Drilling Reawakens Sleeping Faults in Texas, Leads to Earthquakes - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drilling-reawakens-sleeping-faults-in-texas-leads-to-earthquakes/ <comment><USER2> In a state where many believe the Earth is 6000 years old, a study that claims the faults haven't moved for 300,000,000 years will be taken with a grain of salt, and a ton of religious fury.

<comment><USER3> I grew up in the area. I'm sure some of that will happen, but it is also BLATANTLY obvious to the people living there that something has changed. I have relatives that have lived in the area for 70+ years who had never experienced a single earthquake ever until less than 10 years ago, and now suddenly there are earthquakes once a month or more. They know something is up, and whatever their religious beliefs, they also know it started happening at the same time as the fracking equipment rolled in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This heading (and the heading of the article itself) are wrong. If you read the article it is not that "drilling" reawakens sleeping faults, but that deep injection wells do. Deep injection wells are one way to dispose of produced water from oil and gas production.

So it's not "drilling" that is at issue, but injecting water for disposal that awaken faults.

<comment><USER5> Actually there are only two major methods of drilling both include injection of a product. For core drilling you inject water/"mud" to remove cuttings and for RC you use air pressure to remove cuttings. Injection is intrinsic to drilling. I'm yet to hear of a deep hole rig that doesn't use injection.

So yes it is the drilling that is the problem.

Note: I worked on drill rigs for half a year punching holes to 1.6km.

<comment><USER6> The science to date has linked the quakes to deep salt water disposal wells lubricating faults. These wells are taking flowback and produced water from oil wells once they are put on production. The earthquake phenomenon is not related to circulating "mud" during drilling.

<comment><USER5> No doubt the science has linked that to it, but you also regularly fill faults whilst drilling for core or hell even when drilling water bore holes. If the grounds crap you just pump mud with some additives in till the holes are blocked or your at least retain some pressure. I'm gonna throw it out there also, having worked amongst it most drillers/holes that are drilled...we know piss all about whats going on down there. Hell we had one hole that was LITERALLY within 50m of the side wall of an open cut mine, we drilled down past the open cuts depth from surface because our targets were for next to segments of the underground mine that went off the open cut. We lost water pressure/return for a good week, had to cart loads in and mix it plenty thick to try and plug the hole. Few weeks into the job, the other offsider went for a walk in a direction we didn't usually go for a piss, about 100m away he came across all our drilling fluid forming a small lake in the windrows above the open cut. Geologists had no clue why it had happened or why we had lost water in the first place leading up to that discovery.

The point is, drilling sure as shit isn't an exact science, you should probably be more skeptical about its effects than not. Most drillers aren't some highly educated academic that knows exactly whats going on down hole...most of them have been hired because they have the mechanical aptitude to fix just about anything that can go wrong with a rig or have the perseverance to push through the horrible conditions, both above ground and down hole to get the job done. Drilling be it through the process itself or the result of its action definitely plays a role in the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since science is now establishing a connection between drilling (or rather reinjection) and quakes, these outfits ought to be required to buy EQ insurance before they are allowed to drill, but enough to cover all restitution costs.

<comment><USER8> How do you determine that _that specific_ earthquake was directly caused by reinjection? Is it possible that reinjection is creating more frequent, smaller quakes, and avoiding stress buildup that would be released as a larger quake later? Do they get credit against the latter for the former? Is there an amount of earthquake insurance available commercially to cover "all restitution costs"?

<comment><USER7> You don't. It's a general fund paid in by all operators in an area. The funds should be sufficient to cover necessary indemnification.

Sure, the small quakes likely are relieving bigger ones tens of thousands of years hence, so we don't care about that.

The rules would be, you want to drill and re-inject to make some money, make sure it's profitable enough that you can pay into an EQ indemnification fund. Actuaries would set rates.

<comment><USER9> I agree with this. The model would be the US Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund. The idea is all drillers pay an excise tax into a fund, and this fund acts as insurance for anyone who can show damages by an earthquake in a drilling area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We seem to plunder the environment until it kills us.

<comment><USER11> Humans aren't the first to do this by a long shot. Animals of all other sorts do it in a rush to exploit resources. It's just how we work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> RICO investigation 10 years from now when we'll found out that the execs knew they were causing earthquakes, but continued to deceive the public?

<comment><USER13> And what exactly will the damage claim amount to? I'm yet to find any evidence in reporting regarding any actual damage beyond some small cracks and broken plates.

<comment><USER14> In areas with heavy fracking (e.g. northern Pennsylvania around Dimock) there are trucks from companies like GeoKinetics and Halliburton everywhere and they are purposely trying to create mini earthquakes to get access to the shale. It is pretty common knowledge that there have been more tremors and seismic activity since fracking started. As far as damage reports go, the gas companies (and I assume also the oil companies) ensure every settlement includes a nondisclosure agreement so that no one can talk about the damage if they want money. This is why so many homes no longer have safe drinking water, many people have fallen ill from cancers and similar ailments, and yet there is almost no reporting on it.

Source: I ran a site for a while where people posted images and stories of how natural gas drilling had ruined their lives or caused environmental harm. We would try to get as much info from people as we could before they signed the NDAs for the settlement money and never talked about it again

<comment><USER14> Ah looks like the lobbyists came to share some downvotes for information they didn't like (or maybe a normal user from oil country?)

I can't imagine why someone would downvote factual information that adds to the discussion. The downvote option wasn't added so people could hide comments they disagree with. I've personally met dozens of people who've signed NDAs with natural gas companies but live in denial if you insist.

<comment><USER15> Original downvotes possibly because your source is your interpretation of information collected from laypeople who were about to take money for silence. That's not strong evidence.

Further downvotes likely because your tone is defensive and you throw around wild accusations.

In other words, you presented weak evidence then violated community norms in responding.

However, I would love to check out your site, to see if there's useful information regarding this thread on it. Can you share a URL?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wrong title. Poor management of salt-water injection, NOT drilling, fracking, et all, may lubricate certain types of fault lines in sedimentary deposits.

Part of the problem is the Obama-era EPA did not allow companies to write off dry-holes, leading to a shortage of wells that can be used for salt-water injection. This put a stress on the existing injection infrastructure.

<comment><USER17> Would there be any salt-water injection without drilling for petroleum or natural gas?

One follows the other.

<comment><USER18> Also for extracting geothermal energy, but this is usually done in more active areas.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help picking a name for my app - <AUTHOR>

I'm developing a forex social webapp. There are two names that I like but unfortunately the .com isn't available for one of them however I was able to get two alternative names.
I want to show you the names and ask you to help me pick one from the available options. They are:
pipsandchips.com
forex is all about making pips. pips and chips sounds kind of like fish and chips and, I think it sounds kind of catchy and fun
tradebook.com
due to the social nature of my app I think the name would work really well. The .com isn't available but I was able to purchase tradebookhq.com and tradebookapp.com
What do you guys recommend?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I like pips and chips. I had no idea what forex was, but now that I know, it kinda makes sense. Chips like coins/money, pips, I have no idea why they use that word.

tradebook doesn't have as memorable a name.

pips and chips also has a somewhat british ring to it, and with the right design can really play across the line of old-school established english financial system (king and country and all that), and a more modern playful perspective.

I like it!

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know much about the lingo in the Forex world, but pipsandchips.com is kinda catchy. But it might be an issue if you ever tried expanding the network/app to other niches of, say, day traders.

I'm just gonna share a few that popped into my head, not knowing the lingo or real purpose of the site: getpipped.com igetpips(or pipped).com pippers.com showmeyourpips.com i-pips.com pippr.com pipster.com

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the feedback. I think I'm going to go with pips and chips. It definitely sounds a lot more catchy and perhaps easier to remember.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would imagine that tradebook is a trademark of Bloomberg.</comment>


What happened to opensparc's idea of an open cpu? - <AUTHOR>

What happened to opensparc http://www.opensparc.net/? People worry about proprietary hardware, but here's a GPL 64bit cpu and there's no excitement?
As Oracle has control of Sun's assets, if Oracle wanted to release SPARC T3 as GPL, the Verilog would have already been released.
I've gone to their website and it's bitrotting. I can download archive files, but there's no cvs access. I want to see the information mirrored to keep the the cpu alive. Maybe store the cvs on github. <comment><USER2> It still costs millions of dollars to fab an OpenSPARC, so it's not really that open. I can't think of any real problems that it solves.

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone shrunk it so it fits on a FPGA.

Also, does it really cost 5 million to fab at TSMC? I need to figure out what process size and to fill in the quotes <http://www.mosis.com/prices.html>.

They make lots of 40 chips.

[http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/how- much...](http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/7042/how-much-does-it- cost-to-have-a-custom-asic-made) gave an example of a 40 lot run costing 3k.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Stack Exchange Knockoff? - <AUTHOR>

I see a domain where the Stack Overflow model would be likely to work really well - repetitive technical questions best answered with expert knowledge from a well bounded community with a fair amount of churn. I would love to use stack exchange (even though it has more features than are probably required at the scale of the endevour) but I don't really want to go through their approval process, preclude monetization or cede control over logistical decisions. So I am looking for suggestions regarding a stack exchange knockoff, preferably on the MS stack. As always many thanks. <comment><USER2> I don't recall what platform it's built on, but how about OSQA[1]?

