Ask HN: What are your must-have apps? - <AUTHOR>

So, someone in another thread said something was one of their '5 must-have apps', and I was just about to ask what the other four were when I thought that now is as good a time as any to ask:<p>What are your Must-Have Apps? (can be more or less than five) <comment><USER2>
      Quicksilver

The quick application launching and various file and text manipulation actions are great, but it's the multiple clipboards that I find invaluable. Being able to save and search through 500 clipboards makes Quicksilver the one greatest productivity tool I have.

      iTerm

Multiple profiles, full screen mode, sending commands to all open tabs, etc. make it a better terminal than Terminal.

      Adium

It doesn't have video chat yet but I don't mind. It does everything else I could want an IM client to do and the OTR encryption works right out of the box. Plus, the next version reportedly supports both Twitter and IRC.

      Navicat

It's the best tool I've seen for accessing remote databases (I use the MySQL version for Windows running in CrossOver). Sequel Pro and Querious both win on looks but Navicat has the features I need.

      Drupal

Drupal is known for being a good content management system but for me it's an absolutely great web application framework. It does nearly everything I need my websites to do, from running wikis and OpenID providers to large social networks, project management platforms, ecommerce sites and virtual worlds. The Drupal community is so large and diverse that the conferences, camps and user groups are the best I've seen around any industry or software project.

      Virtualmin and Webmin

These are web control panels like cPanel and WHM that are available as a free, GPL version or as a commercially supported "Pro" version. I think Virtualmin is a YC startup, too. Virtualmin and Webmin are occasionally a little rough around the edges but they have completely taken away the pain of administering my sites.

      GrandCentral

It used to be that using voicemail was a necessary time expenditure that nobody really questioned. GrandCentral saves me a lot of time I'd otherwise be wasting.

Here's a tip: don't upgrade your GrandCentral account to Google Voice unless you want the stuff that only Google Voice has (like voicemail transcription). All the GrandCentral-compatible tools like GrandCentral Dialer for the Nokia N8x0 tablets don't work with Google Voice yet.

<comment><USER3> Re: iTerm, I used to use it, but then I figured out how to (ab)use Terminal and I'm now happy with Terminal.

Have a look at my tutorial on how to create and use multiple profiles on my geek blog: <http://www.swombat.com/setting-up-terminalapp-with-tr-0>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Firefox w/Firebug

I hate Firefox as a browser on the Mac, but as a professional front-end developer it's the most valuable piece of kit I have.

2\. OmniFocus

It's pretty expensive but it's also really really good, and has industrial strength data integrity. Allows me to stay on top of everything at all times. The apparent high cost disappears when you realise that I use it _all the time_ and am able to rely on it 100%. In fact it's my only app with "Start at login".

3\. VMWare Fusion

Allows me run all kinds of virtualised environments (particularly copies of live environments, and Erlang development environments) as though they're local folders, which means I can use the OS X desktop toolchain to work on code, but use Linux for package management etc. Also for Windows, obviously.

4\. DropBox

One of the best services on the Internet, bar none.

I haven't listed a text editor here as I use TextMate, but am not so attached to it that I couldn't replace it with something else.

</comment><comment><USER5> 1) Fluid. The ability to launch work GMail in one window, personal GMail in another window, and Lala.com in a third window and have them all running in separate processes that can't bring each other down has been a great help.

2) Eclipse. It's an 800lb gorilla but I've been using it for years (shortly after it was open-sourced). It can do Java, Scala, PHP, and many others.

3) TextMate. Because firing up Eclipse to write a Python or Ruby script is overkill. I also like that I can type "mate ." in the terminal and get the current directory in the project drawer.

4) Safari/Webkit. I used Firefox for a long time, but on the Mac it just can't compare to Webkit, especially once the Developer tools were introduced.

5) Terminal.app. I currently have 3 windows open for a total of 12 tabs. What I really mean is the unix under-pinnings, but Terminal.app is how you get to those.

Nothing very exciting in the list above, but those are the apps that I spend 90% of my time using.

<comment><USER6> Wow. Fluid is awesome. I lost a huge basecamp message I was about to submit yesterday and threw a fit that resulted in a broken monitor. Never again!

Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1\. terminal / putty 2\. textmate / vim 3\. quicksilver 4\. firefox + firebug

Whenever I use any computer, I find myself installing all of these programs, in order to get anything done.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nearly all of my "must have" apps run on either the Mozilla or the Emacs platforms. If you give me a java runtime, I know where to get a ssh applet and from there I will find my way home, including a remote emacs session running under `screen` :-)

Mozilla effectively functions as my desktop; I use firebug, scrapbook, chatzilla, Pencil sketching and prototyping GUIs, SQLite manager to design databases, and web developer plugin (along with things meant to keep the web safe and sane)

But other than that:

5) a PDF reader.

4) Skype.

3) Open Office, or similar package with good Arabic support.

2) the unix toolchain, including GCC.

1) A Common Lisp implementation (sbcl, lispworks, or CLISP.)

0) putty or any other ssh client. Without SSH I can't function.

[edit: readers may note that I treat GCC as a "tool" ;-]

<comment><USER9> You should consider using irssi, (<http://irssi.org/>) a console irc client which is _way_ better than chatzilla.

</comment></comment><comment> 8-bit_Blaster The following five programs are some of my favorite staples to install on a fresh copy of Windows XP:

1) Notepad++

My favorite free, open source text editor. Gets the job done.

2) Mozilla Sunbird

Sunbird helps me keep track of what I have to do with calendar and to-do list features. Open source!

3) Google Picasa

Whether on Linux or Windows, I have yet to find a photo organizer and image manipulator that is as easy-to-use and feature-packed as Picasa.

4) 7-Zip

When it comes to [un]compression I like this one because it can do 7Z, ZIP, RAR, and GZ. Also open source!

5) KeePass

Great way of keeping track of hundreds of silly passwords and software serial numbers. Open source!

</comment><comment><USER10> Believe it or not? After attempting interface development on all three platforms, as much as I hate it and all of its idiosyncrasies, I fall back to windows on the operating system standpoint. Everything I need is there, and in some cases nowhere else (without running a VM).

\- Visual Studio 2008 Express. has some of the best Javascript support out there. Sorry, but TextMate doesn't have anything to check for stupid syntax errors on the fly - and NetBeans is bulkier, imho. The only thing you're missing is third party add-ins, and I haven't found much use for them yet. If I need to step into some ruby, I'm fine with TextMate. It's not the best tool for JavaScript though.

-IE6 and

\- IE7. Developing for them is an interesting challenge. And a necessary evil. Because you're developing on the same machine you're debugging IEx on, it's a lot easier to use Visual Studio to place breakpoints, watches, and so forth than to use the mostly useless default script debugger.

\- Safari or Chrome.

-Firefox, with Firebug. And YSlow!. And the Web Developer toolbar.

\- Pandora. (I find I only listen to my music collection when I'm commuting)

\- Photoshop.

\- Google Docs

\- Skype

\- Pidgin (ugh; it's horrible on all platforms...)

So as it happens, Windows unfortunately is the only platform I can run all my tools on. Sucks but there it is (I'd rather be on Ubuntu. I can do stuff like pin a stationary translucent terminal with no decorations to my desktop. And the terminal app for AWN is fairly spiffy for quick one-offs).

<comment><USER11> Textmate has the awesome Javascript Tools extension [http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200901/javascript_tool...](http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200901/javascript_tools_bundle_for_textmate/)

shift+control+v and it runs it through Doug Crawford's lint engine. It also has the option of running it on every file save.

Also, I'd suggest using IE8 instead of IE7. It has way way better dev tools, and built in support for IE7 (using the compatibility mode button). As for IE6, you should do us all a favor and drop support for that ASAP.

<comment><USER10> No can do. 8% of our userbase still uses it. Not my decision to make, unfortunately.

