Is it time to treat sugar like smoking? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-48499195 <comment><USER2> I started eating keto over a year ago, and found that I totally lost my appetite for sugary and other carb-based foods, so have just kept it up.

One thing that was eye opening to me was from paying close attention to food labels. I used to try to mostly eat "healthy", so I'd tend to buy the "low calorie" options. What surprised me was how basically they just substitute fat for sugar. Ceasar dressing normal has 1g carbs and 4g fat per Tbsp (45 cal), but low calorie is 4g carbs and 1.5g fat per Tbsp (30 cal). This adds up, and I think I was actually eating a pretty unhealthy balance of macronutrients (fat/protein/carbs) while thinking I was eating healthy, despite my BMI slowly creeping up over a decade to being middle of "overweight" (I'm now in the middle of "normal" range, just from changing my diet).

Well I think treating sugar like smoking is far too extreme, I do think the demonization of fat along with the addition of excess sugar to "healthy" food options is a terrible combination, and that needs to end.

<comment><USER3> I think the demonisation of fat might be partly a linguistic problem. "fat" is a derogatory term for someone who is overweight, but it also happens to describe an important component of food, so the (incorrect) connection forms itself: eating fat = getting fat. This isn't the case in all languages, though I don't know if that actually has meant Germany or wherever cares less about fat content.

<comment><USER4> Maybe we should call it "lipids"? Not sure if that's the same.

<comment><USER5> I've always preferred the French nomenclature: carbohydrates are glucides and fats are lipides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How about we start treating alcohol like smoking? For example ban alcohol advertising like we have with tobacco and I bet society would improve in a lot of unforeseen ways (besides the obvious reduction in alcohol related deaths and diseases and family issues).

<comment><USER7> For most people, alcohol isn't addictive in the same way that smoking or sugar is. If you eat stuff with a lot of sugar it makes things without sugar actually taste worse. Whereas drinking alcohol doesn't make water taste worse or whatever.

Also alcohol only kills 80k or so Americans per year, way less than smoking or sugar.

<comment><USER8> Is there any reliable source to back up the claim that sugar is more addictive than alcohol?

I am suspicious about this claim because there are plenty of people and families ruined directly as a result of alcoholism. I don't think sugar addiction is causing nearly as much trouble as alcoholism, despite being a more widely consumed and easily available substance.

<comment><USER9> The number of "Obese People" far outweighs the number of chronic alcoholics... we are talking about almost 1/3rd of the population being obese (i.e. not just a bit fat, or chubby, just straight out obese).

<comment><USER8> Is obesity a sign of sugar addiction? I don't think so. People addicted to substances like alcohol and heroin will go out of their way to obtain these substances breaking laws and ruining others' lives if necessary. While obese people are just... obese, not crazy nor dangerous. Their mind don't get wired by sugar to put sugar in front of decency and laws.

Not to mention sugar is not the only cause of obesity anyway. Sedentary lifestyle, hormones, gut bacteria, and the portion sizes in the US are all likely causes.

<comment><USER10> > While obese people are just... obese, not crazy nor dangerous.

If you could wave a magic wand, wouldn't most obese people prefer a healthy weight? In aggregate, we can add up individual decisions and call the average "human nature." The actions of society have forced individuals to live with bodies that don't function as well as they could, so it makes sense for us to do _something_ about the problem.

How well do we understand the causes of the obesity epidemic? Is sugar responsible for, say, 10% or 90% of the total? If we wish to progress toward a low-sugar future, then it would be good to have an estimate of how much good it would do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> FYI: This article is referring to requiring sugary products to use plain packaging:

> ...suggested sweets, snacks and sugary drinks should be wrapped in plain > packaging to make them less appealing, given the excess consumption of the > sweet stuff

(I think some of the responses here are assuming the question is about treating sugar like smoking in other respects.)

<comment><USER12> I think people are afraid of a slippery slope. Legislation is almost always done in a slippery slope manner - at first you limit things a little and wait until people accept it. After a while you limit some more, then some more and then some more.

You can do whatever you want with sugar, but it's not going to solve the obesity problem. Not only are carbs one of the few macro nutrients we can digest, they're also in pretty much everything.

<comment><USER13> What do you think will solve the obesity problem? People weren't obese like they are now 100 years ago. Something must have changed

<comment><USER12> People stopped being poor. It's difficult to become obese when you simply don't have enough food. The solution to the problem isn't going to be in the past, because we want people to live a better life and not worse.

I think what will solve the obesity problem is education. The basic ideas of nutrition (in terms of physics and biology) should be taught to everyone. It should not be possible for someone to graduate high school and find the basics of a nutritional label difficult to understand.

This should also be coupled with a better cultural attitude. People should feel encouraged to try to lose weight when they're obese, rather than told some form of "healthy at every size" nonsense or be made fun of when they are at the gym. It should be seen as an ailment that can be improved rather than something shameful. If you have a broken arm, then you're not told that it's fine to have a broken arm, nor are you made fun of for trying to get your broken arm fixed.

I used to be overweight and I understood that it was bad, but it was difficult to try to improve it. The people around you notice that you're doing things differently and you'll hear snide remarks or encouragement, but this leads to expectations, so you try to hide it instead. That way nobody expects anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> God I hope so. I grew up obese and am now about halfway through undoing the damage using a ketogenic diet. I really do think sugar sweetened drinks should be banned for sale to children under 18, as that causes the most damage.

<comment><USER12> So, they're only allowed water? Because you're also banning juice and milk with they ban.

<comment><USER15> That would be a good thing. Milk consumption greatly reduces iron absorption (and health benefits are iffy to say the least), and fruit is better eaten than drank. Our digestive system is built on the idea of chewing food (through vagus nerve stimulation).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It'd be much harder than cigarettes to define and enforce, and more prone to loopholes. What's a "sugary food"? Grams of sugar? They'd just sell fun-sized. Percentage mass? That could impact fruit. Added sugar? What is "non-added sugar"? Specific product categories like soda and candy? They'd just walk the line with things like "sweetened sparkling water".

I support the idea in principle, and I hope they figure out a way to define it, but it'll be hard.

<comment><USER17> If I eat a strawberry thats non-added sugar. If I sprinkle sugar on the strawberry, thats added sugar.

It would be pretty easy to deduce the distinction between added and not sugars - if you put a sugar in your food and list it in the ingredients it has added sugar. If the thing as its grown has sugar then its not an added sugar.

If that leads to the GMO modification of crops even further to produce more sugars thats a lot less harmful than the status quo adding of corn syrup / cane sugar / etc to everything.

<comment><USER18> Any dish that is a prepared composite will quickly get into gray areas.

"I didn't add sugar, i just put this highly sweet blended fruit in the dish!"

<comment><USER19> The new version of the nutrition label specifically calls out added sugars [1], so it sounds like if there are gray areas the FDA has been able to decide on a standard.

[1] [https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/postings/2018/05/nutr...](https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/postings/2018/05/nutrition- labels.php)

<comment><USER20> Right, but right now there's not a super strong incentive for companies to try and manipulate their added sugar label. It can be a marketing thing for some brands but if added sugar was actively penalized then you would start seeing better attempts to keep foods sweet with "non-sugar" sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> And sitting without physical activity too, please, it's much more dangerous.

<comment><USER22> Exercise is important especially for your brain but bad nutrition has a much higher impact than no exercise.

<comment><USER23> Out of curiosity, how did you become so knowledgeable about nutrition? This comment, and your other (now deleted) comment make it seem like you are really confident that you know more than everyone else.

My biggest complaint about learning about nutrition is that everyone says opposing things, and it is really difficult for me to know what is right and what is snake oil.

Any tips on learning the "right" way to be healthy?

<comment><USER12> I would recommend getting a variety of sources of information while staying very skeptical of any outlandish claims. However, the reason why diet is more important than exercise is that exercise doesn't burn many calories compared to how many calories you need for your body's upkeep during a day.[0]

Look at those numbers and keep in mind that a daily recommended caloric intake is at 2000 kcal. Now look at caloric values of food - carbs and protein are at around 4 kcal per gram and fat is 9 kcal per gram. Take pineapple juice for instance - it has around 60 kcal per 100 ml. If you drink 2 glasses of that (400ml) then that's already more than 10% of your daily calories. People often drink an entire liter per day though.

[0] [https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight- loss/calories...](https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-weight- loss/calories-burned-in-30-minutes-of-leisure-and-routine-activities)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> No, it's not. This is ridiculous.

Sugar is bad in large quantities, but there's no such thing as second hand sugar consumption, which is the main reason why anybody wanted to regulate smoking, since nobody wants to get lung cancer from working in a place where everyone else is doing something harmful.

What we need to do with regard to sugar is get people to have some got dang self control, which starts with proper education K-12 and decent menus for school lunches.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is there much difference between sugar and refined carbs like white bread?

<comment><USER26> No the body will convert all sugars / carbs the same. The only difference is how fast it will get in your blood.

<comment><USER27> Not all sugar is actually processed by the body the same though.

Fructose gets processed in the liver whereas glucose goes into the blood stream triggering insulin response.

Other very fine points are glycemic index, for example a low glycemic index food breakdown to glucose, bypassing the liver, but is absorbed into the bloodstream relatively slowly for glucose and minimizes the insulin spike/response promoting more stable blood sugar levels.

