Ask HN: What software should I use to write a textbook? - <AUTHOR> I will be delivering it as a PDF and thinking about printing a version in the future.  What are the best software solutions for this? <comment><USER3> If you have time to invest, go for a TeX variant (LaTeX or ConTeXt). That gives full control over any typesetting detail.

I'd recommend ConTeXt [0] over LaTeX. A minimal document is as simple as

        \starttext
        Start writing here…
        \stoptext

and you can go a _long_ way from there, including making ebooks. Much better than LaTeX for layout control, language support, graphics integration, table generation, etc… It's also intimately integrated with Lua for your scripting needs.

The documentation is possibly its weak point: it's rich and comprehensive, although somewhat sparse and at times heavily technical. But it's worth the effort, IMHO.

You may get inspired by the TeX showcase [1] (not only ConTeXt, but also LaTeX and plain TeX).

[0] [http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page](http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page) [1] [https://www.tug.org/texshowcase/](https://www.tug.org/texshowcase/)

<comment><USER4> For a book I'd recomment ConTeXt. It's rougher around the edges but it's geared more towards "rich" presentation with sidebars, imaages, maybe even some color vs LaTeX which at it's core is optimized for things like journal articles with relatively little formatting.

If I was going to compare them to commerical software, ConTexT is closer to InDesign and LaTeX is closer to Word.

<comment><USER5> I'll simply quote a thread by William Adams on the context mailing list (copied from here [http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Comparison_between_ConTeXt_and...](http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Comparison_between_ConTeXt_and_other_typesetting_programs), the link to the mailing list does not work)

With a graphical tool, one is limited to the automation which the developers are willing to build into the tool and sentenced to handling manually everything else, every time that there's a change, e.g., if you have a keyword block on your opening article pages aligned against the outside gutter and the layout program can't place it automatically and contextually, then every time the article changes from opening to a left to a right or vice-versa one has to make that change manually.

I wrote up a longer comparison once upon a time --- Scribus isn't that much different from InDesign and Quark, so the criticism holds:

While I'm no TeX wizard, I prefer it because it allows one to off-load some of the tedium and repetitiveness to the computer, as opposed to repeatedly solving variations of the same problems by hand time after time after time.

So,

* using Quark is like being chained to a an oar which is covered w/ splinters and mostly broken at the other end and which will randomly break due to being poorly carved (Quark has crashed on me 183 times this year) leaving one adrift or run aground, or sometimes returning the vessel to its starting point (a few of those crashes have resulted in unrecoverable document corruption --- my autobackup folder may contain 2 or 3 GBs of files for a given iteration of a particular project each month) --- the oar can be smoothed somewhat and reinforced (by purchasing or finding XTensions, using XTags &c.) and periodically one is required to purchase a new oar (sometimes just after the previous one has been customized adequately). For some tasks, one can impress any graphic designer as a galley slave to ease the effort for others, but while charts are available, there are no automagic navigation options and every journey must be manually piloted.

* using InDesign is pretty much the same except the oar is smoother and stronger (it's crashed 29 times on me thus far this year), there aren't as many customization options and it's not quite as easy to find a candidate for impressment (though soon it'll be as easy as for Quark). Charts are available, but again, piloting is strictly manual.

* using Plain TeX one has to craft the vessel's oar oneself (as well as the rest of the vessel unless one is typesetting a clone of The TeXbook), but it's as sturdy and as nice a one as one's skills allow and can even be an engine which moves the vessel in and of itself --- it can be difficult or impossible to find people suitable to help w/ either carving the oar or using it though, but once a given journey is worked out, the oar becomes magical and rows for itself except for when one runs into an unplanned for obstacle (the navigation charts are old ones and not often up-dated, with a lot of "terra incognita"), allowing one an auto-pilot option for certain journeys, dependent upon one's skill. using ePlain, an oar is provided, can be customized, and can be enchanted and the charts are okay, but have a lot of "terra incognita" on them.

* using LaTeX, an oar is provided and there're lots of nifty customizations and improvements already available, and one can impress additional oars from CTAN, however on a semi-random basis, adding one oar will break other oars, sometimes leaving one adrift or run aground. One can enchant a set of oars to accomplish a given journey, easing the piloting requirement, and the navigation charts are decent and obstacles are fairly well-known.

* using ConTeXt, a very nice oar is provided, which has lots of customization options, but the navigational charts aren't easily read by a traditionally trained navigator at first, although they are fairly compleat and most journey can be carefully worked out, but once one is, it is quite automatic and there's a good auto-pilot option.

<comment><USER6> I am comfortable with making anything in Adobe Indesign.

If you are going to make things in Indesign, it should be as a last step process, after the full draft has been made. Otherwise you will slow down your writing by a lot.

Quark is rather outdated IMO, little has changed over the years. It has terrible UI and native keybind controls

I would use some flavor of markdown + some notetaking tool that supports it. A good example would be gitbooks.io, there's other ones out there too.

Latex & Variants is what has always been used for textbooks. Can't go wrong with it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My process is to use markdown [1] (very little style related formatting) and then convert to a desired format using pandoc [2]. Building multiple books that look the same, later revisions, etc - becomes really easy.

One of the benefits is that you can convert a chapter to a webpage and gauge interest in the book itself.

[1] [https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/)

[2] [http://pandoc.org/](http://pandoc.org/)

<comment><USER8> +1 for this. I do this at work for documentation. Markdown presents well on github and using Pandoc with Makefiles so I don't have to remember the options for generating PDFs, Word format, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Begin with plain ASCII text. It's very easy to get distracted by the formatting and looks. Content is what's important. So begin with a basic editor like notepad/vi/emacs. Perhaps at best markdown. Get it done, then edited, then you can typeset with something like Latex/Word.

<comment><USER10> Just that. Maybe Word in the first place, for the spell checking. But, other than that, just use it as a plain text editor.

I also find it useful to create a new file for each chapter.

<comment><USER11> You don't need Word for spell checking. For instance, Emacs can use ISpell, ASpell, etc.

<comment><USER10> Good to know. I'll check if Sublime Text supports spell checking as well :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Check out Pollen: [http://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/](http://docs.racket- lang.org/pollen/)

The author of the package, Matthew Butterick, wrote several books with it, such as

\- Practical Typography: [https://practicaltypography.com/](https://practicaltypography.com/)

\- Beautiful Racket: [https://beautifulracket.com/](https://beautifulracket.com/)

Looking at the results, I can't help but be impressed. If I was writing a book, I would start here.

I think you can get it to output LaTeX which you can then use to generate your final PDF and ePub, if you like.

Previous HN discussion here with some other real-world users chiming in with their experiences: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15335010](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15335010)

</comment><comment><USER13> "What is Best" always depends on what you need. For writing a book, the final answer is probably LaTeX. That's assuming what you need is not highly simple. (However, the advice to work in plain text before you typeset is really solid)

However... for something simple, I'll point to [https://casual- effects.com/markdeep/](https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/) I've found that Visual Studio Code + [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Flixs.vs...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Flixs.vs- code-http-server-and-html-preview) make for a lovely editing experience. Basically, you write plain text, hit ctrl-s and see formatted HTML in a side panel. The homepage explains how to generate PDFs.

Here's some notes about fancy typesetting from someone who wrote a book using Markdeep: [https://imaginary- institute.com/resources/MarkdeepToInDesign...](https://imaginary- institute.com/resources/MarkdeepToInDesign/MD-ID-notes.md.html)

<comment><USER14> As a sidenote that "someone" is Andrew Glassner [0] :) - i.e. the editor of the venerable Graphics Gems series and much else. The books you refer to are here

[https://www.glassner.com/portfolio/deep-learning-from- basics...](https://www.glassner.com/portfolio/deep-learning-from-basics-to- practice/)

As another examples Google's Filament PBR renderer has beautiful documentation written in Markdeep as well: [https://google.github.io/filament/Filament.md.html](https://google.github.io/filament/Filament.md.html)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Too many commenters are thinking about the last steps (layout and pre-print) when the hard parts are everything up to that point. Go purchase a copy of Scrivener and if on Linux then maybe learn org mode really well or else run Scrivener in a VM.

</comment><comment><USER16> The LaTeX document format is pretty well fit for the use case (it's kinda been made in that sense).

If it's "too complex", you may be interested in reStructuredText, a stricter and more complete alternative to Markdown, that auto-converts well into LaTeX.

</comment><comment><USER17> It doesn't matter. Stop wasting time on thinking about the right tool and start writing. Way more projects fail because they are never finished (or even properly started) than because of wrong software.

<comment><USER18> Really. Writing text beats fighting with (whatever) tech.

Once the writing is done, you have something you know makes the formatting fight worth waging. That way, the half-hour you'll spend finding a bloody compromise for some problem won't be cutting into your writing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Your favorite coding editor (intellij, vim, emacs, notepad++,...), markdown and pandoc.

Markdown lets you focus on content and structure, pandoc creates a PDF of it by using latex, which you can later use to define how the text shall be printed (twosided? Us legal/a4/a5? Title, author,... ) and gives you latex formatted text, which is always correct & professional.

Pandoc also allows tables and images in markdown.

</comment><comment><USER20> Please do not use LaTeX. If your textbook is supposed to have special layout needs, you will have a hard time with LaTeX. Tables are a real nuisance in LaTeX as well - normally you have your data in some other tool like Excel or some Jupyter notebook or CSV. Turning the data into a nicely looking and well- placed LaTeX table is not straightforward. Sure, there are specialized LaTeX extension packages for a lot of functionalities, but you will need time to get familiar with them. I would just start with MS Office or LibreOffice - <USER2> offer sufficient functionality and if you need more specialized tools, then those tools usually have an import function for DOCX /ODT files.

