America Is Too Dumb for TV News - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/america-is-too-dumb-for-tv-news-20151125 <comment><USER2> The problem is that far too often, what we align ourselves with is far more to do with cultural identity and supporting of viewpoints which dovetail with our own, than out of any desire to believe what's actually correct.

I don't say this about America, but about people in general. We care far more about our egos and not challenging the beliefs we hold, than we do about being correct.

For myself, I can't help but look at this, and the rise of the micro- aggression culture and see links. There's something odd that's happened, where opinion and niceness has become sacrosanct, beyond truth. It's a tribalistic, and ultimately dangerous thing.

<comment><USER3> >I can't help but look at this, and the rise of the micro-aggression culture and see links

That's funny, because my first thought was the kneejerk reactions on Reddit to anything that could be construed as "SJW." This phenomenon doesn't pick a side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The media has been the driving force for extinguishing critical thinking by the news consumer for decades.

They're so focused on entertainment that they don't want - or even know how - to dispense of an idiot like Trump.

So instead they throw some GOML shade at the people they've throughly failed.

</comment><comment><USER5> The article seems to have some truth wrapped in a lot of sensationalism. The basic premise seems to be that the News has become more entertainment in its effort to gain viewership, and as its taken viewers along with it, they have lost their ability to think critically.

I don't agree with the conclusion, I often read pieces like this one which expresses outrage with the news media, but can agree that the economic requirements for news programs and channels to support their host organizations has influenced them in negative ways. And that leads me to conclude that if you want hard hitting and accurate journalism you need to find a different way to support it.

</comment><comment><USER6> flagged, this tripe does not belong on HN. It is a pure partisan hit piece and if this is what HN is to become prior to the next election it will not be worth visiting. Amazing the title wasn't Republican Voters are too dumb for TV news, because that all this article is trying to convey

<comment><USER7> Have you seen Aaron Sorkin's most recent TV show, The Newsroom? It's mostly left-leaning (by American standards, at least) so you may not like it (apologies if I've mis-judged your political stance..), but personally I thought it was a great - though often very flawed - show. Anyway, the reason I mention it is that one story theme is the idea that balanced journalism doesn't always mean 50% to each side. I can't find the quote I want from the show with a quick Google, but here's a very similar quote from Sorkin himself: _' I don't believe the truth always lies in the middle. I don't believe there are two sides to every argument. I think the facts are the center. And watching the news abandon the facts in favor of "fairness" is what's troubling to me.'_

Regardless of whether it was said by Trump or Clinton, if someone says they "watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering [at the 9/11 attacks]" and then claimed they saw it on TV, and then facts showed that this was never shown on TV because as far as anyone can tell it didn't happen... I'd want to see an article about them lying. And that article would naturally make the side of whoever lied look worse. Nothing partisan about it.

<comment><USER8> I've been watching The West Wing again (also Sorkin), and even though I really like the show, at times I cringe at how self-righteous and patronizing the writing can be.

One thing that made the show more palatable was the addition of Ainsley Hayes, a Republican who is hired by the White House on the president's insistence (and causes much grumbling from the other characters initially). She specifically calls out the self-righteous attitude of the other characters and their simplistic view of all Republicans as gun-toting hillbillies.

I stopped watching The Newsroom because it was both more extreme in its partisanship and in its oversimplification of the opposition. And it didn't have an Ainsley Hayes character (or at least not one as good).

I grew up as a very religious evangelical christian, and as such I grew up alongside many American evangelicals who would never vote for the baby-killing atheist Democrats.

And while I strongly disagree with most of their views, I've come to realize that this is not because they're stupid and I'm smart, or because they're mean and I'm kind, or because they're lazy and I am not, but rather most of the time it's because we just disagree on some very fundamental issues. If I were to accept their axioms to be true, they can provide coherent and perhaps even convincing arguments. I know this because I believed much of what they believe myself. Sure, I was younger, but I wasn't stupid. Or at least not more stupid than I am now...

<comment><USER7> Personally the shows suited my political views, but I definitely always saw how they could be much less fun to watch for other people.

An interesting quote from the same Sorkin interview [1] I mentioned before:

 _Question: 'Will's take is that liberals don't know how to win and conservatives are wrong and often ignorant. The left will like that version of fairness more than the right will.'

Sorkin's Answer: 'All I can say is this: First of all, my biggest concern always is, was it a good story, well told? I'm not thinking about the politics at all. But I don't want to make the same mistake that I accuse the media of making, which is that they all better be equal accusations on all sides, that fairness is somehow a virtue in art. It's not. Fairness and balance don't have anything to do with art. This isn't journalism, and it doesn't have to live by those rules. It's meant to have a subjective point of view and an authorial voice.'_

[1] [http://www.vulture.com/2012/06/aaron-sorkin-newsroom- intervi...](http://www.vulture.com/2012/06/aaron-sorkin-newsroom- interview.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> hm, as a European I miss radio news more. not dedicated channels like here, but the mandated news breaks _every_ radio channel needs to broadcast. no one can escape getting at least a tiny amount of information. it is so easy to be completely oblivious over here in the US.

that being said, i don't think it is that bad. trump is an old, white rich guy - what exactly did you think is going in his head? its amazing that he is restraining himself from ranting about "niggers, chinks and wetbacks". you know he talks like that in private, like any other of his profile. that is how he grew up, in a segregated US.

black president, gay marriage - all signs that society overall is moving in the right direction, the old guard simply dying off. like that crazy aunt you'll meet at thanksgiving who only rants about "the jews".

happy thanksgiving.

<comment><USER10> > hm, as a European I miss radio news more. not dedicated channels like here, > but the mandated news breaks every radio channel needs to broadcast.

Same, however my commute to/from work is luckily listening to the Boston NPR station, where I get a full dose of BBC News in the mornings and a random NPR news show in the afternoon depending on when I leave. I unplugged my cable a long time ago, and I stopped visiting most news websites even longer ago. If it weren't for shares on facebook, I'd never find out about what scandalous thing a politician said to get in the media's eye again. If I could filter facebook to only have text and photo shares from friends, I'd be so much happier with the site.

It's interesting what you say about what's going on in his head. Before I graduated school or worked in software, I had a pretty interesting repeating summer job as a QA technician in the nuclear industry. I did a great job and got along great with my boss and coworkers, and often we'd get together over holidays and special occasions. He was an older guy nearing early retirement. On one such get-together, the boss revealed his real opinion about "who caused all this crap shit we're in", being "niggers and spics". Ugh. I was shocked that I was working for a racist, but what shocked me more was just hearing that, period. I couldn't imagine holding an opinion like that at all, let alone having it my entire adult life and believing it worthwhile to share.

I have a hard time believing that most politicians are as dumb as the words they say to get on the air, and Trump is a master at constantly being on the air. But, at this point, I wouldn't be surprised by it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you want to be a leader and you say something silly, then you say it with conviction and you go with it. That's what a lot of modern leaders don't seem to understand. They duck and retreat when offended groups or the media go after them - and it looks feeble.

The media and those groups don't really matter.</comment>


RowHammer: A Retrospective - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09724 <comment><USER2> I'm not a security expert by any means, but row hammer has always struck me as one of the most ingenious hacks ever. I mean if you can flip bits by sending electric current repeatedly through a channel then what can't you do? Nothing is sacred. There is no God

<comment><USER3> Similar stuff can happen with NAND flash but the NAND flash controller can have algorithms to intervene.

<comment><USER4> NAND always has at least one or two layers of ECC protecting your data, so deliberately induced read disturb errors are a lot harder to turn into a practical exploit—and that's before adding any specific measures to predict and prevent read disturb errors.

<comment><USER3> I used to work in SSD firmware development. Thing is the newer generations of NAND are quite fragile so the ECC protection is essential and it is a lot easier to trigger read disturb since you can issue millions of reads with ease. Of course various caches in the controller and system can mitigate the trivial access patterns. With read disturb detection algorithms the difficulty is you would need lots of fine grain access statistics to make it optimal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The "Mitigation" section here gives a friendly explanation:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer#Mitigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer#Mitigation)

Summarizing:

The DRAM is refreshed every 64ms, which isn't always frequent enough to prevent bit errors. This could be solved by an 8ms refresh interval, but performance would suffer.

Several clever techniques (hacks) have been thought up to provide as-needed refreshing of specific memory rows that are at risk. These have minimal performance impacts, vs a faster refresh rate overall.

<comment><USER6> in _practical_ summary: No mitigation. unless you degrade performace considerably or buy a very specific, impossible to find cpu+board+ram combination.

also,

> some manufacturers implement TRR in their DDR4 products,[26][27] although it > is not part of the DDR4 memory standard published by JEDEC.[28] Internally, > TRR identifies possible victim rows, by counting the number of row > activations and comparing it against predefined chip-specific maximum > activate count (MAC) and maximum activate window (tMAW) values, and > refreshes these rows to prevent bit flips.

both sources cites manufaturers thinking about producing this. I can't find a single place offering "ddr4 trr". But they may forget to mention as ram today sells mostly for the color of the heatsink than anything else.

<comment><USER7> Not to excuse poor hardware, but rowhammer can be pretty easily mitigated in software by using guard rows as mentioned in the paper.

To explain, rowhammer allows you to flip bits in adjacent memory rows. So, we if we just put an unused row of physical memory between two pieces of physical memory we want protected from each other, then rowhammer attacks as normally described are effectively impossible.

