The Banality of Systemic Evil - <AUTHOR> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/ <comment><USER3> How about we try to get to the core issues of this systemic risk of authoritarianism and repression, and look at:

Ageism: Why can't younger people vote? Because they don't have valid opinions? Some adults don't have valid opinions. This seems to affect our dramatically in our modern era, as many of our older folks are still around and skewing the generational differences towards conservatism.

Classism: Why do we feel it necessary to have a political class at all? Bush Sr., Mr. Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, (Ms. Clinton?). To me, it feels weird even asking these people to have differing views. They're all apart of the council on foreign relations ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Fore...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Foreign_Relations)). Control+F either Clinton or Bush. This in my opinion, is why we won't change any neo-con/neo-lib policies anytime soon. Expect less worker rights, more outsourcing, more free trade, more deficits, and more protection of institutions deemed too big to fail (impossible in classical capitalism but not the crony kind).

Apathy: The US has killed many people in Iraq since 2003. If you crunch one version of account, it works out to 16 people every day, for 20 years. Yet most Americans are more concerned with their own internal matters. This seems like it could be extended to anything being committed outside of the US to other humans, including torture, enslavement, anything. The American people have already shown that if their bellies are full, then it doesn't matter how many people their government kills. How can anyone fix this?

Anyway, this to me seems like the major hurdles we all need to get over...

<comment><USER4> > Why can't younger people vote? Because they don't have valid opinions?

Because society has a long-standing agreement that a phase of life called "childhood" exists, during which an individual is not fully developed and can't be trusted to make decisions about his or her future. It may be somewhat arbitrarily defined at 18, but I don't see why people who need to be protected against entering into contracts as well as receiving a slew of rights and protections can be expected to have meaningful input into the management of their country. Someone who can't even join the military could vote to send their older fellow countrymen into war. I find the idea that the voting age can be lower than the age of majority very strange, and I have strong doubts that the age of majority should be lowered to 16 - on account of protecting childhood.

> This seems to affect our dramatically in our modern era, as many of our > older folks are still around and skewing the generational differences > towards conservatism.

Wait, what. You meant to come out _against_ ageism, then you criticize old people for voting "wrong"?

All in all, if you take a step back from you criticisms, there's a common point: Legitimacy. Submitting a ballot every few years is a very weak foundation for a government as sprawling and powerful as most modern and western ones. Fiddling the knobs of who can vote does little more than shift the balance of power inside the political class.

<comment><USER5> Even if we grant the notion of childhood as valid (one which I agree with, but am open to other models - the idea that one turns 18 and is suddenly a different person has weird impacts), we are seeing a systemic erosion of the notion. One which makes the GP's question valid.

I mean that the very idea of 18 == adulthood is going away. For instance, more and more people over the age of 13 but under the age of 18 are being prosecuted as adults in criminal cases. Zero tolerance policies for kids of all ages are assuming that they are capable of making choices with life altering consequences, but only in negative ways. So for some actions - <USER2> understanding of the world is assumed much younger than the age of 18. On the other hand, we are seeing the infantilization of people older than 18 - drinking age is 21, car rental 25, college policies are becoming more and more like those of high-school, college campus law enforcement is becoming less and less tolerant of "young people behavior" (e.g. parties and festivals). It is a weird set of standards that sends a strange message. Those that conform well are placed in a class that can fully enjoy the rewards of membership eventually, and those that don't or make mistakes are placed in a different class, one with many restrictions.

Basically I'm saying that while the notions of adulthood and childhood aren't bad, the implementation brings them into question.

<comment><USER6> Your examples of blurring childhood and adulthood are mostly answerable (however poorly) by saying "well, these things may be increasingly happening, but they Shouldn't Happen and we should work on fixing that".

Here's an example that can't be thus answered. Should a minor pay income taxes, if they have enough income? I think most people would say yes. But then tell me again why they can't vote?

<comment><USER7> I don't think that minors can get that much income because their employment is very limited, and they cannot enter into business contracts.

<comment><USER6> Minors can _de facto_ have arbitrarily large incomes from investments, although typically the investments are structured as trusts and are not legally the property of the minor.

Besides, child movie stars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Manipulative. For instance:

* The article's entire coverage of Manning revolves around a single incident involving the detention of 15 Iraqis. But that's not all Manning did, despite the wording of the article. Manning fell afoul of the law by haphazardly collecting and releasing to a stranger on the Internet far more documents than any person could possibly have reviewed, many of which had no public interest implications.

* The article cites the case of Jeremy Hammond, convicted for hacking and dumping Stratfor. Ludlow famously supports Hammond's actions. But Hammond didn't leak secrets he knew were in the public interest. He picked an organization whose politics he disagreed with, attacked them, and helped circulate the credit card numbers of its subscribers to the Internet. The clear message being sent by Hammond's inclusion in the article is that he is of a kind with Manning, Snowden, and Swartz. The only thing his case has in common with the others is that they they share some of the same political motivations.

* The article does the same thing with John Kiriakou, asserting as axiomatic the idea that Kiriakou was motivated by the public interest. But Kiriakou didn't become a "whistleblower" until that label became convenient to his defense, after it became apparent that his conversations with journalists, which related to a book he was selling, had outed an agent who had been in deep cover for over 20 years.

I'm left with a disquieting conclusions about the way proponents of Ludlow think: so long as the accused share your politics, it's more important for society to empathize with their motivations than with their decisions and actions. That's what people who blow up abortion clinics think.

I'm also a little worried about the phenomenon of generating public support for any mass leak by working with the media to promote those leaked documents that are most interesting/entertaining/important, while working to thwart any effort to evaluate the impact of the leak as a whole. Call it "Greenwaldism", which feeds a careful drip of calculated outrage and then harnesses it to attack anyone who points out any accompanying documents that might have caused harm by their disclosure.

<comment><USER9> I'd be curious to hear why you make a distinction between leaking for the public interest and leaking because of a disagreement with an organization's politics? Presumably most people hold their political views because they believe they believe those views are in the best public interest?

<comment><USER8> Hammond didn't leak information about Stratfor! He attacked them. His actions were straightforwardly criminal, in a way that few people on HN have any problem recognizing, and his case is only blurred by articles like this that attempt to conflate what he did with what he believed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Skimming the article I see no mention of COINTELPRO, of which these programs are no doubt a continuation of at least spiritually. This would make sense given that this is the NY Times, and bringing up COINTELPRO would perhaps force them to admit racial/xenophobic dimensions and roots to these recent revelations (e.g. the USG's history of targeting civil rights and anti-war activism), instead of white guys fighting for other white guys' iPad Privacy..

>Swartz argued that it was sometimes necessary to break the rules that required obedience to the system in order to avoid systemic evil.

That paragraph would have been a perfect place in which to touch on the Church Committee and its origins. Does the author even know about it?

Honestly, most people with social power and influence don't seem to care about the revelations because they don't. They have nothing on the line -- their rights will never be threatened, nor will government programs like the endless War on Terror ever affect them (in ways that they will understand; "blowback" is evidently too intricate of a concept for most). Could that be because they're white men? Perish the thought

</comment><comment><USER11> I was reading up on Jeremy Hammond as I knew less about him and this caught my eye:

The judge's husband has an email address released in the Stratfor disclosure and works with Stratfor clients, but the judge refuses to recuse herself (while threatening Hammond that he faces a life sentence).

Unmitigated gall.

<comment><USER12> Jeremy Hammond has been around for a while: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hammond](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hammond)

He created a whole site like Stripe's Capture the Flag back in 2003: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackThisSite](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackThisSite)

This part of his history is also sad:

 _Hammond attended the University of Illinois at Chicago on a full scholarship. In the spring of 2004, during his freshman year, he pointed out a security flaw on the computer science department's website to department administrators, offering to fix it. For pointing out the flaw, Hammond was called before the department chair and ultimately banned from returning for his sophomore year._

<comment><USER13> I met Jeremy at HOPE Number Six.

He was absolutely convinced that hacking was going to be the way that we protest in the future. He likened it to doing a sit-in of a restaurant, protesting outside of a business, or chaining yourself to a tree.

Everything he did was focused on this goal. Helping people learn to hack was going to be a required part of a functioning society. He led by example and some people followed.

I can't help but wonder if he is the first of his kind: a political prisoner of the Internet age.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You have to be _very_ careful here about the argument that you're making.

If you're effectively saying that any individual has free reign to do whatever they desire with trade secrets, sensitive diplomatic information, and whatnot because of a moral injury they may feel the system is giving them, then you've effectively destroyed any form of organized human activity that involves trust or secrets.

Here's why: people get morally offended at all kinds of bullshit. It's totally dependent on the individual as to what pushes their buttons.

So yes, good people in bad systems do really bad things. Lots of Nazis were working boring jobs as part of the system that exterminated millions of people. But as a society we generally do not hold these people accountable for such actions. After WWII most of those folks kept right on working boring jobs, this time rebuilding the country instead of operating concentration camps.

Whether or not those people are supposed to feel guilt or revulsion at their own actions is a _moral_ question -- a question between each of them and their own standard of what the universe expects of them. Confusing personal decisions with public ones is a good way to muddle your thinking.

