The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race – Agriculture - <AUTHOR> http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race <comment><USER3> "To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered."

Science, astronomy, biology and archaeology -- all advanced culture -- cannot happen without the critical mass of population provided by cities, fed by agriculture. This article is such nonsense.

<comment><USER4> For all our tremendous advances and expansive knowledge, we still have some billions of people that that are malnourished or starving, some that live on less than a dollar a day, some that die by the hundreds of thousands in wars over resources or religion; we have nations and societies that collapse within a few hundred years as they generally grow too top-heavy to function without replacement; we are depleting resources at tremendous rates without care to the cost; and so on.

As the article says, if you chose to be born twenty thousand years ago, there's a good chance you would be born in a tribe with a reasonably stable social and cultural structure that rarely lacked for any major needs. Today, you would most likely be born as one of the masses of poor subsistence farmers throughout the world, but most likely in China or India, who's life and work is miserable/back-breaking enough that they'll choose to make our electronics for 10 or 12 or 14 hours a day and consider it an improvement.

It seems that only in the last decade has modern technology reached the point where it can be provided to the masses and begin what might be a global transformation that leads to better lives for all - rather than better lives for a few at the expense of the many.

<comment><USER5> "if you chose to be born twenty thousand years ago, there's a good chance you would be born in a tribe with a reasonably stable social and cultural structure that rarely lacked for any major needs"

If you survived your first year of life, then your first 5 years of life, etc

Then you would have to hunt or do dangerous stuff with precarious tools, no health care in case of accident, etc

Oh and you would probably die by your 30s.

Makes the chinese factory kind of look good.

<comment><USER6> Wow. Really? Wow.

No. It doesn't make the Chinese factory look good. [edit: removed because it sounded too mean to me]

I suggest watching some documentaries about Asian nomads or other indigenous peoples. They live a primitive life, sure. But they seem pretty content and stress free. I'm not even sure if I prefer my own pampered life to theirs.

I'd rather kill myself than work in a Chinese factory. From what I hear on the news, I'm not the only one who thinks that way.

<comment><USER5> "I suggest watching some documentaries..."

And you heard about the Chinese factories on the same documentaries right?

But the Chinese workers have a choice, most of them came from the Chinese countryside willingly.

Now, why did they choose that instead of having a simple, stress free life in the Chinese countryside? It's probably "easier" than being an Asian nomad, and some may have that exact background.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

</comment><comment><USER8> MmHg, I like my fellow human beings, I prefer more of them than less of them, and therefore agriculture is positive, as are culture, cities, medical science, and so forth.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's a matter of tradeoffs. Yes, agriculture had some severe disavantages, but the advantages were also huge. Without the stability that agriculture gave us, we wouldn't be what we are now.

</comment><comment><USER10> Jesus Christ could the author take longer to get to the point? Also, they are terribly selective of their evidence. It's perfectly possible that life expectancy decreased following invention of agriculture and that people had more stressful lives, but the other benefits of social organisation so totally make up for that, as shown by the huge increase in life expectancies since then. Do you realise just how much more peaceful we are in organised society than in hunter-gather societies? Watch the talk on "the surprising decline in violence" by Stephen Pinker: [http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...](http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html)

<comment><USER7> Also, life expectancy is a tricky thing, in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a hunter-gatherer tribe would. And the end result would be that in the settlement you'd have an explosion in terms of person-years lived, even though on a per person level the life expectancy might have gone down.

<comment><USER11> > _in an agricultural settlement people would be having more children than a > hunter-gatherer tribe would_

Er, is this true? Birth-control seems a relatively modern thing... Even if a H-G society might be less _inclined_ to have lots of children (I dunno, really), did they actually have the knowledge and/or wherewithal (e.g. to purposely refrain from sex) to achieve that?

<comment><USER7> How it happens isn't relevant, we know for a fact that hunter-gatherer tribes have low population growth rates compared even to stone age agrarian settlements. Exactly why this is so is probably an interesting question. A few things to remember: fertility is dependent on consistent nutrition, people _don't_ necessarily have sex like rabbits all the time, and in low population tribes the ability to find a mate may be a challenge. Also, infant mortality during the winter can be a bitch, even in an agrarian society with tons of stored food.

Edit: poking around on the internet, it looks like infant mortality is the big differentiator. In hunter-gatherers it's rather high, at around 1 in 3, which is nearly double the infant mortality you'd expect even in primitive agrarian societies. That's going to have a tremendous impact on the population growth.

<comment><USER11> Certainly increased mortality would be the obvious explanation for low population grow absent birth-control...

[Which makes H-G society sound rather less peachy than the original article seems to have been claiming...]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"_

I'm sure this would seem like a much more profound statement if I hadn't yet learned ecology.

<comment><USER13> You're right in a sense. I am trying to be controversial here: I remember high school courses teaches us that nature, through natural selection, influenced mankind. Until man empowered enough intelligence and influence back its environment, through Agriculture first, shaping the lands, steering water streams and so on. Then through industrial revolution. Generating green house gas emissions. I am not sure which one of a bushman or a agriculture lead to the best ecologic behavior then. :-/

<comment><USER14> "You're right in a sense. I am trying to be controversial here"

Not surprising, "controversial" claims often require selective myopia in order to make claims that counter how the world works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's funny how technology brings us back to this "hunter gatherer heaven":

\- population crowding is no longer necessary as telecommuting is a viable way of doing most jobs (hopefully the naysayers will be "silenced" in a few generations... like Moses's people that had to die in the desert before reaching the "promised land" as their mentalities were not compatible with it)

\- we're becoming "hunters" again, as we engage in competitive activities to earn more "game" (money), dedicating more resources to this "hunting" than to actually "producing things"

\- we're "gatherers" again - only that we gather from the supermarket instead of the bushes and we gather from the fruits of mechanized agriculture and industry instead of the fruits of the land

...but better still, _we may soon be able to have the cake and eat it too_ : space colonization, ocean colonization, even higher yield concentrated agriculture via new biotech breakthroughs and "too cheap to meter" energy via large scale thorium reactors deployments and later fusion will allow _even faster exoponential continuous population growth_.

Let our Zerg (err... Human) swarm grow exponentially and engulf the universe! :)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm assuming this is being posted (from 1987!) because of how hilariously wrong it was.

<comment><USER4> I think not. This is very much in line with what I know from cultural anthropology, and the writer is Jared Diamond, who you might know as the author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" and "Collapse".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The author is Jared Diamond - IMHO one of the great thinkers of our time, who certainly deserves serious consideration. His books, "Guns, Germs and Steel", "Collapse", "The Third Chimpanzee" are excellent, thought-provoking (even worldview-altering) reads.

That said.. he is right, but from the vantage point of someone in this day and age, who loves science and technology, who has benefitted from the efforts of the billions of post-agricultural humans, I selfishly prefer this outcome to sitting around gathering nuts in uncomfortable underwear, waging endless war with neighbouring bands and tribes.

Sure, agriculture produced a Long Dip in living standards, with population increases outstripping any gains made in production. But the whole point of a large population - perhaps the only redeeming feature of civilization - <USER2> that one can trawl the probabilistic waters and produce the few very mad, very interesting geniuses who make it all worthwhile.

I've always thought that the Matrix really came about due to the natural tendency of civilization to increase population density. From the open savannah to cubicles, cars and capsule hotels.. the Matrix is just highly aggressive telecommuting.

And it worked, too. Humans maintained ever higher population densities, produced lots of crazy geniuses who kept improving the interfaces, until significant bits of personalities could jump across from brain to brain. "AIs" were nothing more than mobile multiple-personality disorders. Morpheus' crowd were basically scavengers, helping keep the Matrix clean of dangerous personalities while maintaining a reserve pool of free-range human at Zion, in case the Matrix needed to be repopulated... which it did, from time to time, after epic meme-virus infections which killed off most of the existing inhabitants. The whole "AI vs humans" story and attempts to kill Morpheus & co was a big piece of drama to keep them righteously motivated rather than relaxing with the blue pill.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if the evolution of agriculture has been similarly negative/positive for the other animals that do it, namely some species of ants. Ants overall make up 15-20% of this planet's animal biomass, visiting aliens wouldn't be crazy to call them one of our planet's dominant species (and completely ignore the hairless apes).

</comment><comment><USER19> Funny, I like my modern, high-tech lifestyle.

<comment><USER20> The article specifically mentions that the top X% are better off in agriculture. If you have an enjoyable high-tech lifestyle, then you are probably a part of them (as most of HN).

<comment><USER19> Actually, for where I live I'm pretty median by income.

<comment><USER21> if you are able to comment on hackernews thru an internet connection, you are probably living within the top ~10% of the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not sure I completely agree with this view. It's not confronting the other argument: what if we were still all hunter-gatherers, and agriculture never became mainstream?

I'm not sure we would reach the same level of a sophisticated society that we enjoy today. Would the writer of this article have time to dedicate to writing, if he had to hunt for food, instead of having it ready in a dish in a few minutes? I highly doubt it.

I also think there's an evolutionary benefit that came out of agriculture. As the complexity of our behavior towards dealing with an agricultural system increased, so did our intelligence.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm not sure we would reach the same level of intelligence - through natural evolution - that we have today, if we didn't build highly complex systems that required lots of logical thinking (agriculture). If we were all still hunters, we would not be as intelligent.

