Zettelkästen? - <AUTHOR> https://clerestory.netlify.com/zk/ <comment><USER2> My father used to have a gigantic collection of index cards when he worked as a professor at a high school for librarians. We're talking about 100,000 cards or more. When he had to give a seminar session about topic X, he just selected a bunch of cards from his well-ordered, beautiful wooden storage boxes, fastened them with a rubber band, and took them for work. They contained references, small summaries, newspaper articles, keywords, etc.

I tried to use the same system but never had the patience to implement it - and the digital versus analogue divide also prevented it, because this works best if you use only digital or only analogue. Index cards _and_ a database don't work well together.

 _Edit: Maybe important, and I forget to mention it: All of my attempts of replicating such a system on the computer have failed, and I have never heard of anyone in Academia who successfully used a digital system throughout their career. #1 Reason of failure is that the database format or program became obsolete, #2 Database /Systems Migration problems._

<comment><USER3> I think going plaintext might be the best way here.

I wonder, though... I think writing something by hand gives a different feel for it. I don't know how to explain it. It's like your mind works better if you write by hand.

So maybe an app, used with a stylus on a tablet or large-ish phone might be the best combination? It should then create folders and textfiles, and just store the text there. Which would require OCR and proofreading, of course. But that shouldn't be an issue.

<comment><USER4> Agreed! That's why I went for markdown in implementing it for myself.

Handwriting definitely helps, but a lot of it in this system is done during reading (or just general life), which Ahrens calls "literature notes". Ahrens has a theory that handwriting forces paraphrasing, which he views as important to learning. Anyway, I handwrite all that, then there's a later stage of integrating the relevant info into the system.

For me, searchability and accessibility, plus backup (I write a ton on paper already and I'm a bit worried about losing notebooks) makes it worth the digital step.

Also, I suspect from initial usage that the Zettelkasten is what Krakauer calls a "complementary cognitive artifact": [https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2016/09/comp...](https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2016/09/competitive- cognitive-artifacts-and.html)

I.e., it makes you better at what you're trying to do even in the absence of the tool. To me, the main benefit of the system is that it encourages relational thinking.

<comment><USER5> Hi @bryankam, I just realized you're the author of the linked article. Thank you so much for writing and sharing and commenting.

Regarding handwriting, I'm of a similar mind, having evolved my own system (hybrid of bullet journal + "slice-planner" in monthly moleskine quad-ruled paper journals, plus .md files and evernote) which is in need of some refinement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I must, as I always do, bring up my favorite editor Code Browser which works for this to some degree: [http://tibleiz.net/code- browser/](http://tibleiz.net/code-browser/)

I've been using it for some 15 years and I don't think I will ever leave it. I do wish that other editors (vscode in particular) would adopt its folding style or at least enable it. Doesn't seem promising though ([https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/17904](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/17904))

<comment><USER7> I'd like to let people know about Sublime Zettelkasten[1], which is this really useful module for Sublime that automates searching, linking, and lots of other stuff. There's also a standalone version that is attempting to have the same functionality[2].

[1]: [https://github.com/renerocksai/sublime_zk](https://github.com/renerocksai/sublime_zk) [2]: [https://github.com/renerocksai/sublimeless_zk](https://github.com/renerocksai/sublimeless_zk)

<comment><USER8> I have some minor hacks I've made to sublimeless zk which help it play nice with dark mode in KDE Neon (otherwise the Qt themes get overriden). They're super messy tweaks, but if anyone is interested I'll consider cleaning up and submitting a PR.

<comment><USER9> Yes, please share!

I have some minor tweaks as well: [https://github.com/unqueued/sublime- notelink](https://github.com/unqueued/sublime-notelink)

I'm making the notelink properly follow zettelkästen links, as well as some other tweaks, so I can use my zettle file alongside my unstructured Markdown wikis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I actually was just at a small meetup for people in the SF Bay Area who are building memex's. The Zettelkasten was a common theme in several of the projects people were working on. Here are my notes from the event for anyone interested: [http://ceasarbautista.com/posts/memex_meetup_2.html](http://ceasarbautista.com/posts/memex_meetup_2.html)

There are a couple projects that came up that were loosely based on the Zettelkasten:

\- IdeaFlow by Jacob Cole \- Roam Research by Conor White-Sullivan \- "Cards" by Joel Solymosi

IdeaFlow and Roam are both basically WorkFlowly except that you can link bullets together, plus additional unique features. The ability to link bullets together basically makes it a Zettelkasten, and enables many cool features. As Conor puts it "You shouldn't have to know the structure of your thought as you're typing".

Cards was more faithful to the Zettelkasten in that the metaphor was index cards instead of bullets. The unique thing about Joel's approach is that you can transclude them into documents (sequences of cards), which was a feature inspired by Project Xanadu. That enables Joel to reuse cards across many documents, and had the benefit of letting him effectively update multiple documents at once by editing a single card.

I've been writing an encyclopedia for the last six years. When I heard the Zettelkasten idea it made me wish I had heard of it earlier. It seems like a potentially better way to organize information since the links are between paragraphs rather than pages.

<comment><USER11> Cool recap. From your article:

> Is there a general interchange format for these systems?

I don't understand why none of these people is using RDF. Seems like a perfect technology for a memex.

<comment><USER10> I've never heard of it! I will check it out. Have you seen it used successfully?

<comment><USER11> RDF is the technology behind schema.org, so that would be a good success story. There are quite a bunch of companies working around RDF based technologies, like TopQuadrant, StarDog, Ontotext, and more. But if you want to start playing with it, I recommend you start with Jena/Fuseki [1], it is super easy to run.

Example: say your database contains a note about "doves", and another one about, say, "seagulls". Later, you can search for things you have written about _birds_ , and the query would find both your notes about doves and seagulls (something that you wouldn't be able to do with a fulltext search). There's a whole world of things you can do with inference, so using RDF is a no brainer when it comes to finding relationships between things. It also makes it trivial to import knowledge annotated by other ppl.

If you are interested, here are some other resources I found useful to get started:

* [http://www.learningsparql.com/](http://www.learningsparql.com/)

A great book about SPARQL, a query language for RDF data.

* [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596153823.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596153823.do)

"Programming the Semantic Web"

This is book is old but Chapter 2 and 3 are a good intro on "machine-readable meaning" and Inference. The author also has another cool book on "collective intelligence" I still haven't worked through yet :-)

* [http://www.bobdc.com/blog/reification-is-a-red-herring/](http://www.bobdc.com/blog/reification-is-a-red-herring/)

How to model "property graphs" with RDF. You'll stumble upon this question at some point :-)

[1]: [https://jena.apache.org/documentation/fuseki2/fuseki- run.htm...](https://jena.apache.org/documentation/fuseki2/fuseki- run.html#fuseki-standalone-server)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had the realization yesterday while waiting for a train that the Notes app on iOS contains all the functionality I'd need in order to be able to build a small organization/business .. as long as I standardized my form of note- taking and rigorously applied policies on how Notes are transformed from one Folder to the other - and on what conditions I send the Notes to others using Airdrop.

In other words, all I really need a computer for, is formatting and forwarding rules. ;)

Anyway it was an interesting experiment to come up with some standard Notes that would be productive for a small office - and I realized, part way through this hacking on the rails, thats how people used to do it: plain old ink and paper, and a standard system for routing things around.

I started to wonder what happened? I guess HR departments got tired of having to train workers, and came to rely on computerization as a way of 'training in the chair' \- or, outright, replacing peoples ability to apply standard techniques to their workday.

Even today in a computer-savvy environment, people still seem to resist the idea of having standard ways of doing things. Everyone has this idea that they are unique and special individuals who have more to contribute to the world than they end up taking - but give them pen and paper and tell them thats the only way to do things from now on, and all the hubris falls apart and the excuses come out.

It has been true for 40 years, and I think it'll long be true for another century at least: if you can't do it on paper first, you're not ready to computerize the problem.

<comment><USER13> I've thought about this as well and have tried to implement a Zettelkasten in Apple Notes before but couldn't find an easy way to link between notes. Do you know of a solution?

<comment><USER12> I don't have a solution - only convention - i.e. the users have to make the process work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here is a picture of German author Arno Schmidt with his "Note box":

[https://www.tagesspiegel.de/images/heprodimagesfotos88120140...](https://www.tagesspiegel.de/images/heprodimagesfotos88120140114arnoschmidttv3-jpg/9332150/2-format43.jpg)

Btw: He is regarded as an important author who is famously not read, as his magnus opus is even difficult to hold with a weight of 13 pounds:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seasons-biggest-novel- has-1...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seasons-biggest-novel- has-1-3-million-words-and-outweighs-a-bowling-ball-1474642359)

And Niklas Luhmann himself explaining his Zettelkasten (the archive with 50000 notes beside his desk):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCFP5i_0ibE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCFP5i_0ibE)

What he is explaining is not important, what I want to show is that it looks like utter (creative?) chaos for someone not Niklas Luhmann.

<comment><USER15> Fun fact aside: Arno Schmidt's grandnephew is Dave Winer. We know Winer today more as the chief populariser of RSS but his life's idea is more in Outlining, organising your thoughts in nested lists and, since he's a programmer, coding in and on outline structures.

