Cold fusion E-Cat experiment ends explosively - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-02/06/cold-fusion-reactor <comment><USER2> It is worth noting that the E-Cat is the sort of thing that is not just unlikely, but blatantly fraudulent. It's claimed to work by adding hydrogen to nickel to make copper, a reaction so ridiculously unfeasible it doesn't even happen in supernova explosions.

[http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/12/05/the- nucle...](http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/12/05/the-nuclear- physics-of-why-we/)

[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer)

<comment><USER3> Also worth noting is that the original invention is not by Rossi, but by Sergio Focardi [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergio_Focardi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergio_Focardi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm going to keep repeating this. The negative control is to run the exact same experiment with deuterium instead of hydrogen. It shouldn't work. This experiment can easily be done even with Rossi's black box setup, and, as a blinded experiment if desired.

<comment><USER5> Deuterium is not quite as easy to get as hydrogen.

<comment><USER6> Run a current through this for pure deuterium gas: [https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&c...](https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=16_17_69&products_id=135)

<comment><USER7> Hmm. Well that link's certainly put me on a watch list or two.

<comment><USER8> High school kids run fusors on deuterium. It's not a big deal.

It has all sorts of practical applications [0] and is easily extracted from seawater, where it makes up one out of every few thousand hydrogen atoms.

(Of course these days there's no telling what irrational criteria might put you on a watch list.)

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Applications](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Applications)

<comment><USER9> Anyone who worries about going on a watch list should immediately be put on a watch list and this policy should be made completely public. Many common psychoses can be then avoided in society by making people fully justified in their personal persecution complexes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > [...] _or whether it was something simpler: hydrogen is involved so > conventional explosions are always possible, and lithium aluminium hydride > is pyrophoric, busting into flames in air._

I didn't know this detail. So it has something that can act like a conventional chemical fuel inside the device. If the device allows entering a small amount of oxygen, the fuel will slowly burn and produce an unexpected excess of energy. [Another alternative is a plain fraud, but I still don't discard a combination of an excess of optimism and bad measurements and experimental designs.]

</comment><comment><USER11> The processes of using Deuterium in Cold Fusion is different from that of regular Hydrogen.

Cold Fusion is a whole field of science - so depending on what one wants to achieve there are different approaches.

Want nano diamonds? add a bit of carbon on a wire of ferry - ala Celani

For the latest "dog bone" technology, its not that easy, as to just use Deuterium Gas instead of Hydrogen Gas. You have to have nickel powder with the right properties- as Rossi has his own, one would have to fumble in darkness so the best approach is to just stick to something proven.</comment>


Math Should be the Language of Politics Today - <AUTHOR>

Math:116m housholds in the US. Average income: $60k. New Federal budget divided across 116M averages $31k. Those are big numbers. Yet no one is talking numbers. Math is not driving the national discussion on economics. Very frustrating! <comment><USER2> :( don't start political fights on hn. i thought this was going to be about requiring only formal logic on the senate floor, or some such. the relative size of the federal budget over the us population, not as interesting...</comment>


Why do you need something to differentiate your business from other competitors? - <AUTHOR>

I am co-founder of a very young startup and I have struggle to understand why all the investors are asking for something that differentiate my business from other competitors. Assuming there is only one relatively bigger player in this very large and untapped market. What did differentiate Plated vs Blue Apron or Grubhub vs Seamless ( of course before acquisition). Also we have shown (Launched in May 14) 25% weekly growth so far in our sales. <comment><USER3> I like this question. Differentiation is a pretty vague term and could mean almost anything: A better user experience, a different approach to sales/marketing, or a different business model. You're right, if you're in a large market there probably is enough space for multiple players and you can grow quickly even without differentiation. But you must still be prepared to answer "Why should we pick you instead of XX?" from a customer. I don't know what industry you are in, but competing solely based on price usually isn't a good idea. You don't want to attract the "cheap" customers who can't afford better/expensive products (they're often the most troublesome), and you don't want to start a price war with other companies. What if a new startup comes along and offers the same for 25% less?

I think what many investors are getting at is less about initial differentiation and more about long-term defensibility. How can you make sure that whoever comes along (competitor or new entrant) can't just copy what you are doing for cheaper and steal away your customers? Do you have proprietary data? Network effects? Customer lock-in? Does your service increase in value the longer you around through data/network/customers?

Also, don't forget that most investors (particularly VCs) are looking for breakout successes. They want to find the next Twitter, Dropbox, Airbnb, etc. They barely make money from companies that are doing well but are just cruising along. You can probably build a profitable business just copying what your competitors are doing in a large market, but that's not what VCs are looking for.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is mostly a framing issue. I am sure you are having "something" that is different from your competitors. The "Unique Selling Proposition" is getting increasingly replaced by the term "Value Proposition". And "Value Proposition" can be anything your company overdelivers - maybe your service is better, maybe your servers are more stable, maybe your user experience is better. That should be possible to argue a lot easier.

<comment><AUTHOR> We believe we have a lot better customer service because I personally care a lot about our customers. That's actually the main reason we have decided to be more transparent with our pricing but from an investor point of view it's not something that we can prove or measure, am I right?

<comment><USER4> You certainly can do some post-customer care survey and collect personal testimonials of happy customers who praise how great your service was. But these better be really awesome, otherwise it looks too forced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So customers know why they should buy you, as opposed to the 14 other companies offering the same thing.

Unless you are building life-size replicas of people out of tuna salad and Swedish Fish, other companies will do what you do. What makes your product or service better than anyone else?

ANYTHING can be the difference-- price, components, features, performance, service-- as long as you can prove to an investor that IT is the reason people are giving your money, as opposed to competitors.

I have a friend who opened a comic book store that he staffed with women who are lingerie models who can also (they have been trained) speak knowledgeably about comics. That's his differentiator (Hooters of comics).

If your sales are growing, there must be something you are doing right (or better)-- that people are picking coming to you for. Figure out what it is and tell your investors that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our sales are growing but we are not both serving the same area. I guess most of the investors we have talked to are concerned about the future when we want to expand to the areas that they are already serving. You need to consider the fact that we still strongly believe that the market and demand is a lot larger than all the major competitors capacities combined.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Personally, of the companies you mentioned, Grubhub is the only one I recall having heard of.

Differentiation can be as simple as name recognition. A canonical example might be "Kleenex". AirBnB is a recent startup that I think captured some of this.

In a growing market with low barriers to entry or an established commodity market, name recognition is pretty much all there is. In a market with one dominate player, "we are not the dominate player" is can also be a meaningful differentiator.

The question is good if it is in reference to comprehensive execution - <USER2> is the context includes marketing and advertising in addition to product. It's a bit weaker if it is just about product. Product-market fit is why both Porsche and Kia successfully manufacture cars people will buy.

<comment><AUTHOR> In a market with one dominate player, "we are not the dominate player" is can also be a meaningful differentiator. <\-- How can this be in our advantage?

<comment><USER7> This is the first time in many years that I've corrected someone's spelling on the internet, but many writers are make this mistake recently, and it is extremely annoying to some of us: it should be "dominant", not "dominate".

"Dominate" is a verb.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Your sales growth sounds good . . . the investors are looking for something you have that your competitors don't.

I would focus on your customers . . . maybe even do some quick phone interviews with them . . . or look over your feedback/support requests and add some features they request that would make your startup even better, providing them with more value . . . there are always ways to innovate and do it better than the other guy while providing more value to your customer. Then outline a few of these differences to your potential investors.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you truly are growing 25% a week since May, then that's your differentiation right there: I promise you the other competitors are not growing so fast. Maybe it's pricing or ease of use or better experience, but the numbers speak for themselves.

By the way, 25% a week means you grew by 50X since May. Unless you started with a really low number, that's great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Almost every investor has been impressed with our growth but they are still concerned about the future and how we want to get customers when we expand our service to the area that is already covered by our competitor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> in my opinion, if you don't offer something different, why would someone choose you over more sophisticated ones. Investors are people who want their investments to bring them success and money. So success simply won't come, if one isn't different or better than others. It means the best case is you are going to be only as good as them, not better.

