Ask HN: Which is that site which gives learning path for learning algorithms - <AUTHOR> Few days ago I came across one site which gives a nice path and modules by modules progress of learning and practising algorithms.
I forget the site name, do you have seen any products like this ? <comment><USER2> What kinds of algorithms? What area: Science? Engineering? Math? Computing? Machine Learning? Optimisation? Sorting? Artificial Intelligence?

A clue would help ... what do you remember?

<comment><AUTHOR> It was related to programming interview, computing only and there was a very well structured path as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I found these two resources nice -

* [https://www.hackerearth.com/practice/codemonk/](https://www.hackerearth.com/practice/codemonk/)

* [https://www.codechef.com/certification/data-structures-and-a...](https://www.codechef.com/certification/data-structures-and-algorithms/prepare)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry not this one, I am aware about the above both, so the site I am finding was just dedicated to data-structure and algorithms , thats it , there was nothing much apart from that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Probably this one? [https://roadmap.sh/](https://roadmap.sh/) I have seen it few times last year, so could be. Although I would say it lacks the part of 'practising algorithms'.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't seem to say algorithms. Am I missing something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good list of resources here:

[https://github.com/tayllan/awesome- algorithms](https://github.com/tayllan/awesome-algorithms)

</comment><comment><USER7> [https://metacademy.org/](https://metacademy.org/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Might be Exercism?

[https://exercism.io](https://exercism.io)

</comment><comment><USER9> Maybe this? [https://github.com/tayllan/awesome- algorithms](https://github.com/tayllan/awesome-algorithms)

<comment><AUTHOR> Beautiful compilation :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not affiliated, just a user, but if you're looking for guided learning for interview specific algos and problems, etc, I used interviewcake with great success

</comment><comment><USER11> Hackerrank is probably what you are thinking of

<comment><USER12> Classical engineering? Architectural? Electrical? Et. al?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.firecode.io/](https://www.firecode.io/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Might be project Euler where you learn how to solve mathematical issues with algorithms

</comment><comment><USER15> Coursera and Udacity have some excellent courses by the likes of Robert Sedgewick.

</comment><comment><USER16> this is a solid, structured course I recently took, but it is paid [https://interviewespresso.com/p/python](https://interviewespresso.com/p/python)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for this, its really good one , though paid, the one I am trying to retrieve was free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Leetcode?

</comment><comment><USER18> sounds very much like [https://www.interviewbit.com](https://www.interviewbit.com)

<comment><USER19> This is what I had in mind as well. The difficulty ramps up quickly! I just had to do a couple of these and felt confident enough to start applying to jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Brilliant.org?

</comment><comment><USER21> following</comment>


How I Made £5,000 Out of Thin Air - <AUTHOR> http://www.yourfirstidea.com/?p=1229

<comment><USER2> This is very encouraging - thanks for posting. I like the idea of selling to someone who could make the conversions you could not, using the same source.

</comment><comment><USER3> Spamming people on Facebook to generate leads for ambulance-chasing lawyers? This sounds super sleazy. I'm glad to hear they shut you down. Congrats on the money, I guess.</comment>


Stop Using Small Font Sizes - <AUTHOR> http://hn.explodie.org/writings/stop-using-small-font-size.html <comment><USER2> I don't mind small font sizes as long as you don't do anything to break zoom in the browser.

What is killing me a lot more lately is the trend towards extremely low contrast sites, like white backgrounds with almost-white text. This is starting to be _everywhere_ recently and it is horrible.

I'm sure that design looks great on your Pantone-calibrated monitor, designer, but on mine I can barely even see there are words there let alone easily read them. Supplying a user-defined CSS or constantly highlighting paragraphs is much more painful than a zooming in with the scroll wheel or a simple gesture.

So I agree with the point the article is making but I think there are currently bigger fish to fry when it comes to painful design trends on the web.

<comment><USER3> Idea: a browser feature (plugin) just like zoom, only that would up the contrast on sites (or decrease, too).

It would have to be semi-intelligent to adjust the brightness accordingly (so it would work both on light-gray-on-white sites and dark-gray-on-black sites), but having an in-browser contrast control would be _great_.

<comment><USER4> There's a Chrome extension that does something like that: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/high- contrast/djcf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/high- contrast/djcfdncoelnlbldjfhinnjlhdjlikmph)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's great to see this on HN where there are literally fonts as low as 7pt being used...

Everyone keeps saying that it's fine as long as zoom functions correctly. Well it's also fine to use a font size widely accepted as readable. 7pt? Really? Why? Because zoom works?

I know a lot of people who read HN that use style bot to increase the font size. To act like this isn't an issue seems really weird to me. Ctrl+- is there for people who really need the help seeing. It's _actually_ being used to make up for bad designers.

<comment><USER6> And zoom does not function correctly on the default Android browser.

<comment><USER7> And if I pinch zoom in I can't see the whole line.

<comment><USER8> First do a pinch zoom, then double-tap to make the text reflow using the new size.

(Unfortunately not in Chrome for Android, since it's too cool for usability. Should work on anything using Android's built-in webkit).

<comment><USER6> For me and my Nexus 4, double-tap re-zooms to the width of the element tapped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> On the other hand, don't use font sizes that are too big (I've noticed that on a number of blogs and startup sites recently).

It might look great on your large iMac screen, but when I read it with an 11" MBA, it's pretty frustrating to only be able to see a handful of lines of text at the same time.

Even this blog which is doing the complaining, I wish I could see more of the text at the same time. Though it's a matter of personal preference, a find its line-height to be a bit too tall. 1.5em is just too much for body text, in my opinion -- it's almost like overcompensation, and you rarely see that in the body text of printed books or magazines. 1.2 or 1.3 can be a lot better.

<comment><AUTHOR> How wide is your screen (in px)? Because the max width of my layout is around the old 760px standard. You should be able to see everything (even if, as you say, it's a bit too large).

On the other hand, it's a pretty valid critique. To be honest I forgot that there are 11 inch screens (or, screens that are larger than phones but smaller than 17inch desktop monitors). I'm not on any sort of a big screen.

And indeed, my lineheight is 1.618em (golden number in math, heh). I say 1.5 because it's a nice compromise. Perhaps 1.3 or so is better in certain circumstances.

<comment><USER3> Not width I'm talking about (that's fine), it's the height.

It's funny, because screen height _shouldn't_ affect "readability" (other than making you scroll more often), but with these large-font blogs/sites, they give me a certain feeling of "claustrophobia" -- that I can't see a couple paragraphs' worth to come, or can't see the last couple paragraphs I read.

I think it might be that it prevents me from being able to _scan_ content easily, the way you can on a printed page, where you can quickly skip to the part you can tell is relevant to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll take that into consideration, thanks for the feedback :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd prefer seeing fonts specified as an offset from the browser's standard display format, and in ems rather than pixels or points. Body text _must_ be at the user-specified size.

Contrast is another huge and growing issue. <http://contrastrebellion.com/>

I'm growing increasingly annoyed at sites which offer zero padding between text and display edges. At least a few pixels offset should be offered, and I prefer 50-200 for most full-screen displays.

Interstitials, pop-up nags, requests, quizzes, and the like increasingly make me likely to either close the a tab immediately, or use Firefox's RIP (Remove It Permanently) plug-in.

Fixed-position elements, especially headers and footers, but also sidebars, are similarly annoying. With the smaller overall screen resolutions of the past few years, and wide, short format 10:9 displays, vertical real estate is especially lacking. Sidebars frequently play poorly with mobile devices.

Most lately, I've found several sites which refuse to scroll vertically while on my mobile (Android). The Atlantic's mobile site among them, but there are others. Not a helpful feature.

</comment><comment><USER10> 12pt Times New Roman is the standard for publishing, so that's become the go- to size for a lot of websites. It was plenty big on 800x600 displays, but I agree that it's generally too small for today's resolutions.

However, the solution isn't to pick a new, slightly larger point size and just set everything to that, it's to use media queries to set an appropriate size for whatever medium the content is being displayed in, and to use sizes relative to the user's default rather than specifying exact point sizes.

You can also use absolute sizes (in and cm in CSS) so that the browser will display the font at the given size without regard to the display resolution or DPI.

Edit: Also, I highly recommend Readability, but obviously it'd be preferable if people just did the right thing to begin with.

<comment><USER11> 1pt is a unit of length. One point is 1/72 of an inch. It should be the same height now that it ever was, even on old monitors.

<comment><USER12> Not in CSS, 1pt is always x pixels regardless of how many DPI you have.

<comment><USER13> Nope, it's way more complicated than that. Device pixels, CSS pixels, a pixel is not a pixel. PPK on the subject:

[http://fronteers.nl/congres/2012/sessions/a-pixel-is-not- a-p...](http://fronteers.nl/congres/2012/sessions/a-pixel-is-not-a-pixel- peter-paul-koch)

Points are a terrible unit for specifying font sizes for the screen. Use px or proportional units (em, percentages, etc.). Points are for print, not screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The idea that small font sizes are acceptable because "users can zoom" is fucking _ridiculous_ , and I am extremely disappointed to see it suggested here. That is absolutely the wrong attitude. If a user has to go out of their way to use your interface, you're _doing it wrong_. No question. Interfaces should bend over backward for their users, not the other way around. Yes, you can't satisfy every edge case, but the default attitude must not be "well, users can just use this workaround". That thinking is why we have crappy interfaces. If that's your approach for building interfaces, please _stop building interfaces_ , for the sake of the user.

</comment><comment><USER15> While we're complaining, don't open sites in a new tab just for the hell of it, especially when they're intended to be something you visit then return to. I know where the middle button is.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is one of the reasons that I can't leave firefox. It's got a really nice feature in the Advanced fonts & colors configuration that lets you set a minimum font size. These days I keep it set to 12pt so that sites can't start putting 2-3pt fonts on there.

