How to make a bee hotel [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.foxleas.com/uploads/files/Bee%20Hotel%20page%20V4%20Nov%202015.pdf <comment><USER2> If you do decide to make a bee hotel, then please do this:

Beware Birds! If you notice Woodpeckers or other birds attacking the tunnels looking for bee larvae, fix a piece of chicken wire across the front of the bee house. This does not seem to deter the bees.

Basically, make sure that a four inch beak (over estimate, three might be OK) can penetrate a hole in the "hotel."

I suggest that chicken wire is an integral part and not optional.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do your garden a huge favor today: pile up some sparsely stacked logs or branches and just leave them there, perhaps covered by a tarp.

Don't disturb already fallen wood, of course — current weather conditions should certainly provide a surplus of newly fallen branches without having to find old ones.

It's even more low-effort than a bee hotel and my log sanctuary has been home to hibernating admiral butterflies, hedgehogs, and many fungi and fauna that supply the bottom of the local food chain.

<comment><USER4> A few dishes or shallow bowels with water around the garden, refilled frequently, will attract a great number of insect, birds and other animals as well. We frequently see squirrels drinking from a bowl placed on the garden wall for example. Make sure to put some pebbles or branchlets into them, it will help insects get out if they fall in.

Also: stone piles can host a lot of animals as well.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately depending on where you live this is the best way to fill your neighborhood with mosquitoes.

<comment><USER6> Shouldn't be a problem it the bowls remain dry at intervals before to be refilled.

<comment><USER4> Exactly this. There are some smaller ones that are constantly water-filled but they have no mosquito larvae either. We already speculated that the water in these small vessels might become too warm because they thrive in the larger garden water tanks here. They are pretty harmless though. No diseases transmitting and the bites themselves are harmless. Also nets at windows are somewhat common here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bee hotel I recently made: [https://imgur.com/gallery/axH0NNt](https://imgur.com/gallery/axH0NNt)

<comment><USER8> That looks great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those with 3D printers, there's some good designs on thingiverse.

My favorite is this hexagonal design, which can be easily taken apart, cleaned, and stored at the end of the season. I just printed it and placed it inside the cheap (ineffective) one from Costco

I use strips of printer paper to line the tubes.

1\. [https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3457603](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3457603)

</comment><comment><USER10> Title should be: _How to make a bee hotel (2015) [pdf]_</comment>


Cellular Automata: Rule 30 fed as input to Conway's Game of Life (2019) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK7nBOLYzdE <comment><USER2> I love the colorful persistent phosphor effect.

It reminds me of running Life and Munching Squares on a PDP-7 340 Vector Graphics Display, with its beautiful P7 phosphor:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB78NXH77s4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB78NXH77s4)

Conway's Game of LIFE in a DEC PDP-7 w/ Type 340 Display

Here is an implementation of John Conway's Game of Life on an 18 bit DEC PDP-7 with a DEC Type 340 X/Y point display. Patterns are stored on and can be called from our new JK09 PDP-7 storage device which is what we use for UNIX V0. We have set a few starter patterns including Bill Gosper's Glider Gun.

The sounds you hear are from the Type 347 display controller. They were received using a Yaesu FT1XD radio in AM mode.

The world supports 1296 points (36 x 36). We are attempting to increase this to 72 x 72 or 5184 points.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4oRHv- Svwc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4oRHv-Svwc)

DEC PDP-7 w/ Type 340 display running Munching Squares and Spirograph

Two display hacks run on PDP-7 serial number 129 with the Type 340 XY display option. The 340 has a P7 phosphor has a slow decay which gives Munching Squares an eerie afterglow. Both programs read the left switches to modify patterns. A small AM radio was used to pick up RFI from the Type 347 controller. For the MIT AI lab hackers the Munching Squares "music" was referred to as Munching Tunes.

<comment><USER3> Yes, that has some mystical effect on me. I think I saw it when you shares it the other day. How does the AM capture the sound? What exactly generates the sound waves?

<comment><USER2> It's electromagnetic interference from the electronics. A hulking powerful "big iron" PDP-7 makes a much better RFI broadcast antenna than an iPhone, but it broadcasts at much lower frequencies, that an AM radio can pick up.

You can hear a little bit of interference on an FM radio, but it sounds much stronger and more interesting on the AM dial.

PDP-7's were actually relatively sleek fast inexpensive computers for the time, and were only 18 bits compared to the PDP-6's and PDP-10's 36 bits. ("If you're not working with 36 bits, you're not working with a full DEC!" -DIGEX) But physically they still have a lot of "big iron" parts and use lots of power like mainframes.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-7)

The other sibling post by nitrogen referred to "tempest", which is a (no longer) secret NSA codename for "Telecommunications Electronics Materials Protected from Emanating Spurious Transmissions", a certification for shielding equipment from spying on it via electromagnetic radiation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_\(codename\))

The slower the computer, the more "details" you can hear of the computation. Modern computers are so fast and have so much going on and are so much better shielded (they need to be, since they have their own radios they don't want their own RFI to interfere with), that they aren't nearly as interesting to listen to on AM radio. I loved to listen to my Apple ][ on AM radio, especially compiling my FORTH system and applications (it's satisfying to listen to your own code you wrote compiling and running)!

<comment><USER3> Thank you, this is a very interesting topic to me. I remember ,when I was a kid in the 90s and had the Sound Blaster card, 1.0 or something quite cheap and in certain situations I would hear very similar but quiet interference on the headphones when there was no sound playing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Neat! In a similar vein, here's Game of Life implemented in Game of Life:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8)

<comment><USER5> According to Wikipedia, a cellular automaton running the game of life rules is Turing complete. So it can compute anything that a Universal Turing Machine can compute [1] - In other words, anything that a conventional computer can compute.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life)

<comment><USER6> Including Tetris. [https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/11880/43394](https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/11880/43394)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Same account posted a similar video for rule 110 : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2uhhAXd7PI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2uhhAXd7PI)

Pretty interesting !

<comment><USER4> Fun fact is that rule 110 is Turing complete, which for me is mind blowing

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Wikipedia article on Rule 30 is interesting: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been playing around with Cellular Automata recently too!!! Wish my viz looked as good as this one, though :D

[https://lockwood.dev/automata/2020/03/28/bruteforcing- beauti...](https://lockwood.dev/automata/2020/03/28/bruteforcing-beautiful- cellular-automata-rulesets-with-golang.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> Watching this video caused some noticeable motion aftereffects for me.

<comment><USER11> Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER12> The bottom part "goes down" when you stop the video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Slightly unnerving to see it fall victim to a kind of Kessler Syndrome, preventing gliders from escaping eventually.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have been watching some videos about quantum field theory[1]. Now that I saw this, just got the random idea if there could be some relation between those and cellular automaton.

Particles would be the "cells". Them being live or dead would be result of the interactions of the underlying fields.

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

</comment><comment><USER15> Would it be possible to advance the POV up as the game goes on?

Should be cool to see other planets etc etc.

<comment><USER16> There are no other planets. They are entirely alone in their universe, and will simply fly out to eternity in a futile search for other life.

<comment><USER17> There's one glider that comes back: [https://youtu.be/IK7nBOLYzdE?t=112](https://youtu.be/IK7nBOLYzdE?t=112)

<comment><USER16> Those didn't come back from deep space they simply made a U-turn in low orbit and returned to the surface.

In theory two gliders taking off at the same time at the right distance on a long enough axis could collide in deep space and create something new, which would then return to the planet surface like some kind of invasion, but I doubt it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The top half reminds me a bit of the old arcade game "Missile Command."

</comment><comment><USER2> This is a beautiful combination, and reminiscent of Rudy Rucker's hybrid cellular automata rule "EcoLiBra", that combined Life and Brian's Brain by switching between them on a per-pixel basis, based on another cellular automata rule, Anneal, running in a parallel plane.

Anneal decides whether each cell is land or water, and clumps cells into oceans and continents that look like cow spots, with smoothly eroded shorelines and long beaches. Life runs on land, and brain runs in water, and they interact and stimulate each other along the beaches where land and water meet.

Actually EcoLiBra uses "AntiLife" (aka "Death") on land, the ones-complement of life, because that makes the empty space "1" for AntiLife stimulate Brain, and the empty space "0" for brain stimulate Life, so the beach is a fertile breeding ground that never dies out, and there's much more cross-species stimulation and humping and birthing along the shores, then the children disperse by swimming down into the deep ocean, or climbing up into the inland hills.

[http://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/celdoc/rules.html#EcoL...](http://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/celdoc/rules.html#EcoLiBra)

>ECOLIBRA

>The JC EcoLiBra rule, a cross between Life and Brain.

