iPhone 6 slows down by 28% after just 4 months use - <AUTHOR> https://simplyfixit.co.uk/iphone-battery-slow-benchmarks/ <comment><USER2> I call bullshit. Reading the cached version, this is poorly disguised marketing lies for a third battery replacement service.

The test scenario was not described, this is only one sample which could have been selected and the source is not credible.

After 12 months of heavy daily usage on my 6s, I'm seeing 87% battery capacity left as an example after over 312 cycles. I am also seeing the same benchmark as the day I got it.

<comment><USER3> When can you find battery capacity?

<comment><USER4> I'm using [https://itunes.apple.com/se/app/battery-life- doctor/id116593...](https://itunes.apple.com/se/app/battery-life- doctor/id1165930552?l=en&mt=8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I know that this article states a well-known fact at this point, but I can't overlook that it is on the homepage of a company that sells battery replacement services for iPhones.

EDIT: Also note that Apple as of today is offering battery replacement services themselves at $29. [1]

[1]: [https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/12/30/29-battery- repl...](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/12/30/29-battery-replacements)

<comment><USER6> Better that people give their money to a third party, than to the company that created the problem in the first place.

<comment><USER7> Apple invented battery physics now?

<comment><USER8> Battery physics? No. But they're definitely pioneers in the field of covert downclocking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Everyone defending Apple's behavior is missing the point _completely_. Yes, it's a reasonable way to manage degrading battery life and related electronic issues.

What's NOT reasonable is Apple CONCEALING this behavior. This led people to believe that they needed a new $1000 phone, instead of a $79 battery replacement.

<comment><USER10> My phone gives me a warning notification if performance might be getting degraded because the storage is getting full, and provides suggested actions to delete stuff stored locally.

Something about replacing the battery would have been perfectly reasonable for Apple to have suggested similarly, since we know the hardware can detect poor battery performance. Of course, we know why they didn't do this; it would cut into sales of new models.

<comment><USER11> Ironically, I regularly get a warning on my Macbook Pro that I am running out of disk space, even when I have over half left.

The kicker? They try really hard to sell me on paying for iCloud.

Scammy?

Absolutely.

Someone who is NOT computer literate will likely pay for iCloud storage based on false information.

<comment><USER12> Do you, though? That sounds like a bug. I have also seen that warning, but only when I have about 10% free space.

<comment><USER11> Do I what? I have a 512gb disk. It has over 300gb free.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, this is definitely not a normal thing then. It's certainly not a standard Apple feature to start warning people that they're running out of disk space when there's so much free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I bought a new iPhone every 2 or 3 years because of the slowdowns. I would have paid 29 euros for a new battery had I known that it would restore performance. Shit like this makes me hate the iPhone X I'm typing this on. I was thinking of getting an Apple watch but I will _not_ buy it because I don't trust them anymore. They better restore trust or it will cost them a lot of sales in the long run. Making phones with replacable batteries would be a good start.

<comment><USER14> It looks like the CPU-slowdown-for-old-battery thing was only introduced about a year ago. So you can probably blame your X purchase on this (especially if you came from a 6 or maybe 6S -- a 7 should not have been significantly affected unless there is a bigger battery issue with it), but before then your older phone were probably "naturally" slow.

<comment><USER13> At this point how do we know Apple doesn't make intentional decisions that slowdown older phones? Maybe CPU benchmarking tools where given all CPU power in the past and they forgot to implement it now, just like the GPU manufacturers were caught cheating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I always wonder if slowing down the phone is a good solution. By slowing down the CPU the CPU needs less energy. But at the same time the user has to wait much longer in order to finish what he was trying to do. Thus the screen is on for a longer period of time. Isn't the screen one of the main energy consumers in an iPhone?

Launching apps on my iPhone 6 (which needs a new battery) takes for ages (even when compared to my older but less used iPhone 5S). I can't imagine that the extended "screen lit"-time does not have a big impact as well.

Also: I am one of the few users who would be totally fine with the iPhone shutting down at 20% or so (if I have the full performance as I used to) because my iPhone is rarely going near 20%. At work I can charge. At home I can charge. When I am on the go I usually am not using the phone that much... However playing hearthstone when I am in bed, loading the phone, everything takes much longer as well which makes playing games less fun...

<comment><USER12> The issue is not specifically about battery life, but about the ability of the battery to provide a stable voltage under load. The voltage of the cells sags more under high current draw as the battery ages; reducing the current draw by throttling the maximum SoC frequency seems to be intended to avoid the problem where the voltage dips to a level that causes the SoC to shut down suddenly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How did they generate this data? The screenshots say that all of the benchmarks were made within an hour of each other, and out in order of the charge cycles. Are they swapping out batteries?

</comment><comment><USER17> So,

\- Apple makes phones that have batteries normal owners can't replace.

\- When the battery degrades the phone's performance degrades.

\- Users either pay for a new phone or were paying $80 for new batteries.

\- Apple admits the ruse, lowers the replacement cost to $30, basically admitting that $50 was profit.

\- Turns out another company already did replacements for $30 and was probably making money on it. So Apple's still likely making money on it.

\- Users get upset but line up around the block to buy whatever Apple puts out anyways -- sight unseen.

We get the behavior we incentivize. In this case we get planned obsolescence and shakedowns for repair. Until consumers vote with their wallets, all this kvetching doesn't mean shit.

<comment><USER18> > another company already did replacements for $30

£30, which is $40.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't know about 28% in four months.

But this whole controversy reminds me of a few years ago. When people were very happy with their iPhones (including some of my friends), because they manifested and maintained "battery life" that their friends' Android phones did not.

Maybe Apple shouldn't have hidden what they're doing. Maybe it's arguably a legitimate trade secret (I'd hardly be in favor of "patenting" the functionality).

Anyway, now Apple's "shit" for how they manage battery degradation. A couple of years ago, or whenever, before all this upset: They were "the shit" with respect to battery durability -- as perceived by users in their charge lifetimes. At least, among some of my friends. And some press, IIRC. And whatever.

Apple's not magic. Their batteries degrade, too. On the other hand, the vertical integration and efficiencies they are engineering into their newer chipsets? Pretty amazing.

P.S. I'm no Apple Fanboy. Just recalling how perspectives change.

<comment><USER20> I think you're making a mistake of treating users of X as a homogenous group. Some users were not happy with how the performance and the battery degraded. Some were happy with the power usage over time. Some were happy to point out how they're better than the users of Y.

All of that is still the case. What changed is that "I think my iPhone is getting slower, but I'm going to replace it with a new one anyway" is not interesting news, but "it's been proven why it's getting slower, now I feel ripped off because I didn't actually need to upgrade the whole phone, just the battery" is interesting.

<comment><USER19> Regarding the first, Apple has -- since its renaissance -- consistently had a limited number of products. Limited product lines. They themselves lump users together, to some degree; and many argue for this advantage: High quality products that "just work", and don't make me choose between fifty-odd variations.

Regarding the latter, I generally agree. I'd much rather know what's going on and have the choice of spending circa $100 (supposedly formerly $80, now $30 for a year), to replace the battery. (And a separate pox on "thin" making all these batteries unremovable; but I guess that's my personal preference.)

Maybe Apple knowingly benefited from uninformed user upgrading. How much of that was battery/throttling, and how much of that was Apple users wanting to have the latest and greatest -- for functionality and performance, or just for status? We may never know.

But, as I mentioned, the perceived charge lifetime and durability of same, were -- as far as I saw -- major marketing/selling points of iPhones. And I recall myself grumbling about how my Android phones' charge lifetimes were decreasing, mere months into the devices lives.

I don't know whether this could have been patented (like stupid rounded- corners patents and so many other things). But, it wasn't. Was Apple obligated to reveal this "secret sauce"? I don't know.

For _most_ people, the implementation seemed to work out fine. Friends with 3 and 4 year old iPhones, while many Android users could barely make it to 2 years (for multiple factors, not just charge lifetime -- e.g. timely and ongoing updates, anyone?).

I wish there was a phone that wasn't so wholly owned by big corporations. As opposed to its users. But it seems to be the nature of our world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I dunno. I've been using my iPhone 6s for 1.5 years. Maybe it's slowed down, but it's not anything that I've noticed.

</comment><comment><USER22> Cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gaYTRe...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gaYTRe- jJhoJ:https://simplyfixit.co.uk/iphone-battery-slow-benchmarks/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Geekbench CPU scores from the release iPhone 7 running iOS 10 show scores of around 3400/5500\. My 14 month old iPhone 7 running 11.2 reports around 3500/5900.

So no slow down on this model. Battery capacity it as 87%.

<comment><USER24> I have an iPhone 6 that's about a year and a half old, and although I experience frequent & noticeable slowdowns while using it, and although my battery life has noticeably decreased since I started using it, the Geekbench score for the phone is higher than the average iPhone 6. It makes me wonder what's going on.