I've used the javascript tool. "1 error, 2 warnings," with no explanations? I'd rather copy/paste the code into jslint and run it manually. It also doesn't find some of the things that the original jslint tool does.

Really, it's "awesome," but only if you haven't used something like VS's Javascript support. Sorry, but it's lightyears away. It's kind of like the difference between using nano and using gnome's default text editor...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 1\. A text editor that is powerful, stable, and basically good for programming. I rely on "vim" almost always, but Xcode is a nice fallback.

2\. A powerful terminal. On Linux, "aterm" is the best I have ever found. On Mac, I prefer MacTelnet but Apple's Terminal is pretty good.

3\. A suite of infrastructure tools. I've been in the Unix universe for many years, so it's hard to imagine anything except the usual suspects: ls, find, grep, awk, xargs, etc. all joined through shells, Perl and Python. These are definitely "must have"; even if they don't qualify as a single app, they certainly qualify as a single entity I couldn't live without. (And having stumbled my way through Windows' inadequacies, I now know this painfully well.)

4\. A web browser, and by extension, Google. I like OmniWeb the most, though I use Firefox at work. I've even been known to use Lynx, or the occasional automation through "wget". There is simply no faster way to get information anymore; I'm more likely to web search for tools than run "man" pages, even.

5\. E-mail. I prefer a trivial "send" interface (I like basic command line "mail" sometimes, though "pine"/"alpine" are my favorite). I do use Thunderbird and Apple's Mail quite a bit. I am not a fan of overly complex tools, but the ability to tag and search/filter mail by tag is a really compelling Thunderbird feature.

<comment><USER13> Argh... you had me hoping there that MacTelnet might be an improvement on my beloved urxvt. Sadly, it isn't VT100-compliant: it fails to render my 'screen' status bar properly.

Who wants to write a better terminal app?

<comment><USER14> There's iTerm for OS X (<http://iterm.sourceforge.net/>), although I find Terminal.app more than adequate.

<comment><USER13> Neither is fully VT100-compliant, though, nor does either one fully support mouse input. Terminal.app also has a few rendering bugs that show up occasionally in screen. (Noticing a pattern here?)

<comment><USER15> Perhaps you have a problem with terminfo?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 1\. e

2\. m

3\. a

4\. c

5\. s

<comment><USER17> 1\. v

2\. i

:-P

<comment><USER18> you should try 'm', it'll work really well with the rest of your tools.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm guessing you mean apps that allow me to be productive. Not considering Twitter and IM clients, here's my list:

* Terminal.app

* The Python interpreter (I use Python for things like automating tasks, renaming and reorganizing files and even as a simple calculator)

* TextMate

* A nice little todo app called Anxiety (<http://anxietyapp.com>)

* iCal

* A web browser. I prefer Opera, but I really don't care as long as it's not IE6.

* xPad (sweet and simple note taking program)

And, of course, XCode and Interface Builder for writing Cocoa apps.

There's only one app from Linux that I miss on OS X: AmaroK (or something equally powerful). I know I can get AmaroK on OS X, but there are way too many dependencies. I'm also not willing to sacrifice 400MB of disk space for a media player.

</comment><comment><USER19> 1) Dropbox

2) Firefox (with StumbleUpon and AdBlock Plus)

3) Scite

4) Leo (<http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html>)

5) My own tools

</comment><comment><USER20> For linux users, a very useful app: BasKet Note Pads. It's an organization tool, you write pages with notes, format text in those notes, dragndrop files into the page, and the killer feature: at any time you can capture a part of the screen and it goes directly to that page. (e.g. you can be writing notes about a PDF and capture text/a graph/an image from it, directly, in a second) I can't live without it. Out of curiosity, does anyone know similar apps? (in any OS)

link: <http://basket.kde.org/>

</comment><comment><USER21> ClipX - ClipX allows for mulit copy/paste functionality.

<comment><USER22> I too would highly recommend this app (it's for Windows by the way). It has made several things much easier - for one, I can now copy the different parts of a post (here or at proggit) at a go before replying, and paste them one by one as I need to cite them.

It can also save your file copy operations, so you can copy the same set of files to different places at a go and do many other things you wish Windows had native support for.

<comment><USER23> I use a similar program, Ditto (Windows only). Ditto is very configurable, including allowing one to specify what clipboard formats are captured. It uses SQLite for the datastore and supports searching of the clip history.

I agree with the parent; a clipboard manager is great for assembling information while minimizing context switches. In particular, I've worked in environments offering rather limited screen real estate. In those, Ditto helps keep me from overdosing on Alt-Tab. It's also useful for parking "I may need this" snippets for longer term reference. With the search facility, as long as I remember some aspect of the snippet, it's usually only a second or three away from my fingers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> i believe you mean desktop apps? does browser count as app? if so, then all I need is chrome. I have several desktop apps created from chrome for various web apps. other than that,

skype,

intellij/netbeans/eclipse(one of them running)

notepad++ (anything and everything -editor)

sumatrapdf

dropbox

tiddlywiki

flashnote (for windows) else evernote

</comment><comment><USER25> These are my top 10 in no particular order. They're basically what reside in my dock. I think you can really tell a lot about a person based on what apps they keep near.

1\. Textmate 2\. Transmit 3\. Espresso 4\. Adium 5\. Tweetie 6\. The Hit List 7\. NewsFire 8\. Safari/WebKit 9\. Terminal + VIM 10\. Pages

</comment><comment><USER26> 1\. emacs (incl. shell, irc, personal wiki) 2\. firefox (incl. email, blog) 3\. wmii (tiling window manager)

<comment><USER27> I really like wmii, but too bad, wmii doesn't playing nice with dual monitor. trying to setup for week with no result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Emacs, Firefox, Python, Clojure, Totem.

</comment><comment><USER29> 1) Webkit (Safari)

2) Ruby

3) Terminal

4) Textmate

5) Photoshop

6) VMware (Windows Vista image running on 256MB RAM)

7) Spotify (used to be iTunes, but who needs that when you have practically every song you may want for free?)

</comment><comment><USER30> My top 5 are:

* Firefox

* Office Suite

* PDF Viewer

* Vim

* Winsplit Revolution

My other favorites (not "must-haves") are:

* Media Player Classic/MPlayer

* GNU Octave/Maxima

* Midnight Commander

</comment><comment><USER31> 1\. gnu coreutils

It's a little more than 5, but they're all required :)

</comment><comment><USER32> \- Putty/OpenSSH

\- RealVNC

\- VMWare Server

I love being able to sit at one [desktop] computer and control 6 others. Some run embedded software, some are servers, some are virtual.

</comment><comment><USER33> 1\. FAR manager (this one tops them all, can do also SSH/FTP stuff, text editing, archiving etc)

2\. Notepad++

3\. Firefox

4\. skype

5\. eclipse

6\. the bat

7\. adobe photoshop

</comment><comment><USER34> desktop only right?

1) firefox

2) music player (itunes, rhythmbox, songbird, etc)

3) geany (or some other great code editor)

4) terminal (linux shell equivalent - does that even count?)

5) ssh/sftp client (ubuntu built-in works fine)

6) torrent client (ktorrent is great, miro for rss)

</comment><comment><USER11> 1\. Launchbar / 2. Fluid / 3. Firefox & Firebug / 4. Querious / 5. Photoshop

</comment><comment><USER35> Quicksilver, Firefox, TextMate, Terminal & Adium.

</comment><comment><USER36> Emacs, Safari, iTunes, VLC and Terminal.app.