To provide a simple case, assume you a totally static system with two processes, A and B, that need 2MB each executing on hardware with an 8KB row size (order of magnitude correct). Then if we just put process A in physical addresses 2MB to 4MB and process B in physical addresses (4MB + 8KB) to (6MB + 8KB), then the physical memory is separated by more than the row size and rowhammer attacks in one process can not affect the other.

The main thing about this solution is that physical memory allocation needs to be allocated in at least row-sized blocks and you eat overhead anytime you need to insert a guard row. However, the overhead can be largely mitigated if you only insert guard rows between the security boundaries of your code instead of on every allocation.

As an example of how we could mitigate overhead by choosing a larger security boundary, say we have VMs on a shared host, but the VMs get 1GB of guaranteed memory. Then when we create a new VM we can just allocate 1GB of contiguous physical memory and insert a guard row after it. Since the memory of the VMs is not interleaved, all the memory of a VM is further than one guard row from the memory in any other VM, so all VMs are safe from rowhammer attacks by any of the other VMs. With this solution, we only eat a 8KB overhead on a 1GB allocation which is a trivial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As of 2019 do we have practical mitigations against RowHammer? Or do we still pretend that it isn't something to be worried about, and keep producing DRAM that's fundamentally broken?

<comment><USER5> See my other comment, or [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer#Mitigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer#Mitigation)

Edit: As gcb0 mentions, these may be theoretical only: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828147)

<comment><USER9> The other comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19827454](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19827454)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've never understood this. Why not just have the memory controller transparently encrypt/decrypt the data using a random key generated at boot (or hell - even a unique key programmed per-controller at the factory)? Then you get actual integrity validation against any kind of error/bit flip, not just Row Hammer. Then you'd also be using ECC for it's purpose of correcting errors rather than hoping it's also catching attacks (which it turns out it can't).

<comment><USER11> "Why not" turns out to have quite an expensive answer (both in silicon and runtime latency). If you just cipher using a standard algorithm like AES then performance isn't great, but adding integrity protection to it further slows that down. Of course, you can use a lighter cipher, but then you don't have the years of cryptanalysis that gives everyone some assurance.

I think the jury is still out on AMD SME and Intel TME in terms of their respective performance hits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is the current state of RawHammer in newly produced memory?

<comment><USER13> From the article:

 _Unfortunately, despite the many proposals in industry and academia to fix the RowHammer issue, RowHammer failures still seem to be observable in state- of-the-art DRAM devices in a variety of generations and standards (e.g., DDR4, ECC DRAM, LPDDR3 and LPDDR2 DRAM)._

I think newly produced would mean DDR4.</comment></comment>


Abstracts for 26th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference (Nov 5-8) - <AUTHOR> https://www.tcl-lang.org/community/tcl2019/abstracts.html <comment><USER2> I notice a couple of the talks are repeats from the European meeting that I attended in June :-) [http://www.eurotcl.eu/program.html](http://www.eurotcl.eu/program.html)</comment>


How do I go about finding a technical-co founder?  - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea that I would like to make real but have none of the programming capabilities necessary to create.
1. How do I find someone that can help me with my idea?
2. How do I make sure that they are really capable of doing what I am asking them to do?
3. How do I ensure that they don't just take my idea and run with it?
4. If someone is found, how are these sorts of partnerships usually split monetarily? <comment><USER2> 1\. From friends, meetups, intros.

2\. Review previous work, ask friends who are technical to review his/her previous work.

3\. You could do a non-compete, but would be expensive to enforce. So really, you can't. But if he can just take your idea and execute it better, why can't competitors anyway?

4\. Depends (are you funded? is there a salary involved?), but I'd suggest just 50/50.

<comment><USER3> I'll second this and just add:

1\. Universities often have good coders willing to work part-time (but you may have to pay). Also, try the HN co-founder spreadsheet: [http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0AgCvDTyBjHdOdDFfMENqeWVGNVFx...](http://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0AgCvDTyBjHdOdDFfMENqeWVGNVFxTXdnaDZBRkd0cUE&sort) =name&layout=list&num=50

2\. If you're not technical, you're fucked. You can't really know. If they like math or know (relatively) obscure languages like Python and Haskell, you're in luck. This is one of the hardest obstacles you'll face (with other being if they have your level of passion and commitment to the project.)

3\. You can't; don't try. Creating something compelling is not about programming it. It's a thousand things and most of them are conceived/created as you're doing it. In other words, at the beginning there's almost nothing to steal, despite how it feels.

4\. A good technical co-founder is worth their weight in uranium. Those that have doubted this are those that have had to learn the hard way. If you go 50/50, be prepared to do a ton of work in bus. dev. to compensate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Contact me at david927 at gmail dot com</comment>


Officially our best-ever cease and desist - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkgeek.com/blog/2010/06/officially-our-bestever-cease.html

<comment><USER2> I found out that a lot of law firms, once retained for trademark purposes essentially operate on autopilot with low paid paralegals churning out c&d's at anything that moves in order to rack up billable hours. Many times the actual trademark holder isn't even aware of how their lawyers might be about to embarrass them next.

</comment><comment><USER3> Never underestimate the greed of billable hours in an idle lawyer's hands.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, I wonder how much money that cost them. Lawyers aren't cheap.

<comment><USER5> Lawyers on retainer get paid whether they do anything or not.

<comment><USER6> Opportunity cost.

Having your retained lawyers do this keeps them too busy to, e.g., go after the National Cannibals Club ("the other other white meat").

So at the end of the day, you've got to increase your stable of lawyers on retainer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> IANAL, YANAL, etc. But I still want to ask: suppose regular people start using the phrase "the other white meat" in various discussions. I used to refer to the Nitro Ruby Web framework as the other white meat in discussions that inevitably mentioned Rails. Suppose, as a reaction to this nonsense, it was used everywhere, all time, so as to dilute any special association with a particular product.

I realize in the land of the free you can get sued by near anyone over near anything, but how likely/risky is it that blatant use of this phrase in on- line discussions would lead to legal action or threats from pork lawyers (AKA swine swine :) )?

While this may not be the case that sparks a populist reaction, would encouraging people to wilfully apply some trademarked phrase as often as possible work as a protest?

Ironically, the idea of spamming the on-line world with misapplied trademark usage made me think of Hormel, who handled _their_ trade-name issues like thoughtful people. The pork people may have blown a chance to make something positive out this for themselves. At the very least, thuggish behavior doesn't help. There are nicer ways to defend trademarks.

<comment><USER8> The standard is "likelihood of confusion." so if you call Nitro the other white meat then someone will have to be confused and think you are talking about a meat product. Also I believe you would have to be using the name in trade(sell a book titled Nitro the other white meat or some such) On the other hand it would not be likely to dilute their TM since generic-ness is usually in reference to a class of products. Nitro not being in the same class should not dilute the name for the meat industry. aka Apple music vs Apple computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That's ridiculous. Neither unicorn, nor the american white eagle, nor even the albatross comes close to pork. Mmmmm, pork.

<comment><USER10> I take it you didn't try baby seals .. half-alive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The sad thing is, the NPB may have had a valid point here. Unlike most forms of intellectual property, trademark rights _do_ degrade if you don't defend the mark and it is deemed to be diluted. I'm not sure the ThinkGeek guys got this, since they referred to parody as a defence, and that would normally be used in connection with copyright. So we can all have a good laugh, but there might be a real point about the appropriateness of various legal standards for defending intellectual property rights as well.

<comment><USER12> But ThinkGeek uses the phrase "The New White Meat" not "The Other White Meat". Does trademarking "The Other White Meat" mean that no other product can ever refer to itself as "White Meat"?

<comment><USER13> You can't change one word to a close synonym and then claim that your branding is totally different. "The New White Meat" is obviously something that could be confused with "The Other White Meat."

<comment><USER14> In this case there is no product. While it did not make it through trial, The North Face vs. The South Butt seems more intrusive: [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36334733/ns/business- consumer_ne...](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36334733/ns/business- consumer_news/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The irony is that "The other white meat," although catchy enough to have a found a long-term place in popular culture, is no longer a great promotion slogan for pork. The obsession with lower-fat foods has faded with time. Food writers complain that present-day pork doesn't have enough fat. However, even if they choose not to use it at all, the NPB will continue to defend their trademark (never mind whether this case truly infringes).

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems a little absurd that trademarks can be used like this - I can understand for product names, and slogans, but surely if the words are different - then you're just trademarking the _idea_.

So, if I get it right, if you refer to any meat as being white meat but not chicken, then you infringe upon the National Pork Board's trademark? Just checking, I'd never heard of the slogan 'til today (not from US).

</comment><comment><USER17> Offtopic, but one of the best things about Thinkgeeks site is the footer. Scroll all the way down to the bottom :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh, shit. Guess I am in trouble now. Posted this about a week ago in an unrelated copyright violation: [http://codercofounder.wordpress.com/2010/06/12/product- manag...](http://codercofounder.wordpress.com/2010/06/12/product-management- and-the-other-white-meat/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Unicorn meat is not only white, it is also kosher / halal.</comment>


How did the letter Z become to be associated with sleeping/snoring? - <AUTHOR> http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/27045/how-did-the-letter-z-become-to-be-associated-with-sleeping-snoring <comment><USER2> Interesting....a friend of mine has a daughter learning Greek. She asked if Greek comics used "ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ" (Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet) to depict snoring.