<comment><USER17> Chromium has this feature as well.

I do miss Firefox's ability to set a different font for pages written in different languages though, if only for viewing silly SJIS art...

<comment><USER18> Chrome's version is confusing and applies oddly. (IME, YMMV, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you use an absolute font size and get it right, fine. If not, I won't read your site. I'm too lazy to use ⌘-+. Sorry.

(Actually, if your site is _really_ interesting, I might be motivated to write a user script to fix your fonts and other usability problems. But your site is unlikely to be _that_ interesting.)

There is no need to specify an absolute font size. Use only relative font sizes (and be careful about ratios below one).

Also, please favor liquid layouts. Just because my screen is 2560px wide doesn't mean I want to use it all for your site (actually, just the opposite!).

<comment><USER20> > _Just because my screen is 2560px wide doesn't mean I want to use it all for > your site_

Yet this is what you're telling your browser by maximising the window NSEW, and the site obeys it, which is good. The point of so much real estate and a windowing system is not to have it end up empty, unless asked to. I hate it when sites make undue assumptions and reimplement in-browser window management. My browser is _not_ my OS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Also, if you break zooming on my iOS devices, I won't bother to read your website. I find this an exceptionally stupid thing to do.

That includes the abomination known as Swype (I think) which breaks websites for iPhone/iPad users presenting them with an interface which does something different than it appears to, breaks zooming, introduces useless and unintuitive "pagination" and generally makes users' lives miserable.

<comment><USER22> I don't have an IOS device. What do you mean by broken? Does the font size stay constant while the page elements get bigger, or does zooming not work at all?

<comment><USER23> Zooming just does nothing. It's meant for web apps that would be inconvenienced by accidental zooming, but developers seem to insist on enabling on everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> TL;DR: use vh/vw CSS units in your bookmarklets.

I have a 15" MBP (older than retina, but higher resolution than the default configuration, 1680x1050) and another laptop with same screen size and even higher resolution (1920x1200), and most of the time I need to zoom in to comfortably read text for long periods.

I also have some grips with contrast, so I ended up using a bookmarklet that increases the text size and improves contrast, based on the Darken bookmarklet popularized in LifeHacker some time ago.

The interesting change is that since I browse with my browser window maximized most of the time, I took advantage of the vh CSS (vh = Viewport Height) unit to find the text size I'm most comfortable with, and then I can use the same bookmarklet in both computers.

Unfortunately VH/VW is relative to the window size, not screen size, so I wouldn't recommend using it for websites in general -- although for mobile web apps it should be a great fit!

The gist of it is:

font-size:2.5vh !important; line-height:4vh !important; background: black ! important; color: #DDD !important; text-shadow: 0 0 black !important;

</comment><comment><USER25> I recommend to check these two articles by Oliver Reichenstein about this topic, one of them he wrote about 7 years ago

<http://informationarchitects.net/blog/100e2r>

[http://informationarchitects.net/blog/responsive- typography-...](http://informationarchitects.net/blog/responsive-typography- the-basics/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I agree that there can be problematic sites with too small fonts, a nearly non existing line height or grey on white background. But to be honest I stopped caring.

I am normally using Safari (on my Mac and on iOS) and if I visit a site which is hard to read or if I disagree with the mobile no-zoom responsive decision because it doesn't work for me I just turn on the "reader mode". Big enough font size, line height, good contrast, focus on content. What else could I ask for? (well, beside another font maybe)

I see no reason leaving a site or discussing the design taste of someone as long as I have a one-button-read-nicely solution available. But if this won't work (some sites, somehow manage to break it) I'm out.

There are design decisions which look good but are not useable for many people. I believe most of the time someone is aware of this but decided he either does not care or that it is okay. Still, some education and discussion in this field is always good, especially for people just starting.

</comment><comment><USER27> Some of this advice differs from the carefully thought out style advice in the HTML5 Boilerplate project,

<http://html5boilerplate.com/>

(which, dismayingly, is loading very slowly in Chrome just now, but loading fine in IE), the basis for my restyling my very old personal website. A line height of 1.4 is plenty large. The author is fully correct, of course, that it is best not to specify a font size at all, and especially not to specify a size that can't be resized at will be any user who happens to visit your site. Responsive Web design

<http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-of-responsive-web-design>

<http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design>

is the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER28> Only if you stop using fully-justified text first.

<comment><USER5> What's wrong with justified text? I prefer reading justified text.

<comment><USER29> Justified text is fine in printed material when a certain amount of control can be exercised to make sure that terrible things don't happen.

Browsers are horrible at justifying text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> huh, initially I thought "It is not THAT big of a problem" but after reading his article (easily) then trying to read an article in some of his example offenders sites...I can see his point.

Consider my eyes opened... (and not squinting.)

<comment><USER31> funnily, the article itself is an "offending site": [http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=1g14rd&s=6](http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=1g14rd&s=6)

<comment><AUTHOR> What sort of browser do you use that doesn't support anti-aliasing of fonts?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Quite otherwise, I dislike the trend of large font sizes with huge line heights. But is it really an issue today when you can easily zoom in or out to your preferable size on practically any browser/device?

</comment><comment><USER33> I noticed that if I zoom in, then there is no margin defined on the sides. This makes it quite hard to read both when zoomed in, or it's in a small browser window. Defining a minimum margin would fix this.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's a personal preference, not a general direction.

I like small fonts. I like the before pictures better. I bought a 30" monitor so I can fit more content, more windows there, not to look at huge letters and whitespace.

</comment><comment><USER35> You are right simply changing the font size and line height makes a big difference. I always wondered why my fonts where not feeling right. I went with so many different fonts but was still not satisfied . My solution was to just go on the websites I like reading on and open inspector . Crazy how increasing the margin on your paragraphs can make a difference.

So yes I completely agree with you. However I think you should include before and after examples on your article to make it complete

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. The basic thing I evaluate on most "news" sites is I dive in and set their font to 16 or 18px and 1.5em line height. I even leave their fonts in tact, most of the time. It's an instantaneous readability increase.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll prepare a few side-by-sides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I found the Atlantic more readable at the smaller type than the larger type. Perhaps it's because it's serif, as opposed to the sans-serif in the other two examples.

</comment><comment><USER37> Everyone is talking about the font size and how zooming can fix small fonts.

That's only half of the discussion. The other half is line spacing. I think that's much more important.

In his examples at the bottom, the Phoronix one really gets a big improvement by not having the lines squished together. If I open up Phoronix in my browser and add the 1.5em line-height CSS rule, the site becomes considerably more comfortable to read, without even touching the 12px font size.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm now starting to understand why what I consider to be obscenely large text has been proliferating through the web in recent years. My assumption has been that websites should use 12pt sans-serif fonts for standard content. Maybe my assumptions need to be revised. While it's annoying to me to see websites with text at 16pt, maybe that's what people want these days and I'll just have to suck it up and zoom out.

</comment><comment><USER39> I redesigned my blog recently[1] and purposely made the type slightly bigger than intuitively felt comfortable. The funny thing is, plenty of people complain about it being too big, but nobody complained when it was way too small.

[1] <http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/reverse-engineering-redesign/>

</comment><comment><USER40> Sub-pixel anti-aliasing doesn't seem to work on your site. I find that really annoying. I am using Google Chrome 25 on OS X 10.8.2.

<comment><AUTHOR> There appears to be a bug!

<http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=172281>

<comment><USER40> removing -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased in the CSS seems to restore subpixel anti-alising.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll get rid of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Hear, hear! :) I'm really happy to see this get to the front page.

But why pixels (px) and not points (pt)?

I made a site using 12pt text and it looks good everywhere (ipad, iphone, chromebook, linux, windows, mac).

I suspect 16px is going to look too small on a Retina Macbook (I don't own one, so I wouldn't know).

<comment><USER42> From the CSS specification:

px: pixel units — 1px is equal to 0.75pt.

[...]

The reference pixel is the visual angle of one pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi and a distance from the reader of an arm's length. For a nominal arm's length of 28 inches, the visual angle is therefore about 0.0213 degrees. For reading at arm's length, 1px thus corresponds to about 0.26 mm (1/96 inch).

<http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#length-units>

<comment><USER41> Thanks! I didn't know that a CSS px wasn't the same as a screen pixel.

<comment><USER43> Also, on Retina displays, OS X browsers automatically double pixel dimensions.

By default, something declared as 16px is actually rendered as 32px (but sharper).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I agree that lots of type is set too small. Trying to create global rules for design when clearly something like font size needs to be addressed on a case by case basis depending on what font you are using is not a way to solve the issue.

</comment><comment><USER44> People are lazy. They want to see how much text is there for them to read before having the slightest intent.

Making text bigger makes that decision more difficult. It also creates the delusion that there is more to read than there actually is.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is literally a rehashing of this: [http://jxnblk.tumblr.com/post/41796724549/im-sick-of-your- ti...](http://jxnblk.tumblr.com/post/41796724549/im-sick-of-your-tiny-tiny- type) from 3 weeks ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing it out, I didn't see that article.

After having read that article, I'll concede the fundamental argument is the same. I don't have a smartphone, however. The only place I will ever read something is on my desktop computer, and that's what I want. Media queries or "mobile-first design" can be used to solve the issue from both sides of that complaint.

<comment><USER46> Your site is barely readable and unzoomable on my phone where I would normally read a short blog post from an unknown but potentially interesting site. It's a very real glass house situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps it's a failing of your browser? I've set nothing to prevent you from zooming.