[1]: <http://osqa.net></comment>


Apple's 1986 Clothing Collection - <AUTHOR> http://www.huhmagazine.co.uk/3900/apples-1986-clothing-collection

<comment><USER2> Woah, I used to have a white Apple sweatshirt that I found in a thrift store sometime in the 90s. I always assumed it was just corporate swag given out at trade shows. Interesting that even back then there was a vision of the brand as something very distinct from the product.

</comment><comment><USER3> wow I did not know popping the collar dated back to the 80's.... I guess three 6 mafia was right with that song: "Now ever since I can remember I been poppin' my collar Poppin' poppin' my collar, poppin' poppin' my collar"

[http://www.huhmagazine.co.uk/images/uploaded/apple_clothing_...](http://www.huhmagazine.co.uk/images/uploaded/apple_clothing_07.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, it's funny how trends are so cyclical, the "trucker hat" style has made its way back as well :)

<comment><USER4> doesnt pg think it's due to "submarine" marketers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now they can claim that they were the first company to make wearables and be technically right.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's amazing how now this fashion is hip and for lack of a better word, 'swag.' Not to different from my 1989 Nintendo Sunglasses [0], only given to a few employees at the time. Were for kids and teens at the time, somewhat tacky neon but now considered adult swag. Gotta love fashion evolution.

I will die with these shades... haha, no pms about buying them please.

[0] [http://imgur.com/a/NXZHn](http://imgur.com/a/NXZHn)

<comment><USER7> Isn't a 30 year cycle normal for fashion?

<comment><USER8> elements cycle - styles really don't. For instance, here you have high shorts which are also loose-fit and with a color palette that's fallen out. Also if you had a closer look, you could see the material and cut of the fabric is different. It may have an elastic waistband and other nuances that form the cogent style.

all of these facets of the garment or outfit together as a package are unlikely to come back. Parceled out ones? sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I still have a MacUser t-shirt that was given out to subscriber (my father used to subscribe). Judging from the appearance of the mouse, it should be from the pre-ADB mouse days so about the same age as this.

</comment><comment> 97-109-107 on a related note - Softwear by Microsoft [http://hideyourarms.com/2008/12/09/microsoft- softwear/](http://hideyourarms.com/2008/12/09/microsoft-softwear/)

</comment><comment><USER10> That kid in Extant really is a robot.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would do cocaine with any one of these people on my garwood in Tahoe whilst sipping Mai Tais. --1986</comment>


Oh Shit: How to Break a Large Website (and how not to) -- PDF version  - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/27168812/Oh-Shit-How-to-Break-a-Large-Website-and-how-not-to-PDF-version <comment><USER2> Somewhat OT: is it just me or does anyone else find it utterly ironic that scribd, a site dedicated to helping people avoid dealing with the PDF browser plugin mess, is intentionally going through the trouble of converting their source document _to_ PDF just so they can display it in their viewer?

There's dogfooding, and then there's this. I'm not sure what to make of it.

<comment><USER3> Why is it ironic? I wouldn't talk about the trouble of _converting_ their source document to PDF, since PDF already is the standard format for publishing presentations. Every scientist I know who makes presentations in PowerPoint exports to PDF when transmitting them to other people, mainly to minimize version conflicts and people ripping off their content. PS and PDF are also the standard output of LaTeX.

scribd exists because PDF browser plugins kind of suck, not because PDF itself sucks.

<comment><USER4> > PS and PDF are also the standard output of LaTeX.

Erm, I thought that DVI was the default output medium.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure that pdflatex is used far more widely than plain latex these days, given that it is simpler to use and makes it easier to take advantage of PDF features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only person who's shocked by the idea that one of Scribd's developers was repeatedly taking down the website by pushing code live without testing it or understanding the queries it ran?

I guess maybe he's just exaggerating for entertainment value... It's good to see that he's sharing his mistakes for others to learn from, and going into detail on why things went wrong. However, it's really depressing to not see any attention paid to the root causes - WTF wasn't he testing his code?

<comment><USER7> Half of these are things that I could see doing quite easily -- for example, although I happen to know that "select count(*) from users where lower(users.user_name) = 'patio11'" will result in a full table scan on MySQL, that category of mistake is easy to make and has bitten me a time or three. And it is easy to miss if your testing methodology doesn't include "Now run it against a data set about as big as the production DB." So that would be a pattern to look out for both when coding and, critically, when designing processes to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen to you.

Then there's "code that throws an exception anywhere you execute it every time you execute it was pushed to production." This points to a rather different type of process error.

<comment><USER8> I know you're making a general point here, but for the example given, I think it's generally best to refresh your dev data from production regularly (maybe after each large release). That way you're always testing on data 'close' to the current production state, which would help you avoid any data-related issues like this.

<comment><USER7> I think that is a good idea if you're able to get away with it. Scribd can. We can't do it at my day job.

There are hundreds of different ways to break the personal information privacy law if we screw up anonymization of test data. For example, supposing we just take the naive approach and overwrite all names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, etc etc etc. Should be fine, right? Except, uh oh, the data is still personally identifiable: the data will tell you that a female student who took CS103 and English 101 last year was given a semester of medical leave. If a copy of that dataset leaks and someone in the department realizes "Hey wait, the only person in that double major is Hanako... medical leave... Hanako was pregnant last year?!?", then our company just made the front page news, we made our customer look horrible (and likely owe them and Hanako several tens of millions of yen in we're-so-sorry money), and we just broke the information privacy law something fierce.

Incidentally, engineers not treating test data with the same "This CD is nuclear waste" precautions we treat the production data set is a _frequent_ cause of breaches like this. Somebody decides to work from home for the day, gets his laptop stolen, _bam_ front page news. I nearly got in severe trouble for leaving a printout of the student roster on the printer fifteen feet from a door somebody could tailgate through -- the only thing that saved my keister was that I could show that the student roster I printed out was fake. (Lesson learned about producing good test data: don't produce _too_ good test data.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> pdf link anyone? i could find on scribd, and the slides aren't showing for me (chrome 5.0, mac 10.5). thx.

<comment><USER10> "Oh Shit: You need to upload 3 public documents to download that PDF."

<comment><USER11> Unless you're on mobile!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would like to see scribd links banished from here.

Please, just link to the PDF, not to an idiotic site that puts a login barrier and other barriers around downloading the PDF.

Every time I land on scribd, I make a throwaway account (with mailinator or whatever), and use that to download the PDF.

Edit: ... and I can't help but notice the irony that breaking scribd, makes it more obvious to more people that just providing the data (in PDF, in HTML, whatever) is better than burying it inside scribd. Thus nudging the world in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER13> Who'd have thought that "knowing your code / sql" would be a problem when using software that writes most of it for you!

I'm sure Rails is great for getting an application up quickly, but once you get some traffic and the application gets more complex surely you'd end up hacking it so much you might as well have written from scratch in PHP or similar?

That article just confirmed that I made the right decision when staying well clear of Rails.

<comment><USER14> No, this is absolutely not the case.

There are plenty of large sites e.g., yellowpages.com and urbandictionary.com (which switched from PHP) which are built using Rails.

Even if you have scaling problems that are around that of, say, Twitter, your application code still isn't your bottleneck; talking to your database is. No amount of framework (or lack thereof, as you propose/promote) will save you from the ramifications of poorly-constructed SQL.

<comment><USER13> "ramifications of poorly-constructed SQL"

Surely the best defense against this is writing every query yourself rather than letting Rails do it? (As implied in the article).

My argument isn't Ruby execution speed vs PHP execution speed, it's Ruby writing it's own SQL vs me writing it.

I agree 100% that the database is usually the bottleneck, it certainly is for my site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I quickly got distracted by the F-16 flight manual in the "More from this user" sidebar. Downloading...

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm surprised any website running at scale is letting an ORM generate SQL queries.

<comment><USER17> Just out of interest - why? Do you not trust developers to keep an eye out for bad generated queries, or do you have a problem with ORM generated SQL in general?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm sure the management at Scribd is happy that this ad ([http://content.yieldmanager.edgesuite.net/atoms/2e/71/ab/d0/...](http://content.yieldmanager.edgesuite.net/atoms/2e/71/ab/d0/2e71abd090c080660ed0c6c743378ccc.gif)) is annoying readers of their own presentation.</comment>


A tale of a 7 year journey in developing software for the enterprise - <AUTHOR> http://www.theenterprisearchitect.eu/archive/2013/01/05/a-tale-of-a-7-year-journey-in-developing-software-for-the-enterprise <comment><USER2> One of the many inspiring stories on HN. The methods sound great, the company sounds great, and I'd want to either work for them or start my own company like that.

