The lingua franca of LaTeX - <AUTHOR> https://increment.com/open-source/the-lingua-franca-of-latex/ <comment><USER3> This is a good article! A couple of corrections to the early history in the introductory paragraphs:

• It is indeed true that the first edition of Volumes 1–3 of _The Art of Computer Programming_ and the second edition of Volume 1 (1968, 1969, 1973, 1973) had been done with hot-metal typesetting (pieces of lead, laid out to form the page) with a human doing the typesetting/compositing (with a Monotype machine). And that for the second edition of Volume 2 in 1977, the publisher Addison-Wesley was switching to a cheaper alternative. But the cheaper alternative was not electronic; it was _phototypesetting_ (the letterforms made with light and lenses instead of metal). It was Knuth who noticed a book that _had_ been electronically typeset (Patrick Winston's AI book), realized that electronic typesetting machines actually had enough resolution to print like "real books" (unlike typewriters or printers of the time), and decided to solve his problem for himself (as he felt that he could make shapes with 0s and 1s).

• The summer of 1977, Knuth spent in China, thinking he'd specified his program in enough detail and his two students would be able to complete the program by the time he came back. He came back and saw they had only implemented a small subset, and decided to spend his sabbatical year writing the program himself. He mentions that as he started writing it he realized the students' proto-TeX was an impressive effort, because there was a lot missing from his specifications. Knuth's article _The Errors of TeX_ (reprinted in his collection _Literate Programming_ ) goes into excellent detail on the development process.

Also: a suggestion to try plain TeX (instead of LaTeX), if you haven't tried it. The book _A Beginner 's Book of TeX_ by Seroul and Levy is especially good. It might surprise you.

<comment><USER4> > It was Knuth who noticed a book that had been electronically typeset > (Patrick Winston's AI book), realized that electronic typesetting machines > actually had enough resolution to print like "real books"

Searching for what the actual resolutions were, I saw in your older comment (1) that you mention "Alphatype CRS" and "more than 5000 DPI."

If you mention 1977, and there were already 5000+ DPI machines then, I'd really like to read a little more about that: it's impressively more than what the "laser printers" used by mortals were able to have. How did these high resolution machines work? How did they achieve the resolution physically, and how did they manage to process so much bits at the time when the RAM of microcomputers was counted in kilobytes?

1) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17917367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17917367)

P.S. Digging deeper: I've just found the reason we see today the text produced with TeX as "too thin": [https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/48369/are- the-origin...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/48369/are-the-original- cm-fonts-better-than-the-current-type1-fonts/361722#361722) and linked there: [https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb37-3/tb117ruckert.pdf](https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb37-3/tb117ruckert.pdf)

<comment><USER5> The Alphatype CRS ("Cathode Ray Setter") was nominally 5333dpi, but it's a bit of a fudge. As the person who wrote the DVI interface for it, and personally ran the entire Art of Computer Programming, Vol. 2, 2nd Edition through it, let me explain.

You are very correct that in the early 1980's, even 64k of RAM was quite expensive, and enough memory to handle a complete frame buffer at even 1000dpi would be prohibitive. The Alphatype dealt with this by representing fonts in an outline format handled directly by special hardware. In particular, it had an S100 backplane (typical for microcomputers in the day) into which was plugged a CPU card (an 8088, I think), a RAM card (64k or less), and four special-purpose cards, each of which knew how to take a character outline, trace through it, and generate a single vertical slice of bits of the character's bitmap.

A bit more about the physical machine, to understand how things fit together: It was about the size and shape of a large clothes washer. Inside, on the bottom, was a CRT sitting on its back side, facing up. There was a mirror and lens mounted above it, on a gimbal system that could move it left/right and up/down via stepper motors (kind of like modern Coke machines that pick a bottle from the row/column you select and bring it to the dispenser area). And, at the back, there was a slot in which you'd place a big sheet of photo paper (maybe 3ft by 3ft) that would hang vertically.

OK, we're all set to go. With the paper in, the lens gets moved so that it's focused on the very top left of the paper, and the horizontal stepper motor, under control of the CPU, starts moving it rightwards. Simultaneously, the CPU tells the first decoder card to DMA the outline info for the first character on the page, and to get the first vertical slice ready. When the stepper motor says it's gotten to the right spot, the CPU tells the decoder card to send its vertical slice to the CRT, which flashes it, and thus exposes the photo paper. In the meantime, the CPU has told the second card to get ready with the second vertical slice, so that there can be a bit of double-buffering, with one slice ready to flash while the next one is being computed. When the continuously- moving horizontal stepper gives the word, the second slice is flashed, and so on. (Why two more outline cards? Well, there might be a kern between characters that slightly overlaps them (think "VA"), and the whole thing is so slow we don't want to need a second pass, so actually two cards might flash at once, one with the last slice or two of the "V" and the other with the fist slice of the "A".)

So, once a line is completed, the vertical stepper motor moves the lens down the page to the next baseline, and then the second line starts, this time right-to-left, to double throughput. But therein lies the first fallacy of the 5333dpi resolution: There is enough hysteresis in the worm gear drive that you don't really know where you are to 1/5333 of an inch. The system relies on the fact that nobody notices that alternate lines are slightly misaligned horizontally (which also makes it all the more important that you don't have to make a second pass to handle overlapping kerned characters; there it might be noticeable).

Looking closer at the CRT and lens, basically the height of the CRT (~1200 pixels, IIRC) get reduced onto the photo paper to a maximum font size of ~18pt (IIRC), or 1/4in, giving a nominal resolution of ~5000dpi on the paper. But this design means you can't typeset a character that was taller than a certain size without breaking it into vertical pieces, and setting them on separate baseline passes. Because of the hysteresis mentioned above, we had to make sure all split-up characters were only exposed on left-to-right passes, thus slowing things down. Even then, though, you could see that the pieces still didn't quite line up, and also suffered from some effects of the lack of sharpness of the entire optical system. You can actually see this in the published 2nd edition of Vol 2.

Finishing up, once the sheet was done (six pages fit for Knuth's books, three across and two down), the system would pause, and the operator remove the photo paper, start it through the chemical developer, load another sheet, and push the button to continue the typesetting.

It's worth noting that the firmware that ran on the 8088 as supplied by Alphatype was not up to the job of handling dynamically downloaded Metafont characters, so Knuth re-wrote it from scratch. We're talking 7 simultaneous levels of interrupt (4 outline cards, 2 stepper motors that you had to accelerate properly and then keep going at a constant rate, and the RS-232 input coming from the DEC-20 mainframe with its own protocol). In assembly code. With the only debugging being from a 4x4 keyboard ("0-9 A-F") and a 16 character display. Fun times!

Now, if anybody asks, I can describe the replacement Autologic APS-5 that we replaced it with for the next volume. Teaser: Lower nominal resolution, but much nicer final images. No microcode required, but sent actual bitmaps, slowly but surely, and we were only able to do it because they accidentally sent a manual that specified the secret run-length encoding scheme.

<comment><USER4> Thank you many times! The minute you posted this I've wanted to write that I've discovered your 2007 interview (1) where some details (but this answer is more detailed, many thanks!) were able to give me some overall idea how it was done.

And what I was missing there were exactly these "alignment" problems: I couldn't imagine that the pictures and "big letters" could work on 5000 dpi when only a two letters were formed at once and something had to mechanically move all the time.

So yes, please more details, and also about APS-5 and "actual bitmaps"! And please try to also write (as much as you can estimate) the years when you used the said technologies. Which year was Alphatype CRS used? And which APS-5?

1) [https://tug.org/interviews/fuchs.html](https://tug.org/interviews/fuchs.html)

<comment><USER4> And just to show you why I care about the years: you said about the controller CPU it was 8008 in the 2007 interview, which is an 8-bit CPU (e.g. used on CP/M machines), and now 8088, which is a 16-bit with an 8-bit bus (the one in the first IBM PC). If you aren't sure about the CPU but if we'd know when the device started to sell maybe we can exclude the later.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the naming conventions between 8008, 8080, 8086, 8088, and 80186 is enough to make you nuts.

Anyway, let's check the sources! Surfing over to [https://www.saildart.org/[ALF,DEK]/](https://www.saildart.org/\[ALF,DEK\]/) and clicking on ALPHA.LST on the left, shows code that looks like it's for an 8080 to me, but I'm rusty on this. The file itself is dated July 1980, but it's just a listing and not the sources themselves (not sure why).

Knuth starts the "Preface to the Third Edition" of Vol 2 with: "When the second edition of this book was completed in 1980, it represented the first major test case for prototype systems of electronic publishing called TeX and METAFONT. I am now pleased to celebrate the full development of those systems by returning to the book that inspired and shaped them." Here he's talking about our very first Alphatype production output, confirming it was 1980.

Note that the CRS wasn't an especially new model when we got ours, so it wouldn't be too surprising for the CPU to not be the latest and greatest as of 1980, especially as I got the feeling they were pretty price-sensitive designing it.

By the way, the mention of "fonts came on floppy disks" elsewhere was generally true back then (and selling font floppies was how the typesetter manufactures made some of their income), but we didn't use the floppy disk drives for Knuth's CM fonts at all. All required METAFONT-generated characters were sent down along with each print job. And, in fact, there wasn't enough RAM to hold all the characters for a typical job (remember, each different point size had different character shapes, like in the old lead type days!) so the DVI software on the mainframe had to know to mix in reloads of characters that had been dropped to make room for others, as it was creating output for each page. It's essentially the off-line paging problem: If you know the complete future of page accesses, how can you make an optimal choice of which pages to drop when necessary? That's my one paper with Knuth: "Optimal prepaging and font caching" TOPLAS Jan 85 (ugly scan of the 1982 tech report STAN-CS-82-901 at [https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a119439.pdf](https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a119439.pdf) when it was still called "Optimal font caching"). Actually, the last full paragraph on page 15 of the later says that the plan to use the Alphatype CRS started two years before production happened, meaning that the CRS was available commercially by 1978.