<comment><USER21> you mean the same level of knowledge, not intelligence - people were just as intelligent back then. Knowledge accumulation required agriculture, since it freed up time.

<comment><USER22> Evidence of that? I actually think that knowledge accumulation led to an evolutionary change at the gene level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I guess some people here dont understasnd the point of the article.

There are 3 levels on which we can think about survival.

1\. Population level

On this level, agriculture is clear benefit as it provided stable microenvironment to practice abstract sciences that led us here.

2\. Individual level

On this level, we clearly lost it. Degenerative disease, particularly dental one and so called diseases of civilization. It may or may not reflect on u as individual depending on ur environment and genetics, but it reflects badly on majority of people. So this is middle ground heading bad way ATM and in what direction will it go depends on how fast we can adapt (epigenetics etc.)

3\. Cell level.

Ask your enterocytes how they feel about glutens and friends. Ask your neurons how they feel about sugar surge and Coca Cola. Its total disaster here. Way to much for adaptation. Thats why we have rogue cells converting to metazoa 1.0 software (i.e. cancer).

<comment><USER24> > 3\. Cell level. Ask your enterocytes how they feel about glutens and > friends. Ask your neurons how they feel about sugar surge and Coca Cola. Its > total disaster here. Way to much for adaptation. Thats why we have rogue > cells converting to metazoa 1.0 software (i.e. cancer).

Is this true? (The bit about cancer)

<comment><USER21> i have heard that humans didn't used to eat so much sugar. It was a desirable food, high energy concentrations. but it was "hard" to get in nature. But with modern tech, it is now so cheap that the process of evolution hasn't really "selected" for people who could cope because it happened so fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Maybe in a few thousand years time people will be reading about how the widespread adoption of computers and the internet in the 20th century was actually a catastrophe because before that it was so much easier to maintain your privacy and there weren't so many goddamn robots everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER26> One important difference was how society was organised. Before agriculture, hunter-gatherer groups were collaborators. They depended on each other to put down game and gather vegetables. The more individuals in the group, the stronger they were. That's a completely different situation from a farming community in which its inhabitants are in competition to each other. The more farmers on a given area, the worse for each of them. They have to compete with each other over the arable land.

</comment><comment><USER7> This sort of paean to the "noble savage" always glosses over some of the worst aspects of such lifestyles. Such as excessive tribalism and racism, lack of individual liberty, and a stultifying lack of art and cultural refinements.

It's fascinating to me how some of the most liberal folks can idolize some of the most regressive and socially conservative lifestyles and cultures in history.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you, unlike most, don't believe modernity = progress history I'd recommend you read Ishmael. Great story which explores the cultural and environmental effect of leaving our hunter-gatherer lifestyle behind.

</comment><comment><USER28> > a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter.

Did anyone else envision an awesome zombie movie while reading this?

</comment><comment><USER29> _Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture._

And at 11:59pm we adopted the Enlightenment, egalitarianism, scientific method, self-determination. Just because something was the case for a long time doesn't mean it was by default the best case.

<comment><USER12> We best hope that longest adoption doesn't make for the default best case, or else the dinosaurs are a much better choice than humans.

<comment><USER30> And single celled bacterium that feed off nitrogen are the best animal ever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > _It turns out that these people [hunter-gatherers] have plenty of leisure > time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors_

That's got to be a logical fallacy.

A single farmer with modern tools can feed hundreds of people.

<comment><USER32> Someone needs to make those modern tools...

<comment><USER31> Most people are not involved in production anymore, most of it is automated, and levels of automation will only increase.</comment></comment></comment>


COBS: A Compact Bit-Sliced Signature Index [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://bingmann.github.io/2019/publications/1905.09624v2.pdf <comment><USER2> I don't understand the function enough to comment about how cool it is, but I do know that COBS is an overloaded term "consistent overhead byte stuffing" which I use all the time as a way to transfer binary data packets. You might consider a different acronym to avoid confusing search results.

</comment><comment><USER3> The github page might be a better link: [https://github.com/bingmann/cobs/](https://github.com/bingmann/cobs/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I believe a similar approach was described (by me while at VMware) here [https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1807128.1807134](https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1807128.1807134) , see Figure 5.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why so shy? The site by itself is a gem. Bookmarked!</comment>


Ask HN: What will become possible by 2025 in your field of expertise? - <AUTHOR> In your field of expertise, what's not possible now, but will become possible in 3-5 years? What about 10 years? <comment><USER2> Looking at a 10 year window. There's a low probability, but non-zero, that I'll be able to correctly align and distribute DOM elements both horizontally and vertically. I might accomplish this by dropping support for the Internet Explorer family of browsers.

<comment> at-fates-hands > I might accomplish this by dropping support for the Internet Explorer family > of browsers.

I was just working on some legacy stuff last week. Only worked in IE11, in compatibility mode. I had to use vanilla JS to get some data out of a huge form.

Yeah, document.querySelector('#app') doesn't work. I found out, "It only works on _modern_ browsers" which IE11 doesn't qualify as, which is kind of funny to me. I ended up using document.getElementById('app') instead though, which did work.

<comment><USER3> Is there some joke I'm not getting? querySelector has worked on IE since version 8.

<comment> at-fates-hands Except when you're running in compatibility mode.

<comment><USER3> Compatibility mode would be like coding for IE7. Not IE11's fault :D

<comment> at-fates-hands Yeaper.

"Legacy software man, it's a helluva drug!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In the field of education, I believe we're not that far off from having basic teachable AI agents.

As the maxim goes, "The best way to learn is to teach". My vision here is that for any new topic a student learns, they (or the instructor) would be able to instantiate an AI agent with relevant preliminary knowledge, for the student to practice on. The student would try to teach the agent facts and/or how to perform basic tasks, and the agent, with some basic metacognition would be able to query the student regarding any unclear or conflicting points.

It definitely won't be anywhere near Turing Test level in 5 years, but I believe that by then we'll have something useful. And beyond that, I think there's real potential here, both for revolutionising education, and further down the line in terms of AGI.

This is slightly tangential, but this article from a few days ago strengthened my belief that we're getting closer - [https://reiinakano.com/2019/11/12/solving- probability.html](https://reiinakano.com/2019/11/12/solving-probability.html)

<comment><USER5> A simple BOT that a student could ask for advice "I don't understand Python WHILE loops" and it pointed them to a YouTube video coupled with some easy examples.

I see that is almost possible now.

<comment><USER6> [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=I+don%27t+under...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=I+don%27t+understand+Python+WHILE+loops) seems to work just fine.

<comment><USER5> Couple this with repl.it and some examples to work through. Some hints on how to debug it, etc.

I'm not asking for anything magic, just the glue that sticks all these bits together.

<comment><USER7> I've been using Thonny with my students which has some basic feedback about errors and possible solutions, which isn't bad (as well as variable inspection, although that gets a bit tedious with larger programs).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In about 10 years, it will be possible to run a cell lysate sample through a mass spec machine and get what a present-day scientist would call a pretty good picture of everything going on at the proteomic/metabolomic level, in perhaps ~5 hours.

But in that time we will have probably discovered several currently- unappreciated, biologically relevant biochemical mechanisms which we can't efficiently probe like this. And also it will be considered next to useless because it doesn't work on single-cell samples. :)

<comment><USER9> Years ago, I was at a biology outreach-to-the-humanities seminar. Someone asked about the driver of these decades of progress. They were seemingly fishing for some Kuhnian escape from old oppressively restraining dogmas. And were visibly unhappy with the answer that it was mostly economics. Rapidly advancing technology changing the set of questions we can afford to pursue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Enlightenment will be achieved when we develop One True Platform which marries front end and backend development so that we don't need to maintain complex frameworks whose sole reason for existence is to make sure the computers don't blow up passing data back and forth.

<comment><USER11> Any projects or murmurs alluding to tangible progress in that space?

<comment><USER12> ActiveFacts (the hard formalism parts are done and working, but almost none of the quality of life stuff is implemented yet)

Core idea is to start from a human-authored formal domain model (sample models: [https://github.com/cjheath/activefacts- examples/blob/master/...](https://github.com/cjheath/activefacts- examples/blob/master/cql/Warehousing.cql) ) and generate:

* Database schemas - warehouse, OLAP, and (planned) the ETL script between them. * Application models (for ORM etc) - the rails one is implemented. * Code generation for serialization / deserialization from the shared domain model. * (planned) automatic query extraction from type-safe templates (you write your template in terms of the domain model, and it gets automatically compiled into a set of database queries which supply the data it needs).

It's hard to learn, which is a hefty up-front price to pay, but it neatly avoids a ton of work 12+ months down the track.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have no doubt that deepfakes will be impossible to tell apart from real videos (at least to a human) in 3-5 years.

In 10 years I think we'll be able to generate entire movies programmatically.

<comment><USER14> I agree with the deep fakes thing wrt video, but I'm still not convinced by the ability of current (and near future) ML models to generate meaningful written content like a film script. The GPT-2 stuff I've seen has mostly been sensible English, but I've never seen it actually generate a coherent story. What do you see are the steps between where we are now and where we'll be in 10 years?

<comment><USER15> "meaningful written content like a film script"

Award winning, agreed, no. Good enough for a special effects blockbuster or pr0n or stereotypical teen comedy or date night romcom, probably good enough.

