Google announces eBooks - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/discover-more-than-3-million-google.html <comment><USER3> I got a Kindle in August, which has a similar "all your books in our cloud" approach. Now I worry about Amazon being able to cancel or delete my account, cutting me off from every book I bought in the Kindle Store. I feel like that's giving them too much power.

The same problem exists with the new Google ebooks service.

I back up my computer with Time Machine and Carbonite. I'm not worried about losing the ebooks stored on my computer. I don't need Amazon or Google to "keep my books safe."

Compare to O'Reilly Media: "Whenever possible we provide [eBooks] to you in five DRM-free file formats — PDF, ePub, Kindle-compatible .mobi, DAISY, and Android .apk — that you can use on the devices of your choice." (from their website)

Music from iTunes is similar to eBooks from O'Reilly: no DRM, download the files and store them yourself.

<comment><USER4> That's why I never bought a Kindle.It's like paying for a book but be forced to keep it only at the shopkeeper's shelf. Kindle means I don't own the book I have paid for. Giving them too much power is another thing that I'm wary of. So I still use various mail accounts, various options for online activities instead of going ga-ga over all things G.

<comment><USER5> _That's why I never bought a Kindle.It's like paying for a book but be forced to keep it only at the shopkeeper's shelf._

I don't know of any actual Kindle owners who feel that way.

<comment><USER6> Right because those of us that feel that way, don't buy Kindles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it just me or is their bookstore search awful? I've tried various programming subjects (software, software engineering, computer graphics, etc.) and always get results like "Report of the 55th National Conference on Weights and Measures 1970" or "Veterans' Administration FY 1988 budget"

<comment><USER8> If it's anything like the Android App Store search on my phone, I think I'll stick with my Kindle, or real books. I'm confused how a company that made search work so well has such poor offerings for things like my apps or these books. What gives?

<comment><USER9> +1

Android App search is terrible. Now this bookstore is too.

You'd think Google could get search right.

<comment><USER10> GMail search is awful as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And once again non-Americans are left out _sigh_

I can't help laughing when they even write about how incredibly open they are.

And what, even the video is private ? I'm guessing it's just location blocked. .. but why??

<comment><USER12> Think about it. Really hard. In your visualizations use terms like "licensing" and "international". You may find enlightenment this way.

<comment><USER13> > Think about it. Really hard.

No need to think hard about it: Google simply doesn't give a shit. Really. Let me remind you that, almost two years in, Google Voice is still completely and utterly useless outside of North America.

> You may find enlightenment this way.

Enlightenment as to why the _video_ of their ebooks demo would be region- locked?

<comment><USER14> Well, in Canada at least, there's pretty immovable legislation preventing them from rolling it out.

<comment><USER15> What legislation is that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No Kindle support (though the web reader looks E-ink friendly). Amazon _really_ needs to open up their SDK and allow you to write book-readers - <USER2> could grab a huge market if they did. As-is, they may be left hurting if they don't explicitly support this, especially if Google's claim of "the world's largest selection of ebooks" is accurate (and I have no reason to doubt it).

<comment><USER17> Amazon should rather support epub format if they care to have some success in Europe and maybe some other non-US markets.

<comment><USER18> ePub is not the problem. It is the Adobe DRM that is comes baked into most ePub documents that are sold.

<comment><USER16> Which (I'm very sad to see, but maybe it'll change in time) Google has adopted :\

<comment><USER19> I'm not so much. My sony reader is compatible with Adobe DRM. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Google eBooks can be downloaded onto all eReader devices that run Adobe Digital Editions"[0]

In other words: "Adobe DRM"

[0] <http://books.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=179863>

</comment><comment><USER20>
      1. Get a group of friends together with similar reading tastes.
      2. Create a new shared Google account.
      3. Share books.
      4. Profit? (Any reasons this wouldn't work?)

<comment><USER21> Assuming they will restrict the account to signing on from one location at a time, it would be the equivalent of loaning others books in e-readers that allow it.

Or the equivalent of a bunch of people sharing a Steam account.

<comment><USER3> You might start reading a book on your computer at home in the morning, and you might leave that open as you rush off to work. You might open a second copy on your e-reader as you go to work, and so on.

Therefore there are natural use cases where you have the same Google account logged into Google ebooks on multiple devices at the same time.

Therefore Google must allow for those use cases.

Those use cases can be mimicked by friends sharing a Google account.

Google could check for obvious misuse. For example, they could look for two devices separated by a large distance and using the same Google account with Google ebooks at the same time. I know they already do something like that with Gmail (for a different reason).

<comment><USER21> In those cases it can auto-logout of the previously connected platforms, the same way Steam does.

<comment><USER3> What if I'm writing a paper on the books of Bill Bryson, I want to have In a Sunburned Country open on my MacBook, and I want to have Notes from a Small Island open on my iPhone (at the same time)?

There are legitimate reasons to have two devices logged into Google ebooks with the same account at the same time.

Video games are different. Few people play two video games at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looks like they definitely just scanned some books. I downloaded a sample of "Information Theory and Statistical Learning" and the font was too pixelated and thus unreadable on my android device unless I zoomed in. Zooming in only evidences the pixelation even more.

An O'Reilly book seemed fine, so I want to imagine that technical/math- notation intensive books are hard to optimize for e-reading. Anyone have some knowledge about this? How hard is it to make a technical book's digital font easier to read if you don't already have the LaTeX/pdf?

</comment><comment><USER23> I think this takes our personal library into the ubiquitous cloud, which is great. But again, the key question is, will Google be able to integrate with existing eBooks like Kindle, Nook or Plastic Logic. That will be the one big thing that will determine their success...

Another cool feature I really like is the ability for small bookstores to create their own storefront. That is a smart move. By opening the cloud, they will capitalize on the marketplace created by someone else.

<comment><USER16> Nook is on the list, but no Kindle. Though, ultimately, anything with web access. The web reader looks pretty minimal, it'd probably run fine on an E-ink device like the Kindle.

<http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalpublishing/supported-devices>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone remember Google Video? Me neither.

Amazon and Apple own the ebook market and Google doesn't even have a tablet. Can you read Google ebooks on a Kindle? So much for read anywhere. Sorry Google but you're late for the party.

<comment><USER25> That's why there are standards, and the Google Bookstore supports two standards (ePub and PDF).

You know, there are also people out there with Sony, BeBook, and iRiver readers.

<comment><USER18> Both the ePub and PDF are DRM encumbered. I would not call those "standards".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> "We designed Google eBooks to be open."

How exactly is this open?

<comment><USER27> The formats are open, ePUB and PDF. It is doesn't appear to me that you can actually download the files.

• Android and iOS have dedicated reader apps that support offline reading. Something is downloaded, but it might well be DRM wrapped.

• Web browser based reading appears to be online only. No mention of downloading and using your own native reader on a laptop.

• The interesting one is the nook. For nook the book is transferred into the native nook reader. Sounds like there might be some way to get the book in that process, or maybe they have already DRM'd it with B&N's blessing.

Please, I already have a book reading app I like. I don't want your vanity take on what a book reader should be. Just sell me the book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I've only done a quick skim, but their prices are really high. The ebook version of many programming books are more expensive than their paper counterparts at amazon.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've been going nuts the last couple of months buying books from O'Reilly. It's great, I can put them on my iPad, my iPod Touch, my laptop, my desktop, whatever can read an ePub or a PDF. And no one can "recall" them. I have zero interest in any other deal as far as ebooks are concerned.

</comment><comment><USER30> They mention how 'open' it is, however I want to know about the DRM of it? IMHO you can't be fully open with DRM.

<comment><USER31> apparently they mean 'open' in the sense of 'restricting users via DRM' and 'locks out most of the world'

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can anyone deduce what the DRM position is on books sold via Google Books?

Closest I can get is <http://books.google.com/help/ebooks/content.html> which says PDF and ePUB formats that might have DRM in them -- but I wasn't aware there was any (significant) DRM in PDF format.

<comment><USER33> I read somewhere it was Adobe's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why not support the Kindle? Creating books in the Kindle format is easy enough. I don't understand this decision.

<comment><USER34> Answer my own question: ""The reader itself is built in Java, and will be accessible on mobile devices via the browser or the standalone apps — the Android app should be available now, and the iOS app will be so soon.""

<comment><USER35> The kindle is also implemented with Java (on top of Linux).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Finally! One more reason to boycott Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER37> What? _No Kindle support_?

What kind of asinine universe are we creating for ourselves? This is what I never understood about iTunes:

1\. The world discovers MP3s: music that you can listen to on any digital music player! You know how you can take a tape cassette and play it in any cassette player, and hear music? It's like that! Yay!

2\. iTunes sells iTunes music: music that you can listen to on... Apple devices! Wait, what?

You mean I can download _digital music_ from iTunes, but it might not work on my _digital music player_?

It must be because it's better, then. What's that? There's no technical advantage? I am confused!

Now it's happening again! We have eBooks of various assortments. You read eBooks with eReaders. Unless they're incompatible. How can you tell? Well, it depends on where you bought each of them. It's getting to where you need a damn chart.

We don't make cars that only run on certain fucking roads. Why do we make music that only plays on certain fucking music players?!

I know all about DRM, and the incentives behind it. I know "why" it works this way. I'm just lamenting how stupid it is that we are making things _more_ complicated, and _less_ inter-operable. It's fucking 2010. We're in the future now. We should know better.

<comment><USER38> An e-book's container format is (essentially) orthogonal to whether or not it has DRM.

Kindle uses a convoluted, badly designed container, where everyone else uses ePub, which is an open standard.