<comment><USER4> > Surfing over to > [https://www.saildart.org/[ALF,DEK]/](https://www.saildart.org/\[ALF,DEK\]/) > and clicking on ALPHA.LST on the left, shows code that looks like it's for > an 8080 to me

Wow, thanks for that! Yes it is surely 8080 code (at least, 8080 mnemonics, definitely not 8088 which are different, 8008 initially used other mnemonics than in that LST, then the 8080 mnemonics were applied to 8008 too, but 8008 needed more hardware to use, so it should be 8080 in CRS then).

Also thanks for the STAN-CS-82-901. Now the story of programming CRS is quite clear. And even as a poor scan, it can be compared to doi.org/10.1145/2363.2367

Did I understand correctly, for CRS, what was uploaded were never bitmap fonts but always the "curves" of the letters? I believe 100 bitmap images in the resolution of 1024x768 were too much for the whole setup, even only for the cache?

And... I'm not surprised that Knuth managed to develop that firmware after I've discovered this story ("The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth)"):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567)

As you see I'm also really interested in everything you can tell about Autologic APS-5, both how it worked and how it was used in TeX context!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used LaTex in college, to typeset all my essays. I also used it in my creative writing class, and people were amazed that I was able to add line numbers to my work so we could easily discuss it by referring to line numbers! I'm pretty sure I got better grades in all my writing based classes based solely on the fact that I used LaTex to typeset my work.

The last time I wrote a resume[0] I used LaTex to do it too, and I provide the LaTex source[1] on my website. I've seen bits of it show up in other people's resumes, which is exactly what I want to happen! But what was funny was how often people would say "boy this looks so clean and professional!". Pretty sure I got some interviews just because of how "pretty" my resume was.

[0] [https://www.jedberg.net/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.pdf](https://www.jedberg.net/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.pdf)

[1] [https://www.jedberg.net/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.tex](https://www.jedberg.net/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.tex)

<comment><USER7> _Pretty sure I got some interviews just because of how "pretty" my resume was._

Definitely. I've had interviewers start by thanking me for my CV being well- formatted and also short.

Ha. I've just noticed that as I type this, I have literally in front of me on my desk Eijkhout's "Tex by Topic", Lamport's latex book and "The Latex Companion" by Goosens et al. This must be where I do most of my pretty document making.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a t/roff and eqn and tbl user I never found the story compelling. The uplift cost to latex in 1982 was north of my painpoint and in 1990 I managed to do things in tbl and eqn I never imagined possible. Tex font fascism was also a bummer. A phototypesetting expert I knew preferred the actual type to digital type, the microfilm typeset stuff was amazing (I saw galley proofs in bromide and they were crisp and clean)

I think I "get" it better now. It's just at that time there was another school of more pragmatic engineering aligned thought in Unix using Dec10 RUNOFF derived concepts which morphd into t/roff and stuck there.

Maybe it's like Emacs and vi? Dec 10 SOS editor was like ed which led to ex and vi. If you walked into the TECO door you went lisp and Emacs.

To launch into Tex and latex you needed a professor leading you there rather than an engineer doing nroff and t/roff

<comment><USER9> Interesting to hear from the pre-Tex world. I'd like to see some examples of expert use of tbl and eqn; outside of manpages the roff ecosystem seems to have vanished.

<comment><USER10> The BSDs ship with a lot of the original non-man-page Unix documentation: the system manager's manual, the programmer's supplementary documentation, and the user's supplementary documentation. These are written to be typeset with troff, not printed on a teletype like the man pages can be, so they tend to be a bit more refined. [https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/share/doc/](https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/share/doc/) They are missing some chapters (eg eqn and tbl) due to copyright disputes but you can find them in TUHS archives [https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi- bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc](https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi- bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Random LaTeX question: Does anyone have any tips for writing LaTeX code to avoid typos or other mistakes? I.e., using the fact that LaTeX is a programming language and not just markup language to catch mistakes?

I started adding what basically are assertions to my TeX files. These have caught a fair number of errors. I also periodically run "static analysis" scripts to catch writing and coding errors but these tends to have many false positives in my experience. E.g., chktex and these: [http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive- voi...](http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel- words-duplicates/)

But I'm thinking there may be good coding styles or habits that could prevent errors too. Any ideas?

<comment><USER12> My observation is that TeX/LaTeX are designed for use by humans but unlike other programming, the literal content of the document occupies more of the source being generated by the author than the elements used to control the layout (macros, elemental operators, etc.); consequently, errors like improper nesting of environments can produce puzzling error messages. An XML style markup language would produce easier to understand error messages, but I believe that _TeX /LaTeX makes the proper trade off by reducing the authoring effort_ to create content at the expense of harder to debug documents when complex formatting is being done.

Another important observation is the TeX itself is as free of errors as any piece of software you are ever likely to use. LaTeX and many packages can sometimes have quirks because of a bug, but _the underlying engine works the way it is intended to work, always._

So knowing this, my approach is to _use a system that continuously shows the typeset output_ as I type, if I can. That way errors are usually obvious and easy to find. If that's not practical with your favorite editor, just manually run LaTex on your source frequently to see how your document is progressing. The times I've had to do serious puzzling over what was happening were almost always because I had pages of complex text entered before checking to see the output.

 _TeX most of the time doesn 't care about whitespace._ It makes its own, excellent, decisions on where to to wrap lines according to font size and margins, etc. So this means that you can just start every sentence on a new line without worrying about the right margin; TeX doesn't care. This makes editing and proofing your documents much easier, especially if your editor just autowraps the contents of long sentences without inserting line breaks: then it's easy to cut and paste and rearrange entire sentences while writing. So a three sentence paragraph would look like this in the source:

        Don't go around saying the world owes you a living.
        The world owes you nothing.
        It was here first. [1]

Rarely, whitespace can matter, for example when defining special environments and macros for typesetting mathematics or a programming sample. In this case you can make use of the % (percent character) which starts a comment that continues to the end of line to cut off trailing whitespace. I find this handy when defining my own commands to keep the LaTeX easy to read by breaking it up into lines without worrying about extra spaces being inserted. (Don't be scared by this next example; it's not something that ordinary users would create. The point is it is possible and can be found when needed on tex.stackexchange.com. It's very fancy wizard level typesetting. TeX/LaTeX allows crazy powerful manipulation of text. See [2] to see the results that this produces--really, take a look.) Note the use of %.

        \newcommand\overlineset[2]{%
          \stackengine{2pt}{$#1$}{\makebox[\widthof{$#1$}]{%
              $\scriptscriptstyle\hrulefill\,#2\,\hrulefill$}}%
                  {O}{c}{F}{T}{S}%
        }

_Don 't fuss with margins, heading font, caption location for figures, and so forth while creating your masterpiece._ Get the content down while making sure that LaTeX is formatting it without error. Afterwards, since everything is parameterized, you can go back and modify the appearance and get it to look just right and it will be consistent across the entire document. I find this so very superior to the What-You-See-Is-All-You-Get style of document preparation in Word.

Because TeX/LaTeX is a markup language, it's very easy to generate form letters, labels, etc. by writing a small python script. I've done this to generate spine labels for my books containing a 2-D barcode, Dewey Decimal call number, author, ISBN, and my name for my books. The python code looks up the dimensions of the book on the internet to control the best layout. The TeX/LaTeX part wasn't hard, and with TeX's Turing complete macro language I could have programmed almost all of this in pure TeX, but _I found the combination of using python as a preprocessor for a TeX /LaTeX backend very powerful._

Fancy graphics are a challenge in any document, but _a fantastic package for graphics is available for LaTeX called TikZ._ It is a macro package, written in modern TeX/LaTeX macros. It, like most LaTeX packages, has excellent documentation. See the TikZ package documentation at [3]. Photos and other graphics can be directly inserted into documents too, but TikZ is integrated with LaTeX so margins, reflowing text, captions, fonts come out perfectly.

 _For academic and more serious writing learn BibTeX,_ a bibliography generator/database. BibTeX citation information is widely available for the papers I care about so I don't even have to enter the Author/Title/Publisher/etc. myself.

I waste too much time thinking about Fonts because I like them. Once upon a time, when TeX was created, there were very few fonts available for digital use. Today, Font creation should probably be left to professionals and serious hobbyists so I don't use MetaFont anymore. It is a font creation system and has been a part of TeX from the very beginning and is still available to those that would like to design their own fonts. I used it to create my company's first Logo (I only needed 5 upper case letters). Today, there are so many great fonts available, and TeX/LaTeX can work with all modern fonts so making your own isn't a good use of your time. _Make sure to consult up to date documentation on font handling because there has been a great deal of evolution in the use of fonts in TeX /LaTeX over the past few decades._

TeX is now 40 years old and has had many extension and additions so _it is no fun to build from scratch._ Fortunately for the Mac there is the comprehensive MacTex distribution containing every standard/optional part that you should need if you are using MacOS; on Windows there is proTeXt, but I haven't used it. Both MacTeX and proTeXt are just system specific distributions of the TeXLive distribution available on Linux that is updated every year.

Programmers are probably most productive in their favorite editors and these are likely to have a LaTeX mode. _Emacs has a very capable mode, AUCTeX,_ for editing LaTeX documents. I even generate PDFs from my org-mode files by using org-mode support for LaTeX. However, I do this only for documents that are org-mode to begin with, not for ordinary documents.

