Stack Free Recursion (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://home.olympus.net/~7seas/recurse.html <comment><USER2> The "spaghetti code" conversion - using labels instead of calls - only works if the original recursion didn't actually need to be recursive, i.e. it didn't require storage proportional to its maximum stack depth, and could already have been rewritten as a loop.

Other than that, the approach trades code (time) for data (space). Instead of making a copy of activation record variables at each level of the recursion, the mutation of the activation record variables is implicitly encoded in the return address pushed onto the call stack, because the code at the return address undoes the mutation.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm so confused by this. His solutions end up using recursion, yet he says it's stack-free. Which doesn't make any sense at all considering deficient compilers allocate stack frames on each call for languages like C. This is all chapter 1 SICP-grade stuff. Unless you're going to do a technique (read: hack) such as trampolining (certainly not done here) I don't see how it's possible to have recursion without a stack. The runtime should keep pushing frames. Notice there's still a pointer defined in the Hanoi().

I don't think this can be computed on a register machine. What do you girls/guys think?

<comment><USER4> The title ("Stack Free Recursion") is certainly misleading, as are the labels of several examples ("Stackless Factorial", "This Form of Routine Can Be Changed to Stack Free Recursion", the function stackfree(x), "Stackless Towers of Hanoi"), in that all these examples, and all but one example in the paper, implicitly use a stack for return addresses.

However, in the abstract, the definition of the bet, and throughout much of the article, the author does distinguish between the concepts of a "data stack" and a "return stack", and he illustrates _one_ case in which the return stack is in fact eliminated entirely (and says, at the bottom, that it is "sometimes possible" to remove the return stack). Overall, 19/48 instances of the string "stack" are preceded by either "data" or "return".

Is it fair to use "stackless" to mean "data-stack-less", without saying so explicitly? I would say no. The stated advantage is that less memory is used (and that the result "sometimes is faster", presumably due to fewer push/pop operations). However, "stackless" implies that you've eliminated the problem completely, when you've achieved less, perhaps significantly less than that. For example, in the case of factorial, the naive approach stores two CPU words per level of recursion (the value of x and the return address), and the (data-)stackless approach stores one CPU word per recurse (the return address); this fixes _half_ the problem.

Also, see this in the abstract: "We also present a method that uses no return stack or data stack and we derive a simple line drawing function using the information presented herein." This wording strongly suggests that the line drawing function doesn't use a return stack, when it does. A comma after "data stack" would make it a _little_ less non-obvious that the two statements in the sentence are not related to each other. I would have to call this paper "oversold".

<comment><USER3> Definitely agree on the "oversold".

I notice you said "half the problem" at the end of your third paragraph there. I'm assuming the other half is that it seems foolish to save the return address for a recurse. Only the first call should save a return. I think one problem with compiler writers is that oddly they don't separate how to treat a procedure and its recursions as different cases. They just fit every procedure into the same bucket-list algorithm of 1. allocate frames 2. allocate return address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't this just rewriting tail calls ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call))? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER6> This was 1995, Outside of Prolog, LISP, Scheme, and other exotic languages, what popular languages of that era offered TC? (C, Pascal, C++, BASIC, FORTRAN, etc) didn't.

<comment><USER7> Tail call optimization, strictly speaking, isn't a language feature (though a language standard can require it in conforming implementations, as Scheme standards have. Which brings me to:

> (C, Pascal, C++, BASIC, FORTRAN, etc) didn't.

I'm not sure that's true. gcc, in optimizing modes, could do at least tail recursion elimination at least as far back as 1999, and does more now. (The earliest reference I can find refers to gcc 2.95.3, but its not clear to me if that's the first version that did it, or just the earliest version on which the writer tested and confirmed the behavior.)

Outside of a handful of languages, tail call elimination in either restrictive (e.g., tail recursion only) or general forms is an optional optimization rather than an essential behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems to me like the sort of optimization a compiler should do for you. Does GCC do this?

</comment><comment><USER9> As a dev who has never really got into the low-level parts of programming, I don't really understand yet how this is stackless. I thought the stack had more to do with the depth of function calls than with the passing of function parameters. Can anyone here explain it?

<comment><USER10> Haven't read all of it, but the author assumes the availability of a return stack, which somehow makes this approach not really stack-free. Most modern calling conventions (x86) use a register(eax/rax) for returning values.

But his approach does in fact conserve stack space.

<comment><USER11> A little bit further down, he shows how to avoid using the return stack also, to use no stack at all.

Also, by "return stack", he isn't referring to the mechanism for returning values, he is referring to the mechanism for knowing which address to jump (return) to when a function is finished. In x86, this is still done with a stack, but the stack modifications are done "behind the scenes" by the call/ret instructions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hoare writes in his (famous) paper on quicksort (in 1962): "We'd implement our own recursion schema for perf reasons"

Recursion is just a tree.

Calling a function/procedure is expensive (in memory and run-time).

Create a tree (e.g. linked list), base your recursion on that!

You are not at university anymore, where you look at naive implementations for the sake of learning.

Spoiler: I (actually _do_ ) resolve (function-call) recursion to (tree-based) recursion when I feel like I want to.

Downvoters pls explain.</comment>


Ask HN: Best website to register your domain name? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to create my first website and I wanted to get opinions from the much more experienced people here. Which website is the best and why? Price isn't too much of an issue because it seems fairly reasonable no matter who you go through but I don't want to register through a shady or bad website as I've heard stories of people having trouble transferring their domains to a decent website after realizing the picked a bad one. <comment><USER2> <http://www.namecheap.com> is solid and compares in price to godaddy and offers things like free ssl cert and making the whois record anonymous. If you search HN you will find a post very similar to this one with a lot of details.

google.com the search site:news.ycombinator.com best registrar. Or something like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good advice, I ended up reading a long slashdot comments thread and 2 different hacker news threads and ended up going with gandi.net

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> GoDaddy is perhaps the most popular. It's a great price, and they're very flexible. I've registered 2 or 3 domains with them now, and I've had a first- class experience every time.

As they've grown, I've noticed that they try and "sell" more things to you that you probably don't need, but that's to be expected with any growing company. I would recommend them, especially for your first website.

<comment><USER4> I went to renew a Godaddy domain, and they wanted to charge for whois privacy, something like $10 per domain per year. It's free when you first sign up, pay when renewing now. That's kind of junk when there's plenty that offer it for free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We used godaddy for a while, but got fed up with the overpriced privacy charges so we switched to 1and where privacy is included. They don't do the crazy upselling like godaddy either. <http://1and1.com>

</comment><comment><USER6> I recently tried registering through google apps (via enom or godaddy.) no complaints. reg. details are made private and your mail and everything else is set-up.

</comment><comment><USER7> Domain.com has always treated me well, and their interface is the least cluttered of all the ones I've used.

</comment><comment><USER8> gandi.net</comment>


The trick that makes you overspend - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190801-the-trick-that-makes-you-overspend <comment><USER2> I dunno, in both scenarios I would choose flight for 330$, since 1.5hr extra for saved 70$ seem like pretty good deal in any case (and I earn more per hour than that saving, but usually not working when traveling anyway).

Also thanks top EU and mandatory display of price per unit I pretty much ignore end prices in supermarkets and check prices if I am not already familiar how does end price translate to price per unit. But I also don't but things I don't need just because they are cheap, it would have to be extremely good deal to spend money on wasted space in my apartment for something I don't need in upcoming days/weeks.

Paul Graham had very enlightening essay Stuff on this topic which should be mandatory reading especially for growing teenagers to form their attitude towards useless stuff.</comment>


Leonard Cohen Has Died - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/leonard-cohen-dead-at-82-w449792 <comment><USER2> Sad for the artistic loss but also glad he died at peace after a rich life spent doing what he loved till the last moment. He joins a special list, alongside Hintjens who also passed recently, of those who manage to strip the dread from death and stress the importance of 'tidying up' over passive acceptance as one enters the final days.

 _"The big change is the proximity to death," he said. "I am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I can't, also, that's O.K. But my natural thrust is to finish things that I've begun."_

 _"For some odd reason," he went on, "I have all my marbles, so far. I have many resources, some cultivated on a personal level, but circumstantial, too: my daughter and her children live downstairs, and my son lives two blocks down the street. So I am extremely blessed. I have an assistant who is devoted and skillful. I have a friend like Bob and another friend or two who make my life very rich. So in a certain sense I've never had it better. . . . At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It's a cliché, but it's underestimated as an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable."_ [0]

[0] [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/leonard- cohen-m...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/leonard-cohen-makes- it-darker)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a wonderful article about Leonard Cohen:

[http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and- culture/music/89715...](http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and- culture/music/89715/leonard)

The quote that stood out the most for me:

"In a pursuit like rock 'n' roll, which is entirely devoted to redemption, Cohen's ideas were not only old but radical. His peers all insisted that salvation was at hand. To go to a Doors concert was to stare at the lithe messiah undressing on stage and believe that it was entirely possible to break on through to the other side. To see Cohen play was to gawk at an aging Jew telling you that life was hard and laced with sorrow but that if we love each other and fuck one another and have the mad courage to laugh even when the sun is clearly setting, we'll be just all right. To borrow a metaphor from a field never too far from Cohen's heart, theology, Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, and the rest were all good Christians, and they set themselves up as the redeemers who had to die for the sins of their fans. Cohen was a Jew, and like Jews he believed that salvation was nothing more than a lot of hard work and a small but sustainable reward."

