Greenland lost 2B tons of ice yesterday, which is unusual - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/14/us/greenland-sudden-ice-melt-wxc/index.html <comment><USER2> Here is the latest PIOMAS data:

[http://psc.apl.uw.edu/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/schweiger...](http://psc.apl.uw.edu/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/schweiger/ice_volume/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrentV2.1_CY.png)

2012 was the worst year, but 2016 and 2017 were pretty close.

The PIOMAS project has been analyzing Arctic ice density and area via satellite since 1979.

[http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice- volum...](http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume- anomaly/)

Here is the trend of all their data since 1979. It's not looking good:

[http://psc.apl.uw.edu/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/schweiger...](http://psc.apl.uw.edu/wordpress/wp- content/uploads/schweiger/ice_volume/BPIOMASIceVolumeAnomalyCurrentV2.1.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> We're going to go extinct because we're clearly incapable of prioritizing the survival of our species over short term conveniences.

<comment><USER4> Not to worry, there's only about 7m of sea level rise locked up in Greenland. Someone will be along in a moment to tell us this will be beneficial as we'll have somewhere new to holiday or explore for oil...

<comment><USER2> Sea rise, while significant, is the least of our problems regarding climate change.

Agriculture will be severely affected by drought, heatwaves and cold waves. This will have very serious consequences.

For example, the 2010 heatwave in Russia produced wildfires which reduced its wheat harvest by 30%. Russia decided to stop exporting wheat which in turn increased global food prices. This incident is considered the be one of the causes of the Arab spring revolts.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires)

Imagine something like this on a global scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > unusual but not unprecedented

> the melt season was "happening about three weeks earlier than average, and > earlier than the record-setting melt year of 2012."

</comment><comment><USER6> Conveniently left out of reports like this is that while Greenland may have lost 2B tons of ice, it did not then lose 2B tons of the meltwater. Most of the meltwater will continue to sit there right where it is, and then turn back into ice in short order, or at least when the summer melt season ends. So the net loss of ice, if any, will be quite low.</comment>


Improving the productivity and focus with AngularJS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/web-dev/33d8c0ac11f1

<comment><USER2> Angular is best at copying and improving on ideas of MVVM in WPF. They are trying to fix the web. It's good.</comment>


Feds to Partially Blame Tesla's Autopilot in Fatal Crash: Report - <AUTHOR> http://jalopnik.com/the-ntsb-to-partially-blame-teslas-autopilot-in-fatal-c-1803136365 <comment><USER2> <his Tesla collided with a semi-tractor trailer that failed to yield when crossing a divided highway.>

Yeh not sure anyone could have avoided that crash, this should be in the first sentence really.</comment>


Fertilizer plant explodes near Waco, Texas - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/04/fertilizer-plant-just-exploded-waco-texas/64337/

<comment><AUTHOR> For those who didn't click through to the article, this video is crazy: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrpKx3aIjA>

The explosion happens at 0:29.

<comment><USER2> Before watching the video, switch off the sound.

<comment><USER3> Or leave it. Most people have only seen explosions in the movie, where the hero hides behind a tree and walks it off. This shows you how it really happens in real life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love how cable news now is juts basically youtube videos looping over and over and amateur photos because they have zero in-field reporter budgets. Opinion and talking heads are far cheaper and people watch anyway.

Cannot wait until corporate news loses all power.

As far as broadcast news, why exactly are we giving them airspace?

But they are thrilled, just incredibly relieved, they have something else to talk about since they ran out of facts about Boston two days ago. I mean it's not like any hope for national gun control was completely thrown out the window today.

<comment><USER5> I happened to be (unfortunately) watching the coverage on CNN. Sanjay Gupta...a DOCTOR said

"just about any chemical you can think of is at some point in a fertilizer plant"

When you have nothing factual to talk about, ratchet up the fear to keep the viewers on baited breath.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apparently, there were some pretty strong explosions before:

Halifax explosion - a ship carrying 2000+ tons of high explosives, exploded in the middle of Halifax harbor completely obliterating the whole town, evaporating all the water in the harbor, creating 18 m tsunami, throwing the gun barrel from a ship 5km away.

Just 2 years ago there was this huge explosion [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelos_Florakis_Naval_Base_e...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelos_Florakis_Naval_Base_explosion) with more than 2kt TNT equivalent yield, check these before [http://www.hellas-sat.net/files/image/accident- cy/20%20June%...](http://www.hellas-sat.net/files/image/accident- cy/20%20June%202011%20Before%20Accident.jpg) and after image [http://www.hellas-sat.net/files/image/accident- cy/12%20July%...](http://www.hellas-sat.net/files/image/accident- cy/12%20July%202011%20after%20Accident.jpg)

<comment><USER7> I live near the middle of the area destroyed in the Halifax Explosion.

It was pretty significant, but didn't obliterate the whole town. The Richmond district (which is in the east part of the Halifax North End) was almost completely wiped out, almost 2000 people died and 9000 Haligonians were injured out of a population of 65,000.

If you ever watch the Harrison Ford movie, K-19: The Widowmaker, you'd see the area of the Halifax North End that was affected, it was the location for shots in the film that stood for the Soviet-era Sevmash shipyard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a really sad event for the locals considering Waco is a rather small town of about 126,000 people, the plant hired a lot of people. I think the saddest part of all of this is the comments on most of the news articles you read about the explosion (including the one linked). People are drawing all sorts of conclusions from it being related to the Boston bombing incident to it being an attack by North Korea and arguing over trivial-political nonsense that doesn't even relate to the story.

The explosion is probably one of the scariest things you'll ever see, imagine being within a mere few hundred metres of the explosion and the amount of G's that would be emitted, for survivors who were close by I couldn't imagine anything more terrifying. My heart goes out to the locals in Waco and those who've lost family/friends.

<comment><USER9> >The explosion is probably one of the scariest things you'll ever see

Come on, please could we stop losing perspective here? It is by far from one of the scariest things that have happened in my lifetime, it is a tragedy for those afflicted by it - but accidents like this probably happen every few months somewhere in the world.

<comment><USER8> Maybe not scary watching it via a Youtube embed... Nobody is losing perspective, I can't imagine anything scarier than being inside of or close to a fertiliser factory housing toxic chemicals exploding, can you? Except maybe being a victim of an atomic blast, but that doesn't happen everyday. Factories housing deadly chemicals don't just explode every few months, I don't recall the last time I heard of anything like this happening. Calm down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is absolutely crazy. I will tell my professor, and hopefully we can do a case study on how to prevent explosions like these.

<comment><USER11> really!!! keep me posted brah!

>Please read the comment guidelines.

<comment><USER10> I just did, and didn't see anything I violated. I could be wrong though, and would love to correct my behavior. I said it was absolutely crazy because if you go frame-by-frame there is literally a flash of white in a single frame, then the explosion. No build-up, no nothing. It happened within 3/24 of a second. If you make some estimate of the scale, you could use dimensional analysis to estimate the energy of the explosion. The time scales are a little large, but it could be done to probably two orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER12> Ignore the trolls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's a really poor article, just pictures and no facts.

BBC w/ ongoing coverage: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22195495>

CNN w/ ongoing coverage: [http://us.cnn.com/2013/04/18/us/texas- explosion/index.html?h...](http://us.cnn.com/2013/04/18/us/texas- explosion/index.html?hpt=hp_t1)

The casualty reports are all over the place, sources are saying anywhere from 2 to 70 killed; 60 to 200 injured. Nearby buildings and homes destroyed. There is a nursing home right next to it, fate currently unknown. Regardless, a real tragedy.

</comment><comment><USER14> Hopefully this causes some heads to roll: "West fertilizer plant said in report that it presented no risk": [http://www.dallasnews.com/news/state/headlines/20130417-west...](http://www.dallasnews.com/news/state/headlines/20130417-west- fertilizer-plant-said-in-report-that-it-presented-no-risk.ece)

<comment><USER12> I'm not surprised. There was obviously a very complacent attitude at the plant, otherwise this accident would not have happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Given how explosive nitrogen compounds are (they all want to turn back into N2 gas, some of them more badly than others), I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.

<comment><USER9> Well they certainly do happen:

\- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppau_explosion>

\- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_Disaster>

Ammonium nitrate is nothing to trifle with: "As all involved died in the explosion, the causes are not clear",</comment></comment>


A non-trivial website that has no back end - <AUTHOR> https://blog.oxplot.com/the-art-of-barebackness/ <comment><USER2> This feels like it's playing games with words a lot. What they've built here is a service which is perfectly cacheable: the same content is served to every user, and can be precomputed in advance. This allows them to run their page generation code in a batch generator instead of during processing of the http query.

It's certainly a very good idea to serve as much of your content from cache as is possible, and I don't think anybody would be surprised by that statement. However, they still have the same amount of page generation code, they're just running it at a different time. I'm not sure I'd call that "no back end". I'd call it an interesting choice of tradeoffs to optimise query latency.

<comment><USER3> Yeap, the approach was reasonably common in the past - e.g. Movable Type has a dynamic administration backend that generates static public pages; Slash (the codebase powering early Slashdot) used to re-generate static HTML files whenever someone posted a new comment, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a good post. It would be an even better post if the first sentence were removed.