<comment><USER26> Yes that's definitely true I meant they will end up as the same end result. The fast sugars will end up causing you want more of it again in a shorter amount of time so it is ofcourse better to eat veggies instead of a candy bar to get your required energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Start by moving sugary products away from children. Also banning shops selling sweets near the cashier.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think a smaller but still effective first step would be to label sugary products as such. Many people may be unaware of the number of things they consume which are more than 50% refined sugar by dry weight. A great deal of "fruit" products fall in to this category.

</comment><comment><USER30> Should we trust the government to decide what food is "healthy"? Absolutely not. Just look at how many times the "recommenced diet" has changed in the past few decades. There's no reason to expect that the current evidence against sugar is more correct than previous (now debunked) evidence against fat.

What's more, what's healthy depends on who you are. People with eating disorders, for example, need easy access to caloric foods, including sugary foods, to weight restore and eat healthily.

Instead of focusing on trying to figure out what is and isn't good for you, we should focus on making sure people have access to foods we already know are healthy by eliminating urban food deserts.

<comment><USER31> Eating disorders can be some of the most dangerous things you can suffer from (anorexia has a mortality of 30% if I remember correctly); however on a population scale the damage is dwafted buy the damage from obesity because so many more people are seriously fat.

<comment><USER30> Right, so there needs to be solutions that work for everyone. That's why I think food _access_ is key (i.e. more grocery stores in low income neighborhoods). People who need more food can get it, and people who need healthier food will have access.

<comment><USER31> That assumes that people will choose healthier food when it is available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nv-vn How about we just let people choose what to do with their body?

As a kid my parents didn't care too much about what I ate. I regularly had sweets of any kind as a kid. I certainly have no addiction to sugar because of that. I probably drink soda less than once a month and have cake/ice cream/chocolate/candy at about the same frequency. Meanwhile, people I grew up with who were never allowed sugar seem much more addicted to it, eating sweets with every meal or as a snack. Earlier this week I heard someone at work talking about how their child has never eaten any kind of sweets before and personally this just sounds like a recipe for disaster.

<comment><USER32> The problem with this approach is, the vast majority of people pick the default option when presented with it (e.g., states that, by default, mark you as an organ donor have proportionally more organ donors).

Public policy has real, measurable implications. We don't need to treat sugar like smoking or alcohol, but when you find a way to move people away from it as their "default" setting, you will find, in aggregate huge savings in health care expenses and better outcomes (a sizable amount of health care spending is due to preventable conditions, like Type II diabetes).

I agree, in principle, people can still consume sugar, if they want. The occasional slice of birthday cake is _not_ the problem with sugar. It's the consumption of a 2-liter of soda, multiple times per week, that's the problem (regular consumption). But we need to make it easier for people to avoid processed, simple carbohydrates.

One possible solution is increasing the ubiquity and ease-of-access to whole foods. Eating healthy needs to have the convenience of going to a fast food restaurant -- they're everywhere, they're cheap, and it's fast. We desperately need this as a society. Consider it more as a preventative, or we can pay for it on the other end (higher health care costs).

<comment> nv-vn I do agree with you that access to cheap/convenient healthy foods is certainly lacking. This is definitely a problem I think we can and should tackle. I think giving people more choices is a great thing and I would happily support this. The "default" also makes a lot of sense here. Really at the end of the day what I'm skeptical of is trying to force people's hands into cutting sugar out of their diet.

<comment><USER32> There's varying degrees of "force". For example, we could "force" people to get their children vaccination, but that panders to fears of conspiracy theories. Instead, you can take away access to public education (e.g., vaccination mandatory for schooling). Then it comes at a steep price, yet you still maintain the freedom of choice. I don't think of vaccination as an analogous example here, since nobody really sees sugar as dangerous. In small quantities, it isn't. The danger is the context of the overall diet. Decades of lots of sugar consumption undoubtedly leads to negative health outcomes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In my younger, smoking years, when the anti-smoking lobby grew stronger and managed to land more and more restrictions on smoking, to the degree that you almost felt like a leper...

I remember telling my anti-smoking, chocolate-eating friends "you know one day they will come for you too, right?"

That sure didn't take long. Let's see how _they_ feel about it this time around.

<comment><USER34> Did you not eat chocolate? Did all of your anti-smoking friends had the urge to eat chocolate during breaks or social events? That's a very odd characterization.

Smoking is banned for under 18 already, and affects others around you, while chocolate does not (an I really saying this?). As seen in the article, sugar is a bigger issue for the 4-18 age range. I'm sure your friends feel absolutely fine.

<comment><USER33> > Did you not eat chocolate?

No. I don't eat chocolate, don't drink soda and don't have sugar in my coffee.

You may find that crazy, but what's really crazy is having no vices at all.

Trying to ban them all is sure to make us all unhappy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> That's simply not going to happen because there is no "second hand sugar" scenario. Even alcohol, which is incredibly destructive to third parties by any measure (domestic abuse, drunk driving, etc), hasn't successfully been publicly vilified to the same extent as smoking.

<comment><USER36> It was, back in the 1920's.

<comment><USER17> It was a moral panic though, rather than a reflection on the legitimate bodily harm of consumption. The prohibitionists were not arguing to save alcoholics livers, they were arguing to ban perceived unchristian behavior.

<comment><USER36> Domestic abuse was a large part of it; the temperance movement was largely and at times primarily comprised of women, and the temperance movement was closely linked to the women's suffrage movement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm not harmed if I'm sitting next to a someone who is consuming sugar.

What we should have is health insurance premiums based on risk factors such as obesity, even in public systems.

<comment><USER38> That could get exciting. Think of all the factors we could base health insurance on. Risky outdoor activities? Higher premiums. Biking to work? Higher premiums.

Alternatively, we could work to help everyone become healthier, and then use as large a risk pool as possible to leverage the benefits of insurance.

<comment><USER39> Well, life insurance does that. I recall having someone over to check my health and they had me fill out a form detailing the types of activities I do (it even covered skydiving).

Since I'm healthy, I got a fantastic rate.

However, nothing like that happened for my health insurance. The closest I have is a program that helps pay for my gym membership if I go regularly. The really silly thing is that I'm not able to go regularly because I ride my bike a lot, yet I am likely more healthy because of that than many of the people who go to the gym regularly.

Honestly, I would totally be down with a voluntary system like that for things like obesity, smoking, etc. If I present a lower risk to the insurance company, shouldn't I be rewarded with lower rates? If that were the case, I think more people would make real changes to their lives instead of fiddling with fad diets, pedometers, and gym memberships. Saving $20/month on a gym membership or getting a free Fitbit is less motivating than saving $100/month for being healthy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Social media is the new smoking not sugar

<comment><USER41> Hacker news is my new smoking

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Smoking has second hand smoke, but I think sugar is internal to your body rather than all everywhere like smoking is. So, it is not same kind of thing and should not be treat like same kind of thing, due to that.

</comment><comment><USER43> No unless second hand sugar is a thing.

</comment><comment><USER44> I have a feeling most of the addiction came from the food and drink industry. Perhaps the amount of sugar contained in the industry provided foods should be restricted to some sane amount and not a quantity to induce you to eat it. This way, the home cook can control their sugar intake and the home cook cannot produce the number of available goods one eats by just picking it off the shelf at a store.

Higher end restaurants that cook their own food won't be restricted this way either and that's a good thing because one goes to such places for food you don't normally get at home but fast food restaurants get most of their food from factory stores where sugar content can and should be restricted for the same reason grocery store food should--sweetening foods makes you want them more.

</comment><comment><USER45> Yet another application of Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

</comment><comment><USER22> haha deleted

<comment><USER46> So you're on keto ?

<comment><USER47> I think keto is even lower on carbs. At most 20-30g per day (only nuts and vegetables, basically).

But, obviously, like 99% of people, the parent poster lacks the willpower to do that. _wink wink_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> While we're on the topic of telling people how to live, why don't we keep the sugar and simply start exercising?

<comment><USER38> You can't outrun the spoon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> What? No! Fucking hell. Speak to a nutritionist. You need carbs! They aren't bad when eaten in the correct amount and type. The body uses glycogen and glucose for energy, the problem isn't sugar, the problem is a lack of understanding by the public on the topics of exercise, food and health. I don't know about anyone else but all three school types (private, public, and charter) in America seem to neglect this type of information when teaching PE. We seem to treat PE as strictly a means to burn off excess energy for overactive adolescents instead of using this as an opportunity to understand the biological mechanisms involved in converting food to fuel. That is not to say that this information is not taught but it seems that its only ever taught as an extracurricular when a student picks up a sport such as football. Even then its almost treated like tribal knowledge passed down from the coach to the players.

All of this is further hampered by other factors as well such as the disappearing HomeEc curriculum, the general faddness of dieting in the press (this article being a good example) and a misconception on the behalf of the public on matters related to food consumption. There is almost a mysticism/dogma about how food works that seems to prevail over discourse related to nutrition these days. Furthermore, there is a return to quackery lately with things such as alkaline diets and such despite the fact that most of the foods that they suggest to eat, such as fruit, are often more acidic rather than basic. I blame this on MLMs trying to sell water to middle class retards too stupid to understand that they are being swindled. Sugar is not the Great Satan of food. It's simply people that are too ignorant to understand what they are eating will continue to make poor choices.</comment>


Show HN: /etc/hosts File Management Utility and Golang Library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/txn2/txeh <comment><USER2> Heh, I also wrote one of these. Wondering if there is anything missing that I did not support correctly. [https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile](https://github.com/kevinburke/hostsfile)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice. I wrote txeh because the lib I was using for kubefwd (a Kubernetes port forward utility) was a little too opinionated about the format and use of /etc/hosts. A few of libs I looked at really wanted to take over the file.

