Don't Be So Sure the Economy Will Return to Normal - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/upshot/dont-be-so-sure-the-economy-will-return-to-normal.html?smid=tw-upshotnyt&_r=1&abt=0002&abg=0 <comment><USER2> "Normal" is hilarious in context.

In the UK we have a housing crisis so acute that even "well paid" professionals are paying 50%+ of income on a 1 bedroom flat.

We have a government that sees the unemployed as vermin, rats to be extinguished. A government with a puritanical "work will set you free" mindset.

And overlaid on that, in the past decade we've had the Internet go mainstream. Working class kids now have an acute awareness of what the other half is up to.

The whole model is bloody broken. It makes me depressed that people even engage with this tripe. It's like having a discussion about how best to cook a slab of meat that's been left out for months and has gone fuzzy and green.

We can't go on with this nonsense class based serfs and lords stuff. Really, we can't. It's not just bad for the squeezed middle, it's bankrupt from top to bottom. People working in shit jobs for shit pay to die early. Middle class kids buckling themselves in with the student debt and the mortgage to spend their entire adult life under the heel of the capitalists.

And now they _know_ it. It's not just 'how life is', any more. It's how life was made to be for them, by those.

We don't need kebabs or movies or dry cleaning. This stuff exists and these people are working in crap conditions for the sole reason that we decided as a society that people don't deserve the basics unless they submit to the machine.

It can be fixed. The difference between a landlord and a tenant is a piece of paper or a few bytes in a database.... but we cling on to the model.

When and how will it end?

<comment><USER3> _We have a government that sees the unemployed as vermin, rats to be extinguished. A government with a puritanical "work will set you free" mindset._

I'll give you that, as a somewhat tinted perspective on the governments views, but I'm not sure where you want to go with it? Every government aims for minimal unemployment, it's one of their key tasks - to get people into work. I'm not sure you'll find anyone willing to say "You can work if you want to [you can leave your old friends behind], otherwise here just live on other peoples taxes".

 _People working in shit jobs for shit pay to die early_

Most people work jobs that they do not enjoy. Working is a means to an end, survival. Please do define for me a system where the jobs are all lovely and nobody has to do anything they don't want to do. There seems to be this theory that everyone should be happy, it's pure myth. Life never has worked like that for the majority of the population in any historical system.

<comment><USER2> Ehhhh... I don't really know where to start here. We have viewpoints and value systems that differ on the most basic level. I don't give a single fuck for the historical system. The historical system is a system of rich and poor, of serfs and lords, full of exploitation at every level. Forget about it.

'Living on other peoples taxes' is total nonsense. It posits a world within which my work allows you to be lazy when that is not the case at all. You can be lazy regardless of whether or not I work in the vast majority of cases. Very few jobs are actually essential and even fewer are useful to the 'lazy' person (because they would not be wealthy enough to patronise restaurants, take luxury holidays, drive flash cars, etc.)

The UK has a ton of housing stock. It exists, it's there. We need a bit more, but generally, people work in order to pay a wealthy landlord; they don't work because the home needs any labour in order for it to persist.

We do need some level of labour in order for society to continue. But I argue that we don't need to force people by withholding (yes, withholding. not failing to present them - land ownership is a withholding of the commons) basics from them.

People will work anyway because they want more. The bottom level doesn't have to be serf status.

Money is a distraction. It is the current way of distributing resources. It doesn't have to be.

There is a distinction between giving people the opportunity to work and therefore increase their wealth; and forcing them to work by withholding things and renting it back to them. The former is great! The latter is evil.

<comment><USER4> Money itself isn't so terrible. It's a fungible unit of value. People are always going to engage in private transactions. Getting rid of money would just make the second side of the transaction more subjective and therefore less efficient. (yes, markets getting more efficient combined with the baked in assumptions are why the system is coming unglued. but that doesn't mean trying to make them less efficient will fix it)

The real problem is, as you said, extremely high rent (even if you "buy") just for a place to _exist_. This puts labor in an extremely weak negotiating position (people being worried about losing their jobs!), which any true free market proponent should be _against_.

Imagine how things would change if a minimum wage worker made enough in a few months to cover their expenses for a year IF they mostly stayed home, ate inexpensive food, didn't buy more clothes/gadgets, etc. Run the numbers with current prices and you'll see that this isn't some planned economy dream, but pretty close to current conditions if the rent paid to banks (on money they're mostly allowed to conjure from thin air) were taken out of the picture! Gosh after several months of work and no longer under duress, workers might even be in a position to _demand_ a raise!

<comment><USER2> Spot on. I'm not against money per se; I take issue with the fact it's used at every level rather than only where it makes sense.

It doesn't make sense to use pure supply and demand for land at the very bottom level of human sized parcels. It makes sense to say that a studio should be cheaper than a 1BR should be cheaper than a 2BR and so on; but not that the studio should be allowed to tend towards its absolute maximum price (e.g. roughly minimum wage).

Why? You don't even need a moral argument. It's simply inefficient, a huge drag on the economy. It means people spend 90% of their time scrambling just to exist and never do anything more.

It is like if I had to spend 90% of my CPU power just to run the OS. Bonkers.

It benefits no-one but landlords who in many cases are in a zero risk situation (you own a home and then you still own a home; the monetary value is really a game, it's not a real risk).

<comment><USER4> > _It doesn 't make sense to use pure supply and demand for land at the very > bottom level of human sized parcels_

I don't think you even have to go this deep.

The banks are the ones that create new money, multiplying deposits tenfold based on the _valuation_ of the assets they're writing notes on. But that valuation is set entirely by the selling prices!

So in this circular situation, the _only_ downward pressure on housing is what the banks will loan (especially with further down-payment-erosion like PMI), which is set by the carrying cost of the capital (interest) times what people are willing to pay per month. There is no risk of default since on paper, the asset is worth slightly more than the loan.

I think if you were to revoke financial primacy and eg disallow repossession of residences in bankruptcy, you'd see a pretty quick correction as there would then be an actual risk that someone would take a loan to buy a house and then decide servicing that debt was pointless.

But there's no political capital, since everyone that has bought property (even and especially with a mortgage) wants to see the bubble keep going up forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I read a theory somewhere that one of the the reasons Japan and Germany did so well in the post war years was that the war had completely cleaned out the rot and corruption from their institutions and they were starting over with a clean slate.

I have no idea how true this is. But I do suspect some of the troubles in America are more than economic... they are structural. Corruption in boardrooms. Profits without production. Institutions far deviated from their original purpose. Workers showing up and barely going through the motions with a sense of entitlement. Managers who have long since ceased to serve any useful function holding on to their jobs and perniciously cutting out anyone who would threaten them by innovating or producing. It's no one persons fault. It's not even the systems fault. It's just I think what happens when systems grow stale and a bit corrupt. Maybe there does inevitably have to be a real reset before things can get better again.

<comment><USER6> The situation is getting a bit like the late Qing dynasty, the late Ming dynasty, the late Ming dynasty, the late Song dynasty and before that, the late Tang dynasty, the late Jin dynasty, and the late Han dynasty before them.

The corruption amongst the wealthy and the powerful, as well as overreach of power from the central state causes instability in the empire, and with revolts, crisis and invasions abound, the empire collapses, and a new one arises like a phoenix out of ashes, along with a new era of prosperity where government officials work to the benefit of the people.

Dynasties in China rarely last more than 300 years before the corruption and the reach of the state expands too much and collapse the dynasty with it. The current global hegemon is the United States of America...How long has it been since the last rebellion in the Americas, against the last global hegemon before them, the British Empire?

239 years.

I am optimistic my future grandchildren will live in more optimistic times than my future children will.

<comment><USER7> > where government officials work to the benefit of the people.

hahahahahahahaha

<comment><USER6> Sounds funny now, but it happened in the early-Han, early-Song, early-Ming and early-Qing. In each of those times the new government had fewer regulations to begin with, needed popular support (to raise more armies and crush the remaining opposition) and would pass reforms that would allow prosperity to happen. Each of those periods are considered one of China's golden ages. Perhaps you might also want to take a look at: [http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2014/092814_files/...](http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2014/092814_files/TheFateofEmpiresbySirJohnGlubb.pdf) which describes these cycles well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cowan talks about a "reset". Perhaps part of the "reset" will be putting some of benefits of productivity back in everyone's pocket.

<comment><USER9> The real issue here is globalization. In the post-WW2 years, US workers had a monopoly on labor provided to US firms, and thus were able to extract some of their firms' economic surplus (either through unionization or the threat of unionization). Company owners shared some of their profits with their workers because they had no other choice.

Now that trade borders are relatively open, companies have the option of looking elsewhere. US workers can no longer extract the surplus because if they attempt to, their company will simply relocate operations to a different country.

It's an either-or proposition: You can have free global trade, _or_ you can have a job market that pays high wages to workers of average skill. You want both, but it's impossible; so we have to make a choice. We've chosen free global trade, and (as the article notes) there's a slow adjustment time in institutions. Figuring it began in the 1970's with Nixon opening up China, it took about 25 years to really be felt (in the dotcom bust, financial crisis and subsequent slow recovery).