>This rule is a cross between Life and Brain. The basic idea is that the cells are divided between dark "sea" cells and light "land" cells. We run Brain in the sea, and on land we run not Life but AntiLife. All the land cells are normally firing cells, and the presence of an active AntiLife cell is signaled by having a land cell which is not firing. Full details on EcoLiBra are in §

>The name EcoLiBra suggests 1) an ecology of Life and Brain, 2) a balanced situation (equilibrium), and 3) the human intestinal bacteria Escherichia coli, known as E. coli for short. The third connection is perhaps a bit unsavory, but remember that E. coli cells are in fact the favorite "guinea pigs" for present day genesplicing experiments. As one of the goals of CelLab is to promote the development of artificial life, the designer gene connection is entirely appropriate. I've given EcoLiBra a nice, symmetric start pattern, but it also does fine if you press R to randomize the screen. You can make a randomized screen a little more interesting by using the screen editor to drill a big black hole in the center. This can be done by using the following keystrokes

Here is an earlier somewhat simpler cellular automata rule that Rudy Rucker made when he first started playing with the CAM-6 in 1987.

[http://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/celdoc/rules.html#Brai...](http://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/celdoc/rules.html#BraiLife)

>BRAILIFE

>The JC BraiLife rule after 213 generations. A hauler is about to hit a butterfly just above and to the right of the center of the diamond shape.

>When I first started hacking cellular automata on the CAM-6 in 1987, I couldn't quite see how to think of a completely new rule. So I decided a good way to start might be to try combining some of the old rules, particularly the rules Life and Brain.

>Life is very interesting, but it tends to die out. Brain, on the other hand, is extremely hard to kill off; if anything, Brain is too persistent. So I thought I might try running Life and Brain in parallel, using Brain to stimulate Life, and using Life to dampen Brain.

>At first I had every firing Brain cell turn on a Life cell, and had every firing Life cell turn off a Brain cell, but, run fullscreen, this reaction quickly wipes Brain out. You can see the fullscreen reaction by loading BraiLife, clearing all the screens, setting plane 4 to 1, and randomizing plane 2. The keystrokes are as follows. Note that you do not press Enter after answering the "Initialize planes" prompts called up by pressing I:

Rudy referrs to Anneal as "Vote" (with a twist of chaos is a tie-breaker):

[http://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/celdoc/rules.html#Vote](http://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/celdoc/rules.html#Vote)

>VOTE

>The JC Vote rule, a few generations after a random start. Vote is a one-bit rule where each cell calculates the NineSum of itself and its eight neighbors, and then determines its new state on the basis of the NineSum. We can regard this as EveryCell conducting a little election between 0 and 1 among the nine cells in its neighborhood. If either 0 or 1 wins by a clear majority of 6 votes or more out of the nine votes, then that is the state which EveryCell will take on. But if either 0 or 1 wins by a scant, sneaky majority of 5 votes out of the nine, then the election is overturned, and EveryCell takes on the color of the "losing" state. Vote is discussed in more detail in the Theory chapter.

>The version of Vote shown here uses bit #1 as an "echo" of bit #0. This means that cells will take on different colors if they have changed state in the last generation. You can keep rerandomizing Vote by pressing R. It's a bit startling to see what organic-looking shapes can arise from such a simple rule acting on a rectangular grid.

</comment><comment><USER19> How much computational resources does this take? Is it ever growing, or can you cut it off outside a certain window without it affecting the visible part?

<comment><USER6> I can answer the second bit: no. However, cutting it off at a certain point won't affect anything, so long as you keep shrinking the cut off bit by one each turn. Eventually you'll have nothing generating any more, but everything you do generate will be accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Pretty random. I wonder if there is a way of thinking about this perceived complexity with a higher dimension similar to the way imaginary numbers are used.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazing. Looks like a warzone.</comment>


Linux touchpad like a MacBook Pro, May 2020 update - <AUTHOR> https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-macbook-pro-may-2020-update/ <comment><USER2> For those only reading comments, the author plans to hire a developer to address touchpad issues. You can help:

\- Take the Linux Touchpad Experience Poll: [https://www.gitclear.com/polls/linux_touchpad_experience](https://www.gitclear.com/polls/linux_touchpad_experience)

\- Become a sponsor on GitHub: [https://github.com/gitclear/libinput](https://github.com/gitclear/libinput) (GitHub matches every donation up to $5k, so your $5 can become $10)

\- Get paid $50/hr to work on libinput: [http://archive.is/FGHTT](http://archive.is/FGHTT) (link to archive of the original article ty danso)

<comment><USER3> Touch on linux has always been a pet peeve of mine (I was the first to publish two-finger right click patches[1] for the synaptics driver [http://wikigentoo.ksiezyc.pl/Synaptics_Touchpad.htm](http://wikigentoo.ksiezyc.pl/Synaptics_Touchpad.htm) ). I've long thought about fixing the current drivers, but I can't prioritize the time myself. I'll donate some cash.

Luckily, this should be relatively simple. Anyone who wants to make this should be looking at the Chromium touchpad code (runs linux, and my Pixelbook touchpad is as good as a macbook touchpad. For example, the touch input filter: [https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/touch_...](https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/touch_noise_filter/+/refs/heads/master) )

I think you'd get most of the quality with a kalman filter (A really cool filter that takes unstable input, and corrects it based on probabilities to give very high quality output).

[1] [http://douglas.mayle.org/files/synaptics-two-finger- click.di...](http://douglas.mayle.org/files/synaptics-two-finger-click.diff)

<comment><USER4> On that note - does the synaptics driver not have all of the functionality the author wants - as long as he is willing to do the tweaking to the synclient settings?

(I have not used my touchpad since getting used to a trackpoint, but I vaguely remember using the synaptics driver to get it usable)

Edit: NVM, I read another one of his blog posts where he addresses synaptics and mtrack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently tried switching from an MBP to an X1 Carbon, in a yet another attempt to switch to Linux as my daily driver. I ended up being thwarted, to my surprise, by the touchpad support.

The big problem I encountered was poor palm detection: I learned through this process that I have a tendency to use the touchpad with my right hand, while my left hand is still in typing position. This means that the edge of my left palm rests along the upper-left corner of the touchpad. This would result in the driver sometimes detecting two touchpoints instead of one, and I would end up scrolling when I meant to move the pointer.

The result of this was pretty amazing to me: after a few hours of use I found that my wrists, shoulders, and neck hurt because I was subconsciously trying to adjust my hands to avoid this. After a couple of days trying different drivers and tweaking config files, I ended up conceding that it just wasn't there yet.

It's too bad: I have lots of imposter syndrome about understanding my OS and using Linux seems like a great cure. But after literally decades of trying, what I've noticed is that hardware (or at least, my acclimating to new hardware) always advances enough past Linux's capabilities that the switch is difficult. In the past, it was about getting sound cards or WiFi working, and nowadays it's about things like touchpads and high-resolution displays.

<comment><USER6> I find that, with my Thinkpads that I don't use the touchpad at all. I find the trackpoint a much more convenient pointing device as it keeps my hands a home row.

<comment><USER7> Touchpad scrolling is nice. Yes keyboard shortcuts exist for scroll, but I for whatever reason vastly prefer touch-based.

<comment><USER6> On Thinkpads, there's also the thumb buttons below the space bar that act as mouse buttons. The middle one allows you to scroll with the trackpoint. It's very convenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Could someone ELI5, why it is so difficult to make it right? And I do not mean exclusively to Linux, because Windows has been horrible for years now too.

If the issue is hardware, then we'd blame OEMs.

If it's software, then we'd blame, say, Microsoft.

If it was a combination of these two, then we could say that Apple is the only one that controls both... if it wasn't for the Surface series which still has atrocious touchpad experience.

<comment><USER9> If I was being uncharitable I'd say that the problem is that companies beside Apple just don't _care_ about a good user experience. Maybe they could produce the same product if they thought it mattered. With almost all non-Apple laptops being flimsy, cheap-feeling plastic junk, stuffed full of ports and bezels, I feel like they're miles away from being at the stage where it makes sense to optimise the trackpad.

<comment><USER10> Like apple cares about a good keyboard?

<comment><USER11> They do care. Sure, they've made a few big mistakes, but they worked to correct them.

PC laptop manufacturers? With a few exceptions their keyboards are just garbage.

<comment><USER12> Lenovo probably does the best keyboards at this point. Their old 7-row keyboards were even better though.

<comment><USER11> I really don't care for their keyboards now. They used to be the _best_ out there, but now they're... just... mediocre.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Count me among those who agree there is a vast gulf. Another thing I've noticed recently is that on my X1 carbon (7th gen) there is a small but noticeably distance when I first start dragging a finger before the cursor moves that does not exist on a Mac trackpad with MacOS.

I also wonder what the experience is like using Linux on a Mac trackpad. Is it closer to the experience on MacOS or closer to the experience with Linux on commodity hardware? If the latter, maybe it makes sense to improve that first.

Maybe not though, if the synergy between hardware and software is the "secret sauce" that's missing then maybe optimizing the mac trackpad for Linux would be wasted effort.

