Millennial dads have pathetic DIY skills compared to baby boomers - <AUTHOR> https://nypost.com/2019/06/06/millennial-dads-have-pathetic-diy-skills-compared-to-baby-boomers/ <comment><USER2> The results are hardly surprising.

A lot of "DIY"ness was learned by junior watching Dad do a DIY fix and learning from the experience.

But, a lot of DIY by Dad was done for a "can't afford to pay the professional" reason for a large portion of history. Esp. for the minor stuff (unclog toilet -> $10 reusable plunger vs. $100+ fee just to get plumber to drive out and also utilize the same $10 reusable plunger on the clogged toilet one time).

But the millennial generation was the first where the prior generation was starting to become wealthy enough to let someone else handle these jobs vs. DIY and save money. And without the example of watching Dad DIY, junior never learned to do any of it himself or herself.

And when one never learned how to do even the most minor DIY tasks, of course one ends up paying the professionals to do the same tasks instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> For such a scathing article title (expected if "millennial" is there, I guess) it's interesting that the article itself says things such as:

>For example, while boomer dads have the edge when it comes to traditional DIY, 62 percent of boomer dads concede that millennial dads are better at tech-related tasks.

>Millennial dads are also more likely than their own fathers to prioritize family time over DIY.

>"Today's time-pressed dads are quick to master new tools like apps and mobile technology for their families' benefit. They're also more likely to outsource time-consuming home maintenance to professionals who have the tools and training to get the job done right — a handy trade-off that enables today's dads to spend more time with the people they love."

Which sort of goes against the tone of the title...

<comment><USER4> >"Today's time-pressed dads are quick to master new tools like apps and mobile technology for their families' benefit. They're also more likely to outsource time-consuming home maintenance to professionals who have the tools and training to get the job done right — a handy trade-off that enables today's dads to spend more time with the people they love."

False comparison though if you read between the lines.

Time spent doing DIY stuff is by definition spending time with your family if you encourage the kiddos to join in and learn something.

Also, I despise the attitude of "let the professional do it _right_ ".

That attitude right there teaches helplessness. I can't do it. I don't know how. I need to call the magic man who knows how.

No, if a man has done it, a man can learn to do it. Sometimes it takes a bit of mucking around at first, but the key thing is persevere.

Teach a kid to call a professional, you secure the professional's well-being for life.

Teach the kid the foundations of all professional work; experimentation, research, perseverence, and basic safety/survival skills while learning and figuring out a new thing they've never done, and you secure your child's position as a burgeoning professional for life.

Never mind that it makes modern life a lot less scary to.

<comment><USER3> >Time spent doing DIY stuff is by definition spending time with your family if you encourage the kiddos to join in and learn something.

DIY is not "by definition" spending time with your family... It "by definition" is "Do it yourself". Not "Do it yourself, with your family". That's a big "if" you have there.

>No, if a man has done it, a man can learn to do it. Sometimes it takes a bit of mucking around at first, but the key thing is persevere.

I don't think anyone is claiming they can't learn. They would just rather not learn that specific skill, and instead use their time for something else - which very well might be a different skill. What is wrong with that?

And you can't really be asserting that claim when it comes to everything in life. No matter how much I persevere, there are things you can't just learn through "mucking around a bit" or solely through self "experimentation, research, perseverence and basic safety". I'm not trusting any doctor that wants to operate on me, who learned it from Mom or Dad by being taught the foundations of "all professional work" or because they were "mucking around" for awhile.</comment></comment></comment>


Unifying our fragmented health data requires a common storage repository - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@daedalus2718/unifying-our-fragmented-health-data-requires-a-common-storage-repository-a97b88c64225 <comment><USER2> Currenting using samsung health and google fit for most of my data, but actual medical data linkage is harder till fda approvals i bet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have your medical records from doctors in there as well? In my experience, that's the hardest stuff to get efficiently.</comment></comment>


D Language Server - <AUTHOR> https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=LaurentTreguier.vscode-dls <comment><USER2> It's amazing to me that Microsoft came up with a spec that seems to have been so effective and very well missing from editors to get a bit of a bump in regards to not having the burden of reimplementing the same handling for different languages. This plugin is awesome because it reuses some of D's already existing tech that predates LangServ but now that there's an open standard for all languages focus can be made towards LangServ. D remains one of my favorite languages. My only complaint is tooling support, which is improving thanks to efforts like LangServ.

<comment><USER3> LSP concept was not invented at Microsoft but they used their market power and VS Code momentum to force the various ecosystems into it. I want to claim that this is Erich Gamma's doing (who also worked on other plugin systems notable Eclipse before) but do not know for sure.

<comment><USER4> Erich Gamma works at Microsoft.

<comment><USER3> In Zürich. At VS Code. I think Erich pushed this concept with VS Code.

I think to remember that the original out of process language server and using of a generic protocol was somewhere in the vim/emacs sphere. Was mentioned by the VS Code team afair.

<comment><USER4> [https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server- protocol/wiki/P...](https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server- protocol/wiki/Protocol-History)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Union Station: our web app performance monitoring service - <AUTHOR> http://blog.phusion.nl/2011/03/02/introducing-union-station-our-web-app-performance-monitoring-and-behavior-analysis-service-now-in-open-beta/

<comment><USER2> One thing unrelated to your app, but the design of your pricing table.

You point out the recommended plan - which jumps out - but it's very difficult to easily compare the plans. My two cents: use graphics (checks or bullets) for included features, leave out features that are the same across the board (like no setup fee), and reduce it to critical features only.

The rest of the site looks great, I love the design/UI.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hosted?

I understand they acknowledge this, but I'd be as unlikely to use a product like this as I'd be to use a remote memory profiler. Which is pretty unlikely.