There are also some nice standalone programs for preparing LaTeX documents. I've used the program TeXShop that comes with the bundle of TeX related stuff that is installed when you install the MacTeX distribution. It probably runs on Windows and Linux as well. This is a good TeX editor, but programmers will likely miss the power and flexibility of using a programming editor (git integration, custom key-bindings, etc.)

 _To try out LaTeX without needing to install any software there is the excellent web based LaTeX system call Overleaf [4]._ It also supports collaborative editing.

[1] attributed to Mark Twain

[2] [https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/122117/overline- cont...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/122117/overline-containing- text-or-other-symbols?rq=1)

[3] [https://www.bu.edu/math/files/2013/08/tikzpgfmanual.pdf](https://www.bu.edu/math/files/2013/08/tikzpgfmanual.pdf)

[4] [https://www.overleaf.com](https://www.overleaf.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Let's not forget to show some love for the tool that makes LaTeX usable by mere mortals:

[https://www.lyx.org/](https://www.lyx.org/)

Lyx is so useful that I am sometimes amazed it is not more popular. All the power of LaTeX with the ease of use of MS Word. And free and opensource. What's not to love?

<comment><USER14> Yeah, Word-style "WYSIWYG" versus LaTeX-style source-code + compiling is really a pretty big philosophical difference. Some people much prefer the latter, and will avoid WYSIWYG LaTeX tools. The marked up source code gives you much better control, and you can use semantic macros that for example allow you to change how you format vectors or chapter titles etc. across the whole document easily.

See a marginally relevant xkcd here: [https://xkcd.com/2109/](https://xkcd.com/2109/)

<comment><USER15> Maybe you know this, but LyX is somewhere in the middle.

You can see roughly what you are doing while writing, which makes some things much easier. Especially typing in large formulae (and double-checking that you didn't make a mistake). Although the way you enter them is more typing than point-and-clicking.

For something like changing how the chapter titles look, you are pretty much back in the world of Latex, trying out some macro to change all of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I use Plain TeX with .dvi output. One advantage is that it can use the DVI format, which is in many ways much better than PDF for many things. (You can also convert DVI to PDF and to other formats; I wrote a program to convert DVI to PBM (without using PostScript), and use that to print out the documents (through foo2zjs, which converts the PBM into the format needed by the printer).)

<comment><USER17> > DVI format, which is in many ways much better than PDF for many things

Would you mind listing a few? I ask because, if my memory serves correctly, the only thing DVI ever accomplished for me was to make me want to poke my eyes out.

<comment><USER5> Ouch! Sorry! Anything specific? (DVI is my design.)

<comment><USER17> Haha wow! Yeah sure, here's an example of what I mean: [https://imgur.com/a/eX2BcIC](https://imgur.com/a/eX2BcIC)

I'll refrain from elaborating on the difference between those (it's probably best if I don't), except to say that my jaws will probably shatter the floor if you tell me you don't see the difference. :-)

(Probably worth saying that I have the same issue with PS; it's not just DVI. I do sometimes wonder if I'm the only one who sees these.)

<comment><USER5> There's no context given, so it's hard to tell why you're ascribing the problem to dvi, rather than it being used sub-optimally. What's the full tool chain being used? What's the output device?

Given that dvi doesn't involve pixels, and lets you position any character anywhere on the page, with precisely known rules for rounding into resolution- specific device-space, you'll have to be more specific about what you're blaming dvi itself for.

<comment><USER17> Happy to provide context if you tell me what to provide...

The "output device" is... my monitor?

The toolchain is TeXLive for generating the files, and the usual viewer for each file type on Windows (Acrobat Reader for PDFs, and Evince for DVI). If you think it's Evince's fault I'd love to hear better alternatives, because I haven't found a _single_ viewer that views DVIs any differently. And for input files, you can generate files via LaTeX pretty easily:

      % DVI: latex    thisfile.tex
      % PDF: pdflatex thisfile.tex
      \documentclass{article}
      \usepackage{lipsum}
      \begin{document}\lipsum\end{document}

If this is using it "sub-optimally" then I guess I don't know how to use it "optimally", and I'm happy to hear how.

Remember, though, at the end of the day, I'm just an end-user. I just know that every time I try to view DVI and PS files I have to tear my eyes out, and that I don't have this struggle with PDFs. I neither know which particular person or place in the pipeline to assign the blame to, nor does knowing that make it any easier for me to read the text...

<comment><USER5> Presumably Evince could do a better job of it then.

<comment><USER17> What viewer would you recommend then? Would you mind posting a screenshot coming from the optimal viewer you have in mind? Like I said, I haven't found any viewer that does a better job.

<comment><USER5> I'm not current, so I don't know if anyone has bothered to do a dvi viewer optimized for today's display technology. Given the billions of dollars invested in the pdf ecosystem, though, it's a reasonable place to live.

<comment><USER17> > I'm not current, so I don't know if anyone has bothered to do a dvi viewer > optimized for today's display technology.

Oh, if that's the problem, then please just point to a better viewer for yesterday's display technology. Or even a decade ago's. I'll find you an older monitor from whatever era you had a good viewing experience on and try it on that. Because I'm one hundred percent sure an older display technology is not going to make it look better. You can see above that above pointed out that it's looked awful since 2003. I can vouch that it's consistently been awful since over a decade ago, and PDFs have consistently been fine... on every kind of display and resolution I've tried. I've absolutely never, ever had a good experience viewing DVIs.

<comment><USER5> 1982 DataDisc displays that Knuth developed everything on? Sorry you're unhappy, but given that dvi is literally a dump of TeX's internal results on layout positioning, it contains all the information that any other system could possibly use. Perhaps your concerns have more to do with font rendering?

<comment><USER18> Indeed -- I think it's clear mehrdadn's main issue is with the font rendering. The image shows subpixel antialiasing on the PDF version, and not on the DVI, so naturally they look quite different.

But that's nothing to do with DVI itself; it's entirely the responsibility of the renderer.

<comment><USER17> I find these responses baffling. I'm just an end-user. All I see is that every time I get a DVI file, I want to tear my eyes out, no matter where or when I open it. First my assessment gets questioned, then when I spend time installing software and compiling an example just to demonstrate the concrete problem upon request -- which I have no reason to believe was novel or previously unknown in any way -- I'm promptly shut down and told to respect the file format and instead blame all the viewers in existence. Great -- so what was/am I supposed to do with this information? Are my eyes supposed to see the file clearly now that the blame got assigned somewhere? Or am I supposed to write my own DVI viewer tomorrow afternoon? How is this intended to be helpful?

<comment><USER19> It's not helpful if you're expecting to be handed polished products that do what you want. It is helpful if you want to understand what's going on. I think it would be interesting to get a high quality DVI viewer based on modern graphics tech, but of course such a thing will take time and effort. I plan to meet with Dr. Fuchs in the next few weeks to talk about this and related issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And whilst this is shameless self-promotion, if you want to try out LaTeX without installing it yourself, please check out [https://www.overleaf.com](https://www.overleaf.com) (I'm one of the founders)

<comment><USER20> Virtually everyone at school used Overleaf. Impressive bit of kit, particularly since the version 2 update. I was fond of how v1 kept everything in a git repo though.

<comment><USER21> I liked that about v1 as well, but it seems like they have brought it over to v2 [0]. Trying it on a v2 project it only seems to have one commit for everything up until the first clone?

[0]: [https://www.overleaf.com/blog/bringing-the-git-bridge- to-v2-...](https://www.overleaf.com/blog/bringing-the-git-bridge-to-v2-its- here-in-beta)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This quote is amusing:

"there's even an open archive maintained by Cornell University where authors of papers in physics, chemistry, and other disciplines can directly submit their LaTeX manuscripts for open viewing."

for two reasons:

1) sounds like 'there's even a church at Vatican' seen that arXiv.org is the biggest ever collection of scientific articles submitted by their authors

2) and there's no chemistry section in arXiv.org, but a half is mathematics and some computer science

</comment><comment><USER23> Just a curious question. I love LaTeX. Can we build a programming language for the web which just focusses on the writing and takes care of the styling for Web, Mobile etc. I mean Markdown is already there doing somewhat similar but it still needs to set up properly and styled to use it correctly. Can LaTeX type tool be developed for web where the user writes what he wants to write and generates a static web book or blog post or article confirming to the same style?

Apologies if this is stupid question.

<comment><USER24> There's thousands of tools like this, called "static site generators". Most include a barebones default theme like you describe.

There's so many because a few years ago they were a big hype and everybody and their cat built one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just curious with regard to presentations: Does any known tech corp use beamer for presentations?

<comment><USER26> I've seen people from IBM giving talks using Beamer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I know there's a smaller but vocal group in tech that openly attacks LaTeX, e.g. "LaTeX considered harmful". While I don't completely agree with them, but I think there are some legitimate and genuine criticisms here.

Personally, I find LaTeX is great due to its native programmability - <USER2> facilitates a natural separation of content and presentation, combined with its markup language, can be very powerful. It also enables extensibility - community packages for almost every single type of content, e.g. organic chemistry, Feynman diagram, even music. A typical user only needs to \usepackage and stop worrying. It's CTAN ecosystem is just like a programming language like Perl, or recently, Node.js or Go, which is great.

But I find all hell breaks loose when you want to get a slightly different formatting than what's offered. Then suddenly the entire system becomes something you need to fight against. Previously, you could be a happy \usepackage code monkey, but now you need to know the system inside-out and hack a path ahead. Just like what happens when you use a software library in a slightly different way than the author expected, then suddenly you find yourself in a battle with the entire library, unfortunately, the same thing occurs in typesetting...