<comment><USER14> Honestly, I don't think this is as difficult of a problem as we think. Has anybody tried scrolling in Windows UWP/Modern/RT apps with a precision touchpad? It's just as glorious. In fact, I've read many accounts of people who use pre-Chromium Edge just for the scrolling experience. Microsoft also ported this scrolling algorithm/profile to Chromium Edge, even if it's slightly less responsive (probably limited by win32)

If you don't like the scrolling in UWP it probably has more to do with it's acceleration graph than its capability. That, and macOS seem to just make their UI animations way smoother than anything I've seen on Windows and Linux. The Windows desktop switching and "expose" animation kills me every time it janks.

I don't know what's stopping Microsoft from porting this scrolling behavior to Win32, and to be fair it seem like they tried (scrolling in Explorer is noticeably different on a precision touchpad even though not as smooth) but probably they're held back by backward compatibility or that it's too much of an effort to make that pig fly.

<comment><USER15> I wouldn't conflate someone else doing something you like with difficulty.

<comment><USER14> well most of the posts here somewhat suggests this is a difficult problem that only Apple has the resources and desire to solve

<comment><USER15> Microsoft is not lacking in resources or motivation. It's still a hard problem regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Am I the only one who doesn't get this? Trackpads on Linux with various Thinkpads have always seemed fine. I've used trackpads on various Mac laptops (Pro and Air) and those have seemed fine also. To round things out, my experience with trackpads on Windows (Thinkpads and XPS) has been that they are fine.

Admittedly I have Linux set up for keyboard use with a TWM, but the trackpads, when I used them, have been fine.

<comment><USER17> I have no idea about linux, scrolling on windows is pretty much hardcoded to use a early 2000s scroll wheel mouse.

Because of their low resolution, windows scrolling is done one text line at a time, while macs scroll a pixel at a time.

This sounds superficial, but it is really not. With the higher resolution, you get a very direct connection with the scrolled content. Without this almost tactile feedback, inertial scrolling doesn't work at all.

And since scrolling is like 90 % of what I use a trackpad for, I will not even consider using windows with a trackpad until they have fixed it.

<comment><USER18> Is this why touchpad scrolling is so crazy in LibreOffice? On windows, mouse and scrollwheel works fine in Libre. Using touchpad it shoots the document to the moon each time scrolling gestures are applied.

There is not a similar effect in other applications.

<comment><USER17> Probably. Google maps used to have huge problems with zooming (since it was meant to use the scroll wheel), as did a lot of games that relied on the mouse wheel to cycle through an inventory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ugh: my web host is weak. If the page won't load for you, you can see its native version at [https://public.amplenote.com/LiTtaTWY3GfzzhF26Exu8tXx](https://public.amplenote.com/LiTtaTWY3GfzzhF26Exu8tXx)

<comment><USER19> Just wanted to apologize for prematurely sharing this last week. Was testing the waters of linux again and happened to get curious about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Someone made an archive.is snapshot that's accessible while the live site is down: [http://archive.is/FGHTT](http://archive.is/FGHTT)

</comment><comment><USER21> There are three things at play here that give Apple/OS X their unique advantage:

1) Size. I have _huge_ hands. A 2015 MBP has a trackpad whose size I have yet to see on any Windows/Linux laptop. I'm too clumsy for IBM's trackpad and the tiny "touchpads" on usual laptops should rather be called "touchpadlets" because they are so small that most I have experienced have had my fingers awkwardly collide. I won't go back on non-Apple hardware until there is a decently wide offering of decently sized touchpads.

2) Drivers. Back with my last Windows laptop it was some Elantech touchpad with Elantech drivers. Installing some random drivers from some random other laptop on a forum hint somewhere in the 30th Google result area suddenly gave me a whole lot of gestures. Just... WTF? Why is this not a core OS component in Windows and has it been possible over the last five years (since I switched) to finally use gestures OOTB in Linux?!

3) OS primitives / integration. Windows and (IIRC, please correct me!) Linux operate on the concept of "steps" with absolute scroll delta values, while OS X (and iOS/Android) operates on ... I don't even know what, it simply feels utterly smooth instead of janky. But I also assume that this is the most difficult to fix :(

</comment><comment><USER22> Am I the only one who prefers the red nubs on on Thinkpads? I find it very hard to use any touchpads. When I used a mac, I would carry around a mouse. I wish thinkpads would get rid of the touchpad. I'm perfectly happy with just using the nub.

<comment><USER23> Are there any laptops with two nubs: one for the mouse, one for scrolling? Then one could also put the keyboard in a more comfortable position right where the touchpad is now.

<comment><USER24> With the Thinkpads there's just the one nub, but the middle mouse button is easily reachable for scrolling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's funny that people want this so badly that the site has been down for me the whole time it's been on the front page yet it's still getting upvoted to the top.

<comment><USER26> Same here. Linux trackpad as good as Mac is tech porn.

<comment><USER27> Hahaha, that's so true. I've heard of multiple people placing bounties on making this a reality

<comment><USER28> It seems to me, at least as someone on the outside of this debate looking in, that people are having some trouble defining what "better" actually means. I think if the difference could be quantified, it could be addressed.

<comment><USER25> Ken Kocienda talks about this in his book Creative Selection. While working at Apple, they identified processes that needed to optimized with heuristics as opposed to algorithms. Some things need to be tweaked by a person and cannot be solved by applying an algorithm. He posits that this is the reason Apple has traditionally had such a great user experience with the products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have these settings in my .xinitrc on my ThinkPad T420, but never had to do anything terribly arcane to get it to work as I expect it to.

        exec xinput set-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad' 'Synaptics Tap Action' 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 &
        exec xinput set-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad' 'Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling' 1 1 &
        exec xinput set-prop 'TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint' 'libinput Accel Speed' -.3 &
        exec xinput set-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad' 'Synaptics Coasting Speed' 0 0 &

Sure, it could be more fine-tuned, but it works just fine that way.

On other laptops I've had to reduce the "finger size" (I can't remember the name of the setting), so I could use it even with a light touch, but that's the biggest problem I've had with it so far.

<comment><USER30> Are you actually using exec before each xinput command? If so, only your first xinput command actually gets run. exec replaces the currently running process, effectively making it run-this-and-exit.

<comment><USER31> Looks like & saves the day by invoking the command in a subshell and then in that subshell exec replaces the subshell with the xinput command. E.g. you can test it by

        $ cat ./a.sh
        #!/bin/sh
        exec /bin/echo foo &
        exec /bin/echo bar &

which outputs foo and bar. Seems like a special case, just like exec without a command for file descriptor redirection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> With [https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1117](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1117) scrolling in GTK apps (including Firefox) is really smooth

<comment><USER33> Is this something one needs to enable?

And from what version of Gnome/GTK is this available?

<comment><USER32> It's a patch that's not merged yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have this to ask about this project:

1) how exactly are you planning to cooperate with upstream (meaning Peter Hutterer, meaning Red Hat)? Suppose someone does the work, then what? libinput has issues open for years, including issues that have patches, how are you going to make sure yours is not going to get buried?

2) if there existed a programmer both capable and willing to pull this off, wouldn't it make sense for them to set up sponsorship themselves and cut the middleman out?

</comment><comment><USER35> Duplicate of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23039515](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23039515), although the author apparently changed the title of the blog post.

<comment><USER36> It was posted there while it was a draft on his blog, before it was actually finished. The links which were the purpose of the post hadn't been setup yet.

> I presume nobody is randomly visiting pages on bill.harding.blog, so you > aren't seeing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Part of the Apple touch story is this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks)

</comment><comment><USER38> For whatever it's worth/if it helps with this journey - the trackpad on the surface book/surface laptops is the closest I've seen to the mac trackpads. I'm assuming it's some combination of hardware and software. From stricly a tracking/responsiveness perspective, I would say they're dead even. I like the multi-finger click options better on MacOS - I'm sure it would be trivial for Microsoft to implement if they wanted to.

</comment><comment><USER39> A few years ago I was dual booting Arch on a 2013 Macbook Pro and couldn't for the life of me get the trackpad working nicely as it would on MacOS. Up until then I'd made the assumption that Apple trackpads felt the way they did mostly due to hardware. When writing code I'm using vim and am keyboard focused but I've become really used to browsing websites and docs using the trackpad on MacOS.

Edit: some formatting

</comment><comment><USER40> with my work enforced MBP most of the time i want to right click i end up clicking and triggering an unintended consequence just because i have my two fingers too close. On linux i never had this happen even on the cheapest touchpads.

<comment><USER41> That surprises me, I just tried very hard to smash my fingers together to make it think I was using one finger (I was using the Magic Trackpad, but I also tried on my 16" MBP) and it always registered a right click.

I actually can't think of the last time I misclicked a right click on Mac.

<comment><USER40> 2015 15" if that makes any difference, but last models (2012 i think) had the same problem.