Ironically the cheapest part of a movie right now seems to be the script / storyline, and some kind of Amazon Turk with more flexible morality might write better than we get now versions of special effects demo reels (aka action flicks) or pr0n or teen comedies via the magic of extensive A/B testing and population sampling.

<comment> fbi-director I'm hereby patenting an idea or company that let's you input a story, a use some gui to modify the looks of each character, and let the tool this company provides, create a porn to your liking - per your provided input.

Even if it's in drawing/hentai form and not 'real' people.

Big bucks to be made!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the RF / wireless world, in the coming 5-10 years we may finally see commercial use of large phased arrays. This was supposed to come with mm-wave 5G, but probably will get pushed to 5G++ or 6G. Starlink actually looks on track to be the first consumer 'killer app'.

Hard to understate how big this will be for maintaining growth in wireless capacity. I think there's a timeline where we ditch copper coax and even buried fiber in most infrastructure.

<comment> o-__-o Fiber will be replaceable upon ubiquitous distribution of ultra wideband (UWB) technology

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> We're going to see ray tracing become dominant I think. Its possible now but its not good enough yet. Five years though? Id bank on yes.

<comment><USER18> I'm already doing interesting stuff (unimaginable 20 years ago) with Nvidia RTX - totally agree with you.

<comment><USER19> Can you elaborate on what you're working on with RTX?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands I started working in RPA (robotic process automation) and what our team is working on will end up putting a lot of people out of work. In 3-5 years, I would expect most data entry jobs to be eliminated by the scripts our team is writing.

The scary part? I work in the health care industry. This means a lot of the heavy forms processing that goes on will soon be completely automated by robots and without any human interaction or decision making. The future is cold and calculating; without any empathy or consideration for the patient - only the bottom line for the provider is what matters.

Nearly every day I get the statistics of how many jobs our team's bots are replacing. In one instance, we had several bots that effectively replaced over 1,000 FTE's and saved the company close to $3 million. We have over 600 bots right now running which is in the top 1% of all companies in the country and they're looking to expand that number even more.

Nearly every day I feel the moral weight of what I'm doing and it gives me pause.

<comment><USER20> > bots that effectively replaced over 1,000 FTE's and saved the company close > to $3 million

This doesn't add up. You're saying each full time employee earns on average $1k/year?

<comment><USER21> Maybe the first year's savings were offset by the high cost of developing the automation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm a project manager. Putting aside the possible/not possible speculation for a moment, what I hope to see in the near future is a kind of support system that could evaluate work in progress, work done and other factors to better help us with risk management. Schedules are tighter than ever, deadlines are seen as life or death, penalties for delays are easily surpassing the million USD marks. So I think we need all the intelligence we can get to understand what's really going on in project and make the right decisions to minimize/eliminate risk.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure of your industry, so deadlines could be really important there, but almost every programming job i've had the deadlines were frequently just self imposed hysteria. Management would make a big deal, but when you dug into what the actual consequences of a missed deadline were it was usually minor. I actually think the culture of tracking everything can make things worse because when everyone is at full capacity theres zero slack for process optimization or serendipity or experimentation. Its like the more overly "busy" everyone is in a company, the more collective intelligence, empathy, and perspective is lost.

It also is essentially lost on almost all management that coding is almost always a creative endeavor. After all if the thing you're building already exists you could just buy it. Creative works are extremely hard to estimate in any meaningful way.

<comment><USER23> Deadlines are about budgets. Do you know what happens when the company runs out of money?

<comment><USER17> Do you know what happens to deadlines when the talent evaporates because they don't want to deal with management-by-hysteria and they leave for a place that treats them like adults?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not sure about 3-5 years but within the next 10 years we'll likely have 3D sensors that can see 100s of meters in daylight, resolve to sub-centimetres at megapixel resolutions with 30+ fps. At the price and form factor of an entry- level DSLR.

In 15 to 20 years every smartphone (or perhaps pair of AR glasses) will have one of these.

<comment><USER25> > In 15 to 20 years every smartphone [...] will have [3D sensors that can see > 100s of meters in daylight, resolve to sub-centimetres at megapixel > resolutions with 30+ fps].

I'm a total layperson with cameras and had an abiding sense that there is a fairly hard limitation on what's possible within a smartphone-type housing (because the sensor is limited by the amount of light). I'd love to hear more about how this perceived physical barrier is being overcome!

<comment><USER9> Not my field, but my impression is optical system design is a very rich high- dimensional space. And thus that suggestions of hard limitation are often overlooking possibilities.

For example, resolutions in angle, time, color, and intensity can be traded, inhomogeneously, and augmented with computation. It's not that simple hard limits, say Rayleigh's diffraction limit on resolution, are wrong exactly. But they do seem to get naively misapplied as system limitations. Super-resolution microscopy techniques, for example, work around it.

<comment><USER25> Interesting, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Gathering actually reliable data from the healthcare system will enable the rise of true clinical science and the fall of the clinician-researcher star system.

You said possible. Not actually realized :-)

<comment><USER27> You show me a clinical environment, outside maybe Intermountain or Atria, where physicians enter accurate and complete and timely data, then I will show you a ... well, I don't know. But I believe this "vision" is prohibited by clinicians that simply don't bother entering in data that aren't relevant to an encounter-billing thingie. (In the US).

Please tell me that I am wrong. I used to be a lot more optomistic about HCIT than I seem to be right now...

<comment> jerome-jh You comment is both funny and to the point. Applies to France as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Full self-driving car that can operate using just cameras on a variety of weather conditions (still limited)

</comment><comment><USER29> In 3-5 years if we are lucky, life expectancy in the US will stop going down.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think we will start seeing more and more advanced composite 'metamaterials' being applied in the world outside of research labs.

These are materials with engineered structures at usually the nano or micro scale that have unique/unusual properties. Things like better antennas, imaging devices, or even materials that can perform computations.

As the manufacturing processes develop more I think we will start seeing them more widespread. Defence industries are in particular interested in this at the moment but the potentials are much bigger.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm looking forward to the consumer release next year of 1080p AR glasses. And hope one of them has sufficient visual quality and pragmatics to displace a lot of my laptop screen use.

In 3-5 years? Apple is rumored to intend both headset and glasses. So I hope for all-day AR, with >1080p resolution, eye tracking, and hand tracking, that Just Works. Enabling 3D GUIs. At least shallow ones - avoiding vergence- accommodation conflict in consumer devices may take additional years.

</comment><comment><USER31> Expect to see the first ever commercial liquid fueled nuclear power plants under construction by 2025, maybe even operational. China will probably be the very first.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm a front end web developer. I hope we have better DOM - WebGL integration to enable some really nice effects and optimizations. Most users have reasonably powerful GPUs even on cheap smartphones but the only way to utilise them in a web page is disappointingly separate to the HTML side of things. Hardware accelerated position updates, lists, etc (more than CSS does already) would be awesome.

<comment><USER5> It's crazy that N64 games (e.g. mario) have really interesting menu screens, with nice animations, an interesting background, menu items that pop and jiggle... all pretty much impossible in HTML for someone like me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> In 10 years major chip design houses might start seriously consider using analog computation for machine learning.

<comment><USER34> Can you elaborate ?

<comment> 0-_-0 Most networks currently are float32. Low accuracy networks are possible, and the random noise of an analog circuit is basically a regularizer for a neural network, instead of being unwanted or incorrect. It's a feature, not a bug!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Programming for more than thirty years here.

Within five years there should be multiple AIs that specialize in different types of programming. They will have a combination of a natural language interface and interactive screens.

Most of these will be based on starting with existing template applications and tweaking them to handle special cases. They will manage that by training neural networks on datasets that provide requested tweak descriptions and the resulting code or schema changes. They will have a fallback to manually edit formulas or code when necessary. AIs will also be trained to read API descriptions and write code to access them.

Within 10 years fully general purpose AI will be available that can completely replace programmers even for difficult or novel problems.

</comment><comment><USER36> By 2025, it's quite possible that vapor-deposited boron-based icosahedral superconductor and semiconductor materials will begin to revolutionize many areas, including quantum computing, slashing power requirements of existing chips by 90+%, and most importantly, quantum energy devices (think batteries that never need recharging, powered by the expansion of the universe) that effectively convert ambient heat to electricity just as PV cells convert ambient light to electricity. This uses a new quantum thermodynamics that has no classical analog. FWIW, these materials have already been invented, and the theory behind them is probably sorted out as well.

</comment><comment><USER37> Not exactly my field as I'm mainly on the backend/infrastructure side of these projects but I see a lot of recent progress in consumer devices/wearables inching their way into the medical space and replacing expensive medical equipment for detection and prevention of certain ailments.

One recent example is using PPG on smartwatches like Fitbit and Apple Watch to detect atrial fibrillation.

In 3-5 years I see some more use cases like this being released.

</comment><comment><USER38> In 2025 Cobol can into cloud.

<comment><USER39> Can you really not run Cobol on a regular linux box?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> By 2025, the "OS" of choice for at least the remainder of the first half of the century will become a set of cloud services APIs, but advances in hardware will allow these services to be pushed back to the edge much as mainframes were replaced by distributed networks.

</comment><comment><USER40> Think, I would use release of _SolveSpace 3.0_ for my CAD experiments, instead of nightly builds.