<comment><USER21> Personally I find it pretty painful creating large documents in Word. Creating documents in Latex helps me focus on the text/structure without worrying about figure/table placement (I can still have them in the markup, but and fix all the formatting issues after I've written the text).

I think it depends on author mentality somewhat. Word works well for some, Latex for others.

It might also be worth considering Markdown or plain HTML. Particularly if an ePub/kindle version is a possibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Use a word processor to write a book. Think about that other stuff after your book is written. You don't need to think about it yet. You need to write that book.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, I think one of the risks here is spending so much time picking the right tool that you lose interest in writing the book. Latex is great for writing papers, formatting, references, but arguably not great for churning out thoughts. Sometimes a pencil and paper will do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would start by writing it in whatever software you find most conducive to long writing and editing sessions (be that MS Word, Dark Room, Scrivener, or a programmer's text editor).

Then convert it to the format you want to use for formatting and layout.

</comment><comment><USER25> I spent a lot of time on this before I settled on Pandoc and reStructuredText. However, if you have a publisher, they may dictate the medium.

I wrote about my experience writing a book on Emacs in Emacs here, and the tooling I used [1]

[1] [https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/how-to-write-a- book-i...](https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/how-to-write-a-book-in- emacs)

</comment><comment><USER26> Have you had a look at Apple iBooks author? [https://www.apple.com/ibooks- author/](https://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/)

<comment><USER27> Pages now saves ePub, might be a better tool for most of the job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Use whatever tool allows you to sit down and write content sooner. If you don't know Latex, don't waste time learning it (unless the book has a lot of formulas in it). So if you already know how to use Word, (or similar word processors like the Libreoffice one) use that. They are perfectly fine for large text base stuff. If you have plenty of images it will get heavy, but I think there might be a way to link to external files?). Rendering in PDF from MS Word works very well. If you need to share it with somebody for review and comments, most people would be able to open it and read it and comment directly on it. And the WYSIWIG aspect of it should not be underestimated. The amount of personalization of fonts, spaces, etc, is way larger than other options.

</comment><comment><USER29> I highly recommend [https://github.com/softcover/softcover](https://github.com/softcover/softcover) see dogfooded demo [http://manual.softcover.io/book](http://manual.softcover.io/book)

You can write the text either as Markdown or LaTeX, and softcover will build PDF, HTML, ePUB, mobi versions of the book for you.

It's the only ePub generation strategy that I know of that doesn't butcher the math.

</comment><comment><USER30> I agree with what others have said, that there is no best system/framework because it depends on the use-case. But I haven't seen Sphinx (which I'm currently attempting to use) here, so I'll mention it. It's often used for web-based docs but has built-in PDF output via pandoc. The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python is one example of a book produced with it:

[https://docs.python-guide.org/](https://docs.python-guide.org/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Looks like you should use pandoc (or asciidoc) from within your favorite text editor (e.g Visual Studio Code, Atom, ...) Using raw LaTeX is wasted effort IMHO, only commit to it, if you really need it. If you want to sell later as E-Book, i recommended to get the technical details right now. This might give you an edge over authors who are only able to deliver a converted pdf.

</comment><comment><USER32> Maybe Atlas ? [https://atlas.oreilly.com/](https://atlas.oreilly.com/)

</comment><comment><USER33> RMarkdown can make for some great textbooks. Take a look at the online version of R for Data Science, to see what can be accomplished:

[http://r4ds.had.co.nz](http://r4ds.had.co.nz)

[https://github.com/hadley/r4ds](https://github.com/hadley/r4ds)

</comment><comment><USER34> Asciidoctor is worth a look, in line with plain text / markdown but offers a bit more in terms of textbook specifics.

[https://asciidoctor.org/](https://asciidoctor.org/)

</comment><comment><USER35> Use your preferred variation of plaintext - markdown, reStructuredText, etc. - in as plain an editor as you can come up with. (There are plenty of minimalist/distraction free plaintext editors out there if you'd rather not use your favorite code editor.)

The hardest part in long form copy is getting the content written. Anything visual on top is just distraction that will get in your way and slow you down.

Once you've the copy, use Pandoc or equivalent, and _then_ typeset and format using a more sophisticated medium as needed.

</comment><comment><USER36> To some degree what you use is dependent upon what type of content it is. Is it purely text? Text and some images/graphics? Tables? Equations?

A good starting point for primarily text or text+pics is whatever editor you like to use everyday. Once your content is final (or nearly so) you can export as ascii and then add latex (or variant) formatting.

If it is heavily equation oriented, there are a number of wysiwyg type latex editors that may be helpful or just bite the bullet and start as a latex text document.

</comment><comment><USER37> None of the suggestions address the writing process and what might facilitate that process. I was so frustrated with existing word processors in that regard that I wrote my own. It's built on my personal work flow augmented with spell checking and find/replace. I did add layout features as an afterthought but rarely use them. I'd market it, but marketing "side projects" is an insurmountable hassle.

</comment><comment><USER38> Am I allowed to advertise my own work? :) I added some features to Helpinator that make it more convenient to write textbooks, especially on programming. For example, you can add self-check quizzes, step-by-step guides, easily manage code snippets, etc. And you can export to 10+ formats, including PDF. Or export to Github-flavored markdown to submit it to Github.

</comment><comment><USER39> I've written, typeset and published a book about a game (a variant of contract bridge) [1] using this toolchain: emacs org mode > Pandoc > Adobe Indesign (via ICML). Worked beautifully.

[1] [https://www.santeonisto.com/swingbridge](https://www.santeonisto.com/swingbridge)

</comment><comment><USER8> I used Latex for several books and liked it. I once wrote a single book, but in Java and Common Lisp editions, and Latex worked really well for that.

Then I switched to Leanpub.com and never looked back. With Leanpub markdown you can still use Latex for formulas.

I love to write and Leanpub takes almost all of the hassle/overhead out of the process.

</comment><comment><USER40> I suggest Doconce ([https://github.com/hplgit/doconce](https://github.com/hplgit/doconce)) which is a language that compiles to latex, html and other formats. It is easy to make a version specialized for tablet etc. It is used quite heavily at my university.

</comment><comment><USER41> If you want ridiculously high power for doing anything you want with a book in any language, TeX and friends will grant you god's level.

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

</comment><comment><USER42> You should give Leanpub [0] a shot which is a platform for self-publishers. You not only get full-control over the process, but you can also use various input sources and formats (GitHub/Bitbucket, Dropbox, PDF, ...) and output formats (PDF, EPUB, MOBI).

I write all my books with Markdown and Git/GitHub [1] and release them eventually on Leanpub [2]. Even if you don't want to release the book on their platform, you can take away the output files and publish them somewhere else (e.g. own platform, Amazon).

\- [0] [https://leanpub.com](https://leanpub.com)

\- [1] [https://github.com/the-road-to-learn-react/the-road-to- learn...](https://github.com/the-road-to-learn-react/the-road-to-learn- react/tree/master/manuscript)

\- [2] [https://leanpub.com/the-road-to-learn-react](https://leanpub.com/the- road-to-learn-react)

</comment><comment><USER43> Depends on the topic. If there's a lot of math, you might as well go straight to LaTeX.

</comment><comment><USER44> I used Scribus to develop a language teaching course book for kids. It's kind of like Adobe's InDesign, but open source. A bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it I find its quite easy to use.

</comment><comment><USER45> Many tools have been described in this thread.

I'd say, go with the simples you can find (maybe even LibreOffice Writer).

Worry about layout and imagination later.

Make sure the tool you use doesn't get in the way of actually writing the book.

</comment><comment><USER46> Bookdown is super easy. Some oreilly books (eg R for Data Science) used it.

</comment><comment><USER47> "The best" is something that does not exist, you have to know what your requirements are. Having said that, I would suggest ASCIIDOC, reStructuredText, or the good old LibreOffice.

</comment><comment><USER48> Ms word.

</comment><comment><USER49> I wrote a perl book using pod (the perl doc format). The process was baroque: pod to latex,latex to rtf. Which then gave me an msword interchange format - important for the publisher.

I also wrote a PhD thesis. I started with various msword compatible formats (for process reasons). I curated the documents into markdown and was hoping to use markdown/citeproc to produce a thesis via either msword or latex. However that was going to be a pain in the bum, so I finished it up with latex/hyperref/bibtex.

So, tl;dr I think if your book is not citation or maths heavy and you are in control of the process I would recommend markdown to latex via pandoc. If it's citation heavy,then I'd probably recommend cutting out the pandoc middleman and going straight to latex/bibtex. If it's maths heavy then markdown to latex might work. If it's someone else's process, I recommend jury rigging something that will get them an MVP.

</comment><comment><USER50> Emacs, org-mode.

</comment><comment><USER51> plaintext / .txt / .md

</comment><comment><USER52> vim!

</comment><comment><USER53> Vim

</comment><comment><USER54> Sadly, it's latex.

 _Yikes_</comment>


Is Twitter search really real time full-text search? - <AUTHOR> http://www.lshift.net/blog/2009/01/20/my-thoughts-on-real-time-full-text-search

<comment><USER3> it isn't real time - send a tweet, delete the tweet, search for it - <USER2> appears.</comment>


Amazon/IBM backed AI for Education HackWeek: $17K in prizes - <AUTHOR> http://opened.ai <comment><USER2> Medium post with all the details and the story: [https://medium.com/opened- ai/ai-for-education-global-hackwee...](https://medium.com/opened-ai/ai-for- education-global-hackweek-7edc7db87d4f)</comment>


Joe Hewitt on the iPad - <AUTHOR> http://joehewitt.com/post/ipad/ <comment><USER2> I almost didn't upvote this in deference for those who are (understandably) sick of the iPad discussion. But it represents my viewpoint quite succinctly.

