Ask HN: Recommend using Registered Agent or no? - <AUTHOR>

Hello, I'm starting a small online business and I'm now in a position where I feel ready to create an LLC in my state.
I've been looking at using a company that specializes as a registered agent, so that my home address won't be listed in the public filings (for privacy reasons).
The thing is that I can't tell how one company is better than the others. There's nearly zero credible ratings/comments on the internet about them. The only differentiating factor is their pricing, which varies from $50-$300. A few of their 'signup' forms aren't even using SSL/HTTPS, which makes me even more nervous about the overall quality of any of these services that I see, https or not.
Furthermore, all of their terms of services state that they're not liable for any mishaps in any letters that may be lost or damaged even if it is in their possession, which makes any lawsuits against my LLC to be won by default (for non-response) in court. IF in the case the registered agent is found to be liable, a lot of them stipulate that the max damages covered are $X amount (ie, lower than $50k).
So I'm kind of wondering, how should I go about finding a reliable and safe registered agent to use? <comment><USER2> I've used myself, friends/family, a lawyer, my CPA firm, and one of the cheaper national services out there.

The best was my CPA firm, because they handle mail like clockwork and contacted me through email when I got something, even attaching a scanned copy. When it was a yearly report they'd even fill it out for me ($) and send it (after asking, of course).

I think some mom-and-pop mailbox stores might also do this (the ones that make it look like you have a real address and not a PO box, which I found helpful), so if you're looking to use them for a mailing address it might make sense to ask them about that as well.

With government paperwork, I've learned that "no news is good news". Unfortunately, that's entirely predicated upon the reliability of receipt of any news headed your way. The cheap service I used (LegalZoom) appears to have not forwarded me a couple forms. Granted, I should have been watching for the forms, and filled them out myself when I noticed I'd not been forwarded anything, but the whole episode still got my status set to "REVOKED" with that Secretary of State ($$$$).

I've also noticed that the business branch of my various Secretary of States (CA, CO, IL, IA, NJ, MN) have always been sufficiently helpful over the phone. They've given me plenty of advice and helped steer me through their respective jungles of paperwork. Yours might also have an opinion about any RA service you're considering.</comment>


Golang SSH Security - <AUTHOR> https://bridge.grumpy-troll.org/2017/04/golang-ssh-security/ <comment><USER2> I am...not a fan of Golang, as I have made pretty clear around here on occasion. But I'll give credit where credit's due, and this is a good decision on the part of the people maintaining x/crypto/ssh. Not the tooling vendor's awful response--I'm pretty sure I know who it is, and if not there's two of 'em because I've had these conversations before--but the maintainers are doing the right thing. This probably shouldn't have gotten out the door without host key verification in the _first_ place (and that ties back into the reasons why I do not like or trust Golang or its community when it comes to tools that I have to consume), but it's better to bite the bullet and fix this _now_ instead of letting it fester.

(The "PGP is too hard for discussing security issues" thing, though, is total nonsense. Can't be doing that.)

<comment> grey-area Doesn't the writer call out hashicorp specifically by name in the article?

 _I used to respect this vendor and recommend their tools to others. I am having to rethink this a lot. I am no longer happy to recommend Hashicorp products to others._

<comment><USER2> Oh, ha, I glazed over that paragraph! But yeah, it was totally Hashicorp I was thinking about; this sort of reliability-thoroughly-optional thing shoots through a lot of their tools and keeps me pretty far away from any of the ones that might touch live environments. (Packer and Vagrant are fine.)

<comment><USER3> Which one of their tools are we talking about here? Terraform?

<comment><USER4> blog-post author here: all of them written in Golang which use SSH.

Packer, Terraform, Vault, all of them.

Using a bastion host in your configurations doesn't help if you invoke the tooling on your laptop, since the connection to the bastion host is done with the SSH package, again with no host-key verification.

<comment><USER5> And Vault is supposed to be a super secure root of trust. Hmm...

<comment><USER6> Damn, I was planning on using Vault eventually. This attitude towards security gives me pause about put all my secrets into it. Is there any alternatives?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh man:

        > I am bemused by an approach to accepting
        > security reports which is to go through the
        > motions of having PGP public keys available
        > for people to use to report issues but upon
        > receiving such a request ask for it to be
        > submitted without PGP because digging out
        > the keys is too much of a hassle.

<comment><USER8> I was the one who replied with that, asking him to resend without PGP, for two reasons:

1) both of our MTAs do STARTTLS. And gmail is only TLS.

2) 99% of the PGP-encrypted emails we get to firstname.lastname@example.com are bogus security reports. Whereas "cleartext" security reports are only about 5-10% bogus. Getting a PGP-encrypted email to email@example.com has basically become a reliable signal that the report is going to be bogus, so I stopped caring about spending the 5 minutes decrypting the damn thing (logging in to the key server to get the key, remembering how to use gpg). But I recognized him as a knowledgeable person from the Internet, and I knew (1), so I just asked him to send without PGP to save me 5 minutes.

Even if I'd used PGP, I would've just replied cleartext anyway to our firstname.lastname@example.com list, except all the MIME would've been garbled and unreadable.

In summary, the PGP tooling sucks (especially in gmail, but really everywhere) and it's too often used by people who are more interested in using PGP than reporting valid security issues.

<comment><USER9> > _I recognized him as a knowledgeable person from the Internet, and I knew > (1), so I just asked him to send without PGP to save me 5 minutes._

I understand where you're coming from but this bit of logic I don't get. Especially if you recognized him, then clearly it's _worth_ spending the five minutes.

The five minutes you personally save, someone else has to pay them. The person who originally sent you the email now has to read the response, process it, send you another non-encrypted email and/or enter into a meta-debate with you. They end up mentioning it on their blog and now we're all having this meta- meta-chat about it on hacker news, wasting several man-hours on it.

Was it worth it?

<comment><USER8> I'd say it was worth it. This thread was more fun than using gpg, even if the time savings is a wash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love Digital Ocean, but they do the same thing with their API. I wrote to them about it years ago, even talked to some developers there, and the general explanation is the same: Screw around with cloud-init to get the public key.

If you use the DO API to provision servers my feature request is here:

[https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea...](https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean/suggestions/9307569-return- the-droplet-s-ssh-public-key-as-part-of-api)

Please upvote it or at the very least copy the cloud-init script to help provision your servers.

<comment><USER11> For hostkeys on DO you can probably get a script to run that'll request a signed certificate from a server you own. The signed cert can be validated fully by clients.

Or go with a convergence style system and probe it from multiple locations.

Or just give up and go with TOFU - if you never get an error even on different connections, you probably haven't been mitm'd.

<comment><USER12> > For hostkeys on DO you can probably get a script to run that'll request a > signed certificate from a server you own.

Or just embed the signed host certificate in cloud-init.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> While I really love the stable nature of Go and its standard library, I am happy that this breaking change was put out there in the interest of security.

This issue hit me while building a tool for internal use at my employer. I am using the glide vendoring manager for this project, added another dependency which triggered an update of all other dependencies. At that point my tool broke and forced me to actually think about host key verification.

<comment><USER14> This isn't the standard library though, and if it were then it wouldn't have been changed.

<comment><USER4> It's a special case though. The golang.org/x/ packages are experimental but also candidates for promotion to the standard library. Eg, "context".

But this sort of issue is exactly the sort of real-world review and hardening which justifies having a namespace for stuff to go _before_ it becomes stdlib.

<comment><USER15> No, x repos are just eXtra.

/x/exp is expiramental.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm really impressed with the quick response from the golang team. The fact that they didn't mind introducing breaking changes shows that their priorities are right.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's amazing how many people out there consider MITM as something they don't have to defend against. If you're a developer you have to assume your system will be MITMed. It doesn't matter if you're on the Internet or behind a firewall. Trust on first use is not a good solution because someone can tailor their attack against that first use.

<comment><USER18> What are some clear signs that this is happening to you? I track the url requested on my server(s) and some of them don't make sense/looking for exploits like wordpress login exploits. I don't know I have SSL/A+ according to Qualys, I'm kind of drawing a blank where MITM happens. I've seen/read about it before. Heartbleed? No I don't know... really tired, but interested, gots to Google.

edit: I'm still on LAMP stack for clarification. Too bad to hear about Golang though I'm still looking to learn it I hear a lot of great things about it.

<comment><USER19> MITM attacks are designed to not be detectable, so the solution is to have tooling which prohibits them – exactly what is lacking in this case.

For web, using TLS (SSL) is a good start. This could be improved further by using HSTS, HPKP, DANE etc. (not sure if A+ already implies them anyway).

For SSH, you need to have an out-of-band way to get the host keys or use something like an SSH CA.

<comment><USER18> What does that mean out-of-band? I'm not good with SSH, I'm not using 2-factor key based, also in general it makes sense to have separate servers right? Like one server that transfers request to a server closer to another country. Not Cloudflare but your own thing assuming you rented from different datacenters in the world. Sorry not related to the question.

edit: literally band? Like another wavelength/connection?

<comment><USER20> A different network connection (With physical infrastructure you might actually use a completely different network) that you can use to move private keys or any other sensetive information without exposing it to the Internet. We use such a network to monitor all of our infrastructure, and for iLo.

<comment><USER18> Thanks for your input. I have to look into this more. Have to plan stuff out for the future when growing past the single vps "instance"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Golang seems to follow the 80/20 rule from the outset (or perhaps an even smaller proportion), which is perfectly fine. Some other languages' standardlibs try to offer a complete treatment of a particular problemspace from the start which is tricky to get right on first attempt. Those are the instances where developers complain about complex APIs, uneven abstractions, or the like.

