What Software Can Learn from Bluegrass - <AUTHOR> https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/309530 <comment><USER2> Bluegrass is a music style originating in Appalachia from the Irish, Scottish, and English influences of the area...

Also, heavy African American influences - a lot of music historians source the banjo to Africa, and African American string bands were very common and were a big influence on bluegrass and what we call "old time". If you're into bluegrass and old time, check out the Mississippi Sheiks. For something more current, the Carolina Chocolate Drops are pretty awesome.

Oh one other thing (man, really don't mean to seem too critical here), imperfection is _very_ tolerated in a bluegrass group ;) You don't have to pass on a solo if you're worried you'll make a mistake, go for it. Better to go for it than hold back too much.

Just don't play over other people, be cool, listen a bit. You should have a basic competence, if not, probably practice a bit more and join a beginner or slow jam for a bit. But especially in a casual jam, seriously, take your break, it's cool.

<comment><USER3> _(man, really don 't mean to seem too critical here)_

I don't think we should give this article a complete pass. I think the author is using something the target audience thinks is cool but knows little about to make assertions for his favored development ideology. Also, I think a more detailed and nuanced analysis is instructive.

From the article: _Studies show teams in which members have an equal voice and a chance to be heard perform far better._

That's not the complete story of how Bluegrass and Old-Time sessions work, in my understanding, at least not all of them. There is often a leader, ranking highest in some combination of talent and age, agreed upon tacitly, who gets to tell people when to take a solo. Irish sessions often work somewhat like this, with the leader telling people to start a tune instead of take a solo. Such leaders can establish a feeling or a culture for the group.

 _As in jazz, bluegrass music often contains unplanned elements. Because the musicians are experts at their discipline, they can quickly make alterations to the song while it is being played._

This can even happen in Irish music. However, most often there is a corpus of well known tunes and a structure worked out ahead of time. This also goes for Bluegrass and Jazz. In my experience, whether or not unplanned elements work has more to do with the expertise of the players and their relationships with each other than anything else. I think that is the most valuable takeaway from this analogy. It's not enough that everyone has a chance to be heard. There needs to be a culture of people who are collectively motivated to create something great together who are tuned into a mutual give and take. Sessions can also break down into unproductive competition.

<comment><USER2> Irish music is tough that way. I play a bit of bluegrass and Irish, but I find it easier to join a bluegrass jam. You do need to learn to improvise for bluegrass, but once you can (and you can follow the chord changes), you can improvise during a break and, especially, play backup. Jazz musicians can also do this with chord charts, as long as someone knows the lead.

Irish music is both easier and harder in this regard. You can get away with not improvising at all, but I find the tunes are complex, played in unison, and often at high speeds. There's no moment where all eyes are on you and you have to improvise, but there's nowhere to hide if you don't know the tune, either. Adding additional challenge is the minor variances in tunes that occur between regions and jam sessions. You really do need to build up a very substantial repertoire of music to be able to drop into an Irish jam and be able to play along for most of the session.

(Yeah, I know, I'm responding to a minor point, and going off on a tangent, I just like the subject).

<comment><USER3> _Jazz musicians can also do this with chord charts, as long as someone knows the lead._

In one session I used to play in, there was a player who could play any Irish tune after listening to it just one time through, so long as someone else kept playing it.

There's an Irish flute player in the Bay Area who I love playing with and listening to. He's 100% variations all of the time, all the way through, but he does it right and everything fits.

 _Adding additional challenge is the minor variances in tunes that occur between regions and jam sessions._

TBH, many North American players just fluff those. Often, it falls to more capable players to match up to the others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> this is an analogy that is worthy of discussion, but i dont think this discussion really touches on some key things. the first is that in bluegrass, like gypsy jazz, the idea of jams are central. jams are informal gatherings where people come and go and play tunes together. they are often damn fun, which is really the reason they exist. some jams are more novice, others are more advanced, but in general you are expected to be welcoming, or at the very least not mean. and this is how people are able to start to learn the style. they are able to sit right next to people who are much better than them and learn. this is the best way to learn this kind of music, to be right next to someone who is doing the things you want to do.

the jams also serve a second purpose which is that they are a pretty good way of communicating everyone's musical skills to each other. it doesn't tell you everything about a musician, but its a good gauge of overall maturity, interests, and sound. this means that likeminded musicians find each other quickly. festivals are interesting to watch, because you see that by the end of 4 days or so, people have often created informal jam groups that are quasi bands at that point.

tech meetups seem to be a really shitty quasi jam. open source projects seem to be a better format, and though i havent really been part of it, demoscene, defcon, chiptunes, infosec... strike me as communities that are a little more mature about the whole thing. i dont know them well enough, but i get the vibe anyway. they seem to have stronger sense of community.

i think that really good software teams are almost certainly the product of something resembling a jamming environment. the key is that all the members of the team have independently decided that they respect all the other members and want to be on the team with them. i think this is not fully understood and institutionalized in software management practices. i think that now the focus is too much on "here is the problem we want to solve, lets find the people that are skilled in this area". i guess im saying that good teams will create themselves and management is kind of a crutch. i get that there are real world constraints etc blah blah. but sometimes i wonder about this: money does not help creating good music, and i kind of think that might be more true of software than we think too.

<comment><USER2> <money does not help creating good music, and i kind of think that might be more true of software than we think too.>

Wow, yeah, I agree. I think this is such a misunderstood aspect of software. A lot of institutions seem to think it's like biotech, where a huge investment in gleaming buildings and dedicated lab space will make all the difference.

I'm old enough (and grew up in SF) to remember when software development was not the monied, gentrifying cultural enemy it's often made out to be nowadays, but a creative pursuit that naturally took place in funky, artistic neighborhoods, for the same reasons everyone else was there. It was the right environment for this sort of activity.

Money does of course help for software development in that you do need to live, and it takes a lot of time. I read this interesting quote about the Galapagos project (an arts collective moving from NY to Detroit)[1]: "You can't paint at night in your kitchen and hope to be a good artist. It doesn't work that way."

Now, counter examples abound, I am sure of that. And most creative folks do need to do something to make ends meet. But in the end, if paying the rent means you have to be drained from a corporate job by the end of the day, it does make it harder to create good music, art, and yeah, software. This is one reason I have to wonder if SF can continue to be the locale where this sort of creativity, including even software, will come from in the future.

[1] [https://www.galapagosdetroit.com](https://www.galapagosdetroit.com)

<comment><USER4> yes, i think its a good point you bring up. having some money affords you more time to work on art. but i think that it doesnt work beyond that- i.e. offering big monetary rewards does not improve the music. at some point, the incentives of money and music will always misalign, and so the person who cares more about music will create something better. i kind of think of money as a constraining force, not an inspiring one- the less you have to think about it the better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Bluegrass is played swiftly and to perfection._

Not sure I agree. Lots of Bluegrass players, even the some of the best ones, favor speed over clean execution. Maybe another commonality with SW development.

<comment><USER3> _Lots of Bluegrass players, even the some of the best ones, favor speed over clean execution._

I don't know if it's still a thing, but I've met lots of Bay Area 20-somethings who seem to try and impress you with how many keystrokes a minute they can pull off in front of you, regardless of how it helps or hurts communication about what they are doing. It's as if they're enacting a TV drama image of what a hacker is supposed to be like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a great film that came out last year about the Japanese bluegrass scene. If you're like me and have had no interest in bluegrass this is an endearing introduction which really illustrates some of the deeper points of the culture from an unlikely source.

[http://www.farwesternmovie.com](http://www.farwesternmovie.com)

</comment><comment><USER7> For all the reasons listed by the other commenters, this is not a great article about bluegrass or software development.

There are some parallels, though. Bluegrass music was primarily a male- dominated genre, but that is changing. Early pioneers like Lynn Morris, Hazel Dickens, etc. opened the door, Rhonda Vincent and Alison Krauss pushed it open, and Molly Tuttle, Sierra Hull, and Sarah Jarosz have come through. There's little doubt in mainstream bluegrass now that women can be spectacular (Molly just won IBMA Guitar Player of the Year), though there are plenty of conservative pockets left and even prominent successful women still encounter sexist attitudes and behaviour.

Another is the presence of a thriving indie subculture. There are thousands of small bands achieving modest regional amounts of success. Two examples from tech: Clive Thompson plays in the Brooklyn 80s covers band The Delorean Sisters [http://www.deloreansisters.com/](http://www.deloreansisters.com/) and I play in the New Zealand progressive bluegrass band The Pipi Pickers [http://pipipickers.com](http://pipipickers.com) . There are plenty of side projects of software developers, small pet projects that will never be "the next Linux" but which achieve a modest following and serve the purpose of being intellectual stimulation for the developer. The jump from hobbyist to professional is a big one, though bluegrass lacks the paychecks in tech. "Get good at it, and you can make literally tens of dollars playing bluegrass."

My favourite comparison though is the headspace of developers and musicians. Both struggle to explain their inner processes, both crave flow state, both need a lot of practice and competence to reach that stage. Part of me suspects that a 10x developer, if such a beast exists, is mostly a function of having absorbed the language/framework/os so deeply that they aren't constantly losing flow state by hitting StackOverflow. Similarly, to play in the pocket and improvise fluidly requires hours of practice and the internalising of the physical actions required to make a given sound. Anyone trying to figure out on the fly where a D note is, is not in that flow state.

Neither seems at risk of being automated away. Deep Learning is making inroads into styles and genres (e.g., [https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00887](https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00887)) but little sounds like it could replace musicians and composers any time soon. And while deep learning systems are being used to tune deep learning systems, we're still far away from software being generated from problem descriptions or specifications. (Please throw links at me if I'm wrong!)

