A Cyberpunk Manifesto – Revised - <AUTHOR> https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk-fashion-lifestyle/a-cyberpunk-manifesto-revised/ <comment><USER2> I used to have a print-out of this on my bedroom wall as a teenager, next to the Hacker Manifesto.

Looking back at this as an adult, having not read it for many year, I'm shocked at how antisocial it is. Did I really believe this stuff?

I'm guessing it was a way for an intelligent, yet powerless, kid to gain some sense of control -- identifying strongly with my skills to feel superior to the society that denied me the freedoms I desired.

Now, as an adult member of society, I'm acutely aware how much I depend on the established systems for my security and well-being. Young people shouldn't feel the need to withdraw and create their own subcultures to gain a sense of belonging or security. We should be incorporating them into society, giving them a sense of purpose and belonging, and equipping them to make meaningful contributions.

Any thoughts how we can achieve that?

<comment><USER3> >I'm shocked at how antisocial it is. Did I really believe this stuff?

I did. And I remember how much. Today I think being thrown wide and clear of "the mainstream" by my teenaged rebellion was valuable. It gave me a great view from the outside so that as I began my journey back i could better find my place in it.

What I saw that most changed my mind? I was expecting a world of nefarious villains, but what I found was nothing but a bunch of weak anit-patterns and emergent behaviours. The world didn't suck because illuminati super-villains were oppressing the sheeple, it sucked for the same reason parks get trashed. Garbage accumulates and nobody bothers to pick it up.

<comment><USER4> _> The world didn't suck because illuminati super-villains were oppressing the sheeple, it sucked for the same reason parks get trashed. Garbage accumulates and nobody bothers to pick it up._

Excellently phrased. And paradoxically, harder to fix.

Everyone is willing to play at being the hero, but no one wants to pick up garbage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a very strange feeling to see that cyberpunk has become irrelevant today, while still being right on some judgments. Corporations are bigger than ever, the Net has become vital resource for billions of people, climate is changing and air became unbreathable in many giant megalopolises but... it's not a dystopia, it's just the future that came and felt different from what we had expected, a sort of normality that is not worse than anything in the history before. Probably, the reason is that we've got 404 in our search of the ultimate evil to oppose to. There's no single ultimate evil to resist, there are many smaller ones and many come from the resistance itself, because there's no ultimate truth to defend. The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it.

<comment><USER6> >The future has come and there's no cyberpunk in it.

It's likely that the last Presidential election was decided, in no small part, by the efforts of a neo-anarchist site publishing classified information and a group of meme obsessed netizens attempting to disrupt and undermine the establishment. That seems pretty cyberpunk to me.

<comment><USER7> My favorite was when this neoanarchist site published a video of the military killing people, and the credit card companies refused to continue to serve them. And then an amorphous non-organization known as "Anonymous" brought down the credit card companies' websites. Meanwhile the neoanarchists switched to a newly emerging "crypto-currency" created by a shadowy entity known only as "Satoshi Nakamoto".

<comment><USER8> and said amorphous non-organisation also arose from a neo-anarchist online collective. And the digital crypto-currency was used to buy drugs and other contraband from digital bazaars hidden in the "deep web".

It's quite funny when you think about it, cyberpunk fiction predicted many of the most recent technology intrigue stories/events.

<comment><USER6> >It's quite funny when you think about it, cyberpunk fiction predicted many of the most recent technology intrigue stories/events.

That's not entirely coincidental, considering how influential cyberpunk was during the nascent days of the internet. We have it to thank for the term "cyberspace" after all, and like the technology in Star Trek, a lot of people who grew up with it have been trying to "make it real" with limited success.

Still can't store a human consciousness on a tape drive, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > 5\. Even in the most developed and 'democratic' countries, the System > imposes misinformation. Even in the countries that pretend to be the cradle > of free speech, misinformation is the System's primary weapon. A weapon they > use very well.

I wonder how that would be revisited today. Now misinformation comes from all corners, many factions all vying to misinform their way into being "the system".

The idea that some cyberpunk underground stands in resistance to this "system" is frankly hopeless. Do you want 9-11 truthers and Obama birthers? That's how you get them. Do you want antivaxers and chemtrails believers? Then let them think that they have a secret truth. Do you want the "alt-right" ? This is where it grew.

<comment><USER10> It was ever thus. The rate's increased, for which we have the Internet to thank, but that's the only change, and one not of kind but of degree. Truth and lies compete, and sometimes lies win out. Would you rather there be only pravda?

<comment><USER11> Indeed. You can't know what's truly true ( _istina_ ) without some crucible in which free ideas flow, to enable the discourse which moves toward that truth. Free speech is quintessential to escaping the _pravda_ , truthiness-es and alt-facts fed to us. The side effect is that some alt-facts find a safe space to thrive and multiply. I don't think this can be avoided, I think it ultimately is a feature of nature.

To use a machine learning analogy, all the _pravda_ out there - everyone's relative truths - is your training set. If you limit your training set, you lose some ability to generalize to the real world.

<comment><USER9> > discourse which moves toward that truth

Can you demonstrate that the discourse does move towards truth?

> all the pravda out there - everyone's relative truths -

"relative truth", eh? Is vaccine denial is relative truth? How about "Sandy hook was staged?" how about "Obama is a foreign muslim, and he founded ISIS" ?

I know that these beliefs come from a place of ignorance, anger and fear, but weaponising ignorance and fear is not a "discourse which moves toward that truth" and these memes are not a "relative truth", they are a near totality of the opposite. And yet they affect the fate of nations.

I certainly don't have answers, but I know that you first have to ask the right questions, and that this manifesto no longer does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow I'm from Bulgaria and didn't know this existed. Disinformation accomplished.

</comment><comment><USER13> The original has a rhythm, it reads like a poem. Shouldn't the corrections have tried to maintain that?

This version is awkward to read and that draws attention to how silly some of its statements are. Like that you might just want to take a little walk sometimes is not a crucial component of the manifesto, it just helped that paragraph flow before.

</comment><comment><USER14> Revised to fix translation errors, rather than revised for the current political climate. I'd have preferred the latter.

<comment><USER15> What has really changed, though?

> 1\. The Society surrounding us is clogged with conservancy, pulling > everything and everybody to itself, while it sinks slowly into the quicksand > of time.

> 3\. The System must impose its truth upon us so that it can rule. The > government needs us to follow it blindly. For this reason, we live in an > informational eclipse. When people can only acquire information from the > government, they cannot distinguish right from the wrong. So the lie becomes > a truth – truth, fundamental to everything else. Thus, leaders control with > lies and ordinary people have no notion of what is true and follow the > government blindly, trusting it.

> 12\. Those who control the Net, control the information.

These seem as relevant today as they were yesterday. And it's quite likely they will still be relevant tomorrow; human nature is slow to change.

<comment><USER9> > When people can only acquire information from the government, they cannot > distinguish right from the wrong. So the lie becomes a truth

Is that really as relevant today as it was yesterday? It seems to me now far more complex and entangled than the monolithic "resist the government system" set out:

In the US, rather than the government controlling the truth, a certain clique of fringe peddlers of a distorted narrative - the likes of Breitbart and Infowars, have done so well as to attempt a hostile takeover of government, _and so far are succeeding_. Is the name "Infowars" not a self-conscious echo of the sentiment that you quote above? But the content is poisoned fruit.

In the UK, the Murdoch press drives government policy, not vice versa. And has for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> HN-dotted already. Google cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DmPqry...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:DmPqryjtK_oJ:https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk- fashion-lifestyle/a-cyberpunk-manifesto-revised/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)

<comment><USER17> TIA is a more socially useful feed.

[https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.neondystopia.com/c...](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.neondystopia.com/cyberpunk- fashion-lifestyle/a-cyberpunk-manifesto-revised/)

Archive.is / Archive.fo another:

[https://archive.fo/3GFSF](https://archive.fo/3GFSF)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> [meta] Fantastic discussion</comment>


The Future of Privacy: How Privacy Norms Can Inform Regulation - <AUTHOR> http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/PrivacyGenerations.html

<comment><USER2> Excellent discussion. Here are danah's recommendations to the attendees (technologists, entrepreneurs, policy makers):

1) Provide tools that allow people to make wise decisions; 2) Offer control and transparency around data and information flows; 3) Emphasize opt-in over opt-out models; 4) Focus on curtailing usage, not collection.</comment>


Sexy Interactive iPhone 5S & iOS7 Concept made in css and no images - <AUTHOR> http://recombu.com/mobile/interactive/iphone-5s-ios7-concept

<comment><USER2> Thanks for featuring this. Would be great to hear what everyone thinks!</comment>


Show HN: Hacking an ultrasound probe with a Raspberry Pi and low-cost hardware - <AUTHOR> https://kelu124.gitbooks.io/echomods/content/RPI.html <comment><USER2> Very cool. There was something on HN about a year ago about why ultrasound machines are so expensive. This might provide some background on why something low cost makes sense.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230741](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230741)

<comment><AUTHOR> Before trolling a bit, I remember the main costs don't come from hardware (though it definitely costs something) - rather for r&d, patents, and most of all proper certification, since, in the end, it's a matter of life and death. That being said, this experiment is mostly a dev kit to help curious tinkerers explore the topic :)

<comment><USER3> Am I allowed to built an ultrasonic probe the way I want if I don't use it on anybody else but me ?

<comment><USER4> Yes. Just come up with a non-medical/safety use for it and you are good. Check your car's engine to see if it will last through the next race - a very useful thing to do and nobody will think twice. Check a boiler to be sure it won't explode - you better get this right or people will die so don't talk about potential uses here.

<comment><USER3> Yes, more and more (since I started reusing old devices), I wished I could inspect things non invasively. To find locking or friction points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really enjoying this little bubble of Raspberry Pi content; it's close to my heart. Keep it up HN!