Bottom line: There is not Kindle support because Kindle is too picky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Someone should make an ebooks site that uses Dropbox as a backend. Local file control is a really important part of keeping files secure in the cloud. Controled from a single company is really just control with a single point of failure.

<comment><USER40> dropbox not being a single company?

<comment><USER39> I meant that you'll have a copy on all of your machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> "Google eBooks is all about choice, so you can use just about any device you own to read any book, anywhere." Aslong as you buy the book from google and use googles software. Isnt that the oposite of choice?

</comment><comment><USER42> Works fine using a US VPN from Germany

</comment><comment><USER43> Keep Innovating Google..

</comment><comment><USER44> What is it with Amazon that makes it possible for them to sell eBooks to anywhere in the world no questions asked?

I hate DRM and I love my B&N nook, but fuck it, I want Amazon to make Kindle app for nook!

Really tired of seeing "not available in your part of the world yet" for the last few years in most eBook stores.

<comment><USER45> Amazon is not selling eBooks to anywhere. Yes, selling in 100+ countries is impressive, but there are 200+ of them.

<comment><USER44> still, 100 > 1</comment></comment></comment>


Zoom consumes 4% of CPU as statistics shows. No way - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/gtQ2jiM <comment><USER2> Let me guess: i7 with hyperthreading? -> 55%/12 = ~4%

<comment><USER3> That's not quite how SMT works. Half of the core is not sitting idle when running a 1 thread workload on a 2 thread core. Rather the core will be working at mostly full tilt.

Also if only one core is active, it can be put into a higher than normal power regime.

<comment><USER2> As far as I know, 100 % in the Activity Manager is one hyperthread fully busy, regardless of clock. It doesn't seem too unlikely that Zoom takes that from the equivalent API, divides it by the number of seen virtual cores to convert it to some measure of "overall CPU load", and reports it as usage. It's not a good measure, but an explanation. (And as you point out boosting happens, so the "55%" reported by Activity Manager is already not all that good)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Zoom doesn't have to do much computing while in a meeting – except for video encoding, which is usually handled by the GPU. That's why "GPU Time" is high (as shown in Activity Monitor) and why your MBP gets hot.</comment>


Ask HN: Laptops Security for a 40 Startups – What are you using? - <AUTHOR> What tools are you using to protect your laptops (Mac/Linux and Windows 10)?
As long as we were a small team, with mainly linux and some Macs, we were "fine".. However, now as we grow, I need to get a unified security platform to protect them all.
Would appreciate if you can share what tools are you using for this purpose.
Edit: Security needs - Identity (keys) as well as malware/virus protection.
Thanks for sharing! <comment><USER2> Among many other duties, I help manage a fleet of ~80 Macs for number of early-stage tech companies. We're doing some things well, and some things we don't have a good answer for yet.

Good:

\- Sophos Endpoint protection (cloud.sophos.com). We've found this to work great, is easily-configurable, and is inexpensive, something around $25/user/year for the "advanced" license, which also gets you DLP functionality.

\- JAMF Pro for MDM. If starting now, I'd probably go with the hosted "JAMF Now" product. We use this to enforce security policy, deploy apps, monitor patch compliance, enforce patch installation, etc.

\- NoMAD for Active Directory integration. I've just started R&D on deprecating our AD and moving to Okta as a primary identity provider, so once this is ready, I'll be switching over to JAMF Connect, which supports Okta.

Not good / In progress:

\- Centralized log collection from the laptop fleet. This is challenging due to the on/off connectivity nature of laptops.

\- Sometimes NoMAD messes things up and user passwords get out of sync between AD and the local MacOS user database. This causes no small amount of frustration as you can imagine.

Hopefully this is helpful. If anyone else has suggestions on the "not good" items, please reply!

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm lobbying for FIDO2 devices like YubiKeys where I work (we issue both Windows and Apple laptops). Google has had great success with YubiKeys.</comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on my web app please (BuyersVote.com) - <AUTHOR> http://buyersvote.com/

<comment><USER2> I can't point out a specific reason, but for me the front-page has a bit of a "sedo-parking" look to it. Maybe it's the top-menu and the logo, I'm not sure. Sorry for being so vague, but this was my first thought when I clicked the link.

<comment><USER3> +1 I think it's the single colour scheme and Arial font.

<comment><USER4> I think it's the ".com" at the end of "buyersvote.com" that did it for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool idea, I've always wished there was something like this when shopping in a category. My process always breaks down into cross-referencing several items on cnet, amazon, ign, etc and a vote would give me a quick top 3 to narrow down my choices and save me some time.

Feedback:

1) Is there a way to cross-post an item to multiple lists? There are many categories that are simply subsets of others, ie HP Pavilion 1234 might be in "Computers", "Desktop Computers", and "Gaming Machines." It would be nice to collate votes and comments from many sources too.

2) I agree with AlexMuir on the color scheme, and you already have an alternate color available on the home page in the orange. You've worked this color in on other pages but not on the homepage. I'd suggest using an orange- scheme for the list links since those are something you'd probably want to draw attention to anyway.

3) On the comments page, I tried to click the up/down arrows before realizing they were just symbols of how a user voted instead of a vote itself. To make it more clear, I'd suggest using a +1 or -1 icon there instead of a different colored arrow.

4) You may be able to fill in some blank lists and items by reading through Amazon metadata or the like. It takes alot less inertia to upvote something than it does to enter a list or item, so I think that makes it more likely to get user involvement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow...great feedback.

Yep you nailed the exact same pain point I had. When I would sometimes do "best *" type searches on google before buying something, I'd get back crappy results with old forum posts or affiliate link filled ezine articles.

On adding an item to multiple lists, I thought about this but decided against it just because an item could have different ratings for different categories (iPhone is a great computer, not as good at making phone calls), and it would make the UI simpler.

Good feedback on the up/down voting. When you say Amazon metadata what are you referring to? Not familiar with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1) on the actual reviews page you could probably save space by not displaying a whole row for an upvote with no text review

2) if users have the ability to add their own items to the list, you are going to need a way to monitor the lists for duplicates or items that are not specific enough - (example, iPhone) or items that are wrong (iPhone Blackberry). Since you are starting with a clean slate in terms of products, it will be most useful to you to ensure that the product names are kept as clean as possible, this will make it MUCH easier to integrate with a price service if you plan to monetize it that way in future.

3) I'm not sure what the 'revisions' button is supposed to do (not technically, I mean in terms of usefulness to the site). I was able to rollback someone else's review to a previous version.

4) Product lists can grow to be quite diverse and you will need a way to categorize the lists the same way that products are grouped into lists. For example, you may need an Electronics category where all PC's, cell phones and GPS's are listed. And futher on you may need to break the cell phone category into 'Smart Phones' and 'Cell Phones'. Advice for this is that if you do plan to monetize by connecting with a price service then map your categories to that of the price service because it will be easier to sync up your products later (unless they really don't match your categorization in which case you will need a way to match them up behind the scenes.)

5) Don't know how you would approach this one, but when I went to 'Blogs for Entrepeneurs' and clicked on 'Paul Grahams Blog' I could see that the response was positive so I would want to check out this blog. If I didn't know who Paul Graham was I would need to then google his name to find his blog. It would be nice for items like that if the person who creates the item could add some text or blurb about it. But I'm not sure how that would translate when adding an actual product that is not a blog.

Hope that was useful :) Good luck with it!

[edit: spelling]

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback!

Agreed, the naming and duplicates are an issue. I was planning on doing this like StackOverflow with a "did you mean?" type suggestion box, but haven't built it yet.

Yeah the revisions might be useful in a wiki way if people try to hack it, but aren't really right now.

For categorization - I thought about this but it kept making the UI more complicated to pick a category first. I was definitely trying to go for a Twitter-esque bare minimum approach and solve the overwhelming amount of data with search instead of categories (like wikipedia). I'm not sure yet if this will work though. And Google has yet to index all the pages so the Google custom search I have setup is not 100% functional yet.

On Paul Grahams blog, it does have a link to the "external site" at the top: <http://buyersvote.com/items/paul-graham-s-blog-reviews> But it's probably not that obvious. Thanks for the help!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice start to your app. I had a similar idea a few years ago which I never acted on. One thing you might want to do is categorize things by price. When I thought about this idea it was because whilst if I am going to buy an espresso machine I go out and research all the details and then make a decision based on many factors, most of my friends ask me "what is the best espresso machine under $500" etc. Whilst that doesn't apply to some things you have like banks, it does for most things people will buy.

Good luck, hope it works.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the encouragement. Yep - I like the idea of free form lists like that because it does allow anyone to create niche type lists that aren't predefined in certain categories. So if someone did want to start a "Expresso Machines Under $500" list it would be fine. Then there oculd be some discussion in the comments for whether it should be merged into another list etc, like Wikipedia, and some tool to merge them if needed (although I haven't built that yet).

Anyway - thanks for the feedback. The hardest part right now has been getting critical mass. So we'll see what happens with it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What exactly is the etiquette for posting a "Review my Startup/Webapp" as an ask or rather as an actual link? I've seen it both ways an I'm wondering if one is preferred over the other.

<comment><USER9> I much prefer direct linking. It allows me to click open the site/app in a new tab, and I can click in to allow me to view the comments. We are smart enough here to know how to do that.</comment></comment>


Kindle Dev Kit open to beta testers - <AUTHOR> https://kindlepublishing.amazon.com/gp/vendor/sign-in

<comment><USER2> "Developer Guidelines:

Voice over IP functionality, advertising, offensive materials, collection of customer information without express customer knowledge and consent, or usage of the Amazon or Kindle brand in any way are not allowed. In addition, active content must meet all Amazon technical requirements, not be a generic reader, and not contain malicious code.

We will work to refine the above guidelines throughout the beta."

