Ask HM: How do you get good sleep? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> This is not medical advice. See a doctor to check for underlying illness causing insomnia.

1) Concentrate on sleep hygiene first.

(<http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/insomnia/Documents/sleepdiary.pdf>)

([http://www.cks.nhs.uk/insomnia/management/scenario_insomnia/...](http://www.cks.nhs.uk/insomnia/management/scenario_insomnia/good_sleep_hygiene))

(<http://www.papworthrssc.nhs.uk/sleep-services-hygiene.php>)

You'll see that routine is important. Develop a "going to bed" routine. For some people that will be having a shower at wearing particular clothing. Others will have a warm milky drink then brush their teeth. The routine is important because it 'tells' your body that it's time for sleep.

2) You might find that sleep hygiene is still not enough. You could try one of the z drugs for a week to help kick your body back into a routine.

3) If that doesn't work you can try CBT for insomnia. It's hard to find quality CBT for insomnia.

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely not insomnia. Just trying to get some information as to how I can get better sleep and not be so groggy in the morning.

Thanks for the links. I had no idea that exercise before going to bed was poor sleep hygiene. The whole no napping also comes as a surprise. I never managed to nap because it takes me way to long to fall asleep but many of my friends do and they find it has really positive effects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here are a few things that have worked for me.

* No soda - I found soda messed with my body chemistry quite a bit, also affecting my sleep patterns. I sleep and feel better without it.

* No caffeine after 12pm - I have most of my caffeine between 6-8 AM, with the occasional cup of coffee before lunch.

* Very little alcohol on work nights - More than two beers/one cocktail, I've found, contributes to a really poor quality sleep for me.

* Wake up between 5-6 AM, reading in bed by 9 PM (sleeping by 10 usually). Getting into a routine helps me set aside the 7-8 hours of sleep I need each night.

* Exercise - I go to a personal trainer 3x a week after work, and do cardio on the off days. This helps get me to sleep at night, since I'll usually be pretty tired after workouts.

* Eliminate stress at work - I found that for a few months, big projects at work were keeping me up at night. I had to consciously stop thinking about work in my personal time, which helped me sleep.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also cut down on soda and caffein 100%, and I feel much better overall. I could never go back. I used to get so addicted. When I began my internship I would be going through up to 10 shitty drinks a day. As soon as I completely cut them out my productivity, focus and energy dramatically increased.

Everyone is telling me to wake up early...eurgh. I'm going to do it but I'm really going to miss sleeping in, especially during the weekend where I go to bed at 3-6am on average.

<comment><USER4> Agree. Cutting down on your caffein and alcohol helps so much. You don't notice once it's starting to affect your routines but once you quit it (even for a while) your body will feel so good again

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The single best thing that helps me consistently to get restful enough sleep that I wake up feeling refreshed the next day is to be OUTSIDE (not just indoors in bright light, but actually outside in daylight) doing aerobic exercise such as walking or biking somewhere where I need to be to accomplish some task. (We chose our housing location to be near a city trail so that we can walk or bike to the public library and to the bank and to much of our shopping. Our son who attends the local high school can walk or bike there too.) Generally, people who get outside (for light exposure to reset their biological clock) and exercise (for physical tiredness and mental relaxation) sleep fairly well. As DanBC correctly points out in his top-level comment, you may need medical advice for persistent insomnia, but if what he advises and what I advise here works for you, great. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah that makes a of sense. I go to school at Stanford, so I'm outside running around to go to classes all the time. It's been really bad here in Paris, where I've been spending almost all my time coding in my room.

And its definitely not at the case where I need medical attention. There are mornings (like today) where I wake up incredibly groggy. Hopefully everything will be better as soon as I get back into my daily routine with exercise again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to find sleeping hard. The best solution i have found so far is really simple.

-Stop thinking so much!!!

A few years ago, i asked my brother (who somehow falls asleep within 5 minutes every time) what he dreams about. He responded, saything that he does not dream! I was like, yea right. Who doesn't dream! Then, the otherday i found this really interesting article on how to fall asleep faster. They went on to say that although there are alot of factors that affect us (light, food, water etc), the biggest reason we are not sleeping easily is because we are just thinking too much!

It's really not hard, just try not to think about anything analytical. Dream of flowers, clouds etc (don't count sheep), just don't dream of anything that makes you think.

I now see why my brother fell asleep so fast, it's because he wasn't thinking. (well, he probably was but not nearly as much as what I was).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I can't even begin to describe how much I think at night. It's when I make plans, collect my thoughts about what happened throughout the day, think about what I have do to tomorrow, the list is endless.

I think that two of the issues is that thinking is fun, and I find that 'not thinking about anything analytical' is incredibly boring for me, to the point where I can get aggravated. So after a while of thinking about my breathing, and random boring, non-thought provoking crap I give up and BAM all the intense thoughts that I was desperate to thing about come back.

A second issue, which is very linked, is the fact that I read a lot. Reading does make me tired, which, I imagine is plus, but it's even thought provoking. I'm not a fan of novels so I tend to read factual books..

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a weird problem that when I'm around people I fall asleep before midnight, when I'm alone for several days I start staying up way too late (1:00am and beyond). Normally after work (which can be anytime between 4:30pm and 6:00pm) I have to start winding down and stop thinking about all the work I did and have to do. I either read for 1-2 hours right after work or exercise such as yoga, running or soccer. That calms me down mentally and I go home, cook dinner, watch one tv show or play on my 360, shower and then iron my clothes for the next day. Showering and ironing clothes send a clear signal that it's time to go to bed.

</comment><comment><USER8> I find that when I've been working late my mind is a mess of racing thoughts and it's impossible to get to sleep quickly.

What I have been doing lately is listening to audiobooks, which really help to prevent my thoughts from jumping around. My books of choice have been the Harry Potter series (the ones read by Stephen Fry, of course) - his voice is really soothing, and the books are (generally) not too loud, or varying in volume. I find that generally I fall asleep within about 10-15 minutes of starting.

The worst thing is that I struggle to get to sleep without it now.

<comment><AUTHOR> That seems like a good solution. As I mentioned above I'm not a fan of stories/novels, but I'll give podcasts a shot.

<comment><USER9> I think fiction is better than listening to podcasts. The goal is to turn your brain off, not to think.

<comment><AUTHOR> but I don't like fiction :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I listen to BBC Radio 4 podcasts on my iPod.

I think a key think is when you finally lie down and shut your eyes, have something "neutral" to think about until you drop off. EG Do not think about how you have too much to do at work, instead think about something harmless like (daft examples) what your perfect PC would look like, how you would spend a lottery win, etc. Or listen to a Radio 4 podcast on a subject that mildly interests you.

</comment><comment><USER11> Here are a few things that work for me:

      - Limit the number of hours you're in front of a screen during the day.
      - Don't look at any screen past 5 p.m
      - Don't exhaust yourself mentally during the day, stay focused.
      - Exercise regularly.
      − Go outside.
      - Don't concentrate on hard problems a few hours before going to bed. Relax.

</comment><comment><USER12> This post is already 14 hours behind, but here's what worked for groggy mornings. Groggy mornings are attributed to a dehydrated body.

1) Drink couple of (large) glasses of water.

2) First thing you do after waking up, is drink water. Cold water - better.

Try it for a week. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER13> * Work out - Exhaust yourself

* Meditation - Empty the mind. Inculcate thoughtless awareness

* Yoga - Stretch the stress out of the body, let it relax

</comment><comment><USER14> I barely get any sleep (too busy making things) and when I do, it's great. So get less sleep and it will all be great!

</comment><comment><USER15> Reading a book in a sleeping position helps a lot. I usually fall asleep after 10 pages. You should try it.

</comment><comment><USER16> Personally, I generally don't.

</comment><comment><USER17> Simplest way: get exhaustively I-can't-keep-my-eyes-open-tired.

Don't sleep 10 hours every day. Wake up at 6:30am starting tomorrow. Go to sleep when you get tired. Repeat.

It also helps to do things in the real world. If you're spending all your time inside not moving around very much, you'll end up with that annoying situation where it's 2am, you're tired, but you can't fall asleep.

<comment><AUTHOR> Going to have to get rid of the habit of snoozing and waking up at a fixed time everyday. 6.30 would be pushing it but 8 am should be feasible.