However, one of the artifacts of a popular language having a lean-and-mean standard library is that custom code proliferates, and the Go community's distaste for frameworks (as opposed to libraries) means that the it's not just the business-specific edges of the code that's unique in each implementation (as you'd expect), but also a good amount of the plumbing and domain-specific control code and their immediate callers. In some other languages, where there's more of a culture for using a dependency to intentionally simplify your problem space in exchange for ceding control, this style would be derided as NIH.

The vendor's response here is a function of not only the vendor's own rationale and priorities, but also of the above developer philosophy. This is surprising to me, given that Go is an opinionated language, and yet opinionated third-party code driving your logic is frequently discouraged by its community.

On the other hand, the language maintainers' response was measured, proper, and commendable. They made a breaking change to an experimental API, and improved their product in the process.

<comment><USER22> This isn't 80/20 - this is broken. If you trust your network, use rsh or telnet.

<comment><USER23> Telnet does not support port forwarding, file transfer, host key authentication (trusted network ≠ trusted clients), etc., and is not installed by default on most systems. rsh only supports file transfer out of those, and is dead enough that it's not even in Homebrew.

Nor is there any reason _not_ to use SSH just because you trust your network, except possibly performance of huge file transfers.

<comment><USER22> Well, I'd rather run something I know has limited security (eg rsh+/etc/hosts- allow over a closed vpn) than ssh without key verification - because then you throw out trust, and encryption without trust buys you very little. Or kerberized rsh/telnet.

As for port forwarding, if you trust the network, presumably you don't need forwarding? And for file transfer just use zmodem, or run rsync/ftp? (remember: you trust the network..).

I will admit that there's a minor convenience to be able to use one client/api/interface - but I'm not sure it's worth the tradeoff of suddenly not knowing if you should be trusting ssh to be actually _secure_ , rather than just _convenient_.

Clearly the maintainers of the go package feel the same way (after some gentle prodding).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hello! As the blog post clearly states, the vendor is HashiCorp. As the founder of HashiCorp and someone who participated in the initial report we received on this topic, I'd like to state our point of view from my own mouth.

I'd first like to be up front about exactly which of our software doesn't perform host key verification, since we have a lot of software and this CVE doesn't apply to most. There are three places that were identified as affected: Packer and Terraform with SSH provisioners, which both create a machine resource and can perform SSH connections to setup the machine; and Vault's SSH backend in Dynamic Key mode performs SSH connections from the Vault server to hosts (other modes do not).

Any other usage of our software is unaffected.

We'll discuss each of these cases in detail, since the details matter to understand our thought process and response.

Vault:

The SSH secret backend has three modes that can be used for generating SSH credentials: certificates, one-time passwords, and dynamic keys. Only the dynamic key mode ever actually makes connections to other machines, but more importantly, our documentation has _always_ recommended that the dynamic key mode only be used as a last resort because of its various (documented) drawbacks compared to the other modes. With the addition of the ability to generate SSH certificates (which was on our roadmap for a long time and added in 0.7, prior to both the original report and the blog post), we did not explicitly mark the dynamic key mode as deprecated in our documentation, but we probably should do so.

Given that it is not recommended for usage (but maintained for backwards compatibility), we chose to warn users of this additional drawback of the dynamic key method, and documented the lack of host key verification ([https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/commit/251da1bcdc27678fea...](https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/commit/251da1bcdc27678feaa477f087c8d010223d7e8c)). As we stated in our response to the reporter, "It isn't something we want to hide (and we're not trying to) and we will document this."

Terraform/Packer:

Terraform and Packer support the ability to use "provisioners" to bootstrap a machine. In both, the provisioner is run very shortly after the machine is initially created, representing an extremely small window of attack. Neither support connecting to a pre-existing machine via SSH under normal use cases (you can make it happen through some advanced configuration trickery with Terraform, but it's abnormal). Because of this, we didn't register this as a high-priority issue.

However, we admit that this can be improved and we likely should've been more reactionary in our response. I apologize for that. We have added plans to improve this to our roadmap, covered in a couple paragraphs.

As the blog post states, the reporter suggested parsing console logs to determine the host key. And, as the blog post correctly says, we don't want to do this. There is a combinatorial explosion of complexity in supporting this, we have experience with this (due to Vagrant supporting this type of behavior), and we've found maintenance of this sort of functionality to be difficult to support over time. We came to this conclusion though only because there is a viable alternative: SSH certificate authentication. If a viable alternative didn't exist, we may have been forced to take the more complex route.

SSH certificate authentication was introduced many years ago and is broadly supported. This type of auth also provides authenticity to a first-use connection. We mentioned in our response email that this is something we're open to doing instead. I admit that in our response to the reporter, we explicitly said this "is not a priority" but shortly after decided to schedule this work for the next major TF release. We should've followed up again, but didn't.

And that's where we're at currently! I hope this helps make our response to the report and our future roadmap around this issue more clear.

<comment><USER25> Why do you think there is "an extremely small window of attack?" The mitmproxy is likely between you and the internet somehow, meaning ANY ssh connection will be MITMed. It is not like the MITM is waiting for you to spawn a machine before it pops into existence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well. I haven't really started to learn golang yet. But sure that this breaking change indeed convinced me to do it. I have implemented an automated ssh session in another language there was absolutely no host key checking or tofu implementation even worse that they designed the api not to allow that manually. That was frustrating. But obviously the golang language designers and the entry owner and myself sharing the same concerns obviously. Thanks for writing about this

</comment><comment><USER27> Really wonderful and thorough report. I'm not at all a security expert but manage to learn quite a lot from reading this post. Kudos to the author for giving context and background on the issues. If more security reports are written like this, the whole industry would benefit greatly.

</comment><comment><USER28> Why do people keep saying "the vendor"? It's hashicorp.

<comment><USER29> Calling software companies "vendors" is a fun little lost piece of Americana. Like calling marijuana "grass".

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> A few things:

1\. how can an experimental library (x/) get a CVE?

2\. what is "hostkey verification"? Probably the fingerprint check you usually get when you ssh into a machine + the blocking warning you get when the fingerprint of the machine suddenly changes.

3\. if this is what "hostkey verification" is. How is it so hard to implement? create some sort of fingerprint out of the server's public key; prompt the user for input; cache the result.

<comment><USER31> Every host has a public/private keypair that it stores locally. The client stores the last confirmed (or manually added) host key in ~/.ssh/known_hosts. Host key verification is checking the host key against this list.

A lot of people ignore the importance of this part. It is also a bootstrapping issue: At some point you need to get the key into known_hosts. Most people do this by confirming it the first time they connect. That's usually fine for new servers, but what about old servers, e.g. if you're a dev who just joined the company? Most companies don't seem to have a secure way of seeding clients with the initial host keys. I've never seen it.

We solve this with a script that gets them from Puppet (via PuppetDB, its repository of host "facts"). That script has to hard-code the host key of the Puppet host, of course.

Another solution is using the X.509-style certs to sign each host with your own CA, but I haven't looked into that workflow. Edit: It's actually a much nicer workflow. You can sign users, too.

<comment><USER32> _That 's usually fine for new servers, but what about old servers, e.g. if you're a dev who just joined the company? Most companies don't seem to have a secure way of seeding clients with the initial host keys. I've never seen it._

One way to do this is via SSHFP (ssh fingerprint) records in DNS. Unfortunately they do not seem to be particularly widely supported nor widely used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wrote about this a while back, and also proposed a solution which doesn't involve parsing console output: [https://www.danieldent.com/blog/ssh-requires- a-chain-of-trus...](https://www.danieldent.com/blog/ssh-requires-a-chain-of- trust/)

</comment><comment><USER34> FYI, you can also instruct cloud-init to use a particular key pair by supplying it in instance metadata/user-data. This avoids the need for hacky scripts extracting public keys from console output (which may also be delayed by a few minutes after the instance starts).

</comment><comment><USER35> When we built the new set of drivers for Neo4j, we decided to allow three modes: No encryption, Trust on First Use and Trusted Signature - there's no way to establish an connection without trust.

This was a terrifying decision, because of ease of use concerns. Having done so and shipped it, TL;DR: It worked awesome, outside of some early kinks in TOFU that we worked out - and now everyone can sleep well knowing there's not a single install that thinks they are running an encrypted setup when they really aren't.

Anyone that came back asking for a flag to disable host key verification seemed happy with our argument for why that's not really much different from just disabling encryption.

See "Trust" here: [https://neo4j.com/docs/developer- manual/current/drivers/conf...](https://neo4j.com/docs/developer- manual/current/drivers/configure-connect/)

If you're interested in doing this as well, we wrote code to do it in Python, JS, Java and C#, it's all Apache licensed:

JS: [https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j-javascript- driver/blob/1.2/sr...](https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j-javascript- driver/blob/1.2/src/v1/internal/ch-node.js#L106)

Python: [https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j-python- driver/blob/1.2/neo4j/...](https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j-python- driver/blob/1.2/neo4j/bolt/connection.py#L463)

Java: [https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j-java- driver/blob/1.3/driver/s...](https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j-java- driver/blob/1.3/driver/src/main/java/org/neo4j/driver/internal/security/TLSSocketChannel.java#L68)

C#: [https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j-dotnet- driver/blob/1.3/Neo4j....](https://github.com/neo4j/neo4j-dotnet- driver/blob/1.3/Neo4j.Driver/Neo4j.Driver/Internal/Connector/ITrustStrategy.cs#L28)

</comment><comment><USER36> Phil may be grumpy, but he is not a troll.

