Nikon's 300mm F/2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.company7.com/library/nikon/Nikon_0300f2.html <comment><USER2> That's a remarkable lens. One thing that I think has been lost in photography today thanks to the smartphone is the value of high quality lenses. You simply can't replace great optics with software (at least, not yet).

I've got a few higher end cameras, and my favourite is probably my Leica Q2. It has a fixed prime lens (28mm), and the photos are just astounding.

<comment><USER3> Still have a Nikon D70 from ~2004 that has only about 6 megapixels but will take better photos than any phone made today even using lenses that were made in the 1970s. It is hard to describe to people without showing them but the sharpness of photos is amazing with high quality lenses.

<comment><USER4> I still shot (for still life images, mostly, with external flash) with a D60 until I upgraded that to an used, beat-up D700.

You can definitely get much better images if you have a good lens, and on older cameras good lighting or very good form. But more modern smartphone lenses and software are plenty good for certain types of photography (and especially video).

I shoot less and less with my D750 and D700 (in non-studio / non-low-light- event situations), and more and more with my iPhone, because of the convenience and portability.

But there are definitely types of pictures that can't be taken without good glass and a larger sensor size. No software can simulate the physics that makes a longer focal length make a great portrait. (You just can't stuff that quality of glass into such a small lens, and the sensor can't physically gather enough photons to compete.)

<comment><USER5> Agreed. I bring all my travel photos into Lightroom which I subsequently edit on a 5k display.

Today I travel with an iPhone 11 Pro and a Fuji X-T2. In the past it's been whatever current-gen iPhone and pocket cameras like the Sony RX-100Mk3, Canon S110, Canon S95, and DSLRs like a Nikon D3000 and D50.

It used to be, the photos looked better on the phone after shooting them, just because the screen was so much better, but once imported to the computer, the iPhone photos looked like an oil painting even compared to a upper midrange P+S pocket camera, let alone a DSLR. It wasn't even close.

These days, between the XT-2 and the iPhone 11 Pro, it's hard to tell which is which. Sometimes the iPhone looks better as-shot because of the image processing presets. Other times it's the Fuji. At 1:1 on a 5k display it's just not as obvious as it was when the pixels were blown up more.

Even in good light, yes, the sharpness on the Fuji is better, but not by leaps and bounds. Not in a way that would be immediately obvious to anyone walking by the computer as it used to be.

I've never bought high-end glass, and frankly, some of my earlier DSLR photos are pretty bad compared to what my iPhone returns these days.

<comment><USER6> Rent some high-end glass sometime when you're bored. It is enlightening both in its capability and when realizing that a lot of consumer glass is wonderful, especially at ~f/8 (here's looking at you, nifty-fifty).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing to watch out for, with tele lenses, is the weight.

I personally really like Nikon's 300mm f/4 PF. They use a Phase Fresnel element (which, if you're a lens geek, is quite cool). In return for giving up a couple of stops of light, the lens is actually hand-holdable! (In fact, it's lighter than their top of the line 70-200 f/2.8 zoom)

<comment><USER8> One approach to saving weight while increasing telephoto reach is to use a smaller sensor. e.g. that Nikon 300mm f/2 lens can be mounted to a modern Micro Four Thirds camera (e.g. Olympus or Panasonic) for 600mm of equivalent reach while retaining the f/2 light gathering ability and unmodified optics. Adapters are very inexpensive (e.g. Voigtländer) compared to the cost of lenses like this or good quality bodies.

The other path to doubling reach would be a 2x teleconverter which would reduce light gathering to f/4 and introduce glass elements that won't do image quality any favours.

Small sensor downside: high ISO ability. Probably two stops lost, but with modern MFT sensors you can still shoot up to ISO 6400 with great results.

Small sensor downside _or_ upside, depending on your needs: deeper depth of field (twice the depth of field, in this case, which is still pretty amazing for 600mm!)

<comment><USER9> At the risk of sounding pedantic - the f-stop* roughly equates to "light per area" or brightness, so if you're using crop factor, you need to apply it to the f-stop as well as the focal length.

So for a given full-frame lens at a given f-stop, if you drop down to an APS-C sensor, you're reducing the amount of light gathered by about one stop (half). On an m43, you're obviously losing 75% of the light gathering capacity (two stops).

Putting a 300mm f/2 lens on a micro 4/3rds body should result in images similar to a full-frame camera with a 600mm f/4 lens.

*Obviously t-stop would be better, since it's an actual measurement of brightness.

<comment><USER10> Except you're not. This is a popular talking point in 35mm circles, but the amount of light on a given area on the sensor remains unchanged, which is what actually matters.

The smaller sensors _are_ challenged to keep their noise down, given they typically have a smaller pixel pitch to keep up the megapickel count.

<comment><USER11> Noise is the key, as far as I can tell a FF sensor usually has at least 1 stop more usable ISO compared to a crop of the same generation.

So to get a comparable shutter speed, assuming 1 stop less ISO, you still need that 400mm f/2.8 on crop to match the 600mm f/4 on FF.

Humorously, they have the same front element size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's also the even crazier Canon 300mm f/1.8 (yes, that's not a typo!) [1] Apparently only four or so copies are known to exist and there's almost no information on the lens available on the net.

[1] [https://petapixel.com/2017/04/27/canon-300mm-f1-8-yes- monste...](https://petapixel.com/2017/04/27/canon-300mm-f1-8-yes-monster-lens- exists/)

<comment><USER13> If we're talking about crazy lenses, might as well jump straight to the Zeiss 50/0.7:

[http://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the- fam...](http://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the- famous-f0-7-lenses/)

Only ten were made. NASA bought six to send round the dark side of the moon. Stanley Kubrick bought the other three.

<comment><USER9> f/0.7 manual focus and no aperture.

That thing must be a royal PITA to focus...

<comment><USER14> Infinity focus for the moon I'm sure and special rigs for Barry Lyndon apparently:

[http://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the- fam...](http://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the- famous-f0-7-lenses/)

I also remember reading somewhere the actors had a bad time from having to make sure to stand still to not go out of focus. 4cm of depth of field isn't much.

<comment><USER13> One of the articles about it mentions that Kubrick directed the scene so that the actors only moved from side to side, so they'd stay in focus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Only $21k, [https://usedphotopro.com/nikon-nikkor-ais-300mm-f2-ed-if- len...](https://usedphotopro.com/nikon-nikkor-ais-300mm-f2-ed-if- lens-300-2-rare-lens-only)

</comment><comment><USER16> Hah, I mistake it with the slower 300mm f2.8

This is my first time know this f2 version.

The price tag is very high close to 10k. And it's very heavy...

<comment><USER17> If you haven't, look into TV broadcasting zoom lenses. Insane, heavy, turret mounted. Cool gear. :)

<comment><USER18> Here is a video about it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkTaMyatsTo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkTaMyatsTo)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> They did a few other "one-offs." If you are ever in Tokyo, check out the Nikon Museum, in their Shinagawa headquarters.

Here's a couple of doozies:

[https://www.stuff.tv/news/just-because-they-could- ps100000-n...](https://www.stuff.tv/news/just-because-they-could- ps100000-nikon-fisheye-lens)

[https://petapixel.com/2016/06/22/rare-nikon-1200mm-lens- setu...](https://petapixel.com/2016/06/22/rare-nikon-1200mm-lens-setup-3-feet- long/)

[https://petapixel.com/2013/11/13/ultra- rare-2000mm-f11-nikko...](https://petapixel.com/2013/11/13/ultra- rare-2000mm-f11-nikkor-lens-ebay-25k-broken/)</comment>


What are the best sources for US and global statistics? - <AUTHOR> I've become increasingly disenfranchised with mainstream and non-mainstream news' interpretation of the important narratives within the world. I'm looking for things like PPM of carbon in the atmosphere, current nuclear arsenal of the united states, car crashes per year by country, etc. <comment><USER2> Wolfram Alpha is pretty good for random factual queries. It will even do computation, so you can ask for the number of dietary calories in a cubic lightyear of cream cheese. [https://www.wolframalpha.com/](https://www.wolframalpha.com/)

If you are looking more for proven statistics that get suppressed for political reasons, then the now-defunct hatefact site is what you want. It featured over 700 awkward facts, with citations. Archive as one big page: [http://archive.is/LRe05](http://archive.is/LRe05) Archive with 1 page per category: [http://hatefacts.subvert.pw/hub.html](http://hatefacts.subvert.pw/hub.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks so much</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Build Site vs Use Magento for eCommerce site? - <AUTHOR> Hey there - I'm building a really simple eCommerce site.  I'm a good coder but don't want to do work for work's sake.  For those of you who have worked with Magento, would you recommend using it vs. building your own Ruhy or PHP site?  Have any suggestions?  Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> I think theres better in between solutions. Magento is a full featured amazon type site. Its a beast on its own. If you want a simple store, you can do yourself then look at spree. If you want something simple and fast, out of the cart look at shopify or yahoo ecommerce solutions. I think theres more to running a store than just hosting code, such as worrying about payment solutions, and overall security. Thats why I would first suggest paying for something like shopify or yahoo, and see if you can generate the business needed to rationalize going with a solution like Magento.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the pointers and the quick reply. I'll look spree up. If I go with something like paypal to handle the checkout process, do I still need to worry about general security? Much thanks :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you're looking to build something really simple, I wouldn't touch Magento with a ten foot pole.