</comment><comment><USER6> I have no idea how hackernews always reads my mind about this kind of things but I started thinking about this topic due to a personal interest a few days ago.

And my question is. Can the ultrasound probe be made of off-the shelf parts. I think I understand why it's not possible with electromagnetic parts alone (kind of a speaker) they just can't vibrate fast enough to reach the Mhz frequency range.

But would it be possible to use a regular crystal oscillator they should be cheap, can easily be found for Mhz frequencies and are basically the same technology as the PZTs used in ultrasound probes. Just remove the casing and excite them, would that work?

<comment><USER7> I'd been thinking about this technology recently as well, but hadn't gotten any further than perusing data sheets a little.

My impression is that quartz crystals as found in oscillators are so brittle that it's hard to use them for things like this; I guess PZT (lead zirconium titanate) is more robust somehow? There are also polymer-based piezo materials, like PVDF.

<comment><USER8> Another potential issue is that ultrasound machines send out an impulse instead of a single frequency. So maybe the quartz crystal oscillators aren't good at producing a short high-bandwidth signal?

That being said, there's a type of radar system called "stepped frequency continuous wave" radar that uses a bunch of single frequency transmissions instead of an impulse transmission. The basic idea is that instead of using a high-bandwidth transceiver to send and receive the impulse, you can use a low- bandwidth transceiver to send and receive tones, and then hop this transceiver over the large bandwidth to get a high-resolution image (the tradeoff being that it takes longer to acquire an image). Since ultrasound is basically radar, I'd imagine this technique could be used for ultrasound too.

<comment><USER6> But wouldn't a lower frequency be at the cost of spatial resolution due to the longer wavelength?

<comment><USER8> The spatial resolution depends on the bandwidth of your transmission. An infinite-bandwidth signal is a delta in time, and gives infinite precision. Any finite bandwidth impulse will be a sinc in time, with temporal width proportional to the inverse of the bandwidth. So a higher bandwidth impulse will be shorter in time, which would give better temporal resolution.

Typical radar works by sending and receiving a high-bandwidth impulse, which requires high-bandwidth transceivers. Let's say that transmission occupies frequencies between f0 and f1. SFCW radar works by sending a bunch of individual low-bandwidth transmissions between f0 and f1. So each transmission is small, but together they occupy the same f0 to f1 bandwidth. Assuming the environment didn't change in the time it took to send all of those low- bandwidth transmissions, you've effectively simulated a high-bandwidth impulse using a bunch of low-bandwidth impulses. So the spatial resolution will be the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Could one use this as a sense-prothesis (without a motor)?

How small can the probe head get? Can I tape it to my ringfinger? Any health hazzards?

My first try would be taping it to my finger and listening to the signals enveloped mapped to my audible range.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could be indeed! Augmented sensing, there's definitely something one can do. A ping (radar-like) every 5s, and in time you listen to echoes. The more intense, the higher the frequency. Ping me through the contact in the doc if you're keen on discussing about this!

<comment><USER9> Actually I fear 5s is far too slow to develop a sense-like feel for it :/

But thank you for the offer to discuss more :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow that's really awesome, I'm just skimming the site at the moment, are you planning on selling the pulser boards etc. out of interest, if so roughly how much do they cost?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Theres a link for tindie in the doc. It's quote expensive, high voltage being the main reason, but I'm planning on reducing the costs and have a cheaper on-board extension for the pi once this hardware stabilizes

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's tough to get right with discrete components.

As a side note, does anyone reading this have MAX2082EVKIT# lying around in a trash pile somewhere? I'm looking for one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me know if you can spare one too ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> could rtl-sdrs and rpitx be used at all?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's been a question I'd love to be able to answer to!</comment></comment>


Humans continue to evolve - <AUTHOR> http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/55844/

<comment><USER2> The implications of this, is that we are selecting for early births, with no regard at all to how long we will live.

Normally long life means you can take care of the offspring, but since offspring will survive even if you don't, this aspect is not selected for.

The implications of this are not good, because we are selecting for the traits least desirable in modern society.

People who delay births, and thereby demonstrate health later in life have far fewer children than those who give birth early.

Additionally there is an unfortunate trend for people to delay children until their "career" is settled. Which means that people with simple careers (manual labor and the like) have far more children than those who's careers take longer (and are presumably more intelligent), and it's those more complex jobs that are in demand right now.

<comment><USER3> There has been a fair amount of research that suggests over some point having more money results in more kids. There seems to be a dip when you have some but not enough with spikes at low and high levels of income.

An interesting take on this: [http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?...](http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14164483)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Ever since Charles Darwin, a prevailing attitude among medical practitioners has been that evolution does not operate in humans because modern medicine and culture have greatly leveled the playing field by homogenizing survival rates."

I call baloney on this. Where's the citation of anyone saying that?

</comment><comment><USER5> The ongoing financial meltdown (not to mention Warming) argues against that assertion.

Our _rationalization_ skills are evolving though. We now know _many_ more people to point our fingers at.</comment>


Nearly Half of All College Grades Are A's - <AUTHOR> http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700151924/Nearly-half-of-college-grades-are-As-study-finds.html <comment><USER2> Yup. Faculty don't like you pointing this out and actually complain loudly to the Provost level administration at a University when it is done so. Here's what happened to me a few years ago:

I created a web app at the request of one of the schools & deans at the University I work for. (I do stats/database reporting full time.) It was wildly popular with students for enrollment purposes. After a few days it got shut down by a direct Provost order. The faculty did not like it being so easy to compare their grades with their colleagues on "identical classes" (large foundational courses math and science) and worried that it would damage departmental and eventually school reputation.

Personally I thought it was bullshit to take down (not only because I worked so hard on it and it was fuckin cool.) The data is released to companies (by way of an Open Records Request) that make money by selling "pick the best professor for this class" rankings to naive students.

Our research department devoted resources to making the application because we thought making the data easy to use and public would in fact CORRECT for grade inflation over time. Basically, I feel that the old way has to die off before any changes will be made and there's some pretty big changes looming for higher ed in the future.

<comment><USER3> If you're just storing non-personal statistics on grades for courses of professors, how can they actually shut you down? I know there are lots of "Professor Review" sites out there, so is it just the grades aspect? I don't remember signing anything at my college that says I can't give out grade info, but I may be mistaken.

<comment><USER4> > If you're just storing non-personal statistics on grades for courses of > professors, how can they actually shut you down?

"I created a web app at the request of one of the schools & deans at the University I work for."

The provost has some authority over the deans and schools. Since the application is "owned" by his employer....

Yes, maybe he could continue it "on the side" but he may want to stay employed and if he got the grade information from the school, they can probably shut that down

<comment><USER2> Yeah, University employees are contractually held to a non-compete agreement which would prolly break down here when brought to general counsel.

The grade distribution information is not considered restricted under any FERPA or other policy, but it is considered 'sensitive' and requires an external party to jump through quite a few legal hoops to access.

Edit: I serve at the behest of the Provost. So that was basically the boss/boss saying "we made a mistake, please take that down."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I attended university in the early 90s, and majored in Computer Science. On a lark, I took a class on Native American Literature (just on the name alone, I thought it would have been more Native American lore; it turned out to be contemporary fiction written by Native Americans). The entire grade was based on one mid-term and one final. The mid-term I failed. When it came time for the final, I realized there was no way I could even answer the single question and simply walked out of the class.

I fully expected an F for that class, but I ended up with a C, which surprised the hell out of me.

I was recently talking with a friend (a former English instructor for a well known university in the United States) about this, and he said I either received a "Gentleman's C" or (more likely) the instructor simply thought he lost my paper and erred on the side of grade inflation.

<comment><USER6> leme guess, UC Santa Cruz? ;)

<comment><USER7> Wow, does Santa Cruz really have that bad a rap?

It likely wasn't, by the way- the school of engineering at Santa Cruz wasn't founded until 1997.

<comment><USER6> Grad quality is more consistent elsewhere, like Cal, than at USCS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The NYT article on the same topic has nice graphs that show the change in grade distribution since the 1940's and the shift in the bell curve:

[http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history- of-...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-of-college- grade-inflation/)

And, Walter Russel Mead of The American Interest offers a nice summary: _"43 percent of all grades given in American colleges are A's. Social science grades are higher than grades in science and math. Humanities grades are higher still. Grades in private colleges are higher than grades at public universities. Northern schools give A's more freely than southern ones, and prestigious colleges have flabbier standards than their less fashionable rivals."_

<comment><USER9> That's a very disturbing chart. Even if the course materials are just as hard as before, which I doubt, as a student you can't know whether you actually comprehend them as well as you need to. By extension, employers can no longer rely on a degree as a token of acquired knowledge or work ethic.

<comment><USER10> Yet tuition prices consistently increase.

Why is it costing more to impart less knowledge?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In Norway, we have the opposite problem: Nearly half of the grades in some subjects at NTNU are Fs, and 40% of all students get an F _every year_. The institute for IT, maths and electronics implicitly says that "a high failure rate means the standard is high", and they ignore feedback and complaints about professors.

Luckily (if I should put it like that), the grades themselves are usually fair. It's just that some subjects require too much work to be considered as one subject, which seems to be the university's intentions.

<comment><USER12> This is similar in Germany. Although I always had the it was necessary to remove a certain percentage from students with weed-out courses as entry to Maths, CS and Engineering is mostly free.

But as soon as you are through the weed-out stage (or undergrad) A or B is pretty much the only grade you can get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> When I was in college I had a professor offer to not put a grade on any of our work. I took him up on it and it was one of the best classes I ever had. I was so much more focused on the feedback rather than the score. I wish more college classes were like that.

<comment><USER10> There are acutally entire colleges like that...

