Truth Values - <AUTHOR> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-values/ <comment><USER2> When I, attempted, to read this paper I felt as though I was Remy's brother in Ratatouille where Remy is trying to show him the power of taste variance but something internally doesn't compute. It's as if sight is a clear understanding and I'm looking at the subject of the paper through frosted glass.

It saddens me that my mind can't quite grasp it.

<comment><USER3> I also find much of the article dense, but here's my attempt at a summary.

Logicians like the idea that words and phrases have "meanings" or "references."

Like, "my computer" should be interpreted, when I say it, as referencing a particular gadget that I own.

If you sit around and speculate about such references, you might wonder, for example, what the reference of "the unit sphere" is. Your Platonist friends will tell you that the reference is to an actually existing abstract object, or something like that.

The question of truth values seems to revolve around the question of the reference of a claim such as "Socrates is mortal." And the proposed answer is that this claim is a kind of name referring either to "the Truth" or "the False."

Note that this is how you tend to think of such claims when you work in predicate logic: the term Mortal(Socrates) is assumed to have the value True or False.

A quote cited by the article, by Jan Łukasiewicz (incidentally the inventor of "Polish notation"):

"All true propositions denote one and the same object, namely truth, and all false propositions denote one and the same object, namely falsehood. I consider truth and falsehood to be singular objects in the same sense as the number 2 or 4 is. … Ontologically, truth has its analogue in being, and falsehood, in non-being. The objects denoted by propositions are called logical values. Truth is the positive, and falsehood is the negative logical value. … Logic is the science of objects of a special kind, namely a science of logical values."

These thoughts about meaning were fundamental to the development of mathematical logic. Frege's notion of truth values was a prerequisite for his development of formal first-order logic and second-order logic, and algebraic logic in general (Boole's algebraic logic is an early version).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This statement is false.</comment>


How to Optimize Your Content Marketing Reach with Online Influencers - <AUTHOR> http://www.ronsela.com/content-marketing-reach/

<comment><AUTHOR> All marketers face the same problems every day, figuring out ways to captivate their audience with quality content. The concept that content is king is well known to all, but the real problem that businesses face now is that firms have to focus on generating a non-stop stream of quality content.</comment>


Show HN: I built a website to better compare USB-C hubs found on Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.usb-hubs.org/ <comment><USER3> Needs to filter whether it can show HDMI 4K at 30Hz or 60Hz. And related to that, for video, it's possible to have 2 4K 60hz through or one or none.

Also filter whether it's one USB-C connects to computer or two USB-C connects to computer. With two USB-C connected to computer, can pass through more types of USB to accessories.

Finally, it doesn't show matches that I know are matches.

// I buy these to test, but don't want to waste time testing duds, so spend time trying to figure out if/when the claimed stats are possible.

101 Intro: [https://www.howtogeek.com/211843/usb-type-c-explained- what-i...](https://www.howtogeek.com/211843/usb-type-c-explained-what-it-is- and-why-youll-want-it/)

301 Deep dive: [https://www.bigmessowires.com/2019/05/19/explaining-4k-60hz-...](https://www.bigmessowires.com/2019/05/19/explaining-4k-60hz- video-through-usb-c-hub/)

<comment><USER4> > Needs to filter whether it can show HDMI 4K at 30Hz or 60Hz. And related to > that, for video, it's possible to have 2 4K 60hz through or one or none.

I don't think they'd bother, because none of these docks can do it. USB-C 3.1 inherently can't support a 4k@60hz display, due to bandwidth limitations. And it certainly can't run two of them.

You'd have to jump up to a Thunderbolt 3 dock for that sort of thing.

<comment><USER3> The Thunderbolt capable docks on Amazon are still listed as USB-C because consumers seem to think it's all about cable shape.

That said, there are plenty of dual USB-C connector, dual HDMI 4K@60hz port, dongles designed for Mac on Amazon. I think this is the most recent addition:

[https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RH9HF4R/](https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RH9HF4R/)

 _"Satechi Aluminum Type-C Dual HDMI Adapter 4K 60Hz with USB-C PD Charging — Stunning dual HDMI display with a convenient USB-C PD port to keep your setup up and running - all in 4K 60Hz resolution. ENGINEERED FOR 4K DUAL DISPLAY - features dual HDMI ports to connect two monitors for stunning, extended 4K 60Hz display. Requires a direct HDMI connection, will not work with VGA, DVI or Thunderbolt displays..."_

By contrast, this is one HDMI 4K@60Hz and one HDMI 4K@30Hz:

[https://smile.amazon.com/Satechi-Multimedia-Adapter- Gigabit-...](https://smile.amazon.com/Satechi-Multimedia-Adapter-Gigabit- Ethernet/dp/B07RH8L9GV/)

Includes the two 4K HDMI ports of differing refresh rates, USB-C PD 3.0 charging, Gigabit Ethernet, micro/SD card readers, and USB 3.0 ports, and also will _not_ work with Thunderbolt.

<comment><USER5> Two 4k @ 60 Hz is either Thunderbolt (which is fine for Macs but has a price and I would rather buy like [https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=38575](https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=38575) or [https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=31261](https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=31261) instead of a noname company) or DisplayLink which is to be avoided at all costs. This hub is Thunderbolt as can be deciphered from "Does not support MacBook models with single USB-C port" (see [https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT201736#usbc](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201736#usbc) ) but the fact I need to decipher what it is a second strike against it. It seems lately Intel has loosened its iron grip on Thunderbolt 3 (after all, it handed the standard over to USB IF) so now everything goes (we see empty M.2 to TB3 enclosures and chaining eGPU boxes both of which were forbidden by Intel prior) but the fact they didn't include the trademarked name makes me go hm.

Finally, it could be a DP 1.4 MST hub but that is very rare (the first USB C to DP 1.4 MST I am aware of was announced at CES 2020 [https://plugable.com/2020/01/07/plugables-new-docking- statio...](https://plugable.com/2020/01/07/plugables-new-docking-station-and- adatpers-at-ces-2020-raise-the-bar-for-connectivity-power-and-productivity/) and didn't ship yet) and figuring out support will be _very_ interesting. All Intel 14nm laptop CPUs are stuck with DisplayPort 1.2 and then researching which laptops with Radeon / nVidia GPUs run their USB C through those GPUs to provide DP 1.4 will be fun.

Let's put 4k @ 60 (and then 4k @ 30) into the bandwidth calculator: [https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/729232-guide-to- display...](https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/729232-guide-to-display- cables-adapters-v2/?section=calc&H=3840&V=2160&F=60&calculations=show) you can see you need more than what DP 1.2 can provide so everything I said above applies.

Oh and of course if it's for a Mac, in general, you could just use two USB C plugs, I suspect that's what the 4k @ 60 + 4k @ 30 is: one plug is used in DP alt mode, the other is used in MFDP mode.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't support macs with a single port because it takes two ports, uses each one. That changes the bandwidth calculator math.

This adapter was, I believe, also announced at CES 2020.

<comment><USER5> Oh I see now [https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/I/71z-IlmfZeL...](https://images-na.ssl-images- amazon.com/images/I/71z-IlmfZeL._AC_SL1500_.jpg) the single plug misled me to think it's just one USB C. Crafty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For choosing the right product based on a list of spec requirements I can highly recommend the price comparison website Geizhals [1]. They offer an insane amount of filter options over a wide category of products. Want USB C hub with Power Delivery, Gigabit LAN, a card reader and at least 2 display options? Here are your options: [2]. Also works for Mainboards, TVs and a whole lot of other stuff

[1] [https://geizhals.eu/?cat=nbdock](https://geizhals.eu/?cat=nbdock) [2] [https://geizhals.eu/?cat=nbdock&xf=5206_2%7E5207_DisplayPort...](https://geizhals.eu/?cat=nbdock&xf=5206_2%7E5207_DisplayPort%7E5208_Gb+LAN%7E5211_Cardreader%7E5211_USB-C+Power+Delivery%7E5860_USB-C+3.0)

<comment><USER7> This one is my favorite site of this type:

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

It has an awesome interface and covers the US and the UK.

<comment><USER8> I've been working for 2 years on a successor for productchart! Modern UI and KISS, check it out here : [https://picked.cc](https://picked.cc)

<comment><USER9> How can you reduce phones to a single checkbox that says whether they're "intuitive" or not?

<comment><USER10> it lets people say 'i want an iphone' while still feeling reasonable

<comment><USER11> OnePlus, LG, and Xiaomi are all included under 'intuitive'. (Though Samsung appears to not be?)

<comment><USER10> Ugh, I feel awful snarking now - that is strange to me, I could see OnePlus and Xiaomi, but LG and not Samsung is a headscratcher... and honestly, if you include all those, it seems like a "has top 5 marketshare except Huawei" checkbox...maybe that's a good thing?

Anyways, enough rambling, thanks for sharing :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unfortunately this doesn't fix any of the confusing bullshit around USB versions and specs and port shapes. And it muddies the issue by mixing "3" and "2" with "C", which describe entirely different things. My first search looking for 3 USB-C ports brought up this behemoth: [https://www.amazon.com/Ethernet-Adapter-VEOOVE-Samsung- Unive...](https://www.amazon.com/Ethernet-Adapter-VEOOVE-Samsung-Universal- Compatible/dp/B07VNKR495/)

2 of the USB-C ports are USB 2.0? WTF is that. Nobody wants that.

<comment><USER13> And the third is just PD, no data. Searching for 2 ports is no better - they're all one data plus one PD (with the exception of one that's macbook- specific, so it can pass-thru two ports because it's using 2 on the host).

It seems like it'd be more realistic to have a tick-box for "a usb-c port" and a tick-box for "a PD port".

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Awesome work. Having just gone through this for my company, I'd recommend a few valuable bits of information:

\- Thunderbolt 3 support filter

\- Power delivery capability (usually 60W-100W if at all)

Both of those are valuable for mac shoppers.