I don't support how closed the Apple platform is, but I think the iPhone OS is great for a whole range of computing. On the positive side its created a market for developers, without pushing out indie developers (like consoles do).

I certainly have sympathy for the idea of teaching kids to program on these devices, and how hard Apple will no doubt make that. While its going to be hard to get any kind of interpreter on the device, I'm sure someone will succeed eventually - and then we could well have a generation of kids who grow up programming because of the device.

<comment><USER3> > While its going to be hard to get any kind of interpreter on the device, I'm > sure someone will succeed eventually - and then we could well have a > generation of kids who grow up programming because of the device.

Yes, someone will eventually succeed. There will be a jailbreak for this device which will turn it into a more interesting platform for students and technical users.

The complaint is that it should have been this way from the start, and we're betting on a flaw in Apple's design in order to get the most of their product.

<comment><USER4> Why would a jailbreak be needed? What am I missing?

An iPad developer could compile up copies of some of life's goodies like bash, emacs, Perl, Ruby, Python, some lisp variants, Apache, etc.

Then the developer write a little Mac-application which let the user apply for the Apple Developer program. When that is granted, the application installs the developer tools and downloads the iPad projects for emacs, etc.

Every user which use scripting applications will be his/her own developer. Without jailbreaks.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure you have to pay $100/year to sign up to the iPhone dev program and I imagine the iPad dev program will be the same. So your idea works fine except for the part where everybody who wants to install your package will first have to pay Apple $100. I'm not sure how many people will be willing to do that just to start learning about programming.

<comment><USER4> >>I'm not sure how many people will be willing to [pay a tax of $100/year] just to start learning about programming.

Huh, learning? That is like saying people won't buy a car so they can learn to drive... :-)

A user could have an iPad to _write_ and/or _run_ suitable scripting programs. Like emacs. [Edit: Or other programs written with Perl/Python/Ruby/Lisp etc.]

If that is worth a tax of 8-9$/month will vary between users.

<comment><USER6> > _If that is worth a tax of 8-9$/month will vary between users._

And between teenagers who may or may not have access to dad's credit card, or between countries who may or may not have access to that program ;)

This also means that a user won't be able to install some software with a single click ... he'll have to first go through the registration process, with a valid credit-card, and some time on his hands.

I really don't know why people try to downplay this. If this model gets popular (and it already is to some extent because of the iPhone) ... devs and many regular users simply get proper fucked.

<comment><USER4> >> This also means that a user won't be able to install some software with a single click

>> ... many regular users simply get proper fucked.

My point was to suggest automation of the process. I didn't imply that this would be painless, just less painful than jailbreaks.

If it becomes common, even Steve Jobs will have to give in and have a simple checkbox for allowing scripting apps. (Like different sets of installable applications in Debian/Ubuntu).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If we leave aside the downsides, we are left with two major things here:

\- Simplified computer that the majority can handle fully on their own without someone's help. They can choose what apps they want, get rid of ones they don't want, etc. It _does_ take the stress & overhead away from installing stuff on your machine. That means people will install stuff.

\- Assumed location awareness, connectivity, camera (eventually), mic, headphones, accelerometer, ambient light sensor along with the UI is a genuinely new paradigm

Those two things together have the potential to be a very big deal.

<comment><USER8> I don't believe it has GPS, so not so sure about the locational awareness bit.

<comment><USER9> If I'm not wrong, I believe the 3g version has A-GPS.

<comment><USER10> You are correct: <http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/> (left-most column under "Location")

It looks like both the wifi and 3g versions have a digital compass, as well.

<comment><USER7> Wow. I never even considered that they would differ on something like that.

That's a substantial hit on the "it just works" front. Some apps will not be able to do anything useful without this. Some people won't understand why.

<comment><USER11> The reason why is that Qualcomm and most 3G chip manufacturers bundle GPS, as it is required by federal law for 911 service. Just adding a standalone GPS module to the Wifi version would probably cost about as much as adding a 3G chip.

Btw, does anyone else find it striking how much patent licensing adds to the cost of a device? I'm pretty sure Apple is passing the $130 3G upgrade along at almost cost. These 3G chips have been out for years now and probably only cost about $10-20 to manufacture, yet every 3G cellphone manufacturer gets raped by patent licensing costs to the tune of $100+.

<comment><USER12> Given that Ericsson F3507g mini-pcie card is $80 give or take, I doubt that the $130 3G upgrade is at cost.

<comment><USER11> Does the Ericsson card have a GPS radio and quad-band G3 as well, or just 3G?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I commented on a previous post that I wouldn't read another iPad article, because all the ones I had read were tripe that bludgeoned the device for ideological reasons, or praised it because it's shiny.

However, I respect Joe Hewitt's iPhone work and other writings, so I checked out his article, and I finally got some real insight. This is certainly the best iPad article I've read so far. The idea that we need to re-imagine all of our current software with the capabilities of a large, responsive touchscreen is a good take on the release.

The only thing that worries me is the risk... what's the chance people don't buy these things? Apple has had a flop or two in its past, and even though I develop iPhone apps, I'm a bit leery of developing iPad apps.

<comment><USER14> During the keynote, they presented the iPad as "magical and revolutionary". Of course, this is marketing, but I was thinking about it to try to see what could be so magical and revolutionary about it.

For the magical part, sure it's a wild hyperbole. But I suppose you could say that, in that it feels like it's the real beginning of the kind of interfaces that have been imagined and dreamt of for many years on TV, in movies… and considering the size of it, it is pretty amazing.

As far as revolutionary, my first impression was "how is that revolutionary since everything it does an iPod Touch has been doing for a couple of years on a smaller screen?". But I came to a similar conclusion as Joe Hewitt, in that it's revolutionary (though it's also hyperbolic) because it shifts the paradigms of computing and the way we think about computers. Yes, the iPhone/iPod Touch are similar technically but the apps were still apps for an advanced mobile phone and the size of the screen was in fact very limiting.

In a way, I feel that the iPad is what computers should have been from the start if it had been possible at the time. For example, take the mouse. It was a great invention to interact "directly" with what's on the screen, but if it had been possible to have touchscreens then, I doubt mice would have been used. Applications have always been a bunch of files in the filesystem and we got used to that, but really that's something we don't really need to know and something that Apple has been removing for quite some time on the Mac even, with app bundles.

So, of course, we'll see what happens. But I think it's an interesting step.

 _PS: yes, I think I drank too much kool-aid_

<comment><USER15> I still think that for most office uses, a mouse is better than a touch screen. If I'm spending a lot of time entering data, a all-in-one touch screen device is miles behind a monitor at eye level several feet away, a good tactile keyboard flat on my desk, and a mouse a few inches away. Maybe I'm constrained by what I already know, but I can't picture a touch device being better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From a developer's point of view, how does the power of Android compare to that of the iPhone OS? I haven't developed on either, but articles I've read so far seem to indicate the two have pros and cons but are pretty evenly matched overall. Of course the iPhone still attracts more developers because it has more users.

Let's assume that Android-based smartphones become increasingly successful as many predict, and that users find Android smartphones about as appealing as iPhones. Tablets running Android have been announced, though no apps have been optimized for the larger screen size yet. If Google released tablet-optimized versions of the stock apps, and made the appropriate tweaks to the SDK and the Market, wouldn't Android-based tablets be a close match to the iPad?

How come there hasn't been any excitement about the potential of Android-based tablets?

<comment><USER17> As a developer for Android devices, i must say this article makes me really sad. How can a developer be satisfied with limitations and just put the "but it's how it is to be more secure" stamp on it.

Let's see those 2 sentences that make really no sense: "it can't just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS." and: "As a developer, it's a bit sad losing the ability to come up with crazy plugins and daemons and system-level utilities, but I believe it's a tradeoff worth making."

I've now owned Android devices since the G1 (the first), now switching to the Nexus One. The nerd i am i probably installed hundreds of those apps, that are not approved by someone. Not one of them did somehow brick my phone! The worst thing that happens is that apps don't do what i want, some even crash (but that's surprisingly rare). But still, they can run in the background, communicate with each other, etc.

So, why am i telling this: If smart engineers can think about what a smartphone OS should be like, it will support save mechanisms for multitasking, for daemons and plugins. Behind Androids Interface are a lot of very neat concepts working.(intents/broadcasts, man, i love that concept!)

From what i can tell:

\- iPhone OS is some stripped down Mac OS version, which probably has its deficits in some areas. I believe that Apple just doesn't give us multitasking because it has heavy impact on batterylife or security (because the OS wasn't made for mobiles, in the beginning).

\- When chosing between a _free_ development platform on Java, with Eclipse on every major platform and a subscription based development only with Mac OSX and a language that is basically used nowhere else (Obj-C)... well, the choice is clear for me. Google did a pretty good job with the Eclipse integration and it's toolchain.

<comment><USER11> _As a developer for Android devices, i must say this article makes me really sad. How can a developer be satisfied with limitations and just put the "but it's how it is to be more secure" stamp on it._

I find it ironic that an Android developer is saying this. Android only has what, 256MB of available disk space for 3rd party programs? That is extremely limiting for all kinds of useful apps that might need a local database, or for large apps like games.

Also, the Android marketplace has similar limitations to the App store, but none of the safety. Google can and will pull your app if it doesn't like it, however, their post-release approval process lets malicious apps get through. There's already been one phishing app released. It seems like Google has all of the bad features of an open PC (viruses, worms, malware) and all of the bad features of a sandbox (complete control over code execution, unless you root your device).

<comment><USER17> Well, you should get your facts straight first. "Android only has what, 256MB of available disk space for 3rd party programs?"