I can't quite tell from the launch page what level of detail is conveyed, but if you can tell what gems, method names and data sources are used that could be a competitive advantage. There are plenty of profiling and targeting applications/services that people are unlikely to want to reveal that they're using. I'd also be concerned about the increased visibility an attacker might be able to gain into a public application.

I saw that a "firewall" edition is in the works, and I understand the appeal of ongoing fees with SAAS, but I'm still surprised people are willing to remote out code insight to this level. At least, I haven't seen offers of hosted debuggers, profilers, compilers etc. Has gmail and basecamp really softened up the market that much?

<comment><USER4> Have you heard of newrelic.com or scoutapp.com? Basically the same thing.

<comment><USER3> Nope I hadn't, thanks. Seems like collectively those companies have a lot of high profile clients, so I guess the answer is I'm the odd ball.

<comment><USER5> Newrelic is exceedingly useful. I can see Union Station being equally useful, honestly.

<comment><USER6> Second this. NewRelic rocks. My company spends around $700/mo on it, happily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clever to put the fact that it requires Passenger at the bottom of the feature set :)

<comment><USER8> This fact is displayed pretty prominently on the sign up page. That said, if there's enough demand for it we'll add support for other app servers as well. For the initial launch we've focused on Phusion Passenger integration so that we can deliver the best of the best.

</comment></comment><comment> tomh- Always good to see new dutch software products/startups!

<comment><USER9> Phusion's a great group - Passenger is absolutely fabulous, especially for NGinX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very slick, complete, confident site for such a young and small team. Respect.</comment>


The Production of Law, Security, and Arbitration in the Free Market - <AUTHOR> http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Libertarian/Machinery_of_Freedom/MofF_Chapter_29.html

<comment><USER2> This stuff often feels like electric buggywhips for horseless automobiles, or early-80s thinkpieces on virtual reality that seriously proposed "online shopping", when it came, would consist of slipping on vr goggles and literally walking through a virtual mall.

The entire article is a mix of mildly-interesting speculation with lots of bizarre shortcomings of imagination (bizarre in the context of such other flights of fancy; keep in mind this is a guy imaginative enough to come up with the seasteading notion, so he's not lacking in visionary skills).

A quick idiocy is the capital-punishment example:

 _Consider, as a particular example, the issue of capital punishment. Some people might feel that the risk to themselves of being convicted, correctly or incorrectly, and executed for a capital crime outweighed any possible advantages of capital punishment. They would prefer, where possible, to patronize protection agencies that patronized courts that did not give capital punishment. Other citizens might feel that they would be safer from potential murderers if it was known that anyone who murdered them would end up in the electric chair. They might consider that safety more important than the risk of ending up in the electric chair themselves or of being responsible for the death of an innocent accused of murder. They would, if possible, patronize agencies that patronized courts that did give capital punishment.

If one position or the other is almost universal, it may pay all protection agencies to use courts of the one sort or the other. If some people feel one way and some the other, and if their feelings are strong enough to affect their choice of protection agencies, it pays some agencies to adopt a policy of guaranteeing, whenever possible, to use courts that do not recognize capital punishment. They can then attract anti-capital-punishment customers. Other agencies do the opposite._

There's many bugs in the logic here. The biggest one is that there's such an obvious tension between the theory that you can opt out of capital punishment risk by smart choice of defense agencies and the theory that you can opt for a better deterrent factor by smart choice of defense agencies (eg: those that supply capital punishment) that it's surprising someone could even write the two paragraphs above.

If you don't see it immediately, it works like this:

Firstly is the notion that you can have a greater deterrent to would-be murderers by patronizing a defense agency that patronizes a court that hands out decisions that include the option of capital punishment.

So some dude murders me; what is supposed to happen in this world is something like:

\- despite being dead, my contract with the defense agency specifies that they are to pursue vengeance against whoever murdered me

\- my defense agency investigates and discovers my killer is Killem Abdul Murder-ar

\- (following the example of Tannahelp) rather than just hire a sniper to satisfy the contract in an efficient fashion, my defense agency instead calls up Murder-ar's defense agency and we set a court date

\- my defense agency presents the case ; we get a pronouncement of the death penalty

\- my defense agency then tracks Murder-ar down and shoots him, satisfying its contract

...and knowledge of this hypothetical sequence of events is enough to deter would-be murderers b/c it illustrates the grave consequences to them that would follow from murdering me.

Secondly is the notion that I can opt out of capital punishment by patronizing a defense agency that doesn't patronize a court that hands out capital punishment.

So I accidentally kill some dude b/c I drive my forklift in an irresponsible fashion, but his aggrieved widow believes my actions to be murder and has her defense agency pursue matters. What is supposed to happen is something like:

\- the widow's agency calls my agency and is like "we want to kill frig to satisfy the murder-vengeance clause in our defense contract"

\- my agency is like "we're a defense agency so of course we're not going to say 'fine with us'"; a court date is arranged

\- because my agency is one that doesn't patronize courts that hand out death penalties I can sleep soundly at night because I know that whatever punishment the court metes out for my manslaughter at least it won't be capital punishment

Thought of in isolation these both seem cool -- oh wow I can scare away potential murders with the threat of capital punishment _or_ I can avoid the threat of capital punishment _if I so choose_! Freedom rocks!

But there's such an obvious tension between the two possibilities:

\- deterring people from killing you via exposing them to capital punishment risk depends upon being able to expose them to capital punishment risk even against their own wishes

\- being able to expose people to capital punishment risk against their own wishes directly works against your ability to voluntarily opt out of capital punishment risk

...including them back-to-back with no explanation of how the tension reconciles is (or should be) embarrassing.