</comment><comment><USER37> Good thing they didn't write this in C, or their library would have real security trouble. /s

</comment><comment><USER38> Could SSHFP records not have been an option here? Especially combined with something like DNSSEC?

<comment><USER19> Maybe, but then the library would have to support those.

This isn't as much about the concrete technology as it is about the willingness to implement any host-key checking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if the devops company was this one:

[https://gravitational.com/teleport/index.html](https://gravitational.com/teleport/index.html)

EDIT: Actually, it looks like it's Hashicorp.</comment>


Obama Seeks 'On-Ramp' for More Startups to Go Public - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running_small_business/archives/2012/01/obama_seeks_on-ramp_for_more_startups_to_go_public.html

<comment><USER2> This is definitely a plus overall, even if there are one or two potential flaws. What's concerning for Startup Visa proponents is that the Visa risks being overshadowed by these changes or seen as a bridge too far by wary politicians. I think if you're a Startup Visa supporter in or outside the US, then you can agree that the Visa is far more significant for the US tech startup industry than these current suggestions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome, I was beginning to miss that little Pets.com sock puppet.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yay, loosening regulations on wall street. Lets let startups without enough financial knowledge and market power to create a real IPO jump into being publicly traded.

I see this going really well.

<comment><USER5> There does not exist a homogenous entity called "regulation" where more of it is good and less of it is bad. There are plenty of regulations that accomplish no useful purpose, and even more whose benefits are less than the costs they impose upon commerce.

I would hazard to guess that making it harder for small businesses to go public was one of those unintended consequences of regulation that do more harm than good. Sarbox, or at least a portion of it, ought to be repealed.</comment></comment>


I'm trying to bootstrap my own startup - Any advice? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hellohired.com

<comment><USER3> Ha - I had this idea a few weeks ago. Glad to see someone has JFDI and got this up and live.

First off, $14/month is NOTHING. You may be able to make it up on volume, but read [https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterpris...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales) \- I would start at $99/month (but thats me)

Second - if you are planning to bootstrap this, whats your marketing strategy? How are you going to get 100 business using it this month? Hr people outreach? Now you could blog/tweet/etc. people and get them but rather than a push method, how about a pull? Partnerships are great - find things like [http://hackerbundle.com/](http://hackerbundle.com/) that you can jump on to at least get to the right people. Then you can get them to push it out, checkout [http://www.getharvest.com/invitation/8t9a?utm_source=rp&utm_...](http://www.getharvest.com/invitation/8t9a?utm_source=rp&utm_medium=twitter) it's a landing page that is custom to a specific user who can push it out to their followers.

Third and last - timeshifting. Rather than trying to email/contact everyone, setup things that can happen automatically adn build a list. Weekly webinars, interviews with bloggers, etc. Build up video/online content that is interesting and useful that other people will read/watch (slideshare - <USER2> for hiring/process/etc.)

Good Luck - love the direction!

<comment><AUTHOR> John, wow. This is one of my first posts on HN and I never expected this.

Yea, the $14 seems low, but it'll cover base operation costs. I did plan on making up for it in volume (going to read that article) but also have promotion opportunities (at cost) when companies publish new jobs.

In terms of marketing, I'm banking on a great experience going a long way. I have a few connections that can hopefully help me get a few recognizable logos on the homepage that could boost the credibility.

In addition to that, all your other questions are really challenging me for how I can get that momentum a lot sooner. And your suggestions are extremely helpful. I have a few loosely outlined goals for the next 30 days, and I'm going to include these into those plans.

Thank you so much :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "automatically works on mobile and table devices" I wish I had a table device, but I'm guessing it's a typo.

It looks pretty awesome so far. I'm not sure if you're necessarily trying to get beta testers, but when I saw "The first 1000 companies that sign up get 2 months free!" I thought... well, not many companies must have thought this was good enough to try. Not to mention, if I come back in three months and that message is still up, I know that you still haven't convinced 1000 companies to sign up in three (or six, or nine) months. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing.

It looks great and if my company were ready for that stage I would sign up for sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah, you don't have a table device? My bad :P

Thanks for the encouragement, xauronx. That was also really good feedback on my "1000 companies" messaging. I guess my strategy is to try and give a little extra incentive for the early adopters. I do have plans to adjust it as I get closer to that goal, I'm not entirely sure to what yet.

Thank you so much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is going to take longer than you think. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, I'm ready for a long haul. What I'm really going to make sure of is that I remain focused on validating the concept before I invest too much time/effort/money into building the wrong thing.

So at least if it takes a long time, I'm making small incremental steps in the right direction.</comment></comment>


Fitness tracking app gives away location of secret US army bases - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases <comment><USER2> Extensive discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16249955)

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty incredible level of detail. I can see the main roads on my FOB in Iraq. Definitely not the greatest thing ever.</comment>


Revisiting 'Zork': What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/06/revisiting-zork-what-we-lost-in-the-transition-to-visual-games/241074/ <comment><USER2> This article brings to mind what I dislike about the modern game industry.

First off, what is a game? Let's consider two broad types of games: competitive games and puzzle games. Competitive games (like chess) feature more than one player and the outcome of the game is unknown (both in terms of the winner and the final game state). Puzzle games (generally speaking) don't have a strong competitive element and the final outcome is known (i.e., a lone player solves the puzzle).

I contend that first-person shooters (in single player mode) are nothing more than big puzzle games. This isn't bad per se, but the problem lies in how these games have evolved.

Rather than make the "puzzles" in FPS games more challenging and innovative (i.e., focus on gameplay), the major game studios have instead focused on increasing the audio-visuals and cinematic attributes of their products. As a result, gameplay has consistently been minimized in favor of eye candy.

No better example comes to mind than the recent smash hit, L.A. Noire. The extent to which the producers of this game clearly wish they were making movies comes off as obsequious. The tiny sliver of game mechanics they did include is mind-numbingly repetitive and utterly without challenge.

These things are no longer "games", they're shitty movies.

<comment><USER3> Interactive Fiction as a genre is significantly less accessible than FPS. Not only due to the medium of text, which is inherently less flashy and instantly compelling than 3D environments, but due to the nature of the puzzles.

Taking the rose-colored glasses off, a large part of the adventure gaming genre (including point-and-clicks) relied on obscure object interactions or guessing the right command to proceed. Freeing a bird to drive away a snake in Colossal Cave Adventure is not necessarily intuitive.

For some people, including myself, this is fun. But it's not an easy, thoughtless, escapist form of entertainment - which is where the modern FPS comes in.

<comment><USER4> I feel that both forms are missing the mark for my taste. Essentially, they represent two of the classic failures in crafting a good ("pencil and paper") role-playing game: This game is all fighting and This game is all puzzles. The really fun games are the ones that have a cool environment (like text adventures) and let you make interesting choices.

I know there have been some efforts to do that sort of thing with a text- adventure-y environment (Storytron?) but don't know of anyone who has really gotten it right yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone should make a satirical text adventure about doing startups, where you wander around the valley trying to get funding and so on.

        >LOOK

        You are in a brand new air conditioned Palo Alto office.
        Empty packets of ramen litter the floor. There are two desks,
        each with brand new macbooks on them.

        >SIT DOWN

        There are no chairs. What are you, some kind of loser?

        >PIVOT

        You are bought by a google.

And so on. I know suggesting things for other people to do is bad form, "do it yourself!" goes the familiar cry. Unfortunately I don't have the requisite insider knowledge to make it funny.

<comment><USER6> This really is a marvellous idea! It could be totally hilarious.

<comment><USER7> It would be pretty easy, too, using Inform 7.

<comment><USER8> They have a nice history of IF coding here: <http://inform7.com/if/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Zork really isn't the best example, just the first (and even then it was just an adaptation of _Adventure_ ). The Infocom adventures got far more sophisticated in every way over the following few years, in terms of prose, setting, gameplay and atmosphere.

I credit adventure games with teaching me to touch type. To this day I can still type "inventory" far faster than any other nine-letter word.

<comment><USER10> Can you give an example of one of the later, better games?

<comment><USER11> If you don't mind moderately difficult games (my personal preference) I strongly recommend taking a look at the blurbs for these few tremendously good games and seeing if they appeal to you:

Adam Cadre - _Varicella_ <http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=ywwlr3tpxnktjasd>

Jon Ingold - _Make It Good_ <http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=jdrbw1htq4ah8q57>

Andrew Plotkin - _Spider And Web_ <http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=2xyccw3pe0uovfad>

<comment><USER12> OTOH if you want to start with something easier, but still with puzzles, _Bronze_ by Emily Short is a good one.

If you want a very good game with almost no puzzles, then definitely _Photopia_.

<comment><USER11> Another game with moderately easy puzzles that might appeal to the HN demographic is Dan Schmidt - _For A Change_. The setting is an abstract, somewhat pastoral landscape full of things whose descriptions are alien but extremely evocative. The theme of the puzzles is imagining and understanding things about the world of the game. I found it rather entrancing.

<http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=t61i5akczyblx2zd>

Anyway, there are so many really must-play IF works from the last decade that the recommendations could go on forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We didn't lose anything -- interactive fiction games are still being produced, and you can play them on your android or iphone these days, too. <http://ifarchive.org/> and <http://xyzzyawards.org/> are good places to start.