I built the CLI because I needed a fast way to remove CIDR ranges (ie 172.27.1.0/24, etc..) when 100's of IPs get added and then no longer needed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: One Child One Laptop - <AUTHOR>

http://one.laptop.org/about/faq (linking to faq because the homepage is a pretty obnoxious full page splash)<p>I love the idea of getting laptops to kids in third world countries.  But I am not sure about their custom OS, and I am having a hard time finding anything very specific about what they are able to "learn". I want to make sure I am not just falling for some sales pitch.  Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Last I heard, it was a re-skinned and simplified Ubuntu based os. This might have changed given the rise of android based os flavors in the market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any idea how 'simplified' it is? ie. Can they browse the internet? Could they run a python script?

<comment><USER3> <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developers_manual></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Open Sub Search – A free and opensource subtitle search app for Windows - <AUTHOR> https://iboshkov.github.io/open-sub-search/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, this is a little side project I did during the weekend, there's still some kinks to be ironed out but it's a decent starting point and has proven useful over these past couple of days of me using it.

Any feedback/constructive criticism is appreciated.

Please report any issues that you may encounter.</comment>


22% of Millennials say they have no friends - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/8/1/20750047/millennials-poll-loneliness <comment><USER2> Social Media? Home video games?

Back in my day sonny, we had to actually go physically locate our friends (no cell phones), and ask "hey, you want to go spend some quarters at the video arcade and then get some nachos? Who's going to drive? Want to go ask XXX and YYY to see if they want to come along?"

</comment><comment><USER3> I have had points in my life where I have had no friends; it really sucks. These periods would always compound my anxiety issues, my insecurities. Luckily, I am no longer isolated, and I feel so much better. I honestly believe that there needs to be systemic changes in society to solve this problem. For all my disaste for religions and other questionable institutions, they do provide a meaningful community that is a part of your daily life. You see the same people every week doing the same thing; it gives you that ritual we all need. I wish there was a community like this for us areligious folks.

</comment><comment><USER4> For me, friends happened naturally for the first 15 years of my life. When I lost all mine as I became an adult, I didn't know how to gain new ones.

Most of my old friends I met through other friends. But if I have no friends, that can't happen. It's a catch-22 of sorts. It's so much harder to meet people when you're not getting invited to social events!

I considered going to bars, but had no interest in that. I considered changing jobs, but had no interest in that either.

Ultimately, the best solution I found was meetup.com. I joined a bunch of random clubs on the site and met a bunch of quirky people. After a few weeks, I realized I wasn't lonely anymore. It wasn't even about friendship in the end. It was just about spending more face-time.

</comment><comment><USER5> For me my friends were definitely a detriment. I was failing to finish university and so I stopped hanging out with them altogether one day. I deleted all my phone contacts, social media, changed phone numbers, basically became a ghost.

Sometimes I feel like I could have worked on managing my social life rather than eliminating it altogether, but this has worked out so far. I don't imagine I will have trouble making new friends when I finish school and begin working.

I do feel lonely, but I try to fill free time with working out, hobbies or hanging out with family. Leaving the house is definitely the most important thing for avoiding depression from loneliness in my opinion. I never felt worse than spending days on end without getting sunlight.

</comment><comment><USER6> I bet it's mostly men too. We have to focus and get some kind of value through work of somekind if we are to have a chance of other's approval. A single man in his 40's with no wife or kids and no job is probably the lowest tier in society, and trying to avoid it is not an easy task.

<comment><USER7> I bet not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of my first posts on HN was asking how people, especially ones working remote or in small offices, manage to deal with loneliness. I was overwhelmed by the number of replies, and saddened that it seems to be a really common issue.

Part of the article says _" Still, the findings on millennial are surprising."_ which... I think at this point you have to deliberately go out of your way to avoid articles on loneliness (in the millennial age group). They're a pretty hot topic right now, especially with the realization of the physical health impacts chronic loneliness has.

I still struggle with feeling lonely on a daily basis. It's really hard. But, one thing that seems to help, at least sometimes: Strike up a conversation with a stranger. Sometimes it goes sour, but the majority of the time I find that the stranger I strike up a conversation with is just as eager to have a conversation. Considering loneliness is pretty common, you'll likely be striking up a conversation with someone who is lonely as well.

<comment><USER9> >the majority of the time I find that the stranger I strike up a conversation with is just as eager to have a conversation

I've attempted this a _lot_ , as means to cope with spending enormous amounts of time in transient spaces such as airports, hotels, etc. (~300+ days/yr "on the road"). I've observed that age seems to be a huge factor in whether or not this actually works.

As a millennial, I don't seem to have a lot of success with this when it comes to striking up conversations with other millennials -- my success rate starting and keeping a conversation going here is probably in the 10-20% range, and most of the time, the conversation ends within a minute or two because the other party just doesn't seem that interested in a conversation, even in cases where there are some clear shared interests or connections.

My success rate with gen X-ers is better, probably in the 30-40% range. Boomers are by far the most receptive, with probably a 50-60% success rate at keeping a conversation going for a while.

<comment><USER10> Taking improv class, I got to meet a lot of people who - besides the _acting_ part of improv - were basically interested in striking up conversation. I was a bit out of my comfort zone, but it was a good learning experience and it gave me a few skills to work with: now I go into conversations, and even small interactions, not just thinking about the business topic or whatever is on my mind, but about effortfully constructing an appropriate _scene_ and being a character in that scene, in that momement. And that gives me more room to play with and to spot common "tactical conversation" methods.

Regardless, I'm still basically a quiet person and keep to myself in public - it's a thing I have to "turn on".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I work from home full time. And I'm single; and I live alone.

I often go through the whole workweek without saying more than a couple words to another person in real life.

I wonder what this does to me over time. It probably isn't good.

It's funny, too, I actually tend not to mind stretches of alone time. I get used to it. It's when I oscillate between a day of being alone, and then a night out, then a day alone again, a night out, etc., that I feel the loneliness during the day. Mondays tend to suck for the same reason, since now I'm suddenly alone again after spending the weekend with people in the real world. I usually start to feel OK again by Tuesday.

I admit to in the past wanting to say no to offers to hang out just because I know I'll miss the human contact after.

This probably all sounds crazy but (shrug emoticon was here, I guess HN doesn't like emoticons :( )

<comment><USER12> Same here, though I really really enjoy living + working alone (5+ years now).

Tip: get a dog. Having a dog forces me to leave the house at least twice a day to go on walks, plus it's a great conversation starter with people around the neighborhood. Dogs are social animals and it's amazing how the simple act of loving and receiving love in return can improve emotional well-being.

<comment><USER13> Minor adjustment:

Dogs are wonderful companions. But they do come with needs and stress of their own. They are no replacement for therapy, mental health, or social engagement. Get a dog because you want to care for and love a dog. Animals aren't remedies.</comment></comment></comment>


Urbit and the blockchain wars - <AUTHOR> https://urbit.org/blog/2017.9-critique/ <comment><USER2> > The simplest procedure, with the strongest blockchain, would be just to > encode each Urbit event as raw (OP_RETURN) data on the Bitcoin blockchain

I don't understand the purpose of this. What's the point of pointing people to the Bitcoin blockchain to look for public keys? Ultimately, the authority that puts the relevant information into the OP_RETURN output decides what people get. How will users know they get the right information unless a) Urbit signs the relevant data somehow, or b) points them towards a specific Bitcoin transaction ID? In either case I don't see what the advantage is of putting something in a blockchain, when that something comes from a central source of truth -- why not just consume this information directly from the central source of truth?

> And best of all, you can get your Urbit star or planet entirely through the > blockchain, without interacting with any centralized database or payment > mechanism.

Great! So all the slowness of a blockchain without any of the advantages?

To be clear, I'm fully aware of how a blockchain is useful for governing internal data (e.g. Bitcoin blocks excluding double spends). But I don't see the point of third parties putting data into blockchains, and pointing other people there to retrieve it, unless we're talking about some sort of proof-of- existence (which utilizes the timestamping feature of a blockchain).

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know of a good introduction to urbit? Every few months it pops up, and I can never quite wrap my head around it.

<comment><USER4> Does this help?:

[https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so- dark-f...](https://medium.com/@IsaacSimpson/urbit-and-the-not-so-dark-future- of-the-internet-400c9b667e2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A match made in heaven

<comment><USER6> Dark Heaven?</comment></comment>


Largest Known Maya Structure Found - <AUTHOR> https://www.insidescience.org/news/largest-known-maya-structure-found-more-4000-feet-long-and-nearly-3000-years-old <comment> spaced-out It's tragic how little we know about the Maya compared to what we could have known. Thousands of books were destroyed, primarily by one Spanish bishop, and only four survive today[1]. If that hadn't of happened, it's possible we could have known as much about the Maya as we do about the Ancient Greeks.

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

<comment><USER2> The destruction of those codixes is, without a doubt, one of the greatest acts of cultural vandalism in history. Absolutely tragic.

At the same time, I've read a bit more about that incident, and... this is probably not politically correct to say, but I did develop some sympathy for that bishop. Yes, he was a religious zealot who couldn't distinguish other cultures from "satanism". But also, well, the Maya were in a pretty rough state when he encountered them. They'd been experiencing severe drought and civil war and plagues brought by the Europeans and more. Their way of dealing with this was mass human sacrifice. The Maya didn't have a sacrificial- industrial complex the way that the Aztecs did, but when nothing else would appease the gods, that's what they'd do.