<comment><USER7> re $$$, I recently spoke to a musician in a nationally-known touring bluegrass band, winner of IBMA awards. He's making $20k/y, $30k on a good year. He's homeless, couchsurfing with friends and playing gigs outside the band when the band isn't touring. I was surprised and shocked, as I suspect many of the band's fans would be to hear that.</comment></comment>


Facebook Roadblock - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/roadblock/

<comment><AUTHOR> It might be fun to send the automated phone call to a public phone booth (if any still exist).</comment>


The Liar's Tell: Is Paul Ekman Stretching the Truth? - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/article/The-Liars-Tell/149261/

<comment><USER2> "Ekman now admits it was a mistake to define micro-expressions by duration, and describes them now as any facial expression that is very difficult to detect in real time."

I can see why he regrets having made it--it's the only concrete, measurable claim he made (that's mentioned in the article).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'ts been said before, but there's a major issue with any program that depends on TSA officers' perception of people as liars or truthful: true positives are going to be swamped by officer bias. In lower-stakes situations study after study shows police officers presuming non-white people to be more likely to be criminals without regard for local statistics. A terrorist group probably has a higher chance of slipping a member by who is or can pass for non-Arab under this setup. I doubt most domestic terrorists (almost universally white) are going to get the same scrutiny no matter how nervous as a frustrated Arab- American woman from Des Moines will. At best they might get checked in case they were smuggling.

The model here relies on teaching officers to select people based on whether they think they're lying, it's a perfect situation for prejudice to distract from actual threats. Bruce Schneier and others have pointed how this wastes resources and increases the attack surface for terrorists, but the TSA has been highly resistant to feedback & criticism. It's the equivalent of having the physical security guys for a building do sweeps at night to look for post- its with passwords. That's not the computer security threat and it's not the breaking & entering one, so why do you have them wandering around in the dark?

</comment><comment><USER4> Anxiety occurs for multiple reasons, so false positives would always be a confounding factor, even if micro expressions occured 100% of the time.

There is quite a bit of evidence that even with physiological measures linked to stress and lie detector machines, there is little reason to believe lie detectors are especially effective. Given that non invasive means of detecting anxiety are limited, and anxiety is itself limited, such screening is going to not be helpful.

That said, there are some great studies on using recognition and EEGs or fmri machines to detect lies. Your brain processes item's you recognize in different ways, so if someone maintains they never were in an apartment where a murder occured nor had seen it ever, you could display a series of apartments, including the murder scene, and be able to tell when they recognized the apartment. It's known in the field as the Guilty Knowledge Test, or GKT. Check out the work by Farwell and others if you are interested.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't know if Ekman is real or not (probably not), but any serious study of predictions should report both precision (are your accused liars all guilty?) and recall (did you catch all the liars?), not make statements like "70-percent accuracy." Especially if we are using these techniques for security screening, these numbers are essential. We'll also need to educate security personnel about the unintuitive nature of false positives, where even if a test achieves a low false positive rate, a given flagged person still has a low chance of being a liar (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_paradox](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_paradox)).

</comment><comment><USER6> Ekman is no less of of voodoo priest than polygraphers - an entire so-call profession of witch doctors. He has cashed-in magnificently on a government and population willing to buy empty high-tech looking boxes from a dowsing practitioner to detect bombs.

<comment><USER7> If he's getting anything near what his skeptics are saying with somewhat better than 50% accuracy after frame by frame processing and word analysis (which would be the rather detrimental portrayal given in the article), then he's doing a lot better than polygraphs. Polygraphs are a known pseudoscience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be interesting to read an objective analysis of Israel's airport security screening, to compare with what Ekman and the TSA have concocted. There are plenty of glowing articles [1] about the Israeli "gold standard", but I'm sure there are also plenty of glowing articles about Ekman.

It's certainly a field with many shades of gray. Not sure if most on HN can relate to any of this, engineers are mostly about facts, about black and white. Emotions don't have a lot to do with coding or debugging (except for frustration, no shortage of that!).

[1] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-wagner/what-israeli- air...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-wagner/what-israeli-airport- secu_b_4978149.html)</comment>


Bits of Advice for the VM Writer - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/curryon/cliff-clickbitsofadviceforthevmwriter <comment><USER2> By Clifford Click, from ~20 years of experience with just Hotspot.

Some hard earned knowledge, like:

      • GC requires SP (& usually PC) for stack roots
      • Hard to find the SP+PC of remote thread
       ─ Common problem of OS's
       ─ ! Very surprising to me, until I tried it !
       ─ Fails (w/low frequency) on many "robust" OSes!
       ─ Caught in page fault handler, nested in tlb handler, nested in stack overflow handler nested in ....

Ouch!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to go back in time a few years and show people slide 7 saying: "Footprint: embedded (1G), desktop (32G+), ...". While it's mostly true, my initial response was "WHAT?"

I still remember the J2ME which was running on tiny feature phones. And carry a yubikey which runs JavaCard.

</comment><comment><USER4> From page 40:

>Thing I won't do again...

>Write a VM in C/C++

>-Java plenty fast now

What is he trying to say here?

Is he saying that he would use Java to write a VM? Wouldn't there be two layers of GC then?

Or is he suggesting a stripped-down, GC-less variant Java instead?

<comment><USER5> There a number of JVM's written in Java with an mini interpreter in machine code. All code starts in the interpreter. GC and JIT run on themselves, more and more code gets optimized and no longer runs in the mini interpreter but actually is machine code.

I believe maxime and JikesVM are java with minimal assembly interpreters. There is one for Squeek and smalltalk as well. PyPy probably fits in this category as well.

All though all of these are meta circular now. i.e. the assembly mini interpreter has been thrown away and the generated machine code saved and shipped as a bin/exe.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Am I a fraud? - <AUTHOR> For years I've been working in a particular space. Built a name for myself. Got invited to speak at events etc. unfortunately, there wasnt much money to be made. I enjoyed building products, which kept giving me work from a totally different industry. It kept growing and I've been able to build a flow of work where I continue to build products but for a different audience/industry. It's paying well so I wanted to switch my business from focussing on the previous niche, to this new one. But I feel like a fraud. Am I abandoning this previous mission just to follow the dollars? The work is the same. Enjoyable in both industries. The pivot would move me away from a mission into a new industry with not much of a north star.
I'm afraid I'll regret it. Have I been an imposter all this time?
Any advice? <comment><USER2> If there was no conflict and it just naturally happened and B worked out better than A I'd say just go for B and ride it out.

They say you shouldn't change horses mid-stream, but why not. If it's a more reliable faster horse it's probably happier to be rode. Sure,you will miss the first horse, but if you don't ride too hard it will still follow in your trail.

Just keep it in sight and don't let the faster horse get all the food.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you found people that think that you provide value to them, that is a nice thing, wither they pay you or not.

But if some of these people pay you, then it does not diminish the value of what you are doing, it is their way to tell you that you bring them something valuable.

Something different would be if you think the money is used to coerce you to do something that you dislike, but you say that you actually enjoy what you are doing.

You are lucky, and certainly not an imposter!</comment>


6B Cockroaches are being groomed in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2142316/giant-indoor-farm-china-breeding-six-billion-cockroaches-year <comment><USER2> I just hope they have good QA. I can't imagine what happens when things fuck up.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess a preference for cockroaches is not exclusive to Paul Graham.

</comment><comment><USER4> CockroachDB anyone?</comment>


A scikit-learn pipeline in Wallaroo - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wallaroolabs.com/2018/02/a-scikit-learn-pipeline-in-wallaroo/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone! I'm the author of this post, if you have any questions please post them here, on our mailing list or on IRC, and I'll be glad to help!

</comment><comment><USER2> I am trying to understand where Wallaroo fits in the steaming landscape.

How does this compare to kafka-streams app running on kubernetes

<comment><USER3> Hi,

VP of Engineering at Wallaroo Labs.

The folks who we most appeal to right now are folks who are looking for a native Python streaming solution. There's also a decent amount of excitement from the Go community about our Go version that is out as a preview release.

There's a lot of JVM based solutions out there for streaming, the choices outside the JVM are pretty sparse.

Wallaroo is particularly well suited to streaming applications that need to keep some state in-memory to make fast decisions based on incoming data.

The Python version of Wallaroo can handle tens of thousands of events a second and respond within a few milliseconds. This is all dependent on the application logic of course, but it should give a rough idea.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin Block Time Halved To Five Minutes Amid Exponential Network Growth - <AUTHOR> http://thegenesisblock.com/bitcoin-block-time-halved-to-five-minutes-amid-exponential-network-growth/ <comment><USER2> "A common misconception is that transactional confidence is based on time"

Transactional confidence is based on the probability of someone compromising the network for enough blocks to undo a spend that you've already honored (IE you gave them what they paid for, then they undo the transaction). At 6 blocks, you are assuming that an attacker won't have the computational power to reverse 6 blocks in a row.

When blocks come out every 2 hours, that means you need to find every single block for 12 hours, or essentially control the blockchain for a long time.

When the block rate is down at 5 minutes, you only need to control the network for 30 minutes - you have more chances to get lucky and undo 6 transactions in a row in your 12 hours of purchased computing time.

A halved block rate does not mean you need less computational power, but it does mean that computational power is probably cheaper and 6 blocks worth of power is going to be more affordable.

<comment><USER3> Unless your purchased compute time is more than 50% of the network your odds depend mostly on the number of confirmations and not the time they take. The cost of a sub-50% attack increases exponentially with more confirmations but only linearly with longer confirmations, so the number of confirmations is more important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Inaccurate title. The network still sets the difficulty every 2016 blocks ( i.e. 2 weeks) so that it takes 10 minutes on average to create a block.