Maybe they optimize to the wrong finger size to the point you can't even if you try, and i trigger the bug too often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Am I just the minority who finds touchpad on my GNU/Linux system reasonably functional and bug-free?

With a tool like Fusumu ([https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma](https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma)) I am using three finger and four finger gestures just fine!

<comment><USER13> The experience is not terrible, it's just that when compared side by side it's clearly inferior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Can we also talk about pinch and zoom (e.g. image viewer or browser)? It seems that gesture is totally artificial for desktop Linux (we have it on Android though) and there are not even API interfaces existing for that trackpad gesture.

Hoping all Linux input libraries will get a lot more attention and funding in the future :)

</comment><comment><USER44> No way this is just a matter of paying a freelancer $50K. If that was it then System76 would have done it and someone would be rich from selling a closed source driver already.

And software doesn't even touch the problem that most of what's wrong with non-Mac touchpads is the universally lousy hardware.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is a solved problem, isn't it? On my Dell M6800 with Ubuntu 16.04, the touchpad experience is very poor, I avoid using it. On my (Linux based after all) Chromebook Pixel (anno 2013) it's fine, never been tempted to connect a mouse.

Perhaps I should clarify: the difference is also a difference in usage: on the Chromebook I use the trackpad almost exclusively to select the current window or scroll its content, rarely set the cursor or highlight some text to be copied (the latter is already more challenging than with a mouse, I'd say). I haven't attempted to use a CAD program using the touch pad yet. So the touchpad works mostly fine for what a Chromebook is useful for, it's no replacement for a mouse on a workstation.

</comment><comment><USER46> Hardware-wise, I'm extremely satisfied with Blade Stealth late 2019 one. However, (on popOS) there's a slight issue with palm rejection. I occasionally activate it with my palm. Is there a way to make rejection more aggressive?

</comment><comment><USER47> I have a pretty decent trackpad experience on linux. grated it has been a little glitchy but not as much anymore..

in any case I blame propietary vendors for preventing better open source support.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> If anyone is curious to see what people think about Linux touchpads currently, here are some of the preliminary results with 9000 responses counted thus far:

[https://public.amplenote.com/HbcoZf/touchpad-results- prelim](https://public.amplenote.com/HbcoZf/touchpad-results-prelim)

Average satisfaction looks to be around 2 of 5. People are excited about multi-touch, especially the double finger right click.

</comment><comment><USER48> A few comments here have mentioned that MacBook touchpad development is tied to iPhone touchscreen R&D. This might be stating the obvious, but could a similar effort be made by leveraging Android touchscreen R&D and code for Linux? [1]

[1] [https://source.android.com/devices/input/touch- devices](https://source.android.com/devices/input/touch-devices)

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm just curious what exactly the deficiency is on touchpads with Linux? I have a fairly commodity Acer laptop (Swift 3 w/ Ryzen APU), and the touchpad is accurate, sensitive (no noticeable lag at all), two finger scrolling works, tap to click works with one, two and three fingers, etc... I haven't changed any settings except sensitivity and whatnot in the standard Ubuntu settings GUI.

<comment><USER39> Whatever you think of Apple, for some reason there is a huge gap in their trackpads and basically everything else I've tried. There is the way the physical trackpad feels and doesn't "stick" as well as the responsiveness and accuracy of the drivers.

<comment><USER49> That's not a real answer though. What objective difference is there? From some replies it might be software in the OS that changes the acceleration of the cursor, so that'd be an answer if true.

Personally, I hate the feel of MacOS. The cursor seems unnaturally slow and when you crank up the speed has some weird behaviour.

<comment><USER39> Appologies the answer was a bit flakey and yes you have a point it might be that I'm just very used to it and to me it feels better, as to you it feels worse. I mentioned in another comment on here that I wasn't able to get anything close to the feeling of the MacOS trackpad from using the same hardware on linux. I suppose the person who wrote this article feels the same way that I do about it.

<comment><USER49> Fair enough. I guess I don't get a lot of the complaints when people talk about 'feel' because I've never like the MacOS 'feel'. Linux touchpads are plenty accurate and precise IMO so I've never understood why people say they're 'bad'. There doesn't seem to be any actual deficiency, just a lack of features that Apple bakes into the OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Since the site is slow, here's a direct link to the Github page to Sponsor the project.

They want to hire a developer to fix the issues identified by the survey.

[https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear](https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear)

</comment><comment><USER51> Given how much developer-contempt there is for the new touchpads, its amazing to me that the opposite of this has not been tried by hardware hackers already (as far as I know).

That is, hacking in an old tactile (non-touchpad) keyboard into the top section of the latest Macbook Pros.

</comment><comment><USER34> Some research done on the subject: [https://pavelfatin.com/scrolling-with- pleasure/](https://pavelfatin.com/scrolling-with-pleasure/)

</comment><comment><USER52> On a related note, what are some decent external touch pads? I would love to have one to give my mouse hand a break sometimes while at my desktop.

<comment><USER41> Personally I use the Apple Magic Trackpad. It's just a giant slab on my desk and it's great (Don't even use a mouse). But I use that with a Mac, so it depends on what you are using.

<comment><USER52> I have a Mac, but I also have a Linux machine. I go back and forth depending.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I disable my Touchpad, not because of any shortcomings it might have, but because one of the selling points of a ThinkPad for me is the Trackpoint. I can operate it fine without moving my hands from the home typing position with my thumb's on the mouse buttons.

<comment><USER54> I just physically unplug the touchpad and fingerprint reader on mine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> The comments on this post make me think of that scene in American Psycho with the business cards.</comment>


Understanding GCC Builtins to Develop Better Tools [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.manuelrigger.at/papers/GCCBuiltins-ESECFSE19-preprint.pdf <comment><USER2> Not a builtin, but a GCC feature which has improved my C code hugely is __attribute__((cleanup)). It is used to specify a destructor for a local variable; when the variable goes out of scope the function is called with a pointer to the variable as an argument.

Example:

      {
        __attribute__((cleanup(foo)))
          int a;
          …
         /* foo(&a) will implicitly be called here */
      }

<comment><USER3> Didn't know this existed. The closest thing I can think of similar to this is `defer` of Golang.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It'd be great if the GCC devs adopted a process for introducing new builtins, that required code review, unit testing, and justification of use-cases.

Some of the GCC builtin wrappers are outstanding, e.g. __builtin_memcpy on two-power sizes, since it can do things that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

Some GCC builtins, e.g. __builtin_va_start, can take away flexibility since it locks into the core codebase nontrivial code generation that's suboptimal in certain cases.

Most of the builtins are neutral, e.g. atomics api, which provides 42 different ways to say asm("mov"), 13 different ways to say asm("xchg"), and twenty different ways to asm("lock cmpxchg").

Other GCC builtins, e.g. __builtin_ia32_rdrand32_step, don't even have the multi-architecture benefit, only seem to exist because some folks disagree with the asm() keyword, and is naturally problematic from a security standpoint when the GCC devs get it wrong.

What's great about builtins like asm() is it's one simple general-purpose abstraction that puts the power of so many compiler internals into the hands of the user at once, rather than being another narrowly-focused case-by-case feature you need to beseech the core dev team to get.

<comment><USER5> The main problem with assembly, afaik, is that gcc doesn't know how to optimize even very simple assembly.

<comment><USER6> GCC treats inline assembly as an opaque blob of text It knows nothing about, plus some register constraints it knows something about. It will "optimise" assembly if you've passed the right registers as input/output, and haven't marked it volatile and memory clobbering. Simple things like eliminating it if it is dead code, but this probably isn't the optimisation you were looking for!

Depending on who you ask, this is a feature, not a defect. Inline assembly is your last line of defence against a compiler which thinks it knows better than you.

Clang/llvm go a step further and do parse and optimize your inline assembly; that makes me uncomfortable, but I've always subscribed to the "don't touch user asm" mindset for compiler development.

Your main benefit of builtins over assembly is that no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get the suggested replacement given by the parent for __atomic_compare_exchange to assemble on my arm64 server!

<comment><USER4> I've never coded directly for ARM, but if it's anything like x86, then this example might help you (on GCC6+):

char DidIt; asm("lock cmpxchg" : "=@ccz"(DidIt), "+m"(IfThing), "+a"(IsEqualToMe) : "r"(ReplaceItWithMe) : "cc");

<comment><USER6> Thank you for assuming the best from me, and providing a genuine attempt at help in response to my much more bad-faith remark.

Two things complicate the AArch64 (Arm64) story for atomic builtins.

One is Arm's weak memory model. This permits different, more efficient, implementations of compare exchange depending on which of the C++ ordering guarantees you need and ask for. A compiler will generate different code for the sequential consistent model than it will for acquire/release.

The other is that there are two ways to provide atomics on Arm, and which you have access to depends on the architecture revision implemented by your particular Arm hardware. If you have Armv8.1-A atomic operations available to you, you'll use a similar interface to x86; a single instruction which looks like a cmpxchg. If you don't have the atomic extension, you'll instead be using a load-lock/store-conditional loop of ldrex/strex for all of your atomic operations.