<comment><AUTHOR> What if the difference is as simple as different/more transparent pricing model? or what if the market is a lot bigger than the size of all the existing players combined? I guess my question is that how not offering a different service can hurt you in the future?</comment></comment>


Banned by the Publisher - <AUTHOR> http://www.nickcolebooks.com/2016/02/09/banned-by-the-publisher/ <comment><USER2> They're using "ban a book" to elicit a specific response here. Look; a publisher has the right to publish or not any work they wish for any reason they wish.

If the publisher had turned around and tried to stop the author from publishing this themselves (via indie routes) or going to another publisher, sure, I'd agree that that would be akin to trying to "ban" something.

But the reality is here that the publisher just opted out of publishing this specific works, as is their right. Sorry, author, but you sound bitter. Move on.

<comment><USER3> The publisher absolutely has the right to not publish the book. It's also very possible the author is being a bit unreasonable and bitter. We are only getting one side of the story.

However, I read this more as a warning that there is a bias in the publishing world and to not look at currently-published works in the aggregate as an unbiased body of work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious why the author's agent didn't just approach other mainstream publishers with it. After all, if he's a critical and commercial success with HarperCollins then it's very likely that someone, somewhere will take a serious interest. Now I know that the publishing world has conglomerated a lot in the last 20 years...but still there are other players.

edit: and editors at other imprints owned by the same group will often take a different view.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article gives us one passionate side of the situation. It would be nice to be a fly on the wall during the lead up conversations between HarperCollins and Mr. Cole's agent prior to the final decision being made.

Perhaps the story is as straight forward as Mr. Cole represented it; that HarperCollins declined to publish the novel because of the nature of the AI conflict described. Personally, it strikes me as oddly simplistic, and lacking in other context, given the success that Mr. Cole's previous work brought the publisher.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting how I felt total empathy for the author up until about 2/3 of the way through, when I started to wonder if he was, perhaps, just a jerk. Probably somewhere around when he started comparing his publisher to the Nazis.

<comment><USER7> He didn't compare the publisher to nazis. He talked about one of the essential components that allowed the nazis to have power in germany.

The nazis existed. They were real.

I don't like the modern fad of holocaust revisionism that says "anyone who talks about the nazis is ipso facto unable to make an argument (because the nazis were not real and there is not possibility that there could be a valid comparison between the conditions that allowed them to exist and conditions in current society-- because the nazis weren't real.)"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > In other words, they were attempting to effectively ban a book because they > felt the ideas and concepts I was writing about were dangerous and more > importantly, not in keeping with their philosophical ideals.

No, they were exercising their private property rights to publish only what they want to publish.

<comment><USER9> Larry Correia says [1] that "ban" would not be the right word here, but what they were doing was effectively _censoring_ his work. And the reason they did so, in the instant case, was because of _politics._ Period.

[1] [http://monsterhunternation.com/2016/02/10/left-wing-bias- in-...](http://monsterhunternation.com/2016/02/10/left-wing-bias-in- publishing-your-wrongthink-will-be-punished/)

<comment><USER10> To which I'd say, "And?"

The fact that you say something controversial doesn't change the relationship between an author and a publisher from "I'll publish your book if I think it's good and will sell" into "I'll publish your book absolutely because it makes a political stand".

He's free to find another publisher, or as in this case, self-publish. This seems about as clear a case of "move along, nothing to see here" as the internet is capable of providing.

<comment><USER11> You seem to be responding to a different situation than the one presented here. At least according to the OP, this author wasn't taking a political stand — it was just a small plot detail. They didn't even ask him to change it. Somebody saw something they didn't like and attempted to punish the author in the most severe way available to them. This is their right, of course, but you have the right to do lots of lousy things, including burn books.

<comment><USER12> They did ask him to change it. And the "punishment" was just to not publish him. Hardly severe, given the large number of other publishers available, and now the pretty good option of going without a publisher altogether.

"Publisher asks author to change book" hardly seems worthy of attention.

<comment><USER11> According to the author, they had already killed the book before they even sent him any notes. That seems to be the biggest part of what he found so upsetting.

<comment><USER12> The book was removed from the schedule, but I imagine it could have been reinstated (reschedule?) if the requested changes had been made. Certainly a dick move by the publisher if it went down like that, but the choice to change the offending section seems to have been there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Next time I'm turned down for something, I should write a blog post complaining about how I've been "banned."

What next, "banned from acting" when the author auditions for a commercial but the producers pick someone else?

<comment><USER13> Controversy sells, also sadly evidenced by the 2016 US political process. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see a few people pointing out that the book wasn't really banned, in the sense that it was not published as a direct result of government intervention. But is this really a meaningful distinction?

The book was prevented from being published in approximately the same way a book advocating communism would have been effectively banned from publication in the 1950s (via whisper campaigns, implied or explicit threats of blacklisting, etc).

edit: sometimes this is justifiable: for example, a book titled 'Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong and Kim Jong Un: misunderstood heroes?' would probably also be effectively banned via social pressure.

<comment><USER15> > I see a few people pointing out that the book wasn't really banned, in the > sense that it was not published as a direct result of government > intervention. But is this really a meaningful distinction?

Yes, there is a meaningful distinction between a publisher deciding not to publish a book, and a book being banned. While there may certainly be conditions where private action is so powerful in a given marketplace it is substantially equivalent to a government prohibition and raises the same issues, this isn't one. There are other publishers, and there has never been a time when self-publishing and bypassing major publishers -- especially for an already successful writer -- is easier.

The fact that this whole complaint is actually a promotional piece for the book, which is in fact being published through Amazon's direct publishing offering, demonstrates exactly why the distinction between a publisher choosing not to publish a book and the book actually being banned is a meaningful -- night-and-day -- distinction.

> The book was prevented from being published

No, it was, in fact, _not_ prevented from being published. The first two sentences of the article are "I launched a book this week and I went Indie with it. Indie means I released it on Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing."

<comment><USER14> >No, it was, in fact, not prevented from being published. The first two sentences of the article are "I launched a book this week and I went Indie with it. Indie means I released it on Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing."

Prevented from being published via established channels, then. The analogy still holds, because in the 1950s you could still publish content considered communist in photocopied zines.

<comment><USER15> > Prevented from being published via established channels, then.

Kindle Direct Publishing has been around about as long as the Kindle (they were, IIRC, announced at the same time), and is backed by the dominant online book and ebook retailer. Its a pretty well-established channel.

> The analogy still holds, because in the 1950s you could still publish > content considered communist in photocopied zines.

The analogy does not, even remotely, hold, because such photocopied zines would not be available via major retail outlets, whereas Kindle Direct Publishing is directly sponsored by the dominant retail outlet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We're in a similar situation except with Amazon being the one banning our books. I am the owner of FAKKU, an English publisher of erotic manga (Japanese comics). Despite there being a category on Amazon for our specific material and previously receiving approval to list our books behind an "Adults Only" flag, our books have been banned.

If you're wondering what that looks like from the customer perspective, you can see (or not see) our banned best sellers here: [http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Erotica- Manga/zgbs/...](http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Erotica- Manga/zgbs/books/7406072011)

<comment><USER15> Actually, I think being blocked by a retail channel with the absolute dominance Amazon has is a lot more significant than being turned down by a publisher.

The former is a significant bar to reaching customers, the latter not so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Having gone to the trouble of reading said first chapter ... wut. It's the "AI sees a human do something that can be interpreted as callous, starts thinking, decides maybe this is going to be a problem" trope (and, actually, as a firmly pro-choice person I find that the human action in question being one I wouldn't condemn actually _adds_ to the horror inherent to the trope).

The ranty and bitter tone of the author does him no favours, certainly, but taking him off the publication list before contacting him, and for something so (to my mind) frankly silly, quite understandably would feel like enough of a kick in the teeth that irrational anger is pretty understandable.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's terrible but thinking Amazon is a haven from censorship is wrong. They can and will close your account for any reason or no reason at all. If they didn't agree with this idea, they'd kill the book, guaranteed.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why is this blatant marketing allowed on HN?

This is the same ploy as the "banned" super bowl commercial scam. Submit something obviously unacceptable and then cry foul when it gets refused hoping to get views via the media attention.

<comment><USER20> I agree that this sound like self-promoting, but calling that bit of the book "obviously unacceptable"?