<comment><USER5> The first two would be even better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This website has a back-end, imo. It has crawlers, indexers, jobs, etc. Really the only thing it doesn't have is an api, a monolithic request handler, or a database. Well they don't show a db but they probably have at least a list of sites to crawl. Also worth pointing out that, unless they are doing geolocation or otherwise trying to pin down what a valid request is for a specific IP, then someone should theoretically be able to extract the entire dataset as static files.

Lastly I agree with the other poster who found the first sentence disagreeable. I am not offended, but it just seemed out of place in a semi- smarmy way.

<comment><AUTHOR> > someone should theoretically be able to extract the entire dataset as static > files

Yep, not only possible but trivial. One has to just figure out where the hash links are in each blob and follow them.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Sourcery – get a free, self-updating website - <AUTHOR> https://sourceryapp.com <comment><USER2> Landing page is crisp and precise. I love the idea. Congratulations on the launch.

Auto-complete is fast and relevant. I believe you're boosting local results? That's super nice. The generated webpage is nicely filled with details from Google Maps (?) along with reviews and a contact-us form. I like the overall simplicity of adding and editing subsections of the pages, too. Kudos.

Quick questions:

1\. From where'd you scrape data for businesses world-wide, if you don't mind revealing? The data you have (judging by auto-complete) is frankly unsettling but not surprising.

2\. There's e-commerce too, and the flow is manual: Upload photos, add price and description. Simple enough. As your product evolves, how'd you plan to manage to keep it that way rather than turn it into a Shopify-clone which most business owners would then need a _IT guy_ to run it for them...?

3\. On the pricing page, you mention business plans are coming soon, but the only two features I found that's extra from the free plan are _24 /7 support_ and _...and more_. Curious: what _more_?

4\. How long have you been working on this idea? What were you inspired by, initially?

5\. How do you generate the pages? Randomly choose a template and fit the data in, or is it powered by AI? I see that no matter what I choose as a _Goal_ among _Brand_ , _Leads_ , and _Conversion_ the template and the structure of the page remains the same.

6\. Can you give us a 10000-foot view of your architecture and tools, if that's okay?

7\. When you mention _personalize the website for each visitor_... Is that like ad networks that show relevant ads where you mean to show relevant products? If so, how'd you gather enough data abt a visitor to be sure of the personalization (acquire/gather data from third-parties)? What value do you see that personalization offers? I'm not being skeptical, just want to hear your point of view on this.

Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the good questions!

1\. Mostly google maps and social networks

2\. At the moment we don't have a "back-office" integration, we have a rudimentary editor that can be manually edited at the back of our "Products & Services" feature and if the user provides their PayPal merchant ID we add "Purchase" and "Subscribe" and "Pay Invoice" buttons wherever it makes sense.

3\. We have a number of ideas for that, including specialized business platform integrations, custom domain names, and other features that would be used by businesses that we think should be on a paid plan.

4\. We've been working on this for a few months now, we were inspired by the readily available and fresh data and the price (in time and/or $$) to get a decent website created and updated for a small shop people like restaurants, barbers, nannies, garages, etc.

5\. Given your business category, location, amount of data available and other signals we try to be smart about what your site should look like and what sections should be where. That stuff has been figured out with A/B testing every day for the past 20 years and humans should move on. That also means we can generate the website in real-time, for the specific business and the individual visitor making the request...

6\. Heroku + EC2, mongo atlas for the DB and lots or nodejs and react. letsencrypt for the certs.

7\. It means we're able to shape the site depending on the history of the visitor. For example we'll show a menu first to a visitor who is likely hungry.

<comment><USER3> > For example we'll show a menu first to a visitor who is likely hungry.

How would you possibly know this?

<comment><USER4> If I go to a restaurant's website I want to know two, maybe there things, their hours, the menu, and possibly their phone number/reservation link. I have never wanted anything else.

<comment><USER5> As simple as it sound, I feel there's need to stress on how important it is for users to find what they seeks without going through maze of hyperlinks and visual fluffs.

* If I'm seeking for contact number and/or address, I'll attempt to find it in "Contact Us" on first level navigation, or footer of any page.

* If I'm seeking for menu, I wish it's available on first level navigation. Price would be nice, but understandable if it's not feasible/ideal to show them.

* If I want to make online booking, I either look for widget on side of homepage, or proceed to "Contact Us" to see if there's either a widget or hyperlink for booking. If not, then at least I should see a telephone number for me to call.

* If I want to see more details of an event I heard of that is happening now/soon, then I wish it's available as a feature on homepage. If not, I'll look for "News" on first level navigation and hoping to see what I'm after in the first page of listing. And for the love of god, please include year in your news post or in the body content. This is especially important when it is an annual/reoccurring event.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While the concept is sound, I do hope that you will allow users of your service to 'detach' at some point to make their sites into something more complex. Working around Website as a Service limitations is a tremendously tedious haul. I have worked with a Shopify project for a few months now and having to either write or pay for (via an app) functionality that has existed on any self hosted e-commerce for years is really annoying. Not being able to modify backend code impedes development speed as you try to hack around the backend's deficiencies with Liquid. I didn't want this post to be this long but I just wanted to give my experience on this kind of subject and I hope you take appropiate measures to save your customers from dealing with similar issues.

<comment><USER7> If you don't want to pay for the Shopify app you can always write it yourself..

<comment><USER6> I am already aware of that, but why should I have to for basic features? If you need reviews for products, you will need an app _developed by Shopify_ (but for some reason not integrated into their main product - what the hell?) which doesn't interoperate properly with _any_ multi-language app (again, which shouldn't even be an app, as multi-language is a core part of many e-commerce applications) since it generates HTML server-side with embedded texts and returns it as JSONP. Another example is getting orders in a printable format. You need an app for something that could probably be done in 100 lines or less on the Shopify admin's backend. Don't get me started on multi-currency support which you can't even do with an app and need to rewire your entire checkout process to a third party system for. It's an agonizing mess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Please change `width: 100vw` to `width: 100%` in the header element on your landing page. It results in the horizontal scroll bar in the bottom of the screen (you will see it if you view your landing page on something other than a mac).

<comment><AUTHOR> done

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since Google Places API doesn't allow storing any data, are you just footing the bill for the site to be "re-created" every time a user visits it?

You're offering this for free, which is great, but I'm not sure how this works out financially.

<comment><USER10> You can easily use Web Scrapping using Javascript dataextraction and storing into a CSV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's slightly sad that the internet is turning into a bunch of sites that are all based on the same templates. Don't we need more website builders that are open and creative by design? I understand not everyone has the time to learn how to write html but we should at least be building tools to make websites more interesting and distinct.

<comment><USER12> I second your sentiment. I ask myself, if at least one of the reasons behind this is the human need of recognition.

I mean don't we all want our presented thoughts to be seen/read if not appreciated?

But how do if your quirky design is being punished by the search engine overlords, because it doesn't conform to the standards defined by them? By their rules leading to SEO spam and mediocre, conform designs?

Just an idea not totally thought through.

<comment><USER13> You want Neocities.org, the spiritual successor to 90s-era website quirkiness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How do you verify that it is exactly business owner who's trying to create website? Ease of generation almost invites pranks, and maybe even fraud. IANAL, but I strongly suspect you'll got sued at some point for damages caused by a fake website.

<comment><USER2> In their defense, anyone could buy a domain name of any unclaimed business' today and setup a website and email accounts.

SourceryApp does pre-populate the phone number attained from Google Maps for auth but that remains editable, currently. I believe the problem of fake websites will bite them if they get anywhere as popular as Twitter, but they don't have to worry abt that, right now, imo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> From the terms of service... " In other words, you grant us and our subsidiaries affiliates, and successors a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty- free, fully-paid, transferable, irrevocable, perpetual, and sub-licensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, prepare derivative works of, distribute, publicly perform, and publicly display your Content throughout the world in any media." lol nope

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the remark. This simply makes sure we have your permission to use the content you send us to generate and host the website you're asking us to create.

<comment><USER16> Is the "irrevocable, perpetual, and sub-licensable" really necessary for this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think this is pretty brilliant. I offer a word of warning: SMBs are a tough crowd to sell to. Even with a 100% turnkey offering, they are a remarkably vocal, high-maintenance group as a whole. The idea of the external web, the social web as a CMS has lots of implications in enterprise as well. Don't let SMBs sour your love for your business.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very slick! Tried it for a no-online-presence second hand retro gaming store here in Miami and it spit out a decent website!

[https://sourceryapp.com/preview?gId=ChIJj_kmPXvn2YgRgamV6Yh8...](https://sourceryapp.com/preview?gId=ChIJj_kmPXvn2YgRgamV6Yh8qPU)

Pretty damn good lads! Congratulations on the launch!

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a pretty solid, simple idea, gotta say. Of all the "quick website" apps, this approach seems like it could get a pretty good result from the get- go, given a good amount of social media / website information available for the business.

<comment><USER2> Curious, what other quick website apps you know of? Not low code, but quick.

I've seen [https://milkshake.app](https://milkshake.app), [https://onuniverse.com](https://onuniverse.com) before and walked away impressed. [https://glideapps.com](https://glideapps.com) is in a similar domain, but for apps.