<comment><USER4> That article contains a wonderful story about how he calmed a hostile audience in the middle of the night at a festival in 1970. I recommend it. (Search for "Isle of Wight", the story starts there.)

<comment><USER5> [https://vimeo.com/56002315](https://vimeo.com/56002315) is an hour-long documentary about his performance there, with lots of footage of the show itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/leonard-cohen-pens- fi...](http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/leonard-cohen-pens-final-letter- to-so-long-marianne-muse-w433144)

Back in July he wrote to a dying Marianne Ihlen, "Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine."

<comment><USER7> Thanks. That story just broke me down, while sitting in the office with tears running down my cheeks.

Reminded me of my late father having passed away some 18 months ago.

Thanks for that moment. Your link was a gift.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe we recently discussed Mr. Cohen: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12700141](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12700141)

I have cried more tears listening to Leonard Cohen than all the other tears I've cried combined, his music, his words, his poems have always resonated deeply within me. He truly is my favourite artist. We listened to him daily in my dad's house and I grew to find an incredibly amount of peace in his voice. Love the HN community seems to like him as much. rest well sir.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MXOuaZuTak](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MXOuaZuTak)

<comment><USER9> I feel bad for not knowing more about him. Thanks for that YouTube link, so good.

<comment><USER10> If you have Spotify, there's a playlist there published by Spotify called "This Is: Leonard Cohen", it's one of the best sweeps over his career that I've seen so far.

He may not have been as prolific as Dylan, but he also had pretty much no duds.

I'm thankful to have his work seeing me through this life. Especially so these days.

<comment><USER11> Yes! I follow that playlist, and it's superb. Here's a direct link to it: [http://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/1kZSS179bOW1A5...](http://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/1kZSS179bOW1A5QOAuclXj)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I took my mum to see him live in Brisbane back in 2013. At the end of the show he thanked his backing band. And then he thanked, by name, the sound engineers, the lighting operators, the cameraman filming for the tour DVD, and various other staff. One of the greatest musicians to have lived but also a genuine and decent person.

<comment><USER13> The simple thing that gets me is how he always addresses his audience as 'friends', and thanks them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I saw Leonard Cohen on his last tour. He opened every show on the tour by saying "I don't know if we'll meet again, but tonight we'll give you everything we got."

<comment><USER15> About 4 years ago I was scanning my twitter timeline and I noticed someone posted a picture from a Leonard Cohen concert that night in Montreal. What?!? I hadn't heard anything about it and my heart sank. After a frantic search I found out he was playing the next night and I bought myself a ticket.

I went by myself, which is unusual for me when it comes to concerts. He played for 3 hours and needless to say, it was incredible.

During "Suzanne", the room (a hockey arena) was completely dark except for a spotlight shining up from below casting a giant shadow behind him. Combined with such a haunting song it made for one of the most beautiful musical experiences of my life.

Here's a recording of that performance: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3pcPK4eXHQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3pcPK4eXHQ)

That turned out to be the last time he played here and I'm so thankful to have gotten a chance to hear him play his songs.

Way too many great lines to quote, but these ones comfort me: "But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song"

EDIT: I found a video from a different concert that gives a better idea of what it looked like, though the link above is a better performance imo, + much better audio: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emgt62vls3o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emgt62vls3o)

(also love the single comment, which I ran through google translate: "What is still the magic of this man? I am not a sentimental dragon, but it goes straight to the heart.")

<comment><USER13> > During "Suzanne", the room (a hockey arena) was completely dark except for a > spotlight shining up from below casting a giant shadow behind him. Combined > with such a haunting song it made for one of the most beautiful musical > experiences of my life.

I think that what got me from the concert (which I saw in Chicago) was when he dropped to his knees to sing. What a privilege it was to see such a giant perform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article was posted here about a month ago:

       http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/leonard-cohen-makes-it-darker

Discussion:

       https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12700141

Interestingly, I was thinking about him on the subway just before surfacing to see above thread pop up. Very glad that I got to catch up on his bio (and to see him live a few years back) before his departure.

2016 - what a year.

<comment><USER17> "Hineni hineni. I'm ready my Lord."

from "Make it Darker"

nb: The word 'Hineni' means 'Here I am' in a spiritual sense, which is what Abraham says and means to God to indicate his readiness when he is called.

<comment><USER18> "Hineni" means "here I am" in a _literal_ sense too - Cohen happens to be making a biblical/spiritual reference there, but like most lines from the (Hebrew) bible, the language is very plain and straightforward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So sad. I saw him in Manhattan. My wife got tickets as a Christmas present, knowing I had been excited when we were traveling in Barcelona and he was there that week. (Couldn't get tickets -- didn't even try.) So we showed up at Madison Square Garden and I had no idea what we were seeing -- and there were no markings to give away the surprise! It was not until the show started that I knew it was a Leonard Cohen concert. It was an awesome evening.

      If you want a lover
      I'll do anything you ask me to
      And if you want another kind of love
      I'll wear a mask for you
      If you want a partner, take my hand, or
      If you want to strike me down in anger
      Here I stand
      I'm your man

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm not sad. He had probably the best life he could have had, and it ended on a high note.

<comment><USER21> And he got to live to 82, it's hard to say it's too early.

<comment><USER22> 80 is my threshold digit for sadness. If you reached it without long debilitating condition or traumatic life, then, at least if I had the pleasure to get there, no complaints.

<comment><USER23> Cohen resumed smoking at age 80, because why not.

<comment><USER24> I never thought about this ... I've always wanted to smoke (the mechanics of the whole thing please(s) me on some level) but I suffer from asthma and a mild disinclination to lung cancer. Mind you, when I say "smoke", I mean the real thing, not vaping.

Don't mind me, though. I hope I outgrow this at some point.

<comment><USER22> From asthmatic to asthmatic, I never liked the slightest thing about smoking. Maybe the shape .. that's it. Last year I had a health accident, cardiovascular and lung in deep trouble, and for some reason, all of a sudden I started having strong smoking envy. Considering I avoided smoking because of asthma, being in lower health condition made these "cravings" somehow absurd. But there was something smoking represented: inhaling a gas that made your mind peaceful, just like proper breathing does, and my health deprived me of this, so smoking felt like the only substitute.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> And then you heard, on Remembrance Day, of the Poet who had gone away; No more music in the dark to keep you warm.

For years to come you will recall the music's death, the soldier's fall, and your songs salute them both. So: Hallelujah!

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

\--

The first Cohen song that I ever heard was "Everybody Knows", in _Pump Up the Volume_.

<comment><USER26> Same. I think the juxtaposition between the cohen version throughout and the 4 non blondes (?) version at the end made me love it so much more.

I feel that many singers just sing the words, and sometimes they're pretty, sometimes sad. It was like raw emotion poured out every time Leonard Cohen opened his mouth.

<comment><USER27> That would be Concrete Blonde.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There was recently a lovely interview with Leonard Cohen on Fresh Air [1], from which I learned that he had also spent some time a Zen monk. The article mentions this in passing, but there's more detail in the interview.

> While never abandoning Judaism, the Sabbath-observing songwriter attributed > Buddhism to curbing the depressive episodes that had always plagued him.

[1] [http://www.npr.org/2016/10/21/498810429/leonard-cohen-on- poe...](http://www.npr.org/2016/10/21/498810429/leonard-cohen-on-poetry-music- and-why-he-left-the-zen-monastery)

</comment><comment><USER29> If you have ~40 minutes to spare, Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History did a really interesting story on Hallelujah in July:

[http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/07-hallelujah](http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/07-hallelujah)

</comment><comment><USER30> Listening to Leonard and drinking whiskey. It's closing time. Just fuck me up Leonard.

</comment><comment><USER31> RIP. Listening to his brand new release You Want It Darker (via Spotify HQ on my Audio Technica ADG1Xs, Soundblaster ZXR sound card). I can't get over the quality of the production and how utterly perfect his voice still is .. right until the very end. In light of recent events, this song is uncanny. What a masterpiece to finish a magnificent career.

<comment><USER32> I believe his son was the sound engineer. He clearly didn't phone it in.

<comment><USER31> Interesting, and a stellar job. I could easily see this becoming a reference track / album for hi-fi affectionados, bringing depths and detail to my new headset that I didn't know it had. (I upgraded a few months ago from the ATH- ADG1s.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Easily one of the greatest songwriters of the generation. As Dylan said, 'As far as I'm concerned, Leonard, you're Number 1. I'm Number Zero.'

His songs are dark and poetic and really keep you entranced. I'm glad he released his last effort (Leaving the Table is a great one for the occasion) and seemed totally at peace in his New Yorker feature.

</comment><comment><USER34> If it be your will. That I speak no more. And my voice be still. As it was before. I will speak no more.

</comment><comment><USER35> Man this was a surprise. I read this article very recently.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2016/10/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2016/10/13/leonard-cohen-i-am-ready-to-die-i-hope-its-not-too- uncomfortable/)

Which was quickly followed by:

[http://consequenceofsound.net/2016/10/leonard-cohen-no- longe...](http://consequenceofsound.net/2016/10/leonard-cohen-no-longer-ready- to-die-says-hell-live-until-120/)

</comment><comment><USER36>
        Like a bird on a wire
        Like a drunk in a midnight choir
        I have tried, in my way, to be free

</comment><comment><USER37> His song,"Hallelujah," is timeless and even he agreed KD Lang's version is the best...

Wasn't a fan of hers until... [https://youtu.be/ikdLBQACC74](https://youtu.be/ikdLBQACC74)

<comment><USER38> I'll always prefer Jeff Buckley's.