But I'm a student and I guess I should finish my studies before dropping out. Despite the great tales of Bill Gates & co, it seems like the right thing to do. It also gives me an opportunity to watch behind the scenes of "real life" companies. Internships.

And that's what I want to ask about: All companies seem so traditional... There is no space for the methods described in all these HN stories; no time for innovation. "The customer wanted these features last week, do you think we have time for [you name it]?"

So I don't know what my question really is... It's just, these stories sound so good, but during internships, it turns out they're no more than stories. Or are they? Or is it an American thing or something?

<comment><USER3> I guess I've been in your situation as a CS student. I dreaded the thought of working for one of the big Dutch IT companies or consulting firms and their string of boring and/or failing projects. None of the Dutch start-ups appealed to me, I didn't feel ready to start my own, and I figured I could learn more from success than from failure.

If you're studying computer science in university, I can really recommend getting an internship at a major American company. It's very useful to get a peek in the kitchen of hugely successful companies. They can be a bit tricky to get into from Europe. Some universities give better access than others. I did an MSc in Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems at VU Amsterdam. An internship at Google, Facebook, or Amazon is almost a standard part of the program. Of course, you do have to pass the interviews yourself, and work very hard in general. Most of the TU's also have pretty good access to Google and Microsoft internships.

I did a 5 month internship at Amazon right after I finished college and it was a fantastic experience. Amazon is a start-up-like environment, with small, autonomous teams churning out new services and features all the time. You typically get a good deal of freedom to plot your own course and rethink the way things are done if you dare. "Disagree & commit" they like to call it. There are tons of really smart and experienced people to learn from, very interesting problems that force you to really understand distributed systems top to bottom, and some brilliantly simple solutions to problems such as large-scale software deployment. One of the best parts of the experience is figuring out how the business works and why things are done in a certain way. I was part of launching a new Amazon Web Service called CloudFront during my time there, and came up with a couple of new concepts that are still in use today. Different companies have different cultures, but I know many people who had similarly good experiences as interns at Google or Facebook. The experience does depend heavily on the team that you end up in, but also on how well-rounded and adaptive you are by then. Take your time.

I can also really recommend studying/finishing Computer Science. University is a unique chance to develop independent, analytical thinking together with your peers and build up a solid background in the field, which will give you a huge advantage throughout your career. Remember that for every dropout millionaire, there is someone like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, or Jeff Bezos with a prestigious cum laude MSc degree outsmarting them on the long run. Speaking of which, try to aim for cum laude, not because anyone cares, but because working hard on hard topics makes you smarter.

After the internship, I went on to do a PhD in cooperative self-driving cars, because I found that a hugely interesting problem, but I kept a part-time software development job at Amazon.

btw, in case you didn't notice, Mendix is originally a Dutch company, so you might not have to look very far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have seen many Java based Process Modelers Fail to live up the the promise of allowing "business users" the ability to create workflows without writing any code. It appears however that Mendix may have figured out how to make it work. I think that it has to do with the entire closed-loop solution (develop, deploy, monitor, app store, SVN integration, Domain model management, DSL's etc). Without those supporting pieces all working together, developers would inevitably need to be involved, thus stunting business user adoption.

</comment><comment><USER5> Agile is mentioned quite a lot in this article, but something doesn't feel right. It is rather hard to conquer some ground in the Enterprise world as an Agile start-up. I don't think big companies are ready for this.

<comment><USER6> They were not transforming any enterprises, they were selling working software. That is a much simpler problem. Most companies do not care about your internal methodologies, they only care about delivering what they need.

This does raise an interesting point. Maybe this is just me, but have others been noticing a great disillusionment with IT? I can universally bash IT to anyone I know and no one ever defends them. If what the people I am talking to is true, IT departments everywhere are focused on preventing change and delivering things without value.

<comment><USER7> Regarding your latter point, I think this comes from the exposure of technology increasing every day.

I've built and operated a helpdesk for a 150,000 employee organisation with a high security requirement.

People bash the IT guys because they think they understand it, but they don't.

Users really are absolute fucking criminals most of the time purely due to either ignorance or arrogance.

IT departments are primarily focussed on protecting people from each other, the internet and from making massive fuck ups. Every user who comes whinging to the helpdesk over a trivial issue or a brick wall is usually unaware that it's there for their own protection. It is the thing that is probably stopping that secure document pissing off out of the building on a USB stick.

The 150k member organisation in question eventually had to lock their PCs into custom built frames with a hole for a finger to turn them on, all USB ports epoxied up, MAC address locking on all switches and oodles and oodles of cable ties and body search on entry and exit to stop USB sticks, phones etc being taken in.

That's the front line for you. They need defending and I stand up for them regularly.

<comment><USER8> The above dystopia is in fact why most people hate IT. It's not the front line, it is the policies such as expoxying USB ports for data loss prevention that are reviled. Some organizations really do require high levels of DLP - national security for one, production support for secure managed services is another. Others are utterly draconian for questionable cost/benefit reasons.

It should not be considered criminal to use documents on multiple devices. Thankfully saner heads are prevailing as bring-your-own-device policy management and app containerization becomes mandatory now that the CEO and VP of marketing insists on using their iPad.

<comment><USER9> The incentive structure of an IT worker is similar to that of a government bureaucrat: When in doubt, ban.

Because the _one_ time something happens, you're gonna hear that the systems were 'improperly secured.' Then they'll call in external auditors fresh out of school working from an over-photocopied checklist to tell you how incompetent you are.

Personally, I'm happy with trends like BYOD etc. If the CEO loses data because he wanted email on his iPad (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that), then IT won't be blamed for it.

<comment><USER10> > _Personally, I'm happy with trends like BYOD etc. If the CEO loses data > because he wanted email on his iPad (and there is absolutely nothing wrong > with that), then IT won't be blamed for it._

Yes, it will. For the same reason "the government" is blamed when someone eats a lump of poison out of a can labelled "poison".

"Why didn't you stop me?"

<comment><USER9> You're quite right :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Iceland drills 4.7 km down into volcano to tap clean energy - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-05-iceland-drills-km-volcano-energy.html <comment><USER2> I'd be careful about getting too optimistic.

Conventional geothermal is about 4-5 cents/kWh, on par with natural gas in the US. The dominant capital cost is drilling a large well (you need volume), and so geothermal plants are generally only built in areas that require shallow (1km) wells.

Well costs are ~quadratic in depth. Given how much money has already been spent optimizing drilling for the oil&gas industry, along with how cutthroat that market is, I don't see the cost coming down significantly. As a result, deep geothermal will likely be limited to niche regions like Iceland. And you need deep geothermal to scale it past the existing locations.

I would love to be wrong, since geothermal checks all the boxes for renewables and is also suitable for base load power, but I don't see an obvious path forward short of a drilling tech miracle.

(source: Climate and Energy R&D group)

<comment><USER3> Don't bill deep geothermal as any sort of green. There are usually emissions that have health consequences for the population around the power plant. The corrosion of the pipes bringing steam from the drill site to the turbines is massive. Drilling that deep and pumping water into the hole ups the risk of earthquakes.

(source: I live in Reykjavík and have witnessed first-hand the increased stench from the Hellisheiði geothermal plant)

<comment><USER4> I don't disagree with you—I've been to an 800 MW geothermal facility in northern California and was taken aback by the giant heaps of sulphur everywhere—but other renewables come with their own downsides.

\- contemporary photovoltaic panels require all sorts of strange metals to make, which have environmental impacts via mining. This might change with new materials. Solar also tends to have quite high carbon dioxide impacts due to the manufacturing process. These are obviously way less than gas or coal, but about double compared to other renewables and nuclear.

\- hydroelectric is notorious for destroying huge ecosystems stretching far above and far below the dam and its reservoir. Hydro is so bad that California doesn't let large projects count in the Renewable Portfolio Standard.

It's tough; there's no perfect energy source.

<comment><USER5> "contemporary photovoltaic panels require all sorts of strange metals to make"

Certain kinds do (e.g. CdTe and CIGS), but not the kind that you'd put on your house. If modern solar panels required significant amounts of rare earths they wouldn't be as cheap as they are.

"Solar also tends to have quite high carbon dioxide impacts due to the manufacturing process."

About 30g/kwh of CO2 vs. coal's ~900g/kwh, and a lot of that is simply because it is usually currently made without green power (i.e. it will go down).

"It's tough; there's no perfect energy source."

There's a lot of half truths told about really good energy sources.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, coal is obviously WAY worse than solar vis a vis carbon dioxide. I'm not disputing that. But compared to other renewables, it doesn't do as well as you'd expect:

\- wind: 11 g / kWh [1]

\- nuclear: 12 g / kWh [2]

\- solar PV: 45 g / kWh [3]

\- gas: 450 g / kWh [4]

Of course, 12 g vs 45 g is NOTHING compared to 45 g vs 450 g (and coal is another 2x atop gas!), so I'm making a bit of a mountain out of a molehill.