Right now, however, people are adding so much computational power in that intervening two weeks, that by the end of those two weeks it takes 6 minutes to create a block, not 10.

This is presumably due to custom hardware mining rigs coming online since they just shipped.

<comment><USER5> The title was accurate. Blocks are being found at a rate of 1 every 5 minutes. There's no way the next difficulty jump will be enough to bring the speed to 10 minutes since it takes the average time over the last 2016 blocks. It's likely in a couple weeks the time to find blocks will be even lower than it is now if the growth rate continues like this.

<comment><USER6> There's also a ceiling on the percentage increase and decrease possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If only the bitcoin algorithm could have accounted for incredibly various technical and sociological issues.

Good thing Moore's Law somehow exists and has maintained the curve perfectly despite not being a law, despite somehow not making any reference to the consumer activity that seemingly drives it, and a heavily innovation- constraining duopoly for every chip that is used in desktops/laptops.

Some times I feel like the computer industry really is driven by magic smoke.

<comment><USER8> >If only the bitcoin algorithm could have accounted for incredibly various technical and sociological issues.

I think they did a pretty decent job given that "incredibly various technical and sociological issues" is the definition of a wicked problem ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some alt-coins have been destroyed by the in-rush of massive hashing power, which caused a difficulty-adjustment up, followed by an exit of that hashing power, leaving block-progress so slow that it would take 'forever' (impractically long) for the next normal compensating adjustment-down to happen.

Since one of the joys of Bitcoin is using it to exercise one's paranoid imagination, consider scenarios where somehow, an enemy of Bitcoin (or promoter of an alternative) can somehow _disable_ or _redirect_ all that ASIC power in a short time frame.

Perhaps, in cahoots with the ASIC makers, some magic input can cause them to begin malfunctioning (either temporarily or permanently). Or, a cartel controls enough SHA256 power to withhold capacity, and switch to a NewCoin needing the same hashing resources, in rapid coordinated succession. Or both.

It might be hard for Bitcoin-prime to adapt in time, while NewCoin's deep- pocketed backers from the USG, CCP, or evil lectroids of Planet-X tempt miners and Bitcoin balance holders to switch to NewCoin, perhaps via an initial endowment mechanism which requires the irreversible destruction/relinquishment of old Bitcoin balances.

Ah, good times. Good Stephensonian-science-fictional times.

</comment><comment><USER10> If only people were this determined to run things like Folding@Home....

<comment><USER11> "If only you were doing X instead of Y with your money and time."

E.g. helping african children instead of reading HN.

No one yet figured out which "useful" computation has configurable difficulty, uniform success probability and which is easy to verify without using central authority. Complaining about people for hashing blocks is like being disappointed at someone not doing the charity _you_ like.

For me, miners are doing great job providing security to the blockchain and making transactions confirmed faster than usual. And Bitcoin, in my opinion, will help poor people and protect more wealth and health than a potentially better cancer treatment.

<comment><USER12> "Bitcoin, in my opinion, will help poor people and protect more wealth and health than a potentially better cancer treatment."

That is almost certainly not the case:

1\. Poor people have to pay taxes too, and they are less able to afford the risks or fees associated with currency exchange.

2\. Poor people are more likely to use or depend on the welfare system, which is not likely to start using Bitcoin.

<comment><USER13> 1\. In less developed countries, unfair taxes and harassment and are one of the reasons for poverty. Bitcoin reduces the risks of outsiders interfering.

2\. Irrelevant (edit: and slightly disturbing that you think the condition of poor people can only be improved by the welfare system. There is some evidence that the inverse is true.)

3\. Poor people in Africa are already using M-Pesa and other electronic currencies. Bitcoin is a less costly alternative to those payment systems.

4\. Many guest workers in rich countries are transferring a part of their income to their relatives in their home country, often for large fees. These fees are much smaller when using Bitcoin.

<comment><USER12> 1\. How does Bitcoin make taxation more difficult than paper money? How does it make taxation difficult at all? Even if somehow Bitcoin made it hard for a corrupt government to impose taxes, there are a lot of things the government could do to make Bitcoin hard to use (and they only need to ensure that a large number of people have trouble).

2\. Welfare is a reality of life, and has been as far back as we have written records. If you have a better system that might actually work, I'm all ears, but until then we need to deal with the reality of this world.

It is also wrong to assume that transaction fees for Bitcoin will remain low forever. As Bitcoin exchanges and other services start complying with financial regulations, the costs of that compliance will be passed on to their customers. Bitcoin is not useful without exchanges in countries that will not accept Bitcoin for tax payments, which at the moment is all countries.

<comment><USER13> 1\. Cash can be easily found and seized, not only by corrupt governments but by organized crime (If you think there is a difference). Bitcoin is decentralized and based on cryptography - you only need to have internet access and private keys to make transactions.

2\. Free trade and industrialization have a much better track record of lifting people out of poverty than handouts. Even Bono agrees. Bitcoin helps free trade and wealth aggregation, especially in countries with unstable currencies (Argentina, Zimbabwe)

3\. As explained in (1), Bitcoin is much harder to control than a centralized system. There is no need for centralized exchanges, everybody with a smartphone and internet access can trade Bitcoin. The fact that government don't accept taxes in Bitcoin does not imply that it will not help poor people, it implies that Bitcoin will not help the government if it chooses to criminalize virtual currencies.

<comment><USER12> 1\. Computers can be easily found, seized, searched, backdoored, confiscated, etc. How is that any different than the situation you face with cash?

2\. Free trade does not make welfare unnecessary. The point of welfare is not to lift people out of poverty, it is to ensure that people are not starving to death and that they have a place to live. If everyone had to depend on the free market to make enough money to eat, there would always be people who starve to death -- just like there will always be businesses that go bankrupt. In countries with dysfunctional or non-existence welfare systems people _do_ starve to death when they cannot find enough money to pay for their food.

3\. Governments do not need to criminalize Bitcoin to stop it from becoming popular. As long as businesses are required to pay taxes those businesses will need to get the money the government accepts tax payments in. Either those businesses will demand the money up front, or they will accept Bitcoin payments and then run to the nearest exchange when the tax collectors come. Either way Bitcoin is only going to be used as long as people have access to Bitcoin exchanges.

Of course, it is possible that the government is so corrupt and so dysfunctional that it is unable to even enforce the tax code. Such governments tend to not last long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Given the exponential growth in the network hash rate, how much sooner than 2140 can we expect the last bitcoins to be mined?

<comment><USER15> Once equilibrium is reached, we can expect hashing rates to bottom out. A similar rush will occur over time as the cadence of Bitcoin hashing technologies approaches more regularity, not unlike how new generations of CPUs and GPUs are released on a timely and predictable basis.

This will be the pattern of Bitcoin hashing -- waxing and waning with each new generation of ASICs and the lull between each release.

One has to wonder what will happen to all the surplus ASIC hardware as well- financed miners regularly upgrade their hashing infrastructure.

<comment><USER16> Perhaps sold for very little money to people who have free power. Soon it will be about power efficiency more than raw hashing power like what happened during the switch form CPU to GPU mining.</comment></comment></comment>


A practical guide to selling ebooks online - <AUTHOR> http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=1151&hn1

<comment><USER2> A few tips I've picked up by finding a few ebook marketing websites recently by accident:

* Long-form! Write a _lot_ of text explaining why your ebook will be useful, giving helpful examples (but not real answers... that's in the ebook) and basically just _lots_ of stuff that'll make the reader feel like you've put lots of work into this thing, you're giving them all this text for free, and it'd be kinda rude if they didn't buy a copy of your ebook.

* Get people saying "yes": the simplest is to only have the beginning of your interminable pitch on the home page... don't have any actual info there (not even the fact that you're selling an ebook): instead, put a big link at the bottom of page 1 that says "Yes! I'd like to learn more!" or similar.

* Urgency AND anchoring in one! When you finally show the price (after initial anchoring like "most people would expect to pay hundreds of dollars for tips this valuable"), use a bit of JavaScript to say that "Our normal price is $79 -- but due to high demand we've lowered the price to only $49... but only until " + tomorrowsDate + "! If you miss this flash sale, you'll need to pay full price, sorry!"

* Get their email so your long-form sale can go on forever! Require an email address to see an excerpt, or maybe even to see the page with pricing. Then every week or so send them an email with another ton of text, and "accidents" like "oh no, we accidentally lowered the price with a typo but we'll have to honor that just for today!"

This is only partly tongue-in-cheek. This may sound annoying -- and indeed, it is -- but I'll bet it really works. Even recognizing the tricks at each step, it's sometimes hard for me to avoid getting sucked in.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have no experience making millions of dollars from eBooks, but I can report that the final section is incorrect. I have sold books on leanpub.com to technically savvy users who apparently do pay for ebooks.

Twice I have tried to give away ebooks here on HN, and both times there were people who chose to pay even though the content was available free in PDF, iBook, and Kindle formats.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would argue that that represents an unusual case: people here pay you out of respect/gratitude for your contribution to the community.

For unknown authors, the sales picture is different.

<comment><USER3> That may be true. Let's say that it is. In that case, the article could be improved by distinguishing between the two cases of an author with a niche brand of some sort and an author without. If you have a niche brand, some of the other marketplaces may offer advantages such as lower costs or more flexibility.

<comment><AUTHOR> An author with an established brand or significant following (and I count your HN reputation as an example) can sell _anywhere_ , b/c readers will seek out his work and deal with all kinds of annoyances: usb cable device syncs, finding out which folder to copy into, which ebook format file to use, etc.

If you don't have a brand or following, though, selling through marketplaces that are not tied to devices is a huge disadvantage.