<comment><USER14> If someone wanted to write an interactive text game like these and put it on the web, are there any frameworks available? If not, a lot of the work would be on figuring out how to parse the player's input, how to map out the possible paths through the game, etc, instead of writing the story.

<comment><USER15> I actually started working on a Ruby IF framework, with the intent that it could also be used to create MUDs and IF-ish games that had combat, so they can be played like an RPG.

I haven't gotten far yet, sadly. You are correct about the player's input being an issue, and the mapping has some issues to resolve, but the biggest problem is actually the interactions between objects or the player and objects.

For instance, the 'push' command is going to mean something different to every entity. Some won't respond (default response) but others might move or react.

I actually implemented that once in C# in such a way that it confused most of the other developers and they quit. I offered to scrap my code, but that was kind of the end of the project. -sigh-

<comment><USER16> Have the ruby thing on github by any chance? Id love to check it out. I've been toying with the idea of writing a mud in ruby, and giving it a graphical web frontend to make it more accessible to new players.

<comment><USER15> Not Github. Back then I was using RubyForge.

Fair Warning: I think I as far as I got was logging in. I don't remember if I got any commands working at all.

<http://rubyforge.org/projects/textualize/>

I will probably move it to GitHub soon as I've been thinking about working on it again.

<comment><USER16> Cool, I have one from a while ago that I got about that far as well. I was thinking about working through the Mud Game Programming book to get a working foundation going, but send me an email (in profile) once you start working on it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let's also not forget the mechanics of these games tended to be maddening at times. Knowing what you wanted to do and having to guess at the nouns and verbs the designer expected was beyond frustrating.

I'm all for fond remembrance. But the problems of text-based games weren't limited to comparing poorly to graphics. Some of them were inherent; implicit companions of the desirable parts of such "written" games.

<comment><USER18> Are there any NLP guys here? Can we improve this situation with modern technology?

<comment><USER19> Yes, depending on your expectations.

With a LOT of effort it would be entirely possible to build something like SHRDLU that could handle a specific game:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU>

Caution: Don't be misled by the impressive-looking conversation transcript. With no disrespect meant to Terry Winograd and the ground-breaking work he did it was- like every natural language demonstration since the dawn of computing- fragile, prone to odd mistakes and the transcripts were usually generated by someone already acclimated to the idiosyncrasies the system to make it look its best.

You could build something that recognized a richer grammar and even engaged in limited conversational discourse. It would be good enough that a person might briefly forget they were dealing with a system of limited capabilities until, inevitably, it would break down and remind them they are not conversing with a human.

The risk is those failures could be sufficiently frequent and severe as to make it worthless. The user might be better off with something less ambitious, more predictable and less frustrating. Then again, that wouldn't do anything to push the state of the art, so it should be worth the risk to try it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> <http://www.getlamp.com/>

<comment><USER21> Awesome documentary on the history of interactive fiction - big focus on the early days up through infocom (actually, I just realized I never finished watching it!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> For everyone person who loved text adventures, another nine people gave up in the first room.

<comment><USER23> This may be true, but it doesn't really address the point of the article. The argument is that modern games could take a lesson from text adventure games in engaging the players' imaginations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> My favorite text adventure was Pirate's Cove, on my trusty Vic 20. You can still play it, with an emulator

<http://www.c64gg.com/Adams_Scott_DL.html>

although that version seems to have some simple graphics, which is just wrong.

There's more information on the Scott Adams games here [http://www.lysator.liu.se/adventure/Adventure_International/...](http://www.lysator.liu.se/adventure/Adventure_International/Classic.html)

Good times....

<comment><USER25> Here's Scott Adams' site: <http://www.msadams.com/>

You can download Windows versions of all the SAGA adventures there (apart from the Marvel ones, I think), and he has links to web-playable versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Infocom was just the tip of the interactive fiction iceberg.

There's still a vibrant interactive fiction gaming scene. It has thrived despite Infocom's demise.

Many interactive fiction games continue to be developed, played, entered in competitions, and reviewed.

Here are some links to get you started:

<http://www.wurb.com/if/genre>

<http://www.ifreviews.org>

<http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive.html>

[http://ifdb.tads.org/search?browse&list&sortby=new](http://ifdb.tads.org/search?browse&list&sortby=new)

<comment><USER26> Relatively recently the IF community has experienced a bit of a renaissance because of the release of Inform 7, which allows you to program games in the most natural sounding English I've ever seen in a programming language. Here's a sample:

\---

      "Cave Entrance"

      The Cobble Crawl is a room. "You are crawling over cobbles in a low
      passage. There is a dim light at the east end of the passage."

      A wicker cage is here. "There is a small wicker cage discarded
      nearby."

      The Debris Room is west of the Crawl. "You are in a debris room
      filled with stuff washed in from the surface. A low wide passage
      with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here, but an
      awkward canyon leads upward and west. A note on the wall says,
      'Magic word XYZZY'."

      The black rod is here. "A three foot black rod with a rusty star
      on one end lies nearby."

      Above the Debris Room is the Sloping E/W Canyon. West of the Canyon
      is the Orange River Chamber.

\---

As you can see, it reads just like regular English, and it's very easy to understand what's going on here.

Here's a more complete example:

<http://inform7.com/learn/man/ex74.html#e74>

And here are some full, playable games (with source):

<http://www.hpiweb.com/newmedia/>

<http://inform7.com/learn/complete-examples/>

A couple of quick tutorials:

<http://www.brasslantern.org/writers/howto/i7tutorial.html>

[http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Beginners_Guide_to_Interactive_...](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Beginners_Guide_to_Interactive_Fiction_with_Inform_7/Getting_Started_with_Inform_7)

The full manual:

<http://inform7.com/learn/manuals/>

Wikipedia article:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7>

<comment><USER7> You can even do a form of map reduce.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Great article.

Ultima 7 was a graphical game that had a similar effect on me. The graphics were somewhat abstract and generic and left a lot for the imagination to fill in. The writing was wonderful and put flesh on the world. Playing the game was like reading a novel.

It seems like game makers need to focus less on graphics and more on music and writing.

<comment><USER28> Ultima 6 and 7 were awesome games. I haven't had a chance to play it, but they have done remakes of 5 and 6 with better graphics.

u6project.com/

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I still remember bicycling over to the "L" building on Auburn's campus to play ADVENT and DND and DUNGEON on their PDP-11 (or whatever model of minicomputer it was at the time). Thanks to the OP for sharing this article. Now I have to will myself to do some actual work today instead of playing old IF games online.

<comment><USER30> telnet gein.vistech.net

Login: games / pressplay

         A  ADVENTURE        The original Collosal Cave adventure
         B  BLIND            Escape the unseen maze
         C  BUNNY            Destroy the man-eating bunny rabbits
         D  CATCH            Navigate a star-field
         E  CHICKEN          Chicken hunt
         F  CONNECT4         Connect 4 in a row
         G  CROSSFIRE        Evade and attack within the grid
         H  DALEKS           Terminate... Terminate...
         I  DEFENDER         Defend the planet from the invaders
         J  DESTROYER        Destroy the aliens
         K  DIG              Dig Dug
         L  DOOR             Watch out for the monster in the maze
         M  EMPIRE           The original single player Empire
         N  GRANNY           Road Rage!
         O  MOLE             Hunt the moles
         P  TETRIS           Manipulate the falling blocks

<comment><USER31> Global Thermonuclear War

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is exactly why I tend to prefer books to theatre, and theatre to film. Filling in the details engages my imagination in a way that the polished, finished surfaces of contemporary games and films do not.

<comment><USER33> There are still lots of contemporary indie games and films.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I miss the Infocom games. One of the most enjoyable parts of them was the feeling that you were engaging with an actual person and their own personality, sense of humor, etc. The programmer and author of these games were often one and the same; at the least, they weren't a huge team of people writing off a spec.

I love many modern games but the better they get, the more they seem to be strangled by their own content pipeline; the requirement to produce AAA-level graphics, sound, writing, advertising means the scale of these things is very large and the appetite for risk is low.

All that being said, many of the Infocom games were stupidly obscure and irritating and relied on you doing something almost completely arbitrary at some given point to make things work. But they were just so good in so many ways that this was forgivable. All of the Zorks, the Enchanter series, Suspended, Starcross, Deadline... the list goes on and on.

It's worth noting that Infocom themselves moved into a dodgy neither fish nor fowl territory towards the end with added graphics and some pretty mediocre titles.

Almost 30 years on, I can't work on a house using a ladder and not think "It's too bad that the ladder analysis department closes at noon".

<comment><USER35> You should really look at modern IF, which retain all the good things you mention but have a more modern/humane approach to the actual game play.

Lost Pig is a short, interesting one: <http://pr-if.org/play/lostpig/>

<comment><USER36> I have very positive memories of playing Graham Nelson's _Curses_. Nelson implemented the Inform language so that he could write _Curses_ , making it a landmark game in modern IF games.

The game is like the best of the Infocom games in how it builds up a world in terms of initially confusing parallels that start to fit together like jigsaw pieces; it's achievement is that it does this in a more sophisticated and rewarding way, to my taste at least. It takes as much time to complete as the bigger of the Zork games.

You can play it online at:

<http://z-machine.appspot.com/game/curses/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I built a VoiceXML interface for Zork back in 1999. It was meant as a demo application for a VoiceXML interpreter that Cicso was trying to push and I was a test engineer on. It had automatic speech recognition and text to speech. So you could say "Go South" and then hear "You are standing in a forest. There is a bucket." Or whatever.