<comment><USER20> The most minimalist that I'm aware of: [http://txti.es/](http://txti.es/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I got this error message while trying to generate a website:

{"message":"Cannot return null for non-nullable field Entity.phone."}

<comment><AUTHOR> happens in the rare cases when we can't find a phone anywhere for the business - we're working on a solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My business doesn't come up in the autocomplete and there's no category for the type of business. There's no free text field for me to enter my business type and if I choose fixed categories from the list, none of the imagery in the generated sites looks passable.

I don't understand what functionality this offers that GoDaddy GoCentral doesn't have? Why do I care if it happens in 5 seconds if the result doesn't feel tailored to me or quality?

I can't help but feel like it's a bargain basement ripoff of a hodge podge of ideas already in the market from Squarespace and GoCentral.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's fair, Squarespace has a use case. Sourcery is opinionated and not a freestyle tool - we are building websites that you don't have to design, build or update and that lets us offer features that aren't possible in DIY site builders.

<comment><USER22> I think GoCentral already does this: autogenerated single page sites where the imagery & text are dynamically generated based on a small number of user-made choices at sign-up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I tried a couple of companies but I just get a blank page and a bunch of JS errors in the console :/

<comment><AUTHOR> should be fixed now

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> we're hitting API limits and themes are defaulting to generic - sorry about that, we're working on it

<comment><AUTHOR> ok, themes are back in business

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just a head's up to the site admin that browsers may disable autoplay on video, resulting in a blank box next to the "How it works" paragraphs.

You can enable autoplay by including a `mute` attribute in the <video> tag.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the advice, `muted` was added

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How do you proceed if your business isn't found in the autocomplete?

<comment><USER26> I tried it. It still works, looks like you'll have to provide more info though

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Tried a few restaurants in my area.

RT Rotisserie in San Francisco yields an error: {"message":"Cannot return null for non-nullable field Entity.phone."}

</comment><comment><USER28> Add a <noscript> to your landing mayhaps? Takes a little while to figure out that I need my JS on for a proper representation.

</comment><comment><USER29> great project. But why? Do you intend to out-compete wix/etc?

This is a significant piece of work, effort, and skill. I feel so bewildered some times. Maybe i am just too focused on end-result and revenues.

p.s. yes, i am working on my own startup. yes, i am a developer not a manager. yes, i do get sidetracked into side projects

p.s.s. i love the pay-pal integration

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the kind words

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Oops... we've encountered an error. GraphQL error: Cannot read property 'alias' of undefined GraphQL error: Cannot read property 'alias' of undefined

</comment><comment><USER31> My site doesn't look as good as I was expecting: [https://i.imgur.com/6c89cqu.png](https://i.imgur.com/6c89cqu.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> should be fixed - does it look better now? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Nice. I wanted to do this when I was at Weebly, but never happened.

</comment><comment><USER33> So basically you're taking all the content under a Google Business Listing and flattening it out. It's slick but nothing crazy.

</comment><comment><USER34> Oops... we've encountered an error. GraphQL error: Cannot return null for non- nullable field Entity.phone.

</comment><comment><USER35> Please check the designs on Firefox on Android. Doesn't work properly.

</comment><comment><USER36> Okay, I'm seriously impressed, this is amazing! Congrats on launching.

</comment><comment><USER37> Really cool idea

</comment><comment><USER38> typed: angryangels, got Angry chicken xD

</comment><comment><USER39> Who are you and why would you think I'd trust my business to you?

<comment><USER40> >trust my business to you?

Clearly you haven't taken a proper look. They are just scraping what is already there, so they aren't the ones holding the trust you mention.</comment></comment>


David Lynch's Dune – A sci-fi film by a director without much care for sci-fi - <AUTHOR> http://www.tor.com/2017/04/18/david-lynchs-dune-is-what-you-get-when-you-build-a-science-fictional-world-with-no-interest-in-science-fiction/ <comment><USER3> I for one love SF _and_ Lynch's Dune. Is this article just an excuse to show us the awesome set art? Not being sarcastic here, I really wish I could see the full uncut version, have only seen the heavily edited TV one that airs every year or two. It's great far-future stuff, and I think more interesting (if less successful) than Alien or other Geiger-inspired sets.

I've read elsewhere on the Internet that Dune the novel actually is an inspiration for the Star Wars universe, even if the Star Wars cinematography predates and must influence (even if through intentional avoidance of such appearance) Lynch's treatment of Dune...

[edit: fixed typo of Dune, not Doom]

<comment><USER4> I also love Lynch's Dune. I've seen the extended version once a long time ago. From what I remember there was scenes of voiceovers and art explaining more of the universe and the houses and their relationships.

Have you seen the documentary "Jodorowsky's Dune"? If you're a Dune fan, or a fan of 70's and 80's era sci-fi films, I highly recommend it. What I found most interesting about that documentary is how the director created this amazing team to work on his Dune project, which eventually failed, but ended up influencing the style/art of so many subsequent Sci-fi films because that team dispersed and they worked on so many prominent films.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg4OCeSTL08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg4OCeSTL08) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune)

<comment><USER5> As a big fan of Jodorowsky (L'Incal is one my favourite graphic novels ever), I think we could also unequivocally say that whatever he had made would _not_ have been very faithful to the book. It's quite possible that Dune fans would have been even less happy with Jodorowsky's film than Lynch's.

We also have to remember that this was before Star Wars and Alien. Most scifi at the time was, with some honourable exceptions (2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, The Andromeda Strain, Solaris), pretty silly, childish, often campy stuff: The Black Hole, Buck Rogers, Moonraker. Pulp origins aside, Star Wars introduces a level of violence, maturity and realism to the genre that stood out at the time, and closer to that of contemporary adult 1970s productions like Apocalypse Now, Easy Rider and so on.

For all the considerable talent involved in the Dune adaptation, it's quite possible — and this eases the pain over the loss of the project a bit — that it would have been closer in tone to something like Zardoz or Flash Gordon, i.e. a big, colourful, but ultimately also a bit silly extravaganza. Even O'Bannon's Alien script was also pretty pulpy and silly until Ridley Scott, David Giler and Walter Hill hammered it into shape.

<comment><USER6> I think one of the reasons why "Jodorowsky's Dune" is such an amazing documentary is that it describes an impossibly ambitious film, something so awesome that you're drawn into believing in it with the director himself.

If it really _were_ made however, yeah, it could _only_ have be a disappointment in comparison to what the documentary about it suggests.

Jodorowsky's version of Dune is perhaps the greatest film that was never made and, ironically, it is better this way.

<comment><USER7> We'll never know. Another lost work I would kill to see is Tarkovsky's original version of Stalker.

He spent an entire summer filming the Strugatskys' original screenplay, based on their masterpiece Roadside Picnic. But he was using a type of American Kodak film stock that was found to be out of date; he tried several times to confirm the problem with the Soviet processing lab, but they were unfamiliar with the stock, and only by the time he was done shooting did they realize that the footage was in fact unusable.

At this point Tarkovsky had used too much money, and had no choice but to go back to the Soviet film board to negotiate a new financing deal. At the same time, he was deeply unhappy with what he'd filmed so far (he had also fired his cinematographer), and was desperate to start over fresh. Helped by the Strugatskys, he developed a new, miminalistic framework for the film that eliminated most of the scifi trappings of the novel, and he reshot the film almost without a script. (The whole story of Stalker is much more complicated, of course. I recommend the book "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue", by Johnson and Petrie, for more information.)

I don't know what happened to the damaged footage, but I guess it must have been destroyed. We'll never know what it was like. I don't think anyone except a handful of people have seen the footage, and they are all dead.

<comment><USER6> Stalker was a unforgettable mesmerizing, almost hypnotic film. I didn't know there had been an earlier attempt! IMHO that Tarkovsky was able to make ANY film at all in the hostile bureaucratic atmosphere in which he worked gives a ray of hope to artists everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Alternative hypothesis: something set 21,000 years (edited - well spotted!) into the future is going to be as impossible to imagine for us as today's world was for Jules Vernes. As such gothic madness might be a more realistic interpretation.

A lot of the criticism misses the mark. I can try and find alternative explanations. The "outdated" computers? The Butlerian Jihad caused that future world not to build anything more complicated than a light switch. The unique worlds, monochromatic and with their odd uniqueness? Visible signalling of these being different cultures that survived by virtue of their unique characteristics. Unlike the "bugs vs Marines" of a lot of space opera, the Tleilaxu, Guild, Bene Gesserit and Harkonnen are all fundamentally different, their differences giving them a survival edge, influence and power. Black desert suits? Maybe the filters need solar energy to run. Erotic Bene Gesserit intonation? Have you read the later books?

This was the only depiction of Baron Harkonnen which I thought truly captured his sadistic genius. And the blocky shields are so much cooler than the form fitting transparent bubbles of later Hollywood SF (e.g. Star Wars), also explaining the difficulty involved in going slow for so long when trying to penetrate them (because the space between shield and human is so great). Or what about the worms, which despite (or perhaps because of) the sorry state of 1984 CGI somehow were just as immense as I had imagined them reading the words. There was this alien feel to all the vehicles, especially the ornithopters and the harvester carrier, which has only been recently replicated in the seemingly nonsensical vertical ovals of Arrival or the glaring contrast between earth and ship in District 9. This was definitely the artistic generation responsible for Brutalist architecture, which is not always fun to live in, but has a thousand times more soul than the International Style condos copy/pasted across all of the world's megacities today.

