The Multiworse Is Coming - <AUTHOR> http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-multiworse-is-coming.html <comment><USER2> There seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding about funding models and how CERN and, at least, the US differ. In the early 90s I was briefly on a small team to sell IBM Federal products to the nascent US supercollider project. (With a background in physics, I was referred to as their throwdown physicist.)

Then the supercollider was canceled, and later we called on CERN in Geneva to brief them on storage systems software and hardware, like hierarchical mass storage and linear tape robots. CERN had a nice mockup of the proposed LHC, where you climbed down a ladder into a fake tube, like what is bored underground. While we were down there, our hosts shared a shocking factoid with us. The US government canceled the proposed $12 billion supercollider project, and to exit all the contracts and fill in the holes that had already been dug was costing $650 million. CERN told us that for $650 million, they could build the LHC. I didn't verify their numbers, but their capital efficiency was stunning.

CERN is funded by all the European countries with a steady budget, and they are allowed to spend it however they wish. When CERN needs to build something big, they put some part of their steady funding into the bank, and it just sits their for however long it takes until they need it. By having steady, stable funding, they can make much more efficient use of their funds. As far as I can tell, there is little or no political heat about CERN's budget like "what have you done for us lately?"

The US, on the other hand, funds large projects out of special legislation in Congress, and everyone has to get their constituents a piece of the pie. This has some gross inefficiencies for large science projects. Appropriate hype is the motive force.

<comment><USER3> Apropos of nothing, I don't believe they filled in ALL the holes down there. When I briefly worked for Dart Container, purveyors of the classic styrene foam J Cup, I learned they had just opened a MASSIVE new warehouse down in Texas, built in part of the tunnel system meant to become the home of the SSC.

I got to see part of their warehousing up near Lansing, MI. Imagine a building the size of a jumbo jet hangar, packed to the rafters with NOTHING but boxes on boxes of J Cups. Now imagine another. I'm pretty sure the Lansing facility had at least two, and that still wasn't enough for the millions of cups they move each year.

We use a lot of cups.

<comment><USER4> That's an obscene amount of polystyrene. Ugh. OT but I wish the stuff were never used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's worth considering the cultural context in which high-end physics operates, at least within the United States.

The U.S.'s greatest military victory--the last time we can cleanly call ourselves heroes--was World War II. The Nazis were an awful regime who did horrific things that no one can defend. And Japan directly attacked us. We had good reasons for fighting and we (with our allies) conclusively won.

And there is broad public sentiment that we won because of physics. High-end theoretical physics gave us futuristic tools like radio, radar, and of course the nuclear bomb. Lower-end physics gave us the tools for engineering the incredible machines we fought with, like airplanes, bombs, tanks, and ships.

So, in minds of U.S. citizens, and more importantly in the halls of U.S. government, discussions of high-end physics come with an implicit promise of military applications. Maybe we could figure out anti-gravity, people think, or ray guns, or teleportation, or force fields--if we only understood the particles and fields a bit better.

Physicists do not promise any of this, of course. But at least IMO it is a real phenomenon. I went to see Interstellar with someone who had worked in and with Congress for a long time. After we left, she said "do you think it's true that once we understand gravity, we'll be able to manage gravity and create antigravity?" I had to explain that just understanding a phenomenon does not grant magical powers over it.

But that has been the experience of the U.S. government! They gave money so physicists could better understand particles, and in return the scientists gave the government seemingly magical powers, like seeing in the dark (radar) and city-destroying explosions (nuclear fission and fusion).

So what happens when physics stops delivering military leaps forward? Or when the physics is superseded by another discipline that delivers military applications?

It looked like chemistry and biology might do that, but then the world managed to collectively decide that those should be illegal tools of war. But it seems totally obvious that the current top priority for military application is information technology.

So, I think the author is correct that particle physics faces a looming crisis, at least in funding and public confidence.

<comment><USER6> In the USA, a lot of funding for R & D (e.g. engineering and science) comes from grants that are military grants (e.g. Army, Navy, Air Force, etc.). In the US, about half (54%) of federal funding (coming from the public Federal budget) is via "military" and the rest is from other federal agencies ("civilian").

Source: [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/how-science-fares- us...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/how-science-fares-us-budget- deal)

Is that an American thing?

<comment><USER6> Note: The above figures don't take classified funding into account. Because it's secret. Most of the classified funding is military, so the proportion of military funding is actually higher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think theoretical physics might be in need of a short dose of internal reflection and debate coupled with some side reading of contemporary philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. These sorts of debates around concepts like "naturalness" and "laws of nature" are philosophical bread and butter.

This isn't to say that modern philosophers aren't susceptible to alluring desert landscapes like "naturalness", but at least philosophers are trained to think about and critique these kinds of things. Physics needs to be capable of having this debating itself and recognise assumptions with wobbly metaphysical underpinnings.

<comment><USER8> This is so very important.

In particular, there's a long-accumulating need for a revision of the current dogma on the philosophy of science and its operationalization -- Popper falsificationism, peer review, publication-oriented research, freaking null hypothesis...

Most of our current science has happened before Popper and falsificationism, so there is nothing "essentially true" about the current M.O. of science. And heck, was it falsificationism that brought us vaccines, nuclear energy and computers? Because there's a replication crisis going on in many scientific fields, and particle physics doesn't fit the mold of falsificationism at all.

I'm not coming forward with a solution in an HN comment, but I think we need to stop equating science, the civilizational project, with this specific philosophy of science and social system for organizing science.

<comment><USER9> Could you elaborate on what you perceive as the problem with falsificationism? I'm familiar with the philosophical argument that Popper's demarcation of science is too narrow. What is less clear is that this argument over the definition of science currently has any influence on scientific practice. Are there some examples where scientists (or funding agencies) have adhered to "falsificationism" in a way that impeded progress? This is in contrast with the other issues you mentioned: peer review, publication-oriented research and abuse of the null hypothesis (by which I assume you mean p-hacking and its cousins), which I agree are very real problems in practice.

<comment><USER8> > Could you elaborate on what you perceive as the problem with > falsificationism?

Operationally? You have to pick a null hypothesis. You have to carve reality in two, specify two possible universes and ask an experiment to tell you which universe where you're in.

Darwinism (the one in Darwin's works) isn't like this. Adhesion to falsificationism would have nipped that one in the bud.

Stuff like this is the way forward: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_holism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_holism)

<comment><USER10> I always wonder where this naive falsificationism as a point of critique comes from. Certainly not from Popper, as he already argued for holism in the sense of Duhem and Quine from the beginning (Logik der Forschung was written in 1934!)...

<comment><USER11> From addressing the great many naive falsificationists that have heard of, or were taught, Popper's basic idea without any of his elaborations and footnotes, let alone those by people like Quine, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, ... A little knowledge can be a dangerously misleading thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > To justify substantial investments, I am told, an experiment needs a clear > goal and at least a promise of breakthrough discoveries.

This is antithetical to science. If you're promising a breakthrough discovery, you're approaching the experiment with bias.

The fact that more new particles have not emerged at energy levels the LHC can produce _is_ a discovery--if I'm understanding the blog post correctly[1], it's the beginnings of a disproof of naturalness in supersymmmetry. It's not as exciting as if they had discovered hundreds of new things to study, but it's equally important.

And that's exactly why I agree with the author: science is about finding what's _true_ not about finding what's _exciting_. As a taxpayer, I think one of the most valuable things particle physics could do here is to educate people on that bias and lead by example. I get that they fear losing their funding to do science, but if you let that fear push you into pursuing exciting results over the truth, then you're not doing science anyway.

[1] I'm not a particle physicist--my post is about the social problem that physicists are facing, not about the physics.

<comment><USER13> "This is antithetical to science. If you're promising a breakthrough discovery, you're approaching the experiment with bias."

I think all experiments are began with some premonition of what to expect. For example Michaelson and Morley very much expected to measure the speed through which earth would pass through aether ... except they couldn't. An the results pushed physics toward theory of relativity.

I disagree that's it's an entirely bad process to bankroll experiments based on unproven promises. This is exactly how the Manhattan Project happened. The physicists promised that it was very likely they could create a very large explosion, but they did not _know_ if it would bang or fizzle. So, the US government began a huge industrial scale operation to enrich uranium and to assemble the bomb. The first atomic bomb explosion was very much empirical science that was bankrolled by "unsound" promises.

In this sense going beyond LHC would be kinda ground breaking - big budget science with _absolutely no clue_ on what to expect. It's how discoveries are made, yes, but I'm not sure if any large scale scientific project has been funded without at least some clue on what to expect.

<comment><USER12> > I think all experiments are began with some premonition of what to expect. > For example Michaelson and Morley very much expected to measure the speed > through which earth would pass through aether ... except they couldn't. An > the results pushed physics toward theory of relativity.

> I disagree that's it's an entirely bad process to bankroll experiments based > on unproven promises. This is exactly how the Manhattan Project happened. > The physicists promised that it was very likely they could create a very > large explosion, but they did not know if it would bang or fizzle. So, the > US government began a huge industrial scale operation to enrich uranium and > to assemble the bomb. The first atomic bomb explosion was very much > empirical science that was bankrolled by "unsound" promises.

What you're describing is the "hypothesis" step in the scientific process. Properly done, a hypothesis _isn 't_ a promise--it's simply a statement of the possibility you're testing, without any commitment to the possibility being the reality or not.