<comment><USER19> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh0nkoJgDM8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh0nkoJgDM8)

It's pretty simple. Get rejected, complain about how the man is holding you down, and hope the free publicity rolls in. It's marketing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oh God. A publisher didn't like his work of fiction and perhaps acted unprofessionally and he cries about free speech and concentration camps, all in the same long winded paragraph. Cry me a river.

Free speech protects you from censorship from the government, not from a private company that doesn't like your book and so chooses not to invest their money and time in publishing it. Free speech does not mean other people have to listen to you, take you seriously, or do what you want them to.

Free speech means you can throw your little tantrum in public and the government cannot tell you to shut the fuck up. Rightly so, that is left to society in general to do.</comment>


Doubling Mono's Float Speed - <AUTHOR> http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2018/Apr-11.html <comment><USER2> Wow, I hadn't imagined that because the coordinates are sent to the GPU as floats, that means triangles start voxelizing when you get further away from origin.

Seems like it could make an awesome shader-free animation if you translated the entire worlds position by a ridiculously large (increasing in value) float.

<comment> Const-me > that means triangles start voxelizing when you get further away from origin

They can in a few edge cases, but in most cases they don't.

Simplifying many things, to render a model, a game engine uploads 2 things to GPU:

1\. Model's vertex buffer + index buffer. The vertices are in mesh's own coordinate system, and most 3D designers don't design their meshes placed 100km away from origin.

2\. A single 4x4 matrix, containing ( world * view * projection ) transform. World transforms the model from local to world coordinate system, view from world to camera related, and projection from camera related to 2D screen coordinates + depth.

If you're 200km far from origin, and are looking at a model near the camera, world transform will contain large values because you're very far, view transform will also contain large values because camera's also very far, but multiplied together they won't have very large values, because model is near the camera.

And if your model is very far from the camera, so the ( world * view * projection ) transform contains huge values, you won't notice precision degradation, because the whole model will occupy a single pixel at most.

<comment><USER3> > They can in a few edge cases, but in most cases they don't. [...] world > transform will contain large values because you're very far, view transform > will also contain large values because camera's also very far, but > multiplied together they won't have very large values, because model is near > the camera.

This is a good point; this problem is more prone to show up in a ray tracer than a rasterizer, since rasterizers have to apply the camera transform to the geometry, and ray tracers don't.

It's pretty easy to see this problem while using Maya though. Z-buffer resolution in the editor drops off from the origin.

We might see this issue crop up with increasing frequency as more and more people use GPUs for ray tracing...

<comment><USER4> And the problem is old and well known e.g. by game developers. For example "A Real-Time Procedural Universe, Part Three: Matters of Scale" by Sean O'Neil from 2002 [1] discusses rendering problems at planetary, star-system and even galaxy scale, including Z-buffer precision and various options regarding 32-bit float vs. 64-bit double vs. 128-bit fixed-point integer + float offsets (for vertex coordinates of a mesh) etc.

[1] [https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131393/a_realtime_pro...](https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131393/a_realtime_procedural_universe_.php?print=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Keanu wonders: is Minecraft chunky purely because everything's rendered really far from the origin?"

Actually, Minecraft used to have some interesting float-precision-induced artifacts once you got far from the origin:

[https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Far_Lands](https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Far_Lands)

<comment><USER6> Minecraft's Far Lands aren't actually related to floating point precision, although movement near the Far Lands is affected.

My understanding of what causes the Far Lands isn't that great, but I think it's caused by one of six or eight shorts overflowing in the generation algorithm.

Edit: It seems I needed to read more of the Minecraft Wiki link for the Farlands. [https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Far_Lands#Cause](https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Far_Lands#Cause) covers it much better than I could.

</comment></comment><comment> drew-y I've run into a similar issue writing a ray tracer in Swift! We are even both using Peter Shirley's "Ray Tracing in One Weekend" as a reference! I'm to this day struggling to get the performance near the level of the C++ reference implementation. I've made some improvements but overall the swift version is around 5x slower.

If any one is interested the source code is available here: [https://gitlab.com/youngwerth/ray- tracer/settings/repository](https://gitlab.com/youngwerth/ray- tracer/settings/repository)

Compiled using "swift build -c release".

<comment><USER7> You should look at the assembly to know for sure (after you have profiled and narrowed it down).

With this sort of speed difference my guess is that there is either excess memory allocation going on, pointer hopping when you think you are using something by value on the stack, or both.

<comment><USER8> I'll second looking at the assembly code. I had a similar problem a few years ago and an assembly expert told us that we were moving data in and out of the cache all the time instead of leaving it there. We had to change the way we looped through arrays and got a huge improvement. this could be wrong but I would also guess that the Swift optimizer is not as good as the ones C++ has mainly for the reason that it's newer.

<comment><USER7> You don't need to look at assembly to avoid cache misses, you just need to understand what the language is doing under the hood in a general sense, then make sure you access memory in a way that it can be prefetched.

My guess is that it is either the program being written slightly differently or that swift is doing some sort of indirection under the hood.

<comment><USER8> "you just need to understand what the language is doing under the hood in a general sense"

Isn't the best to find out to look at the assembly? How else can you know what the compiler and optimizer are doing?

<comment><USER7> No, understanding what the language is doing is not the same as looking at assembly or even understanding what the optimizer is doing.

If swift is creating some variables on the heap and/or creating virtual tables for inheritance (I don't know much about it) then you don't need to look at the assembly to know that you are creating indirection or doing too many heap allocations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It pains me to hear about developers doing the wrong thing just to beat a dumb benchmark. If you really care about cpu raytracing performance, you need to write handcrafted simd code and C# default float handling is of no consequence to you. Correctness > speed.

<comment><USER10> Did you even read the article?

> _In Mono, decades ago, we made the mistake of performing all 32-bit float > computations as 64-bit floats while still storing the data in 32-bit > locations._ (...) _Applications did pay a heavier price for the extra > computation time, but [in the 2003 era] Mono was mostly used for Linux > desktop application, serving HTTP pages and some server processes, so > floating point performance was never an issue we faced day to day._ (...) > _Nowadays, Games, 3D applications image processing, VR, AR and machine > learning have made floating point operations a more common data type in > modern applications. When it rains, it pours, and this is no exception. > Floats are no longer your friendly data type that you sprinkle in a few > places in your code, here and there. They come in an avalanche and there is > no place to hide. There are so many of them, and they won't stop coming at > you._

The raytracer is just a good performance test.

<comment><USER9> Yes I did and fwiw, comments asking people whether they read the article or not is ot on hn. A performance test is exactly the same thing as a benchmark. In any real world code, slower floats doesn't matter at all. None of you who have commented have been able to or even tried to prove me wrong on that point.

<comment><USER11> > In any real world code, slower floats doesn't matter at all

This is the same reasoning that tanked the Cyrix 6x86.

If it were true, why don't we just ditch hardware floating point altogether and just emulate it with integer arithmetic instead? I'm sure chip manufacturers would appreciate having the die-space back.

<comment><USER9> That's a straw man. I explained that I meant that a slower builtin floating point _TYPE_ doesn't matter. "If you really care about cpu raytracing performance, you need to write handcrafted simd code and C# default float handling is of no consequence to you."</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why e-mail has become the new snail mail - <AUTHOR> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/sathnam_sanghera/article6937890.ece

<comment><USER2> ...and, oddly, the old snail mail might not be as bad any more. I get so little non-spam snail mail that if anyone were to take the time to send me a hand-written letter, I would make reading it a priority.</comment>


The Future of RSS Isn't Another NetNewsWire - <AUTHOR> http://carpeaqua.com/2013/03/18/the-future-of-rss-isnt-another-netnewswire/

<comment><USER2> Ah, Prismatic is a new one for me :)

A quick glance shows that they have the most engaging team page I've ever seen - <http://getprismatic.com/people></comment>


Researchers discover meat-eating plant in Ontario - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-06-meat-eating-ontario-canada.html <comment><USER2> This doesn't seem that new to me, besides the location being in Canada. I watched a PBS special on Carnivorous plants recently and they covered the fact that pitcher plants in some parts of the world will digest the rodents that fall into them. The rodents like to lick the sweet nectar and poop in the plants which benefits both species. However, they do sometimes fall in and then die and are slowly digested. Researchers filmed this and then found rodent skeletons in some of the plants.