The typical ipad/kindle/nook user does not go outside the store built-in to the device looking for content (the majority of them probably don't even know it's possible), except for a small, bleeding-edge minority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the titles was expecting the story to have practical tips for publishing and marketing ebooks. This reads more as a short overview of the 3 most popular markets but doesn't dive that deep.

<comment><AUTHOR> As I mentioned at the start, it was an extended explanation for people who needed more than just links to KDP and iBookstore.</comment></comment>


Even a Moderate Amount of Drinking Could Cause Brain Decline - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/even-a-moderate-amount-of-drinking-could-cause-brain-decline/ <comment><USER2> This is constantly on my mind.

I code probably for around 8 hours a day, and spend another two staring at spreadsheets before I head home to my young family. This is repeated six days a week. As such I take a stack of Modafinil, Sprint by Nootrobox ([https://hvmn.com/sprint](https://hvmn.com/sprint)), Vitamin B, and one general all rounder vitamin pill to maximize my productivity.

Looking back at a) the not so legal drugs, and b) the large amounts of alcohol I used to consume, I wonder if my brain functions would be much higher at this point. I think reading that article, depressingly the answer is yes.

With my younger days partying at places like Mahiki ([https://www.londonnightguide.com/mahiki- guestlist/](https://www.londonnightguide.com/mahiki-guestlist/)) then I would consider it a miracle that my brain is even able to function on the level that it does - with or without my Modafinil stack.

In a parallel universe somewhere I'm working at Goldman Sachs and a non-drink or drug taking sensible person from birth.

But meh, that would probably bore me to tears.</comment>


Browser extension that tells you if a Steam game is included with Xbox Game Pass - <AUTHOR> https://gabinaureche.com/included-with-xbox-game-pass/ <comment><AUTHOR> Steam is still the main store I visit and I often realize really late that some game I am interested by are included with Xbox Game Pass. So I built a browser extension to have that information right in Steam.

I was happy to find out that many of the games in my wishlist are included with Xbox Game Pass :)</comment>


The parable of Nintendo - <AUTHOR> http://www.asymco.com/2012/03/26/staying-satiated-and-smart/ <comment><USER2> Summary of key points, article is well worth reading and is well documented with charts and sales data:

"The Wii addressed non-consumers with a new, more intuitive controller and standard resolution rather than competing for hardcore gamers with more power and richer graphics."

"Nintendo expanded the console market. Its innovation was interesting enough that many hard core gamers used the console in addition to a PS3 or Xbox and many non-gamers bought it as their first console. The result is that 95 million Wii's have been sold vs. 66 million Xbox 360′s and 62 million PS3′s."

"However, this strategy has not been enough to protect the company from the disruptive effect of mobile computing."

"The lesson here is that a company that disrupts does not necessarily survive. Long term survival depends on the ability for serial disruption. Serial disruption is an uncomfortable state for an organization to exist in as disruptions are usually enabled by "desperate" necessity. "

"Desperation is not something management is trained to aspire for. What management strives for is steady state satisfaction and predictability from intelligent planning."</comment>


Introducing QC2 - the Quantum Compute Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2010/04/introducing-qc2-the-quantum-compute-cloud.html

<comment><USER2> So Quantum Computing is April fools material now... well i am glad at least it is useful for //something// ;)</comment>


Is the Party Over at Google+? - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/07/28/google.plus.traffic.falls.mashable/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

<comment><USER2> Google+ is too late to win the social media throne. It's boring and only superficially different. The only way Google+ can survive and not shrivel up like Wave is to stop trying to be Facebook 2. Be different Google. Don't be boring.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is an amazing new social media feature. They're still testing it as well.</comment>


Ask YC: How do you find manufacturers to outsource to? - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea for a toy.  How does one go about finding a toy manufacturer in China for example that can built it?  Do they typically have in house resources to help with design and material selection? <comment><USER2> You're probably going to want a design firm, rather than a manufacturing firm, to get you to the point where you have a physical prototype, CAD files of manufacturable parts, and choices of materials and processes. Then they can guide you to a contract manufacturer.

Some resources:

Design firms that work on toys:

[http://www.dexigner.com/directory/cat/Toy_Design/Companies.h...](http://www.dexigner.com/directory/cat/Toy_Design/Companies.html)

MIT product design course:

[http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of- Management/15-783J...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Sloan-School-of- Management/15-783JSpring-2006/CourseHome/index.htm)

Berkeley's course covering rapid prototyping and manufacturing, including lecture videos:

<http://bmi.berkeley.edu/Me221/me221_resources.htm> [http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906...](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978169)

The Berkeley videos totally opened my eyes - I was a computer science guy with no clue about making physical products.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a lone entrepreneur with an idea, don't think I can afford professional design firm. I will check out the MIT and Berkeley courses though.

<comment><USER2> You still might want to get the bids and see what you can afford - even $10k might get you pretty far if you're willing to do a lot of the work yourself, using the design firm as consultants to guide you through the process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The guys behind MouseDriver ([http://www.amazon.com/MouseDriver-Chronicles- John-Lusk/dp/07...](http://www.amazon.com/MouseDriver-Chronicles-John- Lusk/dp/0738205737)) did this.

I don't remember the details (and unfortunately I freecycled the book so I can't look it up now) but you might want to read that for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am not sure if <http://alibaba.com> can help.

<comment><USER5> Be careful when dealing with vendors through the site. Beyond having to deal with Engrish, given turnaround times are often inaccurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi Noel, there are many companies who work as intermediates between you and chinese manufacturers. These companies are based in china, but run by foreigners. They find the company, produce the product, arrange the shipping. So it's basically the same deal you would get, but perhaps 5% more expensive. For that, you avoid the cross cultural difference, you have reputable sources etc.

I can introduce you to a company I know personally based in Shanghai. They'll source any product you want. Send me a message if you're interested, I don't want to be seen as a shill.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Maximus, I sent you an email, but it bounced I used the maximus gmail address on your profile.

How would you respond to mixmax's post above? (on the cultural differences)

<comment><USER6> Sorry, my email in the profile was wrong. It's email@example.com, and not email@example.com

Regarding the cultural differences - I'll say this: It's very difficult to do effective work with chinese companies without micro management. The chinese work very hard, but sometimes they work very hard on the wrong things. An obviously flawed product will get created and nobody will bother to inform you till its too late. And the english is terrible. Products are mislabelled, punctuation is usually in the wrong spot.

Outsourcing to china is a very hands on affair. Quality control is not an option, it's a neccessity.

I've been to china often over the past few months, and it's a very different working philosophy from what I'm used to. So yes, be careful. Very careful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have Chinese friends, maybe need to recruit them for effective communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A friend of mine had a company that outsourced production of T-shirts to China. The problems he faced was not so much finding suppliers but dealing with the cultural differences of how to do business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you be more specific on the "cultural differences of how to do business." Do you just mean language?

<comment><USER7> I didn't elaborate in the parent post since it might have sounded racist. Which it isn't meant to be.

It seems that asians have a different perspective of doing a deal than Europeans and Americans. Americans and Europeans think the negotiations are over when the contract is signed. Asians seem to think that the negotiations have only just started when the contract is signed, and they will try anything to cut corners if they can. So you basically have to watch every step extremely closely, making sure you don't release payments before the priduct is secured, etc.

This, of course, is just my impression - feel free to correct me if it isn't accurate.

<comment><USER8> I'm going to have to disagree with you here. I designed a retail product and had it manufactured in China. While there are cultural differences, I didn't have any problems in terms of altering a contract after its signed, or cutting corners. The company and specific representative I dealt with was courteous, fair, and delivered on the promise completely to my expectations. Language is no doubt a barrier (the employees' english is often a few notches down from a native speaker, as expected), but it just required less requests per email, and working in a style that was compatible. Finally, there are some great benefits to working with a Chinese company: low costs, and the time difference. It's really great to be able to start up a late night email correspondence that's right in the middle of their workday.

<comment><AUTHOR> bkow, do you mind sharing more information about your experience? What you desinged, how you contracted with, etc.? You can email me directly if you with noel AY noelgomez D O T com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Doesn't directly help you, but Bunnie, the guy who made the Chumby, has very interesting blog posts about getting a product made in China. Check out his blog starting around January 2007.

<http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?m=200701>

</comment><comment><USER10> You seem to be missing an important step, before you find a manufacturer you probably want to create a prototype. While the idea might be great in your head, you won't know if it's any good until you've built a few prototypes and tested them on your target audience.

There's a TV series in the UK called Dragon's Den where inventors pitch their ideas to angels to get funding. You can actually learn a lot from watching it (in terms of understanding if your product will actually suceed or not and various problems you might encounter). It might be worth your time watch a couple of seasons of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am planning on prototyping first even though that may not have been clear.

There is a show in the US called American inventor which sounds similar to Dragon's Den (it probably is the same thing adapted for the US, like American Idol).

I have seen American inventor and you do learn a lot. The biggest lesson is not to spend too much on something which may not sell. I have seen people go on there and state that they have put their life savings or $50,000 to $100,000 on ideas which were not so great.

I have no illusions and tend to be pretty realistic. I think there is potential for my idea, but I would first prototype it and see if there is a market before building 10k units.