A good hypothesis results in the same experiment as its negative: "There are more supersymmetric particles at higher energies" is the same hypothesis as "There are _not_ more supersymmetric particles at higher energies" because you test both hypotheses in the same way. Contrast this with a promise: you can't promise something _and_ its opposite.

> In this sense going beyond LHC would be kinda ground breaking - big budget > science with absolutely no clue on what to expect. It's how discoveries are > made, yes, but I'm not sure if any large scale scientific project has been > funded without at least some clue on what to expect.

I don't think we have absolutely no clue what to expect--the article goes into some of the possibilities.

<comment><USER14> > A good hypothesis results in the same experiment as its negative: "There are > more supersymmetric particles at higher energies" is the same hypothesis as > "There are not more supersymmetric particles at higher energies" because you > test both hypotheses in the same way.

Actually, no, they are not the same. You are excluding the middle, as it is necessary for an experiment to disprove the null hypothesis before any conclusion can be made. Just because you don't prove your hypothesis doesn't mean you prove its negation. Typically, an experiment will find no result at all.

<comment><USER15> The negative of we "will see X via some experiment." Is not "X does not exist," but rather, "we will _not_ see X via some experiment."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > It's a PR disaster that particle physics won't be able to shake off easily.

I really don't see this. As a non-specialist, I assumed that the LHC was pottering along making useful if non-spectacular discoveries. The fact that naturalness is in doubt due to its data sounds exactly like the work it should be doing. Blame physics for not having a clutch of new particles ready for discovery, not physicists.

<comment><USER17> The problem as I understand it is that prior to natural-ness being in doubt, it was expected that the LHC would make discoveries in supersymmetry that would justify practically bigger (but hugely expensive) colliders. Without a new frontier of supersymmetrical particles to explore, that next collider doesn't offer much for anyone to get excited about, let alone the taxpayers who might be asked to pay for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In recent decades, the high-energy physicists haven't produced much. But the low-energy physicists have been getting many new results. The action today seems to be down near absolute zero. The stranger predictions of quantum mechanics, from quantum entanglement to slow light, have not only been directly verified, but are approaching commercial use.

 _"If you can 't measure it, you can't improve it"_ (Lord Kelvin)

</comment><comment><USER19> Please help me understand the logic of naturalness. Suppose we have one constant, alpha, approx= 1.425, and another (beta) approx=2.157 - such setup is deemed natural. And if the other constant is approx 2.157 times 10^40, it's not natural. and needs fine-tuning, right? The underlying assumption is that fine-tuning _is not needed_ for a former setup, that is, if beta was about 0.5%, or 0.05% different from where it sits at 2.157, then we would be totally fine, Universe would look the same for all intents and purposes. I fail to see how this follows. Maybe the difference by 10^(-40) would make life impossible? how can we possibly know this?

<comment><USER20> It's not really about the values of constants but about where they appear and about their size.

So imagine we have some Physics setup were certain laws should hold. There is some magical formula called Lagrangian L = stuff. When you construct this L from scratch, you add _everything_ you have. That is some e for the Electron field function, some phi for the Higgs, some m for its mass etc etc. At first this sounds like an insanely long and random equation. But because of all the constraints in your setup its 'only' one page long for the Standard Model case. Oh yes and then there are some stupid terms which must be really small to only _softly_ violate the constraints. E.g. CP-symmetry for strong interactions - violation of this symmetry hasn't been observed in nature "Strong CP problem". That's where fine-tuning has to happen at the moment...

<comment><USER19> Please confirm that my understanding is correct. You have a number of "stupid" terms in Lagrangian, whose cumulative effect must be small in order for the whole theory to make sense at all. This small cumulative effect can be achieved in 2 ways: 1) each term is small 2) terms more or less cancel out. When each term is small, we call it naturalness, otherwise it's fine-tuning. If this is correct, then... say you have N random varaibles, and you know that the sum is small. What is more likely: that each of N variables is small, or that the sum is small because it just happens to be small? :)

<comment><USER20> Fortunately there are not so many terms of this kind in the Standard Model case. :)

However terms don't really cancel each other out. (I'm sure you could construct a scenario where that happens but that doesn't generalize.) It's part of the construction manual if you will to have only independent constants and terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I to understand from this article that the LHC is over? That the global community of particle physicists can't come up with anything interesting to do with the world's most powerful particle collider? I do hope I'm misinterpreting the article, because that would be a huge disappointment.

<comment><USER22> You misunderstand, the particle physicists are having a blast discovering properties, they're just not finding any more particles. Finding particles is sexy, and sexy gets funding, so the risk is that they run out of funding with their run of the mill sciencing.

That's why they're postulating, maybe if we had a slightly larger collider we could find sexy super symmetry. The author thinks that is disingenuous because the argument that a slightly larger collider would find supersymmetry is speculation, not based on real science.

Anyway, even if there was a solid argument for there being supersymmetry just around the corner I don't think a larger collider would be funded, the LHC offered many many sexy things, so the stars aligned and it got funded, but would the stars align again for such a huge amount of funding, just for supersymmetry? I feel as a layman the idea of supersymmetry is not captivating enough. Not in the way the higgs boson was.

Anyway, there's so much applied physics research just waiting to be done right now, maybe it's time for theoretical physics to chew on it for a bit.

<comment><USER21> > the particle physicists are having a blast discovering properties

I'm glad to learn that I was mistaken! As a layman myself, this is really all I want from the LHC: for it to continue to be a useful piece of equipment for scientific experments. From the article, it sounded like the attitude was, "we didn't find anything sexy, so we're done here," which would be a huge waste.

<comment><USER23> For what it's worth, there are accelerators, colliders, and synchrotrons here in the US that were dwarfed by the LHC (and practically unheard of in popular culture) that are in use today.

They're still running experiments on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Lab in New York, for example, even though it started operation 8 years before the LHC and runs at a fraction of the energy.

<comment><USER24> I always get excited when driving or flying over SLAC! Although I understand that the facility is now half laser interferometry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting article. In lieu of any qualification to verify the claims; the comment section seemed on superficial reading populated with experienced scientists that gave some support.

Another takeaway was the introduction (for me) to the concept of "naturalness", with which the author has some issues. It is however not possible to do away with it (if I'm not mistaken about its meaning), except in cases where the assumptions of naturalness turn out to be wrong, as it seems it was in this case.

It seems to me that some concept of "naturalness", is what we use to interpret empirical facts, without which we could not make sense of it at all. Examples of what I would consider "naturalness": that the past precedes the present, that large things contain smaller things (perhaps in infinity), ad that small things are contained in larger things (perhaps in infinity), etc.

Granted, our sense of naturalness could be completely wrong, and empirical data constantly challenge what we consider natural, which is how it should be.

<comment><USER26> Your understanding of what naturalness is seems odd. If you get rid of naturalness, you just have fine tuning. Fine tuning is not beautiful but it is not a logical disaster as you describe.

<comment><USER25> ok thanks, on further investigation I realize my interpretation of "naturalness" was a laymans uninitiated one:

"In physics, naturalness is the property that the dimensionless ratios between free parameters or physical constants appearing in a physical theory"[0]

I have no idea what that means atm

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalness_(physics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalness_\(physics\))

<comment><USER27> I'll take a stab (I Am Not A Physicist (in fact I couldn't handle the math and moved to CS ;-) ). Parameters or constants in a theory generally have units (i.e. speeds, density, whatever). But lots of things (usually ratios) have no units because they all cancel out. Those are called "dimensionless". Pi is dimensionless, as is e.

What the naturalness property seems to be saying is that these dimensionless parameters (which you have to stick into the equations to make the math work out) should all be around the same order of magnitude and not require too much precision. If there is such a parameter that is super huge or super small (in relation to the others) or requires a lot of precision, it's an indication that the theory is incomplete. There should be an observable reason for that difference/precision.

If I've gotten that right, then I can see why people would be sceptical of naturalness. If naturalness was correct, I would actually be curious of _why_ it was correct.

<comment><USER28> Moreover, "naturalness" is not mathematically well-defined even though many of its most passionate proponents claim that it is. This is one of the primary objections that Sabine has of "naturalness", not only might it be wrong, but when you plumb the motivations for it and actually _try_ to make it mathematically well-defined, the motivations turn out to all disintegrate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Like hair, trust is hard to split. And like hair, trust is easier to lose than to grow."

Worth reading just for this quote.

</comment><comment><USER30> Maybe it's time for a paradigm shift in particle physics as Thomas S Kuhn once predicted

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

<comment><USER13> Kuhn's model is not a prediction, it's a statement of fact how human accepted knowledge moves sometimes forward in huge paradigm shifts.

Everyone "knew" that the speed of light was constant, everyone "knew" earth had to be only couple of thousands of years old (e.g. Lord Kelvin was a firm believer in only a thousands of years based on his physically based estimates), atoms where quite a hard bargain to sell as anything as computational tools until you got some computations and Jean Perrin to do some experiments, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baptiste_Perrin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baptiste_Perrin), continental plates where supposed to be solid fixations, until they weren't, etc.

It's nice of Kuhn to point this out. Maybe it's convenient for administrators or something to realize accepted facts tend to change - but it gives absolutely no clue on _how_ exactly move science forward.

I don't really understand the huge uproar about Kuhn - his ideas should be "obvious" to anyone familiar with history of science. But maybe as professional management and pathological "professionalism" made it's headway in his time it was nice to point out that Gant chartable progress was not all there was to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "Just do it" actually sounds like a good reason. Tackling difficult engineering problems always creates spinoffs even if the core activity is fruitless.