<comment><USER15> Not only for macs... I have 4 raspberry pi4 powered through an USB hub and spent quite a bit of time looking for one that had at least 4 ports and that every port could deliver a minimum of 5V-3A. The US amazon had a few, but trying to find them (or similar) in several european Amazons was quite difficult.

<comment><USER16> Any chance of a link? I'm looking good something to power a Pi4 cluster. Thanks

<comment><USER15> I ended up going with this one: [https://thepihut.com/products/anidees-6-port- smart-ic-usb-ch...](https://thepihut.com/products/anidees-6-port-smart-ic-usb- charger-50-watt)

Have had it for a couple of months now with no issues.

<comment><USER16> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would prefer if it had less products but actually reviewed them, there is so much crap on Amazon you really need to try something out, disassemble it, sometimes even measure it to figure out if it's crap or not.

SEO Spam really ruined product search / reviews.

Just last week I tried hard but couldn't find a good review of USB-C Power Adaptors, just page after page of SEO optimized spam without actual content.

<comment><USER18> I actually wrote about this just last week: [http://mdolon.com/essays/amazon- has-ruined-search-and-google...](http://mdolon.com/essays/amazon-has-ruined- search-and-google-is-in-on-it)

<comment><USER19> Interesting post, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much people, I really appreciate all your feedback. I read all comments, already answered to some them. I will try to respond to every one, but can't promise that.

I noted down all the feedback and ideas for improvement and will tackle those points:

* better filters (video resolution, displayPort, card readers, power delivery) and sorting by price, "no-feature" search

* Better and cleaner design

* Moar data: definitely Thunderbolt 3 hubs and usb-c hubs of higher quality (anker?)

* implement reviewmeta to check the reviews of each product

* better quality of product data/prices and so on

<comment><USER20> > * Moar data: definitely Thunderbolt 3 hubs and usb-c hubs of higher quality > (anker?)

Are you talking about adding hubs that aren't available on Amazon? When I started to use my 13" mbp as a desktop station I was surprised how hard it was to find a decent hub, and I couldn't find anything on Amazon that worked. I tried several hubs that seemed to work, but they interfered with wifi.

I ended up with a CalDigit TS3 Plus, and it's been really good so far. I would not have found that on a site that only reviews Amazon products, but I would have really appreciated an actual recommendation rather than just a large set of products to compare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is great. I always wonder why amazon itself is so useless in this space. The only thing you can go is price and reviews there, without any good comparisons between products.

<comment><USER22> I like wirecutter for this. Their picks are rarely the most expensive and they try to recommend things that last long. I am happy they can make a dollar or two of my referral link pick for the research work they do.

<comment><USER23> I feel like they've been slipping recently in order to maximize referral income. There's been a number of things they've suggested that are simply no where near the best. I'd use them as a guide but not a definitive answer - that should go for any site with affiliate links.

<comment><USER24> I agree. A lot of the highest quality products are not sold on Amazon any longer due to the myriad of issues and I have noticed that unless the site has a referral program or is a member of one, I rarely see a recommendation for their product. Or even a mention of their product. I could be wrong, but I'm not sure they have any recommendations for products that aren't sold with an affiliate program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just a word of caution, I believe it is against the affiliate agreement that you show prices. I mean, two of the first four now have the wrong price -- the price probably changed on amazon's side. I believe that's why Amazon doesn't want affiliates to show prices.

<comment><USER26> Yes this is true. Can confirm

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm in the market for a dock/hub for my 16" MBP and I'm completely baffled by the lack of decent options. I just want the following 3 capabilities:

\- 100W PD

\- 4k60Hz (preferably through USB-C)

\- Gigabit ethernet

I have not been able to find a _single_ docking station or hub that can check these 3 boxes :(

<comment><USER28> 4k60 + gigabit is not possible without going up to Thunderbolt 3 - there isn't enough bandwidth otherwise. The best you can do is 4k60 + USB 2.0 (so a gigabit Ethernet connection would cap out at ~300mbps in practice.) See [https://www.bigmessowires.com/2019/05/19/explaining-4k-60hz-...](https://www.bigmessowires.com/2019/05/19/explaining-4k-60hz- video-through-usb-c-hub/)

DisplayPort 1.4 changes this, but everything seems to be stuck on 1.2

100W is, of course, possible.

I use a CalDigit USB-C Pro Dock with my MBP: [https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07VL675DT](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07VL675DT) \- it's TB3, but it can fall back to USC-C (with reduced capabilities, of course). It uses Intel's newer Titan Ridge chipset. The older and more common Alpine Ridge chipset is TB3 only.

<comment><USER29> >>100W is, of course, possible.

I don't think it is. The dock itself uses quite a lot of power, that's why the highest you can find is about 85-90W. USB-C cables support max of 100W so I don't think it's physically possible to accept 100W and output 100W at the same time.

<comment><USER28> Well, with these power pass-through hubs like what the website has, you're correct.

I was thinking more of a proper dock that has its own power supply. My dock has a 150W power brick, and then it supplies 85W to my laptop. In theory, the numbers could be 165W and 100W.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice work. I miss the ability to filter by video support. I got this one [1] without reading the fine print, and it only supports 4K at 30Hz, not 60Hz.

I'm actually still looking for a hub that will do 4K/60Hz HDMI/DP and power delivery (and preferably 1-2 extra USB-C ports), so that I can power my MacBook Pro with it, and have it deliver video to my external display, all while only having one cable going into the MacBook. Not dual monitors, just a single display while the lid is closed.

From what I can tell, that's only possible with an expensive Thunderbolt dock.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079GSMZ7G](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079GSMZ7G)

<comment><USER31> To work around macOS' awful monitor restrictions (i.e. lack of general MST support), we bit the bullet and got a Dell WB19TB [1] (Thunderbolt dock). It sucks from a wiring perspective but it works.

[1] [https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-thunderbolt- dock-w...](https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-thunderbolt-dock- wd19tb/apd/210-arik/pc-accessories)

(To those that go down this route, be aware: you cannot use both DP ports on this dock as-is -- again, macOS lacks MST support. One monitor must be connected to the Thunderbolt add-on module.)

<comment><USER32> I wouldn't trust Dell with this. I have a Dell monitor that I bought because it has a USB-C port that supported both PD and video. But it turns out it doesn't work well with MacBooks (constantly loses connection, and messes with the MacBook's sleep). Dell acknowledged the issue and released a patch that fixed it ... for Windows machines. They refuse to fix it for MacBooks because they don't want to support a competitor's product. So I would be highly skeptical of a Thunderbolt dock from Dell working well with MacBooks.

Addendum: That monitor is also a dud in many other ways, notably that the PIP and PBP feature sucks and it has horrific ghosting. All a real shame as Dell used to have high standards for their monitors.

<comment><USER30> I have the same monitor. It's great, but I ran into the issues you mentioned with multiple USB-C docks, including Apple's own multiport adapter. Have you been able to get anything to work?

<comment><USER32> I've only tried my MacBook. Make sure you're on the monitor's latest firmware at least. That doesn't fix anything for MacBooks but the latest patch was supposed resolve USB-C issues for other devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> crooked-v I want a USB-C hub that's just one USB-C in to multiple USB-C out. Why is that so impossible to find?

<comment><USER33> Type-C says that there can't be type-c hubs. Just wait for some Chinese OEM to work that around

<comment><USER34> > Type-C says that there can't be type-c hubs.

Where does it say that? I've seen a lot of posts claiming just the opposite.

You can't just take a setup designed for type-A ports and mechanically convert them to type-C, because that would allow you to make an A-to-A connection. But that's not a blocker for a properly-designed hub.

<comment><USER33> It's buried somewhere in the spec, using evasive wording.

I bet this is fully artificial limitation sneaked into the spec by people not wanting "stuff working without PCs"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is really cool. One more bit of data that would be helpful: cord length. Almost all of these have short cords that are great for portable use cases, but not ideal for use at a desk.

<comment><USER36> I was going to suggest just getting a longer cable, but I see now that almost all of them have non-removable USB-C cables sticking out.

Why is this? Is it because only one port can be upstream, so they try to avoid the confusion? Or just cost?

<comment><USER37> Probably both. A good USB-C cable isn't cheap and using the wrong cable would cause the hub not to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This really didn't make things any less confusing. If anything else, I'm more confused by just a massive spam of product tiles as the first thing I see. It feels like I misclicked an ad in my Google search and ended up at a knock-off product website from abroad.

What you really need to be doing is making recommendations, product breakdown, and even label things as your "choice" and why. Right now, it just looks like a glorified affiliate link farm and that feels dirty.

Spamming users with a wall of product is not the solution.

</comment><comment><USER39> One of the things that blew my mind was that in the USB-C spec, you can't have a male to female cord, but I was only able to find two hubs on amazon with a detatchable cable.

Why you ask?

I have a mac and a PC on my desk, and i plug my kb,mouse, and headset (usb sound card) into the hub) and just swap one cable instead of three to game. If you have a better solution that has hub/kvm -> usb-c for the mac, i'm all ears.

</comment><comment><USER40> I am extremely frustrated at the lack of options for USB-C multiport adapters. The majority of the models seem to be manufactured by brands I have never heard of. Any that seem to be decent quality and have decent port selection are also extremely expensive.

Apple decided to eliminate all data ports except USB-C on its notebooks several years ago, yet they don't offer a robust multiport adapter? (I guess you can spend $70 if you want the privilege of being able to plug in a conference room HDMI adapter, but not much else.)

I am also completely confused on how many of these multiport adapters work. One I purchased in the past required that I install drivers on my Mac. Others seem to not require that. Can I plug USB-C adapters into USB-C adapters, if say, I wanted to plug a USB-C to Ethernet adapter into my main USB-C multiport adapter? Does it depend on the adapters? Does any USB-C multiport adapter that has a female USB-C port allow me to charge the device the adapter is plugged into? I seem to have had mixed results with that in the past.