That's nonsense. It depends on the device. Also, the G1 has far less then 256 MB free for apps, yet a typical app is around 100kB large. Also data can be on the SD Card and future version of android will be able to install apps on the sd card as well (maybe even the current version, don't know).

"Google can and will pull your app if it doesn't like it"

Where is the proof for that? Afaik they still have to show the behavior Apple is showing constantly by pulling normal apps. Guess what, you can easily install and use another market application and Google won't forbid you to do so: <http://slideme.org/> is a good example. You can install it easily on an _unrooted_ device like other applications.

I agree that the android market could use some approval process for applications that need security (like banking apps). Something like the SSL- Info in your browser. But that's about it. Also could you please point me to any viruses and worms you are mentioning?

By the way, what do you mean by "complete control over code execution, unless you root your device"? who is controling what exactly? If you mean native code (i suppose you mean the sandbox is the dalvik vm), i should point you to <http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/1.5_r1/index.html> .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "The store may not be open, but the iPhone/iPad platform itself could hardly be more open to tinkerers of all ages."

Considering it as an Apple product in the vein of the iPhone, with all the limitations that go along with that? Yes. But considering it as a computer? No.

<comment><USER19> "...could hardly be more open...?" Except that you have to pay $100. Oh and you have to develop on a Mac, so you should probably buy one of those too.

<comment><USER20> $100 is only required if you want to publish your apps on Apple's App Store. If you just want to tinker you can build the apps for yourself and let friends use them also. I don't recall what the limitations are on that. As for the requirement to own a computer to develop for it -- yeah... that's common.

<comment><USER3> Not true. Apple requires you to sign your application before the iPhone OS will allow it to be installed. Also, the check is on the device itself, not in iTunes.

There's only two ways to get the apps installed: 1) Pay $100. 2) Crack the device.

Reference and instruction via networkpx: [http://networkpx.blogspot.com/2009/09/compiling- iphoneos-31-...](http://networkpx.blogspot.com/2009/09/compiling- iphoneos-31-apps-with-xcode.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One of the few iPad articles that I actually enjoyed reading. Facebook on the iPhone was a real reinvention of UI. Something we don't see often enough.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think the iPad is good for what it is - a personal media player. It is NOT the laptop/touchscreen hybrid next generation technology that we had hoped for. I suspect as a PMP it will see wide success, but there is still a massive void yet to be filled with a proper touchscreen laptop that can accommodate all of our computing and graphic needs. We can only hope another company steps up to the plate and delivers something truly revolutionary. Not just another iPhone/PMP.

</comment><comment><USER23> I have a hard time accepting his new found love for Apple when in the article before last, he was ranting about the evils of Apple's app store approval process. He claimed that he would no longer be making iPhone apps, and would make web applications instead. Now, he says that the glorified iPod touch is going force everyone to "re-imagine" their applications. Sorry, but I'll remain skeptical thank you very much.

</comment><comment><USER24> > The store may not be open, but the iPhone/iPad platform itself could hardly > be more open to tinkerers of all ages.

Really? Can I install an iPhone/iPad IDE and emulator on my Ubuntu workstation?

</comment><comment><USER25> iPad, as a device is a new opportunity for developers. But not an incredible one. Open up the platform, and we can consider it incredible.

He calls the demand for open-computing and removal of restrictions a "nonsense" .

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure if you are familiar with Joe Hewitt's backstory, but he's been very vocally against the app store policies. In fact, he left the Facebook iPhone application team over this:

"My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple's policies." – Joe Hewitt"

ref: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/joe-hewitt-developer- of...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/11/joe-hewitt-developer-of-facebooks- massively-popular-iphone-app-quits-the-project/)

<comment><USER25> Quoting him & disagreeing with him calling iPad platform an "incredible opportunity" - gets me downmodded.

I laughed a little.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Enough with these iPad stories, please?</comment>


Webhook service communication via Serverless - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/davidhampgonsalves/webhook-liaison <comment><AUTHOR> Connect webhook enabled(and straight http endpoints) together via configuration. It runs on Lambda(using the Serverless framework) so < million requests are free. The JSON transformations & filters powered by JMESPath which makes them quite powerful.</comment>


After Eve - <AUTHOR> http://scattered-thoughts.net/blog/2016/01/17/after-eve/ <comment><USER2> One of the articles this article links to cuts to the core of the issue:

[http://prog21.dadgum.com/46.html](http://prog21.dadgum.com/46.html)

I couldn't agree more. Tech is a tool, wanting better tools and becoming better at using those tools makes sense when there's something non-tech related driving you forward, ideally something creative, social or altruistic.

That said, I do think Eve has the power to do some social good, so like the author of this article I hope it continues.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was expecting spreadsheets.

</comment><comment><USER4> > ...the idea that even relatively small investments of > time/effort/organization can multiply into massive outcomes when steadily > applied. I'm pretty excited to see what I could do with a more deliberate > effort.

My first deliberate effort is in progress here - [https://github.com/jamii/notes/](https://github.com/jamii/notes/) \- aiming for around 15 books over 3 weeks.

<comment><USER5> Am I reading that right, you want to read 15 books in 3 weeks?

<comment><USER6> If you're out of work that's perfectly doable. I sometimes read books in a day or two even while having a full-time job. (Back-of-the-envelope calculation: at 1-2 minutes a page, a 300-page book takes 5-10 hours).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder what workflow the author uses to take notes while reading? I prefer reading on a kindle or the iPad, but these devices are so geared towards consuming content that it's almost impossible to have a frictionless workflow taking notes.

<comment><USER8> When it comes to eBooks, Marvin for iOS has a great system where you can easily select/highlight entire sentences. If I want to add a note, I choose the highlight and annotate option and then dictate to siri what my note is. That works pretty well, and I can then easily export highlights and annotations to email (and then another system).

For pdf's I use Goodreader, and the same annotation technique.

Still not ideal though. I would be very interested in an app where I can highlight text and immediately dictate (or record) comments without an extra tap...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why did you quit?

</comment><comment><USER10> great article</comment>


Announcing SSH Tunnels for Browserling - <AUTHOR> http://catonmat.net/blog/announcing-ssh-tunnels-for-browserling/

<comment><USER2> for ssh tunneling under Windows I prefer Bitvise Tunnelier over Putty.</comment>


How Microsoft Research banished the BSOD - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/how-microsoft-research-banished-the-bsod-697216?src=rss&attr=all

<comment><USER2> I don't care how uncool Microsoft is perceived to be, Microsoft Research would be my dream job over any other tech company. It's like being a researcher at a top university without having to beg for grants every year.

<comment><USER3> I don't know. I have worked with and around academics a few times. They can be surprisingly disorganized and crisis-driven/reactive. "Gets things done" is not exactly how I would describe the academics I've encountered.

<comment><USER4> I am curious why he is being down-voted. I am sure people disagree with him, but I'd like to at least hear some anecdotes.

<comment><USER5> So would I. Some anecdotes about his interactions with MSR researchers would have been nice instead of seemingly random dissing of academics.

<comment><USER6> Here's one MSR employee who impresses me: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Peyton_Jones>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Non sequitur.

      1- Guy proves 4 Colour Theorem with software, and mathematically proves
         the software with another program (or something like that, it isn't
         completely clear.)
      2- Most BSODs caused by 3rd party drivers.
      3- Make software to test those drivers before shipping.
      4- BSODs mostly gone!

The article's title promised an explanation but instead they gave a flawed story. It seems on one hand they dumbed down the article, but on the other hand they kept some of the fancy sounding concepts. It would be forgivable if it weren't a tech-oriented publication. "Deep into technology."

<comment><USER8> Well, no, they do say a little more than that:

 _"... the techniques that George used to prove that his computer based proof was correct happens to have direct application to a set of tools that we give to people that build PC peripherals..."_

I know MS uses Prefast (<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms933794.aspx>) to improve driver quality. I'm not sure what other verification/analysis techniques they use, but it's not too surprising that a technique developed for efficient automated theorem proving would be applicable to efficient software verification.

To say that doing this is solely responsible for "banishing the BSOD" is irresponsible and misinformed in a few different ways, of course.

<comment><USER9> In addition to Prefast, there is also the Static Driver Verifier(SDV). Comes with the Windows Driver Kit, analyzes your code to detect common problems people have when writing drivers. The Windows Driver Kit is free -- you can learn more about SDV here: <http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/tools/sdv.mspx>

SDV began its life as a project called SLAM. This page has documentation on SLAM, academic papers, etc. <http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/slam/>

I'm not sure of the exact connection highlighted in the article, but this work builds on decades of work in automated theorem proving. It's exciting that now these techniques are used on real code.

(Disclosure: the SLAM & SDV authors are colleagues of mine at Microsoft.)

<comment><USER10> Also the WHQL driver verification/certification process which does additional testing internally at MS and allows you to actually install drivers without major warnings on x64/modern Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not as quick and easy as the way they banished the Xbox 360's RROD (Red Ring of Death): [http://www.joystiq.com/2010/06/16/xbox-360-slim-17-smaller-t...](http://www.joystiq.com/2010/06/16/xbox-360-slim-17-smaller- than-original-incapable-of-rrod-ing/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Very interesting work with the Four Color Theorum, but the BSOD isn't exactly "banished", at least for me.

<comment><USER13> I haven't encountered a BSOD anywhere in all the machines I work on in at least 5 years. But I did skip Vista entirely. 64 bit Windows 7 seems mostly excellent stability wise, although I could list a few exceptions to this (Super (video converter) seemed to bring down my internet connection yesterday until I killed it), and I could make a huge list of usability gripes with it that I can't for the life of me figure out why MS doesn't fix.

But generally speaking I'm pretty happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow. From proving the Four Colour Theorem to reducing driver induced BSODs.