Available APIs: <http://java.sun.com/javame/reference/apis/jsr217/> <http://kdk-javadocs.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> was this already available? ...or is this the SDK everyone's waiting for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand the point of this.

Why would anyone worry creating a native application for a highly restricted and proprietary platform when he/she has the option of creating a web application with much better control of deployment, simpler learning curve, etc?

We've seen this history before. Just ask Lotus, WordPerfect, Ashton-Tate, Borland, Computer Associates and thousands of iPhone developers how nice it is to put a leash around your neck and handle it to Microsoft and Apple. Oh, and, after that ask McMillan if Amazon is a non-controling company with open standards.

This is a gold rush with Amazon and Apple selling the picks and shovels.

<comment><USER4> The web experience is second best on any small device right now.

If it is speed and access to the whole device, then you need to code for their API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Still didn't get my dev kit =(

<comment><USER6> me neither. Wonder what the delay is?

<comment><AUTHOR> submission required a brief description of proposed applications, which Amazon said they would review. I don't get it - does that mean that they'll wade through all of the ideas and pick the ones that sound good? Or was it just a soft filter to make sure developers have an idea?</comment></comment></comment>


Crash early and crash often for more reliable software - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mattklein123/crash-early-and-crash-often-for-more-reliable-software-597738dd21c5 <comment><USER2> I think the poster is spot on. However I think that this reasoning would lean towards defensive programming. And this produces "ugly" code. And for that reason a lot of people don't like it.</comment>


AWS Lambda – In Full Production with New Features for Mobile Devs - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-lambda-update-production-status-and-a-focus-on-mobile-apps/

<comment><USER2> Using Lambda has been a really fun experience. The abstraction takes a lot of cognitive load off the developer, which I found valuable. The biggest challenge I had was around logging. The CloudWatch web interface for Lambda events was definitely not my favorite...</comment>


Cessna 188 Pacific Rescue - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cessna_188_Pacific_rescue <comment><USER2> "Vette ... instructed the Cessna to point directly at the setting sun. He did the same, and noted the difference in heading between the aircraft as four degrees. After making an allowance for the differing altitudes of the aircraft, the difference in sunset times between the aircraft and Norfolk Island was also noted. This data allowed the crew to calculate that the Cessna must be southwest of the DC-10 by about 400 nautical miles."

A story for your kids when they think they'll never have to understand this math stuff, since computers do it for them.

<comment><USER3> That said, the kids might point out that most pilots these days will have a GPS in the plane, as well as a backup iPad with Foreflight.

Especially if they're doing a cross-Pacific ferry flight.

<comment><USER4> The Cessna got lost because its direction finder was broken without pilots knowledge, and the other _plane_ with backup equipment crashed en route. A future retelling of the same story would be "While boarding, the ipad fell onto the runway, cracking the screen and damaging the digitiser. The GPS then malfunctioned"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's an explanation of the 'aural boxing' technique used by the planes to find each other:

[http://www.navworld.com/navcerebrations/mayday.htm](http://www.navworld.com/navcerebrations/mayday.htm)

<comment><USER6> In summary: You assume that the target is stationary(ish) and you know, say, that it is to your front/left.

You fly straight and note when the other plane comes into radio range (i1), and when it goes out of radio range again (o1).

Now you turn 90 degrees left and note when it goes into range (i2) and out of range again (o2).

Now you connect i1 and o1 with a segment S1, and draw a perpendicular to it, P1, through its midpoint (the "Line segment bisector"). Similar, with 1 replaced by 2.

The intersection of P1 and P2 is where the target is.

This works because the edge of the radio range is (basically) a circle that you're intersecting with your segments, and the perpendicular bisectors go through the centre of the circle.

Cool technique. It doesn't even depend on your turn being exactly 90 degrees. It does depend on the pilot on the other radio jabbering on non-stop, and you knowing where you are - without GPS etc.

Frankly, the navigators of early last century, before GPS and inertial navigation system - respect. They knew how to reckon. (Here, the guys in the jet had INS, apparently, but still, hats off!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems like a good place to share a few amazing plane related survival stories:

\- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Elder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lauren_Elder) _Lauren Elder survives 1976 plane crash_

\- [https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17476615](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17476615) _Juliane Koepcke: How I survived a plane crash_

\- [http://clear-prop.org/aviation/haynes.html](http://clear- prop.org/aviation/haynes.html) _The Crash of United Flight 232 by Capt. Al Haynes_

<comment><USER8> Oh my, Lauren Elder's story is quite something. She survived the crash, climbed down from the mountain including a 100' descent straight down a dry waterfall, and made her way into Independence, California with a broken arm, looking for help.

And people shunned her!

Because she looked a bit disheveled.

<comment><USER9> From the Wikipedia's article:

> People saw her disheveled appearance and were afraid; _Charles Manson had > recently been put on trial in the town, and his female followers spent a lot > of time hanging around it_.

The full context makes people's reactions to her much more acceptable and understandable.

<comment><USER8> Very true, and I didn't mean my comment to be critical of the people in the town. Of course they had reason to be fearful after what they had recently experienced.

I was looking at it from her point of view: she barely survived a plane crash where the other two people died, almost lost her life _again_ on the way down the mountain, and then when she thought she'd reached "safety"...

Just an awful experience for everyone involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Gordon Brooks was the flight engineer on Air New Zealand Flight 901 and was > killed when the DC-10 crashed into Mount Erebus, Antarctica, on 28 November > 1979. Vette published a book about the Flight 901 disaster, called Impact > Erebus.

And then Wikipedia leads me to this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_New_Zealand_Flight_901](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_New_Zealand_Flight_901)

What a series of unfortunate events.

<comment><USER11> There's an entire website for that. It's much more comprehensive than the wiki page. Also it has that nostalgic early 2000s feel.

[http://www.erebus.co.nz/](http://www.erebus.co.nz/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > He touched down on Norfolk Island after being in the air for twenty-three > hours and five minutes.

How is that possible? The Cessna 188 has a cruise speed around 110 mph (at 75% power) and a range of 370 miles. That implies a bit over 3 hours of time aloft. Stall speed is 60 mph. I'm not understanding how you get to 23 hours of flight time.

<comment><USER12> It's covered in the Bakula movie - they stripped the plane down to the extreme and installed fuel tanks so huge that they could barely take off.

That's also why he was on his own - his oppo crashed on takeoff due to the massive fuel load.

It looks like the full movie with the explanation is on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4_f3T8AzJo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4_f3T8AzJo).

<comment><USER8> Forgive my ignorance, but could you say what "his oppo" means? Thanks!

(Update: after reading the Wikipedia article I see that it probably refers to "his colleague", but I wasn't familiar with the use of "oppo" here.)

<comment><USER3> Friend/companion. [https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/oppo](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/oppo)

<comment><USER8> Ah, roger that, thanks!

I see that this is a British English word, so it brings to mind the old saying: "Two peoples divided by a common language."

<comment><USER13> If it helps, I grew up in England and never heard this word either -- sounds like use outside aviation/Navy is rare.

<comment><USER14> It's archaic, apparently an abbreviation of opposite number. We might use work buddy today, where colleague is too wooden.

Was pretty common to hear amongst the wartime generation, but has declined pretty rapidly since the 80s. _Never once_ heard it used for "sweetheart" as Webster's seems to think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This BBC article about Atlantic ferry pilots might also be interesting: "The pilots who risk their lives flying tiny planes over the Atlantic", [https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34484972](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34484972) (HN Discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17685358)).

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's another one: "The Parachute That Saved a Plane", [https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/01/amazing...](https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/01/amazing- footage-of-a-small-plane-being-rescued-by-a-cruise-ship-and-a- parachute/384837/?single_page=true).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Tangentially related: there is a website that gathers info about solo flights around the world, with links to personal websites and blogs, people who found this article interesting may like it: [http://www.earthrounders.com/](http://www.earthrounders.com/)

Edit: there is also another website specifically related to solo flights around the world completed before the advent of GPS: [http://www.soloflights.org/index.html](http://www.soloflights.org/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Potentially of interest: A free celestial navigation course:

[https://my.vanderbilt.edu/astronav/](https://my.vanderbilt.edu/astronav/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Considering insuring the plane and pilot as well as the ferry and fuel fees. wouldn't it be cheaper to crate and ship a plane that size than to fly it over the open Pacific for 4 days?

<comment><USER18> My understanding is that crating and shipping an airplane requires disassembly. Then you have to reassemble it at the other end and reprove airworthiness as it has been rebuilt. The price, not to mention time consumed, is higher than just flying the thing to its destination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm intrigued as to how the DC-10 had enough fuel to take such a massive detour?

<comment><USER20> A Cessna 188, even loaded to the gills with extra fuel, can stay in the air for 24 hours?

<comment><USER3> Probably. Throttle way back and fuel consumption drops dramatically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Vette wanted all the passengers to be involved, so he asked them to look out of the windows and invited small groups to come to the cockpit."

Can't imagine this happening in this century, given 9/11\. Mind you, regardless of airplane security being more or less secure nowadays, and regardless of the chance of such a near accident/rescue happening plus the chance of having a terrorist on-board; rather because of the strict rules and the fear associated post 9/11.

<comment><USER6> As a kid/teenager last century, I was frequently let into the cockpit of airliners in flight, and sometimes even invited to sit in the jump seat and fly along for a while - at least once even for the landing. Glorious. Innocent days.

<comment><USER22> Since I saw this episode of "Air crash"[1] about Aeroflot Flight 593 when a kid invited in the cockpit crashed an Aeroflot Airbus I'm pretty happy that kids aren't any longer invite to the cockpit. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1kPAWVI5UA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1kPAWVI5UA)

<comment><USER6> haha, yeah, I'm aware of that. I should say though that they let me sit in the cockpit, but they didn't let me "drive" :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Interesting use of the instruments.