<comment><USER15> He's not even making the argument you're suggesting, he's simply trying to explain why the media has such a hard time explaining the motivation behind the whistleblowers and why they end up circumventing chain of command.

<comment><USER16> No, he doesn't explain that. There's just some hand waving about "the bureaucracy" and "the system". I think it does a disservice to the many real whistleblowers who believe (often correctly) that by working within the system, or at least by working outside it without breaking the law, they can effect meaningful change.

He makes no attempt to explain just what "evil" Manning was fighting by passing along essentially random classified diplomatic traffic, or why Snowden might have felt morally justified in leaking secrets about U.S. spying on strategic competitors. This was not the Pentagon Papers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _David Brooks made a case for why he thought Snowden was wrong to leak > information about the Prism surveillance program ... "For society to > function well," he wrote, "there have to be basic levels of trust and > cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. > By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has > betrayed all of these things." The complaint is eerily parallel to one from > a case discussed in "Moral Mazes," where ... the complaint against the > accountant by the other managers of his company was that "by insisting on > his own moral purity … he eroded the fundamental trust and understanding > that makes cooperative managerial work possible."_

Welcome to the hyper-individualistic, hyper-critical, post-communitarian world, where neither tradition nor any existing social institution is taken for granted. Everything is now open to critical scrutiny, and nothing that fails such scrutiny will receive anyone's respect. Gone are the days when "institutions", "common procedures" and "cooperative managerial work", for example, were universally agreed to be valuable things in themselves. Now they need to prove their own worth, or else. Because if they have no intrinsic moral worth, you can't blame others for eroding them.

I don't know whether there really is such a thing as Generation W, but if Snowden and Swartz are its holotypes, then I have rather high hopes for it. Not because I expect a whole lot of whistleblowing in the foreseeable future, nor because I think they're particularly interested in politics (they probably aren't), but because they're probably the first generation to ascribe absolutely no intrinsic moral worth to the "System" in "Systemic Evil".

The System, whether it's a corrupt industry, a corrupt three-letter agency, or your country, has finally lost the romantic halo ascribed to it by traditional assumptions. It has revealed itself to be just another social convention with some (in fact, lots of) instrumental value but zero intrinsic value. The baby boomers, of course, also had their moment of subversiveness in the form of the civil rights movement. But the U.S. in the 60s and 70s was affluent and egalitarian enough to leave them with lifetime jobs, nice suburban homes, and enough money to watch Fox News on their four-foot TVs for the remainder of their retirement. Those perks are now gone, and with it the last traces of the System's romantic halo. All that is left is a rotting social infrastructure with questionable instrumental value at best.

So perhaps for the first time in human history, a large number of people are now mentally prepared to judge the "System" solely on its instrumental value. Instead of asking whether or not their actions will help preserve the System, people can now honestly ask whether certain portions of the System are worth preserving in the first place. Gen W is like the theoretical physicist in that famous story who, when asked how his research contributes to national defense, replies that his research makes the nation worth defending. Only sometimes, it might not be worth defending. Or perhaps even worth destroying.

It is no surprise that the Obama administration has a reputation for prosecuting more whistleblowers than (nearly?) every other administration before it. Previous administrations had no need for massive prosecutions, the population behaved itself. But the population won't behave anymore. The only psychological bias that kept them at bay has dissolved away, and I suspect that it's gone for good.

And like a lot of people who have warm fuzzy feelings about Snowden, I think that this quiet but irreversible change in humanity's sociopolitical lookout will turn out to be a Very Good Thing (tm) in the long term. Another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.

<comment><USER18> There is nothing new under the sun. Your grand kids will be writing similar screeds in whatever forum is popular with them about more or less the same subject, just as the hippie generation did in the 1960's.

Society vacillates between rejecting institutions and embracing them, for a basic reason: you really don't want to go too far in any direction.

On one hand, you obviously don't want to become slaves to the status quo. Injustice exists, and it must be fought. On one hand, there is intrinsic value in having issues be _settled._ At a point, a final disposition is better than the "right" disposition. It is difficult for society to function productively without broadly shared values, purposes, and coordinating institutions.

The idea of a "hyper-individualistic" "post-communitarian" world is absolutely at odds with the direction of social change to date. Our societies become ever more interdependent, a phenomenon that has accelerated greatly since the industrial revolution and the resulting trend towards specialization and division of labor. Which is really the more "hyper-individualistic" world? The world circa 1750 where everyone was a farmer and grew their own food and sewed their own clothes and generally did 95% of the activities necessary to sustain their lives, or the world circa 2013 where everyone does a hyper-specialized job and depends on the labor of thousands of other people doing hyper- specialized jobs to maintain their lifestyle? Shared values, shared purpose, and common institutions are far more important today than they were a couple of hundred years ago.

<comment><USER19> Actually, two things are new:

1) The ability to store/process data on the scale to monitor an entire population.

2) The US government's assertion that it has the right to do this. It's not new under the sun, but it's new in the US.

<comment><USER20> Sadly, point 2 is really not new in the US. The amount of data might be but some pretty ugly examples can be found in every decade of the 1900s (maybe not so much in the first two but the 30's were fun).

<comment><USER19> Sure, we've got the j. edgar hoover era and everything going along with that, but that's a case of individualized, nominally illegal wiretapping. Now we're talking about broad-based wiretapping with entire buildings dedicated to it, operating practically in the open compared to the cloak-and-dagger stuff of yore.

<comment><USER20> I would say the 1930's under FDR were worse than what Hoover did. Even with the limited technology they did a pretty good job of oppression.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Systems are optimized for their own survival and preventing the system from doing evil may well require breaking with organizational niceties, protocols or laws. It requires stepping outside of one's assigned organizational role. The chief executive is not in a better position to recognize systemic evil than is a middle level manager or, for that matter, an IT contractor. Recognizing systemic evil does not require rank or intelligence, just honesty of vision."

It is natural for ALL systems, whether a political organization, company, terrorist organization, and even biological entities, to fight change and keep the system in tact. We are now at a point where we can critically assess our social organizations from a humanistic perspective and ask if they are really adding value or not.

It is very, very exciting. Also scary.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's nice to see discussion in mainstream media applying Arendt to the policies and practices of the United States. I've been talking about this for some time now.

Spreading awareness of how institutional behavior can lead to evil actions is extremely important. We have learned a lot about power, evil, oppression, etc since the structure of the modern democratic state was created. We can and need to do much better.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think this is a very powerful & well reasoned piece.

I have a feeling that many of those who should read it will be unduly distracted by the gender issues around Manning.

<comment><USER24> I was hoping to send this piece to my Mother, as we've had long, frustrating conversations about each of the people mentioned in the article, but hesitated for that very reason. Then, just now reading your comment, realized that my hesitation is actually a desire on my part not to fight a battle on two fronts.

But. It's worth the fight. Sending her the article and I might even stop in for dinner and start the conversation fresh tonight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is why we have checks and balances between three branches of government -- to make sure no one branch gets too much leeway to get disconnected from what everyone else thinks is ok.

Similarly, people set up governments for societies but they also have a culture, and an idea of what is "beyond the pale". An insular culture can slowly become disconnected from the rest of the people, even in government which gets feedback through voting and other limited means. Thus, individuals possessing a "moral sense" who are hired to work in the government may in fact engage in whistleblowing. Governments recognize this and many offer limited protections to this activity. Of course, if they are too far gone in how much they disconnect from the people's preferences, then they might seek to screen heavily when hiring new people, to make sure they don't have this "liability". And thus make themselves even more insular.

At the end of the day, SECRECY is the source of many of the problems. Secret laws and secret courts like FISA which sometimes complain that they are being lied to by the executive branch -- but only during fortuitous court case does it even come to light. Or this: [http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/the- secr...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/the-secret-memo- that-explains-why-obama-can-kill-americans/246004/) ... nothing changed in the last two years. I am a liberal and I really liked Obama, but I despise his administration's stance on secrecy, and foreign policy, because it sets a terrible precedent.

Compare: [http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOp...](http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment)

</comment><comment><USER26> Plato said "The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

<comment><USER27> I doubt that Plato said that.

<comment><USER8> _Misquoted. According to Respectfully Quoted, this maxim is unverified. In fact, however, it is drawn from Plato 's Republic. Paul Shorey offers a literal translation: "But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule" (Book 1, Section 347c). Since Plato specifically addresses those unwilling to govern (), rather than those who are simply indifferent, the accurate translation unfortunately does not apply as broadly to think-tank work as the misquotation does._

<comment><USER27> Thanks! The fact that there's a path back to the original makes that one less spurious than it sounded.

There was quite a good article recently about how quotes turn into misquotes and eventually proverbs: [http://www.chronicle.com/article/Who-Really-Said- That-/14155...](http://www.chronicle.com/article/Who-Really-Said- That-/141559/)

 _There are basically three kinds of Wrongly Attributed Statements. WAS I is an adaptation or composite of a statement or statements from someone or several people, who may or may not be famous. WAS II is a statement that was uttered, as is, by someone, often not famous, that has come to be widely attributed to someone else, invariably more famous. WAS III was never uttered by anyone, at least not that we know of._

So this was a WAS I. :)

Edit: Actually, this article is better than quite good. It's the best one I've seen on the topic and quite fun and one could even call it definitive.