My recommendation? Look into FoxyCart, CS-Cart, Shopify, BigCommerce, Interspire - in that order. You will be very happy.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the suggestions. I will look into them :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I built a magento ecommerce site about 1 year ago. Here's a quick summary of my experience:

Pros \- Beautiful themes out of the box \- Easy to setup initially (i.e. payment plug-ins,etc)

Cons \- Extremely slow on a shared host (i.e. netfirms) \- If your host is slow, using the admin panel to manage the content is painful

The performance issue killed it for me. Unless you can spend some more money on a good hosting service, I'd stay away from it. Otherwise, it's pretty awesome out of the box.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for sharing your thoughts. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently built a site using the CartThrob module for ExpressionEngine:

<http://www.cartthrob.com>

<http://www.expressionengine.com>

I've also saw this recently, but haven't looked into it much beyond the web site. Might be worth taking a look:

<http://lemonstandapp.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the pointers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You may want to describe what "really simple eCommerce site" really means. Is it going to grow in the near future perhaps? The simplest conceivable eCommerce site in my mind is some cart component and single form checkout process that just compiles an order and sends the owner/clerk in an email.

<comment><AUTHOR> What you describe is pretty much what I envisioned. It would be simple in the following sense: \- there will be no cart, buying an item shoots them to the checkout process \- we will only list a single item/day

<comment><USER7> If that is all you are after, Magento is not worth the tradeoff - it is supremely robust but its code and database schema is just too complex to let you do simple things easily.

You could try Open Cart, it's quite a modern PHP cart with paypal etc built in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the pointers. I now realize that all I want is a payment processor which will allow me to keep the user on my site while they enter their payment details. I don't believe that I can do this with paypal. Any ideas?

<comment><USER8> You can do this with paypal, you just have to code the integration yourself. Can be as simple as having a form POST different values to the paypal API then redirecting to your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> I looked into this. Seems like to keep them on my site, I would need to get a SSL certificate installed on my server which doesn't seem fun or cheap for that matter. Thanks all the same :)</comment></comment></comment>


The tricky math of Covid-19 herd immunity - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-tricky-math-of-covid-19-herd-immunity-20200630/ <comment><USER2> I feel uninterested in R-nought (or R) when there is evidence for a huge variance around how many people each person will infect.

Infections seem to happen at large gatherings: one person can be identified as infecting 50 others simultaneously, especially in the early cases, even though the R-nought is said to be no more than 2.5

That suggests infectiousness is an incredibly skewed distribution, to the point of implausibility.

An epidemiologist apparently setting out R-nought as the underlying basis for their modelling (or even: communicating it to the public as such) worries me.

I wouldn't begin any statistical modelling unless I was thinking about the distribution of infectiousness more generally: even a high school student of statistics would know to look beyond the mean and to the variance.

<comment><USER3> Some people earn $0, others earn $1000000 a year. That doesn't mean mean an aggregate like mean income isn't useful

<comment><USER4> Income is a perfect example of a quantity for which mean is not an informative statistic. Really, anything more-or-less bounded on one side is not well- characterized by the mean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, one thing's for sure - the USA will reach herd immunity more quickly than the rest of the world at the current rate.

The thing that bugs me about covid-19 is how we only try to optimize for reducing deaths of that one thing (covid-19), while letting other types of collateral damage resulting from said optimizations pile up unaccounted for as side effects. Experts are clearly very bad at predicting second and third order side effects resulting from covid-19 death reduction optimization.

To use a computer analogy, it's like going to extreme measures to refactor all programs so that Covid19Exception kills as few processes as possible, meanwhile processes left and right are dying at elevated rates due to HeartExceptions and BrainExceptions (and in a few months CancerExceptions) and the OOM Killer is on the prowl but nobody is noticing because they are hyperfocused on Covid19Exceptions.

<comment><USER6> I think you've misunderstood what the experts are attempting to do. They're not trying to get 0 covid deaths at the expense of all else.

COVID can easily overwhelm the hospital system all by itself. We saw that in Italy and China... and hospital systems in several parts of the US are already near capacity. Once they're overwhelmed, there will be no room left in the hospitals, and they'll have to do one of two things: Start sending covid patients home, which will increase the covid death rate and/or start refusing patients with other injuries/diseases.. which will increase the deaths in those cases.

The restrictions are all about preventing the hospitals from being overwhelmed, and causing more people to die than currently. It just seems like they're so focused on covid, because it spreads so rapidly that it can overwhelm hospitals in a very short period of time.

Unfortunately with the numbers in Texas, Florida, and elsewhere... and with how long it takes for restrictions to have an effect... it's very likely we'll see what an overwhelmed hospital system looks like very soon.

<comment><USER5> > COVID can easily overwhelm the hospital system all by itself.

1\. Is there anything a hospital can actually do to save someone with a serious case of covid-19? As far as I know, ventilators are ineffective (and may even make things worse?). If 100 people with _serious_ covid-19 are taking up ICU beds, how many will live due to direct hospital intervention? If it's a very low %, it seems like a no-brainer to turn away covid-19 cases in favor or other, more treatable diseases. Otherwise it's like letting people with prion disease use up all the ICU beds despite their condition being pretty much untreatable.

2\. Anti-covid measures can do the inverse. Remember back in March/April/May when all the hospitals in the USA were empty due to SIP? Most hospitals ended up dismantling their temporary covid-19 field hospitals due to lack of use.

<comment><USER7> If you look at statistics, death rates skyrocket in places and at the time when hospitals are overwhelmed.

Also remember, doctors and nurses are people, too. Who is going to save your ass if all staff is sick?

<comment><USER5> If all the staff is sick, then 2 weeks later all the staff will be immune. So just... Don't get sick during the window when all staff is simultaneously sick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this taking into account possible reinfection and mutation rates? There's a lot about the virus we don't know.

<comment><USER9> The controversies over reinfection were about the idea of immunity passports, which are much more sensitive to small errors - if 10% of people can get a mild reinfection, that's a rounding error in herd immunity but a distastrous gap in immunity passports. Epidemiologists are very confident that people who recover from the virus get substantial and reasonably long-lasting immunity.

<comment><USER10> > Epidemiologists are very confident that people who recover from the virus > get substantial and reasonably long-lasting immunity.

Citation?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Rewordious - Domain Thesaurus - <AUTHOR>

Ever have an idea for a domain name just to find out that it is already taken? Followed by spending too much time searching for available domains based off synonyms, when you should be focusing on building something? Yeah, us too.
You can now use Rewordious to: - Find synonyms based on up to three keywords (use brackets to keep a certain word static) - See what sites are available and which are already taken - Register your new domain (just GoDaddy for now, Moniker soon)
http://rewordio.us
This is our first weekend project since leaving our jobs in NYC to move to the Bay Area. It is something that has been rolling around in our heads for a while. If you have suggestions or enhancement ideas, let us know. If all goes well, you'll hopefully hear more from us in the future.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Looks like a good start, but I think your result set needs to be better.

For example, I searched for "[physics]book" hoping to get back results like "physicsfolio.com", "physicsreport.com", etc. My result was actually "physicsbook.com" -- which isn't even available.

So, the idea sounds great especially if you could create some intelligent parsing scripts and pull some good synonyms (possibly using the wordnik.com api?) then I think it would be another useful tool while searching for domain names.

Check <http://www.wordnik.com/thesaurus/book> for a good example of some synonyms for "book" which I'd love to see integrated with rewordio.us

For what it's worth, my favorite domain name whois tool is domaintyper.com -- consider integrating some of the features from that service (or even just the site mechanics) and I think you'd have a pretty decent product on your hands!

<comment><USER3> This was because there was no space between [physics] and book. I'm working on a fix to handle that case right now, but if you enter "[physics] book" you'll see the results you were looking for. Hope this helps!

\- John (technical cofounder)

<comment><USER3> This is fixed. [physics]book will now work. Thanks for the suggestion!

<comment><USER2> The results are MUCH better now....thanks for the direct attention! I love HN :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm unsure whether it's because of the words I'm choosing, but there don't seem to be any really valuable suggestions in the list, and often the suggestions are themselves unavailable.

I like the thesaurus concept, but doesn't quite solve the problem of people parking any and every domain they can (if that can be solved, grrr). Perhaps breaking the words down to roots and culling new meanings out of those foundations would yield more interesting and useful results.

The idea of suggesting new terms and letting you know whether or not they're available is useful, but the thesaurus function doesn't seem to be as developed as, for example, visualthesaurus.com.

</comment><comment><USER5> Are you doing some testing, because the site comes up, but no results are visible for me (tried on Chrome and Safari on Windows)

Nevertheless, I love the concept.

