Cleveland TFR (for RNC) affects drone pilots - <AUTHOR> http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_6_3692.html <comment><AUTHOR> (Cross-posted from /r/DailyTechNewsShow, but I think it may also be of interest to HN. Below is what I added to the original Reddit post.)

To be honest, it's not really much of a story. The Republican National Convention has a multi-layered TFR (temporarily flight restriction) established for it, which is not at all surprising. What's interesting is the bit at the end:

F. THE FOLLOWING OPERATIONS ARE NOT AUTHORIZED WITHIN THIS TFR: …, MODEL AIRCRAFT OPERATIONS, MODEL ROCKETRY, UNMANNED AIRCRAFT SYSTEMS (UAS), …

I wonder how many licensed drone pilots are aware of this? The largest part of the TFR is a 30-mile circle, and goes from surface to just under Flight Level 180 (approx. just under 18,000 feet).</comment>


Ask HN: Would this work? Resume into stories by sales person - <AUTHOR> I noticed that many job seeking individuals struggles to write good resume and stand out of the crowd.
Solution: Transfer resume into deeply personal story by professional sales people to attract job opportunities and stand out of the crowd.
Would you use such service and how much you are willing to pay for it? <comment><USER2> If an employer needs to see a resume first and what you apply with is not a resume, you won't even get past the first and most basic filter of the hiring process. There is no good reason to ever do this.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't use this, for the same reasons other people have said.

Though I would say props for trying to do some market validation and getting real feedback rather than letting an idea fester in your head without telling anyone. You will find an idea worth working on eventually.

</comment><comment><USER4> Businesses (including nonprofits) hire people to cut costs/risks or raise revenue (or impact). How would a deeply personal story help convince a hiring manager that paying this person a competative salary would lead to the business value?

<comment><AUTHOR> Story of how you got to coding and stories about challenges will tell you more about person for hiring than just resume.

<comment><USER2> The time and place for those is the interview stage.

<comment><USER5> Or the cover letter, if "how you got into coding" is relevant to why you're likely to be good at this role

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For any place with a reasonably competent hiring process, you won't get offered a job solely based on your resume. But you might not progress to next stage in application process if your resume indicates there is no chance that you are a strong fit for the role (e.g. in extreme cases, application for a dev role with no evidence of relevant work experience or study or personal projects). Resume doesn't have to be great, just good enough.

I find it easier to recommend hiring fresh grads with no industry experience & brief CVs who perform very strongly at hands on programming interviews versus people with extensive experience who can speak eloquently about their past roles but do not perform that well when skills are directly measured in (admittedly, contrived and fairly artificial) interview setting.

</comment><comment><USER7> No, resumes are for screening someone with a glance, when there are 200 people to screen. If you want stories, link a blog or portfolio.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would prefer to link that story (personal blog URL) in my traditional-style resume.</comment>


MX-80 – Ahead of its time: A small, lightweight computer printer - <AUTHOR> https://global.epson.com/company/corporate_history/milestone_products/11_mx80.html <comment> amiga-workbench I have the IBM rebrand on my desk. It still works absolutely flawlessly and you can get new ink ribbons fairly easily.

[http://mos6581.com/pictures/5170-canvas/new- blinds.JPG](http://mos6581.com/pictures/5170-canvas/new-blinds.JPG)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9vzMVK5kV8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9vzMVK5kV8)

<comment><USER3> Those IBM keyboard clicks and printing sound from the video brings back good memories.

<comment><USER4> All that's missing to complete the picture... [https://youtu.be/vvr9AMWEU-c?t=2](https://youtu.be/vvr9AMWEU-c?t=2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> david-given My father had one of these back in the day for the BBC Micro.

I remember struggling with painfully slow screen dump routines (for printing an image of the screen onto paper) before someone had the insight that by printing the images _sideways_ you could read a byte of horizontal scanline data from memory and throw it directly at the printer, which treated it as a vertical column of dots; this meant you didn't need the painfully expensive step of rotating each 8x8 character cell.

Simple in hindsight, but it took ages to realise, and made screen dumps so much simpler and faster.

<comment><USER5> Classic combination - BBC Micro and MX-80.

Seems you were hacking yours differently to what I was doing. I acquired some army headed letter (UK), or rather 'stole'. With it I forged a letter with my MX-80 to trick a friend's parent to pop into the army recruitment centre.

This friend's parent had skived off National Service many aeons ago and I pranked him into going back to account for himself. The letter 'had to be legit' because it wasn't hand typed. So easily fooled. The things you do as a small child that you would never do as an adult.

<comment><USER6> You'd go to bloody prison for 20 years now for things we did in 80ies/early 90ies

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Still have mine in the loft somewhere, that and the ribbon cable to attach it to my TRS-80. Being able to print out program listings and annotate them revolutionised debugging for me.

The "O" character and "0" number looked very similar, so we used to use a hack to print "0", followed by a backspace escape code, and then a slash. That produced a slashed zero.

<comment><USER8> > so we used to use a hack to print "0", followed by a backspace escape code, > and then a slash. That produced a slashed zero.

That's awesome. Thanks for sharing, because as somebody who grow up with windows 3.1 being the earliest OS, these stories are great.

<comment><USER9> This sort of thing is actually exactly what backspace was originally for - <USER2> predates computers, and was used on typewriters to e.g. make accented characters, or underline text (ASCII has underscore as a symbol for that exact purpose). You could also make things bold by doing backspace and then re- printing the same character, one or more times.

<comment><USER10> Right, and that usage was later carried on to Unix man pages. Hence this tiny but handy script I wrote (and have used for years), to strip those formatting characters:

m, a Unix shell utility to save cleaned-up man pages as text:

[https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2017/03/m-unix-shell-utility- to-...](https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2017/03/m-unix-shell-utility-to-save- cleaned-up.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It was popular even in the USSR in mid-80s. MX-80 were brought in the Soviet Union as a part of Yamaha MSX-2 based computer classes for Soviet children. I remember my joy when I was able to print black and white New Year's postcard with nice fonts and graphics on that printer in 1985 :-)

<comment><USER12> You just reminded me how happy we were to pick and see fonts on these in school ~computer days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Like to also draw attention to LX80, the dot matrix printer that followed this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlccmP9TpFo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlccmP9TpFo)

and

[http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6040/Epson- LX-80/](http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6040/Epson-LX-80/)

<comment><USER14> Oh yeah. Legendary printer. Lasted for absolute years and years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Also significant were the control codes. Many other printers offered Epson control code emulation, such as the Amstrad DMP* printers.

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

<comment><USER16> I think the ESC/P was the newer ones after the LQ series. I spent many an hour on our FX-80 (the successor to the MX-80), mostly doing label printing code for my dad's pharmacy. With all the escape codes documented it was great. The FX had the trick of being able to do reverse feed (From memory Esc [ 2j I think - heck that was some time ago?)

