because the entire point of buying the device is to buy apps for it,"_

The opposite is true. Apple doesn't need to make money on software, because their hardware products have healthy profit margins. The iTunes Store breaks even, and it has done so for years. The same is true for the other software Apple sells.

Compared to competing products, Apple's software products are dirt cheap. Its office suite (iWork) is priced at $60 while Microsoft Office is priced at $280. Apple's photography software (Aperture) costs $80, Adobe's Lightroom costs $300. Apple's video editing suite (Final Cut) costs $1000, Avid's Media Composer costs $2300.

<comment><USER46> Do not ignore the fact that Apple's offerings are far less powerful, useful, and debugged than the competing software you listed.

Aperture requires a Mac Pro to run properly, which undermines the cost argument.

<comment><USER47> Aperture runs fine on any Mac. 4gb RAM helps, and an SSD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This article didn't get the prices right (which is suprising since that was the sole point of the article), and it got the history exactly backward.

The main shock people had about the ipad was how expensive it was priced ($500-$750). They weren't 'surprised' at how low it was priced. And to Apple's credit, we now know that even at that price it would sell well, and also we know that this price is actually not so unreasonable or inflated as we thought, because other major manufacturers making comparable quality tablet products are also in that price range (except for the nook color, notion ink adam, archos 101 and 70, or several no-name tablets).

Also, the xoom is $600 compared to the old ipad's price of $500. If you want to compare the $800 xoom with 3g (and 4g), compare it with the $750 ipad with 3g. So the prices are not so different.

<comment><USER26> I disagree. I remember much of the Tech press predicating a $1000 price point and being rather surprised at the existence of a low end model at $499. It was only the cross section of nerds that really dislike Apple that called it expensive and panned it as a crippled piece of junk. (Engadet had to shut down their commenting system for a few days due to all the vitriol)

Also, I think you're missing the point on pricing. It really hurts Motorola that there isn't a low end model at $499, because there are a lot of non- technical users for whom 16GB is perfectly adequate. We don't have direct data AFAIK, but I'm willing to bet the low end iPad is Apple's best selling model by far.

<comment><USER48> I completely agree with you. There was a collective jaw drop when Steve put the $499 slide up. The lowest the rumor mill had gotten was $800 leading up to that point.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Notforest - cleaning up the Web one page at a time - <AUTHOR> http://www.notforest.com/

<comment><USER2> <3!

Thank you for making this, and please please please don't "pivot" from a bookmarklet into another half-baked social network.

<comment><AUTHOR> heh, absolutely no chance of that happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Tried this on a well-marked-up, html5 valid page. It ended up pulling one random piece of content from near the bottom. I realized that it was probably pulling the longest content on the page. Looking at the source code, that's exactly what it does. It removes forms, objects, scripts, images, blank links, divs, etc. Then it goes through paragraphs and tables and finds the longest content. This algorithm seems pretty good for long-form article content, but not for the marketing homepage I tried it on. Overall, pretty cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out and, yeah, it was designed to work with blog posts and news articles and not marketing-type sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great idea, works well on 4 sites out of the 5 I tried it on. Too bad it makes notforest.com completely blank and thus not readable at all.

I'll keep it anyway !

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool idea, a Chrome extension would be useful since some of us hides the bookmarks bar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks and totally agree about Chrome extension, will look into that. Notforest has actually been knocking around for a couple of years now and is due a code update so maybe good time to add browser extensions too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hmm, what's the difference between this and Readability?

<comment><USER7> All Readability does is replace the crap on websites with other, different crap.

Unfortunately, this site does a much worse job of recognizing the content text on pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it ironic that notforest.com is blank after using it?

</comment><comment><USER9> Well, why is the text on your page unreadable then? Grey on white.

<comment><USER10> Not only that, the text seems to be made of data: images?!</comment></comment>


Japan's Self-Defence Forces Are Beginning to Focus on China - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/04/20/japans-self-defence-forces-are-beginning-to-focus-on-china <comment><USER2> What's really interesting is to the common Japanese person, their are two threats, China and the Japanese military itself.

Clearly, they worry about China, but they really worry about how the Japanese military answered to no one in the last decade of Imperial Japan.

This is what concerns a lot of Japanese people. The military wrote a check that the Japanese people had to cash.

