Runtime Compiled C++: Faster runtime compiles and improved compiler support - <AUTHOR> http://runtimecompiledcplusplus.blogspot.com/2015/08/faster-runtime-compiles-and-improved.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Adding object file persistence for faster compiles on Linux and OS X may cause some issues with developers current configurations, so I'd be happy to here of any issues either here, or via the projects github issues [https://github.com/RuntimeCompiledCPlusPlus/RuntimeCompiledC...](https://github.com/RuntimeCompiledCPlusPlus/RuntimeCompiledCPlusPlus/issues)</comment>


Silent and cool Raspberry Pi 4 - <AUTHOR> https://jng.imagine27.com/index.php/2019-09-23-132445_raspberry-pi-4.html <comment><USER2> Pretty nice looking and well built case, especially given the price.</comment>


Check out my weekend project: instant secure password-less chat - <AUTHOR> https://natchat.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This project was built in about 12 hours total. NAT chat creates chat rooms based on your external IP, so anyone behind your home or office router can join, but nobody from the outside can see what you are talking about.

Technology: nginx for serving static files, node.js + socket.io for chat communication.

Use case: you want to quickly share a link with someone in your home/office, but don't want to e-mail it to them and don't want to make them sign into an instant messenger, etc. Traffic is encrypted through SSL/TLS and nothing is stored on the server aside from a short buffer that sits in memory.

<comment><USER2> _but nobody from the outside can see what you are talking about._

How do we know you're not piping everything to Israel? Or worse, Google?

<comment><USER3> I'd like to see the code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will share tonight.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here it is: <http://github.com/ipartola/natchat>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like it. I'm a big fan of simplicity over features.

I had a similar weekend project that I threw together last year to make myself familiar with App Engine. It was similar to yours in that it was unauthenticated AJAX chat, but it relied on obscure URLs instead of grouping by IP address.

For instance, to make a spontaneous chat session with Hacker News junkies you'd make up something like: <http://www.yakeze.com/chat/HackerNews20101011/>

<comment> mike-cardwell Sounds very much like twich.me, which was also discussed on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1590173>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea.

There's also some sort of Zeroconf-based chat in Pidgin/Telepathy/Empathy which serves the same purpose and doesn't rely on you and the Internet for privacy, although it isn't quite as instant as your solution.

</comment><comment><USER6> Cool idea. Any chance of adding autogenerated room ids (like <http://titanpad.com/yiA0RpN7o9>) instead of just using external IP's?

</comment><comment><USER7> I just saw a guy in the chat, I'm in my office. Does it mean there is someone else that I could know, that is reading HN right now ? (the guy just left..)

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell Here, it works fine in Safari, but is completely broken in Firefox 3.6 and IE7. Looks like there is an uncaught security exception in the JS.

</comment><comment><USER8> this will be a good place to hang out & see if the person hacking your home system has funny things to say to ya. the call is coming from inside the chatroom!

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell You're missing a privacy policy and T&C's.

<comment><AUTHOR> So I am. But this thing was an exercise in using Node.js, not a way to make a buck, so T&C were not on my initial TODO list. As for privacy, see my original comment: the data is not logged. The rest is up to you.

<comment> mike-cardwell T&C's aren't as important, but if people are going to be submitting data to your website, you should have a privacy policy. A comment on a third party forum isn't equivalent.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a good point. I'll add it as soon as I have time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Excellent, like it a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.</comment></comment>


Valve's SteamVR solves big problems and poses bigger questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-03-15-valves-astounding-steamvr-solves-big-problems-and-poses-bigger-questions <comment><USER2> I hope this isn't the way it goes. For purely selfish reasons. As a wheelchair user, VR has the potential to provide sets of experiences that are difficult for me to find elsewhere, like running, jumping, exploring spaces with verticality. But not if I have to wheel myself slowly around a 15' area doing n-point turns with my controllers on my knees.

Ah, I can't blame them, but it will be sad not to be able to access these experiences.

And, even for able bodied folks, isn't part of the fun of games being able to do virtually things you're not able to do in real life? Limiting games to walking around a small room - might give you immersion, but is that really going to be fun in the long run?

<comment><USER3> The bit that's funny about this is I remember an HCI researcher back in the 90's who argued in the opposite direction: the wheelchair is the perfect way to interact with a VR environment.

Two large discs on independent rotation encoders make for an incredibly cheap and portable interface. Moving around the environment is intuitive and user actions have an obvious physical meaning in the environment. You get a rudimentary form of haptic feedback for free, as feeling the angular momentum of the spinning wheels gives the user information about their momentum in the virtual space.

If you really felt like getting fancy, you could add a stepper motor to each shaft for the price of even the cheapest position tracking system. With the motor, you can provide the counter torque to simulate going up a hill or spin the wheels up as you go down a ramp. A system that lets a standing user instantly grasp the terrain under their feet would cost an astronomical amount, but it's trivial in a chair. Just the simple immersion of needing to give a little extra force to get a wheel over a door jam would make a huge difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I developed a mild fascination with omnidirectional treadmills a while back. It's such an interesting engineering challenge. Anyways, the large size and hefty cost of these treadmills seems almost unavoidable, and therefore makes them unappealing to a large consumer market. It also seems like this technology is the obvious next step for VR.

So, that leads me to the conclusion that perhaps there might be some future resurgence of the arcade. Except they'll have VR headsets and omnidirectional treadmills instead of Pacman.

Wait, maybe there will be Pacman, but you'll be running.

<comment><USER5> This is sort of a dumb question, but why develop omnidirectional treadmills instead of omnidirectional footwear?

<comment><USER6> Or even better; I never understood why ppl were not looking into these [http://www.thebabyloft.co.uk/images/products/door- bouncer.jp...](http://www.thebabyloft.co.uk/images/products/door-bouncer.jpg)

With sensor lights picking up the foot movements. I bet the engineering challenge of giving sensory feedback to the foot is easier than making the treadmills work.

<comment><USER7> These things were all explored over the last 30 years in the VR space. Body suits, hanging rigs, chairs, caves - you name it someone experimented with it.

I fully expect we'll see a massive re-exploration of all of it in the next 30 years, especially as VR becomes a $100 billion market across consumer/enterprise/govt. Eventually a few optimal approaches for the home will come out of that market process, similar to gaming today: you might have a basic controller, you might buy a driving wheel, you might install an entire flight simulator environment, all depending on how far you want to go to boost your experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ah. He just tried a VR headset in an environment where you can move around. If you haven't seen that before, it's impressive.

You need a lot of floor space to get the real effect of movement. You also need reliable motion tracking and a display image solidly aligned with the real world, or users will fall down, or, in a non-flat environment, fall off things.

This could bring back laser tag.

<comment><USER9> It is funny seeing this concept beginning to gain legs. A buddy and I were working on a concept for VR/AR laser-tag style locations for a college entrepreneurship class about 5 years ago. However, every entrepreneur they brought in to critique our ideas flat out told us this was a moronic idea that could never work and that nobody would ever be interested in. We were told we had to change to a new idea or we'd fail the class. Oh, academics...

<comment><USER10> You say they were entrepreneurs, not academics.

Also, THEY WERE RIGHT!!. 5 years ago you'd have failed miserably in the market with this.

The OLED screens alone had required billions of dollars in investment. Same with the inertial sensors, or small digital cameras and SSDs. All this tech has improved thanks to the smartphone boom in the last 5 years.

Obviously some day we will have flying cars, when we dominate all the anti gravity and the rest of the anti particles, and antimatter.

But if you try to make a business out of flying cars today, you will most likely fail because you got too early.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I fear that all of this is a race to produce incompatible consumption devices for proprietary paid content channels. I do not expect to see open content for them via open channels and sincerely hope I'm wrong.

Steam is just one of the players that will give you access to their content exclusively via their channel on their device. It's all modeled on Apple. I was once very excited about VR but watching what is happening has cooled my interest considerably. It will probably be a long time before the shakeout that can make it interesting again.