<comment><USER10> There are other factors here:

Automation. East asia remains the manufacturing powerhouse of the world, but even that region is losing production jobs in absolute numbers. Low skilled labour opportunities are disappearing everywhere.

Transport. Free trade doesn't cause a sudden loss of jobs to abroad. Cheap and effiecient logistics did. The incentives for moving jobs abroad is there with or without trade treaties.

Regulation and incentives. Not sure if it remains the case but most of the major US tech companies including the likes of Microsoft, Dell and Intel used to be headquartered on Ireland due to tax incentives.

Unions. Love 'em or hate 'em, they do cause disturbances in the market equilibriums.

\---

All of this has happened without treaties with either the EU nor the pacific countries. Some automotive factories may have ended up in Mexico, but NAFTA is hardly the reason that the US is where it's at.

<comment><USER11>
      > Automation
      > ...
      > Transport

Now combine them. There was an article on HN yesterday about autonomous semi trucks.

about the only thing that will stop this is the cost of energy, which is all but artificially low right now. If/when it climbs, the economy is in for the mother of all "resets".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> People of the west. The capitalists are abandoning you. They don't give a fuck about you. You live in a 'mature' economy. They are going where the growth is like China.

But don't fight it. Take it like a man. Watch more TV, drink more. Weed is being legalized so you feel better about all of this.

</comment><comment><USER7> The entire financial and monetary system is a government-enforced cartel. I don't expect that to change anytime soon. Things will just keep getting worse.</comment>


Improving license and patent issues in the LLVM	community - <AUTHOR> http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-September/104778.html <comment><USER2> > \-- Exceptions to the Apache 2.0 License: --

I really like this and wanted this on my own projects rather than downgrading to MIT. Personally I really like the strong patent guarantees in the Apache 2.0 license.

The question is, isn't this a new license? Should this be considered the Apache 2.1 or Apache 2.c for compatible?

I'd like to reuse this license provision and drop My use of MIT.

<comment><USER3> This is actually isn't uncommon.

The GCC makes the similar exceptions. Libs/Snippets from peephole optimizations are _technically_ covered by the compiler's license as they're part of the compiler. So the output program is in a sense a derivative work. This really hasn't been challenged in court, but you can see how this could invoke a rather lengthy case if you say pissed off Peter Thiel.

To cover this the GCC's GPL license has exceptions to the GPLv3 for output programs, or programs that use it's headers. You really can't argue the GCC isn't licensed by the GPL. It merely has a handful of exceptions that are specific to the legal oddity of a program who's copyright copyrights derived works, and its sole purpose is to produce derived works.

The Linux Kernel has similar exceptions as syscall functions are inserted into your program at load time. And really everything links against it's headers.

Makes sense the LLVM would do the same

<comment><USER4> GPLv3 has a framework for exceptions built-in. Apache 2.0 supposes no exceptions. The question is why FSF/SFLC thought it insufficient to simply enumerate the exceptions alongside the license.

<comment><USER5> The exceptions provide gpl2 compatibility, gplv3 is already compatible with Apache 2. As for why nobody did this before, i suspect the fsf wanted folks to move to gplv3, and neither side really wanted to do something like this. There are disadvantages to doing it like this, but it was felt this was the best we could really do.

Remember also that both those organizations have very different goals.

<comment><USER4> ASLv2 is compatible with GPLv3 (works under ASLv2 can be inorporated into GPLv3), but not vice versa. This is because GPL has (arguably useful) restrictions which ASL does not. A common goal of ASLv2 and GPLv3 is the restriction on patents, which makes them both incompatible with GPLv2. This is an important difference which makes GPLv3 a superior freedom-preserving license to v2, and the resulting incompatibility is not a matter of interpretation - you can't downgrade licenses. It is unfortunate that Linux was not licensed as GPLv2 _or later_ which is, alongside Linus' support for TiVoization(DrM) and the corporate lawyers' spreading of FUD, the reason why we're still forced to discuss GPLv2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some more comments: [https://lwn.net/Articles/701155/#Comments](https://lwn.net/Articles/701155/#Comments)

</comment><comment><USER7> eli5 me please

<comment><USER8> The current license is effectively the MIT license, which lets downstream developers repackage the code for development works to do what they want, with the most important boilerplate being the part that says "we're not legally liable if this software causes problems."

The biggest flaw of MIT-like licenses is their silence on patent issues, compilers unfortunately being one of the cases where patents are indeed an issue (SEH and Steensgards being two major things well-known as being under patent). Legal opinions differ on what the effect is, and some companies with more aggressive legal departments are twitchy about the matter.

The Apache license covers patents in a satisfactory way while still retaining the permissibility of the MIT license. However, Apache and GPL aren't necessarily compatible with each other--Apache v2 and GPLv3 work around it by adding explicit compatibility clauses. The Apache v2/GPLv2 compatibility story is something that legal opinions differ on [1]. The exceptions being proposed are designed to explicitly guarantee compatibility between the two licenses.

[1] The consensus seems to be that it would just work. However, it is worth keeping in mind that Apple is a prominent contributor to LLVM, and Apple does seem to generally take a more pessimistic legal approach, as well as being very well-known for their abhorrence of GPLv3 code.

<comment><USER9> > SEH and Steensgards

What's that?

<comment><USER10> Google turns up these:

[https://www.google.com/patents/US5628016](https://www.google.com/patents/US5628016)

[https://www.google.com/patents/US6247169](https://www.google.com/patents/US6247169)

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070016894A1](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070016894A1)

I'm not sure about the last one since it's an apparently abandoned application rather than a granted patent...

Interestingly, US6247169 reports "lapsed" on the google page due to non- payment of fees...

I'm _really_ not sure what to make of US5628016 - it's filing date is in 1994, but there's a report of a 2015 "Assignment" legal event.

(edit - fixed links)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Adds Song Lyrics to Top of Search Results,Points Searchers to Google Play - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/22/google-adds-song-lyrics-to-top-of-search-results-points-searchers-to-google-play/ <comment><USER2> What a shame that the mentioned lyrics sites like these are going to lose traffic:

* [http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/ledzeppelin/stairwaytoheaven....](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/ledzeppelin/stairwaytoheaven.html)

* [http://www.songlyrics.com/led-zeppelin/stairway-to-heaven-ly...](http://www.songlyrics.com/led-zeppelin/stairway-to-heaven-lyrics/)

Slow loading and each sporting giant ads that pop from the side of the screen and cover up the lyrics.

Compare to Google's fast, minimal version: [https://play.google.com/music/preview/Thhet5jtvzdxkti7vc62o2...](https://play.google.com/music/preview/Thhet5jtvzdxkti7vc62o2fiajq?lyrics=1)

Good job Google.

<comment><USER3> Well, in New Zealand that link gets "Lyrics not available", so I wouldn't consider it an improvement.

<comment><USER4> This feature doesn't appear to be in AU/NZ search results yet.

<comment><USER5> Maybe there's a copyright issue at play here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This feels like the same vein as Microsoft abusing it's monopoly to distribute IE in the 90s. I don't know what Microsoft's market share was back then (seems around 75% according to [1]), but Google's is around 68% [2] at the moment which puts them in a pretty good position to drive traffic wherever they feel like. Some might say this is their prerogative, but the same argument could have been made for Microsoft back then. Since Bing is doing the same thing[3], we have the two major search engines both potentially killing off song lyric sites and the businesses behind them. Whether this is ok or not is not as interesting as where all these structured data additions will take us. Will it see the death of curated content sites (like the lyric sites) in favor of the search behemoths having their own content databases, or will we see a resurgence of these sorts of sites with new ways to discover them?

[1] [http://news.cnet.com/Windows-95-remains-most-popular- operati...](http://news.cnet.com/Windows-95-remains-most-popular-operating- system/2100-1040_3-228773.html)

[2] [http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2345837/google- search...](http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2345837/google-search- engine-market-share-nears-68)

[3] [http://searchengineland.com/bing-starts-showing-full-song- ly...](http://searchengineland.com/bing-starts-showing-full-song-lyrics-right- search-results-205050)

<comment><USER7> Microsoft's desktop market share by 1998 was 90%+.

Here's an amazing press release by Microsoft (reprinted newspaper article), acknowledging it (when they were still trying to defend their success rather than redirect the message off of it):

[http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ofnote/9-16mrktshare.mspx](http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/ofnote/9-16mrktshare.mspx)

This move by Google is in the vein of Microsoft eating its ecosystem, which is something every dominate platform will always do to some degree. That predates the Internet Explorer bundling.

Over the span of two decades Microsoft either purchased or built into Windows, dozens of products that used to exist stand-alone.

Google will do exactly the same thing, and they will increasingly take flak for it. Google let everyone know they were going to do this, many years ago. Any simple data / facts / snippets they can provide that act as fast answers to common queries, they will build into the top of results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The post makes negative implications on a company that will do whatever it wants with search results, just as it always has and just as we've trusted them to do for at least the last decade.

In my mind, this isn't news.