<http://www.ncf.edu/>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_College_of_Florida#Distingu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_College_of_Florida#Distinguishing_academic_features)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wish it was at least a little more standardized across schools and majors. A little variance is fine but i went to a school where evreryone,not just me, had to study into the night to maintain barely passing grades in any technical subject while kids at other schools and "easier" majors maintained 3.5+ without cracking open a book.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is a good trend. The grade is binary (A or not A). It's not possible to evaluate a class of 100 students with 90% of whom you've never spoken.

<comment><USER16> I always felt it was a good idea to make sure my teacher knew my name after the first couple sessions. Get to know your teachers everyone, they are cool and they want to see you succeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For the curious, I can tell you this is certainly not a global effect. At the UK university I work at, we mark work out of 20, and only a small proportion of students get above 17 (considered excellent, probably equivalent to A).

<comment><USER18> I attended the International School of Brussels for my high school education, and most teachers were from the UK. I can vouch for the difference in culture regarding grades. I once had an English teacher tell me I should be "leading the class" since she had given me an A- the semester before. Such an attitude was prevalent among all my teachers, and I felt it really damaged my college application to American schools. I applied to stanford and of the 4500 early applicants, 2500 had a 4.0 GPA (perfect). Not one student at my school had an unweighted 4.0. I had a measly 3.4.

Other than the comparative nature of GPAs in college applications, I thought it was a great approach. The only class I was able to coast through was Math, but I was one of the few who could do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have no data to back this up but anecdotally I once had a professor explain how some, if not most, professors would adjust their grading to get to a specific average for exams and essays.

However we use numbers (1 till 10, 10 being best) here and from my understanding they would try to average it around 7.5. Having all your grades an 8 (or higher) translates to graduating cum laude, basically turning cum laude into 'just above average'.

I assume this is due to management tactics that involve investigating classes that deviate from grade averages rather than trying to judge based on course quality.

<comment><USER20> How cum laude is awarded differs somewhat between universities, but the University of Maryland, for one, does not confer latin honors to any student below the 10th percentile in their college. Here are the GPA requirements for this past semester for the college of engineering:

      GPA Ranges for Latin Honors: May 2011

      Summa:            4.000 - 3.976
      Magna:             3.975 - 3.912
      Cum Laude:      3.911 - 3.825

This is still well above 'just above average.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> None of this is surprising given only straight-A students get into college, and only straight-A college students get into graduate school. The days of the "gentleman's C" have long past.

</comment><comment><USER22> not mine...

</comment><comment><USER23> Now that we have entered the machine thinking age, where tools like IBM's Watson can answer open ended straight forward questions, grades measuring memorization and straight forward question-answering miss the mark.

I predict the ability to answer a multiple choice/fill in the blank test will be dominated by the machine once IBM's Watson gets deployed to all the arts and sciences.

There needs to be a bigger emphasis on what you can build given the sum of human knowledge instead of "how much you can remember".

I'm thinking of a grading system where you measure the number of processes and tasks you can do which are useful to humanity that $10,000 worth computer can't do. High = A, Low = F. "the arts" doesn't count. I'm talking creative thinking, innovation, things like that.

<comment> St-Clock By your standard, we should let the machines vote because that's a multiple choice question.

<comment><USER23> I think an advanced objective-thinking algorithm like watson advanced another 15 years would provide night-vs-day superior choices than your average self serving voter who has the objective thinking capability of a random number generator.

Voting is basically a popularity contest anyway. An objective thinking machine would have to be fed an objective question, like: "Which candidate has appealed to the politically active youth community with a tech-savvy hip message of 'change' "?

<comment> St-Clock I agree with you that a machine may someday make a more "rational" vote than the average voter. We had quite an experience in Quebec recently...

That being said, your solution does not improve humanity. It does not make the voters (or the students) better understand their world. It's just a bandaid to hide their ignorance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A question..should not an article of on such a serious subject be devoid of errors?

Not just grammar, but illogical assumptions, errors in logic, etc? See how many errors you find..I find too many to rely on the article on any basis.

<comment><USER25> This comment is a classic example of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law></comment></comment>


NCC: 64-bit C compiler (and preprocessor, assembler, linker, etc.) for AMD64 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gnuless/ncc#readme <comment><USER2> Don't be confused by "C" compiler. This is a K&R C compiler that can compile legacy programs from the 70s on x64 machines. Great for software archeology.

This serves a completely different purpose than GCC or CLang.

</comment><comment><USER3> > BSD/64 (my port of pre-Reno 4.3BSD to Intel/AMD 64-bit desktops).

This is the interesting part here, a 64bit port of 4.3BSD!

</comment><comment><USER4> To get a feel for the language, take a look at the source code (which is, naturally, written in K&R C). The compile times must be amazing - it would probably take something like a couple of seconds to rebuild the entire compiler using itself.

</comment><comment><USER5> looks sweet, very nice project and example on how to implement some compiler architecture parts. awsome to go through the sources a bit and look how it works. thanks!

</comment><comment><USER6> Not to be confused with [https://github.com/zeit/ncc](https://github.com/zeit/ncc)

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome work!</comment>


Plan 9: The way the future was - <AUTHOR> http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html <comment><USER2> Unsurprisingly given the common pedigree, a number of ideas from Plan 9 have made their way into Go. E.g., compare <http://golang.org/pkg/net/#Dial> and <http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/dial>.

Go's approach to concurrency is familiar in the Plan 9 world from Alef (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alef_(programming_language)>, <http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/alef.pdf>) and Limbo (<http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/papers/limbo.html>), the language used to implement Inferno, a Plan 9 spinoff.

<comment><USER3> Cool. I wasn't sure if it was common knowledge that Ken Thompson and Rob Pike created Go. The Go compiler toolchain is from Plan 9, too: <http://golang.org/cmd/>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Am I the only one who doesn't get excited about the idea of absolutely everything being a file?

People seem to like the idea of being able to say things like "cat file.wav > /dev/dsp". But a sound card is a complex thing that can be configured in umpteen different ways; what if the file has a different sample rate than the card is currently running at? Even if you gerry-rigged a kernel driver that could handle this case (by, for example, noticing when the file had been open()'d and expecting the next bytes to be a WAV header, which it uses to reconfigure the card), you're left with something that doesn't have even the most basic functionality that you'd expect from a sound player; for example, "pause."

So what has representing /dev/dsp as a file really bought you? It doesn't help you know what devices are available, because there's tons of crap in /dev that doesn't necessarily have a kernel driver loaded for it. It's not that useful as an end-user interface for selecting a sound card, because users don't want to choose between /dev/dsp and /dev/dsp2, they want to see nice names like "Internal Speaker" or "Apogee Duet."

Files give you a simple API for lots of common operations, which is nice, but the fact that all files are not created equal means that operations sometimes don't work like you expect. For example, how would you guess that "tail -f" is implemented? If you're like me, you would have expected that it works by calling poll/select/etc. and waiting for the file to become read-ready. But this approach doesn't actually work for monitoring growing files; the select() will just return immediately with read-ready even if you're at EOF. So what "tail -f" actually does is a loop that alternates between sleep() and fstat(). I'm serious! [http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob;f...](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob;f=src/tail.c;h=29ddabd62c650c4b0c9ed9b52bb3270e25f1bb90;hb=02551d8a62d84b8788a8793de121c2f1e5212d63#l1071)

<comment><USER5> You could configure it by doing something like

      echo "22050" > /dev/dsp/config/sample_rate_hz
      echo "lanczos" > /dev/dsp/config/resample_algorithm

You could then search for configs by using find, back them up by using tar, be able to easily replicate settings between computers using rsync etc.

The idea is not to have one unconfigurable binary reciever, but rather to expose the interface as a hierarchy of rw files instead of a number of C functions, because the C functions have no easy shell representation, and most command-line tools fail using them.

It's very reminiscent of REST.

<comment><USER6> That API seems so clunky. What if I have two different programs, with different sample rates, which I want to play back at the same time?

<comment><USER7> Each program sees its own copy of /dev/dsp. Behind the scenes, that copy is backed by some magic on the OS's part that handles state tracking, mixing, etc.

The program only ever sees a dumb bit bucket with some flags on how to handle it--that's why we have OSs, after all: to avoid having to write hardware driver code for all our programs (see the bad old days of DOS game programming).

The program still needs to manage sound mixing in userland to fill that buffer. That's nothing new, however, and you can use PortAudio, FMOD, XACT, whatever to do that mixing for you, or roll your own.

This abstraction would greatly simplify that process.

<comment><USER6> Thanks to you and others who pointed out that plan9 exposes private copies to each program. I did not know that, and it would solve the issue I wondered about.

But that doesn't solve the underlying issue. If my program uses two libraries, both of which play sounds, then how does each library get its own configuration filesystem? Is there a way to create a new view, so that the two libraries can be disconnected from what the main program needs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The impression I got was that the guys behind Unix were annoyed when their operating-systems research was stalled in the name of "API compatibility", so they started Plan 9 and actively resisted commercialisation for as long as possible (for example, they gave it the least marketable name they could think of).

There's so many interesting ideas in Plan 9, I'm occasionally tempted to install it and try it out... but then I read things like the list of keyboard shortcuts in the standard editor acme¹, and I get cold feet.

¹: <http://acme.cat-v.org/keyboard> \- in particular, note that there are no keyboard shortcuts for 'move the cursor to the next/previous line'. Think about _that_.

<comment><USER9> The problem wasn't that the Plan 9 guys opposed commercialization, quite the contrary, the problem was that AT&T never let the system become open source. For some time it wasn't even available outside universities. That killed it.

Yes, acme doesn't have keyboard shortcuts, I use it every day.

<comment><USER10> >the problem was that AT&T never let the system become open source.