<comment><USER41> >yet they don't offer a robust multiport adapter?

After struggling with countless hubs now, having drives disconnect and displays freak out I'm now convinced the reason Apple only offers adapters like single USB-C to USB-A and no hub solution is because deep down they know that the hub technology just isn't reliable or feasible at all and only 1 to 1 port conversions are actually reliable in this spec.

Happy to be proven completely wrong, but honestly I've yet to see a hub that can reliably keep drives connected and only the Apple single C to A cable manages to do it reliably enough across 5+ hours and the fact Apple doesn't even ship a $100-$300 hub speaks volumes to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Very nice project! Can you tell us a little about your tech? How did you crawl Amazon's USB listings, did you use their API? And then how did you figure out if an item has the feature you are looking for: What was your parsing and extraction logic like? Finally, how often are you refreshing your index?

I'm always interested in projects that have a clear path to monetization.

<comment><USER43> Also, I was pleased to see Erlang :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> No option for DisplayPort? Currently trying to find a way to run two screens from my 2 port MacBook Pro (Macs don't support display daisy chaining for some reason) and the HDMI dongles I've used before have been so incredibly janky and unreliable.

The two ports on this laptop are an absolute nightmare, this wasn't my choice because it's a work machine but please no one else buy this thing because it's pure suffering, hubs never work reliably only cables that work are the single C to display port cable and the single official Apple C to A cable.

Every hub I try has drives disconnecting on their own, HDMI displays freaking out and so on. This isn't pro level computing if my data and displays don't work reliably.

</comment><comment><USER44> Do not forget to use Amazon Product api to fetch price and mention the last price update in product disclaimer, otherwise you may be violating affiliate program terms, and may get your account suspended.

</comment><comment><USER28> First up, nice job. This is awesome!

Here's a few filters off the top of my head that you might consider adding:

* Price

* DisplayPort ports

* Maximum power pass-through

* Is the ethernet port gigabit or just 100mbit ( e.g. [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06Y5N3YCD/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06Y5N3YCD/) \- You generally can't get 4k60 + gigabit without thunderbolt 3.)

You might also want to consider adding docks, or perhaps create a second website for those. (In my mind, the main distinction between the two is weather or not it has a built-in power supply - it looks like none of yours do.)

</comment><comment><USER45> Cool that you have an option to turn off affiliate links but since you are providing value and product recommendations with this site I'd personally say it's fine to remove that option.

</comment><comment><USER46> I was thinking about adding few things to make it paid service: \- allow people to enter keywords describing product \- allow people to enter their own affiliate id \- allow people to generate short url to dynamically generated page showing above

All above would allow people to quickly generate and share chunks of specific amazon products to their following and monetize it.

You could either produce sidebar with your own ads or just charge for such service so it would be win-win for all

<comment><USER47> I was thinking about the same. If there are any affiliate marketing people in here, can you tell us more about your workload, RoI, setup and problems? :D

<comment><USER48> Depends on the niche. Some work easily out (especially if its about products with an EAN), for others it works too, but you need manually processing, if you care to not only offer a comparing of Amazon products. The Amazon API is howevery very detailed and useful for product data. You look at the data provided and either try to "not care and add everything" or to form it to fit your scheme (imo the better way).

Issues are with marketing (SEO, useful text), malformed or wrong informations and normally there is no global valid usable database available to get all the data. Sometimes I depend on crawling, so websites changing break normally price-updating. By using an API its not such much a hassle, but also using the API sometimes product ids change and you have to keep it updated to not end up with a broken website.

I created Keyfuchs[1], a german / english price comparing website for game key prices and we mostly manually write the texts, half-automatically crawl the different stores and try to set it up nicely for our users.

[1][https://www.keyfuchs.de](https://www.keyfuchs.de) / [https://www.thegamefox.net](https://www.thegamefox.net)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Anyone else thinks its weird that we created an entire industry/product section just because notebook builders don't include common ports anymore?

<comment><USER27> Not really. I mean, it's conceivable that portable devices have gotten smaller and more streamlined since they get replaced sooner, while the outside world has largely remained the same (from a connectivity standpoint).

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> There's only one USB-C hub listed with a detachable cable, the uni Hub. Any USB-C cable that supports full speed USB 3.2 Gen 2 works. I reviewed it on my blog here: [https://www.naut.ca/blog/2019/09/11/uni-usb-c- hub/](https://www.naut.ca/blog/2019/09/11/uni-usb-c-hub/)

<comment><USER51> I've bought a uni USB-c to DisplayPort cable before. Support was helpful: had some trouble getting it to work with my laptop in Linux and they sent me another cable to make sure it wasn't a cable issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Personal opinion: I have had the best value-for-quality out of the "J5 Create" brand. Adding them to this list (it's a useful tool) would be great.

[https://smile.amazon.com/stores/node/9123406011](https://smile.amazon.com/stores/node/9123406011)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the hint! Will add them:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> The key factor esp for video is "does it support thunderbolt" (to which the answer today for these price points is "no").

For a laptop you want TB 3 for high frame rate video and fast drives. For an iPad Pro, it's not necessary (and I carry one of these listed devices in my bag with me)

</comment><comment><USER54> I just want to tell you how much I appreciate how you allow to turn the affiliate link on and off. And also that you basically made it so that it's the first thing I see when I join. I don't see that much honesty and openness out in the open that often. So thanks!

</comment><comment><USER55> Nice work, looks like a solid tool - have a suggestion for my recent debacle. I had to buy a dock to use my Apple Thunderbolt Display with a new USB-C MBP. There were few that could do it whilst also offering power delivery. I went with this dock which I notice isn't on your list, nor is the ability to filter for Thunderbolt 2 support. [https://www.amazon.com/OWC-14-Port-Thunderbolt- Compatible-OW...](https://www.amazon.com/OWC-14-Port-Thunderbolt-Compatible- OWCTB3DK14PSG/dp/B07JMH6BSY)

</comment><comment><USER56> Are _any_ of these products actual one-to-many USB-C hubs?

You know, a _hub_. Which seemingly do not exist for USB-C / USB 3.

[https://superuser.com/q/1381139/122042](https://superuser.com/q/1381139/122042)

[https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/10/14/the-impossible-dream- of-u...](https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/10/14/the-impossible-dream-of-usb-c/)

</comment><comment><USER57> Tangentially related, does anyone know if there is a DisplayPort-to- USB-C/Thunderbolt cable one could use to connect a GPU (DisplayPort) to a monitor (USB-C/Thunderbolt)?

I'd like to connnect Titan RTX (DisplayPort) to LG's 31" 5k2k (USB-C) but all I see are cables for the opposite direction, i.e. USB-C/Thunderbolt to DisplayPort, for MacBooks. Other DisplayPort on LG is already used by another computer (gaming PC with 2080Ti) and HDMI can't do 5120x2160@60Hz.

<comment><USER5> The Delock 63928 [https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_63928/merkmale.html?setLang...](https://www.delock.de/produkte/G_63928/merkmale.html?setLanguage=en) is in the direction you want but I am not 100% it can do DisplayPort 1.4. AmazonGlobal ships it globally from [https://www.amazon.co.uk/DeLOCK- Displayport-Adaptor-type-Mon...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/DeLOCK-Displayport- Adaptor-type-Monitor/dp/B07FYLCG3S) please test and report back either at [https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/co23kd/i_have...](https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/co23kd/i_have_found_the_mythical_displayport_to_usbc/) and mention /u/chx_ so I see your report or just email me at chx1975 gmail . While reddit has unsavory parts, we keep our little corner focused on USB C knowledge.

Alternatively, you can power the Gigabyte GC Titan Ridge from a mining riser, no PCIe is necessary, feed it DisplayPort signals, get Thunderbolt signals. Titan Ridge is DP 1.4 capable.

<comment><USER57> Thanks, ordering that DeLOCK now! Will get back to you when I test it!

Titan Ridge is an option as well though I want to use it in an x399 Zenith Extreme board (DeepLearning rig) and that might be challenging (in theory it should work but the board is super buggy).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm still baffled as to why no one offers more than four USB-A ports - <USER2> very few offer four.

The Anker four-port hub [0] is great (I own like four, just in case), but I would kill for one with five or six ports.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Aluminum-Adapter-MacBook- Chrome...](https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Aluminum-Adapter-MacBook- Chromebook/dp/B07DFYQXY7/ref=sr_1_19?tag=usbhubs0b-20)

<comment><USER59> Could be power reasons? There are plenty of many-port USB hubs for desktop use, but they tend to have external power bricks.

For example: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014ZQ07NE/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014ZQ07NE/) (7 ports)

With a cable like: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UXKTJE0](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00UXKTJE0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> oh goodness… yes, fine work, but this site rubs my hugest tech pet peeve today

There is not a single USB-C hub on this site. A USB-C hub would take one USB-C port and turn it into several USB-C ports.

These are what are called port replicators. There are no USB-C hubs in existence, which is a huge reason why the standard is still struggling.

Thank you for putting a selector for "how many USB-C ports" front and center, that at least illustrates the problem…

<comment><USER60> (why are there no "real" USB-C hubs? some say that it is due to the lack of the existence of a chip that Intel is going to release "any time now" for like a year now… others say that the power delivery requirements of USB-C make this really tricky)

<comment><USER61> USB-C hubs are on their way. A couple of IC makers now have parts supporting that, so products using them are in the development pipeline: [http://www.genesyslogic.com/en/product_view.php?show=69](http://www.genesyslogic.com/en/product_view.php?show=69)

I'm actually currently developing one as well that has a unique twist to it.