For example, with LaTeX you can add footnotes to essentially anywhere with guaranteed aesthetics. UNLESS you want to add a footnote for your title, then it turns out the existing infrastructure in the "article" template doesn't allow it at all, and you need to define and redefine and undefine some internal macros in your document to implement it, as I learned from [https://tex.stackexchange.com/](https://tex.stackexchange.com/)

And all the separation of content and presentation and its benefits ends at this point. It's no longer "what you think is what you get".

The same issue also occurs when you are trying to make a Beamer slideshow, most "environments" in LaTeX are designed for papers, not a slide. For example, when I want to put some images to the slide, often not fits in a "regular" geometric position, I find I have to keep hacking the width and position of the images and keep compiling until the result is acceptable. I don't know if there are better packages for typesetting slideshow, recommendations are welcome.

Another problem I've noticed is the phenomenon of confusing and outdated packages. Often there are more than one package for a specific task, some are old and limited but still used in many documents, others are new, the rest are competing implementations. Old ones are frequently mentioned in the old guides, it works for a while until you have a corner case, then it takes a few attempts before moving to the newer packages. Again, just like programming languages. A recent trend in programming is writing new, cleaner implementations for basic tasks, I don't know if the same thing is happening in the LaTeX community, if it is, I think it would be great.

On the other hand, I've yet to see a word processor which allows users to extend it and automate formatting and typesetting without doing some ugly macros hacked together and written in VBScript. So I see LaTeX as a valuable tool and I'll keep using LaTeX in the foreseeable future.

The final words, having [https://tex.stackexchange.com/](https://tex.stackexchange.com/) is a great contribution to the LaTeX community, just like how [https://stackoverflow.com/](https://stackoverflow.com/) helps for programming.

<comment><USER28> >But I find all hell breaks loose when you want to get a slightly different formatting than what's offered. Then suddenly the entire system becomes something you need to fight against.

LaTeX was developed with the goal of freeing the user (a researcher, typically) from wasting time on layout and focusing on content (scientific research, usually).

Plain TeX is much more flexible, but you may argue that it is much lower level (or is it?).

For general typesetting, I can't recommend ConTeXt enough. Its philosophy is nearer to TeX than LaTeX, and it gives you full control on layout, too. Much smaller package than the full TeX/LaTeX ecosystem. And it's scriptable with Lua!

<comment><USER27> > _For general typesetting, I can't recommend ConTeXt enough._

Thanks. I'm currently using XeTeX/XeLaTeX due to its newer codebase, native Unicode support, OpenType fonts, PDF outputs, etc. But perhaps it is the time to try ConTeXt. I was struggling previously with Lua in Awesome window manager as I find (from a Python background) the syntax is weird, but now I think seriously need to pick up a serious textbook to learn Lua, the Lua engine is embedded in everything, learning it opens a new world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm a little sad that there still doesn't seem to be a "LaTeX for the Web", a document markup system with similar philosophy as LaTeX but for HTML output. LaTeX is basically only suited for static PDF output, which only survives because there don't seem to be tools that do an equally good job generating HTML documents.

There are a lot of special-purpose markup languages, like Markdown and AsciiDoc. They involve toolchains written in other languages to convert them to HTML. If you want to add features, you have to hack the toolchain.

For blog posts and simple websites, that's fine. But sometimes I want to build something nontrivial -- as an academic, the first thing that comes to mind is an academic paper, where I might want to have special markup for theorems, proofs, examples, figures, and tables, and have ways to automatically cross- reference them, generate tables of contents, embed automatically formatted bibliographies, and so on. Or generate figures from code (like TiKZ), or embed data analysis code right in the source and embed the results (via knitr or Sweave).

With pandoc, bookdown, and knitr, you can get pretty close to this. But what made LaTeX so powerful is that it is programmable _in LaTeX_. It can be extended: you can define new types of environments (example problems! homework exercises! every example shows equivalent source code in three different languages! category diagrams generated automatically! musical notation is typeset!), you can make new commands to automate drudgery (typesetting chemical equations! building complicated equations!), and you can do it all with at least some basic separation between content and presentation style. Converting the larger LaTeX documents I've made to Markdown or Org would be basically impossible without writing a bunch of scripts to extend the Markdown renderer and hack everything together. There's no equivalent of just writing a LaTeX package.

I'm not aware of another document preparation system that comes close to LaTeX. Org mode is probably the closest, since it has tools to embed code blocks in other languages and include their output, but after a week of fighting with conversions between markup languages I can really see the appeal of LaTeX's uniform syntax and built-in programmability.

The other promising option seems to be Pollen[0], a Racket-based programmable system. But it seems more like TeX than LaTeX: it provides the very basic tools to build a programmable document system, but not the higher-level conveniences (like cross-referencing commands and standard sectioning and environment commands) you would need to build yourself. Maybe someday...

[0] [https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/](https://docs.racket- lang.org/pollen/)

<comment><USER30> Have you looked at Scribble? It's very programmable, and evaluated similarly to TeX or LaTeX, but in a more powerful and straightforward language (Racket).

It's used by academics to write conference papers, it's used for most of the Racket books for both Web and camera-ready typesetting for print, and I've even used it for embedded API docs.

[https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/](https://docs.racket- lang.org/scribble/)

(That manual itself was written in Scribble.)

(I'm actually thinking of moving from Scribble to Markdown for embedded API docs, as part of an open source ecosystem goal, to make docs for reusable modules more lightweight to add, but it's hard to give up some things about Scribble. For example, for one module, I needed substantial documentation about each opcode, and wanted it to be formatted similarly to an API function, but with different meta properties, and some tricky formatting. Scribble let me make a simple semantic form for that, separate from formatting, like LaTeX would.)

<comment><USER31> That looks nice, but it's no match for LaTeX in the academic publishing world, simply because virtually all technical conferences and journals only provide Word and LaTeX templates.

<comment><USER29> Scribble can export to LaTeX and includes templates for a couple different CS conferences, actually, though probably one would have to extend it a bit to use it for other venues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Note for any college students (especially undergrad): Do your STEM presentations in Beamer to get extra brownie points.

</comment><comment><USER25> Just curious with regard to presentations: Does any known tech corp use beamer?

</comment><comment><USER33> Maybe I dreamed it but I could swear that I read that Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid was typeset by Hofstadter in TeX. That, by itself, although fairly amazing, wasn't the most noteworthy thing to me but that he had first read—uploaded to his brain—all the docs for TeX before he wrote a single word and let the experience of using it call forth from memory the relevant documentation.

<comment><USER34> While METAFONT, and to a lesser extent, TeX, were to become frequently featured characters in Hofstadter's _Metamagical Themas_ days, GEB was pre- TeX. It was created using Pentti Kanerva's TV-Edit at Stanford (with the data on punched paper tape). The preface to the 20th anniversary edition of GEB tells the tale.

<comment><USER33> Ah. Thank you. Well, I guess I did dream it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Good tutorial for Latex?

<comment><USER36> There are tons of resources at [https://www.tug.org/texlive/](https://www.tug.org/texlive/). If you download it there are many included.

<comment><USER36> Also the article itself has some pointers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> While I was big into LaTeX during the university, even wrote my thesis with it, using the MikTeX distribution, nowadays I rather use the likes of Word, FrameMaker, DocBook or DITA based tooling.

<comment><USER38> It was quite long ago a saw a new project that opted to utilise DocBook. Is it still popular?

<comment><USER37> I used it on a project three years ago.

All the help system was based on it, generating Word, PDF and HTML based deliveries.

It is relatively popular at the enterprise level, where the licensing costs for such tools are peanuts vs the overall project costs.

<comment><USER38> Neat! Would you minding listing some of those toolchain vendors? I think about pros and cons of various publishing systems from time to time and would love some new input.

<comment><USER37> FrameMaker, OxygenXML, RoboHelp, XMetaL, XMLmind, Arbortext.

<comment><USER38> Oh, lots of stuff to look up. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> j-pb If we want to get remotely intelligent machines, LaTeX needs to die.

It's a visual description based on a turing complete language, 95% of semantic meaning is lost once it's poured into a TeX document, end the last 5% are gone once it's compiled into a mess of pdf text boxes that ignore text flow and just look correct.

Literally any other document description language would be a better lingua franca than LaTeX, because a language should be used to communicate, and TeX is meant to print curves.

<comment> ezequiel-garzon The use of LaTeX should not and does not prevent the advancement of machine intelligence, just as the stubborn use of blackboards and chalk by mathematicians as prime communication devices. Now, when machines get intelligent enough they'll figure out LaTeX and more.

Keep in mind that one goal of TeX was to make it fairly easy for a human to write it down. Another goal is for another _human_ to be able to understand that source quite well. Now picture both tasks with semantics-rich MathML.</comment></comment>


Microsoft Responds to Horrified Developers on Future of Windows 8 - <AUTHOR> http://www.devside.net/blog/windows-8-apps-using-html5-js

<comment><USER2> Umm, this video didn't show or say anything that wasn't in the videos that caused the "freak out" to happen in the first place. There was no description of how the new html/js/css development platform is going to work, no mention of how it will integrate with .NET, or if it will integrate at all actually. I'm not one of the people who are freaked out, or even care, about this windows 8 crap, but this honestly answers none of the concerns I've seen people have.

tl;dr: you can't answer a question by saying the same exact thing that prompted the question to be asked in the first place -- this is therefore not a "response".

</comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't call running a shell over Windows 7 re-imagining Windows. I'd call it hacking Windows.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a .Net Developer, and I approve of this message. Windows 8 rocks!!</comment>


Guy Adds Boat Tail to Car, Increases MPG by 15% - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/01/guy_adds_boat_tail_to_car_increases_mpg_by_151.php

<comment><USER2> You can get roughly the same MPG increase just by cutting off your side mirrors, and you can still park after doing it. (You just need to mount a couple cameras and an LED screen in front of the driver so that you can safely merge.)</comment>


Ask HN: 100 people on my beta list? - <AUTHOR>

Hi, this is my first 'Ask HN' post; please educate me if necessary.
I wrote down a bullet-point list of features for a desktop app I wanted to implement and published it.
During the last months I got around 100 people leaving their email-address, basically saying, yes, I'd be interested in this product - let me know when it's ready.
Now 100 is almost nothing, since the price could only be in the $20-50 range, and I'm not really motivated to provide support, once people would really pay. It is just not my dream product, although I can see, how it could help people with their workflow.
How would you handle such a situation? <comment><USER2> If you're not motivated to provide suuport and it's not your dream project, I'd treat the opportunity more like a contract position: you're likely to be paid around $2k for doing a certain amount of work. If that's worth it for your time, then go ahead.

If you're concerned about support taking time, then think of time spent on support as time invested in getting more customers (since you're either improving a relationship that might lead to recommendations or improving your product).

</comment><comment><USER3> One possible course of action:

email these 100 people explaining to them that while you have a good number of 'intent to buy', you can't launch the app in absence of more buyer interest. Next, ask/request their help in terms of getting more signups.

(As per Richard Bach's Cosmic Law,) Like poles attract i.e. people are likely to know others having common interest. If your app is useful enough, (hopefully it is,) the current 100 will help you get more leads.

HTH

<comment><USER4>
       you can't launch the app in absence of more buyer interest

If somebody mails that to me, I myself would lose interest in the product. And I don't think that's just me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What about charging monthly? If you could set a lower value than 20-50$ per month and your client life-time is something higher than 6-8 months, you can create something more interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's - as I think of it now - genuinely a desktop app and therefore somewhat difficult to set monthly price tags.

<comment><USER5> Spotify is an example, but you can find many others like Evernote, Steam or WoW. It depends on your users willing to pay on a monthly basis. But you are the one that best know your product, if you say it'd difficult, it must be true :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What exactly is the situation? You've got 100 people interested in buying your product based on a landing page.

I take it you were expecting more? How much more? You've got 100ish leads on your project for sales that should be easyish to sell to (at least compared to random people). You won't get it, but if you get all of them at the bottom price, that's $2k a month.

By all accounts, I can only see this as a good thing, especially if your landing page indicates that there's cost involved. If the landing page gives any indication that the service might be free, it's easier to discount some of those leads, but if you're advertising a for-pay service and got 100 hits, I think you're looking pretty good, from my perspective.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't expecting anything. I started it, because I had the idea, I saw one dominant competing product which sucked and I just wanted to get a feel for the market.

Yes, these leads may be precious. But it's just a desktop app, just a one-time payment.

(P.S. If it were a webish app with $20/month price tag and 100 people ready to give it a try, I would be really busy implementing the stuff right now ;)

<comment><USER3> > But it's just a desktop app, just a one-time payment.

In which case, consider building a feature or time limited freeware version initially, without support, offering users to buy/upgrade, and submit it to all the shareware/freeware joints out there. That should get you a decent number of potential buyers, a good percentage of which should convert.

Test the waters this way and if you still don't get enough numbers, ditch the idea of full commercial version.

HTH

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the app? What platform are you targeting?</comment>


Landing a declarative programming job - <AUTHOR> http://logicaltypes.blogspot.com/2008/08/lucky-you.html

<comment><USER2> Conclusion: Be in the top 1% of programmers, not the bottom 99%.

<comment><USER3> Not just be a top coder, but be a good salesman, self promoter, and networker to make those opportunities.

<comment><USER4> And teach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"!@#$%^_ , we need a phoneme-based name-matcher but the programmer who built it in assembler retired years ago!" (Trans: Doug, we need you to write a fuzzy ILP system in Mercury)*

Two words: code reuse.

Various soundex algorithms are readily available in lots of languages. Even without them, implementing one shouldn't take more than a couple of hours... this guy seems to be more of a salesman than a programmer.

</comment><comment><USER6> I get occasional contacts for Erlang development now, and all I did was to list it on my resume and start a Xing group about Erlang (which has no traffic). Not sure if it would be possible to convert these contacts into contracts (I rejected for other reasons, like location), as my Erlang experience amounts to doing a couple of projecteuler exercises. Just saying that recruiters are not only looking for Java developers.

</comment><comment><USER7> 13 hours prep for each hour of teaching, and 8 hours recovery from each meeting (+ prep I assume) and still has time to do coding.

I'm impressed.

<comment><USER8> Presumably sleeping and recovery were coincident.</comment></comment>


Is Algebra Necessary? - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/opinion/sunday/is-algebra-necessary.html <comment><USER2> Andrew Hacker, 2012.

His main argument seems to be:

* Math is hard;

* It makes students fail;

* I've never used it;

* Therefore we shouldn't teach it.

So why bother teaching anything? If the point is to make it easier to pass school, why not just hand out certificates to say they've passed and then let employers select who they choose and provide training.

<comment><USER3> _So why bother teaching anything?_

I'm curious about your answer because if the reason for teaching is to facilitate the success of every child, then teaching something that is at odds with a particular child's success seems also at odds with that purpose.

Or to put it another way, life for educators is easier when institutional norms facilitate labeling children failures and that such labeling allows educators to disclaim responsibility for the educational outcomes of children so labeled.

It's a really messy problem. I mean the circumstances of many children in their teenage years are such that learning algebra is legitimately not a priority. The circumstances of other children in their teenage years are such that their psycho-physical development is at a stage where learning algebra is extraordinarily difficult.

All of that can change between age 14 and 24 or 34 or 44. And the educational outcomes that matter are the later ages.</comment></comment>


Elon Musk renames his BFR spacecraft Starship - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46274158 <comment><USER2> Technically inaccurate, as others pointed out, but I would have been surprised if they kept BFR as a name. Yes, it includes the joke of "Big F..alcon Rocket", but it sounds very technical and it doesn't carry the appeal like e.g. Falcon does. And whilst some may disagree, I think Musk very much cares about how his products and companies are perceived.

<comment><USER3> I think he's considering how they are perceived by NASA, and it seems that there's little room for jokes right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> But it won't even go to other stars!

<comment><USER5> Maybe is named after the music band, and it will eventually help to build a (space?) city.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but can Rock'n Roll be used in a vacuum?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In which Elon tweets a few words and somehow the BBC picks that up and it turns into HN #1.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess spaceships are very inspiring to the crowd here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This won't work

He's stuck with BFR because _WE_ like BFR

Do you know what you get if you call a cat a dog?

A cat.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm okay with this as long as he names each iteration after a U.S. President. So we'd have "Washington Starship", then "Adams Starship", and so on.

<comment><USER9> You only say that so we'll have a Jefferson Starship.</comment></comment>


A Look Inside Transcriptic's (YC W15) New Biotech Testing Facility - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/25/a-look-inside-transcriptics-new-biotech-testing-facility/

<comment><USER2> Techcrunch has zero understanding of biotech research or how expensive and hard it is, or the current state of the art. ($20k in credits is not going to go very far..)

I like the idea of Transcriptic, but it's relevant only to a very small subset of the kinds of experiments that people do. There have been robots and CROs (and structure-based design, etc, etc, etc.) in biotech for a very long time.

<comment><USER3> Well, this comment is a big improvement over how it was a few years ago when we first started and everyone thought the whole idea was clearly impossible. We went from being impossible to trivial! Progress!

<comment><USER2> I didn't say it's trivial.. I think it's a cool model (and much better to be Amazon than all the suckers paying for AWS!), I know it's hard to do well (and expensive), and I don't doubt at all that your software is waaaay better than what Tecan and PerkinElmer et al. provide. The breathlessness of the reporting irks me though..</comment></comment></comment>


Disciple: A Strict Dialect of Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://disciple.ouroborus.net/ <comment><USER2> There is quite a lot of Haskell dialects... the last one listed here was Atomo (<http://atomo-lang.org/>) and now another contender. Or simply put Haskell the language is also good at hosting dialects.

<comment><USER3> Atomo's an EDSL in Haskell. I think I'd have to consider Clojure to be a Java dialect by your definition.

<comment><USER2> I guess I've mistaken the stand-point in that, my bad!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Color me interested. Pragmatism where destructive array updates are concerned is a boon for the numerical stuff I'm interested in.

<comment><USER5> Remember that regular Haskell has pragmatic destructive arrays as well (e.g. repa, vector, hmatrix).

The primary interesting thing about DDC, in my view, is the effect types -- the type system can infer what kind of monadic effects you're using.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I guess I came off as slurring Haskell a little bit. Sorry. Could you point me to any resources on how to use Haskell for numeric stuff? I've been thinking of doing a blog series on neutron transport with either Haskell or Common Lisp, but I'd like to peruse a few examples of idiomatic Haskell numerics before shooting my mouth off.

<comment><USER5> My colleague, Matt Sottile, has a nice blog on languages, functional programming, and scientific (often numerical) computing, <http://syntacticsalt.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From a quick look through, the current type system and semantics seems to have more in common with an ML dialect than Haskell (though its syntax and long term intended type system style does resemble haskell's more closely)

</comment><comment><USER7> How is this different to Clean? (a much older Haskell/research variant, see <http://wiki.clean.cs.ru.nl/Clean>)

<comment><USER8> Haskell first appeared 2/3 years after Clean. The right description is more like 'Haskell and Clean are the twin Free offspring of the lazy FP language Miranda, which unfortunately was proprietary; they both have different but related approaches to being pure'.