<comment><USER10> I've seen American inventor before, it's not quite like DD. DD is pretty much like a real VC pitch type of scenario, where you have startups that have got off the ground and are looking for funding to expand. So you get a lot more variety of companies and a lot more concentration on business planning. AI seems to be a lot more focus on "best invention" and is a lot more "reality showish" then DD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thomasnet is a free resource to find prototypers and design shops - <http://snurl.com/28w08> [www_thomasnet_com]

</comment><comment><USER12> Please read this: [http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2008/0804.frank.ht...](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2008/0804.frank.html)

It is not so easy to outsource to Asia if you care about ethics, quality, or safety. You will need some broker with experience to help you sort out the good companies from the bad ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I know this is an issue I need to consider. I have also thought of the whole led based paint debacle which surfaced last year since my idea is for a toy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My fiancee is in the retail business (seasonal gifts, in 600+ stores). The key is finding a good sourcing company - there are some that will work on commission once you prove yourself to be a good product developer. They'll even haggle with the plants to get you multiple samples before forcing you into a production line.

<comment><AUTHOR> semigeek, do you mind sharing some of your/your fiancee's experience. You can email me directly at noel AY noelgomez D OT com

I'm interested in how she got things prototyped and even how she sold things into the retail channel.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Looking for Micropayment service, any suggestions? - <AUTHOR>

Start thinking about step 2 - Price, and so I start researching for Micropayment services. The ones that I know now is Paypal (not sure if they can be considered micropayment provider) and Zaypay (http://www.zaypay.com/public/en/docs/overview)<p>Feel free to drop in any you know. <comment><USER2> You could try Amazon FPS < [http://www.amazon.com/Flexible-Payments-Service- AWS/b?ie=UTF...](http://www.amazon.com/Flexible-Payments-Service- AWS/b?ie=UTF8&node=342430011) >. I'm not sure, but I think you might even be able to use them to bill less than 1 cent.

<comment><USER3> Yup, this looks like what you want.

"Micro-Payments Support: With Amazon FPS you can track and aggregate micro- payments (e.g. payments less than $0.50 or even $0.01) into a single payment transaction"

<comment><USER4> According to the Developer's Guide, FPS supports micropayments as small as $0.00001. ("The money type handles micropayment amounts, with a precision of 1000th of a cent...")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's a good question. I looked into this recently too, but haven't decided yet whether to go with "Amazon FPS" or "Google Checkout". Search on those terms and you'll get some relevant comparison hits. I'd love to hear about other services, if any look viable. Shared experiences would also be welcome.

<comment><USER6> mde, do you have contact info? E-Mail in profiles is only visible to the YC people, not other users.

<comment><USER5> Hmm, does that mean everyone who want to share their email should put it in their "about"? I just did so -- someone correct me if there's a better way to share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> mobilemoney.com has worked well for me in the past.</comment>


WxPython 4.0.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://www.wxpython.org/news/wxpython-4.0.0-release/index.html <comment><USER2> How come documentation for "embedded" GUI frameworks like wxPython is so devoid of screenshots and graphical explanation?

Compare these pages...

* Overview, [https://www.wxpython.org/pages/overview/](https://www.wxpython.org/pages/overview/)

* API, [https://docs.wxpython.org/](https://docs.wxpython.org/)

* Demo, [https://wiki.wxpython.org/WxSmallApp](https://wiki.wxpython.org/WxSmallApp)

...with these pages for Bootstrap:

* Overview, [http://getbootstrap.com/](http://getbootstrap.com/)

* API docs, [http://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/getting-started/introductio...](http://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/getting-started/introduction/)

* Demo, [http://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/examples/](http://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/examples/)

For me, this difference made web UI frameworks much more approachable. Visual widget catalogs simplify the task of finding widgets or code samples. Widget screen shots help determine if code is performing as expected.

<comment><USER3> because the list of widgets with screenshots are the same as wxwidgets which is in here: [http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/page_screenshots.html](http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/page_screenshots.html)

<comment><USER4> Sadly, the screenshots on that page seem to have been last updated when Windows XP was still current (which was 10+ years ago)

They're also not HiDPI/Retina, and the whole website design seems to be stuck in the mid-2000s, too. Somehow mobile and web developers got aboard all the new design and interaction trends, but Desktop GUI frameworks seem to be all stuck 10 years behind.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably because of a lack of capital investment in desktop software.

And yet a lot of people don't understand why everyone is using Electron for desktop apps these days.

<comment><USER5> > Somehow mobile and web developers got aboard all the new design and > interaction trends

Because the new design trends are all about how to adapt to the limitations (and possibilities) of mobile and web. For desktop applications these mobile- first designs don't work very well (see Windows 8) and we already had long- established design patterns that do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great work! Finally a stable version working with Python3!

I find wxPython highly productive and enjoyable to work with and the wx C++ documentation has always been outstanding. Now the Python docs are also really good! [https://docs.wxpython.org/](https://docs.wxpython.org/)

I know that Qt gets most of the publicity, but personally I prefer wx (having written huge applications in wx and only a small one in Qt, but still). Being able to .Bind() anything without sub-classing and the fact that the class constructors normally takes sensible parameters so that no further method calls are needed to set up a widget makes it very fast and compact to generate dynamic UIs with readable code.

The work Robin Dunn has done with wxPython is simply massive and he should be known as one of the great open source legends, especially in the Python community! Congratulations on a fantastic release!

</comment><comment><USER7> I used (and liked) wx in the nineties - didn't know it was still around.

Qt is my goto GUI for Python these days, does anyone have experience with wx vs Qt for Python? The samples look like it's all dynamically generated (vs. something like QtDesigner) and that's how we used it way back when.

<comment><USER8> My "go to GUI" is a web app -- I can't imagine anything I'd write a GUI app for these days.

<comment><USER9> Text editor, video, audio editor, system widgets and settings, web browser, terminal emulator, git GUI client, crypto coin wallet, chat client, games, document editor, security focused software a la Keybase client.

<comment><USER10> the point is HTML5/CSS/JS nowadays provides superior UI experience to traditional UI frameworks. In many of the categories above, there are electron/webview based applications that's very popular.

Text editor, document editor -> VS Code/Atom

terminal emulator -> Google's terminal emulator

git GUI client -> GitHub client is electron based

chat client -> slack is electron based

games -> lots of web based

<comment><USER7> Also, GUI toolkits were never fun or easy to use in desktop development. I've used MFC, wx and Qt with C++, Forms and WPF with C# and Qt with Python. All of those had their challenges so browser-based GUIs don't seem so bad as an alternative. Not a fan of JS but modern toolkits are almost at a point where they hide enough of the ugliness.

<comment><USER11> Never? Dude, Tk back in the day! Compared with all the raw X11 predecessors, it was a revelation for Unix GUI's.

<comment><USER7> True - Tk was quite the step up back then. I still use it every day when I fire up gitk or git gui.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems like the site is down. Here is a cached version:

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ght2vB...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ght2vBmKuEsJ:https://www.wxpython.org/news/wxpython-4.0.0-release/index.html+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=no&client=ubuntu)

</comment><comment><USER13> Does wxWidgets provide any declaration based reactive programming with data binding? Something like WPF/XAML or Qt/QML or any modern web framework provides? Once you use a modern GUI framework with reactive programming capabilities, it is hard to go back to writing the code line by line procedurally to create your GUI and to keep the information on screen up-to- date without using reactive elements.

</comment><comment><USER14> This brought a couple of app ideas back to the front of my mind, but also the difficulties involved in shipping a Python app to an end user. Requiring the user to care about the right version of the runtime, their python and library path, etc. is a real pain in the ass for all concerned.

Are there any Python projects out there that allow you to ship a "binary" (even if it's just a self contained python with the relevant libraries like WxPython brought in) for people to use?

<comment><USER15> Yes - cx_Freeze. Nice example is Cura application: [https://github.com/Ultimaker/cura- build/tree/master/packagin...](https://github.com/Ultimaker/cura- build/tree/master/packaging) (hint: .in files)

They are shipping Python 3.5.2 + required PyQT5 parts + other python libraries. Only Python files visible for users are in plugins folder (rest are bundled[as pyc-s] in single zip file, python interpreter is "merged" with entry *.py file as an executable).

You can easily download Cura from Ultimaker site and "inspect" result yourself ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if it makes more sense e.g. for macOS to create a Swift UI and an existing python code base as external process which is called on request.

Does somebody knows which API interface specification is most suitable for that kind of communication on a single PC: Swift <-> Python ? For web it easy (e.g. REST) but there has to be other options on a fully controllable code base on your PC (seems my desktop programming days are long gone.. otherwise I would know myself)

<comment><USER17> Some kind of JSON over sockets (or MsgPack over pipes, BSON over ZMQ, etc.) works pretty well for these kinds of scenarios.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always had the impression that WxWidgets is obsolete and dying. Nice to see it still active.

Out of curiosity, any big or important software written in WxPython?

<comment><USER19> Not answering the real question but we have a lot of little wxPython GUIs driving big engineering design software suites at the advanced nuclear design company I work at. Engineers (mechanical, nuclear, etc.) can grasp it fairly quickly, get their knobs on the screen, and be back to doing their mechanical and nuclear engineering. We got started because the original python guy (me) learned it from a grad student in 2005 via the excellent wx docs and demos collection of examples. Works great and we recently went all Python 3.

<comment><USER18> I realized it's a great tool for quick prototyping, especially internal software, but I was wondering if anybody took it beyond that.

<comment><USER20> Not that I know of. Here is a list from the wxPython homepage: [https://wiki.wxpython.org/wxPythonPit%20Apps](https://wiki.wxpython.org/wxPythonPit%20Apps)

As you can see much of the list is either 'toy' applications or older applications that haven't been updated for ages.

<comment><USER21> Chandler is on that list! That's the failed PIM desktop software that Mitch Kapor financed as a hobby project and which was the subject of the book "Dreaming in Code"by Scott Rosenberg. Terrific book, shame about the software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Unfortunately they decided to pull all the 3.x versions from pypi/pip at the same time, breaking a lot of projects that use pip to install dependencies but haven't yet ported to the new wxpython. I don't really understand why anyone would do that, but eh.