</comment><comment><USER9> This article is from 3 months ago!

</comment><comment><USER10> relevant - list of business models Google search could kill:

[http://www.elite-strategies.com/list-businesses-google- searc...](http://www.elite-strategies.com/list-businesses-google-search-kill/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Which is presumably why rap genius is moving on to become a universal annotated knowledge database instead of staying in the lyrics business.

<comment><USER12> That was always the goal of rap genius, ever since the very beginning.

Edit: Not sure why I was downvoted. I was Facebook friends with the founders since 2011 or so and saw how "Genius" was intended to be a framework for annotation of more than just lyrics: they were actually trying to gear it towards news, education, and various other things. It wasn't just an internal thing either; back in 2013 they claimed to have been in contact with with Fortune 500 companies about using the platform[0] for what I guess is documentation, and also suggested they might take annotated books and sell them [0]. They were openly discussing their plans to expand "Rap Genius into Everything Genius" after the Andreessen Horowitz investment [1]. This is barring my personal conversations with the founders and even my Facebook message pitch of expanding into education in Australia a few years ago.

[0] [http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/power-pitch/29-old- gets-15-mi...](http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/power-pitch/29-old- gets-15-million-decipher-song-lyrics-124202754.html)

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jul/23/rap-genius- co-f...](http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jul/23/rap-genius-co-founders- interview)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Are there decent people in this world at all?

</comment><comment><USER14> Doesn't this hurt Google? Now there are fewer people seeing its ads.

Can the extra purchases on the Google Play really make up for it? I suspect not.

<comment><USER15> 2 reasons to look up lyrics:

"Ooh, what song was that?" -> lyrics -> link to buy song.

"I want a good thing to quote on Facebook" -> other people look it up -> listen -> maybe buy.

The former might give a decent return (compared to showing ads to the 95% of people who wouldn't buy the song but would have seen ads) - keep in mind they're already primed for finding (and getting) the song.

<comment><USER14> > Ooh, what song was that?

You have to know the name already, and be listening to it. You can't lookup lyrics by tune (there are tools that do that, but not this).

Main reason to look up lyrics: I have the song, but I have no idea what the singer is actually saying, i.e. no sale involved.

<comment><USER16> Or, alternatively, search for an unknown song by a snippet of known lyrics.

"here's a truck stop instead of saint peter's"

Sale might ensue.

Isn't it interesting that we have reciprocal use-cases?

<comment><USER14> It's very interesting!

But I tried your search, and while it found the song, it didn't have that special panel.

But when I searched for:

"r.e.m. man on the moon lyrics"

That panel came up.

So while yours might be an interesting use case, that are not actually doing it.

So my initial question, still stands: Doesn't this hurt google?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Keeping Time with Amazon Time Sync Service - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/keeping-time-with-amazon-time-sync-service/ <comment><USER2> Details worth highlighting.. They recommend chrony over ntpd, which makes particular sense given that chrony is designed to work well on virtual machine. They are doing leap second smearing like Google does internally. They don't say anything about what sort of accuracy you can expect but if the clock source is truly local it could be very good.

It's kinda neat they're using a link local address.

<comment><USER3> What is leap second smearing? Spreading it out over some other period, vs. a sudden jump of one second?

<comment><USER4> > Spreading it out over some other period

Yes.

They make a second last slightly long for some time period.

<comment><USER5> Or shorter... Leap seconds can be negative.

<comment><USER6> Theoretically, yes, but it's never happened since leap seconds were established in 1972, and it seems very unlikely to happen for quite some time. Chances are that a lot of software doesn't actually support negative leap seconds at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Argh! I wish the NTP servers were usable from outside of AWS.

Outside of North America and Europe, there aren't as many public NTP servers as there should be. For example, according to [http://www.pool.ntp.org/zone/south- america](http://www.pool.ntp.org/zone/south-america), South America has less than 50 NTP servers.

It would be awesome if the large, widely-distributed providers (not just AWS with CloudFront, but also Akami, Cloudflare, etc.) provided public, Stratum-1 NTP servers at their POPs.

<comment><USER8> time.windows.com, time.apple.com, and time1.google.com are all publicly accessible.

Apple's one is also available at time.asia.apple.com and time.euro.apple.com

<comment><USER9> windows and apple tend to keep terribly inconsistent time, though, and windows time goes nutso at leap smears.

<comment><USER8> Do you have a citation for this? I've been monitoring NTP servers for years and Apple's are among the closest to my GPS reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm amidst digging into getting some gps clock hardware to make sure an open source db we're developing at work can work in some interesting situations. (Hit me up if you wanna join the team ;) )

High accuracy time is a fascinating domain. It's this weird mix of general relativity, hardware, and anthropology. Cesium atoms and satellites vs calendars vs astronomy: who wins? :)

Point being: more organizations making high accuracy time available to more folks is a good thing!

<comment><USER11> What trouble are you having with the GPSs? Getting them hooked up to ntpd is fairly easy after you get used to some of the common hiccups.

As far as who wins for a long time now it has been astronomers. The fact that Google and Amazon are doing leap smearing is a nice sign that the tide may be turning. It is very rare that you see organizations supporting leap seconds during big standards discussions that are not astronomers.

<comment><USER10> Getting a rig for some servers is easy. Figuring out a range of hardware to test and support for a range of different types of possible users with different budgets, from some tiny hobby user at home to the entire global economy... have very different needs and hardware budgets. :)

<comment><USER11> The entire global economy? Maybe you should narrow your market focus a little. NTPD and or GPSD support anything with NMEA and PPS. You should be able to satisfy a large range of users with any ublox 6, 7 or 8T.

<comment><USER12> Yep, you can buy a Neo-6M with breakout board and antenna for $5 and hook it up to a Raspberry Pi without much trouble.

Software can be fiddly but I found this guide to be helpful: [http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/Raspberry-Pi- NTP.html](http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/Raspberry-Pi-NTP.html)

Hell, you can hook it up to a NodeMCU as well: [https://blog.squix.org/2016/05/esp8266-peripherals-ublox- gps...](https://blog.squix.org/2016/05/esp8266-peripherals-ublox-gps- module.html)

Bam, $10 wifi enabled GPS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > uses a fleet of redundant satellite-connected and atomic clocks in each > region

I am really curious to know what atomic frequency standards they are using. There is something a little suspicious about the wording. I have a feeling they mean "we use GPSDOs" and there are no atomic frequency standards physically located in each regional datacenter.

I'm also a little surprised to see that the remote clock is stratum 4. It would be interesting to see how they are distributing the time between their clocks.

If someone from amazon reads this it would be neat if you posted some more details about your setup.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have been hoping for this for a long time, with Google's TrueTime system being so unique. Quite a lot more work would have to go into guaranteeing the results all the way into your application, but this is still a great start.

</comment><comment><USER14> When is Google announcing TrueTime as a service on GCP? I see them doing this really soon since aws has it now

<comment><USER2> TrueTime is a lot more than just the NTP service Amazon just announced.

<comment><USER15> Can you expand on what you meant by that?

If you take it at face value, the TrueTime API is implementable on top of any clock synchronization protocol. It's just coincidentally true that if you're close to a stratum 0-equivalent clock, your skew will be low. In terms of implementation, TrueTime daemons essentially also use Marzullo's algorithm to estimate timestamps, just like NTP.

What am I missing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting to know if they have an SLA for this and how it's formulated.

Time is important and hard. I doubt that customers who really need precise time would walk away from their ghetto solutions with no SLA because when something like this craps out, it's almost always a circus.

But hey, when time precision and accuracy is a bonus not a requirement for your AWS instance then 'free local NTP server!'

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd be curious to know how this compares to Google's (internal ) TrueTime service[1], and if it allows for development of globally consistent but highly available storage systems like Spanner.

[1] [https://research.google.com/pubs/pub45855.html](https://research.google.com/pubs/pub45855.html)

<comment><USER18> Considering this coincided with announcements of multi-region multi-master DBs (Aurora, DynamoDB) it seems likely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does this actually work? We had horrible issues with time drifting between services in AWS at scale in distributed systems.

Something like eg Google Spanner relies on atomic clocks - it's a combination of hardware and software that enable the use of wallclock time.

</comment><comment><USER20> System clock synchronization is a really hard problem but especially important for things like live video stream encoding where the frame timestamps need to correspond to the real wall-clock (within milliseconds) for things like sub- second play-by-play synchronization.

<comment><USER21> How accurate does that need to be...?

100ms? 10ms? 1ms? 100us?

<comment><USER22> Finance centric:

Finra (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) requires <50ms

MiFID II (EU centric) HFT requirement can be as low as 100 microseconds accuracy, or 0.1ms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The amount of dog fooding that happens at AWS is impressive - looks like they needed and built this for DynamoDB global tables (assumes clock sync across all regions) and made it available to all instances.

</comment><comment><USER24> Curious if I'll be able to replace the NTP servers inside our PCI-compliant environment with this.

</comment><comment><USER15> Are there SLAs for this out? Can I get TrueTime-style assumptions about my clock skew?

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it going to be monotonically increasing?