<comment><USER62> [http://www.simulatechnology.com/Product/Detail/uid/5de9347e-...](http://www.simulatechnology.com/Product/Detail/uid/5de9347e-1741-11ea- ad99-0050568966ec?typeName=Industries&type=Type-C_Accessory) exists, at least to some extent. It uses the aforementioned chip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> It looks really nice!

I was wondering if you could add power output per port, and total, in Amps...

Reason that I ask is because someone might want to power a whole bunch of Raspberry Pi's off of a single USB hub, and if it doesn't have the requisite amps (~3.0 Amps per socket), it will probably burn out, or power will probably sag, and that wouldn't be fun!

But, other than that minor "would-be-nice" \-- great site, all in all!

</comment><comment><USER64> Seems very nice. Is there a way to search for hubs that don't have a feature? I want a hub that has ethernet, but not hdmi, for example.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is already on my todo list. It was easier to implement the simple "has feature", instead of doing a full blown search interface :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> This is really good work! I have been trying to find a hub that I can use between Macbook Pro and LG 27UK850-W USB Type C display but so far didn't have a chance

MacbookPro <-> USB-C Hub <-> Display

Currently, the display can provide enough power to RMP, I would like to have hub in between so that I still have only one cable but it seems impossible to find

</comment><comment><USER66> This is so necessary! However, it still doesn't answer a burning question that I have: are there any USB-C hubs that can draw power from an _upstream_ power delivery source and supply it to downstream USB-A devices?

Just to be clear, I don't expect you to have this answer. From what I can tell, the answer is "no that doesn't exist".

<comment><USER67> USB hubs did this even prior to PD. Is there a particular non-standard wattage you're looking for?

<comment><USER66> The USB spec limits the amount of power a single device can draw from its host. For a USB hub, this means that the downstream devices will have to split a single device's worth of power allowance between them. So to support multiple power hungry devices, many existing USB hubs offer additional external power supplies.

In my case, I have two midi controllers and an external audio interface that all want their full share of power. The audio interface refuses to run without it.

So I'm wondering if there's a hub that is "externally powered" via the _host 's_ PD power supply.

There are plenty of USB C hubs that can draw additional power from a downstream PD source. But I want something that can draw additional power from the host even if it's a laptop running on battery.

(Power Delivery is an additional spec that can run over USB C, but its existence is independent of and doesn't change the USB spec's power limitations for a single device)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> It doesn't show some of the most important brands and sellers like the anker 7+3 usb 3 hub.

[https://www.amazon.com/Anker-PowerIQ-Charging-MacBook- Surfac...](https://www.amazon.com/Anker-PowerIQ-Charging-MacBook- Surface/dp/B00VDVCQ84)

</comment><comment><USER69> Of all these there are probably half a dozen devices that are free of defects. This site does nothing to help me filter out the rest. For me, the way I approach this is I just find an Anker-made thing that most closely matches what I need and buy it. It might cost a few bucks more, but it works.

</comment><comment><USER70> Suggestion: add a field for HDMI or Thunderbolt video. I have devices that will only work with HDMI like ChromeBooks and Samsung Galaxy phones (you can plug them into a screen and use them like a computer). I also have devices that will work with thunderbolt like my Mac and Dell laptops.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love these kind of websites, it's much better than a 20-page guide on CNET or Wirecutter.

I've been working for two years on a similar website for Phones/VR/Cameras/Drones, check it out here : [https://picked.cc](https://picked.cc)

</comment><comment><USER71> Actually all those hubs are almost all equal: they support usb 3.0 and differ very little. Just buy Anker (upgraded) and you will be fine. Different story for usb 3.1 gen 2. There's only one hub currently and it's Sony UHS-II. (And even this one can support 4K only in 30 FPS)

</comment><comment><USER72> Needs an option for total USB ports (including USB3 + USB2). Say someone has 3 hard drives, a keyboard and a mouse. Probably they would want at least 3 USB3 ports for the hard drives and at least 5 total, but would be just as happy with 5 USB3 as 3 USB3 and 2 USB2.

</comment><comment><USER73> Related question: a lot of these hubs have very short cords. Apparently usb c extension cords are not allowed by the usb c spec, but some users report generic female-male cables from amazon can do the job fine. Anyone have experience with this or know of caveats?

</comment><comment><USER74> Useful, but one thing: a USB-3 port can be compatible with a USB-2 port, so one _might_ expect that 2 USB-2 ports can also be covered by a device with two USB-3 ports (as long as they have the same connector), but I don't think the search works like that.

</comment><comment><USER75> Here's a bug/feature request:

The website doesn't support the Amazon links in Australia. When I click a link on my iPhone it opens the Amazon app, then tries to switch my app to the US listing which doesn't work.

My suggestion is to provide multiple Amazon links for various countries.

</comment><comment><USER76> Nice site! Would be nice to add cable length as well, finding hub for desktop PCs very hard.

</comment><comment><USER77> From what I can see, none of these support multiple 4K monitors - how do people dock in situations like this? I've been using a USB-C eGPU with my multiple screens and Ethernet attached to that. Is there a cheaper way to do this?

<comment><USER78> Is it possible to buy two adapters and plug one monitor into each? Tedious, yes, but cheaper than eGPUs.

<comment><USER3> [https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RH9HF4R/](https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RH9HF4R/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Nice job. (But how did we get into this mess in the first case, I ask rhetorically.)

</comment><comment><USER80> Consider running fakespot against the reviews of them as well, because I straight up never buy commodity electronics on amazon without first checking to see how astroturfed the reviews are.

</comment><comment><USER81> Great start, I end up with 49 products that meet my basic filters. I'd really like some more feature differentiation to decide. Release dates might help too, as I'd rather buy a newer product.

</comment><comment><USER47> Nice! It looks pretty clean and I appreciate the affiliate toggle button.

What's the story behind this? (Very specific product ;))

I would suggest adding more margin vertically on cards and making them smaller for mobile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the design was/is more of a quick and dirty to get it up and running, will definitely improve it!

The Story: I was actually looking to buy a USB-C hub myself but was annoyed by the amazon website: no filtering, no clear marking of features... Talked to some tech friends, they had encountered the same thing, so I quickly acted and created that website^^

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I'd personally like to be able to filter by DisplayPort ports.

</comment><comment><USER83> Quite a few of these use the exact same board internally, I wish there was a way to work it out, and I wish manufacturers were more open about this.

</comment><comment><USER84> Not bad. Functionality aside, one thing it can improve is UI responsiveness - the UI alignment isn't displayed nicely in iPhone SE Safari.

</comment><comment><USER85> I would like to see a filter for UHS-II SD cards as well. I think Sony is the only brand making a hub with one included at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER86> It looks very cool :)

Is it open source? I'd love to contribute!

</comment><comment><USER87> It is quite nice of you to give option to disable affiliate links - though I guess no sane person would want to disable them.

</comment><comment><USER88> No tickbox for powered vs not, no data on psu if powered, no chipset information either.

So it ends up being not very helpful, sorry.

</comment><comment><USER25> Nice! Unless I'm not seeing it, the only thing it really needs is sorting (by price, by rating, etc).

</comment><comment><USER89> Feature request: USB-PD 3.0 feature option. The protocol changed pretty massively between PD 2.0 and 3.0

</comment><comment><USER90> An important filter is not just if it has hdmi but how many screens it can support. Just a suggestion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is already on my todo list:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Why not Thunderbolt 3 hubs? Also card readers are interesting, pass through power might be as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> My plan is to add more usb hubs (usb-3, thunderbolt), so stay tuned ;) Card reader filter will also be implemented very soon:)

I am no expert on usb hubs, but filtering for pass through power is actually possible: You have to specify at least 1 for usb-c port, then you can select the "Power Delivery" checkbox. Is power delivery the same as pass through power? and it is it possible to have that without having a usb-c port?

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> So this means there are no hubs that can do 4k60 for an iPad Pro because it's not TB3?

</comment><comment><USER93> Would be cool if this could link to not only amazon USA bUt also those in other countries.

</comment><comment><USER94> Which of these would work best for connecting two external drives to move files around.

I have a 2013 macbook pro with 2 lightning ports, and 2 usb 2 ports.

Very often I need to connect two external drives at the same time, leaving me without a port to connect my wireless logitech mouse and keyboard.

I tried to find a lightning to usb adapter, but these don't seem to exist.

</comment><comment><USER95> Sell it to Amazon, their GUI needs an overhaul, it's an unstructured mess.

</comment><comment><USER96> The new 16 inch Macbook Pro has a 96W charger, any adapter supports that yet?

</comment><comment><USER97> Nice idea. I'm curious, how much affiliate revenue are you generating?

</comment><comment><USER98> Need to find a way to detect fraudulent reviews and you're set.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely! It is on my todo list to include [https://reviewmeta.com/](https://reviewmeta.com/) information for every product :)

<comment><USER99> Just out of curiosity, do you have any statistics on how many people disable the affiliate links?

That's really clever by the way, placing that button so prominently. It both instills trust and serves as a gentle reminder of the amount of work that went into this (at least in my mind).

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not track that information, yet. But it is a cool idea and I think would make for some interesting insights: Will implement!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Have you posted this to the folks at /r/usbchardware ?

<comment><USER5> Oh hi! /r/usbchardware mod here.

I will talk to the other mods whether we want to endorse these. I personally would never encourage anyone to buy a non-certified device made by a noname company but the others might have a different opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Dude, you should really Github this one, would be huge Kudos!

</comment><comment><USER102> thanks for this, i made a mistake of buying a normal hdmi cable for 4k monitor, it provided 4k@30hz only, i was not aware of this spec until i experience the lag.

</comment><comment> all-out-of-hope That lack of consistent height across cards is killing me.

</comment><comment><USER103> I wish there is a website to compare power bank on Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER104> Adding a number of DisplayPort ports would be nice too.

</comment><comment><USER105> Very nice! How do you crawl the data and how often?