If I remember correctly from his blog Winer and Schmidt never had much contact, language barrier and such, so it's more of a coincidence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A tool under development I've been recently curious about is [https://roamresearch.com](https://roamresearch.com) which seems to be focused less on GTD or bookwriting, but more around the aspect of knowledge capture for intellectual work. [https://youtu.be/L6GIW4PprQE?t=24](https://youtu.be/L6GIW4PprQE?t=24) shows a recent state of development - mentioning zettlekasting and also Tiago Forte's P.A.R.A.

The intriguing part of the system seems to be more in the fluid process of hyperlinking to a topic of interest. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD_Gi8EQGVQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD_Gi8EQGVQ) also shows a mind-mapping mode.

</comment><comment><USER17> There's an open-source WYSIWYG Markdown editor named Zettlr, the author of which is very fond of the Zettelkasten method and seems to provide some features meant to help with it:

[https://www.zettlr.com/](https://www.zettlr.com/)

I don't know much about Zettelkasten, but I used this app as a Markdown editor of choice for some time until I discovered Marktext.

<comment><USER18> Wow that looks really neat! Too bad that there seems to be no Webclient, although it seems to be a Webapp (based on Electron) ... Last weekend I hacked a tiny WYSIWG flat-file HTML wiki for documenting a small hobby project with a non-coder friend, but now Zettlr looks like all I ever wished for, for that purpose. Except I would've to bug my buddy to install the Zettlr applciation as well.

<comment><USER17> As I hinted to in the comment, if you just want a WYSIWYG Markdown editor, and you're not particularly interested in the Zettelkasten aspect, take a look at [https://marktext.app](https://marktext.app) too, to compare which one you prefer. In my personal opinion, Marktext seems in particular more robust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wrote a small Go program to manage a Zettelkasten-like set of notes. I use it to keep notes for work and for personal diary-keeping.

The goal was to have the least friction possible for taking notes, figuring that's the only way I'd actually do it. I say 'zk t' to print out the tree of all my notes, then 'zk e 23' to edit note #23. I can set my "current" note by running 'zk 5', then when I next run 'zk e' it'll automatically open up note #5. There's a hierarchy, so I can make note #1 titled "work", then create notes under that for different work topics. I can also link and unlink notes from different points in the hierarchy, so the same note can appear in multiple places.

The code is at [https://github.com/floren/zk](https://github.com/floren/zk) if anyone would like to play with it. Caveat: I bashed out just enough to make it useful, then stopped fooling with it and started working. The code has too much manual file-bashing and struct-bashing. I've also been meaning to add the ability to associate files with a given note (so I take notes on a paper and attach the PDF, etc.) for at least two years but haven't done it yet.

<comment><USER20> I kind of got inspired by the original article ... and your post (which was in the top spot when I first looked at the entry). I set out to build my own digital version of the Zettelkasten system.

But the more I think about it ... there is not a lot that there is to implement that basic command line tools don't handle.

\---

Basically every editor (camp vim here) has support for markdown syntax highlighting, giving you a simple way to compose notes.

Fulltext search is handled by grep (ripgrep for me), fuzzy file search (fzf) probably comes in handy too.

If you need pretty printed notes you can use pandoc to convert multiple zettel files into one document of basically any format.

Graphs can be created with graphviz/dot.

\---

There is little there is to improve on. From my (zettelkasten) notes:

* Something that assembles multiple notes into one temporary, editable document. Changes are commited into their respective zettel files once you close the editor.

* Some scripts that provide easy to access reports. E.g. based on recent activity, topic or based of a single zettel and it's neighbors.

\---

All of the above are more or less trivial to implement. So ... any one up to propose something more challenging that is actually useful?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am kinda surprised no one has mentioned Tinderbox by eastgate systems! (1)

Beck Tench (2) has a brilliant youtube series (3) about how she uses tinderbox with the zettlekasten method to create associations between various notes. She also links these notes to her devonthink db so that when she is searching for something there it will also pull up her relevant notes.

I myself have been using her method in writing my masters thesis and I think, because I am a visual learner, the ability to visualise theories through a mind-map style interface has really helped my retention and understanding of them.

Anyway, try it out!

(1): [http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/](http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/) (2): [https://www.becktench.com/workflow#reading](https://www.becktench.com/workflow#reading) (3): [https://www.becktench.com/blog/2018/11/12/using- zettelkasten...](https://www.becktench.com/blog/2018/11/12/using-zettelkasten- and-tinderbox-to-document-a-literature-review)

</comment><comment><USER22> I have been using this system for a few months now. I keep my notes organized as markdown files in one directory.

My experience has been positive, and my zettelkasten rewards later visits with serendipitous connections. It's like how one often makes/discovers these connections while conversing with a friend -- except, in this case, the "friend" is a snapshot of your own thoughts at a different point in time.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those not enlightened by the German title, "Zettelkasten", or "slip-card box", is an index-card based information capture and organisation system created by the late Geman sociologist Niklas Luhmann.

<comment><USER23> He is famous for having written his books on basis of his Zettelkasten but I doubt he invented it. It could well be he thought so himself though after having lost/omitted the external reference on that index card of his named Zettelkasten.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you liked this idea, give TiddlyWiki ([https://tiddlywiki.com/](https://tiddlywiki.com/)) a go - it was built on similar premises.

<comment><USER25> Tiddlywiki is what I use to manage my own personal Zettelkasten as well; it's pretty well suited for the task. There's a bit of ugliness when renaming Tiddlers, but for a lot of inter-related topics, I add an automatically- generated list of backlinks like this:

      !!!! Backlinks
      <<list-links "[all[current]listed[]!has[draft.of]!is[system]]">>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This article describes roughly how I use Evernote for about half of my notes, and this process has made me a lot more creative and improved the quality and coherence of my thinking.

</comment><comment><USER27> Arno Schmidt is a somewhat obscure German author, known for the use of this system. He wrote a book titled "Zettel's Traum".

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

[https://www.zinzin.com/observations/2013/who-was-arno- schmid...](https://www.zinzin.com/observations/2013/who-was-arno-schmidt-and- what-is-zettels-traum-some-evidentiary-fragments/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom%27s_Dream](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom%27s_Dream)

<comment><AUTHOR> Use of index cards by authors and researchers is pretty much legendary. From some earlier research I've done:

\- Carl Linneaus, who largely invented the modern index card. [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090616080137.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090616080137.htm)

\- Numerous library cataloguers, including Melvil Dewey.

\- Vladimir Nabokov

\- Garrett Hardin (of "Tragedy of the Commons" fame). I've seen his personal collection, which was extensive.

\- Herb Caen, "three dot columnist" for the San Francisco. _Chronicle_.

\- John McPhee, _The Control of Nature_ and numerous other books. [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/structure](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/14/structure)

I've written previously (discussion POIC, a similar model) here: [https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/u4dgr0tkxk4tk9npuvex5a](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/u4dgr0tkxk4tk9npuvex5a)

More on index card usage:

[https://o.ello.co/https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2...](https://o.ello.co/https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/may/09/health- and-wellbeing)

<comment><USER28> Also Robert Pirsig, known for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, whose second book Lila is concerned extensively with an index card scheme.

<comment><USER4> That's great to know. I loved Zen when I was younger, thanks for mentioning Lilo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Actually, "Zettelkästen" is the plural form; the singular would be simply "Zettelkasten."

<comment><USER30> German here - I misread the title as Zettelkäst _ch_ en and thought that the word Zettelkasten was a clever way to work around the umlaut. Looks like I was wrong ;)

A _Kästchen_ is a small _Kasten_ (box) by the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> There is a famous book by Arno Schmidt, ZETTEL'S TRAUM (sic!) with only 2000 copies published because it has such a complicated layout. The gargantuan novel was published in folio format with 1,334 pages. The story is told mostly in three shifting columns, presenting the text in the form of notes, collages, and typewritten pages.

[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettel's_Traum](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettel's_Traum)

</comment><comment><USER32> I have an incomplete system modeled after a few ideas of zettelkasten.

150 words per card(I wrote it out on the index card and determined its approximate size), all organized into a single directory, with citations in another. All have randomly generated IDs, with title as filenames. To date, I have created about 35K words of notes across 550 cards. Only recently, did I work on linking stuff up(using the randomly generated IDs).

I even wrote a way to display ten random cards in an electron app before switching away to GTK and ruby(still working to get back to previous level of functionality). I mostly used the random display of cards to re-read and expand the cards, since I usually get more on the second read-around.

I am not quite sure how useful it is. When I was programming, I looked stuff up in my notes and mostly added to the cards that I didn't know about programming.

</comment><comment><USER33> As a German speaker, my biggest issue is with the first sentence: I think Zettelkästen is a fantastic word! :)

I'm a heavy Emacs user; one of my most-used extensions is Deft [1] which was inspired by Notational Velocity. With that I have defined some keystrokes globally from org-mode which let me create inter-file links.

I really like this system for collecting general notes. What I think I'm missing that this system provides is the serendipity of stumbling onto something. I can usually jump straight to what I want. It _has_ happened on occasion that I do run into something unexpected and welcome. I'd like to try and find a way to make that more common.

1: [https://github.com/jrblevin/deft](https://github.com/jrblevin/deft)

<comment><USER34> I'm a little late to this thread, but since you are using emacs and deft, you might be interested in this package I created: [https://github.com/efls/zetteldeft](https://github.com/efls/zetteldeft)

I aim to polish it a bit more before publishing it to MELPA, but you might find it interesting already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I had a Zettelkasten once. I (mis-?) used this system when I was preparing for my final exams of my apprenticeship.

