Google's Mid-East Marketing Head Snatched Off Cairo Street - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/googles_mid-east_marketing_head_snatched_off_cairo.php

<comment><USER2> tl;dr: "whoops actually this headline is totally inaccurate. please ignore."

<comment><USER3>
      "(Update: Chris Albon tells us in the comments that a
      number of Ghonim's friends "have confirmed for a day now
      that the man in the video and screenshot is definitely
      *not* him." Because of Albon's assertion that "at this
      point the rumor is hurting the search for him," we have
      removed the screenshot and the video we had previously
      posted.)"</comment></comment>


San Francisco can become a world capital. First it needs to get over itself - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/01/san-francisco-can-become-a-world-capital-first-it-needs-to-get-over-itself/

<comment><USER2> San Francisco has lots of great qualities, but constantly telling ourselves that it is the greatest place in the world home to the greatest (or, in the author's words, the "smartest, most creative") people is tiresome. As South Park memorably put it, San Francisco has an abundance of "smug." The city has real problems, of which housing is only one.

The SF Weekly (an alternative newspaper here) has published several thought- provoking articles on the state of the city over the years. They are all titled, "The Worst Run Big City in the US."

Those articles include: [http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst- run-big-ci...](http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-city- in-the-u-s/)

[http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-04-14/news/the-muni-death- spira...](http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-04-14/news/the-muni-death-spiral/)

[http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-06-13/news/muni-sfmta-buses- pub...](http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-06-13/news/muni-sfmta-buses-public- transportation-maintenance-accidents/)

<http://www.sfweekly.com/2010-10-20/news/let-it-bleed/>

[http://www.sfweekly.com/2011-01-26/news/premium-pay-san- fran...](http://www.sfweekly.com/2011-01-26/news/premium-pay-san-francisco- city-workers-bonuses-budget-wages/)

[http://www.sfweekly.com/2011-07-27/news/san-francisco- commis...](http://www.sfweekly.com/2011-07-27/news/san-francisco-commission- inefficien-joe-eskenazi/)

San Francisco also has a civil grand jury that periodically issues reports on topics of citywide concern. These are generally ignored, even though they point out significant present and future problems (I'm thinking specifically of looming pension issues).

[http://www.sfsuperiorcourt.org/general-info/grand- jury/jury-...](http://www.sfsuperiorcourt.org/general-info/grand-jury/jury- reports)

I've lived and worked here since college, so I'm not immune to the city's charms. But we shouldn't be blind to its faults, either.

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER3> > San Francisco has lots of great qualities, but constantly telling ourselves > that it is the greatest place in the world

Trust me, the rest of the country finds it pretty amusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> San Francisco is completely, utterly corrupt when it comes to housing. In 2011 there were a total of 418 new housing units built [1]. Really? One of the hottest areas with the highest demand in the entire country and only 418 new units were added in a full year? That's an absolute outrage.

[1] [http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2012/05/san_franciscos_to...](http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2012/05/san_franciscos_total_housing_inventory_and_pipeline_rep.html)

<comment><USER5> In case you haven't noticed sf is bounded by the Pacific Ocean. It can't just grow and it already has a very high housing density. The only area that can absorb new housing is china basin (3rd st) and that is being developed. The rest is already full.

Do we really want or feel that more people in sf is a good thing? Why not live down the peninsula or the east bay where there's an unlimited amount of space.

<comment><USER4> There is extremely high demand and artificially limited supply. Without corruption land and buildings would be purchased at fair market value and additional housing units would be built up in their place. As it stands the few real estate owners can continuously increase prices without further investment because corrupt politics prevents any new competition.

San Francisco has a love affair with beat-up 100 year old victorian houses and outrageously high prices. If I owned one of those houses I also wouldn't want to let any new real estate developers into my Cool Kids Club.

<comment><USER6> Excuse me, how is that a problem again? The same could be said of any exclusive area in the US. If you find San Francisco extremely expensive, then move elsewhere. Seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree with nearly everything this article says, with one important caveat: this won't last.

The Great Nerd Influx of 2012 is just one of many boom/bust cycles that San Francisco has experienced, and it's far from the most robust -- there are a lot of good reasons to believe that this sudden surge in activity will fade in a few years as thousands of doomed startups hit the series-A wall. Rents have shot up dramatically in a year, but it's almost entirely a side-effect of the funding bubble. It's hard to fault government for reacting slowly to short- term phenomena.

I moved here at the tail end of the last funding boom, and watched rents _fall_ after Sequoia sent out the "Good Times, RIP" slide deck. Think it can't happen again? It will. It doesn't make a lot of sense to run out and rip down the victorians to make room for market-rate condos simply because SOMA is a trendy place for startups at this particular moment.

<comment><USER8> The ability to build should not depend on whether a boom will last...even if we could trust people that predict that it won't. The entire US continues to benefit from an overly exuberant boom in fiber-optic cables in the late 90's. San Francisco would continue to benefit from the housing stock even if all the nerds packed up and moved to Oakland.

<comment><USER7> _"The ability to build should not depend on whether a boom will last"_

That's an assertion of fact, when it should be an argument. And it's not a particularly good argument.

There are a lot of valid reasons for the city to regulate construction: fire safety, traffic control, utility provisioning, transit, urban/community planning, affordable housing, diversity, and aesthetics (just to name a few off the top of my head). These concerns mean that the city gets to control building policy, and once they do that, _how_ they control that policy is a question of degree.

Every city in the world regulates the number and type of construction permits that are issued. San Francisco may be conservative about issuing new permits, but nobody reasonable is arguing that they shouldn't be allowed to regulate construction _at all_. If the city regulators announced tomorrow that it was open-season for new construction in San Francisco, they'd be doing a disservice to everyone who lives here.

<comment><USER8> It was an argument. I don't know you could confuse it for anything else. And your counter to my argument was a straw man. I never questioned the idea that governments shouldn't be able to regulate...just that regulating growth on the prediction of a bust following a current boom is not only short sighted, but that the housing stock growth presents few burdens even in the presence of a bust.

<comment><USER7> _"I never questioned the idea that governments shouldn't be able to regulate...just that regulating growth on the prediction of a bust following a current boom is not only short sighted, but that the housing stock growth presents few burdens even in the presence of a bust."_

I think part of my original comment was confusing: the restrictions on building in San Francisco aren't new. I'm saying that it's probably not a great idea to lift those restrictions based on short-term trends. If the city were being reactionary and _lowering_ the number of permits in response to this boom, I think that would be pretty stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Things are getting better... the top post on HN currently refers to 2011's 418 units, but this was following a huge economic downturn. Projects in the city take huge resources and require years of permitting and approvals, followed by years of construction. This isn't a 'flip-the-switch' type of problem like you can solve in the suburbs. This process could obviously be expedited, and I hope people work toward that, but things aren't as dire as they sound.

I really think that the current administration is much more pro-growth than previous ones have been. There are 370k housing units currently available in the city. The pipline report has some really good news as far as housing is concerned. (<http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=1691>)

* 48,000 new housing units approved (including Candlestick, Treasure Island, and Park Merced developments, but still a 13% increase in available units)

* 4,200 units currently under construction

* 9mm sq ft of new commercial real estate approved

* 3mm sq ft of new retail space approved

</comment><comment><USER10> I wish there were a way to take a slice of Oakland or maybe San Jose (or conceivably, San Mateo), make it independent with great services (Palo Alto quality schools, UK quality police) and pro-growth policies.