</comment><comment><USER106> Can you add a switch for Amazon UK DE FR ES?

</comment><comment><USER107> Would also be great to know if it supports 4K!

<comment><USER35> And if 4K, whether it's 4k@60hz or 4k@30hz. Almost none of the affordable hubs support 60hz.

<comment><USER108> I still don't have a dock for my MPB at my home because none of them support 144hz+. Just have to shuffle cables around every time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> What is the app stack? i see vue in there.

</comment><comment><USER110> There are other storefronts than Amazon.

<comment><USER111> I agree. Amazon is probably the worst choice for this, since you never know if the product you buy will still be the same one that was reviewed.

<comment><USER112> Bur who else rewards you with sweet referral dollars? Or pennies, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> When it comes to peripherals you should seriously consider all the options, discard everything, and just buy Anker because it's the best.

<comment><USER114> I did exactly that. And I'm really positively surprised about the build quality of Anker hub.

I bought some of the wireless chargers from Anker before and those feel quite plastic-y, so this was nice.

<comment><USER113> They tend to drop product lines immediately when they're no longer profitable (like their bang'n external drive docks) so we buy their stuff in bulk when it fits our purpose.

edit: Oh hey, it's run by a former googler. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anker_(mobile_chargers)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anker_\(mobile_chargers\)) neat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER115> How far away is USB4?

</comment><comment><USER116> Any as an option?

</comment><comment><USER117> missing display port..</comment>


Advice for the young scientist (by John Baez) - <AUTHOR> http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/advice.html <comment><AUTHOR> And in Portuguese: [https://logic-forall.blogspot.com/2020/05/telling-stuff- as-i...](https://logic-forall.blogspot.com/2020/05/telling-stuff-as-it- is.html)</comment>


Show HN: Pitch Deck Template v.3, the easiest way to create your pitch deck - <AUTHOR> https://basetemplates.com/pitch-deck-template <comment><USER2> Nice site! The template viewer is a great feature, since it gives the user an immediate place to play with the product.

Do people think it's a good idea to include the terms of the raise you are seeking in your pitch deck ("The Ask")? Wouldn't it be better to let the VC say the first number? IIRC this is the advice given in _Venture Deals_ by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I think it's a good idea to clearly state what amount of money you're looking to raise and what for. But you should be also flexible enough to take into the account any critique on that point from VC's.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys! Please, check the landing page and let me know for any feedback. If you're interested in the purchase, here's a 30% HackerNews friendly discount code for you "hn30".

Vasyl</comment>


Ask HN: Does taking notes help? Is it worth it to use systems like Zettelkasten? - <AUTHOR> There is quite a fuzz about taking notes and systems like Zettelkasten lately. Roam Research (https://roamresearch.com/) contributed to these things going viral.
I have a question regarding this: do these systems help in the context of programming/software development/computer science? Does note taking help you to understand, remember and learn things?
I am quite struggling if I should take on such a system myself and what the benefits and disadvantages are. <comment><USER2> Just try something without paying for it, set some reminders to make sure you use it, don't be too prescriptive, don't do so much that it frustrates you, and _only change one thing at a time about your process_ so you're doing most of your notetaking process on autopilot.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter that notetaking helps me. You need to see if it helps you, and you have to try it to do that. But it's one of those things where it isn't all or nothing. Start small and if it helps do more.

</comment><comment><USER3> From my personal experience, taking notes by hand, at least after the initial presentation of information, is better for recall and synthesis. There's plenty of research that support this if you look online.

But obviously, digital storage is much better for data persistence and sharing. I personally think maintaining a Zettelkasten-like system by hand is too much of a barrier. Try looking at apps like Bear or Notable for your needs.</comment>


Ask HN: What specific skill has had the biggest impact in your career? - <AUTHOR> I'm curious what specific skill has had the biggest impact in you, career wise. Ideally, answers will focus on __specific__ things that can/were learned in relatively short periods of time.<p>In my case, I would probably say command line programming in awk. It's something you can master in an afternoon or two and that will save you countless hours for decades to come. <comment><USER2> I don't have a good answer for this, but I find the notion that you can learn something in just a few hours that will profoundly impact your career intriguing.

Interpersonal skills (re: AwesomeFaic), grokking bureaucracy, learning how to learn are all career-long pursuits that define most careers (I would argue).

Tools like awk and sed are great but ultimately of marginal importance to the average developer. In fact, I haven't even found the sum of _all_ similar efficiencies to be worth dealing with.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a developer, practicing articulation and interpersonal skills has advanced my career more than any specific technology. I've gotten jobs because I was the most memorable and pleasant to be around, more so than explicitly being the strongest developer (although I obviously keep relevant skills up to date, too)</comment>


Unusual official workaround to get data from Oracle into Excel '97 - <AUTHOR> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/168702 <comment><AUTHOR> Hint: look at workaround method 2.</comment>


Sick and Wrong: How Washington is screwing up health care reform - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29988909/sick_and_wrong/

<comment><USER2> _Because the plan wouldn't have any profit motive — and wouldn't have to waste money on executive bonuses and corporate marketing — it would automatically cost less than private insurance._

So everything is "automatically" cheaper when provided by the government rather than by a company? That is a very strange conception of how businesses work.</comment>


Rayground: Ray Tracing Playground on the Web - <AUTHOR> https://rayground.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Rayground: An Online Educational Tool for Ray Tracing (Eurographics 2020 educational papers)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isLY6yUIMMA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isLY6yUIMMA)</comment>


Daredevil "Mad" Mike Hughes was killed in a steam powered rocket launch - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsweek.com/daredevil-mike-hughes-rocket-crash-1488622 <comment><USER2> Dupe [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22395528](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22395528)

</comment><comment><USER3> ghoul media</comment>


So you've got a business idea... Now what? - <AUTHOR> http://startup.partnerup.com/2007/12/04/so-you-have-a-business-idea-now-what/ <comment><USER2> So this is supposed to be the first step:

"The first step is to do a quick and dirty evaluation of whether your business idea has potential. [...] Find five people or companies who could actually be potential customers. [...] Have them sign an NDA and then tell them a bit about your product/service."

Right. How about a business that makes potential customers of startups sign NDAs? Ooops, now I've revealed my groundbreaking business idea! Consider yourselves under NDA! Please!</comment>


Containerising Legacy Applications – The Clean and the Dirty Approach - <AUTHOR> http://blog.contino.io/blog/containerising-legacy-applications-the-clean-the-dirty-approach <comment><USER2> Refactoring takes time, expense, and expertise. Keeping legacy applications running as-is takes 'merely' documentation and a sense of pragmatism.

I submit that the best approach for dealing with a legacy application is to Leave It The Fuck Alone. (LITFA) Don't extend them. Don't try to understand their inner workings any more than you have to to meet business needs. Just Don't. Leave it the fuck alone. You can keep them running a long long time, generating revenue, while you plan out replacement greenfield apps for the time when you really honestly do need them.

If you have a problem with it, fix it and document the solution. It will happen again. Put a little extra time in and fix it a little better this time, updating the documentation. Over time you will come to understand its behavior. Under no circumstances make any major changes to it. Keep everything tiny and fix exactly one thing at a time.

Refactoring legacy apps is good in one and only one situation, you've got massive amounts of money riding on it, enough so that it's worth doing everything right.

<comment><USER3> Need a book and a design pattern name for that. It will make it easier to sell to management and to train new employees about.

<comment><USER2> If anyone wants to offer me a book deal and reserve, I'd be happy to write it.

Though honestly I think the best path forward is to start a company offering fixed-price legacy app maintenance. Another thing I'd consider doing if I got the right offer.

<comment><USER4> > Though honestly I think the best path forward is to start a company offering > fixed-price legacy app maintenance.

So a dog and a human? A human to watch the legacy app, and the dog to bite the human if they try to touch the legacy app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article seems to uncritically assume that microservices are a good idea. If you want to microserviceize a legacy app, go ahead, but I doubt that using containers is a good excuse to do so.

Also, it seems to me that containers would be perfect for code written in weird no-longer-supported languages since you could presumably containerize the compiler without having to fight with incompatibilities caused by newer distros.

<comment><USER6> An honest question, I am just beginning to understand containers so it might be naive.

Containers share kernel from the base operating system so when kernel updates to new incompatible version with breaking changes, how containerize application will continue to work.

<comment><USER7> The kernel interface tends to be super stable (eg on Linux, kernel interface ABI breakage is a blocker bug, and Linus rants about that every now and then when people ignore this).

So it shouldn't be too painful to run RedHat 4.1 (from 1997) in a container on top of current Linux 4.8 and use that to run software linked against that ancient set of libraries. Probably easier than getting all those libraries to run in a current era userland.

<comment><USER3> Did you try that?

I am experiencing so many issues with Docker and current kernels. I can only envision an attempt to run RedHat 4.1 over a modern system as a recipe for disaster.

<comment><USER6> What kind of issues you have got into? I would like to hear from you.

Though I don't have any experience of managing containers, argument does not make a lot of sense to me. They are pitched as holy grail which will get rid of entire IT team managing the operating system i.e. upgrades, patching, and configuration management. It just looks counter-intuitive to me as any new upgrade, bug fix , or security patch still needs to be applied to base OS. Containerized application can move freely from one host OS to another host OS but they will still depend on same underlying environment.

<comment><USER8> > _They are pitched as holy grail which will get rid of entire IT team > managing the operating system i.e. upgrades, patching, and configuration > management._

They don't. Containers push a lot of that responsibility out to the developers.

You still need operators if you're running your own IaaS substrate.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we do some stuff with containers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Me: Hey Boss, it's time to containerise legacy application x!

> Boss: Sounds like a good idea.

> Me: Ok, so we need a complete redesign into microservices to be 100% > webscale, let's split it into 30 smaller projects then we can deploy it with > swarm or kubernetes or whatever. Give me a team, 3 months and plenty of > coffee.