I had to cover a huge set of knowledge fields from which ~65% I had zero experience with, neither theoretical nor practical.

The questions that were to be expected of course wouldn't go into too much detail, but the variance of possible questions made it necessary to gain a deeper understanding instead of just memorizing words (e.g. because used vocabulary can differ/overlap from domain to domain)

I've never heard of Luhman or his system, but always thought the knowledge contained in my Zettelkasten would make a great book and that the Zettelkasten's modular organization would make it very easy to parse the knowledge into whatever form you like.

</comment><comment><USER36> The Pile of Index Cards (PoIC) system is another take on this

[https://unclutterer.com/2014/06/17/the-pile-of-index- cards-p...](https://unclutterer.com/2014/06/17/the-pile-of-index-cards-poic- system/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Previously addressed ;-)

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/u4dgr0tkxk4tk9npuvex5a](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/u4dgr0tkxk4tk9npuvex5a)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> There is even a VS Code extension that looked promising, but I was not able to get it to work when I tried:

\- extension: [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=nergal-p...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=nergal- perm.zettelkasten)

\- repo: [https://github.com/nergal-perm/zettelkasten- vscode](https://github.com/nergal-perm/zettelkasten-vscode)

Also I wasn't able to find a license file when I looked now. And unlike stackoverflow there isn't an implied license on GitHub, except to read and fork the repo.

<comment><USER38> package.json lists license as MIT.

[https://github.com/nergal-perm/zettelkasten- vscode/blob/mast...](https://github.com/nergal-perm/zettelkasten- vscode/blob/master/package.json)

<comment><USER37> Nice find!

Edit:

I do however suspect that this is the default when you create a new node.js project, so it might or might not be what the author wanted..?

Anyways, often the author meant it to be open source and just forgot to add a license. Here's one example I stumbled across where the author had just forgotten it: [https://github.com/louisukiri/SlackClient/pull/5](https://github.com/louisukiri/SlackClient/pull/5)

A possibly more entertaining example is the project that was on the front page here a few days ago [0] where the author claimed that the project was Open Source (which it was not, it was Apache 2.0 with Commons Clause, -which even according to them Commons Clause people themselves is not Open Source[1]. This has resultet in a rather long thread in the issue tracker[2] which is simultaneously sad (because it is necessary but distracts from a promising project) and entertaining (for people who can enjoy the forum equivalent of AFV anyways).

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191676)

[1]: [https://commonsclause.com/](https://commonsclause.com/), see FAQ, heading "Is this "Open Source"?"

[2]: [https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40](https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40)

<comment><USER39> Isn't the package.json default license "ISC"?

<comment><USER40> Yes, it is. ISC is, for those who may not know it, an MIT license reworded, to match international jurisdiction, which implies certain rights from the ground up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Shameless plug: I'm currently building a web app[0] that attempts to digitize the notecard format in a way that makes note-taking easy and powerful. It's in its infancy, but I would like to integrate better support for some zettelkästen methodologies down the line. The "linking" in our platform isn't quite as powerful as zettelkästen for some use-cases, but we do utilize a "parent-child" method of organizing your notes hierarchically.

[0] [https://supernotes.app](https://supernotes.app)

<comment><USER42> I get an error visiting the page :( It it only me?

<comment><USER41> Yeah, sorry about that. I am "moving fast and breaking things" at the moment as I'm hoping to do a proper launch next week and want to make sure everything is stress-tested and scalable before then. My fiddling with load balancers, etc. is causing things to break periodically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote this article. Thanks very much for posting it here and for everyone who read/commented/corrected me :) It's also great to hear about the other projects in this area, so thanks again!

</comment><comment><USER43> The people from the blog he links (that I'm in the process of reading) wrote an application for macOS that reminds me of notational velocity in spirit but that has been made specifically for Zettelkasten and should be able to handle even huge amounts of notes (stored in plain text, the best format in my opinion, portable and all that): [https://zettelkasten.de/the- archive/](https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/)

</comment><comment><USER44> This way of organizing information instantly reminds me of graph databases, and how natural it _feels_ to model and query with them.

In the back of my head I have this nagging thought that graph databases are a strict upgrade from traditional relational (SQL) in many if not most cases.

I have nothing to back this up. It really is just a feeling. It simply feels more fun and productive.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's amazing that the guy is referring to Luhmann's zettelkasten and went on to implement it and did not stumble upon an existing implementation: [http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/](http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/en/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for mentioning this! I did have a look at that software but couldn't get it to run on my Linux machine. To be fair, I didn't try very hard.

I also figured, since what I started was just a lightweight tree of plaintext markdown files, that it would be easy to integrate into another comparable system later on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Wiki in a jar [https://sourceforge.net/projects/wikiinajar2/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/wikiinajar2/)

</comment><comment><USER5> How did I not know about this before now? Excited to dig deeper and make time to give it a try!

<comment><USER47> I've been using org-mode in the Emacs editor for years. Despite my 25 years of professional experience, I have not found anything that would be comparable to getting involved. For me it was and is a life changer. Emacs outshines all other editing software in the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. - Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning of the Command Line (1998). You will See...</comment></comment>


TSA Screening Barely Working Better Than Chance - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/13/5100702/tsa-screening-works-only-a-little-better-than-chance-according-to

<comment><AUTHOR> also at: [http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/11/14/2316242/tsa- screenin...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/11/14/2316242/tsa-screening- barely-working-better-than-chance)</comment>


Internet Disruption Report: February 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://internetdisruption.report/2020/03/23/internet-disruption-report-february-2020/ <comment><USER2> This morning my partner disconnected the modem when vacuuming and we both panicked that the internet was down. It's unfathomable, at this time, how critical this service has become for so many of us, who would perhaps live first without running water than lose connectivity.. Applause to the brave souls keeping our infrastructure up.

<comment> ur-whale >disconnected the modem

Are you still using a modem? Or have you already switched to full-on "zombie apocalypse" mode and started to rely on previous century, proven tech.?

<comment><USER3> They are surely referring to their Cable Modem, DSL Modem, Cellular Modem, or Fiber Modem.

<comment> ur-whale > They are surely referring to their Cable Modem, DSL Modem, Cellular Modem, > or Fiber Modem.

This was tongue in cheek, but clearly lost on some.

But since we've now switched to full-on anal retentive mode: none of the above are modems since there's no modulation or demodulation happening in any of them.

<comment><USER4> What is Quadrature Amplitude Modulation then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I support a couple hundred people working from home and have seen multiple cases where 'fiber' internet was getting <3mbps and 150+ms average, making VoIP and even RDP pretty awful to use.

CenturyLink seems to be the worst offender so far. They must _really_ over provision.

<comment><USER6> > They must _really_ over provision.

Oversubscribe :).

<comment><USER5> Ohhh, yup, thank you!</comment></comment></comment>


Ditch Your ORM - <AUTHOR> http://solnic.eu/2015/09/18/ditch-your-orm.html <comment><USER2> I love my ORM.</comment>


Modern Language Wishlist - <AUTHOR> http://www.lispcast.com/modern-language-wishlist <comment><USER2> Most languages have most of the listed features. The most interesting uncommon idea on that list to me is model of time. But only when it allows reversible computing. I don't know how practical that is though. Anyways I've separated out the parts of the list which I think are less common. And listed examples off the top of my head so by no means is the below meant to be exhaustive.

The uncommon ones:

* _Units_ \- F# and Frink

* _homoiconicity_ \- Lisps, Prolog, Io, Factor, Pure?, ...

* _macros and extensible syntax_ \- the above list, Nemerle, Dylan

* _Unification_ \- Prolog, Mercury - logic languages. anyone with type inference. anyone with predicate dispatch, a full example of which I do not know. F# Active patterns and scala extractors are close.

* _Error (managing numeric Imprecision)_ \- Best I can understand I can only note that I have seen people treat similar concepts with monads. So haskell and any language which allows easy monads. So scala, f#, haskell, clojure, nemerle

* _Math types_ \- Axiom/Aldor. To an extent, dependently typed languages - not practical. yet?

* _Polymorphism_ \- Although it sounds more like structural typing. So OCaml, Scala. Also F#, haskell partially.

* _Aspects_ \- Metaprogramming makes this relatively easy and clean to implement. so anyone with macros too. Arguably, monads are another way to follow the same philosophy.

* _term rewriting_ \- not common, very niche and not mentioned, but pure-lang allows this and for abstract math programming it is a really fun & powerful concept.

* _pluggable types_ \- F# has this as type providers. Gosu open types. I have used it in F#. At a start, it is a very awesome way to consume an api.

Less Uncommon:

* _pattern matching_ \- most functional languages. to a small extent the java.nexts

* _Immutable values_ \- most functional languages

* _Parser_ \- parser combinators or any language which implements PEGs e.g. Nemerle

* _Design by contract_ \- eiffel and as a library in most languages

* _laziness_ \- the usual functional suspects.

<comment><USER3> I think that the full numeric tower of scheme is what the author had in mind for Math types: big nums, true rationals, strong sense of exactness, etc...