<comment><USER17> LQ series used extended version called ESC/P2 (most of the extensions having to do with higher resolution of 24-pin printers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wasted the 1980's trying to invent ribbon re-inking method.

<comment> amiga-workbench I don't know about re-inking, but can't you loosen up a dried ribbon by using a light machine oil?

<comment><USER18> I think not. The paper sucks the oil and it spreads. Ribbon ink has very special dry but sticky qualities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Epson still makes dot matrix printers too.

[https://epson.com/For-Work/Printers/Impact/c/w160](https://epson.com/For- Work/Printers/Impact/c/w160)

<comment><USER20> What are they used for today? I assume they have better reliability (from their simpler technology) compared to inkjet or laser printers, which keeps them popular in certain industries.

<comment><USER21> Just a few days ago, I realized, the best thing to update somebody else's code, would be to print it out and take it to bed with me, so I can read the source without starring into that lamp (the monitor). I also could make notes with a pen, like placing the line number next to a function call (pointing to the function definition), etc.

Problem was, that the printout would have been over a hundred pages. Too expensive and feels like a waste of resources.

Then I remembered dot-matrix printers and checked out the market. They go about EUR200+ these days. Sadly, the one I'd liked (DIN A3 format, so to be able to print out long lines of code without wrapping, with 4 colors for some basic syntax highlite) are in the EUR1000 range.

My text-editor on the Amiga (in the 90's) would have a special print utility, that would allow to format the text (source code) in a way to fit as much text on the paper as possible, by choosing a smaller font, having multiple columns, etc.

Interestingly, nothing similar seems in production, these days.

So, ideally there'd be an affordable dot-matrix color printer, without a fixed line length (set it in the driver), and some pleasing monotype font for coders (including special chars like function arrows) as one of its internal charsets along with a utility I described above. My eyes would love it!

<comment><USER22> _They go about EUR200+ these days. Sadly, the one I 'd liked (DIN A3 format, so to be able to print out long lines of code without wrapping, with 4 colors for some basic syntax highlite) are in the EUR1000 range._

The reason for this being that they're still produced with the same level of quality they used to be, while "consumer level" printers have become more cost-optimised and less reliable. Dot matrix printers are still used in commercial/industrial applications so they haven't been subjected to the same race-to-the-bottom that consumer printers have.

<comment><USER21> Yes, I understand. InkJets bring in the money via the ink and also, the market for dot-matrix must now be smaller, than it was, when that printing technique was the only affordable on the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I still remember them and printing (very loud) TrueType fonts documents with TextMaker from DOS.

</comment><comment><USER24> I loved that printer. Did so much with it and was the first time I really did a bunch of stuff with ESC sequences. Bidirectional printing was cool and getting it to print graphics by driving the print head directly felt like magic. Anyone who programmed that printer will be instantly at home with Epson (and compatible) thermal printers and more.

<comment><USER25> Indeed! I remember using one to print zooms of the Mandelbrot set in grayscale (highly dithered) from an Apple ][+. For speed I coded in 6502 and called directly into the BASIC floating point routines for the math. The printer would take a day or so to print a sheet worth of image. But it was a great graphic output device, far less ephemeral than the screen. It was somewhat satisfying for it to print a new row of dots every now and then, once the computer had completed some math...

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I remember those, and often prefer them over ink-jet because one could often fix any problems themselves. With ink-jets, if there's problems, it's hard to see what's actually going on. You usually have to rely on software drivers to diagnose and/or clean them, which often fail for some reason (probably version compatibility). I'm really disappointed with ink-jets. The higher-quality dot- matrix ribbons rarely broke, just got tangled. You could untangle it and get back to work. The problems and solutions were more clear-cut, hands-on, and visual. If they could make dot-matrix printers match the resolution of ink- jets, I just may get one, at least as a back-up.

</comment><comment><USER27> There was a program called Fancy Font that let you do a primitive form of DTP on one of these. You typed up your document in the Fancy Font markup language and then sent it off to the printer using the Fancy Font runoff program (called 'pfont'), which would print out the document, using graphics mode to render the, er, fancy fonts.

Documents printed out this way on a dot matrix printer looked like ass, so when they became available Fancy Font supported the new exciting HP LaserJets.

</comment><comment><USER28> We had a similar model with the name of FX-80. A photo I just found:

[1] [http://i2.wp.com/www.applerescueofdenver.com/wp- content/uplo...](http://i2.wp.com/www.applerescueofdenver.com/wp- content/uploads/fx80-537594-5.jpg)

Not sure how it compared to the MX-80, but it was definitely a great printer for its time. I remember finally replacing it was a 24-pin (oh the luxury) dot matrix printer after years of service by the FX-80.

</comment><comment><USER29> Used one of these back in the day. Excellent machines. Paper feed was so much more reliable and error-free compared to modern printers. And when things went wrong a reset and restart of the job was simple. Now I have to revere the psychology of the machine, and hope to god that its fragile plastic innards don't break.

I'd willingly return to needing special printer paper if it meant I didn't have issues with the feeding mechanism.

<comment><USER30> Have you tried a Brother laser?

<comment><USER31> Add me to the list of people supporting this message. Mine is 13 years old and I've never had a problem with it.

(The UI is very simple: one button. I don't know what it does, as I've never needed to press it. If a document fails to print, that just means the thing is out of paper.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I still have mine somewhere in storage. I bet it would even still work if I got a USB->Parallel port adapter.

</comment><comment><USER33> Funny - I was _just yesterday_ advertised one of these via the Amazon widget on Facebook

<comment><USER34> I would call it weird! OP surely received similar advertise that led to this post. Why would someone advertise such an old tech now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is there an emulator that handles this printer? I am working on a 3D multicore libretro frontend with Lua scripting. It would be interesting for me to have virtual printouts (images) to go along with a 3d model for something like this.

</comment><comment><USER36> I saved up money to buy one of these in college, was amazing, fast, sounded like a well tuned race car :-) Still have some CSCI homework and projects on paper printed on this from my Atari ST.

</comment><comment><USER37> i owned one of these back in the 90's, i remember connecting this to my compaq 286 with a lpt1 port or whatever you call it. no color, but i remember printing nude gifs i had back thrn of playboy playmates.

fyi, in china, when you eat at restaurants or buy things from stores you get these government tax receipts which are typically printed with these epsons, that's almost 30 years since i first started using these.

</comment><comment><USER38> Throwing away the manual to my Epson printers was a difficult thing to do but marked a milestone in a nerds life in that era

<comment><USER21> You mean, you threw away the manual, so you'd have to find out everything yourself, by playing/hacking with the system?