<comment><USER32> It _is_ a good reason, but it's a reason that's difficult to sell to people who make decisions about where to spend a few billion dollars.

<comment><USER31> Justify it with the benefits of previous activity.

<comment><USER33> What are the benefits of the LHC again? I mean, the benefits of spending billions that all of us can notice in our daily lives?

<comment><USER34> The LHC was a project of unprecedented magnitude and complexity. During the planning stages, CERN devoted some resources to developing better ways for teams on LHC and other projects to communicate with each other and share documentation.

That is the reason why the address in your browser's URL line starts with "http(s):" followed by "www." It's not an exaggeration to say that the work of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN led directly to the creation of trillions of dollars of economic value.

<comment><USER35> Sure, spinoffs are nice, but they happen with _all_ types of public access research. Why not create a project of a unprecedented magnitude and complexity that _also_ creates very important results _directly_? It's like saying "spend vast amounts of resources on pursuing random goals, and eventually some of the resources, by accident, will create a ROI". Yes they will, but is it really the best way to do this? It's not like some version of hypertext wouldn't happen without CERN.

I'm not saying CERN wasn't useful. It was. And the budget wasn't that big. But this kind of logic is not very sound. If we have a lot of money and a series of concrete problems, we should spend the money to solve them.

Most of the money are to be spend directly on the problem, less to develop and build new tools to tackle the problem, and finally even less to discover new possible mechanisms that might or might not allow us to improve our tools in the future.

There's a lot of uncertainty in the future, and it's best not to bet a lot of money on it.

<comment><USER36> > _Why not create a project of a unprecedented magnitude and complexity that > also creates very important results directly?_

This is not an option, if we had any project candidates like this they would have already been funded. Everything that is not already done by the private sector exists as a big step in to the unkown. (The private sector is _very_ good at allocating resources to projects that give immediate results, but it will never do anything that can't.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The author is missing a major point: politicians may still support enormous projects like the LHC for the same reason they would support any pork barrel project: it gives them influence and the ability to direct money to their friends/constituents.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm not a physicist, so I might sound like a moron stating this:

Isn't it possible that current theories in particle physics are just simply inaccurate models of the world? They're just hypothetical low-level explanations of observed high-level effects, and could have been empirically proved by the large colliders, which doesn't seem to have happened.

So maybe we don't need new experiments, but new models. A negative result is a result too.

On a related note, the assumption in quantum physics that particles have a probability distribution rather than an exact location has always bugged me. Why can't there be low-level mechanisms going on that are too quick/small to be measured (today)?

<comment><USER39> The models are almost certainly inaccurate, we just don't know how inaccurate. It's quite possible that we need new models (or ditch supersymmetry), but physicists become invested in their models and try everything to tweak them to match observations, until it just doesn't work anymore and we have a major breakthrough.

>On a related note, the assumption in quantum physics that particles have a probability distribution rather than an exact location has always bugged me. Why can't there be low-level mechanisms going on that are too quick/small to be measured (today)?

It bugged a lot of other people too (Einstein's famous "God does not play dice" comes from the same corner). Experiments so far are only consistent with a probability distribution, unless you permit signals to go back in time. Of course how you interpret the model is an entirely different problem (do things only happen once observed, are we in a multiverse and all possibilities happen in some universe, are we simulated and those effects are caused by optimisations (both not calculating things until needed, and inaccuracies akin to floating point errors), etc. the possibilites are endless)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I had no idea LHC was thought to provide more than Higgs' boson, and I don't think lots of people have any clue what it is.

</comment><comment><USER41> > Remember next time we come asking for money.

Interesting point. Money drives research.

It took over 400 years from the discovery of gun powder to be applied to the use of projectiles. While it only took 40 years from the mass-energy equation to create an atomic bomb.

</comment><comment><USER42> Next World Collider will be built in China.

They are about the only major country increasing government R&D funds.

The only exception would be if there is a breakthrough technology 100x more cost effective, i.e. you could build a 10x power LHC for a tenth of the cost. I see press releases of breakthroughs using lasers or EMF. But very unclear if they'd scale up to a petavolt.

Probably could build a pretty powerful accelerator using the world's electricity devoted to bitcoin mining :-)

</comment><comment><USER43> > the conclusions based on naturalness were not predictions, but merely pleas > for the laws of nature to be pretty

This is the main point.

She totally nailed it.

</comment><comment><USER44> "Such a vacuum decay, however, wouldn't take place until long after all stars have burned out and the universe has become inhospitable to life anyway. And seeing that most people don't care what might happen to our planet in a hundred years, they probably won't care much what might happen to our universe in 10100 billion years."

</comment><comment><USER45> > and at least a promise of breakthrough discoveries

If we could promise a breakthrough discovery, we wouldn't need to build the machine.

The author seems almost heartbroken at the absence of life-altering findings. No new discoveries means we at least know what we're doing a little bit, right?

<comment><USER46> > This article seems almost heartbroken at the absence of life-altering > findings.

That's not my takeaway. I think they were talking about how scientist shouldn't lie to get grants that probably won't achieve much.

<comment><USER47> That's (unfortunately) endearingly naïve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I wonder why the post doesn't mention a pretty recent potential deviation from Standard Model [1][2]. It seems that LHC may deliver some new physics after all, it just needs more data to rule out statistical anomaly

[1]: [https://youtu.be/edvdzh9Pggg?t=3124](https://youtu.be/edvdzh9Pggg?t=3124)

[2]: [https://home.cern/scientists/updates/2017/06/lhcb-flavour- an...](https://home.cern/scientists/updates/2017/06/lhcb-flavour-anomalies- continue-intrigue)

<comment><USER49> This is of interest:

[https://thewire.in/science/hopes-for-new-physics-pave-the- ro...](https://thewire.in/science/hopes-for-new-physics-pave-the-road-to- rencontres)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Perhaps whats going on is they have been measuring their own collective prior probability that these particles exist.

This is what would happen if you set your null model to be something that was false regardless of these particles existing. The way it works is more belief -> more effort put towards detection. It requires a certain amount of time and funding to cross the "discovery" threshold so this will only happen if there is enough prior belief.

</comment><comment><USER20> I guess the detection of the Higgs boson is already a great thing! That was the missing part of the Standard Model. Now that theory is complete -- within its limits/Energy scale. Too bad that the many years before the LHC there was an ever increasing backlog of theory to be tested against experiment. Damn, Physics has so much in common with Software Development... ;-)

</comment><comment><USER51> If just 3% of the data from the LHC has been analyzed so far, which means there is 97% more data to come in and be analyzed, and if the Higgs boson was discovered within these 3%, isn't it a bit quick to deem the experiment as failed already? Please note I most certainly have no idea about the subject at hand.

<comment><USER52> The boffins were looking for the Higgs Boson, makes a big difference.

Plenty of obscure and unintended findings came long after experiments have concluded. If history is anything to go by, LHC data will be useful far into the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Its not that i personaly votet for building the LHC. Its not that a higgs discovery changed my life.

I don't think that politics are influenced by this at all and building something like an even bigger LHC, ah come on every physicist would love something like that anyway.

</comment><comment><USER54> The biggest problem with modern physics is that it's totally incomprehensible. People want to understand how the world works! The public would support physicists' work a lot more if they understood what was going on.

<comment><USER55> Even physicists would like to have simple explanations instead of all these mind-bending models that they have to work with. If anything, you have to blame nature for being so incomprehensible.

<comment><USER56> I was reminded of an Einstein quote I'd heard multiple times before. Apparently there is some debate over this, but it has been claimed he said that, apart from maths, all physical theories "ought to lend themselves to so simple a description 'that even a child could understand them.'

Other physicists have said similar; while still others, like Feynman, have said what sounds like the opposite.

Source: [https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22410](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/22410)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Physics research has got to focus on commercially viable fusion, that is the most urgent environmental and geopolitical problem facing the West if not the entire world.

<comment><USER58> The commercially viable part will be the most difficult; even if they manage to get more power out of fusion than they put in, and do so in a stable fashion (e.g. always on), even then a reactor will cost in the order of tens of billions to build, and much more to maintain. I'll believe we'll have fusion power within 30-50 years, I can't yet believe it'll be economically viable in that period. It'll have to compete with relatively straightforward means of generating power, like solar. I expect it to be cheaper to just clad every roof in a country with solar panels - and it'll generate more power - than build a fusion reactor.

<comment><USER59> There are good arguments that new superconductors massively lower the cost of fusion. Old projections on the back of ITER are probably too conservative now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> What about serendipitous discoveries then? Research rarely leads to planned breakthroughs.

<comment><USER61> In experimental physics it does.

Two recent planned breakthroughs: Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves, and LIGO detected them in 2016. Bell predicted that entangled quantum particles would exhibit fundamentally nonlocal properties, and in 2015 the first "loophole-free" test demonstrating violation of local realism occurred.

These experiments were done with expectations of a result. That is not to say that they had foregone conclusions, just that there was some phenomenon that the scientists hoped to see, and confirmation one way or the other would be of interest to the community. Most experiments are like this -- of course scientists should keep their eyes open for unexpected discoveries, but in general pursuing expected results is more fruitful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Well, I'm a member of the public and I will _always_ support basic research funding.