I thought it was really neat but it never made it past demo stage. I wrote a kind of lazy socket engine in PHP and then used phpzork.com for all my data. It was crude and you couldn't complete the entire game on the phone because I didn't have time to encode all possible actions for the ASR engine. But you could move around and grab a few things. All via telephone ;)

I just checked and it looks like phpzork.com is no longer. Pity, as it was a great way to enjoy Zork 10 years ago.

<comment><USER8> Great idea: you could have started a 1-800-ADVNTUR service ;) not to mention it would be tempting to be able to play adventure games in the car, while, er, not driving to strange and exotic places. I'd also love to hear what that sounds like - thinking of the voice acting in some adventure games I've played where you could do worse than replace the recorded drawl with TTS and cut down on the floppies.. <http://www.adventuregamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29027>

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> You can play zork in your browser here: <http://thcnet.net/zork/index.php>

</comment><comment><USER39> Any suggestions for Infocom games? Just missed them I'm afraid - cut my teeth on nethack and commander keen.

<comment><USER29> It's hard to go wrong with any of them, really. You should play through the original Zork trilogy. I really liked their mystery titles, especially "Deadline"; I seem to recall that you had a lot more interaction with the other characters in the game (i.e. the suspects). The "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" game was pretty good, too; even though I'd already read the books, some of the puzzles were tricky to figure out. I think I still have my "Don't Panic!" button that came in the box with that one.

<comment><USER5> h2g2 is difficult to the point where it seems like a parody of the genre. Some of it makes stuff like monkey island seem trivial, and I find it hard not to assume that the whole thing was a big joke on the part of Douglas Adams.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, H2G2 is really, really funny and pretty much impossible. Spend some time fumbling around in each room (there really are some funny responses you should see!) and then refer to a walkthrough to advance to the next room. Save often - although even saving often won't help if you don't get the screwdriver in the first room. It really is a player-hostile game.

<comment><USER5> It's all very well saying "fumble around in each room" but most of the time you only have a half dozen moves before you die.

There are _so many_ things that you have to do in order not to render the game unfinishable further down the line, and they're thrown in _so quickly_ and _so covertly_ that I cannot believe it isn't satire.

I mean, if you take it as anything apart from satire it's just unforgivably bad game design.

Adams was involved in writing it, and he was definitely into computers. He was the first person in the UK to own an apple machine. He would have almost certainly played zork/dungeon and such games, and therefore being Adams he would not have been able to resist parodying their ridiculous nature.

<comment><USER41> Douglas Adams was also involved with writing the Infocom title _Bureaucracy_ , which was similarly odd in game play, though not as fiendishly difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "Visual" vs textual games is a bit of a false dichotomy though; in particular the Marathon series does a great job of blending action and intelligent, literary story: <http://marathon.bungie.org/story/shakespeare.html> The first Deus Ex also had plenty of literature in it, sampling heavily from The Man who was Thursday and other classics.

</comment><comment><USER43> I remember as kid, playing the Zork series and exchanging hints with my 4th grade teacher. Great game, and that made it all the more fun.

I think the game that had the biggest impact on me, though, was a game for the Apple ][ called "Odyssey"... I remember many hours lost to that game:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_The_Compleat_Apventure>

</comment><comment><USER44> I miss these games.

</comment><comment><USER45> If you want games with no/low graphics and lots of depth there are still MUDs out there. Or for war, empire is still out there.

</comment><comment><USER46> Get ye flask

<http://www.homestarrunner.com/dman3.html>

</comment><comment><USER47> Tangential question - has the original unsplit version of Zork ever been rereleased anywhere?

<comment><USER7> MIT Zork is bundled in with the iPhone/iPad Frotz interpreter, so it's probably in IFDB.

<comment><USER47> Indeed it is, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> You can be eaten by a Grue in the Black Ops Terminal Interrogation Room :)

</comment><comment><USER49> i foresee an article 'what we lost in the transition from keyboards to audio- visual interfaces'.

</comment><comment><USER50> sassa frassa kids these days

</comment><comment><USER51> What I miss in modern games is... really fun, great jump n runs and fun adventures like "Monkey Island" seem to be a dieing or already dead genre.

It is all about MMOs, RTS, role playing, shooters and sports games nowadays.

<comment><USER52> For what it's worth, Monkey Island on the iPad is _amazing_. Seriously the way it's meant to be played. I just introduced my girlfriend to the series on the iPad the other day.

Tablets seem to be bringing adventure games back a bit -- they were effectively dead for the longest time.

<comment><USER10> I had the realization the other day that the SCUMM games and Heroes of Might and Magic (an amazing game) would play very very well on an iPad.

What a pity, I have an iPad 2 in front of me and I can't play the games. Thanks, Apple. I can't wait to get rid of it for a Galaxy tab.

<comment><USER53> Um... ever heard of ScummVM? They have a wonderful iPad edition.

<comment><USER10> How can I install it on an iPad 2?

<comment><USER54> It's only available if you jailbreak your iPad. If it's not available by default in Cydia, there's a repository you can add to download it. The controls don't always feel 100% right, but it does work like a charm.

Alternatively, the new-fangled remakes of the first two Monkey Island games are available for sale on the App Store proper.

<comment><USER51> If I understand it correctly, ScummVM itself is not allowed to run on iOS because it loads content (the games) after being installed, right?

What if one made a stripped version that just comes with one game and no loading? but then you would have to find a way of bundling those games legally...

<comment><USER10> I believe they have done that for Flight of the Amazon Queen on the app store.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Next Photoshop will get 64-bit boost--on Windows only - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9909725-39.html?tag=newsmap

<comment><USER2> If you're interested in some of the history behind the 64 bit Mac version, read this:

[http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2008/04/02/rhapsody...](http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2008/04/02/rhapsody- and-blues)</comment>


Ask YC:  Meetups / Events in the Valley on Interview Weekend? - <AUTHOR>

I was asked by one of the founders being interviewed (who wishes to remain anonymous!) to see what's going on in the Valley over interview weekend. This is a pretty good idea for those who aren't from the Valley (yet); you can learn the culture a bit, talk with other founders, etc.<p>Oh, and good luck to everyone! <comment><USER2> I was just going to ask the same question. We (QuantRunner) are coming from NYC and would like to see the SV equivalent of the New York Tech Meetup. The NYTM is the biggest tech/startup event in the city, most people in the community attend it or have attended it, we would like to compare and contrast cultures.

Are there any other get-togethers that weekend, any kind of mailing list for the invitees?

We are looking forward to it.

</comment><comment><USER3> There was GoGaRuCo (sold out now though), but I had to cancel my ticket unfortunately...

There is a pretty sweet coffee shop near the YC office called Red Rock Coffee, it's often filled to the brim with laptop users, quite a few of them entrepreneurs. It's a two floor coffee shop that is often the location for various meetup groups (such as the iPhone & Facebook Apps).

<comment><USER4> Just for reference for anyone else, the Palo Alto equivalent of Red Rock is Coupa Cafe. It's smaller than RR, but it's packed with startuppy types either brainstorming or just coding. Incidentally, I'll probably be there coding up our prototype a couple hours from now if anyone wants to stop by.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty quiet weekend. We (cloudkick) would be happy to grab a beer with some folks in south bay (san jose, caltrain friendly) on Saturday evening if others are interested.

</comment><comment><USER6> AdTech is coming up next week: <http://www.ad-tech.com/>

Tickets are prohibitively expensive, but you can get an exhibition hall pass for $35. Obviously focuses on digital marketing.

Do you think might be worth a visit?

</comment><comment><USER4> There's Silicon Valley Geek Breakfast at 8am on Friday in Sunnyvale. See:

<http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=194749365592>

</comment><comment><USER2> I was just going to ask the same question. We (QuantRunner) are coming from NYC and would like to see the SV equivalent of the New York Tech Meetup. The NYTM is the biggest tech/startup event in the city, most people in the community attend it or have attended it, we would like to compare and contrast cultures.

Are there any other get-togethers that weekend, any kind of mailing list for the invitees?

We are looking forward to it.

</comment><comment><USER7> what about something totally unrelated, Sunday should be perfect beach weather...

</comment><comment><USER8> if you don't find anything, why not organize something yourself?

<comment><AUTHOR> Me personally? I don't live there.</comment></comment>


Dream Homes from the Past Century - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190521-10-dream-homes-from-the-past-century <comment><USER2> Recently my idea of a dream house would something in the traditional Japanese style with wood, tatami, shoji, and a beautiful garden. I remember being really blown away by the Nomura house [1] in Kanazawa many years ago.

Of course I would probably want to update it with better insulation, air conditioning, and more glass/screens to let me enjoy the views of the garden while keeping the bugs out.

The best part is you don't even need to break the bank to get something like that. An old abandoned Japanese folk house can be purchased for next to nothing and completely renovated for less than the cost of a 1 bedroom condo in the Bay Area. [2]

[1] [https://www.kanazawastation.com/nomura-samurai-house- garden/](https://www.kanazawastation.com/nomura-samurai-house-garden/)

[2] [https://www.rakusumu.com/sale/detail/00166-200049](https://www.rakusumu.com/sale/detail/00166-200049)

<comment><USER3> A lot of those homes are difficult to retrofit with decent heating and insulation. I had a friend thattried this with an old Beijing hutong whose bones simply weren't designed for central heating. You can put in something, but it will be expensive and/or ineffective.