<comment> matthew-wegner Valve is going to give away their "Lighthouse" room-tracking technology:

 _" So we're gonna just give that away. What we want is for that to be like USB. It's not some special secret sauce. It's like everybody in the PC community will benefit if there's this useful technology out there. So if you want to build it into your mice, or build it into your monitors, or your TVs, anybody can do it."_

[http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/04/valve-vr- input/](http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/04/valve-vr-input/)

<comment><USER11> That is indeed a good sign if not definitive. Given your creds you've made me much more optimistic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone doubt this will technology will be the biggest advance in human- computer interactions in decades?

<comment><USER13> I'm hoping it brings some fun, education uses. For example, VR cooking with Gordon Ramsey, where you're in a virtual kitchen, cooking along with a professional chef. Or VR public speaking. Most people are scared of speaking in public, so you can practice in front of a VR crowd. You could have DLC for classroom speaking, weddings, boardrooms, etc. I figure you could setup a 3D 360 camera in front of a group of volunteers, and then just use that video for the VR experience. It would also be great for training. Ever run a backhoe? A typical setup is two sticks for moving the bucket, so you could make an easy simulator with the Valve VR controllers to give people practice in a variety of situations. Or driving simulators for new drivers, where they can practice their parking.

You need real world training for all of the above, but I'd be curious to see how the VR training could help people get started. I wouldn't buy a VR headset for any of these things alone, but combine it with games, entertainment, virtual workspaces (you could be sitting in a 10x10 basement, but feel like you're sitting at a desk in a penthouse overlooking New York), and I think they could be quite versatile, and a worthwhile purchase.

I can imagine big business in creating alternate reality assets, such as virtual homes. I wonder if you could combine the real world and the virtual world as well. For example, I'm building a new home, so I make a 20x20 room, dividing a 5x20 and 15x20 section with a sliding door. I put a bed in the 15x20 area, and a railing in the 5x20 section. There's nothing passed the railing, it's just a railing 2ft from a blank wall. However, I create a virtual world that matches the geometry. I put on the headset, and I can sit down on my virtual bed, or walk across the room and slide the door to the balcony. With the headset, the balcony looks like it's on the 20th floor, overlooking the ocean. I can lean on the railing and look down at the world below, while in the real world, I'm just wearing a headset staring at the wall in front of me. I could put a fan in the 5x20 room, so in VR, it feels like there's a breeze on the balcony.

It sounds a little crazy, but is it? You can turn an unfinished space, such as a basement, into a billion dollar VR dream home. There could be a VR home generator, where you enter the floor plan of your basement, and it generates a VR home with rooms and doors that match that space. I'm curious to see where things go, it'll be an interesting decade.

<comment><USER14> Great ideas, I can see public speaking becoming a large attraction. VR-based conferences may gain popularity where you can watch presentations and do a live Q&A at the end. Imagine a programming conference where you get a digital goody-bag of software and/or source code.

<comment><USER15> VR simulcast conferences - real attendees are on the floor, the VR audience is represented as floating above them, the presenter uses something like Google glass to interact for questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Excuse me while I pen a letter to Mr Newell re: building an arcade at every destination mall in the country. Brb.

<comment><USER17> I'm really looking forward to the return of game centers / arcades to experience VR. I was a bit too young in the 80ies to see the end of the arcade craze that could even lead to coin shortages in Japan. I could even see asymmetric multiplayer games to come out of this - players sitting in arcades around virtual tables are the generals having a situation overview, while players on their home consoles are the FPS foot soldiers / pilots. Imagine planetary or space battles unfolding like that...

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders#Impact_and_legac...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Invaders#Impact_and_legacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone have a sense yet of how the Oculus and Steam sets compare?

</comment><comment><USER19> All this VR stuff is just another fad like 3D TV and movies.

I've tried the Oculus DK2 and the headsets are still too heavy on your face, too low res, and not responsive enough.

The problem is that "immersion" is just not important enough. It doesn't add enough to the experience to overcome the downsides.

<comment><USER20> Crystal cove is supposedly way lighter. Sony Morpheus attaches to your head in an entirely different way. Valve's is still supposed to be a bit heavy.

DK2 is pretty damn responsive, but only if you have everything set up just right and are on a beefy GPU.

Resolution is going to go up rapidly, we already have 1440p phones.

Playing half-life 2 with Razer hydras converted me even back on dk1. I expect room scale walking to be even more immersive than moving around with the joystick on the hydras, but way limited in what types of games translate well due to room size. But I think they can do some great things, a lot of what we do in the real world is room-scale.

Just hanging out in a virtual theater with friends watching content is pretty awesome already, your friends just aren't there yet.

It does separate you from your body and give you a blindfolded feeling, lots of improvement needed there. For that reason AR will probably overtake it for a lot of uses for a long time.</comment></comment>


ZFS on Linux Runs into a Snag with Linux 5.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ZFS-On-Linux-5.0-Problem <comment><USER2> It's just sad from a technical perspective.</comment>


Apple Is About To Lose The iPhone Trademark In Brazil - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-to-lose-iphone-trademark-in-brazil-2013-2

<comment><USER2> Sometimes companies are inflicted with some extreme bad luck related to names, marks and so on.

This is a case that is not really trademark trolling, and more of a company that did planned for a product, registered it, and another years later ended with a name conflict.

I hope they can solve this in a amicable way, because the brazillian justice system is very crazy, and if they go for for lawsuit, it will drag, and drag, and drag... and might end killing Gradiente (that is a important company somewhat in Brazil)</comment>


Steve Furber: why kids are turned off computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/interviews/360094/steve-furber-why-kids-are-turned-off-computing

<comment><USER2> I don't think that's true and that should be easy to prove: the books you will read in GCSE English are below the level that any kid who likes reading will have read independently - yet no-one worries that it is turning kids off reading.

<comment><USER3> That seems surprisingly generous towards GCSE English. I know one straight-A student that I went to school with that swore he would never read another book in his life after leaving his Higher English exam (Scottish equivalent of A-level or whatever they are called these days). I'd imagine that if you weren't already a reader then it wouldn't have fired you up to become one either.</comment></comment>


Right-Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability - <AUTHOR> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/navigation-menu-alignment.html <comment><USER2> What about usability though? If the navigation was on the right side, it would make it much more convenient to select menu items since the user's mouse pointer is (most likely) on the right side anyway for scrolling purposes. This is what makes blog design themes so popular. But I agree that each has its own place for the type of website (business, education, etc.)

<comment><USER3> If the entire width of the element is clickable, not just where the text is, then the targets will be larger which would address your concerns I assume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nielsen talks about eye tracking studies and appears to make the argument that the menu should be on the left because of the way we (westerners) read. So what about languages like Arabic and Hebrew? As I understand, these are right to left written languages. Would his study find people tracking on the right?

<comment><USER5> From the article:

 _(Of course, the left-alignment guideline is for languages that read left-to- right. For languages that read in the opposite direction, the guideline is reversed: you should right-justify the menu. In either case, the point is to make it easier for users to scan down the side on which they start reading.)_</comment></comment>


Russian, Japanese and Chinese Take Top Spots in ACM Programming Contest - <AUTHOR> http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2015/icpc-2015/

<comment><USER2> here is the "exact" ranking, without grouping several participants into a single one position [http://icpc.baylor.edu/scoreboard/](http://icpc.baylor.edu/scoreboard/)

<comment><USER3> In what units is the time or what does it represent? I though they had only 5 hours available.

<comment><USER4> There is a penalty when your submission fails, for 20 minutes(?). The final time for a successful submission may add up over 5 hours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The problems: [http://icpc.baylor.edu/download/worldfinals/problems/icpc201...](http://icpc.baylor.edu/download/worldfinals/problems/icpc2015.pdf)

They solved this in 5 hours, using one computer, one calculator and no other help.

Does anyone know what was the team size limit?