<comment><USER39> I like Cohen's. It's different from all the Wainwright-style covers, and I once heard he'd written over a hundred verses for it that he alternates on concerts. I wish they were available somewhere, but I suspect I would have had to have been there.

<comment><USER40> Perhaps John Cale might still have them because Cohen faxed him 15 pages of lyrics - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallelujah_(Leonard_Cohen_song...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallelujah_\(Leonard_Cohen_song\)#John_Cale)

NB. It's the version by Cale which became the basis of the later covers by Buckley, Wainwright, etc - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzu4LE667VM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzu4LE667VM)

<comment><USER39> You're right of course. I don't know why I thought it was Wainwright.

<comment><USER40> That's OK, clearly it also confused the producers of the Shrek soundtrack album too :)

Here's a post from couple of days ago which documents the history of Hallelujah - [http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2016/11/11/leonard-...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2016/11/11/leonard- cohen-hallelujah-jeff-buckley/93632656/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Now I'm living in this temple Where they tell you what to do I'm old and I've had to settle On a different point of view

I was fighting with temptation But I didn't want to win A man like me don't like to see Temptation caving in

</comment><comment><USER42> A sad day. I'm a big fan, had the privilege of seeing him perform four times and I've named my daughter Suzanne.

I cant be sure, but back in 2008 when he played "Democracy is coming to the USA" he seemed to be delighted that Obama won. IMHO this part of the song is more appropriate for Leonard's last days on earth: "I love the country but I can't stand the scene".

RIP

edit: removed comment about the president elect

</comment><comment><USER43> A wonderful voice. A favorite of my mother's who over the years became a favorite of mine.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTTC_fD598A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTTC_fD598A)

</comment><comment><USER44> RIP. Those looking to try Cohen for the first time (or wanting to rediscover him) should listen to Live in London (2009), which IMHO is one of the best live albums ever. Great songs and some witty banter in between.

[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2p8je2](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2p8je2)

<comment><USER45> Given the recent election, may I suggest this song of his: "Democracy"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU-RuR- qO4Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU-RuR-qO4Y)

[http://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-democracy-lyrics](http://genius.com/Leonard- cohen-democracy-lyrics)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I wanted to post some of his lyrics as a comment, but it turns out you can take any rhyming subset and it is appropriate for almost any occasion. (Not kidding, try it yourself).

They're ambiguous so that helps.

"But let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie, your eyes are soft with sorrow, Hey, that's no way to say goodbye."

RIP, Leonard Cohen

<comment><USER47>
        "Ring the bells that still can ring
         forget your perfect offering
         there is a crack in everything
         that's how the light gets in."
                               -- Anthem

As I get older, I appreciate the cracks more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> No longer aching in the places he used to play. Rest in peace Leonard, it's closing time.

</comment><comment><USER49> "No one can sing a Leonard Cohen song the way Cohen himself can't." is still my favourite description of his work.

</comment><comment><USER50> Big fan of Leonard Cohen, big loss. I think his Isle of Wight performance is one of the greatest of all time considering what was going on the crowd and how he used his showmanship and calming music to turn things around:

[https://vimeo.com/56002315](https://vimeo.com/56002315)

</comment><comment><USER51> A tremendous loss.

A recent profile that I greatly enjoyed:

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/leonard- cohen-m...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/leonard-cohen-makes- it-darker)

</comment><comment><USER52> "Everybody Knows" is one of my favorite songs, just on grounds of its lyrical quality alone.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lin-a2lTelg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lin-a2lTelg)

</comment><comment><USER53> I will never not get shivers listening to his Hallelujah: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttEMYvpoR-k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttEMYvpoR-k)

</comment><comment><USER54> As a native Montréaler, this hit me really, really hard. The man was a legend, and hopefully his legacy will live on in the city.

I'd really like to see McGill, our common alma mater, commemorate him in some way.

</comment><comment><USER55> Just making a general point here that this event has surfaced..

I dont get why people are so emotional when famous artists die. Posting on facebook and whatnot.. We werent personal friends with them, so it wont affect our lives in any way. Their works are still as available as ever, and still as great as ever. We can still listen to their music every day.

If they died old then they've had a good run to make a good body of great work that can be their direct legacy for hundreds of years. Few people achieve that.

<comment><USER56> My mother knows I have been a longtime fan of Leonard Cohen. I received some texts this morning saying she hoped I wasn't sad. Not at all - I presume he lived a great life. His death doesn't affect me and it doesn't change my enjoyment of his music or writing. Those are works created in certain moments of time, that's what matters and cannot be erased.

<comment><USER57> If you haven't already, this is an excellent read -

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/leonard- cohen-m...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/leonard-cohen-makes- it-darker)

<comment><USER56> Thanks, that's cool. I've just bookmarked it for reading tonight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> It's a widely held sentiment that 2016 has killed more long-running celebrities than any other year. Is there any factual basis to this, or is it just confirmation bias?

<comment><USER59> \- Celebrity is lumpy. Bowie, Prince and Cohen were big lumps.

\- The lumps are distributed unevenly. Baby boomers are dying around now, and they created their own culture.

\- Celebrity itself only became big roughly (very roughly) as these people came of age and did their great works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> May you rest in peace, Mr. Cohen.

It seems like so many of my favorite musicians and songwriters have passed in the last few years and its a struggle to figure out why. I'm a millenial with a wide taste in music from the early 20th century blues to contemporary EDM but it seems like the musicians whose talent you could just sense with every note and lyric are rapidly disappearing. I should be too young for this kind of cynicism but its an easy trap to fall into when comparing Dylan, Bowie, or Cohen to some song on the pop charts or an artist in the overwhelming field of independent musicians.

It's a sad day but I can't help but marvel at the universe. It is a kind of unique, rare beauty when a life-long artist like Bowie or Cohen close out their final chapter by releasing an album within weeks of their death.

<comment><USER61> > _It seems like so many of my favorite musicians and songwriters have passed > in the last few years and I 'm struggling to figure out why._

Because people generally die, and your favorite musicans are all several decades older than you, and thus close to the median life expectancy?

Assuming you are not into 2010's teen pop of course.

If one likes pre-war blues, for example, almost all of their favorite musicians would not be around anymore.

> _I 'm a millenial with a wide taste in music from the early 20th century > blues classics to contemporary EDM but it seems like the musicians whose > talent you could just sense with every note and lyric are rapidly > disappearing._

Well, not many "contemporary EDM" musicians are rapidly disappearing. OTOH, Dylan, Bowie or Cohen were all 65+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Wow! Such a sad news. He was one of the greatest and his songs were timeless.

One of my favorites is "Everybody Knows": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxd23UVID7k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxd23UVID7k)

You will be missed.

עליו השלום

</comment><comment><USER63> This is sad. I heard about this listening to the radio this morning while waiting for the school bus with my son. I introduced my (future) wife to his music and our wedding song was "Dance me to the end of love." I gave her the Matisse coffee-table book set to its lyrics ([https://www.amazon.com/Dance- End-Love-Art-Poetry/dp/19321839...](https://www.amazon.com/Dance-End-Love-Art- Poetry/dp/1932183930/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1478888948&sr=8-1&keywords=matisse+dance+me+to+the+end+of+love)).

I always wanted to meet him and now, I'll never have the chance.

R.I.P.

</comment><comment><USER64> [http://img.wennermedia.com/760-width/rs-leonard- cohen01-4c21...](http://img.wennermedia.com/760-width/rs-leonard- cohen01-4c21b534-aa2d-49fb-9fbd-be9df32b3700.jpg)

He looks so much like Adam Sandler

<comment><USER65> I always thought he and Leonard Nimoy were merging visually as they aged.

Here he looks like...some random but famous actor whose name escapes me:

[http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q8IlTmpaTiQ/Vnq3CrkSOnI/AAAAAAAAxY...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q8IlTmpaTiQ/Vnq3CrkSOnI/AAAAAAAAxYI/pSQMRZjNd6U/s1600/leonard- cohen.jpg)

<comment><USER57> Alfred Molina? Or maybe Tony Hancock[1]?

[1] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039f1y4](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b039f1y4)

<comment><USER65> Finally figured it out. Pretty weak in retrospect.

[http://static.tvgcdn.net/mediabin/showcards/celebs/s-u/thumb...](http://static.tvgcdn.net/mediabin/showcards/celebs/s-u/thumbs/shia- labeouf2_sc_768x1024.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> :'(

 _There is a crack, a crack in everything.

That how the light comes in._

?

<comment><USER67> But perhaps remember the previous line:

Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> About a week ago commented with a friend of mine his last album was absolutely wonderful and how awesome that he was 80 years old and still creating with the quality that he was. He was the musician that touched the most, others I sort of grew out of but always came back to Leonard - I suspect that there hasn't been a month in the last 15 years where I haven't listened to him. As an aside also discovered Irving Layton, a poet, through him.

</comment><comment><USER69> Leonard Cohen - So Long, Marianne (live 1968):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE6wBBrTMEs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE6wBBrTMEs)

So long, Leonard.

<comment><USER70> Marianne herself just died in July; when she was dying Leonard wrote her a letter saying he wasn't far behind.

[https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/aug/07/so-long- marian...](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/aug/07/so-long-marianne- leonard-cohen-writes-to-muse-just-before-her-death)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I heard there was a secret chord.

<comment><USER72> I did my best, it wasn't much

I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch

I told the truth, I didn't come to fool you

But even though it all went wrong

I'll stand before the Lord of Song

with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Dear 2016, please stop already.