Also, what makes it unreadable? I'm aware that I still have some work to do on the stylesheet. I don't have a mobile device, a small-ish screen, or a retina display so my testing of devices is limited. Constructive feedback welcome :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Couldn't agree more. It's a trend which I've also been noticing - i.e. tiny text or tiny light grey text on a white background. A few CTRL-+'s fix the problem, but I shouldn't really need to do that in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER48> I totally agree but this kind of post makes no sense because they may not change to do anything about it. I personally use Clearly from Evernote for the old new site and the content is much easier and joyful to read :)

</comment><comment><USER49> Hilariously, the site is nearly unreadable on my iPhone and two-thirds of the offending sites have larger font sizes on mobile safari.

Quick someone write a "Stop Using Mobile-Hostile Stylesheets" article.

</comment><comment><USER50> Why em in one case and px in another? Why em at all?

</comment><comment><USER51> The last month or so, I've taken the author's advice when they start an article with TL;DR. Thanks for saving me time!

</comment><comment><USER52> What about applications? (I'm referring to short text or even words, like form labels, errors, hints...)

</comment><comment><USER53> In almost every case, the bad example was more readable to me.

</comment><comment><USER54> german HN pendant <http://hackerbruecke.io/> tried to fix it

</comment><comment><USER55> And stop vertical videos!

</comment><comment><USER56> We _just_ went through this like a week or two ago. Yeesh. Every browser I use has support for text resizing, default text sizes, or zoom levels. Android WebKit has double-tap and reflow.

I don't see why this is a problem demanding such rants.

Ironically the first thing I did when the page loaded was tap Ctrl+- Ctrl+-.

<comment><USER57> The browsers I use most -- Safari on iPhone and iPad -- do not allow this. The only way to increase font size is to zoom the entire page, which often results in lines that are too wide for the screen.

And a growing number of websites take deliberate steps to prevent any zooming on the page. I can't understand why any designer thinks this is helpful.

At least iOS Safari has "reader" mode now, which does what I wish most websites would do: throw away all of the CSS, and render the page as a plain list of H1's and P's.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes unfortunately there is a set of meta tags you can use to set things like default and max zoom level for the page. If they're both at 1.0, you can't zoom at all. I'm not sure who thought that was a good idea to standardize, but if I meet them they will not be receiving a beer.</comment></comment></comment>


Why It Might Be Healthier to Sleep Alone - <AUTHOR> http://www.alternet.org/sex/142576/why_it_might_be_healthier_to_sleep_alone

<comment><USER2> Wow, that article was difficult to understand.</comment>


Dave Eggers made me quit Twitter for a week - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2013/10/07/dave_eggers_made_me_quit_twitter/singleton/

<comment><USER2> Eh. My own procrastination and the horrible ad hominem in the local political discussions on my feed got me off Facebook for over 2 months, and on minimal Twitter (use it for work-related stuff). Definitely at least a smidgen more newsworthy than quitting Twitter for a week.

AMA about my great sacrifice

</comment><comment><USER3> The NY Times had an excellent excerpt of "The Circle", Dave Egger's book, called "We Like You So Much and Want To Know You Better":

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/magazine/dave-eggers- ficti...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/magazine/dave-eggers- fiction.html?pagewanted=all)

The HN discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6461893](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6461893)

</comment><comment><USER4> Quit = didn't log on for a week

::gasp::

Risible!

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady She quit for 1 week and this made a popular publication? I've read at least a dozen instances of people quitting for longer here on HN and personally quit for 1 month before eventually deleting my account.

</comment><comment><USER5> Michele Filgate made me quit reading Salon forever.

<comment><USER6> That's sort of senselessly hateful. Anything in particular you didn't like about the article?

<comment><USER7> It's super low on content and void of anything all that interesting. It's like Salon is capitalizing on this book being published to get some hits. It's not the worst I've seen of this but it's not worth the click.

Salon is usually known for doing better than that, but I guess they have to make the easy money where they can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rename "quit" to "stop using" so that no more poor souls click on this garbage.</comment>


New 2MW electric vehicle chargers could revolutionise mining industry - <AUTHOR> https://thedriven.io/2019/10/23/new-2mw-electric-vehicle-chargers-could-revolutionise-mining-industry/ <comment><USER2> Mining is not the only place where this is starting to happen. Fully charged recently did an episode on an electric digger: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cumZxYjzx6M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cumZxYjzx6M)

Fuel cost is a great incentive of course but other advantages include a lot less noise and pollution; which is great for indoor operation. Also, these things only use power when you use them (as opposed to idling and slurping lots of diesel).

I could see batteries get common for a lot of equipment that is currently diesel powered, in the agricultural, construction, and other sectors. If all you need is a lot of torque/power, electric & hydrolic can do the job.

<comment><USER3> Fascinating... I always thought that stuff would be the last to be electrified.

<comment><USER4> I always thought they should be first. They are order of magnitude more utilised than passenger cars (at least 30% of time compared to 5% or so). They produce tons of noise and are more complex than electric.

<comment><USER5> It just hasn't been cost effective until now. Tesla saw this and started with a very expensive roadster and just recently ended up with more affordable options like the Model 3.

Industrial equipment is either making money or spending it. I look forward to the cost optimization that will come with battery powered heavy machinery.

Thinking aloud: how can the electrical grid keep up? Surely we need to invest in this area, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The charging system being referred to is called HPCCV (High Power Charging for Commercial Vehicles), and is being defined by the CharIN group, the same industry organisation responsible for the CCS standard.

Incidentally, Tesla is also involved in this effort, as part of the specification of the charging connector for the Tesla Semi.

 _CharIN Steering Committee paves the way for the development of a CCS compliant plug for commercial vehicles with >2MW_

[https://www.charinev.org/news/news- detail-2018/news/charin-s...](https://www.charinev.org/news/news- detail-2018/news/charin-steering-committee-paves-the-way-for-the-development- of-a-ccs-compliant-plug-for-commercial-v/)

<comment><USER7> It's nice to hear that Tesla is working on a real standard for once. I bought an EV recently, but didn't consider the Model 3 because it doesn't have a J1772 port (nor a proper dashboard, but I digress.)

<comment><USER8> Tesla comes with a J1772 adapter. Isn't J1772 limited to 20kW?

Why would a built-in 20kW max charging connector be a must-have specification for an EV?

And the lack of the "real dashboard" is obviously one of the best things going for the Model 3. Makes night time driving in particular almost surreal.

The car is extremely forward thinking and futuristic. Definitely not for everyone.

<comment><USER7> > Why would a built-in 20kW max charging connector be a must-have > specification for an EV?

The J1772+CCS DC connector can handle up to 350 kW, but even if that weren't the case, I would prioritize standardization over raw power. I don't want a car with a proprietary dongle for J1772, nor a phone with a proprietary dongle for USB.

Proprietary connectors and anti-consumer and anti-competition. It would be nice if more people said no to them.

<comment><USER9> You will have to try pretty hard to convince people that using a small adapter IS THE END OF THE GODDAMNED WORLD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just to put in perspective if my math's right based on 139k btu per gallon and say 40% diesel engine efficiency and 60 gallons per minute truck stop diesel pump flow, the diesel pump is equivalent to about a 60 megawatt charger.

Which is why a diesel semi can refill in a few minutes and go for 1000+ miles while an electric semi will take half hour to charge for 500 miles at 2MW.

Obviously though for mining operations where its short range goes up and then back down electrification is perfect, its also great for urban buses with regular short routes.

<comment><USER11> Apparently the largest electric mining trucks on earth never have to charge. They go up the hill empty, load up with tons of rock, and regen all the way back down which is more than enough to recharge. This makes my engineer's heart smile.

<comment><USER12> > Apparently the largest electric mining trucks on earth never have to charge.

Well that can't be true.

<comment><USER13> Yes. Yes it can. Regenerative braking downhill, while holding a full load, can generate more power than it takes to move the _empty_ truck back up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some entrepreneurs in Adelaide recently developed a fully electric utility vehicle for use in agribusiness and mining. It's based on a 79 series LandCruiser (which are still made brand new) and it has 350km of range. I saw some people scoff at that, but mining and agribusiness have the ability to introduce infrastructure, and these vehicles are work vehicles for use on site. Well managed vehicle and battery stocks could see these running 24/7 if need be. Have some solar on site or a grid hookup and you'd never have to worry about fuel logistics for the light vehicle section of your fleet.

[https://thedriven.io/2019/10/24/first-electric-ute- engineere...](https://thedriven.io/2019/10/24/first-electric-ute-engineered- in-australia-for-use-in-mining-and-agribusiness/)

<comment><USER15> Electric vehicles also come with an enormous low speed torque simply because of the nature of electric engines.

<comment><USER16> This is why mining haul trucks use them for brakes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A quick thought experiment...

If you wanted to transfer 2MW, you could do it at 200 amps and 10,000 volts.

Two 200 amp conductors, 3 meters long, and 10 mm^2 cross sectional area will come out at half a kilogram. 400 watts of heating will happen in the wire, which could be cooled by a 1mm^2 water/steam return cooling pipe in each conductor running at 1 ml/sec. That weighs another 12 grams.

Insulating a 10,000 volt supply sounds a lot, but if the wire was insulated with PTFE, with a 10x safety margin, you would only need a thickness of 1mm on each conductor. Total weight 140 grams.

So - the total weight of a 2 Megawatt human-safe cable could, with the right engineering, be under a kilogram (2 lbs) for 3 meters of cable, plenty to hook up your car or truck.

<comment><USER18> You're not wrong, but what is an EV going to do with 10,000 volts? You'd have to convert that into something useful to the battery system, so all you've done is shove the efficiency drop and heating issues into the vehicle's on- board transformer systems (which would add more weight) instead of the charger.

<comment><USER17> Downconverting voltages is surprisingly easy - a single bank of MOSFETS and an inductor is all you need. A 2MW convertor made of [1] comes out to less than 100 grams (excluding cooling, but that's fairly small at ~100 watts).