Emeryville kind of does this, but isn't ideally positioned (Caltrain and/or BART, highways to Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Francisco).

Ideally also some special tax benefits (at least California, but maybe even federal) due to being "enterprise zones".

It would be politically unpopular to redevelop an entire area of Oakland or San Jose (i.e. moving out everything), and segregating services, but the net benefits would be worth it for even the remaining parts of the city and county.

I think some of the "eastern Alameda/Contra Costa county" areas work on this model, too -- there are a surprising number of corporate HQs for enterprise companies out there, and especially regional offices for non-bay-area companies. Higher density and less suburbia would make it more appealing to startups, though. I was surprised by just how nice Walnut Creek, Livermore, Pleasanton, etc. are.

<comment><USER11> _Emeryville kind of does this, but isn't ideally positioned_

Emeryville had great potential, I think the location is great, but as you mention, for getting to SF or SV the public transit sucks. And is alas pretty- unwalkable, even locally. If San Pablo had a Bart Stop (without the 1-3 mile walk to it), it would be much more interesting place, IMHO.

<comment><USER10> Emery-go-round made up (slightly) for the BART situation. Still not great, though, and it got a lot worse in the past year.

Also, the bordering areas of Berkeley and Oakland are sufficiently bad that I feel uncomfortable at night in some parts of Emeryville. I don't know how you could really set up a separate city without some kind of natural border like the water or hills.

<comment><USER11> yeah, i should caveat the location is great strategically, in the sense that it is well placed on the map and in (close to Sf/soma, Cal, the Water, 580, weather, etc). in terms human geography/sociology, it has some drawbacks that go beyond the transit issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've read some of JWZ's blog posts about trying to get permits for the expansion of his club in San Francisco. I wouldn't hold my breath for this type of expansion to happen.

</comment><comment><USER13> Okay. Here is how I look at it. I am a smart, focussed, imaginative guy. I believe pretty strongly that if I lived in a city where I was in close proximity to a lot of other smart, talented people, I could make some great things happen. I have a lot of ideas that would require teams of such people to realise, any one of which could become an important business or non-profit venture. The Internet is great, and web-based collaboration and idea- realisation tools are certainly developing and making the world flatter, but proximity is still a very large catalyst to things happening. San Francisco happens to sound like one of the best cities for someone like me to move to. I happen to live very far from San Francisco, in another country. I am sure there are a lot of people like me around the world. The cost and difficulty and unknowns of the idea of moving to SF are pretty intimidating.

Now what would happen if all the people like me were able to easily move to San Francisco, and start meeting and talking and coming up with ideas and doing things together? If those big walls of distance, national borders, and evidently prohibitively expensive real estate were broken down? I imagine some very great things could happen. One thing this article pin-pointed is interesting: salaries at major SF tech companies are high because of the housing shortage. What might happen if you could concentrate the world's smartest people in one great city with affordable housing, so that the companies they might start could pay lower wages? Well you could definitely start companies a lot easier, and they could be profitable at lower levels, so it would encourage I think better and more diverse companies and internet services. I think San Francisco would also benefit hugely.

I think eventually a city like this has to come along eventually. If there is going to be a global village, there needs to be a global hub where the best and the brightest can meet and work together. Currently the world doesn't have such a place. It seems like SF has as good a shot as any of becoming that hub. Doing so would of course require some sacrifices, so the question for SF seems to be, do you want to go on being sorta great but holding off true greatness because you don't want to give up any of the things you like about the way you have things now, or are you willing to aim high?

The question for anyone else is, what can you do to make it much much easier for people from around the world to gather together in a single place? There are a lot of legislatory hurdles to be dissolved. Also anyone who made it their business to help people make the jump could do well I think.

Also, as an aside, nation-states and borders are so 20th century. Eventually the world will have no borders - a truly united world has to happen eventually. Removing borders should be a priority for everybody.

</comment><comment><USER14> "If it accepts its fate as large metropolis, San Francisco could become the next New York, Hong Kong, or Paris"

There's a reason I want to eventually move to SF and it's not just because it is the center of the tech industry.

</comment><comment><USER15> San Francisco needs to work on its public transportation infrastructure before it even starts thinking about becoming as densely packed as New York, Tokyo, etc.

<comment><USER16> No doubt. Brooklyn to NYC takes 10 minutes.

Sunset to downtown is 45. Madness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There are a couple of things that really really bug me about this city:

1) The horrible state of the public transport system. Irrespective of the recent rains we have been having, the Muni system appears completely broken down. There are buses on the same route which appear at bizarre periodicities (A couple of buses every 5 minutes and then one bus after 50 minutes). The metro line (especially the N line) has way too many repairs going on. Also, there is a ridiculously large amount of cars on the road and way too few bike lanes. This is something the city should fix by a combination of exorbitant tolls, making parking expensive and taxes.

2) The homeless people situation. While I am sorry for their situation, the city's response to homeless people appears to be either switching from completely ignoring the problem to sending out a few town cars every couple hours in the nights so that they can chase homeless people from one block of a street to the other.

</comment><comment><USER18> The author writes, "Victorian houses... are very pretty. They're also very inefficient. Collectively, they take up a lot of space, but don't house very many people... if developers were allowed to do it, they'd buy up small houses and apartments all over the city and replace them with highrises"

Funny, you don't often hear about plans to start building tower blocks in Pacific Heights, a neighborhood with probably one of the lowest population densities in the city. Surely, given the economic arguments, VCs and business leaders residing there wouldn't mind a bit of construction?

The author believes "Build more houses, lots and lots more, and you'll finally start seeing rents go down" yet the evidence of rental prices in Manhattan, Tokyo and Hong Kong suggest otherwise. In fact, today in Hong Kong, a car parking spot costs double the average US house price! [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-26/hong-kong- parking-c...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-26/hong-kong-parking- costs-387-000-as-cash-moves-from-homes.html)

This battle over high-rises has been going on for decades, through every boom and bust, and this time is no different. The one constant is people falling in love with the pretty Victorian houses on tree lined streets. Amen to that!

1971 - The Ultimate High-rise: San Francisco's Mad Rush to the Sky. [http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Highrise-Franciscos-Rush- Towa...](http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Highrise-Franciscos-Rush- Toward/dp/B000K6QLPM)

1999 - Do high-rises create a healthier economy? [http://www.spur.org/publications/library/article/proposition...](http://www.spur.org/publications/library/article/propositionM07011999)

2005 - Is San Francisco's Anti-Highrise Movement Dead? <http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=2317>

2007 - Ugly canyons everywhere! With the latest San Francisco construction boom, history repeats itself. <http://www.sfbg.com/2007/02/21/next-mad-rush- sky>

</comment><comment><USER8> Its a great article. Unfortunately, the problem plagues Seattle too, which also has the potential to be a world city, but can't get over its incredible NIMBYism. You can't even remodel your kitchen without getting your neighborhood to vote on it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't buy the taller buildings = more wealth, creativity and energy argument. New York and Tokyo are easy examples to refer to but they are in scale and history completely different. What about other cities that build high and are on a smaller or average size scale? Good examples? And you couldn't double SF's size by building higher easily anyway. City and county is 800,000 people now, doubling would bring it to population of Manhattan. That's lots of floors in lots of buildings. Tokyo is 13 million: 16x the size of SF. Not a relevant comparison.

<comment><USER20> > I don't buy the taller buildings = more wealth, creativity and energy > argument.