I wanted to know the answer, so I embarked on a journey of Greek comic searches for people snoring and eventually I found this comic [1]. It shows people using Greek to communicate, but then the person sleeping is saying "ZZZZZZZ". I find it hilarious and interesting because Greek doesn't have the letter Z.

[1] - [https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos- xta1/v/t1.0-9/1...](https://scontent-dfw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos- xta1/v/t1.0-9/12122681_10153595914206007_3561239833782958990_n.jpg?oh=70be7668ca6577a26081af3ca4bdb0cc&oe=56B4DF50)

<comment><USER3> Greek does have the letter Ζ, which is the capital Greek zeta. It is written just like the Latin capital Z.

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

<comment><USER2> Derp, you're right. I knew that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Straight Dope has more on this:

[http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3063/why-is-the- let...](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3063/why-is-the-letter-z- associated-with-sleep)

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't that more semiotics than etymology?</comment>


Leaving Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/01/leaving-facebook/

<comment><USER2> What happened Facebook? - you used to be cool.

Steve's argument is about usability - which is sensible. But ultimately Facebook will lose it's awesome power before it even really deploys it, because it'll cease being cool. Choosing a suite of social software is just too much (and increasingly so) - a question along the lines of: 'What social network shares my values and will define me appropriately as a person'.

Actually - it makes me think that the decline of Google fervour as so much hype. Google never really was cool. They were always just nerds running algos to make stuff easier for folks. I use google not to signal to others my social status. I use it because I want to know stuff. Sure they can always stuff that up. But at least they don't have Facebook's Achilles.

Good learnings...

Value != Cool</comment>


Wherein I Write Apple's Technote About OpenSSL on OS X - <AUTHOR> http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/33696323211/wherein-i-write-apples-technote-about-openssl-on-os-x

<comment><USER2> It seems quite understandable that there'd be breaking changes between version 0.9 and 1.0, I don't see how you can extrapolate that to "OpenSSL doesn't offer API compatibility between versions."

I also don't see how the advice to include your own version is any better than shipping two versions.

<comment><USER3> Have you ever used OpenSSL? It is a total mess. For a popular project, its code is unreadable. I don't know how they maintain it.

<comment><USER4> I absolutely agree. I had to dig pretty deep into it to see what broke between versions. It is crazy town in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You won't find any Apple technote on the subject because the use of OpenSSL is deprecated on iOS and OS X from their point of view.

<comment><USER6> Deprecated in favor of what? This post talks about a compatibility layer between app source code and OpenSSL.

<comment><USER7> Common Crypto contains functions for

• Hashing: MD5, SHA1, SHA2

• HMAC (hash based message authentication) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash- based_message_authenticati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash- based_message_authentication_code)

• PBKDF2 (password to key) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBKDF2>

• Symmetric Encryption: AES, DES, 3DES, CAST, RC4, RC2, and Blowfish. (The algorithm selection is poorly documented in the man pages, I'm reading source here.)

It has an API that would not surprise anyone who has used a similar library.

It is open source, APSL 2.0. You can read it here: <http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/CommonCrypto/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is so undeservedly harsh.

Seriously, considering that 0.9.8 was released in 2005. During the last 7 years are you telling me openssl is the only "unixy" library to have a new backwards incompatible version come out? And by the way, they are still providing updates to 0.9.8. It's still the default version in debian stable.

      http://www.openssl.org/news/changelog.html
      http://www.openssl.org/

So to recap: 0.9.8 is by no means unsupported. The saints over at the openssl group are continuing to provide updates to this 7 year old library so that people like Apple can continue providing seamless security updates to users who have linked against 0.9.8.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm looking at upstream tracker [1], and I can see a number of changes in the later releases, but is the API really that unstable?

What parts of the API in particular are that bad?

1\. <http://upstream-tracker.org/versions/openssl.html>

<comment><USER6> I see 27 symbols removed in version 1.0.0. That is 27 symbols that cannot be found by the dynamic linker if an older app binary requires them.

<comment><USER10> That's a major version change. You expect API compatibility typically with patch-level and minor releases.

<comment><USER11> Apple needs API compatibility across major versions too.

<comment><USER12> Apple is welcome to do what they like (and it seems like they're offering alternatives that are at least equivalent, and possibly superior) but a "major release" has incompatible changes to APIs by definition.

<comment><USER11> Mac OS X has gone through a large number of major releases without making binary incompatible changes to APIs. That may be one definition of "major release", but it's certainly not universal. In any case, I don't understand this discussion centered around whether OpenSSL is justified in doing this or that. It doesn't matter! Apple needs binary compatibility, OpenSSL does not provide it, Apple doesn't expose OpenSSl. That's it. The reasons why OpenSSL doesn't provide it, whether they're right or wrong or just sideways, simply do not matter.

<comment><USER13> OS X hasn't changed its major version number in over 10 years. :-)

iOS major version bumps frequently though...

<comment><USER6> "major release" != "major version number"

Besides, Apple's major OS releases are executed like a major version number bump regardless of how others outside the company do things. These bumps include deprecation markers and warnings for APIs with planned retirement. There's no technical reason to remove deprecated APIs (keeping them around forever) to support older apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've found that the EVP library (provided with OpenSSL) to be good for implementing basic cryptographic functionalities. It provides a decent layer of abstraction that's portable across different versions of OpenSSL.</comment>


Ike Jime, the Japanese Slaughter Method for Tastier Fish - <AUTHOR> https://guide.michelin.com/sg/dining-out/what-is-ike-jime/news <comment><USER3> I fish on occasion, though at my skill level it's probably better described as "being disappointed next to water". I'm usually going for perch or bluegill. People typically throw them in a cooler of ice while still alive, or put them on a stringer, a line run through their mouth and out the gill so that can sort of still somewhat swim around and live until the fisherman is ready to go home.

Both of those seem pretty unpleasant to me. I tried putting them in a cooler on ice the first time and they flopped around for hours. They were still moving when I went to clean them later. If you watch videos of people cleaning fish, you'll see they are often still moving even while the fish is being filleted. When I was a kid, I once saw someone cut the fillets off a fish and toss the "carcass" back in the water where it proceeded to try to swim away.

The last time I went fishing, I tried the first step of ike jime where you spike the brain. I used a little pocket knife and poked it between the eyes. It took a few tries to find the right spot, but once I did, I do think it was more humane. The gills flare and the fish stiffens for a second and then immediately after it has clearly shuffled off its mortal coil.

I don't know if it improves the taste, but it seems kinder to me than letting it beat itself senseless in a pile of ice or flail around in the water with a line running through its throat.

For anyone who thinks this comment is brutal or unpleasant, I would really recommend spending some time fishing or hunting if you eat meat. It's important to have a real tactile understanding of what it means to take an animal from the wild and turn it into food. It's up to you to decide if you think that people _should or shouldn 't_ do it, but, either way, I think it is a real learning experience to understand what that choice entails.

Also, I think we tend to live lives increasingly removed from the physical, tactile, natural world. Fishing is a good way to reconnect with nature and with your _own_ nature as an animal, a predator that eats other animals.

<comment><USER4> Reading this is making me want to go meatless, so thank you for not softening any details.

I don't think I could handle directly killing an animal and preparing the meat unless I was in survival mode. Going to the local grocery store and picking up some neatly wrapped cuts of meat truly removes me from the suffering aspect of animals, let alone the atrocities taking place behind closed doors in mass production slaughterhouses.

How does everyone deal with the cognitive dissonance of how your meat is prepared?

<comment><USER3> I think it's important to keep in mind that attitudes around death and killing vary widely. In liberal society today many equate killing an animal to violent murder. By implication, doing so for practical reasons (like food) to thus be even worse: a kind of craven, mercenary murder-for-hire which is deeply immoral.

That mindset does not leave much room to interpret killing as anything but hateful and evil. The animal does not want to die any more than you or I would, and thus making it die is deeply wrong.

But for much of human history, killing animals was considered a fundamentally different act from killing a human. (Heck, killing humans was also considered much more acceptable in certain situations.)

If you spend time around hunters or farmers, they have much more complex relationship with animals than most urban dwellers do. The latter tend to have a simplified view that animals are sort like dumb, well-meaning people in animal costumes. The former respect that we have many things in common with animals, but also many differences. Eacn animal has a complex role in our society that has aspects of being material property, a natural resource, and a living thinking being.

In an urban environment, the only killing you are likely to experience is violent acts in movies and violent attacks between humans. Out in nature, you experience a greater range of ways that animals physically interact. And, if you spend time with farmers, you understand what it means to both care for and kill the same animal, to give it both a good life and a good death.

It is obviously not morally wrong for a wolf to eat a chicken. While we humans may "know better" and choose to not do that, we are also quite closely related to wolves. The chicken has a right to live a complete chicken life, and we also have some right to live a complete life as an omnivorous primate with the sharp teeth and stereoscopic vision of a predator.

There is no cognitive dissonance in killing an animal for food as long as you are willing to accept that animals are different from humans in some important ways.

<comment><USER5> You believe that we have the teeth of a predator? That seems like a wild leap. Have you ever tried to eat the flesh off of an animal raw? I don't think your teeth or jaw would be capable. Where are your claws to aid you?

<comment><USER6> Plenty of people eat blue steak, sushi, and uncooked shellfish by choice. Additionally, having to do a lot of hard chewing not only strengthens jaw muscles significantly, but also your jawbone strength and size.