[1] [http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_wind.html](http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_wind.html)

[2] [http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_nuclear.html](http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_nuclear.html)

[3] [http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_pv.html](http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_pv.html)

[4] [http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_ngas.html](http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_ngas.html)

<comment><USER5> Gas actually contributes more to global warming even than coal does because of the methane (~100x as powerful a warming gas as CO2) also released during extraction:

[http://inhabitat.com/updated-cornell-study-shows-fracking- ca...](http://inhabitat.com/updated-cornell-study-shows-fracking-causes-more- global-warming-than-coal/)

<comment><USER6> On the other hand, methane breaks down fast. It's only an immediate problem; if we didn't release more CO2 than could be absorbed, then we'd have a fairly decent methane budget as well.

As it stands, of course, it makes everything worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And geothermal energy is a too-often-overlooked technology. It's not intermittent like wind and solar. It's more like nuclear but without the emotional baggage. As we try deep decarbonization, we're going to need more things like geothermal (or nuclear) or we'll end up spending like 2 or 3x as much money over-building solar to provide enough power even on cloudy winter days, building many more wind turbines, etc.

The hard part isn't getting to 60-80% clean energy, it's getting that last 20%. Geothermal helps a LOT with that. (As does nuclear, which is why we should be protecting existing nuclear assets until fossil fuels are eliminated... The existing ~20% of our electricity in the US produced by nuclear will make deep decarbonization multiple times cheaper than relying solely on wind and solar alone, plus accelerate deep decarbonization by a decade.)

An interesting idea is to build geothermal and solar at the same site. Consider areas where these two maps overlap in high potential for both: Geothermal: [http://www.smu.edu/~/media/Site/Dedman/Academics/Programs/Ge...](http://www.smu.edu/~/media/Site/Dedman/Academics/Programs/Geothermal%20Lab/Graphics/SMUHeatFlowMap2011_CopyrightVA0001377160_jpg) and Solar: [http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_pv_us_june_dec2008.jpg](http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_pv_us_june_dec2008.jpg)

Places like New Mexico and southern Colorado are good fits for this.

A problem with geothermal is if you draw heat too fast from the ground, the output will decline over the years. If you stop drawing heat, the ground will warm back up and then when you start again, output will be higher than it was when you stopped. So there is some sense in conserving geothermal power when demand for it is low.

So the idea is, you draw from solar when the Sun is shining and draw from geothermal when it's not. By being co-located, you can use the same grid infrastructure and get higher utilization out of your powerlines. You've essentially converted some of your solar energy into a baseload power source. Or you can think about it as enhancing the output and lifetime of your geothermal power source.

(And it's possible that if you have a LOT of extra solar power, you could run a resistive load underground, using the ground as a makeshift thermal battery.)

<comment><USER8> From what I understand, the big hurdle for 100% renewable is not replacing the power stations that provide base load power, but rather replacing peak load power stations. Hydro is often used for that, but in the Midwest the peaker stations are almost entirely run with natural gas.

Replacing those often involves some way of storing energy that you've generated in a renewable fashion. The issue is that storing large amounts of energy is not easy, especially when you live in an area that could be described as flatter than flat.

<comment><USER9> Mr. Musk said that the world would need about 100 gigafactories in order to produce enough batteries to level out solar production off hours.

One factory is producing batteries now, and Tesla is announcing three or four new gigafactory locations by the end of the year.

It's a start.

<comment><USER10> Do we even have enough Lithium to supply 100 gigafactories? Recycling Lithium batteries is still quite difficult.

<comment><USER7> Yes we do, and no it's not, at least not the way Tesla is doing it. Because they're using a standardized cell and standardized packs, they can easily automate the careful recycling of a lithium cell.

<comment><USER11> Tesla actually does a single/two step recycling process that incinerates/electrolytically separates the metals from the graphite/hydrocarbons/lithium. The lithium containing fraction is sold as clinker or aggregate. Rocks, basically. Only the steel, nickel and cobalt are really recycled.

<comment><USER7> I'm talking about the newer process they're developing at the gigafactory. But you're right that lithium is so cheap at the moment (getting it from salty brines) that you don't really need to recycle it. The other metals, sure. But push comes to shove, you could pull it from ocean water. Won't ever be economically competitive with brines, but it's also not too expensive if that were the only option.

<comment><USER11> copying my other comment:

>Lithium is one of the most prevalent elements on earth. Spodumene (rocky lithium ore) is likely to be a very important economic source in the future as it is much more common than the brine currently used to manufacture batteries. Brine requires a water pump to extract, spodumene requires mining like any normal mineral, but it's found in extremely high quality deposits in the US including single crystals up to 47 feet across. That means higher quality lithium in addition to greater availability.

>Spodumene is ~6-7% lithium by mass and is mined in an open pit, so no worries about soil or water pollution. It's separated from other rocks by grinding, flotation, and then acid. Very few people like acid in their industrial processes but I will note that lithium production uses way less hydroflouric acid than oil refining. The final stage uses sulfuric acid and while again acid is never good, sulfuric acid is one of the most-used and most-produced chemicals. Most minerals require sulfuric acid for extraction. It comes in a bottle of drain cleaner. Mining lithium rock is as economically painless as buying blasting powder and excavators, and as environmentally painless as... well nothing. The pollution is basically negligible.

I didn't know the gigafactory was gonna do component-level recycling, that's pretty cool. I think it should be relatively easy to separate the metals from the SEI and graphite/lithium in a recoverable way, but processing the SEI has to be pretty complex. Maybe acid would do it- at that point it would probably be worth it to recycle the lithium but you'd have to set up an entire process line just to be able to add it to raw feedstock ore. It'll take a LOT of battery recycling before that's more profitable than selling it as clinker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I was in sixth grade I entered a science contest to invent a new form of clean energy. Mostly I entered because I was getting a B in my science class and needed extra credit to get up to an A.

And the thing I "invented" was literally what's in this article, geothermal power. Pump water down near magma, have it turned to steam, have that steam come rushing back up to power turbines.

The problem with my invention was that the company sponsoring the contest was a geothermal energy company.

I'm still proud of myself though, because I thought of the idea independently and it is a pretty damn cool idea for how to get energy.

</comment><comment><USER13> Iceland has discussed building a ~7TW (I think?) cable to transmit power to the UK.

At least in Reykjavik, hot water is piped directly into homes and used for heating (radiators) as well as hot water (with attendant sulfur smell). My host there told me "my wife doesn't like the smell so, we use heated cold water instead". I had to think for a few seconds to parse the phrase "heated cold water". Oh, right, that's what I call "hot water" :)

It's so abundant, they don't mind the waste. Just leave the windows above the radiator open, the radiator keeps the room warm, you get fresh outside air inside, and the convective flow keeps the air moving. That chilled water is sent back to the geothermal plant and pumped back into the ground to replace the water taken out. IIRC there are definitely been geological issues (earthquakes) as a result of this whole process.

<comment><USER14> Most of your comment is wrong. They've been discussing building a 1GW cable. 7000 times smaller than 7TW. A 7TW cable would be enough to transmit Iceland's yearly electricity production 700 times over. It produces ~10GW per annum.

Hot water is not piped directly into the homes in Reykjavík, it's heated up "cold" water, with artificially added sulfur. See another comment of mine here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14274085)

In Reykjavík the water you use is not recycled in any way, it's pumped into a sewer from there into the ocean. It's definitely not pumped the >50 km back to Nesjavellir for reprocessing.

<comment><USER13> Thank you for the corrections. I was in the datacenter but now I've googled it and found the information about the 1GW cable:

[http://www.atlanticsuperconnection.com](http://www.atlanticsuperconnection.com)

I'm very surprised to find that the hot water is heated cold water. Where is it heated? Offsite, with geothermal plants, I must assume? Otherwise I'd be VERY confused about how my host would not know that he had 2 separate water heaters. Seems quite odd that a local would not know this, but I guess that's how rumors work. Is the hot water in radiators similarly offsite-heated water?

<comment><USER14> I interpreted your comment as saying that hot water was piped directly into homes from a natural source, but I see now that you may not have meant that.

There are exceptions, but generally hot water is piped directly into homes in Iceland from municipal heating. There's no domestic water heaters. There are dual hot & cold water pipes everywhere. The hot water that comes out of the tap is from the same source that's in the hot water radiators.

In the case of Reykjavík the hot water is initially cold water heated at Nesjavellir[1] and at [2] you can see an article in Icelandic about the pipe. It's 27km of 80x90cm pipe that can transfer 1600 liters of 100 degree hot water per second. Here's the pipe on Street View: [https://goo.gl/jFzvYN](https://goo.gl/jFzvYN)

The reason they heat up cold water is simply because most of the time when you find an abundant natural heat source it doesn't also come with an abundant natural water source. Therefore you pump cold water in, mix it with the heat, and pump out hot water.