<comment><USER63> Since we have limited amounts of money to distribute to all kinds of basic research, you have to ask whether the money needed for a bigger collider might be better spent on say, high temperature superconductors or astrophysics or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> There's a simpler argument in favor of high-powered facilities, but in geopolitics it is hypocritical, bestial and misanthropic: better physics facilities provide strength to intellectual backbone of your nuclear deterent, keeping it reliable, competant and accurate, so things really work if they need to.</comment>


WordPress Caching with Nginx and Redis - <AUTHOR> http://eamann.com/tech/ludicrous-speed-wordpress-caching-with-redis/ <comment><USER2> The whole point of HTTP is to be architected such that intermediate proxies such as Varnish are transparent accelerators.

"I just feel it's overused." — e.g. You wanted to use nginx and Redis, and needed to justify away from the simple solution.

It should be a smell that instead of doing full-page caching in Varnish, you've instead rolled your own full-page application layer caching. Varnish handles POSTs, it handles logins (configured via VCL). This solution is a hack. I applaud your performance, but it's rather nonsensical.

Furthermore, memcached is not difficult to run — it's a single daemon that requires less setup than Redis! And no persistent storage.

Final note: "Redis is an open source flat file database server – meaning it's an optimized key value store for your system." — this is somewhat nonsense. Redis is a fast datastructure-oriented KV store that happens to be able to persist state to disk, but is by no means a 'flat file database server' and I'm not sure how that implies that it's an optimized KV store.

</comment><comment><USER3> You could do exactly the same with nginx or Varnish acting as reverse caching proxies. Cool hack, but nothing I would ever run in production when you have all the other good tools at your disposal. Tools that are proven and that actually scale.

<comment><USER4> Yep, here, Redis is an unnecessary component, since he is caching the entire HTML page it seems, in Redis.

Seems he can accomplish the same with Nginx itself (which he's already using -- though not certain of the details if u are serving PHP via nginx itself too).

There is a place for a Memcached/Redis type role in generating a Wordpress page. Tools like W3 Total cache store certain small elements of the page in Memecached. So, could see Redis being used there. But for blind full page caching, Nginx can do that job.

<comment><USER5> And memcached is not even the best option, using apc with W3 is few times faster than using memcached.

<comment><USER3> You are talking about two different things here. Memcached is a memory store, while APC is a opcode cacher. W3 seems to be a plugin for Wordpress that serves pre-rendered pages using some mod_rewrite trickery.

<comment><USER5> I meant under W3 there are more than one option for cache storage. <http://i.imgur.com/OjbyvF2.png> and APC is faster than memcached in a single server environment [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1794342/memcache-vs- apc-f...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1794342/memcache-vs-apc-f..). I assume that most people using php most likely already have apc installed (or they really should).

<comment><USER6> Most people on WordPress and/or using PHP are on shared servers and thus cannot use APC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Redis doesn't actually provide much here. Use nginx caching directly. That gives you all the nginx cache handling goodies. Then, if its really necessary (probably not) you can put the cache directory into mem with TMPFS.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm sorry but I cannot take this article seriously. Memcached is trivial to install and to set up on all the Linux distributions that I know of. On Ubuntu, it's actually as simple as apt-get install -y memcached. I have set up memcached servers that handle tens of thousands of queries per second and it has never been a concern.

In any event, you're much better off doing full-page caching using tools designed for this task, such as Varnish. As a bonus, you get tools such as varnishtop, varnishlog and varnishstat to monitor your cache.

</comment><comment><USER9> > _I have been working with professionally on the web for over 7 years and > have not once been able to configure Memcached properly._

What were the problems you had with Memcached? Assuming you install it from your distro's respositories, you just need to tweak a configuration file with less than 10 options, the most important option being -m. Unlike Redis, Memcached rarely adds exciting new features, so there's little incentive to compile it yourself.

<comment><USER2> Apparently he hasn't been working very professionally, it's an incredibly easy service to run. I still have the same version of memcached running from 2008.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I 'm curious why you are still invoking PHP and not serving the cached page directly from Redis with Nginx.

I believe that detecting the prescense of cookies, HTTP methods and and request paramters are all supported using the buitlin "if" block and standard HTTP module variables.

</comment><comment><USER11> One thing here I found surprising is the claim that Redis is easier to install than memcached.

Ubuntu or Debian: apt-get install memcached

OS X: brew install memcached

CentOS/Fedora: yum install memcached

They're both essentially one command to install on popular platforms, and both have extremely simple conf files.

</comment><comment><USER12> Since when has memcached been hard to configure, most times I've left it in either the default settings or upped the memory allocation. If you're going to treat Redis like a cache you should really be looking at memcached.

"best of all, it's open source" -- Open Source should never be the tickbox on a feature set that wins over another product. Look what the product provides now and into the future with the less work -- just because you can change or view the source code doesn't mean it's going to grow with you.

</comment><comment><USER13> A gist of the entire Predis library on the blog post? That's a bit… inefficient… to say the least.

<comment><USER14> Its a fucking gist

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> if you're technical enough to set up Redis I'd think you're technical enough to ditch Wordpress silliness and just publish statically.

<comment><USER16> But you might run the blog with someone who isn't. Or be running the blog for someone else. Setting up varnish is another option that's likely even better (didn't read the details of the post, but it looks like it always hits a php script to get the cache).

<comment><USER15> I think integrating wordpress-like administration systems with static publishing systems should be a major goal. That's how movable-type used to work in the old days, and it was great. Now that we have client-side plugins like Disqus for dynamic interactivity features, there's no need for published content to be dynamically rendered. It's all downside and no upside, other than, "wordpress exists".</comment></comment></comment>


HTML5 Presentation - <AUTHOR> http://slides.html5rocks.com/

<comment><USER2> I know this will sound like I've been living in a server room for the past decade, but I'm going to go ahead and say it.

Does this feel _backwards_ to anyone else?

We're building more and more on a layer that wasn't originally constructed to support more than text. I understand that the protocols are changing and that web browsers make a relatively great 'standardized' client platform. But in a world of portable, fast languages that can run anywhere, we still spin up our CPUs to turn HTML into buttons and animations with Javascript. There's something that seems hugely wasteful and contrived (hacky) about building more and more stuff on a mishmash of HTML + Javascript + CSS, when their origin (doing entirely different things) shines through so clearly sometiems.

I don't have a better answer, and I'm not even saying HTML5 is the wrong path, just pondering! Thick client, thin client, etc. mess, of course.

Edit: Upon further thought, it's the relatively high CPU use that bugs me primarily. Obviously, some JS engines are better than others, and I know theres a lot of work in that area. Plus, who's to say that JS CPU cycles aren't a legit performance cost for web apps?

<comment><USER3> Welcome to the word of organic evolution. Yes, it's messy and inefficient - because nobody knows beforehand how things would turn out. In hindsight, it's not rational to entrust junior programmers with single-handed development of initial versions of HTML and Javascript - but it was the only way these things could come out. Big, "rational", committee-driven projects (e.g. The Semantic Web) failed, and it's interesting to speculate why.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't say that the Semantic Web has failed... it's moving slowly, but it's been adopted more and more. These sort of standards seem to have a critical mass kind of life... maybe compounded by the Internet hype machine.

Microframeworks for example have been very effective. I also hope we'll soon have something like FOAF spreading. Even Digg has made much of its context semantic now (check the source code)

<comment><USER3> I meant that it failed to even remotely match the growth rate of organically adopted solutions like HTML and JS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> this has been around here already:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1272481>

</comment><comment><USER4> Wonderful! Seeing all the different pieces of the puzzle in one place has really made me excited again about HTML5.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I particularly like the new range-slider input option, it seem much simpler to use than jQuery UI's range-slider. Which is where I think HTML5 really shines, making things simpler, by putting more functionality into HTML you previously needed JS for.</comment></comment>


What the archives of academic job ads can tell us - <AUTHOR> http://jgoodwin.net/blog/jobs-of-the-mla/

<comment><AUTHOR> The job ads from 1972 are priceless. This one in particular is like something out of a David Foster Wallace novel:

"We may very well have an opening or so for September, 1972. Publications definitely helpful, as is degree from high-ranking school and ability to receive serve in the backhand corner. David Orr, Chairman, English"

</comment><comment><USER2> Does anyone have any idea what crespo and crespulum mean? I checked two of my dead-tree Latin dictionaries and even resorted to an online search and came up empty. This is going to stick in my craw for a while until I can sort it out. Any other Latinists out there with ideas?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was wondering the same thing. Crespare means "to curl" in Italian. So it means... Who will curl the curly? I suspect it's some sort of pun on a well- known Latin phrase, but I have no idea what it would be.

<comment><USER3> Don't be misled: the -are and -ire endings mark different conjugations (per my other comment, a Latin "crespare" would have become "créper" in French, which means "frizz" or "crimp" and is thus almost certainly cognate to your Italian word, but not to the "crespit" of the OP).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why make every reader click through to the twitter feed? At the very least, you could embed a screenshot of the twitter post but it would seem simpler to link direct to the image.

<comment><USER5> You're probably blocking social media and/or tracking on sites. If you access the site with none of that, the author's Twitter posts are seen on the blog post itself. If you are blocking it, you get the the plain text version with a link instead of the image. It's the equivalent of the alt attribute in for the <img> HTML tag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> MLA = Modern Language Association of America

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Language_Association](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Language_Association)

The JIL is the recognized professional source for announcements of full-time faculty positions available in the fields of English and foreign languages in North American colleges and universities

[http://www.mla.org/resources/jil](http://www.mla.org/resources/jil)

</comment><comment><USER7> For anyone curious about sampling effects, a scan of the December 1972 MLA Job Information List is at [http://rid.olfo.org/doc/mlajilocr/jil_eng_1972_12-OCR.pdf](http://rid.olfo.org/doc/mlajilocr/jil_eng_1972_12-OCR.pdf) . (This is the one that contains the Latin that bartonfink and others are curious about; p50, ordered by ZIP code.)