Also, CLOS (Common Lisp) has after, before and around methods for "aspect oriented".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is basically a desciption of Clojure, in particular:

\- Explicit model of time ([http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity- State-Rich...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Identity-State-Rich- Hickey)) \- Homoiconic / Extensible syntax (shared by most Lisps) \- Math- oriented numeric types (Clojure maths is arbitrary precision by default, and it has nice things like rational types) \- Immutable (Clojure data structures are all immutable) \- Garbage collection (inherited from the JVM) \- String manipulation (Regular expressions are a built-in type)

Most of the other features actually seem more like libraries than language features, but given that Clojure can access the entire Java ecosystem I think you can do all of it from Clojure with relatively little pain.

<comment><USER5> Clojure is awesome, but does struggle on the "Good error messages" requirement, which is a problem when you're starting out.

<comment><USER6> I find it interesting that two of the most exciting languages that exist right now are built on top of the VM for one of the worst ones.

<comment><USER5> The strength of Java for many years has been the platform, and indeed the surrounding ecosystem, not the language. In that sense it's no surprise that there is a lot of effort going in to providing better languages on that platform.

<comment><USER7> The reason I'm _not_ using Clojure is that it's based on the Java platform. I keep hearing that JVM is nice because there are good libraries, but I haven't figured out what the good libraries are. Sure, there are some nice platform independent abstractions for common operating system interfaces like file and network I/O, but it still lacks lots of stuff.

The problem with Java libraries w.r.t. modern high level languages is that Java libraries are built on Java abstractions. It doesn't matter how high level the new language is, but when interfacing with Java libs, you have to stick to single dispatch object oriented programming. So in the end, there are many cases where you use the Java library through some wrapper layer written in Clojure or your Clojure code ends up looking a lot like Java.

Once you add a wrapper layer shim between your preferred language and the platform, it doesn't matter what's underneath. That's why I like to stick to languages that are built on native code and libraries, C and Posix and Unix API's with some Linux and/or BSD additions. Of course, if you want to run on Windows, all the code has to be duplicated since Win API's are different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This just seems like an everything and the kitchen sink list. I am not convinced supporting every possible use case leads to an approachable/efficient language. It seems akin to arguing my car should also be a boat and an airplane.

<comment><USER9> How far is Python from this list? Macros are missing but the remaining list seem close to me.

<comment><USER10> Math sucks a lot in Python 2.7:

      3 / 2 == 1

Python 3 fixes that, thou, but still it uses floating point numbers instead of rational numbers.

<comment><USER11> > it uses floating point numbers instead of rational numbers.

import decimal

import fractions

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll add one that people don't seem to think about much: the ability to encapsulate an ongoing computation and grab new values from it at leisure.

Examples: Haskell has lazy lists; Python has generators; Unix shells have pipes; in Go you can whip this up pretty easily with a goroutine and a channel; etc. Does his ideal language allow for this?

<comment><USER13> I should add controlled laziness to the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it just me or did anyone else feel he was talking about Racket? I have never understood why Racket doesnt get the love that it deserves.

<comment><USER15> Is it just me or did anyone else feel he was talking about Go? I have never understood why Go doesnt get the love that it deserves.

(No seriously, he described Go)

<comment><USER16> > Is it just me or did anyone else feel he was talking about Go?

That's really just you:

* Go does not ship with a set collection, no literal or convenient syntax

* Go only ships with with doubly linked lists and no literal or convenient syntax

* Go's literal syntax for the Array and Map builtins is significantly less convenient than that of most other languages (including but not limited to statically typed ones)

* Go is not homoiconic

* Go does not have an extensible syntax

* Go does not have math-oriented numeric types (quite the opposite), neither does it have precision errors (I am not even sure it can meaningfully interact with IEEE-754 error flags)

* Go does not have units (as far as I can tell)

* Go does not have pattern-matching, let alone unification (could have made error reporting good, can't have that)

* Go does not have aspects

* Go does not (as far as I can tell) have any special support for writing parsers

* Go has very little support for immutability

* Go does not have an explicit model of time

* I don't think I've seen any built-in structure serializer and deserializer (equivalent to Lisp readers and writers) in Go

> (No seriously, he described Go)

Only if you're completely delusional, skipped about 60% of his list and gave Go huge leeway on the rest.

Clojure, for instance, is a far better match on this.

<comment><USER17> Have a look at the "gob" package for serializer and deserializer support for Go types.

As for the syntax-related points, Go offers quite a bit. There's the goyacc tool, the scanner package, the template package (think quasiquote), and a bunch of packages for processing Go code: go/ast, go/scanner, go/parser, go/printer, go/build, go/doc, etc.

For math-oriented numbers, there's the "big" package. Many languages make such numerics much more convenient but you can get pretty far with little effort using just the "big" package.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The most obvious thing I can see that he wasn't explicit about was Unicode support. Should be native, just work and included from day one.

<comment><USER13> Good one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you're going to throw everything and the kitchen sink in a language, you may as well include Erlang-type multiprocessing and message passing.

</comment><comment><USER20> \+ 1 for easy serialization. Every language should have equivalent of Python pickle module.

Sometimes you need specific file format, compatibility between languages, customization, etc - then pickle is not enough. But for my uses pickle was good enough most of the time, and it's stupidly easy to use. No need to change your code in any way. That makes one-off cashing of intermediate results to file system manageable, implementing save/load game is 3 lines of code (counting import). I love it, and I miss it in every other language I use.

Javascript has JSON, but writing general code to serialize arbitrary object graph with cycles, functions as field values, properly storing prototype chains, etc is still hard.

</comment><comment><USER21> <http://colinm.org/language_checklist.html>

This has never been more relevant.

</comment><comment><USER22> This list is more about default library a language should come with rather than language design.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am surprised it's not very Lisp-biased.

Anyway, no love for type inference or generic?

<comment><USER24> Except for homoiconicity.

<comment><USER25> Tcl, Forth, Io, and (traditional) Smalltalk are also all homoiconic. You don't have to have a Lisp to get there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wrong: first item should be environments as first class types. Much of the rest follows. _And_ you can stick it to smarmy common lisp geeks.

<comment><USER27> This post does a really good job of analyzing first-class environments and explaining why "first-class environments are useless at best, and dangerous at worst": [http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/09/first-class- environments...](http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/09/first-class- environments.html)

<comment><USER28> I found his argument a bit of a wash. It boiled down to usual critique of macros, operator overloading, and inheritance: "You don't know what's going to happen".

Meh, most of the time it's not a problem, when it is, it's for a good reason, and if it's for a bad reason, you probably should choose a different software package that is written better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Here's one he missed: a good package manager.

Yes, I realize that's not technically an aspect of a language, in the purest sense. Yes, I realize that this is something that the community can provide. However, I will argue that any new language that neglects to ship a package manager alongside the language implementation is doing a disservice to its users.

Go (goinstall) and Rust (cargo) had the right idea.

</comment><comment><USER30> One thing that always bugs me is that modern languages that ship with fairly strong datetime libraries still make it a pain to deal with just dates. My db can handle just a date why does my language need to treat date as some hack on datetime?

I want 12/01/1980 not 12/01/1980 00:00:00 -5

</comment><comment><USER31> First need of a good language: have a simple specification. The full reference manual shall be very concise, complete and readable. Even with a language as simple as javascript, the specification is a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER32> Yet, no mention of concurrency/parallelism primitives. _sigh_

<comment><USER13> Good idea. But they do kind of fall under a "model of time."

<comment><USER32> In fact, the article does mention concurrency in there. I must have read over that thinking right away that they meant UTC/ Time Zone issues again. d'oh!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> hmm, what exactly does he mean by data-oriented programming?

iirc that's something where you don't store data chopped up into objects, but have arrays that keep all the data of one "aspect" of all "objects"... or something like that. something game programmers would use, helps avoid cache misses.

is that what he was talking about? if so, what does it have to do with macros?

<comment><USER13> I meant data-driven programming.

<http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch09s01.html>

More data (and data structures) and less code. It's very common in Lisps and other homo-iconic languages.

<comment><USER33> thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> REBOL is the only language I can think of that comes close to this list.

<http://rebol.com/>

</comment><comment><USER35> All I want: Smalltalk with tail recursion and a process model like erlang (implies immutable values).

</comment><comment><USER36> The more I read this article , the more I feel he is not talking about _language_. He is talking about _library_.

<comment><USER37> Yea he mentions language features like interface-based polymophism, garbage collection, namespaces, first class functions, closures, etc. But then he goes on to talk about I/O methods, string manipulation, CSV output, etc. By which I think he means standard library features. The post really should have been split into language features + standard library features to make it clearer.

I may be influenced by the fact i'm into Go at the moment, but i think it covers most of the "features" he talks about, as well as many of the "libraries" (some may not be part of the standard library, but will be available through 3rd party packages). If the author is reading this, I encourage him to have a good honest look at <http://golang.org/>

I don't know if i like his discussion of "math-oriented types" vs. "machine- oriented types". At least as far as I see it (and according to wikipedia[1]), in maths whole integers (Z) are a subset of rational numbers (Q). When in your high-school maths class you say 3 + 2.5 = 5.5, you're really doing an implicit conversion to 3.0 + 2.5 = 5.5 or 3/1 + 5/2 = 11/2. Most languages allow you to also get rid of the bit-size of numbers by just defining "int" or "float" numbers that default to some predetermined bit-width (e.g. 32-bit). Most languages also have libraries or mechanisms (see Go and Python) for large precision numerical calculation so you can have your theoretically infinite size "no-overflow" situation; but that comes at the cost of speed, so we only use these types when it is specifically needed. It's not impossible to use them in all cases, but it is impractical.

