What's With Sci-Fi's Fixation on Single-Gendered Planets? - <AUTHOR> https://www.tor.com/2018/07/25/single-gender-planets-in-science-fiction/ <comment><USER2> Regarding the "what if" novels, not the novels where a gender is entirely missing for unexplained reasons like discussed at the end:

Because few things have had as strong an influence in our culture as gender, it's central to both our biology and culture; it's an extremely big avenue for narrative exploration messing with that. In other words, I'm surprised there isn't more of a fixation with "single-gender" sci fi considering how important gender is.

<comment><USER3> Why is there comparatively little "gender futurist" stuff, then? _Left Hand Of Darkness_ being the standout example, but I suppose Banks' technologically mediated gender fluidity also counts.

<comment><USER4> The Imperial Radch Series starting with Ancillary Justice does this a bit. The main human civilization in the setting, the Radch, don't care about gender or have a word for it. Given the widespread availability of cloning and other methods of reproduction they just don't view it as important anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These are all old books. The modern trend seems to be gender is an afterthought. The main character in the Ancillary series has difficulty distinguishing men from women.

<comment><USER6> Except _The Stars Are Legion_ , which was last year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have been an avid sci-fi reader my entire life and have never come across a book set on a single gender planet. So "fixation" is a bit of clickbait there.

<comment><USER8> I think that would be simply a wrong title and not clickbait.

<comment> yoz-y To me it looks like the author had an idea, then the title and then was not able to actually find enough data to support the idea. They went with the title anyways.

I'd pitch two more examples:

In Dune by Frank Herbert the whole Tleilaxu population is male and nobody knows what happened to their women (this is explained later in the book). It seems odd to me that this was not mentioned in the article as I assume that Dune is more known that any of the books the author mentioned. Tleilaxu in the book have a sort of religious hatred for women.

In the The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld the initial antagonist is a race human women who have "since disposed of the useless gender" and merged with machines. This is stated as a matter of fact and is not a theme explored by the book.

<comment><USER9> It's not quite a true single-gender planet, but Frank Herbert also wrote The White Plague [1], a story about a bioengineered plague that kills only women, set in more or less the present day on a copy of real Earth.

One of the scarier books I've read. For most science fiction, there's a clear reason why the events can't really happen, or at the very least, that some sort of massive breakthrough would be required (FTL, fusion, etc.) for the story to happen, or it's just so absurd or disconnected from my real day-to- day experience that it's not a real concern. I've got no such defense for this story, so even though I've read stories about things that are arguably more horrifying in the sense that there are more deaths or the deaths are more horrible or such, this book penetrated my psychological defenses like few others ever have. There's very little stopping it from happening now, and ever less every year. Usually the modern focus of the discussion is race-specific plagues, but (genetic) gender would probably not be that hard to nail either. Even if such a plague wasn't quite 100% accurate, it wouldn't matter much.

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

<comment><USER10> Along those lines, James Tiptree Jr.'s short story "[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwfly_Solution") concerns a plague causing males to kill all females.

(Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" was already mentioned in the linked-to article.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are plenty of Earth species that reproduce asexually through parthenogenisis, fission, budding, etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> Definitely read "sf" in the title as "San Fransisco", not "Sci-Fi".

<comment><USER13> Same here, wonder if it is down to a pre-disposition from reading too much tech.

<comment><USER14> Even without that predisposition, I'd imagine San Fransisco would still be the common expansion. SF is a large city, world-famous for things other than tech, and I've never heard the already abbreviated Sci-Fi cut down again to SF.

The original article has Sci-Fi.

<comment><USER15> 'SF' is very commonly used as an abbreviation for science fiction, particularly within the community, and has been for many decades. It's not a further abbreviation of sci-fi, it's an alternative.

One of the intentions is to distinguish it from futuristic fiction which is more about the rip-roaring adventure than the science. For example, Star Wars would be labelled sci-fi, 2001 would be labelled SF.

If you're thinking it sounds like there's an element of snobbishness in there, you are definitely right. It's much the same as with those authors who prefer to say that they write speculative fiction rather than science fiction (SF as an abbreviation also has the advantage that it works for both of those).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is 37 Signals pre-recorded billing phone number? - <AUTHOR>

When 37 Signals shows up on a bill, there's a phone number. That phone number is a pre-recorded message that explains the charges and about how to contact them. I'm thinking about setting up something similar, and I'd really like to listen to their recording!
Does anyone know the number?
The article I found out about their pre-recorded message: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1545-how-we-reduced-chargebacks-by-30-as-a-percentage-of-sales <comment><USER2> Its not a phone number, its a code when you enter it at the end of their URL, it redirects you to a charge page.

37 Signals charge page: <http://37signals.com/charge>

Here are some other examples:

Wufoo - <http://wufoo.com/charge/>

SlideRoom - <http://www.slideroom.com/charge>

If you're receiving payments via PayPal its easy to do, all you need to do is edit "Credit Card Statement Name" which is found in My Account > Profile > Payment receiving preferences (Under Security and risk settings).</comment>


Ask HN: What's the best documentation you've ever read (or written)? - <AUTHOR> I've been thinking a lot about documentation and how to get a user up to speed on a code base as quickly and effortlessly (on the part of the user) as possible.
I know "best" can be somewhat arbitrary or subjective, but use whichever metric you think is most relevant (organization, clarity, etc...). And, if you'd like, let me know what you think "best" should mean in relation to documentation quality.
Also, I know this question has been asked before, but those threads are all several years old, so in that time the documentation pool has obviously changed (and hopefully improved). <comment><USER2> [https://freebsd.org/handbook](https://freebsd.org/handbook)

It's a comprehensive, yet not too dense, set of documentation for getting people up to speed on how to do things with FreeBSD. You may not find a better one even today.

</comment><comment><USER3> The reference pages for Mathematica are by far the best docs I've seen for a programming language. They're thorough and each example can be evaluated in place.

Online version here [1] is not evaluatable and is rendered to images, but otherwise it's the same content as the desktop version. Specific example [2].

[1] [http://reference.wolfram.com/language/](http://reference.wolfram.com/language/) [2] [http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Histogram.html](http://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Histogram.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I like the official git documentation. There are many tutorials out there but reading through the official doc always makes things clearer to me at least

[https://git-scm.com/doc](https://git-scm.com/doc)

I also like Stripe documentation

[https://stripe.com/docs](https://stripe.com/docs)

</comment><comment><USER5> ZeroMQ Guide has frequently been mentioned on HN as one of the better pieces of software documentation:

[http://zguide.zeromq.org/](http://zguide.zeromq.org/)

It is useful not just for using ZeroMQ, but about learning about distributed systems in general.

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.digifire.in/2016/02/06/interview-with-apoorv- aro...](https://www.digifire.in/2016/02/06/interview-with-apoorv-arora-co- founder-at-baatna/)

It's a recently written tech interview for a startup named Baatna. Good read!</comment>


Someone (probably) solved the Goldbach conjecture - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.3465

<comment><USER2> No. Nor has the author proven the Riemann Hypothesis, as the other paper recently submitted to arxiv by that author claims to have done.

<comment><USER3> It's only a matter of time until he proves P != NP too.</comment></comment>


UCLA banned my book from a free speech event - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/education/319100-ucla-banned-my-book-on-islam-from-a-free-speech-event <comment><USER2> Onkar Ghate is a senior fellow and chief content officer at the Ayn Rand Institute.