[0] [https://github.com/symbian9/solvespace-daily- engineering](https://github.com/symbian9/solvespace-daily-engineering)

</comment><comment><USER41> In about 3 to 5 years, it will be possible to create ultra high-Q mechanical micro-resonators with extremely low thermal noise coupling. This will allow a huge number of new quantum optomechanical setups and experiments

<comment><USER9> Years ago I saw a talk by someone who built mems oscillators. They were fervent in declaring something like "Brownian motion... it is evil! EVIL!!!". I've since wondered if you could leverage that for science education. For every phenomena and property, find someone who _deeply_ emotionally cares about it, loves or hates it, and create an interview clip. To give topics emotional weight, and shift them from unfamiliar incoming trivia, into something that at least someone really cares about.

</comment></comment><comment> jerome-jh I think the cost of storage will drop again sharply, after the current plateau, because there is so much push for it, and we are not quite at the physical limit yet.

In SW development, automatic code generation will breakthrough.

</comment><comment><USER42> I expect to have a lot more secure remote access to the scientific instruments in my lab than my IT group can provide using the internet.

Working on it now.

Going to call it _Dial-Up_.

</comment><comment><USER43> It will be possible to make the bullet obsolete

<comment><USER27> How so and why? Are kinetic projectiles expected to be superceded by something different within 5 years?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> \- In 5 years you will be able to easily write powerful programs through voice interfaces like Siri, Alexa, Bixby, and/or Google

\- In 5 years you will be able to start and make 90% of the key design decisions for a new general or domain specific programming languages in a couple of days, a process that currently takes many months to years if not decades

\- In 10 years it will be impossible for most software engineers to keep their jobs if they refrain from using program synthesis AI's providing "super- autocomplete"

<comment><USER25> I don't believe it'll be possible to write powerful programs through voice interface, but I do believe it'll be possible to overcome GUI limitations with significantly more complex voice commands than are available at the moment. Things like "Hey dingus, schedule a meeting with Rod, Jane, and Freddy on the final Thursday of every month. We'll defer to Jane's calendar."

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I am Senior Software Development Consultant programming 20 years.

Based on expertise in multiple international projects i think in 5 years from now software will start to solve most important humanity problems.

In 10 years from now it will at last have substantial role in solving them.

<comment><USER46> What kind of problems are you imagining here? I feel perpetually jaded (software is going to get better at sending advertisements to people!) and would love some uplifting stories!

<comment><USER45> Unemployment, health, safety, food, water, climate, conflicts, education.

These are the main problems that software will help solve. And i can observe a lots of focus on these topics in recent years. Actually since a lots of limits software faced had dissapeared.

This means software will be less used for whacky stuff like ads but for things people care about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> 3-5 years?

1\. The IRS primary, secondary, and cold backup tertiary mainframes will have failed and not have sufficient replacements in place.

2\. Library of Congress Subject Headings will be incomprehesible due to controversies over how they are not sufficiently "woke" and library subject cataloguing will have to reach back to revitalize the work of Minnie Earl Sears to try to maintain order.

3\. There will be an Internet. There will be the FAANG properties. They won't overlap anymore.

<comment><USER48> More details about IRS mainframes? Sounds interesting. (Dare I say promising...)

<comment><USER47> Start here: [https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2019reports/2019...](https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2019reports/201920083fr.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


Indian E-Commerce Giant Flipkart Raises Massive $1B Round - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/29/indian-e-commerce-giant-flipkart-raises-massive-1b-round/

<comment><USER2> I like that the Indian start up scene is getting serious now. Entrepreneurs are brave enough to compete with the big players unlike a few years ago when most start ups were basically simple web apps or a tech consultancy kind of thing. As an Indian this gives me hope that a soon the brain drain will stop and a lot of talented Indians abroad (with connections and some money to invest) will come back to India to either start up or work for one.</comment>


Show HN: Robust-ML.org, a community-run reference for SOTA adversarial defenses - <AUTHOR> https://www.robust-ml.org/ <comment><USER2> Hi HN! I'm one of the authors of this resource. Here's a little bit of background on why we created this resource:

Adversarial machine learning is a relatively new but rapidly developing field. It's easy to see why people are excited about this research area: ML systems are being increasingly deployed in the real world, and yet, they're very easy to fool with maliciously perturbed inputs. There have been dozens of proposed attacks and hundreds of proposed defenses against malicious inputs to machine learning systems. To help researchers keep up with developments in this field, we created this community-run reference for state-of-the-art adversarial example defenses.

Unlike most subfields of ML, security is a negative goal: the goal is to produce a machine learning system that can't be fooled. Showing that a system can't be fooled is really hard.

Measuring progress in traditional machine learning can be done through a monotonically increasing objective: if a paper increases accuracy on a given benchmark from 94% to 95%, progress has been made. Future papers may improve on the benchmark, but accuracy will not decrease. In contrast, measuring progress in adversarial machine learning is exceptionally difficult. By definition, the metric used to measure accuracy on a given defense is success on the best attack (that respects the threat model), which may not exist at the time of publication. This is why future third-party analyses of defense techniques are important.

robust-ml.org lists current defenses along with analyses of the defenses, making it easy to get a complete picture of which techniques have been shown to be broken and which techniques currently seems to be working.</comment>


USB charger blamed for woman's electrocution as store owner faces questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-27/knock-off-usb-charger-to-blame-for-womans-death/5555138

<comment><USER2> You may also be interested in this teardown: [http://www.arcfn.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab- app...](http://www.arcfn.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple- is.html)

The subsequent HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706753](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706753)</comment>


Kunal Bahl was denied an H-1B visa. Now he competes with Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/02/news/india/snapdeal-india-kunal-bahl-h1b-visa/index.html <comment><USER2> So? Businessmen are worth more than regular people is the message?</comment>


Vagrant - build and distribute virtualized development environments. - <AUTHOR> http://vagrantup.com/

<comment><USER2> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901>

Many comments already over there.</comment>


Expresso: A simple expressions language with polymorphic extensible row types - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/willtim/Expresso <comment><USER3> Looks like a fun project, very nice :-)

For those interested in more of the beautiful theory on extensible row types, this project seems to be based on an earlier paper I wrote on scoped labels: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/scopedlabels.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Hi, author here, yes your paper was a huge inspiration and I really should add a references section in the readme. The row types in Expresso use very simple lacks constraints, similar to the old Hugs TREX system, and don't permit duplicate/scoped labels. I felt this was also a pretty good sweet spot.

<comment><USER3> Thanks :-) TREX (by Mark Jones and Benedict Gaster) is great. The beauty is that a lacks constraints can get translated to fields offsets at runtime making it super efficient!

E.g. a type like:

foo :: r/x => { x :: int | r } -> int

foo r = r.x

Gets translated at runtime to a function where the lacks constraint r/x becomes an actual offset parameter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've toyed with the idea of doing a language like this. With a small difference, records would be the only way to express values and bindings.

There would be no need to think of currying and partial application of functions as it would naturally follow from partially evaluating incomplete record inputs.

Another (nice?) property would be that a value always comes with a name binding. This no need to encode semantics of values purely as positions in lists and tuples.

So a question then to an implementer, is this something you considered? Is feasible?

<comment><USER4> I have considered using pattern bindings to easily create "field pun" bindings.

For example, one can already introduce all the fields of a record as local bindings, e.g.

let {..} = import "List.x"

or just a subset using, e.g.

let {reverse} = import "List.x"

Similarly for function argument bindings, e.g.

f {x, y} = x - <USER2>

The above is just syntactic sugar for:

f r = r.x - r.y

Such named arguments of course prevent arguments with the same type being passed in the wrong order, e.g.

f {x=2, y=1}

There is still some minor work to be done to better support inline type annotations on such patterns to make them more usable.

Your idea of unifying bindings with records is interesting and not something I have considered.

<comment><USER5> Actually I even thought of unifying records and lambdas. Which could end up with a concatenative language, where application is commutative.

Couldn't find a syntax that made sense though...

<comment><USER6> Do you have any notes on this? It is something I'm actively researching.

<comment><USER5> Not much. But basically a bit inspired by Cat (a stack based, typed, concatenative language), and a thought that stacks could be replaced by first class environments and rewriting, so you could have a concatenative language with partial evaluation. Instead of the usual ordered parameter lists, and/or curried functions with partial application, functions take environments and produce environments. A program like "{a=1}{b=2}{c=a+b}" would evaluate to "{c=3}". While "{b=2}{c=a+b}" evaluates to "{c=a+2}"

<comment><USER6> So the values in the environment are single use? I'm going to think on this...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice! I like how unit/void arise naturally from empty record/sum types.

</comment><comment><USER8> It seems like there's just a global namespace of labels. This reminds me of the situation in Javascript before symbols were introduced. I'm curious why this choice was made?

<comment><USER4> Labels in Expresso are just type-level symbols. Label names can be re-used over and over again in different records and variants. This works fine because a name is not tired to any particular nominal type (like a constructor in Haskell or Java).

<comment><USER8> But it seems like it would be an error to concatenate two records with a name clash, though, right?

<comment><USER4> Yes because duplicate labels are not allowed within the scope of a single record (you can specify which one overrides the other, but perhaps we also need a convenient rename syntax). This point was that different records can happily contain the same field names. The situation is the same as SQL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Any chance that such kind of records will land in a mainstream language such as C# or F# in less than a decade?