There are also a lot of reasons to increase voltages in EV battery systems. The current ~400V systems need thick heavy internal wiring, and for all electric (ie. no mechanical) braking and ultra fast charging, they are insufficient.

[1]: [http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/csd19537q3.pdf](http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/csd19537q3.pdf)

<comment><USER19> You understand that the device you linked will blow up if exposed to over 100V right? You're insanely oversimplifying what it would take to convert 10kV down to a usable voltage for use in EVs. Anything that can convert 2MW will be the size of a fridge, at minimum. If you could save a bunch of copper cabling by running everything at 10kV, people would be doing it. 800V is already pushing the limits of what most folks can do with technology we have today.

As a reminder, 10kV can arc close to 2 inches in free air (depending on humidity, of course), which means you need to insulate the hell out of it anywhere it's exposed. That means motors are pretty complicated to use at 10kV. By comparison, 800V only arcs 0.1mm (0.004 inches) max.

<comment><USER5> Yes, and even a tiny penetration of the insulation will destroy the dialetric strength of the material, posing a substantial risk to humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Are there any mines where machines/vehicles are powered by e.g. overhead cables? Seems like that might in some cases be cheaper to pull off than equipping huge vehicles that go up and down the same path over and over again with huge batteries.

<comment><USER21> The article mentions that pantographs are unusable due to the number of exposed moving parts and the existence of conductive dust.

<comment><USER17> Conductive dust is _evil_. Even your phone will likley stop working if you get conductive dust into it. It's as bad as water, except gravity doesn't keep it pooled on the floor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For what it's worth I know the three highest costs in most mines are: Diesel, explosives, and tires. Anything you can do to address those issues are big $ savings

<comment><USER17> Tires? Really?

Most work vehicles rarely go above 10 mph, and could probably get away with non-air-filled tyres made of steel if necessary. They'd last forever then.

<comment><USER23> [https://www.mining.com/kal-tire-at-minexpo/](https://www.mining.com/kal-tire- at-minexpo/) seems to back that assertion up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's promising to see some other areas more than the cars trying to use electric vehicles. I hope we can reach a 100% electric (and clean generation) before it's too late...

<comment><USER25> It's already "too late" in the sense that stopping carbon emissions won't be enough to prevent catastrophic change. It's just now that in addiction to stopping, we need to go negative and start sequestering carbon. This is a far more expensive path than if we had decarbonized sooner.

For detailed info from real scientists rather than an internet rando, see IPCC SR 1.5, in particular figure 2.5:

[https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/#cid_457](https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/#cid_457)

And if you have kids or care about fairness to future generations, this paper should spur you into action:

Young people's burden: requirement of negative CO2 emissions

[https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/8/577/2017/](https://www.earth-syst- dynam.net/8/577/2017/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> At some point isn't it simpler and cheaper to have several independent battery packs which each present their own 350kW ports and you can connect multiple charging cables at once — versus inventing entirely new standards and needing a pluggable harness that can carry two freakin' megawatts?

<comment><USER9> That's what Tesla showed for the semi, it's 4 car battery packs used in parallel to power 4 motors, and a 4-cable cable for charging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm not sure how much these batteries are compared to the rest of the truck but why not just have removable battery packs that can take longer to charge while a fresh one gets clipped on? You might only need a few % spare batteries?

<comment><USER27> It's difficult to build an interface for high power draw which is convenient enough that doesn't break down over thousands of uses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I always thought mining equipment intentionally runs on hydraulic power (and pneumatic back in the day) to avoid sparks that could set off possible gas or dust particle explosion. With brushless motors etc I can imagine how electric can match the safety of hydraulic power, but lithium-ion batteries in a mine? That is a horrible accident waiting to happen. What if the battery is pierced by something? What if it shorts internally when due to an accident? I wouldn't want to be anywhere near it when that happens. We limit the size of lithium- ion batteries we can fly with precisely for the same reason.

<comment><USER29> No. Unless its specialized underground mining may take precautions, but a huge portion of above ground mining equipment is already electric. Most of the biggest shovels on the planet are hooked to a power cable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interesting; it seems that the dust in mines is actually conductive, and makes for a challenge with high-powered appliances.

<comment><USER31> I saw that too. I wondered whether it might be simpler to have removable batteries (I know they'd be big) and set the charger up on the surface, away from the conductive dust. Vehicle downtime that way may be shorter (remove expended batteries and replace them with a fresh set from the charging station) than charging the vehicle. Maybe that means you need fewer vehicles?

Not a fan of the class of comment where people from outside the field propose dumb obvious solutions that make no sense to any actual practitioner, so this is more of a question.

<comment><USER32> The problem with that is getting the batteries to surface. Underground mines operate in either of two access methods: shaft to surface or ramp to surface. In shaft to surface you use an elevator to move all the ore and waste out of the mine for processing, in ramp to surface you'll either use a conveyor belt or use trucks like these to run from where they're loaded to surface. Trucks are also used in shaft access to move ore internally but generally not to surface. In the truck to surface the swap would work but in a shaft access scenario you'd have to throw the batteries into the elevator which has an impact on the proportion of the time you use the shaft for ore. Also usually those trucks are left near where they're needed the operators get picked up at the end of their shift and the next guy gets dropped back at the equipment at the start of his shift. So positioning of these chargers would be tricky. The payoff in terms of savings in ventilation though are where the benefits come for these though. Price of electricity can be very high depending on where the mine is since it's very common to operate off grid in remote locations.

<comment><USER31> Thanks, I understand that. Of course access-to-surface is another constrained resource which is no doubt already optimized for existing operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sounds too ambitious.

There are people working at 900kw chargers at BYD, and they say that cabling for it is already so stiff and heavy that it's bordering on the limit of what is humanly possible to handle.

Under spec electronic components are exploding in split second. Imagine a bank of DC-DC converters operating at 600A, and where few stages go out of sync. 10% of 600A is still 60A that turns into heat, in addition to heat already generated by normal operation.

<comment><USER34> In a mining situation, why would you think they'd be handled by humans? I would expect it to be a machine driven coupler. Completely unrealistic in a consumer situation due to potential damage and liability. But in a mine? Nobody is going to care about a scratched body panel.

<comment><USER35> They might care about horrific electrical accidents.

With High voltage/high Amperage acidents - your lucky if you die on the spot otherwise you last a few days in intensive care with limbs blown off and your internal organs destroyed

<comment><USER6> Like EV chargers, the couplers and protocols are designed with safety in mind. It's not like you're plugging in to a giant electrical socket and throwing a switch. The system handshakes, runs tests for current leakage, etc. If anything doesn't check out 100%, it won't energise.

<comment><USER35> Have you not heard of murphy's law, or not thought that miners might take shortcuts and bodge a connection.

<comment><USER19> Then where are all the folks dying today from the high power Tesla Supercharger incidents? 2MW or 250kW, either way you'll be dead if that accidentally lights you up.

If you set the system up right, you can't do that in a meaningful way, and if you do... well there's 2MW of deterrent. It only takes one workplace incident like that to make sure the bosses put some measures in place to make sure it never happens again. And keep in mind: at that kind of power level, you aren't just zapping one person... it's probably going to destroy a LOT of equipment and infrastructure... so there's a hefty monetary incentive to make sure that never happens.

<comment><USER35> Consumer EV charging is basically a cooker circuit.

When you go to serious Amperage and High/Medium Voltages its a completely different ball game.

<comment><USER19> Sure, the wall chargers you have in your house are. You think the 400V, 625A circuits (250kW chargers) are just dumb circuits though? Fairly certain they have temperature and voltage monitoring on both sides of the cable and both sides of the connector, all to monitor for any issues with either the connector or the cable continuously. Anything goes wrong, gets to hot, etc? It kills power.

You're right though. Medium voltage circuits (and above) are going to be much more complex. The fact is, once you start operating at medium voltage and above, stuff that previously was an insulator may not actually be as insulating as you think...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The headline made me think bitcoin miners were using free charging stations to power their mobile mining PCs.

<comment><USER37> haha, this is actually quite witty ^ ^

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why not just run multiple chargers in parallel?

<comment><USER38> That's kinda what they are underneath, but things are never that simple.

For example, getting all that power across a single "cable" (or bundle of cables, or connector of some kind) introduces interesting engineering issues. Heat is a big problem, and watercooled cables are more and more common even in regular EVs. The article also talks about how conductive dust can be a massive issue and how they need to work around that.

<comment><USER21> But why bother bundling the parallel cables? It's probably faster / easier to hook up six separate flexible cables than a single bundle that's incredibly stiff and heavy.

<comment><USER38> I'm assuming since even 250kw EV chargers require liquid cooling and are already difficult to work with (limited length, extremely stiff and a lot of hardware to safely connect), that it becomes a bit cumbersome to work with 8 of those cables.

And even if you are reusing the same connectors and cables, I'm assuming it would need some kind of orchestration to have all the chargers work in unison. And at that point designing a single connector sounds like a logical next step. Especially if they are going to design it to work in the harsh environments they expect.

But I'm also just a layperson, so I absolutely don't know for sure.

<comment><USER6> Higher voltages and liquid cooled cables permit higher power levels without making the cables and connectors unreasonably large and heavy. You can see this in Tesla's "V3" supercharger, where they increased the power to 250 kW, but actually made the cables _thinner_ by adding liquid cooling.

Of course, high voltages do brings other issues, like risk of arcing, that need to be mitigated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is it realistic to remove ventilation with all that conductive dust floating around?

<comment><USER40> Presumably the ventilation and filtration requirements will be significantly reduced rather than completely eliminated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Electricity is not a source of energy, you need to burn something else to generate it. Solar, wind and hydro only takes us so far. Batteries can not compete with the energy density of dead trees, it's actually two orders of magnitude off.