Islam and the War on Terror[edit] ARI has taken many controversial positions with respect to the Muslim world. They hold that the motivation for Islamic terrorism comes from their religiosity, not poverty or a reaction to Western policies.[42] They have urged that the US use overwhelming, retaliatory force to "end states who sponsor terrorism", using whatever means are necessary to end the threat.[43] In his article "Ends States Who Sponsor Terrorism", which was published as a full page ad in The New York Times, Peikoff wrote, "The choice today is mass death in the United States or mass death in the terrorist nations. Our Commander-In-Chief must decide whether it is his duty to save Americans or the governments who conspire to kill them." Although some at ARI initially supported the invasion of Iraq, it has criticized how the Iraq War was handled.[44] Since October 2, 2001, the institute has held that Iran should be the primary target in the war against "Islamic totalitarianism".[43]

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

Perhaps it does not take a leap of the imagination to see how this calls for mass genocide of nations without any objective discussion regarding terrorism. I never understood why the US considers Iran a terrorist state when Iran are fully vested in fighting against ISIS.</comment>


Some popular self help books - <AUTHOR> https://dailyjag.com/literature/read-these-self-help-books-and-make-most-of-our-this-downtime/ <comment><USER2> Site is hugged to death, but as usual I won't let that stop me from commenting.

I don't think many lives are changed by self-help books. People who are actively trying to change their lives often read self-help books, and then misattribute any positive result to the book. Then they recommend the book to others, and it's either mindless blather, or common-sense tropes wrapped in a bow, or something that reinforces a decision they've already made. Someone decides they need to focus on something, and then reads a book about it while they're focused on it. They already changed their life before they read the book, by making the decision to change.

No one is changed by a religious text if they are already a religious person who largely agrees with the philosophy. No one changes their diet if they haven't already made a decision to eat healthier. No one GETS.RICH.QUICK if they weren't already entrepreneurial.

Yeah, maybe these books impacted people in some way. But they were already 99% of the way there. Recommending them to someone who isn't also 99% of the way there isn't going to change a thing.

The older I get the more obvious it is that there are no new ideas, there's just new branding.

<comment><USER2> Now that I can see the site, these are all books by people who through a combination of luck, timing, skill, and work managed to get rich. Now they think they figured out something others didn't. No, they were well-positioned --largely through the circumstances of their birth--got lucky, and then had the skill to take advantage of the combination. Now they think they discovered something. They didn't, and they actually have no awareness of how they ended up where they are.

<comment><USER3> And the things they did learn can all be boiled down to a blog article. Instead they fleshing out simple ideas to 100 pages of examples and repetition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've only read three self-help books that have dramatically changed my thinking:

* How To Develop Your Thinking Ability by Ken Keyes Jr. It's out of print now, but easy to find a copy. It condenses down a lot of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics into an easy to digest format.

* The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey. Also quite an old book, mentions a lot of similar ideas to Psychocybernetics (essentially the queen or king of all self-help books: most other ones just re-iterate the ideas in this one). It discusses how the thinking mind gets in the way of true excellence. I started reading it largely to consider how I was keeping myself from entering into meditative jhana.

* Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. While certainly filled with some questionable ideas, this absolutely broke my neat model of objective reality into tiny little pieces in high school. It set off a journey of self-exploration.

While some of the books in this list are good, everyone in silicon valley talks about a lot of those books nonstop. You'll understand the language SV folks use to talk about ideas, but you won't offer much else in the way of a unique perspective. A journey of reading needs to be self-lead.

<comment><USER5> > I started reading it largely to consider how I was keeping myself from > entering into meditative jhana.

Can you elaborate on this please? I've read The Inner Game of Tennis and I'm familiar with the (samatha) jhanas (and somewhat experienced as well). Do you mean something like convincing Self 1 to relax enough and trusting Self 2 to take you into the first jhana, etc?

<comment><USER4> > Do you mean something like convincing Self 1 to relax enough and trusting > Self 2 to take you into the first jhana?

Yeah, pretty much. It primed me to pay a lot more attention to the judging mind particularly during sits (and really made me aware how much doubt as a hindrance disrupts my practice). While retrospectively it's sort of obvious, I mainly have learned meditation through reading, so if an instruction isn't phrased the right way I've noticed I miss it.

<comment><USER5> Thanks. I similarly came up with a heuristic after reading Tor Nørretranders' book The User Illusion. I remind myself that there is some part of my brain already paying attention constantly to the breath at the tip of the nose (or whatever the current meditation object is) because if a noxious stimulus presented there I would certainly become consciously aware of it. So all I have to do is 'tune in' to that part of my awareness. This works pretty well for me, and not surprisingly many meditation instructions use this metaphor of tuning a radio, but it didn't make as much sense before I began to think of it in this way. I have also learned meditation mainly from reading.

<comment><USER4> Ah that's a wonderful heuristic, I'll try next time I sit. Thanks for sharing. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If y'all gonna hop in this thread with your favorite book it may be more convincing to write something more than just "it changed my life." Apparently Buddhism, stoicism, and the Rust programming language are all equally capable of changing a hackernews poster's life?

<comment><USER7> Every book I ever read technically changed my life

<comment><USER8> There were books that changed my life so little that I read them a second time because I forgot I read them the first time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The millionaire fastlane by MJ de Marco dispite its cliché title is by far one of the best books I've ever read. It shows what it takes to make money by solving other people's problems in a no BS manner.

<comment><USER10> That book is total bs, probably the worst offender on the list. It's nothing but just-so anecdotes written by someone who (a) got outrageously lucky and (b) benefits hugely from white privilege.

"Self-made millionaire" is not a thing. If you start from a premise that believes this is a possible concept, you're just self-deluded selling snake oil.

The Millionaire Fastlane is the same old scam as the rest of them. Its self- aggrandizing author can believe he knows some psychological focus principles that unlock chances of wealth, but it's just ego/narcissism. He just got lucky, in a cosmic sense (being born white in modern America) and in specific business opportunities. For every one MJ Demarco there are a million people with same mindset, same grit, same determination, same talent, same attitude etc who got nothing. It's all just plinko.

<comment> UK-Al05 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I recommend the Satipatthana Sutta by the Buddha. It will change your life if you do what it says. Sad I hadn't heard of it 20 years before.

<comment><USER6> How did it change your life? What did it say you should do? How would your last 20 years been different if you had read it earlier?

<comment><USER12> It's the oldest text on mindfulness meditation in the buddhist tradition. In all likelihood, they didn't just read it and follow the instructions, as interpreting it's meaning from scratch is the life's work of a buddhist scholar. It doesn't include any of the buddhist moral teaching ("have goodwill towards others") so most likely OP meant that meditation had a positive effect on their life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> These are not self-help books; they're mainly books on trying to get rich.

<comment><USER14> Doesn't getting rich help you?

<comment><USER3> Not everyone, not all of the time. And getting rich always costs something you might not be willing to give up.

<comment><USER14> You're holding money to a far higher standard (everyone? all the time?) than any of these self-help techniques are held to. I suspect that's because you know it works better.

If someone is reading 'books on how to get rich' then they're not looking to get mega-yacht wealthy. They're looking for financial security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

by William Braxton Irvine

<comment><USER16> This book is on my night stand I try to read it a couple times a year. I feel like you can't just read it once. You have to be reminded of its principals constantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm glad to see Millionaire Fastlane at the top of the list. I make money effortlessly in large part due to the mindset of value creation that this book talks about.

<comment><USER18> I'm curious if it's relatable to Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

That changed the way I thought about money very early on by focusing on defining assets purely as things that generate money for you and not "things you own."

Ex. Your house is not an asset, a house that you rent to a tenant is, etc.

The goal of the book was to reiterate the idea that creating income generating assets will allow you to exit the workforce. No other type of asset defined by other terms would do so.

It had a big focus on real estate or investing in small stable, we'll establish business models like gas stations, etc but in our field it could easily apply to stable side projects too.

Very cash flow oriented.

<comment><USER17> It's really nothing like that. It's a short enough book so just read it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Cloudflare is reporting a 502 Bad Gateway (for me). The article is available at The Internet Archive [1].