<comment><USER5> C#8 will have a kind of records. Not fully this kind of records, but perhaps close enough to put pressure in that direction.</comment></comment>


Texas Jury Strikes Down Patent Trolls' Claim To Own the Interactive Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/02/interactive-web-patent/

<comment><USER2> You _know_ a patent claim has no merit when even an East Texas court won't accept it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_f...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_for_the_Eastern_District_of_Texas#Patent_litigation)

<comment><USER3> Honestly, I think being a juror in a patent trial is a hard proposition anywhere. Why do I say that:

-The subject matter is likely to be mostly to totally outside of a person's technical depth and factual experience. (Here I try and think if someone asked me to decide some question related to something like advanced particle physics, chemistry, or the tax code).

-There is not that much time to figure out what is going on (these trials tend to last less than a week of 7 hour days).

-There are many different complex topics being addressed in that time span: the patents, what is being accused, etc.

-What is said is being said by competing groups of apparently competent people.

-Those people are saying widely different things about the aforementioned complex subject matter.

-Everything is being said in an extremely serious environment (Federal Court) which lends substantial gravity to each side.

-Jurors are not to consult information beyond what is presented to them in court.

<comment><USER2> > -The subject matter is likely to be mostly to totally outside of a person's > technical depth and factual experience. (Here I try and think if someone > asked me to decide some question related to something like advanced particle > physics, chemistry, or the tax code).

Not just "likely"; anyone who had such experience would get kicked off the jury.

Nobody on Hacker News will ever get to serve as a juror on a patent trial. (That cuts both ways, though: nobody biased towards patents will ever sit on a patent trial either.)

<comment><USER3> I think it's worth noting that as a nation we have chosen to be "biased" in favor of patents. A patent is presumptively valid. To find a patent invalid a jury's standard is "clear and convincing evidence." By contrast the standard for infringement is "a preponderance of the evidence."

<comment><USER4> Its worth noting that those standards evolved when patents were subject to much more intense review by the patent office, and it was (procedurally) easier for the patent office to just reject an application.

One of the easiest potential fixes to the US patent system would just remove the no longer warranted presumption of validity from patents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The dueling teams of lawyers have spent millions creating elaborate > presentations

Did the lawyers spend millions, or did they bill millions?

<comment><USER6> Probably spent millions in getting expert testimonials. Those aren't cheap. Of course they turned around to bill the clients for the work with cost plus.

<comment><USER7> All in a day's work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Apple, Argosy Publishing, Blockbuster, Citigroup, eBay, Frito-Lay, JP Morgan > Chase, New Frontier Media, Office Depot, Perot Systems, Playboy Enterprises > International, Rent-A-Center, Sun Microsystems (bought by Oracle while this > litigation was underway), and Texas Instruments.

^^ The list of companies who settled with Eloas before the patent was ruled invalid.

A part of me wishes companies had a legal obligation to fight patent claims they believed to be invalid. Settling hurts us all.

<comment><USER9> Can the companies that settled ask for their money back?

<comment><USER10> Most likely not. They buy the licence to indemnify themselves, like insurance. But when you don't use your insurance you don't get the money back.

<comment><USER11> It's closer to a protection racket than insurance in this case, isn't it?

<comment><USER10> Yup, that basically sums up how patent trolling works. Threaten with a government backed court order for unknown millions. Offer a special deal worth hundreds of thousands to take away that threat.

Public corporations tend to go with option 2 even though they know 75% of it is bullshit. They have to list any outstanding lawsuits as liabilities every quarter. Investors ask lots of questions about these liabilities. Expenses are cheaper than liabilities so it's better to turn those liabilities into relatively, small expenses than potentially large liabilities.

Small private companies also go for option 2. Cheaper to pay them off than be billed $200/hour for a lawyer and the court fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have to wonder when I keep hearing about these cases: if you have say a 50% chance of a favorable ruling on some absurd patent, and the upside is billions of dollars in shakedown payments, backed by the authority of the judicial system, how much would a disreputable company be willing to spend on the chance of getting such a ruling? How many other companies, seeing such rulings, would try to get their own? How many cases would they bring on the chance of getting the ruling? I ask somewhat rhetorically, but of course I'm suggesting by asking the answer is "a lot" and also suspecting that there do exist people that will prop up shell companies that bring case after case after case until they get rulings that enable them to legally blackmail others.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's a list of at least some of the companies that fought the patent:

Google, Amazon, Adobe, CDW Corp, JCPenney, Staples and Yahoo. [1]

Well done guys. Long live the fighters!

[1] [http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-02-09/google-amazon- co...](http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-02-09/google-amazon-com-win- trial-over-interactive-web-patents.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is important because this Texas court is not just any court but THE court where most patent law is deliberated. The fact that this was struck down here is a victory. Most of these trolls are shell corps setup by a group of lawyers with no technical council strictly to manipulate the legal system to extort money from tech companies willing to settle than battle it out in court. I hope this starts to slow the onslaught of frivolous lawsuits by wanna be lawyers. We spent Millions last year out of our R&D budget to defend ourselves from this nonsense. They target companies with potential and growth and use models to determine optimal circumstances for settlement. Maybe this will slow the destruction of innovation and American jobs driven by these greedy people. Lawyers wonder why they have a bad rap but yet they don't seem to police their own. Sadness:(

</comment><comment><USER15> Personally, I think it's crazy that some court in Texas even gets a chance at deciding a case with a reach like this.

Heck, they were talking about basically shutting down the web or turning it into yet another "you have to pay big bucks to participate" medium of which we definitely have enough already.

<comment><USER4> Every case has to start somewhere. If the obscure court screwed up somehow, they can always appeal it up the chain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can't believe they settled in just two hours. The claim must have been as specious as it appeared, but like most trolls, they might have lost the battle, but they'll crawl back to wherever they come from and regroup for the next battle.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thank God. I didn't realize UCal had a stake in this. WTF? Don't they know better?

<comment><USER18> That would strike me as worthy of a black mark by the industry---a statement that we will not hire your students if you back this stuff.

<comment><USER19> That would be an overreach, and unfairly punish some eminently-qualified grads from Berkeley and the like. I would, however, like to see some of the big boys boycott a career fair, or simply set up a stand with no attendant and a poster reading, "UC Berkeley tried to blackmail us and hold the web hostage. In response, we will not be attending this career fair." Then let the _students_ put pressure on the administration to perform a cranio-anal extraction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Well I'm glad to see the end of that. Its quite possible some courts (judges/juries) would not have grasped the true ramifications of this claim and may have opened a can of worms.

<comment><USER21> While I agree with you that I am glad this has basically died because I too was worried about what would happen:

It is not in the jury's remit to "grasp the true ramifications of this claim". They have to judge it based solely on the merits of the case and the law being applied.

If Eolas had a valid case then they should be paid, even if it means problems with companies that are "too big to fail" and the rest of us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm glad to learn the jury made the right decision. Sometimes it seems too much to expect even that much. Something really needs to be done to fix this nature of trolling.

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe they're seeing so many patents they're starting to realize how many of those patents are just ... stupid?

When you're exposed to a field more (lots of cases kinda do that), you start to think more like a person in that field and suddenly previously non-obvious things are obvious!

<comment><USER24> Who, the jurors? It's unlikely any juror on this case has been a juror before in a patent case.

<comment><USER25> 1) Predict that a new piece of technology will be used to solve a common problem (i.e. using a Facebook page as a resume).

2) Patent it.

3) ...

4) Sue EVERYONE.

5) Now any juror on a case will have an opinion on IP law.

<comment><USER26> 3) Wait till the patent has almost expired.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Datejs: A Truly Slick Date Script - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2007/11/27/datejs-a-truly-slick-date-script/

<comment><USER2> This is rather slick. I've used Perl's Date::Manip. It would be nice to move that to the browser but Date::Manip still seems to do a better job. For instance, Date::Manip will resolve "First tue in nov" or "third wed in june" while datejs doesn't. The kiko date parser worked really well. I understand they wrote it themselves?

<http://search.cpan.org/~sbeck/Date-Manip-5.48/Manip.pod>

</comment><comment><USER3> Try _"next friday at 1700"_ and you get _"Wednesday, November 30, 3707 0:00:00 AM"_

So it fails a simple test (24hr clock). [0]

But it is a nice idea. You get real time feedback and so you can test if it works. Now would I use it for my blog engine? Maybe. Would I use the source? I looked at the code [1] and the structure looks good but I cannot read the code. It looks like it's all on one line and is not readable. What's the use if I can't enjoy reading it? It's free software, but I can't read it to fix it.

Dates and times are difficult. For a real alternative try ~ <http://datetime.perl.org/?Modules>

[0] <http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/2070923712/>

[1] <http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/2070134059/>

<comment><USER4> for non-minified source you probably need to checkout the source from their repository instead of downloading releases.

I don't think perl is an acceptable replacement for javascript in a web application. The idea here would be to date validation or manipulation without communicating to a server.

<comment><USER3> _"... for non-minified source you probably need to checkout the source from their repository instead of downloading releases ..._

Didn't try this, thanks. Why would the releases [0],[1] be minified? I would have thought the source would be untouched. Who cares if it's 2 X the current download? .... some time later: I've just tried _"svn checkout<http://datejs.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/> datejs-read-only"_ I've just checked out revision 93 and the source code for _datejs-read-only/src/core.js_ looks exactly like the shot of the source [2] for the _Datejs-all- Alpha/src/core.js_ [3] The svn release is the same.