</comment><comment><USER37> 1\. OmniFocus 2\. Safari 3\. Xcode

</comment><comment><USER38> vim + screen + urxvt

</comment><comment><USER39> Textmate

Transmit

Sequel Pro

OmniFocus or OmniOutliner for GTD

I'm finding I use Nambu more and more for reading Tweets</comment>


Robot Furniture - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/24/style/robot-furniture-beep-beep-boop.html <comment><USER2> This is an interesting idea if you have high ceilings. In my experience, a room small enough to make this system worth using would also have low ceilings. My ceilings are 8 ft, so unless the proposed bed and ceiling boxes are less than 2 feet tall I'm going to be hitting my head on them all the time.

To be honest, this seems like the Juicero of furniture: an expensive tech solution to a non-tech problem. The problem is solved for a fraction of the cost with a daybed that has storage underneath.[1] It is, after all, still a combination sleep/living area with storage room for clothes.

As someone working on a furniture solution for small spaces and with a history of professional furniture building, turning furniture into built-in moving electronics is IMO not the solution:

1\. It increases the cost of the furniture to be out of the range of your customers, who are typically in a small space because they do not have a ton of extra money.

2\. Good luck getting your landlord to approve bolting large furniture to your ceiling, and what do you do when you move?

[1] [https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70320135/](https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70320135/)

<comment><USER3> > Good luck getting your landlord to approve bolting large furniture to your > ceiling, and what do you do when you move?

The article sounds like this is a feature of the apartment (to help make up for small unit sizes).

<comment><USER2> In that case, good luck getting your landlord out to fix the bed if it gets stuck in the ceiling! :)

<comment><USER3> Luxury apartment buildings typically have pretty good maintenance capabilities. You already rely on them to be able and cook, go to the restroom, take a shower, etc.

<comment><USER4> But if you have a luxury apartment, it's likely large enough for traditional furniture.

<comment><USER3> Why is that? Luxury doesn't equal size, especially in a dense urban area. Did you read the article? What else do you call a small, expensive apartment with tons of amenities that also contains robotic furniture?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2009/04/curato...](http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2009/04/curator- finds-murphy-beds-place-in-american-history/)

"Inventor William Lawrence Murphy (1856-1957) began tinkering with hideaway beds while living in a one-room apartment in San Francisco in the late 19th century. He was falling for a young opera singer and courting customs at that time would not permit a lady to enter a gentleman's bedroom. But according to family legend, Murphy's limited finances and a strict moral code didn't spoil his chance at love. His invention allowed him to stow his bed in his closet, transforming his one-room apartment from a bedroom into a parlor.

"The couple married in 1900."

<comment><USER6> On the other hand, consider the fate of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr). , who survived his own inventions of CFCs and leaded gasoline (leading to lead poisoning), only to succumb to his invention of furniture:

> In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted poliomyelitis, which left him > severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to > help others lift him from bed. In 1944, he was entangled in the device and > died of strangulation.[15][16][17]

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Beds take up a lot of floor area, but lifting them off the floor with expensive machinery you must install in your ceiling is hardly a compelling solution.

It's the prevalence of innerspring mattresses that's responsible for contemporary bedding being unwieldy. An innerspring mattress is constructed to predetermined form factor, and is resistant to folding or rolling or other mechanical ways of conserving space. Getting it out of the way means manipulating the entire unit as one, which absent a pulley system installed in your ceiling typically means rotating it onto a weak edge, where it can barely remain upright; this can be rectified by a platform that holds that the mattress in place while it is pivoted upright into a recess in the wall, in an established, if outdated design.

If you forego monolithic innerspring mattresses, you have vastly more options in moving bedding when it's not needed.

<comment><USER8> "you must install in your ceiling is hardly a compelling solution." \- why? we have "expensive" machinery to open our garage doors. Why specifically do you think it is not a compelling solution?

I personally think this is a great idea as ceilings are useless for the most part and that space can be used for something else - like storing the entire bed.

<comment><USER9> > ceilings are useless for the most part

I would say they are underutilized. Ceilings are certainly useful for preventing rain from falling on our heads ;)

<comment><USER10> Those are roofs. Ceilings are basically just for looks.

<comment><USER11> And for maintaining a proper vapor barrier and insulation - two things rather critical to asset value and livability respectively, in most climates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've watched this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI3Zo3Ax494](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI3Zo3Ax494) on "This Old House" years ago and it also stood out as really well designed, instead of a product looking for a problem to solve. The issue is always cost but this system seemed more on track with reality.

</comment><comment><USER13> I guess I'm not the only one who thought the next step for home furnishings was giving them the ability to break down at the worst possible time.

</comment><comment><USER14> This meme seems to crop up every couple years, but AFAIK there is no affordable way to obtain such products.

Haven't found anyone who actually sells beds that retract into the ceiling. [https://resourcefurniture.com/](https://resourcefurniture.com/) sells nicely designed but crushingly expensive murphy bed type things.

Anyone know where I can get a retractable bed set up for less than a thousand?

</comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of a very cool apartment I visited many years ago. I used to party with some SCAD kids in Savannah. Two interior design majors I knew had gotten themselves a small apartment and a very tolerant landlord. The bedroom was amazing! The bed hung from the ceiling on strong cables, similar to the bed in the article, but the sleeping position was about 0.8 meters high rather than on the floor. In addition, the floor of the room was not flat, but made up of various levels of platforms. The lounge chair was up in one of the upper corners of the room, and you could watch the TV mounted at the same level over the heads of people occupying the floor space.

They also had a stripper pole in the front room, which was great for parties. But it was the bedroom with the hanging bed which really impressed me.

</comment><comment><USER16> Will I be able to sleep in my bed during a power outage?

<comment><USER17> Sure, if you can reach the mechanical release.

I'd be more worried about DoS[0] attacks against the cloud service that prevent me from using the app to call down my bed and other furniture. Or someone hacking in and pulling my bed up with me in it. What a nightmare that would be.

[0] Denial of Sleep

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> i built something similar for a home project

i ended up taking it down due to concern of having all of that weight above me

when a huge mass is suspended above you the potential gravitational energy becomes very palapable

</comment><comment><USER19> While this is an interesting curiosity, it is inferior to the Murphy bed. People move, and like to rearrange their furniture in their own places. The straps are unpleasant to look at, and likely have a higher failure rate due to their complexity.

There is no way this will see mass adoption, if that's their goal I think they should do more customer research.

</comment><comment><USER20> who doesn't want to stand below a 200kg Alexa-controlled piece of furniture hanging from the ceiling. Alexa drop it!

</comment><comment><USER21> Polymorphic homes maybe, but what's robotic about these? A robot would self- clean for example.

this accomplishes the same and doesnt require any motors: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juWaO5TJS00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juWaO5TJS00)

</comment><comment><USER22> Nissan did build some robotic office chairs.[1] They rearrange themselves for meetings.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLEgvD7iG-M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLEgvD7iG-M)

<comment><USER23> i wish. thats staged

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This sounds great until you realize you have to put every non-robotic thing away into its tiny little container before you can do anything pertaining to changing the room around.

</comment><comment><USER25> "YES! More things to bump my head into!" \- Tall People

<comment><USER23> LOL! as a short person, I always forget this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Could it not come crashing down upon you?

"I wanted to sit on my couch, but it fell and nearly killed me... damn robot furniture."

<comment><USER27> It could, but it shouldn't if properly made.

For one thing, it's got 4 straps. If any 3 straps or any two opposing corner straps are intact, then it should probably not fall down. So there's some redundancy.

Aside from that, use a worm drive[1] between the motor and the pulleys. As long as the gearbox is intact, the weight of the furniture won't be able to turn the output gear.

If you want more assurance than that, put some kind of extra brake or lock on the pulleys or drive shaft. Maybe a pawl[2].