If you haven't read The New Geography of Jobs, I highly recommend it. It gives an excellent explanation of why having a higher density of knowledge workers increases their per-capita productivity and creativity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was surprised that the risk of a large earthquake was not mentioned in the article. Having lived in SF for over a year and experienced two relatively minor 4.0 earthquakes, this is a real risk and one that suggests it doesn't make sense to pack the city with large, high rise buildings.

SF is also a city of extremes - it contains the richest people in the world and the poorest people. Something really need to be done about the large mentally ill population before SF can be considered a truly forward looking city.

<comment><USER22> It was mentioned. The author briefly stated it was not worth talking about since other earthquake-prone cities like Tokyo have built up despite this just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's fundamentally a culture difference. The West Coast is not the East Coast, and SF will never be NYC.

<comment><USER24> That's a little vague … could you elaborate?

<comment><USER25> more hallucinogens on the left coast. No surprise BSD was a left coast hippy idea, and mainframe OS was a IBM/east coast thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> San Francisco is tiny. It covers less than 50 square miles! Liberalized housing rules aren't going to offset that. This article is making an observation about the greater SF metro area and using it to drive an argument about SF proper; it's incoherent.

</comment><comment><USER27> Meh. If you want New York, you know where to find it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Major agreement. Urban housing is effectively a cartel, in that the owners spend a lot of time corrupting city councils and zoning boards to prevent new supply so the absentee mega-owners can charge exorbitant prices. It's rent- seeking (literally) parasitism at its worst.

<comment><USER29> If that's so, how come the city still has rent control? Not that I think rent control is a good idea, but property owners hate it and by your thesis they should be able to get it abolished because they have the city government in their pocket. In reality, it's usually residents and tenants who raise the largest objections to new developments, either on environmental, value- reduction, or affordability grounds.

<comment><USER11> SF rent control is profitable for landlords. It resets with each tenant. So, only if you overpay when you initially buy are you ever going to lose money b/c rent control. And if you do that, its a fault of the bid being off.

<comment><USER26> I don't follow this. How could it be more profitable for landlords to have a price ceiling?

<comment><USER11> Its not that its 'more profitable', it is that it 'is profitable' (enough). And, its not only profitbale enough, but it creates a lock-in (people wont move/give up their space) wich reduces turnover. The ideal position for a landlord is protiable tenants that don't turnover. That's why there is more inertia in the system than seems at first blush to be likely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Please start a company in your own town. San Francisco is full. Kthx.</comment>


Hackathon ideas - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2011/04/08/11FreeHackathonIdeas.html

<comment><USER2> Totally agree: _commercial APIs are over-represented and open formats and protocols are not represented at all._

Some comments:

 _4\. Centralized subscription manager._

If we're talking RSS, nearly everything syncs with Google Reader at this point. I'd love for that protocol to be opened up...

 _8\. Open source Dropbox clone._

This would be awesome, especially with Dropbox's history of design related security issues.

 _11\. Make Apache an end-user product._

WAMP/MAMP and similar are one step in this direction.

<comment><USER3> >11\. Make Apache an end-user product. WAMP/MAMP and similar are one step in this direction.

Take a look at Opera Unite (<http://unite.opera.com/overview/>). I'm really surprised nobody has taken this idea and run with it.

On second thought, I guess that is what the CouchDB guys are/were doing, but I don't think the whole picture has come into focus for anyone yet. It will quite something once it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are there general topics people would be interested in for hackathons that would be more interesting? I'd like to see more "hackathons for good" like <http://cure.nyhacker.org> or interesting topics like <http://gamehackday.org></comment>


Mining Strava's cycling data - <AUTHOR> http://ocfnash.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/mining-the-strava-data/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. You should link to the segments you are talking about. (Edit: I see you did now, sorry. Edit2: Wow, Ryan Sherlock has that KOM in Ireland and the KOM on Old La Honda in California. Nice work by a non-Protour rider!)

 _Amongst the questions that I thought it might be interesting to attack are the following.._

I think you'll find many people are using Strava data to attack the problem of developing a model for maximal power output over time. Veloclinc[1] and DJConnel[2] are probably the best places to start for reading about this.

The "cleaning data" section surprised me. In my experience maybe 10% of (manually inspected) efforts have significant problems, but you seem to have thrown away a lot more than that on Col du Tourmalet and Alpe d'Huez. Stocking Lane looks roughly in the order I'd expect. Any idea what is going on there?

 _it is likely that a person will cycle a 15% gradient towards the end of a climb more slowly than the 15% near the beginning._

Not really. Judging your maximum speed on a climb is a significant problem and it goes both ways (especially on faster cyclists). Hence the "Chris Froome looking at his stem" meme[3] - he is notorious for climbing based on power output (which maximises your overall velocity).

Regarding altitude, you are best to look at the device the data came from. Phones are notorious for getting altitude data wrong, whereas Garmin devices are pretty good. Using Google data is mixed: the gradient of the road changes significantly depending what line you take, and that isn't replicated in Google's data.

Regarding your power equation, you realize Strava already does this (as power estimates), right? [4] is a pretty decent Javascript version. The problem is that it is _very_ weight dependant, and getting an exact weight for a bike+rider+clothes is pretty hard from random Strava data.

[1] Hard to read, but eg: [http://veloclinic.tumblr.com/post/85194606798/ward- smith-cp-...](http://veloclinic.tumblr.com/post/85194606798/ward-smith-cp-vs- wko4-ftp-if-you-use-the-correct)

[2] eg: [http://djconnel.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/numerical-testing- of...](http://djconnel.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/numerical-testing-of-maximal- power.html)

[3] [http://chrisfroomelookingatstems.tumblr.com/](http://chrisfroomelookingatstems.tumblr.com/)

[4] [http://www.kreuzotter.de/english/espeed.htm](http://www.kreuzotter.de/english/espeed.htm)

<comment><USER3> Android vs. Garmin altitude data seems like an irrelevant distinction, as Strava keeps and maintains forever the altitude profile of the very first person who rode from A to B, no matter how ridiculous the data. On the route I ride most often, up Tunnel Rd in Oakland, California, it's a climb of about 1000 feet over about 4 miles, depending on where you reckon the start and end, but on the whole length it's just monotonically uphill. There are no down grades. But the Strava data is all over the place. It goes up and down on small scales constantly. It says there's a -47% grade at one point. The profile looks like the business end of a backsaw, when in reality it's just up.

To make any sense of this data requires substantial low-pass filtering over their altitude data. I don't know why Strava doesn't try to clean this up.

<comment><USER4> Using the API you can get both the Segment altitude data and the Segment Effort altitude data. The segment data is what's displayed on the website and can be bad. But the Segment Effort data would be a subset of the data from the activity. So you can get many many versions of the altitude for the segment and do any type of analysis you wish.

<comment><USER2> Can I ask why Strava doesn't do something about the Segment altitude data?

<comment><USER4> Priorities....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you guys are interested in data-mining Strava, here is some interesting info on their metro project and how they are using it to affect change.

[http://blog.strava.com/arent-we-all-people-for- bikes-7783/](http://blog.strava.com/arent-we-all-people-for-bikes-7783/)

[http://metro.strava.com/](http://metro.strava.com/)</comment>


Behind the Pins: Building Analytics - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.pinterest.com/post/96104443004/behind-the-pins-building-analytics

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi bcbrown,

Thank you for reading the post! We use AWS as our processing cluster, so we can easily scale according to our needs. The condition job here is a way to check cross workflow dependencies. When each job succeeded and emitted files, it will create a success file within the output directory. The condition job just looks for the existence of the success file, which is fast and reliable.