</comment><comment><USER14> Haha, so Microsoft decides against banishing the BSOD? So far as I know, it seems that most stuffs started at Microsoft Research end there. Therefore: good job, researcher, now I will come back to my trusted fedora. I mean, Fedora.</comment>


Ask HN: Selling Web Software to Government? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone out there have strong experience in selling web apps/software to government(state or federal)? Would you be willing to offer some pointers?<p>We've never done it before and are complete neophytes, but are exploring the idea as another way to bootstrap. Any general pointers would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you're in the SF area and would want to grab lunch or a coffee that would be great. <comment><USER2> I am from Brazil and probably the whole process is different, but here are some of my experiences.

\- Most of the times a gov doesn't "buy" things directly. They open a bidding, auction, whatever is the english term. They'll put a set of requirements, and let companies bid anonymously...

\- There's a certain threshold for this "bidding" to be required. In Brazil a couple years ago, cities couldn't buy anything above R$ 750.00 without the whole bidding process. So, vendors priced their stuff at R$ 749.99;

\- Another method to manipulate the bidding is that the buyers will agree with the vendor(s) to make a certain set of requirements that only the vendor(s) can satisfy;

\- There's the chance that in four years, the next administration, they'll kick you out;

\- You'll get many, many leads. A new mayor is elected, he puts his people on charge. They're from party X, and party X also controls other cities, and they'll recommend you;

\- Some politicians will try to pay with influence, that is, instead of money, they'll talk about the wonders they can do to you or your company in different spheres of the administration. This is different of straight corruption where money exchange hands, it's sold more like a friendship, one hand washing the other. It's like having friends in the police or lawyers. How easier your life will be;

Other than that, the whole politics thing, it's like any normal commercial transaction. You sell something, gives support, and life goes on. I worked during 6 years making software for law firms, and law-related parts of the government. I wasn't directly involved in the whole politics things, I was just the programmer and my boss was the marketing/salesman guy, but I would get lots of hints here and there.

There's also the issue of legacy applications, worse than on the enterprise. Govs don't have the financial incentive to change stuff, to make things run more smoothly. You'll deal with a lot of old stuff, or crap things made by family members and their relatives.</comment>


new Drone startup Raises $10M Series A: Ghost Aerial filming - <AUTHOR> http://igg.me/p/ghost-drone-aerial-filming-has-never-been-easier/x/9521469 EHANG, Maker Of Ghost Drone, Raises $10M Series A Led By GGV Capital techcrunch.com/2014/12/30/ehang-seriesa/ Though the market is still in its early stages, drone startups are becoming increasingly popular among venture capital firms. One of the latest companies to benefit is EHANG, maker of Ghost Drone, which users can control by tilting their smartphones. The company announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series A led by GGV Capital, with participation from entrepreneurs Xiaoping Xu, the co-founder of ZhenFund; entrepreneur Nick Yang, former chief technology officer of Sohu; and early-stage startup fund PreAngel also participated.
(EHANG was a finalist at the TechCrunch/TechNode Beijing event's startup competition in August.)
i ordered one
Ghost turns the average person into a filmmaker. Capture your adventures with amazing aerial shots! <comment><AUTHOR> i got 1 and would like to meetup with Dji, 3d fliers</comment>


Will Obama Break Up Google? - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/will-obama-break-up-monopolist-google-2009-2 <comment><USER3> This will probably not be a popular opinion, but I think that Google must eventually become public property. Once their search share approaches 100%, they will have a strangle hold on the flow of information. This is too much power for any profit-driven entity to have. Think of what you do when you have a question about basically anything? You go to Google. If the ethics of the engine become even slightly compromised it could be disastrous for society.

I'm not saying this is an issue now, but as corporations grow, they are constantly pressured to increase earnings. Over time, they morph into institutions that no longer resemble their origins. It's tough for us to imagine the Google we all know and love becoming a corrupt, blood sucking corporation, but what if they never discover a new Golden Goose? There will be extreme pressure to draw more profits from search in any way possible.

Of course there are tremendous issues with putting Google under government control. The government is quite possibly an even less trustworthy entity. But unless a major competitor emerges in the next decade, something big will happen on this front.

<comment><USER4> How is Google's search share nearing 100% any different from Microsoft's OS share nearing 100%? Microsoft could have quite easily done whatever it wanted with the flow of information during the mid-late 90's, with a huge market share and very little competition.

The government won't just 'take control' of a public company; it may attempt to break it up, perhaps, but the Internet is, as of now, about as much of a free market as exists anywhere. If Google has near 100% market share, perhaps it deserves it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is it that they have a monopoly on Search and Cloud Computing exactly?

<comment><USER6> They definitely don't, at least not right now.

They are a big company with a huge market share, and that scares people. However, they don't generally do things that give them an unfair advantage over their competition.

Yahoo, Ask, etc are definitely competitive in the search market. Google is the clear front runner, but they are not without significant competition.

The idea that they have a monopoly on cloud computing is completely absurd. They don't even have online storage for normal users live yet. They provide users with a place to store and edit documents online, but they are far from the only company doing that. They don't come close to competing with S3.

The only reasonable allegation is the charge of having a monopoly on online advertising. I'm still not entirely sure why they were able to buy DoubleClick, and I would not be too surprised if the advertising portion of Google was forced to split at some point in the future. As far as a monopoly on search and cloud computing go though, I would definitely agree that those are not valid in the current market.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't forcing the advertising division to split destroy Google? It seems like that would create one company with huge profit but not much else and another company with lots of projects and engineers but no profit source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article failed to take into account Eric Schmidt's connections to the Obama Administration. Wasn't he part of his economic advisory team?

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't see how to break up Google in any remotely sane way. Whichever of the Baby Googles got the search engine would win, and the rest would lose. That's not a monopoly-busting action, that's just insane.

Which I normally wouldn't put past a politician, but I'm not seeing the upside for them, either. Is there a public outcry against Google? No.

This is probably an extortion attempt to get "donations" to make sure this legal action just never seems to quite manifest in concrete form.

But, if it absolutely had to be done, one interesting possibility would be to _fork_ (in the Unix system call sense) pieces of Google, such that every Baby Google gets full rights to the same search engine. Tricky, though. Very tricky.

</comment><comment><USER10> _Google is "quickly gathering market power in what I would call an online computing environment in the clouds," she said_

This quote really gives the impression that she doesn't know what she's talking about.

<comment><USER11> Make it rain, then! You have the power to do so... (not mr endtime - <USER2> about Miss Varney)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We must not allow any single company to have a monopoly on clouds!</comment>


Why Fire Makes Us Human - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884/?no-ist <comment><USER2> I once came across a curious anthropological account of the importance of fire is a section in Feliks Koneczny's book "On the Plurality of Civilizations"[0] written in the 1930s. (The OCR or transcription isn't great, but the text is still able to be read.) Others might find it interesting.

[0] [https://www.scribd.com/doc/4464979/ON-THE-PLURALITY-OF- CIVIL...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/4464979/ON-THE-PLURALITY-OF- CIVILIZATIONS-Feliks-Koneczny-Entire-Book#page=49)

</comment><comment><USER3> From, uh, 2013.

And the book, _Catching Fire_ , mentioned in the article and from which most of the info is gleaned is from 2010. The scholar in the article, Richard Wrangham, wrote the book.

 _Sapiens_ by Yuval Noah Harari doesn't push the domestication of fire as far back as 1.8 million years as Wrangham does but it does note that the chimpanzee brain uses 6% of the body's energy at rest, while according to the article "A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain". The hypothesis is that only cooking could have provided this boost. Shorter gut, bigger brain. It's a fascinating conjecture. The question is, did we develop sophisticated language before domesticating fire or vice-versa. Perhaps the synthesised creation myths of all the world's cultures and religions could provide a clue?

<comment><USER4> Regarding the timescale this is about, what does it matter that the article is 5 years old?

<comment><USER3> Only that normally we put the year in the title of the post like this (2013) so that people know it's a few years old. That's all, not that the info is out of date or anything.

<comment><USER5> Which is useful if, like me, you guessed whose work this was going to be about (I took an anthro class in college with one of his former grad students) and hoped it would be a follow-up, not the same book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I loved this article. Stories like this make me feel a weirdly intense connection with everyone. One thing we can all have in common is our evolutionary history and how it made us the beings we are, flaws and all.

<comment><USER7> It makes you wonder why humans are so much more special than every other species. In only a few hundred thousand years we evolved far beyond a threshold that no species has managed to achieve in the years, and for some, eons of evolution proceeding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Loren Eiseley also focused on the anthropology of fire. This is from the 1950's:

[https://carrieshmarrie.weebly.com/blog/man-the-firemaker- by-...](https://carrieshmarrie.weebly.com/blog/man-the-firemaker-by-loren- eiseley)

also the same thing in a Google Books link: [https://books.google.com/books?id=Bg2-Clxqy88C&lpg=PA45&ots=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=Bg2-Clxqy88C&lpg=PA45&ots=TBV97a_PBn&pg=PA45#v=onepage&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER9> Fermentation is another naturally-occurring thing that has been used by humans to prepare food since forever. I think it is myopic to focus on fire.

<comment><USER10> Fire substantially predates fermentation, though. We were already benefiting from fire-cooked food long before the rise of conscious fermentation.

Besides that, fermentation at scale, for pickling, beer, or bread, requires containers - which are a product of ceramics, which is a product of fire. Fermentation as a humanity-changing technology is inseparable from fire that way.

<comment><USER9> Ceramics? People have fermented food in seal skin: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiviak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiviak)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm currently reading _Why We Sleep_ and just finished a chapter on how humans' ancestors came out of the trees and started sleeping on the ground. It's speculated that early humans' use of fire made this non-suicidal - keeping away the big nocturnal predators and also reducing the number of ticks, etc, preying on them.