In the end, a language can't do everything. Most languages focus on providing a good core, along with mechanism for users to extend functionality in any way they see fit. In this case I think the author wants the language to just do everything for him out of the box, without any pesky libraries, and without being bloated or slow. _That_ most certainly _is_ impossible. There is a good reason why no language implements _all_ of these "features".

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(mathematics)>

Ed: Z is a subset of Q.

<comment> dan-k Actually, from a math perspective, it's kind of nonsensical to talk about type conversion at all. That is, 3, 3.0, and 3/1 are purely notational differences, and all three represent exactly the same object. Since math is theoretically infinite precision, the way you write a number has no impact on the way operations like division act on it, making whether it belongs to Z, or just Q or R a moot point. Now, if you restrict your problem domain to Z, then that affects the operations you're able to do to a number and remain in that domain. That's more like what happens with types in programming; we restrict our domain by default because leaving the integers changes the computer's representation of the number in a way that affects its behavior.

<comment><USER38> Kind of. But you might say that rational numbers are ordered pairs of integers and positive integers, real numbers are Cauchy sequences of rationals, and complex numbers are ordered pairs of real numbers, and the real number 3 can't be added to (2+i) without converting it to a complex number first.

<comment> dan-k Those are all valid ways of conceptualizing those sets, but I don't think it changes the point I was making. The real number 3 doesn't need to be "converted" to a complex number to be added to 2+i. 3 is always both a real number and a complex number, which may be represented as either 3 or 3+0*i, and either way gives 5+i when added to 2+i. All the latter notation really does is clarifies what domain you're currently working in, and even so, I've never seen anyone write it out explicitly.

Type conversion is more like if you had the written number 3 and a picture of the point 5 on a number line and someone told you to add them. Naturally, you would write 5 as a number first, because you don't have a useful way to add a number and a picture. But this doesn't change the results of adding the quantities 3 and 5; it's purely an artifact of the way the information was presented to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clojure and Scala are both there, except on idiomatic libraries (you might have to use Java libraries).

Clojure wins on simplicity of syntax (Scala has a rule that operators ending with ':' associated to the right, which makes an incredible amount of sense once you understand the language but is annoying and arbitrary to beginners) and homoiconicity. Scala wins on pattern matching and robustness (static typing). I'd use Scala for a game, because it's fast (both in terms of human and CPU performance). Both are great languages.

<comment><USER39> Because Clojure is a Lisp we have macros and with macros comes a lot of power. Clojure has a full powered pattern matching library. See this: <https://github.com/clojure/core.match></comment></comment>


Deliberation increases the wisdom of crowds - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.00045 <comment><USER2> An interesting observation on the wisdom of crowds for me is para-mutual horse track betting. The odds given for each horse, which determine the payout for a bet are determined by how many people make that bet. Very roughly, in para- mutual betting (the most common kind) there is a single pool of money bet on a race. If 200 people have placed the same bet on a horse that wins, the pool is divided amongst the 200 (less the say 10% held back as profits for the track) .

My initial thoughts were that there must be some inefficiency in the odds as people either avoid or engage in betting at certain posted payout ratios. To my surprise, it appears that the actual odds reflect the actual probabilities that the horses will win. Somehow, the crowd at the track is able to bet on race after race and correctly, as a group, determine the probability of winning for all of the horses running. At least they predict it well enough that given the vig (slang for the percent held back by the track) there is no simple mathematical strategy that works to achieve winnings above chance.

I'm not a gambler, but I have read a few academic papers on race-track betting[1]. It surprised me that the odds (which determine the payout on a bet --horses with high odds pay out more while being believed to have more remote chances of winning) so accurately predict the chances of a horse winning that there is no simple mathematical strategy that is worth pursuing.

[1] This was back around 1975 so there is likely to be much more research available now. I remember one paper published in an operations research journal around that year that covered harness racing, but I can't seem to find it now.

</comment><comment><USER3> The improved accuracy is all due to the increased guess variance between groups, right? If so, it isn't an unintuitive result. I feel as if the authors cheated a little bit in the abstract when they wrote that their findings go against the "prevailing view". Deliberation is expected to reduce the guess variance within groups, but not between them.

Great paper, anyway. But it made me wonder: how large the groups can be before they start reducing the accuracy of the aggregate guess?

<comment><USER4> I considered that too. Maybe it's just some strange wording. Either way, I think the reasoning in consideration of bias sounds solid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Uh, certainly lots of people actually know the answers of questions such as "the height of the Eiffel Tower"? It's not then surprising that the crowd accuracy increases when people can talk?

My impression is that the tasks where an "independent crowd" outperforms a "dependent" one is on tasks where it's highly unlikely that any one participant can know the answer for sure. (estimation number of objects, etc.)

I didn't easily find any references to such papers, but this link is one confirmation [http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140708-when-crowd- wisdom-g...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140708-when-crowd-wisdom-goes- wrong) (search for "Flawed thinking")

EDIT: Wikipedia seems to be a decent entry point [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd#Problems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd#Problems)

<comment><USER6> Sure, but what if several people in the crowd think they know the height of the Eiffel Tower? Does the crowd always go with the most confident individual? The most credentialed?

Presumably the crowd is able to take into account hundreds of these factors and arrive close to the truth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What circumstances bring out the 'madness of crowds' as opposed to the 'wisdom of crowds'?

<comment><USER8> Maybe there are different subsets of "leader types" that step forward in different circumstances. When there is a sense that some action should be taken to correct some wrong, but there is nothing particularly productive the group can achieve at that time, a different sort becomes the most visibly confident and people follow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder, how are these results skewed for more complex problems where certain questions and answers are taboo? How easy is it for the wisdom of the crowd to fail once global bias and majority censorship are considered?

Are echo chambers ultimately better or worse for society?

</comment><comment><USER10> The findings make sense to me... but only as long as there's no money involved, e.g., awards for the best individual prediction. Money might change the incentives for participants to deliberate in good faith.

Also, I suspect the findings would look very different if there were a market on which participants could make money by betting on and against individual predictions. I imagine one would end up with a kind of Keynesian Beauty Contest: [https://www.ft.com/content/6149527a-25b8-11e5-bd83-71cb60e8f...](https://www.ft.com/content/6149527a-25b8-11e5-bd83-71cb60e8f08c)

<comment><USER11> As a matter of fact, betting markets are a fantastic way of aggregating opinion in the wisdom of the crowds literature. If you have some option that will pay out $1 if something is true, and you think there are 70% odds of it happening, you'll buy it if the price is less than 70 cents.

<comment><USER12> It's fun. A few tips from my predictit.org (healthy:) addiction:

Never buy at the asking price, put in a buy order lower and let the market come to you. Unless it's a question that will be resolved soon, it's likely your buy order will get filled.

Pay attention to how many orders are on each side, often people will "prop up" a market with a series of small orders, which at a glance make it look like a particular position is worth more than it really is.

Put in small orders, over and over, don't make big buys unless you can afford to lose. Each day you have more information, not less.

Never under-estimate how far the other side will drive down or up a question. Your perception of what the other side will do is prob wrong, regardless whether you are actually correct when the question is called. (for example, you could buy "Yes" for T2016 @ $0.14 (on the dollar) when the Billy Bush tape came out).

Stick to what you know.

Make sure you understand linked markets before buying a bunch of stuff at 0.99.

Keep a strong cash balance. If you put in too many buy orders, you will wake up, they got filled, and your long standing buy orders are now canceled because you couldn't cover them and now you go to the back of the line when you place them again.

Always have some sell orders on every position. The swings might hit them and then you can re-buy at a lower price.

Consider that there may be players that are not out to make money.

Never use the comment sections for anything other than comic relief.

Keep track of your time investment, even if you are making money, it might not be worth it. In the case of predictit which is one of the few options for US players, you cant risk more than $850 on any single question (well.. really $1650 on linked markets) so you are not going to get rich.

<comment><USER13> Thank you for showing me(/us) this, I've not heard of it before. Thank you twice for your personal wisdom as to your thoughts/experiences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can this be explained by confidence levels? I'd guess that "small group consensus" values would be a skewed towards the values from people who say "I know this" and away from those who say "I have no idea, here's a wild guess".

</comment><comment><USER8> When applied to bits of trivia with concrete answers, I can see this as true because the most confident voices that persuade the others are probably more or less in agreement and actually correct.</comment>


There are 1.3GW of read-to-build battery storage projects in the UK - <AUTHOR> https://www.energy-storage.news/news/majority-of-ready-to-build-uk-battery-storage-projects-are-bigger-than-30mw <comment><USER2> What does the 1.3GW mean? Peak power output? And what is the storage capacity? Very disappointing reporting.</comment>


Flask.io for sale - <AUTHOR> https://flippa.com/8228512-flask-io <comment><USER2> I know this is wishful thinking, but as a fan of the Python Flask (the Python web server) [1], I really hope that somehow this ends up in their hands.