So anyhow, the Bishop had apparently witnessed a mass human sacrifice. Of children. And it really got to him, convincing him that their religion was strictly satanic. Given his own cultural frame, and what he witnessed, it's hard for me to say that I would have done any differently under the circumstances. That would've gotten under my skin too. Hard to say I would've kept perspective after that.

<comment><USER3> That's a pretty fair stance. I've actually been to Southern Mexico where their descendants live today. Even today, to my American frame, the indigenous people are strange. But that's what drew me to check out some of their villages.

I highly recommend these places out! Their churches which mix Catholicism with their own believes are very far out.

<comment><USER2> You don't even need to go to Southern Mexico for that. There's a small enclave town in Phoenix, Arizona, called Guadalupe. It's a Mexican / native community. In the centre of town, there's a public square flanked by two Catholic churches.[1] One is a very traditional Catholic church. The other is a syncretic church which (according to people I knew in the community) mixed in many elements of Yaqui spirituality.

The survival of native spirituality, even within syncretic religion, is always somehow reassuring to me, given how much cultural vandalism occurred during the colonisation of the Americas.

1: [https://email@example.com,-111.9644457,3a,15.4...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-111.9644457,3a,15.4y,244.62h,93.27t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sfMKLbVmw0T5Q5OX4lR52gQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Again shows what you can do with lidar images. I'm not sure how widely they are publicly available but if you can get lidar footage of an area you (think) you know definitely check it out. There's a lot of man-made things to discover.

E.g. here's a little story from my area: we were on a walk once and someone pointed to a certain plant which is known to only thrive on very limey soil. And acoording to her used in the past by people as indicator for figuring out where they could get lime for making mortar. Nothing special to see though. A couple of months later, unrelated, a geologist showed lidar images of that area and in a spot close to where said plant was found, there was obvisouly a quite huge round sink in the terrain. Turns out this was once, many centuries ago, essentially a lime mine (which the geologist knew because of history). Nice how history, biology, geology can all come together like that. Yet if you don't know it it's pretty much invisible. Sattelite also doesn't give even the slightest hint. But with a height model and applying some shade it suddenly becomes quite obvious.

</comment><comment><USER5> What many people do not know is that the Maya are still around, mostly in Guatemala.

There's a recent movie about the challenges affecting modern Mayans called Ixcanul, watch it if you can.

<comment><USER6> huh? Nearly every southern Mexican is Mayan.

<comment><USER5> Guatemala has ~40% of the total Maya population so that makes sense.

Are the Maya communities in Mexico still speaking Maya languages?

<comment><USER7> Yes! The biggest community is in Yucatan with over 800K speakers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan_languages#:~:text=Yucate...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan_languages#:~:text=Yucatec%20Maya%20\(known%20simply%20as,of%20Quintana%20Roo%20and%20Campeche).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I unironically thought this was about Maya the 3d modelling software when I first read the headline, like that the maximum size limit for a Maya model had been found out or something like that.

Very interesting article though!

</comment><comment><USER9> It's kind of impressive they accomplished so much without inventing the wheel... or has that been debunked and is just long outdated information?

<comment><USER10> Some wheeled toys have been found in Mexico, it's not like the wheel was never invented. But The Americas didn't have domesticable large animals that could be used to pull wheeled carriages (bisons were not domesticated at the time), that's why the wheel was never used for that purpose.

Indeed it's very impressive how much they accomplished by themselves without the wheel, without big domesticated animals and without contact with other civilizations.

<comment><USER11> Furthermore the land in southeast mexico is very hilly, and when it's not, it's often swampy or waterlogged (or was at the time of the maya). It's certainly more straightforward to use barges.

Related, I very much recommend the book "Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs".

<comment><USER12> I second this book too, it's a great introduction to Mesoamerican civilization. The author, Michael D. Coe, also has another excellent book "Breaking the Maya Code" on the decipherment of the Maya glyphs The fundamentals were done in 1950-60's by Knorozov and Proskouriakoff, but the decipherment was only widely accepted until as recently as the 1970's[1]!

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_script#Decipherment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_script#Decipherment)

<comment><USER13> Apparently Richard Feynman made fundamental contributions, being more numerate than your average archaeologist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I once visited a Maya site in the Jungle, off the beaten path, away from the usual tourist site. It was probably the most amazing experience I've ever had. It was almost magical.

</comment><comment><USER15> There's a show on Netflix I think, called Lost Cities that uses Lidar in this way.

<comment><USER16> Speaking of Lost Cities, I've been watching the 80s cartoon Mysterious Cities of Gold with my kids. Highly recommended. It's a lost gem about the time of conquistadors in southern and central America - well written for a kids show, entertaining for adults, continuous story arc like modern shows, and a nice mix of history and science fiction.

<comment><USER17> I remember watching (and loving) that as a child, and it was only somewhat recently that I learned it was inspired upon a book:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King%27s_Fifth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King%27s_Fifth)

Not a great read, but I was certainly feeling nostalgic when I finished it.

<comment><USER18> Here is a write up about the history behind The Mysterious Cities of Gold:

[http://jeffzurita.com/2019/05/19/estevan-and-the-cities- of-g...](http://jeffzurita.com/2019/05/19/estevan-and-the-cities-of-gold/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Abstract: Archaeologists have traditionally thought that the development of > Maya civilization was gradual, assuming that small villages began to emerge > during the Middle Preclassic period (1000–350 BC; dates are calibrated > throughout) along with the use of ceramics and the adoption of sedentism1. > Recent finds of early ceremonial complexes are beginning to challenge this > model. Here we describe an airborne lidar survey and excavations of the > previously unknown site of Aguada Fénix (Tabasco, Mexico) with an artificial > plateau, which measures 1,400 m in length and 10 to 15 m in height and has 9 > causeways radiating out from it. We dated this construction to between 1000 > and 800 BC using a Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon dates. To our knowledge, > this is the oldest monumental construction ever found in the Maya area and > the largest in the entire pre-Hispanic history of the region. Although the > site exhibits some similarities to the earlier Olmec centre of San Lorenzo, > the community of Aguada Fénix probably did not have marked social inequality > comparable to that of San Lorenzo. Aguada Fénix and other ceremonial > complexes of the same period suggest the importance of communal work in the > initial development of Maya civilization.

The "the community of Aguada Fénix probably did not have marked social inequality comparable to that of San Lorenzo" claim seems to be explained by:

> It is also likely that social inequality at Aguada Fénix was not as > pronounced as at San Lorenzo and La Venta. Unlike those Olmec centres, > Aguada Fénix does not exhibit clear indicators of marked social inequality, > such as sculptures representing high-status individuals. The only stone > sculpture found so far at Aguada Fénix depicts an animal (Extended Data Fig. > 10).

This seems like a stretch to me considering the excavation is not complete (?), but at least the limestone peccary was named 'Choco' :)

> Cache AF1, found in operation AF1D. It contained a limestone > sculpture—possibly representing a white-lipped peccary—that we named > 'Choco'.

Free to access images (the maps at the beginning and the artifacts at the end are the most interesting to a layman like me): [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2343-4#Sec15](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2343-4#Sec15)

DOI: [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2343-4](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2343-4)

Placement within Mexico for context: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Tabasco_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Tabasco_in_Mexico_%28location_map_scheme%29.svg)

</comment><comment><USER20> The consistent underestimation of the capabilities and development of historic indigenous peoples outside Europe and the Middle East is both absurd and tragic. You'd think that by now archaeologists might have adjusted their assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER21> Url changed from [https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/researchers- find-3000-year...](https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/researchers- find-3000-year-maya-structure-larger-pyramids/story?id=71095913), which points to this, which doesn't have an autoplaying video.

</comment><comment><USER22> Aliens.

<comment><USER21> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23436526)</comment></comment>


Successes (and Some Growing Pains) at Hulu - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/technology/01hulu.html?src=twt&twt=nytimes <comment><USER2> ""Aggregation works for consumers," he said. "It makes it easier to find and discover and enjoy premium content, and it works for advertisers, because with that aggregation you get greater reach." [...] To get permission to move content onto other platforms "takes a lot of wrangling," [and is] "like trying to pass the health care bill.""

I think a driver for consolidation into One Media Service To Rule Them All is that advertisers and content providers would get to see _where else_ their viewers are going. One can imagine targeting different ads to viewers depending on their pattern of viewing -- oh look, they watch "Battlestar Galactica" on one network _and_ they watch "This Old House" on another -- hm, home repair geek? Upsell the fancy cordless drill! Like the data mining credit card companies can do, except for content.

This benefit of cooperation goes beyond the 'greater reaach' argument in the article, and might help counter the pressures causing these companies to want to go it alone.</comment>


The truth about the Hillary Clinton Google conspiracy theory – Jun. 10, 2016 - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/10/technology/hillary-clinton-google-search-results/ <comment><USER2> It's not that "she's not a criminal" (the argument if this CNN report) that they don't autocorrect, it's that Google doesn't autocomplete "cri" to anyone- even Charles Manson or Al Capone- to "avoid disparaging a person's name". This is actually what they quote Google as saying in the next sentence. CNN is taking their argument one assumption too far, which is not what Google said. Typical media bias and spin. I'm actually more disappointed in CNN than Google's response, which seems quite reasonable. See below:

"The examples that SourceFed chose are __factually incorrect __. Hillary Clinton has not been charged with a crime. She has not been indicted. Google (GOOGL, Tech30) knows this, and its algorithm actually filters out inaccurate information in autocomplete.