<comment><USER5> But the steak was cut off from the corpse already. Have you tried biting through a cow hide with your teeth to get to that steak? The fish was already filleted with a knife etc.

<comment><USER7> Humans are so superior in our intelligence we have figured out how to make knives and cook food.

<comment><USER5> This is irrelevant. I'm simply stating that we don't have the teeth of a predator. I'm very surprised to be downvoted for this on HN where people take pride in their scientific awareness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is probably a better overview for the HN crowd:

[http://www.cookingissues.com/category/ike- jime/](http://www.cookingissues.com/category/ike-jime/)

<comment><USER9> Interesting website. My cooking skills are very basic, but now I'm interested in getting a Searzall.

[http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=6031.html](http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=6031.html)

<comment><USER10> David Arnold, the man behind cooking issues and the searzall, is awesome and super-smart. He also has a weekly podcast by the same name[0] that I find enjoyable. He's basically a mad scientist w/ food + drinks. His bar in Manhattan[1] is crazy cool. He's also done a lecture series at Harvard[2] if you're interested in learning more about the science/engineering of food.

As far as the Searzall goes; very cool product. If you get in to Sous Vide it's definitely one of the better ways of finising a protein. I still default to a broiler or hot cast-iron because it's often easier + faster w/ similar results. But, I still use the searzall ~weekly just as a hand-held broiler for toasting things. hah

0- [https://heritageradionetwork.org/series/cooking- issues/](https://heritageradionetwork.org/series/cooking-issues/)

1- [https://goo.gl/maps/V8zXdyBwNJE2](https://goo.gl/maps/V8zXdyBwNJE2)

2- [https://www.youtube.com/user/Harvard/search?query=dave+arnol...](https://www.youtube.com/user/Harvard/search?query=dave+arnold)

<comment><USER11> Where can you buy the Searzall? They only link the to finished Kickstarter?

<comment><USER10> The Searzall is on Amazon[0] and as mentioned you'll need a torch like this[1]! It's actually in stock right now so if you want one within the net 6 months I recommend buying it. They sell out quickly and they're manufactured in laggy batches. You'll also need to buy some of the propane locally. Their challenges with Amazon comes up regularly on their podcast... apparently it's been lots of headaches.

0- [https://amzn.to/2MQOZzb](https://amzn.to/2MQOZzb)

1- [https://amzn.to/2DW7lvU](https://amzn.to/2DW7lvU)

<comment><USER12> Nice referral links

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Given that it's on the Michelin website, it may interest you to know that Japan is tied for 1st for number of restaurants with 3 Michelin stars.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Michelin_3-star_restau...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Michelin_3-star_restaurants)

It has a stunning _25 restaurants._ For a population of 126 million. The runner up, USA, has 15 restaurants with twice the population.

As a frequent traveler Japan, I can say from personal experience, it is _hard_ to find a bad meal in Japan.

<comment><USER14> One my gripes with "michelin star" system is that it is heavily tilted towards European and Japanese food. There is absolutely no Indian, South American, Mediterranean, Thai, or Chinese restaurants (albeit few though) in it's catalog. They are pretty much missing the diverse and exceptional gastronomical experience in doing so.

EDIT: Small change, looks like there are few Chinese restaurants!

<comment><USER15> I don't think they're missing out - they probably enjoy a good Indian restaurant as much as we do. But for _what they measure_ , that's tilted toward a certain kind of presentation that is predominantly done by French and Japanese restaurants. It's not just about the food, and how enjoyable the food is. It's about the wine selection, the interior decoration, and a whole host of other things.

Rather than resenting the Michelin system for not representing the kind of restaurants we love, maybe just recognize that it's not supposed to do that, and find other ways to find and measure restaurants that don't fit the Michelin data model?

<comment><USER16> > _But for what they measure, that 's tilted toward a certain kind of > presentation that is predominantly done by French and Japanese restaurants. > It's not just about the food, and how enjoyable the food is. It's about the > wine selection, the interior decoration, and a whole host of other things._

Michelin _stars_ are awarded based on food "quality" alone [1]:

> the quality of ingredients used, the skill in food preparation, the > combination of flavours, the value for money, the consistency of culinary > standards.

[1] [https://guide.michelin.com/hk/en/hong-kong- macau/features/5-...](https://guide.michelin.com/hk/en/hong-kong- macau/features/5-myths-about-the-michelin-guide-debunked/news)

<comment><USER15> So why is their such a tilt toward expensive French, Japanese, and modernist restaurants? Sure, they even give stars to a couple of food carts now, but how recent is that development?

This is not to say they aren't improving. But it does say that they didn't always live up to their own stated standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's important to note that this method of slaughter is also considered more humane, and for the same reason _why_ the fish tastes better when prepared this way. Because the fish's body is not flooded with stress chemicals like it is when the brain is not destroyed first and its blood remains inside.

In other words the usual fish slaughter method leaves the fish alive as it slowly suffocates to death and then is killed. This results in muscles filled with lactic acid and other bad things.

<comment><USER13> >body is not flooded with stress chemicals like it is when the brain is not destroyed first and its blood remains inside.

I've heard both sides of this but have never actually seen any evidence. Some cultures, portions of China for example, believe the opposite - the more stressful death leads to more delicious meat.

I'm for the least stressful death for ethical reasons, but I'd be curious if there's any resources you've found that demonstrate for example your lactic acid point?

<comment><USER18> Both arguments seem quite hokey and not really rooted in science.

When muscle gets cut off from it's blood supply, it produces lactic acid through anaerobic respiration. That's regardless if the nervous system is sending out "stress signals".

It's pretty hard to kill an animal and not produce stress (the physiological kind) response in it's tissue.

The nervous system is also more than just the brain. For example your spinal cord can receive and send signals to your limbs that don't even pass through the brain.

<comment><USER19> See this: [http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=5661.html](http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=5661.html) (scroll down 1 page)

<comment><USER18> That explanation seems pretty hokey to me as well.

The pictures of the muscle are when the fish is alive (overcrowding). That I can believe.

But drawing a distinction between just cutting the dishes head off versus an elaborate process laid out? I haven't seen any evidence it matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Vox's Future Perfect podcast did a good episode on this, too: [https://www.vox.com/future- perfect/2018/11/14/18091698/futur...](https://www.vox.com/future- perfect/2018/11/14/18091698/future-perfect-podcast-killing-fish-ikejime- animal-welfare)

</comment><comment><USER21> For those who want to see what the whole process looks like in reality, there is youtube.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WLSdKunI2Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WLSdKunI2Y)

<comment><USER22> Thanks! Was about to open another tab to search for that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > After all, key to good sushi and sashimi is in ageing the fish, allowing the > enzymes to break down and moisture to evaporate, resulting in a concentrated > flavour.

Can someone elaborate / explain? I always thought that the main quality in sushi and sashimi fish is its freshness. The fresher the better, to the point where shops might even keep the fish alive in aquariums.

<comment><USER24> Fish used in sushi is almost inevitably frozen, or you'd have a mouthful of extremely rubbery, almost crunchy fish. Remember also that the original sushi was fish fermented in salted rice for a while. As the availability and taste for fresher fish grew, along with modern refrigeration it was discovered that you get a better texture with fish that had been frozen immediately after slaughter.

This, it is important to note, is only really the case with large, slow- growing pelagic fish like tuna.

<comment><USER25> Freezing also kills some potentially zoonotic parasites that may be present in fish.

Unless you're buying it straight off the docks, or pulling it out of the water yourself, any unfrozen fish you see has likely been thawed on site, after delivery.

"Fresh" fish means that it was frozen on the boat, and just thawed today.

I sometimes make nigiri sushi by sawing slices off of a frozen fish filet with a kitchen-use-only coping saw. Then I put it in the fridge for the next day. Comes out fine. If I wanted, I could freeze the rice with it, and have sushi later in the week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> do fish feel pain? [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fish-feel- pain...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fish-feel- pain-180967764/)

<comment><USER27> Interesting experiments referenced. I think I my personal assumption was that fish could maybe feel pain, and insects probably couldn't. But now one of those is answered.

<comment><USER28> > insects probably couldn't

I saw something (can't find source right now) that insects don't feel pain. The key observation was that insects with injured legs don't favor that leg at all. The evolutionary explanation is that pain is a survival mechanism to avoid further damaging an already-damaged body part; if the organism doesn't live long enough for its body parts to heal, it doesn't benefit from feeling pain.

<comment><USER29> I asked myself this a while back when I was feeding my tarantulas their weekly crickets and from my brief searches it seems like there isn't a general consensus on if inverts do or do not feel pain, but most people lean towards no. One big indicator for this was the fact that various insects have been observed to not react or notice at all when they are being eaten. I've anecdotal observed this myself sometimes where crickets do not seem to realize they are currently being eaten by a giant tarantula.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I remember catching mackerel on a line while on a sailing trip once. None of us really knew how to do fishing, so we beat them to death with a bilge pump handle. It took ages. I don't think that was ike jime.

</comment><comment><USER31> When hearing about cooking things the one or the other way, I always wonder if the difference in taste is significant. If you'd do a double-blind study, would you see (taste?) a significant difference?

<comment><USER32> Yes, if you developped the taste for it. If you repeatedly savor something, you will become very familiar with it's taste and notice subtle variations. But you need to savor it slowly and be intent about it, not just consume it rapidly while thinking about other things.