Edit 2: Ok, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445595).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think this otherwise-great article is weakened by its praise of Manning. Unlike the heroic Snowden, Manning leaked an enormous bulk of documents that she didn't actually review in detail, which showed little to no wrongdoing relative to the bulk of the texts leaked. This seems useless, reckless, and spiteful. [http://www.quora.com/Chelsea-formerly-PFC-Bradley- Manning/Is...](http://www.quora.com/Chelsea-formerly-PFC-Bradley-Manning/Is- PFC-Chelsea-Manning-a-hero-or-is-she-a-villain-Why/answer/Jon-Davis-10)

</comment><comment><USER29> "a statement about what happens when people play their 'proper' roles within a system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing — or at least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences."

Like Todd in Breaking Bad, who is in fact a neo-nazi.

</comment><comment><USER30> You'll forgive me if I don't put reading someone's email on the same moral plane as the premeditated murder of 12 million people during the Holocaust.

</comment><comment><USER16> Notably missing from this piece: An argument that valid responses to perceived abuses include massive, indiscriminate data dumps, repeatedly bypassing MIT's network access controls and/or taking laptops full of classified information to Moscow.

<comment><USER31> Oh no, the powerpoint presentation that tells which companies are in bed with NSA will doom us all.

Moscow probably knows most of it, this isn't information/news for them.

I'd like to see all the men that were killed hurt by WikiLeaks data dumps. I mean cables were fucking benign, nothing people already didn't know or heavily suspected.

<comment><USER32> Also notably missing from current discourse: A valid argument that valid responses to perceived abuses include using the traditional whistle-blower channels.

People go to Moscow because there seems to be no other way to blow the whistle any more, not without ending up like Pfc Manning. Snowden said that right from the start; missing that part is either ignorance or disinformation.</comment></comment></comment>


Subtle expectations for everyday things - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/BPYJDXA <comment><AUTHOR> I was looking for an apartment this weekend in NJ and found myself in an unfamiliar building with destination dispatch elevators. What would you personally press to exit?</comment>


21e6, LLC raises $5 million to manufacture Bitcoin ASIC - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=334759.0

<comment><USER2> Now we have a Bitcoin ASIC bubble in addition to the regular Bitcoin bubble. I have a feeling some of these guys are not going to recoup their NRE (especially at 20 nm) when customers are only willing to pay $0.50/GH/s. Never mind, I'm sure suckers will buy them.

<comment><USER3> Is anyone actually shipping anything performing in the sub $6/GH/s range? Seems like everyone claiming that has failed to ship. Then again by the time these guys do ship something it may not matter much given the amount of hashing power coming online in the next 90 days (assuming knc, hashfast and others actually hit their targets).

<comment><USER2> The price scales inversely to difficulty which is roughly doubling every month. Anything shipping right now is probably worth $10-12/GH/s. December delivery pricing is around $6/GH/s, January is around $3/GH/s, etc.

<comment><USER3> Right, I agree about both this ventures potential for covering and at the same time there are tons of suckers. My comment was just more to the fact that companies currently claiming they can deliver at $3/GH/s haven't actually been able to. I'll pick on cointerra since they have a banner that calls out their price of $3/GH/s. They were supposed to have delivered in November or December and now it's late January. When they do actually deliver in February (if they deliver at all) the miners that come on line will likely be producing at a loss for their buyers. KNC is delivering at $6/GH/s in December and they are sold out.

<comment><USER2> It is estimated that most ASICs cost less than $1/GH/s to make and the current prices just reflect demand outstripping supply. Thus by January I expect all vendors (including e.g. KnC who has known working chips) to be selling for $3/GH/s.

AFAIK Cointerra's batch 1 delivery date has always been December.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The difficulty is climbing at an incredible rate because (a) lots of ASIC miners are coming on-line, and (b) a lot more people have started mining.

At some point very soon, mining Bitcoin will become unprofitable overall simply because an essentially fixed number of output Bitcoins are being divided across a larger and larger number of miners.

The only way to mine profitably will be figuring out how to mine both more efficiently and significantly more quickly than the general mining population.

Essentially if you are newly investing in Bitcoin now, you need to believe that (a) the mining solution that you're buying into will be at least an order of magnitude faster than the current generation products, or (b) Bitcoin will increase in value so much that even a small number of Bitcoins will be very valuable.

If this is just another Bitcoin ASIC, it's seems a very risky investment.

<comment><USER5> > Essentially if you are newly investing in Bitcoin now, you need to believe > that (a) ... or (b) Bitcoin will increase in value so much that even a small > number of Bitcoins will be very valuable.

If you can't mine profitably, yet believe that the value of a bitcoin will increase, then you're better off just paying money directly for bitcoins rather than inefficiently mining them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice name! matches the number of total bitcoins mined + unmined.

<comment><USER7> I was thinking maybe Unicode code point, looked it up, and got ⇦--your explanation makes a lot more sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Last time I looked at ASIC design a few years ago, that might get you a couple of prototypes and not much else. The software, staff and fabs cost a crap load of cash.

<comment><AUTHOR> "A few years ago" is a long time ago. Thanks to Moore's law, designing an ASIC, getting a full mask set made, and the first few wafers etched only costs $500k at 65nm:

[http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=73](http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=73)

Other Bitcoin companies (KnCMiner, etc) have apparently done 28nm with merely $1-3 million.

<comment><USER9> That matched my experience as well in trying to price out my frame buffer design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Question, is it at all possible to mine bitcoins on a personal laptop?

<comment><USER11> Not with any kind of profit - even with a high end graphics card in the laptop, such as a HD 8970M, you would be looking at best a 0.0004 BTC daily return - this would definitely outweigh any profit after you take power consumption in to account. Any changes in difficulty (which is often), will lower your return.</comment></comment>


Rich desktop app for HTML/CSS authoring - <AUTHOR> http://www.pingendo.com <comment><USER2> I've only spent a few minutes with this, but so far it looks very promising.

I work in an enterprise envrionment where we have varying levels of design/programming skill. One of our needs is for our designers or business analysts to be able to mockup screens without explicity writing HTML but in a way where nothing gets lost in translation to developers. We've been looking at Axure, but I've generally found it to be disappointing, if not plain annoying.

This looks much better.

Likes:

\- It's a native application. We're not always connected when we need to prototype a screen, and, frankly we somehow haven't figured out the whole wi- fi/security balance thing. Native is great.

\- I love that it uses bootstrap and provides a few template page options.

\- Responsive options, proper element positioning options... lovely

Wants/questions:

\- Customizable templates? Is it possible to alter or add to the default styles and template options? I.e. an in-house modified bootstrap or bootstrap- like option? Basically a way for the design lead to create custom elements and styles for use by the rest of the team.

\- Ability to add new elements in snippets

\- Maybe some basic logic, just enough to allow a simulation-type scenario. Although I would rather go without this than have the option over-complicate the interface.

I apologize if some of the wants are already possible; regardless I am definetly a customer.

<comment><USER3> Might want to look at Balsamiq Mockups:

<http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups>

It's easy enough for non-techies to use, can be installed locally, and can have new elements added via snippets.

It doesn't generate HTML, but in my experience developers don't want to get HTML; they just want to see what the non-techie wants done and then they'd prefer to write the code themselves. Balsamiq works great in that scenario.

<comment><USER2> Yup, we've been using Balsamiq, it's fantastic for a lot of things but there are times when a higher-fidelity tool is needed.

On top of this, we are also creating a standardized look and toolset for all of our apps - something sort of like Bootstrap - so there are many situations where it would be great to be able to just assemble the UI pieces that we've already defined and say 'what do you think of this?' or even run through some informal usabiltiy testing.

Side note: I think Balsamiq is the main reason I was so disappointed in Axure. Balsamiq is so efficient and so good at what it does, and Axure... well, you kind of wonder if anyone at Axure actually uses Axure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 'Scuze me for ranting, but too often these software project pages make the visitor hunt for the licence. Is this GPL or BSD or proprietary or what? Where's the source?

They're not saying - or it was taking too long for me to find. As a general rule, if there's a big "download" button and they're urging you to try something __before __they will give up any real info about it (or worse, insetead of), well that strikes me as scammy and I just link away.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. License info are missing. We'll fix it. Pingendo in not planned to be released as open-source. It's available in free download during the beta period. A commercial version will follow. The download contains xulrunner and pingendo binaries. Thank you.

<comment><USER5> Will it remain free for people who download it now? Or will it expire in a few weeks when the commercial version comes out?

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment is not planned to keep it free once finished the beta period. but everything 'possible. Anyway we'll be happy to provide you with a free license to thank you for your feedback!

<comment><USER6> Any idea on price yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> No sorry! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like it. But (there's always a but) you badly need a short tutorial. A video would work too. Something to get started on.