Aside from the clear compassion and helpfulness, I wonder how much of it was thanks to careful training versus a creative use of the available tools?

<comment><USER24> Wellll..... it seemed to be a long list of ....

1\. Tried this incredibly cunning and creative trick... 2\. It didn't work. 3\. Try another incredibly cunning and creative trick... 4\. goto 2.

And then just before the end, Get Very Very Lucky with something that had nothing to do with cunning or creativity.

<comment><USER25> Not really, the Wikipedia page is a bit short on provinding the whole picture...

They used Magnetic Heading difference, with the difference between the setting sun angle, to determine general direction of the Cessna from the DC-10.

Then they used VHF boxing to pinpoint the Cessna. AT this point he was told to Fly NW. This direction alone would probably have saved him.

However Navigation at dark over the ocean is an iffy thing so always work it till you get home. So that is what they did. Since the Cessna could not see the fuel trail made by the DC-10 since it was higher up and the pilot could not see through his canopy, they used sunset settings times to further locate the Cessna.

Now with this additional directional confirmation Vette could have told the pilot a more exact heading and then, the oil rig location confirmed it.

If not for the initial course correction to fly NW the Cessna would have never seen the oil rig and would be somewhere in the ocean today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is reminiscent of the Frederick Forsythe short story "The Shepherd", in which a Vampire (early British jet bomber) suffers instrument failure flying westward to Canada on Christmas Eve.

I highly recommend the audio of the classic reading by Alan Maitland of CBC's "As It Happens", available on their website. They rebroadcast it every December.

</comment><comment><USER27> There was a made for TV movie about this in the late 80's...it was one of the things that first got me interested in aviation. Wish I could find the name of that movie - any help?

<comment><USER28> From the article:

> The incident was dramatised in the American 1993 made-for-TV movie Mercy > Mission - the Rescue of Flight 771. It starred Scott Bakula as Jay Prochnow > and Robert Loggia as Gordon Vette.</comment></comment>


Frame by frame xkcd's Rosetta landing - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd1446.org/

<comment><USER2> I think the most interesting thing about this is _who_ put this page together.

The github repo reveals it: [https://github.com/MagicalTux/xkcd1446](https://github.com/MagicalTux/xkcd1446)

MagicalTux = Mark Karpeles = founder of Mt. Gox....

Interesting to see that he's showing his face again. He's still specializing in programming the hacked together PHP scripts that he was famous for at Gox.

[https://github.com/MagicalTux/xkcd1446/blob/9988809331727766...](https://github.com/MagicalTux/xkcd1446/blob/9988809331727766f924c0857c80a1a7af4a06f4/get.php)

<comment><USER3> No wonder it doesn't work on my phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do harpoons work on comets? Why yes they do! :-) Love it.</comment>


The Missing 11th of the Month - <AUTHOR> http://drhagen.com/blog/the-missing-11th-of-the-month/ <comment><USER2> So many submissions, so little discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10817549](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10817549)

Please use Algolia before you submit anything to HN: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20missing%2011th&sort=byDa...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=the%20missing%2011th&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=pastMonth&type=story)

<comment><USER3> It looks like "organic" resubmissions from independent users, not some kind of net of spammers.

I like the article. It has an unexpected result, is well explained, and provides enough evidence to be very convincing.

I think it's a good resubmission according to the FAQ [1].

I think that it has little discussions because it's not a polemic topic. Many articles with a lot of comments are borderline politics, so each one has an opinion and want to state it. Many interesting technical articles have a high upvotes/comments ratio.

\--

I actually would prefer another mechanism to ensure that all the upvotes and comments are hold together in a single submission. But for now the official method is to wait until one of the resubmissions gets lucky and goes to the front page.

[1] From the FAQ:

> _Are reposts ok?_

> _If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill > reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok._</comment></comment>


All Oculus Software and VR applications must be stored in C:\ drive - <AUTHOR> https://support.oculus.com/help/oculus/1734357913462268?sr=1&query=drive&sid=0g1SHyHqRPXIZ9P2o <comment><USER2> Funnily enough, not just the fact that users and developers need to care about drive letters, the drive C: itself is called drive C: because drives A: and B: were reserved for floppy drives. And I don't think many machines have had floppy drives in the 2000's.

Linux has had a unified directory tree since the early 90's where it completely doesn't matter which drives host which directories. Implementing such a tree on Windows and mapping "C:", "D:" etc. as pseudo-roots to suitable locations to make it backwards compatible would not be an insurmountable task. Surely not trivial, but even on Windows application programs do not write to physical drives directly which gives the filesystem an opportunity to do any path translations it wants to. Thus, the question becomes a matter of will: Why hasn't Microsoft considered it important to fix their drive accesses?

What do they see as the advantage of having drives mapped to drive letters? It's certainly not usability: Linux can produce "drive icons" for each mounted drive. You plug in a USB stick and its icon shows up on the desktop――all this _regardless of whether_ the USB stick is actually mounted in /mnt/$STICK or /media/$USER/$STICK or wherever.

They could also support mounting extra drives to directories under C: so that the user would never have to deal with other drive letters. The "C:" would just be a historical prefix but in practice it wouldn't matter because you could mount your second disk at C:\Program Files\ and the applications wouldn't even know about it. I vaguely remember that WinNT kernel could actually do this, however it's apparently well-hidden from users because I don't see this having been set up anywhere.

<comment><USER3> > They could also support mounting extra drives to directories under C: so > that the user would never have to deal with other drive letters. The "C:" > would just be a historical prefix but in practice it wouldn't matter because > you could mount your second disk at C:\Program Files\ and the applications > wouldn't even know about it. I vaguely remember that WinNT kernel could > actually do this, however it's apparently well-hidden from users because I > don't see this having been set up anywhere.

Windows can indeed do this (since Windows 2000). It's not necessarily hidden, but the OS defaults to using drive letters for (new) partitions and most people don't mind. In Disk Management you can assign not only drive letters but also mount points for a partition (or both). I suppose you are left with the C-drive to be more or less / like you mentioned. I don't know if programs run into trouble because of hard coding of paths but that wouldn't be so much Microsoft's fault I think. I used to mount a USB-stick this way because it only contained a Truecrypt container, which would get its own drive letter thru Truecrypt so I didn't care to have two drive letters for one piece of storage. :)

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

<comment><USER4> As usual the problem is with badly behaving software. E.g. I have a bunch of software storing its crap in C:\Users\JohnDoe\Documents\ while I've changed the location of that folder to D:\JohnDoe\Documents.

<comment><USER5> That's what happens when a folder accesses the actual path when you've changed the CSIDL ID (relocating documents). If you've done it as an NTFS reparse point, there wouldn't be any such C:\Users\JohnDoe\Documents, and trying to navigate there would put you in D:\\.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Probably not a deal breaker for most, but it seems a little weird that they didn't plan for this. Surely a relatively small SSD for OS + large HDD for games etc. isn't that unusual for Oculus' target market?

<comment><USER7> Isn't is the opposite? SSD for OS, programs and games, HDD for stuff like photos, videos, movies?

Once I moved the games to SSD, load times improved tremendously.

<comment><USER8> With [http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover](http://www.traynier.com/software/steammover) you can physically move stuff to D: selectively, but leave them logically on C:.

Of course it's just a gui on junction points, so you don't _need_ it but it's free and easy to use.

[edit: not only for Steam, so should work for Oculus as well.]

<comment><USER9> You haven't need this sort of trick for ~3 years. Steam now supports multiple drives/steam folders

<comment><USER8> Thanks, didn't know that.

Can you move games after installation?

<comment><USER10> Not out of the box through the UI. You would have to cut/paste the game folders around, but Steam will automatically detect the move next time you restart the client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow... The Sea Drive. Brings back memories of those weird systems I had to use in the dark, distant past, where programs had to inexplicably be aware of what physical device a file was on in order to access it.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is what happens when your devs get the machines they want and not the machines their customers have.

<comment><USER13> Although, to be real, if you're running an Oculus, you have something similar to the machine the devs want.

That said, SSD boot drive isn't super uncommon.

<comment><USER14> Unless you explicitly got a drive to put games on because you got sick of installing and uninstalling them all the time because you thought it wasn't 1995 any more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Odd that the twitchy front page of /r/Oculus made it's way on the front page here, but I'll echo the ever-present Oculus founder's response that addressing this is pretty high on their roadmap. Sauce: [https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4bd31n/oculus_softw...](https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4bd31n/oculus_software_and_vr_applications_must_be/d18dw80)

<comment><USER16> Palmer said that fixing it was nontrivial. I wonder if that's "nontrivial because all software needs to be tested carefully even though it's just adding a configurable path" or "nontrivial for reason that are deep into OS fundamentals"?

<comment><USER17> My guess would be that once you allow something other than C:, you're opening things up to running games off of all kinds of weird devices like external USB drives, flash sticks, weird legacy hardware, network drives. This makes the problem of streaming assets a lot more challenging. Some techniques, like mmap'ing resources in, might require a NTFS formatted drive.

Limiting you to running off the system drive sidesteps a lot of those problems, and lets you make certain assumptions (e.g. it's probably NTFS and reasonably fast).

Also, drives that are not C: tend to disappear and reappear relatively frequently. Having a launcher have to check and handle it semi-gracefully is not simple. If you make people keep things on C:, they are more likely to stick around.

<comment><USER18> > e.g. it's probably NTFS

It has to be since Vista.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What I really love is that it has to go in "Program Files (x86)" specifically, even though the Rift requires 64-bit Windows.