[1] [http://web.archive.org/web/20200712144005/https://dailyjag.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200712144005/https://dailyjag.com/literature/read- these-self-help-books-and-make-most-of-our-this-downtime/)

</comment><comment><USER6> On "When":

> This book explores scientific facts that imply that the impact of the > decision taken is dependent on their timing.

I'm skeptical whenever a self help book talks about "scientific facts" as it relates to psychological research. Especially lately as a lot of psychology experiments are undergoing a crisis of reproducibility. I recall some oft- repeated idea that we have a limited willpower gas tank that is depleted by every decision we make in a day, which was based on a cookie experiment that I read was recently reproduced to show an opposite result.

In any case the use of the word "fact" seems strong but perhaps the book addresses this.

</comment><comment><USER20> I would watch [https://youtu.be/dmLTLkCBSN8](https://youtu.be/dmLTLkCBSN8) for a contrary view. These books are brain crack and rarely lead to any significant life changes.

<comment><USER21> This is a well put together video but I wouldn't take as drastic a view. I believe we have something to learn from everyone, it's just knowing what will work for you and what won't while being careful of not entering that cultish mindset. Everything in moderation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> _Range_ is not a self-help book.

Sure, it's thesis is practicable and generalizable, but it's more of a pop- psych book.

That said, I'd recommend _Range_ as a great book to read on a flight or at the beach (whenever those return). The thesis is pretty easy to grok. The chapters that give examples towards the thesis are entertaining and memorable. The section on the orphan musical geniuses is very good.

It's a great book, just not self-help.

</comment><comment><USER23> Dan Pink is fairly good. I enjoyed _A Whole New Mind._

In it, he set out a fairly useful exercise for me, called "The mini-saga" (I don't think he originated the idea).

The goal is to write a story in _exactly_ fifty words (not characters).

It was an enjoyable exercise.

I always like the story that was attributed to Hemingway, that the shortest story ever told was _" For sale, baby shoes, never worn."_

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So everyone, that is my personal list. I have read every single one of these books and have only shared them since I find them really helpful.

P.S. I chose a really bad day to move plugins, update site etc and that's why some of you were seeing the 502 errors. Sorry about that.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't know how much self help it might be considered, but reading about reinforcement learning was quite a valuable perspective. Now I reflect a bit more on my own value functions and how I can possibly communicate them effectively.

</comment><comment><USER25> I like "The Rust Programming Language" by Steve Kablink. It really changed my life. And it's free. (We should put this book in hotel rooms.)

[https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/](https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/)

Also

> Continual upskilling is critical for accelerating your career progression. > However, the time constraint that corporate employment entail tends to spare > limited time for you to improve your skillset.

Who writes like this? "Upskilling?" C'mon

<comment><USER26> In what way did it change your life ?

<comment><USER25> Realizing that the programming language and compiler can take care of many of the bugs and problems that plague programmers.

<comment><USER6> I don't really feel like this falls under the "self help" category of books, which imo are more generalist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I like 'getting things done'.

<comment><USER17> I liked it when I first read it 20 years ago, but it also invisibility promotes a fear based perfectionism.

The path of getting things done leads to nowhere.

<comment><USER27> This may be the case for you but these kind of things are very much dependent on the person.

One thing is to accept that not all items on various lists will be finished. The book explicitly says this is the case and recommends to remove items if they have not been done after a few weeks. If one can do this without much or any negative emotion I do not see this downside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> so how successful are you if you read all theese books? 3 commas successful?

<comment><USER29> I'm happy, healthy, loved, and have a full belly.

Would you like a list of the self-help books that got me to my three commas?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The cancer of the internet the "self help" guides and gurus

<comment><USER31> The first step: become somebody else. That's the only step though. If you can't do that then don't get your hopes up to adapt the mindset.

wayback: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200712144005/https://dailyjag....](https://web.archive.org/web/20200712144005/https://dailyjag.com/literature/read- these-self-help-books-and-make-most-of-our-this-downtime/)</comment></comment>


If you want more women in Silicon Valley, start by giving your girls Legos - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/5912/if-you-want-more-women-in-silicon-valley-start-by-giving-your-girls-legos/ <comment><USER2> Without a proper scientific study the premise is worthless. IMO it's _at least_ just as likely they were predisposed to play with lego...

</comment><comment><USER3> And maybe force them to like programming. Slap them if they don't use a computer for hours every day.

Sorry, but the idea that we should artificially excite girls about programming is silly to me. If they are interested, fine, if not, so be it. The very first programmer was a woman (Ada Lovelace) and she didn't have Legos or prep talks.

Why start from the premise that there _should_ be 50%-50% men and women programmers and try to force that, instead of watching what girls and boys actually like, and of course help any girl that _actually_ wants to go into programming?

We don't force young boys to go into ballet dancing, or even think that there is a problem because the genders there are not 50%-50%. And we don't give benzedrine, beers and toy trucks to girls to make them go into truck driving, which is also a profession with a gender imbalance.

Oh, and what about professional basketball and football? Should we force girls to be into it more, and force people to watch them play professionally? Because men's basketball and men's football currently dominate.

<comment><USER4> it's artificial to give women legos to play with when they are children? I wouldn't say using Ada as an example really fits your argument considering she was taught mathematics at an early age, which is certainly more direct than playing with legos.</comment></comment>


What 19th-century Calcutta's street cries revealed about its food and politics - <AUTHOR> https://scroll.in/magazine/834289/what-19th-century-calcuttas-street-cries-revealed-about-its-food-and-politics <comment><USER2> As a Bengali, I was hoping for more detail and context here.</comment>


For your social and spiritual journey: thoughts, community and meditation - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paralign/id906756239?mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> I am here and all ears for your feedback/comments</comment>


Tumblr Rockets Past Wordpress - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/tumblr-rockets-past-wordpress-2011-6

<comment><USER2> Link to the real article <http://mashable.com/2011/06/15/tumblr-surpasses- wordpress/>

Also the comparison only includes hosted wordpress blogs at wordpress.com</comment>


Portland, OR: a video montage on why you'll love it - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1B2_r6Azvg

<comment><USER2> Wow, that's ridiculously well timed; my wife and I need to make a decision tomorrow about moving across the country to Portland!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> FYI: This video vastly understates the volume and variety of delicious microbrews available in the city.

<comment><USER3> Portland is beer obsessed.. The owner of Hopworks (the brewery in the clip, makes a brief appearance) is my backyard neighbor -- super nice guy. Makes totally Organic beer, and owns a very nice bicycle powered bar.</comment></comment>


Apple could release an updated MacBook Air - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/21/apple-could-release-an-updated-macbook-air/ <comment><USER2> As a developer, who spends a lot of time on my MBP with a Linux VM, it's the updated Mini I'm most interested in.

Apple has pretty much destroyed the MBP, due to bad design decisions (keyboard, touchbar) and bad QA. A reasonable way to go for me would be a suitably beefed up Mini along with a Linux laptop.</comment>


Why databases use ordered indexes but programming uses hash tables - <AUTHOR> https://www.evanjones.ca/ordered-vs-unordered-indexes.html <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21738802](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21738802).</comment>


Ask HN: How do tech firms manage their cryptographic keys? - <AUTHOR>

I study computer security at the PhD level and have an interest in key management.  In the recent news we have noticed how poorly protected some private keys remain.  Crackers have stolen Certificate Authority private keys and bitcoin wallets. <comment><USER3> Hardware security modules, dedicated airgapped boxes, smart cards, etc - <USER2> are lots of solutions (and you now have something to Google). You'll get better answers if you ask more specific questions, and Google is probably a better tool than HN.</comment>


Zen Founder, Rob Walling podcast about blending startups, family and life - <AUTHOR> http://zenfounder.com/

<comment><USER2> Can't recommend this highly enough -- Rob and Sherry have talked about the ups-and-downs his entrepreneurial career had on their marriage at previous Microconfs. It was genuine (verging on raw) and enormously affecting for me -- helped avoid some stress in my own marriage. (Not obvious for me, for example, that firewalling your spouse from business finances is sometimes a stress- reliever for them.)