<comment><USER3> It may be comforting to realize that when Japan entered World War 2, only 73 years had elapsed since the transition from a feudal system into a constitutional democracy. There were still people old enough to remember the old system. It's 78 years since 1941.

<comment><USER4> France experienced a similar trajectory. The sudden egalitarianism of the French Revolution allowed for a much larger and more dynamic military, which in turn enabled the Napoleonic Wars.

Massive populations and political revolution are the common cause. Japan doesn't have the conditions for either, even if Abe achieved his relatively anodyne constitutional amendments. China is more susceptible to adopting that expansionary role, and it doesn't have a constitution binding its hands.

<comment><USER5> If you look at Chinese history they are remarkably non expansionist. Chinese power has always come from their culture and trade.

Japan uses Chinese characters not because they were ever invaded by a Chinese army. Soft power isn't a modern American invention. The Chinese mastered it a thousand years ago!

<comment><USER6> > Chinese history they are remarkably non expansionist

That's a narrative story, not a history.

"China" has never been a continuously consolidated political entity. The PRC (and the ROC, and previous imperial governments) find it a useful myth to equate its current geography of control with a tradition that hearkens back through millenia, but it's quite simply not. The Qin dynasty initially controlled the area of a small province, and conquered its neighboring state rivals one by one to establish a dominion over them; it fell, just as countless other empires fell, leading to centuries of alternating fragmentation and consolidation.

Even in modern times, various political entities that position themselves in the history of China have engaged in expansionist colonial missions over a range of territories, from Xinjiang to Taiwan to Tibet. Even Inner Manchuria is only considered "part of China" because the Qing dynasty ruled it and China simultaneously. (As an interesting aside, contemporaneous Han historiography considered the Qing ruling class foreign usurpers; it was only in the 20th century that ROC/PRC historiography decided to incorporate the Qing Dynasty into China's lineage, for political reasons.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The better way of looking at it is that American guarantees can only mean so much. A DPRK with a nuke is different kind of threat to US, compared to Japan compared to South Korea. There is already enough gap, the Japanese realized that leaving their security with Americans entirely is not a strategy. So they are walking back from the pacifist constitutions and militarizing.

In the short-to-mid term its good for US, a formidable ally with world class navy! But a Japan with powerful navy cant help itself but wants to dominate Pacific, that what happened in December of 1941, the rest is history.

<comment><USER8> The world in 1941 was a lot different. Back then, one would be forgiven for viewing history as either colonize or be colonized.

This is not to defend Japan's actions, they did totally unjustified things in China, and as it turned out after Japan modernized, the west never posed a threat (as WWII would wipe out the Europeans ability to colonize and the US had no interest in it.

The point being, now our perspective on history is very different. Colonization is a thing of the past. Respecting borders is by and large an unimpeachable norm across most of the world. I don't think Japan will feel the same pressures.

<comment><USER9> Respecting borders has been an "unimpeachable norm" for how long, though? Since 1945, at most. That's not even 80 years - just long enough for us to forget _why_ we made it verboten in the first place.

I fear that Crimea and the Golan Heights will turn out to be the first drops in a devastating torrent.

<comment><USER10> Cyprus has been occupied by Turkey a NATO member for how long now and you are worried about the Golan Heights?

As far as Crimea goes the world is much better off with it than the alternative of forcing Russia's hand.

No one that can read a map ever thought Russia would give up their only warm water port, it's also the reason why they went to Syria it's their only port with access to the med that doesn't have a NATO toll booth controlling it.

Russia is a land locked country with all of its strategic assets and everything it cares about within strike distance of NATO FOBs.

The US and NATO isn't stupid they won't be bogged down fighting over the rubbles of Stalingrad and they are much better logistically equipped to fight in winter than Napoleon.

If a conventional conflict breaks out NATO tanks would find themselves on the outskirts of Moscow well before Russia can reach Warsaw yet alone Berlin.

The buffer zone of the former Baltic and Soviet states has eroded and as much as the Baltics fear Russia if I was a Russian general I would be binge drinking and for a good reason just to stop my balls from shivering.

Russia has no strategic depth, it's land locked and thanks to improvements in air and missile defense also air and even space locked.

Their geographical actions are about as predictable as playing risk with a 3 year old but just like that game the biggest risk is you have no idea if and when they'll throw a tantrum and smash the board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They didn't just start focusing on China now. Not sure what prompted this particular title, since there isn't much substance in the paragraphs before the paywall.