<comment><USER42> Try burning dead trees or their derivatives indoors or underground and suddenly you care about zero emission vehicles. Zero emission here means that they don't emit at the place where they are used e.g. in an underground mine or a city center. Electricity generation in a power plant with proper filters is much cleaner than having many local burners emitting their exhaust right into your breathing air.

<comment><USER41> Well that doesn't help much when you're down in a hole in the ground risking your life for money that is created out of thin air.

<comment><USER41> Just to add a law of nature:

The carbon based system can drive metal based systems, but no the other way around.

So you will never be able to make food/nuclear/mining with electricity, only dead trees can make both metal and organic stuff.

This means nuclear is completely retarded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why quick charge instead of just doing a battery swap?

<comment><USER44> Electric car batteries are large. It is hard to remove them without also taking apart a big part of the car at the same time

<comment><USER43> You'd do the swap using machinery, not by hand.

<comment><USER45> You're right, but can you imagine how many problems could be introduced by changing batteries in an underground mine? A brand new equipment takes a single shift to gain a nice coat of mud from head to toe. I don't think it's impossible but there are a lot of challenges with regards to battery swapping that would need to be addressed before this becomes feasible for this industry.

<comment><USER43> Why would you change it underground? You'd schedule the changes in a controlled environment. Or is this naive?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How scientists taught monkeys the concept of money - <AUTHOR> http://www.zmescience.com/research/how-scientists-tught-monkeys-the-concept-of-money-not-long-after-the-first-prostitute-monkey-appeared/

<comment><USER2> The name Marc Hauser piqued my interest. He has been accused of scientific misconduct [1], and his research has been tainted. Take this article with a suitable grain of salt...

[1] [http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/08/harvard- de...](http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/08/harvard-dean- confirms-misconduct.html), via Wikipedia

<comment><USER3> Ah, but he wasn't involved in this study -- one of the researchers had worked with him on a previous study, and that's why his name came up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I nearly misread this for "How scientists taught monkeys the concept of monkey". That would have been an interesting self-awareness experience for the monkeys!

</comment><comment><USER5> The paper itself is quite readable: [http://www.q-group.org/archives_folder/pdf/spring2008/ChenBe...](http://www.q-group.org/archives_folder/pdf/spring2008/ChenBehavioralBiases.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> The writing is atrocious. "...are the two researchers who have had made the study." or "It's exactly this selfish desires that they tried to exploit and experiment with great success..."

I barely made it through.

<comment><USER5> The experimental description also leaves out key information in understanding what they did. I linked to the real paper in this thread which seems much more readable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Token economies are as old as the hills. It's also called "secondary reinforcement" - although cognitive psychologists will be bothered on ideological grounds if you reference any psychology from before 1950 or so

</comment><comment><USER8> I think Santos gave a TED talk, which might be better than this article.

I saw her talk at Harvard Medical School when I was working there. She's a good speaker and gives an entertaining talk.

<http://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_santos.html>

</comment><comment><USER9> Fascinating. I didn't read (yet) the paper linked in the article, but was the prostitution case a male buying service from a female or something else?

<comment><USER10> I took a look and couldn't find it anywhere in there. I think this may have come from outside the paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The description given is kind of weak in this particular article, but the other papers linked in this comment thread are pretty good. Apparently they're working on finding physiological mechanisms for this stuff, I was reading about it recently. Like, literally what chemicals in brains cause this sort of behavior. If I can find the link I'll post it...

</comment><comment><USER12> 1\. Teach some monkeys about money.

2\. Let them loose in South America.

3\. Wait a while.

4\. Get some monkeys addicted to tobacco, let them loose, and wait longer.

5\. Install surveillance stations in the jungle and start taxing the transactions.

Some countries could do very well out of having a sudden influx of Pan citizens.</comment>


Cryptocats: The automated cat photo tool - <AUTHOR> https://www.cryptocats.me/ <comment><USER2> This is great. It's the key to my server's life.</comment>


MSI GS65 Stealth – Just when you thought Gaming laptops could not have form - <AUTHOR> https://www.laptopspark.com/gallery/msi-gs65-just-when-you-thought-form-function-wasnt-an-option-in-a-gaming-laptop/ <comment><AUTHOR> if anyone has tried it, how would you compare it to Aero 15X?</comment>


In an Improving Economy, Places in Distress - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/24/business/distress-cities-counties.html <comment><USER2> This is essentially an evergreen. At the next point in the business cycle, you get to write the headline "In a collapsing economy, points of light"

</comment><comment><USER3> 48% of working-age adults in Buffalo are NOT working?

Holy shit, how is this possible? What are they living on and who is supporting them?

<comment><USER4> Only ~45% of American adults work 30+ hours per week.

Source: [http://www.gallup.com/poll/166775/payroll-population-rate- fa...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/166775/payroll-population-rate-falls- december.aspx)

<comment><USER3> Can somebody explain how this works? It says unemployment is at 7.4% but only 42.9% work more than 30 hours a week?

So they are employed but part-time? What kind of jobs account for the 57% of America that work less than 30 hours a week?

This is the first time that I hear of this and I don't understand it at all.

<comment><USER5> It's a big issue and one reason you can't compare the current headline U-3 statistic ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#United_States_Bur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#United_States_Bureau_of_Labor_statistics)) with those reported during the Great Depression.

It is, however, the "firmest" statistic, since U4-6 require things like surveys to estimate how many would be workers are "discouraged" through "underemployed". And you have to do that to distinguish them from e.g. voluntary stay at home mothers (and fathers).

<comment><USER6> Don't all these statistics require surveys?

<comment><USER5> Ah, you're of course right. As I recall, the surveys for discouraged workers are harder because they're harder to find.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


TOP 8: Ways to ease your life using technology - <AUTHOR> http://guru8.net/2013/08/top-8-ways-to-ease-your-life-using-technology/

<comment><USER2> And this is why I read HN and try to keep my mind open.

Yawn, a Valley list of 8 things that life hacker has already covered. Probably by a Stanford dropout and a wanna ... Err why are they talking about Uganda?

This is standard Silicon Valley stuff - produced and aimed at the Ugandan cognescenti. Did I miss a memo? Fiverr runs in Uganada? Well of course it does, it's the same site, the same credit cards, just type in different addresses

Thank you mboses - nice to have my mind stretched a little

And you know what - I did not notice his accent</comment>


Slack. Or why you need to hash reset_token like password - <AUTHOR> http://sakurity.com/blog/2015/03/27/slack_or_reset_token_hashing.html?

<comment><USER2> Even without an ID in the post, you could hash the input and search for a matching value in the DB, right? So not having an ID along with it isn't proof they aren't hashing tokens, but... I think hashing tokens, especially session_id, is a good defense-in-depth practice which almost no one is following.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Even without an ID in the post, you could hash the input and search for a > matching value in the DB, right

Hmmm indeed! if we hash incoming value _before_ searching then it would work. So with blackbox it's impossible to tell, I'm sorry.</comment></comment>


Show HN: OnePager Page Builder for WordPress/Joomla - <AUTHOR>

Hey Guys,
We made the first cross CMS Page builder. Released beta version for WordPress and we'll release it for Joomla too. We create it using ReactJS framework so its fast as hell. Try yourself http://www.getonepager.com
Your suggestion and feedback need.
Thanks <comment><USER2> Are you related to [http://onepagerapp.com](http://onepagerapp.com)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope [http://getonepager.com](http://getonepager.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Had a quick play and it's quite slick. Can see if being useful with custom blocks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We are working on more blocks and will be able to release with stable version. Blocks creation is easy too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you like it.</comment></comment>


Google's Chrome Becomes Web 'Gatekeeper' and Rivals Complain - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-28/google-s-chrome-becomes-web-gatekeeper-and-rivals-complain <comment><USER2> Anecdotal observation: A few years ago, I made a video game for an early 1960s computer, the PDP-1, running in an homegrown emulator in web technology. [1] Amazingly, the game runs at 60 frames per second (yes, you could do this with early 1960s tech), and, amazingly, browsers were able to render the emulation, including a rather complex simulation of the dual-phosphor screen, at 60 fps (you could do this in 2016). Admittedly, Chrome wasn't the fastest browser then, skipping a frame now and then, but caught up with others browsers over the next year. That is, until a few revisions ago, when something inside Chrome went terribly wrong, causing the browser to grind over the emulation in single-digits frame rates. Other browsers, like Firefox and Safari, are still running the emulation (which is as of 2012) happily at 60 fps, but these combine just about 15% of the intended desktop audiences. So for all measure and market concentration, the project is dead by now, due to a bug in the dominant browser. More importantly, it fails to deliver the proof it was intended to provide, namely that you could do a video game at 60 fps around 1960, because you randomly can't do so today.

[1] [https://www.masswerk.at/icss/](https://www.masswerk.at/icss/)

<comment><USER3> fyi that works for me at 60fps in chrome 74 on a 2018 macbook pro

<comment><USER2> Interesting. So it may be related to hardware acceleration (GPU)? Or even processor type (think side channel attack mitigations.)

<comment><USER4> FWIW, I tried both with and without hardware acceleration on my 2018 MBP, and it worked fine both ways.

<comment><USER2> It's definitely bound to hardware acceleration: I just tried on an old MacPro (2008) and it stutters with hardware acceleration enabled, but runs smoothly without. Apparently, there are some overoptimistic assumptions about the GPU hardware available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the case of Chrome, you can't blame Google. They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular.

However the current situation is worrisome, because alternative implementations are dying and in the case of the web, diversity is important.