Also include a mailing list. I'd like to follow the development of this app (cause it would come in handy for me). But I don't always remember to check a website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! We are working on a "getting started" tutorial and a more exhaustive user manual. For the developments you can checkout our public developments board @ Trello [https://trello.com/board/pingendo-development- board/506057b0...](https://trello.com/board/pingendo-development- board/506057b0bdca2872540010e0) You can also click on Developments from the Help menu within Pingendo.

Thank you for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Shame it doesn't have a Linux version. But it appears to work fine on Wine.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for your note re WINE.

Edit: tried it myself too - install ran without problems. Seems like most things work fine but code editing itself was buggy, couldn't select the correct text or position the cursor on text in the code editor. Sadly that makes it unusable for me.

Kubuntu 13.04 (WINE 1.4.1).

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry for the bug you encountered. We are actively working to fix all problems remaining in our html and css parser. Would you be so kind to send me an example of a not-working html file, so that i can fix the bug ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Downloaded win version for a 32bit xp system and noticed two bugs,

1\. along with the app another window started which was like the menu with a menu item "File" represented by a horizontal line at the very top of my screen, i just right clicked from task bar and closed it, main app still worked.

2\. tried to open saved html file with browser (assigned to chrome) but the url was wrong, it was missing the drive letter so nothing showed.

3\. after closing page and then choosing another template the app vanishes.

At first glance it is ok, maybe better suited for users without much experience with browser tools and code. However it provides viewing in different screen sizes, code snippets and drag and drop which are helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for filling these bugs! We already fixed them in our development version that will be release in the next few days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice start. Right now I can see where it will help with quick wire framing based on pre-existing themes. I like being able to drag items onto the tree version of the DOM.

Would be nice to be able to alter LESS variables and recompile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! You are not the first asking for LESS support, we'll investigate the ways to properly integrate it.

Thank you for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a bit of a techie noob but it looks like you're just hosting the file on a web host somewhere:

      curl -I http://www.pingendo.com/Pingendo.dmg
      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Server: Apache
      Last-Modified: Tue, 14 May 2013 15:24:34 GMT
      Content-Length: 38477827
      Content-Type: application/octet-stream

I would host your file on something like Amazon S3. I'm getting 93kb/s on your host.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry but we did not expect such high number of downloads. we are fixing it. thank you for the feedback!

<comment><USER12> Let me know if you need help setting up. It's easy! contact in profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ubuntu version pls :)

<comment><USER14> Portable Windows version pls :)

<comment><USER15> Nokia 6010 version pls :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> On the first glance looks really, good. I started with template, made few changes, added few things.

I personally use Zurb more, so if I could start with that... even if I can make my own template, it would be fine.

</comment><comment><USER17> Feedback:

1\. Make this as a webapp. Should work anywhere, like gDocs! Think: Anyone can collaborate, so the ideas and possibilities are more.

BTW, Why did you go the platform way? any particular reason worth mentioning?

2\. Have a forum for knowledgebase, to answer FAQ's, ideas and take new- questions. See OSQA or Askbot, might help you a lot in this direction.

3\. Show your users, all the cool possibilities. Videos and use-cases matters most to convince anyone to try your app.

4\. Get more templates, widgets(short-codes) and page-layouts. This will be cool to start-off!

<comment><USER12> 1\. Divshot does this and it's buggy. I actually really like that it's native. In theory it's less error prone.

Downloading now...I'm a customer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I downloaded the Windows version, but don't see any references to Foundation, in the app or on their website. Is the title wrong ?

<comment><AUTHOR> the title is wrong. we lately decided to not release yet the integration for Foundation. It will be available soon with the next release. Sorry for the inconvenience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It looks great, but isn't it risky to force people use an IDE? A lot of developers like to work in their own environment.

</comment><comment><USER14> What about a fluid + responsive template

</comment><comment><USER20> 26mb install and not a word on what I am installing prior to running it? Sorry.

<comment><USER21> I believe there is an how it works link on the homepage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks neat. Perhaps a short video/screen-cast to show how it works or its coolest feature would be great.

Will give this a try on the weekend.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! We are working on a tutorial and a more exhaustive user manual, any suggestion is more than welcome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> With what is it coded on windows and mac ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Javascript

<comment><USER21> you mean you used something like air ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mozilla XULrunner, the same as Firefox.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apache Server Status for www.apache.org - <AUTHOR> http://www.apache.org/server-status

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure why they are still supporting their decision to make that link accessible to everybody. [http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg48333.ht...](http://www.mail- firstname.lastname@example.com/msg48333.html)</comment>


First Round Capital Forces Its Start-Ups to Sing for Their Supper - <AUTHOR> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091209/first-round-capital-forces-its-startups-to-sing-for-their-supper-and-your-holiday-card/?mod=ATD_rss <comment><USER2> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0oyaA1iNFs></comment>


Show HN: Django React Boilerplate – Hybrid Model, Session Auth, CSRF Protection - <AUTHOR> https://parijat29.github.io/django-react-boilerplate/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a boilerplate project that can be used as a template for any websites (portfolio, e-commerce etc.) with Django backend and React frontend. It follows the Hybrid Model, which means it can be deployed as a single unit into the same server. It is set up to use session-based authentication and includes an example of how to use them. It also provides safety from CSRF attacks.

</comment><comment><USER2> Why does this impact SEO? Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> It is configured to use static content caching and server-side rendering without using separate Nodejs stack. This is achieved by pre-building the React app and then injecting it to the Django App. This way any static content helping the SEO can be rendered on the server-side. Only dynamic content will be loaded by the client-side scripts.</comment></comment>


Variables and Memory Management in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://www.warambil.com/variables-and-memory-management-in-rust <comment><AUTHOR> This post explores how variables and memory are managed by the Rust programming language. Concepts like ownership, sharing and borrowing are explained here.

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice and concise summary. Thank you!</comment>


Using Lasers to Find Land Mines and IEDs - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/optoelectronics/using-lasers-to-find-land-mines-and-ieds/0

<comment><USER2> So, basically they're creating a lasing region of space, in mid-air, at a distance of 30 meters (~100 feet):

 _The beam is transmitted through a lens that focuses it on a spot 30 or so meters away; there it converges and then diverges, giving this region an hourglass shape. Because the laser pulse is very brief—on the order of nanoseconds—the intensity is high enough to break molecules of oxygen into their constituent atoms over a few millimeters in the thin midsection of the hourglass. This happens so rapidly during the pulse that the same pulse subsequently excites many of the oxygen atoms into a high-energy state, creating what's called a population inversion. This unstable condition then leads to the familiar laser chain reaction in which an excited atom drops to a lower energy state, emitting a photon of a particular wavelength, and that photon in turn stimulates another excited atom to emit a photon of the same wavelength and phase._

The thus excited region of space emits two laser beams, one in the direction of the original "trigger" beams, and one _in the opposite direction_ i.e. back at the source. The intensity is said to be around 1,000,000 times that of the ambient radiation in that wavelength, so it's "easy" to detect. And the beam carries information about the molecular mix in the generating volume of space, which is of course the core feature here.

That is ... pretty close to being magic, in that "naah, that can't be possible!" way that is so fantastically neat.

Too bad the triggering impulse (heh) to develop this is something as nasty as land mines and IEDs, the technology itself is just beautiful.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but how do you get the sharks 100 feet up? And won't they suffocate without water?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's pretty amazing! I've always wondered if you could have a device that detects ice (using lasers, or other optical methods) and place one looking down at the road in front of each tire.

Your car could then warn you when it starts seeing ice, and possibly even take measures to improve control.

I know a lot of times the road will be wet and it will be below freezing but there's no ice, but it's scary to drive because you know you could encounter ice at any time.

</comment><comment><USER5> If I were an Afghanistani/Iraqi/whoever planting IEDs/mines trying to defeat this, I'd make small bundles with explosives in them and sprinkle them in random areas to create large enough numbers of false positives to make using this onerous.

Still, this is a promising sounding tech. for detecting mines in past battlefields, ordnance, mercury and so on. Hope the idea is developed in a workable way.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems you're limiting your perspective to recent conflicts. Mines and unexploded ordinance are a huge and long-standing problem across the globe. For example, it is still common for explosives from the first world war, a 100 years ago, to be found in Europe. Similar is true for nearly every other conflict in history.

An interesting point the article did not mention is how some forms of munitions tend to release more identifiable gases as they slowly decay over time. This is one of the reasons why using trained dogs has been effective to locate mines. If they can get this laser and radar tech working effectively, it stands to reason this tech will be especially useful for finding and clearing old mine fields.

Mines are a terrible problem, but tech like this has a chance of saving a lot of innocent lives.

<comment><USER6> There's been a lot of success in using trained rats to detect landmines -- they're cheaper to care for / transport, quicker to train (IIRC), and too light to set off the mines.

I've also read of more unusual / interesting detection techniques researched, like bees, and my personal favorite, the seeding by air of bioluminescent bacteria that feed off of said gases.

<comment><USER7> In case anyone is interested in reading more about mine-detecting rats, you can check out an organization called Apopo. They're pretty cool, and you can even adopt your own rat!

