The CIA and Jeff Bezos Bet on Quantum Computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429429/the-cia-and-jeff-bezos-bet-on-quantum-computing/ <comment><USER2> The societal impact of quantum computing would be immense -- the entire security infrastructure of the web would have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

However, many experts -- including Scott Aaronson (who is mentioned in the article) -- have cast doubt on D-Wave's claims, because the company has not yet _proved_ that its machines are producing results by exploiting quantum phenomena like particle entanglement and superposition. In other words, D-Wave's devices may very well be different, but still classical, computers. D-Wave's engineers acknowledge as much: they are quoted in the article stating that "they don't yet know for sure what's happening inside the chip."

The fact that Bezos, a very smart guy, has invested in D-Wave, has changed my perception of the company from "these are likely crazy people making outrageous claims" to "maybe these guys are unto something." Exciting and a bit scary. Time will tell.

<comment><USER3> I think "don't yet know for sure what's happening" is a bit misleading to the casual reader. If they're actually being honest it's more like: don't know that anything "special" is happening.

Frankly, their devices just aren't quantum computers until they can show they perform quantum mechanically. Until then, they are just hype. Bezos' investment is perfectly rational as an affiliation move -- if he was serious, he'd donate to, say, the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo where real quantum computer development is taking place. But the press releases for their accomplishments get several orders of magnitude less attention, so why bother? (or, is it that you just can't buy in to IBM -- also real work -- or HRL)

Their job ads [1-3] focus is very telling to me; which are mostly for new algorithms people, with long unfilled placements for physicists and materials engineers. The big development in QC this decade has been that "materials matter", and that you can't just throw qubits together willy-nilly. D-Wave scaled their qubit count (see the ridiculous "Rose's Law" slide [4]) basically by ignoring all these problems.

[1-3] [http://www.dwavesys.com/en/files/20120627_d- wave_algorithms_...](http://www.dwavesys.com/en/files/20120627_d- wave_algorithms_researcher_job_ad.pdf) <http://www.dwavesys.com/en/files/senior_engineer_2011.pdf> <http://www.dwavesys.com/uploads/20091026_Design_Engineer.pdf> (<http://www.dwavesys.com/en/careers.html>)

[4] <http://www.dwavesys.com/en/dev-tutorial-hardware.html>

<comment><USER4> Just a side note - you're probably conflating Perimeter Institute (www.perimeterinstitute.ca) and Institute for Quantum Computing (<http://iqc.uwaterloo.ca/>). Both are in Waterloo, but it's the latter that is involved in developing quantum computing implementations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would it be overly conspiratorial to suggest that the CIA and NSA are in fact interested in a large-scale implementation of Shor's algorithm? Perhaps I underestimate how much use intelligence agencies have for optimization...

<comment><USER6> Can anyone provide an explanation of this in layman's terms? I took a look at wikipedia but am having a hard time wrapping my head around it..

<comment><USER7> A lot of public key cryptography methods used in the real world are based on the fact that factoring really big numbers is computationally unfeasible. Shor's algorithm makes it feasible, but it's a quantum algorithm that can't be run on a classical computer. Basically, alot of stuff won't be secure anymore when it's feasible to run Shor's algorithm.

<comment><USER8> But would new forms of currently-infeasible encryption become possible at the same time? Many forms of encryption have fallen over the years as technology and mathematics have advanced; while at the same time better encryption methods have been developed.

<comment><USER7> Oh, of course. The dance between defense and offense will continue as usual. However, there may be a window of time where a lot of services are left vulnerable in the transition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did anyone else catch the temperature miscalculation?

> It is actually a cold gun: the structure is a chilly -259 °F (4 °Kelvin) at > the wide end and a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero at its > tip...

4 degrees Kelvin is approx -452 Fahrenheit is approx -269 Celsius. Absolute zero is −459.67° F

<comment><USER9> 4 Kelvin is probably the correct number since that's the temperature of liquid helium.

<comment><USER10> You can go a bit lower than the temperature of liquid helium just as you can cool something to lower than the temperature of liquid water just by using evaporating water. However, 4 Kelvin is probably correct. The image they show appears to be of a cryostat that would almost certainly use helium as a cryogen. Such cryostats are realistically limited to around 2-3 Kelvin. They can go a bit lower when empty, but generally not if you stick a complex experiment with a lot of heat-conducting fibers and wires into them.

4K is probably warmer than they'd like for a quantum circuit, but getting their apparatus colder would require a much beefier cryostat or more exotic technologies like magnetic cooling built inside a helium cryostat. Such setups are capable of getting complex setups down to the hundreds of millikelvin, which is much nicer for this sort of work!

As for writing a scientific article using Fahrenheit... Please don't do that. Just don't.

<comment><USER9> Well obviously you can go lower, but 4K is the boiling point of Liquid Helium, so it's the easiest temperature to hold it at.

In the article they mention they chip itself is kept at millkelvin temperatures.

And I disagree about using Fahrenheit - this is not a paper in a journal, it's a lay article. By all means use Fahrenheit if that's what your audience understands. Don't let pedantry get in the way of clarity. (Kelvin has some real meaning, but C vs F is totally arbitrary. One is the freezing point of water, the other is the lowest temperature you can get with a salt/ice mixture.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Quantum computing and nuclear fusion power generation are probably 2 of the biggest problems to solve in order to make the next technological leap.

If D-Wave comprehensively cracks Quantum computing I reckon Bezos may become the world's first Trillionaire.

<comment><USER12> In the past, technology would provide efficiency to a problem, and a lot of times up root a job in the process. Which is okay, because a new job was created in the wake. Astute observers though might notice that the skill level has been increasing each time a job is transformed. This is okay when an evolution in technology is equivalent to a single lifetime, but as the evolution of technology speeds up the adaption becomes more difficult. I feel like we are seeing the effects of the last technological revolution today. As a software engineer, I get 4 emails a day from recruiters... but those with no technical skills are being unemployed in troves, and finding a job is near impossible.

So my question. What happens when an assumed intelligence explosion disrupts, an already disrupted world? I absolutely don't believe there's anything we can (or should) do to slow technological progress... but its an interesting topic to see how it affects society. There seems to be a disconnect, technology evolves exponentially, and society evolves linearly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > He (Arronson) and other critics say the company must still prove two things: > that its qubits really can enter superpositions and become entangled, and > that the chip delivers a significant "quantum speed-up" compared to a > classical computer working on the same problem.

I'm curious how one goes about "proving superposition"? If one does the most obvious thing, opening the box containing Schrodinger's cat to observer and hence prove state, then you've just lost the superposition.

Anyhow, for those wondering about addressing the impacts of successful quantum computing on cryptography (i.e. security of most things, including your banking transactions on the web), you should check out the efforts of Dan J. Bernstein (DBJ) and friends on the "Post-Quantum Crypto" web site:

<http://pqcrypto.org/>

Though research is still on-going, at present it seems some algorithms are resistant to quantum cryptanalysis. It might take a decade or two to retool all the systems using crypto vulnerable to quantum cryptanalysis ( _assuming someone succeeds in building a quantum computer_ ), but at least it seems like there's hope.

</comment><comment><USER7> Stop reading after the second paragraph, quantum computing isn't some magic wand you wave at problems to make them disappear. It's simply a new way of approaching them, and it requires algorithms designed to take advantage of this new approach to computing to solve said problems.

<comment><USER14> Those approaches are increasingly well-studied and a lot of them (Grover's algorithm, anyone?) look an awful lot like magic.

(For people who don't want to look that up, Grover's algorithm does searches on unsorted databases in root-n time, that is, in fewer operations than would be required to inspect every element of the database.)

<comment><USER5> Grover's algorithm does indeed look rather like magic, but even better is the geometrical proof - WP's description looks good at a quick skim. In my (fairly limited) experience, this sort of geometrical thinking is the best way to understand quantum algorithms intuitively.

<comment><USER15> Although Grover's algorithm is extremely impressive...it's a probabilistic algorithm, which means that the result is not guaranteed, but very likely. And the likelihood can be increased by running the algorithm more than once.

<comment><USER16> The likelihood increases exponentially because each time you run the algorithm it's independent of the previous times. Even if it's only 75% sure, you only need to run it a few dozen times before it's more likely for there to be a hardware fault in your _display_ giving you the wrong answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> On a related note, D-wave is sure posting some interesting job opportunities: [https://www.mitacs.ca/o/2012/07/cognition-and-creativity- fra...](https://www.mitacs.ca/o/2012/07/cognition-and-creativity-frameworks- engineer-dwave-systems-inc)

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't think their big contract with Lockheed Martin should be a good indicator of actual quantum computing. What they built is probably optimized for some of the problems that Lockheed Martin is trying to solve...