Future feature suggestion: add multilingual suggestions

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://rewordio.us/>

Related post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024927>

</comment><comment><USER6> Ha, I put "easy" as a keyword and it's giving me "sluttish" "loose" "tardily" and "promiscuous".

Almost what I was going for - ha! But neat little tool</comment>


Perfect UX Is Impossible (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://erik.itland.no/perfect-ux-is-impossible <comment><USER2> Many people forget to ask the (essential) question: "Good UX – _for whom_?"

For example a tool that might be exceptional to use for a professional might be very very bad to use for a consumer and vice versa.

Software (in theory) could give multiple target demographics with good consistent etc UX at once by beeing configurable. However there is a clear trend to making everything intuitive and easy for inexperienced users (like a iPad), often at the expense of people who have to use the software the whole day. In the worst case the whole target demographic of a software _is powerusers_ but the UX still trades off usability for a flat learning curve.

Imagine a point of sale system. Retail workers have to use that stuff the whole day. This means it nearly never makes sense to sacrifice power user efficiency just to be able to tell some manager who will never have to work with the damn thing: _" Look how easy this is to understand"_.

<comment><USER3> This is why I wish software in general - especially tools - was more _configurable_.

The more users are able to alter UI/UX, the more they can tailor it to their use case.

There has been so much focus on _consistency_ in UI/UX that we have thrown customization right out the window.

Consistency is valuable, but I think we ought to move its focus away from UI/UX, and down one rung on the ladder of abstraction: to functionality.

We could also make an effort to move UI/UX one rung _up_ the ladder of abstraction, and have a high-level interface for discreet functionalities. This is something that isn't tried often, but seems to work out well when it is.

<comment><USER4> Do you have any examples?

<comment><USER3> bash, or any other shell.

In a shell, you can set aliases, and even create intermediate functionality to interface with. You can even write software that works as a front end for your shell.

The shell is so far removed from functionality, it hardly implements any at all. Instead, it uses entirely separate programs by providing the user a consistent and configurable interface to those programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > you didn't put in any kind way to configure it.

I have often found that in many projects I have worked on that there are always UX compromises that are made for good reasons (typically to make the primary use cases as usable/simple/easy as possible etc, often at the expense of "power users").

Things that _can_ be configured often never get done purely due to time/resource constraints, rather than due to any maliciousness or lack of foresight. You can bet your bottom dollar that the engineers building the system will have brought up the fact that something can/should be a user preference/have a power-user shortcut/etc etc during early stages of design & development (since the engineers tend to fall into the "power user" category due to their familiarity with the software they're making)

However, I have found that once the primary use case gets marked as done, it is never updated to allow power users to shortcut/configure bits and pieces "because agile" (i.e. you are off to the next feature and there is never a time to go back and look at tech-/UX-debt).

For what it is worth, I don't think this is a bad thing. Often the "power users" with some niche workflows are typically a) a very, very small percentage of your users, and b) a very, very vocal percentage of your users. Most of the users will just get on with their life when using your software, but it is the "power users" who will _make sure_ that you're aware of how much your team's work sucks.

When the "power users" are a significant proportion of your users, only then is it worth formally recognising their needs as part of the formal design, otherwise it generally seems to be a lot of work to support the niche needs of literally a handful of users at the opportunity cost of adding features for the other 99.99995% of your users.

<comment><USER6> > You can bet your bottom dollar that the engineers building the system will > have brought up the fact that something can/should be a user preference/have > a power-user shortcut/etc etc during early stages of design & development

As a developer, I've come to respect the curse of dimensionality w.r.t. testing and quality control: every binary option _doubles_ the number of possible user configurations, and thus the testing load. In a very concrete sense configurability leads to more buggy code, and I usually err on the side of reliability.

<comment><USER7> > every binary option doubles the number of possible user configurations, and > thus the testing load

Only if you assume your software is the worst possible variety of spaghetti.

Configurations do increase the software complexity. By how much is a very complicated question.

<comment><USER8> In theory, every additional binary configuration item doubles your state space, because you have all the old state space, but now both with that value on and off.

It is tempting to say that in practice the result is less than this, but in practice, it isn't. Adding a binary option may seem not to double the state space because it only modifies a small portion of the original space. e.g., imagine an option that the user sets to force all emails to be in ALL CAPS. Strong abstractions can mostly contain that state space increase in a principled manner to just that email code, for instance.

But if you've been doing this for ten+ years, you've almost certainly encountered the moral equivalent three other supposedly equally-well contained things interacting to produce a bug. Maybe if the user set this setting to true, and was using your UI in Armenian, and all the other settings on the page are in their longest possible form in Armenian, and your UI guy used a fixed-size frame ever so slightly incorrectly, your setting disappeared off the UI entirely, just to draw one example out, even though you had a "proof" that this setting couldn't affect anything but the email code. Any number of other ways this could go wrong.

None of our tools are good enough to fully contain the _exponential_ state space explosion exponentially correctly, and it will sooner or later push through your best efforts to contain it. One of the best ways to prevent this is just not to feed the exponential monster.

<comment><USER9> If you look at what happens with Refactoring or Unit testing, instead of just listening to what people tell you is happening, you see that a lot of goes on is synthesizing one state from a small group of others, over and over again.

So for instance there may be five different criteria that decide whether you are qualified to receive a 10% off discount. You make a block of code that is responsible for emitting a single boolean, and the rest of the system only ever interacts with that single value.

Instead of an upper bound of 2^n you have one that is somewhere around n/3 factorial. Which is still a scary-big number, but might push out the dog leg a couple of years.

<comment><USER6> > instead of just listening to what people tell you is happening

Can you elaborate on what you're referring to with this phrase? As far as I can tell, everyone here is reasoning from their personal experiences rather than adopting the opinions of others.

<comment><USER9> Ah, I meant 'in the literature' not in the thread. Just commenting on the frequent disconnect between 'why we do things' and why we do things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _> > We just simplified the whole Desktop Environment Experience!

> Fine, this will be great for onboarding new users but you just made it a lot > harder to use for all existing users._

This is one of my biggest pet peeves in UX. People almost always mix up user- friendly with beginner-friendly.

Those are very different and the majority of cases they are opposites of each other.

A good UX is one that combine the two (well, that is also under the assumption that a broad audience is targeted).

<comment><USER11> > A good UX is one that combine the two

good metaphor is of help. e.g. desktop metaphor for tool to manage files. works good for beginners, doesn't constrain experts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I partially agree with the article, but the examples given are very simple and don't prove anything. Saying that it's impossible to have good UX because A is good for some users and bad for others while B is the opposite doesn't prove that there is no option C which satisfies both types of users.

<comment><USER13> It's a straw man article. No one is saying any UX is perfect, and their analysis is so superficial to be meaningless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Close to "Perfect UX" is when technology is acting on your behalf, _and you don't even know it's there_.

A good example of this is the Nest thermostat. After a few weeks you just forget it exists, and it does its thing in the background.

<comment><USER15> Like any proper thermostat. Except when it loses Internet connection or Nest/Google decides it's bored with the platform and bricks your thermostat remotely :).

I think depending on third-party subscriptions should be considered an UX antipattern.

<comment><USER14> Other thermostats don't learn your preferences.

If anything, Nest gets in the way the first few weeks, then goes to the background.

I'm talking about product UX, how a Nest thermostat usually works, independently of Google getting bored ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Getting caught up in trying to have the perfect UX is one of the largest causes of developer paralysis that I've seen. IMO, push it even if it works for 75% of people, and keep working towards 100% – UX is learned on the way.

<comment><USER17> Attempting to achieve perfection is a problem, but at a minimum I believe any feature needs a good long time spent considering pain points for a wide variety of users.

Achieving perfection is impossible, but you need to at least improve the level of the worst aspects.

A lot of the problems in open-source software user interfaces, I contend, come from people finishing a feature on the backend and then throwing together a UI that merely functions.

I, on the other hand, spend most of a feature's development time thinking about the UI, putting a lot of consideration towards how it interacts with other aspects of the program and how I can remove unnecessary mouse clicks and reduce visual surprise.

<comment><USER18> Both budget and time are the constraints for UI / UX. A bad UI / UX can be redesigned easily without affecting much, especially data. But bad process can produce bad data, and it's both harder and time consuming to fix process and data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Move away from one-size-fits all, but have the UX adapt to user behavior. Personalized UX is pretty close to perfect.

<comment><USER20> at the same time, way more complex to automate tests/qa, and to debug

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I read some of the other posts by OP and they mentioned that the ribbon interface was a mess. I remember I quite enjoyed it, and I'm also aware that some people didn't like it, but I never knew why they didn't like it. Anyone here care to enlighten me, from a UX standpoint?

<comment><USER22> For me, the ribbon interface makes it difficult to find things, unless they happen to be on the default ribbon.

The classical menu is a tree structure. The first level is horizontal in the menu bar, every other level is vertical and opens when you click the previous level. You can easily go inspect the entire structure if you are looking for something that you use rarely and don't remember where it is.

Also, the items are ordered by topic ("file-related things here, editing- related things here"), with ribbons it feels like "most frequently used buttons here, everything else randomly hidden somewhere else". It does not help that some ribbons are secret and only appear when you do a specific action, e.g. select an item of given type. I'd rather have a disabled menu item that I can't click, but at least I see that it exists.