Lynch's movie was glorious precisely because it freed itself from the constraint of present day science and became a standalone creation from the inspiration of the source material. The other interpretations did not create that sense of awe. I found the miniseries particularly boring, a kind of BBC period drama feel instead of being transported into a completely new, intense world. What makes Dune great as a book and as a 1984 movie is precisely that it frees itself from "realism" and suspends disbelief in just the right way for telling a great story. Might as well complain about X-wings flying like F-14s and making sound in vacuum...

<comment><USER9> The criticism reads like superficial snark, and misses the wood for the trees.

It's not a terrible film. Not by a long way.

It's a difficult film. It's risky. It's not entirely successful.

But terrible? Wisecracking CGI Superheroes Episode Number Actually I've Lost Count Now is a terrible film. (One of a long, long series.)

Men With Guns and So Very Much Shooting is a terrible film.

Too Many Explosions Looking for a Plot That Isn't All About Running and Shouting is a terrible film.

Dune was one of many drug-assisted weird things that fell out of the 1970s and never quite left. It's not a terrible film - it's a museum piece.

<comment><USER10> >But terrible? Wisecracking CGI Superheroes Episode Number Actually I've Lost Count Now is a terrible film.

That's a really low bar. A better comparison would be the three-part Dune miniseries that came out in 2000, one in which Lynch's version doesn't fare very well.

<comment><USER8> I respectfully disagree and think the 2000 version has aged very badly (artistically speaking, it also holds lower value for me).

For example, watch the harvester-eaten-by-worm scene [1] [2]. Which of the two has stood the test of time? I could watch the 1984 version over and over again. Everything about the 2000 version - even the timing of each shot - <USER2> uninspired and dated, almost like a Westwood Command and Conquer in-game video. Watch how much more engaging the storytelling is in 1984 in this essentially dialogue-free chapter.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P50b-19_j8c&t=18s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P50b-19_j8c&t=18s)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxDjnSnbNhw&t=1m30s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxDjnSnbNhw&t=1m30s)

<comment><USER11> The 2000 miniseries already looked awful and campy when it came out. I should know -- as a Dune fan I bought it instantly, and was deeply disappointed.

Lynch's version, for all its flaws, is still watchable.

<comment><USER12> The live play staging in the 2000 version looked really out of place on TV when I watched it. Having everyone retire to a dramatic pose with dramatic lighting at the end of a scene? It just looks amateurish on TV IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very surprised to pop in and see discussion of Dune without mention that Denis Villeneuve is rebooting Dune. [0] Villeneuve is also working on the Blade Runner sequel scheduled for release in October.

For anyone who has seen Arrival, Sicario, or his other movies, I wonder if you're on the same hype level as me. He's absolutely excellent. He also seems to loves sci-fi, which can't hurt.

[0] [http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/1/14468876/dune-reboot- denis-...](http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/1/14468876/dune-reboot-denis- villeneuve-director-official)

<comment><USER8> I am happy and sad. Arrival and Sicario are precisely the kind of complex, thoughtful directing that SF needs after years of Marvel movies.

On the other hand, why reboot Dune yet again? Nobody has given Asimov's Foundation a try!

<comment><USER14> How do you make a movie out of Asimov's books? There's hardly any action, Asimov said so himself.

<comment><USER15> The original "Foundation Trilogy" is actually a series of short stories bound together. In a perfect world, I'd suggest taking each story, expanding it into a full movie, and adding such action as is necessary. If my memory serves me (as it often doesn't), the Foundation Trilogy still has some action as quite a lot of it takes place during war, and as a consequence of that, could easily be expanded to have a bit more "action". (I wouldn't want to focus on that necessarily, as the Foundation series has always been cerebral, but we would like to avoid Star Wars: The Phantom Tax Dispute Menace, too.)

In reality I have little confidence in either Hollywood to pull that off, nor the stories to carry movies. Personally I think both Bicentennial Man and I, Robot were both quite accurate, loving adaptations of his work (almost everyone seems to miss that I, Robot was a pitch-perfect Zeroth Law story and fits in quite well to at least the tone, if not the literal timeline), and what they showed is, yeah, don't try to adapt Asimov to the screen. There is an immense wealth of other great science fiction from that era that would do better in adaptation.

<comment><USER11> "I, Robot" wasn't an Asimov adaptation, which is why it seems so off. It was actually developed from a script titled _Hardwired_ , with very tenuous links to anything by Asimov, and later re-written with references to the Three Laws. Thematically it's unlike anything Asimov wrote. It directly contradicts most characterizations in Asimov stories, including -- but not limited to -- a direct contradiction of the character of Susan Calvin and everything she stood for in the stories. Old, ugly, cerebral but misanthropic woman turned into a young pretty girl/damsel in distress who's also the hero's romantic interest. Ugh.

It's also an awful, awful movie. (also see: the obnoxious product placement, with Will Smith selling you sneakers at a random point in the movie).

<comment><USER15> "Thematically it's unlike anything Asimov wrote."

Again, as everyone seems to miss, it is a pitch-perfect Zeroth Law story, and to my mind fits in squarely into his Robot stories about the perils and limitations of the entire idea of the Three Laws. It is definitely an alternate timeline from the other ones, but that's not hard to believe. I find myself wondering if everybody read the same Asimov as I did. Or have only I read the later Asimov stories? If it was so accurate by accident, then they did a good job being so accidentally accurate.

Yes, Susan Calvin is wrong, but by adaptation standards that's nothing, and Asimov's characterizations were always paper-thin anyhow. I guess I find it less horrifying that Susan Calvin is wrong than some fans because "old, ugly, cerebral, and misanthropic" is pretty much her _entire_ character. It's not like she's some fully-fleshed out character masterpiece with a multi-story arc, reasons for her characteristics, relationships with other characters in the universe, stories of her own, foibles and weaknesses to match her quirks and strengths... she just... likes robots, hates people. Asimov doesn't do characters.

I really feel like for both movies I mentioned, that's it. That's what an Asimov adaptation is going to look like. Those are the best you can possibly hope for. To the extent you still don't like them, a perfectly viable opinion as I do not deny my tastes can be a bit quirky even by HN standards (I like both the Tron movies and Star Trek: The Motion Picture too), then I would therefore not suggest agitating for Hollywood to dip into Asimov's works any more, because it's not going to get any better than that.

<comment><USER16> > it is a pitch-perfect Zeroth Law story

100% agree. It also mostly follows the Three Laws, with one egregious failure (but it was a set up so he could snipe the robots using uzis after jumping the motorcycle so.....?)

It actually makes a good example of the sort dangers of AI that people like Eliezer Yudkowsky like to point out.

I would agree with you that by adaptation standards, it's in-tone with the bulk of the Asimov robot novels, although there are some definite parts where the Hollywood breaks out of the basement.

<comment><USER15> "although there are some definite parts where the Hollywood breaks out of the basement."

Yes... I'm not saying it was a _great_ movie or anything. I'm just saying A: it was a Zeroth-Law story and B: It is probably about all we can hope for from an Asimov adaptation from Hollywood.

The inference you can draw from the combination of "it was not a great movie" and "it is about all we can hope for from an Asimov adaptation" is fully intentional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Lynch's Dune does have many problems, but I still enjoy it. The set design and world that the film describes is often quite beautiful and has in many ways set the tone for all depictions of the universe after. The books don't offer much in the way of visual specificity, so even the later Scifi Channel's mini series took on various inspirations from the Lynch film.

I think the real hatred for the movie comes from not just cutting down the original material to fit within a film, but then needlessly adding new material that wasn't at all in keeping with the book, so it loses "trueness" from both ends. There's also some unevenness in the pacing and gravity the movie tries to get across. Dune is by no means an action story, but the movie can be a bit plodding at points that don't call for it, and faster paced parts sometimes don't work or come off poorly or cheesy.

I think also there's an unnecessary attempt at adding mystery to a story that didn't really have or need it. The book explains many of the strange parts of the universe quite well, but the movie has characters uttering odd phrases and strange events happening without comment or description -- reading the book fills in most of this strangeness, but it shouldn't be necessary as the film should stand on its own.

Still, the new cuts of the film are good watches and make for an entry into a nice thoughtful sci-fi weekend that might include movies like Bladerunner.

</comment><comment><USER18> Has the author even read Dune? Like, really read it?

One caption reads:

> This looks like a future computer, I'm pretty sure.

Obviously suggesting it's not science-fictioney enough, but _there are no computers in Dune_ \- everything doing data storage and retrieval in that universe is understood to be a very complicated mechanical machine.

Dune is more steampunk than laser beams, and Lynch brilliantly captured that aesthetic.

<comment><USER19> I can't remember if this is established in Frank's books or instead retconned by his son, that all AI and computerization was banned after the Butlerian Jihad.

<comment><USER20> My recollection - and I admit it's been a while - is that the events _of_ the Jihad were expanded on in some of the Brian Herbert / Kevin J Anderson works, but that the basic notion (electronic computation forbidden, and why) was well established in the very first book.