<comment><USER19> I have heard from people familiar with the Lockheed project that the purchase was largely motivated by tax incentives. Something along the lines of a Canadian-American agreement, in which companies could claim 10x as much business expenses if they were making purchases of research equipment from Canadian suppliers. The implication was that Lockheed never had strong confidence in this technology, but had little to lose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> No one has explained exactly what kind of problems would Quantum computer could solve well. From few articles I've read it is not for all kinds of tasks a magic ax.

if someone can expand on that, that would be great.

</comment><comment><USER21> What happened with all of the posts from this guy mocking D-Wave?: <http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=431>

<comment><USER17> "I hereby announce my retirement as Chief D-Wave Skeptic, a job that I never wanted in the first place." -<http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=639></comment></comment>


Gradient-Based Hyperparameter Optimization Through Reversible Learning - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03492 <comment><USER2> > The last remaining parameter to SGD is the initial parameter vector. > Treating this vector as a hyperparameter blurs the distinction between > learning and meta-learning. In the extreme case where all elementary > learning rates are set to zero, the training set ceases to matter and the > meta-learning procedure exactly reduces to elementary learning on the > validation set. Due to philosophical vertigo, we chose not to optimize the > initial parameter vector.

Comedy gold.

</comment><comment><USER3> Authors here, feel free to ask us anything!

<comment><USER4> First off, thanks for your efforts!

From what I've followed of machine learning, I feel like there are areas that are not very rigorous, for example where humans have to tune weights and parameters. Does your work address those places?

Specifically do you think you can train on enough parameters, and compare enough results, to begin to estimate how that tuning can be done automatically?

<comment><USER3> Yes, gradient-based hyperparameter optimization is one option for taking the human out of the loop to some extent. Of course, we can't avoid having to specify hyper-hyper-parameters!

More generally, automatic hyperparameter tuning (without gradients) is already a standard part of many researchers' pipelines.

It's also part of good scientific practice, since it makes it harder to bias the results towards a particular method.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just gave a brief run through the paper, and I'm curious: is reverse-mode differentiation in this context similar in concept to adjoint-type methods used in computational fluid dynamics (and increasingly, in design optimization in other fields)?

Backwards-propagation of a gradient calculation to allow for extremely high- dimensional parameter spaces is a trick that has been around for awhile in some circles, but also seems to have been missed in a lot of other disciplines. I'm seeing a lot of publications making use of it in the last few years, and it's pretty exciting to see them used in more places. My hope is that more scientific and engineering analysis codes will expose derivative interfaces for use in numerical optimization.

Here's some short papers with some background for those interested in the topic from a physical engineering perspective:

[http://www.piercelab.caltech.edu/assets/papers/ftc00.pdf](http://www.piercelab.caltech.edu/assets/papers/ftc00.pdf)

[http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/skoge/prost/proceedings/npcw09/A...](http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/skoge/prost/proceedings/npcw09/A-N- Ringset-R-1.pdf)

<comment><USER3> As far as I understand, the adjoint method computes gradients for functions that obey hard constraints (such as fluid solvers), and the main advantage is that it avoids differentiating through iterative constraint satisfaction procedures.

I had some success with naively differentiating through fluid solvers, though. Here is a fluid field whose initial velocities have been initialized so that it will end up matching a given image (i.e. blowing a fancy smoke ring:)

[https://github.com/HIPS/autograd/blob/master/examples/fluids...](https://github.com/HIPS/autograd/blob/master/examples/fluidsim/animated.gif)

and here's a free-form wing shape in the middle of being optimized to maximize lift-to-drag ratio:

[https://github.com/HIPS/autograd/blob/master/examples/fluids...](https://github.com/HIPS/autograd/blob/master/examples/fluidsim/wing.png)

I too find it baffling when I see engineers doing gradient-free optimization of simulated objective functions, although it's not always easy to compute gradients, especially when using massive Fortran codebases or very large-scale simulations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do we now need hypervalidation sets?

<comment><USER3> Right, once we start heavily hyper-parameterizing our models, there's the potential to overfit the hyperparameters. I think most people agree that has already happened on common datasets such as MNIST.

However, the current method of avoiding hyperparameters is just to have very few of them. This is kind of like avoiding overfitting of parameters by only having 10 parameters in your model - barbaric!

That being said, for hyper-gradients to really be useful, someone needs to develop hyperparameter optimization schemes such as BayesOpt that can condition on gradient information, to allow us to try different hyperparameter settings in parallel. I know at least one group is working on this, but as far as I know it's not ready for prime time yet.

<comment><USER7> Could overfitting also be addressed by sharing and optimizing hyperparameters over multiple datasets? For example, could initialization be shared across multiple handwriting sets?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Will this research continue at HIPS or is it all going to Twitter?</comment>


The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial - <AUTHOR> http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mcmartin/mcmartinaccount.html

<comment><USER2> Think of these cases every time you look down at our ancestors for holding witchcraft trials.

At least for the Massachusetts ones in Salem the state realized it had made a mistake, apologized and held a day of ... remembrance or whatever. Today's Massachusetts pursued the Amiraults to the bitter end (and that was probably a factor in Scott Brown's Senate win).</comment>


Ask HN: What documentary films inspired you the most? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> American Splendor - About comic creator Harvey Pekar, who isn't an artist, just a storyteller. But was the creator of some popular cult-classic comics detailing his ordinary life tribulations and trials. Creativity comes in all forms.

Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi - these are usually more considered artsy films but they also small views of different cultures busy at work and how they interact.

Some of the early Nova series programs (early = 1980's) they had some really great stuff such as the Exploratoruim - its history and a really good bit about how they designed/built exhibits (with the founder, Dr. Frank Oppeheimer)... and another one on Open Spaces, particularly centering on the public spaces in New York and the studies of maximizing planning and design for public usability. It just illustrated to me there are a wide variety of real life problems in need of solutions.

Bell Science Educational Series - (1956-64, available on VHS) covers a lot of ground in many aspects of sciences (not just physics and chemistry) Very approachable for a kid from the sticks. :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> The entire Connections series. I know it is going through a revival right now thanks to Reddit and such, but I grew up on the VHS tapes from the local library. I'm sure it had an impact on my life, even if I'm not 100% clear what that impact was.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like the _city symphony_ style of low-narrative documentary films from the early 20th century, which depict the rhythms and textures of a modern city.

Examples:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin:_Symphony_of_a_Metropoli...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin:_Symphony_of_a_Metropolis)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_with_a_Movie_Camera>

</comment><comment><USER5> Indie Game: The Movie

Minecraft: The Story of Mojang

I would love a documentary that is like M:TSoM, but solely about app developers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Stanley Kubrick: A life in pictures

Man on Wire

Most stuff by Herzog

Transcendent Man - Ray Kurzweill

Die Hard (just kidding)

</comment><comment><USER7> The Imposter - maybe not inspiring but an amazing documentary.

</comment><comment><USER8> Startup.com

Exit Through the Gift Shop

Ilha Das Flores

</comment><comment><USER9> The Money Masters by Bill Still</comment>


Show HN: Chrome Extension Displaying Social Media Link Previews - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-share-preview/ggnikicjfklimmffbkhknndafpdlabib <comment><AUTHOR> As I was coding away on the Placid ( [https://placid.app](https://placid.app) ) Wordpress-Plugin I noticed I needed a simpler way to look at og:images and twitter:cards and created an uncomplicated injected Container to do that in my Wordpress installation.

After that, I wanted it for "ALL THE SITES" \- and so a little Chrome Extension fell out of it :)</comment>


The most common myth about programming - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-most-common-misconceptions-myths-about-programming/answer/Max-Ri-1?share=466260cc&srid=aPrS <comment><USER2> I believe the most common myth about programming is that you have to be a genius or you won't ever be good enough.

<comment><USER3> Careful, logical, thoughtful, and a bit creative are all good.

Thinking oneself to be a genius is generally a handicap from observing hires and peers who have! Dunning–Kruger ahoy...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cor! That's rather belligerent. There's lots of ways of doing a good programming job, appropriate to the task in hand, and being able to pass a lambda as an argument is not the only measure of such. And I speak as someone lucky enough to have been able to pass and curry lambdas since the 80s, BTW...

<comment><AUTHOR> I seriously doubt that someone like yourself, who's been currying since the 80s, would invent a language that didn't have multi-line lambdas. And that's the whole point.

<comment><USER3> For shell scripting?

For all (new) DSLs?

For assembly languages?

Functions as first order entities are nice, but plenty of new code gets written in languages without, eg C, because it's up to the job. Just because a feature is nice and useful for some high level algorithms and languages, does not make it indispensable for all tasks.

I've spent most of my professional life managing without just fine for practical purposes. Unless you'd like to admit special cases such as Java's single method inner classes for example.

The 30kloc of C++ (11) we now have running an energy-saving radiator valve (TRV) does have some lambdas, because they're handy, but I'm not sure that any of them are multi-line to be really specific in rebutting the claim...

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not about using lambdas everywhere all the time. This is about recognizing that those who create programming languages are not omniscient. I'm not sure why you're so adamant about misrepresenting my point.