There's a lot in the linked essay that's similar (which is impressive in its own right given how short it is).

I wish it was better thought-out than it is; it reads like a "blub" political philosopher explaining why X is a better blub than Y.

<comment><AUTHOR> You confused Patri Friedman with David Friedman.

David Friedman wrote the spectulative guide to anarcho-capitalism, _Machinery of Freedom_ where as Patri Friedman, who was influenced by David's ideas, head the seasteading movement.

Interestingly enough, where as David Friedman, wrote in opposition to his father, the eminent economist Milton Friedman, Patri Friedman explictly implemented his father's ideas and expanded upon it.

<comment><USER2> Incidentally I find Patri's stuff much better than David's (if this is any indication).

Seasteading is far-out but Patri seems self-aware of that and has the wisdom to take an "I don't have all the answers yet" attitude where warranted.

From what I've seen of David's work (again: if this is any indication) it seems poorly thought-through (probably) or dishonest (possibly); a post-state anarchist society is going to be _different_ , this stuff reads like epicycles-within-epicycles to convince you it'd be "the same but better".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> That was a fun read. In this scenario, how do I start a protection agency when others are already competing? They'll kick my ass and shut me down. Do I need to hire myself protection until I can grow large enough to protect myself? In other words, how do we deal with anti-competitive behavior?

<comment><USER4> And what do you do, if by chance, it happens that one protection agency dominates and the others recede. What if the remaining one starts forcing you to pay its premiums, and calls itself the "government"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not very well argued, but it's a plausible summary of a _potential_ outcome.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is quite possibly the stupidest, most non-sensical article about "reforming" the legal system that I've ever read. And I've read some really stupid stuff.

The guy spends half the article saying why arbitration doesn't work...and then proposes a system based on arbitration as the solution to our woes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you elaborate on why you think the guy diss abritation and then propose abritation?

It seem like you didn't read the article carefully.</comment></comment>


A new Google Wallet app for all Android phones - <AUTHOR> http://googlecommerce.blogspot.com/2013/09/a-new-google-wallet-app-for-all-android.html

<comment><USER2> As a Verizon customer, I will believe it when I see it. As it stands, I can't use Isis (not in the right market) or Google Wallet (because Verizon won't let it compete with Isis).

The changes sound nice, but the way they phrase "for all Android phones" doesn't give me confidence.</comment>


Military Intelligence Used to Shut Down French BitTorrent Site - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/military-intelligence-used-to-shutdown-250k-user-bittorrent-site-090606/

<comment><USER2> In other news a burgeoning market of tech savvy 18-28 year olds in France are in need of someone with basic sys admin skills and $200 to pay for server fees.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder whether they are really that concerned about content, or whether this is a not-so-subtle message to people who might feel tempted to resurrect the 'spirit of 68' amid the economic doldrums.</comment>


Android Toolbar dropshadow on all API levels - <AUTHOR>

How can you get a Toolbar dropshadow on all API levels on Android? I created a repo to demonstrate this exact issue : https://github.com/lawloretienne/ToolbarExample I only see a dropshadow on API level 21+ . <comment><USER2> There are a few topics on StackOverflow where this gets answered. The short answer: Toolbar is using the "elevation" property, which only Lollipop and above support natively. A simple solution is to manually add the shadow as a drawable to the Toolbar, and hide that when running on SDK 21+.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ya I was hoping that was not the case anymore. I have a temporary work around that adds a dropshadow view on the layout file while the layout-v21 file does NOT have the dropshadow view. Which seems to work, but I wanted to see if there is a better "Best Practice".</comment></comment>


How to Listen to Your Customers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.instantq.com/?p=17

<comment><USER2> Frequently affirmed but rarely followed advice.</comment>


This Photo Is Actually a Pencil Perfect Drawing - <AUTHOR> http://www.odditycentral.com/pics/this-photo-is-actually-a-pencil-perfect-drawing.html

<comment><USER2> Oddity central is one of those horrible sites that have a dozen links in the article - all back to their own site. SEO gone amok.

Here's an actual link to the artists profile:

<http://diegokoi.deviantart.com/gallery/?offset=24>

<comment><USER3> Some of them you can tell are drawings, but <http://diegokoi.deviantart.com/gallery/25937209#/d5hk8nb> looks really good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is what I call art that takes real talent.

<comment><USER5> Is it art or craftsmanship?

<comment><USER6> It is both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, amazing</comment>


It's a lot like SQL: Why Domain Driven Design witho core domains is mostly useless - <AUTHOR> https://adaptechsolutions.net/strategic-domain-driven-design-pm-simplified/ <comment><USER2> An interesting project. Well written. Thanks.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the most cost-effective TURN solution? - <AUTHOR> I'm scoping out solutions and debating between using Twilio/Plivo or an open source solution like https://github.com/coturn/coturn.
Does anyone have experience with the cost dynamics of one vs the other? I imagine it has to be cheaper to run our own TURN servers, but I want to make sure it's worth it (cost savings significantly outweigh the setup overhead and such, in the long-term) before locking into that approach.
Context: implementing P2P VoIP in a mobile app, probably over WebRTC. We probably won't expect too much load at first (max 100 active concurrent calls), so I imagine Twilio might even be cheaper overall, at first.
Any help/resources/etc would be much appreciated. Thanks! <comment><USER2> Why do you think you'd be locked in? To switch from twilio to your own service, it's one LOC client side, and setting up your server. I don't see what would lock you in. If you need to host your own TURN server, you need to host it somewhere where bandwidth is cheap, so NOT aws. You can any lightsail, DO, etc. However, with a VPS, you're subject to instabilities from other users, so you may want to get your own instances from Hetzner/OVH. This is a lot of overhead as you see, so only do it if it's worth it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi,

Running your own TURN server isn't that difficult and you should remember that most calls (80-95%) don't need TURN (packet relay) but only use STUN (IP discovery). So one small TURN server should have no trouble handling 100 concurrent calls.