-Tongbo

</comment><comment><USER2> A 19 hour, 100-job Hadoop pipeline! Are you running up against the limits of your architecture, or do you think there's room to grow?

"The MapReduce pipeline starts to process data as soon as the data is available. It's triggered by the condition jobs which periodically check if the data is available on S3." What do you mean by that? What's the trigger condition, when the number of logged events reaches a threshold? I was a little surprised to hear it's dynamically triggered, and not on a scheduled clock.

Cool stuff, thanks for posting it.</comment>


Entanglement-based secure quantum cryptography over 1,120 kilometres - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2401-y <comment><USER2> Naive question: quantum entanglement can't break causality, right? We can't use it for faster than light communication.

<comment><USER3> You are correct, at least as far as current theory and technology is concerned. There must be a conventional carrier signal and the actual latency is the latency of that signal.

What entanglement may allow here is a perfect absolutely unbreakable one time pad. It may allow encryption that is physically impossible to break over any time span (without access to the devices on either end or a side channel attack on those devices that is).

It may also allow this without asymmetric key exchange. Symmetric algorithms like AES or ChaCha are still practically unbreakable with a quantum computer as long as 256 bit keys are used, but quantum secure conventionally compostable key agreement is still in the research stages.</comment></comment>


The Virtues of Monitoring - <AUTHOR> http://www.paperplanes.de/2011/1/5/the_virtues_of_monitoring.html

<comment><USER2> This is a really good introduction to the different levels of infrastructure monitoring and their various pros/cons.

<http://librato.com> (full disclosure: I hack there) is a startup with a new kind of entry in the process-level monitoring/management space. Would love any feedback the infrastructure-minded part of the community here might have.

</comment><comment><USER3> Monitoring is one of the most important thing.

Rule of thumb: Think of everything you wish you had monitored after a crisis has happened (which might be "everything").

<comment><USER4> the problem is you will probably think of monitoring the stuff that you wished you had monitored only _after_ the crisis happened, people are built in a way that makes it hard for us to think of what may go wrong.

So another simple rule I learned with time is to trust/understand the defaults,plugins,knobs,metrics that come with well known monitoring systems ("why the hell should I monitor _that_?"). This way you use the experience of other people as a backup for your own.

<comment><USER5> How about starting with the application/business metrics first (as those are presumably easier to articulate). As things fail over time move down the stack (infra/system) to get earlier warnings?</comment></comment></comment>


Offshore Wind Farms Don't Harm Marine Life - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/offshore-wind-farms-dont-harm-shore-crabs <comment><USER2> It's not the main point of this article, but I frequently see sources mentioning wind turbines as a cause of bird deaths. Clearly, it's true. Wind turbines may kill over half a million birds per year in the US[1]. That said, apparently cars and other factors like window strikes against stationary buildings, cats, cell towers, and electric wires kill orders of magnitude more birds[2]. Big numbers sound horrible without perspective...

[1] [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wsb.260/abstract](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wsb.260/abstract) [2] [http://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird- mort...](http://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mortality/)</comment>


Ask HN: Spot SpaceX Starlink Tail - <AUTHOR> I can't wait to see the tail pass over the roof of my house (Italy). Does anyone already have a ready app? (input: coordinates - output: visibility date and time) <comment><USER2> From a reddit thread[0], there are preliminary TLE data here[1] and you can enter that into gpredict[2] to show when you might be able to see a pass.

Edit: I wasn't able to easily find newer TLEs from the NORAD database, and I don't know how off the preliminary TLEs from [1] might be.

Edit2: Updated TLEs are in a later email on satobs: [3].

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/bslrii/will_s...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/bslrii/will_starlink_satellites_be_visible_to_the_naked/)

[1] [http://www.satobs.org/seesat/May-2019/0193.html](http://www.satobs.org/seesat/May-2019/0193.html)

[2] [http://gpredict.oz9aec.net/](http://gpredict.oz9aec.net/)

[3] [http://www.satobs.org/seesat/May-2019/0207.html](http://www.satobs.org/seesat/May-2019/0207.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> brilliant! and thank you very much!</comment></comment>


Generic FSMs in Erlang - <AUTHOR> http://learnyousomeerlang.com/finite-state-machines

<comment><USER2> Good stuff. Compared to the more "popular" generic behaviours like gen_server, gen_fsm doesn't get a lot of attention. It's nice to see it added to your tutorial with this level of detail.

<comment><USER3> I've also gotten good mileage out of "gen_event"; I have a protocol with a generic connection layer, then a modular part where you claim you support "Module X", which is implemented as a gen_event plugin that first verifies you can do that, then allows this connection to have that module. It makes it really easy to write something relatively secure by ensuring you can get to certain capabilities if and only if you pass a certain check to validate you ability to have them. It's a good tradeoff between typing (as in, typing things on the keyboard) and security for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Author, here. I hope you enjoy.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, I am enjoying it. I'm working on a holiday project that includes writing an Erlang server that will need a FSM. Even though I've written many FSMs in other languages I'm new to Erlang, so it's great to have this nice guide. Glad I decided to peruse Hacker News before I started on the FSM implementation!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I prefer name-brand flying spaghetti monsters actually.

<comment><USER7> That what was I thought when I saw the title, too. However, from experience I realized that making any sort of comment alluding that without adding substantively to the discussion would certainly elicit sanctimonious shows of disapproval.

The key to getting away with that in this topic would be to make an insightful comment about finite state machines, and throw the FSM reference in at the beginning or the end. Extra bonus if you can skillfully weave a Flying Spaghetti Monster narrative into your comment, like a parable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Too bad the new "Erlang and OTP in Action" book leaves gen_fsm out of scope.

Anyway gen_fsm behavior is pretty weak comparing to FSM frameworks I used in C++: no on_entry / on_exit callbacks.

Also, I'm not sure you can use gen_fsm sequentially by itself (i.e. without Erlang process).

<comment><USER3> "no on_entry / on_exit callbacks."

That's not too hard to fix; write your handle_event callback as something that observes the state, dispatches out to the "really_handle_event" function, observes the new state, and fires the desired callback, implemented however you want them to be. Ten reusable lines or so.

"Also, I'm not sure you can use gen_fsm sequentially by itself (i.e. without Erlang process)."

Not really much point, really. The gen_fsm itself is basically wrapping the state machine described there into a supervisor tree. If you don't want the supervisor tree, it is utterly trivial to write a state machine of your own in Erlang. It is one place where pattern matching excels. You want some sort of record indicating your state, then you can do things like:

      -record(state, {name, val1, val2}).

      event1(State=#state{name = initial}) -> handle...
      event1(State=#state{name = connecting}) -> handle...
      event1(State=#state{name = connected}) -> handle...

      event2(State=#state{name = initial}) -> handle...

and so on. A little more plumbing is necessary to manage returning the new state but that's the basic idea, which is just about the only other thing you "get" from gen_fsm "for free".

<comment><USER8> As Erlang is Turing-complete, obviously you can code FSM in it. The question is, giving Erlang/OTP Soft-Realtime Telecom roots, why FSM primitives are so weak?