<comment><USER4> This isn't about recognizing omniscience not. This is about bad-mouthing someone who wrote a programming language that doesn't support multi-line lambdas.

(Bad-mouthing: "not at this level of of programming", "This is a really huge problem because only 25% of people are capable of thinking for themselves", with the implication that van Rossum cannot think for himself.)

Explicit in there is the view that one _must_ program with multi-line lambdas in order to be at a higher level of programming competency. A view I disagree with.

Your account name is appropriate as this is sort of smug attitude seems common among Lisp fans. I think they see Lisp (or Scheme) as a jewel of a language, but feel themselves in the doldrums of the programming world. They can't figure out why others aren't using it, and decide that others must simply be sheep.

That's bad-mouthing as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brabant Killers - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabant_killers <comment><USER2> Guess this was posted now due to this article earlier this week: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/16/belgian- police...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/16/belgian-police- release-photo-in-bid-to-crack-crazy-brabant-killers-case)

</comment><comment><USER3> Basically the group appeared many times, killing in total 28 people, (!) wounding others, all for no significant financial gain (even "robberies" with _nothing_ taken).

"The last gang robbery (despite patrols checking the supermarket every twenty minutes) led to rumors of them having some kind of inside knowledge and possibly complicity by individual gendarmes in the attacks. Nearby Gendarmerie vehicles (which had a semiautomatic FN Uzi in a compartment) did not engage or pursue the gang. The Belgian "stay-behind" network SDRA8 (Gladio) — operating as a secret branch of the Belgian military service — was suggested by some to have links to the gang. Some units of the stay-behind network were made up of members of the Belgian Gendarmerie. One theory was that the communist threat in Western Europe was taken as justifying Operation Gladio being activated. However, the Belgian parliamentary inquiry into Gladio found no substantive evidence that Gladio was involved in any terrorist acts or that criminal groups had infiltrated the stay-behind network."

SDRA8:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_stay- behind_network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_stay-behind_network)

<comment><USER2> Cool, never heard of that (Gladio). Born shortly after it was dissolved might explain that :)

<comment><USER3> It's significantly worse than you could imagine:

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

"The role of the CIA in Gladio ... are the subject of debate. The European Parliament resolution on Gladio concluded that _military secret services in certain member states were involved in serious terrorism and crime, whether or not their superiors were aware_.[2]"

But it was a secret, and researched only later.

<comment><USER2> Yup you're right, worse than I can imagine. I always have the impression that, at least nowadays, Belgium doesn't really have the resources to do super shady things (NSA-style things)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


18-year-old's breakthrough invention can recharge phones in seconds - <AUTHOR> http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/19/18-year-olds-breakthrough-invention-can-recharge-phones-in-seconds/

<comment><USER2> I'm sure I've missed a few, but here are some previous submissions of this story:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5730887> (nbcnews.com) <\- moderate discussion

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5737910> (dailymail.co.uk)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738327> (dailymail.co.uk)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738595> (techspot.com)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5741949> (cnn.com)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5742227> (twocircles.net)

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5743341> (sfgate.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> I haven't seen any article that explains this in finer detail. Everyone is talking about the achievement at a very high level - and that is about it.</comment>


Luda: A lightweight and responsive UI framework for modern web development - <AUTHOR> https://oatw.github.io/luda <comment><USER2> Whenever I stumble upon yet another UI/CSS framework, I always check the form elements first. Here we go.[1]

* _Every_ input needs a <label>.

* Use the `for` attribute to connect labels and inputs.

* Placeholders are not a replacement for labels. You don't need placeholders just for the sake of it.[2]

* Do not build custom form elements if it can be done without them. There is no need for the dropdown, just use <select>.

* Do use <fieldset> and <legend> to group multiple checkbox/radio inputs.

* Error texts should be connected to the particular input via `aria-describedby`.

* Do use the `required` attribute if form fields are mandatory.

[1]: [https://oatw.github.io/luda/0.1.x/elements/form](https://oatw.github.io/luda/0.1.x/elements/form), [https://oatw.github.io/luda/0.1.x/patterns/form- group](https://oatw.github.io/luda/0.1.x/patterns/form-group)

[2]: [https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/forms/instructions/#placeho...](https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/forms/instructions/#placeholder- text)

<comment><USER3> To add to this:

\- check the contrast accessibility: it seems very poor for read-only fields due to the opacity. Even the default seems low for body text.

I think there's great documentation of customization, but I had a few questions related to design decision:

Why data-readonly and not use readobly and other browser native html5 attributes like validation?

Why flexbox and not grid? If you're only targeting latest browsers: this could provide some greater power.

Another thing I noticed is that FF is noted as not supporting CSS scrollbsrs, but it is coming: will Luda be updated when it's available?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello memco!

Thanks for the good questions!

1\. The `data-readonly` attribute behaves different from the native readonly attribute, developers may use the native readonly attribute in their own customized components. I don't want developers to get stuck in such situations. That's why the native readonly attribute is not overridden in Luda.

About native HTML validation: Native validation popovers can not be easily customized in all browsers. Maybe some developers still want to validate forms in JS instead of the native HTML validation. It's a choice to developers how to validate forms, Luda does't limit the ways.

2\. CSS grid is an awosome feature, I'm sure it will be implemented in future versions. But before version 1.0.0, making Luda stable is the main target.

3\. Luda aims to be a modern framework, so any new features will be considered seriously, including CSS scrollbars in Firefox.

At last, the styles of the form components may be changed due to some problems, not only the contrast accessibility.

I'm very happy you look into Luda for details, please keep an eye on future versions if you're interested. Your suggestions are import to me. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I cannot unsee this. My eyes are going to hurt for a while from the moving background.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well~ Sorry for that. Maybe the background will be removed in the future. But personally, I like to keep it for a while.

<comment><USER5> At least make it slower though. Nothing against moving background, but this is a bit extreme.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your kindly suggestion! I've changed the background.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is text so faint and small ?

<comment><USER2> Raleway is such a poor typeface choice. They even forgot to import the italic styles from Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I made a mistake - taking personal feelings over user experiences.

I'll consider using the Open Sans font for body texts.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Besides, please consider to make headlines bold again. That would help a lot with content hierarchy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it! I'll handle this later.

I'm going to sleep now.

Good night!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its painful to read on my FHD Dell. Constrast is poor with white on red and grey on dark gray. Most frameworks apart from Bootstrap and Material are unreadable on older screens and people still use 768p screens that dont show in outdoor light.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, indeed. Maybe that's one of the reasons why Bootstrap is the most popular UI framework in the world.

But not all the UI frameworks target nomatter new devices or old devices. It depends on the authors' choices.

Enhancing the typo accesibility and contrast are already proposed in others' comments, I think it's a problem to solve.

Thanks for your comment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On mobile I have to scroll up and open the hamburger menu to advance to the next page. Prev/Next links at the bottom of each doc page would be great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds great! Thanks for the suggestion! I'll solve this later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks sharp and clean. Are there any projects already using Luda, that anyone would like to share. So we can see it in action?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello coffeefox!

Luda has just been released for 2 days. Before this release, I used it in some internal projects of the company I'm working for. I'm sorry for unable to share these projects currently.

Personally, I'm using it to build my blog with Rails, the blog will come out soon!

For Luda, there's still a long way to go.

Thanks for your comment! Have a good day!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks awesome and very complete. Looking forward to example projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's still a young project.

Examples will be added, but I'm not sure about the time.

Thanks very much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why did you feel the need to create another UI framework?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://dev.to/oatw/why-and-how-i-built-my-own-ui- framework-...](https://dev.to/oatw/why-and-how-i-built-my-own-ui-framework- inspite-of-so-many-great-ones-9g6)</comment></comment>


Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67N5CC20100824?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FscienceNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Science%29&utm_content=Twitter <comment><USER2> The lab that did the study is part of a team that received a $500MM award from BP. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

<http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml>

<comment><USER3> They aren't the only ones studying this; are you aware of anything that contradicts their results? From studies to simple observations that things stopped getting worse when the well was capped?

(I for one an _extremely_ tired of this sort of attack, which among other things implies that government funded researchers are a pure as the driven snow. OK, I exaggerate, but it's been well demonstrated in _many_ fields that deviating from the scientific establishment's orthodoxy results in your no longer being able to get government funding for your research.)

<comment><USER4> Check this out:

[http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100819/full/news.2010.420.ht...](http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100819/full/news.2010.420.html)

<http://gulfblog.uga.edu/>

<comment><USER5> I believe the article you linked to discusses the same study the OP acknowledges.

 _"These latest findings may initially seem to be at odds with a study published last Thursday in Science by researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution..."_

 _"The Woods Hole team used an autonomous robot submarine and a mass spectrometer to detect the plume, but were forced to leave the area in late June...But that was before the well was capped in mid-July. Hazen said that within two weeks of the capping, the plume could not be detected"_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hijacking this to say that the use of the colon in this title and others like it is deeply offensive. It should be:

"Study: Microbes Ate BP Oil Deep-Water Plume"

It doesn't make any sense for it to be the other way around!