Sherry has separately talked about depression/psychological health for founders, something which far, far too many folks struggle with (quietly).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah - Sherry's talk at MicroConf Europe was one of the best in some ways: seeing the 'human' side of someone who has been successful, and hearing that it's been difficult and stressful and not just bouncing from strength to strength makes it seem more real and attainable.

( patio11's talk was good too - lots of practical advice :-)</comment></comment>


Honda's New Hydrogen-Powered Vehicle Feels More Like a Real Car - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2015/10/27/hondas-new-hydrogen-powered-vehicle-feels-more-like-a-real-car/?utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix <comment><USER2> What on Earth is a "Real" car?

My electric car drives just like a real car - only faster, quieter, and with less pollution.

90% of the time, my car is parked at home or work - so it can fully recharge over 3-4 hours. At a rapid charger it will fill up in 30 minutes.

I still don't quite see the point of creating hydrogen, shipping or piping it across the country, storing it, and regularly stopping at speciality shops in order to purchase it. We already have a existing electrical infrastructure and the reality is that most people aren't driving 400 miles every single day, so don't need to be constantly refuleing.

<comment><USER3> Just curious, how do you know that your car produces less pollution? The electricity is still generated and transmitted, so it is at least possible that the energy used to power your vehicle is worse for the environment because of its source. Also, did you factor in the impact that mining lithium has on the environment?

<comment><USER4> > Just curious, how do you know that your car produces less pollution?

This data is available: [http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_01.html](http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_01.html)

Even in the absolute worst case, energy generation from fossil fuels at a power plant is significantly more efficient than the internal combustion engine, even after taking transmission and charging losses into account.

In reality, EVs tend to be sold in areas with high renewable penetration. And about 40% of EV owners have rooftop solar systems.

The biggest argument for EVs in general is that they are fuel agnostic. Transitioning to EVs right now means decoupling transportation from fuel, which means the fleet automatically becomes cleaner as we continue to build renewable capacity and phase out fossil fuels.

<comment><USER5> [http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-car- emissions](http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-car-emissions)

Places like Detroit has coal fired plants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Garages have a big problem: _" Hydrogen collects under roofs and overhangs, where it forms an explosion hazard; any building that contains a potential source of hydrogen should have good ventilation, strong ignition suppression systems for all electric devices, and preferably be designed to have a roof that can be safely blown away from the rest of the structure in an explosion."_ (Wikipedia)

Hydrogen storage tanks tend to leak slowly. The molecules are so small that they diffuse through solid metal.

<comment><USER7> This is likely an absolutely stupid idea, but in a structure where ventilation isn't an option, what would be the impact of having a "pilot light" in areas where hydrogen accumulates? Essentially burn it off before it accumulates to the point of presenting a significant hazard.

Additionally, (perhaps primarily) if the molecules seep through a sealed tank, wouldn't they escape an overhang/roof with far more ease?

<comment><USER8> If the pilot light fails for long time and then is fixed, boom.

<comment><USER9> And if not boom, you're burned alive by an invisible flame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> BMW's been developing hydrogen-powered cars for over a decade. One of their advantages is that the same engine could use either gasoline or hydrogen making it a much more practical car for a world in which there is not yet the same distribution infrastructure for hydrogen as there is for gasoline. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to get as much press as EVs which have both serious operational drawbacks (short range, long charging periods, etc.) and manufacturing costs (lithium batteries, etc).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Hydrogen_7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Hydrogen_7)

<comment><USER11> The energy efficiency is much worse for Hydrogen.

PS: It's actually significantly more efficient to burn crude oil and charge high mileage electric cars from that than instead of refining oil and then using an IC engine.

<comment><USER12> > PS: It's actually significantly more efficient to burn crude oil and charge > high mileage electric cars from that than instead of refining oil and then > using an IC engine.

That might be, yet burning crude oil produces a horrible amount of nasty stuff - sulphurous molecules turning into acid rain, radioactive trace elements concentrating in the exhaust...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hydrogen cars are probably a dead end. Not enough benefit for the infrastructure costs required. I think the future options will be EV and synthetic gas. As batteries improve further, EV will have a lot of advantages. But it will only be available for those who have personal garages. For everyone else, it makes more sense to create gasoline instead of building an entirely new hydrogen infrastructure. There is already technology in early stages that can create gas from just electricity, water, and CO2 from the air. It seems refining that technology is a much better idea than trying to use hydrogen.

<comment><USER14> Wait - gas as in gasoline or some other gas (LPG?)

<comment><USER13> Gasoline - Audi is working on the technology [http://www.audiusa.com/newsroom/news/press- releases/2015/05/...](http://www.audiusa.com/newsroom/news/press- releases/2015/05/researchers-produce-first-audi-e-benzin)

The first version requires biomass, which means it has all the disadvantages of current biofuels. But their next goal is to remove that requirement. If they succeed, then they will have a process that only needs power, water, and CO2.

It's early stage technology and investment is probably very small right now. Why wouldn't it be when oil is so cheap. But someday the oil fields will start running dry and peak oil will truly come. When oil hits $200, $300 per barrel, the demand for this kind of technology will be immense. EV sales will increase dramatically, but many will be unable to use EV due to lack of personal garages (even Supercharger times are not enough if thats the only way to charge. And only Tesla has access to that, what about Leaf, Bolt, etc?).

A brand new hydrogen infrastructure doesn't seem to fit anywhere in the future. It's too expensive and the benefits are marginal compared to gas (a lot of legacy infrastructure) or EV (an entirely new paradigm using existing electric infrastructure).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's nice, but is there any real advantage to hydrogen over batteries, or have batteries at this stage left hydrogen in the dust?

Cost? Weight? Overall efficiency? No numbers are given for any of these, but they've all traditional weakpoints of hydrogen.

Hydrogen also requires a lot of fancy infrastructure, whereas batteries can be charged (slowly) practically anywhere.

One advantage is that you could refill your tank in a long road trip, hypothetically, if you found a hydrogen filling station, faster than you could recharge your electric car. But that's a rare use case.

Anything I'm missing? Or is hydrogen just a zombie technology?

<comment><USER16> It is very hard for hydrogen to overcome it's 25% grid to motor efficiency [1]. It means that it will always be significantly more expensive per kWh delivered to a motor. However, the market may value quick refueling very highly.

[1] [http://iqsoft.co.in/images/The%2021st%20Century%20Electric%2...](http://iqsoft.co.in/images/The%2021st%20Century%20Electric%20Car_img_3.jpg)

<comment><USER17> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell#Efficiency_of_leadin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell#Efficiency_of_leading_fuel_cell_types)

"According to the U.S. Department of Energy, fuel cells are generally between 40–60% energy efficient."

I feel like I'm reading a beauty contest gossip :) . Strong opinions, weak arguments...

<comment><USER16> > fuel cells are generally between 40–60% energy efficient

Which is reduced to 25% grid-to-motor efficiency when electrolysis and compression (required for practical energy densities) are taken into account. As illustrated in the linked graphic.

Electrolysis is assumed since other methods (e.g., methane reformation) generally generate greenhouse gases, but there has been some work on algae bioreactors [1] that might become economically interesting.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_hydrogen_production...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_hydrogen_production_\(Algae\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am surprised that it hasn't been mentioned yet: Elon Musk, who has some experience in this field and we can also assume has done the math, says that hydrogen cars are a dead end

[http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/02/12/3621136/tesla- el...](http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/02/12/3621136/tesla-elon-musk- hydrogen-dumb/)

[http://www.wired.com/2013/10/elon-musk- hydrogen/](http://www.wired.com/2013/10/elon-musk-hydrogen/)

[http://insideevs.com/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-hydrogen-fuel- cell-...](http://insideevs.com/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-hydrogen-fuel-cell- vehicles-are-mind-boggingly-stupid/)

Does Honda think otherwise, and if so, why?