Getting this exactly right is tricky, so where possible I'd encourage using the atomic builtins (or, of course, your language's portable API, over assembly).

The biggest benefit is that if in future architecture technology moves forward again, the GCC and language built ins will let you move with it, while assembly leaves you relearning occasionally.

<comment><USER4> I think it's awesome that GCC provides builtins that help ARM devs generate the best atomic code possible, for ARM. As someone who only cares about her coding running natively on x86, I would obviously never use C/C++11 atomics, since it's kind of regressive for a high-level language to specify 42 different ways to say "MOV". How would I even know my code works? The way I see it, the "portability" here only flows in one direction: helping ARM/MIPS/etc. folks move to x86. The only thing I don't get, is why it's part of the language standard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It surprises me more of these haven't become standardised features. __builtin_expect is very common (but as a compiler hint I somewhat understand its absence), __builtin_clz is arguably a missing feature.

<comment><USER4> I suspect (but haven't verified) that modern compilers are actually implementing __builtin_expect() as a no-op. Much better alternatives exist today, e.g. GCC 8+ __cold__ and profile guided optimizations, which don't have a negative impact on code readability.</comment></comment>


Digg Raises $28 Million in Series C Funding - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/09/24/digg-raises-28-million-in-series-c-funding/ <comment><USER2> I wonder how accurate that page view count is. Seems extremely low given the number of visitors they have. Just 150 million page views cannot generate that much ad revenue. Maybe $100k-$200k/mo max even with a sweet heart deal from MS?

Seems kind of sad that they're digging (sigh) such a big hole. If they had kept things light originally they could have sold for $80 million and walked away with more themselves with much less risk of total failure.

Hiring a bunch of people, fancy office, tons of servers. Totally unnecessary. The site could be run with very few resources if they had made that a goal.

<comment><USER3> Digg is also valuable for the page views it creates on other sites as well.

<comment><USER4> True, but selling that as a service would negatively affect their image.

<comment><USER5> Digg has a positive image?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Digg has been around for a while and it seems a little odd that they would still need such a cash injection if they were to be self-sustaining at any point in the future. Are they hiring a lot of new people and moving into new areas?

If they're using this money to cover operating costs for another finite period of time, it points to a failure of their business model since they aren't able to sustain their costs based on their revenue.

Digg has a wide reach, but they don't have great engagement of their users. Going off compete.com's data: Digg users hit 4-5 pages per visit and visit the site less than three times per month. So, their monthly uniques are high at 20-25M, but their total visits are low at 70M.

Digg is a decently impressive service, but community is hard. Google deals with hard issues, but nothing is harder to figure out than people.

<comment><USER7> From the article, it looks like Digg is plateauing. Consequently, they probably want to expand and are looking for cash infusion.

Or more cynically, management is looking for some way to monetize their current shares without an IPO or buyout in the near future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Microsoft already has financial ties to Digg. The software maker sells online ads for Digg under a three-year deal that expires in 2010."

So Digg is controlled by microsoft? No wonder all the xbox love and zero wii or psp news.

Talk about fair and balanced!

<comment><USER9> I think it's more a matter of the crowds attracted to Digg. The 360 is the "mainstream gamer" console, whereas Wii appeals to a wider audience and PS3 has a more limited fanbase. The sorts of people on Digg fall close to the 360 base.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The plans seem reasonable, but I hope they're profitable by now. I'm assuming this was a case of cash flow from operations not being able to finance their aggressive expansion plans.

</comment><comment><USER11> Entire Digg revenue model == advertising?

<comment><USER12> Digg does quite well on "sponsorship" type advertising. I.e. they add a new feature, or a labs thing, and get Cisco or Intel or someone to sponsor it.

<comment><USER4> But how long can they sustain that for?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone know what the valuation was?

<comment><USER12> My guess (and I'm a shareholder) -- down round, more opportunities for Kevin and Jay to extract value (personal service contracts, deals tied to the two spinoff companies, etc). Every employee and ex-employee loses.

The two of them have done a great job, at every turn, of hiding financial information from the minority shareholders. Meaning me most of all. The fact that it's a guess proves my point. I'm still fighting for 2006 financials.

<comment><USER12> My comment got picked up by valleywag. Just to make it clear, I have the exact same class of shares as Kevin, and no mention of cashing out has been mentioned to me. If there hasn't been "cashing out" I'm fine with that. If there has been, I at the very least should know the details. My issue isn't dilution but liquidity preferences.

<comment><USER14> You should make clear why you think that's true, since it isn't in just about every situation I've ever been involved with.

You aren't on the board and you aren't a major shareholder.

Your shareholder agreement or employee agreement probably state that you agree to vote with the majority in all votes which is another way of saying you don't get to vote (or gain access to the financials).

<comment><USER12> The second half of your second paragraph and the entirety of your last paragraph aren't correct. Or weren't until I left the company.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


No new Covid cases from Lake of the Ozarks crowds, Missouri health director says - <AUTHOR> https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/state-and-regional/no-new-covid-19-cases-from-lake-of-the-ozarks-crowds-missouri-health-director-says/article_6f36ad32-d125-5382-b78f-74bd0f6510ac.html <comment><USER2> Very good news - a risky "experiment" in the wild but a useful data point to help safely reopen.

<comment><USER3> I'd like to know the risk posed by going into water where potentially infected people have been, more specifically pools. I suppose chlorine minimizes that but on the other hand wet masks don't work ...

<comment><USER4> Is this a serious question? You're wondering what the risk is from a sneeze in a body of water the size of a lake or swimming pool?

<comment><USER5> It's a fair question. eg, LSD dosage is in micrograms.

What I've recently heard is that sunlight and chlorine are very effective disinfectants. And that transmission is actually difficult vs eg measles. Someone can't just sneeze on you and you get it, typically. Close quarters for a longer period of time (15 min was the number I heard, don't know how that was evaluated) is required.

This does make sense if you think about known high transmission routes -- high density, extended contact, indoor situations.

So pools themselves are probably safe, including off-pool activity like the chair, the bar (to get a drink and leave), the bathroom, etc.

It's just what I heard from various sources. I don't have any citations to back it up. Best to do your own research. I only responded because I found your reply overly dismissive.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Climate models miss most of the coarse dust in the atmosphere - <AUTHOR> https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/15/eaaz9507 <comment><USER2> The entire premise of the conclusion is that larger dust particles absorb light and warm the atmosphere, and yet the cited paper [16] I believe, does not appear to reach that conclusion at all. If anything, the contribution to cloud formation may offset the absorbed energy.

Models are little more than extrapolations made from assumptions, but I am having a hard time understanding the basis for the assumptions made here.

<comment><USER3> _> The entire premise of the conclusion is that larger dust particles absorb light and warm the atmosphere_

Which is a questionable premise given that we already know large volcanic eruptions cool the planet (the latest was Mt. Pintanubo in 1992). And how do they do that? By putting lots of coarse dust into the atmosphere.

<comment><USER4> That's part of the story. From Pinatubo, there is believed to also be a warming effect due to the stratospheric SO2 absorbing heat from below (related to the claims of the article), and in a secondary effect, potentially changing atmospheric circulation.

See point 6 in [https://eos.org/articles/pinatubo-25-years-later-eight- ways-...](https://eos.org/articles/pinatubo-25-years-later-eight-ways-the- eruption-broke-ground)

As with a lot of Earth science: it's complicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No surprise here. Climate models do a job on the details that matter most. They might improve as suggested in this paper.

<comment><USER6> Given that they are modeling a chaotic system it is extremely important that they get even the tiniest details correct, or they are no better than a random guess.

<comment><USER7> Climate is much less chaotic than weather, as it is about long-term and long- range averages; the quality of climate models can be judged by feeding them historic inputs (such as the amount of anthropogenic greenhouse emissions) and comparing their outputs for the years until 2020 with the actual record. Even simple climate models are substantially better than random guesses.</comment></comment></comment>


The Electoral College's Racist Origins - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/electoral-college-racist-origins/601918/ <comment><USER2> Blacks could not vote at all when the electorial college was established.</comment>


Shaking up the Market: We made our topo iPhone app free today - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaiagps.com/news/article/Offline%20Topo%20Maps%20is%20now%20free

<comment><USER2> I've seen this strategy before for iPhone apps, and I'm still not sure I completely understand it - for instance, RunKeeper Pro was free for the month of January. In your case, is it to push sales of the Gaia GPS?

Thanks in advance for any info you might want to share.

<comment><AUTHOR> The intent is, in the end, to increase sales of our paid app(s). We also do have a Gaia GPS Lite app, but we wanted to have a completely free, non-ad- supported, non-lite restricted app that lots of other companies are actually charging for.

There are many paid analogs to Offline Topo Maps.