<comment><USER4> 炬燵 are a thing

<comment><USER5> True. It's long been my opinion that it's more efficient to heat a person (or a couple of persons) than to heat an entire home, most of which is empty at any given time. A kotatsu fits that bill rather nicely.

<comment><USER3> Kotatsus are limited: they are ok if you are idle, but they don't warm your hands if you want to get work done on a laptop. I can never get anything done MIL's apartment in southern China in the winter (southern China gets no central heating, and it still gets cold).

<comment><USER6> Put a lump of butter in your tea. Sure it's gross but you'll be warm. ;-)

<comment><USER3> Doesn't stop your hands from freezing.

<comment><USER6> It suspect it would (unless you have circulation issues in your hands or something.) Your body burns the extra fat and whatnot to keep your core temp up. At least that's the theory I was told. I was camping in the mountains and too cold at night when a friend told me about this. We used hot chocolate, a cup after dinner with a tablespoon of butter in it. Sure enough, I was roasty toasty all night.

I'm not sure it would stop your hands from freezing but it might be worth a try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Part of me loves architecture and seeing these amazing homes. Sadly, a bigger part of me cannot afford a 1 bedroom condo.

In my old age, my lower middle class 'lot in life' prevents me from really enjoying luxurious things.

<comment><USER4> Brits in the Austen period distinguished between attributes, acquisitions, and accomplishments. The first are things one is born with and keep until death, such as eye colour. The second are things one has bought and may sell. The last are things one has done, or has learned how to do. You may not be able to acquire instances of 'architecture porn', but you can enjoy them (and may even be able to rent them), and very little keeps you from accomplishing things.

<comment><USER8> this is so true

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A lot of these are too form over function for my tastes. They are very interesting to look at for the most part, but I'm not sure I'd like to live in a glass cube with everything on show, or in a brutalist mountain of concrete. The one I would pick, however, is the "teletubby house" at the bottom of the article. It looks small, but strikes a good balance between art and practicality, to my mind.

</comment><comment><USER10> My biggest worry is, when i finaly have the money and the ground to build my dream, that i'm not allowed to due to building restrictions :(...

Germany is densily populated and you can get a house + ground with 2-5 acres for 200-500.000k but they are all in the so called 'outter area' and apparently we don't want that. You have strict building restrictions. you can't just tear it down and rebiuld it (what you often need to to be able to build their at all. Your dream house will not be the original 0815 building)

Anyway, while i have a ton of ideas, my main motivation is to create spaces and design a house around it.

That spot where you gonna watch movies, the wind and rain protected outdoor place to watch the rain, the office which allows me to look out, feel the wind and having enough shade that my screen is usefull, the gaming room, they day bedroom, bright, with a great view and the tea room. Something like when Dr. Strange was finding that teacher there was a very beautiful japanese style empty square room with openings to every side and curtains.

Aaaand a Workshop, hobby room with big window to the north, solar power, additional water reserve and a storehouse for gworing your own food.

All of that should be in a layout with optimizes sun exposure. And it has either stacks of wood outside the window with slits high enough that you can look out but the sun doesn't annoy you or other high quality automatic blindes.

Modern, pratical, sustainable (also cheap to maintain).

Basically to build my dream house, i just need luck, time and money. Luck for the location and building regulations, Time to think that through and money.

I think i watched too much BBCs Grand Designs

<comment><USER11> google is telling me an acre is a bit more than 4000 square meter...You need 8000-20,000 square meter plot for your house & yard or am I reading something wrongly?

The house my father was born in (& my grandmother still lived in till shortly before she died) was on a ~2500 square meter plot that seemed _huge_ to me, so much that when my father & uncle sold the property 4 more houses were built on the same plot.

From what you wrote above your house would comfortably fit in a 1000 square meter plot with enough room for a yard around it.

<comment><USER12> Very large yards make for good neighbors.

<comment><USER13> And lets you do things without bothering them either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> First I was surprised to see how modern were these houses from the _"past century"_. Then I realized that the past century is no longer the 19th century, as it was while I was growing up and got used to the term.

<comment><USER15> Same here. I was actually hoping to see lots of outdated dreams, like "look what they thought would be cool, but turned out to be completely impractical".

Also, all such posts miss location. What good is a cool house, if the next supermarket is 50 miles away?

<comment><USER16> 50 miles is not really all that far, especially if there are closer markets that aren't full-blown supermarkets. Under the right circumstances--and assuming Internet etc.--I would certainly consider living 50 miles from a supermarket.

<comment><USER17> I agree, and I live something like 40 miles from a walmart.

We do have a local grocery closer, it's about a 30 minute drive.

We strive to produce a lot of our own food, and that which we do not produce, we buy in bulk. We make a trip to the grocery every couple of weeks, primarily for things that perish quickly--produce in the winter (when we are not producing it in our garden), milk, etc.

Internet isn't great, but it can stream a few TVs worth of netflix, so it's not terrible either.

With 40 acres, mostly of hardwood forest I can romp around in--I love it there, truly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I lived for 10 years in a very transparent house. Loved it for two years. The lack of privacy and the need of shade from sunlight=heat inside made me finall move to a more closed construction.

<comment><USER19> haha, that transparent bedroom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hate to say it, but the Desert House looks like the restroom building at the local park here.

I like the other houses :-)

<comment><USER21> Beware anytime an architect says "subvert" with a gleam in their eyes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is it just me or does anybody else think that the Desert House, United States looks a lot like a rest stop bathroom?

<comment><USER23> Definitely an odd exterior aesthetic but it's a lot more rational on the inside: [https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/jim-jennings- sli...](https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/jim-jennings- slideshow-092009)

<comment><USER24> Interesting interior design too with the open area and the gap window at ceiling level going around the whole home. I guess there's not much of a view and likely a lot of solar heat, so the configuration makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I dislike how much glass is used in many of these houses. I imagine they let a LOT of ambient noise and heat inside.

<comment><USER26> You can build windows that have sound attenuation greater than common wall construction.

My office at home has a series of 62"x80" windows effectively forming the walls on two sides of four sides, and smaller windows covering on one side. I had the windows built as 3/16"-PVB_laminate-1/4"-1/2"_gap-1/4". The lamination and the different thicknesses detune the panes, and the large mass provides a lot of attenuation.

You can hardly hear someone standing outside yelling. People often comment how quiet it is after they step inside and close the door.

[It also helps that I don't have any computers in the room-- just display/keyboard and long fiber displayport cables to a rack in another room.]

These windows aren't particularly exotic... basically just the minimum you might to do design for a lot of attenuation.

Here is a comparison chart (from a quick google): [http://girardglass.com/uploads/stc_rating_chart.pdf](http://girardglass.com/uploads/stc_rating_chart.pdf)

Similarly for thermal insulating properties. Modern coatings can reject an enormous amount of heat-- enough that in some designs its preferable to us less effective coatings because the windows face the morning sun and the heat gain is beneficial.

<comment><USER27> Can you explain what "3/16"-PVB_laminate-1/4"-1/2"_gap-1/4" means? Is that four layers of glass?

<comment><USER26> 3/16" glass then a layer of PVB laminate then a layer of 1/4" class then a 1/2" sealed space of air then 1/4" glass.

So two glass panes, which are different thicknesses, one which is comprised of a laminate sandwich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'd love a service that surfaced "architecturally desirable" homes for sale in your area, at various price points.

This is a hard criteria to define. But I know it when I see it. Some combination of materials, craftsmanship, age, and design. Not necessarily location or price.

It's very hard to filter for using Redfin or Zillow. I wish there was an MLS site that showed you 50+ listing thumbnails on a single page and allowed you to click through on any that caught your eye.

<comment><USER29> 100% agree. I usually search Zillow with "modern" or "contemporary" or "architect", which usually means 5-10% will actually be interesting houses. It seems the vast majority of even extremely expensive homes are completely devoid of any sense of design beyond "however the other McMansions look".

<comment><USER17> Perhaps this has something to do with location, as well.

The town my business is located in (American South) has a great, long history. Many, many homes are now over 100 years old. A lot of them are very large, and have exquisite crafstmanship oozing everywhere--for me, that's primarily woodwork. Exposed beams, winding staircases, etc.

Anyway there's a couple hundred of those here, I think.

There are also a ton of more modern (1970s-era) homes that were definitely swanky at the time, but now are really lackluster. They just look dated, while the 100-year-old homes look magnificent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Are these dream homes or architecturally interesting homes? I would certainly not want to live in one of those homes.

<comment><USER2> Definitely "dream" in the not-your-home-in-reality sense. My assumption is that the people who can afford to build houses like this do so as second (or third, etc) homes, and live in something much more practical as their "daily driver".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> If I am on a small budget, would build something like this:

[https://www.calearth.org/tour](https://www.calearth.org/tour)

[https://www.calearth.org/alumni-projects2](https://www.calearth.org/alumni- projects2)

If the budget is unlimited, would probably buy a castle in south of France or something...

</comment><comment><USER32> Reminds me of this good blog post on how social behaviors drive architecture of our homes: [https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2019/04/archite...](https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2019/04/architecture-and-the-house-of-.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> Also check out [https://www.dwell.com/](https://www.dwell.com/) – sort of like a Dribbble for homes

There's something really inspiring about nice architecture and interior designs

</comment><comment><USER34> A few of the homes have many glass walls where do you plug in things? Seems very impractical.

<comment><USER35> Power outlets built into the floor, most likely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Chilean house is literally just some glass and wood. Scary to think how people sleep in that.