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

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawl)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why are articles critical of cryptocurrencies being flagged? - <AUTHOR> This article was on the front page just now: https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-society.html
but got flagged for some unknown reason. I can only guess because it is strongly critical of cryptocurrencies.
Is flagging just community driven? As in, if an article gets flagged enough is it automatically taken down? Or does a mod have to step in?
If a mod has to step in, then why are they censoring articles critical of cryptocurrencies? <comment><USER2> Both mods and community can result in a dead post. (You can see them by going to your profile and changing the dropdown)

w.r.t. cryptos, I think this community is less interested in the topic than two years ago. Turns out most of the content is either bs and shilling. This community is more interested in blockchain, less so about cryptocurrencies. Technical articles or those that teach something interesting do well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mods didn't touch that submission. Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things, but I suppose it was a combination of (1) users who felt it wasn't a substantive article and (2) users who are fatigued by the controversy around cryptocurrency. That controversy is many years old by now, has been discussed to death, and leads to poor-quality generic discussion ([https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment)). In case it helps, articles that are favorable about cryptocurrency get an even more hostile reception, especially anything reminiscent of the crypto-hype of 8-10 years ago.

This doesn't mean that articles on the topic can't do well on HN. It just means that the bar for substantiveness is high.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thank you for asking. This article was a great experiment, despite it being flagged.

Because nobody could answer the question I posed in the article.

To be clear: I'm quite convinced that I was being flagged by the visitors and that's why it was removed.

</comment><comment><USER5> Articles are automatically taken down after they're flagged enough. Plenty of articles critical of cryptocurrencies have been posted here. It's most likely people just thought the article was blogspam.

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe it got flagged because it's an abomination of an article. Did you even read the damn thing? The author has no authority to speak on the subject seeing as he does not even recognize the work many crypto projects are doing to help the unbanked and solve energy consumption (PoS vs PoW).

Crypto fills a niche, it's the cash of the internet providing an unregulated unrestricted ability to transfer value.

A number of the negative points in the article could have been said about regular fiat currency.

This article is a one sided brain fart by someone who knows nothing about the subject they are writing about.

<comment><USER7> The article brings up a lot of points, and whether they hold up to scrutiny should be dealt with in the comments, not by flagging the article.

<comment><USER2> The article gets flagged when the commenting becomes a flame war, much like this post is becoming with people flagging and down voting based on emotion.

Case in point why crypto doesn't belong here, too many people getting too emotionally attached to their ideas to have a civil coversation.

Please downvote and flag more things you dislike for personal reasons.</comment></comment></comment>


My Dinner with Peter Thiel - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/nick-bilton-dinner-with-peter-thiel <comment><USER2> What a waste of an article and opportunity. The journalist had the opportunity to sit with 30 other tech visionaries listening to them talk about their vision for the future, and he just..forgot everything they said because he was hungry, and spent most of the article writing about his own hunger?

<comment><USER3> I hate this style of lazy tech journalism where the interviewer inserts themselves into the story. It worked for Hunter S. Thompson a lot better than this writer.

<comment><USER4> That's because Hunter S. Thompson was interesting in and of himself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The author says Peter Thiel is buddies with Elon Musk. From what I've read, they're not really that close. They kind of had a falling out at Paypal if I'm not mistaken.

<comment><USER6> The article also said that "Thiel thinks that people shouldn't go to college because it's a waste of time" and then threw in a misquote of Ayn Rand for good measure.

What all these things have in common is that they're false but truth-adjacent: they sound similar enough to something true that the guy who wrote them can't be fired for journalistic misconduct. It's a very common type of falsehood for reporters looking to make reality fit the story.

<comment><USER7> > 'truth-adjacent'

I'll have to remember that one.

There is something about politicians and journalists in particular that makes them especially prone to such semi-deliberate lies.

My hunch is that being overly socialized, hyper-socialized, causes people to do this. Suppose you have to interact with a large number of people, at least some of which could affect your future deleteriously. You can't plausibly remember the specific details for each person to know what will or won't cause offense, especially when you must also gauge people telling their friends about something you said. As a rule people remember a negative feeling e.g. an irritating remark much more so than a positive one e.g. caused by a compliment.

The heuristic here is to gauge the general atmosphere in a room or discussion and then play to the crowd. The act of this averaging results in satisficing* which could also be described by this truth adjacent quality. I wouldn't even be sure it's intentional. They probably don't even realize that in most domains outside of social interaction this is maladaptive. There's an expression to the effect of "reversed stupidity is not intelligence". If you reverse autism you don't get normality, you get people barely able to cognite outside of the social realm.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't get the point why people who made their money from tech (like Thiel) should be worse (regarding what they do with their money) than people who didn't make their money from tech. It's imo. positive that they have strong opinions and take actions vs. laying on the beach and drinking cocktails (quoting the article).

<comment><USER9> Depends on the strong opinions held and the actions taken. For some individuals, the world might be better off if they just sat on the beach and enjoyed their wealth. With great power comes great responsibility, but if someone doesn't care enough to agonize over the responsibility part then I would prefer that they didn't exercise the power.

<comment><USER10> Oth. If the alternative to people who actually had to build something and make it work is people who graduated from Harvard with journalist degrees....

...both groups will contain sociopaths, abut at least one of them will have learnt to do something useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's another story of a dinner with Thiel in George Packer's The Unwinding ([https://www.amazon.com/Unwinding-Inner-History-New- America/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Unwinding-Inner-History-New- America/dp/0374534608)). The vignettes about Thiel are a small but interesting part of a great book.

</comment><comment><USER12> tl;dr: People with power and money do their own thing.

<comment><USER13> People do their own thing.

If the author had gotten a big lavish dinner he'd use it to talk about the .1% and how out of touch they are. Instead he got an eccentric geek circle with probably a lot of boring SV inside baseball chatter and no food and uses it to drag out the spectre of the rich weirdo.

We've survived two centuries of mega rich people with strange agendas and we can survive this. Honestly this crowd is far, far less scary than the Ahmanson family and other supporters of things like "theonomy." Google the "Chalcedon foundation." Or Henry Ford and his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, or countless other examples. The SV crowd and their rather tame gentrified version of transhumanism and Ayn Rand is fluffy bunny of light stuff compared to those things.

Is Thiel actually a Trump supporter or is he just contractually bound to cast a vote for him due to being a delegate?

I'm getting bored with the SV bashing genre. You can criticize SV for many things, but SV did not cause the decline of the middle class. That trend was firmly in place by the mid-late 70s and began a full 30 years before SV rose as a power. It's largely due to outsourcing, the decline of unions, and the siphoning of trillions out of the American economy to support our pointless waffling quasi-empire. Blame Nixon.</comment></comment>


South Dakota's Anti-Meth Marketing Slogan Is Going Viral - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/2019/11/18/south-dakotas-anti-meth-marketing-slogan-is-going-viral/ <comment><USER2> I think it's rather good. It's a direct acknowledgement that the state has a problem, as well as a catchy and amusing way to say that they're trying to address it.

Internet scorn is maybe getting a little boring...?

<comment><USER3> Its provocative but is it a good use of funds?

they spent 465k already, can spend up to 1.4 Million just on an advertising campaign. Those funds could be used to actually help users.

from the governor's own tweet. "3,366 people were arrested last year because of meth in SD. 13 people died."

they spent 35k per overdose death for awareness. Surely the funds couldve been better put to use

<comment><USER2> Counter is that it reduces the population of users. Simply diverting funds entirely to helping users would seem to invite perpetual spend.

<comment><USER3> Does it reduce the population of users? People are I know who were meth users were aware of the dangers...

<comment><USER2> Actually yeah that's a fair point. Thinking back on my comment, I'm not sure that what I said stands up.

I'm not even sure how one would go about measuring it, given all the other initiatives happening concurrently with this ad campaign.

Intuitively, something a bit attention-grabbing like this could reach more people than some stodgy "drugs bad mmmkay" thing, and I don't think it's wrong to spend a small percentage of a large harm-reduction budget on an awareness campaign. But that's about all I'd be confident saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The slogan is "Meth. We're on it" in case you don't.want to be baited I to clicking.

</comment><comment><USER5> Catchy, honest, funny, and viral. I'd say they got their money's worth.