<comment><USER2> That makes sense. I'm watching the iPhone app market, and just wondering how developers are determining their pricing strategies.</comment></comment></comment>


A Way to Brew Morphine Raises Concerns Over Regulation - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/health/a-way-to-brew-morphine-raises-concerns-over-regulation.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Dr Oye wants us to seriously entertain the idea that if we simply regulate drug production then we would be safe from drug cartels? Regulation is not a magic cure for basic human behavior. If people want drugs, they will get them, and there will be others to make it. Any time you make a law restricting the production of drugs, you are simply removing competition for those that don't follow the law. Drug cartels would be stopped in their tracks if the US ended the war on drugs.

I also find it curious that he comments on big pharma already having access to abundant supplies of opium, but it would be disaster if local producers could produce morphine or heroine. God forbid anyone else undercuts them with a cheaper-to-produce product.

Any talk of how to better fight the drug war is just rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Drug use is a medical and social issue, not a criminal one. The attitude of drugs as a criminal issue is also one of the reasons the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. I am frankly tired of being fed the notion that the existence of drugs is a constant danger to society, and the only way out is to fight a never-ending war.

<comment><USER3> I was surprised to learn the prevalence of illegal substances in prisons [0]. If authorities are unable to curtail access to drugs in one of the most controlled environments in the country, what hope do they have of removing them from the streets? Seems like a lost cause.

[0] [http://nakedlaw.avvo.com/crime/how-common-are-drugs-in- priso...](http://nakedlaw.avvo.com/crime/how-common-are-drugs-in-prison.html)

<comment><USER4> I believe you fundamentally misunderstand.

In order to believe that the authorities really think they can remove drugs, you'd have to assume they continue to hold this belief in spite of 44 years of post war-on-drugs evidence. I mean, I think cops are authoritarian idiots, but they're not _that_ stupid. As Bill Hicks said, we had a war on drugs, and the people on drugs won. They're more pure and often cheaper than ever.

Rather, the war on drugs is a way to systematically deprive people of civil rights and transfer control to police. Not to mention all the private prison vendors who are making bank. And the military industrial complex selling weapons to the police. Seen from this angle, actions make sense.

After all, we've never really had a war on drugs -- we've had a war on some classes (black, poor) of people who use some (crack bad! coke ok! heroin bad! adderall good! xanax good!) drugs.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's hopeless, it's just that focusing on removing the supply without solving the root cause (namely that there is major, lucrative demand) is a waste of resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Scary stuff. Not because of the reasons cited in the article -- but because I hadn't previously realized that drug cartels have obvious incentives to invest in synthetic biology expertise.

That sort of capability can later be directed to applications such as massive destruction, or even extortion of nation states. Not to mention experimental organisms wrecking ecosystems. These dangers would (and have) made wonderful movie plots and I'd prefer them to stay on the big screen.

One obstacle in the past has been that the transition from "make lots drugs and robust transportation/communication networks" to "make weapons of mass destruction" has been so long as to be irrelevant. There was no plausible organizational evolutionary path from one to the other. But perhaps that has changed. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of applications of synthetic biology to drug creation.

 _Imagine what the word would look like if you could make nuclear bombs using the same tech used to produce heroine._

Would drug cartels have a thriving side business selling them to ____? Would any nation state be able to control the cartels at all?

<comment><USER7> Killing your customers is bad business. Cartels operate sound businesses. So we have nothing to fear from them.

Now this tech in some crazy hands is dangerous.

But with the power amplification in modern times -

Two generations ago - a person could create a small business or small terrorist act alone.

10 years ago it was possible to have a thousand person billion dollar company and 9/11 ...

Now we have a billion dollar company with single digit numbers of employees and we will have the first billion dollar one man company in the next 5-10 years.

I leave the rest to your imagination. But you should not be worried from terrorist organisations - disgruntled lone wolves will be the real danger.

<comment><USER8> >Killing your customers is bad business. Cartels operate sound businesses. So we have nothing to fear from them.

I highly suggest you look up the Zetas cartel and their methodologies.

<comment><USER9> I'd argue that they are killing their competitors not customers

<comment><USER10> Sure but the original argument was that the drug cartels have a tremendous potential for violence. That seems established and the "customer" part's a red haring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The track record of the illegal drug industry in organic chemistry is not impressive. They can't make consistently good LSD or MDMA. Both of those are difficult to do right and require frequent analysis with expensive equipment to control the process. They can't even make methamphetamine without screwing up. There's a direct synthesis for cocaine. It's documented.[1] The drug cartels are still doing it the old fashioned way, growing coca. With most pharmaceuticals, the quality control costs more than the production.

So this is probably not a major problem.

[1] [https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/cocaine.tot...](https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/cocaine.total.synthesis.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Heroin should be legal for anyone to purchase aged 21 or over. Sell it off of liquor store shelves in clean, measured doses, with single-use needles. All sealed up with tamper-proof packaging.

Let the big pharmaceutical companies manufacture it. They can do it so cheap they'll drive the cartels out of business.

It's amazing that anyone could think that this could be a problem.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Links to the paper [1] and commentary [2] in Nature Chemical Biology:

[1] [http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc...](http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchembio.1816.html)

[2] [http://www.nature.com/news/drugs-regulate-home-brew- opiates-...](http://www.nature.com/news/drugs-regulate-home-brew- opiates-1.17563)

</comment><comment><USER13> Calling the FBI is the alternative to the top-down approach? Thank you Supervisory Special Agent for letting me know that as long as we call before a crime is committed, that makes the FBI a community level grassroots organization.

</comment><comment><USER14> Could you genetically modify yeast to produce LSD?

<comment><USER15> LSD was accidentally discovered while looking into variations of chemicals made by Ergot. Maybe it would be easier to modify yeast, maybe it would be easier to modify ergot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is the tip of a large iceberg. There is no reason all sorts of drugs can't be made in this way. Get a bit of that yeast and you can do it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's completely legal to grow opium poppies, it's just not legal to extract the sap, or to process it.

It's also a simpler way to get started producing morphine than to be doing cutting edge genetically engineering of bacteria to produce it as a byproduct of sugar digestion.

</comment><comment><USER18> Kuro5hin's trane claims that it has been legal to grow opium poppies in the US since the early seventies. You can use them for ornamentation, to eat the seeds and so on but not for use as a drug.

I haven't actually looked but expect there is wild opium growing in the high desert of california.

<comment><USER19> A very good childhood friend of mine has been growing small amounts papaver somniferum (opium poppies) in his back yard because it is much cheaper than prescription pain killers. He was injured in a car accident and has lived with debilitating pain most of his adult life.

<comment><USER20> I'm curious, has he avoided opium addiction or is it just that the effects of addiction are less bad than his pain?

<comment><USER19> We have always generally been pretty responsible drug users throughout our lives, and so he knows how to avoid addiction, or to minimize its affect on him. Opioids are easy to escalate in dose and frequency, and for some years I was prescribed oxycodone for my pain, but I did not abuse it, because I had his help in avoiding addiction. I think education is the best tool to avoid this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Short Afghanistan.</comment>


Arc O'Reilly Book - <AUTHOR> http://www.oreillymaker.com/link/7957/arc/ <comment><USER2> Should've gone with the Fish for the cover image - invokes the (left) parentheses ((((( ((( ((((( so much more clearly....

</comment><comment><USER3> upmodded for sheer geniuses

</comment><comment><USER4> Author: Smug Veanie

:)</comment>


Show HN: My Weekend Fun Project - Pure-CSS Emoticons - <AUTHOR> http://www.alfajango.com/blog/a-practical-application-for-pure-css-icons-emoticons/ <comment><AUTHOR> I just needed to unwind this weekend, so I developed a new jQuery plugin / stylesheet that creates emoticons on any webpage in pure CSS (using a bunch of CSS3 properties). The benefits of this approach are described in the post here.

On a side note, I emailed Faruk Ateş (who wrote this post entitled "Pure CSS Icons: Make The Madness Stop" [1]) to see what he thought, and he said it was a pretty solid implementation.

One of the things that Faruk (and skatey on IRC) brought up is that one of the age-old annoyances with inline emoticon replacement in bodies of text (prevalent in forums) is that they break the line-height of the text. I had to make the choice for this plugin to either keep the text the right size (and thus the emoticon a little larger than line-height), or make the actual text smaller so that the emoticon is exactly line-height. I chose the former, but upon further reflection, I'll probably change to the latter in the next release.

[1] [http://farukat.es/journal/2010/08/469-pure-css-icons-make- ma...](http://farukat.es/journal/2010/08/469-pure-css-icons-make-madness-stop)

EDIT: BTW, here is a direct link to the live demo: [http://www.alfajango.com/blog/jquery-css-emoticons- plugin/jq...](http://www.alfajango.com/blog/jquery-css-emoticons- plugin/jquery-css-emoticons-demo/)</comment>


Why Does Sweden Have So Many Startups? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/sweden-startups/541413/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> The most important quote:

 _" Sweden's impressive start-up record can also be attributed to some broader aspects of how the country is set up. Its social safety net, for instance, helps entrepreneurs feel safe to take risks. In Sweden, university is free, and students can get loans for living expenses, which allows anyone to pursue higher education. Health care is free too, and childcare is heavily subsidized. None of these benefits are contingent on having a job, which means people know that they can take entrepreneurial risks and still know many of their necessities will be covered.