<comment><USER12> Well, they feared an USSR invasion. Now that's gone and Russia alone can't really invade Japan. China can.

<comment><USER13> China is barely capable of taking over Taiwan without enormous cost and material and human loss. Japan is far, far harder to "invade" and is barely even something they would consider.

Even an "attack" (something short of an invasion), consisting of surgical strikes (and what, nukes?) would be prohibitively costly in every way possible and would also be 100% guaranteed to bring the US in to the conflict.

The Chinese government likes having Japan around as a useful lightning conductor for public anger, which redirects protests away from them. They are Japan's biggest trading partner. They are not going to invade any country this useful and valuable to them.

Please don't use a word like "invade" lightly; it's very, very far from ever being a reality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there an easy way to bypass the paywall? Wouldn't mind subscribing to the economist tbh, just not right this instant.

<comment><USER4> Use Outline, here is the outlined version: [https://outline.com/9xnM42](https://outline.com/9xnM42)</comment></comment>


I'm giving away free ad space for early startups - <AUTHOR> http://selfdebugging.com/2007/09/20/free-ad-space-for-your-startup/

<comment><AUTHOR> Update: I just received a very generous offer from Adpinion (a YC company). If your ad is selected then, in addition to the 2-to-3 week period your ad will show on my web site, you'll also get a $40 worth of free advertising on Adpinion's network at large. I think this is a great opportunity to get publicity for free. Don't delay.

</comment><comment><USER2> Has anyone made an ad-trading site for small web sites? It doesn't even need to be direct swaps: you could make a little marketplace sort of thing (without real money).

<comment><USER3> I'm on a ridiculous e-marketing "OMG YOU CAN BE A MILLIONARE TOO" email list and got a message talking about this ad-trading service for blog posts.

<http://www.blogrush.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that's very noble of you, but I have to ask why you're willing to do graphic ads instead of just text ones?

If you're starting a new site, graphic ads can be very jarring to new users, especially if they're just trying to figure out what your site is all about. On the other hand, textual ads can be very subtle, but still useful to any startup - if anything, just to help them out in terms of Page Rank.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know about noble! I just have this big empty space on the right side, and the layout looks unbalanced if I don't fill it. I do use text ads on internal pages, but I prefer images on the home page because they go well with the design. I don't believe it'll have a negative impact on the user experience, otherwise, I wouldn't have done it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> News.YC link exchange sounds like a good idea to me. There might be some competition here, but probably not a ton of overlap. I'd definitely participate with my newest project (soon).

AdBrite's <http://www.spottt.com/> might be a good option (soon).

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been searching for something like this. I wonder what happened to LinkExchange after MS bought it!! It was a good application.</comment></comment>


CBS4 Investigation Finds Dead Voters Casting Ballots in Colorado - <AUTHOR> http://denver.cbslocal.com/2016/09/22/cbs4-investigation-finds-dead-voters-casting-ballots-in-colorado/ <comment><USER2> I'm very curious to know who the zombies voted for, given some party's obsession with voter fraud.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you really think about docker? - <AUTHOR> Lots of push and articles about how docker is awesome, wanted to see what the larger community thought about using docker? <comment><USER2> I use Docker to keep my development machine clean. For example: [https://github.com/ChanderG/H99](https://github.com/ChanderG/H99). For playing with different technologies, I love the ease and organization that Docker offers.

</comment><comment><USER3> tldr; Get sucked in by image creation, stay for the API.

The documentation could be better. Getting my brain around what a Docker commit actually is and when the cache breaks for a RUN command vs a COPY command took some digging.

They are definitely catering to the "up and running" crowd.

The idea of combining image creation with container deployment and making the CLI as "sugar-ey" and "user-friendly" as possible is mostly marketing fluff designed to make containers easy to swallow for the masses.

However, the API IS powerful. Combined with tools like CoreOS and Kubernetes, or some in-house custom built tools and Docker is a pretty spicy piece of technology that is definitely worth it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think is nice for building PaaS like backends AKA microservices and also to automate large deployments when you need isolated small machines.

</comment><comment><USER5> Containers as a concept are nice, but I'm not sure if Docker specifically is the best implementation yet.

</comment><comment><USER6> Its modern static linking.</comment>