<comment><USER23> 22.214.171.124 is still here: [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wxPython/188.8.131.52](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wxPython/18.104.22.168)

Wonder if they think 4.0 is compatible with 3.0?

<comment><USER24> Note that there are no files for 126.96.36.199.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Nice, but I find the release announcement a bit underwhelming. Which of the seemingly minor fixes and tune-ups does warrant such a major version bump ?

<comment><USER24> The announcement is misleading. These are changes since the previous beta release (4.0.0b2), not since wxPython 3.0.

Full changelog: [https://github.com/wxWidgets/Phoenix/blob/master/CHANGES.rst](https://github.com/wxWidgets/Phoenix/blob/master/CHANGES.rst)

Migration guide: [https://docs.wxpython.org/MigrationGuide.html](https://docs.wxpython.org/MigrationGuide.html)

<comment><USER26> Thank you. I was wondering the same thing.

I glanced at the information and, if I understand it correctly, 4.0.0 is the first release of a ground up rewrite.

What's not immediately clear (and perhaps because I did not read the material clearly enough) is if any significant features were added. I wonder because I find it hard to rewrite something without taking advantage of the opportunity to add features. Or perhaps the desire to add features that would be difficult with the 3.x.x code drove the upgrade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Does this work with Python 3?

<comment><USER28> I believe so.

It is tested against Python 3 in their Travis config: [https://github.com/wxWidgets/Phoenix/blob/master/.travis.yml](https://github.com/wxWidgets/Phoenix/blob/master/.travis.yml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I haven't used it in a while, but found it comfortable enough. PythonCard spoiled me a bit, though.

</comment><comment><USER30> My biggest problem with wxpython is that you apparently can't set closures as event handlers. Instead, you have to define a member function, and register it. This makes the process a bit tedious compared to JavaScript.

<comment><USER5> The documentation seems to claim[1] otherwise:

      It also allows the direct binding of events to:

        * A handler method in the same or another object.
        * An ordinary function like a static method or a global function.
        * An arbitrary callable object.

If it works for arbitrary callable objects it should certainly work for closures.

[1] [https://docs.wxpython.org/events_overview.html](https://docs.wxpython.org/events_overview.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think the site is down.

</comment><comment><USER31> I just woke up, and would have sworn the title read "Python 4 Released."

<comment><USER32> In view of the pace of python 3 adoption, it could be better to start right now ...</comment></comment>


Is Ning a Porn Facilitator? - <AUTHOR> http://www.centernetworks.com/ning-a-porn-pusher <comment><USER2> Call it Rule 33 (the one that precedes <http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rule+34>) of the Internet:

The primary driver of adoption for all new internet technologies is porn. (c.f. email, BBSs, chat, usenet, http, bittorrent, social networks, etc)

or, more likely, Rule 34a:

Given a reasonably useful internet technology, someone will find a way to use it for porn.</comment>


Google Analytics Bookmarklet to Automatically Load the Current Day's Stats - <AUTHOR> http://dmix.ca/2010/04/google-analytics-bookmarklet-to-automatically-load-the-current-day/

<comment><USER2> This looks really cool, and will feed my stat-tracking addiction, but I couldn't get it to work in Chrome...

I think I should just do a stats panel with this like the panic board...

<comment><AUTHOR> Dragging the bookmarklets has been disabled in the new chrome versions.

You have to add this to your bookmark bar manually: <http://dmix.ca/ga.txt> (right click toolbar + add page)

<comment><USER2> I tried that, and it didn't work... I click on the link and nothing popped up..

I'm going to switch over to firefox and just use it in there. Thanks for a great widget!

<comment><AUTHOR> You have to load one of your analytics pages first, then click the "Todays Analytics" bookmark.

This way you can have one bookmark and use it on any GA page.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Typhon is a Python implementation for the Rubinius (ruby) VM - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vic/typhon

<comment><AUTHOR> One other thing a lot of people don't know about Rubinius is that its fundamental concurrency primitive is Rubinius::Channel, similar to channels in Go. For example, see Rubinius' implementation of class Mutex: [https://github.com/evanphx/rubinius/blob/master/lib/thread.r...](https://github.com/evanphx/rubinius/blob/master/lib/thread.rb#L42)

Quoth MenTaLguY: _MenTaLguY: Channels are the basic communication primitive in Rubinius; everything else is implemented atop them. The fundamental concurrency model is more or less the asynchronous pi calculus minus replication and a few common extensions like non-deterministic choice (which potentially requires channel operations to be centrally arbitrated). I advocated pi calculus channels because of their simplicity, which generally translates to performance and maintainability._

<http://www.infoq.com/articles/actors-rubinius-interview>

</comment><comment><USER2> This is like the bizarro version of the late _why's unHoly ( <http://github.com/whymirror/unholy> ), the README for which contained this:

"You know, it's crazy that Python and Ruby fans find themselves battling so much. While syntax is different, this exercise proves how close they are to each other!"

...Which is the apparent reason for naming the codebase "unHoly". A code ambassador to try to mediate a peaceful resolution to the holy wars. (Pyhad? Rusades? I bet _why could have come up with a better name.)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For more information about Rubinius: <http://rubini.us/>

More language implementations on top of Rubinius: <http://rubini.us/projects/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Calling Ruby code from Python.

<http://twitter.com/vborja/status/22350595050438657>

Awesome!! seems to work like from __future__ in python.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Maybe Rubinius VM does what Parrot was originally intended to. ( Running > many dynamic languages )

This is the most interesting part, to me. Especially given that Ruby has pretty much been my personal successor to Perl...

I wonder if we'll see more of this in the future, as rbx matures.</comment>


Give Yourself Constraints - <AUTHOR> http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2011/02/20/give-yourself-constraints/

<comment><USER2> This is something I have done unknowningly. I created an iphone game in 2009 in two months and though it wasn't exactly the way I wanted it I was very productive. I haven't done much until early this year. The driving factor for me getting going again was I put constraints on myself. Now I realize why this is working and feel a bit better command over the process. I am going to test this out on myself some more.

</comment><comment><USER3> I share your sentiment of too many half projects. Creative people always seem to be caught between the thrill of doing something new and long hard slog of making it to the finishing line.

The driver for me to cut down on distractions was the fact the my project was not going as well as I hoped. I guess we all need some setbacks to put us on track.

Loved your website and product though! Good luck

</comment><comment><USER4> Steve just posted on the constraints he used to design Gauges: [http://orderedlist.com/blog/articles/design-focus-and- constr...](http://orderedlist.com/blog/articles/design-focus-and-constraints/)

Figured that is related so I should mention it here.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's funny how John's experience of constraints after major surgery reminded me of the "constraints" I've felt since having a kid.. except it's been going on a year so far with no end in sight ;-)</comment>


Plprofiler – A Handy Tool for Profiling PL/pgSQL Code - <AUTHOR> https://www.percona.com/blog/2019/02/13/plprofiler-getting-a-handy-tool-for-profiling-your-pl-pgsql-code/#plprofiler <comment><USER2> Original article title is "plprofiler – Getting a Handy Tool for Profiling Your PL/pgSQL Code." What is the implication behind the title used here, "If you still write stored procedures in a Database, you may need a profiler"?

<comment><USER3> Maybe they are of the opinion that stored procedures are anachronistic and rarely used anymore?

<comment><USER4> > Essentially all applications that are performance-sensitive use a stored- > procedure interface to run application logic inside the DBMS and avoid the > crippling overhead of back-and-forth communication between the application > and the DBMS.

—Micheal Stonebreaker [1]

[1]: [https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep544/10au/resou...](https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep544/10au/resources/p10-stonebraker.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Also stored procedures are convenient for complex data processing, SQL is much more expressive and efficient for selecting, grouping, joining than something like java.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Facebook knows which images I am in. Why can't I "disappear"? - <AUTHOR>

I don't want my image on Facebook.
Facebook knows who I am because people keep tagging me in photos.
Why do I not have the right to say "blank me out of all photos".
It should be up to me if my image is on Facbeook.
Facebook has the technology to identify me and therefore it should give me the right to NOT appear, even if (especially if) I don't have a Facebook account. <comment><USER2> > It should be up to me if my image is on Facbeook

It is, but it's not Facebook who put the images there. It's the people taking the photos and uploading them. Tell your friends not to tag you.

If you have a Facebook account, then you can disable you being 'auto-tagged' in pictures [1]. If you don't, then you can't be tagged properly (eg linked to a profile, obviously), and there's only the text descriptions that people put there.

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline](https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=timeline)

</comment><comment><USER3> When someone takes a picture of you, they need to have your consent. After they have your picture it is their right to distribute it. This is not a problem of facebook, more a problem of someone violating your Personality Rights.

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

<comment><USER4> At least in the United States, Personality rights are only for commercial use. You do not need someone's consent to take their photo or to publish said photo as long as you do not attempt to profit from it.

This for example allows you to take a photo on the street and publish it even if the photo contains some strangers. The concern that does come up is whether the subject of the photo has a reasonable expectation of privacy; if they are in public, they do not. (note: not a lawyer, but I have taken many photos of strangers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You could try to use European data protection laws. Photos of your face, and your name, are both personal data.

This approach might be tricky. Are you an EU citizen? Does Facebook have any EU presence?

</comment><comment><USER6> Easy: don't have a facebook account, don't let friends take your picture, don't have friends.</comment>


Windows 7: The almost-there operating system - <AUTHOR> http://blog.szynalski.com/2010/01/20/windows-7-almost-there/

<comment><USER2> Windows 7 might be ok for some users, but I don't think it's ready for the desktop.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious; what do you think is the OS that's ready for the desktop? By the high score of your comment, I'm guessing a lot of people agree with your sentiment, and I don't understand your distinction between what is "ok for some users" and "ready for the desktop."