<comment><USER20> A lot of times this happens because the installer itself is 32 bit even if the payload contains amd64 binaries. (Similar situation occurred back in the Win16 -> Win32 transition.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not that big a deal, it's easy to use junction points / symlinks across drives.

<comment><USER19> Rule #1 of interface design: "Easy for me does not mean easy for the user."

You or I can immediately see the need for a symlink and implement it. The average gamer has probably never heard of such a thing, and it might take several hours of increasing frustration to discover that Oculus won't install on their game drive, look for solutions, learn what a symlink is, and figure out how to make one.

And even without that, if you fucked up but it's easy for the customer to fix, you still fucked up. That's not an excuse.

<comment><USER21> Oh, I certainly it's a UX travesty from that standpoint. I was more commenting from the perspective of why it's not quite as bad as the title makes it out to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _> This is near the very top of our roadmap ... we are still in the process of rolling out our support pages, don't take anything as final yet._

<comment><USER14> The fact that this is hard to implement is a sad, sad, reminder of how shitty backwards comparability can be. How, over the past 30 years has someone at MS not taken the time to write a real abstraction for the file system? When I first switched to linux 10 years ago I though 'Oh cool, you can mount stuff wherever you want, why would you do that?!' Now it saddens me to realize that the vast majority of computer users have never actually learned to use a file system despite the fact that they are one of the most useful information management tools ever invented, probably second only to the card catalog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Yeah, so much for their Linux support.

<comment><USER22> This is really AMD and NVIDIA's fault, not Oculus'. Hitting 90fps is hard enough without taking a sizable performance hit from the linux graphics stack.

Valve pulled a similar move a while back where they prevented people on OS X from playing games they had paid for (Portal), because the combination of macbook IGP and OS X's OpenGL implementation dropped framerates to unplayable levels. The game ran fine on Windows on the same hardware.

<comment><USER23> May be they can use Vulkan now.

<comment><USER22> Vulkan's lower-level access certainly allows performance concerns to become the domain of the engine rather than the driver. Games standardizing on a few big engines seems to be doing more for linux than when operating systems standardize on a few big APIs (which is necessary but not sufficient).

Coupled with other recent news (the AMDGPU effort, 900-series firmware for kernel 4.6, ..) i'm cautiously optimistic about the future for 3D on linux - but mostly i'm cautiously optimistic at the cross-vendor adoption of Vulkan. Today a lot of enablement comes via vendor-specific tech (LiquidVR/GameWorks), and Vulkan has kept the scope open for extensions just like OpenGL did. I hope the industry has learned to avoid fragmentation after some of the horror stories from early DirectX[1].

\--

1\. "The pixel shaders of Shader Model 1.0 were extremely specific to NVIDIA's hardware. There was no attempt made whatsoever at abstracting NVIDIA's hardware; SM 1.0 was just whatever the GeForce 3 did." \-- [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/88055](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/88055)

<comment><USER24> > I hope the industry has learned to avoid fragmentation after some of the > horror stories from early DirectX[1].

They learned it so well, that except for urban legends OpenGL isn't used at all in game consoles and if it wasn't for Apple's adoption of OpenGL ES for iOS gaming, it would have been ignored as well.

And now it has been shown the door on Apple platforms.

<comment><USER23> Except Apple's platforms will die out as high end gaming targets. As VR developers already said multiple times. Apple doesn't care about it apparently.

<comment><USER24> The only VR guys that said that are Valve, which is just a studio in a sea of AAA studios.

How well are they selling those Steam machines?

What about that OpenGL and Vulkan support on the PS4, Wii and XBox?

The games industry cares about delivering game experiences and selling IP, not FOSS APIs.

<comment><USER23> _> The only VR guys that said that are Valve_

No one argued with that because what they said is true. Apple are simply out of the VR picture. At least for now.

 _> How well are they selling those Steam machines?_

Good enough I suppose, given that soon after Steam Machines were released, Sony and MS rushed to announce that they plan to update their hardware more frequently. Competition works. It doesn't mean it won't get even better.

 _> The games industry cares_

You keep talking about it as if it's some single mind. It's not.

 _> What about that OpenGL and Vulkan support on the PS4, Wii and XBox?_

You can forget about OpenGL. I expect Sony to add Vulkan supprot first, and then MS add it under pressure a few years later.

<comment><USER24> > No one argued with that because what they said is true. Apple are simply out > of the VR picture. At least for now.

Until they release their own VRKit.

> Good enough I suppose, given that soon after Steam Machines were released, > Sony and MS rushed to announce that they plan to update their hardware more > frequently. Competition works. It doesn't mean it won't get even better.

So what are those dangerous the numbers of Steam Machines running SteamOS sales?

Sony and MS have little to fear from those sales on a global scale, specially since most Steam Machines were actually being sold with Windows.

> You keep talking about it as if it's some single mind. It's not.

I was an IGDA member, attended a couple GDCE bot at London and Cologne, was part of the regular meetings of a game developments degree, had the opportunity to visit a well known AAA studios, including SCEE.

Didn't stay as my position in regards to private life is not what the industry expects from the majority of developers.

What is you experience on the industry?

> You can forget about OpenGL. I expect Sony to add Vulkan supprot first, and > then MS add it under pressure a few years later.

Sony will only add Vulkan on their Android phones, because Google added it.

They will never replace LibGCM with Vulkan, when their API and existing tools can do so much more.

<comment><USER23> _> Until they release their own VRKit._

Possible. Let them.

 _> So what are those dangerous the numbers of Steam Machines running SteamOS sales?_

No idea, but MS and Sony's fear is telling. They are scared that their comfortable grip on the market will be busted. And that's good. Without competition they would have kept their 7 year hardware refresh cycle. Monopolists don't like change and move forward only under the pressure of competition. In result, consoles hardware will be more up to date, and games won't be held back by it like they often were until now. Thanks to Steam Machines.

 _> had the opportunity to visit a well known AAA studios_

You mean controlled by legacy publishers and old media? Those are bad examples. It's not where innovation happens.

 _> What is you experience on the industry?_

I'm interested in innovative studios, not in the old media controlled ones. For instance Cloud Imperium are working on adding Vulkan support to CryEngine at present. That's interesting.

 _> Sony will only add Vulkan on their Android phones, because Google added it._

Sony will only benefit by adding Vulkan on their PS#, and in the processing giving MS a kick in the rear. Wait and see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> FWIW, this looks like it might only apply to games purchased through Oculus Home, the Steam equivalent for the Oculus Rift (or perhaps the UPlay equivalent). Games/experiences that aren't distributed via Oculus Home (SteamVR, Steam games w/ Oculus support, independently distributed games) appear to not be beholden to this limitation.

<comment><AUTHOR> For the DK2 maybe, but for CV1 this limitation is probably imposed by firmware (something that would be widely known if not for the NDA). Wouldn't surprised if this happens to be the result of whatever DRM they're employing.

It's an annoyance for users that use SSDs or multiple partitions; I know I can use a symlink (I doubt all Oculus users will though), but the fact that this was overlooked is a little absurd. Fingers crossed for a day one fix, or at least an actual explanation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Minimum viable product.

</comment><comment><USER26> Well that's weird. Must have something to do with the Windows registry. Maybe someone who knows more can elaborate.

<comment><USER27>
      C:\program files(x86)\

is where 32 bit programs go on Windows. Just like fstab goes in \etc on Linux. Generally, putting program files elsewhere winds up being a user managed pain in the ass at best and breaking dependencies at worst...by which I mean that eventually a user winds up with some program that won't run from K:\my programs\, if you don't believe me, well here's an example.

<comment><USER28> Sorry but this is just not true. Steam, Origin, UPlay, and just about every other gaming marketplace allows you to install the gaming library anywhere you went. Heck steam allows you to straight up and move the steam folder anywhere, delete everything but the games and the steam.exe and it will repair itself.

<comment><USER29> Steam only added the ability to store games elsewhere relatively recently. It was a long sought after feature that took ages to implement. I doubt it was really easy and just a case of no-one caring.

<comment><USER28> By recently you mean in the last 5-10 years. It has been around for ages.

Is it easy? Probably not but that is irrelevant because the competition already does it.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, I had a look back and it's been around longer than I thought. I was so used to symlinking I didn't realise the feature has existed since 2011 or 2012.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Seems fair enough for a fairly new software.

<comment><USER31> Don't think so. It looks more like some really bad choices mostly like bad dependencies or hard-coded things or something else. But to me this reflects the product quality and most importantly a big yellow warning on software quality.

<comment><USER27> To me, closely following the standards for Windows means less code and in particular less code that introduces edge cases for the sake of edge cases.

<comment><USER32> Is "installing only to C:\" an actual Windows standard? I'm fairly certain Windows doesn't have a problem installing software to different drives.

<comment><USER27> Per the article Occulus installs to

      C:\program files(x86)\

and that is the standard location for 32 bit (x86) program installation on Windows 64 bit systems. Many, but not all programs [obviously] can be installed at non-standard locations.

See _Installer and Logo Certification Requirement_ 2.4 here: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/aa372825\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

<comment><USER33> It's not standard - at least not per any official MS documentation. There are specific API calls you are supposed to make to query the program files directory, which will be different depending on whether you are a 32bit or 64bit program, and where the user/administrator has configured the program files folder to be.

This is also like windows programming 101, so I'm honestly a bit shocked to see oculus dropping the ball on this.

<comment><USER34> Specifically [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/bb7...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/bb762188\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

[https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/CppShellKnownFol...](https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/CppShellKnownFolders-7df114ad)

hr = SHGetKnownFolderPath(FOLDERID_ProgramFiles, 0, NULL, &pszPath);

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Party like it's 1999 !!