<comment><USER26> I see no reason that it would ever go backward, so yes. Especially with leap second smearing, meaning it's not only monotonically increasing, but also never stops (never a slope of zero).

<comment><USER27> Double leap-seconds are allowed, though I can't find any evidence one has ever happened. In such an occurrence, POSIX time would actually go backwards afterwards.

<comment><USER26> Is there any reason to believe they don't just smear both leap seconds?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Somewhat meta, but this is a bit ironic of an offering considering the time on their display boards at re:Invent are noticeably out of sync.</comment>


My Experience with Nix on OS X - <AUTHOR> https://www.mpscholten.de/nixos/2016/05/26/my-experience-with-nix-on-osx.html? <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: Nix(OS) developer, I am biased.

It's very important for us to get such feedback. This allows us to improve and move forward.

In Nix defense I think it's not worth comparing stability yet, although that is the most important aspect for users.

What matters currently is how many smart people grasp the idea why we're fundamentally better by architecturing the language and packaging problem itself and any help we get to move us forward.

For fair comparison you should note that we have ~800 contributors, probably more than 90% are on Linux. Meanwhile Homebrew packages have almost 6000 contributors.

We have recently added 4 macs to our build farm at [http://hydra.nixos.org/machines](http://hydra.nixos.org/machines), but we desperately need more developers _that care_. Not 6000, just a few more.

<comment><USER3> Is there an easy overview page to see packages which are failing to build on Mac, maybe even with a link to the failing build output?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've never used Nix for OS X, but I can confirm that the UI can definitely use some work, and the proposed changed which are in the pipe look fantastic.

But, comparing Nix on the simple operations is like reviewing a sports car after only driving it in a school zone. There is so much more that Nix provides that homebrew doesn't even come close to.

Nix has made managing of my servers way easier then anything I have tried before and I have no intentions of changing away any time soon.

<comment><USER5> I tried Nix on OS X after a recent HN topic suggested it. I hate Homebrew with a passion (it's fine initially but, over time, it's always created a hard-to- clean-up mess for me), so I was looking for something that could replace it for most unixy things I need to install.

I immediately ran into a showstopper bug that they've had for some time now. Apparently, they've focused on NixOS and the CA certificate configuration is borked on other platforms. This means Git, Curl and anything else that tries to use the standard OS certificate store will fail certificate validation. I know it's only one issue, but it was pernicious enough for me to nuke my Nix install and move onto something else.

At the moment, the best I can find for OS X is Rudix. The selection of available software is pathetic compared to Homebrew and Nix, but a lot of the core stuff is there and it's all packaged as a .pkg, which makes it really easy to cleanly erase installed software.

<comment><USER6> > _At the moment, the best I can find for OS X is Rudix. The selection of > available software is pathetic compared to Homebrew and Nix, but a lot of > the core stuff is there and it 's all packaged as a .pkg, which makes it > really easy to cleanly erase installed software._

Apologies for hijacking a Nix thread, but I'd love your views on our OS X binary package sets[0]. We currently ship over 14,000 pre-built signed packages, all self-contained under /opt/pkg, and easy to search/install/remove using pkgin which has a familiar feel to anyone used to apt-get/yum/etc.

The packages are continuously built from pkgsrc trunk so should be reasonably up-to-date, and we try to be responsive when users need newer versions or packages built with different options.

So far the feedback has been positive, but I'd love to see more use-cases so we can improve the experience for everybody. Thanks.

[0] [https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on- osx/](https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/)

<comment><USER5> I wasn't aware of this, but it looks really promising. Thank you for posting this!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm guessing one of the major reasons more packages are "broken" for macos is there is a CI system running for linux/nixos (travis) and not one for macos. So macos breakages can slip in easily.

If a passionate mac advocate wanted to take on the responsibility of setting up & running a CI machine and hooking it up to the github PRs, I can only imagine it being a good thing...

<comment><USER8> the major reason for poor package support is low number of osx users (hydra - nix build farm - builds binaries also for osx).

<comment><USER3> I've started looking at this. Part of the problem is that nix wants (reasonably) to do "everything itself", including (for example) bundling the OS X SDKs itself.

At the moment that's broken (the 10.9 SDK is installed in 10.11, then links against some 10.11 libraries, which is blocking mplayer). I don't have the knowledge to fix it.

homebrew and fink have had the same problem (deciding when to link against system libraries and when to try to rebuild) -- hopefully nix will get over this hurdle.

<comment><USER9> The correct answer for Nix is to never link against a library provided by the system. Nix provides its own bootstrap binaries and it must be done that way for the sake of reproducibility.

<comment><USER3> This is exactly what Nix does, but not all libraries are currently 'Nixified', and the ones which are aren't consistent.

Apple doesn't help this -- they want you to just install xcode and the most recent SDK and nothing else.

<comment><USER10> well, there's xcode-select to chose the SDK you want which kinda implies the availability of multiple – currently for example swift 2.2 and 3.0.

I'm tempted by the "1-environment" idea but homebrew has done such an excellent job in comparison to fink/port, I';; stay loyal. Also wondering if those two projects couldn't profit from some code sharing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Redesign of nix command line is a good thing. Nix should be more intuitive.

I totally agree that nix is the future of package management.

<comment><USER12> What makes Nix the future of package management? I'm not familiar with it so I don't know!

I looked at the web-site and didn't find it clear what it does that Homebrew doesn't, other than being cross-platform (although I recently started using Linuxbrew which has made Homebrew cross-platform-ish for me).

<comment><USER13> The power of Nix start when you start building your own ~/.nixpkgs/default.nix (but you don't really need to if you don't want to):

        {
          packageOverrides = pkgs: with pkgs; rec {
            all = buildEnv {
              name = "all";
              paths = [
                vim
                fish
                gitAndTools.gitFull
              ];
            };
          };
        }

This is the Nix package collection. You can install this package with `nix-env -i all`. What does it do? Install vim, install fish, install git. Not much, and easily doable in Homebrew in much fewer keystrokes.

Now imagine you decided that you don't like vim and want to go with emacs. You change the paths to `paths = [ emacs fish gitAndTools.gitFull ]`. Run `nix-env -i all` again. What does it do now? It _uninstall vim_ and install emacs.

Now that you decided you don't like emacs after all and want to go back to vim. You can just run `nix-env --rollback` and it will happily rollback the change it made to the filesystem made by latest nix-env call, as in, restoring vim at where you expect it to be.

This is the declarative nature of Nix. You declare the state you want the package to be (or the whole system, in case of NixOS) and Nix will figure out how to get to that state. default.nix can also do a lot more things, for example, adding custom packages, overriding versions, changing build flags and much more.

Let's say one day you need to clone the whole setup to other machine, you only need to copy this default.nix and run `nix-env -i all` on that machine and everything is reproduced in the way you expected. This default.nix can also be per-project, allowing collaborators to share the same packages (and custom packages).

<comment><USER14> > It _uninstall vim_ and install emacs.

If a package system is well designed, having the package for vim on my system shouldn't be doing any harm even if I'm not currently using it, so the system you are describing isn't really any better than just having a list of packages I want installed in a text file.

<comment><USER13> That is not the point I want to make. Having both Vim and Emacs doesn't really do any harm. You can even have multiple versions of Vim in the same machine, even with different and incompatible dependency version, and Nix will happily manage that. The point is that with Nix collection, it will try to build the system _exactly as described_ without any kind of side effect.

Using Vim isn't the best example (why would someone want multiple Vim?) but the same apply to languages as well. For example if I want to use Python 3.2, but there are handful of utilities that require 3.3+. I can just install 3.2 to my profile and install those utilities with 3.5 without actually exposing 3.5 to my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nix is not great for casual Linux desktop usage - I tried installing the Atom editor, and cancelled when I saw X11 being downloaded. You might as well run NixOS in a VM.

<comment><USER16> It's hard to say what caused this without more information, but the flip side is that it demonstrates the power of Nix. Everything required to get Atom working--all the way down to something as basic as the display server--is explicitly declared in the configuration and can be downloaded and installed with one command. So although this wasn't what you intended, Nix was actually doing what it is supposed to do: acquire every necessary component (as per the specification) for your application to work.

<comment><USER17> This is true, literally, of every package manager that came before Nix and every one that will come after. It's fundamentally what a package manager is and does. This isn't the power of Nix -- it's table stakes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What do people do about packages being old? Many of their front facing server packages are not being updated. Presumably, they have quite a few security issues in them

<comment> vertex-four Updating packages is generally easy and takes 10 minutes of your time (including sending a pull request) once you've figured out how it works. Please do so if you're a NixOS user - NixOS has far, far fewer people working on it than, say, Debian.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nix looks cool on OSX, but trying to install something like elixir from scratch involves my macbook air compiling packages for at least 40+ minutes before I ctrl-break which is a no go.

I thought Gentoo was cool in the early 2000s when I didn't do sysadmin work for my job. I'm not waiting an hour or two to install a package anymore.

I'm sure this will improve when more precompiled packages are released for OSX when it is more popular.