The fun part is that it doesn't have to be fancy. Wine is probably the most extreme example as there's a heavy push to equate fancy (expensive) with tasty but very often the 2 don't correlate. While my favorite wines are from the Burgundy area and can reach insane prices, I will thoroughly enjoy a $4 Vinho Verde.

I've mostly eliminated soda from my diet but recently went back to enjoying the Mexican Coca Cola made with cane sugar. It comes in small bottles. I sip it slowly and enjoy it over the course of an entire meal—still my favorite pairing if I'm going to grill my own hamburgers—and of course with water on the side. It's a very different experience than guzzling an enormous amount of fountain soda with a straw.

<comment><USER33> There have been numerous double blind tests of wine that show an astonishing lack of difference based on price. The adjectives you use are also common in audiophiles who seem to value very expensive speaker cables etc.

<comment><USER32> Funny you should mention audio because I enjoy really good audio but on equipment that's often cheaper than run-of-the-mill equipment (and certainly way cheaper than the audiophile hype). Again it comes down to listening and savoring the differences, not the price tag. And a cheap extension cord is more than sufficient when it comes to speaker cables. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you're interested in japanese cuisine and techniques, there is an excellent series of books from the japanese culinary academy. [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/JCA/the- japanese-c...](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/JCA/the-japanese- culinary-academys-complete-japanese-cuisine)

The third book is about cutting fish and includes ike jima steps for different kinds of fish

</comment><comment><USER35> I can't help but feel bad about it, like we really shouldn't be killing anything to eat or to any purpose at all. Yes i'm much more sensibilized than most but we all should be.

<comment><USER36> The benefits of being an apex predator.

<comment><USER37> Just wait until Xenomorphs arrive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm all for making it quick, but the article doesn't inspire confidence that this process is quick. By the time this procedure is carried out, the fish has been hooked, drawn up and out of the water, dropped on the ground, and wrestled into position. That must take at least 2 minutes.

If adrenaline and other transmitters were going to be released, that process should do it, regardless of what happens afterward.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm not sure I ever made the connection between Michelin stars and the tire company by the same name until I saw their mascot at the top of the page.

Reading the history it makes sense: To sell more tires give people a good reason to travel.

Are there other examples of this sort of unexpected symbiosis?

</comment><comment><USER40> I have no problem with the concept of killing an animal to eat it. However this method doesn't appear to be humane. Just cut the damn fish head and be done with it already.

<comment><USER41> It's a fancier pithing process and step one is "scramble the brain". I don't see how it's worse, and it's probably better.

draining the blood off rapidly and shorting out the spinal column really does improve matters, too.

It's not all that different in intent from kosher and halal slaughter: minimize pain and suffering, respect the animal, get tastier food while you're at it.

<comment><USER42> > It's not all that different in intent from kosher and halal slaughter: > minimize pain and suffering, respect the animal, get tastier food while > you're at it.

Except that this is not the intent for kosher and halal, nor do these methods minimize pain and suffering. In both kosher and halal the animal has to fully conscious when its jugulars are cut, the difference lies mainly in whether the name of god is to be proclaimed over every slaughtered animal (halal) or only on the first and last one (kosher), whether slaughter can be performed by any believer (halal) or only by a specific priest (kosher, only Sachets (a type of rabbi) can perform kosher slaughter), whether the whole animal is considered to be edible (halal) or only its forequarters (kosher) and which animals can be consumed (rabbit, wild hens, shellfish, duck and goose can be halal but they can never be kosher). Kosher and halal were and are ways to identify tribes as being part of a religious group - a form of shared ritual - <USER2> probably also contain some vestiges of lore (trichine-infected pork can kill, Red Tide-infected shellfish likewise, a rule which makes sure the animal is fully conscious when slaughtered also gives a reasonable guarantee it is not diseased, etc).

Whacking the animal over the head with a mallet or using a more modern equivalent like a bolt pistol (cattle, horses) or electric shock (pigs) before slitting its throat does tend to reduce suffering when done correctly so it can not be said that kosher and halal lead to 'minimize[d] pain and suffering'.

<comment><USER43> You are incorrect. I can not speak for halal, but in Kosher slaughter minimizing pain IS a primary goal.

You have completely skipped the stringent rules about the knife in your summary, so perhaps you are just not aware of it.

The knife must be razor sharp - the slightest knick renders it unusable. The knife must be drawn in a single motion, any hesitation, or pressure, while cutting makes the animal not kosher. The location of the cut is precisely defined.

All of the above are there to minimize pain, because the knife is so sharp the animal doesn't feel the pain, any pressure on the wound would also trigger pain.

> or only on the first and last one (kosher)

This isn't correct. Only one blessing is said, and not saying the blessing does not render the animal not-kosher. The blessing is about the shochet, not the animal. This is different in Halal were the blessing is the primary thing that makes the animal halal.

> whether slaughter can be performed by any believer (halal) or only by a > specific priest (kosher, only Sachets (a type of rabbi) can perform kosher > slaughter)

The shochet is not a priest. Being a shochet is 100% about knowing what to do, and 0% about any kind of special status. Anyone can be a shochet, including women. And you do not need to be a Rabbi, you just need to be trained.

> bolt pistol

A captive bolt pistol has an unacceptable high failure rate. You can NOT consider them more humane than Kosher slaughter.

<comment><USER42> On the religious details of the status of the _shochet_ and the number and character of formulations uttered by him (or, apparently, her) I can well be wrong, not being an insider and as such only having access to the (often only partly correct) information which is available to outsiders - although there is also the possibility of there being several 'truths' for different rites or sects. This is also mostly besides the point in this context.

On the minimising of pain I'm not wrong. Captive bolt pistols and electric shocks can be misapplied and that certainly happens in some cases. In the majority of cases these devices fulfil their purpose in that they knock out the animal before the knife is applied. This knocking out is instantaneous, contrast that to the slow death by oxygen deprivation which is what happens in halal and kosher slaughter. A sharp knife only makes the cut itself less painful, it does nothing for the minute-long death process which follows.

<comment><USER43> > although there is also the possibility of there being several 'truths' for > different rites or sects

There is not.

> On the minimising of pain I'm not wrong

You are. You are simply misinformed on the topic, yet writing with authority you do not posses.

> for the minute-long death process which follows.

There is no minute-long death process. Insensibility happens within 10 seconds according to Temple Grandin. Additionally when done properly the animal appears not to feel it. ([https://www.grandin.com/ritual/rec.ritual.slaughter.html](https://www.grandin.com/ritual/rec.ritual.slaughter.html))

I also know this personally because I visited a shechita plant and watched them. The animal collapsed often the moment the shochet removed his knife. To me the worst part of the process was the cattle prods used to move the animal in line (the cattle really hated that). The actual killing was very painless.

> and that certainly happens in some cases

No, it happens in 13.6% of cases ([https://faunalytics.org/effective-captive- bolt-stunning/](https://faunalytics.org/effective-captive-bolt-stunning/)) And when it happens the animal is left in severe pain, and is processed without any further regard to its pain.

Captive bolt stunning is LESS humane then Shechita. Every piece of evidence shows this, but people think "if it's new it must be better".

The only benefit is in cost - Shechita is very expensive because of the necessary training. Captive bolts need little training. But they are not better for the animals.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook cancels its big San Francisco conference over coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.slashgear.com/facebook-cancels-its-big-san-francisco-conference-over-coronavirus-15609943/ <comment><USER2> Super surprised about this decision. I'm Asian American so my family was super sure I was going to get sick at a conference I had to fly to last week if I didn't wear a face mask. I didn't see any particular worry at the conference itself. Definitely more hand sanitizer than before but overall, no one wore any face masks besides a handful of Asian participants. Besides the media, I haven't seen much concern for the coronavirus besides practicing the same habits you always should during flu season.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. I go to school in a very foreign-rich asian community (I'm asian, but born in the US) and I feel like the coronavirus has gone out of control. Given there's only been 1 case in my area, I have no concern.

However, I could see why conferences where people from all over the world in one place could be a problem.</comment>


H5ai - a beautified Apache index - <AUTHOR> http://larsjung.de/h5ai/

<comment><USER2> Apologies for the aside, but another one of this fellow's projects, jquery.fracs, is pretty impressive: <https://github.com/lrsjng/jQuery.fracs>

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link.

This is used in h5ai. I find these views more useful that scroll bars. Its amazing what can be done inside the browser these days.

<http://larsjung.de/fracs/>

> jQuery.fracs determines the fraction of an HTML element that is currently in > the viewport, as well as the fraction it takes of the complete viewport and > the fraction of the area that might possibly be visible. It also provides > the coordinates of the visible rectangle, absolute (in document space) and > relative (in element space).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Link to source and some screenshots, since the site is quite slow right now: <https://github.com/lrsjng/h5ai>

<comment><USER5> As always, Chrome users, prefix the address in the omnibox with 'cache:' to get

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Alarsj...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Alarsjung.de%2Fh5ai%2F)

At first I thought this was kind of overkill for such a 'simple' function but the example of Github shows how important effective presentation of a file list can be. To the average web user the default Apache listing can look 'broken' whereas I would have no problem directing a client to the URL of an index that looked like this.

<comment><USER6> This is a Google search feature, not a Chrome Omnibox feature, btw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is quite nice, however, if you are wanting to serve static content I no longer believe Apache the proper tool for the job. Use cherokee, lighttpd or nginx, they are all faster and have decent file interfaces.