</comment><comment><USER36> I haven't had a C:\ drive in a decade.

<comment><USER37> Obviously "I'm proud I'm not a Windows user" comments are kinda irrelevant for an article about a device that currently only works on Windows, am I right?</comment></comment>


Parallel Universes Colliding Could Explain Quantum Weirdness - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/parallel-universes-colliding-could-explain-quantum-weirdness <comment><USER2> Surely if they are colliding then they are no longer parallel.

<comment><USER3> The Vice headline does not accurately reflect the article. The hypothesis is that _interaction_ between parallel worlds could lead to the observed behavior we currently describe using quantum mechanics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems to me that wave particle collapse and the second law of thermodynamics have something in common.

The latter can be explained by simple statistics. There are far far less ordered states than unordered so it's much more likely that a system would eventually go into an unordered state.

In fact I consider life to be an interesting counteraction to the second law of thermodynamics!

Now, something like that could happen to probability when you simply go up to macro scales. When you have a huge number of particles all interacting together then the variance is reduced to such an extent that it is as if the wavefunction collapsed.

After all there is a chance I could go through a wall in quantum mechanics, just astronomically small because that would need to happen with all the particles at once.

</comment><comment><USER5> I just like thinking about things out of my depth, so take my non-expert rantings with a grain of salt:

I actually have a personal theory similar to this, but instead of multiple parallel universes, just one other universe. Dual Universes.

I came up with this idea when thinking about dark matter and antimatter. I seem to understand that dark matter is more plentiful away from planetary bodies. When thinking about the big bang, the mathematics/physics that governed the forming of galaxies, stars, planets, black holes, etc, seem to indicate a desire of a certain "order".

What if another universe somehow broke into this one, and all the matter in it spewed forth as a different type of matter into ours? Perhaps that matter seeks to find it's original origin, perhaps in the form of a black hole back into that other universe. (discounting the blackhole/whitehole theory), but since black holes are fairly rare, in the mean-time, that matter seeks to gather until it can pass that point of no return to become a black hole.

In essence my idea is that gravity is a byproduct of matter seeking to return to it's antimatter state in another universe.

Lots of unfounded hypothesis there, so forgive me if I've gone off the deep end with that one. I'm just a curious george.

</comment><comment><USER6> ..Is 'Physical Review X' actually a well regarded journal?

<comment><USER7> Yes, according to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Review_X#Brief_History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Review_X#Brief_History)

"Since its foundation the journal's impact factor has been increasing and for the first time passed that of the older and prestigious non-open-access journal Physical Review Letters for the year 2013. This makes Physical Review X currently the journal within the family of Physical Review journals with the highest impact factor."

<comment><USER8> It should also be noted that (as of now) there are no immediate citations for these claims.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. We don't understand "our own" universe and pulling a "parallel" one out of the proverbial hat is supposed to help anything? I just view that as a violation of Occam's razor.

</comment><comment><USER10> I interpret this as: We are here for the journey experience and there are many different journeys!

</comment><comment><USER11> That's interesting, because "parallel universes", like gods, are mere dogmas and does not exist anywhere but minds of believers and has been built out of "social" mental constructs (memes) supported by flawed (correlation is not causation) "empirical evidences".)

<comment><USER12> Don't be a dick. These guys are legitimate scientists writing about a new mental model for quantum mechanics, and it's interesting.

I don't know how else you expect the field to evolve…

<comment><USER11> There are many parallel observers, not universes, colliding with each other.)

<comment><USER13> When I used to program Lisp I would habitually add an extra close parens to the end of long statements, just to make sure I didn't miss one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can you help me learn about climate change? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN friends,
I'm pretty concerned about the ramifications of climate change but I find myself woefully under-informed.
The difficulty I have is finding unbiased sources. To be clear - I believe in the phenomenon, and I believe in the consensus about our species causing it. But I find any searches I do through Google (for example) to be so muddled by catastrophizing and political strife that I find it hard to learn anything of value. So, I turn to this community.
Specifically, I'm looking for resources, or ways to find resources, that help me with the following:
1. I want to learn the technical causes of climate change (for example, I get that CO2 is bad, but I don't know much about the phrase "400 PPM.") and the "current state of global warming."
2. I want to understand grounded, realistic consequences due to happen in the next 10, 20 and 30 years.
3. I want to know what can and cannot be changed at this point, and I want to know what I can do to help as a non-scientist.
I am not averse to reading technical papers on this if it means I can learn about this in as "pure" a way possible. I also don't mean this to come across as lazy, I just really don't know what I don't know and I've seen enough convincingly educated comments here to ask. <comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming) covers much of that.

1\. Humans pollute. One form of pollution is exhaust gases. We burn a lot of fossil fuels. One of the resulting gasses is CO2 - carbon dioxide. This ends up in the atmosphere.

CO2 is naturally present in the atmosphere. However, we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere faster than it can be taken out. One reason is that fossil fuels are a form of long-term storage, which took CO2 out of the ecosystem across a long period of time. We are returning that CO2 at a much faster rate than it was created.

CO2 is a "greenhouse gas." It acts as an insulator for infrared energy, a.k.a, "heat". Light comes to the earth from the Sun, warms up the planet, and is re- radiated back into space. This includes a shift from visible to infrared energy. CO2 blocks infrared more than it does visible, so adding CO2 to the atmosphere can result in more heat.

(The mechanics are very complicated. Clouds reflect light, so lower energy. The oceans absorb CO2 but become more acidic.)

The amount of CO2 in the air is small. It's measured in parts per million, or "ppm". The "400 ppm" is a semi-symbolic threshold which indicates the severity of the problem. It's been over a million years since the CO2 levels were his high, meaning (roughly) that insulation level is this high, meaning (roughly) that it's going to get hotter.

2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming) gives a good summary of the effects of global warming.

3\. I cannot answer this one. There are a myriad of possibilities.

> I also don't mean this to come across as lazy, I just really don't know what > I don't know and I've seen enough convincingly educated comments here to > ask.

To help pursuade people that you aren't lazy, you could include information about what you've looked at, or why you feel like the Wikipedia pages are insufficiently unbiased.

There are many documents referenced from those pages.

A search for the IPCC reports includes pointers to things like [http://ipcc- wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/WG2AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf](http://ipcc- wg2.gov/AR5/images/uploads/WG2AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf) "Climate Change 2014 / Impacts, Adaption, and Vulnerability / Summary for Policymakers".

</comment><comment><USER3> > what I can do to help.

This excellent piece was on the front page of HN in last 12 months.

'What can a technologist do about climate change'

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622615)</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone need a designer? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a designer interested in working with startups - being in the midwest I am not around enough startups to get introductions or meet enough people to make the proper connections. Anyone have recommendations on how to approach startups with regards to design, or could make a connection for me: you can see some of my work here, designjohn.com <comment><USER2> Although I am not hiring or anything I would love to hear your opinions on how I can better design a site I am working on. (I posted not too long ago here - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3574003>). The basic response so far has been that the site functionality is awesome but the design -- not so much. If you could take a look and give some tips that would be great. If not, good luck with your search!

<comment><AUTHOR> Certainly, I'll leave a response on your post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey,

I would love to talk with you further regarding a position. I've sent you an email.

Talk to you soon.

Best, Shahed</comment>


DNA marks in adults tracked back to changes in earliest days of life - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-07-dna-adults-tracked-earliest-days.html <comment><USER2> This page, or something it loads, is causing Firefox to use 100% CPU. Cryptocurrency malware, perhaps?

<comment><USER3> Implying the resurrection of Lamarck with that domain name, my spidey-sense tingles.

<comment><USER4> They have stablished in other studies that the epigenetic marks can last for a few generations (at least in c.elegans) so the simplification is that the system works in 'lamarkian ways'.

This is not biologists trying to refute evolution, but rather a simplification to talk about these issues with a broader public</comment></comment></comment>


Sublime Text 2: Beta - <AUTHOR> http://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/sublime-text-2-beta <comment><USER2> As a longtime vim user I'm interested in knowing if there's anyone that's switched to Sublime Text (or TextMate, or any other similar contemporary editor) and if so, how has it gone? There seem to be a lot of cool features here but do they outweigh the benefit of knowing that they key bindings you've learned will continue to serve you for decades?

Please, this is not flamebait. I'm interested if anyone's made a switch from an old standby like vim/emacs to a new editor and how they've fared. Maybe it's time for me to start looking at all the new editors out there.

<comment><USER3> I gave the Sublime v 1.something a try when I was in a particular situation. It was ok; however, it was quite resource intensive. Start editing large files, and be prepared to wait...

<comment><USER4> I routinely edit files of 5-10k loc and have never had a problem. It blows ide's (eg eclipse) out of the water in terms of speed.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it's picked up since version 1. Also, it was a rather large file I was dealing with. Maybe I'll give it another go.

My understanding/impression at the time was that Sublime was at least in part using Python, although perhaps I'm mis-remembering. Once I observed that, the slowdown "made sense" to me. It may have also had to do with (regular expression) find/replace. So, altogether, my use may not have been "typical".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been using Sublime Text 2 since the first alpha and absolutely love it. Insanely customizable, really well laid out, great project management, fast as hell, etc. I'm still using 'E' on Windows, but on OS X this is all I use.

<comment><USER6> I've been using it for awhile as well and what's totally nuts is that the entire interface (colors, images, tabs, scrollbars, buttons) are all described in a CSS-like language inside a configuration file. I actually changed all the PNGs out to make the tabs look different and go for a Lion-like scrollbar and it was no sweat. Everything in the entire app is described in JSON config files so you can literally muck around with the internals as much as you want. The best is when you miss a comma, restart Sublime Text and the entire interface is garbled :)

<comment><USER7> I hate the black tabs and would something more like Chrome.