[1] [http://flask.pocoo.org/](http://flask.pocoo.org/)</comment>


The Economics of Skyscraper Height - <AUTHOR> https://buildingtheskyline.org/economics-of-skyscraper-height-series/ <comment><USER2> All new skyscrapers will come only in high-growth places, not high-wealth places. IMHO that's because high-wealth places will settle down to generalized universal veto and stagnation. High-growth places haven't yet had a chance for established players to stall everything.

The reason why we won't have NYC or SF looking like Star Trek¹ is that the people are already wealthy and they chose to live here in the way it is so the people who would want Star Trek SF won't come to present-day SF to make it into Star Trek SF. Star Trek SF may be some unassuming town in America or (more likely) one of the emerging economies: maybe East Asia, but maybe if African nations capture their demographic dividend (unlikely IMHO) maybe them.

¹ I will have someone LongBets this on my behalf if someone wants to take the other side. San Francisco will never be like Star Trek's hyper-developed San Francisco. Willing to nail down specifics too.

EDIT: Maybe I should make an exception for high-wealth places with dictators/monarchs. There they can bypass any normal human process.

EDIT 2: No bets. Bets are off. Looks like I'd just lose money on this one because of NYC.

<comment><USER3> ??? NYC is full of skyscrapers.

It may not have 'ultra high' buildings, but those exist for different reasons and the economics are different.

SF has earthquakes and a shifty foundation which is material.

<comment><USER2> Right, my claim is that NYC will not get many more tall towers. It's settling down into a state where there will be few more.

<comment><USER4> I believe your hypothesis is not entirely correct. 9 of the 10 tallest buildings in NYC are to be completed between 2000 and 2021.

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

In Europe, if you exclude Russia from the top 20 tallest buildings, the UK (2), Germany (2) and Spain (2) have the tallest buildings, with the UK and Spain buildings built in the 2000s.

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

<comment><USER2> Welp! Thank you! Boy am I glad no one fleeced me on the bet, eh?

<comment><USER5> You have a refreshing way of accepting when you are wrong, it is a joy to witness on these here pipes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This has to be the most tortured definition of a histogram: "Now imagine that you were a giant and could "harvest" all the world' skyscrapers and put them into a jumbo pile—like a child might make a pile of sticks of various lengths. Now in our little game, we pick up each skyscraper (stick) and measure its height. Then we place it in one of several bins or buckets. The first bucket will contain buildings that range from 150 to 199 meters. The second contains buildings 200 to 248 and so on. The last bucket ranges from 788 to 836 meters, and which contains the Burj Khalifa at 0.828 km tall."

</comment><comment><USER7> The commercial real estate collapse we are just at the beginning of will definitely limit skyscraper height.

See Pinterest paying $100mm to break their lease in a new development in SF.

See AOC limiting new AMZN business, major banks distributing their work force in NYC.

<comment><USER8> Im curious to know why this would be downvoted. Everyone has spent the last 6 months talking about the end of offices and "work from home". Can someone elaborate?

<comment><USER9> My hypothesis is that the whole work from home will fizzle out pretty quickly for most people, with the exception of a few tech companies.

Anecdotally, my company did a survey (10k+ employees) and the vast majority didn't want full-time work from home in perpetuity.

I think it works well for some industries and functions, but it's an absolute cluster for others. Add in the inevitable "COL adjustment" for people who live in LCOL areas, it will be a few percentage of employees who make a permanent change.

Once Covid is a thing of the past, we'll see the vast majority of people return to work in an office - likely with a lot more "work from home" flexibility, but still an expectation that they are in the office for some percentage of their work week.

Just my 2 cents. I could be entirely wrong.

<comment><USER10> One of the big four Australian banks is planing to have halve their CBD real estate in Australia in the next few years.

This is because they have found WFH to be so successful.

<comment><USER11> > This is because they have found WFH to be so successful.

I am honestly somewhat wary of this. It seems like execs saw the dollar signs flashing and are starting this, yet we barely have any data on this affects levels of productivity. It hasn't been that long for them to get that data.

<comment><USER12> I agree. For one thing, relationships that were built in-person, around the watercooler and physically present lunches, are different than relationships which started out online and zoom-only.

I've had remote-only jobs and jobs where I went into an office every day, and I have many more pleasant memories and longer-lasting relationships from the jobs which had an onsite component.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Vegas isn't mentioned anywhere in the article (which focuses on NYC) but it seems particularly relevant. Why do I suspect that, had more effort gone into computing the "economic height" of some Vegas hotels and condos, they would have been built smaller -- or not all all (Fontainebleu/The Drew, I'm looking at you. Resorts World is in this bucket, too.)

</comment><comment><USER14> >> Contrary to popular belief, most skyscrapers have a strong economic rational.

I doubt there is a popular belief that says "tall skyscrapers do not have an economic rational". Really weird starting point to make this article

<comment><USER15> Yep, also should be "rationale" rather than "rational".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> And then covid comes along and says

>How are you going to get elevators up beyond 5 floors and social distance?

<comment><USER2> Ask the folks from Taipei, I suppose. Since they've solved this one.

<comment><USER17> They solved it by almost completely stopping Covid-19 at the border. So while there are indeed many lessons to learn from Taiwan, I doubt they are the people to look to for how to deal with large numbers of undetected infected persons using elevators.

<comment><USER2> Perhaps the Koreans or the Japanese, then. Or perhaps we can wait ten years for a New York Times article describing a scientific paper, billed "The unreasonable effectiveness of masking to fight last decade's pandemic".

It could perhaps start with a few chapters on how "When I was 18, I'd planned to take the summer off to go to the Pyrenees" followed by how the author rarely ever fell sick.

Halfway through, there'll be some text about how "But the culture of mask wearing in Asia led to far lower viral loads for those exposed, scientists say, allowing them to fight off the disease. Few, if any, actually fell ill. But in my hometown..." and then some folksy take on what their hometown is like. A small town in Ohio is a good one.

"By the time scientists had realized the value of face masks, that hometown had been ravaged by both disease and closures". Now you can insert some tale about a local diner that was open for 50 years and now had to close.

Approximately 1400 words later you can quote a few papers that revealed that with universal masking risk of infection is remarkably low. It will be an unprecedented discovery. Then a few Taboola ads at the bottom about how "This new garment will take the world by storm" with someone wearing a mask.

And then we can discuss it on HN. If you remember me then, make sure to link to this comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think much of the "popular belief" against skyscrapers is unknowingly influenced by reactionary thinkers of the 20th century's second half.

The shrillest thinking but/thus the most influential is this moronic idea of phallus symbols. According to which, they are a power tool for the patriachy, which albeit being so powerful the patriachy is simoultaniously so immature that it can't refrain from playing with its genitalia in public.

The fact that this phallus idiocy is virtually non-rebuked in academia and still considered established, tells you about the influence on popular belief the reactionaries have had.

On the contrary, skyscrapers are a sign of a culture's virtousness. Which is why dictators (and also immature policy makers [1]) throughout modern history try to emulate the skylines of these cities [2], but never achieve it [3]. Their artificial skylines either look like an experiment gone bad [4, 5], consist of only a few (one) tall buildings [6] or are confined to some "new business district" on the outskirts of their capital [7, 8].

There are other moronic reactionary, influential, ideas like the one of "clouding" ("Verschattung"), according to which because of skyscrapers we're either dying from Vitamin D deficiency or because of sadness because we can't see our monuments anymore. This is ignoring the fact that a 2 story building is already enough to cast a shadow upon you, thus in most old towns you were already unable to see any landmarks and already were "clouded" (in warmer areas even intentionally).

On the contrary, while most skyscrapers will look functional, many achieve a democratization of identity, in that they enable more people see their city's icons.

[1] [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikingturm](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikingturm)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_(Moscow)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sisters_\(Moscow\))

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

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

[5] [http://www.globalpostmark.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/03/201...](http://www.globalpostmark.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/03/2011-March-China_0410.jpg)

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

[7] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_City_(businnes_center)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_City_\(businnes_center\))

[8] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur- Sultan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur-Sultan)

<comment><USER19> TIL "yonic architecture" is a productive image search term.

        Not sure if parametricist cat pics
             =.=
        are any improvement on Sphynx pics

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If humans are to minimize impact on the rest of the ecosystem I don't see how that is compatible with NO SKYCRAPERS. In long run I think it will make sense both economically and in reducing human footprint on earth[0].

Making high density living bearable and even desirable that's the art we need (and millenia of urbanization has been about) to master.

[0] I'm aware that dense cities are not automatically more sustainable. But I suspect is easier to achieve sustainability due to proximity.

<comment><USER21> _I 'm aware that dense cities are not automatically more sustainable._

Seems like you're under-selling density here.

A dense city may not be automatically sustainable but it seems logical that denseness would be necessary to create a much more sustainable city than today.

Oppositely, there is degree of sprawl is almost automatically unsustainable, in ecological and economic terms.

<comment><USER9> _there is degree of sprawl is almost automatically unsustainable_

I'm not sure we'd ever reach that point in the developed world. Populations have already peaked (it's only going up because of immigration) and sprawl is self-limiting because who wants to do a 4 hour daily commute?

<comment><USER22> I think he is referring to collateral sprawl. Meaning, that density could be assumed to relatively increase property values and increase demand for support infrastructure. Businesses and people seek out low-priced space within the region. So, a high density area will spur unintended sprawl which might lead to other issues.