<comment><USER19> In all fairness, Elon Musk makes electric cars - and, batteries - so he has every incentive to exaggerate how bad of a bet fuel cells are ;)

I know very little about this debate and what little I know makes me side with the electric car crowd. But Elon Musk has a hell of a horse in this race and thus his statements should never be taken as unbiased.

<comment><USER18> > Elon Musk has a hell of a horse in this race

Tesla is a recent entrant, so actually it may have been the other way around: Musk looked at all the horses, and worked out that there was a potential winner before even deciding to enter the race.

Compare with Honda, who have been making Internal combustion engines since the 1940s. If anyone has a pre-existing horse in the race, they do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder why they're using hydrogen instead of ammonia, which is like hydrogen except better in every way? Ammonia has hydrogen's good properties: not a greenhouse gas and doesn't produce greenhouse gases, doesn't cause smog, numerous production methods including electrolysis, easily transported in liquid form, can be used in fuel cells or in ICEs. However it doesn't embrittle, in liquid form it's actually denser in hydrogen atoms than liquid hydrogen is, and due to its agricultural applications there is already an established distribution infrastructure (in the Midwest, at least).

</comment><comment><USER21> So, for cars this looks like a dead technology because batteries are probably going to win. What about airplanes? They won't be battery powered anytime soon?

</comment><comment><USER22> I cannot navigate this page. 4 adsense ads at the top. scrolling broken, and a photo of the car in the middle.

I wonder how forbes test their stuff.

<comment><USER12> > I wonder how forbes test their stuff.

Probably, like any techie with a bit of knowledge, using adblockers...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Best case Fool Cell technology will be as good as battery technology is today.

"Extremely silly" according to Musk. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_e7rA4fBAo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_e7rA4fBAo)

</comment><comment><USER12> I could imagine that a source of hydrogen could be medical institutions - after all, a hospital consumes large amounts of pure oxygen, and electrolysis provides lots of it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Japan has been quietly developing Stan Meyer technology. Once they release it the only competition will be permanent batteries.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is the real future for EVs. Quick refueling means you can actually take a proper road trip (at least when fuel stations are built), and it may actually be practical for a country like Canada (big, sparsely populated). Also it needs less batteries, which is likely to reduce its ecological footprint.

<comment><USER26> I thought the issue with H was transportation: a critical hurdle for new fuel technology adoption is safety (as seen in Tesla's quick and overprotective addition of an armored underbody on the Model S when a few stray stories of crashes caught flames in the press). Tankers of H hurdling down our freeways?

I feel like range anxiety on full-on EV's will dissipate in the next few years as we get to 300+ miles on a charge. After that, what's the downside?

<comment><USER27> The dream expressed in the article would be to have high-pressure electrolysis to produce hydrogen on-site.

I won't disagree if you think that 300+ miles/charge will come first.

<comment><USER28> Electrolysis is a fairly inefficient way to produce hydrogen. If you've got enough energy to do electrolysis, then you've got enough energy to run a motor. The only technical reason you'd want to use hydrogen is that you can do combustion and long-term fuel storage. It would be valuable if you were using something like sunlight to produce hydrogen, since sunlight can't really run a car.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Instant Color Schemes (Enter a word or phrase) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I believe this works:

[http://www.gpeters.com/color/color- schemes.php?search_term=b...](http://www.gpeters.com/color/color- schemes.php?search_term=badass)

<comment><USER3> America is also rather unexpected.

[http://www.gpeters.com/color/color- schemes.php?search_term=A...](http://www.gpeters.com/color/color- schemes.php?search_term=America)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like it. A little slow but it seemed to work for me:

[http://www.gpeters.com/color/color- schemes.php?search_term=f...](http://www.gpeters.com/color/color- schemes.php?search_term=football)

[http://www.gpeters.com/color/color- schemes.php?search_term=b...](http://www.gpeters.com/color/color- schemes.php?search_term=barbie)

</comment><comment><USER5> Apparently the colour of freedom is all khaki greens, repressive greys, and midnight blues:

[http://www.gpeters.com/color/color- schemes.php?search_term=f...](http://www.gpeters.com/color/color- schemes.php?search_term=freedom)

I wanted to search for the colour of Obama, but realised that would be racist.

</comment><comment><USER6> great... Its a nice starting point for those at the very beginning of product design.

I love these comments on how slow it is. You high-bandwidth people are spoiled. To me it was slow too; as is most every page I load from China ;). I sometimes feel I'm still in 1991 with my Hayes modem

</comment><comment><USER7> "Strong Bad" returns a quite accurate palette. Nice. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice idea, but it seems to be broken (at least for me.)

</comment><comment><USER9> for those of you for whom it doesn't work, it seems like the site is extremely slow. I'm on fios and it took like 3 minutes to do the search.</comment>


Using Source Maps with TypeScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaron-powell.com/web/typescript-source-maps

<comment><USER2> This is proof that any sentiments toward / away from a company are not based on "trends" but on actions, if you make good products / tools, open source them, listen to the community / market and not try to change it, then people will follow. Someone is making some great decisions there, and if I was a Google decision maker, I would have gave him/her a job offer very quickly. Microsoft is trendy again, using git, sponsors jQuery, develops VIM emacs and sublime text support? The actually caused me to download and use Visual Studio, 7 years after I left it for Eclipse? Comeback of the year for me.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the 3rd frontpage article about TypeScript in 3 days. It certainly seems to be getting a lot of 'air time' amongst developers.

I can't help but see this as a good thing for the languages adoption. Languages live and die based on the community that arise around them. So it bodes well for typescripts future to see so much discussion and interest around it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm pleasantly surprised that the compiler supports source maps out of the box even though IE doesn't support them yet.</comment>


The state of netbooting Raspberry Pis - <AUTHOR> https://blog.alexellis.io/the-state-of-netbooting-raspberry-pi/ <comment><USER2> Not to mention the onboard LAN is over the USB connection, but is topped off at 100 Mbps, so no high-throughput uses will work over the network.

Alternative SBCs have started adding onboard eMMC, USB 3.0, and GigE; while they're still not desktop PCs, having faster IO makes tinkering so much less annoying (for many applications). I hope if anything, the next Pi has Gigabit.

<comment><USER3> Given that many people use RPi as base for home entertainment systems... I'd prefer GigE and one or two SATA ports.

<comment><USER4> There are boards with all that.

The fastest low-cost networking board right now (that I can find) is the espressobin, built around the Marvell Armada chipset. It's got three full- duplex GigE ports that can actually run as such as well as pci-E and SATA. Unfortunately it's oriented toward routers and stuff so it lacks HDMI, so no good for home entertainment.

<comment><USER3> > There are boards with all that.

Problem with these: I can never be sure what level of acceleration for video playback is supported - and in what quality. The Pi is pretty rock solid in that department. Also, the Pi has by far the biggest community and extensive documentation, and I can rely on there still being Pis available in years, compared to the Chinese outfits where no one knows how long they'll stay in market.

<comment><USER5> Concur. I've played with the ODroid C2, Beaglebone Black, and the three "full flavor" Raspberry Pi models. The RasPis have, far and away, the best supportability. The ODroids are great _when they work_ \- love that GigE, but they aren't maintaining an OS distribution with the same care and man-power that Raspbian is getting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> this is a bit misleading in that it's not necessarily about netbooting (which per linked article just works).