Both Opera and Microsoft's Edge are now powered by Chromium. Chromium is a project controlled by Google. Its redeeming quality, in terms of its open source nature, is the ability to fork, however competitors such as Microsoft proved that they no longer have the capacity to develop a modern browser.

At this point the only remaining alternatives are Firefox and Safari.

I think nowadays Firefox is a much better browser and that Mozilla is better at guarding my interests, so I would use Firefox even if it weren't a better browser, however the market isn't necessarily interested in that.

<comment><USER6> " _They made a good browser, did some marketing and it got popular._ "

They did make a good browser. However, their market share is not down to better browser _or_ "some advertising." They use their other assets (search, youtube, android, docs..) to make chrome the "default" option.

It's a dominance breeds dominance cycle... a hallmark of modern monopoly.

Chrome wouldn't have gotten anywhere if it wasn't a very good browser. It is good. But, I don't think it could have been that kind of wipeout without leveraging google's greater web dominance.

There was a time when IE was a good browser _and_ the default one. They dominated. A few years later, Mozilla had the better browser. Firefox slowly climbed to the middle, by being very good. They never got to 50% of the market.

IMO, during the IE6_v_FF days the feature and quality gap between browsers was at its highest. _Much_ bigger than Chrome_v_FF ever was. Still Chrome today is far more dominant than FF or anything ever was... except IE in its monopoly day.

<comment><USER7> If you search for Firefox, Google says "did you mean Chrome?"

Edited to add: This has actually happened to me when setting up a new Windows PC for someone.

<comment><USER8> Just tried searching for 'firefox' as a quick test.

I do get a page of Firefox results, but I also get a box titled _' People also ask'_ after the first four results, with the very first item being; _' Is Mozilla Firefox Safe to Download?'_ I also get a box at the bottom of the page titled _' Web Browsers,'_ with the first item in that box being Chrome. And Firefox is just not in that box at all. Not a popular enough web browser to include in the box marked web browsers when searched for by name, it would seem. On the other hand, UC Browser makes the list after Chrome, Opera and Safari, which I hadn't even heard of until today, but is apparently by Alibaba.

<comment><USER9> > And Firefox is just not in that box at all.

If you search for Chrome, Chrome will not show up in that box either. And the first browser in that box is, guess what, Firefox. You just searched for it, why include it in the box?

UC Browser is pretty popular in Asia. Statcounter reports 3% market share worldwide, right between Samsung Internet and IE.

<comment><USER8> >If you search for Chrome, Chrome will not show up in that box either. And the first browser in that box is, guess what, Firefox. You just searched for it, why include it in the box?

Oh, good catch, you are right. Is just a bad title for the box and does not appear to be in any way nefarious. _' Other Web Browsers'_ would be a lot less confusing.

Am still cocking an eyebrow at _' Is Mozilla Firefox Safe to Download?'_ though.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure if anything changed in a day, but I'm not getting that result at all (in fact, I'm not getting a "did you mean Chrome" either). The latter isn't explainable by me, but for the former... well, remember the search results are tailored to you (that's another pandora's box about echo chambers in itself) so perhaps you've been searching for more security-oriented things and that affects your results. In my case, the first page was mostly official Firefox links, wikipedia, and the very last result of the first page was "Google Just Gave 2 Billion Chrome Users A Reason To Switch To Firefox" so it doesn't seem like there's anything awry going on here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google is a clear monopoly, there's no doubt about it. It has a 70% browser market share, 70% market share in the search ecosystem. Even though their service is good and people are happy, I think they need to be broken down for the sake of keeping an open internet. Even Facebook for that matter. That's my opinion

<comment><USER12> Those 70% numbers undersell it. It's basically impossible to use the internet today without touching Google servers. Even if you, personally, completely eschew all Google services, almost everyone you want to communicate with will be on a Google service. Sending an email? Watching a video? Reading a blog? Chances are good that Google's involved.

<comment><USER13> Not sure why you were downvoted. I think you raise a good point, chrome + adwords + dns + etc + etc.. is concerning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Antitrust law is, I suspect, _hopelessly_ outdated... both the laws and the understanding of monopolies/trusts that are baked into them.

These laws were based on 19th-century competition. The problems att were price fixing, predatory pricing (eg price low to kill competition then raise prices), supply chain bottlenecking (how you gonna sell your ore without my trains) ... industrial era trust stuff.

The precedents and laws are hair-splitting and specific. It's just not the kind of system that can "think" high level and apply abstract principles to totally new problems.

Google & Facebook mostly have no prices to fix. The ad markets where they make their money are competitive bid-based, ostensibly the opposite of a "monopolistic pricing" structure.

The economic/theory just doesn't match the pratices anymore. For example: Facebooks' revenue.

Imagine that tomorrow morning BMW's revenues are cut in half. BMW would need to produce fewer cars. Cars cost X to produce. Cut X in half, and you can expect half the volume.

What would happen if we did the same to FB. My guess is that they'd still make the same FB. If you take path dependency^ out of the mix (that it's hard to fire people and adjust downward), It's scary to think how big a company is required to make FB. Doesn't seem like a stretch to speculate that it can be done on a $5-$10bn budget... 1/10th of their current revenue. After all, Facebook _was_ Facebook on that budget not long ago.

^By path dependency I mean imagine that FB's revenue had just never gotten to $80bn in the first place, the sahare price had never gotten so high. Etc.

IDK what exactly that implies about what antitrust laws should be, but it does mean that the theoretical foundation for the current ruleset is totally off. The way monopolistic power conerts to money in 2019 is _fundamentally_ different from 1891... I mean genuinely fundamental, I'm not using it as a superlative. The definition of monopoly, benefits of owning one, the reasons why they're bad (or not).

<comment><USER14> Breaking up a monopoly requires that said monopoly be bad for society, and it's adverse effects can't be fixed via markets due to reasons like size and reach.

Monopoly in its own is neither good nor bad.

Facebook has a monopoly in social network. Is that bad? What is the effect of the monopoly? Is Facebook's monopoly having an adverse effect, or is the adverse effect inherent in the way social networks work (and breaking the monopoly won't help).

Simply being a monopoly is an unreasonable reason to break it up.

<comment><USER15> You could say that monopolies are inherently bad because they stifle innovation even if they don't lead to higher prices. An unassailable monopolist has no reason to innovate because competitors are effectively locked out.

But it appears to me that there is a psychological bias towards an exceedingly narrow definition of substitution goods and therefore markets, especially in digital technologies.

For instance, Microsoft clearly has an extremely dominant position in PC operating systems. The market for PC operating systems used to be synonymous with personal computing, but that is no longer true. Mobile devices now dominate personal computing.

So Microsoft has lost most of its monopolistic power without ever losing its dominance in the market as it was originally defined by regulators and users.

Similarly, search used to be synonymous with using a web search engine and Google clearly has a monopoly there. But now we search Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, etc for various specific things in different contexts and Google has to pay billions to buy users from Apple.

So my point is that yes, monopolies are inherently bad, but they are also inherently unstable in ways that are not adequately reflected in the current thinking around anti-trust regulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I installed Firefox as my daily driver last year and have been completely happy with it. Great dev tools, good performance, and I agree with Mozilla's stance on privacy. All wins for me. I'll still occasionally open up Chrome for dev purposes -- but for the sake of browser diversity and maintaining an open internet, I encourage all my friends to give Firefox a try.

<comment> huy-nguyen The main problem with Firefox is high memory usage.

<comment><USER17> Did you mean "Chrome"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What's the steelman argument for Google withholding Widevine from Samuel Maddock? Electron packaging with Widevine is a thing so this seems unusual. If you are Google and you're the good guy, why are you doing this?

<comment><USER19> The steelman is that Widevine is a DRM platform; to tell the difference between a browser and a ripper application it needs a lot of knowledge about the context in which it's meant to run, and how to tell the difference between a 'real' Chrome that follows the licensing rules and a fork of Chrome that doesn't. It should have been obvious to Maddock that he wouldn't be allowed to do this: I'm not sure why it's come up as an issue as a result.

As for Electron, are you sure? I found this page:

[https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/testing-widevine- cdm](https://electronjs.org/docs/tutorial/testing-widevine-cdm)

It says:

 _To enable video playback with this new restriction, castLabs has created a fork that has implemented the necessary changes to enable Widevine to be played in an Electron application if one has obtained the necessary licenses from widevine._

So there's a fork of Electron that _enables_ you to embed Widevine, _if and only if_ you have the necessary licenses (otherwise presumably your Electron fork would be detected as a stream ripper).

Thus I'm not sure you're right about that. At any rate, if Electron became a back door to extract content, it'd be remotely detected and disabled. That's the entire point of the Widevine system.

As for "the good guy", gah, please, are we all 10 years old here? Content licensing and copyright enforcement is not a good vs evil fight. Some content producers choose to upload their video as WebM files to free hosting providers and let anyone who wants to watch them. Others stick it on YouTube and ask YT to monetize (means, no ad blocking). Still others want viewers to pay for the content (means, no content ripping). All these are valid economic models that are widely used, and Google obviously wants to support them because otherwise the answer is not "no DRM", it's "no in-browser Netflix".

<comment><USER20> The issue I ran into was in acquiring the necessary licenses that you mentioned. Verified Media Path (VMP) can be used to verify the authenticity of the browser platform. I believe it uses public key cryptography for identification by Widevine's license servers.

It seems like it would be trivial for Widevine to revoke access if there were ever abuse.

I have more details in a blog post I wrote last month. [https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine- blocked...](https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked-my- browser/)

<comment><USER19> Look carefully at the response they sent you. Their perception is you're asking for a license for an open source product, i.e. a license that would remain valid even as random people contribute code or fork the product. That clearly cannot work, conceptually.