Funny enough, someone found this back in Victorian days and all the papers talked about the meat eating plant. The Venus fly trap seriously put a dent in their view of plants. This was all talked about in the same PBS special.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does that mean eating this plant isn't vegan?

<comment><USER4> Plants aren't sentient, so I think most vegans would be okay with it if it didn't contain whole sentient animal (like a salamander) at the time.

(But there's no Grand Council of Veganism that makes such judgments, of course.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone should let it know of the health benefits of a plant-based diet.

<comment><USER6> We're going to get one and feed it Beyond Meat burgers.</comment></comment>


Reddit's redesign could kill discussion subreddits - <AUTHOR> https://changemyview.net/2018/04/11/reddit-redesigned-its-site-and-it-could-kill-discussion-subreddits/ <comment><USER2> Mobile phones. Again.

It's always mobile phones that ruin good websites these days.

They optimise for swipe, scroll and tap. Look, like, emoji.

They don't optimise for text. In fact they are increasingly hostile to it. The Tinderfication of online dating has been a depressing race to the bottom.

The internet was never going to be as great as we thought it was. No other technology has been. Folks thought the telegraph would end wars and that TVs would have everyone soaking up a deep education. But that's not where the money was.

But I felt it wouldn't be this shitty. At some point we're all going to look back on that moment when Jobs held up the first iPhone that could run an app and regret it.

<comment><AUTHOR> And yet so few of the designers consider dark/black colour themes, which are not only more easier on the eyes, but also notably save the battery.

<comment><USER3> Dark themes are worse for the eyes, [https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/53264/dark-or- white-c...](https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/53264/dark-or-white-color- theme-is-better-for-the-eyes)

Don't know about battery life. I guess if it's AMOLED, [https://www.greenbot.com/article/2834583/how-much-power- does...](https://www.greenbot.com/article/2834583/how-much-power-does-a-black- interface-really-save-on-amoled-displays.html)

<comment><USER4> Maybe, but I wonder if that is true at night with the lights off. When I read in bed at night, I _much_ prefer light on dark text. Combined with Android's night mode to tint things red, it is fantastic.

In fact, I wish the Kindle Paperwhite would come out with an inverted mode already (although I think I read there were some challenges with doing so). It can be fairly straining on my eyes to have the sidelit screen bright enough to be legible while being as dim as possible to make reading with the lights off comfortable.

<comment><USER5> Majority of reading is done in a brighter setting so many factors contribute to using dark text in white background. In the case of reading in the dark or low light settings, using a Kindle Paperwhite gets complicated since you want to make the background darker while still maintaining sufficient contrast to read the text which is always in a dark font color.

In the UX StackExchange post, it's stated that astigmatism is also a contributing factor to favor dark text on white background. I do believe that these night time settings should be toggled automatically for white text with dark background as well as accounting for blue wavelength reduction for screens with full colors.

<comment><USER6> I would like operating systems, browsers and websites to globally support a "night mode" where a dark background is used. Especially with the proliferation of mobile devices, people increasingly use technology in low- light environments. As it stands today, I have to add external stylesheets to websites to get this effect, and if I want to toggle them, I have to toggle each one manually. It's similar, but worse for Android apps because the app itself has to support themes.

I find having a significant portion of the screen white when my eyes are relatively dark-adapted uncomfortable, even when the brightness is set fairly low. I find a dark background with light text very preferable under those conditions. I do not care if there is research suggesting I should not have this preference.

From talking to others in person and online, I get the impression that my preference is very common. Android was supposed to get something resembling this, but the feature has been dropped or delayed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Two reasons why Reddit isn't "digg-ing" their own grave right now:

1\. This change is much smaller and less destructive than digg's big change (although the long term effects can be just as destructive).

2\. When Digg's redesign caused an exodus, Reddit was extremely well known as "that ugly digg clone" and "this digg link was on Reddit yesterday". Reddit doesn't have a well known established "number two" the way digg did. Raddleme is a leftist fringe site, voat is a racist fringe site, HN is a technology fringe site. Discord servers rely on Reddit for discoverability and member vetting. When this has been discussed before, I've never seen a viable candidate mentioned. Since the only people who can leave are people who only use fringe topics, Reddit won't be able to loose critical mass and then the fringers will have to come back.

On the other hand, these changes appear to be a step into the Twitter/Instagram/facebook market. I'm curious if Reddit will be ready in time to take advantage of this upcoming Facebook exodus, also if there will even be an exodus.

<comment><USER8> You've painted a picture in my mind of Reddit as this massive blob connecting Discord, so-called "fringe communities", etc.

It actually makes me appreciate Reddit a bit more -- it can be garbage, but it's also a bit of a centralized meeting place for so many smaller communities. Even if the bulk of those smaller communities doesn't take place on Reddit itself, they still flow _through_ Reddit.

Reddit is like the central bazaar of discoverability. The community you end up in might not live on Reddit, but in all likelihood, you discovered it through Reddit.

So despite how terrible the big communities can be (which is not a Reddit- exclusive problem), I'm still glad it exists. Maybe an alternative is needed, but at the very least, I respect how Reddit has mostly retained this unique ability over the years.

<comment><USER9> I dislike trying to talk about "The Reddit Community" for the same reason I'd dislike trying to talk about "The New York City Community" or "The Tokyo Community": You don't have a million-member community. You can talk about Dunbar's Number, you can talk about the simple fact nobody goes out and meets a million people even if they're all on the same website/within a half-mile radius of their home, but the result is the same.

It's possible to talk about "The Average Redditor" or "The Average New Yorker" or "The Average Tokyo Resident", because statistics isn't about community, but the whole reason Reddit has survived at the size it is is precisely because subreddits allow different people to have vastly different views of "what's on Reddit" based on subscription/unsubscription. This allows The_Donald and EnoughTrumpSpam and dozens of other communities which would fight like cats in a sack were they ever mixed to share the same service.

So Reddit isn't a community. It's a pre-made hosted platform to build a community meeting point that you can largely (or completely, via invitation- only private subreddits) insulate from all the other communities on the same platform.

<comment><USER10> But these community members aren't insulated entirely, ever. A new account is always provided the same front page experience, due to default subscriptions, and most Redditors only add subreddits to that front page, never removing any. Even if they curate to an extreme level, the Popular feed is always the same for everyone. You need to manually override that feed with RES filters to eliminate content.

So I think it's valid to refer to "The Reddit Community", with some caution, because there is a familiarity with some of the same content, and an ability to relate in certain modes of thinking. The same way as "The Tokyo Community" generally familiar with Shibuya crossing, the local weather patterns, and behavioral expectations.

There's significant standard deviation, but also a commonality that enables a stronger connection to other members of the platform / city.

<comment><USER11> Defaults have been gone for a while. Doesn't affect older users but going forward every users front page will be more different.

<comment><USER12> I literally just made an account today and it subscribed me to a bunch of defaults.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From reading Reddit threads about the redesign: pretty much everyone hates it, especially Reddit's most passionate users, who have been very articulate, consistent, and aligned about exactly what they don't like, and Reddit just keeps brushing them off and dismissing their point of view.

Maybe the purpose of the redesign is something like monetization? Or maybe they are just out of touch and by the time they really understood the community's point of view, the decisions had been made, so the Reddit employees tasked with handling the community response can't really say or do much.

<comment><USER14> Of course it's about monetization. There's a difference between how Reddit- the-company (and its investors) view the site, and how its users do.

It's like with cafés - visitors likes them quiet, and would very much enjoy having an electrical outlet near the table (to charge up phone) and even free Wi-Fi. But cafés aren't in business of making peoples' life better and more enjoyable, they're in business of selling coffee - so they'll actively _remove_ electrical outlets, remove their Wi-Fi and make the place noiser, to increase turnover.

<comment><USER15> Genuinely interested to know where in the world the cafes are like that.

<comment><USER16> I'm in the Midwest. All of them do _something_ to discourage staying all day. Most don't have many seats with access to electrical. WiFi is restricted to a couple hours per session and not any faster than it needs to be. Most of them are echoey on purpose. It's been several years since one tried to make bringing a computer at all difficult, though. I credit this to the re- emergence of Dunkin Donuts in our area, reducing the gain from competing for customers without much time for coffee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't get it. What exactly is changing? From the screenshots from the reddit post about it, it looks.... like reddit. There's posts and the posts have upvote/downvote buttons, and there's a link to the comments that shows how many there are. Am I missing something? The OP article doesn't actually have any screenshots of changes, and I made it several paragraphs into the article still not understanding what is changing.