As someone who's played with raspberry pi's on "real" networks I can tell you that netbooting one is not as reliable as you think. It may work on a small home network, but once you have 50+ devices tftp-ing something will show it's limits.

The firmware that netboots is also not as reliable as one would think. If it fails it just hangs. A proper netboot/PXE client will retry forever.

The approach I followed was to build a minimum ramdisk image which I've placed on the SD card. When that starts, it creates a in-memory file system and downloads the actual image to this file system. The SD card is in read-only mode after that.

<comment><USER7> I don't disagree, it reads a bit like submarine marketing for the clustering hardware. But the difficulty in net booting is for the Pi1 or Pi2. On the Pi 3 it "just works."

That said, net booting used to be a thing. When I joined Sun Microsystems in 1986 it was all about the 'diskless workstation.' At the time was the brand new Sun 3/50.

<comment><USER6> point was that it does not just work on a pi 3 if you put it in a real-life environment.

also, net booting is still a thing, but not for the diskless scenario :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The real issue with raspberry pis is that ethernet is actually on the usb2 controller, so it's capped at 80mbps afaik, and it's also shared with other usb storage.

I hope raspberry pi 4 has gigabit ethernet and netbooting becomes a first class function.

<comment><USER9> And/or a usb3 controller to tie networking to...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Netbooting is one of these problems that turns out to be much more difficult than it's inherent complexity warrants. Setting up DHCP and TFTP doesn't cause a full psychosis yet, but then we enter the "no win zone" of NFS and filesystems. One of the persistent frustrations with any sort of Linux filesystem is that their makers feel you would only ever want to use them with a full-blown Linux kernel, too. No libext, the only userland tool you get is a bunch of 10000 LoC C monsters that an autoconf behemoth ensures can only be built on a modern Linux glibc system. When at the end of the day we are talking about an abstraction that should work perfectly fine with just read(), write() and seek().

My ideal "netbooting" setup is a faux SD card that translates block IO to UDP packets on a GBit link and has a little software on my computer reading/writing from a binary blob. I can still mount it if theres something mountable in the blob. Being a SD card it solves the other big problem with netbooting, which is that it's not transparent. The bootloader needs to know it's netbooting. The kernel needs to have support for NFS. init needs to know you are netbooting to mount the differently-named FS. And then when a service decides on startup to reset the network connection (hello Android), you're still fucked.

<comment><USER11> If you haven't seen it, try out the all-in-one tool: [https://github.com/google/netboot](https://github.com/google/netboot) go get go.universe.tf/netboot/cmd/pixiecore

It is completly self contained. The user just provides it with a linux kernel image and the initrd image.

<comment><USER10> That's a very good start, if you install a DHCP server on Linux they usually assume it's because you trying to run a federated thousand machine network, not just to stub some initial config values, and so the complexity matches that expectation..

But the biggest pain point remains the whole NFS mess. I'm not sure you can even do something like SELinux over NFS, and even if you could, you still need to configure the right _host computer permissions and attributes_ only for stuff to match on the _netbooting machine_.

<comment><USER11> Netboot is most effective when the system is a minimal system and is configuration driven, see tinycore linux or CoreOS container linux with ignition.

NFS is a mess. So design your solutions to not need it. I see no reason why the pixieboot solution isn't something capable of scaling to thousands of machines on a network.

<comment><USER10> I mean, we are in agreement. There are just systems like mobile SoC running platforms like Android where you desperately want some sort of network booting scheme for development because you are constantly rebuilding parts of the software, where the storage options for the part are highly constrained, slow and unreliable (like the RPi) and the performance and architecture necessitate cross-building.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm pretty curious about using RPis for a Kubernetes Cluster. Is there a benefit to using a RPi cluster compared to a simple server or is this purely for research purposes?

<comment><USER13> Depending on the amount of nodes you're wanting, it usually is better to just grab an Intel NUC and virtualise. Much smaller than a RPi cluster and much more powerful.</comment></comment>


Renaissance hedge fund loses 20% this year - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/6bd17811-3205-454e-89e4-953dce6b4dfe <comment><AUTHOR> I originally thought this was the Medallion Fund, but it's one of their other funds that is open to investors, so not as noteworthy.</comment>


Ask HN: Which country has the world's greatest healthcare plan? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I guess this depends on your definition of "greatest" is.

Best value for money? Best service? Cheapest? Fairest?

This is politics, there isn't really any hard truths, just ideals. A highly valued European healthcare plan simply might not match with the ideals of the majority of American's. So "greatest" is always going to be relative to the society it's being implemented in.</comment>


TensorFlow Tutorials - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pkmital/tensorflow_tutorials <comment><USER2> I really like their high-level tutorials as in here: [https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/0.6.0/tutorials/](https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/0.6.0/tutorials/) (with descriptions and general intro to neural networks, not only - a specific library).

There are also Jupyter Notebooks: [https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorf...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorflow/examples/udacity) (used as exercises in the Udacity course: [https://www.udacity.com/course/deep-learning-- ud730](https://www.udacity.com/course/deep-learning--ud730)).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a great start.

However, I love to attach narratives to problems, and have always enjoyed the coding competition questions where they tell a little scenario (albeit contrived) that usually have to do with something like a farmer and her cows in a barn or bees flying to pollen.

It seems to somehow engage my mind more with the problem.

Anyways, It would be great if there was some sort of 'problem description' and a background story context to really get the learner excited about applying the machine learning tool to solve real (fictional) life problems that are affecting real (fictional) people.

And just to dream, maybe a comic edition like codecomics does with react, or learning mysql with nostarchpress manga comics.

</comment><comment><USER4> These look like machine learning cases - does anyone have any other examples - network design? Crypto?

<comment><USER5> Some other applications: [https://github.com/aymericdamien/TensorFlow- Examples](https://github.com/aymericdamien/TensorFlow-Examples) [https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/0.6.0/tutorials/pdes/ind...](https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/0.6.0/tutorials/pdes/index.html) [https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/0.6.0/tutorials/mandelbr...](https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/0.6.0/tutorials/mandelbrot/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone have experience how TensorFlow work on Raspberry pi? I have an idea for a simple robot-car that's learns itself how to drive and and transport sensitive things (say, full glass of water). Would it put too much heavy load operations on Raspi 2?

<comment><USER7> I would use NVidia Jetson TK1 or X1 instead, you can run same CUDA accelerated ML frameworks as elsewhere. Runs Ubuntu. TK1 is about $190 with 192 CUDA cores and enough IO for whatever you need. [http://elinux.org/Jetson/GPIO](http://elinux.org/Jetson/GPIO)

Train on a desktop/cloud GPU and use the trained network on the Jetson, you should get realtime perf for most simple autonomous driving related stuff.

Look into ROS and Ardupilot Rover as well for a head start into autonomous RC cars.

Here's a tutorial on getting Tensorflow running on Jetson - [http://cudamusing.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/building- tensorflow...](http://cudamusing.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/building-tensorflow- for-jetson-tk1.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is great!

If anyone's interested, yesterday we put up a fairly detailed guide to installing TensorFlow on EC2 GPU instances with Python 3.4.

[http://eatcodeplay.com/installing-gpu-enabled-tensorflow- wit...](http://eatcodeplay.com/installing-gpu-enabled-tensorflow-with- python-3-4-in-ec2/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm trying to read the official docs for a computer vision gp and my mind froze. Will try these ones. Thanks :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Half the tutorial is about how to set up virtualEnv and other config.

This is why I hate developing in python. I will just wait for go and node.js to come up with their own APIs for tensor flow.