<comment><USER8> It's hard to see which one is highlighted. They need more contrast.

<comment><USER9> Totally agree.

I also wish the tab text collapsing worked differently. Once you have over a certain number of tabs they become pretty much useless as you can't see any titles anymore. In contrast, TextMate keeps all the tab titles visible and just moves the extra tabs into a dropdown. It's not perfect, but it's more usable than what Sublime currently does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honestly and evenly, if I'm a proficient vim/emacs user, why would I want to try this out?

I know there's plenty of market not underneath that hypothetical, but an editor has to answer that question to even register with me these days. I also assume I'm not alone.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, you're probably not the target of a full GUI editor... question probably isn't even worth answering.

<comment><USER12> What is a "full GUI editor"?

Vim and Emacs both have (optional) GUIs, but I've never used Sublime... am I missing something?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ever since I stopped waiting on TextMate 2 and learned to love myself more, I've moved on to vim and now emacs. I'd be weary of any editor that isn't open source or has a solid organization behind it.

</comment><comment><USER14> You know what I love about Sublime? It this nifty little feature where if you're looking at files in your file list in the side bar ... clicking through them brings up the content of that file in the tab you were last editing (no opening of a new tab) ... and when you go back to editing your file ... the content shows back up in the tab.

So you can look through files very quickly, just by clicking through them, instead of opening 20 files only to close them all when you find the one you want.

And if you start editing the content of a file you were just perusing, a tab opens for that file automatically. tres cool.

... totally sold me on sublime.

<comment><USER14> What would be really cool would be if the sidebar would jump to the file you were working on when you're editing it ... I have many projects open at a time, and I hate having to mouse down to find the file I'm currently working on ... to open ... say ... and associated or related file.

<comment><USER15> I do not know if this is due to some plugin I installed but my Vim 7.3 has the exact same feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I just gave it a try and absolutely love the minimap feature. Definitely helps with browsing through my code quickly. Once it had code-folding, I will hit 'Purchase'. Until then it's TextWrangler for me.

</comment><comment><USER17> For Ubuntu and Debian users, I would recommend installing this from the PPA. <https://launchpad.net/~webupd8team/+archive/sublime-text-2> Installing from this PPA worked well for me and it would appear to be up to date.

</comment><comment><USER18> I would say this is more than a replacement for TextMate on OS X. Stop waiting for a TM update and jumpt to Sublime Text 2. I've been using it since the early alphas and it's always been top notch.

The only thing that bothers me right now is the slightly different keyboard shortcuts between Linux and OS X, but I think you can "correct" those manually by editing a couple of config files. Other than that, I _LOVE_ this editor! :)

<comment><USER19> Not only that, but it's mostly compatable with things like .tmLanguage files, so there's even some cross-portability there.

(I've never used Textmate, being a Linux user, but being able to benefit from the ecosystem to get e.g. .pp file highlighting is great)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am really sick of new 'text editors' hitting the scene that can't handle editing text other than English.

<comment> T-R Have you been having a problem with a particular language? I've been using Sublime Text to work on code with comments in Japanese without a problem for almost 2 years now (well, the fonts were squished at first, but that bug was fixed a long time ago).

<comment><USER21> CJK input don't seem to work right (although it displays fine once entered). There are special steps you have to take because of the way input works for those languages. Here is the cached version of an old article I read describing how to do it (summary: use the NSTextInput protocol).

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ORe08or...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ORe08or6mQUJ:yllan.org/blog/archives/231&hl=en&gl=us&strip=0)

(It's a bit harder to read because the screenshots weren't cached, but it should still be a good starting point.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> ST2 is fantastic. One of the many benefits compared to TextMate is that it supports Emacs-style marks, which enables commands like kill-region and yank.

I have created an "Emacsify" package with some important keyboard shortcuts and additional commands. You can find it here: <https://github.com/stiang/EmacsifySublimeText>

</comment><comment><USER23> Sublime Text claims to be an editor for prose as well as for code. But does it allow you to use good-looking proportional fonts with good line spacing? Yes, in this respect (though in no other) a text editor should be like Word. I write all my "prose" in a simple text editor (Vim), but I dislike the limitation of using only fixed-width typefaces.

</comment><comment><USER24> How does it compare with powerful IDEs like Intellij/PyCharm or Eclipse? I mean, does it make sense to have an editor that is both good at "code, html and prose" (debugging and refactoring comes to mind...)?

<comment> T-R When I last worked on a Java project, I ended up going back and forth between Sublime Text and Eclipse.

ST makes navigating the code more quick and smooth - the minimap takes away the feeling of looking at code through tunnel vision, you can preview files much more quickly, and view more code at once with minimalist full-screen mode settings and multi-column layout. The regex search with active highlighting in both the minimap and the file is also nice, and multi-select is pretty helpful for refactoring repetitive code.

That said, ST is just a text editor, not an IDE - while some features, like autocomplete, are partially compensated for, it doesn't do type checking or follow references across files, so other features that stem from those will be missed; e.g. refactoring across multiple files is usually faster in Eclipse. I would usually do most of my editing in ST, and then type-check, compile, and debug in Eclipse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm loving Sublime... except the character spacing is weird for me (running on OSX using Droid Sans Mono). Has anyone else experienced this or know a solution? Sublime/Textmate example: <http://cl.ly/050P2l37121b2R0P0a3V>

Update: After going through other mono fonts... it seems like all of them are spaced just a little farther apart than what they appear like in Textmate, Espresso, etc.

<comment><USER26> That screenshot makes it look like there's no text folding arrows for Sublime, is that true? I wouldn't even try it out if it's missing that feature because I use it in Textmate dozens of times a day.

<comment><USER27> It's true. And it's one of the reasons I can't keep using Sublime.

Also, as nice as that preview-scrollbar is, it doesn't show the full file. Just ~ 3 screens worth. Almost totally useless for navigating a _file_ as opposed to a _function_. As much as I hate Visual Studio, the MetalScroll plugin is just what I would have liked. You can get a "feel" for the layout of the entire file / class / etc in one glance, navigating with it is massively better. <http://code.google.com/p/metalscroll/>

What would make me happy is TextMate + Chrome-like tokens in the scroll bar for where matches exist when you search. And threaded project-searches. But alas, TM hasn't changed in quite a while. I guess it's time to learn Vim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Been watching sublime for some time now after I gave it a short try. If only these lightweight editors provided CTRL-click type navigation I'd be sold. I use IntelliJ IDEA now - it is a powerhouse of irreplaceable help. It works magic with Java/Groovy/JavaScript/CSS/HTML navigation.

I need Sublime to provide type navigation. Forget debugging and other features.

</comment><comment><USER29> I use it and love it. If you ever tried 1.x and have not tried 2.x then you should give it another try. It's worlds better.

</comment><comment><USER30> As a TextMate user, I love Sublime and I'm trying to migrate over.

The built-in project-wide search is extremely slow (it seems to search absolutely everything and consumes 100% CPU while doing it) and seems unfinished. I really miss AckMate (<https://github.com/protocool/AckMate/wiki/Usage>).

Also, some files with canonical names (Gemfile, Rakefile) don't have file extensions nor shebang lines, and so Sublime can't determine the language for syntax highlighting. Is there a way to fix this?

</comment><comment><USER31> Their server is getting hammered right now. Anyone have a mirror?

</comment><comment><USER32> I LOVE this program and I can't wait for it to be in the Ubuntu Software Center...everyone should be able to get and use this really easily.

<comment><USER18> Sublime Text 2 is not open source and will never be included in Ubuntu or (likely) any other Linux distro. However, I will say that it is one of the very few software packages I have ever purchased. That's saying quite a bit coming from a dyed in the wool GPL guy like myself. :)

<comment><USER33> Ubuntu Software Center includes non-open source software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've been using Sublime 2 since early alpha, it is... aptly named. I've tried dozens of editors and eventually settled on TextMate many years ago.

Within 2 days, Sublime had completely* replaced it--something that many editors have failed to do.

I can't wait until I get paid, so that I can throw money at them.

* I still use TM on occasion for its GUI theme/bundle etc. editors.

</comment><comment><USER35> Poor syntax highlighting for HAML and coffeescript highlithing is non existent... This is why I love vim and the Janus "bundle" <https://github.com/carlhuda/janus/> : they are always up to date.

<comment><USER16> CS works for me. Just get the bundle for TextMate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I've wrote a ruby gem to act as an equivalent of TextMate's mate command, OS X only I'm afraid.

gem install slime

</comment><comment><USER37> I bought the alpha a few months back because I was very impressed with the demo. Its fast, looks good and has good amount of power, power close to Vim level in my opinion. But at the end of the day I use Vim because it is so ubiquitous (and open).

</comment><comment><USER38> Here is an alternate download location from the developer:

<http://126.96.36.199/>

Source: <http://twitter.com/sublimehq/status/86799940021518336>

</comment><comment><USER39> Does it do language autocomplete?

<comment><USER40> Yep. You hit CTRL+SPACE and it'll give you a drop down list of possible completions. It'll also have your previously typed variables in the list.

I'm more of a tab user myself though. So I'll type array_p and hit tab once for array_push. (for example)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Why should I use Sublime Text and not emacs? (note that I'm not experienced with emacs)

<comment><USER42> Probably because it will take you between 3 to 5 years less time to learn how to be proficient at your text editor if it's ST rather than emacs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I am a big fan of this project, and it's made some great progress over the months. Only thing holding me back right now: code navigator. The overview display is nice, but a full code navigator would seal the deal.