From a good FSM library I would expect following:

      1. Specify human readable STT (State Transition Table)
      2. For each event/state combination specify if it's valid or should be ignored, etc.
      3. On entry / on exit for each state.
      4. Masking/unmasking of events.

gen_fsm as it today do not provide much value over gen_server.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great stuff. I was just arguing on the ErlangCamp mailing list that the gen_fsm behaviour is great! I just sent this out to everyone.</comment>


Show:Tot – Convert any text into trello task - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tot-convert-any-text-into/ahbnljonnejlldcfccaklgpcblpodfeo <comment><AUTHOR> My friend came up with an idea and we made this chrome extension (our first) which can help to convert any text in the task.

Check here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoYb1ol_Sp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoYb1ol_Sp0)

Please give it a try and let me know if you want to integrate other task management tool like clickup or asana etc</comment>


Router can power your devices wirelessly from 15 feet away - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/05/energous-wattup-wireless-charging-demo/ <comment><USER2> No, it can't. This happens every year, and every year it turns out to be snake oil.

Anyone remember this?

[http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/09/airnergy-wifi-power- syste...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/09/airnergy-wifi-power-system-gives- rca-a-reason-to-exist-video/)

<comment><USER2> Also how are these guys a public company? They're acting like some hotshot new startup, but they're a public company with nothing to their name but a patent and the fuzzy goal of licensing this pipe dream to other companies. The executives seem to have impressive bios, but the only ones that are taking a salary are the CEO and CTO. They supposedly have 9 employees as of 2014 (there are 6 non-independent board members, so three engineers?).

It just keeps getting weirder... this is starting to look more like fraud than your average startup-peddling-snake-oil.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are they ignoring the FCC's EIRP maxima (and beamforming penalty) on the 2.4GHz ISM band?

If they aren't, they can still get 1W theoretically, which is actually useful: it can kind of charge your phone in 8 hours. Assuming 100% of the power is captured by the antenna, that is. (Note that I say theoretically: the real world is very bad for theoretical models.)

Also something to worry about: the FCC's maximum permissible radiation exposure. For 6 minute controlled application (people near the transmitter know it's on), you're allowed an energy density of 5mW per square centimeter. An iPhone 4 is about 55 cm^2, so that would mean a maximum of 275mW. That would charge the phone in 24 hours. (These are guidelines for amateur radio operators, not Part 15 devices; I don't know what the regs around Part 15 say about power density. The regs also cover far-field effects, not near-field effects, so perhaps they can get around these.)

Finally, if you want to play with beamforming and figure out how to get 100% of the power to a 55 cm^2 area, try: [http://apenwarr.ca/beamlab/](http://apenwarr.ca/beamlab/)

<comment><USER4> 2.4Ghz is only used for the bluetooth communication, not for the power transfer. That happens at 5.7-5.8Ghz.

"What are the RF spectrums being used by WattUp?" [1]

\- 2.4GHz (Unlicensed) for Bluetooth Low Energy communication

\- 5.7-5.8 GHz (Unlicensed Industrial, Scientific & Medical, ISM) band for power transfer"

[1] [http://www.energous.com/page-f/](http://www.energous.com/page-f/)

<comment><USER3> Same EIRP regulations and RF safety regulations for all ISM bands, as far as I can tell.

(900MHz has a slightly difference RF exposure calculation that you have to do compared to 1300MHz and up. But 2.4 and 5 are the same.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See also:

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

On HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404884)

And this one:

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/11/disruptive-defined-ubeam- la...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/11/disruptive-defined-ubeam- lands-750k-to-let-you-charge-gadgets-without-plugs/)

On HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4232925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4232925)

This is a weird bit in the article:

"To demo its tech, Energous has turned a casino suite into a faux home full of wireless power, which we dropped by to allow the company's founder Michael Leabman to put on a show for us."

If there is one thing that sets off my spidey sense during due diligence on new products it is demos in controlled environments.

</comment><comment><USER6> The post and the product page at [http://www.energous.com/overview/](http://www.energous.com/overview/) don't have much details. However the product pages has some data about the power output:

> Power Delivered to a Consumer Full-Featured Product

> 4W delivered simultaneously to 4 devices, 0-5 feet

> 2W delivered simultaneously to 4 devices, 5-10 feet

> 1W delivered simultaneously to 4 devices, 10-15 feet

> Delivering on average 2W to 4 devices simultaneously within the charging > envelope

Things that concern me are, in random order:

\- Is it safe to keep the device (let say it's a phone) in a pocket or close to one's head while is it charging?

\- Is it safe to sit/sleep for hours in between the charger and a (possibly somebody's else) device?

\- How focused the power beam is?

\- What are the safety measures to prevent other people stealing the power? Think about the family living on the other side of the wall. Probably Bluetooth pairing, but I'm not 100% sure.

\- Does it cause reduction of bandwidth for WiFi? (it uses the same frequencies)

\- Compliancy with regulations about electromagnetic pollution? They started the certification process in the USA for a receiver ([http://www.energous.com/energous-completes-initial-fcc- part-...](http://www.energous.com/energous-completes-initial-fcc- part-15-certification-testing-wattup-wire-free-charging-receiver/)) but I'm more worried about the transmitter.

</comment><comment><USER7> Surely this would mean sending very high powered microwaves around a living space. Does anybody have more information/knowledge about the medium to long term safety of this approach.

<comment><USER8> Just don't have any chocolate in your pockets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They claim to reach 70% efficiency, by transmitting power on the wifi bands, and compare it to a charging mat (90%), and tout 15 feet distance, but leave out one detail:

How quickly efficiency drops off.

I suspect you only get 70% if your phone is literally on top of the router, and that the efficiency drops of very quickly to 0 as you approach the range limit.

<comment><USER10> The suspicion is that the 70% efficiency is how much of the power arriving at the phone can be used for charging it, not much the transmitter is supplying.

<comment><USER11> My car's USB port can barely charge my Samsung Galaxy 5.... I can't imagine how long it would take via radio wave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> ~4.5m for the rest of the world..

</comment><comment><USER13> >but none of the solutions have ever set our devices free from a charging pad, which is tantamount to plugging them in, really.

No, not really. I love my wireless charging pad it's as easy as putting my phone down, which I do when I'm not using it anyway.

<comment><USER14> Plugging them in isn't such a big deal.

<comment><USER15> The port wears out over time. I'd rather use the less efficient wireless charging rather than have to replace a port on a device at some point in its life.

<comment><USER16> In all of the years I've been using electronics I have never had to replace a port. I'd argue anyone concerned about that is likely an edge case.

<comment><USER17> I agree. Engineers have done good work on ensuring cables fail before ports do.

I've been careless (charging a phone in my pocket) and broke several cables. The port is still rock solid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And if you have your phone in your pocket and happen to be in the beam, your testicles get microwaved. (Well, I hope and may assume that they addressed that in some way, but the article doesn't mention it.)

</comment><comment><USER19> Please stop it already with the wireless powering. That stuff was discovered by Tesla ages ago, it's a very well known technology and it has very well known drawbacks like that the efficiency drops proportionally to distance square and that these kinds of electromagnetic waves actually do have a negative impact on human health.

<comment><USER3> Wireless power has worked fine for a hundred years. Ever use a crystal radio?

Your health effects are very clearly in the [citation needed] area. The only negative effect from long-wave radiation (not gamma or UV) is that it heats things. If you heat a human too much, they die.

<comment><USER19> Ever sat in a microwave while it was running? That is exactly what is happening to your body if you are between this charging router and a device that draws a lot of energy. Ever put a lightbulb in a microwave? That is exactly what will happen in your apartment between this charging router and the charging device. It's a safety and health hazard and it provides little to no benefits. And please, that high powered electromagnetic waves are a health hazard does not need a citation.