The whole thing except the fonts was put under a very liberal open-source licence 10 or 12 or so years ago. (By then it was owned by Bellcore or Lucent, not AT&T.) Before then there were severe restrictions; is your opinion that by time the severe restrictions were lifted, it was too late because Linux had already become entrenched?

<comment><USER9> Yes, it was made open source in 2000, 8 years after the first release of 1992, far too late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> First, one should note that this is a chapter (or section) of "The Art of Unix Programming", by esr; it is a fantastic book (I'm going through it now, on chapter 9 of 20, and the wisdom has been near-palpable).

As for the specifics of the article. Plan 9 did indeed do many things right; in fact, many things are done in a very Unixy way. For example, the networking stack is build precisely where it ought to be: as a detail below a powerful network protocol (9P) which can be made as transparent or concrete as necessary (one can easily write individual TCP or UDP packets using the file system; just as easily, you can network-export any file system).

Similarly, Plan 9's handling of security, in particular the elimination of the superuser, was fantastic. And while I in particular disagree with the approach Plan 9 takes to the GUI, it is certainly a consistent, powerful, and inspired model. And a variety of its other ideas, such as UTF-8 and the /proc and /sys file systems, have worked their way into modern Unixes such as Linux.

Now, Plan 9's failure has been aptly explained elsewhere, in particular in the article linked. But, being somewhat old (2004, I believe; though when that particular section was written I do not know), it makes the prediction that Unixes will eventually come to absorb all of the Plan 9 features. Instead, it looks like the Linux kernel, at least, has mostly given up on ever implementing union mounts (one of the most inspired of Plan 9's innovations, at least in my view). And while the /net file system is incredibly useful, its power is much diminished when you can't assume that the world speaks 9P, which will seemingly never be the case. And a variety of Plan 9's choices are impossible without ignoring POSIX compatibility, which causes problems of its own.

Unix rode the growth of servers in the seventies and eighties, and is by now rather entrenched (see the History chapter in Art of Unix Programming); much like the WIMP GUI metaphor rode the personal computing wave. I think both of these areas are by now too old and entrenched for us to simply replace the current monopolies there. And I've come to terms with the fact that Plan 9 will never, ever become the standard OS --- it is simply not designed for any battlegrounds except those it has already lost in. But I strongly urge anyone designing an OS (or, really, any sort of all-encompassing computer system) to look over the innovations and ideas of Plan 9. Luckily, I don't think anything like Windows or Unix will win in a totally new environment, because Windows and Unix aren't made for any environments but their own. So while Plan 9 never won, I think its ideas have a good chance of living on. And I await an exciting time of innovation in Operating Systems in the coming century.

<comment><USER12>
        > And I've come to terms with the fact that Plan 9 will
        > never, ever become the standard OS --- it is simply
        > not designed for any battlegrounds except those it
        > has already lost in

Why is 9p cool? Are there any gaps - for example - lack of good support from scripting languages?

Have there been any serious attempts at creating a plan 9 rackspace or cloud service? Maybe you could get a hobbyist community grown around plan 9 + 9p.

I haven't looked at plan9 for ages, but remember there was some complexity about setting it up for ssh access.

Update: fgudin pointed me to this for hosting <http://sdf.org/?join>

<comment><USER13> 9P is cool, but 9P is not Plan 9. 9P is the Plan 9 filesystem protocol.

Plan 9 lacks emacs, bash, C++, and a full-featured web browser; this alone is enough to make a lot of people post once on the mailing list bitching about it, then never come back. It does have vim now, although its use is not encouraged because we have other editors.

If you come at Plan 9 as though it's "just like Unix", you're going to have a bad time. Expecting to access it via ssh is one part of that--yes, we have an old ssh server, and yes we now have ssh v2 client support, but to access a Plan 9 system you want to use something like drawterm on Linux/Windows/Mac or cpu from another Plan 9 system.

I'm on sdf but have not played with my Plan 9 instance much. If you want to start off experimenting, I'd recommend just firing up VMware or Virtualbox instead. If you decide you want a physical Plan 9 system, well, I've found that it runs pretty well on every Thinkpad I've ever tried.

If you want more info, you can ask here or email me (check my profile).

<comment><USER14> Are there reasons why it would be hard to port Unix software to it? Could something like Cygwin be developed to help make it easier to run Unix-ish software on it?

<comment><USER15> It comes with a library called APE (see [1]), which provides most POSIX-y things implemented in terms of Plan 9 native API:s. (For example, BSD socket operations are just functions wrapping the normal file reads and writes that you would do in native Plan 9 code.)

Some things do not work, though (permissions models are a bit different, and chroot is entirely unimplemented, for instance).

1: <http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape>

<comment><USER14> That shouldn't prevent things like scripting languages or web browsers to be ported.

<comment><USER13> The difficult thing is getting it ported _correctly_. As several people have shown, it's easy to get Go running. However, getting Go running properly in such a way that you can continue to get updates from upstream is much more difficult. So you end up with ancient versions of gmake, gcc, python, mercurial, Go, etc., all mostly-functional but no longer getting bugfixes, because it's much more difficult to make a nice clean port that can be accepted into the upstream.

Oh, and given that the major web browsers all seem to be written in C++, and we don't have a C++ compiler... that's problematic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The real shame is that inferno never became android. It was around early enough. Had the right feature set. I guess it was not in Google's backyard (America) and had lost it's backbone a little to early.

I guess when Google was shopping for mobile OS they were also looking for a talent grab. With Inferno by 2005 most had already left.

<comment><USER17> True, but, they already had all the talent from Plan 9

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Plan 9 was and is too good to be ignored. Indeed many of its features are now a must in Linux systems (for example good support for private namespaces) and the p9fs, designed to be virtualizable and distributed, is getting serious traction in the virtualization world (see 9p virtio).

And Plan 9 also has the best mascot around!

<comment><USER19> It helps that Eric Van Hensbergen, the guy behind 9p virtio, was a Plan 9 developer.

<comment><USER9> s/was/is/

He was one of the guys that ported Plan 9 to the Blue Gene supercomputer. He has many active projects in the Plan 9 community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've often thought that Plan 9's everything-is-a-file system with a consistent API for access is the missing link between Unix's everything-is-a-file and REST's consistent interface constraint. I think it's certainly arguable that Plan 9 shares many features with RESTful architectures.

</comment><comment><USER14> This need updating. "The Room", a film that came after the article was written, is obviously worse than either "Manos" or "Plan 9", as anyone who saw even its first minutes will readily attest.

edit: I'm sorry. I often forget my colleagues are humourless at this time in the morning.

<comment><USER21> I think "Birdemic" would be more appropriate, since the first half is about someone pitching a tech startup (and the second half is about being vomited on by animated GIFs of birds).

<comment><USER14> I can't disagree with facts. According to IMDB, <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1316037/> is worse than <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368226/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Plan 9 wasn't a failure and it wasn't the future, directly.

It was a research OS that was never even close to being positioned to market, be it consumers, servers, etc -- although technology coming out of Plan 9 did make it into some commercial applications.

Indirectly, Plan 9 technologies (or inspired successors) made their way into real products. Linux's procfs is one notable example.

</comment><comment><USER23> It seems that (almost?) everything that was planned out for plan9 is finding its way into operating systems.

The ideas were good, but somehow they had to take the long way around. It was way ahead of its time.

<comment><USER24> I remember an interview with one of the ex-Plan9 people now at Google (Rob Pike maybe?) talking about how he's switched to Linux, since that's what Google runs on, and finds it a strange experience, as if a bunch of bugs you thought you'd fixed 20 years ago have resurfaced in the main branch. But Linux does seem to be picking up a steady number of the features.

<comment><USER16> It was Rob Pike from the slashdot interview. [http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob- pi...](http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/04/10/18/1153211/rob-pike- responds)

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the link. (irrelevant: I like how he used wOOd to represent OO programming)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I always find it pretty sad that while everybody speaks about the integrated environments of Smalltalk and Plan 9, Niklaus Wirth's Oberon is almost left forgotten…

<comment><USER27> One of the Plan 9 papers actually refers to Oberon as an example of a similarly integrated system. I believe it's the one titled 'The Use of Name Spaces in Plan 9,' but I'm not certain.

Unfortunately, the server is down right now so I'm unable to check but, if you're curious, the various papers can be found here: <http://plan9.bell- labs.com/sys/doc/>

<comment><USER26> Probably the acme paper. Oberon definitely had the mouse chording, not sure if there's previous art in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28>
        > There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the
        > most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing
        > codebase that is just good enough.

Isn't this concept applicable to every system once it incorporates programmability?

</comment><comment><USER29> Ugly now beats beautiful later.

An elegant solution requires a deep understanding of a problem, and that understanding takes a lot of data (awareness of cases), and then a lot of time and effort to create a simple theory of it and to create a simple solution embodying that theory.

<comment><USER30> The trick is to build ugly systems that are able to grow into beautiful ones.

<comment><USER13> That is quite a trick. The problem is that pretty soon, everyone depends on the behavior of the ugly warts in your original system, so now you're stuck with them lest you break the holy Compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I recently tried plan 9 for a bit. Though i understand all the cool things it does and agree with a lot of it. One thing really disappointed and struck me as totally brain dead: there is no such thing as terminal emulator or it seems something like text only mode. In general it seems to me that achieving keyboard only control (that is comfortable to use) is not really possible at least for now.

</comment><comment><USER32> A good introduction to the Plan 9 UI I found, for any who are interested: <http://vimeo.com/7748726>

</comment><comment><USER33> "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it. Poorly." – Henry Spencer

<comment><USER34> Except that Plan 9 was designed by the people who built UNIX. Are you implying that the people who built UNIX don't understand it?