<comment><USER39> 50 more days. We're nearly done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> couple good ones:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZqq- zAkGy4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZqq-zAkGy4)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FeZe5P803c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FeZe5P803c)

</comment><comment><USER75> There's only one bed and there's only one prayer; as I listen all night for your step on the stair.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TFWug6KlvMI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TFWug6KlvMI)

</comment><comment><USER76> RIP. The voice will be here for the rest of generation and becomes legacy for the next.

</comment><comment><USER61> If you haven't heard his songs, either the early folky ones or the post-80s electronic-ballads, definitely check them out. They are songs for grown-ups (he started his career as a singer around 34 years old after all).

</comment><comment><USER77> Very sad. Also sad that the very first thing I did when I saw a mention of it on Facebook was google "leonard cohen death hoax". Thanks and farewell, Mr. Cohen.

</comment><comment><USER78> And who shall I say is calling?

\-- You will be missed but never forgotten.

</comment><comment><USER79> On the Level feels like it was written for me (i know) It describes my current feelings about Lady Heroin after nearly 2 years clean. Perfectly.

RIP.

</comment><comment><USER80> "But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone

I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song"

One of the greats.

</comment><comment><USER81>
        Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld
        So I can sigh eternally

</comment><comment><USER82> I can't think of a better, more appropriate Cohen cover: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGRfJ6-qkr4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGRfJ6-qkr4)

</comment><comment><USER83> Hallelujah was the first dance song at our wedding. RIP.

<comment><USER84> I feel with you. I was born into this world with Leonard Cohen in the background. Still "the Captain" make my mother feel in a very special way that I cannot relate to.

A relative of mine did interviews with both Cohen and Marianne Ihlen (the Marianne from his song)[1].

Cohen has a special place in my heart, his humor, darkness, humbleness[2] and poetic aide is for me very inspirational and aspirational and the thought of him make me choose life when I get depressed.

[1]: [https://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/marianne2006.html](https://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/marianne2006.html)

[2]: [https://youtu.be/VIR5ps8usuo](https://youtu.be/VIR5ps8usuo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> Sad day. The year of the great dead continues.

</comment><comment><USER86> Fuck this year.

At least he lived the most graceful life. Having only ever known him in the last 20 years, it seems as if he started as an old man, and died young.

</comment><comment><USER87> Rest in peace.

</comment><comment><USER88> Hallelujah!

</comment><comment><USER89> Hallelujah, hallelujah.

</comment><comment><USER90> God damn it.

</comment><comment><USER91> I am reeling.

Leonard's music had an uncanny sense of timing, both musical and cultural. He referenced the external, political world, indirectly - not through selfishly inward bullshit, like many of his contemporaries, but by sifting it through relationships with others and his relationship to the divine.

As I am writing this, the next article in hackernews is about Peter Thiel and his ascension to whatever office he is seeking in Trump's cabinet. His views on the damage women and minorities have done to Libertarianism (whatever that is), and how democracy is shit are well known, and I will let you judge how Palantir has benefited humanity.

The thing that gets me is his straight faced desire for immortality. Note that he doesn't wish for immortality for someone who is great, he wishes it for himself.

RIP Leonard. You already are immortal.

<comment><USER92> Way to use someone's death for political purposes. Aren't you ashamed of yourself? (Note to mods: trying to be really civil here, but come on!)

<comment><USER93> He was merely demonstrating the contrast between two people and doing so politely and in an eloquent way, whether you agree with him or not why should the mods be involved? And why should he be ashamed of himself/herself..

<comment><USER92> He was using a man's death as a soapbox to criticize Thiel's political leanings. If you don't find that problematic, I'm not sure what to tell you.

<comment><USER94> I think you're both right. Which means best to leave it alone and move on IMHO. The first sentence of his post about Cohen is nicely put, "uncanny timing" and all that. Then he spoiled it with a whiny point on politics.

Cohen said something funny about his time spent meditating at a zen buddhist monastery in the hills. He said of the experience that "on a superficial level it basically gets you to stop whining"..."it makes whining the least appropriate response to suffering".*

* From his last interview, audio here: [http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/leonard-cohen-...](http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/leonard-cohen-a-final-interview)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I didn't know Leonard Cohen was a hacker. Wait, does he happen to be popular among hackers?

<comment><USER27> By the responses I would say yes, yes he was.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I am building a step-by-step equation solver to learn how math works - <AUTHOR> I am an average programmer who used to have trouble understanding how math worked. According to Donald Knuth, science is knowledge that is understood so well that it can be taught to a computer. So, I decided to write a program that solves elementary algebra equations step-by-step the way humans typically do to fully understand the process. This turned out to be a very effective way to learn math because I now understand how elementary algebra works, and I am no longer intimidated by more advanced mathematics.<p>My question is, would enough programmers be interested in learning how math works using this approach to make it worthwhile for me to create educational materials that are based on it? <comment><USER2> This exists. Its a program called Maple and really sophisticated. Industry standard. Every physicist/mathematician has a license. It can perform all the standard operations on a lot of math objects that you have probably never even heard about. No offense here. Math gets a lot stranger once you leave calculus behind.

There is wolframalpha, the computational knowledge engine. Provides maple core functionality and behaves more like a search engine.

If you do this for your own learning experience, that's awesome. As a business, you would have to be really good at a lot of very deep math to compete on that level.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is Maple able to show the steps a human would typically take to solve a given elementary algebra equation?

<comment><USER3> The market for "solve an algebra equation and show the steps" is students who want something to do their homework for them. And yes, websites (and graphing calculator apps) already do this. For example, [http://cymath.com/](http://cymath.com/)

It's cool that you made it, but whether you decide to do anything else with it depends on what your goals are.

<comment><AUTHOR> No currently used step-by-step equation software I am aware of shows all of the steps (inferences) that are needed to solve an equation, and why it took those steps. For example, I just had cymath solve 8 _x - 2 = -9 + 7_ x. The solution it provides is missing steps, and there is no explanation of why it took the steps it did. The solver I am writing shows all of the steps needed to solve an equation, and it is capable of explaining why it took these steps (although the "why" part is not shown in the video).

<comment><USER4> Wolfram|Alpha does this pretty well, although they moved the step-by-step solver to the paid version quite a while ago and I've only tried the early free version. They also have an extensive knowledge base and other resources that make it very easy to understand even completely new concepts.

And Mathematica of course does everything Wolfram|Alpha can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes, sure. You can even give a better insight about how roots of a polynomial of grade 2 can be obtained with a step by step approach or how you can derive and integrate symbolically.

This is like the explain command in databases.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is pretty cool. I might actually use this (assuming it can solve any "solvable" linear system). I'd also use a version of this for differential equations, if you happened to write one :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This video shows what I have working so far:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy6bwNBkAK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy6bwNBkAK0)

<comment><USER7> Please explain either with text or voice what is happening in that video. It is hard to follow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Lesson 6 at the following website explains the fundamentals of how the solver works:

[http://patternmatics.org/temp_1/mathfuture/](http://patternmatics.org/temp_1/mathfuture/)

The other lessons explain some of the concepts used in lesson 6.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would be very interested. Do you have a sample lesson to share?

</comment><comment><USER9> I think there will be hundreds of kids and students who struggle with math.</comment>


One weird trick to furnish your new home for free - <AUTHOR> http://jessepollak.me/one-weird-trick-to-furnish-your-new-home-for-free/

<comment><USER2> I didn't even read the story and I know this is going to be dumb.

There's no such thing as a free lunch!

<comment><USER3> There is.. But the lunch is most likely shitty, leftover ikea meatballs from the 90s.</comment></comment>


Major Experiments That Still Haven't Found What They're Looking For - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/7-major-experiments-that-still-havent-found-what-theyre-looking-for <comment><USER2> Member of the Eöt-Wash gravity group here. Happy to answer questions :)

<comment><USER3> If inertial mass and gravitational mass could be different, what sort of effects would that have? If we were able to make a material with much more mass of one kind than the other, what sort of things would be possible?

<comment><USER2> This is something I hadn't thought through before and made my morning bus ride substantially more interesting :)

I'm moving this disclaimer to the beginning, as I don't want anyone to get too excited: We haven't observed differences between the two yet, at a level of a part in 10^13. The following outcomes would only be possible with a different sort of matter than what we're aware of.

Energy is still conserved, so there aren't any perpetual motion machines that result. Such materials would fall differently--both in terms of acceleration and direction. (The later is because objects are also subject to inertial "forces", e.g. centrifugal force, Coriolis force, due to us living on a rotating reference frame called the Earth.). Orbital radii for given orbital periods could be different, so you could have geostationary satellites at different distances from the Earth. You could also make objects that are harder to push than to lift, or vice versa, but I can't think of a practical application for this other than demonstrating the effect.

<comment><USER4> Easy to lift but a ton of inertia?

Weaponry sounds like a good application.

<comment><USER5> Can't imagine how it would be better than any other material.

But a sofa made of that thing would be great for the times one's moving.

<comment><USER4> Imagine bullets with the impact of a 20 mm anti-materiel round that weigh as much as BB's.

Would be great for infantry. NATO nations standardized on 5.56mm in lieu of 7.62 in part because a soldier can carry more 5.56 rounds for the same weight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Proton decay, proton decay.

Always the same thing.

The Kamiokande experiments are amazing.