</comment><comment><USER8> Why are we looking at the twitter feed? Just so there is some kind of graphic?

The way I'm reading this, the write up should have been an imgur submission of ad snippets posted on reddit.

</comment><comment><USER9> Imaging a $1M salary being common in 40 years!

<comment><USER10> True, and a house in a good neighborhood will cost 10 million.</comment></comment>


Crusoe at the Crossroads - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/crusoe-at-the-crossroads <comment> mark-r I read Robinson Crusoe in probably 5th grade, and found it nearly impenetrable. I should find a copy and try again; I assume it's available through Project Gutenberg.

<comment><USER2> It is, and it's a pretty easy read, especially relative to other texts of the era —- a good page-turner, actually.</comment></comment>


Your team might not need Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/faun/your-team-might-not-need-kubernetes-57240e8d554a <comment><USER2> Whilst I think we will all agree that a lot of / most teams do not need to use Kubernetes, is there not advantages in actual team satisfaction and development?

Kubernetes is a hot thing, and people want to use, understand it, and become experts in it. Mostly for professional reasons yes, but it will help attract talent, and will likely help with retention.

So I see it as a bit of a trade off. You might have higher infra costs, and a more complex system (and the things that go with that), but you arguably have a happier team aiding retention and hiring which also has a financial value.</comment>


Apple tried to stop Steve Jobs story - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=26900

<comment><USER2> "Workers on sensitive projects have to pass through many layers of security. Once at their desks or benches, they are monitored by cameras and they must cover up devices with black cloaks and turn on red warning lights when they are uncovered."

That takes paranoia to a whole new level. I would not want to work in a place like that. Apple makes nice stuff, but from a company that came from 'openness' they are now the total antipode.</comment>


Believing without evidence is always morally wrong - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/ideas/believing-without-evidence-is-always-morally-wrong <comment><USER3> Adhering to this, would make experimentation difficult in many fields. I am not a fan. Taking action, even if there's no evidence, in the service of the preservation of life is moral. It may not be effective (or net positive effect), but the place of sacrifice is a different moral question.

</comment><comment><USER4> I disagree with this. Intuition is powerful evolved trait in humans, and often times has valuable information. Many believes furthermore, can only be evidenced by intuition. Logic in western countries has really dominated the culture for a long time now, and their are disastrous effects I think on the west because of it. You need logic and intuition to be whole, and you need beliefs based in facts and in feeling, not just one.

I also have to say, that their are some things that believing in without evidence makes your life significantly better. Believing in a meaning of life even though there is no evidence at all to support it is one example, and I don't know how anyone would function without that belief.

<comment><USER5> Plenty of people function very well without believing in a notion of objective meaningfulness.

<comment><USER4> No they don't. I have met a large amount of people. Even the nihilists believe in some sort of meaning. Furthermore, it is literally impossible to function without a believe in something meaningful, which can not be backed up by evidence given we have no facts to evidence that any action, animal, thing, matters at all or has any meaning.

Just waking up the morning and brushing your teeth is the acknowledgment that your teeth are meaningful and that your health is meaningful. Even if you are purely hedonistic you acknowledge that your pain and pleasure is meaningful.

If you are a functioning human you believe that there is meaning, and that is a belief that can not be backed up by any sort of conclusive evidence.

<comment><USER6> Sure they do. The examples you gave are all for subjective meaningfulness - <USER2> teeth, my health, my pain and pleasure are all very meaningful to me, but at the same time I know they are meaningless in the grand scheme of things and I'm fine with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the author missed an opportunity at the end, when threading the role of AI/decision-making with respect to our lives...

Our behavior in society is fluid and dynamic. And so the extent to which data gets used to influence our future can, and should also reflect our changing values and beliefs.

The caveat is: what's the lag behind to which automated systems accurately reflect our beliefs of what's right and wrong?

Things like the semantics of words change regularly, at least in English.

And so is it safe to assume and believe that systems using "big data" accurately project and reflect society within a given moment of time?

</comment><comment><USER8> ...the irony of a director at GS lecturing about right/wrong.

</comment><comment><USER9> >Add the wrong ingredients into the Big Data recipe, and what you'll get is a potentially toxic output.

Shouldn't the Big Data algorithms apply the same principles?

</comment><comment><USER10> If only more "journalists" thought about this before reporting things.</comment>


Domaining - Insure.com sells for $16mm - <AUTHOR> http://www.elliotsblog.com/insure-com-sells-for-16-million-7361

<comment><USER2> That's a nice ROI.

Anybody interested in a nice two letter domain for a fraction of that ;) ?

<comment><USER3> you should go through a list of companies with WW in them and start pitching them to buy your company + domain. Get them to do an auction to drive up the price

       Weight Watchers
       WW Grainger, Inc
       William Wrigley Jr. Company
       Watson Wyatt Worldwide
       W_____ W____ _________

<comment><USER2> This first part is pretty obvious, I have a long list of such names, but I'm not sure how to go about an actual sale, the auction sounds like a good idea, thank you!

<comment><USER4> Look for the email I just sent you if you're interested in trying to get it auctioned off.

<comment><USER5> Could you tell me too, please? A friend of mine has asked me to help him sell a three character .com domain name and I don't know how. What do you think it would go for?

<comment><USER4> I know that Moniker does this exact kind of auctions. You could just start at <http://domainauctions.moniker.com/how_to_sell> and try to find them through their website. Or email my user name at gmail.com and I can ask internally (they are owned by the same company that owns my employer) for who you can get in contact with there behind the scenes. Of course I may be told that people are supposed to go through the website, though that is less likely if the domain name is a really good one. :-)

<comment><USER5> Thank you!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dear Co-Founder - <AUTHOR> http://www.64notes.com/dear-co-founder-open-letter-to-your-co-founder <comment><USER2> It looks like a proposal mail, full of emotions. Being an entrepreneur, totally understand the point that a co-founder is not less than a spouse.

IMHO even after reading this, he/she does not want to continue, you should stay separate for good & concentrate on the venture. Co-founders are like boyfriend/girlfriend, you dont look for one, but find one on the way :).

Wish you, your co-founder & the venture - best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Champ Kind: The bottom line is you've been spending a lot of time with this lady, Ron. You're a member of the Channel Four News Team.

Ron Burgundy: That's a given.

Champ Kind: We need you. Hell, I need you. I'm a mess without you. I miss you so damn much! I miss being with you. I miss being _near_ you. I miss your laugh!

Champ Kind: I miss your scent.

Champ Kind: I miss your musk... When this all gets sorted out, I think you and me should get an apartment together!

Brian Fantana: Take it easy, Champ. Why don't you sit this next one out, stop talking for a while.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's poetic but does make a lot of sense. Nice one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can't help. I am poetic soul :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If I got a letter like this from someone that I wasn't dating for a while I would be totally creeped out.

</comment><comment><USER6> I found the phrasing uncomfortably mushy/emotional despite agreeing with the message.</comment>


Finds New Gamers to Squad Up With - <AUTHOR> http://www.recruit.gg <comment><AUTHOR> Built with no-code.</comment>


MIT Developers Plan Collapsible Car for City Driving - <AUTHOR> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,308636,00.html <comment><USER2> There has been a lot of buzz about this, but I would predict that it catches on much more quickly in asia; Americans like their individuality, and to own their own things, maybe if zipcar does better these would catch on, but in a midwest _cough_ metropolis.. I still don't know anyone who uses our shared car service (flexcar).</comment>


Scott Adams: The Problem With the Economy - <AUTHOR> http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_problem_with_the_economy/

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one who's pretty much always under-whelmed by Scott Adams blog posts?

I feel like if this had been written by a nobody, it would never have gotten any attention here.

<comment><USER3> _"... It doesn't seem to matter what applications I use. And closing applications doesn't free up memory. This has been true on every computer I have owned, both Macs and PCs. Rebooting periodically is the only temporary fix. To which I say, "SERIOUSLY?? WTF???? IS THIS REALLY AN UNSOLVEABLE PROBLEM, LIKE FRICKIN' GRAVITY???" ..."_

Though not perfect solution, Web Apps try to address this problem. One reason to read articles is they simultaneously show how crap desktop application (and operating system) software can be and how difficult it is to make good software. The ability to hold two contradictory statements in ones head is difficult but necessary. To understand why Adams wrote the post and find a solution is a recipe for Startups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how much these problems are problems of information. The reason printers are crap is that most people buy them based on 1) price, and 2) listed features. As a result, manufacturers optimize for these. If people understood that most of the listed features would never work, the paper would constantly jam, the drivers would never be updated, toner/ink would be expensive, installing the printer would require adding lots of stupid software to windows, they would probably pick a more expensive printer with less features that actually works.

<comment><USER5> I have a HP 4100 laser printer at home for just the reasons you mentioned. Unlike consumer-oriented printers, it's marketed to IT managers who have to internalize all the pain associated with such purchases. These buyers ask the right questions.