Man, that'd be some real "Guy Hardening" you did there :-). Like, leaving your clothes at home and having a walk in the snow naked, sliding down the hill like a seal and rolling yourself back up.

<comment><USER38> It's all part of my S.A.S. preparation.... currently doing survival training in a no internet situation

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I recall designing fonts for the mx80 in basic, the user manual was my first programming "book".

</comment><comment><USER40> MX-100 and green bar, for the win! (smile)</comment>


A 1980 Teenager's View of Social Media - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@brianstorms/a-1980-teenagers-view-of-social-media-eaf8a5fdbf6c <comment><USER2> You know what's weird? I met my future wife online at college via a PARTI (PARTICIPATE, a terminal based messaging system running on PR1MOS that allowed a form of effectively real-time chatting and pseudonyms) in college...in the mid 1980s.

So in most of the 1980s and into the 1990s, I couldn't really effectively answer the "how did you meet" question because that wasn't yet a thing yet. ("On the computer" wasn't really satisfactory before people had a notion of "online".) And when it was more technically explainable, it was sort of seedy because there was so little that was local or social about it.

So the discovery, decades later, of people meeting online, of social media, of dating sites, of changing screen names to reflect your mood...that all seemed ancient in a way.

The only thing left is to watch it go by, to be rediscovered again by those new to computers...

<comment><USER3> > "On the computer"

Oh, computer dating, where you input your statistics and the computer picks the logically perfect match. Nah, it'll never catch on.

(Remember that idea?)

<comment><USER4> It still exists. It's called "OKCupid".

<comment><USER5> The "matching" part of OK cupid is a joke/gimmick, though. It's accuracy level is not really well correlated to the site success. They even showed that once when they intentionally flipped the match scores

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, this was a hugely entertaining read. I can hardly believe it was written in 1980. Really lost it, laughing out loud at this part (and several other parts):

> There is nothing like going home to the parents house and sitting there at > the dinner table trying to explain what an amazing set of conversations you > had today on the computer. They're like, what? It can take an entire dinner > conversation to try to explain what pnotes and TERM-talk are, and then you > realize by the end of dinner, you have gotten nowhere, and they still simply > Do. Not. Get. It. It's frustrating. Some day, everyone will use these kinds > of tools and we won't be having these pointless hour-long conversations at > the dinner table or anywhere else, trying to explain The Future, which for > some weird reason you, lucky bastard, are already IN, while they're still > stuck in the past. I look forward to when this stuff is all mainstream and > people can just talk about the online mail and chats they had today and > nobody bats an eye. It will come. Question is, how long?

<comment><USER7> It wasn't written in 1980, it's a tongue-in-cheek response to an article written by a 2015 teenager that went viral yesterday: [https://medium.com/backchannel/a-teenagers-view-on-social- me...](https://medium.com/backchannel/a-teenagers-view-on-social- media-1df945c09ac6)

<comment><USER8> Ah, thank you. I was starting to get a bit of vertigo on how prescient this was, I felt like I was reading The Machine. Now that I know it's satire it makes a lot more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very interesting read. I often try to educate people telling them that the social network gimmick is just that : a gimmick in a marketing ploy. A network of computers is social by nature of the users being social beings. Using computers in a network was already social when I got in in the 1990's. The social part is not from facebook or whatever the current popular thing is, they try to get hold of it for their own profit and it's sad.

I'm looked at weird when I say that so called social networks feature regressions from what was possible then. Reading this article, I learned that even in the 1990's we had made a few steps backward from the previous decades, I mean what happened to the simple feedback channel offered by TERM-comment ? How come this is not a standard feature ?

</comment><comment><USER10> Oh man, so many good memories from that. My friend RPD III was so good at flashhook dialing we could dial in to PLATO even with a lock on the rotary phone, which was no small feat since it had a large number of high digits and a zero or two.

We figured out the local admin's password (superkey+text man) and gave ourselves extra accounts and privileges. Sure we had hacked access to our RSTS/E PDP 11/34A by snagging the sysadmin's password off the LA30/LA36 (forget which) and replacing the login program, but even with Tek 4014 terminals it was nothing like PLATO.

</comment><comment><USER11> This article makes me miss Learnlink, Emory University's bulletin board and student email system from the mid-nineties to 2012. It was still going strong when I graduated in 2007. There's something magic that happens when _everyone_ in a community is using the same service. Even though students come and go, a culture develops.

There have been at least a couple replacement attempts, but I don't know if either have caught on.

[https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/emoryit/2014/06/20/learnlink-...](https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/emoryit/2014/06/20/learnlink- retired/)

[http://osls.emory.edu/student_orgs/community/ll_to_community...](http://osls.emory.edu/student_orgs/community/ll_to_community_migration_FAQs.html)

[http://www.emorywheel.com/emory-bubble-launches-aims-to- repl...](http://www.emorywheel.com/emory-bubble-launches-aims-to-replace- learnlink/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Really interesting article. I wish it hadn't been written with the gimmick of being written as if it were from the 80s.

<comment><USER13> It was a response to this article: [https://medium.com/backchannel/a-teenagers-view-on-social- me...](https://medium.com/backchannel/a-teenagers-view-on-social- media-1df945c09ac6)

<comment><USER12> I know. I knew that based on the title. I still wish it was a response and not an emulation or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Heh. I learnt to touch type on a PLATO system in 1990.

</comment><comment><USER15> "The all-too-few of us already thriving online now and who've seen the future, find it hard to explain to the multitudes who haven't yet what this all is and why it's really important."

Some people are well-aware of what computers are, but they choose not to use them. It's not because they don't have the money or the expertise to use them; I know a sheriff's deputy who uses computers in his work, but he doesn't have a computer at home. He never uses a computer when he's off work.

From time to time I suggest to people where they can get free computer training; there are ways to obtain actual hardware either inexpensively or even free of charge.

But few who I offer such suggestions to, want to use computers. The reason they don't use computers is not because they cannot, but choose not to.

<comment><USER3> I wonder how much of that choice is driven by fear, not so much fear that the computer would Do Bad Things, like some enraged minor deity, but fear that they really are Out Of It and can't learn new things.

If they don't try, they can't fail, and they don't have to face up to things quite yet.

Maybe I'm being uncharitable.

<comment><USER16> OR they consider computers as work machines and don't want to bring work home.

I mean, if all you're going to do with it is watch TV and fart around online, you don't need a computer at home really. You're better off without TV and you're definitely better off without wasting time on imgur, HN, Facebook, etc.

My point is, having a computer at home is kind of passe these days unless you're a nerd.

<comment><USER5> Considering how many people use Facebook Instagram and WhatsApp, your notion of "passe" is... passe.