> Boss: It's a fricking legacy CRUD app. Just shove the thing in a dockerfile > and move on.

<comment><USER3> > Him: _shoves thing in a dockerfile_

> Him: _realizes that existing data is destroyed every time the app is > restarted because containers are ephemerals_

<comment><USER5> Volumes. Containers are easy to use but they're not idiot-proof.

<comment><USER3> Volumes are tied to a machine. That's kinda ruining the point of docker ^^

<comment><USER10> So use a volume on a Gluster or Ceph volume or similar. There are plenty of solutions.

I do agree that state is a challenge, but Docker at least pushes people towards being explicit about state rather than leaving data all over the place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Of course this doesn't weigh up the cost man hours needed to port it....

The reason why shoving legacy apps into VMs was/is so compelling was because it required little work, and gave you great things (like easy backup, point in time recovery, stop-the-world stepping, cloning for dev environments etc, lower running costs)

porting something effectively to containers will in a large number of circumstances require effort to make networking usable. Programming time is expensive. Testing is expensive.

What does containerising actually give you for a legacy app? Will it give you HA? (not unless its capable already) will it give you painfree backups? (well depends how you map and manage your volumes)

Just hoover it up into a VM, set it, and forget it. It'll be much cheaper in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER12> Have you heard of [http://Stratus5.com](http://Stratus5.com) ?

This is one of the companies I've been working with. We've built a container aggregation and automation platform for this exact use-case.

We can take pretty much any application, new, or legacy, wrap it in a container, and then automate all the business services required to turn it into a trial-upsell cloud service.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Most legacy apps in their original states are far from being microservice- > oriented.

an understatement of the year, especially when it comes to transactional ones, which a lot of legacy ones are. Distributed transactions across microservices ... sounds delightful, almost like CORBA dist transactions.</comment>


Harvard supercomputing cluster hijacked to mine Dogecoin - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/harvard-supercomputing-cluster-hijacked-to-produce-alt-cryptocurrency/ <comment><USER2> I'm hopeful that future cryptocurrencies won't be so energy-intensive to mine. Bitcoin is already a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions, believe it or not.

EDIT: Reversible computing ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing)) is a possible way to have computationally difficult proof-of-work while minimizing energy consumption.

<comment><USER3> How do you make something incapable of being energy-intensive but still difficult? The more computers have to work at something, the more energy they use. I'm not the world's leading expert, but I don't see a way around that.

<comment><USER4> There is being energy intensive, and then there is being CPU intensive.

You could imagine a hypothetical coin that somehow uses proof of data storage and retrieval instead of proof of work. Producing and running tons of harddrives would still require power, but it would be a less.. direct.. requirement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When xkcd's April Fools comic ran this year[1] I was doing some Real Work on a few of the engineering research servers at my university. When I noticed the jobs were going much slower than usual I popped open "top". Lo and behold, there were 20 instances of a program named 'xkcd', hashing violently, collectively using 90% of the CPU resources. I checked each of the other machines, and they too had been invaded by 'xkcd' daemons. Knowing that it would be over the next day, and that my job could wait, I figured I wouldn't try making trouble for the (presumably) undergraduate comic enthusiasts, but it sure was annoying. I found out later through reddit that there were at least three independent groups of students running the 'xkcd' hashing script on the servers. (A few had also spun up EC3 instances, so presumably they had a bit more skin in the game).

If nerds will do this for nothing but internet points, it doesn't surprise me that semi-public resources will be exploited when there's a monetary incentive involved.

[1][http://xkcd.com/1193](http://xkcd.com/1193)

</comment><comment><USER6> If cryptocurrencies become mainstream, this will be a bigger problem I think. Even things like "free" electricity are attractive for mining purposes, ex: universities, businesses, etc. If every student setup mining, it adds up (at the university / business' expense).

If I am the one paying for an office at $500 a month that includes all electricity usage, is it fair to plug in a ton of mining hardware and profit / subsidize myself? What if I manage to use more than $500 worth of electricity?

Is shared space even setup for monitoring individual renter's usage behavior? I don't think so.

edit: note, I do mine Doge but with my own stuff at home

<comment><USER7> There is a new extremely "green" office building in Seattle that does meter/monitor individual electricity plugs. It's uncommon, but not entirely unprecedented.

<comment><USER8> Is that the greenfire campus or whatever in Ballard?

<comment><USER7> I was thinking of the Bullet Center on cap hill actually. Not sure about Greenfire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm currently "ignoring" a similar effort in my lab (~20 workstations). I don't think they've broken a MHash/s yet out of an estimated potential ~2-3MH.

<comment><USER10> We recently received an email about our Comp Sci labs (300+ GPU-equipped workstations) being used for bitcoin mining at night.

<comment><USER9> I hope not to receive a similar one. I overheard them talking about using an external stratum proxy, maybe they'll also use ssl/ssh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This was a young researcher who's access to the cluster was never revoked when they left a few years ago.

Original e-mail Harvard sent last week:

\</comment><comment>

Dear all,

I really hate having to send notes like this to our community - especially one as smart, gifted and talented as you all are, but anyway here goes...

Yesterday we were alerted to an unfortunate situation by one of our community members using the cluster who spotted an anomaly with a set of compute nodes.

Long story short, a "dogecoin" (bitcoin derivative) mining operation had been set up on the cluster consuming significant resources in order to participate in a mining contest.

I do want to also quickly state that we do not inspect, examine or look at algorithms and codes that are executing on the cluster, we respect your science and assume we are all good citizens. However, in the course of business, or as happened yesterday, if we are alerted to unexpected behavior we always investigate the cause of any issue.

So, to put this simply:

Harvard resources can not be used for any personal or private gain or any non research related activity.

Accordingly, any participation in "Klondike" style digital mining operations or contests for profit requiring Harvard owned assets to examine digital currency key strength and length are strictly prohibited for fairly obvious reasons. In fact, any activities using our shared resources for any non scientific purpose that results or does not actually result in personal gain are also clearly and explicitly denied.

As a result, and as guidance and as warning to you all, I do need to say that the individual involved in this particular operation no longer has access to any and all research computing facilities on a fully permanent basis.

Don't let this happen to you.

</comment><comment><USER12> Well, there you go.

This kind of use was sorta obvious since the dawn of Bitcoin (and even before; in my high school people were running SETI@HOME screen savers on all school computers to build up ranking points for their team). I'm not sure why so many people act surprised.

</comment><comment><USER13> Would it really surprise anyone if it was revealed that stuff like this already happened with Bitcoin? Seriously, give a bunch of hackers with access to racks full of Other People's Machines, plus an obvious way to turn cycles into money, and the only surprise would be if they _didn 't_ take advantage of the opportunity. I for one expect this to be the norm for every cryptocurrency from now until the end of time. The only question is _how much_ of it the rest of the world is willing to tolerate.

</comment><comment><USER14> While I think there are many interesting properties of cryptocurrency and the potential applications, I also can't help but think that this mining is just an extreme waste of computing power; compared to other uses like research, application development, hosting a website, even gaming (entertainment), mining (use for heating aside) looks like it's not much more than using computing power for the sake of using computing power, which I find extremely disturbing.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have heard people say that scrypt is better than SHA256 as a basis for cryptocurrency because it doesn't put all the network power in specialist ASIC boxes, but then stuff like this happens.

Do you think Harvard would have paid for a custom-build scrypt-coin miner if someone wrote a real academic proposal for it?

<comment><USER16> There have been some claims that an scrypt ASIC is coming soon, but I think it's mostly vapor so far.

<comment><USER6> From my understanding, scrypt ASICs have been held back by the cost of memory hardware as scrypt requires more memory usage. There has been talk of forking existing scrypt currencies to require even more memory to counter ASICs further but so far I think only a few new coins have done this.

<comment><USER17> My understanding is the scrypt currencies use the lowest possible memory factor, which was just stupid.

<comment><USER18> Its memory requirement of 128KB is a compromise between computation-hardness for the prover and verification efficiency for the verifier. You don't want verification of a proof-of-work to take a lot of resources, since every client has to perform it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From the article, Odyssey's Top500 page: [http://www.top500.org/system/175596](http://www.top500.org/system/175596)

It debuted in 61st place in 6/2008\. By 11/2010 it had fallen to 434 and has since dropped entirely off the list.

At 6 years old it's fairly long in the tooth now.

</comment><comment><USER20> As someone who's used the Odyssey cluster extensively, I can add that the most nodes I've run consecutively is ~ 500. While there are ~ 4000+ nodes on the cluster there's no way any single user could run that many simultaneously.

</comment><comment><USER21> ha, wasn't me

<comment><USER22> So it was you?

<comment><USER21> see my comment history...</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook to start hosting other sites' content this May - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/03/wsj-facebook-instant-articles/

<comment><USER2> Do businesses trust Facebook enough to even try this or do they just need "enough" businesses with high-quality content to display - content that likely easily goes viral but that Facebook likely pulls back the throttle on distributing? There's all kinds of possibilities of what Facebook could do, without you being able to know how much or what exactly is being served. I really think a better possibility for businesses can exist. Do people not remember Facebook's bait and switch for fan/businesses pages, and the other trust violations Facebook has been involved with?</comment>


Bad engineers and internet, India is far from becoming the next Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/950473/with-its-bad-engineers-and-horrible-internet-india-is-far-from-becoming-the-next-silicon-valley/ <comment><USER2> The distribution of engineering talent in India is hyper-Gaussian at best. Even students coming out of 'premier' college have very little knowledge about their field. There's also a lot of hiring discrimination and people are hired based on the college they went to rather than their caliber. This is changing slowly with startups and new age companies hiring based on parameters other than one an institution's name.</comment>


Shell Has a Forth-Like Quality - <AUTHOR> http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/13.html <comment><USER2> I'm really excited about new shells. Fish has been mentioned here (which I've used for 2+ years). It's amazing and adds a lot of good functionality.