<comment><USER8> I don't think this is true. Apache with mpm_worker and fastcgi for python/php should perform on a typical dedicated server like nginx till the network is saturated. you also have to consider that .htaccess files are quite cpu intensive because the way apache works they are parsed at every request. put your .htaccess config in the config-file disable unused modules and use mpm worker and I bet the difference is negligible. if you have to count every io operation and you run on small memory nginx may make a difference.

[http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/apache-vs-nginx- vs-v...](http://nbonvin.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/apache-vs-nginx-vs-varnish- vs-gwan/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't get it... It's just a 404 page? Or is this an actual error?

</comment><comment><USER10> I guess we won't be seeing any screenshots...</comment>


PyLiveUpdate: Modifying running Python code on the fly - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/devopspp/pyliveupdate <comment><AUTHOR> Any feedback would be welcome! Appreciated!

</comment><comment><USER2> Great tool! Will try it out</comment>


Bay Area rail costs: Why are they among the world's highest? - <AUTHOR> https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-train-rail-costs-price-bart-muni <comment><USER2> > The firm earned a reputation for low-balling bids to win contracts and then > going massively over budget, an allegation that Ron Tutor, the firm's owner, > denies.

> Since 2000, his firm has cost Bay Area governments $765 million more than > expected on 11 major projects.

Our contract bidding process is a farce.

If your costs go over budget, you should eat the costs. This will inflate bid prices, but avoids perverse incentives.

The contract payout should decrease by $x million per week beyond the completion deadline. Doesn't Spain already do this?</comment>


Joe Armstrong: Solving the wrong problem (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://web.archive.org/web/20170724020805/http://joearms.github.io/2013/03/28/solving-the-wrong-problem.html <comment><AUTHOR> The old URL for this is a 404 now, so I submitted the archived version (thanks to the Internet Archive for preserving it in any case). However, I have found there is a new, valid URL for this article:

[https://joearms.github.io/published/2013-03-28-solving- the-w...](https://joearms.github.io/published/2013-03-28-solving-the-wrong- problem.html)

previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451202](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451202)</comment>


Ghana teacher drawing MS word on blackboard gets real computers - <AUTHOR> http://indianexpress.com/article/trending/trending-globally/after-ghana-teachers-ms-word-drawing-on-blackboard-went-viral-indian-firm-gifts-real-computers-to-school-5102261/ <comment><USER2> Stories like this totally make sense to me. Dreams are the most fearful force in our lives. A teacher needs to transfer inspirations to their students just as much as knowledge and experience. Experience can be gained by exposure, but inspirations can totally exist without much exposure. As a student, when you don't have inspirations then the lack of (or the existence thereof) practical exposure sucks, but many things were dreamed about for a long time before becoming a reality.

I didn't know what an actual computer was until I was 11. I am a millennial, only 30 now, but I was one of those people who only knew about the magical computers through my dad's stories and books. In the first 10 years of my life, I grew up poor as a church mouse in a rural area in Vietnam. To tell you how bad it was, I'm a male and only barely over 5ft and 100lbs now. My dad, who was a college lecturer, told us about him learning English and how to use MS-DOS on his 1.2MB floppy disk in the early 1990s -- it was mind-blowing to my 6-year-old brain. Everything you need is in this small package. If you want to delete something, just press a key instead of scratching it! If you want to issue any command, give it all it wants to know and press Enter!

I just had the first blip of making an impact by shipping a free software product that many people find useful which I first shared here. I am quite convinced that people don't just use that software because it is useful and functional to them. Compared to a $300 commercial product that has everything working correctly my free software project that uses $100 worth of hardware is a piece of buggy brahmin shit. People tried it because it gets them inspired. Shortly after I announced, it set up pictures of people trying and making awesome setups on the homepage. I also made a subreddit to share stories and ask questions, and a personal blog telling why and how I'm making progress and what I was really thinking when I made those decisions. I am still very much a real person that has opinions, dreams, and ideals. I haven't turned into an intelligent PR speech machine that says the empty words. That is something a company that sells those products can't deliver compared to a hipster dude living in a hole like me can. I am living in a dream as much as the adopters of my software.

I used to see a quote on a professor's office door when I was an undergrad that said: "People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel." I tried to keep that quote in mind whenever I have the opportunity to teach or bring something to someone.

</comment><comment><USER3> Funny because the blackboard doesn't mention MS Word anywhere as far as I can tell, it mentions "Features of a word processing window" and it doesn't specifically look like MS Word either. This also makes me wonder what happened to the one Laptop per Child project [0], their G+ site was not posted on since November 2016. Is it really Microsoft Word that is going to be used by these students? Or will it be LibreOffice or Google Docs?

[0] [http://one.laptop.org/](http://one.laptop.org/)

<comment><USER4> Look at the title bar.

<comment><USER3> Oops, you're right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dupe of yesterday?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16610469)

</comment><comment><USER6> So rather than solving the problem (Millions without access to appropriate schooling) we cover it up.

Let alone what they need is NOT computers, it's phones (And more importantly TV and Radio access)

I know a lot of these places can't afford the electricity to run the machines, was this sorted? (And if it has solar, generator or intermittent, then low wattage devices with UPS are needed)

<comment><USER7> A Ghanaian company (subsidiary of the Indian one) donated the computers, so hopefully they're aware of any potential power issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sure, it's a nice gesture, but I'm wondering how they will solve the electricity problem in Ghana with desktop computers?

<comment><USER9> Everyone keeps pointing out electricity but first off, not all of Ghana is suffering from a power shortage. Secondly, even if they can have it on one hour a day it's better than what came before.

<comment><USER10> I think the parent meant why desktop computers instead of laptops.

<comment><USER8> Right. Sorry, I thought it was more obvious.

My friends who live in Ghana go days without being able to access the Internet. It's actually a big problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > For more than six years this computer teacher has been drawing interfaces on > blackboard for his students as the school did not have the resources.

This is a nice story, but doesn't having a computer teachers in communities that can't afford computers seem like a waste of resources?

<comment><USER12> It is a nice story but perhaps overstating the problem a little: "Showing his class how to use a PC posed a fundamental problem as the school's only computer and his own personal laptop were both broken." [https://news.microsoft.com/apac/2018/03/15/teacher-who- used-...](https://news.microsoft.com/apac/2018/03/15/teacher-who-used-a- chalkboard-in-computer-class-because-he-had-no-computer-stars-at-microsofts- education-exchange/)</comment></comment>


Modern science and Chinese philosophy tell us about how we think (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/10/mergers--acquisitions/trying-not-to-try <comment><USER2> It is not just in Chinese philosophy that wu wei appears in. Classical Tantra, for example, talks about iccha-shakti.

The latter connection to the modern understanding is ok, but limited. Harmonizing with the different psychological and anatomical selves is only a part of it. This is also about harmonizing with Reality. (Which, when I put it that way, implies that there is a separateness to Reality for there to be harmonized; that's the dualist explanation to what is essentially a non-dual teaching).

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess that in hierarchical structures of companies there is a varying degree of using(ACC/lateral PFC). Probably people higher up in the structure should have mastered having a strong PFC than ACC, people in the lower structure are like the ox-butchers, who ideally should have mastered one or few tasks which might not be so easy for people handling many tasks together.

</comment><comment><USER4> A modern take on this subject is a book called Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Gallwey. I read the Inner Game of Golf recently and it talks about allowing your subconscious mind to perform without your conscious (verbal) mind gettin in the way. A lot has to deal with becoming relaxed and not allowing your critical self to tense up your body. Apparently Pete Carrol (NFL Seahawks coach) credits the book to a lot of his success. Im guessing here but it's possible that Jordan Spieth (won two major golf tournaments last year and tied Tiger Woods lowest scoring record at Augusta) used this book too. The author has some putting drills that I correlate to Spieth's use of not looking at the ball for short putts; he looks at the hole instead.

</comment><comment><USER5> The neurology of baseball as discussed on NPR on 9-3-2016 identified successful pitchers and batters as those who did not allow thinking to interfere with their instantaneous physical actions. Reaction times measured were less than 500 milliseconds.

</comment><comment><USER6> Pseudo science with an academic veneer.

<comment><USER7> The science is pretty solid as far as psychology goes. Thinking Fast and Slow is often recommended on HN because it provides such a good overview of how the mind makes decisions with what Kahneman calls system 1 and 2. He ended up winning a nobel prize for his work in decision theory.

However I think matching what we know is right to ancient texts is the sketchy part. After all, there's plenty that's wrong in the ancient texts, we just don't see them.</comment></comment>


The IRS Should File Your Taxes for You - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/04/automatic_tax_filing_readyreturn_systems_work_fine_but_intuit_and_grover.html <comment><USER2> Here in the UK, less than 15% of the population need to file a tax return. For most employed people, their tax affairs are handled automatically by their employer and Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. People who have overpaid tax through withholding receive refunds automatically at the end of the tax year. Those who do have to file a return can do so entirely online; The process takes just a few minutes and all calculations are performed automatically.</comment>


Why two alpha males can't lead a startup as co-founders - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/alpha-males-lead-startup-cofounders <comment><USER2> I call BS on the first money not being important, especially if your were covering the other persons bills. A lot of times the venture probably wouldn't have happened without some cash. He probably just said that so he feels better about himself for fucking over his first investors AKA family and friends. That first money is also the first money to say I believe in you and what your doing. You'd have to be a sociopath not to value that more than anything. YC would have minimal value if "the I believe in you" factor wasn't a part of it.</comment>


Postgres 9.2 highlight: range types - <AUTHOR> http://michael.otacoo.com/postgresql-2/postgres-9-2-highlight-range-types/ <comment><USER2> This is pretty neat. Though it seems a little odd that a query like:

      INSERT INTO salary_grid VALUES (1, 'junior developper', '[20000, 30000]');

would produce a record like:

      1 | junior developper | [20000,30001)

Is it just an error in the post that a query with an inclusive upper bound would result in a record with an exclusive upper bound?