<comment><USER20> But I'd like to know if the power density of this device can get anywhere close to the "health hazard" limit. We need citation or numbers about that. I'm sure you can already harvest some microwatts from wifi, and most people agree that nobody dies because of that.

<comment><USER19> Of course nobody dies of WiFi. I'm not claiming that WiFi kills you. What we are talking about here is transmitting multiple Watts (or else your phone takes forever to charge), or even more, through the air. That's a lot of orders of magnitude more than microwatts.

<comment><USER21> And microwave ovens are orders of magnitude more than the claimed 1-4 watts, so stop using that as a scare tactic.

<comment><USER22> Microwave ovens are isolated. They certainly don't output watts to the outside.

 _" A Federal standard limits the amount of microwaves that can leak from an oven throughout its lifetime to 5 milliwatts (mW) of microwave radiation per square centimeter at approximately 2 inches from the oven surface."_

[http://www.fda.gov/radiation- emittingproducts/resourcesforyo...](http://www.fda.gov/radiation- emittingproducts/resourcesforyouradiationemittingproducts/ucm252762.htm)

<comment><USER3> Microwave ovens are very leaky. A coworker and I walked around our office with a spectrum analyzer* and turned on microwaves. Much leakage into the upper 2.4GHz wifi band on every one we tested, no matter old or brand new.

* Actually, we were using a Wi-Spy. No need for sensitive lab equipment to detect this much radiation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Musl libc - <AUTHOR> http://www.etalabs.net/musl/ <comment><USER2> Addressing afhof's comments...

1 & 2\. I don't see any reason to believe there will ever be a new machine with non-power-of-two word size, and I'm doubtful that there are even any historical post-standardization C implementations like that. Certainly Linux, which makes much bigger assumptions about word size and the relationship of types, will never support such hypothetical systems. Generality is good if it buys you anything practical, but my approach has been to avoid excess generality unless it has a practical benefit. This approach has been very beneficial in the dynamic linker, wherein assuming that things that are the same on real-world archs actually are the same, the amount of per-arch code to maintain is only some 30 lines (which might grow to 60-100 once TLS is supported), as opposed to many hundreds or even thousands in other implementations.

At this point, musl does not have official documentation/manual. When it does, these sorts of requirements as well as all the implementation documentation required by ISO C and POSIX will be documented.

3\. The casts are all necessary (C does not define implicit conversions between pointer types) and correct. Casting to (void *) rather than an explicit type is my preference because it reduces duplication of the type in multiple places, but in any case this is purely a stylistic matter and has nothing to do with the generated code or correctness.

4\. The ONES macro was leftover from other files on which this code was based (strchr and strcpy). Obviously it's not needed in memcpy which copies a fixed number of bytes without searching for any terminator character, so it could/should be removed. Thanks for catching this.

<comment><USER3> > _I don't see any reason to believe there will ever be a new machine with > non-power-of-two word size_

Well...obviously it's designed to run Forth and not C, but for what it's worth, this is a pretty recent machine with an 18-bit word size: [http://www.intellasys.net/index.php?option=com_content&t...](http://www.intellasys.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=60&Itemid=75)

<comment><USER2> Machines with a word size that's not a multiple of 8 cannot support POSIX at all. POSIX requires CHAR_BIT==8, and to support the POSIX and C11 memory model for threads, bytes must be individually addressible without a read-modify- write cycle on a larger memory unit. So this kind of thing really is irrelevant as far as POSIX is concerned.

<comment><USER4> funny, because POSIX came as an idea from RMS, an ex lisp machine hacker, where non-power of two words were tobe found at large

<comment><USER2> The lore is that the the _name_ POSIX, not the idea for POSIX, came from RMS and was a form of disguised spite for the process (i.e. that he intended it to be read as Piece Of Shit *IX, or similar). I'm not sure whether there's any evidence to corroborate this part of the lore, but in the early days POSIX was definitely not representative of RMS's ideas/vision. These days the standards process and even the document itself are a lot more open (though still not up to RMS's standards).

CHAR_BIT==8 was not mandated by POSIX until 2001 when it was aligned with C99, and seems to have been mandated as a consequence of C99's requirement that [u]intXX_t types not have any padding bits, and the requirement (in POSIX) that network-related interfaces use uint8_t, uint16_t, and uint32_t (which, per C99, cannot all exist unless CHAR_BIT==8).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like it's pretty good, featurewise: <http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html>

utf8 multibyte, decent abi versioning and compat, pthreads ...

Edit: Also, MIT License!

<comment><USER6> I was going to note that it's not MIT License as I recall from last time I checked, but turns out they relicensed it recently (May 6, 2012, <http://www.etalabs.net/musl/download.html> ) to MIT License. Thanks for pointing it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some things come to mind when looking through the source. Perhaps they are pedantic gripes, but perhaps they need some work. I had these observations while looking through memcpy.c:

1\. Assumption of power of 2 word size. The ALIGN macro is defined as one less than the size of size_t (which should be enough to hold the length of something in memory). I would be more comfortable with it being defined as the the size of a processor WORD rather than as a length of memory.

2\. Using the ALIGN macro in calculations of misaligned memory copies. This goes to #1's point: Suppose the word size is not a power of 2? Suppose the word size is 6 octets rather than 4 or 8. The & mask might produce incorrect results since there would be 0's in the mask.

3\. There seems to be a lot of casting going on where it either shouldn't be or it looks wrong. A good example of this is the cast to void on line 19. If there is a cast, why isn't to the (size_t*) type? Even if this is correct, I now have to think a lot more about it, or hunt through the commit log. Yes, I could. No, I shouldn't have to.

4\. The ONES macro is unused, and the ALIGN MACRO are not part of a header somewhere. An alignment macro seems like it might be beneficial in other parts of the library. I recognize that this increases interdependency, but I feel it may be justified since it would be useful in other place, and may be changed in the future.

I am very pleased that this library is being developed. I think competition drives up the quality of code, and libc is one of the places where high quality code is invaluable. (Looking at the comparison chart they provided was impressive!) I must admit I don't have good solution to the issues I found, so I'm afraid my criticism may not be as constructive as I would prefer.

Thanks for making this, it was quite pleasant to look at non Drepper'd libc code. :)

Here is the link I looked at for reference: [http://git.etalabs.net/cgi- bin/gitweb.cgi?p=musl;a=blob;f=sr...](http://git.etalabs.net/cgi- bin/gitweb.cgi?p=musl;a=blob;f=src/string/memcpy.c;h=02cb4694252e5c0b07e6c5666a8f53018d493107;hb=HEAD)

<comment><USER8> > _Assumption of power of 2 word size_

You don't say. And I bet they have no intention of supporting middle-endian byte ordering either. What an amateur act :)

<comment><USER9> ... and just when I was about to use this to replace libc on Linux/390 for my 31-bit S/390.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think the usual benchmark if you get to the point that you can run Linux and use an extensive libc is compatibility with existing software, not necessarily a conformant implementation.

<comment><USER11> I've been experimenting with using NetBSD pkgsrc on musl to see how far it goes. Many hundreds of packages compile and pass all their tests, including, for instance, every major language interpreter, various development libraries and resources, and XFCE4. Things that don't compile usually fall into one of two categories: (1) using #ifdef __linux__ to mean #ifdef __GLIBC__, and (2) fundamentally unportable packages that have huge hacks for every single platform they support. There's rumbling about creating a package support wiki where people can document what packages work, don't work, or require patches to work, but it doesn't yet exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> #musl on irc.freenode.net to discuss development.