Shortly, with classical menu I feel in control: everything is here, neatly organized by topic, I choose what I want. With ribbons it feels like the system discourages me from doing anything that is not in the default ribbon, by making it more difficult to find.

I have no idea how large part of this is simply a force of habit. But from my experience, new users who never saw a non-ribbon menu still have a problem finding things. Except now I have that problem, too.

(In larger context, it feels like a typical Microsoft arbitrary change for change's sake. Just like the control panel is dramatically different in each version of Windows. It's like the more important something is, the more they love to experiment with it, where "experiment" means forcing it on all users.)

<comment><USER21> I see. I can only say that I was never advanced enough of a user that this became a problem; much of what I needed was already in the ribbon, and I could find them by just scanning the whole thing, as opposed to drilling down menus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I agree with basically everything said in the post. I also don't believe any sane and experienced software professional would disagree with any point made here.

I think the point is to strive to satisfy ease of usability and function for the highest percentage of users possible. If you have multiple personas of users who use your application, the amount of time you spend with the R&D of the UX to satisfy each persona should likely be proportional to the percentage of revenue each persona brings in.

I'm a backend developer who is pretty awful at developing good UIs, but damn I appreciate a good one when it comes along and feel like the part of the brain that's used to build a very solid UI is a special one that not many people have developed.

<comment><USER24> > _I think the point is to strive to satisfy ease of usability and function > for the highest percentage of users possible._

And so, it blows my mind how Instagram and WhatsApp have continued to get their UX right despite adding so many features over the years. This is super hard considering more than half the world, not all of whom are technology savvy, use WhatsApp and Instagram on daily basis with flawless understanding. I mean, sure, they might struggle a bit, but it isn't anywhere close to frustrating them unlike other popular software. Not to mention how frictionless, smooth their entire UX is.

I guess, design focused on content consumption is easier (Email/IM) than content creation (Microsoft Office)? Or, may be, the value of popular software is such, that people put up with it, anyway, and learn to live with it despite the UX?

<comment><USER12> Using a chat application or scrolling through a feed is not hard. Users can easily learn a new UX if the product really provides value. Yes, having better UX is good for many reasons, but people have always learned to go around bad UX in order to achieve their goals. Facebook has a shitty UX, I never find what I'm looking for, spammed with ads, fake news, slow loading times, bugged notifications, yet it's still one of the most popular sites on the planet. Their ad manager is a joke when it comes to UX and bugs, yet people still spend billions on advertising on Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Agree with this article - also, another unspoken truth about UX: it is a multiplier, not a constant factor. If your app provides a ton of value, people will suffer through truly awful UX. And the tightest flow can't save an app nobody wants.

</comment><comment><USER26> Define "perfect."

If we want an app that will work for all possible users, then, yes, it is impossible.

If, however, we want a UX that is optimized for only a certain set of users, then it may actually be entirely possible; especially if we can depend on user training.

Tufte is big on interfaces like that. Some of his ideas are weird as hell, at first blush; but, as soon as we start to grok it, it's great.

I remember the Japanese train schedules and maps in the Tokyo stations. They looked like complete monstrosities, at first. However, after I'd been there a couple of days, I learned to use them to very quickly find my stations and cost.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't think the title is helpful, but I agree with the gist of the article. We have a long way to go to achieve human-computer interfaces for naive users that are better than human-human-computer systems, where the human in the middle is a trained expert user working with a poweruser interface. This is basically what sales and customer support are for digital services and SaaS. I think we'll eventually get there, but it's a long road, with loads of open problems. This is why I'm optimistic about the career prospects of product engineers for the foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER28> Because there will always be more than one target audience with different needs and preferred ways of doing things it can't be done. You can do the most common for your targeted audience which can be a good solution, but never will everyone think it's perfect.

Its similar to the idea that someones utopia is someone else's dystopia.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Deleted and resubmitted since I had posted a wrong URL.

</comment><comment><USER29> At least that's Microsoft's motto

</comment><comment><USER30> Steve jobs: hold my beer</comment>


API Keys on GitHub - <AUTHOR>

I wanted to add something a little more dangerous to this recent meme. A lot of the time, people bake credentials into apps and then accidentally commit them. Especially database credentials and API keys.
A naive approach for hunting API keys gets a of false positives; things like api_key = "<VALID KEY>". But if we put some characters you'd be likely to find in an API key, we get a much better ratio.
https://github.com/search?q=api_key+%3D+%22z9&type=Code&ref=searchresults
Repeating the search with different values can yield a lot of keys.
Another method is to go for less keys, but more valuable ones. This has an awful signal/noise ratio, but the keys you find are pure gold to a bad guy.
https://github.com/search?q=amazon+api+key+%3D+%22g&type=Code&ref=searchresults
I expect most of these keys are redacted by now, but this has lead to real compromise in the past. This story was on HN a while back:
http://vertis.io/2013/12/16/unauthorised-litecoin-mining.html <comment><USER2> Seems like you found a gold mine for hackers!

<comment><AUTHOR> They've been abusing it for a long time, and GitHub has taken steps to remediation the situation.

There are also other avenues, such as PasteBin. I've seen a bunch of people post, say, router configurations to PasteBin to share them with tech support, including password encrypted with Cisco's broken password 7.

RaiderSec built a bot that find them automatically: twitter.com/dumpmon</comment></comment>


World's Largest Canyon Hides Beneath Antarctic Ice Sheet - <AUTHOR> http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2015/12/22/G37220.1.abstract <comment><USER2> Actual URL [PDF]: [http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2015/12/22/G37220.1...](http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/early/2015/12/22/G37220.1.full.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Greenland has something like this, too: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland's_Grand_Canyon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland's_Grand_Canyon)

</comment><comment><USER4> I remember debating folks about climate change a while back, from the perspective of managing unknown risks. So much of what could happen or what is projected about the influence of Antarctic glaciers on global sea level rise depends on things like subglacial ice flow dynamics, which we simply have no idea about. And now we have evidence for a 1-km deep canyon directing freshwater flows under the ice. It's amazing.

</comment><comment><USER5> It reads like good literature. "a paucity of ... measurements". The precision of the text belies the grand landscape it describes.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice supplemental read for those interested in the "local" "preliminary(?)" effects of climate change on sea level...

The Siege of Miami--As temperatures climb, so, too, will sea levels....

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/the-siege-of- mi...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/the-siege-of-miami)

</comment><comment><USER7> I read this as Crayon multiple times. Was so excited for a moment.

</comment><comment><USER8> Thanks to the great efforts of the human race, we will soon be able to visit all the hidden beauty of Antarctica :)

<comment><USER9> Actually, probably not. The research I've read has suggested that global warming would actually increase the East Antarctic ice cap rather than decrease it (by weakening the semi-permanent winter system that basically blocks moist air from entering it), even if the West Antarctic ice completely collapses.</comment></comment>


"What Is the Chinese Economic Model?" author reports server attacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.tapsns.com/blog/index.php/2010/01/thank-you-and-please-continue/

<comment><USER3> While I found the original article believable and interesting, I can't help but wonder whether there's more than meets the eye to all this "Oh yeah, China is evil" movement that's developing...

The US government has been trying to get China to "behave" for quite some time. One of the very obvious points of contention is copyright law - <USER2> someone once said, "Chinese copyright is the right to copy anything they want". Now, the previous article painted this from the point of view of massive industrial IP theft - theft of patents, technologies, etc.

But we all know that there's another kind of IP that has a lot of influence over the governments of the world, and that's media IP - music, books, movies, etc.

It's clear that both are happening to some extent, but what are the proportions? Is 99.9% of the "Chinese IP problem" to do with stolen media? To do with the fact that you can buy pirated DVDs on every street corner? Or is it 99%? 90%? 10%? Basically, is the main force behind all this anti-china discussion the media lobby, or is it a somewhat more bona fide effort to protect more legitimate industry?

Cause I have to say - if I have a choice between the Chinese model of media copyright (i.e., no copyright protection) and the US one, I'll pick the Chinese one. It's a better starting point for improvement than the current US model.

<comment><USER4> It's especially interesting given that the U.S. model for IP is pragmatic rather than ideologic, i.e. temporary government-granted monopolies are a necessary evil we accept in order to further technological and creative progress for the benefit of all citizens.

Considering the opinion many here have that innovation in the U.S. is stifled rather than encouraged under the modern politicized IP model, it might be enlightening to compare how effective innovation is under each model. I am curious how much sustained innovation is happening over there versus the highly-publicized accounts of IP 'theft'?

<comment><USER5> _temporary_

Practically speaking, copyrights are perpetual in the US. If something is copyrighted for life plus 90 years, I'm not going to see anything made during my lifetime enter the public domain naturally.

<comment><USER4> This is true, but it was not always the case. That copyrights last so long now is the result of change due to political pressure.

Even as recently as 1998 copyright was only authors life plus 50 years, and less before that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am not surprised by this action. Bottomline, China is a big bully. You want example?