<comment><USER16> Most people use those on their phone, not on their computers.

Looking at my non-nerd family members and non-nerd friends it seems that the only reason anyone opens a computer is to watch a movie, watch youtube on a bigger screen, or to do some sort of work or another. (school reports for instance)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dutch police take down hornets' nest of DDoS botnets - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/dutch-police-take-down-hornets-nest-of-ddos-botnets/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of that fun time I had to explain to my boss that providing a 'russian contact' of his with a number of servers that would have some sort of 'remote kill switches to delete everything', probably wasn't a smart venture for our hosting business. At some point the cops will come knocking :)

<comment><USER3> Kill switch?

Maybe just LUKS with dropbear. Then:

        # cryptsetup luksRemoveKey /dev/mapper/foo

<comment><USER4> Check your local laws on cryptography and destruction of evidence before trying this. You may still be legally obliged to decrypt the material or go to jail.

<comment><USER3> True. Last I read, that ex cop is still locked up in Philadelphia, for contempt. They don't believe that he forgot his passphrase.

But parent was talking about hosting servers for a client. If the client executed that command, I don't see how the provider could be responsible.

The client could be. But they'd need to extradite him, from Russia, which might not be so easy, these days.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes going to jail for obstruction/destruction of evidence is a better option than the alternative...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it just me, or are the majority of raids of malware/botnet hosters typically in the EU? I mean just 6 days ago a raid was cunducted on a old NATO bunker in Germany. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21090549](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21090549)

Is it that it's easier to become a hosting provider there with more protections (rights) and/or does America/NA lack the legal authority/process to conduct as many raids. Obviously eastern Eurupe/Russia is the wild west but I'm just suprised how much comes out of western Europe.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious why Eastern Europe/Russia _are_ the wild west of douchey internet behavior. I mean there are seemingly endless bulletproof hosting providers. Who wakes up in the morning with the ultimate goal of being slimy on purpose like that? And why are there so many of them concentrated in Russia/Eastern Europe?

<comment><USER8> I'd assume that the ultimate goal that motivates most of them is to make money to improve other parts of their lives.

That often boils down to reaping the gains and externalizing the costs, which these hosting solutions seem to do fairly well for their owners (though perhaps not for the operators that get caught up in the eventual stings).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" hosting all sorts of badies, from phishing pages to vulnerability scanners, and from crypto-mining operations to malware repositories."_

Is crypto-mining now a bad thing or is this article leaving out some details that I'm missing?

<comment><USER10> People mine on systems that they do not own. Try leaving SSH open with weak credentials, or use any software with a recently disclosed RCE. It won't be long until somebody drops a Monero miner.

<comment><USER11> I mean, I've seen ad-block filters for scripts that try to crypto-mine via peoples browsers through ads on websites, so this is hardly surprising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why didn't their upstream provider just blackhole their IP ranges?

<comment><USER13> Because law enforcement tends to reach for the law as their tool of choice. And since crimes were committed, their goals include not just "stop it from happening again" but also "prosecute", which needs evidence that cannot be obtained by a routing patch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was in elementary school with one of the suspects. He was always a troubled kid. Very sad how that turned out.

<comment><USER15> This is not bidirectional though,.. many troubled kids become great people.

<comment><USER16> Many "normal" kids become troubled adults, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I thought the initial `D` in DDOS sttod for "distributed". The article reports about "DDoS botnets operating on KV's infrastructure". Wouldn't "DDoS botnets operated from KV's infrastructure" be a better description?

<comment><USER18> I run a distributed system on AWS infrastructure. It's still distributed by all common usage of the word.

<comment><USER19> If your system goes down together with Amazon, it's not distributed, it just occupies several machines - a farm.

<comment><USER20> Yes but a Farm Systems Engineer is a very different job than a Distributed Systems Engineer.

<comment><USER21> lol. I work down at the Cloud Farm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love how they don't tell the full name of Marco B. and Angelo K., but do tell that they companies were called "Bos IT Holding BV" and "Kreikamp IT Holding BV".

<comment><USER23> Bos means a forest, likely nothing to do with his name

<comment><USER24> It costs 2.50 to check the names of the owners of these companies at the chamber of commerce if that makes you doubt whether or not it's actually the name. This means that the owners were effectively outed by the publication anyway.

<comment><USER25> Not really, the point of Dutch privacy law (and similar EU laws) in this context is not to deter a dedicated investigator, but to merely put enough of a hurdle in place that everyone reading the article won't see the names of suspects, and they won't show up in web searches etc.

<comment><USER26> Iirc it's not even an actual law, more of an agreement between all news organizations to not publish names like that. I seem to recall Geenstijl(Dutch "news" site) publishing full names and not getting in trouble over it.

<comment><USER27> Geenstijl doesn't have high journalist standards.

<comment><USER28> But they do have to follow the law, which is his point.

<comment><USER27> Sometimes there is no law necessary because an industry regulates themselves. Which the Dutch press historically has done so, in this example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If even Bulletproof hosts aren't safe why aren't malware authors using P2P infrastructure?

<comment><USER30> There is a difference between ignoring abuse reports and being immune to a raid by law enforcement. For these authors there is a trade-off between convenience, cost and security: using already available infrastructure is probably easier than to set up your own complicated hosting solution.

If any of them end up getting caught because of the information gathered by this raid they obviously misvalued one of these aspects in their trade-off analysis. Humans all make mistakes.</comment></comment>


TCP BBR Congestion Control - <AUTHOR> https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/97/materials/slides-97-iccrg-bbr-congestion-control <comment><USER2> This looks promising. I've been annoyed by "Bufferbloat" for over a decade and find different solutions to the problem pretty fascinating.

The nice part about this solution is that it doesn't require making changes to the individual nodes on the network (e.g. cable modem) in the way that other solutions have required (small and fair queues).

It also appears to be able to avoid the usual packet-drops of regular TCP congestion control.</comment>


You Can't Dig Upwards (Why You Should Learn C) - <AUTHOR> http://www.evanmiller.org/you-cant-dig-upwards.html <comment><USER2> Credit where credit is due; PG never said anything bad about C, quite the opposite. It may be at the bottom of the abstraction pyramid, but it's right up there with Lisp in the power pyramid. They choose different ways to get there, which makes them orthogonal; knowing both means you'll find your way around most languages/problems.</comment>


The Case Against Covid Tests for the Young and Healthy - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-case-against-covid-tests-for-the-young-and-healthy-11599151722 <comment><USER2> Testing everyone, every day will isolate and eliminate any pockets of Covid. Children should be tested before attending school. People should be tested before going to work.

There are less-than-1-dollar tests coming which just require some spit, probably called "lick-a-stick".