<comment><USER20> My understanding is this is at least partly because of a lack of mac build machines for hydra.</comment></comment>


Ultima Thule Is Weirder Than We Thought - <AUTHOR> https://gereshes.com/2019/03/18/ultima-thule-is-weirder-than-we-thought/ <comment><USER2> They should probably rename it to Olaf.</comment>


Inspired by Snowden, more NSA insiders are blowing the whistle - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2013/11/02/inspired-by-snowden-more-nsa.html

<comment><USER2> Direct link [http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/10/more-nsa- leake...](http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/10/more-nsa-leakers- followed-snowdens-footsteps-whistleblower-lawyer-says/)</comment>


Tanzania bans newspaper for 2 years - tefo-mohapi https://www.iafrikan.com/2017/06/17/tanzanias-government-has-imposed-a-two-year-ban-on-a-newspaper-including-any-online-articles-it-publishes/ <comment><AUTHOR> Tanzanian here and i am surprised find my country in the front page of hacker news.

Summary of what is going on.

17 years ago, Tanzania signed a "bad" contract with acacia mining company[1].

The person who signed the contract on Tanzania side is Jakawa Mrisho Kikwete when he was a minister for energy, water and minerals and Benjamin William Mkapa was Tanzania's president at that time. Mr. Kikwete became Tanzania's president after Mkapa finished his second term.

The currently president is running an investigation and is completely side stepping these two individuals who are at the center of it and does not want them to even be mentioned and thats what is going on.

If he chooses not to talk about them then thats his prerogative but, the citizens of Tanzania should be allowed to and there is plenty of stuff to talk about.

[1] [http://www.acaciamining.com/](http://www.acaciamining.com/)

<comment><USER2> lol, as a Ugandan. I know exactly how u feell

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Tanzania bans 'a' newspaper for 2 years

<comment><USER4> I think the singular use of "newspaper" here follows convention in not needing a leading article ("a").

(Had it been plural the article would have also not been needed _on a grammatical basis_ , although I think it would in that case have been fair to specify "some" or "all").

<comment><USER5> Lacking a definite article is incorrect and worse, confusing.

"Tanzania bans fruit for two years"

"Tanzania bans song for two years"

<comment><USER6> No confusion

The first can mean all fruit is banned, because "fruit" is a mass noun and as such does not have a plural form.

The second clearly refers to _one_ song, just like the headline refers to _one_ newspaper.

<comment><USER7> "Song" can also refer to the act of singing, so the second one still read ambiguously to me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/mislav/status/1022058279000842240 <comment><USER3> Removing jQuery is not always a good idea. The best advertisement for jQuery, ironically, is this site: [http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/](http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/) Look at how simple things are in the left column, and how much more code is needed in the right column.

jQuery has many convenience features such as chaining, for example: item.addClass('selected').siblings().removeClass('selected'); and you don't have to check for nulls after each selection.

Many functions such as closest() and remove() have no equivalents in IE11, and other things such as replaceWith() and before() are not available even in Edge.

For simple sites it is easy enough to remove jQuery, but for more complex javascript applications, especially apps that have a lot of interactivity, removing jQuery will result in more code, or you will end up writing a lot of utility functions thereby creating your own little clone of jQuery.

<comment><USER4> I was one of the developers who made [http://youmightnotneedjquery.com](http://youmightnotneedjquery.com). To be fair, we made it in... 2014? There is a lot you can do now which you couldn't do then, just with a browser. A lot of the challenging examples, like animation, you're better off doing with straight CSS.

Ultimately, I haven't actually used jQuery for anything serious in half a decade, and somehow I manage.

<comment><USER5> I kind of imagine we will one day have a basic poly fill for all the cross platform issues jQuery actually excels at, and then we truly won't need jQuery since that's all it's really good at these days. Things like chaining are an anti pattern and lead to brittle code!

<comment><USER6> Oh, but we already do have that, over there: [https://jquery.com/](https://jquery.com/)

What's with the trend "jQ is old, old is bad! We need something that does the same thing, and most importantly _is not named jQuery_ "?

<comment><USER7> Most DOM manipulation in jQuery goes through jQuery.globalEval, which uses eval(). Meaning if you want to have a CSP, you have to allow unsafe-eval if you need to support jQuery.

CSP is an incredibly useful tool, and it's close to impossible to use it properly with jQuery.

<comment><USER8> First concrete, legitimate reason I've seen all thread. Is there something fundamental about jQuery's design that forces it to use eval(), or is it possible a new version could avoids that?

<comment><USER7> Performing evals is a core part of the design. Take a look at the additional notes section on this documentation of the .html method.

[http://api.jquery.com/html/](http://api.jquery.com/html/)

>By design, any jQuery constructor or method that accepts an HTML string — jQuery(), .append(), .after(), etc. — can potentially execute code

This makes jQuery less safe in general, but I think the CSP restrictions this puts in place are probably a greater issue for most people. I've been involved in retro-fitting strict CSPs into a few projects, and more than once I've been thwarted by very minor use of jQuery in a couple of places.

<comment><USER5> It's part of the design _of the creation of new elements_. But that's just one part of jQuery, and a part I would be completely okay with jQuery getting rid of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm impressed. I don't think the web would be where it is today without JQuery, and being able to completely pull it out is pretty awesome. Not because of JQ-hate, but web standards have improved that much.

<comment><USER10> I think it's a testament to jQuery's influence that, even though many of us don't use it today, we still often think in a jQuery way. The most useful common bits of jQuery's approach got baked into standards.

I think it's impressive that even when I'm not using jQuery (haven't in many years), I find myself writing code using features/capabilities where jQuery was an obvious inspiration.

<comment><USER11> I mean, when you think about how many people were using jQuery for

(a) cross-browser compatibility, which mostly works now (except for cutting edge stuff, which is pretty optional) (b) $.ajax (uses that could be replaced by window.fetch) (c) Sizzle (Replaced by document.querySelector[All])

<comment><USER6> Yeah. And IIRC, all of this came about as "let's take these awesome pieces of jQuery (which were written because browsers sucked) and reimplement them natively." Now the roles are apparently reversed, with jQuery being the Big Bad?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> i offer wonder where the state of the web would be if John Resig never would have created jquery. i think everyone who is into web development today owes a thank you to him. jquery single-handedly made programming on the browser easier.

<comment><USER13> > jquery single-handedly made programming on the browser easier.

Besides jQuery there were several competing libraries abstracting the browser inconsistencies: YUI (Y=Yahoo), prototypejs, mootools, dojo. So I'd say multi- handedly.

<comment><USER14> I also remember Scriptaculous which at some point got somehow merged with Prototype and became Protaculous.

<comment><USER15> That's like, the hardest name I've ever had to read.

<comment><USER16> Reminds of the old days when Karma was named Testacular.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Around 8 years ago I was on a project where my boss told me the web app I'd be working on was really slow, and they needed me to help them speed it up. When I took a look at it, I discovered the app was using a multitude of libraries with overlapping functionality - jQuery, ExtJS, Mochikit, YUI, and I think a few others. Every previous developer had simply included their library of choice when working on the app, and it had made the app overly bloated (and complicated). Definitely a good sign that browser APIs and their polyfills have become good enough for standard web app development.

</comment><comment><USER18> How much of the reaction to this is: "isn't it neat that web standards have advanced enough that we don't need jquery anymore," vs a pile on of: "jquery teh sucks cause it's old and stuff."

<comment><USER19> The web has modernized. Browsers are kept up to date now more than ever. jQuery helped support antiquated browsers, but that niche is no longer nearly as prevalent as it once was.

<comment><USER20> Really? jQuery is not just about jQuery itself but its host of plugins make it very powerful. I still use some date picker even though input fields have supported date type but they look inconsistent across browsers and don't look as good as some of the jQuery plugins and it's just 1 example.

<comment><USER21> Certainly there is a lot of old infrastructure around jQuery. There is also a lot of infrastructure around Java's Swing.

But, the point isn't that those things exist or that there are a lot of them. The point is that jQuery's biggest value add, at the time, was it had a very consistent and fairly fast development across several browsers. In the bad old days, IE, firefox, and Safari all had vastly different and divergent sets of features. Heck, half of the stuff jQuery did was stuff you should be able to do with CSS but couldn't because of how differently CSS behaved across browser. This was one of the biggest value adds of jQuery. (I went through the bad old days.. they were hell)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have created one of the decently popular jQuery light (3kb) alternatives: [https://umbrellajs.com/](https://umbrellajs.com/)

And I do not always recommend it, indeed for smaller projects you might be better off with plain Javascript: [https://umbrellajs.com/documentation#native- methods](https://umbrellajs.com/documentation#native-methods)

But native Javascript, as explained there, is more error-prone while jQuery (and Umbrella) are more permissive. Both have their pros and cons, but if you try to make native Javascript as permissive as jQuery you'll end up with a big mess. Unless you create some internal methods, which then you bundle, test, release, and... end up with another jQuery clone!

</comment><comment><USER23> Modern front-end dev is all about over-engineering things with MVC libraries and whatnots, but for the love of God one shall not use jQuery.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's all fun and games, until you have to access parent elements.