Also, hurray that the worst case scenario didn't happen. I will try to remember this the next time I read sky-is-falling articles from commenters at the Oil Drum.

<comment><USER7> Why do you think it doesn't make sense? A colon doesn't necessarily imply the format, "person: person's statement", or "term: definition", but can also be used in titles with the form "title: subtitle" or "title: explanation". I think you might just be mixing up typical uses of colons in programming language syntax with "correct" usage in English.

There's no ultimately "right" or "wrong" (or, sheesh, "deeply offensive") usage of punctuation, only conventional or atypical. This particular usage is straight-forward to understand (were you seriously confused?), and quite common in titles and headlines of all sorts. In this case, putting "study" at the end emphasizes the first part of the title: so what?

<comment><USER6> You wanted a period at the end of that last sentence, not a colon.

When one thing says another, for example, a study says a finding, the sayer goes on the left. For example:

HouseAbsolute: That's just how it's done.

as in a play, or

HouseAbsolute said: that's just how it's done.

in the less often seen form of this use. That's just how it is done. I dislike it being done the opposite way in titles because I think it probably misleads people into thinking it's an acceptable way to use the punctuation in a typical sentence, where in fact it is backwards from the way it should be in a typical sentence.

> or, sheesh, "deeply offensive"

Exaggeration: something I use occasionally. (This is the appositive form of the colon, according to Wikipedia.)

> There's no ultimately "right" or "wrong" usage of punctuation.

I'm not a strong prescriptive punctuationist, but I do feel we should not use misleading punctuation when we can avoid it or when it doesn't add much. A dash would be fine here, because it's a fairly typical way of showing quotation, although not historically accepted yet. The colon, however, is not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We should turn those microbes loose on the deficit too then.

<comment><USER3> I'm afraid that condition already obtains: the microbes were up to the task since the a lot of oil naturally seeps into the Gulf every year (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_seep>) and in this case they just had a whole lot more to chow down on.

Similarly, there are entities many would rank at the moral level of microbes that are _highly_ evolved to feast on endless quantities of Federal money, borrowed or not. Their answer to the deficit is like the Gulf's microbes: "more, yum!" which is not quite what I think you're looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found this article a more lucid overview of the situation:

<http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100831/full/467016a.html>

<comment><USER3> Ah, yes. that's really useful:

Like the Woods Hole study it was published in _Science_ , a notorious tool of the industrial establishment ^_^.

The "bugs" are of the the order _Oceanospirillales_.

One item I was able to Google said they are facultatively anaerobic (<http://www.springerlink.com/content/v46161x20k433868/>), which would explain how they could feast without serious oxygen depletion and that the latter is not necessarily a good proxy for detecting oil.

This further explains how the two studies nicely mesh together (which their PIs agree upon). Woods Hole found oil but normal oxygen levels, LBNL found facultatively anaerobic "bugs" that were eating the oil without serious oxygen consumption.

(We can also assume that if these bugs can be cultured and kept viable, the basic metabolic details can be elucidated (assuming they haven't been already) and such _in vitro_ results will further help confirm the LBNL study.)

And as it noted this is all months old data, but both studies will help guide further searches for BP oil source oil and these bugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This might be the answer to our "depleted ocean fish stock" problem. Feed the bottom of the food chain and we'll have plenty of fish in 5 years.

<comment><USER3> With the possible exception of damaged ocean bottoms, I'm not aware of any "depleted ocean fish stock" problem that's a loss of total biomass. What we've seen with e.g. the cod off of New England is the suppression of an apex predictor to the point where many suspect it has been replaced by new apex predators that have prevented its revival to commercially significant numbers.

Bad news if you love the taste of cod (as I do, I showed up in the Boston area in its waning days) but not quite the same thing.

That said, iron is said to be the limiting micro-nutrient in the oceans (mostly in the context of CO2 geo-engineering) so adding that to an area would be a first step to achieving greater biomass. But it still wouldn't bring back the cod :-(.

<comment><USER10> To some extent, I find it kind of disheartening that the only reason that you care about over-fishing and the possible extinction of species is how it affects your dinner plate... (i.e. If you didn't like the taste of cod, then you wouldn't care about it at all.)

<comment><USER3> Errr ... I'm not sure where you came to that conclusion from what I said. I follow the cod situation because of "how it affects [my] dinner plate" and because I had a near front row seat to the whole mess for a dozen years, I don't follow the blue-fin? tuna one closely because I don't care all that much about them. And, yeah, I was raised by a fisher and _very_ serious hunter and I often view animals through the lens of their ending up on my dinner plate.

None of that has anything to do with how much I might care about "possible extinction", which is something I'm mostly resigned to (e.g. see the passenger pigeon), except ... as far as I know, we're not talking about that with former apex predators. It 's just that their stocks are no longer commercially viable, the theory here being that they are now prey.

That might result in them going extinct, but I don't think that's the default assumption. I bet if you wanted to set up a cod fish farm it wouldn't be _too_ difficult to get wild-type breeding stock to start with. No one's done that (as far as I know) since there are other areas with cod and similar fish that haven't seen a population collapse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> But wasn't this the expected outcome by people who actually work in this industry and knew the type of oil being released into the Gulf?

From the sources I read, this is what they said would happen. But this didn't sell as well as the catastrophic view point.

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1297820...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129782098)

</comment><comment><USER13> You know, this makes sense. Bubbles of oil have risen from the ocean bottom before, (no I cannot find a reference, I am disappointed by this, but if humans can cause it then nature can do worse more often) and we have not found any big dead spots in the ocean floor. It makes since either it happens incredibly rarely or the ocean's ecosystem had a natural defense to the problem.

</comment><comment><USER14> Anyone know if there are any extra dangers from eating shrimp that have been chowing down on these microbes?

</comment><comment><USER15> Sorry this is probably dumb question but does this imply the oil is mostly cleaned up now?

</comment><comment><USER16> So what happened to the benzene in the crude oil? Did the microbes eat that too?

</comment><comment><USER17> Reading "light sweet Louisiana crude" actually made me hungry. Sounds like a Cajun dish . . .

</comment><comment><USER18> then why did the BP people need to dump untold gallons of corexit in the gulf? that was idiotic.

<comment><USER19> They probably didn't know about these microbe's effectiveness. That, and there was so much publicity about the problems that they had to do ~something~ --- doing nothing would have been taken even worse by the public. Seriously, imagine BP saying, "uh ... yeah, there's not a problem, billions of tiny microbes are going to take care of our accident." People would have mocked them plenty, and their PR guys wouldn't want that.</comment></comment>


How to Give Mars an Atmosphere, Maybe (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/-how-to-give-mars-an-atmosphere-maybe- <comment><USER2> There is not enough CO2 or any other such gas on Mars to make an atmosphere better than 5% of Earth's, even if you razed the surface kilometers down and boiled the ice caps and installed an artificial magnetosphere.

[https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-018-0529-6](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-018-0529-6)

20 millibars is essentially the long-term limit without piping in gas from other planets or comets.

There's plenty of science and exploration to be done on Mars, and efforts towards getting people there are admirable, but let's keep it red. Non- scientists (like Elon) should at least consider not ignoring the data we've spent billions of dollars collecting and confirming over the past 50 years.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just don't get the point of humans living on Mars. Literally the entire surface of the earth, including the seafloor, is more habitable than Mars and can be reached without having to fight the rocket equation. Sure, thinking about space travel and terraforming is fun, but what compelling reason is there for mankind to invest unbelievable amounts of resources in actually doing it?

<comment><USER4> off-site backup?

Seriously though, another independent human colony would lend some much needed perspective to the worlds political problems.

Also what if just because we can might be enough reason? Maybe we can't, that would be quite important to know too.

<comment><USER3> These are the standard arguments people bring in favor of human spaceflight. I don't find them compelling enough to justify the enormous cost of such a project. A serious attempt at colonizing Mars would probably consume a significant fraction of the GDP of whichever country/ies is/are doing it. Currently, we are not even close to investing such amounts of money in order to solve much more pressing issues, such as climate change.

<comment><USER4> None of that is money problem though. Your (I presume) country has like 11 aircraft carriers? + 2 being built and 2 ordered ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_of_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_of_the_United_States_Navy))

What can 11 do that you can't with 8? & the matching carrier group.

Having somewhere else that none of that applies to would be incredible.

<comment><USER5> There's a more or less linear relationship between the number of carriers and how much time you have them deployed. They require an awful lot of maintenance.

Which I'm not weighing in on whether more are necessary, just that more carriers does mean more time deployed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This terraforming Mars argument always sounds a bit "mechanical horse" to me. By the time we'd be able to do this, we would have merged our "survival machine" human body with technology and would not require the incubator of earth's environment to survive. Feels more likely that in a century or two we'd have essentially immortal carbon nanotube exoskeletons wrapped around human brains going wherever the hell they want across the solar system and beyond.