<comment><USER23> GPU and CPU being run separately perhaps?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's funny that most everyone I know with 6 or 6s has problems (slow, bad battery) and everyone I know (including mysel) with 7 has no problems what-so- ever. Maybe 6 was just a bad product?

<comment><USER26> I have a 6 plus. I broke the screen a few months ago, so they replaced it with a brand new 6 plus (hence new battery). It is very slow in much the same way that many other people describe -- it will just pause for a long time (a minute or more) in some weird stuck state. The old phone that I broke had the same problem. I have the minimum apps installed, and background refresh disabled. My wife and mother both have 6 pluses, which exhibit the same weird long pause slowdown behavior. After trial and error, the best hack to get around it is: (1) when it happens, immediately turn the phone off and on with the upper right power button, then (2) immediately after the phone turns back on, close all running or suspended apps. If you don't do (1), then you're just completely stuck for a long time. I've had this problem before and after iOS 11, and with my new and old phones.

<comment><USER27> I have had a 6 Plus for 3 years, my girlfriend has a 6 as well but none of us have the issues you describe. Yes it got quite slow with iOS 11, but it's just a bit laggy at times, no long pauses that require a reboot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't think this is true beyond benchmarks. They stress test the CPU and that's when the throttling hits the hardest. It's throttling peaks in CPU usage, and a benchmark is all peak.

So this sounds like a worst case scenario. Actual use can be completely different.

Not defending Apple though. This complete lack of communication over an obviously controversial choice is amateurish. So much of this could have been easily avoided by clearly mentioning it in a Beta release, along with of course implmenting an on/off switch!

</comment><comment><USER29> Do bear in mind the issue in question is voltage spikes (which cause unexpected shutdown), that's what Apple is trying to prevent. Most of the time there'll be no performance impact, it would just lower how far the phone can boost clock speed when it needs it, I'm guessing? So it would affect the peak (and therefore mean) performance, but not the mode or median, I think?

Correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER16> Modern CPUs will pretty much always try to boost as long as they have the thermal and power headroom to do so (see race to sleep). Talking about mean, median, and 'mode' of performance is going to be tricky because it'll be heavily dependent on how the tests are being run. Things like, is there enough time to rebuild thermal headroom between iterations, or does a single iteration ever actually run enough to exhaust its thermal headroom will effect the results of multiple runs.

So returning to the base point, any reduction in boost frequency in -normal- usage (seperate from benchmarking) will cause (machine) measureable (but maybe not perceived) performance loss because everything is built around trying to crank out work as quickly as possible for as short of a time as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Shouldn't this study take 4 months to complete?

<comment><USER20> Not for a company getting multiple iPhones of various age every day in for repair. If they can do a check on some percentage of their customers, they're likely to get tens/hundreds of data points a day and be able to graph an average age-vs-slowdown relation.

If they started after the original forum post, they should have a pretty good idea already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is making an interesting case for using an external battery case to keep the phone at 100% more often and reduce charge cycles.

I wonder if the comparable battery performance gaps perceived by for many Android users will be seen as closer than we thought - of Android devices secretly dialed down its devices would they have much better battery life.

</comment><comment><USER32> Interesting for me is that my iPhone 4 is much faster than my iPhone 5S. And the battery lasts much longer on my 4.

I think what Apple changed these days is that the latest version of iOS works both on 5+, while I remember my iPhone 4 was stuck with old version and I was never able to upgrade it.

</comment><comment><USER27> I just tested my own iPhone 6 Plus that i bought in early 2015 and that i have been using daily ever since.

Single Core Score 1518, Multicore 2607

These are better than the 0 day scores in that article, which seems weird. My phone must have close to 900 charging cycles by now, if not more.

</comment><comment><USER33> I have an android phone - the nexus 5 and it's a total shitbag right now. It seems like it's slowed down massively. I can't imagine this is only apple.

<comment><USER34> I also still use a stock N5 and I've noticed it really taking a nosedive over the past few months.

<comment><USER35> The nand memory could be degrading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't see the actual age of the battery mentioned

<comment><USER37> Nor the operating conditions (temperature in particular), which as Apple mentioned rightly in their press release can have quite a substantial impact on how quickly capacity degrades.

<comment><USER38> Would the type of case used contribute to premature wear? Thinking Otterbox rugged type cases causing the battery to retain excessive heat while charging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Does it even bother anyone at Apple that their company has a problem with ethics?

It would seem as an engineer, if your boss told you to write code that intentionally slowed a user's device down (for ANY reason), wouldn't the proper response be "Will do, but how do we inform the user so they can avoid it?"

What frustrates me most is Apple won't learn a lesson from this, they just merely "got caught" this time.

<comment><USER40> Well, all phones intentionally slow themselves down (throttle) when they get too hot; peak CPU performance can only be maintained for a certain amount of time until it cools back down. I don't think any mobile OS directly exposes this to the user. Lowering peak performance in the long term is different, but I suspect they didn't see it as all that different.

<comment><USER39> I think the difference is that the user will notice their phone is hot and running slow, so there's some sort of feedback available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Utter crap, marketing rubbish. I'm pretty critical of apple but this is incredibly off.

</comment><comment><USER42> Is there some data on iPads as well?

</comment><comment><USER43> Forced obsolescence.. so many other things could have been done. A battery saver option could let users pick their performance options, but no, just get a new iPhone for $800...

<comment><USER44> the problem is not performance vs power usage, the problem is the cpu faults and the device reboots because they fucked up completely on engineering safe voltage margin into the thing

all cpu faults if undervolted. tipically the more the clock speed, the higher the voltage needed so that transistor keep working correctly.

on a mobile device battery degradation is normal, with that comes less viable battery life but also a lower voltage

when you put togheter the two things you just need to plan accordingly. that's what was the whole kerfuffle: they didn't

it doesn't help that they use short lived batteries in iphones (go check it, ipads are rated twice the cycles) but the whole issue comes from bad engineering of the cpu/gpu or whatever they put into that doesn't work with the degrading battery output the device should have been built to cope with

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> There's absolutely no good reason why iPhone batteries are not easily user- replaceable. All the reasons usually given are weak excuses for an essentially consumer-hostile hardware design.

<comment><USER46> Strawman.

<comment><USER45> How so?

If the battery was easily replaceable, then I doubt there would be much outrage about this issue. But with the iPhone, device and battery are fused together and are thus seen as a single unit.</comment></comment></comment>


Zillow drops complaint against 'McMansion Hell' - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2017/zillow-drops-complaint-mcmansion-hell-blog-backlash-copyright-claim/ <comment><USER2> EFF's response: "Our client has no obligation to, and thus will not, comply with Zillow's demands. Zillow's legal threats are not supported and plainly seek to interfere with protected speech."

The only way this kind of bullshit will stop is if legal demand letters (like Zillow's) that are used with little to no legal standing - purely to bully - need to come with quick and easy recourse where the instigator and their lawyers get nice big fines.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a soft way to excuse the charge of computer fraud.

<comment> King-Aaron Is it the rehosting of images that constitutes the 'fraud' description? Or is there another element to the story?

<comment><USER4> I think they were trying to argue that she was exceeding her authorized access as defined by the ToS and therefore "committing fraud" under the CFAA.

<comment> King-Aaron Ah, I gotcha.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Metaprogramming Spell Book - <AUTHOR> http://ducktypo.blogspot.com/2010/08/metaprogramming-spell-book.html

<comment><USER2> I have a "meta" question. Is having the h-scroll bars default when you link from gist, or is your main content section not >=80 chars wide?

</comment><comment><USER3> would be nice if it were all in the same gist (separate files if need be)</comment>


Pick this Nit: Null Path URIs and the Pedantic Web - <AUTHOR> http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2010/04/pick-this-nit-null-path-uris-and.html <comment><USER2> So the moral of the story is "bring your own laptop to the demo" right? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> That doesn't work so well when the customer has trouble giving you an IP address. Our software provided links that would work from inside customer's IP address range, not outside it, so WiMAX wouldn't have been an option, either.</comment></comment>


What is Open Source Bicycle Design? - onreact-com http://worldbike.org/what-open-source-bicycle-design

<comment><AUTHOR> Aren't this and the open source digital camera solutions in search of problems?

<comment><USER2> I'd argue there is a stagnant design industry around bicycles. The major manufacturers are greatly restricted by the market as well as international racing regulations, on their ability to innovate. Meanwhile most small custom builders don't have the R&D luxuries.

Open source bike design can lead to rapid iterations for improving human powered transportation.

Starting with a new methodology can yield un-predictable results. This is a good thing in terms of innovation.

For a good example of open source bicycle design look up Python recumbents. <http://www.python-lowracer.de/>

</comment></comment><comment> onreact-com There is a broken image on this page. To see actual images look elsewhere on the site, e.g. here:

<http://worldbike.org/about-us></comment>


Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/rfreebern/status/1214560971185778693 <comment><USER2> It took me a while to get the joke because I didn't recognize that white ghost on a white background. I take this as another example why these non-ascii urls are a bad idea for security.