I'd love to see hardware manufacturers offer SLAs on driver availability. "Support for all MSFT non-EOL publicly available OSes through 12/2013" or something similar. The actual quality of the drivers would be much harder to quantify.

The information asymmetry problem is really hard to solve for the "it just works" meta-feature. Could someone build a site that features it-just-works products in various categories? How could one crowd-source this information? When I tell people to buy a five year-old printer off eBay because it's the most reliable thing out there, they think I'm nuts.

<comment><USER6> Here's a site of product reviews that have a focus on quality and no emphasis on newness, i.e. things that just work. <http://kk.org/cooltools/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of either Scott Adams or I is really ignorant of the furniture market. I've bought

* A bed * Bookshelves * A table * Chairs * A desk * A couch

And I've never had to wait more than a week for delivery. The chairs, table, bookshelves, and bed were available to take immediately. In what universe do you have to wait 2 months for furniture?

<comment><USER8> Do you buy cheap stuff, IKEA or similar? It's really a different market if you do.

<comment><USER9> I bought a dining set from a furniture company in Canada through a retailer here in the Bay Area. It took 2 weeks to get delivered, then I had to return one item and get a replacement, which also took about 2 weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sorry, had to stop reading when he was complaining about his computers. My vista and linux machines can pretty much run forever without any memory problems. I'm pretty sure OSX is the same way.

<comment><USER11> Same here (OSX and Linux). I had to go and double-check the date of the article when I read that line. Are people really still having this problem with modern operating systems?

<comment><USER12> Yes. You can apt-get or ports as many well-reviewed opens source packages are you like without problems, but when was the last time you downloaded any Windows shareware/freeware?

But for a normal person who wants to make a photo album or bingo cards, or have a nice screensaver, their first thought is to go to the internet and download a program. This is the problem.

Your or I would first:

1\. See if the web site seemed legit. 2\. Rule out anything with lots of Google adware or image ads 3\. Find an open-source version.

But the crappy scammer site seems about par for the internet course to this person, so they download it and soon have viruses and registry entries that crowd out all their actual programs.

This happens every three or six months on a Windows computer run by a normal person, and is a huge part of why the iPad and its closed ecosystem is going to eventually take over the consumer market unless Linux geeks get serious about usability.

<comment><USER11> Wow. I remember XP being this way, but I kinda figured it was a solved problem with Vista/Win7 by now. I haven't had to do any Windows hand-holding since I got my parents an iMac about 5 years ago.

I'm feeling something that's not quite schadenfreude, but certainly along the lines having dodged a bullet with that move. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think if you ignore his specific technical examples, he has a good point, that perception is being sold mostly and firstly, not reality.

<comment><USER14> And that's the way things have always been. This is not some new development. Look at newspaper ads from 80 years ago.

I'm a bit of a curmudgeon, but I'm not old enough yet to insist that _everything_ was better back in my day.

<comment><USER8> Some of it's sampling bias. The stuff from your day that is still around was better. You've forgotten the cheap crap that fell apart long since.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's a depressing thing. Too many people (me included) are working on software or to correct problems caused by software and it is not really that important.

</comment><comment><USER16> For a rant about poor quality products, the knock about _delivery times of furniture_ is totally out of place.

Five or ten years down the line, when the legs _aren't_ falling off because you purchased a decent quality item, are you really going to care that it took two extra weeks to deliver? And how often are you even ordering furniture?

What an odd product category to use for that example.

<comment><USER5> Agree (although I accidentally down-modded you). There are many ways to measure quality, and timeliness of availability is certainly one. For a kid in a dorm room who just wants a particle board bookshelf, waiting two months would be absurd. However, I wanted some nice oak bookshelves for my office, and I wouldn't mind waiting a couple of months if they were otherwise what I desired.

<comment><USER17> Right with you on the custom furniture thing. Most skilled crafts-people are booked for months ahead.

The ones that I know don't want to scale because then they would not be making furniture, they would be running a business.

Interestingly, a furniture 'startup' is frequently a vehicle for one person to make a living doing what they love. Often after years of working as a professional in another field making money for the family, building a nest egg, tooling up, honing their skills and trying to develop a reputation and market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> To be _extremely_ charitable, he is at best describing symptoms of the problems with the economy, not the problem itself.

</comment><comment><USER19> I run _gasp_ windows vista at work. I've never had to reboot my computer due to memory problems. It'll run for two or 3 weeks before our admin makes us reboot for windows update reasons....</comment>


Ask HN: How to exploit Linux notebooks? - <AUTHOR> So all of you have probably read or heard about the CIA leak that says that the CIA compromises TVs, smartphones and not only Windows and Mac computers, but also Linux computers.
Now my understand is that my particular notebook is rather secure against any remote attack: my browser doesn't launch java programs/applets, I don't have flash installed, my email client (mu4e) doesn't run code from attachments, there are almost (!) no services running (postfix, cupsd and sshd are an exception) - so how the hack does the CIA (or anybody else for that matter) get into my notebook?
I would assume that either my browsers (chromium or firefox) have security holes that I am unaware of or... or what?
Attacking the Linux kernel on IP level? Using electromagnetic waves to flip bits on my SSDs?
Please post as many ideas and details as you have - I would like to summarise this thread later to make a list of things to be done for other Linux users to secure their desktop / notebook system.
Let's not focus on the physical aspects, as going to a computer and changing stuff physically, even with a partially encrypted drive, is rather easy and cannot be easily prevented. <comment><USER2> For a three letter agency or a state sponsored entity, the way to exploit a Linux notebook would be to exploit Unix and C and various utilities at the source code level starting in the 1970's. To have not done so would have been professionally incompetent. To not continue to do so today would also be.

Even if one does not believe that Bell Labs and MIT are part and parcel of the military industrial complex, Naval Research Labs from whence came Tor and DARPA from whence came the internet are undeniably so. If you're not a baby boomer or possibly early GenX, odds are your computer was basically PWND before you were born. Consider that the ARPA net lacked most all the security features considered essential on modern networks but the motivations to snoop computers were very similar to those today.

That does not mean that security won't reduce ordinary exploits, but agencies like the NSA and KGB have office buildings full of Moxie Marlinspike's working 9-5 year in and year out to obtain signals intelligence. They work in a context where there are billions of dollars to fund research and nearly a century of institutional knowledge backed by patriotic zeal.

<comment><USER3> Well that would have to be the case not only for Linux, but Windows, etc. There are far more Windows systems, so the odds are that finding "useful" information is even higher.

<comment><USER2> Yep. And the folks in China would be slackers if they weren't putting back doors as devices roll down the assembly line (likewise for manufacturing accessible to US interests).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A well secured Linux computer, especially when behind a robust firewall would probably not be easy to compromise, if at all. An well secured OpenBSD system is likely to be even more resilient.

Since Linux is used by Android and shipped as many different distros, in a general sense, there probably are a multitude of security holes. IoT devices are even more of a concern. The problems with these Linux deployments is not with Linux kernel nor GNU utilities per se, but with the insecure configuration and poorly written apps.

You are probably referring to (almost-)fake news articles, by sloppy journalists. They rarely research properly their topics, nor do they provide suitable caveats. Sensationalism wins the day for them.</comment>


Show HN: Archive websites from the command line - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm sorry, I'm not seeing any link or other content here.

What am I missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for pointing this out. I'll resubmit.</comment></comment>


India's Answer to Uber, Ola Takes $210M Led by Softbank at $1B Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2014/10/27/olacabs-softbank-india/

<comment><USER2> I was in Bangalore once. Traffic is like hell. Hard to imagine such a service in big cities. But at least you wont get screwed by the auto-drivers.</comment>


Ask HN: What to do when you realize your startup is a clone? - <AUTHOR> I've been working on something for a few weeks and realizing that I essentially have to clone another service before I can provide my differentiating value.<p>Would you let that stop you? Would you do anything differently knowing that? <comment><USER2> Well if you didn't know this at the start then 1, you didn't do your homework and 2, you came up with it independently. Which means other will too.

I wouldn't let it stop you, just because someone had an idea first doesn't mean you can't do it better.

</comment><comment><USER3> Keep working. Almost every startup is a clone. Almost every mega-successful large company (Coca-Cola, for example) was a clone -- we just haven't heard of the original product that they cloned.

Figure out what makes users of the other product unhappy and fix it for them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Definitely not.

Find your niche and solve the problem the other company isn't solving or solving well.

Over time your product will differentiate where your customers tell you to go.

</comment><comment><USER5> Be unique. Be different in your approach. Learn about your competition -- become a customer and see what they are doing wrong. Is it the product? Is it customer service? Is it the UI/UX? There is ALWAYS room for improvement. Where they fail.. is where you can win. Everyone loves alternatives. I do it all the time: I take a look at something and think: Can I create a similar clone of this? How can this be improved? How can I create this very same product, offer it for cheaper, yet still be able to profit off of it?

Is that mean of me? Because that is how capitalism (and globalism) works. DuckDuckGo and Bing exist because Google is not perfect. Microsoft and Apple. Yahoo and Google. YouTube has Vimeo. Microsoft Word and OpenOffice. Twilio and Plivo. Internet Explorer and Maxthon and Chrome and Firefox. Xfinity and DirecTV and Dish. T-Mobile and Verizon and AT&T and Sprint.

The list is endless for "clones" and "alternatives".

Most developers make this common mistake when they think about creating something: "I want to make the next Facebook."