<comment><USER37> I imagine being on a lot large enough or remote enough that you have no visible neighbors probably helps.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, as long as you have isolation there's no reason to keep people from being able to see in the house.

That said, that design doesn't seem super practical and the photographs probably wouldn't look nearly as nice once all the electrical cords and general clutter is out. And I imagine it doesn't offer a lot of separation for visiting family, etc.

The Graham House looks like it has lots of glass while still having some separation between parts of the house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's 2020, and most Chinese still don't believe that most of Americans are living in wooden houses.

</comment><comment><USER39> Really nice to know that I'd have to work till I'm 60 to afford a house like that without taking on serious debt. What a time to be alive. I'm so grateful.

<comment><USER40> The horror of having to settle for having all your needs met and living without insane luxury. Poor you.

These houses would have been unaffordable to almost everyone at any time I'm history and two hundred years ago no amount of wealth could have bought you them at all. So what again is special about being alive now?

<comment><USER41> What is special about now is that you can have a simple house now, and have it be the envy of a kings' from 200 years ago.

The sheer comfort of living in a modern house is insane, regardless of the size.

<comment><USER42> Add a decent modern mattress and a 60" TV connected to Netflix and bring the billionaire envy 150 years forward?

<comment><USER43> Not the mattress. High quality handmade horsehair mattresses are what the absolute richest of the rich have slept on for hundreds of years and continue to do today in 2020. There's a reason they go for $100k, I've tried them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your thoughts on very long functions? - <AUTHOR> I have a function that is very long - several hundred lines.
And I feel like I should break it up into smaller functions.
But the thing is, it's meant to be several hundred lines of sequential instructions.  There's just a long sequence of things that need to happen at this point in my application.
Breaking it into functions would seem to be introducing unneeded complexity. After all - functions are there to be reused.  And whenever you see a function you have to consider what places in the code might be using it.  Whereas in this case, if I broke this code into functions, none of those functions would be re-used.... they would all be called in sequence.
Admittedly it is hard to navigate up and down this long function which does have logical sections to it.  Maybe I should just bite the bullet and pull out each section into a separate function?
I dunno.  It feels wrong to have a several hundred line function but it also seems wrong to break it up, thereby increasing complexity.
What do you think? <comment><USER2> Any code that you write now will need to be edited in future for enhancement or bug fixes. If you are able to split individual steps or sub tasks of the main function into smaller sub functions, you would not be required to scan through the entire code in future for any modifications. If the functions are named properly, you can directly go to the function and edit it as required.

Also, assume that this big function breaks for some reason. Having sub functions will make it easier for you or anyone else maintaining the code to isolate it and track the source error in a much easier way.

So for me, functions are not just about re-usability, but also about maintenance and readability of code.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not going to say you definitely need to split them, but there's a good reason to do that, even if there are no other users - this read easier:

        def function:
          do_foo()
          something = do_bar()
          frobnicate(something)

than this:

        def function:
          // do foo
          lots
          of
          detailed
          code
          // do bar
          lots
          something = of
          other
          stuff
          // frobnicate
          ...

At least it makes the dependencies and logical blocks of functionality more clear.

</comment><comment><USER4> How well can you introspect about code logic across a scroll? Or a page? If it's one unit of code, how can you mentally commit to it, without seeing all of it?

The smaller thing: it's about how you interact with it in an editor, ide.

</comment><comment><USER5> John Carmack agrees with you:

[http://number- none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm...](http://number- none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.html)</comment>


Google is profiting from Holocaust denial, says Jewish museum - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/google-profiting-holocaust-denial-jewish-breman-museum <comment><USER3> Google profits off a lot of stuff I disagree with too. I don't really blame Google, though. They're just a search engine, right? The real problem is that people can say things I don't agree with on the Internet. Something needs to be done about this. We should really look to China for leadership in this area.

Ok, enough sarcasm. What is really interesting about this is that the old saying "history is written by the winner" may have to be changed to "history is auctioned off to the highest bidder".

<comment><USER4> _The real problem is that people can say things I don 't agree with on the Internet._

I'm sure you know this already, but Google's search rankings !== "the internet".

Not only that, but they've been downranking all kinds of content -- including spam of all sorts; and most assiduously (and famously), virtually all forms of pornography -- for nearly as longs as they've been in existence. Which no one calls "censorship", or "blocking stuff I disagree with"† -- because of course it isn't. It's simply a matter of editorial discretion -- of the kind that all mass media companies have always engaged in, since mass media became a thing.

Got a problem with that? Start your own search engine.

† As if holocaust denialism were a simple matter of "stuff I disagree with". But it isn't of course -- which again, I'm sure you knew already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh please not this again. The internet is not the united nations. Any step away from serving users free from external pressure in ORGANIC results is a step towards censorship.

If you want to sway people's opinion from results that match their demographic and search behaviour then you better pay for it because that's an AD - <USER2> definite representation of truth or relevancy.

If you really want to provide the most relevant result for those queries, produce the content and make it trusted enough for it to rank first. If you can't then you are not relevant.

Google works on trust and relevancy (government links mean a lot for example). There's no devil behind the screen deciding to rank neo Nazi material at Google.

</comment><comment><USER6> Searching for "did the holocaust happen" in Bing brings back the Wikipedia article for "Holocaust Denial" first, followed by a BBC article about why the holocaust happened, and then the results from neo-nazi sites who have SEO'd their way to (nearly) the top. The difference is small, but it's better than Google.

If people start thinking Bing is actually better at finding relevant things than Google's search engine then Google should be _very_ concerned.

</comment><comment><USER7> If I Google: "Is the earth..." the first suggestion is flat...

That said when you Google "Is the earth flat" the first result is a wikipedia entry frame.

"The flat Earth model is an archaic conception of the Earth's..."

If you Google "did the holocaust happen" the first result is from Stormfront "Top 10 reasons why the holocaust didn't happen"

Am Jewish; Parents were born in 1942 in Europe don't have a specific objection or a strong (or any at all) opinion about this; I don't think Google should tamper with results but as they already do I don't think showing the wikipedia entry as the first result rather than Stormfront is a horrible breach of freedom of expression.

After all they do that if you Google ways to kill yourself and similar bad things, and Google does tamper with political search results as it seems.

</comment><comment><USER8> Related discussion from 10 days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153086)</comment>


What is truth? - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2104

<comment><USER2> Matchbook cover version (his words): _All truth claims can be unpacked as predictions._

You'll have a lot of trouble if you try to use this as a _complete_ or _comprehensive_ theory of truth, as the blog's first two comments point out. (First comment asks, "What about (putatively true) statements concerning the past?" Second comment asks, "What about math?")

He tips his hat at the bottom to Pierce, but the piece just feels thin, for lack of a better word. There's not a lot of meat on the assertions.

<comment><USER3> Actually, his primary definition is _truth is what makes the future less surprising_ , which is far more general than your quote. It works even where there is not enough information to _predict_ the future.</comment></comment>


Was Greece just Nuked? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamesaltucher.com/

<comment><USER2> Linkbait title. Tl;dr: the media exaggerates things to sell and forgets about old issues really fast. It's odd that the title sort of does exactly what the article is complaining about.

</comment><comment><USER3> seriously, wtf is up with these blog posts? not only it's wrongly linked but it's also a dupe of TWO dead posts <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2347678> and <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2347487>

</comment><comment><USER4> um.. what?</comment>


US Army Knowledge Online Security Warning - <AUTHOR> https://www.us.army.mil/suite/login/welcome.html <comment><AUTHOR> Chrome gives a security warning upon visiting the site. They appear to be using SHA-1 still besides the "certificate is invalid" warning.

<comment><USER2> Got a security warning using Firefox, as well.</comment></comment>


I beat the best compressor on the planet, by 1 bit - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@duhroach/beating-the-best-compressor-on-the-planet-by-1-bit-9fecfb23d649#.nzzgygaot <comment><USER2> What was your Weissman score?

<comment><AUTHOR> 6.8?</comment></comment>


A mystery trader just made over $200M betting on Volatility - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com.au/vix-stock-market-mystery-trader-rolls-over-massive-bet-into-february-2018-1 <comment><USER2> Assuming the trader is still holding the position described in the article, they have made significantly less profit to date, and they may have even lost money. That's because for each long 15-strike VIX call they hold, they're short two 25-strike VIX calls.

Their payoff diagram from this position w.r.t. the VIX settlement value at the time that their options expire increases linearly from 15 to 25, then decreases linearly (with a slope of the same magnitude) past that point. Their profit will be maximized if the VIX settles at exactly 25, while they will lose money if the VIX settles above 35.

Of course, it's also possible that this "mystery trader" is using this position as a hedge against direct or indirect VIX exposure in the remainder of their portfolio.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree - but looking at the daily graph of the VIX index - it rose slowly from around 18 to top out at 37. I'd expect anyone holding this position is actively trading and would have wound up the position with a significant profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Someone did well at the horses.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand the sentiment, but I would absolutely refer you to Nicholas Talebs books and his treatment of volatility if you have not already seen them.