There are AMIs if you use AWS, and if you're interested I can send over the config files we use. We use coturn. My email is in my profile.

Shameless plug: I'm a co-founder of EagleDial, we specialize in calls over WebRTC with built in payments either per minute or per call. We have white label solutions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you going to need other WebRTC (or similar) infrastructure? For many use cases, you'll want the TURN server to be colocated with the rest of your infrastructure.</comment>


A Cryptologist Takes a Crack at Deciphering DNA's Deep Secrets (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/science/12prof.html?pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> I met Nick when I visited the Broad Institute a few years ago. Fun guy. He told a shaggy mosquito joke that somehow ended up with the challenge of extracting DNA from tiny mosquito testicles.

I question just how effective our belief that evolution and development can be understood from just treating DNA as an information science- and I say that as a person who has been doing precisely that for 20+ years. I'm finding, more and more, there are variables that contribute a lot to evo devo that have nothing to do with the specific sequence of coding regions, and more and more to do with the more cryptic (heh) regions. Although we apply more and more DNA sequencing scaling, and more and more information theory- our rate of knowledge discovery appears to be flattening out.

I've realigned my research interests around cellular biology, specifically high throughput imaging of induced pluripotent stem cells, because it appears that those systems can provide us with a lot more direct experimental evidence, and that evidence is more consistent with the behavior of systems, than what can be extracted from DNA using the best statistical techniques.

</comment><comment><USER3> I enjoy a lot of the speculative fiction around junk dna containing an ancient message hidden by our progenitors. What a great way to talk to your descendants (seeded by, say, bacteria lodged in comets) through time when they are ready to hear what you have to say.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am very interested in the benefits of DNA studies and their application to cryptography. I don't know much about biology but It would be interesting to know if there's a relation between code breaking through quantum computing and DNA, and if quantum computing would ever help in figuring out DNA

<comment><USER5> This is a pretty old article, and well before this time markov/bayesian stuff was already in full swing for bioinformatics, AFAIK. Biology draws from many disciplines, and it's taken a lot of computer science to get to where it is now. But I think that the infosec community generally is pretty underwhelming in its application of statistical methods to big data. People seem to have limited imaginations when it comes to pattern matching, and too quickly jump to heuristics and "machine learning" without properly understanding the limitations of the data and techniques they're working with.

        To paraphrase provocatively, 'machine learning is statistics
        minus any checking of models and assumptions'.
        ~Brian Ripley, 2004 [1]

We should really check out some of the stuff bioinformatics people have been doing. That's not to say that _cryptography_ has more to give to biology, quite the contrary. But I think the broader infosec community should try harder when it comes to doing stats properly. I think there is a lot more in common between bioinformatics and infosec analytics than most (on either side) realize. Huge amounts of messy, un/semi-structured data being the common theme.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, I find that wetlab biologists tend to have a better understanding of the limitations of the experiments they're setting up, in terms of interpreting the significance, limitations and meaning of their results at least - than the computer science types playing in biology. But good stats is the one universal skill that all good scientists should master.

I spent a few years where part of my work was supporting evolutionary geneticists manage and figure out their data. Enormous amounts of data. So much raw data that the very large scientific institution I'm sure you've heard of couldn't accommodate it in their normal data repositories (at least not if every researcher started doing so). Having multi-million dollar research projects conclude and then archived to a handful of redundant sets of HDDs curated by teams and departments that now no longer exist is unnerving (supposedly things are better these days).

In any case, it's a fascinating area to work in for budding computer scientists. There are many problems to sink your teeth into, even basic stuff like repeatable analyses on research projects running for more than 10-15 years. "Yes, there are faster/more robust/more appropriate MCMV (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) solutions out there but we don't feel like re-running a decade's worth of work to ensure they're comparable". But I digress.

It amused me that each research team seemed to be either computer-science heavy (and ignorant about the quality or nature or "ground truth" of their data and the possibly embarrassing impacts on the signals they thought they were seeing), almost wilfully ignorant or at least dismissive of "old-school" biology methods and data...

... or were very wet-lab savvy and grounded in the raw biology side of things but limited their research questions according to the types of analyses they were comfortable doing themselves, using well-established methods, tools and software that would run on their biggest $20k PC under someone's desk. Although that was seriously changing by 2013 when I left (partly due to nice big web-UIs in front of HPC clusters, partly due to better mixing of team capabilities).

Now, it's easy to dismiss the latter group as just being not "up to date" or unskilled in "big data" (recent biology grad programmes are hopefully improving). But what was surprising was the obvious opportunities (to me) that highly CS-capable teams (inside and outside of the organisation I worked for) seemed to be deliberately staying away from. On more than one occasion I asked some of these people why they were ignoring the rich, machine-readable, highly-curated datasets from more traditional biology science (Eg. taxonomy/ID/phenotype/ecology info).

The answers are varied: they aren't even aware this data exists in machine- readable form; they seem unfamiliar with the very biology discipline they're playing in (they're more obsessed with algorithms); but a disturbing trend seemed to be a generic distrust of manually curated data. I guess because there's no repeatable algorithms to reproduce human curators :-)

Now, I'm not saying everyone should go out and use that data as a source of truth, but it should at least be a reference to sanity-check or compare to. And imagine if you actually did augment your sequence data with this stuff - one (admittedly naieve) thought was that there might be a fun way to look for at least some phenotype influences in a given genome, "for free", without having to start new wetlab work - i.e. just repurpose existing data.