<comment><USER6> > this campaign is a refresh of the state's "Meth Changes Everything" > marketing strategy

That's just as unintentionally funny to the point of living parody. Was the tourism board involved

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The stigma around what an addict looks like is something that needs to be shattered. I really like the ad. Scare tactics are stupid and hurtful. They destroy the debate and vilify people that need care. People take drugs for reasons. People use meth to get some pep to hang drywall to feed their kids or study for college to get a better life. Sometimes that spirals way out of control but also sometimes people are lifetime addicts with deep private problems and nearly no one knows what they are struggling with. It's never popular to say, but there are people out there that use hard drugs and do not have regrettable experiences and maintain a happy life with them. We will never have a count of them because it's not like they can self report easily. All of our statistics are from people who have medical or legal complications.

Many years ago I was a low voltage / home theater technician. One of my favorite customers was a 70 year old retired gentleman who didn't seem to be aware that he was an obvious junkie. He had been on large amounts of oxycontin after a back surgery years before. I grew up around heroin junkies and it was plain as day to me. Him and his wife were the nicest people and would frequently ask me to stay for dinner. He would sometimes get the nods at the table and have to retreat to the sofa. He had a huge "junkie sweet tooth" and liked to create sweet snacks while stoned. He would come in glassy-eyed while I would be wedged under a desk running wires and offer me red vines and talk about his snack ideas and show me pictures of his grandkids. One of the best was ritz cracker peanut butter sandwiches dipped in chocolate and frozen. Highly recommend. You could tell that they were kind people who had never lived a life where drug usage was normal. He loved college football and was sort of an archivist of the history of different stadiums. They had adult children that were happy and productive. I would bet money neither he or his wife had ever smoked weed or even had more than a handful of regrettable hangovers. I felt so sad knowing what they are going through every day and the inevitable results of his addiction.

A lot of times intense drug usage follows traumatic events in people's lives and resolves itself nearly silently in about 5 years[0]. We all have most likely have a few people in our lives struggling silently because of stigma. Living a dual life because of the sort or rhetoric put out by DARE or Faces of Meth. Suffering silently increases anxiety and amplifies dependance. "Meth. We're on it." is a much needed take on how to tackle the issue in public discourse.

Drug dependance is not a moral failing. It can happen to you. Addicts need love and understanding and it's our duty as fellow humans to provide it.

[0] [https://www.recoveryanswers.org/research- post/1-in-10-americ...](https://www.recoveryanswers.org/research- post/1-in-10-americans-report-having-resolved-a-significant-substance-use- problem/)</comment>


Bluehost vs. Hostgator Comparison of Web Hosting Services - <AUTHOR> http://selfmadesuccess.com/bluehost-vs-hostgator-comparison-web-hosting-services/ <comment><USER2> They're owned by the same parent company, and in fact a lot of the HG servers are moving over to Provo.</comment>


Elastic Stack 6.6.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.elastic.co/blog/elastic-stack-6-6-0-released <comment><AUTHOR> For those interested, the original paper on the Bkd-tree structure mentioned in the note about geo_shape updates: [https://users.cs.duke.edu/~pankaj/publications/papers/bkd- ss...](https://users.cs.duke.edu/~pankaj/publications/papers/bkd-sstd.pdf)</comment>


Hadoopy: Cython based MapReduce library for Python (w/ Oozie Support) - <AUTHOR> http://brandynwhite.com/hadoopy-cython-based-mapreduce-library-for-py

<comment><USER2> That's gotta be one of the craziest post titles I've read on HN lately ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it's pretty loaded, hopefully there is something in there for everyone : )

<comment><USER3> You had me at Hadoop.</comment></comment></comment>


At an Air Show in China, Drones Are the Stars - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/world/asia/china-drones.html <comment><USER2> Imagine what's going to happen with all this drone R&D.

I don't think the F35 will make it to its desired life before it's obsolete. 50 years is a long time.

[https://breakingdefense.com/2012/03/f-35-total-costs-soar- to...](https://breakingdefense.com/2012/03/f-35-total-costs-soar- to-1-5-trillion-lockheed-defends-program/)</comment>


The Experience and Perception of Time - <AUTHOR> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/

<comment><USER2> Von Bertalanffy talks about difference in time perceptions in species (insects, small mammals, primates). It was really interesting.

[http://panarchy.org/vonbertalanffy/systems.1968.html](http://panarchy.org/vonbertalanffy/systems.1968.html)</comment>


Ask HN: What do you enjoy working hard at? - <AUTHOR> I've always loved this quote from Robert Heinlein and am in some ways still searching for it.  Curious to hear what your answer is?
Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing. One man may find happiness in supporting a wife and children. Another may find it in robbing banks. Still another may labor mightily for years in pursuing pure research with no discernible result. Note the individual and subjective nature of each case. No two are alike and there is no reason to expect them to be. Each man or woman must find for himself or herself that occupation in which hard work and long hours make him or her happy. Contrariwise, if you are looking for shorter hours and longer vacations and early retirement, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you need to take up bank robbing. Or geeking in a sideshow. Or even politics. Robert Heinlein <comment><USER2> Finding good porn.

No, really, hear me out. The industry has such a high turnover rate, talent and technicians alike. The barrier to entry is very low, almost non existent. This means the market place is constantly flooded with poor quality product.

I have studied and worked in the movie industry, so I have a bit of inside knowledge about the craft. Certainly the same things annoy me that annoy everyone else with bad porn, shit lighting, over acting, bad sound, etc.

Now, don't get me wrong sometimes poor quality work will do, but I'm going on about the search for _good_ stuff.

Maybe it's the synergy of titillation and craft that lights up my happy circuits. But I think the real key here is as soon as I've ingested the work in question, well, the thrill is gone. I won't make any excuses, that's just how the ol' libido runs.

</comment><comment><USER3> "may find happiness in supporting a wife and children"

This is me ever since I had my kids. But to achieve this, I am working towards building a life where I have enough financial freedom that I can choose to spend my time however I want. If I want 2 months off, I should be able to take that without worrying about asking a boss or taking unpaid leave.

So I enjoy working hard at building the life that I envision.

</comment><comment><USER4> This isn't going to be a direct answer, but I don't know that I totally agree with the quote. For example, some people find deep happiness only from traveling, but it's hard to consider that to be work.

I think what the quote is really getting at is this: can you find a way to be paid to do something you enjoy doing anyway?

</comment><comment><USER5> I think it's a very important question for every adult human, and each year answer can be different.

Few years ago for me it was mutexes, RAII and similar things. This year it's changing country of living.

</comment><comment><USER6> A project that has momentum

</comment><comment><USER7> For money, honor, power.

<comment><USER2> Conan! What is best in life?

Conan: Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. Hear the lamentations of their women.</comment></comment>


Auto Scale your Heroku Apps with Hero Scale - <AUTHOR> https://www.heroscale.com

<comment><USER2> Autoscaling Heroku workers is definitely a problem that people would like solved, but I see a few issues with trying to offer the solution as a SaaS. One, you're targeting developers. There are several github repos that do this kind of thing for free, and developers would know how to find and implement those. Two, those github repo's are going to do a better job of scaling because they can turn dynos/workers on and off instantly (e.g. as soon as a delayed job is done); much more cost effective than waiting up to 5 minutes to turn dynos/workers on/off. Three, you're targeting people that are trying to save money and _don't_ want to spend money.

As an aside, perhaps I (a cheap developer) am not in your target demographic, and you're really targeting folks with lots of Heroku apps and lots of money to spend. In which case you should be charging bundles more than $20/month.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I tried all the open source autoscaling heroku tools on Github. They were not easy to use, and had major problems (try them, you'll see!)

I think Heroku users value their time above all else. There's much cheaper ways to host your Rails apps. This tool allows Heroku users to save money while not having to spend days getting their autoscaling stuff working and tested.