I also like that the author mentioned runit. I wish there was more documentation for runit, but I've been using it on Void linux and it's an amazing, damn simply init system. If an init script is missing for any package in Void, they are trivial to write. Most are less than three lines.

I also really like how the post author demonstrated how shell commands are composed in ways that traditional functions aren't composed; that is commands that change the environment for the command they run (environment variables, processor scheduling, security, input/output redirection). This is the very nature of an _implicit_.

<comment><USER3> > Fish has been mentioned here (which I've used for 2+ years). It's amazing > and adds a lot of good functionality.

What does it add exactly? As far as I can tell, it's needlessly incompatible with POSIX shells, and doesn't do as much as e.g. zsh (or even bash?).

I'm not saying that zsh & bash are the end-all, be-all of shells, but I just don't see that fish improves on them.

And honestly, for config files I think we could do a lot worse than an s-expression language.

<comment><USER4> fish dev here. We love zsh and anyone pushing on what shells can do!

Here's where I think fish fits in. The main goals of fish are:

1\. Thoughtful UI that just works

2\. Sane scripting

zsh does more than fish, and we're happy to let it. The tradeoff is that zsh requires substantial configuration to realize that power - and once you get into the weeds, you will learn which options are incompatible with each other. zsh has 21 options controlling history, and fish has none, but you'll probably be happier with fish's defaults.

fish has a smaller feature set, but that feature set just works out of the box: tab completions, syntax highlighting, autosuggestions, etc. Customizations (prompt, colors, etc) can be done with a web UI or a nice command line interface, and not arcane syntax (PS1=...)

The hope is you can be more productive in your shell without needing to invest tons of time configuring and learning it.

<comment><USER5> > adds a lot of good functionality.

Parent's comment is misleading, then. As someone who already has a pretty solid grasp of Bash, when I peeked at Fish it looked like there was nothing that it would gain me -- though I understand that the preconfigured shell can be useful for people who don't have the time to learn and tweak it.

<comment><USER4> If fish has a hook (har har), it would be autosuggestions. fish suggests the rest of the command as you type, like your web browser does for URLs. This feels faster than tab completions, because you can see what command you'll get ahead of time. It also lets you summon commands from history quickly, without having to think about it - just start typing.

If you're a die-hard bash user, autosuggestions are the feature most likely to pique your interest and make the command line more pleasant.

<comment><USER5> Will take a look, but 'history-search-backward' fills most of my needs in that regard.

<comment><USER2> You really should. Once I got use to the fish auto-complete history, the Bash reverse search felt terribly primitive. There is no Ctrl+R. Just type part of an old command and hit the up arrow to scroll.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you are interested in a shell with first-class function, list and map values and pipelines that pass such complex data (instead of structureless bytes), you might be interested in elvish: [https://github.com/elves/elvish](https://github.com/elves/elvish)

Disclaimer: I am the author of elvish.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi xiaq I mentioned your shell here:

[https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/ExternalResources](https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/ExternalResources)

If there is a better summary, let me know, or feel free to edit the wiki page yourself. (I think it should be editable.)

I've been in contact with the authors of the oh shell, NGS shell, and mash shell, and exchanged some interesting ideas. The design of the oil language should be more concrete in 2-3 months and I'm hoping to get feedback from others who have thought about this space. I might ping you then :)

Are the elvish structured data pipelines actually separate processes, or are they goroutines? Is there a format for piping them over say SSH? I have been thinking about this a little bit for oil.

<comment><USER6> Hi chubot, I didn't realize that you are developing a shell as well. It's great to see competitions. Can you share some ideas that you learned from the authors of said shells? I would love to hear those, designing shells is not an easy task.

Structured data pipelines run in the same process as elvish, in goroutines. For interacting with external commands you need to serialize and deserialize, like this:

      ~> put [foo bar lorem ipsum] | to-json |
         python3 -c 'import sys, json;print(json.dumps([x.upper() for x in json.load(sys.stdin)]))' |
         from-json
      ▶ [FOO BAR LOREM IPSUM]

<comment><AUTHOR> OK cool, that makes sense.

I had some good discussions with Michael MacInnis and recently Ilya Sher. I had actually read Michael's masters thesis in 2011 or 2012 and found it to be a very good historical overview of shells:

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=99934401164441475...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=9993440116444147516)

I agree with the goal of "taking shell seriously as a programming language", which I think all projects share. I disagreed on the need to make shell a variant of Lisp. I actually tried this a bit -- I hacked on femtolisp, which is used to bootstrap Julia, and I thought I could bootstrap a good shell with it. This didn't work out as nicely as I had hoped so I dropped the idea.

Ilya was having some issues with the "two modes" of parsing -- command mode for shell-like constructs and expression mode for programming features (function calls, math, etc.). I thought this would be an issue too, but as mentioned in another comment, now that I've written a bash parser I think it's straightforward to solve, and Ilya agreed.

The thing is that bash already has many different modes of parsing, which I implement using "lexer modes" or lexical state. This same technique can be applied to a new shell and then there should be a natural way of mixing commands and expressions (quoted and unquoted words, etc.):

[http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/10/19.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/10/19.html)

I'm also trying to make oil do what bash/dash/etc. do essentially syscall for syscall. I believe that is a little hard with Go because it has its own runtime. Although I think there is a way to pin a goroutine to a single thread which can mitigate those issues.

I was planning to start a thread in maybe a month to review some of these issues and exchange feedback. Let me know if you are interested!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Totally! Bernstein chaining is concatenative. So are shell pipelines, if you squint at them just right: function composition mediated by special stacks of records called stdin and stdout.

Reminds me, I have a pretty neat tail-recursive shell pipeline trick I need to share with HN!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm interested in the tail recursive pipeline trick!

The next post mentions that pipelines are also concatenative, although there is a slight difference and I think "point-free" is more accurate.

"Pipelines Support Vectorized, Point-Free, and Imperative Style"

[http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/15.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/15.html)

<comment><USER7> Nice. I'm loving this series, keep it up!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think it would be interesting to have an init system and/or package manager configured using a logic programming language, such as a Prolog dialect.

For instance, one could write "is_installed(X11) :- is_installed (KDE)" to specify that X11 must be installed if KDE is installed.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure how much of it is left today, but there is precedent for Prolog in OS startup:

[http://www.redditmirror.cc/cache/websites/web.archive.org_84...](http://www.redditmirror.cc/cache/websites/web.archive.org_84624/web.archive.org/web/20040603192757/research.microsoft.com/research/dtg/davidhov/pap.htm)

<comment><USER8> I wish that logic programming languages (and especially the one used in that article) had more friendly syntax. Even just replacing ":-" with "<-" would be nice...

<comment><USER10> Actually, Prolog uses "\-->" for to define grammars[1] for parsing. Not confusing at all! :)

(actually, parsing is one of the things i really love about Prolog. Writing a simple grammars is much easier and much more pleasurable than using things like regular expressions. The fact that it's far more powerful and readable is just a bonus. )

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Easy way to do file descriptor passing ("Bernstein chaining") with any UNIX programs, not just ones written by djb:

[http://skarnet.org/software/execline/pipeline.html](http://skarnet.org/software/execline/pipeline.html)

Execline resembles a "program launcher".

We can make a braindead launcher in a few minutes using the sh language. This is just the first way that came to mind.

       #!/bin/sh

       test $# -ge 1||
       exec echo usage: $0 program arguments
       test $# -le 5||
       exec echo max 5 arguments

       {
       a=$#;
       b=$(command -v $1);

       echo 'main(){
       char *b['$((a+1))'];'

       a=$((a-1));
       test $a -ge 0||
       exec echo 'b['$#']=(void *)0;
       execve("'$b'",b,(void *)0);
       }'
       echo 'b[0]="'$1'";'

       # repeat

       a=$((a-1));
       test $a -ge 0||
       exec echo 'b['$#']=(void *)0;
       execve("'$b'",b,(void *)0);
       }'
       echo 'b[1]="'$2'";'

       a=$((a-1));
       test $a -ge 0||
       exec echo 'b['$#']=(void *)0;
       execve("'$b'",b,(void *)0);
       }'
       echo 'b[2]="'$3'";'

       a=$((a-1));
       test $a -ge 0||
       exec echo 'b['$#']=(void *)0;
       execve("'$b'",b,(void *)0);
       }'
       echo 'b[3]="'$4'";'

       a=$((a-1));
       test $a -ge 0||
       exec echo 'b['$#']=(void *)0;
       execve("'$b'",b,(void *)0);
       }'
       echo 'b[4]="'$5'";'

       a=$((a-1));
       test $a -ge 0||
       exec echo 'b['$#']=(void *)0;
       execve("'$b'",b,(void *)0);
       }'
       echo 'b[5]="'$6'";'

       } #| exec gcc -xc - -o run -static  \
       && exec run

re: envdir, storing variables in the filesystem

"no stinkin loops"

or "stupid shell scripter" PoC, take 2

       #!/bin/sh
       # e is a dir of "environmental variables"
       # e is mounted on tmpfs i.e., it's memory not disk
       # output:
       # ==> 0
       # ==> 1
       # ==> 2
       # ==> 3
       # ==> 4
       # ==> 5
       test -f e/$0||echo 0 > e/$0
       read n < e/$0
       test $n -le 5||exec rm e/$0
       echo ==\> $n
       echo $((n+1)) > e/$0
       test -f $0||exit # just in case
       $0

</comment><comment><USER12> As someone not well versed in OS history / design:

Why are terminals NOT just REPLs for regular programming languages with OS_Convenience_Functions #include'd automatically?