</comment><comment><USER7> Would have appreciated if someone noticed the spell-checker underlining in the slide screenshot and...fixed it.

</comment><comment><USER8> If terraforming Mars were to be successful, wouldn't the long-term livability of Mars still be hampered by having about a third of Earth's gravity?

I imagine it to dramatically affect human physiology, making it perhaps impossible for Martians to ever return to Earth.

<comment><USER9> Also, the lack of a magnetic field to protect from solar radiation.

<comment><USER10> I think this is the crucial point. When I heard this I gave up hope.

<comment><USER11> Why? You're not going to be spending most of your time out on suits anyway. Put some sandbags on the roof.

<comment><USER12> Because the atmosphere will be stripped away by the Sun. But see comment about generating a magnetic field.

<comment><USER13> Yes, over billions of years the atmosphere will be stripped away. But the process is way too slow for us to worry about.

<comment><USER12> [https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars- atmo...](https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars- atmosphere.html)

NASA estimates, given Mars was given a magnetic field, it would only take a century (give or take) to start to melt oceans. So your estimate seems to be off by a bit.

<comment><USER11> Did you reply to the wrong comment?

<comment><USER12> No - it means that the solar wind is affecting the atmosphere enough that a greenhouse effect on Mars is not getting started, even though it could if there was a magnetic field on the planet.

This means the solar wind effect is not negligible. An artificial magnetic field plus other means could have a drastic and extremely rapid (in geologic terms, hundreds of years) effect on Mars climate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't the problem with a artificial atmosphere also the low gravity? How to solve that? Or is it strong enough that the loss can be compensated?

</comment><comment><USER2> Why is this marked as (2017) when it's dated November 15, 2019?

</comment><comment><USER15> Let's fix our own planet first before fixing another one ha

<comment><USER16> This is a silly argument. We can do more than one thing at a time.

<comment><USER17> Not so silly. Resources are limited

<comment><USER16> Are you in charge of all the resources? If not, it's a silly argument. People will do whatever they want to do. You might as well propose herding cats.

<comment><USER17> Maybe is silly for you.

"If you are not (put some impossible random requisite here) then you are wrong"

Well... As other billions of people, I don't need to be "in charge of all the resources in the planet" or "to be Santa Claus or Jesus" to talk about the problems of humankind (or to be aware that neglecting earth conservation, to put five machines more or less in Mars none less, is a terribly stupid idea). If you equal asking more resources for nature conservation with proposing herding cats, then your logic has some serious loopholes.

<comment><USER18> Those loopholes are features, not bugs. They allow the mind to close the door to consideration of reflexive problems. Those with a feedback loop back to the self. It really simplifies existence! xD</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


To a child, often the box a toy came in is more appealing than the toy itself - <AUTHOR> http://vincentsanders.blogspot.com/2015/02/to-child-often-box-toy-came-in-is-more.html <comment><USER2> Slightly misleading headline, but after reading the article I have to admit I have been in the same position myself. After years or pilling on HDDs, I now have a small collection that would be better used as a side storage. Sadly I haven't been able to find any decent solutions (i.e. good price/quality ratio). You either go with expensive NAS solutions, or find feeble HDD enclosures that are prone to failure. Has anyone found something good to house 3-4+ HDDs that can be accessed via USB?

<comment><USER3> I just put a bunch of external 4TB USB drives on a Mac Mini which is also connected to home theater. I was going to go with a Synology or QNAP but 1) drives were expensive when I was buying (no longer true) 2) this is incremental 3) none of the lower end devices support decent full-disk crypto -- you need to go up to an i3-based system, which is kind of pricey.

I looked for the same thing (a multi-drive USB enclosure), but a good Pluggable hub and a bunch of discrete drives seems to work better.

ZFS seems like the right solution now, so if I move to a place with an equipment closet, I'll probably do that. (current solution is also pretty quiet)

<comment><USER2> So out of curiosity, what file system format are you using? HFS+?

<comment><USER3> Yes :( I realize this is suboptimal, but it's easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a child I recall using imagination to superimpose the glorious boxart of Atari 2600 cartridges onto the crude sprites of the actual games.

[http://a.dilcdn.com/bl/wp- content/uploads/sites/6/2015/02/em...](http://a.dilcdn.com/bl/wp- content/uploads/sites/6/2015/02/empire-atari.jpg) [http://babysoftmurderhands.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/08/Ha...](http://babysoftmurderhands.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/08/Haunted_House_-_1981_-_Atari.jpeg) [http://www.retrogamesnow.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/at...](http://www.retrogamesnow.co.uk/wp- content/uploads/2013/10/atari-2600-breakout.jpg) [http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/scale_small/9/93770/2367...](http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/scale_small/9/93770/2367714-a2600_junglehunt_au.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER5> Makespace mentioned in the article is this one:

[http://makespace.org/](http://makespace.org/)

"a community workshop in Cambridge for making and fixing things, meeting people, working on projects and sharing skills."

<comment><USER6> Here's a list of places similar to that: [http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces](http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_Hacker_Spaces)

Unfortunately, only the larger hackerspaces have laser cutters, so your milage may vary. Fablabs are also places you can look into, however they usually cost quite a bit (techshop for example costs 100$ per month) compared to hackerspaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, this has nothing to do with the article, but the title of the article has almost nothing to do with the article either.

One of the things my kids (6 and 4 now) love more than anything: 1\. Go to home depot, buy 20-30 packing boxes of various sizes ($50-$100). 2\. Buy a bunch of packing tape and one of the tape rollers ($10-$20) 3\. Buy two good box cutters ($10)

Now, when the kids are asleep, stay up all night and build something. I've done haunted houses, Christmas castles, and more. It's really fun and helps work some creative juices that normally don't get worked by just programming. Kids love it and will play with it daily. And when they've finally destroyed it, it can just be recycled. We had this year's Halloween creation up for two months until we took it down for Christmas.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm finding the bizarre phenomena of people commenting before having read the article just as interesting as the article itself

<comment><USER7> The article itself is actually pretty boring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a child incredibly into LEGOs, Tinker Toys, Linkin Logs, K-nex, etc., I can say this was never the case.

<comment><USER10> I think the saying is more a commentary on all the useless crap we buy kids for their birthdays, holidays, etc that are played with for 10 minutes and then thrown in a corner. For many of these "filler" gifts the box literally is more fun than the gift.

Like you said though, there are some gifts that stick with a child... My Commodore 64 that I received in 1982 and my 300 baud modem I received in 1985 for instance changed the entire path of my life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> To a cat too.

</comment><comment><USER12> And the box the refrigerator came in is the best toy of all.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think we've all seen this first hand. Christmas, young kids, ripping out the shiny wrapping, the box, and then having this look 'is that it ? that was cool' while leaving the toy on the floor.

Isn't it the same for adults though ?

<comment><USER14> Did you read the article?

<comment><USER13> Obviously..

Ironically, I am in the exact same situation, having collected many ThinkPads parts, I have a dozen of drives sitting here and am just finishing pushing everything onto a ZFS NAS. Still I'd like to repurpose all these drives (web cache/proxy, DMZ, tiny cloud)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This only happens when the toy is badly chosen.

I volunteered to teach very young children to use 3d printers basically for making toys, and it is incredible how much they have inside when the toy is open. The only problem with 3d printers is time.

Children want open toys, a helicopter that can dive and then transform into a car.

A box and two wires could become a car that girls could use to add passengers. The passengers could be a piece of cardboard and a boam ball, made in 15 seconds.

Passengers could talk, and be daddy, or mom, or grandma.

It is sad so many times the box(and paper) is the most open thing children could have access to.

Legos that could only make one thing is not what children wants, it is what manufacturers want. Fragile dolls. Dumb toys so kids do not harm themselves(which makes them not learn basic responsibility).

<comment><USER16> Read the article before commenting please.

<comment><USER17> Frankly I think the discussion about children and toys is a bit more interesting than some storage thing, but to each his own.</comment></comment></comment>


The Art of Computer Programming Reading Group - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibiblio.org/taocprg/

<comment><USER2> Reading group from 2005. The author comments:

 _Not surprisingly, after a very short period of time, this fell to the wayside. The page and schedule are left up for anyone who has interest in their own push through TAoCP._

Anybody care to comment on whether the pacing seems appropriate?

<comment><USER3> I suspect this might have been easier to accomplish without taking on the exercises. I'd try going through the texts first, gaining some understanding, and then follow it up with some serious exercise crunching whenever I felt like it.

That way, I at least gain a theoretical understanding of the stuff - enough to understand what some CS papers talk about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recently saw Alex Stepanov quoted recommending TAoCP to his students, saying "It is something that they should keep studying for the rest of their lives." While that might be excessive (volume 3 is still less than 40 years old, right?), I think a year sounds short.