"I think if you want to be an innovative country, you have to give people security so they dare to take risks," Mikael Damberg, Sweden's minister for enterprise and innovation, told me."_

The second case, which is not present in the article is that in Sweden, working in a small company is considered a risky proposition and a such small companies are offering higher salary than big companies. It means that they tend to attract the best people too. In most of the rest of Europe (DK, DE, FR from my own experience), if you want the engineer path with good money, you need to get hired by a big company.

<comment><USER3> Other Scandinavian countries are also doing quite well, way beyond what their size would suggest.

But also well beyond other countries with developed welfare systems, such as France. I think these discussions always miss one key factor: Language.

If you don't speak English quite well at an early age (already at 10-13 years old) you are much less likely to get into software development at an early age. If you don't get into software development at an early age, you are much less likely to do a software based startup when you are in your twenties. There is a thousand times as much documentation, conferences, tutorials, courses, online fora etc in English as in other languages and this is how new ideas in IT spread. Only months or years afterwards, it's translated to Spanish or Chinese, and only if it has caught on. Just about everything new in IT spreads through English, whether it's AI or web development or anything else.

The Scandinavian languages are not that different from English, the countries are small and consume a lot of music, movies, TV etc from the US/UK. Movies and TV have never been dubbed, except for toddlers. So for the last 50-60 years or more, Scandinavians have been quite good at English. Your average 70 year old Scandinavian speaks English better than your average 20 year old Italian. A drunkard on a bench in Scandinavia is likely to speak better English than most academics I've met in Southern or Eastern Europe.

We live in an era of software driven startups. It's easy to forget that it was not always like that. There were times when successful businesses were driven by mechanics (GM), electronics (Sony), chemistry (Kodak), trade or other factors. Now it's software, and whether your language, framework, or library of choice is C, C++, Python, Lisp, Java, PHP, JS, HTML, CSS, Tensorflow, React, or almost any other tech that the unicorns are built with, the new developments in that tech will initially have spread from English speakers to English speakers. The fact that the largest software companies in the last two decades have all been American then reinforces that trend.

<comment><USER4> >If you don't speak English quite well at an early age (already at 10-13 years old) you are much less likely to get into software development at an early age.

china and russia beg to differ?

<comment><USER3> There are many great Russian and Chinese developers but little Russian or Chinese software has spread outside those countries. Except viruses, maybe

<comment><USER5> vue.js

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's one. A good one :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think more important than the welfare system (potential entrepreneurs probably don't see welfare as their backup solution anyway) is that the quality of life depends so much less on income than in say the US, so people are not that worried about earning less for a few years.

You still get the same healthcare and education, the same access to sports (even golf!) and nature (very important for us), and since there is zero stigma associated with public transportation it doesn't matter if you can't afford a car.

<comment><USER7> I think that's true. But it's also that he Swedish concept of welfare has traditionally included the broader concept of "the welfare state". Meaning that welfare doesn't just apply to social security as such but the availability and quality of housing, education, care, transport and, as you say, even recreational activities.

It's not that sport organizations in Sweden are open to everyone out of the goodness of their hearts (though I think many people support it). It's because they are required to if they want to be registered as non-profits, receive government funding, rent subsidized facilities owned by the state etc.

<comment><USER6> Regarding sports there is nothing stopping anyone from starting an entirely profit driven club, like most gyms for example, as far as I know. I think it's mostly a matter of tradition. And the financial support you get for that type of broadly run organisation, not just sport. But that too speaks to the egalitarian traditions.

<comment><USER7> What's stopping them is of course that they can't compete with non-profits that are being subsidized by the state. (Which I don't disagree with). Sure, it is a tradition, but like many things it's enabled by the laws on the books.

For instance the school system isn't very egalitarian, at least not in Stockholm, these days (nor is the housing market for that matter). The school system is quite different compared to e.g. Finland. The laws changed and so did the quality of different school. "Grade inflation" is very common etc.

<comment><USER6> Ah, but they would be able to compete with the subsidised, volunteer run organisations if there was greater willingness to pay for a more professionally run club, with better facilities etc. This does happen for some sports, such as gyms where there is a market for upscale clubs, but not for football for example, to my knowledge. People would just feel weird about putting their children in a luxury football club.

Every year when it's time to sign the children up for ballet, football, gymnastics etc it's the same thing, extremely high pressure on all clubs, places fill up within hours. I'm sure that if it wasn't for Jante, there would be a huge market for more expensive clubs with shorter queues.

In what sense is the school system not egalitarian? It's not very good anymore, true, but that has other causes. I mean all schools cost the same, i.e. nothing, and anyone can apply to any school. It's even forbidden to charge for school lunch, or even ask children to bring fruits because "some people may not be able to afford that" (though this is going way too far in my opinion).

I agree that housing has changed, and prices are getting pretty crazy in places. But regardless of the price differentials between areas, which still are far from as extreme as in the US, my point is more that it doesn't matter as much which area you live in, your quality of life will be pretty similar. Building standards are extremely high in Sweden so even the cheapest places are pretty robustly made at least. And the houses on the most expensive addresses are still relatively modest, there are no doormen or valets or crazy things like that. The differences are more subtle, and there is less showing off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many startups and many 'small businesses' are different things; what about value of startup exits in Sweden, vs its nominal GDP? How does that figure compare to the U.S.?

Sweden may look tiny, but in fact it has GDP 1/36th of U.S., did it also generate ~$100B of startup worth in 20 years (Silicon Valley made about $2.5-3T in this time and quite a bit - maybe up to $1T - elsewhere in the U.S.)?

</comment><comment><USER9> Nobody's really mentioning it, but taxes are a huge consideration.

For US companies, acquiring an overseas company provides an easy way to repatriate cash without having to pay the higher levels of tax on it. Note that a number of successful Swedish startups were acquired either by US companies or by international conglomerates with a strong US presence. That's not a coincidence.

<comment><USER10> This is a good point. Especially with Sweden being pretty easy on the taxes on acquisitions, compared to other Nordic countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sounds like the whole discussion is kind of blurred by the definition of what a start-up is.

IMO the article misrepresents the cited study[1], which doesn't talk about "start-ups". It could just as well be represented as: in weak state countries lacking a stable operating environment for large businesses, companies are short-lived and the only option for many people is self-employment. Also, the size of state sector vs private sector just tells you how the activity in the country is organised: you can have public healthcare or private healthcare, and of course the private healthcare means more private sector activity. It doesn't mean that the private sector healthcare is a better outcome.

[1] PDF link: [https://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2011conference/program/retrieve.p...](https://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2011conference/program/retrieve.php?pdfid=347)

</comment><comment><USER12> Sweden have good working morale and extremely high unemployment rates among young people that often have high education. If you start a tech company you will be flooded with applications and you can cherry pick talents. The entry wage for developers are around $25,000 year, yes year, not monthly!

<comment><USER13> I have no idea why you think that. I can assure you that no developer in Sweden gets paid that little.

<comment><USER14> As a former tech recruiter in Stockholm I can assure you that they do. These devs, however, usually do not have a degree from university/college, and are either juniors and/or self taught. If you look at the university/college educated devs the story is different, but not by that much.

Entry level median salary for devs without higher education from the year I left recruitment (2013/2014) was 28000 USD per year. Add 3000 USD for entry level devs with university/college education.

YMMV but I don't think things have changed that much since then.

<comment><USER13> I would still be very surprised if any developer in Stockholm is paid $25k a year as OP says. That's less than 17k SEK a month. I also don't think your numbers are valid anymore. The demand on developers is completely crazy in Stockholm right now. Even with minimum prior experience you shouldn't settle for anything less than 25k a month.

<comment><USER14> While I think you are right in saying the salaries probably has gone up, I am very hesitant to believe that they are more than 25-30% higher. There were boatloads of devs coming out of these 12-14 week bootcamps or vocational 80 week programs (KY) with promises of work, and the market was flooded. This kept salaries down. I don't think it has become any better.

I had a look at some old notes and stats from 2012-2013. Knowledge in JS, Php, Java, Python or C/C++ were required for all of the positions.

14 recruits in the 18-20 yr, no edu bracket (high school dropouts/just graduated), mean salary 24451 USD (199200 SEK)

24 recruits in the 18-20 yr, bootcamp/vocational edu bracket (high school dropouts/just graduated), mean salary 27249 USD (222000 SEK)

17 recruits in the 20-22 yr, bootcamp/vocational edu bracket, mean salary 28869 USD (235200 SEK)

29 recruits in the 20-26 yr, higher edu bracket, mean salary 34467 USD (280800 SEK)

These were placed with employers, startups and established companies, in the tech sector. Mainly in central Stockholm and Kista (tech hub outside of Stockholm).