<comment><USER7> That's an understatement! The Super Kamiokande project alone pioneered at least a dozen technologies and improvements now used by much of the particle physics, nanotech, semiconductor fabrication, high precision sensing, and even biotech fields.

The technologies developed for water purification are especially marvelous. The Super Kamiokande is full of water that is likely the purest substance in the solar system (at a macroscopic level, although maybe there's crazy bulk gluon plasma at the center of the sun).

<comment><USER8> Seen the pictures of guys in boats floating out in the kamiokande? I always thought it was the coolest looking experiment.

I was really sad when all the bulbs broke years back :'(

<comment><USER9> Honest question: Wouldn't people floating in boats thought the water induce impurities?

<comment><USER7> Yes but they shut down the experiment and partially drain the detector to let crews in for repair, maintenance, etc. In order to get it started again, there is a whole complex procedure to flush the chamber and refill it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems that the part about the Neutron EDM is outdated. As far as I know CryoEDM was deconstructed (The experiment hall was empty two years ago) [1]. Maybe there is a follow up experiment, but it has been very quiet recently.

As an current example the nEDM experiment is actively developed [2].

[1] [https://www.ill.eu/instruments-support/instruments- groups/in...](https://www.ill.eu/instruments-support/instruments- groups/instruments/cryoedm/description/a-view-of-the-cryoedm-instrument/) [2] [https://www.psi.ch/nedm/amazing-nedm](https://www.psi.ch/nedm/amazing-nedm)

</comment><comment><USER11> In real science, not the TV kind, negative results are important, too.

<comment><USER12> Tell that to the journals...

<comment><USER13> Journals usually publish negative results from major experiments. Here's the one for LUX

[http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118...](http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.021303)

<comment><USER14> Yea my layman understanding is that it's a social pressure to not publish the results in the first place.

<comment><USER13> It depends, lots of these experiments result in better bounds on theories. LUX for example pushed down the cross-section for WIMP dark matter below the previous measurement. That in itself is an advancement, with implications on what theories for dark matter are possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You could claim LHC hasn't found anything in the sense that it hasn't found anything that disagrees with the standard model. I consider finding the Higgs as we expected a letdown, though it is of course very important. There is a lot of data collection to be done so hopefully they will find something unexpected.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting, I've never heard of that Mr. Clarke's quote before. I don't understand though, if we'd be alone in the universe, why would that be terrifying?

</comment><comment><USER17> The very first link for more information about the first experiment is dead [http://luxdarkmatter.org/](http://luxdarkmatter.org/)

<comment><USER6> [https://archive.is/JiJXh](https://archive.is/JiJXh)

for those not being able to access it like myself.

<comment><USER6> The actual page is [http://lux.brown.edu/LUX_dark_matter/Home.html](http://lux.brown.edu/LUX_dark_matter/Home.html)

The original page has almost all links broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> TBF, Michelson–Morley experiment did not found anything too

<comment><USER5> I hate this phrasing. Like most of the experiments on the article, Michelson- Morley did find the lack of something.

And it did expand the number of digits beyond the colon for the physics predictions, just like Michelson promised :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thanks for posting this. As a side note, I really like the style of nautil.us and their idea of writing about a single topic from different perspectives. How is this journal not very popular? (Or is it?)

<comment><USER20> They've been criticised for twisting physics to support the conclusions they want to draw from it, even if there is an alternative and much simpler interpretation of the results, see [http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9053](http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9053) — quote:

 _The group driving [Fake Physics] is small but determined, ideology-driven and well-funded by rich people with an ax to grind. The majority of the community is unwilling to take on the unpleasant and unrewarding task of challenging them. While Multiverse Fake Physics plays a large role in media coverage of fundamental physics, partially because of funding from the Templeton Foundation, there are very few actual papers on the subject and "research" in this area is a small fraction of what theorists are doing. Most physicists just hope that if they ignore this it will go away._

The Templeton Foundation, a religious organisation which has been funding them, has received a lot of criticism from the scientific community for linking science and religion.

I don't think we should dismiss Nautilus outright but I do feel like they get more traction on HN than they deserve.

<comment><USER21> Without clinking-through each of the links given in the article you linked to, can you help me, as a layman, summarize the criticism of Nautilus with regard to multiverse physics? Is the criticism more that they are disproportionately covering it, or is it misrepresenting it?

Related: From the blog you linked, "not even wrong" is a phrase used as an attack by experts on outsiders, but it does not need to be an attack. It can simply be: "that is outside the realm of mainstream scientific research." I think experts would do well not to be condescending, but rather more explanatory here.

<comment><USER20> Well I think it's a mixture of both, "disproportionate coverage" is a fair description, insofar as it misrepresents the activities and opinions of the research community (most of which appears to consider it hokum). I'll have to defer to the experts for the details, however, as I'm merely relaying their concerns.

<comment><USER21> I watch Sixty Symbols on Youtube and they have a number of episodes on string theory--which I've read necessarily implies extra dimensions(can't vouch for that conclusion personally), leading to multiverse theories. These episodes are straight from researchers themselves so I was surprised to read these ideas in the link provided, supporting your idea that the multiverse is hokum.

Anyways it's interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> it's forty-two

(couldn't resist)

</comment><comment><USER23> Dedicated to the letter U, the numeral 2, and a little dog called Snuggles.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is desktop text editing software still so bad? - <AUTHOR>

For example: Why is Microsoft Word's autocorrect still not using the kind of text editing technology that already functions in all tablets and smart phones? <comment><USER2> I shudder at the mere thought. Word does some simple autocorrecting that has rarely ever been annoying; besides that, the most helpful thing it does is underline (potentially) misspelled words and offer suggestions. Given my experience with some smart phones, I'd rather not have what I type change mid- way. I even have autocorrect turned off on all of my phones.

</comment><comment><USER3> After 2-3 years, I turned autocorrect off on my phone and wish I had done so sooner.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why? I would imagine that better and better autocorrect will make us want it more and more, not less and less. I'm just interested in why you would drop it.

<comment><USER4> It has not been my experience that autocorrect has become better: it has simply become more lax. As an example, I would actually find it really useful if the iPhone's autocorrect was smart enough to realize that my fingers were slightly off position as I typed (due to the lack of physical feedback) and could figure out what word I meant to type. However, it seems to just be running a spell check; it doesn't even realize that if I mash at the screen four times I intend to have four letters and it should not autocorrect what I typed to a word with five letters because it seems to be spelled similarly. The result is that a slight offset on the keyboard doesn't get corrected: it gets mutated into something hilariously unrelated to what you intended to type. Meanwhile, it also doesn't bother trying to come up with any kind of confidence rating for words I type that it doesn't understand. As an example: if I sit there and type a word with one finger, carefully moving my hand slowly to each key and carefully lining up each press, when I hit space bar the iPhone should realize "there is no way in hell I should be correcting this right now: this was a careful and deliberate action on behalf of this user", and yet even when you do that it will take a word and butcher it into one of the words in its dictionary; which, in the case of the iPhone, includes such words as "it's" and excludes such words as "its"... it doesn't even have the common decency to run a grammar check, something Word has had a reasonable-if- not-perfect implementation of for well over a decade now. Honestly: the iPhone has a /lot/ to learn from Word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Because in order to create a really good new generation of word processor, someone would have to start from scratch and reimagine the whole thing.

Microsoft lives from taking users' documents hostage and making users pay for software upgrades, so they won't do it. OOo/Libre Office does not seem to have the man power to do it. Apple seems to be utterly unmotivated to anything more than absolutely necessery with its office suite.

That said, there _are_ interesting alternatives out there if you are willing to part with more than basic *.docx compatibility.

</comment><comment><USER6> The autocorrect on my android is great... until I want to type something that is "incorrect" like type a linkedlist.c and get an autospace after the period.

I think there can be improvement for keyboards inspired by touchscreen keyboards, but it's going to be different then what's out there on phones and tablets because of the differences in how we type between the two. We don't touch type on mobile devices.

I think the only thing free when typing is our thumbs..

</comment><comment><USER7> > _the kind of text editing technology that already functions in all tablets > and smart phones?_

The reason that technology exists is because we're so bad at tapping small rectangles with our thumbs. If you interacted with your smartphone using a full size touch-typing keyboard, the phone wouldn't have advanced autocorrect.

</comment><comment><USER8> Most typists have a disdain for autocorrect.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why shoot for tablets and smartphones when there's better tech.

[http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/03/spell-checking- powere...](http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/03/spell-checking-powered-by- web.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> I own a Dell Venue Pro which has both keyboard and touchsreen text entry. Autocorrect is counterproductive when I use the keyboard. I wouldn't even begin to want that in a word processor...or FireFox like I'm using now.</comment>


N26 customers feel betrayed by the German digital bank's decision to quit the UK - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/17/n26-customers-feel-betrayed-by-german-digital-bank-for-leaving-uk.html <comment><USER2> A sample of 3 people is not representative of all the customers. This article is pushing for sensationalism.

Switching bank accounts in the UK is dead easy. Open the new bank account, give them your old bank account reference and they do all of the switching for you, port over the scheduled and direct debit payments.

N26 is not competitive in the UK compared to Monzo, Starling and Revolut. Just pick one and you're good to go.

<comment><USER3> There are other implications to switching banks, e.g. credit reference agencies will often deduct points if you frequently switch current accounts and/or don't have at least one long-standing account.

Also worth noting many of the challenger banks do not yet report to any/all of the three main credit reference agencies.

<comment><USER4> Monzo and starling does, Revolut does not have a bank license in the UK.