</comment><comment><USER5> Reading all volumes of TAoCP from cover to cover is probably unnecessary, it's _reference_ material mostly. Also, the pace of "just over 34 pages a week" for such heavy material is insane.

</comment><comment><USER6> What does it mean to say you "don't have time to get a computer science degree"? Like, have you been diagnosed with a chronic disease? When you go to college you generally want to be "all in," to the extent that often you _actually_ won't have time for a job or for socializing.

<comment><USER7> My guess would be that it means taking four years off from his career would be seriously detrimental to some other goal, e.g. continuing to feed his family.

<comment><USER6> I assumed that's what he meant, but I think that's more an issue of not being able to _afford_ to go to college.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Start with this (a more realizable goal):

[http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Computer-Science-Language- Inf...](http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Computer-Science-Language- Information/dp/1881526917)

</comment><comment><USER9> The pace seems too fast to me. Working through some of the exercises should be attempted and these are not your typical textbook exercises.</comment>


Insufficient Sleep Associated with Risky Teen Behavior - <AUTHOR> https://neurosciencenews.com/sleep-teen-behavior-9938/ <comment><USER3> "Compared to students who reported sleeping eight hours at night, high school students who slept less than six hours were twice as likely to self-report using alcohol, tobacco, marijuana or other drugs, and driving after drinking alcohol. They were also nearly twice as likely to report carrying a weapon or being in a fight."

Have they established causation? Or could it be that lifestyle including alcohol and weapons also happens to involve less sleep?

<comment><USER4> "Compared to students who reported sleeping eight hours at night, high school students who slept less than six hours were twice as likely to self-report using alcohol, tobacco, marijuana or other drugs, and driving after drinking alcohol. They were also nearly twice as likely to report carrying a weapon or being in a fight. Researchers found the strongest associations were related to mood and self- harm. Those who slept less than six hours were more than three times as likely to consider or attempt suicide, and four times as likely to attempt suicide, resulting in treatment. Only 30 percent of the students in the study reported averaging more than eight hours of sleep on school nights."

Seems like a lot of data mining to create correlations (hence the use of the word "association" a lot). This kind of work can be good for problem _finding_ and hypothesis generation. It's unfortunate that we live in a world where:

\- news outlets publish research that is meant to stimulate discussion + hypothesis exploration

\- readers are unable, undereducated, and / or disempowered to discern the level of rigorous science examination done

EDIT: The funny thing is that I predict that this HN thread will lead hundreds of folks to tell stories of confirmation bias.

<comment><USER5> Nearly every morning one of our local radio station gives "fun" "facts" and always start with "Scientist say " and end with something ridiculous like "dogs can't look up", or "purple is the best colour", or something equally bizarre, and they treat it like because "scientists" say it it has meaning or value, and then they both discuss it as a fact, and have people phone in and talk about it. We utterly fail at scientific education and communication in North America.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure if it's only NA though... just read the chapter 6 "Authority" of Cialdinis book "Influence". People take stuff that authorities like scientists say as given. It's human nature. The example of how this can be abused as outlined in the book are quite bizarre.

<comment><USER5> Oh, yeah, I just didn't want to generalize farther than my own experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Many of these risky behaviors are likely to take place at night. Students who are out partying and drinking are likely to be doing this at night, which will cut down into their sleep time.

The implication of this study is that the lack of sleep is causing the risky behaviors. However, saying that risky behavior caused less sleep could also be as reasonable an implication.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish high school teachers would take note of this. My kid goes to an accelerated program high school in Toronto and she is so swamped with homework and tests, she hardly gets any sleep on weeknights and on some weekends too.

<comment><USER9> There are lots of options to mitigate this.

You can take them out of the accelerated/gifted program and put them back on the "normal" university track in high school.

The big risk is that it will cause your kid to get alienated socially among both the "normal" and the "gifted" kids, so make sure that your kid is involved in the decision-making process.

If your kid has an IEP, you can also talk to the teacher to get accommodations. For example, maybe your kid could quietly work on their homework during their school day, instead of being forced to pay attention to the teacher's lecture.

You can also just tell the kid that they can decide how much homework they want to complete. In high school and university, any un-completed work just gets recorded as a zero; if the kid is already getting 80s and 90s then a few missed or half-complete assignment questions shouldn't materially affect their final grade (provided they understand enough of the main concepts to complete major tests/projects/exams). Having a strategy for deciding what work is safest to drop/defer when you're overwhelmed is a useful skill both in upper education and in the workplace.

Source: Went to a high school in York Region.

<comment><USER8> Thank you. I found your comments very insightful and helpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Part 2 of study: "Insufficient Sleep Associated with Risky Adult Behavior As Well!"

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if similar experiments have been done in the military, where you have a good number of young people that basically sleep as much as you let them sleep, and that during the day are subject to (extreme) fatigue/training (the amount of which is anyway under your control), including some (allowed/part of the training) fights.

<comment><USER12> The military has a pretty good idea just how long they can keep people awake, and what the best combinations of stimulants are to keep them in warfighting condition. The Wehrmacht in WW2 used an awful lot of amphetamines, and dexedrine has been in common usage for a long time as well.

<comment><USER13> Maybe not: [https://taskandpurpose.com/fitzgerald-mccain-sleep- deprivati...](https://taskandpurpose.com/fitzgerald-mccain-sleep-deprivation- navy/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would expect the confounding variable in this study to be peer pressure. If your peers can pressure you into drinking alcohol or using marijuana, they probably peer pressure you into staying up late -- to do the aforementioned activities.

</comment><comment><USER14> In other news, hunger causes eating and heat makes you sweat!

</comment><comment><USER15> Common cause, adhd leads to both.

<comment><USER16> Funny story, insufficient sleep looks a lot like adhd: [https://www.additudemag.com/symptoms-of- insomnia/](https://www.additudemag.com/symptoms-of-insomnia/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish Elon would read this article and get some sleep.

</comment><comment><USER18> And the consequences of insufficient sleep on adult behavior? Child behavior? Elderly behavior? Perhaps this is a human trait, and not something isolated to the ever-examined and ever more heavily regulated adolescent?

Not that any of this is news. That adolescents need more sleep than any other age group, and that they suffer tremendously from being deprived it by adults, has been known for an extremely long time. When I was in high school in the 90s, there were dozens of studies about it even then. But adults don't care. The most common resistance to the notion of starting high school later is that it would interfere with football practice, making it a total non-starter. That football destroys brains, teaches mob mentality, and other such things doesn't matter. It is, to our society, far too important to let those other matters interfere.

<comment><USER19> > And the consequences of insufficient sleep on ...

Ahh.. the Copenhagen Interpretation of studies.

This particular study is about teenagers - perhaps because 'risky teen behaviour' is something you're more likely to find in teenagers, or, less churlishly, because risky behaviour in general is something you find much more often in teenagers.

Also compare age-segmented stats for depression, suicides, violence, etc - <USER2> they're an obviously higher at-risk demographic.

> Not that any of this is news. That adolescents need more sleep than any > other age group, and that they suffer tremendously from being deprived it by > adults, has been known for an extremely long time.

This is not true.

Outside of newborns / toddlers, pretty much everyone needs about 8 hours of sleep. Changes as you get (much) older make it more difficult to _get_ the full 8 hours, and adolescents' circadian rhythms means that to the uninformed it seems like they want more / less / longer / lazier etc.

They don't - all the current research indicates they need ~8 hours too, but they don't naturally want to fall asleep until 2-3 hours after the average 25+yo.

> But adults don't care.

This is a breathtaking thing to say.

> The most common resistance to the notion of starting high school later is > that it would interfere with football practice, making it a total non- > starter.

I'd suggest this courageous hypothesis could _at best_ apply to something less than 5% of the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Oh. Twice as much. That's a lot, right?

We could be moving from 1% to 2% here. Technically true, but statistically meaningless. So while we could say that a teen who engages in risky behavior is less likely to have adequate sleep, we can't say that a teen that has inadequate sleep is likely to engage in risky behavior. And if we're looking to identify teens likely to engage in risky behavior, it's useless.

And there are other things to consider as well. The study was done with 67,615 participants. 70% who are sleep-deprived compared to 30% who are "well- rested". The population of "sleep-deprived" is much, much larger.

Also, we're looking at self-reporting. A bit unreliable in the best conditions.

And we're drawing a casual link here that may not actually exist. They both may be symptoms of a third problem. For instance, students in impoverished conditions may have more risky behavior regardless of sleep schedules. And if that was the real reason, forcing more sleep on people is hardly going to fix the problem.</comment>


Ask HN: What front end tools do you find yourself most productive with? - <AUTHOR> I am poking around for a new tool to learn as a mainly backend developer and coming to the conclusion that HTML, CSS and JS seem to be yesterday's options. I'm left wondering; if you were learning today and wanted to get proficient fast, what would you learn? Typescript? React? Vue? Purescript? Bucklescript? Bulma? Bootstrap 4? (to only name a few)<p>I realize there are categories such as styling kits, frameworks or UI libraries, but are there any that stand out as diamonds in the rough for quality of developer life or productivity rate in their category or overall? <comment><USER2> I use React and TypeScript.