Now I admit I could just as easily contact the author to get a non-minified version. Why do I have to (or need to) ask permission?

[0] The svn repository online <http://datejs.googlecode.com/svn/>

[1] Access to the source <http://code.google.com/p/datejs/source>

[2] <http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/2070134059/>

[3] <http://datejs.googlecode.com/files/Datejs-all-Alpha1.zip>

<comment><USER4> <http://datejs.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/> there are 2 versions of each file. The one named file-debug.js contains the non-minified version

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://abstractnonsense.com/datejs.png>

</comment><comment><USER6> I want to see this check the timezone of the client, and calculate other timezones (unix: PST: next tuesday + 5 years)?

</comment><comment><USER7> I typed "112807" (the most likely entry by my users) and it responded "No One's Home".

Handle the easy cases first; then get slick.

It should be able to handle any delimitter, even no delimitter at all.

<comment><USER6> well, other parts of the world standard to DDMMYY, so do you choose in ambiguous cases? not likely.

<comment><USER7> "so do you choose in ambiguous cases?"

Absolutely!

Find a way around the ambiguity. Either a preference record, local URL, "Did you mean?" response, etc. Any attempt at helping your user is better than "No One's Home".

<comment><USER6> Certainly, and also, at second thought, having separator characters doesn't make it any less ambiguous either (DD/MM/YYYY || MM/DD/YYYY).

When I said "you" I was speaking for the program, my opinion is that the client should choose as well.

<comment><USER7> This is an old problem, but always an interesting example. I like to think I can accept almost anything from my user in a date field and know what they meant. For September 2, 2007, they should be able to type any of the following: 090207, 0902, 9/2, 9/2/7, 92. My users have also appreciated things like "T" for today, "Y" for yesterday, and of course, "" for today. The year and month should always default to the current. I could go on and on...

When I saw this post, I got excited because I (like almost everyone else) have always struggled with this one. So I put in the simplest case and it couldn't handle it. Oh well.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I agree that you should be able to do all of those examples, but if I wanted 2/9/7 to mean the same thing; there would need to be some sort of addiditional indication that I go day month year, (september second is a good example, september 13th would have been unambigious)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Survival Tips for Women in Tech (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://women2.com/2018/09/18/survival-tips-for-women-in-tech/ <comment><USER2> >it's not me, it's them. >don't be afraid to quit.

And they don't know why they're avoided. Sad.</comment>


Ask HN: Jobs/skills required in big data - <AUTHOR>

Hello,
As someone who is interested with data, I am considering possibly diving into the world of 'big data'.
I'm looking to see if someone can direct/help me in figuring out the main skills required to get a job/create a company/work at startup in this area. <comment><USER2> Be a good developer and love working with data. Java is the most common language of the open source big data tools. If you're a statistician learn to code, and if you're a developer you should have a good data intuition.

You might work for a while with a consulting firm like Think Big Analytics to get some solid experience with the major tools.

At Quantcast, we process 10 petabytes a day but few people we hired had a big data background. We actually told the sourcers to stop using Hadoop as a search keyword because so many people add it to their resumes, whether or not they know how to work with data.

<comment><AUTHOR> interesting..thank you for your response

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would start by looking at job description in hot "big data" startup to see what skills and technology they list. That should get you started and avoid learning the wrong stuff.

Hadoop?

</comment><comment><USER4> You could do worse than beginning to learn Hadoop; but the Big Data world is more than just Hadoop. Some other technologies you might want to look into, depending on which aspect of this you are most interested in:

Statistics / Probability - the theory behind a lot of the analysis that goes on.

R - data analysis using R often goes hand in hand with the "big data" stuff.

Mahout - a machine learning library, built (mostly) on top of Hadoop.

Incanter - an 'R' like environment written in Clojure

Clojure itself, would not be a bad idea.

Learn about a couple of message passing / message queuing systems: 0MQ, HornetQ, Kafka, etc.

Streaming computation / real (or near) time map reduce: Storm, S4, etc.

On a semi-related note, log collection tools like Flume and Scribe.

A bit about RPC systems and data protocols like Thrift, Protocol Buffers, Etch, etc. wouldn't hurt.

Knowing about some distributed filesystems would be good.. HDFS, and maybe a touch of knowledge about some of the "old school" ones like PVFS.

On the subject of "old school" there is still a place for MPI and OpenMP for solving some types of problems on large clusters. Learning MPI is never a bad thing.

Learning about some modern nosql data stores like maybe HBase, Cassandra, MongoDB, etc. would be good.

Basic Linux sysadmin skills, of course.

Knowing about virtualization technologies: Xen, VirtualBox, KVM, whatever.

Automated deployment / configuration management / remote comand execution tools: Puppet, Chef, cfengine, Fabric, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> wow...thank you for that response.

I do have some stats background. Basically did Advanced Econometrics at University level and we used R as the program there. So I'm familiar on that end.

But looking to see if I can learn more about it, because I do enjoy analyzing data. But have relatively little coding, programming experience.

I searched into it today, still a little bit lost but have bit more information now. Trying to weight the pros and cons of diving into the field at this point in my life as I am not sure how long it would take to learn all of it to become good at it and get a good job/start a company.

<comment><USER4> Cool. To elaborate a bit more.. while "Big Data" is more than just Hadoop, I'd say that Hadoop is, for now, the Elephant In The Room (no pun intended), when it comes to Big Data processing. If we take that as a truism, I'd say:

If you want to get into the programming side of this stuff, you would be well served to spend some time learning Java. I know Java isn't considered the "coolest" language to know anymore, but if you want to work with Hadoop using the native APIs, well... it's written in Java. Now, that's not to say that you can't use Hadoop to distribute work in other languages (say, Python) but if you wanted to master Hadoop, some Java background would help, IMO.

Of course one nice thing about Hadoop isn't that you don't _have_ to write directly to the map/reduce API in Java. There are layers built on top of it, that abstract some of that away... you get things like Pig, Cascading, etc. that make Hadoop easier to use. But knowing some Java will help if you want to hack on Hadoop itself, or if you need to write directly to the API for some reason.

If you have a good stats background but not much programming, I'd recommend start learning Java + Hadoop, and then grow outwards from there, pulling in other technologies (see above) as you go.</comment></comment></comment>


What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered? - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-comment-in-source-code-you-have-ever-encountered <comment><USER2>
        // Yes, I know this is wrong.
        // It needs to match scm://.../other-system/.../other-lang.code</comment>


What I would do differently if I was learning to program again - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/8wr9xv/what_i_would_do_differently_if_i_was_learning_to/ <comment><USER4> I wouldn't. I'd learn a trade. Not to be facetious, I'm serious. I love programming. I never played video games, I spent my free time learning basic and then assembler in the late 80's. At the time, I was custom cabinet maker. I eventually become allergic to the 'smell' in oak, causing health problems. I had to give it up. I was busy 8 hours a day. I made decent money. Theirs a certain satisfaction at the end of the day and being able to point at something physical and say 'A good days work'. I began contract programming and eventually into full time employment.

Flash forward about 30 years. I'm still writing code professionally. I rarely write code for just enjoyment anymore. Those carpenters, cabinet makers, plumbers, electricians.. .trades people, make the same or more than I do. Their unionized. They can work practically anywhere and make the same amount of money. Not just in major cities. It doesn't see many radical shifts in technologies, unlike programming that is a life long learning because of advancing tech. Its VERY likely you will find your skill set obsolete without a real concerted effort of constantly upgrading. I wont even get into the culture which IMO is fostered by those writing the cheques and even your peers. Nor the moral issues that you will inevitably face - something few programmers ever talk about. It's a real kick in the happiness meter when something you write is designed solely to put many people out of work.

My opinion, my real opinion, is that if you find yourself writing code 'for fun' even if you don't know what your doing, pursue it. If your only in it for the career. Turn and run like hell. You'll be burnt out in 5 years and starting over.

<comment><USER5> The grass is always greener. I grew up in a working class neighborhood where the majority of my friends parents and high school friends later became involved in trades. My high school had a trades program for mechanics, HVAC, electricians, plumbing, and a beauty school.

The vast majority are NOT making six figures. The work is hard, has long hours, and is physically exhausting. My grandpa was a welder/machine shop owner my uncle is a electrician. They would trade anything for a cushy desk job with great pay, great benefits and easy workload. I've never worked past 4pm and have ample paid vacation time. They will never be able to say that. Google says that here in Austin TX, the average master plumber makes $25 an hr. HVAC is the highest at $44 an hour on average. And we are going through a construction boom, also don't forget that you have to factor working in 100 degree heat and 50% humidity 5 months out of the year.

Sure you can start a business and eventually have 5 workers and 3 trucks like my grandpa but then you become a entrepreneur and have to deal with the whole billing, scheduling, selling, headaches of running a small business.

I find a lot of tech people idolize the blue collar fields. It's damn hard work.

<comment><USER4> Just for a point of reference, I've been a Cabinet Maker, Welder, Powder Coater, Skid nailer, punch press operator and more. Believe me, I understand blue collar. I was in my 30's before I worked professionally as a programmer.