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9586413](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9586413)</comment>


Android 2.x accounts for over 80% of Android phones in use - <AUTHOR> http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-versions.html

<comment><USER2> 80% of Android phones accessing the Android market, not 80% of phones in use.</comment>


Scientists develop 'unbreakable' glass almost as tough as steel - <AUTHOR> http://ajw.asahi.com/article/sci_tech/technology/AJ201510290034 <comment><USER2> To nitpick, the article uses the words 'tough', 'hard' and 'rigid' to describe this glass, though those all mean different things.

I'd suggest that _all_ glass is both hard and rigid, so presumably 'tough' is what they're going for. If so, the glass should be able to withstand a large tensile force without fracture or permanent deformation.

'unbreakable' is also a little disingenuous. Everything is breakable, given a big enough hammer ;)

<comment><USER3> Don't think it's nitpicking at all. I came away unsure whether the new material is hard (scratch resistant) or tough (won't shatter when dropped). An article about a new material that doesn't make the distinction fails fundamentally.

<comment><USER4> You might find it interesting that toughness and "won't shatter when dropped" are different things.

Toughness(G) = slowly absorb energy without fracture.

Shattering is more dependable of:

Fracture toughness(Kc) = (E*G)^0,5

Where E = modulus. That explains why plastics with low E shatter easily while being tough. Metals have additional hardening methods that allow them to go beyond this rule.

PS. Your knowledge on the subject is already what I'd wish laymen had. So I really don't mean any offense.

<comment><USER5> To clarify, is fracture toughness the ability to withstand a sudden increase in energy?

<comment><USER4> Not really.. I had kind of error there. It's still often toughness when you wish to study how material reacts to sudden increases in (kinetic)energy.

Fracture toughness describes relation between maximum tension and maximum depth of pre-existing crack that still doesn't launch phenomena called "fast fracture".

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

It's highly relevant in many cases, because most real world materials have microscopic cracks. And because the load where fast fracture might happen is often lot smaller than yield load.

Curiously Charpy impact test still indicates more toughness than fast fracture. But it's never used to quantify toughness in real life.

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

Thanks for that comment. I need to clear this stuff bit more in my head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is cool regardless. But I am interested in cost and weight.

If it is too costly we might only see it used in niche applications (e.g. aircraft windows?). But even then if it weighs more than regular glass it may not even be utilised there.

I'd like to see it used on vehicle front windshields, cracks are a constant pain in the butt, and they can leave the rear window and side windows as regular glass for emergency escape (typically only the front one receives most of the debris). But it really comes back to both weight and cost again.

<comment><USER7> Your windshield is safety glass, so consideration must be given for the need to dissipate energy when a human head collides with it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield#Safety](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield#Safety)

Trivia: A famous lawsuit about the safety of windshield glass was the _Pane_ vs. Ford case in 1917

<comment><USER8> I don't think that safely fracturing when struck by a human is the safety function referred to in the linked article - once a person hits the windshield, the primary safety mechanisms (seatbelts, airbags, and structural integrity of the car) have already failed, so whatever happens at the windshield will make little difference.

What the article says is that the safety role of a windshield (besides not breaking into dangerous shards of glass) is in being strong enough to maintain the structural integrity of the passenger compartment:

 _Modern, glued-in windshields contribute to the vehicle 's rigidity, but the main force for innovation has historically been the need to prevent injury from sharp glass fragments. Almost all nations now require windshields to stay in one piece even if broken, except if pierced by a strong force. Properly installed automobile windshields are also essential to safety; along with the roof of the car, they provide protection to the vehicle's occupants in the case of a roll-over accident._

 _Today's windshields are a safety device just like seat belts and airbags. The installation of the auto glass is done with an automotive grade urethane designed specifically for automobiles. The adhesive creates a molecular bond between the glass and the vehicle. If the adhesive bond fails at any point on the glass it can reduce the effectiveness of the air bag and substantially compromise the structural integrity of the roof._

<comment><USER9> Windshields are laminated safety glass, which it sounds like you might be confusing with tempered safety glass. There's a huge difference in how those break.

Laminated glass remains in one solid mass held together by the plastic sheet in the middle, while tempered glass explodes into tiny pieces that are sharp but not overly harmful. Ordinary annealed glass breaks into long, dagger-like pieces that are dangerously sharp, which is why it's tempered or laminated into safety glass.

So the windshield is meant not to break apart, because it's laminated rather than tempered. The polymer lining between the lites of glass prevents it from scattering and causes it to be quite impact resistant. [1] Conversely, you'd really hate to have tempered glass as your windshield, if it broke the entire thing would just pop into tiny pieces that would get into your eyes. If a rock hit hard enough to break a hypothetical tempered windshield, the parts that didn't pop would be filled with cracks and impossible to see through due to being white from being filled with tiny cracks, though you could just bat them out of the way as any parts were partially intact would simply crumble when moved.

The side windows are tempered, incidentally. If you've ever broken a side window, you know what I mean about the whole thing just exploding. [2] If you manage to pop it, the entire window will just fall apart easily, which might be good if you had to leave from the window of a car. It can cause small cuts and scratches and such, but it's not terribly dangerous unless it gets in your eyes, even if, say, a sheet of 3mm, 33 1/4 x 73 1/4 inch glass breaks while you're holding it. [3] It's no fun, but when you compare it to the fact that annealed glass accidents have been fatal, it's not so bad. [4] Yes, I used to work for a glass factory, so when I say that I've seen hundreds of tons of broken glass, the word 'tons' should be understood in the literal, 2,000 lbs sense of the word.

[1] Source: Determined empirically by beating on damaged pieces of it with a shovel, when said pieces wouldn't fit into the dumpster. Or you can read this, whatever: [http://sem-proceedings.com/10f/sem.org-IMPLAST-2010-SEM- Fall...](http://sem-proceedings.com/10f/sem.org-IMPLAST-2010-SEM- Fall-s004p01-Blast-Impact-Resistance-Laminated-Glass-Structures.pdf)

[2] See also: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPwaq_6aXbo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPwaq_6aXbo) This normally happens only if hit from the corner or an edge, but it can happen just randomly. We usually saw this in winter, but only a few times a year, meaning there was at most about a 1 in 10,000 chance of spontaneous breakage in my experience and probably significantly less based on the average daily volume numbers I remember. When there's something containing the edge of tempered, it sometimes just takes on a white, broken look due to all the cracks, but crumbles to the touch. It tends to just disintegrate like in the video most of the time, though.

[3] Source: Direct, personal experience on multiple occasions for that very size and many others. This is an every-day kind of thing and causes no injury to someone with proper safety gear.

[4] Source: I'm directly aware of at least one such accident where someone was found dead after having their neck cut when attempting to dispose of a cracked sheet. I also provided first aid to someone who could've lost a hand to injury.

<comment><USER4> I thought windshields are tempered _and_ laminated. Not that it significantly changes what you said. Just explains why occasional shards flying away from windshields are not that sharp.

<comment><USER9> I have never heard of a glass that's tempered & laminated. I'm not sure you could temper a glass flat enough to laminate it, either--it moves on rollers during the entire tempering process to keep it (mostly) flat, but it's nowhere near as flat as it is coming from the float plant and distortion is measured as part of the QC process.

You also can't temper any laminate that I know of--the liner would simply melt and cause a mess in the furnace. Our tempering furnace operated in the 700-800F range.

They might seam the edges of the laminate, though, like you do with annealed glass before tempering. I didn't work with windshields, only window glass, including some 6mm clear tempered that went to Google.

<comment><USER4> Tempered laminated exists. But I can't find anything about it being used in car windshields. My bad, sorry.

The way I would do it would be chemical tempering before laminating. Then you probably have lot less warping.

<comment><USER9> Yes, the break pattern of a windshield is consistent with annealed glass. If it were tempered, the entire window could become an opaque white whenever it was damaged by a rock and that just wouldn't be safe. Not that the 'spiderweb' pattern is easy to see through, but it's better than being fully opaque.