Keeping people like "young and healthy (how do you know?)" untested gives a perfect place for Covid to spread.

Listen to This Week in Virology (TWIV) [https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/](https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/)</comment>


NPM to turn JS libraries into RESTful web services - <AUTHOR> https://www.npmjs.org/package/service-o-matic

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a module for node.js which turns other modules into RESTful JSON based web services. It also auto-generates some documentation and web based forms so you can try them out.

It's handy if you a have a module or simple library that does something you want to expose to other people or that you want to be able consume from another platform (e.g. to leverage functionality in a node library from an app written in another language or from a browser).

Despite the hacky nature of it I've hooked up a demo against a dozen or so existing services: [http://service-o-matic.iaincollins.com](http://service-o- matic.iaincollins.com) (I expect this will probably break)

It's a hack created in an afternoon, there are no tests yet, it only supports GET and doesn't work with all modules. It's intended to spark a bit of interest in this approach to service creation (auto-generated web services already being something that .NET and to a slightly lesser extent Java both do well).

I'd be up for working/collaborating on it further if there is sufficient interest (adding tests, new features, docblock parsing, JSON-schema generation, support for currently unsupported modules, etc).

</comment><comment><USER2> Title makes it sound like NPM the company / service is doing this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm yeah, doh!</comment></comment>


Z – A dynamic functional programming language that compiles to JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://zlanguage.github.io <comment><USER3> At first I thought this was some reference to the well-known Z specification language ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation)). Come on guys, pick a name that a) doesn't clash with a language that has been around since the 1970s, and b) can realistically be found in a web search.

The language itself looks decent enough, but what's the compelling reason for using this rather than one of the many other languages? I'm sure there must be one, scratching a personal itch aside, but at least tell us about the rationale.

<comment><USER4> > doesn't clash with a language that has been around since the 1970s

I don't think 1970 is much of a filter.

That's pretty much the same as saying "doesn't clash with a language since the beginning of time".

<comment><USER5> To my knowledge, the 70s are mostly not the beginning of time.

<comment><USER4> In software, it almost is.

It's _literally_ the "beginning" of Unix time, which most systems use.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I was wondering if I should add "(except timestamps)" where I made my previous post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Z performs coercion, but it's coercion rules make more sense than JavaScript's:

        "9" + 2 # ==> 11
        "9" ++ 2 # ==> "92"

Yeah, that just doesn't make things better

<comment><USER7> I agree. I kind of hate to say this, but Perl (5) got this right by having an explicit concatentation operator for strings (given how common they are in many programming tasks), and then a separate addition operator.

<comment><USER8> This seems to be the case for Z, too, doesn't it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> With similar goals and similar feature set there's LiveScript, probably a decade old at this point: [https://livescript.net](https://livescript.net)

It lacks some features of Z, from a cursory glance, for example there's no `match` construct, but it packs most of the features around function currying, piping values, destructuring inputs, composing and so on into a indentation based, low-noise syntax. Syntax preference is of course a personal thing; I prefer the LS one. I've been using LiveScript on and off for years, starting back in the CoffeeScript days on the frontend, then with node, and most recently for Tizen programming. The language is on life support for many years now, meaning no new features - last addition were generator functions - <USER2> the feature set is still ahead of JS. There's a bit of an uncomfortable feeling when using constructs like let and const, which compile to very different things than what you get in ES, but well, they were implemented in LS first, so it's understandable.

I may consider Z next time I have a chance, if it's actively maintained and developed. JS may have become a better language, but it's not optimized for functional-first programming - there's no escaping the verbose syntax and the malnoutrished stdlib. It may look like it is, but that's only in comparison with Java or PHP - if you put it beside OCaml and Elixir you'll see it sticking out like a sore thumb. Which isn't bad, of course, JS is a multiparadigm, general-purpose language and it has huge amounts of backward compatibility - with both code and human minds - to uphold. Still, if you want FP-only, it's easier to use another language instead of trying to bend JS almost to the point of breaking with still subpar results.

</comment><comment><USER10> I see a lot of reasons listed to use Z, most seem to be improved syntax, but what I don't really see there is the answer to "why?". Why is Z being developed? Surely not just to smooth out minor syntax annoyances?

> Z also has the ternary operator, though it's syntax is more readable than > most programming languages:

I'm kind of a fan of the very terse ternary, I personally don't feel like

        X = if cond1 value1
            else if cond2 value2
            else value3

Is particularly more "readable" than

        X = cond1 ? value1 : (cond2 ? value2 : value3)

I do appreciate the multi-line functional if statement, but the big reason for use of a ternary in my book is when I really want or need a one-liner. Plus I like having a very obviously different syntax for the functional if vs the imperative if, I don't want them to look similar.

That said, readability seems like a weak argument and always prone to subjective debate. For the last several jobs I've had we used auto-formatters and have completely gotten rid of stupid programmer debates about readability.

> The first thing Z clarifies is that Exceptions are not baseballs. For some > reason, rather than "raising" an issue, you would "throw" it. That makes no > sense at all.

FWIW, this text is off-putting, it'd be better to just describe the syntax Z uses without the incredulity. This feels like a titch of bike-shedding. The big problems with exceptions have nothing to do with the keywords and everything to do with the design. That said "settle" feels weird and it's also going to be potentially confusing when you try to add a "finally" block, or a re-raise semantic.

> If you forget to settle an error, Z will throw a runtime error.

Should that be "Z will raise a runtime error"?

<comment><USER11> At a quick glance at least it seems that what Z offers is a better (in the eyes of its designer) syntax. I glanced through to about the ternary operator in order to find the USP. After going back just now I found "The Why of Z" and it seems to be that text output typically needs some kind of module import:

        "First off, the import statement is clutter. Why can't the text function be built-in, perhaps?"

So it seems it's not out to solve the bigger issues of programming...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So what's the "killer feature" of this? I.e. how is it better than Elm, Reason, ClojureScript, ScalaScript etc?

</comment><comment><USER13> This isn't a criticism of OP but my general thoughts about a new programming language project.

I think that every new language should show _one thing_ that the language can do well, wheres other languages can't; in other words, we need motivating examples. I've always having a trouble figuring out why a language was created in the first place.

<comment><USER14> The best selling feature is coming with a platform, everything else is less important.

If the platforms succeeds, the language is deemed to success and eventually outlive the platform.

Anything else is kind of yet another programming language.

<comment><USER15> But a platform gets creates if there is a reason to pick the language in the first place, usualy by curious people with time. Nobody in production would choose a new language, sure, that comes later.

<comment><USER14> UNIX was initially designed in Assembly, C came later after the couple of BCPL and B interations.

LiveScript came after Web as platform was being adopted.