<comment><USER3> Monzo report to TransUnion and Experian (as of last month), but not Equifax.

Starling report to Equifax and TransUnion, but not Experian.

I don't believe Revolut report to anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> last year N26 was like: "we've just opened our London hub. we're adding hundreds every day. we'll be hiring hundreds of people".

this year: "With the UK having left the EU at the end of January, we will in due course no longer be able to operate in the UK with our European banking licence. Therefore, we are writing to share the news that we will be leaving the UK and closing all accounts."

translation: "not enough signed up in order for us to apply to the UK regulators."

honestly, this was by far the worst kind of response any startup can have. really amateurish.

<comment><USER6> In the UK, in the past years, we have got used to anything and everything being blamed on Brexit so people have really grown cynical about this 'reason'.

Here, considering that they are faring poorly and that they launched in the UK _after_ the EU referendum many people think (rightly IMO) that they are taking the piss by blaming Brexit.

It's also not clear whether a full bank licence is required to offer basic current accounts. I believe that Revolut operated for years without one and that the bank licence they have now is in fact an EU licence.

They seem to want to focus on the US, that's their choice.

<comment><USER7> can you give examples of things blamed on brexit that is not, in fact, brexit's fault

<comment><USER8> Queues in Schiphol...

<comment><USER9> No, but expecting queuing to get _better_ as a result of brexit is just ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can totally see how staying in a market this volatile - due to Brexit of course! - can pose a too big and complicated task to a startup. That's fine I think. Better to estimate your ability to provide a good service up front and make professional decisions, even if that means sacrifice.

<comment><USER11> Brexit will have many challenges. But blaming "volatility" instead of competition is letting N26 off the hook for simply not being all that compelling compared to it's competitors.

<comment><USER9> I think maybe you are "half right" in that the additional costs imposed by brexit just meant it wasn't worthwhile.

<comment><USER12> So far nothing has actually changed, despite the headlines. Transition period etc. If you believe the FT then the big impact so far is a slightly weaker currency which should help a German firm, not hinder them.

It's really not clear where this volatility would be coming from, or what that actually means precisely, or why it'd be an issue now and not when they entered the market, or why they'd find it so hard to get a UK banking license if they did end up needing one. The costs of getting a banking license are high _if you 're creating a new bank_, because there are so many policies and laws to comply with that require infrastructure e.g. AML enforcement.

But if you're already operating the costs of getting a license would pretty minimal. So many of the requirements are about demonstrating you _could_ run a bank in theory, that a process for converting an EU-recognised license to a UK-recognised license would certainly be very streamlined. This is doubly true because the UK has focussed on making it much easier to create new banks in the past 10 years. The banking application process is far easier than it used to be.

<comment><USER9> The relationship between the UK and mainland Europe is changing dramatically. The UK think they're going to force things their way by economic might alone, but the social ramifications of all of this will last far longer than you might expect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "never gave any indication that the U.K. leaving the EU would make trading > difficult for them."

duh. it should not be something you have to say. the opposite would be surprising and would be worth stating. my point is the default for banks is that brexit will affect their licence to operate in the UK

<comment><USER13> Yeah, every contact I have with UK institutions had been sending me letters for well over a year now about their brexit plans. OTOH, N26 (which is also my bank) really should have notified customers about their plans way earlier.

<comment><USER7> customers should have been wary that N26 did not have a brexit plan

<comment><USER6> They launched in the UK _after_ the EU referendum... It's not like Brexit meant that they suddenly had to rethink their strategy, is it?

No, they are faring poorly in a very competitive, crowded market and have simply decided to focus on the US.

<comment><USER7> the nature of the withdrawal agreement was not clear until brexit actually happened

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Leave means leave and this is what leave means. UK voted for this and actions have consequences. Many others will follow. Hardly anything to get upset about.

</comment><comment><USER5> this is N26's deleted blog post before this announcement: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQgcNPyXUAcsVrK?format=jpg&name=...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EQgcNPyXUAcsVrK?format=jpg&name=large)

key quote: "we are 100% focused on ensuring minimum disruption to our customers whatever the outcome or timing of Brexit"

</comment><comment><USER15> Monzo and Revolut were a thousand times better than N26. Good riddance N26 !

<comment><USER16> What was poor about N26? I have a Monzo account but have not really used the others.

<comment><USER15> They lied about the reasons to betray 200.000 users in UK. One hint: it was not Brexit.

<comment><USER5> it's known across the financial news teams that N26 left the UK due to very low adoption numbers. applying to the UK regulators did not make sense.

<comment><USER17> As I understand it, the need for UK regulation only came up due to brexit (before they were in thanks to the common market), so I guess "it's brexit" is sort of right, even if that leaves it a couple of steps?

Without it they could have coasted along for a while longer with not much extra effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Companies leaving the UK after brexit, UNEXPECTED!

<comment><USER18> People keep telling it's not about brexit.

It is!

Before brexit N26 could keep doing business in the UK with an european banking license, even if growth was slower than ideal.

Now they cannot anymore, and have to apply for an expensive uk-only banking license.

If it was because of low market share, they would have quitted earlier.</comment></comment>


Open Source Contribution Etiquette - <AUTHOR> http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2010/Dec-31.html <comment><USER2> Wow, I had never heard of someone doing major reformatting, reorganizing, or refactoring on someone else's code before submitting a patch! I would say that anyone who would do such a thing doesn't understand what it means to work with other people!

<comment><USER3> It happens although I'd like to believe it's rare. I perpetrated the most glaring example of patch refactoring I've ever seen.

The scenario: \- Original maintainer's module code totally ignored the code style conventions for the larger project it was a part of. \- Module maintainer had been dragging heels on a raft of bugfixes, module stuck in beta limbo for six months. \- Boss says we need this feature (cleaned up and stable) in our codebase by the end of the month.

My play: I refactored the codebase to meet larger project coding style standards, patched every bug in the issue queue, added a suite of unit tests and submitted the entire thing back to the maintainer.

Maintainer's play: The maintainer opted to reject my patch on the grounds he preferred his personal coding style to the project standards.

Endgame: I promptly re-rolled the patch as an addition to another related module, got the code committed to that project, posted an issue to the original maintainer's queue indicating his module was deprecated. Last time I checked in dude's module was still buggy and he was taking flack from several people involved with the larger project for being a cowboy with the coding standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always thought a general etiquette guide and howto for contributing to open source projects would be useful.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hmm,

 _"The maintainer is in for the long-haul, and has been working on this code for longer than you have. Chances are, he will keep doing this even after you have long moved into your next project."_

That might be a common pattern but it seems like it's sort-of a dead end pattern. If put yourself out there as The Maintainer in that way, you've basically said no is going to be able to make major contributions without you - going it alone become a self-perpetuating process and it's indeed not surprising that no one will stick around.

I have a large project that I hope to release in the next 1-3 months. I've put a large amount of effort into it. I'm also putting effort into making the code good enough that others can come on board and make significant extensions to it. Following the existing code style certainly but quite possible rearranging functionality, breaking up and rearranging function if it's useful and so- forth.

A VCS like git that lets everyone have the branch they like can be good here. Do what you love and inclusion in the main branch should follow sooner or later...

<comment><USER6> It depends. If you are the main author of a large project, and you look forward to extend it by taking contributions in a direction that carries _any_ meaning to you, integrating code at random won't magically result in a better project.

As the author an maintainer of several small FOSS projects, I rarely receive pull requests that I can merge right away. In that sense, a distributed VCS doesn't really improve over the patch-by-mail approach for random contributions (it _does_ helps cooperation among regulars however).

I can also tell you right away that a FOSS project without direction or maintainer quickly dies, independently of the VCS. Successfull forks are very rare. Mostly, projects with good potential but no maintainer get simply dumped and reimplemented by another programmer.

If you are a maintainer, you will appreciate all the points the authors is making. If you are making a contribution, adhering to all the points will increase the odds of your change to make it quickly and improve the software.

Also, conversely as a contributor, I don't spend time on projects which have no maintainer or lack direction anymore. Having the source of a project (especially large) sounds useful at first, until you realize that maintaining it without the inner knowledge is a daunting task. It only makes sense if you are willing to use it extensively (and become the new the-facto maintainer).

<comment><USER5> I'm mostly saying that it seems useful for a maintainer to offer those aiming to contribute a path towards doing more than just fixing bugs.

<comment><USER6> There's no need for that. Users/contributors will do whatever they want with the source already. That includes hacking the source for private purposes only. Github is the pinnacle of that attitude (which in my opinion is not _social_ coding at _all_ \-- but I digress).

Of course, the articles misses an important point: talking to the maintainer/author first. If you were about to do a big change, would you know if there were any chance to be integrated first? Maybe knowing if someone is already working on it? (heavy refactoring comes to mind). I've gained precious insights about design by simply talking to authors before starting to work on a contribution, saving my time countless times.

If your intention is doing a change _no matter what_ , then you're not really interested in _contributing_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> SCM (a la GitHub pull requests) really helps with this. When your contribution is reduced to a line-by-line diff, it becomes clear what the essential changes are (and satisfying to make the diff as short as possible).

</comment><comment><USER8> Who does that ? Each time i had to fix something in a OSS project i touched as little code as possible. Everybody knows is no fun working with code written by somebody else.

</comment><comment><USER9> Indeed, the code formatting style used by Mono (eg spaces before argument parens like "SomeMethod ()") is one of the biggest reasons I'll probably never contribute to it. I can't change the existing style, but it makes my eyes bleed to read, so I avoid it.