I don't know what fancy technology they use for this at Nesjavellir, but in some rural areas this setup is literally just a coiled pipe dropped into a hot spring.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesjavellir_Geothermal_Power_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesjavellir_Geothermal_Power_Station)

2\. [http://www.verkis.is/verkefni/veitur/vatnsveitur/nesjavallar...](http://www.verkis.is/verkefni/veitur/vatnsveitur/nesjavallaraed)

<comment><USER13> I did understand the water to be piped directly into homes from a natural source, which is what my original comment reflected. However, in retrospect, that may have been a misunderstanding on my part rather than what my host literally told me. I perhaps combined the concept of municipal hot water and the sulfur smell into a concept where the hot water was actually geothermal water -- rather than normal water heated by geothermal power.

I did see one of the very large geothermal plants, but am having a hard time remembering where it was. Either on my way to/from Thórsmörk, along the golden circle, or on a drive to Snaefellsnes.

Thanks again for your insight!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's pretty dwarfy! But, can they pump magma to the surface, to defend their rocky fortress?

I just hope that they are being careful not to drill through any adamantine formations. [http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Raw_adamantine](http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Raw_adamantine)

<comment><USER16> Praise the miners!

I firmly believe that the technology to pump water that turns the waterwheel that powers the water pump (and also something else) _must be_ extracting geothermal energy. We just don't see the details. %%

It would be a whole lot cleaner (and friendlier to the framerate) to have a 3x3 geothermal power plant building with a magma reservoir under one tile, and a water reservoir under another, which transmits power to mechanisms or axles touching it, and maybe also pressurized steam to any pipe touching it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yes, this seems much better than coal/oil, but isn't there a finite amount of heat under Earth's crust? Have we studied what would happen if we cool Earth's internal temperature by extracting heat in this way?

The Magnetoshpere which protects us from radiation is generated by the magma under the crust[1]. Eventually, if we interfere with the magma currents too much, don't we run the risk of damaging our magnetosphere?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field#Physi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field#Physical_origin)

<comment><USER18> Also excuse my ignorance - but does the heat released warm the Earth's atmosphere? I realize it doesn't create greenhouse gases, but wonder if the newly released heat would make a difference to sea & air temperatures, or just gets radiated away.

<comment><USER11> It actually warms the atmosphere infinitesimally _less_ than other methods of generating power (aside from solar, wind or hydro). Normally when you burn something to generate electricity the excess heat is released into the air. The same process, with the same efficiency (in fact, slightly better), still happens in geothermal but it also very very slightly reduces the amount of heat coming up from the earths core elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _" The Institute of Economic Studies at the University of Iceland said in a February report that the country will not be able to abide by the COP21 climate change agreement signed in Paris in 2015.

Greenhouse gas emissions are rising in all sectors of the economy, except in fisheries and agriculture, it said."_

This is unfortunate. Given Iceland's cheap & abundant renewable energy (2X Norway's electricity production per capita!), they really ought to be following the example set by Norway and prioritising Electric Vehicles through tax policies, etc.

It would be easy to build excellent charging infrastructure for EVs in this island nation - instead you have hordes of tourists driving around the ring road in smelly diesels.

I do see a few Nissan Leafs around Reykjavik and Akureyri, but there is barely any public charging infrastructure for driving between cities and tourist attractions.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone know where phys.org has their articles from? I suppose it has something to do with Elsevier. Since a LOT of their articles has to do with students and universities.

Overall, they publish a great amount of "copy-paste" articles, either from other news sites and/or student papers. I am 100% sure their reports don't write original articles, just rewrite from other sources. It looks to me that Elsevier has found something new with the information they are tapping from (students/universities)

PS. The source of their article now is : [https://techxplore.com/news/2016-10-geothermal-power- potenti...](https://techxplore.com/news/2016-10-geothermal-power-potential- iceland-drilling.html)

PS2. Elsevier seemed my best guess, since a lot of articles discuss research from students. Other articles are a rewrite

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting . NZ has had a geothermal plant for decades that is situated in a volcanic area (and right next to tourist hotspots of Rotorua and Taupo). They force cold water down and use the steam to drive turbines. No idea on the efficiency but the fact its been operating for decades would suggest its good enough to be viable.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm at a loss a bit, are they directly tapping underground sources of hot pressurized liquid and not using some form of heat exhanger? How would they deal with various minerals dissolved in the water from gumming up their turbines or heavy elements escaping into the environment? IIRC there was one geothermal plant (in one of the nordic countries, i don't recall which) sitting by hotsprings that had to replace their piping every few months due to mineral deposits...

random thought: Could geothermal power be considered nuclear power considering half of the Earth's internal energy comes from decaying radioactive isotopes?

<comment><USER23> > random thought: Could geothermal power be considered nuclear power > considering half of the Earth's internal energy comes from decaying > radioactive isotopes?

Only to the extend that all power is nuclear power. Solar power: the sun is a huge fission reactor. Coal: ultimately got its energy from the sun. Etc.

<comment><USER24> Nitpick: the sun is a huge fusion reactor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's an English language summary page from the company itself at [https://www.resourcepark.is](https://www.resourcepark.is)

</comment><comment><USER25> This looks like the beginning of the shinra to me

</comment><comment><USER26> Makes sense, some neighbors in the Midwest have been heating their homes, driveways, etc. with geothermal heat pumps. Same principle, I suppose.

<comment><USER7> Not at all! Very different principle. "Geothermal" heat pumps are just using the ground as a thermal mass. There's no extraction of the energy from the Earth's interior, with such a heat pump, just using dirt as a thermal buffer (between the seasons).

It's actually super annoying that the same word "geothermal" is used for both. If I were emperor of the world, I'd ensure that the proper "ground-source heat pump" were used instead of the criminally misleading "geothermal."

Ground-source heat pumps are not energy sources, they consume energy.

What Iceland is doing is actually developing an energy source.

<comment><USER27> Iceland has also been utilizing its geothermal resources for centuries. Currently circa 22% of their electricity and 87% of the heating and hot water needs are met using geothermal energy.

<comment><USER28> The sulfuric smell in the hot water takes a little getting used to, but it's pretty amazing that it's naturally heated in most places throughout the country (though, a bit easier in such a tiny country).

<comment><USER14> The sulfuric smell in the hot water has nothing to do with the use of geothermal power. Most tourists think so because they've only been to or near the capital area.

Reykjavík artificially adds sulfur to its hot water to reduce the corrosion of their hot water pipes.

I can't find a source for that in English but there's one in Icelandic, it's the "Vinnslutæknileg vandamál við vinnslu jarðhita" section.

1\. [http://web.archive.org/web/20160813045634/http://www.samorka...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160813045634/http://www.samorka.is/doc/1368)

<comment><USER28> This seems contrary to most tourism information, and that PDF is pretty much the only source I can find... interesting. So they intentionally make their hot water non-potable to prevent corrosion (the bulk of tourism info recommends not drinking the hot water)?

Seems like Iceland could really use some sort of myth/fact information as they continue look to grow their tourism.

<comment><USER29> You should never drink hot tap water from any source unless you boiled it yourself using cold tap water in a kettle somehow anyway. There's increased likelyhood of bacteria and trace heavy metals from whatever heating equipment was used. Totally not worth it.

<comment><USER30> Probably OK to drink if you use a gas or electric califont (zero hot water storage).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Do you want to get firemonsters? Because this is how you get firemonsters.

</comment><comment><USER32> It would be cool to 3d print rock structures using magma from below

<comment><USER11> geothermal doesn't use magma, which would destroy the borehole. Its just a hole into very hot rock somewhat near magma. It's still far enough away that water/steam can flow in between the rocks. Steam is what comes up the hole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Someone more knowledgable than me, please correct me... if they are drilling a hole in the ground and making steam come up from said hole, doesn't that heat up the Earth's crust and atmosphere more than the previous condition without the hole, therefore contributing to higher temperatures (and climate change), making it not that "clean" after all? Maybe cleaner than carbon/petrol, but not ideal for the current context.

<comment><USER15> I'm probably no more knowledgeable than you in this area, but I have a free morning, and this is interesting. My hypothesis, is that the heat that we produce or release to generate usable energy, is an insignificant factor in global warming, compared to the solar heat that we trap with greenhouse gases. Let's find some quick simple stats and do some arithmetic, to figure out how much we are directly heating the surface of the Earth.

According to Wikipedia, the global energy production for 2012 was about 5.616e+20 joules, or 156 petawatt-hours. The Earth has about 1.386e+21 liters of water on it, and I will assume that that water represents the bulk of the relevant thermal mass, when considering weather patterns and sea level.

Now, let's estimate the heating caused by that energy. According to www.bickfordscience.com/03-05_State_Changes/PDF/Specific_Heat.pdf, 4,184 Joules of energy applied to 1 KG of water will raise its temperature by 1 degree Celsius, and this scales linearly with mass. Assuming that Earth-water averages out a density of 1 KG per liter, our 5.616e+20 joules, applied over a year to our 1.386e+21 liter water mass, would heat that water by 1.036e-38 degrees Celcius.

It has been a while since I've done a dimensional analysis, and the scale here are so extreme that I can't tell if my result is sensible. However, if my assumptions are reasonable and my math is correct, and the processes that I have chosen to ignore are insignificant (i.e. radiation into space over one year), then all of the heat that we release in the generation of the global energy supply, has a negligible impact on the temperature of the planet.