"Our autocomplete algorithm will not show a predicted query that is offensive or disparaging when displayed in conjunction with a person's name," a Google spokeswoman said. "Google autocomplete does not favor any candidate or cause. Claims to the contrary simply misunderstand how autocomplete works."

</comment><comment><USER3> I like this one:

"Google understands humans better than we understand ourselves," Rhea told CNNMoney.

<comment><USER4> That is just a practical application of the old adage "a person may be unpredictable, but a large group of people is woefully predictable." Statistics from Big Data are, again, confirming that strong, completely independent thinking and decision-making is an illusion.</comment></comment>


Chrome To Exceed 23% Market Share in August - <AUTHOR> http://www.conceivablytech.com/8961/business/chrome-to-exceed-23-market-share-in-august

<comment><USER2> And probably the biggest reason is... it doesn't require admin rights to install by default!</comment>


Opera files complaint - an open letter to the Web community (wants to force MS to support standards) - <AUTHOR> http://people.opera.com/howcome/2007/msft/ <comment><USER2> I actually had more problems with Opera issues than with IE problems. Anyway, I really don't like that kind of thing - companies should be allowed to do shape their products the way they want, and no, Microsoft is not a monopoly.

And I am not even an American...

Besides the European Commission whatever is definitely a bigger bane than Microsoft ever was.

<comment><USER3> In most cases I would agree with you, but in this case the free market doesn't really work that well because the stakeholders in the internet browser compatibility market are the software developers. Unfortunately internet software developers make up such a tiny portion of the actual market share of web browsers that they could all make the move to Firefox or Opera (and most of them do) and it would still have minimal effect.

The software developer is presented with two choices: 1. Continue to develop software for IE no matter how annoying and time consuming it is to nail all those annoying bugs or 2. Refuse to support IE.

Since the general public (read: the bulk of web browser users) are generally ignorant of the difference between IE/Firefox/Opera/etc these companies are really left with no choice. Either support Microsoft or die. The stakeholders are left powerless because they are participants in a market where the participants in that market don't even understand what they are consuming and why.

Of course Microsoft is not a monopoly (by the precise definition of the term), and I tend to lean away from antitrust legislation. However, the externalities their selfish decisions in this area project on the market sum to millions on millions of dollars, if this threat incites them to do something about that I am all for it.

<comment><USER2> I tend to think that if users really think they need something, they'll find a way to get it. For example, most people managed to get themselves a DVD Player. They saw that their neighbours were doing some cool thing in their homes, and m,anaged to inform themselves and buy the bloody players.

If people were so keen on IE alternatives, they would pester their bosses to be allowed to switch. Apparently, FF is not different enough for people to care.

Going the legal way might just open a huge can of worms. For example, how likely will companies be in the future to agree on standards, if next thing they know they'll end up in court for it? As a company, I'd rather stick to my proprietary stuff instead (Flash...).

Also, maybe it simply isn't so easy to be 100% compliant to a specification. Is the specification even unambiguous enough, and clear enough for every developer getting the same picture? Should we really use the courts to establish the meanings of paragraphs in specifications like that? And what about Opera, they suck pretty bad, too - if Microsoft gets some flack, they should be next.

As a web developer, I'd rather wish the EU would shoot down both IE and Opera, and simply force everyone to use Firefox. While they are at it, they should also disallow new versions of Firefox to come out, because they might force me to adapt my code. But that is not the world we REALLY want to live in, or is it?

<comment><USER3> "If people were so keen on IE alternatives, they would pester their bosses to be allowed to switch. Apparently, FF is not different enough for people to care."

This is what I am getting at. Its not enough for your average person to care, because the stakeholders in the browser war are the developers who have to put in all the extra time to make it work on IE _so_ the average person can be browser agnostic.

In this case Microsoft is abusing their power as a large presence in the market to do whatever they want even though that is detrimental to the market. While I do think that an antitrust case would be over the top, there has to be some way to do something about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this letter is about 3 years late.

IE7 fixes most of the annoying stupid problems that used to drive me crazy; now I can develop a site in Safari and Firefox, and it usually works almost perfectly in IE7. I don't mean to say that IE7 is perfect, just that the problems aren't nearly as bad as they used to be.

<comment><USER5> Visit Acid 2 in Opera. It's fine.

Visit in in FF2. It's a little odd, but you can tell its a smiley face. In FF3 it's fine.

Visit in in Konq, or Safari, or Nokia browser. It's fine.

Visit in it IE 7.

Then make up your mind.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, theoretical tests show how shitty IE7 really is, but in practice, it works 98% of the time for me.

<comment><USER5> You're completely right - IE7 works fine for users. But that level of user support would be a lot easier for developers to achieve if we didn't have to code around its quirks.

<comment><USER4> My point is that it has like 95% fewer quirks than IE6. And I was referring to it as a developer.

It still is hideous. Why did they take they file/edit menus off? That was probably the worst user interface mistake in the history of Microsoft, only to be superseded by the Office 2007 interface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Microsoft should file a complaint to force Opera to support javascript properly.

</comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps web developers should stage a strike. Have a day (or more) where everyone participating turns off there work arounds for IE (and perhaps put up a link to their favorite browsers).

</comment><comment><USER8> >For example, Internet Explorer is the only modern Web browser that does not support Acid2.

Um, no. In fact I think only Safari and Opera support Acid2.

I fully support the guys at Opera in furthering web standards, but they should make sure what they say is factual.

<comment><USER9> From the wikipedia article that he linked:

Acid2 is supported by: \- WebCore-based (Safari, OmniWeb, Shiira) \- Konqueror \- Prince \- iCab \- Presto-based (Opera, Internet Channel on Wii) \- Gecko- based 1.9+ (Firefox 3 beta)

It is not supported by: \- Internet Explorer \- Firefox 2 (Current stable version) \- NetFront (PS3 browser)

So yes, technically IE is not the only browser that doesn't support it, but they are the only browser which has said that CSS compliance is not a priority for them.

<comment><USER10> I think it's nitpicking to say that the current version of FF doesn't support Acid2. It's clear that MS doesn't care to implement CSS correctly - and they only reason they can do that is because of their extraordinary market share. That's wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The obvious correct solution is to get everyone off of IE altogether.</comment>


Free support "for as long as you own your Apple product." - <AUTHOR> http://www.info.apple.com/usen/legacy/legacyfaq.html/legacy_list.html <comment><USER2> I wish my car dealer offered what Apple Store does...1) free evaluation of my hardware/software, 2) free minor repairs and 3) free estimate (and suggested alternatives) of repair costs and timing.</comment>


NoSQL Databases: What, Why and When - <AUTHOR> http://ontwik.com/nosql/nosql-databases-what-why-and-when-lorenzo-alberton/

<comment><USER2> The slide that contrasts RDBMS and NoSQL DBs and asks "A step backwards?" reminds me of the rebuttal of MapReduce and NoSQL stores by Mike Stonebraker (copy of the article here: [http://craig- henderson.blogspot.com/2009/11/dewitt-and-stone...](http://craig- henderson.blogspot.com/2009/11/dewitt-and-stonebrakers-mapreduce-major.html))

<comment><USER3> Interesting article.

The author compares map-reduce to Teradata. Serious question: could a system on the scale of Google's various "apps" run on a Teradata database?

<comment><USER4> "Google Scale" is not really all that big of a problem as long as competent people are involved. Google's approach is to basically accept that everything is O(N) and simply through enough hardware at the problem that it's not an issue. RDBMS's often let you do things as O(log N) but they risk O(N^2) or even O(N^N) so your developers need to know what they are doing.

PS: The median developer at any large company is practically incompetent, so it's probably a vary good trade off once you have data centers of that size. However, for comparison Slashdot ran on 4 fairly cheap machines for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Opinion: traditional databases suck and so do NoSQL ones, for the exact opposite reasons.

A better solution would be one that gives developers fine-grained control over "scalable and loose" vs "less-scalable and tight", rather than all-or-nothing in either direction.

That is to say: I want full ACID on my "financial transactions" collection and maximum scalability for my "chat messages" one -- but I want them in the same overall system, accessed via the same API, managed via the same tools, and with knobs that can be inexpensively modified on the running system.

<comment><USER6> I think finer grained consistency models (as well as some other options) would be a step forward for RDBMS systems. However, that doesn't get over the fact that the relational model is not always the best fit for your data. This is especially true if your data is semi-structured. I work with the MongoDB/10gen team and we have a lot of users who enjoy working with the document model, and have seen drastic reductions in both amount of code and time-to-production from it.

<comment><USER5> Just a vocabulary/definitions nit: Data modelling (relational, document, data- structure, whatever) is an independent concern from consistency.

I may want ACID properties but over a document-structured store, for example, and there's nothing contradictory in such a desire...

In fact, as a continuation of my "mix and match" consistency pipe dream; I'd like to mix-and-match data models within the same system, too! Strongly typed w/ integrity constraints; bag-o-data; etc...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Apologies for the extremely flat and boring tone of voice and the somewhat rushed comparison of the actual products. Next time I'll do better, promise :)

Some notes to introduce the slides: [http://www.alberton.info/nosql_databases_what_when_why_phpuk...](http://www.alberton.info/nosql_databases_what_when_why_phpuk2011.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I was at this conference and attended this speech, it was one of the better presentations

</comment><comment><USER9> Very nice set of slides.

<comment><USER10> Even better if you watch the video to get the commentary....