<comment><USER33> No, no! Quite the reverse.</comment></comment></comment>


Taser has started its own in-house AI unit - <AUTHOR> http://www.vocativ.com/402771/ai-body-cams-cops-google/ <comment><USER2> I work at TASER/Axon, the company asserted to have this technology. This article, which appeared on the front page of the Drudge report this morning, is extremely disingenuous.

They have repackaged a press release that announced our investments in computer vision and machine learning and have made a huge leap that we have built or are currently building facial recognition into our cameras. This is false.

We believe that AI has the potential to streamline police work and reduce inefficiency. Police officers spend a substantial amount of time (65% according to a Netherlands study) doing administrative tasks like report writing and filling out forms. Our goal is to reduce this wasted time so that officers can spend more time in the street and with their communities.

If this sounds interesting, we're hiring! Come join our team in Seattle and write code that saves lives.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing your perspective. Reducing inefficiency would be great, but what is TASER/Axon's view about this technology's effects on privacy and civil rights (EDIT: and on their responsibility to create products that protect rights and sell them to users who will do the same).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title of the article is misleading. The article actually states that Taser's cameras do not have facial recognition. They use face detection to blur and redact faces from footage captured by body cameras. And far from real time they say that they hope to take that redaction process that takes eight hours to 1.5 hours for an hour video clip.

</comment><comment><USER5> 14 years ago I told my teacher at a very respected uni that real-time facial recognition would surely be used by gov for security.

He said I was insane and that this would be extremely hard to implement and it was very improbable that it would ever happen. He basically demoralized me in front of my colleagues.

Needless to say he failed to convince otherwise and I lost all respect for him.

<comment><USER6> One rule of thumb I've found very useful is that if someone says a proposed or imagined outcome is impossible rather than asking how would that work, it's probably bullshit.

Obviously if they can follow through with a good reason like pointing out a violation of thermodynamics or some inherent mathematical paradox you should take that seriously, but the more reflexive the dismissal the less well- founded it usually turns out to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Per the comments noting that this (police-mounted face recognition) isn't a thing:

I'm amazed that pervasive face recognition _isn 't_ a thing. I figured it would be the killer app for Google Glass, popping up notes about everyone you see. Apple & Facebook could leverage it from the face tagging in Photos & FB. Police could be well-served by a vest-mounted lightweight system giving likely identifications of encountered suspects (or anyone) from mugshots et al. Thing is, all the technology is there waiting for use; it's a killer app just waiting for society to put up with it (just like privacy invasions that were intolerable back when and are normal today).

(I'm not necessarily _advocating_ it, just figuring it's inevitable and ready to explode onto the scene.)

<comment><USER8> It exists in Russia under the name FindFace.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only viable solution to this is regulation, and our only real hopes for it are the ACLU and the EFF.

<comment><USER10> It's too easy to implement, so it can't be regularized. The only thing you get in return is that you'll be able to recognize the faces of police officers as well with the same technology. The world is shrinking, and it will feel like we're all living in a huge village.

<comment><USER11> > and it will feel like we're all living in a huge village

A very apt way of putting it. For a while now I've held the opinion that anonymity (and to some degree privacy, at least the privacy you expect from anonymity) as we know it is a short-lived artifact of our accumulation into larger groups, where it's not possible to know everyone around you and almost everything about them. The farther back you go, the less anonymity there was to the people that you saw every day.

In that respect, what we're seeing is a return to the norm. That doesn't mean it's better, but I'm not sure there's a way to actually prevent it exept on an individual basis, and then only with a lot of work on the part of that individual.

<comment><USER9> > _In that respect, what we 're seeing is a return to the norm_

In no way. Note that the article is about police body cameras. This is less about technology than it is about the power of the state over individuals.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure what you think gives the state a monopoly on this. There's massive amounts of information about most people online, and there will be even more in the future. I think it's likely that in the future even if you've never put a single picture of yourself online, there will likely be enough images of people in public and associated information to identify you anyway (use a credit card at a store? Why wouldn't they choose to associate your image from in-store cameras with that customer record?).

All the more egregious aspects of online marketing and tracking are coming to the physical realm. You too will likely be able to access this information for a price. Good luck trying to stop it. Honestly. The world would be a better place in my estimation if you could. I just have little faith in measures designed to combat economically incentivized behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Facial Recognition - This is who person is based on this face

Facial Detection - This part of image is a face

The article is referring to facial detection and object classification and not, as is mentioned, facial recognition. Also, it would certainly NOT be real time. Computers are still quite poor at this even if they take a super long amount of time and processing power.

<comment><USER13> _The article is referring to facial detection and object classification and not, as is mentioned, facial recognition. Also, it would certainly NOT be real time. Computers are still quite poor at this even if they take a super long amount of time and processing power._

Visiting the links presented in the article, you'll find this is possibly not correct. The article may have misrepresented but it does lead to a study that specifically mentions "facial recognition" capabilities on these devices.

"A Market Survey on Body Worn Camera Technologies" from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and sponsored by the Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice in November of 2016 found 9 different devices capable of facial recognition[1]. The software itself comes from a handful of startups and technology companies.

They define facial recognition: "Facial recognition features allow the user to identify or verify a person from a digital image or a video frame."

Relevant to Hacker News, this article is timely probably due to the mentioned Dextro being acquired by AXON[2] (owned by TASER) to utilize their software in their body camera[3].

[1] - [https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/250381.pdf](https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/250381.pdf)

[2] - [https://medium.com/@dextro_co/dextro- announcement-d21212463b...](https://medium.com/@dextro_co/dextro- announcement-d21212463bf2#.2d5btj2z4)

[3] - [https://buy.taser.com/axon-body-camera/](https://buy.taser.com/axon- body-camera/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Guy Fawkes. Guy Fawkes. Guy Fawkes.

<comment><USER7> So the system recognizes the mask as a known mask, recommending immediate application of laws punishing wearing masks in public for nefarious purposes, which is rather the whole point of wearing that particular mask.</comment></comment>


How Climate Change Is Becoming a Deadly Part of White Nationalism - <AUTHOR> https://earther.gizmodo.com/how-climate-change-is-becoming-a-deadly-part-of-white-n-1837010929 <comment><USER2> Well, I've got to say that I didn't see that coming. So, is it easier to contain white nationalists who have sound ecological policies than it is to deal with the damage sustained if they were out "rolling coal"? Then I get to some of their "solutions" for climate change and...nah, the environmental movement can do without them.</comment>


GoDaddy Issues Official Apology - <AUTHOR> https://s3.amazonaws.com/uploads.hipchat.com/13894/48313/tp8t6siyuucpm7f/Screen%20Shot%202012-09-14%20at%2010.31.51%20PM.png

<comment><USER2> "The service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables."

Was this truly caused by "an internal network event"?</comment>


Amazon Sent Out a Scripted News Segment, and 11 Stations Aired It - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/05/26/amazon-sent-out-a-scripted-news-segment-and-11-stations-aired-it/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316044](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23316044)</comment>


Poll: Startup Productivity Sinks - <AUTHOR> http://evhead.com/2007/11/poll-startup-productivity-sinks.asp

<comment><USER2> It'd be neat to hook this up to RescueTime and see if our perceived productivity sinks match up with actual productivity sinks. I found that I spend significantly less time on Internet procrastination than I thought I did, and significantly more time with the computer turned off entirely.

Also would be neat to correlate this with company size and stage of development. In my current startup (which is just me doing all the coding), the top productivity sinks are Internet distractions and slow decision-making, because most of the rest don't apply. In my last employer, the top ones were office distractions, bugs & errors, and working on things we don't finish.

And it's interesting how answers might change with hindsight. A couple months ago, I wrote a library that, if you asked me 2 weeks after I finished it, would've gone into the "Working on things that don't matter." Now I just happened to find another use for it, and it's now a critical part of our infrastructure.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I know it was a joke (I think?), but for clarification, I was trying to distinguish _unnecessary_ time sinks, whereas IE is annoying, but necessary.

But if anyone has any other suggestions for big ones, please comment.

</comment><comment><USER3> They forgot the all important: "Getting it to work in IE"</comment>


Csh Programming Considered Harmful (1996) - <AUTHOR> http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/ <comment><USER2> It can actually be very difficult to "walk away" from this style of shell in established Unix environments, which I know from experience. (And I would love to avoid tcsh, as I have my own list of grievances that go far beyond what was listed on that web page.)

For some reason -- and I've witnessed this multiple times -- there has been a tendency to use tcsh as a baseline, and then build stuff on top of it that lasts for years. After awhile, too many scripts assume they can simply "source" a csh-style file to set their environment variables and aliases. And administrators may not even offer standard login files for other shells (which is sad, considering that Bourne-style allows many more shells to work).

Pretty soon, your choices are to grudgingly use tcsh, where everything works as intended; or, to use a different shell, and see obscure problems from time to time because of missing settings.

So basically, nearly 15 years after this article, I can say that tcsh is alive and well in Unix environments and "can't" go anywhere if they were unfortunate enough to use it as a baseline. Technically there are ways forward, of course, but nothing ever seems "broken enough" in tcsh to warrant the effort to change it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm really surprised, because my experience is completely different. I haven't seen csh shell script in years and I've never used it as my login shell. In fact on my current system I don't even have csh installed.

I'm a Linux person who started to use it around the middle of 90s. What's your background? I guess csh is still popular in commercial variants of Unix.

PS. Fortunately Mac OS X doesn't ship with tcsh as the default login shell anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> More harmful than the "Haskell shell"? ;) <http://code.haskell.org/shsh/>

And I imagine a BF shell ( <http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/bf/> ) would be pretty bad. Unfortunately, I can't find one.</comment>


'Must be willing to work under pressure' is a warning sign - <AUTHOR> https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/12/03/work-under-pressure/ <comment><USER2> I've had 2 jobs where the description had "able to work with difficult people". In hindsight, there was a very very good reason for this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Managers often consider placing pressure on developers a natural and desirable state of things, as it's their duty to keep developers busy, to gain customers with aggressive schedules, and to meet objectives through other people's effort.