<comment><USER10> Maybe it would be a good idea not only to have coding standards, but also automatic handling of auto-formatting code when checking in. If you have a highly flexible coding style system like uncrustify for example, and check ins would be guaranteed to be automatically formatted, you could simply tell vim or emacs to format it with your coding style when opening, and then auto- format it for check in.. I know it's oversimplifying, but maybe it would help some people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It helps to keep clear the distinction to "contributing to someone's open source project" and "writing code for an open source project".

The code might be open/free, but the maintainer of a given instance/repo is ultimately in charge of at least that.</comment>


Show HN: Office Hours – Hold office hours by phone anytime, anywhere - <AUTHOR> Hello HN! My name is Rohan Pavuluri, and I'm launching an iPhone app called Office Hours (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/get-office-hours/id145648052...). The app lets you hold "office hours" by phone anytime, anywhere. You can think of it as the green Facebook messenger symbol but for calls. In real time, easily let your network know that you're free to accept calls. And easily find out who in your network is free to accept a call from you.
I built Office Hours as a side project on the weekends with a friend to address the personal pain I feel scheduling phone calls. I run a nonprofit, and I love having conversations with everyone who reaches out to learn more about our work. But these conversations are generally painful to schedule for two reasons:
1. The back-and-forth email exchange to find a time slot is exhausting.
2. I don't want to commit to time slots on my calendar because something that takes priority -- aka anything directly work-related -- may come up. Calendly doesn't solve this.
Given that I have deadtime during grocery shopping, commutes, and other errands, I thought to myself, what if I could easily schedule all of these calls during my deadtime? What if I could just turn "on" my "office hours" and send a notification to "followers" that I'm free to chat? I also wanted to follow my friends and mentors and get notifications when they're free, so I could eliminate the friction involved with scheduling. That's how I got the idea for Office Hours.
How it works if you have inbound requests for your time: just download the app, add people who want to talk to you as "Followers", and they'll get a notification whenever you turn on your Office Hours. Whenever you're on a call with someone who follows you, your Office Hours automatically close to your other Followers.
How it works if you want to request someone else's time: just send them a Follow request. If they accept your request, you'll get a notification when they open up their Office Hours. When you see they're free, you can give them a call through the app.
I'm looking for any feedback, particularly around potential use cases. Some ideas: professional networking that's not time-sensitive such as career advice chats, social catch-ups with friends and family, and teachers and students.
In the future, I hope to implement VoIP, so I can make it easier to schedule calls internationally. I also hope to implement end-to-end encryption. Feel free to email firstname.lastname@example.com with any feedback too. <comment><USER2> Hey this looks really cool. I could see this potentially being useful for communities that have guests do public office hours but might have issues getting the word out to interested people who don't regularly visit the forums for updates (thinking of IndieHackers).

Good work :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea. I'll try to ping some folks at IndieHackers to see if they're interested. And other forums too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great idea. You should add the ability to create groups. For example, if you join a startup incubator's group, you will see which of its mentors are available at any given time. You will be able to pitch your app as a way to enhance the value of non-digital networks by making it easier to utilize said networks. I also think it would be nice to have a "drop-in" feature where the person with office hours would put their phone on speaker and allow anyone to connect without even calling. Let me know if you ever need help brainstorming.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a very cool idea.

I'm officially a mentor in a couple communities and suffer the same pain with regards to scheduling.

I'm also mentored and I'm always debating whether if now is a good to talk and I won't bother my mentor.

It could also be used in a paying context. I do a bit of consulting about the saas solution we sell and its ecommerce ecosystem. We are of course happy to reply our customers but sometimes their contractors (particularly more juniors one) are hesitant to inquire about something and fear bothering me, especially when there's a timezone difference.

This tool could serve as a "yes, do "bother" me now, I'm actually open to discussions" indicator in many situations.

I'd suggest extending the indicator to email/slack/text and written communications in general as sometimes mentors or mentoree prefer expressing themselves in written form.

I think there's a market for this "omnichannel availability indicator", in both non profit/free and paid modes.

Please ping me when you release an Android version?

<comment><AUTHOR> I love the idea of an "omnichannel availability indicator." Thanks so much. I live in NYC, and you can't take phone calls during a 30 min subway ride, but you can definitely answer texts. So it's fitting. And yes, I'll ping you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey there! I'm really interested in this idea, as I hold daily office hours for my free manager mentoring program (shameless plug, link is in my profile).

I have daily sessions and currently use Calendly to handle coordination. It allows me to cap the number of sessions to one per day, while letting people pick slots in my calendar that haven't been filled by work meetings. It's worked well to date, but I'm hitting limits of the software as I have other mentors who want to join but calendly doesn't have great advanced settings to load balance across multiple people with limits.

In essence, I want to be able to have a mentor take up to N calls per day, and rotate between other mentors when that person's calendar is full. Right now it only lets me set global limits across all team members.

If you're going to be doing any sort of discovery, I'd love to be listed as well. My email is in my profile if you want to collaborate.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great idea! Can we follow a person for a limited time only? Say I want to talk to a professional mentor this week. It would be annoying for me to keep getting notifications of their availability after a week. Just a thought!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. You can unfollow them whenever you want. Or simply turn off notifications whenever you want.

<comment><USER6> Great feature!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems great, and honestly like the type of thing that could and should just be integrated into iOS/Android natively for anyone in your contacts etc..

I hope if they steal it from you they make it worth your while.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree that it should be a feature that is already integrated into your phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is "office hours?" From context it sounds like a conference call timeslot?

<comment><AUTHOR> When the user holds "office hours," they inform everyone who follows them that they're available to accept calls. It's like a conference call timeslot, but in real time. For example, if you decide to go grocery shopping at 2 PM on Saturday, you can make your timeslot available to everyone who may want to reach you as soon as you walk into the grocery store. You don't need to plan ahead of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really like this idea. What's the tech stack?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Ionic + Firebase + Twilio

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Smart. Very smart. You'll go far.

</comment><comment><USER11> Seriously genious!

</comment><comment><USER12> Awesomesauce</comment>


Building a chat system using core.async and server-sent-events - <AUTHOR> http://blog.juxt.pro/posts/course-notes.html

<comment><USER2> Is there a link to an actual tutorial?</comment>


Vvvv – A Multipurpose Toolkit - <AUTHOR> https://vvvv.org/ <comment><USER2> Used it for DJ visuals and it's quite nice. Recently switched to PureData though as that can run on non-windows too.</comment>


The Art of Unix Usability (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/html/ <comment><USER4> This is so critical, and I'm so happy to see it on HN.

When I was a PhD student, I TA'd an HCI class my advisor taught, where he gave a project a week. The very first project was to design a text interface - <USER2> subsequent weeks then ramped up to designing applications for 1024x768 mouse driven computers, then touch screens, then 80" screens viewed from 50 feet away, etc. I think any good UI design class should proceed in this manner.

Now that I've left academia, when I need to assess an interactive designer's skills, the first thing I do is ask them to design a text interface because all of the core principles exposed in the posted piece are foundations of any good interactive design - regardless of whether it's in a terminal, in a GUI, or for a gesture driven application (conversely, UI designers who dismiss textual interfaces as irrelevant to UI design are probably mediocre designers).

Most of the fundamentals of interaction design are present in good textual interfaces, and there's no fluff to hide behind if you are a mediocre interaction designer. I commonly see UIs with lush graphics, beautiful animations, the perfect quirky copy - and yet it all falls flat because one of the rules listed in the posted book aren't respected, but when you try to tell the designers that they just point at all these things as signs of how great their interface is.

The truth is that all this crap doesn't matter if your interaction model is shitty. Just like a great artist should be able to make beautiful pieces using just a piece of charcoal regardless of their Photoshop skills, a great interaction designer should know how to design effective text interfaces - <USER3> if they can't, no amount of CSS skills or blog posts on "skeuomorphic vs flat" they've read will matter.

<comment><USER5> Just curios, but... how do you frame the task of designing a text interface when evaluating an UI designer? ...and what's their usual reaction to the request?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it is important to remember, while this is instructive and has good pointers to the usability literature, it represents a particular point of view, not THE UNIX point of view of simplicity. In fact there is no one Unix point of view.

Some of original Unix authors are of a particular opinion, that Unix itself has gone wrong by becoming too complex. (see [http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf](http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf), see also Rob Pike's critique of BSD sockets, etc.) If I were to summarize their apparent position on simplicity, it might be that the design should be structurally simple throughout, not just on the surface.

For contrast, note that ESR uses the X window system in his discussion of GUI interfaces. The X system was famously heavyweight and complex (at the time.) If I were to summarize ESR's apparent view of simplicity, it might be that simplicity is something you present to the user.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great read, and following these rules is so important when designing CLIs.

It's such a shame that for all its popularity, Git spits in the face of so many of these rules (least surprise, reversibility, failure, silence, predictability, etc.). It can be argued that understanding Git's plumbing obviates some of these violations, but I'd counter that I have better things to do than memorize intricate plumbing and byzantine combinations of commands and flags just to get usable source control. In either case, it's a fine VCS saddled with a tragic command-line interface, and it's become so popular that we're going to be stuck with that CLI for ages now.

Just goes to show: The command line is so elegant and pleasant when programs follow these rules. Make an effort to get your CLI right from the get-go, because if your program becomes popular you won't be able to change it later.

<comment><USER8> > It's such a shame that for all its popularity, Git spits in the face of so > many of these rules (least surprise, reversibility, failure, silence, > predictability, etc.).