China claims all of South China Sea <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia- pacific/8047206.stm>

China that sent 250,000 troop over to teach Vietnam a lesson during 1979 war <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War>.

On and on...we need to be tough on China. American CEO needs to think long term before moving jobs to China.

<comment><USER7> It's remarkably ineffective bullying. Oh no, the web site was down for several minutes, and some unnecessary expenses were incurred! We're doomed!

What these guys need to learn to do is say "Fuck you, you're an idiot, and here is a coherent rebuttal:" and submit it to the news aggregators that gave the original article its popularity. There are enough contrarians that it should be easy to get a lot of people to read your rebuttal and take it seriously. Launching some half-assed attack on a server is the equivalent of just flinging poo, and it just doesn't work.

<comment><USER8> The thing is, the Chinese are fiercely nationalistic - it would not surprise me at all if many of these attacks are being done without government sanction.

I would tread carefully on news like this - it's easy to read too much into it, and it's too easy to manipulate, kind of like blaming all communists because one of them set fire to a building.

<comment><USER6> Are you kidding me? Take a look at this video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_gSasJPs1Y>. Chinese Plain-Clothes Officials Block CNN Cameras With Umbrellas In Tienanmen Square. How low can the Chinese government goes? They operated like a gang, no less.

<comment><USER8> And how does this indicate that these hack attacks are sanctioned or originate from the Chinese government?

Nobody is saying the Chinese government isn't censor-happy and oppressive, but get a grip on yourself man. Talk to some Chinese - particularly the young ones - and you will find a population very truly eager to attack the West in whatever way they can. It's _more_ than likely that a significant number of hacks coming out of China today are occurring out of people's own free will, not by the explicit order of the government.

<comment><USER9> "Talk to some Chinese - particularly the young ones - and you will find a population very truly eager to attack the West in whatever way they can."

Why? I am genuinely curious. I can see why someone (say)in an Islamic society would want to attack the West, but why would a Chinese kid hate the West?

<comment><USER8> Yeah, the above "they're poor" explanation doesn't really hit the mark.

It's a combination of many things, some of which I will probably miss off the top of my head:

\- Propaganda: The Chinese are educated to be very wary of Western influence. Western societies in media are often portrayed as disorganized and chaotic, so naturally there is aversion to Western ideas (though strangely, not Western products).

\- Fear: There is a consistent belief (not unique to China) that America unduly uses its influence to exploit other nations for its own benefit. The education system encourages the attitude of "now it's our turn" with regards to their current economic boom. When Western countries do things like, say, discuss limitations on carbon emissions, the Chinese see this as deliberate sabotage of their economy fueled by jealousy of their success. There is a fairly prevalent belief that the US is out to "get" China, and that it's China's rightful turn to be the dominant global player.

\- History: The Chinese have long proclaimed to have the richest history and was in fact the most powerful empire on Earth for significant periods of time through its history. Through nepotism and corruption the Qing dynasty fell to European conquest, and China was forced to accept extremely unfavourable surrender terms, and has basically been kicked around globally since then... until now. Think of China as the bullied kid with a grudge - now he's going to fuck you up, and there's not a thing you can do to convince him otherwise. There is definitely a lot of feelings of vengeance involved when it comes to Chinese antagonism of the West.

As a Chinese, I'm really, really terrified of China - not because they have a totalitarian regime, but because they have a totalitarian regime _with popular support_.

Also, there is a widespread belief that nobody will watch out for Chinese interests except the Chinese... so despite the imperfections of their government, many will defend it vehemently - because everyone else is out to get them.

<comment><USER6> This is the most ridiculous stuff I have ever heard. We Asian loves the west, especially American. I have never heard anyone hates the west like you've mentioned. Bottom line, China wants to be the center of the universe. They would do anything to score a point. They don't have systematically governance. That is why I call them a gang instead.

If they go to great length just to censure some minor stuff, what do you think they would not do?

<comment><USER8> There are a lot of varieties of Asian - which one are you? I'm basing all of the above off my experiences with the Chinese, particularly college-aged Chinese international students that I've had extensively dealings with in the past.

There is some selection bias here, but this is acknowledged: the Chinese regime doesn't enjoy a great deal of popular support from the working class (read: manual labor), but enjoys widespread support from educated intelligentsia (the sort that would send their kids overseas for education).

I've also surfed through Chinese social networks, and the amount of anti- American and anti-West media on them (and being passed around like LOLcat pics) is pretty alarming. Keep in mind that the vast majority of people on these networks are young, grew up without witnessing the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, and are the direct beneficiaries of China's capitalism. Oh, they're educated to boot, which makes the whole deal just that much scarier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "This would mean that China would prosecute and disavow IP theft."

There are (at least) three major areas where outsourcing to China provides economic benefit to foreign companies:

1 - Wages - Many Chinese are paid a wage that despite China having "minimum wage" laws are significantly below that of the foreign company's home minimum wages. If Chinese workers are paid a "living wage" in parity with that of the home country, the economics of outsourcing to China take a hit.

2 - Environment - China for the most part has let enforcement of environment law (the law does exist) take a back seat to capturing business. Covering the cost of protecting environment damage raises costs.

3 - Intellectual Property - Protecting IP increases cost and is for the most part a long term "foreign tax", not an initial capital investment.

Start doing the above three "right" and doing business in China becomes unprofitable for many.

The author of the article continues to express this as a one-sided problem: "We look forward to having China as a real partner in the world, not on its own private terms, but on terms well understood by global trading partners."

I support positive change in regards to doing business with China. I do not see how this can happen without more objective discussion, which would include how "global trading partners" contribute to the problems.

I'm with swombat and maxklein on this one. I'm going to start flagging HN submissions that only paint half the picture.

<comment><USER11> > _2 - Environment - China for the most part has let enforcement of > environment law (the law does exist) take a back seat to capturing business. > Covering the cost of protecting environment damage raises costs._

AFAIK, there are government officials and positions that care about this and try to do their job, but for example, when polluting factories are due for inspection they stop polluting long enough to pass inspection (even surprise inspections). Obviously there are other elements in the government that are subverting the process (or that just view the process as a PR campaign with the people, not really caring about the results).

<comment><USER10> I can see this being the case. One thing people miss while they are bashing the China gov about corruption and oppression is that a great deal of the "bad behavior" in China is caused by business leaders (small and large), not government. There exist fairly good laws protecting worker rights. Unfortunately, if an employer wants to be abusive, they will and its up to the employee to decide how or if they want to fight it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The original essay was discussed extensively here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1054989>

</comment><comment><USER12> As a non-ethnic Chinese who's lived in China many years, the one thing that annoys me is the sweeping access restrictions on sites and blogs related to IT. The other points are fairly irrelevant to me personally.

In May 2009, the whole of blogspot was blocked, including through proxies, feeds, etc. Two months earlier (March), Youtube was blocked, but I never used it so I didn't care. Before that, from before the Olympics to the Youtube block, was 8 or 9 months of general internet freedom. Perhaps falun gong (and similar) and porno was blocked, I don't know. But there were no noticeable restrictions on IT-related sites and blogs. Even before the Olympics, when blogs were blocked, it was only temporary, and easy to get around it with proxies.

But since May 2009, the sudden change in internet policy affects me, and my online interest in IT. I'm not interested in porno or reading about human rights while living in China anyway. So these Great Firewall restrictions, instead of blocking just what needed to be blocked, blocked far too much, blocking what I wanted to access. Not only that, China being China, sites got blocked that had no reason to be, like <http://www.python.org/download> and subpages. Seems someone in the Firewall staff tried to hide their mischief by keeping the main www.python.org page available. But maybe I wrong, and no-one paid anyone, instead China's just decided to promote a closer-to-home Japanese-invented scripting language by blocking downloads of a European/American one.

Some would ask, why don't I get a VPN? So far, I can't be bothered, China's a cash economy so I don't have credit cards.

As for the other points:

(1) China protects its industries from foreign competition completely. James McGregor's "One Billion Customers" is the most readable book I've read on this subject. I'm not in China run a business. If I want to make money, I'll leave first and go live somewhere business-friendly.

(2) As swombat said in another thread "if I have a choice between the Chinese model of media copyright (i.e., no copyright protection) and the US one, I'll pick the Chinese one. It's a better starting point for improvement than the current US model."

I wouldn't know where to buy or watch a legal English-language movie in China anyway, I don't think they have them outside Jingapore (=what we who live outside Beijing call it).

(3) I just assume my internet-connected PC is being accessed remotely, or at least my emails being read. At one place I lived, I was given a new phone which could listen while it was on the hook. I didn't bother complaining, they could just say it must be from a faulty batch. If I really need to keep some information private, I'll go live in a Western country.

(4) As for currency manipulation, looks like the US and China are in a deadly embrace. By the time it unwinds, the Euro will be the big winner, which was what the Euro was really about in the first place, wasn't it?

(5) Re human rights, if I decide to take an interest in that subject, I'll leave China and return to my home country and begin there. No need to preach to others while there's plenty of problems at home.