<comment><USER3> Pedro's DJ fork[1] has worked quite well for me. What didn't go well with it for you?

[1] <https://github.com/pedro/delayed_job/tree/autoscaling>

<comment><USER4> It only scales jobs, it doesn't scale dynos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is a great idea however it would seem that this is more of a feature than a business. What happens when Heroku implements this feature themselves?

P.S. Love the website design, it really pops!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah, yep. I've been waiting for this feature from Heroku for over a year. Finally decided to just implement it ourselves. We then realized it might be nice to make it easy for other people.

We'd welcome Heroku implementing it! We actually think there's many other things we can add on top of Heroku that would be valuable so we're not too worried :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems like they did not scale heroscale.com itself. All I get is:

      App crashed

      This application is temporarily offline.

      If you're the administrator of this app,
      please check your heroku logs for the backtrace.

<comment><USER7> I get a bad ssl cert warning.

<comment><USER8> Yep. SSL cert warning on Safari for iPhone.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's the only browser that the cert doesn't like. Guess now I know why godaddy sells SSL certs for 10 dollars

<comment><USER7> I use godaddy certs without issue. Make sure you included the bundle certs etc etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, cool. I'll get that fixed. I used the instructions from [http://clearcove.ca/blog/2010/11/how-to-secure-a-rails- app-o...](http://clearcove.ca/blog/2010/11/how-to-secure-a-rails-app-on- heroku-with-ssl-firesheep/) however it must have missed a step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> David Dollar that works at Heroku already wrote a (free) gem that auto scales your heroku apps.

<https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-autoscale>

<comment><USER10> I feel those who point "free" alternatives to Hero Scale have never actually tried to auto-scale their dynos. That gem is not a serious alternative.

David Dollar worked on it for one day and then never committed anything again (except for three months later, one little note: "This gem is a proof of concept and should not be used in production").

In my experience this gem crashes requests frequently (502 errors if I remember well). I don't know what's going on in that code - I wasted some time looking into it with no luck - but something in there is flawed.

Heroku is supposed to be simple. The idea of Heroku is you can focus on the design of your apps. Auto scaling turned out to be a huge pain and waste of time for me. I ran out of patience and moved my Ruby code to the Google App Engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a great idea. I looked at the auto scaling repositories on GitHub: 1) There wasn't a good solution for Rails 3 yet. 2) The GitHub repos were typically forks of existing repos (like for CollectiveIdea's Delayed Jobs) and therefore would not always be up to date. I wouldn't be too worried about Heroku implementing this (though I hope they do) because there isn't a direct incentive for them to save you money by auto scaling. I'm definitely going to try this out.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wait, why doesn't Heroku itself do this?

<comment><USER13> For an enterprise: autoscaling is either not a value add ("You can cut $40 a month off our $300 hosting bill? Absence of 'yay'.") or Really Freaking Hard And App Specific. SmugMug, as I recall, did a _lot_ of work to dynamically spin up and shut down instances to minimize their bill (not a Heroku app, obviously), because their usage patterns consistently predicted high load for workers at certain times and low loads at other times.

For a ramen-munching startup: shaving $40 off our bill is very motivating. However, while we have dreams of scaling up, if you actually _do_ it we're going to wig out when we see a four figure hosting bill. By the way, we're pathological customers who understand _just_ enough of this to be a danger to ourselves, and we will blame you on the Internets when your system does exactly what we tell it to do.

<comment><USER12> I see your point, but why would a startup wig out when they scale? Presumably, revenues would scale with demand, so I would be quite grateful that my provider allowed me to satisfy the demand quickly and reliably...

<comment><USER14> Real-life example of what Patrick is talking about: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1688904>

<comment><USER12> Oh, now I see. It's not so much about scaling up, then, as it is about forgetting to scale back down after a spike.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This looks pretty cool. As a startup, any savings is worth it. Problem is, my app is too matured to try a few things that aren't proven / stable yet. I will wait to see if Heroku official includes this as an add-on. If so, I'm totally down.

I could implement it myself, but if it's coming and implemented by a team who's dedicated a lot more time than I can, then it's worth it.

</comment><comment><USER16> We drop $500-800/month on Heroku, so I just signed up to give it a shot- doesn't take a lot of savings to make it worthwhile.

</comment><comment><USER17> App Engine is the only service that gets this 'auto scaling' right. Unfortunately the rest of the service sucks.

</comment><comment><USER18> Tried to add my Heroku account and got the typical rails 500 error:"We're sorry, but something went wrong."

EDIT: Refreshed and it seemed to work!

</comment><comment><USER7> Isn't Heroku supposed to auto-scale EC2?

So we have Heroscale autoscaling Heroku which autoscales EC2??

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER19> Yes and no. Right now, if you're running at one dyno then you're pulled from the heroku "mesh" if you run idle. However, this is a free account so it's not really saving you any money.

Heroku doesn't auto manage your dyno and workers based on usage. You set dynos at 10, you're running 10 throughout the month. Likewise with workers.

Heroscale ramps your dynos and workers up/down based on necessity.

<comment><USER20> Since the site doesn't describe this in any detail: can you define 'necessity'? In other words, can you tell us anything about how and when your service decides to scale up or down, for dynos and for workers? And what have you done to avoid porpoising (to borrow an aviation term for lack of a better option coming to mind at the moment.)

Also, can your service scale workers all the way down to zero and then spark up the first worker upon the next job submission? Or can it only scale workers as low as one?

<comment><USER19> Good feedback, will put together a "wtf is it doing" page.

I'm familiar with the "pilot induced oscillations" from a first hand basis, scared the crap out of me. The desired scaling quality is quick ramp ups and then gradual, minute based ramp downs. This is to handle a sudden influx of traffic to the site. We don't just peg your dynos anytime something comes in. And the free accounts are set at 3 max, so don't worry about it blowing up your bill.

Dynos are ramped up fast as a response to incoming traffic and average wait times per request. I'm still refining this algorithm so feedback during beta would be awesome.

The algorithms for workers are slightly different than dynos since they feed of different info. The answer to your question is yes, it will scale down to zero if you have nothing in the queue. You can override this by setting server min and max thresholds for workers.

Drop us a line at contact AT heroscale DOT com and happy to talk more.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the details. I will have a think about what other questions I might like to ask you and will try to fire them over to your contact email in the next day or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure I want to give my Heroku account password to an external service.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're working on a heroku proxy API that will allow people to hook into heroscale via oath.

<comment><USER21> Yes, I will probably wait for oath before signing up and checking it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Threw an error when I tried to connect my Heroku account :(

<comment><USER19> Fixed, was redis issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ouch. "App crashed" messages not the best marketing for an auto-scaling app.

</comment><comment><USER24> "App crashed"

Looks like it couldn't scale to the hacker news traffic. Is that Irony?

<comment><USER25> It would be if that error meant that the app couldn't handle the traffic. "App crashed" just means that their code is doing something weird and the thin process crashed.</comment></comment>


ArsTechnica Hacked? - <AUTHOR>

I think ArsTechnica got hacked not sure... it was up about an hour ago but now Its just a black page with a couple of links to Twitter Feeds (that look brand new) <comment><USER2> Just posted the same thing. Definitely hacked: [https://twitter.com/arstechnica/status/544587442305523712](https://twitter.com/arstechnica/status/544587442305523712)</comment>


What if half of Switzerland's rooftops produced electricity? - <AUTHOR> https://actu.epfl.ch/news/what-if-half-of-switzerland-s-rooftops-produced-el/ <comment><USER2> The other thing that would happen that no one talks about is that electricity rates would skyrocket because the power company wasn't making enough money. This is exactly what happened in Ontario, Canada. People started conserving and it caused rates to go up. Same thing happened with water in California (at least the Bay Area). People started conserving better, so to reward us, they raised water rates.