</comment><comment><USER13> Don't really get the theory behind changing the default stack size for threads. Feels like they did it just to be different which might get someone scratching their heads for a bit.

<comment><USER2> The glibc default thread stack size is unacceptable/broken for a couple reasons. It eats memory like crazy (usually 8-10 megs per thread), and by memory I mean commit charge, which is a highly finite resource on a well- configured system without overcommit. Even if you allow overcommit, on 32-bit systems you'll exhaust virtual memory quickly, putting a low cap on the number of threads you can create (just 300 threads will use all 3GB of address space).

With that said, musl's current default is way too low. It's caused problems with several major applications such as git. We're in the process of trying to establish a good value for the default, which will likely end up being somewhere between 32k and 256k. I'm thinking 80k right now (96k including guard page and POSIX thread-local storage) but I would welcome evidence/data that helps make a good choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A grand project! Love the benchmark table.

</comment><comment><USER8> † MIT license</comment>


Why Are Alphabet Letters Arranged How They Are? - <AUTHOR> https://www.scienceabc.com/social-science/why-are-alphabet-letters-arranged-how-they-are.html <comment><USER2> This seems very low quality. And it ends with:

> the alphabet's letters are in that order because they have simply __always > been that way __.

Seriously? Like before the universe?

Quick search leads to Wikipedia (obviously) which actually tries to answer the question: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet#Letter...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet#Letter_names_and_order)

Interestingly, first sounds and "words" produced by human babies are quite similar to the sounds the starting letters of most alphabets produce ("baba", "dada", "gaga" etc): [https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby-talk-your-babys- first-w...](https://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby-talk-your-babys-first- words#1)

So the answer may be in biology / evolution.

<comment><USER3> The article doesn't seem to mention the "Futhark", which is the Runic alphabet, which _is_ the same alphabet optimized for carving into grained wood.

For some reason, the old Scandinavian stylization of this alphabet is not ordered the same, since "futhark" is, like "alphabet" being the first two letters in order, "f" "u" "th" "a" "r" "k", no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The answer is because the script evolved and was not designed so letters appear in somewhat random order.

Brahmi, which is the parent script for most Indian scripts as well as a bunch of other scripts in the region (Tibetan, Thai, Burmese, Javanese etc.), has a well-designed alphabet ordering. Simple vowels come first, followed by dipthongs, followed by constants. Consonants themselves are ordered as velar first, followed by palatals, retroflexes, dental and finally labial consonants -- notice the articulation point is moving from the back to the front of the mouth. Within each group the ordering is unvoiced, unvoiced aspirated, voiced, voiced aspirated and finally nasal consonant. It's a thing of beauty.

</comment><comment><USER5> "So the order has ancient roots, but where does it come from?

I hate to disappoint you, but we're really not sure. The practice of having the letters in an established order makes sense: It's easier to teach and to learn. Why some ancient people put them in that specific order, though, is unknown. Whoever did it didn't leave any record that we know of explaining why they lined the letters up like that."

[https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/29011/why-are-letters- ab...](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/29011/why-are-letters-abc-order)

</comment><comment><USER6> This doesn't answer the question, but it's a great TMBG song: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRYw- pqSdKo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRYw-pqSdKo)

<comment><USER7> My kids watched that DVD _so many times_

That DVD taught me how to do the alphabet backwards as well as I can forwards.

<comment><USER8> My Dad taught us, around the table after dinner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A lot of words to basically not answer the question. Honestly, he doesn't even come close.

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://qz.com/india/965283/a-biography-of-the-tamil- languag...](https://qz.com/india/965283/a-biography-of-the-tamil-language- reveals-its-influence-on-sanskrit-and-hebrew/). how hebrew , sanskrit and tamil related

</comment><comment><USER11> Would that this article didn't have dumb impact font memes.

<comment><USER12> Children use memes these days. The article and website is clearly targeted at age < 16

It's a good article for its purpose (giving kids a history lesson of our alphabet), and I imagine effective. But you have to appreciate its audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > English is considered a very difficult language to master due to the > inconsistencies in it, as well as the different ways you can pronounce any > given letter.

This is a huge pet peeve of mine. The writer hedges this statement with the passive voice, and "master" is difficult to qualify, but generally speaking English is not a difficult language. I'll concede that phonics are a mess, but it's not riddled with more inconsistencies than most other world languages.

<comment><USER14> > I'll concede that phonics are a mess, but it's not riddled with more > inconsistencies than most other world languages.

Actually it is. And it's not just a matter of opinion, either. Going by objective criteria:

1\. English has most of the grammar exceptions of German and French combined, plus a few others gained from other languages it borrowed words and/or constructs from -- which is to say more than most if not all other languages.

2\. Phonics are, to echo your thoughts, not just a mess but an utter, complete mess.

3\. English's lexical similarity with other languages (whether European or not) is below [0] the typical value you'll find when probing into languages spoken by neighbors.

4\. Depending on how you define what a word is, English is widely considered to have the richest set of words to pick from.

It's straightforward to learn International English. But to learn English at a high level is, in fact, very hard. Consider spending some time with a Modern English major from a good university if you need any convincing.

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

<comment><USER13> I'm really not interested in the opinion of an English major on the subject, unless they're also familiar with linguistics or they've learned a foreign language to a high level. This is a heuristics issue monolingual English speakers are susceptible to. I spend most of my time with non-native English speakers (Italians, Germans, and Japanese people), and they all report that English is less complex than their native language.

Of course English (and especially the mastery of English) is complex, but it's not exceptionally complex. Your "objective criteria" is sometimes not very objective, and sometimes not very good criteria for language complexity.

1\. This point isn't objective. Borrowing grammar from German and French does not mean that we've accumulated more exceptions in our grammar than any other language, it doesn't mean that other languages have not also borrowed, and this does not objectively prove that English has more exceptions than any other language.

Russian requires you to decline a noun by grammatical number (single/plural), one of six cases, and one of three genders. Even after you take these three axises into consideration and find the proper declension in your declension matrix there's still a chance that it doesn't follow the rules that you learned. You can either call this a system of 3 different noun types (one for each gender) with a ton of exceptions, or you can classify it as 18 different noun types with a ton of complex rules, and nearly no exceptions. English is like this as well (particularly phonetics, which is related to the next point). It's hard to be objective about language.

2\. We agree on this point, but I want to point out that Chinese and Japanese are an order of magnitude more complex when it comes to phonetics. You need to learn several thousand characters to be considered literate as an adult. I can't read Chinese, but in Japanese the pronunciation of these characters changes depending on context. High frequency examples:

上 - 18th most common Kanji used on Wikipedia, 8 different pronunciations (9 if you consider ショウ and ジョウ different)

生 - 27th most common Kanji on Wikipedia, 12 different pronunciations

3\. Lexical similarities isn't a relevant criteria. The inverse to your point, nobody would say "Russian isn't a complicated language because it's lexically similar to Ukrainian." Both can be complex if they're lexically similar, and a lexically unique language could be utterly uncomplicated. The most charitable interpretation I can speak to this point is that lexical similarities definitely help language acquisition, because you get a lot of words "for free" so to speak.