<comment><USER3> It's not white, it's the blueish grey #E1E8ED. You need a better monitor :)

<comment><USER4> Fails all contrast measures abysmally: [https://contrast-ratio.com/#%23E1E8ED- on-white](https://contrast-ratio.com/#%23E1E8ED-on-white)

And this is despite that fact that the actual "font color" is #14171A with excellent contrast: [https://contrast-ratio.com/#%2314171A-on- white](https://contrast-ratio.com/#%2314171A-on-white)

But these bizarre characters don't respond the text color and thus utterly unpredictable in their legibility.

<comment><USER3> The use of the color is quite different from a regular character, so measuring by the same yardstick makes no sense. This is a blob of color, not just some thin lines.

> these bizarre characters

At least on Twitter.com, they're not characters, they're SVG images.

<comment><USER4> PNG, but yes.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it differs based on the browser? Shows up as [https://abs-0.twimg.com/emoji/v2/svg/1f47b.svg](https://abs-0.twimg.com/emoji/v2/svg/1f47b.svg) to me.

<comment><USER4> [https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/1f47b.png](https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/1f47b.png) ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is using Punycode encoding, see [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain).

<comment><USER2> Why is this even a thing?

<comment><USER6> There are a bunch of different human writing systems. All of them are weird because they were invented by humans, most of them are _very_ weird indeed because they were invented by humans a long time ago and then gradually mutated.

The Latin system is the one you're using here. It's very popular. Most humans in the integrated tribes are somewhat familiar with it‡. It has twenty six "letters" and then twenty six more "capital letters" which look different but mean almost the same thing for some reason, and then a bunch more symbols that aren't quite letters although some (apostrophe, ampersand) have a better claim than others. But other popular systems include Han, which has a shitload of logograms, and Cyrillic and Greek which have different letters than Latin and different rules about how letters work.

Anyway, the people who invented DNS only or primarily used the Latin system and they weren't much into capital letters. So, their system doesn't treat capital letters as different and only has one set of twenty six Latin letters, ten digits, a dash and an underscore for some reason.

But, lots of people who do NOT have Latin as the primary or only writing system found this annoying to work with. They wanted to use their writing system with DNS especially once the Web came along and popularized the Internet.

Punycode is a way to use some reserved nonsense-looking Latin text in any DNS label to mean that actually this DNS name should be displayed as some Unicode text. Unicode encodes all popular human writing systems (and lots of unpopular ones) fairly well, so this sorts the problem out. Specifically Punycode reserves Latin names that start xn-- for this purpose. By only caring about display this avoids changing anything in the technical underpinnings. Only user-facing code needed to change, every other layer is unaltered.

The rules about IDNs say that a registry (such as .com) should have rules to ensure the names in that registry are unambigous and meaningful. But in practice the purpose of the .com registry in particular is to make as much money as possible regardless of the consequences. So you can register any name you please and they won't stop you even if it's deliberately confusing.

‡ None of the extant unintegrated tribes have writing. This probably doesn't mean anything important.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps ironically, URLs were never meant for human consumption in the first place. You were meant to "travel" to various sites via search indices, etc. (Think Google.)

Viewed in that light, restricting DNS names to ASCII as a way to reduce bugs, security issues, etc., makes a lot of sense.

<comment><USER8> Search engines happened remarkably late. Nobody understood how easy search engines would be.

People thought you would follow links from directory pages linked from your "home page", hence the house symbol still seen in browsers. Yahoo! is a leftover of an attempt at a directory.

<comment><USER7> Indeed--this is what was meant by "indices".

It's kind of like XML. It was never meant to be seen by human eyes, except in a few debugging scenarios. Unfortunately, that intention was ignored, and now we have a usability disaster. (At least in the case of XML, it can just die.)

<comment><USER9> I agree with what you said about XML. But in its stead we have a lot of JSON which is several respects is even worse.

The worst part of it is that it doesn't have a stable definition for numbers, making it impossible to guarantee you're getting the same value back if you encode and then decode a number. Reliably preserving the data you serialise using it should be a primary feature for an encoding format. JSON can't even do that.

<comment><USER10> Why do you need a stable serialization for an unstable data type? Use a string of you want stability.

<comment><USER9> The point is that a 64-bit integer is stable in the language I'm using (which is most languages).

My opinion is that a serialisation format that explicitly makes something as fundamental as the representation of numbers unspecified is not useful as a data representation format.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hate to be a spoilsport, but this is a good reminder that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack) is still possible in some domains and with some browsers and CLI tools, although some of the easier tricks to detect have been mitigated.

<comment><AUTHOR> if you run pihole or a local dnsmasq/unbound it should be possible to mitigate it by sinkholing any unicode domains, e.g. with dnsmasq (requires a patch [https://github.com/spacedingo/dnsmasq- regexp_2.76](https://github.com/spacedingo/dnsmasq-regexp_2.76)) you can do this:

      address=/:xn--*:/0.0.0.0

does anyone know if something like this is possible with unbound?

<comment><USER12> But... What about legit unicode domains? I own a couple that I use for personal projects or file sharing.

<comment><USER13> I've never seen a legit unicode domain personally, but, is this not compatible with whitelisting specific domains? (in pihole, anyways...)

<comment><USER14> I have, but I live in Norway, where we have æøå in the standard alphabet. I suspect it's more common still in Asian countries, because at least in Norwegian, there are standard ascii replacements for all the extra letters, å = aa, ø = oe, æ = ae

<comment><USER15> Here in Sweden I have never encountered a single legit IDN domain.

<comment><USER16> I know [http://www.xn--sknetrafiken-ucb.se](http://www.skånetrafiken.se), but like many it just redirects to an ASCII version. (Does it look weird seeing "Skane" when you know it ought to be "Skaane"?)

Similarly for a power company, [http://xn--rsted-uua.dk](http://ørsted.dk), just a redirect, but they do use it on adverts and my electricity bill.

Some that don't redirect: [http://xn--mgk--jra.dk/](http://mgk-ø.dk/) [https://www.xn---strm-uuae.dk/](https://www.ø-strøm.dk/) [https://xn-- magnusbrth-85a.se/](https://magnusbråth.se/)

(HN has converted the displayed URLs to Punycode, presumably as a quick security measure without reference to the reasonable characters for each TLD.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wanted to make a new website using emojis instead of "www" as a joke about the number of syllables. ("Angry Face Angry Face Angry Face" takes the same amount of time to say "www".)

Browsers kept insisting on showing this as xn--b38haa.crankybill.com, so I went with "grr" instead.

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting, both Chrome and Firefox seem to show the Punycode encoding after I enter the emoji in the URL for me.

Do browsers always show the Punycode encoding, or do they show the encoded glyphs only in some scenarios? I can't find examples of Punycode in the wild used by normal websites.

<comment><USER19> I believe the config of which glyphs to show depends on the TLD. There is a hardcoded list of which character ranges are acceptable per TLD, and if any characters are outside those ranges, the xn-- form is shown instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not all unicode characters are valid IDN labels. For example, emojis are not valid in IDN labels.

<comment><USER21> Valid or not several emoji domains have existed since 2001 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain)

<comment><USER22> As with so many things domain name related, what is or is not valid varies by and is determined by registrar. The biggest registrars (.com, .net, .org as three examples) generally have a lot of restrictions on IDNs, whereas many countries can afford to allow just about the full gamut of Unicode if they wish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hmm, I wonder if that's going to be the next battle field for URLs: Facebook will try to register its logo as an emoji, and you'd just need to go to [http://[f]](http://\[f\]) to open their site.

There already is an emoji for apple (the fruit, not the company). Oh the horrors. I should start an emoji NIC!

<comment><USER24> These would be less than convenient to type, but perhaps as we go more and more towards a non-typing web where a walled-garden start page and predefined links lead to the most popular sites with a click, these URLs will become fashionable. I think if so, this will herald the impending death of the human- read and typed URL in favor of start page links and search results.

<comment><USER25> There are more mobile users than there are desktop users, and for them it's just the same to type.

<comment><USER26> How is switch to emoji input -> press search box -> start typing apple -> press apple symbol and so on "just the same" as app<CR>?

<comment><USER25> You don't have to search. Just hit the apple emoji. If you use it frequently, it'll probably be on the front. If not, it takes two seconds to hit the category it's in and then press it.

<comment><USER26> Because apple happens to start with an a. Ok fine, specifically for apple.com it's almost the same. But that's not really the point I was arguing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> And how do i type that in the address bar?

<comment><USER17> If you use Windows, [Logo]+[.]

<comment><USER28> That's a neat trick. It even has kaomoji and useful symbols ╰( _°▽°_ )╯

<comment><USER29> This sounds like the modern version of this [http://bash.org/?835030](http://bash.org/?835030) quote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Ghost in the shell...