If you had a private, proprietary fork of your browser that was being distributed and nobody else could modify it or contribute code that would undo the DRM, _and_ you were willing to sign giant contracts spelling out in exacting detail what features you could and could not add around video (e.g. no download feature), _and_ the Widevine people thought you'd actually have the financial resources to defend your private fork against hooking, memory overwrite and other attacks (you don't think proprietary Chrome is just Chromium+library, right?) in a long term manner, _then_ they might have been willing to work with you. But then you'd be a company, not an individual open source developer.

Rights enforcement and open source are not compatible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My problem with Chrome extends to Google's general stewardship of the web, including search.

I wish to qualify my complaint by acknowledging that Google have done tonnes of brilliant stuff, Chrome included. However, one can be over-awed by the brilliance and not see what is being missed.

A few years ago HTML5 came along with better elements than the humble div to describe content in a page. These new elements, e.g. section, aside, article, main, header, footer and nav, are what web pages should be written with. But Google are okay not really caring about HTML elements. They can sift through tag soup for search and therefore how well a page is written is of no consequence for them.

Chrome does support the new elements absolutely fine but the dev tools that we use and the things like Lighthouse are about metrics that matter to Google and don't concern quality HTML. This enforces a cargo cult mentality and we have 99% of the web bloated by markup that is quite hard to write and to debug. If Lighthouse audit reminded you that the div element was 'element of last resort' according to the spec and knocked a few percentage points off your score for accessibility if your page only used divs then that would encourage people to write decent HTML using the full element vocabulary.

</comment><comment> b-3-n The real problem is that regardless how much we trust Google and Chrome nobody can make guarantees about future government or corporate politics so it should be really important to us to keep the browser market competitive.

</comment><comment><USER22> To those who don't see an issue here, go an read up about ActiveX and NPAPI.

</comment><comment><USER23> Firefox made a lot of strategic error mostly because they were arrogant. Not implementing the Filesystem API is one of many. The world will simply move on without you. It's very unfortunate how bad decisions screwed up the web.

[https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api- in-f...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/07/why-no-filesystem-api-in-firefox/)

</comment><comment><USER24> It's hard to believe what a behemoth Chrome has become when it was only announced in 2008. What makes this even more amazing is it did this when IE/Edge ships as standard on Windows (which seems to be ~80% marketshare) and Safari ships as standard on OSX/iOS. It wasn't until Android 4.1 (2012) that Chrome even shipped on Android.

Chrome did several things really well out of the gate:

\- Auto update. Words can't adequately describe just how freeing and refreshing this was (and is). Doesn't FF STILL ask you when you open it to install an update? In 2019? Really? For non-technical people, auto update is what you want. For technical people, it's also what you want.

\- The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is beyond me.

\- N-Gram completion of searches in the Omnibar

\- This was a big one: while tabs existed before Chrome, Chrome was the first major browser to have one process per tab to isolate crashes and performance issues. This was huge at the time.

\- Javascript performance initially was night and day between Chrome and everyone else.

\- Chrome was standards compliant.

\- Chrome ran across multiple platforms

\- (This came later) Chrome Sync is hugely convenient.

\- (Also later) I'm not sure when this one started exactly but Chrome took a fairly aggressive stance against ISP DNS hijacking.

Where once MS leveraged their desktop OS dominance to kill Netscape, the fact that Chrome essentially forced MS to kill Edge in favour of rebranding Chrome is... astounding. This also goes to show just how problematic antitrust application is in tech because its amazing how quickly market dominance can disappear or cease to be relevant.

I find it laughable that some here and elsewhere attribute Chrome's rise to dark patterns or they throw around terms like "antitrust" without really knowing what that means (seriously, look deeper into Standard Oil) when there were and are a ton of good reasons to use Chrome that other vendors have been unable or unwilling to replicate.

Just take cross-platform as one. This made Safari and Edge a nonstarter for me from day one (despite Safari's brief venture into Windows support).

All this alarmist Butwhatifism about alleged market dominance is (IMHO) not only unhelpful, it's counterproductive. It's the boy who cried wolf. It makes people numb.

<comment><USER25> > \- The Omnibar. To this day, FF persists with the two-box model where one is > technically for URLs and the other for search. No one wants that of course > so search basically works in the URL box. Why they don't just merge this is > beyond me.

Privacy. Google doesn't worry about privacy, of course, but firefox tries to avoid sending all the URLs you ever type to google or your alternate search suggestion provider.

<comment><USER26> Isn't that just a bit of code to fix?

if (s matches possibly valid URL pattern) then try to open it else send s to search provider

<comment><USER25> Searches are sent as you type, so it's not really that simple.

Firefox already does what you suggested when hitting enter in the default URL bar - if it's not a valid URL, it gets used as a search.

FWIW, I now see search bar has been off by default in firefox for the last 2 years (still grandfathered in for legacy users like me), so I think mozilla gave up on this. [https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/09/firefox-57-search-bar- off-...](https://www.ghacks.net/2017/09/09/firefox-57-search-bar-off-by- default/)

<comment><USER27> > Searches are sent as you type, so it's not really that simple.

You might also very well end up with something that is not a valid URL when searching in your local history or bookmarks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great time for Microsoft to open source its Edge engine. It sure seems like it works great and has no Google related problems so it can form base for future foss adventures.

<comment><USER25> Considering Edge is just an evolved Trident engine, open sourcing it would probably be very difficult. A 24-year-old proprietary software project may have commercially licensed parts inside it that aren't subject to open sourcing; MS has certainly made such deals in the past like the ZIP support in Windows Explorer being licensed from a third party.

<comment><USER28> I think they could manage, given that they open sourced bunch of stuff that probably had the same problems.

What is shame is for such valuable effort to die. Tech dying is a shame and you can see it everywhere, from folks experimenting with TempleOs to 8bit game emulators...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I really don't like how browser vendors have become extension gatekeepers, strongly discouraging any integration they disapprove of. I like what Gab has done with the Dissenter Browser (fork of Brave) after being removed from the Google/Firefox stores.

<comment><USER30> Imagine being so convinced that nazis and white supremacists are "right" that literally fork your own browser.

<comment><USER31> Can you explain your comment, as it sounds like hyperbole to me.

<comment><USER30> GAB is a social media site that is "friendly" and "a safe haven" for neo- nazis, white supremacists and "the alt-right". It was created because they were too extreme even for Twitter's ridiculously ineffective controls on hate speech.

They apparently believe so strongly that they are "right", that they literally forked a browser to allow their extension to be used, so that like-minded nazis and white supremacists can discuss.... how bad jews are I guess, on any site they wish.

What exactly is hyperbolic? The first sentence is almost exactly the description of GAB from wikipedia btw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> as a software dev, not having to deal with other browsers is a blessing. countless hours wasted on debugging various browsers gets massively reduced. second point, moving the conversation from "<browser x> hasn't caught up" to "everyone's caught up" helps the web focus on technologies more so than before. discussions should now concentrate almost exclusively around the next web technologies, no more competition regarding web engines, more competition regarding web technologies. clear win imo.

as a biz dev, it's a bit saddening to see a lot of browser competitors go down the drain. but this also means that the possibility of disruption will be much higher in the future. so this is a win for biz dev as well?

<comment><USER33> The problem is if Chrome finally wins it all (we're almost there) and at some point they decide to remove a functionality that we all love, or they stop improving as there is no competition, or they decide to make you pay a little fee for developing a website with an extra functionality, or they decide that Chrome does not run on Mac anymore....

The problem with monopolies is that they control all the power, for the good or the bad decisions, and without competition they are not forced to look for the costumers benefit...

<comment><USER34> As Chromium is open source, wouldn't someone then fork it and re-add those features or maintain Mac support?

It seems like there is little motivation to maintain a separate browser at the moment, but one day Google may do something that motivates people to fork/create a new one. That could be a big bang moment or just a slow crawl that opens up a niche that a new browser could fill.

<comment><USER35> Maintaining a browser fork is a lot of work. And Google can simply decide to close-source their browser engine once their takeover is complete. What could anyone do about it? Google just keeps adding features until all Chromium forks die off.

<comment><USER14> The problem is not the source but the way Google can affect the standard.

The biggest is DRM. If stuff like that gets into the standard where only large players can make a compliant implementation, then it becomes a huge problem for the web.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Cloud 66 EasyDeploy - Making Deployment of Open Source Projects Simple - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloud66.com/post/62900887610/introducing-cloud-66-easydeploy

<comment><USER2> Hmm, you seem to have scrubbed your blog of the security incident[1], what have you done since to protect customers?

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685406](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685406)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link and note. During the incident we communicated with all of our customers (the link you're referring to is a copy of the email we sent to all customers and was posted by one of them) and followed up with regular updates about the progress and the steps taken to remedy the issue.

Hope it helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks interesting but I don't care much for deployment services that I can't operate and host myself.

Shameless plug for my Open-Source self-hosted Heroku Clone: ShipBuilder

Http://shipbuilder.io Https://github.com/SendHub/shipbuilder

Get full control over your production environments with the power of LXC, Go, and HAProxy!

<comment><AUTHOR> I've come across ShipBuilder before and I think it's great. Cloud 66 actually provisions and deploys the apps to your own servers, so I guess that should tick the box!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have no idea what this does. Maybe include a single line in non-technical language?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is an easy way to deploy a project from Github to your own servers in less than 15 minutes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite books? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for interesting books about new ideas and concepts. Share your favorite books here.<p>One of my favorites is How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenbreg (https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Wrong-Mathematical/dp/0143127535) <comment><USER3> From my favorite author Anthony J. Dos Reis[0]

If you want to learn assembly language, computer architecture and C++ all at the same time: Assembly Language and Computer Architecture Using C++ and Java , Course Technology, 2004 [1]

If you want to learn how to write compilers, context free grammars, regular expressions and implement grep: Compiler Construction Using Java, JavaCC, and Yacc, IEEE/Wiley, 2012 [2]

If you want to learn functional programming, lambda calculus and LISP: An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus by Greg Michaelson [3]

My programming skills had grown dramatically with this books. I would wholeheartedly recommend the books mentioned above for those who are interested to learn.