<comment><USER21> "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind" is cited by Paul from the OC Bible in _Dune_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Lynch's Dune is so weird – It's deeply, irredeemably flawed, from the perspective of someone who started with the rich world of the novels. But it's paradoxically beautiful and I can't help but enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's hard to squeeze Dune into a single movie. The book is a good 500 pages long, which fits better into one three movies than into one.

But if you are determined to fit it into a single movie, it should be possible. Here's the outline I came up with:

ACT 1 (30 min) Start in Arrakeen, with the Atreides already in charge. Leto is the kind master, Paul his formidable young son. Their rivals are the Harkonnen, a nasty bunch (they abuse servants). Introduce Arrakis as the source of the Spice, possibly as part of Jessica's training of Paul in esoteric disciplines. The Fremen are mentioned, but as a minor impoverished rabble. Meanwhile, the Emperor, the Space Guild, and the Harkonnen meet and agree to replace the Atreides, together to maintain control of the Spice. The Harkonnen attack, Leto dies, and Paul and his mother flee to the desert. End with Paul looking back and vowing revenge.

ACT 2 (30 min) Paul and Jessica encounter the Fremen, and are taken in by them. Paul tests himself against young Fremen fighters and is impressed; they are very good, but he is better. He accompanies them on a raid against the Harkonnen, and is again impressed. He joins the Fremen, and becomes a worm- rider. He learns the true size of the Fremen from seeing one of their secret meetings. At Jessica's urgings, he decides to lead the Fremen against the Harkonnen. Meanwhile, the Harkonnen are making a cruel mess of Arrakis.

ACT 3 (30 min) Paul campaigns to become the Fremen war-leader; this is shown as a montage of public speaking to increasingly large gatherings and knife fighting. Harkonnen cruelties continue; the Emperor announces plans for a visit. Jessica speaks of the Voice from the Outer World prophesy. Paul, Jessica and Stilgar begin training the troops, incorporating her and Paul's esoteric training. They wait for a sandstorm, and attack in force with wormriders. Fight scenes between Fremen and Hakonnen. The fight goes to the Fremen. The Emperor flees in a ship. Paul addresses the crowds of Arrakeen from a balcony proclaiming a new day of Arrakis, with the natives in charge.

I think that could work. But some stuff did get left out: the spice as a mutagen, the nature of the Bene Gesserit and their goals, the Kwisatz Haderach, Paul's Harkonnen heritage, Paul's duel with Feyd-Rautha, and everything about Liet-Kynes.

<comment><USER24> Lynch in a nutshell: created on drugs; best consumed on drugs.

The problem with Lynch's _Dune_ is that it seems not to have been planned properly (at all?); i can only assume they started shooting with what they thought was a half-finished script which turned out to be a 1/10 finished script.

This lines up with everything else David Lynch has done (e.g. _Twin Peaks_ loses the plot 3/4 of the way through the first season and never recovers, Mark Frost -- his co-creator -- has said in interviews they had no plan as to how the story was going to resolve and that certainly gels with my viewing of the show and my reaction to rabid fan explanations of how it all makes sense and _Fire Walk With Me_ is a work of genius).

 _Dune_ starts out at a deliberate pace, covering stuff in the first 100 pages or so quite nicely. I love the look and design of everything, and the first fight with shield effects was awesome for the time. But then most of the running time and budget are gone and whoops, need to cram in the rest. Because the shield effect was too expensive they introduce the "weirding way" b.s. to eliminate the need for all that fancy knife-fighting, shields, etc.

So the last 45 minutes is just a montage of silliness.

<comment><USER25> > Lynch in a nutshell: created on drugs; best consumed on drugs.

I am not sure if Lynch draws his inspiration from drugs; I cannot rule it out, but it feels unlikely somehow. (Although it would explain _Inland Empire_...)

The second part is true, though. ;-)

As for the pacing, I read somewhere that the first version of the movie was about four hours long, but the studio made him cut it down to two-ish hours (or maybe they did it for him).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Did Stanley Kubrick have an "interest in SF"? I think as a director you should have an interest in making a good movie that is somehow coherent for the audience that watches it. Which is also the reason why computers are almost always absurd in movies. They're mysteries that need to be represented differently than just their correct technological side.

<comment><USER27> Kubrick worked pretty closely with Arthur C Clarke.

IIRC Clarke wasn't happy with the result. The film would probably not have been as good without his help, however.

<comment><USER11> Is there a source for this? I always thought Clarke was so satisfied with the movie that he actually wrote his book sequels to better match the movie rather than the first book!

(Personally, I think Kubrick's movie is a masterpiece and far superior to Clarke's first book, which is an ok but entirely forgettable and minor work of SF).

<comment><USER27> I recalled incorrectly; Clarke was apparently pretty happy with it. I must have been thinking of some other SF film. . .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If you haven't done so yet, buy the book, read all 900 pages of it, it's amazing! The first game about Dune with it's combination of adventure and strategy is also very nice. [http://gamesnostalgia.com/en/game/dune](http://gamesnostalgia.com/en/game/dune)

</comment><comment><USER29> Three words: Dino De Laurentiis

Lynch is very circumspect when talking about him (at least in the Lynch on Lynch book I read), but it's likely Dino had him under massive pressure to make various schlocky compromises.

Despite many of the impressive titles in among De Laurentiis' filmography as a producer, it should be recalled he made over 500 films and was very (even purely) commercial in outlook. He was definitely also a "hands-on" producer.

</comment><comment><USER30> I enjoy Lynch's Dune. There are some great fan edits, the 'Third stage navigator' edits that add in a fair amount of the cut scenes. The longer cut is a great improvement.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you enjoy listening to podcasts, Unjustly Maligned has a pretty good appreciation of that movie: [https://www.theincomparable.com/ump/37/](https://www.theincomparable.com/ump/37/)

Recommended.

</comment><comment><USER32> fun little anecdote: Lucas asked Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi. The mind reels… [http://www.slashfilm.com/david-lynch-talks-about-not- directi...](http://www.slashfilm.com/david-lynch-talks-about-not-directing- return-of-the-jedi/)

</comment><comment><USER33> The visual were great. It looked better than the 2000's mini series. The story failed to capture the book, but it's not like a lot of stuff happen in the book itself, since it's more a description of the ecology and culture of a planet.

I've heard they are doing yet another movie, but they should go for a TV show, game of throne style, not a movie.

</comment><comment><USER34> Lynch's Dune shares some names of people and places, and some basic concepts with the book. Very little else. There's a lot of change for change's sake in it and most of that is in illogical ways (some of which are pointed out in the article).

I've seen it a couple of times, but I see no reason to do so again. I can just read the books again!

</comment><comment><USER35> Dune is a beautiful film by Lynch, but the story pacing and deadpan-ish acting really hurts it. Lynch sometimes needs to be reined in. A reined in Lynch can make the difference between an amazing "Elephant Man" or weird as hell "Rabbits."

<comment><USER36> Reign - to control as a monarch.

Rein - the straps used to control a horse.

Lynch needs to be reined in.

<comment><USER37> No rein on Dune.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I saw Dune on the big screen when it first came out, and it is unquestionably the second-worst SF movie I've ever seen - so bad it put this formerly avid SF fan off the genre for years...

<comment><USER39> Name the worst as well as as your top 3. I need some context here.

<comment><USER40> I'd have to put the two Kevin Costner post-apocalyptic flops on the list - Waterworld and The Postman.

The Postman rankles especially, since it was a pretty decent book that was butchered badly [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Postman)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I loved Lynch's Dune. Whatever the cause, the end result was a film that felt as weird and surreal and alien as Dune itself. The retro-futurist aspect of the tech only added to this.

</comment><comment><USER42> So the creator of Eraserhead, Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet is being lectured to about world building? Dune is one of the few Lynch works I haven't seen, but given his oeuvre I'm willing to chalk up any lapse to him not being on his game for a moment.

As far as the title of this article is concerned, I doubt that Lynch is overly concerned with any genre so much as the ineffable, ill-defined language of human dreams and desires.

</comment><comment><USER43> I mostly agree with the premise that it's a deeply flawed film that fails to capture many parts of what makes _Dune_ such a masterpiece. That said, the scene where Paul calls his first sandworm is one of my favorites (the great Toto score certainly helps) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj7R_2WWdKs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj7R_2WWdKs)

</comment><comment><USER44> This reminds me of JJ Abrams and his 'I never got Star Trek' comment. To this day it's like a jock giving a wedgie to the geeky kid in me.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think the author never read Frank Herbert's book, but only saw the movie. Most people who hate the movie have never read the book.

<comment><USER46> The writer just finished a _reread_ of the first book. The link to the series of articles is literally right at the top of the page above the title. And there were a number of fans of the books who hated the movie when it came out in 1984. It's an interesting take, or we wouldn't be talking about it still, but kind of divisive and not a great adaptation of the novel IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Wow. A whole article, an entire HN thread- and not a single mention of poor old Sting?

</comment><comment><USER48> Look, I'm a big fan of the original Dune series (not of the mess Frank Herbert's son did after his death in order to make money out of his father vision - those books actually ruined a bit of the originals for me, I actually suggest that you don't read those).