<comment><USER9> But businesses seeking out low cost areas is probably unavoidable.

You could build a super dense city, but a limited population is going to want to live there - people with kids, etc.

Unless you're willing to force them to live in a city, some people are going to seek out low cost areas and be a source of employees for the companies doing the same.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A new kind of browser benchmark - <AUTHOR> http://google.github.io/latency-benchmark/

<comment><USER2> On my i7 macbook pro, Safari is outperforming Chrome and Firefox by long shot.

Safari: 5.4/10 Chrome: 2.7/10 Firefox: 1.5

I'm curious if any current browsers can actually hit 10/10.

<comment><AUTHOR> Benchmark author here. That is similar to my experience. No browser I've tested on any platform comes close to 10/10\. Due to the difficulty of quantifying latency and jank and the lack of existing benchmarks, no browser has really optimized for them, focusing instead on raw JavaScript throughput. My hope in developing this benchmark has been to change that.</comment></comment>


'Journalologists' use scientific methods to study academic publishing - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/journalologists-use-scientific-methods-study-academic-publishing-their-work-improving <comment><USER3> Journalologism seems like an insular discipline, by medical scientists, overlooking the already substantial research discipline of biblio-, infor-, scientometrics.

If you want to study scientific communication, it is downright daft to limit yourself to the journal as your only one unit of analysis.

<comment><USER4> When you study something, you have to focus somewhere. It is not "daft" to focus on something, even if you and everyone else know there is more out there - you only have limited time and effort. The hope is that others will focus on the other things.

<comment><USER3> The issue is that journals have already been studies for over 60 years (closer to 100 actually), in the wider context of general scientific communication. You can find literally thousands of papers dealing with questions about journals in the bibliometric/scientometric literature. Coining a new discipline without acknowledging prior research, while at the same time choosing an arbitrary delimitation of your object of study (scientific communication), is at the best daft and at the worst a scam.

<comment><USER4> This is a popular science article about the work of a bunch of researchers. I think it's fair to assume the researchers have an understanding of how their work fits into the larger field in a way not represented by the author of the popular science article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> But who journalologises the journalologists?

<comment><USER6> jornalolologists

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is nothing surprising. The study of bibliometrics has been going on since the 1960s, and the field of bibliography (in its modern academic sense) is a lot older than that.

<comment><USER4> I'm confused why you lead with "This is nothing surprising." The article does not present it as a surprise, but as something the reader may not know - <USER2> is standard for any article. The author is also clear in explaining that this process has been going on for decades.

<comment><USER8> Its common to think if your research results are not novel it isnt worth publishing. That's one reason why there is a replication crisis.

<comment><USER4> I am also aware of that, and it's talked about in the article as well. What relationship does that fact have with our current discussion?

<comment><USER8> I figured the person you were responding to held that attitude. That if an idea is not novel its not worth publishing, like this story in their opinion.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How many Mars missions have been successful? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53589767 <comment><USER2> About half. On those figures we can expect half of the current mission-modules flying to Mars to fail.

We might get Perseverance to Mars perhaps, but its drone may not launch; and similar with the other two multi-module flights on the way.</comment>


Show HN: Anonymous location-based chat, with emojis - <AUTHOR> https://www.cow.chat/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm the author of . It's my take on an anonymous location based chat. It's written in react, using node.js, websockets and a redis backend - deployed to heroku. I'm a big fan of omegle and slack, so I took some of the best bits and mashed them together with the gelocation API.

ps: It moos as the notification sound.</comment>


Everything Wrong with Peter Thiel's Doomsday Survival Plan (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.outsideonline.com/2152476/everything-thats-wrong-billionaires-doomsday-survival-plan <comment><USER2> > _"I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society > actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice > right now," Antonio García Martínez_

I know this is not the focus of the article, but this statement reads like someone noticing something is going on outside their own comfy privileged bubble, and then concluding they know more about about it than the people who are in the middle of said events.

Sure, being able to step back and look at something from some distance is necessary to reflect and figure out what is going on, but I don't get the impression that that is what is happening here.

<comment><USER3> Given the historical frequency of war, I'd say what looks like stability probably isn't as stable as one might like to assume.

<comment><USER2> Am I missing what you're trying to argue perhaps? Because at first glance it looks like that has nothing to do with my point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thiel can only protect himself against some threats. In the long run, we're all dead and he can't fight lack of water or systematic financial collapse extending beyond two or three years, or viral threats beyond his enclave leaking in. Sheep diseases mutate and his NZ hideaway is suddenly buried in fomites...

So his plan is ostentatious consumption for a specific subset of problems. What he fails to strategize is how an Iwi or even just a bunch of NZ hoons can unwind his plan. I like to imagine a Morris minor version of mad Max politely knocking on his door asking for some assistance raising hell</comment>


Today Is National Adjunct Walkout Day - <AUTHOR> http://actionforallies.commons.mla.org/

<comment><USER2> What are they protesting?

<comment><USER3> They're protesting for "fair wages and better working conditions" says the event's Facebook page: [https://www.facebook.com/pages/National-Adjunct- Walkout-Day/...](https://www.facebook.com/pages/National-Adjunct-Walkout- Day/340019999501000)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will Windows ever be free? - <AUTHOR> Recent discussions on HN have included comments saying that Microsoft makes its money from cloud and subscriptions, and that Windows is not so important any more.
Is this just garbage? And if not, might Windows be free one day?
What would Microsoft gain from Windows being free? <comment><USER2> Not as things stand atm.

Most giant companies make most of their money by monopolizing (or oligapolizing) a particular market segment or vertical which means one or two product lines that generate massive amounts of cash for decades. MS: Windows and Office, Google: search, Apple: Phones and Laptops. etc.

The only way for MS to give up a large bulk of its income is if they find a way to make even more in some other fashion. Ex. Give out Windows for free and fill it with ads. That is not going to happen. It would literally be suicide. I can maybe see MS creating a windows subscription model similar to what they did with Office but... say you dont pay your sub for a given month then what? they´re gonna lock you out from your own PC? I don´t think the OS model for license is ever going to change but that´s my 2 cents.

Edit: Now that I think about it, perhaps if we get better bandwidth and less latency in our home connection MS could offer a form of windows on a small stick that you can run without having a HDD and all your local files are stored on Azure for instance in return for monthly payment and that version of Windows could be free of charge. But I don´t see that happening any time soon.</comment>


Zig: connect opposite corners … get the highest and lowest scores - <AUTHOR> http://zig.iffy.studio/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the developer. I am trying to figure out how to improve this game. I think there is something good here, but maybe I'm wrong.</comment>


Show HN: Fullpage Chrome Screenshots - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nomdplicjljgmgfbjgfnpdgkjpdphdah <comment><USER2> This feature was added to Chrome DevTools in Chrome 59. No need for a separate extension.

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/devtools-r...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/devtools- release-notes#screenshots)</comment>


Just Make It Faster - <AUTHOR> http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/12/just-make-it-faster.html <comment><USER2> Good post. Don't forget to pay your full-stack engineer with a full-stack money. Don't be cheap on them mkay?

On the other hand, I'd like to have a full-stack CEO as well. Not just someone who can only say "make it work", "make it faster", "make me some money".

<comment><USER3> I'm curious to know what do you think is a reasonable wage in SF for a "full- stack" developer. Feel free to break it down by years of experience.

And by full-stack CEO, you mean someone who understands all the aspects of the business and isn't a pandering, disconnected, figure-head? In a lot of companies they'd be called the operating CEO, or in more cases, the COO/president.

<comment><USER2> How about in the ballpark of a health specialist (doctor) salary? 200k at least? 300k? Or maybe pro-Athlete level salary? 700k/season (NBA, 2nd round draft)

Am I exaggerate in terms of salary? probably... these days, who can learn every single technology (from hardware to software) under the sun?

WebServices, REST, ORM, DB, data modeling, data warehouse, virtualization, security, capacity planning, storage, performance tuning, backup and recovery, test automation (you do test your own code right? not just throwing shitty code to QA right?), build and deployment strategy.

[No, NoSQL doesn't count]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are _non_ -full-stack programmers? That's a scary thought. I have trouble imagining what sort of mind could be able to write code, but only one kind of code.

<comment><USER5> Non full-stack is the norm, actually.

There are really two types of coders: the scrappy Ill-figure-it-out-as-I-go- along full-stack coders, and the Im-working-9-to-5-and-have-50-certifications coders.

Of course I exaggerate a bit, but businesses like to put people in little boxes. That means that the vast majority of business programmers (which are most of them) are working in one specialized area. They can write code, but don't know how the database works. Or they can make a kick-ass website, but have no idea how the back-end works. They can make the best library you ever saw, but they have no people skills. It's very common.

In fact, "full stack" to me means making things people want, which includes a lot more than just bits and bytes. It starts with words coming out of somebody's mouth and ends with them being happy. Lots of little steps in between.

If anything, the generalist is a dying breed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author achieved a big speed increase with a faster disk, more RAM, adding indexes, and rewriting slow queries. The relevant skillset is "knowing a thing or two about databases", not "full-stack programmer".

<comment><USER7> Incorrect, the point about being a full stack programmer is knowing where to look. You only need to know about databases to FIX the problem but you need the full stack to FIND the problem.