<comment><USER3> Sounds like the reasonable thing to do is to the electric bill into a fixed fee portion (infrastructure) and a variable fee portion (energy).

<comment><USER4> This is exactly what is done in some countries, like Portugal.

The main difference is that a fully variable model subsidizes solar panel owners at the expense of the other clients, which makes solar panels a more attractive investment, whereas here the case for home solar is much weaker, particularly for low energy consumers.

<comment><USER5> In Norway we pay three different amounts, sometimes to two separate entities.

I pay the company that supplies the electricity per kilowatt-hour for the energy and the company that owns the local distribution network for the rental of the cables and a per kilowatt-hour fee for transporting the energy.

In my case it is just one company but the energy supplier could be separate from the infrastructure owner.

<comment><USER6> This kind of "free market" for electricity tends to drive up infrastructure costs needlessly (see Australia), while incentivizing bad behaviour by generation suppliers in the market (see Enron).

Public utilities generally provide a higher caliber of service at a lower price, with less administrative bloat.

<comment><USER7> Depends on the state, but in Vic the 'poles and wires' component, both in distribution (suburb) and transmission (pylons) costs are built into the fee that is charged for electricity supply (cost of connectivity) in a positive feedback loop: the more the companies invested, the more they could charge.

This was designed to avoid the 'run it into the ground's privatisation mentality, but it went the other way. Sadly, there was no price component for improving the network with new ideas, so it is still the same design as 100 years ago.

A system designed by accountants has done things accountants love, and nothing for electrical engineering or the citizens. Surprise.

The old SEC wasn't innovative or cheap, and neither is the privatised system. For incentives to be effective they have to be broken down to be smaller components rewarding specific conduct, and tweaked in response to system performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So all this study actually did was estimate roof coverage in Switzerland using a new method?

The figure is pretty easy to estimate anyway, but they used the _Machine Learning_ OMG method?

> What if half of Switzerland's rooftops produced electricity?

What would be interesting if someone did some work and actually worked this out, no?

How would infrastructure change? What backups would be needed? Could surplus, if any, be used for anything? Could you connect to other countries in new ways? How would employment be effected? Supply chains for materials? Reflected and absorbed energy would change city heat sinks how? Would smog change at all?

</comment><comment><USER9> Someone did a calculation for Singapore: [https://medium.com/sausheong/estimate-the-solar-output-of- yo...](https://medium.com/sausheong/estimate-the-solar-output-of-your-rooftop- with-google-maps-725e4f636f14)

His conclusion: 'This is about 7.3 TWh or 11.5% of the 63.4 TWh of expected Singapore's electricity consumption in 2030'

He also made an interesting tool to calc easily the output of solar panels on your rooftop: [https://sausheong.github.io/solarest/](https://sausheong.github.io/solarest/)

The only thing missing there is an easy way to get the average sunpower for some place in the world. I made a small app to calc that from the nasa website but unfortunately did not yet have time to put it online

<comment><USER10> Do any of these tools factor in average cloud cover etc.?

<comment><USER11> Do solar panels wear down in extreme weather? Eg if it regularly drops below -30C in winter, will that have a negative impact on the solar panel's lifespan? Because if it does then that's another factor to consider.

<comment><USER12> Panels are typically extremely hardy and are rated for decades (although I don't know about icy conditions). The rest of the electrical components are typically the weakest link.

<comment><USER11> I understand that solar panels are hardy, but these kinds of icy conditions even impact things such as asphalt - literal rock. I find it somewhat difficult believe that there's no wear and treat associated with icy weather, but I can't find any information on it. It's all promotional material that assuages all worries.

<comment><USER13> > asphalt - literal rock.

Asphalt is bitumen, a liquid, it is about as far removed from literal rock as possible. The reason asphalt roads break down in very cold weather is water which gets into tiny cracks, and which then expands when it freezes.

Solar panels are encased in a fairly thick layer of glass. Just like the windows in your house, they don't break from a bit of frost. If there are cracks where water can enter, they can break for the same reasons as asphalt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone want to do the math on how much such a project would cost (with perhaps a projection in 10/20 years)?

</comment><comment><USER15> Is lack of sunlight an issue in Swiss ? I believe they have very short days during winter ?

<comment><USER16> They're on a fairly low latitude so no, not shorter than say France or Austria. At worst you get some shade because of the landscape.

I guess that's roughly the latitude of Maine is you live on the states. So shorter days than Florida, but not crazy short either.

<comment><USER17> The mountains are more of a problem. There is a famous Swiss village that only gets a few hours of sun in the summer because the prominence of the mountains around it is so high.

<comment><USER18> The population density map of Switzerland and the elevation map of Switzerland look like inverses of each other. The famous Swiss villages don't have many people in them compared to the cities, so the situation you describe, while real, isn't important.

<comment><USER17> In the denser parts of Switzerland, apartments are very common. I don't see how solar works when people are living in a 5 story building. I couldn't see solar working that well where I lived in Lausanne, for example, at least on a person housed/energy unit basis.

<comment><USER18> Five floors probably isn't too bad, thought of course that depends entirely on how many people in each apartment and how large they are — e.g. one person in a 50 m² place, divided by five floors, with 20% efficient panels, 25% duty cycle for night/latitude, still implies 500 W, compared to the average electricity consumption in Switzerland of about 900 W per person. It's not _everything_ but it's also a pretty impressively large number.

(Something I only found out by looking up Swiss energy consumption: apparently Switzerland produces just over half of its current electricity from hydro power, which makes sense considering the terrain).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What if we just build another nuclear plant instead? Lets just go China or South Korea to build one for us. Or even better plan on some next Gen designs that are gone be coming out in the next 10ish years.

</comment><comment><USER20> Rooftops in Switzerland are covered with snow for many months each year. Yet this article doesn't even mention the word "snow".

<comment><USER21> Except they're not, for the vast majority of them. Yes, it might be true in the ski resorts, but most people leave in the plains. Zürich has barely had any snowfall this year.

Even in snowier years, it's a few days per year at most.</comment></comment>


Surviving C++ - <AUTHOR> http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2011/02/surviving-c.html

<comment><USER2> _In fact, no one uses straight C++ to make anything, in real world everyone starts by sub-setting C++ into something "safer" and then adding back the fundamental missing features (i.e. memory management, serialization, reflection and so on) via libraries, macros or other trickery (i.e. code to code transformers, code generators or parsers and so on), so really the C++ we use is not a standard, but a studio specific version of the language._

I really don't understand this at all. He seems to be saying that using "straight C++" would mean using the worst parts of the language in the worst ways, but not taking advantage of the features that make C++ usable. If he really thinks everyone uses macros, code generators, or code transformers to do real-world C++, then he's wrong. I've been using C++ professionally for almost ten years now, and I've never seen anything like that except: a few legacy macro tricks that we easily replaced with better, non-macro techniques; and Qt's preprocessor, which we never actually used in production code.

Style points for C++ have been rehashed endlessly. "C++ Coding Standards" is pretty good IIRC: [http://www.amazon.com/Coding-Standards-Rules-Guidelines- Prac...](http://www.amazon.com/Coding-Standards-Rules-Guidelines- Practices/dp/0321113586)

For gaming and embedded software, you will need further rules for performance. I'm not sure why this is a ding on C++. Doesn't any reasonably powerful language have performance pitfalls? Don't use CLOS in your embedded systems, folks.

 _C++ as a medium for our art looks more like statuary marble than modeling clay: it requires a team of muscular stone cutters under the guidance of a genius in order to produce some amazing sculptures. And once a given idea has been translated into the stone, you hardy can change it without re-sculpting most of it or having to work in the constraints that the shape it currently has impose on you._

This is only true if your system is badly factored or if you are averse to recompiling. "Ahhh, arrgh, no, I refuse to change the interface of this fundamental class referenced by every other object in the system because the next compile-link cycle will take ten minutes! I'll leave it crappy for the rest of eternity just so I don't have to wait ten minutes for a compile, or because my approach to changing this extremely fundamental class is to keep making haphazard changes to its interface until my code finally works, so my ten or twelve compile-link cycles will cumulatively take _almost two hours_." Fine, we'll have an adult make the change instead.