Probably an artifact of the fact git was originally designed to be a kit others could use to make a DVCS with a nice interface.

Which might point to another maxim: Always expect that your interfaces will be used widely, even if you don't expect them to be.

An extreme, pathological example of this is the BANCStar programming language:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BANCStar_programming_language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BANCStar_programming_language)

[http://reocities.com/ResearchTriangle/station/2266/tarpit/ba...](http://reocities.com/ResearchTriangle/station/2266/tarpit/bancstar.html)

[https://github.com/jloughry/BANCStar](https://github.com/jloughry/BANCStar)

<comment><USER9> > > [http://reocities.com/ResearchTriangle/station/2266/tarpit/ba...](http://reocities.com/ResearchTriangle/station/2266/tarpit/bancstar.html)

Note that a lot of the links in there don't work anymore and you'll need to use archive.org to view them. In which case I would also ask you to donate to help keep the archive alive, if you can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you have the Stylish browser add-on ([https://userstyles.org/](https://userstyles.org/)), you can make this book much easier to read with this custom style I just wrote: "The Art of Unix Programming, and … Usability – improve readability", [https://userstyles.org/styles/107208/](https://userstyles.org/styles/107208/).

Here is the main part of the style's CSS, if you just want to use your developer tools on each page:

        body {
            font-size: 20px;
            line-height: 1.3;
            max-width: 700px;
            margin-left: auto;
            margin-right: auto;
        }

I referred to [http://practicaltypography.com/summary-of-key- rules.html](http://practicaltypography.com/summary-of-key-rules.html) when choosing these numbers.

<comment><USER11> I'll note that you can also go to [http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/taouu.html](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/taouu.html) for the full book at once, which makes it more feasible to add these styles via console without going nuts and without needing an add-on (or if you're in Safari...).

<comment><USER12> There's a Stylish extension for Safari too.

<comment><USER11> Good to know; userstyles.org doesn't mention it Safari on the page linked, at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Holy cosmic coincidence, Batman. I posted an Ask HN about an hour after you first posted this seeking suggestions for discussions of information design for command-line programs.

Even more funny, valaruca1 suggested that "The Art of Unix Programming" by Eric S Raymond might be a good place to start. I was a little disappointed when I checked it out; perhaps he just mis-remembered this keyword.

Thanks for posting this--it looks like where I need to start.

<comment><USER11> As a followup, after reading much of this and skimming the rest, the command- line side of things doesn't get much focus beyond the principles, after which the book turns to GUIs for unix. Neither TAOUP and TAOUU give much coverage to output for the human reader; most of the coverage of the topic is restricted to making the output useful for other cli programs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was browsing some old(ish) books in the computer science section of a used bookstore, and there was a popular book on Motif user interface programming. Curious, I started to leaf through it. Then I didn't believe my eyes and went through it more carefully.

About 350 pages. Lots of APIs and descriptions of options and stuff, but exactly _one_ diagram. In the whole book. For me, this pretty much sums up why Unix UIs were so bad.

<comment><USER14> wow</comment></comment>


Review my website: Big Blue Saw - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on this business for 4.5 years now, off and on with contract jobs.<p>I'd really appreciate the trained eyes of HN taking a look at the website to tell me what they think: http://www.bigbluesaw.com/ . In particular, I want to make sure that the website is easy an pleasant to use, and that there are as few barriers as possible to ordering. Let me know what you think. <comment><USER2> Cool idea. Interesting tool. Site looks pretty good in general, just needs refinement.

Few quick thoughts:

1\. If I knew nothing about drafting, the Designer wouldn't be very attractive to me - it would scare me away. I'd prefer to just send you a picture or two (which I see is available now after looking around). Make it easier to see.

2\. The picture slideshow isn't especially effective. Instead I'd have a few pictures of your proudest work.

3\. Homepage: I don't know where my eyes should go to learn about what the site does. Have a single focal point.

4\. The login form on the front - I don't know why I'm logging in and what it does for me.

5\. The radiant blue with the gray boxes with text is a bit ugly and reminds me of 1995. The "Sale on Waterjet" text is the same.

Hope it works out for you! Can tell you've put a lot of work into it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll put these things on the to-do list.</comment></comment>


Coca-Cola Launches Mobile Payment System - Partners with Google - <AUTHOR> http://anidea.com/strategy/coca-cola-launches-mobile-payment-system/

<comment><USER2> On one hand, I really like this because it does make it more convenient to use vending machines by removing the need for cash and coins. The other side of that coin, however, is I feel it'll make me less selective and I'll end up paying their marked up prices since the cost will seem "less real." Parting with real cash makes me less inclined to spend $1.25 on a soda, but if all I have to do is tap and "pay later" I'll probably give in to temptation more often.

<comment><USER3> _I really like this because it does make it more convenient to use vending machines by removing the need for cash and coins._

Going beyond that, I would absolutely kill to see NFC-enabled parking meters. Using credit or debit all the time means I don't accumulate coins anymore in my car. So then I have nothing to pay parking meters, and I often end up having to take a gamble on getting a ticket.

<comment><USER4> A large chunk of San Francisco has credit card enabled meters: <http://sfpark.org/>

The whole program is actually really interesting: the meters update their prices by 25-50¢ each month to attempt to meet congestion targets per street.

Plus they have an API providing app developers with meter information (including current usage) <http://sfpark.org/how-it- works/developerresources/>.

The video (<http://sfpark.org/about-the-project/>) explains it really well.

<comment><USER5> Philadelphia recently installed credit-card meters, and they're terrible. They almost always refuse to scan either of my two cards correctly, a problem I never have with any other card scanners. I don't know if it's because they're exposed to the elements or what, but they just don't perform as advertised. NFC would be great in this scenario, as you can fully protect the sensor from the weather.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> TFT + network + Android NFC + Google = targeted ads on vending machines!

In version 2.0, you will get a discount for automatically posting your purchase on G+.

</comment><comment><USER7> This isn't a very accurate headline.

<comment><USER8> This would be a more useful comment if it were more specific.

<comment><USER7> Coca-Cola is not launching a mobile payment system.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What makes a good API presentation? - <AUTHOR>

i don't want to limit answers here so i won't be too specific. as a developer, what takeaways would you want from a presentation focusing on a particular API? what makes a presentation interesting and what's crucial you learn? context: i'm presenting an API tomorrow at hackNY and looking for some insight to see what i can improve. <comment><USER2> Joshua Bloch gave a good presentation on API design, you might have seen this before. Here is the link - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw>

Mostly along those lines will make a presentation useful and interesting. Not sure whats the time limit for your presentation but real life example would keep the audience more interactive or building something on the fly from ground up.</comment>


Microsciky32: 32-bits CPU Open Source Micro Size Quadcopter Drone - <AUTHOR> https://dronegarageblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/micro-scisky-the-32bits-open-source-brushed-flight-controller/ <comment><USER2> thank you. As i try to fumble through the paces of learning LOS acro mode im interested in this FC and seeing its small size is defiantly an eye opener to its capabilities.</comment>


Show HN: Annotary - Highlight Web Pages, Share Your Notes - <AUTHOR> http://annotary.com/

<comment><USER2> This kind of thing should come native and default with the Internet browsers, but it doesn't and I don't know why. Consequently a question I keep on asking for long: why is no one paying attention to the bookmarks manager of any of the popular browsers?

In any case, these annotating services have a long history on the web and most of them have failed to make any mark in a long run (anyone remembers Google Notebook and why they folded?). Clipmarks was another old annotating service which had a good bookmarklet and cult following but it had to fold. Diigo I believe is still around but in what form?

The moral of the story is that it is practically impossible now to gain the trust of the crowd with any such new service. I wouldn't want to use your service because I cannot trust you will be around for long. Sorry, but that's the reality at the end of the day.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN folks, I've been on this site for some years now and watched many others post their projects and get great feedback.

This is my latest endeavor. I thought it would appeal nicely to the HN crowd who read heavily online. Let me know what you think - I'm here to answer any questions.

<comment><USER3> So, yet another bookmark-note-taking-whatnot-app.

1\. Can you export your data? JSON preferred.

2\. Is there an API?

3\. How does it compare to <http://okfnlabs.org/annotator/>, which is free, open source and distributed?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Not yet, although it's a pretty commonly requested feature, so we'll likely include it soon.

2\. Again, not yet. What features would you like to see in an API?

3\. The main difference is the social value. I can easily make annotations and share them with you, see what my friends are bookmarking and highlighting. We're looking to build a community, rather than just an annotation tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Diigo had this functionality in say 2010, and somehow it doesn't seem to have taken off. Anyone knows why?

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks like the same thing Markerly is working on

<comment><USER6> they are indeed similar - I like annotary's UI much better</comment></comment>


Risk-First Software Development - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/risk-first/website/wiki <comment><USER2> Author here, hope you enjoy reading this.

Feel free to ask anything.

thanks

<comment><USER3> I tried to figure out how to edit this wiki page and submit a PR but ran out of time for today, so let me just drop this suggestion here for now.

I would change this:

> A recontextualization of the software process as being an exercise in > mitigating different kinds of risk.

to:

> A new way to look at the software development process: it's an exercise in > mitigating different kinds of risk.

The PR comment would be "Use plain English." ;-)

<comment><USER2> Updated it for you: [https://github.com/risk- first/website/wiki](https://github.com/risk-first/website/wiki)

Using plain english is harder than it sounds! :)</comment></comment></comment>