If you knew a little about assembler then maybe you'd waste a lot of time rewriting code. Instead of fixing the db. Full stack programmers are valuable for their knowledge that is an inch deep but a mile wide. Any fix a full stack performs is going to seem trivial to an expert in that field.

<comment><USER8> A "full stack programmer" will be able to look at the whole and see what should be done differently, but a database performance person (not a generic DBA) will be bring a much deeper knowledge of that one area (just as a GPU programmer will know more about GPU optimization then the application developer). Sometimes you need that specialist to get you over the hump. An "inch deep and mile wide" sort of knowledge will not get you the fastest performance.

<comment><USER9> It's been my experience that most of the time, you don't need "the fastest performance." You really only need things to be "fast enough." Though the dividing line between "too slow" and "fast enough" is pretty murky, it's obvious when you're firmly on one side or the other. In the article example, 24 hours is clearly too slow, while 10 minutes is clearly fast enough.

Consider, too, that expert-level knowledge of the sort a DB performance person will bring is often (rightly or wrongly) more expensive than that of a generalist. Maybe the expert can bring the runtimes down by a further factor of 100 (to 6 seconds), but, at that point, you have to seriously question whether it's worth it. They might be able to get another factor of 100 and get the runtime for a single analysis down to 6 seconds, but at that point, you have to start seriously questioning whether it would be worthwhile to do it. In the article's example, the analysis step could only be run twice in a week because it took 24 hours to execute (and, then, presumably the other 3 days of the week were spent doing something with the results). Since it might take a full day and a half of work to actually do anything with the results, getting the time to run an analysis down from 10 minutes to 6 seconds clearly isn't worth it. If it were me, I might have even stopped once I got the runtime down below an hour, because then it could be run over a lunch break or during a meeting or something.

I suppose my point is basically equivalent to Knuth's quip about premature optimization. In this particular example, there seems to be no reason to optimize further, because the system is probably 95% as useful as it can possibly get. Eliminating 47.8 hours of runtime per week lets you squeeze in one more run per week, but cutting that runtime down to 12 seconds per week (which is essentially 0) would seem to have a very small marginal gain.

<comment><USER10> Wait a minute, who says that the specialist also can't do "fast enough"? And more to the point, how do you know that the "fast enough" solution is within the reach of the generalist or that the specialist can't figure it out sooner than the generalist can? I can't count the number of times I've spun my wheels on something for days and then brought the problem to an experienced database developer who figured it out in minutes.

<comment><USER11> I think his point is that there's usually a bottleneck somewhere, and unless the bottleneck lies within the specialist's realm of specialization, the generalist is in a better position to spot it.

<comment><USER10> What are you trying say? That there are pros _and_ cons behind the decision between specialization and generalization? That's crazy talk if ever I heard it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I wrong in thinking that most technical founders are full stack developers?

<comment><USER13> I'm thinking "Full stack developer" is about to start replacing "ninja rockstar" in job ads.

<comment><USER14> I'm okay with that, at least "Full stack developer" is a bit more descriptive.

<comment><USER15> And can verified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If something is taking way too long, often times it shouldn't be made faster, it should be done differently. For example, it takes me 4 hours to get to work, just making the car faster isn't going to help. Maybe the solution is to take a plane, get a different job,work from home, or move closer to where you want to be.

<comment><USER17> Yep. What the post described as the final solution was bringing down the running time from 24hrs to 10min using straightforward optimisations. I would guess moving from 10min to 30sec would take doing it differently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ain't nothing faster than 0. I've done games for 20 years. The best optimizations are figuring out how to avoid running the code in the first place. This is where full-stack programmers come in.

There seems to be a battle here between full-stackers and specialists, but if you think of a full-stacker as "an extremely experienced generalist", then I think there are plenty of "extremely experienced specialists" who fit that description too. That is to say, an extremely experienced "database optimizer" is going to know how the presentation layer hits the database and how the database hits the disc, and I expect they would know many different database technologies.

</comment><comment><USER18> If everyone could just say "I'm a full-stack" or "I'm a generalist" it'd save me a lot of reading. Thanks. :-)</comment>


Wikipedia takes business approach - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7347766.stm

<comment><USER2> "Ms Gardner says they are also looking at cashing in on the Wikipedia brand and are open to suggestions some of which have included TV programmes and a board game."

Wikipedia branded board games? Is this a joke?

The biz dev at Wikipedia should think of ideas that complement things they are already doing well, in much the same way Amazon came out with S3/EC2, fulfillment services, mTurk, etc. The majority of searches conducted are information retrieval, which would make advertising potentially useful and very lucrative. They could use the active community of editors to provide services for book publishers, translation, etc.</comment>


About ESEO – The European Student Earth Orbiter - <AUTHOR> https://www.esa.int/Education/ESEO/About_ESEO_-_the_European_Student_Earth_Orbiter <comment><AUTHOR> Also, [https://twitter.com/hashtag/ESEO](https://twitter.com/hashtag/ESEO)</comment>


Show HN: Would love some feedback on my new site - <AUTHOR> http://www.jrdnbwmn.com/

<comment><USER2> I don't know why, but I don't like the font. And the section, "What to expect when working with me..." is really verbose. "Clients hire me to..." Main points can be highlighted as a headline. "Design websites and write code. Redesign existing site. Consulting. I think the site matter can really be condensed a lot. Good work overall. How long did you work on this site? Good portfolio too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks iamshs! I'm not sure how long it took me, haha. Been working on it here and there for a few weeks, then just got it all finished this past weekend.

<comment><USER2> I just noticed that there is no visual cue to scroll down on the landing page. It is just the graphic. I was confused when I landed just now, that where did the website go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks awesome! The spacing is very consistent and elements have plenty of room to breathe. The typography looks great. Really clean style.

Quick fix needed for Firefox: [http://i.imgur.com/5RhWf2Y.png](http://i.imgur.com/5RhWf2Y.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks coderdude! I sent out a fix for those images</comment></comment>


xkcd - Network - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/350/ <comment><USER2> xkcd continues to impress me with its immense cleverness. I saw Randall Monroe speak at CMU a couple weeks ago.

First, I was surprised that he was 23. I assumed he was older. I also assumed that the deep romanticism of some of xkcd's comics meant that he was in a serious relationship of some kind -- he isn't, and implied that he always has trouble with girls.

<comment><USER3> "I also assumed that the deep romanticism of some of xkcd's comics meant that he was in a serious relationship of some kind"

Funny, I assumed the opposite. A lot of his comics about relationships resonate with the self image I had before I married.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm really tempted to try creating this. It really would make a cool "aquarium" if you could figure out a way to visualize it.

<comment><USER5> Well, the buncha windows instances running under a RAMd-up VMWARE server is pretty easy to cover (if a bit costly).

You'd probably want to run a couple of different versions of virus and spyware checkers (for variety) on the various Windows machines (not being much a Windows guy, I couldn't make any great suggestions here, but Norton, McAfee, etc come to mind).

The next part would be some sort of client to report back to a monitoring server the infection status of each box. You'd have to come up with a scale to determine level of infection, and (ideally) how the infection got there. From that point, you display everything on an NMS system of sorts. His graphic reminded me a lot of the OpenView screens we used to watch back in the late 90's, mostly for the randomness of the machine layouts and the interconnected lines.

After that, it's just a matter of how/where you display the NMS screen.

Could this whole thing be hosted in something like the Amazon S3 environment, allowing for many people to view the screen remotely?

<comment><USER6> > After that, it's just a matter of how/where you display the NMS screen.

The most appropriate device would be Microsoft's Big Ass Table. (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZrr7AZ9nCY>)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yeah xkcd is just too funny. I love his physics jokes, cause it just so happens I'm learning physics atm and they make sense.

My favorite is his comic about naming his kid

Robert'); DROP TABLE STUDENTS; --

lmao. I'm so naming my kid

Timmy'); Drop Table *; --

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish I can filter the xkcd. :(

</comment><comment><USER9> Some researchers have implemented in software toy ecosystems which eventually developed viruses and parasites and prey-predator cycles and what not. The very first one, by the way, was implemented in Lisp (cited and commented upon in the book "Complexity" by Roger Lewin.)

Now doing it with Windows machines adds a sarcastic/sadistic tone to the whole thing.

<comment><USER10> Do you have any online references for this virus-ecosystem? A name, at least?

<comment><USER11> Not sure if it's the one albertcardona was referring to; but this sounds like Thomas Ray's Tierra simulator. Details at <http://www.nis.atr.jp/~ray/pubs/tierra/tierrahtml.html>

From his abstract: "Digital organisms have been synthesized based on a computer metaphor of organic life in which CPU time is the 'energy' resource and memory is the 'material' resource. Memory is organized into informational 'genetic' patterns that exploit CPU time for self-replication. Mutation generates new forms, and evolution proceeds by natural selection as different 'genotypes' compete for CPU time and memory space. In addition, new genotypes appear which exploit other 'creatures' for informational or energetic resources."</comment></comment></comment>


Homeland Security refuses to accept US citizenship status of revered  director - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/man-without-a-country-revered-theater-director-has-to-prove-he-belongs/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like the SSA are the ones refusing to accept his status, but I guess headlines aren't allowed to criticize _them_.

</comment><comment><USER3> Did anyone else read that as revered _dictator_? Current political climate is clearly having an effect.</comment>