.NET was created to replace COM (did not went accordingly as planned), with VB, Java and C++ on board, with support for multiple languages. C# came later given the outcome of the Sun process.

Using Ruby outside Rails development is not so common.

Younger Python developers might not be aware of this, but there were only two reasons to pick Python on the late 90's, either one disliked Perl and wanted something else, or had to deliver Web applications in Zope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks interesting, but I don't see a compelling reason to choose Z over the myriad of other transpile to JS languages out there. I wonder if the author or user(s) can chime in?

</comment><comment><USER17> >let x: 5 # ==> x is now 5

>x: "Hola Mundo" # ==> x has changed types

One of the biggest complaints people have about JS is the lack of strict typing. So, this doesn't appear to solve it.

Inversely, one thing a lot of older JS people dislike (I'm an older JS person, but this doesn't apply to me) is how functional JS is getting, so I don't think this will be very popular with that crowd. Especially considering how many features are being added via the ecmascript proposal process/babel transpiration (eg: [https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline- operator](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline-operator))

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't know, it reminds me of LiveScript plus goroutines. [http://livescript.net/](http://livescript.net/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Cool, but if you want to sell it, Z needs a "killer app". What does this do better than ANY other language?

Ex: Web server in 5 lines, or super simple matrix manipulation.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am not a fortuneteller, but I can still predict that programing language designers will soon run out of letters to use as names for their languages.

</comment><comment><USER21> Mm. Looking at the examples, it seems like the JavaScript snippets are rather verbose and there's not a "fat arrow" in sight. If you're accepting pull requests, I would love to provide more succinct code for comparison's sake.

Side note: how does this compare to other languages that tote cross- compiliation to JS (Haxe, Nim, ReasonML, js_of_ocaml, TypeScript, etc.)?

<comment><USER22> Nim compiles to C, C++, Objective C as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the title should be corrected. It is not a strictly functional language, it states that it is a multi-paradigm language, and the examples look more imperative than anything else to me. The docs say it leans toward functional dynamic programming but I'd like to see some justification for that claim.

</comment><comment><USER24> The "explicit settling" of exceptions is IMHO an _excellent_ idea. I wish more languages had this.

I do think it's interesting to compare Go-style green threading with JS-like async/await syntax. The main question is: are Z threads cooperative (as in JS) or preemptive (as in Go)?

</comment><comment><USER25> > you can still cause side effects and create impure functions without dealing > with monads or working your way through atoms

Why do they have to put a dig to other languages in the opening paragraph?

</comment><comment><USER26> Quite an ugly language syntactically. I like some of the features like support for literals of any base. But ES2019 is pretty awesome without adding much extra transpiling - I recommend the Elvis operator!

[https://babeljs.io/docs/en/babel-plugin-proposal-optional- ch...](https://babeljs.io/docs/en/babel-plugin-proposal-optional-chaining)

</comment><comment><USER27> Does it not support bitwise operators? it seems to use ^ for pow, and I can't find them in the docs.

<comment><USER28> They seem to be available as functions under a global object named "JS":

      JS.&(x, y)
      JS.|(x, y)
      JS.^(x, y)
      JS["~"](x)
      JS.<<(x, y)
      JS.>>(x, y)
      JS.>>>(x, y)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What does this language do differently from others? AFAICT it's a vanity project.

</comment><comment><USER30> I thought this was an "A to Z" for functional languages that compile to JavaScript, but in reverse.

</comment><comment><USER31> Calling the umpteenth JS obfuscator a language is a bit of a stretch, but hey, it enhances the npm module swamp by one more instance.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a HN for trading? - <AUTHOR>

I remember a HN member launched a social news site for trading news, viz., indices, stocks, FX, etc.<p>Otherwise, any links to trading and trading news communities? <comment><USER2> Trading is a big topic. I know of these 2 forums for quantitative finance professionals:

<http://www.wilmott.com/index.cfm?nocookies=yes>

<http://www.nuclearphynance.com/>

In my opinion, if you aren't trading professionally i.e. not attached to a broker, hedge fund, prop trading house, etc, then you're probably better off not trading at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://quant.ly> occupies a space in my Safari. Some interesting stuff posted there.</comment>


What are "actual pictures" of atoms actually pictures of? - <AUTHOR> http://www.askamathematician.com/2016/06/q-what-are-actual-pictures-of-atoms-actually-pictures-of/ <comment> semi-extrinsic Well, as the article points out, the things being imaged are most definitely actual atoms. The only thing TFA is nitpicking about is that light isn't used to image those atoms.

This is about as interesting as pointing out the fact that an ultrasound picture of a baby isn't an "actual picture", since we use sound instead of light to make the image.

<comment><USER2> The concept of the scanning tunneling microscope is so simple and ridiculous that it was probably thought of and dismissed long before someone built one. "You're going to image atoms by dragging a tiny needle across them"? Yet that's pretty much how it works.

The first one was built in 1981, but one could have been built in the 1950s. Piezoelectric crystals were known. Raster scanning circuits were known. Feedback circuits for controlling the height were known. The tricks for making one-atom sharp points were not known, but the earliest STMs just stretched out a tiny platinum wire until it broke, and sometimes you got a one-atom point.

Hobbyists have built STMs.[1] It's simpler than building a 3D printer.

[1] [https://dberard.com/home-built-stm/](https://dberard.com/home-built-stm/)

<comment> semi-extrinsic I know, I did a benchtop STM lab for my Nuclear Physics course some years ago. Most of the day was spent trying to make single atom needles by a wrist-flick technique for cutting platinum wire with some sharp pliers.

<comment><USER3> I worked in the lab at the Nation Physical Lab in the UK that had the low pressure + low temperature STM, we used to make the tips by dipping the ends in a very strong solution of NaOH. You relied on the surface tension as it dissolved to produce you a very sharp tip.

Surprisingly easy.

<comment><USER4> How do you know if your tip is one atom wide or not?

Also, what would the shape of the tip look like if you drew it? I'm wondering what kind of general angles the surface has. Is it like a cone with a single atom at the tip? What kind of slope?

<comment><USER5> The only real way to know if you had a single atom tip was to image a known surface. If the image was junk you probably had some funky tip states going on. HOPG (graphite) was the standard we typically used.

A good tip could be just about anything, from a nice cone to really jagged. One problem was any of the methods one has to view the tip can't actually resolve the single atom that is doing the imaging.

<comment><USER6> Man .. I know what my next hobby project is going to be :)

Dumb question .. I get that the needle scans a surface and you get the quantum tunneling effect between the atom you are "looking at" and the tip of the needle. What I don't get is how one figures out depth. For each X,Y position, do you just keep going down until you touch something, and then move up, and go to the next position? If so, apart from the issue with 1 atom tip, I imagine the next problem would how to increment X and Y by 1 atom.