<comment><USER11> Use the docker image instead - [https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/0.6.0/get_started/os_set...](https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/0.6.0/get_started/os_setup.html#docker_install)

<comment><USER12> I'd successfully finished the Andrew Ng Coursera class using Matlab on my old MacBook Air, and moved on to TensorFlow. Turns out Docker is just too much for my 2 Gb Mac - it totally hangs. I got it working pretty easily on a web IDE codeenv, but it has limitations and I couldn't load the sample files or use ipython notebook. I'd love to run through these tutorials on a remote hosted environment with minimal configuration work. Anyone have advice?</comment></comment></comment>


Japanese Writing After Murakami - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/japan-cultural-life-kelts/ <comment><USER3> For those in the West who haven't read Japanese literature, I highly recommend it.

When I first read Murakami, I had mixed feelings. I struggled to relate with his characters; their outlook on the world seemed so alien compared to mine. I also was frustrated that "nothing happened". His writing seemed much more driven by the underlying emotion of the narrative ("foreboding" is the best description that comes to mind) than plot.

However, when I traveled to Tokyo for the first time I realized that the feelings that I had reading his novels captured the essence of the city - <USER2> sense of duty, the isolation, the assertion of individuality in a place that epitomizes collectivism. His writing provided a window into a worldview that could not have been more different from my own.

I'm glad to have run across this article; I'll add these other authors to my reading list.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, "nothing happening" can equally well describe much of the Western post-modern literary tradition.

I think one thing that sets Murakami apart is the earnest simplicity of his writing. His writing seemingly doesn't attempt to manipulate the reader, and it doesn't seem to aim beyond high school English in complexity. It's workmanlike, unaffected, and personal. To me, it brings to mind John Williams (Stoner) and Karl Ove Knausgaard (who is admittedly a much more capable prose stylist).

In his earlier works, the simplicity feels a bit... simple. But in hi later, more mature works, he doesn't shy away from going into detail about the sheer _mundaneness_ of living. I haven't read 1Q84, but the first book to really deserve the stereotype of Murakami as being about single guys with cats lounging about in empty apartments while waiting for the pasta to boil is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the core theme of which is figuring out reality, and by the extension, life. It's a work where the economy of style meets an economy of plot (even though it's actually a complex plot!) perfectly, and it's a masterpiece.

I've never been to Japan, but I find his other concerns you mention — isolation and so on — to be just as relevant in other social-democratic cultures (perhaps the US less so).

<comment><USER5> Most of the postmodern fiction I've read (Pynchon, Foster-Wallace, etc) seems to have the opposite problem: too much stuff happening.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. I think a better comparison is with modern author's like Hemingway.. Forget which story, but there is a Murakami short that is directly influenced by a Hemingway short.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >The sex and race-driven identity politics currently animating and, to my mind, diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West are either muted or non-existent in Japan, where postmodern aesthetics are the outer skin of a modernist backbone. Japanese stories focus on the individual adrift in seas of excessive convenience and information, obsessed with personal not political identities, and questions of the soul.

Oh boy, this puts into words how I've felt about Japanese vs. Western media for a few years now.

<comment><USER8> This paragraph is deliberately left vague - a Rorschach test of sorts.

I am not quite sure what he is referring to exactly. I do know that my local bookstore has much more books from authors who are gay, trans, black, Asian, etc than it did 15 years ago. If you value diversity in your media - which I do - then this is wonderful. We had a NY Times best seller last year about black women mathematicians working at NASA in the mid 1900s - it's very hard to imagine who would have published that book in the 90s or 2000s.

If that constitutes _"diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West"_ in the author's mind, so be it, but perhaps he should be a tad more upfront about what he really means.

<comment><USER9> My reading would be: contemporary western literary culture is excessively, stiflingly concerned about authenticity. I want to read books about a wide range of experience, far wider than any individual is likely to have in reality; the best fiction is at least partly an exercise in imagination as well as observation.

It's great that authors from different racial/sexual/... backgrounds are writing, but with contemporary culture focused heavily on racial/sexual/... identities, we need novels that can engage with that and show us different perspectives within a unified narrative. So we need to be ok with authors writing from the perspective of identities other than their own, even- especially- when that inevitably leads to some inaccuracies. The push for diversity may have lead to greater inter-novel diversity, but it has, ironically, heavily damaged intra-novel diversity in the west, as many authors (understandably) no longer dare to attempt to represent other identity- perspectives in their work.

<comment><USER10> But is it worth it to have less volume and more authenticity?

<comment><USER9> It's not less volume though, it's no volume. No-one can write authentically as black and white, straight and gay, cis and trans, but we need books that incorporate all of those and more. Conceivably collaborative novels could be an answer, but I haven't seen them be very successful either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For thise interested in Murakami's contemporaries, Banana Yoshimoto is an interesting case. I've only read one of her works, _Kitchen_ , but the similarity is almost astonishing. They both cover themes of loss, a strong sense of a mystical undercurrent right underneath everyday life, and independent (but not necessarily rebellious) protagonists -- and, while it may be an artifact of translation, they have similarly uncluttered but lively prose. She came a bit after he did, in the late 80s, so maybe he influenced her.

In Chinese, Ge Fei's _Invisibility Cloak_ \-- while a much more recent work -- also comes to mind, although there's something harder and less dreamy about it. _Invisibility Cloak_ is about a niche audio technician and hobbyist who gets involved with a strange underworld customer, and I'll leave it at that :)

If you like Murakami and want to dip a toe into "deeper" (or at least more prestigious and less popular) Japanese fiction, Kenzaburo Oe ( _Changeling_ , _A Personal Matter_ ) is a good starting point. If you want to go darker, a little more unhinged, and on the opposite end of the political spectrum, Yukio Mishima ( _Confessions of a Mask_ ) is also good.

If you want to go even further back, Junichiro Tanizaki's _The Makioka Sisters_ is an oddly enjoyable story of adult sisters and their shifting relationships -- if Proust is like a jungle, alive and profligate and almost obscenely lush, then Tanizaki is more like fresh-cut wood, clean and with a certain reserve and neutrality, but still alive.

I find Yasunari Kawabata the least accessible of all these writers, but he seems to be held in high esteem in Japan. His _Snow Country_ is I'm guessing making references to things I don't understand, but it's at least pleasant to read, and the ending is (I'm told, and at least kind of feel, but not with any sophistication) a very nice example of _ma_ , which Wikipedia tells me roughly means negative space.

Finally, to end an overlong post, I first heard of most of these things in Brian Phillips' excellent longform article connecting modern Japanese sumo, older Japanese literature, and Yukio Mishima's very strange attempted coup/suicide: [http://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan- hak...](http://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-hakuho-yukio- mishima-novelist-seppuku/)

</comment><comment><USER12> > It's impossible to overestimate the depth of his influence on contemporary > Japanese literature and culture,

This is complete 100% pure grade A nonsense. It's like saying "it's impossible to overestimate the depth of Dan Brown's influence on contemporary America literature and culture." Haruki Murakami has lots of obsessive fans, but he has had almost zero influence on Japanese literature or culture because nobody other than his rabid fans cares about his writing.

> Japan's current literary and cultural scene takes in "light novels", brisk > narratives that lean heavily on sentimentality and romance and often feature > visuals drawn from manga-style aesthetics, and dystopian post-apocalyptic > stories of intimate violence, such as Natsuo Kirino's suspense thrillers, > Out and Grotesque.

This is also total garbage. "Light novels" are specific (terrible) genre of young adult novels with anime style illustrations (yes, illustrations, not just "aesthetics") that are probably aimed chiefly at middle schoolers. Natsuo Kirino's books are not "light novels." This article is intentionally trying to conflate these completely different things in order to misleadingly suggest that actual Japanese literature has been influenced by "manga-style aesthetics."

> Music plays a prominent role in much contemporary Japanese literature; but > it is not mere metaphor. Murakami...

Yes, Haruki Murakami loves to litter his books with references, Ready Player One style, but this is not something that is normal in Japanese literature.