</comment><comment><USER31> This made my day!</comment>


A NY Doctor Shared with Hannity His Hydroxy Chloroquine/Azithromycin Results - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/RossFairchild/status/1242263727325483010 <comment><USER3> From the twitter page: _"

A NY Doctor shared with Hannity his Hydroxychloroquine/Azithromycin results.

\- 200mg 2x daily Hydroxy Chloroquine

\- 500mg 1x daily Azithromycin \- 220mg 1x daily Zinc sulfate

350 patients • Breathing restored 3-4 hours • Zero deaths • Zero hospitalizations • Zero intubations"_

Note that the chloroquine dosage he used is lower than that for malaria - <USER2> bonus.

Note the use of zinc sulfate, possibly following

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4182877/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4182877/)

and (PDF)

[https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/jo...](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0109180&type=printable)

i.e., the chloroquin allows zinc ions to enter the otherwise-impermeable cell wall where the ions can halt the RNA viral replication process.</comment>


Ecuador Gives Assange Citizenship, Worsening Standoff with Britain - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/world/europe/julian-assange-ecuador-embassy.html <comment><USER2> TBH if I was Assange, I wouldn't leave the embassy now that Trump is president.

Yes, Obama aggressively prosecuted whistle blowers, but Trump is certainly worse.

So, at least three more years in the embassy?

It's ironic that he's gonna spent more time being de facto imprisoned than Chelsea (Bradley) Manning (7 years), his source.

Quick search:

[https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798)

18 U.S. Code § 798 - Disclosure of classified information

>Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.</comment>


Ask HN: Facebook alternative? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> I thought about this a while ago and came to the conclusion that if my goal wad to keep information private that's not the function of a social network. At best you'll find a different company to abuse you or a permanent decentralized network where attackers can scrape everything if they are ever let near your circle of friends.

If your goal is to simply have a better implemented social media network you will likely face a network effect problem where nobody is on that platform - <USER2> mean technically MySpace still exists.

<comment><AUTHOR> Myspace seems to be a ghost town :'(

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Diaspora seems to be the choice for this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried it but none of my friends were ready to move on it. :(

<comment><USER5> If you want the network most people use, it's fb. I wouldn't worry about it. The worst thing that fb does with your data is to customize the ads you see.</comment></comment></comment>


JSON and bencode - <AUTHOR> Are there any <i>technical</i> reasons that JSON could be superior to bencode? <comment><USER2> Browsers can probably parse JSON faster.</comment>


Hacker news, but for ideas - <AUTHOR> http://idea-ne.ws/

<comment><USER2> If I may respectfully say that the domain name is terrible. There must be a nice .COM brand name for such a concept?

I was curious about the Hacker News backend, interesting to see it is open source. I really like the <http://slinkset.com> hosted service which is essentially the same functionality.

<comment><USER3> open source? Where can I download the code from?

<comment><USER4> <http://arclanguage.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love talking about ideas and was actually thinking of implementing something like this myself. You've got one user.

<comment><USER6> _Great people talk about ideas. Average people talk about things. Small people talk about people._

\- Dave Marinaccio

<comment><USER7> Have seen this so many times, and just realized for the first time it's self- referential. Clever!

<comment><USER8> Hey, good point! It's like Groucho Marx's "I'd never join a club that would have me as a member."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Many of the headlines look like SEO spam.

"Cheap custom suits for Men"

"Jewelry delivery service"

etc..

<comment><USER10> The "Cheap custom suits for Men" idea is described simply as "$100 custom suits for men.".

This reminds me of the Ali G episode where he presents his idea for the ice cream glove (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkuOuxRD1Bc>).

The Venn Diagram for $100 custom suits would have "all the people without much money" in one circle, and "all the people who want to be really well-dressed" in the other. The intersection represents a huge market, which means this idea is nothing short of brilliant.

<comment><USER11> I actually bought a $100 custom suit when I visited Shanghai. It was perhaps the best $100 I ever spent, it ended up looking really good.

<comment><USER12> I got a suit for €100 in Damascus a few weeks back. It looks awesome and is really, really comfortable. :-P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> whats next? now we have a simple, yet functional community based idea incubator. definitely not the ideal tool for the job, but a really good start. We also have startups.com, a stackoverflow type knowledge exchange, focused on startup experience. Tools like skype, github, basecamp or fogbugz let startups and developers coordinate efforts across the office or across the world. Social networks let users discover mutual friends with aligned interests or ambitions. Finally, we can't forget about the extensive libraries of articles, presentations, and videos that are multiplying at a frightening pace. I, for one would be interested in a service that integrated all of the above together. Would anyone else?

<comment><USER14> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a great idea for a site. But it's success will depend entirely on how serious the majority of submittors take it. On that, I don't have much confidence. If there were some kind of incentive, like the top-voted idea each month or bi-monthly is somehow actually funded, then the jokers would become completely irrelevant.

<comment><USER16> What if you could vote with money? So everyone who votes on the winning idea can then choose to contribute some amount and the sum of everyone's contributions buys, say, a 25% share in the idea, acting as seed funding.

If only there was a website where I could discuss with people if this is a good idea or not...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree on the need for this. I am working on a similar project, oriented towards students: <http://www.aleveo.com/ideas>

IMHO, more discussion there is on ideas, more people are willing to cross the threshold and actually start working.

</comment><comment><USER14> Error 404: The domain you are trying to reach has been disabled for violations of our TOS/AUP.

(That apparently applies to ne.ws as a whole.)

Bravura, do you have a backup? Will you move to a different domain? Please?

</comment><comment><USER18> Didn't you get the memo? Ideas have very little value on their own.

<comment><USER19> That's why it's OK just to trade them around for fun.

Btw. I'm getting "502 BAD GATEWAY" all the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about this, it's my second day administering an arc.news server. I'm not sure what happened but I rebooted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We are working on something similar at the moment, but it's less about news and more about sharing and inspiration.

Going to launch 1 quarter 09

<comment><USER21> _Going to launch 1 quarter 09_

How are you doing the time machine part ;)

<comment><USER20> Ask me three months ago

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had a feeling that we've all been missing out on something here on HN. Now we know what that something is: ideas.

</comment><comment><USER23> Similar site at <http://halfbakery.com> \- I really love it

</comment><comment><USER24> There's also Halfbakery and its ilk:

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

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfbakery> (lists 5 similar sites)

</comment><comment><USER25> No Clickpass login implementation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used the source-code distributed here: <http://arclanguage.org/install>

<comment><USER25> cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I get "502 Bad Gateway". I guess that's a good idea ...

</comment><comment><USER27> Kitten Mittens</comment>


An apparent connection between random matrices and the Riemann Zeta Function - <AUTHOR> http://www.newton.ac.uk/programmes/RMA/

<comment><AUTHOR> The interesting thing here is the similarity with Fermat's Last Theorem (now the Wiles-Taylor Theorem). There it was a completely unexpected connection between Modular Forms and Elliptic Curves (Taniyama-Suimura Conjecture - <USER2> Theorem) that opened the way for the proof. Here there appears to be predictive power in random matrices to talk about the zeros on the critical line of the RZF.

And before you ask, I don't know much about this. I've been to a talk and it all looked reasonable and exciting, but there's no way I could reproduce any of it. I can try to interpret stuff if people ask.

</comment><comment><USER3> some background i found on a quick search:

<http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_6_28_99.html> (short summary)

<http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/~majm/bib/GAFoS.pdf> (two page magazine article)

<http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/~majpk/papers/67.pdf> (heavier)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I'm never quite sure how much extra material to provide.</comment></comment>


To Create Jobs, Build Public Transit, Not Highways - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/01/jobs-for-main-street-act/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

<comment><USER2> In the U.S.A, public transit is not feasable. I was in Texas a while back - compared to Europe, things are just way too far apart to make trains or subways feasable.

I also lived in China for a while, and in China you mostly travel by bus. And it is my experience that the Bus is very inconvenient transportation mechanism.

If it does not make sense to build a local train transportation network, then build the highways, because the people will use cars.

<comment><USER3> This is the perpetual problem of public transit in the U.S. If you build something, say a metro system. It has to be sprawling, with large parking areas at the outlying stations. And then significant infrastructure upgrades to handle the traffic to/from the station parking decks.

See, <http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/subway/>

The D.C. metro system for example, is about as wide across geographically as the Seoul Subway (in other words, its service area is very similar). But its daily ridership is something like 1/10th the amount (800k vs 8million). On the long arms of the system, adding more stations won't necessarily increase the ridership because the population density of those areas is too low, a station in one of these outlying areas with parking decks might only see a couple thousand riders a day. At any rate, in most cases it's actually faster, cheaper and more convenient to drive all the way to your destination than to drive through rush hour to a station, fight for the limited parking then take the metro in.