<comment><USER3> but this is exactly the same range. (note that theses are ranges in the ring of integers)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Smartest thing you've ever done? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Did a micro-architecture directed-study in highschool covering the MIPS architecture, MIPS assembly execution, implementation of many fundamental components such as latches, MUX's, ALU's etc, pipelines, caches, and many other topics of how machines execute programs.

To this day, I wind up drilling through several layers of abstraction and run- times naturally simply by having intuition that there is no other way for data to get from point A to point B without it being expressed in registers, atomic instructions, and abstractions that can be built on top of them. I use it to understand theoretical explanations of Turing machines, automatons, fastest implementations of algorithms, buffer overflow exploits, language implementations, data models, OS's, threads, processes, memory addressing, intrinsics, tail-recursion optimizations, JIT's, GC's, objects, C++ vtables...it goes on. Probably anything I will ever study always seems capable of mapping back to a problem space where Jump-and-load has to exist and cache coherency completely breaks down when playing with threads that compete for writes without locks.

The course was entirely optional. I was done about half-way through the semester and continued reading the course textbook until I had at least brushed across every part of it. Compared to other subjects of fundamental happenings, such as boot loaders in Linux, studying micro-architecture completely blows open the doors to your long-term capability to problem solve in any space in computing without the slightest question of what happens in the end.

In programming communities, as the original knowledge becomes boiled down into maxims and the maxims get repeated without the original discussion, people start parroting the whole argument against early-optimization or complaining about how scripting languages have no type-safety or how impure functions have side-effects and don't have reliable return values. It's very convenient to build your knowledge on the fulcrum of every community teeter-totter, the sheet-metal of every bike-shed, the fundamental logic from which all abstractions are born and all abstractions can be decomposed. Micro- architecture is the axiom space of programming. If you understand micro- architecture, it will give you a path of understanding into anything you will ever encounter in programming.

I had studied a lot of anecdotal micro-architecture when following the AMD Intel competitive race when it was at its hottest and reading tons of articles on overclocking and pondering how north-bridges and south-bridges might work, but taking the course basically paved the way for everything else I've done in computing since, much more-so than the C++ intro and OOP classes I took. Languages seem to have no foundation without some micro-architecture experience. You think that there might be some magical way to do X that you simply can't see through the abstractions. After studying micro-architecture, the magic is gone. Everything magic after that is how you abstract those ideas on top of each other.

<comment><USER3> This doesn't sound like a typical high school class. Were you at a specialized high school? Can you say a little more about the class itself?

<comment><USER2> It was at a magnet school, as were the C++ and OOP classes. The class was self-paced. I was the only student. We only had about fifteen three-hour lectures before the prof basically said, "and that's all I got." Book was about 1k pages. Drained it. Totally forgot the title, but it was definitely a university text on MIPS and microarch. There was a class in OS's, data- structures, and probably some others that I could have taken instead. I had long been trading AMD and other tech stocks and naturally had a huge preference for anything hardware. Data Structures would have gotten me closer to writing meaningful programs faster. It's not clear that had I focused more on high-level programming, especially with scripting languages, that I would have had the willingness to approach lower-level tools and programming languages over the years. My time at the helm of scripting languages has made it very efficient to tool around with various highly abstract constructions in OOP, API writing, and also making money. My ongoing trip back into the low- level these days is what gets me excited.

For the record, I highly recommend magnet schools. I highly recommend supporting increased education spending, founding companies that focus on better value for education, and especially projects like MOOC's that can offer more selection while bringing down geographic barriers. Offering only Fordist institutions from last century is inexcusable.

<comment><USER3> >> founding companies that focus on better value for education

What companies do you see doing this? I see so many areas ripe for improvement in education. But most efforts I see in education that are affected by a profit motive seem to be taken over by that profit motive. It seems to me that if you really want to make education better for all students, you have to go down the non-profit road.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Marrying the right person.

</comment><comment><USER3> I went to PyCon this year and last year.

I have taught high school math and science for about 15 years now. My father was a software engineer in the 70's and 80's, so I had played with programming all my life. When my father passed away a few years ago, I went through his computer and saw the programs he'd been working on for years, which would never see any actual use. I decided then and there to take my own programming more seriously, and try to do something more meaningful with it.

I was incredibly intimidated to go to a professional programming conference as a non-professional programmer. I couldn't believe how positive the experience was. The first year I went to PyCon I got a clear sense that I could do something meaningful. The second year I made all kinds of connections that I continue to build on, and I have a couple really meaningful projects started.

Short version: Going to PyCon helped me jump-start a second career, and makes me a much better teacher as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> It may sound silly, but the smartest thing I've ever done was: to start writing.

When I've finished my studies and I was working, I've realized I've could not write with an acceptable level. I mean, I knew my language, knew the words but I could not compose anything interesting. All stories, emails and other texts were equally difficult to read, full of grammar errors and many times I lost the argument points.

That's when I started a blog, and secretly to write everyday, until I improved to a level I've never imagined. My blog became so popular that open the professional world. With that I went to Europe and other countries.

</comment><comment><USER6> Starting to tinker with programming at a very young age.

<comment><USER7> Moved to San Francisco and spent time with people smarter than myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Installed Linux.

<comment><USER2> Close 2nd for me. Freshman year down at the student union after getting totally sick of working with Codeblocks and MSVC++ on Windows for trying to make something meaningful in OGRE, installed Debian, got it working but wasn't making a lot of progress and blamed it on the distro, decided to go more hardcore and do Gentoo. There was a Linux gap somewhere when I wad going to install OpenBSD on a new machine before I got Ubuntu and was totally blow away by how fast the hardware support had come in such a short time. Nowadays I preach towards the "harder" distros like Arch because Ubuntu did tend to water down the whole configuration hacking experience and seemed to get in the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Quitting the military to make significantly less money doing something I loved.

</comment><comment><USER10> Balancing work and personal life/family.

</comment><comment><USER11> Dropped out of college.</comment>


Optimizing Big Number Arithmetic Without SSE - <AUTHOR> http://accu.org/index.php/journals/1849

<comment><USER3> IMHO the problem here is the capabilities of the optimizing compiler, not the language itself. I would argue that it should be the compiler's job to figure these optimizations, otherwise you might as well use inline ASM on compiler intrinsics since it won't be portable anyway.

There are certain features of the C standard that forces the compiler to generate non-optimal code by default in certain cases (like aliasing rules, as any FORTRAN proponent will remind you). I don't think it's the case in TFA.

So basically, blame the optimizer, not the language.

P.S.: I used this cached version since the site appears to be down: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:accu.or...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:accu.org/index.php/journals/1849&strip=1)

<comment><USER4> You could argue that it is a fault of the C language that it does not expose the carry flag of the CPU. This makes the most optimal implementation of e.g. addition impossible without resorting to (inline) assembler.

Of course not every CPU has a carry flag...

<comment><USER3> Except that exposing too much hardware state to the coder might give less room for the compiler to optimize aggressively for all architectures.

What if the architecture doesn't have a carry? Then the compiler has to generate one when needed.

What if the architecture has better ways to do the addition anyway? What if the architecture is only 8bit and even regular "int" adds take several instructions anyway, so it makes so sense opmimizing for 128bit adds?

C doesn't even mandate what happens in case of an integer overflow, it has no business exposing carry flags.

If I ever write a C tutorial I'll title it "How I learned to stop worrying and love the compiler".

EDIT: of course in this case you can't really "let the compiler handle it" if you care about bignum performances. The only solution here would be

a/ expose much more hardware state to the language, which as I've already stated doesn't sound very convenient or C-ish enough for me,

b/ modify the optimizer to better handle bignum code or

c/ use a bignum library and possibly make it part of the standard.

I wouldn't be opposed to a standard <bignum.h>, I think it would make some sense. In the meantime I just use gmp.h, it's faster than anything I could come up with anyway, asm or otherwise. Bignum is hard.

<comment><AUTHOR> > What if the architecture doesn't have a carry? Then the compiler has to > generate one when needed.

Adding two N-bit numbers produces N+1-bit result, and C gives you no direct means of accessing the full result. IMO, this is a language defect and has little to do with HW support. [This pertains also to multiplication: NxN bits -> 2N-bit result.]

If the hardware actually returns the full result, excellent; if no, the compiler has to synthesize code to compute it, _if needed_. Whether it's needed is inferrable by the code that follows, e.g., the type of the variable the result is assigned to.

IMO, inferring that only a partial result is used (e.g., carry is discarded) is much easier for the optimizer than inferring what some instruction sequence is supposed to do. (E.g., 4+ multiplications and few additions => single 32x32=>64 multiply.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A relatively easy way for a C programmer to bridge the gap is to use something like DynASM[0].