Horrible statement. Worst idea ever. You have already diminished your potential by even thinking that. This is not to say that you shouldn't aim for something _like_ Facebook, but don't try to become _the next Facebook_ when it already has a history of being strong and persevering, especially when one of the very top companies, Google, went against them and lost. That is a huge lesson for all developers to learn and practice caution. Facebook has its place in history and it will continue for many years. You will end up wasting years of your life trying to be like Facebook. Google should have approached Google Plus differently and instead of trying to be the clone, have provided a more unique experience for using Google Plus. Facebook is good at a lot of things, but they aren't good at everything. Focus on those things that Facebook really can't be good at... or any company for that matter.

I am currently working on several web applications where there are dozens of those same web platforms that already exist, and I have to remind myself of why I continue: Because I am doing it differently. Because I am targeting a different audience. Because I am different. For example, my competition mainly focuses on small and large businesses. I prefer to focus on individuals, startups, and small businesses. They might offer a sass while I might offer a paygo system. There are so many things you can do that make you stand out and be different from your competition.

If I were to acquire some big businesses or anyone looking for alternatives and leaving my competition, than I'm glad I was there as that alternative company they could turn to because they were upset with their normal service. If they leave me, than I know I must improve my services.

Never let anyone stop you from doing you. Have confidence in yourself and your work. Your personality is what helps make you unique and different and it is what makes people want to try your product or use you as an alternative. The one rule that most companies forget once they become big: Everyone wants to be treated as a human being, not a number. The Zappos company can attest to that.</comment>


Announcing Gatsby Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://www.gatsbyjs.org/blog/2019-11-14-announcing-gatsby-cloud/ <comment><USER2> Crazy love React, but Gatsby has just some strange air about it. Really tried to like but can't - something tells me there's a huge red flag hidden...

<comment><USER3> I mean, it's a great framework if you're building a static web page and you want the flexibility of using React. If you want to serve up dynamic apps with server rendered content, Next.js (also React based) might be a better choice. Or a traditional SPA (as shown in Create React App) is fine for a lot of use cases, too.

<comment><USER4> I agree with this. Static Blogs with Gatsby are incredible once you get past the mental overhead. I chose before hand to do static sites for my blog just for pricing and security reasons. With Gatsby you can do compile time queries to your static files through GraphQL and display content based off your files and their metadata, this means you can do things like automatic tagging and article's in series all with mainly markdown files with metadata, the occasional React page, and some js config files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Our WTL Studio builder is also bootstrapped with Gatsby [https://wtlstudio.com/](https://wtlstudio.com/) Although now that I see Gatsby Cloud pricing, we may want to bump our rookie numbers, too... ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)</comment>


NET and WebAssembly ,Is This the Future of the Fronten - <AUTHOR> https://www.hanselman.com/blog/NETAndWebAssemblyIsThisTheFutureOfTheFrontend.aspx <comment><USER2> Hmm... Sounds really interesting but WebAssembly doesn't have GC so porting dotNET applications there wouldn't be as straightforward as it seems.</comment>


Code Monkey Island - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rajsidhu/code-monkey-island-making-programming-childs-play

<comment><USER2> It's a neat name, but I wonder if rights holders to Monkey Island will ask for a change?</comment>


Show HN: PromLens – The query builder, analyzer, and explainer for PromQL - <AUTHOR> https://promlens.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Check out [https://promlens.com/?l=OTuO7josUeU](https://promlens.com/?l=OTuO7josUeU) for an example of a shared page with some queries, and [https://promlens.com/features](https://promlens.com/features) for an overview of PromLens features.</comment>


Voluntary Human Extinction Movement - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement <comment><USER2> Voluntary Human Extinction is unnecessary..

The earth will be a red Giant in about 5 billion years and fry the earth anyway

<comment><USER3> I think (human) life will be impossible much sooner than that, something like in 1 billion years (can't remember where I read that).

The problem I see with VHEM is that only the people that believe humanity is harmful to the earth will cease to reproduce. Meanwhile the others that are busy mating.</comment></comment>


Magic PNG Thumbnails - <AUTHOR> http://thume.ca/projects/2012/11/14/magic-png-files/ <comment> martin-adams I saw an excellent use of this recently here:

[https://mobile.twitter.com/SciencePorn/status/63454773027106...](https://mobile.twitter.com/SciencePorn/status/634547730271064064?s=09)

<comment><USER2> I see no difference.

<comment><USER3> Try the non-mobile link: [https://twitter.com/SciencePorn/status/634547730271064064](https://twitter.com/SciencePorn/status/634547730271064064)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could someone explain why this image is flickering on my MacBook Air screen?

[http://thume.ca/assets/postassets/doubleVision/out.png](http://thume.ca/assets/postassets/doubleVision/out.png)

Especially "ze first" image as seen in FF and Chrome.

I suppose it is related to how monitors use temporal dithering to fake 24 bit colors when they really have 18 bits per pixel, but why is it more apparent on this kind of picture?

Is it a perceptual issue or a technical one?

It is also apparent when using Windows XP under virtualization. Some windows have checkerboard patterns that flicker.

<comment><USER5> Here's a page with a test and a potential explanation [http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/inversion.php](http://www.lagom.nl/lcd- test/inversion.php)

<comment><USER6> More detailed explanations:

[http://www.mvkonnik.info/2009/04/brief-note-about-lcd- displa...](http://www.mvkonnik.info/2009/04/brief-note-about-lcd- displays.html)

[http://www.solomon- systech.com/files/ck/files/Application%20...](http://www.solomon- systech.com/files/ck/files/Application%20Notes/TFT%20Flickering%20Application%20Note_1.1.pdf)

tl;dr: the liquid crystals in LCDs need to be driven with AC voltage to prevent electrolysis degradation. This is known as "inversion" and there are different patterns used. If the magnitude of the + voltage is different from the - voltage, i.e. the "common" voltage Vcom is not exactly in the middle, the subpixels change brightness slightly on each cycle and this causes flicker. The flickering becomes much more noticeable if the pattern displayed in the image matches the inversion pattern.

Neither of my (nearly 10 years old now... but still working well) LCD monitors flicker on all the images, so this is something that shouldn't be occurring on a good monitor. I suppose manufacturers now are relaxing the tolerances to save cost, justifying it by the fact that flickering is not observable on "most" (debatable) content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Someone needs to apply this to the photo of the white-gold/blue-black dress image to really fuck with the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER8> I saw someone do something similar in ye olde days of Gravatar. It abused their resizing algorithm to get different images at different scales. It was very simple (and probably couldn't have worked if it was much more complicated) - just the text `i++` on a noisy background. But when scaled it turned into `i--`. In both cases, it was very readable.

</comment><comment><USER9> It is really an unfortunate over-engineering in the PNG format to include gamma correction. So many problems would have been avoided if PNGs just stored RGB values and let the renderer/OS/driver/screen decide how to display it. Trying to do gamma correction based on various guesses about screens just lead to jarring color inconsistencies.

Here is great article about it. It is a few years old, so some of the problems are fixed now. [https://hsivonen.fi/png-gamma/](https://hsivonen.fi/png- gamma/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone else remember an old libpng hack that distinguish IE, Firefox and WinXP? exact one PNG file, viewed differently on each.

Sorry my Google-fu failed and I can't find the link.

<comment><USER11> Not exactly what you mentioned, but reminded me of this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/glitch_art/comments/1buu5k/this_jpe...](https://www.reddit.com/r/glitch_art/comments/1buu5k/this_jpeg_glitches_differently_in_each_web/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> as seen on 4chan

<comment><USER6> I also saw it on 4chan first, a long time ago, but I'd bet this trick has been around for many years before that. The gamma of 0.023 also seems to have been the de-facto way to do this.

Here's a good illustration that shows how the pixel values of the 2 images have been "compressed" into two separate ranges:

[https://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/boards/g/img/0244/57/13...](https://archive.rebeccablacktech.com/boards/g/img/0244/57/1335397543121.jpg)</comment></comment>


Show HN: TerrainVer – Generate Worms-Style Cartoon Terrain in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://juliango202.com/terrainver/ <comment><USER2> this is a pretty faithful reproduction. I like it! a lot of solid pointers to great algorithms in here.

\- perlin noise: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perlin_noise) for generating terrain bumps

\- flood fill for painting terrain on top of noise : [http://lodev.org/cgtutor/floodfill.html#Scanline_Floodfill_A...](http://lodev.org/cgtutor/floodfill.html#Scanline_Floodfill_Algorithm_With_Stack)

\- convolutions with webgl shaders [https://github.com/phoboslab/WebGLImageFilter](https://github.com/phoboslab/WebGLImageFilter)

\- dilation filter

\- "closing" in image processing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closing_(morphology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closing_\(morphology\))

\- deciding in the hqx algorithm for anti aliasing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hqx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hqx)

\- texturing

\- halton sequences for even distribution of worms [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_sequence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_sequence)

\- sine wave for water

all done in the browser.

github repo at [https://github.com/juliango202/TerrainVer](https://github.com/juliango202/TerrainVer)

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent demo.

I've been working on a procedural terrain generator for fun. Voxel-based. Just big chunks of 16x16x256 sections. Like minecraft.

My goal is create a function that will take any 3D integer coordinate and output a particular type of block for that coordinate... be it air, granite, dirt, etc.

The constraint, however, is that the only knowledge the function has is the coordinate; that is, it has no knowledge of adjoining blocks.