<comment><USER4> I don't know the original quote, but it's often repeated that Linux is "not ready for the desktop." So, irony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who recently moved from XP to 7, my review can be summed up as "it works".

Feels just as fast as XP, and the new UI is a neutral/positive change. The best feature is the configurable systray settings (always show, always hide, hide but show notifications).

Admittedly, I use my desktop for video games and internet, and 7 seems to work great for that (as opposed to the launch version of Vista).

 _edit_ Forgot to say that "good enough" may not be good enough to restore faith in Windows for those burned by the Vista launch, but if you bought a new computer and it had 7 no tears would be shed. That alone might be enough to keep users.

<comment><USER6> I would pay about 500 USD for having the XP interface on Windows 7.

And for what it's worth, XP has configurable systray settings. They are "Always show", "Always hide" and "Hide when inactive".

The biggest features I miss, in order, are:

(1) The XP start menu - I had it organized just perfectly for muscle memory. If I want to start apps by typing I can use the console, thanks. Start Menu Search is just fine, but I don't use it.

(2) Windows Explorer. I have my toolbar / menu / location bar in Explorer in XP tuned for maximum vertical space. The folder treeview in XP works correctly, unlike the buggy one in Win7. Here's a demo for you: open up Explorer with the treeview visible. Select a folder that has subfolders. Then expand the subfolders by clicking on the little nub next to it. Observe that the treeview scroll position jumps so that the expanded node's children are aligned to the bottom of the visible area. This drives me up the walls. Other things include the giant file drag icons, the all or nothing approach to thumbnails, the file locks held on Thumbs.db on folders across the network (prevents deletion from Explorer itself!), the weird listview selection semantics, the lack of a Favorites menu, the way the treeview disappears when the Control Panel is selected, the lack of a selectable Network Connections submenu / subfolder in the Control Panel shell namespace, etc. I could go on.

(3) User colour preferences are not respected. I like my sky blue window background, and in XP it is correctly used for the treeview and listview in Windows Explorer. Not in Win7 - no, it's glaring white everywhere. It's interesting to see how inconsistently the user preference for window background colour is applied. Lots of text areas sometimes show white, sometimes the user colour, depending on their focus state, the application, etc. There's no rhyme or reason to it. It scans like a shoddy joke.

I guess I should clarify one thing: the XP interface I use is not the Fisher Price one that it comes with out of the box, but rather the Win2000-alike one but that still has the XP start menu and other XP-level accoutrements .

<comment><USER7> > the XP interface I use is not the Fisher Price one that it comes with out of > the box, but rather the Win2000-alike one but that still has the XP start > menu and other XP-level accoutrements.

Amen to this. I am still running XP on the Windows box that I have, so can't speak to the Vista or 7 experiences; but I know that the first thing I did when I upgraded from 95 to 98, and then from 98 to XP, was to hunt for a way to disable as much of the eye candy as possible and just get a familiar start menu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> However, certainly the best version of Windows so far. The MathML you can understand - MS wants to sell Word 2007 to lots of student's who don't want to "bother" learning LaTeX.

<comment><USER9> Students should be using TeXmacs, not LaTeX/TeX nor Word.

<comment><USER10> TeXmacs keeps crashing for me! At least LaTeX and Word are stable.

<comment><USER9> Which version of TeXmacs did you try and on what platform?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _The official rationale is that it is not the firewall's job to block malicious applications from accessing the network_

Then what is it?

<comment><USER12> Make applications on your machine comply to whatever network policy you have? I honestly don't want to have to whitelist every single one program I run to be able to do access the network. Do you?

I'm also pretty sure changing firewall-rules requires administrator priveledges, and hence it's no different than it is on Linux. Except ofcourse on Linux, the firewall isn't application-aware, so you can't even control which processes are allowed to open inbound communication.

This really is a lot of noise over nothing.

<comment><USER13> > Except of course on Linux, the firewall isn't application-aware, so you > can't even control which processes are allowed to open inbound > communication.

You certainly can set application-level network privileges, and Red Hat derived distros do by default. For example, to list all the applications that are allowed to bind to port 80:

      [sweeks@kweh ~]$ sudo sesearch --allow -t http_port_t -p name_bind
      Found 15 semantic av rules:
         allow httpd_t http_port_t : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ;
         allow kerneloops_t http_port_t : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ;
         allow varnishd_t http_port_t : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ;
         allow dnsmasq_t port_type : udp_socket { recv_msg send_msg name_bind } ;
         allow svirt_t port_type : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ;
         allow svirt_t port_type : udp_socket { recv_msg send_msg name_bind } ;
         allow squid_t http_port_t : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ;
         allow corenet_unconfined_type port_type : tcp_socket { recv_msg send_msg name_bind name_connect } ;
         allow portreserve_t port_type : tcp_socket name_bind ;
         allow corenet_unconfined_type port_type : udp_socket { recv_msg send_msg name_bind } ;
         allow portreserve_t port_type : udp_socket name_bind ;
         allow varnishd_t port_type : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ;
         allow qemu_t port_type : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ;
         allow qemu_t port_type : udp_socket { recv_msg send_msg name_bind } ;
         allow squid_t port_type : tcp_socket { name_bind name_connect } ;

Any processes running under other domains won't be allowed to bind to port 80.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Windows 7 backup is horrible. I tried to backup my 200 GB of data to a NAS drive. After 5 hours (35%) it just stopped. No reason. No explanation.

<comment><USER15> I've had good experiences with DeltaCopy. It's an open source rsync-based backup solution. Saved my data when one of my drives died last year.

<http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dang, when the thing people complain about in an OS is the "math input panel" and the "sticky notes" apps, I'd say the OS must be pretty freaking perfect.

I can't believe you couldn't think of anything more substantive to mention.

<comment><USER17> Having skipped from XP to OSX (skipping Vista completely), I dropped using my Mac almost as soon as I got Windows 7. It has so many little convenience features, that even the trouble of learning the new ins and outs of the OS was so much smoother than learning the similar ins and outs on my Mac, and the results were so much more productive. All of the major OS interactions are pretty much amazing.

On my Mac I kept going "oh, so that's how you do that" when getting to know it while transitioning from XP.

On my Windows 7 PC I kept going "Oh! that's such a much better way".

It also doesn't try to overwhelm with glossy shininess, it just _does_ stuff that's natural and intuitive. The new taskbar is pretty much magic in code.

<comment><USER18> Natural and intuitive is a loaded phrase. It's natural and intuitive because you have prior experience with the prior offerings from one vendor. People going from OSX 10.4 to windows 7 to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard are going to be parroting your comments just in the other direction.

<comment><USER17> I personally think that OSX has more in common with XP than 7 does with XP or OSX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Isn't the reason why Microsoft's OS is always "almost-there" the fact that they have the US government (and every tech competitor) looking over their shoulder every second, analyzing every new feature to make sure it doesn't sqaush some poor helpless competitor?

It's the reason we went 5+ years without any browser innovation, and it's probably the reason why we don't have a _good_ built in Firewall, Anti-Virus or even paint application. Some of it might be MS protecting their software partners (which is ok in my book) but if I had big brother analyzing every move I made, I wouldn't spend millions building something only to have it excluded because some whiny EU/US politician think it's unfair.

I don't think it's fair to criticize MS for half-baked features when you realize that they _need_ software makers to stay happy, and they _need_ big brother to keep their nose out of their tech.

MS doesn't release it's own PC (ala Apple) because they can't or don't know how, they don't because it would piss off Dell/HP and the politicians who represent the districts where those companies reside.

<comment><USER20> Microsoft's been quite willing to play hard-ball and jump into areas where they can attempt to aggresively compete and hopefully squash competitors. Look at Zune, Silverlight, Windows Mobile, XBox. The trouble is, they've largely failed in the marketplace, with the XBox as the only success.

Blaming this failure on 'the politicians' is unconvincing, to say the least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If they had added a working backup solution everyone would be up in arms accusing them of anti-competitive behavior.

<comment><USER22> It would only be anti-competitive if they made it difficult for users to choose a 3rd party solution, or made it difficult for 3rd parties to achieve the same levels of integration. Just including a "good" feature isn't anti- competive on its own right.

<comment><USER21> It has never been difficult to use another browser on Windows.

<comment><USER22> Unless you want to use windows update, or activex content, or integrate with windows explorer, or...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is 35 hours to back up 500GB over USB actually unreasonable?

<comment><USER24> Yes. It should be more in the order of 3 hours.

<comment><USER6> Presuming the data is being backed up at the block level on the disk, so that no random seeking is involved. If it's on a filesystem basis, involves many small files, and we're talking spinning hunks of rust, 3 hours is a ludicrously optimistic estimate.

<comment><USER25> Time Machine can do it on a full 500GB filesystem in a little over 5 hours, in my experience. YMMV.

<comment><USER6> Is that an incremental backup, or the full backup? I would expect a full filesystem backup to be easier to do in block mode for large parts than only part of the filesystem, while incremental backups could be made much easier with filesystem support, such as what ZFS can do with the increment from one snapshot to another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Former XP user who upgraded to Windows 7 here. I am hugely impressed with Windows 7 and the annoyances listed here are valid complaints, but on the whole extremely minor.