Anyway, first time I saw Lynch's Dune I didn't really liked it because it was too different from the books. But after some years (and reading the all series from Frank Herbert) I actually started to like the film.

See, for me, Lynch's film, was the best _possible_ one. A lot of Dune is about thoughts, mental plans, counter plans. A mental chess game that goes on the mind of all the main characters and I don't think you can actually put all that on screen (at lest not without extending the film for several hours).

Sure you could have a grander vision of the books with better SciFi and a lot more money, but other than visually for an higher budget, I don't think any director can really do much better than Lynch.

Well, it's my take at least. I might be wrong (and would like to be proven wrong by a new Dune movie that exceeds my expectations) but until I see a movie that does better, I actually vouch for Lynch's Dune.

<comment><USER49> _Look, I 'm a big fan of the original Dune series (not of the mess Frank Herbert's son did after his death in order to make money out of his father vision - those books actually ruined a bit of the originals for me, I actually suggest that you don't read those)._

I tried to love the son's prequels but couldn't and therefore I second your comments. There were many mysteries within mysteries in Frank H's series that weren't present in the followons.

<comment><USER46> I feel like the prequels don't fit with the rest of the series, which got weirder and weirder as they went further into the future timeline. The prequels, etc. kind of just got bland and pedestrian. But some of the characters were interesting and it wasn't a completely terrible read. Just not as good as what Frank Herbert would have done.

<comment><USER50> I didn't mind the House * prequels, but the ones covering the butlerian jihad were pretty awful.

The sequels were ok, I was just happy to have closure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> "The movie also has the distinction of branding the character in an explicitly homophobic light by heightening the Baron's actions and displaying them all at once:"

Hmmm. I don't think you've read the book.

</comment><comment><USER52> s/Lynch/Herbert/

I remember as a teenager eagerly anticipating reading Dune. And was totally disappointed. There's nothing SF about it.

<comment><USER53> Mind reading, Personal shields, planetary nukes, FTL travel, cyborgs, history of AI war vs humans...

<comment><USER54> Dune's setting feels almost medieval instead of futuristic. Some futuristic technologies exist. But in many ways it shows how humanity has regressed rather than advanced.

A lot of it feels an awful lot more like magic than science. Like the mind reading and prophecy stuff. The more interesting technology, personal shields, is just an excuse to explain why people fight with swords instead of modern weapons. Which lends to the medieval feel thing. And an awful lot of technology is missing, like anything remotely like a computer. The robot wars happened in the distant past and aren't part of the story. Just an explanation for why there aren't any computers. It's barely mentioned in the book at all actually.

<comment><USER55> Mindreading? Was that in the books, have I forgotten it? I believe it's in the movie, sort of, but in the book the Bene Gesserit were trained to communicate with covert hand signals while simultaneously carrying on a verbal conversation. I think they conveyed this in the movie as mindreading, but it's been years since I watched it.

<comment><USER49> s/mindreading/truthseeing/

<comment><USER55> Ah, yeah, forgot about that. Reminds me a bit of _Lie to Me_ taken to an extreme.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Use a Headless CMS - <AUTHOR> https://blog.strapi.io/10-reasons-headless-cms/ <comment><AUTHOR> I was reaching about brand new CMSs and found this one, although it doesn't focus on the flexibility of headless CMSs but it's a pretty decent article.</comment>


A Postmortem on the Parity Multi-Sig Library Self-Destruct - <AUTHOR> https://paritytech.io/blog/security-is-a-process-a-postmortem-on-the-parity-multi-sig-library-self-destruct.html <comment><USER2> The juicy bit:

 _In August, a Github contributor called "3esmit" recommended a code change that initWallet should be called when being deployed which at the time was considered a convenience enhancement. Thus, we committed this proposed enhancement to the library contract that would automatically initialize it by calling initWallet on construction. Interpreting the recommendation as enhancement, the changed code was to be deployed in a regular update at a future point in time._

Someone noticed and mentioned the issue in August, but it wasn't considered critical and thus not fixed for the already deployed contract.</comment>


Apple Suspends Over-the-Phone AppleID Password Resets - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/apple-icloud-password-freeze/

<comment> X-Istence "After Epic Hack [...]".

Sorry, not that epic. Yes, multiple steps were required but the biggest issue in security once again was the human element.

Epic would be finding the flaws in SSL/TLS that allows you to generate a valid cert for any domain (Moxie Marlinspike) or a bug in DNS that is such cause for concern that people have to upgrade their infrastructure (Dan Kaminsky) or intercepting GSM calls (Chris Paget) while making the device believe it is on a legitimate network.

This hack came down to social engineering and using flaws in two companies verification systems. That isn't epic. People have been calling companies and people on the phone for decades and having them hand over information without proper identification/verification. The guys stuff got remote erased, well damn, the system worked as it was supposed to work ... other than that the right person wasn't at the controls ... remote wipe worked as expected.

Yes, changes have to be made, and yes security and verification of identity has to be made more secure when there is a lot at stake, but this hack was by no means epic.

<comment><USER2> I think the description of it as epic refers to the amount and nature of the damage done, not the technical accomplishment. We expect that someone might be able to hack our online accounts, but that they could hack our online accounts and then use that to reach into our homes to nuke data off of our hard drives is different.

<comment><USER3> Remember that you have to explicitly enable this feature.

Remote wipe is NOT enabled by default.

<comment><USER4> It's too bad the feature is named 'Find My Mac' instead of 'Remote Wipe'.

<comment><USER5> I really do think these things should be separate, with separate enabled/disabled settings.

Especially on the iPhone/iPad where a lost device (i.e. behind the couch or something) is far more common than a stolen one.

<comment><USER6> I don't know. I travel a lot per train and losing my iPhone there or at a random bar/party I certainly want to remote wipe it.

<comment><USER7> But if you have enabled a 4-digit pin, why worry?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think having to re-enable remote wipe on each device after a password reset would be a reasonable compromise.

<comment><USER9> Would be nice if they offered the option to remote encrypt and you can only decrypt with a visit to a Apple store. But nomatter what you offer, there will always be a way to offer a little more.

Your approach does leae users open to there own hindsight and if you lost a device you might in some situations reset the password first and then thing about remotely wiping the device and in those situations you will be a bit erked. That said it would be nice to at least have that option, options are nice as they allow the user to pick the level of control they want, more options more choice. Still be nice if a device being remote wiped checked its location and went - oi hang on your at home I need to verify this first, scary but doable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wouldn't it be much better if video calls (or Facetime) became ubiquitous (and mandated for auth)? The mere fact that the attacker needs to show his face for getting the password reset should improve things a lot because it would make detection as well as post-facto investigation much easier.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wired mentions Apple 46 times in the article (including twice in the title)... and Amazon 3 times. In fact, most of the public and HN outrage about this incident has been directed at Apple.

That's the downside of Apple being so close to perfect. We expect perfection from them at all times. And when they make a mistake, it seems 100x more outrageous than if it were any other company.

Don't get me wrong, they made a terrible mistake in this case, but Amazon has gotten off lightly in comparison.

<comment><USER12> The bulk of the damage was done as a result of the breach in Apple's security - all the Amazon breach did was give the attacker the last 4 digits of a card, which is not super private anyway. It isn't 100% fair - and to be clear, processes at both companies were pretty poor - but I don't think people are out to get Apple here.

And, while Apple is very good, they are nowhere near perfect - especially when it comes to online services. Apple fans playing the victim card for them is just as tiring as people jumping all over them when they slip up.

<comment><USER13> > all the Amazon breach did was give the attacker the last 4 digits of a card, > which is not super private anyway.

Precisely. Go to any mall, restaurant, or shopping center in the U.S. and you're bound to find at least one discarded receipt with the last four digits of the shopper's credit card number on it, possibly with their name and/or signature.

<comment><USER14> But that's the fault of the shopper for not policing their information properly, in this case it wasn't Honan's fault that his last 4 leaked. The last 4 still shouldn't be given out over the phone, _ever_ , most companies have a policy of not confirming any card detail on their system on the phone in the UK.

<comment><USER15> Are you arguing that it's Amazon's fault, not Apple's, that this "hack" happened?

<comment><USER14> No, I'm arguing that Amazon is at fault for handing out card details willy nilly, Apple is at fault for not training their CS staff to, in the word's of House, assume everybody lies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does Apple do in-store password resets? I'm thinking with their retail presence this would be a good solution. If you want your password reset come into the store with a photo-ID and the physical credit card on your account. Doesn't get much better than that. I realize not everyone has an Apple Store nearby but many do.

<comment><USER17> "I realize not everyone has an Apple Store nearby but many do."

That could be a handy additional service to offer, but they'd still have to provide a non-in-store method for all the people who don't, so it wouldn't be any more secure.

<comment><USER18> Facetime?

<comment><USER19> You need an Apple ID for FaceTime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > In an earlier attempt on Tuesday to change an AppleID password (which is the > same password used to log into iCloud and iTunes), Apple customer service > offered up a different response, saying that passwords could only be changed > over the phone if we were able to supply a serial number for a device linked > to the AppleID in question — for example, an iPhone, iPad or MacBook > computer.