<comment><USER4> and they need to be told off. so sad I accepted so many things in my early career. now if somebody tries to put a tight deadline on me I'd be "pff nope".

<comment><USER5> The problem I've found is that if you stand up for yourself, you get sidelined. I need to find somewhere new!</comment></comment></comment>


Please review my iPad App. A Notes/Browser Hybrid (w/ promo codes) - <AUTHOR>

You can see the app on iTunes here:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cork-take-notes-as-you-browse/id391237199?mt=8
The concept is basically implementing a side-by-side window workflow at the app level.  The functions I chose to mate were notes and web browsing but the same ideas could be applied to a lot of workflows.  Think of this as a first step toward one-window productivity apps like coda on the iPad.
Here are some promo codes for those that read this early:
a. LKE3FXXXHKE6 b. 9JK76EJTM9PF c. HYH9KXMREWAL d. YYMERK4KXH6X e. P6F74JMLFHT9 f. L4F7ARXRAN69 g. LXF3RWT9NWNE h. YW4MEJEJ4969 i. 3YR4FHPHW9AW j. HFJXK6W94LW3 k. 9WJ7K7MKTKEH l. RYFX97LTE77X m. X4AX9M3NNTXN n. NNFW4PT4LRAK o. NMNKLN9WHENY p. 49P66YAHJYFN q. WKHRAMA3RPEK r. TNYLHXKLXLME s. XAPF3PPY76FR t. KEWMXWLAJ6RW u. R33T33TLEXTY v. 3RNJHLWN697E w. RAR7EARJ9HLF x. RWMT463RLAJ9 y. E34MAYXLAYFY z. KL9MHYXYLTR3
if you like the app please review it in the app store.  those really help sales and there aren't many reviews yet. <comment><USER2> I used RAR7EARJ9HLF.

This app is a great idea. I really like the ability to pin data from selecting it.

An idea: it would be cool if I could drag links over the left in landscape mode. Sometimes when I browse sites, I'll come across a site with three or four links to click. In a browser, I can open multiple tabs. This would be great if I could drag'em over to a pin to look at at my leisure instead of Safari's cumbersome window-switching interface.

Also, the ability to sync notes would be great (even if these could somehow combine with the current Notes app!).

Finally (this may be overkill), but it would be cool if two-finger scrolling would let you scroll inside of a note if it goes beyond the size of the post- it. I know I can click on it, this would be for quick reference.

All in all, nice work! It's not buggy, it's fast, responsive, and does something that I've always kinda wished Safari could do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I've definitely thought about the ability to add whole sites to the notes pane as a different take on tabs. This is a great idea but I'll need to work thought the implementation and figure out what the limits of webkit are. There are a lot of other things I want to add but this was an initial release to get a read on how people use the app and what kind of income stream I can expect.

Syncing is also a big deal. I'd love to use the simple note API as a back end if they ever open that up to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks; I took the first one, LKE3FXXXHKE6. Sorry, it doesn't do much for me, but I'm not the target user. There are plenty of apps that allow me to do two apps side-by-side. Actually, I have more control over the situation by just cutting-and-pasting from the browser to a text editor...unless you added something that allowed the user to move all the notes around, pile them on top of each other, zoom out so you can manipulate more notes at a time. That's probably outside the scope of what you were planning to do.

I admire and applaud your desire to innovate and your ability to bring an app to market! Good luck with this and future projects.

</comment><comment><USER4> Used code: E34MAYXLAYFY

I'm on OS4.2 just as a note. When the app first loaded, the welcome webpage just showed up as a blank screen.

It might be nice if the note when selected (in landscape) was a little larger, a la the compose mail window in mail.

As fredleblanc said a syncing ability might be nice (maybe dropbox).

A small nitpick, add a little more space when looking at the note between the actions button and the trashcan, they're just slightly too close for my fingers when I'm not paying attention.

Overall looks good.

</comment><comment><USER5> Neat idea...but what's up with your age rating?

        You must be at least 17 years old to download this application
        * Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes
        * Frequent/Intense Simulated Gambling
        * Frequent/Intense Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
        * Frequent/Intense Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
        * Frequent/Intense Profanity or Crude Humor
        * Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity
        * Frequent/Intense Horror/Fear Themes
        * Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple makes you rate anything that has direct access to the Internet as 17+. Any web browser apps on the store will have a similar rating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks .. i used : KL9MHYXYLTR3

By the way, do you have anything planned for the bookmarks?

</comment><comment><USER7> Thanks, I used code: TNYLHXKLXLME</comment>


Elie Wiesel Visits Disneyland - <AUTHOR> http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/206125/elie-wiesel-visits-disneyland <comment><USER2> It's strange to me to read a gifted author lavish such praise on another creative talent. It felt very genuine and inspired - which is pretty much how I feel when I visit Disney World. For all the flaws of Disney, the creations of the man and the company hit the target exactly - I feel like a kid again when I experience them.

I wonder if we would have gotten such an honest description of awe from Wiesel's contemporaries. Would Sartre, Camus or Orwell have been as impressed? I couldn't say for certain, but I can say that no one had experienced more atrocities to contrast the experience with. That says something big about the magic of Disney's creation.

<comment><USER3> > I wonder if we would have gotten such an honest description of awe from > Wiesel's contemporaries. Would Sartre, Camus or Orwell have been as > impressed? I couldn't say for certain, but I can say that no one had > experienced more atrocities to contrast the experience with. That says > something big about the magic of Disney's creation.

Sartre and Camus were almost certainly less compassionate, nostalgic or otherwise prone to being guided in their writing by emotion; I would also say they were more serious authors than Wiesel, one cannot really imagine them being excited by as an adjacent commentator pointed out:

>> "Futuristic man will live such a wonderful life! Everything will come to him so, so easily! If someone knocks at the door, you won't have to go to see who it is: He will appear on the screen of your television. If the telephone rings, you'll be able to see the person you're speaking with and not just hear his voice. And a thousand other such conveniences will turn your house into a royal palace and transform you yourself into a lazy, fat, lonely king."

> Quick, someone put this into an Internet-of-Things sales pitch!

Consider Wiesel's words in this article:

>> Wiesel understands why: "If one wants to calm his nerves and forget the bitter realities of daily life, there is no better-suited place to do so than Disneyland. In Disneyland, the land of children's dreams, everything is simple, beautiful, good. There, no one screams at his fellow, no one is exploited by his fellow, no one's fortune derives from his fellow's misfortune. If children had the right to vote, they would vote Disney their president. And the whole world would look different."

There seems to be an immediacy, and almost childish sincerity to them and his own willingness to suspend reality (including his own personal experience) and believe in the Disney world. Constrast this to e.g. Sartre's No Exit - in the later there is also the suspension of reality for illusion if you will, but rather than being immediate or sincere the reader is faced with it unraveling into something Hellish. Which is to say that I cannot imagine a serious author calling Disney a genius - but take this with a grain of salt if being serious means being unable to suspend your own reality for a brief moment of childish happiness.

<comment><USER2> Excellent comment. Especially this:

 _Which is to say that I cannot imagine a serious author calling Disney a genius - but take this with a grain of salt if being serious means being unable to suspend your own reality for a brief moment of childish happiness._

I like writing fiction, but I'll gladly give up being taken seriously as an author if being a serious fiction writer means giving up the ability to enjoy flights of fancy. In fact, I have trouble understanding how even the most serious fiction can work without it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Walt Disney, the World's First UX Designer:

[https://uxmag.com/articles/walt-disney-the-worlds-first- ux-d...](https://uxmag.com/articles/walt-disney-the-worlds-first-ux-designer)

</comment><comment><USER5> There is, or at least was, a plaque above a bench on a Main Street porch dedicated to Disney's business partner for Disneyland. He was, IIRC, an expert in hospitality.

The plaque read: 'A clean environment is a pleasure to the senses.'

As a kid, I remember being amused at the number of sweepers, dressed in striped shirts, pressed white pants and straw hats, whisking popcorn and straw wrappers off the walkways. In spite of tens of thousands of people, mostly kids, running and discarding, the park was always immaculate. It impresses me to this day not just that so much attention was given to cleanliness, but that Disney realized how much it mattered.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Futuristic man will live such a wonderful life! Everything will come to him so, so easily! If someone knocks at the door, you won't have to go to see who it is: He will appear on the screen of your television. If the telephone rings, you'll be able to see the person you're speaking with and not just hear his voice. And a thousand other such conveniences will turn your house into a royal palace and transform you yourself into a lazy, fat, lonely king."

Quick, someone put this into an Internet-of-Things sales pitch!

</comment><comment><USER7> Because of the author's background I couldn't help but get a morose chuckle out of the popover ad which read "We'll come for you".

<comment><USER8> It says "We'll come to you!", not "for you".

<comment><USER7> Ah! Sorry. I read it, clicked the X, and now it's not coming back. (I don't feel like faffing around with trying to make it come back...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's funny because Walt Disney was known to be a raging antisemite.</comment>


Rick Steves Wants to Save the World, One Vacation at a Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/20/magazine/rick-steves-travel-world.html <comment><USER2> I did a ton of traveling last year all over the world and the conclusion I reached was that the popular destinations are completely overwhelmed.

I guess it's the combination of cheap flights and instagram but if you want to enjoy yourself then forget about Kyoto and Venice etc and look into some less popular and less well known places instead.

And do the rest of us a favor and don't location tag if you do discover something great.

<comment><USER3> Roger that. We visited Venice in October, off season. First night in the restaurant, 4 tables surrounding us... 3 were Americans and the 4th French.