I'm not familiar with any tempered laminates as we never made such, but a chemical process sounds more reasonable than trying to get laminated glass through a tempering furnace or laminate two tempered lites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Am I being overly cynical when I interpret: "We will establish a way to mass- produce the new material shortly ... We are looking to commercialize the technique within five years." as "We have no clue how to mass-produce this but hope we can figure it out in five years if someone gives us money"?

It's hard to imagine how a gas-based "containerless processing system" will lend itself to producing the thin, uniform sheets of glass for windows or complex shapes like tableware.

It's a cool prototype, but figuring out how to produce at scale is often the hard part.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. A method of making glass via a containerless processing system that I am aware of, is aerodynamic levitation, wherein a ball of starting material is suspended in a stream of gas, such as Ar, and heated by lasers. This method is used in systems that tend to crystallise rapidly rather than quench to a nice glass, since the thermal mass of the sample is very small and you can take all the heat away instantly by tunring off the laser. Samples prepared by such a method are typically 100s to 1000s of microns in diameter. I would be very interested to hear how they would scale this method to industrial production, if aerodynamic levitation is how they made their glass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sounds like a hybrid between glass and "transparent aluminium".

<comment><USER13> So... Gorilla glass?

edit: yeah...

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

Gorilla Glass is a brand of specialized toughened glass developed and manufactured by Corning, now in its fourth generation,[1] designed to be thin, light and damage-resistant. This type of glass is not unique to Corning; similar glasses include Asahi Glass Co. Dragontrail and Schott AG Xensation.[2][3]

The alkali-aluminosilicate sheet glass [snip]

(The link is to asahi.com)

<comment><USER14> Gorilla glass uses a post-solidification hardening step.

The glass described in the article uses a higher aluminum content than any other mass-produced glass, to the point where any contact with a solid surface would produce alumina crystals rather than incorporate the aluminum into the glass structure.

So they levitated a glass bead with a continuous stream of air until it solidified. The bead is very strong, but they have no idea how to work the resulting glass into fibers or sheets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sorry, But That New Glass From Japanese Researchers Isn't Unbreakable

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/carmendrahl/2015/11/03/sorry- but...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/carmendrahl/2015/11/03/sorry-but-that-new- glass-from-japanese-researchers-isnt-unbreakable/)

</comment><comment><USER16> A few questions on applicability

1\. Would this be good for a car? Is having a mostly unbreakable windshield a good thing?

2\. How would it handle for cookware? Will it last even if an ignorant person left it in the oven for hours on end?

3\. What about uses on phones? Can I have both a scratch resistant touch screen that also doesn't fracture if I drop it 3ft onto asphalt?

4\. What does it do in reaction to sunlight? How insulative is it if used in buildings and homes?

5\. Is it non reactive for biomedical uses? Does it deteriorate over time? How stable is it?

<comment><USER17> >2\. How would it handle for cookware? Will it last even if an ignorant person left it in the oven for hours on end?

Pyrex has been around since the 1910s and doing this just fine ever since.

<comment><USER18> Pyrex _will_ shatter if you take it out of a blistering hot oven and pour cold water on it (e.g. to let stuck on food soak).

<comment><USER19> Yah...I just learned this the hard way. I took it out of the oven and put in on the cold granite countertop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Finally, we can keep humpback whales in our starships!

<comment><USER21> Serious question, couldn't they have just used steel walls and grabbed the whales no problem?

I see no reason that they needed to be able to see through the walls and look at the Wales inside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This could revolutionize knife making. A steel knife is always like a saw on micro level. A glass (like obsidian) could get properly sharp. A glass with the properties of steel is a dream come true.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wait. A big elasticity coefficient is not the same as 'unbreakable'.

Being a mixture of silicates and alumina, I'll be very surprised if this is not fragile. There's nothing about it on the article.

<comment><USER5> Glass itself isn't always "fragile" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Rupert%27s_Drop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Rupert%27s_Drop) so perhaps we'll be pleasantly surprised

<comment><USER24> Oh man, I love Prince Rupert's Drop. As usual, Smarter Every Day has a great video on them: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe-f4gokRBs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe-f4gokRBs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> But is it as scratch resistant as hardened glass? Having glass that doesn't fracture when dropped is nice, but not if it means it gets scratched up from the keys in my pocket.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the "containerless processing technique" is an acoustic levitator. My friend was on the team building one for a Japanese investor who wanted to make a wine glass that didn't break when you knocked it over on your fancy granite worktop.

See one working [https://youtu.be/0K8zs-KSitc](https://youtu.be/0K8zs-KSitc)

</comment><comment><USER26> Make bottles out of this, sell them, return a deposit to get them back. Wash them. Reuse.

</comment><comment><USER27> Here's a link to the paper itself if you have access: [http://www.nature.com/articles/srep15233](http://www.nature.com/articles/srep15233)

</comment><comment><USER28> Please start with the iphone. Damn thing shatters if I look at it funny.

<comment><USER29> Man, I've never had a problem with a broken iPhone screen. I worked for months on a pretty large construction site breaking up concrete while dropping my phone fairly regularly and it's still aces.

Obviously a stronger screen would be great, but a case does wonders if you want a functioning phone for now.

<comment><USER28> yup, hindsight...

I never had a problem with a phone screen breaking until the 6 plus. My OnePlus is bulletproof.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I bet the British government will try to ban this too.

</comment><comment><USER31> Put it on an iPhone and it will shatter. Guaranteed.

</comment><comment><USER32> Is this anything like aerogel?

<comment><USER33> Aerogels aren't known for their structural strength or elasticity, but for their extreme insulative properties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if it's safe to smoke out of.

<comment><USER35> aluminum is a known neurotoxin

<comment><USER36> Only at very high concentrations: Adverse neurological effects have been observed in rats and mice at doses of 100–200 mg Al/kg/day, while the USDA limit is 0.10–0.12 mg Al/kg/day for adult (25–30- and 70+-year-old) males and females. Aluminum is the 3rd most common element in the Earth's crust and humans have evolved given a certain level of environmental exposure. ([http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp22-c2.pdf](http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp22-c2.pdf))</comment></comment></comment>


Washington state to require face masks after county runs out of hospital beds - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/washington-state-require-face-mask-hospital-beds-coronavirus/ <comment><USER2> Ok, I'm not here to discredit mask usage because I fundamentally believe that plays an important role in fighting the virus.

... But, this article is a mess

* The numbers it provides are cumulative. That doesn't really give us a sense of this uptick.

* According to IHME[1] infection counts across Washington haven't spiked, they have been constant throughout! (With a slight dip in April but the data is spikey)

* This Yakima county has a small population (~230,000) and it's not clear how much beds they actually have. My guess, very little.

Anyways, masks are good. Wear a mask.

[1] [https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of- america/wash...](https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of- america/washington)</comment>


Turning the Raspberry Pi Into an FM Transmitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry_Pi_Into_an_FM_Transmitter <comment><USER2> Heh, that blows away my AM morse code sender [1] using a PIC. One of the things I did in the PIC and it would probably work here is to mush the data into a sort of pre-encoded form (which is ready to be shipped out to the transmitter) I expect you could do the same here by taking the wave file, precomputing what the stereo deltas on the FM signal would be than then just using that file (maybe a foo.efm for encoded-FM) then just DMA the pre- processed file to the spectrum offset and voila, done.

[1] <http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/robotics/projects/eelb.html> (and yes I'm re-doing the web site not in Comic Sans which will eventually all be moved to <http://robotics.mcmanis.com> but until then ...

</comment><comment><USER3> I bet the FCC (or RCA in the UK) will love that :)

The amount of noise and harmonics that come off that sort of transmitter will be horrible. At least chuck a bandpass on the end of it.

<comment><USER4> What is the power output of something like this? Would the FCC even care?