</comment><comment><USER13> This anti-china propaganda on the internet at the moment is sickening. If you want to buy into the China Removes Avatar from Cinemas and Rides With Hitler, then go on, but I'm not going to involve myself in any more of these discussions.

China is trying to develop for 1/4 of the worlds population in a system that is different to yours, but is similar to the system that has been in place for 5000 years of chinese civilisation.

This will be my last sentence on china related topics till this propaganda wave blows over: Just because it's different does not mean you must kill it.

<comment><USER14> So if, say, Germany was found to have hired tens of thousands of hackers to break into companies and servers around the world, we should just chalk it up to their "different system" and let them off with a slap on the wrist?

Australia is currently attempting to censor movies, the internet, and video games in rather absurd ways--and just like China, they're getting criticized for it. Why should China get special treatment? Why shouldn't we be allowed to criticize them as we would criticize anyone else who did the same things?

 _but is similar to the system that has been in place for 5000 years of chinese civilisation._

There is absolutely nothing similar between China's current embarrassing actions and their glorious history prior to ~1800. Merely _comparing_ the current oligarchy to the institutions of the past is a huge insult to China and its history.

<comment><USER15> Can you provide a reference for the tens of thousands of hackers to break into companies and servers? Surely there would be some whistle-blowers, after all hackers are such an unreliable bunch! That's exactly what the parent is talking about: all this smells fishy. Google says it and 34 other companies have been attacked and the world goes crazy. Companies exist to make profit, government is here for security. I think it is quite realistic to assume that Google did it to make more money, see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062059>

<comment><USER16> Yep, here you go:

[http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2010/01/13/chinas-sophistcated- ha...](http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2010/01/13/chinas-sophistcated-hacker-army- the-worlds-best-cyber-terrorists/)

      The FBI report estimates that since 2003, the Chinese Army
      has specifically developed a network of over 30,000 Chinese
      military cyberspies, plus more than 150,000 private-sector
      computer experts, whose mission is to steal American
      military and technological secrets and cause mischief in
      government and financial services.

<comment><USER17> Why don't we pump more money into our cyber armed forces too?

<comment><USER18> We're trying, but for the most part we haven't yet developed the type of comprehensive strategy for these types of operations that the PRC has. You should read the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission's report linked from Google's blog entry.

<comment><USER11> More like the government agencies are all falling over themselves to be the 'one true agency/military branch' that does _all_ of the cyber-defense. I remember a few years ago about the Air Force starting up some sort of Cyber Intelligence branch which was going to be completely separate from any other branch/agency's efforts.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Observation: Lucene rocks - <AUTHOR> Two-word summary: Lucene rocks. Nine-word summary: It indexed 3 gigs of text in 20 minutes.
I've wanted to figure out Lucene but never got around to it (the Lucene book is very outdated and none of the example code works, for instance) but today I did something simpler, a little experiment in indexing.
I have a directory of about 3.2 GB of XML documents (medical journal papers downloaded from ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/articles.tar.gz -- it's about a 700 MB file). I wondered how long it would take the simple disk-based Lucene demo using default settings (http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_3_1/demo.html).
System stats: 7200 RPM 300 GB disk; Windows XP SP 2, Quad Core 2.4 ghz Core 2, 2 GB DDR2-800 RAM.
It took 23 minutes, the last 5 of which were merely flattening index chunks into a single file so that searches run faster.
So about 20 minutes for 3 gigs of text. The final index file was about 1/5 the size of the original source text at 646 MB.
Memory usage was very reasonable - it hovered around 30-40 MB (unlike, say, Java IDEs which use up 200 MB or so).
Ultimately a benchmark like this is disk-bound, but that's still fast as shit in my opinion. I had to whip together a ghetto homegrown indexing system at work several months ago (I've never had time to optimize it), and this blows away what I created. <comment><USER2> Agreed. I was able to set up full text indexing/searching in a few hours.

The longest part of the process was trying to figure out which versions of Java Lucene and Zend PHP Lucene were compatible. FYI:

 _Lucene 2.1 index format support (which is also used in Lucene 2.2) is included in the current "trunk" branch. It is available via SVN in current nightly snapshots.

We hope to include Lucene 2.1 index format support in ZF 1.5.0. The current release (ZF V1.0.4) works with Lucene 1.9-2.0 index formats._

[http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.search.lucene.html#...](http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.search.lucene.html#ftn.id2740528)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And the biggest difference between my ghetto system and Lucene is that searches with lots of results are very, very fast.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've heard good things about Lucene, but we use Sphinx: <http://www.sphinxsearch.com/>

For our tests, it indexed much faster than the common Lucene implementations, and for our needs was also a tad faster overall. I haven't tried the newest version, though.

<comment><USER4> I don't know what kind of testing you've done but nothing even approaches the speed of Lucene. It's by far the fastest open source search engine currently available. If you're using Rails, I cannot recommend Solr enough. It's amazing.

Cutting's a genius.

<comment><USER3> Do you have references for "nothing even approaches"? Specifically compared to Sphinx? The only comparisons I've found are showing sphinx coming ahead in many indexing/search cases (if only slightly). See my other comment on this thread with links to benchmarks where sphinx clearly "comes close". We did a good bit of research on this, so it does feel odd that you'd say "nothing even approaches".

It was also ridiculously easy to get Sphinx up and going. Lucene is a killer engine, no doubt, but Sphinx's ROI alone won us over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I second your observation, though my recent foray into Lucene was far simpler. I used the RAMDirectory feature to build an index in memory for a large list of names (and our queries go through a thick OR/M). The user of the application needs to be able to filter the list by keywords and doing the query each time was taking too long (2 or 3 seconds). It's now near instantaneous.

I think for 10,000 documents (two fields: name and id) it takes 20 seconds to build the index in Lucene .NET.

I had always heard of using Lucene for really large datasets and thought it might be overkill for speeding up a somewhat small part of one application dialog. In reality it took a single reference to the Lucene .NET dll and a few functions to build the documents and add them to the index.

</comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone compare Lucene to Xapian? I have never tried Lucene, but have been very happy with Xapian.

<http://xapian.org/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Plucene - Perl port of Lucene

<http://search.cpan.org/~tmtm/Plucene-1.21/lib/Plucene.pm>

<comment><USER8> Plucene is slow as hell.

You better use Kinoseach, which also uses the same index format as lucene.

Some benchmarks are on this site : <http://marvinhumphrey.com/kinosearch/benchmarks.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> lucene is pretty cool and it's a lot better than anything I've seen so far (including ferret). The only problem I've experienced with it was index corruption, which is fairly common and frustrating (though in fairness it could have been due to my sys admin skills)</comment>


Millions of Americans are about to lose their health insurance in a pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/27/coronavirus-pandemic-americans-health-insurance <comment><USER2> I can appreciate the problem here, but right now, the majority of the layoffs seem to be furloughs in the service industry and I'm betting they already weren't getting health insurance besides what they received from ACA.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one thing about a Single-Payer "Socialist" system that most Americans just _can 't_ get their heads around.

The big excuse in the US is that the country couldn't afford it. But many other tiny, poor countries _can_ afford it in some way or other, to ensure that _everybody_ has access to some form of cheap medical care that won't bankrupt you.

With Single-Payer, _everybody_ , whether employed or homeless has access to basic medical care. Usually that basic medical care can even provide ICU services, and at no cost to the patient.

<comment><USER4> As someone from one of those smaller population "socialist" countries, what we can't get our head around is how America justifies it's health insurance system. It's the richest nation on earth, yet you can't have a small tax to ensure that poorer people don't spread disease and illness.

A healthy population is more productive, leading to higher profits. Even the capitalists can surely see this is a good thing.</comment></comment>


This is what people think app developers do - <AUTHOR> http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-video-18534062-app-developer.php?st=05e96b6 <comment><AUTHOR> Note that in the description they say he's coding in C++</comment>


Show HN: I built a hardware anti-cheat and the gaming community lost their minds - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/2uxvuf/i_built_a_hardware_anticheat_for_multiplayer/

<comment><USER2> This happens. A lot.</comment>


D, L-lysine acetylsalicylate and glycine Impairs Coronavirus Replication (2016) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.longdom.org/open-access/d-llysine-acetylsalicylate--glycine-impairs-coronavirus-replication-jaa-1000151.pdf <comment><USER2> Edit: I accidentally used the stock concentration in my original calculation, updated to the effective dose found.

The average volume of a human is around 62 liters.

The effective concentration for the highest EC50 is 6.71mM. The lowest EC50 is 1.31.

Aspirin DL-lysine as a molecular weight of 326.34.

Therefore, to reach the concentrations used in the study, the average person would have to consume somewhere between 26 and 135g of asprin (from the two molarities above). Way above the maximum safe daily dose, which is 4 grams.

Using the absolute best case scenario- 1.31mM- and an effective volume of 12 liters, that's still 5.1g. Which is /just/ under the max safe dose. At 6.71mM, that's 26g.

<comment><USER3> Drugs don't spread out evenly through the whole body. For this class of drug, it's bloodstream concentration that matters.