You'll likely start wrapping these methods, and before you know it, you have jQuery-micro.

<comment><USER25> That's what I have, a very small helper library that contains 5 or 6 functions that I use frequently like .closest(), .hideAll(), .showAll() etc.

My application doesn't use much JS so this seems reasonable to me instead of including a framework for a few functions.

<comment><USER26> For what it's worth, [https://caniuse.com/#feat=element- closest](https://caniuse.com/#feat=element-closest) is supported by everyone except IE (and Opera Mini, I guess).

<comment><USER6> That's exactly the point! "Oh, you can code [a polyfill] yourself, and it will work. Mostly. Sort of. jQuery bad, reinventing the wheel good! Never mind that you originally went there to implement some business logic, let's get tangled in the myriad almost-almost-working combinations."

<comment><USER27> > Oh, you can code [a polyfill] yourself, and it will work.

Use a polyfill that already exists. Take it out when browser support is there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> jQuery is actually one of the nicer javascript libraries.

\- knows what it is, i.e. a web javascript module, it doesn't try to inappropriately wrap itself in CommonJS/AMDJS wrappers

\- doesn't need node/npm to run

\- doesn't need node/npm to build

<comment><USER29> However, it would be nice if I could include the parts I wanna use. Similar to lodash/underscore. Now it's either full jQuery or nothing.

<comment><USER30> You can do that by building it with only the modules you want: [https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/master/README.md)

There's also an official slim build without ajax and effect modules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Just curious, does there exist a library that uses jquery syntax but with modern vanilla JS as the guts? i'm sure someone must have done this but i dont know about it. I'm interested to know if you could just replace the jquery cdn link for this and have your old jquery code still work?

<comment><USER32> What do you mean by jQuery syntax? jQuery has a lot of features. If you mean the query selector you can do

        let $ = document.querySelectorAll;

If you mean chaining commands you can use the latest version of jQuery. It uses querySelectorAll under the hood.

<comment><USER33> FYI I believe it is generally considered better to prefer const over let if the value is never going to change. Prevents accidentally reassigning $ here.

<comment><USER32> True. I quickly threw that out as an example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Nothing but respect for jQuery. It has had such a wide range of influence on both javascript and the browser ecosystem. The good thing about a great tool is that when the problems it solves no longer exist and can be retired gracefully.

</comment><comment> rkuykendall-com > What did we replace it with? No framework whatsoever

They bragged, about the single worst web UI I have to use on a daily basis. Github.com combines the worst elements of static and dynamic web-pages:

\- If something gets updated on the backend, it will update on the frontend

      - Except all the times it doesn't

\- If you change something on the frontend, it will update on the page

      - Unless you interact with the page in any way after that, like changing tabs???

What you end up with is a frontend that uses a lot of AJAX, but still requires constant hard refreshes to see accurate information. It's an absolute disaster.

</comment><comment><USER35> I assume jQuery itself will use this modern browser functionality. Making it smaller.

<comment><USER36> Well, they threw away the Sizzle selector engine once querySelector became available everywhere, but other than that… eh. I don't think they use fetch or Web Animations or anything like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Without comparison of performance "before" and "after" (in numbers, not words), this news doesn't have any sense.

</comment><comment><USER38> I started my JavaScript career in 2011 with the two books "JavaScript - <USER2> Good Parts" by Crockford and "Professional JavaScript Techniques" by Resig.

Somehow all the time I'm doing JS, people were talking about how jQuery was "an old library" and "the old way to do things" even in 2011.

2 years ago I was on a JavaScript meetup and some guy, who did interfaces for stock trading, said: "We had to write our own framework, because jQuery just didn't cut it anymore!"

I just thought, no shit, it's 2016 and NOW you talk about replacing jQuery? Since its inception I used 4 different frameworks and even when I started in 2011 it was already "old news". Where have you been living if you had the impression there is only jQuery and "your own framework"

<comment><USER39> IMO, jQuery is still very usable for all the "almost static" web sites out there. Sure there are smaller and arguably better options out there, but there's no harm in using it if you're used to it.

I don't see why it being old is an inherent problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> As noted by others, jQuery was essential in carving a path between the past of browser incompatibilities and the modern form of mostly reliable and evolving standards. It was hardly alone - other libraries did their part, evergreen browsers are essential, and the list of people doing a lot of thankless work is long and unassembled - but it was nonetheless an essential piece.

I want to clarify a bit about "JA Hate" though: Most of it stemmed not from JQ's limitations or age, but rather as a matter of architecture. While it's cool these days to smugly enjoy the options of vanilla JS, JQ hate was around before those standards were reliably implemented.

JQ really stepped in when dynamic web pages (i.e. pages that modify their own HTML without page refreshes) were becoming a thing. AJAX calls were new (to most) and exciting. form validations that didn't require 2-3 seconds to load, etc. All made far, far easier by the APIs JQ had.

BUT there were complications: JQ plugins meant that having multiple copies of JQ on the page tended to not work well - and that happened if you were mingling content sources. JQ didn't require it, but many coders would use the DOM to store data (JQ made it so EASY), which worked well short term but caused troubles. Example: If you have a list of items, with every other item shaded, and every item had some metadata in the HTML, and then you wanted to remove some items, what did you do? More importantly, when you wanted to restore them, where did it come from? If you were tracking everything in a JS variables and building the DOM, no problem, but if you were using the DOM to hold your data, you had issues. Even if you WEREN'T using the DOM to track your state, repainting all the DOM got expensive - a table of 10 items worked great, but a table of 1000 could bog down terribly.

Ultimately someone would inherit (or create) a convoluted mess of JQ and blame JQ rather than the creator.

Much of the JQ hate came not from JQ flaws, but the flaws of coding done in the face of JQ success (as has happened with so many languages/libraries/frameworks before and since). We've learned from those flaws AND successes though - querySelector() basically uses the sizzle syntax; modern virtual dom libraries deal with the DOM pains; be it React's Unidirectional flow or Angular's two-way binding, the goal is not to use the DOM to hold state; and every AJAX library out there tried for a better interface (arguably fetch() beat them all). We're still hashing out how to handle reusable pieces of non-static HTML, but there are many options.

So congrats to anyone that doesn't need JQ, and no hate to those that use it if they strive to use it well. I can only hope to write something hated for the results of success that nonetheless leaves the world better off.

</comment><comment><USER41> As a vanilla-JS guy for 2 decades, I can say that you can go far without any frameworks, especially now.

The one feature I miss that jquery has is dialog boxes that can be customized with HTML.

Does anybody know of any cross-browser javascript dialog functions?

<comment><USER42> Right on! You may want to look into Sweet Alert, it's super easy to integrate! [https://sweetalert2.github.io](https://sweetalert2.github.io)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I recently replaced jQuery on a project with a small custom DOM library. It cut more than 20% from the footprint of the application and helped to push load times on 3G under 3 seconds.

If you use some of the weirder stuff in jQuery or use plugins you might end up doing some targeted refactoring or just porting that code but I found it a relatively painless transition to make.

Tip: write unit/integration tests for the code you're about to convert as it makes the process much easier and faster.

</comment><comment><USER44> The thing that I found surprising is their foray into web components: [https://github.com/github?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=-element&type=&la...](https://github.com/github?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=-element&type=&language=).

Custom elements are probably a great fit for .erb templates.

</comment><comment><USER45> A bit OT: In my personal projects, it's easy to use plain JS instead of jquery. But as soon as I start dealing with object- and array-data (formally json), I cannot miss the underscrore.js library. At least without it, I start writing my own helpers for some actions on obj/arrays.

</comment><comment><USER46> Don't you miss jQuery set-oriented operations, like $('.widget- item').removeClass('.selected')?

With querySelectorAll, you have to iterate over all the matching elements. Do you use some shortcut?

<comment><USER47> querySelector() will get you one element, otherwise you can use something like

Array.from(querySelectorAll('*')).forEach()

It is a little more cumbersome.

<comment><USER46> Yes, this is what I do, and I agree it's a little more cumbersome. That's why I asked ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> but is the page smaller/faster now? that's what matters

<comment><USER49> Apparently, yes. The author tweets later in the thread that the benefits they have seen include:

"Fewer kb sent to visitors, more explicit syntax when performing DOM manipulations, ability to use Flowjs for static type checking"

<comment><USER50> Surprised they are using flow, the new version of their Git GUI is written in TypeScript

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The `$.extend` example seems a little overdone -- isn't `Object.assign({}, objA, objB)` a sufficient replacement for most uses?

<comment><USER20> The simplicity of the grammar is what counts here.

<comment><USER51> I actually meant to reply to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17612990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17612990) , which mentions [http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/](http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/) as a point of comparison between jQuery and vanilla JS. For some reason I thought that was the top-level article, not the linked tweet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Great. How about removing the actual performance bottlenecks now? And the single point of failure.

</comment><comment><USER53> jQuery really pushed forward the base plane for standards in the browser. It was a common well tested library that allowed developers more time in developing their app/game/etc rather than testing in browsers fixing standards holes.