I'm very productive with React, but I've also had a lot of practice with the React style of thinking (data passed down from parents, state management, JSX syntax). There are tools that make your life easier, like create-react-app[0], that let you focus on learning the framework and not worry about the process (webpack, babel, etc.).

When learning something new, especially when there are _so_ many ever-changing tools for front end work, I'm a fan of limiting the scope of new material to just the thing I'm focused on understanding. Similarly, you'll see React and Redux as a unit nearly everywhere, but it's worth it to work with and learn React on its own before adding the additional learning curve of Redux. I find it's important to understand the problem a tool is solving before adopting that tool. Kind of like building a web app without a framework to understand why it's helpful!

I also use TypeScript, but not to make me more productive in the short-term. It actually takes a little more time for the initial development, but I view it as a worthy investment that benefits the next person to work with the code, be it another developer or me in a few months.

[0] [https://github.com/facebook/create-react- app](https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app)

<comment><USER3> Same here. I went from front end when Angular was starting to pop up, but Angular never really clicked with me for some reason. I went into backend and platform development. Popped my head back into front end development recently. React is just such a pleasure to work with and exactly the way I've always wanted to be able to build front ends. (This sounds kinda dramatic, but it's true...)

<comment><USER4> Hi,

Any link you'd suggest for a starter in UI who wants to start with React JS and has worked always in backend (PHP / DB / OS stuff when developing)?

I am aware of JS and do minor contributions to libraries but those are very basic level (compared to what library of the size of ReactJS)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> JS is not _" yesterday's option"_, quite the contrary. The same for HTML and CSS. If you want to be proficient fast, you should focus on a good foundation on all three.

But if you are past that, I would suggest Vue. I have not used it myself, but lots of colleagues tell wonders about how easy, comfortable and fast it is to built things on it.

There are doubts about it being production-ready for larger companies and projects, but it seems to be the king of productivity nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER6> I work mostly with EmberJS (www.emberjs.com) as my Single Page Application (SPA) framework and I really like my productivity.

Ember has 3 core projects (Ember, Ember-CLI, Ember-Data) that deal with Routing, Data Store, Build Tooling, Templates, everything you need to build a SPA application. Things are built to work together so most of the times, things just work.

The framework has been around since 2011 and keeps getting better/modern. I've started an app in 2015, with Ember 1.13, and I've been upgrading since (currently on 3.0).

There are a lot of community addons for most situations (date-pickers, select, deploy, analytics, etc... you can get a sense by browser ember-observer.com)

</comment><comment><USER7> I haven't really worked with any client-side languages before, so I picked up Elm because it was similar to other languages I'd used in the past. It's got a unique approach to things and an incredibly active community. It's adoption is not as widespread though. Most of my coworkers swear by React and Vue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Does Elm's charm wear off if you aren't already a functional programmer? What were your favorite learning resources?

<comment><USER7> I was familiar with Haskell but I wouldn't consider myself a functional programmer, most of my career has been on the Object Oriented side of things. I actually found it to be quite approachable. It's charm has stayed so far as I've found it offers a lot of advantages in terms of code re-use. The elm- lang.org resources, hosted Core lib documentation were most of what I've used. They have live examples in a web repl that is helpful. I would recommend checking with their git though as the pace of the languages development can go through spurts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> JQuery or plain Javascript.

I am in the same boat backend dev who needs to do some front end. I now have an app to maintain with an Angular monstrosity on the front end. I can see why everyone dropped it, I am still trying to work out where all the hype came from 5 or 6 years ago.

If you are looking for employment options then React seems to be the way to go.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I haven't heard a lot of great things about Angular and my JQuery itself is a bit rusty so I figured I'd start fresh with something new. React seems more robust than Vue on close inspection, but maybe harder to learn. I hate CSS and HTML is often excessively tedious to me so a UI kits are looking attractive. Has anyone used Sketch plus [https://ant.design/](https://ant.design/) ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I tend to argue that it's important to learn the base technologies (HTML, CSS and JS) before you jump into any frameworks. I've found that without a solid base in those three, it's too hard to debug problems.

After that, I'd pick one of Angular, React or Vue and see where it takes you.

</comment><comment> a-saleh If I had to do a project, probably vue or just vanila-js.

If I wanted to learn more, I really liked the purescript book [1]. It made many concepts I wanted to learn in Haskell click. I am not sure I would be confident enough to try to deliver a project in it, but I know some people do, I really liked the presentation of Claudia Doppioslash contrasting Elm and Purescript [2]

[1] [https://leanpub.com/purescript/read](https://leanpub.com/purescript/read)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngWo5e-294o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngWo5e-294o)

</comment><comment><USER10> React + CSS modules is a good place to start.

The CSS modules is to teach you how to write CSS that is tightly scoped, but something like BEM or styled components could do the same thing. Avoid global styles.

I'd also learn a tiny bit of functional programming. JS isn't quite a functional language, but lends itself nicely to simple functional patterns. React is also explicitly functionally influenced. Think composition over inheritance. Don't go overboard.

TypeScript or Flow for type checking are probably a good idea. TypeScript is far more supported, but kind of encourages the OO style. I prefer Flow, but most will say TypeScript won.

I will also say VSCode is a really great editor for JS and front end development.

<comment><USER11> Try Styled Components.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I personally love Angular (Not AngularJS) + TypeScript. If you can get along with how opinionated it is, you will be rewarded with a quick development time and great looking project that is easy as pie to manage.

Vue doesn't seem to be robust enough yet for larger projects, and I personally just don't fancy React's syntax.

If you want to just be able to get from 0 understanding of front-end to making a working demo, you really need basic HTML/CSS/JavaScript. It's like trying to write a book before you learn to read.

</comment><comment><USER13> We really need something like flutter for the web now.

I'm sick of writing markup and stylesheets (react jsx is basically html with a little sparkle).

Flutter integrates styling markup and business logic in such a wonderful way, I've never witnessed. It results in an extremely productive development cycle.

And then there's the intellij integration which is just crazy good.

Bottom line I never have to think about styling and logic differently. Almost no context switches. With stuff like react, there's at least 3, maybe 4 context switches.

</comment><comment><USER14> I code mostly in React. But I find Vue to be more productive. Bulletproof routing and state management.

I use React because I mostly develop React Native apps and React web apps. Vue doesn't have anything close to React Native. React has a slight edge over Vue when compared to availability of components(npm packages). Thus I maintain JS sanity.

</comment><comment><USER15> For small projects, I still use AngularJS. Ridiculous productivity and no build system. Of course it has it's warts, but it's my go-to for personal projects or MVPs/demos.

I've been meaning to learn Vue but haven't had the time.

</comment><comment><USER16> Clojurescript. Everything else is just too painful to use.</comment>


Show HN: Doddns, a Dynamic DNS Client for Digital Ocean - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/esell/doddns <comment><USER2> That's interesting, if only because it let me know that Digital Ocean provide DNS-hosting - for free - which they introduced a few years ago:

[https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/digitalocean- labs-...](https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/digitalocean-labs- presents-dns-management/)

I had no idea, but if it is free (and more reliable than their virtual machine hosting) it might be worth looking at in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have any high traffic sites or anything but I've been using their DNS for at least six months and haven't had any issues.</comment></comment>


Distributed Locks Are Dead; Long Live Distributed Locks - <AUTHOR> https://hazelcast.com/blog/long-live-distributed-locks/ <comment><USER2> This is good work, and the lock semantics and fencing token (epoch) make a lot of sense. I can't help but think that implementing java.util.concurrent.locks.Lock will turn out to be a liability. The problem here is that the code looks like a Java lock, but the semantics are entirely different with regards to failure. Specifically:

> While we're on this subject, the same logic applies even to the primary > FencedLock.lock() call: at the very next line of code in your program, you > may no longer be holding the lock.

That's not, in most programmer's experience, how locks work. This behavior is necessary (at some level) to deal with partial failures and stalls of clients, but means that if you use this like Lock your code will be very wrong.

> Note the key message here: all external services must participate in the > fencing-token protocol, with guaranteed linearizability, for the whole setup > to uphold its invariants.

So this isn't really like a Java lock at all, and instead is a nice convenient way to build part of an epoch/view change implementation. That's useful, but in my mind the API they chose will reduce the likelihood that non-experts will use this correctly.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it's worth to add a few previous discussions about distributed locks.

Redlock is a distributed lock using Redis: [https://redis.io/topics/distlock](https://redis.io/topics/distlock)

Martin Kleppmann criticized Redlock and mentioned the fencing solution: [http://martin.kleppmann.com/2016/02/08/how-to-do- distributed...](http://martin.kleppmann.com/2016/02/08/how-to-do-distributed- locking.html)

Antirez disagrees with the analysis and the HN post has a good discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065933](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065933)

</comment><comment><USER4> More accurately, these are leases, not locks in the traditional sense. The lease expires when the corresponding client session ends, which is detected by the absence of a heartbeat from the client.