<comment><USER11> +1 on that, commentary is excellent and concise. If you want a brief intro to concepts in distributed DBs this is it. Grab that coffee and turn up the speakers.</comment></comment></comment>


Do shorter hours or higher wages make better teachers? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/04/daily-chart-18?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/teacherssalaries <comment><USER2> Wrong question.

Wages that are enough for the teacher to live to teach and not struggle, coupled with the autonomy necessary to reach and improve their students makes netter teachers.

They are professionals. Treating them as such will improve things a lot.</comment>


Atlantic Canadian Founders Deserve Better Than FAN (First Angel Network) - <AUTHOR> http://startupnorth.ca/2013/02/19/atlantic-canadian-founders-deserve-better-than-first-angel-network-fan/

<comment><USER2> We would all be wise to remember that when a lot of money is being thrown around, some con artists will arrive. Scammers will haunt the edges of any scene where people are giving out something valuable. Those of us who read Hacker News are aware of the reputable investors who mean well, and who clearly want to help facilitate the creation of wealth. Anyone who reads this site can name at least a dozen investors and/or incubators that are honest. But we should not be innocent: whenever there is a gold rush, there will be liars and cheats.

I have written about this before, but in 2009 I was hired by a small startup in New York City. At that time I lived in Virginia but I had wanted to move to New York, and this job offer was the perfect chance. So I moved to New York. I had worked with startups in Virginia, and I had high hopes about the startup in New York.

All the same, what I saw at the startup was disturbing. The financing seemed questionable. The central figure ran what he called an investment firm. That meant he reached out to potential investors and he tried to get them to invest small amounts in his various projects. At any given time he had 10 to 12 projects that he was raising money for. He would raise $100,000 or more to get a startup going. Each project might have 10 investors.

I worked at that place for a few months, and then I was told that they had to close down because all the money was gone. The project manager/COO told me that they'd spent $80,000 of the $100,000. I was not clear why things were closing down. He told me to send in my final invoice. I did. They never paid me. 2 months later I was told there was no money to pay me. I had long (sometimes angry) conversations with the COO about the money. He gave me some reassurances about the money, how much had been spent, how much had been raised, how much there was. But he also said that the main figure had never granted him (the COO) access to any of the financial statements, so he was not able to speak with 100% confidence about how much money there had been, or still was.

It is possible that all of this can be put down to the normal chaos of startups. But it seemed like the main figure here was raising $x amount for a startup, spending 80% of the money, and then telling investors that, sadly, the project had failed, they had not gotten enough momentum, these things are very risky, etc.

Maybe he had an understanding with the investors, but I very much had the impression that he kept 20% of the money for himself. And he was doing this constantly for 10 to 12 projects. He went to dozens of events in New York and in Boston, he was constantly pitching, constantly raising money. He was very good at getting people to hand him money. But I have my doubts about whether the money was being spent the way the investors would assume it was spent.

The normal chaos of startups can hide a lot of corruption. You can use the riskiness of startups as a cover for fleecing investors and delivering very little. In the end, all you have to say is "I am very sorry, these things are very risky, I'm sure you knew this was risky, we did our best but we failed to get momentum." And of course, startups are risky, that part is true, but the investor has the reasonable expectation that if they give you money, then you did everything possible to make your startup a success.

Here is a bit of age old wisdom: let the invest beware. (And likewise, beware of the exploitive investor pitch.)

The fact that there are some famous investors whose integrity is well known should not distract anyone from the fact that there are scam artists in every walk of life.

<comment><USER3> This reminds me of the musical "The Producers". Raising money for ventures that often fail leads to intentionally raising money for something that you hope will fail to hide corruption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's no Google-cached copy of the page, but here's a summary from a news site:

[http://business.financialpost.com/2013/02/24/feathers- flying...](http://business.financialpost.com/2013/02/24/feathers-flying-as- maritime-entrepreneur-network-accused-of-conduct-unbecoming-an-angel/)

 _\- Despite taking public money from government agencies such as ACOA (which gave FAN $1.1-million between 2006 and 2011), FAN charges $3,000 to present each startup to its investor network.

\- Startups that present are also required to sign a consulting contract with a private company owned by Finlay and Lowe. These services normally include helping the company prepare its pitch, negotiate a deal, and ensure due diligence by legal experts.

\- In return for these services, the companies normally pay Finlay and Lowe a percentage of the capital they raise. (Crow quotes a standard fee of 8%, although Finlay says the percentage varies, and has been as low as 4%.)_

It also quotes responses from the FAN partners, which you can judge the validity of for yourself. Getting up to 8% of the investment raised is a sweet gig for them, I think. Too bad they don't let the startup know about their "consulting fees" till it's almost time to present to the investors.</s>

<comment><USER5> There are some serious conflicts of interest there.

<comment><USER6> Welcome to the Maritimes.

<comment><USER7> Ain't that the truth. Watching PEI politics, for one, makes me think I'm back in high school again...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Soooooo, that $3,000 to pitch is actually a deal when compared to what TechCrunch charges, or what DEMO charges for a booth..... Both are wastes of money.

<comment><USER9> Well, at Techcrunch I believe the main battlefield is free but the booth setups are paid for.

<comment><USER6> This is correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The site is loading slow under HN's load, here's the text content: <http://pastebin.com/QKsXiAg3>

</comment><comment><USER11> It's Canada. This is standard operating procedure.

EDIT: To clarify, I mean modestly wealthy individuals attempting to take advantage of hopeful entrepreneurs is SOP in Canada. I've seen it on the west coast first hand, and have reports from the east coast about similar things.

<comment><USER12> It is most certainly not the standard procedure.

EDIT (for your edit): >To clarify, I mean modestly wealthy individuals attempting to take advantage of hopeful entrepreneurs is SOP in Canada. I've seen it on the west coast first hand, and have reports from the east coast about similar things.

Again, this is NOT the standard operating procedure in Canada. I'm sure there are individuals who have no qualms about squeezing entrepreneurs, but I can't imagine this is any different from US. The one problem I found is that, though Canada (Ontario at least) has a wonderful Angel network, and phenomenal government programs (e.g. FedDev, SRED), there is a lack of Series A (and later) VC money.

<comment><USER13> I have first hand experience in your quoted excellent programs. I'm using a temporary username as I don't want to link my comments to past identifiable use of this website.

SRED is a dirty game where consultants will elaborate on your less than applicable research to boost your chances of getting grant money. And hey, the consultant will get paid, the company will get paid and the tax-payer with the actual developer who's SIN and identity is used gets chucked on the hook for it. It's absurd. Both of the programs you have mentioned get people that I know very rich, tax-payers poorer and regular workers adding to it by paying on average 33% - 37% taxes.

Sometimes, I wonder if playing by the rules without leeching off the system is worth my while. And as long as I have enough to keep a roof over my family's head, I just might stay on the right side of this debacle of a ruse.

<comment><USER12> >SRED is a dirty game where consultants will elaborate on your less than applicable research to boost your chances of getting grant money.

It's as dirty as you want it to be. If you want to lie and cheat, you can try, and you may be able to get away with it. Or you can honestly approach the process, and sleep better at night.

>I wonder if playing by the rules without leeching off the system is worth my while

Playing by the rules? These are federal and provincial programs. There's nothing shady or illegal about them. I think the startups that qualify do benefit from them immensely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are good alternatives in the area. LightSail had very good experiences with Innovacorp. Quick and reasonable -- no crazy expenses.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a strait up scam. NEVER pay to pitch.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. 100%.

It prays on desperate entrepreneurs that will do anything to keep their businesses alive. And it's wrong, for so many reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> ERANYC might be a worse deal - they don't charge to pitch them, but they want 8% and anti-dilution, for $40k investment.

<comment><USER9> How is that worse? Thats similar to most incubators.

<comment><USER17> Including the anti-dilution part?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me of an old dilbert cartoon in which they play the game "Trust". You fall backwards, into your teammates' arms. You can imagine how it goes, but the key lesson learnt is, essentially: Don't trust anybody.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What a bummer. I post something half interesting and the site goes down. . .

<comment><USER16> Sorry, I messed up. My configuration was substandard this morning. Upgraded the memory available to the WP & MySQL instances. Turned on WP-Supercache. And adding a Varnish layer in front.

<comment><USER19> Try W3 Total Cache, they have super-tight Varnish integration.

<comment><USER16> Working on it with vmfarms guys (we got 10x our high point traffic using hourly measure on this post) updating our infrastructure to be more resilient.

<comment><USER20> I recommend replacing super cache with W3TC. It has a lot more features, including minifying your CSS and JS. If you need help with it email me, dan at driverdan dot com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sometimes it seems like Atlantic Canada can never win.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's hard work but things are changing. Exits here are growing and early stage startups have good access to capital

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Found it hilarious i can't connect to the site.