<http://www.apopo.org/en/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> All they need to do is scale this up a bit, put it in orbit and they've got Star Trek sensor arrays.</comment>


MAVEPAY: a new lightweight payment scheme for peer to peer currency networks - <AUTHOR> http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/mavepay-a-new-lightweight-payment-scheme-for-peer-to-peer-currency-networks/

<comment><AUTHOR> Check also MAVE: digital signature protocol for massive bulk verifications <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3852279></comment>


How I won over $150k in Cash, Investments, and Prizes at Hackathons - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bclark8923/how-i-won-over-150k-in-cash-investments-and-prizes-at-hackathons-a4b5e6b95fe9

<comment><USER2> Great post

</comment><comment><USER3> Some gems where dropped here ... thanks</comment>


Almost Genius: A Wall-Socket With Built-In Extension Cord - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovation/almost-genius-wall-socket-built-extension-cord?partner=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fastcompany%2Fheadlines+%28Fast+Company+Headlines%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> Much discussion already here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1016016></comment>


:lang() CSS Pseudo-Class - <AUTHOR> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:lang <comment><AUTHOR> A pain point that I've encountered repeatedly but observed consciously for the first time today: The natural comfortable font size can vary for different languages. Hence, a font size of say 14px that works just fine for English could make you squint when reading Chinese.

A solution for this is to add something like the following to your CSS stylesheet:

      :lang(en) {
        font-size: 14px;
      }

      :lang(zh) {
        font-size: 18px;
      }</comment>


Ubuntu One : Store, Sync & Share - <AUTHOR> https://ubuntuone.com/ <comment><USER2> While we launched the beta today with file sharing, our plan is to make Ubuntu One much more than a file sharing service: <http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/8843> "Ubuntu One provides shared synchronised storage and databases for developers: you store your data and Ubuntu One takes care of making it available to every other person and every other machine you've shared it to. In addition to this set of simple APIs which you can use to get synchronised data, Ubuntu One also offers services built on top of these: work with your users' contacts to make it easy to share information with other people, and build services on top of all these APIs which work everywhere, both from the web and from the desktop."

-elliot <https://launchpad.net/~statik/>

</comment><comment><USER3> It's hard to see myself choosing this over Dropbox. Currently no cross- platform support, and it's still a proprietary client.

*edit: My bad. I googled for 'ubuntuone license' and the excerpt said it was proprietary. The Launchpad page now says GPLv3. No code released yet, but I'm sure it will follow as the project goes public:

<https://code.launchpad.net/ubuntuone-client>

<comment><USER4> That's only for the client though, not for the server.

<comment><USER5> If they develop an open source client for it, someone will develop an open source server to interact with the client. That's the way it works!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am I the only one who thinks these prices are really high? I appreciate the free 2GB you get, but I think $10/month for 8GB extra is just way to much. I can get a VPS with 20GB of disk drive for that. With something like $25/year I wouldn't mind at all, but for $10/month I expect a bit more than 2->10GB.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks like dropbox for ubuntu.

<comment><USER8> <https://www.getdropbox.com/install?os=lin>

<comment><USER9> Exactly, Dropbox is "Dropbox for Linux"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why do I think it'll turn into yet another Megaupload or Rapidshare crack/porn/app upload site?

All you gotta do is wrap your stuff in encrypted zips and dump the passwords where the links are.</comment>


Ask HN: Can we do a small design job for you? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, can we do a small design job for you free? anything from business cards to Facebook covers, banners, book covers.
I just did this for my fellow 7 Day Startup Facebook group members. And got amazing feedback. Even got a testimonial from the famous Dan Norris of Wpcurve himself. So I'm thinking about doing something cool for the HN community as well.
The reason I'm doing this is because I'm training my designers for a subscription-based design service. So I need a few test projects to give them. It's also an opportunity to contribute to HN community.
Anyway, I can do this for 2 people. So first come first serve.
Thanks guys. <comment><AUTHOR> arisAlexis: sorry, we can't do logo. Logo design requires a long creative process.

qubex: The ideal situation for us is get a test project that a lot of other people are looking for as well. For example, business cards, banners, book covers, flyers. But send me your diagram and all the details (please explain what you want to achieve in detail). I'll forward it to my designers. If this is something they could do fast, I'll let you know.

<comment><USER2> Contact details?

<comment><AUTHOR> send me an email email@example.com or just post a dropbox link here

<comment><USER2> Sent two days ago. Am I to take it you are not interested?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's out of scope for this offer. Sorry we can't do it.

<comment><USER2> An email reply would have been nice, but thanks all the same and good luck in your endeavours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Would you be willing to take a small diagram and re-render it in some kind of TRON/ENCOM style?

</comment><comment><USER3> are you interested in making a company logo for a not-yet-launched-not-yet- for-profit startup?

</comment><comment><USER4> good for you, good thread idea :></comment>


Nutrition Science Initiative launched - <AUTHOR> http://nusi.org

<comment><USER2> If the independence from industry and focus on the scientific method can be truly maintained then this can only be a good thing.

One comment, the board of directors seem pretty top heavy with "big pharma" and VC/private equity types, which I find a bit hard to reconcile with the non-profit and independence aims of nusi. Surely the whole thrust of an organization like this is to promote health and this must be fundamentally against the interests of drug companies. I'd certainly be interested to hear what the board of directors hope to achive.

<comment><USER3> As someone who has recently learned of a ketosis diet and a low carb approach to this problem, it was pretty interesting when during this talk, <http://youtu.be/FSeSTq-N4U4?t=32m10s>, when he mentions the diabetes booklet given out by a pharmaceutical company which recommends low sugar foods. While this seems like a good approach, the doctor in the video explains how this is counter intuitive to combat diabetes, as a _as little sugar/starch as possible_ diet is the correct approach. This booklet told people to have fruits and starches but in moderation, when most of those foods they said was fine, should be avoided entirely if possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What NuSi is doing sounds great.

I was vegetarian for 7 years, an omnivore for 1 when I started weight-lifting, and after that I stopped weight-lifting and became a runner. It has been a year and am training for my first half marathon.

Compared to 10 years ago, I feel there has been an increase on food data- collecting and more rigorous scientific experiments that help build a database of bad foods and good foods. And I feel what NuSi is doing can be a good thing because it'll bring about talks and communication between big food corporations and nutritionists, "food scientists", etc.

However, the dilemma for me comes when trying to change the rules of what ingredients are allowed in foods (I'm thinking about the so-called 'soda pop ban'). I feel certain things ought to be banned, such as trans fats/hydrogenated oils. I think they are poisonous, but corporations, being as they are, are reluctant to change this because using them are so cost- effective and good for their pockets. To ban something that would decrease a company's profit and force them to effectively increase their production cost goes against their ideology.

I am optimistic that gradually we will see an improvement, but we are years away from it, simply because changing large companies's mission for a higher food standard brings about unwanted consequences for them, especially when change is abrupt.

So, of course, we're getting the wrong advice. It is a chain of connections. Some health advisers work for large companies and have their own agenda to push. Other scientists and nutritionists do not have the means to fund big experiments and collect more data.

My question is: who are these 'best scientists and universities' that are working on these 'risky questions'? Transparency would be nice, for sure.

You have my attention.

(My $0.02)

</comment><comment><USER5> Tim Ferriss posted about joining the board yesterday - <http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2012/09/12/nusi/>

</comment><comment><USER6> The idea of examining food to determine if its good or bad for us sounds wonderful. Simply reading some of the comments here shows prejudices on both sides. I put myself on the side of "don't eat so much" as compared to "don't eat that".

Yet I am a firm believer that when lives gets easier people get lazier. When they get lazy they do not make good choices because they do not have too. People do not even have to go anywhere or even outside for entertainment. The amount of physical labor, let alone activities in general, has vastly decreased. Then add in the fact that about any food you want is readily available, conveniently packaged, and having the means to keep most if not all of it for long periods of time and it looks like a recipe for disaster.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's complicated because people don't want to cook. If you eat freshly cooked vegetables and WHOLE grains, what problem will you have? Another silly attempt at "hacking" our bodies. Spare me.

<comment><USER8> It's assumptions like these that drive the need for rigorous nutritional science initiatives.

<comment><USER7> So Michele Obama's attempt to counter obesity with exercise for children and healthy fresh cooked food needs to be examined rigorously through the lens of a nutritional science initiative? We might discover that exercise makes you more fat or fresh vegetables contain an unknown chemical which makes kids fat? Again people don't want to cook simple healthy food and are more interested in the next four hour body guru telling them that they can eat lots of meat and no grains or some other crazy thing.

<comment><USER9> I agree with your comments on the benefits of cooking as many meals as possible from scratch, and on the idea that it clearly was possible for people decades and centuries ago to avoid getting fat.

So absent some pervasive non-dietary effect, we should be able to stay thin by eating like our grandparents.

On the other hand, we don't want to be spending limited resources on things that don't solve the problem at hand. For instance, as the American Heart Association and American College of Sports Medicine stated:

"It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared with those who have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling."