> But there are larger currents at work that make today's Japanese stories, > poems, animations and manga so vivid as domestic cultural artefacts, and so > ripely attractive to the rest of the world.

> Ten years ago I wrote in my book Japanamerica:

So basically, "Having written a book about the popularity of anime in the US makes me an expert on Japanese literature." Please.

<comment><USER13> Ah, there it is. It wouldn't be an online discussion of Murakami without at least one person vehemently arguing that his work is garbage, that most Japanese people don't care about him, and that his novels don't reflect Real Japan.

<comment><USER14> I actually think that most people in Japan don't really care about him. Grew up in Japan as a native, very few of my friends actually read his novel. Everyone knows he's a famous author, but that doesn't mean his work is popular among the masses. I wouldn't say it's garbage, but I tend to think he's famous mostly because all the critics praise him.

<comment><USER13> I didn't mean that he was wrong, only that they were trite observations that somebody always mentions. Even the fact that his work is not popular among the masses doesn't add much to the conversation, any more than pointing out that the average American doesn't care about Jeffrey Eugenides, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen, or Thomas Pynchon...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've read and enjoyed some Murakami (Norwegian Wood and Hard-boiled Wonderland), but can anyone recommend some (or one) other Japanese authors to check out? This is especially intriguing to me:

> ... Japanese stories focus on the individual adrift in seas of excessive > convenience and information, obsessed with personal not political > identities, and questions of the soul.

Or maybe some other Murakami. I can say I enjoyed Norwegian Wood quite a bit more then Hard-boiled Wonderland.

<comment><USER16> Three Japanese authors that are wildly different from Murakami:

* Yukio Mishima. Prose is incredibly dense to the point of being baroque (there are pages of footnotes even in the Japanese originals), but there's nobody else quite like him: heavy focus on themes of sex, death and mysticism. "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" is his most famous work but the "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy is also good.

 _What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity…_

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

* Osamu Dazai. The F. Scott Fitzgerald of Japan in time, themes and popularity, wrote a series of heavily autobiographical novels about his struggles with money, health, family and basically everything. Fairly grim but compelling reading.

 _The year before last I was expelled from my family and, reduced to poverty overnight, was left to wander the streets, begging help for various quarters, barely managing to stay alive from one day to the next, and just when I 'd begun to think I might be able to support myself with my writing, I came down with a serious illness. Thanks to the compassion of others, I was able to rent a small house in Funabashi, Chiba, next to the muddy sea, and spent the summer there alone, convalescing. Though battling an illness that each and every night left my robe literally drenched with sweat, I had no choice but to press ahead with my work. The cold half pint of milk I drank each morning was the only thing that gave me a certain peculiar sense of the joy in life; my mental anguish and exhaustion were such that the oleanders blooming in one corner of the garden appeared to me merely flicking tongues of flame..._

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

* Murakami Ryu. Not to be confused with his namesake, Ryu's writing is very opposite of whimsical and "Almost Transparent Blue" is shockingly brutal.

 _This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%AB_Murakami](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%AB_Murakami)

<comment><USER17> I second Mishima, who has not let me down. I enjoyed "Confessions of a Mask", and plan to read "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" next and the last 2 books of his tetralogy.

 _By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive the Truth. And first we must know that each of the petals has eighty-four thousand veins and that each vein gives eighty-four thousand lights._

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Ar-Curunir Murakami books are rather weird; when I first read Kafka on the Shore (my first Murakami book), there didn't seem to be anything happening in story; yet, I couldn't put it down and was up the whole night finishing it.

I think his appeal is his ability to describe surreal events and commonplace events in the same sentence without a hiccup; it feels very natural.

<comment><USER18> Same. For recommendation, Which one did you read next ?

<comment><USER19> My introduction to Murakami was Hard-Boiled Wonderland [0]. It was unlike anything I'd read before and thought it was really bloody good. I think I read it over a couple of evenings, was quite hard to put down.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard- Boiled_Wonderland_and_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard- Boiled_Wonderland_and_the_End_of_the_World)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I own pretty much everything Murakami has ever written, including his non- fiction, and while I enjoy them all, _Dance Dance Dance_ might be my favorite. I also never see anyone recommend it, which seems odd to me. An old hotel elevator that opens to a void where the Sheep Man waits for you. It's utterly bizarre. I love it.

 _Norwegian Wood_ is also very good, but it doesn't have my favorite trait of Murakami's other writing: the easy surreality of it. An unseen world pushes into the world of his characters, and they underreact. In terms of overall concerns, the Sheep Man is as pressing as a date with an attractive woman.

In a similar vein, _CivilWarLand in Bad Decline_ by George Saunders is both lightly funny and surreal. _Strange Weather in Tokyo_ by Hiromi Kawakami reminded me a bit of the meloncholy of _Norwegian Wood_. _The New York Trilogy_ by Paul Auster is also very reminiscent of Murakami.

<comment><USER4> It's worth warning that Dance Dance Dance is a sequel to his Rat trilogy (which ends with A Wild Sheep Chase, which for many years was the only in the trilogy available in English). It makes references to characters and events in those books.

Personally, I read it after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is his masterpiece. Compared to WUBC, Dance feels like a unfinished dress rehearsal by a middle-schooler. Dance is full of ideas, but never builds a cohesive universe. There are killers and shared dreams and/alternate universes and so on, but none of it adds up to a very satisfying whole. WUBC, on the other hand, actually constructs, in quite masterly fashion, a mythology. Murakami is able to hold himself back and keep things mysterious, but the mysteries don't seem random, and the drama around to unravel them unfolds organically. It feels like a very carefully planned novel, unlike some of his other ramshackle plots. And the dream magic isn't there for weirdness; it actually serves a very important narrative point, one that leads to plot resolution and real catharsis, and the magical aspects don't seem so magical as David Lynchian, like something out of Twin Peaks (especially the revival series!). Some of his books, including Dance, seem full of intentional weirdness where Murakami is throwing everything at the wall to see if it would stick, but everything in WUBC just works.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the reply. I agree with your assessment but not your characterization.

You seem very plot-focused. One of the things I like about Murakami's writing is the somewhat random, unfinished quality. It's like life in that respect. The plot is generally incidental; his novels seem like they're meant to evoke an atmosphere and a feeling.

In other words, we are frequently dropped into the middle of an otherwise unremarkable character's life where they experience a turning point in their view of the world and (in many cases) reality. And then life goes on. In other words, the plot is only there to support the character's internal journey.

<comment><USER4> It's not that I'm plot-focused — some of my favourite novels don't have much of a plot at all — but I expect a novel to provide a certain structure that has a point to it.

To me, Dance comes across as an immature sketch, an example where Murakami had lots of things he wanted to include, but he didn't know to create the architecture around which themes could come together. Some of the plot points seem like Murakami wanting to burrow into a kind of Lynchian Hollywood reality, with serial killers and weird hotels. I didn't find those as being interesting ways to explore the character's "internal journey".

Dance doesn't "click", whereas the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is extremely satisfying in the way it does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you're interested in Murakami in general, his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is really interesting, showing the intersection of Marathons and writing in his life.

</comment><comment><USER22> IMO Japanese writing before Murakami is worth looking at, staring with the greats of the early 20th century.

<comment><USER23> I liked "The Woman in the Dune" by Abe, which was my first book by a Japanese author. Any particular recommendations?

<comment><USER22> I liked Takasebune by Mori Ougai as a short parable that's written very powerfully.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think one of the things I like about Murakami is that his writing doesn't feel pretentious and is matter-of-factly, even though most of it is quite fantastical.

I really can't bear pretentiousness in writing (or music).

</comment><comment><USER25> i strongly suggest everyone to watch subtle family dramas from Koreeda, very relaxing, you can start with Still walking or After the storm, it's odd how can we relate to people living in completely different culture so much</comment>