<comment><USER34> You multiplied instead of dividing somewhere, the result should be : dT = 5.616e+20 / 1.386e+21 / 4,184 = 9.684e-5, or about 1 ten thousandth of a Kelvin. So still insignificant.</comment></comment></comment>


QNX Ignores Desktop Standards, Security - <AUTHOR> http://www.trollaxor.com/2009/10/qnx-ignores-desktop-standards-security.html

<comment><USER2> I refuse to take anything from Trollaxor seriously. These are the guys who used to crap-flood slashdot with nasty ASCII art. They're the pre-4chan professional trolls.

Just read the rest of the blog to be sure :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a little confused, isn't QNX an operating system focused on embedded systems? I would expect it would probably lag behind in desktop apps because of focus and small user base.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. Saying 'QNX is sucks as a desktop OS' is like saying 'Windows 7 sucks because it doesn't run on my toaster'. Well, d'uh!

It's a classical case of wrong expectations. The author criticizes QNX for not automatically installing a SMP kernel. That is actually a good thing as multiprocessor real-time systems are very much different from uniprocessor real-time systems. People building real-time systems should consciously choose to allow SMP; the OS shouldn't do it behind the scenes in a dot update.</comment></comment>


A Brief Beginner's Guide To Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://www.unexpected-vortices.com/clojure/brief-beginners-guide/ <comment><USER2> The Emacs setup steps are somewhat behind the times. These days it's easier to use packages to install new modes and themes, and Technomancy's Emacs Starter Kit should be mentioned for those who are new to Emacs and want sensible defaults.

It's even easier with Emacs 24, as the starter kit can be installed via a package as well. Current best practise is to put all the packages you need in your init.el file, then when you start Emacs, it'll download and install any packages you're missing.

You have a section "Other Libraries" and a section "Finding the Libraries You Want", which cover essentially the same ground, but are strangely split up. So the former mentions the Clojure wiki page, and the latter mentions clojure- toolbox and other third-party library lists. Maybe they should all be in one section?

Other things... "lein deps" isn't really necessary anymore, as Leiningen checks for dependencies before running each command.

I think you also need to mention that you can effectively forgo the group-id and have [foo "1.0"] (which is the same as [foo/foo "1.0"]).

Pushing to Clojars is easier with the "lein-clojars" plugin. Then it's just a "lein push" away.

<comment><USER3> >> Current best practise is to put all the packages you need in your init.el file, then when you start Emacs, it'll download and install any packages you're missing.

I wasn't aware of that, how does that work? Obviously just `require`'ing the packages is not sufficient.

<comment><USER2> Take a look at the Emacs Starter Kit README:

<https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit>

Basically it uses a combination of `package-installed-p` to check if the package is installed, and `package-install` to install said package if it is not.

Note this is for Emacs 24, which comes with `package.el` preinstalled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> In "5. The Language", not one mention of the language's real roots - Lisp.

Very unfortunate, IMHO.

<comment><USER5> Hi. Thanks for the feedback. Please note that the document is a work-in- progress.

I didn't think to mention its roots on that page, given that it's one of the first things mentioned on the main clojure.org page.

Added a note about it being a Lisp dialect.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. Its always good for anyone who has even a passing interest in a programming language to know the motivation for it given the amount of programming languages out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice to see chapter 4 on setting up a dev environment early on, many clojure tutorials (and even a book I have) leave this out, or until the end. Working within a project is how you'll write real-world code so you might as well start with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for this, very useful.

Btw,

      git config --global core.editor nano

This made me smile :)

<comment><USER7> Why more people don't stick 'emacsclient -t -a ""' in there, I'll never understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What does the author mean here?

> "If you're using [...] another OS (tsk tsk tsk) [...]"

I develop on Mint and Gentoo, so any joking here is probably passing over me. Other than a jab at MS (and maybe Apple), does this mean that programming in Clojure would/could be difficult outside of Linux?

<comment><USER5> I was joking, and meant "any other OS besides GNU/Linux". Perhaps not perfectly clear though. Removed unnecessary text.

You should've seen it before though! Had to scale it back from "or another OS ({folds arms} {slowly shakes head} [long sigh] _tsk tsk tsk_ )". ;)

<comment><USER9> what do you have against freebsd??!</comment></comment></comment>


Rethinking Site Registration Strategies: Traditional Email vs 3rd Party Services - <AUTHOR> http://oakcitylabs.com/2012/10/09/rethinking-site-registration-strategies-traditional-email-vs-3rd-party-services/

<comment><AUTHOR> I just started a new blog and this was my first post. I would love some feedback.

Thanks in advance.</comment>


Testers are the first to see indications of failure. Here's their warning signs - <AUTHOR> https://www.functionize.com/blog/from-the-qa-trenches-6-signs-of-project-success-or-failure/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure that the article shows that testers are to see the first indication of project failure, but I'm sure that how testing is approached in the project is a very good indicator of its potential to fail.

I've always found that taking a design or specification and before you cut any code you sit down and plan both a test strategy and specific test it will immediately highlight any shortfalls in the specification as logical inconsistencies and unclear assumptions in the spec are immediately highlighted.

If it is impossible to test a requirement, then you can be fairly sure that it will be very difficult, or impossible to develop it.</comment>


Building and Linking Libraries in C - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~newhall/unixhelp/howto_C_libraries.html <comment><USER2> > LD_LIBRARY_PATH

While this works, it's generally a bad idea to depend on LD_LIBRARY_PATH. This type of environment override should generally be left as a tool for sysadmins and other integration/workaround needs.

Instead, you can bake the library search path into the executable with ld's "-rpath" option.

        gcc -o foo -Wall -Wl,-rpath,/lib/search/dir

> -shared

Building a shared library may also require building position independent object files. (CFLAGS += -fPIC). If the library is being distributed, it is also a good idea to set the soname[1].

This can get complicated very quickly, so it's probably better to let something like libtool[2] handle building and managing the library. (Autotools is a lot easier[2] to use that its reputation suggests. Way too many configure.ac scripts are a cargo cult mess)

[1] [http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared- libraries...](http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared- libraries.html#AEN95)

[2] [https://autotools.io/libtool/index.html](https://autotools.io/libtool/index.html)

[3] [https://autotools.io/whosafraid.html](https://autotools.io/whosafraid.html)

<comment><USER3> I found libtool extremely painful to work with; it will hide your compiled libs in a hidden subdir, will wrap your compiled executable in a fscking shell script that then calls your real binary, it's unable to isolate a build against libs that may or may not be installed on your build system etc. Yet for all magic it does, libtool still doesn't solve the problem of building for a PREFIX (eg. /usr/local) in a temporary directory, and you need a chroot-jail or something for that.

From the libtool manual ([1]):

        Currently it is not generally possible to install into a temporary
        staging area that contains needed third-party libraries that are not
        yet visible at their final location.

So to build against a shared lib provided by another package, that other package has to be installed at the final destination already.

I seriously considered going back to just static libraries at some point. I believe the build system of git does away with autotools alltogether, consisting of just a simple Makefile.

Also, a link to phk's libtool rant seems apt here ([2]).

[1]: [https://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/html_node/Instal...](https://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/html_node/Install- mode.html)

[2]: [http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257&ref=fullrss](http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257&ref=fullrss)

Edit: typo; make links work

<comment><USER4> both of those links are 404 (at least for me)

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry, first one should work now.

Second one works for me, but has already been discussed here back in 2012 eg. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4407188) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Increasingly popular are the "single header libraries", which were popularised by Sean Barrett[0]. It's as simple as downloading the header, putting it somewhere in your tree and #including it where you need it. It's especially useful for redistributing libraries, but I've also found it useful to create these in my own projects.

[0][https://github.com/nothings/stb](https://github.com/nothings/stb)

<comment><USER6> Doesn't this hurt compile times and increase exe size?

<comment><USER5> I tend to use a single compilation unit, and use plain C. For a 50k line project I have build times of 1-1.2sec. On top of that I'm also linking to opengl, windows.h and a couple of headers in the standard lib.

<comment><USER7> The speed up is easy to explain. Instead of launching gcc 50 times, it's now once for all.

<comment><USER5> Exactly :) I come from a .net background, where compile times are kinda bad compared to what I get in C. I had also heard of big C++ projects that could take more than 30 mins to build. So I was always scared to move to native code. Until I learned the single compilation unit trick! And if compile times were to get slow again, there are many more ways to bring it down even further,

<comment><USER6> Since when are .Net compile times worse than c? Csc compiles extremely fast, most long compile times are caused by msbuild doing... not much at all really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _If you create your own shared object files and do not install them in /usr/lib, then you need to set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable so that the runtime linker can find them and load them at run time._

A better approach would be to use the $ORIGIN linker keyword (-R works in gcc by special dispensation for compatibility with every other linker in existence, and is portable, as opposed to -rpath):

      gcc -L/home/newhall/lib -R'$ORIGIN:$ORIGIN/../lib' -lmine -o myprog myprog.c

because unfortunately the $ORIGIN keyword includes the $, to embed it effectively into Makefiles and shell scripts, the following is needed in the environment:

      O='$$O'; export O
      ORIGIN='$ORIGIN'; export ORIGIN

this way, both shell and make will expand $ORIGIN to $ORIGIN, without the need to recursively escape anything. $ORIGIN linker keyword is supported by GNU ld, Solaris / illumos ld, and HP-UX's ld.