P.S. I think some of the marketing put out on these things really confuses the issue. Sure .. it gets people excited about science but it gives people the wrong intuition. As a non-physics person, I got a lot out of this article.

<comment><USER7> In the simplest configuration have a X-Y stage that you raster, along with Z axis control - generally these are all piezo controlled. Your signal is then acquired by maintaining a constant tunneling current while you raster, so you track the Z axis position as you raster.

This means that you're getting a "pseudo-height" map - if you had a surface with 2 types of atoms, both the same size, but with different tunneling barriers, you would see them appear to be different sizes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of my first jobs out of college was doing manual chip layouts (which will give you some idea of how old I am). Once the layout was done, the design was sent to a "mask house" which would print the layout onto a series of glass plates (the "masks") which were then used in the chip fabrication process. When the masks for my first chip came back I popped one of them into a bench microscope to see what it looked like. I was expecting to see my design in black-and-white printing, but all I could see (of course) were rainbows because the mask was effectively a diffraction grating. This was my first visceral encounter with quantum mechanics. I _knew_ there was a pattern there, but I could never see it directly with my own eyes.

<comment><USER9> What era of chip layout was this? I'm surprised that manual chip layout was still being done when chip features were that small. I look at 1970s chips a lot, and the features are easily visible under a microscope, as they are much larger than wavelength-sized.

<comment><USER8> This was in 1984, and it was for experimental chips, not production chips. The layout was done using CAD tools, but the placement was all manual.

Also, I think they were analog chips, not digital. I'm not sure. This was a co-op job in my first year at college at the IBM plant on Cottle Road, and I was never fully in touch with the big picture. I think they were making big- ass hard drives, and the chips I was working on were part of the circuitry that amplified the raw signal from the read-write head, but those details were way above my pay grade.

<comment><USER10> How many features were on the chip?

<comment><USER8> I have no idea. This was more than 30 years ago. But the number of transistors was in the hundreds or maybe low thousands. (I can't recall if I was laying out individual transistors or functional modules.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The linked video "A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie" is entertaining. IBM made a stop-motion animated movie from individual atoms.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCX78-8-q0&feature=youtu.be)

<comment><USER11> It was linked with the text "all manner of jackassery" I am glad to know I am not the only one who thought that video was a waste of time.

<comment><USER12> Connecting incredibly difficult to understand scientific achievements with the simple notion of the common human desire for play and creativity is truly glorious.

A beautiful symbol of prowess, intelligence, creativity and humanity. I don't think anyone should underestimate the impact that a video like that can have on a child (or even a curious adult!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well, an image is a representation of something in a way that humans can see. Whether waves, electrons or poking sticks were used doesn't change the fact of it being an image.

Say, a dolphin's echolocation might let him "see" a diver using sound - [http://i.imgur.com/CS6wkNV.png](http://i.imgur.com/CS6wkNV.png) , which would still be considered an image, even though it's using sound.

Anyway that's just semantics, and an STM is still a damn impressive piece of kit.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, it's not a photo but it is an image or picture. The article is doing a bad job of defining its terms, but still it's interesting for a layman like myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I built an STM a while back for fun and when people ask me how I managed to "image" atoms I usually use the analogy of the STM being like a "microscope sonar" where the atoms are "blips" on a plane (the sonar map). Sure it's not actual EM radiation landing on a CMOS detector but it's still pretty neat nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER16> > This technology has been around for decades and, like the advent of the > synth, has given rise to all manner of jackassery.

What's with the synthesizer hate? That seems random.

<comment><USER17> That was the weirdest part of this article. I enjoyed the whole thing until the end, but why does the author call IBM's cute and amazing movie "A Boy and His Atom" _jackassery_?

<comment><USER18> I think it's being used to mean a sort of playing around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love that offhanded comment about how the helical structure of DNA is not at all obvious from that crystallography. All the more impressive then, the history of that discovery.

<comment><USER20> Like many things about the article it's hard to tell when the author is joking.

Knowing DNA was helical from the fiber diffraction images (not crystallography- they were working with DNA fibers, not crystals) was actually "obvious". A helix forms a distinctive cross pattern, this can be (and was) predicted easily from diffraction theory applied to a helical structure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I strongly encourage anyone who is thinking about this to read: "A Different Universe" by Robert Laughlin. This is one of his main concerns of modern science, and although its kind of a muddled argument he thinks that the emergent phenomena captured by photographs are entirely misapplied to atomic forces.

</comment><comment><USER22> super impressive DIY microscope to see atoms:

[https://dberard.com/home-built-stm/](https://dberard.com/home-built-stm/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I cannot see (pun intended) how "normal" seeing is fundamentally different. One basically sees by measuring their interactions with photons and deducing how something "looks like" vs. measuring interactions with electrons in STM and making a similar deduction.

</comment><comment><USER24> You can also hear it when you move atoms.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbLvy- ayi4A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbLvy-ayi4A)

</comment><comment><USER25> The strange barb at music synthesizers was uncalled for.

<comment><USER26> His point was that it is common for a "new" technology to be used just ... because it's there. There was a lot of very bad music made in the early-80s when digital synths became available, and IBM using an AFM to make an advertising blurb could be considered in thie vein.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think we may have DDOSed this site. I'm getting "Error establishing a database connection".

</comment><comment><USER28> for fun: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t60EfnqZKrQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t60EfnqZKrQ)

How To Make Something One Atom Thick Tom Scott

</comment><comment><USER29> There's a philosophy idea that in order to say we can "see" something, we have to be able to collect consistent information by several different methods. For example if all we have is a STM, then we don't know which parts of the image are artifacts and which are real so we haven't seen anything. But if we have an STM and crystallography, we can have more faith in the features that are common to both images - such as interatomic distances and the geometry of crystal structure. But we still couldn't say that we've seen the shape of an atom since that would look different in each instrument's image.

A great example is people who "discovered" lost cities under the sea. They saw regular patterns of lines on the seafloor in Google Earth and interpreted them as ancient roads or walls. But they were only seeing artifacts from ships that had sailed back and forth in straight lines collecting data. If they had looked both at those sonar scans and some other data for the same location, they would have only seen the lines on one image and been able to conclude that they were either an artifact of the sonar or below the level of sensitivity of the other instrument.</comment>


Cli Twi - dead simple Twitter client - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/honza/clitwi

<comment><USER2> Another great Twitter cli client, if cli is your thing, is TTYtter.

<http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/>

Don't mean to detract from the original post, I just find ttytter to be a great client (and it's a single perl file)

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the project; I don't know how I feel about the name.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know. I'm not very creative when it comes to naming my projects. Sorry. Suggestions?