</comment><comment><USER12> Tangential, but I've also heard that humans are the only animal that will willingly run _towards_ a fire.

<comment><USER13> Some insects are attracted to flames:

[https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129035...](https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12903572)

<comment><USER12> Gah! Forgot about those. Maybe because I hate them. I'm sure there was some type of cognitive bias at play.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cooking helped us to fuel our large brains. May we turn it around and ask: for a given diet and brain size, is the adaptive value of curiosity/creativity to save on calories? Not just by improving our plans, tools and behaviours but by making thinking itself more efficient (in terms of simple wattage).</comment>


YC On The Funded:  "Nice people, niched auditory" - <AUTHOR> http://www.thefunded.com/funds/item/3421 <comment><USER2> How could YC possibly pass up on teams with an 'exciting management' background?

</comment><comment><USER3> _Niched auditory?_ What's that?

<comment><USER4> I guess it means specific. Unlikely, I don't have access to the site, they never approved me, but proposed a paid membership. I don't think I'm going to pay ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Somebody is bitter about rejection.

</comment><comment><USER6> Their business model: Linkmium.</comment>


Ask HN: How to stop constant march of features as a co-founder - <AUTHOR> Background: I am a technical co-founder who has been working on a startup for a while now.
My non-technical co-founder/CEO (who has majority share) is constantly thinking of new features he wants us to deliver ASAP. The problem is, as we've kept building features, the system itself is getting less stable and we've accumulated cut-corners over time to deliver ASAP. We (the engineers) have made it clear that we need to spend at least a month or two refactoring, adding tests, and doing other improvements if we want to get the product to a level where we can successfully land & support a big customer.
Every time we find a stability issue & figure out a fix, he asks for LOE - if we don't say we can turn it around in a day or two he shoots it down and says we have too many features (which he just thought of to begin with in the last 2 weeks) to do.
A few months ago, we pushed back pretty hard and said after our next milestone, we need time to pause features & work on stability, and he said we would. Well, it's been a few months and now there are a bunch of new features we Need in order to be Successful. It's getting harder to believe since half of the features we did build get little to no use.
So what can I do? I've tried pushing back but it doesn't feel like my opinion on how I should spend my time & labor carries weight. I'm trying to slow down feature development by bundling new tests, adding missing tests, etc into my definition of done. But that feels like a band-aid and it's hard to improve things piecemeal like that. <comment><USER2> Might be worthwhile having a conversation with your co-founder. Ask him to focus on the key features which will drive the revenue. For every new feature there has to be a critical number of users that need the product not just one offs.

</comment><comment><USER3> How many cofounders are there? How is the equity split? 55%-45%? 60%-40%? 95%-5%? Do you have that in written?

Do you have any customers? Are you (and the rest of the team) getting paid?

</comment><comment><USER4> I really don't see how you expect to stop this realistically. This is the modus operandi of stakeholders at every organization.</comment>


Authorized Steve Jobs biography will include resignation details - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/08/25/authorized_steve_jobs_biography_will_include_resignation_details.html

<comment><USER2> _The book was originally set to arrive in 2012, but this month its release was bumped up to Nov. 21, 2011_

That's ominous.

<comment><USER3> Possibly not. 2012 is only ~5 weeks from the Nov 21 date, and there might be a marketing benefit in releasing the book closer to the release date of the iPhone.

<comment><USER2> Good point, and I'd much rather believe that this is the reason than something more dire.</comment></comment></comment>


Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls - <AUTHOR> http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/nearly-a-million-users-and-no-spam-or-trolls <comment><USER2> Apply a no-exceptions whitelist to your email and you'd have the same thing. Almost nobody does, this, though, and for good reason.

This guy is absolutely right that Twitter is a clever design that folks would be wise to learn from. But Twitter doesn't so much eliminate the problem of spam as _dodge_ it: most people still need a way for relative strangers to get through to them, but they have email for that, so Twitter doesn't need to solve that problem.

If email ceased to exist, Twitter might find themselves pressured to reinvent it, and then spam would arrive right along with it. Similarly, if Twitter yielded to pressure to create a forum like this one, where relative strangers can contribute to discussions, trolls would arrive right along with that feature.

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't true at all. I receive about as many spam followers for my active twitter account as I do friend requests for my shell myspace account.

<http://twitter.com/fivedollarwiki>, or <http://twitter.com/DiningFever> are both users which have recently followed me for no clear reason.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think there are similarities between Facebook and Twitter in that the networks that form are localized within groups of individuals that are familiar with each other. Facebook originally did not have a spam problem up until they themselves decided to spam their users in an effort to monetize their traffic.

Twitter, if it is to be profitable through advertising, will have "spam" in the form of advertisements from within Twitter the same way Facebook has various forms of spam from within (Facebook apps included!).

Nonetheless, 1 million users along with the claim of the article is impressive at this point. I don't use Twitter (how un-2007/2008 of me no doubt) so I cannot comment on getting spam.

</comment><comment><USER5> My first "follower" on twitter was a spammer. Whoops!</comment>


Food allergies get curiouser and curiouser  - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327191.300-food-allergies-get-curiouser-and-curiouser.html?full=true <comment><USER2> This is called Oral Allergy Syndrome: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_allergy_syndrome>

For most of my life I've thought I was allergic to melons and cucumber.

As it turns out, I'm allergic to ragweed pollen. By way of allergy shots for the ragweed pollen, I'm finding myself not nearly as sensitive to either melons or cucumber.

</comment><comment><USER3> I had the idea the other day that perhaps increasing allergy prevalence is a side effect of women taking birth control. Taking birth control causes women to prefer mates with a major histocompatibility complex that is similar to their own, as opposed to different. I'm wondering if allergies are the result of violating nature's usual preference in this regard.

I'm just a layman, so feel free to correct or scoff at the plausability of my pet theory.

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=birth- contr...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=birth-control- pills-affect-womens-taste)

<comment><USER4> For the record, not all scientists accept the research regarding birth control and mate preference as sound science. There's not even good evidence that humans can detect (even unconsciously) the MHC genotypes of another person (most of the papers don't show a statistically significant effect), which the referenced paper takes as one if its premises.

In addition, in the paper referred to in the article, there isn't a lot of difference between those on the pill and off (the error bars tended to overlap):

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18700206?ordinalpos=1&...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18700206?ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum)

It was also not a random or blind trial: "allocation to the pill/control group was entirely the decision of the volunteers, not the experiments."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis>

The Hygiene Hypothesis is the theory that fewer infectious agents you encounter as a child will boost the chances you'll have allergenic problems. The reasoning behind this is that your immune system isn't getting the same inputs or "training sets" as they would have 200 years ago. Since it isn't getting primed with actual infectious material, your immune system starts reacting adversely to silly things like pollen, peanuts, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> The passenger with the severe nut allergy was named Hazel?

(And are there any other names for people which are also names for nuts?)

<comment><USER7> from seinfeld:

 _You know what I love? How there's two nuts named after people: Hazel and Filbert._

<comment><USER8> Interesting bit of trivia - Filberts and hazel nuts are different names for the same plant.

<comment><USER9> That means that there's one nuts named Hazel and Filbert.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Suggest to HN: a website to highlight unjust/immoral laws - <AUTHOR>

In light of recent events, unjust laws and relative morality, I have an idea for a website basically called 'felonies I've committed.'
The site is anonymous, (e.g. no social logins), with a linked .onion copy available for the very cautious.
The page shows a number of simple questions like 'have you ever downloaded a movie from a friend or torrent site', 'accidentally or knowingly taken marijuana over the Canadian border,' etc., with inclusion of the number of times or volume when applicable. The questions are written to be easily understandable and with the loosest reasonable interpretation possible.
On submission you get a report saying something like "based on your answers you could be charged with 80 years in jail and/or 100k in fines." The report would itemize the charges based on answers and include links to the federal laws and the ability to comment on each question/law.
This is purely as an exercise to show people how ridiculous many laws are, demonstrate the gravity of breaking them and create some dialog. <comment><USER2> <http://www.plainsite.org/issues/></comment>


Android 2.2 demolishes iOS4 in JavaScript benchmarks - <AUTHOR> http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/everything/~3/Fe2vBjQR9KU/android-22-demolishes-ios4-in-javascript-benchmarks.ars <comment><USER2> This gets said a lot, but I think it's because it's true so I'll say it again. Apple's products have almost always been lagging in terms of spec sheet. Whether it's speed benchmarks or just a list of features they are always behind. But it doesn't concern them or most of their customers.

People trying to beat them on spec never will because it's not the game they're playing (at least not right now). They're building and selling user experience; it's the sum of the parts that makes them great, not the quality or performance of individual parts.

<comment><USER3> No kidding. This page[1] of Ars' Froyo review made me cringe, and I'm a geek who understands all of this stuff! No way I could recommend this to friends & family who aren't into tech for the sake of tech. If that's the cost of removable and upgradeable storage count me out.

[http://arstechnica.com/open- source/reviews/2010/07/android-2...](http://arstechnica.com/open- source/reviews/2010/07/android-22-froyo.ars/2)

This particular problem is with the handset, not the OS, but it's basically the flagship device. Ugh.

<comment><USER4> By default Froyo manages moving apps between internal storage and the SD card automatically. Normal users never have to see those (admittedly ugly) detail screens. Your complaint is like looking at the man page for vi in Terminal.app and concluding that Mac OS X is only usable by geeks.

<comment><USER5> But they'll be bitten by this. The Android team are clearly not smart enough to understand why people like the iPhone.