Alternatively, for SPMD-like problems, Intel's open source ISPC[1] compiler is a pretty easy way to benefit from the SIMD hardware in your processor.

[0] [http://luajit.org/dynasm.html](http://luajit.org/dynasm.html)

[1] [http://ispc.github.io/](http://ispc.github.io/)

<comment><USER6> ispc is a research project so I would think twice before using it in production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Article poses good questions, although the load time is terrible[1]. Here's the intro while you are waiting for it:

      There is one thing which has puzzled me for a while, and
      it is the performance of programs written in C when it
      comes to big numbers. It may or may not help with the
      decades-long 'C vs Fortran' performance debate, but let's
      concentrate on one single and reasonably well-defined
      thing – big number arithmetic in C and see if it can be
      improved.

      In fact, there are very few things which gain from being
      rewritten in assembler (compared to C), but big number
      arithmetic is one of them, with relatively little progress
      in this direction over the years. Let's take a look at
      OpenSSL (a library which is among the most concerned about
      big number performance: 99% of SSL connections use RSA
      these days, and RSA_performance == Big_Number_Performance,
      and RSA is notoriously sslloooowww).

      ...

      OpenSSL prefers to use assembler for big number
      calculations. It was the case back in 1998, and it is
      still the case now (last time I checked, the difference
      between C and asm implementations was 2x, but it was long
      ago, so things may have easily changed since). But why
      should this be the case? Why with all the optimizations
      compilers are doing now, should such a common and trivial
      thing still need to be written in asm (which has its own
      drawbacks – from the need to write it manually for each
      and every platform, to sub-optimality of generic asm when
      it comes to pipeline optimizations – and hand-rewriting
      asm for each new CPU -march/-mtune is not realistic)? If
      it can perform in asm but cannot perform in C, it means
      that all hardware support is present, but the performance
      is lost somewhere in between C developer and generated
      binary code; in short – the compiler cannot produce good
      code. This article will try to perform some analysis of
      this phenomenon.

[1] Maybe they are using IPoAC? It sometimes exhibits high packet loss with heavy rain, particularly on international links: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers)

<comment><USER8> > But why should this be the case? Why with all the optimizations compilers > are doing now, should such a common and trivial thing still need to be > written in asm?

Yes, if the CPU vendor keeps coming with all kinds of clowny instructions like MMX/SSE2/SSE4/SSE XP/etc to accelerate things (but really because they need new instructions so the ABI remains patented). Compilers and libraries can't keep with all the new instructions.

<comment><USER9> High performance libraries do keep up with the new instructions, e.g. GMP[1] likes the new MULX[2] instruction a lot.

[1]: [https://gmplib.org/list-archives/gmp- devel/2013-August/00335...](https://gmplib.org/list-archives/gmp- devel/2013-August/003353.html) [2]: [http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/intelligent- systems/i...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/intelligent- systems/intel-technology/ia-large-integer-arithmetic-paper.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> When hearing a claim such as "there is a substantial gap between the capabilities of hardware and C", my first question is "what hardware"?

Last I checked, C was used on lots of hardware, lots of it which differs substantially from the X86 architecture.

C aims to be portable. For it to be portable its constructs must be so too.

If there exists hardware which doesn't have a carry-flag (like mentioned elsewhere in this thread), exposing it to the C-programmer will result in non- portable code, or a need for (possibly inefficient) compiler-internal workarounds.

Looking at it the other way around, namely upwards the abstraction layer, C has a very limited capability to convey the _intent_ of code. Lots of hardware has the capability to process things in parallel, and C doesn't have any way to exploit that without explicit code to do so.

And as long as C is meant to be portable, that _has_ to be allright.

<comment><USER11> Carry flag emulation may be "possibly inefficient" on architectures without carry flag, but not exposing carry flag on architectures with carry flag is definitely inefficient. I don't think it is the right tradeoff.

Consider that many architectures on which C can be used lack hardware multipliers. This is totally not an argument against having multiplication in the language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Current CPU's are largely C machines, with a few extensions past C's edges. It was not always so, see eg P-machines, AS/400, Lisp machines, even current GPUs.

</comment><comment><USER13> The current page is shown because the Blocklayout Template Engine failed to render the page, however this could be due to a problem not in BL itself but in the template. BL has raised or has left uncaught the following exception:

Database Query Error

Description: ErrorNo: 2006, Message:Database error while executing: 'SELECT inst.xar_id as bid, btypes.xar_type as type, btypes.xar_module as module, inst.xar_name as name, inst.xar_title as title, inst.xar_content as content, inst.xar_last_update as last_update, inst.xar_state as state, group_inst.xar_position as position, bgroups.xar_id AS bgid, bgroups.xar_name AS group_name, bgroups.xar_template AS group_bl_template, inst.xar_template AS inst_bl_template, group_inst.xar_template AS group_inst_bl_template FROM xar_block_group_instances group_inst LEFT JOIN xar_block_groups bgroups ON group_inst.xar_group_id = bgroups.xar_id LEFT JOIN xar_block_instances inst ON inst.xar_id = group_inst.xar_instance_id LEFT JOIN xar_block_types btypes ON btypes.xar_id = inst.xar_type_id WHERE bgroups.xar_name = 'header' AND inst.xar_state > 0 ORDER BY group_inst.xar_position ASC'; error description is: 'MySQL server has gone away'.

Explanation: A database query could not be executed, either because the query could not be understood or because it returned unexpected results.

Product: App - <USER2>

Component: Articles

</comment><comment><USER14> Yeah, yeah, pointers are evil, memory management is hard, cache locality is a horrible mess, lame, sequential spaghetti code does not automatically scaled by a "stupid" compiler, so we all should use Java and NodeJS VMs which eliminate the necessity to think, and even to have such capacity. With VMs questions of optimal performance just never arise.)

<comment><USER15> Except if you are writing the VM...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Mirror:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140208005209/http://accu.org/i...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140208005209/http://accu.org/index.php/journals/1849)</comment>


AprilFools Google Chrome extension - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/aprilfools/imkdafnalljikgogmjdccklndcdbfnng

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi ! I've made this google chrome extension to easily goof up your co-workers browser.

Install this extension into your co-workers Google Chrome. You can choose an effect to apply to every website they visit.

Tell me what you think :)</comment>


A data-destroy vulnerability for the IBM PCjr - <AUTHOR> https://retro.moe/2018/01/15/ibm-pcjr-zero-day-data-destroy-vulnerability/ <comment><USER2> You're missing a catchy name, a logo and a dedicated URL.

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah, although the name is: "double-the-joy-will-get-you-destroyed"

<comment><USER2> How about something pithier, like "Joykill"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, yeah, I like it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to setup home systems that can control lights/temperature, etc? - <AUTHOR>

One side project I've been thinking about for a long time is setting up systems that control things at my home, such as temperature, lights, alarms, music.
Has anyone set up similar systems at their house?  How did you go?  What were the technical challenges?
Further, has anyone managed to setup systems that follow voice commands? <comment><USER2> X10 is one way (old, standard) to do this. It works by transmitting a couple of bits at each zero-crossing of the 60Hz house current. IE, it works over your existing electrical lines.

I set up a system in my house, controlled partly by controllers in the switches themselves (push a button on a wall-mounted switch inside, it sends an X10 signal thru the house wiring to a listener in a box in the back yard). Also controlled by an always-on computer which can turn off lights at given times, or respond to scripts, or pokes over the internet.

The potential is huge. But the reality, with X10, can be a bummer. At first the system worked quite well -- lights on and off at the correct time, good response to button presses. But for reasons not clear at all, the system performance gets flaky. I put in a repeater/phase coupler (e.g., [http://www.smarthome.com/4823/Leviton-2-Phase-X10-Coupler- Re...](http://www.smarthome.com/4823/Leviton-2-Phase-X10-Coupler-Repeater- HCA02-10E/p.aspx)), changed out some of the off-brand switches with Leviton parts, etc. This helped, but did not make the system solid.

This turns out to be unacceptable. When you press a light switch, you need the light to come on (even if it's just a driveway light). Nobody in the house but me has the patience to use the X10 switches any more. But now, it would be a major pain to replace the X10 components because the cost and re-install time adds up. (E.g., one X10 dimmer is about $70. I have almost 10. One multi-unit wall controller is about $50, and I have almost 10 of those too.)

I put this stuff in myself, but I don't think the problem was with the install. I'm an EE, I'm used to lab work, and I'm familiar with the NEC for home wiring.

Perhaps a Zigbee, UPB, or Insteon system would be better.

My lessons learned: X10 doesn't work in my (modest-sized) house. Don't commit to any home automation system without a long-term small-scale trial. Don't use these components for critical tasks (like "turning on the heat so the pipes won't freeze", or "turning off the sprinkler system").

</comment><comment><USER3> I first tried to do something like this about 10 years ago. I wanted to put a microcontroller in every switch patress and network them across the mains using a TDA5051A modem. Unfortunately the size of the various components (including all the transformers and other passives) was too great for me to retrofit to exisitng hardware.

I've come back to this recently, as I can now use a ZigBee module for comms, and by going surface mount I can get the required components in a very compact space.

Never tried to do voice recognition in a socket, but that's a very interesting idea - have microphones in every patress and network them to create an array.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There has to be at least a few people on HN that have done this. Did you use systems like Linux Home Automation (<http://www.linuxha.com/>) or <http://www.linuxmce.org> ?

Did you roll your own? Buy a commercial application ?</comment>