<comment><USER44> There's a hotkey that brings up a search with all of the methods in a particular file (apple-r on a mac) that does the trick for me. Be nice if it did a bit more, but it does enough for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Selecting text shows invisible characters, awesome (it's the little things).

</comment><comment><USER46> I really like the feel of sublime text, however there's one feature keeping me on Notepad++ which is double click to highlight text also highlights all instances of that word in the document.

</comment><comment><USER47> from textmate, to vim and now sublimetext2. I'm not that proficient on editors, but sublimetext is being great. fast and simple very configurable. my editor of choice for a couple of months.

</comment><comment><USER48> How's the keys customization? Is there a vi-mode key binding?!

<comment><USER49> This is the only downside I've found to using vi/vim full time. Wanting and expecting the keybindings everywhere, even in things like html text areas.

<comment><USER50> If you happen to still use Firefox, there's an extension It's All Text that allows you to use an external editor like vim for textarea input. <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/>

There are somewhat similar extensions for Chrome to get the same effect, but requires a more elaborate setup to get around the sandboxing used by Chrome. [http://superuser.com/questions/261689/its-all-text-for- chrom...](http://superuser.com/questions/261689/its-all-text-for-chrome)

<comment><USER49> Yeah I've got Vimium, so that is pretty nice, but I still get confused a little bit when it doesn't work as I expect. Vim has ruined my mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I like this as a code editor, but the lack of even a rudimentary project/directory view (other than the file list overlay which I don't like at all) kills it for me.

<comment><USER52> The "Add Folder to Project" isn't to your liking?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This seems pretty cool, but is there a way to filter out certain file/folder patterns (or globs) on a per-project basis rather than globally?

</comment><comment><USER54> Where is the Peepcode Screencast or something similar for this that teaches me the basics in about an hour?

<comment><USER55> With a discoverable, well-designed GUI, you shouldn't need one. Emacs and VIM are very powerful, but not very discoverable.

<comment><USER42> TextMate had a peepcode screencast. In fact, what launched textmate was probably DHH using TextMate in his "blog in 15 minutes" screencast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't stand the black tabs.

<comment><USER56> I think maybe the name of the software might be a more trivial thing to worry about in a text editor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Happy to say that I've already been using it for a while. Big fan.

</comment><comment><USER58> How does this compare with Coderoom?

</comment><comment><USER59> Poor support for PHP 5.3

</comment><comment><USER60> Wow, this looks great! I really dig the no-distraction mode, I did something similar with my terminal program and I love it.

 _clicks Download_

...oh. 10.6 required.

Shucks. At least I got to see pictures of it, I guess.

<comment><USER58> A good reason for a Linux guest on VBox, I spose.</comment></comment>


Ask:HN How can I learn Postgresql?  - <AUTHOR>

Read: Rails newbie, Unsuccessful importing a '|' delimiter text file to Postgresql database
I have a project that I am developing on rails which will need an extensive pre-populated database. After reading from several sources that to test a MVP, it is easy to deploy on Heroku without much sysadmin work and it uses postgres.
For last few days I have been trying to import a '|' delimiter text file to a postgresql database table and so far unsuccessful. I am using PostgresApp and PgAdmin3 to import the table and it says extra data at the end of column. The documentation on Postgresql is not favorable towards novice.
So what choices would be a better option in long term? 1. Should I outsource the work to a database developer on elance or Odesk? 2. Should I take time to learn more SQL in depth and start from there? <comment><USER2> Have you gone through the tutorial? If not, I suggest doing that. From there, once you have a solid base knowledge, you will be able to more easily understand the documentation and use other sources for more technical problems. As far as whether you should outsource it - how much database work does involve? It really depends on what your goals are, and whether you have time, or money. I suggest asking your technical question on stackoverflow.com if you haven't already, it's a much more fitting place to get help on that sort of thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which tutorial? I saw few tutorials on youtube and one on Udemy (I am in halfway). But most youtube tutorials are limited to how to create a table, add columns in pgadmin3. But the postgresql tutorial in Udemy is decent. Thank you for the feedback.</comment></comment>


Does my two-year-old daughter remember the womb? - <AUTHOR>

My mom once read a theory that very young children can sometimes remember the birth experiences, or even living in the womb, so when my younger brother was about one, she asked him if he remembered being born.  He didn't say anything, but what he did astounded us: He raised each of his arms and used his palms to press hard against both sides of his head, straining to squeeze his skull!  It seemed like his was trying to show us what it was like to be squeezed from the birth canal.
Fast Forward about twenty years.  Last night my two-year-old was afraid so my wife and I let her sleep in our bed with us.  After I woke up this morning I heard her quietly wispering to herself, over and over: "siss-SAW siss-SAW, siss-SAW sissSAW".
I listened for a long time, thinking she was probably 'talking' in her sleep, and finally quietly asked what she was saying, in case she wasn't asleep.
She wasn't.  She looked over at me and smiled. "Siss-SAW."
"Sister?"
"Siss-SAW."
We went back-and-forth like that a couple times.  I realised I didn't understand what she was saying, which is not uncommon, though her speech is getting clearer - she's almost three.  I decided to try a different angle, "Where did you hear that?
"Outside," she said first, and then she said, "when I was a baby in mommy's heart." I asked her if she meant she'd heard that sound before she was born, when she was living inside mommy's tummy (inaccurate, I know).  She said yes.
It hit me.  That siss-SAW sound was like the swishy sound a beating heart makes.  You hear it coming out of the speakers of a heart monitor.  We usually think "thump thump", but that is more a description of how a heartbeat feels than how it sounds.  Was my daughter just telling me what I wanted to hear, or was she waking up this morning reminiscing about her mother's heartbeat from inside the womb? <comment><USER2> _My mom once read a theory that very young children can sometimes remember the birth experiences_

Is you mother a neurologist? A memory researcher? A cognitive scientist, perhaps?

It's pretty well established that long-term memory formation doesn't really begin until after age 1. Here's a brief interview with a researcher: [http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/11.07/01-memory.htm...](http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/11.07/01-memory.html)

 _Was my daughter just telling me what I wanted to hear?_

Sure sounds that way.

<comment><USER3> That study tells of kids being given a toy for a little while, then revisiting them months later and seeing if they remember what to do with the toy.

For some reason I find that less than convincing, maybe they weren't interested in it, maybe it wasn't significant enough.

Birth is pretty much the single largest event in a babies first year of life trauma wise, I wouldn't be surprised if some remnant of that experience remained because of its intensity and I wouldn't be surprised if a baby remembered the sounds of being in the womb because of the duration of the exposure. Compared to either of those a toy seems to be pretty insignificant and if there is one thing the brain is really good at it is discarding stuff that isn't relevant. Older children that would remember the toy might have been more captivated by it. Babies that I know can be utterly fascinated by some things and completely oblivious to other things, then reverse their interest a while later for no reason that I as an adult can fathom.

Of course the memories of any early experience will fade over time but I wouldn't rule them out so quickly based on this specific experiment, which seems to assume rather a lot about the subjects desire to remember that particular toy and about vision, not memory per se. It's a pretty indirect test.

If something doesn't interest me I won't remember it even today, and I take it as read that my 'long term memory' has been formed by now.

Interesting reading:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=do+babies+remember+the+womb>

If there is a definitive study that babies can not form memories that could make it through to the age of the OPs child then you'd have to wonder how come babies age 1 can use words and seem to be able to understand some pretty complicated concepts as well as having learned how to use a good part of their bodies musculature, it's not at all rare to have 1 year olds that can walk or even run. If they can do all that without long term memory you'd have to posit some mechanism that allows them to do all this with a memory that spans at most a day. After all, if every day is a new day then you would have to explain the kind of character development you seen in babies during their first year and all this other stuff that I think is definitely memory based _without_ the ability to form long term memories.

Also, vision is a relatively new thing for a newborn, they've seen colours but not actual objects and it takes them a fair amount of time to start to make sense of our 3D world. Sound is different, babies can hear pretty good at a relatively early time during the gestation period (about 5 months in), which means that they then have 4 months to be exposed to their moms heartbeat in a way that they could be aware of it.

Also, you can refresh memories by re-thinking of something that you still remember and you can remember that experience as something by itself, so even with only a shorter term memory you could theoretically carry things over a longer period. Shades of 'memento' there.

<comment><USER2> I'm certainly not claiming that infants have the equivalent of Korsakoff's syndrome. And there certainly has been research that indicates that babies respond differently to the speech rhythms of the language they are exposed to in utero than foreign languages, and that infants are calmed by recordings of the fetal heartbeat/mother's heartbeat combination. In fact, when my eldest daughter was born, I bought a CD ("Music to Be Born By", by Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead) designed for this specific purpose.

My point is that there is pretty broad agreement that 2 year olds do not have conscious memories of birth or in utero life, of the nature described by the OP's anecdote. In fact, the sound of the maternal heartbeat was presumably so constant that it is difficult to imagine a fetus forming a conscious memory of it, as it would lack the "novelty" necessary for memory formation.

<comment><USER3> > the sound of the maternal heartbeat was presumably so constant that it is > difficult to imagine a fetus forming a conscious memory of it, as it would > lack the "novelty" necessary for memory formation.

That's a good point, actually. If something is repetitive enough it fades in to the background. I remember working next to an open window in Toronto while there was major construction going on to replace the road right next to the office. The windows were open because we didn't have money for AC and it was right under a roof. The first two days were terrible, after that we stopped hearing the jackhammers. Only when they finished did we notice...

<comment><AUTHOR> You stopped noticing them, but you do all the same have a very vivid memory of their existence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I believe it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Welcome to HN, Jason!</comment></comment>