When countering the aversion to manually curated data, I tried to point out that the very "garbage in" being dealt with - the genome sequences, spatial records, environmental layers etc. - all involve an element of human curation. I mean, that's how we end up with nearly 20% of non-human genomes containing human DNA [2] in the first place. And that's before we even consider whether stuff in the "good" 80% are even representative of the species group(s) of interest - you wouldn't believe how easy it is for people in the field (or the lab!) to get species identification completely and utterly wrong. Or scrape up DNA samples of some infection or parasite instead of the actual thing itself...

... and yet even with all these imperfections in the molecular data, we find that some of the old-school morphological (phenotype-driven) taxonomies are still 80%+ unchanged (hazy on the numbers now) when reconstructed with purely DNA-derived phylogenies. And that's on groups where we're still fighting over what the best DNA markers are to build those molecular phylogenies in the first place! A lot of people don't realize that the same DNA evidence can give different pictures of the evolutionary tree, depending on what genes you're picking on...

Apologies for the over-sized rant, it's been a while since I had to think of this stuff.

[1] [http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6/the-two- cultures-...](http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/6/the-two-cultures- statistics-vs-machine-learning)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17genome.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17genome.html)

<comment><USER6> This certainly was a rant :)

You do bring up a very good point which is the difficulty that biologists and CS people have talking to each other. As someone with feet in both camps I see all the time both sides talking past each other and completely missing the basic assumptions each side make about the same data. Biologists generate the wrong data because they don't know what the CS people need and the CS people don't know what to ask the biologists to generate. It does make a lot of low hanging fruit available if you can understand both fields.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Impacts of X orders of magnitude improvement on battery efficiency? - <AUTHOR> I have been thinking lately in how increases in battery technology have enabled lots of new transport technology (such as Teslas, segways, e-scooters, etc.), drones, mobile phones, etc., and how several other classical scifi technology is only (/mainly?) fiction due to energy limitations (exoskeletons, human-carrying drones, robots, some black-mirror-level technology, etc.).
Mobile phone adoption has changed the world. Electric cars are posed to do the same (sadly, autonomous cars promised a lot more changes that now seem somewhat farther into the future). I thought it would be an interesting thread for HN to discuss some other areas in which a hypothetical sudden 10x, 100x change in energy storage/availability would have a big impact in the world.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> These are really good insights. I think the holy grail of fuel cell tech is charge once instantly, and never have to worry about re-charging. Optimal electrical independence. Device includes nanoscale materials design that allows it to convert passive use into energy. In addition, a wireless electrical grid is deployed allowing consumers to draw power from via the air. One plank that combined with satellite internet and AI constitutes the Next- gen engineering platform on which to build.

[https://www.techspot.com/news/77076-samsung-graphene- batteri...](https://www.techspot.com/news/77076-samsung-graphene-batteries- which-can-charge-phone-12.html)

Ossia: Proven Wireless Power Technology

[http://www.ossia.com/](http://www.ossia.com/)</comment>


Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_Hours <comment><USER2> Quick heads up: the PDF version has not been updated to reflect many corrections made to the wiki version.

For this reason, I'd rather work with the wiki version than the PDF.

</comment><comment><USER3> A thread from 2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9275336](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9275336)

2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6619799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6619799)

2010: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1378043](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1378043)

</comment><comment><USER4> there is a v2.0 version of this here, it may still be a WIP: [https://www.wespiser.com/writings/wyas/home.html](https://www.wespiser.com/writings/wyas/home.html)

<comment><USER5> Author here, yes, It is now complete, or complete to the spec that was originally set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not very familiar with Haskell - is this still a useful first tutorial or has the language changed too much since 2007?

<comment><USER7> The areas of Haskell they show haven't really changed in the time since. If you enjoy reading it, I say it's a useful tutorial.</comment></comment>


Going private might be the best way to adjust sales models for Dell - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.gartner.com/tiffani-bova/2013/08/14/dell-going-private-might-be-the-best-way-to-adjust-sales-models/

<comment><AUTHOR> Also companies such as Blackberry are thinking of going private.

Is this a new trend or just a few isolated cases?</comment>


A Visual History of Eve: 2014 - 2018 - <AUTHOR> http://futureofcoding.org/essays/eve/ <comment><USER2> My view of this is: all of us who have written a lot of code feel intuitively there is something wrong with how coding is done. It feels like we are repeating too much work every time, reinventing the wheel for the umpteenth time. It feels like the tools and notations we have are missing something fundamental and thus forcing extra menial work that is not essentially necessary. Eve was one of the multiple attempts at converting that intuition in actual knowledge and in an actual product. They weren't able to do it, same as Intentional Software and others before them, but they explored uncharted territory using that intuition, and that is an interesting exploration. Kudos to them for trying. And hopefully someone will find the underlying core concepts we're missing to make that leap into future programming!

<comment><USER3> FWIW I agree that something feels wrong and repetitive, but I don't think Eve addressed my problem at all.

A big part of my pain, and the pain I've observed in 15 years of industry, is programming language silos. Too much time is spent on "How do I do X in language Y?" rather than just "How do I do X?"

For example, people want a web socket server, or a syntax highlighting library, in pure Python, or Go, or JavaScript, etc. It's repetitive and drastically increases the amount of code that has to be maintained, and reduces the overall quality of each solution (e.g. think e-mail parsers, video codecs, spam filters, information retrieval libraries, etc.).

There's this tendency of languages to want to be the be-all end-all, i.e. to pretend that they are at the center of the universe. Instead, they should focus on interoperating with other languages (as in the Unix philosophy).