4\. Again, I don't think vocab size is a great criteria for language complexity, and it's not very objective. We could inflate this number with a huge dictionary full of words that nobody uses. Some times words are "buy two get one free," like "wind, shield, windshield". Many languages have this (必ず without fail、勝つ victory、必勝 certain victory) and it doesn't reflect complexity in any consistent way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Right here is when Tevye jumps in and starts singing "tradition!"

It's because ancestor and cousin scripts used the phonetic glyphs for numbers as well, and the ordering had to be fixed.

Once Indo-Arabic numerals made it in to the character set, the need for strict ordering went away. But now that characters have numeric values again (ASCII, Unicode), they're fixed forever.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you find this article interesting, you would probably enjoy this great podcast about the history of English:

[https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/](https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/)

He goes into much more detail. He has a separate audiobook that focus on the evolution of the alphabet.

<comment><USER17> +1 this is a really good podcast, much better than the lame article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it true, or some strange legend, that 'ampersand' used to be at the end of the Alphabet Song? And it was written 'and per se And' meaning the 'and' sign, which was considered a letter at the time. And got sung and mangled/mondegreened into 'ampersand'?

<comment><USER18> From etymonline.com:

ampersand. (n) 1837, contraction of _and per se and_ , meaning _' &' by itself is 'and'_ (a hybrid phrase, partly in Latin, partly in English). An earlier form of it was colloquial _ampassy_ (1706). The distinction is to avoid confusion with "&" in such formations as "&c.", a once common way of writing "etc." (the _et_ in _et cetera_ is Latin for "and"). The letters a, I, and o also formerly (15c.-16c.) were written _a per se_ , etc., especially when standing alone as words.

The symbol is based on the Latin word _et_ "and," and comes from an old Roman system of shorthand signs (ligatures) attested in Pompeiian graffiti...

In old schoolbooks the ampersand was printed at the end of the alphabet and thus by 1880s the word _ampersand_ had acquired a slang sense of "posterior, rear end, hindquarters."

[https://www.etymonline.com/word/ampersand](https://www.etymonline.com/word/ampersand)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What a frustrating article to read.

tldr;

"Why Are Alphabet Letters Arranged How They Are?"

Because the Greeks modified the Phoenician alphabet a bit, and used that order.

"Well...why was the Phoenician alphabet arranged the way it was?"

<no answer>

<comment><USER20> The Latin alphabet lost a few Greek letters, but retained "F", which existed in older Greek alphabets but was lost in newer alphabets. Latin changed the pronunciation of a few letters and later added letters, at the end of the alphabet, except for "G" (which replaced an abandoned Greek letter).

Before that, the Greeks took the Phoenician alphabet, which had 22 letters ending in "R", "S" and "T".

The Greeks lost a few Phoenician letters and added new letters after "T".

The Phoenicians inherited the alphabet from other closely related Semitic people (very little is known about those), but the Phoenician language was simplified during time and the Phoenician alphabet lost 5 letters from the older alphabet, which had 27 letters.

I am not aware of an older alphabet whose order is known, besides the old 27-letter ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet.

Most evidence about the letter order of the old 27-letter alphabet comes from the Ugaritic alphabet, which was also derived from it, like the Phoenician, but which replaced the graphic signs used by the older alphabet with cuneiform signs, nevertheless retaining the names and the order of the original 27 letters. The Ugaritic alphabet added 3 new letters after the original 27 letters.

The names of the first 27 letters of the Ugaritic alphabet can be seen in the Unicode database (from 0x10380 to 0x1039A).

Many school exercises with the Ugaritic alphabet have been unearthed, so there is no doubt about the letter order.

<comment><USER20> I have forgotten to mention that my point was that all known alphabets derive their order from an ancient 27-letter Semitic alphabet, so any hypotheses about the origin of the letter order must discuss the order of the original 27 letters, not the order of the letters of more recent alphabets, which just copied the original order, then deleting some letters and adding new letters, usually at the end of the alphabet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I recently learned Sanskrit and it was shockinh to find the order being so scientific.

Guttural palatal <x> dental labial

And in the order aspirated unaspirated

Pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER22> Isn't it because in Hebrew (and other ancient languages) the letters are also numbers?

<comment><USER20> Yes, but the numeric values were attached to the letters much later (providing a means for writing numbers), many hundreds of years after the alphabetic letter order was established.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can we stop putting dumb memes in blog post in 2020?

</comment><comment><USER24> They're in alphabetical order.

</comment><comment><USER25> So that singing the alphabet song we learned as a child is more melodic.

<comment><USER26> If the letters were indeed arranged in service of the alphabet song, they did a terrible job. "G" and "P" are too far apart, so the letters L–P have to be sung really fast for the rhyme to work.

As a very young child, I remember thinking that "LMNO" was one letter, until I watched a Sesame Street segment which explicitly addressed this misconception. Since this segment exists, I clearly wasn't the only child who got confused.

<comment><USER27> I like the backwards variant but it suffers the same problem.

        my know I now z y x
        me with sing you won't time next
        z y x, w
        v u t
        s r q
        p o n m
        l k j
        i h g f
        e d c b a

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> They probably arranged them that way to match the Alphabet Song.

<comment><USER29> "Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?" \- Steven Wright

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> to prevent old mechanical typewriters from jamming

<comment><USER31> This is about why it's A B C, not why it's Q W E.

<comment><USER30> yes, if it were A B C it would jam all the time. think about it.

<comment><USER32> good bait

<comment><USER30> assuming a particular permutation from the lexicographic order to the standard three-line typewriter order, anything other than A B C would cause absolute chaos and many a snagged ink ribbon. think about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > English is considered a very difficult language to master due to the > inconsistencies in it

By whom? I don't think it would be hard for a person who knows a language from Standard Average European Sprachbund to learn English compared to, say, Chinese, Arabic or Bengali.

<comment><USER34> I think you're glossing over an important phrase in your quote: "to master". English is relatively straightforward to learn to a good enough level where everyone can understand you. Mastering English is being really good at internalizing the inconsistencies of the language, of which there are plenty.

Most recent one I encountered was a non-native speaker on a comment thread saying "childs" instead of "children", and there's really no general rule about english grammar that would indicate "ren" being the pluralizing qualifier here. You just have to memorize these things.

How do you pronounce "read"? That depends on if you interpreted the word as past tense or present tense. How do you pronounce "lead"? That depends on if you interpreted the word as the heavy metal or the verb meaning taking charge of an effort. The "o" in lose sounds exactly like the one in choose, but the "o" in loose sounds nothing like the one in chose.

<comment><USER33> Due to Zipf's law of words frequency there is only so much irregularity a language can handle. And English is not special in this regard.

Irregularities are not hard to master, it is one of the easiest things actually, it's rote memorization. For someone whose native language is without articles it would be a struggle to learn a language with them for the first time. Or, for an English native speaker it would be really hard to learn how to construct naturally-sounding Japanese sentences.

If instead of being concerned with articles, tenses, relative clause positioning, noun-verb argreement, topic and focus expression, morphosyntactic alignment, negative coordination, discourse markers, grammatical mood, grammatical genders / noun classes, coverbs, preverbs, measure words, etc you are being concerned with how to pronounce _read_ , it means you learn an easy language (for you), because, probably, your native language shares lots of features with English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why we've made the Web like this in 2020? It's horrible, we need to fix it and never repeat these mistakes. [https://imgur.com/3wX5GmV](https://imgur.com/3wX5GmV) \- screenshot of this site when I've opened it.</comment>