Now I'm _really_ not suggesting that it doesn't suck when you have to wait ten minutes to recompile your system when you change an interface that every other source file in your system includes, but I hope recompilation time is not the weightiest consideration in that case.

 _It's not a coincidence that the more a language is dynamic, the less need there is for fancy debugging tools. Who needs a watch window indeed, if I can just add on the fly a widget on screen that graphs the value of a given variable?_

This is a legitimate complaint. Building instrumentation into a C++ system is a pain in the ass, and it will never be as powerful as in a language with introspection.

 _Well, the art of sculpting in C++, the art of design, becomes really the art of subdividing our sculpture in pieces, the real design challenge is all about how to cut or work into pieces. Too many of them and the sculpture will be a fragile and ugly mess (translation: craptastically slow OOP shit). Too little and we loose flexibility._

As far as I can tell, the point here is that if C++ was a better language, bad design wouldn't be a problem. If it took C++ to drive him to consider OO design principles, I'd hate to see the code he wrote in other OO languages. Also, decomposition is not the only consideration. There are cross-cutting concerns such as memory management, logging, and instrumentation.

The design principles at the end of the post are better and more comprehensively covered by "Large-Scale C++ Software Design": [http://www.amazon.com/Large-Scale-Software-Design-John- Lakos...](http://www.amazon.com/Large-Scale-Software-Design-John- Lakos/dp/0201633620) Some of the language points in that book reflect the immaturity of C++ implementations when the book was written, but the design guidelines are still relevant.

In general, it's very hard to say anything original about C++. Practitioners and proponents of C++ are much more aware of its limitations than its detractors realize. Also, this may come as a shock to the web generation, but C++ is a topic that is very well covered by available books. Just as you might browse through a few relevant blogs to see if someone else has already made the same point you were about to make, with C++ you should do the same with the highly-regarded books.

<comment><USER3> > If he really thinks everyone uses macros, code generators, or code > transformers...

That's not what he was talking about. He basically said that if you take two different teams, they will most likely use different subsets of C++ features. One will be all about classes, hierarchies and (god forbid) boost and other will be using C++ as beefed up C. That sort of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"...Otherwise, the class has to have some data associated with it. Are we sure we want to link Foo both to the interface of Bar and to its in memory layout?

No, you are not. Don't do it, use composition instead. [More Effective C++, 33 Make non-leaf classes abstract]"_

Sigh. Dude either didn't read the book, or didn't think about what it's saying; he's just quoting the chapter headings and drawing a silly conclusion. Abstract classes can most definitely have data in them, and Meyers is _not_ saying that you should restrict yourself to object composition (he has a whole section on how and when to use inheritance in the first book!)

The point Meyers was making is that if you're allowed to _instantiate_ a base class that implements an assignment operator, you can easily get into a place where you can do bad, mixed-type assignments. If you make your base classes abstract, you can prevent this problem -- hence the chapter title.

This isn't the only bit of bad advice in this blog post -- just one that I picked out at random. It's another example of a rant by someone who knows just enough about C++ to be dangerous, but not enough to be insightful. Flagged.

<comment><USER5> This is the issue with C++. This level of knowledge of any other language you'd be fine to let the guy do some code. You have to have considerably better developers.

With C++ you have this huge dearth of people who know enough about the language to convince someone else of it, then you get them on your project and they blow stuff up by doing it subtly wrong.

C++ has uses, but it's the sulfuric acid of programming languages: you have to have good personnel control and fire those who screw around outside the boundaries of the right style. A programming group with one guy programming like C with classes and another guy programming like it's Ocaml without garbage collection, and you're in for a mighty piece of hell.

<comment><USER4> _"This level of knowledge of any other language you'd be fine to let the guy do some code. You have to have considerably better developers."_

Don't tell that to every Ruby and Python startup that's hiring "rock star" developers. You might hurt their feelings.

At the end of the day, you want the best programmers you can afford on _any_ project, so I don't think it's a particularly compelling argument to say that Blub is a better language because it lets less-qualified people get work done faster.

That said, this guy _gives the impression_ of being competent at C++, but most of his advice is really quite bad. It's fairly easy to write and informed- sounding rant about Python or Ruby, too. The difference is that more people in this forum know those languages, so they're more willing to call bullshit on the poseurs. The level of C++ (and C) competency in the web world is, frankly, disturbingly low.

<comment><USER5> >At the end of the day, you want the best programmers you can afford on any project, so I don't think it's a particularly compelling argument to say that Blub is a better language because it lets less-qualified people get work done faster.

That's complete pap. Of COURSE you want less capable people to get things done. That's the entire point of junior and midlevel developers. Less expensive is sometimes (not always) more useful than being super great. You act like only very good dev's with 8-13 year of industry experience are any use at all with that attitude. Some things really shouldn't require geniuses to do.

<comment><USER4> _"You act like only very good dev's with 8-13 year of industry experience are any use at all with that attitude. Some things really shouldn't require geniuses to do."_

You're overstating the claim. You don't need to be a "genius" to be productive in C++. Yes, there's a learning curve. It _may_ even be a little steeper than in other languages, but it's entirely possible for a smart new grad to contribute meaningfully to a large C++ project. It happens at Microsoft and Google and thousands of other companies _every single year_.

This line of argument against C++ is entirely overblown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really don't see the point of the tone the article adopts. If it is aimed at C++ users, badly mouthing C++ can only put them off what could be useful advice. If it is aimed at C++ bashers, they don't need the C++ advice anyway.

<comment><USER7> Bad mouthing of C++ has become a popular thing to do lately. I think it's partly because C++ is a difficult and time consuming language to learn with many caveats, and people find it easier to give up and bash it instead.

Just because C++ doesn't feel as "clean" as other languages doesn't mean it's not incredibly powerful, widely supported, and a fun language to develop in. To all the haters out there - give it a chance!

<comment><USER8> But the main reason it's not as clean is because it has had to maintain backwards compatibility with C, which is 40 years old now.

Ironically, had C++ been 'cleaner' and not as backwards compatible with C from the outset, then we probably would not be having this conversation today because no one would have ever adopted it. :)

<comment><USER9> Can you give an example of removing some backwards compatibility with C that would make C++ cleaner?

<comment><USER10> Converting static array references to pointers when passing them as a function parameter. The whole array/pointer conflation.

C's struct "tag name space".

Trigraphs and \ line splicing.

Replace #include with symbolic import.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Should we consider using PIMPL_

No. Just don't.

I'll say this about C++: the worst thing about it is that each new job requires you to learn what is 'good' and what is 'taboo' at the new company. One man's natural and elegant is another man's obtuse and illegible.

<comment><USER12> Your thoughts are exactly what I have encountered in the last 10 years.

The author of the article really gives me the impression that he should just really stick to ruby and have his lolz.

C++ is a language, it has slowly evolved over 15+ years, it isn't the prettiest thing. Different people use different parts. Deal with it. If you don't want to work with c++ find a job doing something else.</comment></comment>


SSRI use during pregnancy linked to autism and developmental delays in boys - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140415153735.htm

<comment><USER2> Worthwhile to add "boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls"

[http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/22/why-girls-may-be- prote...](http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/22/why-girls-may-be-protected- against-autism/)</comment>


McDonald's is selling a meatless burger in Germany - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/07/business/mcdonalds-meatless-burger-germany/index.html <comment><USER2> They have been selling meatless burgers in India since they started here. I don't see what's the big deal about.

May be they weren't a typical burger.</comment>