As noted elsewhere, the cost of Intercontinental travel is dropping and the primary tourist destinations are overwhelmed, even in off seasons.

<comment><USER4> I was in Venice in May a couple of years ago. While the city was cool, and the typical attractions were fun to see, we were a bit underwhelmed.

We then hopped a RyanAir flight to Bari because that's where my wife's family emigrated from. Thought we'd rent a car, spend 4-5 hours hopping around Bari and then move on to Naples. We ended up spending 4 nights and completely loved the city and the whole of Puglia. It ended up being the best part of the trip.

Maybe it was just expectations were reversed, but we truly loved Bari, and could have just skipped Venice and Naples and spent more time there. Not that Venice and Naples were disappointing, but they didn't stand out at the end of the trip.

Italy as a whole was wonderful. Can't wait to go back.

<comment> james-mcelwain I love Bari. In general, I've found the "deep cuts" in Italy to be way better than the tourist traps. I most recently spent two weeks in rural Sicily where there wasn't much to do and it was fantastic.

<comment><USER2> Do you need to speak Italian to travel in these places? I'd love to see more of Italy but not sure how hard it is to get by on English.

<comment><USER5> English works fine. Get a roaming data plan and use google translate for situations where basic english doesn't cut it. I also print out common phrases and words and try and learn a little bit of the cultural nuances (hand signals, body language etc) which always help break the ice and make communication easier / fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I volunteered at my local PBS station in high school during pledge drives. This was 2001. Rick was there once, talking about the DVDs of his show you would get if you donated. After his segment, he hung out and talked with every volunteer. None of the other hosts ever did that. Love him so much.

</comment><comment><USER7> I read his book _Europe through the back door_ before my second trip to Europe, around 1992. What a refreshing book, especially in a category that was (and is) dominated by publications and institutions that are invested in making you want expensive and exclusive accommodations and attractions.

He has kind of a upright earnestness, combined with a sort of Germanic devotion to efficiency ("save money by sleeping on the train"; "plan a day's activity city-hopping by integrating a few key visits with the train schedule", "roll your trousers when packing"), that some nerds would generally find appealing.

I've returned to that book several times over the years when I feel like I need an attitude adjustment about how I travel, because it's easy to fall into the habit of just booking expensive accommodations. The result can be one- dimensional.

<comment><USER8> > What a refreshing book, especially in a category that was (and is) dominated > by publications and institutions that are invested in making you want > expensive and exclusive accommodations and attractions.

That was mainly a problem of the US market, though. In the 1990s the American travel guide market, i.e. the sort of guides you would find in any mall bookshop, was completely dominated by Fodors and Frommers, which aimed at those with rather high budgets. So, Rick Steves could offer an alternative to that within North America. Meanwhile, however, in the UK and Australia Lonely Planet and Rough Guides were more widely available. (Not to mention some of the travel guide series in the German- and French-speaking world). _Those_ guides opened up travel to even lower budgets than Rick Steves could.

<comment><USER7> I agree with this. I found the Rough Guides another good antidote to Froddors/Michelin - and in fact, a better _guidebook_ than ETTBD. I don't think I remember LP guides for Europe being helpful - I thought their main forte was Asia. Maybe that impression is mistaken.

For me, the thing was that ETTBD presented, explicitly, a whole travel philosophy/attitude that I found inspiring at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Weird fact: For the last ~10 years I have always watched Rick Steves' show while doing laundry (sorting and folding). The two are now inextricably linked in my head (thinking about folding socks makes me think about Barcelona), but I really look forward to doing laundry.

<comment><USER10> I grew up watching The Frugal Gourmet and Sesame Street on PBS. Jeff Smith is inextricably a part of my boyhood.

Unfortunately, it is no longer politic to utter that sentence.

<comment><USER11> Why?

<comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Smith_(chef)#Sexual_abuse...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Smith_\(chef\)#Sexual_abuse_allegations)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like travel. I like traveling outside of the US. It undoubtedly does all sort of great things. But first you have to realize, that paid vacation isn't even guaranteed in the US, at least 1/4 of all workers get no paid vacation, and of the ones that do the likelihood that it is enough time to get to another country and back is pretty slim.

Edit: typos

<comment><USER14> Was able to get 6 nights in Japan on 4 vacation days by leveraging Thanksgiving. Told relatives I would miss Thanksgiving but attend Christmas, everyone thought that made sense. For those who celebrate and enjoy Christmas, I don't recommend missing Christmas for solo travel overseas, did that once and felt very isolated. People in the place I was visiting were celebrating their own Christmases and people I knew back home were celebrating Christmas and I wasn't there. With Thanksgiving it's likely not a holiday in the country you're visiting so everything is open and for me at least, I don't really care about missing Thanksgiving, a better version happens 1 month later.

<comment><USER15> >Was able to get 6 nights in Japan ... For those who celebrate and enjoy Christmas, I don't recommend missing Christmas for solo travel overseas, did that once and felt very isolated. People in the place I was visiting were celebrating their own Christmases

I'm pretty sure Japan doesn't celebrate Christmas. So if you don't care about celebrating it, or would really like to just get away from all the Xmas hoopla (esp. if you're single; Christmas is a terrible time for single people, and suicide rates go way up at that time of year), Japan seems like a great place to go. Stay away from the European countries though.

<comment><USER16> Japan apparently celebrates Christmas with KFC [0].

[0] [https://www.businessinsider.com/how-kfc-became-a- christmas-t...](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-kfc-became-a-christmas- tradition-in-japan-2016-12)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish we could decarbonize long distance travel. I would love to see more of the world but I can't justify contributing to climate change for such a trivial thing. I can limit emissions by doing smaller trips with bike, bus or train locally, but oceans present a problem.

A round trip transatlantic flight from New York to Berlin emits 2.4 metric tons of CO2e per person.

[https://co2.myclimate.org/en/portfolios?calculation_id=16976...](https://co2.myclimate.org/en/portfolios?calculation_id=1697638)

The UN says global emissions per capita needs to drop to 1.5 metric tons/year by 2050 if we have any hope of keeping to a 2C temperature rise this century.

I wonder if there's any hope of electric planes hitting the energy density needed for commercial airlines, or algae based plane fuel taking off. I would even use a slower or more expensive mean of travel if it meant the emissions were drastically reduced.

[https://www.treehugger.com/aviation/worlds-first-flight- powe...](https://www.treehugger.com/aviation/worlds-first-flight-powered- by-100-algae-biofuels-completed.html)

<comment><USER18> This sort of hyper-sensitivity to any negative effects of your actions is absolutely paralyzing, as you clearly demonstrate.

It will keep you from enjoying anything. People believe they shouldn't have kids because "there's too many people". Or spend the $10 on a reusable bottle of water they are going to lose instead of buying the $1 and giving $9 to your cause of choice (charity, church, weed for the homeless).

The only way to really go zero-emissions, which would really benefit everyone (I guess, by this logic) is to just off yourself.

But I'd argue that you could do more good, have more potential to solve these problems you are concerned about, by exposing yourself to things outside your comfort zone. Other places, people, cultures, great works of art and engineering, and rich experiences.

All of the planes you ride on are going to fly anyway, get out there and get it!

<comment><USER19> > People believe they shouldn't have kids because "there's too many people".

This is true though. There are too many people on the planet, and you shouldn't have kids if it aligns with you beliefs.

Luckily, countries are already headed in that direction (fertility rates below replacement rate) [1]. But we should do more with carbon tax funds to further incentivize this outcome.

[1] [https://ourworldindata.org/fertility- rates/](https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rates/)

<comment><USER20> If you're so sure, why stop at not having kids, why continue being a person?

<comment><USER19> The changes required to live a more sustainable life aren't out of reach for most people, and don't require action so drastic.

You're already here, stay for a bit.

<comment><USER20> I absolutely agree with you, which is why I would never alter my life creation activities for environmental concerns. If humans wanted to fix our energy issues we could make a serious push (perhaps 5% GDP) towards nuclear technologies.

<comment><USER19> I'm not suggesting we remove agency (yours or otherwise), but there are people out there that will accept cash to not have children. Efforts like that should be pursued as long as its entirely voluntary, as not having a child is one of the most impactful actions someone can perform to reduce damage to the planet (we're pushing limits at 7.53 billion people already). Economics is a powerful incentive.

Regarding nuclear, I'm not going to beat a dead horse in this thread.

<comment><USER15> Long-term, I'd like to see anti-aging therapies really work out so that human lifespans are greatly extended, along with contraception and fertility technologies perfected so that people only have kids when they're really, really ready for them (probably after age 50).

As for nuclear, I'll beat the dead horse: we don't need it (at least fission). We need more renewable power, especially solar, since 1500W/m^3 hits the Earth's surface all day long. We just need to figure out how to make solar panels in a more environmentally-friendly manner (better recycling of their materials, etc.), and deploy them in more places, especially in places where they don't have negative effects, such as on rooftops, over highways, etc.

Then, we need to figure out how to have humans live in a more environmental manner, by increasing density. If most of the population lived at the density of Manhattan or Tokyo, we wouldn't have all these complaints about humans taking up too much land area.

The problems associated with overpopulation can be solved with technology and policy, if we really want to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't know how Rick Steves came to be, but he is a gem. His show is so ridiculously wholesome, it's a true joy to watch.

<comment><USER22> As a Northwesterner, it's clear to me how Northwest he is. He's like Ballard in a person. Or Bellingham.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I appreciate Rick Steves and always enjoyed his shows.

But reading recent posts on HN about how tourists are ruining Europe (and other places) makes me wonder if his message has become obsolete.

After all, air travel contributes to climate change. And I for one do not relish jumping on the QM2 - which surely burns fossil fuels - to spend two weeks (one week each way) traversing the Atlantic.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Queen_Mary_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Queen_Mary_2)

Cheap airfares contribute to overtourism. Just ask Dubrovnik.