<comment><USER5> They say, _"This means that all you need to do to turn the Raspberry-Pi into a (ridiculously powerful) FM Transmitter..."_ and claim it's transmitting at least 50 meters away, which is far beyond what's allowed by the FCC. Not that they'd care unless someone filed a complaint.

<comment><USER6> Wrong.

There are multiple rules for different spectrum.

Anyone can transmit for miles on FM in the 'green dot' / 'blue dot' spectrum. The laws were written for business, but anyone can use them.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_band#Overview>

<comment><USER7> But that's not the band on which this is transmitting.

<comment><USER6> This can be configured in software. Pi can transmit up over 450 Mhz.

<comment><USER8> And with a paperclip antenna, it's leaking harmonics all over the place, not just at 450MHz or 100MHz, or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since there's a nerdy rPi post at the top of HN, I'm going to take the opportunity to plug my new baremetal midi file player / lv2 audio plugin host:

[http://www.joebutton.co.uk/blog/baremetal-midi- lv2-raspberry...](http://www.joebutton.co.uk/blog/baremetal-midi- lv2-raspberrypi/)

When I get time I want to connect up a MIDI keyboard and audio input, so it becomes a synth / guitar stompbox that'll use an open audio plugin format.

<comment><USER10> Now that is cool will have to try that on one of my PI's

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> An unreplied comment on a previous submission on HN was questioning the remote feasibility of running TCP over FM with the Raspberry Pi. I too am curious about the state of the art in general, if any, and how it might possibly be exploited for long-range networking between small computers like the Pi.

<comment><USER12> Packet radio has increased in popularity in recent years. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio#Amateur_Packet_Ra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio#Amateur_Packet_Radio_Evolution) Might be worth looking into, although I'm not sure how practical it would be for the RPi.

<comment><USER13> It should be entierly possible to modulate packet radio using the GPIO hack, however you would probably need a real-time kernel extension to ensure proper transmission. Decoding is easily possible on the CPU as well, provided you attach soeme RF demodulation circuitry, e.g. to a sound card input.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just found PiHAT - Rasberry Pi Home Automation Transmitter: <http://www.skagmo.com/page.php?p=projects/22_pihat>

<comment><USER15> That's fantastic, I discovered earlier that I had some plugs like those and now I'm trying to make them work. I've managed to make them turn off easily enough, but I can't for the life of me get them to turn on.

Would anyone happen to know how I can tune in to my remote's frequency (144.63 MHz, it says, even though the remote operates at 433.49 or something) and listen to the tones it generates?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Back in the TRS-80 days, someone discovered they could make sounds through an AM radio and a few games took advantage of that.

<comment> mark-r I saw it done in the '70s with a PDP-8.

<comment><USER17> Back when I was doing z80 programming on my TI-83+, I would sometimes us an AM radio as a very crude debugger. Programs stuck in busy loops would generally have a very distinct sound, and you were often over time able to learn what other parts of your program sounded like too.

<comment><USER3> That is one of those little stories which is just awesome.

That's when you KNOW the machine.

You just can't do that with anything these days. Even my HP50G calc is personality-free in that respect.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, my understanding is that doing that became difficult even on the higher end 83+/84+ series calculators as the clockrate went up, though I haven't actually put that to the test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oh, nice! Here is situation: I have a pretty old car with FM receiver and single CD player, with no line input. Problem: I want to listen to the music from my iPhone, hopefully with a distraction free interface. For that I need a horrible contraption from car power splitter, USB cable to the iPhone that usually doubles as GPS on the dashboard, audio cable back to FM transmitter down there plugged into power outlet.

But now I can have a raspberry pi hidden somewhere, translating audio to FM and possibly recognizing my voice commands while at it like "play We Are the Void by Dark Tranquillity"

<comment><USER19> Or you could get an iTrip, but I agree that the RPi is way more fun.

<http://www.griffintechnology.com/itrip>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder, would it be possible to do the same thing in reverse, i.e. use it as some kind of radio receiver that dumps .wav to disk?

<comment><USER21> No, but rtlsdr [1] is a classical use-case for raspis.

[1] - <http://sdr.osmocom.org/trac/wiki/rtl-sdr>

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Well, this is cool, but it would be cooler if they wrote an open source cell tower for GSM phones running on Raspberry Pi.

<comment><USER23> <http://wush.net/trac/rangepublic>

<comment><USER8> $5k for a dev box? Not really in the same league...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fantastic, now we should combine that with a good text to speech engine so it can read aloud e-books, blogs, and whatnot during daily commute.

</comment><comment><USER6> I found this very exciting! Every Pi is now a potential pirate radio station!

I imagine that if a proper ground plane antenna were hooked up to it the pi would transmit much farther.

Are FM transmitters still restricted for civilians in some parts of the world?

</comment><comment><USER25> I just read about Distributed Dance Party [1], a movement that uses an FM transmitters and a bunch of boomboxes to power outdoor parties. Seems like this would be perfect for parades or groups that need a cheap way to communicate with a large number of people.

[1] [http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/01/mf-decentralized- danc...](http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/01/mf-decentralized-dance-party/)

</comment><comment><USER26> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.icr...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry_Pi_Into_an_FM_Transmitter)

</comment><comment><USER27> This is brilliant! Thanks for sharing!!</comment>


Plan9's RC shell for Unix - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rakitzis/rc <comment><AUTHOR> Some fun notes about this shell:

\- There is no '~'

\- You edit history VERY differently, it's pretty neat, using # and % to edit the history line before it's executed

\- The default prompt is ';', so when you copy paste it comes up as a no-op line terminator

<comment><USER2> This is not the Plan 9 Shell.

The Plan 9 shell does not have command history, thank goodness.

And ~ is $home in the Plan 9 shell.

If you want the Plan 9 tools on Unix, use Russ Cox' Plan 9 from User Space [http://swtch.com/plan9port/](http://swtch.com/plan9port/)

<comment><USER3> Your comments are welcome, but they are largely incorrect.

This version of rc was written outside the Labs in 1991 from the reference materials publicly available at the time.

Shell history is implemented as an external command (as in plan9's shell).

~ does not alias to $home on plan9port, or in my version of the shell. ~ is the pattern matching operator:

% ls ~ ls: ~: No such file or directory % ls ~/.rcrc ls: ~/.rcrc: No such file or directory % ~ a b || echo not matched not matched

Good luck.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why hasn't Google put Android voice recognition into Chrome itself? - <AUTHOR>

It would be useful and aid in accessibility to have voice recognition entry into any input field in Chrome.
Chrome's Google search box shows they can do it.
How can Joe Random Public convince them to do this? <comment><USER2> 1) it's baked into operating systems as features that most people don't use:

[http://lifehacker.com/215764/hack-attack-make-your-macs- spee...](http://lifehacker.com/215764/hack-attack-make-your-macs-speech- recognition-work-for-you)

[http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/set-up-speech- re...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/set-up-speech-recognition)

2) there's already an ecosystem of dictation / voice-assisted software that the overwhelming majority of the world doesn't want:

[http://alternativeto.net/software/nuance-dragon- naturallyspe...](http://alternativeto.net/software/nuance-dragon- naturallyspeaking/)

Joe Random Public can convince Google they want this as soon as someone convinces Joe Random Public they need this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but more and more Siri and Google Now are doing that training. And having used Dragon, I can say it's a very heavyweight solution that requires a great deal of training, not just of the system but of the user. I would vastly prefer a lightweight mic box next to each input field.

<comment><USER2> I think on mobile it's lost to the keyboard as well as a general purpose input tool - the hardware and networks weren't there to support it initially, on- screen keyboards have (massively) improved and people have grown more familiar with them, and devices have grown considerably as well which allows for an even better typing experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Chrome's supported voice recognition via the Web Speech API since Chrome 25.</comment>


Porting SimBlob(OS/2 game) to the web - <AUTHOR> http://simblob.blogspot.com/2013/06/porting-simblob-to-web.html

<comment><USER2> I was just playing this game _before_ I saw it on hn.</comment>


Twitter: When the network is the thing - <AUTHOR> http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2015/9/1/when-the-network-is-mature <comment><USER2> This claims that the network makes twitter, not the 140 character limit. Well, it was that 140 character limit made the network in the first place.