"One obvious downside of external application storage is that the software installed on the SD card will only be available when the card is mounted on the device. If you plug your phone into your computer and enable USB mass storage mode, for example, the software installed on the SD card will not be accessible. Due to this limitation, Google's developer documentation warns that long-running software like background services, live wallpapers, and widgets should not allow SD installation."

Can you imagine explaining this to end users? "Well, if you install to the SD card to get more storage, you can't use this app when your phone is plugged into your computer." This is just... stupid.

<comment><USER4> _"Well, if you install to the SD card to get more storage, you can't use this app when your phone is plugged into your computer."_

Plugged in is fine, it's only when the SD card is explicitly mounted as a USB drive that the apps are unavailable. Still mildly annoying, but not as annoying as the iPhone refusing to let you access its filesystem at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there any commonly used web app which have cpu intensive javascript code?

I would assume that most of the time would be wasted on rendering and downloading, and that javascript runs a fraction, even unmeasurable time.

From SunSpider website: _"This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more "_

How often are this things really done in a browser, and are they really the bottleneck?

<comment><USER7> More and more of these tasks are getting to be commonplace in the client side scripting of a website.

However, you raise a valid point: Mobile websites, the kinds most likely to be served to you via MobileSafari, will likely not have things like Tag clouds or 3D raytracers for the foreseeable future.

Maybe there should be a mobile edition of the JS benchmarks run?

And also, as much as speed is an issue, what about a benchmark for compliance? Safari/Webkit is still (to some sites) a red headed step child. The "it works in FF and IE" mentality applies there. My bank is an example of that. It has gotten better, but there are still plenty of web apps where webkit is unsupported.

<comment><USER8> > there are still plenty of web apps where webkit is unsupported.

I hope one of these days we _will_ get to the point where web apps are standards complaint, rather than rendering engine complaint.

We've largely won the battle on earning recognition and support for Gecko, but now we have to do most of it over again for Webkit? What new and exciting engine will we be griping about in two years? Does this make sense?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to see how fast my Android phone runs with 2.2. Too bad I can't. One thing the iOS releases have going for them is that users can actually get them when they are released. 48 Days later, I still don't have the 2.2 update.

<comment><USER10> Well, it's not really 48 days later. It's 48 days after the announcement, but the final source wasn't released until a week or two ago.

<comment><USER9> Umm I don't know for sure. I just went with the "Latest stable release" date on Wikipedia's page about it.

<comment><USER11> [http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/06/froyo-code- dr...](http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/06/froyo-code-drop.html)

"Today is one of those days that has my heart racing; we've just released the source code for Android 2.2."

...

"Posted by Tim Bray on 23 June 2010"

<comment><USER12> releasing the source != pushing out over the air OS updates

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems to me that Apple really doesn't care all that much about the iPhone's browser performance. Anything that presents a good alternative to the App Store universe is not in Apple's best interest.

<comment><USER14> Then why are they pushing so hard on HTML5? If what you say were true they should be trying to stall it, no?

<comment><USER13> Because web apps are still preferable to Flash

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't see this as an advantage _per se_. Javascript on iPhone is indeed slower, but not to the point that it renders web apps unusable.

It could become an advantage over iPhone if Google plans to boost web apps on the platform. Otherwise this benchmark is meaningless to the average user, in my opinion.

<comment><USER16> It renders some web apps unusable. Try reorganizing your Netflix queue on the iPad. Netflix's JS doesn't scale well to a queue with hundreds of items. On a computer running a modern browser, this means a lag of a couple of seconds. But on the iPad, it can be s full minute.

<comment><USER17> (The post isn't comparing Android 2.2 to the iPad but rather to the iPhone 4 hardware and OS...)

<comment><USER18> You're being downvoted because the article is comparing iOS4 to Android 2.2. Both are operating systems. iOS4 is on both the iPad and the iPhone.

In fact, the iPad and iPhone 4 are very similar in hardware as well. The most significant difference is in RAM, where the iPhone has twice as much as the iPad.

Mentioning his or her experience on the iPad is completely valid.

<comment><USER19> iOS4 isn't on the iPad and won't be for several months.

That said, _of course_ faster javascript is a benefit. Shaving even fractions of a second off web operations has huge benefits for users and results in much higher usage and happier customers.

When the performance bumps are _imperceptible_ , it will be time to make a distinction. But on mobile devices that's still quite a ways out.

<comment><USER7> And that said, the CPU of the iPad is believed to be 1GHz, where the iPhone 4 CPU is believed to be a 750MHz model.

Its likely that the experience will be faster on the iPad when iOS 4 comes out for it in October.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The most interesting part of this will be how Gruber eventually spins this... can't wait to see that.

<comment><USER21> My guess is he'll be completely silent about it, UNTIL there's some future iOS update the lets iOS score higher in the same benchmark. _Then_ it'll be an example of Apple's attention to detail and planning, and how Google doesn't care about their user experience. :-)

<comment><USER4> Exactly. Just like pixels per inch, where it didn't matter that the Droid and N1 were massively superior to the iPhone for months. Then the iPhone 4 comes out with slightly higher PPI than the Droid and now it's all about the magical retina display.

<comment><USER22> Sigh. That's just not true. Here is what Gruber said about Nexus One's screen (January 2010):

 _"The high pixel density of the display is marvelous for reading text. Letterforms are, as you'd expect, very crisp. My biggest gripe about the Nexus One display is that certain colors are way over-saturated. All skin tones look very orange to me. Everyone gets that spray-on tan look. Reds, pinks, and especially oranges all go fluorescent. In short, I love the pixel density and brightness (and, so far, the battery life), but I do not like the color reproduction. I don't know if that's the nature of OLED, or if it's specific to the Nexus One."_

— <http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/19/nexus-one-oled>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Personally, I'd rather see a aggregate subjective ratings of "responsiveness" and "speed", rather than raw horsepower, as it were.

If the end goal is enhancing user experience, why not benchmark against those metrics?

<comment> joe-mccann And what would be examples of benchmarking a subjective experience? I mean, a shitty JavaScript engineer can make any UX shitty regardless of speed of JavaScript tests, whereas a good JavaScript engineer can make a UX good with a crap interpreter.

<comment><USER23> Right, so it's entirely appropriate to benchmark arbitrary computational metrics, but benchmarking UI metrics is inconceivable?

I don't understand your argument - true shitty engineers can ruin a UI, as well as they can ruin a JS interpreter. The point of testing and benchmarking is to evaluate the relative "performance" in each of these domains.

Measuring page loads on an array of popular, representative websites, or measuring the latency between user interactions and some visible response are some examples.

Also, having a group of real people give subjective ratings I think carries more weight than people give it credit for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's great because that's the main thing most people look at when they're buying a phone. Forget the display and the camera, what are the JavaScript benchmarks like?

Don't get me wrong, it's good that these sort of enhancements are made and that the platforms drive each other on in this area, but it's not actually going to sell any phones because the gap will never become big enough to become a genuine selling point.

</comment><comment><USER25> Seems like a duplicate of [<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1493937>]. I really wish there was a way to stop the blatant duplicate submission. This is of their feeds.arstechnica.com instead of the already submitted arstechnica.com article.

Maybe this is coincidental, but I am not sure anymore...

<comment><USER26> That would make for a good feature request.

On the right of flag we could add "merge with" and take a news.yc url and if enough people submitted the same url a mod could merge all the comments into the old story.

<comment><USER25> I have been thinking of this for some time. A "merge with" would be great to help the clutter and then the good conversations that happen would not be lost once one is closed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is there something fundamentally different in the approach taken in Froyo that makes for this kind of speed improvement?

<comment><USER7> Everything has been enhanced by a JIT compiler for the apps. It should result in a 250-300% speed-up in real-world usage on most devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I won't be surprised if V8 is faster than the laggy Java Dalvik JIT VM in 2.2.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't care. iPhone 4. I want iPhone 4.

<comment><USER30> I get the reference. Funny. (if you haven't seen the video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg&feature=player_embedded))

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I just benchmarked my Palm Pre against my collegue HTC Android phone, and the Pre beats the HTC hands down : V8 score 52 to 9...

<comment><USER32> You don't say which HTC phone it is, but I don't think any of them have 2.2 yet...

<comment><USER33> The Nexus One is made by HTC and many of them, including mine, have been upgraded to 2.2. I agree with your original point, though: what version of Android OS and Palm was he comparing?

<comment><USER31> Android 1.5 vs WebOS 1.4.2. No Android 2.x device is apparently available in France ATM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> iOS 4 demolishes Android 2.2 in not responding to touch events like molasses

<comment><USER35> got anything quantitative to back that up? have you even run 2.2?

<comment><USER34> [http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2316004/Mobile%20Photo%20Jul%207%2C%...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2316004/Mobile%20Photo%20Jul%207%2C%202010%202%2030%2045%20PM.jpg)

Had to take it with my iPhone 4, so it's not included in the picture. Before you ask, I'm a mobile developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Good for Android. They should be good at something. At least one thing.</comment>


HTML-Ipsum - <AUTHOR> http://html-ipsum.com/ <comment><USER2> This is my standard source:

<http://www.lorem-ipsum.info/generator3>

I use this usually with English, Greek, Russian, Arabic and Chinese text. This makes me fix up most character encoding issues at the earliest possible opportunity in a project.

This maybe overkill for a lot of development, but most of the sites I have worked on in the past two years have been in 14+ languages.

<comment><USER3> Do you know enough about this generator to trust the text generated in other languages? For all you know, the Arabic or Hebrew ones might be embedding culturally insensitive words if they were "translated" from the original gibberish _lorem ipsum_. Or do other scripts have a pseudo-canonical passage to quote from like _De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum_?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thank you. I can't even remember how often I copied the lorem-ipsum into my source code and marked the paragraphs up with <p>-tags. This will save me some time (and frustration).