<comment><USER18> You should be able to interact with the redesign directly at [https://new.reddit.com](https://new.reddit.com). The main complaints I've seen leveled at the redesign are: user profiles becoming more like Facebook profiles, the new chat functionality missing core features, and the newly created "best" ranking becoming the default.

<comment><USER17> Not sure why, but that link just brings me to the normal homepage (as it's looked for years).

<comment><USER19> This confused me as well. See Izkata below your comment with a wired link to screenshots.

But I see the old reddit as well.

<comment><USER17> I wonder if you have to be logged in for that link to work? I'm at work right now and I never log in to reddit from here.

<comment><USER20> Nope.

I'm logged in and still getting redirected to the original.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sadly, the reddit website has become a travesty - especially on mobile. A huge "DOWNLOAD THE REDDIT APP" banner obscures literally 30% of the page. There is a teeny-tiny "view on mobille site" link in small, low-contrast text that can be used to dismiss the annoying banner. Due to its size and user-hostile design, the Reddit banner is even worse than most news sites that try to push their newsletter/app/subscription with similarly annoying banners.

<comment><USER22> On Android, use the "Reddit if fun" application - classic Reddit, fit for mobile: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu.android.reddit&hl=en)

<comment><USER23> Yeah but I don't want to use another app for that. I already have app for browsing Reddit - it's called web browser and I'd like to keep using it rather than downloading yet another app that does basically the same.

<comment><USER24> I get your point, but "Reddit is Fun" is really good. It's the opposite of the stupid mobile apps which are inferior to the website proper.

I might even prefer it to the desktop site (not to speak of the mobile site).

<comment><USER14> Seconding Reddit is Fun - it has a very decent UX (about the only thing I'd love to see improved is the comment box, especially around quoting stuff). It's lean, bullshit-free, actively developed and offers all the features you'd have on the website (at least all that I know of).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A day before the re-design announcement I was explaining to a friend why Digg died and why Reddit would never dare re-designing their page. Oh boy was I wrong.

<comment><USER26> You make it sound like this came out of nowhere. Reddit has been letting people beta test this for months.

<comment><USER27> And I told them it is terrible and stopped beta testing within minutes.

<comment><USER28> And you were wrong. Time to admit it.

<comment><USER29> You're right. I love it when websites run slow and hog resources to provide less functionality than they used to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Purely from a user perspective I personally love the new Reddit design, I don't find it detracts much from the previous design at all. BUT I use a top- end Macbook Pro and I find the new design to be terribly slow and a performance hog, where it simply kills the UX.

Once you open up 10 tabs (how I typically browse Reddit, by shift clicking each thread I want to read) I can hear my CPU fans kicking in. I had to tune Firefox to use 6 cores instead of 4 to get any decent performance. I may just end up going back to the old design :/

I'm not sure what computers/browsers Reddit's UI/UX team has been testing on, or if they've ever tried to open multiple pages at once, but this is a pretty blatant issue.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. The design aesthetic actually works but the technical overhead in implementing is the problem. HN works so well because not only does it prioritize information density but it consumes less resources. The Reddit redesign pushes thumbnails, infinite scroll, and a useless right sidebar.

Thumbnails waste space depending on the subreddit. Infinite scroll destroys the idea of a discrete "front page" which is core to Reddit being the front page of the Internet. In addition the infinite scroll makes no sense in the comments where on Mobile you can jump between top-level parent comments whereas on Desktop it's too busy loading child comments before you can get to the next top-level parent comment. The right sidebar is persistent and serves little purpose for a power user. The left sidebar which provides core navigation for a power user is useful when persistent but loads asynchronously with the middle, main content for it to be a consistent user experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Top tier sites like reddit should not drop large, disruptive, releases like this.

Take Amazon for example. If they went from the design 5-7 years ago straight to the current design, there would be uproar, Stock price dip etc.

The incremental approach allows the site owner to both roll back bad ideas but also condition users into where the design is heading.

(Correction: not Conde Nast) The owner, has a plan, which is clearly not inline with the current Reddit usage, this is not the approach to get to that goal.

I am struggling to think of big drops like this working, anyone?

<comment><USER32> > I am struggling to think of big drops like this working, anyone?

Gmail has done major overhauls all in one go. So has Dropbox. Google calendars. Google earth. Apple's main site. Most newspaper's sites. Bitbucket. Facebook has had several. All of these have irritated some portion of users who decried the death of the product, yet eventually people get used to it. I think it works more often than not.

And if we went suddenly from Amazon of five years ago[1] to the Amazon of today I don't think there would be that much of an uproar. It's basically the same site, just with minor colour and layout changes.

[1]: [https://web.archive.org/web/20130316112319/http://www.amazon...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130316112319/http://www.amazon.com/)

<comment><USER33> "It's basically the same site, just with minor colour and layout changes."

The most dramatic change has been to "community" features. Amazon feels it is enough of a monopoly now that it now longer has to attract customers through the ability to discuss things. The discussion boards were shut down, and similarly the ability to leave a comment under someone's product review was restructured so that that feature no longer serves to let people maintain a lively conversation among themselves about the author or musician. Many listings now only show by default reviews from customers who actually brought the product; this was done to tackle the problem of shill reviewers, but it also eviscerated the community that had popped up to share their feelings on even library loans because for nearly two decades Amazon had let anyone review and discuss books and music.

The page to see your review history has been changed so that it is now an infinite scroll. While infinite scroll is a very popular design choice these days, I can't help but wonder if Amazon also wanted to make it difficult for the reviewers with 1000+ reviews to easily move their content to another site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> As long as redditors can choose between the designs I don't see a problem. Once this choice is removed though they've veered in to Digg territory. All the power users and influencers will use the old design because they're used to it. I can see why reddit wants a redesign -- reddit is ugly but people are used to it that way and grew to like it. The redesign is for new users.

Reddit has already been down this path with Pao. If they don't like how the site is being run they will depart or revolt.

<comment><USER35> > The redesign is for new users

And I suspect bigger, more visible ads/paid content

<comment><USER36> The paid content is definitely way worse (more insidious) in the new design): it blends in far more, and equally as bad is that a lot of it seems to be just using those trash fb-esque style clickbait titles.

Reddit's not perfect, but trash-tier clickbait titles is not something I'm accustomed to seeing on there, nor do I want to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I unfortunately saw this weeks ago. I did the checkbox accepting being in the Beta program.

At first, I thought something was rewriting the whole content of my browser. And then, I realized, no, this is their "redesign". On mobile, the site is unusable - as in a overlay bar blocks all clicks or anything - for at least 30 seconds. Being on a laptop wasn't much better. There, it was 10 seconds of unusuability, per loaded page.

It took me 3 minutes to navigate to turn _off_ beta. From there, it went back to the decent site I'm used to. Well, except a button in the upper left band that states "TRY THE REDESIGN"... Uhh, no.

All good things must come to an end. There is an end to everything, to good things as well.

<comment><USER38> What browser are you on? new.reddit.com works just fine on updated Firefox... biggest annoyance is the lack of sidebars on subreddits, apparently they need to be enabled by the mods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> All I wanted to see is what the comments section now looks like. It's literally the only thing I'm there for, and preview photos never show it. (My biggest complaint with many HN app previews too)

Of course, when I try the preview myself, I'm greeted with this:

[https://imgur.com/a/PvRhk](https://imgur.com/a/PvRhk)

<comment><USER40> Here's an example.

[https://imgur.com/a/RfioM](https://imgur.com/a/RfioM)

<comment><USER4> I'm not seeing any significant differences there. Am I missing something obvious?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Frustrating to discuss this on reddit as well. They always think we should watch and eait but that rarely works. Especially if they already added huge banners advertising their data collecting app and now autoplaying videos, before people complained they also autoplayed them with sound..

</comment><comment><USER42> How can an article about a re-design not actually show or compare the two designs?

<comment><USER43> [https://www.wired.com/story/reddit- redesign/](https://www.wired.com/story/reddit-redesign/)

This one at least has some screenshots of the new design. It feels like a Facebook clone to me. In particular it looks like they're flattening comments to be like FB rather than the thread? model that Reddit has today.