The author describes reasons why the 140 character limit is a problem (e.g. you can't have long conversations), in which they absolutely miss the point. Twitter is not meant to solve all of your communication needs. The 140 character limit allows Twitter to be a reliable source of quick bits of information - you can dive deeper if you want, but it's a great cursory overview.

Tools don't have to solve every problem. They can (and probably should) solve one specific problem really well. Twitter does that.

<comment><USER3> Twitter is a feed, like RSS and co, but centralized thus without the need to maintain one's own blog.

So yes it is not meant to be used as a conversation tool. Its biggest problem is in my opinion is curation. If I follow someone on twitter because he tweets about Javascript or Web Security, I don't want to hear about the toys he bought for his babies, his vacations or any activities unrelated to the subject that made me follow that person. Twitter needs some kind of a channel system, hashtags are a poor way to filter tweets. Too much noise.

That's basically why I stopped using it and went back to RSS. If common people understood how RSS works, they would not need twitter.

<comment><USER4> Shameless plug: you're pinpointing one of the reasons that made us start tree.

The gist of it: you follow people within categories so as to only get exposed to content that matters to you (tightly integrated with a bookmarking side and chrome extension).

We have conducted our closed-beta for 4 months now, only in Estonia, but we're launching really soon.

If you want more informations, feel free to reach out (contact in my profile).

<comment><USER5> _you follow people within categories_

One small nit pick: this is exactly what he's saying he doesn't want. He wants a way to be able to filter out content based on topic, not based on users. Putting a user in a category doesn't magically filter their baby pictures out of their discussion of algorithmic filters. Maybe automatic topic tagging? Combine that with being able to put topics on an ignore list and you would have my interest in a hurry.

<comment><USER4> Following that user in "web development" instead of "everything" (a la twitter) will solve his issue. You follow people within categories, you don't associate people with categories.

I probably didn't phrase it correctly, I stand corrected.

When you share or save something on tree, you have to choose one of the 20 categories: tech, business, news&society, art&design, music, etc... In turn, people will see that you shared in X or Y and can decide to follow you exclusively in this X or Y category. Your feed is actually a multi-feed (depending on how many categories you decided to follow people in, up to 20).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm reminded of when Facebook first eliminated the formatting constraints on status updates, so that users could simply enter text instead of adapting their message to the "___ is __ing" convention. At the time, I'm sure there was some Slate article decrying the move because it would make Facebook just another website.

Personally, I tended to agree: it seemed like some of the quirky charm of Facebook had been needlessly killed. But I was wrong. The communicative potential of Facebook never would have ripened if status updates had remained so constricted. The original novelty of the medium itself gave way to the sustained novelty of diverse messages.

What does that mean for Twitter? I'm not sure.

Its ongoing success chastens me, because when I heard about it, the idea sounded idiotic. Why use a protocol that imposed a 140 character limit? Well, there is clearly some utility, given how many active users Twitter has. But it is also obvious that many of those same users are frustrated by the limitations of what they can express.

If I were running Twitter, I would take a middle path: Keep the 140 character limit on "Tweets" but integrate a new type of public message without a character limit. (Perhaps the 'subject line' of the new message class would be a Tweet, which would expand into the full text when clicked.) This seems like the best way to provide users an easier means of expressing themselves without destroying Twitter as they know it.</comment>


The Most Powerful Lesson I've Ever Learned in Business - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mmccue/the-most-powerful-lesson-i-ve-ever-learned-in-business-4d89e95ab250 <comment><USER2> Original posting got 30+ comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11154125](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11154125)</comment>


Jepsen: YugaByte DB 1.3.1 - <AUTHOR> https://jepsen.io/analyses/yugabyte-db-1.3.1 <comment><USER2> I cannot recall seeing a public Jensen report that didn't result in better software. Kudos to the Jepsen team and their clients.

</comment><comment><USER3> the db doesnt guarantee linearizability (assuming clock skew). even the post says stale counters values can be read.

Doesn't that mean that following use cases are not possible:

      1. keeping count of page views
      2. vote count per ticket/post
      3. like/dislike counts per entity

a reason to use highly scalabale db like Yuga would be to keep such counts.

<comment><AUTHOR> All those should be possible; you just might not observe the state of the counter as it was a few milliseconds(?) ago, rather than what it might be right now. If you're dealing with extremely frequent updates where the chances of observing that sort of anomaly are more common, chances are the precise value of the counter doesn't matter so much, and an occasional off-by-one or off-by-two isn't the end of the world. YMMV, of course. :)

<comment><USER3> >you just might not observe the state of the counter as it was a few milliseconds

did you mean 'might observe' instead of 'might not'? stale read would result in the older value being read.

i believe the anomaly would then occur depending on how close the 2 events are in time, regardless of frequency.

in that case, precise counts can be needed even with low frequency. say you are a restaurant with 1 burger left. 2 folks order the same time, but you decrement the count by 1 only.

also anything involving monetary values, you definitely don't want to read stale values ever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, thank you. I was rushing to get out the door and edited the sentence carelessly! You'll likely see a current value _most_ of the time, even under high contention, but might occasionally see a slightly stale one.

As grogers notes, a stale read is a different phenomenon than the burger problem you describe, which is also called "lost update". We didn't observe any cases of lost updates in YugaByte DB.

As for monetary values, you might find it interesting to ask someone who works in banking or fintech about recency properties of their data systems. Latencies on the order of multiple days are surprisingly common.

<comment><USER3> correct me if i am wrong here:

1\. burger case, i do: count = count-1 if both txs see count=1, we get count=0 at the end.

2\. i didnt say banking per se. can involve a simple billing system of a startup. or any critical data where you need to ensure you are reading accurate, uptodate values. maybe a leaderboard.

>You'll likely see a current value most of the time

'most' is not a guarantee :) either the system is designed with seeing uptodate values or not. and if 'some' of the time the value is stale, you have to program with low consistency in mind.

the marketing on yugabyte's page makes it seems it can replace db's like cassandra and give you a consistent view of your data. but if one is seeing stale values, you are back to coding like data is non-consistent

<comment><AUTHOR> _correct me if i am wrong here... i do: count = count-1 if both txs see count=1, we get count=0 at the end._

I, er, don't mean to be rude, but... both grogers and I have already explained that this idea is somewhat less than correct. The anomaly you're describing is called lost update, and is explicitly prohibited by both snapshot isolation and serializable isolation, the two isolation levels supported by YugaByte DB. Linearizability is not necessary to prevent lost updates. This is not only a theoretical fact, but supported by experimental evidence: we have extensively tested YugaByte DB for lost updates, and have not (yet) observed any.

 _i didnt say banking per se. can involve a simple billing system of a startup. or any critical data where you need to ensure you are reading accurate, uptodate values. maybe a leaderboard._

While linearizability may be a nice property for these systems to have, it is rarely _necessary_. Billing systems and leaderboards, like bank ledgers and shopping carts, are often designed as append-only ledgers with eventual consistency, employing sealing windows, compensating transactions, and time- shifting to handle late discovery of events. Others are designed as as reports periodically derived from some underlying datastore via, say, an ETL process; data may be not only milliseconds, but even days or weeks out of date. That's not to say this is a universal pattern, but I can think of a few dozen systems off the top of my head.

I know this because I've worked on several systems like this, including in fintech, and consulted for companies and government organizations building others. I can also offer some anecdotal experience here. For example, I have no fewer than three emails in my inbox from AWS's billing system informing me of missing data or other mistakes in the previous month's bill, accompanied by updated reports providing newer data. Last summer, my bank deferred visibility of some transaction data for over _six weeks_.