I currently live in a town that is resource based, mining and forestry. The epitome of blue-collar. Believe me, those guys make double what I do with bonuses and benefits. Even without, they make significantly more than I do. It isn't uncommon for a worker in this town to be able to retire by 45. They work until they are offered early retirement, or, have their pensions bought out. All this with very little education beyond 'common-core' in the mining sector. Ya, they bust their asses. But they're paid for it. So, ya, you raise valid points, but I'll stick with my first hand experience. Have you ever worked blue-collar or just second had info as you present.

<comment><USER6> > They can work practically anywhere and make the same amount of money

You are contradicting yourself by saying you're in a boom town and also they can move anywhere. (Can they move to Thailand? I can move to Thailand as a programmer). In a mine in Australia you can make 6 figures standing at a gate and letting trucks through, or higher to drive the truck, but it's specific.

I think their mobility would definitely be worse that a programmers.

> I'll stick with my first hand experience. Have you ever worked blue-collar > or just second had info as you present.

I don't think anecdotes are a good example here. Something like [https://data.gov.au/dataset/taxation- statistics-2013-14/reso...](https://data.gov.au/dataset/taxation- statistics-2013-14/resource/c506c052-be2f-4fba-8a65-90f9e60f7775) would be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd use an ide from day 1 instead of wasting time with vim.

I seriously dramatically slowed down my advancement as a programmer because I didn't use a full featured ide straight up.

Now I only use vi to edit files in /etc

<comment><USER8> I'd use Vim from day 1, instead of wasting time with several IDEs.

<comment><USER7> Why would anyone not want the power of an ide?

Is it a Unix tough guy thing where there's nothing that a GUI app does that you can't do better in a terminal? Or is it that you've never really spent a lot of time in a professional ide so when you argue against it, it's cause you don't know?

<comment><USER9> All my opinion, of course.

I learned Python much better because I did not use an IDE.

I've written Java and C# using IDEs. I barely remember anything about their standard libraries. Python, in comparison, I know like the back of my hand. Thanks to writing Python in vim, I had to reference the docs, and eventually memorized them. Like vim itself, it made for a steeper learning curve, but the productivity gains in the decade after have been well worth it. I've since done the same thing with Go.

And that's not even mentioning that vim _is_ an IDE - it's an extensible C IDE. Building with go-to-line errors? Yup. View definition? Yup. Syntax highlighting? Yup. The only thing it's missing is having the debugger built into it.

In the end, vim has the best features of an IDE without the bloat. It makes you use your brain when writing new code while giving you the ability to navigate your existing code with ease.

<comment><USER10> > I barely remember anything about their standard libraries.

If an IDE can abstract that memorization away from you, what's the problem? The benefit I provide as a software developer is to solve business problems and provide value to the people that use my product. Knowing the optional third parameter to a string method I use once a month off the top of my head really doesn't help me with that as long as looking it up isn't slowing me down.

<comment><USER11> I think the problem is always in the breadth of understanding. When you read documentation you discover more than exactly what you're looking for. When you tab complete something, it just tells you all the methods in the class that start with the letters you typed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd just buy the book on the subject and leverage their respective web docs instead of watching lengthy videos of people talking about the thing.

Looking back at it, I regret not investing in quality books rather than some online subscription.

<comment><USER13> I have generally always learned from books. Today's increased use of videos helps with high level explanations, but video can't keep up with changes as quickly as text can.

<comment><USER14> videos where I can watch the developer coding are the best for my style of learning. really sticks seeing it executed rather than showing some powerpoint slides of high level diagrams and code snippets.

<comment><USER13> I prefer a combination of videos and books. It doesn't seem realistic with how content is packaged and delivered that one or the other entirely can work on their own.

I'm not sure where the idea of powerpoints came from. Well written books generally read like videos. Books have the added benefit that it's easier to jump around and drill down right to what you are looking for, something that's generally harder to hop around on the timeline of a video.

Still, Videos are excellent to watch for many things.

Updating videos though is tough, and it can cause videos to not be as up to date and indepth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't code anymore (I'm more of a pointy-haired lower boss)...but what i wish i could go back in time and change around this is to have focused - <USER2> mean really, really focused - on 2 or 3 different programming languages only. Instead, what I've done over the years - again, when I coded as a dayjob - <USER3> to go shallow on far too many different languages (and ecosystems). I don't think it was me just chasing the "new thing" for the popularity of it. I genuinely was curious about, and wanted to learn "the new thing". The problem - as is often the case with tech - is that there's just too many "new things" coming out all the time...and one just can't keep up. So, sure, i feel like somewhat a jack-of-all-trades (and all my employers have benefited from it), but in more ways than i would like, i lack the depth - and possibly enjoyment/fulfillment - of being really awesome at one or very few things. That old adage about picking one (or a very, very few) thing(s) is no joke; and i see its wisdom only now (after working for 22 years professionally). If i could travel back in time (relative to programming), I'd tell my younger self 3 things:

1) Focus on depth of a couple of things, and never mind breadth.

2) As soon as possible - either before graduating college, or right after, etc. - work for yourself and not The Man. whether going into business as a solopreneur, or partnering with a few people - doesn't matter. Mistakes will be made, but you will feel more in control of any/all outcomes - good or bad.

3) Be generous for experiences, but be a cheap bastard when buying actual/material "things". Save shit tons of money.

<comment><USER12> > _...either before graduating college, or right after, etc. - work for > yourself and not The Man..._

Why do you think that would an appropriate moment to do so ?

<comment><USER15> Because the early complacency of working for someone else doesn't get a chance to set in. Also, because if things don't work out with some initiative, you can bounce back from a setback much easier/quicker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I dont really agree with do not go to bootcamp advice. I think that structured supervised learning it can be very useful for those who are starting from very little knowledge. Knowing what is worth cloning/learning and what exactly to do with that clone or what exactly to learn is half the struggle for those who dont know much but have aptitude. Moreover, deadlines add motivation and prevent freeze from the thing not being perfect enough yet. Some bootcamps seemed to really push people to learn maximum during short time, so if it is not too expensive (money matters) then it might be really effective way to start.

I was able to come up with realistic own projects only after learning in sort of similar way - through structured organizations and from friends advice. Not everyone has friend advice. And having actual task someone will check adds motivation to finish it - finishing those own assigned projects that you are pretty positive are no useful to anyone is demotivating.

</comment><comment><USER17> The number one thing I see in my students (I teach Scala, usually to already experienced developers) is they don't actively engage with the material. Write notes, or code up short examples, or draw pictures, or whatever works for you to actively think about what is being taught. This corresponds to "Write down what you learn" and "Build shitty stuff that works" in the linked article.

Bike shedding IDE or editors is a game everyone can play (use Spacemacs) but as long as the tools don't get in the way it's not very important at the start.

<comment><USER18> > they don't actively engage with the material. Write notes, or code up short > examples, or draw pictures,

Do you lecture? I'm an intense scribbler of notes during lectures, but I don't (wouldn't) code up examples during a lecture, because it would get in the way of my listening.

I guess I'm asking: what is your knowledge delivery system format? "Actively engaged" will take different forms depending on the delivery system...

<comment><USER17> It varies. Several years ago it was lectures interspersed with exercises. Now we know a lot more about pedagogy we use many tricks: we live code, we get students to vote on questions, we have them work in teams and teach each other, etc. Live coding is a good time to code along.

I agree that what actively engaged means will differ depending on student and context.

<comment><USER18> Interesting.

If I had to work with a pair or a team, as an introvert, I would find myself subtly withdrawing from active participation. I like live-coding, and I like active-listening (the latter is absorbing, hoping to understand and the former is testing/verifying/correcting/practicing your understanding, but I like absorbing or total-immersion personal practice. Group exercises get in the way of that (for me - again - I'm probably weird).

So, (and I'm thinking about this as I type), I think that I am active, but in my own particular ways. Because I grew up in odd remote/rural circumstances, maybe these habits were habituated because I did not get socialized with normal folk well until my mid-to-late- teens. But, maybe it's genetic? I notice one of my two sons has the same tendencies, and he's lived in an urban/public environment his whole life.

What I'm pondering is (beyond the scope of your Scala classes), is whether there are ways to actively engage multiple "types" of people? I'm not just talking about what they call "visual learners" vs "audio learners" (which has largely been debunked?), but ... IDK. I'm trying to assemble a platform for programs that get people to/through their GED, as various states put work requirements on government benefit recipients, and a major hiring block is simply not having a high-school degree. I'd like to make everything as warm and fuzzy and low-friction for everyone as I can - but I don't know how - because (obviously) not everyone is me! :-)

<comment><USER17> Yes, learning styles have been debunked.

The group work falls under the general rubric of "active learning". It's more structured and shorter (20 mins maybe) than the kind of project I was exposed to at school and University (which might have been 6 weeks long, for example.)

I can't comment on your particular situation, as I don't know enough context, but in general there is an incredible amount of research on effective teaching methods. I've only started to get into the field in the last few years and I'm far from an expert. Nonetheless, some suggestions: there will be a lot of topic specific research you should probably look at. In addition there is general research on pedagogy. A good starting point is probably [https://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences- effec...](https://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes- learning-achievement/) This shows: different teaching techniques can have huge effects on outcomes, and there are a lot of different effective techniques you can incorporate. There is some nuance in the techniques so it's worth reading deeper on particular topics (and reading the dissenting opinions!)