<comment><USER44> The only significant change I've noticed re: comments are how the nested chains collapse: instead of the intuitive [+] and [-] at the parent comment, there's a line that runs alongside the chain. Click that line and it collapses.

It's not as easy to figure out on your own, but it's a significant improvement IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The redesign adds a bit of lag from all the javascript and extra elements. The old plain text + expanding comments + images/gifs is much smoother and includes everything that's needed

</comment><comment><USER46> There is certain design by committee feeling at new redesing, its like they are putting everything there chat, share, follow, fancy sidebar, options and more.

</comment><comment><USER47> Reddit is pushing to become a news site rather than a community site.

<comment><USER48> I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption. People already view Twitter as a source of news, no reason they wouldn't accept Reddit as a news media as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Reddit gave me the opportunity to try the new layout, and I lasted exactly 1 minute before reverting. The log in page was broken. I could see where to sign up for a new account, but could not see area to log in for existing users.

The problem appeared to be one of resizing the old log in page correctly for the new layout. Regardless, not my issue as a stupid user to have to debug log in pages for a major website.

If this sort of basic thing is missing in the redesign, they have big problems ahead.

</comment><comment><USER50> The question is: By mistake or by design?

<comment><USER51> There are no mistakes in it. This was planned years ago, they spent a lot of time evaluating different technologies and UI mockups. I'm interested to see if AMA with Barak Obama will be still readable, or will start consuming gigabytes of RAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I miss being able to collapse comments by pressing the minus-sign button.

<comment><USER53> The long bar (beneath the upvote/downvote buttons) that shows what level the current comment is at collapses comments by clicking it. Very unintuitive, and I only found it by accident.

<comment><USER52> ah, thanks... but yes, very unintuitive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The Apollo app is what official Reddit should be like right now.

<comment><USER36> Or Reddit Sync.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Reddit has its issues (brigading, trolling, execssive politics, 12-year old level "memes" on serious discussions), but it was a site you could visit without regret, and get lost in for hours.

With the new redesign, it _is_ Facebook - people share a link, you click the comments section, it shows you the top comments, you upvote the top comments (or the ones that agree with your view), and rinse and repeat till infinity, because you have infinite scroll. Which is not how I want the future Reddit to look like.

Yes, it is good for advertisers. Yes, it is good for the the new wave of people who will arrive from Facebook.

But it is utterly disheartening for Reddit to stray so far from what I viewed its core emphasis as - comments.

</comment><comment><USER56> wonder what will be the next reddit .. maybe the last push before some decentralized thing that needed some userbase.

<comment><USER57> PhpBB or vBulletin reincarnations?

<comment><USER56> Actually I wouldn't mind, I miss the spirit of these boards. phpbb was hell, but it seems a lot of php things are now based on clean modules (even though a quick googling sheds doubts on the status of phpbb over symfony modules)

<comment><USER57> Definitely didn't want to give impression that it's somehow worse. A well moderated board is lightyears ahead of a subreddit or, god forbid, FB group. Even half assed categorisation and search awesome. Today's forums could have proper full text search and pimped up moderation tools, possibly with some AI helpers on top.. Just thinking about it makes me drool.

<comment><USER56> I don't know if my interests shield me from bad subreddits but most of the one I glance at are fine, at worst they're just comatose but never toxic. I like reddit quite a bit, it has that weird organic value that overcome a lot of weirdness and subpar features.

Still old boards were .. much more home like than most of the web 2.0 ever dreamed of.

<comment><USER57> Not that they're bad. There's definitely a lot of subreddits with a good charm. But they're PITA from information archive point of view. Browsing old threads is much harder than in classic BB. Thus people keep asking same question over and over again even more than in the old days :)

Hundreds-of-pages-over-a-decade historical threads don't happen on either of new platforms either :( Which is one of the lovely quirks of the old boards IMO.

<comment><USER56> oh that sure, reddit has no function here on most subreddits, but for non instantaneous chat/help it's very good.

<comment><USER57> I guess I lurk on different type of classic forums. Most of them focus on generating long-standing content on-the-spot chat is just a byproduct.

<comment><USER56> yeah, per 'site' moderation has still a massive influence over this. /r/askhistorian is very strict about answers, anything that deviates from sourced and on topic will be removed. You can read anything there and have clear concise deep answers even years after.

this is something I liked a lot about reddit, there's no micromanagement, it's very organic and free. I'm not always for senseless freedom but in this case I found it to yield interesting things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Can somebody please summarize what has changed? Maybe I don't use Reddit enough, but I just refreshed one of the subreddits that I like, and I can't find a difference. Possibly a caching issue?

<comment><USER59> Maybe this will help -

[http://new.reddit.com/](http://new.reddit.com/)

<comment><USER60> is this supposed to be the new reddit?

it's the same ol' reddit for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> The design reminds me too much of the native iOS Reddit app; fine for mobile, but I really do not like it for desktop. It is absolutely annoying to me.

</comment><comment><USER62> in other news how is their new profile design going? I keep adding /overview to mine and other profiles to be able to actually click on things . Why do they keep breaking functionality for no apparent reason? It's becoming a theme in many high-traffic websites (google adsense, analytics come to mind), it's as if new managers roll in and decide to piss all around their territory.

</comment><comment><USER63> I find the new design noisy and distracting.

</comment><comment> gm-conspiracy digg v3?

<comment><USER64> I thought it was digg v4 that was Digg's undoing. Which was taken over by...Reddit. I guess its time for some other community site to take over. Maybe those Amino apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Is Fark still relevant? Their Cohen raid night thread was really long.

</comment><comment><USER66> I started using reddit in 2008. Although I doubt it was intentional reddit was a refuge from the "Best viewed with Javascript" modern web for many years. It worked just fine to browse and read with no JS enabled and was very snappy and low resource usage that way. Sure, you had to toggle JS back on to vote or post but that was easy enough.

I left just before they pushed out the redesign due their increased censorship but from what I can see now it is a random chance that a sub will work with JS disabled. Half the time the post content in a div that only is rendered visible when you turn on JS. You can read it if you view source but not in the browser's native interface.

<comment><USER67> It's 2018 and you're criticizing a site for not running well with JS disabled. You're the one actively deciding to make websites harder to use, why should they design the site for you?

<comment><USER68> It's 2018 and web developers are still not competent enough to build simple websites (blogs, news, reddit) without forcing visitors to use JS.

JS is the technology responsible for most of the malware infections and spyware ad-tracking. It's not like people disable it just to piss off developers, there are very good reasons to turn it off.

<comment><USER69> > most of the malware infections

Can you give a source for that?

I keep asking for it and never had any good response. The best I have found is that it helps show phishing. A link that said "Install me" and trigger the download of an executable when you click on it doesn't make HTML responsible for malware infections.

<comment><USER70> [https://labsblog.f-secure.com/2016/04/28/browser-and- email-t...](https://labsblog.f-secure.com/2016/04/28/browser-and-email-top- attack-channels-for-malware-delivery/)

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+malware+vector&atb=v64-...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=javascript+malware+vector&atb=v64-5_a&t=cros&ia=qa)

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=javascript%20malware%20...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=javascript%20malware%20vector&btnG=Search&as_sdt=800000000001&as_sdtp=on)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> cup-of-tea Reddit is terrible for discussion anyway. You can't have a discussion when people can "downvote" your post. Nothing of value has been lost here. I say that as someone who used reddit heavily until about a month ago when I kicked the addiction.

<comment><USER71> All downvoting does is enforce 'crowd-think'. You could never picture it today, but back in 2012, /r/politics was much more central then it was today (still left leaning, but you could actually find differing opinions). But soon after that election, anyone who disagreed would get downvoted into oblivion, and eventually those people stop posting. And what you're left with is today's /r/politics.

You can see this in a lot of topic related subreddits, if something is extremely popular, you'll get downvoted for calling out any faults. Eventually people just stop posting.

<comment> cup-of-tea Indeed. Downvoting simply shouldn't exist. It lets users feel like "mini- censors" and it turns out people really like censoring views they don't agree with or that make them uncomfortable.