[https://blogs.oracle.com/ali/entry/avoiding_ld_library_path_...](https://blogs.oracle.com/ali/entry/avoiding_ld_library_path_the)

[https://blogs.oracle.com/rie/entry/tt_ld_library_path_tt](https://blogs.oracle.com/rie/entry/tt_ld_library_path_tt)

Also, unless one is an operating system vendor, one may not install anything into /usr, as that is the vendor's namespace and having a clash with the vendor could bring one's production down in case of upgrades, were the vendor to deliver the same software. The System V and LSB FHS specifications state that /opt is for 3rd party and unbundled applications, /etc/opt for configuration, and /var/opt for data.

Unfortunately, the essay says nothing about library interface versioning with linker map files, for backward compatibility, so that one single shared object library can be used by all versions of the consuming software simultaneously.

</comment><comment><USER9> Also: [https://www.akkadia.org/drepper/dsohowto.pdf](https://www.akkadia.org/drepper/dsohowto.pdf)

<comment><USER10> drepper to the rescue

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope there is a tool like Cargo ([https://crates.io](https://crates.io)) in C

<comment><USER12> There is, your bog standard package manager (in unix and unix-like systems).

<comment><USER13> That sort of package manager has a totally different purpose and does absolutely nothing to help build your code, manage dependency versions, or control how dependencies are built.

<comment><USER14> They clearly do manage "dependency versions" (that's what they do: that's the primary purpose of say, apt). As for the other things, I am pretty certain those are anti-features? I don't want the way I find and manage libraries and depenendencies to assume I am going to use some specific build environment, and the entire point of good package management is to be able to reuse packages so encouraging developers to "control how dependencies are built" is asking for trouble.

<comment><USER13> System-wide package managers give you a single, global version of a package built to interact solely with the rest of that one distribution.

I absolutely do want to control how dependencies are built- I want to build them in debug mode, link them using LTO, cross-compile them, or (Rust- specific, since someone mentioned Cargo) switch the panic strategy. Further, many packages I depend on via language-specific tools likely will never be in any distro's repository, nor should they be.

As for assuming a build environment, that may be an issue with a language like C or C++ that has already gone a different route, but it's better when a language has a single, established way of building things that a package manager can integrate with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice simple guide. Perfect for people like me that are "relearning" c.

<comment><USER15> You might also like [http://david.rothlis.net/c/compilation_model/](http://david.rothlis.net/c/compilation_model/) \-- a tutorial I wrote that goes into some detail on what the preprocessor, compiler, assembler & linker do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > (3b) you could also build an ARCHIVE FILE (a statically linked library, > libmylib.a) from one or more .o files. If you link with a static library, > its code is copied into the a.out file at runtime.

Huh? There is no copying at runtime when using a static library. Or have I misunderstood this all these years?

</comment><comment><USER17> See also: [https://nickdesaulniers.github.io/blog/2016/11/20/static- and...](https://nickdesaulniers.github.io/blog/2016/11/20/static-and-dynamic- libraries/)

</comment><comment><USER18> An alternative to using LD_LIBRARY_PATH is to bake the rpath into the executable. It's a little nicer for the user, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER19> Tangential question: why aren't we using '#pragma once' more? I've adopted it in personal stuff and it's obviously Good. Is anyone still really coding for some arcane compiler that doesn't support it? Or is there some good reason for not just switching?

<comment><USER20> There are proprietary compilers for embedded chipsets that don't support this feature. Granted, these are fewer and further between than they once were, but they are out there. It really depends on how portable you want your code to be. Even though it is widely supported, it still isn't a standard language feature.

If your goal is to have a library that runs on most Unix-like and Windows systems, then '#pragma once' works just fine. But, if there's a possibility that your code would be deployed to an odd platform, it's probably best to use traditional header guards. I'm so used to using header guards that the appeal of '#pragma once' isn't that great for me.

<comment><USER21> You don't have to go that far.. Oracle Studio (nee Sun Studio) for Solaris doesn't support it.

<comment><USER18> Wikipedia lists it as supported since version 12.5.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragma_once#Portability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragma_once#Portability)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Do yourself a favour and use libtool through Autotools: [https://autotools.io/libtool/index.html](https://autotools.io/libtool/index.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Best Mac OS X Password Manager - <AUTHOR> I currently use Keychain / iCloud, 1Password, and Stickies to manage my passwords. Because one tool doesn't handle everything.  (For instance, I put the "2FA" stuff like my first pet's name in Stickies.) Which I imagine is less secure than having just one solution.
Is it reasonable to expect these solutions to converge? Now that Apple Safari has content blocking hooks, I fantasize they'll add hooks for suggesting passwords and filling out forms. So that Safari and 1Password aren't clobbering each other.
Instead of managing passwords, I'd like some kind of key exchange, a la ssh. Is that on the horizon?
Thanks for humoring my questions. <comment><USER2> I only use 1password across OSX, iOS and Windows. I share my vault via Dropbox as iCloud doesn't play nice w/ Windows yet. You can add custom fields into login records to save your 2FA stuff. Just flag the field as a password and it won't show in plain text until you "reveal" it. It's one of the few of these kinds of apps that are being integrated with other iOS apps at the moment (e.g. eBay, Uber and Disney). Safari already has an extension for 1password. I just tell it and Chrome to not ask to save passwords and log in via the extension.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the replies. I guess I just needed validation before abandoning Keychain.

I'll figure out how to migrate the 2FA stuff.

Is a Keychain -> 1Password migration tool (feature) a good idea?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I also only use 1Password. It supports more than just passwords, it includes Credit Card Info, and App Registration data as well. Its been great to get access to it, and use the password generator at work to generate new passwords every 180 days because of our password policy :(

</comment><comment><USER4> Use 1Password's "Secure Notes" instead of stickies so that your 2FA stuff is encrypted.

<comment><USER5> I use 1Password as well, but instead of using its secure notes section for "security question answers," I put these inside optional fields in the 1Password logins records for the particular site. You can create whatever additional fields you like, or just use the note field. Further, instead of adding "valid" information, I use random strings of characters for my answers, and store them here as well, unique to each site. Seems much more secure than telling a whole bunch of sites my first pets name.

Another nice feature of 1Password is that it can store/generate the rolling Google Authenticator style 2 factor authentication codes right inside the login details in one of the additional fields.</comment></comment>


Slack is down - <AUTHOR> https://slack.com/ <comment><USER2> And suddenly hundreds of teams around the world realized how dependent they are on Slack.

And also realized there's no offline mode that's at least read-only.

That being said I'd still consider myself an advocate.

<comment><USER3> It's honestly ridiculous they don't allow for offline read mode. I needed to check a previous message in a channel, but nope, completely useless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love how [https://status.slack.com/](https://status.slack.com/) says 'All's good under the hood, boss!' yet [https://slack.com](https://slack.com) is responding with 503s.

<comment><USER5> It's been updated

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I used slack.com because [https://status.slack.com/](https://status.slack.com/) hadn't been updated yet. It's updated now.

</comment><comment><USER6> Confirming down, contrary to status page.

Edit, status page updated.

</comment><comment><USER7> Status page still says up. Thanks for posting.</comment>


Mentors, Coaches and Teachers - <AUTHOR> http://steveblank.com/2011/04/19/mentors-coaches-and-teachers/

<comment><USER5> _Disclaimer: I'm a business coach, with Shirlaws, running my own coaching business._

This is actually a question I get asked a lot - "what's the difference?" - <USER2> the point where I wrote a page for our Australian website on the difference [1]. The only (minor) disagreement I have to Steve's answer is that any of a Mentor / Coach / Teacher will care (should care) - the key value in a Mentor is that they have usually 'walked the path before'. When a mentor gives you answers, they're often from specific experience which can be immensely valuable... except when you're trying to do something different to how everyone has done it before, of course.

The best thing about having a Mentor, as Steve notes, is that the two-way street normally makes it accessible to people who are starting out. If you want to build a start-up, you can't pay for a consultant, you probably can't hire a coach (unless you're funded, or they're cheap - in which case, why are you listening to them), and a teacher is unlikely to give you the practical grounding you need to implement good ideas.

Having a mentor who's built startups before means being so much more focused sooner, and you also energise them - see Fred Wilson's post yesterday [2]. So they're available. YC etc give and receive so much value, and Mentoring is (from an outside perspective) a key part of it.