"Just move further into the city then!" Is a sentiment I've heard quite a bit. But D.C. is not able to handle much more growth in density. By law no building can be higher than the Washington Monument, and even if that law were to be relaxed, it's unlikely to spur lots of tall, high density residential apartment buildings because there is a major airport right next door. So outlying areas like Silver Spring, MD and Arlington, VA end up with lots of high density growth. But at exorbitant pricing. Apartments 10 miles apart, in a relatively low density area like Northern Virginia or Southern Maryland can be as much as 3x the rental price of each other. Housing can be even worse.

While the East Coast of the U.S. is generally low density, it's almost _all_ owned by someone. Lots and lots and lots of suburbs. Nearly any additions to a mass transit system requires heavy handed uses of eminent domain laws, which are always unpopular.

All of this to encourage people to ride mass transit.

But from the rider's perspective the equation makes no sense:

\- Parking is expensive at the outlying stations, and even worse closer in

\- Fare is expensive, I'm always surprised at how cheap mass transit is in other countries

\- Added up, a single trip on a U.S. mass transit system can cost 2-3x the cost in gas and wear and tear on your vehicle.

\- Many systems are relatively unreliable, the New York system is pretty good, and tends to route around problems pretty well, but later systems like D.C.s suffer from daily breakdowns, and single tracks, so a breakdown in one part of the system literally brings the entire system to a screeching halt. Resulting in hour long delays getting home.

\- A trip on mass transit usually takes longer than just driving anyways, and in more crowded less pleasant conditions

\- American cities tend to not be terribly walkable once you do get dumped off of a mass transit system. With few exceptions, like New York City, or Most of D.C. and Boston, walking in a typical American city is walking with a death wish. Crossing highways and major arteries full of high-speed traffic, few sidewalks, few pedestrian rights-of-way and on and on.

\- Buses are also generally unpleasant, usually populated by people with vast, on-display, personal problems like drug addiction, homelessness, mental health problems, etc. Mostly because people without these problems have cars and simply drive.

Expanding on this basic idea for local mass transit, rail also stands a similarly poor chance. Outside of the Middle and Northern East Coast, rail is generally poor, and transit times are incredibly long. New York to Chicago for example is basically a 1-day trip by rail (overnight). But only a 3 hour flight. And those are relatively close cities by American Standards. By European standards that's further than London to Munich!

New York to Miami, on the same Coast, is a 31 hour trip by rail! But _only_ 20 hours by car and 3 hours by plane. Which would you take?

New York to LA, across the continent takes several _days_. That's like taking a rail trip from Barcelona to Minsk.

The solution to the problem is thus usually phrased as "just throw down some more rail lines and start counting the jobs". Even more realistic people consider that, in an idealized world that would cost billions. But really, with the eminent domain considerations, massive restructuring of cities, de- suburbanization, rerouting of existing lines to be more efficient, easy transit to and from the system, parking, etc. we are more likely talking trillions of dollars.

So instead we get more limited visions like

\- 1 more line on the D.C. metro over the next 20 years

\- and [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/18/map-of-potential- hi...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/18/map-of-potential-high- spe_n_167804.html)

Which, while really fantastic, and a great start, won't affect the vast majority of the country.

<comment><USER4> I think the best point here is that American cities are not walkable. We tend to prefer long main roads with lots of business off of them to central areas where all important businesses are in walking distance. Main squares are more conducive to public transit than main avenues, because once you get there, you can walk. This is, in my mind, one of the hardest problems to solve for American public transit.

The expense and environment I think would both almost solve themselves if public transit became more common. If it were the main way to travel, then the distribution of people on buses would match the overall distribution of people.

<comment><USER3> I agree, that's the main barrier. A subway line might cost a few billion, but reorganizing a major urban area to be walkable takes decades.

Part of it is that most American cities are very new in comparison to their European and Asian counterparts.

London, Paris, Barcelona, Tokyo, Kyoto, Seoul, etc. all have Ancient, Roman and/or Medieval cores which by default are designed for walk-ability. The modern cities are by and large extensions of those cores. The only American cities that have similar levels of walk-ability are ones that were founded and largely settled before the car like New York, Philadelphia, D.C. -- basically mid and north atlantic cities. Otherwise you simply can't walk by design.

Fixing that requires essentially rebuilding an entire city, which really isn't going to happen anytime soon. Imagine rebuilding something like say, L.A., at ~500 sq miles of broken sprawling urbanity, to be mass-transit ready.

<comment><USER5> > reorganizing a major urban area to be walkable takes decades

It seems to take about 15 to 20 years. The dense walkable urban areas in Northern Virginia and Maryland grew up around the metro system in that time frame.

Large areas don't actually need to be reorganized, just refurbished. Many cities including philadelphia, baltimore, and DC to some extent have loads of developed space that's just low rent and crime ridden. Just put back in the streetcars that were ripped out in the 60s, fix-up the buildings, and price out the gangsters from living there. That's basically the story of NYC's rehabilitation in the 90s, except they didn't need streetcars.

<comment><USER3> I think that your point about places like Philly and Baltimore being easy to rehabilitate in 15-20 years makes sense. But there are still large areas along the D.C. orange and red lines that are virtually unwalkable without putting your life in danger. For example, I used to live what would have been a 15-20 minute walk to the Vienna station on the D.C. Orange line, but to get there, most of the trip was next to fast roads, with no sidewalks, and a trip over two overpasses. I made that trip twice before giving up (and after almost getting hit by a handful of cars both times).

There are parts on the blue line that are pseudo-walkable once you get off the system, but places like Franconia-Springfield are death traps.

I do agree though that even those areas are better than they were when those stations were built. However, outside of a very limited "walkable" area of a couple of blocks in the best cases (like Dunn Loring or the Two Falls Church stations), you'd be hard pressed to live anywhere but immediately next to the station and not drive.

I really think that it's because most of the D.C. area grew up post-automobile and is designed as a vast urban sprawl. Things that might have a positive influence, like new lines on the system, have taken 30 years to get started on (Silver Line).

I'm however, happy to see new developments along that line, where those lessons have been learned and they are basically rebuilding parts of the urban infrastructure to make it more downtown, like Tyson's Corner and Reston.

<comment><USER5> Everything in from East Falls Church on the orange line is walkable. It was car dealerships and gas stations 25 years ago. Silver spring on in on the red line is walkable.

My point about DC was more that the district itself has tons of ghetto that could easily be re-gentrified. The middle class left the row-houses in the 60s in many cities, they turned to ghetto, but this is not necessarily a permanent state of affairs.

To repeat, this is basically what has happened in NYC. The former ghetto inhabitants are now driving up the crime rate in northern Pennsylvania and other areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article gives the exact reason it is not being spent on public transit: _Second, all those buses, trains and subways need people to operate them and maintain the infrastructure._

The stimulus is based on moral hazard. States spend federal money on projects that they don't feel are worth spending their own money on. Spending on mass transit would force states to spend more of their own money on projects they feel are not worth it.

<comment><USER7> I don't follow your first point, would you mind breaking it down? Governments are scared of a lot of things, but swelling their own ranks by creating more civil service jobs usually isn't one of them, is it?

There is definitely some serious game theory afoot; states have a perverse incentive to not spend on important things, lest they not receive federal money to cover those things. It is similar to the perverse incentive in large companies and government to spend one's entire budget at all costs, lest you get allocated less next time.

<comment><USER8> The big problem is that most cities, states, and the US are bankrupt. The amount of money they are in debt is ridiculous and way out of proportion to the services they provide and the taxes that they can collect. For instance the city of cambridge, MA has over 1.2 Billion dollars of debt/unfunded liabilities for 70,000 people.

[http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/30/cambridge-massachusetts- ope...](http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/30/cambridge-massachusetts-opeb- pensions-ratings-opinions-contributors-peter-schweich.html)

<comment><USER9> I have an idea: how about we give them a big chunk of money? :)

Seriously, this point doesn't work. No state is going to turn down a transit project, certainly not because of the operating costs (most of which _are_ funded in these kinds of bills -- it's not a one-time check). And in any case, in most urban environments transit is required to pay its own operating costs. Where do you think that bus fare goes anyway?

<comment><USER6> Fares often pay only a fraction of the cost of mass transit. For example, my local light rail costs about $8/ride. The fare is only $1.90.

(Sorry, the source is the dead tree version of one of my local rags.)

<comment><USER9> Right, because it's including construction and infrastructure costs (the things being subsidized!) in the "net cost" of the ride. The actual operating expenses are almost precisely borne by the fare structure, and in fact many cities have laws to this effect _prohibiting_ them from funding things like salaries for transit companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks like the study just analyzed the direct employment effects of the construction projects -- how many ditch diggers, bus drivers, etc. would get paychecks either from the project or from the system the project creates.

The headline numbers, 16,000 job-months for transit, 8,000 job-months for highways (per billion dollars spent), show how small the direct employment is -- 16,000 job-months is about $60 million, or 6% of the investment.

The real question, which is apparently unaddressed, is which transportation infrastructure produces a greater benefit for the regional economy. The economic differences there will likely dwarf the direct effects.