If we tell people to go running during their lunch hour, and then they go eat at MacDonald's because they don't have time to cook, it's probably not helping the situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't get it. What is their point? Why not go public once they have some results? Also wondering how they want to get fast results when presumably a lot of effects of diets are only visible in the long term?

Also, are there really just useless studies, or are they just not popular enough?

This almost cries out for a parody. Teleportation - we have waited long enough. Now we bundle the best scientists and we will deliver fast results.

</comment><comment><USER11> Peter Thiel, in his Stanford class, referred to a "Manhattan Project for nutrition." He indicated that it was in the formative stages at that point. I wonder if this is what he was referring to.</comment>


Are Customers Addicted to Handset Subsidies? - <AUTHOR> https://thelab.o2.com/2013/03/are-customers-addicted-to-handset-subsidies/

<comment><USER2> I don't think customers in the US and UK markets are addicted to handset subsidies -- they just don't know any better. I recently moved to an MVNO that uses the T-Mobile network and three-months in I really couldn't be happier. More than that, everyone I share the story with is extremely interested in my experience. It's really just a matter of time.

There are two hurdles that I see: First, the lack of cheap, available, unlocked phones. I can afford the upfront cost of a Nexus 4, but I know many relatives who cannot. Even so-called "dumb" phones run $100 or so and selection is extremely limited. Second, many professionals I talk to get their phone and service from their company. As we all know, corporations are slow to change especially when it comes to telecom (evidenced by the sheer number still issuing BB phones).

I see T-Mobile trying to address these hurdles by bringing a trusted brand to the no-contract/non-subsidized market. I hope it works out for them.

<comment><USER3> The point made by Legere (T-Mob CEO) a few months ago was that we need to start seeing handsets for the sophisticated, lasting, pieces of technology that they are. He argued that handset subsidies have pushed us into a mindset where we see our phone as disposable, destined for upgrade every 2 years. When we take this perspective there is no shortage of available phones, we should just be comfortable with upgrading our handsets much less often than we are currently accustomed to.

Also, T-Mobile still allow you to pay off the cost of your phone over the length of the contract, so people will still be able to get state-of-the-art phones for a low upfront cost.

<comment><USER4> That would be good if phones lasted more than two years without malfunctioning. My S2 is now coming up to 18 months and repeatedly crashes.

I could imagine paying £250 for a Nexus 4 to keep for 2-3 years, but not £600 for an iPhone.

<comment><USER5> Is the cost to repair the S2 less than the cost for a new one? Maybe all it needs is a fresh install of Android. Of course I understand that you can't always simply reflash your phone, especially locked ones (as subsidized phones usually are).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This strikes me as a very dumb question. For all the answers to this, simply look at the credit card industry and consumer motivation to spend money they do not have.

People want stuff they cannot afford, so they spend money they do not have, it costs them dearly. That's how the system works; not that I advocate it.

It takes considerable effort to get out of the cycle, especially for people in consumerist USA.

The way I look at it is: If they ask me for my social security number, then I am getting a loan, and so I do not go through with the transaction. For my prepaid phone I spent $250 for the phone, and I pay $19 monthly. No SSN required. For a phone plan, I would spend $0 (or whatever for a higher-end phone), sign a contract, provide my SSN, and pay monthly over at least 2 years.

</comment><comment><USER7> That's a refreshing tone and message for an official telecoms company blog.

He mentions that the no money up front phone is like buying the phone on a 38% APR. I think that's exactly how people in the UK look at it. If you don't want a fancy phone then quite a few places will give a PS3 or similar device instead, which you pay up over your contract. It's just an obfuscated credit purchase. I've even seen offers where they basically give you cash up front in return for your monthly fees.

</comment><comment><USER8> My subsidy is up this summer, and I may switch. One thing -- if you look at T-Mobile's coverage map, make sure you zoom in far enough. At low levels of zoom, it shows green. But at higher zoom levels, the map shows only 2G coverage in some of the places I care about.

<http://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/pcc.aspx/>

<comment><USER9> Isn't that true for all carriers though? Verizon is generally considered to have the "best" coverage, but at my apartment and my job, the signal on my company Verizon phone is definitively worse than my own T-Mobile handset or co-workers' AT&T devices...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We're not addicted. It's just that until this T-Mobile thing came around, subsidized and unsubsidized plan had the same cost. My Verizon bill would be the same $80 whether or not my phone is subsidized. It doesn't cost less. So there is no benefit to buying an unlocked phone in the US for more than $200.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is what Cesar Alierta (Telefonica's CEO) dared say aloud... "Spanish customers need an education".

Like he was our father, man.</comment>


Ask HN: Post leftpad-ocolypse, practical guidelines for Node devs? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for practical takeaways in the wake of the npm/leftpad disaster?
Should I still use npm?  If so, should I adopt specific practices in my package.json, etc?
Should I be considering some other package manager?
Other stuff? <comment><USER2> "if a repo is worth using, it's worth mirroring, and archiving. and potentially forking, too."

\-- i just made that up.

(but we _actually do, in fact, do all of that_ for our major dependencies like upstream OS's, build deps, gitgub repos, cm, etc.)

if you don't have anyone on your team that knows how ......... well, you should probaby fix that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Commit your node_modules to source control. I've saved myself repeatedly by not putting node_modules in the project's gitignore.

\- All developers on a project are in sync. \- You can get the repo back into a good state if npm choked. \- You can go back in time to a prior version _with_ all of it's actual dependencies at that point in time.

<comment><USER4> I'd suggest people bake in an archival process during their deploys so you always have a zip/tarball of the entire source code and node_modules that you deploy, but still use npm install during development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just read a few good tips here[1]. Basically shrinkwrap and use a private npm server/cache.

1 - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11354147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11354147)

</comment><comment><USER6> The advice is simple: Don't rely on third-party stuff you can implement yourself with no significant effort. And for stuff you can't, backup those modules.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is the best way to backup modules? Do you need to create your own private module host, as you can for ruby gems?

<comment><USER6> I may sound old but one can start with just backing up node_modules/ directory.

If third party modules are hosted on GitHub, you can fork them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there a package manager out there with signed releases (GPG or something)?

</comment><comment><USER8> vendoring if such a thing is possible is the first thing that comes to mind</comment>


Comcast failed to install Internet for 10 months then demanded $60,000 in fees - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/03/comcast-failed-to-install-internet-for-10-months-then-demanded-60000-in-fees/?platform=hootsuite <comment><USER2> Yeah we are in the Bay Area the "tech hub" but we still have all the issues that people from LA // Maine // Boston complain about.. Shit internet speeds at shit pricing. Why someone does not introduce competitive fiber is beyond me, esp considering all the engineers in the area. East Bay has the option for using Tekify, whom is supposed to be very reliable....

</comment><comment><USER3> They didn't charge us $60000, but experience has been similar in Bellevue, WA. We eventually resorted to the wireless ethernet service. (It was a more of an issue that they couldn't pull wires from ANY service providers in the area -- and it happened to be just 5 minutes away from Downtown Bellevue...)</comment>


Europe Wants Apple and Google to Fix In-App Payments Problem - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/europe-wants-apple-and-google-to-fix-in-app-payments-problem/ <comment><USER3> Great news. My kids ask me to buy a game for him on our iPad and when I find a free game, I don't want my kid coming back to me 20 minutes later with a screen asking to buy more 'tokens'.

Fuck that. Thank you Google for leading the way with this. Free should be free as in the entire thing for free. Or let me pay for the damn thing once and let me go about my day.

</comment><comment><USER4> A small note that bears repeating:

Most of the big money-maker IAPs are so devious because they sell the same thing that people 20 years ago got from gaming magazines: Cheat codes.

The difference: These cheat codes work only once.

<comment><USER5> 20 years ago it was perfectly normal for kids to be pouring money into arcade machines in exchange for 5 minutes of gameplay. Then be be told to pay more, fast, or lose all progress. Doesn't seem very different to me?

<comment><USER6> The relationship with an arcade game is explicit and up-front: You put coins in to play, and you put more coins in to continue _when you lose_. If you were good, pretty much every arcade game out there could be completed on one credit. It wasn't terribly unusual for someone to get good enough to do that.

F2P games just extract money from you randomly, repeatedly, indefinitely. Completion without payment is no longer a matter of skill; in many cases skill has _zero bearing_ on how much a F2P game costs to play. Instead, they charge you money and to avoid paying, playing the game is dragged out in time, filled with more tedious repetition and grinding, or you have to wait 48 hours between actions instead of a handful of minutes. The developers know that nobody wants to wait 48 hours between actions in a city-building/dungeon- building game, and that nobody wants to plant and harvest the same crop a zillion times before buying a single upgrade, so they use those unattractive barriers as a lever to get you to spend money.

Also, as a rather significant difference: For an arcade game to be successful they had to make it as appealing as possible and have lots of replay value, so you'd keep coming back and pumping quarters in to get better. They also needed a good skill curve, so it would take as long as possible before you got good enough to complete it on one quarter. And they wanted it to be fun enough that you'd still want to play even once you 'mastered' it in that fashion.