This might feel counter-intuitive, but since money is fungible and addition is commutative, it's one of the _easiest_ things to work with in a stale or even eventually-consistent manner. Where you _really_ want linearizability (or at least sequential consistency) is in domains where operations _don 't_ commute. Linearizability is particularly important where those non-commutative operations involve side-channels, but that's a longer discussion for another time.

 _' most' is not a guarantee_

This is true, but there is a qualitative difference between a system which exhibits, say, a 5ms stale read once per thousand transactions during clock skew, and a 10-day stale read one in every two transactions all the time. I mention these numbers to provide a rough characterization of anomaly frequency and severity.

 _the marketing on yugabyte 's page makes it seems it can replace db's like cassandra and give you a consistent view of your data. but if one is seeing stale values, you are back to coding like data is non-consistent_

Linearizability is not the only form of consistency model, and many models have no realtime properties whatsoever. You might find [https://jepsen.io/consistency](https://jepsen.io/consistency) informative.

<comment><USER3> thanks for clarifying. appreciate the detailed answer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> seems like yugabyte, like postgres, also spawns a process per connection; thus requiring use of external connection pool

<comment><USER4> Very astute observation! Two things:

* We implemented a feature to share memory between these connection handling processes so that makes it a bit more efficient

* Longer term we are thinking of switching to a thread based model. This is how our other API YCQL works.

(cto / co-founder)

<comment><USER5> I think this is a very important thing to prioritize for a DB of this nature. Postgres/RDBMS connections in general are an extreme weak spot for containerized/serverless applications.

DynamoDB/ElasticSearch's approach of not needing to establish/maintain a connection seems like the ideal solution. I think for applications that would utilize your DB, a minor hit to the speed of an individual request is well worth it as compared to being able to scale up the amount of simultaneous requests.

<comment><USER4> Yes absolutely spot on!

Peeling the onion one more layer, there are two underlying features that are required:

1) Move to a threaded model to be able to scale instantaneously. This is already the case with YCQL, we're planning on doing this for YSQL.

2) There needs to be a change to the client drivers in order to become smarter to deal with how the app connects to the DB. In fact, we're working on enabling this for the Spring (Java) ecosystem by enhancing the JDSB driver (still in the early stages): [https://github.com/YugaByte/ybjdbc](https://github.com/YugaByte/ybjdbc)

(cto/co-founder)

<comment><USER3> what does the JDBC driver has to do with thread per connection in the database? jdbc doesnt care if you use threads or processes for the connection

<comment><USER4> True for a single node. However, there will be multiple IP address/connections anyway, since YugaByte DB is a distributed DB and it runs across multiple nodes. JDBC drivers connect to only one node - so to provide true connection scaling, the client side would need to become aware of a multi-node cluster and do connection pooling across these. Of course there are other issues also that need to get solved that are slightly related:

* The node given to the JDBC driver could be down, or nodes could get added/removed over time. This makes "discovery of nodes" a problem.

* We could use a random round robin strategy to connect to nodes - where client connects to a random cluster node which internally connects to the appropriate node. This would result in an increased latency, and also an increase in the net number of connections needed.

These may not matter if the load balancer is smart like in the case of Kubernetes (and where the extra hop becomes mandatory as well). But for non-k8s deployments, these help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great. I am not sure about using yugabytedb now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Keep in mind that this analysis focuses on features which are still in beta; while YugaByte DB advertises SQL features throughout their marketing, the documentation does state that SQL isn't production-ready yet. We should expect bugs at this stage! :-)</comment></comment>


1976 race through an empty Paris [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJYOMFayruw <comment><USER2> First saw this in Highschool Film Studies. I believe it was done early morning to avoid traffic. What a maniac..</comment>


How One Lawyer's Crusade Could Change Football - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/magazine/how-one-lawyers-crusade-could-change-football-forever.html

<comment><USER2> I find it odd how the whole a majority of the Times articles that are written are against the continuation of the major sports of America?

What audience are they targeting, sports are a universal demographical pull, no?

<comment><USER3> The NY Times takes a skeptical view of the business of sports, it is true. I don't see a lot of bad stuff written about baseball or basketball, though, and it covers football extensively, for all the questions it raises about the damage caused.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: how to setup a US company/bank account - <AUTHOR>

I know that there were already many discussions about payment gateways and comparisons between US/Non-US solutions but fact is that for many nice solutions a US bank account (and often a tax ID) is needed.
Also I just wanted to get (more out of curiosity) my feet wet with Win7 mobile apps and despite the ridiculous signup process they also restrict selling apps to US entities (like android did for a while). Also things like Amazon payments and Google checkout only work with US bank accounts.
I have seen some trustee services in Delaware that offer incorporation for overseas companies in the US but it seems a bit pricy for a couple of test apps and the odd idea i want to try out.
Are there any ways to get a US bank account from overseas without having to go through a full incorporation? Is there an easy (cheap) way to get a US company registered from overseas? I am not too fussed about low tax rates or anything - it is really only for testing out markets and ideas. <comment><USER2> I can't answer your question directly, but one option you might look into is U.S. brokerage accounts. With some of them (Etrade for example) you can get a debit card, direct deposits, wire transfers and other features without as many restrictions as opening a bank account.

</comment><comment><USER3> After 9/11 there are no options other than founding a U.S. corporation or visiting a U.S. bank in person to get an account.</comment>


Milo Yiannopoulos Is the Pretty, Monstrous Face of the Alt-Right - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-america-divided/milo-yiannopoulos/ <comment><USER2> Wow. What a sick puppy.</comment>


Uber loses right to classify drivers as self-employed in UK - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/28/uber-uk-tribunal-self-employed-status <comment><USER2> Other discussion - BBC article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815441](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12815441)

</comment><comment><USER3> This will be expensive for Uber if they lose the appeal and I am not sure how they could win it at this stage. The appeal would be a way to slow down the impostion of this ruling however it is likely to be backdated to this date if they are unsuccessful so it would mean extra cost with no benefit.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the next steps regarding processors technology? - <AUTHOR> Given that Moore's law has come to an end and it's not doable to keep shrinking stuff, where will the next improvements regarding processors be made? <comment><USER2> Optical Processors, FGPA 'reconfigurable hardware', 3d layering, Quantum processors (if they ever go commercial), Neurochips (rat-brain-neural-network- on-a-chip for specialist hardware applications). If hardware devs ever run out of ideas we may even have to go back to resource-efficient programming!

</comment><comment><USER3> Next couple of generations will still be "shrinking stuff", after that it will be "new stuff" (e.g. graphene) and "stacking stuff" (3D integration).

</comment><comment><USER4> Specialization. We're already seeing specialized processors take over niches of compute (Googles TPU, bitcoin ASICs, GPUs etc etc). I think we'll see this trend accelerate.

<comment><USER5> 2017 ACM Turing Award Lecture by Hennessy and Patterson nicely summarizes the emphasis on domain-specific languages and domain-specific architectures going forward. [https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/2/234352-a-new-golden- ag...](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/2/234352-a-new-golden-age-for- computer-architecture/fulltext)</comment></comment>


Immigrants lacking papers work legally – as their own bosses - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-ff-immigration-business-20130915,0,4218531.story <comment><USER2> Feel free to run this by an immigration lawyer if it matters to you, but "Opening an LLC is legal regardless of immigration status" is true. It doesn't imply that _working_ for your own LLC is legitimate absent a work-capable visa. The Times is mostly reporting on a way which currently avoids controls designed to make working illegally (which is, ahem, not uncommon) more difficult.

In a similar fashion, owning a LLC makes it radically easier to not pay income taxes than being a W-2 employee, but it does not excuse you from paying income taxes.

<comment><USER3> The analysis from patio11 is essentially correct. It is NOT legal to be living in the United States unless one has a citizenship or visa status that allows doing so. What forming an LLC does is avoid many of the enforcement mechanisms that reveal persons who are in the United States illegally. But if you are found anyway, nothing about forming the LLC will protect you from being deported. You don't gain an immigration status by forming the LLC--what you gain is a way of making a living. If you are making a living in the United States without work permission, you are still an illegal immigrant. Simply put, the newspaper headline is WRONG--there is nothing legal about working in those circumstances.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I am simply describing the immigration law of the United States as it is, not as I might desire it to be.)