AirBnB has priced locals out of their own housing markets. Just ask Venice.

That said, I hope he continues doing his thing.

<comment><USER24> Perhaps ruining specific parts of Europe, but I think it's unfair to say tourists have ever ruined an entire country or even city. Usually there's just small easily avoidable areas if you don't want to deal with crowds and overpriced food. That said I will never travel to Rome, the Bahamas, or Paris unless forced.

<comment><USER8> > Usually there's just small easily avoidable areas if you don't want to deal > with crowds

I recently visited Madrid, a city I lived in nearly 20 years ago. What struck me was not just the suffocating crowds of tourists in the very center of the city compared to back then. I also found that what used to be quiet residential neighborhoods (after all, they lack any particular sights) now had a distinct amount of tourists walking around with suitcases or backpacks – I assumed that AirBnB was now spreading tourists throughout the whole city.

<comment><USER15> For the ones in local neighborhoods, as long as they're not overcrowding the place, or committing crimes or something, you have to remember that all those tourists are pumping money into the local economy. They're eating food at the local eateries, they're paying for transport (probably helping fund the local public transit), they're giving money to local homeowners who then spend at least some of it locally and hopefully pay some extra taxes, etc. I fail to see how this is a problem, unless it's just too many of them of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Related thread about more efficient ways to broaden your horizons than traveling around the world for a week:

[https://twitter.com/juliagalef/status/885211413618212864](https://twitter.com/juliagalef/status/885211413618212864)

She lists examples like reading and hanging out with different people, but I'd love to hear more alternatives. Trying new hobbies is another great one

<comment><USER26> Classic gatekeeping tweet.

<comment><USER27> I don't take it that way. In terms of "broadening your horizons" it's easy to travel and not connect with the local culture. You're just a tourist, window shopping into the lives of the local people. Strolling through with your selfie stick to earn social credibility on the Gram.

That said, I think people who enjoy Rick Steves would also be the type to make an effort to get the authentic experience. Could be my own projection.

<comment><USER28> So what if you don't connect with the local culture? What if that isn't your point of traveling?

<comment><USER29> You don't have to do anything.

The tweet began with a premise. If the premise for travel is "broadening your horizons" then the assertion is that there are far cheaper, more accessible ways to do that than hopping on a transatlantic jet and spending a week in a foreign place. There is a real conversation to be had about the impact of tourism on local ways of life and local economies (both in good ways and bad).

If the premise for travel is "because I want to", then by all means go ahead...

It'd be helpful if people thought a bit more about what other people are saying and were more charitable about interpretations instead of finding the first reason to get mad.

<comment><USER28> What if I want to broaden my horizons by visiting the ancient ruins of Rome, Persia, etc? Or going to observe Mountain Gorilla in Biwindi?

> It'd be helpful if people thought a bit more about what other people are > saying and were more charitable about interpretations instead of finding the > first reason to get mad.

I'm not mad - I just think it was a stupid, self-back-patting point.

<comment><USER29> 1\. She stated it was her opinion. She's not forcing you to do or think anything.

2\. Her assertion was that she thinks it's overrated, costly, and inefficient. You did nothing to address those points.

If you think travel can be cheaper at achieving the premise, is not overrated at achieving the premise, or that it's a more efficient ways of achieving the premise of "broadening horizons" than alternatives then that's a relevant conversation. If you can effectively make those points then we'd have a real conversation on our hands.

Saying it's "stupid, self-back-patting" is not productive and misses the point entirely.

<comment><USER28> 1\. Yes. And I'm allowed to have opinions on other people's opinions.

2\. Yes, and that is what I take issue with, and yes, I did address the point. She says that it is 'overrated, super-inefficient way to "broaden your horizons"', and I said that there is more than one way to broaden your horizons than to talk to people who live far away from you, such as going to historical locations or natural settings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Very well written and entertaining article.

The best part is his journal called High Notes, in which he writes his deepest thoughts while being stoned.

"Make a rug with vacuum marks, so it always looks freshly vacuumed."

The article also touches on how his obsessiveness has hurt his relationships. Including how he snapped at his children for not wanting to power-travel like he does.

</comment><comment><USER31> We live in a time where international air travel has become ridiculously cheap relative to domestic travel. I regularly see roundtrip flights between SFO and Singapore/HK for ~$600 and RT flights between US and Europe for ~$400 or so, but expect to pay at least $650 to go between SF<>NY and even $350 just to go between SF and LA sometimes.

Point is, it's never been cheaper to travel internationally. Enjoy it while it's still true.

<comment><USER15> It's not just that: everything in the US is ridiculously expensive now, so it doesn't make sense to travel domestically at all for me any more. I can stay in very decent hotels in western Europe and Japan for $50/night, but paying that much in America would put me in a rat-trap. Eating out (hard to avoid when traveling) is much cheaper in Europe in my experience. And ground transport is _far_ cheaper in other countries.

America is just plain overpriced. The only thing that's harder about international travel is that so many people don't speak English in other countries, but that's also part of the fun of it.

<comment><USER22> Yup; I stayed in a rented room (AirBnB) in Vienna with a few software developers in their 20s, 25 euro a night. Their penthouse apartment directly overlooked the Danube. I couldn't believe what a deal I stumbled upon, but then I found some of the clean budget hotels (Ibis or similar) were like 45 euro a night. In a major European city!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Nothing like Rick Steves and Bob Ross episodes to take the edge of a day.

</comment><comment><USER33> My first intro to Rick Steves was when his soothing yet excited voice guided me through the Louvre via his iPhone app. Ever since then, and time I'm in a new place in Europe, I always look for one of his guides. He's helped me through places like Vienna and Budapest. I'm glad he exists.

</comment><comment><USER34> Love Rick Steves, and used his resources to plan a 3 week vacation touring Italy almost 20 years ago now. It was an amazing trip.

Rick has also been on the board of NORML forever.

Warning: If you travel enough you might come down with "Cosmopolitan bias", which is evidently a bad thing in some circles.

</comment><comment><USER35> Step 1 - Have money

<comment><USER3> Yes, you need to have some. But the barrier is getting lower by the year, even for International travel.

For example:

San Francisco <-> Milan, May 7 - May 20, Norwegian Air+Easy Jet: $598.

Air Bnb for the duration: Central Loft, $70/night, 13 nights, $910. (you can find much lower as well, if you want to go for the minimum).

Shop local, cook & eat in the apartment, $20/day? $280.

Spend 13 days walking and exploring Milan for under $2,000.

That's not a trivial amount, but it's not the $2,000 air fare and $150 night hotel and $50 day food type of money, either.

<comment><USER36> > San Francisco <-> Milan, May 7 - May 20, Norwegian Air+Easy Jet: $598.

That's great if you are near a large city like San Francisco.

However, Madison, WI <-> Milan, May 7 - May 20, United: $1304 economy, 21h travel time.

It IS the $2000 airfare ( or approaching it).

Now, ORD <-> MIL is $687, but MSN -> ORD is at least a 2 1/2 hour trip by car, longer by bus.

It's a $60/rt ride from Madison to O'Hare on the Van Galder bus. If you drive, it's whatever cost to take your car plus at least $10/day at ORD.

<comment><USER37> Not sure about unpopular US departure cities but if one is flexible and waits for deals then it's doable to find cheap fare even outside of a flight hub.

I used to pay ~$1500 CAD from Ottawa, Canada to Manila, Philippines. Now that I'm aware of deals and have a flexible schedule/remote-work-policy I scoff at any trip with the same itinerary that's > $800.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> How can I watch Rick Steves?

<comment><USER17> I don't know if it's available outside the US, but PBS has some of the more recent episodes online for free: [https://www.pbs.org/show/rick-steves- europe/](https://www.pbs.org/show/rick-steves-europe/)

<comment><USER38> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> His energy and positivity are both refreshing.</comment>


Porting MIT Scheme to the .NET CLR - <AUTHOR> http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/09/if-you-havent-heard.html <comment><USER2> The discussion of the trade-offs between different internal implementations of closures, continuations, and lexical scoping was enlightening.

I'd like to hear more about the specifics joys and frustrations of building this all on top of the CLR. Are there any plans to compile down into .Net assemblies?

</comment><comment><USER3> There's another open source port called IronScheme that's pretty far along. You can find it at:

<http://ironscheme.codeplex.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> Why not port it to JVM?

<comment><USER5> If he was porting it to the JVM, one could just as easily ask "Why not .NET?" I get the impression that his choice of VM is, with respect to his project, arbitrary and not important for his goals.</comment></comment>


Cryptocurrency miner installed on Ello via Cloudflare hack - <AUTHOR> https://ello.co/noudio/post/m5nrhewciyh7i1ajzlvgrg <comment><AUTHOR> This report comes by way of a comment to a user post. There's no clear headline available, I've supplied a descriptive one.

Ello engineer colinta writes:

 _Someone was able to access our Cloudflare account. This is bad bad very bad, but as far as we can tell they did very little; they added a js.ello.co record and pointed it to their own server, then they copied our React javascript code and added their own mining code to it (not bitcoin, btw, they were mining for "Monero", which I'm unfamiliar with). Then they added a 301 redirect rule to serve their js file whenever our file was requested._

 _They could have done a lot more damage, for one they could have locked us out of our account. It 's really strange that they didn't, which indicates maybe that they were using an API key (you can't change the password that way)._

 _So we have now reset all of our passwords and API keys for everything that Cloudflare touches, and we reached out to Cloudflare to see if they can give us more information. We think that this hack started at ~11:30am mountain time, and was on the site for ~4 hours._

The attack also seems to be making rounds, so folks might want to keep a close eye on their own stacks.</comment>