<comment><USER23> The site you can't connect to is startupnorth, a blog about canadian startups. the fund in question is First Angel Network (according to the slug, as that's all i can see too.)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Free Java Lambdas Screencasts - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I got back in to Java a last year for work and was really pleased by some of the features added in Java 8. I decided to make a screencast series covering some of the new features (lambdas, streams, etc) and have finished the first section on Lambdas: http://bitpress.io/learning-modern-java/
As I said, I have been out of the Java world a while, since college in fact, so I would love some feedback on these screencasts (if you don't want to download the zip with the videos and code samples, there is a preview chapter under "What's Inside"). You can also sign up to get announcements about other screencasts my partner and I are doing (we are covering PHP, APIs, Docker, Java, and more)
I am currently in the process of recording a direct follow up to these screencasts covering Java 8 Streams and will send out an announcement via newsletter, so sign up if you are interested!
Thanks for your time! <comment><AUTHOR> Also to note, the source code is available here [https://github.com/bitpressio/modern-java- lambdas](https://github.com/bitpressio/modern-java-lambdas) if you don't want to download the full video series here [http://bitpress.io/learning-modern- java/](http://bitpress.io/learning-modern-java/)</comment>


Akka, Spray and Play to come Together - <AUTHOR> http://scalalearn.com/akka-spray-play-come-together/

<comment><USER2> This was covered by Typesafe's announcement. The linked 'article' seems to be spam for the author's books. The fact that the submitter is the author of the blog post and had no karma before posting doesn't bode well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the "philosophy" section on the Spray site: [http://spray.io/introduction/what-is- spray/](http://spray.io/introduction/what-is-spray/)

It speaks nicely to what it should and shouldn't be used for at a high enough level that people new to it can understand quickly.

</comment><comment><USER4> Now if only they had a decent DB library/ORM. (And no, Slick isn't it)

<comment><USER5> I've just recently discovered Slick only by noticing it performed quite well in TechEmpower's last round of benchmarks. So I'm genuinely curious, what's wrong with Slick?

<comment><USER6> I recently learned Slick, and it was a hellish ride. First of all, a large part of the problems I had were an unbelievable terrible documentation. Sometimes, in order to do even the simplest things, I had to look into particular unit tests deep within the sources of the project, or follow stackoverflow discussions with multiple proposals, only one of which actually worked. Oftentimes this was for things which I considered granted and implemented. The certainly best example is getting an object by id. I would have thought that this, being the most basic operation, should be possible through some kind of default operation like "get" or "getById" or "objectById" or something else. Instead, you have stackoverflow answers like this:

def findById(userId: Int)(implicit session: Session): Option[User] = { val query = for{ u <\- Users if u.id === userId } yield u query.firstOption }

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16461260/select-single- ro...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16461260/select-single-row-based-on- id-in-slick)

However, that's not even the brink of the iceberg. Try finding out how to update multiple fields in an object. Say you retrieve a User object, and you want to set a new email, zip, and address. I'd suppose, this would work with simple getters and setters, i.e.:

user = Users.get(user_id) user.email = new_mail user.zip = new_zip user.address = new_address

Instead, you have to do this:

val map = Query(User) .filter(_.id === user_id) .map(ab => ab.email ~ ab.zip ~ ab.address)

map.update((new_mail, new_zip, new_address))

And even that only works with updateable result sets. See: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16757368/how-do-you- updat...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16757368/how-do-you-update- multiple-columns-using-slick-lifted-embedding)

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/scalaquery/ML56aZAfy3g...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/scalaquery/ML56aZAfy3g/nx- PPV1y2dEJ)

Or, to quote from the stackoverflow answer above: "Typesafe, why your documentation is so bad ? I have to Google pretty much every silly thing or dig through unit-tests for hours. Please improve it. Thanks."

Now, after a lot of searching, I found solutions to all of my problems, but it took a long time, lots of Google, and almost nothing came out of their awful documentation.

<comment><USER7> This looks great. Seriously all of the answers you give seem simple and convenient ways of doing things.

You could reduce your first example to def findById(userId: Int)(implicit s: Session) = Users.filter(_.id === userId).firstOption

<comment><USER6> Certainly true, but when you're just starting out, that kind of thinking may not be there yet. You need some time with Slick to understand this, and it is difficult to get into it because it lacks the simple facilities. I actually spend a lot of time searching for these simple facitilies until I realized that they're really not there yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is really awesome news. I like Play and AKKA is really good.

In the past I've used Erlang/OTP and loved it, but with this news, I might use this instead.

</comment><comment><USER9> Slick, although looks promising, is not ready. Lack of documentation, examples, and voodoo syntax. If anyone can tell me what $, #$, and +? inside sqlu statement are?

So here is something I found. Its a benchmark for some of the ORM frameworks out there. Slick doesn't do too well.

[http://databen.ch/](http://databen.ch/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm interested to see the effects of the spray optimization work making its way into Play.</comment>


Ask HN: How do 100+ person startups efficiently manage employee expenses? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> I can give you 3 examples:

My first job out of college back in the mid-90s was processing expense statements for a small government contract (~200 employees). We were a division of a large corporation and would handle all our employee expense statements within our division. The first rule (and this applies across the board) was that for the most part employees could be trusted. So I was mainly looking for unapproved expenses (in this case anything over $100 had to be approved by their direct manager, anything over $500 had to be approved by their group manager, and anything over $1000 had to have division manager approval). While I was scanning I was just double checking to make sure they didn't have some random expense listed (i.e. cash advance on the credit card). After that it was fairly simple. The employees all had company credit cards that had personal guarantees to the employee, so if the payment wasn't made the employee was ultimately responsible for the bill. The only thing the company did was allow employees who may not otherwise qualify for the card eligible. Whenever an employee was ready they would fill out an expense statement and submit it to me with all their receipts. I would process everything and take it to the division head for final approval. The next pay period the expenses were included in their check (pre-tax).

My second example was with an Internet startup. I was employee 24 and when I first started it was pretty much a free for all on company expenses. There were no real controls in place, however, as time went on and we grew similar controls were established like above. Approvals were required at certain cost triggers. And expense statements were submitted for final approval. Again, we had company credit cards that were personally guaranteed but backed by the company.

Finally, when I worked at Microsoft in the late 90s/early 2000 the experience was very similar to both the above. There were thresholds for expense approvals, we would fill out expense statements online that went to our manager for approval and I can't remember if we got a separate checks or if they were included in our check. Like the other two examples, expenses started at the team level and moved up the chain depending on what the threshold was.

In all the cases there were clear policies in place regarding what was an expense and what was not. It was clear that if an expense wasn't approved the employee was responsible. And there was always someone reviewing the expenses to make sure they were acceptable. While time consuming, it is really not a complicated process and a single person can process expenses for a larger group (in my first case I personally manually handled - pre-Internet - <USER2> 100 expense statements a week). Unless there it is a company requiring extensive travel for all employees there really should not be a lot of direct "employee expense" statements.

<comment><USER4> We've had this challenge as well at a smaller scale. People would go out to lunch all the time to "discuss work" and expense it. We were paying thousands a month for that.

After a while that, and a few other things, got a bit out of hand.

Rather than just go after that, we've made it a goal (among other quarterly goals) for everyone to work towards a certain amount of profitability that people can have a part of.

In addition to reducing expenses (yes, it's cheaper) it's also created a bit more of a frugal culture in the company. It's great, people watch what they spend themselves and are much more concerned about their departments' budgets.

Mind you, we have less than 30 employees at the company (I'm one of the founders).

Also, all expenses automatically go to your manager and then get reconciled by our accountant who basically has OCD and will question anything that even looks remotely questionable to anyone including management.

Point is, we created this more frugal culture so everyone can have a bit more in the long run.

<comment><USER3> It's funny you say that. In my 2nd example, at the startup, the culture initially was similar. We would go out to lunch as a team and expense it. We would go for drinks after work and expense it ("team building"). As we grew the culture shifted to a "frugal" one, but it was rewarded more with raises and bonuses. Executives sold it to employees not as "cutting costs" but as a gain for employees. At the time we were planning an IPO (this was during the first bubble) and we were sold that if we could show less expenses, more revenue we would end up with higher stock prices thus there was an incentive for us.

For the most part though employees were not upset by the transition from spending freely to frugal. I learned from my first job doing expenses that the majority of employees, given simple controls/policies, will abide by them. Some may push the limit from time to time, but blatant expense fraud can be overcome, in most cases, with minimal time/effort and some basic oversight. Having a system of checks/balances (thresholds and management approval limits) along with a final accounting review prior to reimbursement prevents most cases.</comment></comment></comment>


Peter Thiel – American Democracy Lecture Transcript [3/14/19] - <AUTHOR> https://activationenergy.io/thiel/ <comment><USER2> Please take out uh/um/yeah. It's really disturbing in reading the text. I understand that you didn't want to over-edit it (and I am thankful for it), but right now not having complete sentences makes it much harder to understand what Peter's saying. Try to think about whether he himself would have written down his thoughts this way.

<comment><USER3> Realized this while reading, I'll edit it out tonight!</comment></comment>


How to unfuck performance reviews - <AUTHOR> http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/how-to-unfuck-performance-reviews/

<comment><USER2> That's the best word I've ever heard.</comment>


Intel Abandoning 10nm, Planning to Use TSMC's 6nm and 3nm for GPUs - <AUTHOR> https://wccftech.com/intel-abandoning-10nm-after-dg1-planning-to-use-tsmcs-6nm-and-3nm-for-next-generation-xe-gpus/ <comment><USER2> > The transition to TSMC for GPU production is something that has been rumored > before and just like before, we do not have independent validation of this > information - so this post has been marked rumor and to be taken with a > grain of salt.

So... why is this on the frontpage??

<comment><USER3> No idea. I don't trust anything on wccftech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder why Intel doesn't start to use TSMC 5nm and 3nm for CPUs. They are struggling with their internal R&D for these nodes anyhow.

<comment><USER5> I would assume it's a volume issue. Intel makes so many CPU's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this just for GPUs? They can't be giving up on their own 10nm for CPUs surely?