Adding (or worse, substituting) a serial number helps, but seems insecure in the event of a lost/stolen phone. A device serial number, plus all the already mentioned info: name, address, last 4 characters of a credit card, are all reasonably easy to extract from a stolen phone. Would be nice if some piece of info not usually stored on a phone were required. I suppose that a lost phone is already a security breach, but any containment would be an improvement.

<comment><USER21> On many Apple devices, the only way to access the serial is to actually log into the device and open Settings or About this Mac. If the attacker's able to do that then – in the majority of cases – they likely already have access to your mail and probably many other accounts as well. At that point, it's pretty much game over for you; containment's impossible.

(Two big loopholes on the Mac side are guest accounts and the recovery partition. Both of those offer ways to get your machine's serial number which do not require the attacker to log into your account.)

<comment><USER22> The serial is engraved/printed on the case of my Macbook Pro and iPhone 4.

<comment><USER21> Ah, you're correct on the MacBook case. I didn't have any laptops nearby to confirm.

I can't find anywhere on my phone where the serial number's printed, though. The numbers on the back are not the phone's serial number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interestingly Google will not get into this situation because they do not offer over the phone support. That is the advantage of being a free service I guess! People do not expect customer service beyond a point.

Of course they offer two factor authentication.

<comment><USER7> Google have their own problems with Youtube's aggressive Content ID system and pulling down of public domain NASA videos on the grounds of (wtf?) copyright infringement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I see no reason not to use a password manager (ex: keychain on macos) to keep different usernames and passwords for each account. It is very little overhead (at least with keychain).

And yes I mean different user names even if it is required to be a valid email id. If you use gmail, you can use "firstname.lastname@example.com" as the email address. This is additional protection against remote hackers since guessing the account name of one account doesn't get you the names of accounts on other services.

And yes ABSOLUTELY NO reason to not have 2 factor auth for your google account.

<comment><USER25> You didn't really read the article about what happened did you? It didn't really come down to the email address especially since part of it was concealed. This came down to both companies letting you do things over the phone with minimal personal information.

<comment><USER24> This is merely things that I practice that I think may be useful to some. I did read the full article and not just this one all the others including Matt Cuts post on 2fa. The companies are to blame, yes, but the "victim" is also responsible to some extent. "Only the paranoid survive." (I think that's by Andy Grove).

Honan owned up to not backing up, for example. Would it have been an "epic hack" if he could restore up to date data because he had a time machine backup?</comment></comment></comment>


Why doesn't the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003) - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031010-00/?p=42203 <comment><USER2> On a more practical note, why would you want to have seconds on the clock? I find that most of the time I don't want to know the time to a precision of better than 5 minutes. That may just be me, but when someone asks the time and I read it off my phone as 3:56 it really bothers me and sometimes I convert that to 5-to-4 just to avoid what in most cases is arbitrary extra precision. Sure there are times when minutes count, and there are occasions when I want to time something to the second, but from a UI perspective those are not common use cases that warrant screen real estate for extra digits especially back then.

<comment><USER3> On macOS, it's a useful indicator of when the system has frozen/kernel panic, which unfortunately happens far too often.

<comment><USER4> You must have really bad luck with Macs.

As a MacOS user for seven years I can't say I've ever had that issue. Certainly not enough to need the seconds to be an indicator. I've had my system completely lock up maybe four times and those times my mouse refusing to move was enough of an indicator.

Heck, right now it's been two and a half months since I've rebooted... and probably a year since I've rebooted because it froze.

I'm not an Apple fan boy either. In fact my next computer will probably be Linux. But I have to admin the last three Macs I have owned have been great computers.

<comment><USER5> You must not work in an organization that insists on installing security software for you. If I have >2w uptime on my machine I generally have to restart for some reason or other. It's like people have forgotten that computers can and should have more uptime than that.

A faulty update from one of our security software vendors caused a once-per- hour kernel panic and forced reboot for a day or two. It was really nice.

(Obviously none of this is the fault of OSX or Apple but I would kill for 2.5m of uptime on my work laptop).

<comment><USER6> I feel you there. It got to the point at one gig where engineering folks--who were given root on their preconfigured laptops--often spent their first day figuring out how to kill and extricate Sophos from their machines. For developers who weren't seasoned jerks, it could be a real challenge until somebody took pity on them and helped them find single-user mode, yank out the kexts, and manually delete everything. (The happy .pkg BOMs helped out, too!)

Ordinarily I wouldn't do this and just punch out on a gig (because seriously, it's that annoying and that effectively-useless), but we were a recently- acquired startup subsidiary, so we were also our own IT shop--the CTO actively approved.

<comment><USER7> Is it still possible to do this kind of thing on the most recent macOS? I recall the issue with the 'git' binary not being modifiable, even with sudo, unless you mounted the macOS filesystem under Linux and made the changes from there.

<comment><USER6> You can disable rootless via the recovery partition.

<comment><USER7> Ah, thanks. I'm assuming that quietly got added in after "we can't touch the filesystem _at all_ " caused too many complaints...?

<comment><USER6> It was literally there from day one (from day minus-a-bunch if you count the beta releases) and the hyperbolic inanity that led normal people to the misconception you had was never necessary in the first place.

<comment><USER7> Heh. Thanks for the info.

I just checked, I read about this at [http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/04/17/unprotected/](http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2016/04/17/unprotected/).

I must admit that I _am_ very curious why " _git and 64 other files in /usr/bin are all the same size (18176 bytes on my machine)_", why dtruss and strings fail, and what behavior changes when you turn rootless off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It might not be the memory concern it once was, but today it might very well be a power concern. Modern laptop display pipelines can save power if they don't have to redraw any of the screen: constantly updating status bar animations break that.[1]

1: [https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2013/712/](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2013/712/) (I think the relatively short graphics section mentions this. Can't seem to find the talk that goes into it in more detail...)

<comment><USER9> Can't watch on either Chrome or Firefox. Apple are real gits.

<comment><USER10> Neither Chrome or Firefox support HLS on the desktop despite providing support on mobile (since Android 3.0 I believe). They have categorically refused to add desktop support, if you have any complaints I would take it up with them.

<comment><USER11> Why would they support a closed, proprietary format when there exist better, open ones?

<comment><USER12> What is a better one? A patent pool has formed around DASH and you need to buy a license to use it:

[http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/MPEG- DASH/Pages/Intro.as...](http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/MPEG- DASH/Pages/Intro.aspx)

<comment><USER13> Use a plain file? It's not like that video is a real time feed anymore.

Otherwise, include a js player with HLS support for other browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Too bad the team which made that decision wasn't available to help the VS Code team not use 13% CPU to render a blinking cursor ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014))

<comment><USER15> We are in a different era now, where desktop apps are written in JS. Performance is implicitly thrown out of the window(s) when compared to software written for control over every bit of CPU and memory usage.

<comment><USER16> But the JS ecosystem learns things! They implement tree shaking and other stuff to improve performance!

Obviously real programmers learned all this decades ago - same for the "NoSQL" followers who after years of struggling with piles of cr.p finally (re)discover what a true ACID-capable database is...

I'm just waiting for the JS world to rediscover threads and proper multitasking, but given the track record I don't expect that in the next decade.

Seriously, the JS world is a hellhole of disasters, and many of them easily preventable if the people acting as "evangelists" actually had a bit of clue about what they're talking. And to top it off, a JS-only implementation will never be nearly as fast as well-written C or even C++ code, no matter how hard "evangelists" push it.

<comment><USER17> But C++ GUI toolkits are disaster. While any kid can put together a reasonable looking JS app, the default options in toolkits like Qt are junk. Common features like centering a QComboBox aren't there. Quickly, you're going to have to custom build every widget. Then you need to hire engineers to manually press all the buttons. These engineers won't be too good at art stuff, so guess what, now you need to hire graphic designers - many of whom aren't familiar with Qt. You're best bet is to pay a consulting company tons of money to make a GUI, which you will struggle to keep updated. Even with unlimited cash, the lead time for this is unjustifiable.

Do customers really want to trade performance for actual money? Are people still browsing the fatweb?

<comment><USER16> > Common features like centering a QComboBox aren't there

Well, browsers didn't have proper vertical centering for UI elements for ages, too. Not to mention it's between a PITA and impossible to do "simple" things like styling a file upload button (only works via pseudo CSS on Chrome) or cross-browser styling of a scrollbar (usually people tend to handroll JS stuff, which is expectedly slow and unintuitive).

> You're best bet is to pay a consulting company tons of money to make a GUI, > which you will struggle to keep updated.

It's the same in the Web sphere, with the added difference of clients not simply accepting "you cannot style a file upload button/input element cross- browser-like", they will usually answer you something along "it's the Web and HTML5 after all!!!". You will always need specialized engineers, designers and UX designers for a well-working app, no matter if native or web.

(But yes I agree with you that C++ GUI toolkits are a desaster, especially when cross-platform! And especially the build tooling _coughs at autotools_ )

<comment><USER15> What saddens me is that instead of improving the web software development process with tried and tested methodologies, the inverse happened, and the web and its terrible software ecosystems and perpetrators are somehow seen as the "cool kids" of software development. When observer pattern is seen as the holy grail of modern web development, you know we are in trouble.