But the Wired article doesn't even go there. There's a statement that transit "allows people to get to work", implying that highways don't, but that's all.

But that's okay. We know cars are evil and transit is good, so there must be numbers out there somewhere to show it.

<comment><USER11> I think the point about "allowing people to get to work" is that people with no car (a much larger proportion of the jobless than of the employed, presumably) have more limited employment options, and improving public transit gives them access to more jobs. It seems a pretty good guess to me, at least, that public transit does more to give more people access to more jobs than highways costing the same amount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The basic premise, the government can create jobs out of thin air, is flawed. Rest is gravy.

<comment><USER10> Jobs are created out of debt, not thin air. The gov't does indeed have the ability to create more debt and more jobs.

We're betting that the stimulus' net effect on the economy is more growth than the debt's interest, so it'll be more productive to borrow, spend, and repay than not to.

You'll note that the private sector does this all the time. Student loans are a perfect example: create a professor's job today for a higher salary tomorrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Building transit doesn't fix the trade imbalance.

<comment><USER14> Actually, as long as the US is importing oil it does in part.

<comment><USER13> We need to export more goods, not import.

<comment><USER15> Or import less. If the transit was more energy efficient, or just less reliant on oil, it could have some impact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Monorail, monorail!</comment>


Building a Spotify Player for My Mac SE/30 - <AUTHOR> https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/55998-building-a-spotify-player-for-my-mac-se30/ <comment><USER2> This is interesting, but I'd call it more "using a Mac SE/30 to display what A Spotify client/player is playing."

I was curious about whether a SE/30 was actually able to keep up with decoding modern mp3 streams - I seem to recall newer processors than those running under significant load in the early days of Winamp.

Edit for relevance: [https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2672/why-...](https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2672/why- does-mp3-audio-decoding-overwhelm-retro-cpus)

<comment><USER3> Decoding MP3 requires about 24 MIPS on a DSP at minimum. On a general purpose CPU, a 66MHz 486 or 68040 can just about do it at quality. The Mac SE is nowhere close.

<comment><USER4> IIRC on a 486 DX/66 running Windows 95 you had to set Winamp to decode at half quality in order for playback to not skip (on a 128kbps file)

<comment><USER5> Yes, the fastest 486 systems could just _barely_ do full-quality 44.1/16 MP3 decoding (DX4/100, etc) Even then a DOS player was a better bet than Winamp.

A SE/30 would be absolutely screwed.

<comment><USER6> As a comparison a basic home theatre pc these days with ryzen 1500x cpu, and GeForce 1030 fanless with GPU accelerated hevc in the video drivers, can decode up to about 350Mbps bitrate of HEVC 2160p 60fps using the latest VLC build. Beyond that it starts dropping frames.

edit: tests run using sample videos from here, if anyone wants to see what bitrate of 4K they can play back before it starts losing frames.

[http://jell.yfish.us/](http://jell.yfish.us/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The title doesn't do the post justice. This is an amazing use of a vintage Macintosh and the technical details are quite interesting.

<comment><USER8> Its an awesome demo, but if you pay your own electricity bill old hardware such as this just isn't practical. At least not in my country with our energy prices.

<comment><USER9> The SE/30 power supply is only 100W, so it doesn't burn that much.

<comment><USER10> You're both right, but i see his/her point since I also have to pay my own electricity bill. A Raspberry Pi or similiar hardware will do this at an order of magnitude cheaper. Still, for romance reasons, I much prefer the solution in the article. Sometimes it's just worth the extra small bit of money for the romance

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's built on Retro68, a gcc based cross-compiler for building classic Mac apps on modern machines: [https://github.com/autc04/Retro68](https://github.com/autc04/Retro68)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is so cool. I mean, I would've futzed around with HyperCard for 100 hours before getting half of this to work. Good job!

For all the posters that are going on about MP3 decoding, yes, we remember how decoding MP3s used to take up 80% of our Pentium 120 CPU cycles. Until MMX came along. Those dancing fab engineers saved our CPU cycles. Anyway, who knows how Ogg Vorbis would've decoded from Spotify back then - probably not well!

The major advances since then have been out-of-order instruction execution and SIMD instructions (although we still don't have general vector processors, as Hennessy & Patterson still lament in the 5th edition).

(My mother used to tell me I was getting a 486 instead of a Pentium 66 when I bas being a brat.. the terror it used to strike in me! unreal.)

</comment><comment><USER13> The creator of this (ants) also made a classic Mac wifi extension which is also a brilliant little backport of modern wifi selection UI.

[https://github.com/antscode/MacWifi](https://github.com/antscode/MacWifi)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm more impressed by having WiFi on such a Mac rather than the Spotify client itself.

<comment><USER15> If you didn't see it, here's his walkthrough of how he did the wi-fi. Very cool!

[https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/31078-adding- wi-f...](https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/31078-adding-wi-fi-to-my- mac-se30/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Practical? Hell no

Coolest thing I've seen in a while? Hell ya!

Good job on this, this is some awesome functional art!

</comment><comment> King-Aaron I'd love to have this in my living room as the primary stereo, just for the aesthetic quality.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm afraid to start mine up without re-capping it. But, I don't know much about that. Any relevant tips?

With regard to OP, workaround for the "hug of death":

[https://web.archive.org/web/20181219174629/https://68kmla.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181219174629/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/55998-building- a-spotify-player-for-my-mac-se30/)

P.S. I should probably also re-cap my Kaypro 2x. If the drives will even still work; what does one do about the belts and such in those? And what does one lubricate their rails and friction points with?

Sorry if this is too OT, but I figure this kind of story may attract people who know these things.

Finally, this coming year, I may be moving to a place that gives me space and energy to take on these hobby projects.

</comment><comment><USER18> "The speaker itself streams and plays the music, and the Mac simply tells the speaker which song to play...."

I was unaware that you could now get speakers with that kind of horsepower built-in. What's their typical use-case?

<comment><USER19> Expensive, but looks like they do a lot: [https://usa.yamaha.com/products/audio_visual/speaker_systems...](https://usa.yamaha.com/products/audio_visual/speaker_systems/nx-n500/)

<comment><USER20> You could also use a chromecast audio, which should work with spotify: [https://www.spotify.com/en/chromecastaudio/](https://www.spotify.com/en/chromecastaudio/)

<comment><USER21> It does... also got a google home mini that I use with it (was bundled in with something else I was buying). The voice recognition seems to be a bit better with Alexa though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't remember the last time I was this impressed by a post on HN.

Bravo!

</comment><comment><USER23> This is absolutely amazing. I'm extremely impressed with the engineering behind this, especially the details like the OAuth bridge or the WiFi adapter.

</comment><comment><USER24> Just pulled my Mac SE out of storage. Great to see what the little machine can still do!

</comment><comment><USER25> Why is the video muted?

<comment> clever-cleaver Copyright.

<comment><USER26> Smart. I was just about to go out and buy a CD and then I saw this YT video, I was thinking great! Now I can listen to Phil Collins for free!

Then I realised there was no audio. So I went and purchased the CD and now I realise how immoral it would have been to watch this video without paying the artist's record label their fees. Phew

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Super cool! I'm a little surprised nobody has backported a TLS implementation though.

<comment><USER28> I'm personally maintaining mbed TLS for classic Mac (68k included) for use in a libssh2-powered SSH client (an update of MacSSH). It works well on PPC, but I haven't benchmarked it on a 68k Mac yet. Without any optimized assembly, I fear it might be really slow.

[https://github.com/bslabs/mbedtls/tree/macos](https://github.com/bslabs/mbedtls/tree/macos)

<comment><USER27> Oh cool, I knew there had to be one. The Spotify responses should be pretty small other than the images, so unless the handshake was really expensive it might be ok (small key sizes?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Amazon's music player has no ability to download music to your pc.

</comment><comment><USER30> Just watching civil war and wonder why Spider-Man collect a mac/se. Can it be used today? Here it goes.</comment>


Robot crushes worker at Volkswagen factory - <AUTHOR> http://www.thelocal.de/20150701/assembly-robot-kills-worker-at-volkswagen

<comment><USER2> "This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error."

\-- HAL-9000

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like the robot is probably evil.</comment>


Tim Berners-Lee: Web access is a human right - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/041211-mit-berners-lee.html <comment><USER2> It's a real shame when an expert on one topic starts to talk in public about another area they don't really know about.

"Human Right" is an attribute with a lot of implications. If the web is a human right because otherwise people end up disadvantaged, then surely more basic communications technologies are human rights also? Like pens and paper? Even worse, if your logic is that things become human rights because they're simply beneficial, then you have to create loads of new human rights. Washing machines are human rights. Public transport is a human right. Five pieces of fruit a day is a human right. And then you're starting to loose a lot of the original meaning of the term.