<comment><USER3> Still like the horses analogy. There are professionals that can make good predictions about horse races, as there are professionals that can make good predictions about random (but not causeless) events in the market.</comment></comment></comment>


Inland Waterways Europe: Maps and Fleet - <AUTHOR> http://www.inlandnavigation.eu/what-we-do/maps-fleet/ <comment><USER2> The history behind inland shipping is quite interesting. When the first container barges started to appear in the 70s, the minimum distance to make it viable against trucking was predicted to be 200km+. Nowadays, distances are short as 50km are barged, or even shorter sometimes when doing in-port transshipment within bigger ports like Rotterdam or Antwerp. (Keep in mind that the Rotterdam port area is about 45km long, stretching from Maasvlakte to the city centre)

Classically the Rhine region has seen a lot of container transport, but over time other canals and rivers have seen container terminals pop up. In addition, smaller sea ports have essentially become inland ports with the rise of main ports like Rotterdam and Antwerp. The bigger ships (20 000+ containers) are received there, and then distributed onto smaller feeders or barges that will then hop to the various smaller ports in the region. If you look at a map of inland terminals in the Netherlands, you can get to virtually anywhere within a range of 50km over water. In Belgium they are trying to alleviate the heavy truck traffic in the Antwerp region by offloading this traffic onto trains and barges. Even in places where only narrow or shallow canals are available, smaller barges will take 12 to 24 trucks of the road at a time.

It's incredible how much potential there still is to take trucks off the road and use water transportation instead. It's much better in terms of CO2 emitted, and it's also a lot cheaper. It's just harder to plan, since there is inflexibility in destinations, you need last-mile trucking, and the total transport will usually be a lot slower. All in all difficult, but solvable problems. Most of these are information problems and that's what my employer is trying to solve in software :)

<comment><USER3> Another amazing thing is how early the Chinese (with significant inland natural waterways) were building mega-scale artificial waterways for this purpose. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_\(China\)) (~6th century) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_canals_in_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_canals_in_China) .. also how different (and in some ways superior) their sail plans were [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_rig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_rig)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It still amazes me how dense the European waterways are. For example, it is possible to travel from Switzerland to Budapest by boat _fairly_ directly via Rhine, Main and Danube, without going through the Mediterranean. Somehow, this seems completely counter-intuitive.

<comment><USER5> or the fact you can go from Amsterdam to the black sea fairly directly and from there to st. petersburg is even more mind boggling

<comment><USER6> The fact that Amsterdam has a harbour in the first place is pretty amazing, it's not exactly a coastal city.

<comment><USER4> It isn't?

[https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/52.7870/5.4190](https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=9/52.7870/5.4190)

The third largest port of Europe, Hamburg, is 110 kilometers away from the coast.

[https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/53.6002/10.1280](https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/53.6002/10.1280)

<comment><USER5> My favorite one of these is Iquitos in Peru, which is an Atlantic port, reachable by ocean going vessels, 2,200 miles away from the ocean

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a (fairly rudimentary) OpenStreetMap-based rendering of European waterways here: [https://maps.grade.de/mobile.htm](https://maps.grade.de/mobile.htm)

Somewhere on my todo list is a more detailed one with North American coverage. (But the list is long.)

</comment><comment><USER8> The Dutch (and most busy) part is hardly readable. Check [https://vaarweginformatie.nl/frp/main/#/geo/map?layers=FAIRW...](https://vaarweginformatie.nl/frp/main/#/geo/map?layers=FAIRWAY&sublayer=FAIRWAY) for much more details.

<comment><USER9> In case you're looking for something like flightradar:

[https://www.marinetraffic.com/nl/ais/home/centerx:7.6/center...](https://www.marinetraffic.com/nl/ais/home/centerx:7.6/centery:49.1/zoom:6)

<comment><USER10> (Off-topic) That link is localized "nl", and I'm in the US, but for some reason it's trying to access google.cn. ಠ_ಠ

[https://i.paste.pics/1d51475b28fe67095693ca871c7fdc5f.png](https://i.paste.pics/1d51475b28fe67095693ca871c7fdc5f.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This Wikipedia article has a similar map for the United State: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_waterways_of_the_United...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_waterways_of_the_United_States)

Incidentally, the inland waterways of the US would probably have much more freight traffic if the Jones Act didn't make it illegal to use foreign-built vessels for traffic between US ports: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920#Ca...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920#Cabotage)

</comment><comment><USER12> You can download free charts for many of Europe's inland waterways. One great method is to use OpenCPN [0,1] and its "Chart Downloader".

[0] [https://opencpn.org/](https://opencpn.org/)

[1] [https://opencpn.org/OpenCPN/info/chartsource.html](https://opencpn.org/OpenCPN/info/chartsource.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Can I put a shipping container house on a barge and live on the inland waterways?

[https://www.curbed.com/2017/6/21/15839730/shipping- container...](https://www.curbed.com/2017/6/21/15839730/shipping-container- house-for-sale-buy)

<comment><USER3> Interesting idea. Probably could, but it wouldn't pass inspection for registration as quarters on a vessel itself, so you'd have to have it as cargo. Then I guess if/when declaring cargo crossing borders you'd have to say a couple of humans in this box thing, which is odd and sure to raise eyebrows, smuggle you or list you as crew. So basically you'd be paying for the barge anyway, and living in worse conditions in a largely uninsulated (and probably power hungry) box on board.

What's the point? Just get a boat. There are many cheap boats, many people live on them. Check [https://www.yachtworld.com/](https://www.yachtworld.com/) [http://www.cruisersforum.com/](http://www.cruisersforum.com/) [https://sailinganarchy.com/](https://sailinganarchy.com/) for a start. Roughly <=USD$20K will get you something that floats and 1-2 people can live in cramped but OK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if there are any costs to use the waterways. Even if the boats are slower than trains, couldn't it be the case that with all the layovers a train takes as much or more time than a boat? It would be cool to have a boat service similar to Flixbus.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, there is: speed. I work on software for inland cargo shipping, and the major factor there is speed and inflexibility of destinations. Trains, at least for cargo, are easily faster by a factor of two, if not faster. Going from the port of Rotterdam to Groningen (north of NL) takes about 24 hours by barge, but will take only around 8 hours by cargo train. By passenger train similar distances will take around 4 to 5 hours.

Usually this is not too big of an issue when transporting cheap bulk goods, but especially food and other perishables (flowers!) are difficult when it comes to transportation over water.

It's quite curious how the Europe is the only place with real inland shipping networks over water, other regions do not even come close in terms of amount of cargo transported, even though the natural resources are often there. The rest of the world pretty much relies on trains and trucks to transport cargo. There is quite some room for disruption here, but it's a hard an capital intensive market to break into.

EDIT: To come back to your point about people, they often value time quite highly. Not very many people take a ship to travel the world anymore, even though there is a lot of the earth reachable by the sea. Natural resources is only one part of the equation, and usually the trade-off is between time and money.

<comment><USER15> Actually most other continents have far less rivers which lend themselves to easy shipping. Also development in Europe was ahead of the curve in the last couple hundred years (and before we did not have the technology for locks and easy travel upriver). Now that everyone has catched up (or is in the process) there are fare quicker/easier/cheaper/flexible options like trains, trucks, planes available. So the pressure to build good waterways is way less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This seems to be missing an awful lot of canals in the UK. Leeds Liverpool canal, all the canals around Birmingham. Norfolk Broads. Manchester shipping canal seems to have been cut short.

And I'm fairly certain you can sail from Bordeaux to Marseille, inland.

<comment><USER17> I think that as well, though the map seems mostly concerned with canals available to big vessels.

I think you are thinking about the "Canal du Midi", which is still a quite famous construction work form the 17th century: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_du_Midi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_du_Midi)

<comment><USER16> Big vessels perhaps.

I've seen some big ships in parts of the broads, and the Manchester shipping canal is for, well, ships.

And yes I was thinking of the Canal du Midi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm fascinated by the vikings so I've always wondered if these waterways (especially the eastern one) were as easy to use 1000 years ago.

Also they forgot the modern waterway Göta Kanal in Sweden.

<comment><USER7> 1000 years ago European waterways didn't have pound locks, so no, certainly not as easy to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The linked waterway map is completely fantastic. It explains a lot about European history and economic significance of certain cities as trade hubs.</comment>


Integer division is slow - <AUTHOR> https://kristerw.blogspot.com/2017/05/integer-division-is-slow.html <comment><USER2> Your code

        std::random_device entropySource;
        std::mt19937 randGenerator(entropySource());

does not properly seed a mt19937. To copy a comment I made just two weeks ago (this error is a direct result of <random>'s poor design),

It is unfortunate how people keep trying to use `std::mt19937` and, unsurprisingly given how hard it is to use, how they (almost)[0] inevitably fail. Do yourself a favour and use a randomness library that doesn't hate you[1], is simple to seed correctly[2], produces decent quality randomness[3], isn't horribly bloated[4] and has more features[5] to boot. It's 2017. Let the Mersenne Twister die.

[0]: [https://codereview.stackexchange.com/q/114066/40768](https://codereview.stackexchange.com/q/114066/40768)

[1]: [http://www.pcg-random.org/](http://www.pcg-random.org/)

[2]: [http://www.pcg-random.org/posts/cpps-random_device.html](http://www.pcg- random.org/posts/cpps-random_device.html)

[3]: [http://www.pcg-random.org/paper.html](http://www.pcg- random.org/paper.html)

[4]: [https://cs.stackexchange.com/q/50059/16408](https://cs.stackexchange.com/q/50059/16408)

[5]: [http://www.pcg-random.org/using-pcg-cpp.html#extra- features](http://www.pcg-random.org/using-pcg-cpp.html#extra-features)

</comment><comment><USER3> How come the optimizer doesn't figure out theIntDist is constant if it's declared outside the loop? Given that the function is templated, it should have access to its internals, and so have all the information needed to do constant propagation, no?</comment>