<comment><USER17> Waking up at 0630 makes sure you'll be almost passing out by 9pm-10pm (please don't drive late if you're waking up super early). The goal is to fall asleep after all. You can obviously adjust as necessary, but may as well go all in if you need to experience real sleep again.

Other things that help waking up early: move nine timezones left in the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats funny. I'm in Paris, and I'm heading back to school at Stanford in 4 days. Thats exactly 9 timezones.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


DARPA gives $3M to Continuum Analytics to improve Python for big data - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/us-defense-agency-feeds-python/240151767 <comment><USER2> More info from Continuum Analytics:

<http://continuum.io/blog/continuum-wins-darpa-xdata-funding>

The money is going to develop Blaze and Bokeh:

<http://blaze.pydata.org/>

<https://github.com/ContinuumIO/Bokeh>

<comment><USER3> Better D3 integration from within Python would be awesome.

<comment><USER4> Bokeh has three components. BokehJS runs in the browser, the Bokeh server and the Bokeh Python client library.

BokehJS draws plots in the browser with canvas. BokehJS maintains a data model of plot models (plots, renederers of different types, tools) with Backbone JS. It has a a connection to the Bokeh server via web sockets.

The Bokeh server keeps track of plot objects and other models with redis. It keeps these persistently in documents.

The python client connects to the server and either create new plots or updates existing plots. You can create a plot with python and get a url to embed that plot in any web page. This means that your python code can just be a script that doesn't have to worry about serving up a web page.

We intend to write client libraries in other languages like java, R, and ruby to name a few.

<comment><USER5> So... the server would maintain a set of grammar-of-graphics-like objects, which would be replicated as backbone models? In theory we could use whichever graphics libraries we want on top the backbone layer, right?

Bokeh is starting to sound like everything I've ever wanted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Blaze has the potential to be great. Numpy/Scipy (and previously, numarry and NumPy) are, at least to scientists, some of the most useful libraries in Python. Being able to express computation in a high level language, and having it run in native code, yet still be able to access the data in python, is often a major productivity enhancer.

I'm still a bit skeptical Blaze will catch on. It's ambitious, and the python numeric community has had to chase each new implementation (with serious issues with backwards compatibility and cost of adoption) over the years. I would actually far prefer numpy and its limited functionality, over a much more complex system that didn't have any adopters.

<comment><USER5> Having a bit of a look at the docs^1, I don't really see it as "yet another arrays package". The API exposes generalized table/array operations, and a subset of those features can be implemented using NumPy's ndarrays. If the interface is clean, then I don't think adoption will be an issue: there simply isn't anything else that does this.

You are absolutely right that both of these projects are extremely ambitious, but, given the $3 mil grant, I can't help but be optimistic.

1 [http://blaze.pydata.org/docs/overview.html#blaze-is-a- genera...](http://blaze.pydata.org/docs/overview.html#blaze-is-a- generalization-of-numpy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great! Continuum Analytics are doing cool stuff for numeric / big data Python and it's great to see the language getting more and more traction in this domain.

<comment><USER8> Will this mean better scientific computing with Python?

<comment><USER9> Depends on what you call scientific computing, Continuum Analytics appears to have a data/stats focus (I now work as a statistician and people talks good about their products, I never used them), there I believe Python has the possibility to displace R and Octave/SciLab/MatLab as the language for light academic stuff, for CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and CEM (Computational Electrodynamics) guys generally run on C, C++ and Fortran, or whatever runs Numerical Linear Algebra faster, I doubt Python will take this post anytime soon.

<comment><USER10> I doubt, that you will find it easy to beat well written numeric Python code with naive C, C++ or Fortran approach.

Python is not inherently slower than C, C++ or Fortran. It is just a language after all. If you have a fast implementation of computational engine, like Numpy, you can reach speeds of C++ in computational tasks. If you have an optimizer that simplifies your math expressions, before running them - you can get better than naive C++ approach. An optimizer and computational engine that optimally offloads work from CPU to GPU can give an order of magnitude advantage over naive C++/blas code.

And to give you a concrete example - there is a nice Python library called Theano, that is doing just than.

<comment><USER11> > _I doubt, that you will find it easy to beat well written numeric Python > code with naive C, C++ or Fortran approach._

Huh? People do it all the time. Naive, but not memory-leaking or improper complexity using, C/C++ etc code, beats Python hands town -- and can be more than 10-20 times faster.

> _Python is not inherently slower than C, C++ or Fortran. It is just a > language after all._

An interpreted language, with a not-that-good interpreter and garbage collector, non primitive integers and other such things holding it back.

> _If you have a fast implementation of computational engine, like Numpy, you > can reach speeds of C++ in computational tasks._

That's because the "fast implementation" is NOT written in Python.

<comment><USER10> Let's go down to some example and consider a typical numeric problem, for example estimation of a cross entropy gradient of some function on your data.

With Python (and Theano computational engine) you can write something along the lines:

        def cost(goal, prediction):
            crossEntropy = -goal * log(prediction) - (1 - goal) * log(goal - prediction)
            return mean(crossEntropy)

        prediction = 1 / (1 + exp( ....  -dot(x,w) - b + ...)) > 0.5
        gradW, gradB = grad(cost(y, prediction) + (w**2).sum(), [w,b])

And then just apply that function to a matrix containing your data. That's it. When you apply a function, it will be interpreted, converted into a computation graph, this computation graph will be optimized and parts of the computation will be offloaded to GPU with memory transfers between the host and GPU taken care of, and you will get a result in a user friendly and efficient Numpy array.

The resulting computation will be nearly optimal and limited by memory bandwith, CPU - GPU bus bandwidth and GPU FOPS rate. With luck you can get close to theoretical maximum of your GPU floating point performance. And all done in a few lines of Python.

Now consider the same in C++. Yes, it can be done. But there are just no open source libraries available that can do that. Closest open-source implementation that I know of is gpumatrix, a port of C++ Eigen library to GPU. And it doesn't even come close to what is available in Python. So with C++, if you want to match the performance of these few lines of Python code, good luck studying Cuda or OpenCL and implementing the computation engine right, from the first time.

(disclaimer) I'm not in any way affiliated with OP and I actually use (and like) C/C++ a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I saw a presentation about Blaze at PyData. The CEO of Continuum was the author of Numpy and said they are doing everything he would have done differently in Blaze.

Also, Blaze is attempting to abstract the concept of having huge arrays distributed across multiple systems, clusters, clouds, whatever. So imagine having large distributed arrays that you can easily perform computations on. Could be very powerful if it works as planned.

</comment><comment><USER13> "If they can learn an easy language, they won't have to rely on an external software development group to complete their analysis."

Although scientists earn more credit here than business people, allow me to make a skeptical remark:

This is exactly the same reason they had in the past regarding with SQL. "Business people can't wait for programmers to run their queries; if they can learn an easy language, they won't have to rely on programmers to do that for them..."

In the end, the business people did not do SQL; they just force developers to do it for them, using SQL.

History repeats itself, perpetuating fallacies

<comment><USER14> Many business people do write SQL. Typically in a poorly administered access database, but they do write SQL.

Scientists also already use several easy languages (r, MATLAB, SAS, increasingly python) rather than relying on outside developers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would be really cool, if part of this money went for funding PyPy's NumPy effort (they still need $15K to be fully funded)

</comment><comment><USER16> This will sure make me to learn python over ruby

</comment><comment><USER17> Article calls it both a 'donation' and an 'investment' - which is it?

<comment><USER18> I'd guess 'grant' would be a better term than either for what's happening here. AFAIK, DARPA doesn't take equity, but does make grants based on intended deliverables.

('Investment' was used in the article in the general sense of "an investment in our children's future" or "investing in shared infrastructure", rather than expecting a specific liquid return like cash dividends or an appreciated exit event.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> All I see in these libraries are standard data types which are already available in Python. Are these libraries even being developed by mathematicians? It looks like someone hired a bunch of first grade computer science students to chunk out wrappers.

<comment><USER20> There are many new data types introduced by these libraries, distinct from the standard library types. The N-dimentional array is the most notable one.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Reclaim – an adaptive calendar app that plans time for your routines - <AUTHOR> https://reclaim.ai/daily-habits/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello Hacker News!

Even though I'm only modestly active, Hacker News and its community have been a staple in my life pretty much since launch, through 3 startups and 3 kids. So I'd love to hear what folks think of my latest creation.

We launched it last week and have pretty different messaging than "policy engine" for the general public. But for this audience I figured it's a more helpful description.