<comment><USER3> The idea's been applied to more basic information sources for a while, at least by some people. Some of the advocates for public libraries have long argued a version of "access to knowledge" or "access to information" as a right. Extending that to the internet seems to be sort of a modern version (although that could presumably also be fulfilled via libraries; it's not clear that _home access_ to internet is specifically required).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _While access to water is a more fundamental right..._

Sorry, I can't get past this. If the word "right" is so fluffy we can use it anywhere, it doesn't have any meaning.

I firmly believe that computers are becoming integrated with our minds. That means, yes, there are going to be real rights associated with them. It's an open issue to figure out exactly when we cross that line where the rules change, but we're getting very close.

But if "health care", "internet access", "water", and all these other things are tossed out as rights, it takes away the entire reason that internet access may qualify. It's just a jumble of feel-good meaninglessness.

We face this same problem with the word "war". We have a war on drugs, a war in Afghanistan, a war on poverty, a war on crime. If it's all a "war", then none of it is a war. The word war has no meaning that we can grab onto.

Sorry, I know it sounds pedantic or like splitting hairs, but it matters: Berners-Lee could make a good case for this, if he knew what the argument for rights were based on. Without that, however, he actually hurts the cause. That's not good.

<comment><USER5> > yes, there are going to be real rights associated with them.

what's a real right?

<comment><USER6> My criteria is when someone mentions a right, can I meaningfully append the question 'At whose expense'? If I can, it's bogus.

These are rights: Right to liberty, to own property, to your life, to the pursuit of happiness, to freedom of speech.

These are not: Right to a job, to a 'fair' wage, to an education, to internet access, to clean water, to a pig every month.

Real rights prevent someone from doing awful things to you, basically "No one will harm you, or interfere with you doing this" (where this might be living, owning property, speaking, etc). The bogus rights are basically promises of free stuff.

<comment><USER7> Wait, just being able to ask the question? There isn't even a dependance on the answer?

Wow.

Then your two sets aren't even correct. None of the things you mention are rights. You can append the question to all of the things you put in the "These are rights" pile, even if you would then think the answer is "nobody".

Heck, sometimes the answer will even be someone besides the "right holder". Person A's hypothetical "right to liberty" can clearly come at the expense of person B, when person B is using person A as trained but unpaid labor.

I think this simple criterion is rather flawed.

<comment><USER8> "Wait, just being able to ask the question? There isn't even a dependance on the answer?"

You appear to have skipped over the word "meaningfully" in warrenwilkinson's post, or perhaps he edited it in, but either way, it addresses your concern.

(To your later point I'd observe that rights are generally considered symmetrical; in a society where you have "the right to liberty" your example falls through because A's right is being violated for your example, and your argument seems to fundamentally require asymmetry for it to make any sense.)

<comment><USER7> You are shifting all the work that the criterion was meant to do into the term "meaningfully". Without elaboration on the application of that term, this is of no help as I used a very common standard of "meaningful", "having meaning". A question has meaning, even when the answer is obvious or the answer to a "who" question is "no one". Example: "Who has been to Mars?" is a clearly meaningful sentence.

The issue at play later is: does person A have a right to liberty. Warrenwilkinson's criterion for it not being a right was the ability to append "At whose expense?". I even made that a more reasonable criterion, by implying the further requirement that, in order for a hypothetical right to be considered not a right, it had to come at the expense of someone else (the elaboration used by many other people in better statements of similar criteria, and seemingly the underlying consideration really at play in the two lists warrenwilkinson gave). The objection to even this elaboration was that in the case of a society with slavery, the hypothetical "right to liberty" would obviously come at the expense of slaver owners.

You introduce the interesting symmetry constraint, as charitably as I can gather, intending to use the symmetry between the slaves and owners. No help really, as the owners might as easily conclude that they don't have a right to liberty, they simply have liberty itself. If you landed on an island with slavery on-going, does the criteria proposed have any teeth?

There is, I think, a sharper edged point than this merely amusing slavery objection, but I've mentioned it in other threads already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Of course it's not a human right. Neither are water or food, so his analogy is pointless.

This is "you have a right to free speech; you don't have a right to a printing press" for the modern age. You still have the right to free speech, and in the case of the Internet, the right to freely associate. You don't, however, have the right to have someone else pay your ISP bill.

True rights require no infringement on others. You simply have them, without requiring labor, money, or time from others.

<comment><USER2> (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights>)

<comment><USER10> To quote myself from a few months ago:

 _"I am a citizen, you must hold (if you are the government) or fund (if you are a taxpayer) an election for me to vote in."

What's your feeling on that positive right? I've encountered people who argue against democracy, and I've encountered people who will re-word the right as stated above and then call it a negative right. I disagree with the former, and the latter only succeed in demonstrating that the difference between positive and negative rights is one of phrasing, and not of the right itself. Do you have a different take on the matter?_

The idea of "negative" and "positive" rights is one way of looking at the matter, but it has flaws.

Edit: I don't mean to imply the parent post is making any argument one way or the other; I'm just commenting on the idea itself.

Edit 2: Other things (some completely outlandish, some more plausible) worth thinking about:

      - I own a square mile of land with a river running through
        it.  You own an adjacent square mile of land downriver
        of mine.  If I, entirely on my own property, divert the
        river such that it ceases to run through your property,
        have I aggressed against you?  Do you have the right to
        never have the value of your property decrease?
      - I am fantabulously wealthy and buy up all the food in
        the world.  Do I have the right to refuse to sell it?
        Have I aggressed against the other 7 billion by forcing
        the large majority of them to starve to death?
      - The local branch of the Nazis are hunting for members
        of unpopular minorities.  I am a gay black Jew.  Am I
        justified in trespassing on a stranger's property in
        order to hide and evade capture?

<comment><USER2> This is only a problem if you take an absolutist line, which I don't think anyone really does. Even the toughest libertarians still want a police force and law courts.

<comment><USER11> If a philosophy doesn't work in absolutist terms, perhaps it shouldn't be expressed in absolutist terms. The parent comment left no apparent wiggle room.

<comment><USER2> Meh, people are lazy with language like this all the time. Many people say "murder is always wrong", but, when you ask them, say "well, self defense is ok". Instead of assuming the worst possible case for your opponent, be charitable with his case. You'll avoid nonsense discussions much more often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Let's put it this way.

If 99.9% of a society is web enabled and you deny access to the web to a subset by pricing it out of reach or allowing carriers to not install cables because it would not be not profitable for them in the short term, well then you've done a human injustice.

But would not say it's a human right just yet. When society demands that you are web enabled or face crippling setbacks and some people still cannot afford it, then you've got a problem. That's not going to happen anytime soon.

Instead, let's focus on affordable, accessible, quality health care as a real human right since many 3rd world countries still won't have that for quite some time, as well as the United States.

<comment><USER13> I'd venture to claim that it is far more feasible to bring 100% of the world population internet access than to bring them health care at even US Medicaid standards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Internet access and especially _personal_ internet connections is a luxury that almost the entire world has very limited or no access to.

To call it a basic human right when it's only really accessible to an elite slice of humanity is just silly.

<comment><USER15> There are far more connected people than you think. Something like 30% of the people on the planet have web access. 30% is not "an elite slice", especially considering that over the next decade or two the number will climb higher and higher until it's pretty much 100%. The developing countries - especially in Africa - are exploding in web use, especially mobile web.

TBL is perhaps a bit early with his words, but not by much I'd say.

Edit: Numbers: <http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm>

<comment><USER14> I don't know, I've been in a _lot_ of poor countries and I'm sitting in a _really_ poor one right now - Nicaragua. There's loads of internet cafes and the people do use them but that's like an hour here and there for the small % that actually use the internet at all.

I bet that 30% includes them even though they're a long way from our dependency on being connected 24/7 and the deep integration into our lives - we're probably _disconnected_ less than these people are _connected_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It must be pretty awesome to be a guy who _invented_ a human right.

<comment><USER17> It's easier than you think. Just invent something and declare it human right. Done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's a simple check you should make before opening your mouth to talk about human rights.

Is the thing I'm talking about created, made, or maintained by the work of others? Yes? Then it's not a human right.

<comment><USER7> Infants must be fed and cared for in several ways, necessarily using the resources and time of others. Therefore, within your framework, they have no right to life. Care to rework it a bit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That's a stretch and one I don't agree with.

</comment><comment><USER20> Some alert congress so we can update the constitution.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is already happening in Finland: [http://articles.cnn.com/2009-10-15/tech/finland.internet.rig...](http://articles.cnn.com/2009-10-15/tech/finland.internet.rights_1_internet- access-fast-internet-megabit?_s=PM:TECH)

A rising tide floats all boats, so I really don't see why this is such a big deal. If the government was willing to build an ISP or subsidize existing providers, this would be a win-win scenario for everyone-- it would accelerate the spread of information, increase literacy, give people the ability to self- educate.

If you think people should have access to public libraries and public education growing up, I don't see why you'd disagree with this.</comment>


Ask reddit to upvote user freedom by serving no nonfree JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/freejs-reddit

<comment><USER2> Strange, I got the JS source just by going to the site!