Browsers are more standardized today because of it, but what will come in the future when there isn't a library as widespread to help that effort, probably more fragmentation and eventually more jQuery like libraries whether that is polyfills, vdom kits, wasm, based and more.

jQuery also created a rare simplification in the front end fast moving javascript eco-system that standardized a well tested across all browsers library that made front end development easier rather than more complex. There aren't lots of libraries like it today that look to make things more standard and simple rather than adding monstrous monolithic abstractions that are brittle to change, yet change every few months causing brittle/flaky development.

As a webdev that developed javascript before jQuery and all the others (mootools, prototype, scriptalicious even dhtml etc) it was a very welcome library and may not be understood how impactful it was to development speeds and a market standard that really helped ship products.

I feel like jQuery gets lots of underserved hate just like javascript itself does, meanwhile they are very useful, helpful and needed tools. Tools that simplify over adding more complexity are needed, some engineers just like to add complexity which makes them seem smarter, when the job of an engineer is taking complexity and simplifying it. jQuery simplified over adding complexity. jQuery always made team developments more robust especially with juniors on the squad, you could at least know jQuery was tested and focus on the implementation and app over internals/support/browsers. jQuery is a perfect simplified abstraction of common javascript needs that standardized development from signatures to usage and eventually browsers. Just like javascript itself which has simplified web apps and development, jQuery's simplicity and usefulness went well beyond the call of duty. Believe it or not, jQuery is still a good library and that is mainly because its mission is to simplify complexity. I feel like some of the hate against jQuery is because it simplified too much and people that like to add complexity felt it made them seem less than, comments like "it didn't even need jQuery but the samples were in that anyways" were because jQuery was a simplification and market standard most of the time, and that is ok, platforms are built from good cornerstones and libs you can trust just like native/browser standards themselves.

I do lots of projects, some with jQuery and some without, the ones with jQuery still seem to get less in the weeds of browser standards/capabilities than the ones without. Native js is much better by far but even jQuery uses most of that now. The other areas of jQuery like animation are not as useful anymore (CSS animations). However it is still nice to have jQuery at times because without jQuery, even with most of the useful tools available natively in javascript, it is a common signature/library that when not present still leads to other people making their own helpers and re-creating jQuery at least the useful parts i.e. selectors, event handling, ajax, dom etc.

Thanks jQuery and John Resig, we'll need more libraries like you in the future to bring front end dev back to sanity and see though standards fragmentation again one day, for now that is numerous polyfills and vdom kits. Let the best of the warring new jQuery's win. "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" \- jQuery

</comment><comment><USER54> No.

</comment><comment><USER55> I hate when I see a javascript question in stack overflow and all answers use jQuery without needing it.</comment>


Microsoft Challenges Google's Artificial Brain With 'Project Adam' - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/07/microsoft-adam/

<comment><USER2> As an academic researcher in object recognition, I'm starting to wonder if I can still make significant contributions in this area, given that I'm competing with larger teams with far greater resources at Google, Microsoft, etc. For people like me, it is probably time to pivot to new problems in machine perception; the challenge is getting funding for them.

<comment><USER3> There's a lot of room left! Can you get accuracy at 120 fps? Can you do that in an embedded system? Can you use temporal and contextual queues to build a self-supervised system? Can you handle stereo and depth? Can the system handle a wide variety of image sizes? Can it handle rotation? Can it handle obstruction?

There is so so much more to vision than ImageNet! Go visit your robotics lab and they'll give you a giant laundry list of things they need but don't have.

<comment><USER2> Sure, I agree with you that there is more to vision than ImageNet (and many- category object recognition), and that's why I indicated I'm looking for other computer vision problems to work on that I think I can solve.

Incidentally, these deep convolutional neural networks do handle rotation very well (see Table 1, Krizhevsky et al): [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3530.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3530.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a nice result. I'm sure a lot of people had this particular idea but never got to actually do it. Not surprising because this is actually why to human brain scales so well. This was also hinted by AutoEncoders where pieces of a net are built separately bottom-up. I'm guessing a final settling phase would also be useful here.

One unfortunate thing is that different runs will produce different nets. But if training is radically faster and accuracy differences are small than this is one new technique to add to the toolbox.</comment>


Up to 200k U.S. coronavirus deaths 'if we do things almost perfectly' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dr-deborah-birx-predicts-200-000-deaths-if-we-do-n1171876 <comment><USER2> don't post this drivel in here.</comment>


Open Source Thinkpad T420 Battery Design - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iam4722202468/ThinkpadBattery <comment><USER2> This is a cool project, and I love it when somebody "takes back" their hardware a little bit or keeps them useful through hacking instead of throwing it away.

But it shows how irrationally our society is set up in some aspects. In an ideal world, you could just send the Lenovo engineer a mail and ask for the firmware source. But the incentives are such that they keep it secret, probably because they make a lot of money with batteries. So hackers spend a lot of time reverse engineering stuff. It seems really inefficient.

<comment><USER3> This is why my next laptop will be a MNT Reform, you can change the individual cells yourself:

[https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform](https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform)

<comment><USER4> I just received my developer beta MNT Reform, and I've been really enjoying it. They keyboard takes a bit of getting used to, but everything's very cute.

<comment> silly-silly Any chance you could host a 'sosreport' so I could get a look at the hardware config ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The T420 has been my main daily driver for nearly 6 years (using it right now to type this!) and I super excited to check this post out in more depth as battery duration is one of my biggest personal complaints about the system.

To those wondering about the T420, they are fantastically rugged and I still think they are the best laptop on the market assuming you can handle either a slightly crap monitor or the hassle to upgrade it. I've dropped them onto concrete, dremeled them, even lit them on fire, most of the time they'll take the abuse but even when they don't, they are dirt cheap so who cares! Ebay has them listed at $150 a replacement, you can literally buy nearly 10 of them before scratching the entry point for a Macbook. All of this while being able to a modern web-dev development setup thanks to it's incredibly simple upgrade bays.

<comment><USER6> I can unfortunately not live with the crap display (I do image editing). What's the hassle like?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty easy, but a bit expensive considering the laptop itself only costs around $150. A 1080p display + adaptor board for it costs about $100 and the 1440p display + adaptor is around $150. If you look up "T420 ips mod" you'll find lots of pictures and tutorials.

<comment><USER7> I just use another monitor, while the laptop display act like a second display.

<comment><USER6> Need it on the road.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had a big brother model of the t420, which uses the same battery and can also coreboot, the w520. It's the workstation model with i7 quad and a dedicated quadro graphics card. I understand the audience targeted here uses it mainly for development work.

So hardware video acceleration for newer formats isn't seen as a priority. That is an issue I came across, even with a quad core i7 and quardo, it struggle with h265 4k playback smoothly, and 4k vp9 pushed it a little hard too. 1080p youtube is fine as is x264, no problems there but x265 always gave it a little trouble.

There are many great things about it, but I thought I would mention the one drawback of an older thinkpad with older intel chips, is poor hardware accelerated video playback of newer codecs. If you stream online, it's a non issue mostly.

I had mine for 9 years before it finally died. I think the gpu overheated and burnt out, it gets to the login screen and then freezes. I was pushing it hard in terms of video encoding so part of it was my own fault. I still miss machine and that keyboard and nub.

</comment><comment><USER9> _Currently remaining battery % 's aren't exact because I'm assuming there is a linear coorelation between voltage and capacity (Which is wrong). I don't plan on fixing this, as the exact % is unimportant to me._

There are dedicated ICs which will give the remaining charge accurately, which may possibly be even cheaper than this ad-hoc solution.

<comment><USER10> Could you measure a calibration discharge curve with a (digital) bench power supply draining constant current (or constant power) and use it as a LUT?

<comment><USER11> Not as simple. Voltage also changes with load and temperature for multiple reasons. You'd also need to account for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It really speaks to how badly innovation has slowed in chip design that a 10+ year old budget laptop is still comptitive hardware

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't consider the ThinkPad line "budget" in any way --- that would be the IdeaPads.

<comment><USER13> You can find them on eBay for cheap. That makes them budget. Nobody cares if they were $9000 last year or a million when they were released. They are commonly found as cheap old business equipment or found in the trash. You can get a thinkpad today for under $600 new and and old ones for under $200. Ideapads have sometimes been more expensive than thinkpad so it's not a good metric.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The T420 has been one of the best Linux laptops I've ever owned.

Pretty much recommend this over System76 any day.

</comment><comment><USER15> Check out this battery recall notice, which includes the T420. Lenovo sent me a brand new replacement 9-cell unit for my T420 about 6 months ago.

[https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/hf004122](https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/hf004122)

Typed on my T420 running Linux Mint 20.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if this project could be applied to the X230 laptops.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it should, but the laptop's firmware would need to be modified to not check for an authentic battery

<comment><USER16> Nice to know. I've done that firmware mod on the T430, so it's not too hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cool project, I wish battery stuff in general was more open-source friendly and not hidden in a wade of obscure datasheets.