I'd love to answer any questions about the product or the technical details for how we built it. And of course, feedback is very welcome.

Thank you!

<comment><USER2> Hi there! This is a great product idea and deserves more attention on HN. Please ask @dang to see if he can get your more front-page time.

One point of feedback: you mention "policy engine" in your Show HN title but your website uses the word "habits". You should use consistent messaging.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha I'll give it a shot. I'd love more exposure, not just because it's a bit self serving but also because time management is a topic I care a ton about.

Re: phrasing... I purposely chose a more techie (and I suppose accurate) term here. But we didn't for our default messaging because "regular" people wouldn't really grok a "policy engine". Or perhaps you're saying you think they would? :)

<comment><USER2> I'm saying that you should pick a term, make sure everyone groks your meaning, and stick to it. :-)

I used to work for an organization that was extremely meeting-heavy. My colleague would block his entire calendar on Fridays just so he could have a day free to focus on getting things done.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Optimizing Handwriting - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@masonicboom/optimizing-handwriting-c301135d5e22 <comment><USER2> I write e with one stroke. I am very confused by this article.

In fact, I use one stroke for all lowercase letters except f, i, j, k, t, x, and z.

<comment><USER3> Going by the diagram, it looks as if substantial changes in direction are being counted as a new stroke (which is arguable). Look at `r' \- I somehow doubt the pen is lifted between drawing one part and the next.

<comment><USER4> This is correct. I chose this definition of "stroke" for simplicity. It's meant as a proxy measure for "difficulty of writing the letter". A better measure might be "median time it takes to write each letter at an acceptable level of legibility", but that would require a lot more effort. The numerical results will depend on the measure of effort, but I suspect the general point will be the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I also have some qualms with how you decide what is a "stroke", but this is an interesting line of analysis.

However, I would argue it is more important for an alphabet to optimized for readability rather than writability. If you want to write fast, learn shorthand or the stenotype!

<comment><USER4> Admittedly, the choice of "stroke" definition is an imperfect measure of the cost to write each letter (see my comment above).

Even if you want readability to weigh more heavily than writability into the optimization, wouldn't you agree that increasing writability, at no cost to readability, would be good (it's a "Pareto improvement")? This is the point of the concluding section, which discusses swapping the meaning of existing letters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If we are going to do radical alphabet redesigns, I suggest coming up with new designs for each of the 26 letters so that it only takes one stroke to write each. That would probably result in an alphabet that would be more difficult to read, but it would be optimized for the number-of-strokes-for-average- english-writing heuristic.

<comment> david-given You might be interested to read about Elian:

[http://www.ccelian.com/ElianScriptFull.html](http://www.ccelian.com/ElianScriptFull.html)

I think the letter notation could use optimisation --- the cost per letter varies extensively, but the letters are assigned alphabetically, so letters near the top of the alphabet are cheaper to write than letters at the bottom --- but I like the underlying principle that it's designed for _humans_ to write, not machines, therefore it's intended from the ground up to allow expression and choice in how you write it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a great optimization: write in cursive! So much time is wasted writing every letter separately. If it's still too slow, there's always shorthand.</comment>


HoloLens secret sauce: A 28nm customized 24-core DSP engine built by TSMC - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/22/microsoft_hololens_hpu/ <comment><USER2> For those who haven't had the pleasure: developing on Tensilica Xtensa cores generally means living within 128-256KB of directly-accessible memory; a windowed register file that makes writing your own exception handlers "interesting"; a 6-year-old GCC bolted to a proprietary backend; per-seat licensing fees to use the compiler; and a corporate owner that's only halfway interested in the ecosystem they now control.

So yeah, kind of wishing it would just die and let ARM take over the embedded space.

<comment><USER3> > a 6-year-old GCC bolted to a proprietary backend

Not only a violation of the GPL, but for a code owned by the FSF and even Stallman himself.

That's a bold move. And very douchey.

<comment><USER4> Typically those are creative workarounds for the GPL not actual violations.

<comment><USER5> The question of whether what they've produced is a derivative work of GCC is one for the courts, which tend to take a dim view of creative workarounds.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely not. The GPL boundary is very clearly defined and intentionally has never been brought to court.

<comment><USER5> How so? The GPL grants permission to distribute derivative works in general under the GPL, and additionally to distribute derivative works consisting of object code that is the compiled form of system libraries (narrowly defined) without including that source (though AIUI still under the GPL); that's all. If someone were distributing a derivative work of a GPLed program not under the GPL and therefore without permission (i.e. without being otherwise licensed by the copyright holder), that would be copyright infringement. The question of what is or is not a derivative work in the general case is absolutely a question for the court. The FSF explicitly says as much: [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.html#MereAggregation](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.html#MereAggregation)

<comment><USER4> All of this is irrelevant. The GPL stops at the process boundary and that's exactly what these compilers do. They provide the modifications to GCC itself under the GPL and then have separate executables that are proprietary that feed things in and out of GCC.

<comment><USER6> It's still pretty clearly a violation of the intentions of the gcc developers, and something that only exists to wrap one product seems very suspiciously like a derivative work. I'd be curious to see this tested in court.

<comment><USER4> But the FSF would not be curious to test this in court because they know they lose. I had this conversation many years ago with people that wrote extactly this type of software and the general consensus was that the FSF would stay away from probing the GPL there because there is angood chance that the ruling would set a precedent they don't want. The FUD surrounding the license in that regard is preferrable.

In general it's 2016 and no longer relevant. The world moved on to LLVM and these GCC using toolchains are on their way out for good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) chip used in its virtual reality HoloLens specs_

It seems to be insurmountably hard for press to understand that virtual reality and augmented reality are related but distinct concepts.

Beyond that, interesting teardown. The 10w number is great, but my guess is a lot of the high power processing happens in the sensor suite because it's using 4 repurposed IR sensor receiver combos to relay depth data in a highly structured way. That means this processor is the glue between the IMU and RGBD camera combo. I think in the end this can't scale down to consumer side with this approach, not to mention the other hindrances to scaling down with the protection system.

<comment><USER8> Isn't VR just AR with the camera covered?

<comment><USER9> Not really. VR is an entire immersive environment to itself, it doesn't have to interact with reality.

AR has to blend in to the environment around, so it's a different class of problem. It has to locate points in the scene to add things to and project in a believable manner.

<comment><USER10> Turn off the lights. It's VR.

<comment><USER9> Not really, turn out the lights and you'll stop seeing AR at all.

VR will, for example, create a room with a table and put a chess game on that table. This all happens within the VR author's control and designs.

AR has to analyse the scene and find the table, find the angle the table is at relative to the eyes, compute the position and perspective of the table and the chess board to look correct on the table.

Both have the same end result - images projected to a user's eyes - but how they get there is quite different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> HoloLens 3D miniMap of House with Synced Ladies +1 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-JvTZjbwNs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-JvTZjbwNs) GG:)

<comment><USER12> That cracked me up. Is that blue circle a gaze tracker? because it keeps pointing at virtual boobs whenever he looks at the models :)) not to mention sending avatar to the kitchen, priceless :D

<comment><USER13> It is! I feel like gaze tracking is one thing that's missing from VR headsets that's in the hololens. Social VR won't work until your eye movement and facial expressions can be translated into the application.

<comment><USER14> I'm sure gaze tracking would make rendering more efficient, just render the stuff the user is looking at in high def, the rest in low polygon and low rez textures.

<comment> Const-me Unlike head, eyeballs rotate too fast.

Wikipedia says "the peak angular speed of the eye during a saccade reaches up to 900°/s in humans".

For reality-like experience, you need to have sub-millisecond rendering latency. For a moderately-complex 3D scene, current GPUs can't do anything close to that.

<comment><USER12> Modern mouse sensors can track ridiculous speeds and accelerations, 6000-10000 frames per second are the norm nowadays. Eye might rotate fast, but your brain turns off the picture during saccades.

<comment> Const-me You're right, low latency sensor is a minor problems. Low latency rendering is much harder to solve.

A good-looking 3D scene usually takes around 10-15 milliseconds to render. For the last decades, GPUs were optimized for throughput, not for lower latencies.

One common method how existing VR products achieve lower latencies — they render in a larger buffer, then shift the result to accommodate for head rotation since when the rendering was started, then present to the VR headset.