<comment><USER7> The last two paragraphs of the article imply that they will continue using their own fabs for CPUs.</comment></comment>


Pilot predicts movie box office - <AUTHOR> https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/10/21/can-this-boston-startup-predict-film-grosses/ib6zL7GR0Qj6FoKc7OpCRN/story.html <comment><USER2> wow super cool how accurate some of their predictions were. Curious to know which features are most predictive of box office success

<comment><AUTHOR> We haven't found one particular feature to be the most predictive overall, across all different types of projects, but we have noticed that certain features are more predictive for certain projects. For instance, a horror film, on average, is more affected by the presence of other horror/thriller genre fare released within a 2 week range than an action/comedy/drama film.</comment></comment>


Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 for PHP - <AUTHOR> http://www.zend.com/en/products/studio/flash-builder-for-php/index

<comment><AUTHOR> Adobe's product page: <http://www.adobe.com/products/flash-builder_php.html>

Blog post about this: [http://andigutmans.blogspot.com/2011/04/rapidly- deliver-nati...](http://andigutmans.blogspot.com/2011/04/rapidly-deliver- native-connected-mobile.html)</comment>


Tying ecosystems through browsers - <AUTHOR> http://dbaron.org/log/20150803-ecosystems <comment><USER2> >Some of the recent threats to the ability to implement competitive browsers are non-technical

I believe the biggest threats remain technical.

It's too challenging or expensive to implement a competitive browser engine from scratch.

Add to that the challenge and expense of building a Search Engine or Smart Assistant (significant features integrated today's browsers) it's nearly impossible for all but a few companies to even try to enter the market.</comment>


Unix things web developers often struggle with – and how to fix them - <AUTHOR> https://certsimple.com/blog/unix-things-web-developers-struggle-with <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. The list: EALLCAPS messages, handing non-responsive terminal apps, how to use interpreters, restarting services, running unprivileged apps on low ports - is just based on my own experiences working with people from non-Unix backgrounds.

There's a few simpler things that also come up:

\- You don't need to close your terminal window to make .bash_profile changes take effect, just run `bash -l` to start a login shell

\- The find command. Find can do a bunch of stuff, but most of the time you just want:

        find /dir -name 'somefile.ext'

If you'd prefer to type:

        findname 'somefile.ext'

...then here's a shortcut for your .bash_profile:

        function findname () {
            find . -name "$@"
        }

     - journalctl. A lot of folk seem to spend time either hunting for a regex to scrape time or scrolling like a maniac to find a particular time of day. Just:

        journalctl -u myapp --since 09:00

To get everything that happened since 9AM.</comment>


Great business advise from Steve Jobs: "Focusing is about saying no" - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8eP99neOVs

<comment><USER2> Not to be a stickler, but it is "advice" not "advise".</comment>


DropBox Facing Competition From Google Drive - <AUTHOR> http://www.techiediy.com/dropbox-facing-competition-from-google-drive

<comment><USER2> does google drive offer nice native apps to seamlessly sync folders, etc..</comment>


Alternative operating systems - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/10-best-alternative-operating-systems-934484

<comment><USER2> Glad they have Inferno, but why no Plan 9?

In any case, two tongue-in-cheek:

``Systems Software Research is Irrelevant'' by Rob Pike <http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/>

``Why Some Dead OSes Still matter'' by Andrey Mirtchovski and Latchesar IonkoV <http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/misc/dead_OSes_still_matter/>

<comment><USER3> Your comment made me look up Plan 9 on wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs>). I like very much the philosophy of Plan 9 and the evolution from the Unix base and it is really a pitty that Plan9 did not have much success. I hope that some of it designs will find its way to Unix though.

I discovered that at least one Plan 9 invention had success and is found today everywhere: UTF 8 encoding.

<comment><USER2> No place for the past tense :-)

The OS is under development, and as more people jump in [1], the pace increases. A lot of software has been ported natively or to APE; you can get a pretty decent UNIX workstation with P9 alone those days.

On the other hand, if you want to try it the easy way, consider <http://swtch.com/plan9port/> Runs on virtually any POSIX environment, but it's just a teaser of Plan 9. I'm using the Acme editor from it daily.

Linux adapted quite a bit, the clone() syscall, the --bind option for mount (only partly implemented, thou), the pervasive namespacing, the XRender API (modeled after BitBlt) and some more.

In a way Git's storage resembles Venti [2] but probably is just convergent evolution.

\--

[1] <http://9fans.net/archive/> search powered by grep :D

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venti>

EDIT Re: UTF-8

It's a funny story; Linux only imported half of the Unicode support from Plan 9. In P9, UTF-8 is used on-the-wire and on-the-storage. However, in case a process wants to deal with sizeable amount of text (say, a text editor, a grep etc.), it converts the UTF-8 into `Runes' -- strings of 32bit integers (till recently 16bit) directly denoting Unicode characters, for fast access by offset. And back to send over wire or write to storage.

Another nice story, you get a network connection with just one libcall: dial().

For example, int fd = dial("tcp!news.ycombinator.com!http", 0, 0, 0);

and that's it :D

<comment><USER4> For folks looking for a really fast and easy way to play around with Plan 9, I would encourage you to look at 9vx: <http://swtch.com/9vx/>

No virtual machine, just a tarball (available for freebsd, linux and mac os x) that uses vx32 (<http://swtch.com/9vx/>) to dynamically execute plan9 code in a sandbox.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the great pointer; totally forgot about this project :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think that's the worst OpenBSD screenshot I've ever seen. Just look at <http://www.google.com/images?q=openbsd+screenshot> \- OpenBSD will happily run pretty much any unix software including WMs. The only real issue is a lack of blobs like nvidia's X driver, and that's not only a disadvantage...

<comment><USER6> Ah yes, the eternal "transparant terms with half-naked woman or anime background." To be honest I prefer the article's picture to this parody of good aesthetics. It's like I'm running Gentoo in '98 all over again.

<comment><USER7> That's about 4 years too early for you to be running Gentoo, buddy.

* tugs at Locke1689's neckbeard to see if it's fake

<comment><USER6> I'm 21. I think I actually first used Linux in '99. It was Red Hat 5 IIRC. The Gentoo ricers didn't come till later, but hyperbole has always been my preferred writing style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> JNode: 'Planned future features include lower memory consumption...'

As soon as I read that someone was building an OS entirely from Java, I immediately wondered, "How did they solve the memory consumption problem?"

Evidently, they didn't. Why even start such a project without first attacking this obvious, fatal problem?

<comment><USER9> Because one of Java's core unwritten design ideas is "memory is not an issue". So, if the project is going to be done in unaltered Java then it has to be done on a system with lots of memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> They speak about bunch of (seemingly) toy OSes but do not mention Plan 9? It's a well-designed OS that takes the UNIX "everything is a file" abstraction to its logical conclusion. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs>

<comment><USER11> Inferno was, in some sense, the successor to Plan 9, as it was developed by the same people using the experience gained from Plan 9 and with similar goals in mind. For example, the protocol underlying the "everything is a file" abstraction in 4th edition Plan 9 is 9P2000; this is basically identical to the Styx protocol found in Inferno, save for the name. It wouldn't surprise me if the author was familiar with Plan 9 but, because of only relatively cursory research, assumed that Inferno had succeeded or obseleted it in some way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow, I had forgotten about some of those. Nice reminder.

I actually played around with FreeVMS, but I am too young to have ever experienced one in the wild, so after I successfully booted it, I was then stuck. :-/

I have not dabbled with JNode in many, many years, but I find it especially amusing that one of their upcoming release goals is to "use less memory." :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> No mention of Google or Android in an article about the future of operating systems? It seems to me that a current big shakeup on the OS market is actually being led by Google and that Android represents quite a bit of the future of "alternative" OSs.

<comment><USER10> IMO, Android isn't generally applicable. The reason Android works is because you have a (fairly) limited set of devices with more or less the same hardware and capabilities (e.g., touchscreen, GPS, radios, gyroscope etc.) So application writers have a fixed number of events they need to access, and a VM + software stack would be able to provide that while making development and security relatively easier.

Real operating systems have to run on a myriad of hardware and potentially interface with tons of devices and protocols, so you would need to allow programmers to go to the hardware level and read and write bytes by hand.

<comment><USER14> > Real operating systems have to run on a myriad of hardware

Historically untrue, and still not true for OSes like Windows NT (modern versions x86 and Itanium only), MVS (z Series only), and, of course, Mac OS X.

Historically, I think Unix was the first OS to run on multiple different kinds of hardware, as opposed to running on multiple variants of the same architecture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> SGI's IRIX is also a nice one; check out the gallery on Nekochan <http://www.nekochan.net/gallery2/main.php>

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm happy to see that FreeVMS is making progress, though it probably means my good friend JKB has too much free time :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Great?

<comment><USER17> More like, "10 Operating Systems With Great Screenshots".

Using the ability to run Firefox as a metric, I think only Haiku, ReactOS and OpenBSD qualify as great.

<comment><USER18> I had to double check the article publish dates. I don't know who the main audience for this site is but if someone told me these screenshots were of state-of-the-art alternative OSes back in 1999 or earlier, I would have believed it in a second.

<comment><USER19> Why? Because the definition of state-of-the-art OS is one with a useless Aero/Compiz/whatever 3d graphics Hollywood feel?

IMO, the most exciting OS stuff is far from visible in the UI, let alone screenshots...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is it true that Windows NT was so-named as it was supposed to be VMS+1 ?

</comment><comment><USER21> vote me down if you want. At first I though HN was degenerating to Reddit. Now I'm convinced we are regressing to Slashdot.</comment>