<comment><USER7> Ok, didn't realize that timing. There is a Haskell/Clean crosscompiler I believe too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have quite a few ML-loving friends who might be into this...

</comment><comment><USER10> I thought _Haskell_ was a strict dialect of Haskell.

<comment><USER11> The "strict" refers to the fact it's not lazily evaluated.

<comment><USER12> I suspect the GP is referring to Haskell's ability to use strict evaluation via language features like the ! operator. (though I could be wrong)</comment></comment></comment>


Experience Presence and Heartfelt Connection - <AUTHOR> https://www.human.online/ <comment><AUTHOR> Connect with people from all places and backgrounds. Slow down and share a moment in silence.</comment>


IPython Cookbook released - <AUTHOR> http://cyrille.rossant.net/ipython-cookbook-released/ <comment><USER2> Just wanted to say congrats. I admit I skipped the beginner book, but will definitely pick up the new ebook.</comment>


EFF to Supreme Court: Violating Terms of Service Isn't a Crime Under the CFAA - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-asks-supreme-court-rule-violating-terms-service-isnt-crime-under-cfaa <comment><USER2> Good. It's hard to think of any other cases / examples where breaching a service contract which doesn't also lead to a crime is directly punishable under a statute.

I suppose it would be like the manufacturer of a blowtorch saying "this can only be used to blowtorch X,Y and Z" and then calling the Feds on you for using it to toast the tops of your creme brulee.

Or you tuning a pressure washer up to a higher than agreed upon pressure and discovering that there's some flaw in a component. You may have lost the warranty, but haven't broken a law.

But even those aren't great analogies

</comment><comment><USER3> We had a bad user who we kept banning for harassing other users. He would come back over and over again, using different pictures, IPs, even throwaway phone numbers or FB accounts etc. We ended up stopping him by involving a lawyer who drafted a letter invoking the CFAA. But it revolved around him violating our terms of service (eg no harassment, banned users are banned forever etc.)

Anybody know: Would CFAA still apply here if EFF wins this case? Or are there any other laws which would cover this kind of unauthorized access?

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> >> Or are there any other laws which would cover this kind of unauthorized access?

Here's the thing. Violating terms of service and unauthorized access are two different things. Your site apparently is publically accessible and anyone can create a fake user profile. You are not vetting anyone or granting any specific person access.

<comment><USER3> I mean they would log in with FB, through a VPN, then verify a phone number which was usually some throwaway. I am not sure how we could be more strict short of asking all of our users for pictures of their IDs. We were explicit with the user that they were banned and not allowed on the site anymore. I wonder how we would have made sure that user never returned.

<comment><USER5> If you were a local corner store and you had a disruptive customer who returned repeatedly, your recourse would be calling the cops for trespass.

CFAA violations come with 5-10 year prison sentences per violation. A little extreme for a trespasser whose conduct is otherwise non-criminal, don't you think?

<comment><USER3> Definitely extreme - ideally I would want something like a "restraining order" against the disruptive user that legally compels them to no longer use the website. If they still break that, then probably fines+damages of some kind. But you know, _something_.

The other extreme which some people are advocating "let the users do whatever the hell they want and it's your own fault if they keep spoofing fb accounts/phone numbers and creating new accounts" I find pretty bad and tone- deaf; it gives carte blanche to bad behavior. Any malicious user who is set on messing with you becomes a full-time job to deal with. Most people who run some kind of B2C website have run into this and once you hit 1M+ users you are bound to be dealing with a handful of those at any one time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes! Let's make sure in the memory of Aaron Schwartz and the many others who have faced undue scrutiny under CFAA that we see drastic reform of this draconian law and how it is applied.

<comment><USER7> Aaron Swartz [http://www.aaronsw.com/](http://www.aaronsw.com/)

EDIT: why was this downvoted? Is there a different Aaron "Schwartz" or did the parent misspell Swartz?

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the correction! Apologies for my gross oversight.</comment></comment></comment>


Writing a Windows Phone 7 game? Have a fallback plan - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.silverarcade.com/silverlight-games-101/13/silverlight-writing-a-windows-phone-7-game-have-a-fallback-plan/

<comment><USER2> While I think comparing sales on a platform that is years old to a platform that is months old is silly, he has a good point with how the store works. It is 1 step away from actively working towards killing Indie games.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is my request: Let me filter! Meaning, when I am searching for Apps, I don't want to see Music. This why is this not the default behavior?</comment>


The Nordic countries are probably the best-governed in the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21570835-nordic-countries-are-probably-best-governed-world-secret-their <comment><USER2> What they seem to be glossing over is that homogeneity plays a large factor in this. Whether it's tribes, races or just plain ol' religion, a lot of inherent instability comes about as a result of people disagreeing the bajeezus out of each other for no real reason other than... "I'm not _them_ ".

Of course, if you're a native in these lands, that still leaves your people under-represented.

<comment><USER3> Actually no. The non-homogeneous states in America with lots of Nordic peoples tend to be the best governed as well. Think Minnesota ("think Minnesota" is the answer to every statistic comparing Europe to the States, crime, gun control, healthcare, etc., because Minnesota is basically Yankee Switzerland on every statistic). Almost as if it's not about the legal structure, but rather the people.

It's more like if you rated everyone on the planet on "does this person make the place where he lives a better place or not", Scandinavians (and their descendants) would score perfect 10s.

A geneticist friend of mine has an explanation for this: he thinks that adaption to civilization makes us more nepotistic. He contrasts guest-rights in Northern Europe with "my brother against my cousin, my cousin against the stranger," of Egypt. When he gets melancholy, he will tell you that future of civilization is Mesopotamia -- where we have been civilized the longest. And Idiocracy.

<comment><USER2> Minnesota is more than 90% white and Christian : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Minnesota>

But I have a feeling, Minnesota's "Yankee Switzerland" status has more to do with public education than with its demographic makeup.

<comment><USER4> Are Nordic people not "white"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love it how The Economist often runs articles trying to prove that excellent living conditions in nordic countries are all about "pro-business reforms" and have nothing to do with their well known welfare states. Ahh, The Economist...

<comment><USER6> That article mentioned plenty of welfare policies.

"Universal free education allows students of all backgrounds to achieve their potential. Separate taxation of spouses puts wives on an equal footing with their husbands. Universal day care for children makes it possible for both parents to work full-time."

In fact the conclusion of the article was this:

"Economists frequently express puzzlement about the Nordic countries' recent economic success, given that their governments are so big... Goran Persson, a former Swedish prime minister, once compared Sweden's economy with a bumblebee—"with its overly heavy body and little wings, supposedly it should not be able to fly—but it does." Today it is fighting fit and flying better than it has done for decades."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is it with the recent Economist's crush on Nordic countries? Am I missing something?

At least two others in the past day! <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5152160> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5149821>

<comment><USER8> It's a common theme at the Economist to pick out a section of the world and focus on it for an issue.

This week it happens to be the Nordics but in the past it has done China, the USA, France, Singapore, etc.

<comment><USER9> Once a month or once a quarter I think.

<comment><USER10> More of than once a quarter, for special reports. But if I should abstain for all technology reporting for a quarter, the "Technology Quarterly" of the Economist is the one I would not like to miss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They are also closest to the real socialism, no Soviet country got even close to what they are doing - and I am saying that as a person coming from a former soviet republic.

The difference however, is that they willingly(and democratically) choose to provide all those social benefits. Good for them.

<comment><USER12> This is just plain wrong. The means of production in Sweden have always been held in private hands, the one attempt to change this ended in spectacular failure. The big exception would be LKAB which is the owner of the iron ore mines in northern Sweden. A country where private equity companies owns schools is not socialist.

There is a large public sector in the Nordic countries but this is run off the taxes from these successful capitalist companies and their employees. So a better name would be welfare capitalism, not socialism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of the U.S. News and World Report rankings. They were taken seriously for years before people realized that they were seriously skewed and biased against some larger state universities.

I've been to Sweden and stayed with a family there and got the impression that they are mostly an intelligent and compassionate people that tend to think alike. However the drive that set the U.S. apart (back then at least) was for innovation, business, and capitalism, while the Scandinavian/Nordics were making furniture and high quality items without really caring about making a lot of money from mass production, so their GDP was much lower.

To say now that they are well-governed because the U.S. is starting to suck economically based on biased stats? Worthless info, imo.

<comment><USER14> Aren't Swedish companies like Ericsson, Volvo, Scania, Saab, etc into innovation and mass production? I would say that for example Spotify (and many other Nordic companies) are quite innovative as well.

<comment><USER15> For its small size, Sweden is an outlier in terms of successful big companies, however most of those were formed a long time ago.

H&M: 1947, Ericsson: 1876, Volvo: 1927, Ikea: 1943, ABB (formerly ACEA): 1883, AstraZeneca (formerly Astra AB): 1913, SAAB: 1937, Electrolux: 1919, etc

These have been the backbone of Swedish innovation for a long time, but we can't count on them anymore. We need more Google's and Apple's. There's Spotify, Digital Illusions (now EA), Skype (sort of), but there are no big successes anymore.

<comment><USER14> I agree, and a problem is that many of the promising companies are sold (for example Dice, Skype and TAT) to large, usually foreign, corporations before they get the chance to grow.

<comment><USER15> Right, and not only that, a large number of companies move their headquarters elsewhere, such as Ikea to the Netherlands, Spotify to London etc. If I ever start my own company, I'll make sure never to be that greedy. I see the welfare state as an investment in people and businesses. Investment relies on getting paid by a few outliers. What is essentially happening is that when a company becomes successful it just says "well thanks for all the support and opportunity, but now that we're successful we don't really want to pay you back, so we're just going to go somewhere else, problem?".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > they have also largely escaped the social ills that plague America.