With dynamic LOD based on eye targets this trick will not work. To show better details at the center, you have to actually re-render your scene using better LoDs/textures near the view center. And that, my friend, is going to take 10-15ms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lay speculation here:

If the first run is on a 28nm process, does this suggest the second generation on e.g. Intel's 14nm process might yield a drastically more powerful HoloLens model in the current form factor, or at least a more compact one capable of all the same (assuming the optics were also compacted) for revision 2?

There's a whole ton of stuff I'm not taking into account such as the physical size of the current HPU, but my guess is that this is the largest point of improvement just going by the process alone.

<comment><USER16>
      e.g. Intel's 14nm process

Intel doesn't let anyone else use their fabs. TSMC has their own fabs, and their own fab tech.

14nm is outdated, by the way. TSMC says they'll start shipping 10nm parts by the end of the year: [http://en.ctimes.com.tw/DispNews.asp?O=HJZ4GC65UYSSAA00NW](http://en.ctimes.com.tw/DispNews.asp?O=HJZ4GC65UYSSAA00NW)

<comment><USER17> _> Intel doesn't let anyone else use their fabs._

I don't think this is true any more.

<comment><USER18> Did they just buy a license for ARM or announce they'd let people use their fabs for ARM?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well this explains a lot. In my university (Russia, Mathematic-Mechanic faculty of SPBu) there are a lot of investments in computer vision stuff and it it almost impossible to build fast and with low TDP software for CV without SDP/FPGA/etc stuff.

</comment><comment><USER11> This article gave a more in-depth look at optics (waveguides) and other parts of Hololens: [http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-hololens- componen...](http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-hololens-components- hpu-28nm,32546.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> Only 10W for all that? While I'm a little sceptical that is an impressive number.

<comment><USER21> Yeah but - 10W all getting radiated inside a single 12x12mm BGA package? Isn't that a lot? It sounds to me like that'd be running very hot...

I had a project with a Raspberry Pi2 which was only drawing ~2.5W all up (including the wifi dongle), and it got flaky when the sun shone on the case and got it a bit warm.

<comment><USER22> 10W is probably on the high-end for passive cooling of such a package, but zero problem with a fan.

<comment><USER23> For reference: an Intel Atom (e.g. Braswell) CPU has a TDP of 6W and a pretty large passive heatsink.

<comment><USER12> also for reference ~10W is Pentium ~100MHz territory. Afair 133MHz was the first one that required fan on top of the heatsink.

<comment><USER24> Fwiw my 486dx2-66 had a fan, and when that fan died we noticed because of corrupted memory crashing the system. Compared to modern CPU coolers it was downright tiny, but required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I love to see when vendors actually modify a chip instead of using just off the shelf parts.

But even then, low bar....

</comment><comment><USER26> Several independent review article about Hololens mention the limited view (relatively small view angle), underwhelming and off putting. (You can immediately spot a sponsored article if it doesn't even mention that issue at all.) iPhone 6 and high end Android smartphones already have augment reality apps with SLAM technology that is far more impressive than what MS PR is suggestion Hololens might one day be able to offer - the E3 presentation in 2015 and 2016 were faked as we know in the meantime.

<comment><USER27> > iPhone 6 and high end Android smartphones already have augment reality apps > with SLAM technology that is far more impressive

This is the most wrong comment I've seen on HN in a long time. The SLAM in Hololens is incredibly impressive and _nothing_ on _any_ smartphone is _one hundredth_ as good, with the possible exception of the still unreleased Project Tango phone.

<comment><USER28> Could you possibly explain for those of us out of the loop as to why? Otherwise I could simply say:

"This is the most wrong comment I've seen on HN in a long time. The SLAM in smartphones are the _same_ as the one in Hololens. Project Tango should prove _even more_ impressive."

And no one would be any wiser.

<comment><USER29> SLAM stands for "simultaneous location and mapping", it's about being in an unknown environment which you need to both map and localise yourself in. I'm familiar with it in the context of robotic navigation, but it seems Hololens deals with it too - mapping the environment to place holograms, localising within that environment because you need to be able to interact with them.

Most smartphones simply don't have to do this, they don't have to map their environments without user input. They don't have to localise themselves within a map of the environment that they've built themselves. Project Tango does do AR and environment mapping on a smartphone, so it does deal with the SLAM problem too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> TLDR; It's running Windows 10 :)

</comment><comment><USER31> This is a GPU rather the a DSP (the tricky part is rendering not filtering). Core count is a bit of a pointless metric unless you know how big/ powerful a core is.

I like the idea of a self contained VR headset with no wires, but I don't think going to see on for ab a decade, there's just too much processing power needed for a realistic experience. I hope I'm wrong!

Edit: It appears this is in fact DSP (digital signal processor). That's a huge amount of power for dedicated signal processing, I'm intrigued to know what can be done with it.

<comment> T-A > self contained VR headset with no wires

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/16/12503948/intel-project- all...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/16/12503948/intel-project-allow-vr- headset-cordless-mixed-reality)

<comment><USER12> castAR is also 'pivoting' from computer accessory to self contained unit</comment></comment></comment>


The Fallout – The medical aftermath of Hiroshima - <AUTHOR> http://hiroshima.australiandoctor.com.au/#c1 <comment><USER2> If you ever get the chance, visit the memorial and museum in Hiroshima.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I had read and occasionally seen a documentary on the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I lived in Tokyo for a while and visited Hiroshima and the A-bomb museum. They had a "scaled" model of the entire city and the bomb hanging on the model with the proportional distance at the height it exploded (represented with red ball - size of billiards ball ) That picture/model is ingrained in my memory - it gave me an instant visual of the scale of horror. Pictures/movies don't come close to describing it. If you can go to the A-bomb museum in Hiroshima - do it.

<comment><USER4> I have not visited Hiroshima, or Japan at all for that matter, but I just recently came back from visiting the beaches of Normandy, the American cemetery, Arromanches, and other war memorials around there.

While obviously not the same thing, I recognize what you say about the scale of horror – it really is unfathomable from pictures, movies, and other representations. You simply have to visit to get a feel for just how big some of these key events of the war actually were, and it's absolutely mind boggling and horrific.

What really got me about visiting Normandy though was how real it all suddenly became. I'd like to think I'm a fairly well educated person when it comes to modern history, and particularly in terms of WW2. But since I grew up in a country that wasn't really pulled into it, everything just seemed so distant (even though it physically wasn't, I'm from Sweden) and in many ways unreal. That all changed with Normandy, and it was a very strange and mixed set of quite strong emotions involved. I can only imagine what it's like to visit Hiroshima, and hope I some day get the chance to do so.

<comment><USER5> I could recommend another, shorter trip, if you can spare a few days: get a Russian visa and drive to Haparanda - Kuhmo - Kostamuksha - Belomorsk. Nowadays, it's a one-day drive.

Look at Stalin's Canal there, and imagine that when it was built, the wasted humans were many enough to lay along the canal, buried there head to toe, to form a chain as long as the man-built parts of the canal itself.

The canal was never economically or militarily useful, it was just a project used to get rid of people.

Not quite as many people killed as in Hiroshima, but they were each one separately and individually starved, beaten or shot to death instead of being killed remotely by one big industrial bomb. The killing machinery was human and it worked slow and it worked eye to eye.

From Belomorsk you can take a boat trip to Solovetsk, which was the original development lab for how to starve people in concentration camps. Both Soviets and Nazis studied and developed their methods based on the findings there.

Notice also that you won't see memorials for those who were killed. The miserable swamps are their monument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As nuclear weapons get larger the radius at which the fire and concussion is deadly grows faster than the radius at which their radiation is deadly. For relatively small bombs a lot of the deaths from the initial explosion are going to be from radiation and the two bombs dropped on Japan were small compared to the ones standing by in the cold war.

Of course, unlike the bombs dropped on Japan modern thermonuclear weapons burn large amount of U328 with the fast neutrons created from fusion, resulting in large amounts of fallout. They may not cause many radiation deaths from their explosion but the fallout they create will endanger people downwind for a long time after the initial explosion.

I don't have words to convey how much I hope we never see those weapons used in anger.

<comment><USER7> _Of course, unlike the bombs dropped on Japan modern thermonuclear weapons burn large amount of U328 with the fast neutrons created from fusion, resulting in large amounts of fallout. They may not cause many radiation deaths from their explosion but the fallout they create will endanger people downwind for a long time after the initial explosion._

That depends, some use U-238 for this purpose to about double the yield, some don't, like the 50 Mt Tsar Bomba in its one test: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba)

 _I don 't have words to convey how much I hope we never see those weapons used in anger._

Nothing that I know about human nature suggests that they'll again never be used in anger, it's only a question of when. Hopefully not any time soon.