<comment><USER4> Minor nitpick: Visa status != Immigration status

For example: As a student you can have an expired F1 visa in your passport, but as long as your I-20 document is kept valid and you are attending school you are fine. The visa is only of concern when crossing the border.

<comment><USER5> Correct

This also applied for regular B visas, if it expires on day X you have until day X to cross the border, but the maximum duration of your stay is determined by the officer, regardless of the remaining visa duration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At least they can create their own companies in the US. I am currently a freelance frontend engineer who needs to scale to hire people but I can't start my own company in France. I have to do it with a French associate who must be the president. I have the chance of doing it with my best friend.

By the way, they refused to renew my papers because I dropped out of school to be the CTO in a startup who made it to a notorious national journal.

<comment><USER7> I am facing a similar issue with Indonesia.

Really, regarding France, just start an Ltd in the UK and hire people in France (evil grin).

I am a part owner of a UK LTD ([http://www.efficito.com](http://www.efficito.com)) and neither our stockholders nor our directors, nor our officers are from the UK. It made it slightly harder to get a bank account opened in the Netherlands though.

<comment><USER8> Any bank you would recommend?

<comment><USER7> I don't know of any in France. My understanding in all cases is that it really helps to know folks at the bank. So I would start at where you currently do your banking and see what you can do there.

<comment><USER8> I actually meant in the Netherlands :-)

<comment><USER7> I won't say we have a lot of experience and I feel a bit odd making a recommendation based on being in business for less than a year.... (I am in Indonesia and this makes it a bit harder to feel secure in my recommendations.) Feel free to email me at firstname.lastname@example.com and I will talk with my business partner (who is in the Netherlands) a bit more before giving a recommendation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, so a person is brought into a country a 7. At 20, she still has no legal right to be there, and if caught, can be sent back to "her" country?

That's effed up.

<comment><USER10> How about this: 300 million people are brought (illegally) to the country at 7.

At 20, should they have a legal right to be there?

<comment><USER11> > At 20, should they have a legal right to be there?

Absolutely. After all, if 13 years is not enough to locate and deport them those people have a right to a continued existence in the place where they are now completely at home and integrated. Anything else would be inhuman.

<comment><USER12> I know people who worked legally(!) in the US for 14 years, and paid taxes for this whole time - they do not even have a Green Card yet. And you are saying that illegal immigrants should get citizenship just because they have been here for 13 years.

<comment><USER12> If you say that once someone exhibit all properties of a citizen he should become one. My question to you is: at what point does one start exhibiting all properties of a citizen and how should Government verify that he does?

<comment><USER11> That's easy: as soon as the government thinks that someone ought to be taxed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you want to engage independent contractor in the US, you need to solicit federal form W-9 which requires the contractor to provide a Taxpayer Identification Number (Employer Identification Number or Social Security Number). If you are engaging a corporation, they usually don't have to provide a W-9.

If you are a contractor trying to register as a company, you need to put a Social Security Number for each owner/officer on the registration forms (in most [all?] of the United States). Persons who aren't authorized to work can get an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) which is a restricted Social Security Number. Restrictions include no ability to collect benefits and expiration after five years.

EDIT: By "register a company" I meant that if you have an ITIN you at least have a number to put in that space on the registration form. Whether or not the jurisdiction will accept the number will vary. Whether or not banks in the area will let you open an account will vary by jurisdiction as well.

<comment><USER14> Neither Texas nor Washington State appear to require SSN/ITIN information when forming a corporation. I've formed corporations in both states and haven't needed to supply my SSN. The form to request an EIN for the corporation also doesn't request the individual preparer's SSN. When I opened bank accounts for these, I was requested to provide my SSN as a "unique identifier" for me but, with some of the banks/credit unions I used, I was told it is optional.

<comment><USER15> Was this pre or post patriot act? The identity requirements for bank accounts got a lot stricter since then.

<comment><USER16> You don't need an SSN to open a bank account. Consider the number of _legal_ immigrants in the US without a SSN.

<comment><USER8> Legal immigrants don't get a "special" SSN?

<comment><USER17> I am a lawful permanent resident (i.e. green card holder). My SSN card doesn't have any endorsement; it appears exactly the same as a US Citizen's card. When I was on a nonimmigrant visa, it did have the endorsement "VALID FOR WORK ONLY WITH DHS AUTHORIZATION" as I needed an Employment Authorization Card to work. (They granted my green card before they approved the EAC though.)

See [http://ssa- custhelp.ssa.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/1125/~/t...](http://ssa- custhelp.ssa.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/1125/~/types-of-social-security- cards-issued) for more details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> An immigration law reform is ever increasingly necessary. If there wasn't opportunity for foreigners they wouldn't come here in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER19> DACA recipients are not under threat of deportation and are eligible for US work permits. Arizona law still prevents Carla Chavarria from getting a driver's license, but not working AFAIK. I have specifically seen it as an argument against the driver's license law that it makes it hard for DACA people to get a job.</comment>


MEAN vs. LAMP - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/2937159/application-development/mean-vs-lamp-your-next-programming-project.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not convinced by the "JOIN" argument, but other points could make sense.</comment>


Lessons for someone starting work for the first time in United States - <AUTHOR>

I am graduating December and starting work as a software engineer. This is my first job in the United States. I am very scared about the cultural difference in addition to all other first job fears.
Any tips, advice or lessons that you learned in the workplace would be very very helpful.
For example, should I get some chocolates for my coworkers in the first day? I remember seeing someone do this when I was an intern.
Please help. <comment><USER2> Skip the chocolates. Instead, confirm their confidence in you by doing something useful as quickly as possible. Minimize cultural differences (ie. try to fit in without sacrificing anything important). Don't pander - you were hired for a reason.</comment>


I'm 32 and spent $200k on biohacking - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/im-32-and-spent-200k-on-biohacking-became-calmer-thinner-extroverted-healthier-happier-2a2e846ae113 <comment><USER2> Okay, so, lithium is used to treat bipolar. Metformin is being tested to treat lithium weight gain. Modafinil is sometimes used for treatment resistant depression. And escitalopram is an anti-depressant. All of that, plus the hormones (which some doctors think might help folks with depression), makes me think that the author has a health issue and his biohacking success is actually just reflective of him getting better. I can't see how he could convince a doctor to prescribe these meds otherwise.

<comment><USER3> No, in his introduction it said that this was his hobby. I feel like he would have mentioned if he had any sort of illness, otherwise that would be dishonest writing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Call me crazy, but I think the meditating >1000 times might account for 99% of this.

<comment> matt-attack Do you mean the meditating caused the weight loss and improvement in oxygen uptake?

<comment><USER4> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not doing drugs all the time, I'm 'biohacking'.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this a joke?

Has Tim Ferris just adopted a new alias?

</comment><comment><USER7> I agree with him

</comment><comment><USER8> tl;dr: money _does_ buy happiness after all.

Like, it's great that rich CEOs get to burn all this money and have all these necessary connections for their "biohacking", but very few of us have that kind of money. It'd be nice to get some info on doing this sort of thing on a budget (and preferably without being able to bribe - er, "persuade" \- a doctor into writing a bunch of prescriptions).

<comment><USER9> This is extremely easy to do legally and with brand-name medications if you live near the US-Mexico border.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great</comment>


Atari's new VCS isn't a console, but it isn't quite a computer either - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/06/ataris-new-vcs-isnt-a-console-but-it-isnt-quite-a-computer-either/ <comment><USER2> Its an Ouya type scam. Current Atari brand owners have been running around for almost 2 years now doing fake demos and accusing journalists of lying, while avoiding to answer basic questions like where would the games come from. [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/21/atari_interview_in_...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/21/atari_interview_in_full/)</comment>