That is not a fair assessment. The social landscape in both regions is very different. The nordic region does not have the same influx of immigrants as North America. And increasingly, North African and Middle Eastern (primarily Muslim) immigrants (and born-citizen second generations) are being marginalized [1].

I wonder how the Nordic nations will react when more and more immigrants start moving there to start businesses, if that turns out to be the case in the future.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/world/europe/14dutch.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/world/europe/14dutch.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

<comment><USER17> "According to Washington-based Refugees International the U.S. has admitted fewer than 800 Iraqi refugees since the invasion, Sweden had accepted 18,000 and Australia had resettled almost 6,000."

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

<comment><USER16> I do not question the charity and helpfulness of these nations. Neither do I find any issues with their foreign policies. My point was directed more to how the society (not the government) deals with the immigrants [1].

[1] [http://www.smh.com.au/world/norwegian-schools-segregation- sp...](http://www.smh.com.au/world/norwegian-schools-segregation-sparks-race- row-20111126-1o089.html)

<comment><USER18> Can you summarize how you interpret that article?

For example, do you think that is common practice in Norway? I read elsewhere that the policy was quickly abandoned once it was made public. Do you think the 50 students who demonstrated in protest show that this was an unexpected practice? Might the comment of "school captain Helena Skagen" .. "what they did was wrong because you can't split the students according to their culture" might indicate that this was an unusual event, and hence newsworthy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Perhaps more interesting is the USA is ranked 8, just behind all the obvious Nordic, Swiss and Singaporean contenders. The general tone of most mass media and internet commentary would suggest it should be somewhere behind Russia and Mexico.

<comment><USER19> That's American exceptionalism for you. I imagine it gives us a sense of purpose to believe we live in the most corrupt, illiterate, violent country in the world.

<comment><USER20> How do you know that it is Americans who are pushing that narrative?

<comment><USER19> Because I hear it from my friends, and most of my friends are American. And frankly, I imagine non-Americans don't think about us that much.

<comment><USER20> In my experience, the people who talk about America being the most violent, the most corrupt, etc. are the ones who also like to decry 'American exceptionalism'. And if you think that non-Americans don't think about Americans that much, I suggest you listen to the BBC.

<comment><USER19> > In my experience, the people who talk about America being the most violent, > the most corrupt, etc. are the ones who also like to decry 'American > exceptionalism'.

That's my point, yeah? "We're so stuck up" is just as ignorantly self-centered as "We're so industrious" or whatever else Americans say about ourselves. We're mostly just normal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm no economist but I wonder if the Nordic model is sustainable without external innovation and cheap labour (going on in countries like the USA and China respectively -- who perhaps pay a price in terms of 'social ills').

<comment><USER22> One might almost assume we Nordics had looked at the world around us and chosen a direction based on what we saw..

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Using "probably" is such a weasel word, which is part of the reason it bothers me so immensely on their "it's always greener on the other side" piece on the Nordic countries.

It's the same crap as "Danes" (or whoever) are the happiest people in the world. It's just a silly meme that people don't bother to scrutinize to understand.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word>

</comment><comment><USER24> I still think Singapore is better, lived in both Sweden and Singapore.

I got the feeling that the Swedish (as well as the UK and German) economy is unsustainable.

<comment><USER25> Germany is #2 manufacturing exporter in the world. If they are unsustainable, I don't know what is then.

<comment><USER26> Running a perennial trade surplus is unsustainable if the country belongs to an area with fixed exchange rates, unless all the other countries also run a big trade surplus.

<comment><USER25> German exports are not contained to EU, it's a major exporter worldwide.

<comment><USER26> That doesn't matter. If the rest of EU has a trade deficit the imbalances will still accumulate. The result of that is what we are currently seeing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Yet it is hard to see the Nordic model of government spreading quickly, mainly because the Nordic talent for government is sui generis. Nordic government arose from a combination of difficult geography and benign history. All the Nordic countries have small populations, which means that members of the ruling elites have to get on with each other. Their monarchs lived in relatively modest places and their barons had to strike bargains with independent-minded peasants and seafarers."

Population of Norway: 5 million

Population of Sweden: 10 million

Population of Finland: 5 million

Population of USA: 315 million

That's gotta factor into it at least a little...

<comment><USER28> People on here who have worked at both big companies and startups should really appreciate how hard it is to manage large organizations efficiently. Things that work great at small scale fall apart as they grow (both organizationally and technologically).

I believe that these small Nordic governments can be effective and accountable, but that doesn't mean that it will translate to something 30-60 times as large. For comparison, Kaiser in California (one health care provider in one state) serves 8.9 million patients.

<comment><USER27> Not only that, but the sheer size and wealth of the US means there are some corrupting forces at work that are also much larger. After all, you still only have to wave money in front of a small number of people, but a country with larger, wealthier forces can wave a lot more of it... and the inequality is likely to get worse as a result as well, which makes good government even more challenging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I find it a bit hard to swallow that "corruption perceptions" is an objective metric. And let's not forget that Norway's wealth - and thus the ease with which the government can improve other factors - is due to its natural resources, i.e. oil. If Switzerland is exemplary, go look up when it allowed women to vote.

There's not much to be said against Sweden and Denmark though: one could sum up their success by saying that they simply never went down the road of screwing the population in order to be able to reduce corporation tax, which is all too common nowdays (see Ireland, USA, even Germany).

<comment><USER30> > And let's not forget that Norway's wealth

If oil wealth was all you needed to have good government, then the arab world would look drastically different from how it does today. I'd say that natural resource wealth actually makes it HARDER to have a good government, as it'd be a more tempting target to corrupt.

> There's not much to be said against Sweden and Denmark though: one could sum > up their success by saying that they simply never went down the road of > screwing the population in order to be able to reduce corporation tax

Sweden actually has a quite low corporation tax.

<comment><USER29> > If oil wealth was all you needed to have good government, then the arab > world would look drastically different

It's not all you need. But if good intentions are there, it makes a little difference whether you have a $700b oil fund (for a population of 5 million) or not. In other words, many other countries might be similarly well governed, but lacking financing.

> Sweden actually has a quite low corporation tax.

It was higher than the EU average until Jan 1st 2013.

<comment><USER10> Yes so therefore it was lowered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In my opinion, you should be able to measure how well a country is governed by the amount of trust the people put in their government. I think the Nordic countries would score fairly high in that, but honestly, there are huge problems in those countries as well. Every country is run by imperfect and irrational people.

<comment><USER31> The corruption perceptions index, which is one of the factors the Economist ranking takes into account, is one possible proxy for the level of trust people have in their government: <http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results/>

Trust is a more general concept than just perceived lack of corruption, but I would guess the two are closely related (though which direction the causality goes in is an interesting question).

<comment><USER15> Yes, also I had much trust in the Swedish justice system, but after all the Pirate Bay and Assange stuff, my trust is wavering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This table sounds incredibly fishy. Bankrupt Ireland one below Germany?

</comment><comment><USER33> Best governed? Not all of them; Sweden has disqualified itself with its disgraceful actions against both Assange and Anataka.

<comment><USER34> What have Sweden done to Assange? He's been accused of "sexuellt ofredande" by a private citizen and refused to appear in court. But that is not the fault of the state is it?

<comment><USER35> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4280532>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What I find surprising is US ranks relatively low for global innovation. Apple, Silicon Valley, Google, Anyone?

</comment><comment><USER37> Governments based on giving favors to members of one's tribe tend to be less stable.</comment>


Oakland Fire Department Releases Report Ghost Ship Fire - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/19/ghost-ship-fire-oakland-releases-50-page-report-on-cause-of-deadly-inferno/ <comment><AUTHOR> The full report, [http://www.fireengineering.com/content/dam/fe/online- article...](http://www.fireengineering.com/content/dam/fe/online- articles/documents/2017/oakland-ca-ghost-ship.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: Would you like your favourite celebrity read a book to you? - <AUTHOR> I'm working on a product where you can select a book, and a voice you want and I'd read out the book summary or review in that voice. Imagine Barack Obama or Morgan Freeman reading your favorite bedtime stories!
My questions are
1. I'm unsure about how to make it a good and useful product. What are some of the usecases? I can summarize blogs, books, etc, but what else?
2. What are the copyright implications here? Can I just take someone's voice and use it? <comment><USER2> You'll likely run into 'likeness' issues if you use actual celebrities' voices, especially considering that it would cut into their own book sales. I imagine many authors have self-narrated their own audiobooks and don't want others to undercut it.

I think this might be better suited for public domain books from the past. If I could have _The Count of Monte Cristo_ read by a Frenchman (in English), or _Sherlock Holmes_ read by a British man with a Victorian accent, that would be cool.

Also another idea: audio versions of movie scripts. Select a character type for each role in the story, then automatically generate an audio version of the entire thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Audio versions of scripts sound good. I'll look into this :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would find that very distracting, unless it was someone with a good narrator voice, like Morgan Freeman.

I know this because my suspension of disbelief gets somewhat broken when I recognize the voice actor in an animated feature. I imagine it would be similar with characters in a book.