<comment><USER6> The replaced the U-238 in the Tsar Bomba test with lead when they tested it at the cost of halving its power, you're right. But sadly I've never heard of that being done with a deployed thermonuclear weapon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When reading on the web, I usually hit ctrl-A (highlight all) to change the contrast of a website's text. Not usually a problem.

On this website, on Chrome, doing this causes it to immediately unhighlight everything, and then eternally highlight-unhighlight-highlight-unhighlight at random intervals. I've never seen quite such bizarre behavior. Works on FF though.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted. I can reproduce this behaviour in Chrome. I don't have the best eyes and occasionally use the same trick to increase legibility.

The myriad subtle ways in which designers of "rich websites" break accessibility can be quite frustrating. And most of it is completely unnecessary - the article would still be an amzing read if it were a classic article with standard scroll behavior.

<comment><USER10> Comments about website formatting are a pestilence, and off-topic for HN. Because the topic of web design is both subjective and very accessible, even to people who have barely skimmed the article, they tend to spawn large, distracting subthreads --- sometimes those subthreads even end up at the tops of threads.

Petitioning site owners to change their design via HN threads almost never works, but (ironically) is virtually guaranteed to degrade the HN thread itself. So, just don't.</comment></comment></comment>


Patent: A method for creating exalted video games and virtual realities... - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/patents?id=aAuzAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4

<comment><USER2> Actual game play path in patent illustration:

"Woman seizes property for redistribution". -> _What does player do?_ -> "Shoot Woman". -> _World is saved._

I don't care what your ideology is, that's funny right there.</comment>


Disturbingly Real Replicants from Hanson Robotics - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2009/07/17/disturbingly-real-replicants-from-hanson-robotics/

<comment><USER2> When they're not moving, they look very real. As soon as they start moving, they look terribly fake.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find the title "disturbingly" stupid. Why should real-looking faces be disturbing?

<http://www.madametussauds.com/London/>

<comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley></comment></comment>


Antari breakout - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1440&bih=802&q=antari+breakout&oq=antari+breakout

<comment><USER2> Thanks for waking up the whole family with that blip :(</comment>


Ask HN: How do you maintain your mental health as a solo founder? - <AUTHOR> Hey everyone. Last year, I was (thankfully) fired from my job and decided to go full time on my side project. I've been doing 4 figures MRR which allows me to live well enough.
Thing is, back then I thought to myself "Great! now I can put everything into my project and improve it massively", but I found that when it was "just a side project" it was easier for me to work on it than it is now. The less I work on it the more pressure I feel to work on it which in turns makes me work on it less.
Luckily for me (or not?), it's providing me with passive income, but I have this nagging feeling that 'someone else would have done so much better than me'. When I had a co-founder on my last startup this burden was shared and also I had someone to be accountable to. Now I'm kinda lost in that regard and I'm doing everything I can to stay busy on other things and not my main source of income.
Has anyone been in this kind of situation? How'd you get out?
Kind of a plug but when I searched for a place to talk about this (and many other issues) I couldn't find one. I'm trying to see if more people need such a place, so if you do, you can visit https://solocity.net and sign up. It's not a product or anything just trying to see if there's a place for a community of solo founders that are interested in helping each other out. <comment><USER2> Why not post solocity as a "Show HN"?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's against the rules to post a pre-launch in Show HN

<comment><USER2> Why not launch?</comment></comment></comment>


Apple Will Support Microsoft's Edge (Win10) at Tomorrow's Event - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/abe238/status/641398174469353472

<comment><USER2> Apple's Keynote Stream on their website will support Microsoft Edge (Win10) for Tomorrow's event. Misleading headline.

</comment><comment><USER3> What really got me is that no other desktop browser was supported.

This is because of HLS streaming. Which Google and Mozilla are fighting against for various reasons and MS Edge now supports.</comment>


Instagram Killer - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsweek.com/vero-social-network-rivals-instagram-keeps-crashing-821618 <comment><AUTHOR> Ok, so I'm looking/reading this article basically saying that this new version of an instagram-like platform is going to replace it and it's on a subscription model. Ok, I get it, this is a good way to monetize, but in the grand scheme of things, no one wants to pay for the convenience of no ads..well, I don't. Maybe it's because I'm cheap. 8-)

To me, what Vimeo is to Youtube is what Vero is to Instagram.

Would you pay for a service like this? Would you pay for ANY social media access? It's bad enough we have to pay for tools to manage social media let along the platforms themselves.</comment>


Survival Of The Stupidest - <AUTHOR> http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/survival_stupidest-77846 <comment><USER2> (Bear in mind that for the duration of this post, I am adopting the definition of stupid as given in "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity." It is not quite the same as "unintelligent", and it is sufficiently well-defined that it is no longer merely an insult, either.)

Amusing, but less insightful than "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity". While it is true that you can construct cases where two stupid people may ruin one smart one's day while coming out with a net win for one or both of them, you have to go farther and show that this case _dominates_. I would submit that it in fact does not, and stupid people will still tend to harm themselves more than anyone around them, if for no other reason than that is the easiest outcome for them to obtain. I do not thing there is a great benefit in running in a great herd of people who are constantly causing the herd a net harm (by definition of stupid), and the herds in this case would tend to eliminate themselves.

I think it is sufficient to observe merely that being smart is _hard_. In the great space of all actions one may take, the vast bulk of them are bad actions that will cause harm. Rather than complicated and IMHO probably false theories about how stupid people can win in herds, somehow converting their huge set of transactions each of which is a net harm into some sort of benefit, one need merely point out that as more people become intelligent, it actually raises the bar for _further_ intelligent actions. The low-hanging fruit has been plucked. For example, some people who were very well adapted for producing net value in the 20th century find it much more difficult in the 21st because we've successfully captured so much value already.

(Also the article falls prey a bit to the idea that a carefully constructed game play strategy can fall to a player who acts stupidly. While, again, you can construct scenarios in which this is true as was done in the article, it is the exception. In general good gameplay strategies do not fall apart when presented with a stupid opponent, they win swiftly. If you really believe this is a general property of game strategies, I invite you to download any competent chess playing program and attack it with a "random" move strategy. It is true that you may force it off the opening book relatively early, but it will still efficiently tear you apart, not react with the AI-equivalent of stunned confusion. This is a sort of low-grade AI/game theory urban legend.)

<comment><USER3> Some of the stupidest things I have ever seen were done by people who, by any reasonable measure, are extremely smart. I've never personally met anyone who was "smart" in every possible area of their lives - its not just "work/tech" smarts that count if you insist on making this evaluation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I told my daughter to bring her umbrella to school today because the weather report called for rain. But it didn't rain. I am, by definition, stupid because I caused a loss for another person and derived no gain.

So it seems odd to have an outcome-based definition of stupidity and not a decision-based definition. Stupidity can't be attributed to a person if it is defined by the random forces existing outside of them.

I, for one, believe stupidity has degrees of intensity and is context- sensitive. I find it shallow when people are labeled as stupid simply because they failed to make an optimal decision in one of thousands of decisions they make everyday, possibly in an area for which they have no concern or for which the cost of finding the optimal decision far outweighed even difference in benefits between the worst and best outcome.

<comment><USER3> "labeled as stupid"

I strongly dislike the idea of labelling _people_ as stupid, or for that matter smart, as it then implies that everything they do is then destined to be "stupid" or "smart". I am, more than happy to label individual _decisions_ as stupid or smart.

<comment><USER5> There's no such thing as a stupid person, just people who are intuitively "smart" in their own interest based on time, place and circumstance. Which is what I think the underline point of the article was, albeit written in a manner with empirical examples to demonstrate. So, Yippy! Let's get stupid..er, I mean smart!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not convinced that there are really two distinct sets of people in the world: stupid and not stupid. In my experience, most people are pretty good at some things and stupid with other things. I notice that in myself to a certain extent, and forces like the Dunning-Kruger effect probably prevent me from noticing more.

In terms of the original article, I think that answers the question of why stupidity continues to exist. Most people (even ones who appear to me to be stupid) are smart enough at enough things that they continue to live and procreate.