The second constraint -- (because one can never trust floating point) -- is to have the function (and the requisite RNG) use only integers between 0 and 100,000 with no calculations that involve fractions. This constrain is to guarantee that with a given seed, the same terrain will be generated on any system. Rolling hills and mountains and caves and all the typical minecraft kinda stuff is trivial. But, I'm trying to get my magical black-box function to create buildings with walls, windows, etc. that's trickier.

Have you come across anything like this?

<comment><USER4> Why no fractions? If you are worried about loss of precision caused by floating-point numbers, you can use exact fractions. For instance, there is "mpq" in GMP (for C), the "fractions" module in Python's stdlib, or you could hand-write a small fractions library yourself.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It's a sort of silly constraint. Not truly necessary. But, there are other aspects of the project that make it much easier to completely and utterly do away with floating point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The fact that all of the illustrations in the article update when you generate a new terrain is neat attention to detail :) Good article, thanks for it and for open sourcing your code!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for noticing :) This article actually started as a debug page where I displayed all the images to see what was wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love this. Recreating old games makes you really appreciate the techniques and effort put into even the small things that one often takes for granted. Doing it yourself is a great way to learn real-world applications of abstract math/compsci algorithms.

I hope others build on this in the future and add the worms gameplay mechanics. One of my favorite games when I was younger.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great! About 6 years ago I created a worms destructible terrain using canvas. Still up on my website all these years later, no promises on code quality though :)

[http://jastanton.com/experiments/Destructible- Terrain/](http://jastanton.com/experiments/Destructible-Terrain/)

<comment><USER8> My unfinished clone: [https://kmbaragona.gitlab.io/volley/](https://kmbaragona.gitlab.io/volley/)

WebGL (three.js) based. Keyboard input, arrow keys + space to fire. (no use on any mobile device) Terrain operations are done on vector svg-like objects, not pixels or polygons. Physics is also done in vector space. Terrain is converted to polygons just before rendering.

Was kind of fun :) With the right terrain the physics let you drive your tank round and round in a loop with centripetal force.</comment></comment>


Let's learn from Patagonia - <AUTHOR> https://msadowski.github.io/lets-learn-from-patagonia/ <comment><AUTHOR> I decided to buy Let My People Go Surfing after someone recommended it on HN. At that point I didn't even know what Patagonia was but after reading this book I can say that it was the most impactful business book I've read.

If anyone of you read this book I'm very curious about your opinions!</comment>


Ask HN: What do you do to make normal people more productive? - <AUTHOR>

I've read blogs after blogs about the absolute need to hire "rock star programmers" or the "best of the best" and what you need to do to make them productive.
That's cool and all but I want to hire normal and average people.  People who are just your average day to day programmer/developer/analysts/accountant/etc.
What techniques are there to make NORMAL people more productive in their jobs? <comment><USER2> Do everything in your power to communicate clearly, including making sure your employees know that they are expected to ask ?'s if they aren't sure of something. The cost of an average employee isn't necessarily paid in the fact that they work more slowly than the superstar - it's that they aren't sure what to do and either do the wrong thing or spend time spinning their wheels trying to figure out what the right thing is. If you can circumvent that through excellent communication, you can effectively farm out your own intelligence (assuming you are, in fact, intelligent) and get by with less intelligent employees.

</comment><comment><USER3> Being a developer I've worked closely with lots of other developers, and been on both sides of this equation; Sometimes I'm the 'normal guy' and sometimes I'm the 'rock star' depending who I'm sitting with.

As the 'normal guy' I observe what tools they are using, how they navigate them and what they are doing, because often times we both know the language equally or close to equal yet have a different selection in tools to aid the development process either 'go to' libraries or editors.

As the 'rock star' I may interrupt the developer to show them a faster way to do the same thing, either algorithm or editor functions. Because face it, the only thing that makes you a rock star is that you can get it done faster and more efficient then the other guy.

<comment><USER3> Yet you have to have 'rock star' qualities to even want to learn IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him put on his swimming suit

try to understand what the horse wants to do ... try to help the horse be more productive doing what he wants to do ... don't try to get your normal horse into your abnormal swim suit

<comment><USER4> Hire the right person for the job ... sometimes you have hired the wrong person; it happens a lot; help that wrong person find his right job as rapidly as possible ... pay him to quit (Zappos-style) if that's what it takes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why do you need to pay them to quit?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Put them around ABnormal people that are more productive.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would take a page from Google's play-book and feed them well. Good food has health benefits, it's a bonding experience, and lots of people really don't cook well or do a good job taking care of themselves. Taking care of them in this manner can be good for the bottom line.

My current supervisor buys us lunch when she wants us to work through lunch because we are behind. I think she's got the right idea. It doesn't necessarily have to be "free food" per se the way Google does it but anything you can do to help your people eat well is going to be a good thing.</comment>


MindCuber for Lego Mindstorms EV3 - <AUTHOR> http://mindcuber.com/ <comment><USER2> Oh dear, looks like I really need to get my dad to redesign his website</comment>


Sqlize: Command line utility to uppercase your SQL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/johnmarinelli/BILLYMAYSQL <comment><AUTHOR> hey all! here is a quick little gem I made to transform my SQL/PostgreSQL scripts to uppercase. I also had a lot of fun with the README. In fact, I probably had _more_ fun with the README.

I'm a Rails dev turned data sherpa so I spend a lot of time writing SQL now, and am too lazy to constantly shift my pinky over to the caps lock, so I wrote this.

Contributions are always welcome - I would love to add more PostgreSQL (and any other DB system)'s keywords. This is pretty easy; all it takes is a json array in sqlize/keywords directory and a simple class.</comment>


Gawker Reaches Settlement with Hulk Hogan for $31M - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdrange/2016/11/02/gawker-media-close-to-reaching-settlement-with-hulk-hogan/ <comment><USER2> Quoting Nick Denton, "As the most unpalatable part of the deal, three true stories — about Hulk Hogan, the claim by Shiva Ayyadurai that he invented email and the feud between the founders of Tinder — are being removed from the web."

The Shiva Ayyadurai "INVENTOR OF EMAIL!!!" thing is especially egregious and shouldn't be forgotten.

[http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2012/05/shiva-ayyaduri- email-u...](http://www.bostonmagazine.com/2012/05/shiva-ayyaduri-email-us- postal-service/)</comment>


Custom Elements Coming to WebKit - <AUTHOR> https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2016-March/027995.html <comment><USER2> My interest in custom elements has waned because it doesn't have an answer for server-side rendering.

Has there been any work towards that?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think server-side rendering is a bit of a red herring. What matters is how fast you can get to first paint. Executing some client-side JavaScript to get the DOM setup for first-paint is fine, as long as the payload delivery + render time is fast, and it can be really fast, especially when you create custom elements optimized for first paint.

Custom elements are a very good compression format: you define a element once, and use it over and over, each time saving space over having had written out the whole component definition. In cases of heavily reused elements, the size of the definition + per-element savings * number of instances will be an overall reduction in wire size.

Thinking of elements in term of compression is useful to me, when considering server-side rendering: Server-side rendering is a bit like taking a compressed file, decompressing it on the server, sending it to the client, and then recompressing it on the client. That clearly doesn't make sense with regards to audio and video, so it should raise questions about markup too.

Just like other uses of compression, you need the size reduction to be large enough, and the decompression speed to be fast enough, to realize an overall improvement. The key for custom element libraries will be creating small, fast, first paint optimized feature sets that the critical content can be written in, so that the initial view is actually faster than server-side rendering.

In addition to that view (which isn't universal, for sure!), and some work in Polymer for extremely lightweight elements, there's also work in Polymer towards enabling more traditional optimizations: one is that in Polymer 1.3 you can create an un-upgraded element (the tag in markup, but no registered definition for it), set up children, properties, attributes and event listeners, and when the definition is loaded and the element upgraded, all the existing data is wired in properly. This lets an app do lazy loading on an element-defintion basis. We're also looking at how an element could do a similar thing for it's shadow root: recognize that the shadow root is already rendered and just attached to it, rather than re-stamp it. These primitives are some of the most important needed for server-side rendering.

<comment><USER3> There are two main benefits to server-side rendering:

\- time to first paint is faster on CPU-constrained devices (e.g. low-end phones), and

\- interoperability with non-JS-powered UAs (like robots)

I believe a big part of the desire for server-side rendering is a fear that search performance may be penalized if a crawler doesn't speak JavaScript, or tries to crawl the page when it's not in a state a human user would consider stable. I know there's been work done on Googlebot to make it correctly interpret client-rendered pages. If you could confidently say "Using Web Components will not have a negative affect on your search ranking; Googlebot can crawl and understand Web Components at least as well as traditional HTML elements," it would allay many of the concerns about WC, especially with regard to server-side rendering.

<comment><USER2> Even on high-end hardware it's hard to hit 200ms first paint doing purely client rendering. Even when using a CDN. Would love to be proven wrong here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can we realistically expect widespread browser support of web components by the second half of 2017?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm optimistic that we'll see pretty widespread support, maybe 3 of the 4 major engines, by the end of 2016, with the 4th following shortly. The face- to-face meetings have gone extremely well, and all browsers are pretty motivated to ship quickly.

The Web Component polyfills and Polymer will also be updated to support the new versions of the standards.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The title change to "Prototyping Custom Elements API" from "Custom Elements Coming to WebKit" is not accurate.

The linked email was a reply to an old thread about prototyping Custom Element API, but the actual email is about starting the _real_ implementation.</comment>