</comment><comment><USER5> Now that's a great idea.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of recommendations from good web designers I've heard is to use _actual_ content for drafts. If actual content is not available, write something that seems like an actual content.

<comment><USER7> That is the opposite of the practice used in the print world - where _lorem ipsum_ comes from. The rationale is that the semantic meaning of the words can bias design decisions. This sequence of "words" has the same distribution of letters as English, yet means nothing.

What is the rationale from the web designers you've spoken to?

<comment><USER6> I might have misremembered the advice. Maybe they were talking about not using it on web sites intended to be in other languages (I mean, Cyrillic, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you like this, you might also like <http://tabularasa.org/></comment>


A man who cleans up after plane crashes - <AUTHOR> http://www.gq.com/story/man-who-cleans-up-plane-crashes <comment><USER2> What an annoying site on mobile. While reading, advertisements load and shift your view to some place in the article you've never seen before.

Is this style of monetization supposed to make me want to buy a magazine?

(No, I didn't finish reading it. I don't care anymore. Definitely not the "worst job in the world".)

<comment><USER3> Have to agree with you, even if it is orthogonal to the excellent content. I kept thinking that the story hadn't fully loaded, and the jankiness was a result of new assets popping in. After the fifth time of accidentally clicking on an ad and losing my place, I quit. What I had read up to that point was great though.

Just another example showing how fucked the media industry currently is, in that its executives and leaders don't actually dogfood their own product on digital. There's no way a competent editor or publisher would put up with that reading experience, if they had actually experienced it by reading the story via mobile. But because the story looks great in print, they probably don't care how it isn't on the web site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the members of the audience ENRAGED by ads during their reading experience, I will summarize the key points in the article that you can use in your daily life to survive plane crashes:

Never inflate your floatation vest until you exit the plane.

Don't take your shoes off until you're sure your plane has successfully taken off.

Put your shoes on a few minutes before your plane starts landing.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you liked this, you might like a This American Life segment that aired in 2000, "Grime Scene", about a guy who built a business cleaning up after crime scenes. Skip ahead to 8:14. [https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/164/...](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/164/crime-scene?act=2#play)

</comment><comment><USER6> Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13253884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13253884)

<comment><USER7> Not a dupe, the other one didn't garner sufficient attention.</comment></comment>


Raspberry Pi 2 is 'camera shy' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31294745

<comment><USER2> > _Albert Einstein won a Nobel Prize for his discovery that if a light hits a > component and it generates a charge, it causes that component to reset._

Wait, what? Are they really saying here that Einstein got his Nobel Prize for discovering that _light resets electronics_? I recall being taught a different definition of photoelectric effect at school.

> _Raspberry Pi creator Eben Upton told the BBC the glitch was an > "unintentional educational bonus"._

Got to give them points for humour.

<comment><USER3> WRT your first point: yeah, I know what they mean, but that is very poorly worded

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a really badly written article. I didn't really understand what was happening until I read the Foundations article:

[http://www.raspberrypi.org/xenon-death-flash-a-free- physics-...](http://www.raspberrypi.org/xenon-death-flash-a-free-physics- lesson/)

Essentially, the component that regulates power to the CPU is a die-on-board package and due to the photoelectric effect certain types of high intensity ultraviolet are causing a voltage drop which crashes the board. Duct tape, as always, is a solution.</comment>


Organizing your OpenSCAD code: Part I - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cubehero.com/2013/12/18/organizing-your-openscad-code-part-i/ <comment><USER2> I saw OpenSCAD mentioned in another HN comment, and thought it looked interesting. I was wondering though:

How does OpenSCAD compare to other free CAD programs like FreeCAD? Is it just that it's more focused on programming?

<comment><USER3> The primary difference: You don't drag stuff around to create your models. You write code for it. Now, you can import existing models for a variety of formats, then move them around (with transforms, still in code). It's more like POV-Ray, for instance, than Blender.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If OpenSCAD isn't powerful enough for you, there's a Clojure wrapper that lets you leverage Clojure to generate SCAD code: [https://github.com/farrellm/scad- clj](https://github.com/farrellm/scad-clj). OpenSCAD automatically re-renders the model when the file changes on disk, so you can essentially have a 3D modeling REPL with this setup.

<comment><USER3> > OpenSCAD automatically re-renders the model when the file changes on disk, > so you can essentially have a 3D modeling REPL with this setup.

I love this feature of OpenSCAD. I've tried 3d modeling tools in the past, they just don't work for me. But code, I can do that. With a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV (primarily for watching videos, listening to music) I ssh into it and edit the files with emacs, and every save I get an updated view. I need to take a look at this clojure wrapper, however. I'm not hugely familiar with clojure, but CL and scheme I've got so it shouldn't take me long.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Lemme know if there's other topics on OpenSCAD that you'd like to see and read about.

<comment> alok-g It it possible to create animations also with OpenSCAD?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is, though it's usually not used for figure animation, but more mechanical animations.

<comment><USER5> This is exactly I would be interested in! Do you also have any tips for 2D drafting in harmony with openscad?

<comment><AUTHOR> You'd have to be more specific. What does "2D drafting in harmony with openscad" mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I made a framework to write OpenSCAD code in Ruby. Helps a lot to keep yourself sane on big projects: [https://github.com/Joaz/CrystalScad](https://github.com/Joaz/CrystalScad)

<comment><USER7> There's also a similar project for Python [1].

That said, do I understand correctly that the way you assume the users will share their OpenSCAD models is to share the generated OpenSCAD scripts?

[1] [https://github.com/SolidCode/SolidPython](https://github.com/SolidCode/SolidPython)

<comment><USER6> My work is heavily inspired by SolidPython. SolidPython, unfortunately has some shortcomings at the syntax (resulting in too many braces to read properly).

I do hope that the people will share the ruby code and not the generated openscad code, as that would be hardly readable.

<comment><USER8> I not (yet) got ruby installed. Have you an example how [https://github.com/Joaz/bulldozer/tree/master](https://github.com/Joaz/bulldozer/tree/master) Builds in openSCAD format or .stl or even a jpg ?

Thanks, Brendan</comment></comment></comment></comment>


7 Game developing things I've learned so far - <AUTHOR> http://www.mauriziopz.eu/from0togame/index.php/7-game-developing-things-i-learned-so-far/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. Earlier I've made a few small game prototypes, nothing that can compare to a real, full blown game, but it's where I'd like to go someday and I can totally agree with most of the points.

However "OOP rules" is a bit dual edged for me. When I started out with prototyping these games I tried really hard to do it "the correct way" with loads of abstractions and with proper encapsulation and what not. Sure parts got good but I a made a lot of bloat along the way and now I could have made it a lot simpler (and better). Maybe it's because I've been spending time with Haskell and lisp (functional lisp that is) and now I'd like to "go back" to a more functional approach. Maybe it's because it's just a personal growth as a programmer though?

I might agree with the step by step approach, although I personally think it's funner (and thus more educational) to just dive in head first and make shit happen. I don't think I've ever learned as much as when I sat down and decided that yes I would finally make a working game and just jumped in head first. Break things - it's the way we (at least how I) learn.

Which brings me to #5:

"Don't just jump at any problem and start writing code." Well that's a little how I do things. Maybe I don't even know exactly what the problem is before a few attempts? How would you for example solve a path finding problem in a modern RTS? A bit of forethought is vital of course, but can you really think of all the subtle problems that will come up? Or even all the big ones? I think iterate early and often is the key to game making, and it's a bit similar with problemsolving.

But of course that's also what he's getting at later with "Write some basic functionality and then expand it." It's just that I think when I'm coding, not before.

Now after I wrote this I realize I agree with almost everything he said but with minor differences.

</comment><comment><USER3> The #1 thing I've learnt making casual games is making them is 10% fun and 90% boring. There must be millions of unfinished prototypes out there that were dropped just after the fun ended and the developer had a 'better' idea... I know I have a few dozen.

<comment><USER4> It's when the job gets hard and boring that I forge forward because I KNOW that's the point when most developers stop and the competition will be less after launch.

I just completed the working prototype of my next game. It's RIGHT NOW that the other developers quit because this is when it starts getting dull.

It's now time to:

\- add 2 player

\- create the computer player's AI

\- make a working high scoring system

\- create the game-options screens

\- add the little features and game options

\- add extra animations or "flare" that sets me apart from the typical indie dev

\- create screen shots, marketing copy, the web page, the icon, the high res icon, get a TOS, etc.

But this is why there's a difference between running a mobile business and writing an app.

<comment><USER3> Yep. It's exactly the same in the Flash industry, prototypes get done and dropped in days, never to be touched again. Those last weeks of work are boring as ____but unfinished games are worth _exactly_ $0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find point 3 (OOP Rules) an interesting conclusion. It seems like there is a greater push towards data driven game development and component based entity systems that have a more functional or procedural feel than OOP.

It seems that people are moving towards a set up where the processing is handled by globally available managers and GameObjects are instead contained across multiple Component types.

That's not to say you can't build an component based system in an OOP language of course.

<comment><USER6> OOP(in the hierarchical sense) is heavily blunted by the need for global mutable state in games. The game design often turns out to need to access anything, anywhere, at any time, so the natural move is towards a model more reminiscent of a relational database, with lots of indexing and denormalization. Subsequently the job of implementing game design is reduced to a lot of query statements; most of them are collision or "is-a" categorizations.

At the same time, there's some pressure to serialize large parts of the game, if possible, for two reasons - save games, and editing tools. This further encourages a more formal relational-type system(leading to the entity/component distinction), since a setup based around unstructured pointers is harder to cleanly serialize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google copy: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.mau...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.mauriziopz.eu/from0togame/index.php/7-game- developing-things-i-learned-so-far/)</comment>