My big complaints are: 1\. Upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 is a horrible experience if you made the mistake of buying an upgrade license. 2\. Windows 7, presumably borrowing from Mac, does a lot more to hide details about errors from the user. Maybe this makes the computer less scary (questionable IMO, but at least arguable), but it /definitely/ makes it more frustrating to diagnose and fix problems.</comment>


Ask HN: Are peer to peer marketplaces required to charge Sales Tax? - <AUTHOR> I'm having trouble finding the answer to this on Google and I couldn't get any answers on Quora, so I thought I might ask this question on HN.<p>If I start an online marketplace for people to buy and sell goods online (All second-hand goods, almost all sold for less than they were purchased for) is it still necessary to charge sales tax on the sale of these items. If it is neccesary, is my marketplace responsible for charging and collecting sales tax or can I leave the responsibility to collect sales tax to the seller? <comment><USER2> This sounds like a question for a tax lawyer. You won't be able to get a conclusive answer here, to be honest.

What if you get audited down the line? Are you going to refer them to a HN answer?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm just looking for general advice here. In the near future, I will look for a lawyer in this specific domain, but for now, just starting up the business, I'm just looking for someone to point me in the right direction in regards to marketplace taxes.</comment></comment>


Engine failures on 787 Dreamliners prompt ANA to refit entire fleet - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/sep/01/engine-failures-on-787-dreamliners-prompt-ana-to-refit-entire-fleet <comment><AUTHOR> _" The Rolls-Royce chief executive officer, Warren East, said on Tuesday that ANA's problem was a "manageable issue". ANA's "intensive" use of the engines had caused the blades to wear more quickly than usual, he said."_

Is the root cause an airline operating procedure?

</comment><comment><USER2> This article is somewhat confusing. Are they replacing the engines with new engines, or refurbishing the existing engines with new blades?</comment>


Nasa ends year-long Mars simulation on Hawaii - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-37211051 <comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/six-scientists-just- eme...](http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/six-scientists-just-emerged-from- a-dome-after-a-year-simulating-life-on-mars), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER3> I honestly don't understand NASA's approach with simulating and studying long- term isolation. Submarines, especially nuclear ones, have been doing 100+ day missions under cramped conditions for over eighty years, and in war times with crews that were anything but picked for their compatibility with each other. And yet, from Mercury on, NASA never seems to have tried to tap into that experience, nor the hardware, and keeps insisting on doing everything themselves from scratch. Why?

<comment><USER4> They do share information, but it's a much different situation.

It's not 100 days, NASA already does 100 day missions on the ISS, there's little NASA doesn't know from direct experience that any navy could tell them. The most common scenario for a mission to Mars would involve 6 month trips with 18 month stays on the Martian surface, for a total of well over 2 years away from Earth. With a crew of maybe 4, on the low end. That's a situation that's completely unprecedented in history. Not only do you have extended isolation, but there's no way to get out of that isolation, no matter what happens. They are locked in to that extremely long term of isolation, there's no abort scenario to bring them back home sooner (in many mission designs anyway). The closest analogy on Earth isn't submarine voyages, it's actually prison. And that's a big reason why there's been a desire to study these sorts of things separately, without the extensive cost of space hardware in the picture. Because it is an unknown and it does have the potential to impact the potential success of a mission.

<comment><USER5> Whalers and fishing ships in the Medieval era would have been going on ~6-12 month journeys, with no contact faster than sending your boat somewhere.

The Pitcairn Islands were settled by mutineers from the Bounty, and this settlement wasn't recontacted for 18 years.

Small groups of people being out of practical contact with anyone else would have been relatively common in the Age of Sail--it's only with the development of radio telegraphy that ship voyages were not horribly isolated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The BBC article includes a picture of the dome's interior.

[http://i.imgur.com/oQnNUfY.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/oQnNUfY.jpg)

Is that a Tardis on the left?

<comment><USER7> Damnnn, you're going to be stuck in a tent for a year, and they don't even put in some windows.

The surroundings look martian enough. They weren't trying to artifically simulate a day/night cycle were they? (No articles mention this)

<comment><USER8> Not having windows seems like an important part of the test! It looks like there might be a small porthole on one of the sides, but I doubt a real Martian habitat would have much more than that, and the psychological impacts would be interesting to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In my opinion, getting used to living in small space is the simplest thing about surviving on Mars. It is much more difficult to maintain a steady supply of oxygen, water, food, and energy. Also, there is always a possibility that something important will suddenly break down and the colonists will need to repair it using only what they have at hand. I would be much more impressed if they tried to test how humans and current technology cope with these hard tasks.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash True. If there is anything that can be considered an unambiguous benefit to this otherwise hollow era of ubiquitous entertainment, it is that living in a small space has become much easier to cope with.

Just go to 4chan and check out a lair thread. People will go to utterly squalid lengths to stay glued to their skinner boxes.

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

<comment><USER10> Lair? Skinner boxes? I'm losing my grasp on today's youngsters...

<comment><USER11> Skinner boxes are from the 1930s. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A more complete simulation could have taken place on the top of Mt Everest. Except living there for a year would be far easier than living a year on Mars.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure if you're being serious or snide; either is fine with me, because there's a lot of truth to what you said.

It might be interesting to actually break that comparison down a bit. I won't attempt to do that, but a couple of things jump to mind.

1\. The 'cost per kilo' to Everest is probably a lot lower. 2\. The chance of mortality per trip is impossible to know for Mars, but we can just assume it's about the same as for Everest. 3\. Everest has a lot more atmosphere than any location on Mars. 4\. I'm not certain, but I believe there are locations on Mars that are warmer on average than Everest. 5\. Mars lacks an effective planetary radiation shield. 6\. A somewhat educated guess on my part: because the atmosphere is so thin on Mars, the wind at its worst can't cause anything like the damage it can on Everest. One of the few intentional unscientific things in The Martian was how much force wind on Mars has. 7\. I think the big Mars win, compare to Everest, is how much flat land you there is available.

This is a kind of whimsical thought process, but it belies a deeper mental struggle on my part. There are few people more excited about the prospect of humans forming living on Mars. It just makes me giddy and warm all over thinking about it. But at the same time, there are countless enormous and serious problems here on earth that could be attacked with the huge sums of money and resources required to setup shop on Mars.

So what it is all about? Musk says that we need to make humans a multi- planetary species. Ok, fair enough. But consider the timeframe and odds of an event on earth that would make human life here impossible. Sure, we could have a total nuclear war after 10x worst case climate change after etc etc etc. But I think that will leave more people alive and more or less functional in the long term than we could put on Mars in a hundred years.

So what is it about?

One of my dark guesses is this: Musk, looking into the future, sees humanity tearing itself apart for various reasons. And that those death spasms, over the course of years and decades, will likely destroy any extreme, 'mars replacement' outposts we make here on earth.

Millions of miles away, a few thousand people on Mars might be immune to such events.

This is an emotionally driven analysis on my part, but it does cross my mind from time to time.

In the meantime, I look forward to this Saturday's SpaceX launch and return! And even more keenly I look forward to next month's Mars Architecture presentation.

<comment><USER14> Mars is a radiation bath because there is no magnetic field.

Mars is a dead planet it is not geologically active which means it has a solid core that does not provide a dynamo effect.

We still don't know why, one of the theories is that it lacks a large moon which might have an important impact on the longevity of the planet.

The other suspect is nuclear elements that decay and produce heat but it is not known if it's enoguh to keep the plant cool.

The other 2 planets that are still active are Venus and Pluto.

Pluto has a very large moon (relative to its size) but Venus doesn't, however it could be that the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus is enoguh to keep the planet not only warm but in overdrive because the atmosphere is thick and heavy it puts a lot of pressure on Venus which might be enough to keep it going.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article really lacks substance. Why not do a semi in depth interview about what it was like, their biggest struggles, biggest wins, how they kept sane, ect. Seeing that is posted here, I would've expected more of an interesting read than just "they were in a dome a whole year." As commentators pointed out, Navy sailors go through confide quarters for better part of the year. Not too mention, America houses the most prisoners in the world, surely they would be a good example of cramped living. Hmm, oh well, it is has gone.

<comment><USER11> Navy sailors and prisoners get fresh food, interact with more than six people, and can phone friends/family without a multi-minute time delay. It's more than just cramped living.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is it with the use of the word "just" in headlines over the past few years? They're not going full-on "you won't believe what happens next", but it seems like it's a form of clickbait-lite.

<comment><USER17> Because it implies that this news is the newest news. it JUST happened.

<comment><USER3> …a day before that article was written, so two days ago.

<comment><USER18> So recently... not long ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why are Atlas Obscura articles tolerated on HN? They often lack substance when compared to more upstream sources and invariably come packaged with social- media ready clickbaity titles.

<comment><USER2> It belongs to a class of sites that produce both interesting original content and blogspam, i.e. low-quality ripoffs of other sources. The present post unfortunately was the latter, which is why we eventually changed the URL to the BBC piece it was lifted from.

This category of sites is problematic for HN. We want their best articles, so we don't ban them (though we do typically penalize them by default). But we definitely don't want their dreck.

One thing's for sure: if we don't notice that an article is lifted from another source and/or spammy, users will. In that case, please let us know. We're as eager as you are to have HN link to the best story on a topic. The best way to let us know is by emailing email@example.com. We can't read all the comments here but we do read all the emails.

<comment><USER19> I had no idea that certain classes of sites have default penalties ascribed to them here, very cool. Thanks for the explanation!</comment></comment></comment>


Catching date-related failures before they become critical (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/01/03/future/

<comment><USER2> So instead of

           boolean needToUninstall() {
             if now > EXPIRATION_TIME
               return true
             else
               return false
           }

we need to

           boolean needToUninstall(givenTime) {
             if givenTime > EXPIRATION_TIME
               return true
             else
               return false
           }

           needToUninstall(now) && doUninstall()

so the code is now testable. Or simply use dependency injection to change the value of `now`

Is it hard to pass time as parameter?</comment>