It's not just downvoting, though. Reddit also lets the moderators act like real censors and they are completely unaccountable. There is no way to visit a subreddit and know whether the discussion there is censored or not. So you have to assume it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I had no idea there was "discussion subreddits" on reddit. I always thought it was a site for hoarding karma by posting memes and puns.

<comment><USER73> I can't down vote your comment, but if I could, I would. It isn't constructive to the conversation at hand.

But on a personal note, if you can't find interesting, intelligent content on Reddit, that is a criticism of yourself, not Reddit. Reddit houses some fascinatingly talented, smart, engaging people across a vast array of subject matter.

<comment><USER74> In order to find that interesting content, you need to learn about it. I can imagine many new users coming to reddit, seeing just the front page and drawing their conclusions, turning around and not look back.

Should they be criticized by that?

Maybe take the time to share some of that interesting content here to parent to change his view instead of denouncing him. ([https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> What interesting?</comment>


81% of all Smartphones are powered by Linux - <AUTHOR> https://haydenjames.io/81-percent-smartphones-powered-by-linux/ <comment><USER2> The market share of Linux is somewhat pointless here, since this share comes mostly from Android and from a user's (and app developers) perspective there is not much Linux specific in Android. Goggle's plan to replace Android with Fuchsia makes clear that Android is not so much about Linux.</comment>


"Swatter" Tyler Barriss Charged with Involuntary Manslaughter - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/01/serial-swatter-tyler-swautistic-barriss-charged-with-involuntary-manslaughter/ <comment><USER2> Seen from Europe, this is ludicrous. __Police __killed that guy. Swating as a prank is possible in the US because of US police 's hysteria. And it's police hysteria that escalated a nasty prank into homicide--if not murder.

[EDIT for clarity]: it's ludicrous that prankster and police officer aren't _both_ charged. Police incompetence is no exoneration of Tyler's responsibility, and conversely, Tyler's criminal actions are no excuse for the police officer's lethal lack of judgement/restraint. Of course Tyler is a criminal, I thought it went without saying.[/EDIT]

The core problem is that it's OK for US police to kill US citizens, and it's essential not to shift the blame. By primarily blaming Tyler (who's a super- nasty piece of shit, but that's another issue), medias and justice reinforce bad police officers' sentiment of impunity.

In most developed countries, if a cop shoots someone who wasn't actually about to kill someone, he's criminally liable. His career is over, and his freedom in jeopardy. If he wrongly "felt threatened", that's poor judgment and incompetence, certainly not an excuse. And whether the victim was guilty of anything or not isn't a mitigating factor either: it's exclusively up to the justice to say so and to punish. That's why Judge Dredd isn't called Copper Dredd.

<comment><USER3> _By primarily blaming Tyler (who 's a super-nasty piece of shit, but that's another issue_

No, that is absolutely not another issue. If we don't hold people responsible for misusing these resources, there simply is no remedy here. SWAT teams cannot be expected to be fully prepared for both a hostage situation and a so- called _prank._

Pranks are generally fucked up shit anyway. Pranks that can turn deadly so easily should not be called _pranks._ They should be labeled _serious crimes_ and prosecuted accordingly.

Furthermore, I get rather tired of blow hard Europeans imagining they know what is best for internal matters of the US and that policies that work in their country would obviously work exactly the same here. If your country works better than the US, good for you. That isn't evidence that you know what is best for the US.

<comment><USER2> > SWAT teams cannot be expected to be fully prepared for both a hostage > situation and a so-called prank.

Yes they should, and they are in the rest of the world. Being a competent police officer is not supposed to be an easy job, and not everyone has what it takes to be trusted amid civilians with deadly weapons.

> Pranks [...] should be labelled serious crimes and prosecuted accordingly.

That is also true, but not the #1 priority. Most unnecessary uses of deadly force by police aren't triggered by pranks. I sure expect Tyler to rot in jail for quite some time, I'd be mad if he weren't. Ditto for the wannabe Dirty Harry who killed a civilian he swore to serve and protect. The thing is, I'm confident the former will happen, and I fear the latter won't.

> I get rather tired of blow hard Europeans imagining they know what is best > for internal matters of the US

What baffles me is that even when a problem is solved in all of the non-US developed world, looking at how it's solved by everyone else isn't considered worth debating in the US. Or as the Onion puts it every few months, when a US mass shooting occurs:

[https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only- na...](https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where- this-r-1819580358)

<comment><USER4> There isn't a clear set of policies that will put an end to mass shootings, at least not without overhauls in the current interpretation of the US constitution.

America Uncovered (same crew as China Uncensored) made a pretty-balanced video on the topic [https://youtube.com/watch?v=hAtLnTyimT0](https://youtube.com/watch?v=hAtLnTyimT0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Police responding to the alert surrounded the home at the address Barriss provided and shot 28-year old Andrew Finch as he emerged from the doorway of his mother's home. Finch, a father of two, was unarmed, and died shortly after being shot by police."

I'm sorry but this whole article is ridiculous. Yes, calling the police on someone for jokes is absolutely not okay, and he deserves punishment for it. But it seems very farfetched, and honestly pretty insane, that the police murdering an unarmed man is something you should consider happening when you call the police.

The police have the guns, they are responsible for using them. Whether the call is a hoax or not, the police should not kill anyone unless they absolutely have no other choice. If someone is unarmed this is obviously not the case.

It is ridiculous that this article tries to frame some idiot for murder / manslaughter. The police killed the guy. No one else.

<comment><USER6> They both killed the guy. The guy lied with the intent to get heavily armed people to point guns at someone. Anyone who does this and tries to claim that they couldn't possibly know that the risk is deadly, is either lying or lacks basic reasoning skills.

<comment><USER7> > They both killed the guy.

A good way to check logic is to test the statements against other scenarios.

> The guy lied with the intent to get heavily armed people to point guns at > someone.

What if we apply your reasoning to politicians that lied in order to enable invasions of other countries? Does that mean they also committed mass murder and war crimes? If no, then please explain what is the difference? If yes, then why are the politicians not charged?

What if we apply your reasoning to the same exact scenario but instead of it having been false, this was where there was an actual armed attack and a victim had been made to open the door and then been shot within seconds by the policeman? In that scenario, would you not say that the policeman had committed an act of murder or at least gross negligence leading to murder?

<comment><USER6> Some politicians are guilty of mass murder and war crimes under exactly the circumstance you give. And part of the reason those from more powerful countries are not charged is they have made every effort to put themselves above international law. For instance, Bush Jr signed the Hague Invasion Act - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service- Members%27_Pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service- Members%27_Protection_Act) \- to guard against this very risk.

edit - And in your second scenario, that would be negligence causing a homicide. It wouldn't be murder unless there was an intent to kill the hostage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Uh, not that this guy doesn't deserve to be charged, but what about the cop who shot an innocent, unarmed man?

<comment><USER9> There'll be an investigation, he'll be cleared, and he'll be back on the street in a few months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> My perspective from the U.K. is that it's primarily the swatters fault but the terrible action taken by the police is somewhat "allowed" by US society due to fear of guns being available.

I was trying to figure out how prevalent swatting is in the U.K. and if it could go this wrong. At least here the police don't have to be as afraid of an armed defence which gives them less of an excuse for overreacting

<comment><USER11> I've found a Brit involved in a US swatting: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/robert- mcdaid...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/robert-mcdaid- charged-tyran-dobbs-swatting-hoax-call-swat-terrorism-maryland-shot-gun- explosives-a7677071.html)

And someone swatted Mumsnet: [https://www.newstatesman.com/sci- tech/2015/08/troll-hacked-m...](https://www.newstatesman.com/sci- tech/2015/08/troll-hacked-mumsnet-and-sent-armed-police-founders-house)

But generally the lack of trigger-happy police makes it much less likely in the UK. I suspect a lot of protocol was built up in the era of regular (most, but not all false) bomb threats from the IRA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hope he gets the maximum sentence. Then I hope they dig up as much as possible of his past dirt and then lock him up forever. Then I hope they round up more SWATters and give them the same treatment.

I won't go into to details of what will happen to this wimp behind bars, he doesn't look so tough.

But it cannot be that some stupid "kid" somewhere murders people for fun.