Some languages want to be their own operating system, but empirically that doesn't work. The JVM had this explicit goal of "making Windows irrelevant", but instead it ended up as just another process on a Unix system!!!

(Something like Mirage in OCaml is an extreme example of this, although I think it's a pretty interesting project.)

This only really comes up after you become at least an "intermediate programmer". When I started, I wanted everything to be in my favorite language so it would be easy for me to understand and modify. But now I realize that it's more efficient to be able to reuse the best tool for the job PERIOD, not the best tool for the job in language X.

Microsoft actually had some degree of success with this with COM. You can do a surprising amount of automation from JavaScript or Visual BASIC in much the same way. But IMO the "language cacophony" situation is worse on the server side, even though to some extent the problem is easier because you have more computing resources.

In this regard, Eve actually makes things worse! I say that every new language makes things locally better, but globally worse. Because you never have a system in just one language. If you think you do, then your view fo the system is too narrow.

I'm chipping away at the edges of this problem with [http://www.oilshell.org/](http://www.oilshell.org/), but honestly it's not close... I chose to replicate the Unix shell first -- a big success story, though one with many flaws -- and then maybe many years from now, extend it with a form of integration tighter than bytes over pipes.

<comment><USER4> Definitely more interoperability to get best tool for the job and leverage ecosystems. I'm with you on that. On this...

"they should focus on interoperating with other languages (as in the Unix philosophy)."

Maybe instead follow the _OpenVMS philosophy_ where they standardized the calling conventions to support multi-language development.

[http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/doc/82final/5973/5973pro.html#int...](http://h41379.www4.hpe.com/doc/82final/5973/5973pro.html#intro_32)

Microsoft's CLR followed that path in the VM space. Got similarly good results. Tools like Racket and mbase do with DSL's where they share underlying LISP-like language to avoid problems with DSL's own weaknesses.

<comment><USER5> Actually on Windows we have come full circle as those CLR ideas, which were originally thought for COM Runtime, have been brought back into COM as UWP.

IBM mainframes also follow the multi-language environment philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most successful languages were initially created for a very specific target. C -> UNIX OS. C++ -> network simulations. PHP -> Rasmus's homepage. JS -> interactive web pages. C# -> WinForms apps.

From scrolling through that list of prototypes, which are all over the place, it looks like they couldn't decide what language to make because they didn't know what they were making it for. I think there's a real lesson here in being _specific_ with your product at first and then generalizing later. It's very hard to be all things to all people from day one.

<comment><USER7> The whole thing was an exploration into the unknown. It was a discovery process.

<comment><USER8> In such case having a specific use case in mind could be actually helpful.

It's much easier to explore the unknown if at least you know what you'd like to find instead than just wandering without a clear destination and hope to somehow stumble upon it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Eve's whole focus on "observability" of code and data seems kind of overwhelming imo...

I mean, the 2 most successful paradigms for "full-strength" interaction with computers are (1) code in general purpose programming languages and (2) spreadsheets. And they both have one thing in common: _only code or only data is visible most of the time (or by default)!_ I think this is for one simple reason: that's all our monkey brains can take, we only want a small narrow window into one of these 2 domains, and we can barely handle that. We don't really want to "see the data flow" or "the code behind the cells", we want things hidden away 99% of the time, and we want to be spared from the paralyzing effect of endless choice that allowing us to interact with everything would cause.

I think the problems people would most appreciate solving are instead:

(1) how to switch between code-first and data-first mode in the same tool

(2) how to build a successful repository/marketplace of good enough "components" usable in your tool (and "NPM of Excell plugins" but for your tool)

I think people mostly fall clearly into two camps: either _completely overwhelmed_ by their current tools already, anything even slightly more complex and their "brain would explode", or _they just want full power for their technical task_ (so they'll use something semi-domain-specific like Jupyter notebook). I think "designing for humans" should be based or deisngning for _limitations,_ for _neuroticism_ and for _somewhat illogical /irrational behavior_ ...that's what best describes _human_ users and that's what Excell got brilliantly right. You can be resentfully angry, lazy, overwhelmed and ADHDed, all at the same time, in one of the worse days of your life, and you'll still get something done with Excell.

<comment><USER10> > And they both have one thing in common: only code or only data is visible > most of the time (or by default)!

This is true, but one of the the biggest source of errors in spreadsheets arises from the inability to see code, and one of the biggest source of errors in regular code is the inability to see and record the data flow.

In Eve, technically you still could only interact with data, because code was treated as data too. We still had a lot of work to do in figuring out an interface for working with programs built in this manner.

> we want things hidden away 99% of the time, and we want to be spared from > the paralyzing effect of endless choice that allowing us to interact with > everything would cause.

I agree with you here, and this is one of the things we kept in mind when designing and building Eve. We likened it to having lego parts bucket on the floor. Sure, everything you need is right there, but the vast design space available to you limits your ability to work. But what if we could show you only the parts that were applicable at the current time. Or show you only the parts that would fit a certain spot. We could do this with Eve, because we kept information the compilers throw away and made it available (and added to it) during program execution.

This of course was never fully realized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _Thanks to the Eve team: Chris Granger, Corey Montella, Josh Cole, and Jamie > Brandon. You were an inspiration._

And I hope they continue to be! The ideas that Eve made concrete are too good not to carry forward in the design of future languages. It wasn't just the literate/logical programming paradigms, atypical of popular languages in production today, that made Even stand out: it was the idea (really, the sort of moral imperative) that as you make changes to the code, you should be able to see the effects of those changes _in real time._

It's worth pointing out that Light Table, sort of the precursor to Eve, was pretty much directly inspired by Bret Victor's talk "Inventing on Principle." [0] I'd encourage anyone who hasn't seen Bret's work to go check out that, and all his talks really. :)

[0] [https://vimeo.com/36579366](https://vimeo.com/36579366)

<comment><USER12> I should note that Eric Hoffman also was part of the team for a year.