The game theory examples the author gives in the second half of the article over-simplify the issue by assuming stupid is a binary on/off attribute. Within a game, you can assume that's true by assuming the people make stupid decisions within the rules of the game. But in real life, there isn't one single set of rules that determines whether we or not we live and procreate.

<comment><USER7> > _I'm not convinced that there are really two distinct sets of people in the > world: stupid and not stupid. In my experience, most people are pretty good > at some things and stupid with other things._

I've read a quite thorough explanation similar to this in one of Scott Adams' books : most people are somewhat intelligent, but behave stupidly at times - In fact, we may assume most people behave stupidly most of the time. Maybe he called that the "Dogbert principle" or something similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was hoping this article would address the dysgenics-based[1] theory in the film Idiocracy: fertility decreases with rising intelligence[2], resulting in a severe "brain drain" and producing a profoundly stupid, simple society.

Regardless, I appreciated the extension of Cipolla's ideas into game theory -- stupid people can do everything from take your money to kill you.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgenic#Intelligence_dysgenics> [2]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence>

<comment><USER9> Alas, the Wikipedia article you kindly linked to is an example of the point- of-view pushing that goes on too much on Wikipedia in relation to the topic of human intelligence.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence#Case_amendments)

It's going to be a long, long, LONG time before Wikipedia will come close to correctly representing what the most reliable sources say about time trends in IQ in national populations, about the relationship of genetic factors to the development of human intelligence, or about most related subjects.

For a reliable source on the subject you are curious about, see Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to THE BELL CURVE

[http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Genes-Success- Scientists-...](http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Genes-Success-Scientists- Statistics/dp/0387949860/)

with articles by several expert statisticians, geneticists, and psychologists.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for the extra information! I'll add that to my reading list.

To clarify: I've always taken the plot of "Idiocracy" to be fictional fantasy, and I simply used Wikipedia articles as a short-hand to summarize the ideas advanced by the movie. I realized that such a plot is so charged with the potential to offend people, I've never had a conversation with anyone about it (after all, we all think we're on the 'sweet' side of the curve, right?). Personally, I don't think such a brain drain could occur, but I'm always interested in research about such topics.

Also: thanks for pointing out the importance of the IQ/intelligence debate. From what I've seen in my reading, IQ is really a proxy for a few things: quality of education, social advantages, etc. I agree 100% that IQ≠intelligence; the Wikipedia articles in question should be rewritten to reflect this fact.

However, while IQ does not represent intellectual horsepower, it has been shown to be that aforementioned _proxy_ for other sociological and other factors -- in that sense, it is still useful to compare IQ with fertility. I do understand your concern that the consensus regarding such studies is poorly represented on Wikipedia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

My pet theory corollary to this (and one that I think has become increasingly prevalent in the age of anti-elitism and -intellectualism) can be described as "never attribute to human achievement that which can be explained by religious miracle".

It's gotten so prevalent, in fact, that Apple uses it in it's modern marketing campaigns. The idea that a consumer electronic device can be "magical" is a nauseating reminder once again that, because of globalization and layers of both self-imposed and corporate-sponsored abstraction/obfuscation, we no longer know how even the most basic concepts operate or what things we consume are made of.

It's gotten to the point where we openly _discourage_ tinkering. For example: What once was a proud young hacker's rite of passage going to Radio Shack and buying a breadboard to make LEDs shine and motors whir, is nowadays seen with derision or as malicious alchemy ("he's a terrorist building some kinda bomb or sumthin'", et al.).

And, it's not even about education, though in many cases you'd think it were. When a doctor has slaved away for years in academia, plied his trade in residency, done fellowships and participated in research for novel procedures and drug discoveries, their saving of a patient's life is more likely than not attributed by the patient to God than their exhaustive efforts. Ditto, any economic downturn/upturn, droughts _and_ bumper crop seasons, etc.

Most people don't know who Norman Borlaug is, but they sure know who made their drought- and pest-resistant, season and climate-independent, abundant and hearty sandwich bread be so cheap and taste so good: God.

In politics, one need not look further than the Tea Party to see that this "magical" thinking is rife in political discourse, with so many clinging on to America's "manifest destiny" and "American exceptionalism" as the answer to both why we got to where we are and where we need to go. Nevermind that most of our "exceptionalism" stemmed from the fact that we were the only industrialized country left standing after WWII and had factories ready to serve the world. Now that we have no war? It's the illegal invader's from Mexico's fault we're going downhill, which isn't even Occam's razor "a => b" thinking, just simpleminded bigotry.

<comment><USER11> Maybe it's just you cherrypicking examples. Just as you think we are discourage tinkering, I can point to the DIY and Maker movement, the proliberation of Hackerspaces, and so much more.

In any case, humans do not build a civilization by having really smart men who know everything, but having specialists in all area of life.

The scientists would do well not to express their disgust and disdain for the lowly plumbers or the trashmen,

Yes, we are stupid, but so are you. Just pick an area that you know nothing about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The author neglects an obvious point: stupid people can be very useful, in that you can get them to do harm to others, while you benefit, and they get nothing.

<comment><USER13> Well he does quote the third law of stupidity:

"Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Stupid quote: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/quotes?qt=qt0427901>

</comment><comment><USER15> I found this article to be very informative actually.

I also would like to point out that it's not possible to be smart in every area. As Mark Twain said, "we are all stupid, just on different subjects".

</comment><comment><USER16> so this can probably explain why randomly selecting stocks turn out to make a profit than professionals: in a game of stupid(irrational), randomly select (being the most stupid) turn out to win.

</comment><comment><USER17> this explains the "tea party"

</comment><comment><USER18> I guess one of the strengths of the population of stupid people is being oblivious of belonging to them -- a membership that even rational people cannot avoid. Stupidity manifesting in the most unexpected ways and occasions is a proof of its ubiquity, and implies that it is difficult to find not even a vaccine but a simple method of diagnosis.</comment>


Daddy, did you need to buy an electric car? - <AUTHOR> https://svedic.org/tech/daddy-did-you-really-need-electric-car <comment><USER2> For a time while working at a Bay Area tech company I had a Chevy Volt. I parked in a city-owned garage with a charger, but the charge fee per mile of range worked out to be about the same as the cost of gasoline. So I tried to take advantage of chargers provided at work.

Employees who used the chargers were encouraged to join an email list. The tone of this list was incredibly negative, with constant bickering about the lack of free chargers and cars left plugged in too long. Tesla owners could hog a charger for the whole day while poor Leaf owners would be anxious about making it home.

Eventually I wrote a little script that would scrape the ChargePoint API to tell me when chargers became available, which I kept as a well-guarded superpower.

Overall the experience of driving an electric vehicle without having a dedicated, personal charger was a considerable headache.

<comment><USER3> That is a jerk thing for the Tesla owners to do, but that's also something that I think it a bit silly for the other EV owners to have not expected: you should at least be able to round-trip from your home to your work. What if there's a power outage? what if traffic is worse than you expect and you're stuck on the road for longer? what if people in your garage are being a jerk and aren't sharing the plugs?

Granted, it's significantly more inefficient for everyone to have this reserve capacity and not use it all the time, and people should be conscientious enough to share the limited infrastructure.

Is there a way this could have been brought up to manglement or something similar? Or a friendly suggestion to the group? ("Hey, if you don't absolutely need to charge, please leave your phone number in the window, so others who need the charger can call & safely unplug your car" etc etc)

<comment><USER4> > That is a jerk thing for the Tesla owners to do

Is it though? Vehicle owners are classically used to leaving their cars parked until the next time that they are needed. For people to recognize that there are insufficient chargers to the point that it becomes socially valuable for people to stop what they are doing once their battery is topped off and head to their vehicle to unplug is a pretty significant behavior change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does this compare to the US? It sounds like there's no way to pay cash, or just use a credit card and go at any of these stations. Using an app, and requiring and account to do this is idiotic and will just end up leaving you stranded like this guy. If a gas station required me to have an account and app to gas up my car, I would tell them to screw off and never go there again.

<comment><USER6> Disclaimer: We own several Teslas, US-specific.

With Tesla Superchargers, it's automatic. You pull up, you plug in, you charge, and your credit card on file with Tesla is automatically charged as soon as you stop the charging session (whether in the app for your vehicle, pressing the button on the Supercharger handle, or in the vehicle on the control/display panel). You're never more than ~100 miles away from a Supercharger station [1].