The complex field of pharmacokinetics relates the bloodstream concentration to the ingested amount over time. The simple version uses a "volume of distribution" which, for salicylate, is 11.9 liters for a standard male. [[https://sepia.unil.ch/pharmacology/index.php?id=83](https://sepia.unil.ch/pharmacology/index.php?id=83)].

So to achieve the 1 - 7 milimolar concentrations they used would require 3.8 - 27.2 grams of aspirin.

<comment><USER4> What's the half-life of aspirin in the bloodstream? Probably less than a day, which would significantly increase the dose required to maintain those concentrations.

It seems like this might merit further research as a treatment for severe cases, but it's far too dangerous to be a prophylactic for healthy people.

(And that's all assuming these results on other coronaviruses apply to the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This should be taken down.

Unsafe procedures are proposed and discussed here.

This is a single study and not a recommendation for treatment of anything, esp. the virus causing COVID-19

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if other salicylates would have the same effect, given the research showing that Bismuth inhibits SARS and the fact that Pepto Bismol is bismuth subsalicylate:

[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6193909_Bismuth_Com...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6193909_Bismuth_Complexes_Inhibit_the_SARS_Coronavirus)

<comment><USER7> I saw the abstract, and ever since I've been wondering about whether that Bismuth paper includes bismuth subsalicylate as well as citrate, or whether chugging a bottle of Pepto Bismol a day would be a mistake equivalent to aquarium cleaner guy.

On the other hand, if it's the glycine that causes most of the effect, that's a cheap nutritional supplement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone explain what "D, L-lysine acetylsalicylate and glycine" are in laymen's terms?

I saw some comments mentioned about Aspirin/NSAID. But what's the practicality of this research? Btw, this was dated 2016.

<comment><USER9> It is a salt of aspirin, in addition to glycine, an amino acid...Lysine is also an amino acid but in this case is part of the aspirin salt.

[https://www.drugs.com/international/aspirin- lysine.html](https://www.drugs.com/international/aspirin-lysine.html)

<comment><USER10> As I understand it... the reason they think they need to have the Lysine is that it it makes the body absorb it better. Please correct me if I'm wrong!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The EC50s in the paper are in the millimolar. These are physiologically irrelevant concentrations.

<comment><USER12> Irrelevant in the sense that anything will kill baddies at high enough concentrations, but it'll also kill people?

Or irrelevant in the sense that it's totally achievable to do that in people and it won't mess with their bodies too much?

<comment><USER2> The first one, unfortunately. To reach the concentrations in the paper, you'd have to consume over 1kg asprin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pretty sure I used to take L-lysine for cold sores. Maybe it has general antiviral properties.

<comment><USER14> Certain viruses (herpetic) proliferate in an environment high in arginine, and low in lysine. High lysine/low arginine = suppression of replication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have some glycine. I can get lysine and aspirin. How do I make lysine acetylsalicylate?

<comment><USER16> You don't. Don't make your own medicine.

<comment><USER15> Why? I make some (not illegal, very simple) occasionally. It works great and costs me some orders of magnitude less than it would cost to buy the same amount.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's one on Nettle..

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3085190/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3085190/)

</comment><comment><USER18> And during this out break, we have seen some tentative data that patients on aspirin do worse, and should avoid it.

Wish we knew which way to jump.

<comment><USER19> This study was done in vitro. If I recall the counterindication of aspirin in C19 patients was accelerating pneumonia or something. So it's possible aspirin does both.

<comment><USER20> Look with suspicion on any in vitro data. There are so many differences between in vitro and a living organism. Nevermind the fact that in vitro tests usually use concentrations that would never be achieved in the body, a fact usually lost on the public. I'd definitely lean towards the "aspirin is bad with Coronavirus" camp on this one.

Source: Myself, a former tester of in vitro effects.

<comment><USER6> > Nevermind the fact that in vitro tests usually use concentrations that would > never be achieved in the body, a fact usually lost on the public.

But the reason large doses are used in vitro is because it's easier to show that a chemical actually inhibits viral replication if you can slow down replication by 99.9%. But in real life, you might only need to slow down replication by 10% or whatever to meaningfully improve clinical outcomes.

<comment><USER20> That's true in theory and we should see aspirin doing something in vivo for coronavirus if it did, but we don't. Something else more important seems to be affecting it the other way.

In skimming the article it seems they used 20 mM doses and ranges which is an absolutely enormous amount of anything. We normally considered low uM the range where something is even beginning to be interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/1217/](https://xkcd.com/1217/)</comment>


Is your mobile carrier modifying your data?  - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/stuey/status/20209062354

<comment><USER2> It would be more useful it there was some information about what it checks for. I've also never had problem with this, so it would be good to have some information about why this was created.

<comment><USER3> It looks like it's simply checking to see if CSS is being inlined in responses.

The page source is pretty simple, and it looks like it's doing everything on the client side. A CSS file is being included as the first link in the HEAD, and then JavaScript looks at the URL of the first link to see if it's the same as what it expects.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much time do you spend deciding what to wear everyday? - <AUTHOR> Me and my co-founder are building an app that helps people decide what to wear and buy, since we've always had that problem ourselves. Our mission is to take the guesswork out of dressing well and to save people all the time wasted in the process. We would be immensely grateful for any insight you might have on the way you go through deciding how to dress and on your shopping habits. Thank you <comment><USER2> I spend absolutely no time making decisions on what to wear. I decided a long time ago that I don't care about fashion, I just want to look acceptable and be comfortable. So I took a bunch of company swag shirts so I wear the "same" shirt every day essentially. I have a bunch of pairs of the same jeans. One belt. One pair of shoes. I got a couple of identical hoodies if it's cold. Everything fits well and looks pretty acceptable. I have absolutely no decisions to make, always look the same, always ready to go quickly. Some of my friends and family find it a bit odd, but it saves me money and hassle on dealing with something that I do not enjoy. I also like that I don't have to worry if a shirt or something gets messed up. I just toss it and pull another out of the closet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your response :)

</comment></comment><comment> Lorenz-Kraft I don't think at all about anything that I wear. I just pick the next from my stack of trousers/shirts/socks. Thinking about what to wear seems to be a waste of my time.

Same about buying: When I see something I like, I buy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your response :)

<comment> Lorenz-Kraft And a little more productive info for your project: I think there are already several companies using your idea. For example: [https://www.outfittery.de](https://www.outfittery.de)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, we're aware of it. We're confident though, cause we're using a different approach to this problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you think HN includes your target market, you probably shouldn't get into this business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! You can always learn something, especially from people that point out flaws to you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a couple of templates. I use a couple of fashion basics.

1\. If belt then match with shoe.

2\. Use 2 to 3 different colors match, preferably: one main/front, one alternate/background and one terriary/accentuation color.

3\. Dress to a stereotype. I dress a bit /fancy (e.g. dress shoes and buttoned shirt)

But most days I don't care, and dress for comfort, lol.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for taking the time to respond :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a company in Germany that has been doing this for a long time: [https://www.modomoto.de/](https://www.modomoto.de/)

I'm not sure if it's profitable. I think it's a really average idea / business model, to be honest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :) We're confident though, because we have a new approach to the problem and to the way people go shopping. Also we have a lot of expertise in the fashion market

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to work outside of tech and noticed that people in other areas think about it more. We (tech) default to systems for recurring things like what to wear but I remember more creative fields like agencies and media seemed to think about this a lot. Walk through a creative agency office and you can see that everyone makes an effort each day. Maybe there will be some more feedback from those people. Just a thought.

As for me, system all the way. 6 t-shirts, 3 jeans, jacket when needed.

</comment><comment><USER7> Before going to sleep I use to check my wardrobe to see what is available for the next morning. I spend less then 5 minutes mentally selecting the combination I will use.

<comment><USER8> This is me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your response. Same as above for you :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> None.

I wear the same white alpaca sweater almost every day, the building I work inside is cold. I wear the same pear of jeans almost every day. I pick whatever shirt is clean and feel like wearing.

When I go out to a nice event, celebration, date, etc. I usually wear my Armani blazer and whatever shirt (maybe tie). Takes a few minutes at most.

Hiking/camping - whatever is in my bag that is clean.

</comment><comment><USER10> Not much time. I've almost naturally fallen into a rhythm of wearing the same 4 shirts to work M-Th and Friday is jeans/casual. I alternate between a few pairs of pants. So, less than a minute is spent deciding and looking for my work clothes. Going out, I tend to wear whatever is top-of-stack, weather permitting.

</comment><comment><USER11> Not a ton (I have an idea come to mind either in the night or the morning) but I easily spend 5min finding the stuff inside my closet and then an extra 3min debating if it's OK for the current weather and if I need extra layers or waterproof layers and if I own warm or waterproof things that match with my previous idea of what I want to wear.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're interested in a solution that will take that time virtually to 0, please check out our app: [https://www.getvispo.com](https://www.getvispo.com)

It generates combinations with your own clothes, based on the occasion (work, party etc.), weather, season, and a touch of our Italian taste. You can also save the combinations for future use. In this way you can always remember what you have in your closet, discover new great combinations you've never thought of, and save a lot of time.