The reasons I (and, it seems, others) get asked the difference a lot is because some people see mentor / coach / teacher as an OR conversation - <USER3> is better, "which of this OR this OR this is right for me?". In reality, it's an AND conversation - "how can I get the most out of this relationship AND this one AND this one?"

Get a mentor who has walked the path. Get a teacher when you want education on a specific topic. Get a coach when you want someone to give you the skills to build the strategy and to guide you, with experience and (ideally) proven frameworks, through successful implementation and beyond.

[1] <http://shirlaws.com.au/coaching/about-coaching> [2] <http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/04/reinvesting-capital.html>

Edit: It's also worth noting that, in the commercial world, these terms (plus 'consultant') are often seen as interchangeable. I'm sure there are coaches out there who would vehemently disagree with my approach here. If you're paying a mentor to guide you through implmentation, go for it - <USER4> relationship, not an industry term, is what matters.

</comment><comment><USER6> A mentor relationship is a two-way street. To make it work, you have to bring something to the party.

A lot of people don't realize this, which inspired me to write "How to get your Professors' Attention — along with Coaching or Mentoring:" [http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your- professors%E2...](http://jseliger.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your- professors%E2%80%99-attention-or-how-to-get-the-coaching-and-mentorship-you- need) . I've observed lots of people doing it wrong, so I wanted to describe how to do it right.

I don't think of the mentoring and teaching as majorly different activities, as you do, but I think a lot of people don't realize they need to do something special to make themselves worth of investing in.</comment>


Netflix was the top stock of the decade - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/23/netflix-was-the-top-stock-of-the-decade-delivering-over-4000percent-return.html <comment><USER3> I bought Netflix at the time of the Qwikster debacle because it was obvious the market was overreacting to what amounted to a one-time mistake. At the time, Netflix was a leader in both vision and their technology was a major competitive advantage.

Almost a decade later I'm bearish. Their technology advantage is being commoditized away, and production + marketing has not been their forte. It's possible they'll turn it around, but even so they've got a massive battle on their hands against the likes of Disney and other big content producers who have almost a century of experience in this exact arena. It's not that I don't think they'll be successful, but the current price is over-inflated because Tech—they've got a long way to go to justify the valuation.

<comment><USER4> It's hilarious how much production has not been their forte. Aside from a few hits like Stranger Things, most of their originals, which they need to pan out for future success (instead of paying 100 million for Friends) are absolute rubbish.

<comment><USER5> Witcher has to have been one of the worst-written TV shows I've seen. A shame because the source material isn't bad at all.

<comment><USER6> There haven't been any good video game-to-motion picture ever. What people love in games is really hard to put on screen (Witcher has the original source material books but they were never as famous or good as the games).

Honestly it's really hard to do it, to appeal to both the gamers and the wider audience who never touched the game (inc the critics)

I'm playing games since the late 80s and seen so many movies and TV shows failing.

This list is perfect [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_g...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_video_games)

<comment><USER7> The Castlevania anime is really well done and can stand alone without the game but if you have played some of the games it really feels like a playthrough with a good story, though the first two seasons are based on one particular version. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania_\(TV_series\))

<comment><USER8> I found it quite surprisingly good! Also surprisingly gory and crude - <USER2> isn't good or bad but seems notable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember for years I kept seeing predictions of Netflix's demise about how someone established coming along and doing it better or every content providers just not selling and/or creating their own service...and so on.

Netflix is still around and at least for me it is one of a couple services I regularly use / keep and I'm actually kinda annoyed when another service comes along. I just watch what the handful of services I use have...I don't want to chase content around.

<comment><USER10> I used to feel this way but more and more Netflix is the service i question if it's worth the price to me. This holiday season kinda emphasized why: normally i wind up binging a lot of Christmas movies this time of year but their selection this year (in Canada at least) was downright bad. Like 1 or 2 things i recognized and a dozen or so crappy shovelware shows.

I'm basically only in it for their original stuff now, which with everyone trying to eat their pie was really the only way they were ever going to keep people, but i could just sub for a couple months every year to binge those. Keeping the year round sub for that is kinda meh as a value proposition.

<comment><USER11> > Like 1 or 2 things i recognized and a dozen or so crappy shovelware shows.

[https://i.redd.it/rd05w5nlj0541.jpg](https://i.redd.it/rd05w5nlj0541.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > A $1 million bet on Netflix's stock placed on Jan. 1, 2010, would be worth > close to $43 million today.

Same goes for AMD, in 2016 it was just $1.8, now it's $47. Incredible growth in just 4 years

<comment><USER13> That one hurt. AMD had hired Keller, and rumblings of a new generation were afoot. I'd just bought a house and had no spare cash, so told my trusted coworker to go all in on AMD. He had no spare cash either. Now we once a year have the 'so...AMD...yup...yup' conversation.

<comment><USER14> And now they don't have Keller so... sell quickly?

<comment><USER15> Eh they still have Papermaster.

Disclosure: I went long AMD in 2009 and doubled my bet when Mark joined.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And second-to-top stock of the last two decades. [1]

Top stock of the 90s was (I believe) Dell.

[1] [https://howmuch.net/articles/best-performing- stocks](https://howmuch.net/articles/best-performing-stocks)

</comment><comment><USER17> With Youtube and Disney+ encroaching on their territory, Netflix is in a pretty precarious position in my opinion.

<comment><USER18> Not sure how you measure precarious. Do you think people will just drop Netflix and run to another streaming provider?

Or do people end up paying for a handful of these things?

I can say from my own experience I've got at least 4 streaming subscriptions I can think of...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Bummer. I knew this would happen to some extent early in the decade, but thought they'd lose it all when the media companies took back control of their media. Also, was cleaned out over a margin call on Apple in ~2009.

One of these days I'll make the right call at the right time.

<comment><USER20> One of these days you'll stop trying to time the market and you'll make money.

<comment><USER21> Hard to beat ETFs over the long run without insider information.

<comment><USER22> Buy'n'hold is a hard strategy to beat in terms of results and time commitment. Two of the best people at this run fool.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I should know better but I got into an Internet debate about when the millenium changed (1999 -> 2000 vs 2000 -> 2001 (obviously)). It all started when I made a joke about the decade not ending yet.

</comment><comment><USER24> Bitcoin beat every single stock.

<comment><USER25> And 2000 other speculative investment/currency projects failed

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Netflix started streaming in 2010. Apples fall down.

</comment><comment><USER18> Many people view the decade ending next year, 2020...

So there's still time for TSLA to beat NFLX.

</comment><comment><USER27> Netflix also gradually moved to the dark side, disassociating from Internet companies alliances, and joining the MPAA and similar cartels of copyright maximalists.

</comment><comment><USER28> Some Netflix trivia: my residential internet connection can't stream Netflix as of yesterday. I get M7111-5059 which is "[y]ou seem to be using an unblocker or proxy" despite using neither VPN nor HTTP proxy.

I don't have malware on my PC, everything else is an iDevice, the trickiest thing I do is use Google Public DNS [0].

Alas their help page [1] says to contact my ISP. Who have helpfully confirmed they aren't doing a VPN on my behalf! Contacting Netflix results in them asking me if I am using "automatic" network settings and to ... contact my ISP. "We're confident that your ISP can get you back to streaming."

My best theory is they've blocked a range of IPs belonging to my ISP because something in that range is helping users evade Netflix's geoblocking.

If anybody knows more about how Netflix's great firewall works I am all ears...

EDIT: Yes I have tried changing my IP by disconnecting the modem but it seems it's a static assignment. Next port of call is to ask the ISP. Or better yet, Netflix might unblock me!

[0] Cloudflare DNS makes no difference, and my ISP's DNS makes no difference.

[1] [https://help.netflix.com/en/node/53047](https://help.netflix.com/en/node/53047)

<comment><USER29> Irony of ironies, your best solution might be to use a vpn. My ISP does dramatic traffic shaping at peak hours, and is blocked by prime video as they think it's a vpn, and I use a popular commercially available vpn provider to sidestep it, and most of their servers seem to work fine with Netflix etc. Additionally, as my ISP is a cell provider, it also means I get automatically served mobile optimised content when streaming, which the VPN also sidesteps - it's the difference between 800kbps and 50mbps. It's literally the difference between YouTube at 144p or 4K.

It's costing me $3 a month - my connection would be pretty much unusable without it.</comment></comment>


A Meta for Computers - <AUTHOR> https://notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2020-06-07-09:33.html <comment><USER2> I find this interesting how natural it comes to use people as a metaphor to explain programs.

I found sometime ago that i could read an actual code like a prose to someone who knows nothing about programming if i replace just one word \- "function" with almost any word for a person - worker, agent, operator etc. (maybe just not a specific occupation like an actor).

Notice that only in programming you can call a function, and a function can take and return something. Everywhere else you call a person who can take and return something and a function is a purpose of someone or something.

This unusual use of the word makes non programmers imagination stumble. And i found that my imagination also stumbles on it. I know what "function" means in context of programming but it does not paint a clear picture in my head. Just like a bad prose.

I think we have a good metaphor for computation hidden by a wrong word.</comment>