[0] - [http://cs.newpaltz.edu/~dosreist/](http://cs.newpaltz.edu/~dosreist/)

[1] - [https://www.amazon.com/Assembly-Language-Computer- Architectu...](https://www.amazon.com/Assembly-Language-Computer-Architecture- Using/dp/0534405274)

[2] - [https://www.amazon.com/Compiler-Construction-Using-Java- Java...](https://www.amazon.com/Compiler-Construction-Using-Java- JavaCC/dp/0470949597)

[3] - [https://www.cs.rochester.edu/~brown/173/readings/LCBook.pdf](https://www.cs.rochester.edu/~brown/173/readings/LCBook.pdf) \- [https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Functional- Programming-C...](https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Functional-Programming- Calculus-Mathematics/dp/0486478831)

</comment><comment><USER4> Here are a few:

 _Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order_ by Steven Strogatz

 _Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics_ by John Derbyshire

 _Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions_ by Dan Ariely

 _The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong_ by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull

</comment><comment><USER5> The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford - [https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping- Busine...](https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping- Business/dp/0988262592)

</comment><comment><USER6> Why Nations Fail - amazing book for understanding why some countries are dirt poor while others are rich. Absolutely phenomenal read.

</comment><comment><USER7> The Inner Game of Tennis

Think And Grow Rich - I based my cover letter off of some of the concepts in this book and it has worked remarkably well.

<comment><USER8> I came here to post The Inner Game of Tennis and was pleasantly surprised to see it in the top comment.

The book is only tangentially related to tennis - the real meat of the book is about how to adopt useful mentalities which will help you succeed at a variety of things. It's an extremely easy read and can be finished casually in a few days.

A great book which made me question some of my most deeply held beliefs about learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

NonViolent Communication: A Language of Life

</comment><comment><USER10> See also: What are some books about everything? [http://qr.ae/8S14dl](http://qr.ae/8S14dl)

The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, Second Edition [https://amzn.com/dp/B00OYUO4PY](https://amzn.com/dp/B00OYUO4PY)

I'm told the dead trees version is a must, but it's also massive, so pick your preferred inconvenience.

This is like Eno's Oblique Strategies deck in encyclopedia form.

Useful in any circumstances where you'd like to gain fresh perspective on a creation.

From Amazon :

The Art of Game Design presents 100+ sets of questions, or different lenses, for viewing a game's design, encompassing diverse fields such as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, puzzle design, and anthropology...

</comment><comment><USER11> Big science fiction fan

1\. Revelation Space

2\. Hyperion

3\. The Postman

4\. The Day of the Triffids

5\. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos)

[3] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman)

[4] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids)

[5] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy)

</comment><comment><USER12> _The Four Steps To The Epiphany_ \- Steve Blank

 _Code_ by Charles Petzold

 _Artificial Life_ \- Steven Levy

 _Time Reborn_ \- Lee Smolin

 _The Singularity is Near_ \- Ray Kurzweil

 _Surfaces and Essences_ \- Douglas Hofstadter

 _How to Measure Anything_ \- Douglas Hubbard

\-- _One of my favorites is How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenbreg_

I have that on my list of "to read real soon now". Sounds fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER13> Some of Edward de Bono's books about lateral thinking. Read some years ago. Concepts in it are not new, but may be unfamiliar to some/you, so mentioning. Lateral thinking can be useful for problem solving when traditional thinking methods don't work, or even if they do.

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

And speaking of "wrong", since you mention a book with that in the name, de Bono has also written a book called "I am Right, You are Wrong", which is about the tendency all of us have to think that we are right and the other party is wrong.

Edit: Added his web site:

[http://www.edwdebono.com/](http://www.edwdebono.com/)

</comment><comment><USER14> 1\. [https://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Techniques-Models- Computer-P...](https://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Techniques-Models-Computer- Programming/dp/0262220695)

2\. [https://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-Concepts-MIT- Press/dp/026263...](https://www.amazon.com/Big-Book-Concepts-MIT- Press/dp/0262632993/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1468535286&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Big+Book+of+Concepts)

3\. [https://www.amazon.com/Gödel-Escher-Bach-Eternal- Golden/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Gödel-Escher-Bach-Eternal- Golden/dp/0465026567/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1468535300&sr=8-1&keywords=escher+godel+bach)

<comment><USER15> Is it a HN feature that cuts off long URLs unless you click Reply to isolate the comment? Actually even after isolating the comment the URLs are cut off (but not quite as short). Highly annoying.

You should edit and put the titles before the links.

<comment><USER14> Updated as new comment since two hours already elapsed

[1] Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming (MIT Press) - URL: [https://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Techniques-Models- Computer-P...](https://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Techniques-Models-Computer- Programming/dp/0262220695)

[2] The Big Book of Concepts (MIT Press) - URL: [https://www.amazon.com/Big- Book-Concepts-MIT-Press/dp/026263...](https://www.amazon.com/Big-Book- Concepts-MIT- Press/dp/0262632993/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1468535286&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Big+Book+of+Concepts)

[3] Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - URL: [https://www.amazon.com/Gödel-Escher-Bach-Eternal- Golden/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Gödel-Escher-Bach-Eternal- Golden/dp/0465026567/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1468535300&sr=8-1&keywords=escher+godel+bach)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just started reading the Art of Learning [https://www.amazon.com/Art- Learning-Journey-Optimal-Performa...](https://www.amazon.com/Art-Learning- Journey-Optimal-Performance/dp/0743277465)

I finished Linchpin a few weeks back and that was an amazing book [https://www.amazon.com/Linchpin-Are-Indispensable-Seth- Godin...](https://www.amazon.com/Linchpin-Are-Indispensable-Seth- Godin/dp/1591844096)

Will It Fly is a great book I learning a lot of great marketing tricks from [https://www.amazon.com/Will-Test-Business-Waste- Money/dp/099...](https://www.amazon.com/Will-Test-Business-Waste- Money/dp/0997082305)

<comment><USER17> Will it fly has a 5 star rating from 450 odd reviews!!

<comment><USER18> 450 fiverr gigs.

<comment><USER16> I doubt that, he has a lot of fans.

I have to say, I learned a ton of cool tricks that one would have to spend weeks reading through forums to learn.

The part on how to build a market map is worth its weight in gold.

I opted for the kindle book, and the audio add on was only $2 which is an amazing price if you have bought other audio add ons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Alan Kay's reading list: [http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp](http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp)

</comment><comment><USER20> Try

 _The Forever War_ by Joe Haldeman. A great book about time dilation and Vietnam.

 _The Water Knife_ by Paolo Bacigalupi. A book about water rights in the south west that I can think of.

</comment><comment><USER21> Creativity, Inc. - Ed Catmull.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big - Scott Adams

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed - Ben Rich

Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey

</comment><comment><USER22> _Thinking, Fast and Slow_ by Daniel Kahneman.

Also, strangely enough (not being a Harry Potter fan), I immensely enjoyed _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_.

</comment><comment><USER23> A)The Annotated Turing - <USER2>

B)Armchair Universe: An Exploration of Computer Worlds -- A.K. Dewdney

The latter had many great ideas which inspired me to do interesting experiments on computers with minimal programming experience, it had a great chapter on recursion which really helped me understand recursion when it had no programming experience. I still go back and read sections of this book. Quite a joy IMHO

</comment><comment><USER24> _barbarians at the gate_ is a good read if you're into that sort of thing (business, banking, law, money)

</comment><comment><USER25> Just finished Grit by Angela Duckworth. Great insights for entrepreneurs/start-upers

</comment><comment><USER26> Here is Ellenberg's own list of books he has read in the last few years:

[https://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/the- booklist/](https://quomodocumque.wordpress.com/the-booklist/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Are Your Lights On?: A Treatise on the Definition of Diverse Problems

</comment><comment><USER13> Robin Sharma's "The Monk who sold his Ferrari" is a good one. So is his "Who Will Cry When You Die?"

</comment><comment><USER28> \- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

\- A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by Irvine

</comment><comment><USER29> How to Win Friends and Influence People - The tips in this book do work magic.

</comment><comment><USER30> _Cosmos_ by Carl Sagan

</comment><comment><USER31> The Holy Bible :)

</comment><comment><USER32> The field guide to understanding human error

by Sidney Dekker

</comment><comment><USER33> the hard thing about hard things - Ben is an amazing story teller, very personable, and great lessons

<comment><USER17> This book was good - amazing story teller. Takes through highs and lows of his journey - feels like you are watching him in a boxing ring. Message: Persevere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> zero to one

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read that. It's worth reading just to get into the mind of Peter Thiel. The "start small and monopolise" is what really stuck with me.

<comment><USER25> This is what he focuses on in his portion of "how to start a startup" on YouTube. It's cool to watch him talk about it. Great concept.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Infinite Jest

Ulysses

The Selfish Gene

The Histories of Herodotus

Moby-Dick

Gödel, Escher, Bach

<comment><USER35> Melville "Bartlby the Scrivener" & Ramsey "When We Are No More: how Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future"

Down "Brilliant Beacons: a History of the American Lighthouse"

Koestler "Darkness Before Noon" & "The Invisible Writing" & "The Ghost in the Machine"

John Gardner - anything really but October light and the sunlight dialogs in particular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A Song of Fire and Ice

Zennis

Wheel of Time

Quiet

Lord of the Rings

Irrational Exuberance</comment>