<comment><USER10> Don't forget Rob Attorri! He wasn't an engineer, but he was there from day one (cofounded with Chris)!

<comment><AUTHOR> Added, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I thought this was going to be some kind of April Fool's thing where it went from spreadsheets and tables and eventually ended up with space combat.

That screenshot in the middle with the moon had me going for a second.

</comment><comment><USER14> It's neat seeing all the prototypes in one place. It looks like the team was trying to find what the product wanted to be. Is it a spreadsheet? Is it a wiki? A database? A web application maker? A REPL? A literate IDE? Some combination of all these things?

It seems like the team never was able to close the loop on the human outcomes of what their product was supposed to enable.

<comment><USER10> From an outside perspective this seems rather random, but we were really methodically exploring a design space. We incorporated different ideas from each IDE into the next. For a long time we were working on the IDE and semantics of the language at the same time, which was really holding us back. Eventually we separated those concerns, and refined the programming model in v0.2. But in each iteration of the language, there was something missing, causing us to try a new angle, or to throw out old assumptions.

> It seems like the team never was able to close the loop on the human > outcomes of what their product was supposed to enable.

What we really wanted from Eve was to define programming in a way that didn't feel like programming. We got close to this feeling in FiveSquare Eve and WikiEve. Smalltalk Eve (that's not what we called it, but what the article calls it) was probably the closest we got to this ideal, but unfortunately we didn't have enough runway to flesh it out.

<comment><USER15> Are you planning write a postmortem on this project? I really hope you do. I'm sure you have plenty of insights to share that would be super helpful for other people exploring this space.

Many of us here would really love to read up on the ideas behind each iteration, the specifics on what went well, what didn't go as expected, the target market and their feedback. It doesn't need to be a fancy paper, even a short but detailed bullet list for each iteration would be fine.

From my outsider perspective, it seems like you were trying to build a "silver bullet". For example, both FiveSquare Eve and WikiEve look promising. FiveSquare could be a great WYSIWYG website/app builder. WikiEve could be a great note taking tool. Just because they aren't the future of programming, doesn't mean they aren't useful!

<comment><USER10> > Are you planning write a postmortem on this project?

Chris has a keynote at splashcon 2018 about this: [https://2018.splashcon.org/event/splash-2018-keynotes- agains...](https://2018.splashcon.org/event/splash-2018-keynotes-against-the- current-what-we-learned-from-eve)

I'm trying to pen some of my thoughts as well, but it's taken a long time to try and distill some of these things into something comprehensible. Sometimes I don't even understand why we did some things :P

> From my outsider perspective, it seems like you were trying to build a > "silver bullet". For example, both FiveSquare Eve and WikiEve look > promising. FiveSquare could be a great WYSIWYG website/app builder. WikiEve > could be a great note taking tool. Just because they aren't the future of > programming, doesn't mean they aren't useful!

I think you're right about that. I think several times we could have taken a prototype Eve and made it a product people would have paid money to use. Many people said "Why don't you just make relational excel, that would go a long way to being a good useful product" and we basically did that in Grid Eve.

But every time we were tempted to monetize some artifact of Eve and call it a business, we had to remind ourselves that what we had didn't really address the original problem: programming needs to be easier. And this was the right move, because if we had stopped at WikiEve or Grid Eve or whatever version and iterated on it until it was a product, then we would have missed out on learning a lot more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This progression is impressive and the examples are visually stunning but I'm a bit concerned about how much the mouse is being used. When there's too many panels, fields and values on the screen, how do you keep your hands on the keyboard?

In the IDEs that I've tried, I find them impossible to use if there aren't keyboard shortcuts for everything. As an extreme example, take a look at Eclim which merges the functionality of the Eclipse code engine with the GUI of vi - [http://eclim.org/index.html](http://eclim.org/index.html) (note that I don't use this as my daily editor - I'm not proficient enough yet or perhaps it's just a bit too extreme).

<comment><USER17> Actually, several of those editors were explorations of what programming would look like using _just_ the mouse. The mouse isn't really the issue with programming performance, per se -- instead the problem is the constant context switching back and forth.

Several version focused on _just_ the keyboard, but we found that most of the things we built using Eve were inherently visual, and as such needed to be tested and interacted with using the mouse. Since we can't eliminate that context shift, we tried doubling down on it.

As a die hard Emacs user, I was shocked by just how competitive the mouse could be in the smalltalk-esque environment we built.

<comment><USER17> I noticed I had a video of the "calculator" interface we designed to try and make mouse/touch-only interaction possible. I've made it public for anyone interested.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT8shMtBZsY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT8shMtBZsY)

EDIT: Fixed the link

<comment><USER18> Your link is broken, I think you accidentally linked to the upload page.

<comment><USER17> Ah, thanks for the tip. Fixed now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Since a number of people who worked on Eve are watching the thread: what's next for you? What do you feel like you learned about human-computer interaction? What are you going to bring to your future work on these kinds of ideas?

<comment><USER10> I left a PhD program to join Eve, so I'm going to finish that and join academia to continue this research. I'm working to bring some of the ideas I learned from working on Eve into my own project called HiveMind, which in an OS written in Rust and an Eve-like language I call Mech: [https://gitlab.com/cmontella/hivemind](https://gitlab.com/cmontella/hivemind) You can think of it like baremetal Eve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I know a lot of people suggest there is a market for a programming language / Excel hybrid and it looked like some of these prototypes at least partially leaned in that direction.