In comparison, F2P games are _designed around_ the assumption that players will quickly grow bored with them, and that many players will never like the game enough to spend money. They tune it all around averages and sums, around trying to extract as much money as possible out of the people who _do_ pay, as quickly as possible and for as long as possible until those people quit playing too. F2P games are not built around dedicated, satisfied players.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems to me as though iOS 8 addresses all the concerns raised here (at least regarding "[Apple having] no firm commitment and no timing hav[ing] been provided for the implementation of such possible future changes.")

</comment><comment><USER8> This really sucks because now it will be harder to find these free games. Just because you can't control you or your kid from in app purchases why must everyone else suffer?

</comment><comment><USER9> I like the idea, but I'm worried about Google getting bullied into policies, especially on their own ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes, this is pretty old news...

</comment><comment><USER11> Another non-issue like cookies.

<comment><USER12> It's clear you don't have children who play on a tablet.

<comment><USER13> Set some parental controls? Don't authorize them to use your credit card? Don't let them use the device at all if there's nothing else you can do?

I know it's devious for app developers to go after kids but you can prevent it without any government intervention with a little responsibility on your part. You wouldn't give your child a credit card and let them loose in a toy store either.

<comment><USER14> The trouble with parental controls used to be that they worked differently then advertised. Parent configured password, but there was grace periods of password-less 15 minutes after each buy which was not explained to user. You had to follow tech news to know about it. Or, parent configured password, but the password was required only for app store, not for IAP.

Apple store does not allow you to download anything, not even free apps, if you do not have credit card set up. So, if you wanted anything on that device, you had to configure it there.

Essentially, parental controls are getting better slowly, but only lately and under pressure of regulators.

The other issues are already existing regulations about marketing targeted at children and when the word "free" is a lie. EU restricts kids targeted advertisements in general and has rules against lies in advertisements. A lot of debate is friction about whether app stores should follow the same rules as everybody else and how to interpret those rules in apps.

<comment><USER15> I think ios8 will really help out with the whole situation of needing credit cards to be tied to an account.

Not that that helps right now but I tested it out and it is pretty damn impressive. Glad I don't have kids right now though so I don't need to deal with it at all. >.<

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In app purchases exist because there is no free market for apps - <USER2> is purchased through two portals, who set the expected prices and act as unsupervised quality controllers. Because the prices are so low in app purchases and super-star hits are the only ways to profit.

If there was a free market here, there would not be any need for this, products would be priced at sustainable levels, and I as a parent would never ever ever purchase a game that had in app purchases.

I would rather that I could download apps from anywhere and there was still a rating and quality mechanism. Many options exist for that. But I will take this as an alternative

I think the European Union has this weird attitude that a free market works the best and where there is no free market then there should be regulation to guide the path towards the ideal, or there should be protection against the excesses of the unfree market. I, in the main, agree. It all kind of depends on your definition of free and regulation.

<comment><USER14> Free market drives prices down. That is what it is supposed to do. How exactly is it supposed to fix what they consider false "free" labels on apps? Products are not priced on sustainable levels, because sustainably priced app will loose against the one priced as "free".

<comment><USER17> It's even worse than that.

The way startup funding for the cowboy end of the games business works allows the well funded companies to give much more away. What has occurred is the stakes are now out of control. Admittedly a hit game can bring in hundreds of millions, but to make or market it you'll need to spend a very significant fraction of that. This has the side effect of encouraging wild conservatism of design and price gouging as risk minimisation strategies.

The mobile part of the industry at this point needs someone to do what Nintendo did in the 80s, but it's totally unclear who or how that could possibly happen.

<comment><USER14> It is even worst then that. Even big AAA hit games are often loose money projects due to insane development costs. Game studios that produced great games close every month. Big publishers (EA) have track record of destroying brought successful studios within two years. Small developers struggle and close even more often.

Games seems to be extremely hard business these days.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN:  What do you think of 4chan? - <AUTHOR> Recently there was a link here that I consider to be a brilliant parody of HN.  The best parody makes it a bit painful to look in the mirror!  I think it's only fair to let 4chan know how we perceive them, so add your best 4chan parody below (I'll get it started). <comment><AUTHOR> * [Any comment] - <USER4>

* [Any image] - <USER4>

* [Any video] - <USER4>

* [Topic worth discussing] - plenty of comments filled with ridicule and venom

Perhaps HN is where you go (from 4chan) when you reach a certain level of maturity?

EDIT: Obviously enough 4chan users here to produce a long and humorous list of our particular "strangeness". Before someone there decides I'm an enemy, I should state that I don't think they should be shut down, I don't hate them and I fully think they should be able to have their fun.

<comment><USER5> >implying

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm just guessing from your vague comment, but I don't think I was implying anything beyond "I'm an old fart, but let the kids have their fun".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not a parody post, but a serious commentary....

4chan is utterly brilliant, in a "you stay over there, far away from me, and someone else will actually visit you and find the quality posts and link me to them" sort of way :P

This history of 4chan is rather important to internet culture, really. 4chan came from a group of Something Awful Goons love affair with Japanese culture. It was were Anonymous were born, and where, over the years, said group became to be made of a three distinct factions - oldfags, newfags and direct action protesters. The difference between these groups is crucial to understanding a distinct group of security risks faced by internet connected systems today.

4chan has helped drive the discussion of the role of anonymity in online communities. It inadvertently raised the profile of stenography, due to it being used on images being posted to hide less savoury content. 4chan sparked such things as [http://1d4chan.org](http://1d4chan.org) which is a great repository of tabletop gaming culture. 4chan also helped to drive the evolution of many internet memes, especially image macros ('lolcats').

4chan is not without its problems, however. As hinted above, the anonymous image boards have always appealed to people wanting to exchange illicit images. The anonymous nature of the message boards does drive some (many?) of them to be, well, cesspits. The disparate groups that came together in Anonymous pull it in many different ways, causing tension and feuds.

So on second thoughts, let's not go to 4chan; It is a silly place. But I will be sad to see it go, and it deserves to be long remembered.

</comment><comment><USER7> 4chan is one of few sites like craigslist surviving through technological fashion waves relatively unchanged, and is largely a foundation of the internet culture onto itself. Culture that was born on the internet however wrong some people count it.

It is a piece of art as a service and and opinions vary about it wildly.

My 2c.

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash 4chan is unique in that it's a flat discussion/image board that keeps all users anonymous and their posts only alive as long as they need to be. This removes the incentive structures of similar discussion sites like reddit, which, through archiving threads and karma, mean that success and visibility itself relies on the opinions of others. 4chan is a place where brilliant threads can be on the exact same level as banality and obscenity, but in doing so encourages people to speak their minds as freely as they please.

</comment><comment><USER8> OP is [depreciating term about sexual preference]

</comment><comment><USER9> 4chan is a place like no other, only because of the anons. It's my guess that most of them have an emotional scarring of some sort and use it as a resort/rehab.

</comment><comment><USER10> Its terrible place to waste your time on..

</comment><comment><USER11> Nothing.</comment>


Show HN: Reddit/Hacker News clone for football (soccer) news, tactics, rumours - <AUTHOR> https://footylist.com

<comment><USER2> if you build all of this, it's good practice. you might want to work a bit on the design like the logo i suggest to keep it from making the top bar higher than normal(each li element is 39px height, keep it like that), the font colors(maybe use the same color of the "footy" part of the logo), a smaller vote arrow, the comment text area look a bit out of place, try to algn it with the line over it and make it more wide than tall.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great suggestions, and for your time! I will make the changes right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Its a good start. Why not expand into other supports?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

May be in the future if this one becomes successful. For now I just want to put all my energy into this project.</comment></comment>


Imperfect 'best' Practices - <AUTHOR> http://coffeecoder.net/blog/imperfect-best-practices/ <comment><USER2> One 'best' practice that irks me: "Avoid static methods or attributes in Java".

I find static final attributes to be quite good to avoid magic numbers or strings. Static methods also seem better for functional, stateless methods. Why instiate an object when you don't need it?

I assume most professionals know when or not to use static. However, most of my university colleagues avoid it like the plague, because every professor says "static is usually bad practice".

<comment><USER3> My favorite "best" practice to violate is "All fields must be private."

<comment><USER4> I can't remember the last time I've actually made a field private.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dijkstra's "Go To statement considered harmful" article spawned a whole series of "XXX considered harmful" papers by various computer science researchers in the following years. This has even led to "Considered Harmful Considered Harmful" counter posts to the practice: [http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html](http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html)

One can argue that these "considered harmful" taboos were largely personal opinions based on the, in retrospect, limited experience with early computers and computer programming projects. Modern computers are over 1000 times faster with 1000 times bigger memory and many other improvements. This, for example, makes scripting languages much more practical than in the 1960's, specifically making run-time type inference and similar implicit/weak typing methods feasible for many programming projects. These typing methods clearly break many of the rules established in the 1960's but empirically make software development much faster in most cases. C++11 caved into fifty years of real- world experience and added type inference with the auto keyword -- for example.</comment>


MacBook Air survives 1000-foot, 125mph fall from plane - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2015/02/10/macbook-air-plane/

<comment><USER2> I think how it survives depends on the angle from which it crashes to the ground, as well as the touch point. From the picture, it looks that the touch point is the lower left corner of the keyboard side. From that point to the touchpad, is the aluminum shell, which is relatively more flexible than the touchpad glass and absorbed quite some crash impact to that part...Then from that point on, the touchpad had to broke itself to absorbed the impact propagated from the left side of the touchpad to its right side. And we can see from the picture that there was some point at which the crash force was so great that the touchpad from that point on broke into pieces at finer granularity; and that point is also near the line where the aluminum shell displays a more obvious dent.