<comment><USER13> From a design standpoint: Because the ergonomics of shells and regular programming langauges are very different. 99% of your interactions with a shell is going to be single commands, or short piped chains. Economy of keystrokes is something that a lot of people want here, which is why cd and ls are both that short to type. Most programming languages require at least () to run commands, since not requiring that seems sloppy. This makes your two most common interactions twice as long to type.

Shells have also been built to help glue applications together, and are more concise for the easy versions than most programming languages, sometimes heavily so. Most programming languages, (outside of maybe perl and ruby), don't make this use case anywhere close to their top priority, but shells do, trading off other things like a simple syntax for bitwise OR.

In another sense, shells are exactly what you describe, it just happens that the most popular languages for them happen to be sh/bash/zsh/fish etc, which make a different set of tradeoffs than the 'traditional' programming languages.

I'm only partially aware of the history standpoint. My understanding is that before awk, shells (sh, mostly, IIRC) were about the only scripting level languages on various Unixen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there a good place for discussing Oil with the author (mailing list, irc &c.)? I have thought a lot about many things in the blog posts, but there's no comment section, and I'd really like to get clarification as well as dive into a bit more detail on some of these things.

[edit]

Found it here:

[http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/12/29.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/12/29.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> How hard would it to be to make an entirely new shell language that doesn't feel like it's 30+ years old? Why isn't this more common?

I'm aware of, like, TermKit[0], but that didn't get finished and I don't recall hearing about any newer efforts.

[0]: [https://github.com/unconed/TermKit](https://github.com/unconed/TermKit)

<comment><USER16> Build it is not the "hard" part. Anyway you can say a lot of languages are almost there (python, ruby, perl, forth, rebol).

Is that developer are THE WORST. Them will refuse to switch to anything better if it means to a small change in his old ways.

That is why C/C++/Js/Bash rule the world...

<comment><USER17> It's somewhat difficult to come up with a good syntax. You need to support: unquoted strings, executing commands, pipes, file redirects, etc.

Adoption would be even harder, but any resulting language is not going to look like Python or any other "mainstream" language, if it's intended to actually be usable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah this is a problem, but after writing a bash parser I think it's straightforward to solve.

Oil is parsed line by line like any other shell, and there will be a simple rule to determine whether you're in command mode or expression mode.

The "lexer modes" technique (previous referred to as "lexical state") should handle the two sublanguages easily. You basically need it to parse bash, and you will need much less of it to parse oil. My bash parser has 13 lexical states (up from 8), but I expect oil to have somewhere between 4 and 8.

How it's used in the bash parser: [http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/10/19.html](http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/10/19.html)

<comment><USER17> I'm not talking about implementation, but rather designing a clear and consistent syntax. It sounds like your intent is to hew pretty closely to existing shells, in which case you're probably doing more detail work.

<comment><AUTHOR> The strategy is to break compatibility with bash but provide an upgrade path, as mentioned here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13478291](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13478291)

It is a design issue to combine command and expression syntax (unquoted and vs. quoted literals). But I think I've figured it out ... we'll see in a few months! The blog will have updates on these kinds of issues.

<comment><USER17> But are you maintaining POSIX compatibility? I thought I'd read that somewhere on your blog, but I might misremember.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the osh language is basically bash, which is very compatible superset of POSIX sh. The oil language is a totally different language, but you will be able to upgrade to it automatically.

Once you upgrade it's of course not POSIX compatible anymore :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As I pointed out at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13397381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13397381) , you forgot rtprio, idprio, chrt, and numactl; the s6, perp, daemontools- encore, and nosh toolsets; and execline. And TCL and the Thompson shell.

* [http://wiki.tcl.tk/15088](http://wiki.tcl.tk/15088)

* [http://jdebp.eu./FGA/daemontools-family.html](http://jdebp.eu./FGA/daemontools-family.html)

* [http://v6shell.org/](http://v6shell.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I did add s6 in response to your comment, but it wasn't meant to be exhaustive, so I left out the others. I didn't add Linux "perf" or a whole host of other such tools either.

I'm not sure how TCL and the Thompson shell relate though.

<comment><USER18> Apart from the fact that you are re-using the Thompson shell's name, consider things like its if command. Yes, command; not reserved word.

And my list is not exhaustive, either. But it makes the point to those that would erroneously dismiss this (as you yourself do) as something that "doesn't see much use today", that this, given how long the list of non-daemontools- family commands that operate this way actually turns out to be when one looks around, is not really a daemontools, or even a "Bernstein", thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In addition, rather than docker, try sometime running a process with cgexec. It helps to know some of the underlying interfaces to get the full scope of what advanced compositions of those interfaces are doing.

</comment><comment><USER20> Calling anything "oil shell" seems like a pretty good way to invite a trademark dispute from Shell Oil Company.

</comment><comment><USER21> point free forth like does not make</comment>


The Inconvenient Facts on Australian Bushfires - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2020/01/14/the-inconvenient-facts-on-australian-bushfires/ <comment><USER2> While I agree with the general premise that we shouldn't rush to assign blame for individual events to climate change, the rest of the article seems to be trying to say the current fires can't be attributed to climate change as effects aren't expected until 2040. But that seems to be based upon a single study/analysis.

I can also cherry pick: "Australia. Observational data suggest that fire weather extremes are already becoming more frequent and intense (Dowdy, 2018; Head et al. , 2014)" [[https://sciencebrief.org/briefs/wildfires](https://sciencebrief.org/briefs/wildfires)] Noting that the _very same paragraph_ also references the Abatzoglou study.

In any case, the author seems to be frequently banging this same drum: [https://www.desmogblog.com/roger-pielke-jr](https://www.desmogblog.com/roger- pielke-jr) [https://skepticalscience.com/Roger_Pielke_Jr_blog.htm](https://skepticalscience.com/Roger_Pielke_Jr_blog.htm)

<comment><USER3> Climate change is not a discrete event, so it was a bit absurd to attribute those particular fires to climate change, like the media did. At the end of the day, fire is fuel + air + a hot enough temperature to ignite (but not weather hot; more like lightning strike or matches hot). It happens naturally (entire species of trees, including Eucalyptus, have evolved with fire), and some years the fires are bigger than the previous year (for different reasons).

If climate change affects fires in Australia, it will manifest itself in changing _other_ things. Maybe how and what things regrow after fires, how animals resettle those areas, etc. Obviously that's less sensational to sell as a story, but probably more important.

<comment><USER4> There's been some very noticable changes to the climate along the east coast of Australia (where the fires are).

Along the east coast the El Nino/La Nina cyles are becoming much, much more pronounced. Droughts are longer and more severe during the El Nino cycle, floods and rains are also stronger during the wet La Nina cycle.

While this lowers the risk of fire during the La Nina cycle, it also significantly increases it during the El Nino cycle because: 1\. Drier conditions mean more fire. A lot of trees are shedding their bark, a lot more flammable material generally 2\. Less backburning & fire prevention measures can be done during the La Nina cycle because conditions have become too wet to do so, meaning that fires are becoming more intense because more leaf matter and debris are building up during those years

Fire is a pretty regular part of the Australian bushland, but in the past they used to be more regular and not as severe (And very rarely get completely out of control like it has done the last couple of times)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The effects of climate change have not yet been detected in Australian > fires, but changes underway suggest that those effects will be detectable as > early as the 2040s. If so we should expect, more and more intense fires, and > respond accordingly.

This plain English that the author suggests is not fair, like he suggests. The author's other articles seem to want to downplay climate change fears, but the "inconvenient" facts seem to disagree with him. A fairer summary would be closer to:

> The effects of climate change have not yet been detected in the Australian > Bush fires. The effects of climate change have already been confirmed to > potentially cause fires in the Amazon, Mediterranean, Scandinavia, and > Western North America. Australian fires are projected to be impacted by > climate change in approximately 20 years.

This link has better facts IMO: [https://sciencebrief.org/briefs/wildfires](https://sciencebrief.org/briefs/wildfires)</comment>


WikiLeaks Petition - stop the crackdown - get to 1,000,000 signatures - <AUTHOR> http://www.avaaz.org/en/wikileaks_petition/

<comment><USER2> Their 2008 petition on Tibet got to 1,000,000 in seven days; this one seems like it might be on track for getting there in four.</comment>


WiFi232 – An Internet Hayes Modem for Your Retro Computer - <AUTHOR> http://biosrhythm.com/?page_id=1453 <comment><USER2> For those who are curious, the wifi board depicted in this project is the venerable ESP8266. It's really been a hardware tinkerer's dream to be able to add such a capable wifi radio to projects for so cheap ($2 on aliexpress if you don't mind waiting 6 weeks for it to ship from China).

</comment><comment><USER3> LGR had a video on these recently. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsS0E4G310Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsS0E4G310Y)

EDIT: I see it's listed in the article discussions also.

<comment><USER4> Came to post this, Lazy Game Reviews is awesome <3

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I got one of these for my kaypro 2'84, and it was simple to get working. I use it to transfer files from my modern laptop over the network via Kermit at a blistering 19.2kbaud

</comment><comment> amiga-workbench This looks handy, I've got a 3COM Etherlink III and mbrutmans TCP stack in my IBM PC but it rules out a lot of older software that doesn't know anything other than a modem.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Sorry, sold out at the moment but I'm busy making more for you!"

<comment><USER6> I've missed out on two sales since I wasn't checking twitter every hour. They sell out fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This has so much malicious capabilities now for legacy hardware. It's perfect.</comment>


The FOCAL Mission: To the Sun's Gravity Lens (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=785 <comment><USER2> _" One of the great missions for the 21st century could be FOCAL — a space probe sent to the Sun's gravity lens some 550 AU out."_

For comparison, the "straight line" distance from Earth to Pluto recently traversed by New Horizons is about 31.9 AU. Thats about 3 billion miles, and took nearly ten years.

550 AU is a _long_ walk.

</comment><comment><USER3> 550AU is a staggering distance. Compare to New Horizons that took about 9 years to position itself at 33AU.</comment>