</comment><comment><USER3> WTF?</comment>


Dribbble Acquires Creative Market - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/30/dribbble-a-bootstrapped-linkedin-for-designers-acquires-creative-market-grows-to-12m-users/ <comment><USER2> As a Dribbble user I am curious to see what this does to the quality of content on the site.</comment>


Is "genius" hacker Walter O'Brien a fraud? - <AUTHOR> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140924/14422128627/another-story-fake-brilliant-inventor-is-scorpion-walter-obrien-real-computer-security-genius.shtml

<comment><USER2> The linked article appears to describe the behavior of a classic textbook malignant narcissist -- I mean either the author of the piece, or his subject, falls into that category. Maybe both.

More here: [http://arachnoid.com/ChildrenOfNarcissus](http://arachnoid.com/ChildrenOfNarcissus)

<comment><AUTHOR> The subject, sure, but the author? Why?

<comment><USER2> Because without doing independent research, a reader must accept the possibility that the story is wildly exaggerated, which is the sign of a narcissistic journalist.

If the _subject_ is a narcissist, his description of himself may be wildly exaggerated, which is what the article reports.

If the _writer_ is a narcissist, his description of his subject may be wildly exaggerated.

And yes, there are plenty of stories of narcissistic journalists, some eventually exposed as frauds who make up their copy.

The really interesting cases are those in which both the writer and his subject are narcissists.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I see what you're saying. Fair enough.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Machine learning on mobile: on the device or in the cloud? - <AUTHOR> http://machinethink.net/blog/machine-learning-device-or-cloud/ <comment><USER2> If you're interested in fast inference models, be sure to check out QuickNet: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02291](https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02291)

Disclaimer: I'm the author on this paper.

It shares many similarities with Google's production MobileNets albeit MobileNets is a family and QuickNet uses PReLU which has helped a lot in terms of parametric efficiency. Also there's a slight difference in the implementation of the separable convolution (no activation function in between the depthwise and the pointwise for QuickNet).

<comment><USER3> Have you published that paper anywhere on a conference or so? I guess not because it's not really in the common format. But from a quick look, it actually looks interesting, so why not try to submit it somewhere, e.g. some image conference? But you really should work on the format. I assume that this was not done with LaTeX? Then, in the table in your experimental results, what you are also comparing is number of parameters, and maybe train time, and inference time, and maybe memory consumption during inference, so that should all be also in the table. Also, there should be one or two figures which give small sketches of your models blocks, which helps to better understand the difference to e.g. XCeption. Also, as I understand, QuickNet is mostly based on XCeption? But XCeption is not in the table of your experimental comparisons. Also you mention MobileNets which is also not there. You should add that. Then, if you additionally add compression methods like 8-bit quantization, you should have a separate table where you show how much less memory it needs and how much it degrades the performance. Then, to really boost interest in your paper, it would be really nice if you publish some code. It sounds like you already implemented that in Lasagne or in Keras? So just publish that code.

<comment><USER2> The issue with LaTex is that diagrams and tables are a nightmare to deal with, but I've been meaning to get to that once I have some time (swamped atm).

XCeption is not compared because XCeption doesn't have any results on CIFAR, and this was meant to be a fast inference model, which XCeption is not.

I do provide links to full resolution images of the network topology.

A comparison of parameter count, FLOPs and other performance figures would probably be useful, you're right, I'll add that as soon as I have time.

MobileNets came out after this, and I haven't updated it in the meantime.

I used Keras but there are some internal tools, namely a data loader, a visualization tool, a replication environment and an optimizer that I'm not allowed to share externally.

Hope you found it interesting, and thanks for the feedback!!

<comment><USER4> tables are really easy in LaTex, and as for diagrams, just export them as PDFs or something and then include them in LaTex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a really good breakdown on data engineering for mobile. Usually you read something really theoretical or a complex ML solution but here is a great breakdown of the pros and cons of where to do training or inference.

</comment><comment><USER6> When using Google or Amazon assistant, I wish they would do the machine learning on the device. I understand they want to protect their models but just this morning:

Ok Google, what's the time ?

* 2 seconds or so, nothing *

Hey Google, what's the time ?

* Another 2 seconds or so, nothing *

Alexa, what's the time ?

* 2 seconds or so, again *

"Here it currently are the is 9:42 search results for"

What happened ? Network had a hiccup (okay, it sucks), with as a result that Google's connection was blocked for a while, this caused me to repeat the question, which caused Google assistant to resend the query (in other words send a cancel down a tcp connection that hadn't gotten through it's buffer yet, resulting in even more delay). More delay let me to ask alexa instead. Alexa got lucky on the network.

This resulted in Alexa and Google answering at the same time, alexa with the time, google assistant with the search results for "what's the time hey google what's the time alexa what's the time". I was ready to throw things out of the window.

But the root cause of this problem was the delay due to the network.

So PLEASE get local voice transcription going, please ! Save alexa and my phone from getting thrown out the window.

</comment><comment><USER2> I think that custom deep learning chips will be the best enabler of edge device deep learning, it's just too difficult to deploy anything useful onto most smartphones or other computationally constrained devices, and to compound this you often have to use the _CPU_ because the GPU is unavailable either due to the framework or due to the drivers unavailable.

<comment><USER5> I think that custom chips won't be made but just better graphics processors that can do inference even faster. Gamers that want more performance on their mobile games will push mobile graphics to the point that you will able to do gpgpu.

<comment><USER2> The problem is that even the Titan x drowns when doing real time inference, so a mobile gpu beating it without low precision is very unlikely.

<comment><USER7> That's news to me! I'm pretty darn sure the Titan X has no problems with inference on the amounts of data that a single user would want inference for.

<comment><USER2> Well, I was talking about real time object detection on 640x480 video. Perhaps most users would be okay with a 5 second or so delay when processing an image and perhaps you could use Facebook's trick of fast, bad quality style transfer and better quality style transfer once the image is in the servers. But the point is that the current paradigm is very restrictive in terms of deep learning applications.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think computing optical flow remains a major time bottleneck. Any attempt at temporal coherence would be great, and I'm sure there is some attempt on Messenger, but it really only works well for the last style transfer filter, all the way to the right in the app, and that one only really looks great in well lit scenes. Also, the phone seems to heat up a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Both - just like the brain works

<comment><USER9> Your brain comes with a cloud connection?

<comment><USER10> If you believe in God, then... yes :)</comment></comment></comment>


Earth's magnetic poles may be getting ready to flip - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2018/01/31/the-earths-magnetic-poles-ma.html <comment><USER2> "The Earth's magnetic field protects our planet from dangerous solar and cosmic rays, like a giant shield. As the poles switch places (or try to), that shield is weakened; scientists estimate that it could waste away to as little as a tenth of its usual force. The shield could be compromised for centuries while the poles move, allowing malevolent radiation closer to the surface of the planet for that whole time. Already, changes within the Earth have weakened the field over the South Atlantic so much that satellites exposed to the resulting radiation have experienced memory failure."</comment>


Ask HN: Best comfortable book reading chair? - <AUTHOR> I have been meaning to buy a comfortable book reading chair on which I can use to comfortably read books.<p>Do you have any recommendations? Things to keep in mind etc? Please let me know. Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> Depends on your taste, and your budget! I love firm chairs, firm sofas, firm beds, etc. When I sit down into a chair or sofa and it feels like I lose my spine, I'll never get comfortable. This is especially true for a reading chair.

Of course, the Eames chair is super expensive, but it's incredibly comfortable (not everyone agrees) and you'll own it forever: [https://store.hermanmiller.com/living/lounge-chairs-and- otto...](https://store.hermanmiller.com/living/lounge-chairs-and- ottomans/eames-lounge-chair-and-ottoman/5667.html?lang=en_US)

I also love the Knoll lounge chair. They've got a firm and relaxed option, fabric or leather, ottoman is separate: [https://www.knoll.com/product/florence-knoll-relaxed- lounge-...](https://www.knoll.com/product/florence-knoll-relaxed-lounge-chair)

Also firm, comfortable for long periods, and stylish: [https://www.roomandboard.com/catalog/living/chairs/andre- cha...](https://www.roomandboard.com/catalog/living/chairs/andre-chair)

Here's one that's more plush, something you can sink in to: [https://www.roomandboard.com/catalog/living/chairs/hess- leat...](https://www.roomandboard.com/catalog/living/chairs/hess-leather- chair-and-ottoman)

This one is too large and bulky for my taste, but I have friends who own the chair and they love being able to curl up in it: [https://www.crateandbarrel.com/lounge-ii-petite-chair- and-a-...](https://www.crateandbarrel.com/lounge-ii-petite-chair-and-a- half/s590275)

</comment><comment> crooked-v The IKEA Poäng has a pretty good reputation for being a low-cost comfy chair, though you'll want to try one out in person to see how well the lumbar curve works for you.</comment>