What I'd really like to see one day is a web site/an app where one can input a pack voltage and sustained/peak amperage targets and the cell type that is to be used, and it will automa(t/g)ically create a controller schematic / parts list, with full safety features (balancing of _all_ individual batteries, overcurrent/short circuit protection on load side, overtemperature protection on charging side) included.

So, no matter if you're building an e-cig, a drone or a way to power a mobile disco setup without lugging six car starter batteries around, it will always give you a solution that works.

</comment><comment><USER18> Apparently those Thinkpads are from 2011-2012, that's old. What do people do with such old devices that makes building a battery from scratch worthwhile?

<comment><AUTHOR> The T420 is old, but still has some advantages over laptops currently on the market. Up until 2018 many laptops still had dual core cpus like the i7-7500u which are worse than the i7-3840qm that can be put in a T420, and the few currently available laptops that have 1440p displays and quad core cpus are still pretty expensive. Some other reasons people still use the laptop are being able to use coreboot with it and the upgradability of it. It's really cheap to upgrade the laptop to work with bluetooth 5 and wifi 6 and multiple ssd's can be added using the two 2.5" slots and the one msata slot. Using this, someone could make a large 150wh or even 200wh battery that would let this laptop last longer than most new laptops.

<comment><USER19> The display quality is so far behind more modern laptops like the macbook pro though.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the mods that can be done is adding 1440p 14" ips display, like the LP140QH1-SPB1 from the carbon x1 gen 2. It's not as good as a new macbook pro display, but it's very nice to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a concept, lots of industrial innovation are restricted due to lack of collaboration. Lots of University level innovation are restricted due to lack of lots of real world testing, open source can solve these two, but lacks lots of funding. Can all of specific industrial knowledge and technological knowledge be open source to the tune of making a viable product ?

</comment><comment><USER21> I use a t430 with a t420 keyboard, and let me tell you haven't found no other laptop so comfy in layout terms. Yeah I would like a mechanical switch, but I'm happy to see the t420 still alive in the community.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is this still needed if coreboot is installed?

Will this work to make a slice (bottom) battery too?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, this is still needed even with coreboot. The attiny isn't doing anything too complicated, it's just there to tell the laptop the status of the battery. In the testing I did, if you supply 12v without any of the SMBus stuff the laptop will shut off after a few minutes of use.

I'm actually looking in to making a slice battery, it should be possible but sourcing the docking connector seems to be much harder than getting the battery connector.

<comment><USER22> Would it be possible to write directly to /dev/i2c in Linux and spoof the messages? Not sure what the use case of this would be, but might be useful for something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep definitely, I had this exact thought last night and found an example kernel module to spoof a battery, and one to read i2c messages. There's probably all kinds of cool things you can do with a kernel module to communicate between the laptop's i2c port and a microcontroller. The docking connector conveniently has an i2c port on it, maybe I'll look in to this in the future

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As an owner of a T420 and x230 thank you but these laptops are too old. The CPUs use like 25w, the screens are 99% really bad TN screens and a few touchscreen IPS on the x220t and x230t. The screens are the deal breaker. Lugging around a heavy laptop or a small laptop with a crappy screen sucks. The new generation starting wirh 40s are modern battery can have internal and external batteries and the screens aren't overpriced crap, you can easily find a cheap IPS in FHD for under $60 on eBay. These need adapters or expensive crappy screens that aren't produced anymore.

I wish they had better screens to make them worth using. Using an IPS and going back to these is hell, and the 720p on the T420 is also really saddening. It's the worst part of these computers.

<comment><USER23> The rest of the package makes up for it, for me. The keyboard is fantastic, the CPU is more than fast enough, enough ports, they're rugged as hell, and I can get at the parts to swap them out when they fail. It's always been a desktop replacement for me, so lugging it about was rare. I can forgive the screen. Mine spends most of its time plugged into a monitor anyway these days. I think the graphics chip might be on the way out, though, I'm starting to see rendering glitches...

<comment><USER13> The new keyboards are good too. Where are you getting the screen from? They're way overpriced when I find them (12.5in screens, 14in and 15in aren't much better either).

Wait until you get a T440P. About the same, but way more powerful and the screen and battery life are way better. Only like $120 usually and even less pretty often. The batteries are cheap and genuine too. I'm looking forward to more devices like the surface so Keyboards aren't attached to laptops anymore. The new Lenovo keyboard is pretty good but it's expensive!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I would imagine with works well with W520s too. Nice project! Unfortunately aftermarket batteries are always a lottery and more often than not have really poor quality, if not even dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've had two t410s, both have died after the screen hinge breaks in some fashion (nut wears through plastic, hinge breaks, then the plastic cover on the screen separates.

Are t420s better?

</comment><comment><USER26> I love in the final video he has the distance finder on a breadboard. I have a similar one and just found that awesome to see

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm on the lookout for a FHD IPS screen for the T420 that is compatible for max 150$.

Where do I source those?

<comment><AUTHOR> I got a few displays from aliexpress, all of them were good quality. If the seller has a good rating, they'll most likely send legitimate displays. You'll also need a FHD adaptor. Together the adaptor and the screen will easily be under $150.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have a dream:

A large company buys Thinkpad as a brand and launches a few shiny Linux Laptops

<comment><USER29> Instead of making bad Mac Air clones a company should make 1:1 replicas of sturdy, old school, ThinkPads (t420, x230, x220, etc)

There's a market for cheap, reliable, battle tested equipment

<comment><USER16> I wonder how much of the design of those oldschool ThinkPads is patented or otherwise protected. What's to stop some enterprising hacker from making those replicas without authorization?</comment></comment></comment>


Where to find technical consulting/development work? - <AUTHOR> My friends and I are in college and are looking to do technical development/consulting work. Where can we find jobs? <comment><USER2> Have you tried reading or posting to HN's monthly freelancer thread?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10822020](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10822020)

Note, however, that consultants are generally expected to have a deep knowledge of the area they're hired to work in, and are expected to work without supervision. So many companies may not want to hire college students with no prior work experience for a consultant role.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you tried simply just making an effort to ask around more? Especially at college, that should net you a fair bit of connections fairly easily. Good developers are really sought after in my area at least.

</comment><comment><USER4> Your school's MBA's are looking for people like you (though they won't pay you well)</comment>


One-click save links to read later and schedule when you get a newsletter digest - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/itemsy/hgldjebdmbnjjijfpdjoghabodcfohlb <comment><USER2> I don't use RSS, but isn't this just a overspecialized, vendor-locked, ad-hoc version of that?</comment>


Science shows cheese can make wine taste better - <AUTHOR> http://sciencebulletin.org/archives/6593.html <comment><USER2> This was already known, but it's nice for science to confirm.

The Spannish expression "Darsela con queso" (lit: to give it to someone with cheese) was about the custom of giving cheese to buyers that wanted to taste a wine that the seller knew to be bad[0].

[0] ESP [http://marianitu.com/2011/02/17/el-origen-de-la-expresion- qu...](http://marianitu.com/2011/02/17/el-origen-de-la-expresion-que-no-te-la- den-con-queso/)

[0*] or any of [https://www.google.es/search?q=darsela+con+queso](https://www.google.es/search?q=darsela+con+queso)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's an interesting phenomena. On a regular basis stories about the various problems of scientific quality make it to HN, e.g. recently this one [1].

On the other hand every now and then a study that is almost certainly completely bogus and of such low quality that it basically says nothing at all also is very popular.

Add to that the regular comments of the form "maybe this study isn't that good, but my personal anecdotes show ..."

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12713249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12713249)

</comment><comment><USER4> What an absolutely horrible website. Immediately tries to register to send you desktop notifications and covers the article content in a popover to try to harvest your email address.

<comment><USER5> Not for me. Noscript and uBlock: making the internet nicer, one webpage at a time.

<comment><USER6> Just uBlock where and it's also fine!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So.. what about drinking wine with a placebo? Why not include a control test with for example a buttered toast.

</comment><comment><USER8> I would like to anecdotally confirm this.

</comment><comment><USER9> My mouth says cheese makes EVERYTHING taste better. Take that, science.

</comment><comment><USER10> I love wine, cheese and science... not in any particular order.

</comment><comment><USER11> I didn't need science to know this is true.

<comment><USER12> Maybe you are just an outlier?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> on the contrary, wine makes cheese taste better.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm ready to be a tester. Where to find a job offer??

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd prefer something that tastes good out of the box, like orange juice

<comment><USER12> Out of the box you say? [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/29/100-percent- orange-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/29/100-percent-orange-juice- artificial_n_913395.html)</comment></comment>


MIT project: tracking trash in NY & Seattle with tiny cell phones - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/trash-0715.html

<comment><USER2> Anyone know more about the hardware behind this? I tried looking for info on their lab site (<http://senseable.mit.edu/>) but the publications page (<http://senseable.mit.edu/papers/publications.html>) doesn't load in Chromium and I get a javascript error in Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's cool that they can make locator beacons out of GPS and cell transceivers. But why throw more circuit boards in the garbage just to learn what routes and schedules garbagemen follow? Aren't those known in advance?</comment>