What would be the most successful new development that Eve discovered? What is the best part of this that we can take away?

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm probably not the only one that went in thinking this was going to be about Eve (the game). When I saw the spreadsheets and visualizations it only further confirmed this. It took me about half the page before I realized this was something else entirely I'd never heard of.

<comment><USER22> Nope, not the only one ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Oh, man. I was really hoping Eve would be successful.</comment>


Recovering partially lost Ethereum private keys for fun and profit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jkilpatr/partial-eth-key-cracker <comment><USER2> I have 75ETH (from pre-sale) and a rough idea of my password. I still have the JSON file and have tried script based brute force attempts with no luck -- is this tool for me? Or is this for if I know my password but the JSON file itself is corrupted?

<comment><AUTHOR> This tool is for the latter case.

That being said if you have a rough idea of at least the component parts of your password building a simple cracker that takes a dictionary of substrings and tries different arrangements and capitalization shouldn't be too hard.

I've had to crack my own passwords pretty regularly throughout my life, hazard of using long ones and rotating them regularly.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As an exercise for the reader there's about $30 in Eth contained in the partial key in the readme. If you can find the actual key of course.

Happy cracking.</comment>


PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.01703 <comment><USER2> Finally the solution to all of your PyTorch citation problems! :)

<comment><USER3> Relevant Github issue: [https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/4126](https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/issues/4126)

<comment><USER4> It is surprising to me that they don't put this in the README.

(I do know it is in the root directory[0], it is just common practice to have it in the README. To be stupidly obvious)

[0] [https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/master/CITATION](https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/blob/master/CITATION)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Man it's kinda sad as a Lua fan to see so much interest in a project where the main goal is just to not use Lua.

I guess academics like familiarity and Lua insistently refuses to be like other languages (arrays and maps in one type, 1-based arrays, nonstandard builtin patterns, etc).

<comment><USER6> Academics simply don't have the time to learn languages that do not have substantial ecosystems and relative ease-of-use.

<comment><USER5> It's true - there have been attempts to fix it, but nobody has created something other people want to use. The Torch project largely replaced all of the then-popular Lua packages — wxLua was dropped for Torch's internal qtLua, the Lua concurrency libraries (Lanes and luaproc) were ignored in favor of zeroMQ, LPeg and Lua patterns were generally less popular than PCRE and Re2 bindings, _et cetera_. Maybe Torch is to blame (NIH syndrome), maybe the Lua packages weren't up to the task, maybe communication within the community is too hard (Lua lacks centralized discussion channels where experienced users are regularly active), but in the end, Lua didn't come away looking good here.

Learning a new language wasn't too hard when that language was Python, after all.

<comment><USER7> We'd all be happier writing math; writing code is just a nuisance.

<comment><USER6> The Julia programming language's development started explicitly to address this sentiment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want to read it online - [https://www.arxiv- vanity.com/papers/1912.01703/](https://www.arxiv- vanity.com/papers/1912.01703/)

<comment><USER9> ah, yes, why squint at a PDF when you can squint at LaTeX compile errors instead

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a typo in Listing 1?

The forward function of the conv net should use:

t3 = self.fc(t2)

instead of:

t3 = self.fc(t1)

AFAIK the nn.functional.relu function is NOT inplace by default [1]

[https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/nn.functional.html](https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/nn.functional.html)

<comment><USER11> yes that's a typo

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a bit funny to call it imperative, when really at the end of the day, the objective is to get something where you have very little insight into what the neural net. is doing to the state.</comment>


Is it a crime to attack a blockchain? - <AUTHOR> https://decryptmedia.com/4451/ethereum-classic-attack-code-is-law-not-illegal/ <comment><USER2> With all the extortion fraud and crime surrounding it maybe it deserves to be attacked.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It is a bounty...</comment>


Digital Ocean Experiencing Major Outages - <AUTHOR> https://status.digitalocean.com?date=2020-04-21 <comment><USER2> Is there any platform in which a service doesn't go down? I hesitate to run a web app in which an outage could happen on a regular occurrence or at moment's notice.

Any strategies?</comment>


How Pixar Changed All the Rules to Make the Good Dinosaur a Stunning Masterpiece - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/how-pixar-changed-all-the-rules-to-make-the-good-dinosa-1735364564 <comment><USER2> Using USGS data to create the landscapes for this film is genius.

Between Pixar's new CG techniques and new live action techniques like Alfonso Caurón's Gravity, it's encouraging to see that cinema is innovating.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any way to maximise travel while studying in college? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Just do it.

Go to an exchange program or go to school overseas (I think my son may be able to escape American cost disease that way.)

Locate in a city that is close to many things, has a good airport, etc. I spent a year in Dresden, Germany and got to see a lot of western and eastern europe.

Also take opportunities; hike in the blue mountains in Jamaica in the winter, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER3> I assume you're a college student in the USA. One thing that I wish I had considered was doing an exchange program inside the united states in addition to studying abroad.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am an Indian sophomore, I would consider Europe to be my travel destination to explore.

</comment></comment><comment> crooked-v Hostels and youth train tickets can make overland train travel in Europe very inexpensive. That leaves the priciest part as plane tickets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are internships a good way to travel to and within Europe considering the work also. I have never done an internship before and am skeptical that would there be enough time to travel.</comment></comment>


Lessons from Startup School - <AUTHOR>

Hey. I put together my top 5 lessons from startup school
Let me know what you think. Was there one that I missed?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lili-balfour/startup-school-lessons_b_4136530.html <comment><USER2> Phil from Evernote and his classification for example was interesting and usefull.

<comment><AUTHOR> I missed Phil's talk. I'll check it out once the videos are posted.</comment></comment>