(no use to discuss police and use of arms in the USA)

</comment><comment><USER13> I said that's what he should get two weeks ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057578)</comment>


Simple Proof of Fermats Last Theorem: Is There Any Mistake Here? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TheDeepThinker/fermats-last-theorem <comment><USER2> See also

[https://www.scribd.com/document/288757467/FERMAT-S-LAST- THEO...](https://www.scribd.com/document/288757467/FERMAT-S-LAST-THEOREM-FROM- THE-GENERALIZED-LAW-OF-COSINES)

[http://vixra.org/pdf/1506.0047v1.pdf](http://vixra.org/pdf/1506.0047v1.pdf)

[https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1845074/why-cant- we...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1845074/why-cant-we-use-the- law-of-cosines-to-prove-fermats-last-theorem/1850060)

[http://fermatslasttheorem.blogspot.com/2005/08/another- false...](http://fermatslasttheorem.blogspot.com/2005/08/another-false-proof- russian-professor.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks a lot for sharing these links. Specially this one- [http://fermatslasttheorem.blogspot.com/2005/08/another- false...](http://fermatslasttheorem.blogspot.com/2005/08/another-false-proof- russian-professor.html)

I understand, I need to prove that- cos θ is irrational for all θ, where 60<θ<90\. Which is not actually true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Fermat's Last Theorem is easily demonstrated using the binomial theorem - simple algebra. It is dismissed as a proof because most fail to "see" or "understand" variables - particularly mathematicians. Fermat gave us a hint as to his "demonstration" by where he wrote his comment ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diophantus_II.VIII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diophantus_II.VIII) ). The difference of two squares can - in some cases - be a square - Pythagorean triples! The difference (or sum) of two integers raised to a power greater than two - nope.

</comment><comment><USER4> How does cos(theta) produce irrational values for 60 deg <= theta <= 90 deg?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is what I knew. For example- cos 75 = (√2(√3 – 1))/4

For testing you can visit here- [http://www.webconversiononline.com/trigonometry- calculator.a...](http://www.webconversiononline.com/trigonometry- calculator.aspx?anglein=degree&type=cosine&of=85)

<comment><USER2> cosine is a continuous function. Rationals are dense in reals etc. eg, arccos(1/3)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, arccos(1/3) = 70.5287794 degrees

<comment><USER5> The important point is that

cos(arcos(1/3)) = cos(70.5287794... degrees) = 1/3

that is a rational value.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


1964 Antique modem surfs the web - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9dpXHnJXaE <comment><USER2> Wooden box, piano hinge, dovetailed joints, tasteful incisions in the front, discreet plugs on the side.

It's like a steampunk modem, except in earnest.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am drooling with hacker nerdocity. A beautifully organic 45 year old still- working box passed on from a protohacker connected to a defcon-stickered terminal browsing the web on a cli....I need to look away

</comment><comment><USER4> total nerd porn!

I am always amazed just how much shit you can do without a computer in analog. Like a 1900s record player just uses such simple techniques to play sounds, but living in the 21st century it seems almost impossible to do without a computer chip and a sound card and some software.

</comment><comment><USER5> Holy crap it takes that guy forever to get to the point.

8 minutes of video to show an old acoustic coupler modem is still functional.

<comment><USER6> jeez you kids these days with your 1200 baud modems have no patience</comment></comment>


The virtual curmudgeon - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/16909935?story_id=16909935

<comment><USER4> "We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science," he says. "We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential."

This article speaks volumes about how many sheep there are in today's tech scene. We need more lions. They are the ones who challenge the leaders and actually move things forward.

<comment><USER5> I sense some bias in your username.

ahem.

Why must we revive the 'intellectual joy' of it? What does that mean - <USER2> wants to prescribe how people should behave so they/we are doing something he finds joyful? If not that meaning, what meaning?

And if not for the business potential, then to what end must we have more undirected churning through the potentials of CS? I'm guessing that most of the 'potential' will be the digital equivalent of earwax cake - <USER3> doable but so what?

Guess I'll have to read his book to find out. :/

<comment><USER4> \- It's not bias. It's life purpose.

\- CS is an extension of physics. If Newton didn't write Principia, America would not have happened, nor would have Apple Computers. CS attracted me because of the possibility to improve civilization for the better by advancing science.

\- Money is freedom to an extent, then it becomes a fetter.

\- You don't even have to read his book. Just think for yourself.

<comment><USER6> > If Newton didn't write Principia, America would not have happened

That made me curious. What is the chain of causation here?

<comment><USER4> Do you know how much Newton's work impacted Jefferson? It was almost as much as Bob Dylan's influence on Steve Jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The guy takes the other side of every single technological debate out there that doesn't have an official pundit for the other side, often with amusing results. For instance, I really enjoyed watching him tell all the singularity guys what a bunch of science fiction obsessed delusionals they were at a panel discussion a few years back.

However, I often find that he is the go-to-guy for people who can't come up with a good sounding argument for why they don't like this or that new technological trend.

<comment><USER4> His ideas have less to do with 'this or that new technological trend' and more to do with the overall trajectory of human progress. Just look at the bigger picture...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Having not read Jaron's book, this article piqued my interest in doing so - along with the good Amazon reviews. <http://amzn.to/bn1Xyj>. Probably the best book to challenge my preconceived notions of tech.

<comment><USER9> Where do you get those shortened amazon links?

<comment><USER10> bit.ly makes 'em.

<comment><USER9> That's not a bit.ly domain, though. It redirects to amazon.

<comment><USER10> bit.ly has a number of domains specifically for shortening the URL of major sites like Amazon. The New York Times is another one that, if you put it in bit.ly, will use a NYT-specific domain. Maybe these sites have their own URL shortening APIs that bit.ly is leveraging?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For some reason, Jaron Lanier always reminds me of Magical Trevor: <http://www.weebls-stuff.com/songs/magical+trevor/>

</comment><comment><USER12> Is anyone else bothered by the economist magazine's lack of bylines? It's like 4chan for free-trade capitalists.</comment>


Toshiba, Bill Gates to work on next-gen nuke reactor - <AUTHOR> http://www.indianexpress.com/news/toshiba-bill-gates-to-work-on-nextgen-nuke-reactor/594523/

<comment><USER2> Kaspersky gives me a virus warning when I visit this link

<comment><AUTHOR> Dang, you're right, my work computer never gave the warning but my home pc did even though they are running the same AV. Thanks for pointing it out. Would be great if you could flag the story (I can't)</comment></comment>


Remote Sql in JavaScript for Mini-SPA Apps - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/buwilliams/rpcsql <comment><USER2> Allowing at will joins is dangerous. It seems you are trying to replicate the functionality of PostgREST

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's a proof of concept without any real security added. I do believe security is implementable. How would you use PostgRest to implement authorization in an existing system? It seems to me that we could benefit from a drop-in solution.

<comment><USER2> Authorization is explained in the docs (done by PostgreSQL). All the bits together here [https://github.com/subzerocloud/postgrest-starter- kit](https://github.com/subzerocloud/postgrest-starter-kit)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is kinda similar to GraphQL. I like this approach more though.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's inspired by GraphQL. What do you like about this approach? We are kicking ideas around at the office so it's good to have feedback from outsiders.

<comment><USER3> I don't like string-based queries, functional approach suits me better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. Having a data structure under the hood has so many benefits.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Information Architects promises to drop patents pending for Syntax Control - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/iA/status/416393539182796800 <comment><USER2> With just two tweets, DHH single-handedly convinced iA to drop the patents for Syntax Control.

Well done.

[https://twitter.com/dhh/status/416273904299040768](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/416273904299040768)

[https://twitter.com/dhh/status/416274154682216448](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/416274154682216448)</comment>


Labels want $13 million from Pirate Bay as trial starts - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/02/labels-want-13-million-from-pirate-bay-as-trial-starts.ars <comment><USER2> thats it? They've been asking that much from 6 year old girls who shared a bunch of mp3s.</comment>


A eulogy for What.cd, the greatest music collection in the history of the world - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/840661/what-cd-is-gone-a-eulogy-for-the-greatest-music-collection-in-the-world/ <comment><USER2> Response: [http://rocknerd.co.uk/2016/11/19/what-the-death-of-what- cd-f...](http://rocknerd.co.uk/2016/11/19/what-the-death-of-what-cd-failed-to- mean-for-all-of-humanity/)</comment>