I just feel the deformation as the result of this crash is quite predictable, given the same initial parameters...Then why bother went up that high and threw out the laptop, at the risk of hitting some farmer? And if the purpose is to infer some universal rules by induction, I guess many many more laptops (all with the same initial form) need to be thrown out at that height...</comment>


Small chloroquine study in Brazil halted over risk of irregular heart rate - <AUTHOR> https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.07.20056424v1 <comment><USER2> The researchers gave whopping doses of chloroquine to both groups:

(a) high dose chloroquine (600 mg chloroquine twice daily for 10 days or total dose 12g);

(b) low dose chloroquine (450 mg for 5 days, twice daily only on the first day, or total dose 2.7 g)

In addition, all patients received ceftriaxone and azithromycin.

So group (a) got 1200 mg chloroquine the first day and group (b) got 900 mg chloroquine the first day. No wonder they had irregular heart rates! Luckily a review board stopped group (a) treatment before they killed all the patients.

In contrast, the regimen for Covid-19 _successfully_ used by Dr. Zev Zelenko on ~700 patients is:

1\. Hydroxychloroquine 200mg twice a day for 5 days,

2\. Azithromycin 500 mg once a day for 5 days,

3\. Zinc sulfate 220 mg once a day for 5 days.

[https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3829492/posts](https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3829492/posts)

The zinc sulfate is _important_ because it raises the blood level of zinc (Zn++ ion). Chloroquine is a zinc Zn++ "ionophore" which marshals Zn++ across the cell's outer wall into the cytoplasm where the Zn++ can halt viral replication.

"Chloroquine Is a Zinc Ionophore":

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4182877/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4182877/)

(PDF) [https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/jo...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0109180&type=printable)

Some researchers seem to be missing the point that chloroquine and its analogs may play a different role here than in malaria, acting not directly against covid-19 but as a facilitator for Zn++, which then halts covid-19 replication.

Zelenko's use of an antibiotic(azithromycin = Z-Pak) is a prophylaxis against potential secondary bacterial infection; the antibiotic would not likely play a role against the viral infection directly.

Once again we see that randomized, double-blinded clinical trials can be more deadly and less informative than ad-hoc studies performed on the battlefield of medicine.</comment>


Ask HN: If you had three days to learn the most of CS, what would you study? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN!
I'm going on an interview for a position as Software Engineering Intern. I applied even though I haven't (yet) taken any formal classes on algorithms or data structure.
I do have some conceptual understanding of such topics: sorting, searching, data structures and their impact of access/lookup times, big-o notations, complexity.
The thing is, while I do write code, I rely on library-provided abstraction 99.9% of the time (for example I assume sort method of python's list or the qsort function from the c stdlib are going to do a good job).
Now comes the real question: assuming I have only a few days before the interview and would like to fill this gap a bit... What would you advice me to study? Topics, websites, anything.
What is an absolutely-must-know for an intern? <comment><USER2> Ship something which proves you have actual coding ability. Have it ready to talk about at interview, ideally in a fashion that can be demoed. I'd suggest scope along the lines of "single-function web application which has a front- end, has a back-end, consumes an external API, and does one cool thing." Be able to talk about all of it; steer the conversation to whichever is your strongest suit. An interview is a conversation: if they don't bring up "Hey have you built anything recently?" you should bring that up.

Personal opinion: the biggest problem with bright young engineers with substantial academic CS experience is not that they can't write heapsort on command. It's that they frequently have never built anything outside of "fill in this 5% of a toy problem" for undergraduate labs.

It is possible you might be having an interview with someone who values hazing more than they value shipping, in which case you have my sympathy. If you think that is extraordinarily likely, be able to apply your knowledge of big-o and hash tables to decrease the run-time of an arbitrary problem which screamingly needs a hash table. If you have extra time, brush up on quicksort or heapsort.

</comment><comment><USER3> Three days is not a whole lot of time to learn enough of CS to convince your interviewer that you know CS. I would recommend rather than learning something new, just brush up what you already know. Since you say that you rely on libray-provided abstractions it would be good to be able to describe and defend your choices rather than be able to actually implement them -- for example: you should know the complexity of python data structures, if you are going to tell your interviewer you trust the sort method of python's lists:

[https://wiki.python.org/moin/TimeComplexity](https://wiki.python.org/moin/TimeComplexity)

Here are some resources that might help you do a focused revision/study:

[https://www.interviewcake.com/](https://www.interviewcake.com/)

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

[https://codility.com/programmers/lessons/](https://codility.com/programmers/lessons/)

Don't sweat it if you get stuck on something, just move on ahead and revisit the problem later.

Once you've finished the interview though, I would recommend studying things deeply, reading a whole lot of real code and coding as much as possible.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would advise you to start reading _The Art of Computer Programming_. Not because you'll maximize your learning over three days, but will maximize it over your career. And gaining useful habits that last a career is the purpose of an internship. A career isn't like school. It isn't a series of tests that one studies for. It's a life of learning and applying over many years.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER5> Study behavioural questions. Have an answer ready for things like "what do you hope to get out of this internship", "what do you do when you're stuck", "what would your first step be if I asked you to make me a coffee pot", etc.</comment>


Python for Android | Linux Journal - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10940 <comment><USER2> An important bit of TL;DR:

For those who, as did I, say "that's stupid! you have to install the Python for Android APK on the target device!", see [http://code.google.com/p/android- scripting/wiki/SharingScrip...](http://code.google.com/p/android- scripting/wiki/SharingScripts)

</comment><comment><USER3> I can totally relate to the statement: "If, like me, you'd rather eat glass than sit down to write some Java code in Eclipse, it would appear that you are out of luck when it comes to implementing your next project on Android." I've been attempting to educate myself about Android development for a side project. Dealing with Java has been an impediment, as my brain seems to grok scripting languages far more easily.

<comment><USER4> If its a less verbose language that you are looking for, you might want to checkout mirah (and pindah) -- <https://github.com/mirah>

I believe its still under heavy development, but really nice in that mirah can output dalvik bytecode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://pygame.org> also has a pygame subset for android which includes a port of cpython. Not all modules are included though. Some python packages are missing, and some pygame modules are not included too. However it works well enough for most games.

Just create a directory called pygame on your sd card and put your code in there. No need to mess around with setting up java.

<comment><USER6> Stay tuned, we're nearly finished with a release that includes Python 2.7.1 and various other goodies.

SL4A is still the way to go if you want access to a significant portion of the Android API, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know if it is possible to write JRuby android applications? It would seem a natural fit given Java etc etc. I do relate to the comment ""If, like me, you'd rather eat glass than sit down to write some Java code" so I have been looking for a better way to do it. Though, I have lately resigned myself to the fact that I may well have to write Java again...

As an aside...does anyone have experience with PhoneGap or Appcelerator? Wondering about experiences with those approaches (both positive and negative).

<comment><USER8> You might want to check out Ruboto. I haven't used it yet, but it seems to allow you to do exactly what you want, i.e. write full Android apps using JRuby. I've heard there's a significant performance penalty, though.

<http://ruboto.org/>

I've also heard of people having success using Mirah to write Android apps. The syntax is very similar to Ruby, so it will be comfortable for you. It compiles to a straight Java class with no runtime dependencies, so you don't get the performance hit you run into with Ruboto.

<http://www.mirah.org/>

<comment><USER9> WTF? In the Mirah examples, I see a bunch of

      i = 0
      while i < 10
        ...code...
        i += 1
      end

There's no for loop? I couldn't confirm because I didn't find a manual.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At the Texas Linux Fest, there was a great talk that reviewed non-Java ways of programming on Android:

[http://texaslinuxfest.org/sessions/decaffeinated-robot- devel...](http://texaslinuxfest.org/sessions/decaffeinated-robot-developing- android-without-java)

[http://www.deepbluelambda.org/events/live/decaffeinated- robo...](http://www.deepbluelambda.org/events/live/decaffeinated-robot-source- slides-and-audio)

There are some comparisons of code size for the different languages and environments. That was probably the most informative talk I attended at the Linux Fest.

</comment><comment><USER11> nice

<comment><USER12> You are being downvoted because your comment adds nothing to the conversation.</comment></comment>


First Sentences: The Pain, the Glory - <AUTHOR> https://dawntrowelljones.com/2020/07/first-sentences/ <comment><USER2> Disappointed there was no mention of the ne plus ultra of first lines:

> It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at > occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which > swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling > along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps > that struggled against the darkness.

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

(Also, I'm not liking "Outside, bushes shimmied, ..." because I can't read that without 'bushes' and 'shimmied' blending into something 'busheshimmy' and it breaks the flow.)</comment>