</comment><comment><USER4> Instead of trying to use the voice of a specific individual (living or dead) it would be legally safer to offer a choice of character types. Crusty sea dog, cultured Victorian English, mid-west rural tramp, Hollywood want-to-be, etc.</comment>


Ocado warehouse fire: Homes evacuated amid 'explosion risk' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-47151773 <comment><AUTHOR> "This building is not meant for humans to be interacting with the racking and the storage - it has robots moving racking on to loading bays, so for firefighters trying to get in that high and to make an effective fire-fighting strategy, it has been very difficult," he said.</comment>


Wall Street Not Impressed With Bartz As Next Yahoo CEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/13/wall-street-not-impressed-with-bartz-as-next-yahoo-ceo/

<comment><USER2> Wouldn't you want a superstar as CEO, that would get people excited about your company again?</comment>


In Search of Certainty: What Are the Scaling Laws of IT? - <AUTHOR> https://m.soundcloud.com/insearchofcertainty/in-search-of-certainty-podcast-1-what-are-the-scaling-laws-of-it?platform=hootsuite <comment><AUTHOR> A new podcast series by @botchagalupe, with Mark Burgess, author of Promise Theory.</comment>


Ask HN: Where in the cloud is best to host node.js? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a new system who's server component will be using node.js.  Like any other start-up effort I'm looking for a place to host this with zero-to-low cost initially but with the capability to scale up rapidly when necessary.  I've used Google App Engine in the past for this sort of thing but as far as I know, I can't use it to run node.js.<p>Can any of you offer suggestions or tales of your experience with cloud hosts who would be capable of hosing a system like this? <comment><USER2> ElusiveHippo.com (from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1286919>)

</comment><comment><USER3> Google Code?

<comment><AUTHOR> I need somewhere to run it from; I thought Google Code was just source code repositories?</comment></comment>


Saul Griffith on winning a MacArthur, entrepreneurship, and dumpster diving - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/14/smbusiness/Saul_Griffith.fsb/?postversion=2007111509

<comment><USER2> His TED talk is pretty interesting:

<http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/48>

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazing.. there are so many paths to realizing a startup. These people bootstrapped, consulted, etc. and finally found their startup path, not unlike Cognos which was recently acquired by IBM for $5B.

</comment><comment><USER4> _What are you going to do with the $500,000?

...I'd love to see a CAD program that allows you to enter folding patterns for origami and paper airplanes._

The "genius" grants have always been a sad joke.

<comment><USER5> If you take his idea for the CAD program and combine it with his ideas from the TED speech of using materials as code you might end up with something that you can digitally generate very complex 3D structures from very simple building blocks using only a sequencer for the blocks and that might be a very cool product - think of it as the next generation of 3D printers.

And then if you opensource the diagrams people can finally apply opensource ideas to production.</comment></comment>


Detecting Terrorists by Smelling Fear - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6481635/Device-that-smells-human-fear-could-identify-terrorists.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Found on Bruce Schneier's blog [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/detecting_terr...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/detecting_terro.html)

As usually comments are worth reading.</comment>


What's the name of my company? - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3ljl6lu75TvS2d6NDQ2OUZwLUttWDdiaGh1SzFmb3E3bm1n <comment><AUTHOR> I'm having a new logo designed for my software consultancy. I'm not sure if it's clear enough, though. What would you say is the name of the company?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's TECHN actually. I guess I was right about it not being clear enough :(

</comment><comment><USER2> TECHNO? Pretty cool, but quite too geeky, isn't it? ;-)</comment>


Ask HN: What are you using for personal financial planning/tracking? - max-si-m I used to try a bunch of different apps for tracking personal finances(YNAB, Mint etc.). But they didn't fit my "model". There are a few options that I would like to have:
- Transaction fees, I want to see how much I lose on transactions
- Smart budgeting
- Family sharing
- Recurrent savings (e.g >10% from each income)
- Multi currencies
- The planing of big purchases (e.g >5% from each income with deadlines)
- Maybe available money per day (total income - recurrent transactions(e.g savings/subscriptions) - purchases planing  / days in month) something like that.
Google Sheet doesn't fit my expectation, because I fill in transactions from the iPhone.
I already started working on the app for myself but feel that there is a loooot of similar stuff. So no need for one more.
Please, share your experience of tracking the personal budget. What are you using for that? What have you tried to use? Maybe you already made something that will be suitable for me? <comment><AUTHOR> Based on your list of requirements (especially multicurrency), check out Lunch Money ([https://lunchmoney.app](https://lunchmoney.app)) Disclaimer– I am the indie maker behind this :)

<comment> max-si-m That looks pretty! I would definitely try this. Could you tell me more about budgeting? Do you have some way to handle "recurrent savings" (e.g 10% from each income)?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't support any saving goals right now, but we've gotten feedback that users want this. We do show you charts so you can easily compare your expenses vs your income.

The budgeting feature is on a monthly basis and you can choose which categories to allow budgeting and you'll be presented with charts showing you your spending habits vs budgeted spend to help you make your decisions.

Hope that helps, if you have any other questions or feature requests, my email is wide open :) (jen at lunchmoney.app)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> 3 Gnucash files/directories. Handles 2 corporations and my personal life. It's a lot of work. It gets in the way of other work. But since the data is confidential, I put up with it.

<comment> max-si-m It looks a bit too complicated, doesn't it? Does it cost that to dive into it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Libre Office spreadsheets. I also have a few Python scripts I wrote to consume downloaded CSV files of my bank account transactions, summarize them a bit, and drop them into a spreadsheet.

<comment> max-si-m Why do you choose this way? It seems to be a bit complicated, doesn't it?

<comment><USER3> One spreadsheet with two worksheets and two python scripts seems fairly simple to me. No third party, no feeds, no sharing data, nothing. And it just works.

<comment> max-si-m Hmm, in that case, it should works

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm using google sheets, updated in the 1st of each month. It Calculates total net worth which is all in really inverted in. It could be adapted to handle multiple currencies though.

<comment> max-si-m Can you share it or made some simplified version?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ledger-CLI:

[https://www.ledger-cli.org/](https://www.ledger-cli.org/)

<comment> max-si-m I don't think that fill transactions from CLI will work for me. There are a few cons that I found in features:

\- don't have family sharing

\- didn't find a mobile app

\- budgeting

Did I miss something?

<comment><USER5> Family sharing could be handled by a file sync app (i.e., dropbox or otherwise). Do note that this means dropbox also knows your finances unless you also encrypt somehow.

Budgeting is covered within the documentation. There's an example inside of budgeting.

There's a few mobile apps that have some 'support' for ledger (search "ledger" on the F-Droid [1] store to find two of them). There are also a couple web interfaces (general internet search) that could substitute for "mobile app" in some ways.

But as the data file is just text, any mobile text file editor would support "use" of the system for data entry.

One _very_ nice part about the data file being just a text file is that it is also trivial to automate updates so that for recurring bills/income that are equal in value, you can automate the addition of those transactions with any form of job scheduler (i.e. cron on a Linux system).

[1] [https://f-droid.org/](https://f-droid.org/)</comment></comment></comment>


Atari re-entering hardware business with mysterious 'Ataribox' - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/300228/Atari_reentering_hardware_business_with_mysterious_Ataribox.php <comment><USER2> After so many years, Atari looks to me like an empty travelling label : not the same company, not the same people, no continuity, no legacy... just a label being sold and bought by Warner, JTS, Hasbro, Infogrames...

When people think of Atari, they recall Pong and other great games, the ST computer line... the current Atari company is not related to any of that: Nintendo, IBM or Apple ensured their continuity over time and may "re-enter" older markets.

Atari is not "re-entering" anything: Infogrames is just re-using an old mythic brand and intends to start a hardware business.

</comment><comment><USER3> Related: "It's just Emulation - the challenge of selling old games" : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLWY7fCXUwE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLWY7fCXUwE) GDC2016

</comment><comment><USER4> More likely to be a Steambox that can run Windows until SteamOS is finished.

<comment><USER5> I don't know - the wood paneling seems a bit dated.

I'd happily pay for a slick PC case though, that looked as good as a PS4/xbone and could fit a GTX 1080.

<comment><USER6> I imagine the wood is an homage to the 2600: [http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/avgn/images/d/dc/50-ToyH...](http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/avgn/images/d/dc/50-ToyHallofFame- atari-2600-game-system.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130818021209)

<comment><USER5> Well yes, me too, but most people wouldn't want a Steam box to look like that.

<comment><USER4> If it has Atari emulators on it that can buy roms to run over an HDMI cable it might be worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Games console and mysterious - never a good combo</comment>


Deliberate excellence: Why Intel leads the world in semiconductor manufacturing - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/127987-deliberate-excellence-why-intel-leads-the-world-in-semiconductor-manufacturing <comment><USER2> I would have expected that the article would at least mention that Intel has been sued for partially even illegal anti competitive behaviour:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Anti- competitive_allegati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Anti- competitive_allegations)

</comment><comment> excuse-me There is a downside to this - and one which could cause Intel to fall off a wall.

Their tick-tock method of introducing a new product and then half-way through it's life switching it to a small design rule to get a speed and cost benefit as you introduce the next bigger chip is really great - so long as you can make the design rules smaller AND the world wants bigger more powerful versions of the same chip

But it prevented them stepping back and designing a crude little 30K transistor RISC processor from a blank sheet - which later goes onto rule the world.

<comment><USER3> > But it prevented them stepping back and designing a crude little 30K > transistor RISC processor from a blank sheet - which later goes onto rule > the world.

It's unfair to tick-tock to blame it for their failure to preempt ARM, it is far more recent than that. It's not that Intel hasn't tried to wean away folks from x86 with novel and innovative blank-sheet architectures. They tried with ipx432, i860 and Itanic, but all were expensive and well-deserved failures. It certainly seems like Intel engineers need the constraints of the x86 ISA to keep their wild impulses in check.

<comment><USER4> It's not recent at all. Ironically the ARM exists at all because Intel wouldn't let anyone license the 286 design, and at one point Intel had a license to make StrongARMs, which they willingly gave up.

Intel are simply an example of brute force in action.

<comment><USER5> It's irrational to expect a business to get every decision about the future correct.</comment></comment></comment></comment>