With ChargePoint stations (rarely used), I swipe an RFID card or the app on my iPhone/Apple Watch, which authorizes the charge with a J1772 adapter. Super simple, have never had a problem. Many businesses provide Tesla destination chargers or J1772 chargers (or both in some cases) that require no auth to pay, the power is free.

I have not encountered anyone who minded tapping an RFID card, phone, or watch at a Chargepoint station; it is no different than using Apple Pay to pay for fuel. These are solved problems from a payment infrastructure perspective, it's just going to take time to shake out as EV adoption increases.

The author's mistake was not buying a Tesla EV, as they prioritize efforts to ensure a positive charging experience (including spending hundreds of millions of dollars building out and maintaining EV charging infrastructure). Other automakers make no efforts whatsoever (except at brand dealerships; who wants to charge at a car dealership?) to provide charging infrastructure, with this being the result. Nissan Leaf and BMW i3 owners face the same hassles in the US.

[1] [https://supercharge.info/map](https://supercharge.info/map)

<comment><USER7> _The author 's mistake was not buying a Tesla EV_

The commenter's mistake was not reading the...part where the author cannot buy a Tesla in their home country.

 _Nissan Leaf and BMW i3 owners face the same hassles in the US._

What hassles are you referring to? You just outlined how one taps a card and charges at ChargePoint stations, which doesn't seem like a hassle? The only hassle I've encountered in nine years of Leaf ownership is a non-operative charger.

<comment><USER6> TLDR Blog post should be "I made a mistake buying an EV in Croatia"

If you can't buy a Tesla, and settle for another EV, you can't complain about the garbage third party charging experience. They're (Non Tesla EVs) perfectly fine golf carts (<100 miles round trip) if you never make long trips with them though.

Non Tesla level 2 chargers can be out of order (as you mentioned), causing range anxiety or exceptionally slow travel plans for Leafs, i3s, and other EVs without a manufacturer provided charging network. I've never had a Supercharger or destination charger be out of order upon my arrival and need to charge (it happens I've heard, it just much more rare than neglected third party charging stations). I opportunistically charge at ChargePoint stations, but don't need to due to having 300+ miles of range; them being out of order doesn't impact me in our S, X, or Y. I can always Supercharge, other EVs have limited options ( _as this blog post demonstrates_ ).

Anyway, I think the case is really "don't buy an EV if you need to travel and the charging infrastructure doesn't exist", and being of low quality is just as bad as not existing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had a very similar experience during my first somewhat long trip in my Leaf. It has a range of "150" miles, but it's closer to 120. My destination was 60 miles away, should be good for a round trip, maybe a short charge at the destination or on the way back.

Nope. It's 30F out and that left me with 5% battery when I reached my destination. There was a charger nearby at a CVS. Arrived there an it was out of order. The town had a charger in their parking garage, get in and that's out of order as well and I had to pay $5 for the 5 minutes I was in garage.

Drove to the next town over for the next closest charger. 2 blocks away and I'm at 0%, the car is yelling at me but managed to make it to the charger. It works! It's a level 2, but should charge to full in an hour. Head to the shopping area and keep track of the charging process on my phone, which was nice. An hour later and I'm only up to 30% and I have to go back and start the charging process again. Wander around for another hour to get to 75% and can't stay longer because the garage is closing.

Thankfully that 75%, with the heater off and not going above 45mph let me get home with 5% battery left. Many lessons learned that day.

</comment><comment><USER9> Having to research this stuff, get specific apps, and plan out a route is a horrible experience. Compare to ICE cars: universally compatible with stations at almost any corner or highway exit, and all you need is cash or a credit card. Until someone who isn't tech-minded can use EVs for trips like these, don't expect them to get mass adoption.

</comment><comment><USER10> Electric cars need a range extender. Due to lack of imagination on both consumers and manufacturers, this means buying a second ICE car to act as a range extender. Here is an example of planning camping trip on tesla route planner: [https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/trips#/?v=M3_2015_74&o=Guelph,%2...](https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/trips#/?v=M3_2015_74&o=Guelph,%20ON,%email@example.com,-80.24816659999999&s=Killarney%20Provincial%20Park,%20960%20ON-637,%20Killarney,%20ON%20P0M%202A0,%firstname.lastname@example.com,-81.4017487&d=Guelph,%20ON,%email@example.com,-80.24816659999999)

With an ICE, you save over 3 hours of trip time, and modern conveniences of a gas station. Priceless.

</comment><comment><USER3> As I was reading the article I found myself getting more and more frustrated with the author and developers of EV charging infrastructure; the author, for having not researched these things ahead of time, which seems reasonable when buying such an unusually fueled vehicle, and developers for having such crazy disparate standards and plugs and cabling and generally crap user friendliness.

I typically draw this comparison between Tesla and Apple: Tesla wanted people to enjoy using EVs, and they saw a few problems for that:

1\. charging sucks, and range anxiety makes people nervous

2\. most people's perception of electrically-propelled vehicles is of Prius(es? i?): slow and unimpressive.

They solved (1) with the supercharging network, which is insanely easy to use (drive up, plug in, credit card is automatically charged), and integrating the network _as well as_ all Tesla "destination" chargers (level 2s installed at businesses, hotels, etc) such that the car knows where all of them are. The built-in navigation on my model 3 can tell me exactly when and where I'll have to stop for charging along my trip, and for how long, with real-time availability info.

I don't understand how other EV manufacturers haven't tried to co-ordinate a similar open network between them: it would solve so many usability problems. Go lob some $$$ at Chargepoint and use the 3g connection the cars are already using to send telemetry back to check availability for chargers nearby.

Give users incentives to use whatever network works with the manufacturer; buy a Kona? get 15% off your first 5 charges with ChargePoint. Honda Insight? Congrats on your 500 free miles with $OtherProvider!

Tesla absolutely has shortcomings, but they well and truly solved this UX issue. They should at least be given credit by being emulated.

The downside of course is it's easy for them to deploy those solutions in the relatively-homogenously-regulated region of the US, but significantly more difficult in regions like Europe.

<comment><USER11> The one point I'll make is, Tesla solved all these problems. But that only makes it equivalent to ICE vehicles in someways and still worse in others.

UX to find charging stations and having to plan trips? That's impressive if the alternative wasn't ubiquitous gas stations literally everywhere with 5 minute fill up times.

The supercharger network is great but people want to be able to mainly charge at work and at home not on I-79 or someone else's business. And no one wants to foot that infrastructure bill right now.

<comment><USER12> The number of charging stations is just a chicken and egg problem.

<comment><USER11> The problem is deeper than that.

For EVs to truly take over people need to be able to charge at work and at home. This immediately rules out any resident without parking options.

It doesn't matter for ICE vehicles - fill up times are short and gas stations are ubiquitous. But neither of these are true for EVs. Even if they were ubiquitous, they still take time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> High fuel taxes in Europe are a lucrative source of income for governments, and are a perverse incentive to neglect EV infrastructure.

<comment><USER14> Knowing Europe, they will eventually come up with some bundle of regulations and a super VAT for electricity when put into a car to make up the deficit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow. This makes me very grateful to live in America. Our infrastructure may not be as high-tech, but it's at least fairly consistent coast-to-coast.

</comment><comment><USER16> > But this time dreams failed because of people, not because of technology.

As a technologist, never forget this. It's a very common thing.</comment>


Helix: Rust and Ruby, Without the Glue - <AUTHOR> http://blog.skylight.io/introducing-helix/ <comment><USER2> Very excited to see the development of the Ruby/Rust space. The two languages together would seem a joy of a workflow from concept through to maintenance, and the wealth of important Ruby personalities currently involved in Rust (as well as others) encourages that that this will be a well trodden and well documented workflow sooner rather than later.

I think this could help Ruby regain some of its early excitement, and remove the negativity of its 'just a scripting language', 'only for rails, which is too slow for modern development anyway' image.

<comment><USER3> There's a _lot_ of stuff in this space: mrusty, ruru, Helix. It's exciting stuff.

<comment><USER4> mrusty is _super cool_. My only beefs with it are around the difficulties of mruby (package availability, 1.9.3 limitations, generally being "off the beaten path"), not of mrusty itself, but it's such a fantastic way to quickly build a scripting layer that I fell in love with it almost immediately.

I would pay a decent chunk of money for a cleanly integrated MRI implementation inside of Rust, but I also will not be holding my breath for it.