<comment><USER18> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I had to do it again? Avoid going down the operations path. Not because the knowledge wasn't valuable, but I always enjoyed working on bigger programming projects more than tinkering with other people's big programming projects (Linux, Ansible, AWS, Cisco, etc). Having operations on my resume, however, pigeon-holed me into a particular role professionally.

Of course, that's not of much use for anyone else. In fact, I'd recommend getting operations experience to more programmers, if only because we always need more people. But I also understand why more people don't aim to get operations experience.

</comment><comment><USER19> I learned to program on my own then studied EE and hard sciences in school. Figured I already knew everything about programming. Hubris of my youth. I'd have taken more CS courses in college.

</comment><comment><USER20> Don't be a language snob. I wish I would have learned more languages sooner.</comment>


How to build a racing game - <AUTHOR> http://codeincomplete.com/posts/2012/6/22/javascript_racer/

<comment><USER2> Really cool related project: A re-implementation of the original OutRun engine in C++.

<http://reassembler.blogspot.com/>

[http://reassembler.blogspot.co.uk/p/cannonball-open- source-o...](http://reassembler.blogspot.co.uk/p/cannonball-open-source- outrun-engine.html)

<https://github.com/djyt/cannonball>

</comment><comment><USER3> He says it's a simple demo and not a proper game but I found it a lot of fun!

<comment><USER4> Me too, a lot of people made a lot of money in the 80's by doing ports to home computers that weren't this good.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, programming games like this on an 80's computer would be much harder since you couldn't just do everything in a scripting language and not have to worry about CPU cycles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As the article mentions, there are very few tutorials on racing games on the web especially ones that use real 3D geometry calculations and not tricks like Mode 7.

A big thanks to the author for the tutorial and an extremely enjoyable racing game on the browser!

</comment><comment><USER7> Ultraspeed version settings: [http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/5382/080a8b4d79fa4842b495...](http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/5382/080a8b4d79fa4842b4952ed.png)

This game is 100x more fun to play than most of today's racing games...

</comment><comment><USER5> Two things that would improve it immensely.

1) Gamepad support , playing arcade style games on a keyboard is a second class experience at best.

2) Fullscreen mode.

Brings back memories of playing old DOS driving games like the Lotus series.

</comment><comment><USER8> This brought back old memories.

Back then I thought those games were so realistic. Imagine if there was Live for Speed back then, it would've blown my mind.

Very nice level of polish.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wish html5 games would at least be considerate of mobile devices. Some kind of virtual input at least.

I can't be the only person using their internet on a phone.

<comment><USER10> You know this is like a tutorial/demo right?

<comment><USER9> I'd consider this a pretty high priority. Even for a demo.

<comment><USER11> Not... really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reduce road width to get > 60 fps.</comment>


Focus for Startup Ideas: White House Grand Challenge Request for Information - <AUTHOR> http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/grand-challenges-request-information

<comment><USER2> Good resource sink for startup talent.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Responses to this RFI should be submitted by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on April 15, 2010_

Tax day. Hilarious!@ Not only do they want to take 50% of our hard earned dollars, they want to take our knowledge for free!

Here's an idea, stop wasting our brainwaves with your ridiculous tax forms.

<comment><USER4> Because no one ever shares knowledge for free? I'm glad pg and every other successful person in the world didn't take that point of view.

And when was the last time anyone in the US paid 50% of income in taxes? The highest marginal income tax rate is 35%; FICA (SS/Medicare) is on top of that, but only income up to a certain amount is subject to FICA.

<comment><USER3> My micro economics teacher said that nearly everyone pays about 50% of their income in taxes, either through property taxes, sales taxes, vehicle taxes, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heck, I can do one of those.</comment>


Rocket-powered single-seat helicopter emits only water - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/08/one-man-rocket-powered-helicopter-emits-only-water/

<comment><USER2> Actually, $44/hour isn't so expensive - it costs ~$120/hr to rent a Cessna 172. Granted the $44/hour doesn't include the cost to actually purchase and maintain the thing, but what a small price to pay for your own personal helicopter :-D</comment>


Tesla Q2 2019 Vehicle Production and Deliveries - <AUTHOR> https://ir.tesla.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tesla-q2-2019-vehicle-production-deliveries <comment><AUTHOR> * Tesla delivered record 95,200 vehicles in the second quarter, vs. 91,000 expected

* "Orders generated during the quarter exceeded our deliveries, thus we are entering Q3 with an increase in our order backlog. We believe we are well positioned to continue growing total production and deliveries in Q3."

                  Production Deliveries
      Model S/X   14,517     17,650
      Model 3     72,531     77,550
      Total       87,048     95,200

<comment><USER2> Can't wait to see how much money they made!</comment></comment>


Chromebook Pixel review - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/25/4023830/google-chromebook-pixel-review

<comment><USER3> Reviewers tend to dwell on the pixel density without mentioning the other things I want to know about the display: the color gamut, contrast, color accuracy, etc. This article mentions that the screen is "accurate," but it's a mystery what they mean by that or why they think so. One usually needs to wait for measurements reported in anandtech.com before one knows how a display actually performs.

</comment><comment><USER4> The hardware is so good in this case, I think it's far more useful to install ubuntu or windows 8 on this computer instead.

I'm not surprised that video playback is slow since native access to file is probably not perfected in the website environment that Chrome OS probably uses.

</comment><comment><USER5> This notebook will feature a lot in stock photography and advertising - <USER2> more need to photoshop out the apple logo on the notebook lid.</comment>


Travis-Pls: Travis Builds That Don't Timeout - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/naftulikay/travis-pls <comment><USER2> Why does this exist? Great, let's get some stuck builds going on a great platform like Travis _instead_ of fixing your awful build process.

No, stop, and get this garbage out of here.

<comment><USER3> The use case mentioned in the readme seems perfectly reasonable and there is little that you can do to fix it. AMI building at AWS just takes time. The only party that could reasonably fix it is amazon. Travis provides the capability to extend build times as well but the function provided makes it hard to tell if the build process is actually running - so this seems like an improvement.

However, never timing out stuck builds clearly is an issue, so I filed a ticket for it.

<comment><USER4> Ami building produces output.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why so mean? [https://github.com/naftulikay/travis- pls/pull/2](https://github.com/naftulikay/travis-pls/pull/2)

</comment><comment><USER6> so your flipping off the company that is testing opensource projects for free because your build process is wonky?

</comment><comment><USER7> So, we're circumventing tools that kill possible stuck jobs now? That doesn't seem like it'll play out well with Travis CI...

<comment><USER8> Travis CI themselves offer a workaround for their own timeout in the form of travis_wait. This seems to be a slightly different alternative workaround that better meets the authors' needs.

<comment><USER9> >This seems to be a slightly different alternative workaround that better meets the authors' needs

You can take an educated guess though that the fact that travis_wait doesn't keep streaming the output is probably deliberate.

I've been on the other end of the stick often enough. You put in place mechanisms that are designed to protect your system from over-burdensome use and gently prod people towards better ways of using it. Most people take a hint and solve the underlying problem, but some people instead choose to dodgily bypass the protective measures in front of your free system.

Inevitably, you have to send them a mail saying "I can see you on the graphs, stop what you're doing". They try to take it as an opportunity to "open a dialogue" about the problem, and then get in a huff when you respond with "I don't care right now, I've already asked you nicely once, you have one hour to stop using 10% of all our memory, and then you're getting perma-banned".

Anyone with half a brain can take a guess that the travis_wait behavior is probably a defense against really verbose and long builds gumming up their system with millions of lines of stdout that no one cares about. Having the need to bypass it suggests you're operating in a fashion where you really ought to be running your own build system (or breaking up your build process into a clean, sectioned pipeline with parallel test execution), rather than using shared resources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hear the frustration, but what about optimizing the build? Are there pieces that can be cached? What's the longest running part and why?

</comment><comment><USER11> I use this script:

      #!/bin/bash
      set -eu

      (while sleep 60; do echo Do not kill me yet!; done) &
      "$@"

</comment><comment><USER12> How about fixing your own build instead of exploiting a service that's doing your building and testing for you for FREE.

</comment><comment><USER13> The use case mentioned in the README around Packer and building AMIs seems very valid to me. If Travis is fine with longer builds (they provide a way to avoid timeout) I don't see why everyone is pouring hate on this.

<comment><USER14> IMO, the idea of printing something to STDOUT every 9 minutes (or 5 minutes, or 1 minute, or whatever) is totally fine, and maybe this will even be helpful to someone.

There's no need to be a dick about it though, which seems to be the centerpiece of this</comment></comment>


What Are Owl Pellets? – Learn by Watching and Doing - <AUTHOR> http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2016/12/what-are-owl-pellets-learn-by-watching.html#.WEAv16J963U <comment><USER2> Wow, I remember pulling a couple of these apart in third grade or thereabouts. Trying to figure out if some of the contents belonged to a fieldmouse or a vole or a chipmunk.</comment>


Now marketers can actually read your photos on Instagram and Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/40419219/now-marketers-can-actually-read-your-photos-on-instagram-and-facebook <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

Karan Walia, Co-founder & CEO of Cluep here. Let me know if you have any questions!?</comment>