<comment><USER4> I'd suggest twicli or twic over cli-twi; it keeps the same spirit but is pronounceable without sounding/looking like something else. You have what I might call a "hyphen problem", e.g., experts-exchange.

<comment><USER5> Definitely the first thing I thought when I read the name in Github. "Woah! Really? Oh, now I see it"</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Binary to Decimal Conversion in Limited Precision (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/bcd/decimal.html

<comment><USER2> The prof's home page is pretty interesting, see the rest of the arithmetic tutorial series or anything in the "research areas"

He's also the author of the punch card meta-information format which is pretty interesting WRT digitization of historical archives. As you can imagine, given the idea of a piece of cardstock of some size with marks and holes, there is an almost (but not quite) infinite way of representing information. Of course only some possibilities were ever widely implemented. Thats a funny traditional step along the education of a retrocomputing hobbyist, "what you say there's more than one punch card format" LOL. I would imagine in 100 years they'll be saying the same thing about unicode, or perhaps graphics image files...</comment>


Real VT102 Emulation with MAME - <AUTHOR> https://zork.net/~st/jottings/Real-VT102-emulation-with-MAME.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23662907](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23662907)

(oddly, at the time I'm posting this, this discussion-less post is higher on the HN front page?)</comment>


The National Broadband Plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/03/the-national-broadband-plan.html

<comment><USER2> This is pretty crazy, actually..

"If the U.S. military ranked 17th in the world, you can bet that as a nation we would make strengthening our armed forces a national priority. Yet that's just how the U.S. stacks up against the rest of the world in terms of access to high-speed Internet connections. The vital communications systems that make our economy work and serve as a platform for business innovation and social interactions are second-class."

Well, where do we stand on Education, and Healthcare, and why aren't we fixing those?

At a minimum, why are we not refocusing how the Internet was built by focusing this broadband effort on educational and research facilities, as opposed to multimillion dollar grants for Ski Resorts who need high speed Internet connections in rental homes.

</comment><comment><USER3> Agreed. Yesterday there was a segment on NPR regarding this issue. The article does not mention this, but the newly allocated spectrum will not be just handed out to the established big players. However, it will be auctioned off which is still a problem. Unless there is a way to ensure that smaller parties have a way to get at least a part of that spectrum, the auctions will be dominated by the large carriers who can pay more.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The idea of making that whole 500mhz unregulated is interesting. I'm eager to hear what knowledgeable and/or opinionated people here think.

</comment><comment><USER4> _When you take a technology and unregulate it and let the market operate, you'll get way better results than when you lock a technology up in the hands of one owner._

That about sums up my view on patents as well.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is pretty crazy, actually..

"If the U.S. military ranked 17th in the world, you can bet that as a nation we would make strengthening our armed forces a national priority. Yet that's just how the U.S. stacks up against the rest of the world in terms of access to high-speed Internet connections. The vital communications systems that make our economy work and serve as a platform for business innovation and social interactions are second-class."

Well, where do we stand on Education, and Healthcare, and why aren't we fixing those?

At a minimum, why are we not refocusing how the Internet was built by focusing this broadband effort on educational and research facilities, as opposed to multimillion dollar grants for Ski Resorts who need high speed Internet connections in rental homes.</comment>


Show HN: Heart rate measure with iPhone and iPod (Promocodes :)) - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.com/apps/soundpulse

<comment><AUTHOR> Some weeks ago i asked myself if its maybe possible to hear my own heart with the microphone.

After some testing around with some filters and other tools i decided to code an app for everyone.

It does not work really good for people with slow rates like athletes but i am working on v2 already :)

Here are some promo codes for you =D

9AKA44KP9WMK - 9TNJL4KLEL3M - PEF9H9N93MPY - XYXPKWTP7AWX</comment>


The Perfect Site - <AUTHOR> https://perfectsite.neocities.org <comment><USER2> I can sum up the article: Just because you can, doesn't mean you should!</comment>


Will Elizabeth Warren's Stance Against "Junk Science" Matter to Voters? - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-elizabeth-warrens-stance-against-junk-science-matter-to-voters/ <comment><USER2> > it would punish industry representatives with up to $250,000 in fines or > jail time if they knowingly submitted comments with false or fraudulent > information.

any crime punishable by fine is basically just legal for wealthy companies. just saying

<comment><USER3> Fining a company is different from fining a representative.

People talk so glibly about "chilling effects" \- is it obvious that this wouldn't have a chilling effect?</comment></comment>


Ruby on Rails EC2 "Appliance" - <AUTHOR> http://pauldowman.com/projects/ruby-on-rails-ec2/ <comment><USER2> If you use this you may want to install the current version of Ruby (1.8.6) first.</comment>


Senate Hearing on "The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence" - <AUTHOR> http://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/hearings?ID=042DC718-9250-44C0-9BFE-E0371AFAEBAB <comment><USER2> Somewhat surprised that Ted Cruz is heading this up considering his record for trust in science: [http://www.npr.org/2015/12/09/459026242/scientific- evidence-...](http://www.npr.org/2015/12/09/459026242/scientific-evidence- doesn-t-support-global-warming-sen-ted-cruz-says)

Also, this site design is certainly above par for a .gov, I wonder who they contracted for it.

<comment><USER3> From what I remember, Ted Cruz is actually very support of NASA. Which is surprising given how conservative he is.

<comment><USER4> NASA, and particularly the manned spaceflight aspects, has always been popular with conservatives (particularly the "national greatness" types), though not so much libertarians (which can be confusing, since conservatives often use libertarian rhetoric, and selectively invoke "small government" when attacking programs they don't like.)

Plus, as a sibling comment points out, you have to consider the "TX" and not just the "R" in (R-TX).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This ought to be fun. Must see TV for me. You don't hear that about CSPAN often.

It will actually be informative as the questions they ask will reveal just how much of a grasp they have on the subject matter and how it will shape society. Many members of Congress are going to be caught with your pants down when job start disappearing from their states.

</comment><comment><USER6> Getting

      You don't have permission to access "http://serve-403-cf.www.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/hearings?" on this server.</comment>


3 Simple Steps to Being Lucky - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stevebarsh.com/barsh_bits/2009/01/3-simple-steps-to-being-lucky.html <comment><USER2> imo, its all about gathering your ingredients and waiting until the right time. its not worth heavily stressing about location, because location and ingredients are connected. you move location and it tends to drain ingredients.

prepare yourself for an opportunity and go looking. thats luck.</comment>


BackToWork – trivial Windows productivity app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Ribtoks/BackToWork <comment><AUTHOR> Simple application which allows you to restore prioritized windows by a hotkey instead of "alt+tab"ing through all opened windows.</comment>