Make what you will of this, the amount of job seekers with bootcamp/vocational education hasn't gotten less than in 2012/2013\. I believe this keeps the salaries in Stockholm down, and makes you settle for less if you want the job at all. Entry level salaries for devs in Stockholm are low.

BUT - as soon as you get some experience under your belt, you can rise quickly in salary by job hopping for a year or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Completely missed one of the most important points: It's easier to take risks, if those risks actualizing will not destroy your life.

In the US, there's very little social safety net to catch you. If you get sick before the startup is big enough, it means personal bankruptcy - and no medical treatment. Missing revenue targets can mean missing student loan payments, missing rent, etc. There's real risk you'll end up homeless in the end.

In Sweden, you might end up poor, but the poor are still taken care of. You get your medical treatment, the state pays your rent, and you are guaranteed enough income to buy groceries.

<comment><USER16> > In Sweden, you might end up poor, but the poor are still taken care of. You > get your medical treatment, the state pays your rent, and you are guaranteed > enough income to buy groceries.

Way to propagate an ignorant myth. The US has a massive welfare state and social safety net. The average poor person in the US can typically draw $25,000 to $30,000 in benefits per year depending on the state they live in. Those benefits include free healthcare, housing, food, work training, etc. For some states, such as Hawaii, it's nearly $50,000 per year.

Just drawing on several of the most common welfare benefits programs in the US, gets you near $20,000 per year.

According to a fact check by the Washington Post in 2014, the median total individual welfare benefits package in the US was $28,800.

Let's put it another away. These welfare benefits numbers are so high, they exceed the median income in all but a few very wealthy nations.

<comment><USER17> You're only addressing half the comparison. Yes, the US has welfare, but it's conditional and often insufficient.

<comment><USER16> Of course it's conditional, as it should be. If you're at or below the poverty line you can draw on the most welfare benefits, if you're earning a median income the benefits you can utilize are diminished.

Proclaiming it's often insufficient is a comically loaded premise. How often? In which states? Under which circumstances? I've got the perfect response for that: it's often sufficient.

According to the OECD's numbers, the US poor live better than almost any other poor people on the planet save for those in a select few countries (eg Canada, Norway, Sweden, Australia). [1][2]

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonish...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonishing- numbers-americas-poor-still-live-better-than-most-of-the-rest-of-humanity)

[2] [https://mises.org/blog/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class- much-...](https://mises.org/blog/poor-us-are-richer-middle-class-much-europe)

<comment><USER17> Living better is a relative term. Having access to cheap junk food and TVs does not pay medical bills, nor the debt that follows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's OMX, the Swedish stock index:

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EOMX?p=%5EOMX](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EOMX?p=%5EOMX)

vs the S&P 500:

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPY/chart?p=SPY](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPY/chart?p=SPY)

SPY still seems to be doing significantly better over the last 5 years.

<comment><USER19> Did someone also inject 4.5T dollars into the finance industry of Sweden?

<comment><USER20> Yes, the 4.5T quantitative programs by the US gov pushed down interest rates across the entire globe. Financial markets don't exist in isolation.

It's not like money injected is debt free.

<comment><USER19> But the effect on stock prices was to return them to pre recession levels (while growth did not). So regardless of what it did to interest rates (or perhaps in some part because of what it did), the QE has likely inflated prices of stocks - particularly US stocks. So the S&P 500 growth vs the Swedish index is hardly indicative of anything re: startups either way. If anything the increased stock prices in the US should have helped buoy the option for a IPO exit strategy in favor of the US.

<comment><USER18> Feel free to use a different starting year for those charts, whatever you like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> American engineers who are tired of Trump; Feel free to come work with us in Sweden! ;-) Swedish startups are hiring and there's definitely a shortage of engineers at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER22> Suspect the reasons are:

1 very good free secondary and university education system

2 good English language skills

3 social safety net

<comment><USER10> Those same things apply to other Nordic countries, yet they are not as succesful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've considered launching a start-up of my own here in Sweden so I've given the pros and cons some thought, and it is virtually risk free. To summarise, compared with other countries, we may have even more of the upside but the downside is capped at a very anxiety free level.

These are a few of the reasons:

\- highly skilled labour is cheap in absolute terms and the cost to performance ratio for such workers is probably amongst the absolute best in the world. Good for a start-up!

\- For the individual worker a job as a highly competent senior developer on average in my 20 years of experience is pretty much just double that of a garbage collector. Salaried men don't get ahead much but start-up workers do to a similar extent as they do in other start-up hubs in the world. Good for the early employees getting shares or stock options.

\- Social security systems would still leave me able to stay in my nice home in my nice suburb even without a job. It would not affect the healthcare or education for me and my family at all. I would have to cut down on my intercontinental vacations with my family though. It feels like bet I could make without too much anxiety.

-Sweden has had, and still have to some extent, lots and lots of world leading large tech companies in pretty much every industry like automotive, telecom, different types of processing industries etc. Lots of skills, knowledge and ideas has spun off these large companies or started as suppliers to these. I think this ecosystem is one of the more critical factors which the other Scandinavian countries lack. I cannot come to think of even one Scandinavian unicorn-ish type of company from another Scandinavian country than Sweden. Finnish Rovio is close though, but I cannot come to think of any other non-Swedish company. Sorry but please fill me in here Norwegians, Danes and Finns!

\- Stockholm specifically, where all the companies mentioned in the article are from, is a tech hub with lots of skilled and nice people living and working here and lots of good tech companies which makes it start-up friendly for the same reasons it would anywhere else in the world.

\- The Swedish society, compared with most other I've experienced, is pretty well oiled and modern (not saying there isn't room for lots of improvement) where infrastructure like transportation, administration of personal and company affairs etc work quite well. More time and energy to focus on stuff that matters like your business and your family.

\- The weather sucks for at least 6 months of the year. No I'm serious here. Having pretty much nothing else to do than to work and watch Netflix frees up lots of time and energy for work.

My five cents…

<comment><USER24> "please fill me in here Norwegians, Danes and Finns!"

Well, Skype is half-Danish, so there's that :-)

Others that I know of are Unity (founded in Copenhagen), Zendesk (started in Copenhagen), Steelseries, Endomondo, Just-Eat, Tradeshift, Trustpilot, Flying Tiger, Sitecore, TC Electronic, Soundboks, Navision.

It kinda depends on how you define "startup". Bu no, not quite as many as Sweden, but we do have our own established large companies that have spun off into daughter companies in different areas or helped create successful startups.

<comment><USER25> t.c. electronics is 40 years old (and legendary) and probably shouldn't be on that list IMO.

<comment><USER24> Well yeah, I guess.

It was a startup at one point, though ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> With Swedish high cost of living, is it feasible to bootstrap a product company there (a company that needs time to build something to sell) or is an outside investment the only feasible path for such companies?

<comment><USER27> High cost of living? Where'd you get that idea? It's true that some things are certainly more expensive – gas, alcohol, dinners in mid to high end restaurants – but other things, notably the big ticket items like rent, are typically cheaper than in many other places I've been and especially big cities. No need to pay health insurance or other not-really-optional fees is also relevant. Sweden isn't perhaps cheap per se, but I wouldn't say it's much more expensive than anywhere else.

I live in Sweden, and I've lived abroad in both the UK and US, and I'd say living in Stockholm is a lot cheaper than London, and certainly a lot cheaper (and much easier, if you can find an apartment that is) than NYC or SF. But of course it depends on your way of life I guess.

FWIW I've bootstrapped my business, and as someone else suggested in this context the social safety net takes away a lot of the anxiety in doing this. It's not easy, but I also know if shit hits the fan I won't be out on the streets the next morning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The subtitle is misleading.

>How a tiny country with high government spending bred a large number of vibrant young businesses

The article then goes on to attribute almost all of Sweden's success to deregulation and anti-monopoly laws---i.e., less government intervention ∝ more startup success.

<comment><USER29> anti-monopoly laws seem to be the exact opposite of "less government regulation".

<comment><USER30> maybe pro-competitive market would be a better intended description

<comment><USER31> That's still a form of government regulation.

<comment><USER30> competition is what all the benefits of markets comes from, not non- intervention.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Photoshop for Virtual Visit. Worth It? - <AUTHOR> http://free-visit.net/index.php/fr/demos/les-frigos-de-paris <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, my name is Thierry. French, Paris. I program as a living (Airbus, Dassault). But on WE I am often free... I have built a software that is like a 3D photoshop. It takes 30 photos and in a few hours it generates the virtual visit with a simple url. Question... What do you think of this? I kind of need to know from the Ycombinator community as sometimes like today I really feel it is too ambitious for me. \- So, is it really worth pursuing</comment>