<comment><USER5> Just out of curiosity: what limitations of Ruby 1.9.3 is critical in your case?

Not to start a flame war, but according to my experience, Ruby 1.9 is already quite good, later versions of Ruby only introduce minor syntax & semantic changes, which is trivial to work around. This is nothing like the big differences between 1.8 and 1.9

I agree with package availability problem of mruby, tho.

<comment><USER4> Nothing is _critical_ , I'm just so used to writing Ruby 2.3 at this point that 1.9 isn't as enjoyable. I wish it were better, I'm not saying it's bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > With Rails reaching version 5.0, there are plenty of APIs that are heavily > used and extremely feature-stable. My goal with Helix is to eventually make > it possible to reimplement a lot of these APIs as an native extension gem.

Sounds extremely exciting!

</comment><comment><USER7> Great blog post.. First time I've been sold on Rust, sounds like it's got some great features. Maybe I just had to hear about it from a Ruby dev. :)

Typos in the article: "slimed down", "you code could"

Is "needle_length = needle.length" actually necessary? I thought repeated calls would be zero cost, but I'm guessing I'm wrong.

<comment><USER8> If Ruby is anything like Python, nonlocal name lookups in loops can indeed be performance bottlenecks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would be interested to see how Ruby's Set class performs in the Zesty example. If that is actually a bottleneck in the application, I would rather reach for something that is in the Standard Library instead of going fully native.

<comment><USER10> Ruby's set class is implemented in Ruby wrapping a Hash (`{ key => true }`), not in C (or Java or…). It's fairly good when you're testing for containment, but the implementation is probably going to be as bad or worse for the #fully_contains behaviour…except the requirement that Zesty's arrays be sorted.

Conceptually, a Set will do much better even with this sort of optimization.

<comment><USER11> Interesting side-note: Rust's `HashSet<T>` is actually implemented by wrapping a `HashMap<T, ()>`. But because `()` is zero-sized (unlike a boolean), Rust can optimise a ton of stuff out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> But the Rust version of the blank check doesn't handle any encoding but UTF-8. Helix could wrap up a char iterator for it I suppose, one that calls rb_enc_codepoint_len?

And isn't there some common C lib that exposes Unicode functions like is_whitespace? Granted, using a cargo crate is easier than finding and adding a .h, and far easier than getting and linking another lib.

<comment><USER13> The Rust version works on strings not on bytes. Strings don't have encodings.

<comment><USER14> What do you mean? All Rust strings are UTF-8 encoded, and all Ruby strings have an associated encoding.

<comment><USER3> All rust String and &strs are UTF-8 encoded, there are also other string types.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So it is Rusted Rails? XD

Anyway I think the same could be applied to Ruby Core as well. As I have been calling a Rusted Ruby for a long time.

Though I am not sure if this is a good thing for other Ruby implementation like JRuby.

<comment><USER16> I think this is a GREAT thing for other implementations like JRuby. Rusty Ruby would be able to learn from some of the implementation tricks that impls like Jruby and rbx have learned along the way, and maybe those guys will learn something from the Rusty Ruby crew along the way also.

Rust as far I know (not at all, honestly) doesn't interface with Java that well, so for JVM projects, it's nice to have a familiar language like Ruby that can tie in and make prototyping way easier.

I think people misunderstand how awesome Jruby is, because Ruby has never performed that well and Jruby has performed very well. Performance is not the only reason to both implementing a language. There's also the issue of mindshare, where a large group of people might already know Ruby, and it'd be easier in those scenarios to just give them Jruby and let them go to town than try and drag them through learning Java.

Rusty Ruby will do the same thing for Rust, I think. Rust is a very intricate, well-thought-out language, and I think it would benefit a lot from playing off the shared knowledge of thousands of Ruby users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What are the dependencies for installing the gem? I assume the machine will need rustc/cargo to compile the gem.

<comment><USER3> I am not super specifically knowledgeable about these details, but Rubygems lets you upload binaries to make this not needed generaly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Helix is the name Perforce is using to rebrand their set of tools. Just an FYI, I'm not saying that means this should not be called Helix.

<comment><USER19> The amount of name reuse in software in recent years really frustrates. It makes it so much harder to find the information you are looking for.

Besides that I really don't get why perforce are renaming their version control system yo Helix. Perforce is a well-known name, it seems weird to just drop a strong brand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is fucking cool. You have convinced me to pick up Rust.

</comment><comment><USER21> Isnt a set containment problem a really simple problem to solve with a database, eg an inner join and a count?

<comment><USER11> For something that is in memory and throw-away, why go through a DB?

<comment><USER21> I was taking the point of "Why is the problem taking so long when it seems like a simple thing to calculate?" which was a little orthonogal from theme of the total post, so I can see why there would be some confusion.

The article talked about 30 minutes to run through a "is this set of items in this other set of a bunch of items".

While it would probably make sense to do this efficiently in memory the reality is the company mentioned are probably doing it inefficiently in memory; asking some tool which can do this type of work effectively and is fairly well known was my basic suggestion.

<comment><USER22> Why hit the network/a central resource when you could just do it locally?

<comment><USER7> It's a webapp, they're likely already querying all the meal information from a mysql or postgresql db. Chances are they could have made a change to their db models and written some sql to handle food requirements checking instead of handling it after the query. But that could've been premature optimization ultimately, and to speed it up now, it's probably easier to optimize the slow ruby code with some rust instead.

<comment><USER21> Exactly, I dont mean to beat a dead horse, but most bog standard web apps have the quoted items in a db anyway, and these are very common problems.

For example if we have a few tables we can determine which menu items a user could eat:

      users
      user_ingredient_exclusions
      ingredients
      menu_ingredients
      menu

      -- items a user can eat based on not having any items in the excluded   list
      select distinct m.*
      from menu m
      inner join menu_ingredients mi on m.id = mi.menu_id
      left join user_ingredient_exclusions e on e.ingredient_id = mi.ingredient_id
      inner join user u on u.id = e.user_id
      where e.id is null
      and u.id = @id

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> May I say? PRAISE HELIX.

</comment><comment><USER24> Rust has no its ecosystem, just pyramid selling. Swift will beat it!

<comment><USER25> :) I wish I understood this jab. Can you explain me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I like Swift. Rust syntax make me headache.

<comment><USER26> I like apples. Oranges look weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Hmm. Kind of makes you wonder why you're using Ruby at all, which is slow as hell. It appears that once they port all Rails libraries to Rust, it may not take that much effort to create Rust on Rails and get rid of Ruby.

<comment><USER6> Ruby is phenomenally easy to write. This post essentially describes a way to make Ruby less slow, which would reduce the incentive to leave the language.

Once they port all Rails libraries to Rust, you can still use the extremely- ergonomic Ruby programming language, but it won't be "slow as hell" anymore. And ruby performance is "tolerable in most circumstances" as-is.

I certainly agree that it could be awesome to have Rust on Rails for those who would find even Rails on Rust performance intolerable, and Iron's abstractions inadequate.

<comment><USER28> This is the exact reason I'm headlong into Elixir and Phoenix right now. It's like the best of both worlds.</comment></comment></comment>


Learning about your business from anomalous metrics - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.pinterest.com/blog/learning-about-your-business-anomalous-metrics

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey all.

"Learn how looking for anomalies in your daily business metrics can help you more quickly find, learn about and respond to changes in your business."</comment>


Flickr's API vulnerable to straightforward message digest attack - <AUTHOR> http://netifera.com/research/flickr_api_signature_forgery.pdf

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=401926> on <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=401876>

colin, did flickr ever reply to you about that?

<comment><AUTHOR> The major problem with Flickr's scheme is both academically trivial and something that Colin didn't (in any public forum) notice. Which says nothing about Colin, who is very smart, and everything about how ridiculous it is to try to build secure systems that depend on basic crypto primitives.</comment></comment>


China Clamps Down Still Harder on Internet Access, Blocks VPNs - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/world/asia/china-clamps-down-still-harder-on-internet-access.html <comment><USER2> Seems like a great opportunity to ease up visa/immigration restrictions in the US and encourage a brain drain from China of highly sought after professors and professionals.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Great Firewall's days are numbered. What do they think is going to happen when SpaceX and friends start launching their internet satellites?

<comment><USER4> Hopefully not blow them out of orbit like they have demonstrated in the past! Or extort SpaceX into disabling them for that entire region...</comment></comment>