<comment><USER18> The observer pattern isn't sold to everyone... The thing is, Web browsers have been nearly as diverse as OSes both historically and recently... But, you get a mostly compatible UI and runtime engine that's installed on pretty much every personal computing device out there. There's a lot to be said for that.

As to the "cool kids", they exist in every corner of things that get done by people. I think WebASM will open up to higher-level tools once it's widely available, and signalling between the UI layer and WebASM code becomes easier to deal with.

<comment><USER15> > But, you get a mostly compatible UI and runtime engine that's installed on > pretty much every personal computing device out there. There's a lot to be > said for that.

Only "lowest common denominator" comes to mind.

But to the point of this thread, what bothers me is the transcendence of web tech outside of browsers, where a technology known historically for terrible practices with a very low barrier to entry is now considered the "assembly" of all these platforms, such as mobile and desktop, and the developers, that until yesterday could only make a web page that loads 20MB of dependencies to show a few paragraphs of text, now call themselves "mobile developers" or "full-stack developers".

<comment><USER18> Well, I take a bit of offense to the last statement... in only that JavaScript is just as, or more valid as a server-side language for development as any other scripting language is. The engines themselves tend to be more optimized than alternatives, and combined with NPM/CJS modules a much nicer experience than many of the alternatives.

As to being able to target mobile/desktop, why not? I mean with Cordova and Electron you can target 4+ platforms with minimal code variance. And in most cases the performance is good enough, until you need more. And React-Native can go even further towards native/compiled language performance, with slightly more variance.

Yes, there is more memory and cpu use than alternatives, but there's also a real cost in developer time, and time to launch. In many cases it's the difference between having platform X, or not... the alternative is nothing, not something better in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a good article, but keep in mind the timeframe it writes about. Not only was it 22 years ago, its writing about systems at the bare minimum system requirements. (Personally speaking, I remember speccing out a previous gen Windows 3.1 machine with 8MB of RAM in 92... and this is covering 4MB systems in 1995. By that time, 8-16MB would've been common.)

Another story from the time is that I went to CompUSA (as a 'spectator') on the night of the Windows95 release. (It was a midnight release and the stores were open late.) There was a line out the door that snaked around through the store past the Windows 95 boxes, the Plus Pack, boxes, MS Office, and then the memory upgrade desk...

<comment><USER20> The Windows 95 hypetrain was truly something to behold. The Empire State Building lights in Windows colors, Friends castmembers appearing in a (truly lame) promotional video... Windows 95 was the release that put the phrase "operating system" on the common man's lips -- for better or worse.

<comment><USER21> I'd never heard of this "Friends castmembers" video, so I did a bit of YouTubing... I have no words (nearly an hour long, and I think there's a part- two): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGYcNcFhctc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGYcNcFhctc)

This led me to a few other videos: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2owaKucyU1Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2owaKucyU1Y)

Sigh. The 90s.

<comment><USER22> The 90s were really great in a lot of ways. But as you've shown, it was really awful in a few others.

I wonder if there's a parallel universe out there where Windows 95 never happened and Microsoft went out of business somehow. That would be the universe where the 90s were a truly wondrous age.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I worked on a visual programming language in late 80s. It would compile it's programs but the compiler was really slow, took minutes for small programs.

We worked on optimizing it but couldn't find much to optimize. Then the founder took out the code that updated the progress bar as it compiled and compiles finished 10x faster.

This was on Mac Plus.

<comment><USER24> Meanwhile in 2016: [https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283](https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/11283)

<comment><USER25> Truly seems like those that do not learn from history is forced to relive it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> And on current systems, updating every second would decrease battery life by preventing your system from sleeping. Modern systems can easily sleep for more than a second at a time, even with the screen on (and not updating).

I also, personally, can't stand to have distractions like that on my screen away from where I want to focus.

<comment><USER27> That's why Apple got rid of the Time Machine icon animation, IIRC.

<comment><USER28> I had completely forgotten about the Time Machine icon animating before. Interesting. Odd choice perhaps because I imagine most people have the hard drive at their desk, when wall power is easily available. There is a setting that enables backing up on battery power but I think the default value is disabled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Raymond once had an article about why the date/time control panel is not a calendar [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050621-04/?p=...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050621-04/?p=35253)

In Windows 7 they've finally given up and the UI lets you easily scroll up and down through months after clicking on the clock. (Edit: sorry I meant Windows 10)

<comment><USER30> > In Windows 7 they've finally given up

You mean seen sense? How often do you change the date or time on your computer? Probably never since it's automatic these days.

How often do you want to know the date, or what day of the week a day is? I'm guessing a lot more than never.

The old UI was stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Would have thought it would be useless because our eyes notice movement in the periphery and it distracts you to look at it. I would be annoyed with some animation going on that I don't care about.

</comment><comment><USER32> On Linux, there is a very practical reason: to reduce the number of wakeups per second, and save power.

You may think it is far fetched, but try a minimalist XFCE or LXDE desktop, run powertop updating every 5 seconds (so that screen refresh from powertop do not alter your measures) and see for yourself.

For that same reason, you may want to disable the blinking cursor, and conky, and other gizmos that blink things on the screen.

</comment><comment><USER33> ... in Windows 95.

I mean, the article describes why in versions of Windows from an era that was much more memory-constrained. Even in 2003, Windows 95 was as old as Android 2.2 is now. I configured my task bar to display seconds and can't say Cinnamon is hogging that much more memory or CPU because of it.

</comment><comment><USER34> My gut reaction was going to be that it fared poorly in user testing. I'd be pretty distracted by such a thing and prone to idly watching it :-D

</comment><comment><USER35> One thing I've always wondered about the taskbar clock is why they didn't just follow an existing time formatting standard...

[http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9pDonc_uipU/UEoMOdhA- eI/AAAAAAAABw...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9pDonc_uipU/UEoMOdhA- eI/AAAAAAAABw8/8gyhuFzTG3A/s1600/Edit_Digital_Clock_Configuration_Window.png)

...and invented their own:

[https://www.groovypost.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/01/image_...](https://www.groovypost.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/01/image_714.png)

<comment><USER36> From the screenshot, someone not familiar with strftime would be lost; but most people would be able to figure out the invented format. Also, it looked like users got to choose from a drop down of suggestions -- the "format string" was probably only for users to read, not actually parsed.

<comment><USER35> _Also, it looked like users got to choose from a drop down of suggestions -- the "format string" was probably only for users to read, not actually parsed._

Actually it is possible to write your own format string, since those are comboboxes:

[https://www.bleepstatic.com/tutorials/windows/customize- wind...](https://www.bleepstatic.com/tutorials/windows/customize-windows- time/time-customize-format.jpg)

Also, I would agree that the Windows UI is better since it provides a short description of the format letters; but they could've just as easily done that for the commonly-used strftime() specifiers too, with perhaps a link that opens a popup with all of them. The live preview at the top also helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I always have the seconds on (Ubuntu) and it's a good feature. I leave work every day at 17:28:15 sharp, otherwise I will miss my train (London DLR) and yes, seconds matter in this case.

<comment><USER38> If that isn't satire, how are you using the on-screen clock to do that?

Do you start staring at it at around 17:20 (or even earlier?) and wait for it to hit 17:28:15, or is your internal clock so good that you only have to start staring at it at 17:28:00?

Either way, why spend time staring at an on-screen clock if you also could spend that time walking to the train station, or even walking on the platform?

I would find some tool that allows me to set daily alarms at around 17:15 (as an early warning to finish whatever I am doing) and 17:28:15 (as a sign to leave now), so that I wouldn't have to waste time staring at that clock.

<comment><USER37> It's not that hard once you're used to it. I just glance at the clock several times towards the end of work to know exactly when to wind things down and stand up from my chair at exactly 17:28:15. The optimal time was determined by observing elevator business patterns, crowd thickness downstairs and delay margins of train arriving at my stop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > Because that blinking colon and the constantly-updating time were killing > our benchmark numbers.

Like Visual Studio Code uses 12% CPU in idle due to cursor blinking? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13940014)

In comparison the Windows Shell (up to Win7) is a lot more efficient and coded in C/C++.

</comment><comment><USER40> I have been using T-Clock for many years to get seconds in the taskbar clock. [https://github.com/White-Tiger/T-Clock](https://github.com/White- Tiger/T-Clock)

</comment><comment><USER41> MacOS can optionally show seconds. Anyone know if it has similar benchmark impact?

</comment><comment><USER42> If it's just for benchmarks, why not make it a preference (defaulted off), so benchmarks can be run with the default settings (off) just fine, but people can turn it on if they want to?

<comment><USER43> 1) People with it on would say "Windows is slow". 2) Because it adds code to maintain that doesn't need to be.

<comment><USER42> Displaying seconds is a valuable feature, so it's not a matter of having unnecessary code. As for being slow, the ability to display seconds was removed because of the minimum system requirements for Windows. Anyone with a machine that has more than the bare minimum can probably spare the kilobytes necessary to draw seconds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Funny thing is that Android removed in 5.0 animations in status bar to save power as redrawing frequently will eat battery.

</comment><comment><USER45> How could I benchmark this on XFCE nowadays?

</comment><comment><USER46> I always switch it on (KDE).</comment>