<comment><USER5> Locks are always leases in a distributed system, at least in my experience (and for a sane system).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There was also a follow up blog post again by Basri regarding how it's tested using Jepsen for those interested: [https://hazelcast.com/blog/testing-the-cp- subsystem-with-jep...](https://hazelcast.com/blog/testing-the-cp-subsystem- with-jepsen/)

</comment><comment><USER6> What happens when some of the quorum members are not available?

The fact that split brain is not allowed implies that liveness is given up for it.

More importantly, what can I possibly do in the scenario where I would like to obtain several locks at the same time?

Distributed lock frameworks usually imply there's some sort of transaction reversal mechanism implied by the architecture.

<comment><USER7> Each lock has an associated name. If you have locks for separate purposes, you have separate names. If you need to grab multiple locks before processing a single task, I would suggest looking for a design that doesn't need it. If there is no other way, then acquring each like in a defined order would still work.

<comment><USER8> This is one area where code reuse bites us and I think this is why you see so many systems starting to resemble functional code principles.

There are many code bases where you delegate an action to a module that goes out and modifies state (or doesn't) based on its own rules. Composing these things becomes challenging.

It leads to situations where verbs that sound like they should be side effect free are unknowingly causing an avalanche of updates behind the scenes.

And when two calls can touch the same objects in a different order (eg, when you have many-to-one relationships), then you are up a creek without a paddle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love Hazelcast. It's the best thing since the Coupling Facility on zSystem mainframes.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand why people think comparing something to the 360 is ever an insult.</comment></comment>


Simulating the TS808 Tube Screamer in LTSpice - <AUTHOR> http://cushychicken.github.io/ltspice-tube-screamer/ <comment><USER2> Sorry if this is a stupid question (I don't know anything about LTSpice) but would it be possible to actually feed a guitar signal through this simulation and run it out into an amp, in real time?

<comment><USER3> No, these kinds of tools are not designed for real-time signal processing. It is possible to build real-time signal processing software that accurately models physical circuit behaviors, you just need to optimize for computational throughput and latency to make it practical.

For audio processing in particular, accurately simulating physical circuit designs is resurrecting a lot of classic hardware in virtual form. CPUs have enough computational power now to implement very convincing circuit emulations in real-time.

<comment><USER4> By "convincing", what sort of delay would you be looking at on reasonably powerful hardware? Enough to fool the ear into thinking it really was real- time?

As a side question, are the sorts of modeling / math that would be done in a scenario like this amenable to offloading to a GPU (if the transformations would potentially be better handled by something like [http://www.bealto.com/gpu-fft.html](http://www.bealto.com/gpu-fft.html), for instance)? Is that a dumb question? :-)

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, the math required for circuit simulation does not lend itself to parallel implementations, whether it be on a GPU or otherwise. I built LiveSPICE (linked elsewhere in the thread), so I fought a lot with this problem :)

A small disclaimer on the following, I only attempted simulation of audio amp/effect pedal circuits, which are generally small. There might be ways to effectively parallelize (much) larger circuits. Another disclaimer, I worked on this 1+ years ago, so some of it is fuzzy.

The basic issue is that circuit simulation is fundamentally a serial operation. The circuit state at time step n is a function of the circuit state at time step n-1.

The relationship between timesteps is basically a non-linear system of equations, where the number of variables is the number of nodes in the circuit. For a typical guitar effect pedal, this might be ~50 variables.

There's basically no opportunity for parallelism here. You can't parallelize across the non-linear systems, because you don't know what to solve at timestep n until you've solved for timestep n-1. Within each step, a 50 variable system of equations is probably too small to parallelize, even on the CPU. Note that the technique used here is generally Newton's method, which also is difficult to parallelize for the same reason.

The bottom line is that as far as I know, circuit simulation (at least for audio) is entirely limited by single thread performance.

As a side note, the fun part of LiveSPICE is that even a 50 variable non- linear system is far too big to solve at real time sample rates (48 kHz, plus oversampling to avoid aliasing artifacts). The trick is to observe that only a fraction of these variables are non-linear, most of them are related to the other variables linearly. LiveSPICE solves for these linear relationships once during initialization of the simulation, and eliminates them prior to solving the non-linear system. This turns a typical ~50 variable system into a ~5 variable non-linear system (plus a 45 linear relationships). This is a massive reduction in computation required (Newton's method involves repeatedly solving a linear system, which is O(n^3) for simple methods).

<comment><USER6> How do DSPs get around this problem? What gives DSPs the edge over CPUs for real-time audio?

<comment><USER5> DSPs generally aren't necessarily that much more powerful than a CPU, their advantages are usually one or more of the following:

\- Special instructions to help with common DSP tasks (e.g. circular buffers, nice fixed point/rounding instructions, etc.).

\- Much lower power/better performance per watt.

\- Directly connected to audio in/out, to minimize latency.

\- Real time OS, or no OS at all.

However, the main takeaway from my comment should probably be that simulating audio circuits by modeling them at such a low level (a circuit) is probably not the right thing to do. There are higher level models of the behavior of these kinds of effects/amps that are easier to implement and faster to evaluate. Lots of CPU cycles are wasted simulating inaudible behavior in the circuit. It's a really fun toy/project, but probably not something you would want to use to design a widely deployed simulation with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For a circuit meant to be used with a guitar or similar instrument, it is practical for many purposes to use a much lower sampling rate, e.g. 22 KHz. The frequency content beyond 10 kHz is quite limited. I have used conventional LTspice to simulate several vacuum tube guitar/bass/microphone preamps I have built, for example [1]. I am tempted to try a real-time A-B comparison of the actual device with a livespice simulation. [1] [http://www.frontiernet.net/~jff/SonOfSVPCL/DIYSVTBassPreampl...](http://www.frontiernet.net/~jff/SonOfSVPCL/DIYSVTBassPreamplifier.html)

<comment><USER8> As soon as you create non-linearities in DSP you have to oversample to avoid aliasing. In fact it's usual in DSP distortion circuits to oversample by a factor of at least 4 or 8. (I"ve seen some devs use 256X oversampling...)

I can't think of a reason why this wouldn't also be needed in an LTspice model. You can do distortion without it, but if you sample at 22k you're guaranteed to get that harsh halo around the midrange and high end that digital is famous for.

Analog circuits don't have the same problem, because anything out-of-band simply gets rolled off. Unlike a digital system analog doesn't have a Nyquist limit beyond which frequency components reflect back, so a physical circuit should always sound smoother.

<comment><USER7> Good point, that nonlinear processes generate frequencies not present in the input. One of the biggest challenges in making analog circuits with good- sounding clipping distortion is designing proper lowpass and bandpass characteristics into the coupling between stages to roll off undesired artifacts.

The advantage in being able to actually listen to a real-time simulation modeled at the level of resistors, capacitors, inductors, and tubes or transistors is that one would be able to immediately hear the effect of component value changes, rather than just see them on the transient or frequency response plots.

Modeling the system at the level of DSP blocks would be more computationally efficient, but then one is left to derive the equivalent analog circuit. It's not rocket science, but it does add a level of indirection.

In any case, being able to simulate 5 triode sections and the linear filters between them in real time at a 48 kHz sampling on a modern CPU very well might be good enough for rock and roll. My use case is a design tool, not to obtain a substitute for a physical device.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Life as a maker can be pretty lonely. AI "Tinder for friends", anyone? - <AUTHOR> Hi guys, Life as an entrepreneur can be a tough and lonely ride. I've experienced it first-hand for almost a decade, now.
As many of you know, your friendships will be critical when you're stuck in the mud or have to kill your startup. For about half of my entrepreneurial career, I haven't had a good friend group, and it really took a toll on my health and happiness.
So I decided never to go through it again, so I built an app that matches you to the most compatible people nearby for the purposes of friendship. For two years, I've been working on the compatibility algorithm and I'm super proud of the result.  We've connected over 30k people in over 10 countries now.
We just got featured on PH this morning. Your support would be awesome, but it would make me even happier to know that you met some amazing people on We3.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/we3
Or
https://www.we3app.com <comment><USER2> I like the clear "this is not a dating app" messaging. Not quite sure I like the monetization strategy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I'm curious, what would you do instead to try and monetize?

<comment><USER2> That's a tough question and the answer is that I don't know. The current pricing scheme just rubs me the wrong way. I might just not be your target audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I struggled with this. Want to keep the platform free for anyone to use, while also ad-free. Did you see that you can get free tribes forever just by being invited to the tribes that other compatible users start nearby? Or that you can get free tokens by meeting up in person or sharing the app?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Business Directory for Your Site - <AUTHOR> https://ussitedir.com <comment><AUTHOR> Our website has just been built, thus your site can be the first in your sub- directory. The directory is for USA-located and USA-targeted websites only.</comment>