<comment><USER11> I don't think I'm your target audience. I like thinking about what to wear. (I'm female so maybe HN will forgive me for being a bad technologist stereotype in this way)

What I would want would be if I stumbled out of bed, said "where the (expletive) is my warm but super short dress" and Tony Stark's butler made it fly out of under the five cardboard boxes it has somehow fallen behind and went "Dear lady, it is freezing outside. Would you like cheeky printed tights or lace ones with this? Your favorite leather jacket is probably piled up under your Macbook."

Alas, I do not have a robot butler, and so I am seriously considering sticking RFID tags inside my clothing so I can have an app that tells me whether it is, in fact, hung up somewhere and I'm too sleep deprived to see it or I forgot to do laundry _again_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For work days, essentially none. My wife sets out the clothes for me, and my role is limited to choosing brown or black shoes and belt. (Well socks, but generally that's whatever's in the front of the door.)

She has all the clothes sense that I have never particularly had.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your wife is stealing our job! Good for you :) If you (or her) want a second opinion, please check out our app: [https://www.getvispo.com](https://www.getvispo.com) It generates countless combinations with your own clothes, based on the occasion (work, party etc.), weather, season, and a touch of our Italian taste. You can also save the combinations for future use. In this way you can always remember what clothes you have in your closet, discover new great combinations you've never thought of, and save a lot of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> None. I almost only have blue, white, or grey colored clothings, so i pull out the upmost shirt, underwear, pair of trousers every day and i always look superfresh and perfect.

</comment><comment><USER14> stared buying blank mono color shirts (amazon essentials has cheap ones that are fine quality) just so I don't need to really think about it on my way to work in the morning

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your response :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Zero. Well, maybe I do spend a couple seconds, but not more...

</comment><comment><USER16> None - all of my everyday clothes are the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> 5 seconds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There are only two decision points in daily clothing: (1) What to buy, and (2) what to wear. If you've bought correctly, the "what to wear" decision is 5-120 seconds and no more. There's no pain to alleviate here... even a free service that told me what to wear today would be useless to me, and would take longer than just choosing myself.

This leaves the purchase decision, which is far more profitable and is (I assume) the focus of your venture. I see 5 primary market segments here:

1\. Buy cheap, quick, lower quality. Any generic discount store or retail website fills this niche.

2\. Buy cheap, higher quality (or better style), at the cost of time. Mid-tier retailers do well here, but it requires a heavy investment of time and mental energy to know what you want and find it on sale.

3\. Buy quality, full price, auto selected. These are your monthly subscription box services.

4\. Buy quality, full price, curated. Here you go to a store and someone knowledgeable helps select clothing that fits your requirements. Clothes may be tailored / bespoke. Nothing is ever on sale.

5\. Buy quality, full price++, individualized. This is when you have a personal shopper / style consultant who knows you, knows your measurements, and shops at all the stores on your behalf.

If you're solving the question of "What do I buy? What is my personal brand?" then you're playing exclusively in categories 3-4. You want people who are bad at decisions, have disposable income, but also aren't ultra-wealthy and thus don't _need_ the luxury human touch. I'm not convinced that this is an unsolved problem: you'll be competing with incumbents and need to be _dramatically_ {cheaper, better, better marketed}.

Clothing, particularly men's clothing, is pretty darn simple. If there's any real edge left in the "what do I buy" business, it's probably fashion curation based on body type (especially women's body type) which can be quite variable. There are a number of efforts under way here but I don't feel like anyone truly owns this space yet.

And since you asked, my personal datapoints: I am in category #2 (I'm cheap, but I care about quality and am willing to put in the time). Once I feel comfortable enough in my income I'll move directly to category #4 (pay for quality + convenience). I don't feel that category #3 offers good value, and I'm a long way off from affording category #5. I have a curated wardrobe of ~10 very nice dress shirts for daily wear and a set of "black base" jeans / shoes, plus a set of "brown base" jeans / shoes to match with the chosen shirt. Each morning I look at my closet and am done deciding within ~1 minute.

If you think you have an edge here, I'm genuinely curious to know what it is :)</comment>


Ask HN: Interested in a centralized large-scale crawl architecture? - <AUTHOR>

I have been using Nutch for a while and find it quite low-level. The batch based indexing system is good but doesn't work well in many scenarios.<p>I am talking about a single point, auto-updated crawl database. The distributed database will support APIs to inject/remove URLs, fetch content for a URL and register callbacks when a crawl is over, etc. <comment><USER2> I am, so I wrote one. I plan to open it up as a service.

<http://www.wheelbarro.ws/>

I'm building up a lot of the final components, but I have the extraction engine basically done. I convert the HTML into JSON and then pass it off to your script which you can then process out the data using my jEX (my own jQuery).

Once I get my stuff figured out, I'll probably add jsdom support with jQuery.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, definitely, especially if you 1. can scale up and down quickly like cloud hosting and 2. make extracting text from a large set of pages as easy as writing a regular expression.

Shoot me an email, I would love to talk about this further.</comment>


Received pronunciation - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10601444

<comment><USER2> _"... the Bantu languages of Africa, the Indo-European group from Eurasia and the Austronesians of the Pacific ..."_

While it was a good read it had absolutely nothing to do with RP. RP cuts through the Commonwealth nations marking those who speak it, as _"English educated"_. It doesn't matter if you are from Calcutta, or Canberra, Kingston or Kowloon. If you have received RP training you can still be understood.

RP or _"Received pronunciation"_ is a technique that provides accentless enunciation of _"Standard English"_. Taught to foreigners (mostly Commonwealth) as an effective means of communication across language barriers. It is most often (mistakenly) associated only with the English upper class , classically trained Shakespearian actors and BBC World service announcers.

 _"... To do so he looked at three well-studied parts of the linguistic family tree: the Bantu languages of Africa, the Indo-European group from Eurasia and the Austronesians of the Pacific. ..."_

Who are _"Austronesians"_?

Without looking at Dr. Pagels original work [0] I don't know if he used this term but in terms of language, the term "Austronesians" is a nonsense word. In Australia there are over 800 non english langauges. Probably about the same in New Guinea. [1] This is not even including the Indonesia Archipelago which spreads 5000km across 1700 Islands. So to use such a term in a study of languages is a bit far fetched.

 _"... Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel and his colleagues at the University of Reading, UK, used a comparative database of Indo-European languages to trace the words used to express 200 different meanings in 87 different languages ..."_

In New Scientist I found a better summary of what the study was about. [2]

[0] [http://www.ams.rdg.ac.uk/Staff/academic/Professor%20Mark%20P...](http://www.ams.rdg.ac.uk/Staff/academic/Professor%20Mark%20Pagel.htm)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Guinea>

[2] [http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12772-language- mutatio...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12772-language-mutations- affect-leastused-words.html)</comment>


The AR-15, the Most Wanted Gun in America - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/business/the-ar-15-the-most-wanted-gun-in-america.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> The question to ask from here (for you US readers) -- why ban american civilians from owning the same types of weapons as the government allows the military to? In the spirit of the constitution it seems as though our founding fathers would have wanted us, the american people, the same rights to own any type of weapon the government has access to^ for reasons of protecting the people against (potential) attacks from our government; if there is an inequality in weaponry available there is an induced inequality of power.

^Fixed typo

<comment><USER3> Also, given that the 2nd amendment puts this in the context of a "well regulated militia," why not put wait list and verification requirements on buyers who come off the street, but also enable gun ownership through state- sponsored (as opposed to federal) militia groups? This way, gun ownership comes in a social/civic context.

<comment><USER4> Why not kick the _whole_ problem down to where it constitutionally belongs: the states. The constitution is gob-smackingly clear on the issue: the federal government is not to restrict the right to keep and bear arms. It's also clear (but denied, depending on the issue in question, by both the right and the left) that the states can do whatever they damned well please in order to maintain what their people feel is a well trained (that is, "well regulated") militia, from tight restrictions on gun ownership, to allowing automatic weapons.

I dunno, maybe Texas should be free to be Texas, and New York can go ahead and be New York.

If the states just left each other alone, The Big Sort would take care of 99% of these issues. Of course, there isn't much money in that...

<comment><USER5> State governments are also subject to the bill of rights, and that's a damned good thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The amazing thing about the AR is that you can get a stripped lower for $60-80 or so, which is technically "the rifle" for the purposes of regulation -- every other piece is just an unregulated accessory.

For about $10k in business start-up costs and recordkeeping, and either outsourced manufacturing or maybe $100k in machine shop, you can turn $10-15 into $60 (normally) or $150 (now) all day long.</comment>


The quit-Facebook hysteria is ridiculous - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/quit-facebook-hysteria-ridiculous-213341916.html <comment><USER2> > Disclosure: The author's personal investments includes shares of Facebook > and other technology companies.</comment>


Twitter for Mac App Set to Return to macOS Thanks to Apple's Project Catalyst - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2019/06/04/twitter-for-mac-app-set-to-return-to-macos/ <comment><USER2> Hopefully it can open links in a browser and does not force the horrible in- app browsing experience.</comment>